Can an Open Source Map Project Make Money?

Roblimo writes "Bing and Mapquest both use output from OpenStreetMap.org. Mapquest supports the project with money for equipment and access to the code they've written to integrate OSM's work with their display. Bing? They just take from the project and do nothing for it in return. This may be okay in a legal sense, but it is a seriously nekulturny way to behave. Even so, having Microsoft's Bing as a reference might help the project's founder make money. They've put a lot of work into this project, and it's doing a lot of people a lot of good, so they certainly deserve some sort of payback, either direct or indirect. They have a few ideas about how they might legitimately earn a few bucks from their project while remaining free software purists. Do you have any ideas, yourself, about how they might turn a few bucks from OSM?"

Comments

Freedom

[odies]

Bing? They just take from the project and do nothing for it in return. This may be okay in a legal sense, but it is a seriously nekulturny way to behave.

Free software advocates really need to understand that if you want to have true freedom, you have to let people use the project the way the want to and stop tossing a fit when someone doesn't contribute back to it. If you expect or want to get contributions back, you should choose a license that requires it. Otherwise you're being quite a hypocrite about free software.

Purpose of the BSD license also is to let everyone use code freely the way they want, the only true form of freedom. Once you start demanding something more than attribution you're removing freedom and limiting what people can do, making it no better than just having a commercial license. This is also why I view BSD license as way more free than GPL, which has many, many limitations forced upon you. Not really the definition of freedom, is it?

Re:Freedom

[Frosty Piss]

Indeed. If you expect people to "give back", put it in the licence, otherwise quit bitching.

Re:Freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

But you obviously don't understand. Open source is good and Microsoft is evil. We must defeat the forces of evil with religious zealotry and bigotry. Right fellas?

Re:Freedom

[Manfre]

Parent deserves to be modded up, not flagged as flamebait.

Re:Freedom

[cgenman]

You can go to fund raisers with a suggested donation, and not give any money. If their business model for their public mapping division is based around a project which is saving them significant expenditure compared to closed-mapping vendors, it's polite to find ways of helping support them. It helps maintain a healthy software ecosystem. Microsoft is a big company, and Bing is a huge project, which means somehow finding ways of supporting the developers would be polite. Not technically required, but polite.

And, of course, complaining is not the same thing as suing. The proper thing to do in situations like this would be to find unique ways that Bing or Microsoft can help support a bit the people who support this core part of their system.

Re:Freedom

[mr_matticus]

It's more than just that. It's absolutely true that the license sets the expectations. There is no legal difference between an open source and a proprietary license--the only differences are philosophical and in the contours of what the developers choose to allow. Everyone has the freedom to make or not make a project, and every creator has the right to determine the terms under which s/he shares that project. If you choose a broadly permissive license that requires nothing in return in terms of money or contribution, the expectation is that people will do things you don't really like. That is the meaning of freedom, and it must be accepted. If it is not acceptable, use a different license.

But to me, there is a bigger problem in that many, but certainly not all and hopefully not even most, open source advocates engage in mental gymnastics around the issue--working themselves into a lather about companies or individuals not giving back or breaking the "spirit" as they view it, stealing from these projects (and note how no one EVER false-pedant "corrects" with the 'it's not stealing' broken argument on a F/OSS story), while actively engaging in infringement of proprietary licenses. The sentiment is clear, but there is no reconciling this position.

The argument that "I wouldn't have bought Photoshop anyway, and they still have all of code and data, so it's no loss" applies equally, then, to Microsoft here--they wouldn't support this project anyway, and they still have all their original code and data, so there's no harm.

Obviously that's a broken argument, but a number of the posters here can't seem to navigate that disconnect.

Re:Freedom

[iusty]

So pray tell me, what does the GPL *force* you to do?

Re:Freedom

[Frosty Piss]

Prats like you cannot determine the difference between a casual user and large enterprise.

No, not "prats like me", but rather the *licence* of the project does not differentiate between "a casual user and large enterprise".

Re:Freedom

[Darkness404]

The problem isn't that the license doesn't allow it, the license does, its just that its common courtesy to contribute back to the project if you are making money or a large enterprise working on it.

Its like tipping, nowhere does it say that you -must- tip (unless the tip is included with the bill) but its still common courtesy. A waitress has every right to be mad when someone orders $300 worth of food and doesn't even leave her a single cent.

Legal != Moral. Just because something doesn't /have/ to be done doesn't mean it shouldn't be done.

Re:Freedom

[ChipMonk]

Hand over the source, plus your patches, to whatever programs you are distributing. That, or lose your inventory in default judgment, a la Westinghouse Digital.

Re:Freedom

[anon mouse-cow-aard]

The purpose of BSD is to get code out there and perhaps make a reputation for the developer. The freedom afforded is ephemeral since BSD gives others freedom to make code closed and provide no freedom to downstream users. with BSD license, the freedom extends to only a depth of 1. Any downstream developers have the ability to close the source and license only binaries downstream, end of freedoms.

GPL tries very hard to ensure that downstream users enjoy the same freedom as those who obtain the code directly. so the freedeom is self-replicating and goes on to those who receive code through intermediaries. There is an accrual of codes with inheritence that is inherent. Far more people have far more freedom when a GPL license is used.

An important effect of this is that anyone who works on GPL code tends to make it available, and it has the potential to make it back into the mainstream. The mainsteam can therefore integrate and grow stronger, and accumulate improvements, where in BSD the tendency is to fragment forever. There is no incentive to contribute back to the main stream. Hence the diaspora of bsd's in contrast with the relative unity of GPL licensed software.

GPL only limits freedom to the extent necessary to prevent others from removing freedoms for yet other licensees.

More code is made available with more freedoms to more people for more purposes with the GPL.

Re:Freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

There is nothing hypocritical about hoping that users will contribute either financially or through feedback and code without making it part of the license.

When I give christmas gifts to my family I have an expectation that they will gift me to, just because I didn't include a legally binding form requiring them to do so it does not make me a hypocrite.
Of cause you can have a free license and still expect those who profit from your work to contribute back.

As for how to make Microsoft contribute, just keep giving them bad press for being leeches on open software until they decide that it's better to pay or help you. They are trying quite hard to label themselves as open source friendly, make them put their money where there mouths are.

Re:Freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

None of these licences apply to OSM. Map data isn't protected by copyright in the US or anywhere else, really. Some countries have what is called database rights, but the popular Open Source licences haven't been adapted accordingly.

Re:Freedom

[FooAtWFU]

I disagree. I think community projects such as these are justified in expecting contributions from those who benefit from it. Resorting to coercion via license is a poor way of enforcing it, though; licenses can present a big pain in the legal department even for people who are otherwise friendly and willing to give back to the community, and a hostile entity can usually comply with the license while remaining completely unhelpful.

Moreover, whining about "omg, whiners" is kinda tacky too, you know?

Re:Freedom

[Trepidity]

This is somewhat opposite from the usual argument I hear from BSD advocates. They argue that putting it in the license, like the GPL, is unnecessarily legalistic and problematic, and instead the license should be BSD, and encouragement to contribute back should be done via social pressure, PR, etc. Some BSD advocates, at least, argue that this approach overall results in at least as many return contributions, without being legalistic about it.

Re:Freedom

[Trepidity]

The GPL is focused primarily on freedoms of end users rather than developers. From that perspective, the freedom the BSD license gives to developers to put proprietary licenses on their code isn't very pro-freedom for their users, since their users are now prohibited from modifying it.

Re:Freedom

[oldhack]

I hate tipping, and I hate this bogus whining. Change the license or shut up.

Re:Freedom

[amolapacificapaloma]

I think the point is that a large enterprise should be wise enough to know the difference, especially if they are making (or saving) big bucks. They could do a lot of things for the open source effort without expending any money, like raise awareness of the project among end users, suggesting donations... They are just being less polite than the rest of kids in the block. It is also a good time for MS to make a nice PR move to go along with all those "we love open source" statements they are now proclaiming...

Re:Freedom

[Darkness404]

So I take it you aren't mad whenever someone slams a door in your face, after all you didn't sign a contract that he wouldn't. You aren't pissed off when someone takes the next taxi cab in the rain when you are left to stand out without an umbrella? You aren't mad when some guy takes a massive dump in a public toilet and you have to use it? You don't get angry when someone cuts in line?

You have no legal right for someone to open the door for you, you don't have a piece of paper assuring that you will get the next taxi, you don't have a "Bill of Rights of the Bathroom", and you don't have assurance of your place in most lines.

But that doesn't mean you aren't an asshole if you do these things.

Thats the point that these developers are trying to say, that essentially Microsoft was an asshole. Few people seek for legal action after having these things happen to them, but they still have the right to say the person who did that to them was a jerk.

Re:Freedom

[thoughtsatthemoment]

From that perspective, the freedom the BSD license gives to developers to put proprietary licenses on their code isn't very pro-freedom for their users, since their users are now prohibited from modifying the modification.

FTFY

Re:Freedom

[tomhudson]

The GPL doesn't force you to do anything. You're entirely free to not use the code. If you use it, that is your choice, freely made (nobody's going to believe the Underpants Gnomes team up with the GNAA to install firefox on your pc).

As with any software, you're free to either (1) use the code, or (2) not use the code.

If you pick (1), abide by the licensing terms to the extent required by law.

If you pick (2), you need no longer abide by the license.

Note that if you pick (2), you still have to abide by copyright, etc., so I'm *not* saying that not using the code gives you an unlimited license to copy and redistribute in the case of proprietary code (only being pedantic in making the distinction because someone else will be a nazi :-)

Re:Freedom

[nadaou]

you don't want to be bound by the terms of the gpl? fine, then don't use my copyrighted code in your product -- write your own. you want to use my copyrighted code in your project? fine, but here are my terms, in plain english.

if you were dumb enough to distribute my code without reading the short and in plain english license document which came with it, well that's really your own fault. don't get mad at me or my license, it is not like it is subtly designed to trick you into turning over your code, it's out there in plain sight.

you have the freedom to make your own choices; I have mine. Your version of 100% freedom is total anarchy, read some Rousseau (avail now from the Gutenberg project for a low low price of nothing!).

Re:Freedom

[flimflammer]

I know a lot of places where tipping is mandatory. They won't serve you unless you agree to tip a certain percentage. It's bullshit if you ask me.

Re:Freedom

[cynyr]

or just block requests from MS with no notice or block 1/2 of them.

Re:Freedom

[Mr. Freeman]

Not necessarily. It's not hypocritical to expect people to not act like jerks. Sure, personal users not contributing back to the project is one thing. But a huge company like microsoft refusing to help out something that makes them money is a dick move.

Re:Freedom

[OzPeter]

Its like tipping, nowhere does it say that you -must- tip

And there are places in the world where they pay their waitstaff decent amounts of money so that the customer doesn't have to tip.

You just disproved your own argument

Re:Freedom

[cynyr]

no she can't. For the last several years that has not been the case. Employies have had little barginening power in relation to working conditions, or pay, simply there is a high enough unemployment rate that there will always be someone willing to work that job for the just barely legal conditions of the employer.

Waiters/waitresses are allowed to be paid below minimum wage in places that allow tips, at least here in Minnesota MN, USA. They even allow that for places that use a tip pool, where all of the tips everyone on a shift made goes into a pool, and then divided evenly across all of the staff(yes all of the staff, dishwashers too).

Re:Freedom

[oldhack]

Whine, whine, whine.

Re:Freedom

[catbutt]

I say that's not a tip, then, by definition.

Re:Freedom

[evilviper]

The purpose of BSD is to get code out there and perhaps make a reputation for the developer.

I expect a lot of BSD developers will step in here and call you an idiot for assuming you know what their motives are...

BSD gives others freedom to make code closed and provide no freedom to downstream users. with BSD license, the freedom extends to only a depth of 1.

Except EVERYONE can go back to the original (free) code, and do with it whatever they want. You're right that it doesn't push the developer's personal agenda on everyone who wants to redistribute it, but that's not freedom, it's a different type of proprietary.

GPL tries very hard to ensure that downstream users enjoy the same freedom as those who obtain the code directly

Proprietary software does the same thing...

An important effect of this is that anyone who works on GPL code tends to make it available,

Right. You are REQUIRED to contribute your changes to the public. Using your own metric: the freedom extends to only a depth of 0.

and it has the potential to make it back into the mainstream. The mainsteam can therefore integrate and grow stronger, and accumulate improvements, where in BSD the tendency is to fragment forever. There is no incentive to contribute back to the main stream. Hence the diaspora of bsd's in contrast with the relative unity of GPL licensed software.

Now this is just stupid. The BSDs are all open source, under a single license. The fact that they aren't all unified isn't because somebody close-up the source code. It's the LSB that keeps one distro of Linux to another, largely compatible, NOT the GPL.

GPL only limits freedom to the extent necessary to prevent others from removing freedoms for yet other licensees.

No, if it wanted to do that, it would simply require the original source code be provided. The GPL wants to FORCE you to provide any changes YOU made, to others.

More code is made available with more freedoms to more people for more purposes with the GPL.

Are you suggesting it's somehow easier to get the source code for (eg.) GNU tar than it is for BSD tar? I fail to see how that's even possible.

Re:Freedom

[vadim_t]

If you see that as a problem, change the license.

I've got this personal philosophy: don't offer to give more than you're really willing to part with. It's a general philosophy applying to pretty much everything. For instance, don't offer to do a favour, or pay for something if it'd really get on your nerves to have that offer accepted, then get nothing in return.

If you really want to get something in return, GPL or CC-SA it. If, and only if you're really deep inside willing to give something with no strings attached, and won't mind even if somebody takes that and makes millions on it while not giving you a single cent, only then BSD or public domain it.

You're not doing yourself any favours by pretending to be more altruistic than you really are. If deep down you want something in exchange for your trouble, make sure to get it, or you may regret it.

And forget about this "common courtesy" stuff. Corporations don't have it. Picture working at some huge company. Deadline is looming, project budget is tight. Even if you'd like to give something back to whoever you took something useful from, you will need your boss' authorization, and he'll need his, and perhaps it will go further up. They're almost guaranteed not to bother unless there's some good reason for it, such as the license actually requiring it.

Re:Freedom

[scamper_22]

You make it sound like a point worth making.

So yes a waitress has every right to be mad if you don't tip. But still remember, she is still paid a base salary and the restaurant still charges something for the meal. Imagine the restaurant industry if you really only had to pay what you wanted? It might be a good gimmick at one place, but the industry as a whole would collapse.

Humans have existed for thousands of years. Nowhere in history has a society functioned depending on people just doing the moral thing or giving back where they should.
Somewhere along the line, you have to be smart about life.

If you want to make a living doing your craft, you don't give away your labors for free. It really is that simple.
Now we all do things for free, but I don't depend on them for my living.

I write code for a living. I will not contribute to any open source application that is a final product. I'll contribute to research products, random libraries... but not to fully functional commercial products. Because I view it as killing the industry I work in.
For example, I would gladly contribute to log4j because it is not a final product, but just something to make my life easier.
But I certainly wouldn't contribute to Open Office as a final product.

Now those are just my boundaries and arbitrary reasons. You might think differently of course.
I suppose if I worked for Google which makes money on ads, then I might be more amenable to contributing.

The open source world has been largely naive. Much of it funded by government via universities and others from companies whose business is hardware or services or now ads. That's all great... and if you aren't doing and CHARGING for one of those... you're pretty naive to expect to even get a penny back from your work.

Re:Freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never understood tipping, really, or rather my understanding is not something that jives with the norm.

My understanding: tips are for above average performance, if a server was unusually pleasant, responsive, capable, or went out of their way to make my experience more enjoyable. It's a reward for good performance (like a paycheck bonus). How minimum wage is not the minimum for waiters/waitresses, I don't understand. If you earn tips, KEEP it.

My ideal system: you do your job. If you are good at it, you'll earn tips and are thus rewarded. If you are bad at your job, you should still receive at least minimum wage (that everyone else is entitled to, not some discounted minimum wage) until you either quit or are fired from your job for incompetence. That way, one has a consistant rate of income that you can depend on rather than the moods of others and won't have to risk going without a meal or being evicted because you didn't get a sufficient amount of tips.

Re:Freedom

[Angst Badger]

Purpose of the BSD license also is to let everyone use code freely the way they want, the only true form of freedom. Once you start demanding something more than attribution you're removing freedom and limiting what people can do, making it no better than just having a commercial license. This is also why I view BSD license as way more free than GPL, which has many, many limitations forced upon you. Not really the definition of freedom, is it?

I wish to heck that people would stop having arguments over the definition of "freedom" as if they were debating something substantial. It's like debating the definition of "art" or the value of the variable x. The meaning depends upon who's using it and in what context. The BSD license is more free in the sense that you're using the word, and less free in the sense that GPL advocates use the word. Neither side is right or wrong, and at least for a concept as vague (in both cases) as "freedom", there is no "true form of freedom". (In your case, public domain is freer than the BSD license.) Both sides are stubbornly arguing over terminology. More disturbingly, an awful lot of people seem to be unable to tell the difference between words/symbols and the things to which they refer.

Free software advocates really need to understand that if you want to have true freedom, you have to let people use the project the way the want to and stop tossing a fit when someone doesn't contribute back to it.

This much is obvious. If giving things away was a good way to get things in return, it would have supplanted the selling of things thousands of years ago. What free software advocates really need to do is to decide whether they're generously contributing to the common good or running a business. With the exception of full-blown non-profit organizations -- which are not trivial undertakings -- the two goals are mutually exclusive. And yes, expecting for-profit businesses not to take anything cheap or free they can get and turn around and sell it at a premium, value-added or not, is breathtakingly naïve. Speaking of definitions, that's what "business" means.

Re:Freedom

[flimflammer]

The GPL doesn't force you to do anything. You're entirely free to not use the code. If you use it, that is your choice, freely made (nobody's going to believe the Underpants Gnomes team up with the GNAA to install firefox on your pc).

That is a ridiculous notion. What you're essentially saying is the GPL does not impose any restrictions on you because you agreed to use the code and therefore accepted the restrictions. See the problem with that statement? The choice not to use the code in the first place does not mean there are no restrictions if you use it. It just means you have to abide by the restrictions when you do.

The GPL restrictive. If I use GPL code then I am forced to share my modifications with the world. I may not want to, but I have to. It also dictates what I can and can't include with my code because something I may have a license to use, those who try to use my code may not. That sounds an awful lot like restrictions to me.

As a preference I prefer to release my code under BSD because I support my code being truly free for everyone. I want anyone who wishes to use my code to be allowed to without compromising their own goals, even if that goal is financial in nature.

Re:Freedom

[tomhudson]

And yet ond BSD disto, FreeBSD, has 5 of the top 10 places on Netcraft including the Top 4.

The 4 linux distros in the top 10 are much more fragmented. CentOS, Fedora, a couple that aren't so easily identified ...

When I think BSD, I think of only 3 - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD. When I think linux, on the other hand ...

Re:Freedom

[evilviper]

A waitress has every right to be mad when someone orders $300 worth of food and doesn't even leave her a single cent.

"right" has nothing to do with it. She has every right to provide terrible service and expect a tip as well... She has every right to expect anything she wants, but that doesn't mean it's moral or amoral to not give it to her.

Legal != Moral. Just because something doesn't /have/ to be done doesn't mean it shouldn't be done.

No, but using a license that says free for commercial use, then EXPECTING to get a GIFT in return, and COMPLAINING when you don't, just makes you an idiot.

How would you feel about eating at a restaurant that has a big policy statement on the wall, indicating the tip is included in the bill, then getting shouted at by the waitress because you didn't leave her a tip, or not big enough of a tip? Just because your courtesy expectations don't meet-up with someone else's, doesn't give either any right to yell at them about it.

Re:Freedom

[vadim_t]

Sounds like they need an union

Re:Freedom

[OzPeter]

I've never understood tipping, really, or rather my understanding is not something that jives with the norm.

My concept of tipping is that is a scam for business owners to minimize tax liability by effectively forcing payroll taxes onto the waitstaff. if not, then why not just build the labour cost into the product price?

Re:Freedom

[Blakey Rat]

But the project says right there in bold print, "hey, come use this data. It's free."

You can't fault Microsoft for using the data when the project *asks* people to use the data. That's ridiculous. I mean, we can debate back and forth all day, but if there's a sign that says "free apples" and I take an apple, you can't get pissy after-the-fact that I didn't pay you a dollar.

It's really that simple.

If you want Microsoft to do something in exchange for the data, well, fine, but then you can't go around calling it "free" anymore because it ain't. It's really, really that simple.

Re:Freedom

[flimflammer]

That's completely beside the point. The discussion was over the fact that the GPL is a restrictive license, not someone being dumb enough to use GPL code without following the license. You're really just reaffirming that point.

Re:Freedom

[FooBarWidget]

I thought in the US it is required by law to give a tip of at least 10%?

Re:Freedom

[vadim_t]

Free software advocates really need to understand that if you want to have true freedom, you have to let people use the project the way the want to and stop tossing a fit when someone doesn't contribute back to it. If you expect or want to get contributions back, you should choose a license that requires it. Otherwise you're being quite a hypocrite about free software.

Exactly. If you want something in return, ask for it.

Purpose of the BSD license also is to let everyone use code freely the way they want, the only true form of freedom. Once you start demanding something more than attribution you're removing freedom and limiting what people can do, making it no better than just having a commercial license. This is also why I view BSD license as way more free than GPL, which has many, many limitations forced upon you. Not really the definition of freedom, is it?

I don't give a damn if you or anybody else thinks which license is "more free", "less free", or "communist" or whatever other label you want to use for it. I use the GPL because it does what I want to. If you want to convince me that I should license my software under the BSD, then try explaining why would that be in my interest. Arguments about semantics aren't going to do it.

Re:Freedom

[houghi]

It is like tipping in the USofA. I live in Leuven, Belgium and tipping is NOT custom here. Service (and TVA) are included in the bill. Service is better then some places in Belgium where tipping IS expected.

And it would be a LOT easier for many Americans if it would be clear to all how much you where to pay for the service you have gotten, regardless if this is the service in a restaurant or the service given by a doctor.

I agree that there is a difference between legal and moral. However different places have different morals or customs and then it is easier to inform the people what the customs are.

I use a LOT of OSS software and I never knew I had to contribute back to each and every piece of software that I used in the company. Firefox is, I think, one of the most used products in companies around the world and I am sure almost none of the companies contribute back to that project.

Re:Freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

Or you know you could just not work as a waiter or go on strike. Oh wait a business shouldn't try and make money, HOW DARE THEY!!!!!!!

Re:Freedom

[Trepidity]

Well, by "it", I mean "any software they receive". The GNU position is basically that end users should always be able to modify any software they receive.

Re:Freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

In the US 15% is a frequent rule of thumb for good service, 20% for excellent and 18% is the common automatic level for large parties. One advantage of a tipping system is that it allows for negative and positive feedback - receive crappy service and don't tip/tip poorly. A few diners doing so will get the message across to servers to drop the attitude. Compare to Germany's system of server pay being independent of dining experience, where they are noted for service with a frown. Yes it is manipulative and possibly demeaning to force poorly paid workers to be cheerful, but it does result in a better dining experience and select for cheerful servers.

Re:Freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

Just like when you enjoy a music or a movie. It's considered the right thing to do to put back money to the artist. Unless it's on slashdot. In that case the thing to do is to flip the artist the finger in the guise of rebelling against the record label and claim you'll support them when they roll around in concert even though everyone else at the concert has already paid for the studio album and is now paying for the performance.

Slasdork's hypocrisy rears its ugly head again.

Re:Freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

And if you use free software and contribute nothing back, and could have, it's completely expected that we call you white trash. Bing - the search engine of White Trash.

Re:Freedom

[DeadboltX]

* A 20% gratuity will be added to corporations with a market value of 100 billion dollars or more.

Re:Freedom

[grumbel]

How would you feel about eating at a restaurant that has a big policy statement on the wall, indicating the tip is included in the bill, then getting shouted at by the waitress because you didn't leave her a tip, or not big enough of a tip?

Except that is not the case with Open StreetMap, instead they have a nice big "Make a Donation" button right on their front page.

Re:Freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

Waiters/waitresses are allowed to be paid below minimum wage in places that allow tips, at least here in Minnesota MN, USA. They even allow that for places that use a tip pool, where all of the tips everyone on a shift made goes into a pool, and then divided evenly across all of the staff(yes all of the staff, dishwashers too).

A community where all the members contribute the totality of their earnings to a community fund which is in the end equally distributed to all the members of the community? Isn't that communism?

Re:Freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, true freedom is being able to do anything you want, regardless of how it reduces others' freedoms. If a software license limits you from modifying it in ways that would limit others' freedoms, then it's limiting your precious freedom and it should be avoided at all costs.

Re:Freedom

[thoughtsatthemoment]

The GNU position is basically that end users should always be able to modify any software they receive.

That might be costly. It'd take a fortune to educate some of the users to do that.

Re:Freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not a tip. That's an untaxed "Service Charge". It's simply part of the cost of the meal.

Re:Freedom

[noidentity]

Its like tipping, nowhere does it say that you -must- tip (unless the tip is included with the bill) but its still common courtesy. A waitress has every right to be mad when someone orders $300 worth of food and doesn't even leave her a single cent.

One reason I avoid eating out. I have this silly idea that it's like any other business, where they state the prices of the products and I choose which ones I want to buy, then pay the money and get the products. If someone wants to play games, I take my business elsewhere. It's the sellers that feel entitled to more than the stated price that make me have disgust for everyone in their line of business.

Re:Freedom

[tepples]

Unless the owner has threatened to close down any shop that unionizes, especially if the owner has done just that to another of the owner's shops.

Re:Freedom

[spinkham]

With BSD the theory that makes most sense to me is it is easier to push fixes back upstream then maintain them yourselves.
In practice, with BSD smaller patches often are merged and larger changes are sometimes kept private. In that way, BSD and LGPL are probably equivalent in terms of encouraging people to contribute.

In this case, apparently Bing thinks the product they are receiving is good enough, and has no need to contribute to fixing bugs and improving the project. Mapquest thinks contributing to the betterment of the product is warranted. Both are economically and morally fine.

Re:Freedom

[obarel]

Well said.

GPL is a way to force your ideology on others - whether it's a "good" ideology or not is open to discussion.
BSD is a way to not force your ideology on others.

Which one allows more freedoms is pretty obvious.

The GPL wants to FORCE you to provide any changes YOU made, to others.

I would argue that it's worse than that, because it's not only changes to the original code. Even if you link your code against a GPLed library you must provide your own code. I fail to see how writing a speech recognition system that uses readline somehow makes the speech engine "changes to readline", but maybe I'm just an idiot.

Re:Freedom

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

But that doesn't mean you aren't an asshole if you do these things.

The reason someone who does those things is an asshole is because he is violating an implied social contract.
It's effectively impossible to enforce that contract either privately or legislatively, but it's still a contract.

In the case of stuff like software and map information, it is significantly easier to enforce a contract. After all, they already have a contract in place to begin with, it just doesn't contain the terms that (apparently) the developer would like. Since the contract is completely under his control, he should add those terms (and be prepared for any unintended consequences that occur as a result too).

Re:Freedom

[Roger W Moore]

I think the point is that a large enterprise should be wise enough to know the difference, especially if they are making (or saving) big bucks.

Yes the should be but unless you've been living on another planet for the past decade or so you should realize that "large enterprise" and "wise" go together like "banks" and "sensible lending" or "oil companies" and "taking care of the environment" or "CEOs" and "reasonable pay" or.... The best thing to do would be to ask for a donation to help maintain the project. If they are smart they'll support you, if they are stupid they won't and if they are like the RIAA they'll probably sue you for daring to threatening their business model.

Re:Freedom

[RobertLTux]

Well in the US the way the laws goes is there is an absolute minimum rate and if tips to not make the difference between that and the stated minimum wage the employer must make up the difference quoting from the regs

"The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) requires payment of at least the federal minimum wage to covered, nonexempt employees. An employer of a tipped employee is only required to pay $2.13 an hour in direct wages if that amount plus the tips received equals at least the federal minimum wage, the employee retains all tips and the employee customarily and regularly receives more than $30 a month in tips. If an employee's tips combined with the employer's direct wages of at least $2.13 an hour do not equal the federal minimum hourly wage, the employer must make up the difference. "

Oh and it is custom to tip at least US$ 0.25 to show that the tip was not forgotten (but should only be done if the service was so bad you would be sueing the manager if it was worse (meal late/wrong drinks not refilled as needed server was drunk/stoned napkins not provided and my favorite HAD TO ASK MORE THAN ONCE FOR THE BILL)

Re:Freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

People like you disgust me. I wouldn't piss on you if your asshole was on fire.

Re:Freedom

[tukang]

The GPL restrictive. If I use GPL code then I am forced to share my modifications with the world. I may not want to, but I have to.

This is probably the most common misconception about the GPL. You are only forced to share your modifications with the people who use your binaries so if you produce a modified version of some GPL'ed code for Bob, then Bob is the *only* person you're required to give the modified source to.

This might not seem like an important distinction but it is. Suppose Bob is a client who wants to use the project in-house and doesn't want his competitors to benefit from the code he paid you to create - it would be perfectly ok for him to not the share the modifications (and binaries of course) with anyone else and have you sign a contract saying that you wouldn't do so either.

Re:Freedom

[amolapacificapaloma]

That is a ridiculous notion.

You don't like the code's licence, you are free to write your own. You are free to look up the code itself so you can come up with a different implementation and license it however you want :)

The GPL restrictive. If I use GPL code then I am forced to share my modifications with the world. I may not want to, but I have to. It also dictates what I can and can't include with my code because something I may have a license to use, those who try to use my code may not. That sounds an awful lot like restrictions to me.

I think you are getting it wrong. It forces you to share your modifications if you distribute them. You are absolutely free to do whatever you what with that code, for yourself. If you go public, the writers of the parent code chose a license that gives freedom (the four fsf freedoms) to all the users downstream.

Why do you want to private your users/customers/neighbors from that freedom?
Why would you like to infringe upon them (the possibility of) a closed source version of your BSD code?
Why do you think the people that use the GPL shouldn't try to make their own code to remain free?

Re:Freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

That depends on where you live. In some places in the world, tipping a waitress/waiter is disrespectful because it implies that they don't make enough money and need your charity.

Re:Freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

Leave it up to piece of shit Microshaft to fuck somebody over. Anybody that willingly buys their shit or chearleads for them like the parent is a fucking fool. They will use you and throw you in the trash when they're finished.

Re:Freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

Tipping is a very good analogy. For many foreigners, tipping is not part of their culture, just as open source is not the culture at Microsoft. So they can be expected to inadvertently upset a few waitresses when they venture abroad until they get used to the new culture.

Re:Freedom

[nadaou]

The point is that *you* put these restrictions on yourself when *you* decide to use the license.
Do not blame it on the license. The GPL is not an EULA.

Re:Freedom

[paxcoder]

Purpose of the BSD license also is to let everyone use code freely the way they want, the only true form of freedom.

Purpose of the PUBLIC DOMAIN also is to let everyone use code freely the way they want, the only true form of freedom.

Once you start demanding something more than attribution you're removing freedom and limiting what people can do, making it no better than just having a commercial license.

Once you start demanding something more than NOTHING you're removing freedom and limiting what people can do, making it no better than just having a commercial license.

This is also why I view BSD license as way more free than GPL, which has many, many limitations forced upon you. Not really the definition of freedom, is it?

This is also why I view PUBLIC DOMAIN as way more free than BSD, which has many, many limitations forced upon you. Not really the definition of freedom, is it?

See what I did there? Now, let's get serious: Freedom to kill would also be a freedom right? Does that mean it's good, and people should have it? Of course not! While BSD licenses are closer to freedom technically, GPL brings closer to a free world in practice. In a world without copyright your stance would be valid. This isn't that world, and we shouldn't feed the opposite camp.
The only argument I've heard to contest mine is: "Proprietary software isn't intrinsically bad". Well if you think that, there's not much to discuss in the first place. We view software freedom very differently. I advocate all user's and every author's freedom, and you advocate *first* derivative programmer's freedom. In a world with copyright and freedom insensitive authors, the latter very often impedes the former.
And that is what GPL is the right way to go: copyleft. If a proprietary software author looses the opportunity to leech on the community, so be it. They can sell their software as if it were a physical product. They're not the victims here.

BSD - license to kill free derivatives.

Re:Freedom

[Mr. Slippery]

A waitress has every right to be mad when someone orders $300 worth of food and doesn't even leave her a single cent.

Why?

Because an important social convention has been violated. If you believe that non-institutionalized social conventions are unimportant, try cutting in front of someone in line at the supermarket, or walking down the street yelling "Fuck you!" at everyone you see. There's no law against these behaviors, but only someone from a completely different culture, or someone serverely brain-damaged, would not understand them to be highly offensive and likely to cause anger.

Why? If she feels that a hourly salary is unfair, she can negotiate one based on how many dollars of food she serves.

No, she can't, no effectively, because capitalism puts a government-force-backed inequity into the system. When it's Jane Smith versus the government-chartered Amalgamated Restaurant Profits, Inc., it is intellectually dishonest to pretend that some sort of free-market negotiation is going on.

Re:Freedom

[C0vardeAn0nim0]

dude, just because it's _legal_ doesn't mean it's _ethical_.

we can and do bitch about unethical atitudes, regardless of legality.

Re:Freedom

[flimflammer]

You don't like the code's licence, you are free to write your own. You are free to look up the code itself so you can come up with a different implementation and license it however you want :)

I don't think you understand why I made that comment. Their statement was illogical. They claimed that the GPL doesn't force you to do anything, and I provided a statement to the contrary. I do not hate the GPL and have contributed to several GPL projects freely.

I think you are getting it wrong. It forces you to share your modifications if you distribute them. You are absolutely free to do whatever you what with that code, for yourself. If you go public, the writers of the parent code chose a license that gives freedom (the four fsf freedoms) to all the users downstream.

Why do you want to private your users/customers/neighbors from that freedom?
Why would you like to infringe upon them (the possibility of) a closed source version of your BSD code?
Why do you think the people that use the GPL shouldn't try to make their own code to remain free?

I'm sorry that I appear to have created some confusion over what I meant by "share it with the world". I'm aware that I don't need to openly distribute it to everyone, merely people I distribute my programs to. That distinction is partially lost however when I distribute my programs freely and to everyone who wishes to use it :)

I don't hoard my source code. I already provide the source to everything I write to everyone who wants it even though I use a BSD license. The distinction here is that I don't want anyone who uses my source code to feel trapped into releasing their modifications when they release their own derivatives of my code. I'm sure others feel that everyone should contribute and that is a noble position to take; it's just not something I feel too strongly about one way or another. Not everyone can use GPL source code for their projects. When I release my code under the BSD license, I'm telling everyone that they can use my code no matter what situation they're in.

I don't wish to infringe on anyone's license, and I support everyones choice of license, be it BSD, GPL, LGPL, Apache, what have you. If someone uses GPL then I will obey their license if I do anything with their source. On that same note however, no one can tell me that I have utmost freedom when I use the GPL. I have to sacrifice some of my freedoms to ensure the next batch of users down the line have freedoms as well. It may be for the greater good, but it's not truly free. :)

Re:Freedom

[martin-boundary]

There's still plenty of strings attached with the BSD license, like a disclaimer on warranty, and it requires people to refrain from suing the authors if their software harms them.

If you truly don't want to put strings in, then public domain it, and put no other conditions or disclaimers in it at all.

Re:Freedom

[Opie812]

waitress has every right to be mad when someone orders $300 worth of food and doesn't even leave her a single cent.

I'm watching the movie as I type this....

I'm very sorry the government taxes their tips, that's fucked up. That ain't my fault. It would seem to me that waitresses are one of the many groups the government fucks in the ass on a regular basis. Look, if you ask me to sign something that says the government shouldn't do that, I'll sign it, put it to a vote, I'll vote for it, but what I won't do is play ball. And as for this non-college bullshit I got two words for that: learn to fuckin' type, 'cause if you're expecting me to help out with the rent you're in for a big fuckin' surprise.

Re:Freedom

[tomhudson]

No. The original poster said that the gpl forced him to "Hand over the source, plus your patches, to whatever programs you are distributing. That, or lose your inventory in default judgment, a la Westinghouse Digital."

The gpl doesn't force anyone to do that. You're free not to use gpl'd code. The gpl is not some mobster at gunpoint saying "you have to use the gpl and you have to abide by these terms. Or else!" There's no forcing anyone to use gpl code.

Now if gpl code use was mandatory, he would have had a point. But since nobody's forcing him to use gpl'd code, nobody's forcing him to do any of the other stuff.

Yes, the gpl is restrictive. Yes, the gpl is viral to a certain extent. So what. You can always non-gpl code, or write your own, or pay someone to write the code for you. Nobody is "forced."

Re:Freedom

[murdocj]

Exactly. If Bing is using the project according to the license, they are operating correctly. If you want people to PAY for something, sell it. If you want people to use it freely, let them use it freely.

Re:Freedom

[Mr. Freeman]

I could see tipping that much if the server did EVERYTHING on that list, but tipping $0.25 just for not bringing napkins? I mean, meal late isn't even something that you should reflect in the tip, that's the kitchen's fault and they don't get a share of the tips.

Server being drunk/stoned is certainly something that should result in a poor tip (having to ask more than once for the bill as well), but most of your problems are just excuses for not tipping.

Re:Freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

You thought wrong then. It is not required by law to tip anyone, anywhere.

If you do decide to tip, 15% is customary for a restaurant and $1 USD per drink at a bar.

Re:Freedom

[Minwee]

But Bing is already adding a 30% tip on top of what they were being charged. What's the problem?

Re:Freedom

[DRJlaw]

Legal != Moral. Just because something doesn't /have/ to be done doesn't mean it shouldn't be done.

Quite often, it does. Especially when you've sat down and written a detailed agreement that says this:

This License constitutes the entire agreement between the parties with respect to the Work licensed here. There are no understandings, agreements or representations with respect to the Work not specified here.

See Section 8, subsection e.

Once you've taken the time to draw up (or adopt) a detailed contract or license, common courtesy is faithfully following the license. If your intentions and expectations for what your licensees are obligated to do in ordinary circumstances are not in the license, you have no basis to complain -- your failure was either your own responsibility or, even worse, duplicity. Serge Wroclawski chose the CCASA 2.0 license and marketed the heck out of the project using the moral authority of that license. If he wanted to to use a Open Source for the Little Guy, Screw the Man license, then he should have written one and lived with the inevitable criticism that the OSF and others would have heaped upon the project.

This circumstance is not at all like tipping. Tipping is a long established social norm that only applies in some settings. You may tip the waitstaff in a restaurant, but I'm willing to bet that you don't tip the counter worker at McDonalds, that you don't tip at restaurants that explicitly say that tips are not expected/required (why?), and that you don't tip the caterer that you've hired for your kid's graduation party (why?). As you've already acknowledged, you don't tip in restaurants where the facility says that the gratuity is included in the bill. However you want to characterize it, Secion 8(e) is a pretty clear statement that you're not in a 'tipping' situation. Custom is usually satisfied when you follow the written instructions given to you in a restaurant, and equally satisfied when you follow the written instructions given to you in a contact.

Projects cannot have their cake and eat it too. Plenty of software and data licenses, particularly old shareware licenses, very clearly laid out special requirements for commercial use. There is no excuse for not including such language in a license if that is the intended result. You and others are simply using 'common courtesy' as a convenient justification for a significant post-hoc change in the terms of the license based on the success of a particular user. That success doesn't place any additional burden on the project, unlike your order at a restaurant, so frankly I'm confused as to why you feel that any form of 'compensation' in excess of that requested in the license is either required or deserved.

Re:Freedom

[91degrees]

Maybe. Depends on definitions. What difference does it make?

Re:Freedom

[erpbridge]

* A 20% gratuity will be added to corporations with a market value of 100 billion dollars or more.

And what corporations will do is the same as companies have been doing for a very long time: find the loophole, exploit it. In this case, they will create a child company or something that is not them that is worth less than that cap so they don't have to pay, or define themselves as not being a corporation.

Or, use creative accounting to massage their books so that their market value is not X amount, but so that all their assets still add up the same.

Re:Freedom

[DRJlaw]

So I take it you aren't mad whenever someone slams a door in your face, after all you didn't sign a contract that he wouldn't.

Conversely, you would apparently become apoplectic if you signed a contract to fight in a boxing match and then got punched in the head in round 1.

Copyright and License
OpenStreetMap is open data, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 licence (CC-BY-SA).

You are free to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt our maps and data, as long as you credit OpenStreetMap and its contributors. If you alter or build upon our maps or data, you may distribute the result only under the same licence. The full legal code explains your rights and responsibilities.

That is the invitation that this project made. They 'signed a contract' that explicitly said that Bing could do exactly what it is doing. Not quite analogous to getting a door unexpectedly slammed in your face, now is it?

Re:Freedom

[hey!]

I feel entitled to withhold a tip if I get bad service, but it's actually in my self interest to tip reasonable or good service. This is the way waitresses and waiters are compensated in our culture, and it's actually a reasonably good system for me as a diner. Basically, dealing with the public sucks. The tip system gives servers an incentive to put the schmuck who came in earlier behind them and give me good service.

Now there are people who feel entitled to repay good service with no tip, but the system would not work if everyone did what they did. Waiters and waitresses aren't paid a living wage, and if everyone stiffed the people who waited on them, we'd have to raise the wages of the servers and roll that into the food prices. Then there'd be no incentive except professional pride for a server to make an effort to take care of me after they'd had a crappy experience with the last customer. And we certainly don't want to pay the kind of wages that buy professional pride.

So in a nutshell, people who don't tip are contemptible freeloaders, but there's no way to eliminate the possibility of freeloading without eliminating incentive pay (i.e., "tips"). Stiffing a waiter who has given you acceptable service certainly *is* immoral.

Now as this applies to open source projects, its not exactly the same situation, but the same issue of enlightened self-interest apply. If one benefits from an open source project and are in a position to help that project, it is quite reasonable to do so. It wouldn't kill Microsoft to throw some help the developer's way in this case, as Mapquest has done. It's just common sense.

Where it might get interesting is if Microsoft actually thinks that helping the project is against its own interest. In that case, they're quite entitled to even work against the project while at the same time benefiting from it. But in that case the rest of us who benefit from that project might well question whether we want to encourage Microsoft to act this way.

Let me say for the record I don't think Microsoft is pursuing rational self-interest here. I don't think that giving back, even in rational self-interest, is part of the corporate culture there. It's a company renowned for people undermining each other within the organization itself.

Re:Freedom

[dbIII]

Tipping is a demeaning solution to a disgusting problem. The employer doesn't pay enough for his workers to make a living so they have to rely on the charity of strangers. It means people have to beg for money in their own workplace and can never be sure they will bring home enough money for a full days work.
It's a very poor model for anything.

Re:Freedom

[anon mouse-cow-aard]

only 3 BSD's. ok what about this list of derivatives from freebsd alone: http://www.freebsdnews.net/systems/ which mentions:OS X, MidnightBSD, DragonflyBSD, PC-BSD, Tomahawk Desktop, Monowall, pfsens, freeNAS, hamfreesbie, trueBSD, RoFreeSBIE, GhostBSD, TinyBSD, nanoBSD, Evoke... which are afaict bsd distros...

Openbsd proudly lists their commercial spin-offs: http://www.openbsd.org/products.html, RTMX, syscall, Genua, vantronix, Fox-IT, LegatoCRM, MyRestaurant, are essentially derivative distros of openbsd. How many of those companies contribute back to the kernel?

I will stop there.

there are three different kernels and userlands between major BSD families. Where BSD's share userlands, it is likely because they use large GPL code bases like gnome or KDE. You do not see regular exchanges of code among the BSD's and Mac OS-X for example. Do you see patches coming in from NetAPP? no? The filers use NetApp's proprietary operating system called Data ONTAP which includes code borrowed from Berkeley Net/2 BSD Unix and other operating systems.[7] D http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetApp

The point is that there is a great deal of usage of BSD, but they are very often parallel, independent forks, and do little to make the OS family, as a whole, mature.

In contrast, There is a single linux kernel. Distros take snapshots at different times, but patches invariably make their way back to the main tree, so it is fundamentally shared. In contrast, Each BSD has their own kernel, and exchange of drivers and features is a laborious affair involving porting the program. All the linuxes get their drivers from basically the same tree (albeit often different versions.) The same goes for the userland, where substantially the same packages are used.

While there are occasional competing implementations, there aren't several kernels and basic libs being developed in parallel for the heck of it. There are not private companies taking the whole OS, extending it for their particular use, and then selling the result without contributing the extensions back to the main tree. (hello, netapp, apple, MS (tcp stack), and many other documented cases.)

GPL is about being greedy in your freedom, wanting companies and people that have the freedom to build businesses on the software have to help build the ecosystem and foundation for those who come after to do the same.

Re:Freedom

[vadim_t]

I have this system:

You get a tip for exceptional service.

For normal service you get nothing, but you get a regular customer.

For lousy service, I take note and go to a different bar next time.

I don't particularly care if people smile or not. Fake smiles are creepy.

Re:Freedom

[Dr Herbert West]

Unbelievable. Spend less time reading Ayn Rand and try spending some time on the other side of the counter/cash register.

Only a clueless twat who's never had a job like that would dare be so flippant.

Re:Freedom

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

The problem isn't that the license doesn't allow it, the license does, its just that its common courtesy to contribute back to the project if you are making money or a large enterprise working on it.

Its like tipping....

If you have a huge company using said software to a ridiculous degree, isn't that alone a huge win for Open Source?

I think, given what Open Source stands for, you're just being greedy at that point.

Re:Freedom

[Dr Herbert West]

Please mod parent up. In many states in the US it's legal to pay waitstaff less (in some cases, less than a third) of minimum wage. The reason? Tips. Which are taxed as income.

Mind you, I've been in places where tips were "pooled". That is, all the tips for the whole day go in one big jar, and everyone (including management-- evil!) gets their share. So, the tip you leave or don't leave may not go to the person that deserved it.

I know plenty of bartenders that can pull in 200-300 bucks a night... but I know a lot of waitresses that bust their ass for what ends up being about 4 bucks an hour.

So tip the help!

Re:Freedom

[anon mouse-cow-aard]

The purpose of BSD is to get code out there and perhaps make a reputation for the developer.

I expect a lot of BSD developers will step in here and call you an idiot for assuming you know what their motives are...

Regardless of a developers motivation, the only practical effect is accurately characterized.

BSD gives others freedom to make code closed and provide no freedom to downstream users. with BSD license, the freedom extends to only a depth of 1.

Except EVERYONE can go back to the original (free) code, and do with it whatever they want. You're right that it doesn't push the developer's personal agenda on everyone who wants to redistribute it, but that's not freedom, it's a different type of proprietary.

yes everyone can go back to the original, and companies, given the choice, will always retain their IP, especially if they do not think other companies will contribute theirs. Game theory tells us that, it is a lot like prisoners dilemma. The GPL makes it economically sane for a private company to contribute because they know any other company using it will have to contribute too. BSD is a recipe for poverty of contributions.

GPL tries very hard to ensure that downstream users enjoy the same freedom as those who obtain the code directly

Proprietary software does the same thing...

An important effect of this is that anyone who works on GPL code tends to make it available,

Right. You are REQUIRED to contribute your changes to the public. Using your own metric: the freedom extends to only a depth of 0.

and it has the potential to make it back into the mainstream. The mainsteam can therefore integrate and grow stronger, and accumulate improvements, where in BSD the tendency is to fragment forever. There is no incentive to contribute back to the main stream. Hence the diaspora of bsd's in contrast with the relative unity of GPL licensed software.

Now this is just stupid. The BSDs are all open source, under a single license. The fact that they aren't all unified isn't because somebody close-up the source code. It's the LSB that keeps one distro of Linux to another, largely compatible, NOT the GPL.

BSD's aren't unified because the license sets up incentives for forking and keeping changes proprietary. As for the effect of LSB, for example it specified the standard packaging format to be .rpm... ever used debian, ubuntu, arch, or gentoo?

GPL only limits freedom to the extent necessary to prevent others from removing freedoms for yet other licensees.

No, if it wanted to do that, it would simply require the original source code be provided. The GPL wants to FORCE you to provide any changes YOU made, to others.

The original author shared all his code with you, He does insist that you provide the same freedom to him and anyone else with the modifications you choose to distribute. He gives you exactly the same freedoms he has. GPL removes the incentive to keep private code.

More code is made available with more freedoms to more people for more purposes with the GPL.

Are you suggesting it's somehow easier to get the source code for (eg.) GNU tar than it is for BSD tar? I fail to see how that's even possible.

Have a look at any article analyzing contributions to the linux kernel. Many, many companies are now contributing. More code is being created. More people are getting access to more code because the GPL incentivizes reciprocity from individuals and companies.

Re:Freedom

[Artifakt]

The world's full of free where nobody assumes they need a 300 page + liscence to cover every possibility. I volunteer through my church for a food distribution project. We don't ask the people who get help not to disclose where it comes from, identify us workers in public, or any of a host of other legal situations of the sort that get put into private contracts. We pretty much assume that nobody is being given the right to get people's phone numbers without asking them directly if it's all right, and then call them in private instead of going through the church office (that's calls going either way). But, if one of the people we help persisted in begging me for gas money upon recognizing me as that guy from the church food give away, yes, I might bitch about it, even though its not in writing anywhere that they have specifically agreed not to.
            Here's the real issue. If you are dealing with Microsoft, and you do expect something back, you don't need a small set of limitations such as are in the GPL, you need a 300 page plus, spell out every possible scenario, get an army of very, very skilled lawyers to evaluate it in advance, and then hope liscence. One of the reasons I say this is, if there is no formal liscence requiring it, Microsoft apparently gives absolutely nothing. It's not that they do or don't have to, it's that when they could choose to or not, they always choose not. If it might be in their own interest to give something to encourage more of what they are receiving, they still choose not. If looking to the future would show that the goose that lays golden eggs won't lay any more after it's made into pate, they choose not to think that far ahead. If that's how they treat FOSS, that's how they treat everybody else too. I'd go out of business if I treated everyone that way. There's plenty of times I do things that involve giving the customer at least reasonable quality rather than the strict terms of the contract. One of the things that makes me choose to do this is it discourages them bitching about my actions, and I probably make a lot more money overalll by not having as many people going around criticizing me to other potential customers. It's the potential for 'bitching' that makes that happen.
            Microsoft does not have a contract that says these people must discuss these free transactions only in court, or anything else like that, does it? If Microsoft is allowed to 'give back' whatever it wants, including nothing at all, then the other side is equally allowed to bitch, whereas, if there's an implied requirement the FOSS developers act like this free software transaction was a contract and it included a clause saying they would not make critical statements to the media, then why isn't there an implied requirement for Microsoft to give some form of encouragement to the free software developers?

Re:Freedom

[pgmrdlm]

I have cancelled out of 3 responses where I tried to say the same thing. Thank you for pointing that out.

Now we will be modded down into oblivion because of the said hypocrisy.

Re:Freedom

[pgmrdlm]

Wrong, this allows for an employee to actually make more than the other employee's by being exceptionally good at their job. Unlike in a union shop where everyone makes the same, no matter the quality of work.

Re:Freedom

[anon mouse-cow-aard]

Well said.

GPL is a way to force your ideology on others - whether it's a "good" ideology or not is open to discussion. BSD is a way to not force your ideology on others.

Which one allows more freedoms is pretty obvious.

That's true. GPL's purpose is to get more code out there, and it doesn't care if you agree or not. While BSD may provide more freedoms for the code provided, GPL provides more free code.

The GPL wants to FORCE you to provide any changes YOU made, to others.

I would argue that it's worse than that, because it's not only changes to the original code. Even if you link your code against a GPLed library you must provide your own code. I fail to see how writing a speech recognition system that uses readline somehow makes the speech engine "changes to readline", but maybe I'm just an idiot.

In this case, FSF are idiots. I'm with Larry Rosen...

According to an article in the Linux Journal, Lawrence Rosen (IP law specialist, and OSI general counsel) argues that the method of linking is mostly irrelevant to the question about whether a piece of software is a derivative work; more important is the question about whether the software was intended to interface with client software and/or libraries[41]. He states, "The primary indication of whether a new program is a derivative work is whether the source code of the original program was used [in a copy-paste sense], modified, translated or otherwise changed in any way to create the new program. If not, then I would argue that it is not a derivative work,"[41] and lists numerous other points regarding intent, bundling, and linkage mechanism. He further argues on his firm's website[42] that such "market-based" factors are more important than the linking technique.

the above is from the GPL entry on wikipedia, but he said as much in his Open Source Licensing book.

Re:Freedom

[amolapacificapaloma]

I have to sacrifice some of my freedoms to ensure the next batch of users down the line have freedoms as well.

And the next batches of users? You may be sacrificing all of their freedoms... (and saying they don't have to use a proprietary version is... how could I express it... "a ridiculous notion"? :P)

It may be for the greater good, but it's not truly free. :)

Yeah, I do understand that, it's just that sometimes it bothers me that some people don't value the common good as much as it deserves ;) I guess it's not truly free but freer for humankind than anything else...

Re:Freedom

[amolapacificapaloma]

They should view this kind of situations as a way to gain some positive mindshare. Banks and Oil companies spends tons of money in ads, some CEOs have nominal pays of just a dollar a year... They all try to look good, more so if it's cheap to do so. (The RIAA is just evil and doesn't need to care about PR.)

Re:Freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe in freedom of speech. However I disagree with you and, my morals are correct and yours are evil. Therefore you shouldn't have the right to speak. I still believe in freedom, but only if I agree with it.

That's the type of hypocrisy that advocates sound like. Freedom means people have the right to do what they want with your work, within limits, even if you disagree. Many free software advocates do not want freedom, but tyrannical control.

Re:Freedom

[InfiniteWisdom]

For normal service you get nothing, but you get a regular customer.

Correction, the owner of the establishment gets a regular customer.

Re:Freedom

[InfiniteWisdom]

I'm very sorry the government taxes their tips, that's fucked up

Why should tips be any different from other forms of income?

Re:Freedom

[Kalriath]

I'm not sure I'd call the GPL "plain english". In fact, it's just as guilty as the proprietary licenses at redefining english terms and attempting to extend outside of it's legal definition (conveyancing? What's that bullshit?)

Re:Freedom

[hairyfeet]

I'm afraid I have to agree whining about this IS bullshit. To use the famous /. car analogy, it is like you sat a sign on your car that said "free car" and when I come by you happily sign over the title and hand me the keys, but then you find out next week I have money and THEN you scream "But But...You should have given me money!". Tough shit sparky, you shouldn't have given away your car.

It is the SAME thing here, it is NOT like tipping, where this guy is working a low end shit job and begging for change. This guy CHOSE the license, nobody said "choose this or GTFO". He could have chosen any license he wanted but he CHOSE the GPL. If he wants he could easily go dual license like MySQL, but he CHOSE not so. See the difference here?

Re:Freedom

[kyrio]

The owner who pays your wage.

Re:Freedom

[sumdumass]

That's actually illegal. The owner cannot threaten to do close down a business or actually close the business down on the condition of unionization. The best he can get by with is actually closing the shop down after it unionizes and cite something else as the reason. That reason has to be valid too.

A Union isn't necessarily the answer either. Some people tip, some do not. Some people tip too much, some tip not enough, the trick is getting a mix of users/customers in that the good make up for the bad and that having good wait staff can help a lot. I know waitresses making 40K or more a year and only claiming less then 20K because the rest is in tips. A good waiter/waitress in a high volume area that isn't run down with poverty or something like a restaurant that is only a buffet and they bring the drinks, can make 300-400 dollars a weekend in tips alone. If they make another $200 or more during the weekdays, that's about 26K a year on top of her regular salary. I know bartenders who make almost twice as much in tips but they are in really expensive bars.

Re:Freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

So, the tip you leave or don't leave may not go to the person that deserved it.

Because, we all know, that the guys in the back busting their ass to cook the food, prep the salads, get the servers fresh tables, and every other thing that goes into a positive dining experience, these things certainly have no affect on the ability for a server to carry a plate of food from one room to the other correctly.

It's not the person that cooked it, or cleaned the plate it is on, or washed the vegetables in the salad, or made that specialty margarita "just right", it is the person that carries it (the messenger?) that deserves the reward for everyone else doing a good job.

If you go out to eat, and the food is great, the place is clean, yet the snotty server walks around without a clue what the job is all about (if you forget to bring me mustard 10 minutes after you have served me a hamburger, you might want to look into a career move) then simply feel free to tip the people the ARE deserving. That's how a merit based system works. What exists now is nothing but garbage and the servers know it. Automatic tipping is horseshit and only motivates servers to do a shittier job.

Re:Freedom

[index0]

As a software user, I prefer to buy and use software that is under GPL. What benefits do I as a software user get when I buy software that is under BSD?

Re:Freedom

[sumdumass]

Lol.. I know a bunch of bartenders and waiters who have a system too. You don't tip, you get crappy service. eventually you won't come back. If you do come back, they short your drink, spit in your food, or do some nasty things behind your back that you definitely do not want to know about.

Bottom line is, you treat them like crap, they will return the favor in kind.

On the other hand, I'm a firm believer in 'if you take care of your bartender, your bartender will take care of you". By tipping what probably amounts to one drink for every 2 or 4 drinks, I tend to get service faster then others, I'm singled out when they are slammed and everyone is hollering for something, and when they mess up a drink, I'm usually one of the ones they offer it to. And by mess up a drink, I mean something like making a Beam and coke instead of a jack and coke or cherry bomb instead of a grape bomb- the customer catches it before it gets to them so it's not like anyone else has drank from it.

Re:Freedom

[imidan]

I know that this has been said later in the thread, but I just have to repeat it. There are a lot of FOSS people who believe that there is some unwritten code of conduct for using FOSS software. That if you are a large, corporate user, then you have some responsibility to contribute to the project in some way. But that responsibility isn't written into the license. What do we expect the corporate users to do? Are they supposed to divine their responsibilities? Read them in tea leaves? If you expect people (or corporations) to contribute to the project in some way if they use your product, then spell that out in the license. This is how the world works. Unvoiced, implied ideas of responsibility aren't it. How can you expect people to live up to your expectations if you don't even tell them what they are?

Look, I've always thought about the open source license in sort of a Zen way. It's not for us to be upset when people take open source code and profit from it. That's not why we're here, to police the spread of ideas. We're here to propagate ideas. The fact that someone makes money off of them is implicitly part of the entire open source philosophy. We produce this stuff, and it's open for use. Why would we ever get pissed off that someone is using it very successfully? If we want to get entangled in arguing about how much money people are making off of it, then we should have been making commercial software.

Re:Freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

You're exactly right. I think the problem is that so many people here are so focused on the profits that come to someone unrelated from this open source project. But that's so not the point of open source. It's about making the best product that we can; it's about making a product that is open for anyone to read the source of; it's about security through many eyes; it's about all of us having the ability to make changes to the code, to customize it. Open source isn't about profits. But, look, as soon as money gets involved, suddenly we want a piece of it, apparently. And we complain about slow adoption of open source software. Maybe it's because it's an enormous bait-and-switch?! We say, 'here, have this free software!' and then we bitterly complain because the people we gave it to aren't showering us with gifts.

But, to return to your point: yes, there is a contract. It's the software license under which the material was released. If there was some expectation of reciprocation, then it should have been written in to the license.

Re:Freedom

[the_macman]

Know what? Illegal shit happens all the time and the law doesn't give a shit because it's business. Think hiring illegal immigrants. Me thinks you don't have the perspective of a waitress. What's more important to a waitress busting her ass to pay her bills: Demanding more wages against the will of her boss and threatening legal action if he doesn't cooperate or making money? You decide smart guy.

Re:Freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

Service in Belgium is generally shit. The few exceptions are very small family businesses and ones run by Americans and Irish.

Re:Freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

It's an its!

Re:Freedom

[PiSkyHi]

In China, staff will see your tip as an attempted bribe, not quite knowing what you expect for this tip and also worrying they will lose their job.

Re:Freedom

[binkzz]

Firefox is, I think, one of the most used products in companies around the world and I am sure almost none of the companies contribute back to that project.

That's probably the worst example you could have picked :P. Firefox is one of the products of which almost all users contribute back to it. If you use the search bar at the right top, you're contributing to Firefox. They make millions from this.

I agree with you about tipping though. I think it's outdated and unnecessary. Either include it in the bill or don't expect it.

Re:Freedom

[mldi]

Mind you, I've been in places where tips were "pooled". That is, all the tips for the whole day go in one big jar, and everyone (including management-- evil!) gets their share. So, the tip you leave or don't leave may not go to the person that deserved it.

Did not know about management getting a cut of tips. That's just WRONG. But, I do see pooling tips as still be effective (though, not as much) because if a certain waiter/waitress doesn't bring in tips, they'll receive pressure or a piss poor attitude from the other workers. Granted, some people just won't care.

Never been a fan of the pooling tips thing though, from a customer point of view.

Re:Freedom

[Patch86]

1) Wouldn't that put them in breach of their own licence?

2) MS could do a deal with any other company that uses the data to act as a middleman. With BSD licence, once the data has been passed to a second party, it is theirs to do with as they wish.

Re:Freedom

[Patch86]

A BSD licence is a software licence hat, quite explicitly, says "you don't have to give anything back if you don't want". That is why it is the licence of choice for proprietary enterprise, and the projects who wish to work with them.

It is the software equivalent of signing a contract with someone explicitly outlining their right to slam doors in your face.

I'm not criticising the BSD licence; I think it is possibly the most liberal of all the FOSS licences, and serves many huge projects very well indeed. But if you don't want people exercising their rights that you have explicitly granted them, use a licence that doesn't grant them those rights.

Re:Freedom

[Nursie]

In the UK we would consider your behaviour vulgar.

Skipping your place in the ordered queue of customers by slipping money to the barman?

Poor show old chap, poor show.

It's not a bad thing to buy a drink for the bar folk, but expecting particular favours as a result just seems wrong. Very American.

Re:Freedom

[Nursie]

You mean BSD?

Because GPL would be a share-alike type of license.

Re:Freedom

[Nursie]

I'm sorry, what?

FOSS advocates are all ripping off photoshop so they can be safely ignored?

Bullshit. I know a lot of people who have ripped off photoshop, they were all windows users (surprisingly!) a lot of them hadn't paid for windows either.

FOSS advocates and mass, casual software piracy do not go hand in hand. In fact it's one of the reasons that FOSS programs don't get mindshare - they're competing against another form of free.

You're the one with the disconnect buddy.

Re:Freedom

[TheRaven64]

Only a clueless twat who's never had a job like that would dare be so flippant.

Or someone who doesn't live in the USA. Over here, serving staff are not exempted from minimum wage, so they don't rely on tips to survive. Tipping is reserved for people who provide good service, it's not just a hidden fee on top of the meal price.

Re:Freedom

[selven]

Once you start demanding something more than attribution you're removing freedom

Why does attribution get to be the only thing that does not remove freedom? It's a small and reasonable requirement but surely a program that does not require even attribution would be even more free. When people donate clothes to charity they don't write their names on the back so that their generosity can be recognized, so why does the software world get a different threshold?

Re:Freedom

[Mendy]

The problem isn't that the license doesn't allow it, the license does, its just that its common courtesy to contribute back to the project if you are making money or a large enterprise working on it.

There usually isn't a budget code for "common courtesy" though, and even if the members of staff involved feel they should contribute they might be wary of being asked to justify having spent their budget on something they could have got for free. Projects that want to get money need to offer additional formal services in return for it, whether it be support or membership of a board to help shape future development.

Re:Freedom

[daffmeister]

They are protecting (or offering) different freedoms. The BSD licence offers freedom to the first generation recipient to do what they wish (pretty much). The GPL licence is designed to extend that freedom to the second generation recipient, by preventing the first generation recipient from taking it away.

Re:Freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

And the open source world is a world where the waitstaff isn't paid at all. So yes, if one of the largest companies in the world makes ample use of an open source project like this and doesn't even lay down a couple of coins as a tip, it's rude. Not illegal, just rude.

Re:Freedom

[marcello_dl]

> stop tossing a fit when someone doesn't contribute back to it
Not really tossing a fit.

Simply taking notice that MS uses free software for a strategically significant project like bing and does not contribute a dime. Again.

About your stuff about freedoms, which one is freer in your definition?

a society with no rules, where it is possible for a mob to form and drive people out their home OR a society with a rule like: you can't restrict other people's freedom?

If you talk the first one then s/freedom/anarchy so we can understand each other better.

Re:Freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

"Then there'd be no incentive except professional pride for a server to make an effort to take care of me"

that's just bullshit. the owner of the place should be the one managing the personnel and wages. additionally, tips seem to be a nice way to avoid some taxes.

if i go out i don't want to evaluate waitress, then decide their pay. i want to relax and eat. and yes, figure a decent pay into the prices of of food or drinks, that's what a decent place should do.

Re:Freedom

[Bert64]

Actually, at many busy taxi ranks (airports, train stations etc) it is not uncommon to be given a numbered ticket and you can sit down and wait for the taxi to arrive with the corresponding number.

Re:Freedom

[dbIII]

No, it makes them make more money by being good at begging. Also the waitress that flirts like a prostitute is going to make more money than one that doesn't. Wrap your US morality around that one.
It also produces customers that think they can treat staff like shit or even sexually harass them so long as they give a tip - which is one reason why US tourists have a bad reputation in countries where tipping is rare.

Re:Freedom

[Bert64]

If you don't tip, but come back regularly in some places they will become angry with you and spit in your food (or worse)...
Plus your regular custom helps the business owner, not the individual server...

It's also possible to have great food and lousy service, or great service and lousy food... It's quite difficult to tip the chef in most places. I wouldn't necessarily discount a place based on one instance of poor service, if you go again someone else might serve you better.

I fully agree with you about fake smiles being creepy, i don't want to be served by someone who is forcing themselves to appear cheerful... I understand that they are at work and don't feel particularly cheerful, i just want a polite and efficient service.

I don't like having to fight to get the server's attention...
I don't want to wait ages to get the bill...
If i'm eating alone, i don't want to wait longer than necessary for the food.
If i'm eating lunch, chances are there is a time limit (lunch break) and i need to leave fairly quickly, i can't wait 20 minutes for a starter, another 30 for the main and then another 20 for the bill to arrive and another 15 before they take the payment...
I don't need patronising looks from the server because i order too much... Although moving us to a bigger table might be useful, i like to sample lots of different foods.
I don't want the waiter to come back 2 minutes after bringing the food to ask if everything is ok... it's rude to talk with your mouth full which it invariably will be 2 minutes after receiving food, and if i wasn't satisfied i would have said something myself already.

Also, i found service in germany pretty good, the staff were usually very efficient and helpful, usually didn't exhibit fake cheeriness (they are at work after all), and appreciated when you made an effort to speak german (even tho they would quickly detect your accent and reply in english).

Re:Freedom

[queazocotal]

The OSM project also cannot handle large amounts of traffic.

The server connections are on donated bandwidth, which are about flat out.

Bing runs their own servers, to serve up the map tiles, and uses almost no OSM resources, while promoting OSM at least a little with the attribution link.

Bing is donating hardware to the project through providing their own servers.

They could indeed donate to increase the bandwidth or size of the OSM servers, but at the moment, these are not real bottlenecks to the service.
The main bottleneck is the lack of skilled coders to help with the infrastructure.

Some of the software infrastructure could be improved by an order of magnitude or two.

Tag Statistics could be improved, so people could see what tags were used in a given locality, as well as globally.
Nominatim, though much improved, to locate addresses on the map could be improved and have features added.
The API server could do with work enabling it to be segmented over countries or region, while remaining consistent.
The XAPI - large near-line data request server could do with being able to be largely in RAM. It's possible to fit the whole DB - more or less - in RAM using efficient binary representation. It's just not been done, as it's a lot of work.
More video guides, and howtos would be good too.
Of course large servers, huge disk farms, and a ten gigabit link to the net would help too, but that's not an immediate bottleneck.

Re:Freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

No, they would have to own the restaurant as a cooperative.

Re:Freedom

[agnosticnixie]

Only temporarily in most of these cases, staff turnovers are huge.

Re:Freedom

[SWroclawski]

> it just doesn't contain the terms that (apparently) the developer would like

No.... It's a term that the article of this slashdot blurb doesn't like. We in the project (including me, the person who is being paraphrased) have no issue with anyone making money off the project.

Re:Freedom

[agnosticnixie]

It's called going to the shows.

Re:Freedom

[NormalVisual]

I mean, meal late isn't even something that you should reflect in the tip, that's the kitchen's fault and they don't get a share of the tips.

Not when the kitchen had the meal ready 20 minutes ago and it's been sitting under the warmer lamps drying out the whole time because the waiter/tress ignored it. If the kitchen itself is running behind, a good server will let their customers know what's going on.

Re:Freedom

[daveime]

Donation : A voluntary gift (as of money or service or ideas) made to some worthwhile cause.

The operative word is VOLUNTARY.

If they actually meant OBLIGATORY, then they should have bloody written it down.

Re:Freedom

[pjt33]

Waiters/waitresses are allowed to be paid below minimum wage in places that allow tips, at least here in Minnesota MN, USA.

It seems to me that the waitress should be mad at your legislative body.

Re:Freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

This is what I would do...
on each map, image or file that a company gets from my web page I would put a legend saying:

"XYZ company who is using our freely available dataset has used N times our free data and has contributed $M to help run our free service."

Where XYZ is the company behind the web-page (Microsoft in this case), N is the total amount of queries they had made and $M is the money, or maybe the times they have contributed (or just put whether they HAVE, OR HAVE NOT contributed).

Sure, it is not polite for whoever has not contributed but I guess such politeness would be directly proportional to how polite the company has been in leeching the service resources without contributing.

~xtracto anon 'cause I have modded

Re:Freedom

[RobertLTux]

i may not have been clear but there should have be a logical AND in those conditions
i would only give a $0.25 tip if all of those were true not some of them (in fact i like tipping heavy if anything was done right)

Re:Freedom

[silanea]

No. Please read up on what constitutes Communism (and Socialism as well, for that matter, to prevent the next grave misjudgement). In a communist "restaurant", if something like this is even possible, there would not be any earnings to start with.

Tip pools would be seen as something social democrats would push here in Western Europe. Our Communists would have the restaurant burned down.

Re:Freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

Purpose of the BSD license also is to let everyone use code freely the way they want, the only true form of freedom.

The bad side with a BSD license is that everyone is also given "freedom" to become a parasitical entity that only consumes the work of others without giving anything back. GNU GPL prevents this, you must give back if you base your work on software under GNU GPL. In the long term, the software benefits and the community as a whole benefits.

Of course someone using BSD software can donate back. But this is based on their altruistic motives. GNU GPL takes away any question about altruism and enforces that donating back will be there. This is one aspect why GNU GPL is superior - it does not rely on the altruism of men for its vitality.

Re:Freedom

[MBGMorden]

Skipping your place in the ordered queue of customers by slipping money to the barman?

Maybe bars are different there, but in a busy bar here there is no line/queue. There's a mass of people huddled around the bar trying to get the bartender's attention. They pick random people from the crowd as they grab their attention to service. Good tipping doesn't mean that they're breaking line - because there IS no line - just that when they're scanning the crowd they'll pick you out quickly.

I've always found this commercial to be pretty accurate:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpFALUuNWwc

In really busy bars things move fast. Heck at some if you order the same thing more than a few times you're stuck with that for the rest of the night. For example last big bachelor party I was at I ordered 3 screwdrivers before it got really busy. On my 4th drink I was going to switch off to a Rum and Coke. The bartender saw me incoming with money and (given that I'm a good tipper) had my drink ready in a flash - but she fixed another screwdriver just assuming that that's what I was drinking for the evening. Went ahead and stuck with it.

Re:Freedom

[I cant believe its n]

(Why mod Flamebait?)

Why not use a dual license scheme, where you GPL your project for anyone to use, extend and give back; free as in beer and speech. If someone wants to keep their own code non-GPL:ed; allow them to use a regular commercial license where they pay you.

Re:Freedom

[obarel]

Thanks for the references about linking. I agree with what Lawrence Rosen writes on his website, but I'm not sure the licence agrees. From the GPL FAQ:

If a library is released under the GPL (not the LGPL), does that mean that any program which uses it has to be under the GPL or a GPL-compatible license?

        Yes, because the program as it is actually run includes the library.

Re:Freedom

[tomhudson]

My point was that three are only 3 main BSD distros after all these years, and the near-universal favorite is FreeBSD. We don't see anywhere near that level of consolidation in linux. No linux distro has the majority of the market, unlike FreeBSD.

Re:Freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

>The GPL wants to FORCE you to provide any changes YOU made, to others.

Only if you want to distribute the changed software. You can make changes to GPLed software on your own computer/server all day long and not provide a single change to others.

But if you build upon what's already there, you reciprocate their giving their code to you by your giving your code to them. And so the software improves and everyone plays nice.

It's not like the GPL was created in a void. It was created to prevent anyone from ever doing again what they *did*, which was taking all the code someone provided and fork it into a custom version whose source code nobody ever saw again (at least they had the courtesy of changing the name of their software, the assholes).

Copyright in general only applies to distribution.

Re:Freedom

[anyGould]

Which means as long as Microsoft is crediting OpenStreetMap, they're in compliance.

And this, boys and girls, is why you should put the "NonCommerical" part in your CC license - so that Big Company doesn't take your little community project and make all the cash.

Re:Freedom

[anyGould]

Of course, a future problem will be when MapQuest figures out that they're effectively paying for their competition's upgrades as well. Could be this discussion is trying to get Bing on board before MapQuest pulls out (citing quite valid competitive reasons).

Re:Freedom

[ElliotWilcox]

Every piece of open source software I have used - contain a paypal button to support the developers. So even if the license is "open source" the developers acknowledge there is rent to pay, mouths to feed etc... I have personally gotten into the habit of making contributions to open source software I use every day. I also don't commercially use someone's open source software, advertise around it(collecting revenue ala Bing) and stiff the contributing developer. But that is just me. I think if you are going to use even open source software commercially, being a good "net citizen" and making small donations is good stewardship. We are all on this planet together. Why be the a-hole over a few bucks? This is just plain human decency

Re:Freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because a word should have one and only one obvious meaning.
I see that it's not the case in human languages, but programmers usually program in a context-free language.
It's hard to write programs or even explain algorithms in human languages like English because every damn word has 242 meanings and that changes depending on context.
So it's understandable that programmers overlook the fact that the license is not written in a programming language.

Re:Freedom

[pgmrdlm]

You quite obviously live in the socialist world where you don't believe people should get ahead by their own merits.

The better worker gets the increased pay check. To bad your union slugs can't do the same for their workers. But then, that would go against what is yours should also be mine.

Why don't you talk to someone that brings home several hundred dollars a night in tips what they think of your opinion.

Re:Freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

Copyright and License
OpenStreetMap is open data, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 licence (CC-BY-SA).

You are free to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt our maps and data, as long as you credit OpenStreetMap and its contributors. If you alter or build upon our maps or data, you may distribute the result only under the same licence. The full legal code explains your rights and responsibilities.

That is the invitation that this project made. They 'signed a contract' that explicitly said that Bing could do exactly what it is doing. Not quite analogous to getting a door unexpectedly slammed in your face, now is it?

I am altering or building upon your maps or data. Pray I do not alter or build upon it any further.

Re:Freedom

[anon mouse-cow-aard]

which GPL FAQ? The FSF makes this claim, but it could be construed as propaganda on their part. Rosen, who is or was general counsel for opensource.org disagrees.

Much like a click wrap license, what the FAQ says matters less than the interpretation resulting from a court test. The FSF's spin makes use of a library equivalent to making a derived work. Rosen says this is unreasonable and will not stand up to a legal test. The GPL wikipedia page shows the various opinions.

Re:Freedom

[rrossman2]

Nope.. and even the included gratuity for parties of x size or more doesn't *need* to be paid either. They're just saying they already added a tip of whatever percent into the bill so it's easier for everyone (and to make sure the waitress/waiter gets a tip after being tied up with such a large party). We had a party of 8, and the service absolutely blew. It took 35 minutes for the girl to ask what my friend and I wanted to drink, and about another 40 minutes for the drinks to appear. No refills came for anyone, it was just really really bad service. The bill had the included tip of 15% or whatever it was, but the service was so bad we left enough money to cover the food + drinks and a 7% tip. I then walked over to the manager and let him know we were leaving a 7% tip and not the "included" 15% so he knew the bill would look like they were shorted even though they weren't. He thanked me, and apologized for the issues and all was good

Re:Freedom

[anon mouse-cow-aard]

How many ipods & iphones are there on the planet? That you do not even consider them BSD illustrates how the license encourages fragmentation.

Using your classification scheme, there are two main linux distros after all these years: Debian (and it's progeny), Redhat (and it's progeny.)

Re:Freedom

[Angst Badger]

This is only the case in programming languages because context-free languages are easier to write parsers for and can be guaranteed to operate in linear time. Even then, the same literal token can have entirely different meanings in different lexical scopes.

Human brains, on the other hand, have hardwired structures devoted to parsing non-context-free languages. This turns out to be advantageous in a number of ways, one of the more important of which is that meanings are indexed by the word and the context, reducing the number of entries that must be searched in order to understand the word. If evolution had given us an indexing scheme based solely on phonemes, we could probably have a one-to-one relationship between words (actually, morphemes) and meanings, but at the expense of having a hugely expanded vocabulary. Anyway, there's no reason to leave wetware features unused just because we haven't figured out how to replicate them in silicon yet.

The point being -- to put it in programmer-friendly terms -- is that one shouldn't expect natural language documents to parse like formal language documents any more than one would expect 6502 assembly language to run on the JVM.

Re:Freedom

[anyGould]

OK, gotta call FUD on this one.

So, I write some software widget. I release it GPL, all free and dandy.

Now, you can use it to your heart's desire. The license only comes into play if you take my widget and build it into yours. Then my GPL says:

1) If you're giving your widget away for free (like my widget), then go ahead and have fun - we've made the world a bit better.

2) If you're planning on making money from your widget, then if my widget is so important to your project, it's only fair that I get something too. If that bugs you, then feel free to write your own version of my widget - then you don't have to pay me anything.

I've never understood how this makes it at all evil.

(This is based on my personal understanding of GPL; I'm not a lawyer, and I don't want to be one.)

Re:Freedom

[obarel]

I hope you realise that this is one of the problems with GPL. It's a dangerous mine-field if I have to hope that the courts would go against the FAQ as published on www.gnu.org.

So basically I have a piece of software that uses some licence. I check the FAQ for the licence, as published by the people responsible for the licence, and I have to make the decision that their interpretation will not hold in court. Pretty dangerous.

I'd rather find a different implementation, or implement it myself. That means investing more effort in a solved problem (instead of the real problem domain) due to the risky nature of the GPL. I wouldn't call that "freedom".

The FAQ is here:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#IfLibraryIsGPL

Re:Freedom

[sumdumass]

Actually, the union will step in and do the legal action as if there are any shenanigans like you mentioned, the Union will benefit from punitive damages as well. Also built into federal law is provisions that allow a court to force the reopening of the establishment as well as the payment of back wages to all employees working there.

Perhaps before you throw your hand in the air claiming all is lost and it's hopeless, you should actually speak to a qualified union rep or someone who has a little more experience starting a union then giving up at the thought of it. And no, I don't like Unions but the facts remain that the law is on their side.

And yes, I do have the perspective of a waitress as I was a waiter for 5 years and dated a waitress for 10. Sure, there are crappy waitresses and crappy jobs and they do not make much money, but most of that is their own fault. This is just as true as if you remained at a minimum wage job knowing you won't get a raise yet refuse to look for better employment. Or are you saying that you are somehow entitled to something more then the employer is willing to offer and you shouldn't have to change jobs to get it?

Re:Freedom

[anon mouse-cow-aard]

I agree that the lack of clarity is a problem. otoh, it isn't dangerous for anyone working with free software. It is only a problem for those who want to leverage free software in a proprietary way.

I can point you at Rosen's position, here: http://www.rosenlaw.com/lj19.htm which states that:

-- LGPL and GPL are the same, the distinction is not legally meaningful.

-- linking does not constitute creating a derivative work, the license will not "infect" programs which merely use a given library.

and can add that there are many proprietary applications for Linux using the glibc stack, and I have yet to hear of anyone attempting to enforce the GPL for mere use of a library.

Re:Freedom

[Penguin]

dude, just because it's _legal_ doesn't mean it's _ethical_.

And the reverse is true as well. Just because it's legal doesn't mean it isn't ethical.

I have spent lots of time adding data to OpenStreetMap with almost 25.000 edits (including the import of millions of address points in my country). I did it because I would like a map that's available for pretty much any purpose, not excluding Microsoft's usage.

I'm pretty fine with the arrangement. My contributions are to be used and Microsoft does exactly that. However trying to use my contributions as arguments against Microsoft (or any other part that uses the data) is douchebaggery.

Creative Commons is not a cult. There shouldn't be any kind of hidden zealotry about using data - it's not okay to say "This data is free under a CC license and you are encouraged to use it" - and when that happens shouting "However you are a dick if you don't contribute! We want your money or work or other stuff!".

Re:Freedom

[vadim_t]

You quite obviously live in the socialist world where you don't believe people should get ahead by their own merits.

By that I guess you imply you live in the Land of Capitalism, where last time I checked there was a free market (in theory, at least).

And in a free market, I'm perfectly free to vote with my dollars, pay only what's required, and avoid establishments that make a big deal about tipping. Where's the problem?

The better worker gets the increased pay check

Correct. You work well, you get a raise. If the boss is a jerk and you don't, you go work for somebody who pays better. You can demand a higher wage by the virtue of being a better worker. Just like any other job.

And, why would I want to tip the waitress anyway? If I was going to tip somebody it'd be the cook, but that seems to be difficult to do.

Why don't you talk to someone that brings home several hundred dollars a night in tips what they think of your opinion.

That's like asking a corrupt policeman the same sort of thing. Of course they like having extra money, duh. That doesn't mean it's a good thing to have.

What I do think is that they should earn the same amount of money, except as part of their real wage.

Re:Freedom

[Mr. Slippery]

I have this silly idea that it's like any other business, where they state the prices of the products and I choose which ones I want to buy, then pay the money and get the products.

I have this silly idea that intelligent human beings are able to understand that different conventions apply in different situations -- even if they themselves would create other conventions if they were omnipotent -- and can adjust their behavior accordingly. (Provided, of course, that such conventions are not a violation of anyone's rights; social convention is no excuse for racism, sexism, homophobia, etcetera.)

Now, certainly choosing to avoid eating out is less offensive than eating out and pretending that the convention of tipping does not exist; so, kudos on that. But "they state the prices of the products and I choose which ones I want to buy, then pay the money and get the products," is no more or less a valid convention than haggling or tipping.

Re:Freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

Reading comprehension: 0. Good job, buddy.

Re:Freedom

[obarel]

That's exactly right - GPL is not dangerous if you're not making money from selling your code. The entire thread is about that - GPL has more restrictions than BSD (less "freedoms").

There's nothing wrong with that - each developer should choose the licence that works for him/her. GPL is good for some, BSD is good for others, and MIT is also good in some situations.

There is nothing wrong with saying "I want to release my code under certain conditions, for example if someone modifies it then everybody should enjoy the modifications". Absolutely fine. But it's not the only model, and other models work for other people. There are many reasons to open your code, and GPL is not the only option.

By the way, glibc is not a good example because it's LGPL.

Re:Freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

BS. I'm in Brussels (although I am American), and you are expected to tip (so says my waitress friend, anyway, unless you are in McDs or a similar chain, and there you would not tip in the US either). The tips are much smaller than in the US, but they are still a common courtesy, unless you are a selfish bastard and aren't coming back to the resto. But then, I guess we have to explain the VB, the NV-A and the FDF somehow, don't we. :)

Also, I know exactly how much the services I use while in the US are going to cost: 10 to 20%, based on quality service. This is a trivial calculation. I would really be interested in knowing just how you think my life would improve if somebody else did the math for me.

Oh, and every time you use the google search built into firefox, you are contributing cash to that organization. The more you know...

Re:Freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

There are countries where nobody tips, and restaurants work fine. I live in one of these.

It's a mere cultural thing. If everybody contributes, you should do the same. If nobody does, don't do it. It's as simple as that.

If there is a fuss about OSM and Microsoft is because people playing in the same league as Microsoft nearly always contribute to projects they heavily benefit from, and Microsoft is not doing the same. Which is not polite, and makes them get a worse service than they could. In fact, that kind of behaviour tends to make volunteers go away ("Working for Microsoft for free? Are you nuts? I'm gone!"), so Microsoft could lose more than they gain.

Re:Freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

"So I take it you aren't mad whenever someone slams a door in your face, after all you didn't sign a contract that he wouldn't."

No, I'm not mad. Why would I be? I can open my own doors. I've also been in situations where I've seen people who did not slam doors shut allow people into areas they aren't supposed to be.

And even when it happens, don't always think it was done to harm you. I've seen so many people get pissy about inadvertent acts, it's ridiculous, and they take it real personal. I've seen doors slam shut due to the wind or air pressure differences, where the person holding it was pushed in and taken by surprise, and people got *pissed* at his rudeness. I once had a guy say hold an elevator 12 inches from it closing. This was at an apartment where you don't know if the person is taking the stairs, check their mailbox, talk to the manager which has a door next to the elevator, or just enter the building and just entering to wait.

I didn't reach the controls in time. The next time I saw him, he deliberately closed the elevator door when it was full open, then pressed all the keys from his floor down. Thing was, there was a couple people behind me, and a few around the corner getting their mail that knew he didn't hold it for them, and for the next 2 months, I saw him frequently take the stairs after that. It got back to me that he said something about me, but since I always held the elevator for people before and after that, people looked at him like he was a petty ass. Probably didn't help the next time he saw me, I was on the elevator, and when he moved to get on, I feinted a move towards him and he thought twice and got the point.

But to get mad about? Why? It serves you no purpose. You aren't better than them because you hold doors open. You do it because it most often may aid you in the future and makes your life a little easier.

" that essentially Microsoft was an asshole. "

People think MS are assholes anyways. There is no purpose whatsoever for MS to help out. Helping this project isn't going to change the overwhelming stance that MS's reputation is in the toilet. Quit pretending that them giving a few bucks is going to change the project manager's minds--they'll likely take the money, and continue badmouthing MS. It's bad enough this has come forward; while MS doesn't look good, it makes the OSM people look like asses too. That's the thing about complaining and trying to get yours.

The only advantage is if MS gets reduced service from the project. What would happen if Mapquest went under? Maybe MS would step in. What would you say then? I wonder if you deny accepting their money, in spite, while going under. Doubtful. Maybe MS was planning a big payback. Maybe they overlooked this. Maybe they were in the process of getting money back and OSM got inpatient--now they've burned that bridge.

Oh well. See how well it helps to get angry.

Re:Freedom

[pgmrdlm]

And in a free market, I'm perfectly free to vote with my dollars, pay only what's required, and avoid establishments that make a big deal about tipping. Where's the problem?

None. As a person that has worked in these type of jobs. I wouldn't want to wait on you anyway. Take your money and shove it. I can do much better off others. And even better yet, when I walk out the door with the higher pay check in tips. I will know my customers did it because they enjoyed and appreciated the service I provided. Satisfaction in a job well done. Based on amount of money I made that day.

And, why would I want to tip the waitress anyway? If I was going to tip somebody it'd be the cook, but that seems to be difficult to do.

If it wasn't for the waiter/waitress letting the cook know what you wanted, wouldn't get jack shit. If it wasn't for the waiter/waitress letting you know the customer favorites, you would miss out. There is alot to be said about finding out what the waiter/waitress thinks about various items on the menu. But, knowing your a cheap cock sucker. I would not offer that knowledge to you.

That's like asking a corrupt policeman the same sort of thing. Of course they like having extra money, duh. That doesn't mean it's a good thing to have.

What a bull shit argument. How the fuck can you compare a corrupt cop/corrupt politician with a waiter/waitress. Next.

What I do think is that they should earn the same amount of money, except as part of their real wage.

With the knowledge of working for union shops where I was that I should be making more than the asshole next to me that couldn't code his way out of wet paper bag, and that with given specs because they were to stupid to figure things out or understand customer needs. I take that statement as someone that can't survive on your own skill set which is why you don't believe in pay based on quality and attitude of work.

Re:Freedom

[pgmrdlm]

With the knowledge of working for union shops where I was that I should be making more than the asshole next to me that couldn't code his way out of wet paper bag, and that with given specs because they were to stupid to figure things out or understand customer needs. I take that statement as someone that can't survive on your own skill set which is why you don't believe in pay based on quality and attitude of work.

With the knowledge from working IN a union shop, where I was informed by supervisors that I should be making more than the asshole next to me. The dumb fuck that couldn't code without specs, and still didn't get good reviews when he did have specs. I take your statement as someone that can't survive on your own skill set which is why you don't believe in pay based on quality and attitude of work.

Tip presented to you for your above arguments is minimum possible without being none. Stating that your arguments were sub par is being nice.

Re:Freedom

[vadim_t]

None. As a person that has worked in these type of jobs. I wouldn't want to wait on you anyway. Take your money and shove it. I can do much better off others. And even better yet, when I walk out the door with the higher pay check in tips. I will know my customers did it because they enjoyed and appreciated the service I provided. Satisfaction in a job well done. Based on amount of money I made that day.

Bet your boss would really love that attitude. I'm sure he doesn't mind losing customers to keep you happy.

If it wasn't for the waiter/waitress letting the cook know what you wanted, wouldn't get jack shit.

But it turns out it's actually your job to serve customers. If you don't do it, you get fired. So this part doesn't concern me a whole lot. If you take too long I'll just pull out my cell phone and find some way of entretaining myself, even for an hour.

If it wasn't for the waiter/waitress letting you know the customer favorites, you would miss out. There is alot to be said about finding out what the waiter/waitress thinks about various items on the menu. But, knowing your a cheap cock sucker. I would not offer that knowledge to you.

Couldn't care less. My way of eating at restaurants is the following: over the weeks, systematically go from the top of the menu the bottom, skipping those things I obviously won't like. After I'm done with that I'll alternate between those I like best. I don't really want your opinion, I'll form my own.

Sorry to be blunt, but the cook interests me a whole lot more than you do. The cook is why I'm there in the first place, and you're just a replaceable cog in the mechanism.

What a bull shit argument. How the fuck can you compare a corrupt cop/corrupt politician with a waiter/waitress. Next.

The person who benefits from a screwed up situation is the entirely wrong person to ask whether they'd like it to stop existing. If it benefits you, of course you'll say it's a wonderful thing.

I take that statement as someone that can't survive on your own skill set which is why you don't believe in pay based on quality and attitude of work.

Nope, surviving just fine, thanks. Not an union member either. Unions are a means to an end, not an end in themselves. If everything is fine without one, then one isn't needed.

Re:Freedom

[anon mouse-cow-aard]

BSD folks are talking about the most freedom for an individual work. In that sense BSD is freer than GPL.

GPL proponents are referring to the aggregate of the code being released. In that sense, GPL gives more people more access to more free code... so it is freer than BSD.

and yeah, glibc was a slip... but only partially, because Rosen argues that in spite of FSF remonstrations, there is no legal difference between gpl and lgpl.

Re:Freedom

[lordlod]

Skipping your place in the ordered queue of customers by slipping money to the barman?

Maybe bars are different there, but in a busy bar here there is no line/queue. There's a mass of people huddled around the bar trying to get the bartender's attention. They pick random people from the crowd as they grab their attention to service.

When it's busy our bartenders move in one direction (generally right to left) down the bar. With a group of them working each tends to have a patch with 3-4 people that they cycle through. The crowd basically operates as multiple queues and people frown on and block anyone trying to push through.

It's not uncommon, if you reach the front out of order, to indicate that the person next to you got there first. The bartender will then serve them before you. Most people would uncomfortable being served out of order like your example, even if it was at the bartenders discretion.

The tipping culture of the US makes me uncomfortable. Australian bar staff rarely get tips and don't expect it. Instead they get a liveable wage.

Re:Freedom

[tomhudson]

I don't consider them BSD because they AREN'T bsd. Neither is OSX.

XNU is the computer operating system kernel that Apple Inc. acquired and developed for use in the Mac OS X operating system and released as free and open source software as part of the Darwin operating system. XNU is an acronym for X is Not Unix.[1]

BSD

The Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) portion of the kernel provides the POSIX API (BSD system calls), the Unix process model atop Mach tasks, basic security policies, user and group ids, permissions, the network stack, the virtual file system code (including a filesystem independent journalling layer), several local file systems such as HFS/HFS+, the Network File System (NFS) client and server, cryptographic framework, UNIX System V inter-process communication (IPC), Audit subsystem, mandatory access control, and some of the locking primitives. The BSD code present in XNU came from the FreeBSD kernel. Although much of it has been significantly modified, code sharing still occurs between Apple and the FreeBSD Project

Code sharing also goes on between BSD and linux - is linux BSD? Windows has some BSD code. Is Windows BSD? If you're running cygwin to get all the linux stuff on Windows, does Windows then become linux?

Neither OSX nor the iStuff OS are BSD. Different kernels.

Re:Freedom

[pgmrdlm]

What a bull shit argument. How the fuck can you compare a corrupt cop/corrupt politician with a waiter/waitress. Next.

The person who benefits from a screwed up situation is the entirely wrong person to ask whether they'd like it to stop existing. If it benefits you, of course you'll say it's a wonderful thing.

This conversation is over due to this statement by you. By your comparison of a hard working waiter/waitress getting higher tips to a corrupt political politician shows how fucked up you really are. Id spit in your face if you was close enough right now. And hope you had the guts to do something about it.

If you want to know where I live to follow up further, please feel free to respond. Otherwise, fuck off and die. And please do not visit any restraints where I know people. I would hate for them to get stiffed because you associate their hard work with them being corrupt.

Re:Freedom

[pgmrdlm]

http://sheelab.homecreatures.com/

The domain sheelab.homecreatures.com is for sale. To purchase, call BuyDomains.com at 781-839-7903 or 866-866-2700. Click here for more details.

You can't even keep track of your own web site, no wonder you can't handle pay based on individual productivity. This conversation is over, what a loser.

Re:Freedom

[mr_matticus]

FOSS advocates are all ripping off photoshop so they can be safely ignored?

Try reading for a change. That is most explicitly not the case.

FOSS advocates and mass, casual software piracy do not go hand in hand.

No, they don't, and not only did I say no such thing, but that wasn't even the topic of the comment in the first place.

The issue is those that decry the wanton disregard of favored licenses (or worse, as here, stirring up a tempest in a teapot when there hasn't BEEN a license violation in the first place)...while openly supporting the wanton disregard of disfavored licenses. There is all kinds of hand-wringing over proper behavior and stealing from F/OSS projects, but swap out the underlying project and suddenly the tides turn, even with the very same posters in many cases.

This is indefensible.

Re:Freedom

[anon mouse-cow-aard]

Apple stuff came from BSD, and they share so much that to any user, OS-X appears to be BSD. The history is that CMU people took the code and forked it, and the NeXt people made it proprietary and so kept it diverging for a number of years, until it was opensourced by Apple. It has remained parallel ever since. It is an excellent example of BSD causing fragmentation to the point where you claim that it isn't BSD anymore.

If Apple stuff isn't BSD because of the kernel, then I guess Debian is?

http://wiki.debian.org/Debian_GNU/kFreeBSD_why

Re:Freedom

[Confuzzled]

Then there'd be no incentive except professional pride for a server to make an effort to take care of me after they'd had a crappy experience with the last customer.

This is exactly what happened to me in while on vacation. In Italy the price that you pay for your food includes the wages of the waiter, tips are not expected. Also, it's actually quite hard to fire someone legally.

Because of the above almost every waiter we encountered was incredibly rude; they really didn't give a damn. And note that we're not obnoxious tourists, in fact our group was pretty diverse and had people originally from other parts of Europe and Latin America.

Re:Freedom

[evilviper]

Regardless of a developers motivation, the only practical effect is accurately characterized.

In that case, it's the same effect of the GPL as well.

companies, given the choice, will always retain their IP

Many companies contribute code to BSD-licensed projects, and even more fund them to continue their work. In short, you're utterly wrong about the practical effect.

BSD's aren't unified because the license sets up incentives for forking and keeping changes proprietary.

The various BSDs are all BSD licensed, yet they remain non-unified. Repeating your blanket assertion won't make it any more true the second time around.

If you're not going to attempt to reconcile reality with your assertions, everyone should ignore all assertions you make.

As for the effect of LSB, for example it specified the standard packaging format to be .rpm... ever used debian, ubuntu, arch, or gentoo?

Yes, though it's no their preferred format, they ALL include utilities for handling RPMs.

He gives you exactly the same freedoms he has.

Nonsense. He can go back and re-license all of his stuff at any time. The GPL is not binding to him. He binds everyone else with it. Sure, with the GPL, you're giving up your freedom in exchange for someone else's code. It may be a reasonable trade, but it's NOT freedom.

GPL removes the incentive to keep private code.

The incentive is still there. Look at all the GPL violators out there. Ask Tivo why they aren't playing along.

Have a look at any article analyzing contributions to the linux kernel. Many, many companies are now contributing. More code is being created. More people are getting access to more code because the GPL incentivizes reciprocity from individuals and companies.

Linux is more popular than the BSDs. This is likely due to an unfortunately timed lawsuit early on, and then self-propagated, as Linux continues to gets more developers and market share thanks to network effects. This will likely continue.

Your assertion that Linux is more popular BECAUSE IT IS GPL'ed is utterly laughable. Any number of very liberally-licensed software projects (like X11, OpenSSH, Apache, etc.) are every bit as popular as Linux. Your assertion requires extraordinary evidence, and you've provided absolutely none, thus far.

Re:Freedom

[evilviper]

it's actually a reasonably good system for me as a diner.

It's a prisoner's dilemma, actually.

Waiters and waitresses aren't paid a living wage, and if everyone stiffed the people who waited on them, we'd have to raise the wages of the servers and roll that into the food prices.

Clearly, that would be horrible! They'd have financial stability, and all the horrors that come with that. We should model all our industries on street-performers...

Then there'd be no incentive except professional pride for a server to make an effort to take care of me

There are MANY jobs out there which involve salaried employees dealing with the public. The world has not ended. You may feel better stiffing a lousy waitress, but don't blindly believe that's the most effective method of dealing with human resource issues. I guarantee, more than a few have already discovered that not working for that measly tip is loads easier, and the take-home difference isn't enough to matter. In those cases, they have to be dealt with by traditional methods, anyhow. It might not give the diners the catharsis they crave, but it works.

there's no way to eliminate the possibility of freeloading without eliminating incentive pay

I don't know about you, but I have employee reviews. Those I've worked with get to chime-in on how well or poorly I've done my job, and directly affect how much I will get paid...

In short, include a gratuity in the up-front price, and just have each customer rank their waitress to determine how much of that she gets. Problem solved. The problem with that? Restaurants don't want to advertise their REAL prices. They'd rather hide as much of the bill as they can. Phone companies are learning from them.

Now as this applies to open source projects

Umm, no. End of story. Software licenses can COMPEL whatever behavior they want, with no ill effects. A license that requires contributing 1% of the money you earn through using the code, back to the project, would codify what you expect, without closing-up the source, or otherwise making it any less useful. Many open source projects (MAME/MESS come to mind) are open source, yet include restrictions on commercial use in their license. If you don't include a similar clause, you have no-one to blame.

Re:Freedom

[roju]

Big Companies like wikipedia?

Re:Freedom

[Nursie]

That's exactly what I was responding to - your allegations that people who advocate FOSS also rip off commercial software -

But to me, there is a bigger problem in that many, but certainly not all and hopefully not even most, open source advocates engage in mental gymnastics around the issue--working themselves into a lather about companies or individuals not giving back or breaking the "spirit" as they view it, stealing from these projects (and note how no one EVER false-pedant "corrects" with the 'it's not stealing' broken argument on a F/OSS story), while actively engaging in infringement of proprietary licenses. The sentiment is clear, but there is no reconciling this position.

What else could you possibly be saying there? That many FOSS advocated pirate stuff like photoshop. I repeat, you have a disconnect, FOSS users and advocates are usually the very people that won't do that, they'll use FOSS software.

Re:Freedom

[vadim_t]

This conversation is over due to this statement by you. By your comparison of a hard working waiter/waitress getting higher tips to a corrupt political politician shows how fucked up you really are. Id spit in your face if you was close enough right now. And hope you had the guts to do something about it.

How dramatic. If you decide to take that as a mortal insult, so be it. But I'm firm in my belief that nobody deserves extra payment for properly performing the job they're already being paid for doing.

Could you explain why it's needed in your profession, but not in others? For instance, why doesn't a butcher require a tip as well, why does one tip a taxi but not a bus driver, and why can't I demand a 20% extra to write the code I'm paid to write properly and on time?

I do make an exception for actual exceptional service. One example I remember is a taxi driver. Once one spent several minutes figuring out how to fit a huge monitor in the car. That certainly was exceptional service, as he didn't need to bother with something that was on the edge of making the car unsafe to drive (it got very close to blocking the shift lever), and it took a good deal of effort to get there. So of course he got a big tip for his trouble.

You can't even keep track of your own web site, no wonder you can't handle pay based on individual productivity. This conversation is over, what a loser.

I'm perfectly aware the host stopped existing in 2003. I keep that around mostly as a reminder of the times when a community I belonged to was large and vibrant. Those who were in it as well should get the reference. Also it throws off nosey people ;-)

Seriously, I wonder what were you looking for there. If it was still around all you'd find is a few game mods, which seems hardly relevant to the conversation.

IMO, whether I'm right in this or not is completely independent of my current situation, qualifications and such. If you're fishing for something to use for an "ad hominem" argument (your reply suggests so), don't bother. It's bad form for arguments anyway, and I'm not going to fall for that one.

Re:Freedom

[JackieBrown]

I doubt many waiters or waitresses could afford the union dues.

Unions can be overrated anyways. My mom was the leading person organizing the county hospital nurses in San Antonio to unionize. She succeeded and the union then ignored the nurses but took their money and used it to protest bases closings because they made more money from base employees (Kelly) than they did from the nurses.

Re:Freedom

[mr_matticus]

That's exactly what I was responding to - your allegations that people who advocate FOSS also rip off commercial software

Good grief. It's not complicated. You're trying to turn the discussion into something it's not.

It's not about the piracy; it's about the hypocrisy of many individuals in objecting to one form of misconduct with respect to favored products while encouraging that misconduct (or even participating in it) with regard to disfavored products. It's unequivocally prevalent on Slashdot.

I repeat, you have a disconnect, FOSS users and advocates are usually the very people that won't do that, they'll use FOSS software.

There's no disconnect, except in your head. You're generalizing an entire group of people (in two successive posts now), on a tangential issue, in a situation that is not mutually exclusive.

Consider what you're saying. People are "usually" doing one thing, and therefore no one does another thing. Your statement doesn't even possess internal logic.

Re:Freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

I somehow doubt EVERYBODY has to contribute back to EVERY project they ever use. But you certainly should make an effort to contribute to developing projects that would be in your best interest. Microsoft doesn't do that and therein lies the problem. They fight free software and what is good for the community. There is an ethical issue here. When you intentionally neglect to contribute back you are failing in your duty to the community you have taken from.

Re:Freedom

[vegiVamp]

Oh, for pete's sake. Just point out to Ballmer that his pet search engine is using open source data. A few chairs later, and it'll all be over.

Re:Freedom

[Nursie]

It's not about the piracy; it's about the hypocrisy of many individuals in objecting to one form of misconduct with respect to favored products while encouraging that misconduct (or even participating in it) with regard to disfavored products. It's unequivocally prevalent on Slashdot.

Right... so it's about license hypocrisy, and you give an example of Photoshop as something that lots of people don't respect the licensing for (pirate). And it's very prevalent here (something I certainly haven't noticed).

You're generalizing an entire group of people (in two successive posts now), on a tangential issue, in a situation that is not mutually exclusive.

Then I'm not sure why you see it as a "bigger problem".

Re:Freedom

[drinkypoo]

I disagree. I think community projects such as these are justified in expecting contributions from those who benefit from it.

Again, if they want those contributions, they're going to need to amend the ToS. That's the only reasonable way to handle this process.

Moreover, whining about "omg, whiners" is kinda tacky too, you know?

You, sir, are a hypocrite.

Re:Freedom

[godefroi]

Wait, are you saying that unions tend to become self-serving organizations obsessed with building their own financial stability and power base?

Heresy.

Re:Freedom

[SleazyRidr]

Which usually isn't a livable wage where tipping is normal. That's why I refuse to tip where it isn't already the custom. I really don't want the labour laws in Australia to reflect those of the USA.

Re:Freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

But if you actually read the dept of labor's page about this it will show that the worker MUST receive at least real minimum wage through tips+restaurant pay. Now the restaurant can choose to let the server go if they end up paying real minimum wage all the time compared to waitress minimum wage, but welcome to capitalism.

http://www.dol.gov/wb/faq26.htm

Re:Freedom

[anon mouse-cow-aard]

Regardless of a developers motivation, the only practical effect is accurately characterized.

In that case, it's the same effect of the GPL as well.

companies, given the choice, will always retain their IP

Many companies contribute code to BSD-licensed projects, and even more fund them to continue their work. In short, you're utterly wrong about the practical effect.

IBM widely publicised their billion dollar investment in Linux in 2001 alone ( http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-249750.html ) Oracle has their own distro, and is funding btrfs. HP has made installating their printers under linux easier than on windows. The biggest contributors to linux kernel in order are: individuals 18%, Red Hat 12%, Intel with 8%, IBM and Novell with 6% each, and Oracle 3%. The scale of corporate contribution to Linux is many orders of magnitude than anything in the BSD world. (http://apcmag.com/linux-now-75-corporate.htm)

BSD's aren't unified because the license sets up incentives for forking and keeping changes proprietary.

The various BSDs are all BSD licensed, yet they remain non-unified. Repeating your blanket assertion won't make it any more true the second time around.

If you're not going to attempt to reconcile reality with your assertions, everyone should ignore all assertions you make.

see above for evidence of the greater size of corporate contributions to GPL kernel vs. BSD system. Now you argue that any disparity of any kind results from network effect. I will point out that Linux has no shortage of court cases in it's history. have a look at sf.net where the overwhelming majority of projects use GPL or LGPL. The top ten downloads from sf.net? 8 GPL, 1 LGPL, 1 a mix (portable apps.)

http://sourceforge.net/top/toplist.php?type=downloads_week

As for the effect of LSB, for example it specified the standard packaging format to be .rpm... ever used debian, ubuntu, arch, or gentoo?

Yes, though it's no their preferred format, they ALL include utilities for handling RPMs.

It's the native format and normal idioms that we are talking about here. By your logic, BSD is linux because you can install RPM's on it: http://onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2006/01/12/Big_Scary_Daemons.html?page=1

He gives you exactly the same freedoms he has.

Nonsense. He can go back and re-license all of his stuff at any time. The GPL is not binding to him. He binds everyone else with it. Sure, with the GPL, you're giving up your freedom in exchange for someone else's code. It may be a reasonable trade, but it's NOT freedom.

The problem with your analysis, is that it assumes a single copyright holder. The proper way to use GPL, as is done in the linux kernel, is for all contributors to retain copyright on their contributions. In that scenario, as soon as the original author changes the license, he has to revert his code to the state it was before he accepted any contributions... So he is in the same position as anyone else. Anyone can take their marbles (and no one else's) and go home.

The security comes from the fact that in any GPL project that becomes sufficiently important, there will be distributed copyright holders, and it becomes impossible to make it non-free. That is why everyone, including the original author, has the same freedom. They can only withdraw with what they themselves have contributed.

Your assertion that Linux is more popular BECAUSE IT IS GPL'ed is utterly laughable. Any number of very liberally-licensed s

Re:Freedom

[evilviper]

You're still just wasting everyone's time. Yes, Linux is more popular than BSD, therefore it gets more code contributions, and money from companies and individuals. The onus is on you to prove your assertion the license has ANYTHING to do with those facts.

You continue to simply ignore all counter-examples, BSD isn't fragmented because of its license. Fressh is nowhere near as popular as OpenSSH. etc. Goodbye.

Re:Freedom

[anon mouse-cow-aard]

You state, with nothing to back up your assertion, that linux popularity (as a standin for GPL) is because of network effect. When I point out that 9 of the top 10 downloads on sf.net are GPL, and none of them are linux, you ignore it.

freebsd libc isn't nearly as popular as glibc, GPL Bourne Again Shell is far more popular than BSD shells, apache is often fronted by GPL Squid. And do let me know what BSD licensed desktop environment do you prefer...

There is no level of evidence which you will tolerate.

Re:Freedom

[dbIII]

A personal attack on an unrelated subject instead of making your point.
What a loser.

Re:Freedom

[cas2000]

Basically, dealing with the public sucks. The tip system gives servers an incentive to put the schmuck who came in earlier behind them and give me good service.

it doesn't suck anywhere near so much if the 'schmuck who came in earlier' doesn't get to decide whether they're making $2/hour tonight or a livable wage.

tipping is fine - as a bonus (for great service, or for being in the right place at the right time to benefit from someone in a generous mood, etc). but as a substitute for a real wage, the best you can say for it is that it ranks above outright slavery.

i live in a country where tipping is not uncommon, but is never a substitute for a proper wage. by law. we get reasonably good service in AU - sometimes great, sometimes lousy, usually just "good". same as most places, with or without a tipping culture.

i don't mid tipping but i actually feel ashamed and morally dirty when i eat out in a country where wait staff aren't paid a real wage, where they're expected to live on tips....because i'm being made to be an active participant in their exploitation.

(and in some countries, like india, i'll try to tip discretely when the boss isn't watching because it's not uncommon for the boss to just take the lion's share - or all - of the tip)

Stiffing a waiter who has given you acceptable service certainly *is* immoral.

no, not paying them a real wage for their time and labour is immoral. they *deserve* to get paid properly for the hours they have worked whether the customers were generous or not - and even if there were no customers at all (they're not on a profit-share arrangement so why should they share in the loss?)

Re:Freedom

[xaxa]

Maybe bars are different there, but in a busy bar here there is no line/queue. There's a mass of people huddled around the bar trying to get the bartender's attention. They pick random people from the crowd as they grab their attention to service. Good tipping doesn't mean that they're breaking line - because there IS no line - just that when they're scanning the crowd they'll pick you out quickly.

In Britain, even though there doesn't seem to be a line, there's still an ordering.

When I walk up to a bar I'll notice who else is on my left and right. I'm "behind" them. If the barman looks like he's about to serve me, I'll glance left/right and he'll serve someone "ahead" first. However, he'll be keeping an order himself, so only needs the "help" if it's really busy. If he loses track he might say "who's next?" and whoever's been there longest will order drinks. Nothing lets you skip the queue -- but if you're a regular at the bar, you're allowed to grumble to the barman about "how busy it is" when you do get served. (Being obnoxious puts you to the back of the queue. Unfortunately, some foreigners who don't understand what's going accidentally "push in", which loses them a couple of places in the ordering.)

Re:Freedom

[xaxa]

The tipping culture of the US makes me uncomfortable. Australian bar staff rarely get tips and don't expect it. Instead they get a liveable wage.

US-style tipping makes me feel awkward too -- if I wanted to tip the barmen I'd offer to buy him a drink, which is exactly the same in the end (he's welcome to just take the money), but it feels better for me -- it's treating him as a friend, rather than as a servant.

Re:Freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

This conversation is over due to this statement by you. By your comparison of a hard working waiter/waitress getting higher tips to a corrupt political politician shows how fucked up you really are. Id spit in your face if you was close enough right now. And hope you had the guts to do something about it.

I only use the "Foe" thing very rarely -- I don't hide people I merely disagree with.

But with your attitude you're comments aren't worth reading.

Re:Freedom

[xaxa]

No. Please read up on what constitutes Communism (and Socialism as well, for that matter, to prevent the next grave misjudgement). In a communist "restaurant", if something like this is even possible, there would not be any earnings to start with.

Weren't communal eating places quite common? i.e. like a school canteen but you don't pay.

(Or exactly like a school canteen. I'm sure Scotland's not the only place in Europe to have free meals for all children.)

Re:Freedom

[silanea]

School canteens are funded through taxes (or tuition fees where charged) and the people who prepare and serve the food there receive wages. No communism there.

Communal eating places can occur in Communism but are not limited to it. Ancient Spartan society knew shared feasts where everyone contributed, but they were only accessible to a very limited demographic from the upper end of the social order and the funding for them was taken from slave labour. Many medieval communities are known to have had rudimentary "food banks" and other means of sharing food with needy members, and this tradition has carried over into modern societies, but I would not dare call this Communism. Leftist in the widest sense, yes. But not more.

Re:Freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

Fat troll detected

So lets say they make some money...

[BiggerIsBetter]

Let's say they figure out how to make money from allegedly doing good things. Are they going to return it to their contributors as well?

Speaking of which, where's my cheque for contributing to Slashdot's value for all these years?

Re:So lets say they make some money...

[Anonymous Coward]

Your contribution is worth effectively zero. Now mine on the other hand, is probably in the millions.

Re:So lets say they make some money...

[hedwards]

That's my thought on the matter. Cash is usually to cover the cost of a resource and generally not expected if a person is being expected to contribute his or her time and effort. With /. users with sufficient karma are allowed to deactivate ads officially as a reward for contributing in other ways. I'd say in this case, that unless there's value being added which can't otherwise be had that donations or ads, but presumably not both, would be reasonable. But if you go that route all of a sudden that raises the expectations a great deal.

Re:So lets say they make some money...

[Cylix]

You get the "no ads" option if you are recognized as a valued member.

It's not worth a whole lot if you already have ad blocking software or are a paying subscriber. (I'm both).

It is a bit of a bonus for when I am on my work pc.

Unfortunately, It is frightfully inadequate when compared to the billions of dollars Mr. Taco swims in everyday... (like Scrooge McDuck in his money vault).

Re:So lets say they make some money...

[phantomfive]

Your post started at (Score:1), so apparently your karma isn't so great. Try not writing so many drunken troll posts ;)

Re:So lets say they make some money...

[BiggerIsBetter]

World peace might be easy, yet peace on an internet forum seems to be beyond you.

My karma is excellent, however your view of it may vary depending on your preferences...

Re:So lets say they make some money...

[Blakey Rat]

I lost my karma bonus of 6+ years because some asswipe decided he was going to mod all of my posts for a couple weeks -1 Troll. No matter how good the content of them. The mod system is pretty easy to manipulate, really-- especially knowing now that 2 weeks of "random asshole" can undo 6+ years of good karma.

Anyway, point is, don't worry about points. They're stupid, and totally useless for gauging the worth of a poster.

Re:So lets say they make some money...

[Anonymous Coward]

Your post started at (Score:1), so apparently your karma isn't so great. Try not writing so many drunken troll posts ;)

I used to sign in and had the karma bonus but used to post at (Score:1) because I wanted to participate in discussion based on reason rather than speak louder based on reputation.

Re:So lets say they make some money...

[phantomfive]

Calm down man. You started the conversation by asking for payment from Slashdot. The whole thing is a joke, not worth getting upset about.

Re:So lets say they make some money...

[dbIII]

It used to cap out at 50 and probably still does so 6+ years means nothing more than 1+ years or probably even less.
Besides, I've seen a few of those posts (ranting about linux on a place that grew out of a linux fan site) and it's likely you annoyed more than one childish "asswipe" because nobody gets enough points to do that much damage in a couple of weeks.

Re:So lets say they make some money...

[Blakey Rat]

Besides, I've seen a few of those posts (ranting about linux on a place that grew out of a linux fan site) and it's likely you annoyed

Well, whether they were annoyed or not, they weren't trolls, and they certainly shouldn't be modded as trolls. And if you're telling me I should self-censor because there's one particular fandom that dominates the comments here, then you can go screw yourself. (If you weren't implying that, then nevermind.)

Re:So lets say they make some money...

[Arancaytar]

They let you turn off the advertisements. :P

Re:So lets say they make some money...

[dbIII]

Didn't say they were, just saying that fanboys didn't like you.

Re:So lets say they make some money...

[Blakey Rat]

Didn't say they were, just saying that fanboys didn't like you.

Well, ok. Undoubtedly true.

But the thing is that never stopped me from having good karma before. My opinions haven't changed. Which means either:
1) This site has become so much more extremist that it's significantly more difficult to maintain good karma if you're not part of the groupthink
2) I pissed off some single individual who has no problem abusing the mod system to lower my karma

Considering the options, I'd prefer to think number 2 happened.

Go For Donations

[Ltap]

If it's true F/OSS, if people want to use it, they will use it no matter what the developers want. Other than approaching car mapping/GPS systems manufacturers, there isn't much they can do in an overtly commercial sense. This is one of the problems with OSS that isn't userspace software or something well-known; users don't hear about it and they don't get donations. If they asked their users (Bing, Mapquest, etc.) to make it more clear that OSM forms the main portion of whatever they are trying to use it for, it might get more recognition and attention.

Re:Go For Donations

[bcmm]

This is one of the problems with OSS that isn't userspace software or something well-known;

Make that user-facing software - I recall a Slashdot article a while back about how best to ensure that projects like OpenSSL get some of the money that people throw at more visible stuff, like Firefox, that depends upon it.

Re:Go For Donations

[Anonymous Coward]

If they asked their users (Bing, Mapquest, etc.) to make it more clear that OSM forms the main portion of whatever they are trying to use it for, it might get more recognition and attention.

I thought I'd check out how exactly Bing was using OSM and it would appear that they are offering it as an alternative layer:
Bing Maps Adds OpenStreetMap
If you follow the link to the maps it says "(c) OpenStreetMap (and) contributors, CC-BY".
I think the reason they're doing it is to show off serving map data from the Azure CDN and the APIs of Bing itself. More an interesting side project really.

Loose gets started, then squeeze

[cellurl]

If I were them, I would demand more from bing.com
You can sit around, or you can evolve.

Worse case, bing would buy them like Suse or whatever...

Wikipedia evolved to finally moving to San Francisco and tightening the editing rules.
You will make some enemies. Have a tough skin. Keep track of your loyal fans and let them vote!

That's what we do at WikiSPEEDia

-jim

Re:Loose gets started, then squeeze

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice ad you got there, Jim.

They already make money out of OSM

[Lord Satri]

There are plenty of commercial uses of OSM already, and some are making quite enough money out of it. One that I personally use is offmaps.com, but that's obviously barely the tip of the iceberg.

But the question is whether OSM can make money out of it or not. Considering CloudMade are paying 40 employees, I guess they *do* can make money out of it, by "providing APIs for web sites, applications, and devices to use the rendered map data." (source is Wikipedia, probably the CloudMade website would provide more details.)

OSM is an example of success: open geospatial data and business profit.

Re:They already make money out of OSM

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah, not quite yet. Cloudmade are still VC funded.

file a bunch of patents

[Anonymous Coward]

1) online maps
2) online maps that are the product of wiki collaboration
3) online maps that also feature advertising
4) online maps that have markers for stores that paid for advertising
5) online maps that can be personalized for markers for sites visited by the user (I actually haven't seen this yet)
6) online maps that provide a marked route
7) online maps that also feature music, audio, or video clips

Wait a few years, then hire a law firm in East Texas to send nasty letters to every tech firm they can find. The fact that most or all of these have been done many years ago, well that doesn't seem to matter does it.

How do I pronounce nekulturny?

[Anonymous Coward]

How do I pronounce nekulturny?

Re:How do I pronounce nekulturny?

[Anonymous Coward]

joo-ish

Re:How do I pronounce nekulturny?

[Artifakt]

No, it's Russian, not Yiddish. (And yes, I know you were making a stupid racial slur, not a point).
Anyway, 'Nekulturny' is Russian for uncultured, so pronounce it as you think Susan Ivanova would and it will be close enough. By they way, it's also a grand insult, taken much more seriously among native Russian speakers than it sounds it would be in translation.

I can think of a couple

[Anonymous Coward]

1 publish in a large newspaper the fact that ms is using this and giving nothing in return while at the same time patenting the obvious and throwing rocks at the community and hindering progress. The second is to temporarily cut off access due to lack of money and apologize as publicly as possible to the ms customers. Another is a fundraiser to save ms maps who rely on an underfunded project. You must call it ms maps bailout fund. That word resonates with people nowadays for some reason. Remember! You have to get dirty to play with pigs. :)

Legally fine, socially deplorable

[KonoWatakushi]

While I agree with your sentiment about the BSD license, that is completely beside the point.

This is about community, and open source is no different. If one monetizes the work of others, it is only natural to contribute something back. People and companies are free not to, but they certainly deserve shame for acting in such a manner, especially in a case like this.

The very existence of the GPL is a sad reflection upon our society. One shouldn't need the law to force people to act in a responsible and courteous manner. That also applies to the BSD license, though its demands are more reasonable.

Paid ads?

[Anonymous Coward]

Start selling adds at places on the map.

Re:Paid ads?

[MichaelSmith]

Yeah or sell a service to map commercial developments.

Re:Paid ads?

[Megahard]

It's 15 miles from Smithville to Rivertown. From Rivertown to Hillsborough is 23 miles. How far from Smithville to Hillsborough? That will cost you $2.50.

I hope you all remember this...

[Anonymous Coward]

They just take from the project and do nothing for it in return.

If you all agreed that MS is rat bastards for pulling this kinds of tricks just remember that the next time someone goes on one of their MAFIAA rants. After all, Microsoft just made a copy... and did it all legal like, unlike the pirates who wave their flags high around here.

If it sucks when Microsoft does it, it sucks more when you do it.

Re:I hope you all remember this...

[Call Me Black Cloud]

I usually don't respond to or even read ac posts but I have to say...nicely done. You've made an excellent point.

3, no, 4, oops, make that 7 ways to make money

[tomhudson]

1. embed Google ads in maps served via Bing.
2. threaten to be acquired by OraKILL pr Paul Allen
3. include games in the maps served up - games are big. You can then sell them swords and nukes when they are looking at their neighbors cat
4. offer people an "unlisted address" option - "we'll remove your section of the street if you pay us $5 a month. Works for the phone co "pay more, get less service"
5. road sponsorship - it works for highway trash cleanup "this section of road is loving memory of Snuffles the Dog"
6. bring out their own version of MonopolyCityStreets
7. "Risk, the neighborhood edition"

Really, either hire some coders to produce a game, or come to some sort of partnership/sponsorship agreement for developing a game, where they promote the game (say, on every 100th map served) and handle sales.

No

[thoughtsatthemoment]

To make money you have to specialize, and not try to emulate Google or Bing. If your strength is just being better, they will copy you or be motivated to outdo you. It's not just map or open source. It's always difficult to make money when there is a big player or two around to give the product away (for a strategic purpose of course).

Re:No

[Dr. Evil]

OSM started before Google maps was launched, and certainly before Bing.

MapQuest is participating in Free Software sense

[Anonymous Coward]

The accusation that MapQuest only take from OpenStreetMap is untrue. MapQuest have already contributed publicly to OpenStreetMap in fine Free Software fashion.

When MapQuest announced their new http://open.mapquest.co.uk beta project with OpenStreetMap data, they had already sponsored development in two key OSM subprojects (Mapnik http://mapnik.org and nominatim http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Nominatim). Since their announcement, MapQuest have released "code" in the form of their Mapnik style sheets. They have also announced US$1Million of support earmarked for projects that improve OpenStreetMap data in the US.

http://opengeodata.org/mapquest-announce-openstreetmap-support

Both MapQuest and Microsoft sponsored the recent OpenStreetMap State of the Map conference in Girona Spain.

And besides, if OSM is a truly Open project, there is no obligation to contribute, beyond compliance with the license terms of the project. Just as many use Firefox without "contributing" to the Mozilla project.

--rweait

Ask for Donations

[Anonymous Coward]

If you ask money in the right way, showing some goals to reach, people are willing to donate. Do like the Blender's Foundation or the Diaspora guys. Ask money to work full time on some features you want to add on top of OpenStreetMap.

Legally ok... Morally not.

[neuro-commando]

Taking the hard-work of the open-source community and making money off it without any acknowledgement or payment to the origin of the product is just immoral, not that it matters much, but it does a great job of making you come off as an asshole. Like was said, Legally Ok. I don't think they're bitching because Microsoft using it, but rather, because Microsoft is taking their hard work and making a profit off it without doing anything in return. In Polish, we have a word for this kind of behavior: Hamstwo (Haamstvo-phonetically). No one's bitching from a legal standpoint, they understand Microsoft is allowed to do this, they're just annoyed at the disregard these people are showing.

Re:Legally ok... Morally not.

[SWroclawski]

> without any acknowledgement or payment to the origin of the product is just immoral,

Acknowledgement is attribution, and attribution is part of the license. And the license is being followed.

As for payment... there is no obligation for that. Would it be nice? Sure. But it's not required.

Re:Legally ok... Morally not.

[neuro-commando]

That's exactly what I'm saying...

Re:Legally ok... Morally not.

[Peeteriz]

It's definitely moral, as you have deliberately chosen a license that says that you want the product to be freely used also for commercial purposes - i.e., you intentionally forfeit any requests for compensation when it's used commercially, but in return get a wider usage for the product that gives you many indirect benefits - more users, more mindshare, more recognition which increases its value to everybody, including yourself.

This is the whole moral and ethical intent of the licence - that you are not only allowed, but also encouraged by creator to use it in every way, and if you can also get some money out of it, then it's even better - as the money flows support a sustainable development of the new products and motivates entrepreneurs to build new uses for the licensed software that people want so much that they are willing for pay for it.

I see no fault with this use. If the creators of the map project had intended that commercial users are intended to give something back to them - then they have failed in that by putting up a big sign saying the opposite; for example, in their own webpage they publicly state that the only thing they request is "If you are using map data only, we request "Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, CC-BY-SA""

I'd rather say that it's hamstwo of the OpenStreetMap guys - they have made a gift with a comment that only an acknowledgment/credit is expected, but then loudly complain at the receiver for not giving another gift back.

Re:Legally ok... Morally not.

[maxwell demon]

It's damn easy. If someone needs permission from you to do something, and you don't want them to do it, then don't give them the permission to do it. You can't give them the permission and then complain that they do what you explicitly permitted them to do. And yes, a license is just that: A (conditional) permission to do something.

CDDB

[Disk Pickable]

Want to make a few bucks off your collection of free, user-submitted content? Just pull a CDDB.

Re:MapQuest is participating in Free Software sens

[Sir_Lewk]

The accusation that MapQuest only take from OpenStreetMap is untrue.

Mapquest supports the project with money for equipment and access to the code they've written to integrate OSM's work with their display.

Second sentence of the fucking summary. Who is making that accusation?

Misleading writeup

[Anonymous Coward]

The writeup is VERY misleading. Serge Wroclawski is one of the founders of the OSM US non-profit that was formed to help promote and organize OSM activities in the US. I'm not sure of his involvement beyond that, but he is probably an avid mapper. Basically it is a US chapter of the http://www.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Main_Page

That said there is a need for them to raise money so they can actually do thing to promote and organize activities for US OSM members. Things like mapping parties and the use of GPS's for volunteers. Getting more people involved with mapping. Any legal activities, verifying government data copyrights, liability issues. There is talk of trying to do a promotional tour in a van or small bus.

As far as raising money, OSM and it's CC-SA (or ODBL) license has no problem with either the organization or an individual using the data to make money. I believe paper maps and t-shirts have been made and sold in the past. As long as any changes/additions to the data is contributed back there is not a conflict.

Definition

[Anonymous Coward]

They just take from the project and do nothing for it in return

That is regrettably all too often the definition of "corporation".

Registration needed?

[chiui]

Never ever link to a "registration needed" site.
I actually understand more (but still dislike) a paysite, they at least have some motivation to require a tedious register/login procedure.

Clarifications

[SWroclawski]

I want to make a few clarifications to the article.

1. This was, as Roblimo points out, a Facebook chat. This wasn't an interview and I didn't know it was going to be the subject of an article. I was having a conversation with a friend, but when friends are reporters... well mea culpa.

2. Bing is not doing evil here. They are in full compliance with the license as far as I know. And they have expressed interest in offering the project help in the future. I stated a fact, which is that nothing concrete has some out yet, but that's not quite the same "they don't give back.". It's my hope that they will do something for the project, but they're not required to.

3. Lots of companies use OpenStreetMap to make money. There's nothing wrong with that. And many of the same individuals who make money off OSM are its biggest supporters in terms of spreading the word, in terms of helping support the OpenStreetMap Foundation, and by going out and mapping their neighborhoods. There's no separation in my mind between these people and other contributors.

4. The license is essentially attribution-sharealike. It's like the GPL. If there's modification of our data, they're required to make it available to others under the same terms as they received it. That's the license, and that's what everyone is following.

I want to make sure this confusion is cleared up, and if there are any other impressions that are wrong based on this article, I want to apologize for them.

- Serge

Re:Clarifications

[rhendershot]

Bing is not doing evil here. They are in full compliance with the license as far as I know. And they have expressed interest in offering the project help in the future.

I'm sorry you couldn't get that into the OP. I have had my fill of /. sensationalisms.

Re:Clarifications

[tpstigers]

Thanks, Serge. It's nice to have some clarification from someone in a position to actually provide it. It's interesting (and a little disturbing) that so many people think OSM is looking to make a profit. I don't see why it's so hard to understand that free means free for everyone. Sure - it'd be great if Microsoft tossed some funds OSM's way (and I'd be very surprised if they didn't eventually do so), but they are under absolutely no obligation to do so (morally or otherwise). Correct me if I'm mistaken, but I'm pretty sure OpenStreetMap's license doesn't include separate provisions for major corporations.

Re:Clarifications

[DerekLyons]

This was, as Roblimo points out, a Facebook chat. This wasn't an interview and I didn't know it was going to be the subject of an article. I was having a conversation with a friend, but when friends are reporters... well mea culpa.

No, it's not your fault - it's the fault of the unethical jackass who took a personal conversation and made a public post of it.

Re:Clarifications

[DNS-and-BIND]

Your point of view, I guess. I'd say it was a reporter who didn't bother to fact-check anything, but then that would indict the entire trade. In my old government job years ago, I used to fax press releases to reporters, and my office phone was at the bottom. The stories regularly appeared in the newspaper the next day, and I never ever even once got a phone call to verify anything. This was before Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass, and all the other ones who got caught.

Re:Clarifications

[16K Ram Pack]

Completely OT, but I was recently using the MapDroyd app which provides offline mapping using the OSM data (so you can get a map with GPS position when you can't get a signal) and it really made some country walks a lot easier. So, thanks to all the guys at OSM.

Re:Clarifications

[Lemming Mark]

Bravo, thank you for posting this.

Re:Clarifications

[godrik]

First of all, I am an open street map user through maemo mapper on the n810 and you are doing an AWESOME job. Thank you for it.

May be you could suggest the "free-as-in-beer users" of OSM to to add a sponsor link to their search engine.

Something else might be to offer them to develop or organize some feature with them to improve the maps. For instance, I find fairly difficult to edit maps in open street map, but if there was a good interface to allow the user to report back to OSM that an information is wrong with a descriptive text might help mappers that know how to edit the maps to correct them.

Re:Clarifications

[SWroclawski]

> you are doing an AWESOME job.

I don't speak for the project. I'm just a contributor, just like if I were a Wikipedia contributor.

> May be you could suggest the "free-as-in-beer users" of OSM to to add a sponsor link to their search engine.

I don't know what a sponsor link to a search engine is, but the license dictates usage, and everyone is in full compliance with the license.

> For instance, I find fairly difficult to edit maps in open street map, but if there was a good interface to allow the user to report back to OSM that an information is wrong with a descriptive text might help mappers that know how to edit the maps to correct them.

This question has multiple answers, so let me try my best to address them:

1) If you're interested in learning more about OSM, I highly recommend joining the newbies list. It's very low traffic and very high quality.

2) Personally, I think most mapping in OSM isn't that hard (sometimes it is but not usually). Maybe if you explained what you found hard, we could work on that?

3) The suggestion for textual feedback back to OSM is already in the works for the new website, which will hopefully be up later this year. I think that's the bridge between mappers and non-mapping contributors you're asking about.

When you give it away, you will be abused

[Anonymous Coward]

I have worked for many large companies and I can say that if you give it away, they will take it. Open source is scattered in all of my projects of the last 1- years, including Zipping, creating PDFs, displaying graphics, emailing, many tools and the like. I get paid and the people who's software is used receives nothing. The US government uses tons of LAMP. My previous customer is converting from Windows based systems to LAMP to save them money. Linux, Apache, Mysql and PHP will get nothing, but some manager will get big bonuses for saving them money.

When you give it away, you receive no respect.

Re: CloudMade raised over $12M in series B = money

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the way to make money (they must have had series A funding also), and they are using OpenStreetMap data (from cloudmade website).
Raising money from VCs is no guarantee they'll ever make any, but it's much easier (as i should know having raised quite a lot of money from VCs, unfortunately without making any in return mostly) (which is why I'm posting on slashdot in the middle of the night, instead of hanging out on my imaginary yacht)

Re:MapQuest is participating in Free Software sens

[SWroclawski]

> Who is making that accusation?

Probably the same guy whose voting my comment down clarifying things I was quoted on in the original article.

US != World

[Roger W Moore]

Its like tipping, nowhere does it say that you -must- tip (unless the tip is included with the bill) but its still common courtesy.

Unless you are in Japan where it is insulting, or Europe where service is included.

Re:US != World

[Jack Taylor]

Actually, in Japan tipping isn't really insulting, it's just that absolutely no-one does it. For example, if you give try and give a tip at a restaurant in Japan and they're not wise about western tipping culture, they will simply assume that you made a mistake when trying to pay. Either way, if you tip they'll just try to give you your change back (even to the point of running down the street after you!)

The only time it might appear rude is if it could be mistaken for a bribe. This is really a pretty rare occurrence, but just in case I'll warn you not to try and tip any police officers or customs officials ;) In other situations like trying to tip bellboys, etc., you will cause confusion, but no actual insult.

OpenStreetMap has not asked for anything.

[firefishy]

I'm part of the OpenStreetMap sysadmin team... We think it is great that Bing is using our open map data! Hell them using our data is great promotion for our project. We currently have no need to ask them for anything back and I'm sure if we tapped them, they would be supportive. Our project is about creating great open map data, not about becoming rich. Is Bing working on improve OpenStreetMap's open data further? Quite likely. They win, we win.

Re:OpenStreetMap has not asked for anything.

[Anonymous Coward]

It would certainly be nice If they let us (osm contributors) use their aerial and satellite photos as reference in potlatch (the OSM online editor), I understand that there may be licensing issues but it could be worth asking...

Re:OpenStreetMap has not asked for anything.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell them

Acknowledged, I'm sending them to hell as we type. Can someone from Hell confirm they have arrived?

Re:OpenStreetMap has not asked for anything.

[Anonymous Coward]

Its the same when NearMap http://www.nearmap.com started using OpenStreetMap as a layer over their areal photography and including an edit button which would take you to the OpenStreetMap site to work with the NearMap layer.

NearMap users (eg my own mates) were made aware of OpenStreetMap.

I'm a big contributor to OpenStreetMap and donated recently, something don't rarely do but OpenStreetMap totally deserved it for for its tools, providing something useful and for the cost of me uploading and downloading while editing.

Re:OpenStreetMap has not asked for anything.

[lucian1900]

This. Where the fuck does the article say that the OSM team complained about Bing? And btw, thank you very much for OSM. I used it in an Android app dealing with my university campus.

One Word: Subprime

[beaker8000]

They should open a subsidiary that funds risky mortgages. Sell it as an offshoot of their core mapping business. When it fails get bailed out and give everyone bonuses. It's called finance.

arg!

[Blymie]

Maybe I'm missing something, but Bing and their map product is VERY VERY new. Hell, it's been out of 'beta' for what, a year?

How many people are even using their app? How many apps for mobile phones, exist, that use Bing Maps?

It generally takes time to get these sorts of things worked out. Heck, look at Google! I've tried to have multiple issues fixed in my region. Streets labeled wrong, missing streets, extra streets that don't exist.

Do you think they've bothered fixing any of that.. even though I submitted these changes through a link for just such a purpose? Nope!

So, all that said and done, Microsoft is probably being quite honest in their desire to help down the road -- they may just not have the infrastructure / capacity set up yet.

The worst part of all of this, is that I just had to defend M$. Arg!

whatever

[Anonymous Coward]

'nekulturny'? right whatever let's try and sound intelligent by adding foreign terms into an english post, was there no way to express the sentiment in english?
anyway if you give it for free don't complain after the fact, geez :S

Offer custom maps

[quinto2000]

When I got married, I decided I wanted to make maps for my guests, none of whom lived in our small exurb. It turns out this is a pretty common task. I didn't want ugly, low resolution mapquest printout maps though. I wanted to be able to put in points of interest, I wanted a high level of street detail and I wanted some control over the rendering. I was excited to find out about OSM. It turns out, the Open Street Map website allows you to download a section of the map as SVG. Great! However, one problem: it has a pretty small limit on how big it can be, which limits either map size or level of detail. I ended up downloading the entire map, the rendering software and Mapnik style sheets, and having to compile the renderer myself. Then I edited the map in Inkscape, but there are some boundary issues when you just want a small segment of a big map. It was a pretty complicated project, but I think ultimately worth it.

If OSM offered a paid or advertising supported service to help make custom maps, I think it would be pretty popular. I've toyed around with the idea myself of offering this service, but I don't have the time.

Re:Offer custom maps

[CharlyFoxtrot]

I did something similar, creating a blind map of my city for my girlfriend to use in a geography class. But I just used one of the editors to do it. JOSM or Merkaartor I'm not sure which I ended up using, I tried both at the time.

Re:Offer custom maps

[quinto2000]

I think I used JOSM as well--it was a while ago. But I don't think JOSM allowed any rendering, so once I got a map segment with JOSM I had to render it with Mapnik.

At least you think they're not contributing

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe there are Bing employees contributing, but the project doesn't know the code is coming from Bing. It might be done with corporate approval, to improve the product but not let the competition know what is being done. But it would be nice to also give some financial support to the supporting organization.

Ameri-centric obsession over money and freedom

[billcopc]

The gist of it is that someone is making money off of something that's free, and a 3rd party things that's wrong. So tell me, WHY is it wrong ?

OSM is free software. Free to do anything you want with it. Nowhere in its license does it say "If you have lots of money, you have to give us some". For a nation so terrified of watered-down socialism, that's a pretty socialist attitude.

Which part of the equation is "wrong" ? Is it the getting rich part, or the not getting rich part ? If the guys developing OSM were bazillionaires, would this still be an issue ? If there were no money at all, and Bing were the brainchild of a tiny little non-profit org, would this still be an issue ?

There is no issue. If the OSM people wanted money for their work, they would ask for it like everyone else.

Back to the original question...

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you have any ideas, yourself, about how they might turn a few bucks from OSM?"

So now, having settled the issue of others using OSM's data to make money, let's now tap /.'s collective brain and provide ideas on how OSM can make money!

Advertising?

[mveloso]

Why not stick ads in it? I've heard that's the hot thing right now.

the article is a troll

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a troll to bring mindshare to M$ Bong. If OSM has any sense at all, they'll set their firewall to block all M$ sites.

Make a Flattr button!

[MaXMC]

Just make a http://flattr.com/ button so people can donate easily.

Bing Is Noxiously Greedy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Or... serve Microsoft's requests by showing Seattle in Russia.

It's possible to take from openstreetmap.org without giving anything in return, But It's Not Good. BING!

PERSONS-SocialPressure ; CORPORATIONS-Contract

[Anonymous Coward]

expecting PERSONS and incorporated-"PERSONS" to have the same motivation is...
DEVOUTLY-ignorant!

"Persons" are usually *created* specifically to convert
a) ( the work-of ) humanity &
b) ( the worth-of ) world ('s resources )
into quarterly profit-sensation,
which they are usually created specifically to ( and have the legal obligation to! ) CONSUME,
as unlimitedly as they can ( on the short-term, Quarterly basis ),
however they can get away-with!

How can "social pressure" act against a civil machine,
THE WAY it acts against someone who is a living, breathing person??

Ignoring reality,
to hold to some make-believe-symbol,
isn't "noble" or "great",
it's a natural racial Darwin-award in the making...

Fossils record many extinct species that made "assumptions",
like the sabre-cats who assumed that single-prey dependency was the Right Way,
who got forced-extinct when nature decided it was Changes-Time.

Corporations ARE *NOT* PERSONS:
their motivations are NOT the same as ours,
their dependencies ( family? or market-enforcement? ) are NOT the same either!!

Use the means *appropriate* to each kind of creature!

Sun Tsu:
~only if you understand
a) your mutual context,
b) yourself,
c) AND your opponent,
can victory be reasonably-certain.

If you ignore any 1 of these,
you may be lucky for a time,
possibly for the whole current war...

If you ignore 2 of these,
you would have to be very lucky to win a battle.

Ignore all 3, and your entire side's extinction is certain.

Remember that the Supreme General wins the war without battle ever even arising:
by *making* victory without battle-resort!~

Getting in a pissing-match with for-profit corporation-machines,
because they act like for-profit corporations,
proves only that one has been incompetent in knowing both context & the other players in the game/context/battle/culture,
and *strongly* indicates that one doesn't understand one's self/motivation, either...

You want values?
Know values & Live values.

You want values to be committed by machines?
MAKE that be the case,
using forces that corporate-MACHINES feel!

Accommodating machines ( corporate "persons" ) ruling the world,
and complaining that they don't act like REAL-someones,
proves no morality, values, or virtue:

It's only another fossil-record Darwin-award,
being made right now,
by those who can/ought know better...

( this isn't all directed at whom I appear to be replying-to:
the /. system won't let me reply,
with my text-browser,
to the one(s) I wanted to reply to:
this is intended to be part of this particular thread, however!

Blessings & Realizations! :)

Just say that Bing uses your stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

Just say that Bing uses your stuff. "Open Street Map: As used by Microsoft's Bing Search system!".

So how do I make thousands then?

[Anonymous Coward]

So how do I make thousands then? You see the difference here to MAFIAA is that the individual isn't selling their "stolen" music for profit. Here, Microsoft is selling their Bing service with their "stolen" maps. The quotes are deliberately there because in neither case is the product actually stolen.

Adittionaly, in the case of MAFIAA, if you're found with "stolen" or even suspected of having "stolen" product you're arrested jailed and fined inordinate amounts of cash, more than you'd make in a lifetime. Will Microsoft be fined more than their lifetime revenue? No. They won't even be looked askance at by the authorities.

Next time you get on your high horse about MAFIAA being lambasted, remember this.

And stop sucking on the corporate cock.

Government subsidies

[CharlyFoxtrot]

How about some government support ? Governments already have to have accurate maps on hand and should have the data. So pitch it to them as a way to both outsource the hosting of the data and make it freely and easily available for their citizens and businesses. As a plus they could then easily integrate it into their online offerings too, which in my experience often are lacking in the map area. If data doesn't exist yet in digital form (or in an incompatible form) then the openstreetmap community could be leveraged to digitize it.

Re:Government subsidies

[Anonymous Coward]

you do NOT want the bureaucratic government involved

So ?

[daveime]

I have a distinct problem with OSS advocates, who make something "free" and then start laying down conditions or whining when the big boys take advantage of it. If it's free, it's free ... provided they make the proper linkage and/or attributions to the creators as appropriate, then the OSS people got exactly what they wanted (and some would say, no more than they deserved).

Sell Tile Packs

[Anonymous Coward]

How about free tiles on the web, or pre-made tile caches which can be bought on a hard drive or dvd or some such thing?

I maintain a product for my company which can display OSM tiles. To do that, we set up the ability to render them in house. I would gladly have paid for pre-made tile packs instead.

can I read the article w/o registering? :)

[darkeye]

I guess that's a relevant question, given the title of the article :)

I know

[MrKaos]

OSM could tell Bing where to go.

in business world

[Anonymous Coward]

...everyone would laugh at this "common courtesy". It's naive.

Either way, I wish the big corporations would give back directly to the organization for using their efforts. But if it's not in the license, the manager or whoever authorised the "borrowing" of OSM, is not bound to follow it, and in return they'll get a fat bonus check for this b2b "cooperation".

Lawyers make a living finding loopholes in a license.

Tech smart, not business smart

[Call Me Black Cloud]

(to read the article without registering get a login from bugmenot.com)

Another example showing the smartest tech guys aren't the smartest business guys. Or to look at it another way, the most successful tech business guys aren't the best or brightest engineers.

When your business model is the same as a street musician's, i.e. do something nice and hope people drop money in the cup, then you can't complain when you're not paid. In other words, the Blanche DuBois model ("I have always depended upon the kindness of strangers") is no way to earn a living.

Was Bill Gates the smartest engineer at MS? Is Steve Jobs the smartest engineer at Apple? Larry Ellison? Sergey Brin? If you want to make money from your technical skills either work for someone else or get a partner with business savvy. Don't give away your product and cry over an empty tip jar. If you're "as hard-core a free software developer as you can be without being named Richard Stallman" the surely you can't be surprised at your empty refrigerator.

Complain about poor manners all you want, but "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" doesn't work. The internet ain't no commune.

Has he asked Microsoft for a donation?

[Call Me Black Cloud]

Charities spend a lot of time and effort contacting donors and persuading them to support the charity. Has he contacted MS and asked them for cash or hardware? Or does he just expect them to write checks out of the blue? I'm sure the person who wrote the code using OSM output is not the person with the checkbook.

Nokia bought Navteq for 8 billion dollars

[Colin Smith]

So, that might give you an idea what they think good quality map data is worth. They're putting GPS and Ovi Maps into every new phone.

Google are out driving the streets, correcting and putting stuff on top of Tele Atlas data. Also an expensive proposition.

Mapping, is expensive.

Here's the thing. What is a map for? To find out where you are and what's round about you. So... In an urban context, people are looking for things like public transport, restaurants, shops, each other etc etc.Golden opportunity to put advertising services on top of the map data. Hence Google, an advertising company.

What does Nokia get out of it? Well, they already have a handset in every pocket. Add a GPS, and you have a massive geolocation system.

How do you make money as OpenStreetMap to keep running? Get in touch with the Open Directory project http://www.dmoz.org/ they have a directory of things, you have a directory of places.

There is no "more, truer freedom"

[jonaskoelker]

Free software advocates really need to understand that if you want to have true freedom

I think the concepts "true freedom", "false freedom", "more freedom" and "less freedom" don't exist---or at least are very misleading to think in terms of. I think it's much more useful to think in terms of freedom to do specific things.

Like, in the US, people are free to say whatever they want. The government is not free to censor people. One can argue that only if the government is allowed to censor people is it truly free. I think the freedom of the people is more important.

And that's pretty much my take on this discussion: there is no "more free" license. The GPL restricts (de jure) some people in ways the 3-clause BSD license doesn't. The 3-clause BSD license lets people (de facto) restrict some people in ways that aren't legal under the GPL.

Do you want the freedoms behind door number 1 or the ones behind door number 2? Which freedoms are "more"? Which freedoms are "true"?

(Oh, and by the way, who gets to define which freedoms are "true", and why _those_ people? Also, do these "true" freedoms have any special observable properties? Or were you just making a meaningless and/or unfounded assertion?)

Not freedom - hangover of slavery

[dbIII]

The better worker gets the increased pay check

They should get it from their boss. All tipping does is give the better beggar more money. That waitress hanging around a lot and giving a big eyeful of cleavage to the well dressed guys might be doing a terrible job at the other tables where there is less chance of a big tip.
Below minimum wage pay where the balance is supposed to be made up by tips is a symptom that the USA still hasn't entirely got over slavery.
Also if I talk to someone that brings home several hundred dollars a night in tips they will probably say "do you want me to show you a good time big boy?".

Bitcoin!

[Anonymous Coward]

Bitcoin!