Slashdot Mirror
Treefinder Revokes Software License For Users In Immigrant-Friendly Nations
dotancohen writes: The author of bioinformatics software Treefinder is revoking the license to his software for researchers working in eight European countries because he says those countries allow too many immigrants to cross their borders, effective 1 October. The author states, "Immigration to my country harms me, it harms my family, it harms my people. Whoever invites or welcomes immigrants to Europe and Germany is my enemy."
What a dork
Racist gene sequencing software.
From TFA it looks like Jobb is a racist asshole and his Treefinder software is outdated and has plenty alternatives.
Looks like a drama queen thing.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
So basically he's a batshit crazy idiot who is ranting publicly and acting like a whiny bitch?
Congratulations, Gangolf Judd ... you're an idiot, and a moron.
And largely irrelevant, from reading this.
Everything about this article suggests some raving idiot sitting in the dark lamenting how the world won't adhere to his bullshit beliefs.
Whatever, and nothing of value was lost.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Granted, chances are the guy doesn't actually have the right to cancel people's purchases like this. However, the fact that it's halfway-reasonable for him to think he has that right is yet another illustration of how ridiculously overreaching copyright has become.
Again and again, we're seeing a thing that is (a) a government-granted monopoly, not a right, (b) only supposed to be temporary, and (c) not designed for the benefit of the author, but rather for the benefit of society, perverted to the point where people think it trumps actual property rights!
This guy's attitude is fucking sick and disgusting, and that's before I even take the bigotry into account!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
If the West had not destabilized the whole regionfor political ends, we would not be in this mess.
Too few people nowadays (and politicians en masse) are willing to speak from a core belief set for fear of {horrors} offending someone!
Even ridiculous courage is refreshing these days.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
I'm not sure that's possible. Can you revoke a licence of an old program? You can change the licence for a new version, sure, but when I buy (or download) a program, the licence that comes with it *at that time* is the licence I have to adhere to I would think.
From the manual:
"By default, TREEFINDER displays a license notice every time the program is launched.
Clicking the I-agree-button all the time might get on one's nerves after a while, so here is the
trick how to switch it off: using a text editor to create a file containing the words 'I promise
that I will always respect the current license conditions.' and save it in your 'Treefinder'
directory as 'i_agree' (without a file extension!). You will never see the license notice again."
and:
"This license agreement is valid until the next software release. Afterwards, the license of the
latest TREEFINDER version applies."
So it looks like he was already a control freak back in 2011, and was attempting to reserve the right to impose retrospectively whatever licence he felt like issuing in the future. I suspect this wouldn't stand up to serious legal scrutiny, but it was already a big red flag before he went off the rails completely.
But of course! Before the West got involved in the Middle East, it was a peaceful paradise, where unicorns grazed under rainbows, and peoples of all different religions lived together in blissful harmony! It's not like these people ever occupied large parts of Europe, oppressed non-Muslims, or abducted millions of Europeans into slavery, oh no, nothing like that ever happened!
He didn't mention anything about them being legal or illegal, just that "migrants are bad" for Germany, even though every single study on the issue shows quite the opposite. So yeah, he's a nationalist, xenophobic, ignorant muppet who would rather put hundreds of thousands of people in dangerous circumstances before looking past his own nose.
just that people should immigrate legally, so that they can come in at a rate that they can mesh well with existing society.
Say the body responsible for setting a nation's immigration policy has decided to admit refugees on the basis that emergency evacuation from a war zone outweighs the difficulty of "mesh[ing] well with existing society". In that case, they are immigrating legally.
National identity is the kind of thing that stuffs the world up.
I can't understand those that feel proud of a geographical area they happen to live in, especially when they simultaneously destroy the environment that makes any place great to be.
The concept of patriotism is in my opinion, absurd.
And, interestingly enough, nationalism is a recent invention. We are taught that there are distinct countries and the implication is that this has always been the case. If nothing else, people are either told or simply assume that before nations there were tribes and that tribalism preceded nationalism. But it isn't true.
There is a related problem, that of language. We like to pretend that languages are distinct and have clear boundaries. Someone speaks English, or German or Spanish or... But this notion of language is fairly modern and isn't even true. This is tacitly acknowledged by adding labels to indicate region, recognizing that American English is not the same as British English. Nor is the English spoken in India the same as either of those. Egyptian Arabic is a mix of Arabic and British English with some older Egyptian vocabulary thrown in.
Being a dead language, Latin was fairly defined as a language circa 800 AD, but the people inhabiting what we now call France did not refer to themselves as French, German or in fact any national or tribal identity. The term "the Franks" is more modern than anything else. Historically membership in a tribe was a hand wavy group identification, not about ethnicity or heredity. If you asked a Frank about his identity as a Frank you would have confused him. If you asked him what language he spoke it would similarly have confused him.
Linguists have labels for dead "languages" but the truth is there is no hard definition for what such a language was or who spoke it. If you started on the west coast and traveled east the spoken language would shift from place to place with generally increasing differences. The closest you get is a sort of civic identity where someone felt attachment to the city of his birth, but it is reading too much into it to regard it as a precursor to nationalism.
When King Harald set out to unite Norway there was no strict geographical boundary. People who lived in what we now call Norway didn't identify themselves as "Norwegians". They lived in familial groups, households, and identified with their relatives though certainly not in a tribal sense. Individuals who didn't like King Harald's requirement for land ownership left, mostly for Iceland, where family continued to be the most significant group identity and there was certainly no national identity.
No, nationalism was consciously invented as a tool to rally the mass of people behind a political figure or organization. Nationalism, and its sister patriotism, are tools to control a population. It is nationalism that encourages xenophobia. Despite a popular modern conception that primitive peoples were distrustful of outsiders, by and large what we have observed is the opposite. At least, those groups that survived with a primitive lifestyle to more modern times have failed to be adequately suspicious of foreign intruders.
It is modern nationalism, not primitive tribalism, that leads to xenophobia.