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World's Oldest Book is GPLed
figlet writes "The Diamond Sutra is the 'World's Earliest Dated Printed Book.' It was discovered in China in 1907 and now resides at the British Library." The colophon reads: "Reverently [caused to be] made for universal free distribution by Wang Jie on behalf of his two parents on the 13th of the 4th moon of the 9th year of Xiantong. (May 11, 868 A.D.)" Apparently this was version 0.001 of the
GPL.
Because, I presume, it is a fact.
In the literal sense, the Bible is not the Word of God. God did not himself write it. God did not dictate all of the books to whomever wrote them.
Since the books were written physically by humans, and these humans believed that they were writing in accordance with God's Will, and none of them are around today to ask about the subject, it follows that to beleve that the authors were led by God to pen those words requires faith.
The above poster was simply stating a fact that is readily verifiable, as opposed to a fact that requires faith that the AC may not have (or want, for that matter).
A statement that can not be proven is not a fact. A Fact can be proven true or false. If I say to you 'God himself picked up a pen and wrote the exact words which dwell in the bible' you can not dissprove that. It is my opinion that this is true, and it would be your opinion that it is not. But since we can neither view the event, ask the participants, or check mutually agreed upon sources for confirmation or denial it is impossible to prove such a statement. Hence you can not say that the Bible is NOT the literal word of God without a leap of faith which is equal to that required to believe that the bible IS the literal word of God. Hence all of you atheists are in your own religion, the only truly unbiased are those who are truly agnostic.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
Oooooh! That was low! :) Besides, don't you know that the source code is covered by RATI regulations and can't be exported to non-Echelon members?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The original texts (well, the canonical texts anyway - there are no original copies) were in circulation 1700 years ago. Copyright law allows at most 90 years after the authors' deaths. Even ignoring the pragmatic reasons, no it could never be copyrighted.
Translations are a whole different matter. The King James version is over 500 years old and thus in the public domain for the same reasons as the early texts. A number of other older Bibles are also in the public domain.
The NIV (the best of the contemporary English translations in my opinion) is copyrighted - every copy plainly states that it is licensed by The International Bible Society. The terms of use are more liberal than the standard fair use provisions (see the NIV copyright statement.)
Other modern translations have different requirements, but since Bible translators tend to do so out as a missionary calling rather than a source of income, the terms are often very liberal. A good comparison would be the World English Bible copyright or the New American Standard.
I believe there is a project to do a new, explicitly public domain translation, but I can't find their URL and I've forgotten the name.
Well considering the number of people who actually read the bible I would suspect that it would be easy to deceive them.
EX.
1. And the Great giant Gates strode onto the battle field followed by the damned.
2. Linus called to his people. "Verrily I say unto you his iniquity has made him lax we shall perservere over our mortal enemy".
3. And Linus stretched forth his holy staff and brought down the wrath of the one true god onto the evil one.
4. The evil one was wrought with the power of the source and was rendered onto the powers of his own hell and tormentors of his own creation.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
Surely if it were GPL, I wouldn't be allowed to quote even a sentence from it without making my work GPL as well.
11.0010010000111111011010101000100010000101101000
this is going to give them more cannon fodder when they say "Linux is old technology!" Closed Source weenies are gonna FUD with this...
Dan
I suspect most religions see it as worse to worship a false god than no god at all, so if any of those religions is right, but you don't know which one, atheism (or agnosticism) is the safest choice. It's not necessarily the best choice, though (even if you're unsure which god to believe in). See a discussion of Pascal's Wager (which argues that believing in God is the rational thing to do) if you're interested and haven't already.
You can find one at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
You're wrong. Ever hear of burden of proof? Occam's Razor? A load of power-hungry cultists writing the bible is much simpler than invoking the ineffable. I'm much more likely to beleive quantum physics than christian/muslim/hindu etc. doctrine. I have faith in nothing. Faith is belief without justification. The essence of faith is giving up your questioning, doubt and reason. I believe in some things, but only if they are not disproved.
I find it incongruous in the extreme that you proclaim a belief in Quantum Physics in one breath, then invalidate every previous civilizations explanation for the effects which we use Quantum physics to explain. There is NOTHING which makes the theories involved in Quantum Physics any more valid than the theories involved in Christianity, OR the roman Pantheon.
You CAN NOT prove any of what you are saying one way or the other. I do not understand how you can assert a belief in something which is equally as vacuous as what you are denouncing and then turn around and claim you are doing so on some basis other than blind faith in what the priests (scientists) are telling you. I suggest you wake up for a moment and realize that your faith is no more or less valid than mine, or anyone elses, and has an equal chance of being correct. I happen to believe that my faith is correct in essence, you can believe that your faith is correct in essence, but stop trying to denegrate my faith simply because it is not yours.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
The GPL is only the current incarnation of a spirit of openness, harmony, and cooperation which has existed since the beginning of the universe.
Therefore, Linux is a fundamental element of the universe.
This post encoded with ROT26. If you can read it, you've violated the DMCA. Handcuffs please, sergeant.
Yeah... Kind of. Many people feel that the Bible's exceptional unity (you try telling a story over two thousand years) is evidence of exceptional divine involvement in its creation. I tend to agree that this is the case.
Where I tend to disagree is that many people try to reduce the Bible to a single, monolithic, God-written textbook where God is considered to have literally written each and every word (this is called "verbal inspiration"). I disagree with this pretty stronly, mostly because there is no evidence of it.
Also, you said:
I would suggest that you take a look at Deuteronomy 4:2, and its cross-references in a good reference bible. Deut. 4:2 says, in part, "Do not go beyond what is written". I think there are enough incidents of this kind of language in the Bible that we can assume it is a general principle.-- Slashdot sucks.
A serious answer to a question posed in jest:
No. The Kama Sutra is an overhyped antique version of The Joy of Sex, whereas the Diamond Sutra is one of the chapters of the Prajnaparamita ("Sutras of Transcendental Wisdom"), one of the most important works in the Mahayana canon. For example, Zen thought is largely based on the Prajnaparamita sutras, with the Diamond Sutra in a special role.
The literal meaning of "sutra" is just "thread", essentially a recording of a line of thought, and not all that different from sutras on Slashdot. =)
Cheers,
-j.
I warn every one who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if any one adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book, and if any one takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away his share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book. - Revelation 22:18-19
Of course, there is no restriction at all on redistribution. :)
When I'm singing a ballad and a pair of underwear lands on my head, I hate that. It really kills the mood.
-Tom Jones
I will note that my (intelligent, researched) response to the poster was marked as offtopice, but his post was not! Why? His is critical of Christianity, and mine defends it. This is a syndrome on /. -- people, get a clue.
-- Slashdot sucks.
"as Christians do not generally mean that they believe God picked up a pen and wrote out the Bible in KJV English when they say that the Bible is the "word of God.""
..."interesting in how you "know" this."
I understand that. My point was not to point out what most Christians generally believe. I was merely stating that, IIRC, the only thing that God did write were the Ten Commandments. Him, Himself, with His hand. He didn't write the books that became the Bible.
"It happens to be precisely what many Christians believe about the origin of the books of the Bible"
Again, you read too much into what I write. I was not stating what many Christians believe.
Going by what I've read of the Bible (almost all of it, though it's been a while), I do not remeber reading in every book where the author states something to the effect that, "God is speaking to me as I write this", or "By the Inspiration of the Holy Spirit do I write this" (though I agree that some books do have this). That was my point; that there is no evidence that all of the authors were so inspired. Thus, it takes faith for an individual to believe that all of the books of the Bible were inspired by God.
Note the word `all'. It is crucial to my point.
"Your unbelief hardly makes it a "fact that is readily verifiable.""
"it [the Bible] is the word of many, many different humans"
Tell me which part of that statement is false.
all believed they were writing in accordance with God's will"
Not a fact.
"The Bible is not the word of God;"
Ahhh, the clincher. This is a fact. If the AC would have said, The Bible is not the interpreted word of God, then I would agree with you.
"But I'm boggled trying to imagine how I could prove that God didn't speak to John on the Isle of Patmos when he wrote down his vision."
Does John say, "God spoke to me", or "Thus spoke God"?
I am truly trying not to flame here. But I believe that to get at facts(what?) facts(what?) facts, one must remove what a group of people believes to be true. If you take all of my statements at face value, they are, in fact, well, facts.
censorship is a form of noise, which actively seeks to drown out content with silence - Crash Culligan
It is not at all uncommon to find things similar to the one described at the beginning of Buddhist scriptures and suttas. It was considered a meritotious act to distribute copies of the scriptures; in China and Japan, the rich would donate to the temples and monestaries to have a copy of a particular sutta(e.g the diamond) or a set of suttas (e.g the Digha Nikaya, or Long Discourse) published. It was even considered the duty of monks to expound the teachings to anyone who asked(notice that this includes "anyone who asks", not prostelytizing to the uninterested or followers of other religions). So there is really nothing all that odd about the inscription on the inside of this particular book. Anyone familiar with this tradition could probably tell you about it and probably better than I. I really fail to see what it has to do with the GPL; to be honest, if I didn't know better I would call this a crosspost from segfault. If you wanna know a bit more about the suttas, check out Access to Insight, or Dharmanet.
PS- yes, I do know how to spell "sutra". It's Sanskrit, I use Pali. These things happen.
GPL: You are encouraged to give copies to anyone and everyone. You are encouraged to make any changes you like, but you MUST make those changes available under the same terms.
BSD: You are encouraged to give copies to anyone and everyone. You can make any changes you like, and you can use any license you like for said changes.
Shareware: You are encouraged to give copies to anyone and everyone. DO NOT make any changes.
Since this book promises eternal damnation and hellfire if you add, subtract, or alter anything in it, I would call it the world's first piece of shareware.
--
grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
If I wrote a book, and marked it as "universal free distribution", could someone make a copy it, then copyright their copy, and possibly sue me for infringment?
Actually, I think you are misunderstanding the copyright that is being applied. The information in the book, and the way that the information is being presented in the book is subject to the "universal free distribution" clause. The photographer/artist's picture of the book is in itself intellectual property, hence the copyright.
IANAL, but it follows that you are using a copyrighted photograph (regardless of what the picture is) on your website without the owner's, then you are breaking the law. If you simply were taking the text from the photograph of a non-copyrighted book, and posting that up then you would not be violating the law (both from the "universal free distribution" clause and the expiry of the copyright itself).
The board is claiming copyright of an image, not the book. (see later in the thread for postings about translations.)
Translation can easily become harder work than writing, and is certainly a creative endevour. It's not simply a matter of being hard, it does involve a lot beyond copying. A translation is a derivative work, not a copy. As such it requires the permission of the original author, if a valid copyright exists, but it is different from the original and as such embodies the creative labours of a translator.
Saying a translation can't enjoy a separate copyright is like saying any derivative work, like a commentary, can't have a separate copyright. That makes no sense at all.
The meaning of the text cannot change. You are just looking for loopholes. Thats just irritating. I didn't write the damn clause. Go pick up a copy of the bible for yourself.
So, not only did the Chinese have an early version of the GPL, they also had the fabled version 0.1 of the Slash code, too.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Except that the brief mention you cite exhibits evidence of being forged in later, not actually appearing in the original text. For one thing, the statement itself does not fit the 'speaking' style of the rest of the text.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
Rather, a true GPL'ed book would be... The Bible!
Think about it: at first, there was only a couple of books. Then, a lot of people made contributions. A commity (the Vatican) decides what goes in and what doesn't go into a "kernel", or approved dogma. Then they release the new version. People are free to branch the Bible, and indeed, we've seen a few kernel forks over the years. The most important was probably the "Kernel fork 1", where the Old Testament ('Torah' release) and the Old/New Testament forked and formed two separate developper's groups. A few developpers (called apocryphs) saw their contribution cut from the codebase.
Unfortunately, after the kernel fork, the source became closed and proprietary. There's been an attempt to rebuild the codebase by one Muhammed, but it was closed-source and a thousand years later, there's not even been a patch or a single Service Pack.
Oh, did I mention there's also a distro war going on?
"The wages of sin is death but so is the salary of virtue, and at least the evil get to go home early on Fridays."
Copyright applies to any organised data, and is copyrighted by the person doing the organising. Thus, the photograph is copyright to the photographer, and the book to the author.
(This is notwithstanding that the author has been dead over 50/70 years, and so copyright would have expired, even if the author had not GPLed it.)
It also means that you would be on -very- shaky ground, if you were to take a photograph of the same book, under identical viewing conditions, with an identical camera, at an identical angle. My understanding is that that would be a breach of copyright, even though you did not technically copy the original photograph. Any other photograph, taken under any other condition, would almost certainly be a-ok.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The contents of the Bible were ostensibly chosen from a variety of material in circulation in the fourth century (roughly 320 a.D. IIRC) at a coucil of bishops, shortly after Constantine converted to Christianity and theoretically abolish state religions in the Empire.
/. Please consider this a disclaimer distancing myself from any arguments for or against the existence of God, the Virgin birth or the merits of Christianity, Catholocism or any other religion.
The church as it existed then bore little resemblance to modern Catholicism or any other modern sect of Christianity - blaming the Catholics isn't very accurate.
The story as I recall it is that no one could agree which books ought to be considered sacred, and which ought to be rejected. So, a whole bunch were left on a table in a closed room, and they figured God would remove those books that weren't right. Sometime later, the room was reopened and only some of the books were still on the table (the other ones being on the floor, I think) and that's how the New Testament was made.
Yeah, I have a hard time believing the story too. Certainly its remarkable how the New Testament corresponded neatly with Constantine's own theology.
But the New Testament is mostly internally consistent, and only mildly inconsistent with external information. Certainly Josephus brief mention of Christ in the Annals (although not by name) makes it hard to reject his existence outright.
As for the rest, I have no desire to debate theology on
Got any way to prove that God did speak to John on the Isle of Patmos?
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
Of course, by "this book", John means the book of Revelation, the one he was writting.
:)
The Bible didn't exists in John's time.
This verse always get misinterpreted.
- sigs are for wimps.
If he changed the text of Revalations he is. I am jewish and I can see this clearly! Why does every aspect of it need to be explained?
Somehow I suspect that making your own modifications to the Bible and redistributing it as a new and improved version would be frowned upon...
Thomas Jefferson did it. He extractd the moral teachings from the various Gospels and discarded what he thought were the supernatural bits. His version never really caught on, though.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
I fail to see how it is interesting that the world's oldest dated book was intended for free distribution.
It would be interesting if it included a GPL-like license, but while the GPL includes a great deal of verbiage to prevent others from restricting the freedom of the work, this just says it was made for free distribution.
can we buy it on the Web? :)
#define X(x,y) x##y
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
So if the Kama sutra is for what you pleasing the wife, is the Diamond sutra what you need to read to get her to be your wife? :)
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
I'm going to be a wet blanket and respond seriously to a funny post...
It's origin is highly speculative. Some Buddhists believe that it (along with all other Sutras) where written during the lifetime of the Buddha and hidden by the King of the Nagas "until the world was ready." (Nagas are intelligent water-snakes.)
Western scholars put the authorship of this and other sutra to around 2-400 years after the death of the Buddha (around 2,500+ years ago), and the location in Northern India.
This type of "license" was common amongst Buddhist writting, and some books by modern monks are realeased with similar statements at the begining. (However, they have a big ol' copyright at the begining.)
Note: I _am_ Buddhist (Tibetan Drikung Kagyu), and find the Diamond Sutra to be a powerful and beautiful statement of Buddhist belief.
Myddrin
>Somehow I suspect that making your own modifications to the Bible and redistributing it as a new and improved version would be frowned upon..
i think i have to disagree with you here. how about the book of mormon? and the popularity of all those new-age, find jesus for yourself books like the power of living?
even the most popular version of the bible today (king james) is only an interpretation of a translation of the original.
LL
"If you are falling, dive." -Joseph Campbell
"If it's such an article of faith, why do you state the negative as such a fact?"
Because, I presume, it is a fact.
In the literal sense, the Bible is not the Word of God. God did not himself write it. God did not dictate all of the books to whomever wrote them.
Since the books were written physically by humans, and these humans believed that they were writing in accordance with God's Will, and none of them are around today to ask about the subject, it follows that to beleve that the authors were led by God to pen those words requires faith.
The above poster was simply stating a fact that is readily verifiable, as opposed to a fact that requires faith that the AC may not have (or want, for that matter).
censorship is a form of noise, which actively seeks to drown out content with silence - Crash Culligan
I don't mean to start a flame war or anything, but there _are_ vast differences between the major religions. While they all seem to advocate similar behaviors, e.g. Don't be an *sshole. They reasons why you should follow that behaviour are very different (even amongst differing flavors of Christians ie Catholics=do good to go to Heaven, Calvinists=do good for the love of the Creator).
I was raised Catholic myself and found Buddhism about the age of 14 or so (I was never confirmed in the Catholic Church). But off the top of my head here are the differences between Catholism and Buddhism.
Catholic
God
Soul
Hell Forever
1 Life
Buddhist
No God(1)
No Soul(2)
Hell Temporary
Reincarnation
------------------------------------
(1) Buddhist are not required to believe in a God or gods (one of the big draws for me). We are explicitly told no to "take refuge" in God or gods.
(2) Anatta (no soul) is one of the central tenets of Buddhism, it states that there is no part of "Me" that abides forever, "I" am a different collection of causes and conditions then I was when I started writing this sentence.
I don't mean this as a flame or anthing, I just feel we should celebrate our diversity rather than force common ground.
Myddrin
This liscense is much more like the open content liscense than like the GPL. The colophon says that redistribution is allowed, but doesn't speak of modifications. Therefore, any modifications of his text would have to be distinguished from the original (which is how the open content liscense works), which is contrary to the GPL (which forbids authors from requiring credit be due to them or the distinguishing of derived content from the original content).
;)
Of course, after a eleven-hundred years, it's all public domain, although with the rate at which Disney and the late Rep. Sonny Bono were conspiring to extend the duration of copyrights, such an assumption might soon be invalid.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
If you follow that link, you'll find that whoever took the photo of the book (The British Library Board), has slapped a 1997 copyright on it. This in itself brings up an interesting question.
If I wrote a book, and marked it as "universal free distribution", could someone make a copy it, then copyright their copy, and possibly sue me for infringment?
To me, "universal free distribution" would seem like as loose a GPL as you can get. Basically, you are setting absolutely no limits on it's distribution.
So here come the brits (no offense), who reproduce Mr. Wang Jie's (if that's a female name, forgive me) work. And they copyright their work?
Either way this could be good or bad. If you had some copyrighted software you wanted to use, you can just copy it, and copyright your copy.
When it comes down to it, I honestly believe that the original copyright stands. Thus, the British Library Board's claim at copyright is invalid, and I can copy this picture and put it up on my homepage.
the author destroyed all copies of his previous book, "The Big Wu" ...
Clearly dogmatism still runs rampant in both camps (Buddhism and Christanity). Is ignorance dualistic?
How was I being dogmatic? I don't understand...
All I said was that there were differences between the religions, which is true. I didn't say Christians where damned to hell or any such thing.
Myddrin
(The Talmud is, umm, sort of like the 2,500-year-old archives of soc.culture.jewish, back when you had to be a rabbi to get on the Net.)
As I was saying, there's a story in the Talmud about a little crisis the Jewish sages faced, when there were only three Torah scrolls left in the world. (A "Torah scroll" is a single scroll containing the first five books of the Bible, Genesis through Deuteronomy, in the original Hebrew.) All three scrolls had slight variations in the text, and the sages had no way of knowing which variation was more likely to be correct. Since the sages believed that every word of the Torah is from God, and sometimes a single word had vast legal consequences, this was a problem.
So they copied out a new scroll based on the other three, as follows: Whenever the old scrolls disagreed about a certain verse, the new scroll would follow the "majority opinion" of the old scrolls. After the transcription was complete, they declared the new scroll to be The Canonical Sacred Text, and the old scrolls were declared Unfit For Ritual Use.
send all spam to theotherwhitemeat@ropine.com
The Diamond Cutter Sutra is one of the main Buddhist teachings on Emptiness. You can get it in Tibetan, along with a lot of other Buddhist texts in Tibetan at The Asian Classics Input Project. Yes, that's right, it's available on the web, and also in CD form. Ain't technology wonderful?
No The Book of Revalations clearly states that any changes made will result in the changee's eternal damnation to hell.