If this was the case, then one would expect the GPL to contain clauses like the APSL, which requires the open publication of any modifications made. The GPL does not require you to share your modifications if you do not distribute the binaries. One can always use GPL code to do whatever, including linking with proprietary libraries and code, it is only when you distribute the results that the GPL's requirement to share kicks in.
Also, the LGPL does exist, and is used by the FSF, tho it is preferably to use the GPL, and it does not even have such requirements when you DO distribute your modification. So, if RMS was really totally against your freedom to not share, why did he come up with the LGPL, and why does he consider the APSL non-free specificaly because it requires the sharing of all mods, not just re-distributed ones?
"The express intent of the GPL (see Richard Stallman's "GNU Manifesto") is to eliminate
commercial software, thus hijacking the entire industry and forcing users to run only software which Stallman's "Free Software Foundation" controls. An Orwellian prospect."
It seems you are unable to distinguish between commercial and proprietary software. RedHet is Free Software and commercial, and the FSF has no problem with them. Cygnus sells gcc as a commercial product, and they also sign over copyright on their work to the FSF. The only thing the FSF is against, is the use of proprietary licensing, regardless of the commercial or non-commercial nature of the software in question.
RedHat, Cygnus and dozens of other companies have no problems respecting what the GPL required of those who distribute or modify GPLed software. The only people it seems to be paining are those who are incapable of reading, or actively seeking to take the rest of us for a ride.
I do not understand why you think Debian as a distribution has been compromised. Debian cannot make any decisions about how the software it distributes is licensed, provided it fits the DFSG. This license change was made by the author who wrote the libapt library. It was not an exception just for Corel, it was a license to link against libqt, which is not GPL compatible. The author thought it would be advantageous to do this, and his software is STILL undr the GPL.
Corel is cruising towards alot of other licensing issues, because their developers are not thinking things thru. They want to base their distribution of KDE, but as we're all seeing, that is problematic indeed, since libqt is not GPL compatible. This is certainly the first of several licensing issues Corel will get into, and they have noone to blame but themselves. They got lucky that the author of libapt thought that the exception was an acceptable one to make. The next time they may not be so lucky.
To make xdm start, you just need to tell it to not look for a local XServer configuration. To do this, comment out the line in/etc/X11/xdm/xdm.options that says "check-local-xserver" and it should start up just fine. You also need to add an antry to/etc/X11/xdm/XServers telling it where to find your AccelX binary, something like: :0 local/usr/local/bin/XAccel:0 vt9 -bpp 16
Software does have such an organzation. It's call the SPA. It has done nothing to curb "piracy".
As far as the price of software being a determinate of piracy, you obviously have never been involved ina retail software business venture. Never is there a calculation of how much we'll have to add to the price to compensate for pirates, it's always based on what the market can bare, and what covers our expenditures. The notion that software prices are high because of piracy is a convenient lie.
Sheeit, even calling it piracy is a piece of rhetorical bullshit. Noone is harmed, it's non-violent. Nothing is taken away from the author except for a theoretical sale to a person who almost dfinelty would have not bought the orgiginal in the first place.
The following is an excerpt from a mail I sent to the author after reading his article:
Something that I think that this typecasting touches on, is the conception of the "user". What we may have is not the typecasting of OSs, but the typecasting of "users" in a way which does even more damage. If OSs are marginalized, maybe a company or two goes under, but if people are marginalized, then voices go unheard and people are no longer able to excercise power thru computers, wether it is making web pages, sending love letters, or writing Free Software. I find the alienation of people a much bigger threat, and something which not only the marketers, but the pundits for each OS or "user" propogate.
In a Windows only world, the "user" is a consumer, passive and accepting of choices presented to them by the market. They are not supposed to create, contribute or otherwise influence the development of the computer, and their use of it, other than thru the very hollow power of the dollar. In the Linux only world, the technocrat wields alot of power, the user is expected to share the mania of computers that the developers have. This is just as disempowering for many, because instead of being confronted with opaque surfaces, they are inundated with complexities.
The same thing happens in a BeOS only world, as it also has a very specific conception of "user". Something very similiar to Apple or Windows with a more sophisticated technical edge. We should be careful not to typecast BeOS as the third part of a Hegelian dialectic of the "user", the synthesis of two opposing concepts. We should not do that with ANY OS for that matter, because that action STILL will produce a single conception of the user which will alienate and isolate many people.
As Linus and others have pointed out, Linux world domination should not be about being the only OS, but about making the OS a choice, by allowing all different types of people choose the computing platform they want, and which suits their needs. These platforms should then be able to interoperate with one another, so that no one "user" ever becomes dominant. Obivously, this is not what the present personal computing market looks like, but I think it's something that we can all achieve.
Freedom? What is freedom? To me, it's being able to do anything you want without consequences. Free Software should not have a license. I can't do whatever I want with GPL software, namely change the license or encorperate it with non GPL software I have created. To me, that is not freedom.
Freedom is not the ability to do anything you want without consequences, as that is a pipe dream. There are always consequences for your actions, be they legally enforced or not.
Some have said that freedom is acceptance of the law while at the same time being assured that you or no-one else is above it; and that there are no other restrictions placed on you. Others have said that freedom is being unbound by any unjustified hierarchy or restrictions.
Both of these understandings of freedom come to terms with the limits of what one can do without harming others, and they understand that freedom is as much about the community in which the individual lives, as it is about the will of the individual.
The individual author, or individual contributor to a GPLed project gives up certain individual rights in order to have the community as a whole benefit. They benefit from knowing that their work will never be taken away from them, or used against them (this does not mean that you aren't allowed to build GPLed nuclear missiles hehe). So the rights of the community, the group of people sharing their work, are preserved and protected by the GPL. This is indeed it's intent.
This does not mean that the GPL is communist or anti-capitalist (except in so far as capitalism tends towards radical individualism which can be disagreeable with such empowerment of communities and volountary restriction of individual rights). Even the founders of the U.S. understood that freedom is as much about the community as it is about the individual.
I think that you are confusing convenience with freedom. The freedom that the GPL is about is not based on greater convenience or technical capability. The GPL is specifically designed to ensure that the work of the community is never used against that community, and that the work derived from the community will always go back to the community.
This is sorta like the various "open source" licenses which are geared toward ensuring that the work derived from the work of the primary author always benefits them. The difference being that with the GPL, the author is the entire user base, the public. The original author gives up his primacy and in return gets to benefit from the work of the entire community, and the community in exchange for their work are garaunteed access to the fruits of their labor.
And you claim that RMS has a perverse theory of freedom, when it would seem that you are the one with the perverse theory. I am not using perverse in the flame sense, but in it's orginal, as a derivation or misguided and misdirected version of some orginal idea. For RMS freedom is about choice and sharing, and it is the most important issue when choosing a piece of software.
Now this understanding of freedom is a pretty well established one which you could trace back thru history thru Rousseau and others even earlier. The understanding of freedom you are presenting conflates freedom of choice with convenience and technical capabilities, which is why I said it is a perversion.
One reason why I agree with RMS and his understanding of freedom, and his emphasis on issues of freedom of choice and sharing being the primary issue in software is that you can always add convenience and technical capability to something that gives you freedom. But you cannot add freedom to something which gives you technical capabilities or convenience (tho the author can).
I am not willing to give up my freedom of choice when it comes to software, because I want to always control my own usage of the computer. It is an aesthetic as well as practical tool, and even the smallest controls and limitations on how one can use it can have profound effects on ones overall understanding of it.
GPL and free software do not always deliver the most convenience and technical capability, despite what some Open Source pundits may try and claim. But they do deliver something that proprietary software cannot deliver, and that is freedom of choice, freedom to share.
The limitation that the GPL places on what one can do with the source code is designed to protect the community, and I think it is a very small price to pay. I as a developer know that my work will always be available to the community and never used against it in a proprietary product.
This is important to me because in the grand scheme of computer science and human use of computers as thinking tools, the success of a product or product line is nothing, barely a blip. Giving other people the freedom to do whatever they want with my code lets our knowledge of computers be guided by human need and not human greed.
My employer makes money with a free software strategy because they are smart enough to see that software and the things you do with software are service driven. We GPL the tools we make for ourselves to provide these services, and we also ask customers to let us GPL toolz we write for them, because it will reduce our cost of developing and maintaining them in the long run if we GPL them.
Customers do not want to buy a static peice of software which performs some job, they want to have software which does exactly what they need for their business or hobby or whatever. If you change your business model so that your revenue is made on the customization of the software environment to the user's needs, you no longer need the artificial restriction on use of the software which proprietary licenses are about. In fact, free software is beneficial to your work because you can get into it's guts easily, and you can mix and match peices of code and customize it with ease.
In my experience you will find customers balking at the 5k dollar license fee, but not even thinking twice about the 10k dollar custom development and installation costs. They want a solution which does exactly what they need, no more, no less. Shrink wrap proprietary software simply cannot provide this in a maintanable and cost-effective way.
I agree that presently and in the near future there will be a mix of proprietary and free software, any transition takes time. I also agree that there will always be markets which will have some proprietary elements, usually ones tied to other patented or otherwise secretive business process or technology. But do not under-estimate the force with which proprietary software will be pushed out of popular markets, in particular markets for commodity software services.
Check out "The Mathematical Theory of Communication" by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver. It provides a formal model for talking about all of these different forms of communication.
You have to register distributed modifications with Apple, you are not allowed to close off your modifications (which you can do in BSD), but Apple is allowed to close of their modifications, even of code you distributed.
This whole thing is just good for a press release and will not have much impact on Linux or other *Nixes.
Actually, Debian filters bug reports, packages software for distribution, contributes fixes back upstream. It supports free software the old fashion way, it writes it, debugs it, and distributes it.
Debian: We do free software the old-fashioned way, we write it.
Don't sweat the school choice. I know of several good people who went to DeVry. One of them is now a VP at a very very large bank client of ours, who is definetly the most competent client contact we have. I also have an aquaintence who went to DeVry, and now has a sweet job traveling around the world doing installations of wireless networks, a few months in Thailand, some time in India, jump over to Hawaii. Definetly a sweet gig.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, the LGPL does exist, and is used by the FSF, tho it is preferably to use the GPL, and it does not even have such requirements when you DO distribute your modification. So, if RMS was really totally against your freedom to not share, why did he come up with the LGPL, and why does he consider the APSL non-free specificaly because it requires the sharing of all mods, not just re-distributed ones?
From ZDNet news talkback
It seems you are unable to distinguish between commercial and proprietary software. RedHet is Free Software and commercial, and the FSF has no problem with them. Cygnus sells gcc as a commercial product, and they also sign over copyright on their work to the FSF. The only thing the FSF is against, is the use of proprietary licensing, regardless of the commercial or non-commercial nature of the software in question.
RedHat, Cygnus and dozens of other companies have no problems respecting what the GPL required of those who distribute or modify GPLed software. The only people it seems to be paining are those who are incapable of reading, or actively seeking to take the rest of us for a ride.
Corel is cruising towards alot of other licensing issues, because their developers are not thinking things thru. They want to base their distribution of KDE, but as we're all seeing, that is problematic indeed, since libqt is not GPL compatible. This is certainly the first of several licensing issues Corel will get into, and they have noone to blame but themselves. They got lucky that the author of libapt thought that the exception was an acceptable one to make. The next time they may not be so lucky.
To make xdm start, you just need to tell it to not look for a local XServer configuration. To do this, comment out the line in /etc/X11/xdm/xdm.options that says "check-local-xserver" and it should start up just fine. You also need to add an antry to /etc/X11/xdm/XServers telling it where to find your AccelX binary, something like:
:0 local /usr/local/bin/XAccel :0 vt9 -bpp 16
As far as the price of software being a determinate of piracy, you obviously have never been involved ina retail software business venture. Never is there a calculation of how much we'll have to add to the price to compensate for pirates, it's always based on what the market can bare, and what covers our expenditures. The notion that software prices are high because of piracy is a convenient lie.
Sheeit, even calling it piracy is a piece of rhetorical bullshit. Noone is harmed, it's non-violent. Nothing is taken away from the author except for a theoretical sale to a person who almost dfinelty would have not bought the orgiginal in the first place.
The following is an excerpt from a mail I sent to the author after reading his article:
Something that I think that this typecasting touches on, is the conception of the "user". What we may have is not the typecasting of OSs, but the typecasting of "users" in a way which does even more damage. If OSs are marginalized, maybe a company or two goes under, but if people are marginalized, then voices go unheard and people are no longer able to excercise power thru computers, wether it is making web pages, sending love letters, or writing Free Software. I find the alienation of people a much bigger threat, and something which not only the marketers, but the pundits for each OS or "user" propogate.
In a Windows only world, the "user" is a consumer, passive and accepting of choices presented to them by the market. They are not supposed to create, contribute or otherwise influence the development of the computer, and their use of it, other than thru the very hollow power of the dollar. In the Linux only world, the technocrat wields alot of power, the user is expected to share the mania of computers that the developers have. This is just as disempowering for many, because instead of being confronted with opaque surfaces, they are inundated with complexities.
The same thing happens in a BeOS only world, as it also has a very specific conception of "user". Something very similiar to Apple or Windows with a more sophisticated technical edge. We should be careful not to typecast BeOS as the third part of a Hegelian dialectic of the "user", the synthesis of two opposing concepts. We should not do that with ANY OS for that matter, because that action STILL will produce a single conception of the user which will alienate and isolate many people.
As Linus and others have pointed out, Linux world domination should not be about being the only OS, but about making the OS a choice, by allowing all different types of people choose the computing platform they want, and which suits their needs. These platforms should then be able to interoperate with one another, so that no one "user" ever becomes dominant. Obivously, this is not what the present personal computing market looks like, but I think it's something that we can all achieve.
Freedom is not the ability to do anything you want without consequences, as that is a pipe dream. There are always consequences for your actions, be they legally enforced or not.
Some have said that freedom is acceptance of the law while at the same time being assured that you or no-one else is above it; and that there are no other restrictions placed on you. Others have said that freedom is being unbound by any unjustified hierarchy or restrictions.
Both of these understandings of freedom come to terms with the limits of what one can do without harming others, and they understand that freedom is as much about the community in which the individual lives, as it is about the will of the individual.
The individual author, or individual contributor to a GPLed project gives up certain individual rights in order to have the community as a whole benefit. They benefit from knowing that their work will never be taken away from them, or used against them (this does not mean that you aren't allowed to build GPLed nuclear missiles hehe). So the rights of the community, the group of people sharing their work, are preserved and protected by the GPL. This is indeed it's intent.
This does not mean that the GPL is communist or anti-capitalist (except in so far as capitalism tends towards radical individualism which can be disagreeable with such empowerment of communities and volountary restriction of individual rights). Even the founders of the U.S. understood that freedom is as much about the community as it is about the individual.
This is sorta like the various "open source" licenses which are geared toward ensuring that the work derived from the work of the primary author always benefits them. The difference being that with the GPL, the author is the entire user base, the public. The original author gives up his primacy and in return gets to benefit from the work of the entire community, and the community in exchange for their work are garaunteed access to the fruits of their labor.
And you claim that RMS has a perverse theory of freedom, when it would seem that you are the one with the perverse theory. I am not using perverse in the flame sense, but in it's orginal, as a derivation or misguided and misdirected version of some orginal idea. For RMS freedom is about choice and sharing, and it is the most important issue when choosing a piece of software.
Now this understanding of freedom is a pretty well established one which you could trace back thru history thru Rousseau and others even earlier. The understanding of freedom you are presenting conflates freedom of choice with convenience and technical capabilities, which is why I said it is a perversion.
One reason why I agree with RMS and his understanding of freedom, and his emphasis on issues of freedom of choice and sharing being the primary issue in software is that you can always add convenience and technical capability to something that gives you freedom. But you cannot add freedom to something which gives you technical capabilities or convenience (tho the author can).
I am not willing to give up my freedom of choice when it comes to software, because I want to always control my own usage of the computer. It is an aesthetic as well as practical tool, and even the smallest controls and limitations on how one can use it can have profound effects on ones overall understanding of it.
GPL and free software do not always deliver the most convenience and technical capability, despite what some Open Source pundits may try and claim. But they do deliver something that proprietary software cannot deliver, and that is freedom of choice, freedom to share.
The limitation that the GPL places on what one can do with the source code is designed to protect the community, and I think it is a very small price to pay. I as a developer know that my work will always be available to the community and never used against it in a proprietary product.
This is important to me because in the grand scheme of computer science and human use of computers as thinking tools, the success of a product or product line is nothing, barely a blip. Giving other people the freedom to do whatever they want with my code lets our knowledge of computers be guided by human need and not human greed.
Customers do not want to buy a static peice of software which performs some job, they want to have software which does exactly what they need for their business or hobby or whatever. If you change your business model so that your revenue is made on the customization of the software environment to the user's needs, you no longer need the artificial restriction on use of the software which proprietary licenses are about. In fact, free software is beneficial to your work because you can get into it's guts easily, and you can mix and match peices of code and customize it with ease.
In my experience you will find customers balking at the 5k dollar license fee, but not even thinking twice about the 10k dollar custom development and installation costs. They want a solution which does exactly what they need, no more, no less. Shrink wrap proprietary software simply cannot provide this in a maintanable and cost-effective way.
I agree that presently and in the near future there will be a mix of proprietary and free software, any transition takes time. I also agree that there will always be markets which will have some proprietary elements, usually ones tied to other patented or otherwise secretive business process or technology. But do not under-estimate the force with which proprietary software will be pushed out of popular markets, in particular markets for commodity software services.
Check out "The Mathematical Theory of Communication" by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver. It provides a formal model for talking about all of these different forms of communication.
You have to register distributed modifications with Apple, you are not allowed to close off your modifications (which you can do in BSD), but Apple is allowed to close of their modifications, even of code you distributed.
This whole thing is just good for a press release and will not have much impact on Linux or other *Nixes.
Just keep repeating it over and over, and it'll be true...
Actually, Debian filters bug reports, packages software for distribution, contributes fixes back upstream. It supports free software the old fashion way, it writes it, debugs it, and distributes it.
Debian: We do free software the old-fashioned way, we write it.
Don't sweat the school choice. I know of several good people who went to DeVry. One of them is now a VP at a very very large bank client of ours, who is definetly the most competent client contact we have. I also have an aquaintence who went to DeVry, and now has a sweet job traveling around the world doing installations of wireless networks, a few months in Thailand, some time in India, jump over to Hawaii.
Definetly a sweet gig.