Which idea was as the great one? Remote controlled vehicles? The AND circuit? The Tesla coil? Radio? He patented all these...the Supreme Court even verified the radio one.
I quote from the people who gave him the Edison medal: "Were we to seize and eliminate from our industrial world the results of Mr. Tesla's work, the wheels of industry would cease to turn, our electric cars and trains would stop, our towns would be dark, our mills would be dead and idle. So far-reaching is (his) work it has become the warp and woof of industry"
Sadly, Telsa has wandered away and was feeding pigeons during this speech.
No, it's quite a normal definition of hurt. If you offer the code to anyone in the whole world to use as he or she pleases except a developer, you're playing a vicious game of "keep-away" with that developer. You're destroying the market for the functionality by making it available for free. At the same time, you're asking the developer to reimplement it before forging ahead. This is, indeed, hurtful. It holds developers back by requiring them to reimplement the wheel needlessly instead of making forward progress. And it deters standardization by requiring them to create and use a different code base. Not good.
I play keep away all the time. I only loan money to people I trust. I only give rides to people who need them. And I only write code for people when I'm assured they will give back changes. And, BTW, I don't worship the free market. If I destroy a market for something by giving it away for free, well, tough, deal with it. There's nothing unethical about it. Are car makers unethical for destroy the market in horses? What about libraries for destroying the market in bookstores? Now, destroying the market, then raising prices is one thing. But I can't do that after GPLing the code.
So could he! Unfortunately, once you've given the code away to everyone else, it's not fair to ask him to pay for it. He can't make money off it, since its market value is now zero. So, you're asking him to pay for something which he cannot get his customers to pay him for! He's starting out "in the hole," and that's not fair.
He didn't start out the hole, he started out where I started out. With no code. If he chooses to use my code, he has to do with my code what I did with it...hand it out. With changes. And, again, destroying markets by providing a service for free is not unethical. Markets have no inherit right to exist.
He can't hide it -- not if you've published it. He can only keep his improvements. (And that's fair; they're his improvements and his only way of making a living.) Nor can he "run off" with it. It's still there for anyone to use.
His improvements to my code. My code. If he feels restricted by my license, perhaps he shouldn't have used my code.
Well, in that case I think you'll agree that programmers should not be forced to publish their work for free. But this is what the GPL tries to do.
Yes, that magical GPL, we can just make everyone do whatever we want with it. Or, perhaps, it only applies when they start with GPL code. So, they get the head start I gave them, but no one else gets the code they write. Hrm. I can see how they would like that. But, tough. If anyone gets a head start from me, then if you accept it, you have to give other people a head start too. Up to where you are at the time, not to where I coded.
Actually, the BSD license allows the author to ask for credit. Ironically, this is something that Richard Stallman vehemently opposes. He's opposed to authors' rights -- not only for code, but for books and music, too.
You have a good point, I'm not going to argue with this. I can kinda see when RMS was coming from...the credit clause in BSD allowed the original coder to dictate, forever, what a program had to display at certain times. Which is decidedly un-free. But, without it, people can just take code, sed your name out, change the name, and release it. It's a Catch-22. And I see both sides.
Again, the author can ask for this. But the trend is toward not doing so. Under the BSD or MIT X licenses, it's not required; the code has virtually no strings attached. Which is what open source should be about! The GPL is an attempt to turn open source -- which is otherwise a good thing -- into a weapon designed to hurt programmers. The motivation: pure spite and malice. This is not a good thing and is certainly not ethical, and so we should oppose it.
Instead of actually responding to this, which I've done other times in this post to the exact same arguements (which is my fault, I rambled in the original), I'll say something else: If people who put restrictions on code use that allow and disallow who can and can't do what with it are so horrible and unethical, then doesn't that make commercial software completely unethical? Ergo, isn't helping commercial software by write BSD code also unethical? Where in these last two sentences do you disagree?
Frankly, I fail to see how using any software license can be unethical, unless it's a shrinkwrapped one, or one that some tiny clause or law allows you to change retroactively. Maybe if they needed the software to live, or something.
I better post this quick before netscape crashes.
P.S...okay, I give up. How do you quote people without manually copying their text and putting I tags around it? Is it some option I'm missing?
By hurting others, you mean not letting them take my code, close source it, and sell it? Hrm. You have a weird defination of hurt...it's my code. If the little guy wants to challenge the big guys, how about he offers to pay me to write code for him? I could use the cash. But he can't run off with my code and hide it. I don't see how failing to let someone else close-source code I wrote is either unethical or immoral.
Failing to do things for other people with no reward isn't unethical in any system of ethics I can think of. Certainly not mine.
However, what the people who take the code (no matter what their size) of BSD programmers, close source it, and give them no credit, while they are acting 'ethically' (because they were give permission to, however remotely), skirt the edges of morals in my book.
Right. But the entire point of 'civil disobedience' is that people stand up and say 'these laws are unjust, and I'm breaking them dispite what the government says'. You can't stand up and remain anonymous at the same time, so it can't possible be civil disobedience.
You can certainly act justly against things anonymously, because civil disobedience will spectacularly fail in places where the media is controlled by the government.
In fact, and as an aside, various authorities in the field recomend you inform the police beforehand, along with the media. This would cause it to fail even worse in places with controlled media.
Anyway, this can't be anything of the sort, cause we haven't been given a reason for this. So, it's not any form of protest, it's just an attack.
No, but, DUH, blocking anyone's entrance would be. Just like a DoS. But, you have to admit it's you who did it...otherwise, it's a form of non-violent...erm...halfway between protest and terrorism. We don't really have a word for it. It would be like piling 800 pounds of steel against the door of the post office while they were closed, and hiding. No one seems to do that, they either go with real civil disobedience, when you get arrested (hopefully, a bunch of people get arrested), or they just blow things and/or people up.
This, of course, isn't any of that, unless someone issues some sort of notice. It's just plain criminal behavior until then.
Nice way to make up facts without actually having any. How about providing a URL of some sort, to some sort of study or something? I have talked to one I know, (granted, he's not a behavioral psychologist, he studies group behavior) and he has no idea what harm it might cause, knows of no theoretical reason it should cause harm, and of no studies that have shown it does.
So, there you go. I asked one. How about we start using actually studies, instead of hearsay?
The circumstances under which 12/14/1774 and 6/22/1462 are all-even-digit numbers is...never, as 1 is an odd digit, despite what some wackos who failed math think. And, BTW, 0 is even.
Sadly, some people are thinking PRIME numbers, which you can argue that 0 and 1 are, aren't, or N/A...but they are even or odd, respectively. And, unlike an extreme case above claimed, they are numbers. Sheesh. What some people will claim.
Huh? Does anyone understand this comment? The name of the country is China. It's been that, or some variation of that, for thousands of years. And they really don't mind that's their name, promise. If they did, they'd change it.
Yes, that's not the full name, but most people do call it China, just like people call France 'France' and the United Kingdom the 'United Kingdom', both of which have longer real names.
Or are you upset he attributed the actions of the government to the country?
I find it amazing that Heinlein writes a book where the villians are evil racist idiots, and the good guys fight them and win...and it be called racist.
Look, if one race subjects another in a story, by defination, one race has to be on top. I think the fact that he got flak cause he picked black people to be on top is completely insane.
Hey, next time you read it, flip 'black' for 'white' and vis versa..is it racist? Hell no.
Erm, I doubt he can pull his books of Amazon. First of all, I don't think bookstores buy books under any kind of contract, they just own them. Second, I doubt he could do it, as his publisher has the rights to them.
Um, actually, the boy scouts will let in atheists, despite the word 'reverent' in the scout oath. (Or is it the scout law? I always got those confused.) And, I think they just don't let in gay *leaders*...I dunno, but yeah, they are getting sued for it...
I don't think anyone said 'millions of years', I think they said '50 years'. And, BTW, it is uninhabitable at the moment. I have no idea how they're going to do this.
As the defination first was playing around, at a deep level, with your computer, I think the 'posers' who wanted to sound cool, probably were the people running scripts to break into computers.
Wait a second, what country is this? I thought we had the right to protest things we didn't like, be it against the government or just against a person. Silly me.
I don't see this as very likely. Most production NT servers aren't also Linux or FreeBSD servers. In fact, I've never seen a production dual-boot machine. And most of the speed difference would be supposedly coming from misconfigured or just plain of the box broken stuff, like the exchange startup bug people were talking about or that sendmail one that takes five minutes to timeout a DNS lookup on startup.
The only way that would really be true is if someone was running a really small and slow machine, although, technically, the slowest NT machine possible would not be the slowest Linux one...I've seen Linux run on a 5 meg 386-33, which isn't even possible for NT, so you have to conclude that no matter how small a machine you managed to shoehorn NT into, if you put Linux on that box, it would still run faster then that brave little 386 that it took 60 seconds to pop up the prompt after you logged in.
Actually...the orignal Coca-cola recipe (Not the one with cocaine, assuming that actually existed, I mean the one that skyrocketed Coke into the mind of the world) is public knowledge...it's come out in a few books. We still don't know the current one, it's changed slowly over the decades.
No, seriously, if you find a ship floating in international waters with no one on it, you can just take it. If you managed to get to the moon, you can legally make off with the lunar rover.
International law basically goes with the idea if there is no one on a vessel, it's yours. (If there is someone, it's piracy.:) Now, I'm certain no one owns the sky...ergo, you can just waltz in and claim Mir, legally.
Slashdot Mirror
You know. it's fairly easy to sit at home in your underwear and listen to radio shows without a computer. :)
-David T. C.
Note: This was a joke.
-David T. C.
The other 10% is actually commited by people with extreme tans, or against people covered in white paint.
-David T. C.
I quote from the people who gave him the Edison medal: "Were we to seize and eliminate from our industrial world the results of Mr. Tesla's work, the wheels of industry would cease to turn, our electric cars and trains would stop, our towns would be dark, our mills would be dead and idle. So far-reaching is (his) work it has become the warp and woof of industry"
Sadly, Telsa has wandered away and was feeding pigeons during this speech.
-David T. C.
Did you steal this? If not, it's pretty good writing.
-David T. C.
I play keep away all the time. I only loan money to people I trust. I only give rides to people who need them. And I only write code for people when I'm assured they will give back changes. And, BTW, I don't worship the free market. If I destroy a market for something by giving it away for free, well, tough, deal with it. There's nothing unethical about it. Are car makers unethical for destroy the market in horses? What about libraries for destroying the market in bookstores? Now, destroying the market, then raising prices is one thing. But I can't do that after GPLing the code.
So could he! Unfortunately, once you've given the code away to everyone else, it's not fair to ask him to pay for it. He can't make money off it, since its market value is now zero. So, you're asking him to pay for something which he cannot get his customers to pay him for! He's starting out "in the hole," and that's not fair.
He didn't start out the hole, he started out where I started out. With no code. If he chooses to use my code, he has to do with my code what I did with it...hand it out. With changes. And, again, destroying markets by providing a service for free is not unethical. Markets have no inherit right to exist.
He can't hide it -- not if you've published it. He can only keep his improvements. (And that's fair; they're his improvements and his only way of making a living.) Nor can he "run off" with it. It's still there for anyone to use.
His improvements to my code. My code. If he feels restricted by my license, perhaps he shouldn't have used my code.
Well, in that case I think you'll agree that programmers should not be forced to publish their work for free. But this is what the GPL tries to do.
Yes, that magical GPL, we can just make everyone do whatever we want with it. Or, perhaps, it only applies when they start with GPL code. So, they get the head start I gave them, but no one else gets the code they write. Hrm. I can see how they would like that. But, tough. If anyone gets a head start from me, then if you accept it, you have to give other people a head start too. Up to where you are at the time, not to where I coded.
Actually, the BSD license allows the author to ask for credit. Ironically, this is something that Richard Stallman vehemently opposes. He's opposed to authors' rights -- not only for code, but for books and music, too.
You have a good point, I'm not going to argue with this. I can kinda see when RMS was coming from...the credit clause in BSD allowed the original coder to dictate, forever, what a program had to display at certain times. Which is decidedly un-free. But, without it, people can just take code, sed your name out, change the name, and release it. It's a Catch-22. And I see both sides.
Again, the author can ask for this. But the trend is toward not doing so. Under the BSD or MIT X licenses, it's not required; the code has virtually no strings attached. Which is what open source should be about! The GPL is an attempt to turn open source -- which is otherwise a good thing -- into a weapon designed to hurt programmers. The motivation: pure spite and malice. This is not a good thing and is certainly not ethical, and so we should oppose it.
Instead of actually responding to this, which I've done other times in this post to the exact same arguements (which is my fault, I rambled in the original), I'll say something else:
If people who put restrictions on code use that allow and disallow who can and can't do what with it are so horrible and unethical, then doesn't that make commercial software completely unethical? Ergo, isn't helping commercial software by write BSD code also unethical? Where in these last two sentences do you disagree?
Frankly, I fail to see how using any software license can be unethical, unless it's a shrinkwrapped one, or one that some tiny clause or law allows you to change retroactively. Maybe if they needed the software to live, or something.
I better post this quick before netscape crashes.
P.S...okay, I give up. How do you quote people without manually copying their text and putting I tags around it? Is it some option I'm missing?
-David T. C.
Failing to do things for other people with no reward isn't unethical in any system of ethics I can think of. Certainly not mine.
However, what the people who take the code (no matter what their size) of BSD programmers, close source it, and give them no credit, while they are acting 'ethically' (because they were give permission to, however remotely), skirt the edges of morals in my book.
-David T. C.
You can certainly act justly against things anonymously, because civil disobedience will spectacularly fail in places where the media is controlled by the government.
In fact, and as an aside, various authorities in the field recomend you inform the police beforehand, along with the media. This would cause it to fail even worse in places with controlled media.
Anyway, this can't be anything of the sort, cause we haven't been given a reason for this. So, it's not any form of protest, it's just an attack.
-David T. C.
This, of course, isn't any of that, unless someone issues some sort of notice. It's just plain criminal behavior until then.
-David T. C.
Like NOW?
-David T. C.
So, there you go. I asked one. How about we start using actually studies, instead of hearsay?
-David T. C.
The government has the right to limit information from citizens? Hrm. That's a new one.
-David T. C.
I'm fairly certain eln was being sarcastic.
-David T. C.
Sadly, some people are thinking PRIME numbers, which you can argue that 0 and 1 are, aren't, or N/A...but they are even or odd, respectively. And, unlike an extreme case above claimed, they are numbers. Sheesh. What some people will claim.
Hehehe. Do I get the mug?
-David T. C.
Yes, that's not the full name, but most people do call it China, just like people call France 'France' and the United Kingdom the 'United Kingdom', both of which have longer real names.
Or are you upset he attributed the actions of the government to the country?
I'm really confused here.
-David T. C.
Look, if one race subjects another in a story, by defination, one race has to be on top. I think the fact that he got flak cause he picked black people to be on top is completely insane.
Hey, next time you read it, flip 'black' for 'white' and vis versa..is it racist? Hell no.
-David T. C.
Maybe you should looks at a CURRENT version of OS/2, duh.
-David T. C.
Erm, I doubt he can pull his books of Amazon. First of all, I don't think bookstores buy books under any kind of contract, they just own them. Second, I doubt he could do it, as his publisher has the rights to them.
Um, actually, the boy scouts will let in atheists, despite the word 'reverent' in the scout oath. (Or is it the scout law? I always got those confused.) And, I think they just don't let in gay *leaders*...I dunno, but yeah, they are getting sued for it...
I don't think anyone said 'millions of years', I think they said '50 years'. And, BTW, it is uninhabitable at the moment. I have no idea how they're going to do this.
As the defination first was playing around, at a deep level, with your computer, I think the 'posers' who wanted to sound cool, probably were the people running scripts to break into computers.
Wait a second, what country is this? I thought we had the right to protest things we didn't like, be it against the government or just against a person. Silly me.
The only way that would really be true is if someone was running a really small and slow machine, although, technically, the slowest NT machine possible would not be the slowest Linux one...I've seen Linux run on a 5 meg 386-33, which isn't even possible for NT, so you have to conclude that no matter how small a machine you managed to shoehorn NT into, if you put Linux on that box, it would still run faster then that brave little 386 that it took 60 seconds to pop up the prompt after you logged in.
Actually...the orignal Coca-cola recipe (Not the one with cocaine, assuming that actually existed, I mean the one that skyrocketed Coke into the mind of the world) is public knowledge...it's come out in a few books. We still don't know the current one, it's changed slowly over the decades.
International law basically goes with the idea if there is no one on a vessel, it's yours. (If there is someone, it's piracy.:) Now, I'm certain no one owns the sky...ergo, you can just waltz in and claim Mir, legally.