I love how all of your citations are [apple.com]. Citing Jobs in 2007 saying he would like to do away with DRM doesn't mean anything. The man is a publicity genius -- possibly one of the greatest we have ever known. Therefore, I don't place any value on his words. The fact that Apple can have you thinking they hate DRM on the one hand (because they removed the DRM from the music in their store) yet on the other hand are selling the worlds most DRM-encumbered computing devices, with restrictions on the software far far worse than they ever had on the music, just shows what a marketing genius Jobs was. You fell for it. Don't worry, so did everyone else.
The "risk" of Android and other non-GPLv3 software is that someone can take it and wrap it up in DRM and make sure you don't have control over your computing. That is not a lie: it is quite clearly true that that is possible, as it happens all the time. If you don't think this is a problem, then you are not required to listen to Stallman, but that does not make what he said a lie.
As an analogy, what if I told you that there was a risk that if you walk down the street, a homeless person may ask you for money? You may think, "big deal, if that happens I'll either give them money or ignore it -- that does not concern me." Fair enough, but that is still a true statement from me.
Why would you bring up HURD? What the fuck does that have to do with anything? "Stallman said twenty eight years ago that he was going to make a free operating system. And he DID make a free operating system, but contrary to his original statement, he did so using a component written by someone else who licensed it to him freely. Therefore he is a liar." ??? What are you trying to prove? Have you accomplished everything you set out to achieve in the last twenty eight years?
I am not going to continue arguing about intellectual dishonesty when you take someone's one line quotation and read from it that the quoter had a desire to see another human being killed or brutally maimed.
Look at his exact words. People have a serious issue with the phrasing. It is not "equivalent", and your arguments to try to make it so are intellectually dishonest.
If you have a "serious issue with the phrasing" then you're reading too much into it. I'm not going to get into an argument about intellectual dishonesty when you take a statement "I didn't wish for him to die" and interpret it as "I would have been happy with grievous bodily harm." That is a complete troll.
I'm not going to get into an argument about software licensing, but Stallman is free to promote his new license. The reason he promotes GPLv3 is because he believes it is better for, ultimately, everybody. I quote myself from above: "He's campaigning for what he thinks they need. Perhaps he's wrong about what they need, but he is acting in their interests all the same, not his own."
The other links you provide are more evidence of Stallman's rudeness and poor social skills. Which I totally agree he exhibits. This Steve Jobs post exhibits his poor social skills too, but in all of these cases he is not doing anything other than promoting open computing and free software. Bill Joy distributed BSD a decade earlier but you are conflating "open source" and "free software" -- something which Stallman has spend much of his life trying to distinguish between. BSD is open source (as was a lot of software before Stallman's time), but he started the "free software" movement, which is the idea of the GPL -- that not only is the source code available, but if you redistribute it, you must keep sharing the code to make sure that the software remains free. Again, it sounds like you disagree with this ideology. But that doesn't give you the right to pretend it doesn't exist or deliberately blur it with open source.
He effectively said the same thing as I said, just more tersely.
He said: "Nobody deserves to have to die - not Jobs" I said: "I would not wish for any physical harm to come to Jobs" Surely it is reasonable that when somebody says "A person does not deserve to have to die" we can extrapolate that they would not also wish any physical harm to come to that person, unless they explicitly state otherwise?
He said: "we all deserve the end of Jobs' malign influence on people's computing" I said: "his influence was bad for society and it is good for society that his influence has been removed" That's basically the same thing.
Stallman is, by the way, absolutely rude and crude -- I agree. Self-centered? He has never acted in any interest other than that of the computer-using public. He isn't campaigning for what the public wants. He's campaigning for what he thinks they need. Perhaps he's wrong about what they need, but he is acting in their interests all the same, not his own.
But is an entrepreneur as valuable to society as an inventor? As far as I know, Turing contributed vast amounts of research to the field of computer science, upon which we benefit today, and received very little praise for it and ended up dying alone, by his own hand, because his own government did not respect his homosexuality. Jobs sold millions upon millions upon millions of exceedingly shiny devices built upon Turing's inventions, and made billions upon billions of dollars for himself and his company. He died a hero, loved by the people who he sold expensive products to at a cost of their freedom. He made handheld computing popular and contributed more to the death of open computing (running whatever you want on devices you own) than probably anybody else --- is that really as valuable to society?
1. Stallman writes a license designed to ensure that if I write software, you can use it but as long as you don't lock down other people's freedoms. 2. VLC writes software and chooses that license, because they like the idea that people would be able to use it as long as they don't lock down other people's freedoms. 3. Apple creates a device designed exclusively to run software in a way that locks down everybody's freedoms. 4. Applidium releases VLC's software for Apple devices. Apple distributes the software, profiting (indirectly, by the fact that their platform now includes this software) from VLC despite the fact that they are locking down everyone's freedoms to modify and redistribute the software. 5. VLC complains that Apple are not respecting the license. 6. VLC are the bad guys, because Apple was totally fine with it until they complained.
?
Of course Apple has no problem with the GPL. The GPL (rightly) has a problem with Apple. Because when you mix the GPL and Apple, you get a fully-functioning Apple app, and effectively no GPL.
"Despite his death and economical success, I still believe that the vision of Steve Jobs in computing is a menace to fundamental freedoms now an in the future. I have sympathy for his family in this moments of loss, but I can't ignore the dangerous effects of his work."
Isn't that... basically what he wrote? Just worded differently.
So, a massive cerebral hemorrhage, a bullet to the head that left him a vegetable, a mental degenerate disease, or even something that just left him physically too debilitated to continue to do his, job, would have been fine with Stallman. Read the entirety of what he wrote, and you'll see that there's no other interpretation.
That's a ridiculous thing to say. A much fairer interpretation of Stallman's words would be "I would not wish for any physical harm to come to Jobs, but his influence was bad for society and it is good for society that his influence has been removed." His retirement was sufficient to remove that influence. You should not be putting words into Stallman's mouth that he would have been happy for Jobs to become physically debilitated.
What are you supposed to say when a bad person dies? Yes, it is sad for that person and their family. Yes, you do not wish for harm to come to that person. But when a bad person dies and millions of people around the world hold mourning sessions, newspapers plaster their front pages and websites with his face, and the big players begin posting inspirational quotes from the bad person, what are you supposed to say? I think someone needs to say: "wait a minute, guys. Just because he is dead does not exonerate him from the bad things he has done. Let's not forget those things."
You may not agree with Stallman and myself that he did bad things. But there must be some world figure in a position of power who you disagree with, who if they fell off the face of the planet tomorrow, you would say to yourself, "Oh. That's kind of unexpected and sad -- but I can't forgive the things he's done, and frankly, it is probably better that he isn't in a position of power."
I don't think G+'s invitation system was a marketing stunt. It was clearly marked as a "field trial". They needed to test the system with a large number of sophisticated (technically) users, and that's what they did. It only lasted a month or two, then they opened it up to everyone.
Would you say that World of Warcraft has an "idiot marketing scheme" when they do mass beta tests of new features before they invite everybody else in?
There is AppScale, an open source implementation of App Engine which can run App Engine apps on your own web server -- that helps to mitigate the lock-in. I thought I read that a Google employee was behind at least the datastore implementation (but not doing it on Google's time).
Frankly, I think it's in Google's interest to make sure that App Engine apps are portable. That would be consistent with their philosophy of "we don't lock you in; we hope you stay because our service is the best."
I believe it will be done anyway, after this debacle. Strict distros like Debian won't like the fact that it contains copyrighted material, even if the case is thrown out of a US court.
The thing about this is it isn't just a database of current timezones. If it was, it would be reasonably easy to reproduce from scratch. This database -- I have read it -- is a fascinating historical document, in that it does as well as it can to catalogue every single historical time zone used everywhere on Earth, since the railroad days when they realised they needed to worry about this sort of thing. This allows you to say "here is a time in UTC -- what was the corresponding local time at this location?" for any time dating back I think about 200 years. That isn't just for historical interest, but some software may actually make use of it.
So if we all decided to end timezones tomorrow and established a new global time (I suppose we might as well reset the calendar as well to 0 AJ -- After Jobs, seeing as how the world media seems to think he was the next messiah), that would simply constitute a new entry in the database, and wouldn't obviate the need for all of the old entries.
You're deluded if you think that the MPAA has nothing to do with writing copyright laws either in the US or abroad. They do.
And this is not just a French issue. MPAA has been lobbying across the world to get three-strikes laws implemented. I don't have time to find citations now but if you argue with me, I will.
The problem with all of those technologies is that they were Microsoft Windows only. Not like some of the Chrome features which are "Chrome only" (but anybody can implement them and hopefully one day they'll become part of a standard, e.g., NaCl), but truly Windows only and could never possibly hope to become standardised (unless Windows extinguished all other platforms forever). Take #1, ActiveX, and compare it to NaCl of today's Chrome. Yes, it took ten years to get back to the same native speed applications being delivered over the web, but that's how long it takes to get it right. ActiveX could never possibly have been supported by any other platform since it essentially let websites dig straight through to the Windows API. Sure, you got nice fast applications, but it wasn't really the web at all.
#3 is not really a web feature but an operating system feature -- I'm not sure why Microsoft took it out but I think Gnome 3 is doing something like that.
Although it's only been one month since Web Browser Grand Prix VI: Firefox 6, Chrome 13, And Mac OS X Lion, the browser wars show no signs of subsiding.
Browser wars? It's competition, baby, not war. We're not waiting for a war to end so we can announce a winner and all switch to that browser. We're enjoying every glorious moment of a many-browser ecosystem. The "browser wars" were a time of nasty piling on of proprietary features in an attempt to gain an advantage. This is a glorious golden age of competition and (mostly) an emphasis on standards compliance.
Yeah okay, fair point. So it really shouldn't be a patent by any standards. But I still raise the additional point that the problem with FAT is not its usefulness, but the fact that it is a de facto standard and so it is impossible to get away from it, despite the fact that there are much better solutions that do not violate patents but we can't use them with Microsoft Windows.
Just one point about your students: yes they can design file systems that far exceed the VFAT capabilities. But what is important is if, given the old short filename FAT system, they are able to come up with a method for extending the file system to support long filenames with Unicode characters in a backwards-compatible way (that is what the patent covers, not merely the idea of long file names). I agree with you though -- I don't doubt that your students could come up with that extension.
Then I don't see the point of your argument. You're saying that because religion does not cause all evil, it isn't a problem? Or (more likely), that every single evil deed committed in the name of religion would have been committed in a world without religion, but in the name of something else?
I can't agree with that latter argument: it's certainly true for people who are actively malicious. But not for the masses. For instance many religious people want to ban gay marriage because it's against their religious beliefs: are you saying that if they didn't have religion they would find some other reason to ban gay marriage? I think most of them would be okay with it.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a pity Apple is suing them all for being in the same market.
I love how all of your citations are [apple.com]. Citing Jobs in 2007 saying he would like to do away with DRM doesn't mean anything. The man is a publicity genius -- possibly one of the greatest we have ever known. Therefore, I don't place any value on his words. The fact that Apple can have you thinking they hate DRM on the one hand (because they removed the DRM from the music in their store) yet on the other hand are selling the worlds most DRM-encumbered computing devices, with restrictions on the software far far worse than they ever had on the music, just shows what a marketing genius Jobs was. You fell for it. Don't worry, so did everyone else.
The "risk" of Android and other non-GPLv3 software is that someone can take it and wrap it up in DRM and make sure you don't have control over your computing. That is not a lie: it is quite clearly true that that is possible, as it happens all the time. If you don't think this is a problem, then you are not required to listen to Stallman, but that does not make what he said a lie.
As an analogy, what if I told you that there was a risk that if you walk down the street, a homeless person may ask you for money? You may think, "big deal, if that happens I'll either give them money or ignore it -- that does not concern me." Fair enough, but that is still a true statement from me.
Why would you bring up HURD? What the fuck does that have to do with anything? "Stallman said twenty eight years ago that he was going to make a free operating system. And he DID make a free operating system, but contrary to his original statement, he did so using a component written by someone else who licensed it to him freely. Therefore he is a liar." ??? What are you trying to prove? Have you accomplished everything you set out to achieve in the last twenty eight years?
I am not going to continue arguing about intellectual dishonesty when you take someone's one line quotation and read from it that the quoter had a desire to see another human being killed or brutally maimed.
If you have a "serious issue with the phrasing" then you're reading too much into it. I'm not going to get into an argument about intellectual dishonesty when you take a statement "I didn't wish for him to die" and interpret it as "I would have been happy with grievous bodily harm." That is a complete troll.
I'm not going to get into an argument about software licensing, but Stallman is free to promote his new license. The reason he promotes GPLv3 is because he believes it is better for, ultimately, everybody. I quote myself from above: "He's campaigning for what he thinks they need. Perhaps he's wrong about what they need, but he is acting in their interests all the same, not his own."
The other links you provide are more evidence of Stallman's rudeness and poor social skills. Which I totally agree he exhibits. This Steve Jobs post exhibits his poor social skills too, but in all of these cases he is not doing anything other than promoting open computing and free software. Bill Joy distributed BSD a decade earlier but you are conflating "open source" and "free software" -- something which Stallman has spend much of his life trying to distinguish between. BSD is open source (as was a lot of software before Stallman's time), but he started the "free software" movement, which is the idea of the GPL -- that not only is the source code available, but if you redistribute it, you must keep sharing the code to make sure that the software remains free. Again, it sounds like you disagree with this ideology. But that doesn't give you the right to pretend it doesn't exist or deliberately blur it with open source.
He effectively said the same thing as I said, just more tersely.
He said: "Nobody deserves to have to die - not Jobs"
I said: "I would not wish for any physical harm to come to Jobs"
Surely it is reasonable that when somebody says "A person does not deserve to have to die" we can extrapolate that they would not also wish any physical harm to come to that person, unless they explicitly state otherwise?
He said: "we all deserve the end of Jobs' malign influence on people's computing"
I said: "his influence was bad for society and it is good for society that his influence has been removed"
That's basically the same thing.
Stallman is, by the way, absolutely rude and crude -- I agree. Self-centered? He has never acted in any interest other than that of the computer-using public. He isn't campaigning for what the public wants. He's campaigning for what he thinks they need. Perhaps he's wrong about what they need, but he is acting in their interests all the same, not his own.
But is an entrepreneur as valuable to society as an inventor? As far as I know, Turing contributed vast amounts of research to the field of computer science, upon which we benefit today, and received very little praise for it and ended up dying alone, by his own hand, because his own government did not respect his homosexuality. Jobs sold millions upon millions upon millions of exceedingly shiny devices built upon Turing's inventions, and made billions upon billions of dollars for himself and his company. He died a hero, loved by the people who he sold expensive products to at a cost of their freedom. He made handheld computing popular and contributed more to the death of open computing (running whatever you want on devices you own) than probably anybody else --- is that really as valuable to society?
If Stallman caught you saying that, he would rip your eyes out just by glaring at you very hard.
(See Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software by Richard Stallman.)
So basically,
1. Stallman writes a license designed to ensure that if I write software, you can use it but as long as you don't lock down other people's freedoms.
2. VLC writes software and chooses that license, because they like the idea that people would be able to use it as long as they don't lock down other people's freedoms.
3. Apple creates a device designed exclusively to run software in a way that locks down everybody's freedoms.
4. Applidium releases VLC's software for Apple devices. Apple distributes the software, profiting (indirectly, by the fact that their platform now includes this software) from VLC despite the fact that they are locking down everyone's freedoms to modify and redistribute the software.
5. VLC complains that Apple are not respecting the license.
6. VLC are the bad guys, because Apple was totally fine with it until they complained.
?
Of course Apple has no problem with the GPL. The GPL (rightly) has a problem with Apple. Because when you mix the GPL and Apple, you get a fully-functioning Apple app, and effectively no GPL.
Isn't that ... basically what he wrote? Just worded differently.
That's a ridiculous thing to say. A much fairer interpretation of Stallman's words would be "I would not wish for any physical harm to come to Jobs, but his influence was bad for society and it is good for society that his influence has been removed." His retirement was sufficient to remove that influence. You should not be putting words into Stallman's mouth that he would have been happy for Jobs to become physically debilitated.
What are you supposed to say when a bad person dies? Yes, it is sad for that person and their family. Yes, you do not wish for harm to come to that person. But when a bad person dies and millions of people around the world hold mourning sessions, newspapers plaster their front pages and websites with his face, and the big players begin posting inspirational quotes from the bad person, what are you supposed to say? I think someone needs to say: "wait a minute, guys. Just because he is dead does not exonerate him from the bad things he has done. Let's not forget those things."
You may not agree with Stallman and myself that he did bad things. But there must be some world figure in a position of power who you disagree with, who if they fell off the face of the planet tomorrow, you would say to yourself, "Oh. That's kind of unexpected and sad -- but I can't forgive the things he's done, and frankly, it is probably better that he isn't in a position of power."
I don't think G+'s invitation system was a marketing stunt. It was clearly marked as a "field trial". They needed to test the system with a large number of sophisticated (technically) users, and that's what they did. It only lasted a month or two, then they opened it up to everyone.
Would you say that World of Warcraft has an "idiot marketing scheme" when they do mass beta tests of new features before they invite everybody else in?
Not sure if the GP was trolling, but I was genuinely confused about what that meant. Thanks for giving the context.
I've got an ambitious plan for client-side Java: stop suing companies for using their open-source product.
There is AppScale, an open source implementation of App Engine which can run App Engine apps on your own web server -- that helps to mitigate the lock-in. I thought I read that a Google employee was behind at least the datastore implementation (but not doing it on Google's time).
Frankly, I think it's in Google's interest to make sure that App Engine apps are portable. That would be consistent with their philosophy of "we don't lock you in; we hope you stay because our service is the best."
I believe it will be done anyway, after this debacle. Strict distros like Debian won't like the fact that it contains copyrighted material, even if the case is thrown out of a US court.
The thing about this is it isn't just a database of current timezones. If it was, it would be reasonably easy to reproduce from scratch. This database -- I have read it -- is a fascinating historical document, in that it does as well as it can to catalogue every single historical time zone used everywhere on Earth, since the railroad days when they realised they needed to worry about this sort of thing. This allows you to say "here is a time in UTC -- what was the corresponding local time at this location?" for any time dating back I think about 200 years. That isn't just for historical interest, but some software may actually make use of it.
So if we all decided to end timezones tomorrow and established a new global time (I suppose we might as well reset the calendar as well to 0 AJ -- After Jobs, seeing as how the world media seems to think he was the next messiah), that would simply constitute a new entry in the database, and wouldn't obviate the need for all of the old entries.
You're deluded if you think that the MPAA has nothing to do with writing copyright laws either in the US or abroad. They do.
And this is not just a French issue. MPAA has been lobbying across the world to get three-strikes laws implemented. I don't have time to find citations now but if you argue with me, I will.
I don't really understand how the Slashdot tag system works. How many people need to uniquely name a tag before it goes up on the article's page?
So basically, if you take that idea to its logical conclusion, you would have.... Wikipedia?
The problem with all of those technologies is that they were Microsoft Windows only. Not like some of the Chrome features which are "Chrome only" (but anybody can implement them and hopefully one day they'll become part of a standard, e.g., NaCl), but truly Windows only and could never possibly hope to become standardised (unless Windows extinguished all other platforms forever). Take #1, ActiveX, and compare it to NaCl of today's Chrome. Yes, it took ten years to get back to the same native speed applications being delivered over the web, but that's how long it takes to get it right. ActiveX could never possibly have been supported by any other platform since it essentially let websites dig straight through to the Windows API. Sure, you got nice fast applications, but it wasn't really the web at all.
#3 is not really a web feature but an operating system feature -- I'm not sure why Microsoft took it out but I think Gnome 3 is doing something like that.
Browser wars? It's competition, baby, not war. We're not waiting for a war to end so we can announce a winner and all switch to that browser. We're enjoying every glorious moment of a many-browser ecosystem. The "browser wars" were a time of nasty piling on of proprietary features in an attempt to gain an advantage. This is a glorious golden age of competition and (mostly) an emphasis on standards compliance.
Astroturfing?
In the mobile versions it's very important, especially JavaScript performance.
Yeah okay, fair point. So it really shouldn't be a patent by any standards. But I still raise the additional point that the problem with FAT is not its usefulness, but the fact that it is a de facto standard and so it is impossible to get away from it, despite the fact that there are much better solutions that do not violate patents but we can't use them with Microsoft Windows.
Just one point about your students: yes they can design file systems that far exceed the VFAT capabilities. But what is important is if, given the old short filename FAT system, they are able to come up with a method for extending the file system to support long filenames with Unicode characters in a backwards-compatible way (that is what the patent covers, not merely the idea of long file names). I agree with you though -- I don't doubt that your students could come up with that extension.
Then I don't see the point of your argument. You're saying that because religion does not cause all evil, it isn't a problem? Or (more likely), that every single evil deed committed in the name of religion would have been committed in a world without religion, but in the name of something else?
I can't agree with that latter argument: it's certainly true for people who are actively malicious. But not for the masses. For instance many religious people want to ban gay marriage because it's against their religious beliefs: are you saying that if they didn't have religion they would find some other reason to ban gay marriage? I think most of them would be okay with it.