In the near future, such networks will be used to adapt games like Tomb Raider while they are played (e.g. by removing or adding puzzles and enemies), so you get the game you want."
Awesome! In my case, I think it would be hilarious to watch Tomb Raider slowly morph into Starcraft.
It's a bit disingenuous to say that the FSF doesn't care what license you use, when clearly, they care very much.
Your link isn't a page of recommended licenses, by the way, it's a list of licenses with comments on their compatibility with the GPL.
The FSF has an agenda, and are willing to use threat of legal force to advance it. You may like their goals and there's nothing illegal about what they do, but any attempt to frame them as something different is not quite accurate.
RMS goes further than even that. Not only do they consider a program designed to link against a library that doesn't use the GPL infringing, they consider a program that links against a GPL library in addition to other, compatible libraries an infingement.
Which means that if your program CAN work with a GPL library, the FSF considers it it's property, even if another compatible library exists. This is tantamount to copyrighting ideas, which is what I thought we were trying to prevent in the first place.
I don't understand how this makes FSF software more "free" than Microsoft's code, other than that the FSF doesn't charge you a fee. The essential message for both is "you may only use our software only if you agree with our EULA."
Similar to Microsoft, the FSF goal is to create a base of software so large and pervasive that you can't help but accept the GPL or have your project be marginalized. This is ostensibly done so that software is "free."
And that's fine for them, but what is this really going to accomplish? If the FSF were to succeed, any company that wanted to write proprietary software would not be able to do so and charge for it (reasonably, forking would be rampant) on open-source systems. There are substantial realms of software that will only ever exist with this incentive to produce it, because writing it and then supporting it is hard, unenjoyable work. So the only platform that these packages will exist on is a closed source one like Windows.
What the FSF is doing, in effect, is ensuring there will always be two software stacks that are wholly incompatible: a proprietary one where you have no ability to change anything but is the only one that runs that one proprietary application that you absolutely need; and an open source one where everything's great until you need that one application that nobody wants to write.
This ensures that free software will always be marginalized because keeping Windows around is the only way to ensure that those proprietary software companies continue to write the software nobody else wants to without a financial incentive.
It's almost as if the FSF is acting contrary to their stated goals by not thinking beyond the immediate effects of their actions, or at least ignoring the reality that there is software that people want but that nobody wants to write for no profit.
Anyway, I guess I believe more in karma, and that changing a culture through legal means like RMS is trying to do is much more difficult than changing it through example.
you don't make any use of GPL'd components if you're not prepared to put everything under GPL, that is the intent of the license
That's exactly right. Anyone who says differently, especially after reading the Clisp exchange, is deluding themselves.
That might be what you want (yay GPL), but if you're not thrilled about the GPL, you probably shouldn't be using any GPL software in your project, or you'll run into these issues. Take heed, original poster.
It's why I prefer the BSD license; I don't want my hobby to result in me talking to a lawyer.
If you read the exchange, you'll see exactly what happened. It's not a nasty exchange, and not a matter of someone "deserving what they got."
The Clisp authors wanted to link to readline in addition to other libraries, giving the user a choice as to what library to use at compile time. RMS in effect tells the Clisp authors that since they use an interface designed to link to readline in their application, it's a derivative work, regardless of whether the user chooses to link to readline or not.
But in the exchange RMS very clearly states his view of the legal matters behind the GPL, and in my opinion his views are ridiculous. But it's important even if you disagree to understand what RMS thinks "linking" and "derivative work" mean, and he spells it out right here in no uncertain terms.
You just described exactly what happened to Clisp, and it's why I'm not a fan of the GPL, favoring the BSD license.
If anyone doesn't understand this issue, I'd encourage you to do a search for clisp and gpl and read the email exchange between RMS and clisp's authors. The idea that a lisp programming language is a "derivative work" of readline, as if people are only going to use clisp because it uses readline, is asinine to me, especially if there are alternate versions of readline and it's dynamically linked.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't still support the GPL if you so choose, but I don't think many GPL fans are aware of the implications of the linking and derivative work part of it.
Of course, on the other hand, how would you feel about an organization that picks specific people to breed in order to create children with the desired traits so that those children could be sold to the highest bidders?
This is a quintessential military approach to a problem:
"We're spending way too much time and money on [stupid thing]."
"Well, we have a new process that will allow us to do [stupid thing] much faster!"
"Great!"
Examples abound. A perfect one is the primary mode of communication on ships is radio, even though the networks (i.e. chat) are far faster and more reliable. We'll spend hours troubleshooting radios over chat in order to pass voice messages over radio. Then we'll chat again to confirm that the recipient actually received the radio message properly.
"There are no solutions, only trade-offs." - Thomas Sowell
Nothing is perfectly safe; everything involves risk and negative outcomes. There are plenty of negative consequences of using pure solar energy, not the least of which is the impact of manufacturing the tools to harness it.
"It has less change of a meltdown, but if that meltdown occurs, and it will, it's no difference from chernobyle, except this one wil be bigger"
Evidence? Support? Simply saying something is true doesn't make it so.
Taking this a bit further; there had to be a de-facto standard for home computers before they were adopted by the masses. Just like Blu-ray and HD-DVD can't co-exist, and Beta and VHS before that, etc. The majority of people won't participate until there's a clear winner.
Gates was lucky to be there at the right time on the right platform, and his ruthlessness ensured that Microsoft would be a standard. If it weren't him, it would have been someone else.
But until that happened, there wasn't the same relentless drive for faster, better, cheaper computers that we take for granted today. The Commodore 64 was popular for years with identical hardware. The scale of the market didn't support constant research and development of faster consumer hardware.
Even if there's no other reason to like Microsoft, just be thankful it wasn't Apple that become the standard. It could have been a lot worse.
I read the FAQ and I can't shake the feeling that C++0x is a joke that someone's taken way too far.
It's kind of like how I believe pop icons like Britney Spears are famous because of music industry execs betting they can make anybody famous and then trying to one-up each other when it works.
Anyway, my favorite part:
"Try to imagine what the superset of C99, C#, Java, Haskell, Lisp, Python, and Ada would look like."
I imagine it would look very similar to Common Lisp.
Re:It's actually kind of scary
on
Lost In the Cloud
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Don't be surprised; the reason you don't hear it is because that line of argument against Windows is silly and illogical.
The IBM-compatible PC is about as open as you get. If you don't want to use Windows, nothing is stopping you from writing your own OS (Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, QNX, Mac OS X, etc.) It's not prohibitively expensive, requires no government sponsorship, and it's not even that difficult. All the documentation you'd ever need is free from Intel's web site, or you can order a hard copy from them.
What Microsoft does with Windows is largely irrelevant. It's annoying when you have to use it at work or school, but irrelevant to your freedom as a citizen and your freedom to do what you please with the hardware you bought.
Same thing with the iPhone. I can buy a different phone and write software for it to my heart's content. What Apple does with their hardware and phone is irrelevant because I'm not forced to pay for it.
Problems only start when organizations attempt to coerce me by force to pay for something that I otherwise wouldn't have. The whole MS DRM/Palladium debacle was a concern because it had the potential to close off an entire network funded by taxpayer dollars with the expectation that it would be an open system.
Apple and others can do whatever they want with the infrastructure they've paid for. It's only when they try to do something to the infrastructure I paid for that I have a problem.
The word "scientist" is ridiculously broad. Who are these people to which the media constantly refers? And who gives a shit what "scientists" think about politics?
I'd like to know what economists think about politics, including facts and historical data to back their opinions up. But I guess that would take ACTUAL research, which is harder than calling 1000 people and asking them 10 questions each.
Well, let me be the first to say that nothing is truly "free," and this isn't "free" wireless; it's wireless that is paid for through hidden costs (taxes) that Venicians probably did not have a choice but to bear. Adding an intermediary between you and the service provider of nearly any industry can only mean higher costs, because for every intermediate step there's overhead.
For something as relatively inexpensive as providing wireless access points, the penalty is innocuous for believing you can get something for nothing. Believe that about health care, and the penalty can be rather severe.
It's a kludge because applications are written to seem like they are based on a constant connection, when in reality, because of HTTP, the connection is set up and broken quite often relative to how long the application is used.
There are numerous security problems with this model, in addition to the overhead associated with guaranteeing the server "remembers" the client between connections.
The browser and JavaScript and HTML/XML documents are quite close to being a really good application platform, but a stateful, connection-oriented protocol is what you want for the information transfer between a dynamic client and server, not HTTP.
Are you talking about the Social Security that will inevitably bankrupt the country within the next 50 years because it's a pyramid scheme, causing a depression that will make the 30's look like a boom?
Slashdot Mirror
In the near future, such networks will be used to adapt games like Tomb Raider while they are played (e.g. by removing or adding puzzles and enemies), so you get the game you want."
Awesome! In my case, I think it would be hilarious to watch Tomb Raider slowly morph into Starcraft.
It's a bit disingenuous to say that the FSF doesn't care what license you use, when clearly, they care very much.
Your link isn't a page of recommended licenses, by the way, it's a list of licenses with comments on their compatibility with the GPL.
The FSF has an agenda, and are willing to use threat of legal force to advance it. You may like their goals and there's nothing illegal about what they do, but any attempt to frame them as something different is not quite accurate.
RMS goes further than even that. Not only do they consider a program designed to link against a library that doesn't use the GPL infringing, they consider a program that links against a GPL library in addition to other, compatible libraries an infingement.
Which means that if your program CAN work with a GPL library, the FSF considers it it's property, even if another compatible library exists. This is tantamount to copyrighting ideas, which is what I thought we were trying to prevent in the first place.
I don't understand how this makes FSF software more "free" than Microsoft's code, other than that the FSF doesn't charge you a fee. The essential message for both is "you may only use our software only if you agree with our EULA."
Similar to Microsoft, the FSF goal is to create a base of software so large and pervasive that you can't help but accept the GPL or have your project be marginalized. This is ostensibly done so that software is "free."
And that's fine for them, but what is this really going to accomplish? If the FSF were to succeed, any company that wanted to write proprietary software would not be able to do so and charge for it (reasonably, forking would be rampant) on open-source systems. There are substantial realms of software that will only ever exist with this incentive to produce it, because writing it and then supporting it is hard, unenjoyable work. So the only platform that these packages will exist on is a closed source one like Windows.
What the FSF is doing, in effect, is ensuring there will always be two software stacks that are wholly incompatible: a proprietary one where you have no ability to change anything but is the only one that runs that one proprietary application that you absolutely need; and an open source one where everything's great until you need that one application that nobody wants to write.
This ensures that free software will always be marginalized because keeping Windows around is the only way to ensure that those proprietary software companies continue to write the software nobody else wants to without a financial incentive.
It's almost as if the FSF is acting contrary to their stated goals by not thinking beyond the immediate effects of their actions, or at least ignoring the reality that there is software that people want but that nobody wants to write for no profit.
Anyway, I guess I believe more in karma, and that changing a culture through legal means like RMS is trying to do is much more difficult than changing it through example.
Who guarantees that Chevy will still exist then?
They might as well swing for the fences and guarantee everything for the lifetime of the original purchaser.
you don't make any use of GPL'd components if you're not prepared to put everything under GPL, that is the intent of the license
That's exactly right. Anyone who says differently, especially after reading the Clisp exchange, is deluding themselves.
That might be what you want (yay GPL), but if you're not thrilled about the GPL, you probably shouldn't be using any GPL software in your project, or you'll run into these issues. Take heed, original poster.
It's why I prefer the BSD license; I don't want my hobby to result in me talking to a lawyer.
The AUD steady at 0.84 USD
Is this really something to brag about? The US is printing dollars like they're going out of style and the real value is plummeting.
Australia is not immune to the eventual financial catastrophe when the US's bills come due.
If you read the exchange, you'll see exactly what happened. It's not a nasty exchange, and not a matter of someone "deserving what they got."
The Clisp authors wanted to link to readline in addition to other libraries, giving the user a choice as to what library to use at compile time. RMS in effect tells the Clisp authors that since they use an interface designed to link to readline in their application, it's a derivative work, regardless of whether the user chooses to link to readline or not.
But in the exchange RMS very clearly states his view of the legal matters behind the GPL, and in my opinion his views are ridiculous. But it's important even if you disagree to understand what RMS thinks "linking" and "derivative work" mean, and he spells it out right here in no uncertain terms.
Link
You just described exactly what happened to Clisp, and it's why I'm not a fan of the GPL, favoring the BSD license.
If anyone doesn't understand this issue, I'd encourage you to do a search for clisp and gpl and read the email exchange between RMS and clisp's authors. The idea that a lisp programming language is a "derivative work" of readline, as if people are only going to use clisp because it uses readline, is asinine to me, especially if there are alternate versions of readline and it's dynamically linked.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't still support the GPL if you so choose, but I don't think many GPL fans are aware of the implications of the linking and derivative work part of it.
Of course, on the other hand, how would you feel about an organization that picks specific people to breed in order to create children with the desired traits so that those children could be sold to the highest bidders?
If they picked me, I'd be fine with it.
Zerg for me also. Huh.
More accurately, it's like watching baseball.
Causation does not mean correlation.
I'm going through the mental contortions right now trying to think of a way that this sentence could be correct.
I'm coming up short.
And where can I get a spoiler for either?
This is a quintessential military approach to a problem:
"We're spending way too much time and money on [stupid thing]."
"Well, we have a new process that will allow us to do [stupid thing] much faster!"
"Great!"
Examples abound. A perfect one is the primary mode of communication on ships is radio, even though the networks (i.e. chat) are far faster and more reliable. We'll spend hours troubleshooting radios over chat in order to pass voice messages over radio. Then we'll chat again to confirm that the recipient actually received the radio message properly.
...by reducing the amount of bureaucracy.
But realistically that will never happen, so maybe clippy can help us pass the buck down to the few remaining low-ranking folks who actually work.
"There are no solutions, only trade-offs." - Thomas Sowell
Nothing is perfectly safe; everything involves risk and negative outcomes. There are plenty of negative consequences of using pure solar energy, not the least of which is the impact of manufacturing the tools to harness it.
"It has less change of a meltdown, but if that meltdown occurs, and it will, it's no difference from chernobyle, except this one wil be bigger"
Evidence? Support? Simply saying something is true doesn't make it so.
Taking this a bit further; there had to be a de-facto standard for home computers before they were adopted by the masses. Just like Blu-ray and HD-DVD can't co-exist, and Beta and VHS before that, etc. The majority of people won't participate until there's a clear winner.
Gates was lucky to be there at the right time on the right platform, and his ruthlessness ensured that Microsoft would be a standard. If it weren't him, it would have been someone else.
But until that happened, there wasn't the same relentless drive for faster, better, cheaper computers that we take for granted today. The Commodore 64 was popular for years with identical hardware. The scale of the market didn't support constant research and development of faster consumer hardware.
Even if there's no other reason to like Microsoft, just be thankful it wasn't Apple that become the standard. It could have been a lot worse.
I read the FAQ and I can't shake the feeling that C++0x is a joke that someone's taken way too far.
It's kind of like how I believe pop icons like Britney Spears are famous because of music industry execs betting they can make anybody famous and then trying to one-up each other when it works.
Anyway, my favorite part:
"Try to imagine what the superset of C99, C#, Java, Haskell, Lisp, Python, and Ada would look like."
I imagine it would look very similar to Common Lisp.
Don't be surprised; the reason you don't hear it is because that line of argument against Windows is silly and illogical.
The IBM-compatible PC is about as open as you get. If you don't want to use Windows, nothing is stopping you from writing your own OS (Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, QNX, Mac OS X, etc.) It's not prohibitively expensive, requires no government sponsorship, and it's not even that difficult. All the documentation you'd ever need is free from Intel's web site, or you can order a hard copy from them.
What Microsoft does with Windows is largely irrelevant. It's annoying when you have to use it at work or school, but irrelevant to your freedom as a citizen and your freedom to do what you please with the hardware you bought.
Same thing with the iPhone. I can buy a different phone and write software for it to my heart's content. What Apple does with their hardware and phone is irrelevant because I'm not forced to pay for it.
Problems only start when organizations attempt to coerce me by force to pay for something that I otherwise wouldn't have. The whole MS DRM/Palladium debacle was a concern because it had the potential to close off an entire network funded by taxpayer dollars with the expectation that it would be an open system.
Apple and others can do whatever they want with the infrastructure they've paid for. It's only when they try to do something to the infrastructure I paid for that I have a problem.
The word "scientist" is ridiculously broad. Who are these people to which the media constantly refers? And who gives a shit what "scientists" think about politics?
I'd like to know what economists think about politics, including facts and historical data to back their opinions up. But I guess that would take ACTUAL research, which is harder than calling 1000 people and asking them 10 questions each.
Well, let me be the first to say that nothing is truly "free," and this isn't "free" wireless; it's wireless that is paid for through hidden costs (taxes) that Venicians probably did not have a choice but to bear. Adding an intermediary between you and the service provider of nearly any industry can only mean higher costs, because for every intermediate step there's overhead.
For something as relatively inexpensive as providing wireless access points, the penalty is innocuous for believing you can get something for nothing. Believe that about health care, and the penalty can be rather severe.
Thus the difference in response.
It's a kludge because applications are written to seem like they are based on a constant connection, when in reality, because of HTTP, the connection is set up and broken quite often relative to how long the application is used.
There are numerous security problems with this model, in addition to the overhead associated with guaranteeing the server "remembers" the client between connections.
The browser and JavaScript and HTML/XML documents are quite close to being a really good application platform, but a stateful, connection-oriented protocol is what you want for the information transfer between a dynamic client and server, not HTTP.
This sounds like it might make playing as a group from behind a household NAT router much more difficult, no? There at least will be a speed penalty.
That takes a lot of the fun out of it for me.
Are you talking about the Social Security that will inevitably bankrupt the country within the next 50 years because it's a pyramid scheme, causing a depression that will make the 30's look like a boom?
Yes! Let's have more of that!
You assume these people exist, so what happens when the pay for being a doctor is lower such that fewer people find it worthwhile to become doctors?
Obviously, fewer people will become doctors, by your own admission.
Now you have a shortage of doctors even worse than we have now. What is your answer for that problem?