I said: "Just like anti-religious bigots try to outlaw public worship and evangelism."
Afecks said: "That's never happened."
I said: "Child Evangelism Fellowship of San Fernando Valley v. Los Angeles Unified School District"
Afecks said: "free access to school facilities != praying"
I say: "Praying != public worship and evangelism"
I think I proved my point - anti-religious bigots do indeed try to outlaw public worship and evangelism.
If you suddenly want to change the topic to outlawing private prayer, feel free. It would make for a very unenforceable law, though, and it's certainly not what I claimed.
if a raging horde of people comes to my front door trying to kill me I'm allowed to push my "Virgin daughters" at them for them do what they want with, if they'll leave me alone?
RTFB. Try Genesis 19.
s/kill me/rape two men staying with me/
s/allowed to/will be condemned for trying to/
s/push/pull/
s/Virgin daughters/incestuous daughters/
s/leave me alone/leave my guests alone/
And you're hardly supposed to pattern your life after Lot - it's his Uncle Abraham that Christians (and Jews and Muslims) consider a (flawed but generally positive) role model. A Bible scholar you are not, sir!
If you have a source to prove me wrong then let's see it.
What's this, Be Easy On Me day? OK, I'll limit it to just one. If you want more, I got a folder full...
Child Evangelism Fellowship of San Fernando Valley v. Los Angeles Unified School District
This case involves important issues regarding 4 the elimination of discrimination in public schools and public facilities on the basis 5 of religion. Plaintiffs allege, inter alia, that Defendants discriminated against 6 Plaintiffs' religious beliefs by refusing to allow them free access to school facilities 7 even though Defendants permit secular organizations whose speech concerns the 8 same subject matter as the Plaintiffs' free access to school facilities.
Um, what abour Mac OS X? You know, that "other" OS with a higher market share than Linux?
Uh, huh. Linux 3.9%, Mac 4.2%, Windows 88.0%, something like that?
I'd like to live in a world of Linux 34%, Mac 33%, and Windows 33% (or some similar distribution that included Haiku, ReactOS, Gnu/Hurd, et. al.). Each person would choose their OS based on its ability to meet their needs, and all but the most performance-driven application developers would write portable applications.
Now let's all join hands, sing Kum Ba Yah, and buy the world a Coke...:-/
Are they good to their customers? Well, they give them what they pay for."
Not. I paid good money for my daughter's new full copy of XP, and they won't even allow her the updates and support she was promised (except for that most critical^H^H^H desperate of all updates, IE7, which she ignores thanks to Firefox). And my wife's new laptop included a copy of XP Home, which is so bad it's rarely used (thank Mark for Ubuntu!).
They are good at pressuring PC vendors to install only their products. They are good at supporting 3rd party developers to ensure many new applications are Windows only.
But giving customers what they want? Well, not this customer!
the best course is to have nothing to do with Microsoft or its products and get on with life
Well, I do that, sure. But my employer insists on Windows because of "corporate policy", and my kids for the games. But one day... one day...
@AC: "When the Mac first came out, it was dismissed as "a game machine"."
The Atari ST and Commodore Amiga were both dismissed as "game machines". The Mac was dismissed as a "desktop publishing machine". You needed a scorecard to keep the insults straight. Sure glad that's changed!:-)
@llgaz: "No, nothing can be obsolete on open industry standards like OpenGL. At last resort, your OpenGL layer would "software render" the OpenGL 3 content instead of telling GPU to draw it."
Yes, well I remember setting up my first Linux install on an old and ludicrously underpowered machine, and immediately launching (naturally) TuxRacer.
First image: Tux happily sitting on sled at top of hill.
Second image (10 seconds later): Tux careening wildly out of control down the hill.
Third image (10 seconds later): Tux's terror-striken face as he flails through the air toward a stand of trees.
@Cordath: "Now, which of these things" (TV violence or porn) "have the bible thumpers made their top priority?"
Well, both, actually. Violence on over-the-air TV has been a major target of religious organizations since the medium graduated from geekdom to mainstream.
People (religious or not) who are offended by violence, public displays of sexuality, and non-normative language have always attempted to drive such behavior out of the public eye and into "red light districts" and alternate media.
Just like anti-religious bigots try to outlaw public worship and evangelism.:-)
All I hear is whining out of people about this topic. If they really want to learn Vista they should install it themselves. These people really need to know what a bitch it is to find Vista drivers for some devices instead of having it all done for them. Especially existing hardware!
@dybdahl: "Ubuntu is still far behind Microsoft Windows, when it comes to Windows compatibility."
You get modded "Interesting" for "A thoroughbred racehorse is still far behind a hamster, when it comes to being a hamster"??? Oh my, how the yardstick has shortened!
I would counter that Ubuntu is much, much closer to Windows compatibility than Windows is to Ubuntu compatibility. It's true that Microsoft's barely trying, but at least my assertion isn't a tautology!:-)
@jotok: "...when Ubuntu breaks you have to go to the Ubuntu forums and beg for help."
Or you purchase a service contract from Canonical - exactly as you would from Red Hat. The actual differentiators are likely to be price, and quality of enterprise management tools.
Linspire (back in the day - I've been on Ubuntu for quite a while now) worked this way. IIRC you had to hold down a key to rescan for hardware, otherwise it assumed nothing changed and booted very briskly. I'm surprised it didn't catch on with more popular distros.
Ubuntu seems to attract the newbies... Fedora seems to attract the users who have been using Linux for a long while...
Mebbe. Personally, I soured on Mandriva and Fedora because of "RPM Hell" experiences, and while looking for an alternative discovered that Ubuntu's package manager just works.
This is not to say the former haven't fixed RPM dependency problems by now - they may have. But I had a reason back then to try Ubuntu, and I don't have a reason today to try Mandriva or Fedora. Well, not yet.;-)
I did my EE senior project (in 1984) on an Atari 800 with 48k of RAM (took 3 cards to hold all those memory chips!) and a floppy disk drive that wrote 88k per disk (unless you used the "hole punch trick", in which case it was a "flippy" and could hold 176k:-).
For the project, I designed and built a processor from discrete TTL gates (!), and used the Atari to write its operating system as well as a processor simulator to debug it. All this in Atari 8k BASIC.
And I got an A, too.:-):-)
Better yet, as a cooperative education student with NASA, I was actually paid to write a general aviation flight simulator cockpit on the Atari (in raw assembler), and was flown to Oshkosh to present it at the Experimental Aircraft Association convention. I still remember the Apple II and Commodore 64 fans who were determined to argue that their computers were better for flying an airplane than an Atari.
Crazy kids, we were. But I've never understood every bit in every register in any computer since then.
His attempts to market this to farmers in the United States, however, were thwarted by the low cost of labor. He told me "Why would someone spend $150,000 on a system like mine when they can just hire some Mexicans?" It was hard to argue with that logic.
Or maybe we looked at him oddly because we were already highly automated?
My cousin put her three daughters through college (back in the day) by buying an acre of land down the road from her home in Mississippi, and putting up a VERY long building - workroom in the middle, with a football field long chicken coop on either side. The egg company trucks arrived a few days after it was inspected and approved, and FILLED those coops with chickens. I have a photo somewhere looking from the workroom into the door of one of the coops - solid wall of chickens over a slat floor (for obvious reasons), with roosts up high over a mechanical conveyor belt.
Early each morning, she and the girls would walk to the workroom and turn on each conveyor belt in turn (her husband was already at his day job by then). Then they'd load the eggs into boxes, separating the double-yokes, of course. I had the opportunity to do this with them once, for "fun". The eggs came fast and furious when they worked, because they didn't waste time on the scales - they could "size" the eggs by looking. I wasn't that bright. After a couple of hours they were done with loading eggs, so they'd refill the automatic food hoppers and head home for breakfast.
Every couple of days her husband would "walk the coops" after work to remove sick or dead chickens. She tried it once, but when she tried to wring the neck of a sick chicken, the head came off in her hands and she emerged in tears. After that, her husband had THAT job to himself.
Once the chickens were well past their egg laying prime, the trucks returned and carried them away for slaughter. Then came the profit - the slats were removed from the floors, and front-loaders filled dump trucks FULL of (ahem) fertilizer, pure aromatic gold. Once that was carted off and the money banked, the coops were pressure washed and allowed to air out for a few weeks while the family recovered. Then came more chicken trucks...
All this automation, and not an illegal immigrant in sight. In fact, ALL of the farms around where I grew up were highly automated, with (at most) one hired hand to help oversee the machines - and that was many hairs ago. Maybe vineyards in California have had more challenges automating (grapes are quite outside my experience) and need flame-throwing robots, but the soybeans, cotton and animal farms in Mississippi have been highly automated with straight mechanical devices since I was a child.
The girls have long since graduated college and moved on with their lives, but the coop still stands as a monument to automation and the value of well-seasoned chicken droppings.
Your "free to be proprietary" arguments don't sway me because I don't value proprietary software. I value freedom, and thus the GPL's "forever free" approach is far preferable to me.
The developers of the software I choose to use daily - Linux, Gnome and its family of apps, Firefox, Thunderbird, Open Office.org, Java, etc. etc. - have overwhelmingly chosen "forever free" over "free to be proprietary" licenses, so I suspect I'm not as unique as you claim.
Thanks for the discussion, and best wishes on the road ahead.
In practice, there are few if any products that have the momentum behind them that their end-users will have a variety of support sources.
That's incredibly naive. I have modified source of several free projects for independent contractors I know, and I'm hardly a household name. My company has used work-for-hire developers to fix bugs and add enhancements to free software for internal use. You seem to be limiting "support services" to only proprietary-style professional companies that advertise those services in the Wall Street Journal. Open your eyes, my friend - custom modification of free software is ubiquitous. Custom modification for BSD-taken-proprietary is... limited to the company that released the product.
Have you checked SourceForge lately? The amount of abandoned or stillborn projects is staggering.
The number of projects period is astounding. Some of them are incredibly useful; most aren't, because SourceForge is free. Exactly like SlashDot and posts.:-)
By restricting the developer(s), the GPL restricts the user down the line.
Close. By restricting the developer(s), the GPL restricts the developer down the line - particularly, from taking free code and making it non-free, thus limiting what users can do. The GPL places no restrictions an an end-user whatsoever.
The GPL has more restrictions within it than the BSD license, period. The developer is freer to do what he wishes with his project when using the BSD license. The GPL hinders those choices and also makes the developer do more work.
Precisely my argument. BSD license frees the developer to use the code for more projects - specifically, proprietary projects. But proprietary projects limit the freedom of end-users - they cannot fix bugs, or further reuse the code. GPL protects the user's freedoms by ensuring that free code remains free.
You clearly care about the developers, and there's nothing wrong with that. But I care more for the users than the developers, and thus will continue to prefer code that frees end-users.
Actually the GPL is less Free for both end-users and developers.
Nope. Every license "dictates the possibility and type of interface between Free and non-Free software" - it's the nature of a license. Nor does the GPL limit how end-users use such licensed software to implement "potential solutions" in any way, shape or form - in fact, it specifically disclaims any such constraints on the part of end-users. Re-read the GPL - I'll wait. AFAICT, all constraints are on the developer, with none on the end-user. I suspect you're confusing the two (hint: Apple is not an "end-user").
And Apple has some nice software, but it is not released under a BSD license. Try adding it to your own proprietary product, and watch the lawyers go into a frenzy! Not much freedom there.
Allowing developers to improve a package without sharing the improvements also hurts the end-user by limiting the rate of overall improvement in software, and by potentially preventing the end-user from obtaining support from a different source (how many vendors can patch that OS X kernel? I'll wait while you count... Oooonnnneee. Right!). Very much "less free". And as a side "benefit", the rate of improvement for the software is dampened by duplication of effort and reduced collaboration. (How much of Mac OS X has migrated back into *BSD? Not much.)
The GPL has been a huge boon to end-users in both quantity and quality of products - as this particular one has noticed and appreciated over many years. Have you noticed how many GPL'd packages have been ported to Windows? How about that nice Mac interface? Hmmmm.
I have nothing against BSD, it looks like a pretty nice system. And Apple certainly has some nice, very proprietary software. But to claim it is "more free" for end users than any GPL system is simply disingenuous.
Not to quibble, but the price of Linux isn't really free as in beer, nor free as in speech.
Well, we'll probably have to agree to disagree on this point (though flame wars are such fun).
I believe the GPL is "more free" as in speech, because it protects the freedom of end users. My guess is that you consider BSD "more free" as in speech because it give more freedom to developers, even if those developers are building non-free products. Since I care more about end users, I release all of my projects under GPL. C'est la vie.
I have no idea how you would claim that Gnu/Linux costs money. My Ubuntu distribution cost me nothing to download, required no special hardware, and if anything is much easier and more efficient to use for the tasks I do everyday than Windows XP (haven't used Vista or a recent Mac). I suffer through many more "hours spent learning arcane and useless trivia" to keep XP running than I ever do with Linux, which I find much more logical and less bloated. But my guess is that you find a brown "Applications" menu at the top of your screen hopelessly confusing compared to a green "Start" menu at the bottom of your screen, and thus consider Linux "too hard" for "normal" people to understand. My grandmother would disagree, but again, c'est la vie.
Well, it's nice, I suppose, but I don't believe this is a compelling "feature" in the grand scheme of operating system history.
it will install and run on every one of its supported architectures from one DVD
OS X runs on what, 3 architectures? Impressive. Linux runs on over 50 architectureshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel_portabil ity_and_supported_architectures, and I can choose from hundreds of different distributions tailored for various market niches. Why in the world would I want to pack all of those architectures and distros onto a single DVD? Think of the wasted bandwidth when I download my free copy!
Now, if you want to count support for existing peripherals and chip sets... well, that hypothetical "universal Linux DVD" is starting to look quite crowded.
The reason Apple can do this is because OS X is limited to a few architectures and a single "take it or leave it" distribution. Choice is a virtue, not a flaw. Try it sometime!
BTW, does OS X boot into the OS directly from the install DVD so I can test it live, then install in the background with a single click during which I can continue working? Honest question, I don't have a Mac, but "the world's most popular Unixalike" does. That's a feature worth touting, IMHO.
Mac OS X will serve everyone with one price
The price of my OS is "free", as in beer as well as in speech. Yours? That's another feature worth touting, IMHO.
I like OS X and all from what I've seen, very clean and nicely presented. Mac OS X has some good features going for it, but if having all of its rather severely limited architecture and peripheral support on a single DVD is the best you can crow about, you need to crow very quietly indeed.
Re:The GPL: Intellectual Theft
on
GPLv2 Vs. GPLv3
·
· Score: 1
So you took code representing tens of thousands of hours of other people's work, made a few tweaks, and now want to sell it back to them as if you did all the work yourself?
And you didn't check with the copyright owners to see if they would permit this?
> I bet we would agree that having the Supreme Court rule correctly about when human life begins would be a good thing.
First, it is Roe v Wade, not Rowe.
Second, not on your life! I believe in democracy and freedom, not dictated law by appointed-for-life jurists with delusions of godhood. The tragedy of Roe v Wade was that it took a politically contentious issue out of the public arena, where debate and compromise have worked so well on so many similarly divisive issues, and replaced it with a "because we said so" legal ruling.
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I said: "Just like anti-religious bigots try to outlaw public worship and evangelism."
Afecks said: "That's never happened."
I said: "Child Evangelism Fellowship of San Fernando Valley v. Los Angeles Unified School District"
Afecks said: "free access to school facilities != praying"
I say: "Praying != public worship and evangelism"
I think I proved my point - anti-religious bigots do indeed try to outlaw public worship and evangelism.
If you suddenly want to change the topic to outlawing private prayer, feel free. It would make for a very unenforceable law, though, and it's certainly not what I claimed.
RTFB. Try Genesis 19.
And you're hardly supposed to pattern your life after Lot - it's his Uncle Abraham that Christians (and Jews and Muslims) consider a (flawed but generally positive) role model. A Bible scholar you are not, sir!
What's this, Be Easy On Me day? OK, I'll limit it to just one. If you want more, I got a folder full...
Child Evangelism Fellowship of San Fernando Valley v. Los Angeles Unified School District
Uh, huh. Linux 3.9%, Mac 4.2%, Windows 88.0%, something like that?
I'd like to live in a world of Linux 34%, Mac 33%, and Windows 33% (or some similar distribution that included Haiku, ReactOS, Gnu/Hurd, et. al.). Each person would choose their OS based on its ability to meet their needs, and all but the most performance-driven application developers would write portable applications.
Now let's all join hands, sing Kum Ba Yah, and buy the world a Coke... :-/
Not. I paid good money for my daughter's new full copy of XP, and they won't even allow her the updates and support she was promised (except for that most critical^H^H^H desperate of all updates, IE7, which she ignores thanks to Firefox). And my wife's new laptop included a copy of XP Home, which is so bad it's rarely used (thank Mark for Ubuntu!).
They are good at pressuring PC vendors to install only their products. They are good at supporting 3rd party developers to ensure many new applications are Windows only.
But giving customers what they want? Well, not this customer!
Well, I do that, sure. But my employer insists on Windows because of "corporate policy", and my kids for the games. But one day... one day...
@AC: "When the Mac first came out, it was dismissed as "a game machine"."
The Atari ST and Commodore Amiga were both dismissed as "game machines". The Mac was dismissed as a "desktop publishing machine". You needed a scorecard to keep the insults straight. Sure glad that's changed! :-)
@llgaz: "No, nothing can be obsolete on open industry standards like OpenGL. At last resort, your OpenGL layer would "software render" the OpenGL 3 content instead of telling GPU to draw it."
Yes, well I remember setting up my first Linux install on an old and ludicrously underpowered machine, and immediately launching (naturally) TuxRacer.
First image: Tux happily sitting on sled at top of hill.
Second image (10 seconds later): Tux careening wildly out of control down the hill.
Third image (10 seconds later): Tux's terror-striken face as he flails through the air toward a stand of trees.
Fourth image (10 seconds later): "Game over."
@Cordath: "Now, which of these things" (TV violence or porn) "have the bible thumpers made their top priority?"
Well, both, actually. Violence on over-the-air TV has been a major target of religious organizations since the medium graduated from geekdom to mainstream.
People (religious or not) who are offended by violence, public displays of sexuality, and non-normative language have always attempted to drive such behavior out of the public eye and into "red light districts" and alternate media.
Just like anti-religious bigots try to outlaw public worship and evangelism. :-)
Future reference, so do glasses. They can be designed to block certain wavelengths, though - hence, safety glasses, er, contacts.
All I hear is whining out of people about this topic. If they really want to learn Vista they should install it themselves. These people really need to know what a bitch it is to find Vista drivers for some devices instead of having it all done for them. Especially existing hardware!
There, fixed it for ya.
@dybdahl: "Ubuntu is still far behind Microsoft Windows, when it comes to Windows compatibility."
You get modded "Interesting" for "A thoroughbred racehorse is still far behind a hamster, when it comes to being a hamster"??? Oh my, how the yardstick has shortened!
I would counter that Ubuntu is much, much closer to Windows compatibility than Windows is to Ubuntu compatibility. It's true that Microsoft's barely trying, but at least my assertion isn't a tautology! :-)
@jotok: "...when Ubuntu breaks you have to go to the Ubuntu forums and beg for help."
Or you purchase a service contract from Canonical - exactly as you would from Red Hat. The actual differentiators are likely to be price, and quality of enterprise management tools.
Ah, thanks for the insight. Suse is a solid technical product. Even though it's part of Novell now, a little home-grown pride is certainly warranted.
This one's very interesting, too. Ubuntu has even overcome Suse in Germany. That's like the French suddenly preferring California wine. ;-)
http://google.com/trends?q=suse%2Cfedora%2Cubuntu% 2Credhat%2Cgentoo&ctab=0&geo=DE&date=all&sort=2
Linspire (back in the day - I've been on Ubuntu for quite a while now) worked this way. IIRC you had to hold down a key to rescan for hardware, otherwise it assumed nothing changed and booted very briskly. I'm surprised it didn't catch on with more popular distros.
Also, I thought http://www.linuxbios.org/Welcome_to_LinuxBIOS would get through POST and to the payload in just a couple of seconds.
Mebbe. Personally, I soured on Mandriva and Fedora because of "RPM Hell" experiences, and while looking for an alternative discovered that Ubuntu's package manager just works.
This is not to say the former haven't fixed RPM dependency problems by now - they may have. But I had a reason back then to try Ubuntu, and I don't have a reason today to try Mandriva or Fedora. Well, not yet. ;-)
I did my EE senior project (in 1984) on an Atari 800 with 48k of RAM (took 3 cards to hold all those memory chips!) and a floppy disk drive that wrote 88k per disk (unless you used the "hole punch trick", in which case it was a "flippy" and could hold 176k :-).
For the project, I designed and built a processor from discrete TTL gates (!), and used the Atari to write its operating system as well as a processor simulator to debug it. All this in Atari 8k BASIC.
And I got an A, too. :-) :-)
Better yet, as a cooperative education student with NASA, I was actually paid to write a general aviation flight simulator cockpit on the Atari (in raw assembler), and was flown to Oshkosh to present it at the Experimental Aircraft Association convention. I still remember the Apple II and Commodore 64 fans who were determined to argue that their computers were better for flying an airplane than an Atari.
Crazy kids, we were. But I've never understood every bit in every register in any computer since then.
Or maybe we looked at him oddly because we were already highly automated?
My cousin put her three daughters through college (back in the day) by buying an acre of land down the road from her home in Mississippi, and putting up a VERY long building - workroom in the middle, with a football field long chicken coop on either side. The egg company trucks arrived a few days after it was inspected and approved, and FILLED those coops with chickens. I have a photo somewhere looking from the workroom into the door of one of the coops - solid wall of chickens over a slat floor (for obvious reasons), with roosts up high over a mechanical conveyor belt.
Early each morning, she and the girls would walk to the workroom and turn on each conveyor belt in turn (her husband was already at his day job by then). Then they'd load the eggs into boxes, separating the double-yokes, of course. I had the opportunity to do this with them once, for "fun". The eggs came fast and furious when they worked, because they didn't waste time on the scales - they could "size" the eggs by looking. I wasn't that bright. After a couple of hours they were done with loading eggs, so they'd refill the automatic food hoppers and head home for breakfast.
Every couple of days her husband would "walk the coops" after work to remove sick or dead chickens. She tried it once, but when she tried to wring the neck of a sick chicken, the head came off in her hands and she emerged in tears. After that, her husband had THAT job to himself.
Once the chickens were well past their egg laying prime, the trucks returned and carried them away for slaughter. Then came the profit - the slats were removed from the floors, and front-loaders filled dump trucks FULL of (ahem) fertilizer, pure aromatic gold. Once that was carted off and the money banked, the coops were pressure washed and allowed to air out for a few weeks while the family recovered. Then came more chicken trucks...
All this automation, and not an illegal immigrant in sight. In fact, ALL of the farms around where I grew up were highly automated, with (at most) one hired hand to help oversee the machines - and that was many hairs ago. Maybe vineyards in California have had more challenges automating (grapes are quite outside my experience) and need flame-throwing robots, but the soybeans, cotton and animal farms in Mississippi have been highly automated with straight mechanical devices since I was a child.
The girls have long since graduated college and moved on with their lives, but the coop still stands as a monument to automation and the value of well-seasoned chicken droppings.
Your "free to be proprietary" arguments don't sway me because I don't value proprietary software. I value freedom, and thus the GPL's "forever free" approach is far preferable to me.
The developers of the software I choose to use daily - Linux, Gnome and its family of apps, Firefox, Thunderbird, Open Office.org, Java, etc. etc. - have overwhelmingly chosen "forever free" over "free to be proprietary" licenses, so I suspect I'm not as unique as you claim.
Thanks for the discussion, and best wishes on the road ahead.
That's incredibly naive. I have modified source of several free projects for independent contractors I know, and I'm hardly a household name. My company has used work-for-hire developers to fix bugs and add enhancements to free software for internal use. You seem to be limiting "support services" to only proprietary-style professional companies that advertise those services in the Wall Street Journal. Open your eyes, my friend - custom modification of free software is ubiquitous. Custom modification for BSD-taken-proprietary is... limited to the company that released the product.
The number of projects period is astounding. Some of them are incredibly useful; most aren't, because SourceForge is free. Exactly like SlashDot and posts. :-)
Close. By restricting the developer(s), the GPL restricts the developer down the line - particularly, from taking free code and making it non-free, thus limiting what users can do. The GPL places no restrictions an an end-user whatsoever.
Precisely my argument. BSD license frees the developer to use the code for more projects - specifically, proprietary projects. But proprietary projects limit the freedom of end-users - they cannot fix bugs, or further reuse the code. GPL protects the user's freedoms by ensuring that free code remains free.
You clearly care about the developers, and there's nothing wrong with that. But I care more for the users than the developers, and thus will continue to prefer code that frees end-users.
Nope. Every license "dictates the possibility and type of interface between Free and non-Free software" - it's the nature of a license. Nor does the GPL limit how end-users use such licensed software to implement "potential solutions" in any way, shape or form - in fact, it specifically disclaims any such constraints on the part of end-users. Re-read the GPL - I'll wait. AFAICT, all constraints are on the developer, with none on the end-user. I suspect you're confusing the two (hint: Apple is not an "end-user").
And Apple has some nice software, but it is not released under a BSD license. Try adding it to your own proprietary product, and watch the lawyers go into a frenzy! Not much freedom there.
Allowing developers to improve a package without sharing the improvements also hurts the end-user by limiting the rate of overall improvement in software, and by potentially preventing the end-user from obtaining support from a different source (how many vendors can patch that OS X kernel? I'll wait while you count... Oooonnnneee. Right!). Very much "less free". And as a side "benefit", the rate of improvement for the software is dampened by duplication of effort and reduced collaboration. (How much of Mac OS X has migrated back into *BSD? Not much.)
The GPL has been a huge boon to end-users in both quantity and quality of products - as this particular one has noticed and appreciated over many years. Have you noticed how many GPL'd packages have been ported to Windows? How about that nice Mac interface? Hmmmm.
I have nothing against BSD, it looks like a pretty nice system. And Apple certainly has some nice, very proprietary software. But to claim it is "more free" for end users than any GPL system is simply disingenuous.Well, we'll probably have to agree to disagree on this point (though flame wars are such fun).
I believe the GPL is "more free" as in speech, because it protects the freedom of end users. My guess is that you consider BSD "more free" as in speech because it give more freedom to developers, even if those developers are building non-free products. Since I care more about end users, I release all of my projects under GPL. C'est la vie.
I have no idea how you would claim that Gnu/Linux costs money. My Ubuntu distribution cost me nothing to download, required no special hardware, and if anything is much easier and more efficient to use for the tasks I do everyday than Windows XP (haven't used Vista or a recent Mac). I suffer through many more "hours spent learning arcane and useless trivia" to keep XP running than I ever do with Linux, which I find much more logical and less bloated. But my guess is that you find a brown "Applications" menu at the top of your screen hopelessly confusing compared to a green "Start" menu at the bottom of your screen, and thus consider Linux "too hard" for "normal" people to understand. My grandmother would disagree, but again, c'est la vie.
If my guesses are wrong, feel free to elaborate.
Hmmpth. No drubbing from me on your karma! :-)
Well, it's nice, I suppose, but I don't believe this is a compelling "feature" in the grand scheme of operating system history.
OS X runs on what, 3 architectures? Impressive. Linux runs on over 50 architectures http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel_portabil ity_and_supported_architectures, and I can choose from hundreds of different distributions tailored for various market niches. Why in the world would I want to pack all of those architectures and distros onto a single DVD? Think of the wasted bandwidth when I download my free copy!
Now, if you want to count support for existing peripherals and chip sets... well, that hypothetical "universal Linux DVD" is starting to look quite crowded.
The reason Apple can do this is because OS X is limited to a few architectures and a single "take it or leave it" distribution. Choice is a virtue, not a flaw. Try it sometime!
BTW, does OS X boot into the OS directly from the install DVD so I can test it live, then install in the background with a single click during which I can continue working? Honest question, I don't have a Mac, but "the world's most popular Unixalike" does. That's a feature worth touting, IMHO.
The price of my OS is "free", as in beer as well as in speech. Yours? That's another feature worth touting, IMHO.
I like OS X and all from what I've seen, very clean and nicely presented. Mac OS X has some good features going for it, but if having all of its rather severely limited architecture and peripheral support on a single DVD is the best you can crow about, you need to crow very quietly indeed.
So you took code representing tens of thousands of hours of other people's work, made a few tweaks, and now want to sell it back to them as if you did all the work yourself?
And you didn't check with the copyright owners to see if they would permit this?
Dude, you mean and stupid!
First, it is Roe v Wade, not Rowe.
Second, not on your life! I believe in democracy and freedom, not dictated law by appointed-for-life jurists with delusions of godhood. The tragedy of Roe v Wade was that it took a politically contentious issue out of the public arena, where debate and compromise have worked so well on so many similarly divisive issues, and replaced it with a "because we said so" legal ruling.