Well, the interesting thing, from the point of view of a social scientist is not that people are angry-- it's that they carry their real life behaviors into a fantasy world.
This always seemed to be obvious to me.
It's always the real world. That people are at a basketball court, or are communicating through a phone, or a computer network doesn't make them stop being people. Even if I don't know what is your real name, age, gender or appearance, I'm still talking to a human being.
Actually, it is. People play MMOs for the social interaction.
If you just want to kill stuff there's plenty single player games for that, where the computer sticks religiously by the rules and doesn't get offended at anything you do.
If you insist on comparing this with something real-world, imagine if you showed up on a basketball court to get a game and everyone was just standing around talking, but you just grabbed the ball and started doing layups.
I would bet your claim of a win wouldn't be accepted in such a case.
If in a formal competition, the opposing team suddenly decides to sit around and do nothing, sure, they're being stupid.
If however it's an informal gathering, and the two teams decided to have an impromptu break and chat with each other, I doubt very much that you standing under a basket and constantly scoring "because it's according to the rules" would be well received.
I never said you shouldn't be able to use GPL, I said GPL isn't true free software (true as in my definition.)
Ah, that's the semantics argument again, which as I said already I find very uninteresting and ultimately inconsequential.
There were lots of people some time ago arguing heatedly about whether Pluto is a planet or not. IMO, who cares? Whether it fits in some arbitrary category or not, the facts don't change: that there's a mass of rock of 10^22 kg, orbiting around the Sun in a determined orbit, it has some interesting characteristics and so on.
If there are astronomers with a particular interest in Pluto, I doubt very much any of those will suddenly go "Oh no, Pluto is not a planet, I can't be interested in it now", since whatever made it interesting for them hasn't changed. The only thing that has is some arbitrary category we use to classify stuff that floats in space.
So again. You don't think the GPL is true free software? Meh. I don't use the GPL because it's "free software" but because I agree with the terms, and those are facts that remain unchanged regardless of whether you classify it as "free software", "viral", "communism", or whatever.
No, I'm saying "Freedom means not imposing personal preferences on other people." I'm saying that GPL isn't true "freedom."
But you just brought up freedom of speech, and mentioned you can make rules about what people can say in your house.
I'm saying you're being inconsistent: According to your own definition of freedom of speech, it includes the ability for you to impose your personal preferences on other people. So is your idea of freedom of speech not free then, according to the concept of freedom above?
I don't believe a company "owes" us their source.
Who said anything about owing? It's an exchange. "You can have my code, if you contribute your changes". Nothing particularly strange there, those deals abound in the world. "You can have my apples for $1/kg", "You can have my programming expertise for $30/hour", "I'll help you move furniture if you help me with mine later", and so on.
There's no "owing", there's no obligation to accept. I simply present upfront my work, and the conditions under which I'll let you have it. You're completely free to ignore the offer, or to talk to me to see if I'm willing to negotiate terms you find more reasonable.
freedom means I can tell someone to watch their mouth when in my home; freedom means that the government does not impose rules, not that the individuals cannot impose rules.
So what's the problem with the GPL again? The government isn't doing it, I am, and you just said that it's fine for an individual to make their own rules in their home. So I'm making my own rules for my own software, so where's the difference?
GPL tells the individual that they cannot, ever, be opposed to free software; it is a binding contract that forces its view on the people. The government does not "force" freedom of speech, that would contradict itself.
Sure they can, in fact the GPL itself states that accepting it is completely optional. Without that, things fallback to standard copyright law though, which is even more restrictive. The GPL works in such a way that it's the one thing that gives you the right to redistribute the code. Without it you have copyright which doesn't.
For personal usage you might as well pretend it doesn't exist, because it only comes into play when you try to do something copyright wouldn't allow (distribution)
Although yes, I agree, GPL is fine and dandy in a lot of situations. I have some internal software for printing price sheets where I work, which I wrote using GPL software. Still, I don't like the fact I "can't" resell such tools without abiding by the GPL (not that I care, I wrote the program to make my own job easier.)
Your position seems inconsistent to me.
You're opposed to me placing restrictions on what you can do with my work. Ok, whether one agrees or not with that, it's a position that makes sense so far.
However you'd like to, and have no problems with taking my work and placing extra restrictions on it in order to sell it. I take it you want to place restrictions from your mention of abiding by the GPL being inconvenient; since the GPL doesn't forbid selling the software. But it does make it hard to make it profitable.
The former seems to be logically inconsistent with the later. You're saying something like "I don't think you should be able to restrict the usage of your own work; you should give me the book you wrote with absolutely no strings attached. However I want to sell it, and forbid it from being freely copied".
The way I see it there are only two consistent ways of handling it.
A. Authors have copyright, and it gives them the ability to impose restrictions on the usage of get their work. B. There's no such thing as copyright, the owner is the community/god/etc. Works are available to everybody, and nobody has a right to restrict them in any way.
Under the first option, the GPL is fine and dandy, under the second it's unnecessary and neither I or you will be selling the program.
That's an excellent point, but our disagreement is a bit more subtle than this; the difference in view is about whether or not developers should be free to modify and redistribute code under their own licensing, even if that licensing prevents others from doing the same. By nature of my views, of course I believe that is "wrong." However, I personally believe that making rules to prevent it is just as bad.
That's a pretty strange position to hold, since in most modern societies when something is considered unambigously wrong, it's outlawed, results in a fine, or is somehow discouraged.
Freedom of speech means I am free to bad-mouth freedom of speech, if you will; freedom of software means I can use software, modify it, and redistribute it as I see fit.
Does freedom of speech mean freedom to censor, though? Freedom of speech in the US explicitly forbids making laws for censure. "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech [...]"
I can fully understand why someone would support GPL, but I personally believe that it has hurt its own movement.
I think most people get strange impressions of how much it actually hurts though. Some examples:
One company I worked at only did internal development. GPL wasn't a problem. If I fixed something in a GPLd mail server, there was no problem with publishing the patch, because we didn't sell software anyway and weren't about to start.
Another company I worked at used tons of GPLd software for points of sale. Very normal Linux systems, based on Red Hat. The stuff that ran on that wasn't GPLd of course, and for everything that was contributing patches upstream wouldn't be an issue at all.
IBM doesn't have any issues with the GPL either.
I just went through my new TV's manual, and turns out it runs Linux, source for the kernel, busybox, etc, available.
Second Life uses Linux for its servers and has a GPLd client I worked on.
So GPLd software in fact turns out in plenty places, and you might well have it in your TV or wifi access point. Adoption-wise it seems to be doing fine.
Additionally, for some things the GPL is actually an advantage. Picture you're a developer using an open source program to make a say, thin client box. You find a bug and fix it. What do you do with that fix? With a BSD license, you don't have to make it available, and probably won't, because that takes time, and the boss most likely will take the position of that if it's not necessary then why bother? With a GPL license you have to make it available in any case (redistribution), so it'll find its way back to the project.
For some companies, a BSD license is unattractive. Why bother contributing something, when another company can close it, repackage, and then sell, maybe even back to you? With the GPL that can't happen. So IBM gets all of Novell's fixes, and Novell all of IBM's. The GPL ensures a level playing field.
People who have a big problem with the GPL are mostly the ones who sell software. But that's not such a big market. For Linux users it may be well near inexistent, with very few exceptions. For Windows users, it's probably mostly Windows, Office, Photoshop and games. In any case, most development work is in things like devices, internal applications, and vertical applications, and the GPL does perfectly fine there.
Notice that the GNU website talks about "free" (as in speech) software? If GNU doesn't care about "free" software, then it wouldn't be slammed all over their site.
Again, GNU has a rather specific understanding what "free software" is. It doesn't match with your. So you're simply arguing semantics: that GNU does something wrong according to your definition of the word, therefore it hurts what you think what "free software" is.
On FSF websites, "free software" refers to "GNU Free Software (TM)" to put it in some way. The GPL fits perfectly in that definition. They have plenty explanations for why they like GPL style licensing.
To be fair, GNU has done great things for free software, but the main license still pisses me off sometimes. I'm just being extra harsh in this thread because, of all things, I'm reading an article about someone "stealing" something which should be free (as in speech) under a license which touts advocating free software. In all honesty, LGPL (and, as you mention, BSD) is far closer to what I believe constitutes free software.
You're right there, it's not stealing, it's copyright infringement.
I personally believe in freedom of information. I don't believe that information can be "owned" or "licensed," especially considering any "program" can be represented as a point on the real number line. Of course, I'm one of those extreme loons when it comes to copyright/etc laws.;p
Actually that comes quite close to the GNU view of software.
The GPL actively enforces that view: If information can't be owned or licensed, then there's no such thing as a right to restrict it. The GPL works within current law, and turns copyright on itself to achieve that end.
I think the main disagreement here is what exactly is "freedom". The BSD view seems to be that "freedom" is the "absence of rules". The GPL view is that "freedom" is achieved by having rules in place that stop other people from putting limits on what you can do.
Say, are you more free in a society with absolutely no laws, and so can do (in theory) anything you please, or in one where there are laws such as the ones forbidding stealing and murder?
The argument is old because multiple people have made it; Shouldn't that make you take it more seriously?
No, because it's a silly argument about semantics. Whether the GPL can be called free or not doesn't change anything about what it does.
Anyway, my take is that GPL has hurt the free software movement tremendously, simply because it scares people away. You can not give a damn all you want, that won't change the fact you hurt your own movement.
The problem is that you assume that maximum participation at all costs is the key, even if it would be at the cost of sacrificing the very principles of why it was created.
For instance, when I release code under the GPL, I really agree with what the license says, and completely seriously don't want you using it if you're not willing to comply with the license. If the license scares you away, I don't consider that a loss, because in that case your usage of my software doesn't provide any benefit to me anyway.
If you take software I licensed under the GPL, change it, and want to distribute it, I see two main options: If you comply with the license, and release the changes, then I can benefit them. If you don't want to comply with it and pay me for an exception, I benefit from that too. If you're not willing to do either of those things, then there's nothing in it for me, I derive no benefit from your usage, and in fact really, really don't want you to use it.
In fact the only thing I do consider a loss is when you infringe on the license. So please, don't, don't use my software, and go code your own.
Honestly, the whole "free" vs "not free" argument is very old and not really interesting.
The GPL take is that "free" is about the end user's freedom. The developer must accept restrictions, so that they can't take the user's freedom away. The BSD take is that "free" is only such if there are no restrictions of any kind, including the restriction of not being able to impose restrictions on the user.
My take is that I don't give a damn, because free or not, the GPL does exactly what I want to do. Tough if you don't like it.
First of all, there are big and important differences between "shared", "free", and "open source" software. That you seem to lump them in a single group IMO indicates that you think the point of them all is to just release free (of charge) stuff. But it isn't so.
Free Software was always political. It started with a political motivation, when Stallman got annoyed at not being able to fix his printer's driver.
RMS believes that there are 4 freedoms that are vital: The freedom to run the program for any purpose, the freedom to study and modify the program, the freedom to copy the program so you can help your neighbor, and the freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits.
If you talk to Stallman he'll tell you that he believes that forbidding to copy a program to help your neightbour is immoral. The GPL was created with the aim of furthering those principles. For free software there's nothing that "turned" it into a political idea, it was from its very conception.
But that's not the only way of seeing things. There are many people in this, with different motivations. You have Stallman with his opinion of that copyright as typically used is morally wrong, the BSD camp with the "Freedom is the lack of any kind of restrictions", and companies with terms like "You can look, but not touch" and "everything must be contributed back to us".
There was never any universal direction, where all developers work towards a goal like "free stuff for everybody". Everybody has their own motivation.
As I said in another post here, different people have different motivations.
My own isn't to altruistically release stuff for everybody else, it's to derive a benefit from what I release. I'd rather you not use my code at all than infringe the GPL, and I'm being completely serious. If I couldn't release it under the GPL, I wouldn't release it in the first place, and you'd still have to write your own.
For me the forced reciprocation is the whole point, and having the whole world use it without not having to give back is not attractive in the slightest.
When I release my code open-source, it's to make the source code available to others. The only way to prevent my primary goal is by taking down the server the source code is hosted on. Using it in violation of its license is minor in comparison.
That's nice, but not everybody thinks the same way.
I release source under copyleft licenses, the more copyleft the better (AGPL3 preferably), so that:
If people like it, and want to modify it without releasing their changes, they must come to me and pay for that privilege. If people like it, and want to modify it, agreeing to release their changes, I am guaranteed to be able to use them. If people like it, but don't want to modify it, I get recognition for it.
I don't release stuff out of altruism, I'm a selfish bastard and release under such terms that (from my point of view) I benefit in every possible situation. For me the license is important, and I would not release the code if I couldn't do it under favorable (for myself) terms.
Actually that's pretty much how I feel about hardware and software in general.
For me a computer or MP3 player, or a cell phone is just a tool. It's something necessary but completely unexciting, something I buy the basis of technical characteristics.
Specifically it's a big turnoff for me when functionality is lost in the name of design. The "ooh, shiny" appeal vanishes in a couple of days, but technical limitations added to make it shiny remain forever.
Coding while commuting (on a train) sure, but while walking?
Have you ever tried to web browse or text while walking? I avoid doing it unless I know very well where I'm going, and even then there's the danger of walking too far or crossing the street on a red light.
I'm also not sure what sort of code you'll produce like that, but I doubt it will be very good. I find that any kind of distraction or discomfort makes coding a lot harder.
Why spend thousands of dollars smooshing a high resolution display to your face when you can blow up a flatscreen to epic proportions and get all the resolution you need? Practically speaking, the HMD does nothing additional other than give you headache.
Because it just hangs on the wall, probably doesn't provide 3D, and I stop seeing it the moment I turn around or leave the room.
Take the Wii Remote as an example. Accelerometers and IR sensors work together to provide precise positioning. A gyroscope powered attachment called the Motion+ is coming out to close the gap on orientation difficulties. That's the low-end and look at what has already been achieved. The high end stuff allows researchers to build entire rooms where gyroscopes and camera tracking provide location information while the subject is surrounded by projected images or large flat panels.
That's a very restricted solution. It works if you have a room to dedicate to it, and you're happy enough to interact with the system in one unique place. I think that's a pain and very limiting. Technology advances towards being portable. Making a huge investment in something I can't use most of the time seems the wrong way to go for me.
The end goal is to blur the line between man and machine rather than having the machine trick man into believing he's in a different world. As it turns out, bluring the line between reality and unreality is hella lot easier than trying to replace the current reality.
Er, a room covered with displays is exactly the old concept of VR. You're replacing reality completely there, except that instead wearing hardware it's all around you.
In short, don't hold your breath. The VR of the 90's is dead. Long live augmented realtiy.
My understanding of "augmented reality" is precisely an HMD that mixes reality with VR. Things like:
Constant Internet connection that can be used at any time in any place
GPS overlay right over your vision while walking on the street
Vision enhacement - take the normal vision and modify it, by highlighting important things, removing ads, allow attaching a virtual sticky note on any building, extra cameras that allow to see from the back of your head or in infrared, easy lookups of data about things you see.
AR games: Merge reality and a game, playing say, a FPS in a park. Create a chessboard on any surface.
Merging RL with another world: I'd really like to be able to for instance merge RL with Second Life and make it so that somebody from SL can virtually sit near me and appear to be there.
Once we get to the point where a consumer desktop has 32 cores, you're not going to be able to use even half of that CPU by running independent tasks simultaneously. You'll need to have apps that can take advantage of many cores. The more cores you have, the more power a single core application fails to take advantage of.
To say that "the entire mystery is completely rendered moot by the concept of neurochemicals!" is the same thing as saying "I am a materialist." If you are so inclined, and if you find that satisfying, then good for you. Not everyone subscribes to the materialist worldview, and not everyone is willing to make the assumptions that are needed in order to honestly believe in it.
That we don't know 100% exactly how it works doesn't mean there's any magic in it, or that there's anything intangible in there.
Why we get sick used to be a mystery with lots of theories about magic, religion and bad air, until we managed to take a look at the tiny things that cause it.
History so far shows that all those mysteries end up having very materialist explanations.
Actually I think that's a common artifact of a process of gradual refinement.
You start with:
cat/proc/cpuinfo
To get an idea what the contents of the file are like.
Then you figure out something to search for, or to exclude. A quick way of doing that is to recall the previous history line (up arrow), and tack on grep on it:
cat/proc/cpuinfo | grep '^processor'
Then you refine it further, with another history recall and tack another command at the end:
cat/proc/cpuinfo | grep '^processor' | wc -l
Then sometimes you copy/paste that into a shell script and earn another "useless use of cat" award.
Starting with grep is uncomfortable because you have to grep for something, and you often don't know what that should be before seeing the file's contents. Unless you realize you can grep for '.*'.
Well, if you prefer a less arcane solution, you can simply open/proc/cpuinfo in your favourite text editor, and see if "svm" or "vmx" appears in the flags line. But since on a modern box you get something like:
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm lahf_lm ida tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority
eyeballing it is a pretty boring affair, and using grep or the editor's search function would make it easier.
If that's still not friendly enough, you could use the KDE Information Center for instance.
How do you find this in Windows, anyway? I honestly have no clue because it doesn't seem to offer half the amount of information about the CPU without resorting to some third party program.
Manga is just a way to tell a story, and unlike the western idea of "comics are for kids" covers pretty much everything, from material for little children to mature subjects.
Probably part of the interest comes from that Japan is culturally different, so things that have been done 50 times already still seem new to us.
Manga also often has very weird takes on familiar concepts, for instance compare the One Piece pirates with what'd you expect from the western version.
That is really a matter of implementation, you can build a SPARC chip without expensive RAS stuff. See Itanium vs Xeon vs consumer Intel procs.
Well, sure.
SPARC isn't outdated, and I thought the other guy was talking about building new open desktops, not using existing server equipment. With all this talk of ARM being the next best thing for netbooks, I surprised anyone would take this stance against non-x86 architectures. What would you lose? Proprietary, binary x86 blobs? Hahaha, typically not a problem for the "open" bunch.
Actually I had PowerPC in mind.
This discussion went off on a weird tangent. The first post I replied to was asking why implement VGA at all if you're starting from scratch. I replied that nearly all modern desktops boot in text mode, so it's a requirement.
After that, people for some reason start arguing that we should throw out x86 legacy completely, and make a pristine desktop that boots in graphical mode, has no BIOS, and so on. And that there are other architectures that have no BIOS, which Linux doesn't need anyway.
I argued that most other architectures Linux supports are not relevant for this project, since they're either used on embedded hardware, not used for desktops anymore (PowerPC), or almost exclusively used for servers (Sparc), where a video card has questionable value.
I'm not against *supporting* Sparc. But honestly, taking an "open video card" project, and turning it into "let's make a new computer architecture free of legacy from scratch" is kind of a stupid idea. Especially when the reason for doing that seems to be getting rid of the tiny bit of legacy that is VGA.
So.. (emphasis mine) Did you not know we plug the exact same RAM, and exact same expansion cards into SPARC systems that we do PCs? What is this about?
Yeah, I do. But I repeat:
This is a video card. Video cards are of most interest for desktop usage. So any company trying to manufacture a video card and not go bankrupt in the process, must support the most common by far desktop system available: x86. Which currently needs the VGA legacy to work properly.
Now maybe there will be a few people around the world who are using a Sparc box and find a need for this video card, but that's not a significant part of the market by any measure, and it's stupid to target exclusively just to avoid having to implement text mode support.
Ok, and how many people are going to run a desktop on it? It's server hardware.
Again, you seem to be missing my point. Yes, Linux technically doesn't need the BIOS. Yes, there exist other architectures besides x86.
But, a video card is a product for desktops, and the vast majority of desktops are x86. The vast majority of those start booting in text mode.
Pretty much all other architectures are unimportant in comparison, because they're used in embedded hardware, or are technically outdated. If anybody is going to buy this thing, I doubt they're going to put it into a modern Sun server.
It's already a project that's going to find it hard to get wide adoption, why would you make it even harder for it to find an use, by making it incompatible with the most common by far hardware it could be plugged into?
Slashdot Mirror
This always seemed to be obvious to me.
It's always the real world. That people are at a basketball court, or are communicating through a phone, or a computer network doesn't make them stop being people. Even if I don't know what is your real name, age, gender or appearance, I'm still talking to a human being.
Actually, it is. People play MMOs for the social interaction.
If you just want to kill stuff there's plenty single player games for that, where the computer sticks religiously by the rules and doesn't get offended at anything you do.
I would bet your claim of a win wouldn't be accepted in such a case.
If in a formal competition, the opposing team suddenly decides to sit around and do nothing, sure, they're being stupid.
If however it's an informal gathering, and the two teams decided to have an impromptu break and chat with each other, I doubt very much that you standing under a basket and constantly scoring "because it's according to the rules" would be well received.
Ah, that's the semantics argument again, which as I said already I find very uninteresting and ultimately inconsequential.
There were lots of people some time ago arguing heatedly about whether Pluto is a planet or not. IMO, who cares? Whether it fits in some arbitrary category or not, the facts don't change: that there's a mass of rock of 10^22 kg, orbiting around the Sun in a determined orbit, it has some interesting characteristics and so on.
If there are astronomers with a particular interest in Pluto, I doubt very much any of those will suddenly go "Oh no, Pluto is not a planet, I can't be interested in it now", since whatever made it interesting for them hasn't changed. The only thing that has is some arbitrary category we use to classify stuff that floats in space.
So again. You don't think the GPL is true free software? Meh. I don't use the GPL because it's "free software" but because I agree with the terms, and those are facts that remain unchanged regardless of whether you classify it as "free software", "viral", "communism", or whatever.
But you just brought up freedom of speech, and mentioned you can make rules about what people can say in your house.
I'm saying you're being inconsistent: According to your own definition of freedom of speech, it includes the ability for you to impose your personal preferences on other people. So is your idea of freedom of speech not free then, according to the concept of freedom above?
Who said anything about owing? It's an exchange. "You can have my code, if you contribute your changes". Nothing particularly strange there, those deals abound in the world. "You can have my apples for $1/kg", "You can have my programming expertise for $30/hour", "I'll help you move furniture if you help me with mine later", and so on.
There's no "owing", there's no obligation to accept. I simply present upfront my work, and the conditions under which I'll let you have it. You're completely free to ignore the offer, or to talk to me to see if I'm willing to negotiate terms you find more reasonable.
So what's the problem with the GPL again? The government isn't doing it, I am, and you just said that it's fine for an individual to make their own rules in their home. So I'm making my own rules for my own software, so where's the difference?
Sure they can, in fact the GPL itself states that accepting it is completely optional. Without that, things fallback to standard copyright law though, which is even more restrictive. The GPL works in such a way that it's the one thing that gives you the right to redistribute the code. Without it you have copyright which doesn't.
For personal usage you might as well pretend it doesn't exist, because it only comes into play when you try to do something copyright wouldn't allow (distribution)
Your position seems inconsistent to me.
You're opposed to me placing restrictions on what you can do with my work. Ok, whether one agrees or not with that, it's a position that makes sense so far.
However you'd like to, and have no problems with taking my work and placing extra restrictions on it in order to sell it. I take it you want to place restrictions from your mention of abiding by the GPL being inconvenient; since the GPL doesn't forbid selling the software. But it does make it hard to make it profitable.
The former seems to be logically inconsistent with the later. You're saying something like "I don't think you should be able to restrict the usage of your own work; you should give me the book you wrote with absolutely no strings attached. However I want to sell it, and forbid it from being freely copied".
The way I see it there are only two consistent ways of handling it.
A. Authors have copyright, and it gives them the ability to impose restrictions on the usage of get their work.
B. There's no such thing as copyright, the owner is the community/god/etc. Works are available to everybody, and nobody has a right to restrict them in any way.
Under the first option, the GPL is fine and dandy, under the second it's unnecessary and neither I or you will be selling the program.
That's a pretty strange position to hold, since in most modern societies when something is considered unambigously wrong, it's outlawed, results in a fine, or is somehow discouraged.
Does freedom of speech mean freedom to censor, though? Freedom of speech in the US explicitly forbids making laws for censure. "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech [...]"
I think most people get strange impressions of how much it actually hurts though. Some examples:
One company I worked at only did internal development. GPL wasn't a problem. If I fixed something in a GPLd mail server, there was no problem with publishing the patch, because we didn't sell software anyway and weren't about to start.
Another company I worked at used tons of GPLd software for points of sale. Very normal Linux systems, based on Red Hat. The stuff that ran on that wasn't GPLd of course, and for everything that was contributing patches upstream wouldn't be an issue at all.
IBM doesn't have any issues with the GPL either.
I just went through my new TV's manual, and turns out it runs Linux, source for the kernel, busybox, etc, available.
Second Life uses Linux for its servers and has a GPLd client I worked on.
So GPLd software in fact turns out in plenty places, and you might well have it in your TV or wifi access point. Adoption-wise it seems to be doing fine.
Additionally, for some things the GPL is actually an advantage. Picture you're a developer using an open source program to make a say, thin client box. You find a bug and fix it. What do you do with that fix? With a BSD license, you don't have to make it available, and probably won't, because that takes time, and the boss most likely will take the position of that if it's not necessary then why bother? With a GPL license you have to make it available in any case (redistribution), so it'll find its way back to the project.
For some companies, a BSD license is unattractive. Why bother contributing something, when another company can close it, repackage, and then sell, maybe even back to you? With the GPL that can't happen. So IBM gets all of Novell's fixes, and Novell all of IBM's. The GPL ensures a level playing field.
People who have a big problem with the GPL are mostly the ones who sell software. But that's not such a big market. For Linux users it may be well near inexistent, with very few exceptions. For Windows users, it's probably mostly Windows, Office, Photoshop and games. In any case, most development work is in things like devices, internal applications, and vertical applications, and the GPL does perfectly fine there.
Again, GNU has a rather specific understanding what "free software" is. It doesn't match with your. So you're simply arguing semantics: that GNU does something wrong according to your definition of the word, therefore it hurts what you think what "free software" is.
On FSF websites, "free software" refers to "GNU Free Software (TM)" to put it in some way. The GPL fits perfectly in that definition. They have plenty explanations for why they like GPL style licensing.
You're right there, it's not stealing, it's copyright infringement.
Actually that comes quite close to the GNU view of software.
The GPL actively enforces that view: If information can't be owned or licensed, then there's no such thing as a right to restrict it. The GPL works within current law, and turns copyright on itself to achieve that end.
I think the main disagreement here is what exactly is "freedom". The BSD view seems to be that "freedom" is the "absence of rules". The GPL view is that "freedom" is achieved by having rules in place that stop other people from putting limits on what you can do.
Say, are you more free in a society with absolutely no laws, and so can do (in theory) anything you please, or in one where there are laws such as the ones forbidding stealing and murder?
No, because it's a silly argument about semantics. Whether the GPL can be called free or not doesn't change anything about what it does.
The problem is that you assume that maximum participation at all costs is the key, even if it would be at the cost of sacrificing the very principles of why it was created.
For instance, when I release code under the GPL, I really agree with what the license says, and completely seriously don't want you using it if you're not willing to comply with the license. If the license scares you away, I don't consider that a loss, because in that case your usage of my software doesn't provide any benefit to me anyway.
If you take software I licensed under the GPL, change it, and want to distribute it, I see two main options: If you comply with the license, and release the changes, then I can benefit them. If you don't want to comply with it and pay me for an exception, I benefit from that too. If you're not willing to do either of those things, then there's nothing in it for me, I derive no benefit from your usage, and in fact really, really don't want you to use it.
In fact the only thing I do consider a loss is when you infringe on the license. So please, don't, don't use my software, and go code your own.
Honestly, the whole "free" vs "not free" argument is very old and not really interesting.
The GPL take is that "free" is about the end user's freedom. The developer must accept restrictions, so that they can't take the user's freedom away.
The BSD take is that "free" is only such if there are no restrictions of any kind, including the restriction of not being able to impose restrictions on the user.
My take is that I don't give a damn, because free or not, the GPL does exactly what I want to do. Tough if you don't like it.
First of all, there are big and important differences between "shared", "free", and "open source" software. That you seem to lump them in a single group IMO indicates that you think the point of them all is to just release free (of charge) stuff. But it isn't so.
Free Software was always political. It started with a political motivation, when Stallman got annoyed at not being able to fix his printer's driver.
RMS believes that there are 4 freedoms that are vital: The freedom to run the program for any purpose, the freedom to study and modify the program, the freedom to copy the program so you can help your neighbor, and the freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits.
If you talk to Stallman he'll tell you that he believes that forbidding to copy a program to help your neightbour is immoral. The GPL was created with the aim of furthering those principles. For free software there's nothing that "turned" it into a political idea, it was from its very conception.
But that's not the only way of seeing things. There are many people in this, with different motivations. You have Stallman with his opinion of that copyright as typically used is morally wrong, the BSD camp with the "Freedom is the lack of any kind of restrictions", and companies with terms like "You can look, but not touch" and "everything must be contributed back to us".
There was never any universal direction, where all developers work towards a goal like "free stuff for everybody". Everybody has their own motivation.
As I said in another post here, different people have different motivations.
My own isn't to altruistically release stuff for everybody else, it's to derive a benefit from what I release. I'd rather you not use my code at all than infringe the GPL, and I'm being completely serious. If I couldn't release it under the GPL, I wouldn't release it in the first place, and you'd still have to write your own.
For me the forced reciprocation is the whole point, and having the whole world use it without not having to give back is not attractive in the slightest.
That's nice, but not everybody thinks the same way.
I release source under copyleft licenses, the more copyleft the better (AGPL3 preferably), so that:
If people like it, and want to modify it without releasing their changes, they must come to me and pay for that privilege.
If people like it, and want to modify it, agreeing to release their changes, I am guaranteed to be able to use them.
If people like it, but don't want to modify it, I get recognition for it.
I don't release stuff out of altruism, I'm a selfish bastard and release under such terms that (from my point of view) I benefit in every possible situation. For me the license is important, and I would not release the code if I couldn't do it under favorable (for myself) terms.
Actually that's pretty much how I feel about hardware and software in general.
For me a computer or MP3 player, or a cell phone is just a tool. It's something necessary but completely unexciting, something I buy the basis of technical characteristics.
Specifically it's a big turnoff for me when functionality is lost in the name of design. The "ooh, shiny" appeal vanishes in a couple of days, but technical limitations added to make it shiny remain forever.
Coding while commuting (on a train) sure, but while walking?
Have you ever tried to web browse or text while walking? I avoid doing it unless I know very well where I'm going, and even then there's the danger of walking too far or crossing the street on a red light.
I'm also not sure what sort of code you'll produce like that, but I doubt it will be very good. I find that any kind of distraction or discomfort makes coding a lot harder.
I don't think it'll be much worse than the bluetooth headsets that are already pretty common.
Though interacting with an invisible person will probably look really funny to everybody else.
Because it just hangs on the wall, probably doesn't provide 3D, and I stop seeing it the moment I turn around or leave the room.
That's a very restricted solution. It works if you have a room to dedicate to it, and you're happy enough to interact with the system in one unique place. I think that's a pain and very limiting. Technology advances towards being portable. Making a huge investment in something I can't use most of the time seems the wrong way to go for me.
Er, a room covered with displays is exactly the old concept of VR. You're replacing reality completely there, except that instead wearing hardware it's all around you.
My understanding of "augmented reality" is precisely an HMD that mixes reality with VR. Things like:
Constant Internet connection that can be used at any time in any place
GPS overlay right over your vision while walking on the street
Vision enhacement - take the normal vision and modify it, by highlighting important things, removing ads, allow attaching a virtual sticky note on any building, extra cameras that allow to see from the back of your head or in infrared, easy lookups of data about things you see.
AR games: Merge reality and a game, playing say, a FPS in a park. Create a chessboard on any surface.
Merging RL with another world: I'd really like to be able to for instance merge RL with Second Life and make it so that somebody from SL can virtually sit near me and appear to be there.
That only works because you have few cores.
Once we get to the point where a consumer desktop has 32 cores, you're not going to be able to use even half of that CPU by running independent tasks simultaneously. You'll need to have apps that can take advantage of many cores. The more cores you have, the more power a single core application fails to take advantage of.
That's not a "brilliantly made app", it's a video.
If you look closely it's easy to see that the lines disappear much before the rolled up bill reaches them.
Also, as people say, the iphone can't detect credit cards and dollar bills anyway.
And the author admits in the youtube comments that it's just a video, and it "works" by you learning to go through the motions with the right timing.
That we don't know 100% exactly how it works doesn't mean there's any magic in it, or that there's anything intangible in there.
Why we get sick used to be a mystery with lots of theories about magic, religion and bad air, until we managed to take a look at the tiny things that cause it.
History so far shows that all those mysteries end up having very materialist explanations.
Actually I think that's a common artifact of a process of gradual refinement.
You start with:
To get an idea what the contents of the file are like.
Then you figure out something to search for, or to exclude. A quick way of doing that is to recall the previous history line (up arrow), and tack on grep on it:
Then you refine it further, with another history recall and tack another command at the end:
Then sometimes you copy/paste that into a shell script and earn another "useless use of cat" award.
Starting with grep is uncomfortable because you have to grep for something, and you often don't know what that should be before seeing the file's contents. Unless you realize you can grep for '.*'.
Well, if you prefer a less arcane solution, you can simply open /proc/cpuinfo in your favourite text editor, and see if "svm" or "vmx" appears in the flags line. But since on a modern box you get something like:
eyeballing it is a pretty boring affair, and using grep or the editor's search function would make it easier.
If that's still not friendly enough, you could use the KDE Information Center for instance.
How do you find this in Windows, anyway? I honestly have no clue because it doesn't seem to offer half the amount of information about the CPU without resorting to some third party program.
For furries, there's the .fur TLD on OpenNIC
The Death Note Linux Manual.
*dramatic typing*
Sakujo!
Why do people like books?
Manga is just a way to tell a story, and unlike the western idea of "comics are for kids" covers pretty much everything, from material for little children to mature subjects.
Probably part of the interest comes from that Japan is culturally different, so things that have been done 50 times already still seem new to us.
Manga also often has very weird takes on familiar concepts, for instance compare the One Piece pirates with what'd you expect from the western version.
Well, sure.
Actually I had PowerPC in mind.
This discussion went off on a weird tangent. The first post I replied to was asking why implement VGA at all if you're starting from scratch. I replied that nearly all modern desktops boot in text mode, so it's a requirement.
After that, people for some reason start arguing that we should throw out x86 legacy completely, and make a pristine desktop that boots in graphical mode, has no BIOS, and so on. And that there are other architectures that have no BIOS, which Linux doesn't need anyway.
I argued that most other architectures Linux supports are not relevant for this project, since they're either used on embedded hardware, not used for desktops anymore (PowerPC), or almost exclusively used for servers (Sparc), where a video card has questionable value.
I'm not against *supporting* Sparc. But honestly, taking an "open video card" project, and turning it into "let's make a new computer architecture free of legacy from scratch" is kind of a stupid idea. Especially when the reason for doing that seems to be getting rid of the tiny bit of legacy that is VGA.
Yeah, I do. But I repeat:
This is a video card. Video cards are of most interest for desktop usage. So any company trying to manufacture a video card and not go bankrupt in the process, must support the most common by far desktop system available: x86. Which currently needs the VGA legacy to work properly.
Now maybe there will be a few people around the world who are using a Sparc box and find a need for this video card, but that's not a significant part of the market by any measure, and it's stupid to target exclusively just to avoid having to implement text mode support.
Ok, and how many people are going to run a desktop on it? It's server hardware.
Again, you seem to be missing my point. Yes, Linux technically doesn't need the BIOS. Yes, there exist other architectures besides x86.
But, a video card is a product for desktops, and the vast majority of desktops are x86. The vast majority of those start booting in text mode.
Pretty much all other architectures are unimportant in comparison, because they're used in embedded hardware, or are technically outdated. If anybody is going to buy this thing, I doubt they're going to put it into a modern Sun server.
It's already a project that's going to find it hard to get wide adoption, why would you make it even harder for it to find an use, by making it incompatible with the most common by far hardware it could be plugged into?