I'm genuinely curious. How, pray tell, will businesses be making a billion dollars in this manner without copyright? Seems to me that sword has two edges and the original developers can simply take the business' improvements and then provide it for free. Seems to me that the ONLY viable way for such a business to make money would be in a service-based model (support, paid customization, etc...) which I believe is EXACTLY how many free software advocates believe things should be done in the first place. To put it another way, a business would take a free piece of software, and make money off of it by providing a large support structure for other businesses who wish to use it, which I can't imagine the original developers having any problem with. Am I missing something?
...do companies have first amendment rights? Honestly, I don't know, IANAL, but it seems odd to me that constitutional rights be extended to companies. Additionally, it seems that this argument could be taken to utterly unreasonable extremes too:
Wells Fargo: You can't stop us from divulging the financial information of our customers--that would be violating our first amendment rights!
Blue Cross: First amendment rights guarantee us the right to distribute confidential medical information!
If you ask me, this sounds like a nice steaming pile of bullshit.
I hear you on this one. I know this makes me sound like the typical slashdottian yes-man, but with the advent of Vista I got so incredibly sick of Microsoft that, even though I'd previously been heavily invested in the product, I essentially just said "eff them," wiped my drive and installed Linux. Haven't looked back, but I think it's pretty rare for people to actually go about putting their money where their mouth is when it comes to the possibility of slight inconvenience.
I'm sorry, but the attitude of this summary is just a little ridiculous. So somebody bought ammo clips over eBay? This is exceptional how? Clips aren't exactly heavily regulated items and believe it or not we still do enjoy some freedoms in this country. Honestly, I think whoever blames eBay or the seller of the clips for ANYTHING in this should be ashamed of themselves. There is responsibility here, but that responsibility lies with those who knew there was a problem and did nothing, and most of all on the perpetrator himself. Respectfully, I must completely disagree with the summary here and say eBay was absolutely in the right with their "gun-parts-don't-kill-students-guns-and-ammo-do" statement.
Quoting Tennyson...
Their's is not to make reply,
Their's is not to reason why,
Their's is but to do and die While it's questionable whether the new regulations are any more conducive to actual operational security, when it's essentially your job to kill other people and to be killed when necessary the military really has to make sure its soldiers stay in the right frame of mind. It's a tough call if you ask me, but censorship may be necessary.
I don't know if that's entirely true. Free can also be read as meaning something along the lines of "unconstrained." In fact, a simple trip to dictionary.com reveals a plethora of definitions for free that can quite grammatically mean more or less precisely what is intended by "free software" in this sense. For example:
12. given without consideration of a return or reward: a free offer of legal advice. 21. not subject to special regulations, restrictions, duties, etc.: The ship was given free passage. 23. that may be used by or is open to all: a free market.
It would seem to me that many perfectly ordinary definitions of "free" convey precisely what is meant in this case.
One of my first experiences after installing Gentoo...
1. emerge wine
2. come back when it's done compiling
3. wine WoW.exe -opengl
Unfortunately, I didn't have time to mess around more with Gentoo... I was a little busy in Karazhan.
It happens every five years or so. It's almost like clockwork. A new generation of console systems will come out, and suddenly everybody will be predicting the demise of the PC. And sure, PC game sales and development will lag for a bit, then it'll bounce back. Now I know for a fact this has been going on since the 80's when the original Nintendo generation was supposedly going to spell the demise of the PC for gaming, and of course it never did. Why do people keep acting surprised?
One thing I like about Creative Commons is that their license page basically lets you mix and match license clauses to your own specification. Kinda nice to have a quick pre-build license reserving precisely those rights you desire.
Perhaps one (arguably) good opportunity for the platform has passed. Speaking as somebody who works with a dual-boot Vista / Gentoo system, I can say from personal experience that if Microsoft keeps taking their operating system in its current direction (very shiny, DOG slow in comparison) Linux might find itself with a good many more such opportunities in the future.
To be perfectly honest, I'm finding that with Linux it's actually easier to accomplish most tasks that are more complex than, say, word processing because the operating system stays the hell out of my way, unlike Vista. I, for one, see good things in Linux's future.
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I'm genuinely curious. How, pray tell, will businesses be making a billion dollars in this manner without copyright? Seems to me that sword has two edges and the original developers can simply take the business' improvements and then provide it for free. Seems to me that the ONLY viable way for such a business to make money would be in a service-based model (support, paid customization, etc...) which I believe is EXACTLY how many free software advocates believe things should be done in the first place. To put it another way, a business would take a free piece of software, and make money off of it by providing a large support structure for other businesses who wish to use it, which I can't imagine the original developers having any problem with. Am I missing something?
...do companies have first amendment rights? Honestly, I don't know, IANAL, but it seems odd to me that constitutional rights be extended to companies. Additionally, it seems that this argument could be taken to utterly unreasonable extremes too: Wells Fargo: You can't stop us from divulging the financial information of our customers--that would be violating our first amendment rights! Blue Cross: First amendment rights guarantee us the right to distribute confidential medical information! If you ask me, this sounds like a nice steaming pile of bullshit.
I hear you on this one. I know this makes me sound like the typical slashdottian yes-man, but with the advent of Vista I got so incredibly sick of Microsoft that, even though I'd previously been heavily invested in the product, I essentially just said "eff them," wiped my drive and installed Linux. Haven't looked back, but I think it's pretty rare for people to actually go about putting their money where their mouth is when it comes to the possibility of slight inconvenience.
I'm sorry, but the attitude of this summary is just a little ridiculous. So somebody bought ammo clips over eBay? This is exceptional how? Clips aren't exactly heavily regulated items and believe it or not we still do enjoy some freedoms in this country. Honestly, I think whoever blames eBay or the seller of the clips for ANYTHING in this should be ashamed of themselves. There is responsibility here, but that responsibility lies with those who knew there was a problem and did nothing, and most of all on the perpetrator himself. Respectfully, I must completely disagree with the summary here and say eBay was absolutely in the right with their "gun-parts-don't-kill-students-guns-and-ammo-do" statement.
Their's is not to reason why,
Their's is but to do and die While it's questionable whether the new regulations are any more conducive to actual operational security, when it's essentially your job to kill other people and to be killed when necessary the military really has to make sure its soldiers stay in the right frame of mind. It's a tough call if you ask me, but censorship may be necessary.
My guess is it means it'll run on Windows and OSX. That seems to be Microsoft's usual definition of cross-platform.
It would seem to me that many perfectly ordinary definitions of "free" convey precisely what is meant in this case.
One of my first experiences after installing Gentoo... 1. emerge wine 2. come back when it's done compiling 3. wine WoW.exe -opengl Unfortunately, I didn't have time to mess around more with Gentoo... I was a little busy in Karazhan.
It happens every five years or so. It's almost like clockwork. A new generation of console systems will come out, and suddenly everybody will be predicting the demise of the PC. And sure, PC game sales and development will lag for a bit, then it'll bounce back. Now I know for a fact this has been going on since the 80's when the original Nintendo generation was supposedly going to spell the demise of the PC for gaming, and of course it never did. Why do people keep acting surprised?
One thing I like about Creative Commons is that their license page basically lets you mix and match license clauses to your own specification. Kinda nice to have a quick pre-build license reserving precisely those rights you desire.
Perhaps one (arguably) good opportunity for the platform has passed. Speaking as somebody who works with a dual-boot Vista / Gentoo system, I can say from personal experience that if Microsoft keeps taking their operating system in its current direction (very shiny, DOG slow in comparison) Linux might find itself with a good many more such opportunities in the future. To be perfectly honest, I'm finding that with Linux it's actually easier to accomplish most tasks that are more complex than, say, word processing because the operating system stays the hell out of my way, unlike Vista. I, for one, see good things in Linux's future.