Actually, I think there is some merit to this. I just called out to my wife (who is NOT a geek in any way) and asked:
Have you heard of Linux? Answer: "of course!" Have you heard of BSD? Answer: "Huh?" Have you heard of Posix? Answer: "Hmm.. that sounds familiar" Have you heard of RMS? Answer: "no" Have you heard of Richard Stallman? Answer: "I think so"
Never underestimate the power of a catchy word: Apple, Yahoo, Linux, Emacs, iMac, Redhat.
I've always taken these "rights" to be in the context of people who want to also play along with them, not as "take over and cram it down everyone's throats".
If Sun doesn't want to play that game (and believe me, I wish they would!) then they have no obligation to.
It's that simple. You spout off about the Constitution of the United States as if somehow this justifies arbitrary actions against legitimate businesses that do not want to play the GPL game. In fact, I feel the right to protect one's work is just as important as the right to give it away. There is room here for both philosophies. Stallman apparently doesn't belive that.
Stallman and all his followers (myself included) have decided that users need to have these rights
Well boo hoo. That's not how the law is set up in this country. Now, you can try and introduce law that gives you these rights, but currently you just don't have them. Sun is completely inside it's rights here, you aren't. Too bad, you lose. This has nothing to do with Sun being evil or not -- they clearly could have handled the whole Java license better. Still -- it's their RIGHT to do with it as they please, and it's not your right to expect them to GPL it. Why would it be? It's not owned by you, they (sun) are inside the law. If the license is distasteful to you then don't buy into it, that simple. But there's nothing immoral about it. If somehow you can prove otherwise, I'm sure the justice department would be interested -- they seem all full of themselves these days and ready for more antitrust investigations (see MTV).
is just slimy, and as such, there needs to be a replacement, and Sun is at fault and deserves a good sound tongue lashing from Stallman.
Utter crap. Sun doesn't buy into Stallman's ideas, why do they "deserve" this? Because you've decided that you have rights to someone else's property? Give me a break. If somehow you can convince the majority of people to believe in this practice, get it made into law, then you can complain (and take legal action).
Last, "deserve a sound tongue lashing": anger vented at a big company who doesn't buy into this philosophy -- simply pathetic. Grow up, all of you.
Ok, without even really trying and just using this current article at JavaLobby:
We are doing this because Sun's license unacceptably restricts our freedom.
Now just exactly why does RMS have the right to declare to the world that something that Sun owns is unacceptably restricts his freedom? Freedom of what? To use a copyrighted & trademarked item from a company that owns it?? He has no such right -- he can request, he can even plead. But DEMANDING this right he has no grounds. Only Sun has the right to open this up and make it completely free.
His demands are simply not fair to sun, who own the trademark. In this sense he is spreading Doubt, if not Fear and Uncertainty.
As long as Sun uses a license that does not permit unlimited technical changes, it will remain unacceptable, and we will keep on building our replacement.
Here, he uses the word "replacement" in such a way that it sounds like he's declaring war. Sounds like Fear to me. Why can't he just be mellow out and lead through calm and reason, saying something to the effect of "we want a language like Java that is GPL'd, and so we're doing it.
Indeed, I can't think of Sun taking on RMS or anything directly like this: show me where Sun has said that it wants to battle any GNU projects or Linux, or that it thinks they are bad in any way.
Re:Stallman the visionary vs Stallman the politici
on
RMS on Java and GPL
·
· Score: 1
No, you're wrong: here's why:
Stallin's socialism was mandated, required. You had no choice. Not to mention that punishment for standing up to him meant death.
GPL is voluntary. You don't like it, don't use it (and you won't die).
Indeed, this is where I have a problem with RMS trying to sell it as perfect for everything. It's not. It's wonderful if you want to do it. If you don't, don't. But I'm starting to get the feeling that RMS is going down a slippery slope of "everything GPL good, everything else bad".
Isn't it obvious by now that that's what they (VA, LinuxOne) counted on, confusion about this very matter.
This one has me extremely angry, and indignant. I really wish that I knew how to inform the entire world about this LinuxOne scam.
Oh well.
Stallman the visionary vs Stallman the politician
on
RMS on Java and GPL
·
· Score: 3
I truly admire what RMS has done in the past. Emacs, GPL (truly a thing of beauty), and the entire GNU project in general.
However, I sincerely wish that he'd stop the FUD. As a visionary, I believe that he has a responsibility to try and be above the rest of us -- to be clear, calm, a master of self control, a Jesus figure if you will. But lately he has been doing what I consider "mean" things: calling for a boycott of Amazon, throwing FUD up against Java.
Now, whether Amazon or Sun deserve it is besides the point. He should be taken a more careful, thoughtful position.
Maybe it's that I'm starting to get the sense of hatered coming from him lately, and that saddens me. I'd much rather see a person that I'm following be gentler, calmer. Instead, he's becoming political and using his power to hurt.
Case in point is the Amazon lawsuit. Now, first, I HATE that Amazon is sueing over it's one click patent. However, they do have a legal right to enforce their (crappy) patent. The right way for this to fall out is in the court system. I hope they lose. But RMS's call for boycott really bothers me -- I'd much rather that he'd reiterated his stance on the enforcement of patents and stated that he was disturbed by the Amazon lawsuit.
I'm also worried that there are too many blind RMS followers out there. If/. postings are any evidence, there are thousands of RMS followers that will jump to action over anything he says. That scares me, especially now that he's showing signs of using his power in a hardcore political fashion, rather than selling GPL on the strengths of truth an beauty.
With regards to java, it seems that sun has every right to do with it as they please. The wrote it, they have a copyright on it. I wish that RMS would say things like "I really wish that sun would GPL Java, but of course it's their right to do what they wish and I respect that".
Contrary to what many seem to feel here, TELLING companies to GPL things and boycotting them when they don't is NOT truth and beauty. Asking them calmly and with an understanding ear for why they may seem put off by the notion of giving away their IP is the right way to go about it, IMNSHO.
Well, sorry for running off at the mouth. This whole turn of events just makes me sad.
Why is the above marked flaimbait! It's the guy's honest opinion. Whether you agree with it or not is another matter, but not your right to moderate it down!
> 8x8 2-bit icons that are distinguishable from each other
He's right. I defy you to distinguish two icons from each other that are just 1 pixel diference apart. 8x8 is wickedly small -- it takes real talent to make good useable icons at that size.
I see this has been moderated down to "flaimbait", to which I reply:
It is not. It's a serious commentary on the decline in good journalism practices on the part of our "dear" forum hosts. That is to say: we're getting more and more repeat news articles, but only when the "news" closely mirrors the sentiments of Hemos/CmdTaco.
Why is this news, Hemos? You guys had this up just LAST WEEK fom christ sake. So now is everything news twice? Once when you first hear it, then again when it hits Wired?
Those darn Brazilians... they're going to legalize themselves back to the stone age of computing.
Silly them.
BTW, people keep mentioning StarOffice -- it's not open source, is it?? The Barzillian articles clearly (well, as clearly as I can understand from the babelfish translation) mean "open source" the way we know and love it here on./
More importantly, please show me the/. rules section stating that you can only use Linux to read/post here. I have no love for MS products, but it's everyone's right to use it if they want to.
Last - I do post as plain text. I had to turn it off this once to post the the link to the corel site.
You know, this is really sad -- there is so much pent up anger and venom in the general/. crowd. I really seems to me that your average poster here has no self restraint from insulting and rude remarks coming straight out of the gate.
Do you really expect everyone who copies text from an html page on the net to dump it into an editor that they know specifically does not render the weird characters so that they can then hand strip the chars out?! That's silly.
Look -- I simply copied and pasted text from the Corel site using Netscape. It didn't show up looking weird in Netscape when I previewed my post.
I feel that I did due diligence, using a major browser to preview my post.
"Corel has taken this step to ensure that the United States Government follows its own rules for open and fair procurement," said Marcia Mills, Corel's Corporate Counsel. "This is not a matter particular to Corel, nor are we targetting our competitors -- the Department of Labor's decision adversely affects all software vendors and suppliers to the government."
In all seriousness, with most birth control methods being only 99% effective, the serious question of what to do if conception occurs comes up.
Abortion in space? Imagine the religeous leaders of the world... they'll flip! Even more medically intrusive procedures such as getting a vasectomy (snip snip) aren't foolproof.
But is this really legal? If an auto manufacturer put a disclaimer in their owners manual stating "if the car explodes up on the freeway we can't be held liable" would be thrown out of court, no?
Basically, I thought that it's legal to put in disclaimers for consequences *out of control* of the service or item being sold. So, for example, Ebay can put in a disclaimer stating that they can't promise that you'll get paid if a buyer renigs on an auction that they've won. But in the case of Network Solutions, they failed at the very act that they exist to do, and hurt the customer badly because of it. In other words, they failed at something completely under their control. Their software screwed up. This to me would be like Ebay stating "if your auction gets screwed up by our software and we sell your item for the wrong amount, we can't be held accountable." Or how about this. What if your mortgage company could say "if our software screws up and your payment gets lots, you are responsible". I really suspect that a good lawyer could find precident to show that their disclaimer is illegal.
I think your idea is doomed to failure, not just because you'd probably never get anyone else to buy into it, but also because of these:
No trademarks: good luck getting that buy the court system.
No money: ok, you give away the domain names. There will be a gold rush to grab up every name in existance. And just because you don't charge doesn't mean that the new squatters won't charge behind your back.
First come, first serve: Ok, I'll bite. I'd like to reserve:
Yeah, offtopic. Or is it? It seems that now that the mighty Microsoft has taken the big DOJ fall, that every half-cocked half-brained engineer needs a new target, and Sun is it. That less-than-informed bashing (yes BASHING) that goes on here I find disruptive and mean spirited. God, there are a lot of angry and juvenile people that are willing to spout off at the drop of a hat. I'm getting really sick of it.
Do I, as a software engineer, want to hang out in this forum anymore? I don't know. Even filtering out all 0s isn't working. I'm sure glad that the people I work with every day aren't this bitchy.
Several comments above just really got to me. The baseball bat post was one, the person stating that the apology was just to save face was another. What the heck??!! They apologized, man -- in pretty darn quickly too! What more can you ask? Mistakes happen, it's human nature. Oh, that's right -- because Sun won't give away all of it's software for free, it makes them a bad company.
Open source is a good thing, I think we all agree on that. But it doesn't give us license to fuck over anyone and everyone that doesn't buy into it. (sorry for the language). It's worse than being unprofessional -- it can and is actively hurting good companies. I work with Sun hardware day in and day out, and my customers (you know, the ones that pay the bills) are extremely happy that the servers never crash. But the constant bashing is unfairly affecting the reputation of a pretty good company.
Believe me, my head is not buried in the sand. Sun's a big company, and is clearly looking out for it's interests first. It's just that I'm sick of people spouting calling Sun evil because Sun doesn't subscribe to this one person's open-source philosophy.
So there, I've said my peace. It will mostly fall on deaf ears, I'm sure, but at least I said it.
This looks like a classic "sorry I got caught" situation. This assumes intent. I think it's much more likely an "oops -- didn't even think of it" situation.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I think there is some merit to this. I just called out to my wife (who is NOT a geek in any way) and asked:
Have you heard of Linux? Answer: "of course!"
Have you heard of BSD? Answer: "Huh?"
Have you heard of Posix? Answer: "Hmm.. that sounds familiar"
Have you heard of RMS? Answer: "no"
Have you heard of Richard Stallman? Answer: "I think so"
Never underestimate the power of a catchy word: Apple, Yahoo, Linux, Emacs, iMac, Redhat.
If Sun doesn't want to play that game (and believe me, I wish they would!) then they have no obligation to.
It's that simple. You spout off about the Constitution of the United States as if somehow this justifies arbitrary actions against legitimate businesses that do not want to play the GPL game. In fact, I feel the right to protect one's work is just as important as the right to give it away. There is room here for both philosophies. Stallman apparently doesn't belive that.
Stallman and all his followers (myself included) have decided that users need to have these rights
Well boo hoo. That's not how the law is set up in this country. Now, you can try and introduce law that gives you these rights, but currently you just don't have them. Sun is completely inside it's rights here, you aren't. Too bad, you lose. This has nothing to do with Sun being evil or not -- they clearly could have handled the whole Java license better. Still -- it's their RIGHT to do with it as they please, and it's not your right to expect them to GPL it. Why would it be? It's not owned by you, they (sun) are inside the law. If the license is distasteful to you then don't buy into it, that simple. But there's nothing immoral about it. If somehow you can prove otherwise, I'm sure the justice department would be interested -- they seem all full of themselves these days and ready for more antitrust investigations (see MTV).
is just slimy, and as such, there needs to be a replacement, and Sun is at fault and deserves a good sound tongue lashing from Stallman.
Utter crap. Sun doesn't buy into Stallman's ideas, why do they "deserve" this? Because you've decided that you have rights to someone else's property? Give me a break. If somehow you can convince the majority of people to believe in this practice, get it made into law, then you can complain (and take legal action).
Last, "deserve a sound tongue lashing": anger vented at a big company who doesn't buy into this philosophy -- simply pathetic. Grow up, all of you.
We are doing this because Sun's license unacceptably restricts our freedom.
Now just exactly why does RMS have the right to declare to the world that something that Sun owns is unacceptably restricts his freedom? Freedom of what? To use a copyrighted & trademarked item from a company that owns it?? He has no such right -- he can request, he can even plead. But DEMANDING this right he has no grounds. Only Sun has the right to open this up and make it completely free.
His demands are simply not fair to sun, who own the trademark. In this sense he is spreading Doubt, if not Fear and Uncertainty.
As long as Sun uses a license that does not permit unlimited technical changes, it will remain unacceptable, and we will keep on building our replacement.
Here, he uses the word "replacement" in such a way that it sounds like he's declaring war. Sounds like Fear to me. Why can't he just be mellow out and lead through calm and reason, saying something to the effect of "we want a language like Java that is GPL'd, and so we're doing it.
Indeed, I can't think of Sun taking on RMS or anything directly like this: show me where Sun has said that it wants to battle any GNU projects or Linux, or that it thinks they are bad in any way.
No, you're wrong: here's why:
Stallin's socialism was mandated, required. You had no choice. Not to mention that punishment for standing up to him meant death.
GPL is voluntary. You don't like it, don't use it (and you won't die).
Indeed, this is where I have a problem with RMS trying to sell it as perfect for everything. It's not. It's wonderful if you want to do it. If you don't, don't. But I'm starting to get the feeling that RMS is going down a slippery slope of "everything GPL good, everything else bad".
Isn't it obvious by now that that's what they (VA, LinuxOne) counted on, confusion about this very matter.
This one has me extremely angry, and indignant. I really wish that I knew how to inform the entire world about this LinuxOne scam.
Oh well.
I truly admire what RMS has done in the past. Emacs, GPL (truly a thing of beauty), and the entire GNU project in general.
/. postings are any evidence, there are thousands of RMS followers that will jump to action over anything he says. That scares me, especially now that he's showing signs of using his power in a hardcore political fashion, rather than selling GPL on the strengths of truth an beauty.
However, I sincerely wish that he'd stop the FUD. As a visionary, I believe that he has a responsibility to try and be above the rest of us -- to be clear, calm, a master of self control, a Jesus figure if you will. But lately he has been doing what I consider "mean" things: calling for a boycott of Amazon, throwing FUD up against Java.
Now, whether Amazon or Sun deserve it is besides the point. He should be taken a more careful, thoughtful position.
Maybe it's that I'm starting to get the sense of hatered coming from him lately, and that saddens me. I'd much rather see a person that I'm following be gentler, calmer. Instead, he's becoming political and using his power to hurt.
Case in point is the Amazon lawsuit. Now, first, I HATE that Amazon is sueing over it's one click patent. However, they do have a legal right to enforce their (crappy) patent. The right way for this to fall out is in the court system. I hope they lose. But RMS's call for boycott really bothers me -- I'd much rather that he'd reiterated his stance on the enforcement of patents and stated that he was disturbed by the Amazon lawsuit.
I'm also worried that there are too many blind RMS followers out there. If
With regards to java, it seems that sun has every right to do with it as they please. The wrote it, they have a copyright on it. I wish that RMS would say things like "I really wish that sun would GPL Java, but of course it's their right to do what they wish and I respect that".
Contrary to what many seem to feel here, TELLING companies to GPL things and boycotting them when they don't is NOT truth and beauty. Asking them calmly and with an understanding ear for why they may seem put off by the notion of giving away their IP is the right way to go about it, IMNSHO.
Well, sorry for running off at the mouth. This whole turn of events just makes me sad.
Why is the above marked flaimbait! It's the guy's honest opinion. Whether you agree with it or not is another matter, but not your right to moderate it down!
Read his words again:
> 8x8 2-bit icons that are distinguishable from each other
He's right. I defy you to distinguish two icons from each other that are just 1 pixel diference apart. 8x8 is wickedly small -- it takes real talent to make good useable icons at that size.
> If one of my friends didn't like Linux they probably wouldn't be my friend.
Thats really sad.
I used to be a religeous NeXT fan. My best friend didn't care for them (had lots of reasons). He was still my friend.
By the way, if I said that I don't care for Linux, I prefer FreeBSD instead, you'd not want to be my friend? Sniff... I feel all broken up inside. )-:
Look here if you don't believe me.
Because it's not. Their website states that your viewing habits are NOT sent back to Tivo headquarters.
I see that my previous post has been marked down to redundant.
It is not. *THIS* is redundant.
(-:
I see this has been moderated down to "flaimbait", to which I reply:
It is not. It's a serious commentary on the decline in good journalism practices on the part of our "dear" forum hosts. That is to say: we're getting more and more repeat news articles, but only when the "news" closely mirrors the sentiments of Hemos/CmdTaco.
Why is this news, Hemos? You guys had this up just LAST WEEK fom christ sake. So now is everything news twice? Once when you first hear it, then again when it hits Wired?
Those darn Brazilians... they're going to legalize themselves back to the stone age of computing.
Silly them.
BTW, people keep mentioning StarOffice -- it's not open source, is it?? The Barzillian articles clearly (well, as clearly as I can understand from the babelfish translation) mean "open source" the way we know and love it here on
Since when is Netscape on a Mac is a MS product?
/. rules section stating that you can only use Linux to read/post here. I have no love for MS products, but it's everyone's right to use it if they want to.
/. crowd. I really seems to me that your average poster here has no self restraint from insulting and rude remarks coming straight out of the gate.
More importantly, please show me the
Last - I do post as plain text. I had to turn it off this once to post the the link to the corel site.
You know, this is really sad -- there is so much pent up anger and venom in the general
Then let /. strip them out.
Do you really expect everyone who copies text from an html page on the net to dump it into an
editor that they know specifically does not render the weird characters so that they can then hand strip the chars out?! That's silly.
Look -- I simply copied and pasted text from the Corel site using Netscape. It didn't show up looking weird in Netscape when I previewed my post.
I feel that I did due diligence, using a major browser to preview my post.
So just get over this already.
Good grief, I AM NOT!
I used Netscape on my Macintosh G3 to both copy and paste the text. I don't use MS-Anything!
Sheesh.
p.s. my post looks fine in Netscape on my Mac. What are you using to read this?
Not much more detail, but some:
"Corel has taken this step to ensure that the United States Government follows its own rules for open and fair procurement," said Marcia Mills, Corel's Corporate Counsel. "This is not a matter particular to Corel, nor are we targetting our competitors -- the Department of Labor's decision adversely affects all software vendors and suppliers to the government."
In all seriousness, with most birth control methods being only 99% effective, the serious question of what to do if conception occurs comes up.
Abortion in space? Imagine the religeous leaders of the world... they'll flip! Even more medically intrusive procedures such as getting a vasectomy (snip snip) aren't foolproof.
Basically, I thought that it's legal to put in disclaimers for consequences *out of control* of the service or item being sold. So, for example, Ebay can put in a disclaimer stating that they can't promise that you'll get paid if a buyer renigs on an auction that they've won. But in the case of Network Solutions, they failed at the very act that they exist to do, and hurt the customer badly because of it. In other words, they failed at something completely under their control. Their software screwed up. This to me would be like Ebay stating "if your auction gets screwed up by our software and we sell your item for the wrong amount, we can't be held accountable." Or how about this. What if your mortgage company could say "if our software screws up and your payment gets lots, you are responsible". I really suspect that a good lawyer could find precident to show that their disclaimer is illegal.
I think your idea is doomed to failure, not just because you'd probably never get anyone else to buy into it, but also because of these:
No trademarks: good luck getting that buy the court system.
No money: ok, you give away the domain names. There will be a gold rush to grab up every name in existance. And just because you don't charge doesn't mean that the new squatters won't charge behind your back.
First come, first serve: Ok, I'll bite. I'd like to reserve:
mcdonalds.com
apple.com
whitehouse.com
nike.com
microsoft.com
sony.com
abc.com
jennicam.org
go.com
tv.com
sun.com
yahoo.com
slashdot.org
networksolutionssucks.com
dell.com
infoseek.com
cnn.com
motorola.com
lycos.com
disney.com
intel.com
excite.com
By the way, I've sent mail to networksolutions letting them know how shitty a thing I think they've done. I think everyone else should too.
Do I, as a software engineer, want to hang out in this forum anymore? I don't know. Even filtering out all 0s isn't working. I'm sure glad that the people I work with every day aren't this bitchy.
Several comments above just really got to me. The baseball bat post was one, the person stating that the apology was just to save face was another. What the heck??!! They apologized, man -- in pretty darn quickly too! What more can you ask? Mistakes happen, it's human nature. Oh, that's right -- because Sun won't give away all of it's software for free, it makes them a bad company.
Open source is a good thing, I think we all agree on that. But it doesn't give us license to fuck over anyone and everyone that doesn't buy into it. (sorry for the language). It's worse than being unprofessional -- it can and is actively hurting good companies. I work with Sun hardware day in and day out, and my customers (you know, the ones that pay the bills) are extremely happy that the servers never crash. But the constant bashing is unfairly affecting the reputation of a pretty good company.
Believe me, my head is not buried in the sand. Sun's a big company, and is clearly looking out for it's interests first. It's just that I'm sick of people spouting calling Sun evil because Sun doesn't subscribe to this one person's open-source philosophy.
So there, I've said my peace. It will mostly fall on deaf ears, I'm sure, but at least I said it.
This looks like a classic "sorry I got caught" situation. This assumes intent. I think it's much more likely an "oops -- didn't even think of it" situation.
Nah -- the y2k bug'll wipe out their bills from the credit card computers. Even my grandma knows this. (-;