After considerable discussion on debian-legal, we concluded that we cannot think of any ways in which this "hole" could be plugged and still result in a free license.
That suggests it is not a hole at all. This is intuitively correct: I should not have to release my modifications just because I showed somebody the output from my program.
You're hopelessly overcomplicating the matter by introducing a lot of noise that isn't in the GPL.
The GPL does not talk about linking.
The GPL does not talk about web servers.
The GPL talks about what you can do with the code. Derivative works have to be available under the GPL. If you give somebody a copy of the program to run then you have to give them the source. That is all.
If you have an application that links to a GPLed library, your application is ***PROBABLY*** a derivative work of the library, because that's the way in which we normally use libraries. No transformations on the method of linking, however creative, will alter this; the work is a derivative because it is a derivative, not because of the manner in which you load the library.
If you give the program to somebody, you have to give them the source. If you run the program for them, and give them the output, you do not have to give them the source. This does not change just because a web server is involved.
Also we have some pretty solid physics that indicates that rapid greenhouse gas accumulation is a problem.
We also have some really solid physics, in the form of hard measurements, that indicates every volcano eruption throws more greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere than all humanity has generated since the Industrial Revolution.
Any claims about the dangers of greenhouse gasses must explain why all these volcano eruptions aren't a more serious problem, and why our activities are so important by comparison to them.
If they do legal but distasteful things with their verified domains, we can block the domain.
Of course, you can already block their domain; none of these things actually help there.
Perhaps you are labouring under the illusion that it is expensive to setup a domain covered by this stuff. It isn't. Spammers will just continue as they always have.
In this way it's a breeze to copy a picture from ACDSee to Word, for instance. Now try to copy a picture from GQView to OpenOffice.
Nothing to do with linux.
The X window system provides a perfectly adequete select/paste system. Like in Windows, some applications just don't support it fully.
GQView is one such application (presumably because that's a strange thing to want to do; I've never heard of anybody trying to do that before). Openoffice is not.
Yes, I tried every single performance hack. I used all kinds of experimental kernels, did all sorts of prelinking combinations, even did a stage 1 Gentoo install. With all the eye candy on (including some really pretty stuff like true alpha blending), WinXP runs cleaner/faster than Gentoo+ion3. I mean, there is something very wrong going on with Linux desktop.
There is something very wrong going on with your Linux desktop. All my hosts run Debian and they leave Windows in the dust. Especially startup time, which is under 20 seconds for the Debian boxes, but over a minute for Windows. Application start time is insignificant except when that entails loading a lot of data from disk.
Knee-jerk reactions, such as Gentoo is famous for, will neither help nor solve anything. Something you have there is broken.
Alergies are an extreme response from the body to a foreign substance. By building up a tolerance, the body reacts less extremely.
No, quite the opposite. Allergies are an immune-system response; they are the tolerance built up over time. You cannot be allergic to a substance which you have never encountered - your body is responding exactly as if it were repulsing an infection. As such the symptoms will grow stronger with more exposure, as your immune system learns how to react faster (rapidly reaching a plateau).
If there is something to which you build up a tolerance and this reduces the irritation, you aren't allergic to that thing. Any symptoms it appears to cause are not an allergic reaction, they're something else.
Let's change that statement a bit to say "I'm always amazed by the sheer hubris that people display in assuming that their choice of candidate can affect anything so massive as a country. Really, you are not that important." That sounds pretty retarded, doesn't it.
No. That sounds pretty accurate to me. You're deluded if you think that your choice of candidate has a significant effect on the country; once elected, all candidates act in more or less the same manner (a few details vary, but never many or anything of significance).
If you don't think so, then I invite you to elect candidates who will stop the MPAA and all similar organisations.
the reason we have the problem we have now
Given that you haven't even demonstrated the existence of the "problem", it's rather silly to claim you know what the causes are.
Would you tell someone that their vote doesn't matter (carping about parties and electoral colleges aside), and therefore they might as well just skip it all together?
Yes, always. To do otherwise is to buy into the myth of 'representative democracy', which is really just a form of low-grade tranquiliser for the masses.
Well, to that I might remind you that homo sapiens are the only species that sets things on fire, on purpose. That fact alone should demonstrate that people have a slightly different impact in their environment than most other animals.
Every species is unique in some respects and different in some respects. That isn't evidence of superiority.
A well placed group of locusts can ravage an ecology at least as effectively as any human.
how much of a stretch is it to be concerned with the effects of other human sourced gas emissions.
Pretty big stretch to go from "we can cause immediate localised effects" to "we are irreversibly altering the climate of the planet".
Since 1600, there have been 584 species presummed extinct just in the US, suggesting a 7,000 fold increasein the rate of extinctions since the industrial revolution. It's pretty hard to deny a connection to human activity with numbers like that, and I'd say that's a pretty signifigant impression on the world.
Rate of extinction isn't particularly interesting; it's drawing an arbitrary boundary that does not ordinarily exist - specifically between "present but relegated to much smaller numbers and a different ecological niche" and "failed to find a niche to survive in". Besides, most things of this nature reflect not increases in the event, but increases in the detection of the event.
I think it's pretty irresponsbile to write off our activity here on the planet as benign when we already have evidence that we do and are capable of changing environment at least regionally
Who said anything about writing it off? Straw man.
I don't think questioning whether or not our actions and accelerating development might jeapordize that balance is pathetic.
Another straw man. Who said that?
Prove it if you can. Don't claim it must be true just because you can't and you want it to be.
That's a straw man. Nowhere did I use the singular, or the number '1'; that sentence was in the plural (note 'people'), as in:
"the assumption of a group of people that their individual choices of cars matter".
The net result of all the cars in the world isn't hugely more remarkable than the net result of all the farting in the world. It's just not that *big*. A planet *is* that big. People are nowhere near as important as they like to think they are.
How much more evidence do we need before we start to do something about this problem?
Any evidence would be a good start. Currently we only have suppositions and outlandish claims.
Do not believe a tree-hugger when he tells you he has evidence. Insist on seeing it for yourself. Then get an independent analysis of it. It will invariably turn out to be either fake, or not evidence of anything.
"Thermometers on the ground, measuring the near-surface air temperature, demonstrate a marked increase in globally-averaged temperature over the past two decades. Computer models of global warming predict that the temperature trend in the Earth's thick lower atmosphere, called the lower troposphere, should be experiencing an even more pronounced warming that increases smoothly with altitude. And yet, satellite observations of the temperature of the Earth's lower troposphere do not reveal any overall warming trend."
And then goes on to show a graph that matches the one you were replying to, so I don't know what the claim regarding selective data was about.
This page clearly supports the point: CO2 is rising for some unknown reason, and the sky is still not falling.
I'm always amazed by the sheer hubris that people display in assuming that their choice of car can affect anything so massive as a planet. Really, you are not that important.
Despite a great deal of outlandish claims from many people, there's no particular evidence to suggest that humanity is having a significant impact on the planet. Claiming that we have the capability to make any kind of significant impression on something so huge and ancient is self-delusion in extremes. At most, we could wipe *ourselves* out, but the planet wouldn't care; extinction of a species is quite normal for it.
At present, only really careful archaeology would be able to find any trace of us in a few million years time; that's barely noticable on geological timescales. The dinosaurs were more obvious.
The assumption in the past few years that humanity is responsible for any changes it doesn't understand is quite pathetic.
We know that humans have slightly increased CO2 levels in the atmosphere
Actually, we don't. We do not have an accurate record of what 'normal' CO2 levels are, so we cannot even say *if* CO2 levels have increased.
The global warming pundits insist that they must ordinarily be constant. That's fairly unlikely; there appear (in the small amount of data we have collected over the past few decades) to be complicated cycles at work. We do not understand those cycles. Therefore we cannot claim to have altered them.
That's no surprise. apt is basically crap, and porting it to another platform is a stunning exercise in missing the point. The reason Debian works well is because of Debian, not apt; it's the packages which matter.
> The government might want to destroy the airline industry because... ???
If people can't travel easily then they can't see how much better things are in other countries. This makes it easier to get them to accept things which aren't actually true, like "It's better this way". That's how the USSR survived so long.
Of course, for this to work the next requirement will be massive censorship of the internet.
> Basically, that crack in your foundation *might* be no big deal, but it *might* mean that there's a > spring running 6" below the foundation wall and in six months your mansion collapses.
In other words, the presence of the crack tells you nothing useful. That's a pretty good analogy.
> to deny that Apple has created one of the most user-friendly, beautiful, slick gui's for *nix is crazy.
Well then colour me crazy, because that awful thing is ugly, clumsy, and slow. It's like having a glowing orange pogo stick, when you could be driving a car.
Even the UI fanboys have stopped being Apple fanboys these days; where they used to do nothing but sing hymns of praise to Apple all day, now they spend their time complaining about how awful that same product is.
I find this PR campaign Apple are pursuing, where they paint themselves as "community members" or as being friendly to free software, to be rather tasteless. It's nothing but "let them eat cake". People fall for it (inevitably, because people are stupid), but that doesn't change anything.
> I think there should be free cars, houses, books, computers and private jets because right now, all of my available choices are non-free.
Build the house yourself, or get a group of people together and build it, using materials you have on hand, and it will be. You're not obliged to buy it.
Besides, that's a broken analogy. These things can't be inexpensively copied.
> Why, oh why, won't those guys building speedboats spend some time building free versions so I can get mine?
Quite neatly running in the opposite direction from the point here. Why aren't you participating in building one, if that's what you want?
I'm certainly working on building the stuff *I* want to use.
These are mostly not "frequently spouted"; rather, they are occasionally produced perversions of the real points. As such, yes, they're bogus, but so what?
1. "If you're not willing to help fix it then you shouldn't complain about it"
The real form is "If you're not willing to fix it, don't expect me to do it for you; complain all you like, but it won't have much effect unless I happen to care about this problem".
2. "Open Source software allows you(singular) to get under the hood and fix problems"
Correctly, this is "Open Source software allows you(plural) to get under the hood and fix problems". You personally might not be able to do it, but you can pay somebody else to do it.
Some people would say that you can do this for proprietary software too. But think - who are you going to pay to fix the bugs in IE? MS won't take your money and nobody else has the source.
3. "All software should be free"
That should read "All our software should be free". Non-free software can exist, but we shouldn't have to use it. You can if you want to.
The rest of the objections to this are just a lengthly failure to realise that money can be made in ways other than selling software.
4. "Open Source software is always better than closed, proprietary software"
This one's stated correctly but interpreted incorrectly. The mistake here lies in assuming that "better" is a simple quantitative comparison. The meaning of the statement is "free software is always better than proprietary software, in the respect that it is free"; the misinterpreted form is "There exists no proprietary software which I prefer over comparable free software".
5. "Scratching the personal itch"
No myths here. I'm not sure what this guy's point is. Yes, free software primarily serves the needs of the people who write it. So what?
6. "More choice is always better"
Not much here either. If you don't know how to build a system, pay somebody else to do it for you.
Slashdot Mirror
After considerable discussion on debian-legal, we concluded that we cannot think of any ways in which this "hole" could be plugged and still result in a free license.
That suggests it is not a hole at all. This is intuitively correct: I should not have to release my modifications just because I showed somebody the output from my program.
You're hopelessly overcomplicating the matter by introducing a lot of noise that isn't in the GPL.
The GPL does not talk about linking.
The GPL does not talk about web servers.
The GPL talks about what you can do with the code. Derivative works have to be available under the GPL. If you give somebody a copy of the program to run then you have to give them the source. That is all.
If you have an application that links to a GPLed library, your application is ***PROBABLY*** a derivative work of the library, because that's the way in which we normally use libraries. No transformations on the method of linking, however creative, will alter this; the work is a derivative because it is a derivative, not because of the manner in which you load the library.
If you give the program to somebody, you have to give them the source. If you run the program for them, and give them the output, you do not have to give them the source. This does not change just because a web server is involved.
Also we have some pretty solid physics that indicates that rapid greenhouse gas accumulation is a problem.
We also have some really solid physics, in the form of hard measurements, that indicates every volcano eruption throws more greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere than all humanity has generated since the Industrial Revolution.
Any claims about the dangers of greenhouse gasses must explain why all these volcano eruptions aren't a more serious problem, and why our activities are so important by comparison to them.
If they do legal but distasteful things with their verified domains, we can block the domain.
Of course, you can already block their domain; none of these things actually help there.
Perhaps you are labouring under the illusion that it is expensive to setup a domain covered by this stuff. It isn't. Spammers will just continue as they always have.
In this way it's a breeze to copy a picture from ACDSee to Word, for instance. Now try to copy a picture from GQView to OpenOffice.
Nothing to do with linux.
The X window system provides a perfectly adequete select/paste system. Like in Windows, some applications just don't support it fully.
GQView is one such application (presumably because that's a strange thing to want to do; I've never heard of anybody trying to do that before). Openoffice is not.
Yes, I tried every single performance hack. I used all kinds of experimental kernels, did all sorts of prelinking combinations, even did a stage 1 Gentoo install. With all the eye candy on (including some really pretty stuff like true alpha blending), WinXP runs cleaner/faster than Gentoo+ion3. I mean, there is something very wrong going on with Linux desktop.
There is something very wrong going on with your Linux desktop. All my hosts run Debian and they leave Windows in the dust. Especially startup time, which is under 20 seconds for the Debian boxes, but over a minute for Windows. Application start time is insignificant except when that entails loading a lot of data from disk.
Knee-jerk reactions, such as Gentoo is famous for, will neither help nor solve anything. Something you have there is broken.
No, quite the opposite. Allergies are an immune-system response; they are the tolerance built up over time. You cannot be allergic to a substance which you have never encountered - your body is responding exactly as if it were repulsing an infection. As such the symptoms will grow stronger with more exposure, as your immune system learns how to react faster (rapidly reaching a plateau).
If there is something to which you build up a tolerance and this reduces the irritation, you aren't allergic to that thing. Any symptoms it appears to cause are not an allergic reaction, they're something else.
Surely this is a troll, but I'll go anyway.
Let's change that statement a bit to say "I'm always amazed by the sheer hubris that people display in assuming that their choice of candidate can affect anything so massive as a country. Really, you are not that important." That sounds pretty retarded, doesn't it.
No. That sounds pretty accurate to me. You're deluded if you think that your choice of candidate has a significant effect on the country; once elected, all candidates act in more or less the same manner (a few details vary, but never many or anything of significance).
If you don't think so, then I invite you to elect candidates who will stop the MPAA and all similar organisations.
the reason we have the problem we have now
Given that you haven't even demonstrated the existence of the "problem", it's rather silly to claim you know what the causes are.
Would you tell someone that their vote doesn't matter (carping about parties and electoral colleges aside), and therefore they might as well just skip it all together?
Yes, always. To do otherwise is to buy into the myth of 'representative democracy', which is really just a form of low-grade tranquiliser for the masses.
Well, to that I might remind you that homo sapiens are the only species that sets things on fire, on purpose. That fact alone should demonstrate that people have a slightly different impact in their environment than most other animals.
Every species is unique in some respects and different in some respects. That isn't evidence of superiority.
A well placed group of locusts can ravage an ecology at least as effectively as any human.
how much of a stretch is it to be concerned with the effects of other human sourced gas emissions.
Pretty big stretch to go from "we can cause immediate localised effects" to "we are irreversibly altering the climate of the planet".
Since 1600, there have been 584 species presummed extinct just in the US, suggesting a 7,000 fold increasein the rate of extinctions since the industrial revolution. It's pretty hard to deny a connection to human activity with numbers like that, and I'd say that's a pretty signifigant impression on the world.
Rate of extinction isn't particularly interesting; it's drawing an arbitrary boundary that does not ordinarily exist - specifically between "present but relegated to much smaller numbers and a different ecological niche" and "failed to find a niche to survive in". Besides, most things of this nature reflect not increases in the event, but increases in the detection of the event.
I think it's pretty irresponsbile to write off our activity here on the planet as benign when we already have evidence that we do and are capable of changing environment at least regionally
Who said anything about writing it off? Straw man.
I don't think questioning whether or not our actions and accelerating development might jeapordize that balance is pathetic.
Another straw man. Who said that?
Prove it if you can. Don't claim it must be true just because you can't and you want it to be.
That's a straw man. Nowhere did I use the singular, or the number '1'; that sentence was in the plural (note 'people'), as in:
"the assumption of a group of people that their individual choices of cars matter".
The net result of all the cars in the world isn't hugely more remarkable than the net result of all the farting in the world. It's just not that *big*. A planet *is* that big. People are nowhere near as important as they like to think they are.
The accuracy of techniques such as this is unknown and unverifiable. We only have known-accurate data for about 50 years.
That graph is based on a *hypothesis*. That isn't proof. Worse, it's the *same* hypothesis, so it's not even an implication.
If you claim that this does not affect CO2 levels of our atmosphere
Nope, I merely claim that you don't know that they *do*, and have no real evidence to support that theory.
How much more evidence do we need before we start to do something about this problem?
Any evidence would be a good start. Currently we only have suppositions and outlandish claims.
Do not believe a tree-hugger when he tells you he has evidence. Insist on seeing it for yourself. Then get an independent analysis of it. It will invariably turn out to be either fake, or not evidence of anything.
The page you cite says:
"Thermometers on the ground, measuring the near-surface air temperature, demonstrate a marked increase in globally-averaged temperature over the past two decades. Computer models of global warming predict that the temperature trend in the Earth's thick lower atmosphere, called the lower troposphere, should be experiencing an even more pronounced warming that increases smoothly with altitude. And yet, satellite observations of the temperature of the Earth's lower troposphere do not reveal any overall warming trend."
And then goes on to show a graph that matches the one you were replying to, so I don't know what the claim regarding selective data was about.
This page clearly supports the point: CO2 is rising for some unknown reason, and the sky is still not falling.
That graph says the exact same thing as the one it was replying to. The axes aren't quite drawn to the same scale but all the numbers are identical.
I'm always amazed by the sheer hubris that people display in assuming that their choice of car can affect anything so massive as a planet. Really, you are not that important.
Despite a great deal of outlandish claims from many people, there's no particular evidence to suggest that humanity is having a significant impact on the planet. Claiming that we have the capability to make any kind of significant impression on something so huge and ancient is self-delusion in extremes. At most, we could wipe *ourselves* out, but the planet wouldn't care; extinction of a species is quite normal for it.
At present, only really careful archaeology would be able to find any trace of us in a few million years time; that's barely noticable on geological timescales. The dinosaurs were more obvious.
The assumption in the past few years that humanity is responsible for any changes it doesn't understand is quite pathetic.
We know that humans have slightly increased CO2 levels in the atmosphere
Actually, we don't. We do not have an accurate record of what 'normal' CO2 levels are, so we cannot even say *if* CO2 levels have increased.
The global warming pundits insist that they must ordinarily be constant. That's fairly unlikely; there appear (in the small amount of data we have collected over the past few decades) to be complicated cycles at work. We do not understand those cycles. Therefore we cannot claim to have altered them.
That's no surprise. apt is basically crap, and porting it to another platform is a stunning exercise in missing the point. The reason Debian works well is because of Debian, not apt; it's the packages which matter.
> I've found Ext3 to be slow when you have more than about 5000 files in a directory.
Use a 2.6 kernel and dir_index.
> The government might want to destroy the airline industry because... ???
If people can't travel easily then they can't see how much better things are in other countries. This makes it easier to get them to accept things which aren't actually true, like "It's better this way". That's how the USSR survived so long.
Of course, for this to work the next requirement will be massive censorship of the internet.
> Basically, that crack in your foundation *might* be no big deal, but it *might* mean that there's a
> spring running 6" below the foundation wall and in six months your mansion collapses.
In other words, the presence of the crack tells you nothing useful. That's a pretty good analogy.
> to deny that Apple has created one of the most user-friendly, beautiful, slick gui's for *nix is crazy.
Well then colour me crazy, because that awful thing is ugly, clumsy, and slow. It's like having a glowing orange pogo stick, when you could be driving a car.
Even the UI fanboys have stopped being Apple fanboys these days; where they used to do nothing but sing hymns of praise to Apple all day, now they spend their time complaining about how awful that same product is.
I find this PR campaign Apple are pursuing, where they paint themselves as "community members" or as being friendly to free software, to be rather tasteless. It's nothing but "let them eat cake". People fall for it (inevitably, because people are stupid), but that doesn't change anything.
"There were numerous instances where I had an opportunity to commit a crime, but did not do so" is not a valid defence.
> I think there should be free cars, houses, books, computers and private jets because right now, all of my available choices are non-free.
Build the house yourself, or get a group of people together and build it, using materials you have on hand, and it will be. You're not obliged to buy it.
Besides, that's a broken analogy. These things can't be inexpensively copied.
> Why, oh why, won't those guys building speedboats spend some time building free versions so I can get mine?
Quite neatly running in the opposite direction from the point here. Why aren't you participating in building one, if that's what you want?
I'm certainly working on building the stuff *I* want to use.
That's not actually a requirement, if you're willing to accept a less than 100% survival rate.
These are mostly not "frequently spouted"; rather, they are occasionally produced perversions of the real points. As such, yes, they're bogus, but so what?
1. "If you're not willing to help fix it then you shouldn't complain about it"
The real form is "If you're not willing to fix it, don't expect me to do it for you; complain all you like, but it won't have much effect unless I happen to care about this problem".
2. "Open Source software allows you(singular) to get under the hood and fix problems"
Correctly, this is "Open Source software allows you(plural) to get under the hood and fix problems". You personally might not be able to do it, but you can pay somebody else to do it.
Some people would say that you can do this for proprietary software too. But think - who are you going to pay to fix the bugs in IE? MS won't take your money and nobody else has the source.
3. "All software should be free"
That should read "All our software should be free". Non-free software can exist, but we shouldn't have to use it. You can if you want to.
The rest of the objections to this are just a lengthly failure to realise that money can be made in ways other than selling software.
4. "Open Source software is always better than closed, proprietary software"
This one's stated correctly but interpreted incorrectly. The mistake here lies in assuming that "better" is a simple quantitative comparison. The meaning of the statement is "free software is always better than proprietary software, in the respect that it is free"; the misinterpreted form is "There exists no proprietary software which I prefer over comparable free software".
5. "Scratching the personal itch"
No myths here. I'm not sure what this guy's point is. Yes, free software primarily serves the needs of the people who write it. So what?
6. "More choice is always better"
Not much here either. If you don't know how to build a system, pay somebody else to do it for you.