Legal enforcement is not a unique feature of the GPL. Once you choose any license (even the BSD) then you are committed to the restrictions it imposes. My point is not in the least non-relevant. The ultimate freedom here is that "He who writes the code chooses the license." If you do not like the particular mix of liberties and restrictions on GPLed code then don't use or originate it.
The "GPL" isn't about giving back to the community. It isn't giving if it's by force. Since the GPL mandates that the changes be distributed in source it's not giving back to the community. It's the community taking the changes by legal force.
What "forces" you to use GPLed code in the first place? It is an upfront affair that can be taken or left.
That would also prevent proprietary use of BSD code without alternate licensing. Come to think of it all you've succeeded in doing is re-inventing the copyleft that the BSD world dislikes in the first place.
I think what is really going on here is analogous to Sunni vs. Shiite or Protestant vs. Catholic. When a proprietary entity uses BSD code, they are the FOSS equivalent of heathens. They neither know or care about the FOSS ethos so you could say they don't know any better. With GPL vs. BSD, you have slightly different takes on similar ideals. You may be able to convert a heathen but heretics are only fit for stake-burning.
I guess we need to wait for another generation to get into politics, the one that is currently growing up with computers.
How is that going to help necessarily? The relative number of people who actually understand computers isn't going up. The current crop of high schoolers just uses (or attempts to use....) the things without the least understanding of the technical, societal, or political issues involved. If anything, they're even dumber. They put their whole lives on MySpace and Facebook for the perusal of others.
To be sure, there are always new geeks coming along but without a radical shift in our own understanding of how things other than computers work, we aren't going to help matters much either.
Such assignment is non-exclusive. Basically, once copyright is assigned to the FSF they then grant a non-exclusive permissive license back to the assigner. In this way, he who wrote the code can still relicense or put his tree to whatever use he likes.
Secondly the GPL doesn't forbid one from examining code to see how something is done. If you positively absolutely want to develop a proprietary implementation of a method you saw in GPL code then no one will stop you. It would probably be best to use a Chinese Wall method but even just writing a spec from GPL code and re-implementing it seems to happen in the BSD world from time to time. This is fine as long as no copy/paste is going on.
What is and isn't permitted with a codebase isn't a black and white free-for-all or utterly-proprietary choice. I have no problem with BSD and proprietary code but then the GPL isn't the devil either. I don't have much truck with the FSF definition of "Free" but the GPL does embody a good approximation of what I call "Fair". It is pretty much tit-for-tat applied to software licensing which I and others find equitable enough.
"restrictive" to whom exactly? Why this insistence of being sociopathic with code whose authors indicate by word and deed remain fully and correctly usable and modifiable. If a manufacturer wants so desperately to lock down users then why this bull-headed insistence on doing it with GPLv3 code? Your other correspondent was right. At a minimum, if games are played to get around the GPLv3 then the GPLv3 will amended to cope. The intent of the license is pretty clear so there would be legal fights as well.
The forums on neooffice.org has a post from one of the authors that tells you how to disable the nag screen and upgrade notice. Out of respect for the author's stated intentions in that post, I'm not going to repeat the method here. Searching the neooffice.org forums will turn up the post so pluby can speak for himself on this one.
My installs have been running without the browser nags for most of the year now.
Venezuela seems a better example of hydraulic despotism than it does of communism. Almost all input into the economy comes from the oil industry and that is in the hands of very few people. Venezuela uses a form of watered-down socialism to keep discontent at manageable levels while the minority that is involved with oil lives a comfortable-to-pampered existence. You see the same sort of thing where some other resource like diamonds is centrally controlled.
I suppose you've never seen the sheer amount of whinging that takes place everytime a story about enforcing the GPL comes up? "Holy Shit! If the GPL is enforced then business will avoid Open Source and MS will 0wnz3r the werld!!!!" I take the reverse tack to the one you take. If it is OK for the likes of MS and Adobe to enforce their licenses then why is it the sheer height of "hippie zealotry" for FOSS coders to enforce theirs?
Proprietary source code tends to be preyed upon by other proprietary interests. That isn't right either but the lawyers will fight it out. There really isn't a community to outrage. What DOES provoke outrage is the sheer amount of patent and trade-secret reachery that goes on. Open Source projects DON'T WANT tainted code. OSS code that can't be freely redistributed legally is mostly useless.
The first time or two I was given small lists of users to add, I punched them in manually. Create the user, create his share, set the permissions, yadda yadda. Anyone nontechnical watching this would have thought I was working my ass off. Thing is, like most of us, I get tired of it. Now I clean the list of users up into a single column text file and feed it to an adduser script. It takes a minute or two and then I can get back to doing something else like reading Slashdot say. Basically anytime I encounter drudgery I seek ways to automate it. That can be truly difficult but can pay dividends later when I want to read the weekly LWN newsletter. Well seriously, when nothing is going wrong or least no one is complaining I find or create projects like internal LAMP sites. I'd rather be figuring out something new or creating something than data entry type drudgery; automating the boring parts of my job lets me spend more time on what is interesting.
I didn't say that it wasn't inexpensive. I said it was stupid. They'll impose this software on someone with some savvy and then an army of blackhats will either work on defanging it or customizing it for their own purposes. Incidentally, I doubt this software is public domain or open source. That means they pay to license it. A hardware proxy that phones home needs be no more expensive than a little Linksys router. Indeed, such a router could be customized for this application. The costs for such a device aren't dissimilar to what they have to pay paying for this software.
"Monitoring software that only runs on Windows" is an utterly stupid way to accomplish what they're trying to do. A separate physically sealed hardware proxy would be OS and protocol agnostic and less likely to be interfered with. If such software were imposed on me then what would stop me from imaging the disk and analyzing the crap at leisure? If they make a habit of this then sooner or later some blackhat is going to make it his bitch.
Anytime I ever encountered "puregrain" the first thing that happened was that we mixed it with something like OJ or Coke. The only way one bottle of puregrain is better than two bottles of vodka is that you can blow fireballs with it. A given drug cannot get "stronger and stronger" over time as part of some evil plan by "the dealers". It can only be more or less pure. If anything, highly pure drugs will be "cut" so that they can be sold more widely. If addicts did commonly get highly pure drugs, they'd simply habituate and probably use slightly smaller doses. I'm with you: "The dealers want the megastrong drugz to hook even more people!!!!" is a load of crap.
EMP is primarily damaging to electronics and very long runs of power cables. If both coupled and uncoupled vehicles rely on un-EMP hardened control electronics then both are vulnerable. Contrary to Hollywood, small generators and batteries aren't all that vulnerable.
When the phrase "Business Model" is used the clouds do not open up raining Divine Sunshine upon the land while a chorus of angels sings AAAAAAAAAaHHHH! AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH! AAAAAAAAAAAAAaHHHHHHHHHH! To put it less snarkily, I notice that the phrase "Business Model" tends to be used by people who seem feel entitled to my business and are probably the sort that would refer to me as a "consumer" rather than a "customer". In particular, business models based on Internet advertising are built on shifting sand. Smarter bears like Google shift with this and are intelligent enough not to annoy the holy livid piss out of me with flashing audio pop-ups. When I surf on a bone-stock Internet Explorer machine, I wonder how the hell anyone can stand it. The Las Vegas Strip is subdued by comparison. If your "Business Model" depends on that then I can only feel sorry for you.
Adblockers and adblocking proxies exist for all other browers to start with. Secondly, user agent strings are trivial to change although I seriously doubt that asshats of this magnitude have any content that I'm interested. The only thing they've accomplished is to show why they should be blocked from the web.
At least I can quickly read an email and even print them out and stack them by location if I have to leave the office. What's even better about email is that most who email me can't type well so they are brief and to the point. Voicemail is another animal altogether. They ramble on and on and on and tell me how the technical problem relates to their life story before rapid fire rattling off a phone number I have to play back ten times so I can write it down. The real joy is having five or six of the things to listen to and take notes from. At least I get them forwarded to my email so I don't have to play fiddly fuck with the phone too.
I can't see this working - it relies on nobody else being in the market.
That is pretty much the definition of "low volume trading". A stock has figures of merit other than it's price. One figure at least as important as price is volume which is simply how many shares are moving per day. Most days, very few SCOX shares change hands. This has been true of SCOX for quite long periods of time. Low volume stocks can be manipulated by "painting the tape". In the May 2007 time period, SCO had a very good motivation for making their stock look better than it was. It had been below $1.00 for quite a while and was in danger of being delisted and dropped from indexes.
If SCO holds true to their previous patterns, once the volume caused by this extraordinarily bad news tapers off, they'll start painting the price back up. Incidentally, a few independent traders don't make painting a stock impossible but they do make it more expensive. A quick daytrader who spots a painting in progress will be more than happy to transfer some of that money into his own pockets. "Buying out all the people selling for less than the target price" is simply what you have to do to manipulate a stock in this manner.
It is common speculation on some investor boards that SCO paints their stock price by trading small blocks of shares back and forth during low volume periods. The May 07 timeframe was one such period. In fact, it has even been noted that SCOX tends to rise on bad news. You also see those small blocks traded back in forth with gusto whenever SCO has a press release of some kind which are usually related to their mobile easy spamming products.
The 2.3 beta of OO has that ability. It seems to be quite close to release. I expect there'll be some bugfix releases before the quality of that filter matches the 97/2000/XP filter.
On the other hand, crude or not those early Simpsons are something that The Simpsons just isn't anymore: funny. I liked Bart far more as a profane little sociopath than a misunderstood-underachiever-who-just-wants-to-be-c ool-minor-character. I absolutely loved one of old Tracey Ullman shorts where he crams all the family counselors mints into his mouth then spits the chewed up mess back into the bowl when told to "Put Those Back!".
When I quit watching the Simpsons, It was pretty much the "1001 Ways That Homer Can Indulge His Stupidity
Show." You used to have to quick to catch all the jokes and asides they crammed in. These days it's just a played out latter day Flintstones that has overstayed it's welcome by at least five years.
Your problem then is that we (your audiences) are going to get burned out on this stuff. I can only stomach so many superhero, sequel, and icon-of-my-childhood movies before I want to see something else. "Rise of the Silver Surfer" meh. I just got around to watching the last Fantastic Four on the premium movie channels. I have no doubt there will soon be a new Batman movie follow on from "Batman Begins" where he fights the Joker this time. I'll be in absolutely no hurry to see it.
As for nostalgia like Transformers, I'm absolutely satiated. I've relived all I care to relive for awhile. If you want any of MY money then you guys had best gear up to take a chance on something new again. Yeah, I'm damn familiar with all the properties being trotted out. That is getting to be a problem rather than an asset. Want a positive example? I enjoyed the hell out of "V for Vendetta" and didn't even know there was a comic book until the end credits. So there you go. Use existing properties. But for crying out loud, leave the ones that have been run into the ground alone. I'm looking at you Paramount with your stupid Starfleet Academy movie.
Slashdot Mirror
Legal enforcement is not a unique feature of the GPL. Once you choose any license (even the BSD) then you are committed to the restrictions it imposes. My point is not in the least non-relevant. The ultimate freedom here is that "He who writes the code chooses the license." If you do not like the particular mix of liberties and restrictions on GPLed code then don't use or originate it.
The "GPL" isn't about giving back to the community. It isn't giving if it's by force. Since the GPL mandates that the changes be distributed in source it's not giving back to the community. It's the community taking the changes by legal force.
What "forces" you to use GPLed code in the first place? It is an upfront affair that can be taken or left.That would also prevent proprietary use of BSD code without alternate licensing. Come to think of it all you've succeeded in doing is re-inventing the copyleft that the BSD world dislikes in the first place.
I think what is really going on here is analogous to Sunni vs. Shiite or Protestant vs. Catholic. When a proprietary entity uses BSD code, they are the FOSS equivalent of heathens. They neither know or care about the FOSS ethos so you could say they don't know any better. With GPL vs. BSD, you have slightly different takes on similar ideals. You may be able to convert a heathen but heretics are only fit for stake-burning.
I guess we need to wait for another generation to get into politics, the one that is currently growing up with computers.
How is that going to help necessarily? The relative number of people who actually understand computers isn't going up. The current crop of high schoolers just uses (or attempts to use....) the things without the least understanding of the technical, societal, or political issues involved. If anything, they're even dumber. They put their whole lives on MySpace and Facebook for the perusal of others.To be sure, there are always new geeks coming along but without a radical shift in our own understanding of how things other than computers work, we aren't going to help matters much either.
Such assignment is non-exclusive. Basically, once copyright is assigned to the FSF they then grant a non-exclusive permissive license back to the assigner. In this way, he who wrote the code can still relicense or put his tree to whatever use he likes.
Secondly the GPL doesn't forbid one from examining code to see how something is done. If you positively absolutely want to develop a proprietary implementation of a method you saw in GPL code then no one will stop you. It would probably be best to use a Chinese Wall method but even just writing a spec from GPL code and re-implementing it seems to happen in the BSD world from time to time. This is fine as long as no copy/paste is going on.
What is and isn't permitted with a codebase isn't a black and white free-for-all or utterly-proprietary choice. I have no problem with BSD and proprietary code but then the GPL isn't the devil either. I don't have much truck with the FSF definition of "Free" but the GPL does embody a good approximation of what I call "Fair". It is pretty much tit-for-tat applied to software licensing which I and others find equitable enough.
"restrictive" to whom exactly? Why this insistence of being sociopathic with code whose authors indicate by word and deed remain fully and correctly usable and modifiable. If a manufacturer wants so desperately to lock down users then why this bull-headed insistence on doing it with GPLv3 code? Your other correspondent was right. At a minimum, if games are played to get around the GPLv3 then the GPLv3 will amended to cope. The intent of the license is pretty clear so there would be legal fights as well.
The forums on neooffice.org has a post from one of the authors that tells you how to disable the nag screen and upgrade notice. Out of respect for the author's stated intentions in that post, I'm not going to repeat the method here. Searching the neooffice.org forums will turn up the post so pluby can speak for himself on this one.
My installs have been running without the browser nags for most of the year now.
Venezuela seems a better example of hydraulic despotism than it does of communism. Almost all input into the economy comes from the oil industry and that is in the hands of very few people. Venezuela uses a form of watered-down socialism to keep discontent at manageable levels while the minority that is involved with oil lives a comfortable-to-pampered existence. You see the same sort of thing where some other resource like diamonds is centrally controlled.
You mean the "invisible hand" that's going to anally fist us with five dollar a gallon milk to go along with the three dollar a gallon gas?
I've played mp3s on machines with those specs with Linux 2.4.x kernels in the 2000ish timeframe. It took something like 85% CPU but it did play them.
I suppose you've never seen the sheer amount of whinging that takes place everytime a story about enforcing the GPL comes up? "Holy Shit! If the GPL is enforced then business will avoid Open Source and MS will 0wnz3r the werld!!!!" I take the reverse tack to the one you take. If it is OK for the likes of MS and Adobe to enforce their licenses then why is it the sheer height of "hippie zealotry" for FOSS coders to enforce theirs?
Proprietary source code tends to be preyed upon by other proprietary interests. That isn't right either but the lawyers will fight it out. There really isn't a community to outrage. What DOES provoke outrage is the sheer amount of patent and trade-secret reachery that goes on. Open Source projects DON'T WANT tainted code. OSS code that can't be freely redistributed legally is mostly useless.
I've seen that put as an aphorism:
"The essence of a good sysadmin is laziness."
The first time or two I was given small lists of users to add, I punched them in manually. Create the user, create his share, set the permissions, yadda yadda. Anyone nontechnical watching this would have thought I was working my ass off. Thing is, like most of us, I get tired of it. Now I clean the list of users up into a single column text file and feed it to an adduser script. It takes a minute or two and then I can get back to doing something else like reading Slashdot say. Basically anytime I encounter drudgery I seek ways to automate it. That can be truly difficult but can pay dividends later when I want to read the weekly LWN newsletter. Well seriously, when nothing is going wrong or least no one is complaining I find or create projects like internal LAMP sites. I'd rather be figuring out something new or creating something than data entry type drudgery; automating the boring parts of my job lets me spend more time on what is interesting.
I didn't say that it wasn't inexpensive. I said it was stupid. They'll impose this software on someone with some savvy and then an army of blackhats will either work on defanging it or customizing it for their own purposes. Incidentally, I doubt this software is public domain or open source. That means they pay to license it. A hardware proxy that phones home needs be no more expensive than a little Linksys router. Indeed, such a router could be customized for this application. The costs for such a device aren't dissimilar to what they have to pay paying for this software.
"Monitoring software that only runs on Windows" is an utterly stupid way to accomplish what they're trying to do. A separate physically sealed hardware proxy would be OS and protocol agnostic and less likely to be interfered with. If such software were imposed on me then what would stop me from imaging the disk and analyzing the crap at leisure? If they make a habit of this then sooner or later some blackhat is going to make it his bitch.
Anytime I ever encountered "puregrain" the first thing that happened was that we mixed it with something like OJ or Coke. The only way one bottle of puregrain is better than two bottles of vodka is that you can blow fireballs with it. A given drug cannot get "stronger and stronger" over time as part of some evil plan by "the dealers". It can only be more or less pure. If anything, highly pure drugs will be "cut" so that they can be sold more widely. If addicts did commonly get highly pure drugs, they'd simply habituate and probably use slightly smaller doses. I'm with you: "The dealers want the megastrong drugz to hook even more people!!!!" is a load of crap.
EMP is primarily damaging to electronics and very long runs of power cables. If both coupled and uncoupled vehicles rely on un-EMP hardened control electronics then both are vulnerable. Contrary to Hollywood, small generators and batteries aren't all that vulnerable.
When the phrase "Business Model" is used the clouds do not open up raining Divine Sunshine upon the land while a chorus of angels sings AAAAAAAAAaHHHH! AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH! AAAAAAAAAAAAAaHHHHHHHHHH! To put it less snarkily, I notice that the phrase "Business Model" tends to be used by people who seem feel entitled to my business and are probably the sort that would refer to me as a "consumer" rather than a "customer". In particular, business models based on Internet advertising are built on shifting sand. Smarter bears like Google shift with this and are intelligent enough not to annoy the holy livid piss out of me with flashing audio pop-ups. When I surf on a bone-stock Internet Explorer machine, I wonder how the hell anyone can stand it. The Las Vegas Strip is subdued by comparison. If your "Business Model" depends on that then I can only feel sorry for you.
I made a special Agent String just for this idiot that contains: "Microsoft Internet Explorer Really Fire Fox Boy You Are Dumb"
Adblockers and adblocking proxies exist for all other browers to start with. Secondly, user agent strings are trivial to change although I seriously doubt that asshats of this magnitude have any content that I'm interested. The only thing they've accomplished is to show why they should be blocked from the web.
At least I can quickly read an email and even print them out and stack them by location if I have to leave the office. What's even better about email is that most who email me can't type well so they are brief and to the point. Voicemail is another animal altogether. They ramble on and on and on and tell me how the technical problem relates to their life story before rapid fire rattling off a phone number I have to play back ten times so I can write it down. The real joy is having five or six of the things to listen to and take notes from. At least I get them forwarded to my email so I don't have to play fiddly fuck with the phone too.
I can't see this working - it relies on nobody else being in the market.
That is pretty much the definition of "low volume trading". A stock has figures of merit other than it's price. One figure at least as important as price is volume which is simply how many shares are moving per day. Most days, very few SCOX shares change hands. This has been true of SCOX for quite long periods of time. Low volume stocks can be manipulated by "painting the tape". In the May 2007 time period, SCO had a very good motivation for making their stock look better than it was. It had been below $1.00 for quite a while and was in danger of being delisted and dropped from indexes.If SCO holds true to their previous patterns, once the volume caused by this extraordinarily bad news tapers off, they'll start painting the price back up. Incidentally, a few independent traders don't make painting a stock impossible but they do make it more expensive. A quick daytrader who spots a painting in progress will be more than happy to transfer some of that money into his own pockets. "Buying out all the people selling for less than the target price" is simply what you have to do to manipulate a stock in this manner.
It is common speculation on some investor boards that SCO paints their stock price by trading small blocks of shares back and forth during low volume periods. The May 07 timeframe was one such period. In fact, it has even been noted that SCOX tends to rise on bad news. You also see those small blocks traded back in forth with gusto whenever SCO has a press release of some kind which are usually related to their mobile easy spamming products.
The 2.3 beta of OO has that ability. It seems to be quite close to release. I expect there'll be some bugfix releases before the quality of that filter matches the 97/2000/XP filter.
On the other hand, crude or not those early Simpsons are something that The Simpsons just isn't anymore: funny. I liked Bart far more as a profane little sociopath than a misunderstood-underachiever-who-just-wants-to-be-c ool-minor-character. I absolutely loved one of old Tracey Ullman shorts where he crams all the family counselors mints into his mouth then spits the chewed up mess back into the bowl when told to "Put Those Back!".
When I quit watching the Simpsons, It was pretty much the "1001 Ways That Homer Can Indulge His Stupidity Show." You used to have to quick to catch all the jokes and asides they crammed in. These days it's just a played out latter day Flintstones that has overstayed it's welcome by at least five years.
Your problem then is that we (your audiences) are going to get burned out on this stuff. I can only stomach so many superhero, sequel, and icon-of-my-childhood movies before I want to see something else. "Rise of the Silver Surfer" meh. I just got around to watching the last Fantastic Four on the premium movie channels. I have no doubt there will soon be a new Batman movie follow on from "Batman Begins" where he fights the Joker this time. I'll be in absolutely no hurry to see it.
As for nostalgia like Transformers, I'm absolutely satiated. I've relived all I care to relive for awhile. If you want any of MY money then you guys had best gear up to take a chance on something new again. Yeah, I'm damn familiar with all the properties being trotted out. That is getting to be a problem rather than an asset. Want a positive example? I enjoyed the hell out of "V for Vendetta" and didn't even know there was a comic book until the end credits. So there you go. Use existing properties. But for crying out loud, leave the ones that have been run into the ground alone. I'm looking at you Paramount with your stupid Starfleet Academy movie.