Slashdot can NOT verify the validity of stories AND be up and to date
Slashdot CAN destroy karma on both the submitter and poster of subsequently discovered hoaxes/errors and ultimatly remove their privileges
I for one would like to see Slashdot take itself a bit more seriously, making an attempt to keep the posted stories real and relevent and NOT REPEATS.
Why can't we all "meta-moderate" the story posters, if we all think one of them is a dumbass can we note vote him out?
I do not want to see the whole site crippled in beuracracy or the removal of some of the more lively debates (lets face it any story that mentions M$oft is Flamebait).
I would like to see a more useful moderation system including
+1 Flamebait
-1 Flamebait
and also remove the Under and Over rated options.
Why can't we view stories by Moderation class, there are so many stories on slashdot where all I would like to see are the "Funny" stories, and many others where I would just want the "Insightful&&Informative" posts.
I'm not an American either, and will happily confuse all aspects of the mess they call a democratic legal system:-) What I was really implying was that using the UCITA click-through validation we could protect the licensce which prevents them from replying or discussing the mail and have the return to address encypted so that any reply shows they broke both UCITA and DMCA (because they unencrypted the data!). IANAL and therefore I didn't suggest an exact scheme for the annoyance initially because I feel a lawyer with a good grasp of the legal situations and implications could specify this best, perhaps they can even come up with a suitable solution to attack only the DMCA. The aim should be simple, to annoy the hell out of them and get attention while providing them with only one route to escape, the destruction of these stupid laws.
How's about we design a standard form letter for the coporate world we want to disobey. Not a piece of text, but a lovely piece of html, javascript and vbscript. Preferably that protects itself with the DMCA via a click through licensce. Something simple that downloads it's contents on reception (i.e. the document is simply links) and whose content is perhaps all the news items from "favourable" sources of the DMCA related litigations. Simply put it tells them that we object to their use of the DMCA's protections for the reasons discussed below. I presume that the document should be authored in the US to ensure that the legal situation is an appropriate quagmire, and really we should get a nice lawyer to write the click through licensce to ensure that if they try to prosectute ANYONE (ISPs etc.) that they must therefore break the DMCA. Any American Lawyers there to tell us what we should and shouldn't do, and to write the "licensce", I'm sure we wont have a problem designing the mail itself:-)
Check your history books on the exact point at which America officially choose English as it's official language. It won a vote, by one vote, from what Language? What a horrible thought !
Please feel free to correct me (I know you all will), but am I not correct in believing that the defined weight of a kilogram is actually the mass of an object (in Paris?)? The 1mx1mx1m=1000kg for water at 4C (I think as its maximum volume) was meant to work, but in fact they got it slightly wrong (perhaps 0.4%) so they chose the object instead of the easy definition.......go figure! I personally wish we would all just forget the imperial measurements (inch, pound, cup etc. etc.) and just all start to get our head around the metric measurements. I'm 24 (so post "metrification"), Irish and lived in England for 4 Years: I can think distances and understand them in metric; I can think volumes in litres and weights in grams and kilos. I still have to think through some imperial figures though and that bugs me....when have you last seen the kmpl instead of mpg for a car. The worst part is, I just love pints per night, but I'm just going to have to start drinking litres!!!! I think it's pretty fair to say the Open Standard and easiest understood system is metric, who really wants any other way and what Island no they live on? Why don't we all get with the program?
Licensing Windows from Microsoft is not an option because it inevitably means conforming to the giant's wishes and ideas about how machines should run instead of
making the OS work exactly the way developers envisioned. Other problems will also plague developers such as not being able to fix bugs because of the closed source nature of Windows. This freedom to innovate is what open source provides to companies who use Linux and adopt instead of fear the open source philosophy.
My personal favourite: www.gandi.net 12 Euros for a domain with basic (free) dns hosting. No legal strings or ties (ICANN dispute policy) and no hassles changing and configuring your data. Sweet
people like my parents... prefer to pay for their software. "You get what you pay for," they say. "That's the way I was raised, and that's what I think."
Will Corel start to confuse these people? They would have been happy paying for PhotoPaint or WordPerfect 8, but Corel let them have both for nothing. Will this confuse them? I hope so, I hope they start to see that some software should be payed for and some should be free. The OS and Desktop should not be payed for by anyone, the applications you depend on however, everyone should pay for these especially if they are free GPL software. By paying for "free" software you encourage the developers, you tell them that not only do you want to use their work, it is so good that you will hand over some money so they can afford to do more work on it. I think the real applications that are now coming freely to linux (thats beer and speach) will slowly evolve everyones opinion over what they should pay for, even our parents.
let's face it, they couldn't care less about first ammendment rights or any such nonsense, all they want is to preserve their lucrative business model. The cost of paying 20 class action suits anually by school parents where 50 students were butchered by a crazed Britney Spears fan pales to insignificance to the vast revenue gained from control of the music distribution and associated industries. It is quite like the companies who refuse to recall dangerous products because the cost would outweigh the expected legal impact, they just hope no-one realises that they knew in time to stop the deaths. The time has come for you Americans to start making some serious noise. Bush or Gore, whose favourite corporations would you rather have make the law?
www.gandi.net you don't have to pay double to have the domain name hosted unlike joker. Also you actually own the domain and can't have it snapped off you like joker. Read the FAQ and T&C The new trend in domain registrations, hidden charges!
What a pile of fscking horseshat! Why the fsck do people on Slashdot seem to think that the net has gone from a government toy to a corporate tool? The one place I would not expect to see repeated.com madness is here but time and again I see this same opinion trotted out, and every time it is clear that the author wants a commercialised net. The Internet (IMHO) was created by government for the army and used by the only people who could figure out how to make it do something useful and then improved upon by them until eventually even stupid corporate managers could start to remember that they just had to open the right program and type in a domain name, then the net got spamdotted to hell. What is the corporate signal to noise ratio online (i.e. complete bag of poo sites to something with a modicom of sense) and is it any better than the signal to noise ratio of joe blogg's homepages? Lets face it the net is a pile of poo with a few plants thriving in the manure, it doesn't matter how any DNS system is organised, the cream will float and the dung will drop out of view. The only people who care about this rubbish are the fools who belive that the "magic" of having many people staggering over their site by accident is worth an IPO. Lets leave this behind here on Slashdot and start accepting that the net is not anyones and should never be anyones, it is a co-operative system where barriers of entry are minimal and we can all stick up our own signal or noise. Lets stop debating how we should help corporations structure the Internet to service their needs (like the current RIAA battle to corrupt the net to preserve their market). The simple question is this, if the RIAA get a ban on the transferal of copyrighted material over a digital interface are you going to stop stripping your CDs onto your file-server so you can play them at any workstation in your house; and if Afternic get accredited as a reseller are you going to stop typing in domain names and start learning IP addresses? Let's get slashdot talking about how to create the next generation net based on distributed architectures NOT the last generation DNS system and how it is or isn't suiting corporate americas needs. A finally to slightly justify and defend this rant:
I have bought domain names for about $15 including DNS hosting (one email redirected to admin address and a url redirect) and I own the domain. Sounds like a good deal for consumers to me!
The sites that try to do the
multimedia experiance that people want to see today
are nearly without fail the worst sites online for s/n. The most brilliant multimedia sites are usually from the fans and hackers.
If you don't want ICANN what do you want? Microsoft? IP? Gnutella based searching to find info? What? If you have a great idea, code it and see if the hackers are ready to split the net otherwise sit down and shut up.
if he's working with Altavista to develop other tie-ins, he's given them permission to use the name babelfish
fine, he's given them permission now (and possibly on the back of making them scratch his back), but did he give them permission before or after they launched the service and did he have any warning that they were going to launch the service?
I asked if he had given permission to Altavista to use the name BabelFish and the answer was that they are working on cross-developments between altavista and h2g2! Sounds to me like that is about the best proof that
he's not got the slightest interest in slashdot, except as a vehicle to push all his latest and greatest creations
I am amazed at such commercial superficiality from a man who can write such an brilliantly amusing piece of insightful predictive cynicism (see comments on anti-heroism, they are a flavour of my own view that the HitchHickers is the most depressing book around...I love it though)
Perhaps if they release online for free one year after the show has aired on radio (so a big catelogue comes straight out) and allow people to pay by some means if they just can't wait. They are a public service broadcaster at the end of the day, how about getting all those TV programs online toooooooooo (RedDwarf I-VIII would have me sitting in front of RealPlayer for about 26 hours straight every few months!).
How many users don't use ghostscript and how many times have you seen a slashdot flamefest at aladdin? ID have been releasing the Doom & Quake series in source (the code not the artwork and levels) a while down the road and no-one has been ranting about how they should release the code from day one as source (would be nice though). If a company chooses to provide any source code under a license which lets you use it, this is a good thing. If a company only works on GPL code this is a better thing. If a company keeps its knowledge and its code to itself I agree with ESR, they will die. The only companies I can think of that can survive free software's second coming are the BIG players such as IBM, SGI, Sun and these are the guys who have already seen that the light at the end of the tunnel is collaboration. We must encourage EVERY company that contributes to continue and maybe attempt to coerce them to do more or act differently, we must not berate them for how they think suits them to do it. As far as the greedy control freaks (you know who you are), fsck them, they will waste lots of money re-writing free software components and hence sell their wares for extravegant prices and as long as they are generating a worthwile revenue under these rules, they are another target for free software to replace (perhaps with the help of a friendly company).
Can I assume that this is not a "free speach" release because it is sooooo perfect that any bugs in the emulator will also be in the processor so you will have to get around them anyway?
Sorry about the California/Canada mistake. However the difference between Canada and the US is at times irrelevant, as both can have an incredibly North American view of the world, though at least no Canadians I hae ever met would refer to anything outside their own country as "off-shore". Most of this post was inspired by the content of the 106 comments posted at the time (of which many were Americans protesting at having the UN interfering with their constitutional rights!!!!!). One of the posts made a reference to american state domains and my brain put 3+7 together and got 4 when I saw.ca. I had actually been looking in to the domain registration dispute policies from ICANN the other night, and at that time I was pleased to see the UN involved as I would rather that any-day than a "non-profit leadership alliance of 500 major corporations and law firms" or the national arbitration front. Yep good old commerce and law making the net safe for the corporations! Finally on-topic, why do no american companies want to use.us? I just checked to see if anything was up on "www.linux.us" and "www.microsoft.us" for example and surprise, surprise their was nothing there! Can anyone else find either of those domains on other tlds?
Having read this story with 106 comments posted already, there are a few points I feel I must make. The WIPO is now one of four ICANN "Approved Providers for Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy". The other three are: The CPR Institute for Dispute Resolution, a non-profit leadership alliance of 500 major corporations and law firms; eresolution.ca ; and the National Arbitration Forum a nationwide network of former judges, litigators, and law professors who share the Forum principle that disputes should be decided according to established legal principles.
The U.N. is not arbitrating the TLDs for everyone, they are applying the ICANN resolution dispute policy for anyone who applies to them.
All the other approved providers are distinctly U.S., going as far as the "National Arbitration Forum".
We can see a serious level of commercialism and lawyerism from the range of providers.
The US is domain greedy
As an non-US citizen, I am delighted that one of the providers is not completely American, and disgusted that the "National Arbitration Forum" could be approved to rule over an international commodity! The.com,.org and.net domains are international, the generic domains of the net and should be ruled over by the net. The only thing that encouraged me from all my reading was that the eresolution site tried to us an appropriate domain (.ca) instead of simply using.com/.net/.org. Why did they not use.us though? Why does the US have a domain for each state? Does China have multiple tlds? Does the EU have a domain for its merged entity? Why the double standards (and don't tell me that you made the net so you can do what you want with it, take that attitude and we will see a net split as has already started to appear with the refusal of many tld organisations refusal to pay ICANN).
Make the distinction clear. Make it an extra line to type in apt-sources. Host the stuff on another machine. But give maintainers somewhere to host the non-free.debs they work on.
I nearly entirely agree with you, but for the very last line and the word "give"! Yes it is the maintainers and not neccessarily the software profiteer who needs the hosting space, but lets face it, how much does it cost to find the space for a package and its history, not a lot. How much does it cost to provide the full Debian mirrored non-free section? Quite a bit more. The rate of increase of this cost to Debian must be exponential (at present) and I have to agree that Debian should not really be paying a penny of it. My modification to your suggestion is that Debian will simply let the non-free maintainers have one package in the distribution, and that is the package which is used to access the non-free archives. Then the non-free people can use gnutella/ftp/freshmeat/apt-get/whatever interface(s) they can agree on to provide the easiest way for Debian users to work with their software. If the expense of distributing the software outside of Debian is too great, the question must be asked, is this bloatware? And if the cost is substantial, I would expect that the license holder would generally be willing to either meet the Debian criteria to move into the Distro, or stump up the cash/space. If they won't do either of these, you can hardly say that they diserve the support of Debian can you?
TrollTech can publish their code under any license they feel like, period.
Anyone who believes (as Debian do) that software freedom resembles speach not beer can tell them to fsck themselves, period.
You use BSD, I use Linux, and the simple fact that that TrollTech want to revert to the BSD license if neccessary simply shows that they have the interests of business at heart. Debian has the interests of Free software development at heart. Distributing KDE with a Linux distribution weakens the GPL by publically breaking it. The GPL and BSD license allows you to write programs for Windows, or for someone else to port your funky BSD or Linux program to Windows, TrollTech have isolated the M$ OS for their own gain (well it is 90% of the market?) and this is why they shunned the BSD and GPL. I hate the M$ operating systems, but I believe in software freedom (speech NOT beer) and think it is obnoxious to say you can use this as long as you don't try to use it with Windows. If the situation was reversed (say M$ released a toolkit as source code and said that it could be used, modified and anything else you want so long as it is only ever used on their Operating Systems or never used on Linux without a licensing fee) you can imagine the outcry on Slashdot. Bottom line the Debian zealots (and other GPL zealots in general) are protecting the M$ operating system and fighting for its rights. Yes the problem is the GPL, the GPL however is not about linux or even *nix, it is about making sure that everything we all work on together is safe forever. Let all Linux vendors take note and stop distributing QT with GPL software (make the user download and install QT if they want to use the KDE aps that are distributed with the system). Conspriracy Theory: Are TrollTech deliberatly setting out to destroy the GPL so they can release a closed version of the KDE suite for any OS they want? Not a flame, just calling it as I see it.
Slashdot Mirror
- Slashdot can NOT verify the validity of stories AND be up and to date
- Slashdot CAN destroy karma on both the submitter and poster of subsequently discovered hoaxes/errors and ultimatly remove their privileges
- I for one would like to see Slashdot take itself a bit more seriously, making an attempt to keep the posted stories real and relevent and NOT REPEATS.
- Why can't we all "meta-moderate" the story posters, if we all think one of them is a dumbass can we note vote him out?
- I do not want to see the whole site crippled in beuracracy or the removal of some of the more lively debates (lets face it any story that mentions M$oft is Flamebait).
- I would like to see a more useful moderation system including
- Why can't we view stories by Moderation class, there are so many stories on slashdot where all I would like to see are the "Funny" stories, and many others where I would just want the "Insightful&&Informative" posts.
just my E0.02- +1 Flamebait
- -1 Flamebait
and also remove the Under and Over rated options.I'm not an American either, and will happily confuse all aspects of the mess they call a democratic legal system :-)
What I was really implying was that using the UCITA click-through validation we could protect the licensce which prevents them from replying or discussing the mail and have the return to address encypted so that any reply shows they broke both UCITA and DMCA (because they unencrypted the data!). IANAL and therefore I didn't suggest an exact scheme for the annoyance initially because I feel a lawyer with a good grasp of the legal situations and implications could specify this best, perhaps they can even come up with a suitable solution to attack only the DMCA. The aim should be simple, to annoy the hell out of them and get attention while providing them with only one route to escape, the destruction of these stupid laws.
How's about we design a standard form letter for the coporate world we want to disobey. Not a piece of text, but a lovely piece of html, javascript and vbscript. Preferably that protects itself with the DMCA via a click through licensce. Something simple that downloads it's contents on reception (i.e. the document is simply links) and whose content is perhaps all the news items from "favourable" sources of the DMCA related litigations. Simply put it tells them that we object to their use of the DMCA's protections for the reasons discussed below. :-)
I presume that the document should be authored in the US to ensure that the legal situation is an appropriate quagmire, and really we should get a nice lawyer to write the click through licensce to ensure that if they try to prosectute ANYONE (ISPs etc.) that they must therefore break the DMCA.
Any American Lawyers there to tell us what we should and shouldn't do, and to write the "licensce", I'm sure we wont have a problem designing the mail itself
fsck I'd been had!
http://snopes.com/spoons/fracture/germ an.htm
Check your history books on the exact point at which America officially choose English as it's official language. It won a vote, by one vote, from what Language? What a horrible thought !
Please feel free to correct me (I know you all will), but am I not correct in believing that the defined weight of a kilogram is actually the mass of an object (in Paris?)? The 1mx1mx1m=1000kg for water at 4C (I think as its maximum volume) was meant to work, but in fact they got it slightly wrong (perhaps 0.4%) so they chose the object instead of the easy definition.......go figure!
I personally wish we would all just forget the imperial measurements (inch, pound, cup etc. etc.) and just all start to get our head around the metric measurements. I'm 24 (so post "metrification"), Irish and lived in England for 4 Years: I can think distances and understand them in metric; I can think volumes in litres and weights in grams and kilos. I still have to think through some imperial figures though and that bugs me....when have you last seen the kmpl instead of mpg for a car. The worst part is, I just love pints per night, but I'm just going to have to start drinking litres!!!! I think it's pretty fair to say the Open Standard and easiest understood system is metric, who really wants any other way and what Island no they live on? Why don't we all get with the program?
My personal favourite:
www.gandi.net
12 Euros for a domain with basic (free) dns hosting. No legal strings or ties (ICANN dispute policy) and no hassles changing and configuring your data. Sweet
I'm redundant for pointing out the redundancy of the whole story?
So telnet, ftp and unencrypted passwords lead to vulnerability of data on college networks.....well duh
let's face it, they couldn't care less about first ammendment rights or any such nonsense, all they want is to preserve their lucrative business model. The cost of paying 20 class action suits anually by school parents where 50 students were butchered by a crazed Britney Spears fan pales to insignificance to the vast revenue gained from control of the music distribution and associated industries. It is quite like the companies who refuse to recall dangerous products because the cost would outweigh the expected legal impact, they just hope no-one realises that they knew in time to stop the deaths.
The time has come for you Americans to start making some serious noise. Bush or Gore, whose favourite corporations would you rather have make the law?
www.gandi.net
you don't have to pay double to have the domain name hosted unlike joker. Also you actually own the domain and can't have it snapped off you like joker. Read the FAQ and T&C
The new trend in domain registrations, hidden charges!
Why the fsck do people on Slashdot seem to think that the net has gone from a government toy to a corporate tool? The one place I would not expect to see repeated
The Internet (IMHO) was created by government for the army and used by the only people who could figure out how to make it do something useful and then improved upon by them until eventually even stupid corporate managers could start to remember that they just had to open the right program and type in a domain name, then the net got spamdotted to hell. What is the corporate signal to noise ratio online (i.e. complete bag of poo sites to something with a modicom of sense) and is it any better than the signal to noise ratio of joe blogg's homepages? Lets face it the net is a pile of poo with a few plants thriving in the manure, it doesn't matter how any DNS system is organised, the cream will float and the dung will drop out of view. The only people who care about this rubbish are the fools who belive that the "magic" of having many people staggering over their site by accident is worth an IPO. Lets leave this behind here on Slashdot and start accepting that the net is not anyones and should never be anyones, it is a co-operative system where barriers of entry are minimal and we can all stick up our own signal or noise. Lets stop debating how we should help corporations structure the Internet to service their needs (like the current RIAA battle to corrupt the net to preserve their market).
The simple question is this, if the RIAA get a ban on the transferal of copyrighted material over a digital interface are you going to stop stripping your CDs onto your file-server so you can play them at any workstation in your house; and if Afternic get accredited as a reseller are you going to stop typing in domain names and start learning IP addresses? Let's get slashdot talking about how to create the next generation net based on distributed architectures NOT the last generation DNS system and how it is or isn't suiting corporate americas needs.
A finally to slightly justify and defend this rant:
- I have bought domain names for about $15 including DNS hosting (one email redirected to admin address and a url redirect) and I own the domain. Sounds like a good deal for consumers to me!
- The sites that try to do the are nearly without fail the worst sites online for s/n. The most brilliant multimedia sites are usually from the fans and hackers.
- If you don't want ICANN what do you want? Microsoft? IP? Gnutella based searching to find info? What? If you have a great idea, code it and see if the hackers are ready to split the net otherwise sit down and shut up.
This may be written as flamebait but I mean it.Perhaps if they release online for free one year after the show has aired on radio (so a big catelogue comes straight out) and allow people to pay by some means if they just can't wait. They are a public service broadcaster at the end of the day, how about getting all those TV programs online toooooooooo (RedDwarf I-VIII would have me sitting in front of RealPlayer for about 26 hours straight every few months!).
Corel are planning to release Ventura Publisher for Linux in the near future.
ID have been releasing the Doom & Quake series in source (the code not the artwork and levels) a while down the road and no-one has been ranting about how they should release the code from day one as source (would be nice though).
If a company chooses to provide any source code under a license which lets you use it, this is a good thing. If a company only works on GPL code this is a better thing. If a company keeps its knowledge and its code to itself I agree with ESR, they will die. The only companies I can think of that can survive free software's second coming are the BIG players such as IBM, SGI, Sun and these are the guys who have already seen that the light at the end of the tunnel is collaboration. We must encourage EVERY company that contributes to continue and maybe attempt to coerce them to do more or act differently, we must not berate them for how they think suits them to do it. As far as the greedy control freaks (you know who you are), fsck them, they will waste lots of money re-writing free software components and hence sell their wares for extravegant prices and as long as they are generating a worthwile revenue under these rules, they are another target for free software to replace (perhaps with the help of a friendly company).
Can I assume that this is not a "free speach" release because it is sooooo perfect that any bugs in the emulator will also be in the processor so you will have to get around them anyway?
Sorry about the California/Canada mistake. However the difference between Canada and the US is at times irrelevant, as both can have an incredibly North American view of the world, though at least no Canadians I hae ever met would refer to anything outside their own country as "off-shore". .ca. I had actually been looking in to the domain registration dispute policies from ICANN the other night, and at that time I was pleased to see the UN involved as I would rather that any-day than a "non-profit leadership alliance of 500 major corporations and law firms" or the national arbitration front. Yep good old commerce and law making the net safe for the corporations! .us? I just checked to see if anything was up on "www.linux.us" and "www.microsoft.us" for example and surprise, surprise their was nothing there! Can anyone else find either of those domains on other tlds?
Most of this post was inspired by the content of the 106 comments posted at the time (of which many were Americans protesting at having the UN interfering with their constitutional rights!!!!!). One of the posts made a reference to american state domains and my brain put 3+7 together and got 4 when I saw
Finally on-topic, why do no american companies want to use
- The U.N. is not arbitrating the TLDs for everyone, they are applying the ICANN resolution dispute policy for anyone who applies to them.
- All the other approved providers are distinctly U.S., going as far as the "National Arbitration Forum".
- We can see a serious level of commercialism and lawyerism from the range of providers.
- The US is domain greedy
As an non-US citizen, I am delighted that one of the providers is not completely American, and disgusted that the "National Arbitration Forum" could be approved to rule over an international commodity! TheThe only thing that encouraged me from all my reading was that the eresolution site tried to us an appropriate domain (.ca) instead of simply using
My modification to your suggestion is that Debian will simply let the non-free maintainers have one package in the distribution, and that is the package which is used to access the non-free archives. Then the non-free people can use gnutella/ftp/freshmeat/apt-get/whatever interface(s) they can agree on to provide the easiest way for Debian users to work with their software. If the expense of distributing the software outside of Debian is too great, the question must be asked, is this bloatware? And if the cost is substantial, I would expect that the license holder would generally be willing to either meet the Debian criteria to move into the Distro, or stump up the cash/space. If they won't do either of these, you can hardly say that they diserve the support of Debian can you?
As poor www.debian.org is having to take a bit longer under the load, how about
Social contract uk Germany South Africa Japan Brazil
The Start uk Germany South Africa Japan Brazil
- TrollTech can publish their code under any license they feel like, period.
- Anyone who believes (as Debian do) that software freedom resembles speach not beer can tell them to fsck themselves, period.
You use BSD, I use Linux, and the simple fact that that TrollTech want to revert to the BSD license if neccessary simply shows that they have the interests of business at heart. Debian has the interests of Free software development at heart. Distributing KDE with a Linux distribution weakens the GPL by publically breaking it. The GPL and BSD license allows you to write programs for Windows, or for someone else to port your funky BSD or Linux program to Windows, TrollTech have isolated the M$ OS for their own gain (well it is 90% of the market?) and this is why they shunned the BSD and GPL. I hate the M$ operating systems, but I believe in software freedom (speech NOT beer) and think it is obnoxious to say you can use this as long as you don't try to use it with Windows. If the situation was reversed (say M$ released a toolkit as source code and said that it could be used, modified and anything else you want so long as it is only ever used on their Operating Systems or never used on Linux without a licensing fee) you can imagine the outcry on Slashdot.Bottom line the Debian zealots (and other GPL zealots in general) are protecting the M$ operating system and fighting for its rights. Yes the problem is the GPL, the GPL however is not about linux or even *nix, it is about making sure that everything we all work on together is safe forever. Let all Linux vendors take note and stop distributing QT with GPL software (make the user download and install QT if they want to use the KDE aps that are distributed with the system).
Conspriracy Theory: Are TrollTech deliberatly setting out to destroy the GPL so they can release a closed version of the KDE suite for any OS they want?
Not a flame, just calling it as I see it.