I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy, and I'm a huge open source fan. But, people do still need to make money. And, I would rather see closed source software on an open platform, than closed source on a closed platform.
I agree, and while my experiences with Blender have led me to conclude that proprietary software coupled with proprietary formats is a no-win situation on any platform, open or closed, there is a place for commercial software in the Free World.
The problem with United Linux is that they are promoting a very erroneous and IMHO destrictuve meme: that (a) a single commercial entity imposing a defacto embrace-and-extended standard is better than a community consensus and (b) that commercial products are better off targeting one imposed distribution and counting on compatability with others (in contrast to packaging their binaries in a distribution-neutral manner, the way VMWare does, Blender and Loki did, etc.).
Point (b) is particularly problematic (and my sole signficant gripe with Red Hat, who I otherwise like as a company, as they have promoted that harmful meme to some degree as well), and why I will actually be cheering the demise of United Linux (to put it bluntly).
Their strategy is to encourage vendors to package stuff for their distro, arguing that they are the standard to which all other distros (e.g. Gentoo, Source Mage, Slackware, Debian, etc.) must become compatible, then use that in)compatabilties to coerce those who would like to use said commercial products into purchasing their distro.
In short, they are about coercion and removing choice from the community, and as I said in another thread, the losers will ultimately be the commercial vendors, whose products would simply be disregarded regardless of merit because of their incompatability with the installed distribution (which in our case we prefer for a number of reasons, the details of which aren't important here). The vendors will likely then think, erroneously, that they failed due to a lack of GNU/Linux interest, when in fact they failed because they targeted a coercive distribution that the majority of the community rejected, and thus closed themselves out of the very market they were trying to address.
The entire notion of United Linux is based upon at least two false pretenses: (1) that it is somehow impossible for vendors to package binaries in a distribution-neutral manner, despite numerous examples to the contrary and (2) that the GNU/Linux community will accept a compatability standard imposed upon us by either a unilateral or multilateral corporate interest instead of community consensus.
They are sorely mistaken on both of these points, and their arrogance will likely prevent them from seeing that until it is far too late.
Absolutely no arrests were made, no charges filed, so it appears no criminal act was committed.
The theft (using the correct defintion of the word, as presented by every publicly available, referenced dictionary in this thread) of these users computer equipment from the FBI is a 'feature' we've inherited from some of the very unconstitutional operating procedures given to us by the War on Drugs and the Reagan administration, and is basically an end run around the law (and the constitution) to punish the offendors even though no criminal charges are being filed.
Finally, as to the law, the law does not define theft the way you do (at least not here in the United States), courtroom antics and rhetoric aside. Copyright violation is not defined as theft under the law, it is defined as copyright violation, which is something different, and it is defined differently for a reason. The same is true of patent violation... in other words, the law does not recongnize the so-called "theft" of ideas, it instead recognizes the temporary restriction of their dissemination (or use, depending on which portion of IP law the idea is being hoarded under).
The use of the word "theft" in all of these contexts has no legal foundation (at least in the United States)... it is merely newspeak rhetoric by concentrated intersts used for propoganda purposes to promote their own agendas, both in and out of the courtroom. It is not codified into law, or even recognized by any of the publicly available dictionaries quoted here.
Since I'm unwilling to subscribe to OED's online service (as noted, there as many free alternatives available, none of which include the word immaterial int their definitions), I borrowed a colleagues dead-tree copy of the Oxford English Dictionary. It too lacks the words immaterial, and agrees with the other definitions presented here (and thereby disagrees with the definition you presented).
To wit:
steal v. & n. --v (past stole; past part. stolen) 1. tr (also absol.) a. take (another person's proterty) illegally. b. take (property) without right or permission, esp. in secret with the intention of not returning it. 2. tr. obtain surreptitiously or by surprise (stole a kiss). 3. tr. win or get possession of (a person's affections, etc.), esp. insidiously (stole her heart away). 4. intr (foll by in, out, away, up, etc.) move sep. silently or stealthily (stole out of the room). 5 (in various sports)... etc.
There isn't a shred of evidence I can find, in any dictionary, to support your claims, or the 'newspeak'-style definition of theft you have been advocating throughout this thread.
You can make bold statements like these all you want, and you can spout your anti-company rhetoric and how I've been brainwashed into not using the "dictionary definition" all you want--and yet I note you couldn't refute a single point in my argument INCLUDING my citation of the Oxford English Dictionary since you now seem to want to deal in the realm of facts and definitions.
This is inaccurate, as anyone reading this thread from start to finish will be able to see for themself, but I guess I'll repeat it one more time for those who have difficulty grasping it:
Bandwidth is a numerical measure, not an object (material or immaterial) that can be stolen.
If you dishonestly turn the heat down in the winter are you stealing temperature?
If you dishonestly set off the fire alarm in a school or building, are you stealing the school or building? Are you stealing 'time.'
Not by any reasonable, rational, non-self-serving definition, you're not. You are doing all kinds of reprehensible things, but none of them, not one, is theft.
So to with uncapping one's cable modem... you are violating a contract and misusing a service, and in so doing are in violation of the law, but you are not a thief.
As for definitions, I looked up the definition of 'stealing' and 'theft' in several dictionaries, and not one included the words 'material or immaterial'... including a 5 year old dead tree edition Oxford English Dictionary a friend of mine owns (I cannot verify your defintion via the online version as I am unwilling to pay the subscriber fee, when there are several free alteranatives available onlie, including Merriam Webster quoted below).
Either the OED is reflecting a change in the language, which in turn reflects the very deliberate misuse of the word I have been discussing here, or it has made the change as part of its own corporate strategy (it is, after all, a publisher, and as such a member of one of the very copyright and media cartels engaged in the very campaign of newspeak-style redefinitions of the language I have mentioned in this thread).
Main Entry: theft Pronunciation: 'theft Function: noun Etymology: Middle English thiefthe, from Old English thIefth; akin to Old English thEof thief Date: before 12th century 1 a : the act of stealing; specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it b : an unlawful taking (as by embezzlement or burglary) of property 2 obsolete : something stolen 3 : a stolen base in baseball
Main Entry: 1steal Pronunciation: 'stE(&)l Function: verb Inflected Form(s): stole/'stOl/; stolen/'stO-l&n/; stealing Etymology: Middle English stelen, from Old English stelan; akin to Old High German stelan to steal Date: before 12th century intransitive senses 1 : to take the property of another wrongfully and especially as an habitual or regular practice 2 : to come or go secretly, unobtrusively, gradually, or unexpectedly 3 : to steal or attempt to steal a base transitive senses 1 a : to take or appropriate without right or leave and with intent to keep or make use of wrongfully b : to take away by force or unjust means c : to take surreptitiously or without permission d : to appropriate to oneself or beyond one's proper share : make oneself the focus of 2 a : to move, convey, or introduce secretly : SMUGGLE b : to accomplish in a concealed or unobserved manner 3 a : to seize, gain, or win by trickery, skill, or daring b of a base runner : to reach (a base) safely solely by running and usually catching the opposing team off guard
(Merriam-Webster)
None of these, not one, mentions 'immaterial' objects which, by their very nature, cannot be taken.
I agree that some day, we'll have the hardware to make nice, photorealistic animations real time. However, I fail to see how the "improv" idea spins in to this.
Think of something between a theatrical play and a puppet play, photorealistic enough that you can't tell the digital actor from the real thing, broadcast across the net in realtime.
The digital equivelent of a stage play, but with all the special effects possibilities of a full length motion picture.
It is a new art form, with parts taken from the stage, from computer CG, and from Hollywood, and could result in some very interesting work.
The "Open source" philosophy is a development model for software. The software is still "owned" (copyrighted), which is strike one against the "open source is communism" crap.
Correct, to a point. Free Software is also NOT communism, it is Freedom and it encourages a Commons and a Community. Like the US Constitution, Democracy, Authoritarianism, and Existentialism, it is orthogonal to economic systems, be they Communism, Capitalsim, Feudalism, or Barterism.
In contast you seem to have equated Communism with Authoritarianism, which is a very inaccurate equation to make.
I should point out that (a) your rant against communism would more appropriately be aimed at Authoritarianism. It is an American myth that there was no democratic communism (there was a thriving "democratic" communism in Spain, which was coopted and then legislated out of existence by the Spanish government with the active and covert aid of both the United States (who couldn't stand to see any communist system succeed, and contrary to the other examples this one was succeeding and even out competing their capitalist counterparts in the country) and the Soviet Union (who couldn't stand to see a democratic form of communism succeed as that would undermine their entire "authoritarianism is necessary for communism to work" propoganda).
Authoritariansim is Bad, Republicanism and Democracy are Good.
Communism, Socialism and Capitalism all fail miserably in their purest form, but work reasonably well in modified, moderate forms, so long as the political climate is sufficiently free to allow the economy some degree of self-organization. (It is another American myth that communism is by definition a centrally planned economy, though the vast majority of authoritarian implimentations were. The example cited previously, in Spain, was not centrally planned, it was a self-organizing economy of collectives who traded amongst themselves and with their capitalist counterparts).
The mix we had in the west during the 70's and 80's (the rewards of which we reaped in the 80's and 90's) was probably the most successful, but the emergence of unaccountable corporatism appears to be wrecking the once successful form of capitalism we practiced here in the west, perhaps even as much as the unaccountable authoritarian regimes wrecked any chance at a functional communism did in the east.
Finally, back on the topic of the thread, China's communal culture is more amenable to Free Software in many ways than it is to a foreign monopoly like Microsoft (remember, the British ruled China with an iron fist through trade monopolies, so this is more offensive to them than to us, which is saying a lot because monopolies are, or should be, very offensive to anyone who values a free market).
And, last but not least, China is really only communist in name... its economy is as capitalist as any western economy (which isn't saying a lot if you look at any western economy closely... think corporate welfare, which is rampent, protectionist tarrifs, legislated monopolies, and so forth, all of which undermine or even eliminate free markets).
I've seen a plethora of posts that basically argue "today's tech can't do it, so this is a stupid discussion."
Remarkable.
Technically savvy poeple, of all people, should realize that simply because Farscape-style special effects cannot be done in realtime today with today's low end consumer graphics GPUs doesn't mean the concept of 'live performance animation' as such is flawed at all.
First, much lower quality 'live performance' animation is possible with today's consumer hardware, and the improv aspect alone makes it an art form worth persuing in and of itself. The possiblity for algorithmic and technical enhancements that could be driven, or at least explored, by such an art form make it a worthwhile endeavor as well.
Second, in another 5 or 10 years (at most) it will almost certainly be possible to do live performance, farscape quality digital animations (assuming the technological development of the computer hasn't been brought to a standstill through stupid legal 'innovations' like DRM and Palladium). While movie makers would likely simply add this to their set of tools and not replace post-production entirely, the ability to create 'live theatre' digital productions and interactive, perhaps even submersive, two or multi-way environments if not completely synthetic realities is an intriguing one, to say the least, and certainly a worthwhile endeavor whether or not Hollywood can make use of the technque in their movie productions. Indeed, such systems could well render the movie as obsolete as the live stage play is today: in other words, no longer the main popular attraction, but a continuing artform valid in its own right, if no longer the center of public attention.
8 years ago I was at the U of Illinois' virtual reality lab and had an opportunity to play around with some of simulations they run, including one which allows the viewer to explore a three dimensional (submsersive) grey-scale view of the mega-structure of galaxies in the universe (to study large scale structures such as strings of galaxies, etc.).
8 years later I can explore the universe in living color on my GNU/Linux box running Celestia, in 1920x1200 24-bit color, in realtime. While it isn't submersive 3-d VR just yet, it is much higher resolution and full color, and while I can't explore the farthest reaches of the universe, I can explore the immediate galactic neighborhood in incredible detail (much greater than the old simulation allowed). All of this on a $400 Nvidia card, running a free operating system on commodity hardware.
So, in other words, dismissing this possibility simply because you can't do it with perfect, photo-realistic effects today shows a remarkable lack of vision, and a blindness to similiar leaps in technology that we've all beeen taking for granted for the last decade or two. We will be able to do this sort of thing, photorealistically, much sooner than most people probably realize, and the art form can be persued long before the final polish is available.
I get the feeling you are either being deliberately obtuse here, or the misapplication of the English language the content cartels have subjected you to all these years has truly made you incapable of applying the correct, dictionary definition of the words "theft" or "stealing."
Do you agree that using a cable descrambler to get extra channels is stealing? Because it's the exact same thing.
Of course not, because it isn't, regardless of how many times the Cable and Content industry misuse and redefine the word.
It isn't theft.
It is unauthorized access to privately owned information, and as such punishable under the law.
You are partially right, the two concepts are similiar (though not the same thing), but neither one is an example of theft.
If it makes you comfortable to use the English language to remove your behavior (not you specifically) from the "Sin of Taking What is Not Yours" (i.e., Stealing), that is your moral choice. I just think that when we do this as a society, we make it easier for us to violate our neighbor when we rationalize this sort of behavior.
Rewriting the English language to map a modern act (however inappropriate it may be) to a set of 10 laws written five thousand years ago that have nothing whatsoever to do with the discussion of hand so that they can fit within the moral context you've chosen as a frame of reference is exactly the sort of muddy thinking I'm talking about. It completely obfuscates and obscures the underlying ethical questions and discussion, and that is precislely what I am railing against here.
This has nothing to do with the ten commandments, as this activity wasn't even concievable at the time they were written.
Bandwidth is a numerical measure, and isn't any more "stealable" than temperature, pressure, or time is. Misusable, abusable, and quite often bought or sold (as an imperfect mapping of capitalism onto areas where it isn't always directly applicable) yes, but stealable?
Come on, just because the behavior, inappropriate though it is, wasn't concievable to Moses when he wrote the foundations of Hebrew law, doesn't give you the right to change the meaning of those words simply to satisfy your own notion of what should and should not be.
You are so wrong it's obscene. When you signup with an ISP, what do you get? You get an internet connection, and X amount of bandwidth. You have BOUGHT that bandwidth, it's yours... If you take more than that it's stealing.
Your thinking is so muddy it's obscene. The Mississippi River is pristine in comparison.
Let me use another real world analogy that should clear this up:
If you are a shipping company using the limited capacity of, say, the Panama or Suez canal, and you have a contract that allows you to send 5 ships a day through the canal for a particular price, and you decide to slip 10 ships through instead, have you stolen the canal?
No.
Have you stolen money from the canal operators (assume for a moment there is no way for them to easilly charge you each time a ship passes through, ie. no toll booth on the canal itself)?
No.
Do you owe the canal operators money?
Yes.
Are you in violation of your contract?
Yes.
Are you absuing the services of the canal by taking up more of its capacity than your contract allows?
Yes.
Are you "stealing" capacity?
No, because capacity is a numerical measure, not an object that can be stolen. You are misusing the canal's limited resources, but you are not taking them anywhere.
To make this even more crystal clear for those who are still unable to shed the mental shackles of the Newspeak definitino of theft that the media cartels have been feeding them for the last two decades, consider this.
If, instead of filling the canal with ships and using up its capacity in that fashion, are you engaging in theft if you blow the canal up and turn it into a dry river bed?
No, obviously not. You haven't engaged in theft at all, you've engaged in vandalism, sabatage, and perhaps terrorism, but you have not engaged in theft, even though you've reduced the canal's usable capacity down to zero.
How about if you build a damn to block the canal (but don't destroy it)?
Again, no, you aren't stealing anything, you are merely abusing the canal and making it useless to others, ie. are reducing its usable capacity to zero.
Using something in excess to what your contract allows, such as capacity, is not and can never be theft. Indeed the very nature of what we are talking about precludes the possibility of theft as such, without rewriting the definition of the word itself to mean something different than it does, which is exactly what you, and the software and entertainment monopolists you so transparently represent, are trying to do. Which is muddy thinking at its worst.
Allow me to reiterate for the remarkably dense: You haven't stolen anything, you haven't taken anything. Capacity is not an object that can be taken, no theft can be committed.
Your inability to think clearly is a direct result of your misuse of the English language, probably because of your inability to question the misuse of the same language software and entertainment monopolists have been feeding you for years.
BANDWIDTH isn't a thing, it is a measure of capacity, and just as your overuse of a canal's capacity doesn't entail theft of any kind, so to your overuse of a network's capacity doesn't entail theft of any kind.
It does, however, mean you are in violation of contract and very likely owe a serious debt to the providor whose equipment and network you have misused.
It is plain and simple misuse of the English language and common sense that truly results in muddy thinking, exactly like the kind you are displaying here.
Yes, bandwidth is limited. But it nevertheless cannot be taken, and cannot be stolen (without rewriting the defintion of those words), it can merely be misused or abused.
Maybe I am just one of those old moralists or it was my Catholic school up bringing. I think when you take something that is not yours, its stealing.
Yes, but nothing here has been taken.
So if you if you signed a contract that states you will only take 1.5Mb/s of bandwidth and you modify a device to take more than 1.5Mb/s, you are stealing along with breaching a contract.
No, you're not, anymore than you are "stealing" if you rent a car agreeing to not drive it faster than 65 MPH, then take it out on the highway and top it out at 120 MPH.
You are misusing equipment and violating your contract. You haven't taken anything, ergo you have stolen nothing.
It is abuses of the English language like this that not only muddy thinking, but result in the kinds of preposterous public policy such muddy thinking creates, such as the Microsoft/Hollywood attempt at using DRM to cripple technology and consumer choice in the name of preventing "theft" which doesn't even exist (c.f the Palladium thread and the numerous DMCA, SSSCA. CBDTPA, and TCPA threads).
Redefining words to mean something they don't, and then misusing those definitions, is not the moral high ground.
If you want to argue that abusing equipment and violating service agreements is morally wrong, I would agree with you. However, if you want to continue to argue that abusing a service now suddenly equates theft, even when nothing has been taken, then I must respectfully disagree.
...it is breach of contract, nothing more. And, since it is a breach of contract, as numerous others have pointed out, a pair of wire cutters (or a flip of a switch) would have more than sufficed to put an end to this behavior.
If you agree to drive 10 truck on the expressway for a certain, flat tax, and instead drive 500, you haven't stolen anything. Not even the taxes you should have paid. The road is still there, the taxes you did pay are still there... you are merely in debt for the difference still owed. No theft committed. None.
You've violated your contract (and failed to pay taxes that are due), but once again, that is not theft. The same is true in this situation.
Your other point is very good: wonders how many Al Q'aida sleeper cells are going to go undetected here in the U.S. because of American companies like this one who feel it somehow appropriate to appropriate the FBI's services as an enforcement arm of their End User License Agreements and service contracts.
However I can't ignore this. It does worry me since most of my clients only know MS. It is very difficult to get your avarage joe user to break the MS habit, and some clients believe the FUD being spewed/parroted by media.
The parent post to which you replied should never have been marked Troll, and I will enjoy ripping the moderator responsible a new one on meta.
That having been said, I disagree with his suggestion that ignoring this problem is the answer, but not for the reasons you say (or at least, not entirely for those reasons). This must be fought tooth and nail, as we are being attacked from two sides:
1) Microsoft, trying to leverage their monopoly to impose further, very detrimental, restrictions on the freedom of customers to deploy the correct technologies for their solutions under the guise of DRM.
2) The entertainment industry, that is trying to legislate the very same restrictive technologies and require them in all digital hardware.
We would be absolute fools to ignore this.
Having said that, fewer and fewer people care about Microsoft's proprietary protocols. Even offices that deploy Microsoft on the desktop are, in my experience, deploying open protocols in place of Microsoft's wherever possible to avoid the sort of nonsensical moving target and deliberate breakage MS service packs often result in.
The result, interstingly enough, has been a quiet movement on the part of several businesses away from Microsoft not just on the server side, but also on the desktop... and in every case, it has been a very successful move.
This is why Microsoft is scared, this is why Microsoft is trying to impliment coercive technologies that will remove the last vestiges of customer choice, and this is why their unholy alliance with Hollywood will likely succeed in creating a Revelations-esque dystopia if we sit on our hind ends and do nothing to prevent it.
Unfortunately we as Americans are so thoroughly conditioned to not become actavists about any cause, no matter how much we care about it, that it is very possible we will do nothing about it in time.
BTW - As another person who works at a company that has completely depircated Microsoft products and deployed GNU/Linux widely throughout our enterprise I can echo the original poster's comments (that were so unjustly marked as a Troll): Life as a non-Microsoft shop is damn good.
Cartels like the diamond industry? That was has been going strong for ages! Cartels like OPEC?
Absolutely right.
Then, lets not forget cartels like the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), who have successfully lobbied for and purchased legislation to enshrine their oligarchy into US law.
These are the very people who are pushing for this sort of nonsense, and a software monopoly as a result would be fine with them (indeed, perhaps even preferable to a free market, since it is only one point of pressure/influence they would require).
We are absolutely kidding ourselves if we do not think this is a serious threat to Free Software, the GPL, and our very freedom as human beings.
And I will continue to voice my irritation at people who pick two individuals out of a group, point out their differences of opinion, and call the group a bunch of hypocrites for disagreeing.
If you ever see Michael or Timothy pimping a movie, feel free to come out swinging. They're the ones rallying the troops against Big Media
I think my point stands rather clearly, as underscored by the actions of the very people you were defending (don't blame yourself, it is their fault for being hypocrits, not yours).
For those non-Americans reading this thread, the pledge of allegiance goes like this:
I Pledge Allegiance to the Flag Of the United States of America And to the Republic For which it stands One Nation, Under God Indivisible, With Liberty and Justice for All.
Interestingly enough, one of the early drafts went something like
...And to the Republic For Which it Stands, One Nation, Indivisible, With Liberty, Equality, And Justice for all.
However, at the time (early 20th century), that version was rejected because of pressure from the pro-segregationists. Interestingly it wasn't only the fear of racial equality that was cited as a reason for rejecting that particular draft, but the appalling possiblity that it could be construed to imply the women should be considered equal to men as well. God forbid.
Frankly, rulings like this restore some of my faith in the judicial process. As currently written, the plege should be ruled unconstitutional, as (to refer to another post) should the engraving of the words "In God We Trust" on our currency.
Neither reference to God in either context serves to enhance freedom of religion, and both serve to undermine the fundamental separation of church and state upon which the republic was founded, revisionist Christian rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding.
And I will continue to voice my irritation at people who pick two individuals out of a group, point out their differences of opinion, and call the group a bunch of hypocrites for disagreeing.
I'm not referring to two posters out of a community, I'm referring to two editors working for a corporation with an editorial policy. If two members of the Free Software Foundation, the EFF, or what have you engaged in this the organization in question would be accused of hypocracy, and rightly so.
Slashdot, as an organization, is incredibly hypocritical in their stance vis-a-vis the Entertainment Industry, and while today it may be michael and timothy rallying the troops while hemos and commander taco pimp for Hollywood, that (a) wasn't true a few short years ago when, particularly around the time the DeCSS thing first blew up and (b) isn't relevant anyway. Having a specialist in one's organization who concentrates on one aspect, and another who concentrates on the opposite, doesn't make the organization in question, in this case the Slashdot editors (and arguably, to some degree, VA, though I would't personally take things that far), any less hypocritical, or despicable, in their behavior.
So get used to being irritated, because I'm not going away.
f United Linux was attempting to replace LSB, I'd be against it, but at this stage, I don't see evidence that supports such a claim.
The issues are more subtle than outright replacement (as embrace and extend imply), but the results can and generally are just as bad when dealing with the subversion of open standards through a non-open process. I do take some issue with the word claim... I voiced a concern, not a claim, though the more reading I do on the subject the greater that concern grows and the more uneasy I grow with this entire process.
Fortunately the GNU/Linux community is by and large a pretty bright bunch of people, so I doubt this effort at hijacking the standards process, so to speak (if in fact that turns out to be what is happening) will have much success.
Earlier this morning, in a post that was was (amusingly enough) moderated both as interesting and as a troll, with respect to Lucas' onging fight against the freedom of information on the internet I commented:
But a mental note to self that "Lucas sucks (even worse than his last two films)" when Slashdot starts promoting the low-rez sorinsen quicktime tailers for Episode III might be appropriate (in the next story, if/. remains true to form) and a personal boycott of his products (past, present, and future) even more so.
As an aside, one has to wonder what sorts of payola scams exist here, for a site the promotes free software and open source as this one does to constantly be promoting the wares of the one industry that has launched successful attacks against free software and its developers
OK, it wasn't a Lucas Star Wars movie trailer, but rather a Star Trek trailer. Nevertheless the point remains... slashdot continues its shameless promotion of the product of an industry that has effectively declared war against the modern internet in general, on Free Software in particular, and has successfully attacked Free Software developers for deCSS and LiViD through letigious thuggary.
I will continue to voice my irritation at this behavior so long as the slashdot editors continue to engage in the hypocracy of denouncing the behavior of these cartels with one breath, while promoting their products shamelessly with the next.
No slight against Star Trek or Wil intended, rather an expression of distaste of a more generalized problem.
Interesting that the parnet got marked as a troll, particularly in light of the fact that I was right.
OK, so it was a Star Trek, not Star Wars, movie. Same evil industry, same point stands, and slashdot's hawking of the wares of an industry that is waging war not only on software freedom, but on freedom in general, continues unabated.
I believe this situation will soon be resolved calmly, but a hundred "You SUCK!" e-mail cannot help.
You are absolutely right.
But a mental note to self that "Lucas sucks (even worse than his last two films)" when Slashdot starts promoting the low-rez sorinsen quicktime tailers for Episode III might be appropriate (in the next story, if/. remains true to form) and a personal boycott of his products (past, present, and future) even more so.
As an aside, one has to wonder what sorts of payola scams exist here, for a site the promotes free software and open source as this one does to constantly be promoting the wares of the one industry that has launched successful attacks against free software and its developers (unlike Microsoft).
All you've done is offered dark mumblings, unsupported speculation, and conspiracy theories.
Actually, no. All I've done is point out the publicly stated intentions of UL, then expounded on why they are not good for the community. Your responses have largely been "you're wrong!" and when pressed by additional detail, revised to say "ah, I overlooked what you're saying there." All of this of course interlaced with dismissive insults and innuendos, and allegations of contradictions within my arguments, all of which I have thoroughly rebutted.
This final dismissal, labelling the very valid concerns I raise as "dark mumblings, unsuported speculation, and conspiracy theories" I will now rebut by presenting quotes from yourself and the UL article which show that they are in fact not only supported, but require no theory as such, and indeed speak for themselves. Although presented without context, the meaning is IMHO preserved, and the reader can follow the footnoted links to view the context if they are interested.
Going forward, there will only be two platforms certified by the major hardware and software vendors, Red Hat and UnitedLinux. [Reference]
Here's the bottom line-- you can make your distribution binary-compatible with market leaders, by making it Redhat or LSB compatible, otherwise you're kind of stuck. [Reference]
The point is that there's no such thing as "distribution neutral". [Reference]
If Redhat were binary compatible with everyone else , I don't see how you could credibly claim that the packages "only worked with Redhat" [Reference]
If it doesn't live under the distributions packaging system, it's not distribution neutral. [Reference] (Redefining distribution neutral as integrated into all distributions packaging systems, something I'd already demonstrated in two posts was unnecessary and, indeed undesireable.)
They're within their rights to do things differently, but that's a tradeoff you make. You're either compatible with the market leaders, or you're technically superior (whatever that means) and pay the price for being incompatible. [Reference
It is clear that the intent is to replace and supplant community standards based on consensus with standards driven by whatever UL (perhaps with Red Hat) decides. This intent has been reiterated in virtually every response you've made in this discussion. It is irrelevant that this extended standard is based upon open standards if it is being modified and imposed back upon the community in a non-open fashion as has been described here. If this were Microsoft everyone would be shouting "embrace and extend," for indeed that is exactly what is proposed here (though I must point out: sans the "destroy" clause).
It is my opinion that any non-open approach to defining standards is a very negative thing for the community. The process is as important as the result, and the open, collaborative process here is being abandoned and supplanted by a coercive, closed process that is designed to benefit one or two entities, under the guise of serving the community. This is a concern, and indeed if the standards process for the community is so supplanted, one of the most compelling reasons for switching to GNU/Linux (to get out from under one's vendors' thumbs, ie. freedom) goes away almost completely.
As for accusations of "conspiracy theory" you asked me for examples of how such a closed process could be detrimental to the community and I provided several scenerios which have occurred repeatedly, both in the Wintel environment and the (prior to GNU/Linux) fragmented UNIX world. Perhaps you, as an advocate of United Linux, can dismiss these concerns, but as one who makes a living using and deploying Free Software, and as one whose business has benefited greatly from the Freedom provided by Free Software, I cannot dismiss these concerns so easilly, particularly given the fact that every statement made to rebut those concerns has done nothing but confirm them.
It is a collassal mistake in judgement for the likes of Caldera (even coupled with HP and others) to approach the GNU/Linux community, to whome they owe the very product they are leveraging, and arrogantly assert something to the effect of:
As your industry leader we are now getting your act together and defining your standards for you. We will base our work upon the consensus you've formed thus far, but now you will follow our lead or you will be stuck.
I think you are going to find the community singuarly unresponsive and unfriendly to this sort of thing, and rightly so. It is my fervent hope that you do not lead too many software vendors down the garden path in the process... it would be a shame to see the waters poisoned for commercial software vendors because they mistakenly followed the advice of a corporate entity to package their wares for only one or two distros (their own, as it happens) and a non-consensual, imposed standard, rather than packaging them in a form usable by everyone, agnostically, such as VMWare, Blender, and numerous other products have, and then mistakenly reading the community's rejection of the UL imposted "standards" as a rejection of their products.
Too much information can color an impression of an otherwise honorable person. You may say something like, "I have nothing to hide, so this doesn't bother me." Don't fall into that trap. Something will come up that you would rather not be public knowledge. Maybe you wet the bed till you were in high school. Do you want your boss to confront you about that herpes test you had last week?
Or, as happened to a Swiss acquaintance of mine, get called into your bosses office and be read the riot act for not having tidied up your yard and trimmed your hedges properly. While Switzarland is a beautiful country, it is also, in its way, quite Big Brotherish (and the lifetime service in the Army reserves adds to that, but thats another story). Some people don't have a problem with it, but I for one won't be applying for Swiss Citizenship anytime soon.
We in America have gown up expecting to have certain rights and liberties, among them the right to privacy (even if most people do not realize that it isn't enshrined in the constitution as it should have been), and eventually even the apathetic masses (who, I suspect, are less apathetic than the media would have you believe) will grow sufficiently outraged to take to the streats, Osama bin Laden or not.
Good governance is having the wisdom to fix these sorts of ugly trends before the people feel the need to fill the streets and start rioting. Unfortunately I've seen precious little good governance in the United States of late.
As I pointed two sentences later (which you chose to completely remove, since it completely rebuts the point you made based upon my edited comments), binaries can in general be made to work with any distribution, regardless of packaging system or file organization, if the binary is provided in a tarball, along with a list of required dynamic libraries and their versions.
This does not advance your argument, because it is simply incorrect. I was do you a favor by snipping this
Based on my experience (I've been using GNU/Linux since 1993) it is correct. Even ill-behaved binaries packaged specifically for some ancient version of Red Hat, like the Sybase 11.9.2 binaries, can be made to work with, for example, the current release of Gentoo in spite of their deliberate 'Red Hat Only' packaging and configuration assumptions. I could list a dozen other examples, not to mention a plethora of much better behaved and more intelligently packaged proprietary binaries, such as VMWare and various commercial games. To get any of these working all you need to do is insure the proper libraries have been installed in the proper location.
The only exception that comes to mind was Word Perfect, which was so poorly packaged that it required their own distriubution, a failing that reflected their incompetence, or the poor porting job that was done, far more than it did the interoperability of diverse distributions even then.
As an aside I should mention that we are moving away from Sybase to Postgres because of the hoops their idiotic RPM-only packaging scheme, coupled with a Red Hat centric installer that tries to be intelligent (but isn't), force us to jump through. We can get it working, but it is more trouble than it is worth because of the way Sybase has chosen to package it, such that Sybase is now in the process of losing a customer.
If you'd done any packaging, you'd know this.
I have done packaging, and I do know this. I know this to be absolutely incorrect. At worst, your installation script needs to ask a human being (the person installing the software) where the other software it requires is located (be it KDE, Gnome, or what have you). It should be doing this regardless, and getting permission before it does any mucking about with the installed (and presumably functioning) system, and it most certainly should not be making assumptions about any system it is installing upon. For all you know the system has been customized anyway, for another compelling reason, and the fact that it is a Red Hat or UL system may mean absolutely nothing WRT the validity of a particular assumption about where things are located, or what versions are installed.
Furthermore, if your packaging, or your binary, requires modification to existing init scripts, then it is broken. Period. That is the job of the system administrator, and NOTHING should ever be rewriting or modifying existing init scripts. Placing a script in/etc/init.d (or wherever), and suggesting that it should be added to your default runlevel, is as far as any installation should ever go. And if a distribution is really so out of sync with the LSB and LFSS that the installation script can't make an intelligent guess as to where to put the script, then it should put it into a directory under opt and inform the installer that THEY need to add that script to their default init environemt, something that is there responsiblity regardless.
Software installation scripts that go about modifying an installed UNIX or GNU/Linux system like you imply are a recipe for Microsoft-Style disaster with or without a One True Distro, and frankly a profoundly bad idea.
libstdc++ was compiled with different C++ compilers ? Or if a library does something has an ABI change without a change of soname ? What if different vendors choose different sonames for the same library ?
libstdc++ is the only real problem, and even it is easilly resolvable using either chrooted environments, or environments with a modified ld.so.conf configuration in userspace.
An even easier solution is to distribute a statically linked binary in addition to the dynamically linked version. This is how Blender very neatly avoided any problems of this kind., and is a wise thing to do regardless.
And that is the most extreme example. The other examples you cite can be addressed with symbolic links (ideally in a subdirectory added to the app's LD_LIBRARY_PATH specific to that app, so that the overall system isn't cluttered).
An easy solution is to bundle commercial apps into/opt (which is what the LFS standard requires anyway) along with the libraries they need and a startup script that sets the appropriate library environement up for them regardless of distribution. I've done this myself more than once, and it isn't terribly difficult.
The answer isn't to create a One True Distribution(tm) and replace consumer choice, competition, and the free market that GNU/Linux has created with the Linux equivelent of a Microsoft Monopoly, it is to get vendors to intelligently package their products so that they can run with most if not all of the various distros out there.
Correct to you maybe. All this amounts to is that you have binary packages which are equally broken on all distributions. The point is that there's no such thing as "distribution neutral".
This simply isn't true. RPM is most emphatically NOT distribution neutral, even if volunteer developers have spent many man-hours writing packages like "alien" in order to make RPMs accessible to the majority of distros out there which do not use RPM. tar.gz IS distribution neutral. A well packaged binary, with all necessary libraries installed in its own/opt subdirectory and a run script that sets the library resolution environment appropriately goes a very long way toward making a binary distribution neutral. Offering a statically linked binary in parallel to a dynamically linked binary, for those few distros that may be so out of sync with the state of affairs when the binary was created would finish the job.
And that goes for future proofing the binary as well... what if you need to run that binary 5 years from now to access some data, and no distribution on the planet (including Red Hat 75.5 and UL 10.2) has the archaic libraries it was linked against anymore? Well, a statically linked binary will run anyway... no binary-only, closed source commercial product should ever ship without a statically linked version of their binaries, regardless.
If Redhat were binary compatible with everyone else , I don't see how you could credibly claim that the packages "only worked with Redhat"
This is a null argument. It is akin to [insert favorite religion here] saying that if everyone believed as they do the world would have peace.
First, Red Hat (and UL) change, and they change fairly quickly. It is unreasonable, and inappropriate, to demand the rest of the GNU/Linux community, to whome they owe the very existence of the software they are selling, to subordinate themselves in such a way and follow suit every six months.
Second, there are other approaches which, in some cases (like the source based distros such as Source Mage and Gentoo) work better than anything Red Hat or UL is going to be able to come up with because their very paradigm is superior. Coercing them to adhere to Red Hat's notion of how things should be means giving up much of the technnical merit that makes Source Mage and Gentoo signficiantly more stable and better performing than, for example, Red Hat (or any other binary-based distro, for that matter).
We have some degree of standardization already (LSB compliance, LFS, etc.). We do not need proprietary standards in addition to that, and we do not need to trade one set of masters (Microsoft, Sun, or Apple, depending on which camp you come from) for another (Red Hat or UL).
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I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy, and I'm a huge open source fan. But, people do still need to make money. And, I would rather see closed source software on an open platform, than closed source on a closed platform.
I agree, and while my experiences with Blender have led me to conclude that proprietary software coupled with proprietary formats is a no-win situation on any platform, open or closed, there is a place for commercial software in the Free World.
The problem with United Linux is that they are promoting a very erroneous and IMHO destrictuve meme: that (a) a single commercial entity imposing a defacto embrace-and-extended standard is better than a community consensus and (b) that commercial products are better off targeting one imposed distribution and counting on compatability with others (in contrast to packaging their binaries in a distribution-neutral manner, the way VMWare does, Blender and Loki did, etc.).
Point (b) is particularly problematic (and my sole signficant gripe with Red Hat, who I otherwise like as a company, as they have promoted that harmful meme to some degree as well), and why I will actually be cheering the demise of United Linux (to put it bluntly).
Their strategy is to encourage vendors to package stuff for their distro, arguing that they are the standard to which all other distros (e.g. Gentoo, Source Mage, Slackware, Debian, etc.) must become compatible, then use that in)compatabilties to coerce those who would like to use said commercial products into purchasing their distro.
In short, they are about coercion and removing choice from the community, and as I said in another thread, the losers will ultimately be the commercial vendors, whose products would simply be disregarded regardless of merit because of their incompatability with the installed distribution (which in our case we prefer for a number of reasons, the details of which aren't important here). The vendors will likely then think, erroneously, that they failed due to a lack of GNU/Linux interest, when in fact they failed because they targeted a coercive distribution that the majority of the community rejected, and thus closed themselves out of the very market they were trying to address.
The entire notion of United Linux is based upon at least two false pretenses: (1) that it is somehow impossible for vendors to package binaries in a distribution-neutral manner, despite numerous examples to the contrary and (2) that the GNU/Linux community will accept a compatability standard imposed upon us by either a unilateral or multilateral corporate interest instead of community consensus.
They are sorely mistaken on both of these points, and their arrogance will likely prevent them from seeing that until it is far too late.
Absolutely no arrests were made, no charges filed, so it appears no criminal act was committed.
... in other words, the law does not recongnize the so-called "theft" of ideas, it instead recognizes the temporary restriction of their dissemination (or use, depending on which portion of IP law the idea is being hoarded under).
... it is merely newspeak rhetoric by concentrated intersts used for propoganda purposes to promote their own agendas, both in and out of the courtroom. It is not codified into law, or even recognized by any of the publicly available dictionaries quoted here.
The theft (using the correct defintion of the word, as presented by every publicly available, referenced dictionary in this thread) of these users computer equipment from the FBI is a 'feature' we've inherited from some of the very unconstitutional operating procedures given to us by the War on Drugs and the Reagan administration, and is basically an end run around the law (and the constitution) to punish the offendors even though no criminal charges are being filed.
Finally, as to the law, the law does not define theft the way you do (at least not here in the United States), courtroom antics and rhetoric aside. Copyright violation is not defined as theft under the law, it is defined as copyright violation, which is something different, and it is defined differently for a reason. The same is true of patent violation
The use of the word "theft" in all of these contexts has no legal foundation (at least in the United States)
One additional followup
... etc.
Since I'm unwilling to subscribe to OED's online service (as noted, there as many free alternatives available, none of which include the word immaterial int their definitions), I borrowed a colleagues dead-tree copy of the Oxford English Dictionary. It too lacks the words immaterial, and agrees with the other definitions presented here (and thereby disagrees with the definition you presented).
To wit:
steal v. & n. --v (past stole; past part. stolen)
1. tr (also absol.) a. take (another person's proterty) illegally. b. take (property) without right or permission, esp. in secret with the intention of not returning it. 2. tr. obtain surreptitiously or by surprise (stole a kiss). 3. tr. win or get possession of (a person's affections, etc.), esp. insidiously (stole her heart away). 4. intr (foll by in, out, away, up, etc.) move sep. silently or stealthily (stole out of the room). 5 (in various sports)
There isn't a shred of evidence I can find, in any dictionary, to support your claims, or the 'newspeak'-style definition of theft you have been advocating throughout this thread.
You can make bold statements like these all you want, and you can spout your anti-company rhetoric and how I've been brainwashed into not using the "dictionary definition" all you want--and yet I note you couldn't refute a single point in my argument INCLUDING my citation of the Oxford English Dictionary since you now seem to want to deal in the realm of facts and definitions.
... you are violating a contract and misusing a service, and in so doing are in violation of the law, but you are not a thief.
... including a 5 year old dead tree edition Oxford English Dictionary a friend of mine owns (I cannot verify your defintion via the online version as I am unwilling to pay the subscriber fee, when there are several free alteranatives available onlie, including Merriam Webster quoted below).
/'stOl/; stolen /'stO-l&n/; stealing
This is inaccurate, as anyone reading this thread from start to finish will be able to see for themself, but I guess I'll repeat it one more time for those who have difficulty grasping it:
Bandwidth is a numerical measure, not an object (material or immaterial) that can be stolen.
If you dishonestly turn the heat down in the winter are you stealing temperature?
If you dishonestly set off the fire alarm in a school or building, are you stealing the school or building? Are you stealing 'time.'
Not by any reasonable, rational, non-self-serving definition, you're not. You are doing all kinds of reprehensible things, but none of them, not one, is theft.
So to with uncapping one's cable modem
As for definitions, I looked up the definition of 'stealing' and 'theft' in several dictionaries, and not one included the words 'material or immaterial'
Either the OED is reflecting a change in the language, which in turn reflects the very deliberate misuse of the word I have been discussing here, or it has made the change as part of its own corporate strategy (it is, after all, a publisher, and as such a member of one of the very copyright and media cartels engaged in the very campaign of newspeak-style redefinitions of the language I have mentioned in this thread).
Main Entry: theft
Pronunciation: 'theft
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English thiefthe, from Old English thIefth; akin to Old English thEof thief
Date: before 12th century
1 a : the act of stealing; specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it b : an unlawful taking (as by embezzlement or burglary) of property
2 obsolete : something stolen
3 : a stolen base in baseball
Main Entry: 1steal
Pronunciation: 'stE(&)l
Function: verb
Inflected Form(s): stole
Etymology: Middle English stelen, from Old English stelan; akin to Old High German stelan to steal
Date: before 12th century
intransitive senses
1 : to take the property of another wrongfully and especially as an habitual or regular practice
2 : to come or go secretly, unobtrusively, gradually, or unexpectedly
3 : to steal or attempt to steal a base
transitive senses
1 a : to take or appropriate without right or leave and with intent to keep or make use of wrongfully b : to take away by force or unjust means c : to take surreptitiously or without permission d : to appropriate to oneself or beyond one's proper share : make oneself the focus of
2 a : to move, convey, or introduce secretly : SMUGGLE b : to accomplish in a concealed or unobserved manner
3 a : to seize, gain, or win by trickery, skill, or daring b of a base runner : to reach (a base) safely solely by running and usually catching the opposing team off guard
(Merriam-Webster)
None of these, not one, mentions 'immaterial' objects which, by their very nature, cannot be taken.
I agree that some day, we'll have the hardware to make nice, photorealistic animations real time. However, I fail to see how the "improv" idea spins in to this.
Think of something between a theatrical play and a puppet play, photorealistic enough that you can't tell the digital actor from the real thing, broadcast across the net in realtime.
The digital equivelent of a stage play, but with all the special effects possibilities of a full length motion picture.
It is a new art form, with parts taken from the stage, from computer CG, and from Hollywood, and could result in some very interesting work.
The "Open source" philosophy is a development model for software. The software is still "owned" (copyrighted), which is strike one against the "open source is communism" crap.
... its economy is as capitalist as any western economy (which isn't saying a lot if you look at any western economy closely ... think corporate welfare, which is rampent, protectionist tarrifs, legislated monopolies, and so forth, all of which undermine or even eliminate free markets).
Correct, to a point. Free Software is also NOT communism, it is Freedom and it encourages a Commons and a Community. Like the US Constitution, Democracy, Authoritarianism, and Existentialism, it is orthogonal to economic systems, be they Communism, Capitalsim, Feudalism, or Barterism.
In contast you seem to have equated Communism with Authoritarianism, which is a very inaccurate equation to make.
I should point out that (a) your rant against communism would more appropriately be aimed at Authoritarianism. It is an American myth that there was no democratic communism (there was a thriving "democratic" communism in Spain, which was coopted and then legislated out of existence by the Spanish government with the active and covert aid of both the United States (who couldn't stand to see any communist system succeed, and contrary to the other examples this one was succeeding and even out competing their capitalist counterparts in the country) and the Soviet Union (who couldn't stand to see a democratic form of communism succeed as that would undermine their entire "authoritarianism is necessary for communism to work" propoganda).
Authoritariansim is Bad, Republicanism and Democracy are Good.
Communism, Socialism and Capitalism all fail miserably in their purest form, but work reasonably well in modified, moderate forms, so long as the political climate is sufficiently free to allow the economy some degree of self-organization. (It is another American myth that communism is by definition a centrally planned economy, though the vast majority of authoritarian implimentations were. The example cited previously, in Spain, was not centrally planned, it was a self-organizing economy of collectives who traded amongst themselves and with their capitalist counterparts).
The mix we had in the west during the 70's and 80's (the rewards of which we reaped in the 80's and 90's) was probably the most successful, but the emergence of unaccountable corporatism appears to be wrecking the once successful form of capitalism we practiced here in the west, perhaps even as much as the unaccountable authoritarian regimes wrecked any chance at a functional communism did in the east.
Finally, back on the topic of the thread, China's communal culture is more amenable to Free Software in many ways than it is to a foreign monopoly like Microsoft (remember, the British ruled China with an iron fist through trade monopolies, so this is more offensive to them than to us, which is saying a lot because monopolies are, or should be, very offensive to anyone who values a free market).
And, last but not least, China is really only communist in name
I've seen a plethora of posts that basically argue "today's tech can't do it, so this is a stupid discussion."
Remarkable.
Technically savvy poeple, of all people, should realize that simply because Farscape-style special effects cannot be done in realtime today with today's low end consumer graphics GPUs doesn't mean the concept of 'live performance animation' as such is flawed at all.
First, much lower quality 'live performance' animation is possible with today's consumer hardware, and the improv aspect alone makes it an art form worth persuing in and of itself. The possiblity for algorithmic and technical enhancements that could be driven, or at least explored, by such an art form make it a worthwhile endeavor as well.
Second, in another 5 or 10 years (at most) it will almost certainly be possible to do live performance, farscape quality digital animations (assuming the technological development of the computer hasn't been brought to a standstill through stupid legal 'innovations' like DRM and Palladium). While movie makers would likely simply add this to their set of tools and not replace post-production entirely, the ability to create 'live theatre' digital productions and interactive, perhaps even submersive, two or multi-way environments if not completely synthetic realities is an intriguing one, to say the least, and certainly a worthwhile endeavor whether or not Hollywood can make use of the technque in their movie productions. Indeed, such systems could well render the movie as obsolete as the live stage play is today: in other words, no longer the main popular attraction, but a continuing artform valid in its own right, if no longer the center of public attention.
8 years ago I was at the U of Illinois' virtual reality lab and had an opportunity to play around with some of simulations they run, including one which allows the viewer to explore a three dimensional (submsersive) grey-scale view of the mega-structure of galaxies in the universe (to study large scale structures such as strings of galaxies, etc.).
8 years later I can explore the universe in living color on my GNU/Linux box running Celestia, in 1920x1200 24-bit color, in realtime. While it isn't submersive 3-d VR just yet, it is much higher resolution and full color, and while I can't explore the farthest reaches of the universe, I can explore the immediate galactic neighborhood in incredible detail (much greater than the old simulation allowed). All of this on a $400 Nvidia card, running a free operating system on commodity hardware.
So, in other words, dismissing this possibility simply because you can't do it with perfect, photo-realistic effects today shows a remarkable lack of vision, and a blindness to similiar leaps in technology that we've all beeen taking for granted for the last decade or two. We will be able to do this sort of thing, photorealistically, much sooner than most people probably realize, and the art form can be persued long before the final polish is available.
I get the feeling you are either being deliberately obtuse here, or the misapplication of the English language the content cartels have subjected you to all these years has truly made you incapable of applying the correct, dictionary definition of the words "theft" or "stealing."
Do you agree that using a cable descrambler to get extra channels is stealing? Because it's the exact same thing.
Of course not, because it isn't, regardless of how many times the Cable and Content industry misuse and redefine the word.
It isn't theft.
It is unauthorized access to privately owned information, and as such punishable under the law.
You are partially right, the two concepts are similiar (though not the same thing), but neither one is an example of theft.
If it makes you comfortable to use the English language to remove your behavior (not you specifically) from the "Sin of Taking What is Not Yours" (i.e., Stealing), that is your moral choice. I just think that when we do this as a society, we make it easier for us to violate our neighbor when we rationalize this sort of behavior.
Rewriting the English language to map a modern act (however inappropriate it may be) to a set of 10 laws written five thousand years ago that have nothing whatsoever to do with the discussion of hand so that they can fit within the moral context you've chosen as a frame of reference is exactly the sort of muddy thinking I'm talking about. It completely obfuscates and obscures the underlying ethical questions and discussion, and that is precislely what I am railing against here.
This has nothing to do with the ten commandments, as this activity wasn't even concievable at the time they were written.
Bandwidth is a numerical measure, and isn't any more "stealable" than temperature, pressure, or time is. Misusable, abusable, and quite often bought or sold (as an imperfect mapping of capitalism onto areas where it isn't always directly applicable) yes, but stealable?
Come on, just because the behavior, inappropriate though it is, wasn't concievable to Moses when he wrote the foundations of Hebrew law, doesn't give you the right to change the meaning of those words simply to satisfy your own notion of what should and should not be.
Yes, but nothing here has been taken.
You are so wrong it's obscene. When you signup with an ISP, what do you get? You get an internet connection, and X amount of bandwidth. You have BOUGHT that bandwidth, it's yours... If you take more than that it's stealing.
Your thinking is so muddy it's obscene. The Mississippi River is pristine in comparison.
Let me use another real world analogy that should clear this up:
If you are a shipping company using the limited capacity of, say, the Panama or Suez canal, and you have a contract that allows you to send 5 ships a day through the canal for a particular price, and you decide to slip 10 ships through instead, have you stolen the canal?
No.
Have you stolen money from the canal operators (assume for a moment there is no way for them to easilly charge you each time a ship passes through, ie. no toll booth on the canal itself)?
No.
Do you owe the canal operators money?
Yes.
Are you in violation of your contract?
Yes.
Are you absuing the services of the canal by taking up more of its capacity than your contract allows?
Yes.
Are you "stealing" capacity?
No, because capacity is a numerical measure, not an object that can be stolen. You are misusing the canal's limited resources, but you are not taking them anywhere.
To make this even more crystal clear for those who are still unable to shed the mental shackles of the Newspeak definitino of theft that the media cartels have been feeding them for the last two decades, consider this.
If, instead of filling the canal with ships and using up its capacity in that fashion, are you engaging in theft if you blow the canal up and turn it into a dry river bed?
No, obviously not. You haven't engaged in theft at all, you've engaged in vandalism, sabatage, and perhaps terrorism, but you have not engaged in theft, even though you've reduced the canal's usable capacity down to zero.
How about if you build a damn to block the canal (but don't destroy it)?
Again, no, you aren't stealing anything, you are merely abusing the canal and making it useless to others, ie. are reducing its usable capacity to zero.
Using something in excess to what your contract allows, such as capacity, is not and can never be theft. Indeed the very nature of what we are talking about precludes the possibility of theft as such, without rewriting the definition of the word itself to mean something different than it does, which is exactly what you, and the software and entertainment monopolists you so transparently represent, are trying to do. Which is muddy thinking at its worst.
Allow me to reiterate for the remarkably dense: You haven't stolen anything, you haven't taken anything. Capacity is not an object that can be taken, no theft can be committed.
Your inability to think clearly is a direct result of your misuse of the English language, probably because of your inability to question the misuse of the same language software and entertainment monopolists have been feeding you for years.
BANDWIDTH isn't a thing, it is a measure of capacity, and just as your overuse of a canal's capacity doesn't entail theft of any kind, so to your overuse of a network's capacity doesn't entail theft of any kind.
It does, however, mean you are in violation of contract and very likely owe a serious debt to the providor whose equipment and network you have misused.
It is plain and simple misuse of the English language and common sense that truly results in muddy thinking, exactly like the kind you are displaying here.
Yes, bandwidth is limited. But it nevertheless cannot be taken, and cannot be stolen (without rewriting the defintion of those words), it can merely be misused or abused.
Maybe I am just one of those old moralists or it was my Catholic school up bringing. I think when you take something that is not yours, its stealing.
Yes, but nothing here has been taken.
So if you if you signed a contract that states you will only take 1.5Mb/s of bandwidth and you modify a device to take more than 1.5Mb/s, you are stealing along with breaching a contract.
No, you're not, anymore than you are "stealing" if you rent a car agreeing to not drive it faster than 65 MPH, then take it out on the highway and top it out at 120 MPH.
You are misusing equipment and violating your contract. You haven't taken anything, ergo you have stolen nothing.
It is abuses of the English language like this that not only muddy thinking, but result in the kinds of preposterous public policy such muddy thinking creates, such as the Microsoft/Hollywood attempt at using DRM to cripple technology and consumer choice in the name of preventing "theft" which doesn't even exist (c.f the Palladium thread and the numerous DMCA, SSSCA. CBDTPA, and TCPA threads).
Redefining words to mean something they don't, and then misusing those definitions, is not the moral high ground.
If you want to argue that abusing equipment and violating service agreements is morally wrong, I would agree with you. However, if you want to continue to argue that abusing a service now suddenly equates theft, even when nothing has been taken, then I must respectfully disagree.
we're not all Americans dip shit..
No, dumb fuck, we're not.
But those of us who are affected by the attempt to legislate DRM rights (as noted in my post) are.
The point remains, even if it is over your head.
...it is breach of contract, nothing more. And, since it is a breach of contract, as numerous others have pointed out, a pair of wire cutters (or a flip of a switch) would have more than sufficed to put an end to this behavior.
... you are merely in debt for the difference still owed. No theft committed. None.
If you agree to drive 10 truck on the expressway for a certain, flat tax, and instead drive 500, you haven't stolen anything. Not even the taxes you should have paid. The road is still there, the taxes you did pay are still there
You've violated your contract (and failed to pay taxes that are due), but once again, that is not theft. The same is true in this situation.
Your other point is very good: wonders how many Al Q'aida sleeper cells are going to go undetected here in the U.S. because of American companies like this one who feel it somehow appropriate to appropriate the FBI's services as an enforcement arm of their End User License Agreements and service contracts.
However I can't ignore this. It does worry me since most of my clients only know MS. It is very difficult to get your avarage joe user to break the MS habit, and some clients believe the FUD being spewed/parroted by media.
... and in every case, it has been a very successful move.
The parent post to which you replied should never have been marked Troll, and I will enjoy ripping the moderator responsible a new one on meta.
That having been said, I disagree with his suggestion that ignoring this problem is the answer, but not for the reasons you say (or at least, not entirely for those reasons). This must be fought tooth and nail, as we are being attacked from two sides:
1) Microsoft, trying to leverage their monopoly to impose further, very detrimental, restrictions on the freedom of customers to deploy the correct technologies for their solutions under the guise of DRM.
2) The entertainment industry, that is trying to legislate the very same restrictive technologies and require them in all digital hardware.
We would be absolute fools to ignore this.
Having said that, fewer and fewer people care about Microsoft's proprietary protocols. Even offices that deploy Microsoft on the desktop are, in my experience, deploying open protocols in place of Microsoft's wherever possible to avoid the sort of nonsensical moving target and deliberate breakage MS service packs often result in.
The result, interstingly enough, has been a quiet movement on the part of several businesses away from Microsoft not just on the server side, but also on the desktop
This is why Microsoft is scared, this is why Microsoft is trying to impliment coercive technologies that will remove the last vestiges of customer choice, and this is why their unholy alliance with Hollywood will likely succeed in creating a Revelations-esque dystopia if we sit on our hind ends and do nothing to prevent it.
Unfortunately we as Americans are so thoroughly conditioned to not become actavists about any cause, no matter how much we care about it, that it is very possible we will do nothing about it in time.
BTW - As another person who works at a company that has completely depircated Microsoft products and deployed GNU/Linux widely throughout our enterprise I can echo the original poster's comments (that were so unjustly marked as a Troll): Life as a non-Microsoft shop is damn good.
Cartels like the diamond industry? That was has been going strong for ages! Cartels like OPEC?
Absolutely right.
Then, lets not forget cartels like the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), who have successfully lobbied for and purchased legislation to enshrine their oligarchy into US law.
These are the very people who are pushing for this sort of nonsense, and a software monopoly as a result would be fine with them (indeed, perhaps even preferable to a free market, since it is only one point of pressure/influence they would require).
We are absolutely kidding ourselves if we do not think this is a serious threat to Free Software, the GPL, and our very freedom as human beings.
And I will continue to voice my irritation at people who pick two individuals out of a group, point out their differences of opinion, and call the group a bunch of hypocrites for disagreeing.
If you ever see Michael or Timothy pimping a movie, feel free to come out swinging. They're the ones rallying the troops against Big Media
You mean like THIS?
I think my point stands rather clearly, as underscored by the actions of the very people you were defending (don't blame yourself, it is their fault for being hypocrits, not yours).
For those non-Americans reading this thread, the pledge of allegiance goes like this:
I Pledge Allegiance to the Flag
Of the United States of America
And to the Republic
For which it stands
One Nation, Under God
Indivisible, With Liberty and Justice for All.
Interestingly enough, one of the early drafts went something like
...And to the Republic
For Which it Stands,
One Nation, Indivisible,
With Liberty, Equality, And Justice for all.
However, at the time (early 20th century), that version was rejected because of pressure from the pro-segregationists. Interestingly it wasn't only the fear of racial equality that was cited as a reason for rejecting that particular draft, but the appalling possiblity that it could be construed to imply the women should be considered equal to men as well. God forbid.
Frankly, rulings like this restore some of my faith in the judicial process. As currently written, the plege should be ruled unconstitutional, as (to refer to another post) should the engraving of the words "In God We Trust" on our currency.
Neither reference to God in either context serves to enhance freedom of religion, and both serve to undermine the fundamental separation of church and state upon which the republic was founded, revisionist Christian rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding.
And I will continue to voice my irritation at people who pick two individuals out of a group, point out their differences of opinion, and call the group a bunch of hypocrites for disagreeing.
I'm not referring to two posters out of a community, I'm referring to two editors working for a corporation with an editorial policy. If two members of the Free Software Foundation, the EFF, or what have you engaged in this the organization in question would be accused of hypocracy, and rightly so.
Slashdot, as an organization, is incredibly hypocritical in their stance vis-a-vis the Entertainment Industry, and while today it may be michael and timothy rallying the troops while hemos and commander taco pimp for Hollywood, that (a) wasn't true a few short years ago when, particularly around the time the DeCSS thing first blew up and (b) isn't relevant anyway. Having a specialist in one's organization who concentrates on one aspect, and another who concentrates on the opposite, doesn't make the organization in question, in this case the Slashdot editors (and arguably, to some degree, VA, though I would't personally take things that far), any less hypocritical, or despicable, in their behavior.
So get used to being irritated, because I'm not going away.
Again, I disagree.
... I voiced a concern, not a claim, though the more reading I do on the subject the greater that concern grows and the more uneasy I grow with this entire process.
I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this.
f United Linux was attempting to replace LSB, I'd be against it, but at this stage, I don't see evidence that supports such a claim.
The issues are more subtle than outright replacement (as embrace and extend imply), but the results can and generally are just as bad when dealing with the subversion of open standards through a non-open process. I do take some issue with the word claim
Fortunately the GNU/Linux community is by and large a pretty bright bunch of people, so I doubt this effort at hijacking the standards process, so to speak (if in fact that turns out to be what is happening) will have much success.
OK, it wasn't a Lucas Star Wars movie trailer, but rather a Star Trek trailer. Nevertheless the point remains
I will continue to voice my irritation at this behavior so long as the slashdot editors continue to engage in the hypocracy of denouncing the behavior of these cartels with one breath, while promoting their products shamelessly with the next.
No slight against Star Trek or Wil intended, rather an expression of distaste of a more generalized problem.
Interesting that the parnet got marked as a troll, particularly in light of the fact that I was right.
OK, so it was a Star Trek, not Star Wars, movie. Same evil industry, same point stands, and slashdot's hawking of the wares of an industry that is waging war not only on software freedom, but on freedom in general, continues unabated.
I believe this situation will soon be resolved calmly, but a hundred "You SUCK!" e-mail cannot help.
/. remains true to form) and a personal boycott of his products (past, present, and future) even more so.
You are absolutely right.
But a mental note to self that "Lucas sucks (even worse than his last two films)" when Slashdot starts promoting the low-rez sorinsen quicktime tailers for Episode III might be appropriate (in the next story, if
As an aside, one has to wonder what sorts of payola scams exist here, for a site the promotes free software and open source as this one does to constantly be promoting the wares of the one industry that has launched successful attacks against free software and its developers (unlike Microsoft).
Actually, no. All I've done is point out the publicly stated intentions of UL, then expounded on why they are not good for the community. Your responses have largely been "you're wrong!" and when pressed by additional detail, revised to say "ah, I overlooked what you're saying there." All of this of course interlaced with dismissive insults and innuendos, and allegations of contradictions within my arguments, all of which I have thoroughly rebutted.
This final dismissal, labelling the very valid concerns I raise as "dark mumblings, unsuported speculation, and conspiracy theories" I will now rebut by presenting quotes from yourself and the UL article which show that they are in fact not only supported, but require no theory as such, and indeed speak for themselves. Although presented without context, the meaning is IMHO preserved, and the reader can follow the footnoted links to view the context if they are interested.
It is clear that the intent is to replace and supplant community standards based on consensus with standards driven by whatever UL (perhaps with Red Hat) decides. This intent has been reiterated in virtually every response you've made in this discussion. It is irrelevant that this extended standard is based upon open standards if it is being modified and imposed back upon the community in a non-open fashion as has been described here. If this were Microsoft everyone would be shouting "embrace and extend," for indeed that is exactly what is proposed here (though I must point out: sans the "destroy" clause).
It is my opinion that any non-open approach to defining standards is a very negative thing for the community. The process is as important as the result, and the open, collaborative process here is being abandoned and supplanted by a coercive, closed process that is designed to benefit one or two entities, under the guise of serving the community. This is a concern, and indeed if the standards process for the community is so supplanted, one of the most compelling reasons for switching to GNU/Linux (to get out from under one's vendors' thumbs, ie. freedom) goes away almost completely.
As for accusations of "conspiracy theory" you asked me for examples of how such a closed process could be detrimental to the community and I provided several scenerios which have occurred repeatedly, both in the Wintel environment and the (prior to GNU/Linux) fragmented UNIX world. Perhaps you, as an advocate of United Linux, can dismiss these concerns, but as one who makes a living using and deploying Free Software, and as one whose business has benefited greatly from the Freedom provided by Free Software, I cannot dismiss these concerns so easilly, particularly given the fact that every statement made to rebut those concerns has done nothing but confirm them.
It is a collassal mistake in judgement for the likes of Caldera (even coupled with HP and others) to approach the GNU/Linux community, to whome they owe the very product they are leveraging, and arrogantly assert something to the effect of:
As your industry leader we are now getting your act together and defining your standards for you. We will base our work upon the consensus you've formed thus far, but now you will follow our lead or you will be stuck.
I think you are going to find the community singuarly unresponsive and unfriendly to this sort of thing, and rightly so. It is my fervent hope that you do not lead too many software vendors down the garden path in the process
Too much information can color an impression of an otherwise honorable person. You may say something like, "I have nothing to hide, so this doesn't bother me." Don't fall into that trap. Something will come up that you would rather not be public knowledge. Maybe you wet the bed till you were in high school. Do you want your boss to confront you about that herpes test you had last week?
Or, as happened to a Swiss acquaintance of mine, get called into your bosses office and be read the riot act for not having tidied up your yard and trimmed your hedges properly. While Switzarland is a beautiful country, it is also, in its way, quite Big Brotherish (and the lifetime service in the Army reserves adds to that, but thats another story). Some people don't have a problem with it, but I for one won't be applying for Swiss Citizenship anytime soon.
We in America have gown up expecting to have certain rights and liberties, among them the right to privacy (even if most people do not realize that it isn't enshrined in the constitution as it should have been), and eventually even the apathetic masses (who, I suspect, are less apathetic than the media would have you believe) will grow sufficiently outraged to take to the streats, Osama bin Laden or not.
Good governance is having the wisdom to fix these sorts of ugly trends before the people feel the need to fill the streets and start rioting. Unfortunately I've seen precious little good governance in the United States of late.
As I pointed two sentences later (which you chose to completely remove, since it completely rebuts the point you made based upon my edited comments), binaries can in general be made to work with any distribution, regardless of packaging system or file organization, if the binary is provided in a tarball, along with a list of required dynamic libraries and their versions.
/etc/init.d (or wherever), and suggesting that it should be added to your default runlevel, is as far as any installation should ever go. And if a distribution is really so out of sync with the LSB and LFSS that the installation script can't make an intelligent guess as to where to put the script, then it should put it into a directory under opt and inform the installer that THEY need to add that script to their default init environemt, something that is there responsiblity regardless.
/opt (which is what the LFS standard requires anyway) along with the libraries they need and a startup script that sets the appropriate library environement up for them regardless of distribution. I've done this myself more than once, and it isn't terribly difficult.
/opt subdirectory and a run script that sets the library resolution environment appropriately goes a very long way toward making a binary distribution neutral. Offering a statically linked binary in parallel to a dynamically linked binary, for those few distros that may be so out of sync with the state of affairs when the binary was created would finish the job.
... what if you need to run that binary 5 years from now to access some data, and no distribution on the planet (including Red Hat 75.5 and UL 10.2) has the archaic libraries it was linked against anymore? Well, a statically linked binary will run anyway ... no binary-only, closed source commercial product should ever ship without a statically linked version of their binaries, regardless.
This does not advance your argument, because it is simply incorrect. I was do you a favor by snipping this
Based on my experience (I've been using GNU/Linux since 1993) it is correct. Even ill-behaved binaries packaged specifically for some ancient version of Red Hat, like the Sybase 11.9.2 binaries, can be made to work with, for example, the current release of Gentoo in spite of their deliberate 'Red Hat Only' packaging and configuration assumptions. I could list a dozen other examples, not to mention a plethora of much better behaved and more intelligently packaged proprietary binaries, such as VMWare and various commercial games. To get any of these working all you need to do is insure the proper libraries have been installed in the proper location.
The only exception that comes to mind was Word Perfect, which was so poorly packaged that it required their own distriubution, a failing that reflected their incompetence, or the poor porting job that was done, far more than it did the interoperability of diverse distributions even then.
As an aside I should mention that we are moving away from Sybase to Postgres because of the hoops their idiotic RPM-only packaging scheme, coupled with a Red Hat centric installer that tries to be intelligent (but isn't), force us to jump through. We can get it working, but it is more trouble than it is worth because of the way Sybase has chosen to package it, such that Sybase is now in the process of losing a customer.
If you'd done any packaging, you'd know this.
I have done packaging, and I do know this. I know this to be absolutely incorrect. At worst, your installation script needs to ask a human being (the person installing the software) where the other software it requires is located (be it KDE, Gnome, or what have you). It should be doing this regardless, and getting permission before it does any mucking about with the installed (and presumably functioning) system, and it most certainly should not be making assumptions about any system it is installing upon. For all you know the system has been customized anyway, for another compelling reason, and the fact that it is a Red Hat or UL system may mean absolutely nothing WRT the validity of a particular assumption about where things are located, or what versions are installed.
Furthermore, if your packaging, or your binary, requires modification to existing init scripts, then it is broken. Period. That is the job of the system administrator, and NOTHING should ever be rewriting or modifying existing init scripts. Placing a script in
Software installation scripts that go about modifying an installed UNIX or GNU/Linux system like you imply are a recipe for Microsoft-Style disaster with or without a One True Distro, and frankly a profoundly bad idea.
libstdc++ was compiled with different C++ compilers ? Or if a library does something has an ABI change without a change of soname ? What if different vendors choose different sonames for the same library ?
libstdc++ is the only real problem, and even it is easilly resolvable using either chrooted environments, or environments with a modified ld.so.conf configuration in userspace.
An even easier solution is to distribute a statically linked binary in addition to the dynamically linked version. This is how Blender very neatly avoided any problems of this kind., and is a wise thing to do regardless.
And that is the most extreme example. The other examples you cite can be addressed with symbolic links (ideally in a subdirectory added to the app's LD_LIBRARY_PATH specific to that app, so that the overall system isn't cluttered).
An easy solution is to bundle commercial apps into
The answer isn't to create a One True Distribution(tm) and replace consumer choice, competition, and the free market that GNU/Linux has created with the Linux equivelent of a Microsoft Monopoly, it is to get vendors to intelligently package their products so that they can run with most if not all of the various distros out there.
Correct to you maybe. All this amounts to is that you have binary packages which are equally broken on all distributions. The point is that there's no such thing as "distribution neutral".
This simply isn't true. RPM is most emphatically NOT distribution neutral, even if volunteer developers have spent many man-hours writing packages like "alien" in order to make RPMs accessible to the majority of distros out there which do not use RPM. tar.gz IS distribution neutral. A well packaged binary, with all necessary libraries installed in its own
And that goes for future proofing the binary as well
If Redhat were binary compatible with everyone else , I don't see how you could credibly claim that the packages "only worked with Redhat"
This is a null argument. It is akin to [insert favorite religion here] saying that if everyone believed as they do the world would have peace.
First, Red Hat (and UL) change, and they change fairly quickly. It is unreasonable, and inappropriate, to demand the rest of the GNU/Linux community, to whome they owe the very existence of the software they are selling, to subordinate themselves in such a way and follow suit every six months.
Second, there are other approaches which, in some cases (like the source based distros such as Source Mage and Gentoo) work better than anything Red Hat or UL is going to be able to come up with because their very paradigm is superior. Coercing them to adhere to Red Hat's notion of how things should be means giving up much of the technnical merit that makes Source Mage and Gentoo signficiantly more stable and better performing than, for example, Red Hat (or any other binary-based distro, for that matter).
We have some degree of standardization already (LSB compliance, LFS, etc.). We do not need proprietary standards in addition to that, and we do not need to trade one set of masters (Microsoft, Sun, or Apple, depending on which camp you come from) for another (Red Hat or UL).