Public schools aren't exactly "parts" of the government, but the activities of public schools are considered to be sponsored by the government. (And they are. All a school needs to do in order to not only sponsor prayers but discriminate explicitly against people who decline to participate in them, is turn down public funding. But your right to discriminate ends once you accept the tax-dollars of American Buddhists, Jews, Hindus, atheists, etc.)
First of all, you need to get off the man-working-for-corporation thing, because that's not where I am. I'm talking about corporations as well as their employees, and everyone else, being forced to use a product. The other guy mentioned being forced to use what one's corporation uses, not me. What I'm talking about is *anybody* being forced to use e.g. Windows 2005 simply because it is both vastly popular and incompatible with any competitor, as seems to be Microsoft's strategy.
- If you have a problem with what they ask you to do, or the tools they provide you with to do your job, that's your problem - not theirs. If you don't like it, you don't have to work there. Unless you own a significant chunk of the company, you have no say. Period.
I know it's my problem. And my preferred solution to my problem is to suggest that my say in the government, along with other people's who share my problem, be used to stop companies from continuing behavior that is harmful to society. Don't confuse what *is* with what *ought to be* -- we're only talking about the latter. You can't just say that it *isn't* illegal, you have to show why it *shouldn't* be illegal. All I'm saying is that it should, not that it is.
This is as much 'coercion' as someone threatening not to pay you if you don't hold up to your part of a contract
I think you're missing the point, probably because you're stuck on that example the other guy mentioned. If all corporations are forced to use Windows, then your choice is to change careers and become a janitor or something. This is not a real choice. Or put another way, this is less choice than society should provide, and less choice than it *could* provide. So the best course of action is to provide more.
And really, is being asked to use company standard software and such anything like having a gun put to your head?
I guess you don't understand the gun-to-head analogy... When one has a gun to one's head, one is asked to do something. The issue isn't about the nature of the demand, but whether there is a gun to your head that will go off if your answer to the demand is "no". The being-asked part is never the equivalent of the gun-to-head -- the consequences of saying "no" to the being-asked are what may be equivalent to the gun-to-head. The consequences may be losing one's career. If they are, then yes, I do consider those consequences even worse than torch-to-house; at least houses can be insured. One's life will change more dramatically by being out of one's career than by losing one's house to a fire.
The choice, like being shot in the head, is real -- just a trade-off -- but it's not one anybody would realistically choose.
The company has the right to choose what it feels will maximize its value, not you.
Seeing as I'm not talking about any action against the employer, but only about taking action against software developers, I don't know whether I should... But for the purpose of lowering the number of exchanges here, that you hold this opinion both about the employer and the developer who made the incompatible popular software. In which case I contest this claim. The consumer has the right to decide which product have the most value. That is, in fact, the entire theoretical basis of our societal organization. When a company has the power to force people to buy its products in spite of their quality, society has a duty to fix the situation. The contrary policy -- that companies be allowed to use some external advantage to succeed and draw in society's resources in spite of the actual needs of society -- is an invitation to economic tyranny.
(If my assumption about your position is incorrect, please disregard the above paragraph)
Or second most valuable, depending on how CISCO is doing today. This is definitely a matter of national importance, in that it could have profound effects on a major section of the national and world-wide economy, especially in the long-term. Also, in the interests of justice for Netscape et al -- or even MSFT, if you fall into that camp -- this really should be settled as quickly as possible, which is the main reason why I think this is a Good Thing.
Students aren't "muzzled". There are certain realms where it is acceptable to promote religion, and certain realms where it is unacceptable. Into the latter category fits any speach sponsered by government entities, including public education facilities. That students may be elected by a majority is entirely irrelevant -- the entire purpose of the first amendment, and in fact the constitution itself, is to prevent a tyrannous majority from infringing the rights of a minority. The bill of rights outlines certain rights that *a majority may not strip from a minority*.
Nobody is preventing students from saying whatever they want on their own, when they are without any sponsorship from any part of the government.
Along that line, being shot in the head is also a choice. It's also a trade-off. I don't understand the whole gun-to-head analogy. Is that the *only* thing that's coercion? Is not match&gasoline-to-house also coercion? How much threat of economic loss is necessary for a decision to be considered coerced? The point is that one is not capable of choosing a product based on its merits, but instead must choose based on external consequences. This is the breakdown of the entire concept of a free market, where quality is only guaranteed by the ability of people to choose products on the basis of quality. It is exactly the situation where intervention is called for.
Daniel M. Duley posted this message to linuxtoday.com:
Since none of the KDE core developers have been contacted, I am sorry to say I think Rivyn jumped the gun here. While Miguel may have talked to Rikkus - he's not a primary KParts developer. As a matter of fact, as far as I can tell no KParts developer or maintainer was spoken to at all. Thus this is misleading at best. Not that it wouldn't be good to interoperate, but no KDE core developer or KParts developer has been contacted so don't get too excited. A lot of KDE developers have serious issues with Bonobo such as overhead, and nothing has been discussed at all with them.
Sorry guys, assuming Mr. Duley isn't a fraud (and there's no reason to believe he is), this looks like vapor.
What the hell are you talking about? They're not merging, they're just going to use the same componant architecture. Actually, KDE is taking the componant architecture from GNOME (and not the other way around), so there's absolutely no way there could be a licensing problem for GNOME. They're not talking about GNOME using QT, and QT is where the license problems exist. They're *certainly* not merging into one project.
XF4 is totally rewritten from XF3, but they were not actually using XF3 to display 3d graphics -- they were using the id MiniGL drivers -- that is how Quake2 (usually) works. If they actually used XF3 for the 3d graphics, the framerates would be much lower.
The article said that, in Linux, "Q2 uses lib3dfxgl.so, XFree 3.3.6, SMP enabled - GLQuake uses 3DFX Mesa 3.0 driver". lib3dfxgl.so is not an XF3 driver; it bypasses XF, and in fact can be used from the console without even having X installed (as it uses SVGAlib for input). (Q3 actually uses the same mechanism for display, but because it uses X for input it can't be run from the console). Q1 can also work like this with the Mesa drivers. ref_glx.so and ref_softx.so are the Q2 drivers for XF3, and those weren't the ones they used.
Notice that they specifically did *NOT* run the Linux benchmarks with Q2 in a window -- that is not because Linux cannot do this, but because doing so would require using XFree to display the graphics, giving a horrible performance with the latest stable version of XFree.
Now, it may be that XF4 is faster than lib3dfxgl.so. It is, after all, newer. But the difference between XF4 and XF3 is *NOT* the same as the difference between XF3 and lib3dfxgl.so. XF4 is only a major improvement over XF3, not over lib3dfxgl.so. It's probably only a slight improvement over lib3dfxgl.so.
(Also, go see the linuxgames benchmarks with XF4 vs Windows. XF4 varied from much slower than Windows to slightly slower than Windows. BeOS slaughtered Windows, so if we assume the linuxgames benchmarks to be accurate of general performance, we can assume it would have slaughtered XF4 too.)
Those Crusher benchmarks are incredible. BeOS R5 is doing in crusher with a single Voodoo2 more than what I do in GNU/Linux with SLI (dual) Voodoo2 cards, and a comparable system otherwise. It's an unimaginable shame that these drivers will not be available to the free software community. I was skeptical at first, but assuming this isn't an outright forgery, it's obvious that these really are top quality drivers. There are slight flaws in the test (leaving sound on, vsync on for some of the tests, using beta BeOS drivers but a stable Xfree version), but those could not be enough to explain the large differences here. Truly a shame.
Of course, these differences aren't nearly enough for anyone but the most hardcore of gamers to actually switch from Windows. But it's still impressive.
Developing for Linux is *NOT* profitable for MS, even if they make real money in the short-term. It helps MS, but it helps Linux more than it helps MS, and therefore it is bad for MS. Good for society, bad for MS. That's the state of affairs in computing.
Garbled babbling? The original poster suggested that people used closed standards because they are closed, which is of course absurd. And it's not really relevant to the topic; I just replied to it because it was absurd. Anyway, glad you agree, because there'd be little point in arguing with you otherwise, troll as you apparently are.
I don't see how this is so confusing. A company will use SMB filesharing not *BECAUSE* it is a closed format, but *IN SPITE OF THAT FACT*. The company uses it because it is a de facto standard for filesharing -- NFS is a "real" standard (i.e. a documented protocol under the control of standards organizations), but because Windows does not support it, SMB is the actual (in fact -- de facto) standard, the one that people must *actually* support if they are to communicate with the world.. It is used not for technical superiority, but because of it is supported in Windows, *IN SPITE* of its proprietary nature. Get it?
I see, Microsoft == Evil, so DOC must be created to obfusticate. Very smart of you. Why would a company with the smartest people in the world make life more difficult on themselves by making their own formats hard to read?
Because they only make it marginally more difficult for themselves, but at the same time make it vastly more difficult for their competitors. This is the tactic sited in the Halloween documents, and it is known that such tacticts were used in the SMB protocol.
From Halloween: "OSS projects have been able to gain a foothold in many server applications because of the wide utility of highly commoditized, simple protocols. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS projects entry into the market."
We *KNOW* that MS is specifically making protocols, not to enhance the experience of the user or add capabilities (although these may also be done sometimes), but to decrease the ability of free software to interoperate.
I used the word "mischief" because I consider its connotations somewhat mild. There are laws preventing fraud, but there are not laws preventing other things that are also harmful to society. Some of those things are left legal because it is supposed that market forces will make them unprofitable and therefore they will not occur. However, sometimes market forces are insufficient. Try finding a couch that isn't designed to be unusable after 5 years. Try finding a refridgerator whose motor you can replace if it breaks, without replacing the entire unit. There are currently laws that require companies to act in the monetary interests of stock-holders, even if they made no such promise to stock-holders when they went public. It doesn't seem to me any more big brotherish to require that companies only be allowed to compete based on the quality of their products, rather than through what I refer to as mischief, i.e. intentionally crippling one's own products because the crippling hurts competitors more than it hurts consumers.
It's just that when I see people ready to take from the rich "because no one deserves to have as much as they do" that I fear.
In spite of the quotation marks, I said no such thing, or even anything similar. The law currently guarantees certain consumer rights in various fields; drugs, food, automobiles, houses, etc. A supporter of laissez-faire would say that the things these laws require would be guaranteed by the free market, but the fact of the matter is that the laws were enacted because the market failed to guarantee them. Mostly these are life-and-death safety issues, but I see no reason why consumer rights regulations should not also apply to things such as software, when it seems appropriate. It has absolutely nothing to do with taking money away from the rich. It's about consumer rights.
This really should be moderated down, as it is inaccurate. KDE binaries don't violate the GPL -- GPL programs can link to whatever libraries they have permission to link to, be they GPL, BSD, commercial, or whatever. Remember, GNU itself originally was a set of utilities that ran on commercial Unixes. The GPL existed before GPL'd libc's... No, the license being violated by the distribution of KDE binaries is TrollTech's own QT license. But QT's unacceptable license is not the major issue it should be, because QT is not suing RedHat, SuSE, etc. They are allowing their license to be violated, but they have absolutely no legal obligation to continue to do so (unlike trademark law, where monopoly privileges expire if one does not defend them).
> The fact is, if open protocols really are superior, it's only a matter of time (maybe a long time) before they take over.
Huh what? There's absolutely no reason to believe that. Just that people choose something does not make it the best choice. The fact that the majority opinion has changed from time to time proves this. Besides, the very fact that a closed standard is a de facto standard is what makes it appealing (not its closed nature). If driving on the left side of the road was, for some reason, technically superior, there is still no way market forces would ever cause people to switch. Everyone must switch at once, otherwise it loses the benefit of being a standard at all. Likewise with the metric system. However, unlike the metric system or roads, a closed standard can be opened without any effort on the part of the people. A closed standard can *become* an open standard, without anyone having to switch.
But you said it yourself... If the system rewards excellence, people will strive to excel. If the system rewards mischief, people will commit mischief. It hurts MS consumers, and therefore MS, to break compatibility for SMB with all other OS, but it hurts the other OSes more. Therefore, it is in MS's best interests. Plain and simple. Reward mischief, and you will have mischief. Reward doing good for society, and people will do good for society. Punish doing harm to society, and people will cease doing harm to society. The problem with laissez-faire capitalism is that it tends to reward behavior that is harmful to society. Brilliant, you are. Now you just need to abandon that false dichotomy (your opinion vs. communism).
As I said in an earlier post, you can no more choose your computing standards than you can choose the language you speak or choose which side of the road to drive on, or choose what currency to use or choose a 6-day 28hour/day week over a traditional week. You are forced by society to either be a hermit or obey standards, and this applies to computing as well. Standards are necessary no matter who sets them, and so they should be set by someone with the public good in mind (think ISO, IETF, etc) -- not by a single corporation with its own monopoly in mind. And there's simply no reason to allow such a corporation to dictate the standards. Market forces have proved to be deficient in the matter; intervention thus becomes appropriate. I think you take for granted that open standards exist for you to choose. This does not need to be so in the future (although I must say, considering the success of free software, prospects do look good).
> Nobody is putting a gun to your head forcing you to use any given product or standard.
You're missing the entire point. Yes, everyone is forced to use the de facto standard. That's the entire point. This person is talking about a situation in which everyone must choose between a non-functional computer and a computer running Windows. That is not choice.
Why are you using TCP/IP? Is it because you chose that protocol based on technical merit? You are using TCP/IP because it is the standard, and you are forced to choose between it and nothing if you expect to communicate with the rest of the world. Given that we are FORCED to follow standards or be debilitated -- whether it's file formats or driving on the right-hand side of the road -- the standards should be set by someone with the public interest in mind. Not by Microsoft. If MS was able to obfuscate the SMB protocol enough that SAMBA could not reverse engineer it -- and they tried -- then no, you would not have choice. And if, as the original poster feared, every web site required ActiveX, no, you would not have choice. Because no matter how much responsibility you have for your choices, you can't choose the standards that other people use, and those are the ones you have to use too, if you want to communicate with them.
Don't believe me? Try speaking exclusively lojban for a month, because it's the technically superior choice of spoken/written language. See how much choice you really have over what standards you can use.
Another possible reason Metallica only banned users serving the files is that they had no way to track users downloading the files. Sounds more plausible to me... I'd check the relevant law here except that you are right, the discussion is over, and I don't really care personally, and it wasn't relevant to the discussion anyway.
Really? I'd never heard that. Also,/usr/doc/glibc-doc/copyright on my system says
"This is the Debian prepackaged version of the GNU C Library version 2.1.2.
[...] The GNU C Library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Library General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version."
Slashdot Mirror
Public schools aren't exactly "parts" of the government, but the activities of public schools are considered to be sponsored by the government. (And they are. All a school needs to do in order to not only sponsor prayers but discriminate explicitly against people who decline to participate in them, is turn down public funding. But your right to discriminate ends once you accept the tax-dollars of American Buddhists, Jews, Hindus, atheists, etc.)
The choice, like being shot in the head, is real -- just a trade-off -- but it's not one anybody would realistically choose.
Seeing as I'm not talking about any action against the employer, but only about taking action against software developers, I don't know whether I should... But for the purpose of lowering the number of exchanges here, that you hold this opinion both about the employer and the developer who made the incompatible popular software. In which case I contest this claim. The consumer has the right to decide which product have the most value. That is, in fact, the entire theoretical basis of our societal organization. When a company has the power to force people to buy its products in spite of their quality, society has a duty to fix the situation. The contrary policy -- that companies be allowed to use some external advantage to succeed and draw in society's resources in spite of the actual needs of society -- is an invitation to economic tyranny.(If my assumption about your position is incorrect, please disregard the above paragraph)
Or second most valuable, depending on how CISCO is doing today. This is definitely a matter of national importance, in that it could have profound effects on a major section of the national and world-wide economy, especially in the long-term. Also, in the interests of justice for Netscape et al -- or even MSFT, if you fall into that camp -- this really should be settled as quickly as possible, which is the main reason why I think this is a Good Thing.
Nobody is preventing students from saying whatever they want on their own, when they are without any sponsorship from any part of the government.
Along that line, being shot in the head is also a choice. It's also a trade-off. I don't understand the whole gun-to-head analogy. Is that the *only* thing that's coercion? Is not match&gasoline-to-house also coercion? How much threat of economic loss is necessary for a decision to be considered coerced? The point is that one is not capable of choosing a product based on its merits, but instead must choose based on external consequences. This is the breakdown of the entire concept of a free market, where quality is only guaranteed by the ability of people to choose products on the basis of quality. It is exactly the situation where intervention is called for.
How would it allow 2, 3, or 4?
What the hell are you talking about? They're not merging, they're just going to use the same componant architecture. Actually, KDE is taking the componant architecture from GNOME (and not the other way around), so there's absolutely no way there could be a licensing problem for GNOME. They're not talking about GNOME using QT, and QT is where the license problems exist. They're *certainly* not merging into one project.
The article said that, in Linux, "Q2 uses lib3dfxgl.so, XFree 3.3.6, SMP enabled - GLQuake uses 3DFX Mesa 3.0 driver". lib3dfxgl.so is not an XF3 driver; it bypasses XF, and in fact can be used from the console without even having X installed (as it uses SVGAlib for input). (Q3 actually uses the same mechanism for display, but because it uses X for input it can't be run from the console). Q1 can also work like this with the Mesa drivers. ref_glx.so and ref_softx.so are the Q2 drivers for XF3, and those weren't the ones they used.
Notice that they specifically did *NOT* run the Linux benchmarks with Q2 in a window -- that is not because Linux cannot do this, but because doing so would require using XFree to display the graphics, giving a horrible performance with the latest stable version of XFree.
Now, it may be that XF4 is faster than lib3dfxgl.so. It is, after all, newer. But the difference between XF4 and XF3 is *NOT* the same as the difference between XF3 and lib3dfxgl.so. XF4 is only a major improvement over XF3, not over lib3dfxgl.so. It's probably only a slight improvement over lib3dfxgl.so.
(Also, go see the linuxgames benchmarks with XF4 vs Windows. XF4 varied from much slower than Windows to slightly slower than Windows. BeOS slaughtered Windows, so if we assume the linuxgames benchmarks to be accurate of general performance, we can assume it would have slaughtered XF4 too.)
If that's true, then no, it's not so impressive. *shrug*
Of course, these differences aren't nearly enough for anyone but the most hardcore of gamers to actually switch from Windows. But it's still impressive.
Developing for Linux is *NOT* profitable for MS, even if they make real money in the short-term. It helps MS, but it helps Linux more than it helps MS, and therefore it is bad for MS. Good for society, bad for MS. That's the state of affairs in computing.
Garbled babbling? The original poster suggested that people used closed standards because they are closed, which is of course absurd. And it's not really relevant to the topic; I just replied to it because it was absurd. Anyway, glad you agree, because there'd be little point in arguing with you otherwise, troll as you apparently are.
I don't see how this is so confusing. A company will use SMB filesharing not *BECAUSE* it is a closed format, but *IN SPITE OF THAT FACT*. The company uses it because it is a de facto standard for filesharing -- NFS is a "real" standard (i.e. a documented protocol under the control of standards organizations), but because Windows does not support it, SMB is the actual (in fact -- de facto) standard, the one that people must *actually* support if they are to communicate with the world.. It is used not for technical superiority, but because of it is supported in Windows, *IN SPITE* of its proprietary nature. Get it?
From Halloween: "OSS projects have been able to gain a foothold in many server applications because of the wide utility of highly commoditized, simple protocols. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS projects entry into the market."
We *KNOW* that MS is specifically making protocols, not to enhance the experience of the user or add capabilities (although these may also be done sometimes), but to decrease the ability of free software to interoperate.
It's just that when I see people ready to take from the rich "because no one deserves to have as much as they do" that I fear.
In spite of the quotation marks, I said no such thing, or even anything similar. The law currently guarantees certain consumer rights in various fields; drugs, food, automobiles, houses, etc. A supporter of laissez-faire would say that the things these laws require would be guaranteed by the free market, but the fact of the matter is that the laws were enacted because the market failed to guarantee them. Mostly these are life-and-death safety issues, but I see no reason why consumer rights regulations should not also apply to things such as software, when it seems appropriate. It has absolutely nothing to do with taking money away from the rich. It's about consumer rights.
This really should be moderated down, as it is inaccurate. KDE binaries don't violate the GPL -- GPL programs can link to whatever libraries they have permission to link to, be they GPL, BSD, commercial, or whatever. Remember, GNU itself originally was a set of utilities that ran on commercial Unixes. The GPL existed before GPL'd libc's... No, the license being violated by the distribution of KDE binaries is TrollTech's own QT license. But QT's unacceptable license is not the major issue it should be, because QT is not suing RedHat, SuSE, etc. They are allowing their license to be violated, but they have absolutely no legal obligation to continue to do so (unlike trademark law, where monopoly privileges expire if one does not defend them).
Huh what? There's absolutely no reason to believe that. Just that people choose something does not make it the best choice. The fact that the majority opinion has changed from time to time proves this. Besides, the very fact that a closed standard is a de facto standard is what makes it appealing (not its closed nature). If driving on the left side of the road was, for some reason, technically superior, there is still no way market forces would ever cause people to switch. Everyone must switch at once, otherwise it loses the benefit of being a standard at all. Likewise with the metric system. However, unlike the metric system or roads, a closed standard can be opened without any effort on the part of the people. A closed standard can *become* an open standard, without anyone having to switch.
But you said it yourself... If the system rewards excellence, people will strive to excel. If the system rewards mischief, people will commit mischief. It hurts MS consumers, and therefore MS, to break compatibility for SMB with all other OS, but it hurts the other OSes more. Therefore, it is in MS's best interests. Plain and simple. Reward mischief, and you will have mischief. Reward doing good for society, and people will do good for society. Punish doing harm to society, and people will cease doing harm to society. The problem with laissez-faire capitalism is that it tends to reward behavior that is harmful to society. Brilliant, you are. Now you just need to abandon that false dichotomy (your opinion vs. communism).
And why shouldn't I buy from Borders?
You're missing the entire point. Yes, everyone is forced to use the de facto standard. That's the entire point. This person is talking about a situation in which everyone must choose between a non-functional computer and a computer running Windows. That is not choice.
Why are you using TCP/IP? Is it because you chose that protocol based on technical merit? You are using TCP/IP because it is the standard, and you are forced to choose between it and nothing if you expect to communicate with the rest of the world. Given that we are FORCED to follow standards or be debilitated -- whether it's file formats or driving on the right-hand side of the road -- the standards should be set by someone with the public interest in mind. Not by Microsoft. If MS was able to obfuscate the SMB protocol enough that SAMBA could not reverse engineer it -- and they tried -- then no, you would not have choice. And if, as the original poster feared, every web site required ActiveX, no, you would not have choice. Because no matter how much responsibility you have for your choices, you can't choose the standards that other people use, and those are the ones you have to use too, if you want to communicate with them.
Don't believe me? Try speaking exclusively lojban for a month, because it's the technically superior choice of spoken/written language. See how much choice you really have over what standards you can use.
Another possible reason Metallica only banned users serving the files is that they had no way to track users downloading the files. Sounds more plausible to me... I'd check the relevant law here except that you are right, the discussion is over, and I don't really care personally, and it wasn't relevant to the discussion anyway.
Uhm, no, GPL'd programs can link against any libraries that allow it. It's non-GPL programs that can't link against GPL libraries.