Then, what was the big concern of the QPL vs. the GPL. Why is the Mozilla project changing to being dual liscensed under the MPL and the GPL when then MPL alows almost as much as the GPL?
I watch how things happen, and it looks like companies release things under Open Source liscenses, get swarmed on by people saying that somehow this makes their product impossible to ship in this way or that way because of a GPL violation, and then they end up re-releasing under the GPL.
I know this is all pretty vague. It's based on an intuitive feeling I've gotten from reading Slashdot stuff for a long time. It most distinctly isn't based on criticism that any Open Source liscense aside from the GPL is impure. People seem to be finding specific legal incompatibilities that I can't remember the exact nature of just now.
Once you tell anybody your idea or show anybody your work, you've already given it away, and can't prevent them from giving it to anyone else. That's just the way it is. No matter how many attempts you make to erect societal walls to keep it from happening, it will, and short of totalitarianism, you can't do anything at all about it.
I would prefer that this fundamental truth be realized, and people start basing their actions on it. It's much more healthy and sane than continually trying to make everybody conform to a set of rules that just aren't the way things are.
Likening GPL to communism and BSD to socialism is quite flawed. Communism and socialism are both about physical property. Neither a copyright, nor a patent are physical property. Both are mere societal conventions we follow in the hopes of achieving certain ends.
The fact that these conventions have largely come at no cost to society from ignoring what the real laws are is an accident of history. Those costs now loom large, and it's time to revisit our conventions and decide what would better further our goals.
While I very much support the ideals of the FSF, I have a problem with the current GPL.
The current GPL makes it very hard to distribute GPL and non-GPL programs together, even if the non-GPL programs have a liscense I would generally find perfectly acceptable.
This tends to have the 'rolling GPL' effect, which I'm sure Stallman is very happy about, but I find mildly worrisome. I think this makes it harder for a business to decide to release software under terms that are non-GPL, but still free. In the long run, this undermines the goals of the FSF.
Is there anything being done in GPL v3 to address this?
The Net gives us another community to exist in, but far too commonly at the expense of that which we already have. Whilst it can help build relationships with other people, even people we're never likely to even meet in real life, if we fail to build relationships with people in our own physical community then this is hardly improving our lives or society as a whole.
Really now. And how did you reach this conclusion? I suppose none of the interactions I have over the net enrich the lives of either me, or the other person.
In the US, physical communities are dying. They were dying long before the Net came along, and I can only see that the Net has slowed this phenomena to some extent because of the connections it builds, and the sense of purpose people can derive from it.
I have a theory that all the things economists think matter don't matter in the least. The thing that does matter is that people have dreams they feel they can achieve. Hope for the future. The hope for the future present on the Net is what has caused our economy to blossom.
You bemoan the lack of physical connection, but I really don't see much of a difference between the Net and a nervous system. Where does the virtual end? Where does the physical begin?
It doesn't matter if they were picked on geeks. They were taken as a symbol for them anyway. Ultimately, in this context, that is more important than whether or not they were.
The article does not focus on them. It focusses on those who, as picked on geeks, see themselves (rightly or wrongly) in a similar to the Columbine killers.
While I have no strong desire to turn France into America or make all French people into Americans, I still feel sorry for the French for wanting to be French. I presume the feeling was mutual. If it weren't, I wouldn't feel that way.:-)
I also feel sorry for Somali women for wanting to be Somali women, though for a completely different reason. Female circumcision is a horribly barbaric practice.
As many people have probably said, that's totally uneccesary. You don't need much upload bandwidth to download stuff. Just enough for the occasional ACK packet.
I always leave uploading on. I just wish that gnapster had a rate limiter built into it. If it did, I'd leave it up most of the time.
You have no obligation to give it to me. But once you do, I'm perfectly free to give it to someone else. You can't stop me without invoking the massive threat of force and violence of a large government. You can't even tell I've done it without invoking such an entity.
Now, in this country, we have a societal convention, encoded in a set of laws, that say I'm not supposed to do that unless my friend has paid you some money for your idea too. This convention was made long ago with the hope of encouraging people to come up with new ideas and tell others about them. I submit that there is a means of accomplishing the goal without the high cost associated with not letting people share information.
There is a very high cost associated with not letting people share ideas. That cost is the extra innefficiency introduced when not every can use the most efficient and best method of doing something because someone else 'owns' it. In the past, when sharing ideas was harder, this cost was not so noticeable, but now it's becoming more and more noticeable. It's time for something different.
Sorry, your software has very little in common with your car. Comparisons to physical objects are stupid and don't work for exactly the reasons you try to dismiss.
The/dev/random patch in the kernel. Neatest idea I've never seen.
reiserfs. It has some pretty new and interesting concepts in filesystem design.
My StreamModule system. Not at all a derivative of some non-free system.
Rogue, Nethack, Angband. Completely original in their time, and still leaps ahead in terms of gameplay than any commercial alternative.
emacs. It was originally free software. One of the first visual editors.
BIND. Sendmail, Apache is derived from the first (free) webserver. Netscape, derived from the first (free) web browser. Mosaic, the first web browser.
Eros, a totally new concept in how an OS should handle security and persistence.
Practically every new and innovative idea in CS came out as a piece of free software first before some company stole the idea from the public domain and tried to erect a fence around it using copyrights and patents to extort money.
Sorry, we'll create it and put you out of your stupid little petty monopolistic business right here at home.
Ideas are NOT property, no matter how many guns you point at me to try to make me think it is. And that is _exactly_ what copyright and patents are. They are guns pointed at me to try to make me agree that somehow some random idea happens to be yours, and that I 'stole' it because I have the same one.
If you had an idea and I managed to go to a different planet and use it, how could you ever tell? If you can't even tell you were harmed, how can you say you were?
Copyrights and patents do NOT enforce natural rights. They are only a societal convention we created to incent people to create more ideas. In my opinion, they are a societal convention that no longer works. Time for a new one.
No, you can't. If I rip apart a piece of software you wrote, and see a neat algorithm and decide to use it somewhere, I have to worry about whether or not you have a patent on it.
Ultimately, it is. I never have to give you money if I don't want to. It's not your money until I give it to you.
Sorry, that's life.
Go ahead and make your software with your monopolistic liscensing terms. You'll ultimately fail because someone (maybe me) will make a free (as in speech) version. Time to find a different way to make money than extorting it through the use of monopolistic liscenses.
The value in WordPerfect is not so much the program itself. It's the organization behind it. People bought WordPerfect because it worked and they trusted the company to keep up a regular flow of features and upgrades.
The same logic applies. I make a point of buying my Linux distributions because I want to ensure a continued flow of features and upgrades from the company I buy them from. If a company I worked for made extensive use of a particular distribution's products, I'd ask that they'd sponsor a developer or buy support from one of the Linux companies out there.
I refuse to buy software made by a company that seems to feel they need a monopoly to succeed. The monopoly model of copyrights and patents is fundamentally flawed.
You didn't bother to answer my question. Why do you need a monopoly to benefit? Why must I be branded as a thief for also using your idea?
Besides, people will inevitably use the product of your labor without giving you money anyway. Just like we all use the roman alphabet without paying the scribes (or their descendents) who invented it. Treating what you created like physical property is fundamentally wrong.
I understand it perfectly well. You want to be rewarded with a perpetual monopoly on a good which naturally does not accept monopolies as your reward.
Well, excuse me if I find you morally reprehensible.
Well, that alphabet your using there was probably 'stolen'. You should find the descendent and pay him. Same with half the words you're using. Stolen from some author or someone who said them without being given their proper and due monopoly.
I believe in rewards alright, but the one you want is based on a fundamentally flawed equating of physical property with ideas.
Of course, it's a very convenient idea that you have that you somehow deserve this monopoly. It makes a nice tidy set of justifications for invoking political power and violence to try to prevent me from sharing ideas (at no cost to you I might add) you somehow feel you have an exclusive right to.
I feel that your conclusion that you have a right to come over and beat me up because I told a friend something you told me is morally reprehensible. And, fundamentally, that's exactly what you're saying.
While I agree that the interface idea is an excellent idea, I found, on occasion, that I want mixin interfaces that actually have code and data behind them.
In particular, I have a reference counting class that has a reference count in it. Several classes I have multiply inherit from the reference counting class, and a different data containing class, and this works out well.
This couldn't be done in Java. Of course, Java wouldn't need a reference counting class, but the principle is the same.
You are an idiot, masquerading as a programmer. If you wish to flame a clueless academic, you should at least make sure you have the wit to do so intelligently.
The const problem is a real problem. I like to be able to say that the method I'm passing an object to promises not to modify the contents of that object. Your mention of 'static' is totally irrelevant in this context. And the author clearly understands 'final' which is why he says there's no real analog to C++s 'const' methods.
Your 'finalize' method example provides absolutely no guarantee about when it will be called. You may run out of file descriptors, or whatever other resource you're using before the GC is run. The GC only deals with memory, so it won't run when you run out of file decsriptors to save you from stupid, needless errors when you open files.
The real answer to his 'no destructor' argument is the 'finally' clause of a try... catch block, which is just as bad as having to remember to 'delete' things in C++.
As for the reference vs. value semantics of objects vs. primitive types, Java obscures the issue. It's easily as bad as the fuzzy distinction between arrays and pointers in C.
C++ container classes that contain by value do a good job of making it a bit of a pain (and sometimes impossible) to get a pointer to the value they're actually holding. Java, cannot make this a pain.
I personally, would shoot anybody who used 'instanceof' in an OO program in a statically typed language. That just screams 'bad design'. Templates are a far better means of achieving genericity than run-time type checked casting.
This is a good idea. I remember thinking of it a few months back. I should've sent some e-mail to the reiserfs development list. I had just assumed that it was obvious.
The idea of detecting a power failure and automagically dumping to flash RAM is also excellent, and an even better idea.:-)
While that would be nice, using it to create a system snapshot for backup would be even nicer. You could tell all of your applications to write everything they need to write and freeze temporarily. Then you start a backup application as a transaction to your filesystem and it gets the frozen snapshot while your apps are unfrozen and work merrily away. The unfrozen applications see all their updates, and the backup sees the frozen filsystem.
Slashdot Mirror
Then, what was the big concern of the QPL vs. the GPL. Why is the Mozilla project changing to being dual liscensed under the MPL and the GPL when then MPL alows almost as much as the GPL?
I watch how things happen, and it looks like companies release things under Open Source liscenses, get swarmed on by people saying that somehow this makes their product impossible to ship in this way or that way because of a GPL violation, and then they end up re-releasing under the GPL.
I know this is all pretty vague. It's based on an intuitive feeling I've gotten from reading Slashdot stuff for a long time. It most distinctly isn't based on criticism that any Open Source liscense aside from the GPL is impure. People seem to be finding specific legal incompatibilities that I can't remember the exact nature of just now.
Once you tell anybody your idea or show anybody your work, you've already given it away, and can't prevent them from giving it to anyone else. That's just the way it is. No matter how many attempts you make to erect societal walls to keep it from happening, it will, and short of totalitarianism, you can't do anything at all about it.
I would prefer that this fundamental truth be realized, and people start basing their actions on it. It's much more healthy and sane than continually trying to make everybody conform to a set of rules that just aren't the way things are.
Likening GPL to communism and BSD to socialism is quite flawed. Communism and socialism are both about physical property. Neither a copyright, nor a patent are physical property. Both are mere societal conventions we follow in the hopes of achieving certain ends.
The fact that these conventions have largely come at no cost to society from ignoring what the real laws are is an accident of history. Those costs now loom large, and it's time to revisit our conventions and decide what would better further our goals.
While I very much support the ideals of the FSF, I have a problem with the current GPL.
The current GPL makes it very hard to distribute GPL and non-GPL programs together, even if the non-GPL programs have a liscense I would generally find perfectly acceptable.
This tends to have the 'rolling GPL' effect, which I'm sure Stallman is very happy about, but I find mildly worrisome. I think this makes it harder for a business to decide to release software under terms that are non-GPL, but still free. In the long run, this undermines the goals of the FSF.
Is there anything being done in GPL v3 to address this?
Really now. And how did you reach this conclusion? I suppose none of the interactions I have over the net enrich the lives of either me, or the other person.
In the US, physical communities are dying. They were dying long before the Net came along, and I can only see that the Net has slowed this phenomena to some extent because of the connections it builds, and the sense of purpose people can derive from it.
I have a theory that all the things economists think matter don't matter in the least. The thing that does matter is that people have dreams they feel they can achieve. Hope for the future. The hope for the future present on the Net is what has caused our economy to blossom.
You bemoan the lack of physical connection, but I really don't see much of a difference between the Net and a nervous system. Where does the virtual end? Where does the physical begin?
It doesn't matter if they were picked on geeks. They were taken as a symbol for them anyway. Ultimately, in this context, that is more important than whether or not they were.
The article does not focus on them. It focusses on those who, as picked on geeks, see themselves (rightly or wrongly) in a similar to the Columbine killers.
While I have no strong desire to turn France into America or make all French people into Americans, I still feel sorry for the French for wanting to be French. I presume the feeling was mutual. If it weren't, I wouldn't feel that way. :-)
I also feel sorry for Somali women for wanting to be Somali women, though for a completely different reason. Female circumcision is a horribly barbaric practice.
As many people have probably said, that's totally uneccesary. You don't need much upload bandwidth to download stuff. Just enough for the occasional ACK packet.
I always leave uploading on. I just wish that gnapster had a rate limiter built into it. If it did, I'd leave it up most of the time.
You have no obligation to give it to me. But once you do, I'm perfectly free to give it to someone else. You can't stop me without invoking the massive threat of force and violence of a large government. You can't even tell I've done it without invoking such an entity.
Now, in this country, we have a societal convention, encoded in a set of laws, that say I'm not supposed to do that unless my friend has paid you some money for your idea too. This convention was made long ago with the hope of encouraging people to come up with new ideas and tell others about them. I submit that there is a means of accomplishing the goal without the high cost associated with not letting people share information.
There is a very high cost associated with not letting people share ideas. That cost is the extra innefficiency introduced when not every can use the most efficient and best method of doing something because someone else 'owns' it. In the past, when sharing ideas was harder, this cost was not so noticeable, but now it's becoming more and more noticeable. It's time for something different.
Sorry, your software has very little in common with your car. Comparisons to physical objects are stupid and don't work for exactly the reasons you try to dismiss.
Come up with a better argument.
The /dev/random patch in the kernel. Neatest idea I've never seen.
reiserfs. It has some pretty new and interesting concepts in filesystem design.
My StreamModule system. Not at all a derivative of some non-free system.
Rogue, Nethack, Angband. Completely original in their time, and still leaps ahead in terms of gameplay than any commercial alternative.
emacs. It was originally free software. One of the first visual editors.
BIND. Sendmail, Apache is derived from the first (free) webserver. Netscape, derived from the first (free) web browser. Mosaic, the first web browser.
Eros, a totally new concept in how an OS should handle security and persistence.
Practically every new and innovative idea in CS came out as a piece of free software first before some company stole the idea from the public domain and tried to erect a fence around it using copyrights and patents to extort money.
Sorry, we'll create it and put you out of your stupid little petty monopolistic business right here at home.
Ideas are NOT property, no matter how many guns you point at me to try to make me think it is. And that is _exactly_ what copyright and patents are. They are guns pointed at me to try to make me agree that somehow some random idea happens to be yours, and that I 'stole' it because I have the same one.
If you had an idea and I managed to go to a different planet and use it, how could you ever tell? If you can't even tell you were harmed, how can you say you were?
Copyrights and patents do NOT enforce natural rights. They are only a societal convention we created to incent people to create more ideas. In my opinion, they are a societal convention that no longer works. Time for a new one.
No, you can't. If I rip apart a piece of software you wrote, and see a neat algorithm and decide to use it somewhere, I have to worry about whether or not you have a patent on it.
I believe they should be compensated. I think the granting of a temporary monopoly has become the wrong way to do it.
I can't get over how people think that the granting of temporary monopolies is the only means by which ideas will come to fruition.
Ultimately, it is. I never have to give you money if I don't want to. It's not your money until I give it to you.
Sorry, that's life.
Go ahead and make your software with your monopolistic liscensing terms. You'll ultimately fail because someone (maybe me) will make a free (as in speech) version. Time to find a different way to make money than extorting it through the use of monopolistic liscenses.
Make money from some other means than the monopoly bludgeon of copyright.
The value in WordPerfect is not so much the program itself. It's the organization behind it. People bought WordPerfect because it worked and they trusted the company to keep up a regular flow of features and upgrades.
The same logic applies. I make a point of buying my Linux distributions because I want to ensure a continued flow of features and upgrades from the company I buy them from. If a company I worked for made extensive use of a particular distribution's products, I'd ask that they'd sponsor a developer or buy support from one of the Linux companies out there.
I refuse to buy software made by a company that seems to feel they need a monopoly to succeed. The monopoly model of copyrights and patents is fundamentally flawed.
You didn't bother to answer my question. Why do you need a monopoly to benefit? Why must I be branded as a thief for also using your idea?
Besides, people will inevitably use the product of your labor without giving you money anyway. Just like we all use the roman alphabet without paying the scribes (or their descendents) who invented it. Treating what you created like physical property is fundamentally wrong.
Why do you have to have a monopoly to benefit?
I understand it perfectly well. You want to be rewarded with a perpetual monopoly on a good which naturally does not accept monopolies as your reward.
Well, excuse me if I find you morally reprehensible.
Well, that alphabet your using there was probably 'stolen'. You should find the descendent and pay him. Same with half the words you're using. Stolen from some author or someone who said them without being given their proper and due monopoly.
I believe in rewards alright, but the one you want is based on a fundamentally flawed equating of physical property with ideas.
Of course, it's a very convenient idea that you have that you somehow deserve this monopoly. It makes a nice tidy set of justifications for invoking political power and violence to try to prevent me from sharing ideas (at no cost to you I might add) you somehow feel you have an exclusive right to.
I feel that your conclusion that you have a right to come over and beat me up because I told a friend something you told me is morally reprehensible. And, fundamentally, that's exactly what you're saying.
Drawing analogies between software and physical objects is incredibly stupid. Don't do it.
While I agree that the interface idea is an excellent idea, I found, on occasion, that I want mixin interfaces that actually have code and data behind them.
In particular, I have a reference counting class that has a reference count in it. Several classes I have multiply inherit from the reference counting class, and a different data containing class, and this works out well.
This couldn't be done in Java. Of course, Java wouldn't need a reference counting class, but the principle is the same.
You are an idiot, masquerading as a programmer. If you wish to flame a clueless academic, you should at least make sure you have the wit to do so intelligently.
The const problem is a real problem. I like to be able to say that the method I'm passing an object to promises not to modify the contents of that object. Your mention of 'static' is totally irrelevant in this context. And the author clearly understands 'final' which is why he says there's no real analog to C++s 'const' methods.
Your 'finalize' method example provides absolutely no guarantee about when it will be called. You may run out of file descriptors, or whatever other resource you're using before the GC is run. The GC only deals with memory, so it won't run when you run out of file decsriptors to save you from stupid, needless errors when you open files.
The real answer to his 'no destructor' argument is the 'finally' clause of a try ... catch block, which is just as bad as having to remember to 'delete' things in C++.
As for the reference vs. value semantics of objects vs. primitive types, Java obscures the issue. It's easily as bad as the fuzzy distinction between arrays and pointers in C.
C++ container classes that contain by value do a good job of making it a bit of a pain (and sometimes impossible) to get a pointer to the value they're actually holding. Java, cannot make this a pain.
I personally, would shoot anybody who used 'instanceof' in an OO program in a statically typed language. That just screams 'bad design'. Templates are a far better means of achieving genericity than run-time type checked casting.
Hey, what do you know, a well reasoned post on this topic. Will wonders never cease. *big grin*
This is a good idea. I remember thinking of it a few months back. I should've sent some e-mail to the reiserfs development list. I had just assumed that it was obvious.
The idea of detecting a power failure and automagically dumping to flash RAM is also excellent, and an even better idea. :-)
While that would be nice, using it to create a system snapshot for backup would be even nicer. You could tell all of your applications to write everything they need to write and freeze temporarily. Then you start a backup application as a transaction to your filesystem and it gets the frozen snapshot while your apps are unfrozen and work merrily away. The unfrozen applications see all their updates, and the backup sees the frozen filsystem.