I'm paraphrasing the guy I talked to. I knew what he meant, and knew about the skull and cross bones. But I could't remember the university or the name of the society when I wrote the post, and didn't feel like doing 30 minutes of web research before I hit 'submit'.:-)
Perhaps I should've just "same secret society at the same university".
But, Creative Commons is not such a label. It is a label that says "The text of the license is filed under such and such name at the Creative Commons website." I don't find that very useful. I'd much rather the label itself meant something, like the label 'sugar free' does.
Why have Creative Commons at all then? We have a scheme for figuring out what a license is that's called "reading the license". It seems to me that it's utterly useless to come up with some random label for the license when that label has no meaning other than "Hey, you can read the license to figure out what the license means!"
If I sign a negotiated contract with you in which both parties are free to change terms and ask the other party if the changed terms are acceptable, then handing me information on the condition that I not give it to anybody else is fine. I'm perfectly happy with trade secrets.
If I do give it to someone else, your only recourse should be the ability to sue me for damages. The damage is my action that destroyed the secret nature of your former trade secret.
Contracts that are blanketly assumed to be agreed to by everybody who buys something are allowing private entitites to tread into the territory of the legislature. It gives them the unchecked ability to create new law. Just read your average EULA. Such contracts are not really contracts, and should be void.
[StrawMan] So, what you're saying is, your collection of child porn should be all right and no one should be able to tell you otherwise? [/StrawMan]
Well, there are already mechanisms for dealing with that problem. They are called search warrants. I'm perfectly fine with search warrants.
State mandated DRM effectively constitutes both a violation of the 3rd and 4th ammendments as it requires me to support an agent of the state in my own home to enforce the laws of the state, and it requires me to subject my computer to what amounts to a continuous search warrant without any finding of probable cause.
I'm not saying I will do it. I'm saying it will be done, and it will be done by lots and lots of people. There is a distinct difference between those two.
The more DRM they try, the more illegal copying there will be.
I think laws trying to prevent people from doing things that everybody will do anyway are very bad. They open the door for selective enforcement and any number of other evil consequences.
I think a law restricting your right to copy things is as helpful as a law stating that you may not place your hand on your head, or that you're not allowed to masturbate because it constitutes restraint of trade for prositutes.
They have no legitimate wishes. The only reason copyright exists is because of a clause in the constitution that grants congress the power to create it expressly for the purpose of encouraging more stuff to be created. So, it's not there for the benefit of the creators at all, it's for the benefit of everybody else.
There is no 'natural' ownership right over your writing or music or software. The only right you naturally have is the right not to give it to anybody else.
DRM is essentially a tiny policeman in my computer, watching me to prevent me from breaking the rules, or at least detect when I have. That isn't an acceptable solution. My computer is MY computer, not some random artist/programmer/musician's computer. I paid for it. It's sitting on my desk. Would you destroy the concept of physical property to prop up your failing scheme for 'intellectual property'?
Uh, huh. So, you have to copy a program from disk into memory in order for it to run. Is that illegal? How about if you have a huge cluster?
Also, tell me how you restrict making a copy without breaking into people's computers or putting police chips in everything? Which is worse, a world in which people can freely copy stuff, or a world in which every single move you make with anything digital is carefully monitored so you can't? There isn't much of an in-between here you know. I you don't have the careful monitoring, people will make copies. They already do, and all the enforcement efforts of RIAA have not made even the tiniest dent in filesharing.
Personally, I don't want the police state.
Giving incentive to the creators of stuff via copyright is growing more and more pointless every day. So, be brave and give up the stupid idea. It won't work. It can't work. Think of something better.
So, please explain to me how you can have a sane system of laws that restrict things like sharing over P2p and don't restrict things like letting a friend read a book. In a digital world, I do not believe this is possible.
So, I would say that in the final analysis Lessig's ideas reduce to Stallman's. They are just more palatable to you because they seem to say something different, and you hold out some forlorn hope that there is a reasonable way to restrict digital copies.
IMHO, if you're going to have some sort of umbrella for licenses to be put under, it should mean something. Near as I can tell, Creative Commons has no real criteria for deciding whether or not a license is acceptable.
If I read that a license is OSI approved, I know exactly what that means, and what sorts of things I can expect to be able to do and what I can expect to not be able to do.
If I hear that a license is a creative commons license, it tells me nothing. For all I know, it might be "You're allowed to distribute this only if you feel strongly that you have green skin.". They have license that discriminate based on what country you're a citizen of, so I don't see why they won't pick other weird things in the future.
If they want to be taken seriously, they will publish clear criteria for the acceptability of a license.
I don't understand what your problem is. So, they don't want you to call the RHEL firefox package 'firefox'. That means they want you to create a fork for packaging it in RHEL. Go ahead and do it.
Really, it's stupid of them to do this, since, as you pointed out, the package name is how people know the project. So create a fork, and watch the fork start getting lots more attention than the main project because it's easy to find from the package name.
And now you discover why some people (such as myself) who think that socialism is a horrible idea, that government is entirely too large, and that handouts to poor people just make them poorer hate the party you've chosen. The Republican party no longer stands for those values.
Stop believing in a party and start having some ideals of your own. Measure candidates against your ideals rather than against their party affiliation. Be open to listening to what people are saying about them instead of treating it as an attack on your community and justifying their bad behavior.
I will ask the same of Democrats who idealize their political leaders as well. The Democratic party suffers many of the same ills as the Republican party. As someone said to me recently (paraphrased) "John Kerry and George Bush (Sr.) were members of the same secret society (the one at Harvard) and shared the same secret handshake. You can't believe they're that different.".
I'm not a zealot either. I'm a realist. Microsoft will not always be on top. Locking yourself into a particular vendor's tech is just plain stupid. It's bad for your professional development in the long run, and you're helping the people you work for dig themselves into a hole they'll want to get themselves out of later.
I do not mean that only mediocre programmers write in C#. I mean that people who have very little programming skill or talent are going to have a hard time with it. There are stellar programmers who write in VB or PHP, but those two languages really require very little skill to program effectively for.
I actually don't like either Java (which I know fairly well) or C# very much for very similar reasons. But I wasn't intending to bash them technically.
Java is not a dead-end. Java isn't tied to Sun in the same way that.NET is tied to Microsoft. It can free itself of Sun's sticky tentacles. Additionally, Sun in general does not try to tie people into it's own little world as a marketing strategy.
C# and.NET are. I'm not jealous of C# programmers. I'm not jealous of OS/390 assembly programmers either. I consider the two different groups to be at different points on a very similar path.
It's a dead-end in the same way that learning OS/390 assembly was a dead-end 20 years ago. My most recent job has put me in a lot more contact with the IBM mainframe than I've ever had before. And if that teaches me anything, it's that a company that tries hard to make sure that everything always leads back to them will eventually be dead in the technology marketplace.
.NET/C# is all about Microsoft keeping people using Microsoft tools on Microsoft platforms. It's a dead-end. Microsoft may be around for a long time, but their dominance in the marketplace has a much shorter lifetime. Once that dominance ends, people will discover that all their attempts to burn the bridges that might lead from their products to the wide-wide world means that all those skills no longer translate to anything but their products.
I bet most of the.NET code and jobs out there are either from people who were playing around with the language for a bit and wrote some useful code that now needs maintenance, or is there because of some stupid mandate to use Microsoft technology.
.NET/C# is a language for programmers who are at least mediocre. Unlike VB, it's not a language for the masses of poor programmers who's real job is something else. So, why would any programmer who was any good bother to learn some language that's going to enslave them to one company's technology forever. It's senseless.
So, it makes perfect sense that it's hard to find.NET programmers out there.
And don't tell me about GNOME mono. That project will be killed in some way by Microsoft as soon as Microsoft thinks it's in their advantage to do so. It's just a much a dead-end as.NET.
Also, if a maintainer is refusing good patches and generally not doing their job, then someone should just become the maintainer instead. That's what Open Source is about. Maybe glibc needs to be forked again.
I don't want DRM support in any way, shape, or form. I will not use any piece of software which has it. It is flat out wrong. And I firmly believe that a good selling point for Linux as a consumer platform is complete lack of support for random people to come in and tell them what their computer is allowed to do in the privacy of their own home. My computer is mine. It is not someone else's policeman.
That being said, you have a lot of interesting points. It would be nice if the driver API stabilized. But I do not want binary only drivers for the same reason I do not want DRM. But a stabilized API would make decentralized driver development much easier, and I think that's a good thing in and of itself.
As an aside, I use the nVidia drivers, but under a lot of protest. And if there is a 3D accelerator out there that comes within 80% of the performance and has Open Source drivers, I will switch to it even if it's twice the cost.
It would also be nice if the issues you mention in glibc and C++ could be fixed. I'm not completely sure how that could be done for C++ because of inline functions that may rely on the intimate details of the implementation o a class. But I'm interested in your ideas. I'd also like to know the nature of the startup time problems and the refused patch to gcc. I've had a patch to gcc refused as well (the transcoding for EBCDIC in iconv is broken) for no particularly good reason.
Yep, idiot. Checked your posting history. Definitely idiot.
I would much rather see an end-to-end connectivity world + routers sold to consumers being default configured to have a no-ingress firewall. Killing end-to-end connectivity for the purposes of security is like pre-emptively chopping off the hands of children so they don't steal.
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I'm paraphrasing the guy I talked to. I knew what he meant, and knew about the skull and cross bones. But I could't remember the university or the name of the society when I wrote the post, and didn't feel like doing 30 minutes of web research before I hit 'submit'. :-)
Perhaps I should've just "same secret society at the same university".
But, Creative Commons is not such a label. It is a label that says "The text of the license is filed under such and such name at the Creative Commons website." I don't find that very useful. I'd much rather the label itself meant something, like the label 'sugar free' does.
Yes, you've gotten me on that point of semantics. I'll have to be more careful next time. :-)
Why have Creative Commons at all then? We have a scheme for figuring out what a license is that's called "reading the license". It seems to me that it's utterly useless to come up with some random label for the license when that label has no meaning other than "Hey, you can read the license to figure out what the license means!"
That's a really interesting and useful analogy. Thanks!
If I sign a negotiated contract with you in which both parties are free to change terms and ask the other party if the changed terms are acceptable, then handing me information on the condition that I not give it to anybody else is fine. I'm perfectly happy with trade secrets.
If I do give it to someone else, your only recourse should be the ability to sue me for damages. The damage is my action that destroyed the secret nature of your former trade secret.
Contracts that are blanketly assumed to be agreed to by everybody who buys something are allowing private entitites to tread into the territory of the legislature. It gives them the unchecked ability to create new law. Just read your average EULA. Such contracts are not really contracts, and should be void.
Well, there are already mechanisms for dealing with that problem. They are called search warrants. I'm perfectly fine with search warrants.
State mandated DRM effectively constitutes both a violation of the 3rd and 4th ammendments as it requires me to support an agent of the state in my own home to enforce the laws of the state, and it requires me to subject my computer to what amounts to a continuous search warrant without any finding of probable cause.
I'm not saying I will do it. I'm saying it will be done, and it will be done by lots and lots of people. There is a distinct difference between those two.
The more DRM they try, the more illegal copying there will be.
I think laws trying to prevent people from doing things that everybody will do anyway are very bad. They open the door for selective enforcement and any number of other evil consequences.
I think a law restricting your right to copy things is as helpful as a law stating that you may not place your hand on your head, or that you're not allowed to masturbate because it constitutes restraint of trade for prositutes.
They have no legitimate wishes. The only reason copyright exists is because of a clause in the constitution that grants congress the power to create it expressly for the purpose of encouraging more stuff to be created. So, it's not there for the benefit of the creators at all, it's for the benefit of everybody else.
There is no 'natural' ownership right over your writing or music or software. The only right you naturally have is the right not to give it to anybody else.
DRM is essentially a tiny policeman in my computer, watching me to prevent me from breaking the rules, or at least detect when I have. That isn't an acceptable solution. My computer is MY computer, not some random artist/programmer/musician's computer. I paid for it. It's sitting on my desk. Would you destroy the concept of physical property to prop up your failing scheme for 'intellectual property'?
Uh, huh. So, you have to copy a program from disk into memory in order for it to run. Is that illegal? How about if you have a huge cluster?
Also, tell me how you restrict making a copy without breaking into people's computers or putting police chips in everything? Which is worse, a world in which people can freely copy stuff, or a world in which every single move you make with anything digital is carefully monitored so you can't? There isn't much of an in-between here you know. I you don't have the careful monitoring, people will make copies. They already do, and all the enforcement efforts of RIAA have not made even the tiniest dent in filesharing.
Personally, I don't want the police state.
Giving incentive to the creators of stuff via copyright is growing more and more pointless every day. So, be brave and give up the stupid idea. It won't work. It can't work. Think of something better.
So, please explain to me how you can have a sane system of laws that restrict things like sharing over P2p and don't restrict things like letting a friend read a book. In a digital world, I do not believe this is possible.
So, I would say that in the final analysis Lessig's ideas reduce to Stallman's. They are just more palatable to you because they seem to say something different, and you hold out some forlorn hope that there is a reasonable way to restrict digital copies.
IMHO, if you're going to have some sort of umbrella for licenses to be put under, it should mean something. Near as I can tell, Creative Commons has no real criteria for deciding whether or not a license is acceptable.
If I read that a license is OSI approved, I know exactly what that means, and what sorts of things I can expect to be able to do and what I can expect to not be able to do.
If I hear that a license is a creative commons license, it tells me nothing. For all I know, it might be "You're allowed to distribute this only if you feel strongly that you have green skin.". They have license that discriminate based on what country you're a citizen of, so I don't see why they won't pick other weird things in the future.
If they want to be taken seriously, they will publish clear criteria for the acceptability of a license.
I don't understand what your problem is. So, they don't want you to call the RHEL firefox package 'firefox'. That means they want you to create a fork for packaging it in RHEL. Go ahead and do it.
Really, it's stupid of them to do this, since, as you pointed out, the package name is how people know the project. So create a fork, and watch the fork start getting lots more attention than the main project because it's easy to find from the package name.
And now you discover why some people (such as myself) who think that socialism is a horrible idea, that government is entirely too large, and that handouts to poor people just make them poorer hate the party you've chosen. The Republican party no longer stands for those values.
Stop believing in a party and start having some ideals of your own. Measure candidates against your ideals rather than against their party affiliation. Be open to listening to what people are saying about them instead of treating it as an attack on your community and justifying their bad behavior.
I will ask the same of Democrats who idealize their political leaders as well. The Democratic party suffers many of the same ills as the Republican party. As someone said to me recently (paraphrased) "John Kerry and George Bush (Sr.) were members of the same secret society (the one at Harvard) and shared the same secret handshake. You can't believe they're that different.".
I'm not a zealot either. I'm a realist. Microsoft will not always be on top. Locking yourself into a particular vendor's tech is just plain stupid. It's bad for your professional development in the long run, and you're helping the people you work for dig themselves into a hole they'll want to get themselves out of later.
There's short-term self-interest, and long-term. It's not in anybody's long term self-interest to tie themselves to a particular vendor's technology.
I do not mean that only mediocre programmers write in C#. I mean that people who have very little programming skill or talent are going to have a hard time with it. There are stellar programmers who write in VB or PHP, but those two languages really require very little skill to program effectively for.
I actually don't like either Java (which I know fairly well) or C# very much for very similar reasons. But I wasn't intending to bash them technically.
Java is not a dead-end. Java isn't tied to Sun in the same way that .NET is tied to Microsoft. It can free itself of Sun's sticky tentacles. Additionally, Sun in general does not try to tie people into it's own little world as a marketing strategy.
C# and .NET are. I'm not jealous of C# programmers. I'm not jealous of OS/390 assembly programmers either. I consider the two different groups to be at different points on a very similar path.
It's a dead-end in the same way that learning OS/390 assembly was a dead-end 20 years ago. My most recent job has put me in a lot more contact with the IBM mainframe than I've ever had before. And if that teaches me anything, it's that a company that tries hard to make sure that everything always leads back to them will eventually be dead in the technology marketplace.
.NET/C# is all about Microsoft keeping people using Microsoft tools on Microsoft platforms. It's a dead-end. Microsoft may be around for a long time, but their dominance in the marketplace has a much shorter lifetime. Once that dominance ends, people will discover that all their attempts to burn the bridges that might lead from their products to the wide-wide world means that all those skills no longer translate to anything but their products.
I bet most of the .NET code and jobs out there are either from people who were playing around with the language for a bit and wrote some useful code that now needs maintenance, or is there because of some stupid mandate to use Microsoft technology.
.NET/C# is a language for programmers who are at least mediocre. Unlike VB, it's not a language for the masses of poor programmers who's real job is something else. So, why would any programmer who was any good bother to learn some language that's going to enslave them to one company's technology forever. It's senseless.
So, it makes perfect sense that it's hard to find .NET programmers out there.
And don't tell me about GNOME mono. That project will be killed in some way by Microsoft as soon as Microsoft thinks it's in their advantage to do so. It's just a much a dead-end as .NET.
Also, if a maintainer is refusing good patches and generally not doing their job, then someone should just become the maintainer instead. That's what Open Source is about. Maybe glibc needs to be forked again.
I don't want DRM support in any way, shape, or form. I will not use any piece of software which has it. It is flat out wrong. And I firmly believe that a good selling point for Linux as a consumer platform is complete lack of support for random people to come in and tell them what their computer is allowed to do in the privacy of their own home. My computer is mine. It is not someone else's policeman.
That being said, you have a lot of interesting points. It would be nice if the driver API stabilized. But I do not want binary only drivers for the same reason I do not want DRM. But a stabilized API would make decentralized driver development much easier, and I think that's a good thing in and of itself.
As an aside, I use the nVidia drivers, but under a lot of protest. And if there is a 3D accelerator out there that comes within 80% of the performance and has Open Source drivers, I will switch to it even if it's twice the cost.
It would also be nice if the issues you mention in glibc and C++ could be fixed. I'm not completely sure how that could be done for C++ because of inline functions that may rely on the intimate details of the implementation o a class. But I'm interested in your ideas. I'd also like to know the nature of the startup time problems and the refused patch to gcc. I've had a patch to gcc refused as well (the transcoding for EBCDIC in iconv is broken) for no particularly good reason.
That's an explanation that makes sense. Interesting. I'll have to examine some history a bit more closely.
It explains why we haven't interfered in some obnoxiously obvious way in Venezualan or Colombian politics as well.
Yep, idiot. Checked your posting history. Definitely idiot.
I would much rather see an end-to-end connectivity world + routers sold to consumers being default configured to have a no-ingress firewall. Killing end-to-end connectivity for the purposes of security is like pre-emptively chopping off the hands of children so they don't steal.