>Yeah because all we have here is Budweiser and Coors Light, right? You don't know what the fuck you're talking about, seriously.
Hey, I've been to your country once, I asked the waitress what the most popular beer was - I was after all, trying to experience your culture. If you have lesser known but better quality beer - well actually I wouldn't be all that surprised.
Allow me then to rephrase: the beer they serve in jugs at hooters are pretty much piss.
>Commercial applications must generally be distributed with the libraries they require, or the end user must legitimately acquire a copy by other means
Is that so ? The windows API is ALSO a proprietary library. It just happens to come with a license that specifically permits derivative works from linking.
>In addition, Courts are supposed to decide what the law is, not what it should be. Otherwise they are acting as an unelected legislative branch
You speak as an American, but copyright law has to comply with treaties and be enforceable in ALL the countries that sign on. Most countries are NOT like that, only the Anglican countries are. In the countries with Dutch/Roman legal systems (e.g. the vast majority) courts DO decide what the law IS. This is called "common law" (yes I know the phrase has a different meaning in the Anglican legal system) and is law just as much as anything the legislative branch creates. The courts can scrap laws made by the legislative branch, and institute laws not made by them, in fact the courts are a HIGHER power because they the legislative branch cannot do reverse court decisions -only another court can do that. In my country the highest legislative power is the constitutional court which can even dictate government policy to ensure it's in line with both the spirit and letter of the constitution.
There are definite advantages to such a system: firstly it's a LOT more democratic. You need a lot of lobying to get a law changed by the legislative branch but anybody can bring a court case, including on a matter that was not previously IN the law (here that is possible) and if you win - it BECOMES law.
The classic example used when explaining this to first year law students relates a law passed by the legislative branch in the 1800's which made adultery a crime punishable by up to one month in prison. In 1929 a husband catching his wife in an affair wanted her prosecuted - laid charges and had the case appear before court. The judge ruled that this law has not been enforced for decades and that the society as a whole no longer considers adultery something which should be a crime. With that one decision the law was scrapped and it cannot ever be re-instituted unless another judge in a higher (appeals) court were to have a different decision. It creates an interesting balance of power as the courts can undo excessive legislation and institute laws to deal with problematic cases much faster than the government can. There are very few loopholes in our law, and no guilty person EVER gets off on a technicality because Judges can and DO rule on the spirit rather than the letter of the law.
Judges themselves are peer-reviewed and the judicial system has a hierarchy which allows for problems to be resolved. In fact it works SO well that I personally think we'd be better off with no legislative branch at all - let the courts BE the entirety of the legal system. The government can limit itself to international matters and leave the internal running of the country entirely in the hands of the citizens who can make the laws they need through the court system.
So the thing is - America wants to be able to trade with other countries and the Duth/Roman system is by far the most widely used legal system in the free world (because the Dutch colonized most of the planet long before the British empire existed) since courts in all those countries WOULD interpret the GPL to be valid (most of them have governmental policies in favor of open-source) America if it wishes to trade kind of HAVE to go for the same interpretation of copyright law.
The fact that all your legal experts who actually understand the GPL, including people like professors Eben Moglen and Larry Lessig thinks it's what the law says ANYWAY kind of makes your questions... well rather silly. I think they know the law better than you and they have full confidence that the GPL's interpretation is entirely accurate.
Considering that the FSF exists primarily to protect USER's rights, I don't think they could give a flying fuck WHY people comply - as long as they do. The GPL wasn't created to benefit programmers - the OSI has pointed out many ways in which it does benefit them but that has nothing to do with it's goal. It's goal is to benefit USERS. Every new free software program does that, nobody cares what motivated the programmer/company to MAKE it free, only that they did.
>Basically the FSF and the SFLC are either clueless or opportunistic on this issue or more likely, both.
If YOU were write there wouldn't be any business proposition to develop ANYTHING but complete apps - there go all the companies in the world that make money out of licensed libraries. Including free software companies that dual-license and let you pay for the privilege of creating non-free apps - MySQL did that, QT still does.
There are also thousands of commercial developers who create and sell LIBRARIES - by your logic this is impossible since there is no reason to buy a library -just make sure your customer has the same one and you can link it to write apps from all you want.
It's very clear that no court in the world will accept THAT as a tenable scenario - that a programmer who writes a library is worthy of lesser copyright protection than one who writes an application. Because you effectively destroy all copyright protection for basing your app on a library written by anybody else - thus removing all motivation to every write libraries for anybody but the hobyists.
>But it does not modify WordPress source, unless the theme source is based on existing WordPress theme source. Calling functions: Not source modification. Changing runtime state: Not source modification.
Linking a library IS a derivative work - that's what the law says. You need a license to do so.
>But if the "premium" theme is a modification of any WordPress source,
It's worse, even despite the debate about what is linking. Thesis contains massive copies of wordpress source code that were directly lifted and reused within the theme - the developer who did it have admitted as much. That counts as a derivative work even for an LGPL or BSD licensed work.
>that's a slightly different cattle of fish; I think you meant "kettle" of fish:P
>but not by much. The author can charge whatever they want for the derived product (and as a PHP script the source is inherently distributed with the "binary"), but cannot prevent the buyer from freely distributing to anyone else.
Or to put it more simply and accurately: has to put it under the GPL - that says everything you just said.
>The question becomes: Was this ALWAYS clear? If not, you can't go changing the rules just because you don't like what somebody is doing with your work.
That's just wrong. Software changes license all the time. You can't change the license it was released under but you can damn sure change it for the next release. If you were to take a part of your API from the "publicly usuable" to the "derivative work" section (perhaps the internals changed such that a formerly inconsequential function now relies on a massive piece of your work or whatever) then you CAN do that. It would ONLY apply to versions SUBSEQUENT to the change however.
Somehow I doubt thesis wants to be the only theme in the world that only runs on wordpress 0.0.1
I wish. The thing is though, if I was drunk - I'd be sober in the morning, you'd still be a credulous moron who genuinely seems to think the world works however you imagine it would suit you best.
>I'd also be very curious to compare red wine drinkers to expensive grape juice drinkers for heart attack studies. All the great things in wine should also exist in high quality unfermented grape juice (antioxidants, tannins, etc).
My understanding is that the fermentation process involves other chemical changes that actually create some of them and concentrates others - but not being an organic chemist I speak under correction here.
>I'm not a medical researcher, and I do drink alcohol on occasion, but I'm starting to believe that it would be better to be a teetotaller. "Just the coffee please!"
Not coffee then - seriously, caffeine is far worse for your health than alcohol. I still use a lot of it and I'm prepared to take the trade-off and risks, but don't fool yourself. Coffee is pure poison. It's just very delicious poison that makes your brain faster:P
>Absolutely not - otherwise, dropping a css file into a folder would also be creating a derivative work.
Yes parent had that wrong -but your response is even more wrong.
>One of the problems is that the developers are taking the position that "because they don't work in separate processes, they're one program." That is said in so many words in the GPL itself. Like it or not that IS what the license says.
>Back in the single-process DOS (and pre-DOS) days, all programs "worked in the same process space", yet they were still copyrighted. Clearest case in point is a TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident - for you young'uns).
None of the people who wrote the original GPL ever used DOS, none of the software ever written under it was ever meant to be run on a single-tasking operating system. Besides that- the shared memory is a measure it's not the ONLY measure that is used, just A measure that is used to determine the level of derivation.
>The argument that calling the APIs is not sufficient isolation is totally bogus. Calling an API does not make your code part of that code, any more than calling, say, the Windows API means that your program suddenly is merged with Windows and licensed by Microsoft.
Yes it does, it really does. QT is nothing BUT an API - they make their money from selling a proprietory version so you can write proprietory QT apps, all QT apps linking against the GPL'd version HAVE to be GPL'd as well. Indeed what you're saying about Microsoft's API is true as well - you ARE linking their code and creating a derivative. Microsoft's license ON the API however specifically gives permission to do so and states that they do not place any restrictions on the license of such derivations. Some free software libraries and API's like glibc do the same by using the BSD or LGPL licenses. Others like readline use the GPL - and indeed you cannot write a program that uses readline or QT UNLESS you GPL it.
>That's just idiotic. Even a c API is "just functions".
And the only reason you don't need to GPL any Linux app written in C is because the license of GNU's libc (the LGPL) specifically allows you to change the license on derivatives, had libc been under the GPL it would not be legal to port any non-GPL (or at least-non-gpl-COMPATIBLE-license) code to Linux. This is why it was kept that way - not to enable non-free software in fact, RMS had no reason to want to do that, but to allow the porting of other FREE licensed code such as Apache, X or BSD software.
>I'm in favour of the GPL, but this is beyond stupid. If you really are in favor of the GPL then bother to educate yourself about it, and it's history. Everything I said above is spelled out in detail on the gnu.org website, read it sometime.
>How is dropping a text file in the same folder as wordpress creating something that is "part of WP"? This is exactly the kind of restrictive insanity that free software licenses were supposed to eliminate.
How did you get modded insightful ? That's not remotely what a wordpress theme does. A wordpress theme is a script - a program just like wordpress itself, that uses functions from the core wordpress libraries and changes the values of wordpress variables as wordpress executes. It's a completely integrated unit, the one cannot exist without the other - and a wordpress theme is not just a "layout" file - it's a piece of software written to fit in a deliberately left gap inside another piece of software.
>That said, I'm a bit concerned about how this "it's a part of WP" will be interpreted because doesn't that then mean that commercial apps like Zend Studio, etc. are ALSO required to comply with the GPL since they ostensibly hook into the various GPL'ed libraries, etc. ??
They don't - if they did, they would be. You don't need to hook into any GPL licences just to run on Linux. The glibc libraries and such are mostly under the LGPL meaning you CAN link them to something under a different license. It only enters if you use licenses which ARE gpl'd - like for example GNU/Readline.
>I mean I'm all for GPL but if everything that so much as touches GPL'ed software falls under that license, we're going to find fewer and fewer people willing to create commercial apps for GPL OS'es, etc..and while I may not use it, we definitely don't need to go shooting ourselves in the foot at this stage of the game.
Again it is quite possible to write apps for Linux without using any GPL'd libraries, it may be a bit harder - for example you may have to use GTK rather than QT because GTK is LGPL and QT is GPL but if you don't want to play by the rules then you can't complain if the game is a little harder. It's not like you don't get to play at all.
>I like open source but the GPL is sounding more and more dangerous. when even it's advocates can't seem to agree on what exactly it covers I'd be worried.
That's just not true. It's advocates are all in unison here that it covers works like this. It's on idiot in Florida who dissagrees and he is hardly an "advocate".
>>"You are excluding the fourth group: people who never drank, and started drinking at age 40 in moderate amounts."
>no, they'd be under drinkers.
No, they wouldn't. The person who starts to drink FOR the purpose of the experiment is part of the normal - you can compare his health prior to being a drinker with his health after starting.
>Yes your liver is fine for screening out moderate amounts of toxins but that doesn't make them good for you. In reasonable quantities it probably won't do you any significant harm but it's not going to make you any healthier.
Nobody ever actually SAID it was the alcohol that was healthy numbnuts. Though I suspect in moderate quantities it CAN be good for mental health. Not directly - but by easing social situations - and a healthy, happy social life is crucial to good health, so is a healthy happy sex life and alcohol can definitely help with that. What you are ignoring is that the processes by which these drinks are produced and the ingredients used also produce many OTHER chemicals which ARE beneficial. Beer is very rich in probiotics (less so with the highly preservative filled junk they sell in America but if like me - you prefer home-tappery stuff much more so) hops are one of the best sources of several vitamins and they get concentrated in the fermentation process (as opposed to plain cooking which tends to dilute them). Non-alcoholic beer would probably be healthiest of all - but I've never found any that were remotely organic let alone fresh and live-culture (without that it would probably lose). Red-wine is incredibly rich in tannins and several antioxidants - which is why THAT is good for you. Again, the better quality the better the results (ever note that you don't get a hangover from EXPENSIVE red wine ? ) Finally - there is the fact that stress related illnesses are among the most prevalent in our society, and while it's hard to pin down how many people it kills there is no doubt that the vast majority of people have their lives significantly shortened due to high-stress and the quality-of-life in the meantime greatly reduced. It's a direct contributing factor to numerous diseases and in some cases fatal ones. Not least among those are heart disease. Alcohol is both a muscle relaxant and a mental relaxant. Moderate use relieves stress and frankly the side effects are far less severe than any of the prescription meds you can get for the same job. Relieving average daily stress levels by itself probably does more good than alcohol can do bad.
>I'm not a teetotaller I have no beef with beer. >I just recognise marketing campaigns when I see them.
You still haven't proven that they were. When scientists from reputable institutions publish research in reputable journals it gets peer reviewed. If that research is skewed then they get blasted and their reputations (which in science IS your entire career) gets blown to hell. They have to be as unbiased as technology allows them to be - no matter who paid for the research grant. That isn't to say that some scientists aren't bought off and that some don't get away with it - scientists are only human so if this was one study - I'd take it with a grain of salt. But all the numerous confirmatory studies that have been done have ALL come to the SAME conclusion, all these independent researchers including the ones who set out to prove it false because they were raised in alcoholic home (of COURSE some of them exist and nobody is completely bias free) have repeatedly found the same results.
There must come a time when you start saying the balance of evidence is that this is true. I don't trust corporations, I deeply distrust anything they say and I hate advertising -but that doesn't mean they are NEVER right. Sometimes the profitable position is actually true (and make no mistake, there are plenty of organisations that would make a lot more money if they research is proven false - bias goes both ways).
You are excluding the fourth group: people who never drank, and started drinking at age 40 in moderate amounts.
More importantly -you can't fuck your liver with MODERATE use of alcohol. Genuine moderation is well below the levels where liver damage occurs and the very reason you HAVE a liver is to filter out toxins, alcohol causes a problem when you massively overwork it, not when it's just doing it's job. Elephants and Babboons both naturally and normally consume alcohol - and in both cases can get quite addicted if it's too readily available (in nature it generally isn't, the only naturally fermenting fruit in the regions where they occur are Marula and it's a tree that doesn't grow in particularly thick clumps). Mamalian livers have evolved to handle moderate and occasional alcohol consumption long before the first ape tried to walk on two legs.
But you are NOT asking the question: if crack was legal, therefore cheap and (even more) readily available (like alcohol is) how would the numbers compare then ?
More-over you're ignoring: (LifespansReducedDueToLiverDamageFromDrinking)*(AverageLifeSpanReduction.Alcohol) vs (LifespansReducedDueToCrackSideEffects)*(AverageLifeSpanReduction.Crack)
I daresay that in this sum - alcohol will win - by quite a large margin. You need to actually ABUSE alcohol to even HAVE a lifespan reduction (many independent studies have shown that in moderation it can INCREASE lifespan instead even), while crack starts harming organs the very first time you use it and keeps doing so every time you take another hit. The damage is much more widely spread and more severe so AverageLifeSpanReduction.Crack is a much, much higher number than AverageLifeSpanReduction.Alcohol (which is actually a negative number for many users). Even now the crack may already lose that figure despite the much lower figure for LifespansReducedDueToCrackSideEffects - if legally obtainable and used to the extent that alcohol is - the final score for crack would be orders of magnitude higher.
> Alcohol, in and of itself, is not dangerous when consumed in moderation.
And in fact, there have been numerous independent studies showing that specific alcoholic beverages in moderation can in fact be very beneficial to health. Beer and red-wine in particular.
>What certain geeks like you seem to fail to understand is that normal people don't give a flying fuck about how it works on a technical level.
Well then - allow me to not give a flying fuck if they screw up.
>What a normal reasonable person expects from an open wi-fi is that their neighbors might borrow their internet. What they don't expect is that a random asswank will record all their data. While it's very easy to do it does require you to go out of your way to do it which means you're a dick.
Nobody here recorded all their data, nobody even logged on to their computers. Google record the SSID and the tiny bit of traffic needed to GET that much. My cellphone checks for wifi at all times, it's a standard function - it cannot even DO that without collecting 90% of the data google got here. Should 37 states investigate me for walking down the street with a smartphone ? Oh right - it even stores the location of every access point thus found !
>I for one don't want to live in a world where any information that leaves the 4 walls of my house is public.
Well sadly the world doesn't give a fuck what you want. That's the world you DO live in.
Here's an interesting one... by this logic - if radiowaves you broadcast for all to pick up are not public... well you must apply it to sound waves to. So the next time I want to blast metallica at 500DB at 3am - when the neighbours call the cops to complain. I'll say "I was playing the music for myself with a reasonable expectation of privacy and they had NO right to be listening so instead of hassling me go arrest them for spying on me"... yeah THAT will work...
So you're saying that where there is a conflict the right of a person to do something bad for society over-all should trump the right of a person to be treated fairly and with dignity (and doing THAT to everybody is GOOD for society over-all).
By that logic a judge should be allowed to rule based on the color of skin - after all HE has the right to think anything he wants... but no - we declare in law that he MUST rule ONLY on the evidence pertaining to the case. You can't even call a character witness unless somebody is already found guilty and even then only to argue for possible mitigation of the punishment.
Oh but that infringes on some people's right to a fair trial. Apparently though, society as come to think that ensuring everybody's right to a fair trial is upheld trumps the judge's right to freedom of opinion. So why the hell should you not have the same right to fairness in every other aspect of life ?
Life may not be fair - but that is no excuse for PEOPLE to be unfair. Unlike the universe - people can CHOOSE what they do.
I believe that the right to dignity, respect and fairness are incredibly important rights- more important than the rights to freedom of speech and thought (and I treasure those - I will fight to defend them). The only REASON why freedom of speech is valuable to society is because it can be used to PROTECT the right to fairness and dignity. Germany learned a hard lesson about what happens when fairness and dignity of man are not respected as rights - that's why their constitution enshrines these as the most important rights in the country. My right to dignity trumping your right to free speech.
I believe that they are correct. The U.S. constitution was written before World War 2, before even abolitionism - so it doesn't consider these rights to be more important - and I think it's wrong (or more specifically: out of date) in that regard. We know things now, from historical experience, that Thomas Jefferson and George Washington didn't know.
What are we if we do not learn from history other than simple-minded idiots ? Your founding fathers based their list of constitutional rights on their own experiences of oppression, I have no doubt that if they had seen the forms of oppression in the 20th century, your constitution (like mine and Germany's) would have been written to protect against those as well.
We've seen racism cause a holocaust as we speak it's causing a genocide in one country and not so long ago it was causing one in another country (and there - the races didn't even exist, they were just made-up names from colonialists for people from the exact same heritage - look it up, prior to French occupation the idea of Hutu's and Tutsi's didn't EXIST in Rwanda at all). That is the consequences of allowing racism. It starts with "privilege for my own kind" and it ends with massacre. And in this case the slippery slope is not a fallacy - it's a clearly identifiable trend in recent history that has repeated itself over and over in countries all over the globe, it would be stupid to assume that any particular country is capable of avoiding the trend if they don't avoid ever starting down that path.
That's the question: if I can make promotion decisions based on the color of your skin, then you will grow to resent me. Our children will resent each other more... and sooner or later - one of us will get violent, and when it starts, it doesn't end until long after we run out of ammo.
>By your logic, if somebody unknowingly (people don't knowingly make their WiFi networks accessible)
Again, as part of my job I've configured some 800+ routers of various brands over the past 2 years every single one of them has encrypted as the DEFAULT option in the setup wizard. You have to CHOOSE not to use it, people make their wifi open and accessible because they CHOOSE not to deal with passwords. Anybody who just accepts defaults all the way will be secure.
>undresses in front of an open curtain, I have the right to take pictures and post them on the internet because it's being publicly broadcast via rays of light to my retinas. Consumers don't understand WiFi technology completely and aren't aware that they're broadcasting anything.
Yes, and the law agrees. The entire paparazi industry is based on doing exactly that. People who make a fortune stalking celebs hoping to catch a nipple-slip and sell the pictures. The only reason they don't do it to everybody is because we're not interesting enough. Hell there is clear case-law that voyeurism - while you can debate it's ethics all you want - is perfectly legal.
>The second part of the issue is that Google SAVED the data, not just scanned it. They claim this archiving was accidental, which is really odd.
So ? If I see somebody undress through a window and REMEMBER it then I'm saving the data ! Google didn't even publish the data - they did LESS than what paparazzi do every day and no state congressmen are holding an inquest against the tabloids !
In many countries, - for example Germany your right to respect and dignity ARE in fact enshrined in the constitution. I also never said anybody had a RIGHT to be promoted. I SAID nobody had the right to base promotion decisions on things that are not valid grounds for judgement - e.g. things the person didn't choose like sex, race or sexual preference. By all means DO judge on competence for the position. I wasn't advocating affirmative action - on the contrary, I specifically said being passed over in favor of a LESSER candidate.
Slashdot Mirror
>Yeah because all we have here is Budweiser and Coors Light, right? You don't know what the fuck you're talking about, seriously.
Hey, I've been to your country once, I asked the waitress what the most popular beer was - I was after all, trying to experience your culture. If you have lesser known but better quality beer - well actually I wouldn't be all that surprised.
Allow me then to rephrase: the beer they serve in jugs at hooters are pretty much piss.
Happy now ?
>Commercial applications must generally be distributed with the libraries they require, or the end user must legitimately acquire a copy by other means
Is that so ? The windows API is ALSO a proprietary library. It just happens to come with a license that specifically permits derivative works from linking.
>In addition, Courts are supposed to decide what the law is, not what it should be. Otherwise they are acting as an unelected legislative branch
You speak as an American, but copyright law has to comply with treaties and be enforceable in ALL the countries that sign on. Most countries are NOT like that, only the Anglican countries are. In the countries with Dutch/Roman legal systems (e.g. the vast majority) courts DO decide what the law IS. This is called "common law" (yes I know the phrase has a different meaning in the Anglican legal system) and is law just as much as anything the legislative branch creates.
The courts can scrap laws made by the legislative branch, and institute laws not made by them, in fact the courts are a HIGHER power because they the legislative branch cannot do reverse court decisions -only another court can do that. In my country the highest legislative power is the constitutional court which can even dictate government policy to ensure it's in line with both the spirit and letter of the constitution.
There are definite advantages to such a system: firstly it's a LOT more democratic. You need a lot of lobying to get a law changed by the legislative branch but anybody can bring a court case, including on a matter that was not previously IN the law (here that is possible) and if you win - it BECOMES law.
The classic example used when explaining this to first year law students relates a law passed by the legislative branch in the 1800's which made adultery a crime punishable by up to one month in prison. In 1929 a husband catching his wife in an affair wanted her prosecuted - laid charges and had the case appear before court.
The judge ruled that this law has not been enforced for decades and that the society as a whole no longer considers adultery something which should be a crime. With that one decision the law was scrapped and it cannot ever be re-instituted unless another judge in a higher (appeals) court were to have a different decision.
It creates an interesting balance of power as the courts can undo excessive legislation and institute laws to deal with problematic cases much faster than the government can. There are very few loopholes in our law, and no guilty person EVER gets off on a technicality because Judges can and DO rule on the spirit rather than the letter of the law.
Judges themselves are peer-reviewed and the judicial system has a hierarchy which allows for problems to be resolved. In fact it works SO well that I personally think we'd be better off with no legislative branch at all - let the courts BE the entirety of the legal system. The government can limit itself to international matters and leave the internal running of the country entirely in the hands of the citizens who can make the laws they need through the court system.
So the thing is - America wants to be able to trade with other countries and the Duth/Roman system is by far the most widely used legal system in the free world (because the Dutch colonized most of the planet long before the British empire existed) since courts in all those countries WOULD interpret the GPL to be valid (most of them have governmental policies in favor of open-source) America if it wishes to trade kind of HAVE to go for the same interpretation of copyright law.
The fact that all your legal experts who actually understand the GPL, including people like professors Eben Moglen and Larry Lessig thinks it's what the law says ANYWAY kind of makes your questions ... well rather silly. I think they know the law better than you and they have full confidence that the GPL's interpretation is entirely accurate.
Finally - all this academic stuff aside, America
Considering that the FSF exists primarily to protect USER's rights, I don't think they could give a flying fuck WHY people comply - as long as they do. The GPL wasn't created to benefit programmers - the OSI has pointed out many ways in which it does benefit them but that has nothing to do with it's goal.
It's goal is to benefit USERS. Every new free software program does that, nobody cares what motivated the programmer/company to MAKE it free, only that they did.
>Basically the FSF and the SFLC are either clueless or opportunistic on this issue or more likely, both.
If YOU were write there wouldn't be any business proposition to develop ANYTHING but complete apps - there go all the companies in the world that make money out of licensed libraries. Including free software companies that dual-license and let you pay for the privilege of creating non-free apps - MySQL did that, QT still does.
There are also thousands of commercial developers who create and sell LIBRARIES - by your logic this is impossible since there is no reason to buy a library -just make sure your customer has the same one and you can link it to write apps from all you want.
It's very clear that no court in the world will accept THAT as a tenable scenario - that a programmer who writes a library is worthy of lesser copyright protection than one who writes an application. Because you effectively destroy all copyright protection for basing your app on a library written by anybody else - thus removing all motivation to every write libraries for anybody but the hobyists.
>Are all my C programs derivatives of libc because they call libc functions and libc functions call into it?
Yes. Lucky for you the LGPL under which libc is published specifically allows you to create derivatives under any license of your choosing.
>If it includes code from WP, then that's a different story.
It does, and it is. There are TWO stories here.
Lucky for you eglibc is an LGPL'd library, not a GPL'd one then.
>But it does not modify WordPress source, unless the theme source is based on existing WordPress theme source. Calling functions: Not source modification. Changing runtime state: Not source modification.
Linking a library IS a derivative work - that's what the law says. You need a license to do so.
>But if the "premium" theme is a modification of any WordPress source,
It's worse, even despite the debate about what is linking. Thesis contains massive copies of wordpress source code that were directly lifted and reused within the theme - the developer who did it have admitted as much. That counts as a derivative work even for an LGPL or BSD licensed work.
>that's a slightly different cattle of fish; :P
I think you meant "kettle" of fish
>but not by much. The author can charge whatever they want for the derived product (and as a PHP script the source is inherently distributed with the "binary"), but cannot prevent the buyer from freely distributing to anyone else.
Or to put it more simply and accurately: has to put it under the GPL - that says everything you just said.
>The question becomes: Was this ALWAYS clear? If not, you can't go changing the rules just because you don't like what somebody is doing with your work.
That's just wrong. Software changes license all the time. You can't change the license it was released under but you can damn sure change it for the next release. If you were to take a part of your API from the "publicly usuable" to the "derivative work" section (perhaps the internals changed such that a formerly inconsequential function now relies on a massive piece of your work or whatever) then you CAN do that.
It would ONLY apply to versions SUBSEQUENT to the change however.
Somehow I doubt thesis wants to be the only theme in the world that only runs on wordpress 0.0.1
>Are you drunk? That didn't even make sense.
I wish. The thing is though, if I was drunk - I'd be sober in the morning, you'd still be a credulous moron who genuinely seems to think the world works however you imagine it would suit you best.
>I'd also be very curious to compare red wine drinkers to expensive grape juice drinkers for heart attack studies. All the great things in wine should also exist in high quality unfermented grape juice (antioxidants, tannins, etc).
My understanding is that the fermentation process involves other chemical changes that actually create some of them and concentrates others - but not being an organic chemist I speak under correction here.
>I'm not a medical researcher, and I do drink alcohol on occasion, but I'm starting to believe that it would be better to be a teetotaller. "Just the coffee please!"
Not coffee then - seriously, caffeine is far worse for your health than alcohol. I still use a lot of it and I'm prepared to take the trade-off and risks, but don't fool yourself. Coffee is pure poison. It's just very delicious poison that makes your brain faster :P
>Absolutely not - otherwise, dropping a css file into a folder would also be creating a derivative work.
Yes parent had that wrong -but your response is even more wrong.
>One of the problems is that the developers are taking the position that "because they don't work in separate processes, they're one program."
That is said in so many words in the GPL itself. Like it or not that IS what the license says.
>Back in the single-process DOS (and pre-DOS) days, all programs "worked in the same process space", yet they were still copyrighted. Clearest case in point is a TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident - for you young'uns).
None of the people who wrote the original GPL ever used DOS, none of the software ever written under it was ever meant to be run on a single-tasking operating system. Besides that- the shared memory is a measure it's not the ONLY measure that is used, just A measure that is used to determine the level of derivation.
>The argument that calling the APIs is not sufficient isolation is totally bogus. Calling an API does not make your code part of that code, any more than calling, say, the Windows API means that your program suddenly is merged with Windows and licensed by Microsoft.
Yes it does, it really does. QT is nothing BUT an API - they make their money from selling a proprietory version so you can write proprietory QT apps, all QT apps linking against the GPL'd version HAVE to be GPL'd as well. Indeed what you're saying about Microsoft's API is true as well - you ARE linking their code and creating a derivative. Microsoft's license ON the API however specifically gives permission to do so and states that they do not place any restrictions on the license of such derivations. Some free software libraries and API's like glibc do the same by using the BSD or LGPL licenses. Others like readline use the GPL - and indeed you cannot write a program that uses readline or QT UNLESS you GPL it.
>That's just idiotic. Even a c API is "just functions".
And the only reason you don't need to GPL any Linux app written in C is because the license of GNU's libc (the LGPL) specifically allows you to change the license on derivatives, had libc been under the GPL it would not be legal to port any non-GPL (or at least-non-gpl-COMPATIBLE-license) code to Linux. This is why it was kept that way - not to enable non-free software in fact, RMS had no reason to want to do that, but to allow the porting of other FREE licensed code such as Apache, X or BSD software.
>I'm in favour of the GPL, but this is beyond stupid.
If you really are in favor of the GPL then bother to educate yourself about it, and it's history. Everything I said above is spelled out in detail on the gnu.org website, read it sometime.
>How is dropping a text file in the same folder as wordpress creating something that is "part of WP"? This is exactly the kind of restrictive insanity that free software licenses were supposed to eliminate.
How did you get modded insightful ? That's not remotely what a wordpress theme does. A wordpress theme is a script - a program just like wordpress itself, that uses functions from the core wordpress libraries and changes the values of wordpress variables as wordpress executes. It's a completely integrated unit, the one cannot exist without the other - and a wordpress theme is not just a "layout" file - it's a piece of software written to fit in a deliberately left gap inside another piece of software.
>That said, I'm a bit concerned about how this "it's a part of WP" will be interpreted because doesn't that then mean that commercial apps like Zend Studio, etc. are ALSO required to comply with the GPL since they ostensibly hook into the various GPL'ed libraries, etc. ??
They don't - if they did, they would be. You don't need to hook into any GPL licences just to run on Linux. The glibc libraries and such are mostly under the LGPL meaning you CAN link them to something under a different license. It only enters if you use licenses which ARE gpl'd - like for example GNU/Readline.
>I mean I'm all for GPL but if everything that so much as touches GPL'ed software falls under that license, we're going to find fewer and fewer people willing to create commercial apps for GPL OS'es, etc..and while I may not use it, we definitely don't need to go shooting ourselves in the foot at this stage of the game.
Again it is quite possible to write apps for Linux without using any GPL'd libraries, it may be a bit harder - for example you may have to use GTK rather than QT because GTK is LGPL and QT is GPL but if you don't want to play by the rules then you can't complain if the game is a little harder. It's not like you don't get to play at all.
>I like open source but the GPL is sounding more and more dangerous.
when even it's advocates can't seem to agree on what exactly it covers I'd be worried.
That's just not true. It's advocates are all in unison here that it covers works like this. It's on idiot in Florida who dissagrees and he is hardly an "advocate".
>>"You are excluding the fourth group: people who never drank, and started drinking at age 40 in moderate amounts."
>no, they'd be under drinkers.
No, they wouldn't. The person who starts to drink FOR the purpose of the experiment is part of the normal - you can compare his health prior to being a drinker with his health after starting.
>Yes your liver is fine for screening out moderate amounts of toxins but that doesn't make them good for you.
In reasonable quantities it probably won't do you any significant harm but it's not going to make you any healthier.
Nobody ever actually SAID it was the alcohol that was healthy numbnuts. Though I suspect in moderate quantities it CAN be good for mental health. Not directly - but by easing social situations - and a healthy, happy social life is crucial to good health, so is a healthy happy sex life and alcohol can definitely help with that.
What you are ignoring is that the processes by which these drinks are produced and the ingredients used also produce many OTHER chemicals which ARE beneficial. Beer is very rich in probiotics (less so with the highly preservative filled junk they sell in America but if like me - you prefer home-tappery stuff much more so) hops are one of the best sources of several vitamins and they get concentrated in the fermentation process (as opposed to plain cooking which tends to dilute them).
Non-alcoholic beer would probably be healthiest of all - but I've never found any that were remotely organic let alone fresh and live-culture (without that it would probably lose).
Red-wine is incredibly rich in tannins and several antioxidants - which is why THAT is good for you. Again, the better quality the better the results (ever note that you don't get a hangover from EXPENSIVE red wine ? )
Finally - there is the fact that stress related illnesses are among the most prevalent in our society, and while it's hard to pin down how many people it kills there is no doubt that the vast majority of people have their lives significantly shortened due to high-stress and the quality-of-life in the meantime greatly reduced. It's a direct contributing factor to numerous diseases and in some cases fatal ones. Not least among those are heart disease.
Alcohol is both a muscle relaxant and a mental relaxant. Moderate use relieves stress and frankly the side effects are far less severe than any of the prescription meds you can get for the same job. Relieving average daily stress levels by itself probably does more good than alcohol can do bad.
>I'm not a teetotaller I have no beef with beer.
>I just recognise marketing campaigns when I see them.
You still haven't proven that they were. When scientists from reputable institutions publish research in reputable journals it gets peer reviewed. If that research is skewed then they get blasted and their reputations (which in science IS your entire career) gets blown to hell. They have to be as unbiased as technology allows them to be - no matter who paid for the research grant. That isn't to say that some scientists aren't bought off and that some don't get away with it - scientists are only human so if this was one study - I'd take it with a grain of salt. But all the numerous confirmatory studies that have been done have ALL come to the SAME conclusion, all these independent researchers including the ones who set out to prove it false because they were raised in alcoholic home (of COURSE some of them exist and nobody is completely bias free) have repeatedly found the same results.
There must come a time when you start saying the balance of evidence is that this is true. I don't trust corporations, I deeply distrust anything they say and I hate advertising -but that doesn't mean they are NEVER right. Sometimes the profitable position is actually true (and make no mistake, there are plenty of organisations that would make a lot more money if they research is proven false - bias goes both ways).
>Be wary of anything you want to believe.
There may be a locational bias here.
I can just about handle 3 South African beers, in America I ordered by the Jug and usually 2/3 of those on a dinner date with a girl.
Beer doesn't have a universal standard for strength and American beer is pretty much piss.
[citation needed]
You are excluding the fourth group: people who never drank, and started drinking at age 40 in moderate amounts.
More importantly -you can't fuck your liver with MODERATE use of alcohol. Genuine moderation is well below the levels where liver damage occurs and the very reason you HAVE a liver is to filter out toxins, alcohol causes a problem when you massively overwork it, not when it's just doing it's job.
Elephants and Babboons both naturally and normally consume alcohol - and in both cases can get quite addicted if it's too readily available (in nature it generally isn't, the only naturally fermenting fruit in the regions where they occur are Marula and it's a tree that doesn't grow in particularly thick clumps). Mamalian livers have evolved to handle moderate and occasional alcohol consumption long before the first ape tried to walk on two legs.
>SUM(DrunkDrivingDeaths) + SUM(AlcoholFueledDomesticViolenceDeaths) > SUM(ODedOnCrack)
But you are NOT asking the question: if crack was legal, therefore cheap and (even more) readily available (like alcohol is) how would the numbers compare then ?
More-over you're ignoring: (LifespansReducedDueToLiverDamageFromDrinking)*(AverageLifeSpanReduction.Alcohol) vs (LifespansReducedDueToCrackSideEffects)*(AverageLifeSpanReduction.Crack)
I daresay that in this sum - alcohol will win - by quite a large margin. You need to actually ABUSE alcohol to even HAVE a lifespan reduction (many independent studies have shown that in moderation it can INCREASE lifespan instead even), while crack starts harming organs the very first time you use it and keeps doing so every time you take another hit. The damage is much more widely spread and more severe so AverageLifeSpanReduction.Crack is a much, much higher number than AverageLifeSpanReduction.Alcohol (which is actually a negative number for many users).
Even now the crack may already lose that figure despite the much lower figure for LifespansReducedDueToCrackSideEffects - if legally obtainable and used to the extent that alcohol is - the final score for crack would be orders of magnitude higher.
> Alcohol, in and of itself, is not dangerous when consumed in moderation.
And in fact, there have been numerous independent studies showing that specific alcoholic beverages in moderation can in fact be very beneficial to health. Beer and red-wine in particular.
>What certain geeks like you seem to fail to understand is that normal people don't give a flying fuck about how it works on a technical level.
Well then - allow me to not give a flying fuck if they screw up.
>What a normal reasonable person expects from an open wi-fi is that their neighbors might borrow their internet. What they don't expect is that a random asswank will record all their data. While it's very easy to do it does require you to go out of your way to do it which means you're a dick.
Nobody here recorded all their data, nobody even logged on to their computers. Google record the SSID and the tiny bit of traffic needed to GET that much. My cellphone checks for wifi at all times, it's a standard function - it cannot even DO that without collecting 90% of the data google got here. Should 37 states investigate me for walking down the street with a smartphone ? Oh right - it even stores the location of every access point thus found !
>I for one don't want to live in a world where any information that leaves the 4 walls of my house is public.
Well sadly the world doesn't give a fuck what you want. That's the world you DO live in.
Here's an interesting one... by this logic - if radiowaves you broadcast for all to pick up are not public... well you must apply it to sound waves to. So the next time I want to blast metallica at 500DB at 3am - when the neighbours call the cops to complain. I'll say "I was playing the music for myself with a reasonable expectation of privacy and they had NO right to be listening so instead of hassling me go arrest them for spying on me"... yeah THAT will work...
So you're saying that where there is a conflict the right of a person to do something bad for society over-all should trump the right of a person to be treated fairly and with dignity (and doing THAT to everybody is GOOD for society over-all).
By that logic a judge should be allowed to rule based on the color of skin - after all HE has the right to think anything he wants... but no - we declare in law that he MUST rule ONLY on the evidence pertaining to the case. You can't even call a character witness unless somebody is already found guilty and even then only to argue for possible mitigation of the punishment.
Oh but that infringes on some people's right to a fair trial. Apparently though, society as come to think that ensuring everybody's right to a fair trial is upheld trumps the judge's right to freedom of opinion. So why the hell should you not have the same right to fairness in every other aspect of life ?
Life may not be fair - but that is no excuse for PEOPLE to be unfair. Unlike the universe - people can CHOOSE what they do.
I believe that the right to dignity, respect and fairness are incredibly important rights- more important than the rights to freedom of speech and thought (and I treasure those - I will fight to defend them). The only REASON why freedom of speech is valuable to society is because it can be used to PROTECT the right to fairness and dignity.
Germany learned a hard lesson about what happens when fairness and dignity of man are not respected as rights - that's why their constitution enshrines these as the most important rights in the country. My right to dignity trumping your right to free speech.
I believe that they are correct. The U.S. constitution was written before World War 2, before even abolitionism - so it doesn't consider these rights to be more important - and I think it's wrong (or more specifically: out of date) in that regard. We know things now, from historical experience, that Thomas Jefferson and George Washington didn't know.
What are we if we do not learn from history other than simple-minded idiots ? Your founding fathers based their list of constitutional rights on their own experiences of oppression, I have no doubt that if they had seen the forms of oppression in the 20th century, your constitution (like mine and Germany's) would have been written to protect against those as well.
We've seen racism cause a holocaust as we speak it's causing a genocide in one country and not so long ago it was causing one in another country (and there - the races didn't even exist, they were just made-up names from colonialists for people from the exact same heritage - look it up, prior to French occupation the idea of Hutu's and Tutsi's didn't EXIST in Rwanda at all). That is the consequences of allowing racism. It starts with "privilege for my own kind" and it ends with massacre.
And in this case the slippery slope is not a fallacy - it's a clearly identifiable trend in recent history that has repeated itself over and over in countries all over the globe, it would be stupid to assume that any particular country is capable of avoiding the trend if they don't avoid ever starting down that path.
That's the question: if I can make promotion decisions based on the color of your skin, then you will grow to resent me. Our children will resent each other more... and sooner or later - one of us will get violent, and when it starts, it doesn't end until long after we run out of ammo.
>By your logic, if somebody unknowingly (people don't knowingly make their WiFi networks accessible)
Again, as part of my job I've configured some 800+ routers of various brands over the past 2 years every single one of them has encrypted as the DEFAULT option in the setup wizard. You have to CHOOSE not to use it, people make their wifi open and accessible because they CHOOSE not to deal with passwords. Anybody who just accepts defaults all the way will be secure.
>undresses in front of an open curtain, I have the right to take pictures and post them on the internet because it's being publicly broadcast via rays of light to my retinas. Consumers don't understand WiFi technology completely and aren't aware that they're broadcasting anything.
Yes, and the law agrees. The entire paparazi industry is based on doing exactly that. People who make a fortune stalking celebs hoping to catch a nipple-slip and sell the pictures. The only reason they don't do it to everybody is because we're not interesting enough.
Hell there is clear case-law that voyeurism - while you can debate it's ethics all you want - is perfectly legal.
>The second part of the issue is that Google SAVED the data, not just scanned it. They claim this archiving was accidental, which is really odd.
So ? If I see somebody undress through a window and REMEMBER it then I'm saving the data ! Google didn't even publish the data - they did LESS than what paparazzi do every day and no state congressmen are holding an inquest against the tabloids !
In many countries, - for example Germany your right to respect and dignity ARE in fact enshrined in the constitution. I also never said anybody had a RIGHT to be promoted. I SAID nobody had the right to base promotion decisions on things that are not valid grounds for judgement - e.g. things the person didn't choose like sex, race or sexual preference.
By all means DO judge on competence for the position. I wasn't advocating affirmative action - on the contrary, I specifically said being passed over in favor of a LESSER candidate.
Nothing like family in the company to get you QQ's taken seriously !
So you mean every time you die you roll a new character ? What a grind !