More and more developers go under, and it gets harder and harder for programmers to get a job doing anything creative, because these idiots are copying other peoples' ideas and giving it away.
Welcome to capitalism. Undercutting competitors' prices is a fair way of competition.
As to copying ideas, the makers of the proprietary Civ game haven't independently invented turn-based games, programming, the computer, the transistor, or the wheel. In short, everybody is constantly relying on previous ideas.
Hey Bruce, who is so famous and respected that he'll be moderated +5 for writing anything;)
I find it very disrespectful of you to imply that Bruce's posting has been modded +5 only because he's famous. Have you considered the possibility that it has been modded +5 because it's actually insightful?
I hold a degree in both CS and mathematics.
[...] Also, I'm a patent examiner.
Can you explain to me how it could have happened that the USPTO has granted a patent on something which is mathematically impossible? I'm thinking of the compression algorithm which claims to losslessly compress any input to a smaller size, in a way that the process is reversible (US patent #5,533,051).
Seriously, if you can think of any explanation besides incompetence of the patent examiners how such things can happen, please offer it.
Results 1 - 10 of about 453,000 for GNU Public Licence.
Sure, but does any of the pages contain a hint that a "GNU Public Licence" actually exists?
Now then, as to what it is...
I know what the GNU General Public License is. Follow the link in my sig, and you'll see that I've used it myself for years. The article, however, talks about a "GNU Public License".
Here in Germany, it is illegal to "circumvent copy protection" (or to sell or advertise software that does so, or to explain to anyone how to do so). It makes no difference if you use libdvdcss or a "licensend software package," copying a CSS-protected DVD is always illegal in Germany.
The most effective (actually the only) way to do this is by a worldwide boycott of all American products and brands. Yes that means not watching American movies, listening to american songs,
The movie and music industries will always win. If more people consume their products, they'll get more money. If less people consume their products, they'll blame it on "pirates" and they'll get stricter copyright laws, which will also allow them to make more money in the long run.
Stable?
[...] It's a marvelous example of what computing should have been in 1997.
Interesting? MOC!
The parent is an obvious troll. Woody (the current Debian Stable) was released in the summer of 2002, so he is demanding that in 1997, the Debian developers should have provided software which would only have been written half a decade later.
There are certainly things the president can do without asking Congress about it first.
I didn't ask about "things", I asked about enacting laws. Note that while a EU directive is not a law, the EU member countries are required to transform it into a national law, so it has the same power as a law.
To answer my own question: Some web searching has revealed that the US president cannot enact laws without involving Congress.
I'll bet you didn't like the way the 2000 presidential election turned out either did you?
I'm not an American, so I'm not sure how the US political system works. Does the US president have the power to enact laws without involving Congress in any way? If yes, I would indeed conclude that the US is not a democracy according to my understanding of a democracy. If no, your analogy is flawed.
Not trying to be flame bait, but I think GPL is damaging the Open Source movement.
I would hope so. The GPL was created as the license for the Free Software movement, by the same people who founded the movement. The much younger Open Source movement, on the other hand, was hostile towards the Free Software movement from the beginning: as you might remember, RMS was deliberately not invited to the meeting which was later considered the founding meeting of the Open Source movement. As a supporter of the Free Software philosophy, I have no sympathy for the Open Source movement.
BSD style licenses
[...] allow me to re-use that software in my commercial projects [...]. GPL licenses do not. Essentialy I write GPL software and I cannot use it in any commercial projects.
This is of course FUD. The license applies to the licensee, not the copyright holder. The copyright holder can use the same code in commercial free, non-commercial free, commercial proprietary and non-commercial proprietary software at the same time.
IMHO, GPL is not designed to increase free software but to get rid of commercial software.
The GPL is designed to increase the amount of Free Software, so that proprietary software becomes obsolete.
As someone who's method of feeding my newborn baby is writing software you'll have to drag me kicking and screaming to work on any GPL'd code.
As someone whose method of feeding my family is writing commercial Free Software, you'll have to drag me kicking and screaming to work on any BSD-licensed code.:-)
Seriously, you appear to work for a proprietary software company, i.e. your employer's business model endangers my ability to feed my family as much as my employer's business model endangers your ability to feed your family. That's just how our economy works. My employer wouldn't release anything under the BSD license precisely because he doesn't want to give your employer the ability to use our code without giving anything back.
Yeah, you're right. As a non-Microsoft employee, I'm entirely incapable of designing, developing, and implementing, say, an enterprise-wide solution based on Windows for a large user population because I haven't seen Windows' source-code. Riiiiiiight...
I never made any such claim, so what's your point?
From a practical standpoint, you or I or any other skilled person can accomplish just about any goal set in front of us using Windows or OSS or whatever as our "tool".
You or I cannot fix security related bugs in Microsoft Windows within hours after they become publically known. This is not a hyptothetical scenario, but something with occurs in reality quite often.
I think one of the biggest things to take away from Martin's comments is that all this silly Anti-MS vitriol is a pretty big waste of time. It's tired, it's boring, and it's pointless (same as MS's laughable anti-OSS FUD). So you can play the semantics game all day, and sit here and have a conversation with yourself about a "reasonable definition of knowledge" if you want to.
Your claim that I'm having a conversation with myself would be a lot more convincing if you had not replied to what I said.
I admit I only skimmed, but I'm actually pretty impressed about how Martin Taylor handled an interview with the world's greatest mass of Microsoft-haters - specifically, without lying
[...]
How do you know he's not lying? Have you verified every single factual claim with independent sources?
Or that those who want patents seem to be much more actively pursuing them then those who are against them. Those against them don't stand to get a huge amount of licensing income if patents do not come to be, but those who will get that license income really are pushing patents.
In think that for small and medium-sized enterprises (which are mostly opposed to software patents), much more is at stake than for large megacorps (mostly supporters of sw patents). Without sw patents, the megacorps are prevented from forming oligopolies (or even monopolies) and forced to compete fairly. This is hardly a "life threatening" (existence threatening) prospect. OTOH, sw patents could well mean bancruptcy to many small and even some medium-sized businesses.
It would be much more important if both the German and Dutch government finally respected the decisions of their parliaments.
Here in Germany, the Bundestag (German parliament) will ratify its position on software patents in the evening of Feb 17. It is the second last item on the agenda of a Bundestag meeting which is scheduled to last from 9:00am to 9:45pm.
This is actually a major reason why the EU council put software patents on the agenda of its Feb 17 meeting: in the morning, the German minister is not yet formally bound by the Bundestag decision.
I said it in the last Slashdot story about EU patents. And now it seems to be happening, again. These corporations will never give up. Sooner or later, the side with no profit motive gets tired and grows week, and the other side wins. The pro-patent people will just keep trying and trying and sooner or later get their way, I'm afraid.
What's "the side with no profit motive"?
Organizations like CEA-PME, which represents more than half a million European enterprises, or UEAPME,
which represents more than 11 million European enterprises, are opposed to software patents.
While I share your fear that software patents will eventually come, I strongly disagree with the notion that only the 10 or so supporters have profit motives and the tens of millions of companies opposed to software patents haven't.
I still don't get what the "very good thing" is that Real supposedly has done. Are you saying that their new product will become an official part of Fedora? Otherwise, how does its existence change the fact that Fedora users are unable to play MP3s out of the box?
I honestly don't understand what you mean. What is the "very good thing" they've done?
AFAICT, they're appealing to the very dubious claim that the MP3 patents cover decoding in order to promote their proprietary software. This is the classic FUD tactic: "Using a product competing with ours will cause you legal trouble!"
There're certainly more US-specific topics than Sweden-/Brasil-/Italy-/what-have-you-specific topics. I'm sure many of these are of interest to non-USAmericans, but they may be harder for them to make sense of since the "local perspective" is missing.
I like US-specific topics percisely because I can learn something about the topic from a different (different from the mass media) perspective.
Also, don't underestimate the language barrier. I'm sure geeks tend to speak English rather well, on average, but with terms like "carpal tunnel"
Isn't that a medical term which is similar in many languages? In German, at least, it's "Karpaltunnel".
"tin foil hat"
I've learned that one on Slashdot!:-)
Seriously, I want to learn what kind of English geeks speak.
Good point. However, if you follow the Details by country link, the source shows 202.5 million of the 800.7 million internet users worldwide to be in the United States, so the US users still are slightly more than a quarter of all users.:-)
Let's see... According to the CIA World Factbook, slightly more than a quarter of all internet users are in the USA. If we assume that Americans are overrepresented among Slashdotters (although I don't see why Slashdot could be more appealing to geeks in the USA than to geeks elsewhere), my guess would be that between 40% and 50% of all Slashdotters are American.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a harsh accusation. Either you have some proof that Freeciv is infringing a copyright (then post it, please), or you are just trolling.
Your comment is also off-topic, since we are not discussing implementations, but ideas here. Copyright doesn't protect ideas.
Welcome to capitalism. Undercutting competitors' prices is a fair way of competition.
As to copying ideas, the makers of the proprietary Civ game haven't independently invented turn-based games, programming, the computer, the transistor, or the wheel. In short, everybody is constantly relying on previous ideas.
I find it very disrespectful of you to imply that Bruce's posting has been modded +5 only because he's famous. Have you considered the possibility that it has been modded +5 because it's actually insightful?
Can you explain to me how it could have happened that the USPTO has granted a patent on something which is mathematically impossible? I'm thinking of the compression algorithm which claims to losslessly compress any input to a smaller size, in a way that the process is reversible (US patent #5,533,051).
Seriously, if you can think of any explanation besides incompetence of the patent examiners how such things can happen, please offer it.
Sure. There are more than four thousand Google hits for "life on Jupiter", so it is now proven that there's life on Jupiter, right?
That's about the GNU General Public License. We're discussing the "GNU Public License" here.
Yes.
Sure, but does any of the pages contain a hint that a "GNU Public Licence" actually exists?
I know what the GNU General Public License is. Follow the link in my sig, and you'll see that I've used it myself for years. The article, however, talks about a "GNU Public License".
What's the "GNU Public License"? After extensive web searching, I cannot find any evidence that a license with such a name exists.
Here in Germany, it is illegal to "circumvent copy protection" (or to sell or advertise software that does so, or to explain to anyone how to do so). It makes no difference if you use libdvdcss or a "licensend software package," copying a CSS-protected DVD is always illegal in Germany.
You seem to assume that a large fraction of the world population participates in such a boycott. That's a very naive assumption.
The movie and music industries will always win. If more people consume their products, they'll get more money. If less people consume their products, they'll blame it on "pirates" and they'll get stricter copyright laws, which will also allow them to make more money in the long run.
Interesting? MOC!
The parent is an obvious troll. Woody (the current Debian Stable) was released in the summer of 2002, so he is demanding that in 1997, the Debian developers should have provided software which would only have been written half a decade later.
I didn't ask about "things", I asked about enacting laws. Note that while a EU directive is not a law, the EU member countries are required to transform it into a national law, so it has the same power as a law.
To answer my own question: Some web searching has revealed that the US president cannot enact laws without involving Congress.
I'm not an American, so I'm not sure how the US political system works. Does the US president have the power to enact laws without involving Congress in any way? If yes, I would indeed conclude that the US is not a democracy according to my understanding of a democracy. If no, your analogy is flawed.
I would hope so. The GPL was created as the license for the Free Software movement, by the same people who founded the movement. The much younger Open Source movement, on the other hand, was hostile towards the Free Software movement from the beginning: as you might remember, RMS was deliberately not invited to the meeting which was later considered the founding meeting of the Open Source movement. As a supporter of the Free Software philosophy, I have no sympathy for the Open Source movement.
This is of course FUD. The license applies to the licensee, not the copyright holder. The copyright holder can use the same code in commercial free, non-commercial free, commercial proprietary and non-commercial proprietary software at the same time.
The GPL is designed to increase the amount of Free Software, so that proprietary software becomes obsolete.
As someone whose method of feeding my family is writing commercial Free Software, you'll have to drag me kicking and screaming to work on any BSD-licensed code. :-)
Seriously, you appear to work for a proprietary software company, i.e. your employer's business model endangers my ability to feed my family as much as my employer's business model endangers your ability to feed your family. That's just how our economy works. My employer wouldn't release anything under the BSD license precisely because he doesn't want to give your employer the ability to use our code without giving anything back.
I never made any such claim, so what's your point?
You or I cannot fix security related bugs in Microsoft Windows within hours after they become publically known. This is not a hyptothetical scenario, but something with occurs in reality quite often.
Your claim that I'm having a conversation with myself would be a lot more convincing if you had not replied to what I said.
How do you know he's not lying? Have you verified every single factual claim with independent sources?
In a word: no. Nobody outside of Microsoft "knows" Windows, or is even legally allowed to know Windows.
Not for any reasonable definition of "knowledge", at least.
In think that for small and medium-sized enterprises (which are mostly opposed to software patents), much more is at stake than for large megacorps (mostly supporters of sw patents). Without sw patents, the megacorps are prevented from forming oligopolies (or even monopolies) and forced to compete fairly. This is hardly a "life threatening" (existence threatening) prospect. OTOH, sw patents could well mean bancruptcy to many small and even some medium-sized businesses.
Here in Germany, the Bundestag (German parliament) will ratify its position on software patents in the evening of Feb 17. It is the second last item on the agenda of a Bundestag meeting which is scheduled to last from 9:00am to 9:45pm.
This is actually a major reason why the EU council put software patents on the agenda of its Feb 17 meeting: in the morning, the German minister is not yet formally bound by the Bundestag decision.
What's "the side with no profit motive"?
Organizations like CEA-PME, which represents more than half a million European enterprises, or UEAPME, which represents more than 11 million European enterprises, are opposed to software patents.
While I share your fear that software patents will eventually come, I strongly disagree with the notion that only the 10 or so supporters have profit motives and the tens of millions of companies opposed to software patents haven't.
I still don't get what the "very good thing" is that Real supposedly has done. Are you saying that their new product will become an official part of Fedora? Otherwise, how does its existence change the fact that Fedora users are unable to play MP3s out of the box?
I honestly don't understand what you mean. What is the "very good thing" they've done?
AFAICT, they're appealing to the very dubious claim that the MP3 patents cover decoding in order to promote their proprietary software. This is the classic FUD tactic: "Using a product competing with ours will cause you legal trouble!"
I like US-specific topics percisely because I can learn something about the topic from a different (different from the mass media) perspective.
Isn't that a medical term which is similar in many languages? In German, at least, it's "Karpaltunnel".
I've learned that one on Slashdot! :-)
Seriously, I want to learn what kind of English geeks speak.
Good point. However, if you follow the Details by country link, the source shows 202.5 million of the 800.7 million internet users worldwide to be in the United States, so the US users still are slightly more than a quarter of all users. :-)
Let's see... According to the CIA World Factbook, slightly more than a quarter of all internet users are in the USA. If we assume that Americans are overrepresented among Slashdotters (although I don't see why Slashdot could be more appealing to geeks in the USA than to geeks elsewhere), my guess would be that between 40% and 50% of all Slashdotters are American.