Then here's a message for those folks: you can keep staying away from Windows, there's no need for you to try it. My copy of Windows 7 still gives me a blue screen about once every ten startups (ATIKMDAG gets upset for something), and the OS has become slow and bloated with plain usage, even if I've been very cautious about installing software (not that there'd be anything wrong with that in principle, one would think that one of the purposes of buying a computer would be to install software on it, and at least on Linux it just works), to the point that after less than one year of usage now it takes me 30 s to open the "downloads" folder.
So bloat and blue screens are still here in Windows, at least as late as Windows 7; nothing to see, move along.
In fact, even in the USA, whenever "individualism" and "freedom" come to clash with the interests of those in power, then we see that governments re-discover themselves as interventist in a bizarre "reverse socialist" way, and here come all kinds of imaginary property, patents, bailouts for the banks, suspension of civil liberties - so much for the principles of free market and laissez faire.
The Israelis Government would *instantly* recognize a Palestinian State.
The current view of the Israeli Government is this one. If the Palestinian seek to be recognised as a State by the UN, Israel will topple their government. If they quit that pretense, they could be granted authority over 40% of the land they claim.
You must ask yourself why it so hard for the Palestinian people to recognize this
Well, if I try to put myself in the shoes of a Palestinian, I think that it would be hard for me to accept a peace treaty involving the loss of 60% of my country, especially if my country was tiny to begin with.
The Palestinians are not dhimmi at all, because the Israelis don't think they own the Palestinians. The Israelis have zero trust of the Palestinians because of the terrorism in the past
You can't deny that the Palestinian are second-class citizens somehow; whether this is because of the trust the Israeli have of them or not, it must not be easy for the honest Palestinian to withstand this (I mean those who would never do a terrorist attack; there must be some!).
To stop patrolling the borders would invite calamity on the Israeli people - and it would simply be so dumb that no rational person should even propose it.
Indeed, I'm not denying that Israel doesn't have the right to self defense, especially given the enemies that loom at its borders. Patrolling the borders is one thing, enforcing embargos is another.
However in Israel the government is not controlled by those people - and that makes all the difference in the world compared to Hamas. Israel is a modern democracy. Hamas is militant and millennial theocracy that no longer allows elections (and tended to throw Fatah supporters off buildings when they got into power - check YouTube for this nastiness).
Yes, but the strained relationships between Israel and the Palestinian were always there, whether Hamas or Fatah was in charge. Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but the role of religion in the conflict has increased only recently, it was a more laic conflict before the rise of Al Qaida etc in the Muslim world. I like to call things with their name, so I do understand that Hamas are terrorists, but the problem is upstream, we can't reduce it to a religion clash.
We just have learnt not to follow religious texts to the letter.
This is the fundamental difference between Islam and the other two Abrahamic religions.
Well Turkey, although being an Islamic country in religion, has long been quite "western" in culture and politics. So it's not intrinsic that a country inhabitated mostly by Mulsims must be a retrograde theocracy. Unfortunately, now that the world is foolishly polarising around religions again, this might change.
there is nothing Israel has done or will do that will enable them to satisfy Hamas - the goal of Hamas is simply to remove all unbelievers from Palestine. This is why war breaks out so often - Hamas will never ever agree to a permanent peace treaty, all you get are 'hudna', which are temporary ceasefires until Hamas is ready to fight again.
I could think that people resorted to vote for Hamas because they were unsatisifed with the results they had obtained when voting for Fatah in these years (e.g. Israeli settlements growing into what the Palestinian perceive as their own territory). Moreover, people who live in a state of desperation (I think we can agree that Gaza is a hell, whatever the reasons) easily make severe mistakes, even by means of democratic elections (think about Germany during the Weimar Republic).
Another thing. There was no such thing as a Palestinian country (never was, it was always a province of
I understand that we can't accept Hamas declaring that they want an Israeli state not to exist. But what is happening now (in facts, not in declarations) is that it's the Palestinian state that doesn't exist, and its people are de facto "dhimmi" in their own land.
It's unacceptable for Hamas to launch rockets into Israel killing innocent people. But what is also happening now is that Israel's response has killed a number of innocent people many times larger than the terrorists have (I know that making math over the number of victims is disgusting, but it helps to put in perspective who is slaughtered in the end, and please note that we're only talking about the innocent here).
It's unacceptable for religious fanatics to decide the political course of a nation. But we can find religious fanatics in Israel too, and they're calling for the flattening of Palestine as well. Why, the Bible is full of incitations to violence against the enemies of God, there's no need to go looking for them in the Quran. We just have learnt not to follow religious texts to the letter.
So, is it terrorism or is it war? Against terrorism, you use police, and police operations have precise rules. You wouldn't tolerate the FBI to blow up your house when your family is inside because a terrorist is living on the lower floor, would you?
Is it war? War has its rules, too. Two countries declare the matter of contention, they attack each other's military forces, and in the end the interested countries make an agreement to stop the hostilities. At the end of the WW2, the Nazi were prosecuted for their war crimes, such as killing 10 innocent persons for each german soldier killed (many of the innocent persons they chose to massacre were Jews). Even some American officers were prosecuted, by the American themselves, for the force they used against the innocent.
Innocent people are not "enemy's capacity to make war".
Killing many more innocent people of the opposing faction in retaliation for one's victims was a distinctive mark of the Nazis during WW2. Israel shouldn't become a monster to fight another one.
With this line of reasoning, there would be no Linux today. And therefore no Android. Possibly not even the iPhone as we know it, as no KDE => no WebKit. You could probably choose between Windows 2012 and Apple Copland, each one extending HTML in its own proprietary way.
Open source needs no marketing, and it opens up new possibilities (and new markets) for everybody, including commercial entities. So to me this Firefox OS is a welcome new player.
MS does is when they do their idiotic "version-specific upgrade" thing, and when they do that, I can always just wait for the next iteration of Windows that doesn't suck.
Doesn't seem to work with Office. Office 2007 had the ribbon interface, Office 2010 still had it. Office 2012 has BOTH the ribbon and "the design language formerly known as metro". Still waiting for the iteration that "doesn't suck".
GPL-based Mozilla? "Partially BSD based" OS X? You're climbing mirrors.
Mozilla's license is closer to the BSD ones than to the GPL. Chrome is closed source, not BSD.
OS X is mostly closed source, too, although the core kernel (with no drivers) is BSD-licensed the source they release doesn't even boot on any existing machine so I'd hardly consider it an example of a "mature open source development".
Since you're quickly writing off Android's kernel in order to depict the whole product as "BSD based", I wonder how come Google haven't replaced the kernel with a BSD one, given their continued love for the BSD license. Could it be that what you relegated between parentheses is more important than you would make us believe? By the way, ask Android users how happy they are every time a new Android release is out and they cannot install it on their phones because their manufacturers violated (at least the letter of) the GPL and stuffed their kernels with binary blobs. So much for the "restrictive" licensing.
1) Read about the meaning of the EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL() function. It's a matter of public APIs vs internal interfaces.
2) By your reasoning, if I sent a mail to NVIDIA asking them to change their driver's license to the GPL, and they refused, I could write the very same things you've written against the kernel developers. With the same inappropriate adjectives and derogatory replacement of terms that you've chosen to use.
Linux is capitalism stretched over an open source platform - this is no longer a dorm project. There's a enormous amount of corporate money in Linux development, to say otherwise is not reality.
The fact that many capitalists are taking advantage of Linux, while at the same time improving it, doesn't mean that you can say that the open source model of the Linux kernel resembles capitalism. It's so far away from the concept of capitalism, that thinking about it ("to each one according to his need, from each one according to his abilities") it's possibly closer to communism... except that it works.
I've been to IBM research and spoken with their developers - each project is evaluated and priced with expected commercial services and hardware sales before it gets developed.
And would IBM with its corporate culture have *dreamt* of releasing source code for free, which could be used by its competitors too, before Linux entered the scene?
I kind of agree with the rest of your post, but I think that just as NVIDIA poured millions into the development of their cards, so did their users in order to buy them, and they have all the rights to ask NVIDIA for first-class support, which doesn't happen with binary drivers (not even on Windows, as soon as your card ages more than 12 months. And this is true for AMD too, by the way).
AMD OSS drivers are catching up very slowly, but they're finally doing it (for instance, for R300 class hardware you get support from the OSS drivers that is comparable to the binary ones - and better, because unike the binary drivers, the OSS ones work out-of-the-box, still support older cards, get bug fixes and work with new kernels). Part of the code that is being written for AMD and Intel chips can be reused or adapted for other chips, and most important, it can be used to train new developers in writing a 3D graphics card device driver, which is something that until now was exclusive to the developers employed by some GPU manufacturer. This is an investment that won't go away when the next GPU architecture is out, and it cant' be ignored IMHO.
And what about Intel? They got to the point where they only release OSS drivers, with OSS drivers supporting their new hardware even before it comes to the market, and next-gen Intel GPU are sophisticated enough that many average Joes won't feel the need for a discrete GPU anymore. I wouldn't have believed this was possible just a couple years ago, yet we got there. So while I accept your understanding of NVIDIA's position, I don't share the "defeatism" according to which things must either work their way or can't work at all.
Be careful not to be carried away by the strong opinions that you have for the last three letters of the EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL identifier, otherwise you risk making incorrect assumptions about its nature.
From the documentation included in the Linux kernel tarball:
EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL() -- Similar to EXPORT_SYMBOL() except that the symbols exported by EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL() can only be seen by modules with a MODULE_LICENSE() that specifies a GPL compatible license. It implies that the function is considered an internal implementation issue, and not really an interface.
The controversy is about whether a module is a derived work of the kernel
when you link it in. Traditionally, some modules were not considered
derived works by a lot of people arguing that we have a public module
interface that acts as a barrier for the license in the same way that
the syscall interface lets you run proprietary applications.
The EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL is all about symbols that are too low-level
to be considered part of that public module API (assuming that this
API exists). The argument is that symbols which are not meant to be
used in third-party modules can never be a license barrier and
anything using them is a derived work even if you consider other
modules not to be a derived work of the kernel. Note that this
argument can still hold for low-level symbols that are marked as
EXPORT_SYMBOL, using EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL just makes it explicit.
EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL is intended to be used for "an internal implementation
issue, and not really an interface". The dma-buf infrastructure is
explicitly intended as an interface between modules/drivers, so it
should use EXPORT_SYMBOL instead.
The users are free to use proprietary drivers: NVIDIA haven't published but proprietary drivers so far. All embedded graphics chips (but Intel's) are currently exclusively supported by proprietary drivers (and this has been a source of continuous pain for the users, by the way).
The kernel developers extert no control over the users. They "extert control" over what API they want to become public and therefore will have to be supported BY THEM forever (not by NVIDIA, who don't give a damn about supporting the user, as you can see every time they release a new GPU and stop supporting the old one in their "proprietary driver", and also don't give a damn about the progress of Linux, as you can see with their obsession not to share anything). Nothing is preventing NVIDIA from writing a GPL module glueing the internal API to their drivers (which is what has always happened until now). The difference is that in this case the onus of keeping the glue module up to date with the changing internal API would fall on NVIDIA, while making the internal API public would mean that the weight of supporting the API forever is carried by the kernel developers.
On the other hand, you'll see that in the end the API will become public anyway. Linux already has APIs to write userspace drivers (FUSE, CUSE, UIO, ppdev, libusb...), so unlike what you believe kernel developers have nothing against people developing drivers out of their "control" by principle. It's just that they want that to happen with a proper API and not with a wildcard access to the kernel internals.
Even if it is true that NVIDIA is just in it for the money, I think capitalism works the same way.
And that is exactly what the GGP was saying. Open source is no capitalism. Which is not to say that capitalism is bad. It's just that open source works differently and Linux is open source.
Why did he suddenly become pist? Because they decided to roll their own infrastructure code - due to the fact that they couldn't use the gpl version.
...which in turn is due to the fact that they don't want to share a thing, as the GGP was saying. Which is completely different from the picture of NVIDIA that you were painting with the figures for the ARM kernel.
So, Linus is pissed because NVIDIA didn't do what he wanted, not because they do a bad job. He's pissed because they don't contribute or integrate into standard Linux DRI drivers.
He's pissed because if you don't integrate, the resulting operating system is a mess to develop, debug and maintain. Not to mention, that it's much worse for end users.
But they did exactly what they had to do in order to maintain their non-derivative status.
Which is an elaborate way of saying:
they did exactly what they wanted to do, in order not to share code like everyone else on the desktop (ATI, Intel) is doing.
I know how this goes.
I don't doubt that, but why are you throwing patents into the discussion, when patent protection is independent from the open source status of the code, as patents by definition must be disclosed?
1. I want to give away a large amount of money to the poor. This is a good thing, a very good thing. I know that the bank near my house has a large amount of money.
2. The current licensing of the bank makes it impossible for me to get the money, unless I work hard to earn it. Whether this is good is questionable because:
a. It means that I have to get tired OR
b. It means that I have to work like everybody else does for a living, preventing me to have an easier life than all the others.
3) My only other option is that I have to find a less easy way to obtain the money rather than simply picking it up the from the bank. This is a questionable premise.
So, given that my choice is to work to earn money or to give up the idea of giving money to the poor, how are private property laws "good" in this case?
Bullshit. It's NVIDIA who sent a patch to the Linux developers asking them to change the license of their work because they're not willing to change the license of their own.
Actually, it's NVIDA that is unilaterally asking the kernel developers to change the licensing terms of their work, because they won't budge over the licensing terms of their own driver. The forcing here is happening in the opposite direction than you believe. It would be funny to see what would happen if some random kernel developer was to send a mail to NVIDIA asking them to change the license of their drivers to the GPL, in order to solve this same problem.
Graphics on Linux don't suck, unless you own an NVIDIA graphics card, but your complaints for this unfortunate situation are to be directed to NVIDIA, because the kernel developers for their part are doing their best to develop quality drivers, even with NVIDIA's policy of obfuscation and secrecy in place.
There will never be a "year of Linux on the desktop", not so long as these kinds of restrictions exist.
If this was true, then TODAY would be the year of Linux on the desktop, because no "restrictions" exist for PCs with AMD or Intel graphics. The truth is that Linux exists only because it's open source. It's impressive how easily people tend to forget this simple thing.
Because those fanatics happen to have written a seriously good kernel, which is being used by millions of people and hundreds of successful commercial companies.
NVIDIA are the outliers here, everyone else is doing the good thing.
NVIDIA only shares the stuff they're forced to share by virtue of the GPL. The lines they added to the ARM kernel are there only because they were forced to release the core changes needed to support their ARM SOCs.
A couple years ago, back when they had the upper hand, NVIDIA did not even open up the drivers for their ethernet chips, $DEITY knows what trade secrets could have been hidden in a ethernet driver.
Also, don't say that they're not opening the code because it's licensed by third parties: they don't even release documentation for their chips. The truth is that they don't care about open source, and will behave only when forced to.
Full disclosure: Linus Torvalds develops the linux kernel, he's very vamiliar with the licensing, patent and copyright issues and relationships with NVIDIA, and sent them to "fuck themselves" (sic.).
For instance by printing, without your knowledge, invisible patterns on every page, which can help undisclosed third parties to track what you print back to you. I thought this was a crazy conspiracy theory until it was officially confirmed that many printer do this.
Also, many inkjet printers won't print money:-D . If you try, their drivers will point you to a site where you can download authorized fac-simile images instead.
Slashdot Mirror
So bloat and blue screens are still here in Windows, at least as late as Windows 7; nothing to see, move along.
In fact, even in the USA, whenever "individualism" and "freedom" come to clash with the interests of those in power, then we see that governments re-discover themselves as interventist in a bizarre "reverse socialist" way, and here come all kinds of imaginary property, patents, bailouts for the banks, suspension of civil liberties - so much for the principles of free market and laissez faire.
Give a look at the post I was responding to.
The Israelis Government would *instantly* recognize a Palestinian State.
The current view of the Israeli Government is this one. If the Palestinian seek to be recognised as a State by the UN, Israel will topple their government. If they quit that pretense, they could be granted authority over 40% of the land they claim.
You must ask yourself why it so hard for the Palestinian people to recognize this
Well, if I try to put myself in the shoes of a Palestinian, I think that it would be hard for me to accept a peace treaty involving the loss of 60% of my country, especially if my country was tiny to begin with.
The Palestinians are not dhimmi at all, because the Israelis don't think they own the Palestinians. The Israelis have zero trust of the Palestinians because of the terrorism in the past
You can't deny that the Palestinian are second-class citizens somehow; whether this is because of the trust the Israeli have of them or not, it must not be easy for the honest Palestinian to withstand this (I mean those who would never do a terrorist attack; there must be some!).
To stop patrolling the borders would invite calamity on the Israeli people - and it would simply be so dumb that no rational person should even propose it.
Indeed, I'm not denying that Israel doesn't have the right to self defense, especially given the enemies that loom at its borders. Patrolling the borders is one thing, enforcing embargos is another.
However in Israel the government is not controlled by those people - and that makes all the difference in the world compared to Hamas. Israel is a modern democracy. Hamas is militant and millennial theocracy that no longer allows elections (and tended to throw Fatah supporters off buildings when they got into power - check YouTube for this nastiness).
Yes, but the strained relationships between Israel and the Palestinian were always there, whether Hamas or Fatah was in charge. Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but the role of religion in the conflict has increased only recently, it was a more laic conflict before the rise of Al Qaida etc in the Muslim world. I like to call things with their name, so I do understand that Hamas are terrorists, but the problem is upstream, we can't reduce it to a religion clash.
We just have learnt not to follow religious texts to the letter.
This is the fundamental difference between Islam and the other two Abrahamic religions.
Well Turkey, although being an Islamic country in religion, has long been quite "western" in culture and politics. So it's not intrinsic that a country inhabitated mostly by Mulsims must be a retrograde theocracy. Unfortunately, now that the world is foolishly polarising around religions again, this might change.
there is nothing Israel has done or will do that will enable them to satisfy Hamas - the goal of Hamas is simply to remove all unbelievers from Palestine. This is why war breaks out so often - Hamas will never ever agree to a permanent peace treaty, all you get are 'hudna', which are temporary ceasefires until Hamas is ready to fight again.
I could think that people resorted to vote for Hamas because they were unsatisifed with the results they had obtained when voting for Fatah in these years (e.g. Israeli settlements growing into what the Palestinian perceive as their own territory). Moreover, people who live in a state of desperation (I think we can agree that Gaza is a hell, whatever the reasons) easily make severe mistakes, even by means of democratic elections (think about Germany during the Weimar Republic).
Another thing. There was no such thing as a Palestinian country (never was, it was always a province of
It's unacceptable for Hamas to launch rockets into Israel killing innocent people. But what is also happening now is that Israel's response has killed a number of innocent people many times larger than the terrorists have (I know that making math over the number of victims is disgusting, but it helps to put in perspective who is slaughtered in the end, and please note that we're only talking about the innocent here).
It's unacceptable for religious fanatics to decide the political course of a nation. But we can find religious fanatics in Israel too, and they're calling for the flattening of Palestine as well. Why, the Bible is full of incitations to violence against the enemies of God, there's no need to go looking for them in the Quran. We just have learnt not to follow religious texts to the letter.
Is it war? War has its rules, too. Two countries declare the matter of contention, they attack each other's military forces, and in the end the interested countries make an agreement to stop the hostilities. At the end of the WW2, the Nazi were prosecuted for their war crimes, such as killing 10 innocent persons for each german soldier killed (many of the innocent persons they chose to massacre were Jews). Even some American officers were prosecuted, by the American themselves, for the force they used against the innocent.
Innocent people are not "enemy's capacity to make war".
Killing many more innocent people of the opposing faction in retaliation for one's victims was a distinctive mark of the Nazis during WW2. Israel shouldn't become a monster to fight another one.
Open source needs no marketing, and it opens up new possibilities (and new markets) for everybody, including commercial entities. So to me this Firefox OS is a welcome new player.
MS does is when they do their idiotic "version-specific upgrade" thing, and when they do that, I can always just wait for the next iteration of Windows that doesn't suck.
Doesn't seem to work with Office. Office 2007 had the ribbon interface, Office 2010 still had it. Office 2012 has BOTH the ribbon and "the design language formerly known as metro". Still waiting for the iteration that "doesn't suck".
Mozilla's license is closer to the BSD ones than to the GPL. Chrome is closed source, not BSD.
OS X is mostly closed source, too, although the core kernel (with no drivers) is BSD-licensed the source they release doesn't even boot on any existing machine so I'd hardly consider it an example of a "mature open source development".
Since you're quickly writing off Android's kernel in order to depict the whole product as "BSD based", I wonder how come Google haven't replaced the kernel with a BSD one, given their continued love for the BSD license. Could it be that what you relegated between parentheses is more important than you would make us believe? By the way, ask Android users how happy they are every time a new Android release is out and they cannot install it on their phones because their manufacturers violated (at least the letter of) the GPL and stuffed their kernels with binary blobs. So much for the "restrictive" licensing.
1) Read about the meaning of the EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL() function. It's a matter of public APIs vs internal interfaces.
2) By your reasoning, if I sent a mail to NVIDIA asking them to change their driver's license to the GPL, and they refused, I could write the very same things you've written against the kernel developers. With the same inappropriate adjectives and derogatory replacement of terms that you've chosen to use.
Linux is capitalism stretched over an open source platform - this is no longer a dorm project. There's a enormous amount of corporate money in Linux development, to say otherwise is not reality.
The fact that many capitalists are taking advantage of Linux, while at the same time improving it, doesn't mean that you can say that the open source model of the Linux kernel resembles capitalism. It's so far away from the concept of capitalism, that thinking about it ("to each one according to his need, from each one according to his abilities") it's possibly closer to communism... except that it works.
I've been to IBM research and spoken with their developers - each project is evaluated and priced with expected commercial services and hardware sales before it gets developed.
And would IBM with its corporate culture have *dreamt* of releasing source code for free, which could be used by its competitors too, before Linux entered the scene?
I kind of agree with the rest of your post, but I think that just as NVIDIA poured millions into the development of their cards, so did their users in order to buy them, and they have all the rights to ask NVIDIA for first-class support, which doesn't happen with binary drivers (not even on Windows, as soon as your card ages more than 12 months. And this is true for AMD too, by the way).
AMD OSS drivers are catching up very slowly, but they're finally doing it (for instance, for R300 class hardware you get support from the OSS drivers that is comparable to the binary ones - and better, because unike the binary drivers, the OSS ones work out-of-the-box, still support older cards, get bug fixes and work with new kernels). Part of the code that is being written for AMD and Intel chips can be reused or adapted for other chips, and most important, it can be used to train new developers in writing a 3D graphics card device driver, which is something that until now was exclusive to the developers employed by some GPU manufacturer. This is an investment that won't go away when the next GPU architecture is out, and it cant' be ignored IMHO.
And what about Intel? They got to the point where they only release OSS drivers, with OSS drivers supporting their new hardware even before it comes to the market, and next-gen Intel GPU are sophisticated enough that many average Joes won't feel the need for a discrete GPU anymore. I wouldn't have believed this was possible just a couple years ago, yet we got there. So while I accept your understanding of NVIDIA's position, I don't share the "defeatism" according to which things must either work their way or can't work at all.
From the documentation included in the Linux kernel tarball:
Also see http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2012-January/018273.html :
Why, even read the original mail from NVIDIA themselves:
The kernel developers extert no control over the users. They "extert control" over what API they want to become public and therefore will have to be supported BY THEM forever (not by NVIDIA, who don't give a damn about supporting the user, as you can see every time they release a new GPU and stop supporting the old one in their "proprietary driver", and also don't give a damn about the progress of Linux, as you can see with their obsession not to share anything). Nothing is preventing NVIDIA from writing a GPL module glueing the internal API to their drivers (which is what has always happened until now). The difference is that in this case the onus of keeping the glue module up to date with the changing internal API would fall on NVIDIA, while making the internal API public would mean that the weight of supporting the API forever is carried by the kernel developers.
On the other hand, you'll see that in the end the API will become public anyway. Linux already has APIs to write userspace drivers (FUSE, CUSE, UIO, ppdev, libusb...), so unlike what you believe kernel developers have nothing against people developing drivers out of their "control" by principle. It's just that they want that to happen with a proper API and not with a wildcard access to the kernel internals.
And that is exactly what the GGP was saying. Open source is no capitalism. Which is not to say that capitalism is bad. It's just that open source works differently and Linux is open source.
He's pissed because if you don't integrate, the resulting operating system is a mess to develop, debug and maintain. Not to mention, that it's much worse for end users.
Which is an elaborate way of saying:
they did exactly what they wanted to do, in order not to share code like everyone else on the desktop (ATI, Intel) is doing.
I don't doubt that, but why are you throwing patents into the discussion, when patent protection is independent from the open source status of the code, as patents by definition must be disclosed?
2. The current licensing of the bank makes it impossible for me to get the money, unless I work hard to earn it. Whether this is good is questionable because:
a. It means that I have to get tired OR
b. It means that I have to work like everybody else does for a living, preventing me to have an easier life than all the others.
3) My only other option is that I have to find a less easy way to obtain the money rather than simply picking it up the from the bank. This is a questionable premise.
So, given that my choice is to work to earn money or to give up the idea of giving money to the poor, how are private property laws "good" in this case?
Bullshit. It's NVIDIA who sent a patch to the Linux developers asking them to change the license of their work because they're not willing to change the license of their own.
Graphics on Linux don't suck, unless you own an NVIDIA graphics card, but your complaints for this unfortunate situation are to be directed to NVIDIA, because the kernel developers for their part are doing their best to develop quality drivers, even with NVIDIA's policy of obfuscation and secrecy in place.
If this was true, then TODAY would be the year of Linux on the desktop, because no "restrictions" exist for PCs with AMD or Intel graphics. The truth is that Linux exists only because it's open source. It's impressive how easily people tend to forget this simple thing.
NVIDIA are the outliers here, everyone else is doing the good thing.
A couple years ago, back when they had the upper hand, NVIDIA did not even open up the drivers for their ethernet chips, $DEITY knows what trade secrets could have been hidden in a ethernet driver.
Also, don't say that they're not opening the code because it's licensed by third parties: they don't even release documentation for their chips. The truth is that they don't care about open source, and will behave only when forced to.
Full disclosure: Linus Torvalds develops the linux kernel, he's very vamiliar with the licensing, patent and copyright issues and relationships with NVIDIA, and sent them to "fuck themselves" (sic.).
No, this is why linux exists in the first place.
Also, many inkjet printers won't print money :-D . If you try, their drivers will point you to a site where you can download authorized fac-simile images instead.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3d_printer
Price of a 16 GB iPhone 4S: 659 €
Price of a 32 GB iPhone 4S: 779 €
Resulting price of 16 GB flash according to Apple: 120 €
Price of a 16 GB Samsung microSD card: 13 €
Resulting cost of the lack of a microSD slot on the 32 GB iPhone 4S: 107 € = 135 USD
This, is why I like to have a microSD slot in my phones. Most people don't use it? Oh well, most people don't use Lumia phones either.
This phone has no SD card slot.