GPL does make a point about charging for the software. It very specifically says that you MAY NOT charge for the software. It also specifically states that you may not charge to distribute, but that you MAY collect a small fee for the time and materials that might be consumed in reproducing that software (burning a CD or whatever). As for the source distribution, yes, you're required to "make the source available" when you redistribute.
This is why so many companies have modeled their business on SUPPORT, rather than making software available. People who need to have their hands held while using software can expect to pay for the hand holding. Other people who are smart enough and/or adventurous enough to figure things out for themselves will invoke no costs, other than their own time.
Actually, I could use a larger sized ego. I'm rather humble, TBH. I don't lord it over the masses of idiots like I could.
Tell me again why people fork over money to Microsoft, again, and again, and again?
MS: We have an all-new operating system, and you're going to have to PAY US to use it! MASSES: OOOH! AAAHHHHHH! TAKE OUR MONEY!!! Me: Mehhh - wasn't interested anyway, thank you very much. I'll just keep my money in my pockets. APPLEFANBOI: Ehh - I have something prettier and shinier, and I want nothing to do with all those unwashed masses and their MS PC's!
I'm not using Ubuntu. I'm using Debian Wheezy, and Mate. I switch off to Enlightenment from time to time, but currently, I'm content with Mate. When the newest iteration of E17 comes floating down from upstream, I'll give that a more serious try again. No Ubuntu, I've sworn off of it.
Yep. Anyone who uses a GPL'd free product should expect that if/when he passes that free item on, he doesn't charge for it.
Remember, I'm primarily arguing against unbridled corporate greed with my rants against current copyright law. Corporations should have only a limited time in which to make money on the "products" that they bring to market.
Copyleft, on the other hand, is already what copyright SHOULD be after a few years. If there's any greed involved in copyleft, it's to subtle for me to see.
The research often becomes patentable, but genuine research is also copyrightable. Someone has to maintain records of what was tried, how it worked, and how it sparked further research in the same or another direction. All of that documentation, speculation, and verification on paper, or on computer logs, is copyrightable, I'm sure. Most of it probably becomes "trade secret" instead of published material, but I think you get my point.
To tell the truth, there isn't much new content that I want to mess with. A few songs, no movies, no television stuff. Maybe some books. MOST of my music and other entertainment is quite old.
Software is another matter - which is why I'm a Linux guy. I haven't felt the desire to "steal" any software since I made the switch. There's an application to do anything and everything I might want to do, without forking over an hour's wages, or more. Everything on my computer is distributed free of charge, and almost all of it is free to distribute. Oracle Java and Adobe Flash are the main exceptions to the latter, but I have alternatives to both.
Point taken then. But, you also seem to miss my point. I'm not browsing the intartubez and "stealing" everything I can find. I'm objecting to, and rebelling against current copyright laws. Several congress critters could tell you how passionate I am on this subject. I have written a LOT of emails to Washington. Anyone whose valid email address I have discovered has heard from me on the subjects of ACTA, NPP, SOPA, and more.
The laws are patently unjust, and I can't condemn anyone for violating them.
Kinda like marijuana laws. Put reasonable regulations in place, then I'll agree that people who violate marijuana regulations need to be punished. Punishment, in most cases, comparable to a parking fine.
If/when we fix copyright laws, then I might respect them more. You want copyrights for software? Five years. You want copyrights for music, books, and movies? Fifteen years. That's it, no more. Software is all but useless from an economic point of view after five years. Works of fiction never lose value, but still, fifteen years. Original research in a scientific field, I might go to 30 years. Genuine R&D, that takes dump truck loads of money? I might go thirty years on that as well.
In today's world, I have zero respect for copyright law.
Go ahead - kick the dog. How expensive are prosthetics these days? And, steal the car, funerals aren't excessively expensive either, I guess.
Here I am rebelling against unjust and unreasonable laws, you're talking about rebelling against all laws. Is anarchy a genetic defect, or have you just smoked to much of something bad? You were warned that drying Drano then smoking it was bad for you, right?
I thought these were jailbroken devices. As in, probably not new. Like, the neighbor upgraded, and unloaded his device for cheap. Or, maybe it was stolen. Or, it was found on the side of the road, and repaired. Or, it was bought as a present, and the recipient simply doesn't have any money with which to buy apps.
Just because someone has an iDevice, doesn't mean he paid upwards of a thousand dollars for it.
The "argument" is not "pointless". Ones and zeros have almost no value. They are reproducible, infinitely, for free. But, you want to charge me a dollar just to use one particular combination of ones and zeros?
What society do you refer to? A society in which everyone, and everything is measured by it's value to a corporation? If changing copyright back to about fifteen or twenty years should cause that society to crumble and fall, then we should change it. No other reason is needed to do so.
Any standard is better than a standard that belongs to the banks. That's my point.
Remember greenbacks? They were issued BY THE GOVERNMENT. They were printed by government employees, on government equipment, and distributed by the government, to the banks. They were backed by gold, but let's say that we still had greenback money that had been unhooked from the gold standard. Everything in history stays the same, we drop the gold standard in 1975 just like we did.
If that fiat money belonged to the government, and not to the banks, we could go about playing the same sort of banking games that the Federal Reserve does today, without paying the Federal Reserve for doing it.
And, one more time - the money you barter with BELONGS TO the federal reserve, not to the government. We pay interest on every single dollar. The all-important "faith" in the dollar is not faith in our government, but faith in the ability of the central bank to back those bills up with something. And, they have nothing. All they have are imaginary numbers representing imaginary currency, which is all valueless.
Worse? The Federal Reserve engages in fractional lending to it's member banks, then the member banks engage in fractional lending. The Fed lends ten million dollars for every million it prints, then each member bank lends ten more million for every million that they receive.
Tell me that isn't a pyramid scheme. The government actively pursues and imprisons pyramid schemers, but they collude with a private bank to run that bank's pyramid scheme.
The dollar has no value. Gold has value. Oil has value. Oil and gold are stable, the dollar is not. Collecting dollars is a fool's mission, but we're all forced to do it.
You're confused as hell, Bubba. Google for "gold standard". Theoretically, a nation on a gold standard has gold in a vault somewhere that is equal in value to all the currency it has in circulation.
A standard, whether it be gold, silver, titanium, of even wheat, bases your money on SOMETHING.
Of course, that's not the end-all and be-all in national currencies. A fiat money has it's downsides, and upsides. But - fiat money SHOULD BELONG TO THE GOVERNMENT. In such a case, no interest is paid to private banking, as we see today in almost all nations.
If we weren't paying private banking for the privilege of using their fiat money, the government wouldn't be in debt.
No one wins with our current system, EXCEPT THE BANKERS.
Oil reserves? A consumable commodity? We might as well use wheat, that I mentioned above. Land? When the "owner" comes to collect, he can't just pick up a parcel of land, and carry it home, now can he? Labor? We're going to offer slaves to our creditors? Our manufacturing base is being eroded every year, and not being replaced, but how in hell do we use that as capital to pay off creditors? Pack up a plant or six, and carry the machinery home?
A gold standard has it's own strengths, one of which, you can remove some from your pocket, or your vault, and give it to a creditor, who can carry it home with him. Standards. Today, we have none.
I would quibble that "beginning of WWII" thing. Remember, we did some wholesale kidnapping immediately after WWII, just as the Soviet did. We did some innovative stuff during the war, then after the war, but prior to the war, we were battling one helluva depression, like all the rest of the world. In fact, without that depression, Hitler likely would never have gained the support and the power that he did - but that's another discussion.
Liberal? I'm liberal, all of a sudden? CLUE: In the United States of America, to qualify as "liberal" you have to approve of homosexuality and gay marriage, you have to support women's rights (almost militantly), you must beat down a white guy while giving a "brother" a helping hand, you must approve of welfare and free abortions for all women, whether they realize that they need them or not.
I could go on.
But, just because you disagree with my assessment of economics, I'm a fucking liberal.
Actually, that train left the station in 1976. We had a gold standard up until the big oil embargo, remember? Now, speaking of idiots - we're the ones who auctioned off all of our gold, remember? When the shit hits the fan, we have nothing to fall back on.
WTF did you pull that 4000 year thing from? Oh wait - is that feces sticking to it? Yeah - I thought so. Dude, that had to hurt. Women deliver babies, but their hips are all different than a man's. How the hell did you get that out of there?
95 was a poor implementation of many things. It was very short lived. Everyone upgraded as soon as 98 became available. Then, everyone upgraded again as soon as Win98SE became available. And, 95 wasn't so overwhelmingly better than Win3.1 as many people seem to believe. MSDOS6.22 with Win3 was very stable. 95? I've never heard ANYONE praise it for stability. 32 bit disk access was it's main feature, but it was available for MSDOS 6.22 already. It wasn't until 98SE that the OS really got measurably better than MSDOS + Windows.
That's kinda funny, really. How many nations are facing bankruptcy in the world today? And, how many of them have economic "experts" guiding them down the higher debt path? This whole game of fiat money is going to blow up in our faces, sooner or later. The dollar has absolutely no real value. None. It isn't even worth the couple cents it costs to print it. It's worth about as much as toilet paper, in reality.
Slashdot Mirror
GPL does make a point about charging for the software. It very specifically says that you MAY NOT charge for the software. It also specifically states that you may not charge to distribute, but that you MAY collect a small fee for the time and materials that might be consumed in reproducing that software (burning a CD or whatever). As for the source distribution, yes, you're required to "make the source available" when you redistribute.
This is why so many companies have modeled their business on SUPPORT, rather than making software available. People who need to have their hands held while using software can expect to pay for the hand holding. Other people who are smart enough and/or adventurous enough to figure things out for themselves will invoke no costs, other than their own time.
Actually, I could use a larger sized ego. I'm rather humble, TBH. I don't lord it over the masses of idiots like I could.
Tell me again why people fork over money to Microsoft, again, and again, and again?
MS: We have an all-new operating system, and you're going to have to PAY US to use it!
MASSES: OOOH! AAAHHHHHH! TAKE OUR MONEY!!!
Me: Mehhh - wasn't interested anyway, thank you very much. I'll just keep my money in my pockets.
APPLEFANBOI: Ehh - I have something prettier and shinier, and I want nothing to do with all those unwashed masses and their MS PC's!
LMAO
I'm not using Ubuntu. I'm using Debian Wheezy, and Mate. I switch off to Enlightenment from time to time, but currently, I'm content with Mate. When the newest iteration of E17 comes floating down from upstream, I'll give that a more serious try again. No Ubuntu, I've sworn off of it.
Yep. Anyone who uses a GPL'd free product should expect that if/when he passes that free item on, he doesn't charge for it.
Remember, I'm primarily arguing against unbridled corporate greed with my rants against current copyright law. Corporations should have only a limited time in which to make money on the "products" that they bring to market.
Copyleft, on the other hand, is already what copyright SHOULD be after a few years. If there's any greed involved in copyleft, it's to subtle for me to see.
The research often becomes patentable, but genuine research is also copyrightable. Someone has to maintain records of what was tried, how it worked, and how it sparked further research in the same or another direction. All of that documentation, speculation, and verification on paper, or on computer logs, is copyrightable, I'm sure. Most of it probably becomes "trade secret" instead of published material, but I think you get my point.
To tell the truth, there isn't much new content that I want to mess with. A few songs, no movies, no television stuff. Maybe some books. MOST of my music and other entertainment is quite old.
Software is another matter - which is why I'm a Linux guy. I haven't felt the desire to "steal" any software since I made the switch. There's an application to do anything and everything I might want to do, without forking over an hour's wages, or more. Everything on my computer is distributed free of charge, and almost all of it is free to distribute. Oracle Java and Adobe Flash are the main exceptions to the latter, but I have alternatives to both.
Point taken then. But, you also seem to miss my point. I'm not browsing the intartubez and "stealing" everything I can find. I'm objecting to, and rebelling against current copyright laws. Several congress critters could tell you how passionate I am on this subject. I have written a LOT of emails to Washington. Anyone whose valid email address I have discovered has heard from me on the subjects of ACTA, NPP, SOPA, and more.
The laws are patently unjust, and I can't condemn anyone for violating them.
Kinda like marijuana laws. Put reasonable regulations in place, then I'll agree that people who violate marijuana regulations need to be punished. Punishment, in most cases, comparable to a parking fine.
If/when we fix copyright laws, then I might respect them more. You want copyrights for software? Five years. You want copyrights for music, books, and movies? Fifteen years. That's it, no more. Software is all but useless from an economic point of view after five years. Works of fiction never lose value, but still, fifteen years. Original research in a scientific field, I might go to 30 years. Genuine R&D, that takes dump truck loads of money? I might go thirty years on that as well.
In today's world, I have zero respect for copyright law.
Go ahead - kick the dog. How expensive are prosthetics these days? And, steal the car, funerals aren't excessively expensive either, I guess.
Here I am rebelling against unjust and unreasonable laws, you're talking about rebelling against all laws. Is anarchy a genetic defect, or have you just smoked to much of something bad? You were warned that drying Drano then smoking it was bad for you, right?
I thought these were jailbroken devices. As in, probably not new. Like, the neighbor upgraded, and unloaded his device for cheap. Or, maybe it was stolen. Or, it was found on the side of the road, and repaired. Or, it was bought as a present, and the recipient simply doesn't have any money with which to buy apps.
Just because someone has an iDevice, doesn't mean he paid upwards of a thousand dollars for it.
The "argument" is not "pointless". Ones and zeros have almost no value. They are reproducible, infinitely, for free. But, you want to charge me a dollar just to use one particular combination of ones and zeros?
What society do you refer to? A society in which everyone, and everything is measured by it's value to a corporation? If changing copyright back to about fifteen or twenty years should cause that society to crumble and fall, then we should change it. No other reason is needed to do so.
http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/energy-harnassed/2012/jul/17/does-gold-set-price-oil/
In effect, the central bank establishes what we are paying for oil, or anything else for that matter.
Any standard is better than a standard that belongs to the banks. That's my point.
Remember greenbacks? They were issued BY THE GOVERNMENT. They were printed by government employees, on government equipment, and distributed by the government, to the banks. They were backed by gold, but let's say that we still had greenback money that had been unhooked from the gold standard. Everything in history stays the same, we drop the gold standard in 1975 just like we did.
If that fiat money belonged to the government, and not to the banks, we could go about playing the same sort of banking games that the Federal Reserve does today, without paying the Federal Reserve for doing it.
And, one more time - the money you barter with BELONGS TO the federal reserve, not to the government. We pay interest on every single dollar. The all-important "faith" in the dollar is not faith in our government, but faith in the ability of the central bank to back those bills up with something. And, they have nothing. All they have are imaginary numbers representing imaginary currency, which is all valueless.
Worse? The Federal Reserve engages in fractional lending to it's member banks, then the member banks engage in fractional lending. The Fed lends ten million dollars for every million it prints, then each member bank lends ten more million for every million that they receive.
Tell me that isn't a pyramid scheme. The government actively pursues and imprisons pyramid schemers, but they collude with a private bank to run that bank's pyramid scheme.
Inflation is the result. Now, before you argue about inflation - take a look at this chart.
http://www.macrotrends.org/1380/gold-to-oil-ratio-historical-chart
The value of oil vs the value of gold has stayed pretty stable since before I was born. The value of the dollar? Take a look here:
http://www.macrotrends.org/1335/us-dollar-index-gold-and-oil-chart-last-five-years
The dollar has no value. Gold has value. Oil has value. Oil and gold are stable, the dollar is not. Collecting dollars is a fool's mission, but we're all forced to do it.
Uh-huh. And, our present perch in political capital AND military superiority is precarious at best.
Care to guess where the next soon-to-be super power is located? They are wielding their 'Assassin's Mace' quite effectively.
You're confused as hell, Bubba. Google for "gold standard". Theoretically, a nation on a gold standard has gold in a vault somewhere that is equal in value to all the currency it has in circulation.
A standard, whether it be gold, silver, titanium, of even wheat, bases your money on SOMETHING.
Of course, that's not the end-all and be-all in national currencies. A fiat money has it's downsides, and upsides. But - fiat money SHOULD BELONG TO THE GOVERNMENT. In such a case, no interest is paid to private banking, as we see today in almost all nations.
If we weren't paying private banking for the privilege of using their fiat money, the government wouldn't be in debt.
No one wins with our current system, EXCEPT THE BANKERS.
Oil reserves? A consumable commodity? We might as well use wheat, that I mentioned above. Land? When the "owner" comes to collect, he can't just pick up a parcel of land, and carry it home, now can he? Labor? We're going to offer slaves to our creditors? Our manufacturing base is being eroded every year, and not being replaced, but how in hell do we use that as capital to pay off creditors? Pack up a plant or six, and carry the machinery home?
A gold standard has it's own strengths, one of which, you can remove some from your pocket, or your vault, and give it to a creditor, who can carry it home with him. Standards. Today, we have none.
So, what you're saying is, you'll happily pay that Microsoft Tax, so that you can play games? Interesting . . .
I would quibble that "beginning of WWII" thing. Remember, we did some wholesale kidnapping immediately after WWII, just as the Soviet did. We did some innovative stuff during the war, then after the war, but prior to the war, we were battling one helluva depression, like all the rest of the world. In fact, without that depression, Hitler likely would never have gained the support and the power that he did - but that's another discussion.
Liberal? I'm liberal, all of a sudden? CLUE: In the United States of America, to qualify as "liberal" you have to approve of homosexuality and gay marriage, you have to support women's rights (almost militantly), you must beat down a white guy while giving a "brother" a helping hand, you must approve of welfare and free abortions for all women, whether they realize that they need them or not.
I could go on.
But, just because you disagree with my assessment of economics, I'm a fucking liberal.
Did your mama have any children that lived?
Actually, that train left the station in 1976. We had a gold standard up until the big oil embargo, remember? Now, speaking of idiots - we're the ones who auctioned off all of our gold, remember? When the shit hits the fan, we have nothing to fall back on.
WTF did you pull that 4000 year thing from? Oh wait - is that feces sticking to it? Yeah - I thought so. Dude, that had to hurt. Women deliver babies, but their hips are all different than a man's. How the hell did you get that out of there?
95 was a poor implementation of many things. It was very short lived. Everyone upgraded as soon as 98 became available. Then, everyone upgraded again as soon as Win98SE became available. And, 95 wasn't so overwhelmingly better than Win3.1 as many people seem to believe. MSDOS6.22 with Win3 was very stable. 95? I've never heard ANYONE praise it for stability. 32 bit disk access was it's main feature, but it was available for MSDOS 6.22 already. It wasn't until 98SE that the OS really got measurably better than MSDOS + Windows.
Doesn't OpenGL work in the Windows world? I don't think it even cares what version of Windows you might be using.
http://www.opengl.org/wiki/Getting_Started
Retraining on Linux Mint with Mate desktop might be easier. I say "might" - I'm not real sure if all Windows users are retrainable.
Define "top rate" please. Somehow, I think you've discounted all those unethical business practices.
That's kinda funny, really. How many nations are facing bankruptcy in the world today? And, how many of them have economic "experts" guiding them down the higher debt path? This whole game of fiat money is going to blow up in our faces, sooner or later. The dollar has absolutely no real value. None. It isn't even worth the couple cents it costs to print it. It's worth about as much as toilet paper, in reality.