Their example is of people who are using XFS with a 2.4 kernel. These people are (according to CNet) "upset" because XFS won't get added to 2.4. Now just think about this for a second: they are using XFS with 2.4 right now! So obviously, they are not being prevented from doing what they want. The whole issue (which CNet is trying to make out as a big deal) is that these people wish they didn't have to perform an extra step (applying a third-party patch). I hardly think it's going to kill these people to keep on doing what they have been doing for a little while longer (i.e. until they decide that the 2.6 series is sufficiently tested that they're willing to trust it). No one is being "left in the cold".
Actually, to be fair to CNet, they're only mildly misrepresenting the situation. The major source of confusion and misrepresentation is (as usual) the slashdot summary.
I would still argue that individual signed packages are better
I am personally neutral in this argument, but I will point out that 90% of the packages in the archives are autobuilt (most Debian Developers only have access to one of the 11+ architectures supported by Debian). The main counterargument I've heard, though, is that per-package signatures would add a lot of overhead, without adding any security (which is basically true, given some definitions of "a lot"). The main counter-counter argument is that per-package signatures are a lot more flexible (and signatures are pretty small compared to the size of an average package), which is also true. So anyway, that's why I'm neutral.:)
Debian as shipped by default does not check these values
Yes, but now that crypto software is finally allowed in the main archive (as opposed to being stored only on special "non-US" servers), this can (and hopefully will) change. I believe that there's even an open bug-report about this, but I can't really check now, since the bug tracking system is down...
Generally anyone who can upload a backdoored source can also upload its MD5 hash.
But they can't sign the MD5 hash (unless they have the private key, in which case your whole argument breaks down). If Debian didn't sign the MD5 hashes, you might have a point, but since they do...
Because it would require FAR more overhead, and would provide NO MORE SECURITY than the current setup, where the archives are MD5summed, and the MD5sums are then signed.
Unless it was a pretty short "looong time", you didn't work for the same company. The company you worked for, The Santa Cruz Operation, is now called "Tarantella", and they're out of the OS business. The company that's suing IBM is the company formerly named "Caldera", now The SCO Group (no "Santa Cruz" in the name any more). They purchased some assets (name and SYSV source licenses) from the old SCO, but they're a completely separate company.
This is what exactly the SCO's point, you can ask for anything but the "rights regarding derived works", because these rights are already established by U.S.C. 17.
But that's why the terms of the GPL are voluntary. The GPL does not say that you can only use the code under the specified terms. It merely states some conditions under which you can use the code without asking further. In other words, it's a conditional shortcutting of license negotiation. And, in fact, some businesses (e.g. Trolltech) use it exactly in that way.
If licensing something under the GPL made it impossible for that code to be licensed another way, then I think you/SCO might have a point. But that's clearly not the case -- Trolltech will happily sell you a license to use QT in your proprietary app if you don't want to use the GPL on your derivative work. The fact that in some cases (e.g. Linux), it may be prohibitively difficult to arrange alternate licensing doesn't mean it's not possible.
In fact, I have to say that I'm really surprised nobody has brought Trolltech up in these discussions before. Perhaps it's because they're a Norwegian company, not a US one. But still, it seems incredibly relevent. If SCO gets a judgement declaring GPL == PD, then Trolltech is dead. Contrariwise, Trolltech's business model seems to completely torpedo SCO's claims about the effects of the GPL. If the GPL did undermine copyright law in the way that SCO seems to be alleging, then Trolltech wouldn't have a business model. But they do, and a moderately successful one at that.
Linux is [...] [t]he equivalent of some guy 1983 whose only car was some beater that he constantly had jacked up to tweak the motor.
Huh? I've been using Linux as my primary desktop OS since '98, and the amount of "tweaking" and "tinkering" I do dropped massively from when I used to run MS systems (which broke stuff with every update, and occasionally at random inbetween updates). I first set up fvwm in '96, and I've been using it without tweaks or tinks since then, and it works fine. I first set up emacs in 1987, and have been using it with few or no tweaks since then.
I'm sure there are plenty of people using Linux because it allows (not "forces") them to tweak with their systems, but there are also plenty of people using Linux because it allows them (out of the box, no tweaking required) to keep using software they've been using since the seventies or eighties. Compare that to MS (who forced their users to switch to new stuff at the beginning of the nineties) or Apple (who's trying to force their users to switch to new stuff now).
Mac users and Linux users should band together against the common foe. Need I name names?:^)
Nope, sorry, MS is no threat to my vendor. I would say, if anything, that MS and Mac users had better band together against the common foe, Linux. Of course, that's my perspective as a Linux user and free software advocate.
I'd hate to see users of two fantastic operating systems like OS X and Linux turn into bickering opponents not unlike the factious Judean liberation groups in Monty Python's Life of Brian.
The difference is that the various Judean liberation groups had a common goal. OS X and Linux do not. Apple's goals look no closer to mine than MS's. In fact, Apple's goals look nearly identical to MS's, from where I sit, and not one tiny bit like Debian's or Gentoo's or even Red Hat's.
Here's a quiz for you: Which company made such appalling and far-reaching "intellectual property" claims in the eighties that the FSF felt compelled to call for a boycott of them?
o Apple
o Microsoft
Here's a clue: the name does NOT start with "M"!
IMO, there's more than enough room for lots of operating systems out there.
Well, that part's true enough. I truly don't care if MS and Apple continue to hawk their proprietary wares. Neither one is going to have any impact on my use of free software.
The one thing I will concede: the ABM (Anything But Microsoft crowd) would do best to support both Apple and Linux (and the BSDs), but the actual Linux and Apple supporters have little in common, and no reason to band together except fear of MS (and I'm not afraid of MS; they're mostly irrelevent as far as I'm concerned). The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend, especially when my "enemy" is really only my enemy in his own mind, and is mostly just someone to ignore in mine.
I'll do better than that. How about the address and root password of a public Linux box. As seen in Linux Journal. Please feel free to log in and play around -- that's what it's there for. (I'm hoping that the fact that this is a second level comment in a not-posted-just-this-second article will help keep the poor box from getting slashdotted.) Sure, it's SELinux, not quite the same as an off-the-shelf RH boxed set, but what does Windows offer that's anywhere near this level of security?
The other problem is that someone patented pop-under ads.
No, someone didn't! The lawsuit that X10 lost had nothing to do with patents, and everything to do with violating a contract. Basically, they hired some guys, then used their work but didn't pay them.
I guess Slashdotters pick and choose which bad software patents to get upset about.
Ignoring for a second the fact that this all has nothing to do with patents: so what? First of all, there's nothing that says that slashdotters all have to agree with each other. Since you (obviously) post here, that makes you a slashdotter yourself. Do you agree with everyone else that posts to slashdot? Didn't think so. Second of all, the world is not black and white. Just because I disapprove of software patents, that doesn't mean I'm not going to be happy if a particular patent happens to have a good side effect. I'm happy at the effect, not the patent itself.
The ends may not justify the means, but neither do the means justify (or condemn) the ends. Bad means leading to good ends are still bad means - and still good ends! If it were otherwise, the world might be a lot simpler. But it's not.
"Begging the question" aka "circular reasoning", in argument, means [...]
"Begging the question" is not a synonym for "circular reasoning". "Begging the question" simply means that your argument is based on questionable premises. "Circular reasoning" means specifically that you're using your conclusion as your premise. Circular reasoning may be begging the question, but begging the question is not necessarily circular reasoning.
In this case, I think you may be right, it's both circular reasoning and begging the question, but they're not synonyms, although they are, obviously, related.
(If more people on slashdot were to familarize themselves with common logical fallacies, I think this might be a better place.)
Keep in mind that GNU existed quite a while before Linux, but it had virtually no user community because there was no kernel to go with it.
***Bzzzt*** Thanks for playing! GNU had a large and very active user community years before Linus came along. Our company had as-identical-as-possible GNU setups on SunOS, Xenix, and SCO-Unix (for servers), and OS/2 (EMX) and MS-DOS (DJGPP) (for clients and developers). Others were running GNU environments on a wide variety of platforms (AIX, HP-uchhhs, etc., etc.).
I think you're mostly right about the current status of Linus vs. RMS, but your ignorance of the history of their respective projects is appalling. GNU was out there in the real world doing real work for years while Linux languished as a not-ready-for-prime-time toy. (My first Linux boot was 0.12, but I didn't use it for anything serious until well into the 0.99 series.)
I'll freely grant that Linus is more convivial and photogenic than RMS, and his relaxed attitude towards life is a boon to the entire community, and I'd rather have him as a dinner guest anyday, but that doesn't mean I think people should rewrite history.
...benchmark[s] favouring Windows [...] [are] instantly ripped to shreads, so why is this different?
It's not different: the thread is FULL of people (including you) asking "where's the numbers" and calling this study FUD. Some of the highest moderated comments, in fact.
Unfortunately, the response seems to be: MS doesn't allow anyone to publish their numbers. IIRC, they added this clause to their licenses after Oracle published some unfavorable-to-MS benchmarks.
The real difference is that when OSS loses a benchmark test, the general reaction* is that the results are studied, and if they're legitimate (which they often are), then work begins trying to fix the problem, and the eventual result is (usually) a better system. When MS loses a benchmark test, they react by forbidding any more benchmark tests, and nothing else (usually) ever changes.
* At least, the reaction amongst people who count, which is to say, the developers, not the pro-linux trolls on slashdot.
As much as I dislike [Cable Company], I prefer not to talk bad about them in a public forum such as/.
Ah, is that why? I assumed you were using the <generic> form of the name simply because your experience is so generic, and can be used by just about any cable company customer just by substituting in the name of their company (and city and whatever else).:)
Wasn't there a study on code using a robot to find exploits that stated OSS code was more vulnerable than even that of MS?
Never heard of such a thing. Perhaps you were thinking of one of the many studies that show the opposite, such as UWisc's Fuzz Testing study which showed Gnu and Linux code to be more reliable in the face of random input than equivalent code from commercial Unix vendors?
That would seem to be SCO's offer to idemnify its customers against SCO's claims. Big whoop, I don't think anyone thought that even SCO was insane enough to start suing its customers for using what SCO/Caldera sold them.
That does nothing to idemnify SCO's customers against any claims made by IBM.
Doesn't GPL become invalid or at least greatly diminished (in the eyes of the court) if derived code is not released as part of the package?
Steve Jobs wanted to release his Objective C compiler as a proprietary add-on to gcc through just such a mechanism. However, after his lawyers got done discussing the matter with the FSF's lawyers, those plans were scrapped. So, while we still don't know what a court would say, we do know that some motivated lawyers (motivated to make this scheme work, since it would have been in their client's interest) don't think such an argument would stand up in court.
I find it funny that the author implies a link between music file sharing and OSS.
Perfectly reasonable. There is music that can legally be shared (concerts by Grateful Dead, Pearl Jam, Gov't Mule, Widespread Panic, Bernie Worrell (of the Talking Heads & P-Funk), Tom-Tom Club, Cowboy Junkies, Les Claypool (of Primus), Big Head Todd, Jack Black's Tenacious D, etc., etc.), and music that can't be. Just as there is software which can legally be shared and software which can't.
I personally do not know of anybody who does linux who trades in movies or music.
Well, I'm a Debian developer, and I just uploaded an error-corrected version of a Radiators concert to the Live Music Archive. Of course, I didn't violate any copyrights in doing so, since the Radiators have given explicit permission for their concerts to be hosted on the LMA. But there ya go: I trade in legally tradeable software and music.
Well, I disregarded the bit about 30 years old, because the sentence made no sense.
Granted. But I think he's basically using a variation of the "No True Scottsman" logical fallacy. It's true that old people don't play video games if you ignore the old people who do.:)
"[...]the exception that proves the rule[...]"
For anyone who's ever wondered about the apparent oxymoronicity of this phrase, it actually dates back to an older meaning of "proof": a test or a trial. So, the exception tests the rule, and may well end up showing it to be false.
As for the study about the average age, [...] He's saying [...] that those studies are wrong or lying.
But the only evidence he offers is that his mother doesn't play video games. (And why isn't she the exception that proves the rule?) Even if the claim is completely false (and I indeed suspect that the average age is a bit lower than mid-thirties), he hasn't done squat to debunk the claim. All he's done is offer bald-faced assertions with no evidence to back him up. The article wasn't worth the minute or two I took to skim it. Even if he's right, he's still full of crap, and his rightness is just a case of dumb luck.
You're right that the article presents no material evidence whatsoever to back up its claims. You're wrong when they say they don't define their terms. They make specific reference to "over 30". Which makes me, a 44-year-old, call bullshit. In fact, most of my friends and acquaintances who played video games in their youth continue to do so. And, in general, those who didn't still don't (which only makes sense, IMO). That's not a scientific claim, since my sample size is fairly small and somewhat biased, but at least I have a measurable sample to point to.
Anyway, wasn't there a recent study that showed that the average age of video game players was mid-thirties?
Under this idiotic interpretation, Linux would clearly infringe on Unix simply because it works like it.
Under this idiotic interpretation, Windows (as well as Motif, KDE and Gnome) would infringe on Apple's designs. In fact, Apple already lost their lawsuit against MS and HP (the latter for an X11-based GUI) in the US, ages ago, but, of course, the UK is a different jurisdiction. If this goes forward, the UK could be in for a world of hurt as all desktop systems except Apple's become illegal....
I'm asking everyone to stop saying "file sharing" when referring to distributing music files. A more accurate term is music file sharing (or just music sharing).
Suffers from the same flaws: I've engaged in legal music sharing since the late seventies. The Internet Archive has terabytes of music files from hundreds of musicians that can all be legally traded or shared.
As for non-music files, it is every bit as illegal, and probably almost as common, for people to trade the latest MS OS or video game as the latest pop tune.
Sharing music is no more or less illegal than any other form of file sharing. It all depends on the copyrights and licenses of the files. Saying "music file sharing (or just music sharing)" is, in fact, more misleading than just saying "filesharing".
Slashdot Mirror
Their example is of people who are using XFS with a 2.4 kernel. These people are (according to CNet) "upset" because XFS won't get added to 2.4. Now just think about this for a second: they are using XFS with 2.4 right now! So obviously, they are not being prevented from doing what they want. The whole issue (which CNet is trying to make out as a big deal) is that these people wish they didn't have to perform an extra step (applying a third-party patch). I hardly think it's going to kill these people to keep on doing what they have been doing for a little while longer (i.e. until they decide that the 2.6 series is sufficiently tested that they're willing to trust it). No one is being "left in the cold".
Actually, to be fair to CNet, they're only mildly misrepresenting the situation. The major source of confusion and misrepresentation is (as usual) the slashdot summary.
I would still argue that individual signed packages are better
:)
I am personally neutral in this argument, but I will point out that 90% of the packages in the archives are autobuilt (most Debian Developers only have access to one of the 11+ architectures supported by Debian). The main counterargument I've heard, though, is that per-package signatures would add a lot of overhead, without adding any security (which is basically true, given some definitions of "a lot"). The main counter-counter argument is that per-package signatures are a lot more flexible (and signatures are pretty small compared to the size of an average package), which is also true. So anyway, that's why I'm neutral.
Debian as shipped by default does not check these values
Yes, but now that crypto software is finally allowed in the main archive (as opposed to being stored only on special "non-US" servers), this can (and hopefully will) change. I believe that there's even an open bug-report about this, but I can't really check now, since the bug tracking system is down...
Generally anyone who can upload a backdoored source can also upload its MD5 hash.
But they can't sign the MD5 hash (unless they have the private key, in which case your whole argument breaks down). If Debian didn't sign the MD5 hashes, you might have a point, but since they do...
And this is not the default in Debian because?
Because it would require FAR more overhead, and would provide NO MORE SECURITY than the current setup, where the archives are MD5summed, and the MD5sums are then signed.
A looong time ago, I used to work for SCO.
Unless it was a pretty short "looong time", you didn't work for the same company. The company you worked for, The Santa Cruz Operation, is now called "Tarantella", and they're out of the OS business. The company that's suing IBM is the company formerly named "Caldera", now The SCO Group (no "Santa Cruz" in the name any more). They purchased some assets (name and SYSV source licenses) from the old SCO, but they're a completely separate company.
If indeed it is running Linux, once it lanuches it should set some sort of record for the highest use of Linux.
Merely being in Orbit won't be enough for the record, Debian has already flown on the Shuttle back in 1997. In fact, it's done so twice.
This is what exactly the SCO's point, you can ask for anything but the "rights regarding derived works", because these rights are already established by U.S.C. 17.
But that's why the terms of the GPL are voluntary. The GPL does not say that you can only use the code under the specified terms. It merely states some conditions under which you can use the code without asking further. In other words, it's a conditional shortcutting of license negotiation. And, in fact, some businesses (e.g. Trolltech) use it exactly in that way.
If licensing something under the GPL made it impossible for that code to be licensed another way, then I think you/SCO might have a point. But that's clearly not the case -- Trolltech will happily sell you a license to use QT in your proprietary app if you don't want to use the GPL on your derivative work. The fact that in some cases (e.g. Linux), it may be prohibitively difficult to arrange alternate licensing doesn't mean it's not possible.
In fact, I have to say that I'm really surprised nobody has brought Trolltech up in these discussions before. Perhaps it's because they're a Norwegian company, not a US one. But still, it seems incredibly relevent. If SCO gets a judgement declaring GPL == PD, then Trolltech is dead. Contrariwise, Trolltech's business model seems to completely torpedo SCO's claims about the effects of the GPL. If the GPL did undermine copyright law in the way that SCO seems to be alleging, then Trolltech wouldn't have a business model. But they do, and a moderately successful one at that.
Linux is [...] [t]he equivalent of some guy 1983 whose only car was some beater that he constantly had jacked up to tweak the motor.
Huh? I've been using Linux as my primary desktop OS since '98, and the amount of "tweaking" and "tinkering" I do dropped massively from when I used to run MS systems (which broke stuff with every update, and occasionally at random inbetween updates). I first set up fvwm in '96, and I've been using it without tweaks or tinks since then, and it works fine. I first set up emacs in 1987, and have been using it with few or no tweaks since then.
I'm sure there are plenty of people using Linux because it allows (not "forces") them to tweak with their systems, but there are also plenty of people using Linux because it allows them (out of the box, no tweaking required) to keep using software they've been using since the seventies or eighties. Compare that to MS (who forced their users to switch to new stuff at the beginning of the nineties) or Apple (who's trying to force their users to switch to new stuff now).
Mac users and Linux users should band together against the common foe. Need I name names? :^)
Nope, sorry, MS is no threat to my vendor. I would say, if anything, that MS and Mac users had better band together against the common foe, Linux. Of course, that's my perspective as a Linux user and free software advocate.
I'd hate to see users of two fantastic operating systems like OS X and Linux turn into bickering opponents not unlike the factious Judean liberation groups in Monty Python's Life of Brian.
The difference is that the various Judean liberation groups had a common goal. OS X and Linux do not. Apple's goals look no closer to mine than MS's. In fact, Apple's goals look nearly identical to MS's, from where I sit, and not one tiny bit like Debian's or Gentoo's or even Red Hat's.
Here's a quiz for you: Which company made such appalling and far-reaching "intellectual property" claims in the eighties that the FSF felt compelled to call for a boycott of them?
o Apple
o Microsoft
Here's a clue: the name does NOT start with "M"!
IMO, there's more than enough room for lots of operating systems out there.
Well, that part's true enough. I truly don't care if MS and Apple continue to hawk their proprietary wares. Neither one is going to have any impact on my use of free software.
The one thing I will concede: the ABM (Anything But Microsoft crowd) would do best to support both Apple and Linux (and the BSDs), but the actual Linux and Apple supporters have little in common, and no reason to band together except fear of MS (and I'm not afraid of MS; they're mostly irrelevent as far as I'm concerned). The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend, especially when my "enemy" is really only my enemy in his own mind, and is mostly just someone to ignore in mine.
I'll do better than that. How about the address and root password of a public Linux box. As seen in Linux Journal. Please feel free to log in and play around -- that's what it's there for. (I'm hoping that the fact that this is a second level comment in a not-posted-just-this-second article will help keep the poor box from getting slashdotted.) Sure, it's SELinux, not quite the same as an off-the-shelf RH boxed set, but what does Windows offer that's anywhere near this level of security?
The other problem is that someone patented pop-under ads.
No, someone didn't! The lawsuit that X10 lost had nothing to do with patents, and everything to do with violating a contract. Basically, they hired some guys, then used their work but didn't pay them.
I guess Slashdotters pick and choose which bad software patents to get upset about.
Ignoring for a second the fact that this all has nothing to do with patents: so what? First of all, there's nothing that says that slashdotters all have to agree with each other. Since you (obviously) post here, that makes you a slashdotter yourself. Do you agree with everyone else that posts to slashdot? Didn't think so. Second of all, the world is not black and white. Just because I disapprove of software patents, that doesn't mean I'm not going to be happy if a particular patent happens to have a good side effect. I'm happy at the effect, not the patent itself.
The ends may not justify the means, but neither do the means justify (or condemn) the ends. Bad means leading to good ends are still bad means - and still good ends! If it were otherwise, the world might be a lot simpler. But it's not.
"Begging the question" aka "circular reasoning", in argument, means [...]
"Begging the question" is not a synonym for "circular reasoning". "Begging the question" simply means that your argument is based on questionable premises. "Circular reasoning" means specifically that you're using your conclusion as your premise. Circular reasoning may be begging the question, but begging the question is not necessarily circular reasoning.
In this case, I think you may be right, it's both circular reasoning and begging the question, but they're not synonyms, although they are, obviously, related.
(If more people on slashdot were to familarize themselves with common logical fallacies, I think this might be a better place.)
Anyone here regularly read from Project G?
I wouldn't say "regularly", but I would say "once in a while". Is that good enough?
What did you read?
Shakespeare, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Lewis Caroll, early P. G. Wodehouse, early Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Keep in mind that GNU existed quite a while before Linux, but it had virtually no user community because there was no kernel to go with it.
***Bzzzt*** Thanks for playing! GNU had a large and very active user community years before Linus came along. Our company had as-identical-as-possible GNU setups on SunOS, Xenix, and SCO-Unix (for servers), and OS/2 (EMX) and MS-DOS (DJGPP) (for clients and developers). Others were running GNU environments on a wide variety of platforms (AIX, HP-uchhhs, etc., etc.).
I think you're mostly right about the current status of Linus vs. RMS, but your ignorance of the history of their respective projects is appalling. GNU was out there in the real world doing real work for years while Linux languished as a not-ready-for-prime-time toy. (My first Linux boot was 0.12, but I didn't use it for anything serious until well into the 0.99 series.)
I'll freely grant that Linus is more convivial and photogenic than RMS, and his relaxed attitude towards life is a boon to the entire community, and I'd rather have him as a dinner guest anyday, but that doesn't mean I think people should rewrite history.
...benchmark[s] favouring Windows [...] [are] instantly ripped to shreads, so why is this different?
It's not different: the thread is FULL of people (including you) asking "where's the numbers" and calling this study FUD. Some of the highest moderated comments, in fact.
Unfortunately, the response seems to be: MS doesn't allow anyone to publish their numbers. IIRC, they added this clause to their licenses after Oracle published some unfavorable-to-MS benchmarks.
The real difference is that when OSS loses a benchmark test, the general reaction* is that the results are studied, and if they're legitimate (which they often are), then work begins trying to fix the problem, and the eventual result is (usually) a better system. When MS loses a benchmark test, they react by forbidding any more benchmark tests, and nothing else (usually) ever changes.
* At least, the reaction amongst people who count, which is to say, the developers, not the pro-linux trolls on slashdot.
Now, someone please explain to me how these two "goals" (less spam and more privacy) can co-exist with each other.
:)
Well, just off the top of my head, these companies could respect their customers' privacy by NOT selling the names and addresses to spammers...
As much as I dislike [Cable Company], I prefer not to talk bad about them in a public forum such as /.
:)
Ah, is that why? I assumed you were using the <generic> form of the name simply because your experience is so generic, and can be used by just about any cable company customer just by substituting in the name of their company (and city and whatever else).
Wasn't there a study on code using a robot to find exploits that stated OSS code was more vulnerable than even that of MS?
Never heard of such a thing. Perhaps you were thinking of one of the many studies that show the opposite, such as UWisc's Fuzz Testing study which showed Gnu and Linux code to be more reliable in the face of random input than equivalent code from commercial Unix vendors?
That would seem to be SCO's offer to idemnify its customers against SCO's claims. Big whoop, I don't think anyone thought that even SCO was insane enough to start suing its customers for using what SCO/Caldera sold them.
That does nothing to idemnify SCO's customers against any claims made by IBM.
Doesn't GPL become invalid or at least greatly diminished (in the eyes of the court) if derived code is not released as part of the package?
Steve Jobs wanted to release his Objective C compiler as a proprietary add-on to gcc through just such a mechanism. However, after his lawyers got done discussing the matter with the FSF's lawyers, those plans were scrapped. So, while we still don't know what a court would say, we do know that some motivated lawyers (motivated to make this scheme work, since it would have been in their client's interest) don't think such an argument would stand up in court.
I find it funny that the author implies a link between music file sharing and OSS.
Perfectly reasonable. There is music that can legally be shared (concerts by Grateful Dead, Pearl Jam, Gov't Mule, Widespread Panic, Bernie Worrell (of the Talking Heads & P-Funk), Tom-Tom Club, Cowboy Junkies, Les Claypool (of Primus), Big Head Todd, Jack Black's Tenacious D, etc., etc.), and music that can't be. Just as there is software which can legally be shared and software which can't.
I personally do not know of anybody who does linux who trades in movies or music.
Well, I'm a Debian developer, and I just uploaded an error-corrected version of a Radiators concert to the Live Music Archive. Of course, I didn't violate any copyrights in doing so, since the Radiators have given explicit permission for their concerts to be hosted on the LMA. But there ya go: I trade in legally tradeable software and music.
Well, I disregarded the bit about 30 years old, because the sentence made no sense.
:)
Granted. But I think he's basically using a variation of the "No True Scottsman" logical fallacy. It's true that old people don't play video games if you ignore the old people who do.
"[...]the exception that proves the rule[...]"
For anyone who's ever wondered about the apparent oxymoronicity of this phrase, it actually dates back to an older meaning of "proof": a test or a trial. So, the exception tests the rule, and may well end up showing it to be false.
As for the study about the average age, [...] He's saying [...] that those studies are wrong or lying.
But the only evidence he offers is that his mother doesn't play video games. (And why isn't she the exception that proves the rule?) Even if the claim is completely false (and I indeed suspect that the average age is a bit lower than mid-thirties), he hasn't done squat to debunk the claim. All he's done is offer bald-faced assertions with no evidence to back him up. The article wasn't worth the minute or two I took to skim it. Even if he's right, he's still full of crap, and his rightness is just a case of dumb luck.
You're right that the article presents no material evidence whatsoever to back up its claims. You're wrong when they say they don't define their terms. They make specific reference to "over 30". Which makes me, a 44-year-old, call bullshit. In fact, most of my friends and acquaintances who played video games in their youth continue to do so. And, in general, those who didn't still don't (which only makes sense, IMO). That's not a scientific claim, since my sample size is fairly small and somewhat biased, but at least I have a measurable sample to point to.
Anyway, wasn't there a recent study that showed that the average age of video game players was mid-thirties?
Under this idiotic interpretation, Linux would clearly infringe on Unix simply because it works like it.
Under this idiotic interpretation, Windows (as well as Motif, KDE and Gnome) would infringe on Apple's designs. In fact, Apple already lost their lawsuit against MS and HP (the latter for an X11-based GUI) in the US, ages ago, but, of course, the UK is a different jurisdiction. If this goes forward, the UK could be in for a world of hurt as all desktop systems except Apple's become illegal....
I'm asking everyone to stop saying "file sharing" when referring to distributing music files. A more accurate term is music file sharing (or just music sharing).
Suffers from the same flaws: I've engaged in legal music sharing since the late seventies. The Internet Archive has terabytes of music files from hundreds of musicians that can all be legally traded or shared.
As for non-music files, it is every bit as illegal, and probably almost as common, for people to trade the latest MS OS or video game as the latest pop tune.
Sharing music is no more or less illegal than any other form of file sharing. It all depends on the copyrights and licenses of the files. Saying "music file sharing (or just music sharing)" is, in fact, more misleading than just saying "filesharing".