The problem with your argument is that, you have this implicit assumption that the Congress is allowed to make whatever law it wants to. It cannot. The Constitution is not a document that says what rights we the people have. It is a document that enumerates the limited powers of the federal government. Wiretapping and intercepting the communications of an American citizen is not a power specifically granted to the Congress by the Constitution, and therefor, wiretaps and FISA courts, all of that stuff, is unconstitutional.
The Bill of Rights was NEVER intended to be the enumeration of our rights that it has been stated to be, and wrongly, by both political parties. The founding fathers were QUITE clear on this issue and Madison and Jefferson both opposed the Bill of Rights because they were rightly worried that such a statement of rights would in fact be used to undermine the Constitution, and it has. You have a right to own guns.. you have a right to be gay and get married... the government has no right to wiretap you...
In fact, the Buran design was superior - it had no lift engines of its own and could ride on top of the real rocket. This simplifies the loads on the main rocket, allow for more cargo and makes the vehicle immune to insulation damage.
Actually, most pictures of Buran clearly show the rocket riding alongside the Energia booster, just like the Shuttle rides alongside the fuel tank.
It seems rather fashionable to knock the Space Shuttle - it's expensive, it was overhyped, putting the thing on the side of the tank is a design mistake, and the tiles are a maintenance nightmare. It's easy to knock the Shuttle and demand a retreat to older style systems, and I've done it. But the more and more I think about it, the more I think, junking the shuttle and the approach of the orbital space plane is a huge mistake.
We are all aware of the negatives of the shuttle, but let's look at some of the positives of this system. First and foremost, the interior of the space shuttle is -huge- compared to the interior of a Soyuz, or for that matter, any other manned space craft. The Soyuz can bring up 2 or 3 astronauts, while shuttle missions with 6 or 7 are not uncommon. The Soyuz, the Apollo and the nascent Orion are essentially ballistic nosecones with people stuffed in it. The space shuttle has a habital volume, for its crew compartment alone, of over 70 cubic meters. The soyuz, on the other hand, has a habital volume of just 7 cubic meters. Astronauts in these capsules basically sit in their chairs, but in the shuttle they can get up, move around, and do things. The space shuttle is practically a space station in its own right.
The space shuttle has a cargo bay, and, thanks to the Canadians, has a really cool mechanical arm. The cargo bay can be pressurized for even more space, or it can contain additional research facilities. Have we forgotten that the European Space Agency has flown a science station in the space shuttle cargo bay already? Have we forgotten about the repairs made to Hubble? The Space Shuttle can and has repaired other satellites, and right now, is the ONLY SYSTEM that can bring them back a largish cargo from space to earth.
Everyone seems to like knocking NASA, cheering on the likes of Burt Rutan and the X-Prize in hopes for some private sector miracle, but I've not seen any private sector initiative, from scratch, put so much as a suitcase into orbit, certainly not a man, and nothing like the space shuttle. Those fancy suborbital flights are a joke - 3000mph requires a fraction of the total kinetic energy to attain the orbital velocity of over 17000mph. Let me know when anyone, really, anyone builds something as cool as the shuttle...and the thing is, when we're back to tiny capsules for manned space flight, when the naysayers win and the shuttles are tossed off to museums, everyone is going to compare the capsule to the shuttle and say geez, by far, the shuttle was the cooler thing, and the capsule is a step backwards, not forward, and that our next space ship should have been a newer version of the shuttle, not a rehashed capsule.
We'll mop up those cowardly confederates at Antienam...
Those Japanese are too stupid to make it through the jungle at Singapore, and certainly don't have the logistics to sustained forward fleet operations...
It will be at least a decade before the Russians get the atomic bomb...
The United States has a comfortable lead in rocket technology...
A bunch of stupid arabs couldn't put together a complex terrorist attack against the USA....
We've just about got this insurgency licked...
And now..!
Thiefs are too stupid to use advanced technology....
Too bad for him because that's where the camaraderie is today. Suck holes, like Apple and M$, are more about denying user freedom than they are about technical progress or excellence. They get to use great free tools like GCC and X but don't get to pass them and other along to their users. Places like that can't be fun to work for
Oh yeah... please. Open Source really means build systems being closed because they are web based or internal to corporations, as opposed to distributed software. There's nothing in the GPL, according to many posters on \., that would require you to recontribute your changes to an open system if you are just sitting behind a firewall at MegaCorp.
It's people like you who are keeping bright females out of many industries. I think it was obvious from your post who the real c*nt is, so i guess I need not point THAT out.
I would think that people who go around saying that they are the proud owner of a beater Toyota Celica lift back would scare people out of any industry, save for perhaps meat packing and lead mining.
When the Romans were victorious in war, they believed it to be because the gods favored them. They were still operating under the assumption that they were doing the gods' work, only in their case, the gods apparently wanted them to conquer their neighbors.
Being favored by a God, and doing that God's will, are two entirely different things. I mean, you could sail a boat and say the "Wind favors you", but that doesn't mean that you are doing the will of the wind, although, in the ancient mind, it would have. It's entirely different, and you really are more trying to shoehorn in your preconceptions about today's religion into the ancient mind, without really seeing it for what it is. Our whole concept of religion today is completely different...
USA Not So Different...
on
eBay The Vote
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· Score: 3, Insightful
This year's spending by candidates in the Presidential election is going to be something like 2 billion dollars. For that kind of money, the political parties could just give everyone in the USA $10, and quit wasting everyone's time with stupid commercials. Those people who are politically active don't need to see them, and those people who are not don't give a poo, so, why bother?
Erm, the Roman world was still religious before Christianity came along...
There wasn't a cleanly evolved notion of a single God that judges you for how you lived your life... and it was quite recognized that other cultures had their particular Gods. And in the ancient world, religious convinction was never really important because you could always have your own God and all the preachers were hawking their own religions. In fact, when the Romans conquered you, they never really made too big of a deal about local gods, so long as the conquerees also paid tribute to some Roman god - which, obviously, was about finance.
It was the judeo-christian concept of a single god that really did spawn religious conflict. Unlike other conquerees, the jewish state absolutely balked at paying tribute to any God other than their own, and they fought the Romans bitterly on that issue.
So, if anything you could say that monotheism is the root of all religious wars, but, the tradeoff is, the notion of a god that judges all of us for good deeds performed, injects the need to justify barbaric behavior. Sure, the jewish old testament had a lot of "god says go take the promised land", but, the thing to keep in mind, is, that other nations felt no need to make such justifications at all. They just went and did it. So, sure, we could look back at the O.T. and say, in isolation, this proves that they were barbaric, but, when you really sit back and view things in the context of the times, they were more moral by our sense, rather than less so, than their contemporaries.
Actually, please do. Were George Bush a Julius Caesar, he would have just said, "look, Iraq has all of this oil", and then, would have simply bombed all the water supplies and crops, killed most of the population, and sent in a bunch of guys to just grab the oil. Those Iraqi men that survived would have been sent back to the United States as slaves, and those who were in the Iraqi army would have been made to fight each other and wild animals in free for the public spectacles.
Instead, we have a mission where, yeah, behind the scenes, you know oil is a motivator, but its more about access to oil than its out and out capture, and, our soldiers are dying trying to keep the Iraqis from killing each other. Were any competent Roman alive, he would view the whole thing with so much disgust - in the Roman eyes, a civil war among the people you are trying to occupy would be a GOOD THING.
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction." Historically, some of the worst atrocities have been carried out in the name of God
That's simply not true. This charge has been parroted by the anti-religious people, and it completely ignores the historical record.
Let's compare the post Roman world to the pre-Roman world. Prior to Christianity, the world believed in conquest without justification. IF someone had more stuff than you, you sent in an army and took it. Then you brought home a bunch of loot, and were rewarded for it. Look at all the Roman celebrations of conquest - called "triumphs." In the ancient world - if the people were not of your country, it was desirable to kill them and take all of their stuff.
Julius Caesar was no bible thumper, but under him, the Romans practiced a particularly vile form of ethnic cleansing in Gaul. Imagine the outcry today if someone wrote a book bragging that they killed over a million people. That is what Caesar did, and it made him MORE popular, not less. And then there all the lesser cultures that have been wiped our destroyed. Read about emperors of various ancient empires having all of the children killed, burning cities to the ground, and so forth. It was the advent of religion and the idea that people had souls which ultimately drove the idea that everyone had some sort of natural rights.
Similarly, Islam spread as quickly as it did in the middle east because of its promises of fairness and lower taxes to the people.
Both religions, carrying with it a divine proposition against killing, act as a natural brake against social forces that otherwise glorify it.
The last time we had an organized group of people that held the ancient view of empire, we called them the most evil people that had ever lived. The NAZIs didn't kill out of a belief in God - rather, they just felt that conquest and ethnic cleansing were part of the natural order of things, and they fused ancient roman values with modern ideas about evolution to back them up. Even today, extreme racists reject christianity (particularly in American prisons), precisely because of its moral condemnation against genocide and other racial killings.
Everything moved into userspace that possibly can (Usually only threads, IPC and address spaces are left in kernel space). (This is a true microkernel.).
Windows NT 3.1 (the first version) was a fairly purish microkernal. Microkernals came from the CMU Mach Project, and, when David Cutler was tasked for first developing WNT, he turned around and got as many key mach players as he could to come work for him.
Over time, MS has been shoving things into the kernel - this is because people complain about performance. For that, to this day, there is a crowd of people that says that WNT Daytona (3.51), was really the best Windows NT - as NT 4 moved GDI into the kernel. I think now, with the new driver model under Vista, a lot of stuff is being moved out of the kernel and back into user space, bringing Vista more back to its roots.
It's not the hardware as much as it is the application....the flat memory model is the root of all security problems on Intelish hardware...
Even the 386 had some fairly largish number of selectors that could be assigned to an application, rather than just the one with a 2GB address space. So, you could have an application get some big amount of selectors, use them for guarded arrays and so forth, and it could be much more secure than now.
This could be a random steller collision. It's gotta be rare, but still an occurance, when two stars collide. In this case, a largish black hole collides with another star, and the star gets incorporated into it.
Welcome our new 16 solar mass, inside of gigantic super universe is really a giant black hole singularity, with that weird ship from the Disney movie stuck inside, along with the tv game show host and his once she was really hot but now is sorta aging and still has trouble stacking baby blocks especially inside the 1000G black hole overlords.
In a word, no. Absolutely not. In the case of my fictional scheduler, let's say that it only works well if it can solve TSP quickly. The community at large does NOT benefit from such garbage, as looking at it is a waste of time.
In the case of my original content, you and RMS can keep your grubby, communist meathooks off of it.
LOL. So really, when the dust all settles, the open source movement is a fricking fraud, just a substitution of one kind of proprietary economy for another. Big fricking deal. I shit on the GPL.
Thank you, Captain Obvious. The parent to my original post was claiming that Google was violating the GPL by using their own modified version of linux to run their web services. I contrast this to creating original content of my own, while running my own internally-distributed version of linux.
But isn't that, in the case of open software, if you believe in it, that the community at large would benefit from both a modified version of Linux, and your own original content? Read RMS's treatises on the subject. He makes it rather clear that he feels the world is better off if ALL software is not owned, and ALL software as shared. You guys are using arbitrary cases to not share software, and in doing so, misunderstand the spirit of what the GPL tries to accomplish.
And, I would also say, it may not even be appropriate to assume that use of a product inside of a corporation does not consitute distribution. After all, you are -distributing- that product within an organization. Under copywrite law, if my wife and I both want to read the same book at the same time, we have to buy two copies, and thus, since the GPL is a copyright based license, it follows that you have to comply with an open release, regardless of whether or not that person is inside the company or not.
If they sold the modified software, or gave it to a different company, then they would be breaking the GPL, and would get a call from the FSF just like anybody else
You make a lot of arguments, but, at the end of the day, you have described a situation where it is perfectly permissable to have a closed system. You can argue the letter of the GPL as much as you want, but, that leaves me, asking, if it is ok for you to have a closed system in your world of a proprietary web service based company, or a system closed because it enables a proprietary business practice, then why is it so wrong for me to have a closed system as someone who provides software for distribution? You aren't -really- in favor of open systems, as much as you are picking a particular kind of closed system that suits you best.
The whole point of open source is to promote the exchange of information based on the idea that, overall, society is genuinely better off when information is shared and when new ideas are quickly vetted and put to use, by more than one person. When you make a proprietary system, either behind a corporate veil, or behind closed source, you rob society at large of your discoveries, while at the same time you had no problem taking society's.
If you believe in -free- software, then software must be free. It must be free to be distributed, modified, and yes, free to cross those arbitrary boundaries of company. Otherwise, you aren't really benefiting society per se, you are just picking a particular business model. To wit : there's no difference between Google Search and Microsoft Windows. Either way, we have no idea what they do behind the curtains.
I mean, yeah, whatever, that's great, that, Google can distribute Linux from one department to another, but, doesn't that defeat the whole purpose? If you believe that this is ok, then, what you are really doing is creating a defacto subsidization of service providers over software distributors.
That's actually -worse-. At least if you have a copy of Word or Windows, you can, when the DMCA lawyers aren't looking, go and tinker with both and sorta figure out how things work. You can control the installation of the software, and, above all, you can at least get some kind of clue to see if they violated the GPL.
You don't get any of that when someone uses a GPL behind the shield of a web service, or behind the shield of a corporate veil. In the grand scheme of things, if you are using a piece of software to enable a business - even in the back office, you are sorta distributing it... because you are copying the benefits that it provides. And, you give the users of that software no rights at all.
Honestly, I got nuked down to zero, but the intent of OSS is that software is a globally collaborate thing. Hiding behind web services and corporate barriers is not open and not collaborative, and therefor, I stand by my statement, even if not the letter, ALL OF YOU who are using this software at work without making the derived application publicly available are violating the spirit of the GPL.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with your argument is that, you have this implicit assumption that the Congress is allowed to make whatever law it wants to. It cannot. The Constitution is not a document that says what rights we the people have. It is a document that enumerates the limited powers of the federal government. Wiretapping and intercepting the communications of an American citizen is not a power specifically granted to the Congress by the Constitution, and therefor, wiretaps and FISA courts, all of that stuff, is unconstitutional.
The Bill of Rights was NEVER intended to be the enumeration of our rights that it has been stated to be, and wrongly, by both political parties. The founding fathers were QUITE clear on this issue and Madison and Jefferson both opposed the Bill of Rights because they were rightly worried that such a statement of rights would in fact be used to undermine the Constitution, and it has. You have a right to own guns.. you have a right to be gay and get married... the government has no right to wiretap you...
The founding fathers were libertarians.
In fact, the Buran design was superior - it had no lift engines of its own and could ride on top of the real rocket. This simplifies the loads on the main rocket, allow for more cargo and makes the vehicle immune to insulation damage.
Actually, most pictures of Buran clearly show the rocket riding alongside the Energia booster, just like the Shuttle rides alongside the fuel tank.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_program
So, Buran would have had the same problems as the Shuttle, re: chunks of stuff from supercool tank falling off and bashing the ship.
It seems rather fashionable to knock the Space Shuttle - it's expensive, it was overhyped, putting the thing on the side of the tank is a design mistake, and the tiles are a maintenance nightmare. It's easy to knock the Shuttle and demand a retreat to older style systems, and I've done it. But the more and more I think about it, the more I think, junking the shuttle and the approach of the orbital space plane is a huge mistake.
We are all aware of the negatives of the shuttle, but let's look at some of the positives of this system. First and foremost, the interior of the space shuttle is -huge- compared to the interior of a Soyuz, or for that matter, any other manned space craft. The Soyuz can bring up 2 or 3 astronauts, while shuttle missions with 6 or 7 are not uncommon. The Soyuz, the Apollo and the nascent Orion are essentially ballistic nosecones with people stuffed in it. The space shuttle has a habital volume, for its crew compartment alone, of over 70 cubic meters. The soyuz, on the other hand, has a habital volume of just 7 cubic meters. Astronauts in these capsules basically sit in their chairs, but in the shuttle they can get up, move around, and do things. The space shuttle is practically a space station in its own right.
The space shuttle has a cargo bay, and, thanks to the Canadians, has a really cool mechanical arm. The cargo bay can be pressurized for even more space, or it can contain additional research facilities. Have we forgotten that the European Space Agency has flown a science station in the space shuttle cargo bay already? Have we forgotten about the repairs made to Hubble? The Space Shuttle can and has repaired other satellites, and right now, is the ONLY SYSTEM that can bring them back a largish cargo from space to earth.
Everyone seems to like knocking NASA, cheering on the likes of Burt Rutan and the X-Prize in hopes for some private sector miracle, but I've not seen any private sector initiative, from scratch, put so much as a suitcase into orbit, certainly not a man, and nothing like the space shuttle. Those fancy suborbital flights are a joke - 3000mph requires a fraction of the total kinetic energy to attain the orbital velocity of over 17000mph. Let me know when anyone, really, anyone builds something as cool as the shuttle...and the thing is, when we're back to tiny capsules for manned space flight, when the naysayers win and the shuttles are tossed off to museums, everyone is going to compare the capsule to the shuttle and say geez, by far, the shuttle was the cooler thing, and the capsule is a step backwards, not forward, and that our next space ship should have been a newer version of the shuttle, not a rehashed capsule.
We'll mop up those cowardly confederates at Antienam...
Those Japanese are too stupid to make it through the jungle at Singapore, and certainly don't have the logistics to sustained forward fleet operations...
It will be at least a decade before the Russians get the atomic bomb...
The United States has a comfortable lead in rocket technology...
A bunch of stupid arabs couldn't put together a complex terrorist attack against the USA....
We've just about got this insurgency licked...
And now..!
Thiefs are too stupid to use advanced technology....
Too bad for him because that's where the camaraderie is today. Suck holes, like Apple and M$, are more about denying user freedom than they are about technical progress or excellence. They get to use great free tools like GCC and X but don't get to pass them and other along to their users. Places like that can't be fun to work for
Oh yeah... please. Open Source really means build systems being closed because they are web based or internal to corporations, as opposed to distributed software. There's nothing in the GPL, according to many posters on \., that would require you to recontribute your changes to an open system if you are just sitting behind a firewall at MegaCorp.
It's people like you who are keeping bright females out of many industries. I think it was obvious from your post who the real c*nt is, so i guess I need not point THAT out.
I would think that people who go around saying that they are the proud owner of a beater Toyota Celica lift back would scare people out of any industry, save for perhaps meat packing and lead mining.
And losing citizens regularly to border incursions for human sacrifices is a pretty strong motivator. It tends to get people riled up.
It also gets citizens riled up when the charges are trumped up, which was also a Roman tactic...
When the Romans were victorious in war, they believed it to be because the gods favored them. They were still operating under the assumption that they were doing the gods' work, only in their case, the gods apparently wanted them to conquer their neighbors.
Being favored by a God, and doing that God's will, are two entirely different things. I mean, you could sail a boat and say the "Wind favors you", but that doesn't mean that you are doing the will of the wind, although, in the ancient mind, it would have. It's entirely different, and you really are more trying to shoehorn in your preconceptions about today's religion into the ancient mind, without really seeing it for what it is. Our whole concept of religion today is completely different...
This year's spending by candidates in the Presidential election is going to be something like 2 billion dollars. For that kind of money, the political parties could just give everyone in the USA $10, and quit wasting everyone's time with stupid commercials. Those people who are politically active don't need to see them, and those people who are not don't give a poo, so, why bother?
Erm, the Roman world was still religious before Christianity came along...
There wasn't a cleanly evolved notion of a single God that judges you for how you lived your life... and it was quite recognized that other cultures had their particular Gods. And in the ancient world, religious convinction was never really important because you could always have your own God and all the preachers were hawking their own religions. In fact, when the Romans conquered you, they never really made too big of a deal about local gods, so long as the conquerees also paid tribute to some Roman god - which, obviously, was about finance.
It was the judeo-christian concept of a single god that really did spawn religious conflict. Unlike other conquerees, the jewish state absolutely balked at paying tribute to any God other than their own, and they fought the Romans bitterly on that issue.
So, if anything you could say that monotheism is the root of all religious wars, but, the tradeoff is, the notion of a god that judges all of us for good deeds performed, injects the need to justify barbaric behavior. Sure, the jewish old testament had a lot of "god says go take the promised land", but, the thing to keep in mind, is, that other nations felt no need to make such justifications at all. They just went and did it. So, sure, we could look back at the O.T. and say, in isolation, this proves that they were barbaric, but, when you really sit back and view things in the context of the times, they were more moral by our sense, rather than less so, than their contemporaries.
Must ... resist ... making Iraq comment ...
Actually, please do. Were George Bush a Julius Caesar, he would have just said, "look, Iraq has all of this oil", and then, would have simply bombed all the water supplies and crops, killed most of the population, and sent in a bunch of guys to just grab the oil. Those Iraqi men that survived would have been sent back to the United States as slaves, and those who were in the Iraqi army would have been made to fight each other and wild animals in free for the public spectacles.
Instead, we have a mission where, yeah, behind the scenes, you know oil is a motivator, but its more about access to oil than its out and out capture, and, our soldiers are dying trying to keep the Iraqis from killing each other. Were any competent Roman alive, he would view the whole thing with so much disgust - in the Roman eyes, a civil war among the people you are trying to occupy would be a GOOD THING.
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction." Historically, some of the worst atrocities have been carried out in the name of God
That's simply not true. This charge has been parroted by the anti-religious people, and it completely ignores the historical record.
Let's compare the post Roman world to the pre-Roman world. Prior to Christianity, the world believed in conquest without justification. IF someone had more stuff than you, you sent in an army and took it. Then you brought home a bunch of loot, and were rewarded for it. Look at all the Roman celebrations of conquest - called "triumphs." In the ancient world - if the people were not of your country, it was desirable to kill them and take all of their stuff.
Julius Caesar was no bible thumper, but under him, the Romans practiced a particularly vile form of ethnic cleansing in Gaul. Imagine the outcry today if someone wrote a book bragging that they killed over a million people. That is what Caesar did, and it made him MORE popular, not less. And then there all the lesser cultures that have been wiped our destroyed. Read about emperors of various ancient empires having all of the children killed, burning cities to the ground, and so forth. It was the advent of religion and the idea that people had souls which ultimately drove the idea that everyone had some sort of natural rights.
Similarly, Islam spread as quickly as it did in the middle east because of its promises of fairness and lower taxes to the people.
Both religions, carrying with it a divine proposition against killing, act as a natural brake against social forces that otherwise glorify it.
The last time we had an organized group of people that held the ancient view of empire, we called them the most evil people that had ever lived. The NAZIs didn't kill out of a belief in God - rather, they just felt that conquest and ethnic cleansing were part of the natural order of things, and they fused ancient roman values with modern ideas about evolution to back them up. Even today, extreme racists reject christianity (particularly in American prisons), precisely because of its moral condemnation against genocide and other racial killings.
Everything moved into userspace that possibly can (Usually only threads, IPC and address spaces are left in kernel space). (This is a true microkernel.).
Windows NT 3.1 (the first version) was a fairly purish microkernal. Microkernals came from the CMU Mach Project, and, when David Cutler was tasked for first developing WNT, he turned around and got as many key mach players as he could to come work for him.
Over time, MS has been shoving things into the kernel - this is because people complain about performance. For that, to this day, there is a crowd of people that says that WNT Daytona (3.51), was really the best Windows NT - as NT 4 moved GDI into the kernel. I think now, with the new driver model under Vista, a lot of stuff is being moved out of the kernel and back into user space, bringing Vista more back to its roots.
many more people have to die for American to get their blood money??? How many American soliders have to die? How many innocent Iraqis have to die?
Nobody has to die. All we need is for Iraqis to stop killing each other, then, we can leave, with a good democratic government in place.
It's not the hardware as much as it is the application....the flat memory model is the root of all security problems on Intelish hardware...
Even the 386 had some fairly largish number of selectors that could be assigned to an application, rather than just the one with a 2GB address space. So, you could have an application get some big amount of selectors, use them for guarded arrays and so forth, and it could be much more secure than now.
Well, there's 20 trillion dollars of oil in Iraq.
This could be a random steller collision. It's gotta be rare, but still an occurance, when two stars collide. In this case, a largish black hole collides with another star, and the star gets incorporated into it.
Welcome our new 16 solar mass, inside of gigantic super universe is really a giant black hole singularity, with that weird ship from the Disney movie stuck inside, along with the tv game show host and his once she was really hot but now is sorta aging and still has trouble stacking baby blocks especially inside the 1000G black hole overlords.
In a word, no. Absolutely not. In the case of my fictional scheduler, let's say that it only works well if it can solve TSP quickly. The community at large does NOT benefit from such garbage, as looking at it is a waste of time.
In the case of my original content, you and RMS can keep your grubby, communist meathooks off of it.
LOL. So really, when the dust all settles, the open source movement is a fricking fraud, just a substitution of one kind of proprietary economy for another. Big fricking deal. I shit on the GPL.
Welcome the flim flam predicting the unpredictable coding in a bunch of random number generating overlords.
What a waste of 2 million bucks.
Thank you, Captain Obvious. The parent to my original post was claiming that Google was violating the GPL by using their own modified version of linux to run their web services. I contrast this to creating original content of my own, while running my own internally-distributed version of linux.
But isn't that, in the case of open software, if you believe in it, that the community at large would benefit from both a modified version of Linux, and your own original content? Read RMS's treatises on the subject. He makes it rather clear that he feels the world is better off if ALL software is not owned, and ALL software as shared. You guys are using arbitrary cases to not share software, and in doing so, misunderstand the spirit of what the GPL tries to accomplish.
And, I would also say, it may not even be appropriate to assume that use of a product inside of a corporation does not consitute distribution. After all, you are -distributing- that product within an organization. Under copywrite law, if my wife and I both want to read the same book at the same time, we have to buy two copies, and thus, since the GPL is a copyright based license, it follows that you have to comply with an open release, regardless of whether or not that person is inside the company or not.
If they sold the modified software, or gave it to a different company, then they would be breaking the GPL, and would get a call from the FSF just like anybody else
You make a lot of arguments, but, at the end of the day, you have described a situation where it is perfectly permissable to have a closed system. You can argue the letter of the GPL as much as you want, but, that leaves me, asking, if it is ok for you to have a closed system in your world of a proprietary web service based company, or a system closed because it enables a proprietary business practice, then why is it so wrong for me to have a closed system as someone who provides software for distribution? You aren't -really- in favor of open systems, as much as you are picking a particular kind of closed system that suits you best.
The whole point of open source is to promote the exchange of information based on the idea that, overall, society is genuinely better off when information is shared and when new ideas are quickly vetted and put to use, by more than one person. When you make a proprietary system, either behind a corporate veil, or behind closed source, you rob society at large of your discoveries, while at the same time you had no problem taking society's.
If you believe in -free- software, then software must be free. It must be free to be distributed, modified, and yes, free to cross those arbitrary boundaries of company. Otherwise, you aren't really benefiting society per se, you are just picking a particular business model. To wit : there's no difference between Google Search and Microsoft Windows. Either way, we have no idea what they do behind the curtains.
I mean, yeah, whatever, that's great, that, Google can distribute Linux from one department to another, but, doesn't that defeat the whole purpose? If you believe that this is ok, then, what you are really doing is creating a defacto subsidization of service providers over software distributors.
That's actually -worse-. At least if you have a copy of Word or Windows, you can, when the DMCA lawyers aren't looking, go and tinker with both and sorta figure out how things work. You can control the installation of the software, and, above all, you can at least get some kind of clue to see if they violated the GPL.
You don't get any of that when someone uses a GPL behind the shield of a web service, or behind the shield of a corporate veil. In the grand scheme of things, if you are using a piece of software to enable a business - even in the back office, you are sorta distributing it... because you are copying the benefits that it provides. And, you give the users of that software no rights at all.
Honestly, I got nuked down to zero, but the intent of OSS is that software is a globally collaborate thing. Hiding behind web services and corporate barriers is not open and not collaborative, and therefor, I stand by my statement, even if not the letter, ALL OF YOU who are using this software at work without making the derived application publicly available are violating the spirit of the GPL.
There's an overlord joke in there somewhere... I swear.
I for one welcome our New Sued By RIAA Global Earth Protecting Internet Inventing Al Gore Robot Overlords...
The license doesn't come into play until you distribute the software.
It's an academic distinction. No one is going to the expense to build a piece of software without distributing it.