ESR's political views sometimes make it hard for him to understand certain situations, in this case the roles of state and law in deals.
His retorical question is: Would RMS support a law that made proprietary software licenses illegal?
The first problem with the question is that it is pretty far out, the first goal would be to soften copyright law. Copyright law restricts freedom by removing certain freedoms (to copy) without consent of the affected people. I never agreed that I can't use Mickey Mouse in my own work, nonetheless, so it isn't even a deal. No freedom (under any name) would be taken away by removing copyright law. It does have a set of different consequences I would dislike, though.
However, that is not his purpose either. His purpose is to paint RMS and his supporters as lunatics who will use guns to prevent people from making deal/agreements to their mutual benefits.
To do this, we enter the area of deals and contract law. A contract can be seen as a situation where two parties volunteerely give up a limited amount of their freedom, to the benefit of both parties. In an emplyement contract the employee give up some of his freedom to spend his time as he will, and the employer give up some of his freedom to spend his money as he want.
From a metalegal perspective, there are basically three types of agreements.
1. Legal agreements. These are agreements that are guarenteed by the state, through contract law. If the contract is violated, the state will intervene. Without a strong state to guarentee it, you would only be able to make agreements with people you for some reason would know would fullfil it. It would be impossible to make contracts with strangers, and progresss would slow much down.
Libertarians doesn't like the idea of the state as a necessary catalysator for progress, since the state is Evil in Libertarian dogma. So instead they tend to think of this type of contracts as some kind of natural force.
2. Contracts which the state will not guarentee. When a certain kind of contract is outlawed, it typically just really mean that the state will not put its weight behind them. This is ideally contracts which is known to cause trouble, for example a contract to sell your labour for the rest of your life, or a contract in which you promise not to take backup of a computer program.
You are still allowed to sign as many of these contracts you want, you just can't rely on the state to enforce them.
Libertarians tend to ignore this kind of deals, as it makes them uncomfortingly aware of the role played by the state in the first kind of deals.
3. Deals that are really illegal, ideally because they (substancially) damage a third party. Anti-trust law is the prime example of that. If you have a single competitor in a specific market, you are not allowed to make an agreement with him about dividing the market between you. Such a deal would benefit both of you, by bypassing the market forces and allowing higher prices.
Libertarians _hate_ this kind of laws. They see it as the evil state comming with guns[1] and denying the small man (often in the form of a large company) his freedom to make deals with whomever he pleases.
The second dogma of the libertarians is "the market is good". The apperent contradiction with the laws made to protect the market is solved by saying "only the state can stop a free market".
When ESR starts speculating about how free software fanatics would stop proprietary software licenses, he of course ignore the possibility of making it a "kind #2" deal (i.e. deals not backed by the law). Even though these are common, and fits the problem very well, he goes directly to the possibility "kind #3" deals, which are much easier for a Libertarian to relate to. Kind #3 deals are "men with guns", kind #2 deals are the state confusingly staying out of matters between privates.
[1] Even if the state rarely _literally_ bring guns in this kind of cases, they _could_ bring guns if, say, one company kept all their money in cash, and used their constitutional right to defend it with guns. _Then_ the state would bring guns, so the threat is there in the Libertarian mind. And the rhetorics is great.
Most FSF projects were started by volunteers, in the case of gcc, gdb and Emacs the volunteer was RMS.
But glibc was, as far as I understand, a project where Roland McGrath was _hired_ by the FSF to write a C runtime library for use in GNU (and meanwhile in order to provide GCC with an ANSI C compliant library on proprietary Unixen. The first glibc target was SunOS).
This makes it as much a GNU project as anything can be. Owned by and developed for GNU, in the start for FSF money.
UD should of course have thanks for accepting the BURDEN of maintainership, his technical and political contributions to the project (convincing the Linux developers to use the official branch of the GNU library instead of thei own ancient branch is no major feat).
However, if he somehow have forgotten that he was appointed to and have worked for years on a GNU project, I think it is best if he leave at least the political part of the job to someone else, for example a Steering Comittee (with people like Roland McGrath, the original author).
You (I assume you are Geoff Kuenning) leave out a lot from that story...
1. The version wasn't merely not "GPL-compatible", it wasn't open software either. Specifically, it did not allow for-profit distribution alone.
2. People suggested removing these restrictions to you was vicioucly flamed, you wouldn't even accept that these restriction existed. This might be the cause of the "misunderstanding".
3. ispell 4.0 was not derived from your code. It was derived from the code of _original_ ispell author (i.e. not you), who had assigned his code to the FSF. Specifically, it lacked all the i18n features you had added.
It is true that FSF withdraw[1] ispell 4.0 as soon as ispell 3.x was released under a free software license. I think that makes it pretty clear that the action was in defence for free software, not an attempt to increase their control.
[1] As far as one can withdraw alreeady released free software -- ispell 4.0 still have DOS/Windows users as version 3 was much harder to port to DOS. This, b.t.w. is still a cause of confusion about what version is newer. Something that could easily be solved by releasing a version 3 derivative as version 5. That would require someone to be more pragmatic and less determined about whose fault it is, though.
> We end up with the same or more numbers of phds
> and master students per capita.
Really? You may be right, I have no numbers, but the places in US I have been most of the Ph.D. students have been Asian or European. I sometimes think that the only reason USA hasn't become a third world country is the amazing number of bright minds they import from the rest of the world. They don't seem to produce many of their own.
Of course, this is in science and technology only. Maybe USA produce the worlds finest doctors and lawyers.
I wonder how much come from the "old" Red Hat, and how much come from the always profitable Cygnus Solutions. Buying profitable companies is one way to become profitable.
Of the wins listed, about half would be typical Cygnus Solutions contracts (GNUPro), and half would be typical Red Hat contracts (Linux). A few could be either or neither, maybe made possible by the merger.
I don't know about PGCC, but since GCC 3.0 has a brand new ia32 backend with focus on Pentium II performance, chances are that PGCC is no longer relevant.
In short, the 2.9x line (which Redhat admittedly bastardized a bit by grabbing a snapshot and calling it 2.96) will still be fixed for bugs.
Acutally, Red Hat GCC 2.96 is much closer to GCC 3.0 than to GCC 2.95.3. Except for the C++ library, which is basically the same as in 2.95.3. This put Red Hat in an odd situation, they will have to track the 3.0 compiler and the 2.95 library, if they want to remain compatible with their own 2.96 release. However, they employ many of the best GCC engineers, so if anyone can do it, it will be them.
I'd prefer them to swicth to 3.0 at the earliest possible location, though.
Programs that uses iostreams will tend to be slower, because of the new (ISO mandated) template based iostream implementation. In particular, a "hello world" program will tend to compile much slower, since it spend most of its time in the header.
Other programs can compile much faster or much slower, depending on what the bottleneck used to be, and what features they excersize.
There are several implementations of precompiled headers for GCC, which are likely to give a large boost in compilation speed when one of them is selected for inclusion.
"a repeat of the gcc-2.96-REDHAT fiasco?"
on
GCC 3.0 Released
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· Score: 3
Yes. That is the point of the "gcc 2.96 Red Hat fiasco". The C++ library and ABI has been changed in 3.0 in order to conform to the C++ standard, as well as new cross-compiler C++ ABI standard, and to be much more efficient. The problem with the Red Hat release was that it was released half-way through that process, so it would be both forward and backward incompatible with the official FSF releases.
In most other ways, the unofficial gcc 2.96 is an improvement over 2.95, and for C code compatibility is as good as between any two releases of gcc. Mostly GCC 2.96 catches a few bugs that 2.95 failed to notice.
In fact, the name cyGNUs was chosen to emphasize the connection.
It wasn't a public company, so I only have the word of the owners that they made money. And they did start adding som few non-free products. I doubt they made any significant money off these products, though.
Gift economies only works when the gifts are predominately given to people who are part of the gift economy.
I agree that the BSDL is a wonderful and altrustic way to make a gift to everybody, however, as a sustainable economy, I have more faith in the GPL. Than again, even if the BSDL fails to create a sustainable gift economy of its own, it hasn't failed. It wasn't the goal of the license.
RMS: Howdy neighbor, how about I letting you borrow my lawn mover, and you letting me borrow your hedge cutter? It is up to you.
Jay: That is not true sharing! That is sharing at gunpoint! It is theft! It is a virus! You must let me use your lawn mover with no conditions attached, you radical leftist!
Sigh.
Anyway, Hercules is under the QPL, another copyleft (i.e. "viral") license. Jay doesn't care about the issues, he is just carrying an old grudge towards RMS for targetting GNU towards 32 bit platforms with at least 1 MB of flat memmory, at a time where most people (including Jay) could only afford PC AT class machines (80286, segmented memory).
I.e. all the character sets *in common use* in Asia today, maps into a subset of Unicode. They even map into the 16 bit subset, but overlap in a way that make slightly different characters from different character sets share the same code point. That is why an extended version of Unicode is used, so Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters have different codepoints.
Unicode does not contain all characters ever used, for example it does not contain the Nordic runes. These are not used today except by scolars, who will need special software (most likely using the "reserved to the user" part of Unicode). The same is true for many ancient Asian characters.
Qt is good, but its advocates are not
on
Qt for Mac
·
· Score: 2
How can an nearly contentless flame get a score 5?
Someone state that he cannot use Qt, because he write shareware, and the Qt license options doesn't have an option for shareware authors. And that you somehow interpret as "someone desperate to complain about the product"? Gee, if being unable to use a product because of the license isn't a valid complaint, what in your book is. He wasn't even saying TT was evil or anything, just that they apparently wasn't interested in doing business with people like him, and that maybe they should be.
Re:Possibly for somethings, not all though.
on
Qt for Mac
·
· Score: 2
Nope, he want a price strategy that allows Troll Tech to make "a little" money on developers that make "a little" money a program that uses Qt.
Slashdot Mirror
ESR's political views sometimes make it hard for him to understand certain situations, in this case the roles of state and law in deals.
His retorical question is: Would RMS support a law that made proprietary software licenses illegal?
The first problem with the question is that it is pretty far out, the first goal would be to soften copyright law. Copyright law restricts freedom by removing certain freedoms (to copy) without consent of the affected people. I never agreed that I can't use Mickey Mouse in my own work, nonetheless, so it isn't even a deal. No freedom (under any name) would be taken away by removing copyright law. It does have a set of different consequences I would dislike, though.
However, that is not his purpose either. His purpose is to paint RMS and his supporters as lunatics who will use guns to prevent people from making deal/agreements to their mutual benefits.
To do this, we enter the area of deals and contract law. A contract can be seen as a situation where two parties volunteerely give up a limited amount of their freedom, to the benefit of both parties. In an emplyement contract the employee give up some of his freedom to spend his time as he will, and the employer give up some of his freedom to spend his money as he want.
From a metalegal perspective, there are basically three types of agreements.
1. Legal agreements. These are agreements that are guarenteed by the state, through contract law. If the contract is violated, the state will intervene. Without a strong state to guarentee it, you would only be able to make agreements with people you for some reason would know would fullfil it. It would be impossible to make contracts with strangers, and progresss would slow much down.
Libertarians doesn't like the idea of the state as a necessary catalysator for progress, since the state is Evil in Libertarian dogma. So instead they tend to think of this type of contracts as some kind of natural force.
2. Contracts which the state will not guarentee. When a certain kind of contract is outlawed, it typically just really mean that the state will not put its weight behind them. This is ideally contracts which is known to cause trouble, for example a contract to sell your labour for the rest of your life, or a contract in which you promise not to take backup of a computer program.
You are still allowed to sign as many of these contracts you want, you just can't rely on the state to enforce them.
Libertarians tend to ignore this kind of deals, as it makes them uncomfortingly aware of the role played by the state in the first kind of deals.
3. Deals that are really illegal, ideally because they (substancially) damage a third party. Anti-trust law is the prime example of that. If you have a single competitor in a specific market, you are not allowed to make an agreement with him about dividing the market between you. Such a deal would benefit both of you, by bypassing the market forces and allowing higher prices.
Libertarians _hate_ this kind of laws. They see it as the evil state comming with guns[1] and denying the small man (often in the form of a large company) his freedom to make deals with whomever he pleases.
The second dogma of the libertarians is "the market is good". The apperent contradiction with the laws made to protect the market is solved by saying "only the state can stop a free market".
When ESR starts speculating about how free software fanatics would stop proprietary software licenses, he of course ignore the possibility of making it a "kind #2" deal (i.e. deals not backed by the law). Even though these are common, and fits the problem very well, he goes directly to the possibility "kind #3" deals, which are much easier for a Libertarian to relate to. Kind #3 deals are "men with guns", kind #2 deals are the state confusingly staying out of matters between privates.
[1] Even if the state rarely _literally_ bring guns in this kind of cases, they _could_ bring guns if, say, one company kept all their money in cash, and used their constitutional right to defend it with guns. _Then_ the state would bring guns, so the threat is there in the Libertarian mind. And the rhetorics is great.
Most FSF projects were started by volunteers, in the case of gcc, gdb and Emacs the volunteer was RMS.
But glibc was, as far as I understand, a project where Roland McGrath was _hired_ by the FSF to write a C runtime library for use in GNU (and meanwhile in order to provide GCC with an ANSI C compliant library on proprietary Unixen. The first glibc target was SunOS).
This makes it as much a GNU project as anything can be. Owned by and developed for GNU, in the start for FSF money.
UD should of course have thanks for accepting the BURDEN of maintainership, his technical and political contributions to the project (convincing the Linux developers to use the official branch of the GNU library instead of thei own ancient branch is no major feat).
However, if he somehow have forgotten that he was appointed to and have worked for years on a GNU project, I think it is best if he leave at least the political part of the job to someone else, for example a Steering Comittee (with people like Roland McGrath, the original author).
You (I assume you are Geoff Kuenning) leave out a lot from that story...
1. The version wasn't merely not "GPL-compatible", it wasn't open software either. Specifically, it did not allow for-profit distribution alone.
2. People suggested removing these restrictions to you was vicioucly flamed, you wouldn't even accept that these restriction existed. This might be the cause of the "misunderstanding".
3. ispell 4.0 was not derived from your code. It was derived from the code of _original_ ispell author (i.e. not you), who had assigned his code to the FSF. Specifically, it lacked all the i18n features you had added.
It is true that FSF withdraw[1] ispell 4.0 as soon as ispell 3.x was released under a free software license. I think that makes it pretty clear that the action was in defence for free software, not an attempt to increase their control.
[1] As far as one can withdraw alreeady released free software -- ispell 4.0 still have DOS/Windows users as version 3 was much harder to port to DOS. This, b.t.w. is still a cause of confusion about what version is newer. Something that could easily be solved by releasing a version 3 derivative as version 5. That would require someone to be more pragmatic and less determined about whose fault it is, though.
> We end up with the same or more numbers of phds
> and master students per capita.
Really? You may be right, I have no numbers, but the places in US I have been most of the Ph.D. students have been Asian or European. I sometimes think that the only reason USA hasn't become a third world country is the amazing number of bright minds they import from the rest of the world. They don't seem to produce many of their own.
Of course, this is in science and technology only. Maybe USA produce the worlds finest doctors and lawyers.
The foot test is already done.
I wonder how much come from the "old" Red Hat, and how much come from the always profitable Cygnus Solutions. Buying profitable companies is one way to become profitable.
Of the wins listed, about half would be typical Cygnus Solutions contracts (GNUPro), and half would be typical Red Hat contracts (Linux). A few could be either or neither, maybe made possible by the merger.
I believe GCC 2.8 was only fully merged back into EGCS in GCC 3.0.
... but I'm not sure they implement it exactly like GCC.
It is the only major C++ fature not yet implemented.
GCC is basically a new name for EGCS.
I don't know about PGCC, but since GCC 3.0 has a brand new ia32 backend with focus on Pentium II performance, chances are that PGCC is no longer relevant.
Which means you must compile your C++ applications with the same GCC version as your C++ libraries.
It also compiles with GCC, with a warning. The code used to be correct, but the standard commite changed the rules.
I'd prefer them to swicth to 3.0 at the earliest possible location, though.
Programs that uses iostreams will tend to be slower, because of the new (ISO mandated) template based iostream implementation. In particular, a "hello world" program will tend to compile much slower, since it spend most of its time in the header.
Other programs can compile much faster or much slower, depending on what the bottleneck used to be, and what features they excersize.
There are several implementations of precompiled headers for GCC, which are likely to give a large boost in compilation speed when one of them is selected for inclusion.
Yes. That is the point of the "gcc 2.96 Red Hat fiasco". The C++ library and ABI has been changed in 3.0 in order to conform to the C++ standard, as well as new cross-compiler C++ ABI standard, and to be much more efficient. The problem with the Red Hat release was that it was released half-way through that process, so it would be both forward and backward incompatible with the official FSF releases.
In most other ways, the unofficial gcc 2.96 is an improvement over 2.95, and for C code compatibility is as good as between any two releases of gcc. Mostly GCC 2.96 catches a few bugs that 2.95 failed to notice.
> You can't argue my points, so you resort to ad
> hominem.
True, I can't argue your points, but that is because you don't have any points.
That's why I'm making fun of you instead.
In fact, the name cyGNUs was chosen to emphasize the connection.
It wasn't a public company, so I only have the word of the owners that they made money. And they did start adding som few non-free products. I doubt they made any significant money off these products, though.
Gift economies only works when the gifts are predominately given to people who are part of the gift economy.
I agree that the BSDL is a wonderful and altrustic way to make a gift to everybody, however, as a sustainable economy, I have more faith in the GPL. Than again, even if the BSDL fails to create a sustainable gift economy of its own, it hasn't failed. It wasn't the goal of the license.
RMS: Howdy neighbor, how about I letting you borrow my lawn mover, and you letting me borrow your hedge cutter? It is up to you.
Jay: That is not true sharing! That is sharing at gunpoint! It is theft! It is a virus! You must let me use your lawn mover with no conditions attached, you radical leftist!
Sigh.
Anyway, Hercules is under the QPL, another copyleft (i.e. "viral") license. Jay doesn't care about the issues, he is just carrying an old grudge towards RMS for targetting GNU towards 32 bit platforms with at least 1 MB of flat memmory, at a time where most people (including Jay) could only afford PC AT class machines (80286, segmented memory).
And it is the first GCC (maybe the first released compiler) to do so, so I'd say GCC 3.0 has a lot to do with it.
Just FYI. From the mailing list, I believe it could happen.
Of course Lithuania is not as rich as, say, Sweden, but I'm surprised to hear it classified as a development country.
I.e. all the character sets *in common use* in Asia today, maps into a subset of Unicode. They even map into the 16 bit subset, but overlap in a way that make slightly different characters from different character sets share the same code point. That is why an extended version of Unicode is used, so Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters have different codepoints.
Unicode does not contain all characters ever used, for example it does not contain the Nordic runes. These are not used today except by scolars, who will need special software (most likely using the "reserved to the user" part of Unicode). The same is true for many ancient Asian characters.
How can an nearly contentless flame get a score 5?
Someone state that he cannot use Qt, because he write shareware, and the Qt license options doesn't have an option for shareware authors. And that you somehow interpret as "someone desperate to complain about the product"? Gee, if being unable to use a product because of the license isn't a valid complaint, what in your book is. He wasn't even saying TT was evil or anything, just that they apparently wasn't interested in doing business with people like him, and that maybe they should be.
Nope, he want a price strategy that allows Troll Tech to make "a little" money on developers that make "a little" money a program that uses Qt.