Re:Correlation between liking Motif and license?
on
RMS On 'Open' Motif
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· Score: 1
just a note, for the longest time (and possibly still) Open Motif was required to be used by any software developer who did busisness with the government. This probably gave it much more popularity then it ever would have had otherwise.
Natural capitalisim = use nuclear breeder reactors
on
Natural Capitalism
·
· Score: 1
one good form of natural capitalisim would be the acceptance and use of breeder reactor technology. they produce no smog, a minimal amount of waste, and cost a fraction of what other power sources do in terms of dollars and environment (cutting trees, strip mining, oil transport, etc...), and I know people don't want to hear this - but the amount of lives lost per/kw hour is less than with any other power technology - bar none. yes - including radiation posining. (also if you use breeder - nuclear waste is only a fraction of what it is for regular nuclear reactors). - Even better, common use of breeder reactors would bring down the cost of water electrolisys - making the possibility of hydrogen (that do not pollute the air) based fuels commonplace.
We know that microsoft has to support open standards of postscript, otherwise their stuff wouldn't work with half the printers on the planet. This could be used as a universal viewing standard (even thoug it wouldn't be good for preserving context - like opening and modifying a spread sheet - it could still do a lot)
The whole idea behind western society is that people have peoperty rights even if no government exists at all, but people typically organize in government to secure those rights.
In that manner, copyrights and patents are a slap in the face. With them, property rights exist just because the government defines them as property rights - even though any bafoon can tell patents and copyrights have no natural limit in supply or demad.
The natural resource that has limits is peoples time and creativity, and that is the real value of things like the Linux paradigm. It undoes enough of the damage done by copyrights and patents for real and natural market forces to kick in - rather artificial limits in supply and demand created by government coersion.
Copyrights can simply not survive the onslaught of freenet, napster, and the likes. But many corporations have bet over a trillion dollars combined on leveraging copyright controlls to make vast profits. Sorta reminds me of the industrialists who thought that the industrial revolution was about using cottin gyns to expand their slave plantations to vast teritories. However, little did they know, the same technology that was bringing them the cottin gyn was also making it forever more impossible to maintain their control on the population in the form of slavery. (And I don't just mean the controll of Black people, but the controll of white people too - eg the massive restrictions that forbade whites from teaching people how to read to the massive microregulations of the northern states requireing them to return runaway slaves were becomming unworkable at the same time the cost of transporting black people was quickly becoming a fraction of what it once was.)
The consequences of this split in values forced the country into war. I don't know what will happen with intellectual property, but there is a lot at stake. There is no line dividing north and south, and if all hell does break loose it will likely be closer to anarchy - and will extend cross international boarders.
The old saying was that if you have silence on the battle fields but slaves on the plantations, then you do not have peace. This era will not have peace until the coerced imposition of copy controlls is eliminated.
If society wants proliferation of intellectual works, there needs to be some form of property attached to those works in order to guarantee remuneration. Without property the free market cannot operate.
Should the free market be allowed to proliferate in intellectual works? Well, yes, if we feel that there is a principle of scarcity at work. It just so happens that it intellectual work there is scarcity - the scarcity of skill & talent to write good books, music, software, etc.
The limited resource is the time and skill that goes into creating intellectual works - not the information itself. That's what should be measued, and thats what companies like redhat make money from without relying on a government grated monopoly that create artifical limits where no natural ones exist. The same goes for music, make money from live performance, not copyrights! Relying on copyrights is anything but minimal coersion.
I guess my disagreement is here. Software is an expression of intellectual property - it is a product, albeit intangible. Why? It has a cost of production and a a tangible 'market'. Just because it is stored as bits and bytes doesn't mean anything.
The limited comodity is the time and resources that people put behind the software, not the bits themselves. Although in the past information was somewhat linked to comodities that had limited resources, it's not anymore - and trying to apply it like we always had is just unworkable.
Note that I have nothing wrong with the idea that some people want to give software away with provisions that they remain open. My problem with the GPL and Stallman is where proprietary software is considered some sort of 'evil', and that people shouldn't have the right to it. This isn't a great evil - perhaps a misforune - but not something that even comes close (in scale or principle) to slavery.
Well if that's what you think. But surely you've noticed the striking argumentative similarities, is this just a cooincidence? EG. I have a right to own X because I put Y kind of effort into it, I have no incentive to do X without Y, The law recgonizes X as a property right, America's economic success is founded on X?
What about, X started out as a short term limited thing, and now people are trying to make it permanent? - The laws of logic are universal and constant no matter how light or extreme. What would you expect me to think, what is the logical justification for intellectual 'property' ? As one rational person to another - don't the justifications above (for IP) sound rather distastefull to you?
Give the original poster some credit: he was arguing that intellectual property right is an outdated concept.
His argument seems to be that there are some things you can not own. Humans being one of them (and hence the reference to slavery). In current law ideas is another example: you can own the expression of an idea (copyright) and the application of an idea (patent), but not the idea itself.
Thankyou for defending me. I never intended to belittle the great suffering of slavery - if anything, it implies why the African American influence in America is so profoundly important to the success of the information age in this country.
anyhow, to address your thoughts - many of the US fore fathers didn't believe that property came abuout just because some law or king ordered it so - but rather because people had certain basic rights that exist no matter what (with or without government, althought they typically organize into governments to secure those rights), and for any finite resource - there are always going to be differences of opinion on how to use it. Private property is a way to reconcile these differences in a peacefull respectfull way.
as for intellectual property - the US forefathers didn't even believe that it was a basic right at all, and had reservations about it's use, but decided to allow it as a short term incentive to share information anyhow in the tradition of english law. I don't know as much about patents, but copyrights started out as a favor granted by kings to publishers in return for not publishing critizisim of the king.
it's orgins are almost the exact opposite for those of physical property rights.
Are you seriously suggesting that the enslavement of human beings is in any way comparable to someone not letting you hack on their software?
it's not like in degree, but it's like in kind. The justifications are the same, and they are just as incorrect now as they were then.
one thing you should consider is that people have bet over a trillion dollars on the assumption that intellectual property is a basic property right. It's not. If you don't think that they will be willing to be violent or blow away the bill of rights when things hit the fan - think again. History repeats itself. Plenty of people didn't think the civil war could ever happen either, but it did. Back then, with new innovations in travel, it was becomming impossible to hold the slaves down in the south. People had bet countless amounts of money on the foundation of slavery, and when they couldn't controll it anymore all hell broke loose.
another thing you should consider - the civil war was one of the bloodiest wars in history because at the time they were just comming out with new technologies like gas and the machine gun, but didn't yet have the technologies to defend against them. Today we are on the virge of new technologies that could be just as harmfull, and yet have little means to deal with them.
Honestly, I don't know what the consequences are for upholding intellectual property, but with all that's at stake - only a fool would want to find out.
I like hot tea, and I like iced tea, but lukewarm tea I just spit ot of my mouth. This is what this guy is about - he's trying to put opened and closed source on the same playing field. But the problem is that it's a whole differnet ball game. He reminds me of earlier americans who thought that the free states could peacefully get along with the slave states. People who argued this convientely ignored the fact that slavery by it's very nature was non-neutral and abusive. The same is true with closed software specifically, and intellectual property in general.
As slavery taught us, property rights do not derive from the need for profit, the amount of effort you put into it, or the government's personal backing. They derive from physical limits on comodities and mutual respect of human beings. A point that the author of this post conviently ignores. Infact, intellectual 'property' by it's vary nature is imposive and unethical. It is claiming the right to coerce people into upholding it even if their use of it does not affect you in the slightest.
They called slavery a property right, but it wasn't about ownership at all it was about controll. Today the same is true of intellectual 'property', it's not about property at all but controll. Then they said that america's great economeny rested on slavery - but that wasn't true nor did it justify slavery. Today they say it rests on 'intellectual property' dito. They said without slave 'property' they would have no incentive to grow cotton. Today they say that without 'intellectual property' we have no incentive to create and share knowledge. They said I put money effort into slave property - therefore I am entitled to own it, today they say the same thing about intellectual property.
Of course we know how the consequences of imposing slavery as a false property right led to devistation, do we really want to experience similar consequences with newer and more modern technologies?
An AI spam filter that could trustfully remove the garbage, and for stuff it's not sure about - send back a reply with a question that only a person could answer effectively.
If owning a gun is a basic right, and a broken computer at the FBI keeps anyone from fufilling that right. Then who's to say that they just couldn't shut if off anytime they feel like forbiding peoples access to guns?
The modern day battle between MS and linux reminds me alot of the old day battles between slavery and freedom. Simply put, there were a lot of people who saw problems with slavery, but sincerely thought that the slave states could work out a peacefull co-existence with the free states. What they didn't realise was that the very nature of slavery were unreconcilable, and as the industrial revolution pressed onward, the slave states would half to become more and more intrusive to uphold their status quo.
Today there are people who think that we can find a peacfull balance with the copyright status quo, even though they can see first-hand the problems caused by intellectual 'property' enforcement. But the scenario with MS along with the conflicts with RIAA and the MPAA are just more proof that there is no reconciliation, and that especially copyrights and patents must be sone away with at all costs. I say at all costs, not because I know what the consequences are, but because consequences of other resulting conflicts like the civil war were far worse and far more evil than ayone ever expected.
since removed stuff still remains on your hard drive, you can do this to get rid of most of the xtra stuff
dd if=/dev/zero of=/filesys/GARBO sync; rm/filesys/GARBO this will temporarly fill up the fs, but get rid of most the crap. Of course this is vulnerable to taking apart the hard drive and using sensitive detection, you could try this dd if=/dev/random of=/filesys/GARBO; sync; rm GARBO a slightly less secure, but much faster and probably just as reliable: dd if=/dev/urandom of=/filesys/GARBO; sync; rm GARBO another thing I personally like to do since I don't have many important stored cookies is: cd.netscape; rm cookies ; rm history.dat ; ln -s/dev/null cookies; ln -s/dev/null history.dat this isn't really totally secure, but limits it quite a bit. another nice little one is: echo 127.0.0.1 ad.preferences.net >>/etc/hosts there are also ipchains plugins and lists with many more ad hosts out there. chattr -s filename on some implementations of linux will zero out the file when it's deleted.
As much as I hate copyrights, and sincerely believe that they are not a valid property right. I must say America is still better than most places, because who own's information can not even become a question when you are not free to have any property rights at all.
There are a lot of people who think choosing between Democracy, Communisim, and State-isim is like choosing between apples, oranges, and banannas in a grocery store. They say it's all a matter of personal preferance, but frankly it's a load of bull, the USA is still measuraly better than most places inspite of all the crap going on here because our government is less likely to shove this social crap down my throat than most european countries and most communist (or has-been communist) countries.
America's biggest failings IMHO are copyrights, patents, social security, medicade, medicare, the war on drugs, massive taxes, publicly funded educatuion (more like a baby sitting service), and their shamefull harassment of honest gun-owning citizens. But in many cases people are even more harassed in other countries, so I think other people have a lot of nerv critizing the USA, look at your own countries first.
I wouldn't count them out yet. Even though their stock is down, they have 400 million sitting in the bank just sitting there waiting to feed the lawyers, and make this a long and tedious journey. Hell at $7 per share it might just be worth it to close down the company and cash it out at a profit.
should I hate them because they're trying to take away my liberties, or should I love them because they will certainly make fools out of themselves trying to do it. Ahhh, decisions decisions......
I have a growing suspicion that the growing rank of has-been musicians pressing Napster suits are being put up to it by their labels: "Want us to sign you for three more records that won't sell like the newer acts? No way...unless maybe you wanted to help us with this Napsta thing."
It may be that sales of their music are in decline, and they're just to egotastical to admit that their a has-been.
We could also say that the industrial revolution got where it is today because it was subsidized by large slave plantations that bought cottin gyn's - but only an idiot would believe that we need slaves to progress forward into the future. All the fragmentation and other problems government overcame were caused by a government regulation called COPYRIGHTS, that gave companies massive incentive to fragment and made it so that the only decent place to do computer science R&D was in a university/government environment. Open source's real value is not that the source is open, but that it undoes much of the damage cuased by copyrights. Notice that R&D is moving back to the private sector in software now because of it's success. It is really a serious victory for libertarian types like me.
Yes much. So tell me, do you believe that Harriot Tubman was a coward because the freed slaves thru the underground rail-road instead of doing it infront of their face? I guess better a coward than an idiot, huh?
Basicly, if I copy something - say an mp3, use it, even put it on a disk and sell it. This does not violate anybody, but there are many who say that an mp3 is a property right. And so if I copy or especially sell it, they go through great lengths to make me suffer for that. It is simply ouf of bounds, copyrights are not a property right, and infact have led to major problems like Microsoft abuses, like the RIAA, like the MPAA abuses. To us it's about controll, but to them it is about copyrights - and they are just bringing this belief to it's logical conclusion. ESR, who happens to be an expert on the foundation of property right surely must know that they are not a true property right in any sense of libertarian natural law philosophy, yet he continues to expouse it like it is. Why??
I don't know about the BSD, but the specific purpose of the GPL was to counter wrongdoings caused by copyrights. If they didn't exist the externalities like the GPL would never had been necissary.
Oh and I forgot to mention this in my last post, but do you call black people niggers? If not than please don't call people who copy stuff pirates. It's simply a calice and misrepresentitive use of the word. Call it what it is, illegal copying. Copying is not inherently evil, but piracy is. Piracy is where you board a ship, beat the hell out of people, and kill them. OK. It has nothing to do with copying, illegal or otherwise. And you accuse me of stooping to low levels???
Nobody is trying to trivalize the harm done by slavery. Most rational people already assume that slavery was far more oppressive, harmfull, and evil than intellectual property. But the simple fact is, that like slavery, intellectual property isn't a property right, but a controll on human behavior. And the arguments being used to justify intellectual property have amazing parallel to the arguments we have already suffered through before that justified and upheld slavery. If anything, it should show us not that African American suffering is being trivialized, but rather how the African American culture holds some values that are essential to the future of our society in the information age.
Slashdot Mirror
just a note, for the longest time (and possibly still) Open Motif was required to be used by any software developer who did busisness with the government. This probably gave it much more popularity then it ever would have had otherwise.
one good form of natural capitalisim would be the acceptance and use of breeder reactor technology. they produce no smog, a minimal amount of waste, and cost a fraction of what other power sources do in terms of dollars and environment (cutting trees, strip mining, oil transport, etc...), and I know people don't want to hear this - but the amount of lives lost per/kw hour is less than with any other power technology - bar none. yes - including radiation posining. (also if you use breeder - nuclear waste is only a fraction of what it is for regular nuclear reactors). - Even better, common use of breeder reactors would bring down the cost of water electrolisys - making the possibility of hydrogen (that do not pollute the air) based fuels commonplace.
We know that microsoft has to support open standards of postscript, otherwise their stuff wouldn't work with half the printers on the planet. This could be used as a universal viewing standard (even thoug it wouldn't be good for preserving context - like opening and modifying a spread sheet - it could still do a lot)
The whole idea behind western society is that people have peoperty rights even if no government exists at all, but people typically organize in government to secure those rights.
In that manner, copyrights and patents are a slap in the face. With them, property rights exist just because the government defines them as property rights - even though any bafoon can tell patents and copyrights have no natural limit in supply or demad.
The natural resource that has limits is peoples time and creativity, and that is the real value of things like the Linux paradigm. It undoes enough of the damage done by copyrights and patents for real and natural market forces to kick in - rather artificial limits in supply and demand created by government coersion.
Copyrights can simply not survive the onslaught of freenet, napster, and the likes. But many corporations have bet over a trillion dollars combined on leveraging copyright controlls to make vast profits. Sorta reminds me of the industrialists who thought that the industrial revolution was about using cottin gyns to expand their slave plantations to vast teritories. However, little did they know, the same technology that was bringing them the cottin gyn was also making it forever more impossible to maintain their control on the population in the form of slavery. (And I don't just mean the controll of Black people, but the controll of white people too - eg the massive restrictions that forbade whites from teaching people how to read to the massive microregulations of the northern states requireing them to return runaway slaves were becomming unworkable at the same time the cost of transporting black people was quickly becoming a fraction of what it once was.)
The consequences of this split in values forced the country into war. I don't know what will happen with intellectual property, but there is a lot at stake. There is no line dividing north and south, and if all hell does break loose it will likely be closer to anarchy - and will extend cross international boarders.
The old saying was that if you have silence on the battle fields but slaves on the plantations, then you do not have peace. This era will not have peace until the coerced imposition of copy controlls is eliminated.
Should the free market be allowed to proliferate in intellectual works? Well, yes, if we feel that there is a principle of scarcity at work. It just so happens that it intellectual work there is scarcity - the scarcity of skill & talent to write good books, music, software, etc.
The limited resource is the time and skill that goes into creating intellectual works - not the information itself. That's what should be measued, and thats what companies like redhat make money from without relying on a government grated monopoly that create artifical limits where no natural ones exist. The same goes for music, make money from live performance, not copyrights! Relying on copyrights is anything but minimal coersion.
The limited comodity is the time and resources that people put behind the software, not the bits themselves. Although in the past information was somewhat linked to comodities that had limited resources, it's not anymore - and trying to apply it like we always had is just unworkable.
Note that I have nothing wrong with the idea that some people want to give software away with provisions that they remain open. My problem with the GPL and Stallman is where proprietary software is considered some sort of 'evil', and that people shouldn't have the right to it. This isn't a great evil - perhaps a misforune - but not something that even comes close (in scale or principle) to slavery.
Well if that's what you think. But surely you've noticed the striking argumentative similarities, is this just a cooincidence? EG. I have a right to own X because I put Y kind of effort into it, I have no incentive to do X without Y, The law recgonizes X as a property right, America's economic success is founded on X?
What about, X started out as a short term limited thing, and now people are trying to make it permanent? - The laws of logic are universal and constant no matter how light or extreme. What would you expect me to think, what is the logical justification for intellectual 'property' ? As one rational person to another - don't the justifications above (for IP) sound rather distastefull to you?
His argument seems to be that there are some things you can not own. Humans being one of them (and hence the reference to slavery). In current law ideas is another example: you can own the expression of an idea (copyright) and the application of an idea (patent), but not the idea itself.
Thankyou for defending me. I never intended to belittle the great suffering of slavery - if anything, it implies why the African American influence in America is so profoundly important to the success of the information age in this country.
anyhow, to address your thoughts - many of the US fore fathers didn't believe that property came abuout just because some law or king ordered it so - but rather because people had certain basic rights that exist no matter what (with or without government, althought they typically organize into governments to secure those rights), and for any finite resource - there are always going to be differences of opinion on how to use it. Private property is a way to reconcile these differences in a peacefull respectfull way.
as for intellectual property - the US forefathers didn't even believe that it was a basic right at all, and had reservations about it's use, but decided to allow it as a short term incentive to share information anyhow in the tradition of english law. I don't know as much about patents, but copyrights started out as a favor granted by kings to publishers in return for not publishing critizisim of the king.
it's orgins are almost the exact opposite for those of physical property rights.
it's not like in degree, but it's like in kind. The justifications are the same, and they are just as incorrect now as they were then.
one thing you should consider is that people have bet over a trillion dollars on the assumption that intellectual property is a basic property right. It's not. If you don't think that they will be willing to be violent or blow away the bill of rights when things hit the fan - think again. History repeats itself. Plenty of people didn't think the civil war could ever happen either, but it did. Back then, with new innovations in travel, it was becomming impossible to hold the slaves down in the south. People had bet countless amounts of money on the foundation of slavery, and when they couldn't controll it anymore all hell broke loose.
another thing you should consider - the civil war was one of the bloodiest wars in history because at the time they were just comming out with new technologies like gas and the machine gun, but didn't yet have the technologies to defend against them. Today we are on the virge of new technologies that could be just as harmfull, and yet have little means to deal with them.
Honestly, I don't know what the consequences are for upholding intellectual property, but with all that's at stake - only a fool would want to find out.
I like hot tea, and I like iced tea, but lukewarm tea I just spit ot of my mouth. This is what this guy is about - he's trying to put opened and closed source on the same playing field. But the problem is that it's a whole differnet ball game. He reminds me of earlier americans who thought that the free states could peacefully get along with the slave states. People who argued this convientely ignored the fact that slavery by it's very nature was non-neutral and abusive. The same is true with closed software specifically, and intellectual property in general.
As slavery taught us, property rights do not derive from the need for profit, the amount of effort you put into it, or the government's personal backing. They derive from physical limits on comodities and mutual respect of human beings. A point that the author of this post conviently ignores. Infact, intellectual 'property' by it's vary nature is imposive and unethical. It is claiming the right to coerce people into upholding it even if their use of it does not affect you in the slightest.
If he wanted a moral argument, there it is.
They called slavery a property right, but it wasn't about ownership at all it was about controll. Today the same is true of intellectual 'property', it's not about property at all but controll. Then they said that america's great economeny rested on slavery - but that wasn't true nor did it justify slavery. Today they say it rests on 'intellectual property' dito. They said without slave 'property' they would have no incentive to grow cotton. Today they say that without 'intellectual property' we have no incentive to create and share knowledge. They said I put money effort into slave property - therefore I am entitled to own it, today they say the same thing about intellectual property.
Of course we know how the consequences of imposing slavery as a false property right led to devistation, do we really want to experience similar consequences with newer and more modern technologies?
An AI spam filter that could trustfully remove the garbage, and for stuff it's not sure about - send back a reply with a question that only a person could answer effectively.
If owning a gun is a basic right, and a broken computer at the FBI keeps anyone from fufilling that right. Then who's to say that they just couldn't shut if off anytime they feel like forbiding peoples access to guns?
Today there are people who think that we can find a peacfull balance with the copyright status quo, even though they can see first-hand the problems caused by intellectual 'property' enforcement. But the scenario with MS along with the conflicts with RIAA and the MPAA are just more proof that there is no reconciliation, and that especially copyrights and patents must be sone away with at all costs. I say at all costs, not because I know what the consequences are, but because consequences of other resulting conflicts like the civil war were far worse and far more evil than ayone ever expected.
since removed stuff still remains on your hard drive, you can do this to get rid of most of the xtra stuff
/filesys/GARBO .netscape; rm cookies ; rm history.dat ; ln -s /dev/null cookies; ln -s /dev/null history.dat /etc/hosts
dd if=/dev/zero of=/filesys/GARBO
sync; rm
this will temporarly fill up the fs, but get rid of most the crap.
Of course this is vulnerable to taking apart the hard drive and using sensitive detection, you could try this
dd if=/dev/random of=/filesys/GARBO; sync; rm GARBO
a slightly less secure, but much faster and probably just as reliable:
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/filesys/GARBO; sync; rm GARBO
another thing I personally like to do since I don't have many important stored cookies is:
cd
this isn't really totally secure, but limits it quite a bit.
another nice little one is:
echo 127.0.0.1 ad.preferences.net >>
there are also ipchains plugins and lists with many more ad hosts out there.
chattr -s filename on some implementations of linux will zero out the file when it's deleted.
As much as I hate copyrights, and sincerely believe that they are not a valid property right. I must say America is still better than most places, because who own's information can not even become a question when you are not free to have any property rights at all.
There are a lot of people who think choosing between Democracy, Communisim, and State-isim is like choosing between apples, oranges, and banannas in a grocery store. They say it's all a matter of personal preferance, but frankly it's a load of bull, the USA is still measuraly better than most places inspite of all the crap going on here because our government is less likely to shove this social crap down my throat than most european countries and most communist (or has-been communist) countries.
America's biggest failings IMHO are copyrights, patents, social security, medicade, medicare, the war on drugs, massive taxes, publicly funded educatuion (more like a baby sitting service), and their shamefull harassment of honest gun-owning citizens. But in many cases people are even more harassed in other countries, so I think other people have a lot of nerv critizing the USA, look at your own countries first.
I wouldn't count them out yet. Even though their stock is down, they have 400 million sitting in the bank just sitting there waiting to feed the lawyers, and make this a long and tedious journey. Hell at $7 per share it might just be worth it to close down the company and cash it out at a profit.
should I hate them because they're trying to take away my liberties, or should I love them because they will certainly make fools out of themselves trying to do it. Ahhh, decisions decisions ......
It may be that sales of their music are in decline, and they're just to egotastical to admit that their a has-been.
We could also say that the industrial revolution got where it is today because it was subsidized by large slave plantations that bought cottin gyn's - but only an idiot would believe that we need slaves to progress forward into the future. All the fragmentation and other problems government overcame were caused by a government regulation called COPYRIGHTS, that gave companies massive incentive to fragment and made it so that the only decent place to do computer science R&D was in a university/government environment. Open source's real value is not that the source is open, but that it undoes much of the damage cuased by copyrights. Notice that R&D is moving back to the private sector in software now because of it's success. It is really a serious victory for libertarian types like me.
Yes much.
So tell me, do you believe that Harriot Tubman was a coward because the freed slaves thru the underground rail-road instead of doing it infront of their face? I guess better a coward than an idiot, huh?
Basicly, if I copy something - say an mp3, use it, even put it on a disk and sell it. This does not violate anybody, but there are many who say that an mp3 is a property right. And so if I copy or especially sell it, they go through great lengths to make me suffer for that. It is simply ouf of bounds, copyrights are not a property right, and infact have led to major problems like Microsoft abuses, like the RIAA, like the MPAA abuses. To us it's about controll, but to them it is about copyrights - and they are just bringing this belief to it's logical conclusion. ESR, who happens to be an expert on the foundation of property right surely must know that they are not a true property right in any sense of libertarian natural law philosophy, yet he continues to expouse it like it is. Why??
I don't know about the BSD, but the specific purpose of the GPL was to counter wrongdoings caused by copyrights. If they didn't exist the externalities like the GPL would never had been necissary.
Oh and I forgot to mention this in my last post, but do you call black people niggers? If not than please don't call people who copy stuff pirates. It's simply a calice and misrepresentitive use of the word. Call it what it is, illegal copying. Copying is not inherently evil, but piracy is. Piracy is where you board a ship, beat the hell out of people, and kill them. OK. It has nothing to do with copying, illegal or otherwise. And you accuse me of stooping to low levels???
Nobody is trying to trivalize the harm done by slavery. Most rational people already assume that slavery was far more oppressive, harmfull, and evil than intellectual property. But the simple fact is, that like slavery, intellectual property isn't a property right, but a controll on human behavior. And the arguments being used to justify intellectual property have amazing parallel to the arguments we have already suffered through before that justified and upheld slavery. If anything, it should show us not that African American suffering is being trivialized, but rather how the African American culture holds some values that are essential to the future of our society in the information age.