Instead of continuing to use the old, limited, patent-encumbered GIF format, you should consider using PNG. PNG is a free (speech) format which offers the benefits of GIF without the drawbacks.
Like GIF, PNG offers lossless compression: you won't find the ugly square artifacts you get in JPEGs. However, PNG also offers a wider range of bit depths (1-bit through 24-bit), an alpha channel, and gamma information.
(For those who don't know: An alpha channel is a fourth number attached to each pixel, alongside the red, green, and blue values. It tells how transparent that pixel is to be considered. Most browsers and graphics tools don't support alpha yet, but they will. Gamma information helps different computers, with different display characteristics, render an image in the same real-world colors.)
This is the text of an email I sent to the president of Amiga. Please pardon the line length formatting; sadly, Slashdot doesn't yet have terribly good tools for fixing it.
Mr. Collas --
I read with great interest your announcement that future versions of the Amiga operating environment will be based on the Linux kernel. The importance of the Amiga system as an alternative operating system is well known among users of Linux-based systems. As a Debian GNU/Linux system administrator with some knowledge of the benefits of the Amiga, I can only expect that the two will complement each other nicely.
As you may already know, the Linux kernel is released under the GNU General Public License, a "free software" license intended to ensure that free software remains free --- that nobody can turn a piece of free software into proprietary software without the author's permission. One of the provisions of the GPL states that if you take a piece of GPLed software, modify it, and release it, you are legally required to release it under the GPL itself, and to provide your users the source code of your modifications upon request. That is, "derivative works" of GPLed code must themselves be GPLed and released with source available.
Because the Linux kernel, and most of the common utilities that form the rest of Linux-based systems, are GPLed, this means that if Amiga were to make customizations to them for use in the Amiga OE, those customizations would have to be released back to the community.
The best way to do this, of course, is for Amiga's programmers and engineers to participate in the Linux community -- to get those customizations inserted into the mainstream Linux kernel rather than "forking" the project and creating a separate Amiga-only development tree. While the latter is legal under GPL (as long as you release source) it reduces the benefits that both Amiga and Linux can gain from the free- software (aka "open source") model. Cooperating and being involved with the kernel project also would earn the respect and admiration of the existing Linux user base, whereas forking the kernel would likely elicit some degree of displeasure, not to say contempt.
Naturally, being involved in mainstream kernel development means accepting a certain reduction of control over the code your OE uses -- after all, the kernel development effort is led by Linus and Alan, and they say what goes in and what doesn't. However, it also means that fixes and improvements to the mainstream kernel will automatically be compatible with the one Amiga uses; a forked Amiga-only kernel would require merging of patches, a procedure that's not painless.
Back on the issue of the GPL -- besides it being *legally* important that Amiga follow the *letter* of the GPL, it is also *culturally* important that Amiga respect its *spirit*. The GPL is of great cultural importance among Linux developers and users, and respect for it is highly valued. It would be a good move for Amiga to make it clear to the community that you intend to abide by both the letter and spirit of the GPL in your use of the Linux kernel in your operating environment.
Conferring with Linux's "leaders" (among whom I'd rank Linus Torvalds and Eric S. Raymond as the two foremost) would also be a good move in the sense of showing connection with rather than separation from the Linux community. Linux works and grows by widespread communication, not by press releases; opening more lines of communication between Amiga and Linux can only help.
I wish you luck in your endeavor, and look forward to seeing greater connection between the Amiga and Linux development and user communities.
I find these studies inadequate as data to inform a purchasing decision. While MS will claim that they have proven NT to be better than Linux for Web and file serving in the general case, I disagree. Here's why:
These studies do not address price/performance. P/P is one of the most important metrics in making a purchase decision; these studies measured only peak performance. That the prices of the Linux-based and NT configurations tested are not given indicates to me that Microsoft wishes price to be disregarded as a factor in purchasing decisions. To do so would be an irresponsible act for any purchaser. Consider that NT license fees increase dramatically with number of clients, while Linux's price is constant and lower than any NT option.
These studies do not address options such as clustering. Clustering is a common solution to the problem of constant high client load. It may well be a better solution (in P/P and in peak performance terms) than simply boosting processing power with multiple processors. It also has reliability advantages.
These studies are not generalizable to other hardware configurations. While MS will claim that they prove that "NT is faster than Linux" inherently, they do not. The HW configuration was selected for the first Mindcraft study, which has been proven to have been engineered to favor Microsoft. Hence the hardware configuration itself is suspect. An across-the-board comparison on various configurations, with P/P as well as peak performance measured, would be a more reasonable comparison of the virtues of the OSes themselves, and would also highlight particular combinations of HW and SW that are worthy of consideration for purchase.
These studies do not address security. The release version of MS IIS has outstanding security holes, including the recent one disclosed by eEye. This was a root compromise which took eight days for Microsoft to admit, and two more to fix. Microsoft classically avoids the subject of real-world security, preferring the proven-worthless tactic of security by obscurity. Security, of course, is a major consideration to be made in purchasing.
These studies do not address stability. Stability, like P/P, is an important metric for purchase decisions. It helps one determine how expensive a system will be to maintain -- one that requires regular resetting or reconfiguration in order to keep operating will cost in manpower; one which crashes a lot will cost in downtime. Downtime costs money in an enterprise situation, and hence should inform purchase decisions strongly.
These studies do not address changing real-world needs. A real server system is rarely left serving static Web pages forever. When needs change, performance will likely change as well. Building a system to meet a single, narrow-minded need is likely to lead to a dead end in terms of scalability.
These studies demonstrate nothing about the future. Based on past trends, one can expect the situation for Linux-based OSes to get better and better. The next version of Windows NT will likely offer decreased performance on the same hardware (due to increased resource consumption by the OS itself) whereas future versions of Linux will likely improve performance. Buying heavily into Windows NT leads one to platform lock-in which may damage one's ability to escape the expensive effects of bloat.
In short, I do not believe that MS has demonstrated that there are advantages to purchasing an NT system over a Linux-based system for real-world file and Web service. Wise system administrators, IS/IT managers, and CIOs should stick with the proven security responsiveness, stability, price/performance, and scalability of Unix-based systems, possibly including Linux-based systems, rather than betting the farm on the Johnny-come-lately Windows NT.
He gave a perfectly good answer: "Look at Zope. Depending on where the real value comes from in your situation, the benefits may well outweigh the drawbacks. Size it up yourself."
Or do you think opening Zope hurt its creators' business? Funny, their investors don't think so.
> So basically, RMS argues that because it is easy > to copy software, and because it is nice to be > able to modify it on occasion and fix bugs, etc., > that everybody has a _moral obligation_ to > produce free software.
On the contrary, I read his argument as saying that because proprietary software makes it illegal to help our friends by sharing the software that is available to us, that we have an ethical obligation to avoid using it -- and, if we are programmers, to avoid contributing to the ethical dilemma by writing proprietary software.
According to RMS, the dilemma is as follows:
1. I should help my friends, especially when it is easy to do so. (If it's easy to help, I have no good reason not to help.) 2. Copying software is easy, because every computer comes with a copy function, and media and bandwidth are relatively cheap. 3. Therefore, when a friend needs a copy of a piece of software I have, I should give him/her a copy. 4. However, if the software is proprietary, it is illegal for me to distribute copies. (It would also not help my friend if I caused him/her to be a lawbreaker.) 5. Therefore, I am torn between wanting to help my friend (point 3) and wanting to respect the law (point 4).
(This is also the sentiment behind that awful song of RMS's about sharing with your neighbor.)
One "resolution" of the dilemma is to just go ahead and bootleg software. The problem here is that it doesn't resolve it at all -- it just accepts what may be the lesser of two evils.
Another "resolution" would be to encourage your friend to buy the proprietary software. This may not always be reasonable; perhaps the reason your friend needs a copy from you is that the software is prohibitively expensive (as a great deal of, for instance, 3D design and animation software is).
RMS's resolution -- to encourage people to use free software, and to produce enough free software that people can get by on free software alone (the whole idea of the GNU system) is a much, much longer-term approach than either of these. However, it's also one that avoids these other approaches' problems.
> [A] company may believe that exclusive access to > a piece of proprietary software provides the > company with a competitive advantage. For > example, a microprocessor-design company might > embed considerable experience and research in a > computer program to improve the quality of CPU > designs. They might quite rationally believe that > if they gave that software away, their > competitors would use it to improve their own > processors and take business away.
This is the case of a "trade secret". It is a very limited case, which applies to a tiny sector of in-house software. ESR does make reference to this sort of case, when discussing Zope. Zope is a Web-publishing kit which was open-sourced at the suggestion of investors in a Web design group. The investors believed (correctly) that the group's value was not in their software, but in their people. While the example of Web designers does not map directly to chip designers, it does at least show that ESR considered this case much more extensively than you claim.
It's possible that such a case as you suggest could arise. However, do you really think that chip design is so automatable that the algorithms embeddable in software create more of the value than the designers do? Or that chip designers have produced a revolution in expert systems, capable of replacing their own knowledge with stored-program knowledge? I doubt it. Stored knowledge is static; the rapid pace of chip design is kept up by continuous design revolutions. And those come from people, not programs.
ESR didn't "deconstruct" the tragedy of the commons. What he did was demonstrate that it does not apply to software. The TOTC applies to expendable resources -- resources which may indeed be renewable, but which are depleted by overuse faster than they are renewed, like the grass in an over-grazed commons.
Software doesn't get depleted. gcc does not lose half its use-value as a compiler if 2000 instead of 1000 people use it. In fact, it doesn't lose any value. Indeed, it may gain use-value if some of the new users discover bugs and submit patches, or just bug reports -- or if one decides to port it to another platform, or improve its optimization, etc.
How can use-value of software decline as it becomes more popular? If you can demonstrate a general decline in the usefulness of software as it becomes more heavily used, then you can apply the tragedy of the commons to software. Otherwise, it does not apply, as ESR aptly demonstrated.
"Information wants to be free" was originally not a rallying cry, but a statement about security and confidentiality. That "information wants to be free" means that in the absence of artificial restrictions such as security classification, or when those restrictions break down (as in the case of a secret being leaked to the press), information will tend to spread as far as there can be found interest in it.
The military, for instance, spends a lot of effort on keeping information under tight control. (Remember the drills in how to throw things away properly in Cryptonomicon?) These amount to efforts to wall up or shove back the "natural" flow of information in the direction of those who seek it.
ESR gives the example of passwords as "information that does not want to be free". However, if that's the case, then why do we have to go to such lengths to keep our passwords secure? Why encrypt them? Why tediously remind users not to write them on Post-It notes on their monitors? It is precisely because unsecured information leaks around easily that we have to take security measures.
As the examples of passwords and military secrets make clear, the fact that information wants to be free -- that it, like liquids, tends to seek its level -- does not mean that we want, or should want, all information to be completely free.
The use of "Information wants to be free!" as a rallying cry against copyright or trade secret laws is a completely different use of the expression from the original use. It implies that because digital information, such as MP3s or software, is easy to copy, that it makes little sense to go to all the effort of "securing" that information against copying. This does not have to be a moral point; it can simply be the practical utilitarian argument that we would gain more from the unrestricted copying of interesting information than we would from its bottling and sale.
RMS's ideal of sharing comes close to this idea. Computers make it easy for us to share useful software with our friends, RMS argues -- and we would be much better off if we could legally help our friends out by giving them the useful stuff which we have found. Because it is easy to share software, and because it would help our friends to do so, we have an ethical interest (not to say obligation) to share it. However, proprietary software does not allow us to do this; hence, RMS argues that it stands in the way of us being nice to our friends.
I'm not sure I agree fully with RMS's arguments, but there they are.
There is a distinction between closed-source development being a bad or inferior plan and it being morally or ethically wrong. While RMS believes that closed software is ethically wrong (because it does not permit users to share), ESR apparently believes that closed source is not wrong, but simply limiting.
In a sense, this means that ESR comes off as having more confidence in the success of free software on its own merits, whereas RMS feels the need to actively fight and incite people against closed software. RMS seems to think that free software is endangered or placed at risk by the continuing popularity of closed software.
I suspect that RMS gets this attitude from his own history in the MIT AI lab, where free software was forced out in favor of closed software by managerial decisions and local culture changes. However, I find it to be inappropriately applied to Linux-based and other modern free systems. While the AI Lab was a single site, Linux is a worldwide distributed phenomenon; it cannot be shut down in the way that the systems RMS mourns were.
There's a serious problem with Pascal's Wager. According to Pascal, one is better off believing in God because of the potential bad consequences -- going to hell -- of not believing.
However... which god? Pascal's Wager is just as applicable to Allah, the Jewish G-d, Ahura Mazda, Zeus, or Amida-Buddha, as it is to your Baptist God. If you believe in the Baptist God and it turns out that Ahura Mazda (the Zarathustrian God) is the real god, you get to go to Zarathustrian Hell. Pascal's Wager gives you no reason to value the one over the other.
The fact that some of the ideas in the Ten Commandments are good ideas does not mean that the whole document is valuable, nor that it should be taught in schools. Remember that the Ten Commandments begin with "I am the LORD thy God who brought you out of Egypt; thou shalt have no other gods before me." This is an explicitly Judeo-Christian message (actually, an explictly Jewish message that's been co-opted by Christians). While "Thou shalt not murder" and "Thou shalt not steal" are very good ideas to teach children, it is utterly inappropriate for the government to teach children Judaism or Christianity.
Further, it is inappropriate in an ostensibly free country for the government to teach people that religion is coextensive with, or necessary to, ethical or moral thought. Religion is too often and too easily co-opted by intolerant and theocratic movements, as one can see in the case of the Southern Baptist Convention (which I know does not represent all Southern Baptists) and the Religious Right. This is anathema to the republic.
For that matter... didn't Jesus himself preach against public displays of holiness? "When you pray, do not do it in the streets as the hypocrites do..."
"Homogenous" isn't a word in general usage; it's a biological term. The words people are probably thinking of are "homogenized" and "homogeneous".
"Homogenized" means "blended into a uniform mixture". Milk that has been homogenized will not separate into milk and cream.
"Homogeneous" means "all of one kind".
"Heterogeneous" is the opposite of "homogeneous" and means "consisting of dissimilar or diverse ingredients or constituents".
Hence, for operating systems at a site to be homogenized would mean that regardless of their different origin, they were indistinguishably and inseparably mixed together. This might be accomplished by having a common user interface. A site with Windows and Linux systems, where both were running Netscape Navigator and StarOffice and the Linux systems were running fvwm95, might be the beginning of a homogenized site.
For operating systems to be homogeneous would mean for them to all be the same in origin and appearance. An all-Windows site is homogeneous.
And a heterogeneous site would be one which had diverse, clearly distinct, yet intermixed systems -- for instance, one where Linux, Windows, Unix, and MacOS systems all shared data over common protocols.
IMHO, a heterogeneous site is a much better approach than a homogenized or a homogeneous one.:)
I see a lot of Windows usersand defenders claiming that if Linux dominated the corporate desktop, that the virus situation would be no better than it is for Windows now. I think this is fallacious, not to say FUD. Here's why:
1. The majority of Linux software is free (speech) software, which means that it has a lot of eyes looking at it for bugs. Further, it's also free (beer) software, meaning that its developers are less likely to be under pressure to ship a product which is not up to professionally dignified standards. Hence, fewer security holes get into released (non-beta) products..
2. Because the software is free, and because of packaging systems like Debian's APT which make upgrading easy, it is easy for users of Linux-based OSes to keep current. Further, because of freedom and an Internet-centric distribution model, developers can release patches quicker. This means that once a security hole is found, it has a shorter "useful life" to a cracker.
3. Because the Linux security model is more paranoid than Windows's, a Linux-based worm needs to actually exploit a security *hole*, i.e. *bug*, rather that using the inherent misdesigns of the system in the way Melissa does. (Read the Melissa source, if you can find it. It does not use any buffer overruns or other holes; it uses *only* standard APIs in standard ways.)
4. Finally, if Linux-based systems become established on the corporate desktop, they will come with a change in culture. Like any artifact, WIndows exemplifies and reinforces certain philosophies, ideas, and cultural roles. Linux-based OSes follow different ones. While I can't promise (nor even expect) that Linux dominance would come with radically greater user empowerment and desire on the part of the user to *learn* rather than to *fear* the system, I can only hope that it would teach the users *something*. Not to run untrusted executables, maybe?
(Please note the subject line. "Piracy" is a bad metaphor for software copyright and license violation, because it refers to violent crime on the high seas. "Bootlegging", which refers to trafficking in contraband [specifically, alcohol during Prohibition] is a better, if less commonly used, metaphor for the activity.)
Bootlegging spreads bad software. It's true that Microsoft encourages, or at least tolerates, bootlegging in order to gain mindshare and installed base. Every system running MS-Windows, and every system running MS-Office, is a gain for Microsoft. It's a bigger gain if it's paid for, but even if it isn't, it increases the general atmosphere of lock-in.
Those who believe that it's ethically okay to bootleg software one wouldn't buy should take this to heart. When a friend emails you an MS-Word document and you haven't licensed Word, you have a choice: You can bootleg Word, or you can ask your friend to send you the document in an open format, like HTML, PDF, PostScript, or straight ASCII text. If you bootleg Word, you are increasing the acceptability of the Word format as "standard".
I recommend that if you don't have to accept Word documents (e.g. for work) that you refuse them. Don't support a proprietary, closed, pseudo-standard.
Bootlegging often means participating in an ugly underground. If you download bootleg software from warez d00d FTP/FSP/Hotline sites, you're promulgating the warez culture, even if you don't regard yourself as a warez d00d. (Naturally, not all bootleg software is distributed this way. Here, I'm only addressing that which is.)
The warez culture is uncreative, often intolerant, and (unlike the free-software culture) has little respect for the creation of original works. (If warez d00dz were interested in originality, they wouldn't all want to be running the latest, greatest version of Windows.)
Because their critique of "intellectual property" goes no deeper than "I will copy this because I can, nyah nyah!" d00dz don't tend to be interested in actually improving the world through the reform of IP laws. They're rebelling; if IP laws went away, they'd lose something to rebel against.
What warez d00dz do value is status. One earns status by making bootlegged software available: running a popular Hotline site, for instance. If you patronize a particular warez site, you may well be boosting its operator's status among other warez d00dz.
Further, warez d00dz and script kiddies often go hand in hand. The culture's largely the same: both value doing unoriginal, illegal things for the sake of doing them, regardless of damage caused. And script kiddies we could all certainly do without.
If this ugly culture is not reinforced, it will die out. If you participate in it by using warez sites, you are promulgating it.
Bootlegging discourages participation in the writing of free software. If you have an option between using a bootleg program and using a free-software program which does substantially the same thing, and you pick the bootleg program, then you're harming the improvement of the free program.
If you use a free program, you will learn more about it; you may be able to help its development by making bug reports, feature suggestions, documentation, or even patches and improvements; and you will increase its mindshare and installed base.
If you distribute bootleg software instead of distributing free software, you are losing the opportunity to promulgate the latter. You're also increasing the world's dependency on proprietary software (see the first point, above).
Even if there is no free-software equivalent to a particular piece of closed software, if the closed software is widely disseminated, it may well reduce the perceived need for that functionality in free software. This would decrease the chance of someone writing it.
Bootlegging at work exposes your employer to risks. Many workplaces, mine included, casually bootleg software. The common reasons for this are that software licenses are too expensive, and that it is impractical to keep track of the number of copies installed.
However, this is a great risk. A few years ago, my workplace's parent organization was audited by a software-industry group (the SPA, I believe), and found to have a great deal of unlicensed software. They ended up spending a great deal of money getting out of that hole.
If your workplace bootlegs software, you should consider drawing this risk to your employers' attention. Audits do happen. Audits have been used by Microsoft to coerce businesses into adopting expensive, MS-exclusive licenses in order to avoid lawsuits.
And if your employer isn't interested in spending the huge sums of money that license-compliance would cost, or in keeping track of installed copies... what a great opportunity to recommend free software!
Before you say that a Debian-dominated world would be worse than a Red Hat-dominated world, remember that Debian is not a for-profit organization. Debian has no incentive to attempt lock-in, nor to release bug-ridden code to meet deadlines.
While it's very true that the Mac platform is not open-source, the following things are also true:
1. Apple documents its APIs well. It doesn't use undocumented or erroneously-documented APIs to give internal developers an edge, nor does it change APIs in order to sabotage third parties. In fact, Apple has documented its systems to a degree rarely found elsewhere -- including publishing specs, developer notes, and the Inside Macintosh series online. The Inside Macintosh series are really remarkable; when it comes to documenting the thinking behind the API as well as the functions within it, they might just surpass the available documentation for Linux.
2. Apple uses open standards where possible. You might say that this is simply because it hasn't been in the position to embrace-and-extend, but I'd say otherwise. Apple has been at the forefront of adoption of real industry-standard protocols such as FireWire and USB. It has used industry-standard networking protocols wherever it can. (AppleTalk was created before TCP/IP was accessible on the desktop, and for very different purposes from TCP/IP. Now that TCP/IP is everywhere, Apple is moving to abandon AppleTalk in favor of it. And AppleTalk was never a closed standard; it's documented extensively in Inside Macintosh and elsewhere.)
3. The MacOS has consistently done better than any other system at being accessible to everyone. By this I include the ease of localizing applications (modifying them for foreign languages); the built-in support for handicapped and limited-vision users (Easy Access and CloseView); and the human/computer interface research which has gone into making the MacOS far, far more accessible for the average user than any other GUI to date (except, maybe, BeOS).
The Mac is far from perfect; the MacOS is not open source; nor is the Macintosh an open hardware platform. However, Apple has consistently supported open standards, open APIs, and systems which are open (accessible) to the average user. These are all good things, and shouldn't be forgotten.
Apple needs to learn from the free-software movement. Darwin is a start. However, the elements of a closed-systems model in Apple's business plan endanger Apple's future. If KDE, Gnome, or any other free-software GUI project can build an interface as accessible to the user, and to the developer, as the MacOS already is, then Apple will have a lot to lose. Yet KDE and Gnome have a long, long way to go.
I have to disagree with the author of the second piece on the issue of modern attitudes towards alien life. While Star Trek, Babylon 5, et al. promote the idea of diplomacy and respect for alien cultures, these haven't penetrated so far into the collective unconscious as to entirely ward off the '40s-'50s conception of the dangerous, insidious aliens.
Just take a look at The X-Files or any two-bit Roswell/Area 51 show. The aliens, the Greys, are the grantors of high technology, and that technology will, in this mythos, be used to further the aims of greedy businessmen and fascist, militarist politicians. The aliens and their allies will invade your body and alter your mind for reasons you will never understand.
Now, consider which of these mythoi -- the Star Trek diplomatic Prime Directive, or the Roswell paranoia -- is actually more popular among ordinary people today. Which is regarded as more realistic? Which do some people believe to actually be true? And what does that say about views of technology and society?
What it says to me is that a huge number of people in America (I don't know how popular the Roswell mythos is outside the U.S.) believe, or at least suspect, that technology and its masters are ruling the world, and not benevolently. That advanced science will be used not to benefit mankind but to subject us all to greater control: not to liberate, but to enslave.
How much difference is there between thinking that your toaster is spying on you for the time-dwarfs of Zeta Reticuli, and knowing that your computer is spying on you for the gnomes of Redmond? The former sounds fanciful to us, but the latter was also the stuff of science fiction until recently. To those who are not themselves skilled with technology, there really isn't that much difference.
(I'm not saying that all non-geeks are rednecks who think the Greys run Microsoft. I'm saying that these popular mythologies say something about people's relationship with society, and in this case with technology.)
The old ideal of making computers into humanity's friendly aides and servants has not succeeded. Paranoia or no, it's a fact that there are those in whose interest it is to keep people afraid of the machines that they have to, for economic reasons, use every day. If they are afraid of computers -- if they believe that the computer is a willful, uppity, unreliable magical device, understood only by those who have sold their soul to it -- then they won't ask questions. They won't install Linux. They'll just buy upgrades when they're told to.
As I mentioned in a comment where it was on topic, I wasn't that impressed by Cryptonomicon -- but this V.V. article reminds me intensely of Waterhouse the Younger's treatment at the hands of the academics. "Being able to read a technical book is a privilege of the elite", indeed!
Isn't it racist to say that the color of someone's skin matters more than the content of their character, or their social role?
... except for the small but inconvenient fact that when I buy something, it's mine to do with what I choose, provided I don't violate anyone's rights.
It's certainly my right to protect my investment by making a backup of it. I bought the software (or if you like, the license to use the software) and I don't plan on letting something stupid like the degradation of the original media interfere with my right to use it!
I see one major problem with what you just said: you seem to be seeing "postmodernism" as one big thing, and that's just not accurate. There are a lot of views and attitudes which are labeled "postmodern", and some of them are incompatible with others. The academic, politically-correct litcrit "postmodernism" which Stephenson directly mocks in the character of Charlene isn't at all the same thing as, say, Larry Wall's "postmodernism". In fact, they're almost diametric opposites.
I for one think that calling Charlene postmodern is to confuse the issue. Charlene is intolerant and politically-correct, and uses her position as a scholar to mistreat Randy. Her intolerant breed of feminism is a good example of a "totalizing discourse", something that postmodernism tends to critique.*
That we live in a postmodern world does not mean that we're not allowed to have opinions or be right or wrong. To me it means things like these:
No one person, or culture, is right or moral all the time. We should value our ideas and our culture, but we shouldn't assume that they are the source of all virtue or knowledge, and that other people or cultures have nothing to contribute.
Because nobody is right all the time, we need to seek out information from people we disagree with, or who have different perspectives, in order to become educated. This doesn't mean that every perspective is equally useful, only that there's no single perspective which contains all the information in the world.*
Because no culture is right all the time, it follows that our culture is sometimes not right. Some of the rules, generalizations, and assumptions which we are taught aren't true -- or at least aren't entirely true. We need to find out which ones aren't true, and quit teaching them to each other.
An "original" idea isn't entirely original. It depends on a lot of cultural context, and on a lot of precursor ideas. (There would be no Perl without C, sh, awk, and so forth.) Hence while the nominal author of a work has indeed made something new, s/he hasn't made it ex nihilo. To paraphrase Newton, every great author or creator stands on the shoulders of giants -- and him/herself tends to have a few others on his/her shoulders as well.
(This is of course just a partial list. Any other people out there who think postmodernism has something useful to offer, please add to it.)
* Michel Foucault, a postmodern cultural critic if ever there was one, refers to perspectives that claim to understand the whole world as "totalizing discourses". Marxism is his classic example; a die-hard Marxist claims that all social phenomena can be explained completely in terms of economics. Charlene's warrior-feminism is a totalizing discourse which sees everything in terms of white male aggression. Foucault holds that totalizing discourses don't work.
I've actually read this monster of a book. (For those who haven't as much as seen it yet, Cryptonomicon is more than nine hundred pages long. This is longer than either James Joyce's Ulysses or Shea and Wilson's Illuminatus!, though substantially shorter than the Bible.) I've read it -- and I'm not sure what to think of it.
Let me say first that I liked this book, and that I would definitely recommend it to those who've enjoyed Stephenson's other work. However, that doesn't mean I don't have problems with it, which I do. Here are a few impressions:
The editing, at least in this first printing, is nothing short of terrible. The book is full of typos; the FAQ-documented one in the middle of a Perl script is just the most technically relevant. Some are truly embarrassing -- using "damn" to mean "dam" in one place -- while others just look to be the sign of a lack of spell-checking.
Another example of poor editing is evident in the large portions of the book which are printed in a monospace (non-proportional) font, intended to resemble email or other computer text. Real email does not contain ligatures (those jammed-together "fi" and "fl" characters), and in a real monospace font, the spaces themselves are the same size as the letters.
Early in the book -- in the part excerpted on the Web page -- Stephenson commits the Bill Gates Crypto Error. This is my expression for referring to, in the context of crypto, "factoring large prime numbers", as Gates did in The Road Ahead. Naturally, it is very easy to factor large prime numbers; what is hard is to factor composite numbers which are the products of large primes. This is called "prime factorization", but the numbers being factored are most definitely composites.
Okay, enough of the technical bickering... on to the book's ostensible artistic content. First off I would like to say that if I were an academic literary critic I would already be working on a paper entitled "Representations of the Sexual in the Works of Neal Stephenson." When I was reading Snow Crash for the first time I boggled over Stephenson's characterizing vicious, warlike, sexually violent, patriarchal cultures (like the Old Testament Hebrews) as islands of rationality and sanity in a sea of Ashtoreth-worshipping, feminized, oversexed, primitives. After The Diamond Age I dismissed it largely as reverence for "people of the Book" (as opposed to "people of the Seed" perhaps?), but after Cryptonomicon I'm not so sure. He honestly doesn't seem to have a place for a culture, or a character for that matter, which is simultaneously technically creative and sexually open. And now he's even promulgating the old saw that masturbation drains away your creative energies. I find it surprising that he never brings his sexual conservatism to bear against Alan Turing -- though homosexuality does get Turing's ex-lover Rudy in trouble with the Nazi regime, it seems that Stephenson has extended his sexual views past their Old-Testament basis, at least insofar as accepting Turing & Co.
In the light of Larry Wall's eminently reasonable adoption of the postmodern aesthetic in discussing Perl, the Net, and (post)modern culture, I find Stephenson's sniping at postmodernism to be rather silly. While his spoofs of academia -- as in the characters Charlene and Geb (that's G.E.B., as in Hofstadter's book) -- may well be deserved, he seems all too willing to sweep the postmodern under the rubric of the decadent, morally loose, and irrational. These are, ironically enough in a WWII novel, basically the same critiques that the Nazi regime made of "modern" (e.g. Picasso) art.
That's about all I can come up with right now -- oh, one other thing: How the fsck did Enoch Root come back to life?!
You are correct on the matter of revising the license, but not on the matter of versioning. In order for the versioning provision to be in effect, the author has to either explicitly state that the software is licensed under the GPL version N and "any later version", or not mention any version number.
It may be that the FSF's model copyright notice uses the "any later version" language. However, the copyright notice is separable from the license itself; you can write your own copyright notice placing your software explicitly under the GPL version 2 and no other version.
Furthermore, the original poster claimed that Stallman owned all software released under GPL. ("All GPL'ed stuff belongs to Stallman") This, of course, remains false. Copyright vests in the author, not in Stallman or FSF, unless the author assigns it to Stallman or FSF. While Stallman might like authors to do that, it's not a requirement of using the GPL, nor does the GPL even imply that Stallman or the FSF want copyright over all free software.
> All GPL'ed stuff belongs to Stallman, read the license.
You can find the GPL here. If you actually do read it, you will find that noplace within it does Stallman, nor the FSF, claim copyright nor special privilege over GPLed software.
The license does contain some passage specific to software copyrighted by the FSF, for instance the following:
# 10. If you wish to incorporate parts of the Program into # other free programs whose distribution conditions # are different, write to the author to ask for permission. # For software which is copyrighted by the Free Software # Foundation, write to the Free Software Foundation; # we sometimes make exceptions for this.
Read that carefully. FSF does not claim to be the author nor the copyright holder of all GPLed software. Your claim is at best a myth, and at worst a lie which comes close to being FUD.
If you object to some particular provision in the GPL, release your software under a modified version. You could, for instance, strip out the versioning provision (the part which specifies that the licensed software may be licensed under newer versions of the GPL) or add a BSD-style credit-due provision.
In the future, when you call on others to RTFM, please don't make claims which contradict the text of the relevant FM.
Article I, 8, cl. 8, of the Constitution mandates originality as a prerequisite for copyright protection. The constitutional requirement necessitates independent creation plus a modicum of creativity. Since facts do not owe their origin to an act of authorship, they are not original, and thus are not copyrightable.
While Rural has a valid copyright in the directory as a whole because it contains some forward text and some original material in the yellow pages, there is nothing original in Rural's white pages. The raw data are uncopyrightable facts, and the way in which Rural selected, coordinated, and arranged those facts is not original in any way.
Do read the case; it's very interesting material. ("Rural" is a telephone company; "Feist" is a publisher of wide-area phone books which used data from Rural's white pages in making a wide-area white pages directory including material from ten other phone companies.)
If you accept the Constitution's argument, then copyright (in the U.S.) is not founded on a "natural right" but rather on what is known as a consequentialist argument. That is, the Constitution does not say "Copyright is granted because it is a natural right of authors to control their works" but rather "Copyright is granted for the purpose of promoting progress."
Given this argument, one can then argue that copyright and patent are only justified insofar as it actually does promote progress, and that in those cases where it inhibits progress, they are not Constitutionally justified.
Hence, if it could be proven in court that a particular granting of patent or copyright was inhibiting progress in the relevant field, it would not be unreasonable to overturn the patent or copyright, simply on the grounds of not being Constitutionally justified.
(Note that this assumes strict Constitutional constructionism, aka strict enumeration of powers -- the doctrine that the Constitution specifies the powers of the Federal government, and that the government has no legitimate powers which are not expressly granted to it. The last strict constructionist on the Supreme Court was Justice Hugo Black, many years ago, who actually had the daring to say that when the Constitution says "Congress shall make no law..." it actually means NO LAW.)
By "information is a universal" the author does not mean that information is everywhere. This use of the term "universal" is a slightly obscure philosophical use. A better word for the same thing might be "an abstraction" -- something which is not concrete and physical, but abstract and mental.
A piece of information, considered apart from the medium upon which it is recorded, is an abstraction. That's what copyright is granted for. However, by definition, abstractions don't exist in the physical world -- and unless, as the author says, we accept Platonic Formalism, they don't exist at all, any more than perfect circles do.
Slashdot Mirror
Instead of continuing to use the old, limited, patent-encumbered GIF format, you should consider using PNG. PNG is a free (speech) format which offers the benefits of GIF without the drawbacks.
Like GIF, PNG offers lossless compression: you won't find the ugly square artifacts you get in JPEGs. However, PNG also offers a wider range of bit depths (1-bit through 24-bit), an alpha channel, and gamma information.
(For those who don't know: An alpha channel is a fourth number attached to each pixel, alongside the red, green, and blue values. It tells how transparent that pixel is to be considered. Most browsers and graphics tools don't support alpha yet, but they will. Gamma information helps different computers, with different display characteristics, render an image in the same real-world colors.)
This is the text of an email I sent to the president of Amiga. Please pardon the line length formatting; sadly, Slashdot doesn't yet have terribly good tools for fixing it.
Mr. Collas --
I read with great interest your announcement that future versions of the
Amiga operating environment will be based on the Linux kernel. The
importance of the Amiga system as an alternative operating system is well
known among users of Linux-based systems. As a Debian GNU/Linux system
administrator with some knowledge of the benefits of the Amiga, I can only
expect that the two will complement each other nicely.
As you may already know, the Linux kernel is released under the GNU
General Public License, a "free software" license intended to ensure that
free software remains free --- that nobody can turn a piece of free
software into proprietary software without the author's permission.
One of the provisions of the GPL states that if you take a piece of GPLed
software, modify it, and release it, you are legally required to release
it under the GPL itself, and to provide your users the source code of your
modifications upon request. That is, "derivative works" of GPLed code
must themselves be GPLed and released with source available.
Because the Linux kernel, and most of the common utilities that form the
rest of Linux-based systems, are GPLed, this means that if Amiga were to
make customizations to them for use in the Amiga OE, those customizations
would have to be released back to the community.
The best way to do this, of course, is for Amiga's programmers and
engineers to participate in the Linux community -- to get those
customizations inserted into the mainstream Linux kernel rather than
"forking" the project and creating a separate Amiga-only development tree.
While the latter is legal under GPL (as long as you release source) it
reduces the benefits that both Amiga and Linux can gain from the free-
software (aka "open source") model. Cooperating and being involved with
the kernel project also would earn the respect and admiration of the
existing Linux user base, whereas forking the kernel would likely elicit
some degree of displeasure, not to say contempt.
Naturally, being involved in mainstream kernel development means accepting
a certain reduction of control over the code your OE uses -- after all,
the kernel development effort is led by Linus and Alan, and they say what
goes in and what doesn't. However, it also means that fixes and
improvements to the mainstream kernel will automatically be compatible
with the one Amiga uses; a forked Amiga-only kernel would require merging
of patches, a procedure that's not painless.
Back on the issue of the GPL -- besides it being *legally* important that
Amiga follow the *letter* of the GPL, it is also *culturally* important
that Amiga respect its *spirit*. The GPL is of great cultural importance
among Linux developers and users, and respect for it is highly valued. It
would be a good move for Amiga to make it clear to the community that you
intend to abide by both the letter and spirit of the GPL in your use of
the Linux kernel in your operating environment.
Conferring with Linux's "leaders" (among whom I'd rank Linus Torvalds and
Eric S. Raymond as the two foremost) would also be a good move in the
sense of showing connection with rather than separation from the Linux
community. Linux works and grows by widespread communication, not by
press releases; opening more lines of communication between Amiga and
Linux can only help.
I wish you luck in your endeavor, and look forward to seeing greater
connection between the Amiga and Linux development and user communities.
Thank you for your attention.
--- [my real name deleted]
I find these studies inadequate as data to inform a purchasing decision. While MS will claim that they have proven NT to be better than Linux for Web and file serving in the general case, I disagree. Here's why:
These studies do not address price/performance. P/P is one of the most important metrics in making a purchase decision; these studies measured only peak performance. That the prices of the Linux-based and NT configurations tested are not given indicates to me that Microsoft wishes price to be disregarded as a factor in purchasing decisions. To do so would be an irresponsible act for any purchaser. Consider that NT license fees increase dramatically with number of clients, while Linux's price is constant and lower than any NT option.
These studies do not address options such as clustering. Clustering is a common solution to the problem of constant high client load. It may well be a better solution (in P/P and in peak performance terms) than simply boosting processing power with multiple processors. It also has reliability advantages.
These studies are not generalizable to other hardware configurations. While MS will claim that they prove that "NT is faster than Linux" inherently, they do not. The HW configuration was selected for the first Mindcraft study, which has been proven to have been engineered to favor Microsoft. Hence the hardware configuration itself is suspect. An across-the-board comparison on various configurations, with P/P as well as peak performance measured, would be a more reasonable comparison of the virtues of the OSes themselves, and would also highlight particular combinations of HW and SW that are worthy of consideration for purchase.
These studies do not address security. The release version of MS IIS has outstanding security holes, including the recent one disclosed by eEye. This was a root compromise which took eight days for Microsoft to admit, and two more to fix. Microsoft classically avoids the subject of real-world security, preferring the proven-worthless tactic of security by obscurity. Security, of course, is a major consideration to be made in purchasing.
These studies do not address stability. Stability, like P/P, is an important metric for purchase decisions. It helps one determine how expensive a system will be to maintain -- one that requires regular resetting or reconfiguration in order to keep operating will cost in manpower; one which crashes a lot will cost in downtime. Downtime costs money in an enterprise situation, and hence should inform purchase decisions strongly.
These studies do not address changing real-world needs. A real server system is rarely left serving static Web pages forever. When needs change, performance will likely change as well. Building a system to meet a single, narrow-minded need is likely to lead to a dead end in terms of scalability.
These studies demonstrate nothing about the future. Based on past trends, one can expect the situation for Linux-based OSes to get better and better. The next version of Windows NT will likely offer decreased performance on the same hardware (due to increased resource consumption by the OS itself) whereas future versions of Linux will likely improve performance. Buying heavily into Windows NT leads one to platform lock-in which may damage one's ability to escape the expensive effects of bloat.
In short, I do not believe that MS has demonstrated that there are advantages to purchasing an NT system over a Linux-based system for real-world file and Web service. Wise system administrators, IS/IT managers, and CIOs should stick with the proven security responsiveness, stability, price/performance, and scalability of Unix-based systems, possibly including Linux-based systems, rather than betting the farm on the Johnny-come-lately Windows NT.
He gave a perfectly good answer: "Look at Zope. Depending on where the real value comes from in your situation, the benefits may well outweigh the drawbacks. Size it up yourself."
Or do you think opening Zope hurt its creators' business? Funny, their investors don't think so.
> So basically, RMS argues that because it is easy
> to copy software, and because it is nice to be
> able to modify it on occasion and fix bugs, etc.,
> that everybody has a _moral obligation_ to
> produce free software.
On the contrary, I read his argument as saying that because proprietary software makes it illegal to help our friends by sharing the software that is available to us, that we have an ethical obligation to avoid using it -- and, if we are programmers, to avoid contributing to the ethical dilemma by writing proprietary software.
According to RMS, the dilemma is as follows:
1. I should help my friends, especially when it is easy to do so. (If it's easy to help, I have no good reason not to help.)
2. Copying software is easy, because every computer comes with a copy function, and media and bandwidth are relatively cheap.
3. Therefore, when a friend needs a copy of a piece of software I have, I should give him/her a copy.
4. However, if the software is proprietary, it is illegal for me to distribute copies. (It would also not help my friend if I caused him/her to be a lawbreaker.)
5. Therefore, I am torn between wanting to help my friend (point 3) and wanting to respect the law (point 4).
(This is also the sentiment behind that awful song of RMS's about sharing with your neighbor.)
One "resolution" of the dilemma is to just go ahead and bootleg software. The problem here is that it doesn't resolve it at all -- it just accepts what may be the lesser of two evils.
Another "resolution" would be to encourage your friend to buy the proprietary software. This may not always be reasonable; perhaps the reason your friend needs a copy from you is that the software is prohibitively expensive (as a great deal of, for instance, 3D design and animation software is).
RMS's resolution -- to encourage people to use free software, and to produce enough free software that people can get by on free software alone (the whole idea of the GNU system) is a much, much longer-term approach than either of these. However, it's also one that avoids these other approaches' problems.
> [A] company may believe that exclusive access to
> a piece of proprietary software provides the
> company with a competitive advantage. For
> example, a microprocessor-design company might
> embed considerable experience and research in a
> computer program to improve the quality of CPU
> designs. They might quite rationally believe that
> if they gave that software away, their
> competitors would use it to improve their own
> processors and take business away.
This is the case of a "trade secret". It is a very limited case, which applies to a tiny sector of in-house software. ESR does make reference to this sort of case, when discussing Zope. Zope is a Web-publishing kit which was open-sourced at the suggestion of investors in a Web design group. The investors believed (correctly) that the group's value was not in their software, but in their people. While the example of Web designers does not map directly to chip designers, it does at least show that ESR considered this case much more extensively than you claim.
It's possible that such a case as you suggest could arise. However, do you really think that chip design is so automatable that the algorithms embeddable in software create more of the value than the designers do? Or that chip designers have produced a revolution in expert systems, capable of replacing their own knowledge with stored-program knowledge? I doubt it. Stored knowledge is static; the rapid pace of chip design is kept up by continuous design revolutions. And those come from people, not programs.
ESR didn't "deconstruct" the tragedy of the commons. What he did was demonstrate that it does not apply to software. The TOTC applies to expendable resources -- resources which may indeed be renewable, but which are depleted by overuse faster than they are renewed, like the grass in an over-grazed commons.
Software doesn't get depleted. gcc does not lose half its use-value as a compiler if 2000 instead of 1000 people use it. In fact, it doesn't lose any value. Indeed, it may gain use-value if some of the new users discover bugs and submit patches, or just bug reports -- or if one decides to port it to another platform, or improve its optimization, etc.
How can use-value of software decline as it becomes more popular? If you can demonstrate a general decline in the usefulness of software as it becomes more heavily used, then you can apply the tragedy of the commons to software. Otherwise, it does not apply, as ESR aptly demonstrated.
"Information wants to be free" was originally not a rallying cry, but a statement about security and confidentiality. That "information wants to be free" means that in the absence of artificial restrictions such as security classification, or when those restrictions break down (as in the case of a secret being leaked to the press), information will tend to spread as far as there can be found interest in it.
The military, for instance, spends a lot of effort on keeping information under tight control. (Remember the drills in how to throw things away properly in Cryptonomicon?) These amount to efforts to wall up or shove back the "natural" flow of information in the direction of those who seek it.
ESR gives the example of passwords as "information that does not want to be free". However, if that's the case, then why do we have to go to such lengths to keep our passwords secure? Why encrypt them? Why tediously remind users not to write them on Post-It notes on their monitors? It is precisely because unsecured information leaks around easily that we have to take security measures.
As the examples of passwords and military secrets make clear, the fact that information wants to be free -- that it, like liquids, tends to seek its level -- does not mean that we want, or should want, all information to be completely free.
The use of "Information wants to be free!" as a rallying cry against copyright or trade secret laws is a completely different use of the expression from the original use. It implies that because digital information, such as MP3s or software, is easy to copy, that it makes little sense to go to all the effort of "securing" that information against copying. This does not have to be a moral point; it can simply be the practical utilitarian argument that we would gain more from the unrestricted copying of interesting information than we would from its bottling and sale.
RMS's ideal of sharing comes close to this idea. Computers make it easy for us to share useful software with our friends, RMS argues -- and we would be much better off if we could legally help our friends out by giving them the useful stuff which we have found. Because it is easy to share software, and because it would help our friends to do so, we have an ethical interest (not to say obligation) to share it. However, proprietary software does not allow us to do this; hence, RMS argues that it stands in the way of us being nice to our friends.
I'm not sure I agree fully with RMS's arguments, but there they are.
There is a distinction between closed-source development being a bad or inferior plan and it being morally or ethically wrong. While RMS believes that closed software is ethically wrong (because it does not permit users to share), ESR apparently believes that closed source is not wrong, but simply limiting.
In a sense, this means that ESR comes off as having more confidence in the success of free software on its own merits, whereas RMS feels the need to actively fight and incite people against closed software. RMS seems to think that free software is endangered or placed at risk by the continuing popularity of closed software.
I suspect that RMS gets this attitude from his own history in the MIT AI lab, where free software was forced out in favor of closed software by managerial decisions and local culture changes. However, I find it to be inappropriately applied to Linux-based and other modern free systems. While the AI Lab was a single site, Linux is a worldwide distributed phenomenon; it cannot be shut down in the way that the systems RMS mourns were.
There's a serious problem with Pascal's Wager. According to Pascal, one is better off believing in God because of the potential bad consequences -- going to hell -- of not believing.
... which god? Pascal's Wager is just as applicable to Allah, the Jewish G-d, Ahura Mazda, Zeus, or Amida-Buddha, as it is to your Baptist God. If you believe in the Baptist God and it turns out that Ahura Mazda (the Zarathustrian God) is the real god, you get to go to Zarathustrian Hell. Pascal's Wager gives you no reason to value the one over the other.
... didn't Jesus himself preach against public displays of holiness? "When you pray, do not do it in the streets as the hypocrites do ..."
However
The fact that some of the ideas in the Ten Commandments are good ideas does not mean that the whole document is valuable, nor that it should be taught in schools. Remember that the Ten Commandments begin with "I am the LORD thy God who brought you out of Egypt; thou shalt have no other gods before me." This is an explicitly Judeo-Christian message (actually, an explictly Jewish message that's been co-opted by Christians). While "Thou shalt not murder" and "Thou shalt not steal" are very good ideas to teach children, it is utterly inappropriate for the government to teach children Judaism or Christianity.
Further, it is inappropriate in an ostensibly free country for the government to teach people that religion is coextensive with, or necessary to, ethical or moral thought. Religion is too often and too easily co-opted by intolerant and theocratic movements, as one can see in the case of the Southern Baptist Convention (which I know does not represent all Southern Baptists) and the Religious Right. This is anathema to the republic.
For that matter
"Homogenous" isn't a word in general usage; it's a biological term. The words people are probably thinking of are "homogenized" and "homogeneous".
:)
"Homogenized" means "blended into a uniform mixture". Milk that has been homogenized will not separate into milk and cream.
"Homogeneous" means "all of one kind".
"Heterogeneous" is the opposite of "homogeneous" and means "consisting of dissimilar or diverse ingredients or constituents".
Hence, for operating systems at a site to be homogenized would mean that regardless of their different origin, they were indistinguishably and inseparably mixed together. This might be accomplished by having a common user interface. A site with Windows and Linux systems, where both were running Netscape Navigator and StarOffice and the Linux systems were running fvwm95, might be the beginning of a homogenized site.
For operating systems to be homogeneous would mean for them to all be the same in origin and appearance. An all-Windows site is homogeneous.
And a heterogeneous site would be one which had diverse, clearly distinct, yet intermixed systems -- for instance, one where Linux, Windows, Unix, and MacOS systems all shared data over common protocols.
IMHO, a heterogeneous site is a much better approach than a homogenized or a homogeneous one.
I see a lot of Windows usersand defenders claiming that if Linux dominated the corporate desktop, that the virus situation would be no better than it is for Windows now. I think this is fallacious, not to say FUD. Here's why:
1. The majority of Linux software is free (speech) software, which means that it has a lot of eyes looking at it for bugs. Further, it's also free (beer) software, meaning that its developers are less likely to be under pressure to ship a product which is not up to professionally dignified standards. Hence, fewer security holes get into released (non-beta) products..
2. Because the software is free, and because of packaging systems like Debian's APT which make upgrading easy, it is easy for users of Linux-based OSes to keep current. Further, because of freedom and an Internet-centric distribution model, developers can release patches quicker. This means that once a security hole is found, it has a shorter "useful life" to a cracker.
3. Because the Linux security model is more paranoid than Windows's, a Linux-based worm needs to actually exploit a security *hole*, i.e. *bug*, rather that using the inherent misdesigns of the system in the way Melissa does. (Read the Melissa source, if you can find it. It does not use any buffer overruns or other holes; it uses *only* standard APIs in standard ways.)
4. Finally, if Linux-based systems become established on the corporate desktop, they will come with a change in culture. Like any artifact, WIndows exemplifies and reinforces certain philosophies, ideas, and cultural roles. Linux-based OSes follow different ones. While I can't promise (nor even expect) that Linux dominance would come with radically greater user empowerment and desire on the part of the user to *learn* rather than to *fear* the system, I can only hope that it would teach the users *something*. Not to run untrusted executables, maybe?
(Please note the subject line. "Piracy" is a bad metaphor for software copyright and license violation, because it refers to violent crime on the high seas. "Bootlegging", which refers to trafficking in contraband [specifically, alcohol during Prohibition] is a better, if less commonly used, metaphor for the activity.)
... what a great opportunity to recommend free software!
Bootlegging spreads bad software. It's true that Microsoft encourages, or at least tolerates, bootlegging in order to gain mindshare and installed base. Every system running MS-Windows, and every system running MS-Office, is a gain for Microsoft. It's a bigger gain if it's paid for, but even if it isn't, it increases the general atmosphere of lock-in.
Those who believe that it's ethically okay to bootleg software one wouldn't buy should take this to heart. When a friend emails you an MS-Word document and you haven't licensed Word, you have a choice: You can bootleg Word, or you can ask your friend to send you the document in an open format, like HTML, PDF, PostScript, or straight ASCII text. If you bootleg Word, you are increasing the acceptability of the Word format as "standard".
I recommend that if you don't have to accept Word documents (e.g. for work) that you refuse them. Don't support a proprietary, closed, pseudo-standard.
Bootlegging often means participating in an ugly underground. If you download bootleg software from warez d00d FTP/FSP/Hotline sites, you're promulgating the warez culture, even if you don't regard yourself as a warez d00d. (Naturally, not all bootleg software is distributed this way. Here, I'm only addressing that which is.)
The warez culture is uncreative, often intolerant, and (unlike the free-software culture) has little respect for the creation of original works. (If warez d00dz were interested in originality, they wouldn't all want to be running the latest, greatest version of Windows.)
Because their critique of "intellectual property" goes no deeper than "I will copy this because I can, nyah nyah!" d00dz don't tend to be interested in actually improving the world through the reform of IP laws. They're rebelling; if IP laws went away, they'd lose something to rebel against.
What warez d00dz do value is status. One earns status by making bootlegged software available: running a popular Hotline site, for instance. If you patronize a particular warez site, you may well be boosting its operator's status among other warez d00dz.
Further, warez d00dz and script kiddies often go hand in hand. The culture's largely the same: both value doing unoriginal, illegal things for the sake of doing them, regardless of damage caused. And script kiddies we could all certainly do without.
If this ugly culture is not reinforced, it will die out. If you participate in it by using warez sites, you are promulgating it.
Bootlegging discourages participation in the writing of free software. If you have an option between using a bootleg program and using a free-software program which does substantially the same thing, and you pick the bootleg program, then you're harming the improvement of the free program.
If you use a free program, you will learn more about it; you may be able to help its development by making bug reports, feature suggestions, documentation, or even patches and improvements; and you will increase its mindshare and installed base.
If you distribute bootleg software instead of distributing free software, you are losing the opportunity to promulgate the latter. You're also increasing the world's dependency on proprietary software (see the first point, above).
Even if there is no free-software equivalent to a particular piece of closed software, if the closed software is widely disseminated, it may well reduce the perceived need for that functionality in free software. This would decrease the chance of someone writing it.
Bootlegging at work exposes your employer to risks. Many workplaces, mine included, casually bootleg software. The common reasons for this are that software licenses are too expensive, and that it is impractical to keep track of the number of copies installed.
However, this is a great risk. A few years ago, my workplace's parent organization was audited by a software-industry group (the SPA, I believe), and found to have a great deal of unlicensed software. They ended up spending a great deal of money getting out of that hole.
If your workplace bootlegs software, you should consider drawing this risk to your employers' attention. Audits do happen. Audits have been used by Microsoft to coerce businesses into adopting expensive, MS-exclusive licenses in order to avoid lawsuits.
And if your employer isn't interested in spending the huge sums of money that license-compliance would cost, or in keeping track of installed copies
Before you say that a Debian-dominated world would be worse than a Red Hat-dominated world, remember that Debian is not a for-profit organization. Debian has no incentive to attempt lock-in, nor to release bug-ridden code to meet deadlines.
While it's very true that the Mac platform is not open-source, the following things are also true:
1. Apple documents its APIs well. It doesn't use undocumented or erroneously-documented APIs to give internal developers an edge, nor does it change APIs in order to sabotage third parties. In fact, Apple has documented its systems to a degree rarely found elsewhere -- including publishing specs, developer notes, and the Inside Macintosh series online. The Inside Macintosh series are really remarkable; when it comes to documenting the thinking behind the API as well as the functions within it, they might just surpass the available documentation for Linux.
2. Apple uses open standards where possible. You might say that this is simply because it hasn't been in the position to embrace-and-extend, but I'd say otherwise. Apple has been at the forefront of adoption of real industry-standard protocols such as FireWire and USB. It has used industry-standard networking protocols wherever it can. (AppleTalk was created before TCP/IP was accessible on the desktop, and for very different purposes from TCP/IP. Now that TCP/IP is everywhere, Apple is moving to abandon AppleTalk in favor of it. And AppleTalk was never a closed standard; it's documented extensively in Inside Macintosh and elsewhere.)
3. The MacOS has consistently done better than any other system at being accessible to everyone. By this I include the ease of localizing applications (modifying them for foreign languages); the built-in support for handicapped and limited-vision users (Easy Access and CloseView); and the human/computer interface research which has gone into making the MacOS far, far more accessible for the average user than any other GUI to date (except, maybe, BeOS).
The Mac is far from perfect; the MacOS is not open source; nor is the Macintosh an open hardware platform. However, Apple has consistently supported open standards, open APIs, and systems which are open (accessible) to the average user. These are all good things, and shouldn't be forgotten.
Apple needs to learn from the free-software movement. Darwin is a start. However, the elements of a closed-systems model in Apple's business plan endanger Apple's future. If KDE, Gnome, or any other free-software GUI project can build an interface as accessible to the user, and to the developer, as the MacOS already is, then Apple will have a lot to lose. Yet KDE and Gnome have a long, long way to go.
I have to disagree with the author of the second piece on the issue of modern attitudes towards alien life. While Star Trek, Babylon 5, et al. promote the idea of diplomacy and respect for alien cultures, these haven't penetrated so far into the collective unconscious as to entirely ward off the '40s-'50s conception of the dangerous, insidious aliens.
Just take a look at The X-Files or any two-bit Roswell/Area 51 show. The aliens, the Greys, are the grantors of high technology, and that technology will, in this mythos, be used to further the aims of greedy businessmen and fascist, militarist politicians. The aliens and their allies will invade your body and alter your mind for reasons you will never understand.
Now, consider which of these mythoi -- the Star Trek diplomatic Prime Directive, or the Roswell paranoia -- is actually more popular among ordinary people today. Which is regarded as more realistic? Which do some people believe to actually be true? And what does that say about views of technology and society?
What it says to me is that a huge number of people in America (I don't know how popular the Roswell mythos is outside the U.S.) believe, or at least suspect, that technology and its masters are ruling the world, and not benevolently. That advanced science will be used not to benefit mankind but to subject us all to greater control: not to liberate, but to enslave.
How much difference is there between thinking that your toaster is spying on you for the time-dwarfs of Zeta Reticuli, and knowing that your computer is spying on you for the gnomes of Redmond? The former sounds fanciful to us, but the latter was also the stuff of science fiction until recently. To those who are not themselves skilled with technology, there really isn't that much difference.
(I'm not saying that all non-geeks are rednecks who think the Greys run Microsoft. I'm saying that these popular mythologies say something about people's relationship with society, and in this case with technology.)
The old ideal of making computers into humanity's friendly aides and servants has not succeeded. Paranoia or no, it's a fact that there are those in whose interest it is to keep people afraid of the machines that they have to, for economic reasons, use every day. If they are afraid of computers -- if they believe that the computer is a willful, uppity, unreliable magical device, understood only by those who have sold their soul to it -- then they won't ask questions. They won't install Linux. They'll just buy upgrades when they're told to.
[/paranoia]
As I mentioned in a comment where it was on topic, I wasn't that impressed by Cryptonomicon -- but this V.V. article reminds me intensely of Waterhouse the Younger's treatment at the hands of the academics. "Being able to read a technical book is a privilege of the elite", indeed!
Isn't it racist to say that the color of someone's skin matters more than the content of their character, or their social role?
... except for the small but inconvenient fact that when I buy something, it's mine to do with what I choose, provided I don't violate anyone's rights.
It's certainly my right to protect my investment by making a backup of it. I bought the software (or if you like, the license to use the software) and I don't plan on letting something stupid like the degradation of the original media interfere with my right to use it!
I for one think that calling Charlene postmodern is to confuse the issue. Charlene is intolerant and politically-correct, and uses her position as a scholar to mistreat Randy. Her intolerant breed of feminism is a good example of a "totalizing discourse", something that postmodernism tends to critique.*
Have you read "Perl, the first postmodern computer language"? While I think he makes some mistakes about Modernism, he can at least get the point out about postmodernism.
That we live in a postmodern world does not mean that we're not allowed to have opinions or be right or wrong. To me it means things like these:
(This is of course just a partial list. Any other people out there who think postmodernism has something useful to offer, please add to it.)
* Michel Foucault, a postmodern cultural critic if ever there was one, refers to perspectives that claim to understand the whole world as "totalizing discourses". Marxism is his classic example; a die-hard Marxist claims that all social phenomena can be explained completely in terms of economics. Charlene's warrior-feminism is a totalizing discourse which sees everything in terms of white male aggression. Foucault holds that totalizing discourses don't work.
I've actually read this monster of a book. (For those who haven't as much as seen it yet, Cryptonomicon is more than nine hundred pages long. This is longer than either James Joyce's Ulysses or Shea and Wilson's Illuminatus!, though substantially shorter than the Bible.) I've read it -- and I'm not sure what to think of it.
... on to the book's ostensible artistic content. First off I would like to say that if I were an academic literary critic I would already be working on a paper entitled "Representations of the Sexual in the Works of Neal Stephenson." When I was reading Snow Crash for the first time I boggled over Stephenson's characterizing vicious, warlike, sexually violent, patriarchal cultures (like the Old Testament Hebrews) as islands of rationality and sanity in a sea of Ashtoreth-worshipping, feminized, oversexed, primitives. After The Diamond Age I dismissed it largely as reverence for "people of the Book" (as opposed to "people of the Seed" perhaps?), but after Cryptonomicon I'm not so sure. He honestly doesn't seem to have a place for a culture, or a character for that matter, which is simultaneously technically creative and sexually open. And now he's even promulgating the old saw that masturbation drains away your creative energies. I find it surprising that he never brings his sexual conservatism to bear against Alan Turing -- though homosexuality does get Turing's ex-lover Rudy in trouble with the Nazi regime, it seems that Stephenson has extended his sexual views past their Old-Testament basis, at least insofar as accepting Turing & Co.
Let me say first that I liked this book, and that I would definitely recommend it to those who've enjoyed Stephenson's other work. However, that doesn't mean I don't have problems with it, which I do. Here are a few impressions:
The editing, at least in this first printing, is nothing short of terrible. The book is full of typos; the FAQ-documented one in the middle of a Perl script is just the most technically relevant. Some are truly embarrassing -- using "damn" to mean "dam" in one place -- while others just look to be the sign of a lack of spell-checking.
Another example of poor editing is evident in the large portions of the book which are printed in a monospace (non-proportional) font, intended to resemble email or other computer text. Real email does not contain ligatures (those jammed-together "fi" and "fl" characters), and in a real monospace font, the spaces themselves are the same size as the letters.
Early in the book -- in the part excerpted on the Web page -- Stephenson commits the Bill Gates Crypto Error. This is my expression for referring to, in the context of crypto, "factoring large prime numbers", as Gates did in The Road Ahead. Naturally, it is very easy to factor large prime numbers; what is hard is to factor composite numbers which are the products of large primes. This is called "prime factorization", but the numbers being factored are most definitely composites.
Okay, enough of the technical bickering
In the light of Larry Wall's eminently reasonable adoption of the postmodern aesthetic in discussing Perl, the Net, and (post)modern culture, I find Stephenson's sniping at postmodernism to be rather silly. While his spoofs of academia -- as in the characters Charlene and Geb (that's G.E.B., as in Hofstadter's book) -- may well be deserved, he seems all too willing to sweep the postmodern under the rubric of the decadent, morally loose, and irrational. These are, ironically enough in a WWII novel, basically the same critiques that the Nazi regime made of "modern" (e.g. Picasso) art.
That's about all I can come up with right now -- oh, one other thing: How the fsck did Enoch Root come back to life?!
You are correct on the matter of revising the license, but not on the matter of versioning. In order for the versioning provision to be in effect, the author has to either explicitly state that the software is licensed under the GPL version N and "any later version", or not mention any version number.
It may be that the FSF's model copyright notice uses the "any later version" language. However, the copyright notice is separable from the license itself; you can write your own copyright notice placing your software explicitly under the GPL version 2 and no other version.
Furthermore, the original poster claimed that Stallman owned all software released under GPL. ("All GPL'ed stuff belongs to Stallman") This, of course, remains false. Copyright vests in the author, not in Stallman or FSF, unless the author assigns it to Stallman or FSF. While Stallman might like authors to do that, it's not a requirement of using the GPL, nor does the GPL even imply that Stallman or the FSF want copyright over all free software.
> All GPL'ed stuff belongs to Stallman, read the license.
You can find the GPL here. If you actually do read it, you will find that noplace within it does Stallman, nor the FSF, claim copyright nor special privilege over GPLed software.
The license does contain some passage specific to software copyrighted by the FSF, for instance the following:
# 10. If you wish to incorporate parts of the Program into
# other free programs whose distribution conditions
# are different, write to the author to ask for permission.
# For software which is copyrighted by the Free Software
# Foundation, write to the Free Software Foundation;
# we sometimes make exceptions for this.
Read that carefully. FSF does not claim to be the author nor the copyright holder of all GPLed software. Your claim is at best a myth, and at worst a lie which comes close to being FUD.
If you object to some particular provision in the GPL, release your software under a modified version. You could, for instance, strip out the versioning provision (the part which specifies that the licensed software may be licensed under newer versions of the GPL) or add a BSD-style credit-due provision.
In the future, when you call on others to RTFM, please don't make claims which contradict the text of the relevant FM.
Here are some relevant excerpts from Feist v. Rural Tel.:
Article I, 8, cl. 8, of the Constitution mandates originality as a prerequisite for copyright protection. The constitutional requirement necessitates independent creation plus a modicum of creativity. Since facts do not owe their origin to an act of authorship, they are not original, and thus are not copyrightable.
While Rural has a valid copyright in the directory as a whole because it contains some forward text and some original material in the yellow pages, there is nothing original in Rural's white pages. The raw data are uncopyrightable facts, and the way in which Rural selected, coordinated, and arranged those facts is not original in any way.
Do read the case; it's very interesting material. ("Rural" is a telephone company; "Feist" is a publisher of wide-area phone books which used data from Rural's white pages in making a wide-area white pages directory including material from ten other phone companies.)
If you accept the Constitution's argument, then copyright (in the U.S.) is not founded on a "natural right" but rather on what is known as a consequentialist argument. That is, the Constitution does not say "Copyright is granted because it is a natural right of authors to control their works" but rather "Copyright is granted for the purpose of promoting progress."
Given this argument, one can then argue that copyright and patent are only justified insofar as it actually does promote progress, and that in those cases where it inhibits progress, they are not Constitutionally justified.
Hence, if it could be proven in court that a particular granting of patent or copyright was inhibiting progress in the relevant field, it would not be unreasonable to overturn the patent or copyright, simply on the grounds of not being Constitutionally justified.
(Note that this assumes strict Constitutional constructionism, aka strict enumeration of powers -- the doctrine that the Constitution specifies the powers of the Federal government, and that the government has no legitimate powers which are not expressly granted to it. The last strict constructionist on the Supreme Court was Justice Hugo Black, many years ago, who actually had the daring to say that when the Constitution says "Congress shall make no law..." it actually means NO LAW.)
By "information is a universal" the author does not mean that information is everywhere. This use of the term "universal" is a slightly obscure philosophical use. A better word for the same thing might be "an abstraction" -- something which is not concrete and physical, but abstract and mental.
A piece of information, considered apart from the medium upon which it is recorded, is an abstraction. That's what copyright is granted for. However, by definition, abstractions don't exist in the physical world -- and unless, as the author says, we accept Platonic Formalism, they don't exist at all, any more than perfect circles do.