You are confusing your interpretation of the aims of an organisation with the necessary consequence of releasing your code under one particular licence. You also seem to be under the mistaken impression that I consider writing open source software to be a viable method of earning a wage.
True, once there is a sufficiently large codebase licenced under the GPL and owned by the FSF, they could release it all again under a new, much more restrictive version of the GPL.
They wouldn't be able to stop you from using the version that you already had under the terms of the licence that you received with it, however. They also wouldn't be able to force you to relicence any software that you had already written. Unless people started to use the new versions of their software under the new licence in sufficient numbers, they would fail to make much of an impact. Given the voracity with which people around these parts leap upon any perceived attempts to limit their freedom, I don't think the FSF would have much success.
You're right about RMS - he does try to persuade people not to use the LGPL, and some of his ideas are somewhat extreme, to put it mildly. I think RMS has his heart in the right place, and serves a useful purpose; without extremists on both sides, there is a danger of straying too far from the middle ground. For example, consider RMS apparently wanting to destroy proprietary software, and MS apparently wanting to destroy Free software. If only one existed, I think people would tend to drift towards them eventually. With both denouncing the other, people will hopefully see the flaws in both their arguments and strive for a more balanced approach, taking the best of both.
Sorry about the ad hominem attack, but it's been a trying few days at work. I too have a partner and a kid to support; I wouldn't even consider trying to make a living writing open source software. However, I never suggested that you should, either.
The bottom line is that the GPL itself is not trying to hijack anyone's efforts. The FSF may attempt to use it to that end, but that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the GPL itself. Just because patents are, on occasion, misused doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with the intent of giving the creators of IP a way to protect it temporarily.
If you don't like the GPL, that's fine, don't use it, but please don't attribute to it your perceptions of the intention of its creator.
Free Software developers on the other hand resort to legal IP games to hijack others efforts with a highly restrictive GPL, or similar, licenses.
Sorry, you're going to have to explain that one to me, because I really don't understand.
If I write a piece of software and release it under the GPL, in what way am I hijacking other's efforts? All I'm doing is saying "here you go, hope it's useful, feel free to give it to your friends, make modifications, etc - oh, if you do, though, you have to let people have the source, just like I did you, and crediting me as original author would be nice too".
I'm not forcing anyone to make modifications and give away their hard work, I'm just giving them the opportunity to do so, whilst at the same time preventing them from taking my hard work and profiting from it. The GPL and similar licences do exactly the opposite of wht you claim - they prevent the hard work of people from being hijacked by others.
Yes, RMS has argued that all software should be free. However, whilst the majority of it is not, it seems perfectly reasonable to me to create a licence that provides people with more freedom than others, whilst denying them the right to abuse that freedom. (Note that I express no opinion as to whether or not all software should be Free.)
I really am getting tired of saying this, but no-one is forcing anyone to release their code under the GPL. If you think of a great feature that, say, gcc should have but hasn't, then you are free to implement it and distribute your version, complete with source. If, however, you want to charge for it and withold the source, that's fine too. All you have to do is rewrite gcc from scratch, just like you would have to if it was a commercial compiler.
You know, the more I read your comment, the more you sound like someone who really wants to take other people's work and profit from it, and is pissed that the GPL is preventing you from doing that.
Even at work, on a 100Mbps link, I can generally kill popup windows before I've had time to read any of it. At home, with my 33.6 modem, they don't stand a chance.:)
Alternatively, some browsers allow you to selectively disable window.open(). Konqueror has this feature, and I thought Opera did too but I can't find it in the prefs; I have a feeling mozilla does, but 9.1.1 doesn't seem to like my system (sits forever without ever opening a window:) )
A number of companies already employ professional programmers to work on Free Software projects (I won't bore you with a list, you all know the names).
Besides which, do not be fooled into thinking that all professional programmers are automatically better than amateurs; I have worked with some shockingly bad pros in my (relatively short) time.
Also, do not be fooled into thinking that just because someone is being paid to do something, they will do a better job of it. Plenty of professional programmers do their 9-5(ish...) job, go home, and spend an hour or two working on some OS project or other.
Just because there's no-one paying for it, doesn't necessarily mean it isn't being worked on by profesisonals.
I for one would still be decrying it as a violation of a writer's right to control what happens to his or her works once published, and I wouldn't be the only one. Adding carefully selected links to articles, for instance, could give a totally erroneous impression of the writer's intent and meaning. Even just adding relevant, but unfortunate, links could do the same thing.
If this is opt-in, then fine. If it's opt-out, then it's wrong, whether it's MS doing it or mozilla.
On a related note, I'm getting pretty tired of all these "slashdot crowd" type comments. There are many different types of people here now, with many different points of view. Pretty much the only thing we all have in common is an interest in technology. Just see any story related to Linux or Microsoft, and you'll see a pretty even distribution of comments for and against.
There is no collective slashdot point of view, and I really, really wish people would stop acting like there is one just to get a rise out of people. (Yeah, so I bit and it worked this time, but I'm having a bad day at work - mini-rant over:) )
Cheers,
Tim
Re:How can he calm fears Gattaca will come to pass
on
Heredity and Humanity
·
· Score: 2
I think you'd probably think rather differently, if you were born naturally and didn't get lucky in the genetic stakes...
That was the whole point of the film - those whose parents couldn't or wouldn't pay for them to be engineered to be "perfect" were instantly part of a genetic underclass. Discriminated against, unable to secure any but the most menial of jobs, etc.
Yeah, it's an extreme view of a possible outcome of genetic engineering, but how you can possibly ask if it's "such a bad thing" escapes me.
Anyway, the real dangers of genetically engineering the human race aren't ending up living in a Gattaca-like world. They're loss of genetic diversity leading to susceptability to some new "super plague" that comes out of nowhere and catches us by surprise, and the unforeseen consequences of the offspring of people with an "unfortunate" combination of genotypes.
In fact, for the really, really paranoid types in the audience, how's this for a possible scenario: one country covertly genetically engineering their population, or an elite subsection of it, to be resistent to a "super-bug" designed to decimate the rest of the world? It would solve all sorts of crises in one fell swoop - over population, risk of imminent nuclear destruction, rendering of the world uninhabitable due to pollution, etc. Could be quite tempting to a suitably unhinged leader with the technology at his or her fingertips.
Alternatively, the same leader could just have a similar bug engineered to exploit some property of the "dominant" genotype of their least favourite country. With everyone who can afford it engineering themselves and their children towards a common idea of perfection, such a bug could be absolutely devastating.
I'm not saying that either of these are likely, or reason not to research genetic engineering, just providing food for thought. (Not to mention providing the truly paranoid with another reason for sleepless nights;) )
I'd say they're just being realistic. No matter how good your QA process, the chances of catching and squashing every single bug before release are minimal. The best you can realistically hope to do is catch all the real show stoppers. (Assuming that you actually do want to release the product at some point, that is)
Having said that, this is the first time (that I can remember) that I've seen an officially-planned x.0.1 bugfix release announced at the same time:)
So, what power would they have over, for example, over a P2P development effort hosted in Europe?
Oh, appeals to the government of the country in question, threats to withdraw their products from that market, pressure on the American government to put pressure on the country's government, and, for the really paranoid, pressure on America's government to send in the FBI/CIA/troops (delete according to personal conspiracy theory preference).
If a company/group is powerful (read: rich) enough, there are ways and means for it to achieve almost any goals it may set itself.
It's not that programmers are getting sloppy, it's that the designers are getting more ambitious.
The core code of most games probably doesn't take up much more than a few megabytes (I'm at work, so I can't check:-) ). What takes up all the space is all the graphics, sound and fmv. Now that we have large drives, lots of memory and fast processors and graphics cards, the designers and graphic and sound artists can really let themselves go and create visually and aurally rich games.
The reason that games need more and more disk space is that people like me demand ever larger, prettier and better sounding games. It has nothing to do with programmers not bothering to space-optimise their code. (Indeed, you often have a choice between optimising for speed or space usage; given that choice, I know which will be done)
I think MS has enough of a track record of breaking compatibility between versions of eg Office, to justify viewing this as just the next logical step.
Sure, at the moment we don't have to upgrade our version of Office - but new PCs come with the latest version, and our clients are using it, so we effectively do have to upgrade.
Saying "I'm sorry, could you resend that as Word 95 format please?" isn't an option with some clients.
Well, I don't know about anyone else around here, but I knew OO before I'd even heard of SQL.
I know that C, Perl, etc are still very popular languages, and deservedly so, but C++, Java, etc are also extremely popular. I think OO has been around long enough now for there to be little excuse for people not to know anything about it. They're even teaching it to the Physics students at my old university, fer chris' sake!:-)
(Although not until after I'd been forced to learn Fortran, mind you...)
Actually, there are those of us here in the UK who don't think that it's a very good idea at all, given the dangers of it starting another arms race.
After all, if you had been relying on your nukes to keep you "safe" in a "they'll never attack, it would be suicide" sort of way, then someone deployed a system to neutralise that "safety", wouldn't you try to reestablish the balance?
Still, this is a discussion for another time, methinks - we don't want to go to far Offtopic, do we?
Newton was, in fact, responding sarcastically to claims that he had stolen ideas from either Leibnitz or Hooke (I forget which).
That would probably be Leibnitz; if I remember my Maths classes correctly, they both essentially came up with calculus at the same time, but it was Newton's "version" that ended up being adopted.
(Of course, I am dredging long-term memory now, so I may be way off:-) )
And so if someone breaks the law and you get injured because of it, why can you not sue them for damages?
Yeah, that's fair enough - but if the law really says that I'm not responsible for my own actions, then it needs to be changed.
What next - getting away with theft because the combination of the capitalist society we live in and the lack of a well-paying job meant that I was "forced" into it?
Yeah, a lot of the games aren't exactly new, but then Loki probably can't afford to pay the licencing fees on brand new titles. (Not forgetting that porting games takes time, of course...)
Tribes 2, on the other hand, is only a few weeks old. It isn't going to be avilable at a "huge discount" for quite some time yet.
As an AC has already pointed out, Mandrake forked from RedHat a few years ago, and develop seperately now.
In addition to that, don't forget that Mandrake is compiled optimised for Pentium and better machines, which supposedly gives between a 5% to 30% performance boost. I don't have any figures to back up that claim (the boost, that is, not the optimisation:-) ), but it at least doesn't feel any slower than any other distro I've used and, being the most user-friendly, that's good enough for me.
Okay, I'll bite - I haven't been trolled in a while:-)
MS don't ask for handouts, because they force you to pay for their software.
With Mandrake, as with most other Linux distros, you have a choice - pay, or not. All Mandrake are saying is "feel free to download it for free, but if you feel like contributing some sum of money, you can do so here - you can even specify who gets the money!"
They're not asking for handouts. They're giving us the opportunity to show our appreciation for and support of all the hardwork that goes into all the cool stuff we get to use.
However, I have never said that information wants to be free. Personally, I don't think that it does.
I'm all for open source software and the free exchange of information and ideas. What I'm not in favour of is the enforced exchange of information, except where it is clearly in the public interest. The publicising of people's personal information is not in the public interest.
The desire for privacy isn't born of fear. The desire to remove privacy from others is born of the fear of what they will do with it.
I believe quite strongly that privacy is a natural right, that I should be afforded the dignity to live my life as I choose to without being subjected to public scrutiny.
You seem to say that privacy is not a right; let me ask you a counter question: "What gives you the right to know anything about me other than that which I myself choose to tell you?"
You make a number of claims, particularly the 3 consequences of removing privacy, yet I don't see any evidence for any of them. If you want to convince people like me, you're going to have to offer us some evidence. For example, I live in the UK, but have seen no hard evidence to support claim 1. Oh, and with no privacy, we would have no personal lives, as everything would be public.
Slashdot Mirror
You are confusing your interpretation of the aims of an organisation with the necessary consequence of releasing your code under one particular licence. You also seem to be under the mistaken impression that I consider writing open source software to be a viable method of earning a wage.
True, once there is a sufficiently large codebase licenced under the GPL and owned by the FSF, they could release it all again under a new, much more restrictive version of the GPL.
They wouldn't be able to stop you from using the version that you already had under the terms of the licence that you received with it, however. They also wouldn't be able to force you to relicence any software that you had already written. Unless people started to use the new versions of their software under the new licence in sufficient numbers, they would fail to make much of an impact. Given the voracity with which people around these parts leap upon any perceived attempts to limit their freedom, I don't think the FSF would have much success.
You're right about RMS - he does try to persuade people not to use the LGPL, and some of his ideas are somewhat extreme, to put it mildly. I think RMS has his heart in the right place, and serves a useful purpose; without extremists on both sides, there is a danger of straying too far from the middle ground. For example, consider RMS apparently wanting to destroy proprietary software, and MS apparently wanting to destroy Free software. If only one existed, I think people would tend to drift towards them eventually. With both denouncing the other, people will hopefully see the flaws in both their arguments and strive for a more balanced approach, taking the best of both.
Sorry about the ad hominem attack, but it's been a trying few days at work. I too have a partner and a kid to support; I wouldn't even consider trying to make a living writing open source software. However, I never suggested that you should, either.
The bottom line is that the GPL itself is not trying to hijack anyone's efforts. The FSF may attempt to use it to that end, but that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the GPL itself. Just because patents are, on occasion, misused doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with the intent of giving the creators of IP a way to protect it temporarily.
If you don't like the GPL, that's fine, don't use it, but please don't attribute to it your perceptions of the intention of its creator.
Cheers,
Tim
Free Software developers on the other hand resort to legal IP games to hijack others efforts with a highly restrictive GPL, or similar, licenses.
Sorry, you're going to have to explain that one to me, because I really don't understand.
If I write a piece of software and release it under the GPL, in what way am I hijacking other's efforts? All I'm doing is saying "here you go, hope it's useful, feel free to give it to your friends, make modifications, etc - oh, if you do, though, you have to let people have the source, just like I did you, and crediting me as original author would be nice too".
I'm not forcing anyone to make modifications and give away their hard work, I'm just giving them the opportunity to do so, whilst at the same time preventing them from taking my hard work and profiting from it. The GPL and similar licences do exactly the opposite of wht you claim - they prevent the hard work of people from being hijacked by others.
Yes, RMS has argued that all software should be free. However, whilst the majority of it is not, it seems perfectly reasonable to me to create a licence that provides people with more freedom than others, whilst denying them the right to abuse that freedom. (Note that I express no opinion as to whether or not all software should be Free.)
I really am getting tired of saying this, but no-one is forcing anyone to release their code under the GPL. If you think of a great feature that, say, gcc should have but hasn't, then you are free to implement it and distribute your version, complete with source. If, however, you want to charge for it and withold the source, that's fine too. All you have to do is rewrite gcc from scratch, just like you would have to if it was a commercial compiler.
You know, the more I read your comment, the more you sound like someone who really wants to take other people's work and profit from it, and is pissed that the GPL is preventing you from doing that.
Cheers,
Tim
Even at work, on a 100Mbps link, I can generally kill popup windows before I've had time to read any of it. At home, with my 33.6 modem, they don't stand a chance. :)
:) )
Alternatively, some browsers allow you to selectively disable window.open(). Konqueror has this feature, and I thought Opera did too but I can't find it in the prefs; I have a feeling mozilla does, but 9.1.1 doesn't seem to like my system (sits forever without ever opening a window
Cheers,
Tim
A number of companies already employ professional programmers to work on Free Software projects (I won't bore you with a list, you all know the names).
Besides which, do not be fooled into thinking that all professional programmers are automatically better than amateurs; I have worked with some shockingly bad pros in my (relatively short) time.
Also, do not be fooled into thinking that just because someone is being paid to do something, they will do a better job of it. Plenty of professional programmers do their 9-5(ish...) job, go home, and spend an hour or two working on some OS project or other.
Just because there's no-one paying for it, doesn't necessarily mean it isn't being worked on by profesisonals.
Cheers,
Tim
Bull.
:) )
I for one would still be decrying it as a violation of a writer's right to control what happens to his or her works once published, and I wouldn't be the only one. Adding carefully selected links to articles, for instance, could give a totally erroneous impression of the writer's intent and meaning. Even just adding relevant, but unfortunate, links could do the same thing.
If this is opt-in, then fine. If it's opt-out, then it's wrong, whether it's MS doing it or mozilla.
On a related note, I'm getting pretty tired of all these "slashdot crowd" type comments. There are many different types of people here now, with many different points of view. Pretty much the only thing we all have in common is an interest in technology. Just see any story related to Linux or Microsoft, and you'll see a pretty even distribution of comments for and against.
There is no collective slashdot point of view, and I really, really wish people would stop acting like there is one just to get a rise out of people. (Yeah, so I bit and it worked this time, but I'm having a bad day at work - mini-rant over
Cheers,
Tim
I think you'd probably think rather differently, if you were born naturally and didn't get lucky in the genetic stakes...
;) )
That was the whole point of the film - those whose parents couldn't or wouldn't pay for them to be engineered to be "perfect" were instantly part of a genetic underclass. Discriminated against, unable to secure any but the most menial of jobs, etc.
Yeah, it's an extreme view of a possible outcome of genetic engineering, but how you can possibly ask if it's "such a bad thing" escapes me.
Anyway, the real dangers of genetically engineering the human race aren't ending up living in a Gattaca-like world. They're loss of genetic diversity leading to susceptability to some new "super plague" that comes out of nowhere and catches us by surprise, and the unforeseen consequences of the offspring of people with an "unfortunate" combination of genotypes.
In fact, for the really, really paranoid types in the audience, how's this for a possible scenario: one country covertly genetically engineering their population, or an elite subsection of it, to be resistent to a "super-bug" designed to decimate the rest of the world? It would solve all sorts of crises in one fell swoop - over population, risk of imminent nuclear destruction, rendering of the world uninhabitable due to pollution, etc. Could be quite tempting to a suitably unhinged leader with the technology at his or her fingertips.
Alternatively, the same leader could just have a similar bug engineered to exploit some property of the "dominant" genotype of their least favourite country. With everyone who can afford it engineering themselves and their children towards a common idea of perfection, such a bug could be absolutely devastating.
I'm not saying that either of these are likely, or reason not to research genetic engineering, just providing food for thought. (Not to mention providing the truly paranoid with another reason for sleepless nights
Cheers,
Tim
I'd say they're just being realistic. No matter how good your QA process, the chances of catching and squashing every single bug before release are minimal. The best you can realistically hope to do is catch all the real show stoppers. (Assuming that you actually do want to release the product at some point, that is)
:)
Having said that, this is the first time (that I can remember) that I've seen an officially-planned x.0.1 bugfix release announced at the same time
Cheers,
Tim
So, what power would they have over, for example, over a P2P development effort hosted in Europe?
Oh, appeals to the government of the country in question, threats to withdraw their products from that market, pressure on the American government to put pressure on the country's government, and, for the really paranoid, pressure on America's government to send in the FBI/CIA/troops (delete according to personal conspiracy theory preference).
If a company/group is powerful (read: rich) enough, there are ways and means for it to achieve almost any goals it may set itself.
Cheers,
Tim
So what about running OpenMotif under Windows under VMware under Linux?
What about it?
Both Windows and VMWare are proprietary, non-open source pieces of software. Just because they're both running under Linux doesn't mean squat.
Let me ask you this - just because you're holding something I own, does that change the fact that I own it?
Cheers,
Tim
It's not that programmers are getting sloppy, it's that the designers are getting more ambitious.
:-) ). What takes up all the space is all the graphics, sound and fmv. Now that we have large drives, lots of memory and fast processors and graphics cards, the designers and graphic and sound artists can really let themselves go and create visually and aurally rich games.
The core code of most games probably doesn't take up much more than a few megabytes (I'm at work, so I can't check
The reason that games need more and more disk space is that people like me demand ever larger, prettier and better sounding games. It has nothing to do with programmers not bothering to space-optimise their code. (Indeed, you often have a choice between optimising for speed or space usage; given that choice, I know which will be done)
Cheers,
Tim
What do you mean, "new"?
I think MS has enough of a track record of breaking compatibility between versions of eg Office, to justify viewing this as just the next logical step.
Sure, at the moment we don't have to upgrade our version of Office - but new PCs come with the latest version, and our clients are using it, so we effectively do have to upgrade.
Saying "I'm sorry, could you resend that as Word 95 format please?" isn't an option with some clients.
Cheers,
Tim
Everyone knows SQL; nobody knows OO.
:-)
Well, I don't know about anyone else around here, but I knew OO before I'd even heard of SQL.
I know that C, Perl, etc are still very popular languages, and deservedly so, but C++, Java, etc are also extremely popular. I think OO has been around long enough now for there to be little excuse for people not to know anything about it. They're even teaching it to the Physics students at my old university, fer chris' sake!
(Although not until after I'd been forced to learn Fortran, mind you...)
Cheers,
Tim
Actually, there are those of us here in the UK who don't think that it's a very good idea at all, given the dangers of it starting another arms race.
After all, if you had been relying on your nukes to keep you "safe" in a "they'll never attack, it would be suicide" sort of way, then someone deployed a system to neutralise that "safety", wouldn't you try to reestablish the balance?
Still, this is a discussion for another time, methinks - we don't want to go to far Offtopic, do we?
Cheers,
Tim
What about Aqua? It says "music" ;-)
Cheers,
Tim (ducking and running...)
Is savemstrex.org still available ?
:-)
According to whois, yes
Cheers,
Tim
Newton was, in fact, responding sarcastically to claims that he had stolen ideas from either Leibnitz or Hooke (I forget which).
:-) )
That would probably be Leibnitz; if I remember my Maths classes correctly, they both essentially came up with calculus at the same time, but it was Newton's "version" that ended up being adopted.
(Of course, I am dredging long-term memory now, so I may be way off
Cheers,
Tim
And so if someone breaks the law and you get injured because of it, why can you not sue them for damages?
Yeah, that's fair enough - but if the law really says that I'm not responsible for my own actions, then it needs to be changed.
What next - getting away with theft because the combination of the capitalist society we live in and the lack of a well-paying job meant that I was "forced" into it?
Cheers,
Tim
...and the shops for making them so easily available and selling the games, too!
Sue the tech support people who put the PCs together, and fix them when they break!
Hell, sue MS - it's their OS that the games run under!
What's next - suing people for not preventing people from doing things? Oh wait, that's already happened...
Cheers,
Tim
Not another one...
Yeah, a lot of the games aren't exactly new, but then Loki probably can't afford to pay the licencing fees on brand new titles. (Not forgetting that porting games takes time, of course...)
Tribes 2, on the other hand, is only a few weeks old. It isn't going to be avilable at a "huge discount" for quite some time yet.
Cheers,
Tim
"Oracle, n:
2. a. A person considered to be a source of wise counsel or prophetic opinions."
From dictionary.com
Cheers,
Tim
As an AC has already pointed out, Mandrake forked from RedHat a few years ago, and develop seperately now.
:-) ), but it at least doesn't feel any slower than any other distro I've used and, being the most user-friendly, that's good enough for me.
In addition to that, don't forget that Mandrake is compiled optimised for Pentium and better machines, which supposedly gives between a 5% to 30% performance boost. I don't have any figures to back up that claim (the boost, that is, not the optimisation
Cheers,
Tim
Okay, I'll bite - I haven't been trolled in a while :-)
MS don't ask for handouts, because they force you to pay for their software.
With Mandrake, as with most other Linux distros, you have a choice - pay, or not. All Mandrake are saying is "feel free to download it for free, but if you feel like contributing some sum of money, you can do so here - you can even specify who gets the money!"
They're not asking for handouts. They're giving us the opportunity to show our appreciation for and support of all the hardwork that goes into all the cool stuff we get to use.
Cheers,
Tim
Indeed.
However, I have never said that information wants to be free. Personally, I don't think that it does.
I'm all for open source software and the free exchange of information and ideas. What I'm not in favour of is the enforced exchange of information, except where it is clearly in the public interest. The publicising of people's personal information is not in the public interest.
Cheers,
Tim
Damnit - in my eagerness to download it, my brain conveniently didn't notice that "not" in the middle there!
;-)
Guess I'm just a no-good copyright-infringer at heart after all
Cheers,
Tim
The desire for privacy isn't born of fear. The desire to remove privacy from others is born of the fear of what they will do with it.
I believe quite strongly that privacy is a natural right, that I should be afforded the dignity to live my life as I choose to without being subjected to public scrutiny.
You seem to say that privacy is not a right; let me ask you a counter question: "What gives you the right to know anything about me other than that which I myself choose to tell you?"
You make a number of claims, particularly the 3 consequences of removing privacy, yet I don't see any evidence for any of them. If you want to convince people like me, you're going to have to offer us some evidence. For example, I live in the UK, but have seen no hard evidence to support claim 1. Oh, and with no privacy, we would have no personal lives, as everything would be public.
Cheers,
Tim