It never makes sense for a business to use GPL code if doing so requires the business to release all of their code also, where they wouldn't have had to do that if they did not use GPL code. It makes more sense to write your own version, which is what a lot of companies end up doing if they can't find something with a license that is compatible with their needs.
Uh, yeah, that's correct, the people I'm referring to are the people who choose not to use MIT, Apache, BSD, MPL, GPL, LGPL, etc. You're correct. All the best.
Take a GPL'd piece of code and remove the GPL - what do you have left?
Just code. Bereft of legal, social, ethical, moral, or religious responsibilities. Just pure code, the same thing that a lot of programmers produce daily and without any of the political BS that any license brings.
The only reason GPL is viral or poison is the underlying Copyright - GPL takes Copyright and adds rights you would not normally have
No, the only reason the GPL is viral or poison is because if I want to use what someone else released for others to use, now the GPL all of a sudden dictates what I need to do with my code, that I wrote.
However, some authors object to you piggy backing them and making money off their effort with no reward to themselves;
So the GPL is all about benefiting the authors of the code? I mean, they released the code for free, right? They're all about sharing and promoting the free exchange of ideas, but then they want to be compensated if I use their code.
Also, how much can you trust closed source software? Can you be sure it isn't infringing someones copyright?
What, you mean the software I write? I trust it well, thanks, and I'm certain it doesn't infringe anyone else's copyright.
The only conclusion I can come to is that all those who moan about the GPL are those who would rather not pay the author(s) for their work - get something for nothing.
That misses the point more than anything else I've ever seen, ever. Listen up: those who moan about the GPL would rather not have a document dictate to them what they are allowed to do with their product simply because they are using another product covered by the GPL. It's not about getting something for free, it's about the freedom for ME to say how I want to license my code, instead of having that decision made for me. For a recent application, I wanted to use the ExtJS framework because of how awesome it is. This is a commercial product I'm developing. So our choices were to use the GPL license for ExtJS, and release all of our code also, or pay ExtJS for a proprietary license and have the right to do whatever we want to do with our code. We chose the option where we pay ExtJS for their work. I'm happy to pay good programmers for good work, and I've sent the ExtJS team money on more than one occasion.
It's not about wanting something for nothing. It's about the freedom to use the code that I write the way that I want to use it without having another license tell me what I can and can't do with my own code. If you want to somehow twist that around and say that I'm just being greedy, then you're missing the point and you don't understand business.
The result really is that a GPL license is poison to many companies
Right, that was my point and you gave a good example. The fact is that any business creating a software product intends to distribute that product, so it doesn't make any sense for the vast majority of companies to spend their capital to develop a product when they would have to give out all of the blueprints also. The GPL is a good social experiment, and it's useful for hobbyist programmers, but it doesn't have a lot of use in the business world unless your business model revolves around distributing GPL code.
Some people would argue that merely hosting the application for others to use is itself distribution. I've seen that argument brought into discussions over actual usage of the GPL, such as how it relates to the ExtJS project. The fact that the definition of distribution is even a question hints at the weaknesses of the GPL.
In a work-for-hire scenario the software usually doesn't have a license at all - it's wholly owned by whoever paid for it, and they don't need a license to do whatever they want with it. That's what work-for-hire means. If a company is not distributing the software that they paid a programmer to create, then there's no point in using the GPL.
Yeah, I realize that. So which view does a "proponent" take? Wouldn't it be the first? The second would mean you're ignorant to the fact that there are other tools, and the third means that you're ignorant to how the tools get used. So if you're not ignorant then that would leave the first option, which is what a proponent is. So, yeah, proponents of X like to tell people that the world only needs X, that sounds like a correct statement to me. It doesn't really matter if X is a certain car or condiment or religion or operating system or license or whatever.
The GPL makes the user a distributor and if your business model depends on restricting what the user can do it is no surprise that you wouldn't base your creations on the license
A business' motivation is not about restricting the user's freedom, it's about making sure that they get paid for the work they do. That's the difference between a business and a volunteer agency, and that's the reason most businesses don't see a good use for putting their work under the GPL. If you want to see the need to turn a profit and keep the business open as the desire to control the customer, that's your thing. If you have a better way to make money using the GPL, go ahead and start your own business and prove it.
I'm not much of a programmer, and I'm even less of a lawyer, but the GPL seems pretty straightforward to me: I get read, write, and execute permissions, and I give others read, write, and execute permissions (on their own copy).
Really... what's so complicated or controversial about that?
There's nothing complicated or controversial about that statement. And if that were all the GPL were about, you would only need 119 bytes to store the whole thing uncompressed. But, it turns out that there's actually more to it than read, write, and execute permissions.
Doesn't a "proponent" of anything sort of think that the world only needs one of those, and that's the one? I mean, what definition are you using for "proponent"? If you don't believe a certain thing is the best tool for the job then you're not really a "proponent", are you?
Re:This isn't sensationalist, it's the truth
on
Leaving the GPL Behind
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Which side you believe is the side you already believe.
Just to be clear, our choices are fascists, people who share Indians, or businesses, right?
It's difficult to say that the GPL fails to be useful to business because... it was not written with commercialization in mind
That actually sounds like it's directly contradictory to "business", however you want to define that. If you define business as the pursuit of commercializing a product, then the fact that the GPL wasn't written with commercialization in mind certainly seems like it fails to be useful to a business. At least, no business that is actually writing their own code instead of packaging other peoples' code. If your business involves packaging other peoples' code for distribution then, yeah, I'm sure the GPL is very useful to you. I'm not sure how many businesses need to exist that just distribute other peoples' code though.
If you're talking about developing your own product and then choosing a license, from a business standpoint it does make sense that you would release it under a license that doesn't give everyone else free reign with it. At least not in the short term, once your competitive advantage has worn off with time then it makes perfect sense to give it away for free. See id software for an example on that one.
Move beyond the interface, please. The interface is not the end-all-be-all of a piece of software, it's just one of the features. IE6 is so deficient in today's browser market that continuing to use it just because you don't want to adjust to a new interface is frankly doing a disservice to yourself. You're sacrificing a ton of legitimately beneficial features in order to keep one that is arguably useful in the first place. I mean, tab support alone is a reason to ditch IE6. I thought the interface for IE8 was a little funky the first time I saw it but now, even though I never use IE to do any decent browsing (only for occasional testing), when it opens up the interface does make sense to me. The navigation buttons are clear, the menus are where they should be, and anything that I can't immediately find is almost always in one of the menus in the new customizable toolbar. It's also very easy to customize which buttons or menus go in there.
Seriously, you're doing yourself a disservice by using IE6. If you insist on using IE instead of a more capable browser like Opera, do yourself a favor and give IE8 a month or so to adjust to. Your web developer friends will thank you.
Not exactly sure why that's flamebait, because he's right. That's a sensible way to determine an arbitrary number, since all of these numbers are arbitrary anyway.
1. Fuel the car to max capacity on all fuel types. 2. Drive the car until it stops. 3. Figure out how far you went, and how much fuel you used to get there.
If you only use gas for the last calculation, so how much gas you used to get there regardless of how much energy you used also, you would get the same kind of arbitrary numbers as the EPA already gives out, except they would make more sense because it's actually how people would use the car.
That's the question people have: if this car is completely fueled, how far can I go before it needs to refuel?
The unprecedented rating, the first in triple digits, is the result of a new (draft) methodology for calculating the 'gas' mileage for vehicles that operate primarily or extensively on electricity.
The high MPG rating isn't the result of some crazy new technology, it's the result of a crazy new formula for calculating MPG.
Don't worry, the majority of people are aware that the.NET add-on can be uninstalled, it's just that it doesn't help the argument they're trying to make.
Generally, Windows wants to boot from the FIRST partition of the FIRST drive.
Even though I'm a programmer, I don't consider myself particularly apt with regard to installing or setting up an OS (thankfully, XP is drop-dead easy to install and configure in general), but my previous XP machine was running for several years while booting off my H drive. I had a habit for a while of taking whatever drives I had in my previous machine and just throwing them into my new one, so C, D, and E were various hard drives from previous machines (some with Windows directories still on them). F and G were a CD and DVD I think, and then H was my new SATA WD Raptor. Ran fine for years, and I probably wouldn't know how to use something like GRUB if I was given TFM for dummies. I finally forsook(?) my old drives when I got a nice big RAID array for my new machine and just copied all the previous drives to my "old hard drives" folder.
But yeah, like you, reinstalling Windows has sort of become a thing of the past. I use my machine for development at home, games, email, internet stuff, audio/video etc, don't even run a virus scanner or software firewall, and don't seem to have any noticeable problems. It sort of makes me wonder what the people who say they keep needing to reinstall are actually using their machines for. I can only imagine that they're porn surfing with IE. It's getting to the point that by the time I would consider reinstalling Windows to be a good option, my hardware is probably out of date and I'm wanting new stuff anyway.
You can't be that out of touch. The job of a news organization is to report events that affect a lot of people, right? You really think that twitter going offline does not affect a lot of people? I don't use it myself, but I at least acknowledge the fact that it's an extremely popular site (commentary shows on most news networks routinely show viewer comments that were sent to them via twitter, for example). This isn't an indication that mainstream media is declining, it's an indication that services like twitter are on the rise.
Oh no, I'm under no illusion that Blizzard will change anything based on public acceptance. What's more, I'm not even a fan of Starcraft. I just acknowledge the fact that Slashdot is not the correct venue to discuss grievances with Blizzard's plans. There are a lot of people here addressing their posts directly to Blizzard, seems a little odd to me.
Slashdot Mirror
It never makes sense for a business to use GPL code if doing so requires the business to release all of their code also, where they wouldn't have had to do that if they did not use GPL code. It makes more sense to write your own version, which is what a lot of companies end up doing if they can't find something with a license that is compatible with their needs.
Uh, yeah, that's correct, the people I'm referring to are the people who choose not to use MIT, Apache, BSD, MPL, GPL, LGPL, etc. You're correct. All the best.
Take a GPL'd piece of code and remove the GPL - what do you have left?
Just code. Bereft of legal, social, ethical, moral, or religious responsibilities. Just pure code, the same thing that a lot of programmers produce daily and without any of the political BS that any license brings.
The only reason GPL is viral or poison is the underlying Copyright - GPL takes Copyright and adds rights you would not normally have
No, the only reason the GPL is viral or poison is because if I want to use what someone else released for others to use, now the GPL all of a sudden dictates what I need to do with my code, that I wrote.
However, some authors object to you piggy backing them and making money off their effort with no reward to themselves;
So the GPL is all about benefiting the authors of the code? I mean, they released the code for free, right? They're all about sharing and promoting the free exchange of ideas, but then they want to be compensated if I use their code.
Also, how much can you trust closed source software? Can you be sure it isn't infringing someones copyright?
What, you mean the software I write? I trust it well, thanks, and I'm certain it doesn't infringe anyone else's copyright.
The only conclusion I can come to is that all those who moan about the GPL are those who would rather not pay the author(s) for their work - get something for nothing.
That misses the point more than anything else I've ever seen, ever. Listen up: those who moan about the GPL would rather not have a document dictate to them what they are allowed to do with their product simply because they are using another product covered by the GPL. It's not about getting something for free, it's about the freedom for ME to say how I want to license my code, instead of having that decision made for me. For a recent application, I wanted to use the ExtJS framework because of how awesome it is. This is a commercial product I'm developing. So our choices were to use the GPL license for ExtJS, and release all of our code also, or pay ExtJS for a proprietary license and have the right to do whatever we want to do with our code. We chose the option where we pay ExtJS for their work. I'm happy to pay good programmers for good work, and I've sent the ExtJS team money on more than one occasion.
It's not about wanting something for nothing. It's about the freedom to use the code that I write the way that I want to use it without having another license tell me what I can and can't do with my own code. If you want to somehow twist that around and say that I'm just being greedy, then you're missing the point and you don't understand business.
The result really is that a GPL license is poison to many companies
Right, that was my point and you gave a good example. The fact is that any business creating a software product intends to distribute that product, so it doesn't make any sense for the vast majority of companies to spend their capital to develop a product when they would have to give out all of the blueprints also. The GPL is a good social experiment, and it's useful for hobbyist programmers, but it doesn't have a lot of use in the business world unless your business model revolves around distributing GPL code.
Some people would argue that merely hosting the application for others to use is itself distribution. I've seen that argument brought into discussions over actual usage of the GPL, such as how it relates to the ExtJS project. The fact that the definition of distribution is even a question hints at the weaknesses of the GPL.
In a work-for-hire scenario the software usually doesn't have a license at all - it's wholly owned by whoever paid for it, and they don't need a license to do whatever they want with it. That's what work-for-hire means. If a company is not distributing the software that they paid a programmer to create, then there's no point in using the GPL.
Yeah, I realize that. So which view does a "proponent" take? Wouldn't it be the first? The second would mean you're ignorant to the fact that there are other tools, and the third means that you're ignorant to how the tools get used. So if you're not ignorant then that would leave the first option, which is what a proponent is. So, yeah, proponents of X like to tell people that the world only needs X, that sounds like a correct statement to me. It doesn't really matter if X is a certain car or condiment or religion or operating system or license or whatever.
The GPL makes the user a distributor and if your business model depends on restricting what the user can do it is no surprise that you wouldn't base your creations on the license
A business' motivation is not about restricting the user's freedom, it's about making sure that they get paid for the work they do. That's the difference between a business and a volunteer agency, and that's the reason most businesses don't see a good use for putting their work under the GPL. If you want to see the need to turn a profit and keep the business open as the desire to control the customer, that's your thing. If you have a better way to make money using the GPL, go ahead and start your own business and prove it.
I'm not much of a programmer, and I'm even less of a lawyer, but the GPL seems pretty straightforward to me: I get read, write, and execute permissions, and I give others read, write, and execute permissions (on their own copy).
Really... what's so complicated or controversial about that?
There's nothing complicated or controversial about that statement. And if that were all the GPL were about, you would only need 119 bytes to store the whole thing uncompressed. But, it turns out that there's actually more to it than read, write, and execute permissions.
Doesn't a "proponent" of anything sort of think that the world only needs one of those, and that's the one? I mean, what definition are you using for "proponent"? If you don't believe a certain thing is the best tool for the job then you're not really a "proponent", are you?
Which side you believe is the side you already believe.
Just to be clear, our choices are fascists, people who share Indians, or businesses, right?
It's difficult to say that the GPL fails to be useful to business because ... it was not written with commercialization in mind
That actually sounds like it's directly contradictory to "business", however you want to define that. If you define business as the pursuit of commercializing a product, then the fact that the GPL wasn't written with commercialization in mind certainly seems like it fails to be useful to a business. At least, no business that is actually writing their own code instead of packaging other peoples' code. If your business involves packaging other peoples' code for distribution then, yeah, I'm sure the GPL is very useful to you. I'm not sure how many businesses need to exist that just distribute other peoples' code though.
If you're talking about developing your own product and then choosing a license, from a business standpoint it does make sense that you would release it under a license that doesn't give everyone else free reign with it. At least not in the short term, once your competitive advantage has worn off with time then it makes perfect sense to give it away for free. See id software for an example on that one.
Something tells me that anyone running any of those OSs is not real concerned with whether or not their software is up to date.
Move beyond the interface, please. The interface is not the end-all-be-all of a piece of software, it's just one of the features. IE6 is so deficient in today's browser market that continuing to use it just because you don't want to adjust to a new interface is frankly doing a disservice to yourself. You're sacrificing a ton of legitimately beneficial features in order to keep one that is arguably useful in the first place. I mean, tab support alone is a reason to ditch IE6. I thought the interface for IE8 was a little funky the first time I saw it but now, even though I never use IE to do any decent browsing (only for occasional testing), when it opens up the interface does make sense to me. The navigation buttons are clear, the menus are where they should be, and anything that I can't immediately find is almost always in one of the menus in the new customizable toolbar. It's also very easy to customize which buttons or menus go in there.
Seriously, you're doing yourself a disservice by using IE6. If you insist on using IE instead of a more capable browser like Opera, do yourself a favor and give IE8 a month or so to adjust to. Your web developer friends will thank you.
Not exactly sure why that's flamebait, because he's right. That's a sensible way to determine an arbitrary number, since all of these numbers are arbitrary anyway.
1. Fuel the car to max capacity on all fuel types.
2. Drive the car until it stops.
3. Figure out how far you went, and how much fuel you used to get there.
If you only use gas for the last calculation, so how much gas you used to get there regardless of how much energy you used also, you would get the same kind of arbitrary numbers as the EPA already gives out, except they would make more sense because it's actually how people would use the car.
That's the question people have: if this car is completely fueled, how far can I go before it needs to refuel?
This is telling:
The unprecedented rating, the first in triple digits, is the result of a new (draft) methodology for calculating the 'gas' mileage for vehicles that operate primarily or extensively on electricity.
The high MPG rating isn't the result of some crazy new technology, it's the result of a crazy new formula for calculating MPG.
I have the PDF. I hesitate to ask this, but, where can I put it?
Jeez, talk about going right over your head.
Iceweasel can't run Firefox add-ins? Because that's all this is about.
Don't worry, the majority of people are aware that the .NET add-on can be uninstalled, it's just that it doesn't help the argument they're trying to make.
Generally, Windows wants to boot from the FIRST partition of the FIRST drive.
Even though I'm a programmer, I don't consider myself particularly apt with regard to installing or setting up an OS (thankfully, XP is drop-dead easy to install and configure in general), but my previous XP machine was running for several years while booting off my H drive. I had a habit for a while of taking whatever drives I had in my previous machine and just throwing them into my new one, so C, D, and E were various hard drives from previous machines (some with Windows directories still on them). F and G were a CD and DVD I think, and then H was my new SATA WD Raptor. Ran fine for years, and I probably wouldn't know how to use something like GRUB if I was given TFM for dummies. I finally forsook(?) my old drives when I got a nice big RAID array for my new machine and just copied all the previous drives to my "old hard drives" folder.
But yeah, like you, reinstalling Windows has sort of become a thing of the past. I use my machine for development at home, games, email, internet stuff, audio/video etc, don't even run a virus scanner or software firewall, and don't seem to have any noticeable problems. It sort of makes me wonder what the people who say they keep needing to reinstall are actually using their machines for. I can only imagine that they're porn surfing with IE. It's getting to the point that by the time I would consider reinstalling Windows to be a good option, my hardware is probably out of date and I'm wanting new stuff anyway.
And then they say Linux is difficult?
They only say that because it's true.
Does anyone actually think that these sensors are going to be used in any other way than blanket warranty denials?
Actually, I'm pretty sure that's the explicit reason for the sensors, and no one is claiming otherwise.
You can't be that out of touch. The job of a news organization is to report events that affect a lot of people, right? You really think that twitter going offline does not affect a lot of people? I don't use it myself, but I at least acknowledge the fact that it's an extremely popular site (commentary shows on most news networks routinely show viewer comments that were sent to them via twitter, for example). This isn't an indication that mainstream media is declining, it's an indication that services like twitter are on the rise.
Oh no, I'm under no illusion that Blizzard will change anything based on public acceptance. What's more, I'm not even a fan of Starcraft. I just acknowledge the fact that Slashdot is not the correct venue to discuss grievances with Blizzard's plans. There are a lot of people here addressing their posts directly to Blizzard, seems a little odd to me.
No I didn't contact Blizzard, I'm not much of a Starcraft fan. I posted a link to the SC2 forum a little further up though if you're interested.