But all Tivo has to do is exactly what you stated in your post, in order to comply with the GPL3 (separate the software from the hardware).
No. In my example, the software is generic software that comes from Linus; if Tivo were to provide a Tivo-hardware-only version of the software, and require it to operate their Tivo hardware, then they'd be guilty of copyright infringement. See this post of mine for more information about how it works.
Are you also saying the manufacturer would be in the clear if he requires end users to download a device driver signed by the DRM manufacturer to play recorded tv programs? NB: signed by the DRM manufacturer, NOT the computer manufacturer. Is this a plausible way to achieve "Tivo-style DRMization of GPLed works"?
If the end-user is able to modify his Linux kernel, then everything is legal, as it should be, since the customer is in the same situation he would ever be in with hardware that uses a binary driver. If he's not able to modify his Linux kernel (if the DRM prevents it), then the manufacturer is still breaking the law regardless of any separate driver download. See this post of mine for more information about how this works.
Actually, the GPL'ed output of bison it was considered a feature for some time. Enough time for byacc to gain ground. The exception was inserted because of the existence of byacc ment that the ability to use bison was no longer a incentive to release code as GPL.
Do you have a link to back this up? My understanding is that bison was never intended to GPL the code that it output; that was an accidental feature. For example, the bison docs say, "[B]efore Bison version 1.24, Bison-generated parsers could be used only in programs that were free software.... The other GNU programming tools, such as the GNU C compiler,... could always be used for nonfree software. The reason Bison was different was not due to a special policy decision; it resulted from applying the usual General Public License to all of the Bison source code."
The appropriate popularity comparison would be between byacc and bison.
I'm not sure how that matters (I only mentioned popularity to counter a rather silly argument by the original poster), but bison is much more popular than byacc in Debian (11000 installs to 500). BTW, the same person wrote both bison and byacc.
OSS is properly a development model, not a philosophy.
See, I can do that too:
OSS is properly a philosophy, not a development model.
Really, the point is for everyone to use the license that works for them:-).
Re:I fear a repeat of the Bison fiasco...
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The FSF, GPLv3 and DRM
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· Score: 4, Informative
Bison (GNU's version of YACC) used to have the restriction that the output of Bison, since it was a large amount of code, was GPL. As a result, nobody used Bison except for GCC, because the liscence was untenible.
Correction: Bison used to have the restriction that the output of Bison was GPL, because nobody (including the FSF) had noticed that that was true. As soon as somebody did (in 1996 or so), the FSF put in a special exception and life went on pretty much as normal.
I fear that GPLv3, by trying to force RMS's notion of "Liberty" more strongly (anti-DRM provisions, anti-closed-hardware provisions) will be a repeat: GPLv3 based software will only be used by the real FSF zealots. Everyone else will avoid it.
Yes, the popularity of Bison has certainly suffered a staggering defeat; the Debian popularity contest, to pick a random example, shows it slightly less popular than X Windows, but slightly more popular than the ftp client. Doubtless we should heed your example and run screaming from the GPLv3 lest we, like it, and like Bison, become...
(shudder)
unpopular.
Nice use of the word "zealot" to describe harmless nerds who like to share their software, also.
This does bring up a flaw in the idea, though: what stops a company like TiVo from creating "unrelated" shell organizations so as to separate the kernel development and hardware development in order to get around this?
I thought of this same thing after I wrote an earlier post in this thread, and when I checked out the GPLv3 draft, I saw that it was very cleverly handled even in that case:
The Corresponding Source also includes any encryption or authorization keys necessary to install and/or execute modified versions from source code in the recommended or principal context of use, such that they can implement all the same functionality in the same range of circumstances. (For instance, if the work is a DVD player and can play certain DVDs, it must be possible for modified versions to play those DVDs. If the work communicates with an online service, it must be possible for modified versions to communicate with the same online service in the same way such that the service cannot distinguish.) A key need not be included in cases where use of the work normally implies the user already has the key and can read and copy it, as in privacy applications where users generate their own keys. However, the fact that a key is generated based on the object code of the work or is present in hardware that limits its use does not alter the requirement to include it in the Corresponding Source.
So it doesn't force Redhat to give away their private signing keys, unless RHEL _refuses_ to install a non-signed binary (as opposed to merely complaining about it) -- the keys must be "necessary to install and/or execute" the resulting binary. It does cover a situtation where Tivo makes the hardware and the "Ovit" company makes a software image which runs on the Tivo:
If Ovit's software runs only on the Tivo hardware, then the signing key is "necessary to... execute modified versions in the... recommended or principle context of use," and Ovit is guilty of copyright infringement (since the GPLv3 does not apply to their redistribution).
If Ovit's software runs on other hardware than the Tivo (with "all the same functionality"), then their software is legal by the terms of the GPLv3, which is correct, because they really are making general-purpose media center software, and the lack of freedom on Tivo hardware is merely an irritation rather than a menace.
It's really slick. It's almost like they thought about it for a while before they wrote it:-).
It's not quite so simple. Suppose a manufacturer were to build a computer that would only run an OS signed with Linus's key. That turns his "signing key" into an "embedded key". The problem here is that there is no fundamental distinction between the two kinds of keys; it's just a question of how they are used.
The manufacturer building that computer is perfectly legal. Linus continuing to develop Linux and sign his copies of it afterwards is perfectly legal.
The illegal act -- and the signifier of the "fundamental distinction" you're after -- is when the manufacturer copies Linux in order to sell it to someone on his special computer. He may only make that copy if he's complying with the terms of the GPL, the same as it ever was, and in order to comply with the GPL, he must ensure that the people receiving software from him receive the same rights he had when he received it -- the rights to modify it for any purpose that suits them. Since he want to deny his customers that right (at least when running on the computer he sold them), the GPL v3 will (correctly IMHO) deny him the right to sell Linus's software along with his shiny new computer.
If he made that computer, and required that his end users download a kernel.org kernel signed by Linus in order for his computer to operate, he would be in the clear, as would his end users (since they aren't copying any GPLed work, the provisions don't have to apply). This situation would make RMS slightly unhappy, since the end user isn't free to modify his computer's software, but it's perfectly legal according to the terms of the GPL v3.
Of course, the DRM provisions aren't designed to attack that farfetched example; they're designed to counter the much more plausible example of Tivo-style DRMization of GPLed works, letting Tivo profit from hundreds of millions of dollars worth of community research without compensating the community in kind.
All hail the new unremovable advertising popups in GPLv3 (section 5c)!
I think you're mistaken -- all that that requirement means is that there must be an option in the menus of an interactive GUI application to display copyright information (as in "Help / About"). See for yourself:
If the modified work has interactive user interfaces, each must include a convenient feature that displays an appropriate copyright notice... if the interface presents a list of user commands or options, such as a menu, a command to display this information must be prominent in the list; otherwise, the modified work must display this information at startup.
You know, I just posted this, and now I feel bad. It's not Will Wright's fault that the gaming press is a bunch of howler monkeys who are incapable of making the statement, "Will Wright requests the creation of games that are genuinely unusual, while still making some amount of effort to maintain playability, and generally they sell pretty well. Good for him!" without it coming out as "Will Wright, single-handed creator of such breathatking masterpieces as 'The Sims' and 'Black & White,' has outdone Mozart and Bach simultaneously with his new, even-more-Godlike creation: SPORE. You must buy several copies of it at least, for it is INNOVATIVE which is secret code for 'Will Wright's feces cures cancer.'"
Hell, the man likes making (well, overseeing the making of) wierd games, and I've never seen any indication that he's personally very arrogant about his success. I liked Simcity, I thought Black & White sucked, and I probably won't play Spore, but at least he's giving it an honest effort instead of making yet another shooting game about alien zombie gangsters.
Will Wright, I hereby apologize. You may continue to pee on anyone who finds it an enjoyable experience without fear of satirical retribution from me.
And who gave you the binary for the kernel? The kernel hacker himself? If not, he's under no obligation to give you the source (at least not by te GPL).
Remember, this applies equally to kernel hackers as well as people creating derivatives from other GPL software.
From: mrAngry@snootygits.com Subject: I want the source code to your system!
I've been the Mr. Angry in this situation -- I'm not sure if it was a language issue, or why, but instead of telling me "the code is in anonymous cvs from XXX under tag YYY," or sending me a copy, the kernel hacker in question basically told me that he wasn't interested in helping me. It meant that I was stuck unable to make necessary reconfigurations to the only working kernel I could find for my handheld; I was basically stuck with a binary blob that I couldn't modify. I knew that the guy was one of the good guys, but it still really sucked being stuck in a situation that (a) left me unable to use Linux on my handheld, even though someone somewhere had got it working, (b) the GPL was designed to prevent, and (c) was, technically, illegal.
Anyone making source modifications to a system must have at least one source copy of the original so be respectful but don't waste your time worrying about it.
For me it was a much greater waste of time not getting the source code; it was such a waste of time that I gave up and shelved my handheld. You may not care about me personally, but you should bear in mind that fulfilling the GPL's conditions is very important, for reasons besides "it's the law."
Re:Hard Problems and Large Corporations
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WinFS Gets the Axe
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· Score: 1
Of course, that ignores the politics involved in gettings things into the kernel. Sigh. We'll do it all anyway, we just have to accept that it takes 2 years for the kernel folks to get used to something after they see it working.
For a different take on the Reiser4 inclusion fun, see the kerneltrap article summarizing one iteration of the disputes Hans had with the kernel developers. Be sure to check out this one as well.
But even if IE stopped "sucking" in this regard tomorrow, it wouldn't make a bit of difference to me - as a user, IE's crappy CSS support doesn't really affect me (because developers work around it), and as a developer, I'm still going to have to develop for IE6 because it will represent a significant portion of my users for years to come.
That's the spirit! What's with these people who keep adding features and fixing bugs in software, when everybody knows that there are a bunch of old versions of the software sitting around, just not including those fixes yet?
Jesus. How do you even get up in the morning? After all, that only gets you to the other side of your bedroom, and that's a hell of a long way from the office. You might as well just stay in bed; it's hopeless.
People choose the GPL over the BSD license because it fosters better software by keeping the codebase free and available. That is a pragmatic benefit of the GPL.
People choose the GPL for all sorts of reasons. Some kernel developers like the GPL because they want the kernel, including hardware drivers, to remain free software. They're actively opposed to the idea of binary-only drivers proliferating, even if it means more hardware support for Linux. Did you happen to read the link I gave you?
It'd be incredibly arrogant to say that these closed source drivers are no more than "improvements" to some kernel module interface code.
The issue isn't whether it's arrogant to say that; the issue is whether or not it's legal to distribute the NVidia driver with the Linux kernel. My personal opinion is that it is legal, actually, but treating the whole issue as "licensing crap" is wrong. It's like a child complaining about having to eat dinner before having cookies. "But I like cookies! Why can't I just have cookies?"
I know you like hardware support. I like cookies. It's not that simple, though, and saying "stop worrying and eat cookies" doesn't make it that simple. You should think about why Linux is so much better and more successful than its non-GPLed competitors, and why Linus said that relicensing Linux under the GPL was the best thing he ever did.
And even if there was a case in all of this, it'd be the case of one man's (RMS) hatred of closed source software, and it would have exactly zero to do with creating quality free code. So like I said, stop worrying about this licensing crap, and get back to worrying about writing better software.
Why do you think it's just RMS, and that everybody who choosed to use his license actually doesn't agree with most of what it's supposed to mean? Where did you get that idea?
You really should read that link I included. Here, I'll include it again:
I'll even save you some clicking: Some kernel developers (Arjan van de Ven and Andrea Arcangeli) are very concerned about the popularity of binary kernel drivers, and see it possibly eroding Linux's freeness, and interfering with the process of kernel development even for those not using the binary drivers. That's the opinion of people who are heavily involved in kernel development. You say it has "exactly zero to do with creating quality free code"; why do you think you know better than they do?
The 'open source spirit of Linux' is that Open Source is supposed to enable people to stop worrying about this licensing crap.
I think you may have misspelled "BSD." Why do you assume that forbidding closed-source code from being used with the Linux kernel is an accidental side effect of GPL licensing? I think it's exactly the reason why the authors chose the GPL.
That comment is really all you need to know to know that this guy isn't going to be worth shit as a "civil liberties officer." Armed men were pointing guns at him and rooting around in his things at random, and he was trying to find "good guys" among them.
"If only I knew which of these groups of murderous thugs I was supposed to place blind, obedient trust in..."
finding ways to embrace that environment so that the consumer benefits (e.g. more knowledge, entertained, etc) and profits are sustained.
The reader isn't the consumer of traditional advertising-supported publishing; the advertiser is the consumer. The reader -- more specifically, his or her fertile mental landscape, ripe for insemination with the appropriate ideas, generally about what would be a good idea to buy -- is the product.
If newspapers competed for readers, then things like "more knowledge, entertained" and the like would have been what newspapers were competing over these past few decades. Instead, they've been competing for advertisers, with readers as an ornery but ultimately pliable herd population to be corralled. Most of the losing that the newspapers have been doing to the intarweb isn't because of "competition" as such; plenty of people read papers in situations where they just don't have access to the internet. They're losing because their model depends on having a monopoly on truth, and they're losing it. No revolution of interactiveness is necessary for them to stop hemmoraging readers. They just need to stop telling lies (particularly to stop republishing government/industry press releases as if they were truth). TV could stand to learn this lesson, too.
An alternative would be to muzzle the internet, so that they'll get back the monopoly on truth again.
Those movies you can download or share on torrent sites? They aren't copied for financial gain either.
Didn't you get the memo? The movies on file sharing sites all have stegonographically encrypted bomb making instructions in them to give to the terrorists in Al Qaeda in exchange for the money which is used to buy the drugs which are given to the school children for posing in the child pornography which is stored on the computers of the innocent after they're broken into with the hacking tools that come with Linux. It should have all been explained in the Evil People's Ten Steps to Victory flier that came with your Debian installation. Didn't you get one?
And Linux lacks the one big thing MacOS has -- easy support for the most comment media types, including Windows Media, and Quicktime. Trying to get Linux to support both of these is an exercise in futility. Sure it can be done, but not by Joe Schmoe.
Now that it has been modded up, watch it quickly get modded back down and a bunch of highly rated posts dismissing it.
And yet there it sits, blissfully basking in its (justified IMHO) +5 rating. Will it ever be modded down? Will ACs ever stop bitching about the mythical slashdot groupthink moderation conspiracy? Will Donna finally tell Greg what happened last month at the barn dance? Tune in to next week's episode of "Idiots at the Keyboard" to find out!
You are aware, are you not, that there is more than one person who posts to slashdot? It's easily possible for some people to say A, and some people to say B, and for A and B to contradict, without anyone being hypcritical.
Personally, I think that there are some people who do think A and B in this case. I think they do, though, because they see the GPL as a reasonable set of restrictions to put on a piece of software, and they generally sympathize with the goals of the people who create it. In contrast, they see the restrictions that the broadcasting companies want (broadcast flag, skipping commercials made difficult, nobody can distribute content without dealing with us) as unreasonable.
There are surely some parallels, but wouldn't you agree that using someone else's freely-provided work to make money without agreeing to share your work on that product is quite a bit different from getting a show which is already widely distributed from an unauthorized source? They're both copyright infringement, but that's about all they have in common AFAICS.
Actually, none of those applications are Linux-specific,
I never said they were. I said they tended to originate in Linux (actually, "in FOSS" would be more accurate, yes).
and several probably existed (certainly sendmail, the various shells, X11, Mosaic but maybe not Netscape, probably Apache and definitely various ftpd's) for other Unix variants before Linux existed, let alone was widely popular.
In many case that's true. GNU/Linux has the real deals now, though, sendmail and ftpd and apache (which is, of course, descended from NCSA httpd) and X11, which were innovative when they were developed. Microsoft has cheap imitations like Exchange, IIS, and the various pseudo-X-isms. I wasn't saying so much that GNU/Linux deserves a medal for making so much stuff first as that I like GNU/Linux better because it has stuff now that's still research (or vaporware, or poorly-implemented, or a Windows port of something Unix-native) on Windows. The fact that that includes stuff that's decades old like decent shells or sensible MTAs just makes it even sillier.
Linux really just copies from everywhere. There's no shame in that, either, but face it, few people in the Linux community are being paid (in money or pleasure) to transform the world. The approach here is much more incremental (as embodied in the pipeline approach to solving problems), "hey wouldn't it be cool if we changed it so did " or "what if we made work with so we can " than "let's screw everything up to make marketing happy and force an upgrade on our users!"
Thank you for rehashing what I don't agree with. I'll take another stab at disagreeing with it. Ahem:
The package management systems make complex systems administration tasks much more manageable, and I'm not aware of them existing in any OSes before GNU/Linux (no, Solaris's doesn't count).
New languages like perl and python have introduced genuinely new concepts, and have become fairly popular (among those for whom they're an option) apparently because those concepts are powerful. I credit these languages as "belonging" to GNU/Linux simply because that's the most popular Unix where they're being used and developed.
The software engineering knowledge in the free software world is currently the state of the art; pretty much everyone who's doing development knows about freezes, how to handle dependencies and ports, and release management. That's not even close to true in the proprietary world. The stuff Linus and co. are doing with BK and git is pure research, and the kind of system-of-systems problems that the Debian developers solve just to keep "testing" working would (to judge by the SEI article about SoS I read recently) make most academic software engineers wet themselves and cry.
People who are building single-system-image clusters of computers today are using Linux, full stop. Microsoft has a program to try to get Windows to do that.
wiki was new and innovative. Most wiki software has an easy port to Windows (using perl, php, or another Linux-native language), but it's developed on GNU/Linux (actually, I see an exception -- when I searched for "asp wiki" on google, I got a wiki running on ASP called "Asp Wiki". I rest my case.)
bittorrent, coda, emacs, OS-based NAT utilities, etc, etc. Yes, there are Windows ports (or imitations).
Of course, GNU/Linux copies from Windows in a lot of cases too. It often makes clones of a particular, self-contained application. Interestingly enough, those (except for evolution) are programs I almost never find myself using. A lot of it may come down to the type of work people do; a standard office person might find themselves using Firefox, OO.org, and evolution, and conclude that GNU/Linux is just a cheap Windows knockoff. I can't see how any programmer or sysadmin could think that, though; in those areas GNU/Linux is where almost all of the action is, and Windows is still way behind.
Precisely. The Windows -> Linux flowdown is quite well established, as you'll see by the following examples:
IIS -> apache, ftpd COMMAND.COM -> Unix shell Exchange -> sendmail poorly-implemented third-party "virtual desktops" -> multiple X11 desktops Visual SourceSafe -> rcs, CVS, now subversion Internet Explorer -> Mosiac and Netscape Remote Desktop -> X11
Expect to see more shameless copying in the future:
The Linux community will probably create imitations of popular Microsoft languages such as Visual Basic and Cobol.NET to replace outdated perl and python.
The confusing package management systems (particularly in Debian-based distributions) will be replaced with Microsoft's obviously superior "every app's installer does whatever it feels like" approach to shared libraries.
The next version of Firefox will look just about exactly like IE, with popup blocking and tabs, for example.
Vendor-provided security support for third party applications (e.g. Redhat's updated Mozilla, postfix, and mysql packages to replace vulnerable versions) will give way to the familiar, consistent "Fuck off" Microsoft users are accustomed to receiving when using third party products.
The Linux shell will be reinvented after its increasing deprecation in recent years, with scripting features copied (poorly) from Microsoft's offerings.
I could go on, but I think Microsoft's role as an innovator is quite well-established.
Slashdot Mirror
No. In my example, the software is generic software that comes from Linus; if Tivo were to provide a Tivo-hardware-only version of the software, and require it to operate their Tivo hardware, then they'd be guilty of copyright infringement. See this post of mine for more information about how it works.
If the end-user is able to modify his Linux kernel, then everything is legal, as it should be, since the customer is in the same situation he would ever be in with hardware that uses a binary driver. If he's not able to modify his Linux kernel (if the DRM prevents it), then the manufacturer is still breaking the law regardless of any separate driver download. See this post of mine for more information about how this works.
Do you have a link to back this up? My understanding is that bison was never intended to GPL the code that it output; that was an accidental feature. For example, the bison docs say, "[B]efore Bison version 1.24, Bison-generated parsers could be used only in programs that were free software.
I'm not sure how that matters (I only mentioned popularity to counter a rather silly argument by the original poster), but bison is much more popular than byacc in Debian (11000 installs to 500). BTW, the same person wrote both bison and byacc.
See, I can do that too:
OSS is properly a philosophy, not a development model.
Really, the point is for everyone to use the license that works for them
Correction: Bison used to have the restriction that the output of Bison was GPL, because nobody (including the FSF) had noticed that that was true. As soon as somebody did (in 1996 or so), the FSF put in a special exception and life went on pretty much as normal.
Yes, the popularity of Bison has certainly suffered a staggering defeat; the Debian popularity contest, to pick a random example, shows it slightly less popular than X Windows, but slightly more popular than the ftp client. Doubtless we should heed your example and run screaming from the GPLv3 lest we, like it, and like Bison, become...
(shudder)
unpopular.
Nice use of the word "zealot" to describe harmless nerds who like to share their software, also.
I thought of this same thing after I wrote an earlier post in this thread, and when I checked out the GPLv3 draft, I saw that it was very cleverly handled even in that case:
So it doesn't force Redhat to give away their private signing keys, unless RHEL _refuses_ to install a non-signed binary (as opposed to merely complaining about it) -- the keys must be "necessary to install and/or execute" the resulting binary. It does cover a situtation where Tivo makes the hardware and the "Ovit" company makes a software image which runs on the Tivo:
It's really slick. It's almost like they thought about it for a while before they wrote it
The manufacturer building that computer is perfectly legal. Linus continuing to develop Linux and sign his copies of it afterwards is perfectly legal.
The illegal act -- and the signifier of the "fundamental distinction" you're after -- is when the manufacturer copies Linux in order to sell it to someone on his special computer. He may only make that copy if he's complying with the terms of the GPL, the same as it ever was, and in order to comply with the GPL, he must ensure that the people receiving software from him receive the same rights he had when he received it -- the rights to modify it for any purpose that suits them. Since he want to deny his customers that right (at least when running on the computer he sold them), the GPL v3 will (correctly IMHO) deny him the right to sell Linus's software along with his shiny new computer.
If he made that computer, and required that his end users download a kernel.org kernel signed by Linus in order for his computer to operate, he would be in the clear, as would his end users (since they aren't copying any GPLed work, the provisions don't have to apply). This situation would make RMS slightly unhappy, since the end user isn't free to modify his computer's software, but it's perfectly legal according to the terms of the GPL v3.
Of course, the DRM provisions aren't designed to attack that farfetched example; they're designed to counter the much more plausible example of Tivo-style DRMization of GPLed works, letting Tivo profit from hundreds of millions of dollars worth of community research without compensating the community in kind.
I think you're mistaken -- all that that requirement means is that there must be an option in the menus of an interactive GUI application to display copyright information (as in "Help / About"). See for yourself:
Emphasis is mine.
You know, I just posted this, and now I feel bad. It's not Will Wright's fault that the gaming press is a bunch of howler monkeys who are incapable of making the statement, "Will Wright requests the creation of games that are genuinely unusual, while still making some amount of effort to maintain playability, and generally they sell pretty well. Good for him!" without it coming out as "Will Wright, single-handed creator of such breathatking masterpieces as 'The Sims' and 'Black & White,' has outdone Mozart and Bach simultaneously with his new, even-more-Godlike creation: SPORE. You must buy several copies of it at least, for it is INNOVATIVE which is secret code for 'Will Wright's feces cures cancer.'"
Hell, the man likes making (well, overseeing the making of) wierd games, and I've never seen any indication that he's personally very arrogant about his success. I liked Simcity, I thought Black & White sucked, and I probably won't play Spore, but at least he's giving it an honest effort instead of making yet another shooting game about alien zombie gangsters.
Will Wright, I hereby apologize. You may continue to pee on anyone who finds it an enjoyable experience without fear of satirical retribution from me.
Penny Arcade said it very well.
Yes. I downloaded it from his web site.
I've been the Mr. Angry in this situation -- I'm not sure if it was a language issue, or why, but instead of telling me "the code is in anonymous cvs from XXX under tag YYY," or sending me a copy, the kernel hacker in question basically told me that he wasn't interested in helping me. It meant that I was stuck unable to make necessary reconfigurations to the only working kernel I could find for my handheld; I was basically stuck with a binary blob that I couldn't modify. I knew that the guy was one of the good guys, but it still really sucked being stuck in a situation that (a) left me unable to use Linux on my handheld, even though someone somewhere had got it working, (b) the GPL was designed to prevent, and (c) was, technically, illegal.
For me it was a much greater waste of time not getting the source code; it was such a waste of time that I gave up and shelved my handheld. You may not care about me personally, but you should bear in mind that fulfilling the GPL's conditions is very important, for reasons besides "it's the law."
For a different take on the Reiser4 inclusion fun, see the kerneltrap article summarizing one iteration of the disputes Hans had with the kernel developers. Be sure to check out this one as well.
That's the spirit! What's with these people who keep adding features and fixing bugs in software, when everybody knows that there are a bunch of old versions of the software sitting around, just not including those fixes yet?
Jesus. How do you even get up in the morning? After all, that only gets you to the other side of your bedroom, and that's a hell of a long way from the office. You might as well just stay in bed; it's hopeless.
People choose the GPL for all sorts of reasons. Some kernel developers like the GPL because they want the kernel, including hardware drivers, to remain free software. They're actively opposed to the idea of binary-only drivers proliferating, even if it means more hardware support for Linux. Did you happen to read the link I gave you?
The issue isn't whether it's arrogant to say that; the issue is whether or not it's legal to distribute the NVidia driver with the Linux kernel. My personal opinion is that it is legal, actually, but treating the whole issue as "licensing crap" is wrong. It's like a child complaining about having to eat dinner before having cookies. "But I like cookies! Why can't I just have cookies?"
I know you like hardware support. I like cookies. It's not that simple, though, and saying "stop worrying and eat cookies" doesn't make it that simple. You should think about why Linux is so much better and more successful than its non-GPLed competitors, and why Linus said that relicensing Linux under the GPL was the best thing he ever did.
Why do you think it's just RMS, and that everybody who choosed to use his license actually doesn't agree with most of what it's supposed to mean? Where did you get that idea?
You really should read that link I included. Here, I'll include it again:
http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=200
I'll even save you some clicking: Some kernel developers (Arjan van de Ven and Andrea Arcangeli) are very concerned about the popularity of binary kernel drivers, and see it possibly eroding Linux's freeness, and interfering with the process of kernel development even for those not using the binary drivers. That's the opinion of people who are heavily involved in kernel development. You say it has "exactly zero to do with creating quality free code"; why do you think you know better than they do?
I think you may have misspelled "BSD." Why do you assume that forbidding closed-source code from being used with the Linux kernel is an accidental side effect of GPL licensing? I think it's exactly the reason why the authors chose the GPL.
http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=200
That comment is really all you need to know to know that this guy isn't going to be worth shit as a "civil liberties officer." Armed men were pointing guns at him and rooting around in his things at random, and he was trying to find "good guys" among them.
"If only I knew which of these groups of murderous thugs I was supposed to place blind, obedient trust in..."
xterm also does Unicode if you run it as 'uxterm' (uxterm is a wrapper script which runs xterm in Unicode mode), if you're into that sort of thing.
The reader isn't the consumer of traditional advertising-supported publishing; the advertiser is the consumer. The reader -- more specifically, his or her fertile mental landscape, ripe for insemination with the appropriate ideas, generally about what would be a good idea to buy -- is the product.
If newspapers competed for readers, then things like "more knowledge, entertained" and the like would have been what newspapers were competing over these past few decades. Instead, they've been competing for advertisers, with readers as an ornery but ultimately pliable herd population to be corralled. Most of the losing that the newspapers have been doing to the intarweb isn't because of "competition" as such; plenty of people read papers in situations where they just don't have access to the internet. They're losing because their model depends on having a monopoly on truth, and they're losing it. No revolution of interactiveness is necessary for them to stop hemmoraging readers. They just need to stop telling lies (particularly to stop republishing government/industry press releases as if they were truth). TV could stand to learn this lesson, too.
An alternative would be to muzzle the internet, so that they'll get back the monopoly on truth again.
Didn't you get the memo? The movies on file sharing sites all have stegonographically encrypted bomb making instructions in them to give to the terrorists in Al Qaeda in exchange for the money which is used to buy the drugs which are given to the school children for posing in the child pornography which is stored on the computers of the innocent after they're broken into with the hacking tools that come with Linux. It should have all been explained in the Evil People's Ten Steps to Victory flier that came with your Debian installation. Didn't you get one?
Yes, I know Joe Schmoe probably shouldn't use Debian. But it sounds like maybe you should
And yet there it sits, blissfully basking in its (justified IMHO) +5 rating. Will it ever be modded down? Will ACs ever stop bitching about the mythical slashdot groupthink moderation conspiracy? Will Donna finally tell Greg what happened last month at the barn dance? Tune in to next week's episode of "Idiots at the Keyboard" to find out!
You are aware, are you not, that there is more than one person who posts to slashdot? It's easily possible for some people to say A, and some people to say B, and for A and B to contradict, without anyone being hypcritical.
Personally, I think that there are some people who do think A and B in this case. I think they do, though, because they see the GPL as a reasonable set of restrictions to put on a piece of software, and they generally sympathize with the goals of the people who create it. In contrast, they see the restrictions that the broadcasting companies want (broadcast flag, skipping commercials made difficult, nobody can distribute content without dealing with us) as unreasonable.
There are surely some parallels, but wouldn't you agree that using someone else's freely-provided work to make money without agreeing to share your work on that product is quite a bit different from getting a show which is already widely distributed from an unauthorized source? They're both copyright infringement, but that's about all they have in common AFAICS.
I never said they were. I said they tended to originate in Linux (actually, "in FOSS" would be more accurate, yes).
In many case that's true. GNU/Linux has the real deals now, though, sendmail and ftpd and apache (which is, of course, descended from NCSA httpd) and X11, which were innovative when they were developed. Microsoft has cheap imitations like Exchange, IIS, and the various pseudo-X-isms. I wasn't saying so much that GNU/Linux deserves a medal for making so much stuff first as that I like GNU/Linux better because it has stuff now that's still research (or vaporware, or poorly-implemented, or a Windows port of something Unix-native) on Windows. The fact that that includes stuff that's decades old like decent shells or sensible MTAs just makes it even sillier.
Thank you for rehashing what I don't agree with. I'll take another stab at disagreeing with it. Ahem:
Of course, GNU/Linux copies from Windows in a lot of cases too. It often makes clones of a particular, self-contained application. Interestingly enough, those (except for evolution) are programs I almost never find myself using. A lot of it may come down to the type of work people do; a standard office person might find themselves using Firefox, OO.org, and evolution, and conclude that GNU/Linux is just a cheap Windows knockoff. I can't see how any programmer or sysadmin could think that, though; in those areas GNU/Linux is where almost all of the action is, and Windows is still way behind.
IIS -> apache, ftpd
COMMAND.COM -> Unix shell
Exchange -> sendmail
poorly-implemented third-party "virtual desktops" -> multiple X11 desktops
Visual SourceSafe -> rcs, CVS, now subversion
Internet Explorer -> Mosiac and Netscape
Remote Desktop -> X11
Expect to see more shameless copying in the future:
I could go on, but I think Microsoft's role as an innovator is quite well-established.