If they "do" something to Eclipse the codebase will fork and everyone will take the non MS fork like has happened so many times in the past.
Like when they contributed to the Linux kernel...oh wait. What are some of the "many times" when Microsoft has contributed to an open source project and then people have forked and everybody has taken the non-MS fork?
If a high end Mac won't support it. You will need a higher end PC which will be beyond most people's budgets.
What do you mean when you say "high end" and "higher end"? Obviously that doesn't mean price, and if it means performance then that's already very clear. You get a much higher performance (for gaming) PC for a lot less than a Mac Pro for example.
Agree to pretty much all of this, but you and so many other posters keep comparing apples to oranges, no pun intended. The mac Pro was NEVER intended to be racked, or to run games, or RAID, or anything else people are shitting on it for.
Right, the headline is bang on. What the Oculus founder is pointing out is correct, of course some people are unable to parse context and leap to the defense of Apple like the company is their best friend. "Rift will come to Mac if Apple ever releases a good gaming computer" As you point out, the closest thing they have is no good and is designed for a different purpose entirely.
Interesting to me since I have a 15" 2014 MacBook Pro (running windows, but it came with OSX installed) that has a little green Nvidia icon in the task bar.
Why is that interesting? The OP clearly pointed out that the newer 2015 MacBook Pro (I'm using one now) has an AMD GPU.
Can't this problem be mostly circumvented by using a secure password instead of a 4-digit passcode that can be easily brute-forced? And obviously this password can be accessed via a fingerprint using TouchID for convenience.
The latest and greatest console costs $400-500 (here at least) and you'd need to buy one every few years to avoid back-compatibility problems.
I game on PC and console, as far as console gaming is concerned I bought a PS3 in 2007 and I just bought a PS4 at the start of this year, that's 9 years between console purchases! And in that time I haven't had to worry about different graphics cards, operating system upgrades or hardware drivers. Everything just works and it works the same on the developers' systems as it does on mine because it's a consistent platform and configuration.
The difference is that developers know what they are targetting and can then optimize for it. PCs have millions of different configurations, what speed CPU do you have? how many cores? how much cache? what GPU? how many GPUs? what driver? what GL extensions does it support? how much VRAM? what is the bus speed? how much RAM? how fast is the RAM? what operating system is it running? what version of the OS is it? These things are hugely important for effective optimization and consoles unify these things so that developers know what they are.
But you'd have to have first class games too, and we haven't had those in a decade.
There are plenty of first-class PC games and there were a decade ago too. Plenty of people don't want to be messing with drivers and settings to get their different combinations of hardware to work efficiently with a game, they just want to play the game. PC gaming is as much about tweaking to get maximum FPS as it is actually playing.
Some games I prefer to sit at the desk and play on the PC (Counterstrike, Team Fortress, Diablo, etc...) with a mouse and keyboard, some games I prefer to sit in the living room on the couch with a controller and play on the XBox or Playstation (Forza, Uncharted, etc...) and some games are better on a phone. There is no one perfect gaming platform for all genres.
And when I say exclusively, I mean definitely no attempt to cater for any version of D3D.
Why would they do that? The majority of developers (and all the major engines) separate their renderer from the 3D API, this means they can target the available and most efficient API implementation for the given platform. On iOS you can target OpenGL ES or Metal, on OS X it is OpenGL <=4.1 or Metal, on Windows it is generally DX 9, 11 or 12 feature levels, OpenGL or Vulkan, on Linux it is OpenGL or Vulkan, on XBox One it is DirectX (both an 11 and 12 implementation now available but obviously pretty senseless to target 11 when 12 is available on every single system), on PS4 it is PSGL, on Android it is OpenGL ES 1.0, 2.0 or 3.0 depending on the hardware.
In terms of 3D graphics it doesn't make sense to write an engine specifically for one API because no API is truly cross platform, in theory they could be but ultimately the implementations do not exist or don't support all the hardware.
Would you want a car that only accepts fuel from one gas station company?
This is why car analogies don't work, you have to continuously seek out, purchase and put gas in a car to keep it running meaning that being beholden to one vendor would be extremely cumbersome. You don't have to continously seek out, purchase and install the operating system to keep your computer running.
What you need to do is to make your case for why it matters for a personal computer and re-purposing old systems seems like a valid justification. Because a more appropriate analogy is asking would you want an iPhone or iPad that only runs iOS? Sure, many people do. Would you want a smartphone or tablet that only runs Android? Certainly a hell of a lot of people are just fine with that too.
Yes, AMD and Nvidia have been using their own gpl software to load their proprietary video blobs into the kernel to avoid gpl violations and which seems to be okay with Linus for now, but, who knows how long this will last there are a lot of zealots out there that are not happy with this method.
Given it is explicitly called out in the license file preamble for the kernel and re-licensing the kernel is not really possible in terms of practicality I don't see any change happening. Not to mention all the vendors that create proprietary kernel modules and all the kernel contributors that rely on this code (almost all mobile and embedded vendors) would likely continue on with the existing kernel version rather than this re-licensed offshoot if such a thing were even possible.
Any user. If RMS doesn't want to use a non-free printer then he doesn't have to, if Microsoft doesn't want to use a GPL'd TCP/IP stack because they don't want to release their code then they don't have to. But situations like this where the only difference is the user has to put the bits together because the GPL says somebody else can't do it for them then distribute it to them is just silliness, it doesn't grant any additional freedoms or have any different result except for making it more difficult for the user.
And yes I think you can reverse engineer software if you did not specifically agree not to.
And that is wrong, thankfully the EFF has put together a guide here about it.
That's only true if you can't wrap your head around the idea of choosing to limit your own choices.
Wrong! I perfectly understand that I am free to visit a museum while not being free to smash the place up, why can you not understand this?
A person could choose to go to a place that has debtors prisons and choose to rack up a huge debt, and be forced into a slave labor camp.
Yes and a person could choose to murder somebody and be forced into a prison, we are all bound by the consequences of our choices. But of course in terms of software you can just delete it and its provisions no longer affect you.
I don't see what this has to do with anything I've said. The fact that you bring up this seemingly irrelevant example, makes me feel liek you aen;t understanding what I am saying.
Then perhaps you need ot review what you wrote. A person has the right to choose to limit their own freedoms in certain circumstances, you can't take that away.
Denying a person the freedom to shoot themselves in the foot may help to preserve other freedoms that person may have (e.g. freedom to walk), but it is nonetheless a restriction on that persons freedom.
Right, that's my point. It sounds like we agree then!
The interest of the software freedom conservancy is to get Oracle to change the license of ZFS to make it legal for Linux use
It already is legal for Linux use, anybody can use ZFS with Linux perfectly legally.
AND to show that the GPL is a well-defended license, rather than a license nobody cares about people breaking.
In this case they are talking about a completely pointless clause, the end result is the same the only difference is you force the user to put the free and non-free bits together, this is nothting more than the GPL making it harder for the user with absolutely zero benefit whatsoever.
The ultimate freedom lies with the user, you can debate the merits of the licenses all you want but ultimately the user has the choice and that is what is important. It doesn't matter if you are aligned with Linus' view of software freedom or RMS' view of software freedom or the BSD view of software freedom or you don't care about software freedom so long as you have choice. If you care about a software ideology then you should support and invest in that ideology, but most people don't care and those who do rarely care enough to limit themselves to that ideology alone.
The comparison of proprietary software to slavery is analogous. People choose to be bound to a software master.
But you aren't "bound by a software master" any more than you are bound by the rules of a museum when you visit. Sure I can't go in there and smash the place up or change things, but calling that "slavery" is just idiotic.
Nearly all cars have steering wheels. That doesn't mean a car is defined by a having a steering steering wheel. It doesn't mean that a car without a steering wheel is redefining what a car is.
Yes but you don't just point to a submarine and say it is a car. The idea of "choice" is directly contradictory to slavery, though it is becoming evident you don't understand the meaning of the word which is why you're so confused.
It shouldn't be that hard to imagine a scenario where a person makes a choice to be enslaved.
Except for anybody who knows that the definition of "enslaved" is precisely about choice and if you remove freedom of choice then you are no longer enslaved. The "choice" to be enslaved is directly contradictory to the concept of slavery.
In some places you don't have control over *all* your freedoms.
Right, and I have the freedom to choose whether I want to go there or not, that is exactly the scenario you laid out and it is absolutely not slavery because I have choice.
In some places you are prevented from entering into a contract where you enslave yoursel
Except that isn't what we are talking about because in terms of use of proprietary software you always have the freedom of choice to stop being under those conditions at any point you like, because you are not a "slave".
I like that I have the freedom to visit a museum despite not having the freedom to smash the place up when I'm there and I also like that I have the freedom to leave and go somewhere else should I feel the need to smash something up. You have to be extremely intellectually dishonest or extremely stupid to think that is in any way anything like "slavery".
That's may be true for some conditions. Other conditions might promises not to reverse engineer the software. I don't think this means that you are allowed by the license to reverse engineer the software once you stop using it.
So you think you can reverse engineer the software so long as you don't agree to the license?
Historically, slavery, for the vast majority of people, has not been a choice (neither entering nor exiting it). That doesn't mean it can't be a choice.
But it isn't, that's why it's not analagous to slavery because in order for it to be you need to redefine slavery to mean you have a choice about whether you want to be a slave or not.
If you really can't let it go, then try to imagine some other kind of slavery like thing that involves the freedom to restrict your own freedoms.
I have control of my freedoms, I have all the choice, that is the complete opposite of slavery. You think I feel enslaved just because I can't come into your house and just pee all over your walls? I - like most people - are quite happy to restrict my freedom to do that, to suggest this is anything even close to slavery is just complete idiocy.
But copyright law is about protecting the interests of at least one party involved - even if you don't agree with it or with their point of view - so what is the interest of the concerned party in this case?
In this example slavery is not analogous to the use of proprietary software, it's analogous to agreeing to the license of proprietary software, which you can't unagree to.
Of course you can. You can't use the software without agreeing to its license stipulations, if you no longer agree you no longer use it. Just like your license to use the road, you must agree to the license conditions and if you don't then you do not use the road and if you "unagree" you cease to use the road. Slaves can't just "no longer agree" and then not be bound by slavery anymore. Using proprietary software - or the road for that matter - under the specified licensing conditions is a choice, slavery is not.
Sorry yes that first line was unclear, I see no difference between these things. What I meant was that it is the view of the SFLC that this undermines software freedom, they obviously see it as a problem despite the fact that there doesn't seem to be a difference between the two scenarios outside of who actually compiles it.
The comparison to slavery is completely ridiculous. You are totally free to not use proprietary software and/or to discontinue its use if and when you see fit and to even use it only for specific cases and in specific envrionments for specific timeframes. Slaves were not free to just not be slaves when they didn't want to be anymore.
Sounds more like you're arguing that bondage should be illegal because it allows people to enter and exit "slavery" as they see fit.
So what does anybody gain by saying you can combine the free bits and non-free bits into a non-free binary but you cannot give that to anybody else even if you give them the free bits in source form the same as you recieved them? You both have the same resultant non-free binary and the same source code and non-free component(s) from which it was produced so what is gained by making each user combine them themselves rather than just doing it once and distributing the result along with everything else?
Getting the user to create the non-free binary that you cannot distribute yourself does indeed undermine software freedom. If the non-free binary weren't a problem wrt software freedom then the vendor could just distribute it and make the free bits available in source form as restrictive OSS licenses mandate but the license does not allow this method when the result is a combination of free and non-free bits so they get around it by having the user connect the free and non-free bits.
In both cases the actual result is the same: user has access to the free bits in source form with the non-free bits in binary form and has a resultant non-free binary combination of both bits.
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If they "do" something to Eclipse the codebase will fork and everyone will take the non MS fork like has happened so many times in the past.
Like when they contributed to the Linux kernel...oh wait. What are some of the "many times" when Microsoft has contributed to an open source project and then people have forked and everybody has taken the non-MS fork?
If a high end Mac won't support it. You will need a higher end PC which will be beyond most people's budgets.
What do you mean when you say "high end" and "higher end"? Obviously that doesn't mean price, and if it means performance then that's already very clear. You get a much higher performance (for gaming) PC for a lot less than a Mac Pro for example.
Agree to pretty much all of this, but you and so many other posters keep comparing apples to oranges, no pun intended. The mac Pro was NEVER intended to be racked, or to run games, or RAID, or anything else people are shitting on it for.
Right, the headline is bang on. What the Oculus founder is pointing out is correct, of course some people are unable to parse context and leap to the defense of Apple like the company is their best friend. "Rift will come to Mac if Apple ever releases a good gaming computer" As you point out, the closest thing they have is no good and is designed for a different purpose entirely.
Interesting to me since I have a 15" 2014 MacBook Pro (running windows, but it came with OSX installed) that has a little green Nvidia icon in the task bar.
Why is that interesting? The OP clearly pointed out that the newer 2015 MacBook Pro (I'm using one now) has an AMD GPU.
Can't this problem be mostly circumvented by using a secure password instead of a 4-digit passcode that can be easily brute-forced? And obviously this password can be accessed via a fingerprint using TouchID for convenience.
The latest and greatest console costs $400-500 (here at least) and you'd need to buy one every few years to avoid back-compatibility problems.
I game on PC and console, as far as console gaming is concerned I bought a PS3 in 2007 and I just bought a PS4 at the start of this year, that's 9 years between console purchases! And in that time I haven't had to worry about different graphics cards, operating system upgrades or hardware drivers. Everything just works and it works the same on the developers' systems as it does on mine because it's a consistent platform and configuration.
An Xbox is already a low end PC.
The difference is that developers know what they are targetting and can then optimize for it. PCs have millions of different configurations, what speed CPU do you have? how many cores? how much cache? what GPU? how many GPUs? what driver? what GL extensions does it support? how much VRAM? what is the bus speed? how much RAM? how fast is the RAM? what operating system is it running? what version of the OS is it? These things are hugely important for effective optimization and consoles unify these things so that developers know what they are.
But you'd have to have first class games too, and we haven't had those in a decade.
There are plenty of first-class PC games and there were a decade ago too. Plenty of people don't want to be messing with drivers and settings to get their different combinations of hardware to work efficiently with a game, they just want to play the game. PC gaming is as much about tweaking to get maximum FPS as it is actually playing.
Some games I prefer to sit at the desk and play on the PC (Counterstrike, Team Fortress, Diablo, etc...) with a mouse and keyboard, some games I prefer to sit in the living room on the couch with a controller and play on the XBox or Playstation (Forza, Uncharted, etc...) and some games are better on a phone. There is no one perfect gaming platform for all genres.
And when I say exclusively, I mean definitely no attempt to cater for any version of D3D.
Why would they do that? The majority of developers (and all the major engines) separate their renderer from the 3D API, this means they can target the available and most efficient API implementation for the given platform. On iOS you can target OpenGL ES or Metal, on OS X it is OpenGL <=4.1 or Metal, on Windows it is generally DX 9, 11 or 12 feature levels, OpenGL or Vulkan, on Linux it is OpenGL or Vulkan, on XBox One it is DirectX (both an 11 and 12 implementation now available but obviously pretty senseless to target 11 when 12 is available on every single system), on PS4 it is PSGL, on Android it is OpenGL ES 1.0, 2.0 or 3.0 depending on the hardware.
In terms of 3D graphics it doesn't make sense to write an engine specifically for one API because no API is truly cross platform, in theory they could be but ultimately the implementations do not exist or don't support all the hardware.
Would you want a car that only accepts fuel from one gas station company?
This is why car analogies don't work, you have to continuously seek out, purchase and put gas in a car to keep it running meaning that being beholden to one vendor would be extremely cumbersome. You don't have to continously seek out, purchase and install the operating system to keep your computer running.
What you need to do is to make your case for why it matters for a personal computer and re-purposing old systems seems like a valid justification. Because a more appropriate analogy is asking would you want an iPhone or iPad that only runs iOS? Sure, many people do. Would you want a smartphone or tablet that only runs Android? Certainly a hell of a lot of people are just fine with that too.
Yes, AMD and Nvidia have been using their own gpl software to load their proprietary video blobs into the kernel to avoid gpl violations and which seems to be okay with Linus for now, but, who knows how long this will last there are a lot of zealots out there that are not happy with this method.
Given it is explicitly called out in the license file preamble for the kernel and re-licensing the kernel is not really possible in terms of practicality I don't see any change happening. Not to mention all the vendors that create proprietary kernel modules and all the kernel contributors that rely on this code (almost all mobile and embedded vendors) would likely continue on with the existing kernel version rather than this re-licensed offshoot if such a thing were even possible.
Ah, but which user?
Any user. If RMS doesn't want to use a non-free printer then he doesn't have to, if Microsoft doesn't want to use a GPL'd TCP/IP stack because they don't want to release their code then they don't have to. But situations like this where the only difference is the user has to put the bits together because the GPL says somebody else can't do it for them then distribute it to them is just silliness, it doesn't grant any additional freedoms or have any different result except for making it more difficult for the user.
And yes I think you can reverse engineer software if you did not specifically agree not to.
And that is wrong, thankfully the EFF has put together a guide here about it.
That's only true if you can't wrap your head around the idea of choosing to limit your own choices.
Wrong! I perfectly understand that I am free to visit a museum while not being free to smash the place up, why can you not understand this?
A person could choose to go to a place that has debtors prisons and choose to rack up a huge debt, and be forced into a slave labor camp.
Yes and a person could choose to murder somebody and be forced into a prison, we are all bound by the consequences of our choices. But of course in terms of software you can just delete it and its provisions no longer affect you.
I don't see what this has to do with anything I've said. The fact that you bring up this seemingly irrelevant example, makes me feel liek you aen;t understanding what I am saying.
Then perhaps you need ot review what you wrote. A person has the right to choose to limit their own freedoms in certain circumstances, you can't take that away.
Denying a person the freedom to shoot themselves in the foot may help to preserve other freedoms that person may have (e.g. freedom to walk), but it is nonetheless a restriction on that persons freedom.
Right, that's my point. It sounds like we agree then!
The interest of the software freedom conservancy is to get Oracle to change the license of ZFS to make it legal for Linux use
It already is legal for Linux use, anybody can use ZFS with Linux perfectly legally.
AND to show that the GPL is a well-defended license, rather than a license nobody cares about people breaking.
In this case they are talking about a completely pointless clause, the end result is the same the only difference is you force the user to put the free and non-free bits together, this is nothting more than the GPL making it harder for the user with absolutely zero benefit whatsoever.
The ultimate freedom lies with the user, you can debate the merits of the licenses all you want but ultimately the user has the choice and that is what is important. It doesn't matter if you are aligned with Linus' view of software freedom or RMS' view of software freedom or the BSD view of software freedom or you don't care about software freedom so long as you have choice. If you care about a software ideology then you should support and invest in that ideology, but most people don't care and those who do rarely care enough to limit themselves to that ideology alone.
The comparison of proprietary software to slavery is analogous. People choose to be bound to a software master.
But you aren't "bound by a software master" any more than you are bound by the rules of a museum when you visit. Sure I can't go in there and smash the place up or change things, but calling that "slavery" is just idiotic.
According to who? The license or the law?
The law, DMCA.
Nearly all cars have steering wheels. That doesn't mean a car is defined by a having a steering steering wheel. It doesn't mean that a car without a steering wheel is redefining what a car is.
Yes but you don't just point to a submarine and say it is a car. The idea of "choice" is directly contradictory to slavery, though it is becoming evident you don't understand the meaning of the word which is why you're so confused.
It shouldn't be that hard to imagine a scenario where a person makes a choice to be enslaved.
Except for anybody who knows that the definition of "enslaved" is precisely about choice and if you remove freedom of choice then you are no longer enslaved. The "choice" to be enslaved is directly contradictory to the concept of slavery.
In some places you don't have control over *all* your freedoms.
Right, and I have the freedom to choose whether I want to go there or not, that is exactly the scenario you laid out and it is absolutely not slavery because I have choice.
In some places you are prevented from entering into a contract where you enslave yoursel
Except that isn't what we are talking about because in terms of use of proprietary software you always have the freedom of choice to stop being under those conditions at any point you like, because you are not a "slave".
I like that I have the freedom to visit a museum despite not having the freedom to smash the place up when I'm there and I also like that I have the freedom to leave and go somewhere else should I feel the need to smash something up. You have to be extremely intellectually dishonest or extremely stupid to think that is in any way anything like "slavery".
That's may be true for some conditions. Other conditions might promises not to reverse engineer the software. I don't think this means that you are allowed by the license to reverse engineer the software once you stop using it.
So you think you can reverse engineer the software so long as you don't agree to the license?
Historically, slavery, for the vast majority of people, has not been a choice (neither entering nor exiting it). That doesn't mean it can't be a choice.
But it isn't, that's why it's not analagous to slavery because in order for it to be you need to redefine slavery to mean you have a choice about whether you want to be a slave or not.
If you really can't let it go, then try to imagine some other kind of slavery like thing that involves the freedom to restrict your own freedoms.
I have control of my freedoms, I have all the choice, that is the complete opposite of slavery. You think I feel enslaved just because I can't come into your house and just pee all over your walls? I - like most people - are quite happy to restrict my freedom to do that, to suggest this is anything even close to slavery is just complete idiocy.
But copyright law is about protecting the interests of at least one party involved - even if you don't agree with it or with their point of view - so what is the interest of the concerned party in this case?
In this example slavery is not analogous to the use of proprietary software, it's analogous to agreeing to the license of proprietary software, which you can't unagree to.
Of course you can. You can't use the software without agreeing to its license stipulations, if you no longer agree you no longer use it. Just like your license to use the road, you must agree to the license conditions and if you don't then you do not use the road and if you "unagree" you cease to use the road. Slaves can't just "no longer agree" and then not be bound by slavery anymore. Using proprietary software - or the road for that matter - under the specified licensing conditions is a choice, slavery is not.
Sorry yes that first line was unclear, I see no difference between these things. What I meant was that it is the view of the SFLC that this undermines software freedom, they obviously see it as a problem despite the fact that there doesn't seem to be a difference between the two scenarios outside of who actually compiles it.
The comparison to slavery is completely ridiculous. You are totally free to not use proprietary software and/or to discontinue its use if and when you see fit and to even use it only for specific cases and in specific envrionments for specific timeframes. Slaves were not free to just not be slaves when they didn't want to be anymore.
Sounds more like you're arguing that bondage should be illegal because it allows people to enter and exit "slavery" as they see fit.
So what does anybody gain by saying you can combine the free bits and non-free bits into a non-free binary but you cannot give that to anybody else even if you give them the free bits in source form the same as you recieved them? You both have the same resultant non-free binary and the same source code and non-free component(s) from which it was produced so what is gained by making each user combine them themselves rather than just doing it once and distributing the result along with everything else?
Getting the user to create the non-free binary that you cannot distribute yourself does indeed undermine software freedom. If the non-free binary weren't a problem wrt software freedom then the vendor could just distribute it and make the free bits available in source form as restrictive OSS licenses mandate but the license does not allow this method when the result is a combination of free and non-free bits so they get around it by having the user connect the free and non-free bits.
In both cases the actual result is the same: user has access to the free bits in source form with the non-free bits in binary form and has a resultant non-free binary combination of both bits.
For example?