Sorry, but your arguments do not hold. First, how is it that sueing the inventers of the CD format suddenly destroys it? All licences would suddenly be void? I doubt it. Second, if this was such a bad move for Sony, the media company, then Sony, the hardware manufacturer, would not do it, would it? They probably just ran the numbers and decided that the possible losses from the media side were smaller than the probable gains from the hardware side, which means the original poster is right: the hardware manufacturers have more economical power, even within the same company.
No FreeDB booster was ever able to sufficiently explain to me why, for example, Hotel California should be listed under New Age.
IIRC, it's because the database entries are plain text files named "[genre]/[CD checksum].txt" -- if two different CDs have the same checksum, then they have to be in different genres. Also, one can't update the genre of a CD once entered, you can only create a new entry somewhere else.
Well, this is more of an explanation of why FreeDB sucks, not an answer to the GP;-)
Isn't this like me releasing a GPL program which is linked to the nvidia or ATI blobs?
No. If you are the author, you can do any weird thing around the GPL and it will not be illegal; it may, however, affect other people's ability to distribute the resulting code (that is, it will be illegal for them to do it, which probably means you shouldn't have used the GPL for your code in the first place).
Now, if you meant "me DISTRIBUTING a GPL program...", then yes, this is exactly the same. And it is illegal according to the GPL. ATI, NVidia and others don't have a problem with this for their linux drivers because Linus explicitly said he thinks it is ok and will not sue (check the/Documentation dir of the kernel source, I think it is there somewhere). X11 is not GPL'd, so there is no problem there.
Hell, isn't it similar if I write a GPL application which uses the Windows API?
No, this is totally different, the GPL explicitly says that mere aggregation does not create a derivative work, and says that linking with standard libraries etc that come with the OS is allowed as an "special exception".
I personally feel as though this is an overreaction, the ichessu site does not hide the fact its based on JIN and offers sources, or am I wrong and this is infact a genuine GPL violation?
This is the classic example of things the GPL was designed to avoid: I take some free code, enhance it, but the enhanced version is not free. The fact that they acknowledge the use of GPL code does not give them the right to violate it, just like taking responsability for a murder won't let you walk free.
This is where we disagree - the ability to install is different from the ability to run a specific piece of code. It installs, but the hardware will not allow it to execute because it does not match the originally installed piece of code; and the GPL does not require execution only installation, so they are in compliance with the license.
How about this, then: you ask a guy (me!) if it would be possible to install windows XP on your pentium 233MHz with 32MB of ram for a fee. The guy (me!) says, "sure, no problem", plugs an extra 128MB of ram on the machine, installs windows (after a long time;) and removes the 128MB of ram. Now, windows will not run on that computer, because the minimum ram required for windows is 64MB. Would you pay the guy (me!)? You asked for the software to be installed and, by your definition, it is. I could even go as far as saying I "installed" windows on a powerPC-based macintosh by your logic, by just perfoming an installation on a PC and copying the files over to the mac.
Now, where I (and hopefully others) come from, it would be obvious to anyone that the guy screwed you up, because it is only obvious that if you asked for a windows installation it's because you intend to run said copy of windows. But maybe this is just me...
Also, let's not forget that the GPL includes a preamble explaining the spirit of the license, which is "to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software--to make sure the software is free for all its users"; it also mentions that "To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights."
So, even if this specific portion of the GPL is not written in legalese, it is part of the license and is open to interpretation in order to clarify dubious issues (such as this one we are discussing). And do you really believe that actively preventing the user from running a modified version of the software on the hardware in which the distributor installed it does not qualify as breaching the "restrictions that forbid anyone to deny you these rights"? There would be a lot of talk on a court, sure, but in the end, if the lawyers are competent, I could bet what the outcome would be. The new GPL is supposed to simplify the talking, it does not add anything really new in this regard.
I cannot "modify it without restriction", because I cannot make my version do the same things that the original version does (run on top of that specific hardware) in a different way (for instance, with messages in a different language), and this is a restriction.
Now, obviously not every modification is guaranteed to work. If I insert a bug in the code that prevents compilation, or if I try to allocate more memory than the device has, it won't work. These are technical limitations, the license has nothing to do with them. One might try to shoehorn the manufacturer's key "issue" as a "hardware limitation", but I don't think they would be much successful: this is a limitation put in place by design, with the explicit goal of preventing me from modifying the code in certain ways (which is using it modified on that hardware).
Maybe you think that this would be outside the scope of the GPL, but check out section 3 of the GPL2 (yes, version 2):
You may copy and distribute the Program [...] in object code or executable form [...] provided that you also [...] accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code[...]
For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable[emphasis mine].
Now, the distributor gave me a binary compiled and installed on a piece of hardware. If I cannot compile and install it on that same hardware (note that "install" implies being able to run; if I can't run it, I didn't really install it, I just copied it), then I did not receive at least part of "the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable"; this part is the signing key. Either they have to give me their key or (much more reasonable) give me a way to make the device accept my key.
This is the GPL2, this is nothing new; the GPL3 tries to make this clear by citing it explicitly to avoid unecessary confusion (such as that which is hapening now in the community), that's it.
Note that I didn't mention ownership of the device. Wether they, sell, rent, lend, or give away the hardware, this is totally unimportant from the point of view of this discussion: they are redistributing GPL code, they must comply with the license, and preventing me from installing a custom version of the software on the device is breaking the license, even in the case of the GPL2, as I just demonstrated.
The second "summary" (If the hardware doesn't support software freedom like intended in the GPLv3, then you're not allowed to use/put GPLv3 software on it at all. Accept all or nothing of the philosophy of the GPL, not just the parts that you want to) is exactly what it is all about.
The first one is incorrect; DRM may even be useful in some cases (giving warnings before installing software from an unknown source, for instance) and, even when it is bad, that is not the GPL's business. The GPL business is to guarantee that free software remains free, that is, that the receiver of a copy is allowed to see, modify, distribute and run the code.
If Vista is as complicated as its specs say it is, I hope Microsoft takes another two years to get this done because I don't want to have to put up with Vista SP1, Vista SP2, Vista SP3, etc. down the line.
You're kidding, right? RIGHT?
Firstly, the project is very late, this is affecting negatively their business and their image. They cannot afford to have it any later, so they will take shortcuts.
Secondly, while the market (and MS itself!) is changing, don't forget they have made a LOT of money over 20 years by releasing buggy code and fixing it later.
In this scenario, do you actually hope for a moment they will release truly stable and secure code? Come on! They will release the least quality they have any hope that the market will tolerate, which, in the case of MS, isn't saying much...
While I think ubuntu is really, really great, I don't see it offering any more of a challenge to RedHat than debian does; quite on the contrary, in fact, since ubuntu focuses on the desktop while RedHat and debian focus on the server (I know debian doesn't *officially* focus on the server, but still...).
As for MS, well, they are usually able to strike a balance between "does not suck TOO much" and "has microsoft on the name" that appeals to a lot of people, even on corporate servers etc. Still, maybe the HPC market has people knowledgeable enough not to be impressed by branding alone.
In that case, they will have to have a real appeal on the quality/performance front and, even in this case, will be fighting an uphill battle against the "established" systems. Maybe they will learn how it feels to be on the other side of competition?
I didn't ask "why is less power consumption good"; I asked "why would AMD bother to use a transmeta chip intead of one of their own"? The only advantage offered by the transmeta being less power consumption, this is not relevant to the application (this "pre-paid computer"). Why wouldn't they just use one of their more power-hungry cpus *or*, if anything, use the turion, which (I guess) is a little lighter on power?
I don't get it. Aren't the transmetas optimized for low power consumption? Why bother with that on a desktop, why didn't AMD go with one of their "standard" processors?
Well, I guess a possible answer is that their processors are faster than the transmeta and they want to keep the market split ("cheap computers are ok, but if you want performance go for the K8"). Maybe it is also a means of diminishing the competition (previously, transmeta was one of the companies working towards this, now they are partnering, which is probably beneficial to both).
But why haven't such agreements appeared before, on "ordinary", low-end consumer products, then?
As much as I think it sucks that people would actually do such things, they do. And they have been doing it for ages (anyone up to buy a bridge?). In the "real world" people still get caught in naughty scams, but maybe they are a little more aware nowadays. When online, however, I guess most people lower the guard; maybe it is "the internet" or the fact that it is in written form that gives some sense of seriousness to them. Add to it the fact that the vast majority of internet users does not know how easy it is to register ANY domain name in the US and there you are...
A little more education might be useful here. Also, maybe there should be a little higher barriers to domain registration. In Brazil, it is a little more difficult to set-up a domain name: you have to have an actual company, otherwise you have to restrict yourself to the "personal" TLDs. This was originally put in place to avoid a parallel market for domain names (much like what exists in the US today; in Brazil, the registrar is government-managed).
In the end, however, many people are just naïve. It would be nice if that could be a compliment...
Free Software, at least for a part of this community, is a matter of principle, ethics, morality, you name it. Unfortunately, such approach to free software is currently not very fashionable.
Yet, I believe we are headed for some serious turbulence in the not-too-distant future, and the "use the best tool for the job" crowd, the "I use it because it is free (as in beer)" crowd or even the corporations currently making money from free software are not going to be the ones solving the difficult technical/legal problems that are to come for software to be truly free. It will be the idealistic crowd. And that's why we need, more than ever, a lot of evangelization.
According to TFA, Moglen's speech was the only one not "business"-focused; all the other speakers addressed "the wonders of open-source software", as a means of making money while involving a community (which means "reducing costs"). While there is nothing wrong with that, it is important to realize there are ethical reasons for some people to spend a lot of time on something that is not reverted to them in the form of money.
When difficulties arise, are these companies to back-up the free software community, investing developer and lawyer time, or are they going to go the short-term solution of reverting to the closed-software business model? While expecting moral decisions on the part of a company is unreal, it may make business sense to stick to free software, specially if there is a strong enough community behind it to actually have an influence on the market.
Of particular importance, IMHO, is the GPL v3 subject. A lot of ignorance, misinformation, prejudice and even FUD seems to be currently associated with GPL v3. The new GPL is going to be very important, but the community needs to understand it *correctly* ASAP. And I surely hope more *accurate* stuff is written about it, and Moglen is probably the person to do it.
I definitely may be wrong here (never been even close to Canada), but I believe the tax on blank media came out long before music downloads appeared in the radar. Sure, the tax is supposed to compensate for informal, personal copying, by providing some extra revenue to the artists (yeah, right, to the artists... mostly... somewhat... err...). However, I doubt the letter of the law mentions "downloading", which (in this "interesting" world we live in) may make quite a difference.
Ironically, in the 1970's Gilberto Gil himself sued Rod Stewart for plagiarism, and won. I'm not sure that Stewart actually copied Gil's music, perhaps it was a coincidence
Not to agree or disagree with your point, just to clear the facts on this particular event: it was Jorge Ben, not Gilberto Gil; the song (do you think I'm sexy) was written by, IIRC, Stewart's drummer, and they proved that indeed this guy attended a Jorge Ben concert before composing his song. I believe the case ended with some kind of agreement, not a conviction, and the money from the song was (is?) donated to the Unicef.
Mozilla is working off of Netscape's codebase, which is in turn based off of NCSA Mosaic.
Sorry, but no. Netscape was created by the same people that created mosaic, but there was no significant code sharing. As to mozilla, the netscape code was scrapped and mozilla is, therefore, a complete rewrite; that is the reason why it took so long. So, mozilla was (and is) a huge project, and it was successful.
As a side note, you might want to know that, while they did a lot of work on the original netscape code and almost released a netscape 6.0 based on it, someone in netscape's management (that is, someone controlling lots of important developers for the project) decided that instead of releasing and then rewriting, they should rewrite and release "soon", which obviously was a stupid idea. So, the time it took for mozilla to be developed is actually one year less than the time between the netscape source release and the release of mozilla 1.0. It was actually pretty fast if you consider they created for themselves a whole new advanced toolkit for cross-platform development (whether this was a clever move or not is open to discussion).
Firefox and Thunderbird are rewrites of the core of Mozilla.
No, they are completely new programs built on top of the core components of mozilla (gecko and the libraries for cross-platform development). The fact that they have evolved so fast shows the quality of these components.
I don't know as much about Eclipse, but in general, I'm not a big fan of "do it all" IDE's. I'd rather have something like vi or Emacs where vi is a very "one purpose" editor and Emacs is more or less a "here's a small concept with a bunch of stuff that takes advantage of that small concept".
Eclipse is a runtime for the interconnection of plugins. Bunches of plugins make up a complete application. The Java IDE for eclipse is one such application, built with a handful of plugins (one for the editor, one for the debugger... you get the idea). The C/C++ IDE is another application built with a bundle of plugins. So, Eclipse is very much what emacs would be if it had been created in 2000.
Just so you know, my masters was about developing such a system for LADSPA: http://gsd.ime.usp.br/~lago/masters. The research and the beta-level, proof-of-concept implementation were concluded in April.
data should be encrypted before they go into the system, which suppose that the system encrypt the data and which also give the interesting problem: where are the key stored?
Burn the key on 15 CDs and send one home, one to your grandmother's home on a different state, one to a bank vault... you get the idea. That can be made very secure and very fault-tolerant for a cost near to zero (these 15 CDs need to be burnt only *once*; if you are really paranoid, change the key once a year).
The license agreement that governs this is the 1.2 and 1.3 JVM license agreement (don't have it handy, sorry). This was changed in 1.4 thanks to a lot of pressure from the apache project. So, you could write a free 1.1-compatible JVM, you cold not write a free 1.2/1.3-compatible JVM and right now you can write a free 1.4-compatible JVM.
the ardour project has been hostile to such users in the past by insisting that they use an expensive soundcard like the Hammerfall.
Ardour is a sophisticated piece of software, and needs adequate hardware and drivers to run. Right now, under linux this comes down to the Hammerfall, somewhat expensive, and the M-Audio Delta series, which is very reasonably priced (check out the Delta-44: 4 analog ins, 4 analog outs).
ProTools TDM, [...]comes FREE with the appropriate DigiDesign hardware. ProTools LE [...]comes FREE with the appropriate hardware. ProTools FREE, which only works with 2 in/2 out[...]
That is, you can only get a version of protools that is comparable to ardour if you spend serious money (even if it's buying specific hardware), as the parent post said.
Of course, had you gone the less troublesome route and used TDM, you could just buy another farm card and slap it in.
for the slight fee of US$4,000.00...
Maybe it wouldn't be totally out of the question to buy a multiprocessed computer system for that money? Ardour doesn't benefit from more than 2 cpu's right now, but this may change in the future.
[...]a decent sounding reverb across 3 or 4 dozen tracks of 24 bit audio
I hope you use a single instance of the reverb plugin to do this, right?
Many people won't abandon protools, much less overnight; still, ardour is great news for smaller studios, home studios, musicians and the free software radicals like me.
Paul Davis does this about once every six months... Consider his other dead-end project, Quasimodo, and things don't look too good.
Please don't take this troll into account. Ardour has been under development for around 3 years now. The story with Quasimodo is that the CSound community created a "standard" way to do most of what Quasimodo aimed at, so he abandoned the project. jack and ardour, however, are here to stay; not only thanks to Paul's hard work, but also because they have gained enough "critical mass" with the community.
If folks are going to make open source DAWs, where is the open plugin API?
It's here. And it's around 2 years old, with lots of plugins available. Sure, there are more VST plugins out there, and some may be "better" that the equivalent LADSPA ones, but there's already a lot of interesting LADSPA plugins out there.
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Sorry, but your arguments do not hold. First, how is it that sueing the inventers of the CD format suddenly destroys it? All licences would suddenly be void? I doubt it. Second, if this was such a bad move for Sony, the media company, then Sony, the hardware manufacturer, would not do it, would it? They probably just ran the numbers and decided that the possible losses from the media side were smaller than the probable gains from the hardware side, which means the original poster is right: the hardware manufacturers have more economical power, even within the same company.
Well, this is more of an explanation of why FreeDB sucks, not an answer to the GP ;-)
No. If you are the author, you can do any weird thing around the GPL and it will not be illegal; it may, however, affect other people's ability to distribute the resulting code (that is, it will be illegal for them to do it, which probably means you shouldn't have used the GPL for your code in the first place).
Now, if you meant "me DISTRIBUTING a GPL program...", then yes, this is exactly the same. And it is illegal according to the GPL. ATI, NVidia and others don't have a problem with this for their linux drivers because Linus explicitly said he thinks it is ok and will not sue (check the /Documentation dir of the kernel source, I think it is there somewhere). X11 is not GPL'd, so there is no problem there.
Hell, isn't it similar if I write a GPL application which uses the Windows API?
No, this is totally different, the GPL explicitly says that mere aggregation does not create a derivative work, and says that linking with standard libraries etc that come with the OS is allowed as an "special exception".
I personally feel as though this is an overreaction, the ichessu site does not hide the fact its based on JIN and offers sources, or am I wrong and this is infact a genuine GPL violation?
This is the classic example of things the GPL was designed to avoid: I take some free code, enhance it, but the enhanced version is not free. The fact that they acknowledge the use of GPL code does not give them the right to violate it, just like taking responsability for a murder won't let you walk free.
How about this, then: you ask a guy (me!) if it would be possible to install windows XP on your pentium 233MHz with 32MB of ram for a fee. The guy (me!) says, "sure, no problem", plugs an extra 128MB of ram on the machine, installs windows (after a long time ;) and removes the 128MB of ram. Now, windows will not run on that computer, because the minimum ram required for windows is 64MB. Would you pay the guy (me!)? You asked for the software to be installed and, by your definition, it is. I could even go as far as saying I "installed" windows on a powerPC-based macintosh by your logic, by just perfoming an installation on a PC and copying the files over to the mac.
Now, where I (and hopefully others) come from, it would be obvious to anyone that the guy screwed you up, because it is only obvious that if you asked for a windows installation it's because you intend to run said copy of windows. But maybe this is just me...
Also, let's not forget that the GPL includes a preamble explaining the spirit of the license, which is "to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software--to make sure the software is free for all its users"; it also mentions that "To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights."
So, even if this specific portion of the GPL is not written in legalese, it is part of the license and is open to interpretation in order to clarify dubious issues (such as this one we are discussing). And do you really believe that actively preventing the user from running a modified version of the software on the hardware in which the distributor installed it does not qualify as breaching the "restrictions that forbid anyone to deny you these rights"? There would be a lot of talk on a court, sure, but in the end, if the lawyers are competent, I could bet what the outcome would be. The new GPL is supposed to simplify the talking, it does not add anything really new in this regard.
I must disagree.
I cannot "modify it without restriction", because I cannot make my version do the same things that the original version does (run on top of that specific hardware) in a different way (for instance, with messages in a different language), and this is a restriction.
Now, obviously not every modification is guaranteed to work. If I insert a bug in the code that prevents compilation, or if I try to allocate more memory than the device has, it won't work. These are technical limitations, the license has nothing to do with them. One might try to shoehorn the manufacturer's key "issue" as a "hardware limitation", but I don't think they would be much successful: this is a limitation put in place by design, with the explicit goal of preventing me from modifying the code in certain ways (which is using it modified on that hardware).
Maybe you think that this would be outside the scope of the GPL, but check out section 3 of the GPL2 (yes, version 2):
You may copy and distribute the Program [...] in object code or executable form [...] provided that you also [...] accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code[...]
For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable [emphasis mine].
Now, the distributor gave me a binary compiled and installed on a piece of hardware. If I cannot compile and install it on that same hardware (note that "install" implies being able to run; if I can't run it, I didn't really install it, I just copied it), then I did not receive at least part of "the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable"; this part is the signing key. Either they have to give me their key or (much more reasonable) give me a way to make the device accept my key.
This is the GPL2, this is nothing new; the GPL3 tries to make this clear by citing it explicitly to avoid unecessary confusion (such as that which is hapening now in the community), that's it.
Note that I didn't mention ownership of the device. Wether they, sell, rent, lend, or give away the hardware, this is totally unimportant from the point of view of this discussion: they are redistributing GPL code, they must comply with the license, and preventing me from installing a custom version of the software on the device is breaking the license, even in the case of the GPL2, as I just demonstrated.
The first one is incorrect; DRM may even be useful in some cases (giving warnings before installing software from an unknown source, for instance) and, even when it is bad, that is not the GPL's business. The GPL business is to guarantee that free software remains free, that is, that the receiver of a copy is allowed to see, modify, distribute and run the code.
You're kidding, right? RIGHT?
Firstly, the project is very late, this is affecting negatively their business and their image. They cannot afford to have it any later, so they will take shortcuts.
Secondly, while the market (and MS itself!) is changing, don't forget they have made a LOT of money over 20 years by releasing buggy code and fixing it later.
In this scenario, do you actually hope for a moment they will release truly stable and secure code? Come on! They will release the least quality they have any hope that the market will tolerate, which, in the case of MS, isn't saying much...
While I think ubuntu is really, really great, I don't see it offering any more of a challenge to RedHat than debian does; quite on the contrary, in fact, since ubuntu focuses on the desktop while RedHat and debian focus on the server (I know debian doesn't *officially* focus on the server, but still...).
As for MS, well, they are usually able to strike a balance between "does not suck TOO much" and "has microsoft on the name" that appeals to a lot of people, even on corporate servers etc. Still, maybe the HPC market has people knowledgeable enough not to be impressed by branding alone.
In that case, they will have to have a real appeal on the quality/performance front and, even in this case, will be fighting an uphill battle against the "established" systems. Maybe they will learn how it feels to be on the other side of competition?
You realize you did not answer my question?
I didn't ask "why is less power consumption good"; I asked "why would AMD bother to use a transmeta chip intead of one of their own"? The only advantage offered by the transmeta being less power consumption, this is not relevant to the application (this "pre-paid computer"). Why wouldn't they just use one of their more power-hungry cpus *or*, if anything, use the turion, which (I guess) is a little lighter on power?
Not "suddenly", you know... ;-)
I don't get it. Aren't the transmetas optimized for low power consumption? Why bother with that on a desktop, why didn't AMD go with one of their "standard" processors?
Well, I guess a possible answer is that their processors are faster than the transmeta and they want to keep the market split ("cheap computers are ok, but if you want performance go for the K8"). Maybe it is also a means of diminishing the competition (previously, transmeta was one of the companies working towards this, now they are partnering, which is probably beneficial to both).
But why haven't such agreements appeared before, on "ordinary", low-end consumer products, then?
As much as I think it sucks that people would actually do such things, they do. And they have been doing it for ages (anyone up to buy a bridge?). In the "real world" people still get caught in naughty scams, but maybe they are a little more aware nowadays. When online, however, I guess most people lower the guard; maybe it is "the internet" or the fact that it is in written form that gives some sense of seriousness to them. Add to it the fact that the vast majority of internet users does not know how easy it is to register ANY domain name in the US and there you are...
A little more education might be useful here. Also, maybe there should be a little higher barriers to domain registration. In Brazil, it is a little more difficult to set-up a domain name: you have to have an actual company, otherwise you have to restrict yourself to the "personal" TLDs. This was originally put in place to avoid a parallel market for domain names (much like what exists in the US today; in Brazil, the registrar is government-managed).
In the end, however, many people are just naïve. It would be nice if that could be a compliment...
Free Software, at least for a part of this community, is a matter of principle, ethics, morality, you name it. Unfortunately, such approach to free software is currently not very fashionable.
Yet, I believe we are headed for some serious turbulence in the not-too-distant future, and the "use the best tool for the job" crowd, the "I use it because it is free (as in beer)" crowd or even the corporations currently making money from free software are not going to be the ones solving the difficult technical/legal problems that are to come for software to be truly free. It will be the idealistic crowd. And that's why we need, more than ever, a lot of evangelization.
According to TFA, Moglen's speech was the only one not "business"-focused; all the other speakers addressed "the wonders of open-source software", as a means of making money while involving a community (which means "reducing costs"). While there is nothing wrong with that, it is important to realize there are ethical reasons for some people to spend a lot of time on something that is not reverted to them in the form of money.
When difficulties arise, are these companies to back-up the free software community, investing developer and lawyer time, or are they going to go the short-term solution of reverting to the closed-software business model? While expecting moral decisions on the part of a company is unreal, it may make business sense to stick to free software, specially if there is a strong enough community behind it to actually have an influence on the market.
Of particular importance, IMHO, is the GPL v3 subject. A lot of ignorance, misinformation, prejudice and even FUD seems to be currently associated with GPL v3. The new GPL is going to be very important, but the community needs to understand it *correctly* ASAP. And I surely hope more *accurate* stuff is written about it, and Moglen is probably the person to do it.
I definitely may be wrong here (never been even close to Canada), but I believe the tax on blank media came out long before music downloads appeared in the radar. Sure, the tax is supposed to compensate for informal, personal copying, by providing some extra revenue to the artists (yeah, right, to the artists... mostly... somewhat... err...). However, I doubt the letter of the law mentions "downloading", which (in this "interesting" world we live in) may make quite a difference.
Not to agree or disagree with your point, just to clear the facts on this particular event: it was Jorge Ben, not Gilberto Gil; the song (do you think I'm sexy) was written by, IIRC, Stewart's drummer, and they proved that indeed this guy attended a Jorge Ben concert before composing his song. I believe the case ended with some kind of agreement, not a conviction, and the money from the song was (is?) donated to the Unicef.
Sorry, but no. Netscape was created by the same people that created mosaic, but there was no significant code sharing. As to mozilla, the netscape code was scrapped and mozilla is, therefore, a complete rewrite; that is the reason why it took so long. So, mozilla was (and is) a huge project, and it was successful.
As a side note, you might want to know that, while they did a lot of work on the original netscape code and almost released a netscape 6.0 based on it, someone in netscape's management (that is, someone controlling lots of important developers for the project) decided that instead of releasing and then rewriting, they should rewrite and release "soon", which obviously was a stupid idea. So, the time it took for mozilla to be developed is actually one year less than the time between the netscape source release and the release of mozilla 1.0. It was actually pretty fast if you consider they created for themselves a whole new advanced toolkit for cross-platform development (whether this was a clever move or not is open to discussion).
Firefox and Thunderbird are rewrites of the core of Mozilla.
No, they are completely new programs built on top of the core components of mozilla (gecko and the libraries for cross-platform development). The fact that they have evolved so fast shows the quality of these components.
I don't know as much about Eclipse, but in general, I'm not a big fan of "do it all" IDE's. I'd rather have something like vi or Emacs where vi is a very "one purpose" editor and Emacs is more or less a "here's a small concept with a bunch of stuff that takes advantage of that small concept".
Eclipse is a runtime for the interconnection of plugins. Bunches of plugins make up a complete application. The Java IDE for eclipse is one such application, built with a handful of plugins (one for the editor, one for the debugger... you get the idea). The C/C++ IDE is another application built with a bundle of plugins. So, Eclipse is very much what emacs would be if it had been created in 2000.
And DLADSPA, as in "distributed ladspa" (written by yours truly): http://gsd.ime.usp.br/~lago/masters.
Just so you know, my masters was about developing such a system for LADSPA: http://gsd.ime.usp.br/~lago/masters. The research and the beta-level, proof-of-concept implementation were concluded in April.
Burn the key on 15 CDs and send one home, one to your grandmother's home on a different state, one to a bank vault... you get the idea. That can be made very secure and very fault-tolerant for a cost near to zero (these 15 CDs need to be burnt only *once*; if you are really paranoid, change the key once a year).
But if IBM settles with $PLAINTIFF by a cross-licensing deal, independent developers are left out in the cold and $PLAINTIFF can still shut them down.
In this case, IBM cannot legally distribute the work under the GPL; other licenses, of course, may be different.
The license agreement that governs this is the 1.2 and 1.3 JVM license agreement (don't have it handy, sorry). This was changed in 1.4 thanks to a lot of pressure from the apache project. So, you could write a free 1.1-compatible JVM, you cold not write a free 1.2/1.3-compatible JVM and right now you can write a free 1.4-compatible JVM.
the ardour project has been hostile to such users in the past by insisting that they use an expensive soundcard like the Hammerfall.
Ardour is a sophisticated piece of software, and needs adequate hardware and drivers to run. Right now, under linux this comes down to the Hammerfall, somewhat expensive, and the M-Audio Delta series, which is very reasonably priced (check out the Delta-44: 4 analog ins, 4 analog outs).
ProTools TDM, [...]comes FREE with the appropriate DigiDesign hardware. ProTools LE [...]comes FREE with the appropriate hardware. ProTools FREE, which only works with 2 in/2 out[...]
That is, you can only get a version of protools that is comparable to ardour if you spend serious money (even if it's buying specific hardware), as the parent post said.
Of course, had you gone the less troublesome route and used TDM, you could just buy another farm card and slap it in.
for the slight fee of US$4,000.00...
Maybe it wouldn't be totally out of the question to buy a multiprocessed computer system for that money? Ardour doesn't benefit from more than 2 cpu's right now, but this may change in the future.
[...]a decent sounding reverb across 3 or 4 dozen tracks of 24 bit audio
I hope you use a single instance of the reverb plugin to do this, right?
Many people won't abandon protools, much less overnight; still, ardour is great news for smaller studios, home studios, musicians and the free software radicals like me.
Paul Davis does this about once every six months... Consider his other dead-end project, Quasimodo, and things don't look too good.
Please don't take this troll into account. Ardour has been under development for around 3 years now. The story with Quasimodo is that the CSound community created a "standard" way to do most of what Quasimodo aimed at, so he abandoned the project. jack and ardour, however, are here to stay; not only thanks to Paul's hard work, but also because they have gained enough "critical mass" with the community.
If folks are going to make open source DAWs, where is the open plugin API?
It's here. And it's around 2 years old, with lots of plugins available. Sure, there are more VST plugins out there, and some may be "better" that the equivalent LADSPA ones, but there's already a lot of interesting LADSPA plugins out there.