Seriously, do you hear yourself? "Well, *maybe* space will be profitable some day! We just don't know yet!" Well that's a great pitch proposal when you're trying to get funding for your new moon base! Brilliant!
Again, constrast this with the Internet: a) The cost to deploy were *much* lower, b) it could be done incrementally, and c) it was clear right from the outset why it was useful. *None* of these things is true of a moon landing. You're either in it for billions, or you're not in it at all. And at the end, as you yourself point out, there's no obvious way to actually make money once you've gotten there. And yet you think business will just jump in with both feet? Please.
Well, given that these scientists actually, you know, ran experiments by using the scientific method to test their theory, I think I'll trust their results over your claims, thanks.
Maybe for some bugs, but for those nasty caca roches, I get a bowl, wipe the top 4 inches around inside with vegtable oil then put whatever inside... coffee grounds, bananas... whatever...
So, what you're saying is that either the scientists are flat out lying when they claim this works for cockroaches, or that they're so incompetent that they can't even tell when an insect is avoiding some area due to an applied chemical? Really?
Honestly, what the *fuck* is with Slashdotter arrogance? I mean, I've been around here a long time, but it just seems to be getting worse. Do you *honestly* think you're so much fucking smarter than these scientists that, based on a fucking pop-sci article and an abstract, you can invalidate their work with your silly little anecdote?
I mean, seriously... what the fuck is wrong with you?
There was no money in the internet either until the 1990s.
You're an idiot if you believe that. The Internet, being a world-wide communication medium, was clearly useful, at minimum for research, business, and military purposes. Sure, it wasn't clear that there would be consumer-level interest, but there didn't need to be for it to be worth developing and deploying (after all, DARPA developed it for a reason).
Contrast this with a moon colony, which, to any sane human being, is absolutely fucking pointless as far as money-making endeavours go, and it should be clear even to a simpleton how the two are very different.
Actually, forget the bleeding heart, giving money to panhandlers is simply the wrong thing to do. Around here, the city has put up numerous signs discouraging the behaviour, as it reinforces the behaviour, rather than encouraging them to seek out alternatives that don't involve begging on the street.
But we're getting a little off-topic, here. The real point is that 3B for NASA is absolutely a drop in the bucket compare to US military expenditures. If the US really is focused on going back to the moon, it's baffling that congress would balk at such a tiny amount of money (relatively speaking).
What's your point? We could spend the money in other ways? Yeah, maybe. Unless the world destabilized and we had to step in at a later date and spend even more money to pick up the pieces.
Yes. Because a) the US stepping in to other countries in order to stabilize things has worked so very well so far, and b) no other nations could possibly work together with the US to address international issues in a multilateral way.
And this is ignoring the fact that the US military blows obscene amounts of money on pointless technology development (cutting edge interceptors when there has been a dogfight in decades, missile defense shields that don't actually work, tactical nuclear technology, fancy airborn laser systems, microwave-based crowd dispersal gizmos, etc, etc). All while actual, useful scientific and technological endeavours go underfunded. Brilliant!
Yes... and how does the main character do it? By lying and pretending there's something on the moon worth going there for (in this case, diamonds).
The lesson: The only way you'll convince people or businesses that going to the moon is even remotely worth the trouble is by lying through your teeth.
So if you are not in favor of having the government run health care
Umm... I'm not sure what you're talking about, here, given that no one has actually proposed a system by which the government would run health care.
People who conflate Obama's plan with full-on socialized medicine? Yes, those people are, in fact, "bible thumping, gun toting wackos", or some variation thereof.
(like many other developers) I have to look at my hands (not constantly, but at least a glance every 3rd word) to type.
"like many other developers"??? Jebus, I hope not. I've never met a single developer who can't touch type. And in the company I work for, the average is in the 60-70 wpm range (and I'm definitely on the higher end, averaging about 120 wpm).
As for the looking at the keyboard, TBH, I'd just find that annoying... when I'm in the "flow", I prefer to keep my eyes on the screen... having to pause periodically to look down at the keyboard would drive be *batty*.
So far I haven't seen anything to suggest that the principle is wrong.
Only because your system is designed to fail. Money as speech, resulting in legalized bribary (aka, lobbying)? Yeah, big surprise that that's lead to corporate ownership of the system.
If people in the US *actually* cared about running a system resistant to corruption, they'd a) demand the creation of an independent body to run and monitor elections (see Elections Canada for an example), b) make said body responsible for auditing the finances of campaigns, and c) limit campaign donations to some small, fixed amount, and disallow *any* donations from anyone but individuals (ie, corporations, PACs, churches, etc).
But, of course, that'll never happen. Americans would jump on any of these suggestions as limiting their right to free "speech" (ie, the right to bribe politicians as they see fit), despite the fact that their bought-and-paid-for government is already doing just that, and far *far* worse.
In short, the US system was founded on the idea that government will become corrupt, but it was *also* designed such that corruption is made essentially inevitable. It's the sociopolitical equivalent of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So an interested third party gains a mechanic contract, obtains the gear, cracks the encryption
Cracks the encryption? Huh? Common public key cryptosystems are impossible to crack *today* (well, minus theoretical exotic technology, like quantum computers... which are, I'm afraid to say, outside the reach of your typical backyard mechanic).
Given that, you simply assign a unique public key to each car, and then the mechanic must obtain the private key from the manufacturer in order to work on the car (not unlike how digital keys work today). Any mechanic caught giving away the keys to the cars they fix has his contract terminated, and meanwhile, any leaked keys are only useful for those specific cars.
Note, this system doesn't require any form of "punitive" contract terms or anything like that. And all the technology is available today, and relatively cheaply, too.
As to languages, I'm not against GC in practice. I think it's a great idea. I just don't think GC alone is a reason to choose an application framework, GUI toolkit or language.
No, but the lack of a GC is a strong strike against any modern language, IMHO... memory management is *the* place where most major bugs crop up. After all, the minute the language requires you to do something like 'new' or 'malloc', you suddenly have to deal with invalid pointers, bounds checking, and a whole raft of other issues that simply don't existing in a higher-level language where memory is managed for you.
Additionally, C++ lacks proper anonymous methods/closures, which I find a major strike against any language when developing event-based applications. Not to mention nullable types and other syntactic sugar (getters and setters, for example).
Yes, IMO Qt beats the pants off.NET/Winforms in developer productivity and ease of coding.
Again, you haven't explained why. You've already admitted the C#/.NET tooling is far better. C#, as a language, offers everything C++ does and a few things it doesn't (again, like proper anonymous closure support). So the only thing I can figure is it comes down to the actual toolkit model, which brings us to...
The fact that it remains to this day a fancy wrapper for GDI controls is it's Achilles heel. When you reimplement classes like RichTextBox or ListBox, you often have to resort to passing WIN32 messages to your controls to get information you need. It's quite ridiculous that the API doesn't encapsulate the functionality of the control entirely.
That may be true, but ask yourself: how often do you actually find yourself subclassing controls (or anything else, for that matter), rather than just composing them together? If the answer is "often", I would contend you're doing something wrong. And from an external API standpoint, the Windows controls are fairly clean and straightforward to use, a fact made even easier by the superior tooling MS provides.
Incidentally, I also should point out that, traditionally, I haven't been either a Windows programmer or an IDE user (even today, for personal projects, I tend to fall back on good ol' Vim + bash on my Ubuntu-powered Thinkpad)... but VS and C# really are an incredibly powerful pair. Heck, intellisense alone put VS lightyears ahead of most IDEs on the market today (including Vim, unfortunately... omnicomplete doesn't even come close).
"Since the advent of congressionally mandated computers in vehicles more than 15 years ago (for emissions), cars have evolved into complex machines that are no longer just mechanical." It says outright that the problem they're fixing was caused by a regulation to begin with.
Bullshit. Any libertarian would tell you that computers in cars would've happened organically if government hadn't stepped in to require them. Why? Because any car sporting them has better gas mileage, better overall longevity, greater power, and so forth, and so would be an obvious choice for a consumer. It's simply a no-brainer. The government just accelerated the process.
And after widespread adoption, the car companies would've put on the thumbscrews (as they already have).
My suspicion is that the problem this law is designed to fix is one that was created by government regulation in the first place.
Uh, and you come to that conclusion *how*, exactly?
Here, let's play a little game. Let's pretend there were no regulations dictating the actions of car companies, no laws restricting reverse engineering (it's not clear to me that reverse engineering is actually illegal, here, but I can see it falling into a gray area), and no IP laws protecting their trade secrets. You know what would happen? The manufacturers would encrypt all output coming from their car computers, and would include decryption hardware on the gear they sell to the mechanics. Those mechanics would then be placed under a strict contract (which, according to Libertarian thinking, is perfectly reasonable... the government, after all, should exist primarily to enforce voluntary contracts between individuals) such that any attempt to break down, reverse engineer, or otherwise misuse the equipment would result in termination of their contract and repossession of the equipment in question. Voila! The consumer is completely screwed and they have absolutely no recourse (after all, the government getting involved would be evil socialism).
Now, if you can find some clever libertarian solution to this problem, or can otherwise find an issue with my logic, please, show it to me. Because I just don't see it.
And as an aside, one might say "Well, competition solves the problem! A competitor can just come in, keep their cars open, and voila they steal market share!" But, of course, that completely ignores fun things like barrier to entry (yes, believe it or not, it costs a fuckton to get into the car manufacturing business), not to mention good ol' fashioned collusion. 'course, libertarians do like to ignore inconvenient facts such as this.
That would work... But we don't have a free market. Lets see here, oh you mean that we as the taxpayers have -paid- with our tax dollars to bail out various failing auto companies?
What the hell does that have to do with this regulation? Are you saying previous government action has distorted the market and allowed the car manufacturers to do this? You *do* realize that import cars are handled exactly the same way, right?
Seriously, I get your anti-bailout screed... but you're utterly missing the point, here.
However, source code and repair documentation costs nothing. It is the very least they could do after we were forced to give up our hard earned money to support an industry without the financial sense to balance its finances.
And *that* attitude is explicitly *anti*-small-government.
Look, let's pretend the bailouts never happened. Some of those manufacturers died, one or two (like Ford) survived, but barely. The foreign car manufacturers, meanwhile, weathered the storm and are limping along.
Do you *really* think they'd suddenly open up access to their diagnostic equipment/information? No, of course not. There's currently no incentive for them to do so.
Now, the libertarian philosophy says that some small-time competitor would step into the automotive industry and offer what the customers want, and so the problem would solve itself. Of course, that hasn't happened, despite this issue which has been brewing for the last, what, 15 years or so? 20? But that doesn't matter... the invisible hand will solve it, you just gotta give it time!
So, as a small-government type, you should be decrying the actions of the government. The market should solve this problem, right?
Not really unsubstantiated dogma considering I have direct experience with both Qt and.NET/Winforms on windows.
I'm sure you do. But the idea that Qt is somehow "pants off.NET from a ease of coding standpoint", despite being based on a relatively low-level language that lacks even a GC, suggests to me that either a) you don't actually have that much experience with.NET/winforms, or b) your ideology vis a vis languages (eg, perhaps you're a C++ bigot or biased against high-level garbage-collected languages) or vendor (eg, perhaps your an anti-Microsoft zealot) causes you to come to a conclusion that isn't actually backed by evidence.
Now, I could be wrong. Perhaps you could enlighten us all on how Qt is somehow "beats the pants off" C#/.NET. Because, on it's face, the very idea is absurd... I mean, I suppose I could come to believe they're equivalent... but I'm extremely skeptical of your particular claims.
BTW, in the interest of fairness, I should point out that I have a distinct distaste for C++, specifically, and lower-level languages in general, preferring to work in languages like Lisp, Smalltalk, Haskell, and so forth. As such, I'm immediately skeptical when anyone makes the claim that either C or C++ can compare to higher-level languages in terms of overall developer productivity, as my experience, and the experience of most researchers in the area, suggests precisely the opposite.
Uhh, how 'bout "grep -r", among *many* others? Solaris' userland *sucks*. Badly. The fact that you have to graft on the GNU userland just to make it tolerable highlights that fact. And who the hell wants to train themselves to use ggrep instead of grep?
Solaris *desperately* needs to move into this decade. I mean, seriously, they have dtrace, but no recursive grep? Really??
Actually they could "close the source" even if they released it GPL. It is their source code.
Only if copyright was signed over to them for every contribution made to the project, and that may or may not have been handled correctly (see the great Linux and Wine licensing debates, among others, for how that can work out).
What they want is copyright assignment or some other form of permission to use the code in any way, of anything contributed to them. This means they cannot *accept* GPL code (or a whole lot of other licenses).
And this makes no sense.
If "It is their source code", then the code is theirs. Period. All contributions made to the project must include an assignment of copyright over to the project, and if it's under the GPL, then as you can say, they can relicense it as they see fit. Furthermore, in this case, there's no such thing as "[accepting] GPL code", as all code provided to the project is released to them.
So, if they "cannot *accept* GPL code", then that's only because the contributions made to the project are *not* signed over to the project. Whether or no this is the case, though, I don't know.
However, despite what you imply, you can still take *your* code and do anything with it you want, such as distribute it under different licenses.
Well that's a little disingenuous. Of course you can do whatever you want with your code. But the whole point, here, is that you used a GPL'd library to solve some problem you otherwise didn't want to solve yourself. And that means that, sans the GPL'd library, your application is missing some functionality it otherwise would have.
So, sure, you can distribute your broken code any way you want. But if you want your code to leverage the functionality in a GPL'd library, then you have to release your code under the GPL. Period. And that's what makes it viral.
The advertising clause only makes a single, minor requirement: that you add an acknowledgement. That's *very* different from the kind of restrictions the GPL puts on the distributor. So, while I stand corrected that, in a sense, the MIT license is viral (in that the advertising requirement is carried through), it's still a *very* different animal from the GPL.
No, it's not. At least not by any reasonable definition of the term.
The GPL is "viral" because incorporation of GPL'd code into a project necessitates that project also be licensed under the GPL. ie, the project has been "infected" with GPL'd code, and now must itself be GPL'd.
In contrast, the MIT license does *not* require the incorporating project be placed under the MIT license. It only requires attribution be provided in code/documentation.
The developer FAQ explicitly states that they do not want contributions under viral licenses like the GPL. They even use the word viral, and they explicitly name the GPL.
Well, given the GPL is the only high-profile viral license, I find that hardly surprising. Moreover, I can't blame them for wanting to avoid the GPL. I avoid it myself for projects I've written, as it does not meet my personal definition of "free".
Their intent to allow closed source releases has been clear for many years. I'd quote their developer FAQ, but it's currently not responding.
And again, who gives a shit? So they close the source. The last OSS version is always available and can be used as the basis for a fork if anyone cares to do it.
And you should be *praising* the project for being honest about potential plans to close the source. At least they're being upfront about it. And if developers make the choice to contribute anyway, that's their decision.
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What we need to do is repeal that law, open Moon and Mars development to private business, and we'll see colonies on both those bodies before we die.
Uhuh.
Why? What reason could any business *possibly* have for spending billions to go to the Moon or Mars? Where's the profit motive?
Seriously, do you hear yourself? "Well, *maybe* space will be profitable some day! We just don't know yet!" Well that's a great pitch proposal when you're trying to get funding for your new moon base! Brilliant!
Again, constrast this with the Internet: a) The cost to deploy were *much* lower, b) it could be done incrementally, and c) it was clear right from the outset why it was useful. *None* of these things is true of a moon landing. You're either in it for billions, or you're not in it at all. And at the end, as you yourself point out, there's no obvious way to actually make money once you've gotten there. And yet you think business will just jump in with both feet? Please.
Well, given that these scientists actually, you know, ran experiments by using the scientific method to test their theory, I think I'll trust their results over your claims, thanks.
Maybe for some bugs, but for those nasty caca roches, I get a bowl, wipe the top 4 inches around inside with vegtable oil then put whatever inside... coffee grounds, bananas... whatever...
So, what you're saying is that either the scientists are flat out lying when they claim this works for cockroaches, or that they're so incompetent that they can't even tell when an insect is avoiding some area due to an applied chemical? Really?
Honestly, what the *fuck* is with Slashdotter arrogance? I mean, I've been around here a long time, but it just seems to be getting worse. Do you *honestly* think you're so much fucking smarter than these scientists that, based on a fucking pop-sci article and an abstract, you can invalidate their work with your silly little anecdote?
I mean, seriously... what the fuck is wrong with you?
There was no money in the internet either until the 1990s.
You're an idiot if you believe that. The Internet, being a world-wide communication medium, was clearly useful, at minimum for research, business, and military purposes. Sure, it wasn't clear that there would be consumer-level interest, but there didn't need to be for it to be worth developing and deploying (after all, DARPA developed it for a reason).
Contrast this with a moon colony, which, to any sane human being, is absolutely fucking pointless as far as money-making endeavours go, and it should be clear even to a simpleton how the two are very different.
Actually, forget the bleeding heart, giving money to panhandlers is simply the wrong thing to do. Around here, the city has put up numerous signs discouraging the behaviour, as it reinforces the behaviour, rather than encouraging them to seek out alternatives that don't involve begging on the street.
But we're getting a little off-topic, here. The real point is that 3B for NASA is absolutely a drop in the bucket compare to US military expenditures. If the US really is focused on going back to the moon, it's baffling that congress would balk at such a tiny amount of money (relatively speaking).
What's your point? We could spend the money in other ways? Yeah, maybe. Unless the world destabilized and we had to step in at a later date and spend even more money to pick up the pieces.
Yes. Because a) the US stepping in to other countries in order to stabilize things has worked so very well so far, and b) no other nations could possibly work together with the US to address international issues in a multilateral way.
And this is ignoring the fact that the US military blows obscene amounts of money on pointless technology development (cutting edge interceptors when there has been a dogfight in decades, missile defense shields that don't actually work, tactical nuclear technology, fancy airborn laser systems, microwave-based crowd dispersal gizmos, etc, etc). All while actual, useful scientific and technological endeavours go underfunded. Brilliant!
Yes... and how does the main character do it? By lying and pretending there's something on the moon worth going there for (in this case, diamonds).
The lesson: The only way you'll convince people or businesses that going to the moon is even remotely worth the trouble is by lying through your teeth.
So if you are not in favor of having the government run health care
Umm... I'm not sure what you're talking about, here, given that no one has actually proposed a system by which the government would run health care.
People who conflate Obama's plan with full-on socialized medicine? Yes, those people are, in fact, "bible thumping, gun toting wackos", or some variation thereof.
(like many other developers) I have to look at my hands (not constantly, but at least a glance every 3rd word) to type.
"like many other developers"??? Jebus, I hope not. I've never met a single developer who can't touch type. And in the company I work for, the average is in the 60-70 wpm range (and I'm definitely on the higher end, averaging about 120 wpm).
As for the looking at the keyboard, TBH, I'd just find that annoying... when I'm in the "flow", I prefer to keep my eyes on the screen... having to pause periodically to look down at the keyboard would drive be *batty*.
80 wpm? Isn't dvorak supposed to be faster or something? ;)
So far I haven't seen anything to suggest that the principle is wrong.
Only because your system is designed to fail. Money as speech, resulting in legalized bribary (aka, lobbying)? Yeah, big surprise that that's lead to corporate ownership of the system.
If people in the US *actually* cared about running a system resistant to corruption, they'd a) demand the creation of an independent body to run and monitor elections (see Elections Canada for an example), b) make said body responsible for auditing the finances of campaigns, and c) limit campaign donations to some small, fixed amount, and disallow *any* donations from anyone but individuals (ie, corporations, PACs, churches, etc).
But, of course, that'll never happen. Americans would jump on any of these suggestions as limiting their right to free "speech" (ie, the right to bribe politicians as they see fit), despite the fact that their bought-and-paid-for government is already doing just that, and far *far* worse.
In short, the US system was founded on the idea that government will become corrupt, but it was *also* designed such that corruption is made essentially inevitable. It's the sociopolitical equivalent of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So an interested third party gains a mechanic contract, obtains the gear, cracks the encryption
Cracks the encryption? Huh? Common public key cryptosystems are impossible to crack *today* (well, minus theoretical exotic technology, like quantum computers... which are, I'm afraid to say, outside the reach of your typical backyard mechanic).
Given that, you simply assign a unique public key to each car, and then the mechanic must obtain the private key from the manufacturer in order to work on the car (not unlike how digital keys work today). Any mechanic caught giving away the keys to the cars they fix has his contract terminated, and meanwhile, any leaked keys are only useful for those specific cars.
Note, this system doesn't require any form of "punitive" contract terms or anything like that. And all the technology is available today, and relatively cheaply, too.
As to languages, I'm not against GC in practice. I think it's a great idea. I just don't think GC alone is a reason to choose an application framework, GUI toolkit or language.
No, but the lack of a GC is a strong strike against any modern language, IMHO... memory management is *the* place where most major bugs crop up. After all, the minute the language requires you to do something like 'new' or 'malloc', you suddenly have to deal with invalid pointers, bounds checking, and a whole raft of other issues that simply don't existing in a higher-level language where memory is managed for you.
Additionally, C++ lacks proper anonymous methods/closures, which I find a major strike against any language when developing event-based applications. Not to mention nullable types and other syntactic sugar (getters and setters, for example).
Yes, IMO Qt beats the pants off .NET/Winforms in developer productivity and ease of coding.
Again, you haven't explained why. You've already admitted the C#/.NET tooling is far better. C#, as a language, offers everything C++ does and a few things it doesn't (again, like proper anonymous closure support). So the only thing I can figure is it comes down to the actual toolkit model, which brings us to...
The fact that it remains to this day a fancy wrapper for GDI controls is it's Achilles heel. When you reimplement classes like RichTextBox or ListBox, you often have to resort to passing WIN32 messages to your controls to get information you need. It's quite ridiculous that the API doesn't encapsulate the functionality of the control entirely.
That may be true, but ask yourself: how often do you actually find yourself subclassing controls (or anything else, for that matter), rather than just composing them together? If the answer is "often", I would contend you're doing something wrong. And from an external API standpoint, the Windows controls are fairly clean and straightforward to use, a fact made even easier by the superior tooling MS provides.
Incidentally, I also should point out that, traditionally, I haven't been either a Windows programmer or an IDE user (even today, for personal projects, I tend to fall back on good ol' Vim + bash on my Ubuntu-powered Thinkpad)... but VS and C# really are an incredibly powerful pair. Heck, intellisense alone put VS lightyears ahead of most IDEs on the market today (including Vim, unfortunately... omnicomplete doesn't even come close).
"Since the advent of congressionally mandated computers in vehicles more than 15 years ago (for emissions), cars have evolved into complex machines that are no longer just mechanical." It says outright that the problem they're fixing was caused by a regulation to begin with.
Bullshit. Any libertarian would tell you that computers in cars would've happened organically if government hadn't stepped in to require them. Why? Because any car sporting them has better gas mileage, better overall longevity, greater power, and so forth, and so would be an obvious choice for a consumer. It's simply a no-brainer. The government just accelerated the process.
And after widespread adoption, the car companies would've put on the thumbscrews (as they already have).
My suspicion is that the problem this law is designed to fix is one that was created by government regulation in the first place.
Uh, and you come to that conclusion *how*, exactly?
Here, let's play a little game. Let's pretend there were no regulations dictating the actions of car companies, no laws restricting reverse engineering (it's not clear to me that reverse engineering is actually illegal, here, but I can see it falling into a gray area), and no IP laws protecting their trade secrets. You know what would happen? The manufacturers would encrypt all output coming from their car computers, and would include decryption hardware on the gear they sell to the mechanics. Those mechanics would then be placed under a strict contract (which, according to Libertarian thinking, is perfectly reasonable... the government, after all, should exist primarily to enforce voluntary contracts between individuals) such that any attempt to break down, reverse engineer, or otherwise misuse the equipment would result in termination of their contract and repossession of the equipment in question. Voila! The consumer is completely screwed and they have absolutely no recourse (after all, the government getting involved would be evil socialism).
Now, if you can find some clever libertarian solution to this problem, or can otherwise find an issue with my logic, please, show it to me. Because I just don't see it.
And as an aside, one might say "Well, competition solves the problem! A competitor can just come in, keep their cars open, and voila they steal market share!" But, of course, that completely ignores fun things like barrier to entry (yes, believe it or not, it costs a fuckton to get into the car manufacturing business), not to mention good ol' fashioned collusion. 'course, libertarians do like to ignore inconvenient facts such as this.
That would work... But we don't have a free market. Lets see here, oh you mean that we as the taxpayers have -paid- with our tax dollars to bail out various failing auto companies?
What the hell does that have to do with this regulation? Are you saying previous government action has distorted the market and allowed the car manufacturers to do this? You *do* realize that import cars are handled exactly the same way, right?
Seriously, I get your anti-bailout screed... but you're utterly missing the point, here.
However, source code and repair documentation costs nothing. It is the very least they could do after we were forced to give up our hard earned money to support an industry without the financial sense to balance its finances.
And *that* attitude is explicitly *anti*-small-government.
Look, let's pretend the bailouts never happened. Some of those manufacturers died, one or two (like Ford) survived, but barely. The foreign car manufacturers, meanwhile, weathered the storm and are limping along.
Do you *really* think they'd suddenly open up access to their diagnostic equipment/information? No, of course not. There's currently no incentive for them to do so.
Now, the libertarian philosophy says that some small-time competitor would step into the automotive industry and offer what the customers want, and so the problem would solve itself. Of course, that hasn't happened, despite this issue which has been brewing for the last, what, 15 years or so? 20? But that doesn't matter... the invisible hand will solve it, you just gotta give it time!
So, as a small-government type, you should be decrying the actions of the government. The market should solve this problem, right?
Not really unsubstantiated dogma considering I have direct experience with both Qt and .NET/Winforms on windows.
I'm sure you do. But the idea that Qt is somehow "pants off .NET from a ease of coding standpoint", despite being based on a relatively low-level language that lacks even a GC, suggests to me that either a) you don't actually have that much experience with .NET/winforms, or b) your ideology vis a vis languages (eg, perhaps you're a C++ bigot or biased against high-level garbage-collected languages) or vendor (eg, perhaps your an anti-Microsoft zealot) causes you to come to a conclusion that isn't actually backed by evidence.
Now, I could be wrong. Perhaps you could enlighten us all on how Qt is somehow "beats the pants off" C#/.NET. Because, on it's face, the very idea is absurd... I mean, I suppose I could come to believe they're equivalent... but I'm extremely skeptical of your particular claims.
BTW, in the interest of fairness, I should point out that I have a distinct distaste for C++, specifically, and lower-level languages in general, preferring to work in languages like Lisp, Smalltalk, Haskell, and so forth. As such, I'm immediately skeptical when anyone makes the claim that either C or C++ can compare to higher-level languages in terms of overall developer productivity, as my experience, and the experience of most researchers in the area, suggests precisely the opposite.
from a developer standpoint beats the pants off .NET from a ease of coding standpoint.
I'm detecting more than a wiff of unsubstantiated dogma, here...
At a loss of what you mean here.
Uhh, how 'bout "grep -r", among *many* others? Solaris' userland *sucks*. Badly. The fact that you have to graft on the GNU userland just to make it tolerable highlights that fact. And who the hell wants to train themselves to use ggrep instead of grep?
Solaris *desperately* needs to move into this decade. I mean, seriously, they have dtrace, but no recursive grep? Really??
Actually they could "close the source" even if they released it GPL. It is their source code.
Only if copyright was signed over to them for every contribution made to the project, and that may or may not have been handled correctly (see the great Linux and Wine licensing debates, among others, for how that can work out).
What they want is copyright assignment or some other form of permission to use the code in any way, of anything contributed to them. This means they cannot *accept* GPL code (or a whole lot of other licenses).
And this makes no sense.
If "It is their source code", then the code is theirs. Period. All contributions made to the project must include an assignment of copyright over to the project, and if it's under the GPL, then as you can say, they can relicense it as they see fit. Furthermore, in this case, there's no such thing as "[accepting] GPL code", as all code provided to the project is released to them.
So, if they "cannot *accept* GPL code", then that's only because the contributions made to the project are *not* signed over to the project. Whether or no this is the case, though, I don't know.
However, despite what you imply, you can still take *your* code and do anything with it you want, such as distribute it under different licenses.
Well that's a little disingenuous. Of course you can do whatever you want with your code. But the whole point, here, is that you used a GPL'd library to solve some problem you otherwise didn't want to solve yourself. And that means that, sans the GPL'd library, your application is missing some functionality it otherwise would have.
So, sure, you can distribute your broken code any way you want. But if you want your code to leverage the functionality in a GPL'd library, then you have to release your code under the GPL. Period. And that's what makes it viral.
The advertising clause only makes a single, minor requirement: that you add an acknowledgement. That's *very* different from the kind of restrictions the GPL puts on the distributor. So, while I stand corrected that, in a sense, the MIT license is viral (in that the advertising requirement is carried through), it's still a *very* different animal from the GPL.
I've also customized Firefox to avoid wasted space.
And by that, I assume you mean you installed Vimperator?
No, it's not. At least not by any reasonable definition of the term.
The GPL is "viral" because incorporation of GPL'd code into a project necessitates that project also be licensed under the GPL. ie, the project has been "infected" with GPL'd code, and now must itself be GPL'd.
In contrast, the MIT license does *not* require the incorporating project be placed under the MIT license. It only requires attribution be provided in code/documentation.
The developer FAQ explicitly states that they do not want contributions under viral licenses like the GPL. They even use the word viral, and they explicitly name the GPL.
Well, given the GPL is the only high-profile viral license, I find that hardly surprising. Moreover, I can't blame them for wanting to avoid the GPL. I avoid it myself for projects I've written, as it does not meet my personal definition of "free".
Their intent to allow closed source releases has been clear for many years. I'd quote their developer FAQ, but it's currently not responding.
And again, who gives a shit? So they close the source. The last OSS version is always available and can be used as the basis for a fork if anyone cares to do it.
And you should be *praising* the project for being honest about potential plans to close the source. At least they're being upfront about it. And if developers make the choice to contribute anyway, that's their decision.