I hear you. Unless there's a skin for Mozilla that makes it look absolutely identical to IE, and it comes with a rendering plugin that makes it render pages in exactly the same way as IE, then I could never put it on my mom's computer.
I used her computer last weekend to check my mail while visiting. Two hours later my mom is telling me that her computer is broken. Turns out that I had unmaximized the IE window and forgot to maximize it again when I was done. The computer screen looked different to her, and and thought it was broken.
There are two categories of items in your list of evidences and organizations. Government institutions or policies to enforce a managed economy, and government itself.
SEC, FRB, farm subsidies, etc, are examples of a managed economy. In a free market the government has no role except to provide a uniform system of law. In a managed economy government attempts to use what would otherwise be a free market economy to mold and implement policy. Farm subsidies are one classic example. The government policy is that milk should have a particular price. Farm subsidies guarantee that price by paying farmers to produce more milk when the market price indicates that they should be producing less. Then when the farmers produce too much milk the government pays them to dump it down the drain.
Your other category is the government itself (congress, CIA, military). I'm not really sure what you're getting at. Are you trying to tell me that government itself was instituted to deal with free markets? How ludicrous! Certainly some policies of government have been implemented in an attempt to "fix" the market, but that's not the purpose of government.
Let's look at the military. The purpose of the military is to conduct war. Some wars have religious causes, but most are political (too many landless knights so let's start a crusade and ship them all off). But I no of no war that was started because both sides had free market economies. Not one. Wars between nations occur because one nations wants to plunder or punish another nation.
Oh this is horrible! UnitedLinux is going to release sources to a distro without binaries! They can't do that! Let's all go set fire to Caldera's headquarters. After that we can turn our wrath on SuSE, TurboLinux and...
You were modded down in the past because you can't even bother to get a dictionary and look up the word "exclusive".
Making money and bettering humanity are not mutually exclusive concepts. Some people who want to make money don't want to better humanity, and some people who want to better humanity don't want to make money. But I suspect that 99% of people want to BOTH make money and better humanity.
Oh, when you get that dictionary, also look up "capitalism" and "ethics"...
I'm sure you're intelligent enough to understand what's going on here. Some people don't believe that people should be able to restrict what others do with software.
When you get right down to the foundations of reality, nobody is being restricted by anyone else. At the most, the users are restricting themselves by choosing UnitedLinux to begin with. It may be stupid, foolish, and detrimental to their peace of mind, but it's their decision and not mine.
Your rebuttal doesn't explain why Hurd (GPL) or AtheOS (GPL) attracts as many developers as BSD (BSDL). There is a reason why Linux is more popular with developers than BSD, but the licensing is not it.
The answer you seek is, so then Ransom owns the derivative work. You may not mind that, but you should not pretend it is not true.
I didn't say that software should not be owned, RMS said that. I find it odd that those that argue that software should not be owned are the first ones to claim ownership when someone distributes a derivative against their wishes.
Personally, I don't consider Ransom's derivative work to be mine, so it doesn't bother me what he does with it, because it does not affect either myself or my users. What happens between Ransom and his users is a private affair voluntarily agreed to by both parties, so it's none of my business.
If Linux had been under the BSD license, there would certainly be a few developers who would refuse to contribute to it. But I doubt that number would significant. If the GPL was the reason, then why aren't there more developers working on Hurd than there are?
Why didn't BSD win out over Linux? Because BSD got briefly derailed by the AT&T lawsuit at the very instance that 32 bit computers for the masses became available. In short, because of AT&T, Linux got to market first.
BSD is generally considered to have higher quality than Linux.
he seems to suffer from the Slashbot notion that developers who use a BSD license, for instance, are too stupid to realize they're allowing their code to be relicensed
As a user of the BSD license, I wondered if Ransom could relicense my code under a per-seat license. The obvious answer is "yes". The not so obvious answer is "yes, but so what?"
No matter what Ransom does to my code, my copy and my users' copies will still be free. Nothing he can do can alter my cvs repository. Furthermore, the users of Ransom's per-seat version are still going to know that there's a free version out there. That's because Ransom can't remove my copyright or permission notices.
But what if Ransom makes a derivative of my code and licenses that per-seat? The answer is where RMS and the BSD advocates part ways: code that I didn't write does not belong to me. His derivative bits are not mine and I have no ethical claim over them. His version is not my version. If RMS is correct in saying that "software should not be owned", then derivative software should be owned even less.
but almost every group has one or two people that do the work and understand the material. The others don't have a clue or are freeloading.
Yup, like the blurb says, this will teach them all about open source. One or two people write the apps and the rest do nothing but complain about the lack of precompiled packages for Obscurnix.
How is this different from any other Linux distro that has a trademark? You can't build Redhat from sources, burn it onto a CD, and call it "Redhat". You can't do it with Mandrake. You can't do it with Slackware. I'm not as familiar with the others, but Slackware has specific rules about calling a CD "Slackware". You have to have your CD laid out in a certain manner with certain files, etc.
You can of course call those CD's "Redhat Derived", or "Unofficial Mandrake Burnings", or "Remarkable Slackware-Like Distro".
The answer is simple. I would much rather pay $8.00 to see Spiderman on a 30 foot screen with awesome theater audio, than see it for free on a tiny 320x200 window and cheap Labtech speakers.
It's like comparing apples to oranges. Neither side is going to look too intelligent using this bit of data to support their case.
You guys are nucking futs! Price gouging? What price gouging?
Ten years ago I was paying $19.99 a month for 2400 baud access. Five years ago I was paying 25$ a month for 28.8K access. This year I am paying $49 for 1.5Mbps access. That's an awesome deal. It's like moving from a studio apartment to a ten bedroom mansion for only twice the rent.
You're right. Let's charge all long distance telephone users a flat rate.
Re:One argument for the GPL and against "look alik
on
Debian And WineX
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· Score: 2
Your arguments assume that the basic ethical foundations of all people will be changed. I can't make that assumption at all. In order for an anarcho-whatever society to arise, there must be a significant number of people who make that ethical change, but it doesn't have to be everyone. Even if 90% of the society are of the socialist bent, the remaining 10% have no restrictions on forming their own community.
Similar things have happened in history. The social-darwinist mindset of the late 19th centurty did not stop the Amana or Kaweah communities from forming. The industro-military mindset of the 60's did not stop hippy communes.
p.s. "Wage slavery" is another bad analogy despite its common usage. To extend the definition of "slavery" that far is to cheapen its meaning and insult all those who are or have been real slaves.
A slave who attempts to assert sovereignty over his or her own life is breaking the law and may be arrested, maimed or killed. An employee (in the typical capitalistic society) who decides to quit his or her job faces no such penalties. They will certainly face risks, some of which may be enormous, for their decision, but such risks face all important decisions in life.
Why don't you actually go use Qt. I don't mean use it for a day or two, but actually do a real project with it.
Qt is smaller than GTK/GNOME. Really. Go measure it sometime. If it were just GTK+, you would be right, but an application is much more than its interface. Once you start adding in XML, Unicode, SQL, genuine crossplatform capabilities, and decent C++ strings, to name a few, Qt starts to look very attractive.
Programming in Qt for a C++ programmer is very intuitive. Once you understand the simple signal/slot paradigm (which is the same paradigm in gtkmm), and the parent-child relationship of widgets, everything else is automatic. No, hardcore Generic Programming fans won't like it, but for real world C++ programmers, it's a natural fit.
Qt applications are easy to read, and thus easy to maintain. The stereotypical old school Unix hacker doesn't believe in easy to read or maintain code. That's a shame. But everyone else does. Go look at the typical GTK+ code and it's incomprehensible without first knowing the pseudo-OO model GTK+ uses. Look at the typical Qt program and you can understand it without even knowing Qt.
Qt does NOT try to merge every platform into it's code. Go look at it sometime. It's very clean, well documented, and nearly free of the compatibility hacks that litter other toolkits.
1) There is a "free beer" non-commercial Qt for Windows. You must release your code as Open Source, but you don't have to pay for it, and it's fully operational. The only difference I've seen between it and the "real" version is that it sticks a "Freeware" in the title bar.
2) Maybe the Windoze GTK has improved, but the last time I used a WinGTK application it stuck out like a sore thumb. It rather resembled a Unix app ported to Windows (duh!) rather than a native app. That's not what you want for a crossplatform toolkit.
Re:One argument for the GPL and against "look alik
on
Debian And WineX
·
· Score: 2
Nope, you got it wrong. There actually is no difference between the anarcho-socialists and anarcho-capitalists. Since neither believes in government, neither has a way to prevent the formation of societies they disagree with. Nothing is going to stop a syndicalist commune from starting up in an anarcho-capitalist world, and nothing is going to stop a propertarian company town from starting up in an anarcho-capitalist world. As long as the participants involved are volunteers, you can't stop it.
p.s. The "sell youself into slavery" is a tired analogy. It's also silly. Find something new.
You are right that Qt and GTK+ are divided along language lines. For the most part, those who prefer C prefer GTK+ while those who prefer C++ prefer Qt. User interfaces are naturally object oriented, so in my opinion it makes sense to use a language that does OO well, like C++. Thus, everything else being equal, Qt is the better choice for writing GUI applications. Yes, I know you can do OO in C. So what? You can do OO in assembly, but I don't know anyone who does.
Okay, to the meat of the issue: the best and most advanced apps. Since most old time Unix hackers are C fanatics, they tend to use GTK+. But that doesn't rule out the multitude of fantastic advanced applications for Qt such as KOffice, KDevelop, Doxygen, QCad, etc.
Crossplatform licensing fees: Yeah, it's a bitch. Are you writing Free Software? If so, it doesn't matter much, because qt-win32 is free beer. Are you writing proprietary software? If so, how can you expect your users to pay for your software if you don't want to pay for Trolltech's?
It would be fantastic if there were QPL/GPL versions of Qt for Windows and Mac. It would also be fantastic if I got a 25% raise. But I don't expect either to happen tomorrow.
Shared libraries: I'm not sure I understand your concern. Shared libraries may be relatively new to Unix, but all modern unices (except some embedded ones) have them. You problems with Linux are going to be identical under Solaris, AIX, HPUX, etc. Try installing Gnome from scratch under IRIX without going mad...
But perhaps you're using a distro/OS that's a bit too rigid when it comes to package management. My suggestion would be to try Debian or FreeBSD.
Re:One argument for the GPL and against "look alik
on
Debian And WineX
·
· Score: 3
Finally, a GPLer who gets it! Thank you.
Those of us who use the BSD license do so simply because we wish to give/share our software. We don't want to compell anyone to return the favor. It's a no-strings-attached deal.
We realize that not everyone will agree with us, but that's not why we're doing it. People who do wish some sort of a guarantee that mods come back to them should not use the BSD license, because that's not what it's about.
p.s. BSD vs GPL is rather like an anarcho-capitalist arguing with an anarcho-socialist over the nature of liberty.
The BSD license is MORE free in the "libre" sense. To argue any other way is to destroy both the English and French languages. The English word closest to "libre" is "liberty". Liberty means the absence (or relative absence) of external restriction. It's generally used in the political and/or philosophical sense.
The BSD license has fewer external restrictions than the GPL. It is thus freer in the libre sense. It grants the recipient more freedoms, liberties, rights and permissions than the GPL. To say that it is not as free as the GPL is ridiculous.
Do what I do: "Dear Mr. Committer, I noticed that my port has been languishing in GNATS for a month now. Is there a problem with this port? Is it failing to build? Is it breaking hier(7)? Please let me know so I can fix it."
I get the response: "Nothing's wrong with it, we're just backlogged. Here, I'll commit it right now... Thanks for your patience."
(of course, right before the 4.6 freeze, they REALLY are backlogged)
Slashdot Mirror
I hear you. Unless there's a skin for Mozilla that makes it look absolutely identical to IE, and it comes with a rendering plugin that makes it render pages in exactly the same way as IE, then I could never put it on my mom's computer.
I used her computer last weekend to check my mail while visiting. Two hours later my mom is telling me that her computer is broken. Turns out that I had unmaximized the IE window and forgot to maximize it again when I was done. The computer screen looked different to her, and and thought it was broken.
There are two categories of items in your list of evidences and organizations. Government institutions or policies to enforce a managed economy, and government itself.
SEC, FRB, farm subsidies, etc, are examples of a managed economy. In a free market the government has no role except to provide a uniform system of law. In a managed economy government attempts to use what would otherwise be a free market economy to mold and implement policy. Farm subsidies are one classic example. The government policy is that milk should have a particular price. Farm subsidies guarantee that price by paying farmers to produce more milk when the market price indicates that they should be producing less. Then when the farmers produce too much milk the government pays them to dump it down the drain.
Your other category is the government itself (congress, CIA, military). I'm not really sure what you're getting at. Are you trying to tell me that government itself was instituted to deal with free markets? How ludicrous! Certainly some policies of government have been implemented in an attempt to "fix" the market, but that's not the purpose of government.
Let's look at the military. The purpose of the military is to conduct war. Some wars have religious causes, but most are political (too many landless knights so let's start a crusade and ship them all off). But I no of no war that was started because both sides had free market economies. Not one. Wars between nations occur because one nations wants to plunder or punish another nation.
And before you go on about how accumulating wealth makes one a more moral or ethical person...
I never claimed that. It is my opinion that the accumulation of wealth is unrelated to being a moral or ethical person.
Oh this is horrible! UnitedLinux is going to release sources to a distro without binaries! They can't do that! Let's all go set fire to Caldera's headquarters. After that we can turn our wrath on SuSE, TurboLinux and...
...Gentoo, Linux From Scratch, Rock Linux, etc...
You were modded down in the past because you can't even bother to get a dictionary and look up the word "exclusive".
Making money and bettering humanity are not mutually exclusive concepts. Some people who want to make money don't want to better humanity, and some people who want to better humanity don't want to make money. But I suspect that 99% of people want to BOTH make money and better humanity.
Oh, when you get that dictionary, also look up "capitalism" and "ethics"...
I'm sure you're intelligent enough to understand what's going on here. Some people don't believe that people should be able to restrict what others do with software.
When you get right down to the foundations of reality, nobody is being restricted by anyone else. At the most, the users are restricting themselves by choosing UnitedLinux to begin with. It may be stupid, foolish, and detrimental to their peace of mind, but it's their decision and not mine.
Your rebuttal doesn't explain why Hurd (GPL) or AtheOS (GPL) attracts as many developers as BSD (BSDL). There is a reason why Linux is more popular with developers than BSD, but the licensing is not it.
What's unethical about entering into a contract and following it?
Nothing's wrong with it. I just don't require my users to accept a legally binding contract before they get can get the "Free" in "Free Software".
The answer you seek is, so then Ransom owns the derivative work. You may not mind that, but you should not pretend it is not true.
I didn't say that software should not be owned, RMS said that. I find it odd that those that argue that software should not be owned are the first ones to claim ownership when someone distributes a derivative against their wishes.
Personally, I don't consider Ransom's derivative work to be mine, so it doesn't bother me what he does with it, because it does not affect either myself or my users. What happens between Ransom and his users is a private affair voluntarily agreed to by both parties, so it's none of my business.
If Linux had been under the BSD license, there would certainly be a few developers who would refuse to contribute to it. But I doubt that number would significant. If the GPL was the reason, then why aren't there more developers working on Hurd than there are?
Why didn't BSD win out over Linux? Because BSD got briefly derailed by the AT&T lawsuit at the very instance that 32 bit computers for the masses became available. In short, because of AT&T, Linux got to market first.
BSD is generally considered to have higher quality than Linux.
he seems to suffer from the Slashbot notion that developers who use a BSD license, for instance, are too stupid to realize they're allowing their code to be relicensed
As a user of the BSD license, I wondered if Ransom could relicense my code under a per-seat license. The obvious answer is "yes". The not so obvious answer is "yes, but so what?"
No matter what Ransom does to my code, my copy and my users' copies will still be free. Nothing he can do can alter my cvs repository. Furthermore, the users of Ransom's per-seat version are still going to know that there's a free version out there. That's because Ransom can't remove my copyright or permission notices.
But what if Ransom makes a derivative of my code and licenses that per-seat? The answer is where RMS and the BSD advocates part ways: code that I didn't write does not belong to me. His derivative bits are not mine and I have no ethical claim over them. His version is not my version. If RMS is correct in saying that "software should not be owned", then derivative software should be owned even less.
but almost every group has one or two people that do the work and understand the material. The others don't have a clue or are freeloading.
Yup, like the blurb says, this will teach them all about open source. One or two people write the apps and the rest do nothing but complain about the lack of precompiled packages for Obscurnix.
How is this different from any other Linux distro that has a trademark? You can't build Redhat from sources, burn it onto a CD, and call it "Redhat". You can't do it with Mandrake. You can't do it with Slackware. I'm not as familiar with the others, but Slackware has specific rules about calling a CD "Slackware". You have to have your CD laid out in a certain manner with certain files, etc.
You can of course call those CD's "Redhat Derived", or "Unofficial Mandrake Burnings", or "Remarkable Slackware-Like Distro".
The answer is simple. I would much rather pay $8.00 to see Spiderman on a 30 foot screen with awesome theater audio, than see it for free on a tiny 320x200 window and cheap Labtech speakers.
It's like comparing apples to oranges. Neither side is going to look too intelligent using this bit of data to support their case.
You guys are nucking futs! Price gouging? What price gouging?
Ten years ago I was paying $19.99 a month for 2400 baud access. Five years ago I was paying 25$ a month for 28.8K access. This year I am paying $49 for 1.5Mbps access. That's an awesome deal. It's like moving from a studio apartment to a ten bedroom mansion for only twice the rent.
You're right. Let's charge all long distance telephone users a flat rate.
Your arguments assume that the basic ethical foundations of all people will be changed. I can't make that assumption at all. In order for an anarcho-whatever society to arise, there must be a significant number of people who make that ethical change, but it doesn't have to be everyone. Even if 90% of the society are of the socialist bent, the remaining 10% have no restrictions on forming their own community.
Similar things have happened in history. The social-darwinist mindset of the late 19th centurty did not stop the Amana or Kaweah communities from forming. The industro-military mindset of the 60's did not stop hippy communes.
p.s. "Wage slavery" is another bad analogy despite its common usage. To extend the definition of "slavery" that far is to cheapen its meaning and insult all those who are or have been real slaves.
A slave who attempts to assert sovereignty over his or her own life is breaking the law and may be arrested, maimed or killed. An employee (in the typical capitalistic society) who decides to quit his or her job faces no such penalties. They will certainly face risks, some of which may be enormous, for their decision, but such risks face all important decisions in life.
Why don't you actually go use Qt. I don't mean use it for a day or two, but actually do a real project with it.
Qt is smaller than GTK/GNOME. Really. Go measure it sometime. If it were just GTK+, you would be right, but an application is much more than its interface. Once you start adding in XML, Unicode, SQL, genuine crossplatform capabilities, and decent C++ strings, to name a few, Qt starts to look very attractive.
Programming in Qt for a C++ programmer is very intuitive. Once you understand the simple signal/slot paradigm (which is the same paradigm in gtkmm), and the parent-child relationship of widgets, everything else is automatic. No, hardcore Generic Programming fans won't like it, but for real world C++ programmers, it's a natural fit.
Qt applications are easy to read, and thus easy to maintain. The stereotypical old school Unix hacker doesn't believe in easy to read or maintain code. That's a shame. But everyone else does. Go look at the typical GTK+ code and it's incomprehensible without first knowing the pseudo-OO model GTK+ uses. Look at the typical Qt program and you can understand it without even knowing Qt.
Qt does NOT try to merge every platform into it's code. Go look at it sometime. It's very clean, well documented, and nearly free of the compatibility hacks that litter other toolkits.
1) There is a "free beer" non-commercial Qt for Windows. You must release your code as Open Source, but you don't have to pay for it, and it's fully operational. The only difference I've seen between it and the "real" version is that it sticks a "Freeware" in the title bar.
2) Maybe the Windoze GTK has improved, but the last time I used a WinGTK application it stuck out like a sore thumb. It rather resembled a Unix app ported to Windows (duh!) rather than a native app. That's not what you want for a crossplatform toolkit.
Nope, you got it wrong. There actually is no difference between the anarcho-socialists and anarcho-capitalists. Since neither believes in government, neither has a way to prevent the formation of societies they disagree with. Nothing is going to stop a syndicalist commune from starting up in an anarcho-capitalist world, and nothing is going to stop a propertarian company town from starting up in an anarcho-capitalist world. As long as the participants involved are volunteers, you can't stop it.
p.s. The "sell youself into slavery" is a tired analogy. It's also silly. Find something new.
I like feeding trolls, so sue me...
You are right that Qt and GTK+ are divided along language lines. For the most part, those who prefer C prefer GTK+ while those who prefer C++ prefer Qt. User interfaces are naturally object oriented, so in my opinion it makes sense to use a language that does OO well, like C++. Thus, everything else being equal, Qt is the better choice for writing GUI applications. Yes, I know you can do OO in C. So what? You can do OO in assembly, but I don't know anyone who does.
Okay, to the meat of the issue: the best and most advanced apps. Since most old time Unix hackers are C fanatics, they tend to use GTK+. But that doesn't rule out the multitude of fantastic advanced applications for Qt such as KOffice, KDevelop, Doxygen, QCad, etc.
Crossplatform licensing fees: Yeah, it's a bitch. Are you writing Free Software? If so, it doesn't matter much, because qt-win32 is free beer. Are you writing proprietary software? If so, how can you expect your users to pay for your software if you don't want to pay for Trolltech's?
It would be fantastic if there were QPL/GPL versions of Qt for Windows and Mac. It would also be fantastic if I got a 25% raise. But I don't expect either to happen tomorrow.
Shared libraries: I'm not sure I understand your concern. Shared libraries may be relatively new to Unix, but all modern unices (except some embedded ones) have them. You problems with Linux are going to be identical under Solaris, AIX, HPUX, etc. Try installing Gnome from scratch under IRIX without going mad...
But perhaps you're using a distro/OS that's a bit too rigid when it comes to package management. My suggestion would be to try Debian or FreeBSD.
Finally, a GPLer who gets it! Thank you.
Those of us who use the BSD license do so simply because we wish to give/share our software. We don't want to compell anyone to return the favor. It's a no-strings-attached deal.
We realize that not everyone will agree with us, but that's not why we're doing it. People who do wish some sort of a guarantee that mods come back to them should not use the BSD license, because that's not what it's about.
p.s. BSD vs GPL is rather like an anarcho-capitalist arguing with an anarcho-socialist over the nature of liberty.
The BSD license is MORE free in the "libre" sense. To argue any other way is to destroy both the English and French languages. The English word closest to "libre" is "liberty". Liberty means the absence (or relative absence) of external restriction. It's generally used in the political and/or philosophical sense.
The BSD license has fewer external restrictions than the GPL. It is thus freer in the libre sense. It grants the recipient more freedoms, liberties, rights and permissions than the GPL. To say that it is not as free as the GPL is ridiculous.
Do what I do: "Dear Mr. Committer, I noticed that my port has been languishing in GNATS for a month now. Is there a problem with this port? Is it failing to build? Is it breaking hier(7)? Please let me know so I can fix it."
I get the response: "Nothing's wrong with it, we're just backlogged. Here, I'll commit it right now... Thanks for your patience."
(of course, right before the 4.6 freeze, they REALLY are backlogged)