They do think like this. Listen to Billy and Franklin Graham sometime.
Not in my wildest dreams could I imagine Billy or Franklin espousing this drivel. They may talk a bit against evolution and secular humanism and other things. But to think that they would get up there on a stage and denounce BSD because it has a daemon mascot, or Unix because it has chmod 666, or Apple because its logo is an apple with a bite (by Eve) taken out of it, is ridiculous.
This is an evil parody. This is not real. I can't believe so many of you fell for it.
Christians do not believe this tripe. Not even the fundamentalists or evangelicals. If all you know about christianity is what Hollywood and the MPAA tell you, then this guy sound genuine, but it most certainly is not. Distrust all stereotypes. A christian would be as likely to spout this blather as a geek would wear a pocket protector and taped glasses.
The members.truepath.com website is hoax. A very elaborate hoax to be sure, but still a hoax. Just go to the members' bios page if you don't believe me.
The proof of this hoax is simple: there is no theology anwhere. There's a lot of shouting about darwinism, communism and anti-christian terrorists, but I can't find any scriptural references anwhere in their arguments. Not one bible thump in evidence.
I am a christian. I was raised in a christian household. I grew up in the California version of the bible-belt. But I've never met anyone who even remotely resembles these turkeys. Not even the nutbags on the Patriot Network or JT Chick come close.
Not at all. Some licenses are contracts, but not all. A license is a grant of rights. Some grants of rights require a contract (I'll give you these rights if you give me some money), but I can think of dozens that don't (I'll give you these rights in exchange for nothing).
Not as funny as it sounds. My buddy (who I mentioned in another topic) is in rural Redneck County. His ISP is already using this. I, on the other hand, in the middle of Silicon Valley, don't have this option available to me.
Let me rephrase. I live dead set in the center of Silicon Valley, the heart of technology in California. He lives in Podunkburg on the north end of Coyote County. He gets better internet access than I.
Is that the fault of our respective city governments? Possibly. The Mountain View city council is load of buttinskis. But at least we're not as bad as Palo Alto where they literally arrest people for having hedges too high. His city council couldn't tell the difference between a dslam and a slamdance, so they don't know enough to tax his ISP into oblivion.
A buddy of mine lives in rural California. By rural, I don't mean Hollywood, I mean a town of 10,000, a predominantly agricultural economy, long distance to the AOL POP, and forty miles to a anything that can truly be called a city. Granted, it's not southern North Dakota, but other than the weather, it's pretty damn close.
But he's getting better internet connections than I am, and I'm in the middle of Mountain View, home of Netscape, Google and the rest of high-tech culture. You see, he's getting long range wireless, which I don't even have the option for. And he's getting it through a small one-man ISP. The price for his equipment was $500 (including mast router), and $50 a month for the service. That's not bad at all.
The free market seems to be finding it's way past the last mile to his house.
You are assuming that privacy is a right in and of itself. My opinion is that it is not a separate right, but a side effect of other existing rights. When you kid sister sneaks into your room and reads your diary, she is violating your right of personal property. When Yahoo sells your address to the highest bidder, they are violating your right of contract by reneging on their promises.
The government should have no power to invade your property to aquire your secrets. Nor should they engage in any sort of fraud. If a government form says they will keep your information secret, then they had better do so.
As for government secrets, I don't believe they should have any. Simply because you as a citizen are a member of government.
Okay, the heretical question of the day: Is privacy a right?
I don't think it is. Every other legitimate right that I am aware of hinges upon the ownership of property, including the ownership of the self. Do I own the information that pertains to me? Do I own Spamcentral's database entry that lists my email address? Do I own Megamart's correlations into my shopping habits? I don't think so.
Privacy is one of those things, like reputation, that one has to protect through other mechanisms than legal rights. Rule one: if you don't want people to know your email address, don't send email. Rule two: if you don't want Safeway to know your shopping habits, don't use your Safeway card. Rule three: if you don't want the government to know your travel destinations, don't take an airplane. It's damn inconvenient, but the fact remains that once you place your personal information into the public's domain, it becomes public domain.
Privacy is what you make of it.
The government should have no right to search your luggage at airports, because that luggage is your property. But the only thing stopping them from tracking your movements is propriety and decency, two traits which have been lacking in every government since Hammurabi's.
p.s. I find it somewhat ironic that the same community that argues that information should be free is the same community that screams the loudest when their personal information gets traded on the open market.
Q. How does the PC owner transfer their license rights for the operating system?
Sinple, just sell the computer. You have the right, under Copyright law, of first sale. If the license says otherwise, the license is wrong. Unless the copyright holder has a signed contract with your signature on it, you have not relinquished the rights that the laws guarantees you.
Too many software companies are preying on the public's ignorance of the law. And I'm not talking about just Microsoft. I'm talking about Sun, IBM, HP, Adobe, Apple, and even several Open Source companies and foundations. The public doesn't know anything, so when someone comes along and pretends to be an expert, they are believed, even if they are telling the biggest pack of lies since Hitler talked with Chamberlain.
You cannot forfeit your rights just because you use software you legally own, or because you read some words on an install screen, or because you tore open some mylar wrap, or even because you clicked a button that says "yes".
de Raadt's copyright only hinders people who are trying to help him and his project.
If you want to help him out, send him another $30 and give that new copy to your friend.
OpenBSD is Theo's job. Think about that one for a bit. Sure, he could always do consulting, but then he wouldn't be working on OpenBSD. Ditto for service and support or anything else you can think of. In order for his job to bring in enough revenue to pay his wages, he has to sell something. That something happens to be an official CD set.
Re:All my commercial software is licensed
on
Coding Fair Use
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Is there any chance that the Courts will just strike down the licenses for software?
I sure hope so. 99% of the software licenses out there, including many open source licenses, are either illegal or a slap in the face of the legal principles of civilization.
These licenses purport to be contracts. But they are not. There is no consideration. No possibility of negotiation. And no valid assent. Just because a license says you have agreed to something does not make it so.
You walk into a store and buy a copy of Windows XP. Guess what? You now have the legal right to use that software, to sell your only copy of it, to make archival copies, to reverse engineer it, and to install it on any computer that you own. But when you go to try to install it, you see a license. This license is not a contract. There is no consideration, since the license does not offer you anything you don't already have. In fact, it attempts to take away legal rights that you already possess. There is no possibility for negotiation, since Microsoft was not present at the time you purchased it, nor are they present when you must click "I Accept". Nor is there assent, even by clicking that button that says you assent. Because you already have the right to install the software, pushing that button is legally meaningless. Furthermore, you can always get someone else to push that button, so there is no way in hell that Microsoft can even begin to demonstrate that you assented to the license.
I'm waiting for the day when some major commercial software package comes with a only a single line copyright: Copyright 2002 Fubar Company. How much more intellectual property protection does a company need than that?
Shrink-wrap, click-thru, and the every increasingly popular "use-wrap" licenses are fraudulent pieces of legal tripe. They make great tools for intimidation, but their legal worth is less than that of used toilet paper.
I hear you. I have a friend who loves nothing more than pirating copies of software, music, whatever. He's even scanned in magazines and books and uploaded them. He made me aware of a particular subculture where warez are currency. He wouldn't dream of paying $2 for a music CD on sale, but he would gladly spend $4 on blank CDs to burn stuff so he could trade for that very same music online.
So a couple of weeks ago I tried to get him riled up about Holling's despicable bill. I told him the consequences if it would pass. He didn't care. "So what if it becomes illegal", he said, "I'll always find a crack for it, just like I do now."
You point out the major problem with capitalism, and that is the need to grow.
Not at all. This is not a symptom of capitalism, but a symptom of corporatism. I wish people would stop confusing the two. Most corporations are centered around making their stock prices rise, to the point that the general public believes thinks stable stock prices are bad things.
Talk to a business in its first year and ask them where they want to be in five years. You'll find out that they want to grow. But ask a five year old business where they want to be in another five years, and you'll find fewer of them that want to grow. And talk to a ten year old business and you'll find that they're usually quite content just where they are.
Except Joe Camel never tried to sell cigarettes to children. Just because a product's mascot is a cartoon does not make that mascot aimed at children. An advertisement is an advertisement is an advertisement. Just because it comes from your state government doesn't mean it's true. Especially if it's from your state's anti-tobacco advertising group.
I didn't say that. Your argument is that you can make money selling free software. I'm only pointing out that no one has been able to do it successfully yet. That does not invalidate other forms of revenue generation.
People are laying serious cash into businesses like Redhat, Mandrake, and Suse, though
Yes, but they aren't paying for the software. Oh, I'm sure there's some pointy headed bosses out there willing to pay for it, and unscupulous distros willing to profit off their ignorance, but the fact is that Redhat, Mandrake, and SuSE are not making any money selling software.
Redhat is making some money by selling service and support. Mandrake is making some money by soliciting donations. SuSE is making money by prepackaging software and providing manuals. These are very different things from selling the software.
Let me put it another way. If you sent a check off to Redhat for $50, and then received a letter from them saying that you needed to download the ISO images from their ftp site, you would be pissed. For that $50 you expect a nice shrink-wrapped box, nice printed manual, stickers for your computer, and professionally pressed CDs. If you don't get that stuff, you might as well send $2 off to Cheapbytes instead.
As a footnote, I've made money selling free software. A buddy of mine paid me $15 to download and burn all the GNU utilities I thought he'd find useful...
Sounds like you made zero dollars selling the software, and $15 dollars selling *convenience*.
There are, of course, provisions [gnu.org] in the GPL that protect your right to resell GPL software at any price.
Completely irrelevant. If there were no law to the contrary, I could "take" paperclips from my employer and resell them for a ten bucks apiece. But I would earn just as money doing that as I would selling free software.
The real price of a product is not what's on the price sticker, but instead intimately connected to the price the buyer is willing to pay.
It is simply a software license that imposes contractual conditions on the use of software.
No. The GPL is a permission statement. It is not a contract. It gives you generous permissions regarding the work, while taking away zero of your pre-existing rights. There is nothing you need to agree to in order to use, modify or distribute the work. Just follow standard copyright law to the letter, and the conditions placed upon the permissions.
Neither are the MS licenses contractual agreements. You have the legal right to not agree to them, and still use the software. This is because you legally aquired the right to use the software at the time of purchase, which preceeded the time you encountered the license.
The Microsoft license is completely bogus. All it is is an intimidation tool. It looks legitimate enough that Microsoft can haul you to court without the judge laughing in their faces. Once there they can wear you down. Once the judge sees through their tricks, MS will simply settle. And the media will attribute it as a win for Microsoft.
I've seen dozens of tiny companies do exactly the same thing.
But that's missing the point, really. If you don't need to use flash, then don't use it. If you can't make the site work in standard HTML/CSS1, then perhaps you need to find someone who can.
You don't have to dumb it down. Just keep most stuff out of the installer. The installer should install the base system, X11R6, and either GNOME or KDE. Anything else is installed *after* the main installation is complete.
The advantage is that the newbie isn't confused by 7000 packages, and the expert still has full and complete access to them.
Each one has its advantages and disadvantages, just as long as we look at which one fits best for a particular situation all is good and balance is maintained. Or something like that...
I agree. In the particular situation that is taxpayer funded software, there should be zero restrictions on its use by the taxpayer. That means public domain.
Derivative works will not be public domain, but those derivative bits were not funded by the taxpayer, only the original bits.
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They do think like this. Listen to Billy and Franklin Graham sometime.
Not in my wildest dreams could I imagine Billy or Franklin espousing this drivel. They may talk a bit against evolution and secular humanism and other things. But to think that they would get up there on a stage and denounce BSD because it has a daemon mascot, or Unix because it has chmod 666, or Apple because its logo is an apple with a bite (by Eve) taken out of it, is ridiculous.
This is an evil parody. This is not real. I can't believe so many of you fell for it.
Christians do not believe this tripe. Not even the fundamentalists or evangelicals. If all you know about christianity is what Hollywood and the MPAA tell you, then this guy sound genuine, but it most certainly is not. Distrust all stereotypes. A christian would be as likely to spout this blather as a geek would wear a pocket protector and taped glasses.
The members.truepath.com website is hoax. A very elaborate hoax to be sure, but still a hoax. Just go to the members' bios page if you don't believe me.
The proof of this hoax is simple: there is no theology anwhere. There's a lot of shouting about darwinism, communism and anti-christian terrorists, but I can't find any scriptural references anwhere in their arguments. Not one bible thump in evidence.
I am a christian. I was raised in a christian household. I grew up in the California version of the bible-belt. But I've never met anyone who even remotely resembles these turkeys. Not even the nutbags on the Patriot Network or JT Chick come close.
A licence is a type of contract.
Not at all. Some licenses are contracts, but not all. A license is a grant of rights. Some grants of rights require a contract (I'll give you these rights if you give me some money), but I can think of dozens that don't (I'll give you these rights in exchange for nothing).
Not as funny as it sounds. My buddy (who I mentioned in another topic) is in rural Redneck County. His ISP is already using this. I, on the other hand, in the middle of Silicon Valley, don't have this option available to me.
Let me rephrase. I live dead set in the center of Silicon Valley, the heart of technology in California. He lives in Podunkburg on the north end of Coyote County. He gets better internet access than I.
Is that the fault of our respective city governments? Possibly. The Mountain View city council is load of buttinskis. But at least we're not as bad as Palo Alto where they literally arrest people for having hedges too high. His city council couldn't tell the difference between a dslam and a slamdance, so they don't know enough to tax his ISP into oblivion.
A buddy of mine lives in rural California. By rural, I don't mean Hollywood, I mean a town of 10,000, a predominantly agricultural economy, long distance to the AOL POP, and forty miles to a anything that can truly be called a city. Granted, it's not southern North Dakota, but other than the weather, it's pretty damn close.
But he's getting better internet connections than I am, and I'm in the middle of Mountain View, home of Netscape, Google and the rest of high-tech culture. You see, he's getting long range wireless, which I don't even have the option for. And he's getting it through a small one-man ISP. The price for his equipment was $500 (including mast router), and $50 a month for the service. That's not bad at all.
The free market seems to be finding it's way past the last mile to his house.
You are assuming that privacy is a right in and of itself. My opinion is that it is not a separate right, but a side effect of other existing rights. When you kid sister sneaks into your room and reads your diary, she is violating your right of personal property. When Yahoo sells your address to the highest bidder, they are violating your right of contract by reneging on their promises.
The government should have no power to invade your property to aquire your secrets. Nor should they engage in any sort of fraud. If a government form says they will keep your information secret, then they had better do so.
As for government secrets, I don't believe they should have any. Simply because you as a citizen are a member of government.
Okay, the heretical question of the day: Is privacy a right?
I don't think it is. Every other legitimate right that I am aware of hinges upon the ownership of property, including the ownership of the self. Do I own the information that pertains to me? Do I own Spamcentral's database entry that lists my email address? Do I own Megamart's correlations into my shopping habits? I don't think so.
Privacy is one of those things, like reputation, that one has to protect through other mechanisms than legal rights. Rule one: if you don't want people to know your email address, don't send email. Rule two: if you don't want Safeway to know your shopping habits, don't use your Safeway card. Rule three: if you don't want the government to know your travel destinations, don't take an airplane. It's damn inconvenient, but the fact remains that once you place your personal information into the public's domain, it becomes public domain.
Privacy is what you make of it.
The government should have no right to search your luggage at airports, because that luggage is your property. But the only thing stopping them from tracking your movements is propriety and decency, two traits which have been lacking in every government since Hammurabi's.
p.s. I find it somewhat ironic that the same community that argues that information should be free is the same community that screams the loudest when their personal information gets traded on the open market.
Q. How does the PC owner transfer their license rights for the operating system?
Sinple, just sell the computer. You have the right, under Copyright law, of first sale. If the license says otherwise, the license is wrong. Unless the copyright holder has a signed contract with your signature on it, you have not relinquished the rights that the laws guarantees you.
Too many software companies are preying on the public's ignorance of the law. And I'm not talking about just Microsoft. I'm talking about Sun, IBM, HP, Adobe, Apple, and even several Open Source companies and foundations. The public doesn't know anything, so when someone comes along and pretends to be an expert, they are believed, even if they are telling the biggest pack of lies since Hitler talked with Chamberlain.
You cannot forfeit your rights just because you use software you legally own, or because you read some words on an install screen, or because you tore open some mylar wrap, or even because you clicked a button that says "yes".
de Raadt's copyright only hinders people who are trying to help him and his project.
If you want to help him out, send him another $30 and give that new copy to your friend.
OpenBSD is Theo's job. Think about that one for a bit. Sure, he could always do consulting, but then he wouldn't be working on OpenBSD. Ditto for service and support or anything else you can think of. In order for his job to bring in enough revenue to pay his wages, he has to sell something. That something happens to be an official CD set.
Is there any chance that the Courts will just strike down the licenses for software?
I sure hope so. 99% of the software licenses out there, including many open source licenses, are either illegal or a slap in the face of the legal principles of civilization.
These licenses purport to be contracts. But they are not. There is no consideration. No possibility of negotiation. And no valid assent. Just because a license says you have agreed to something does not make it so.
You walk into a store and buy a copy of Windows XP. Guess what? You now have the legal right to use that software, to sell your only copy of it, to make archival copies, to reverse engineer it, and to install it on any computer that you own. But when you go to try to install it, you see a license. This license is not a contract. There is no consideration, since the license does not offer you anything you don't already have. In fact, it attempts to take away legal rights that you already possess. There is no possibility for negotiation, since Microsoft was not present at the time you purchased it, nor are they present when you must click "I Accept". Nor is there assent, even by clicking that button that says you assent. Because you already have the right to install the software, pushing that button is legally meaningless. Furthermore, you can always get someone else to push that button, so there is no way in hell that Microsoft can even begin to demonstrate that you assented to the license.
I'm waiting for the day when some major commercial software package comes with a only a single line copyright: Copyright 2002 Fubar Company. How much more intellectual property protection does a company need than that?
Shrink-wrap, click-thru, and the every increasingly popular "use-wrap" licenses are fraudulent pieces of legal tripe. They make great tools for intimidation, but their legal worth is less than that of used toilet paper.
I hear you. I have a friend who loves nothing more than pirating copies of software, music, whatever. He's even scanned in magazines and books and uploaded them. He made me aware of a particular subculture where warez are currency. He wouldn't dream of paying $2 for a music CD on sale, but he would gladly spend $4 on blank CDs to burn stuff so he could trade for that very same music online.
So a couple of weeks ago I tried to get him riled up about Holling's despicable bill. I told him the consequences if it would pass. He didn't care. "So what if it becomes illegal", he said, "I'll always find a crack for it, just like I do now."
The very sad thing is that he is not alone.
And then don't complain when your civil services go to hell (police response, road conditions, school quality)
Are you saying the only way to have enough adequate funding for police is to have so much spare cash that Davis will mispend it on Oracle licenses?
I say tax the people only enough to support the essential services, and force Davis to pay for his own team of lawyers.
You point out the major problem with capitalism, and that is the need to grow.
Not at all. This is not a symptom of capitalism, but a symptom of corporatism. I wish people would stop confusing the two. Most corporations are centered around making their stock prices rise, to the point that the general public believes thinks stable stock prices are bad things.
Talk to a business in its first year and ask them where they want to be in five years. You'll find out that they want to grow. But ask a five year old business where they want to be in another five years, and you'll find fewer of them that want to grow. And talk to a ten year old business and you'll find that they're usually quite content just where they are.
Except Joe Camel never tried to sell cigarettes to children. Just because a product's mascot is a cartoon does not make that mascot aimed at children. An advertisement is an advertisement is an advertisement. Just because it comes from your state government doesn't mean it's true. Especially if it's from your state's anti-tobacco advertising group.
I didn't say that. Your argument is that you can make money selling free software. I'm only pointing out that no one has been able to do it successfully yet. That does not invalidate other forms of revenue generation.
People are laying serious cash into businesses like Redhat, Mandrake, and Suse, though
Yes, but they aren't paying for the software. Oh, I'm sure there's some pointy headed bosses out there willing to pay for it, and unscupulous distros willing to profit off their ignorance, but the fact is that Redhat, Mandrake, and SuSE are not making any money selling software.
Redhat is making some money by selling service and support. Mandrake is making some money by soliciting donations. SuSE is making money by prepackaging software and providing manuals. These are very different things from selling the software.
Let me put it another way. If you sent a check off to Redhat for $50, and then received a letter from them saying that you needed to download the ISO images from their ftp site, you would be pissed. For that $50 you expect a nice shrink-wrapped box, nice printed manual, stickers for your computer, and professionally pressed CDs. If you don't get that stuff, you might as well send $2 off to Cheapbytes instead.
As a footnote, I've made money selling free software. A buddy of mine paid me $15 to download and burn all the GNU utilities I thought he'd find useful...
Sounds like you made zero dollars selling the software, and $15 dollars selling *convenience*.
There are, of course, provisions [gnu.org] in the GPL that protect your right to resell GPL software at any price.
Completely irrelevant. If there were no law to the contrary, I could "take" paperclips from my employer and resell them for a ten bucks apiece. But I would earn just as money doing that as I would selling free software.
The real price of a product is not what's on the price sticker, but instead intimately connected to the price the buyer is willing to pay.
That's strange, because Microsoft has never operated under a free market.
It is simply a software license that imposes contractual conditions on the use of software.
No. The GPL is a permission statement. It is not a contract. It gives you generous permissions regarding the work, while taking away zero of your pre-existing rights. There is nothing you need to agree to in order to use, modify or distribute the work. Just follow standard copyright law to the letter, and the conditions placed upon the permissions.
Neither are the MS licenses contractual agreements. You have the legal right to not agree to them, and still use the software. This is because you legally aquired the right to use the software at the time of purchase, which preceeded the time you encountered the license.
The Microsoft license is completely bogus. All it is is an intimidation tool. It looks legitimate enough that Microsoft can haul you to court without the judge laughing in their faces. Once there they can wear you down. Once the judge sees through their tricks, MS will simply settle. And the media will attribute it as a win for Microsoft.
I've seen dozens of tiny companies do exactly the same thing.
But that's missing the point, really. If you don't need to use flash, then don't use it. If you can't make the site work in standard HTML/CSS1, then perhaps you need to find someone who can.
You don't have to dumb it down. Just keep most stuff out of the installer. The installer should install the base system, X11R6, and either GNOME or KDE. Anything else is installed *after* the main installation is complete.
The advantage is that the newbie isn't confused by 7000 packages, and the expert still has full and complete access to them.
There's very strong, and I mean very strong, rumour that a Ringworld movie is being worked on.
See the Movie link at www.larryniven.com.
Each one has its advantages and disadvantages, just as long as we look at which one fits best for a particular situation all is good and balance is maintained. Or something like that...
I agree. In the particular situation that is taxpayer funded software, there should be zero restrictions on its use by the taxpayer. That means public domain.
Derivative works will not be public domain, but those derivative bits were not funded by the taxpayer, only the original bits.