You're right. The Republicans truly are the epitome of evil. I don't know why they keep pretending to go through this election farce. Why don't they just declare today that Cheney is the winner in the 2008 election, and get on with their job of starving old people to death for their social security checks?
I never said it wasn't. However, RMS does stress that copyright encumbered copyleft licenses are superior to unencumbered warranty-notice style licenses, and even encourages people NOT to place their software into the public domain.
As for roads, the commonly held belief is that they are public infrastructures that would not otherwise exist without government coercion. Whether or not that is true, the same cannot be said of software. We have a thriving market in software, and oodles of Free Software is being produced without any coercive software tax in sight.
It doesn't matter what the FAQ says, it only matters what is actually in the GPL. Here is what the GPL says:
(Section 1) "You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee."
This allows you to charge for media, distribution and warranty, but says nothing regarding the software itself.
(Section 2b) "You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License."
You cannot sell the software to a third party. You can still sell them a convenient pre-burned CD or a piece of paper with a warranty on it, but you cannot sell the software itself.
Of course, as the author you can do anything you want, since you are not bound by your own license. This is what RMS means when he says you can sell GPL software. But you may not sell anyone else's GPL software, or your own software derived their GPL encumbered code, without their express permission.
The commercial software industry isn't a strawman if the topic at hand is commercial software. The only way to discuss whether or not GPL software can be commercial is to discuss commercial software! Duh!
p.s. Even at your tire company, the odds are high that a commercial software firm wrote the administration and production software. And in the case where the software was written internally, it isn't licensed anyway, because it isn't being distributed.
Stallman has repeatedly stated that universal Free Software is his goal, including its universal adoption by otherwise practical minded corporations. He wants the complete elimination of proprietary software.
He is a zealot, because he is willing to use coercion to promote his ideology. He has demonstrated this by calling for a software tax to fund Free Software, and has supported government regulations requiring the use of Free Software.
The GPL is *NOT* an EULA! It's a DISTRIBUTION LICENSE!
Relax, calm down, take a big deep breath. You'll live longer.
And for the record, the GPL is indeed a EULA. As an end user, there are rights and privileges in the GPL which I do not get until I agree with it. Thus it's an end user license agreement.
The BSD and MIT licenses were around in 1991, and were quite suitable for the needs of the community. Just because they were "academic" licenses doesn't mean they weren't Free Software licenses. According to Linus' autobiography, if it weren't for the AT&T lawsuit, he might have used a BSD Unix on his i386 and never had the impetus to write Linux. That lawsuit was settled very shortly after he started, so it really comes down to a matter of timing.
Linux's popularity is due to grabbing a critical mass of developer mindshare at the right time. Not because of the license. To be sure, many developers prefer copyleft-style licenses, but the lack of such hasn't harmed the popularity of Apache, Perl, Python, etc.
You are also making the mistake of assuming the commercial software industry that the FSF describes is similar to the commercial software industry that actually exists.
The GPL (as do most other F.O.S.S. licenses) prohibits selling the actual software. You can sell support for the software, and charge for the cost of the media or distribution, and you can sell the hardware the software runs on. But you can't sell the software itself.
The distinction may seem subtle, but it is profound. It goes to the very heart of the nature of copyright. You can't sell me the software and then tell me what I can or cannot do with my copy of it. This is why most commercial software developers claim they are not selling the software, but rather the *license* to use the software.
It is disingenuous to claim that you can run a successful commercial venture selling Free Software. Those Open Source companies that are commercially successful are selling something OTHER than the software. They're selling support, service, hardware, consulting, proprietary licenses for proprietary developers, etc.
The GPL was added solely to make the Artistic License GPL-compatible. It's not a matter of choosing which one you want, you get the best of both worlds. For all intents and purposes, Perl is under the Artistic License.
I cleaned out my mom's garage, and discovered a box of my old stuff in it from twenty-five years earlier.
I am now re-reading several books from that period, mainly early Stephen King's. If these were ebooks, they would now be as useless as......the TSR-80 and AppleII software that was in the same box. If I had access to an 8" floppy I might be able to extract the files from them and run them under an emulator. But that's only because they didn't have DRM in 1981.
Considering that you can buy a Mac Mini Intel for the price of that high end video card you need to remain a member in good standing in Gamers Anonymous, you might was well buy the Mac for your non-gaming needs. Throw in a KVM switch and you're set.
In other words. Make your PC a gaming *appliance*, and get a Mac for your real computing use.
1) What does a test taken by a bureaucrat have to do with anything? A bureaucrat's education and intelligent is unrelated to the bureaucrat's morality and ethics. Bad regulations can come from educated and intelligent bureaucrats. Really!
2) It doesn't matter if a corporation has dumb executive, because a corporation has no authority over me. They don't generally impose "regulations" on me, and those few times that they do it is because government has given them that authority. Thus government is still the root cause.
3) Bureaucrats might not make laws, but they do make regulations.
4) While Enron was certainly run by corrupt criminals, it was fostered under an environment led by Gray Davis. Enron was a convenient scapegoat, and while they screwed over their employees and investors, they didn't cause the energy crisis.
5) The last Republican actor governor was pretty damned good for California. You may not have liked him as president, but a governor he was kickass. While the current Republican actor is somewhat muddleheaded, I happened to go to school with the nimwit who was his leading opposition, and I'm very glad he didn't get get elected.
Every time the left starts to convince me that repressive moral regulation has the sole monopoly of the Republican Party (that's 'E' as in "Evil"), along comes some iberal Democrats like these to prove them wrong. There really is no substantive difference between the two parties. One wants a Big Father State to paddle you if you're bad, the other wants a Big Mother State to suffocate you in her embrace. Neither is willing to accept the premise that the state is not your parent.
Vote? Vote? When was the last time you voted for a bureaucrat? Hell, it was a major year long undertaking just to remove a corrupt governor in California!
If it were that simple then S-O wouldn't be as lengthy and complex as it is. In fact, we ALREADY have laws against fraud. That's why the Enron guys are in jail. They broke the law!
He said he had to use email because his documents needed to be backed up. So why not use a network drive? You can even have your "local" email folders there.
He stated that the server is backed up and his local computer, where you recommended he store business critical emails, is not backed up.
I never said to store stuff on the local computer. I said to store it in the home directory. I don't know about the desktop epitome that is called "Windows", but surely even it in all its magnificence can handle remote home directories.
The grandparent will worry about that when the time comes. Duh!
If Vista won't allow VB6 programs to run, then at that time the grandparent poster can upgrade. Or switch to a different toolkit, language, platform, etc. Or throw up his hands in disgust and join a Mac commune. BUT UNTIL THEN, no one but socially repressed people like yourself will care.
Is it going to be a problem in 2015. You bet your ass!
OMG! That's only seven years away! Aaargh! You have to upgrade now to something that will be obsolete in eight years before it's too late! Think of the children! Aaargh!
Of course it's bullshit! Even the Slashdot blurb says it's bullshit! There's not one byte of evidence in the article.
But that doesn't stop the Slashdot posterati from screaming their vocal cords raw that they're being repressed, oppressed and depressed by the Evil Bush Cheney Administration(c)(r)(tm). This is the new media, where accusation is sufficient proof and the guilty are guilty until proven guilty.
if you lost CAD drawings, documents or other critical info because it wasn't on a network drive, your ass was out the door.
"Network drive" is not synonymous with your email account. Really it's not. Otherwise every time you started a new drawing you would have to send an email to yourself...
Print them out? What happened to all the paper-saving benefits?
I didn't say to print out everything. It depends on what it is. Obviously you don't print out a CAD drawing. But maybe you can print out that list of paid holidays for 2006 and pin it up (I'm assuming you've already deleted 2005's, 2004's, 2003's, etc).
Or use PDF! If you're not going to read the document ever again, save it to PDF and burn it to a CD, or store it on your network drive. Really now, no one cares if you're not backing up your particular copy of a memo that 1200 other employees also received at the same time.
At my work we have Sharepoint and websites for projects and groups. Instead of everyone keeping the same CAD drawing around (and firing the one guy in twenty who didn't back up his), just put it up on the project site so everyone who needs access to it gets it. It's simple.
If you need versioning history, then use a versioning system. Because going back through your inbox to see what got sent when by who is a very poor substitute for a real versioning system.
Finally, the computer should adapt to MY work habits and NOT the other way around.
That's a lame excuse to absolve yourself of laziness. Your email account is not a surrogate home directory. Spotlight (and whatever Spotlight clone Microsoft decides to ship with Vista) can search files just as easily as email. Really it can. The time it takes to organize your inbox into project subfolders is exactly the same as it takes to organize your home directory into project subdirectories. Really!
(Of course, if you don't organize your inbox with its five years worth of critical urgent emails that you cannot possibly do without, then you're a freaking idiot, and I hope I never get you as a support monkey).
Slashdot Mirror
You're right. The Republicans truly are the epitome of evil. I don't know why they keep pretending to go through this election farce. Why don't they just declare today that Cheney is the winner in the 2008 election, and get on with their job of starving old people to death for their social security checks?
Remember that copyright itself is coercion.
I never said it wasn't. However, RMS does stress that copyright encumbered copyleft licenses are superior to unencumbered warranty-notice style licenses, and even encourages people NOT to place their software into the public domain.
As for roads, the commonly held belief is that they are public infrastructures that would not otherwise exist without government coercion. Whether or not that is true, the same cannot be said of software. We have a thriving market in software, and oodles of Free Software is being produced without any coercive software tax in sight.
It doesn't matter what the FAQ says, it only matters what is actually in the GPL. Here is what the GPL says:
(Section 1) "You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee."
This allows you to charge for media, distribution and warranty, but says nothing regarding the software itself.
(Section 2b) "You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License."
You cannot sell the software to a third party. You can still sell them a convenient pre-burned CD or a piece of paper with a warranty on it, but you cannot sell the software itself.
Of course, as the author you can do anything you want, since you are not bound by your own license. This is what RMS means when he says you can sell GPL software. But you may not sell anyone else's GPL software, or your own software derived their GPL encumbered code, without their express permission.
In an effort to boost my karma by mimicking those statements most likely to be positively moderated, I hereby present the following post:
"Well, it looks like the Republicans aren't going to win Maryland this year!"
The commercial software industry isn't a strawman if the topic at hand is commercial software. The only way to discuss whether or not GPL software can be commercial is to discuss commercial software! Duh!
p.s. Even at your tire company, the odds are high that a commercial software firm wrote the administration and production software. And in the case where the software was written internally, it isn't licensed anyway, because it isn't being distributed.
Stallman has repeatedly stated that universal Free Software is his goal, including its universal adoption by otherwise practical minded corporations. He wants the complete elimination of proprietary software.
He is a zealot, because he is willing to use coercion to promote his ideology. He has demonstrated this by calling for a software tax to fund Free Software, and has supported government regulations requiring the use of Free Software.
The GPL is *NOT* an EULA! It's a DISTRIBUTION LICENSE!
Relax, calm down, take a big deep breath. You'll live longer.
And for the record, the GPL is indeed a EULA. As an end user, there are rights and privileges in the GPL which I do not get until I agree with it. Thus it's an end user license agreement.
The BSD and MIT licenses were around in 1991, and were quite suitable for the needs of the community. Just because they were "academic" licenses doesn't mean they weren't Free Software licenses. According to Linus' autobiography, if it weren't for the AT&T lawsuit, he might have used a BSD Unix on his i386 and never had the impetus to write Linux. That lawsuit was settled very shortly after he started, so it really comes down to a matter of timing.
Linux's popularity is due to grabbing a critical mass of developer mindshare at the right time. Not because of the license. To be sure, many developers prefer copyleft-style licenses, but the lack of such hasn't harmed the popularity of Apache, Perl, Python, etc.
You are also making the mistake of assuming the commercial software industry that the FSF describes is similar to the commercial software industry that actually exists.
The GPL (as do most other F.O.S.S. licenses) prohibits selling the actual software. You can sell support for the software, and charge for the cost of the media or distribution, and you can sell the hardware the software runs on. But you can't sell the software itself.
The distinction may seem subtle, but it is profound. It goes to the very heart of the nature of copyright. You can't sell me the software and then tell me what I can or cannot do with my copy of it. This is why most commercial software developers claim they are not selling the software, but rather the *license* to use the software.
It is disingenuous to claim that you can run a successful commercial venture selling Free Software. Those Open Source companies that are commercially successful are selling something OTHER than the software. They're selling support, service, hardware, consulting, proprietary licenses for proprietary developers, etc.
The GPL was added solely to make the Artistic License GPL-compatible. It's not a matter of choosing which one you want, you get the best of both worlds. For all intents and purposes, Perl is under the Artistic License.
I cleaned out my mom's garage, and discovered a box of my old stuff in it from twenty-five years earlier.
...the TSR-80 and AppleII software that was in the same box. If I had access to an 8" floppy I might be able to extract the files from them and run them under an emulator. But that's only because they didn't have DRM in 1981.
I am now re-reading several books from that period, mainly early Stephen King's. If these were ebooks, they would now be as useless as...
If this trend keeps up, the only new features in Vista will be a new theme and increased memory requirements.
Considering that you can buy a Mac Mini Intel for the price of that high end video card you need to remain a member in good standing in Gamers Anonymous, you might was well buy the Mac for your non-gaming needs. Throw in a KVM switch and you're set.
In other words. Make your PC a gaming *appliance*, and get a Mac for your real computing use.
The news will be a shock for owners of Intel Macs who had hoped they would be able to dual-boot between Windows Vista and OS X.
Being able to dual-boot would have been nice. But anyone who bought a Mac Intel for that purpose was stupid.
While I will champion their right to be stupid, I won't shed too many tears for them.
1) What does a test taken by a bureaucrat have to do with anything? A bureaucrat's education and intelligent is unrelated to the bureaucrat's morality and ethics. Bad regulations can come from educated and intelligent bureaucrats. Really!
2) It doesn't matter if a corporation has dumb executive, because a corporation has no authority over me. They don't generally impose "regulations" on me, and those few times that they do it is because government has given them that authority. Thus government is still the root cause.
3) Bureaucrats might not make laws, but they do make regulations.
4) While Enron was certainly run by corrupt criminals, it was fostered under an environment led by Gray Davis. Enron was a convenient scapegoat, and while they screwed over their employees and investors, they didn't cause the energy crisis.
5) The last Republican actor governor was pretty damned good for California. You may not have liked him as president, but a governor he was kickass. While the current Republican actor is somewhat muddleheaded, I happened to go to school with the nimwit who was his leading opposition, and I'm very glad he didn't get get elected.
Every time the left starts to convince me that repressive moral regulation has the sole monopoly of the Republican Party (that's 'E' as in "Evil"), along comes some iberal Democrats like these to prove them wrong. There really is no substantive difference between the two parties. One wants a Big Father State to paddle you if you're bad, the other wants a Big Mother State to suffocate you in her embrace. Neither is willing to accept the premise that the state is not your parent.
GNU is a cult. Nothing makes sense until you understand that fact.
Vote? Vote? When was the last time you voted for a bureaucrat? Hell, it was a major year long undertaking just to remove a corrupt governor in California!
But all SO says is...
If it were that simple then S-O wouldn't be as lengthy and complex as it is. In fact, we ALREADY have laws against fraud. That's why the Enron guys are in jail. They broke the law!
Yes we should just let the regulators go wild. They would never do anything to harm anybody anyway.
He said he had to use email because his documents needed to be backed up. So why not use a network drive? You can even have your "local" email folders there.
He stated that the server is backed up and his local computer, where you recommended he store business critical emails, is not backed up.
I never said to store stuff on the local computer. I said to store it in the home directory. I don't know about the desktop epitome that is called "Windows", but surely even it in all its magnificence can handle remote home directories.
I know a guy who knows a guy who says the guy you know is full of shit.
The grandparent will worry about that when the time comes. Duh!
If Vista won't allow VB6 programs to run, then at that time the grandparent poster can upgrade. Or switch to a different toolkit, language, platform, etc. Or throw up his hands in disgust and join a Mac commune. BUT UNTIL THEN, no one but socially repressed people like yourself will care.
Is it going to be a problem in 2015. You bet your ass!
OMG! That's only seven years away! Aaargh! You have to upgrade now to something that will be obsolete in eight years before it's too late! Think of the children! Aaargh!
Of course it's bullshit! Even the Slashdot blurb says it's bullshit! There's not one byte of evidence in the article.
But that doesn't stop the Slashdot posterati from screaming their vocal cords raw that they're being repressed, oppressed and depressed by the Evil Bush Cheney Administration(c)(r)(tm). This is the new media, where accusation is sufficient proof and the guilty are guilty until proven guilty.
if you lost CAD drawings, documents or other critical info because it wasn't on a network drive, your ass was out the door.
"Network drive" is not synonymous with your email account. Really it's not. Otherwise every time you started a new drawing you would have to send an email to yourself...
Print them out? What happened to all the paper-saving benefits?
I didn't say to print out everything. It depends on what it is. Obviously you don't print out a CAD drawing. But maybe you can print out that list of paid holidays for 2006 and pin it up (I'm assuming you've already deleted 2005's, 2004's, 2003's, etc).
Or use PDF! If you're not going to read the document ever again, save it to PDF and burn it to a CD, or store it on your network drive. Really now, no one cares if you're not backing up your particular copy of a memo that 1200 other employees also received at the same time.
At my work we have Sharepoint and websites for projects and groups. Instead of everyone keeping the same CAD drawing around (and firing the one guy in twenty who didn't back up his), just put it up on the project site so everyone who needs access to it gets it. It's simple.
If you need versioning history, then use a versioning system. Because going back through your inbox to see what got sent when by who is a very poor substitute for a real versioning system.
Finally, the computer should adapt to MY work habits and NOT the other way around.
That's a lame excuse to absolve yourself of laziness. Your email account is not a surrogate home directory. Spotlight (and whatever Spotlight clone Microsoft decides to ship with Vista) can search files just as easily as email. Really it can. The time it takes to organize your inbox into project subfolders is exactly the same as it takes to organize your home directory into project subdirectories. Really!
(Of course, if you don't organize your inbox with its five years worth of critical urgent emails that you cannot possibly do without, then you're a freaking idiot, and I hope I never get you as a support monkey).