There is no Microsoft tax. That term was orginally used in a very bad analogy.
A tax is an involuntary monetary obligation to a ruler. Microsoft is not a ruler. You are not obligated to buy any of their products. Whether or not Microsoft gets one penny of yours is entirely your decision. They haven't received a penny from me since DOS 3.3.
All users of BSDL licensed code, and any derivatives, DO have the right to redistribution! The BSDL does not allow anyone to change the license. You can wrap it in the GPL or a proprietary license, but underneath it is still licensed under the BSDL.
If you can manage to extract the TCP/IP stack out of Windows, you have the legal right to redistribute it.
The difference between the GPL and BSDL is that the former is based on spite and the latter on sharing.
Because we won't give up our cause of making sure people always have the right to source and distribution.
What right is that? Where other than the lips of Richard Stallman do find it? You have the right to distribute your own original software any way you please, but you have absolutely no right to tell anyone else how they can distribute theirs.
If software can be morally owned (and most people think it can be), then you have no rights to compell the author to license it the way you want. It all boils down to freedom of the press. Microsoft has as much right to release a closed source application as your hometown newspaper does copyrighting their news. Before you can outlaw closed source you're going to have to eliminate free speech and free press, and get rid of the entirety of the First Amendment to the US Constitution.
On the other hand, if software cannot be morally owned (and a few diehards think it must not be), then the only moral recourse is to release your own software into the public domain. Using the GPL and saying "it's not copyrighted, it's copylefted" is disingenuous. GPL software is owned and copyrighted software. And according to my dictionary, that means it's proprietary.
I used to write papers that disagreed with my teachers all the time. I presented papers on creationism to my biology teacher, papers on libertarian thought to my civics teacher, etc. Never once did I get marked off on it. I usually got marked UP for it, because it showed that at least I wasn't repeating the words of the encyclopedia or teacher.
When I got into University and learned that they expected me to blindly vomit out the ideologies of the professors, I was genuinely shocked!
But if you developed a C program and it only worked properly on a newer vesion of the OS, of any platform, and this was a very wide spread problem. Wouldn't you encorage your users to upgrade?
Telling a user that they are not worthy to use my software or view my website is something I will not do. If they meet the basic requirements for my software (X11R5+ and POSIX), and it still won't run, then I'll go in and fix it. I won't blame the user. If I am following the ISO and ANSI C standards, then your scenario won't work. Period. Only software that doesn't follow the standards (like using glibc and gcc extensions) will have your scenario's problems.
In the case of WASP, why should they even care if I put diesel in my gas-burning Ford, or try to view their pages with an HTML-3.2 browser? I'll tell you why. It's because they're arrogant buttinskis. Well, screw them! Maybe I'll start filtering out pages that have their little "test" in it. Now that's an idea!
Oh, I'm so glad you have an intelligent PHB! I've been to too many sites requiring me to use one specific browser or another just to buy their stupid product.
Funny thing is, when I use Konqueror to tell the site that it's really Netscape of IExplorer, there's never anything there that requires browser specificity...
If they're talking about not supporting Microsoft of Netscape extensions to HTML, I'm right behind them. But if they're talking about not supporting HTML-3.2, then screw them!
I like C++. It's great. But if I have a project that doesn't need objects or templates, then I'll use just plain vanilla C. Likewise, if I don't need any HTML-4.0 constructs, I won't use them, and resort to HTML-3.2 instead.
And I'm certainly not going to put in any ECMAScript telling the user that I disapprove of their personal choice of web browser!
Okay, okay. How about ten inches over the property line. There's got to some place between Bellevue and Issaquah where he gets a clear and uninterrupted view of my butt masquerading as a symbol of market choice.
5% of the vote would send a signal to the moral candidates that only 6% of the populace needs to be moral in order to win. As it now stands, the worthy candidates don't even bother to run because they can't compete against the misinformation machines of the incumbents. But when they see that no one's buying their crap any more, an impossibility comes within reach.
And speaking of mandates, both Gore and Bush had more people vote for them then Clinton did during either of his two "mandates". By a HUGE margin.
Hee, hee. I didn't even read Slashdot last week:-)
I posted this because checking out the replies to their headlines, it seems as if there are an awful lot of people who never read the link, and see the headline as the gospel truth. It almost makes you wonder if they think the WWF is real.
A private security force is not an army. Please pull out your dictionary.
A security cop has no legal authority whatsoever off of their corporate property. If you are trespassing on Microsoft headquarters, they can do quite a bit, but they are utterly powerless at the McDonalds two blocks down the street.
In addition, armies implement the political policies of their governments. An MS security cop can only implement the law of the land, and that only in his limited jurisdiction of MS property. Even in the inner sanctum of Jim Allchin's office they can't arrest you for using Open Source, no matter how much he might want to. If you didn't trespass to get there, they most he could do would have his "army" escort you off the premises (just as I would do if you had the cojones to use Windows in my office).
If I go over to One Microsoft Way in Redmond, stand across the street and waggle my bare ass up at Bill's window way up high, he can't do jack shit about it, and neither can his rentacops. He would have to call the Redmond Police (also known as the government) to come cart me away.
Actually, I think it would make a lot of sense to formally define stealing as 'taking something away from someone so they don't have it anymore'.
You are indeed correct. We need a better term. How about trespass? These individuals are trespassing upon the intellectual property of the artists and distributors.
I'm getting real tired of Slashdot's half assed excuse for journalism. I mean, how hard can it be to write a headline? They don't even have to write the damn article, just the headline and blurb, and they can't even do that right!
Here they say that Napster users are being arrested when they are not. Just earlier they said that Jim Allchin wanted to outlaw Open Source, when he clearly said no such thing. A quick search of previous article will reveal other such deliberate misinformations. And it can only be deliberate, since even a cursory reading of the linked articles reveals the truth.
Never believe anything you read on Slashdot. They make the Weekly World News look like quality journalism in comparison, and even ABC doesn't look that bad next to Andover.
These things are easy to solve for most of us, but I think it's worthwhile for KDE to offer
an easier way to upgrade.
But I doubt that the installer is it. You'll have one easy way to do it with Redhat, another for SuSE, another for Slackware, another for Debian, another for FreeBSD, another for OpenBSD, another for Solaris, another for AIX, another for IRIX...
Maybe if the Linux crowd got involved in the openports project...
Well, the RIAA did it again. They flew their goons over to Belgium and arrested these users, all without triggering off an international incident. What? It wasn't a group of RIAA security guards? It was the Belgium police instead? Damn, I was getting all worked up to yell at a private corporation and now you tell me it was the government yet again. And here I thought only private corporations had that kind of power...
The answer to your problems is simple. Compile from source. The makers of rpm packages are amongst the most anally retentive people on earth. KDE doesn't give a rat's ass what build number your libpng is, but the typical rpm will. If you use an rpm based distro long enough without reinstalling from scratch, you will eventually end up with a dozen libpngs that you can't get rid of because some program long since upgraded once needed it. cf the story on glibc hell.
Sure it takes longer to build a program than it does to install it. But it ain't much harder (./configure; make; make install). And you get to be 100% in control. Your computer is yours. Freenix isn't Windows. Don't let the distros tell you what to do.
Checking for dependencies is a Good Thing(tm). Using it to install generic one-size-fits-all binaries optimized for the lowest common denominator is a Bad Thing(tm).
Or get FreeBSD and simply install KDE by typing "cd/usr/ports/X11/kde-2.0.1; make install"... any dependency required will be downloaded and installed without any tedious "rpm --***" crap.
But by releasing it under a license that, while free, does not require it stay free, you are needlessly creating an opportunity for your work to be used to make people less, not more free.
That is metaphysically impossible. No one can be made less free by my software. It cannot happen. A proprietary fork of my software is still a fork. My own original code is still there and still available. No opportunities or options have been lost, and thus no freedom lost. You can never lose freedom when the only change is an additional choice. Is the user able to modify and redistribute the proprietary fork? Who cares! They can still modify and redistribute MY CODE.
The only possible drawbacks are to myself. But I still lose nothing in the way of freedom, only a possible disruption of my sensibilities. I may be offended by a Microsoft derivation of my own work, but I am still as free as ever, and so are my users.
Free Software is not Free Speech. RMS and the FSF have confused freedom with political correctness. P.C. is about eliminating offensive and boorish behavior, and attempts to use restrictions on freedom to accomplish it. Copyleft is is the same way. It is about eliminating boorish corporate behavior they its authors find personally offensive, and it accomplishes this by restricting my freedom in how I may derive from their code.
On the other hand, if I desire to financially profit off of my software, I would consider putting it under the GPL, as such a move would constrain my competitors. But since my software is not commercial I don't, since no competition can reduce my financial profit.
You poor guy! Don't you know that there's a whole shitload of stuff in Slackware that are not released under the GPL? Even discounting stuff like XFree86, there's stuff normally from GNU in other distros that licensed differently under Slackware. Take a look at your default install shell, or the default vi editor, and some other stuff.
People who use the BSD license are not naive. I am one of them and I take great exception to your comment. I am fully aware of the ramifications of my actions. I am in no way naive. I use the BSD license because I want my software to be free. Really free. Not fake free. Not free with a shitload of distribution restrictions. But so damn free it might as well be public domain except for the warranty disclaimer. Take it and do what ever you want with it.
I'm not doing this to make money. I'm not doing this to change the world. I'm not doing this to make myself feel warm and fuzzy. I'm simply sharing what I wrote with everyone, no strings attached.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no Microsoft tax. That term was orginally used in a very bad analogy.
A tax is an involuntary monetary obligation to a ruler. Microsoft is not a ruler. You are not obligated to buy any of their products. Whether or not Microsoft gets one penny of yours is entirely your decision. They haven't received a penny from me since DOS 3.3.
All users of BSDL licensed code, and any derivatives, DO have the right to redistribution! The BSDL does not allow anyone to change the license. You can wrap it in the GPL or a proprietary license, but underneath it is still licensed under the BSDL.
If you can manage to extract the TCP/IP stack out of Windows, you have the legal right to redistribute it.
The difference between the GPL and BSDL is that the former is based on spite and the latter on sharing.
You cannot steal what is free.
Because we won't give up our cause of making sure people always have the right to source and distribution.
What right is that? Where other than the lips of Richard Stallman do find it? You have the right to distribute your own original software any way you please, but you have absolutely no right to tell anyone else how they can distribute theirs.
If software can be morally owned (and most people think it can be), then you have no rights to compell the author to license it the way you want. It all boils down to freedom of the press. Microsoft has as much right to release a closed source application as your hometown newspaper does copyrighting their news. Before you can outlaw closed source you're going to have to eliminate free speech and free press, and get rid of the entirety of the First Amendment to the US Constitution.
On the other hand, if software cannot be morally owned (and a few diehards think it must not be), then the only moral recourse is to release your own software into the public domain. Using the GPL and saying "it's not copyrighted, it's copylefted" is disingenuous. GPL software is owned and copyrighted software. And according to my dictionary, that means it's proprietary.
I can't remember the name, but a block north of Shoreline on El Camino there is a good place that serves up Gyros
What a horrible teacher!
I used to write papers that disagreed with my teachers all the time. I presented papers on creationism to my biology teacher, papers on libertarian thought to my civics teacher, etc. Never once did I get marked off on it. I usually got marked UP for it, because it showed that at least I wasn't repeating the words of the encyclopedia or teacher.
When I got into University and learned that they expected me to blindly vomit out the ideologies of the professors, I was genuinely shocked!
But if you developed a C program and it only worked properly on a newer vesion of the OS, of any platform, and this was a very wide spread problem. Wouldn't you encorage your users to upgrade?
Telling a user that they are not worthy to use my software or view my website is something I will not do. If they meet the basic requirements for my software (X11R5+ and POSIX), and it still won't run, then I'll go in and fix it. I won't blame the user. If I am following the ISO and ANSI C standards, then your scenario won't work. Period. Only software that doesn't follow the standards (like using glibc and gcc extensions) will have your scenario's problems.
In the case of WASP, why should they even care if I put diesel in my gas-burning Ford, or try to view their pages with an HTML-3.2 browser? I'll tell you why. It's because they're arrogant buttinskis. Well, screw them! Maybe I'll start filtering out pages that have their little "test" in it. Now that's an idea!
Oh, I'm so glad you have an intelligent PHB! I've been to too many sites requiring me to use one specific browser or another just to buy their stupid product.
Funny thing is, when I use Konqueror to tell the site that it's really Netscape of IExplorer, there's never anything there that requires browser specificity...
If they're talking about not supporting Microsoft of Netscape extensions to HTML, I'm right behind them. But if they're talking about not supporting HTML-3.2, then screw them!
I like C++. It's great. But if I have a project that doesn't need objects or templates, then I'll use just plain vanilla C. Likewise, if I don't need any HTML-4.0 constructs, I won't use them, and resort to HTML-3.2 instead.
And I'm certainly not going to put in any ECMAScript telling the user that I disapprove of their personal choice of web browser!
Okay, okay. How about ten inches over the property line. There's got to some place between Bellevue and Issaquah where he gets a clear and uninterrupted view of my butt masquerading as a symbol of market choice.
5% of the vote would send a signal to the moral candidates that only 6% of the populace needs to be moral in order to win. As it now stands, the worthy candidates don't even bother to run because they can't compete against the misinformation machines of the incumbents. But when they see that no one's buying their crap any more, an impossibility comes within reach.
And speaking of mandates, both Gore and Bush had more people vote for them then Clinton did during either of his two "mandates". By a HUGE margin.
So does this mean I can ignore the GPL because Richard Stallman does not have any property in his own works?
Hee, hee. I didn't even read Slashdot last week :-)
I posted this because checking out the replies to their headlines, it seems as if there are an awful lot of people who never read the link, and see the headline as the gospel truth. It almost makes you wonder if they think the WWF is real.
A private security force is not an army. Please pull out your dictionary.
A security cop has no legal authority whatsoever off of their corporate property. If you are trespassing on Microsoft headquarters, they can do quite a bit, but they are utterly powerless at the McDonalds two blocks down the street.
In addition, armies implement the political policies of their governments. An MS security cop can only implement the law of the land, and that only in his limited jurisdiction of MS property. Even in the inner sanctum of Jim Allchin's office they can't arrest you for using Open Source, no matter how much he might want to. If you didn't trespass to get there, they most he could do would have his "army" escort you off the premises (just as I would do if you had the cojones to use Windows in my office).
If I go over to One Microsoft Way in Redmond, stand across the street and waggle my bare ass up at Bill's window way up high, he can't do jack shit about it, and neither can his rentacops. He would have to call the Redmond Police (also known as the government) to come cart me away.
Then don't vote for any candidate! If someone won an election with only 5% of the available vote, a very strong and clear message would be sent.
Actually, I think it would make a lot of sense to formally define stealing as 'taking something away from someone so they don't have it anymore'.
You are indeed correct. We need a better term. How about trespass? These individuals are trespassing upon the intellectual property of the artists and distributors.
I'm getting real tired of Slashdot's half assed excuse for journalism. I mean, how hard can it be to write a headline? They don't even have to write the damn article, just the headline and blurb, and they can't even do that right!
Here they say that Napster users are being arrested when they are not. Just earlier they said that Jim Allchin wanted to outlaw Open Source, when he clearly said no such thing. A quick search of previous article will reveal other such deliberate misinformations. And it can only be deliberate, since even a cursory reading of the linked articles reveals the truth.
Never believe anything you read on Slashdot. They make the Weekly World News look like quality journalism in comparison, and even ABC doesn't look that bad next to Andover.
The remaining crap is usually the result of braindead laws
And since only the government can pass laws, I guess teh ENTIRE blame rests on them.
These things are easy to solve for most of us, but I think it's worthwhile for KDE to offer
an easier way to upgrade.
But I doubt that the installer is it. You'll have one easy way to do it with Redhat, another for SuSE, another for Slackware, another for Debian, another for FreeBSD, another for OpenBSD, another for Solaris, another for AIX, another for IRIX...
Maybe if the Linux crowd got involved in the openports project...
Once again the Slashdot Misinformation Machine is hard at work keeping the Free Software Movement(tm) ignorant of reality.
I'm really surprised no one has mentioned this yet here, even after 800 posts. Oh well, here goes...
THAT'S NOT WHAT JIM ALLCHIN OR MICROSOFT SAID!!!
NOWHERE IN THE ARTICLE IS IT CLAIMED THAT MICROSOFT WANTS TO OUTLAW OPEN SOURCE!!!
Well, the RIAA did it again. They flew their goons over to Belgium and arrested these users, all without triggering off an international incident. What? It wasn't a group of RIAA security guards? It was the Belgium police instead? Damn, I was getting all worked up to yell at a private corporation and now you tell me it was the government yet again. And here I thought only private corporations had that kind of power...
The answer to your problems is simple. Compile from source. The makers of rpm packages are amongst the most anally retentive people on earth. KDE doesn't give a rat's ass what build number your libpng is, but the typical rpm will. If you use an rpm based distro long enough without reinstalling from scratch, you will eventually end up with a dozen libpngs that you can't get rid of because some program long since upgraded once needed it. cf the story on glibc hell.
Sure it takes longer to build a program than it does to install it. But it ain't much harder (./configure; make; make install). And you get to be 100% in control. Your computer is yours. Freenix isn't Windows. Don't let the distros tell you what to do.
Checking for dependencies is a Good Thing(tm). Using it to install generic one-size-fits-all binaries optimized for the lowest common denominator is a Bad Thing(tm).
Or get FreeBSD and simply install KDE by typing "cd /usr/ports/X11/kde-2.0.1; make install" ... any dependency required will be downloaded and installed without any tedious "rpm --***" crap.
Cheers!
But by releasing it under a license that, while free, does not require it stay free, you are needlessly creating an opportunity for your work to be used to make people less, not more free.
That is metaphysically impossible. No one can be made less free by my software. It cannot happen. A proprietary fork of my software is still a fork. My own original code is still there and still available. No opportunities or options have been lost, and thus no freedom lost. You can never lose freedom when the only change is an additional choice. Is the user able to modify and redistribute the proprietary fork? Who cares! They can still modify and redistribute MY CODE.
The only possible drawbacks are to myself. But I still lose nothing in the way of freedom, only a possible disruption of my sensibilities. I may be offended by a Microsoft derivation of my own work, but I am still as free as ever, and so are my users.
Free Software is not Free Speech. RMS and the FSF have confused freedom with political correctness. P.C. is about eliminating offensive and boorish behavior, and attempts to use restrictions on freedom to accomplish it. Copyleft is is the same way. It is about eliminating boorish corporate behavior they its authors find personally offensive, and it accomplishes this by restricting my freedom in how I may derive from their code.
On the other hand, if I desire to financially profit off of my software, I would consider putting it under the GPL, as such a move would constrain my competitors. But since my software is not commercial I don't, since no competition can reduce my financial profit.
Slackware ships with a stock Linus kernel... It's one reason a switch from **cough**, because I never knew what I was getting.
You poor guy! Don't you know that there's a whole shitload of stuff in Slackware that are not released under the GPL? Even discounting stuff like XFree86, there's stuff normally from GNU in other distros that licensed differently under Slackware. Take a look at your default install shell, or the default vi editor, and some other stuff.
People who use the BSD license are not naive. I am one of them and I take great exception to your comment. I am fully aware of the ramifications of my actions. I am in no way naive. I use the BSD license because I want my software to be free. Really free. Not fake free. Not free with a shitload of distribution restrictions. But so damn free it might as well be public domain except for the warranty disclaimer. Take it and do what ever you want with it.
I'm not doing this to make money. I'm not doing this to change the world. I'm not doing this to make myself feel warm and fuzzy. I'm simply sharing what I wrote with everyone, no strings attached.