Did you read that article, or did you just blindly post the link? It was school officials, not Coca Cola, that suspended that student. If it were me, I would have sued the school board up the wazoo, and had half the town rooting for me.
If harddrive copy-protection goes the same way as DVD, it may very well become illegal for you to use "alternative" operating systems on the latest harddrives.
I'll believe that when I see it. I think you have it all backwards. Software may be "licensed" for a particular harddrive, but no harddrive is going to be licensed for a particular piece of software.
Speaking of DVD, it doesn't really look like that you can legally watch a DVD under Linux, even if you legally own that DVD.
No, if you own a DVD you may watch it under Linux. No problem whatsoever. Trouble is, you don't own your DVD's. This is primarily the fault of the DMCA. And as I recall, it was the US Congress that passed this law, and not the corporations. In fact, as I recall, no corporation has ever passed a law. It's time to go after the mafia instead of those paying the protection money.
These large mega-corporations seem more than happy to take away people's rights as long as it benefits their bottom line.
Only if the government lets them. And so would most of the Slashdot readership. The problem isn't the corporations, it's the government giving them special priviledges. If the government told you that you didn't have to pay taxes this year, would you anyway?
There's really only one priviledge that corporations have that no one else does. Just one. They are allowed to shield their owners (stockholders like your grandma) from personal liability. Take that away from them and they are no different from any privately held business. Can you really blame the stockholders? After all, there's the government holding out a big carrot saying "legal immunity". All it takes is fifty bucks in Delaware and you're your own corporation.
Oh, wait! What's that you're saying? The corporations have more money that you? Perhaps if the government wasn't up for sale to the highest bidder it wouldn't be a problem.
Maybe in 100 years, the behavior of Microsoft and Pepsi will be viewed as politically oppressive, and people will wonder with amazement as to why the people of 2001 just stood there and took it.
That's just great. You can't come up with any specific actions of Microsoft's or Pepsi's to classify as a crime, so you leave it up to future philosophers to justify your hatred of them. What a cop out. Please state specific actions of these companies that constitute oppression.
I'm currently drinking Coca Cola out of a 20oz bottle. I have absolutely zero fear anxiety that Pepsi will do anything about it. None in the world. I am so completely unoppressed by Pepsi that I openly flaunt them by drinking Coke, content in the knowledge that they don't even care. Likewise I openly and without shame use Linux, BSD, X, gcc, KDE, KOffice and a multitude of other Open Source products that *directly* compete with Microsoft, with not a care in the world that Bill Gates can do anything to stop me.
Gas/Music/Movies (8.50$??? nooooo way). Give me a BREAK. its like anal rape, except we dont have a choice.
Get a friggin clue! Of course you have a choice. Duh! No one is forcing you to pay for a movie or buy a CD. If you think 8.50$ is too much to watch Unbreakable, DON'T WATCH IT! If you think the price of gas is unreasonable then carpool, bicycle or just bloody walk! Next thing we know you'll be bitching that you're oppressed since no one holds it for you while you pee.
A corporation is legally considered the same as an individual.
And guess why? Because the government says they are! It still comes down to government power. Individuals should be liable for their actions and their property, and that includes stockholders, who actually own the corporations.
Yeah, I know what you mean. They more money they pump into public education the worse our literacy rate gets. So why not do the same for health care:-)
It seems like corporations have no desire other than to strip us of what few remaining freedoms we have...
Take off those reality distorting glasses and see the world as it really is. The only desire corporations have is to turn a profit. And the only way they can turn a profit is to offer products or services that people voluntarily pay for. Side note: Government owned or created monopolies are another beastie entirely.
Let me turn the question around and ask you. What previously possessed freedom of yours has any corporation taken away? Other than patents, which is solely the government's mess, you have the complete and unchallenged freedom to write your own original software. No corporation can tell you what software you cannot originate. Other than government taxation and law, you have the full and unchallenged freedom to spend you money any way you wish. No corporation can force you to buy or not buy any product. On serious reflection, I am also aware of no corporation that can dictate who you may associate with, what religion you may espouse, who you may sleep with, who you must vote for, or even what ISP you must use. Everything a corporation does must either be 100% voluntary or at the behest of the government. If you have a problem with shrinking freedoms, blame the government.
So what has the government done to curtail your freedom? They have restricted your freedom to write original software through patent laws. They have restricted your freedom to spend your money on certain products or give it to certain producers, in addition to dictating how much of it you must first give to them.
Is the United States still the best choice of a place to live for safety, freedom, and quality of life?
You must really be living in fantasy land! Every nation, and I mean every one of them, has corporations. Some nations' governments may be freer than others, but their corporations are all the same.
Some nations will be better than others in certain areas, and worse in others. No nation is going to be better in all areas than all the other nations. And certainly there are no perfect nations. Just put that notion out of your head.
I'm personally getting tired of living in a nation where apparently no one in the capital city has read its constitution, or gives a damn.
Yes, this is a real problem. Funny that you brought up corporations earlier though, when it's the government that's the problem. The good news is that there are some people in DC who have read the constitution and give a big damn about it. Unfortunately those people, from either the left, right, top or bottom, are always classified as extremist kooks. But they are there.
They choice you have is to either help get more of those people in office or run away to another country. Since I don't think this nation has become wholly corrupt (yet) I'll stick around a while longer.
"Once upon a time, Linus took GNU system, wrote a brand new kernel for it, and it was Linux."
BZZRRT! I'm sorry, that is not the answer. Good try, but the million dollars, the new car, and the vacation for two in lovely Helskinki will have to go to another contestant...
Linus did not take the GNU system and write a new kernel for it. I don't know who your history teachers are, but their credentials need to be examined.
Once upon a time, Linus wanted a free Unix or Unix-like operating system for his new i386 computer. Minix sucked. 386BSD was in the middle of a lawsuit. GNU was incomplete. So he decided to write his own. Like GNU, he never finished it. That's because he didn't need to. The Linux distributions took the Linux engine, the GNU chassis and drive train, the BSD electrical system, and added their own body, to create what we call the Linux Operating System. Certainly GNU deserves a hell of a lot of credit, but calling it their operating system is like Abit claiming they built my computer.
Admittedly, TE is a gang of thug^H^H^H^Hlawyers, but the principle cause for ICE's demise was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The game market shifted, causing ICE to file BK, just as TE realized that LoTR:TM would be a huge moneymaker. If ICE had been profitable those couple of years, they would still have the LoTR gaming rights.
But overall this may be a Good Thing(tm). MERP != LoTR. It's not even close. The way it was going, MERP was tarnishing the image of LoTR...
1) Much of MERP is at complete odds with LoTR. For example, Tolkien magic is very rare and performed only by immortals. But MERP magic is quite common, and more than one module has had magic using hobbits.
2) The ICE vision of Middle Earth was becoming too detailed. Where Tolkien painted with a broad brush, ICE ironed out every detail right down to what color socks the Dunlending wore. Normally this wouldn't have been a problem, but all too many people were starting to view ICE's particular version of Middle Earth as the only correct one.
Yet you can't deny that it also brought several innovations that were incorporated later in KDE (embedded panel applets, for example, and an independent component system, which KPart was not).
Embedded panels were around long before GNOME. It's essentially what dockapps are. And the independent component system? What are you talking about? It can't be bonobo, 'cuz it ain't independent.
Yet there were REALLY USEFUL AND INNOVATIVE Gtk apps years before useful KDE apps.
What possible relevance does this have? There were millions of Motif apps before GNOME, but I don't see you crowing about Motif.
I don't care what GNU says, GTK!=GNOME. GTK was around long before GNOME. That an application is built with GTK has absolutely no bearing on whether it is a GNOME app. Let me repeat, GTK!=GNOME. It is utterly disingenuous to retroactively declare GTK to be GNOME, then telling all the GTK developers out there that they're really GNOMies but just didn't know it.
Abiword
Not a GNOME application, since it can run without having any GNOME libraries installed. Besides which, I thought you guys dumped Abiword in favor of StarOffice?
with excellent ideas that give birth to Dia
How the heck can GNOME give birth to Dia, when Dia was around long before GNOME? Next thing I'll know, you'll be claiming that GNOME sparked the creation of GIMP.
I agree. I had a friend who wanted to try Linux. He couldn't decide between SuSE and Corel, so he closed his eyes and picked SuSE.
His complaints with Linux (based solely on SuSE) consisted of:
a) "Which one of these ten text editors do I install?" Ditto for every other category. The enormous selection of packages is a Good Thing(tm). Having to choose amongst them at install time is a Bad Thing(tm).
b) "What do you mean you don't know anything about Yast! I thought you knew Linux!" Okay, the LSB should solve a bit of this, but until then...
It's also a proof that you got the thing to compile so it's at least releasable as alpha code.
How bizarre! Are there really developers who view a successful compile as a milestone of somekind? In my mind, the software should have been compiling ages before it ever got the "alpha" label. Alpha software should be fully functional, just buggy. Beta software should be without any known (to the developer) bugs.
Developers aren't the only needed participants in Open Source development. Taking the attitude that only developers can contribute is very bad. The guy that certainly is not a engineer, but a mere coder (can hammer and saw but cannot build a house).
A non-developer that has access to a binary can:
a) Write documentation, tutorials, etc.
b) Excercise the application in ways that a user would, thus finding bugs that a developer would not.
c) Ensure that the program does what it is supposed to. If there are reqs or specs, then they can be tested. If not at least it can be tested against the "web page".
d) Get excited about the project and tell all of his developer friends.
So what's the alternative? Surely not Debian, Redhat or SuSE. Using common defaults works well for the user who fits those defaults, but screws up everyone else. And throwing a flashy GUI over the adminstration doesn't make it any easier.
I have found, like the other poster, that Slackware is TRULY easier than the other distributions I have tried. The installation is a snap. Administration is easy. That's because Slackware is laid out sensibly. It does require that you be willing to learn, however.
Taking the car analogy, everyone who can drive a stick can drive an auto, but the reverse is not true. Once you know Slackware you know Linux, but once you know Redhat all you know is Redhat.
Because it sames you time? I don't know about you, but my time IS worth money. I installed the XFree-4.0.1 package on Slackware in approx three minutes. Top that using gcc...
Of course, some things I do compile. I rebuilt Qt and KDE for K6 optimization and sped up performance on my destkop about 150%.
Okay, let's say I have an apple orchard and I want my apples to be free. Bad analogy, I know, but bear with me...
One way to make them free is to post I sign telling the whole world, or just the passerbys, that the apples are free and to take as much as they want.
Another way is to add a license to that sign telling everyone that anything they make with the apples must also be free. Then I would go out and sue everyone who sold apple pies made with my apples. How dare they!
As bad as that analogy is, the point is that attaching strings to your code does not make it any more free than without them.
I'm not ragging on the GPL. I've seen enough bad licenses to know that it is a very good license. But what ticks me off are folks that think anything else is just for "dupes". I know scores of folks who use BSD or MIT like licenses. Jordan Hubbard, Theo De Raadt, Brian Behlendorf, David Dawes, et al. They certainly are not dupes.
Would Apache and Xfree86 have done any better if they were under the GPL? I don't think so.
Now I need to add file upload capability; there is a file upload component out there, but the license is weird and definitely not compatible with what I'm doing. So I'm going to have to reinvent that wheel, and I'm going to have to do it 'clean room' even though I know that there are a lot of tricky little tweaks which someone else has already sorted out...
And what a strange license that one is! Certainly you should not use it. Don't even contemplate it.
As for the 'clean room', I don't think that is necessary. You cannot copyright an algorithm. If you peer at their source code to see how they did something, it's legally okay (I am not a lawyer!). Just make doubly sure you don't implement it in the same way.
I'm increasingly of the opinion that life would be a lot simpler, and we would get a lot more innovation done, if the Intellectual Property laws (including copyright) were just scrapped.
It wouldn't make much of a difference. Most proprietary licenses, including the MSEULA, are not based on copyright or any other intellectual property. They are based on contract law instead. That's why they're called "agreements".
Go look at the freshmeat submissions on any day, and you'll realize where developer sentiment lies.
There would be no way to find out, but it would be interesting to know how many developers chose the GPL because a) they had to in order to use some other code, or b) because they thought they had to. In the case of the latter, I've seen enough posters here on Slashdot who think the GPL is the only approved Free Software license. And I have even received an email from someone asking me to GPL my otherwise BSD licensed code because "I will only use Free Software."
Otherwise, they'd be dupes, unpaid employees working for someone else
Oooh! A direct insult:-) Am I being exploited? No! I have made a conscious decision to share my code with zero strings attached. If someone else can make money off of my code, my hat goes off to them, because I sure can't. There is no way in the world they can lock up my code. It's physically impossible. It's on my harddrive, on my website, and on a few others as well. No matter what they do with their copy of the code, my copy is still here untouched. You can't steal what is free.
BTW I will join the liberterian party if and only if the CEO of firestone (or any other person in that corporation) gets the electric chair for murdering hundreds of people.
There hasn't been a trial yet, and I have not seen even a fraction of the evidence. But if hundreds (where did you get that figure?) of people died as the result of an action by the CEO, then the full weight of the law needs to descend upon him. If this action where deliberate, then the death penalty might be warranted. A negligent action should mean alengthy jail term.
But what does this have to do with your joining the libertarian party? Since when has that party stopped demanding people be held accountable for their actions?
to obtain and maintain freedom, be it in software, in the personal domain, or whatever, one must be prepared to use force.
You might need to use force to defend your freedom, as a counter to someone else's force, but as soon as you initiate the force you are removing someone's freedom.
Contrary to your braindead civic's teacher, freedom does not mean the ability to do anything and everything you want, thus necessitating its limit. Rather, freedom is the ability to do anything and everything you want so long as it does not restrict anyone else from doing the same. Big difference.
Slashdot Mirror
Did you read that article, or did you just blindly post the link? It was school officials, not Coca Cola, that suspended that student. If it were me, I would have sued the school board up the wazoo, and had half the town rooting for me.
If harddrive copy-protection goes the same way as DVD, it may very well become illegal for you to use "alternative" operating systems on the latest harddrives.
I'll believe that when I see it. I think you have it all backwards. Software may be "licensed" for a particular harddrive, but no harddrive is going to be licensed for a particular piece of software.
Speaking of DVD, it doesn't really look like that you can legally watch a DVD under Linux, even if you legally own that DVD.
No, if you own a DVD you may watch it under Linux. No problem whatsoever. Trouble is, you don't own your DVD's. This is primarily the fault of the DMCA. And as I recall, it was the US Congress that passed this law, and not the corporations. In fact, as I recall, no corporation has ever passed a law. It's time to go after the mafia instead of those paying the protection money.
These large mega-corporations seem more than happy to take away people's rights as long as it benefits their bottom line.
Only if the government lets them. And so would most of the Slashdot readership. The problem isn't the corporations, it's the government giving them special priviledges. If the government told you that you didn't have to pay taxes this year, would you anyway?
There's really only one priviledge that corporations have that no one else does. Just one. They are allowed to shield their owners (stockholders like your grandma) from personal liability. Take that away from them and they are no different from any privately held business. Can you really blame the stockholders? After all, there's the government holding out a big carrot saying "legal immunity". All it takes is fifty bucks in Delaware and you're your own corporation.
Oh, wait! What's that you're saying? The corporations have more money that you? Perhaps if the government wasn't up for sale to the highest bidder it wouldn't be a problem.
Maybe in 100 years, the behavior of Microsoft and Pepsi will be viewed as politically oppressive, and people will wonder with amazement as to why the people of 2001 just stood there and took it.
That's just great. You can't come up with any specific actions of Microsoft's or Pepsi's to classify as a crime, so you leave it up to future philosophers to justify your hatred of them. What a cop out. Please state specific actions of these companies that constitute oppression.
I'm currently drinking Coca Cola out of a 20oz bottle. I have absolutely zero fear anxiety that Pepsi will do anything about it. None in the world. I am so completely unoppressed by Pepsi that I openly flaunt them by drinking Coke, content in the knowledge that they don't even care. Likewise I openly and without shame use Linux, BSD, X, gcc, KDE, KOffice and a multitude of other Open Source products that *directly* compete with Microsoft, with not a care in the world that Bill Gates can do anything to stop me.
Gas/Music/Movies (8.50$??? nooooo way). Give me a BREAK. its like anal rape, except we dont have a choice.
Get a friggin clue! Of course you have a choice. Duh! No one is forcing you to pay for a movie or buy a CD. If you think 8.50$ is too much to watch Unbreakable, DON'T WATCH IT! If you think the price of gas is unreasonable then carpool, bicycle or just bloody walk! Next thing we know you'll be bitching that you're oppressed since no one holds it for you while you pee.
A corporation is legally considered the same as an individual.
And guess why? Because the government says they are! It still comes down to government power. Individuals should be liable for their actions and their property, and that includes stockholders, who actually own the corporations.
So? Whose perfect? Did you know that there were serfs in Europe right up to 20th century? At least we fixed that problem rather quickly.
Yeah, I know what you mean. They more money they pump into public education the worse our literacy rate gets. So why not do the same for health care :-)
It seems like corporations have no desire other than to strip us of what few remaining freedoms we have...
Take off those reality distorting glasses and see the world as it really is. The only desire corporations have is to turn a profit. And the only way they can turn a profit is to offer products or services that people voluntarily pay for. Side note: Government owned or created monopolies are another beastie entirely.
Let me turn the question around and ask you. What previously possessed freedom of yours has any corporation taken away? Other than patents, which is solely the government's mess, you have the complete and unchallenged freedom to write your own original software. No corporation can tell you what software you cannot originate. Other than government taxation and law, you have the full and unchallenged freedom to spend you money any way you wish. No corporation can force you to buy or not buy any product. On serious reflection, I am also aware of no corporation that can dictate who you may associate with, what religion you may espouse, who you may sleep with, who you must vote for, or even what ISP you must use. Everything a corporation does must either be 100% voluntary or at the behest of the government. If you have a problem with shrinking freedoms, blame the government.
So what has the government done to curtail your freedom? They have restricted your freedom to write original software through patent laws. They have restricted your freedom to spend your money on certain products or give it to certain producers, in addition to dictating how much of it you must first give to them.
Is the United States still the best choice of a place to live for safety, freedom, and quality of life?
You must really be living in fantasy land! Every nation, and I mean every one of them, has corporations. Some nations' governments may be freer than others, but their corporations are all the same.
Some nations will be better than others in certain areas, and worse in others. No nation is going to be better in all areas than all the other nations. And certainly there are no perfect nations. Just put that notion out of your head.
I'm personally getting tired of living in a nation where apparently no one in the capital city has read its constitution, or gives a damn.
Yes, this is a real problem. Funny that you brought up corporations earlier though, when it's the government that's the problem. The good news is that there are some people in DC who have read the constitution and give a big damn about it. Unfortunately those people, from either the left, right, top or bottom, are always classified as extremist kooks. But they are there.
They choice you have is to either help get more of those people in office or run away to another country. Since I don't think this nation has become wholly corrupt (yet) I'll stick around a while longer.
"Once upon a time, Linus took GNU system, wrote a brand new kernel for it, and it was Linux."
BZZRRT! I'm sorry, that is not the answer. Good try, but the million dollars, the new car, and the vacation for two in lovely Helskinki will have to go to another contestant...
Linus did not take the GNU system and write a new kernel for it. I don't know who your history teachers are, but their credentials need to be examined.
Once upon a time, Linus wanted a free Unix or Unix-like operating system for his new i386 computer. Minix sucked. 386BSD was in the middle of a lawsuit. GNU was incomplete. So he decided to write his own. Like GNU, he never finished it. That's because he didn't need to. The Linux distributions took the Linux engine, the GNU chassis and drive train, the BSD electrical system, and added their own body, to create what we call the Linux Operating System. Certainly GNU deserves a hell of a lot of credit, but calling it their operating system is like Abit claiming they built my computer.
Admittedly, TE is a gang of thug^H^H^H^Hlawyers, but the principle cause for ICE's demise was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The game market shifted, causing ICE to file BK, just as TE realized that LoTR:TM would be a huge moneymaker. If ICE had been profitable those couple of years, they would still have the LoTR gaming rights.
But overall this may be a Good Thing(tm). MERP != LoTR. It's not even close. The way it was going, MERP was tarnishing the image of LoTR...
1) Much of MERP is at complete odds with LoTR. For example, Tolkien magic is very rare and performed only by immortals. But MERP magic is quite common, and more than one module has had magic using hobbits.
2) The ICE vision of Middle Earth was becoming too detailed. Where Tolkien painted with a broad brush, ICE ironed out every detail right down to what color socks the Dunlending wore. Normally this wouldn't have been a problem, but all too many people were starting to view ICE's particular version of Middle Earth as the only correct one.
linux outscales solaris in SMP and Enterprise server configurations, it's more stable and more secure out of the box
You've been smoking your old CDs again, haven't you?
Yet you can't deny that it also brought several innovations that were incorporated later in KDE (embedded panel applets, for example, and an independent component system, which KPart was not).
Embedded panels were around long before GNOME. It's essentially what dockapps are. And the independent component system? What are you talking about? It can't be bonobo, 'cuz it ain't independent.
Yet there were REALLY USEFUL AND INNOVATIVE Gtk apps years before useful KDE apps.
What possible relevance does this have? There were millions of Motif apps before GNOME, but I don't see you crowing about Motif.
I don't care what GNU says, GTK!=GNOME. GTK was around long before GNOME. That an application is built with GTK has absolutely no bearing on whether it is a GNOME app. Let me repeat, GTK!=GNOME. It is utterly disingenuous to retroactively declare GTK to be GNOME, then telling all the GTK developers out there that they're really GNOMies but just didn't know it.
Abiword
Not a GNOME application, since it can run without having any GNOME libraries installed. Besides which, I thought you guys dumped Abiword in favor of StarOffice?
with excellent ideas that give birth to Dia
How the heck can GNOME give birth to Dia, when Dia was around long before GNOME? Next thing I'll know, you'll be claiming that GNOME sparked the creation of GIMP.
Go read the article again. This is not about embedding a Mozilla component into a KDE app. It is about embedding any X11 component into KDE.
I agree. I had a friend who wanted to try Linux. He couldn't decide between SuSE and Corel, so he closed his eyes and picked SuSE.
His complaints with Linux (based solely on SuSE) consisted of:
a) "Which one of these ten text editors do I install?" Ditto for every other category. The enormous selection of packages is a Good Thing(tm). Having to choose amongst them at install time is a Bad Thing(tm).
b) "What do you mean you don't know anything about Yast! I thought you knew Linux!" Okay, the LSB should solve a bit of this, but until then...
remember the response when Netscape released their PR1 version of their browser?
PR1 was advertised as "beta" software. Their mistake was calling alpha software as beta.
It's also a proof that you got the thing to compile so it's at least releasable as alpha code.
How bizarre! Are there really developers who view a successful compile as a milestone of somekind? In my mind, the software should have been compiling ages before it ever got the "alpha" label. Alpha software should be fully functional, just buggy. Beta software should be without any known (to the developer) bugs.
Developers aren't the only needed participants in Open Source development. Taking the attitude that only developers can contribute is very bad. The guy that certainly is not a engineer, but a mere coder (can hammer and saw but cannot build a house).
A non-developer that has access to a binary can:
a) Write documentation, tutorials, etc.
b) Excercise the application in ways that a user would, thus finding bugs that a developer would not.
c) Ensure that the program does what it is supposed to. If there are reqs or specs, then they can be tested. If not at least it can be tested against the "web page".
d) Get excited about the project and tell all of his developer friends.
So what's the alternative? Surely not Debian, Redhat or SuSE. Using common defaults works well for the user who fits those defaults, but screws up everyone else. And throwing a flashy GUI over the adminstration doesn't make it any easier.
I have found, like the other poster, that Slackware is TRULY easier than the other distributions I have tried. The installation is a snap. Administration is easy. That's because Slackware is laid out sensibly. It does require that you be willing to learn, however.
Taking the car analogy, everyone who can drive a stick can drive an auto, but the reverse is not true. Once you know Slackware you know Linux, but once you know Redhat all you know is Redhat.
Because it sames you time? I don't know about you, but my time IS worth money. I installed the XFree-4.0.1 package on Slackware in approx three minutes. Top that using gcc...
Of course, some things I do compile. I rebuilt Qt and KDE for K6 optimization and sped up performance on my destkop about 150%.
Okay, let's say I have an apple orchard and I want my apples to be free. Bad analogy, I know, but bear with me...
One way to make them free is to post I sign telling the whole world, or just the passerbys, that the apples are free and to take as much as they want.
Another way is to add a license to that sign telling everyone that anything they make with the apples must also be free. Then I would go out and sue everyone who sold apple pies made with my apples. How dare they!
As bad as that analogy is, the point is that attaching strings to your code does not make it any more free than without them.
I'm not ragging on the GPL. I've seen enough bad licenses to know that it is a very good license. But what ticks me off are folks that think anything else is just for "dupes". I know scores of folks who use BSD or MIT like licenses. Jordan Hubbard, Theo De Raadt, Brian Behlendorf, David Dawes, et al. They certainly are not dupes.
Would Apache and Xfree86 have done any better if they were under the GPL? I don't think so.
Now I need to add file upload capability; there is a file upload component out there, but the license is weird and definitely not compatible with what I'm doing. So I'm going to have to reinvent that wheel, and I'm going to have to do it 'clean room' even though I know that there are a lot of tricky little tweaks which someone else has already sorted out...
And what a strange license that one is! Certainly you should not use it. Don't even contemplate it.
As for the 'clean room', I don't think that is necessary. You cannot copyright an algorithm. If you peer at their source code to see how they did something, it's legally okay (I am not a lawyer!). Just make doubly sure you don't implement it in the same way.
I'm increasingly of the opinion that life would be a lot simpler, and we would get a lot more innovation done, if the Intellectual Property laws (including copyright) were just scrapped.
It wouldn't make much of a difference. Most proprietary licenses, including the MSEULA, are not based on copyright or any other intellectual property. They are based on contract law instead. That's why they're called "agreements".
Go look at the freshmeat submissions on any day, and you'll realize where developer sentiment lies.
:-) Am I being exploited? No! I have made a conscious decision to share my code with zero strings attached. If someone else can make money off of my code, my hat goes off to them, because I sure can't. There is no way in the world they can lock up my code. It's physically impossible. It's on my harddrive, on my website, and on a few others as well. No matter what they do with their copy of the code, my copy is still here untouched. You can't steal what is free.
There would be no way to find out, but it would be interesting to know how many developers chose the GPL because a) they had to in order to use some other code, or b) because they thought they had to. In the case of the latter, I've seen enough posters here on Slashdot who think the GPL is the only approved Free Software license. And I have even received an email from someone asking me to GPL my otherwise BSD licensed code because "I will only use Free Software."
Otherwise, they'd be dupes, unpaid employees working for someone else
Oooh! A direct insult
BTW I will join the liberterian party if and only if the CEO of firestone (or any other person in that corporation) gets the electric chair for murdering hundreds of people.
There hasn't been a trial yet, and I have not seen even a fraction of the evidence. But if hundreds (where did you get that figure?) of people died as the result of an action by the CEO, then the full weight of the law needs to descend upon him. If this action where deliberate, then the death penalty might be warranted. A negligent action should mean alengthy jail term.
But what does this have to do with your joining the libertarian party? Since when has that party stopped demanding people be held accountable for their actions?
By ensuring that changes remain public.
That's not freedom, that's openness.
to obtain and maintain freedom, be it in software, in the personal domain, or whatever, one must be prepared to use force.
You might need to use force to defend your freedom, as a counter to someone else's force, but as soon as you initiate the force you are removing someone's freedom.
Contrary to your braindead civic's teacher, freedom does not mean the ability to do anything and everything you want, thus necessitating its limit. Rather, freedom is the ability to do anything and everything you want so long as it does not restrict anyone else from doing the same. Big difference.