Do you only need a few lines of GPL code? Then write it yourself, it shouldn't take long and you don't have to deal with the GPL at all.
And thus the stallmanistas fall into a trap of their own making... By that logic *all* software is free! Don't like the Window's EULA? No problem! Just rewrite the sucker! I have just as much *real* freedom to use or not to use Windows as I do to use or not to use Linux. The only difference is that one is "open".
No, it isn't called stealing. Go get a dictionary. It is impossible to steal what is free.
If you share something with someone but demand something back, that is NOT sharing, it is loaning. And with the GPLv3, the FSF is getting more usurious every day.
The rationale is that ASP's are public performance, and copyright law grants no rights to the user for public performance.
As it now stands, all free software licenses allow 100% public performance. The GPL currently grants this permission on the basis that it does not restrict *usage*. So the GPLv3 will indeed restrict usage (and the FSF will have to alter their free software definition).
Restricting public performance while still calling the software "free" is bizarre. The words on the FSF pages look less and less like English, and more and more like orwellian gnuspeak.
The only reason I can see for restricting a DTD or any other interface is pure spite. Using the bad but common analogy of free speech, why do you want to regulate the *manner* in which I speak? Public interfaces, especially those created in the Free Software Movement(tm) need to be completely unrestricted.
Are you willing to let other people do the same? What would you think if you came across a Java interface or XML DTD that was placed under a GPL-incompatible copyleft? But it doesn't really matter, because I'll just ignore your restrictions and have the full protection of the law to do so, since you cannot copyright an interface to begin with.
Hee hee! The Corporate lackies of OSDN Inc. post yet another less-than-trivial announcement for Debian LinuxOS. I think that they can't handle The One True OS(tm).
Hee hee. I have a friend working at Apple along a hall that Jobs always walks down. He always know when the boss is coming 'cause the the air always turns blue.
I actually remember a review of DOS95 way back when. It lost by a HUGE margin to PC-DOS and Novell DOS. It was portrayed as a castrated DOS. The recommendation was to keep your old DOS. Since then, nary a peep about DOS95 except in the Caldera trial.
Keeping DOS away from the typical user was probably Microsofts second biggest affront to its users.
It depends on what you want to do with your own code. If you want to give it away, then put it in the public domain, and if you want to loan it out, then put it under the GPL. But if what you want to do is to share your work with the world, then the BSD license is the way to go.
Stop depending on a license to make you free, because you already are!
On the flip side, George Bush is anti-abortion and I believe that women have a right to choose.
Women should have the right to choose what they do with their bodies, so long as it does not hurt another human being. So if they can manage to have an abortion without killing the human being inside of them then go for it.
Its just a matter of what kinds of freedom you want.
Real freedom. The elimination of restrictions imposed on me by force. Ignore what you've been taught by your Public Indoctrination Center's civics teacher, and look it up in the dictionary. Pull out the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers. Reread Thoreau, Nock, Locke and Mill.
Should I be free to kill people and walk around society like I have done nothing?
No, because that isn't freedom...
Should I be allowed to own, buy and sell slaves?
Of course not! Did you even bother to take your brain out of neutral before responding? Go ask the slave if he is free. I guarantee you that he is not!
Freedom is for everyone, rich or poor, black or white, right or wrong. It's not for just a select few. You cannot be free as long as someone in your community is enslaved. And equal freedom! Bill Gates and ROger Smith get every bit as much freedom as you do, or you're a hypocrite.
Browne wants economic freedom, and nothing more, any personal freedom (like drug use) that comes out of it, is simply by chance, a side effect of economic freedom (freedom to sell drugs).
Absolutely backwards! Browne only wants personal freedom, and the economic freedom is a side effect. If I am free to give you a joint, and you are free to give me a green piece of paper, then we are both free to make an economic transactions where you give me a dollar for my joint. How could you possibly restrict my economic activities without restricting my personal freedom at the same time? It's impossible.
If there is a Libertarian president in the near future, what happens exactly? Are publicly funded programs eliminated?
There are different "factions" within the libertarian movement. The anarcho-capitalists favor eliminating all publicly funded programs immediately. The gradualist faction argues that it took up a century to get us into our present straight, and that it will take a century to get us out, and favor a gradual "growing down" of the government.
Most libertarians are in the middle. They recognize that some functions of government are necessary. And those functions are already delineated in the consititution. We favor getting rid of all non-constitutional roles of the federal government as soon as possible.
I grew up in rural California, and it must be a whole different universe than urban Georgia. For one thing, every child went to school, and civics class was required. It din't matter how rich or poor you were, or what your skin color was. You took civics in both junior high and high school.
If you were born a citizen in California and went to school there, you KNOW you have the right to vote. If you are a naturalized citizen, then you had to study for your citizenship test, and you KNOW you have the right to vote. It's time Georgia gets its act together.
As for my $20 dollar net connection, this will be the first presidential election in which I am not classified under the poverty line. And I've voted in five previous presidential elections...
I really want to go with the Libertarians, but I'm sorry, the general population is just not smart enough to govern themselves.
Libertarianism is a political philosophy, not a personal way of life. There is much, much more to libertarians than the Randroid Objectivists (who are a minority in the movement). Don't mistake self interest for selfishness. But libertarianism is about neither self interest nor altruism. It is about initiating violence against others. Simple. Defense but no offense. Nothing more.
So, you think that people are not smart enough to govern themselves? Then who are Nader, Buchanan, Gore and Bush? People! If they can't govern themselves (and I know that Clinton is unable to), then what makes you think they would do any better governing you and I?
it gives corporations more freedom in things they can buy sell and own
Well, like, yeah! Of course. Real freedom is for everyone, not just the people you like. It is impossible for you to be free unless Bill Gates is free. This is what Nader doesn't understand, and why he offers a pseudo-freedom.
If you want freedom, vote Browne. If you want a free beer, vote Nader.
I think he (and a lot of people, both here and elsewhere) need to be educated and made to realize (or at least confront and argue against) the notion that a government mandated and enforced monopoly isn't necessary for IP creators to be fairly compensated and, furthermore, has a stifling impact on the field of endeavor so affected, not to mention the society, culture, and the economy as a whole.
Government mandated and enforced monopoly? Do you have any idea what libertarians even are? Take a look at all of the intellectual property articles at Free Nation, especially this one. You don't need an official government pronouncement to make something property. Do you think that if the trespass laws were repealed that fence builders would go out of business?
And this brings up "Motor Voter" and a lot of other silly election laws. Why should someone who can't even get up the initiative to go to their library or postoffice to register be allowed to vote? These are the last people I want voting! The franchise should only be given to those who actually want it.
Do the archetypical benefits of Free/Open Source fit medical software? When you look at the "big" projects in OSS, you see GIMP, Linux, Perl, Apache, etc. All fun and exciting projects to work on. And software that ordinary developers can use and tinker with.
I work for a company that produces medical software (for medical equipment). I keep asking myself who those "thousand eyes" inspecting the software for bugs will be. Strangely, the name "J. Random Hacker" does not come to mind. In fact, the only people I can think of that would be interested in this stuff are our competitors.
Other than medical administration software, and *boring* DICOM communication protocols, most medical software is written for very expensive equipment, or equipment that is very expensive to install (as in a chest cavity). I don't know any hackers that have a spare MRI in their basement, and the number of them that could even afford one is miniscule.
And who wants to mess around with pacemaker software? Show me a hobbyist that wants to tinker with that, and I'll show you someone lacking common sense.
There are many good reasons to Open Source medical software. But a "bazaar" development model, a thousand scrying eyes, and user-submitted bugfixes are not them.
If they didn't know what they were doing then they shouldn't have installed it.
If you ask that incompetant guy "why did you install Linux?", and he replies "But Bob two cubicles over has Linux", you're stuck.
Which brings us right back to the beginning... IT. Someone in the company needs to say, "these are the company computers and this is what you're allowed to do with them." And users installing their own software shouldn't be one of them. Then you can ask the much more appropriate question "Who authorized a installation?"
We have Free and Open Source Software. It works for the coding. But where is the FS/OSS analogue for project management and SQA? If FS/OSS is to truly leave the realm of hobbyist and academic software, then it needs to dump coders and get engineers.
You've made an excellent point. For a developer writing the software for himself, a spec isn't needed. But even though 99.99% of free software is not commercial, there is still a customer beyond the developer. If the developer is just scratching and itch, and the coding follows wherever the itch happens to lead him at the time, then the software will never be more than hobbyist software.
But without a spec, how can anyone log a bug? For example, version 0.2 of a program cannot use the config files for version 0.1. Is this a bug or is this deliberate? I have no clue, and there is no documentation to say otherwise, beyond a cryptic entry in the ChangeLog (ept: 102300 -.foorc).
I haven't written any specs for my own software. I have no problem with this, and I proudly call it "hobbyist" software. But I've gotten to the point that a couple of developers are thinking of joining the projects. If I want them to be more than bugfixers, then I had better get busy writing some sort of specs/reqs.
The BSD kernel and Linux have different licenses, true. But the Perl on BSD and the Perl on Linux are the same. Ditto for Xfree86, gcc, less, OpenSSH, TCP/IP, lpr, emacs, ad infinitum.
For someone not working on the kernel or OS environment, the licensing is identical. From a user's perspective, one is 100% free and the other is 100% free.
The BSD license leaves version contrrol with UC-Berkley. Period.
Wrong. Go read the license. Go fork the project and create a new CVS tree on your own server if you wish. No one will sue. Version control remains with the FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD core teams for exactly the same reason that version control for Linux remains with Linus: it makes sense to have one official source.
Secondly, BSD is a more mature project than Linux, and that drives people apart. In the earlier days of Linux, and to a certain point even now, you can end up with copyright on a small chunk of the Linux kernel.
Yep. But its more than getting your name in the list of contributors. A new OS has opportunity for everyone to contribute. But with an old OS the opportunity is harder. You either need some grand vision of a radical change, or be content with the unglamorous tuning and tweaking.
But BSD is more than the kernel. There is also the userland OS environment. There's a lot of current work going on there, so you have the opportunity to get involved.
The guy who's just "trying" out Linux is not the type of guy to come in his office and throw it on a machine where he has to get work done.
I've seen two (real not analogies) cases at my work were Linux caused network problems when run by people who didn't know what they were doing. The last case caused a subnet to be down for a day.
The problem isn't Linux. The problem is that these schmucks have root priviledge allowed them to barf all over the network at will.
If someone really wanted to hack the damn network they would of found a way LONG before installing linux.
In that case, since anyone who really wanted to break into your home could do so, why bother with a door lock?
NOTHING happens to the network if a user installs Linux on their machine.
What! There's more than one Linux distribution that comes with default settings that do nasty things to networks. The danger doesn't come from the Linux-guru, but the guy who's just trying it out and doesn't know what they're doing.
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Do you only need a few lines of GPL code? Then write it yourself, it shouldn't take long and you don't have to deal with the GPL at all.
And thus the stallmanistas fall into a trap of their own making... By that logic *all* software is free! Don't like the Window's EULA? No problem! Just rewrite the sucker! I have just as much *real* freedom to use or not to use Windows as I do to use or not to use Linux. The only difference is that one is "open".
No, it isn't called stealing. Go get a dictionary. It is impossible to steal what is free.
If you share something with someone but demand something back, that is NOT sharing, it is loaning. And with the GPLv3, the FSF is getting more usurious every day.
The rationale is that ASP's are public performance, and copyright law grants no rights to the user for public performance.
As it now stands, all free software licenses allow 100% public performance. The GPL currently grants this permission on the basis that it does not restrict *usage*. So the GPLv3 will indeed restrict usage (and the FSF will have to alter their free software definition).
Restricting public performance while still calling the software "free" is bizarre. The words on the FSF pages look less and less like English, and more and more like orwellian gnuspeak.
The only reason I can see for restricting a DTD or any other interface is pure spite. Using the bad but common analogy of free speech, why do you want to regulate the *manner* in which I speak? Public interfaces, especially those created in the Free Software Movement(tm) need to be completely unrestricted.
Are you willing to let other people do the same? What would you think if you came across a Java interface or XML DTD that was placed under a GPL-incompatible copyleft? But it doesn't really matter, because I'll just ignore your restrictions and have the full protection of the law to do so, since you cannot copyright an interface to begin with.
Hee hee! The Corporate lackies of OSDN Inc. post yet another less-than-trivial announcement for Debian LinuxOS. I think that they can't handle The One True OS(tm).
Hee hee. I have a friend working at Apple along a hall that Jobs always walks down. He always know when the boss is coming 'cause the the air always turns blue.
I actually remember a review of DOS95 way back when. It lost by a HUGE margin to PC-DOS and Novell DOS. It was portrayed as a castrated DOS. The recommendation was to keep your old DOS. Since then, nary a peep about DOS95 except in the Caldera trial.
Keeping DOS away from the typical user was probably Microsofts second biggest affront to its users.
It depends on what you want to do with your own code. If you want to give it away, then put it in the public domain, and if you want to loan it out, then put it under the GPL. But if what you want to do is to share your work with the world, then the BSD license is the way to go.
Stop depending on a license to make you free, because you already are!
It's nothing special. It is just a plain vanilla unix.
Well, duh! That's what's so great about it!
On the flip side, George Bush is anti-abortion and I believe that women have a right to choose.
Women should have the right to choose what they do with their bodies, so long as it does not hurt another human being. So if they can manage to have an abortion without killing the human being inside of them then go for it.
Its just a matter of what kinds of freedom you want.
Real freedom. The elimination of restrictions imposed on me by force. Ignore what you've been taught by your Public Indoctrination Center's civics teacher, and look it up in the dictionary. Pull out the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers. Reread Thoreau, Nock, Locke and Mill.
Should I be free to kill people and walk around society like I have done nothing?
No, because that isn't freedom...
Should I be allowed to own, buy and sell slaves?
Of course not! Did you even bother to take your brain out of neutral before responding? Go ask the slave if he is free. I guarantee you that he is not!
Freedom is for everyone, rich or poor, black or white, right or wrong. It's not for just a select few. You cannot be free as long as someone in your community is enslaved. And equal freedom! Bill Gates and ROger Smith get every bit as much freedom as you do, or you're a hypocrite.
Browne wants economic freedom, and nothing more, any personal freedom (like drug use) that comes out of it, is simply by chance, a side effect of economic freedom (freedom to sell drugs).
Absolutely backwards! Browne only wants personal freedom, and the economic freedom is a side effect. If I am free to give you a joint, and you are free to give me a green piece of paper, then we are both free to make an economic transactions where you give me a dollar for my joint. How could you possibly restrict my economic activities without restricting my personal freedom at the same time? It's impossible.
If there is a Libertarian president in the near future, what happens exactly? Are publicly funded programs eliminated?
There are different "factions" within the libertarian movement. The anarcho-capitalists favor eliminating all publicly funded programs immediately. The gradualist faction argues that it took up a century to get us into our present straight, and that it will take a century to get us out, and favor a gradual "growing down" of the government.
Most libertarians are in the middle. They recognize that some functions of government are necessary. And those functions are already delineated in the consititution. We favor getting rid of all non-constitutional roles of the federal government as soon as possible.
I grew up in rural California, and it must be a whole different universe than urban Georgia. For one thing, every child went to school, and civics class was required. It din't matter how rich or poor you were, or what your skin color was. You took civics in both junior high and high school.
If you were born a citizen in California and went to school there, you KNOW you have the right to vote. If you are a naturalized citizen, then you had to study for your citizenship test, and you KNOW you have the right to vote. It's time Georgia gets its act together.
As for my $20 dollar net connection, this will be the first presidential election in which I am not classified under the poverty line. And I've voted in five previous presidential elections...
I really want to go with the Libertarians, but I'm sorry, the general population is just not smart enough to govern themselves.
Libertarianism is a political philosophy, not a personal way of life. There is much, much more to libertarians than the Randroid Objectivists (who are a minority in the movement). Don't mistake self interest for selfishness. But libertarianism is about neither self interest nor altruism. It is about initiating violence against others. Simple. Defense but no offense. Nothing more.
So, you think that people are not smart enough to govern themselves? Then who are Nader, Buchanan, Gore and Bush? People! If they can't govern themselves (and I know that Clinton is unable to), then what makes you think they would do any better governing you and I?
it gives corporations more freedom in things they can buy sell and own
Well, like, yeah! Of course. Real freedom is for everyone, not just the people you like. It is impossible for you to be free unless Bill Gates is free. This is what Nader doesn't understand, and why he offers a pseudo-freedom.
If you want freedom, vote Browne. If you want a free beer, vote Nader.
I think he (and a lot of people, both here and elsewhere) need to be educated and made to realize (or at least confront and argue against) the notion that a government mandated and enforced monopoly isn't necessary for IP creators to be fairly compensated and, furthermore, has a stifling impact on the field of endeavor so affected, not to mention the society, culture, and the economy as a whole.
Government mandated and enforced monopoly? Do you have any idea what libertarians even are? Take a look at all of the intellectual property articles at Free Nation, especially this one. You don't need an official government pronouncement to make something property. Do you think that if the trespass laws were repealed that fence builders would go out of business?
And this brings up "Motor Voter" and a lot of other silly election laws. Why should someone who can't even get up the initiative to go to their library or postoffice to register be allowed to vote? These are the last people I want voting! The franchise should only be given to those who actually want it.
Well, I work on the number one ultrasound machine in the world. Its OS is LynxOS. There's more to embedded medical devices than just pacemakers...
Do the archetypical benefits of Free/Open Source fit medical software? When you look at the "big" projects in OSS, you see GIMP, Linux, Perl, Apache, etc. All fun and exciting projects to work on. And software that ordinary developers can use and tinker with.
I work for a company that produces medical software (for medical equipment). I keep asking myself who those "thousand eyes" inspecting the software for bugs will be. Strangely, the name "J. Random Hacker" does not come to mind. In fact, the only people I can think of that would be interested in this stuff are our competitors.
Other than medical administration software, and *boring* DICOM communication protocols, most medical software is written for very expensive equipment, or equipment that is very expensive to install (as in a chest cavity). I don't know any hackers that have a spare MRI in their basement, and the number of them that could even afford one is miniscule.
And who wants to mess around with pacemaker software? Show me a hobbyist that wants to tinker with that, and I'll show you someone lacking common sense.
There are many good reasons to Open Source medical software. But a "bazaar" development model, a thousand scrying eyes, and user-submitted bugfixes are not them.
If they didn't know what they were doing then they shouldn't have installed it.
If you ask that incompetant guy "why did you install Linux?", and he replies "But Bob two cubicles over has Linux", you're stuck.
Which brings us right back to the beginning... IT. Someone in the company needs to say, "these are the company computers and this is what you're allowed to do with them." And users installing their own software shouldn't be one of them. Then you can ask the much more appropriate question "Who authorized a installation?"
We have Free and Open Source Software. It works for the coding. But where is the FS/OSS analogue for project management and SQA? If FS/OSS is to truly leave the realm of hobbyist and academic software, then it needs to dump coders and get engineers.
You've made an excellent point. For a developer writing the software for himself, a spec isn't needed. But even though 99.99% of free software is not commercial, there is still a customer beyond the developer. If the developer is just scratching and itch, and the coding follows wherever the itch happens to lead him at the time, then the software will never be more than hobbyist software.
.foorc).
But without a spec, how can anyone log a bug? For example, version 0.2 of a program cannot use the config files for version 0.1. Is this a bug or is this deliberate? I have no clue, and there is no documentation to say otherwise, beyond a cryptic entry in the ChangeLog (ept: 102300 -
I haven't written any specs for my own software. I have no problem with this, and I proudly call it "hobbyist" software. But I've gotten to the point that a couple of developers are thinking of joining the projects. If I want them to be more than bugfixers, then I had better get busy writing some sort of specs/reqs.
First off, the license is different.
The BSD kernel and Linux have different licenses, true. But the Perl on BSD and the Perl on Linux are the same. Ditto for Xfree86, gcc, less, OpenSSH, TCP/IP, lpr, emacs, ad infinitum.
For someone not working on the kernel or OS environment, the licensing is identical. From a user's perspective, one is 100% free and the other is 100% free.
The BSD license leaves version contrrol with UC-Berkley. Period.
Wrong. Go read the license. Go fork the project and create a new CVS tree on your own server if you wish. No one will sue. Version control remains with the FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD core teams for exactly the same reason that version control for Linux remains with Linus: it makes sense to have one official source.
Secondly, BSD is a more mature project than Linux, and that drives people apart. In the earlier days of Linux, and to a certain point even now, you can end up with copyright on a small chunk of the Linux kernel.
Yep. But its more than getting your name in the list of contributors. A new OS has opportunity for everyone to contribute. But with an old OS the opportunity is harder. You either need some grand vision of a radical change, or be content with the unglamorous tuning and tweaking.
But BSD is more than the kernel. There is also the userland OS environment. There's a lot of current work going on there, so you have the opportunity to get involved.
The guy who's just "trying" out Linux is not the type of guy to come in his office and throw it on a machine where he has to get work done.
I've seen two (real not analogies) cases at my work were Linux caused network problems when run by people who didn't know what they were doing. The last case caused a subnet to be down for a day.
The problem isn't Linux. The problem is that these schmucks have root priviledge allowed them to barf all over the network at will.
If someone really wanted to hack the damn network they would of found a way LONG before installing linux.
In that case, since anyone who really wanted to break into your home could do so, why bother with a door lock?
NOTHING happens to the network if a user installs Linux on their machine.
What! There's more than one Linux distribution that comes with default settings that do nasty things to networks. The danger doesn't come from the Linux-guru, but the guy who's just trying it out and doesn't know what they're doing.