I was rebutting the statement that "pirating" software does not deprive the owner of his copy. Your last two points are identical in this regard. Whether I illegally download frogger, or legally download gcc then illegally rerelease a modification, the author's original copies are intact and unchanged.
If it's okay to copy frogger because the original is still there, then the same argument applies to copying then changing gcc. Admiring the concept of copyleft is not a justification for holding to a double standard.
What the heck is this title I'm seeing? "Corel GNU/Linux"? What the heck is that? I've looked all over the Corel website, and they don't offer such a product! The closest I could find was "Corel Linux". Is this what you meant, emmett?
I can only conclude one of two things. First, since Corel Linux is derived from Debian GNU/Linux, the names got confused while the proofreader was asleep. Or second, this is GNUspeak. Slashdot, beholden to the whims of the FSF, has to rename everything. God forbid they should get a reputation as independant thinkers!
Regardless of your views on the name of a certain operating system, at least have the moral fiber to call a rose a rose! You can argue all day whether the OS is GNU/Linux, LiGNUx, Linux or Fred(tm), but the name of the distribution offered by Corel is correctly spelled as "Corel Linux OS". Shortening the name to "Corel Linux" is certainly acceptable, but changing it is not.
How does a musician "support" his music? How does an author "support" his short stories or books? How does an artist "support" his painting?
According to the GNU Manifesto, there are two ways: authors should support their creative efforts by waiting on tables, or a tax would be levied on all creative producers, to be doled out to those select few deemed to be politically correct.
"If copyright law disappeared, the way software is commercially written would completely change. It's hard to say what would happen"
There once was a time not that long ago when copyrights applied only loosely to software. The result was a confused mess of copy protection schemes. It also gave rise to the EULA! You see, the EULA is not based on copyright law. When you tear open that shrink wrap and click "OK" in the install window, you are legally binding yourself to a contract.
Without copyright, I foresee a renewed interest in bizarre copy protection schemes, dongles, incomprehensible EULA's, and encryption and registration requisites. Authors and publishers want their works protected. Just a the repeal of trespass laws won't eliminate door locks, so to the elimination of copyright laws won't eliminate the means of protecting software.
"It's hard to say what would happen, but maybe people would pay for the actual creation of software instead of the distribution"
In economics, this is known as the free rider problem. Those who don't understand it are doomed by the law of unintended consequences. Basically, if software is expensive to create, but monetarily free to distribute, it makes a hell of a lot more sense to be the second person in line:-) For some software, your scheme would (and is) actually works. For most of it though, it won't.
It would be nearly impossible to predict what kinds of software will be available in the future, so I'll limit my example to one that I'm sure will be there: games. Why in the world would I spend $100,000 dollars for the coders, artists, musicians, and equipment necessary to get a first quality game created, when I can excercise a miniscule amount of patience and be second in line, receiving it for free? Forseeing your answer, I'll ask my next question: why would I spend that money to be a commercial reseller of the software, when I can be second in line and still have shrink-wrapped boxes ready on "opening" day?
Rosa Parks was BREAKING A LAW when she wouldn't give up her seat. This CRIMINAL act started a movement that ended segregation.
And what evil means did she commit? Breaking a an evil law is not an evil act. Her means were fully consistant with her ends.
If you goal is to do no wrong, then do your very best to do no wrong! What is so hard about understanding this? If you commit wrong acts in the pursuit of good goals, you are a liar if you then go and claim that you did no wrong. Worse, you are a hypocrite. You cannot try to balance the evil with good and expect the result to be good.
I think ~15-20 years (for corporate copyrights), and the lifetime of the author (for individual copyrights) would be ideal.
I would agree. I've advocated just this position on Slashdot previously. However, do you realize that some of these "abandoned" games are less then 15 years old? Do you realize that the members of Metallica are still alive and kicking?
Yeah, but if I *steal* (that is, COPY) the code to a game, I'm not depriving the game company of its property. Look at it this way, I take the shirt, the shirt is gone, there's only one shirt. I take a copy of the game, the game is still there. There can be infinitely many copies of a game.
Using that logic, then it is permissible for me to take a GPLd program, modify it, then redistribute binary only under a different licenes. The original code is still there! I am not depriving the GPL author of it's property! Is this what you are arguing?
I am perfectly willing to accept the dissolution of copyrights as a premise. Are you willing to accept the logical conclusions of that premise?
"Project GNU tools from the FSF, whose essential code (kernel, filesystems, compiler) is protected by copyleft"
Of those three essential parts, my Linux OS contains only the compiler! There is no Hurd. There is no GNUfs. Gee, I'm using gcc on Solaris at work. Does this mean that it's really GNU/Solaris? Hardly!
I can easily get a booting Linux system utilizing nothing from GNU except glibc. But only the unthinking fanatic would call this The GNU System. Before you obnoxiously demand that distros advertise GNU, find out what an OS really is first.
Absolutely! All over the GNU website there are articles proclaiming that software should not be owned. What would they say if I took them up on their offer and redistributed the collective works without the GPL and with a notice saying "nobody owns this stuff, do whatever you want with it"?
No, the bread, fish and wine that Jesus multiplied or created was freely given to him by others. In the Wine Incident(tm), he specifically sought permission first before he changed the water into wine. In the Loaves and Fishes Incident(PatPend), people voluntarily gave him some bread and fish.
I'm guessing that this Open Source Thingy(c) must really be a religion, cause they keep rewriting the Bible.
"Piracy is a bad thing, from an American capitalist point of view."
It's also a bad thing from European, Asian and African views. And last I heard, the socialists didn't hold truck with theft either.
"The principle behind it is that artists should be able to make as much money as they want from their product, while everyone else should be forced to pay for it."
Absolutely wrong. First of all, the artists can make no money unless someone else first wants their product. The amount of money they make is tied to how many people want it. Sometimes this means that artistic products are more dependent on marketing than talent, but hey...millions of fans still want it. Go figure. Second, and more important, no one is forcing you to do anything. No one. There is no gun pointed at your head. No nazis are frog-marching you into the nearest store and coercing you into purchasing Metallica against your will. Believe it or not, you do have free will. It is entirely up to you, and you alone, whether you will buy that album or not.
In case you don't understand it yet, if you don't like that $15 price tag, DON'T BUY IT!
I also loved LW's quote. It's something that a lot of the adolescent slashdot crowd just doesn't get. I'm not knocking adolescents, I used to be one. It is impossible to do good if one is not free to choose good. It is impossible to give if one has nothing to give. Your coveting something does not imply your right to it.
Where did the myth of Robin Hood get twisted? He didn't steal from the rich and give to the poor. He stole from the foreign Norman occpation forces and gave to the native British and Saxon rebels.
Absolutely! The songs are Metallica's. Downloading them without permission from the authors is theft. For those stallmanistas who consider the previous phrase to be meaningless, let me rephrase it. Downloading GNOME, modifying it, then redistributing it binary-only with a different license is theft. In both cases you have infringed upon copyright.
If the MPAA and RIAA spent some time defending their client authors, I would be cheering for them. But so long as they fight against a technology, and not specific illegal misuses of it, I am against them.
If you're not using an old shirt, it's just hanging in the back of the closet, is it still theft if someone takes it? YES!
It's not for YOU to decide if the shirt or game is abandoned. Slashdotters need to realize very clearly that the ends never justify the means. Repeat after me: "The ends (that cool game I really, really want, oh please please please) do not justify the means (theft, piracy, copyright infringement).
Technically, I don't know. Legally, absolutely no problem whatsoever. Go read the BSD license. It'w quick, easy, understandable, and small enough to actually include in the header of each and every one of your source files.
The BSD community sometimes refers to licenses as "encumbered" or "unencumbered". Unencumbered means that the developer doesn't have to propogate someone else's restrictions onto his own code. Anything beyond "do whatever you want as long as you pass on this permission and warranty statement" enters the realm of encumbering.
The BSD community takes the opposite tack of the GPL community, focusing on the 99 people who will do the right thing, as opposed to the one person who won't. To rephrase the biblical lesson, the two cents given by the widow hacker freely and without regret far outweigh the millions given by the pharisaic developer who did it just because the license said so.
Linux is not a kernel for the GNU system. What you normally call "GNU/Linux" is actually the creation of distributors who bundle the linux kernel with a lot of GNU stuff and a lot of BSD stuff and a lot of MIT stuff and a lot of other free stuff. As well as a bunch of linux kernel specific stuff to bind it all together. The operating system I am currently writing this on is most certainly NOT the GNU System. It's official name is "Slackware Linux 7.0". In the interest of brevity, I commonly shorten this name to "Slackware" or "Linux". If you take Slackware Linux 7.0, exise just the kernel, and slip in a copy of Hurd, it won't work. It cannot work without reengineering several major components. If Hurd won't even work in the GNU System, perhaps it's not really the GNU System after all.
I am certainly very concerned about my rights. Very much so. Exceedingly so. But I am not so shallow and wind-driven to assume that I lose any by not running an OS that lacks the imprimatur of the St. IGNUtious. My rights do not extend to demanding for free (as in beer as is all of GNU) someone else's coding labours. To suggest using NT makes someone dominated, subjugated or enslaved is utterly preposterous and an insult to all that ever lived under or fought against real and genuine slavery.
It has been several months since I had this encounter with Debian, so the exact details are blurred. I did not choose to install just the base packages of 30M. I do not know how Netscape was installed, but I have a strong suspicion that it was as a dependency for something else.
I do remember pages and pages of packages to select from in a hard to grasp format, so it may have been possible that Netscape was clearly marked as selected, but I just did not see it. There are inumerous times where I was asked to confirm the installation of dependencies, and some of these confirmation messages extended beyond the page. It may have been that I grew weary of the install and said yes to one of these lists without scrolling down to see if all the presented twenty dozen dependencies were acceptable.
All I know for sure is: I had never installed Debian before, it took two hours to do it, and while the list of packages being currently installed whizzed by, the word "netscape" flashed past, and I saw that it was indeed installed when the process was complete.
This may have been simply a bug that was subseqently fixed. I don't know. I just know what happened to me despite righteous and devote assurances from Debian advocates that it was flatly impossible.
Be that as it may, the non-free section is still included with Debian. It may be semantically correct to say that non-free is not a part of Debian proper, but any newbie perusing the CDs he just purchased would conclude that a particular directory called non-free is actually a part of the CD, and not a figment of his imagination.
...as the spokesman for the Linux movement he surely carries some weight around here ?
RMS is not the spokesman for the Linux movement. He is the spokesman for GNU, a very different thing. He also happens to be one of the many spokesmen for Free Software in general, but they often disagree amongst themselves.
This is not a religion, so stop looking for prophets.
The purpose of law is to protect the lives, liberties and properties of people. The fault for tyranny is not the law, but the fact that we have given control of the law to the state. Please reread your Bastiat.
The last thing we want is to have Linux corrupted by closed source, proprietary software, which by definition cannot be as good as open source.
Self-definitions are meaningless. If you look at the proprietary dictionaries, they will say the opposite. And of course, the ambivalent dictionaries are ambivalent. The only people who classify Open Source as better by definition are a subset of Open Source advocates.
The quality of a program has nothing whatsoever to do with its licensing. This is like judging automobiles by their extended warranties. Good licenses and warranties are very desirable, but they aren't the only things. A closed source DVD player is by most people's definitions, better than an non-existant open source player.
Besides which, you're talking about Linux. Every single Linux distribution, and I mean every single one of them, comes with closed source and proprietary software. YaST, Netscape, XV, StarOffice, you name it. The first time I installed the self-appointed champion of freedom, namely Debian GNU/Linux, it installed proprietary and closed source Netscape Navigator WITHOUT even asking me first. Needless to say, this was also the last time I installed it.
Having a licensed, approved, certified and authorized DVD player for Linux is only a victory for people who like to watch movies on their computer monitor.
The only people interested in a DVD player for Linux are those very same people who like to watch movies on their computer monitor. Those that don't like to watch such movies, well, so what?
If this is a victory for group A, and only group A gets any benefit out of this, it is rather pointless for group B to bitch about it. Sort of like coffee drinkers complaining about the price of tea in China. The kvetching and venting might be fun and self-satisfying, but does little else.
Speaking of tea, the famous Boston Tea Party of early American history managed to provide certain disillusioned Bostonians the opportunity to get drunk and paint their faces, and to get themselves mentioned in every domestic history book since, but did absolutely nothing to benefit anyone who actually enjoyed drinking tea. The problem wasn't the price of tea, or even the so much the tax that was put on it that raised its price. The problem was with the British government. Things really didn't start moving freedom-wise until the colonists started attacking the King's troops instead of the King's merchants.
The problem is not the MPAA. They are merely the King's merchants. The problem is the DMCA which takes away the freedom to reverse engineer. If the MPAA utterly disappeared tomorrow, the DMCA would still be there. Vent your anger at the US Congress and Senate (the King's troops) who saw fit to curtail your previously held rights for a mere thirty pieces of silver.
Oh Puhleaze!! If you want to know how something is licensed, just go look. To let you know, the libraries are under the LGPL, and the applications are either GPL, AL or BSD. A couple niggly things are under other licenses, but who cares. The whole kit and kaboodle is 100% FREE SOFTWARE.
GNU != Free Software. Don't believe me, believe RMS. Go to www.gnu.org and look up the definition of free software. You will find 4 points, freedom to use, freedom to redistribute, freedom to modify and freedom to distribute modifications. Every component in KDE, as well as every piece of software released under any Open Source license qualifies. Every single one. Including the new Qt that KDE2 uses. Including everything released under the Artistic, MIT and BSD licenses.
Don't be a GNU Automaton. Think for yourself. Read the licenses. If you eventually choose not to think, that if fine by me, as long as it is YOUR decision.
Qt 2.1 is compiled by default without jpeg support. I don't know why. If you sit down and type "./configure", you won't get it. Apparently, this is what the RPM makers did. What you need to do is remove the Qt RPM, download Qt 2.1 source, and build it according to directions. You will need to type "./configure -system-jpeg" when configuring to get jpeg support.
Both KDE and GNOME are voluntary projects. There is no Linux King. Everyone can do whatever they want. Freedom reigns within this domain. Asking them to merge is as ludicrous as asking those two neighboring liquor stores on the corner to merge. The only way you're going to do it is to destroy freedom. You'll have to rename it "slave software".
Exhibit A: Every Linux distribution includes proprietary software by default. Every one. Including Debian. Last time I installed Debian it installed Netscape by default without even asking.
Exhibit B: I am free, Free and FREE. I have your capitalized Freedom. The fact that I have Acrobat, FrameMaker, and other binary only, closed source and encumbered software installed on my Linux box in no way diminishes my freedom. There are no shackles on me. I do not have to bow and scrape to massah Adobe. I have complete and 100% free will in using that software. I have complete and 100% free will and ability to discontinue using it and to uninstall it. I am in control of my destiny.
What a twisted and confused mind you must have to equate emancipation with open source licenses.
Slashdot Mirror
I was rebutting the statement that "pirating" software does not deprive the owner of his copy. Your last two points are identical in this regard. Whether I illegally download frogger, or legally download gcc then illegally rerelease a modification, the author's original copies are intact and unchanged.
If it's okay to copy frogger because the original is still there, then the same argument applies to copying then changing gcc. Admiring the concept of copyleft is not a justification for holding to a double standard.
Please put 2 seconds into your OWN rebuttals.
What the heck is this title I'm seeing? "Corel GNU/Linux"? What the heck is that? I've looked all over the Corel website, and they don't offer such a product! The closest I could find was "Corel Linux". Is this what you meant, emmett?
I can only conclude one of two things. First, since Corel Linux is derived from Debian GNU/Linux, the names got confused while the proofreader was asleep. Or second, this is GNUspeak. Slashdot, beholden to the whims of the FSF, has to rename everything. God forbid they should get a reputation as independant thinkers!
Regardless of your views on the name of a certain operating system, at least have the moral fiber to call a rose a rose! You can argue all day whether the OS is GNU/Linux, LiGNUx, Linux or Fred(tm), but the name of the distribution offered by Corel is correctly spelled as "Corel Linux OS". Shortening the name to "Corel Linux" is certainly acceptable, but changing it is not.
He was rich too, what's your point? That Robin Hood should have robbed him as well?
How does a musician "support" his music? How does an author "support" his short stories or books? How does an artist "support" his painting?
According to the GNU Manifesto, there are two ways: authors should support their creative efforts by waiting on tables, or a tax would be levied on all creative producers, to be doled out to those select few deemed to be politically correct.
"If copyright law disappeared, the way software is commercially written would completely change. It's hard to say what would happen"
:-) For some software, your scheme would (and is) actually works. For most of it though, it won't.
There once was a time not that long ago when copyrights applied only loosely to software. The result was a confused mess of copy protection schemes. It also gave rise to the EULA! You see, the EULA is not based on copyright law. When you tear open that shrink wrap and click "OK" in the install window, you are legally binding yourself to a contract.
Without copyright, I foresee a renewed interest in bizarre copy protection schemes, dongles, incomprehensible EULA's, and encryption and registration requisites. Authors and publishers want their works protected. Just a the repeal of trespass laws won't eliminate door locks, so to the elimination of copyright laws won't eliminate the means of protecting software.
"It's hard to say what would happen, but maybe people would pay for the actual creation of software instead of the distribution"
In economics, this is known as the free rider problem. Those who don't understand it are doomed by the law of unintended consequences. Basically, if software is expensive to create, but monetarily free to distribute, it makes a hell of a lot more sense to be the second person in line
It would be nearly impossible to predict what kinds of software will be available in the future, so I'll limit my example to one that I'm sure will be there: games. Why in the world would I spend $100,000 dollars for the coders, artists, musicians, and equipment necessary to get a first quality game created, when I can excercise a miniscule amount of patience and be second in line, receiving it for free? Forseeing your answer, I'll ask my next question: why would I spend that money to be a commercial reseller of the software, when I can be second in line and still have shrink-wrapped boxes ready on "opening" day?
Rosa Parks was BREAKING A LAW when she wouldn't give up her seat. This CRIMINAL act started a movement that ended segregation.
And what evil means did she commit? Breaking a an evil law is not an evil act. Her means were fully consistant with her ends.
If you goal is to do no wrong, then do your very best to do no wrong! What is so hard about understanding this? If you commit wrong acts in the pursuit of good goals, you are a liar if you then go and claim that you did no wrong. Worse, you are a hypocrite. You cannot try to balance the evil with good and expect the result to be good.
I think ~15-20 years (for corporate copyrights), and the lifetime of the author (for individual copyrights) would be ideal.
I would agree. I've advocated just this position on Slashdot previously. However, do you realize that some of these "abandoned" games are less then 15 years old? Do you realize that the members of Metallica are still alive and kicking?
Yeah, but if I *steal* (that is, COPY) the code to a game, I'm not depriving the game company of its property. Look at it this way, I take the shirt, the shirt is gone, there's only one shirt. I take a copy of the game, the game is still there. There can be infinitely many copies of a game.
Using that logic, then it is permissible for me to take a GPLd program, modify it, then redistribute binary only under a different licenes. The original code is still there! I am not depriving the GPL author of it's property! Is this what you are arguing?
I am perfectly willing to accept the dissolution of copyrights as a premise. Are you willing to accept the logical conclusions of that premise?
"Project GNU tools from the FSF, whose essential code (kernel, filesystems, compiler) is protected by copyleft"
Of those three essential parts, my Linux OS contains only the compiler! There is no Hurd. There is no GNUfs. Gee, I'm using gcc on Solaris at work. Does this mean that it's really GNU/Solaris? Hardly!
I can easily get a booting Linux system utilizing nothing from GNU except glibc. But only the unthinking fanatic would call this The GNU System. Before you obnoxiously demand that distros advertise GNU, find out what an OS really is first.
Absolutely! All over the GNU website there are articles proclaiming that software should not be owned. What would they say if I took them up on their offer and redistributed the collective works without the GPL and with a notice saying "nobody owns this stuff, do whatever you want with it"?
No, the bread, fish and wine that Jesus multiplied or created was freely given to him by others. In the Wine Incident(tm), he specifically sought permission first before he changed the water into wine. In the Loaves and Fishes Incident(PatPend), people voluntarily gave him some bread and fish.
I'm guessing that this Open Source Thingy(c) must really be a religion, cause they keep rewriting the Bible.
"Piracy is a bad thing, from an American capitalist point of view."
It's also a bad thing from European, Asian and African views. And last I heard, the socialists didn't hold truck with theft either.
"The principle behind it is that artists should be able to make as much money as they want from their product, while everyone else should be forced to pay for it."
Absolutely wrong. First of all, the artists can make no money unless someone else first wants their product. The amount of money they make is tied to how many people want it. Sometimes this means that artistic products are more dependent on marketing than talent, but hey...millions of fans still want it. Go figure. Second, and more important, no one is forcing you to do anything. No one. There is no gun pointed at your head. No nazis are frog-marching you into the nearest store and coercing you into purchasing Metallica against your will. Believe it or not, you do have free will. It is entirely up to you, and you alone, whether you will buy that album or not.
In case you don't understand it yet, if you don't like that $15 price tag, DON'T BUY IT!
I also loved LW's quote. It's something that a lot of the adolescent slashdot crowd just doesn't get. I'm not knocking adolescents, I used to be one. It is impossible to do good if one is not free to choose good. It is impossible to give if one has nothing to give. Your coveting something does not imply your right to it.
Where did the myth of Robin Hood get twisted? He didn't steal from the rich and give to the poor. He stole from the foreign Norman occpation forces and gave to the native British and Saxon rebels.
Absolutely! The songs are Metallica's. Downloading them without permission from the authors is theft. For those stallmanistas who consider the previous phrase to be meaningless, let me rephrase it. Downloading GNOME, modifying it, then redistributing it binary-only with a different license is theft. In both cases you have infringed upon copyright.
If the MPAA and RIAA spent some time defending their client authors, I would be cheering for them. But so long as they fight against a technology, and not specific illegal misuses of it, I am against them.
If you're not using an old shirt, it's just hanging in the back of the closet, is it still theft if someone takes it? YES!
It's not for YOU to decide if the shirt or game is abandoned. Slashdotters need to realize very clearly that the ends never justify the means. Repeat after me: "The ends (that cool game I really, really want, oh please please please) do not justify the means (theft, piracy, copyright infringement).
Technically, I don't know. Legally, absolutely no problem whatsoever. Go read the BSD license. It'w quick, easy, understandable, and small enough to actually include in the header of each and every one of your source files.
The BSD community sometimes refers to licenses as "encumbered" or "unencumbered". Unencumbered means that the developer doesn't have to propogate someone else's restrictions onto his own code. Anything beyond "do whatever you want as long as you pass on this permission and warranty statement" enters the realm of encumbering.
The BSD community takes the opposite tack of the GPL community, focusing on the 99 people who will do the right thing, as opposed to the one person who won't. To rephrase the biblical lesson, the two cents given by the widow hacker freely and without regret far outweigh the millions given by the pharisaic developer who did it just because the license said so.
Linux is not a kernel for the GNU system. What you normally call "GNU/Linux" is actually the creation of distributors who bundle the linux kernel with a lot of GNU stuff and a lot of BSD stuff and a lot of MIT stuff and a lot of other free stuff. As well as a bunch of linux kernel specific stuff to bind it all together. The operating system I am currently writing this on is most certainly NOT the GNU System. It's official name is "Slackware Linux 7.0". In the interest of brevity, I commonly shorten this name to "Slackware" or "Linux". If you take Slackware Linux 7.0, exise just the kernel, and slip in a copy of Hurd, it won't work. It cannot work without reengineering several major components. If Hurd won't even work in the GNU System, perhaps it's not really the GNU System after all.
I am certainly very concerned about my rights. Very much so. Exceedingly so. But I am not so shallow and wind-driven to assume that I lose any by not running an OS that lacks the imprimatur of the St. IGNUtious. My rights do not extend to demanding for free (as in beer as is all of GNU) someone else's coding labours. To suggest using NT makes someone dominated, subjugated or enslaved is utterly preposterous and an insult to all that ever lived under or fought against real and genuine slavery.
It has been several months since I had this encounter with Debian, so the exact details are blurred. I did not choose to install just the base packages of 30M. I do not know how Netscape was installed, but I have a strong suspicion that it was as a dependency for something else.
I do remember pages and pages of packages to select from in a hard to grasp format, so it may have been possible that Netscape was clearly marked as selected, but I just did not see it. There are inumerous times where I was asked to confirm the installation of dependencies, and some of these confirmation messages extended beyond the page. It may have been that I grew weary of the install and said yes to one of these lists without scrolling down to see if all the presented twenty dozen dependencies were acceptable.
All I know for sure is: I had never installed Debian before, it took two hours to do it, and while the list of packages being currently installed whizzed by, the word "netscape" flashed past, and I saw that it was indeed installed when the process was complete.
This may have been simply a bug that was subseqently fixed. I don't know. I just know what happened to me despite righteous and devote assurances from Debian advocates that it was flatly impossible.
Be that as it may, the non-free section is still included with Debian. It may be semantically correct to say that non-free is not a part of Debian proper, but any newbie perusing the CDs he just purchased would conclude that a particular directory called non-free is actually a part of the CD, and not a figment of his imagination.
...as the spokesman for the Linux movement he surely carries some weight around here ?
RMS is not the spokesman for the Linux movement. He is the spokesman for GNU, a very different thing. He also happens to be one of the many spokesmen for Free Software in general, but they often disagree amongst themselves.
This is not a religion, so stop looking for prophets.
The purpose of law is to protect the lives, liberties and properties of people. The fault for tyranny is not the law, but the fact that we have given control of the law to the state. Please reread your Bastiat.
The last thing we want is to have Linux corrupted by closed source, proprietary software, which by definition cannot be as good as open source.
Self-definitions are meaningless. If you look at the proprietary dictionaries, they will say the opposite. And of course, the ambivalent dictionaries are ambivalent. The only people who classify Open Source as better by definition are a subset of Open Source advocates.
The quality of a program has nothing whatsoever to do with its licensing. This is like judging automobiles by their extended warranties. Good licenses and warranties are very desirable, but they aren't the only things. A closed source DVD player is by most people's definitions, better than an non-existant open source player.
Besides which, you're talking about Linux. Every single Linux distribution, and I mean every single one of them, comes with closed source and proprietary software. YaST, Netscape, XV, StarOffice, you name it. The first time I installed the self-appointed champion of freedom, namely Debian GNU/Linux, it installed proprietary and closed source Netscape Navigator WITHOUT even asking me first. Needless to say, this was also the last time I installed it.
Having a licensed, approved, certified and authorized DVD player for Linux is only a victory for people who like to watch movies on their computer monitor.
The only people interested in a DVD player for Linux are those very same people who like to watch movies on their computer monitor. Those that don't like to watch such movies, well, so what?
If this is a victory for group A, and only group A gets any benefit out of this, it is rather pointless for group B to bitch about it. Sort of like coffee drinkers complaining about the price of tea in China. The kvetching and venting might be fun and self-satisfying, but does little else.
Speaking of tea, the famous Boston Tea Party of early American history managed to provide certain disillusioned Bostonians the opportunity to get drunk and paint their faces, and to get themselves mentioned in every domestic history book since, but did absolutely nothing to benefit anyone who actually enjoyed drinking tea. The problem wasn't the price of tea, or even the so much the tax that was put on it that raised its price. The problem was with the British government. Things really didn't start moving freedom-wise until the colonists started attacking the King's troops instead of the King's merchants.
The problem is not the MPAA. They are merely the King's merchants. The problem is the DMCA which takes away the freedom to reverse engineer. If the MPAA utterly disappeared tomorrow, the DMCA would still be there. Vent your anger at the US Congress and Senate (the King's troops) who saw fit to curtail your previously held rights for a mere thirty pieces of silver.
Oh Puhleaze!! If you want to know how something is licensed, just go look. To let you know, the libraries are under the LGPL, and the applications are either GPL, AL or BSD. A couple niggly things are under other licenses, but who cares. The whole kit and kaboodle is 100% FREE SOFTWARE.
GNU != Free Software. Don't believe me, believe RMS. Go to www.gnu.org and look up the definition of free software. You will find 4 points, freedom to use, freedom to redistribute, freedom to modify and freedom to distribute modifications. Every component in KDE, as well as every piece of software released under any Open Source license qualifies. Every single one. Including the new Qt that KDE2 uses. Including everything released under the Artistic, MIT and BSD licenses.
Don't be a GNU Automaton. Think for yourself. Read the licenses. If you eventually choose not to think, that if fine by me, as long as it is YOUR decision.
Qt 2.1 is compiled by default without jpeg support. I don't know why. If you sit down and type "./configure", you won't get it. Apparently, this is what the RPM makers did. What you need to do is remove the Qt RPM, download Qt 2.1 source, and build it according to directions. You will need to type "./configure -system-jpeg" when configuring to get jpeg support.
Both KDE and GNOME are voluntary projects. There is no Linux King. Everyone can do whatever they want. Freedom reigns within this domain. Asking them to merge is as ludicrous as asking those two neighboring liquor stores on the corner to merge. The only way you're going to do it is to destroy freedom. You'll have to rename it "slave software".
Exhibit A: Every Linux distribution includes proprietary software by default. Every one. Including Debian. Last time I installed Debian it installed Netscape by default without even asking.
Exhibit B: I am free, Free and FREE. I have your capitalized Freedom. The fact that I have Acrobat, FrameMaker, and other binary only, closed source and encumbered software installed on my Linux box in no way diminishes my freedom. There are no shackles on me. I do not have to bow and scrape to massah Adobe. I have complete and 100% free will in using that software. I have complete and 100% free will and ability to discontinue using it and to uninstall it. I am in control of my destiny.
What a twisted and confused mind you must have to equate emancipation with open source licenses.