FSF can not under any circumstances prevent you from licensing software entirely written by you any way you want.
That's true of course, so long as the software written solely by me never comes in contact with GPLd software. The FSF certainly can, and has, prevented the distribution of programs whose only crime was to dynamically link to GPL code.
Re:Free speech, not free beer!
on
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· Score: 2
But the free in "Free Software" is not liberty! Hell, it's not even free speech! This is why people aren't contributing to the FSF - they don't want to encourage even more abuse to the English language.
If Free Software == Free Speech, then why the hell isn't it in the Constitution?
Quick civics lesson for the forgetful. Free Speech means you have the freedom and right to make, utter, create, express speech. You ALREADY have the right to create software. You already have the right to release and distribute it under any bleeding license you want. Free Speech isn't in the constitution in order to grant you some heretofore undiscovered priviledge. NO! It there to guarantee you a right that you ALREADY have!
If you deny people to right to create closed source software, you are eliminating Free Speech. Yet this is exactly what the FSF wants to do, ban proprietary software. If RMS had settled for creating Open Source replacements for proprietary software, he would have been my hero. But he didn't stop there. He decided that he had a cause, and that cause, like all others, was to force the world into his particular vision of it. When he uses terms like subjugation, domination and slavery with regard to closed source software, he is making a complete mockery of everything he says he stands for.
``Free software'' is a matter of liberty, not price.
I am unware of any piece of Free Software that I cannot obtain for zero cash. Sure, the FSF may sell the Deluxe GNU (tm) for $5000, but I can still download every bit of it for zero dollars and zero cents.
Re:This article makes me sick!
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And not one of those people asked for money before hand. As I understand it, they all shared the software with me. Now, I'm not too keen on folks who share something with me, then get their noses bent out of shape because I didn't pay for it afterwards.
The problem with the Free Software movement (as opposed to the Open Source movement) is that it wants to replace proprietary software development with guiltware. Geez, walking through the dot.org pavillion is like trying to watch PBS during pledge week.
If you don't want people freeloading, don't give out freebies.
Re:Notice who was giving the money
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· Score: 2
Just a guess - you don't like rich people. Now ask yourself why anyone would tip a paperboy who hates them? Gee, I'll bet you that missing ten dollar tip right now that you deliberately gave them lousy service and it got worse everytime they didn't tip you.
Re:Caldera acts are clearly anti-GPL at trade show
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· Score: 3
Not having any of those particular Caldera CD's you're talking about, I can only go by what is on the Caldera website. Indeed, they have the source code for all GPL packages available, as well as stating so in their distro license. It took me about two minutes to find this.
Re:A lot of anti-FSF attitude going around
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· Score: 3
The main problem with the FSF and why people don't donate as much as you'd like, is because the FSF is a *political* organization.
It's no wonder that corporations are not contributing to a foundation whose goals are a complete rewrite of the software industry. Why should a CEO pay them any heed when he's told to go wait on tables instead of selling software? Why should an industry based on software as a product donate to an organization that demands software not be owned?
Perhaps they're smart enough to realize that donating to the FSF will not advance Free Software, rather it will work towards eliminating all other Free Software in favor of a particular brand of Free Software known as GNU. They have ample justification in worrying that they donations will be used to fight other Free Software projects, like tcl and kde.
Taking your shell script analogy further, think of Nautilus or Konqueror as a shell. Then the component model makes sense. Konqueror does just one thing, and it does it well: it browses. It doesn't matter if I browse a file system, an ftp site or a web page. I'm still browsing. I'm still browsing in exactly the same way.
Keeping everything small in the Unix model only makes sense if you're going to *USE* them. And you use them by putting them together with redirection, pipes, tees or scripts. That design philosophy can be restated as "componentize". That's exactly what konqueror is.
In the current Linux Magazine, Dave Whittinger has a piece that takes a very controversial stand. And it has bearing on the issue at hand.
He says, in order for Linux to succeed on the desktop, stuff like Eazel has to happen. However, he also says that either KDE or Gnome has to go. Developers have to band together and concentrate on one GUI library. He told distros to pick one or the other desktop and make it the standard.
Now, the presence of a couple dozen different window managers, a couple dozen different file managers, a dozen widget libraries, and half a dozen desktops is way to much for a newbie to deal with. However, paring all this down to just ONE choice is the wrong way to go (let alone being completely unrealistic). It also ignores the fact that Gnome, GTK+, KDE and Qt are *NOT* for Linux. They are for X, and that means all of Unix, plus OS/2 and any other OS that has an X port.
Many GTK+ developers abhor Qt and will never ever use it. And vice versa. Ditto for Gnome and KDE. I know people that will switch back to fvwm rather than *use* KDE. There are a few ecumenical souls out there who actually support both Qt and GTK+ interfaces, but they are rare.
But Dave is correct about some things. It confusing even for experts when every other application has its own inteface. And every distro that is even vaguely geared towards newbies needs to pick a default desktop and leave the alternates on CD #2. And developers need to have good reasons before they start duplicating applications. Just saying "it's like kfoo but for gnome" isn't good enough.
Although fifty or sixty standards are too much, I believe that Linux/BSD/Unix/X is big enough for two desktops and two widget libraries. But those desktops are going to have to learn how to work together smoothly.
Then keep your file windows small and your browser windows large. Nobody's stopping you. No one's forcing you to type an internet URL in you file manager.
"If you installed with RPM or the Debian package manager, you still have application-created data lying around."
I am unaware of any OS that deletes user generated files when the application is removed. Think about this and you'll realize what a Bad Thing that would be. Maybe when you uninstall a program you want to get rid of all your work as well, but some people don't.
"Ports seems like a very ad hoc system, which isn't a great way to ensure system integrity."
From what I can understand listening to people who know, it's much more robust than rpm but not quite as robust as apt. It's more than just a set of makefiles. It keeps track of what's installed, what they're dependent on, etc.
I have to agree. I found the ports collection to be very easy to use. In fact, the FreeBSD packages are merely precompiled ports.
One caveat, however. The purpose of ports is to allow painless compilation on FreeBSD. Since every FreeBSD is like the next, the patches and configurations work without a hitch. But how will a ports work under Linux when there are so many different distributions?
I can't even get some configure scripts to run to completion on some distros. How in the world will ports work when every distro wants to do their own thing? Will every distro have to maintain their own ports collection?
What we need long before we need ports, or the articles universal package manager, is a standard Linux. When the LSB is done, then we can start getting stuff to work properly.
Oh stop it! We want to believe this story. We want to believe that we are doomed. We want to believe that we are powerless. Stop introducing facts into the topic.
As self-contradictory as this is, I'll stab at it anyway. Reverse engineering is not illegal. And, you don't have to agree to the license to reverse engineer something.
But if the license says you can't reverse-engineer, then you are breaking the license if you do so. Now, different countries have different laws regarding whether a license can forbid reverse-engineering or not. I have no idea what laws Norway has on this. I can only assume that they are much more severe than in the US, since Johannsen was *arrested* and *jailed*. The same thing in the US would merit only a subpeona to a civil trial.
Be that as it may, I once argued that the wording of the GPL was not identical to how people used it. I got a stern reply from GNU that no matter what the GPL or the law said, ignoring the wishes of the author was extreme rudeness. In the case of DeCSS, Johannsen exercised extreme rudeness by reverse engineering DeCSS when he knew full well that the MPAA did not want him to do so.
About your point with QT... I believe that would all depend on how you interfaced with DeCSS. If you linked to some GPL'd libraries, then you'd be in big trouble. However, if you used a fork or a pipe...then you'd probably be ok. (IANAL)
RMS concurs for the most part. But that's beside the point. What if the GPL license were violated? What if I did statically or dynamically link DeCSS with Qt? What if, GNU forbid, I actually included DeCSS code in a non-GPL application? Why are we spending so much energy condemning the MPAA for trying to enforce their license when we would be the first to enforce a GPL violation?
Is it just because the MPAA is a corporation? Just because they are big? Just because they are not part of the tribe? What if the DVD encryptions were licensed from a small mom-and-pop shop instead? Would we condemn them for filing a lawsuit on Johannsen? If we would defend him in such a case, would we also defend the MPAA if they did exactly the same thing?
We are spending way too much time bad mouthing corporations, and not nearly enough time trying to get the DMCA repealed.
Then why don't use use the licensed software you already have?
The problem is not the licensing, the problem is that someone violated the CVD license by reverse engineering the decryption. The same people who are condemning the MPAA would be the first ones to call for lawsuit if I distributed a Qt front-end to the GPLd DeCSS.
"What about the arrest of Jon Johansen, the Norwegian teenager partly responsible for DeCSS: did the MPAA have anything to do with it? That was done by Norwegian prosecutors. We were not involved in that. And your reply to the prosecutor who said they did it at your request would be?" Ummm...
Ooh! Did I miss some big story about the Norwegians claiming that the MPAA told them to make the arrest? Why wasn't it on Slashdot? Will the Norwegians next open an embassy in Hollywood? Will Janet Reno prosecute anyone making a Qt front-end to DeCSS? Will Bill Clinton admit that he used Chinese political donations as a means to launder AOL/Time/Warner payoffs?
"Big corporations also mean less and less innovation, less creativity. Bad. Very, very bad."
Then that leaves more room for everyone else to be innovative and creative:-)
Where do you think Linux came from? At a time when the 386 was utterly dominated by Microsoft along came Linus Torvalds and thousands of other little guys all across the internet doing creative and innovative work. Ditto for BSD and GNU who made quality software a standard. Ditto for the KDE and Gnome teams making usable desktops and office suites. Ditto for the guys merely using Linux who are making hardware manufacturers open up their specs. Thanks to them, Microsoft once more has to compete on the basis of its products and not on its size.
If you stop reading the economic textbooks where it talks about monopolies taking over a market, and think that's all there is, you fail to learn that they inevitably implode through their sheer size. No monopoly can ever make the bold and and sometimes rash decisions that startups make every day. When you're a megamultinational corporation, there's no way you're going to risk the wrath of 500 billion dollars worth of shareholders cashing out because you took a market gamble.
"The problem is, frankly, that the corporations behind DVD are subverting governments in order to enforce their will on consumers. It ought to frighten people, it frightens me. Because if they win this based on the might and power of their money and organizations, then what new battles can they win in the future. I mean, think in terms of Soylent Green the big corporate types got the good food and the average Joe got Soylent Green or starved."
Yes, you're paranoid. Take a few steps back and reread what you just wrote. I've heard similar rants at John Birch conventsions! These sort of baseless, screwball and wacked-out aspersions have become all too common since the DeCSS affair.
No, we don't want multi-nationals making our laws for us! Sheesh! What you fail to realize, is that they CANNOT make laws for us! They have to get someone else, namely the government, to do it for them.
Tell you a story. Two corner newsstands in New York circa 1930. One of them believes in fair competition based on quality service and selection. The other wants to be the only newstand for blocks around. So the evil newstand hires the mafia to send Guido over to break the kneecaps of the good newstand's owner. A cub reporter finds out and writes an expose. People get indigant and go picket the evil newsstand, and eventually a court throws the evil owner in jail and it is out of business. Everybody happy, right? Wrong! The mafia and Guido are still out there. Nothing has been done about them. They're still breaking kneecaps and mugging boy scouts for pocket change. Soon, some other shady businessman will hire them to knock off his rivals, and so on, and so on, and so on. Nothing will ever change if you keep going after the crooked businessmen and ignore the mob.
Question: "...However, recently, events have shown that duly elected Governments around the world can be dictated to and ordered around by "Big Corporations", who are accountable to no-one, including the market place."
Answer: "...I think its a responsibility of government to keep the Net and the Web as free and non-commercial as is possible. I don't believe Libertarians would share that view...If I understand them correctly, the Libertarians present a strong political rationale for keeping a space like the Net free from corporate or government interference."
No, Jon, you don't understand Libertarians at all, in fact, you barely understand the internet. (Geez! You're promoting your own book right here in the interview. How commercial can you get!) Libertarians are opposed to involuntary interactions between human beings. This places them against governments and criminals. If a corporation commits a crime (theft, fraud, etc), then a libertarian will be against them. Libertarians do NOT believe that money or making money is evil, nor do they believe the size of an organization has anything at all to do with morality.
Commerce, as long as it remains a voluntary interaction between two individuals or groups, is supported by libertarianism. The philosophy finds nothing wrong with commercial concerns.
But the question, and Jon's reply equating freedom with anti-commercialism, assume that commerce is involuntary. But no one is forced to be subscribed to AOL, to buy Time magazine or to watch Tiny Toons. If corporations really had to power to dictate terms to governments, then where are the laws mandating purchases? (I don't consider government mandated monopolies to be commercial concerns) Why isn't Chrysler sending police to my door when I buy a Ford? How come I am not being sued by ABC/CBS/NBC for not owning a television? Why has Redhat not indicted me for running Slackware?
Corporations can only wield government power if the government first gives it to them. It's extremely frustrating to see people attack the symptom and not the disease.
Two minutes of amateur research reveals some interesting things. Amazing that I, an amateur, could find this, but a trained reporter cannot!
(Of course, Stacheldraht is not the only perpetrator in this recent spate of DoS shenanigans. However it was identified as one of the major cracks used)
From Dave Dittrich's paper on Stacheldraht , we find: "The Makefiles contain rules for Linux and Solaris, with the default being Linux (even though it appears that the code does not work very reliably on Linux). For the purposes of this analysis, all programs were compiled and run on Red Hat Linux 6.0 systems. As far as I am aware, the agent has been witnessed "in the wild" only on Solaris 2.x systems."
Hmmm. It seems that Linux is not the wide-open OS that the article makes it out to be. The rest of the paper also clearly illustrates that any OS with common networking utilities (including NT) is vulnerable to similar agents.
Mr. Dittrich's recommendation is: "The real defense is to make sure that *all* systems are kept up to date with security patches, unnecessary services are turned off, and competent system administrators are running and monitoring every Unix system on your network. (I'll hold my breath while you go make that happen, OK?;)"
Funny, this sounds like that same old security mantra I've been hearing from day one! A more competent reporter would have attributed at least part of the blame to lax security policies.
This is absolutely unbelievable! You guys are so nuts you believe your own propaganda! You actually sound like left-wing John Birchers. What really scares me is the possibility that you might actually be old enough to vote...
"Yes if AOL is pissing you off you can go work for CNN. Oh wait a minute they are the same company maybe you can work for Time oops that wouln't work either."
Sheesh! Is your world so small that you can only find one corporation in it? Within walking distance of where I sit there are VA Linux, SGI, Microsoft, and Sun. There are also several dozen computer and internet related startups. And if I wanted to get out of computing, there are Alza and Acuson. Those poor sots working at AOL/Time/Warner's Netscape building down the street are hardly bound to their employer like a medieval serf.
"Oh yea the corps have first amendment rights granted to them by the Supreme Court so it follows that they MUST have second amendment rights too. You can bet your ass they are going to raise armies soon."
Are you actually imagining that a company would raise and arm their own army?!? Sir, either your brain has short circuited or you've been at the wacky-tabacky again. You scenario might make a good Tom Clancy novel, but a plausible occurance it is not. Remember, every one of their employees (who incidentally outnumber them) also have the same second amendment rights. Ooh! That's another difference between feudalism and employment. Here is the US, employees and employers have identical legal rights.
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FSF can not under any circumstances prevent you from licensing software entirely written by you any way you want.
That's true of course, so long as the software written solely by me never comes in contact with GPLd software. The FSF certainly can, and has, prevented the distribution of programs whose only crime was to dynamically link to GPL code.
But the free in "Free Software" is not liberty! Hell, it's not even free speech! This is why people aren't contributing to the FSF - they don't want to encourage even more abuse to the English language.
If Free Software == Free Speech, then why the hell isn't it in the Constitution?
Quick civics lesson for the forgetful. Free Speech means you have the freedom and right to make, utter, create, express speech. You ALREADY have the right to create software. You already have the right to release and distribute it under any bleeding license you want. Free Speech isn't in the constitution in order to grant you some heretofore undiscovered priviledge. NO! It there to guarantee you a right that you ALREADY have!
If you deny people to right to create closed source software, you are eliminating Free Speech. Yet this is exactly what the FSF wants to do, ban proprietary software. If RMS had settled for creating Open Source replacements for proprietary software, he would have been my hero. But he didn't stop there. He decided that he had a cause, and that cause, like all others, was to force the world into his particular vision of it. When he uses terms like subjugation, domination and slavery with regard to closed source software, he is making a complete mockery of everything he says he stands for.
``Free software'' is a matter of liberty, not price.
I am unware of any piece of Free Software that I cannot obtain for zero cash. Sure, the FSF may sell the Deluxe GNU (tm) for $5000, but I can still download every bit of it for zero dollars and zero cents.
And not one of those people asked for money before hand. As I understand it, they all shared the software with me. Now, I'm not too keen on folks who share something with me, then get their noses bent out of shape because I didn't pay for it afterwards.
The problem with the Free Software movement (as opposed to the Open Source movement) is that it wants to replace proprietary software development with guiltware. Geez, walking through the dot.org pavillion is like trying to watch PBS during pledge week.
If you don't want people freeloading, don't give out freebies.
Just a guess - you don't like rich people. Now ask yourself why anyone would tip a paperboy who hates them? Gee, I'll bet you that missing ten dollar tip right now that you deliberately gave them lousy service and it got worse everytime they didn't tip you.
Not having any of those particular Caldera CD's you're talking about, I can only go by what is on the Caldera website. Indeed, they have the source code for all GPL packages available, as well as stating so in their distro license. It took me about two minutes to find this.
The main problem with the FSF and why people don't donate as much as you'd like, is because the FSF is a *political* organization.
It's no wonder that corporations are not contributing to a foundation whose goals are a complete rewrite of the software industry. Why should a CEO pay them any heed when he's told to go wait on tables instead of selling software? Why should an industry based on software as a product donate to an organization that demands software not be owned?
Perhaps they're smart enough to realize that donating to the FSF will not advance Free Software, rather it will work towards eliminating all other Free Software in favor of a particular brand of Free Software known as GNU. They have ample justification in worrying that they donations will be used to fight other Free Software projects, like tcl and kde.
Taking your shell script analogy further, think of Nautilus or Konqueror as a shell. Then the component model makes sense. Konqueror does just one thing, and it does it well: it browses. It doesn't matter if I browse a file system, an ftp site or a web page. I'm still browsing. I'm still browsing in exactly the same way.
Keeping everything small in the Unix model only makes sense if you're going to *USE* them. And you use them by putting them together with redirection, pipes, tees or scripts. That design philosophy can be restated as "componentize". That's exactly what konqueror is.
In the current Linux Magazine, Dave Whittinger has a piece that takes a very controversial stand. And it has bearing on the issue at hand.
He says, in order for Linux to succeed on the desktop, stuff like Eazel has to happen. However, he also says that either KDE or Gnome has to go. Developers have to band together and concentrate on one GUI library. He told distros to pick one or the other desktop and make it the standard.
Now, the presence of a couple dozen different window managers, a couple dozen different file managers, a dozen widget libraries, and half a dozen desktops is way to much for a newbie to deal with. However, paring all this down to just ONE choice is the wrong way to go (let alone being completely unrealistic). It also ignores the fact that Gnome, GTK+, KDE and Qt are *NOT* for Linux. They are for X, and that means all of Unix, plus OS/2 and any other OS that has an X port.
Many GTK+ developers abhor Qt and will never ever use it. And vice versa. Ditto for Gnome and KDE. I know people that will switch back to fvwm rather than *use* KDE. There are a few ecumenical souls out there who actually support both Qt and GTK+ interfaces, but they are rare.
But Dave is correct about some things. It confusing even for experts when every other application has its own inteface. And every distro that is even vaguely geared towards newbies needs to pick a default desktop and leave the alternates on CD #2. And developers need to have good reasons before they start duplicating applications. Just saying "it's like kfoo but for gnome" isn't good enough.
Although fifty or sixty standards are too much, I believe that Linux/BSD/Unix/X is big enough for two desktops and two widget libraries. But those desktops are going to have to learn how to work together smoothly.
Then keep your file windows small and your browser windows large. Nobody's stopping you. No one's forcing you to type an internet URL in you file manager.
That's just the window manager. It's not Gnome or Nautilus.
Cool. Now check out Konqueror in action...
http://www.mosfet.org/kde2action/
"If you installed with RPM or the Debian package manager, you still have application-created data lying around."
I am unaware of any OS that deletes user generated files when the application is removed. Think about this and you'll realize what a Bad Thing that would be. Maybe when you uninstall a program you want to get rid of all your work as well, but some people don't.
"Can you uninstall programs with make uninstall?"
Yes. Just type make uninstall.
"Ports seems like a very ad hoc system, which isn't a great way to ensure system integrity."
From what I can understand listening to people who know, it's much more robust than rpm but not quite as robust as apt. It's more than just a set of makefiles. It keeps track of what's installed, what they're dependent on, etc.
I have to agree. I found the ports collection to be very easy to use. In fact, the FreeBSD packages are merely precompiled ports.
One caveat, however. The purpose of ports is to allow painless compilation on FreeBSD. Since every FreeBSD is like the next, the patches and configurations work without a hitch. But how will a ports work under Linux when there are so many different distributions?
I can't even get some configure scripts to run to completion on some distros. How in the world will ports work when every distro wants to do their own thing? Will every distro have to maintain their own ports collection?
What we need long before we need ports, or the articles universal package manager, is a standard Linux. When the LSB is done, then we can start getting stuff to work properly.
Oh stop it! We want to believe this story. We want to believe that we are doomed. We want to believe that we are powerless. Stop introducing facts into the topic.
As self-contradictory as this is, I'll stab at it anyway. Reverse engineering is not illegal. And, you don't have to agree to the license to reverse engineer something.
But if the license says you can't reverse-engineer, then you are breaking the license if you do so. Now, different countries have different laws regarding whether a license can forbid reverse-engineering or not. I have no idea what laws Norway has on this. I can only assume that they are much more severe than in the US, since Johannsen was *arrested* and *jailed*. The same thing in the US would merit only a subpeona to a civil trial.
Be that as it may, I once argued that the wording of the GPL was not identical to how people used it. I got a stern reply from GNU that no matter what the GPL or the law said, ignoring the wishes of the author was extreme rudeness. In the case of DeCSS, Johannsen exercised extreme rudeness by reverse engineering DeCSS when he knew full well that the MPAA did not want him to do so.
About your point with QT... I believe that would all depend on how you interfaced with DeCSS. If you linked to some GPL'd libraries, then you'd be in big trouble. However, if you used a fork or a pipe...then you'd probably be ok. (IANAL)
RMS concurs for the most part. But that's beside the point. What if the GPL license were violated? What if I did statically or dynamically link DeCSS with Qt? What if, GNU forbid, I actually included DeCSS code in a non-GPL application? Why are we spending so much energy condemning the MPAA for trying to enforce their license when we would be the first to enforce a GPL violation?
Is it just because the MPAA is a corporation? Just because they are big? Just because they are not part of the tribe? What if the DVD encryptions were licensed from a small mom-and-pop shop instead? Would we condemn them for filing a lawsuit on Johannsen? If we would defend him in such a case, would we also defend the MPAA if they did exactly the same thing?
We are spending way too much time bad mouthing corporations, and not nearly enough time trying to get the DMCA repealed.
Then why don't use use the licensed software you already have?
The problem is not the licensing, the problem is that someone violated the CVD license by reverse engineering the decryption. The same people who are condemning the MPAA would be the first ones to call for lawsuit if I distributed a Qt front-end to the GPLd DeCSS.
"What about the arrest of Jon Johansen, the Norwegian teenager partly responsible for DeCSS: did the MPAA have anything to do with it?
That was done by Norwegian prosecutors. We were not involved in that.
And your reply to the prosecutor who said they did it at your request would be?"
Ummm...
Ooh! Did I miss some big story about the Norwegians claiming that the MPAA told them to make the arrest? Why wasn't it on Slashdot? Will the Norwegians next open an embassy in Hollywood? Will Janet Reno prosecute anyone making a Qt front-end to DeCSS? Will Bill Clinton admit that he used Chinese political donations as a means to launder AOL/Time/Warner payoffs?
"Big corporations also mean less and less innovation, less creativity. Bad. Very, very bad."
:-)
Then that leaves more room for everyone else to be innovative and creative
Where do you think Linux came from? At a time when the 386 was utterly dominated by Microsoft along came Linus Torvalds and thousands of other little guys all across the internet doing creative and innovative work. Ditto for BSD and GNU who made quality software a standard. Ditto for the KDE and Gnome teams making usable desktops and office suites. Ditto for the guys merely using Linux who are making hardware manufacturers open up their specs. Thanks to them, Microsoft once more has to compete on the basis of its products and not on its size.
If you stop reading the economic textbooks where it talks about monopolies taking over a market, and think that's all there is, you fail to learn that they inevitably implode through their sheer size. No monopoly can ever make the bold and and sometimes rash decisions that startups make every day. When you're a megamultinational corporation, there's no way you're going to risk the wrath of 500 billion dollars worth of shareholders cashing out because you took a market gamble.
"The problem is, frankly, that the corporations behind DVD are subverting governments in order to enforce their will on consumers. It ought to frighten people, it frightens me. Because if they win this based on the might and power of their money and organizations, then what new battles can they win in the future. I mean, think in terms of Soylent Green the big corporate types got the good food and the average Joe got Soylent Green or starved."
Yes, you're paranoid. Take a few steps back and reread what you just wrote. I've heard similar rants at John Birch conventsions! These sort of baseless, screwball and wacked-out aspersions have become all too common since the DeCSS affair.
No, we don't want multi-nationals making our laws for us! Sheesh! What you fail to realize, is that they CANNOT make laws for us! They have to get someone else, namely the government, to do it for them.
Tell you a story. Two corner newsstands in New York circa 1930. One of them believes in fair competition based on quality service and selection. The other wants to be the only newstand for blocks around. So the evil newstand hires the mafia to send Guido over to break the kneecaps of the good newstand's owner. A cub reporter finds out and writes an expose. People get indigant and go picket the evil newsstand, and eventually a court throws the evil owner in jail and it is out of business. Everybody happy, right? Wrong! The mafia and Guido are still out there. Nothing has been done about them. They're still breaking kneecaps and mugging boy scouts for pocket change. Soon, some other shady businessman will hire them to knock off his rivals, and so on, and so on, and so on. Nothing will ever change if you keep going after the crooked businessmen and ignore the mob.
No! We're trying to demonize the MPAA here! Stop using logic and facts, it only confuses the issue!
Next thing you know, you'll be claiming that DVDs aren't the only media storage format!
Question: "...However, recently, events have shown that duly elected Governments around the world can be dictated to and ordered around by "Big Corporations", who are accountable to no-one, including the market place."
Answer: "...I think its a responsibility of government to keep the Net and the Web as free and non-commercial as is possible. I don't believe Libertarians would share that view...If I understand them correctly, the Libertarians present a strong political rationale for keeping a space like the Net free from corporate or government interference."
No, Jon, you don't understand Libertarians at all, in fact, you barely understand the internet. (Geez! You're promoting your own book right here in the interview. How commercial can you get!) Libertarians are opposed to involuntary interactions between human beings. This places them against governments and criminals. If a corporation commits a crime (theft, fraud, etc), then a libertarian will be against them. Libertarians do NOT believe that money or making money is evil, nor do they believe the size of an organization has anything at all to do with morality.
Commerce, as long as it remains a voluntary interaction between two individuals or groups, is supported by libertarianism. The philosophy finds nothing wrong with commercial concerns.
But the question, and Jon's reply equating freedom with anti-commercialism, assume that commerce is involuntary. But no one is forced to be subscribed to AOL, to buy Time magazine or to watch Tiny Toons. If corporations really had to power to dictate terms to governments, then where are the laws mandating purchases? (I don't consider government mandated monopolies to be commercial concerns) Why isn't Chrysler sending police to my door when I buy a Ford? How come I am not being sued by ABC/CBS/NBC for not owning a television? Why has Redhat not indicted me for running Slackware?
Corporations can only wield government power if the government first gives it to them. It's extremely frustrating to see people attack the symptom and not the disease.
(Of course, Stacheldraht is not the only perpetrator in this recent spate of DoS shenanigans. However it was identified as one of the major cracks used)
From Dave Dittrich's paper on Stacheldraht , we find: "The Makefiles contain rules for Linux and Solaris, with the default being Linux (even though it appears that the code does not work very reliably on Linux). For the purposes of this analysis, all programs were compiled and run on Red Hat Linux 6.0 systems. As far as I am aware, the agent has been witnessed "in the wild" only on Solaris 2.x systems."
Hmmm. It seems that Linux is not the wide-open OS that the article makes it out to be. The rest of the paper also clearly illustrates that any OS with common networking utilities (including NT) is vulnerable to similar agents.
Mr. Dittrich's recommendation is: "The real defense is to make sure that *all* systems are kept up to date with security patches, unnecessary services are turned off, and competent system administrators are running and monitoring every Unix system on your network. (I'll hold my breath while you go make that happen, OK? ;)"
Funny, this sounds like that same old security mantra I've been hearing from day one! A more competent reporter would have attributed at least part of the blame to lax security policies.
This is absolutely unbelievable! You guys are so nuts you believe your own propaganda! You actually sound like left-wing John Birchers. What really scares me is the possibility that you might actually be old enough to vote...
"Yes if AOL is pissing you off you can go work for CNN. Oh wait a minute they are the same company maybe you can work for Time oops that wouln't work either."
Sheesh! Is your world so small that you can only find one corporation in it? Within walking distance of where I sit there are VA Linux, SGI, Microsoft, and Sun. There are also several dozen computer and internet related startups. And if I wanted to get out of computing, there are Alza and Acuson. Those poor sots working at AOL/Time/Warner's Netscape building down the street are hardly bound to their employer like a medieval serf.
"Oh yea the corps have first amendment rights granted to them by the Supreme Court so it follows that they MUST have second amendment rights too. You can bet your ass they are going to raise armies soon."
Are you actually imagining that a company would raise and arm their own army?!? Sir, either your brain has short circuited or you've been at the wacky-tabacky again. You scenario might make a good Tom Clancy novel, but a plausible occurance it is not. Remember, every one of their employees (who incidentally outnumber them) also have the same second amendment rights. Ooh! That's another difference between feudalism and employment. Here is the US, employees and employers have identical legal rights.