In what reality are private monopolies "good for the economy"?
The notion that the patent system is decent and necessary but somewhat out of control is totally bogus. It's working precisely as intended. Patent law was built by patent trolls, run by patent trolls, and exists thanks to patent trolls. Aka patent attorneys and speculators and companies with no other way to make a profit.
Mafia is right. Comparisons to slavery are right. "A limited slavery system is good for the economy". Hogwash. Abolition is the only cure for this parasite.
Hmm, that's an easy one. You bring troops from region A to fight in region B, those from B to C, and those from C to A. Has been done often, works nicely.
Your post is not accurate in any sense. The GPL exists to stop software written as an open collaboration being privatised and turned into close software. GPLv3 exists because people were cheating with GPLv2 software.
In a free market price of any product will drop by 50% every two years until it hits cabbage prices. Markets where the price remains high are being artificially constrained. Telecoms is a perfect example. Telcos go on about how expensive airspace is, but in fact it's patent pools that exclude competitors, and allow operators to charge their extortionate rates. If fuel cells got 4x cheaper in 10 years, they are in fact overpriced by 8 times (should have fallen 2^5 = 32 times in ten years). I'd be willing to bet any amount of money that it's patents that are doing the constraining here.
Yup. Don't know why your comment modded down. Whenever you see a promising area of technology stagnate and stop moving for 20 years, then pick up magically, it's patents.
The law is what Congress makes, and if they decide math is patentable, then it is.
Actually all patents are medieval hocus pocus. In no world does a monopoly on the market for an idea create wider value to society. Patents are, and have always been, a ruse to transfer wealth from the mass market to a few individuals.
There's only one solution, and that will come eventually, and that is to end all patents, period.
Let's start with your conclusion, "Canonical doesn't follow the arbitrary pattern I believe I've identified therefore I think it will fail". This isn't science, it's looking for evidence to support your (quite poor) theories.
You started by saying, "businesses that succeed using FOSS". This today covers 95% of successful businesses.
You've ignored the many FOSS-based businesses (those that make and distribute it, not just use it) such as IBM, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter, GitHub. None of these fit your "blessed three" yet they're the dominant model.
And you include "holding out a tin cup" as a successful business strategy. Name a single successful "business" that does this.
Let me explain how successful businesses *really* use FOSS. First, they find a market with incumbents paying too much for their software or spending too much making it. Then they build new FOSS stacks and products that attack these incumbents. They take their clients and charge them a fraction of the old prices. You can sell _anything_ like this, as long as the product has software as part of its critical supply chain.
They weren't selling the movies. They were putting them onto Bittorrent. This was more a political act than anything; certainly not a for-profit crime.
Hmm, that article suggests that our ancestors started in Asia and then continued evolving in Africa. So yes, we're all African, and also all Asian, and presumably all Pangean at the end of the day.
Actually it's a shame he cancelled because (a) any publicity can be good and (b) this now sets up the stage for hysterical attacks on the tech scene in general and (c) this is worse, not better, for 'diverse' speakers. What does it mean now to be a non-white or female speaker at a conference? That you're there because the organizers wanted some token diversity? Insurance?
"Hi, I'm the diversity insurance speaker. Name's Token. Here's my card."
To map "diversity" to skin color is superficial and reflects the bias of the viewer more than anything. As a white male programmer I've more in common with other male programmers, no matter what their color, than with male football players, male drug dealers, male prostitutes, male athletes. Skin color has literally nothing to do with it. It's cosmetics.
Gender arguably is more relevant but seriously... there is no bias against women participating in free software projects. It's literally a sport open to anyone, with as few barriers as you can imagine. Age, gender, skin color, origin, perhaps the only filter that reduces diversity is the need for reasonably fluent English.
And still, the number of women in our communities is extremely low. That means the detailed technical world of software appeals to fewer women than it does to men. That's not a problem, it's just a fact, and easily observable. It would be offensive to choose women speakers just for their gender. Tokenism is a nasty form of discrimination. At the same time it would be offensive to refuse people on any basis except their work. I don't think that was the accusation here.
Diversity simply means, different points of view, perspectives, and opinions within the group. It does not mean creating a Star Trek experience.
Then again speaking as a white male it's quite likely that my perception of this is totally biased.
Perhaps his notes are of the form, "this passage works effectively on visiting missionaries if read in an thick Irish accent", or "never use this argument with a Jesuit unless you are prepared to (see pp 575.576)".
Sigh. I'm not sure whether you're misguided or a troll. Let's assume you're sincere. Who wrote the EUPL and with what motives? It's a rhetorical question, don't answer. Just understand that the biggest long term threat to any free software community is regulatory capture. Now compare the EU against the FSF and ask, which is more resistant to capture over the next decades? That by itself should be a clear reason to not use the EUPL or any other license produced by bodies that aren't extraordinarily independent and proven to be so.
Second, you're probably going to explain how Europe is the center of the world, etc. It's not. It's not even a continent.
Third, the GPL is a standard. That means lawyers around the world know it, and it interoperates. It's not about a better or worse license but about standards. All the EUPL can do is fragment the community (which starts to answer my first question, who wrote it and why. You are really too trusting.)
Forth, translations? http://www.gnu.org/licenses/translations.html lists Armenian, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, French, Galician, German, Italian, Serbian, Slovak. I'm sure it will grow to much much more than 22. And note "Chinese". This actually covers 20% of the world's population, if that is the criteria you want to argue with.
Lastly, and really, do I have to say this, your "anglocentrism" criticism is terrible, trollish, pointless. Are you just looking to annoy people? Or are you just entirely ignorant? I was president of the FFII at the time we contributed parts of the GPLv3 patent policy, and I can tell you formally, the GPLv3 was a global project, with input from hundreds of people around the world.
Whether you "approve" or not is irrelevant. But please, get your facts right before you act offended when people insult you.
Thanks for the information... very useful. I wish I had mod points. Yes, my point is about fraudulent use of infected fresh water fish in cheaper sushi restaurants run by non-Japanese kitchens (which in my experience is common), combined with perhaps lower tolerance of western gene pools to the parasite's effects. Sorry if my description of its intentions were fuzzy; I'm basing it off articles like http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/science/2009/10/how-a-liver-fluke-causes-cancer/. If there's an arms race, clearly the human resistance is happening locally, not globally. You see my point.
I'm fine myself, survived a wicked Whipple resection and chemotherapy. I'm a little concerned though that the risk to others isn't wider known; given how simple it should be to detect liver fluke in imported fish samples, and cure infections when found, balanced against the cost of one case of CCA.
Well, there is in fact a real threat here. A common parasite in fresh water fish in tropical countries is the liver fluke, a worm that lives part of its cycle in the human gut and is responsible, in cases, for cholangiocarcinoma, cancer of the bile duct. The worm attaches near the bile duct and produces chemicals that create cancer so it can eat the by-products. Nice little beast. It's a slow developing cancer that kills suddenly because it has no symptoms until it reaches a late stage. It's one of the commoner reasons for death among 50-year old males in countries where it's endemic.
One assumes there's more resistance in populations that have been exposed to this parasite for thousands of years. Women suffer much less from bile duct cancer than men, so there's variation in individual vulnerability. But as Chinese fish is exported, and ends up in places like cheap sushi bars in Birmingham, the parasite ends up in thousands, perhaps millions of people who have little resistance.
Attack of the Killer Sushi.
I should know, I got bile duct cancer a year or two ago and since there were no antecedents in my family, this seemed the most likely cause.
If we started feeding fish on pig feces, it's a slippery slope (sorry!) to feeding them human feces.
Good news is a yearly de-worming should be sufficient to prevent bile-duct cancer, if anyone cared about this.
Note that the Data Retention Directive was adopted in 2005 mostly due to pressure from the UK Labour government. Initially it was claimed to be anti-terrorist; those claims were then amended to anti-crime and anti-paedophile.
It's most probably aimed at quelling the civil disturbances that some authorities see as an inevitable part of our chaotic post-carbon future.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a modest proposal for building a fully decentralized spyproof web: http://hintjens.com/blog:66
In what reality are private monopolies "good for the economy"?
The notion that the patent system is decent and necessary but somewhat out of control is totally bogus. It's working precisely as intended. Patent law was built by patent trolls, run by patent trolls, and exists thanks to patent trolls. Aka patent attorneys and speculators and companies with no other way to make a profit.
Mafia is right. Comparisons to slavery are right. "A limited slavery system is good for the economy". Hogwash. Abolition is the only cure for this parasite.
How about Curve25519 and NaCl?
Hmm, that's an easy one. You bring troops from region A to fight in region B, those from B to C, and those from C to A. Has been done often, works nicely.
Your post is not accurate in any sense. The GPL exists to stop software written as an open collaboration being privatised and turned into close software. GPLv3 exists because people were cheating with GPLv2 software.
Site is down before first comment. Running on a DART-4460 maybe?
The original work can't be privatised but derived works can be, and the original can be lost or made inaccessible.
Public domain doesn't guarantee access. For that you need a remixing license like cc-by-sa or GPL.
"most big companies avoid GPLv3 like the plague"... [citation needed]. This simply isn't true. A few very specific large firms do, Apple being one.
This is for the core engine, GNU/Linux and other platforms. I've used OpenShot and loved it, have pledged $250.
It's great to see KickStarter used for open source like this.
In a free market price of any product will drop by 50% every two years until it hits cabbage prices. Markets where the price remains high are being artificially constrained. Telecoms is a perfect example. Telcos go on about how expensive airspace is, but in fact it's patent pools that exclude competitors, and allow operators to charge their extortionate rates. If fuel cells got 4x cheaper in 10 years, they are in fact overpriced by 8 times (should have fallen 2^5 = 32 times in ten years). I'd be willing to bet any amount of money that it's patents that are doing the constraining here.
Yup. Don't know why your comment modded down. Whenever you see a promising area of technology stagnate and stop moving for 20 years, then pick up magically, it's patents.
The law is what Congress makes, and if they decide math is patentable, then it is.
Actually all patents are medieval hocus pocus. In no world does a monopoly on the market for an idea create wider value to society. Patents are, and have always been, a ruse to transfer wealth from the mass market to a few individuals.
There's only one solution, and that will come eventually, and that is to end all patents, period.
So much wrongness.
Let's start with your conclusion, "Canonical doesn't follow the arbitrary pattern I believe I've identified therefore I think it will fail". This isn't science, it's looking for evidence to support your (quite poor) theories.
You started by saying, "businesses that succeed using FOSS". This today covers 95% of successful businesses.
You've ignored the many FOSS-based businesses (those that make and distribute it, not just use it) such as IBM, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter, GitHub. None of these fit your "blessed three" yet they're the dominant model.
And you include "holding out a tin cup" as a successful business strategy. Name a single successful "business" that does this.
Let me explain how successful businesses *really* use FOSS. First, they find a market with incumbents paying too much for their software or spending too much making it. Then they build new FOSS stacks and products that attack these incumbents. They take their clients and charge them a fraction of the old prices. You can sell _anything_ like this, as long as the product has software as part of its critical supply chain.
They weren't selling the movies. They were putting them onto Bittorrent. This was more a political act than anything; certainly not a for-profit crime.
SVN repo for project is empty. Site has no contact address. Reported site for abuse.
Hmm, that article suggests that our ancestors started in Asia and then continued evolving in Africa. So yes, we're all African, and also all Asian, and presumably all Pangean at the end of the day.
Actually it's a shame he cancelled because (a) any publicity can be good and (b) this now sets up the stage for hysterical attacks on the tech scene in general and (c) this is worse, not better, for 'diverse' speakers. What does it mean now to be a non-white or female speaker at a conference? That you're there because the organizers wanted some token diversity? Insurance?
"Hi, I'm the diversity insurance speaker. Name's Token. Here's my card."
To map "diversity" to skin color is superficial and reflects the bias of the viewer more than anything. As a white male programmer I've more in common with other male programmers, no matter what their color, than with male football players, male drug dealers, male prostitutes, male athletes. Skin color has literally nothing to do with it. It's cosmetics.
Gender arguably is more relevant but seriously... there is no bias against women participating in free software projects. It's literally a sport open to anyone, with as few barriers as you can imagine. Age, gender, skin color, origin, perhaps the only filter that reduces diversity is the need for reasonably fluent English.
And still, the number of women in our communities is extremely low. That means the detailed technical world of software appeals to fewer women than it does to men. That's not a problem, it's just a fact, and easily observable. It would be offensive to choose women speakers just for their gender. Tokenism is a nasty form of discrimination. At the same time it would be offensive to refuse people on any basis except their work. I don't think that was the accusation here.
Diversity simply means, different points of view, perspectives, and opinions within the group. It does not mean creating a Star Trek experience.
Then again speaking as a white male it's quite likely that my perception of this is totally biased.
Perhaps his notes are of the form, "this passage works effectively on visiting missionaries if read in an thick Irish accent", or "never use this argument with a Jesuit unless you are prepared to (see pp 575.576)".
Sigh. I'm not sure whether you're misguided or a troll. Let's assume you're sincere. Who wrote the EUPL and with what motives? It's a rhetorical question, don't answer. Just understand that the biggest long term threat to any free software community is regulatory capture. Now compare the EU against the FSF and ask, which is more resistant to capture over the next decades? That by itself should be a clear reason to not use the EUPL or any other license produced by bodies that aren't extraordinarily independent and proven to be so.
Second, you're probably going to explain how Europe is the center of the world, etc. It's not. It's not even a continent.
Third, the GPL is a standard. That means lawyers around the world know it, and it interoperates. It's not about a better or worse license but about standards. All the EUPL can do is fragment the community (which starts to answer my first question, who wrote it and why. You are really too trusting.)
Forth, translations? http://www.gnu.org/licenses/translations.html lists Armenian, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, French, Galician, German, Italian, Serbian, Slovak. I'm sure it will grow to much much more than 22. And note "Chinese". This actually covers 20% of the world's population, if that is the criteria you want to argue with.
Lastly, and really, do I have to say this, your "anglocentrism" criticism is terrible, trollish, pointless. Are you just looking to annoy people? Or are you just entirely ignorant? I was president of the FFII at the time we contributed parts of the GPLv3 patent policy, and I can tell you formally, the GPLv3 was a global project, with input from hundreds of people around the world.
Whether you "approve" or not is irrelevant. But please, get your facts right before you act offended when people insult you.
Thanks for the information... very useful. I wish I had mod points. Yes, my point is about fraudulent use of infected fresh water fish in cheaper sushi restaurants run by non-Japanese kitchens (which in my experience is common), combined with perhaps lower tolerance of western gene pools to the parasite's effects. Sorry if my description of its intentions were fuzzy; I'm basing it off articles like http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/science/2009/10/how-a-liver-fluke-causes-cancer/. If there's an arms race, clearly the human resistance is happening locally, not globally. You see my point.
I'm fine myself, survived a wicked Whipple resection and chemotherapy. I'm a little concerned though that the risk to others isn't wider known; given how simple it should be to detect liver fluke in imported fish samples, and cure infections when found, balanced against the cost of one case of CCA.
Well, there is in fact a real threat here. A common parasite in fresh water fish in tropical countries is the liver fluke, a worm that lives part of its cycle in the human gut and is responsible, in cases, for cholangiocarcinoma, cancer of the bile duct. The worm attaches near the bile duct and produces chemicals that create cancer so it can eat the by-products. Nice little beast. It's a slow developing cancer that kills suddenly because it has no symptoms until it reaches a late stage. It's one of the commoner reasons for death among 50-year old males in countries where it's endemic.
One assumes there's more resistance in populations that have been exposed to this parasite for thousands of years. Women suffer much less from bile duct cancer than men, so there's variation in individual vulnerability. But as Chinese fish is exported, and ends up in places like cheap sushi bars in Birmingham, the parasite ends up in thousands, perhaps millions of people who have little resistance.
Attack of the Killer Sushi.
I should know, I got bile duct cancer a year or two ago and since there were no antecedents in my family, this seemed the most likely cause.
If we started feeding fish on pig feces, it's a slippery slope (sorry!) to feeding them human feces.
Good news is a yearly de-worming should be sufficient to prevent bile-duct cancer, if anyone cared about this.
If you're better at smaller focused tasks, learn Android development, and team up with someone with good graphics skills.
If you're better at the big picture, learn 0MQ and sell yourself as an architect.
Note that the Data Retention Directive was adopted in 2005 mostly due to pressure from the UK Labour government. Initially it was claimed to be anti-terrorist; those claims were then amended to anti-crime and anti-paedophile.
It's most probably aimed at quelling the civil disturbances that some authorities see as an inevitable part of our chaotic post-carbon future.
It's been said already:
"English is the Linux of human languages. Open source, fully remixable, endlessly rich. (June 2011, by Pieter Hintjens)"