Copyright prevents you from doing things with GPL'd works, not the GPL. The GPL gives you rights you wouldn't have otherwise had.
You're assuming one particular unspecified notion of copyright. No jurisdiction takes it to mean that every single right over some work is reserved to you. For example, the US has the notion of fair use: this is a right you get whether the copyright holder thinks you should have it or not. Perhaps someone believes that if you attempt to subvert [system] by trying to licence your work under the GPL then you forfeit many more protections.
The US is going broke because we are sufficiently technologically advanced not to need 40+ hour work weeks to the age of 60-65 (and could instead aim for 4 day weeks to 70+); because asymmetric tax and worker protections make it favourable to offshore; because the modern education and propaganda/advertising systems breed dependent consuming idiots; and because of the amount of money funneled by government to private corporations - mostly through wars from which those corporations benefit.
Maintaining or increasing poverty among the weak won't solve any problem at all, except that of satisfying sadists and fascists.
Your ethical system could define certain rights which cannot much be added to and/or taken away from by the wording of a licence.
For example, you may believe that the GPL is "too communist" and as such anyone who attempts to licence their work under that licence should be considered to have released it into the public domain. Perhaps you believe so strongly that the GPL is unethical that you consider it necessary to break the GPL's terms so as to discourage use of the GPL.
Think of how civil disobedience works. Now imagine that not everyone who is being civilly disobedient happens to agree with your beliefs.
Then don't redistribute software that is GPL-licensed.
Why is it not ethical to disobey a licence you consider unethical? What if I told you now that by reading beyond this line of this post you're agreeing to send me $10,000? Voluntary; full disclosure; informed consent. Stop reading now if you disagree.
What if you consider that might makes right?
Then the courts will properly and forcefully correct you
Maybe; maybe not. What if you think that you can get the courts to favour you?
A shareholder on the other hand MADE a contribution to your company as an investment.
Err, the shareholder assumes some proportion of ownership of the company (in the weird sense which applies to shareholders). The shareholder is only contributing in the sense that he's contributing to himself. And the company doesn't benefit at all from what happens on the secondary market, even though it's what happens there which usually determines how a company must behave.
and ARE risking something,
Yes, just as a leech risks being turned on by its host.
in many cases more than the people making the decisions.
That's fairly subjective. Risking, say, $10M of a $100M portfolio isn't the same as some guy risking his $100k job when he has no other source of income. But a well-paid executive of an established corporation is often risking (and doing) very little, yes.
Once you come down from whatever silly college professor induced hippie thought pattern you got going on in there,
I'd love to know where I'd got a "silly college professor induced hippie thought pattern" out of a mostly pure mathematics education. Perhaps I have a dangerous love for learning and achievement for their own sakes?
you might be able to understand that making money is not a bad thing in and of itself.
Making money as a means to an end might be OK - it's just a method of allocating the responsibility of resource allocation to those who have by some metric shown themselves to be good allocators. IOW, an entrepreneurial community can be productive. But the love of money itself, while not "the root of all evil", is quite silly.
Ellison and B/P/S form two sides of the same coin, being corporations which have grown quickly and absurdly massive on the business of data gathering and mining. In the former case the link with government work was well-known; in the latter case it's met with cries of HURR CONSPIRACY THEORIST because we trust the government these days not to abuse any large repository of data and try really hard to ignore evidence.
But the individual people concerned are egomaniacal dicks, and that acts against their favour, which in turn acts in our favour.
Oracle has had decades of experience at being a productive prick. Unlike Ballmer, Ellison is not an accountant upgraded beyond his station. If there's someone who will put up a determined fight to cut Google down to size and hinder Brin and Page's journeys into everyone's lives, it's him. If the option was available, they'd all be against the wall - but a second best is to have them squabbling with each other. Their egos are, I think, too great for them to engage in the usual cooperation-under-a-thin-veil-of-competition of large corporations.
(Soviet information-gathering was evil because that time round your family wasn't the one which got to protect its own privacy while taking everyone else's, right Sergei?)
If that weren't the case then the notion of the modern shareholder would be even more one-sided. If I stop paying my mortgage for my negative equity house then I lose my house and the money I put into it.
Private equity leeches are endemic partly because they get to socialise the losses. If they had to use their assets to pay for the debts created each time they fucked up another firm then they would be forced to behave either on a smaller scale or in the long term interest of the companies they own. But they get to play the "it's my property except when I'm losing" card, forcing creditors to take the hit.
Capitalism in any nation dies at the bringing into law of the Ltd/LLC/corporation/whatever form it appears in.
(N.B. Post not intended to speak for or against capitalism. Just to point out that limiting liability implies not-capitalism and results in plutarchy. You can't only make the worker responsible for himself: you have to make the financier responsible too.)
Ownership implies responsibility. Shareholders are not responsible for debt so they are not owners, just leeches.
Private equity firms are the Gekkoesque scourge of modern capitalism, confusing the passion of success in producing something you love (see Hewlett, Packard, Olsen et al.) with the passion of making money because the rules let you.
FWIW, I had a battle with my old university a few years ago re the e-mail example I mentioned - they'd decided that the DPA meant that they would copy-paste chunks of text written about others in certain e-mail archives if a SAR came up. I was not a happy bunny and whined loudly.
Then I thought about it a bit and realised that the DPA effectively says that you must release the substance of what has been said about that person. There are only two (legitimate) ways of doing this: (i) releasing exactly what was said; (ii) rewording it without actually changing any of the meaning of what was said. But (ii) is merely an effort-wasting version of (i). So we have the options of an easy (i), a difficult (ii), or breaking the law (perhaps by appearing to do (ii) but not actually doing it) - it's no wonder many businesses simply send you copies of database entries / communications.
The above supports my refutation of your original point that communications were to be disclosed.
I asserted that "any individual has the right to make a subject access request to any firm for all communications concerning him personally". Perhaps you read that as "right to make a request for all communications". What I actually said was the right to make an SAR. Now:
A subject access request can, if you wish, apply to all communications concerning you;
The SAR entitles you to a copy of all personal data within those communications;
As the above link demonstrates, the definition of "personal data" is fairly broad, including, "any expression of opinion about the individual and any indication of the intentions of the data controller or any other person in respect of the individual."
So, while you don't have the right to the full and exact wording of a whole document containing personal data, you have the right to the substance of all personal data within the document. This is obviously open to abuse in practice, but the principle is clear.
This supports my original point about being interested not being reason enough for a valid SAR.
Erm, of course you can't ask for arbitrary information stored by some firm just because they're interested - but you can ask for all personal information (in the sense covered by the DPA) just because you're interested.
New model of society: govt pays ppl a basic income and govt and biz hold challenges to stimulate individuals to create and innovate and provide services like bug-finding without the need to work for a corporation.
Read Thomas Paine on the basic income guarantee and Thomas Jefferson on copyright.
Your ideas are as old as the USA, thus dangerously close to revolutionary in today's environment.
In particular, you don't have to provide a good reason beyond "the law says I can have this information". (You may need to provide a good reason to ask them to destroy certain types of data held about you, e.g. to declare that the processing is causing you distress.) Nor do you get "only the data itself": the logic of any automated decision-making must be explained if requested and, per the link, "the purposes for processing the information and who the organisation is sharing the information with" must also be provided.
There are, of course, examples of data processing where the law must be interpreted to decide whether records must be released. For example, if two employees were to pass e-mail between each other about you in which they discussed your eligibility for something, would a SAR require you to disclose archives of those e-mails?
The right to privacy is the right not to have intrusion into one's private life. It's certainly not the right for you to protect information about everything you say/do from everyone.
Really? So simply because they have over X amount of dollars you feel they should have no right to privacy? I'm sure in your role as mother, father, son, daughter, manager, supervisor or something you also make decisions that impact others. So, we can have all your emails, personal files and thoughts too, right? It's for the benefit of society at large!
In proportion. My mother/father/son/daughter/underlings should certainly have access to my communications where the communication has an impact on them. UK data protection law (see also EU relatives) considers this principle in the case of relationship between business and the individual: any individual has the right to make a subject access request to any firm for all communications concerning him personally (with only specific exceptions for law enforcement, etc.).
Not sure where you got the "thoughts" and "personal files" strawmen from. Neither are communications with others.
I think his point was that you've chosen an arbitrary amount.
I've chosen the most appropriate starting place.
There are people with a lot of power who are not on that list,
Yes, but let's start with those with the most power.
and there are people on that list who are not much involved in politics
Everything is politics. The extent to which you are involved in politics correlates with the amount of power you have.
You need to show why the people on that list are lesser citizens than yourself, deserving of fewer rights.
We all have the right to secrecy in matters of little consequence to others. None of us have the right to secrecy when making decisions which have the potential for great impact on others. A right doesn't necessarily affect each person equally: property law can only act to restrict the man without property, for example - such laws are of no benefit to the man yet they still apply to him because they are considered to benefit society at large. This is the basis for all law.
No. The privilegium to publish in much of Europe was initially centrally controlled by the Holy Roman Empire - it took centuries to reach a privately controlled rather than government-regulated presses. Most national telecoms providers were owned by the people until taken from them in the great dismantling of society which occurred in the '80s. During the same period we also saw the break-up of union influence in the presses (see Battle of Wapping) which finally brought the major presses in the UK into outright private corporation control.
Slashdot Mirror
Copyright prevents you from doing things with GPL'd works, not the GPL. The GPL gives you rights you wouldn't have otherwise had.
You're assuming one particular unspecified notion of copyright. No jurisdiction takes it to mean that every single right over some work is reserved to you. For example, the US has the notion of fair use: this is a right you get whether the copyright holder thinks you should have it or not. Perhaps someone believes that if you attempt to subvert [system] by trying to licence your work under the GPL then you forfeit many more protections.
The US is going broke because we are sufficiently technologically advanced not to need 40+ hour work weeks to the age of 60-65 (and could instead aim for 4 day weeks to 70+); because asymmetric tax and worker protections make it favourable to offshore; because the modern education and propaganda/advertising systems breed dependent consuming idiots; and because of the amount of money funneled by government to private corporations - mostly through wars from which those corporations benefit.
Maintaining or increasing poverty among the weak won't solve any problem at all, except that of satisfying sadists and fascists.
Your ethical system could define certain rights which cannot much be added to and/or taken away from by the wording of a licence.
For example, you may believe that the GPL is "too communist" and as such anyone who attempts to licence their work under that licence should be considered to have released it into the public domain. Perhaps you believe so strongly that the GPL is unethical that you consider it necessary to break the GPL's terms so as to discourage use of the GPL.
Think of how civil disobedience works. Now imagine that not everyone who is being civilly disobedient happens to agree with your beliefs.
DickBreath,
The law does not define ethics.
What if you consider the GPL unethical?
Then don't redistribute software that is GPL-licensed.
Why is it not ethical to disobey a licence you consider unethical? What if I told you now that by reading beyond this line of this post you're agreeing to send me $10,000? Voluntary; full disclosure; informed consent. Stop reading now if you disagree.
What if you consider that might makes right?
Then the courts will properly and forcefully correct you
Maybe; maybe not. What if you think that you can get the courts to favour you?
What if you consider the GPL unethical?
What if you consider that might makes right?
To imply that not following a software licence is unethical per se suggests a worrying level of conformity.
A shareholder on the other hand MADE a contribution to your company as an investment.
Err, the shareholder assumes some proportion of ownership of the company (in the weird sense which applies to shareholders). The shareholder is only contributing in the sense that he's contributing to himself. And the company doesn't benefit at all from what happens on the secondary market, even though it's what happens there which usually determines how a company must behave.
and ARE risking something,
Yes, just as a leech risks being turned on by its host.
in many cases more than the people making the decisions.
That's fairly subjective. Risking, say, $10M of a $100M portfolio isn't the same as some guy risking his $100k job when he has no other source of income. But a well-paid executive of an established corporation is often risking (and doing) very little, yes.
Once you come down from whatever silly college professor induced hippie thought pattern you got going on in there,
I'd love to know where I'd got a "silly college professor induced hippie thought pattern" out of a mostly pure mathematics education. Perhaps I have a dangerous love for learning and achievement for their own sakes?
you might be able to understand that making money is not a bad thing in and of itself.
Making money as a means to an end might be OK - it's just a method of allocating the responsibility of resource allocation to those who have by some metric shown themselves to be good allocators. IOW, an entrepreneurial community can be productive. But the love of money itself, while not "the root of all evil", is quite silly.
ethically and intellectually challenged.
No. Their ethics may conflict with yours and nothing can be said about their intelligence.
Ellison and B/P/S form two sides of the same coin, being corporations which have grown quickly and absurdly massive on the business of data gathering and mining. In the former case the link with government work was well-known; in the latter case it's met with cries of HURR CONSPIRACY THEORIST because we trust the government these days not to abuse any large repository of data and try really hard to ignore evidence.
But the individual people concerned are egomaniacal dicks, and that acts against their favour, which in turn acts in our favour.
Oracle has had decades of experience at being a productive prick. Unlike Ballmer, Ellison is not an accountant upgraded beyond his station. If there's someone who will put up a determined fight to cut Google down to size and hinder Brin and Page's journeys into everyone's lives, it's him. If the option was available, they'd all be against the wall - but a second best is to have them squabbling with each other. Their egos are, I think, too great for them to engage in the usual cooperation-under-a-thin-veil-of-competition of large corporations.
(Soviet information-gathering was evil because that time round your family wasn't the one which got to protect its own privacy while taking everyone else's, right Sergei?)
If that weren't the case then the notion of the modern shareholder would be even more one-sided. If I stop paying my mortgage for my negative equity house then I lose my house and the money I put into it.
Private equity leeches are endemic partly because they get to socialise the losses. If they had to use their assets to pay for the debts created each time they fucked up another firm then they would be forced to behave either on a smaller scale or in the long term interest of the companies they own. But they get to play the "it's my property except when I'm losing" card, forcing creditors to take the hit.
Capitalism in any nation dies at the bringing into law of the Ltd/LLC/corporation/whatever form it appears in.
(N.B. Post not intended to speak for or against capitalism. Just to point out that limiting liability implies not-capitalism and results in plutarchy. You can't only make the worker responsible for himself: you have to make the financier responsible too.)
Ownership implies responsibility. Shareholders are not responsible for debt so they are not owners, just leeches.
Private equity firms are the Gekkoesque scourge of modern capitalism, confusing the passion of success in producing something you love (see Hewlett, Packard, Olsen et al.) with the passion of making money because the rules let you.
FWIW, I had a battle with my old university a few years ago re the e-mail example I mentioned - they'd decided that the DPA meant that they would copy-paste chunks of text written about others in certain e-mail archives if a SAR came up. I was not a happy bunny and whined loudly.
Then I thought about it a bit and realised that the DPA effectively says that you must release the substance of what has been said about that person. There are only two (legitimate) ways of doing this: (i) releasing exactly what was said; (ii) rewording it without actually changing any of the meaning of what was said. But (ii) is merely an effort-wasting version of (i). So we have the options of an easy (i), a difficult (ii), or breaking the law (perhaps by appearing to do (ii) but not actually doing it) - it's no wonder many businesses simply send you copies of database entries / communications.
The above supports my refutation of your original point that communications were to be disclosed.
I asserted that "any individual has the right to make a subject access request to any firm for all communications concerning him personally". Perhaps you read that as "right to make a request for all communications". What I actually said was the right to make an SAR. Now:
So, while you don't have the right to the full and exact wording of a whole document containing personal data, you have the right to the substance of all personal data within the document. This is obviously open to abuse in practice, but the principle is clear.
This supports my original point about being interested not being reason enough for a valid SAR.
Erm, of course you can't ask for arbitrary information stored by some firm just because they're interested - but you can ask for all personal information (in the sense covered by the DPA) just because you're interested.
New model of society: govt pays ppl a basic income and govt and biz hold challenges to stimulate individuals to create and innovate and provide services like bug-finding without the need to work for a corporation.
Read Thomas Paine on the basic income guarantee and Thomas Jefferson on copyright.
Your ideas are as old as the USA, thus dangerously close to revolutionary in today's environment.
not done as an act of warfare, it was done for pure profit motive.
But you repeat yourself.
I think you underestimate the power of the law.
In particular, you don't have to provide a good reason beyond "the law says I can have this information". (You may need to provide a good reason to ask them to destroy certain types of data held about you, e.g. to declare that the processing is causing you distress.) Nor do you get "only the data itself": the logic of any automated decision-making must be explained if requested and, per the link, "the purposes for processing the information and who the organisation is sharing the information with" must also be provided.
There are, of course, examples of data processing where the law must be interpreted to decide whether records must be released. For example, if two employees were to pass e-mail between each other about you in which they discussed your eligibility for something, would a SAR require you to disclose archives of those e-mails?
The right to privacy is the right not to have intrusion into one's private life. It's certainly not the right for you to protect information about everything you say/do from everyone.
The haggling is over what counts as private life.
Really? So simply because they have over X amount of dollars you feel they should have no right to privacy? I'm sure in your role as mother, father, son, daughter, manager, supervisor or something you also make decisions that impact others. So, we can have all your emails, personal files and thoughts too, right? It's for the benefit of society at large!
In proportion. My mother/father/son/daughter/underlings should certainly have access to my communications where the communication has an impact on them. UK data protection law (see also EU relatives) considers this principle in the case of relationship between business and the individual: any individual has the right to make a subject access request to any firm for all communications concerning him personally (with only specific exceptions for law enforcement, etc.).
Not sure where you got the "thoughts" and "personal files" strawmen from. Neither are communications with others.
I think his point was that you've chosen an arbitrary amount.
I've chosen the most appropriate starting place.
There are people with a lot of power who are not on that list,
Yes, but let's start with those with the most power.
and there are people on that list who are not much involved in politics
Everything is politics. The extent to which you are involved in politics correlates with the amount of power you have.
You need to show why the people on that list are lesser citizens than yourself, deserving of fewer rights.
We all have the right to secrecy in matters of little consequence to others. None of us have the right to secrecy when making decisions which have the potential for great impact on others. A right doesn't necessarily affect each person equally: property law can only act to restrict the man without property, for example - such laws are of no benefit to the man yet they still apply to him because they are considered to benefit society at large. This is the basis for all law.
Because someone making $30,001/year almost certainly does not have the ability to make a seriously damaging impact on the world.
What an odd question. Were you trying to make some point?
Indeed. Call me when we have a similar facility for people on this list.
No. The privilegium to publish in much of Europe was initially centrally controlled by the Holy Roman Empire - it took centuries to reach a privately controlled rather than government-regulated presses. Most national telecoms providers were owned by the people until taken from them in the great dismantling of society which occurred in the '80s. During the same period we also saw the break-up of union influence in the presses (see Battle of Wapping) which finally brought the major presses in the UK into outright private corporation control.
that's a laugh, OpenVMS is alive and well, supported, and gets new features added...
...at a snail's pace and only for a CPU which has been slowly dying for the past decade, even while x86-64 has been sitting there for the porting.
The Alpha was 1990s, plenty of other chips have fallen by the wayside since then, get over it
Why would I get over a philosophy of excellence in engineering? Will you ask me to embrace mediocrity next?
You ought to protect your file as you'd protect your money...
...in a spread of FDIC/FSCS/etc.-insured banks.
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