How much is one of these frontpage/. ads? Please contact me, I may be interested in buying one.
Basically, you have to not sell out, at all. Debian may not always be the latest and greatest, but they have a history of being "free as in freedom" in a way that none of the other distros have been.
So I applaud some extra publicity for the upstanding folks who keep debian running for the sake of the community.
Ok, here's the short version of this post: letting Herbert Jr. and Anderson take over the Dune Franchise is a bit like letting Penny Marshall direct the next LOTR movie. We'd all go to see it anyway, but we'd cry because we know how much better Peter Jackson would have made it. So in my opinion, if anyone other than the dearly departed Frank should be allowed to embrace and extend the series, everyone should because surely someone would do a better job than this.
Here's the slightly elongated version:
I am huge Dune fan. I wanted to cry after I read the last line of Chapterhouse Dune, because I knew there would never be anymore, I had read the very last line of the very last dune book.
Well, imagine my surprise when the Dune:House N series appeared. I was torn but hopeful.
Well, the first two were like good fan fiction. They built a little bit of structure for events that happened later, were mostly consistent and pretty fun to read. But nothing like Frank's work.
The third book (House Corrino) was awful. I'll never get those hours back.
What bugs me is that no one else can add to the Dune canon except the copyright holders, so those of us who love it but do not profit from it are forced to watch in horror as the average quality of the official series is diluted.
I haven't yet read the book being reviewed here, and against my better judgment I probably will eventually but I'll be shocked if it's any good. It's just a shame that just because Herbert Jr. shares half a set of genes with Herbert Sr. that we have to be subjected to his inferior fan fiction while other, more talented writers who would like to add to the series can't publish and profit from their potential works for fear of legal reprisal.
everyone has been pointing out lots of useful ways to do my searching, but I just like mozilla's way best- it appears as a completion option from the main address bar, the first one if it doesn't match a url I've been to recently. This turns out to be the optimal behavior for me.
Yes, I could use the search bar next to the address bar (Which is partially obscured on my 800x600 laptop display some of the time, but anyway). I could type google first (but how would I have known this if you hadn't told me? How will anyone else not reading this discussion know?) I could just go to google and search from there, it's only a couple clicks away, esp. if I bookmark it right? with autcompletion, it's probably like this:
"g" "o" --ooh, there it is in the completionbar-- "tab" "enter" --page has loaded-- "tab" --ooh, now I'm in the search bar and I can search!--
I know I'm splitting hairs here, but I search google 10+ times a day and the differences between these strategies both in terms of time to actually type/click the commands, and how much I have to think to make the browser do my bidding, directly affect my suspension of disbelief that the browser is actually a direct extension of my brain.
Here's a more subjective comparison:
on
Phoenix 0.4 Released
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I have a 200mhz laptop w/ 96 M ram, and a 1.4 ghz desktop w/ 256M ram.
On the laptop,
Mozilla: Painfully slow Phoenix: Usable
On the desktop: Mozilla: The best browser I have ever used Phoenix: Not sufficiently faster to make up for the fact that I can't search google straight out of the address bar.
I guess the real point is, why does microsoft need to fuck with our business deals? Wouldn't it be better if they just sold a damn product instead of controlling every little thing you do with their great ideas?
Well, the Congress already subverted that clause anyway, see the Eldred v. Ashcroft briefs, or visit Disney HQ. These times are no longer limited, and since legitimacy rests with the people, it is our responsibility to restore sanity to the process, even if it means breaking the copyright clause in a more freedom-preserving direction.
Besides, not everything in version 1.0 of the US Constitution was worth saving. 3/5 rule anyone?
What would you do if you had to choose between marginally easier availability of nasty pornography and a democratic revolution in China, or perhaps a return to power of the legitimately elected government of Pakistan?
I know I'm going to get moderated back to the stone age for saying this, but I suspect that I'm not the only one thinking it. I'm having a very hard time imagining any nontrivial legitimate use for this technology.
When some of our founding fathers distributed the federalist papers, they did it under the name "Publius" to retain their anonymity.
Back then, you couldn't discover their ip address no matter how you tried. Publishing is different now. If it was good enough for them, it's good enough for us.
I must say, even if you come across as a bit of a jerk here, you're awfully well informed. Who are you?
Rubbish. I disagree. We are quibbling over subtleties.
Kerberos is alive and well. And the GPL wouldn't have saved it anyway, since I've read several times that Microsoft re-implemented it from scratch for Windows. Please, tell me, how would the original code being GPL'd have changed that?
from the kerberos faq: Subject: 3.5. I've hear Microsoft will support Kerberos in Windows 2000. Is that true?...
This article, written by Ted T'so, gives what I feel is a reasonable summary of the situation....
From: Ted T'so
Microsoft Embraces and Extends Kerberos V5
There has been a lot of excitement generated by Microsoft's announcement that NT 5.0 would use Kerberos. This excitement was followed by a lot of controversy when it was announced by Microsoft would be adding proprietary extensions to the Kerberos V5 protocol. Exactly what and how Microsoft did and tried to do has been a subject of some confusion; here's the scoop about what really happened.
NT 5.0 will indeed use Kerberos. However, this protocol has been "embraced and extended" by Microsoft, by adding a digitally signed Privilege Attribute Certificate (PAC) to the Kerberos ticket....
It seems ironic, however, that Microsoft would choose to design and deploy their implementation with features that are guaranteed to alienate the early adopters of Kerberos, the very people that have helped to create and improve the technology that Microsoft has chosen to "embrace and extend."
Microsoft has issed a number of technical reports explaining how they have implemented Kerberos 5 and procedures for interoperating with "vanilla" Kerberos 5. They include:
* Windows 2000 Kerberos Authentication
* Windows 2000 Kerberos Interoperability
* Step-by-Step Guide to Kerberos 5 (krb5 1.0) Interoperability
Unfortunately, none of the above documents can be read on a non-Microsoft operating system; the FAQ author notes the irony of this situation.
There are two points to be made here- the first is that microsoft muddied the standard and created new ip-related entry barriers to users of kerberos. The second is that had kerberos been GPL'd, these proprietary extensions to the kerberos protocol would have been illegal to distribute without sharing the source code under the same terms they were given.
--- end quoted section, resume abe ferlmans post---
I must concede, however, that Kerberos has not been extinguished; perhaps "fucked with" is a better way to put it.
Classic strategy, insist your opponents arguments don't match the facts regardless of what the facts are.
Er, no. Point out that ad hominem arguments don't relate to the facts. Clearly whether the facts support our positions is in dispute. As it turns out, I've forgotten what the original ad hom was and I'm tired so I'm not going to waste time looking it up anyway.
I'm afraid this argument IS political because the GPL is a license with political intent.
Only in the trivial sense that all economic activity is political. The BSD license can be read as a rejection of the GPL from this simplistic standpoint. Proprietary licenses take a political stance on the nature of intellectual property as well.
Examples? Walk into the store. The software you see on the shelves? Practically none of that would exist.
Can you please prove this? Incidentally, I rarely buy the free software I use off a shelf anyway, what a stupid way to get software in a networked world. So maybe you're right- if no one was afraid of piracy we'd have no middlemen to pay in actual physical stores and the network would fulfill its promise at last.
open source is copying rather than innovating
I would postulate that this is more because the ip system forces free software developers to play catch up than because they are unable to compete on a level playing field with people who lock up their source code under restrictive ip licenses. Games in particular are less necessary and hence less focused on.
In a world where GPL was the norm, people would still want this stuff, and clever marketers would find a way to fund its development- street performer protocol based on reputation for development of previous games- imagine how much John Carmack's next game could rake in before it was released. But that's a very different way of thinking, and current distribution models are based on proprietary thinking.
if your software makes money via people using support, that *encourages* obfuscated software
Not in a truly free market. If the software is a commodity, your competitors won't make it as hard to use as you do and you'll lose out if you play tricks like that.
In fact, your argument here is starting to sound more and more like you want something for nothing.
If that were the case I'd be clamoring for Billy Gates to give us all his source code. No, Mr. Armchair Adhominem Pyschoanalyst, I don't want something for nothing. I just don't want the something the community has in terms of software resource to be whittled into nothing, and I am saddened by the inefficiency created by proprietary software, both in terms of constantly reinventing the wheel and interoperability problems.
those guys aren't cheap. Change the world, and they'll just go elsewhere.
This is the best argument I've heard you make. Dwindling the pool of money available to software firms will dry up the talent pool. But I think you're missing a few points.
1. GPL world = fewer lawyers. I'd be very curious to see a comparison of a software firms salary payouts to developers contrasted against their legal fees. 2. GPL world = more collaboration. There would be less need to constantly reinvent the wheel in-house, so software development would be faster and simpler. 3. Lots of people would code even if it paid jack. Free software developers demonstrate this- many do it for nothing, many professionals would do it for far, far less. The end of the dot-com bubble didn't drain the talent pool, it sharpened it if anything by blowing away some chaff. 4. GPL world = no fear of piracy = more efficient distribution. You could sell your software a lot cheaper without boxes, etc. Different business models would arise. 5. Freedom is worth something. The fact that anyone could modify any software they like in a GPL world gives people options and flexibility they don't currently enjoy. These are worth something, and certainly everyone has a degree to which they'd take slightly lower quality software that was more flexible.
That was the case for me using the 0.9 series of Mozilla releases. IE was still slightly better, but Mozilla gave me a lot of userspace flexibility that IE did not. Now I'm using Mozilla 1.2 and I love it. I would dare say that many of the features in Mozilla (tabbed browsing with useful keyboard shortcuts, popup blcoking built into the browser) have been downright innovative.
Which is fine and dandy, except no-one's going to pay for it. They can't sell existing code as is (for either license) because no-one's going to pay for code they can get for nothing.
I'll cc redhat on the memo, and burn my Debian box set so no one finds the evidence to the contrary.
They can't value-add to it without giving the source to their additions to those who get their binary, and they can't restrict redistribution or use of that source.
Nor can bottled water makers prevent the redistribution of the chemical makeup of water. So?
So, they can't make money off it.
Bottled water, Redhat, yes they can they just have to compete effectively in a mostly commodified market.
Just because the GPL doesn't actually say it can't be sold doesn't mean it doesn't significantly restrict it.
Yes it does. You are trying like hell to conflate "sell" and "take proprietary", but it won't work. The argument that it's hard to compete in a commodity market makes sense, to which I would argue that the government shouldn't be handing out monopolies (idea ownership) in commodity markets anyway, especially if it builds on government code in the first place.
And, again, it does NOT prevent vendor lock-in. It effectively prevents resale of software.
This is exactly wrong. It does prevent lockin. It is forbidden to make proprietary extensions to the software, but explicitly permitted to resell the software.
Except software isn't ownership of ideas. Software is *implementation* of ideas. If software were ownership of ideas, how could the open-source world copy all the ideas that came with the proprietary OSes?
Proprietary software is ownership of a particular idea. The idea/implementation divide is weak in the extreme in a world where judges and patent inspectors don't understand software, and not too strong even in one where they do. What is the implementation and what is the idea? Is the object code the implementation? The source code? The pseudocode?
Implementations are just specific ideas, and their ownership represents the government granting a monopoly in an otherwise commodified market.
Your anti-patent 'discussion' is irrelevent here, since we're not discussing the patent system, but copyright law.
The GPL includes provisions that require that patented software be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all.
The GNU manifesto clearly states
This is not why everyone uses the GPL. Linus Torvalds is a famous example to the contrary.
it's about preventing companies like Microsoft selling software
Erm, if you put that the other way, "preventing companies from 'selling' software the way microsoft does", I might agree with you. But as stated you are incorrect.
It has nothing to do with reference implementations
I admit I was parroting your language a bit there, but a.) a GPL'd piece of software is a perfectly good ref implementation for any non-proprietary project and b.) it's clear to me that lots of people use the BSD license who intend to create more than just reference implementations of things, they intend their products to be complete but they are only interested in disclaiming warranty. I disagree with them about their motivations, but on any day of the week BSD is still better than proprietary so I thank them just the same.
Much of it even has "proprietary" extensions that, given the licensing, so the changes cannot be added back to the original without being rewritten from scratch! Strange but true, a complete (and intended) inversion.
I know of no such example. Enlighten, please.... despite the *fact* that the only time you've demonstrated a problem with freedom is when the code involves patents, not licenses.
I have no problem with freedom, I just want more people to have more of it.
Well, strictly speaking neither is the distribution of software, but for all practical purposes it is free to consumers, and if you could give it away without running out of it like you can with air I feel certain it would be free, unless the government gave someone a monopoly on it.
Around here we drink bottled because of the taste, not the marketing.
That's called adding value to a commodity, and GPL software distributors are free to do it so long as they don't make those additions proprietary.
it raises barriers to entry and creates lockin
you say this, but it's obviously not true. GPL prevents monopolization of code, end of story. What you really meant to say appears later in the paragraph:
How scared would business be if it knew the government was going to release stuff for free?
Not very, considering they could use it. In a world where the GPL is the standard, no one expects to get rich writing some code then sitting on their laurels. The code is a one-time expense, the riches to be made come in fast updates, service, support, distribution. Value adds to a basically commodity market, like fancy labels and smooth taste in a bottle of water.
once a GPL product takes sufficient market share, those who wish to enter the market must provide comparable value before they can even begin to think about charging for their product.
This is not a clear-headed statement. First, this is true in proprietary markets as well. Second, in a GPL market you can build on the work of your competitors, in a proprietary market you must start from scratch. Hence the barriers to entry are astronomically higher in a proprietary market than a GPL one, even discounting the costs associated with making sure you don't violate anyone's ip in a proprietary market even if the product you create uses none of their code.
Why defend inferior producers? Never underestimate the value of "crappier but cheaper" to consumers. Many fine programs have started out that way, plowed early profits into R&D, and ended up as best in class applications. Put a GPL product in such a market and you take out the bottom end, reducing consumer choice.
Free markets are good at weeding out the bad products and favoring the good ones. Markets where governments grant artificial monopolies (idea ownership, a.k.a. copyright and patent abuse) are not free and therefore do not benefit from this sort of competition. The GPL is a way of allowing free competition by opening access to the code infrastructure and focusing competition on those aspects of software production that truly are scarce: service, speed of updates, reputation, etc.
You could say that the interference is an "unintended consequence".
Well, this certainly is saying something different. But I would say it "changes" rather than "interferes with" commercialization. The GPL encourages free market competition by nullifying the anti-market effects of government granted idea ownership monopolies.
I wonder if the folks at Mandrake, RedHat, Suse, etc have heard your screed yet?
What the GPL "interferes" with is not commercialization per se, but commercialization that tries to lock ideas behind a wall of legal ownership. The market is still there with or without the GPL - the GPL just changes the terms on which the market gets to pick products by giving consumers better information about the products and how to use them. And as you surely know, markets where consumers have perfect information operate more efficiently. When that information is asymmetrical, bottlenecks form, prices rise and monopoly players make more money on crappier products.
whether RMS is lying or not is irrelevant
But whether you are trying to slander him here or not certainly is. It's tough when the facts don't support you and you have to resort to ad hominem attacks.
you still have the freedom to take the original code and modify it
no you do not, the idea ownership system takes care of that. You now have the freedom to modify it only in ways that differ from the proprietary one that's already been done, and if you can think of a good extension to the proprietary extension, well forget it- that extension is *owned*, baby. You now have to pay someone to license it, assuming they don't just have it out for you and not want you to use it at all (e.g., microsoft vs. GNU developers).
You have such a narrow view of freedom I have to wonder if someone's not paying you to spew this stuff. There, see, I can make ad hominem arguments too.
Regarding no examples:
Kerberos is the classic example of extinguished code. I see you mention in another thread that it wasn't technically bsd, but that's a distinction without a difference. Finally, if no one embraces and extinguishes code, then the GPL doesn't matter anyway right?
Your problem is that you want to restrict how others use it to fit your own political agenda.
Aha, an ad hominem argument. Can we agree to drop these? If the facts don't support your argument, attack your adversary's politics, a classic strategy.
No, I want to make sure everyone can use it for their own technological, social, political or whatever agendas. You want to make sure people can wall it off behind a corporate boardroom so only the very wealthy can use it. Again, that's the ONLY difference between GPL and BSD. BSD allows lockin, GPL doesn't. The only reason to love lockin is if you are the beneficiary of a government monopoly on an idea.
Much of the software that has been written would never have existed if proprietary software licensing were not allowed. And that's what we're talking about here. In that sense, the GPL restricts choice, by lessening the options.
I believe it's time for you to come up with some examples, buddy. The GNU project and various linux distributions have created a version of nearly every useful piece of software on the planet, and have created quite a few of their own along the way. Imagine if they didn't have to reinvent the wheel every time they started coding. Imagine if software had an incentive to interoperate because vendor lockin was illegal. The cost of creating software would drop immediately. The legal overhead involved in creating software would drop immediately. People would still want software, and just like bottled water, corporations would heavily market their products in a heavily commodified market based on extraneous benefits like service, support, update frequency, reputation for consistency, etc.
you prevent exactly one scenario. That of a company taking your code and selling it.
Read the GPL lately? Anyone is free to sell GPL'd code, or code that extends GPL'd code. You just have to share and share alike, and allow others the *same freedoms you enjoyed* in creating it.
The BSDL is four short paragraphs, or approximately half a page. The GPL is 13 pages.
I am identifying a pattern here, you like to identify differences that don't matter. The length of the full version of the GPL (far more than you need to read to understand the concepts) is irrelevant, the licenses are functionally the same except for the terms of redistribution in the GPL designed to prevent vendor lockin. There is no other substantive difference.
Someone publishing software does NOT restrict my freedom.
The explicit form of your statement is true. It is not the act of publishing that takes away my freedom, it is the claim to the ownership of the ideas in that software that limit my freedom. If you write software that compresses images in an obvious way and patent the system so no one can use it without your permission, you've taken away my freedom to compress my images in the obvious fashion. Each idea that gets *owned* can not be improved upon by anyone but the *owner*. The freedom to innovate is smothered as another branch of the tree of inquiry is blackened.
The reasoning behind BSDL is that we can avoid broken implementations by having a good reference that anyone can use - something the GPL would prevent and thus harm the industry.
The idea behind GPL is to have a good reference that everyone can improve on to make it a better reference, and that no one can take away by making the most obvious or necessary improvements proprietary, or by using their monopolistic market force to make their proprietary extensions standard.
You are forced with a choice between full rights for whoever takes the extension proprietary or "all rights except the right to restrict the rights of others" for everyone. Let's be generous and assume that the right to restrict the rights for others is 99% of the value of the set of rights. Let's set the value of the rights at one dollar, and restrict ourselves to the U.S. Population, which we'll estimate at 240,000,000.
The party who gets the full rights gets $0.99 and everyone else gets nothing, for a total of $0.99 worth of rights.
In a GPL world, everyone (including the party who wanted to take it proprietary) gets $.01 worth of rights. By my calculations, this comes to $2,400,000.00 worth of rights distributed, at one penny per person worth of rights preserved.
See where I'm going with this? In fact, I believe I've just gone there. QED baby, QED.:)
You call my point rot, then fail to counter it. You say:
The users can't lose their freedom through BSDL code being relicensed, since they can still get the original BSDL'd code.
The BSD license allows you to make proprietary *extensions* to the original code, and gain control by adding something proprietary, no matter how obvious, which makes the original free work obsolete. As we all know, software does not stand still: or are you still using windows 3.1 and mozilla 0.8?
That's the point of embrace-extend-extinguish: you take something free and make it non-free through proprietary extensions. It's a tried and true strategy for Microsoft. It works with BSD licensed code, but not with GPL'd code.
Enhancements to that code may or may not be released under the BSDL. And if they're commercial, you make your choice whether to use them or not.
Aha! There's the problem. Enhancements may be made and you say "you" make "your" choice, but licenses exist in a world with multiple people. The question at hand is, what license provides the greatest freedom of choice for the greatest number of people?
The only difference between the GPL and the BSD license is that the BSD license preserves one freedom, that is, the freedom to restrict others' freedoms by making proprietary extensions. This means if one person exercises that freedom, everyone else loses the freedom to make *any* choices regarding that particular extension, since another party now legally owns it. The GPL allows everyone to have the right to make whatever choices they like *except* to restrict the freedoms of others.
Advocates of the BSD license want to trade the freedom to restric the freedoms of others for all the rest of the freedoms they could possibly have: I think it's a poor trade that leaves all of us taken together with less freedom of choice than a GPL style license affords us.
Wonderful thing, freedom of choice.
On this at least we agree. I want freedom of choice for everyone. You want people to have the right to take away my freedom of choice by making proprietary extensions to free software.
The GPL has an uphill battle competing against government-granted monopolies, as one might expect. It's not a fair playing field, which is why the GPL is necessary in the first place. If there were no government sponsored monopolies on ideas, the GPL would be rather pointless except in the ways in which it is not different from the BSD license, i.e., disclaimer of warranty.
Your commentary on freedom is oversimplified. BSD style licenses guarantee the freedom to take away freedoms, the GPL does not- that is the only meaningful difference between them.
That means if ten people use the BSD license, the first one to act can lop off a branch of inquiry that extends from the original BSD work by taking an extension proprietary, leaving 9 people with a diminished set of possible extensions to make. In other words, BSD license guarantees one person's right to take away the freedoms of the other nine.
In a GPL world, the first person is constrained against proprietary extensions, so she may use and extend the software, but may not restrict the 9 others from using it.
So in our hypothetical 10-person society, the BSD license preserves the right of one person to limit the freedoms of the other 9, the GPL prevents one person from acting maliciously to preserve that freedom for the other nine.
Since these two sets of freedoms are mutually exclusive and we must choose, it's clear that the GPL society has more *net* freedom since actors are constrained only against acting in ways that constrain the others, and free to act in any other way they like.
You are clearly a troll, but your post is a good springboard for two important memes.
1. GPL is a vaccine against proprietary vendor lock-in. It ensures that once code has been released for public use, it is not extinguished by proprietary extensions that render the original obsolete. This benefits all players, from free software purveyors to large commercial companies. Ask IBM. 2. The BSD license allows you to do whatever you like, for good or for ill. It is, as my.sig points out, a nonviral guarantee of *your* freedom to restrict the freedoms of everyone else. In this way, it's more like a freedom annhilator than a freedom virus.
The more people who are vaccinated against a contagious disease, the fewer people will catch it. GPL is definitely a vaccine rather than a virus.
If you release it under the GPL, all derived code must itself be released under the GPL. Like it or not, this *does* interfere with commercialization of the software, nobody is going to spend millions of dollars writing code they'll have to give away, under most circumstances.
You are performing one of the great fallacies of free software discussions, and these issues are subtle so I can see how you'd confuse the following:
this *does* interfere with commercialization of the software
this *does* interfere with making the software proprietary
The distinction is very important. You can commercialize GPL'd software, it's right there in the license. You can not make proprietary extensions to that software.
It's like bottled water. You can get water for free from public drinking fountains everywhere, the chemical code for it is known by elementary school children, but people still buy the stuff in very profitable bottles. I think there are two lessons here:
1. never underestimate the power of marketing, even (especially?) in absurdly commodified markets 2. the public availability does not make something commercially unfriendly, it just changes the terms under which vendors must operate to be more consumer-friendly.
Vendor lockin is very, very bad for business. Many projects have been killed or not started out of the fear that Microsoft will include similar functionality in a later release of their operating system that replaces or possibly outright breaks their implementation. In a level playing field (a gpl-frienly environment) Microsoft would be foolish to extinguish rather than interoperate with other vendors. Bottom line: GPL allows non-lockin commercialization, true capitalist-style competition instead of government-sponsored monopolies.
You are wrong. The GPL ensures that everyone competes fairly by removing the ability of actors in the marketplace from gaining monopolies on proprietary extensions to the software.
The GPL does nothing but prevent vendor lockin. It removes bad (read: abusing the idea ownership system) competition and allows good (service, support, distribution, update speed) competition among vendors, as evidenced by the strong competition evident among linux companies today.
Far from removing competition, the GPL removes lockin barriers that prevent entrance in to the market in the firstplace.
Or have you forgotten that "intellectual property" is a government-granted monopoly, which is the diametrical opposite of competition?
We do not have a two party system, it is just that currently (and usually) only two of the parties are able to garner enough votes to even be considered.
Alas, this isn't even formally true. I was at the presidential debates at the JFK library in 2000. Ralph Nader wasn't even allowed to watch much less participate in the debates because the Commission on Presidential Debates concerns itself with maintaining the two party system.
It is true that in some dream world there could be a viable third party candidate, but outside the jfk library that night there were hundreds of riot police with facemasks and no badge numbers showing on their uniforms to tell us that there was no way a third candidate was going to be allowed to compete with the major parties' free advertising in the form of corporate sponsored debates.
There are two exceptions to my thesis in recent history, but they don't really damage my point much. John Anderson in 1980 was an anomaly while the Watergate crisis was still fresh in the minds of the public, and he didn't get to participate in all the debates anyway. Ross Perot bought his way into the debates. This proves the point that money drives politics, but I'm sure if you got Microsoft's chief lobbyist drunk and asked her why she never thought of running someone from microsoft as a pres candidate, she'd tell you it's just cheaper to buy them both off, and that Ross Perot was kinda nuts.
I love Slashdot, I read and post here all the time. I am also a database programmer who works in a research hospital. I would love to show some of my co-workers this article and some of the comments in it to get them thinking about HIPAA and free software.
But when the editors spell the regulations "HIPAAA" in big white letters at the top of the article, I can't share this with anyone who I want to respect me.
C'mon Cliff, and whoever (if anyone) is checking your work. It's not HIPPA, HIPPO, HIPAAA, HIPSTER or HIPAAPATAMAS. It's HIPAA, as krisguy manages to note 5 times in his writeup.
Hopefully the headline will be changed soon and this comment will eventually be modded away as offtopic, but basic spelling, grammar and usage are important to the community that makes your website worth reading.
ps- I'm sure someone will point out that the average slashdot post is worse than the Slashdot editorial crew, but to that I can only say that they will be equally culpable when they are paid for posting.
I *think* you're serious and not just trying to razz me, so I'll respond.
I take it you have firsthand experience of just exactly what constitutes slavery, that you can make a statement like this?
Well I've lived a fairly cushy life so far, I suppose I had better just give up making comparisons since I haven't been personally enslaved, tortured, anally raped or otherwise brutalized often enough.
How ludicrous. Slavery does still exist today--sex slavery is commonplace in Korea and in Eastern Europe. I daresay the women caught in that hideous lifestyle would love having nothing more to worry about than "checking with 'authorities' before distributing an idea"--as it is, most probably don't even get to choose whether their Johns wear condoms.
You seem to lack any ability to look into the future whatsoever. Technology has the potential to centralize control in some pretty horrific ways. It is important to keep those in power from getting used to the idea that they have the right to control the ideas you express, or else the hypothetical and limited slavery that comes from a "check with us before thinking" policy becomes a "don't bother checking with us- we won't let you say anything we don't want you to" policy. Not far from there to real physical slavery. Duh, patent law is not the primary concern of Asian sex slaves. It's an analogy, not a literal equivalence.
He has that right - he wrote the software, therefore, it's his property.
No, he wrote it therefore he wrote it. I disagree with the step that authorship implies property. His property is the paper he wrote it on, not the actions of others who would like to extend his ideas.
He can dictate the terms of its use as he pleases. . . and we, likewise, have the choice of either using his software, or finding something with a more agreeable license, or creating an application ourselves and dicating terms for its use as we see fit.
It's difficult to avoid falling into an is/ought trap here. It is true that the legal idea ownership system currently gives him the legal right to dictate some (but not as many as you imply!) of the conditions under which his software may be used. However, this is not the way it should be. Ideas do not obey the same laws of scarcity that physical products do- once you share an idea, two people have one full idea- if you share a sandwich, two people have half a sandwich. Property rights are based on a social compromise that slows down the violent redistribution of property by assigning moral claims to scarce goods. This system makes no sense for scarce goods.
What is scarce is not the software, but the ability to create it. Larry can refuse to write or publish his software, he can refuse to update or improve it. But it is wrong for him to dictate what is done with his ideas once they are released.
Huh?? I'm sorry, this makes absolutely no sense. I think the "borg-like collective" and "government-approved monopoly" rhetoric is some slap at Microsoft, but I fail to see the connection to BitKeeper.
Bitkeeper is a single corporation, as is Microsoft. The "borg-like collective" I'm talking about is the collection of industries that earn their livelihood through the abuse of the idea ownership system. I'm trying to say that Bitkeeper is just one of a vast number of corporations who collectively threaten the freedom of ideas by locking them up under legal restrictions. If it was just Microsoft or just Bitkeeper they'd be much easier to fight.
I understand why it's a slap in the face, too; but comparing software licensing to slavery is a bit overboard. Software is not sentient by any stretch of the imagination.
No, the users are. In a way it's much more insidious than slavery, it's distributed mind control. The ability to force someone to check with the "authorities" before distributing an idea for fear of violating someone's idea monopoly *is* a form of slavery.
And for christ's sake, the comparison need not be perfect. I mean, if I say "This beer is a little bitter, like coffee", and it's not quite as bitter as coffee, are you going to pounce on me? It's similar in quality even if not in severity.
only your rights toward the use of their system.
Not so- he is demanding that people who use his software not work on other software. That's the angry bee in RMS' bonnett today.
As far as landlords go, I'd way rather own a house. The question is, do we live in a world where the average person is at the whim of a landlord's mood?
We're not dealing with a single corporation, we're dealing with a borg-like collective of corporations being fed government-approved monopolies over ideas, and taking any one down is not going to win the day.
Slashdot Mirror
Will winex run it?
Or am I going to have to install that leaked version of Longhorn after all?
How much is one of these frontpage /. ads? Please contact me, I may be interested in buying one.
Basically, you have to not sell out, at all. Debian may not always be the latest and greatest, but they have a history of being "free as in freedom" in a way that none of the other distros have been.
So I applaud some extra publicity for the upstanding folks who keep debian running for the sake of the community.
Ok, here's the short version of this post: letting Herbert Jr. and Anderson take over the Dune Franchise is a bit like letting Penny Marshall direct the next LOTR movie. We'd all go to see it anyway, but we'd cry because we know how much better Peter Jackson would have made it. So in my opinion, if anyone other than the dearly departed Frank should be allowed to embrace and extend the series, everyone should because surely someone would do a better job than this.
Here's the slightly elongated version:
I am huge Dune fan. I wanted to cry after I read the last line of Chapterhouse Dune, because I knew there would never be anymore, I had read the very last line of the very last dune book.
Well, imagine my surprise when the Dune:House N series appeared. I was torn but hopeful.
Well, the first two were like good fan fiction. They built a little bit of structure for events that happened later, were mostly consistent and pretty fun to read. But nothing like Frank's work.
The third book (House Corrino) was awful. I'll never get those hours back.
What bugs me is that no one else can add to the Dune canon except the copyright holders, so those of us who love it but do not profit from it are forced to watch in horror as the average quality of the official series is diluted.
I haven't yet read the book being reviewed here, and against my better judgment I probably will eventually but I'll be shocked if it's any good. It's just a shame that just because Herbert Jr. shares half a set of genes with Herbert Sr. that we have to be subjected to his inferior fan fiction while other, more talented writers who would like to add to the series can't publish and profit from their potential works for fear of legal reprisal.
Thank you for reading.
is that good enough?
well, no it's not:)
everyone has been pointing out lots of useful ways to do my searching, but I just like mozilla's way best- it appears as a completion option from the main address bar, the first one if it doesn't match a url I've been to recently. This turns out to be the optimal behavior for me.
Yes, I could use the search bar next to the address bar (Which is partially obscured on my 800x600 laptop display some of the time, but anyway). I could type google first (but how would I have known this if you hadn't told me? How will anyone else not reading this discussion know?) I could just go to google and search from there, it's only a couple clicks away, esp. if I bookmark it right? with autcompletion, it's probably like this:
"g" "o" --ooh, there it is in the completionbar-- "tab" "enter" --page has loaded-- "tab" --ooh, now I'm in the search bar and I can search!--
I know I'm splitting hairs here, but I search google 10+ times a day and the differences between these strategies both in terms of time to actually type/click the commands, and how much I have to think to make the browser do my bidding, directly affect my suspension of disbelief that the browser is actually a direct extension of my brain.
I have a 200mhz laptop w/ 96 M ram, and a 1.4 ghz desktop w/ 256M ram.
On the laptop,
Mozilla: Painfully slow
Phoenix: Usable
On the desktop:
Mozilla: The best browser I have ever used
Phoenix: Not sufficiently faster to make up for the fact that I can't search google straight out of the address bar.
I guess the real point is, why does microsoft need to fuck with our business deals? Wouldn't it be better if they just sold a damn product instead of controlling every little thing you do with their great ideas?
Well, the Congress already subverted that clause anyway, see the Eldred v. Ashcroft briefs, or visit Disney HQ. These times are no longer limited, and since legitimacy rests with the people, it is our responsibility to restore sanity to the process, even if it means breaking the copyright clause in a more freedom-preserving direction.
Besides, not everything in version 1.0 of the US Constitution was worth saving. 3/5 rule anyone?
The world is a tough place.
What would you do if you had to choose between marginally easier availability of nasty pornography and a democratic revolution in China, or perhaps a return to power of the legitimately elected government of Pakistan?
I know I'm going to get moderated back to the stone age for saying this, but I suspect that I'm not the only one thinking it. I'm having a very hard time imagining any nontrivial legitimate use for this technology.
When some of our founding fathers distributed the federalist papers, they did it under the name "Publius" to retain their anonymity.
Back then, you couldn't discover their ip address no matter how you tried. Publishing is different now. If it was good enough for them, it's good enough for us.
I must say, even if you come across as a bit of a jerk here, you're awfully well informed. Who are you?
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...
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... despite the *fact* that the only time you've demonstrated a problem with freedom is when the code involves patents, not licenses.
Rubbish.
I disagree. We are quibbling over subtleties.
Kerberos is alive and well. And the GPL wouldn't have saved it anyway, since I've read several times that Microsoft re-implemented it from scratch for Windows. Please, tell me, how would the original code being GPL'd have changed that?
from the kerberos faq:
Subject: 3.5. I've hear Microsoft will support Kerberos in Windows 2000. Is that true?
This article, written by Ted T'so, gives what I feel is a reasonable summary of the situation.
From: Ted T'so
Microsoft Embraces and Extends Kerberos V5
There has been a lot of excitement generated by Microsoft's announcement that NT 5.0 would use Kerberos. This excitement was followed by a lot of controversy when it was announced by Microsoft would be adding proprietary extensions to the Kerberos V5 protocol. Exactly what and how Microsoft did and tried to do has been a subject of some confusion; here's the scoop about what really happened.
NT 5.0 will indeed use Kerberos. However, this protocol has been "embraced and extended" by Microsoft, by adding a digitally signed Privilege Attribute Certificate (PAC) to the Kerberos ticket.
It seems ironic, however, that Microsoft would choose to design and deploy their implementation with features that are guaranteed to alienate the early adopters of Kerberos, the very people that have helped to create and improve the technology that Microsoft has chosen to "embrace and extend."
Microsoft has issed a number of technical reports explaining how they have implemented Kerberos 5 and procedures for interoperating with "vanilla" Kerberos 5. They include:
* Windows 2000 Kerberos Authentication
* Windows 2000 Kerberos Interoperability
* Step-by-Step Guide to Kerberos 5 (krb5 1.0) Interoperability
Unfortunately, none of the above documents can be read on a non-Microsoft operating system; the FAQ author notes the irony of this situation.
There are two points to be made here- the first is that microsoft muddied the standard and created new ip-related entry barriers to users of kerberos. The second is that had kerberos been GPL'd, these proprietary extensions to the kerberos protocol would have been illegal to distribute without sharing the source code under the same terms they were given.
--- end quoted section, resume abe ferlmans post---
I must concede, however, that Kerberos has not been extinguished; perhaps "fucked with" is a better way to put it.
Classic strategy, insist your opponents arguments don't match the facts regardless of what the facts are.
Er, no. Point out that ad hominem arguments don't relate to the facts. Clearly whether the facts support our positions is in dispute. As it turns out, I've forgotten what the original ad hom was and I'm tired so I'm not going to waste time looking it up anyway.
I'm afraid this argument IS political because the GPL is a license with political intent.
Only in the trivial sense that all economic activity is political. The BSD license can be read as a rejection of the GPL from this simplistic standpoint. Proprietary licenses take a political stance on the nature of intellectual property as well.
Examples? Walk into the store. The software you see on the shelves? Practically none of that would exist.
Can you please prove this? Incidentally, I rarely buy the free software I use off a shelf anyway, what a stupid way to get software in a networked world. So maybe you're right- if no one was afraid of piracy we'd have no middlemen to pay in actual physical stores and the network would fulfill its promise at last.
open source is copying rather than innovating
I would postulate that this is more because the ip system forces free software developers to play catch up than because they are unable to compete on a level playing field with people who lock up their source code under restrictive ip licenses. Games in particular are less necessary and hence less focused on.
In a world where GPL was the norm, people would still want this stuff, and clever marketers would find a way to fund its development- street performer protocol based on reputation for development of previous games- imagine how much John Carmack's next game could rake in before it was released. But that's a very different way of thinking, and current distribution models are based on proprietary thinking.
if your software makes money via people using support, that *encourages* obfuscated software
Not in a truly free market. If the software is a commodity, your competitors won't make it as hard to use as you do and you'll lose out if you play tricks like that.
In fact, your argument here is starting to sound more and more like you want something for nothing.
If that were the case I'd be clamoring for Billy Gates to give us all his source code. No, Mr. Armchair Adhominem Pyschoanalyst, I don't want something for nothing. I just don't want the something the community has in terms of software resource to be whittled into nothing, and I am saddened by the inefficiency created by proprietary software, both in terms of constantly reinventing the wheel and interoperability problems.
those guys aren't cheap. Change the world, and they'll just go elsewhere.
This is the best argument I've heard you make. Dwindling the pool of money available to software firms will dry up the talent pool. But I think you're missing a few points.
1. GPL world = fewer lawyers. I'd be very curious to see a comparison of a software firms salary payouts to developers contrasted against their legal fees.
2. GPL world = more collaboration. There would be less need to constantly reinvent the wheel in-house, so software development would be faster and simpler.
3. Lots of people would code even if it paid jack. Free software developers demonstrate this- many do it for nothing, many professionals would do it for far, far less. The end of the dot-com bubble didn't drain the talent pool, it sharpened it if anything by blowing away some chaff.
4. GPL world = no fear of piracy = more efficient distribution. You could sell your software a lot cheaper without boxes, etc. Different business models would arise.
5. Freedom is worth something. The fact that anyone could modify any software they like in a GPL world gives people options and flexibility they don't currently enjoy. These are worth something, and certainly everyone has a degree to which they'd take slightly lower quality software that was more flexible.
That was the case for me using the 0.9 series of Mozilla releases. IE was still slightly better, but Mozilla gave me a lot of userspace flexibility that IE did not. Now I'm using Mozilla 1.2 and I love it. I would dare say that many of the features in Mozilla (tabbed browsing with useful keyboard shortcuts, popup blcoking built into the browser) have been downright innovative.
Which is fine and dandy, except no-one's going to pay for it. They can't sell existing code as is (for either license) because no-one's going to pay for code they can get for nothing.
I'll cc redhat on the memo, and burn my Debian box set so no one finds the evidence to the contrary.
They can't value-add to it without giving the source to their additions to those who get their binary, and they can't restrict redistribution or use of that source.
Nor can bottled water makers prevent the redistribution of the chemical makeup of water. So?
So, they can't make money off it.
Bottled water, Redhat, yes they can they just have to compete effectively in a mostly commodified market.
Just because the GPL doesn't actually say it can't be sold doesn't mean it doesn't significantly restrict it.
Yes it does. You are trying like hell to conflate "sell" and "take proprietary", but it won't work. The argument that it's hard to compete in a commodity market makes sense, to which I would argue that the government shouldn't be handing out monopolies (idea ownership) in commodity markets anyway, especially if it builds on government code in the first place.
And, again, it does NOT prevent vendor lock-in. It effectively prevents resale of software.
This is exactly wrong. It does prevent lockin. It is forbidden to make proprietary extensions to the software, but explicitly permitted to resell the software.
Except software isn't ownership of ideas. Software is *implementation* of ideas. If software were ownership of ideas, how could the open-source world copy all the ideas that came with the proprietary OSes?
Proprietary software is ownership of a particular idea. The idea/implementation divide is weak in the extreme in a world where judges and patent inspectors don't understand software, and not too strong even in one where they do. What is the implementation and what is the idea? Is the object code the implementation? The source code? The pseudocode?
Implementations are just specific ideas, and their ownership represents the government granting a monopoly in an otherwise commodified market.
Your anti-patent 'discussion' is irrelevent here, since we're not discussing the patent system, but copyright law.
The GPL includes provisions that require that patented software be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all.
The GNU manifesto clearly states
This is not why everyone uses the GPL. Linus Torvalds is a famous example to the contrary.
it's about preventing companies like Microsoft selling software
Erm, if you put that the other way, "preventing companies from 'selling' software the way microsoft does", I might agree with you. But as stated you are incorrect.
It has nothing to do with reference implementations
I admit I was parroting your language a bit there, but a.) a GPL'd piece of software is a perfectly good ref implementation for any non-proprietary project and b.) it's clear to me that lots of people use the BSD license who intend to create more than just reference implementations of things, they intend their products to be complete but they are only interested in disclaiming warranty. I disagree with them about their motivations, but on any day of the week BSD is still better than proprietary so I thank them just the same.
Much of it even has "proprietary" extensions that, given the licensing, so the changes cannot be added back to the original without being rewritten from scratch! Strange but true, a complete (and intended) inversion.
I know of no such example. Enlighten, please.
I have no problem with freedom, I just want more people to have more of it.
Water is not free.
Well, strictly speaking neither is the distribution of software, but for all practical purposes it is free to consumers, and if you could give it away without running out of it like you can with air I feel certain it would be free, unless the government gave someone a monopoly on it.
Around here we drink bottled because of the taste, not the marketing.
That's called adding value to a commodity, and GPL software distributors are free to do it so long as they don't make those additions proprietary.
it raises barriers to entry and creates lockin
you say this, but it's obviously not true. GPL prevents monopolization of code, end of story. What you really meant to say appears later in the paragraph:
How scared would business be if it knew the government was going to release stuff for free?
Not very, considering they could use it. In a world where the GPL is the standard, no one expects to get rich writing some code then sitting on their laurels. The code is a one-time expense, the riches to be made come in fast updates, service, support, distribution. Value adds to a basically commodity market, like fancy labels and smooth taste in a bottle of water.
once a GPL product takes sufficient market share, those who wish to enter the market must provide comparable value before they can even begin to think about charging for their product.
This is not a clear-headed statement. First, this is true in proprietary markets as well. Second, in a GPL market you can build on the work of your competitors, in a proprietary market you must start from scratch. Hence the barriers to entry are astronomically higher in a proprietary market than a GPL one, even discounting the costs associated with making sure you don't violate anyone's ip in a proprietary market even if the product you create uses none of their code.
Why defend inferior producers? Never underestimate the value of "crappier but cheaper" to consumers. Many fine programs have started out that way, plowed early profits into R&D, and ended up as best in class applications. Put a GPL product in such a market and you take out the bottom end, reducing consumer choice.
Free markets are good at weeding out the bad products and favoring the good ones. Markets where governments grant artificial monopolies (idea ownership, a.k.a. copyright and patent abuse) are not free and therefore do not benefit from this sort of competition. The GPL is a way of allowing free competition by opening access to the code infrastructure and focusing competition on those aspects of software production that truly are scarce: service, speed of updates, reputation, etc.
You could say that the interference is an "unintended consequence".
Well, this certainly is saying something different. But I would say it "changes" rather than "interferes with" commercialization. The GPL encourages free market competition by nullifying the anti-market effects of government granted idea ownership monopolies.
I wonder if the folks at Mandrake, RedHat, Suse, etc have heard your screed yet?
What the GPL "interferes" with is not commercialization per se, but commercialization that tries to lock ideas behind a wall of legal ownership. The market is still there with or without the GPL - the GPL just changes the terms on which the market gets to pick products by giving consumers better information about the products and how to use them. And as you surely know, markets where consumers have perfect information operate more efficiently. When that information is asymmetrical, bottlenecks form, prices rise and monopoly players make more money on crappier products.
whether RMS is lying or not is irrelevant
But whether you are trying to slander him here or not certainly is. It's tough when the facts don't support you and you have to resort to ad hominem attacks.
you still have the freedom to take the original code and modify it
no you do not, the idea ownership system takes care of that. You now have the freedom to modify it only in ways that differ from the proprietary one that's already been done, and if you can think of a good extension to the proprietary extension, well forget it- that extension is *owned*, baby. You now have to pay someone to license it, assuming they don't just have it out for you and not want you to use it at all (e.g., microsoft vs. GNU developers).
You have such a narrow view of freedom I have to wonder if someone's not paying you to spew this stuff. There, see, I can make ad hominem arguments too.
Regarding no examples:
Kerberos is the classic example of extinguished code. I see you mention in another thread that it wasn't technically bsd, but that's a distinction without a difference. Finally, if no one embraces and extinguishes code, then the GPL doesn't matter anyway right?
Your problem is that you want to restrict how others use it to fit your own political agenda.
Aha, an ad hominem argument. Can we agree to drop these? If the facts don't support your argument, attack your adversary's politics, a classic strategy.
No, I want to make sure everyone can use it for their own technological, social, political or whatever agendas. You want to make sure people can wall it off behind a corporate boardroom so only the very wealthy can use it. Again, that's the ONLY difference between GPL and BSD. BSD allows lockin, GPL doesn't. The only reason to love lockin is if you are the beneficiary of a government monopoly on an idea.
Much of the software that has been written would never have existed if proprietary software licensing were not allowed. And that's what we're talking about here. In that sense, the GPL restricts choice, by lessening the options.
I believe it's time for you to come up with some examples, buddy. The GNU project and various linux distributions have created a version of nearly every useful piece of software on the planet, and have created quite a few of their own along the way. Imagine if they didn't have to reinvent the wheel every time they started coding. Imagine if software had an incentive to interoperate because vendor lockin was illegal. The cost of creating software would drop immediately. The legal overhead involved in creating software would drop immediately. People would still want software, and just like bottled water, corporations would heavily market their products in a heavily commodified market based on extraneous benefits like service, support, update frequency, reputation for consistency, etc.
you prevent exactly one scenario. That of a company taking your code and selling it.
Read the GPL lately? Anyone is free to sell GPL'd code, or code that extends GPL'd code. You just have to share and share alike, and allow others the *same freedoms you enjoyed* in creating it.
The BSDL is four short paragraphs, or approximately half a page. The GPL is 13 pages.
I am identifying a pattern here, you like to identify differences that don't matter. The length of the full version of the GPL (far more than you need to read to understand the concepts) is irrelevant, the licenses are functionally the same except for the terms of redistribution in the GPL designed to prevent vendor lockin. There is no other substantive difference.
Someone publishing software does NOT restrict my freedom.
The explicit form of your statement is true. It is not the act of publishing that takes away my freedom, it is the claim to the ownership of the ideas in that software that limit my freedom. If you write software that compresses images in an obvious way and patent the system so no one can use it without your permission, you've taken away my freedom to compress my images in the obvious fashion. Each idea that gets *owned* can not be improved upon by anyone but the *owner*. The freedom to innovate is smothered as another branch of the tree of inquiry is blackened.
The reasoning behind BSDL is that we can avoid broken implementations by having a good reference that anyone can use - something the GPL would prevent and thus harm the industry.
The idea behind GPL is to have a good reference that everyone can improve on to make it a better reference, and that no one can take away by making the most obvious or necessary improvements proprietary, or by using their monopolistic market force to make their proprietary extensions standard.
You are forced with a choice between full rights for whoever takes the extension proprietary or "all rights except the right to restrict the rights of others" for everyone. Let's be generous and assume that the right to restrict the rights for others is 99% of the value of the set of rights. Let's set the value of the rights at one dollar, and restrict ourselves to the U.S. Population, which we'll estimate at 240,000,000.
:)
The party who gets the full rights gets $0.99 and everyone else gets nothing, for a total of $0.99 worth of rights.
In a GPL world, everyone (including the party who wanted to take it proprietary) gets $.01 worth of rights. By my calculations, this comes to $2,400,000.00 worth of rights distributed, at one penny per person worth of rights preserved.
See where I'm going with this? In fact, I believe I've just gone there. QED baby, QED.
You call my point rot, then fail to counter it. You say:
The users can't lose their freedom through BSDL code being relicensed, since they can still get the original BSDL'd code.
The BSD license allows you to make proprietary *extensions* to the original code, and gain control by adding something proprietary, no matter how obvious, which makes the original free work obsolete. As we all know, software does not stand still: or are you still using windows 3.1 and mozilla 0.8?
That's the point of embrace-extend-extinguish: you take something free and make it non-free through proprietary extensions. It's a tried and true strategy for Microsoft. It works with BSD licensed code, but not with GPL'd code.
Enhancements to that code may or may not be released under the BSDL. And if they're commercial, you make your choice whether to use them or not.
Aha! There's the problem. Enhancements may be made and you say "you" make "your" choice, but licenses exist in a world with multiple people. The question at hand is, what license provides the greatest freedom of choice for the greatest number of people?
The only difference between the GPL and the BSD license is that the BSD license preserves one freedom, that is, the freedom to restrict others' freedoms by making proprietary extensions. This means if one person exercises that freedom, everyone else loses the freedom to make *any* choices regarding that particular extension, since another party now legally owns it. The GPL allows everyone to have the right to make whatever choices they like *except* to restrict the freedoms of others.
Advocates of the BSD license want to trade the freedom to restric the freedoms of others for all the rest of the freedoms they could possibly have: I think it's a poor trade that leaves all of us taken together with less freedom of choice than a GPL style license affords us.
Wonderful thing, freedom of choice.
On this at least we agree. I want freedom of choice for everyone. You want people to have the right to take away my freedom of choice by making proprietary extensions to free software.
BSD license is basically public domain with disclaimer of warranty, and that's where the real debate is anyway.
The GPL has an uphill battle competing against government-granted monopolies, as one might expect. It's not a fair playing field, which is why the GPL is necessary in the first place. If there were no government sponsored monopolies on ideas, the GPL would be rather pointless except in the ways in which it is not different from the BSD license, i.e., disclaimer of warranty.
Your commentary on freedom is oversimplified. BSD style licenses guarantee the freedom to take away freedoms, the GPL does not- that is the only meaningful difference between them.
That means if ten people use the BSD license, the first one to act can lop off a branch of inquiry that extends from the original BSD work by taking an extension proprietary, leaving 9 people with a diminished set of possible extensions to make. In other words, BSD license guarantees one person's right to take away the freedoms of the other nine.
In a GPL world, the first person is constrained against proprietary extensions, so she may use and extend the software, but may not restrict the 9 others from using it.
So in our hypothetical 10-person society, the BSD license preserves the right of one person to limit the freedoms of the other 9, the GPL prevents one person from acting maliciously to preserve that freedom for the other nine.
Since these two sets of freedoms are mutually exclusive and we must choose, it's clear that the GPL society has more *net* freedom since actors are constrained only against acting in ways that constrain the others, and free to act in any other way they like.
You are clearly a troll, but your post is a good springboard for two important memes.
.sig points out, a nonviral guarantee of *your* freedom to restrict the freedoms of everyone else. In this way, it's more like a freedom annhilator than a freedom virus.
1. GPL is a vaccine against proprietary vendor lock-in. It ensures that once code has been released for public use, it is not extinguished by proprietary extensions that render the original obsolete. This benefits all players, from free software purveyors to large commercial companies. Ask IBM.
2. The BSD license allows you to do whatever you like, for good or for ill. It is, as my
The more people who are vaccinated against a contagious disease, the fewer people will catch it. GPL is definitely a vaccine rather than a virus.
If you release it under the GPL, all derived code must itself be released under the GPL. Like it or not, this *does* interfere with commercialization of the software, nobody is going to spend millions of dollars writing code they'll have to give away, under most circumstances.
You are performing one of the great fallacies of free software discussions, and these issues are subtle so I can see how you'd confuse the following:
this *does* interfere with commercialization of the software
this *does* interfere with making the software proprietary
The distinction is very important. You can commercialize GPL'd software, it's right there in the license. You can not make proprietary extensions to that software.
It's like bottled water. You can get water for free from public drinking fountains everywhere, the chemical code for it is known by elementary school children, but people still buy the stuff in very profitable bottles. I think there are two lessons here:
1. never underestimate the power of marketing, even (especially?) in absurdly commodified markets
2. the public availability does not make something commercially unfriendly, it just changes the terms under which vendors must operate to be more consumer-friendly.
Vendor lockin is very, very bad for business. Many projects have been killed or not started out of the fear that Microsoft will include similar functionality in a later release of their operating system that replaces or possibly outright breaks their implementation. In a level playing field (a gpl-frienly environment) Microsoft would be foolish to extinguish rather than interoperate with other vendors. Bottom line: GPL allows non-lockin commercialization, true capitalist-style competition instead of government-sponsored monopolies.
You are wrong. The GPL ensures that everyone competes fairly by removing the ability of actors in the marketplace from gaining monopolies on proprietary extensions to the software.
The GPL does nothing but prevent vendor lockin. It removes bad (read: abusing the idea ownership system) competition and allows good (service, support, distribution, update speed) competition among vendors, as evidenced by the strong competition evident among linux companies today.
Far from removing competition, the GPL removes lockin barriers that prevent entrance in to the market in the firstplace.
Or have you forgotten that "intellectual property" is a government-granted monopoly, which is the diametrical opposite of competition?
BSD is not no license at all. It is a license to impose other, more restrictive licenses upon the original work.
Like Rush says, if you choose not to decide you still have made a choice.
The question is, do we get greater freedom for users through an approach that preserves their freedom or one that is agnostic to it?
We do not have a two party system, it is just that currently (and usually) only two of the parties are able to garner enough votes to even be considered.
Alas, this isn't even formally true. I was at the presidential debates at the JFK library in 2000. Ralph Nader wasn't even allowed to watch much less participate in the debates because the Commission on Presidential Debates concerns itself with maintaining the two party system.
It is true that in some dream world there could be a viable third party candidate, but outside the jfk library that night there were hundreds of riot police with facemasks and no badge numbers showing on their uniforms to tell us that there was no way a third candidate was going to be allowed to compete with the major parties' free advertising in the form of corporate sponsored debates.
There are two exceptions to my thesis in recent history, but they don't really damage my point much. John Anderson in 1980 was an anomaly while the Watergate crisis was still fresh in the minds of the public, and he didn't get to participate in all the debates anyway. Ross Perot bought his way into the debates. This proves the point that money drives politics, but I'm sure if you got Microsoft's chief lobbyist drunk and asked her why she never thought of running someone from microsoft as a pres candidate, she'd tell you it's just cheaper to buy them both off, and that Ross Perot was kinda nuts.
I love Slashdot, I read and post here all the time. I am also a database programmer who works in a research hospital. I would love to show some of my co-workers this article and some of the comments in it to get them thinking about HIPAA and free software.
But when the editors spell the regulations "HIPAAA" in big white letters at the top of the article, I can't share this with anyone who I want to respect me.
C'mon Cliff, and whoever (if anyone) is checking your work. It's not HIPPA, HIPPO, HIPAAA, HIPSTER or HIPAAPATAMAS. It's HIPAA, as krisguy manages to note 5 times in his writeup.
Hopefully the headline will be changed soon and this comment will eventually be modded away as offtopic, but basic spelling, grammar and usage are important to the community that makes your website worth reading.
ps- I'm sure someone will point out that the average slashdot post is worse than the Slashdot editorial crew, but to that I can only say that they will be equally culpable when they are paid for posting.
Once Palladium has gained market acceptance, will the borg-gear be a requirement, or more of a 'perk' for loyal customers and trusted partners?
I *think* you're serious and not just trying to razz me, so I'll respond.
I take it you have firsthand experience of just exactly what constitutes slavery, that you can make a statement like this?
Well I've lived a fairly cushy life so far, I suppose I had better just give up making comparisons since I haven't been personally enslaved, tortured, anally raped or otherwise brutalized often enough.
How ludicrous. Slavery does still exist today--sex slavery is commonplace in Korea and in Eastern Europe. I daresay the women caught in that hideous lifestyle would love having nothing more to worry about than "checking with 'authorities' before distributing an idea"--as it is, most probably don't even get to choose whether their Johns wear condoms.
You seem to lack any ability to look into the future whatsoever. Technology has the potential to centralize control in some pretty horrific ways. It is important to keep those in power from getting used to the idea that they have the right to control the ideas you express, or else the hypothetical and limited slavery that comes from a "check with us before thinking" policy becomes a "don't bother checking with us- we won't let you say anything we don't want you to" policy. Not far from there to real physical slavery. Duh, patent law is not the primary concern of Asian sex slaves. It's an analogy, not a literal equivalence.
He has that right - he wrote the software, therefore, it's his property.
No, he wrote it therefore he wrote it. I disagree with the step that authorship implies property. His property is the paper he wrote it on, not the actions of others who would like to extend his ideas.
He can dictate the terms of its use as he pleases. . . and we, likewise, have the choice of either using his software, or finding something with a more agreeable license, or creating an application ourselves and dicating terms for its use as we see fit.
It's difficult to avoid falling into an is/ought trap here. It is true that the legal idea ownership system currently gives him the legal right to dictate some (but not as many as you imply!) of the conditions under which his software may be used. However, this is not the way it should be. Ideas do not obey the same laws of scarcity that physical products do- once you share an idea, two people have one full idea- if you share a sandwich, two people have half a sandwich. Property rights are based on a social compromise that slows down the violent redistribution of property by assigning moral claims to scarce goods. This system makes no sense for scarce goods.
What is scarce is not the software, but the ability to create it. Larry can refuse to write or publish his software, he can refuse to update or improve it. But it is wrong for him to dictate what is done with his ideas once they are released.
Huh?? I'm sorry, this makes absolutely no sense. I think the "borg-like collective" and "government-approved monopoly" rhetoric is some slap at Microsoft, but I fail to see the connection to BitKeeper.
Bitkeeper is a single corporation, as is Microsoft. The "borg-like collective" I'm talking about is the collection of industries that earn their livelihood through the abuse of the idea ownership system. I'm trying to say that Bitkeeper is just one of a vast number of corporations who collectively threaten the freedom of ideas by locking them up under legal restrictions. If it was just Microsoft or just Bitkeeper they'd be much easier to fight.
I understand why it's a slap in the face, too; but comparing software licensing to slavery is a bit overboard. Software is not sentient by any stretch of the imagination.
No, the users are. In a way it's much more insidious than slavery, it's distributed mind control. The ability to force someone to check with the "authorities" before distributing an idea for fear of violating someone's idea monopoly *is* a form of slavery.
And for christ's sake, the comparison need not be perfect. I mean, if I say "This beer is a little bitter, like coffee", and it's not quite as bitter as coffee, are you going to pounce on me? It's similar in quality even if not in severity.
only your rights toward the use of their system.
Not so- he is demanding that people who use his software not work on other software. That's the angry bee in RMS' bonnett today.
As far as landlords go, I'd way rather own a house. The question is, do we live in a world where the average person is at the whim of a landlord's mood?
We're not dealing with a single corporation, we're dealing with a borg-like collective of corporations being fed government-approved monopolies over ideas, and taking any one down is not going to win the day.