I picked up WoG for US$2. I'd never played it before and had never been bothered enough to even download the demo. Effectively, I was happy to pay US$2 to take a chance on something which I might not like or play at all, or I might love and play relentlessly. I wouldn't have regretted that US$2 if I played it once and never bothered again.
I should add that I'm not a big gamer; I get all my games used for £1-4 for PSX, original XBox and PC and generally stick to recognised AAA titles. I pay similar prices for movie DVDs. Only CDs and DVD box sets get better prices out of me; anywhere from £8 to £16 usually.
Beyond these problems of attitude, there is also the very real and politically neutral problem of a MAD scenario involving Iran and Israel. Mutually Assured Destruction (barely) worked during the Cold War because both the US and the USSR were supremely stable and supremely powerful in their respective spheres of influence.
Also, with a few exceptions (Cuba/Turkey/Italy being the obvious examples), the large geographical distances involved meant that there was time for both sides to double-check and confer before launching a retaliatory strike in the event of a suspected launch by the other. In these regional scenarios (Israel v. most of its neighbours, India v. Pakistan, North Korea v. Japan/South Korea/China/whoever) there's very little time to cool things down; if one party detects a launch their choices are limited to a) do nothing and b) strike back (probably with everything they have) immediately.
Whilst MAD may have kept the West and the Eastern Bloc from fighting a nuclear war, I fear it definitely won't work the same way in these regional conflicts.
You can witness this in terms of people who continually cry about wanting more "quality" electronics, yest consistently purchasing the cheapest crap they can get their hands on. When you talk to them, they claim that quality and reliability are things they value highly. However their consumption habits show that isn't the case, what they value is low cost an features.
I think part of the problem is that 'low cost and features' are easy to verify; you go into the store, or look at some photos, or read some reviews, or at worst, RTFM, and you know what you're getting and for how much.
On the other hand, build quality, stability, reliability etc. can only be evaluated after purchase (at least these days, now that the formerly-reputable brands have debased themselves by badge engineering generic crap to hit a given price point, rather than confidently and assertively saying "we can't build a quality X for £Y, and we don't think anyone else can either"). And if you're not happy, good like finding a vendor who'll give you your money back.
So, given the hit-or-miss nature of assessing build quality, it's not surprising consumers select based on the attributes they can easily evaluate.
USN-819-1 references CVE-2009-2692 not CVE-2008-4609 (i.e. the issue we're talking about here). The details don't match CVE-2008-4609 either. Searching Debian's security announcement list for CVE-2008-4609 finds nothing.
Debian (and by extension, Ubuntu) do a fine job of producing distributions and keeping them pretty secure. But you've not substantiated your claim that they've implemented their own kernel fix for CVE-2008-4609.
Um, you know what Red Hat mean when they say 'upstream', right? That means no distribution will have the fix unless they develop one themselves, since Linus isn't including one.
they used incredibly cheep-ass HBA's for no good reason.
In their defence:
A note about SATA chipsets: Each of the port multiplier backplanes has a Silicon Image SiI3726 chip so that five drives can be attached to one SATA port. Each of the SYBA two-port PCIe SATA cards has a Silicon Image SiI3132, and the four-port PCI Addonics card has a Silicon Image SiI3124 chip. We use only three of the four available ports on the Addonics card because we have only nine backplanes. We don't use the SATA ports on the motherboard because, despite Intel's claims of port multiplier support in their ICH10 south bridge, we noticed strange results in our performance tests. Silicon Image pioneered port multiplier technology, and their chips work best together.
My question would be "What is the argument for protecting Open Source software longer than Closed software? Can you demonstrate that it would be harmful not to?" There would be no "looting" if Copyright had expired on the source code. The situation would be analogous to how BSDL software licensing works currently.
Both BSD-like and GPL-like licenses are available to software creators. By an author choosing to license their work under the GPL, it indicates that they want it to be used and distributed in ways significantly different than if they'd chosen a BSD-like license. The intent here is obvious; the original author is making their work free for you to use and distribute, but only if you're effectively willing to contribute back any changes that you make to versions that you distribute. If the author of a GPL-licensed piece of software was OK with bits of it being incorporated into proprietary software, they would have chosen a BSD-like license for it, or dual-licensed. Whilst my term 'looting' is emotive, I think the author of a GPL-licensed work would think it an appropriate term to use for the situation I describe, even if technically (i.e. because the copyright term had been reduced and protection had expired) it is not.
I have written code and released it under GPL licenses. If the Pirate Party were to make 'share and share alike' licenses ineffective, I wouldn't necessarily use BSD licenses instead for future works. If I can't use my skills to build 'goods in common', then I might as well derive private profit and go proprietary instead. I doubt I'm the only software author who feels this way.
we make exceptions all the time for things
Sure, but my argument has always been that creating an exception for Open Source would be seen as hypocritical and be immensely difficult to legislate and enforce anyway. I've already suggested that the various Pirate Parties, FSF, GNU, Open Rights Group etc. need to get together to discuss the issue properly, because at the moment no one seems to have a workable, acceptable solution.
I sympathise with not wanting to be seen as hypocritical; inconsistent legislation that benefits special interests is one of my bugbears too.
However, I think that failing to see that the authors of Free software are intending to create goods in common is as short-sighted as copyright holders not seeing the value to society of their goods eventually entering the public domain (and in a usable state too, not protected by failed-closed DRM).
I won't go into too much detail here as I've already debated the topic in depth on the PPUK forums: I'd refer you there, and to the Copyright Policy draft document, for more information.
Tried that, didn't even get a cogent acknowledgment of the problem. See one of my other posts today. I am, however, pleased to learn today from another poster that they appear to be listening to rms now.
However as I pointed out several weeks back during a discussion, people can't have their cake and eat it, too: in other words you can't go around creating exceptions for certain things like Open Source software just because you happen to like it.
Firstly, I was talking about Free software not Open Source software. The distinction is important in this context. Open Source software is not necessarily Free (libre) software, but Free software is always also Open Source.
Secondly, what is the point of being able to freely share time-bombed proprietary binaries that cannot be fixed due to lack of source code, but allowing proprietary software authors to 'loot' from Free (libre) software whose copyright protection term has been reduced?
Thirdly, we make exceptions all the time for things, regardless of whether we 'happen to like them' or not but based upon tangible differences between other things. The right to own a nuclear weapon is different from the right to own a firearm. The right to drive a car is different from the right to fly a plane. Free (libre) software is far more than just a different way to develop and distribute software. The Pirate Party, in its obsession for 'free (gratis) stuff' seems to be blind to this.
Ah, that sounds optimistic. I'd had no response to a post I made about a week before that story, nor when I repeated the same point on what appears to be their preferred forum.
The death penalty view is right-wing, but from way back in 2003. The pro-grammar school stance can be seen as egalitarian/progressive/left-wing and the Daily Mail is a right-wing paper.
Don't get me wrong; it's not that I think of Davis as a "leftie 'wet' Tory", but that I perceive that many within his own party perceive him to be.
There are some Conservatives who oppose ID cards and authoritarian policies, such as David Davis [...] but they spend most of their time being demonised by the media for being "right wing"
Really? Got a reference for that? I perceive David Davis' relative lack of influence as coming from his (welcome) views on the value of civil liberties!
The Pirate Party are the only ones serious about challenging ID cards; the tories are just making noises about it for political gain.
The Lib Dems and Greens are also strongly opposed to 'em, and both are more likely to be in a position to be able to assert power and do something about it. I fear the Pirate Party's obsession with 'free (gratis) stuff' also blinds them to the harm it'll do to Free (libre) software.
You are not considering the main point of the argument: that GPL is more restrictive than BSD, and that someday, somebody will have a problem with those restrictions and he/she will sit down and create a BSD version. So in the end, the license will gravitate towards the most free option: BSD (or equivalent).
I was going to counter that with "where are the BSD licensed (C/C++) compilers" but I see there are quite a few out there. However, I note whilst some have advantages compared with gcc (e.g. PCC appears to produce significantly faster code), they all also have significant disadvantages compared to gcc. So whilst one (or more) BSD-licensed clone(s) of a (L)GPL-licensed package may eventually show up, it will be harder for any one project to accrue critical mass and become the BSD licensed-clone. Now, if there's a clone out there that does everything you need, great, and there may even be something to be said for the evolutionary benefits of multiple clones with slightly different target uses, I find it unlikely that anyone would create a functionally-equivalent drop-in replacement for a (L)GPL package.
PyQT also has a commercial license. You're just being a freeloading leech right now.
The availability of commercial licenses for PyQt show that Riverbank has no philosophical objection to people writing and distributing GPL-incompatible code that uses it, but they'd like some money for that use (which is fair enough; they're the authors after all).
Now, Nokia seems to be standardising on Maemo/Qt for their future phones, and part of that is that they'd like to build a viable application marketplace for their phones, a la the iPhone. Keeping it free (gratis) to develop for their platform will encourage developers, which suits their goals. Presumably after asking nicely, they also offered Riverbank some cash or equivalent, at least equal to the costs they eventually incurred in developing PySide. Presumably Riverbank didn't think that was enough, and decline (which is still their perogative).
I disagree, I think applications gravitate to the GPL license since it means that any distributed improvements are available to all, which reduces the likelihood of private forks. This comes at the possible cost of discouraging some improvements altogether (i.e. from people who want - for sake of business model or ego - to have their improvements exclusive to their fork).
Now, canoncial implementations of standards such as file formats and network protocols probably do gravitate to BSD or similar, since this encourages everyone to include support in their products, even if they're an Evil Proprietary Vendor, which in turn makes the standard more useful due to its widespread support. LGPL can be seen as a variant of this that prevents said Evil Proprietary Vendors from 'Embracing and Extending' without contributing their extensions back.
Here was an interesting one, an old PC with a monitor in portrait format. It asks why they didn't catch on, and I'm not sure I know the answer. It seems like it WOULD be better, especially because you could look at an entire page on the thing.
Some contemporary monitors can be rotated between landscape and portrait orientations; the Lenovo L220x, for example. It's a feature that's more popular in pre-press organisations.
It's not their fault Linux isn't stable for more than a year or so. Other OSs deal just fine with older drivers when they want to. Open Source is not an excuse for unstable APIs.
I didn't say it was; but nVidia want the sales from Linux users and partners (otherwise they wouldn't produce any drivers at all) but they don't want to participate on Linux's terms, i.e. GPL-compatible drivers, or programming documentation. The result is that users of their hardware get screwed when nVidia's business model makes it unprofitable to continue to support older GPUs with their drivers.
Unstable APIs are not an outright negative; they allow changes without having to maintain legacy APIs for compatibility. And, like that design decision or not, it's a fact of life with Linux and failing to acknowledge it and produce a solution that's workable is unfair to customers who think they've bought, rather than rent, their GPUs.
I use the proprietary Nvidia blob (version 180) for my Nvidia 8400 and I have no qualms about it. Windows users use proprietary drivers for practically every card that I've seen over the years, so how is it any different in principle if you replace Windows with Linux? While I take open stuff when I can get it, I would rather have a video card and wireless device that works on Linux. Not every Linux user sees things the same way that RMS does by insisting on a 100% FOSS operating system. While you can have that if you want it, I prefer the freedom of being able to mix and match as I see fit.
Nice video card you have there; it's a shame that you rent it from nVidia rather than own it outright.
Think I'm being over-dramatic? Not really, since at some point, nVidia will decide it's no longer worth their time and effort to maintain the driver for it, and the last driver they release will eventually suffer bitrot against the Linux kernel. Being closed source, eventually there's a chance that it cannot be easily patched because there are changes required in the binary blob parts.
Now, I use nVidia video cards too, but that's only because of the pragmatism that says outside of onboard Intel video, they work the best under Linux. I refuse to spend much on them though, because I never know when nVidia will declare my card obsolete - whether I think it is or not.
rms' point is that the Pirate Party's copyright reform platform focuses entirely on free (gratis) use of binaries (which may be timebombed to expire after five years, even, making them useless for *any* purpose, commercial or non-commercial), whilst simultaneously removing copyright protection from GPL and other Free (libre) licenses after five years, thereby allowing proprietary software producers to loot them after their protection has expired.
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I picked up WoG for US$2. I'd never played it before and had never been bothered enough to even download the demo. Effectively, I was happy to pay US$2 to take a chance on something which I might not like or play at all, or I might love and play relentlessly. I wouldn't have regretted that US$2 if I played it once and never bothered again.
I should add that I'm not a big gamer; I get all my games used for £1-4 for PSX, original XBox and PC and generally stick to recognised AAA titles. I pay similar prices for movie DVDs. Only CDs and DVD box sets get better prices out of me; anywhere from £8 to £16 usually.
Wouldn't be the first time Israel decided to go level somebody else's reactor
Or even the second.
Beyond these problems of attitude, there is also the very real and politically neutral problem of a MAD scenario involving Iran and Israel. Mutually Assured Destruction (barely) worked during the Cold War because both the US and the USSR were supremely stable and supremely powerful in their respective spheres of influence.
Also, with a few exceptions (Cuba/Turkey/Italy being the obvious examples), the large geographical distances involved meant that there was time for both sides to double-check and confer before launching a retaliatory strike in the event of a suspected launch by the other. In these regional scenarios (Israel v. most of its neighbours, India v. Pakistan, North Korea v. Japan/South Korea/China/whoever) there's very little time to cool things down; if one party detects a launch their choices are limited to a) do nothing and b) strike back (probably with everything they have) immediately.
Whilst MAD may have kept the West and the Eastern Bloc from fighting a nuclear war, I fear it definitely won't work the same way in these regional conflicts.
You can witness this in terms of people who continually cry about wanting more "quality" electronics, yest consistently purchasing the cheapest crap they can get their hands on. When you talk to them, they claim that quality and reliability are things they value highly. However their consumption habits show that isn't the case, what they value is low cost an features.
I think part of the problem is that 'low cost and features' are easy to verify; you go into the store, or look at some photos, or read some reviews, or at worst, RTFM, and you know what you're getting and for how much.
On the other hand, build quality, stability, reliability etc. can only be evaluated after purchase (at least these days, now that the formerly-reputable brands have debased themselves by badge engineering generic crap to hit a given price point, rather than confidently and assertively saying "we can't build a quality X for £Y, and we don't think anyone else can either"). And if you're not happy, good like finding a vendor who'll give you your money back.
So, given the hit-or-miss nature of assessing build quality, it's not surprising consumers select based on the attributes they can easily evaluate.
However, you are right in that the response is usually worthless.
I concur; no official posthumous pardon, or in the absence of that, funding to maintain the Bletchley Park museum.
USN-819-1 references CVE-2009-2692 not CVE-2008-4609 (i.e. the issue we're talking about here). The details don't match CVE-2008-4609 either. Searching Debian's security announcement list for CVE-2008-4609 finds nothing.
Debian (and by extension, Ubuntu) do a fine job of producing distributions and keeping them pretty secure. But you've not substantiated your claim that they've implemented their own kernel fix for CVE-2008-4609.
Where is it documented that Debian's kernels are fixed? Have you got a link?
Are you quite sure Debian supplied a kernel fix? Only searching debian.org for CVE-2008-4609 doesn't find anything relevant.
Um, you know what Red Hat mean when they say 'upstream', right? That means no distribution will have the fix unless they develop one themselves, since Linus isn't including one.
So no updates for the recently-released CentOS 5.3 for a while either (according to this thread).
they used incredibly cheep-ass HBA's for no good reason.
In their defence:
A note about SATA chipsets: Each of the port multiplier backplanes has a Silicon Image SiI3726 chip so that five drives can be attached to one SATA port. Each of the SYBA two-port PCIe SATA cards has a Silicon Image SiI3132, and the four-port PCI Addonics card has a Silicon Image SiI3124 chip. We use only three of the four available ports on the Addonics card because we have only nine backplanes. We don't use the SATA ports on the motherboard because, despite Intel's claims of port multiplier support in their ICH10 south bridge, we noticed strange results in our performance tests. Silicon Image pioneered port multiplier technology, and their chips work best together.
My question would be "What is the argument for protecting Open Source software longer than Closed software? Can you demonstrate that it would be harmful not to?" There would be no "looting" if Copyright had expired on the source code. The situation would be analogous to how BSDL software licensing works currently.
Both BSD-like and GPL-like licenses are available to software creators. By an author choosing to license their work under the GPL, it indicates that they want it to be used and distributed in ways significantly different than if they'd chosen a BSD-like license. The intent here is obvious; the original author is making their work free for you to use and distribute, but only if you're effectively willing to contribute back any changes that you make to versions that you distribute. If the author of a GPL-licensed piece of software was OK with bits of it being incorporated into proprietary software, they would have chosen a BSD-like license for it, or dual-licensed. Whilst my term 'looting' is emotive, I think the author of a GPL-licensed work would think it an appropriate term to use for the situation I describe, even if technically (i.e. because the copyright term had been reduced and protection had expired) it is not.
I have written code and released it under GPL licenses. If the Pirate Party were to make 'share and share alike' licenses ineffective, I wouldn't necessarily use BSD licenses instead for future works. If I can't use my skills to build 'goods in common', then I might as well derive private profit and go proprietary instead. I doubt I'm the only software author who feels this way.
we make exceptions all the time for things
Sure, but my argument has always been that creating an exception for Open Source would be seen as hypocritical and be immensely difficult to legislate and enforce anyway. I've already suggested that the various Pirate Parties, FSF, GNU, Open Rights Group etc. need to get together to discuss the issue properly, because at the moment no one seems to have a workable, acceptable solution.
I sympathise with not wanting to be seen as hypocritical; inconsistent legislation that benefits special interests is one of my bugbears too.
However, I think that failing to see that the authors of Free software are intending to create goods in common is as short-sighted as copyright holders not seeing the value to society of their goods eventually entering the public domain (and in a usable state too, not protected by failed-closed DRM).
I won't go into too much detail here as I've already debated the topic in depth on the PPUK forums: I'd refer you there, and to the Copyright Policy draft document, for more information.
Tried that, didn't even get a cogent acknowledgment of the problem. See one of my other posts today. I am, however, pleased to learn today from another poster that they appear to be listening to rms now.
However as I pointed out several weeks back during a discussion, people can't have their cake and eat it, too: in other words you can't go around creating exceptions for certain things like Open Source software just because you happen to like it.
Firstly, I was talking about Free software not Open Source software. The distinction is important in this context. Open Source software is not necessarily Free (libre) software, but Free software is always also Open Source.
Secondly, what is the point of being able to freely share time-bombed proprietary binaries that cannot be fixed due to lack of source code, but allowing proprietary software authors to 'loot' from Free (libre) software whose copyright protection term has been reduced?
Thirdly, we make exceptions all the time for things, regardless of whether we 'happen to like them' or not but based upon tangible differences between other things. The right to own a nuclear weapon is different from the right to own a firearm. The right to drive a car is different from the right to fly a plane. Free (libre) software is far more than just a different way to develop and distribute software. The Pirate Party, in its obsession for 'free (gratis) stuff' seems to be blind to this.
Ah, that sounds optimistic. I'd had no response to a post I made about a week before that story, nor when I repeated the same point on what appears to be their preferred forum.
The death penalty view is right-wing, but from way back in 2003. The pro-grammar school stance can be seen as egalitarian/progressive/left-wing and the Daily Mail is a right-wing paper.
Don't get me wrong; it's not that I think of Davis as a "leftie 'wet' Tory", but that I perceive that many within his own party perceive him to be.
There are some Conservatives who oppose ID cards and authoritarian policies, such as David Davis [...] but they spend most of their time being demonised by the media for being "right wing"
Really? Got a reference for that? I perceive David Davis' relative lack of influence as coming from his (welcome) views on the value of civil liberties!
The Pirate Party are the only ones serious about challenging ID cards; the tories are just making noises about it for political gain.
The Lib Dems and Greens are also strongly opposed to 'em, and both are more likely to be in a position to be able to assert power and do something about it. I fear the Pirate Party's obsession with 'free (gratis) stuff' also blinds them to the harm it'll do to Free (libre) software.
You are not considering the main point of the argument: that GPL is more restrictive than BSD, and that someday, somebody will have a problem with those restrictions and he/she will sit down and create a BSD version. So in the end, the license will gravitate towards the most free option: BSD (or equivalent).
I was going to counter that with "where are the BSD licensed (C/C++) compilers" but I see there are quite a few out there. However, I note whilst some have advantages compared with gcc (e.g. PCC appears to produce significantly faster code), they all also have significant disadvantages compared to gcc. So whilst one (or more) BSD-licensed clone(s) of a (L)GPL-licensed package may eventually show up, it will be harder for any one project to accrue critical mass and become the BSD licensed-clone. Now, if there's a clone out there that does everything you need, great, and there may even be something to be said for the evolutionary benefits of multiple clones with slightly different target uses, I find it unlikely that anyone would create a functionally-equivalent drop-in replacement for a (L)GPL package.
PyQT also has a commercial license. You're just being a freeloading leech right now.
The availability of commercial licenses for PyQt show that Riverbank has no philosophical objection to people writing and distributing GPL-incompatible code that uses it, but they'd like some money for that use (which is fair enough; they're the authors after all).
Now, Nokia seems to be standardising on Maemo/Qt for their future phones, and part of that is that they'd like to build a viable application marketplace for their phones, a la the iPhone. Keeping it free (gratis) to develop for their platform will encourage developers, which suits their goals. Presumably after asking nicely, they also offered Riverbank some cash or equivalent, at least equal to the costs they eventually incurred in developing PySide. Presumably Riverbank didn't think that was enough, and decline (which is still their perogative).
I disagree, I think applications gravitate to the GPL license since it means that any distributed improvements are available to all, which reduces the likelihood of private forks. This comes at the possible cost of discouraging some improvements altogether (i.e. from people who want - for sake of business model or ego - to have their improvements exclusive to their fork).
Now, canoncial implementations of standards such as file formats and network protocols probably do gravitate to BSD or similar, since this encourages everyone to include support in their products, even if they're an Evil Proprietary Vendor, which in turn makes the standard more useful due to its widespread support. LGPL can be seen as a variant of this that prevents said Evil Proprietary Vendors from 'Embracing and Extending' without contributing their extensions back.
Here was an interesting one, an old PC with a monitor in portrait format. It asks why they didn't catch on, and I'm not sure I know the answer. It seems like it WOULD be better, especially because you could look at an entire page on the thing.
Some contemporary monitors can be rotated between landscape and portrait orientations; the Lenovo L220x, for example. It's a feature that's more popular in pre-press organisations.
It's not their fault Linux isn't stable for more than a year or so. Other OSs deal just fine with older drivers when they want to. Open Source is not an excuse for unstable APIs.
I didn't say it was; but nVidia want the sales from Linux users and partners (otherwise they wouldn't produce any drivers at all) but they don't want to participate on Linux's terms, i.e. GPL-compatible drivers, or programming documentation. The result is that users of their hardware get screwed when nVidia's business model makes it unprofitable to continue to support older GPUs with their drivers.
Unstable APIs are not an outright negative; they allow changes without having to maintain legacy APIs for compatibility. And, like that design decision or not, it's a fact of life with Linux and failing to acknowledge it and produce a solution that's workable is unfair to customers who think they've bought, rather than rent, their GPUs.
I use the proprietary Nvidia blob (version 180) for my Nvidia 8400 and I have no qualms about it. Windows users use proprietary drivers for practically every card that I've seen over the years, so how is it any different in principle if you replace Windows with Linux? While I take open stuff when I can get it, I would rather have a video card and wireless device that works on Linux. Not every Linux user sees things the same way that RMS does by insisting on a 100% FOSS operating system. While you can have that if you want it, I prefer the freedom of being able to mix and match as I see fit.
Nice video card you have there; it's a shame that you rent it from nVidia rather than own it outright.
Think I'm being over-dramatic? Not really, since at some point, nVidia will decide it's no longer worth their time and effort to maintain the driver for it, and the last driver they release will eventually suffer bitrot against the Linux kernel. Being closed source, eventually there's a chance that it cannot be easily patched because there are changes required in the binary blob parts.
Now, I use nVidia video cards too, but that's only because of the pragmatism that says outside of onboard Intel video, they work the best under Linux. I refuse to spend much on them though, because I never know when nVidia will declare my card obsolete - whether I think it is or not.
Um, you're missing the point.
rms' point is that the Pirate Party's copyright reform platform focuses entirely on free (gratis) use of binaries (which may be timebombed to expire after five years, even, making them useless for *any* purpose, commercial or non-commercial), whilst simultaneously removing copyright protection from GPL and other Free (libre) licenses after five years, thereby allowing proprietary software producers to loot them after their protection has expired.
What view does the UK Pirate Party take of the view that your platform will harm Free (libre) software, as expressed by rms ?