Squashing 31 vulnerabilities in a single patch, is, in a word, efficient. "Embrace and extend," might be a negative part of the Borg ethos, but I give Microsoft credit for displaying the positive side of it, as well.;-)
What I don't understand is why Incredibles, the film that I think lends itself most to a sequel isn't getting the sequel treatment.
Because it doesn't lend itself to a sequel? The first film was moderately original. (I emphasise moderately)
A family of superheroes tries to turn their back on their abilities, blend into society, and live as normal people.
A sequel, however, would have nowhere to go. They'd already demonstrated at the end of the first movie that the family had accepted their abilities, learned to use them, and had thus essentially become generic comic book staples in the process. The entire reason why people think they want a sequel is because, in the first movie, the characters seemed like original people, but given the development that has occurred, that's no longer true. There's no uniqueness there any more.
If Pixar made a sequel of the Incredibles, people would be bored. It wasn't the characters themselves that were interesting; it was the situation they were in that was.
I live in southeastern Australia, and down here, we haven't had regular rainfall now since 1995. Melbourne's water reserves are currently sitting at around 25%. The government's been talking about dredging the Yarra, the city's river, and that is only about a third of peak level at the moment as it is.
This tells me that the long term trend for Victoria is desertification. Queensland is getting floods these days, while we get barely a drop. Unless we're planning on abandoning the entire state, we're going to need technologies exactly like these, in order to be able to continue to live here.
The editors should be a lot more careful about fact checking when posting stories like this. If it turns out to be false, and damaging to Comcast's business due to the amount of Slashbots ranting about how much they hate the ISP, Slashdot's parent company could be looking at a lawsuit from Comcast for libel; and IMHO, they'd be within their rights.
The anti-Capitalist bias on this site truly is genuinely appalling, and it highlights yet again the complete lack of integrity inherent in the double standard that Stallman has indoctrinated into his minions. Corporations doing the wrong thing doesn't give us carte blanche to likewise behave badly. If anything, it's exactly the opposite.
It's information from a Comcast rep that could clear the company's name, potentially.
It is not fair of Slashdot to call a company evil if they don't ensure that clarifying/corrective information is also made prominent, if it is available.
...blogging was a fad. The truly first wave blogs have probably been dead for two years now already; and the blog was also probably more needed during the Bush administration, (as a form of indie media) than it is now.
It will come back around, in time. Fads always do.
The education system isn't about education. It's about penal reform.
When kids are born, their instinctive emotional responses, their ability to be idealistic, and their ability to believe that they can change things for the better, are all intact, because at first they don't know better. I remember one example during my first or second year at school when I didn't want to engage in some of the activities we were doing in class; that was when the dichotomy began to be imprinted, between what I wanted, and what everyone else wanted me to do.
The entire purpose of the education system is to beat anything out of a child that doesn't conform, and this economic program could just be seen as getting the proverbial indentured servitude started that much earlier. The bastards at the top of the heap actually prefer beginning to indoctrinate kids as young as they can, because they know the truth of the words of Uncle Joe. "Give me a child until he is 5 years old, and you may do what you will with him thereafter."
During school, kids get allotted the place in the social hierarchy which they very often occupy for the rest of their lives, and God help you if you're not inherently an athlete with around a 130 IQ. You actually ironically don't want to be far above 130, though; because virtually nobody else is, so if you are, it just makes you look like a freak.
The education system for me was purely about psychological survival, and I very nearly didn't survive; I spent two months in a psychiatric inpatient unit after leaving, and probably another six months in outpatient therapy after that. I went very close to insanity.
Same things happened with web development and Java. In both cases Microsoft embraced and extended to the point of breaking inter-compatibility.
Granted, except in this case, my own theory at least is that like just about everything else that has come out of Sun, (at least that I've ever heard of) Java has largely been a solution in desperate need of a problem.
That's not to say that nobody uses it, (I have a cousin with a CS degree who just got back from two years in England a few days ago, and the company who sent him over there had him doing Java work in particular for some sort of touchscreen kiosk type setup) but your point about why Microsoft were ultimately able to kill Netscape, (i.e., not only was IE incumbent on Windows, but it was also perceived as better, or at least good enough) also applies here.
Specifically, that Java wasn't tangibly more attractive, for the most part, than what Microsoft were able to come up with themselves. I keep hearing a lot of talk online about.NET, Silverlight, and Mono, but I don't hear much these days about Java, at all.
BSD is a bad example, since its lost favor for the vast majority of developers. Linux could be considered the slightly younger, more attractive platform to work on, so people jumped ship to Linux, but nothing stops BSD from living on forever. That's not to say its a success story in modern times vs. Apache which still maintains a very high relevance.
Whether BSD or Apache are popular or not wasn't my point. My point was that, contrary to Stallman's paranoia, Microsoft (or $(EVIL CORPORATION)) haven't used the legal system to literally remove them from existence. The central rationale behind copyleft (and certainly the GPL 3, if not 2) is the expectation that corporations will use the legal system to kill FOSS, and thus the legal system also needs to be used in order to prevent that from occurring.
To a large extent, that hasn't happened. Netscape wasn't FOSS, and even if it was, the legal system wasn't used to kill it. Whether or not software is *irrelevant* or not, is not my point. The point is that the legal system is not being used to literally give non-GPL projects the baby harp seal treatment; and that being the case, there is no genuine need to use the GPL over any other FOSS license.
It's also worth remembering that, while we haven't seen any scenarios yet where the GPL has prevented the actual death of a project, (to differentiate from what the FSF defines as violation) the GPL also did not economically protect Red Hat from Oracle, or projects like CentOS, which essentially provide the same software that Red Hat does, (and in the case of Oracle, possibly similar support) but simply without Red Hat's artwork; as under the GPL, the artwork itself is pretty much the only unique IP that Red Hat owns where its' distros are concerned at all. That can simply be stripped out, and Red Hat's work redistributed by someone else.
1) Give software away without restriction. Result: someone takes the code, incorporates it into their paid for product and using the revenue from their near monopoly blows the 'free' version out of the water. No more free version.
Microsoft would tend to disagree with you, I'm sure. They managed to corner the market with a free product, in the case of Internet Explorer. Before you try and argue semantics simply because this won't be in support of your premise, it's true that they no longer have 100%; but they still wouldn't be that far below 90%.
Before you also start bleating at me about how they were leveraging their monopoly, realise how well Google are doing in the market on search. Thus, it could work for them, whether or not it couldn't work for a smaller startup.
Even with small startups, the whole point isn't to necessarily use the BSD license for everything. Use it for things that ought to have unencumbered reference implementations; video codecs are a good example. That way, it getting copied by other companies is entirely the point; some of said companies will add value to it (and close it) if they want, while others can also develop it but keep it open as they choose, while still others can rely on availability of at least the reference baseline.
Corporations are entirely free to make closed, modified derivatives of Apache; again, if Stallman is right, why haven't they been destroyed yet?
Your entire argument is fear-based; as all of the FSF's rationale is. If the, "corporations are going to destroy everything!" argument is valid, how come any of the BSDs still exist at all? Come to that, why didn't Microsoft destroy the WC3 after they acquired Internet Explorer? How come virtually any of the Internet's protocols still exist, rather than single, monopolised implementations? As I said above, Apache isn't licensed with the GPL; how come it hasn't been destroyed yet?
(FSF moderators, start your engines. You'll want to mod this post down to -1, to make sure nobody sees it)
Mpeg AFAIK is a freely implementable spec. Find a codec for it that uses the BSD license, or write one yourself. Problem solved.
I never use GPL licensed software at all myself unless it is unavoidable, (gcc/gmake etc, unfortunately) for precisely this type of reason.
The GPL is only a free license according to Richard Stallman's dishonest redefinition of the word "free." I consider him a fundamentally dishonest individual, and the FSF an immoral organisation, and I do not support him or them.
Open source was founded in 1998 as a way to stop talking about those things, to hush them up, bury them, put them out of people's sight. So they talk about practical advantages that come if you use free software.
(From Stallman's speech)
This is quite simply not true. The definition of what constitutes Open Source is right here, and I've virtually never seen Linus give an interview where he doesn't mention the GPL, or specifically why he likes it.
You can also read this, as well. People who advocate licenses other than the GPL are perhaps not as vocal as Stallman, but to claim that they are actively repressing or trying to bury anything is a lie, and a particularly malicious and injurious one.
Eventually I just quit buying anything with significant/restrictive DRM. If I find something DRM-free I like I will always buy it that way. Certainly no encrypted songs, ebooks, etc.
Yep, and that's what we have to do. We don't need big fear campaigns against it, like what the FSF did. All we need to do is vote with our wallets.
a) Buy it digitally again, but if you can, make sure it is a copy that is clean in DRM terms.
b) Buy a hard copy. For anything I buy, this is always my approach. A physical copy of something has a much higher chance of lasting years, or more or less indefinitely if I keep it and am able to back it up. I don't do the micropayment for digital downloads thing, and most likely never will. I'm not paying tangible funds for something that could get lost in a power surge. Hard copies are a little more durable, especially if, as I said, they're backed up.
c) If you want to go the digital route, and a) isn't possible, pirate it. Although I don't have huge moral problems with piracy, (as I generally feel that, on balance, most content producers will generally at least break even on any given pirated work, and usually make a large profit, even with piracy) my general policy is that if I like something enough to really seek it out, I will generally like it enough to buy a physical copy from Amazon and give the artist something for their trouble. If it is an artist who I like a lot, and who I'd conceivably buy from often, (such as Shpongle, if I had more money) I'd possibly even write to the artist and ask them if they could make their wares available from their own site, so that I could be sure that the lion's share of my money was going directly to them, where I intend it to go.
In some cases (old/obscure stuff) piracy is going to be your only option, as you may not be able to find the work via retail channels; however again, if the work in question is something you really value, use piracy as a last resort. If a creative person produces something which enriches your life, then in my opinion they deserve to be paid for it.
Further evidence of the administration complete lack of understanding of capitalism and free enterprise - expect others to follow.
I'm extremely tired of seeing opinions like this on Slashdot. Granted, Randian capitalist zealots are actually in much smaller numbers on this site than the pro-FSF Marxist fanatics, but you're no less obnoxious than the GNU/drones.
The thing that is possibly even worse about capitalist extremists than Stallman's cultists, is that at least Stallman is honest about his perspectives. I suspect that you are an individual who fervently, passionately believes in every last one of the shameless lies that you have been brought up with.
A good little flag-waving, non-discriminating 'Murrican. God bless the troops and all of that, while we conveniently overlook the fact that when they die in some hellhole in Tikrit or northern Afghanistan, it's actually to protect OPEC's bottom line. Freedom, even in Stallman's perverted (re)definition of the word, has absolutely nothing to do with it. If you really gave a shit about honouring the troops, though, you wouldn't support the economic farce that they give their blood for. If they really were dying in support of genuine freedom, maybe that'd really be something; but they're not. They're actually fighting for the perpetuation of slavery; both yours and other people's.
As far as capitalist theory goes, I took the time to read both Rand and von Mises. Mises I could respect, because he was careful to write about how capitalism, if properly exercised, could benefit both the many as well as the one or few.
Rand, on the other hand, was an idiot after Neitzche's own heart, who advocated nothing but avarice and blatant egocentrism, and tried to dress it up as something noble and redeemable. It wasn't.
Let this be a lesson to every GNU/drone who reads this, and who thinks because of my past material, I'm your enemy. I'm not. Metaphorically/ideologically speaking, I suck every bit as much Communist pussy as any Stallman worshipping, green badanna wearing, pot smoking yippie freetard who reads Slashdot. I actually went to a Greenpeace meeting once, totally of my own volition, because I consider it human and not necessarily purely freakish to be pissed off about baby harp seals being clubbed to death. That shit is just plain wrong, and so are a lot of other things which the corporate world are doing.
The point of my above digression is this; what I'm really sick of is extremism, on both sides. I'm sick of uber-Communist jackasses like Stallman on the one hand, and uber-Capitalist jackasses like Gates, Ballmer, and the OP here on the other.
We need taxes, dammit. I'm not opposed to Capitalism at all, contrary to how this might sound, but I *am* opposed to the concept of individuals with an annual GDP the same size as several Third World countries, while said Third World still exists at all. If we get the planet cleaned up to having a half-decent baseline for everyone, then we can talk about you keeping *all* of that $50-$60 billion. I'm not advocating redistributing all of it, either; but a good 10-20% of it certainly wouldn't kill Ballmer, while it might very well save the lives of a good many other people in the process.
Likewise, however, we also need Open Source and periodic pandering to the corporate world as well, and that's something Stallman and crew need to learn.
It's pretty simple. If we go to extreme Communism, people die. If we go to extreme Capitalism, people die. We survive by walking the middle path.
Really, this is supposed to be the fabled "democracy" ancient greeks thought up? Oh no, wait. We've transformed that into a PR farce that every four years proves how rotten the people at the top are.
Democracy worked for the ancient Greeks for a certain period of time purely because, for that period of time, the ancient Greeks weren't a degenerate society. They were also probably the only human society that has yet existed, which were not degenerate, and they weren't able to maintain that degree of sociological integrity for very long, either.
Contemporary America, in particular, is an utterly degenerate society. Civic responsibility in any form is a completely alien concept. The three primary activities engaged in are working probably 14 hours a day, being preoccupied on what Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, or "Brangelina," are doing this week, or working on a continually worsening obesity problem.
The system only works if you work the system. Virtually nobody does, and that's why it doesn't work. The only people in contemporary politics, for the most part, are those who want power over others. Nobody else really cares.
The TFA, and any other such articles, amount to nothing other than navel gazing. People who think they are a scientist/artist/whatever, thinking it makes them more leet if they are able to exclude others.
The elitist attitude of contemporary science is something which I hold in extremely deep contempt, to be blunt. Programming might not be considered a pure science, if they want to try and claim that anything that human beings do is completely free of emotion. Nothing does, so by that definition, nothing is a pure science.
If you focus on the purely mechanistic/mathematical aspects of programming, that can be considered science. If you focus on the emotion, or the level of inspiration which sentience is considered a prerequisite for, it's an art. Use whichever term for yourself that you want, or better yet, just be you.
Remember Napoleon, people. The greatest Emperors crown themselves.
Then let's hope the Open Source Initiative's days of calling free software activism "ideological tub-thumping" are behind them. I don't see branding as a means of teaching people about software freedom (the very thing the OSI doesn't talk about in their belief that businesses don't want to hear about user's freedoms), but I'm happy to learn about branding efforts that explicitly teach people about supporting software freedom for its own sake and defending it for future generations so as to build and maintain social solidarity.
You go on to talk about how great the FSF's comparitive "Free Software/Open Source," essay is.
While I'm never going to try and argue with anyone that ethics aren't important, there is a sad fact here which the FSF itself doesn't want to acknowledge; and that is that focusing on ethics as a primary argument with most people quite simply is not going to work.
This is one of the main problems which Stallman as an individual, and subsequently the FSF as an organisation, has; the fact that they are entirely unwilling to adapt their methodology to what will work, in the event that their unsuccessful methodology is simply closer to their existing belief system. The FSF doesn't try and create common ground between what it believes in and what other people want; it simply rejects what anyone else wants and tries to shove its' views down other people's throats, whether they are in fact willing to accept them or not.
The point of the approach described by Eric Raymond and a few other people, is not actually to lose sight of the cause at all, but to initially allow the effects to stand on their own as tangible manifestations of the cause. The effects (technically superior software) can then be seen as tangible byproducts of the cause, and once you have that, then you've got some chance of being able to explain to people that said effects are the result of adhering to solid ethical principles. Solid principles are important everywhere, yes; both inside software development and outside it.
It's film screenwriting 101, though; when producing a film for a general audience, the first thing you do at the start of it is an action scene in order to hold interest. Once you've captured interest, exposition can (and should) immediately follow; but if you don't capture interest, you're very likely to be ignored.
Neurotypical superficiality really sucks; I will admit it as freely as anyone. However, as much as it might suck, it's also an unavoidable fact of life; it's not going away. The only thing ignoring it or resisting it is going to do is get us ignored. We have to figure out how to go through it in order to get our message heard; and it really is not all that difficult.
Use Compiz Fusion, and other related things. Generate some pretty lights, and make tangible displays of how technically superior Open Source is to anything from Microsoft.
Neurotypicals demand that, and they're as uncompromising in their demand for it as Stallman is in his rhetoric. The reason why is because their defining neurological characteristic, in many cases, is being right brained. Hence, they need to see graphical representations of things, because that's how they communicate. Most of us, on the other hand, are left brained; so we can sit and talk about ethical abstractions for hours on end and not have a problem with it; no visual imagery anywhere in sight.
This is also the exact reason why I can sit here with nothing but ratpoison, vim, and Vimperator with Firefox, when they need GNOME, a Start menu, and Nautilus/Konqueror. The CLI scares the hell out of them because it literally isn't how their brain primarily functions.
If the FSF wants to be genuinely useful, it needs to figure out how to communicate with the neurotypical population on their own terms. That is exact
Linux is not an operating system, it is a kernel; together the GNU tools and Linux make up an operating system.
Yes, and for 6 years the FSF were unable to get their own kernel working.
Stop trivialising the importance of the kernel simply so that Stallman can claim universal credit for everything.
Also, try using your own brain while you're at it. The distortions and outright lies which the FSF peddles wouldn't be so bad, if it wasn't for the number of drones going around who regurgitate them wholesale.
If the FSF truly wants peace, then despite my admitted level of trolling in their direction online in the past, I for one would actually be willing to look at reconciliation; however I have some requests which I would like to have met as a condition of such, personally.
- A fundamental recognition of two key facts, which the organisation has been apparently unwilling to recognise in the past.
a) There are individuals in the world which, despite the organisation's best efforts to the contrary, adamantly maintain opposing perspectives to that of the FSF.
b) Said individuals have the right to exist. A world in which the FSF's perspective was universal would be an extremely unhealthy and unbalanced one, and certainly would not be one in which I for one would want to live. The FSF does itself no favours when it holds itself as the exclusive arbiter of appropriate ethical, social, or economic thought.
- The muzzling of Richard Stallman. Stallman is a divisive radical, and the fundamental source of any problems I've ever had with the FSF. He causes conflict, slows progress, and damages the open source community as a whole. He is also utterly incapable of any form of compromise.
- The development of an ability to be realistic about potential threats. I am talking here primarily about the supposed bogeyman of DRM. As I predicted, the use of Digital Rights Management ultimately went nowhere in the marketplace, and this is because the buying public are far more intelligent and discerning than the FSF, sadly, tends to give them credit for.
One area which the FSF badly needs to work on, is its' perception of human nature, both in its' positive and negative aspects. This, more than any other, is perhaps the single main cognitive area in which the organisation is critically lacking. There is an entirely egocentric fixation on what the Foundation itself wants, rather than on external reality and what the rest of the planet wants; especially considering that these two perspectives are opposed far more often than they are in alignment. If the FSF had more of a genuine understanding of what the buying public wants, they would have been able to pre-emptively recognise that DRM was going to go nowhere, entirely without any involvement from them whatsoever, and they could have directed their energies to more genuinely productive persuits.
The Foundation needs to learn to understand that a recognition of both of these perspectives, and seeking reconciliation and blending between them, is the way forward. Radicalism is not a means of progress, and before any of the Foundation's supporters argue that it has worked well enough in the past, they would do well to remember that the majority of progress that has been made towards the FSF's goals, has not actually been made due to the FSF itself, and has in fact been made largely aside from it.
- A return to the generation of software, rather than activism, as a primary focus. Software development was, I feel, not only the FSF's first role, but its' most genuinely valuable. I do not (and did not, when it first happened) feel that the relinquishment of the GNU Project's development to Red Hat was appropriate. The FSF are a non-profit entity, and it makes a lot more sense for such an entity to remain as the custodian of the software, than a for-profit company.
- The repeal of version 3 of the General Public License. I strongly suspect that this is one request which I am not going to be alone in making. Eben Moglen's assurances to the contrary, version 3 of the GPL is something which the FSF's radicals more or less alone want. It is not something which, from everything I have seen, the majority of either the developer or the user communities want.
Version 2 is a license which, while I perhaps still might not see it as being appropriate for *every* situation, is an acceptable and j
The indication is, that said "loser stoners," constitute a fairly sizeable demographic. As such, the point is that in a democratic system, they are to be listened to, irrespective of whether they are in compliance with your own individual tastes/preferences or not.
Slashdot Mirror
Squashing 31 vulnerabilities in a single patch, is, in a word, efficient. "Embrace and extend," might be a negative part of the Borg ethos, but I give Microsoft credit for displaying the positive side of it, as well. ;-)
What I don't understand is why Incredibles, the film that I think lends
itself most to a sequel isn't getting the sequel treatment.
Because it doesn't lend itself to a sequel? The first film was
moderately original. (I emphasise moderately)
A family of superheroes tries to turn their back on their abilities,
blend into society, and live as normal people.
A sequel, however, would have nowhere to go. They'd already demonstrated at
the end of the first movie that the family had accepted their abilities,
learned to use them, and had thus essentially become generic comic book
staples in the process. The entire reason why people think they want a sequel
is because, in the first movie, the characters seemed like original people,
but given the development that has occurred, that's no longer true. There's
no uniqueness there any more.
If Pixar made a sequel of the Incredibles, people would be bored. It wasn't
the characters themselves that were interesting; it was the situation they
were in that was.
I live in southeastern Australia, and down here, we haven't had regular rainfall now since 1995. Melbourne's water reserves are currently sitting at around 25%. The government's been talking about dredging the Yarra, the city's river, and that is only about a third of peak level at the moment as it is.
This tells me that the long term trend for Victoria is desertification. Queensland is getting floods these days, while we get barely a drop. Unless we're planning on abandoning the entire state, we're going to need technologies exactly like these, in order to be able to continue to live here.
The editors should be a lot more careful about fact checking when posting stories like this. If it turns out to be false, and damaging to Comcast's business due to the amount of Slashbots ranting about how much they hate the ISP, Slashdot's parent company could be looking at a lawsuit from Comcast for libel; and IMHO, they'd be within their rights.
The anti-Capitalist bias on this site truly is genuinely appalling, and it highlights yet again the complete lack of integrity inherent in the double standard that Stallman has indoctrinated into his minions. Corporations doing the wrong thing doesn't give us carte blanche to likewise behave badly. If anything, it's exactly the opposite.
It's information from a Comcast rep that could clear the company's name, potentially.
It is not fair of Slashdot to call a company evil if they don't ensure that clarifying/corrective information is also made prominent, if it is available.
merely surrendering your mortal soul / first born to Miguel & Microsoft.
If the alternative was my soul going to RMS instead, that would be a simple choice to make.
"The `//areZ must flow." ;)
...blogging was a fad. The truly first wave blogs have probably been dead for two years now already; and the blog was also probably more needed during the Bush administration, (as a form of indie media) than it is now.
It will come back around, in time. Fads always do.
The education system isn't about education. It's about penal reform.
When kids are born, their instinctive emotional responses, their ability to be idealistic, and their ability to believe that they can change things for the better, are all intact, because at first they don't know better. I remember one example during my first or second year at school when I didn't want to engage in some of the activities we were doing in class; that was when the dichotomy began to be imprinted, between what I wanted, and what everyone else wanted me to do.
The entire purpose of the education system is to beat anything out of a child that doesn't conform, and this economic program could just be seen as getting the proverbial indentured servitude started that much earlier. The bastards at the top of the heap actually prefer beginning to indoctrinate kids as young as they can, because they know the truth of the words of Uncle Joe. "Give me a child until he is 5 years old, and you may do what you will with him thereafter."
During school, kids get allotted the place in the social hierarchy which they very often occupy for the rest of their lives, and God help you if you're not inherently an athlete with around a 130 IQ. You actually ironically don't want to be far above 130, though; because virtually nobody else is, so if you are, it just makes you look like a freak.
The education system for me was purely about psychological survival, and I very nearly didn't survive; I spent two months in a psychiatric inpatient unit after leaving, and probably another six months in outpatient therapy after that. I went very close to insanity.
Interesting, wouldn't you say?
Same things happened with web development and Java. In both cases Microsoft
embraced and extended to the point of breaking inter-compatibility.
Granted, except in this case, my own theory at least is that like just about
everything else that has come out of Sun, (at least that I've ever heard of)
Java has largely been a solution in desperate need of a problem.
That's not to say that nobody uses it, (I have a cousin with a CS
degree who just got back from two years in England a few days ago, and the
company who sent him over there had him doing Java work in particular for some
sort of touchscreen kiosk type setup) but your point about why Microsoft were
ultimately able to kill Netscape, (i.e., not only was IE incumbent on Windows,
but it was also perceived as better, or at least good enough) also applies
here.
Specifically, that Java wasn't tangibly more attractive, for the most part, .NET, Silverlight, and Mono, but I don't hear much
than what Microsoft were able to come up with themselves. I keep hearing a
lot of talk online about
these days about Java, at all.
BSD is a bad example, since its lost favor for the vast majority of
developers. Linux could be considered the slightly younger, more attractive
platform to work on, so people jumped ship to Linux, but nothing stops BSD
from living on forever. That's not to say its a success story in modern times
vs. Apache which still maintains a very high relevance.
Whether BSD or Apache are popular or not wasn't my point. My point was that,
contrary to Stallman's paranoia, Microsoft (or $(EVIL CORPORATION)) haven't
used the legal system to literally remove them from existence. The central
rationale behind copyleft (and certainly the GPL 3, if not 2) is the
expectation that corporations will use the legal system to kill FOSS, and thus
the legal system also needs to be used in order to prevent that from
occurring.
To a large extent, that hasn't happened. Netscape wasn't FOSS, and even if it
was, the legal system wasn't used to kill it. Whether or not software is
*irrelevant* or not, is not my point. The point is that the legal system is
not being used to literally give non-GPL projects the baby harp seal
treatment; and that being the case, there is no genuine need to use the GPL
over any other FOSS license.
It's also worth remembering that, while we haven't seen any scenarios yet
where the GPL has prevented the actual death of a project, (to differentiate
from what the FSF defines as violation) the GPL also did not economically protect
Red Hat from Oracle, or projects like CentOS, which essentially provide the
same software that Red Hat does, (and in the case of Oracle, possibly similar
support) but simply without Red Hat's artwork; as under the GPL, the artwork
itself is pretty much the only unique IP that Red Hat owns where its' distros
are concerned at all. That can simply be stripped out, and Red Hat's work
redistributed by someone else.
1) Give software away without restriction. Result: someone takes the code, incorporates it into their paid for product and using the revenue from their near monopoly blows the 'free' version out of the water. No more free version.
Microsoft would tend to disagree with you, I'm sure. They managed to corner the market with a free product, in the case of Internet Explorer. Before you try and argue semantics simply because this won't be in support of your premise, it's true that they no longer have 100%; but they still wouldn't be that far below 90%.
Before you also start bleating at me about how they were leveraging their monopoly, realise how well Google are doing in the market on search. Thus, it could work for them, whether or not it couldn't work for a smaller startup.
Even with small startups, the whole point isn't to necessarily use the BSD license for everything. Use it for things that ought to have unencumbered reference implementations; video codecs are a good example. That way, it getting copied by other companies is entirely the point; some of said companies will add value to it (and close it) if they want, while others can also develop it but keep it open as they choose, while still others can rely on availability of at least the reference baseline.
Corporations are entirely free to make closed, modified derivatives of Apache; again, if Stallman is right, why haven't they been destroyed yet?
Your entire argument is fear-based; as all of the FSF's rationale is. If the, "corporations are going to destroy everything!" argument is valid, how come any of the BSDs still exist at all? Come to that, why didn't Microsoft destroy the WC3 after they acquired Internet Explorer? How come virtually any of the Internet's protocols still exist, rather than single, monopolised implementations? As I said above, Apache isn't licensed with the GPL; how come it hasn't been destroyed yet?
My best guess: Some 15 year old in an Eastern European country will shortly have some 'splainin to do.
Yep. The authorities are likely to be quoting a certain '70s dance track.
"Urrrgh, those Russians." ;)
(FSF moderators, start your engines. You'll want to mod this post down to -1, to make sure nobody sees it)
Mpeg AFAIK is a freely implementable spec. Find a codec for it that uses the BSD license, or write one yourself. Problem solved.
I never use GPL licensed software at all myself unless it is unavoidable, (gcc/gmake etc, unfortunately) for precisely this type of reason.
The GPL is only a free license according to Richard Stallman's dishonest redefinition of the word "free." I consider him a fundamentally dishonest individual, and the FSF an immoral organisation, and I do not support him or them.
Open source was founded in 1998 as a way to stop talking about those things, to hush them up, bury them, put them out of people's sight. So they talk about practical advantages that come if you use free software.
(From Stallman's speech)
This is quite simply not true. The definition of what constitutes Open Source is right here, and I've virtually never seen Linus give an interview where he doesn't mention the GPL, or specifically why he likes it.
You can also read this, as well. People who advocate licenses other than the GPL are perhaps not as vocal as Stallman, but to claim that they are actively repressing or trying to bury anything is a lie, and a particularly malicious and injurious one.
Eventually I just quit buying anything with significant/restrictive DRM. If I find something DRM-free I like I will always buy it that way. Certainly no encrypted songs, ebooks, etc.
Yep, and that's what we have to do. We don't need big fear campaigns against it, like what the FSF did. All we need to do is vote with our wallets.
a) Buy it digitally again, but if you can, make sure it is a copy that is
clean in DRM terms.
b) Buy a hard copy. For anything I buy, this is always my approach. A
physical copy of something has a much higher chance of lasting years, or more
or less indefinitely if I keep it and am able to back it up. I don't do the
micropayment for digital downloads thing, and most likely never will. I'm not
paying tangible funds for something that could get lost in a power surge.
Hard copies are a little more durable, especially if, as I said, they're
backed up.
c) If you want to go the digital route, and a) isn't possible, pirate it.
Although I don't have huge moral problems with piracy, (as I generally feel
that, on balance, most content producers will generally at least break even on
any given pirated work, and usually make a large profit, even with piracy) my
general policy is that if I like something enough to really seek it out, I
will generally like it enough to buy a physical copy from Amazon and give the
artist something for their trouble. If it is an artist who I like a lot, and
who I'd conceivably buy from often, (such as Shpongle, if I had more money)
I'd possibly even write to the artist and ask them if they could make their
wares available from their own site, so that I could be sure that the lion's
share of my money was going directly to them, where I intend it to go.
In some cases (old/obscure stuff) piracy is going to be your only option, as
you may not be able to find the work via retail channels; however again, if
the work in question is something you really value, use piracy as a last
resort. If a creative person produces something which enriches your life,
then in my opinion they deserve to be paid for it.
You're right, and for the record, I don't consider it appropriate that you got modded down to -1.
Further evidence of the administration complete lack of understanding of
capitalism and free enterprise - expect others to follow.
I'm extremely tired of seeing opinions like this on Slashdot. Granted,
Randian capitalist zealots are actually in much smaller numbers on this site
than the pro-FSF Marxist fanatics, but you're no less obnoxious than the
GNU/drones.
The thing that is possibly even worse about capitalist extremists than
Stallman's cultists, is that at least Stallman is honest about his
perspectives. I suspect that you are an individual who fervently,
passionately believes in every last one of the shameless lies that
you have been brought up with.
A good little flag-waving, non-discriminating 'Murrican. God bless the troops
and all of that, while we conveniently overlook the fact that when they die in
some hellhole in Tikrit or northern Afghanistan, it's actually to protect
OPEC's bottom line. Freedom, even in Stallman's perverted (re)definition of
the word, has absolutely nothing to do with it. If you really gave a shit
about honouring the troops, though, you wouldn't support the economic farce
that they give their blood for. If they really were dying in support of
genuine freedom, maybe that'd really be something; but they're not.
They're actually fighting for the perpetuation of slavery; both yours and other people's.
As far as capitalist theory goes, I took the time to read both Rand and von
Mises. Mises I could respect, because he was careful to write about how
capitalism, if properly exercised, could benefit both the many as well
as the one or few.
Rand, on the other hand, was an idiot after Neitzche's own heart, who advocated
nothing but avarice and blatant egocentrism, and tried to dress it up as
something noble and redeemable. It wasn't.
Let this be a lesson to every GNU/drone who reads this, and who thinks because
of my past material, I'm your enemy. I'm not. Metaphorically/ideologically
speaking, I suck every bit as much Communist pussy as any Stallman
worshipping, green badanna wearing, pot smoking yippie freetard who reads
Slashdot. I actually went to a Greenpeace meeting once, totally of my own
volition, because I consider it human and not necessarily purely freakish to
be pissed off about baby harp seals being clubbed to death. That shit is just
plain wrong, and so are a lot of other things which the corporate world are
doing.
The point of my above digression is this; what I'm really sick of is
extremism, on both sides. I'm sick of uber-Communist jackasses
like Stallman on the one hand, and uber-Capitalist jackasses like Gates,
Ballmer, and the OP here on the other.
We need taxes, dammit. I'm not opposed to Capitalism at all, contrary to how
this might sound, but I *am* opposed to the concept of individuals with an
annual GDP the same size as several Third World countries, while said Third
World still exists at all. If we get the planet cleaned up to having a
half-decent baseline for everyone, then we can talk about you keeping *all* of
that $50-$60 billion. I'm not advocating redistributing all of it, either;
but a good 10-20% of it certainly wouldn't kill Ballmer, while it might very
well save the lives of a good many other people in the process.
Likewise, however, we also need Open Source and periodic pandering to the
corporate world as well, and that's something Stallman and crew need to learn.
It's pretty simple. If we go to extreme Communism, people die. If we go to
extreme Capitalism, people die. We survive by walking the middle path.
Really, this is supposed to be the fabled "democracy" ancient greeks thought up? Oh no, wait. We've transformed that into a PR farce that every four years proves how rotten the people at the top are.
Democracy worked for the ancient Greeks for a certain period of time purely because, for
that period of time, the ancient Greeks weren't a degenerate society. They were also
probably the only human society that has yet existed, which were not degenerate, and they weren't able to maintain that degree of sociological integrity for very long, either.
Contemporary America, in particular, is an utterly degenerate society. Civic
responsibility in any form is a completely alien concept. The three primary activities
engaged in are working probably 14 hours a day, being preoccupied on what Paris Hilton,
Britney Spears, or "Brangelina," are doing this week, or working on a continually
worsening obesity problem.
The system only works if you work the system. Virtually nobody does, and that's why it
doesn't work. The only people in contemporary politics, for the most part, are those who want power over others. Nobody else really cares.
The TFA, and any other such articles, amount to nothing other than navel
gazing. People who think they are a scientist/artist/whatever, thinking it
makes them more leet if they are able to exclude others.
The elitist attitude of contemporary science is something which I hold in
extremely deep contempt, to be blunt. Programming might not be considered a
pure science, if they want to try and claim that anything that
human beings do is completely free of emotion. Nothing does, so by that
definition, nothing is a pure science.
If you focus on the purely mechanistic/mathematical aspects of programming,
that can be considered science. If you focus on the emotion, or the level of
inspiration which sentience is considered a prerequisite for, it's an art.
Use whichever term for yourself that you want, or better yet, just be
you.
Remember Napoleon, people. The greatest Emperors crown themselves.
Then let's hope the Open Source Initiative's days of calling free software
activism "ideological tub-thumping" are behind them. I don't see branding as a
means of teaching people about software freedom (the very thing the OSI
doesn't talk about in their belief that businesses don't want to hear about
user's freedoms), but I'm happy to learn about branding efforts that
explicitly teach people about supporting software freedom for its own sake and
defending it for future generations so as to build and maintain social
solidarity.
You go on to talk about how great the FSF's comparitive "Free Software/Open
Source," essay is.
While I'm never going to try and argue with anyone that ethics aren't
important, there is a sad fact here which the FSF itself doesn't want to
acknowledge; and that is that focusing on ethics as a primary argument with
most people quite simply is not going to work.
This is one of the main problems which Stallman as an individual, and
subsequently the FSF as an organisation, has; the fact that they are entirely
unwilling to adapt their methodology to what will work, in the event
that their unsuccessful methodology is simply closer to their existing belief
system. The FSF doesn't try and create common ground between what it believes
in and what other people want; it simply rejects what anyone else wants and
tries to shove its' views down other people's throats, whether they are in
fact willing to accept them or not.
The point of the approach described by Eric Raymond and a few other people, is
not actually to lose sight of the cause at all, but to initially
allow the effects to stand on their own as tangible manifestations of the
cause. The effects (technically superior software) can then be seen as
tangible byproducts of the cause, and once you have that, then you've
got some chance of being able to explain to people that said effects are the
result of adhering to solid ethical principles. Solid principles are
important everywhere, yes; both inside software development and outside it.
It's film screenwriting 101, though; when producing a film for a general
audience, the first thing you do at the start of it is an action scene in
order to hold interest. Once you've captured interest, exposition can (and
should) immediately follow; but if you don't capture interest, you're very
likely to be ignored.
Neurotypical superficiality really sucks; I will admit it as freely as anyone.
However, as much as it might suck, it's also an unavoidable fact of life; it's
not going away. The only thing ignoring it or resisting it is going to do is
get us ignored. We have to figure out how to go through it in order to
get our message heard; and it really is not all that difficult.
Use Compiz Fusion, and other related things. Generate some pretty lights, and
make tangible displays of how technically superior Open Source is to anything
from Microsoft.
Neurotypicals demand that, and they're as uncompromising in their demand for
it as Stallman is in his rhetoric. The reason why is because their defining
neurological characteristic, in many cases, is being right brained. Hence,
they need to see graphical representations of things, because that's how they
communicate. Most of us, on the other hand, are left brained; so we can sit
and talk about ethical abstractions for hours on end and not have a problem
with it; no visual imagery anywhere in sight.
This is also the exact reason why I can sit here with nothing but ratpoison,
vim, and Vimperator with Firefox, when they need GNOME, a Start menu,
and Nautilus/Konqueror. The CLI scares the hell out of them because it
literally isn't how their brain primarily functions.
If the FSF wants to be genuinely useful, it needs to figure out how to
communicate with the neurotypical population on their own terms. That
is exact
Linux is not an operating system, it is a kernel; together the GNU tools and Linux make up an operating system.
Yes, and for 6 years the FSF were unable to get their own kernel working.
Stop trivialising the importance of the kernel simply so that Stallman can claim universal credit for everything.
Also, try using your own brain while you're at it. The distortions and outright lies which the FSF peddles wouldn't be so bad, if it wasn't for the number of drones going around who regurgitate them wholesale.
If the FSF truly wants peace, then despite my admitted level of trolling in
their direction online in the past, I for one would actually be willing to
look at reconciliation; however I have some requests which I would like to
have met as a condition of such, personally.
- A fundamental recognition of two key facts, which the organisation has been
apparently unwilling to recognise in the past.
a) There are individuals in the world which, despite the organisation's best
efforts to the contrary, adamantly maintain opposing perspectives to that of
the FSF.
b) Said individuals have the right to exist. A world in which the FSF's
perspective was universal would be an extremely unhealthy and unbalanced one,
and certainly would not be one in which I for one would want to live. The FSF
does itself no favours when it holds itself as the exclusive arbiter of
appropriate ethical, social, or economic thought.
- The muzzling of Richard Stallman. Stallman is a divisive radical, and the
fundamental source of any problems I've ever had with the FSF. He causes
conflict, slows progress, and damages the open source community as a whole. He
is also utterly incapable of any form of compromise.
- The development of an ability to be realistic about potential threats. I
am talking here primarily about the supposed bogeyman of DRM. As I
predicted, the use of Digital Rights Management ultimately went nowhere in the
marketplace, and this is because the buying public are far more intelligent
and discerning than the FSF, sadly, tends to give them credit for.
One area which the FSF badly needs to work on, is its' perception of human
nature, both in its' positive and negative aspects. This, more than any
other, is perhaps the single main cognitive area in which the organisation is
critically lacking. There is an entirely egocentric fixation on what the
Foundation itself wants, rather than on external reality and what the rest of
the planet wants; especially considering that these two perspectives are
opposed far more often than they are in alignment. If the FSF had more of a
genuine understanding of what the buying public wants, they would have been
able to pre-emptively recognise that DRM was going to go nowhere, entirely
without any involvement from them whatsoever, and they could have directed
their energies to more genuinely productive persuits.
The Foundation needs to learn to understand that a recognition of both of
these perspectives, and seeking reconciliation and blending between them, is
the way forward. Radicalism is not a means of progress, and before any of the
Foundation's supporters argue that it has worked well enough in the past, they
would do well to remember that the majority of progress that has been made
towards the FSF's goals, has not actually been made due to the FSF itself, and
has in fact been made largely aside from it.
- A return to the generation of software, rather than activism, as a primary
focus. Software development was, I feel, not only the FSF's first role, but
its' most genuinely valuable. I do not (and did not, when it first happened)
feel that the relinquishment of the GNU Project's development to Red Hat was
appropriate. The FSF are a non-profit entity, and it makes a lot more sense
for such an entity to remain as the custodian of the software, than a
for-profit company.
- The repeal of version 3 of the General Public License. I strongly suspect
that this is one request which I am not going to be alone in making. Eben
Moglen's assurances to the contrary, version 3 of the GPL is something which
the FSF's radicals more or less alone want. It is not something which, from
everything I have seen, the majority of either the developer or the user
communities want.
Version 2 is a license which, while I perhaps still might not see it as being
appropriate for *every* situation, is an acceptable and j
Yes, because a bunch of loser stoners
The indication is, that said "loser stoners," constitute a fairly sizeable
demographic. As such, the point is that in a democratic system, they are to
be listened to, irrespective of whether they are in compliance with your own
individual tastes/preferences or not.