Nope. Try a more reliable source like the Wine mailing lists.
I'm not sure why I'm bothering to do this, because I know you're going to continue to think the same thing regardless, but...
I'm looking at http://www.winehq.org/history which I assume you're hopefully going to agree, is likely a reliable source.;) I've tried searching for mailing list entries, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of stuff out there, at least that Google is showing up.
Anyway, there seem to be a couple of points.
a) RMS helpfully pointed out that, at the time anyway, the BSD license was considered incompatible with the GPL. b) There was, as I already surmised in the GP, fear of Wine being "hijacked," by a commercial entity, apparently Corel.
c) There was apparently a majority vote to switch to the LGPL. I don't place a lot of confidence in such democratic measures where Stallman is concerned; a majority vote to move a project to an FSF license isn't going to necessarily mean much, if the people voting aren't capable of objectivity where said licenses are concerned. It reminds me of the amount of pressure that Alan Cox was trying to initially put on Linus, to move the kernel to version 3 of the GPL.
If you want to give yourself some credibility, in response to this, I'd suggest actually trying to legitimately refute what I've already written in the GP, rather than simply coming back again with another variation of the "citation needed," troll; which I suspect in this case translates to you actually not having a more legitimate comeback.
According to Wikipedia, it looks as though the Wine developers had an attack of reciprocity paranoia. This invalidates the BSD license...how, exactly?
There is some bullshit here which needs debunking. Proprietary forks of a non-copyleft project do not inherently "lock out a project's original authors from the subsequent development of a project," at all. Under a non-copyleft license, said original developers never lose their own code, at all. Someone else can fork it, which is fine; and it's still fine even if any of the subsequent (possibly proprietary) forks happen to become more popular than the original project. If popularity is the main thing a project's developers are worried about, I'd begin to seriously wonder about their motivations in programming at all, to be honest.
I'm aware that, as usual, the "duplication of effort," strawman will probably be offered in refutation to this, as well; as in, if a proprietary fork doesn't submit bug fixes back to a parent project, the parent project's developers will have to duplicate the effort of fixing the same bugs.
Truthfully, though, I feel that duplication of effort is something else which is feared both excessively and irrationally, within GPL oriented circles. It's not always a bad thing; there are often times when the original implementation of something really does suck, and can therefore benefit from being thrown away and rewritten from scratch.
Not only that, but a fork by definition is not going to follow the same development path as a parent project anyway. That means that by definition, different bugs are going to end up being produced, and different bugs may or may not get fixed; so there's no automatic guarantee that effort will be duplicated.
I also view the use of the GPL as an indication of inferior intelligence, being completely blunt. People who use the GPL, generally aren't able to objectively assess the negative legal consequences of doing so, or the fact that the usual rationale for the existence of copyleft (reciprocity paranoia; the idea that if people aren't legally forced to contribute modifications to FOSS projects, then said projects will automatically dry up, because people are so inherently evil, stupid, and self-destructive that they'd never voluntarily do so themselves) is emotively based, and demonstrably logically bogus.
If reciprocity paranoia was legitimate, then no BSD licensed project would be able to continue to exist. If it were true that legal enforcement was the only way of ensuring that anyone contributed to FOSS projects, the BSDs and other projects such as PostgreSQL would have died long ago. They haven't, however, because people keep contributing to them; people who do so entirely voluntarily, without having a legal gun held against their heads.
I also know, that that is the main reason why Stallman's cultists don't like the BSDs, or BSD licensed projects, to be mentioned at all. The fact that BSD licensed projects are able to viably continue to exist, is the proverbial inconvenient truth. It undermines the central rationale of Stallman's proposed, desired ideological control of people and the software they use, and also proves that his view of human nature is both excessively negative, and entirely false.
GPL advocates can attempt to argue with this as much as they want. I will say it again; you are cultists. Any argument in favour of the GPL is not logically based; if you were thinking logically, you wouldn't be advocating the GPL in the first place. Your entire rationale is drawn from emotion, (primarily fear, and secondarily a desire to adhere to Stallman's mind control, which leads back to said fear) and not reason. You therefore are incapable of making any argument that I am going to consider valid.
But if you hate the GPL and FSF, you might not want to use the BSD license. They can use your code too.;)
Add a fourth clause.
"While re-licensing is, in every other case, entirely permissible, (including proprietary closed-source licenses) re-issuing code governed by this license, in whole or in part, in source or binary form, including derivative works, under any license issued by the Free Software Foundation, is expressly prohibited."
Ah yes, another one of these stories. Expect to see some references to M$, people defending GPL and people advocating BSD. All in all, everyone will agree that respecting open source licenses is very important. Next thread, something about RIAA, same people demanding their right to download copyrighted music.
Pathetic.
Truthfully, the only people who care about copyright in either case, are those who are afflicted with scarcity thinking...which is all too frequent, sadly.
There is no legal pressure on any company that steals GPL code.
The GPL does have teeth, but as Eben Moglen himself observed, that is not primarily due to the legal system.
GPL violation is primarily punishable not by law, but by the members of the cult themselves.
Violate the GPL, and be public about it, and whether you end up in court or not, you will be issued with death threats. You will be subjected to vigilantism and harassment of all kinds. You will likely be subjected to "hacktivism," involving the types of pranks that Anonymous have been known to engage in.
For GPL violators, the courts are no real threat. The real threat are the proverbial, "GNU generation;" the vast, militant horde of anarchic, Marxist, Eurotrash 14 year olds that Stallman has been able to sink his ideological claws into.
It isn't any lawyer you must fear. It's the nameless, faceless 15 year old Debian user from the Eastern bloc, who can reduce both your home and corporate LAN to smoking ruins, can steal your identity, can have your bank accounts drained or frozen, and can do so both at will and completely invisibly; striking hard, and then melting away back into the anonymous sea of humanity, untraceably.
The you post a few licences you can use without giving back! If you are not giving back that points to code under a license that doesn't enforce it being worse.
a) Reciprocity paranoia is the sole justification for the GPL's existence. b) People who actually write code don't have either the time or the mental focus for reciprocity paranoia. They're too busy.
Armchair "advocates," (even including Stallman himself, here) have the time to be obsessive about whether or not other people are, "giving back," because they're not spending their time doing anything more genuinely useful.
The BSD license, as mentioned, does not legally enforce, "giving back." If it's true, as GPL advocates claim, that it is necessary for reciprocity to be legally enforced in order to ensure that it happens at all, can you possibly explain to me why the BSD operating systems are still being developed, and more specifically, what incentive anyone could have to contribute the results of said development work to the development group(s), since they are not legally forced to do so?
The above question is asked rhetorically. The entire stated justification for the existence of the GNU General Public License (as opposed to non-copyleft FOSS licenses) is utterly moronic. The only reason why it is perpetuated by anyone other than Stallman himself, is due to Stallman's effectiveness as a cult leader, and not, in any way, due to the logical validity of the argument.
"Don't use any version 3 FSF license." Unless you don't like the idea that someone can patent the idea implemented in your code and then sue you for using your code...
Nobody cares.
"If you're not using GPL licensed code, there is no way that you can be responsible for GPL violations." But if you're using non-GPL licensed code you could be responsible for non-GPL violations. You can also be done for patent violations.
The simplest ways to avoid potential GPL violation, are:-
a) If you want to use an FSF license at all, use the LGPL version 2. Don't use any version 3 FSF license. Apart from anything else, doing so just makes them feel justified in creating bad licenses. (Which their 3 series are)
b) If you're going to use GPL code at all, make sure it's not something you intend to modify yourself.
c) Use other licenses (BSD, MIT, etc) as much as possible. In terms of non-GPL licensed code for you to use, the BSDs are free for the taking, and with the BSD license, you get to decide how much of your modifications (if any) you release. Their code quality is nearly always better than Linux anywayz.
If you're not using GPL licensed code, there is no way that you can be responsible for GPL violations. GPL advocates used to use this argument rhetorically, because they felt that this would mean that the person in question would have no choice. (the implication being that there was barely any non-GPL code, so they'd have nothing to be able to use)
I've never understood why people like the GP have such attitudes. They scoff at pre-existing UNIX methods, and then insist that various forms of obscenely, excessively complex, perverted evil such as C++ or XML are somehow preferable and superior.
Although I love using Linux and FreeBSD, and also engaging in shell scripting and simple forms of programming, whenever I see these being discussed in a public forum recently, I've noticed that my immediate response is usually to become angry.
This is because there is now apparently an entire generation of chronically elitist, misinformed, horribly uneducated and misguided programmers, who engage in chronological snobbery and various other subjective logical fallacies while expressing derision towards the UNIX philosophy, (which is, as you rightly point out, the product of 40 years' worth of accumulated experience) and then advocate such horrors as the aforementioned C++ and XML as preferable solutions.
C++, XML, and "object oriented," programming are nothing other than facilitators of elitism. I've never come across a single advocate of C++ who was not a condescending elitist of the worst possible kind. They use its' degree of needless complexity as a means of gratifying their ego, and they thus fight tirelessly to ensure that the means of said ego gratification is preserved.
Inflating epeens, however, is the only thing that C++ really accomplishes.
Subjective ad hominem. (Calling someone clueless, while making no objective citations in support of said claim)
You've never known what you are talking about...Go back to playing with your little toy dBASE programs...
Attempts at condescension/belittlement, again without any kind of rhetorical support.
who understand how to implement post 1980s solutions.
An also baseless appeal to modernity, otherwise known as chronological snobbery. This is the assertion that that which was used in the past, is inherently inferior to that which is used in the present, purely because of its' age. There is no inherent causal relationship between the age of something, on its' own, and its' degree of quality or effectiveness for a given purpose.
The person you are responding to, may well be incorrect, but I also have not been swayed by your own argument.
Hey look, an Arch user! If Firefox is too bloated for you, grab the Gecko renderer and write your own front-end.
Somehow I suspect you were mocking me, but even so, I might just try and figure out how to take you up on that.;)
And yes, I'm an Arch user. Arch carries the distinction of being one of very few Linux distributions in existence, which probably wouldn't make Doug McIlroy cry himself to sleep at night, if he were to use it.;)
What on earth... go back to/g/ please.
I don't use 4chan. I prefer to continue to believe, that at least a small capacity for love, compassion, and empathy remains within my species; and 4chan in particular tends to make that difficult.
When I installed Firefox on this machine via pacman, I had to download over 100 Mb of dependencies as well as the browser itself.
I wish there was a way that I could compile it without the mime types package and all the other garbage, and shell out to something like lftp or wget for when I wanted to download files, the way dillo does. If it wasn't for the fact that the forums I use, require redirection support that dillo doesn't have, I wouldn't use Firefox much at all any more, except maybe for YouTube.
I've got to ask; is writing a simple HTML renderer really so difficult? I wouldn't necessarily want to support every single tag in existence. HTML 3.2/4.0 without CSS/DOM would be fine. Most of DOM is just the usual spam implemented by corporations anywayz; if you know how to write decent HTML, you don't need it.
Every time we convert a mundaine and time consuming task into something more efficient by creating an invention, we progress onto taking away the next mundaine and time consuming task until eventually every single useless task is taken care of and we can all finally relax and read Slashdot all day.
I know that's how it is supposed to work, yes. Inventions are supposed to save labour.
The only problem is, the suits make sure that the system remains based on money. Because of that, labour saving machinery doesn't mean that you get more time to do nothing in comfort. It simply makes it more difficult for you to earn money, and hence avoid starving to death.
Why do we want to watch videos inside a web page? This is something I've never understood, and the first time I saw YouTube it looked like an extremely dumb idea.
Because it's convenient. The world is a lot worse off in a lot of different ways, because of the craving for convenience.
If people didn't crave the convenience of GUIs, and operating systems could be CLI only, they'd be vastly more stable and secure than they are. Why do you think Ubuntu is such a mess?
If people didn't crave the convenience of McDonald's, they'd probably be a lot healthier. There'd also be far less environmental damage, due to land needing to be cleared for raising cattle.
If people didn't crave the convenience of mobile phones, we'd still have a lot more privacy. We'd also be without one more source of cancer, not to mention one more reason for landfills and oceans to continue filling up with plastic junk that nobody will depolymerise or recycle, because the lack of profit doesn't justify the inconvenience.
If people didn't crave the convenience of cars, and their additional speed, we could have a scenario where electrical forms of transportation were a lot more prevalent, which could be a lot less polluting.
If people didn't crave the convenience of the Web, and no-brainer user interfaces, we could still have things like the old private DCC networks, which used the IRC nets as purely a jumping off point. Those nets were lagless, completely private, and untraceable. People could host whatever type of content within them that they wanted; warez and anything else, and not get caught.
If people didn't crave the convenience of the Web being a single interface to *everything,* we could have files of all kinds (including videos which we now use YouTube for) travelling via bit torrent, or the abovementioned dcc chat nets. Because everything would be constantly distributed and decentralised, scenarios like the end of GeoCities would not result in massive data loss when static web hosting was shut down, as long as the system still had the rest of the network; so piracy would also be completely unstoppable. People don't do that, however, because setting up bit torrent daemons or said dcc nets is more complicated, and a lot less...you guessed it...convenient.
The world would be an unimaginably better place, if it wasn't for the craving for convenience.
I unfortunately never experienced comics as a kid. I remember being in a newsagent with my father at the age of four or five, and on seeing some comics there, asked my father about them. Dad was fairly conservative, at the time at least, and his response was along the lines that they were full of weird, potentially Satanic stuff, and that he didn't want me reading them. At the time of course, I was still sufficiently impressionable that my response was, "Yes, Dad," and for a long time, I never looked at them again.
Almost 20 years later, I had a friend who was a graphic artist, and who had been an avid reader of comics for most of his life. Along with my own exposure to the Batman movies and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoons, this friend managed to convey to me the creative benefits that comics can have for both their readers, and their artists.
As I think other people have said, comics are the contemporary form of cave painting, which essentially allows the continuation of one of a very small number of indigenous practices, within contemporary white society.
As with indigenous mythmaking, they allow for a culturally unique and relevant form of explanation/interpretation/processing of events going on around their authors and readers. I thought the depiction of Lex Luthor becoming President within the Superman comics, during the presidency of George W. Bush, was a classic case in point. I can remember reading that Clarke Kent was depicted as being particularly quiet and introspective during 9/11, as well, and was mentally wondering how large America's own responsibility for the event was. These are cases where the authors and readers of comics, can express and analyse their genuine thoughts and feelings, in what may well be the only context where it is truly safe for them to do so.
I've also heard about Marvel producing comics about the old Norse pantheon, as well. As a theist, and as someone who actually believes in the Aesir as a group of literally existing beings, (although I don't worship them, personally) I view these stories as being a scenario where contemporary people can be exposed to these deities, and appreciate the genuine benefits that can be had from such exposure, in a non-threatening and culturally relevant way.
In a society where atheism is becoming as prevalent as it is, within contemporary society, comics may, in the end, be the only chance of exposure to anything beyond the mundane that most people get.
If I had points, you'd get +1, Funny; although the GP would probably think you deserve -1, Troll.;)
Re:Open source is the coat tails that Google rides
on
How Google Uses Linux
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
They take and take from open source and throw back a couple of table scraps and you people all kiss their ass for it.
300K lines of code? Yep, table scraps.
For people who wonder why I continue to want to see the end of the FSF, the above attitude is the reason why. Stallman and his organisation are the reason for it.
Aside from being ugly and spiritually bankrupt, reciprocity paranoia is based on completely erroneous reasoning, as well. The same people who talk about how music piracy isn't harming anyone, because it doesn't physically take away from a finite supply of copies, are also those who express the above paranoia about people "taking," from FOSS, as if that is somehow a physically finite resource, when music isn't.
Come on people, you can't have it both ways. If you can't "steal" music, you can't "steal" code. MS "stealing" this code didn't deprive the Open Source community from using the code (i.e. stealing my car), or at least that's the argument/.er use whenever the word is used in conjunction with music and movies. Eat your own dog food.
The GPL is based on fear, and scarcity thinking. This argument holds up logically, yes, but don't expect it to fly with anyone who supports the use of the GPL; it won't. However, most of said people will also advocate and accept music piracy, which is, of course, simply a double standard.
This is a victimless crime; although in truth, it isn't really a crime at all. If said code had been using the BSD license, nobody would have said a word about it; it wouldn't even be spoken about at all.
It'd be fun if the FSF did decide to try taking Microsoft to court about it, though; then we'd all get to see just how truly impotent the FSF really are.
Any responses to this from GPL advocates will also be ignored.
Because the FSF causes a lot of division. I've suggested BSD licensed software in different forms here before, and any posts which do so immediately get modded down.
Stallman's followers are paranoid about ensuring that nobody uses any FOSS under any license other than the GPL. Bradley Kuhn has said that he thinks the GPL is the only FOSS license that should exist.
Stallman has exceptionally narrow ideas about the way things should be, and anyone who disagrees with said ideas, gets shouted down, harassed, called names, and repressed by his followers.
My original post here got modded down. Every time I write anything here which they disagree with, they mod it down in order to try and ensure nobody reads it, while some of them also respond and call me names. If I'm just trolling, as they claim, you have to wonder why they feel it's worth the effort of suppressing what I write, as well.
The fact that they do that, also hurts Linux's image with people outside the FOSS community as well.
The FSF are a cult, and a harmful one, and we'd be a lot better off without them.
There is way, way, *way* too much of a push away from open, transparent, decentralised internet protocols in pretty much every area, to centralised, proprietary, suit-run messes.
The benefit of being able to run a decentralised server wasn't about doing the gaming equivalent of channel surfing. It was about being able to throw together a LAN in a basement, bedroom, or living room with some local RL friends whenever you wanted.
I can just hear the brainless, ovine responses now.
"But we'll still be able to do that! We can just go through the remote service to do so!"
Yeah, and all of your packets have to go through said remote service as well. If said remote service is hosted in another country, guess how much higher your latency is going to be?
Add to that, the fact that you're paying money for no good reason other than your own stupidity and laziness. You should not want to give a company the ability to dictate terms of use to you, and you especially shouldn't want to give said company money when you don't have to.
It doesn't really bother me, though. I don't play contemporary games, and the single main reason why is because they've been dumbed down in order to give the Guitar Hero demographic what they want; something to serve as a centrepiece in the living room on a Friday night, while people are getting drunk and/or stoned with their friends.
If you care about actually having any kind of real challenge in a game now, you're accused of having no life.
Decentralisation = the people doing it by and for themselves, on their own terms, at low or no cost.
Centralisation = the suits doing it for you, charging you through the nose for it, dictating exactly when, where, and how it's going to happen, and the brainless masses referring to it as being a good thing.
Some of said sheep will probably respond to this very post, in order to tell me I'm wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope. Try a more reliable source like the Wine mailing lists.
I'm not sure why I'm bothering to do this, because I know you're going to continue to think the same thing regardless, but...
I'm looking at http://www.winehq.org/history which I assume you're hopefully going to agree, is likely a reliable source. ;) I've tried searching for mailing list entries, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of stuff out there, at least that Google is showing up.
Anyway, there seem to be a couple of points.
a) RMS helpfully pointed out that, at the time anyway, the BSD license was considered incompatible with the GPL.
b) There was, as I already surmised in the GP, fear of Wine being "hijacked," by a commercial entity, apparently Corel.
c) There was apparently a majority vote to switch to the LGPL. I don't place a lot of confidence in such democratic measures where Stallman is concerned; a majority vote to move a project to an FSF license isn't going to necessarily mean much, if the people voting aren't capable of objectivity where said licenses are concerned. It reminds me of the amount of pressure that Alan Cox was trying to initially put on Linus, to move the kernel to version 3 of the GPL.
If you want to give yourself some credibility, in response to this, I'd suggest actually trying to legitimately refute what I've already written in the GP, rather than simply coming back again with another variation of the "citation needed," troll; which I suspect in this case translates to you actually not having a more legitimate comeback.
Checkout why Wine moved from BSD to GPL.
According to Wikipedia, it looks as though the Wine developers had an attack of reciprocity paranoia. This invalidates the BSD license...how, exactly?
There is some bullshit here which needs debunking. Proprietary forks of a non-copyleft project do not inherently "lock out a project's original authors from the subsequent development of a project," at all. Under a non-copyleft license, said original developers never lose their own code, at all. Someone else can fork it, which is fine; and it's still fine even if any of the subsequent (possibly proprietary) forks happen to become more popular than the original project. If popularity is the main thing a project's developers are worried about, I'd begin to seriously wonder about their motivations in programming at all, to be honest.
I'm aware that, as usual, the "duplication of effort," strawman will probably be offered in refutation to this, as well; as in, if a proprietary fork doesn't submit bug fixes back to a parent project, the parent project's developers will have to duplicate the effort of fixing the same bugs.
Truthfully, though, I feel that duplication of effort is something else which is feared both excessively and irrationally, within GPL oriented circles. It's not always a bad thing; there are often times when the original implementation of something really does suck, and can therefore benefit from being thrown away and rewritten from scratch.
Not only that, but a fork by definition is not going to follow the same development path as a parent project anyway. That means that by definition, different bugs are going to end up being produced, and different bugs may or may not get fixed; so there's no automatic guarantee that effort will be duplicated.
I also view the use of the GPL as an indication of inferior intelligence, being completely blunt. People who use the GPL, generally aren't able to objectively assess the negative legal consequences of doing so, or the fact that the usual rationale for the existence of copyleft (reciprocity paranoia; the idea that if people aren't legally forced to contribute modifications to FOSS projects, then said projects will automatically dry up, because people are so inherently evil, stupid, and self-destructive that they'd never voluntarily do so themselves) is emotively based, and demonstrably logically bogus.
If reciprocity paranoia was legitimate, then no BSD licensed project would be able to continue to exist. If it were true that legal enforcement was the only way of ensuring that anyone contributed to FOSS projects, the BSDs and other projects such as PostgreSQL would have died long ago. They haven't, however, because people keep contributing to them; people who do so entirely voluntarily, without having a legal gun held against their heads.
I also know, that that is the main reason why Stallman's cultists don't like the BSDs, or BSD licensed projects, to be mentioned at all. The fact that BSD licensed projects are able to viably continue to exist, is the proverbial inconvenient truth. It undermines the central rationale of Stallman's proposed, desired ideological control of people and the software they use, and also proves that his view of human nature is both excessively negative, and entirely false.
GPL advocates can attempt to argue with this as much as they want. I will say it again; you are cultists. Any argument in favour of the GPL is not logically based; if you were thinking logically, you wouldn't be advocating the GPL in the first place. Your entire rationale is drawn from emotion, (primarily fear, and secondarily a desire to adhere to Stallman's mind control, which leads back to said fear) and not reason. You therefore are incapable of making any argument that I am going to consider valid.
But if you hate the GPL and FSF, you might not want to use the BSD license. They can use your code too. ;)
Add a fourth clause.
"While re-licensing is, in every other case, entirely permissible, (including proprietary closed-source licenses) re-issuing code governed by this license, in whole or in part, in source or binary form, including derivative works, under any license issued by the Free Software Foundation, is expressly prohibited."
It's sadly predictable that the parent was modded -1, Troll. It should have rightfully been modded +1, Insightful.
Public domain is the most morally desirable way to license code, in truth; but that is, of course, why virtually no one does it.
Ah yes, another one of these stories. Expect to see some references to M$, people defending GPL and people advocating BSD. All in all, everyone will agree that respecting open source licenses is very important. Next thread, something about RIAA, same people demanding their right to download copyrighted music.
Pathetic.
Truthfully, the only people who care about copyright in either case, are those who are afflicted with scarcity thinking...which is all too frequent, sadly.
You're the perfect anti-GPL troll. You act like the GPL is the only, or strictest, license in existence.
Version 3 of the GPL is the most restrictive FOSS license in existence.
Here; go and look it up. I'll wait.
There is no legal pressure on any company that steals GPL code.
The GPL does have teeth, but as Eben Moglen himself observed, that is not primarily due to the legal system.
GPL violation is primarily punishable not by law, but by the members of the cult themselves.
Violate the GPL, and be public about it, and whether you end up in court or not, you will be issued with death threats. You will be subjected to vigilantism and harassment of all kinds. You will likely be subjected to "hacktivism," involving the types of pranks that Anonymous have been known to engage in.
For GPL violators, the courts are no real threat. The real threat are the proverbial, "GNU generation;" the vast, militant horde of anarchic, Marxist, Eurotrash 14 year olds that Stallman has been able to sink his ideological claws into.
It isn't any lawyer you must fear. It's the nameless, faceless 15 year old Debian user from the Eastern bloc, who can reduce both your home and corporate LAN to smoking ruins, can steal your identity, can have your bank accounts drained or frozen, and can do so both at will and completely invisibly; striking hard, and then melting away back into the anonymous sea of humanity, untraceably.
Damn kids. They're all alike. ;)
The you post a few licences you can use without giving back! If you are not giving back that points to code under a license that doesn't enforce it being worse.
a) Reciprocity paranoia is the sole justification for the GPL's existence.
b) People who actually write code don't have either the time or the mental focus for reciprocity paranoia. They're too busy.
Armchair "advocates," (even including Stallman himself, here) have the time to be obsessive about whether or not other people are, "giving back," because they're not spending their time doing anything more genuinely useful.
The BSD license, as mentioned, does not legally enforce, "giving back." If it's true, as GPL advocates claim, that it is necessary for reciprocity to be legally enforced in order to ensure that it happens at all, can you possibly explain to me why the BSD operating systems are still being developed, and more specifically, what incentive anyone could have to contribute the results of said development work to the development group(s), since they are not legally forced to do so?
The above question is asked rhetorically. The entire stated justification for the existence of the GNU General Public License (as opposed to non-copyleft FOSS licenses) is utterly moronic. The only reason why it is perpetuated by anyone other than Stallman himself, is due to Stallman's effectiveness as a cult leader, and not, in any way, due to the logical validity of the argument.
"Don't use any version 3 FSF license." Unless you don't like the idea that someone can patent the idea implemented in your code and then sue you for using your code...
Nobody cares.
"If you're not using GPL licensed code, there is no way that you can be responsible for GPL violations." But if you're using non-GPL licensed code you could be responsible for non-GPL violations. You can also be done for patent violations.
Did I mention that nobody cares?
The simplest ways to avoid potential GPL violation, are:-
a) If you want to use an FSF license at all, use the LGPL version 2. Don't use any version 3 FSF license. Apart from anything else, doing so just makes them feel justified in creating bad licenses. (Which their 3 series are)
b) If you're going to use GPL code at all, make sure it's not something you intend to modify yourself.
c) Use other licenses (BSD, MIT, etc) as much as possible. In terms of non-GPL licensed code for you to use, the BSDs are free for the taking, and with the BSD license, you get to decide how much of your modifications (if any) you release. Their code quality is nearly always better than Linux anywayz.
If you're not using GPL licensed code, there is no way that you can be responsible for GPL violations. GPL advocates used to use this argument rhetorically, because they felt that this would mean that the person in question would have no choice. (the implication being that there was barely any non-GPL code, so they'd have nothing to be able to use)
Call their bluff.
I agree with you.
I've never understood why people like the GP have such attitudes. They scoff at pre-existing UNIX methods, and then insist that various forms of obscenely, excessively complex, perverted evil such as C++ or XML are somehow preferable and superior.
Although I love using Linux and FreeBSD, and also engaging in shell scripting and simple forms of programming, whenever I see these being discussed in a public forum recently, I've noticed that my immediate response is usually to become angry.
This is because there is now apparently an entire generation of chronically elitist, misinformed, horribly uneducated and misguided programmers, who engage in chronological snobbery and various other subjective logical fallacies while expressing derision towards the UNIX philosophy, (which is, as you rightly point out, the product of 40 years' worth of accumulated experience) and then advocate such horrors as the aforementioned C++ and XML as preferable solutions.
C++, XML, and "object oriented," programming are nothing other than facilitators of elitism. I've never come across a single advocate of C++ who was not a condescending elitist of the worst possible kind. They use its' degree of needless complexity as a means of gratifying their ego, and they thus fight tirelessly to ensure that the means of said ego gratification is preserved.
Inflating epeens, however, is the only thing that C++ really accomplishes.
Let's see...
people know you are completely clueless.
Subjective ad hominem. (Calling someone clueless, while making no objective citations in support of said claim)
You've never known what you are talking about...Go back to playing with your little toy dBASE programs...
Attempts at condescension/belittlement, again without any kind of rhetorical support.
who understand how to implement post 1980s solutions.
An also baseless appeal to modernity, otherwise known as chronological snobbery. This is the assertion that that which was used in the past, is inherently inferior to that which is used in the present, purely because of its' age. There is no inherent causal relationship between the age of something, on its' own, and its' degree of quality or effectiveness for a given purpose.
The person you are responding to, may well be incorrect, but I also have not been swayed by your own argument.
Hey look, an Arch user! If Firefox is too bloated for you, grab the Gecko renderer and write your own front-end.
Somehow I suspect you were mocking me, but even so, I might just try and figure out how to take you up on that. ;)
And yes, I'm an Arch user. Arch carries the distinction of being one of very few Linux distributions in existence, which probably wouldn't make Doug McIlroy cry himself to sleep at night, if he were to use it. ;)
What on earth... go back to /g/ please.
I don't use 4chan. I prefer to continue to believe, that at least a small capacity for love, compassion, and empathy remains within my species; and 4chan in particular tends to make that difficult.
When I installed Firefox on this machine via pacman, I had to download over 100 Mb of dependencies as well as the browser itself.
I wish there was a way that I could compile it without the mime types package and all the other garbage, and shell out to something like lftp or wget for when I wanted to download files, the way dillo does. If it wasn't for the fact that the forums I use, require redirection support that dillo doesn't have, I wouldn't use Firefox much at all any more, except maybe for YouTube.
I've got to ask; is writing a simple HTML renderer really so difficult? I wouldn't necessarily want to support every single tag in existence. HTML 3.2/4.0 without CSS/DOM would be fine. Most of DOM is just the usual spam implemented by corporations anywayz; if you know how to write decent HTML, you don't need it.
I don't see the correlation, personally.
Linux and anarcho-communism? Maybe.
Linux and Stallmanite mind control? Most of the time, (though not always) yes.
Linux and homosexuality, though? No.
Every time we convert a mundaine and time consuming task into something more efficient by creating an invention, we progress onto taking away the next mundaine and time consuming task until eventually every single useless task is taken care of and we can all finally relax and read Slashdot all day.
I know that's how it is supposed to work, yes. Inventions are supposed to save labour.
The only problem is, the suits make sure that the system remains based on money. Because of that, labour saving machinery doesn't mean that you get more time to do nothing in comfort. It simply makes it more difficult for you to earn money, and hence avoid starving to death.
Why do we want to watch videos inside a web page? This is something I've never understood, and the first time I saw YouTube it looked like an extremely dumb idea.
Because it's convenient. The world is a lot worse off in a lot of different ways, because of the craving for convenience.
If people didn't crave the convenience of GUIs, and operating systems could be CLI only, they'd be vastly more stable and secure than they are. Why do you think Ubuntu is such a mess?
If people didn't crave the convenience of McDonald's, they'd probably be a lot healthier. There'd also be far less environmental damage, due to land needing to be cleared for raising cattle.
If people didn't crave the convenience of mobile phones, we'd still have a lot more privacy. We'd also be without one more source of cancer, not to mention one more reason for landfills and oceans to continue filling up with plastic junk that nobody will depolymerise or recycle, because the lack of profit doesn't justify the inconvenience.
If people didn't crave the convenience of cars, and their additional speed, we could have a scenario where electrical forms of transportation were a lot more prevalent, which could be a lot less polluting.
If people didn't crave the convenience of the Web, and no-brainer user interfaces, we could still have things like the old private DCC networks, which used the IRC nets as purely a jumping off point. Those nets were lagless, completely private, and untraceable. People could host whatever type of content within them that they wanted; warez and anything else, and not get caught.
If people didn't crave the convenience of the Web being a single interface to *everything,* we could have files of all kinds (including videos which we now use YouTube for) travelling via bit torrent, or the abovementioned dcc chat nets. Because everything would be constantly distributed and decentralised, scenarios like the end of GeoCities would not result in massive data loss when static web hosting was shut down, as long as the system still had the rest of the network; so piracy would also be completely unstoppable. People don't do that, however, because setting up bit torrent daemons or said dcc nets is more complicated, and a lot less...you guessed it...convenient.
The world would be an unimaginably better place, if it wasn't for the craving for convenience.
I unfortunately never experienced comics as a kid. I remember being in a newsagent with my father at the age of four or five, and on seeing some comics there, asked my father about them. Dad was fairly conservative, at the time at least, and his response was along the lines that they were full of weird, potentially Satanic stuff, and that he didn't want me reading them. At the time of course, I was still sufficiently impressionable that my response was, "Yes, Dad," and for a long time, I never looked at them again.
Almost 20 years later, I had a friend who was a graphic artist, and who had been an avid reader of comics for most of his life. Along with my own exposure to the Batman movies and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoons, this friend managed to convey to me the creative benefits that comics can have for both their readers, and their artists.
As I think other people have said, comics are the contemporary form of cave painting, which essentially allows the continuation of one of a very small number of indigenous practices, within contemporary white society.
As with indigenous mythmaking, they allow for a culturally unique and relevant form of explanation/interpretation/processing of events going on around their authors and readers. I thought the depiction of Lex Luthor becoming President within the Superman comics, during the presidency of George W. Bush, was a classic case in point. I can remember reading that Clarke Kent was depicted as being particularly quiet and introspective during 9/11, as well, and was mentally wondering how large America's own responsibility for the event was. These are cases where the authors and readers of comics, can express and analyse their genuine thoughts and feelings, in what may well be the only context where it is truly safe for them to do so.
I've also heard about Marvel producing comics about the old Norse pantheon, as well. As a theist, and as someone who actually believes in the Aesir as a group of literally existing beings, (although I don't worship them, personally) I view these stories as being a scenario where contemporary people can be exposed to these deities, and appreciate the genuine benefits that can be had from such exposure, in a non-threatening and culturally relevant way.
In a society where atheism is becoming as prevalent as it is, within contemporary society, comics may, in the end, be the only chance of exposure to anything beyond the mundane that most people get.
If I had points, you'd get +1, Funny; although the GP would probably think you deserve -1, Troll. ;)
They take and take from open source and throw back a couple of table scraps and you people all kiss their ass for it.
300K lines of code? Yep, table scraps.
For people who wonder why I continue to want to see the end of the FSF, the above attitude is the reason why. Stallman and his organisation are the reason for it.
Aside from being ugly and spiritually bankrupt, reciprocity paranoia is based on completely erroneous reasoning, as well. The same people who talk about how music piracy isn't harming anyone, because it doesn't physically take away from a finite supply of copies, are also those who express the above paranoia about people "taking," from FOSS, as if that is somehow a physically finite resource, when music isn't.
Get rid of your fear.
Come on people, you can't have it both ways. If you can't "steal" music, you can't "steal" code. MS "stealing" this code didn't deprive the Open Source community from using the code (i.e. stealing my car), or at least that's the argument /.er use whenever the word is used in conjunction with music and movies. Eat your own dog food.
The GPL is based on fear, and scarcity thinking. This argument holds up logically, yes, but don't expect it to fly with anyone who supports the use of the GPL; it won't. However, most of said people will also advocate and accept music piracy, which is, of course, simply a double standard.
This is a victimless crime; although in truth, it isn't really a crime at all. If said code had been using the BSD license, nobody would have said a word about it; it wouldn't even be spoken about at all.
It'd be fun if the FSF did decide to try taking Microsoft to court about it, though; then we'd all get to see just how truly impotent the FSF really are.
Any responses to this from GPL advocates will also be ignored.
Because the FSF causes a lot of division. I've suggested BSD licensed software in different forms here before, and any posts which do so immediately get modded down.
Stallman's followers are paranoid about ensuring that nobody uses any FOSS under any license other than the GPL. Bradley Kuhn has said that he thinks the GPL is the only FOSS license that should exist.
Stallman has exceptionally narrow ideas about the way things should be, and anyone who disagrees with said ideas, gets shouted down, harassed, called names, and repressed by his followers.
My original post here got modded down. Every time I write anything here which they disagree with, they mod it down in order to try and ensure nobody reads it, while some of them also respond and call me names. If I'm just trolling, as they claim, you have to wonder why they feel it's worth the effort of suppressing what I write, as well.
The fact that they do that, also hurts Linux's image with people outside the FOSS community as well.
The FSF are a cult, and a harmful one, and we'd be a lot better off without them.
At the moment I am using Arch Linux, although up until about three days ago, I'd been using FreeBSD 7.1 since Febuary.
I use Ratpoison as a window manager, and do virtually everything on the command line.
There is way, way, *way* too much of a push away from open, transparent, decentralised internet protocols in pretty much every area, to centralised, proprietary, suit-run messes.
The benefit of being able to run a decentralised server wasn't about doing the gaming equivalent of channel surfing. It was about being able to throw together a LAN in a basement, bedroom, or living room with some local RL friends whenever you wanted.
I can just hear the brainless, ovine responses now.
"But we'll still be able to do that! We can just go through the remote service to do so!"
Yeah, and all of your packets have to go through said remote service as well. If said remote service is hosted in another country, guess how much higher your latency is going to be?
Add to that, the fact that you're paying money for no good reason other than your own stupidity and laziness. You should not want to give a company the ability to dictate terms of use to you, and you especially shouldn't want to give said company money when you don't have to.
It doesn't really bother me, though. I don't play contemporary games, and the single main reason why is because they've been dumbed down in order to give the Guitar Hero demographic what they want; something to serve as a centrepiece in the living room on a Friday night, while people are getting drunk and/or stoned with their friends.
If you care about actually having any kind of real challenge in a game now, you're accused of having no life.
Decentralisation = the people doing it by and for themselves, on their own terms, at low or no cost.
Centralisation = the suits doing it for you, charging you through the nose for it, dictating exactly when, where, and how it's going to happen, and the brainless masses referring to it as being a good thing.
Some of said sheep will probably respond to this very post, in order to tell me I'm wrong.