MYOPIC. SYCOPHANT. You should spell-check before you cast aspersions. Also, rational arguments never contain "ignorant bastard" in the title. This is all just in case you decide to post a rational argument in the future. By the way, very appropriate domain.
I suppose you could still release a license agreement, but the only thing that makes it enforceable is the copyright. Without it, you could just legally copy it, and say that you didn't agree with the license. I mean, you only have to agree with the license to use the software if the company has a copyright on it.
Ultimately, computers, software, electronics and the whole shebang are about making money. None of them were invented to help or make life easier for Joe Punchclock. That they did this is an interesting and wonderful side effect. Copyrights, trademarks, and patents are the tools of huge corporations and mean more to them than what is the best for everyone. Even if you could come up with a scheme (like limiting the duration of a copyright for software) that made the world a better place, why should a company like M$ or Dell or Phillips or anyone get behind it when they already make a boatload of money off the old way of doing things? I say talk all you want about copyrights and their abuse, but it will never do any good so long as the dollar rules world. Capitalism encourages innovation, no doubt, but it isn't the optimal environment for it because money will always be valued more than innovation itself. So, fortuneboy has a good point. But in America money talks. "Congress shall pass no law abridging the right of corporations to amass obscene amounts of money" - isn't that the subtext of the whole constitution? I mean our freakin revolution was about paying taxes!
- as a side note, how, exactly, is the GPL supposed to protect Linux? I mean sure, if you choose to say you borrowed Linux code, then you have to abide by the terms of the GPL. But if you just steal the code, and release it under a license that isn't open source and strictly forbids reverse engineering or decompiling who would know? I'm sure it's already been done. The GPL is basically an honor system. Copyrights only really protect software with closed source.
Of course it's silly to talk about whether or not code is speech. It most decidedly must be speech. I had intended to make this point, but you've made it much more precisely. It is only by clouding the point that code is speech that the government can pawn off on us the idea that: 1) code can be made illegal to export 2) that the ideas expressed by code can be made illegal to share It's the height of stupidity not to see that the moral and legal bases for checks on the sharing of code are ridiculous. It's just the coldwar psyche of governments that pushes this sort of stuff on us. The free exchange of information just isn't in the national interest. With enough of it, we would see how silly nations are, and that just isn't in the national self-interest. Unrestricted individual liberty (of which truly free speech - which does not exist in the good ol' U.S. of A - is the most important part) recognizes the individual as the most important political unit, but democracy recognizes society collectively as the most important political unit. The free exchange of ideas is ultimately undemocratic, uncommunist, and un-everyothersortofpoliticalideology.
Actually, that's the sort of problem that a lot of people raise. It should be considered language, though because: A) its signs will refer to non-privileged things in the world. Which is just to say that they don't refer to things that are only accessible subjectively to the assigner of the signs (like sensations). B) since it is a mathematical theory its propositions will have to relate to each other using rules of logic, and are thus accessible to anyone who understands those rules (at least in principle). It may be the case that no one ever succeeds in decoding the paper, if it is at least theoretically possible to do so, it will count as a language. I suppose, then, that a government could ban or otherwise stop the distribution of the paper. Which still brings us back to the simpler question of whether or not the government has the right to restrict the free flow of ideas. Source code is in essence simply something that instantiates an idea. It's the idea that the government is regulating by regulating the source code that realizes it. I mean, any number of different lines of code can be used to output the same function. A program can be written to perform exactly the same function in several languages. So it's not the source code that is important it's the ideas that they implement. Can the government restrict your right to share your idea? If it's ok to tell someone in english how to implement an encryption program, how does it differ to give them the source code. It really only differs in levels of abstraction. The english is not sufficiently precise to implement the encryption program, so it has to be translated into a program that is then translated into machine language. But the english, the C (or C++ or Pascal or COBOL) all perform the same communicative function. They all describe encryption (the idea).
I think that, given the pseudo-philosophical bent of the article, what he is doing here is referring to an old argument from the philosophy of language. Wittgenstein basically argued that there cannot be a language that only one person can speak. It begins with the supposition that a person assigns signs to sensations, wher these are taken to be private to the person. He then argues that this supposition cannot be sustained because because no standards for the correct or incorrect application of the same sign to a recurrence of the same sensation are possible. Basically, all this means is that a language that only has subjective meaning (that is subjective in the strict philosophical sense of the word - if it only has subjective meaning the signs only suceed in referring to a sensation when the assigner of the sign uses them) is not a language because it fails one of the necessary conditions of languagehood - its signs cannot communicate meaning to others. Thus, something doesn't count as speech if it only makes sense to the speaker and only could, in principle, ever make sense to the speaker. All of this, seems beside the point, however. Obviously code is written in a language. And obviously utterances of a language count as speech (as do its written utterances as the signs of the written language convey the same meaning as the signs of the spoken language). So what? The question is do we have an unchecked right to communicate all ideas. Do we have a right (moral or legal) to communicate the ideas embodied in all pieces of code?
Slashdot Mirror
MYOPIC. SYCOPHANT. You should spell-check before you cast aspersions. Also, rational arguments never contain "ignorant bastard" in the title. This is all just in case you decide to post a rational argument in the future. By the way, very appropriate domain.
I suppose you could still release a license agreement, but the only thing that makes it enforceable is the copyright. Without it, you could just legally copy it, and say that you didn't agree with the license. I mean, you only have to agree with the license to use the software if the company has a copyright on it.
Ultimately, computers, software, electronics and the whole shebang are about making money. None of them were invented to help or make life easier for Joe Punchclock. That they did this is an interesting and wonderful side effect. Copyrights, trademarks, and patents are the tools of huge corporations and mean more to them than what is the best for everyone. Even if you could come up with a scheme (like limiting the duration of a copyright for software) that made the world a better place, why should a company like M$ or Dell or Phillips or anyone get behind it when they already make a boatload of money off the old way of doing things? I say talk all you want about copyrights and their abuse, but it will never do any good so long as the dollar rules world. Capitalism encourages innovation, no doubt, but it isn't the optimal environment for it because money will always be valued more than innovation itself. So, fortuneboy has a good point. But in America money talks. "Congress shall pass no law abridging the right of corporations to amass obscene amounts of money" - isn't that the subtext of the whole constitution? I mean our freakin revolution was about paying taxes!
- as a side note, how, exactly, is the GPL supposed to protect Linux? I mean sure, if you choose to say you borrowed Linux code, then you have to abide by the terms of the GPL. But if you just steal the code, and release it under a license that isn't open source and strictly forbids reverse engineering or decompiling who would know? I'm sure it's already been done. The GPL is basically an honor system. Copyrights only really protect software with closed source.
Of course it's silly to talk about whether or not code is speech. It most decidedly must be speech. I had intended to make this point, but you've made it much more precisely. It is only by clouding the point that code is speech that the government can pawn off on us the idea that:
1) code can be made illegal to export
2) that the ideas expressed by code can be made illegal to share
It's the height of stupidity not to see that the moral and legal bases for checks on the sharing of code are ridiculous. It's just the coldwar psyche of governments that pushes this sort of stuff on us. The free exchange of information just isn't in the national interest. With enough of it, we would see how silly nations are, and that just isn't in the national self-interest. Unrestricted individual liberty (of which truly free speech - which does not exist in the good ol' U.S. of A - is the most important part) recognizes the individual as the most important political unit, but democracy recognizes society collectively as the most important political unit. The free exchange of ideas is ultimately undemocratic, uncommunist, and un-everyothersortofpoliticalideology.
Actually, that's the sort of problem that a lot of people raise. It should be considered language, though because: A) its signs will refer to non-privileged things in the world. Which is just to say that they don't refer to things that are only accessible subjectively to the assigner of the signs (like sensations). B) since it is a mathematical theory its propositions will have to relate to each other using rules of logic, and are thus accessible to anyone who understands those rules (at least in principle). It may be the case that no one ever succeeds in decoding the paper, if it is at least theoretically possible to do so, it will count as a language. I suppose, then, that a government could ban or otherwise stop the distribution of the paper. Which still brings us back to the simpler question of whether or not the government has the right to restrict the free flow of ideas.
Source code is in essence simply something that instantiates an idea. It's the idea that the government is regulating by regulating the source code that realizes it. I mean, any number of different lines of code can be used to output the same function. A program can be written to perform exactly the same function in several languages. So it's not the source code that is important it's the ideas that they implement. Can the government restrict your right to share your idea? If it's ok to tell someone in english how to implement an encryption program, how does it differ to give them the source code. It really only differs in levels of abstraction. The english is not sufficiently precise to implement the encryption program, so it has to be translated into a program that is then translated into machine language. But the english, the C (or C++ or Pascal or COBOL) all perform the same communicative function. They all describe encryption (the idea).
I think that, given the pseudo-philosophical bent of the article, what he is doing here is referring to an old argument from the philosophy of language. Wittgenstein basically argued that there cannot be a language that only one person can speak. It begins with the supposition that a person assigns signs to sensations, wher these are taken to be private to the person. He then argues that this supposition cannot be sustained because because no standards for the correct or incorrect application of the same sign to a recurrence of the same sensation are possible. Basically, all this means is that a language that only has subjective meaning (that is subjective in the strict philosophical sense of the word - if it only has subjective meaning the signs only suceed in referring to a sensation when the assigner of the sign uses them) is not a language because it fails one of the necessary conditions of languagehood - its signs cannot communicate meaning to others. Thus, something doesn't count as speech if it only makes sense to the speaker and only could, in principle, ever make sense to the speaker.
All of this, seems beside the point, however. Obviously code is written in a language. And obviously utterances of a language count as speech (as do its written utterances as the signs of the written language convey the same meaning as the signs of the spoken language). So what? The question is do we have an unchecked right to communicate all ideas. Do we have a right (moral or legal) to communicate the ideas embodied in all pieces of code?