You'd think it would work that way, but from my experience in testing I find that multiple small releases are easier to work with. You can be much more precise about what they affect and the testing is easier. Then, once you've run a full regression test on each individually you have a fairly good chance of being able to combine them all without any problems. If you just glom a bunch of things together you can't predict the impact very accurately and you end up doing a bunch of "wasted" testing.
Also, you don't end up with the situation where SP2 hoses some program, because you can mark that specific patch, usually a tiny one, as causing problems and people can apply all the rest. The fact that only one small patch is a problem means that only one small patch needs to be fixed and retested, if you had to replace the whole service pack you'd have to retest it all.
Encrypted filesystems. Set the computer up so that if the drives become unmounted an admin with a smart-card and the correct one-time-password must be present to unlock them. With strong enough encryption you can make physical theft pointless, and thus guard against it even if you can't afford armed guards and vaults.
Hell, someone made a router-on-a-floppy distro that had to have a password applied at boot before it would boot off of the encrypted disk (actually a CD I think) and when it finished loading the forwarding and filtering, it proceeded with a slightly modified shutdown routine, stopping all disk access, keyboard access, etc. It stopped just short of reboot with the networking, a syslog client, and monitor still working. You don't need all the rest of the stuff so it's just a security hole to have it. Not perfect security, but much better.
If you don't see that the ideology of free software is good for your business, you haven't been paying attention.
Stick with crappy proprietary software and you'll be locked into continually crappy software, from a vendor who doesn't have a motive to fix or improve it.
Go with open source and not only is there no lock-in, but there's no motive for it. While some developers may not have a motive to work on security, others will. You'll end up with better software that you can customize if needed.
When buying software, you're buying perpetual dependency on those products if you're not careful.
Correct, some clauses can be found to be invalid and not invalidate the contract as a whole. I was trying to over-simplify. However, if key clauses are invalid, the contract is almost always void.
If some minor clauses says you can't compete with the company for three years after employment and the state law limits that to six months, then six months it is, yet the rest will probably stand. However, if I say I'll pay you by giving you a car and it turns out I don't own the car (or there's some other technicality that invalidates the contract) I don't get to keep your work.
The 'must license derivative work under GPL, must honor GPL to distribute this work' is pretty much the key point. They may not be valid, but if not, there's no transfer or granting of rights.
However, perhaps the courts could rule that some of the finer points regarding what counts as a derivative work aren't correct and the GPL as a whole would be fine, but someone's non-authorized use would be allowed because the courts rule that the GPL is wrong about what a derivative work (but in this case, you'd have been allowed to copy the work without the GPL probably, so it's a minor point.)
Only in very few cases does invalidating part of a contract not invalidate the whole thing, and usually only when that one clause was somehow slipped past one of the parties. As the saying goes, it's the courts' job to make sure you get a fair deal, not to make sure you get a good deal. If you sell you house for $1, when clearly compotent to make such a deal, then it stands. If you buy a TV and part of the warranty contract on page 20 says that I own your house, and I specifically told you that the contract didn't say anything of the sort, it wouldn't be binding, even if you didn't read it. Courts are also a little more strict with contracts for necessities, ruling that if I buy a car and get a bad deal it's too bad, but if I'm afraid to buy food or shelter because of the contracts, that's not acceptable.
(The courts are really starting to find that contracts that both parties didn't expect to be read aren't binding - giving the average Joe a twenty-page, densely worded contract with sneaky lawyer tricks in it, just isn't going to convince the judge that you were in agreement, another key point for the contract, because there's no way the average Joe could be expected to find and understand some hidden clause.)
Further, even when a contract is voided, if the consideration (what you or I get) for one party is somehow invalid (illegal, whatever) the whole contract is pretty much voided. The court isn't going to rule that just because it turns out I couldn't give you my house, that you still had to pay me $250K for it.
To summarize, the GPL is fairly clear, there are plaintext summaries to get you to read the appropriate parts, not for a necessity, and clear that it does not override existing copyrights, etc. Because of this, it's very unlikely that any part of it would be found invalid. But, even if it was, the whole consideration for the original author is that their code remains public even in derivative form, if the courts removed this they'd void the whole thing and you'd be back at regular copyright.
A contract that is invalid for any reason isn't binding. Because you need a binding contract to allow you to copy a copyrighted work, if the contract wasn't valid you'd be right back at the start, with you having a copyrighted work and someone wanting it. They wouldn't get it free because of this, any more than you'd get a car for free because the dealership misspelled your name on the contract.
It's not possible for me to be greedy in this case because I'm not asking you to use my code. And if my code is as insignificant as you say, you wouldn't be copying it. Nobody searches the net for twenty lines of so-so code.
Why don't you understand that people hate freeloaders? The GPL isn't to be greedy, it's to spite you. We could just release the code, like people used to do, and let anyone use it, but we use the GPL specifically because greedy people who refuse to share bug us.
Much like the over-hyped turd of capitalism. Everyone think of themselves only, to the disadvantage of others, and the hard-working (read lucky) shall be rewarded. A free market can't exist any more than communal ownership can. Both require people to play fair, capitalism requires this while expecting everyone to cheat - but only to cheat legally...
Free markets collapse quickly into virtual slavery. Of course, it's an optional slavery where you're given a hobson's choice of being able to eat in trade for signing your life away. At which point, if you try to escape, you're initiating violence by stealing your owner's property, but if your escape is resisted, well that's a justified reaction to the use of force... (We've seen examples almost this bad in the history of the USA, with a government that was trying to stop this, how could it not be worse in a world where this kind of thing was encouraged?)
Then there's the issue of how you start. If you'd be willing to divide property up equally, I might consider it. Capitalism favors the owners of capital, most of whom inhereted the money from their parents. Old money rules the world. I don't think we need to cater to these people through our choice of economic systems.
Congrats, your's is quite possible the stupidest post I've read all day.
There's a huge difference between forcing people to use Linux and regulations that require some form of free software be installed. This doesn't have to be a Linux distro, this could be FreeDOS, or probably, nothing. The government probably wouldn't object to you selling bare computers, but they're taking steps to prevent a convicted monopolist who is trying to bleed the country dry from being given a foothold. Seems fair, if MS wants to compete, let them compete on equal footing. They simply need to convince people that their software is worth 1/4 of the average yearly wage.
I'm a programmer, is open source bad for me? My company isn't in the software business, so almost all of the work I do is to customize existing applications for our use. With closed-source products this means I learn whatever scripting language they use and write macros and forms. With open source software we download the source and make modifications at a low level, producing better results, faster, and in a real language (You know, C/C++, Perl, etc, not VB, ObjectPal, etc).
My wage comes out of the same budget as purchasing software so going open source means that there'll be more money to pay me and my teammates to produce actually helpful software (customized so it does what we want it to do).
I'm trying to convince them to embrace the GPL. Right now we use the fact that not distributing binaries means we don't have to distribute source, but if we became more involved in fixing up the applications we use we'd have a lot more pull with the original developers, getting features even faster and easier. Much like IBM has a lot of clout with Linus because they're being helpful, so he merges changes (massively multi-cpu support, etc) that he might not have otherwise.
But my job niche won't go away. No matter how much we like Mozilla, or Bugzilla, or Open Office, there's always going to be a way that we could make it more productive for our staff members and a boss with foresight will want to make the business more efficient.
Technically, this might mean that people in the USA can't use GPLed code because they aren't allowed to distribute the code to people in export-restricted nations, if they were asked to do so. But, they could get around this by distributing (within the USA) the application with source and binary attached, and letting people who are allowed to distribute the source, distribute both to people in restriction countries.
I don't think you meant it, but there's a small technical error in your post.
You said "restrictions on it's use". You can't actually restrict the use (unless I agree to that beforehand) but you can restrict the duplication of it.
This is how GPLed software works. Once I get a copy I can do anything I want with it, except for duplication. The GPL only applies if you wish to duplicate the work, something you can't normally do.
I think the GPL promotes speech-type freedoms, by preventing it from being taken away. By inflating the commons (making revisions free as well) it enables people to make their own revisions.
It's much like freedom to innovate is dependent on tool access. When I started computing in the early 80s, computers shipped with schematics and the complete development library used to write the system code. (An assembler, and a basic interpretter, but it's still what they used.) Now, if it wasn't for free-software languages, you'd have to spend $500+ to even begin to really program (not just script something for another program, like VB is pretty much limited to). This reduction in the ability of the average person to participate would really limit the diversity of opinions and would lead to the only forums being tightly-controlled ones where the owners censored everyone, yet users didn't have a valid alternative.
Or, there's an interesting article here that talks about Carl Orff who wrote his opera Carmina Burana "based mostly on modern interpretations of Hungarian folk music and nursery rhymes that had fascinated Orff since he was a child." He borrowed the culture that surrounded him and he wrote powerful music. Later, in the 80s, comes Techno band Apotheosis and they do something similar, they write a song call O Fortuna, based largely on Orff's work, but in a very different way. The way that an adventure I wrote involving wizards and rangers wouldn't be like LotR, but could been seen to have derived much in the way of ideas from it.
Of course, Orff's estate sued. he was allowed to borrow his culture to create new music, but Apotheosis isn't allowed to do the same.
There's a reason why people are referred to a consumers these days. It's all we're supposed to be. The laws have changed (essentially perpetual copyright, the DMCA removing the ability to copy for quotation or parody, etc) so that unless we invent a new work totally out of vacuum, not based on anything even slightly identifiable, we don't have the right to claim that it's ours.
The GPL prevents this by saying that while you can use something, it has to be available to enrich future generation in the same way. And it's not enough that the original is available, the work is seen as a living entity, always changing to remain relevant. Orff based his work on what he was surrounded by, Hungarian Folk Music, and Apotheosis based their music on what they were surrounded by, Carl Orff's music among other things, and I'll base my music on what I was surrounded by as I grew up, god help me, 80s rock.:)
If copyright was reasonable, so that it lasted a generation or less and I could learn from and build upon what I grew up with, legally, we wouldn't need the GPL. It's a response to copyright that may never expire, to people claiming ownership of derivative works based on a single guitar riff, or to people embrace-and-extending the tools of the commons in order to lock people into a proprietary protocol which of course, you're not allowed to embrace (except at $300 per seat), or extend.
The GPL very much protects freedoms, the free aspect is a side effect that just happens to be kinda cool. I think if you read Stallman's essay's it'll be clear that (right or wrong) this is what was going through his mind as he conceived of it - it wasn't that he didn't want to pay $20 for printer drivers, it was that he couldn't get them, for love or money, and wasn't allowed to make his own. (Without reinventing a very large, copyright-protected wheel.)
If you use GPLed code, you only have to GPL the code it's linked with. The rest of your products are not involved. (And, of course, if you don't distribute the modified GPLed work, you don't have to distribute your code, so if you're only using it internally, you don't have any obligiation to share.)
P.S. The 2-minute delay sucks, who can't type a reasonable comment in two minutes?
That's the issue of Bush being a liar, I'd say it's pretty obvious. And yes, it has nothing to do with the Iraq war.
However, for the people of Iraq, the war will probably be a good thing in the long run. They didn't have much freedom (look at things like Saddam's 100% mandate from the people, that's obviously not real) and the mass graves. Hell, ex-partiate Iraqis (who you must assume, know the truth) urged the USA to remove Saddam back in '91, and he hasn't gotten better.
Similarly, the people of Afghanistan are free of the Taliban and while there are other brutal warlords looking to step in, at least the world is watch and peace-keepers are trying to stop them. Afghani women were being brutally oppressed and now they have a hope of freedom. The religions over there are even more freakishly stupid than the religions over here and the people in charge are just as quick to impose their religion on everyone possible.
Hopefully we keep a first-world presence there long enough to help the people, instead of simply letting another set of creeps move in.
I'd have been contributing code under a BSD license if I didn't know about the GPL, but I wouldn't have been happy with it. Every time someone like Microsoft uses BSD code and doesn't even thank anyone it pisses me off.
But Stallman comes along and writes a legally strong license that does exactly what I want. It won't let you share my stuff unless you're willing to share what you do with it. It's what I feel copyright law itself should be more like.
I consider the GPL a perfect fit and I don't really respect people who whine about it because it's pretty obvious that they're just greedy. They want everyone else's code, it's so important that they have to have it, but nobody can have their code - that's the really creative stuff of course, so it should remain theirs... I've never heard a non-greedy argument against the GPL, and as such, I've never heard a slightly convincing argument against the GPL.
I don't care what a reviewer's final score is, only the reasons they list.
For example, some movie reviewers say things like "Adam Sandler's usual humor wasn't in this movie, leaving it a bit flat." That means that I might not hate the movie though, because I think Adam Sandler is pathetic and his fans are retards.
Similarly, I don't really care what the reviewer of hardware drones on about, as long as they provide the numbers, pictures, and facts (what comes in the box). I can use it as more accurate (less looked-over by marketing) product spec.
Obviously this only works if the reviewer is honest (no lying about the numbers, etc) and if they get the real hardware, but this is what the community is pretty good at finding out, so I feel pretty safe trusting an established site like AnandTech or Tom's (though Tom is a bit of a kook at time, he doesn't lie or anything.)
Not if you state that you believe the memos are Diebold's, but that you have no proof beyond the statements of other websites. In the USA, truth and honest belief are a complete defense against libel/slander. It's the one area where the USA law makes much more sense than elsewhere.
That's my point. But it's also the reason we need truth instead of drug propoganda. If the government thinks kids can get pot they'll tell them that pot kills. They'll also tell them that mixing alcohol and sleeping pills kills, as does drinking cough syrup and mixing alcohol and ibuprofen. Which of these is deadly (or causes organ failure), which is a cheap buzz, and which is a cheap buzz that can cause lasting brain damage?
Instead we need to tell kids that while for various reasons we don't recommend pot (lack of motivation, obesity, etc) it won't kill you and if fact feels quite nice, so we hope that they'll make safe choices and if they do use it, limit their intake, etc, etc.
Then we put big bold letters of a box of ibuprofen that taking it with alcohol could kill you (or merely make you end up on dialysis for life), people will respect it.
Make it honest education or it'll all be ignored when people discover the lie.
Current drug propoganda in the USA suggests that pot is as harmful as heroin and cocaine. The is clearly ridiculous to anyone who has either done these drugs, or even seen people who have. While pot may not be harmless, it isn't going to kill you or addict you for life and end with you living in the gutter; it's just not that kind of thing. No more so than alcohol at any rate.
If a teen who has been told that pot/cocaine/crack/heroin/ecstacy are all deadly ever sees a friend take pot or ecstacy and have a fun trip with no visible side effects, not even addiction (beyond the addiction to fun things that's normal), they're going to realize that they were lied to. Are they going to know to stop with pot and ecstacy though? Nobody told them that these were mild drugs, so they're likely to try something stronger without knowing, something that's actually dangerous.
People already die on the streets from legal substances like alcohol, and die from drugs like tobacco, driving up our insurance claims. (Does your insurance company charge enough for smokers (estimated at quadruple the normal rate, or do you carry some of that?)) We already have to deal with the societal issues of letting them die or paying for it.
So what would happen if you legalized soft drugs? For the hard ones, nothing would change. People would smoke some pot, and maybe drop acid, but these are fairly harmless drugs. They wouldn't get cancer, they wouldn't die. (You'd have to smoke a ton of pot to get lung cancer, even with holding your breath.)
What could you charge for it? Well, you're right that if you charged much it would cost more than illegal sources, but you're also selling accurate dosages, known effects, and legal immunity. I doubt people are going to buy from an illegal dealer if there's a good alternative. So perhaps the poor keep buying it illegally, but that's how it is now - no change for the worse. There'd be a lot less call for illegal drugs, and thus a lot less dealers, and less arrested drug dealers and buyers, so there'd be less prisoners. Reducing the jail population would be a tremendous gain.
As for the harder drugs, I think the same holds mostly true but we could use data from the first stage of the project to plan the later stages.
Considering that Microsoft has stated publicly (and personally from the Ballmer and Gates) that Linux and free-software and communist in nature, anti-american, unstable, and should not be used in any way by government or business, I think it's reasonable that supporters of open source are a bit anti-Microsoft.
In a technical sense, Linus is exactly right. Microsoft is technically uninteresting and Linus wouldn't get anywhere (that he wanted to be) by copying them, nor I would guess, anywhere financially either (MS does dominate markets well). The only reason to consider MS, except as a security hole for servers and yet another unstable desktop OS, is that MS seems hell-bent on destroying our right to use free software (and establish open standards, so that software will always be free in a useful way).
Also, Microsoft has on numerous (and documented) occasions, lied, stolen, perjured, faked evidence, conspired illegally to destroy a competitor, slandered and libelled, and threatened unjust lawsuits to silence critics. But other than that, they're fine neighbors...
Why shouldn't we wish for the collapse of MS, it's them or us, by their choice.
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You'd think it would work that way, but from my experience in testing I find that multiple small releases are easier to work with. You can be much more precise about what they affect and the testing is easier. Then, once you've run a full regression test on each individually you have a fairly good chance of being able to combine them all without any problems. If you just glom a bunch of things together you can't predict the impact very accurately and you end up doing a bunch of "wasted" testing.
Also, you don't end up with the situation where SP2 hoses some program, because you can mark that specific patch, usually a tiny one, as causing problems and people can apply all the rest. The fact that only one small patch is a problem means that only one small patch needs to be fixed and retested, if you had to replace the whole service pack you'd have to retest it all.
Encrypted filesystems. Set the computer up so that if the drives become unmounted an admin with a smart-card and the correct one-time-password must be present to unlock them. With strong enough encryption you can make physical theft pointless, and thus guard against it even if you can't afford armed guards and vaults.
Hell, someone made a router-on-a-floppy distro that had to have a password applied at boot before it would boot off of the encrypted disk (actually a CD I think) and when it finished loading the forwarding and filtering, it proceeded with a slightly modified shutdown routine, stopping all disk access, keyboard access, etc. It stopped just short of reboot with the networking, a syslog client, and monitor still working. You don't need all the rest of the stuff so it's just a security hole to have it. Not perfect security, but much better.
If you don't see that the ideology of free software is good for your business, you haven't been paying attention.
Stick with crappy proprietary software and you'll be locked into continually crappy software, from a vendor who doesn't have a motive to fix or improve it.
Go with open source and not only is there no lock-in, but there's no motive for it. While some developers may not have a motive to work on security, others will. You'll end up with better software that you can customize if needed.
When buying software, you're buying perpetual dependency on those products if you're not careful.
Correct, some clauses can be found to be invalid and not invalidate the contract as a whole. I was trying to over-simplify. However, if key clauses are invalid, the contract is almost always void.
If some minor clauses says you can't compete with the company for three years after employment and the state law limits that to six months, then six months it is, yet the rest will probably stand. However, if I say I'll pay you by giving you a car and it turns out I don't own the car (or there's some other technicality that invalidates the contract) I don't get to keep your work.
The 'must license derivative work under GPL, must honor GPL to distribute this work' is pretty much the key point. They may not be valid, but if not, there's no transfer or granting of rights.
However, perhaps the courts could rule that some of the finer points regarding what counts as a derivative work aren't correct and the GPL as a whole would be fine, but someone's non-authorized use would be allowed because the courts rule that the GPL is wrong about what a derivative work (but in this case, you'd have been allowed to copy the work without the GPL probably, so it's a minor point.)
Only in very few cases does invalidating part of a contract not invalidate the whole thing, and usually only when that one clause was somehow slipped past one of the parties. As the saying goes, it's the courts' job to make sure you get a fair deal, not to make sure you get a good deal. If you sell you house for $1, when clearly compotent to make such a deal, then it stands. If you buy a TV and part of the warranty contract on page 20 says that I own your house, and I specifically told you that the contract didn't say anything of the sort, it wouldn't be binding, even if you didn't read it. Courts are also a little more strict with contracts for necessities, ruling that if I buy a car and get a bad deal it's too bad, but if I'm afraid to buy food or shelter because of the contracts, that's not acceptable.
(The courts are really starting to find that contracts that both parties didn't expect to be read aren't binding - giving the average Joe a twenty-page, densely worded contract with sneaky lawyer tricks in it, just isn't going to convince the judge that you were in agreement, another key point for the contract, because there's no way the average Joe could be expected to find and understand some hidden clause.)
Further, even when a contract is voided, if the consideration (what you or I get) for one party is somehow invalid (illegal, whatever) the whole contract is pretty much voided. The court isn't going to rule that just because it turns out I couldn't give you my house, that you still had to pay me $250K for it.
To summarize, the GPL is fairly clear, there are plaintext summaries to get you to read the appropriate parts, not for a necessity, and clear that it does not override existing copyrights, etc. Because of this, it's very unlikely that any part of it would be found invalid. But, even if it was, the whole consideration for the original author is that their code remains public even in derivative form, if the courts removed this they'd void the whole thing and you'd be back at regular copyright.
A contract that is invalid for any reason isn't binding. Because you need a binding contract to allow you to copy a copyrighted work, if the contract wasn't valid you'd be right back at the start, with you having a copyrighted work and someone wanting it. They wouldn't get it free because of this, any more than you'd get a car for free because the dealership misspelled your name on the contract.
It's not possible for me to be greedy in this case because I'm not asking you to use my code. And if my code is as insignificant as you say, you wouldn't be copying it. Nobody searches the net for twenty lines of so-so code.
Why don't you understand that people hate freeloaders? The GPL isn't to be greedy, it's to spite you. We could just release the code, like people used to do, and let anyone use it, but we use the GPL specifically because greedy people who refuse to share bug us.
Much like the over-hyped turd of capitalism. Everyone think of themselves only, to the disadvantage of others, and the hard-working (read lucky) shall be rewarded. A free market can't exist any more than communal ownership can. Both require people to play fair, capitalism requires this while expecting everyone to cheat - but only to cheat legally...
Free markets collapse quickly into virtual slavery. Of course, it's an optional slavery where you're given a hobson's choice of being able to eat in trade for signing your life away. At which point, if you try to escape, you're initiating violence by stealing your owner's property, but if your escape is resisted, well that's a justified reaction to the use of force... (We've seen examples almost this bad in the history of the USA, with a government that was trying to stop this, how could it not be worse in a world where this kind of thing was encouraged?)
Then there's the issue of how you start. If you'd be willing to divide property up equally, I might consider it. Capitalism favors the owners of capital, most of whom inhereted the money from their parents. Old money rules the world. I don't think we need to cater to these people through our choice of economic systems.
Congrats, your's is quite possible the stupidest post I've read all day.
There's a huge difference between forcing people to use Linux and regulations that require some form of free software be installed. This doesn't have to be a Linux distro, this could be FreeDOS, or probably, nothing. The government probably wouldn't object to you selling bare computers, but they're taking steps to prevent a convicted monopolist who is trying to bleed the country dry from being given a foothold. Seems fair, if MS wants to compete, let them compete on equal footing. They simply need to convince people that their software is worth 1/4 of the average yearly wage.
I'm a programmer, is open source bad for me? My company isn't in the software business, so almost all of the work I do is to customize existing applications for our use. With closed-source products this means I learn whatever scripting language they use and write macros and forms. With open source software we download the source and make modifications at a low level, producing better results, faster, and in a real language (You know, C/C++, Perl, etc, not VB, ObjectPal, etc).
My wage comes out of the same budget as purchasing software so going open source means that there'll be more money to pay me and my teammates to produce actually helpful software (customized so it does what we want it to do).
I'm trying to convince them to embrace the GPL. Right now we use the fact that not distributing binaries means we don't have to distribute source, but if we became more involved in fixing up the applications we use we'd have a lot more pull with the original developers, getting features even faster and easier. Much like IBM has a lot of clout with Linus because they're being helpful, so he merges changes (massively multi-cpu support, etc) that he might not have otherwise.
But my job niche won't go away. No matter how much we like Mozilla, or Bugzilla, or Open Office, there's always going to be a way that we could make it more productive for our staff members and a boss with foresight will want to make the business more efficient.
Technically, this might mean that people in the USA can't use GPLed code because they aren't allowed to distribute the code to people in export-restricted nations, if they were asked to do so. But, they could get around this by distributing (within the USA) the application with source and binary attached, and letting people who are allowed to distribute the source, distribute both to people in restriction countries.
I don't think you meant it, but there's a small technical error in your post.
You said "restrictions on it's use". You can't actually restrict the use (unless I agree to that beforehand) but you can restrict the duplication of it.
This is how GPLed software works. Once I get a copy I can do anything I want with it, except for duplication. The GPL only applies if you wish to duplicate the work, something you can't normally do.
I think the GPL promotes speech-type freedoms, by preventing it from being taken away. By inflating the commons (making revisions free as well) it enables people to make their own revisions.
:)
It's much like freedom to innovate is dependent on tool access. When I started computing in the early 80s, computers shipped with schematics and the complete development library used to write the system code. (An assembler, and a basic interpretter, but it's still what they used.) Now, if it wasn't for free-software languages, you'd have to spend $500+ to even begin to really program (not just script something for another program, like VB is pretty much limited to). This reduction in the ability of the average person to participate would really limit the diversity of opinions and would lead to the only forums being tightly-controlled ones where the owners censored everyone, yet users didn't have a valid alternative.
Or, there's an interesting article here that talks about Carl Orff who wrote his opera Carmina Burana "based mostly on modern interpretations of Hungarian folk music and nursery rhymes that had fascinated Orff since he was a child." He borrowed the culture that surrounded him and he wrote powerful music. Later, in the 80s, comes Techno band Apotheosis and they do something similar, they write a song call O Fortuna, based largely on Orff's work, but in a very different way. The way that an adventure I wrote involving wizards and rangers wouldn't be like LotR, but could been seen to have derived much in the way of ideas from it.
Of course, Orff's estate sued. he was allowed to borrow his culture to create new music, but Apotheosis isn't allowed to do the same.
There's a reason why people are referred to a consumers these days. It's all we're supposed to be. The laws have changed (essentially perpetual copyright, the DMCA removing the ability to copy for quotation or parody, etc) so that unless we invent a new work totally out of vacuum, not based on anything even slightly identifiable, we don't have the right to claim that it's ours.
The GPL prevents this by saying that while you can use something, it has to be available to enrich future generation in the same way. And it's not enough that the original is available, the work is seen as a living entity, always changing to remain relevant. Orff based his work on what he was surrounded by, Hungarian Folk Music, and Apotheosis based their music on what they were surrounded by, Carl Orff's music among other things, and I'll base my music on what I was surrounded by as I grew up, god help me, 80s rock.
If copyright was reasonable, so that it lasted a generation or less and I could learn from and build upon what I grew up with, legally, we wouldn't need the GPL. It's a response to copyright that may never expire, to people claiming ownership of derivative works based on a single guitar riff, or to people embrace-and-extending the tools of the commons in order to lock people into a proprietary protocol which of course, you're not allowed to embrace (except at $300 per seat), or extend.
The GPL very much protects freedoms, the free aspect is a side effect that just happens to be kinda cool. I think if you read Stallman's essay's it'll be clear that (right or wrong) this is what was going through his mind as he conceived of it - it wasn't that he didn't want to pay $20 for printer drivers, it was that he couldn't get them, for love or money, and wasn't allowed to make his own. (Without reinventing a very large, copyright-protected wheel.)
Are you trolling, or honestly mistaken?
If you use GPLed code, you only have to GPL the code it's linked with. The rest of your products are not involved. (And, of course, if you don't distribute the modified GPLed work, you don't have to distribute your code, so if you're only using it internally, you don't have any obligiation to share.)
P.S. The 2-minute delay sucks, who can't type a reasonable comment in two minutes?
That's the issue of Bush being a liar, I'd say it's pretty obvious. And yes, it has nothing to do with the Iraq war.
However, for the people of Iraq, the war will probably be a good thing in the long run. They didn't have much freedom (look at things like Saddam's 100% mandate from the people, that's obviously not real) and the mass graves. Hell, ex-partiate Iraqis (who you must assume, know the truth) urged the USA to remove Saddam back in '91, and he hasn't gotten better.
Similarly, the people of Afghanistan are free of the Taliban and while there are other brutal warlords looking to step in, at least the world is watch and peace-keepers are trying to stop them. Afghani women were being brutally oppressed and now they have a hope of freedom. The religions over there are even more freakishly stupid than the religions over here and the people in charge are just as quick to impose their religion on everyone possible.
Hopefully we keep a first-world presence there long enough to help the people, instead of simply letting another set of creeps move in.
I'd have been contributing code under a BSD license if I didn't know about the GPL, but I wouldn't have been happy with it. Every time someone like Microsoft uses BSD code and doesn't even thank anyone it pisses me off.
But Stallman comes along and writes a legally strong license that does exactly what I want. It won't let you share my stuff unless you're willing to share what you do with it. It's what I feel copyright law itself should be more like.
I consider the GPL a perfect fit and I don't really respect people who whine about it because it's pretty obvious that they're just greedy. They want everyone else's code, it's so important that they have to have it, but nobody can have their code - that's the really creative stuff of course, so it should remain theirs... I've never heard a non-greedy argument against the GPL, and as such, I've never heard a slightly convincing argument against the GPL.
I don't care what a reviewer's final score is, only the reasons they list.
For example, some movie reviewers say things like "Adam Sandler's usual humor wasn't in this movie, leaving it a bit flat." That means that I might not hate the movie though, because I think Adam Sandler is pathetic and his fans are retards.
Similarly, I don't really care what the reviewer of hardware drones on about, as long as they provide the numbers, pictures, and facts (what comes in the box). I can use it as more accurate (less looked-over by marketing) product spec.
Obviously this only works if the reviewer is honest (no lying about the numbers, etc) and if they get the real hardware, but this is what the community is pretty good at finding out, so I feel pretty safe trusting an established site like AnandTech or Tom's (though Tom is a bit of a kook at time, he doesn't lie or anything.)
Ahh, I just assumed that if you were fighting injustice in the USA that you did so because you had a personal stake.
I too am outside of the USA, luckily I'm in Canada and our slander laws are closer to theirs than they are to yours.
Not if you state that you believe the memos are Diebold's, but that you have no proof beyond the statements of other websites. In the USA, truth and honest belief are a complete defense against libel/slander. It's the one area where the USA law makes much more sense than elsewhere.
That's my point. But it's also the reason we need truth instead of drug propoganda. If the government thinks kids can get pot they'll tell them that pot kills. They'll also tell them that mixing alcohol and sleeping pills kills, as does drinking cough syrup and mixing alcohol and ibuprofen. Which of these is deadly (or causes organ failure), which is a cheap buzz, and which is a cheap buzz that can cause lasting brain damage?
Instead we need to tell kids that while for various reasons we don't recommend pot (lack of motivation, obesity, etc) it won't kill you and if fact feels quite nice, so we hope that they'll make safe choices and if they do use it, limit their intake, etc, etc.
Then we put big bold letters of a box of ibuprofen that taking it with alcohol could kill you (or merely make you end up on dialysis for life), people will respect it.
Make it honest education or it'll all be ignored when people discover the lie.
Current drug propoganda in the USA suggests that pot is as harmful as heroin and cocaine. The is clearly ridiculous to anyone who has either done these drugs, or even seen people who have. While pot may not be harmless, it isn't going to kill you or addict you for life and end with you living in the gutter; it's just not that kind of thing. No more so than alcohol at any rate.
If a teen who has been told that pot/cocaine/crack/heroin/ecstacy are all deadly ever sees a friend take pot or ecstacy and have a fun trip with no visible side effects, not even addiction (beyond the addiction to fun things that's normal), they're going to realize that they were lied to. Are they going to know to stop with pot and ecstacy though? Nobody told them that these were mild drugs, so they're likely to try something stronger without knowing, something that's actually dangerous.
People already die on the streets from legal substances like alcohol, and die from drugs like tobacco, driving up our insurance claims. (Does your insurance company charge enough for smokers (estimated at quadruple the normal rate, or do you carry some of that?)) We already have to deal with the societal issues of letting them die or paying for it.
So what would happen if you legalized soft drugs? For the hard ones, nothing would change. People would smoke some pot, and maybe drop acid, but these are fairly harmless drugs. They wouldn't get cancer, they wouldn't die. (You'd have to smoke a ton of pot to get lung cancer, even with holding your breath.)
What could you charge for it? Well, you're right that if you charged much it would cost more than illegal sources, but you're also selling accurate dosages, known effects, and legal immunity. I doubt people are going to buy from an illegal dealer if there's a good alternative. So perhaps the poor keep buying it illegally, but that's how it is now - no change for the worse. There'd be a lot less call for illegal drugs, and thus a lot less dealers, and less arrested drug dealers and buyers, so there'd be less prisoners. Reducing the jail population would be a tremendous gain.
As for the harder drugs, I think the same holds mostly true but we could use data from the first stage of the project to plan the later stages.
Don't drink while taking Ibuprofen.
Well, it sounds stupid, but they only used charged neutrons! :)
Considering that Microsoft has stated publicly (and personally from the Ballmer and Gates) that Linux and free-software and communist in nature, anti-american, unstable, and should not be used in any way by government or business, I think it's reasonable that supporters of open source are a bit anti-Microsoft.
In a technical sense, Linus is exactly right. Microsoft is technically uninteresting and Linus wouldn't get anywhere (that he wanted to be) by copying them, nor I would guess, anywhere financially either (MS does dominate markets well). The only reason to consider MS, except as a security hole for servers and yet another unstable desktop OS, is that MS seems hell-bent on destroying our right to use free software (and establish open standards, so that software will always be free in a useful way).
Also, Microsoft has on numerous (and documented) occasions, lied, stolen, perjured, faked evidence, conspired illegally to destroy a competitor, slandered and libelled, and threatened unjust lawsuits to silence critics. But other than that, they're fine neighbors...
Why shouldn't we wish for the collapse of MS, it's them or us, by their choice.