Are you seriously arguing that the folksy saying "Information wants to be free" is incorrect? When you're done, are you going to take on "Nature abhors a vacuum" as another poster suggested?
Get real. I've heard this phrase from a number of people in different professions, all who knew that literally information doesn't want anything, to describe the difficult of keeping secrets. Yes, it was inaccurate, but also correct in the sense that if you make a single error in an entire DRM-media stack, trust-network, or crypto-system you've made it worse than useless. The security professionals mean that any errors make information free (and visible). The programmers mean that one person cracking your DRM (or making a good analog copy) means your information is free (literally, 0$). Everybody means information is freely copyable and thus a Pandora's box.
Nobody they speak to honestly thinks they mean that the bits are actually animate, ala Tron, or that these Free-Bits choose to ally themselves with free software movement.
The gist of it is that patents don't recognize independent discovery. If I use your invention I'm not against paying for it, but if I invent the same thing independently and your lawyer comes calling... I'd have you all shot. Seriously. Carried into the street and killed.
Fucking idea campers are the lowest of the low, right down there with spammers who sue blacklist operators.
If you're so fucking worthless you can't create, just hold out your hand and ask for a donation. Quit trying to legislate corporate welfare.
Who fucking cares? Why should you own something just because you were the first to do it? What a retarded thing to base government monopolies on.
It's like saying you can't run a construction business because all you can compete on is the quality of your work... "My competition can build roofs, and walls, everything I can!? How will I ever survive without a way to lockout all competition and force customers to deal with me?"
So write your damn program the way you'd attach drywall and get on with business. Your competition might copy you but that's business. You came out with a red widget, now everyone wants red. Red wasn't your invention, neither was painting, you just applied known techniques in a new area and made some easy money. Congrats.
The problem is people who want this easy money to be guaranteed for life...
Not half as much as others. the Khmer Rouge killed intellectuals (including, according to some sources, people who appeared intellectual such as those with glasses) not for what they did, but because they might be trouble.
Pol Pot's goal was an agricultural communism and smart people weren't required for field work.
Hitler on the other hand wanted rockets to flatten England with and liked the fruits of science.
The Nazis got rid of many intellectuals, yes. Not because of the intellectual aspect, but as you mention, because they were Jewish, etc.
I mean, as bad as it got for Nixon, or Clinton, they didn't single out a news network that was reporting badly about them
Yeah, because ALL the networks were reporting on Nixon, not just the other side's attack team.
It's not like FOX has to stop their National Enquirer-like news gathering, it's just that they aren't going to be invited to anything serious because they waste everyone's time.
If Michelle Obama was widely known for their kind of thing, people would probably laugh.
Like they do at Beck.
Because he is. (... known to be that kind of ass.)
Did he get gangbanged by a football team? I guess I could see it... if not he'll deny it. (With proof this time, we let him off on that murder he probably committed in the 90s too easily.)
A business is worthless. Like a dream. It's what you do with it that makes it worthwhile. Employing people is good, but the mob employs people and is bad.
If their business has to break laws to make money, how useful is it to the community?
If you think about it, they probably have a negative value. Sure, they're doing X and have customers lined up, but by breaking the law they've got an unfair advantage over legitimate businesses (ones who pay/acknowledge the creators of their library code thereby funding future development). By undermining the creation of legitimate business they're hurting everyone, including their customers who get a substandard (unlicensed therefore of questionable legality, fitness, etc) product.
Perhaps it should be a wakeup to people and businesses that they're aren't anonymous. The village is small enough we're recognizing them for their behavior and that if they want slack they should start being more open and accepting of criticism before it has to get to the accusation stage.
Being dealt with nicely is something you earn (or can lose at any rate). There's no sense being nice to Microsoft because they've gotten where they are with threats and lawsuits. Being nice is a courtesy you extend to those who would extend it to others.
After all, what you say applies if you want the person to like you at the end. MS for example has tried to eliminate Linux and Open Source a few times with dirty tricks. At this point I'd rather cause them grief than play nicely. I imagine most everyone else they've screwed over feels the same.
Yes, because they were living in the corporate dreamland of lawless cooperation until these open-source thugs just started asserting ownership of code.
Sometimes things can be honest mistakes and warning are nice, but other things are obvious and treating them like a mistake just gives the infringing person a victim role to play and by forgiving everything they did doesn't change their future behavior in the slightest.
Imagine shoplifting. You leave a store and they catch up with you and say "Hi, you MIGHT have something of ours, if you return to the store and sort this out we'll drop this." This is appropriate if it looks accidental and they want you to come back in the future, but if they said this to a thief the thief would give this item back and steal another the next day. Only by pursuing the thief vigorously could they prevent more thefts.
In most cases it's pretty hard to call using someone's library without considering licensing an 'honest' mistake, especially in business. These people need to be smacked with the "We're going to court with this unless you call up and grovel by 9am" or they're just going to screw with you.
Honest people don't rip things out of packages in the store and hide them down their leg - honest businesses don't obfuscate which libraries they're using. People who do these things need to be treated like liars until they show otherwise.
You've got the premise the GPL is a strict license and that it's easy to accidently infringe - as if code just teleports into your project.
It's pretty hard to accidentally infringe. You have to go get someone else's code and stick it in your project. If you don't paste any external code into yours, you're 100% safe!
But all copyrighted source is this way. You can't just release something you didn't write, at least without asking permission for it and appeasing the author. The GPL is far less strict, offering you that ability up front and requiring only one thing - that you not close the source.
One thing the GPL is, is a greed detector. The people who bristle about not being able to use GPLed code are greedy useless people. For them hording is so important they can't understand not hording source from their users, but at the same time they get incensed about the 'non-freedom' of the GPL because they see it as preventing their use of the code. It's pretty funny really.
Wah. And if someone wants to make a project with Microsoft code instead of GPLed code - oh yeah, they can't because MS code isn't even visible, let alone available.
Besides, why would we care if they want to use free software but are unwilling to extend that benefit to others? That's the very definition of a complete fucking asshole. At that, let them pay for it.
Why do people (like you) keep posting these "But, then they can't horde the source" things as if giving assholes the ability to close source wasn't one of the things the GPL was invented to prevent.
But if the source isn't visible they aren't claiming your source is theirs, just that the product is theirs. Microsoft claims Windows is theirs despite the theoretical heritage of the FTP client, for example.
Imagine FTP for instance. It's available, open, and people use it. So someone like MS implements FTP, but closes the source.
Even if they did go and get FTP source and compile it, it wouldn't work without a ton of tweaking, so they're out the ability to tweak their OS.
Oh sure, the people who are already uber-coders don't lose. But the users who might have been coders had they had more source available to look at, they lose. As does everyone they could have helped. Not any source helps here, just the source to what they run day-to-day.
We have cool cars because automotive engineers were able to play around in their cars and invent new things. Ditto software, but only as long as computers aren't locked-down black-boxes.
I learned to program by reading source that shipped on the system disk of my first computer and you ask how users are hurt by not having source...
They lose the freedom to tinker with what would have been open, whatever it was that the company theoretically closed.
If that's the component they're struggling to fix it could be all-important.
I found a minor bug in Rubygems the other day simply by reading the source. If it wasn't available I'd still be wondering what was supposed to happen and tweaking my code trying to make it work.
Solitaire doesn't run better just because it's open sourced so many users might not even notice, but the ones who poke around or fix anything would. It's the difference between a usable machine and one completely covered into anti-tampering epoxy.
Do you possess a license to practice psychiatry & to dispense such diagnoses? No?? Didn't think so. Did you perform a formal psychiatric examination on myself to come up with your "sidewalk surgeon/quack" immediate "prognosis/diagnosis"???
Yeah well, you just make it easy... Somewhere in your hateful screeds you dropped a couple of clues.
Or maybe the next day posting 'Pwned by an AC' and linking to your earlier rants.
Nobody said WHAT you have, but it's obvious you have some mental deficiency.
An unjust law isn't grounds for burning the instigator and beneficiary's houses/etc down? Seems fishy - like a law made by the people who support the original unjust law.
How about starting one level sooner?
The fact that you like or dislike something harmless does not give you a right to pass a law that forces other people to act as you find appropriate. Such a law, once passed, is obviously unreasonable because it was made for the purpose of controlling a harmless activity. Unreasonable laws should be fought, at any level, as much as a tyrant king's unreasonable rules should be fought.
If people, like you, wouldn't insist on the sanctity of the law like some crazy religious thing, this would be obvious. Let me try to reword the issue without your religious trigger words.
"If I'm doing something the limit of your rights to tell me not to coincide exactly with how much you are being harmed."
Something harmless, by definition, is something you can't be harmed by. If you insisted on regulating this, how would you not be a tyrant?
We'd have legal gay marriage (and interspecies marriage to for all it hurts anyone else) if we'd just remove the broken elements of society - those who feel they've got a right to control others.
Have your opinion, you're welcome to it. But when you vote to commit society's resources to something you're doing more than expressing an opinion...
Are you dense? It's that way because it is. It's not an issue of better or worse, it's simply fact.
If you have food and I eat it, it's gone. If you have an idea and I eat it, the idea remains.
If you have food it's fairly provable. If you have an idea who's to say you didn't just hear it from me before claiming to have created it? Who's to say we didn't simultaneously think it when seeing the same thing, or that anyone who saw what you saw wouldn't have thought the same thing?
If libertarianism supports property rights, then why not intellectual property rights?
Because one is reasonable and the other not.
If you had food and someone took it, you wouldn't have food.
But if you had an idea, and someone overheard it and used it, you'd still have your idea.
[...] a person can be wealthy and powerful simply by inheriting land or gold, through no virtue of their own.
And nobody ever got rich by receiving a near-endless copyright to something they didn't write/create?
Tolkien ring any bells?
However, intellectual property requires some sort of intelligence, innovation or talent to generate, and thus moves humanity forward
And sunlight, a tremendously valuable resource is just there, for free.
Sure ideas are valuable, but you've got the idea, if it's valuable, use it. If it isn't why should people pay you?
Why should the government grant long monopolies on those ideas and enforce them?
If we had a socialism I could see royalty kickbacks, independent of a patent, as a reward for work/ideas that had saved society trouble/money, but in a libertarian capitalism... no.
This is very close to termination. In such circumstances, someone offered almost any way out will take it; this is the choice you speak of
Do you choose to go to work?
Not just "do you occasionally like your job", but would you actually choose to cut short your family interaction, get up five days a week to a soul-crushing alarm, plan every major trip including for bereavement at your employer's whim, and so forth?
Dunno about you, but I do it for the money. Because I need food and shelter and net access.
That choice is simply called life.
Wouldn't that be just a little too convenient?
No, it would be about the only way it could be.
These women aren't slaves, anymore at any rate than everyone else trapped in the rat race. There are jobs open for mundane things that are hard to get and pay very little, then there are jobs for less common things that pay more. If those things don't bother you, why should anyone else care?
Even in fields (sky-diving, test pilots, etc) with known risks there are willing takers. Some people couldn't be paid to skydive, others spend their own money doing it. Women in some societies consider showing "western" amounts of flesh to be disgraceful ("You let people photograph you with your arms and legs visible?! Insane!") but a job modeling for Sears would be perfectly respectable in most places.
So it depends. Women who grew up around you and those like you, and who rely on you for other support probably wouldn't feel right doing this dancing because of how you feel. Other women didn't grow up with that, like it, love the money, and feel safe in doing so. Not just because of bouncers and such, but because they know their friends will see it as either no big deal or because they won't be judged for making an economic choice.
Some people are just rude jerks, but be they slashdot trolls, real-life coworkers, or customers, or someone else whose views you find repugnant, sometimes all you can do is walk away.
FOSS has the perfect ways to do that, unlike your day job where you'll be fired if you cause a scene, you can tell some jerk off. You can also remain anonymous and simply be judged on merit alone. Discussion on IRC and such always has a way to ignore people...
These frat boys you want to simply stop being crude are in fact other people whose lives just focus on sex acts more than you find tasteful. Should we truly ask them to change, or censor themselves so you aren't offended, or should you learn to let live?
It's not that you should have to work with someone who annoys you, and in a job you could probably get reassigned simply for not liking them, but you shouldn't have the right to demand that they simply change just because you find them offensive.
No, we aren't missing the point though by just saying "grow a thick skin". It's not a blame the victim mentality. It's a recognition that even if you rubber-padded all the walls you could find you've merely confined yourself to a comfortable prison. The real world is outside - not everyone in it is nice. In some places, people will try to kill you. To go out unsuspecting and pampered is truly dangerous.
By padding the FOSS world and calling out any sexists we merely file one corner off a sharp world and do nothing to help. Any projects not yet brought into the light of appropriate behavior will still be inaccessible. But by armoring the participants, female and male, black and white, we let them go anywhere and tell off their own sexist/racist jerks.
That's just the problem. To you those women on stage are already dead. They've made money for displaying themselves and like a bitter used whore, are just a shell person filled only with the pain of their abuse?
What if they look at the wage slaves whose laps they sit in with the same pity we look at a fast-food worker, or MCSE? They get to dance for a bit and go home. The non-sex workers have to stay for hours and pretend to care about the topic.
The geeks whose careers are settling around them with the finality of cement versus the dancers whose lives are just beginning.
You'd have a point if these women were vat-grown clones who'd be terminated if they didn't perform. The truth though is that they're free to choose and the ones who would be crushed by being there aren't the ones rushing to fill the job.
Slashdot Mirror
Being nice because you have to is not being nice.
I care? Am I your mom?
At some small cost to the jerks and lazy the code (and other code) is available to more users, including me.
And you *only* lose the ability to call the code your own and close it away.
Seems to me all your users lose the ability to read the source code for the applications they use...
Are you seriously arguing that the folksy saying "Information wants to be free" is incorrect? When you're done, are you going to take on "Nature abhors a vacuum" as another poster suggested?
Get real. I've heard this phrase from a number of people in different professions, all who knew that literally information doesn't want anything, to describe the difficult of keeping secrets. Yes, it was inaccurate, but also correct in the sense that if you make a single error in an entire DRM-media stack, trust-network, or crypto-system you've made it worse than useless. The security professionals mean that any errors make information free (and visible). The programmers mean that one person cracking your DRM (or making a good analog copy) means your information is free (literally, 0$). Everybody means information is freely copyable and thus a Pandora's box.
Nobody they speak to honestly thinks they mean that the bits are actually animate, ala Tron, or that these Free-Bits choose to ally themselves with free software movement.
Quit wasting our time.
A trivial counter-example is that you could stamp voters' hands and not allow anyone with a stamped hand to vote.
Clearly all you did was reach for the first justification you could find for the status-quo. You're such an asshole.
The gist of it is that patents don't recognize independent discovery. If I use your invention I'm not against paying for it, but if I invent the same thing independently and your lawyer comes calling ... I'd have you all shot. Seriously. Carried into the street and killed.
Fucking idea campers are the lowest of the low, right down there with spammers who sue blacklist operators.
If you're so fucking worthless you can't create, just hold out your hand and ask for a donation. Quit trying to legislate corporate welfare.
Who fucking cares? Why should you own something just because you were the first to do it? What a retarded thing to base government monopolies on.
It's like saying you can't run a construction business because all you can compete on is the quality of your work... "My competition can build roofs, and walls, everything I can!? How will I ever survive without a way to lockout all competition and force customers to deal with me?"
So write your damn program the way you'd attach drywall and get on with business. Your competition might copy you but that's business. You came out with a red widget, now everyone wants red. Red wasn't your invention, neither was painting, you just applied known techniques in a new area and made some easy money. Congrats.
The problem is people who want this easy money to be guaranteed for life...
Really? The Nazis weren't anti-intellectuals?
Not half as much as others. the Khmer Rouge killed intellectuals (including, according to some sources, people who appeared intellectual such as those with glasses) not for what they did, but because they might be trouble.
Pol Pot's goal was an agricultural communism and smart people weren't required for field work.
Hitler on the other hand wanted rockets to flatten England with and liked the fruits of science.
The Nazis got rid of many intellectuals, yes. Not because of the intellectual aspect, but as you mention, because they were Jewish, etc.
I mean, as bad as it got for Nixon, or Clinton, they didn't single out a news network that was reporting badly about them
Yeah, because ALL the networks were reporting on Nixon, not just the other side's attack team.
It's not like FOX has to stop their National Enquirer-like news gathering, it's just that they aren't going to be invited to anything serious because they waste everyone's time.
If Michelle Obama was widely known for their kind of thing, people would probably laugh.
Like they do at Beck.
Because he is. (... known to be that kind of ass.)
Did he get gangbanged by a football team? I guess I could see it... if not he'll deny it. (With proof this time, we let him off on that murder he probably committed in the 90s too easily.)
A business is worthless. Like a dream. It's what you do with it that makes it worthwhile. Employing people is good, but the mob employs people and is bad.
If their business has to break laws to make money, how useful is it to the community?
If you think about it, they probably have a negative value. Sure, they're doing X and have customers lined up, but by breaking the law they've got an unfair advantage over legitimate businesses (ones who pay/acknowledge the creators of their library code thereby funding future development). By undermining the creation of legitimate business they're hurting everyone, including their customers who get a substandard (unlicensed therefore of questionable legality, fitness, etc) product.
Perhaps it should be a wakeup to people and businesses that they're aren't anonymous. The village is small enough we're recognizing them for their behavior and that if they want slack they should start being more open and accepting of criticism before it has to get to the accusation stage.
Being dealt with nicely is something you earn (or can lose at any rate). There's no sense being nice to Microsoft because they've gotten where they are with threats and lawsuits. Being nice is a courtesy you extend to those who would extend it to others.
After all, what you say applies if you want the person to like you at the end. MS for example has tried to eliminate Linux and Open Source a few times with dirty tricks. At this point I'd rather cause them grief than play nicely. I imagine most everyone else they've screwed over feels the same.
You're the perfect anti-GPL troll. You act like the GPL is the only, or strictest, license in existence.
If only all code was so available.
And you, conflating GPLed source with Linux. Idiot.
Yes, because they were living in the corporate dreamland of lawless cooperation until these open-source thugs just started asserting ownership of code.
Sometimes things can be honest mistakes and warning are nice, but other things are obvious and treating them like a mistake just gives the infringing person a victim role to play and by forgiving everything they did doesn't change their future behavior in the slightest.
Imagine shoplifting. You leave a store and they catch up with you and say "Hi, you MIGHT have something of ours, if you return to the store and sort this out we'll drop this." This is appropriate if it looks accidental and they want you to come back in the future, but if they said this to a thief the thief would give this item back and steal another the next day. Only by pursuing the thief vigorously could they prevent more thefts.
In most cases it's pretty hard to call using someone's library without considering licensing an 'honest' mistake, especially in business. These people need to be smacked with the "We're going to court with this unless you call up and grovel by 9am" or they're just going to screw with you.
Honest people don't rip things out of packages in the store and hide them down their leg - honest businesses don't obfuscate which libraries they're using. People who do these things need to be treated like liars until they show otherwise.
That's all bullshit.
You've got the premise the GPL is a strict license and that it's easy to accidently infringe - as if code just teleports into your project.
It's pretty hard to accidentally infringe. You have to go get someone else's code and stick it in your project. If you don't paste any external code into yours, you're 100% safe!
But all copyrighted source is this way. You can't just release something you didn't write, at least without asking permission for it and appeasing the author. The GPL is far less strict, offering you that ability up front and requiring only one thing - that you not close the source.
One thing the GPL is, is a greed detector. The people who bristle about not being able to use GPLed code are greedy useless people. For them hording is so important they can't understand not hording source from their users, but at the same time they get incensed about the 'non-freedom' of the GPL because they see it as preventing their use of the code. It's pretty funny really.
Wah. And if someone wants to make a project with Microsoft code instead of GPLed code - oh yeah, they can't because MS code isn't even visible, let alone available.
Besides, why would we care if they want to use free software but are unwilling to extend that benefit to others? That's the very definition of a complete fucking asshole. At that, let them pay for it.
Why do people (like you) keep posting these "But, then they can't horde the source" things as if giving assholes the ability to close source wasn't one of the things the GPL was invented to prevent.
But if the source isn't visible they aren't claiming your source is theirs, just that the product is theirs. Microsoft claims Windows is theirs despite the theoretical heritage of the FTP client, for example.
Imagine FTP for instance. It's available, open, and people use it. So someone like MS implements FTP, but closes the source.
Even if they did go and get FTP source and compile it, it wouldn't work without a ton of tweaking, so they're out the ability to tweak their OS.
Oh sure, the people who are already uber-coders don't lose. But the users who might have been coders had they had more source available to look at, they lose. As does everyone they could have helped. Not any source helps here, just the source to what they run day-to-day.
We have cool cars because automotive engineers were able to play around in their cars and invent new things. Ditto software, but only as long as computers aren't locked-down black-boxes.
I learned to program by reading source that shipped on the system disk of my first computer and you ask how users are hurt by not having source...
They lose the freedom to tinker with what would have been open, whatever it was that the company theoretically closed.
If that's the component they're struggling to fix it could be all-important.
I found a minor bug in Rubygems the other day simply by reading the source. If it wasn't available I'd still be wondering what was supposed to happen and tweaking my code trying to make it work.
Solitaire doesn't run better just because it's open sourced so many users might not even notice, but the ones who poke around or fix anything would. It's the difference between a usable machine and one completely covered into anti-tampering epoxy.
He needs meds.
Do you possess a license to practice psychiatry & to dispense such diagnoses? No?? Didn't think so. Did you perform a formal psychiatric examination on myself to come up with your "sidewalk surgeon/quack" immediate "prognosis/diagnosis"???
Yeah well, you just make it easy... Somewhere in your hateful screeds you dropped a couple of clues.
Or maybe the next day posting 'Pwned by an AC' and linking to your earlier rants.
Nobody said WHAT you have, but it's obvious you have some mental deficiency.
Sue me bitch.
That just makes no sense to me. What could they possibly gain out of that?
The perception that such a license is mandatory.
Which war enabled our current way of life? Vietnam, or Afghanistan?
An unjust law isn't grounds for burning the instigator and beneficiary's houses/etc down? Seems fishy - like a law made by the people who support the original unjust law.
How about starting one level sooner?
The fact that you like or dislike something harmless does not give you a right to pass a law that forces other people to act as you find appropriate. Such a law, once passed, is obviously unreasonable because it was made for the purpose of controlling a harmless activity. Unreasonable laws should be fought, at any level, as much as a tyrant king's unreasonable rules should be fought.
If people, like you, wouldn't insist on the sanctity of the law like some crazy religious thing, this would be obvious. Let me try to reword the issue without your religious trigger words.
"If I'm doing something the limit of your rights to tell me not to coincide exactly with how much you are being harmed."
Something harmless, by definition, is something you can't be harmed by. If you insisted on regulating this, how would you not be a tyrant?
We'd have legal gay marriage (and interspecies marriage to for all it hurts anyone else) if we'd just remove the broken elements of society - those who feel they've got a right to control others.
Have your opinion, you're welcome to it. But when you vote to commit society's resources to something you're doing more than expressing an opinion...
Are you dense? It's that way because it is. It's not an issue of better or worse, it's simply fact.
If you have food and I eat it, it's gone. If you have an idea and I eat it, the idea remains.
If you have food it's fairly provable. If you have an idea who's to say you didn't just hear it from me before claiming to have created it? Who's to say we didn't simultaneously think it when seeing the same thing, or that anyone who saw what you saw wouldn't have thought the same thing?
It's the nature of the thing.
If libertarianism supports property rights, then why not intellectual property rights?
Because one is reasonable and the other not.
If you had food and someone took it, you wouldn't have food.
But if you had an idea, and someone overheard it and used it, you'd still have your idea.
[...] a person can be wealthy and powerful simply by inheriting land or gold, through no virtue of their own.
And nobody ever got rich by receiving a near-endless copyright to something they didn't write/create?
Tolkien ring any bells?
However, intellectual property requires some sort of intelligence, innovation or talent to generate, and thus moves humanity forward
And sunlight, a tremendously valuable resource is just there, for free.
Sure ideas are valuable, but you've got the idea, if it's valuable, use it. If it isn't why should people pay you?
Why should the government grant long monopolies on those ideas and enforce them?
If we had a socialism I could see royalty kickbacks, independent of a patent, as a reward for work/ideas that had saved society trouble/money, but in a libertarian capitalism... no.
This is very close to termination. In such circumstances, someone offered almost any way out will take it; this is the choice you speak of
Do you choose to go to work?
Not just "do you occasionally like your job", but would you actually choose to cut short your family interaction, get up five days a week to a soul-crushing alarm, plan every major trip including for bereavement at your employer's whim, and so forth?
Dunno about you, but I do it for the money. Because I need food and shelter and net access.
That choice is simply called life.
Wouldn't that be just a little too convenient?
No, it would be about the only way it could be.
These women aren't slaves, anymore at any rate than everyone else trapped in the rat race. There are jobs open for mundane things that are hard to get and pay very little, then there are jobs for less common things that pay more. If those things don't bother you, why should anyone else care?
Even in fields (sky-diving, test pilots, etc) with known risks there are willing takers. Some people couldn't be paid to skydive, others spend their own money doing it. Women in some societies consider showing "western" amounts of flesh to be disgraceful ("You let people photograph you with your arms and legs visible?! Insane!") but a job modeling for Sears would be perfectly respectable in most places.
So it depends. Women who grew up around you and those like you, and who rely on you for other support probably wouldn't feel right doing this dancing because of how you feel. Other women didn't grow up with that, like it, love the money, and feel safe in doing so. Not just because of bouncers and such, but because they know their friends will see it as either no big deal or because they won't be judged for making an economic choice.
Some people are just rude jerks, but be they slashdot trolls, real-life coworkers, or customers, or someone else whose views you find repugnant, sometimes all you can do is walk away.
FOSS has the perfect ways to do that, unlike your day job where you'll be fired if you cause a scene, you can tell some jerk off. You can also remain anonymous and simply be judged on merit alone. Discussion on IRC and such always has a way to ignore people...
These frat boys you want to simply stop being crude are in fact other people whose lives just focus on sex acts more than you find tasteful. Should we truly ask them to change, or censor themselves so you aren't offended, or should you learn to let live?
It's not that you should have to work with someone who annoys you, and in a job you could probably get reassigned simply for not liking them, but you shouldn't have the right to demand that they simply change just because you find them offensive.
No, we aren't missing the point though by just saying "grow a thick skin". It's not a blame the victim mentality. It's a recognition that even if you rubber-padded all the walls you could find you've merely confined yourself to a comfortable prison. The real world is outside - not everyone in it is nice. In some places, people will try to kill you. To go out unsuspecting and pampered is truly dangerous.
By padding the FOSS world and calling out any sexists we merely file one corner off a sharp world and do nothing to help. Any projects not yet brought into the light of appropriate behavior will still be inaccessible. But by armoring the participants, female and male, black and white, we let them go anywhere and tell off their own sexist/racist jerks.
All of which she is capable?
That's just the problem. To you those women on stage are already dead. They've made money for displaying themselves and like a bitter used whore, are just a shell person filled only with the pain of their abuse?
What if they look at the wage slaves whose laps they sit in with the same pity we look at a fast-food worker, or MCSE? They get to dance for a bit and go home. The non-sex workers have to stay for hours and pretend to care about the topic.
The geeks whose careers are settling around them with the finality of cement versus the dancers whose lives are just beginning.
You'd have a point if these women were vat-grown clones who'd be terminated if they didn't perform. The truth though is that they're free to choose and the ones who would be crushed by being there aren't the ones rushing to fill the job.