Very good point. But while Microsoft may have shaky and untried licenses, it also has hods of money to burn and a Barrel of Killer Attorneys standing guard around its spindly legs. Which, as we all know, makes them rather daunting to sue no matter how weak their legal position is.
Taking things beyond just the wording, what measures in general have been taken to defend the General Public License? For example, where would the money to fight a major court battle come from? Doubtless by now a great deal of money could be raised by an emergency appeal, but is that good enough? Surely the security of the GPL is now sufficiently important that proper advance planning is more than worth the hassle? Moreover, apparently "a stitch in time saves nine" in these matters: consider all the trouble and expense that could have been avoided by registering "Linux" as a trademark in good time.
Leaving some vagueness in the GPL may be a useful (if risky) thing to do, and I'm not suggesting that the FSF's first response to possible GPL threats should be to bare its legal fangs and snarl. But prudently embracing moderation and flexiblity is one thing, and thoughtless ad-hockery is another. In light of the leading position the FSF is not slow to claim in the free software movement, the claims it makes for the GPL as a guarantee of software freedom, and, above all, the by now huge horde of software put under GPL by authors who believed those claims, there is no room for any of the latter. Of course it's not just a GPL or GNU issue: all the free/Open Source licenses need to be both well protected and watertight, and all the organisations who write or pass judgement on them should address the issue if they want to be taken seriously (Hello, SPI! Hello, OSI! Hello, Regents of the University of California! Hello, all the others!). Could they even possibly co-operate with each other on this one?
Oh, and can anyone actually get a response from the FSF on this issue? Some time ago I sent them a brief email asking some of these questions and got no reply, which didn't inspire confidence. I haven't been able to find anything on their website addressing the matter either.
In fact, the proposal to add chat to Mozilla appears in this mozilla.org "Blue Sky" article dating from last May - written by jwz.
From what evidence I've seen, your accusation seems rather unfair - or at least, there's been no obvious sign yet that Netscape or AOL executives have been imposing their will on the Mozilla full-timers. (I certainly can't deny that they could if they decided to.) Quite the opposite: what seems to be delaying Mozilla most is the desire to redo nearly everything from scratch, which certainly suggests an engineer-driven rather than a manager-driven project to me.
The Marshall Plan is generally credited with having played a major part in reviving Western Europe after the war. I'm no expert, but I'm willing to bet that the return the US has reaped from financing the more rapid revival of Western Europe's economy has covered the cost of the Marshall Plan many times over by now. In any case it's probably a little much to put in the same league as Pinochet or East Timor, don't you think?
Firstly, you do know that Communism is no longer in power in Moscow (and will probably stay out at least until the next election, if there is one)?
Secondly, you should realise that the Soviet leaders and ideologues were far from being apostles of slacking-off. In fact hard work held a central place in their ideology: hard work, and lots of it, was going to build the glistening paradise of Socialism. Their official art was full of farm-girls driving tractors and burly miners rejoicing at record coal-production figures. You may have heard of the Five-Year Plans? How about the Trans-Siberian Railway? Also, destroying the most powerful army that had ever been, largely without help for most of the time, required some exertion, or so I am told.
No, the problem with the ol' USSR wasn't that the powers that be thought work was a bad thing. One problem was that so much of all that effort was completely wasted due to things like poor co-ordination and outright stupidity. Another problem was perverse incentives. The Party told the people to work ever harder - increasingly, the people thought "What's in it for me? I won't get paid any more if I do, and I won't get fired if I don't". In this the people were being perfectly good capitalists. They saw it wasn't in their self-interest to work hard, and so they didn't. And indeed, absenteeism and slacking off were chronic problems in the latter days of the Soviet Union. This drove the leaders and the ideologues wild, but what could they do without returning to Stalin-style mass terror or giving up on Communism?
Capitalism doesn't work because it fosters a work ethic. It works because having lots of people allocating resources and planning things for their own selfish ends actually produces better results for society than the government trying to work out what would benefit society generally and then having to try to persuade or force everyone to do their bit. In capitalism, people only work because and when they want to (generally, in order to make money) and only employ people because they want to (generally, because they reckon they can make money out of it). Economic theory says that when they would rather take it easy than get paid, they take it easy. Capitalism goes with the flow of self-interest, which is sometimes hardworking, sometimes lazy. The problems return when people calculate that it is in their interests to steal or break contracts - by pulling sickies, for instance.
Apologies for the convoluted grammar in parts of my posting - I finished it in a hurry. "Why Software Should Not Have Owners" is here. Also, see "Why Don't You Move to Russia?" in "Why Software Sould Be Free", where RMS asserts that he is not a "cawmunist".
i dont know if anti-capitalist sentiment and the open source community necessarily go hand in hand (cough)
Where does open source have the slightest connection with anti-capitalist sentiment? Through the head of OSI, Eric S. Raymond, a packin' Libertarian? Is it through RMS, the father of ideological opposition to proprietary software? Read the GNU Manifesto. Is that a work of anti-capitalism? Is it Linus Torvalds, now working for big bucks in Transmeta, an archetypal example of that icon of contemporary capitalism, the Silicon Valley start-up? Is Larry Wall a Marxist? Is Sendmail, Inc. a front for anarchist agitation?
Some Open Source figures have objections, on principle or on pragmatic grounds, to the intellectual property system. That is NOT a rejection of the right to private property. The very argument that Stallman uses to assert that there is no intellectual property right (at, for example, the "Natural Rights" bulletpoint in his "Why Software Should Not Have Owners" essay), by arguing the contrast between ideas and physical things, implicitly accepts private physical property. (And incidentally, not even RMS argues that operating "intellectual property" systems is wrong in all circumstances).
But I may have somewhat misinterpreted what was meant. There are pockets of anti-capitalist sentiment around the "open-source community": among the old GNU Usenet hangers-on (or so I'm told), and on Slashdot now (as well as loudmouths of opposing persuasions, too). But neither the heavyweight thinkers of free software (eg. Stallman, Raymond, Wall), nor most people who do serious work for it, endorse that sentiment. Let alone do the supporters of the Open Source program! It is after all thanks to the wealth generated by the scarcity economy of capitalism that the "gift economy" of Open Source can exist at all.
Would I be justified in hoping that iD's forthcoming shrink-wrapped Linux release of Quake III will help a lot to make the graphics hardware people more keenly aware of Linux/X/Mesa? iD's clout is considerable, after all: isn't OpenGL's current position and visibility in the mainstream largely thanks to Quake?
Of course, how great the effect will be will depend partly on how well Linux Q3A sells. I think our duty is clear.:)
One purpose of "cracker" and any alternatives is to help the press and their readers, not Slashdotters and suchlike, to make the distinction. Many in the general public aren't even aware of the difference, let alone able to detect it with their Context Wands.
Disclaimer: I fully realize that this is a silly thing to be debating, but I'm doing it anyway for the heck of it:).
Heck, let your hair down. What kind of seriousness do you expect to find in the lower reaches of a Slashdot thread? Here be dragons.:)
IMO, this probably wouldn't stick this time either, partly because it is perjorative. The trick is finding a name that these people wouldn't mind calling _themselves_, which IMO is one of the reasons that "hacker" caught on. "System-breaker" has a chance, though that would probably be abbreviated and mutated among the WaReZ d00dz crowd that it's aimed at. Other labels that have a chance undoubtedly also exist.
*sigh* True: "worm" is too strong to substitute for "cracker" or "hacker". As an insult, though, I reckon it deserves to go far. (In all modesty.:) ) Unfortunately, "System-breaker" sounds, I think, too plodding and too explanatory to catch on either (as well as not being precise enough: "cracker" usually implies a certain type of system-breaker, no?).
And how about "maggot" as the emphatic form?
IMO not a good idea, as it's too close to "faggot" (a perjorative term for homosexuals, for readers who aren't in North America).
The other, loathsome, word is well known across the pond too. I hadn't noticed the similarity when I posted, but I'd still stand by my suggestion. It's certainly right to take pains to avoid giving unintentional offence, but I tend to draw the line at pandering to the type of person who can't or won't distinguish one common word of English from another.
The Jargon File's entry for "cracker" mentions an alternative term from the early 80s, "worm". If "cracker" hasn't caught on, then maybe "worm" might have a better chance of acceptance? Distinguishing between "hacker" and "cracker" sounds like hairsplitting, and the former, more familiar, term is also the more dramatic-sounding ("cracker" sounds awkward). "Worm" has an appropriately contemptuous tone, and so also sounds a bit more exciting.
OTOH, I can see three problems with trying to revive "worm" in this sense. It already has an established meaning in computing jargon, so adding another could lead to confusion. It didn't stick the first time. And it sounds perhaps a bit too perjorative for use except specifically as an insult. But even if "worm" doesn't take the place of "cracker" or stop the misuse of "hacker", I reckon it could complement them nicely.
Slashdot Mirror
Very good point. But while Microsoft may have shaky and untried licenses, it also has hods of money to burn and a Barrel of Killer Attorneys standing guard around its spindly legs. Which, as we all know, makes them rather daunting to sue no matter how weak their legal position is.
Leaving some vagueness in the GPL may be a useful (if risky) thing to do, and I'm not suggesting that the FSF's first response to possible GPL threats should be to bare its legal fangs and snarl. But prudently embracing moderation and flexiblity is one thing, and thoughtless ad-hockery is another. In light of the leading position the FSF is not slow to claim in the free software movement, the claims it makes for the GPL as a guarantee of software freedom, and, above all, the by now huge horde of software put under GPL by authors who believed those claims, there is no room for any of the latter. Of course it's not just a GPL or GNU issue: all the free/Open Source licenses need to be both well protected and watertight, and all the organisations who write or pass judgement on them should address the issue if they want to be taken seriously (Hello, SPI! Hello, OSI! Hello, Regents of the University of California! Hello, all the others!). Could they even possibly co-operate with each other on this one?
Oh, and can anyone actually get a response from the FSF on this issue? Some time ago I sent them a brief email asking some of these questions and got no reply, which didn't inspire confidence. I haven't been able to find anything on their website addressing the matter either.
From what evidence I've seen, your accusation seems rather unfair - or at least, there's been no obvious sign yet that Netscape or AOL executives have been imposing their will on the Mozilla full-timers. (I certainly can't deny that they could if they decided to.) Quite the opposite: what seems to be delaying Mozilla most is the desire to redo nearly everything from scratch, which certainly suggests an engineer-driven rather than a manager-driven project to me.
The Marshall Plan is generally credited with having played a major part in reviving Western Europe after the war. I'm no expert, but I'm willing to bet that the return the US has reaped from financing the more rapid revival of Western Europe's economy has covered the cost of the Marshall Plan many times over by now. In any case it's probably a little much to put in the same league as Pinochet or East Timor, don't you think?
Firstly, you do know that Communism is no longer in power in Moscow (and will probably stay out at least until the next election, if there is one)?
Secondly, you should realise that the Soviet leaders and ideologues were far from being apostles of slacking-off. In fact hard work held a central place in their ideology: hard work, and lots of it, was going to build the glistening paradise of Socialism. Their official art was full of farm-girls driving tractors and burly miners rejoicing at record coal-production figures. You may have heard of the Five-Year Plans? How about the Trans-Siberian Railway? Also, destroying the most powerful army that had ever been, largely without help for most of the time, required some exertion, or so I am told.
No, the problem with the ol' USSR wasn't that the powers that be thought work was a bad thing. One problem was that so much of all that effort was completely wasted due to things like poor co-ordination and outright stupidity. Another problem was perverse incentives. The Party told the people to work ever harder - increasingly, the people thought "What's in it for me? I won't get paid any more if I do, and I won't get fired if I don't". In this the people were being perfectly good capitalists. They saw it wasn't in their self-interest to work hard, and so they didn't. And indeed, absenteeism and slacking off were chronic problems in the latter days of the Soviet Union. This drove the leaders and the ideologues wild, but what could they do without returning to Stalin-style mass terror or giving up on Communism?
Capitalism doesn't work because it fosters a work ethic. It works because having lots of people allocating resources and planning things for their own selfish ends actually produces better results for society than the government trying to work out what would benefit society generally and then having to try to persuade or force everyone to do their bit. In capitalism, people only work because and when they want to (generally, in order to make money) and only employ people because they want to (generally, because they reckon they can make money out of it). Economic theory says that when they would rather take it easy than get paid, they take it easy. Capitalism goes with the flow of self-interest, which is sometimes hardworking, sometimes lazy. The problems return when people calculate that it is in their interests to steal or break contracts - by pulling sickies, for instance.
Apologies for the convoluted grammar in parts of my posting - I finished it in a hurry. "Why Software Should Not Have Owners" is here. Also, see "Why Don't You Move to Russia?" in "Why Software Sould Be Free", where RMS asserts that he is not a "cawmunist".
Where does open source have the slightest connection with anti-capitalist sentiment? Through the head of OSI, Eric S. Raymond, a packin' Libertarian? Is it through RMS, the father of ideological opposition to proprietary software? Read the GNU Manifesto. Is that a work of anti-capitalism? Is it Linus Torvalds, now working for big bucks in Transmeta, an archetypal example of that icon of contemporary capitalism, the Silicon Valley start-up? Is Larry Wall a Marxist? Is Sendmail, Inc. a front for anarchist agitation?
Some Open Source figures have objections, on principle or on pragmatic grounds, to the intellectual property system. That is NOT a rejection of the right to private property. The very argument that Stallman uses to assert that there is no intellectual property right (at, for example, the "Natural Rights" bulletpoint in his "Why Software Should Not Have Owners" essay), by arguing the contrast between ideas and physical things, implicitly accepts private physical property. (And incidentally, not even RMS argues that operating "intellectual property" systems is wrong in all circumstances).
But I may have somewhat misinterpreted what was meant. There are pockets of anti-capitalist sentiment around the "open-source community": among the old GNU Usenet hangers-on (or so I'm told), and on Slashdot now (as well as loudmouths of opposing persuasions, too). But neither the heavyweight thinkers of free software (eg. Stallman, Raymond, Wall), nor most people who do serious work for it, endorse that sentiment. Let alone do the supporters of the Open Source program! It is after all thanks to the wealth generated by the scarcity economy of capitalism that the "gift economy" of Open Source can exist at all.
Of course, how great the effect will be will depend partly on how well Linux Q3A sells. I think our duty is clear. :)
One purpose of "cracker" and any alternatives is to help the press and their readers, not Slashdotters and suchlike, to make the distinction. Many in the general public aren't even aware of the difference, let alone able to detect it with their Context Wands.
Heck, let your hair down. What kind of seriousness do you expect to find in the lower reaches of a Slashdot thread? Here be dragons. :)
*sigh* True: "worm" is too strong to substitute for "cracker" or "hacker". As an insult, though, I reckon it deserves to go far. (In all modesty. :) ) Unfortunately, "System-breaker" sounds, I think, too plodding and too explanatory to catch on either (as well as not being precise enough: "cracker" usually implies a certain type of system-breaker, no?).
The other, loathsome, word is well known across the pond too. I hadn't noticed the similarity when I posted, but I'd still stand by my suggestion. It's certainly right to take pains to avoid giving unintentional offence, but I tend to draw the line at pandering to the type of person who can't or won't distinguish one common word of English from another.
OTOH, I can see three problems with trying to revive "worm" in this sense. It already has an established meaning in computing jargon, so adding another could lead to confusion. It didn't stick the first time. And it sounds perhaps a bit too perjorative for use except specifically as an insult. But even if "worm" doesn't take the place of "cracker" or stop the misuse of "hacker", I reckon it could complement them nicely.
And how about "maggot" as the emphatic form?
Frosted Lucky Charms,
They're magically delicious!
Now if only we could say the same for the human genome... :(