>The key word is few. Your example is a particular case of one of the ways I outlined to make some money out of a license like GPL.
No the keyword in "quite a few" is most certainly not "few", it's a phrase that means "a lot".
And Humpty Dumpty always means what he says, never more nor less.
I think it's quite likely that what you think of as "quite a few" meaning a lot, relative to your personal ability to service potential contractees, coincides with what I mean by "few" relative to the number of potential such contractees compared to the total number of people employed writing software. And if I am right about that, it means that most programmers will have to make their living in some other way, for example developing software that is of general use but not worth thousands of dollars to any single customer. It's that business model that is hard to make compatible with, for instance, GPL3. Thus my quote that immediately follows:
Now was mine a multi-billion dollar business ? Nope, but why should THAT matter ? I made very good money, way more than I could earn as a salary at the time which is really good for a one-man business. You declared that programmers cannot make a living out of the GPL
No, I declared that MOST programmers can't because the markets they would have to serve to do that comprise only a small portion of the much wider market for software.
I decisively proved you wrong, so now you choose to argue matters of degree: "oh SOME programmers can make a living that way..."
The problem is you spoke about programmers earning a living but we both know that isn't what you actually meant - which is why my post bothered you.
Your post bothered me because you are an egotistical jackass who is more interested in blowing your own horn than in recognising certain facts about the software industry, including the number of programmers you would have had to share your business with if they were all trying to make money in the customizing-free-software business. I'm sure you think you're the only person with your skills. That goes well with the egotistical horn-blowing.
What you actually meant is: "I personally am too greedy to be happy with the money I can make ethically so I will defend a system that denies my customers their basic freedoms in order to let me exploit them for more money."
Why don't you stop trying to psychoanalyze me and stay on topic? This is not about my motivation or ethics. It is about whether the GPL is restrictive to the point that it prevents or should prevent the use of GPL'd software in commercial endeavors.
I think it is and, perversely, you're arguing with me about my morals even though you seem to think it is too because you consider me to be intending to do something immoral if I want to have FOSS included as components in a product that I otherwise develop and want to then control the distribution of any portion of the total package that contains the code that I developed.
Hey, don't feel too bad- every corporation on earth agrees with you and will do the exact same thing to the maximum extent they can get away with it. But personally I have a conscience and I refuse to do business outside of what I consider fair and ethical practise. Now of course, that means I'll make less money than the people who don't do honest, fair and ethical business - but I do not consider that an argument in favour of unethical business.
That really is the essence of your argument: "Charging protection money is much more profitable than selling legitimate insurance."
If you ever work for a living, you will understand my point. Until then, keep looking for an employer that will pay you to develop software they can't sell.
Only if it's sold as a drug. If it's sold as a "supplement" it's completely unregulated in the USA.
This is why, IMO, it's wise to avoid new and faddish "supplements." You have no way of knowing if they're safe. Even when they're extracted from foods, they could still be unsafe at 1000x the level you find them in natural foods.
There are many examples. Coffee or tea are pretty benign. But if you made a caffeine-related compound 100X as potent as caffeine, it would be dangerous.
>Work for a company that sells software.
Form my own company to sell software.
>Work for a company that sells software.
Form my own company to sell software.
>In the latter two cases, you need to use copyright to control the distribution of the software. If you don't control the distribution, the price you can get for the software is zero or damn near that and your kids are going to starve.
Wrong. There are quite a few successful companies that do free software, and have been for decades.
The key word is few. Your example is a particular case of one of the ways I outlined to make some money out of a license like GPL.
But a few people wanted additional features - not least one company who wanted to start a franchise of the type of small businesses my software was aimed at. These people were my bread and butter.
emphasis mine. The sparseness of your market illustrates the reason why GPL isn't suitable for most programmers who want to earn money selling the product of their work.
This goes well with my point. It's not that I'd consider violating GPL. It's that I consider the terms of the license so objectionable that I wouldn't want to use it at all for any software I intended to sell. BSD license terms, on the other hand, I have no problem with.
First time accepted submitter SmartAboutThings writes
"Apple and Microsoft are one of the worst companies at protecting our privacy, according to EFF's privacy report. Dropbox, Twitter and Sonic have some of the best scores."
"Sonic" is California ISP Sonic.net, which tops the field with the EFF's only 4-star rating. Of ISPs with national presence, ATT and Comcast come in with a single star apiece, and Verizon gets a goose egg.
All shilling for Sonic aside, I'm pretty sure Apple and Microsoft are two companies.
Either way, the content creators and/or distributors will want to make ~ the same amount of revenue. So, you will pay more up-front for a purchase, but you don't have the recurring fees.
Correction: each way they want to make AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE.
2 tv shows per week at AppleTV rates is about the same as DirecTV's introductory rates. 3 is a little more. You'd be at twice that compared to DirectTV's standard rates.
But for Americans that's a very low rate of TV-watching, especially if you have a family with diverse viewing preferences. Of course, if you also have over-the-air access you're getting a lot more than that for free -- or could be if you chose to put up an antenna.
But I consider the per-view charges of AppleTV very expensive. They're OK for movies, but for weekly television episodes, they're higher than I'm willing to pay.
So you need to use software licenses for any FOSS you use that allow you to use their compilers, tools, operating systems and whatever other tools you need in addition to the unique elements you develop on your own to produce a saleable package that customers will be willing to buy, without giving up any right to control copyright of your own work. I think we're all fine with conveying the license to the FOSS software that's included in our packages to the end user without restriction. You want to use the Linux distribution that's included in my package for stuff I didn't envision? Go ahead. I never owned that anyway and I don't care what you do with it as long as you don't drag me into liability issues for your modifications. I just don't want you to copy the elements I made without paying me for each installation.
It's perfectly legal to build proprietary apps on top of Linux, glibc, and other friends. What you have to do is to provide the source to any modifications you make to the FOSS tools or packages, and convey the license to the user.
The elements you made which are not under GPL/similar, you can do whatever you want with them. The author of the GPLed package on the other hand, intended that you give back, as payment for his having built something you can use for free, any modifications you make. Are you saying that I should respect your right to your own license, but you won't respect mine?
No. I just want clearly drawn lines between what is considered a modification that must be shared back, what is considered licensed use and what I have a right to control in a product that includes GPL controlled programs and libraries along with programs and content that I wrote. It takes a programmer and two lawyers just to figure out what the hell GPL3 means.
If it takes a lawyer to figure out what the GPL means, it may be without charge but it's not free. So I have to be very careful how I use it. I'm much more comfortable using BSD because they seem a lot less prone to sue.
That's not to say that commercial end-use agreements are any better. It takes three lawyers and a federal prosecutor to figure out what they mean and it's never good and always absolves the seller from all responsibility while subjecting you to serious legal liability.
The "double standard" is because EULAs are designed to restrict what you can do with a piece of software over and above what copyright does to restrict you. The GPL and other FOSS licenses give you rights you don't already have.
I respect the GPL because it recognises one thing that EULAs never recognise -- the unlimited right to run the program.
The unlimited right to run the program is never what people object to about the GPL.
If you're making software gratis that you intend to make the world a better place and encourage the progagation of butterflies and rainbows, then yea, all free software is probably a good thing. But in the world that includes not only butterflies and rainbows but also the ability to feed my children, it can be too much of a good thing. Because if I'm a programmer, my livelihood depends on my ability to sell the product of my work for money. There are a few ways that can happen:
Work for a non-software company that needs special software developed to handle something that can't be adequately addressed by FOSS software already available or by affordable closed-source software. For example, porting software to their new machine so the the new machine becomes easier to sell, solving problems that are peculiar to their business, etc.
Work for a company that sells software.
Form my own company to sell software.
In the latter two cases, you need to use copyright to control the distribution of the software. If you don't control the distribution, the price you can get for the software is zero or damn near that and your kids are going to starve.
So you need to use software licenses for any FOSS you use that allow you to use their compilers, tools, operating systems and whatever other tools you need in addition to the unique elements you develop on your own to produce a saleable package that customers will be willing to buy, without giving up any right to control copyright of your own work. I think we're all fine with conveying the license to the FOSS software that's included in our packages to the end user without restriction. You want to use the Linux distribution that's included in my package for stuff I didn't envision? Go ahead. I never owned that anyway and I don't care what you do with it as long as you don't drag me into liability issues for your modifications. I just don't want you to copy the elements I made without paying me for each installation.
As for innocence, that is an attribute ascribed to persons. Your confusion stems from your conflating "being alive and of human origin" with being a person. A fetus is (normally) alive and is of the human species, but it's not a person.
But you're making another mistake as well. A person's innocence of any crime does not make it wrong for me to eject that person, forcibly if necessary, from my house or my body.
If your claims were couched as "I don't think people ought to do that." as opposed to "I hold the moral high ground and those who disagree with me are doing something tantamount to supporting murder." I might be able to find some kind of common ground with you. But you're an extremist with an indefensible position. I am not interested in further discussing how you are wrong.
I was referring to the fact that being a person and human rights are ascribed to a person beginning at birth. The former has been the case for thousands of years and the latter for hundreds of years.
It's possible for a thing that people do to be against the law for reasons other than the claim that fetuses and embryos have rights. In fact the whole claim that fetuses have a "right to life" was invented about 1973.
And maybe that's why the mor literalist denominations are winning.
If you're going to tell people that Jesus literally rose from the dead you may be more successful if you stake the idea that the whole book is literally true cover to cover.
No, it's just as valid to interpret Paul as speaking metaphorically about Adam and the fall of man. Everybody understands that all people are flawed and you can have a dogma that God requires people to be perfected or patched up or whatever before they can achieve eternal salvation (whatever that means). But perhaps typical people have trouble processing such abstract metaphors or more likely have been specifically trained not to.
Most Christian denominations deify the Bible and all rely on unquestioning belief in some pretty strange stuff that's written there. They don't want you questioning whether the Resurrection actually happened.
My biggest problem with atheists is that they're too damned religious.:)
There may be a god. I haven't seen any good evidence for it, but I haven't seen any evidence against it either. Without evidence one way or the other I don't consider the question settled. Atheists *do* consider the question settled. So do "religous nutjobs." They both *believe* with insufficient evidence. That's religion.
And personally, I don't consider the question *interesting* either.
Yes, atheists consider the question of whether there are super-powerful invisible beings controlling our lives to be settled, not by proof but by the sheer ridiculousness of the premise.
Not believing in gods is like not believing in the Easter Bunny. And there's more evidence for the Easter Bunny because there were in fact baskets on Easter morning in my house filled with candy and eggs. And many other people have corroborated that this is not an uncommon occurrence.
A lot more people believe in God than in Sasquatch for some reason. I consider that questions settled too, but I'm open to persuasion if somebody comes up with convincing evidence that the northwest was or is inhabited by large, smelly ape-men. And it would take a lot less persuasion to believe in Sasquatch because if it exists, it's just an elusive or extinct animal that would have little implication regarding what kind of universe we live in. But gods, if they were to exist, would have huge implications for what kind of universe we live in. People who believe in gods have fundamentally different ideas about what the universe is like.
Science isn't about Truths, it's about facts and (adequately) predictive models that explain those facts.
It's not bigoted to call someone a moron because they believe something that's factually wrong.
But it's unjustified. We ALL believe things that are factually wrong.
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>The key word is few. Your example is a particular case of one of the ways I outlined to make some money out of a license like GPL.
No the keyword in "quite a few" is most certainly not "few", it's a phrase that means "a lot".
And Humpty Dumpty always means what he says, never more nor less.
I think it's quite likely that what you think of as "quite a few" meaning a lot, relative to your personal ability to service potential contractees, coincides with what I mean by "few" relative to the number of potential such contractees compared to the total number of people employed writing software. And if I am right about that, it means that most programmers will have to make their living in some other way, for example developing software that is of general use but not worth thousands of dollars to any single customer. It's that business model that is hard to make compatible with, for instance, GPL3. Thus my quote that immediately follows:
Now was mine a multi-billion dollar business ? Nope, but why should THAT matter ? I made very good money, way more than I could earn as a salary at the time which is really good for a one-man business. You declared that programmers cannot make a living out of the GPL
No, I declared that MOST programmers can't because the markets they would have to serve to do that comprise only a small portion of the much wider market for software.
I decisively proved you wrong, so now you choose to argue matters of degree: "oh SOME programmers can make a living that way..."
The problem is you spoke about programmers earning a living but we both know that isn't what you actually meant - which is why my post bothered you.
Your post bothered me because you are an egotistical jackass who is more interested in blowing your own horn than in recognising certain facts about the software industry, including the number of programmers you would have had to share your business with if they were all trying to make money in the customizing-free-software business. I'm sure you think you're the only person with your skills. That goes well with the egotistical horn-blowing.
What you actually meant is: "I personally am too greedy to be happy with the money I can make ethically so I will defend a system that denies my customers their basic freedoms in order to let me exploit them for more money."
Why don't you stop trying to psychoanalyze me and stay on topic? This is not about my motivation or ethics. It is about whether the GPL is restrictive to the point that it prevents or should prevent the use of GPL'd software in commercial endeavors.
I think it is and, perversely, you're arguing with me about my morals even though you seem to think it is too because you consider me to be intending to do something immoral if I want to have FOSS included as components in a product that I otherwise develop and want to then control the distribution of any portion of the total package that contains the code that I developed.
Hey, don't feel too bad- every corporation on earth agrees with you and will do the exact same thing to the maximum extent they can get away with it. But personally I have a conscience and I refuse to do business outside of what I consider fair and ethical practise. Now of course, that means I'll make less money than the people who don't do honest, fair and ethical business - but I do not consider that an argument in favour of unethical business. That really is the essence of your argument: "Charging protection money is much more profitable than selling legitimate insurance."
If you ever work for a living, you will understand my point. Until then, keep looking for an employer that will pay you to develop software they can't sell.
55*0 = 0
Smart enough to do the math incorrectly, but not smart enough to get the joke.
Definitely not. I got one caught in my nostril once. But maybe declawed kittens are safe.
Only if it's sold as a drug. If it's sold as a "supplement" it's completely unregulated in the USA. This is why, IMO, it's wise to avoid new and faddish "supplements." You have no way of knowing if they're safe. Even when they're extracted from foods, they could still be unsafe at 1000x the level you find them in natural foods. There are many examples. Coffee or tea are pretty benign. But if you made a caffeine-related compound 100X as potent as caffeine, it would be dangerous.
>Work for a company that sells software. Form my own company to sell software. >Work for a company that sells software. Form my own company to sell software. >In the latter two cases, you need to use copyright to control the distribution of the software. If you don't control the distribution, the price you can get for the software is zero or damn near that and your kids are going to starve.
Wrong. There are quite a few successful companies that do free software, and have been for decades.
The key word is few. Your example is a particular case of one of the ways I outlined to make some money out of a license like GPL.
But a few people wanted additional features - not least one company who wanted to start a franchise of the type of small businesses my software was aimed at. These people were my bread and butter.
emphasis mine. The sparseness of your market illustrates the reason why GPL isn't suitable for most programmers who want to earn money selling the product of their work.
This goes well with my point. It's not that I'd consider violating GPL. It's that I consider the terms of the license so objectionable that I wouldn't want to use it at all for any software I intended to sell. BSD license terms, on the other hand, I have no problem with.
How do you know? Wouldn't you have to watch TV an awful lot to establish that?
First time accepted submitter SmartAboutThings writes
"Apple and Microsoft are one of the worst companies at protecting our privacy, according to EFF's privacy report. Dropbox, Twitter and Sonic have some of the best scores."
"Sonic" is California ISP Sonic.net, which tops the field with the EFF's only 4-star rating. Of ISPs with national presence, ATT and Comcast come in with a single star apiece, and Verizon gets a goose egg.
All shilling for Sonic aside, I'm pretty sure Apple and Microsoft are two companies.
Either way, the content creators and/or distributors will want to make ~ the same amount of revenue. So, you will pay more up-front for a purchase, but you don't have the recurring fees.
Correction: each way they want to make AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE.
2 tv shows per week at AppleTV rates is about the same as DirecTV's introductory rates. 3 is a little more. You'd be at twice that compared to DirectTV's standard rates. But for Americans that's a very low rate of TV-watching, especially if you have a family with diverse viewing preferences. Of course, if you also have over-the-air access you're getting a lot more than that for free -- or could be if you chose to put up an antenna.
But I consider the per-view charges of AppleTV very expensive. They're OK for movies, but for weekly television episodes, they're higher than I'm willing to pay.
So you need to use software licenses for any FOSS you use that allow you to use their compilers, tools, operating systems and whatever other tools you need in addition to the unique elements you develop on your own to produce a saleable package that customers will be willing to buy, without giving up any right to control copyright of your own work. I think we're all fine with conveying the license to the FOSS software that's included in our packages to the end user without restriction. You want to use the Linux distribution that's included in my package for stuff I didn't envision? Go ahead. I never owned that anyway and I don't care what you do with it as long as you don't drag me into liability issues for your modifications. I just don't want you to copy the elements I made without paying me for each installation.
It's perfectly legal to build proprietary apps on top of Linux, glibc, and other friends. What you have to do is to provide the source to any modifications you make to the FOSS tools or packages, and convey the license to the user.
The elements you made which are not under GPL/similar, you can do whatever you want with them. The author of the GPLed package on the other hand, intended that you give back, as payment for his having built something you can use for free, any modifications you make. Are you saying that I should respect your right to your own license, but you won't respect mine?
No. I just want clearly drawn lines between what is considered a modification that must be shared back, what is considered licensed use and what I have a right to control in a product that includes GPL controlled programs and libraries along with programs and content that I wrote. It takes a programmer and two lawyers just to figure out what the hell GPL3 means.
If it takes a lawyer to figure out what the GPL means, it may be without charge but it's not free. So I have to be very careful how I use it. I'm much more comfortable using BSD because they seem a lot less prone to sue.
That's not to say that commercial end-use agreements are any better. It takes three lawyers and a federal prosecutor to figure out what they mean and it's never good and always absolves the seller from all responsibility while subjecting you to serious legal liability.
The "double standard" is because EULAs are designed to restrict what you can do with a piece of software over and above what copyright does to restrict you. The GPL and other FOSS licenses give you rights you don't already have.
I respect the GPL because it recognises one thing that EULAs never recognise -- the unlimited right to run the program.
The unlimited right to run the program is never what people object to about the GPL.
If you're making software gratis that you intend to make the world a better place and encourage the progagation of butterflies and rainbows, then yea, all free software is probably a good thing. But in the world that includes not only butterflies and rainbows but also the ability to feed my children, it can be too much of a good thing. Because if I'm a programmer, my livelihood depends on my ability to sell the product of my work for money. There are a few ways that can happen:
In the latter two cases, you need to use copyright to control the distribution of the software. If you don't control the distribution, the price you can get for the software is zero or damn near that and your kids are going to starve.
So you need to use software licenses for any FOSS you use that allow you to use their compilers, tools, operating systems and whatever other tools you need in addition to the unique elements you develop on your own to produce a saleable package that customers will be willing to buy, without giving up any right to control copyright of your own work. I think we're all fine with conveying the license to the FOSS software that's included in our packages to the end user without restriction. You want to use the Linux distribution that's included in my package for stuff I didn't envision? Go ahead. I never owned that anyway and I don't care what you do with it as long as you don't drag me into liability issues for your modifications. I just don't want you to copy the elements I made without paying me for each installation.
And have more to protect. An average person of 25 has approximately zero net worth. An average person of 55 has many times that...
What "person?"
As for innocence, that is an attribute ascribed to persons. Your confusion stems from your conflating "being alive and of human origin" with being a person. A fetus is (normally) alive and is of the human species, but it's not a person.
But you're making another mistake as well. A person's innocence of any crime does not make it wrong for me to eject that person, forcibly if necessary, from my house or my body.
If your claims were couched as "I don't think people ought to do that." as opposed to "I hold the moral high ground and those who disagree with me are doing something tantamount to supporting murder." I might be able to find some kind of common ground with you. But you're an extremist with an indefensible position. I am not interested in further discussing how you are wrong.
I was referring to the fact that being a person and human rights are ascribed to a person beginning at birth. The former has been the case for thousands of years and the latter for hundreds of years.
It's possible for a thing that people do to be against the law for reasons other than the claim that fetuses and embryos have rights. In fact the whole claim that fetuses have a "right to life" was invented about 1973.
The original context of this was "on smartphones." You should read my comments with that in mind.
And maybe that's why the mor literalist denominations are winning. If you're going to tell people that Jesus literally rose from the dead you may be more successful if you stake the idea that the whole book is literally true cover to cover.
No, it's just as valid to interpret Paul as speaking metaphorically about Adam and the fall of man. Everybody understands that all people are flawed and you can have a dogma that God requires people to be perfected or patched up or whatever before they can achieve eternal salvation (whatever that means). But perhaps typical people have trouble processing such abstract metaphors or more likely have been specifically trained not to. Most Christian denominations deify the Bible and all rely on unquestioning belief in some pretty strange stuff that's written there. They don't want you questioning whether the Resurrection actually happened.
It depends in large part on how the question was asked and what kind of answer is interpreted as a positive answer.
Pollster: "Do you believe that God created the world, and created humans pretty much as they are sometime in the last ten thousand years?"
Subject: "Whatever."
Pollster: "I'll take that as a 'yes.' Are you Christian or Mormon?"
Subject: "Umm, not exactly..."
Pollster: "Jewish then. Thank you for your cooperation. Have a nice day."
Subject: "Honey, I just got the weirdest call!"
My biggest problem with atheists is that they're too damned religious. :)
There may be a god. I haven't seen any good evidence for it, but I haven't seen any evidence against it either. Without evidence one way or the other I don't consider the question settled. Atheists *do* consider the question settled. So do "religous nutjobs." They both *believe* with insufficient evidence. That's religion.
And personally, I don't consider the question *interesting* either.
Yes, atheists consider the question of whether there are super-powerful invisible beings controlling our lives to be settled, not by proof but by the sheer ridiculousness of the premise.
Not believing in gods is like not believing in the Easter Bunny. And there's more evidence for the Easter Bunny because there were in fact baskets on Easter morning in my house filled with candy and eggs. And many other people have corroborated that this is not an uncommon occurrence.
A lot more people believe in God than in Sasquatch for some reason. I consider that questions settled too, but I'm open to persuasion if somebody comes up with convincing evidence that the northwest was or is inhabited by large, smelly ape-men. And it would take a lot less persuasion to believe in Sasquatch because if it exists, it's just an elusive or extinct animal that would have little implication regarding what kind of universe we live in. But gods, if they were to exist, would have huge implications for what kind of universe we live in. People who believe in gods have fundamentally different ideas about what the universe is like.
Science isn't about Truths, it's about facts and (adequately) predictive models that explain those facts. It's not bigoted to call someone a moron because they believe something that's factually wrong.
But it's unjustified. We ALL believe things that are factually wrong.
Are on the left half of the bell curve.
The law says otherwise. I am not inclined to throw out hundreds of years of legal precedent on your say-so.