Actually, machine code is an interpreted language too. The hardware does the interpretation part...
Really, a compiler is a device that associates a source program (in some language) to a semantically equivalent target program in another language (semantically equivalent == the two programs are "mean" the same thing, perform the same actions).
An interpreter is a device that directly associates a program in some language to its "meaning", that is, actually performs the actions that the program "means".
For example, Python is (has?) both a compiler and an interpreter. Source code written in the python language is compiled into semantically equivalent byte-code. Byte-code is interpreted.
He is happy people don't bother him anymore to add new features to Miniz he doesn't want to. To quote from Operating Systems: Design and Implementation, Second Edition (1997), pp. 14-15:
Shortly after MINIX was released, a USENET newsgroup was formed to discuss it. Within weeks, it had 40,000 subscribers, most of whom wanted to add vast numbers of new features to MINIX to make it bigger and better (well, at least bigger). Every day, several hundred of the offered suggestions, ideas, and snippets of code. The author of MINIX successfully resisted this onslaught for several years, in order to keep MINIX small enough for students to understand. Ever so gradually, it began to became clear that he really meant it. At that point, a Finnish student, Linus Torvalds decided to write a MINIX clone intended to be a feature-heavy production system, rather than an educational tool.
I think the "MINIX clone" part is a bit pretentious, though.
Not that too many people really care, I think... I know that when I want the vi command set, I type 'vi' at the prompt; and when I want the emacs command set... you get the idea.
That was also one of the things that drove to Python. The languages I've learned, each with an increasing degree of satisfaction, are in this order: BASIC (ugh), Java (I don't like bloated VMs), C (too barebones, no GC), Scheme (very nice and elegant, not enough libraries for it), and Python (very nice, tons of third party libraries to help you).
So I'd say that my languages of choice would be the last two (or another LISP, maybe Common), depending on the app. Personally, I'd go with Python first, but a nice module system and tons of libraries in Scheme would level the field for me..
Back when I read alt.hackers on a regular basis (early 90s) the general consensus seemed to be that it involved not necessarily programming, but pretty much any clever solution to a given problem. Sometimes it might involve rewiring power tools, sometimes writing/changing code, maybe even just pounding pieces of wood together...
Well, I'm shure tons of people here have heard the term "hardware hacker" (hey, there even was a column in Popular Electronics I think called like that), so there is certainly a big prcedence for a type of hacking that involves things other than software.
I live in Puerto Rico. I consider Puerto Rico to be a different country than the US (some people don't however; I won't discuss this point now). The FCC does regulate radio in PR.
Anyway, my comment had absolutely nothing to do with microradio. I was just pointing out the tacit assumption of an absurd idea: "everyone has net access". I gave counterexamples: poor people in the US (and industrialized countries), and most people nearly everywhere else.
Sorry to reply twice, I just had to say something else about this bit.
It would be really fun, and good from the standpoint of the people running the transmitters [...]
Hmm. I think you should consider the fact that the people who are pushing this are already doing this, have been doing it in many cases for years, and definitely not (at least not primarily, in any case) for fun; unless you consider being on the receiving end of an FCC raid to be fun...
The 50% of the U.S. population without Internet accesss don't count, anyway. Your point?
Let's stick to _your_ point for a second. I didn't say 50%; I said _more than_ 50%. So you're saying that the majority of the U.S. population doesn't count.
My point is that they do. And the rest of the world's population, every bnit as much.
Did you need me to clarify this, or were you just eager to spout techno-elitist crap?
It would be really fun, and good from the standpoint of the people running the transmitters, but really bad for the listeners. There just aren't, and can't ever be, enough broadcast frequencies for this scheme to be pulled off without a lot of stations interfering with each other.
I'm not so sure about this. Could you be more specific? I would like to see the assumptions behind your judgement. Like wattage, number of people who would want to set up a station, number of people who would actually run one on regular schedule, frequency allocation, etc.
Use the internet! I am watching a 300K bit-per-second stream from NASA Mission Control at the moment, courtesy of broadcast.com . It looks great, with high resolution and 12+ frames per second when there is enough action in the picture - it seems to fall back on a much slower rate when there is less movement.
I use a 33.6 modem to connect to the Internet. Where I live (Puerto Rico), there are no plans that I know of for cable modems, ADSL, or any of those high speed access technologies/. techies seem to think everyone will soon have. Where I live, a very low percentage of the population has a computer. Almost everyone has a radio, though.
So you see, if I and a group of people wanted to communicate to our community, radio is the way to go.
This is the wave of the future. In 10 years or so we will all have 5 Megabit-per-second fiber-optic feeds that cost the same as cable-tv+telephone today. We will choose what we want to see in our homes, and when we want to see it.
This is false. I mean, the "we all" part. Most people won't have such access. And there is the threat that this kind of connection be subsidized by private interests that will have a say on what kind of content we will be able to choose from.
Case in point: I have a cousin living in Houston who gets free dialup net access. When she connects, a non-minimizable, always-on-top window displays ads. For example, one of the sponsors is Barnes and Noble. I remember that I tried to connect to Bookpool and Amazon, and it gave me an error message-- The access provider actually blocks out competitors to one of its sponsors!
Have you stopped to think that this kind of arrangement could very well be what will bring your vision of "cheap internet for everyone" to reality? TV already works like this...
BTW, where I live, basic cable TV is almost $50/mo. Phone is quite cheap, though, since the phone company was owned by the government and they would subsidize phone for low income people. But the government recently sold the phone co. to GTE, so I expect prices to go up gradually...
This is my first post to Slashdot, so please be gentle.
Ha. Welcome to the flamepit;-).
Seriously, I've been posting on slashdot for over a year and a half, and never gotten much flames, even when I've gotten controversial. A couple of emails once, but I just ignored them.
I am heavily involed in a LPFM station, Free Radio Asheville, which broadcasts at a power of 20 watts in my home town. We have been on the air for over a year now and have raided once by the FCC.
I'm sure many people here would like to hear more details about this story.
Anyway, congrats to you and your partners on this truly commendable project.
This is, sadly, much too common on the net nowadays. People who seem to believe that "everyone" has net access. (I have seen two messages in this discussion that explicitly show that, and a few that seem to presuppose it.)
The fact is, it is a privileged minority of people who have net access. Go to a minority/immigrant/blue collar worker community, and try counting how many people have computers.
The GPL refuses the right to do silly things like make changes and distribute them in a proprietary manner.
No, it doesn't. For the simple fact that there is no such right, so no one can "refuse" it to you. (My question was a rhetoric one.) I was responding to a guy that claimed that the GPL "reduces your rights"; which quite simply runs contrary to the fact that the GPL is a license, and therefore, it licenses or allows you to do some specified actions.
That's its job; I'm not unhappy with that, because I agree entirely that proprietary is immoral. However, this reduces freedom for programmers.
So it prevents people from doing a certain kind of immoral act (by your own concession).
Worse, the GPL also explicitly prohibits my linking a non-GPLed program with a GPLed library (even if the program's open source).
This is simply not true. If your program is a separate, independent work from the GPLed library, then you may distribute your program under whichever license you wish; what must be distributed under GPL is the combination of the program and the GPLed code.
In fact, there are non-GPL programs out there that can use GPL libraries. The programs usually don't _require_ the specific GPL libraries they link, but if you have them installed, you can compile the program against the GPL libs. For example, Python can be built with GNU Readline support. Also Hugs, a Haskell interpreter, may be built against it. (Though I must admit these examples are really devoid of practical significance. I just point them out to factually justify my correction.)
My math professor wrote a Forth program to play with group theory. He then ported it to gforth (GNU Forth), and handed out the source for his program together with gforth.exe. Stallman called him and ordered him to stop; it seems that he was distributing gforth without also putting its source on diskettes and handing THEM out as well.
I agree this part of the GPL is not nice. Nowadays, since so many people are connected to the net (for god's sake, you are talking about an _univerisity_), these requirements from the GPL seem obsolete in this situation (you could just put the source in the univeristy FTP server and tell everyone they can get it from there). I think this is going to be phased out in the GPL 3.0, though.
Countless other stories could be told, but the fact remains that the GPL reduces one aspect of freedom in HOPE that it will increase the total amount of freedom. Whether that hope is correct or not, the GPL's only actual action is to reduce freedom, both for the programmer and the distributor.
I think you might have the seed of an argument here. I'll have to give this part more thought.
Gosh, yes, those FreeBSD folks are such greed-heads...:-)
I don't think this was the original poster's point (although the smiley is acknowledged). There are two particular strains of anti-GPL argument. One is the altruistic "I want everyone to be able to use my free code for whatever they wish"; the other one the egotistic "I want to use everyone's free code for whatever I wish". I think the poster was attacking position number 2, which I think is the one which causes the most flames.
I prefer the BSD approach. There is nothing morally wrong with GPL; releasing software under any free/open license is an act of generosity. But to me, the BSD license corresponds to my own sense of the word "freedom", which means allowing people to do things of which you disapprove.
I don't think the more reasoned GPL advocates really have a major issue with this (in the sense you give above; that they would think it, rather than an act of generosity, to be morally wrong). And if some of them happen to do, I think they're wrong.
The GPL doesn't enslave people; it merely reduces their rights. It also claims that it's increasing people's freedom.
Huh? Tell me precisely which "rights" the GPL reduces...
And in my book, telling the whole world "I'll share this code with everyone, if everyone shares their changes with everyone" increases freedom. The result is that everyone is free to share the code.
Ahh, yes, the old "BSD vs. GPL" flame war... As meaningless as ever...
While you hit on the best position (IMHO) to hold on this issue, I think you are missing some of the subthemes of the flamewar... That of the GPL "not being free", and that of the people who whine because they cannot do whatever they want with other peoples' code. Jeez.
Happily, one finds people on the BSD license camp like you who don't go about whining that they should be able to take others' GPL code proprietary...
This is not necessarily true, think about the most common analogy used - free speech. If I have freedom of speech then this freedom includes the right to scream at the top of my lungs every time you try to speak even though this infringes upon your ability to speak.
Eh, this does not infringe upon my ability to speak-- only upon my ability to be heard, to which I only have a right under special circumstances (i.e., I have a right to be heard in a judicial proceeding against me).
It could infringe upon other persons right to hear me. For example, you might that way infringe on the right of the public to be informed, if they want to hear me.
This is essentially why campaign funding limitations were declared unconstitutional.
A sad affair of situations, indeed. "Everyone is equal, but some are more equal." This distorts the political arena in favor of the powerful few.
Freedom may have some 'unfair' consequences - and therefore might not be the 'best' solution, but that doesn't mean that we should redefine freedom to mean what ever we believe is the 'best' solution.
Who's redefining freedom?
The concept of freedom I cite has a very long tradition. It is the concept of freedom subscribed to by religious organizations like the Catholic Church (and surely others whose philosophy I dont't know well), and political theories like socialism and democracy. It is often cited as the reason for the establishment of the state, for example: the function of the state is to ensure freedom for its citizens. And this, in turn, is a common argument for law: we need laws to protect citizens' freedoms to be violated.
The idea of "doing whatever one wants", without taking into account the impact of one's actions on others' freedom, has also a name: libertinism. I would argue that the people who go about crying that the FSF is redefining freedom are the ones who actually are redefining it to mean only 'libertinism'.
Let me make my argument a bit more precise, so as not to be misunderstood: the word 'freedom' has several meanings; the one that the FSF chooses has a very long philosophical and legal history, so it is a very legitimate sense of the word 'freedom'. The FSF makes clear that they use freedom in this sense. The argument that the FSF is redefining freedom is therefore not only unsound; it also sins from attempting to purge one of the meanings of the word 'freedom', thus actually commiting that fault which it purports to find on the FSF. What the argument wishes to be the meaning for freedom is covered precisely by the word 'libertinism': that free software be free of the restrictions that the FSF finds that lead to the original freedom being revoked, so that the proponent of the argument be exempt of the social responsibilities that the FSF believe are the counterpart to free software.
In order to use GPl'd programs, just as with Microsoft programs, I must submit to an onerous license restricting my freedom.
This is simply false. From the GPL:
Section E.2.0: "The act of running the program is not restricted"
Section E.2.5: "You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying the Program or works based on it."
As you can see above, you must accept the GPL _only if_ you wish to _modify_ or _redistribute_ the program.
The GPL is indeed self-explantory. Its point, however, is to infect as much software as possible with the GPL virus (a.k.a. GPV), and to advance the political agenda of RMS and the FSF.
Your terms are not quite fair. "Infecting as much software as possible" draws in the mind a picture where the GPL is some sort of foreign body, jumping from code to code, using it for its own purposes and to the detriment of the code. You might believe the "using" and the "detriment" parts of the above, but the "jumping" part is clearly false. No one forces you to GPL code, or to use GPLed code. No one restricts you from writing the software you want, and using it however you wish.
The FSF's goal is that it be possible for everyone to do anything they want in their computers without having to use proprietary software, not that every program be GPL. The GPL is a means in this scenario, not an end.
If you want to talk about the FSF's non-free software, let's talk about the fact that for anything to be considered part of the GNU Project, the author must assign the copyright to the FSF. He couldn't even relicense it under a free or proprietary license if he wanted! That doesn't seem too free to me.
No one is forcing anyone to assign copyright to FSF. In fact, I'm sure the vast majority of GPL software is not copyrighted by the FSF.
There are also no scare stories as far as I know of the FSF abusing this (abusing as in not giving credit, or releasing proprietary versions)
The fact the FSF requires this is, IIRC, that they wish to be able to defend the copyright of all programs oficially in the GNU project on court. You know, if they took some GPL program they didn't have the copyright over, and someone violated the GPL on that program, if they're not the copyright holder the FSF would have no business in court.
About the charge of the GPL being "non-free", its refutation is brought up all the time here on slashdot and elsewhere. Freedom does not simply mean "being able to do anything one likes". There is an important restriction on freedom, which is that you are not free to restrict other's freedom. This is precisely the aim behind the GPL-- that no one can restrict your freedom to use the GPLed software.
Anti-GPL advocates tend to give undue emphasis to the only superficially paradoxical fact that one has to impose restrictions on software to keep it free. It should be mentioned that this is merely a tactical choice implicit on the GPL, not something essential. When the state imposes by force a system for some to take away from others what the FSF believes is a freedom, the FSF is forced to protect the users of its software from state protected, private monopolies on formerly free code.
If I spend years writing a program using no code other than my own, I can release it under any license I want. If I incorporate BSD licensed code into my program, I can still use any license I want, so long as I preserve copyright notices. If, however, I want to include GPLed code in my program, the GPL forces me to release my program under the GPL. It has *infected* my program. This is where the term `viral' originates with regard to the GPL.
This is what I call the 'libertine software' argument. "It's bad, because I can't do whatever I like with other people's software!"
It's one thing when one says "here's my program, under BSD license; let the everyone do whatever they may with it it." This position, although criticised by GPL advocates (it allows derivative works to be made unfree), at least has some elements of altruism (or at least, sacrifice in exepectation of a greater reward).
But then it's another thing to say "I should be able to do anything I want with free software".
People should really give the Preamble of the GPL a good, slow read. I think it's more than self-explanatory. Freedom for _everyone_ to use, change and share the fruit of the community's work.
I guess you think no one understands the BSD license.
I think I can understand the licensor's point of view: "Here, I wrote this, you can have it. Do what you like with it, I want you to benefit from my work".
However, the point of view of some licensees is what's problematic, IMHO. I mean the same thing I said above, libertine software: "A program is free if I can do whatever I like with it."
Contrast this with the FSF ideal, which I will paraphrase (in my terms): "The ideal for a piece of software is freedom for _everyone_ to examine, change and share it."
:spelling flame:/n./ [Usenet] A posting ostentatiously correcting a previous article's spelling as a way of casting scorn on the point the article was trying to make, instead of actually responding to that point (compare {dictionary flame}). Of course, people who are more than usually slovenly spellers are prone to think *any* correction is a spelling flame. It's an amusing comment on human nature that spelling flames themselves often contain spelling errors.
Hmmm. This doesn't really fit your posts. However, they *are* offtopic, unprovoked, and arrogant.
Hey, most *linguists* I know aren't that uptight about language. The only people I know who vent out like this are either snobs, nationalists, or both. I hope you are the exception.
I find it remarkably demoralizing that a work of serious scholarship about a topic in daily use should out of spite be branded a troll by an overzealous moderator.
Last I checked scholarship about the daily use of language is just that: scholarship on the way users use the language. The work you cite *is* based serious scholarship (OED, Latin grammars), but it is not a descriptive work on the actual use of the English language; it is a prescriptive work, which in no way offers any justificaction for its recommendations.
Hey, I _have_ seen language planners from a language academy make recommendations about such issues. The first example I recall, is a recommendation on the correct plural form for the spanish word 'travesti' for a reporter to use in an article on a newspaper with national circulation. The reporter had asked which of two alternate forms to use: one which was paradigmatically more correct, but hardly in use; other which was in common usage. The recommendation was the form in common usage.
Next time, I suppose I should just flame rabidly rather than resort to honest scholarship so you would actually have something legitimate to whinge about.
Well, you didn't flame rabidly. However, let's look at what you wrote:
Egads! Not this `virii' nuttiness again. Please, please, please read the viruses document before you propagate this silly notion. I honestly believe you will find the article informative and convincing.
Hmm. "Nuttiness", "silly notion". Those *are* condescending words, Mr. Christiansen.
Oh well, I got better things to do, anyway. I'll just leave you with a riddle. What's the plural form of 'Elvis'?
Yup, you guessed it: 'elvi'!
(This was stolen from a Married with Children episode.)
(Furthermore if you've read Ken Thompson's essay on trust, you know there's reason to believe that there may even be binary traces of Stallman's code left in modern egcs-compiled binaries.)
Slashdot Mirror
Really, a compiler is a device that associates a source program (in some language) to a semantically equivalent target program in another language (semantically equivalent == the two programs are "mean" the same thing, perform the same actions).
An interpreter is a device that directly associates a program in some language to its "meaning", that is, actually performs the actions that the program "means".
For example, Python is (has?) both a compiler and an interpreter. Source code written in the python language is compiled into semantically equivalent byte-code. Byte-code is interpreted.
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I think the "MINIX clone" part is a bit pretentious, though.
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So I'd say that my languages of choice would be the last two (or another LISP, maybe Common), depending on the app. Personally, I'd go with Python first, but a nice module system and tons of libraries in Scheme would level the field for me..
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Well, I'm shure tons of people here have heard the term "hardware hacker" (hey, there even was a column in Popular Electronics I think called like that), so there is certainly a big prcedence for a type of hacking that involves things other than software.
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If it were so... Last I heard, voter turnout at US elections is terrible.
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Anyway, my comment had absolutely nothing to do with microradio. I was just pointing out the tacit assumption of an absurd idea: "everyone has net access". I gave counterexamples: poor people in the US (and industrialized countries), and most people nearly everywhere else.
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Sorry to reply twice, I just had to say something else about this bit.
It would be really fun, and good from the standpoint of the people running the transmitters [...]
Hmm. I think you should consider the fact that the people who are pushing this are already doing this, have been doing it in many cases for years, and definitely not (at least not primarily, in any case) for fun; unless you consider being on the receiving end of an FCC raid to be fun...
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Let's stick to _your_ point for a second. I didn't say 50%; I said _more than_ 50%. So you're saying that the majority of the U.S. population doesn't count.
My point is that they do. And the rest of the world's population, every bnit as much.
Did you need me to clarify this, or were you just eager to spout techno-elitist crap?
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I'm not so sure about this. Could you be more specific? I would like to see the assumptions behind your judgement. Like wattage, number of people who would want to set up a station, number of people who would actually run one on regular schedule, frequency allocation, etc.
Use the internet! I am watching a 300K bit-per-second stream from NASA Mission Control at the moment, courtesy of broadcast.com . It looks great, with high resolution and 12+ frames per second when there is enough action in the picture - it seems to fall back on a much slower rate when there is less movement.
I use a 33.6 modem to connect to the Internet. Where I live (Puerto Rico), there are no plans that I know of for cable modems, ADSL, or any of those high speed access technologies /. techies seem to think everyone will soon have. Where I live, a very low percentage of the population has a computer. Almost everyone has a radio, though.
So you see, if I and a group of people wanted to communicate to our community, radio is the way to go.
This is the wave of the future. In 10 years or so we will all have 5 Megabit-per-second fiber-optic feeds that cost the same as cable-tv+telephone today. We will choose what we want to see in our homes, and when we want to see it.
This is false. I mean, the "we all" part. Most people won't have such access. And there is the threat that this kind of connection be subsidized by private interests that will have a say on what kind of content we will be able to choose from.
Case in point: I have a cousin living in Houston who gets free dialup net access. When she connects, a non-minimizable, always-on-top window displays ads. For example, one of the sponsors is Barnes and Noble. I remember that I tried to connect to Bookpool and Amazon, and it gave me an error message-- The access provider actually blocks out competitors to one of its sponsors!
Have you stopped to think that this kind of arrangement could very well be what will bring your vision of "cheap internet for everyone" to reality? TV already works like this...
BTW, where I live, basic cable TV is almost $50/mo. Phone is quite cheap, though, since the phone company was owned by the government and they would subsidize phone for low income people. But the government recently sold the phone co. to GTE, so I expect prices to go up gradually...
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Ha. Welcome to the flamepit ;-).
Seriously, I've been posting on slashdot for over a year and a half, and never gotten much flames, even when I've gotten controversial. A couple of emails once, but I just ignored them.
I am heavily involed in a LPFM station, Free Radio Asheville, which broadcasts at a power of 20 watts in my home town. We have been on the air for over a year now and have raided once by the FCC.
I'm sure many people here would like to hear more details about this story.
Anyway, congrats to you and your partners on this truly commendable project.
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The fact is, it is a privileged minority of people who have net access. Go to a minority/immigrant/blue collar worker community, and try counting how many people have computers.
And go to other countries, and do the same.
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No, it doesn't. For the simple fact that there is no such right, so no one can "refuse" it to you. (My question was a rhetoric one.) I was responding to a guy that claimed that the GPL "reduces your rights"; which quite simply runs contrary to the fact that the GPL is a license, and therefore, it licenses or allows you to do some specified actions.
That's its job; I'm not unhappy with that, because I agree entirely that proprietary is immoral. However, this reduces freedom for programmers.
So it prevents people from doing a certain kind of immoral act (by your own concession).
Worse, the GPL also explicitly prohibits my linking a non-GPLed program with a GPLed library (even if the program's open source).
This is simply not true. If your program is a separate, independent work from the GPLed library, then you may distribute your program under whichever license you wish; what must be distributed under GPL is the combination of the program and the GPLed code.
In fact, there are non-GPL programs out there that can use GPL libraries. The programs usually don't _require_ the specific GPL libraries they link, but if you have them installed, you can compile the program against the GPL libs. For example, Python can be built with GNU Readline support. Also Hugs, a Haskell interpreter, may be built against it. (Though I must admit these examples are really devoid of practical significance. I just point them out to factually justify my correction.)
My math professor wrote a Forth program to play with group theory. He then ported it to gforth (GNU Forth), and handed out the source for his program together with gforth.exe. Stallman called him and ordered him to stop; it seems that he was distributing gforth without also putting its source on diskettes and handing THEM out as well.
I agree this part of the GPL is not nice. Nowadays, since so many people are connected to the net (for god's sake, you are talking about an _univerisity_), these requirements from the GPL seem obsolete in this situation (you could just put the source in the univeristy FTP server and tell everyone they can get it from there). I think this is going to be phased out in the GPL 3.0, though.
Countless other stories could be told, but the fact remains that the GPL reduces one aspect of freedom in HOPE that it will increase the total amount of freedom. Whether that hope is correct or not, the GPL's only actual action is to reduce freedom, both for the programmer and the distributor.
I think you might have the seed of an argument here. I'll have to give this part more thought.
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I don't think this was the original poster's point (although the smiley is acknowledged). There are two particular strains of anti-GPL argument. One is the altruistic "I want everyone to be able to use my free code for whatever they wish"; the other one the egotistic "I want to use everyone's free code for whatever I wish". I think the poster was attacking position number 2, which I think is the one which causes the most flames.
I prefer the BSD approach. There is nothing morally wrong with GPL; releasing software under any free/open license is an act of generosity. But to me, the BSD license corresponds to my own sense of the word "freedom", which means allowing people to do things of which you disapprove.
I don't think the more reasoned GPL advocates really have a major issue with this (in the sense you give above; that they would think it, rather than an act of generosity, to be morally wrong). And if some of them happen to do, I think they're wrong.
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Huh? Tell me precisely which "rights" the GPL reduces...
And in my book, telling the whole world "I'll share this code with everyone, if everyone shares their changes with everyone" increases freedom. The result is that everyone is free to share the code.
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While you hit on the best position (IMHO) to hold on this issue, I think you are missing some of the subthemes of the flamewar... That of the GPL "not being free", and that of the people who whine because they cannot do whatever they want with other peoples' code. Jeez.
Happily, one finds people on the BSD license camp like you who don't go about whining that they should be able to take others' GPL code proprietary...
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Eh, this does not infringe upon my ability to speak-- only upon my ability to be heard, to which I only have a right under special circumstances (i.e., I have a right to be heard in a judicial proceeding against me).
It could infringe upon other persons right to hear me. For example, you might that way infringe on the right of the public to be informed, if they want to hear me.
This is essentially why campaign funding limitations were declared unconstitutional.
A sad affair of situations, indeed. "Everyone is equal, but some are more equal." This distorts the political arena in favor of the powerful few.
Freedom may have some 'unfair' consequences - and therefore might not be the 'best' solution, but that doesn't mean that we should redefine freedom to mean what ever we believe is the 'best' solution.
Who's redefining freedom?
The concept of freedom I cite has a very long tradition. It is the concept of freedom subscribed to by religious organizations like the Catholic Church (and surely others whose philosophy I dont't know well), and political theories like socialism and democracy. It is often cited as the reason for the establishment of the state, for example: the function of the state is to ensure freedom for its citizens. And this, in turn, is a common argument for law: we need laws to protect citizens' freedoms to be violated.
The idea of "doing whatever one wants", without taking into account the impact of one's actions on others' freedom, has also a name: libertinism. I would argue that the people who go about crying that the FSF is redefining freedom are the ones who actually are redefining it to mean only 'libertinism'.
Let me make my argument a bit more precise, so as not to be misunderstood: the word 'freedom' has several meanings; the one that the FSF chooses has a very long philosophical and legal history, so it is a very legitimate sense of the word 'freedom'. The FSF makes clear that they use freedom in this sense. The argument that the FSF is redefining freedom is therefore not only unsound; it also sins from attempting to purge one of the meanings of the word 'freedom', thus actually commiting that fault which it purports to find on the FSF. What the argument wishes to be the meaning for freedom is covered precisely by the word 'libertinism': that free software be free of the restrictions that the FSF finds that lead to the original freedom being revoked, so that the proponent of the argument be exempt of the social responsibilities that the FSF believe are the counterpart to free software.
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This is simply false. From the GPL:
As you can see above, you must accept the GPL _only if_ you wish to _modify_ or _redistribute_ the program.
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Your terms are not quite fair. "Infecting as much software as possible" draws in the mind a picture where the GPL is some sort of foreign body, jumping from code to code, using it for its own purposes and to the detriment of the code. You might believe the "using" and the "detriment" parts of the above, but the "jumping" part is clearly false. No one forces you to GPL code, or to use GPLed code. No one restricts you from writing the software you want, and using it however you wish.
The FSF's goal is that it be possible for everyone to do anything they want in their computers without having to use proprietary software, not that every program be GPL. The GPL is a means in this scenario, not an end.
If you want to talk about the FSF's non-free software, let's talk about the fact that for anything to be considered part of the GNU Project, the author must assign the copyright to the FSF. He couldn't even relicense it under a free or proprietary license if he wanted! That doesn't seem too free to me.
No one is forcing anyone to assign copyright to FSF. In fact, I'm sure the vast majority of GPL software is not copyrighted by the FSF.
There are also no scare stories as far as I know of the FSF abusing this (abusing as in not giving credit, or releasing proprietary versions)
The fact the FSF requires this is, IIRC, that they wish to be able to defend the copyright of all programs oficially in the GNU project on court. You know, if they took some GPL program they didn't have the copyright over, and someone violated the GPL on that program, if they're not the copyright holder the FSF would have no business in court.
About the charge of the GPL being "non-free", its refutation is brought up all the time here on slashdot and elsewhere. Freedom does not simply mean "being able to do anything one likes". There is an important restriction on freedom, which is that you are not free to restrict other's freedom. This is precisely the aim behind the GPL-- that no one can restrict your freedom to use the GPLed software.
Anti-GPL advocates tend to give undue emphasis to the only superficially paradoxical fact that one has to impose restrictions on software to keep it free. It should be mentioned that this is merely a tactical choice implicit on the GPL, not something essential. When the state imposes by force a system for some to take away from others what the FSF believes is a freedom, the FSF is forced to protect the users of its software from state protected, private monopolies on formerly free code.
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This is what I call the 'libertine software' argument. "It's bad, because I can't do whatever I like with other people's software!"
It's one thing when one says "here's my program, under BSD license; let the everyone do whatever they may with it it." This position, although criticised by GPL advocates (it allows derivative works to be made unfree), at least has some elements of altruism (or at least, sacrifice in exepectation of a greater reward).
But then it's another thing to say "I should be able to do anything I want with free software".
People should really give the Preamble of the GPL a good, slow read. I think it's more than self-explanatory. Freedom for _everyone_ to use, change and share the fruit of the community's work.
I guess you think no one understands the BSD license.
I think I can understand the licensor's point of view: "Here, I wrote this, you can have it. Do what you like with it, I want you to benefit from my work".
However, the point of view of some licensees is what's problematic, IMHO. I mean the same thing I said above, libertine software: "A program is free if I can do whatever I like with it."
Contrast this with the FSF ideal, which I will paraphrase (in my terms): "The ideal for a piece of software is freedom for _everyone_ to examine, change and share it."
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Hmmm. This doesn't really fit your posts. However, they *are* offtopic, unprovoked, and arrogant.
Hey, most *linguists* I know aren't that uptight about language. The only people I know who vent out like this are either snobs, nationalists, or both. I hope you are the exception.
I find it remarkably demoralizing that a work of serious scholarship about a topic in daily use should out of spite be branded a troll by an overzealous moderator.
Last I checked scholarship about the daily use of language is just that: scholarship on the way users use the language. The work you cite *is* based serious scholarship (OED, Latin grammars), but it is not a descriptive work on the actual use of the English language; it is a prescriptive work, which in no way offers any justificaction for its recommendations.
Hey, I _have_ seen language planners from a language academy make recommendations about such issues. The first example I recall, is a recommendation on the correct plural form for the spanish word 'travesti' for a reporter to use in an article on a newspaper with national circulation. The reporter had asked which of two alternate forms to use: one which was paradigmatically more correct, but hardly in use; other which was in common usage. The recommendation was the form in common usage.
Next time, I suppose I should just flame rabidly rather than resort to honest scholarship so you would actually have something legitimate to whinge about.
Well, you didn't flame rabidly. However, let's look at what you wrote:
Egads! Not this `virii' nuttiness again. Please, please, please read the viruses document before you propagate this silly notion. I honestly believe you will find the article informative and convincing.
Hmm. "Nuttiness", "silly notion". Those *are* condescending words, Mr. Christiansen.
Oh well, I got better things to do, anyway. I'll just leave you with a riddle. What's the plural form of 'Elvis'?
Yup, you guessed it: 'elvi'!
(This was stolen from a Married with Children episode.)
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Haha!
(Am I the only one to have picked up this joke?)
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