Putting aside some of the strange assertions made about the practicality of ISP level censorship, the cost of such censorship and the impact it will have on small ISPs, the point that I find hardest to digest is the point about children's exposure to pornography.
I grew up in the days before the Internet. Was I exposed to pornography? Yes. In fact most, if not all, of my contemporaries were exposed to pornography. Where did this pornography come from? Well believe it or not, there was a time when pornographic material came in these things called magazines. That's right - magazines!
What used to happen is that one kid would nick one of these magazines and bring it to school. Everyone else would borrow said magazines (the rest is left as an exercise for the reader).
The interesting point is where these magazines came from. Strangers on the streets? No. Mad pornographers trying to hook impressionable kids on their filthy wares? No. Evil devil worshippers and socialists trying to destroy the fabric of society? No. The magazines were nicked from - you guessed it - parents.
Teenagers and adults have always sought out erotic material. It was magazines in my day, the Internet today. Family First, nor any other right wing party, are not going to be changing that fact of life too soon.
One last thing - if you are Australian and interested in IT related policy issues (mandating open file formats, IT procurement policies, censorship etc) please consider voting for the Australian Democrats - if not for the House of Reps then the Senate. Yes they've taken a pounding, but they remain the only party in Australian politics that are dedicated to ensuring accountability in Government and the only party that has aggresively pursued IT policy. Yes some of the others are trying to jump on board the OSS bandwagon (Greens, ALP etc), however the only party to have looked at these issues seriously, and proposed legislation are the Democrats. When they go - so will an accountable Senate.
Two points. First, preference deals, at least for the distribution of preferences in the Senate ballot, are public documents. Second, there is nothing preventing an elector from voting below the line and choosing their own preferences. There is nothing undemocratic about it, at least not in comparison to the Florida situation.
The Greens are great if you want to combine 21st century pseudo-environmentalism with 20th century ineffectual socialism and get the worst of both worlds i.e. social policy that is incompatible with its environmental policy etc.
A far better alternative is the Australian Democrats. Some may still bear a grudge against them for voting for the GST (a far improved GST) but at least their policies aren't internally inconsistent and they DO have a progessive policy approach to IT.
Re:Dictionary shows GPL is less free (as in freedo
on
PHP Not Moving To The GPL
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I take your point. Free has never been a great description of the GPL. However, it is important to note that when RMS starts talking about freedom, he is talking about philosophical definitions of freedom, rather than literal.
When we talk about freedom in a philosophical sense, especially the construction being used by RMS, we are talking about "freedom from x", where x is the philosophically defined constraint. When RMS says that "the GPL guarantees freedom", his construction is effectively saying "the GPL guarantees freedom from closed source software". Implied within that argument (though RMS is often more explicit) is the idea that closed source software is the constraint.
With this in mind, the GPL is more free than the BSD, MIT etc, because the GPL ensures freedom from closed source software. Of course you may not agree with that conception of freedom or the premises on which it is based. That does not prevent the internal validity of RMS claims that the GPL is more free.
All definitions of free are self-serving, but that does not make them wrong.
Sorry, I can't agree with you there. As an Australian that lived and worked in Canada for a couple of years, going to Quebec was sometimes very much like going to a "foreign land" (but with a sort of "safety net" of anglophones).
Having said that, I didn't spend much time in the North, so I don't know much about the French-speaking rednecks. Reading your disclaimer however, I guess I'm not disagreeing with you as much as I first thought.
I would like to add though, that the predominantly English areas of Montreal are a bit dull. If you go there hang out in the French parts and learn to speak French.
I've already said this earlier in the thread...but...
Um HELLO!!!! (I copied that bit off your post)...proprietary computers don't cause lock in....proprietary data formats do. If the data is OS/hardware agnostic, it hardly matters what hardware they use on the desktop.
If using Macs helps with that transition (remember they probably need MS Office) then lucky Apple - they make a sale.
Kid - computers are not about hardware. They are not about software. They are about data. If switching to Apple helps them ensure their data is cross platform, then they are getting all the openness they need.
If their data is cross-platform, then it doesn't matter if they are using Macs, Linux or glorified iPods..they are not "locked in" to a particular vendor.
So why choose Macs? Maybe for them it was a lower TOC. Maybe for them it is easier to get a locked down system for iMacs. Maybe they just want their offices to look nicer? Who knows..maybe the question was answered in the article...
I appreciate the attempt at humour, but, as someone else has already mentioned, BBEdit does do latex (not as well as TeXShop, but it does it nevertheless).
When I switched to OS X, it was because Apple made nice notebooks and could do LaTeX, either through LyX, or through a decent LaTeX editor. As it was I found TeXShop and my mind was made up.
When I told a Mac-using designer friend of mine, he was all to keen to help me switch, but was amused by my LaTeX requirement. When he told his older friends at work, they laughed. You see they all switched to Macs back in the early days so they could use desktop publishing software rather than typesetters like LaTeX.
When they heard I was switching to Mac to use a typesetter they thought it was the craziest thing they had heard in years.
In answer to your questions: 1)nobodys; 2) no; 3) no; and 4) no.
While for all actions there is a moral or ethical component, in the case of economic regulation, ethics is fairly low on the list. Whether this should be the case is a different debate altogether.
The issue of "destroying" a company in the manner you have suggested is not an issue of moral behaviour. It is one of economic efficiency. Excessive market power reduces competition and thus efficiency and more importantly innovation.
We don't see the impact of Microsoft's monopoly in its full as yet. Microsoft products at present often compete with their own (please replace your NT4 systems with Win2k3..please).
But once we are all accessing software by subscription....no need to innovate then.
Good thing you haven't had to sit a spelling test for a while then isn't it. Remember, just because Rupert Murdoch's papers spell it "jail" does not make it so. Rupert just doesn't like the English and loves corrupting its language and bringing down its aristocracy.
While it's been a while since I had a good read of RMS, I'm not even sure he would object to this. After all (please correct me if I'm wrong), any club member is free to put the iso images on their own web server for further redistribution.
The last I read, RMS did not object to the "selling" of software whatsoever - he used to sell emacs on magnetic tape for about $150 if I remember rightly.
Mandrake don't limit further redistribution, so I don't think there is any problem with what Mandrake are doing even from an RMS perspective.
Of course - I'm not RMS and his opinions may radically differ from mine;)
I think the critical issue with the public goods description, and the one that prompted me to respond to your post in the first place - the issue of public expenditure.
What is most interesting about OSS is that it is a product with all the characteristics of a public good, yet it does not require Government action to sustain its development. Provided the prevailing political-legal institutions do not impede OSS development through over zealous IP laws etc, and the market continues to provide the necessary enabling infrastructure - OSS development continues.
This perhaps suggests that OSS is a positive externality of computer hardware manufacture and Internet connectivity - probably a question that warrants further investigation.
As to the issue of of non-rival, non-excludeable goods tending to become public goods, I wonder whether a different approach toward classifying software as a product is required. While proprietary software can be distributed as a public good, it cannot evolve as a public good. The critical factor about informational goods is that the information, or knowledge, must be current for the good to have value. Netscape Navigator 2 is to today's web surfer, what last years stock prices are to today's stock broker - of limited interest (except as time series data of course). Proprietary software distributed as a public good, loses its value as the software becomes dated.
OSS on the other hand can continue to evolve, thanks to the source code, which could be represented as knowledge as a secondary public good. As such, its value as an informational good can be retained as the product can be modified to suit more contemporary needs.
With that in mind, I'm not sure I agree that goods that fit a) and b) tend to become public goods, when the good in question is closed source software.
Having said all that - I have forgotten my train of thought and (again) have spent too much time on Slashdot;)
There is an inherent difficulty in using public goods theory to describe open source software. First, let's take the classic definition of a public good. A public good is one that is a) non-rival (or non-depleteable); b) non-excludeable; and c) produced outside the market. That last point is important, but not included in the Wikipedia definition. There are plenty of better definitions to draw from.
All software meets the first two of these criteria, as do all digital goods. However, proprietary software is certainly produced within the market using traditional "for-profit" motives. By definition then, while proprietary software has the characteristics of a public good - it is not a public good.
The problem with public good theory, is that it was derived specifically as a theory of public expenditure and at a time when informational goods were not a subject of interest for economists or political economists. Private goods displaying the traits of non-excludeability and non-rival did not exist. As such public goods theorists were more concerned with services such as law enforcement and defense etc.
Second, the idea of non-excludeability is a bit more involved than you have suggested in your earlier post. For many public goods theorists, such as Samuelson, a non-excludeable good is not just one that is provided to all (OSS meets this criteria), but must be provided to all. Naval defense of an island does not just provide defense services to those living on the island, but those living on the island have no option but to benefit from the defense (unless they leave of course). They cannot voluntarily exclude themself. Software, OSS or otherwise, does allow individuals to exclude themself from the provision of software, by not installing it.
I also have some issues with the monopoly solution you allude to. I don't think copyright enforcement is necessarily about preventing the free-rider problem with public goods - it is certainly the case for preventing the free-rising of private goods.
Anyway, I could go on with some more issues, but I appear to be wasting too much time on Slashdot. Needless to say, I think that public good theory is not a particularly good fit for OSS. The theory needs significant modification because OSS has certain dependencies on market provision of enabling infrastructure (PCs, Internet connecitivity) that make its relationship to the market far more complex than public goods theory allows.
My personal view is that whoever did the Wikipedia article was getting a bit carried away and the definition contains some theoretical weaknesses.
Anyway, you have a nice day. Nice to read your thoughts.
Cool script. I'm gonna give it a go as soon as I get home. In fact when I do get home I'm gonna crank up the Linux box, call over the girlfriend, find all those directories with those pesky little jpeg images and then I'm gonna run the script.
<p><em>Then</em> I'm gonna say "Look at the Baby. Thumbnails is what that is - I'm making thumbnails and I ain't using no clicky clicky gooey thingy. No mouse and menus and fancy schmancy pictures for me. No. I am no windowsy, maccy loser! I am guru of the keyboard and behold my command line skills!" <p>"Now look me in the eye and say you don't want no hot lovin' tonight!" <p>Or maybe I won't.
I think you'll find that Labor and the DEMOCRATS combined can defeat this. There are only two Greens in the Senate (somewhat fortunate as they don't actually do much real work)
Especially in Afghanistan. Those Taliban love the union of Church and State. Al Q'aida - they're also big fans. Not sure what they think of Pepsi and Apple though - or that fancy, shmancy so-called "rock and roll" music.
First - I am also a Westpac customer and I have not had any major problem with Westpac's on-line banking. When I first tried, Mozilla wouldn't render a number of links along the navigation sidebar down the left - that has now been fixed. I also find that a number of browsers (Safari at least) don't quite render the column widths correctly when viewing all your accounts. Slight inconveniences but still a workable system.
Second - the South Australian Government is not actively trying to pass a bill mandating that all government departments use open source software in preference to Microsoft, et al, where practical. Rather the Australian Democrats have put forward a Bill giving preference to OSS (i.e. use OSS unless OSS will not perform the task you want done properly). This is being driven by a South Australian parliamentarian (can't remember his name). At a federal level Australian Democrat's senator Brian Greig is pushing for something similar.
Re:still the windows metaphor
on
Windows in 2020
·
· Score: 1
We will go way beyond rooms.
We will have wombats. Wombats are better than rooms because they crawl about eating things and can crush a dingoes head when it is threatened.
I want a computing experience that eats things and crushes heads.
It tends to install okay.
Gives you lots of GUI configuration help.
All in all it is a nice beginner distro. As you learn more you can move away from the GUI configuration and do it by hand. Then latter on, if you want to keep learning more you can start setting up the more expert distos like Slackware, of Linux from Scratch.
Whatever you decide to do, Mandrake is certainly nice - hell my sister and Mother in Law both manage to use it everyday, without problems.
Slashdot Mirror
I grew up in the days before the Internet. Was I exposed to pornography? Yes. In fact most, if not all, of my contemporaries were exposed to pornography. Where did this pornography come from? Well believe it or not, there was a time when pornographic material came in these things called magazines. That's right - magazines!
What used to happen is that one kid would nick one of these magazines and bring it to school. Everyone else would borrow said magazines (the rest is left as an exercise for the reader).
The interesting point is where these magazines came from. Strangers on the streets? No. Mad pornographers trying to hook impressionable kids on their filthy wares? No. Evil devil worshippers and socialists trying to destroy the fabric of society? No. The magazines were nicked from - you guessed it - parents.
Teenagers and adults have always sought out erotic material. It was magazines in my day, the Internet today. Family First, nor any other right wing party, are not going to be changing that fact of life too soon.
One last thing - if you are Australian and interested in IT related policy issues (mandating open file formats, IT procurement policies, censorship etc) please consider voting for the Australian Democrats - if not for the House of Reps then the Senate. Yes they've taken a pounding, but they remain the only party in Australian politics that are dedicated to ensuring accountability in Government and the only party that has aggresively pursued IT policy. Yes some of the others are trying to jump on board the OSS bandwagon (Greens, ALP etc), however the only party to have looked at these issues seriously, and proposed legislation are the Democrats. When they go - so will an accountable Senate.
Two points. First, preference deals, at least for the distribution of preferences in the Senate ballot, are public documents. Second, there is nothing preventing an elector from voting below the line and choosing their own preferences. There is nothing undemocratic about it, at least not in comparison to the Florida situation.
A far better alternative is the Australian Democrats. Some may still bear a grudge against them for voting for the GST (a far improved GST) but at least their policies aren't internally inconsistent and they DO have a progessive policy approach to IT.
When we talk about freedom in a philosophical sense, especially the construction being used by RMS, we are talking about "freedom from x", where x is the philosophically defined constraint. When RMS says that "the GPL guarantees freedom", his construction is effectively saying "the GPL guarantees freedom from closed source software". Implied within that argument (though RMS is often more explicit) is the idea that closed source software is the constraint.
With this in mind, the GPL is more free than the BSD, MIT etc, because the GPL ensures freedom from closed source software. Of course you may not agree with that conception of freedom or the premises on which it is based. That does not prevent the internal validity of RMS claims that the GPL is more free.
All definitions of free are self-serving, but that does not make them wrong.
Go the Dockers!
Having said that, I didn't spend much time in the North, so I don't know much about the French-speaking rednecks. Reading your disclaimer however, I guess I'm not disagreeing with you as much as I first thought.
I would like to add though, that the predominantly English areas of Montreal are a bit dull. If you go there hang out in the French parts and learn to speak French.
If the data is cross-platform, then you can scrap your hardware and/or platform. If your data isn't then you are screwed.
Um HELLO!!!! (I copied that bit off your post)...proprietary computers don't cause lock in....proprietary data formats do. If the data is OS/hardware agnostic, it hardly matters what hardware they use on the desktop.
If using Macs helps with that transition (remember they probably need MS Office) then lucky Apple - they make a sale.
If their data is cross-platform, then it doesn't matter if they are using Macs, Linux or glorified iPods..they are not "locked in" to a particular vendor.
So why choose Macs? Maybe for them it was a lower TOC. Maybe for them it is easier to get a locked down system for iMacs. Maybe they just want their offices to look nicer? Who knows..maybe the question was answered in the article...
When I switched to OS X, it was because Apple made nice notebooks and could do LaTeX, either through LyX, or through a decent LaTeX editor. As it was I found TeXShop and my mind was made up.
When I told a Mac-using designer friend of mine, he was all to keen to help me switch, but was amused by my LaTeX requirement. When he told his older friends at work, they laughed. You see they all switched to Macs back in the early days so they could use desktop publishing software rather than typesetters like LaTeX.
When they heard I was switching to Mac to use a typesetter they thought it was the craziest thing they had heard in years.
Your gag perhaps should have been...
he's a mac user. shouldn't he use Quark?
While for all actions there is a moral or ethical component, in the case of economic regulation, ethics is fairly low on the list. Whether this should be the case is a different debate altogether.
The issue of "destroying" a company in the manner you have suggested is not an issue of moral behaviour. It is one of economic efficiency. Excessive market power reduces competition and thus efficiency and more importantly innovation.
We don't see the impact of Microsoft's monopoly in its full as yet. Microsoft products at present often compete with their own (please replace your NT4 systems with Win2k3..please).
But once we are all accessing software by subscription....no need to innovate then.
Good thing you haven't had to sit a spelling test for a while then isn't it. Remember, just because Rupert Murdoch's papers spell it "jail" does not make it so. Rupert just doesn't like the English and loves corrupting its language and bringing down its aristocracy.
The last I read, RMS did not object to the "selling" of software whatsoever - he used to sell emacs on magnetic tape for about $150 if I remember rightly.
Mandrake don't limit further redistribution, so I don't think there is any problem with what Mandrake are doing even from an RMS perspective.
Of course - I'm not RMS and his opinions may radically differ from mine ;)
Lots of people can say it...
Not many can do it.
It's the doing that matters.
What is most interesting about OSS is that it is a product with all the characteristics of a public good, yet it does not require Government action to sustain its development. Provided the prevailing political-legal institutions do not impede OSS development through over zealous IP laws etc, and the market continues to provide the necessary enabling infrastructure - OSS development continues.
This perhaps suggests that OSS is a positive externality of computer hardware manufacture and Internet connectivity - probably a question that warrants further investigation.
As to the issue of of non-rival, non-excludeable goods tending to become public goods, I wonder whether a different approach toward classifying software as a product is required. While proprietary software can be distributed as a public good, it cannot evolve as a public good. The critical factor about informational goods is that the information, or knowledge, must be current for the good to have value. Netscape Navigator 2 is to today's web surfer, what last years stock prices are to today's stock broker - of limited interest (except as time series data of course). Proprietary software distributed as a public good, loses its value as the software becomes dated.
OSS on the other hand can continue to evolve, thanks to the source code, which could be represented as knowledge as a secondary public good. As such, its value as an informational good can be retained as the product can be modified to suit more contemporary needs.
With that in mind, I'm not sure I agree that goods that fit a) and b) tend to become public goods, when the good in question is closed source software.
Having said all that - I have forgotten my train of thought and (again) have spent too much time on Slashdot ;)
All software meets the first two of these criteria, as do all digital goods. However, proprietary software is certainly produced within the market using traditional "for-profit" motives. By definition then, while proprietary software has the characteristics of a public good - it is not a public good.
The problem with public good theory, is that it was derived specifically as a theory of public expenditure and at a time when informational goods were not a subject of interest for economists or political economists. Private goods displaying the traits of non-excludeability and non-rival did not exist. As such public goods theorists were more concerned with services such as law enforcement and defense etc.
Second, the idea of non-excludeability is a bit more involved than you have suggested in your earlier post. For many public goods theorists, such as Samuelson, a non-excludeable good is not just one that is provided to all (OSS meets this criteria), but must be provided to all. Naval defense of an island does not just provide defense services to those living on the island, but those living on the island have no option but to benefit from the defense (unless they leave of course). They cannot voluntarily exclude themself. Software, OSS or otherwise, does allow individuals to exclude themself from the provision of software, by not installing it.
I also have some issues with the monopoly solution you allude to. I don't think copyright enforcement is necessarily about preventing the free-rider problem with public goods - it is certainly the case for preventing the free-rising of private goods.
Anyway, I could go on with some more issues, but I appear to be wasting too much time on Slashdot. Needless to say, I think that public good theory is not a particularly good fit for OSS. The theory needs significant modification because OSS has certain dependencies on market provision of enabling infrastructure (PCs, Internet connecitivity) that make its relationship to the market far more complex than public goods theory allows.
My personal view is that whoever did the Wikipedia article was getting a bit carried away and the definition contains some theoretical weaknesses.
Anyway, you have a nice day. Nice to read your thoughts.
I might make a dickhead of myself on Slashdot
Preview? Preview? Who needs preview?
Cool script. I'm gonna give it a go as soon as I get home. In fact when I do get home I'm gonna crank up the Linux box, call over the girlfriend, find all those directories with those pesky little jpeg images and then I'm gonna run the script.
<p><em>Then</em> I'm gonna say "Look at the Baby. Thumbnails is what that is - I'm making thumbnails and I ain't using no clicky clicky gooey thingy. No mouse and menus and fancy schmancy pictures for me. No. I am no windowsy, maccy loser! I am guru of the keyboard and behold my command line skills!"
<p>"Now look me in the eye and say you don't want no hot lovin' tonight!"
<p>Or maybe I won't.
I think you'll find that Labor and the DEMOCRATS combined can defeat this. There are only two Greens in the Senate (somewhat fortunate as they don't actually do much real work)
well, maybe he does now
The guy's a Mac user...he can get another girlfriend
Especially in Afghanistan. Those Taliban love the union of Church and State. Al Q'aida - they're also big fans. Not sure what they think of Pepsi and Apple though - or that fancy, shmancy so-called "rock and roll" music.
But so long as you're happy..
Two quick points
First - I am also a Westpac customer and I have not had any major problem with Westpac's on-line banking. When I first tried, Mozilla wouldn't render a number of links along the navigation sidebar down the left - that has now been fixed. I also find that a number of browsers (Safari at least) don't quite render the column widths correctly when viewing all your accounts. Slight inconveniences but still a workable system.
Second - the South Australian Government is not actively trying to pass a bill mandating that all government departments use open source software in preference to Microsoft, et al, where practical. Rather the Australian Democrats have put forward a Bill giving preference to OSS (i.e. use OSS unless OSS will not perform the task you want done properly). This is being driven by a South Australian parliamentarian (can't remember his name). At a federal level Australian Democrat's senator Brian Greig is pushing for something similar.
We will go way beyond rooms.
We will have wombats. Wombats are better than rooms because they crawl about eating things and can crush a dingoes head when it is threatened.
I want a computing experience that eats things and crushes heads.
It tends to install okay.
Gives you lots of GUI configuration help.
All in all it is a nice beginner distro. As you learn more you can move away from the GUI configuration and do it by hand. Then latter on, if you want to keep learning more you can start setting up the more expert distos like Slackware, of Linux from Scratch.
Whatever you decide to do, Mandrake is certainly nice - hell my sister and Mother in Law both manage to use it everyday, without problems.
Seppo is not an Aussi term - it's UK Cockney slang - as someone else pointed out it is "Septic Tank Yank" or Seppo