Linux is licensed under GPL v2. In order to move to GPL v3, v4, v99 etc, EVERY SINGLE CONTRIBUTOR must accept this. Practically impossible.
Yeah but that is not the reason Linus is giving. He doesn't like it (and he mentions that bizarre private key issue as a reason for that), and so he doesn't even get to the point where he starts wondering whether it would be practically possible to change licenses. At least that's the way I read his post.
GPLv3 hasn't even been released yet. The public discussion on what it will be
like only started a few days ago. And yet Linus seems to be categorically certain
that he won't even consider using that license? There must be a lot of bad
feelings between him and the FSF (not that I couldn't understand this from
some of the recent events, but I always thought Linus was a very
diplomatic and friendly character who would not be easily offended).
What is that thing about developers having to turn over their private keys?
I don't think anything that stupid is even considered for GPLv3.
I wish there would be a rational and friendly discussion. Is that too much?
Have we come thus far?
w3schools is most definitly not pro microsoft. Wherever did you get a silly idea like that?
"Pro-Microsoft" doesn't mean "Microsoft-only". I'm referring to a Microsoft-leaning bias on their site, which is always difficult to pin down to any single statement, but here's a number of observations:
w3schools features many Microsoft technologies very prominently, such as VBScript,.NET, ASP.
While they do feature server-side technology such as ASP, they don't mention any non-Microsoft server-side technology, with the exception of PHP. No mention that Java even exists.
Here's the first sentence of the VBScript tutorial: When a VBScript is inserted into a HTML document, the Internet browser will read the HTML and interpret the VBScript. Yes, right: the Internet browser. No mention that they are talking about IE, let alone that IE is not the only browser on the planet. There surely are other areas on the site, even some that are Firefox-only. But when it's Firefox-only, that always seems to be mentioned very prominently.
Their "product spotlights", shown in the same layout as their tutorials, exclusively feature.NET and ASP related products. (I haven't seen any others yet.)
In the introduction to their browser statistics, they seem to be quite reluctant to admit that Firefox is a non-negligible factor nowadays. They still suggest that developers should write their sites for Internet Explorer because most people use it.
I'm not saying that they are "evil" because of all that. But a Microsoft-leaning bias is undeniable if you ask me.
There's
a famous
statistic on browser usage at w3schools.com, which is a decidedly
pro-Microsoft site. They have Firefox at close to 25% in recent
months, and they were quick to add a comment that this is probably not
representative, because w3schools visitors are likely quite interested
in the technology and likely to try out alternatives to the browser
that comes installed with their operating system. Interesting,
though, that most of those who do try it out seem to stick with
it...
Could this be broadly (mis)interpreted to mean that you can't license a cryptography program under the GPL?
No, I don't think so, because they follow that statement with an explanation of how it should be understood:
No covered work constitutes part of an effective technological protection
measure: that is to say, distribution of a covered work as part of a system
to generate or access certain data constitutes general permission at least
for development, distribution and use, under this License, of other
software capable of accessing the same data.
So you can license cryptography programs under it all you want, it's just that it won't be illegal per se to write a program that breaks that encryption.
I like the anti-DRM idea very much. From the draft:
No covered work constitutes part of an effective technological protection
measure: that is to say, distribution of a covered work as part of a system
to generate or access certain data constitutes general permission at least
for development, distribution and use, under this License, of other
software capable of accessing the same data.
To me, that sounds like a breathtakingly simple way to undermine the whole purpose of the DMCA and DRM, simply by saying: Software under this license can never be a protection device that people are not allowed to circumvent. Almost as simple and elegant as the idea of copyleft itself. I'm very impressed.
The slashdot summary does not quite get the proportions right. Yes,
the v3 draft does refine how the GPL deals with patents, but that is
only one of many issues in this draft. (I've compiled the list below
from cursory reading of the new license and the rationale that
accompanies it, before it was slashdotted.)
There is a proposal in it that would discourage or disable the use of
GPL software for DRM, by stating that software under the new GPL cannot
constitute an "effective technological protection measure". Thus
it would always be possible for other programs to get at the same
data without falling under the DMCA.
When it comes to patents, the draft is actually not very
aggressive about them. There is no general patent retaliation clause
as in some other licenses, because the FSF believes that disallowing
an offender to use any free software would not be too much of
a deterrent for some.
Compatibility between the new GPL and other free software licenses
will generally be better.
The idea of what constitutes source code and object code is
refined. This, I think, is mostly intended to deal with the case when
software is used over the web, rather than downloaded and installed.
Good numbers. Elsewhere in this thread, I have posted similar calculations, assuming lower efficiency solar cells and not necessarily placing them right at the equator. The needed area would then be about twice the size of Germany, but less than that of Nigeria or Sudan, for instance.
So we need a photovoltaic array about the size of Pennsylvania (174 x 309 miles) at the Equator to produce 314 TWH/day.
Do you think that may have other environmental effects?
Probably less so than all of that CO2 we are blowing into the atmosphere right now, don't you think? Realistically, if we would ever switch over to solar energy on a large scale, nobody in their right mind would concentrate all those cells in a single area. More likely, solar farmland would spruce up all over the place, favouring tropical locations of course. Interesting perspectives for the African continent.
Wikipedia has the interesting figure that about 1 percent of today's farmland would have to be used for solar energy harvesting (and this is probably just about equivalent to the numbers you and I came up with). That sounds very doable to me, and very low-impact on global climate.
The beauty of fossil fuels is that the end product of thousands of years of solar radiation and natural biological and geological processes have concentrated that solar energy in a convenient product. Is it any surprise that it's harder to replicate the whole process ourselves?
It surely isn't. We needn't replicate that whole process, though. Rather than trying to concentrate the energy into a convenient, highly-concentrated product, we can tap the energy directly. This is more difficult than just burning fossil fuels, correct. But fossil fuels are a finite resource. For a civilization entering the industrialized state, fossil fuels can only be a kind of kick-starter until non-depletable long-term energy sources can be exploited.
Interestingly, it has been commented that if we were to pay for the actual amount of energy that went into producing one gallon of petroleum, it would have to cost a million dollars.
See grid energy storage for a quick survey of the current state of play.
But you are saying that the hard numbers and economic analysis that has already been done is wrong, because your intuition says so!
No such analysis has been posted in this thread, only the rather vague statement that it's not economically feasible (to sustain all of our energy needs from solar energy alone). I have argued, based on intuition, that it is feasible. No agreement on this, so the only solution would be to turn to exact numbers.
Here are some: An area of about 750,000 km^2 covered with todays photovoltaic cells (10% efficient) would be enough to cover total world energy consumption. (Which, in 1998, was 379.7 Quad BTU, average solar energy input is 4.2 kWh/m^2/d.)
That area would be about twice the size of Germany. Less than the size of Nigeria or Sudan.
One square meter of photovoltaic cells costs about $1000 today (actually, $300-$700 but let's use easy numbers). So that would be an upper bound of $750 trillion to pay for those cells. Obviously, the price for solar cells would go down dramatically if such mass production were ever to be attempted. For comparison, since the 1950s, nuclear energy was subsidized by about $0.5-1 trillion.
To me, that project seems well within reach of human civilization.
It is literally irrelevant how much energy the sun sends down to us. The only useful metric is how much of that energy we can convert to useful form at a particular cost.
When there is a huge overabundance of available energy, using it only requires moderately efficient technology. That should definitely factor into the cost equation.
And to rephrase my statement yet again: If a civilization is literally inundated with a certain kind of energy, but cannot find an economically viable way to make use of it, something must be wrong with that civilization's economics. In other words, since I think our economy is essentially a reasonable system, I don't believe it's economically impossible for us to live completely off solar energy (which includes wind power, hydroelectrics, and several other forms of almost-direct solar energy).
That's an intuitive statement, yes. We are not talking hard numbers in this thread. That would have to be left to scientific papers, and economic analysis.
The difficulty is converting this energy into a form we can use. If something gives 100 joules of energy, and we can only convert that to 10 joules of energy we can make use of, we'd be better off going with something that gives 50 joules that we can convert to 25 joules of useful energy.
You definitely should look up the real numbers some time. You're in for many pleasant surprises.
Even if photovoltaics (or another direct solar energy harvester) were only 10% efficient, and another source 50% efficient, that's by far offset by the actual amount of energy that's coming in. My favourite one: the amount of energy stored in all of the known fossil fuel reserves on earth equals 20 days of sunshine.
4. Solar cells have a relativly short life span.
5. Since they are packed with heavy metals they are expensive and energy consuming to recycle.
Photovoltaics are not the only option to harvest solar energy. I don't buy the argument that they are, in principle, economically or ecologically infeasible, but even if they were, other forms of solar energy use could be developed. Heck, we have them already in the form of hydroelectricity and wind power (see my other post). And let me repeat it: if it was economically infeasible for us to tap an energy stream that hits us every single second with several thousands of times more energy than we could possibly use, something would be seriously wrong with economics.
1. It's way, way more expensive than anything we're currently using, including wind power. That's why wind farms have been going up all over the place, not solar arrays.
Almost all so-called "renewable energy sources" are pretty direct transformations of solar energy, much more direct than fossil fuels. Wind power is solar power (the atmosphere being used as a big turbine, as it were). Hydroelectricity is solar power (the sun causing water to vaporize, and we harness the process of letting it flow down to lower levels again). Even if photovoltaics or other direct solar energy harvesters are quite expensive nowadays, I don't buy the argument that it's economically impossible to tap the abundant amount of energy that is thrown at us every second. If economics didn't allow that, there would be something seriously wrong with economics.
2. We can't store energy cheaply enough, and on a large enough scale, to run an electricity grid.
Sources? Numbers to back that up? I don't see how it should be impossible to generate electricity at day time and store it until night time, especially if you have much more energy than you need to begin with. Plus, as I said, wind power and hydroelectricity have no daylight constraint and are just solar energy in another form.
As to your final point about China and India, using nuclear power as a temporary measure until we can get our energy production lined up with physical realities could well be an option. But it certainly isn't a sensible solution for much of the planet's future.
Realistically, how much of our current power can we expect to be able to get out of these PC alternatives of yours? That and the costs associated with them are important factors. The issue is preserving our way of life, which, unfortunately will require lots of energy. The prospect of running a world with 6 billion inhabitants on wind power seems a bit unrealistic to me.
The sun delivers several thousand times more energy to the earth in every second than we are currently using. Increasing use of hydroelectricity, wind power, and direct solar power (e.g. photovoltaics) are all means of making more use of that non-depletable energy source.
Burning or fissioning anything that we have down here on earth is, by comparison, very short-sighted.
As to how quick we might switch over to those "alternative energy sources", you have to keep in mind that nuclear energy was heavily subsidized when it was initially developed, and nowhere near as much money has been put into the research of the other energy sources.
It's a question of priorities, and lining up your priorities with physical realities.
Relying on nuclear power in the light of dwindling fossil fuel reserves is a very short-sighted approach. At the current rate of consumption, there is only enough Uranium on the planet for the next 50 years -- somewhat more if you start using more expensive, lower-quality reserves. So the problem is really just shifted into the future by a very small number of years, compared to human history or the history of the planet as a whole.
At the same time, we have an energy source right in our vicinity which is, for all practical purposes, non-depletable and delivers several thousand times more energy to our planet in every second than we are currently using. It would be the most logical thing to switch everything over to that energy source as quickly as possible -- since before long, we'll have to do that anyway.
Intel was very reluctant initially to release the Centrino wireless specs. But after a lot of customer lobbying, petitions and what not, they got one of their best programmers to work full time on producing a free, open source, sourceforge-hosted driver for their cards. Not bad.
They did keep most of the centrino-internals secret in the firmware, which you have to download separately, but still, I think some key people inside Intel (pun intended) have understood the relevance of the Linux community in their market.
Maybe I should spend some time listening to some top-40 radios. But then again, maybe not.
You might wanna check out last.fm instead. Not exactly to get more top-40-ish in your musical taste, but to find all sorts of cool music you would never come across otherwise. Just type the names of those bands you don't know into their interface, and listen to some preview tracks. Or let them analyze your listening habits and suggest music to you. They even give you your own personalized radio station.
No, I'm not affiliated with them, just an amazed user for a couple of weeks now.
They should do so by offering products, maybe even whitepapers, but calling it a "standard" from the beginning is just the kind of attitude that will ultimately bring such a company down.
This is what I was questioning.
I grant you they are not calling it a "standard". That was an inference I made from their way of presenting it. I stand by my suspicion that they expect everybody to follow suit, without them feeling a need to cooperate with other partners within the industry.
It doesn't "look like a standard", it looks like a specification, and it's one that Microsoft has stated that they are going to follow. Good for them for at least publishing it for the world to see.
Beg to differ. "This page offers the latest news and advice for RSS developers," if you want it in a nutshell. Not just they are going to follow it; they suggest very strongly that this is how things are going to be in the future.
Maybe I missed something...but, what the hell are you talking about? RSS is already a standard, and Microsoft is publishing an "extension," as they clearly state.
That is correct, they are calling it an "extension". But still, a "Microsoft Extension Specification" (which is the full term they use on the web site) sounds a whole lot different than a "Microsoft RFC" or a "Microsoft Extension Draft" or a "Microsoft Proposal". As I said in another post, this is very much a matter of style. But look to IBM for an example of a mega-player who's much more developed in its use of correct style in these matters.
Maybe that's why they call them "extensions", not "standards"...
That's a valid point, and of course we are talking matters of style here. But if you look at the page, it says: This page offers the latest news and advice for RSS developers. and then it goes on to list several "Microsoft... Extensions Specifications". No, they are not calling them "standards", yes, they are publishing them as such. At least that's how it appears to me. Granted, the original developer's documents sound a lot more down-to-earth technical, with a genuine interest in the matter, but given the way this is displayed by the corporate machine it's just not the kind of thing I would like to start using.
Yeah, because standards that are developed from the beginning by a commitee are SOOOOO better compared to de facto standards. Now let me resume coding in ADA.
I don't think Ada is a good example for a poorly designed standard, but that's a different matter. I'm not saying standards should be designed-by-comittee up-front. If a company has the market power to set a de-facto standard, so be it. They should do so by offering products, maybe even whitepapers, but calling it a "standard" from the beginning is just the kind of attitude that will ultimately bring such a company down.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah but that is not the reason Linus is giving. He doesn't like it (and he mentions that bizarre private key issue as a reason for that), and so he doesn't even get to the point where he starts wondering whether it would be practically possible to change licenses. At least that's the way I read his post.
What is that thing about developers having to turn over their private keys? I don't think anything that stupid is even considered for GPLv3.
I wish there would be a rational and friendly discussion. Is that too much? Have we come thus far?
"Pro-Microsoft" doesn't mean "Microsoft-only". I'm referring to a Microsoft-leaning bias on their site, which is always difficult to pin down to any single statement, but here's a number of observations:
I'm not saying that they are "evil" because of all that. But a Microsoft-leaning bias is undeniable if you ask me.
There's a famous statistic on browser usage at w3schools.com, which is a decidedly pro-Microsoft site. They have Firefox at close to 25% in recent months, and they were quick to add a comment that this is probably not representative, because w3schools visitors are likely quite interested in the technology and likely to try out alternatives to the browser that comes installed with their operating system. Interesting, though, that most of those who do try it out seem to stick with it...
No, I don't think so, because they follow that statement with an explanation of how it should be understood:
So you can license cryptography programs under it all you want, it's just that it won't be illegal per se to write a program that breaks that encryption.
To me, that sounds like a breathtakingly simple way to undermine the whole purpose of the DMCA and DRM, simply by saying: Software under this license can never be a protection device that people are not allowed to circumvent. Almost as simple and elegant as the idea of copyleft itself. I'm very impressed.
Probably less so than all of that CO2 we are blowing into the atmosphere right now, don't you think? Realistically, if we would ever switch over to solar energy on a large scale, nobody in their right mind would concentrate all those cells in a single area. More likely, solar farmland would spruce up all over the place, favouring tropical locations of course. Interesting perspectives for the African continent.
Wikipedia has the interesting figure that about 1 percent of today's farmland would have to be used for solar energy harvesting (and this is probably just about equivalent to the numbers you and I came up with). That sounds very doable to me, and very low-impact on global climate.
It surely isn't. We needn't replicate that whole process, though. Rather than trying to concentrate the energy into a convenient, highly-concentrated product, we can tap the energy directly. This is more difficult than just burning fossil fuels, correct. But fossil fuels are a finite resource. For a civilization entering the industrialized state, fossil fuels can only be a kind of kick-starter until non-depletable long-term energy sources can be exploited.
Interestingly, it has been commented that if we were to pay for the actual amount of energy that went into producing one gallon of petroleum, it would have to cost a million dollars.
Thanks for that hint.
No such analysis has been posted in this thread, only the rather vague statement that it's not economically feasible (to sustain all of our energy needs from solar energy alone). I have argued, based on intuition, that it is feasible. No agreement on this, so the only solution would be to turn to exact numbers.
Here are some: An area of about 750,000 km^2 covered with todays photovoltaic cells (10% efficient) would be enough to cover total world energy consumption. (Which, in 1998, was 379.7 Quad BTU, average solar energy input is 4.2 kWh/m^2/d.)
That area would be about twice the size of Germany. Less than the size of Nigeria or Sudan.
One square meter of photovoltaic cells costs about $1000 today (actually, $300-$700 but let's use easy numbers). So that would be an upper bound of $750 trillion to pay for those cells. Obviously, the price for solar cells would go down dramatically if such mass production were ever to be attempted. For comparison, since the 1950s, nuclear energy was subsidized by about $0.5-1 trillion.
To me, that project seems well within reach of human civilization.
When there is a huge overabundance of available energy, using it only requires moderately efficient technology. That should definitely factor into the cost equation.
And to rephrase my statement yet again: If a civilization is literally inundated with a certain kind of energy, but cannot find an economically viable way to make use of it, something must be wrong with that civilization's economics. In other words, since I think our economy is essentially a reasonable system, I don't believe it's economically impossible for us to live completely off solar energy (which includes wind power, hydroelectrics, and several other forms of almost-direct solar energy).
That's an intuitive statement, yes. We are not talking hard numbers in this thread. That would have to be left to scientific papers, and economic analysis.
It's damn hard not to see it.
You definitely should look up the real numbers some time. You're in for many pleasant surprises.
Even if photovoltaics (or another direct solar energy harvester) were only 10% efficient, and another source 50% efficient, that's by far offset by the actual amount of energy that's coming in. My favourite one: the amount of energy stored in all of the known fossil fuel reserves on earth equals 20 days of sunshine.
Photovoltaics are not the only option to harvest solar energy. I don't buy the argument that they are, in principle, economically or ecologically infeasible, but even if they were, other forms of solar energy use could be developed. Heck, we have them already in the form of hydroelectricity and wind power (see my other post). And let me repeat it: if it was economically infeasible for us to tap an energy stream that hits us every single second with several thousands of times more energy than we could possibly use, something would be seriously wrong with economics.
Almost all so-called "renewable energy sources" are pretty direct transformations of solar energy, much more direct than fossil fuels. Wind power is solar power (the atmosphere being used as a big turbine, as it were). Hydroelectricity is solar power (the sun causing water to vaporize, and we harness the process of letting it flow down to lower levels again). Even if photovoltaics or other direct solar energy harvesters are quite expensive nowadays, I don't buy the argument that it's economically impossible to tap the abundant amount of energy that is thrown at us every second. If economics didn't allow that, there would be something seriously wrong with economics.
Sources? Numbers to back that up? I don't see how it should be impossible to generate electricity at day time and store it until night time, especially if you have much more energy than you need to begin with. Plus, as I said, wind power and hydroelectricity have no daylight constraint and are just solar energy in another form.
As to your final point about China and India, using nuclear power as a temporary measure until we can get our energy production lined up with physical realities could well be an option. But it certainly isn't a sensible solution for much of the planet's future.
The sun delivers several thousand times more energy to the earth in every second than we are currently using. Increasing use of hydroelectricity, wind power, and direct solar power (e.g. photovoltaics) are all means of making more use of that non-depletable energy source.
Burning or fissioning anything that we have down here on earth is, by comparison, very short-sighted.
As to how quick we might switch over to those "alternative energy sources", you have to keep in mind that nuclear energy was heavily subsidized when it was initially developed, and nowhere near as much money has been put into the research of the other energy sources.
It's a question of priorities, and lining up your priorities with physical realities.
At the same time, we have an energy source right in our vicinity which is, for all practical purposes, non-depletable and delivers several thousand times more energy to our planet in every second than we are currently using. It would be the most logical thing to switch everything over to that energy source as quickly as possible -- since before long, we'll have to do that anyway.
Intel was very reluctant initially to release the Centrino wireless specs. But after a lot of customer lobbying, petitions and what not, they got one of their best programmers to work full time on producing a free, open source, sourceforge-hosted driver for their cards. Not bad.
They did keep most of the centrino-internals secret in the firmware, which you have to download separately, but still, I think some key people inside Intel (pun intended) have understood the relevance of the Linux community in their market.
You might wanna check out last.fm instead. Not exactly to get more top-40-ish in your musical taste, but to find all sorts of cool music you would never come across otherwise. Just type the names of those bands you don't know into their interface, and listen to some preview tracks. Or let them analyze your listening habits and suggest music to you. They even give you your own personalized radio station.
No, I'm not affiliated with them, just an amazed user for a couple of weeks now.
And to think that only yesterday, there was a slashdot story wondering whether the EFF had outlived its usefulness... So there's your answer, I guess.
I grant you they are not calling it a "standard". That was an inference I made from their way of presenting it. I stand by my suspicion that they expect everybody to follow suit, without them feeling a need to cooperate with other partners within the industry.
Beg to differ. "This page offers the latest news and advice for RSS developers," if you want it in a nutshell. Not just they are going to follow it; they suggest very strongly that this is how things are going to be in the future.
I don't like this. That's what I said.
That is correct, they are calling it an "extension". But still, a "Microsoft Extension Specification" (which is the full term they use on the web site) sounds a whole lot different than a "Microsoft RFC" or a "Microsoft Extension Draft" or a "Microsoft Proposal". As I said in another post, this is very much a matter of style. But look to IBM for an example of a mega-player who's much more developed in its use of correct style in these matters.
That's a valid point, and of course we are talking matters of style here. But if you look at the page, it says: This page offers the latest news and advice for RSS developers. and then it goes on to list several "Microsoft ... Extensions Specifications". No, they are not calling them "standards", yes, they are publishing them as such. At least that's how it appears to me. Granted, the original developer's documents sound a lot more down-to-earth technical, with a genuine interest in the matter, but given the way this is displayed by the corporate machine it's just not the kind of thing I would like to start using.
I don't think Ada is a good example for a poorly designed standard, but that's a different matter. I'm not saying standards should be designed-by-comittee up-front. If a company has the market power to set a de-facto standard, so be it. They should do so by offering products, maybe even whitepapers, but calling it a "standard" from the beginning is just the kind of attitude that will ultimately bring such a company down.