OK for opplications ( while StarOffice would not be my example of useful closed source app ) However, infrastructures (OS & widely used libraries ) should be as free as possible, since they would give too much power to their owner.
Erm. How is having a powerful owner a bad thing? A singular guiding mind can be a useful thing to have in a widget toolkit or a utility library. As much as many people on/. hate to admit it, MS' widgets have led to a greater number of quality applications than any open widget set has done.
Actually no. If a corporate IT department hacks The GIMP, the corporation owns those changes and passing it out within the corporation does not constitute distribution.
Err there are other reasons to put stuff under the BSD license. Protection from lawsuits is one. If you just released a program that said "This program is PD." and then it procedes to kill the family dog you still are liable. If you use something like the BSD license you are somewhat protected from inadvertant bugs.
Besides wasn't it Dick Stallman who tried several times (in a rather heavy handed manner) to change the name of all Linux distros to GNULinux distros? How ego stroking is that?
Not that this is particularily on topic or even friendly, but do you know what Beowulf is? It has nothing to do with the situation described in the post you are refering to. Beowulf is a non-starter as a rebuttal to that guys argument.
You would have done better to write this:
The reason those three apps suck so, is because they just suck or because some of the APIs they require are poorly implemented. Netscape is poorly written. Realplayer is probably both poorly written and the sound API in Linux is very ad-hoc. Acrobat read is just written with the expectation that certain functionality exists in the widget sets and a certain amount of reliability exists underneath them.
Actually they don't have to "feed... back to him" they just have to make them available. They could conceivably require you to come to them for the source code/patches. And then locate their offices in the Antarctic. And only distribute their source on paper take using a proprietary mechanism to read that tape which you can buy for a reasonable fee ($50,000K). At least they could last time I read the GPL. There are (were) lots of ways around the spirit of the GPL.
Also you can have a GPLed work that is actively being maintained and still be effectively proprietary. If for example I wanted to port the debian 'apt' (or whatever it's called) system to BarnBSD and did the work to accomplish this, made some diffs, sent them back to Debian. Debian could refuse to incorporate them into the "official" distribution of 'apt' and thus would require that I continually maintain my port independantly. If this were an undertaking of prohibitive cost then you can see how Debian can effectively make their program proprietary. Sure I could try and compete, yet they have the momentum, name recognition and perceived officialness that a competitor would have a difficult time competing with.
GPLed software certainly is owned. Without an owner then the copyright is void (or at least there is no one who can claim the rights granted by copyright law.) Without a copyright holder then the license is void. As a third party you can't pursue someone about a violation or perceived violation of the GPL. Even if you are one receiving the code/binary/whatever you can't do anything about it other than report the violation to the copyright holder. Then the copyright holder has to take whatever actions are necessary to enforce the lincense.
Second merely because someone can take something and go proprietary does not mean that that thing is solely proprietary. If it were legal to grab Linux and slap together a binary-only distro there would still be the other distros out there. Even to accomplish a defacto proprietaryness would require that the open work be of a lower quality than the private work. And there is nothing that stops Redhat and friends from making better and better distros with original code filling in the gaping cavities in usability that currently exist. Most distros do not completely release all of their works under the GPL. That's what set's them apart.
Finally, as the author of a creative work you have certain rights that no amount of licensing can change. You can relicense the code as you see fit when you see fit. You can do things that other people can't, for example you could make a binary only version with bugfixes, etc. if you so desired.
Color coding, while one technique, is not a particularily good one. Just taking successive b&w shots is sufficient to detect moving objects. Comparing this database to known charts would be exceptionally dumb, since for a lot of people the database is the known chart. The original surveyors would already have done anyway.
And there is something inherently wrong with killing? Let's get real here. The standard behavior in nature is to kill for defense or food. Not make treaties or just to let a stronger animal do as it will. Why should it be otherwise in human culture?
But rather than get moralistic and such, do you know that many roofer's use what is called a "nailgun" to drive nails. Guess what they use as the motive force: modified.22 shells. They don't have easy access to electricity and air compressors, so they use a literal gun to drive the nails. There are other uses of delivering a large amount of kinetic energy beyond just killing things.
Wish someone would put that phrase to rest. The truth of the matter is that if you don't know where the weaknesses are then you can't exploit them. You suddenly have to do a ton of probes looking for possibilities and thus you ring a lot of alarms to a watchful admin.
Someone trying to sell Linux to a security concious site would need to independantly get certified. You can't certify a particular program or OS or piece of hardware as B1/C2 certified. It requires complete validation of the whole package. Change the ethernet card you have to recertify the whole shebang.
You aren't automatically entitled to "get a copy" of anything. If you can't find a copy that was produced legally then you can't legally get a copy. That's all there is to it.
If Napster win the case then I could create a website that completely and 100% mirrored any website or portion thereof, and argue that I'm just providing a service. I mean I could be providing a service to remove bonedover.net's adds and instead replacing them with mine. I could be providing a service that allowed people to distribute binaries of GPL-ed programs with modifications for a fee. I could provide a service of following you and your sister anywhere and publicizing it on the net. I could provide a service whereby I allow people to request that I deliver toxic chemicals to your backyard. Cool. Go Napster!
Are you saying that we should protect the "right" of a company to try an make money to the exclusion of the rights of individuals?
Um do you know that "companies" aren't things? At the root of every company are individuals. Every single one. There exists zero companies that are not owned in one manner or another by an individual or group of individuals. Don't those individuals have rights? Don't they deserve to reap the benefits of the infrastructure they've built to provide their product? Shouldn't they be allowed to form an organization that streamlines the process of doing business?
So if I was to setup, maintain, advertise, etc. an ftp site that allowed people to distribute binaries of modified GPL software without the source, you'd have no problem with that? Especially if I made it easy for the individuals doing to modifying/distributing to conceal their identities and origins? I mean all I'd be doing is providing an extremely high latency network link.
30 years ago you would probably been screaming that taping TV shows on my VCR is theft. Well, the Supremes tend to be smart people (Thomas excluded) so they said that it's all fine.
That's a shitty analogy. Why? Three points: 1 - it is legal for you to record music off the radio. 2 - it is illegal for you to copy video cassettes (unless allowed to by the copyright holder.) 3 - it is illegal to distribute both recorded movies off TV and music off the radio.
The reason the RIAA and MPAA stopped fighting VCRs and such is because they convinced congress to pass a "tax" on blank media which get's kicked back to them. Thus they still make some money on all those pirates out there. And on all those legitimate users out there.
The thing is is that Napster is aiding/abetting the weanies who are stealing music via their software. If Napster required everybody to provide a verifiable name, address, etc. that would allow copyright holders to readily track down the offenders then I wouldn't see much of a problem with Napster at all. Let the individuals suffer and watch Napster loose any possibility of making money on the IPO.
If it's not sold or held in a firm copyright then you can't say it's theft.
After asking what a firm copyright is (one that has a hoard of lawyers behind it?) I want to point out that the law has specified what happens to copyright. If you write a book and then die it passes onto whomever you specified in your will. If you didn't specify then it goes to your decendants. If you don't have any decendants then it's public domain.
If you read a poem written by Poe and it's recorded you own the copyright on that recording. If the style you read the poem included a good amount of interpretation then you can even stop others from reading the poem in the same manner.
It's not just a matter of being out of print. It's a matter of being out of copyright. They aren't the same thing. The Grey Lensman books are out of print but still copyright. Just not being available doesn't make it ok to blindly copy and distribute a work.
I'm sure everybody knows this, but the reason stupiddot covers things like napster is because they generate an entire assload of hits. Maybe two assloads. That's all it's about. It's not about freedom. It's not about copyright law. It's not about Linux. It's not about freesoftware. It's about CommanderExploito getting paid.
Of course a dorm shouldn't take priority over a classroom. However an optimal campus network will allow anyone to do anything they need to do. The policing should be handled by the users themselves. They should make sure they don't fuck over the other people using the network. If you want to put the blame somewhere put it on the clueless morons who either can't write their own properly behaving software, or who choose to run software that doesn't properly behave. There should be no artificial limitations on what you can do with a network if it's an appropriate use.
Pretty sure it was a chinese officer. It was the same picture used in the Billy Joel video "We Didn't Start The Fire." But I may be mistaken, it's been a while...
Sorry but having a nice website and giving away stuff is not "pioneering technologies." See the keyword is technology. He may be some kind of musical pioneer (not that much of his stuff ever appeal to me), but he's not a technological pioneer. Arguing that he is is like arguing that Bill Clinton is some kind of political pioneer. The fact the Bill pioneered the art of perjury doesn't make him a political tactician.
...check out the Amazon customer reviews on Lt. Col. David Grossman's Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill.
You see anything funny about those reviews? Many of them are popping within just a few days (the first few days of this month actually.) And they each have one or two "votes" saying how wonderful they were. And then disagreeing reviews all have many negative votes against them. I wonder why. It's so sad when a feature that should help provide the word from other readers is being abused this way. Somebody ought to go smack Grossman and his publisher with a limp fish.
It's up to the parents to decide what their kid can and can't handle. Putting arbitrary ages on when certain things are acceptable is ludicrous. I've met 10 year olds who are more competent to play Quake and some 30 year olds I have met.
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Erm. How is having a powerful owner a bad thing? A singular guiding mind can be a useful thing to have in a widget toolkit or a utility library. As much as many people on
Actually no. If a corporate IT department hacks The GIMP, the corporation owns those changes and passing it out within the corporation does not constitute distribution.
Err there are other reasons to put stuff under the BSD license. Protection from lawsuits is one. If you just released a program that said "This program is PD." and then it procedes to kill the family dog you still are liable. If you use something like the BSD license you are somewhat protected from inadvertant bugs.
Besides wasn't it Dick Stallman who tried several times (in a rather heavy handed manner) to change the name of all Linux distros to GNULinux distros? How ego stroking is that?
You would have done better to write this:
Actually they don't have to "feed ... back to him" they just have to make them available. They could conceivably require you to come to them for the source code/patches. And then locate their offices in the Antarctic. And only distribute their source on paper take using a proprietary mechanism to read that tape which you can buy for a reasonable fee ($50,000K). At least they could last time I read the GPL. There are (were) lots of ways around the spirit of the GPL.
Also you can have a GPLed work that is actively being maintained and still be effectively proprietary. If for example I wanted to port the debian 'apt' (or whatever it's called) system to BarnBSD and did the work to accomplish this, made some diffs, sent them back to Debian. Debian could refuse to incorporate them into the "official" distribution of 'apt' and thus would require that I continually maintain my port independantly. If this were an undertaking of prohibitive cost then you can see how Debian can effectively make their program proprietary. Sure I could try and compete, yet they have the momentum, name recognition and perceived officialness that a competitor would have a difficult time competing with.
GPLed software certainly is owned. Without an owner then the copyright is void (or at least there is no one who can claim the rights granted by copyright law.) Without a copyright holder then the license is void. As a third party you can't pursue someone about a violation or perceived violation of the GPL. Even if you are one receiving the code/binary/whatever you can't do anything about it other than report the violation to the copyright holder. Then the copyright holder has to take whatever actions are necessary to enforce the lincense.
Second merely because someone can take something and go proprietary does not mean that that thing is solely proprietary. If it were legal to grab Linux and slap together a binary-only distro there would still be the other distros out there. Even to accomplish a defacto proprietaryness would require that the open work be of a lower quality than the private work. And there is nothing that stops Redhat and friends from making better and better distros with original code filling in the gaping cavities in usability that currently exist. Most distros do not completely release all of their works under the GPL. That's what set's them apart.
Finally, as the author of a creative work you have certain rights that no amount of licensing can change. You can relicense the code as you see fit when you see fit. You can do things that other people can't, for example you could make a binary only version with bugfixes, etc. if you so desired.
Color coding, while one technique, is not a particularily good one. Just taking successive b&w shots is sufficient to detect moving objects. Comparing this database to known charts would be exceptionally dumb, since for a lot of people the database is the known chart. The original surveyors would already have done anyway.
And there is something inherently wrong with killing? Let's get real here. The standard behavior in nature is to kill for defense or food. Not make treaties or just to let a stronger animal do as it will. Why should it be otherwise in human culture?
.22 shells. They don't have easy access to electricity and air compressors, so they use a literal gun to drive the nails. There are other uses of delivering a large amount of kinetic energy beyond just killing things.
But rather than get moralistic and such, do you know that many roofer's use what is called a "nailgun" to drive nails. Guess what they use as the motive force: modified
Wish someone would put that phrase to rest. The truth of the matter is that if you don't know where the weaknesses are then you can't exploit them. You suddenly have to do a ton of probes looking for possibilities and thus you ring a lot of alarms to a watchful admin.
Someone trying to sell Linux to a security concious site would need to independantly get certified. You can't certify a particular program or OS or piece of hardware as B1/C2 certified. It requires complete validation of the whole package. Change the ethernet card you have to recertify the whole shebang.
If the GPLed XFS is from SGI then SGI can relicense it under any terms they want. Anyone stupid enough to buy it though would just be an idiot.
You aren't automatically entitled to "get a copy" of anything. If you can't find a copy that was produced legally then you can't legally get a copy. That's all there is to it.
If Napster win the case then I could create a website that completely and 100% mirrored any website or portion thereof, and argue that I'm just providing a service. I mean I could be providing a service to remove bonedover.net's adds and instead replacing them with mine. I could be providing a service that allowed people to distribute binaries of GPL-ed programs with modifications for a fee. I could provide a service of following you and your sister anywhere and publicizing it on the net. I could provide a service whereby I allow people to request that I deliver toxic chemicals to your backyard. Cool. Go Napster!
Are you saying that we should protect the "right" of a company to try an make money to the exclusion of the rights of individuals?
Um do you know that "companies" aren't things? At the root of every company are individuals. Every single one. There exists zero companies that are not owned in one manner or another by an individual or group of individuals. Don't those individuals have rights? Don't they deserve to reap the benefits of the infrastructure they've built to provide their product? Shouldn't they be allowed to form an organization that streamlines the process of doing business?
So if I was to setup, maintain, advertise, etc. an ftp site that allowed people to distribute binaries of modified GPL software without the source, you'd have no problem with that? Especially if I made it easy for the individuals doing to modifying/distributing to conceal their identities and origins? I mean all I'd be doing is providing an extremely high latency network link.
30 years ago you would probably been screaming that taping TV shows on my VCR is theft. Well, the Supremes tend to be smart people (Thomas excluded) so they said that it's all fine.
That's a shitty analogy. Why? Three points: 1 - it is legal for you to record music off the radio. 2 - it is illegal for you to copy video cassettes (unless allowed to by the copyright holder.) 3 - it is illegal to distribute both recorded movies off TV and music off the radio.
The reason the RIAA and MPAA stopped fighting VCRs and such is because they convinced congress to pass a "tax" on blank media which get's kicked back to them. Thus they still make some money on all those pirates out there. And on all those legitimate users out there.
The thing is is that Napster is aiding/abetting the weanies who are stealing music via their software. If Napster required everybody to provide a verifiable name, address, etc. that would allow copyright holders to readily track down the offenders then I wouldn't see much of a problem with Napster at all. Let the individuals suffer and watch Napster loose any possibility of making money on the IPO.
If it's not sold or held in a firm copyright then you can't say it's theft.
After asking what a firm copyright is (one that has a hoard of lawyers behind it?) I want to point out that the law has specified what happens to copyright. If you write a book and then die it passes onto whomever you specified in your will. If you didn't specify then it goes to your decendants. If you don't have any decendants then it's public domain.
If you read a poem written by Poe and it's recorded you own the copyright on that recording. If the style you read the poem included a good amount of interpretation then you can even stop others from reading the poem in the same manner.
It's not just a matter of being out of print. It's a matter of being out of copyright. They aren't the same thing. The Grey Lensman books are out of print but still copyright. Just not being available doesn't make it ok to blindly copy and distribute a work.
I'm sure everybody knows this, but the reason stupiddot covers things like napster is because they generate an entire assload of hits. Maybe two assloads. That's all it's about. It's not about freedom. It's not about copyright law. It's not about Linux. It's not about freesoftware. It's about CommanderExploito getting paid.
Of course a dorm shouldn't take priority over a classroom. However an optimal campus network will allow anyone to do anything they need to do. The policing should be handled by the users themselves. They should make sure they don't fuck over the other people using the network. If you want to put the blame somewhere put it on the clueless morons who either can't write their own properly behaving software, or who choose to run software that doesn't properly behave. There should be no artificial limitations on what you can do with a network if it's an appropriate use.
Pretty sure it was a chinese officer. It was the same picture used in the Billy Joel video "We Didn't Start The Fire." But I may be mistaken, it's been a while...
Sorry but having a nice website and giving away stuff is not "pioneering technologies." See the keyword is technology. He may be some kind of musical pioneer (not that much of his stuff ever appeal to me), but he's not a technological pioneer. Arguing that he is is like arguing that Bill Clinton is some kind of political pioneer. The fact the Bill pioneered the art of perjury doesn't make him a political tactician.
...check out the Amazon customer reviews on Lt. Col. David Grossman's Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill.
You see anything funny about those reviews? Many of them are popping within just a few days (the first few days of this month actually.) And they each have one or two "votes" saying how wonderful they were. And then disagreeing reviews all have many negative votes against them. I wonder why. It's so sad when a feature that should help provide the word from other readers is being abused this way. Somebody ought to go smack Grossman and his publisher with a limp fish.
It's up to the parents to decide what their kid can and can't handle. Putting arbitrary ages on when certain things are acceptable is ludicrous. I've met 10 year olds who are more competent to play Quake and some 30 year olds I have met.