So by this logic, throwing every piece of functionality everyone might want into an Apple product is, and then releasing a steaming pile of turd where nothing quite works right is more user friendly?
Of course not, in exact the same way as the lack of something isn't automatically good or user friendly. If you really believe what you said above, then you should also agree with my previous sentence.
Now look at what the grandparent wrote. Tethering and wifi scanning are instantly dismissed as "geeky" even though tethering is a widely wanted function that can be invisible until you try to use it, and scanning is an entirely normal thing to do when using wifi and pretty much comes with the technology. He couldn't find a reply for the porn part though, so he just silently skipped it instead of either admitting that I might have a point, or providing a rebuttal.
You like your N900. That's fabulous for you.
You like your iPhone. That's fabulous for you. I personally hate (insert the rest here)
Let's make a deal: I won't tell you that you don't need anything but a hammer to do home improvements if you'll agree to not tell me all I need is a ratchet set and screwdriver. Sound good?
No deal. This is the Internet. I accept that you may say whatever you wish. Accept that I may reply as I wish, and you'll be happier.
Yes, I know. Every lack of anything in an Apple product is an user friendly feature. If it can't do it, then you didn't need it anyway. If it's added later, then it's a sign of Apple's awesomeness.
If you don't believe me, just search the past apple discussions on slashdot, back when there was no store, and look at all the people talking about how it's not needed anyway, and how web apps will fulfill everybody's needs.
I'd bet that the people currently talking about how there's no need for multitasking will forget they ever said that the moment Apple releases a phone that can. I remember quite well that back in the OS 9 days it also was intuitive as heck, and things like the need to manually set the amount of memory an application could use was something that made perfect sense. The 1 button mice were also an user friendly feature, right until they started shipping normal ones.
Unless you jailbreak. So basically technical users can do all the technical things they want, while non-technical users get an easier to use platform.
I do not like this kind of solution. Why would I want to give money to a company that doesn't want me to do what I want with a device I paid for? It's stupid to pay somebody who is acting against your interests.
I consider this to be a very temporary solution at best. I might be willing to do it, but only if no alternative is available. Since the N900 exists, I have no reason to consider buying an iPhone.
But hey, I can understand you N900 users not wanting users to have a choice of something they can easily understand how to use, so that you can continue to feel superior to everyone.
Heh, that's a funny thing to say.
It's not that I don't want you to have a choice. I'm just giving some friendly advice, based on past experiences. Buy it all you want if you like, but don't complain if you end up running into the limitations one day.
The thing is "what I want" is different for different people.
On the n900, if you want to run sendmail on it, sure, you can. If you don't want to, you don't have to. It doesn't have to be something as geeky as running sendmail on it, though. Maybe what I want is porn or tethering, or scanning for wifi networks.
On the iPhone what you can do is limited to what Apple thinks users should be doing, and that list keeps shrinking.
is this an admission by Microsoft that HP-UX is(somehow) hanging on at the high end, despite HP's every attempt to mismanage it
Doubt it. I don't think Microsoft would give up if there was competition to drive out. They'd do like with the Xbox and keep throwing money at it until it worked. I take it this means that even if they had the marketshare, there would be no (or not enough) profit in it.
Learning Windows as in basic usage and administration is easy. Learning the basics for Linux is quite easy too.
Actual deep knowledge of Active Directory, MSSQL, Exchange, etc is the Windows equivalent of a competent Linux admin, and those people want quite a lot of money as well. True, if you want a monkey that reformats boxes and replaces broken hardware and helps the users a bit, then they can probably be found cheaper for Windows. But that's not who you want to maintain your business critical Oracle server. Actually competent admins with knowledge of the details, good understanding of databases, and especially people like Oracle DBAs aren't going to be cheap, no matter the OS.
There's nothing that easy about MS technologies. They're superficially easy, sure. But there's quite a lot underneath that.
That sounds fine to me, so long you pay your own medical expenses, as well the expenses of whoever/whatever you happen to hit if you fly out of the windshield. After all, according to your own logic, other people shouldn't be paying for you either.
With printf undeclared, it's assumed to be a function that takes an int argument, and returns int. It just happens to work on your machine, but on a 64 bit box it would likely crash, because on AMD64 int is still 32 bits, but a char* is 64 bit.
I've just finished debugging precisely this problem in a piece of software over the weekend, btw.
That is my view on FOSS as well. There is no point in trying to make sure that the person who uses your code is going to contribute back exactly the fair amount. In the FOSS community we should all be friends, I give something, you give something, and somebody else gives something else. As I stated earlier, If I create something useful to you and vice versa, we have both become richer for it - regardless of whether your contribution is on the exact same project I am working on. And this also works in chains where e.g. A helps B, B helps C, C helps A.
Well, I've got a different outlook here. For me friendship is a 1 to 1 thing, not 1 to group. So like you said earlier, "you already have established that the relationship is going to be reciprocal", and the GPL is my way to perform this.
Also IMO friendship isn't something you try, it's something that is, meaning it's just a label you can start applying once the whole reciprocity thing happens.
I contend that cases 1 and 2.2.2 are by far the most common cases - there are exceptions, but in my view they are so rare that it doesn't help to worry about them. Furthermore - you left out a very important case:
I disagree somewhat, IMO 1 is difficult, and happens very rarely under the BSD, and the most common results are 2.2.2 for both GPL and BSD.
Why? Because contributing takes effort. You can't just tar the source tree up, drop it in the project's -dev mail list and be done with that. I've only heard of that working once. Generally the bigger the project you contribute to, the stricter are the requirements for acceptance. Things rarely get into the kernel on the first try.
If you're in a company you have two main problems:
1. You don't own the code you write, your employer does. You can't release it neither under the BSD or the GPL without prior authorization. So if you want to release anything, you have to convince your employer why.
With the GPL arguments in favor of it are "we have to" (license mandates it), "it's more convenient that way" (maintenance) and "we intended to in the first place" (intentional contribution to the project). A legal obligation is a legal obligation and easy to understand. Hopefully agreed to before work started, though. Problems include the whole "virality" thing.
With the BSD arguments in favor lose the "we have to" part. Problems include your competitors getting all your improvements for free, building upon them, and not returning the favor. So if you release something that's almost perfect doing 95% of the work, somebody else polishes up the remaining 5% and makes a lot of money, that's kind of annoying.
2. You don't decide how to use your time, your employer does. You can't spend a few days polishing the code for contribution without authorization. Again you need to convince your employer. Reasons work out pretty much the same as in the previous case.
This is of course optional in both cases, but you'll need to do it if you really want to contribute, as opposed to satisfying the GPL obligation.
From my own work experience I find that even if releasing changes is possible it often won't happen unless required by the license. You need to have the talk with the boss, the boss has to talk with their boss, time has to be spent on cleanup and packaging and so on. This easily takes days, and usually there's plenty other things to do and a deadline is looming. And for many companies the maintenance argument isn't persuasive because they're doing a one time thing. Once done it's done, and any changes are only made to the shipped version.
1.2 - The potential contributor (code/money/whatever) is scared of the GPL and doesn't even bother to check for other options. He might have been willing to contribute (parts of) his code back or pay money, but he is afraid of the viral GPL license. I have personally seen this happening at my workplace and also on other projects which I know about throu
If such a person downloads the music illegally, he has clearly taken something without giving back. I don't think I'd have to explain where the feeling of injustice comes from. I sort of feel the same way about it.
However, if you look at it from the other perspective... The artist/publisher hasn't lost anything, because that person would not have paid anything regardless. So why should he really care?
This is a bad analogy though. With the GPL all of that would be perfectly fine. The only thing that wouldn't be is remixing/sampling the song.
That nexuiz console project for example - they would either have taken the code or not - they would never have complied with the GPL or they would have done so from the beginning. So the GPL neither gained the developers anything or cost them anything, the matter is strictly value neutral.
That's an outcome that couldn't have been known a priori.
I always carry an umbrella with me, so that if it does rain, I don't get wet.
Your argument is akin to "Well, you took the umbrella with you, and it didn't rain, so you shouldn't have taken it". True in that one case, but if you make a general rule out of that you'll always get wet when it rains.
For me FOSS is about sharing code. I give something, somebody else gives something else. Just like in a friendship, I don't want to keep track of who owes who how many favors, you just help each other out as you can. Sure, the balance will never be completely even and some people will abuse that. But in contrast to favors, code is an unlimited resource that doesn't diminish just because somebody helps himself to it.
For me, friendship is about reciprocity. A one sided relationship is doomed to fail, and involves one side exploiting the other. One sided relationships should be terminated when it becomes clear they're not favorable, and shouldn't be entered in the first place when possible. It's not about keeping accounting to the nearest cent, but both parties have to benefit, or there's something wrong.
And I don't see how your project is in jeopardy because it's not GPL'ed. people who care about FOSS will contribute anyway, and those who don't, won't. But your project is no worse off for using a BSD/PD license.
I certainly don't mean to imply that it's not your right to decide. I'm merely questioning the point in making the decision not to allow it. What do you gain by not allowing it,
Potential code contributions, or money.
and what do you lose by allowing it?
Potential code contributions, or money.
My answer to both questions is "absolutely nothing" - so what's the point?
It's not nothing. Example situation: Company/Programmer wants to improve on my code.
Programmer will release the source in any case:
GPL: Programmer uses source, I get improvements. BSD: Programmer uses source, I get improvements.
Programmer does not want to release the source:
Programmer is willing to pay for relicensing.
GPL: Programmer uses source, I get paid. BSD: Programmer uses source, I get nothing.
Programmer is not willing to pay
Programmer decides that not being able to use the source sucks, decides to release source after all
GPL: Programmer uses source, I get improvements. BSD: Doesn't happen, so programmer uses source, I get nothing.
Programmer really doesn't want to pay or release source
GPL: Programmer can't use source, I get nothing. BSD: Programmer uses source, I get nothing.
Programmer will only use source internally
GPL: Programmer uses source, I get nothing, but this may change if the company decides to distribute the program. BSD: Programmer uses source, I get nothing, this is most likely a permanent condition.
So, the tally: Favourable situations with the GPL: 1, 2.1, 2.2.1, half of 3: 3.5 points. Favourable situations with the BSD: 1: 1 point.
Therefore it wouldn't be very smart of me to go with the BSD.
Yes, the 2.2.2 point is a losing scenario for the GPL as well, but what will happen is not certain until it actually does. It's clearly not the only outcome possible, and going with the BSD removes outcomes 2.1, 2.2.1 and 3.
Of course, there's no way children and adults could ever legitimately interact anywhere online. They never happen to play the same games, post to the same forums, and parents never talk to their children online.
This question is irrelevant until "why should someone else be able to sell it at a profit and not pass any of that profit on to you?" is answered.
Why? Because if I hold the copyright to a piece of code you want to use contrary to my license, I'm the one who has what you want and makes the rules. It's entirely up to you to produce a convincing reason why I should let you do what you want. I don't really need to provide any explanations. I don't even need to acknowledge your existence, I could simply ignore you and whatever terms I offered in my license will stand without me needing to defend them in any way.
Well, because I don't lose anything if someone else close-sources my project. My project is still open, other people can still contribute to it - I have lost nothing.
Ok, then where does the feeling of injustice come from?
In my view - if people want to contribute something they will, and if they won't they just won't.
This doesn't make sense to me. It's like you're claiming that no matter what you do, people will do whatever they want anyway. But things just don't work this way, for legal reasons for instance.
After all I don't go around feeling bad about any end-users just using my project because as you said before, its value neutral to me. If somebody else incorporates my source in their closed-source project that is exactly the same to me, it's just a different form of end-use*, I have lost nothing.
Sure, but you've lost the chance to gain something. Why give for free something to precisely the people who could easily afford to pay, and who almost certainly won't if you don't require it?
I'm just tired of needing small bits of code to do obvious task X in relation to a project and then having to worry about all that licensing shit. In the end I end up implementing it myself, because I just don't want to bother with that. And that really ruins the idea of F/OSS for me. Either you share your code or you don't, I just don't want to deal with the licensing mess, I'm not a lawyer, I'm a developer.
See, we have different ideas about what FOSS is for.
For you it seems it's about your personal convenience -- don't want to bother with licensing. That's fine and understandable, but there's no real reason for me to care about your convenience if I don't get anything in return, no matter how much you don't like it.
But, for me FOSS isn't really about that. It's about the project. The chance of getting money is certainly good, but I'm not in that much need of it. What I really want is to ensure the existence of my project independently of me. I want to start something like the Linux kernel, which has code from dozens or hundreds of contributors, and isn't owned by anybody and can't be closed, sold out or relicensed, and will go on so long people are interested in working on it.
Of course, if it's just a feeling of injustice with respect to close-sourcing something open, you should use the GPL. I even share that feeling to some amount, but I reject it for being irrational (and I don't mean to brag about how rational I am because I am not).
True, however for a game, this can be quite limiting as it restricts consoles from being able to play. Good or bad, consoles do move a lot of games and it's a pretty good way to get your games in stores rather than an obscure website that no one knows about (even if it's Free and free).
I'm quite aware of that, and still choose to use the GPL anyway. Also as I said, the number of end users the application gets isn't something that interests me a whole lot.
Sony/Nintendo/Microsoft developer agreements state that no open-source code is allowed, period. This causes some interesting results like having to relicense BSD code under a proprietary license, and using well-known game engines to ensure that no open-source code is actually involved.
I consider this a very good thing, as it creates a chance for me to make money by relicensing. All the more reason to use the GPL..
I see your point and respect your opinion on this. In fact I found your post quite interesting, because it made the whole GPL philosophy thing more clear for me.
Good to know:-)
Nevertheless, I cannot help but think that your view on the matter is somewhat narrow minded, for lack of a better word. I dislike the GPL because it is not important for me to get contributions back on exactly the same project that I am working on. If I write something that is useful to you, and you write something that is useful to me, then we have both become richer for it.
Well, I'm a big proponent of being true to your own desires, to put it in some way. I think people shouldn't try to seem to be more altruistic than they really are. So if deep down I really want to get something in exchange for my trouble, I should make sure I get it. If compliance is voluntary then somebody will eventually not comply, I'll be annoyed and spend a while grumbling at "those ingrates", and that's not really fun and quite preventable. So I figure I can avoid that by just making my terms clear upfront, so that there are no annoyances and no misunderstandings.
If the BSD license works well for you, well, good for you. But it just doesn't fit my personality.
I have already spent time writing the code, why should I care if somebody uses it for their own? As long as there are other people like you or me who also make their code available, we have both gained something.
Well, I don't completely reject the idea of contributing something BSD licensed. But that's going to be limited to bug fixes pretty much.
Now, if I'm starting a large project I'll have to think first, whether my idea is workable, whether it makes sense to spent time working on it, and so on. And the above considerations will be part of that. If it doesn't work out, I just won't start coding in the first place, or find a GPL licensed alternative to contribute to instead, for instance. For my own projects, the GPL is the automatic default. The way I see things, using the BSD doesn't gain me anything, and the GPL provides chances of things going my way. So that's the one I'll go with.
For me at least, the whole point of the GPL is preventing people from closing the source in the manner attempted here.
Different people have different reasons for using it, but my own, as I explained before on here is that I expect a payment in exchange for the use for development in some form. I accept payment in the form of code contributions, or I might be willing to relicense in exchange for money. I consider usage by the end users to be value neutral. It's not bad of course, but it doesn't do me a whole lot of good on its own either, as I'm not into it for the popularity contest.
I've had code that I contributed picked up by other people and improved on. Some of it I plan to pick up again, and improve further, and so on. This is the thing I'm interested in. Just having it appear in some console game without getting any improvements doesn't interest me.
If I agreed with your rationale, I'd release code under the BSD license, but I very intentionally don't.
I'm assuming you're french, and therefore used "objective" instead of lens. There are a lot of photogs that indeed will throw huge amounts of money at their hardware, but to be honest it's usually a useless investment.
Let me disagree somewhat -- it's true that a good photographer will do wonders even with crappy equipment, but there are some things that do require the proper equipment. At least I hope nobody is using 50mm primes to take closeup photos of lions, because that'd be quite suicidal, and an iPhone is unlikely to produce anything interesting at a sports event.
Well, I don't know about people, but while I'm quite lazy, I find the need to eat and have a place where to live motivating enough. Also living my entire life on minimum wage doesn't sound very fun.
At the end of those 2 years you will be in a situation where you must get a job, now. And interviewers are going to ask questions about what's that 2 year hole on your resume, which isn't going to look very good. There are good chances that doing things that way you'll have to settle for a lower paying job and that's no way to advance your career.
Transliteration has nothing to do with the evolution of language though. We're not talking about a dialects here. Transliteration is a hack to represent something written in another language, compensating for the characters that don't exist in the language you're transliterating to.
It is very desirable for it to be accurate, because when for instance you emigrate from Russia to the US, you don't want your name to be written differently in every document and database, as that can result in a considerable bueraucratic mess. People have come up with about 20 different ways of spelling my full name, some of which have a very faint relationship with reality. And so far there have been 2 official spellings of my first, and 3 of my last name. Can you imagine that my father spells his last name differently from mine?
Also, it is very odd when you have to stuggle to understand what the hell those crazy americans mean, when reading a transliterated name that in your language has a single and very unambigous spelling.
And you'd be wrong - impersonation is a separate offense. I can steal all the information relevant to your identity and sell it on to someone else. In fact, that's what most identity theft involves.
Ah, good point there.
In that case I still say it's a misnomer.
Downloading images and sounds to which you don't have a legal right is theft in Canada. Stealing games by downloading them would be covered by "signals" or "intelligence of any nature".
I'm pretty sure Canada must have a separate section for copyright infringement somewhere in its code. Otherwise, again, you can't make a distiction between taking a CD, and copying its contents, which would be rather odd.
Riiiight.... somehow, I don't believe you. And even if I did, there's STILL no justification for Google violating copyright laws.
Well, it's certainly up to you whether to believe me or not.
Google crossed the line long ago. Search engines do NOT need to make a cached copy available to do their jobs.
I think smart people ocassionally ignore strict legality because sometimes doing so works better for them. I certainly could report every neighbour for things like jaywalking and ocassionally letting their dog get on my lawn, but doing so would be kind of a dick move that wouldn't win me any favours whatsoever.
If you're going to obsess over minor things like that I guess that's your right, but it doesn't necessarily work in your favour, and as I said above is more likely to get less ad impressions (or whatever is reason you care about things like that) from me than if you allowed it.
I wonder how many people would say it's "not really identity theft" since you still have your identity... it wasn't "stolen."
I would. There's even a word for it: "impersonation"
Or "I didn't steal the cable/satellite/internet - they still have it."
Yes, indeed.
If we can have theft of identity (and your identity is Intellectual Property in its purest form), ad we can have theft of signals and services, when nothing is actually physically "taken"...
We should go back to the common case - you used something without permission and permission was required, then you're a thief.
Or we could have a bit of precision, and distinguish the rather different cases of for instance, the physical taking of a manuscript, and the unlawful distribution of the text. Those are different crimes, with different consequences. I don't see why they should have the same names.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course not, in exact the same way as the lack of something isn't automatically good or user friendly. If you really believe what you said above, then you should also agree with my previous sentence.
Now look at what the grandparent wrote. Tethering and wifi scanning are instantly dismissed as "geeky" even though tethering is a widely wanted function that can be invisible until you try to use it, and scanning is an entirely normal thing to do when using wifi and pretty much comes with the technology. He couldn't find a reply for the porn part though, so he just silently skipped it instead of either admitting that I might have a point, or providing a rebuttal.
You like your iPhone. That's fabulous for you. I personally hate (insert the rest here)
No deal. This is the Internet. I accept that you may say whatever you wish. Accept that I may reply as I wish, and you'll be happier.
Yes, I know. Every lack of anything in an Apple product is an user friendly feature. If it can't do it, then you didn't need it anyway. If it's added later, then it's a sign of Apple's awesomeness.
If you don't believe me, just search the past apple discussions on slashdot, back when there was no store, and look at all the people talking about how it's not needed anyway, and how web apps will fulfill everybody's needs.
I'd bet that the people currently talking about how there's no need for multitasking will forget they ever said that the moment Apple releases a phone that can. I remember quite well that back in the OS 9 days it also was intuitive as heck, and things like the need to manually set the amount of memory an application could use was something that made perfect sense. The 1 button mice were also an user friendly feature, right until they started shipping normal ones.
I do not like this kind of solution. Why would I want to give money to a company that doesn't want me to do what I want with a device I paid for? It's stupid to pay somebody who is acting against your interests.
I consider this to be a very temporary solution at best. I might be willing to do it, but only if no alternative is available. Since the N900 exists, I have no reason to consider buying an iPhone.
Heh, that's a funny thing to say.
It's not that I don't want you to have a choice. I'm just giving some friendly advice, based on past experiences. Buy it all you want if you like, but don't complain if you end up running into the limitations one day.
The thing is "what I want" is different for different people.
On the n900, if you want to run sendmail on it, sure, you can. If you don't want to, you don't have to. It doesn't have to be something as geeky as running sendmail on it, though. Maybe what I want is porn or tethering, or scanning for wifi networks.
On the iPhone what you can do is limited to what Apple thinks users should be doing, and that list keeps shrinking.
Doubt it. I don't think Microsoft would give up if there was competition to drive out. They'd do like with the Xbox and keep throwing money at it until it worked. I take it this means that even if they had the marketshare, there would be no (or not enough) profit in it.
I think you're comparing apples to oranges.
Learning Windows as in basic usage and administration is easy. Learning the basics for Linux is quite easy too.
Actual deep knowledge of Active Directory, MSSQL, Exchange, etc is the Windows equivalent of a competent Linux admin, and those people want quite a lot of money as well. True, if you want a monkey that reformats boxes and replaces broken hardware and helps the users a bit, then they can probably be found cheaper for Windows. But that's not who you want to maintain your business critical Oracle server. Actually competent admins with knowledge of the details, good understanding of databases, and especially people like Oracle DBAs aren't going to be cheap, no matter the OS.
There's nothing that easy about MS technologies. They're superficially easy, sure. But there's quite a lot underneath that.
That sounds fine to me, so long you pay your own medical expenses, as well the expenses of whoever/whatever you happen to hit if you fly out of the windshield. After all, according to your own logic, other people shouldn't be paying for you either.
No, it won't necessarily do what you expect.
With printf undeclared, it's assumed to be a function that takes an int argument, and returns int. It just happens to work on your machine, but on a 64 bit box it would likely crash, because on AMD64 int is still 32 bits, but a char* is 64 bit.
I've just finished debugging precisely this problem in a piece of software over the weekend, btw.
Well, I've got a different outlook here. For me friendship is a 1 to 1 thing, not 1 to group. So like you said earlier, "you already have established that the relationship is going to be reciprocal", and the GPL is my way to perform this.
Also IMO friendship isn't something you try, it's something that is, meaning it's just a label you can start applying once the whole reciprocity thing happens.
I disagree somewhat, IMO 1 is difficult, and happens very rarely under the BSD, and the most common results are 2.2.2 for both GPL and BSD.
Why? Because contributing takes effort. You can't just tar the source tree up, drop it in the project's -dev mail list and be done with that. I've only heard of that working once. Generally the bigger the project you contribute to, the stricter are the requirements for acceptance. Things rarely get into the kernel on the first try.
If you're in a company you have two main problems:
1. You don't own the code you write, your employer does. You can't release it neither under the BSD or the GPL without prior authorization. So if you want to release anything, you have to convince your employer why.
With the GPL arguments in favor of it are "we have to" (license mandates it), "it's more convenient that way" (maintenance) and "we intended to in the first place" (intentional contribution to the project). A legal obligation is a legal obligation and easy to understand. Hopefully agreed to before work started, though. Problems include the whole "virality" thing.
With the BSD arguments in favor lose the "we have to" part. Problems include your competitors getting all your improvements for free, building upon them, and not returning the favor. So if you release something that's almost perfect doing 95% of the work, somebody else polishes up the remaining 5% and makes a lot of money, that's kind of annoying.
2. You don't decide how to use your time, your employer does. You can't spend a few days polishing the code for contribution without authorization. Again you need to convince your employer. Reasons work out pretty much the same as in the previous case.
This is of course optional in both cases, but you'll need to do it if you really want to contribute, as opposed to satisfying the GPL obligation.
From my own work experience I find that even if releasing changes is possible it often won't happen unless required by the license. You need to have the talk with the boss, the boss has to talk with their boss, time has to be spent on cleanup and packaging and so on. This easily takes days, and usually there's plenty other things to do and a deadline is looming. And for many companies the maintenance argument isn't persuasive because they're doing a one time thing. Once done it's done, and any changes are only made to the shipped version.
This is a bad analogy though. With the GPL all of that would be perfectly fine. The only thing that wouldn't be is remixing/sampling the song.
That's an outcome that couldn't have been known a priori.
I always carry an umbrella with me, so that if it does rain, I don't get wet.
Your argument is akin to "Well, you took the umbrella with you, and it didn't rain, so you shouldn't have taken it". True in that one case, but if you make a general rule out of that you'll always get wet when it rains.
For me, friendship is about reciprocity. A one sided relationship is doomed to fail, and involves one side exploiting the other. One sided relationships should be terminated when it becomes clear they're not favorable, and shouldn't be entered in the first place when possible. It's not about keeping accounting to the nearest cent, but both parties have to benefit, or there's something wrong.
Please see my other post on this.
Potential code contributions, or money.
Potential code contributions, or money.
It's not nothing. Example situation: Company/Programmer wants to improve on my code.
GPL: Programmer uses source, I get improvements.
BSD: Programmer uses source, I get improvements.
GPL: Programmer uses source, I get paid.
BSD: Programmer uses source, I get nothing.
GPL: Programmer uses source, I get improvements.
BSD: Doesn't happen, so programmer uses source, I get nothing.
GPL: Programmer can't use source, I get nothing.
BSD: Programmer uses source, I get nothing.
GPL: Programmer uses source, I get nothing, but this may change if the company decides to distribute the program.
BSD: Programmer uses source, I get nothing, this is most likely a permanent condition.
So, the tally:
Favourable situations with the GPL: 1, 2.1, 2.2.1, half of 3: 3.5 points.
Favourable situations with the BSD: 1: 1 point.
Therefore it wouldn't be very smart of me to go with the BSD.
Yes, the 2.2.2 point is a losing scenario for the GPL as well, but what will happen is not certain until it actually does. It's clearly not the only outcome possible, and going with the BSD removes outcomes 2.1, 2.2.1 and 3.
Of course, there's no way children and adults could ever legitimately interact anywhere online. They never happen to play the same games, post to the same forums, and parents never talk to their children online.
This question is irrelevant until "why should someone else be able to sell it at a profit and not pass any of that profit on to you?" is answered.
Why? Because if I hold the copyright to a piece of code you want to use contrary to my license, I'm the one who has what you want and makes the rules. It's entirely up to you to produce a convincing reason why I should let you do what you want. I don't really need to provide any explanations. I don't even need to acknowledge your existence, I could simply ignore you and whatever terms I offered in my license will stand without me needing to defend them in any way.
Ok, then where does the feeling of injustice come from?
This doesn't make sense to me. It's like you're claiming that no matter what you do, people will do whatever they want anyway. But things just don't work this way, for legal reasons for instance.
Sure, but you've lost the chance to gain something. Why give for free something to precisely the people who could easily afford to pay, and who almost certainly won't if you don't require it?
See, we have different ideas about what FOSS is for.
For you it seems it's about your personal convenience -- don't want to bother with licensing. That's fine and understandable, but there's no real reason for me to care about your convenience if I don't get anything in return, no matter how much you don't like it.
But, for me FOSS isn't really about that. It's about the project. The chance of getting money is certainly good, but I'm not in that much need of it. What I really want is to ensure the existence of my project independently of me. I want to start something like the Linux kernel, which has code from dozens or hundreds of contributors, and isn't owned by anybody and can't be closed, sold out or relicensed, and will go on so long people are interested in working on it.
Why do you think it is irrational?
I'm quite aware of that, and still choose to use the GPL anyway. Also as I said, the number of end users the application gets isn't something that interests me a whole lot.
I consider this a very good thing, as it creates a chance for me to make money by relicensing. All the more reason to use the GPL..
Good to know :-)
Well, I'm a big proponent of being true to your own desires, to put it in some way. I think people shouldn't try to seem to be more altruistic than they really are. So if deep down I really want to get something in exchange for my trouble, I should make sure I get it. If compliance is voluntary then somebody will eventually not comply, I'll be annoyed and spend a while grumbling at "those ingrates", and that's not really fun and quite preventable. So I figure I can avoid that by just making my terms clear upfront, so that there are no annoyances and no misunderstandings.
If the BSD license works well for you, well, good for you. But it just doesn't fit my personality.
Well, I don't completely reject the idea of contributing something BSD licensed. But that's going to be limited to bug fixes pretty much.
Now, if I'm starting a large project I'll have to think first, whether my idea is workable, whether it makes sense to spent time working on it, and so on. And the above considerations will be part of that. If it doesn't work out, I just won't start coding in the first place, or find a GPL licensed alternative to contribute to instead, for instance. For my own projects, the GPL is the automatic default. The way I see things, using the BSD doesn't gain me anything, and the GPL provides chances of things going my way. So that's the one I'll go with.
For me at least, the whole point of the GPL is preventing people from closing the source in the manner attempted here.
Different people have different reasons for using it, but my own, as I explained before on here is that I expect a payment in exchange for the use for development in some form. I accept payment in the form of code contributions, or I might be willing to relicense in exchange for money. I consider usage by the end users to be value neutral. It's not bad of course, but it doesn't do me a whole lot of good on its own either, as I'm not into it for the popularity contest.
I've had code that I contributed picked up by other people and improved on. Some of it I plan to pick up again, and improve further, and so on. This is the thing I'm interested in. Just having it appear in some console game without getting any improvements doesn't interest me.
If I agreed with your rationale, I'd release code under the BSD license, but I very intentionally don't.
Let me disagree somewhat -- it's true that a good photographer will do wonders even with crappy equipment, but there are some things that do require the proper equipment. At least I hope nobody is using 50mm primes to take closeup photos of lions, because that'd be quite suicidal, and an iPhone is unlikely to produce anything interesting at a sports event.
Well, I don't know about people, but while I'm quite lazy, I find the need to eat and have a place where to live motivating enough. Also living my entire life on minimum wage doesn't sound very fun.
That's not a terribly good idea though.
At the end of those 2 years you will be in a situation where you must get a job, now. And interviewers are going to ask questions about what's that 2 year hole on your resume, which isn't going to look very good. There are good chances that doing things that way you'll have to settle for a lower paying job and that's no way to advance your career.
Transliteration has nothing to do with the evolution of language though. We're not talking about a dialects here. Transliteration is a hack to represent something written in another language, compensating for the characters that don't exist in the language you're transliterating to.
It is very desirable for it to be accurate, because when for instance you emigrate from Russia to the US, you don't want your name to be written differently in every document and database, as that can result in a considerable bueraucratic mess. People have come up with about 20 different ways of spelling my full name, some of which have a very faint relationship with reality. And so far there have been 2 official spellings of my first, and 3 of my last name. Can you imagine that my father spells his last name differently from mine?
Also, it is very odd when you have to stuggle to understand what the hell those crazy americans mean, when reading a transliterated name that in your language has a single and very unambigous spelling.
Ah, good point there.
In that case I still say it's a misnomer.
I'm pretty sure Canada must have a separate section for copyright infringement somewhere in its code. Otherwise, again, you can't make a distiction between taking a CD, and copying its contents, which would be rather odd.
I disagree. Get over it.
Well, it's certainly up to you whether to believe me or not.
I think smart people ocassionally ignore strict legality because sometimes doing so works better for them. I certainly could report every neighbour for things like jaywalking and ocassionally letting their dog get on my lawn, but doing so would be kind of a dick move that wouldn't win me any favours whatsoever.
If you're going to obsess over minor things like that I guess that's your right, but it doesn't necessarily work in your favour, and as I said above is more likely to get less ad impressions (or whatever is reason you care about things like that) from me than if you allowed it.
I would. There's even a word for it: "impersonation"
Yes, indeed.
Or we could have a bit of precision, and distinguish the rather different cases of for instance, the physical taking of a manuscript, and the unlawful distribution of the text. Those are different crimes, with different consequences. I don't see why they should have the same names.