I've seen a few folks advocate the pull model for email and say that the burden then rests more on the sender than the receiver. I just don't see it.
I have a friend who sends out monthly newsletters to people who've signed up through his site to read them. These are biggish PDFs, and with his bandwidth it takes him several hours to send them all out. This is no problem; he starts the batch late at night and everyone has their newsletter by the next morning.
Contrast with the pull model. My friend sends out the same number of notification messages. The next morning at 8:00AM Eastern time when everyone is checking their email, he has 3,000 people trying to download their newsletter simultaneously. The server catches on fire. Repeat at 8:00AM Chicago and 8:00AM Los Angeles.
That's why the burden is so much higher than with regular email. Instead of planning for averages, you have to plan for peaks.
As long as they clearly mark this as a rental, I'm OK with it. As soon as they describe it as a sale, then I think they're conducting felony fraud and should be prosecuted criminally.
I'm sorry, I read your post over and over, and all I got from it was [missing the point]
What are acceptable official consequences from stating an opinion? Note that libel and slander are statements of fact, albeit erroneous. For example, I can say "I think OJ Simpson is a killer" with impunity because it is a statement of my beliefs, not an assertion of factual guilt.
So again, if someone expresses an opinion, what do you think are reasonable official reactions and what justification do you give for them? Because, I've gotta tell you, I can't think of a single one.
They used to be, but nowadays what passes for 'History' are CGI images of warships/aircraft and "Ice Road Truckers".
Ooh, I'd forgotten about Ice Road Truckers. DVRs water down channel branding quite a bit, to the point I don't know what stations run half the shows I watch.
Well, I would hope that people would be smart enough
Shakrai, my friend, I am afraid that you may be setting yourself up for a difficult realization one of these days.
to realize that the dirtbags advertising on TV aren't representative of the whole profession.
But in fairness to them, if every "real life" lawyer they've seen is a shyster ambulance chaser, why would they have a reason to think otherwise?
Free speech never meant "say what you like with impunity" and anyone claiming otherwise is full of it.
Careful there. By that benchmark, North Koreans enjoy freedom of speech because they could goosestep right up to Kim Jong-il and call him a runty little jackass. Sure, they and there families may be tortured to death afterward, but they can say it.
Free speech most certainly does mean that you can express your opinion without fear of punishment. However, it doesn't protect you from making enemies, and that's a whole 'nother discussion.
Could we please stop attacking lawyers just for being lawyers?
Turn on any TV channel less high-brow than The History Channel (and maybe even that one; I don't watch it because I'm not that high-brow). Wait 15 minutes. You will see at least one advertisement for lawyers who want you to get rich from asbestos exposure ("even second hand!") or to get you that social security disability check that "you know you deserve". This probably accounts for 90% of the average person's contact with the legal community. Can you really blame them for thinking poorly of the profession?
Apple works to keep confusion out of the Apple world. They do this by controlling the environment carefully.
It's great that they make a polished, consistent system for new users, but I want the ability to use the occasional messy, unpolished application if I want to. I understand that my mother-in-law doesn't want to even know that Vim exists, but that doesn't mean it should be impossible for me to use it.
Apple is about control for the sake of control. "It's for the users" is as good an excuse any.
My biggest peeve came in 10.5.4 (or.3? I think.4). As of then, if you have multiple IMAP accounts, Mail.app groups the inbox for each account under Mailboxes -> Inbox -> {Home,Work,Whatever} but groups every other IMAP folder under top-level folders named after the account. Now my folders look like:
Home . admin . archive . lists . whatever Work . admin . lists . whatever Gmail . friends . lists . other stuff Inbox . Home . Work . Gmail
I hate this and it's unlike my setup under any other mail client. If Mail.app weren't so nicely integrated with the rest of the OS, I'd probably go out of my way to delete it.
It's Apple's platform, Apple's SDK, and Apple's store.
It's also my iPhone (were I to have bought one).
Why should they allow any product on the shelf that competes with their own business?
What are they selling Mail.app for these days? Oh, wait - it's included for free. So, let's rephrase your question so that it makes sense: why should they allow any product on the shelf that enhances part of the OS? Answer: because then it makes their OS more attractive to users. This is generally regarded as a good thing. At least they thought so when they offered Firefox for OS X for download from their own site, even though Firefox "competes" with their own Safari.
You don't get mad at Best Buy for not selling maps to Circuit City. You don't get mad at Circuit City for not selling empty cardboard boxes for $999. Why should Apple's store be any different?
Last I checked, Best Buy and Circuit City haven't gone out of their way to prevent me from installing software I've bought elsewhere.
Apple, I don't know how to tell you this, but Mail.app sucks. Seriously. I put up with it on my Mac because it's not my primary computer and I don't use it enough to install Thunderbird. If I actually needed a good mail reader on OS X, though, Mail.app would be gone in a heartbeat.
So now I know that if I were to get an iPhone, I'd be stuck with a crappy mail reader. The silver lining is that now people know that in advance.
And I fail to see how it prevents you from making changes.
Basically, there are a class of changes you can't make: ones that remove a link to your source tarball.
Which brings up a very real practical question: how up to date does the source you offer have to be? Completely current, as in if you use vim to tweak a PHP script, the change needs to be available instantaneously? If so, then the only way to handle that is pretty much be offering dynamic tarballs of your production code - being very, very careful to strip out your config files so that you're not uploading your database passwords or merchant account numbers.
At any rate, it sounds like there's a pretty effective workaround. While your application has to prominently offer the source, the Squid proxy sitting in front of it might decide to remove all <div class="source"> tags.
What most irks me is that I could set up a server to publish KMail over X11, and this would be fine. If I set up a server to publish, say, an AGPL version of a modified Squirrelmail, then I have to make extra provisions for redistributing source. Wouldn't it be fun if Apache licensed httpd under a similar license? libc? The TCP stack?
The purpose of webapps is to provide the functionality of a native app without the need to install it on the client.
How is this different from console apps or Citrix-published apps or even mailing list software? What is new an special about the web that justifies this radical change in the scope of the GPL?
To clarify, I'm a huge fan of RMS and the FSF. I've even given memberships as birthday presents. I've released my most recent software under the GPLv3 because I think it's a fine license. I just think the FSF is totally off base this time.
at least don't do so by sreadding lies like "properties of a EULA in that you can't modify it as you see fit."
Factually, you can't. This is inarguable. You are explicitly prohibited from making certain modifications. This is contrary to the GPL which is only concerned with modifications in software that you distribute, not software that you execute.
I don't believe that it does (although I understand that there are intelligent people who disagree with me). It's a license affecting end users, namely the ones who install and execute it on their servers, and it governs what they may do with the software. It is a license on usage, in contrast with the GPL which has always been a license on distribution.
AGPL is GPL for application providers (who otherwise would be able to skirt gpl entirely by never distributing a binary executable)
Just like we were skirting the GPL when I was a sysadmin at an ISP and provided shell services to our customers? They could run bash and vi and lots of other GPL and other FOSS code, but we didn't make the source available to them. We even changed some of the code to work better with our system, and we didn't make those changes directly available to customers (even if we did propagate them upstream).
For some reason, people decided that web applications are a whole new kind of client-server system than has ever existed before.
Crud, I quoted an older version (that Google listed higher than the one you linked at that moment, go figure). The current version is:
Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the
Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users
interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version
supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding
Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source
from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary
means of facilitating copying of software. This Corresponding Source
shall include the Corresponding Source for any work covered by version 3
of the GNU General Public License that is incorporated pursuant to the
following paragraph.
The principle is the same: you are not allowed to modify it in certain ways, even if you do not plan to distribute copies of it.
If FSF considers it to be free software, how it is not free software
One of the requirements of Free Software is "[t]he freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1)." The Affero GPL explicitly denies this freedom:
If the Program as you received it is intended to interact with users through a computer network and if, in the version you received, any user interacting with the Program was given the opportunity to request transmission to that user of the Program's complete source code, you must not remove that facility from your modified version of the Program or work based on the Program, and must offer an equivalent opportunity for all users interacting with your Program through a computer network to request immediate transmission by HTTP of the complete source code of your modified version or other derivative work.
I don't care who endorses the AGPL; by the FSF's own definitions, it is not Free Software. Get pissed off and mod me down all you want, but that doesn't change the fact that the AGPL is a EULA in that it governs the behavior of people who merely run the software, even if they do not distribute it (by any reasonable definition of the word "distribute" that has been in common usage during the history of computing).
Google for the debate on debian-legal about whether it complies with the DFSG. Anyway, the crux of the matter is that authors can embed unmodifiable sections in their code, and you are not allowed to alter that code even if you will not be giving copies of it away. The theory is that you're distributing the output of the program, which is part of the program itself - or some nonsense like that. This goes against decades of precedent for the idea of usage versus distribution.
For example, if you VNC to a machine on my home LAN, you could potentially run Quickbooks. It would be executed on my machine and exporting its display to yours, but no one would ever consider this to be distribution. However, if I were running an AGPL'ed equivalent of Quickbooks on my home web server and you accessed it, the authors of the AGPL would claim that I distributed a copy of that application to you. That's their legal theory behind restricting my usage of it.
Another poster said I was spreading FUD. Yeah, I am, and with good reason. I fear that some project I depend on may adopt the AGPL. I'm uncertain that I'd be able to use it given the additional restrictions that it piles on top of the GPL, to the point that I actually doubt it.
Zarafa is available under the Affero GPLv3, which has some rather critical differences from the regular GPLv3, namely that a lot of people don't consider it to be a Free Software license. Specifically, it has a lot of properties of a EULA in that you can't modify it as you see fit even if you don't plan to distribute it.
Say what you want about MS, but I've seen an Exchange server with terabytes of email, gigabytes per day, keeping up fine.
BS. I've seen Exchange servers with gigabytes of mail and megabytes per day roll over and cry until we put a FreeBSD/Postfix/Amavis/ClamAV server in front to lighten the workload by 95%. If this is built on top of FOSS components, I don't doubt for a second that it'll run rings around Exchange.
Exchange has traditionally had exactly one reason for its popularity: vendor lock-in. If this really is a drop-in replacement without annoying CALs, we'll be Microsoft-free on our servers by Monday.
Which is exactly why I find Scala to be interesting.
I just wish they hadn't re-used the name of an Amiga multimedia language. I'd been assuming there was a resurgence of Hypercard-style programming for the first year or so before I realized that this was something new.
Maybe Sun can come out with their own version named ARexx.
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I've seen a few folks advocate the pull model for email and say that the burden then rests more on the sender than the receiver. I just don't see it.
I have a friend who sends out monthly newsletters to people who've signed up through his site to read them. These are biggish PDFs, and with his bandwidth it takes him several hours to send them all out. This is no problem; he starts the batch late at night and everyone has their newsletter by the next morning.
Contrast with the pull model. My friend sends out the same number of notification messages. The next morning at 8:00AM Eastern time when everyone is checking their email, he has 3,000 people trying to download their newsletter simultaneously. The server catches on fire. Repeat at 8:00AM Chicago and 8:00AM Los Angeles.
That's why the burden is so much higher than with regular email. Instead of planning for averages, you have to plan for peaks.
As long as they clearly mark this as a rental, I'm OK with it. As soon as they describe it as a sale, then I think they're conducting felony fraud and should be prosecuted criminally.
I'm sorry, I read your post over and over, and all I got from it was [missing the point]
What are acceptable official consequences from stating an opinion? Note that libel and slander are statements of fact, albeit erroneous. For example, I can say "I think OJ Simpson is a killer" with impunity because it is a statement of my beliefs, not an assertion of factual guilt.
So again, if someone expresses an opinion, what do you think are reasonable official reactions and what justification do you give for them? Because, I've gotta tell you, I can't think of a single one.
They used to be, but nowadays what passes for 'History' are CGI images of warships/aircraft and "Ice Road Truckers".
Ooh, I'd forgotten about Ice Road Truckers. DVRs water down channel branding quite a bit, to the point I don't know what stations run half the shows I watch.
Well, I would hope that people would be smart enough
Shakrai, my friend, I am afraid that you may be setting yourself up for a difficult realization one of these days.
to realize that the dirtbags advertising on TV aren't representative of the whole profession.
But in fairness to them, if every "real life" lawyer they've seen is a shyster ambulance chaser, why would they have a reason to think otherwise?
Free speech never meant "say what you like with impunity" and anyone claiming otherwise is full of it.
Careful there. By that benchmark, North Koreans enjoy freedom of speech because they could goosestep right up to Kim Jong-il and call him a runty little jackass. Sure, they and there families may be tortured to death afterward, but they can say it.
Free speech most certainly does mean that you can express your opinion without fear of punishment. However, it doesn't protect you from making enemies, and that's a whole 'nother discussion.
Could we please stop attacking lawyers just for being lawyers?
Turn on any TV channel less high-brow than The History Channel (and maybe even that one; I don't watch it because I'm not that high-brow). Wait 15 minutes. You will see at least one advertisement for lawyers who want you to get rich from asbestos exposure ("even second hand!") or to get you that social security disability check that "you know you deserve". This probably accounts for 90% of the average person's contact with the legal community. Can you really blame them for thinking poorly of the profession?
Apple works to keep confusion out of the Apple world. They do this by controlling the environment carefully.
It's great that they make a polished, consistent system for new users, but I want the ability to use the occasional messy, unpolished application if I want to. I understand that my mother-in-law doesn't want to even know that Vim exists, but that doesn't mean it should be impossible for me to use it.
Apple is about control for the sake of control. "It's for the users" is as good an excuse any.
Horrible IMAP handling
My biggest peeve came in 10.5.4 (or .3? I think .4). As of then, if you have multiple IMAP accounts, Mail.app groups the inbox for each account under Mailboxes -> Inbox -> {Home,Work,Whatever} but groups every other IMAP folder under top-level folders named after the account. Now my folders look like:
I hate this and it's unlike my setup under any other mail client. If Mail.app weren't so nicely integrated with the rest of the OS, I'd probably go out of my way to delete it.
It's Apple's platform, Apple's SDK, and Apple's store.
It's also my iPhone (were I to have bought one).
Why should they allow any product on the shelf that competes with their own business?
What are they selling Mail.app for these days? Oh, wait - it's included for free. So, let's rephrase your question so that it makes sense: why should they allow any product on the shelf that enhances part of the OS? Answer: because then it makes their OS more attractive to users. This is generally regarded as a good thing. At least they thought so when they offered Firefox for OS X for download from their own site, even though Firefox "competes" with their own Safari.
You don't get mad at Best Buy for not selling maps to Circuit City. You don't get mad at Circuit City for not selling empty cardboard boxes for $999. Why should Apple's store be any different?
Last I checked, Best Buy and Circuit City haven't gone out of their way to prevent me from installing software I've bought elsewhere.
You're absolutely right. If a hypothetical config.php ships with the application, then you're compelled to offer it for download if you modify it.
I really don't get the AGPL love-in. I think people are so focused on the high ideals behind it that they're ignoring its very serious problems.
Apple, I don't know how to tell you this, but Mail.app sucks. Seriously. I put up with it on my Mac because it's not my primary computer and I don't use it enough to install Thunderbird. If I actually needed a good mail reader on OS X, though, Mail.app would be gone in a heartbeat.
So now I know that if I were to get an iPhone, I'd be stuck with a crappy mail reader. The silver lining is that now people know that in advance.
And I fail to see how it prevents you from making changes.
Basically, there are a class of changes you can't make: ones that remove a link to your source tarball.
Which brings up a very real practical question: how up to date does the source you offer have to be? Completely current, as in if you use vim to tweak a PHP script, the change needs to be available instantaneously? If so, then the only way to handle that is pretty much be offering dynamic tarballs of your production code - being very, very careful to strip out your config files so that you're not uploading your database passwords or merchant account numbers.
At any rate, it sounds like there's a pretty effective workaround. While your application has to prominently offer the source, the Squid proxy sitting in front of it might decide to remove all <div class="source"> tags.
What most irks me is that I could set up a server to publish KMail over X11, and this would be fine. If I set up a server to publish, say, an AGPL version of a modified Squirrelmail, then I have to make extra provisions for redistributing source. Wouldn't it be fun if Apache licensed httpd under a similar license? libc? The TCP stack?
You just described the GPL. If the AGPL was as you said, they would be identical.
The purpose of webapps is to provide the functionality of a native app without the need to install it on the client.
How is this different from console apps or Citrix-published apps or even mailing list software? What is new an special about the web that justifies this radical change in the scope of the GPL?
To clarify, I'm a huge fan of RMS and the FSF. I've even given memberships as birthday presents. I've released my most recent software under the GPLv3 because I think it's a fine license. I just think the FSF is totally off base this time.
at least don't do so by sreadding lies like "properties of a EULA in that you can't modify it as you see fit."
Factually, you can't. This is inarguable. You are explicitly prohibited from making certain modifications. This is contrary to the GPL which is only concerned with modifications in software that you distribute, not software that you execute.
The point about the EULA still stands.
I don't believe that it does (although I understand that there are intelligent people who disagree with me). It's a license affecting end users, namely the ones who install and execute it on their servers, and it governs what they may do with the software. It is a license on usage, in contrast with the GPL which has always been a license on distribution.
AGPL is GPL for application providers (who otherwise would be able to skirt gpl entirely by never distributing a binary executable)
Just like we were skirting the GPL when I was a sysadmin at an ISP and provided shell services to our customers? They could run bash and vi and lots of other GPL and other FOSS code, but we didn't make the source available to them. We even changed some of the code to work better with our system, and we didn't make those changes directly available to customers (even if we did propagate them upstream).
For some reason, people decided that web applications are a whole new kind of client-server system than has ever existed before.
Crud, I quoted an older version (that Google listed higher than the one you linked at that moment, go figure). The current version is:
The principle is the same: you are not allowed to modify it in certain ways, even if you do not plan to distribute copies of it.
Technically this is possible, but you always need to have the Zarafa-professional package for Outlook support.
I wonder if they mean support as in "compatibility" or as in "tech support"?
If FSF considers it to be free software, how it is not free software
One of the requirements of Free Software is "[t]he freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1)." The Affero GPL explicitly denies this freedom:
I don't care who endorses the AGPL; by the FSF's own definitions, it is not Free Software. Get pissed off and mod me down all you want, but that doesn't change the fact that the AGPL is a EULA in that it governs the behavior of people who merely run the software, even if they do not distribute it (by any reasonable definition of the word "distribute" that has been in common usage during the history of computing).
Google for the debate on debian-legal about whether it complies with the DFSG. Anyway, the crux of the matter is that authors can embed unmodifiable sections in their code, and you are not allowed to alter that code even if you will not be giving copies of it away. The theory is that you're distributing the output of the program, which is part of the program itself - or some nonsense like that. This goes against decades of precedent for the idea of usage versus distribution.
For example, if you VNC to a machine on my home LAN, you could potentially run Quickbooks. It would be executed on my machine and exporting its display to yours, but no one would ever consider this to be distribution. However, if I were running an AGPL'ed equivalent of Quickbooks on my home web server and you accessed it, the authors of the AGPL would claim that I distributed a copy of that application to you. That's their legal theory behind restricting my usage of it.
Another poster said I was spreading FUD. Yeah, I am, and with good reason. I fear that some project I depend on may adopt the AGPL. I'm uncertain that I'd be able to use it given the additional restrictions that it piles on top of the GPL, to the point that I actually doubt it.
Exactly. And I'd much trust something like Cyrus IMAP over Exchange for data integrity any day of the week.
Zarafa is available under the Affero GPLv3, which has some rather critical differences from the regular GPLv3, namely that a lot of people don't consider it to be a Free Software license. Specifically, it has a lot of properties of a EULA in that you can't modify it as you see fit even if you don't plan to distribute it.
Rats. I was looking forward to this.
Say what you want about MS, but I've seen an Exchange server with terabytes of email, gigabytes per day, keeping up fine.
BS. I've seen Exchange servers with gigabytes of mail and megabytes per day roll over and cry until we put a FreeBSD/Postfix/Amavis/ClamAV server in front to lighten the workload by 95%. If this is built on top of FOSS components, I don't doubt for a second that it'll run rings around Exchange.
Exchange has traditionally had exactly one reason for its popularity: vendor lock-in. If this really is a drop-in replacement without annoying CALs, we'll be Microsoft-free on our servers by Monday.
Which is exactly why I find Scala to be interesting.
I just wish they hadn't re-used the name of an Amiga multimedia language. I'd been assuming there was a resurgence of Hypercard-style programming for the first year or so before I realized that this was something new.
Maybe Sun can come out with their own version named ARexx.