Hey, they redefined Open Source and they didn't even ask us (OSI), so why do you think they would have bothered to ask RMS? At least they're plan to remove their redefinition of Open Source, so there's hope that they'll eventually open source the whole thing. -russ
The ownership of Motif does NOT reside with The Open Group. It resides with the seven sponsors of the OSF Motif PST Agreement. The lawyers of most of these companies working in conjunction with The Open Group's lawyers created the license at the end of 1999. Getting the lawyers from several different companies to agree on the words was a long enough task. It was very late in the release process that it was raised as an issue that the words defining Open Source were inconsistent with the OSI definition.
However, we should state, as we do in the FAQ, that there is no intent to be anything other than consistent with the OSI Open Source definition. Indeed, I have already started working with the legal people within the various companies to request permission to change the words in the license to explicitly reference the OSI Definition. We were unable to complete this task prior to the release date, and decided not to delay the release any more for this problem with the definition.
I cannot say how long it will take to correct the license but we are making progress with the lawyers. I already have approval for the change from two companies.
Libel laws exist because not everyone owns a printing press. However, if you're defamed on a web site, you can defend yourself on a web site.
Maybe somebody needs to start a defamation search engine, which links defamation to defenses against same, and lets people compare to see which is more plausible. -russ
Much progress in economics has been made recently. Coase only figured out recently that externalities have two participants -- that my pollution is only a problem because your house is downwind. Many people would say that it's obvious that the polluter is at fault. However, if I was polluting before you built your house, it's not entirely my fault.
And Coase got a Nobel prize for figuring that out. Or more precisely, for figuring out that transaction costs, not the initial assignment of liability, are what interfere with an efficient solution to the problem of pollution. -russ
There's competition for import tariffs and other anti-free-market government favors as well. But that's only because people tolerate such nonsense.
with many kinds of collusion-- actors _will_ do things that benefit their competitors and hurt the poor,
You're not talking about collusion, you're talking about externalities. And besides which, every class of product (e.g. milk) has its substitutes (e.g. water, or soda). Every monopoly has its competition, even if the competition is from a substituting product.
the powerful ACTUALLY USE their combined might against poor people.
I know that they do. I have a credible plan to stop them -- one that has worked in the past. What is your plan?
Science can tell me that given this, this, and that, you get this result.
That's exactly what economics does. It says that if the demand increases and the supply does not, that the price will rise.
I just got back from the gas station - prices are up to $1.70 over here,
Markets fluctuate. If you want to know about long-term trends, you have to look at long-term prices.
I'm talking about *real* prices, adjusted for inflation. Only a knave or a fool compares unadjusted prices. You can either believe the government's CPI, or you can compare the cost of commodities against wages.
most forests aren't in the US?
How did you come to that conclusion? Obviously not from the cited URL, which only talks about tropical forests. In any case, the obvious conclusion from the reforestation of America cannot be that economic growth leads to deforestation.
I did my research. Can you apologize?
Of course not. You didn't do research. You went answer-grabbing, and lo and behold, you grabbed at the wrong answers. -russ
When a consumer buys a Twinkie, they aren't truly understanding the full implications of the manufacturing process that went into that little snack nor are they understanding the full implications of the wrapper, left behind for next few centuries.
You are exactly correct! That is why landfilling Twinkie wrappers should not be subsidized. That is why littering laws should exist. That is why plastics burning laws should exist. So that the full cost of the Twinkie is included in the price. -russ
And as long as there are wealth and power disparities, actors who can violate these conditions in order to increase their profits will do so. Which will lead to more wealth for them, which gives them more power to do the same thing more extensively, which leads to more wealth, which...
... leads to more and more competition. As long as you pretend that wealth acts as a class, conspiring against other classes, you won't appreciate that poor people can USE the power of wealthy people against other wealthy people.
I understand the problem. You don't understand the solution. -russ
And you know this because you studied the problem? Or because you thought for ten seconds and came to the obvious conclusion? If every economic conclusion was obvious, it wouldn't be interesting and it wouldn't be a science.
I believe that the statement that we are losing resources faster than we are gaining them is for the most part true.
And the most basic discover of economics is that when things become scarce their price rises. And yet, the price of resources has been dropping.
We will run out of oil eventually.
Nobody cares about oil. We only care about the services oil provides. And oil is not the only substance that can produce those services.
If we continue to deforest at the rate we are we will put the CO2 balance out of kilter in the atmosphere.
Do you realize that over most of the last century, the US has had continuous growth in the amount of land dedicated to forests?
A pity you can't debate with someone without resorting to personal slams.
Don't say things which are obviously wrong, or not obviously right, or provably wrong with a little bit of research and I won't slam you. Sheesh!
I decided it was more productive to try to educate people
Telling people things that are wrong is not helpful. Telling people things that you KNOW are wrong is even less helpful. -russ
So people are willing to pay infinite amounts of money to avoid infinitesimally small amounts of pollution? I don't think so. That means that every pollution has its price. If it's easier for you to be paid to stay out of the way of the pollution than it is for the producer to avoid creating the pollution, then you should get the money. Or else the producer should pay. Either way, the price of that product goes up, so that if a competing or substituting product is cheaper, people can reduce pollution just by buying cheap.
Yes, I know this isn't obvious, but if it was obvious, there wouldn't be a Nobel prize for economics. -russ
More to the point: capitalism makes the assumption that people are intelligent and rational. Having worked tech support for three years, I can say with authority that they are not.
If you assume the opposite, then you can't make ANY predictions. At least if you assume people are rational, you'll be right half the time. -russ
even intelligent and concerned consumers cannot really understand the full implications of the products they buy...
Yes they can. They look at the price of one thing, and compare it to the price of another. AS LONG as everyone's property rights are recognized, and air and water pollution is paid for by those producing it, then all the social and environmental factors can be considered just by comparing prices.
Economic growth is not the same as physical growth. You can make money from using less resources. Look at the bottling industry. Bottles (milk, soda) use 50% less plastic than fifteen years ago, and the bottles are cheaper to produce. That's economic growth through physical shrinkage.
It must be tiring to work so hard at being so wrong. -russ
Silly dweeb! So you use two of them! Computers are like jellybeans. If you only have one of them working for you at any time, you're impoverishing yourself. -russ
All the GPL can do is require that you stop distributing infringing code, unless you can prove actual damages. Before they would do anything as dumb as argue that they're separate programs, Microsoft would just rewrite the code from scratch.
Then again, I would have never believed that Microsoft would pursue business as usual with the DOJ breathing down their neck. So who knows what they would really do? -russ
Why would the companies sell them at or below the current market price? They know that they have more customers than they do bananas, so they know that they can get more from their existing customers.
No, it's not a lame example. Translate it into the right to kill at will. How much would a rich person have to pay to get that right? The answer is: everything they have, and more.
I know that a bought legislator doesn't have to accept money from both sides. All they have to do is stay bought. And that's my point -- that a fixed amount of money is sufficient to buy a legislator to put the political fix on a market. And that's necessary because markets dynamically adjust their prices to counteract any fixing anyone tries. -russ
You can't force someone else to release their code. You can only force them to stop distributing yours. So if they stop, that's the end of it, unless you can prove damages. How do you prove damages on a program you charge nothing for?
Markets have nothing to do with it. The fact is that 10% of the population controls.. what.. 80%? 90%? of the wealth. Therefore they have 80 or 90% of the control if they "vote with their dollars."
But markets don't work that way! Whoever told you that was wrong. If you think it's common sense, then it's your common sense that's confusing you.
Okay, let's work through an example. How do you suppose bananas get into stores? Do you think wealthy people control this process? Let's say that a wealthy person decided, for some irrational reason, that they wanted to buy all the bananas. Obviously, bananas are produced by multiple companies in multiple countries. The rich person would have to start with one of them. As soon as they did, that would reduce the supply of bananas. Everyone else still wants bananas on their morning cereal, so the price they have to pay goes up. Very few of them care that much whether bananas cost $1.00 per pound or $1.10. However, the wealthy person now has to cough up 10% more to buy the next batch of bananas. And so on, until they start competing against other rich people (and there are a LOT of rich people in America who want bananas on their cereal and who are completely price-insensitive). There is no price for which they could buy up the last banana. And in actuality, they would run out of interest or money long before they got to that point.
In other words, they don't have 80 or 90% of the control, not when it comes to competing against the rest of society's interest. They have maybe 10% of the control, which is only appropriate since they are 10% of the population.
Contrast this with the political process, whereby a bought legislator stays bought. A legislator who accepted someone's money in return for favors, and didn't provide those favors because someone from the opposite position paid more would soon find that they got no money from anyone. -russ
Sure, there's gazillions of commodities produced by very large, very wealthy companies, for which most people have very little brand loyalty. Without those purchases the wealthy minority would rapidly become much less wealthy. That's why these large companies are always kissing our butts and pandering to our every need.
It's also why those same companies try to buy politicians -- because it's a lot cheaper to buy favors from politicians (who don't care about the quality of your product) than it is to buy favors from your customers (who care only for the quality of your product).
And that's why we don't want politicians to interfere with the market -- because it distracts companies from what's important: pleasing us. -russ
I used 1/2" (id) ENT (electrical non-metallic tubing), aka smurf tubing, so-called because of its baby-blue color. Yeah, but if you run plenums, you need to use plenum-grade wire. -russ
a small minority hold the majority of the dollars.
Quite true. How many bananas do you think they buy in a day? How many yachts do you think the rest of us buy in a year? Not all markets are equally democratic. Some are for the rich and by the rich. Others, particularly the things that most of us buy most of the time in modest quantities, are completely uninfluenced by the activities of the wealthy minority.
"None of the above" would just cause another election. Eventually someone would be elected.
Government -- imagine Microsoft with nuclear weapons. Now try to run Linux, or *BSD, or Solaris. -russ
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, they redefined Open Source and they didn't even ask us (OSI), so why do you think they would have bothered to ask RMS? At least they're plan to remove their redefinition of Open Source, so there's hope that they'll eventually open source the whole thing.
-russ
The ownership of Motif does NOT reside with The Open Group. It resides with the seven sponsors of the OSF Motif PST Agreement. The lawyers of most of these companies working in conjunction with The Open Group's lawyers created the license at the end of 1999. Getting the lawyers from several different companies to agree on the words was a long enough task. It was very late in the release process that it was raised as an issue that the words defining Open Source were inconsistent with the OSI definition.
However, we should state, as we do in the FAQ, that there is no intent to be anything other than consistent with the OSI Open Source definition. Indeed, I have already started working with the legal people within the various companies to request permission to change the words in the license to explicitly reference the OSI Definition. We were unable to complete this task prior to the release date, and decided not to delay the release any more for this problem with the definition.
I cannot say how long it will take to correct the license but we are making progress with the lawyers. I already have approval for the change from two companies.
Maybe somebody needs to start a defamation search engine, which links defamation to defenses against same, and lets people compare to see which is more plausible.
-russ
four out of five firemen recommend fighting fire with water.
-russ
Libel laws exist because not everyone owns a printing press. However, if you're defamed on a web site, you can defend yourself on a web site.
Maybe somebody needs to start a defamation search engine, which links defamation to defenses against same, and lets people compare to see which is more plausible.
-russ
Much progress in economics has been made recently. Coase only figured out recently that externalities have two participants -- that my pollution is only a problem because your house is downwind. Many people would say that it's obvious that the polluter is at fault. However, if I was polluting before you built your house, it's not entirely my fault.
And Coase got a Nobel prize for figuring that out. Or more precisely, for figuring out that transaction costs, not the initial assignment of liability, are what interfere with an efficient solution to the problem of pollution.
-russ
Littering is negative theft -- instead of taking something that I value, you're leaving something that I don't want.
-russ
import tariffs on certain goods,
There's competition for import tariffs and other anti-free-market government favors as well. But that's only because people tolerate such nonsense.
with many kinds of collusion-- actors _will_ do things that benefit their competitors and hurt the poor,
You're not talking about collusion, you're talking about externalities. And besides which, every class of product (e.g. milk) has its substitutes (e.g. water, or soda). Every monopoly has its competition, even if the competition is from a substituting product.
the powerful ACTUALLY USE their combined might against poor people.
I know that they do. I have a credible plan to stop them -- one that has worked in the past. What is your plan?
Science can tell me that given this, this, and that, you get this result.
That's exactly what economics does. It says that if the demand increases and the supply does not, that the price will rise.
I just got back from the gas station - prices are up to $1.70 over here,
Markets fluctuate. If you want to know about long-term trends, you have to look at long-term prices.
I'm talking about *real* prices, adjusted for inflation. Only a knave or a fool compares unadjusted prices. You can either believe the government's CPI, or you can compare the cost of commodities against wages.
most forests aren't in the US?
How did you come to that conclusion? Obviously not from the cited URL, which only talks about tropical forests. In any case, the obvious conclusion from the reforestation of America cannot be that economic growth leads to deforestation.
I did my research. Can you apologize?
Of course not. You didn't do research. You went answer-grabbing, and lo and behold, you grabbed at the wrong answers.
-russ
When a consumer buys a Twinkie, they aren't truly understanding the full implications of the manufacturing process that went into that little snack nor are they understanding the full implications of the wrapper, left behind for next few centuries.
You are exactly correct! That is why landfilling Twinkie wrappers should not be subsidized. That is why littering laws should exist. That is why plastics burning laws should exist. So that the full cost of the Twinkie is included in the price.
-russ
And as long as there are wealth and power disparities, actors who can violate these conditions in order to increase their profits will do so. Which will lead to more wealth for them, which gives them more power to do the same thing more extensively, which leads to more wealth, which ...
... leads to more and more competition. As long as you pretend that wealth acts as a class, conspiring against other classes, you won't appreciate that poor people can USE the power of wealthy people against other wealthy people.
I understand the problem. You don't understand the solution.
-russ
That is a terrible waste of resources.
And you know this because you studied the problem? Or because you thought for ten seconds and came to the obvious conclusion? If every economic conclusion was obvious, it wouldn't be interesting and it wouldn't be a science.
I believe that the statement that we are losing resources faster than we are gaining them is for the most part true.
And the most basic discover of economics is that when things become scarce their price rises. And yet, the price of resources has been dropping.
We will run out of oil eventually.
Nobody cares about oil. We only care about the services oil provides. And oil is not the only substance that can produce those services.
If we continue to deforest at the rate we are we will put the CO2 balance out of kilter in the atmosphere.
Do you realize that over most of the last century, the US has had continuous growth in the amount of land dedicated to forests?
A pity you can't debate with someone without resorting to personal slams.
Don't say things which are obviously wrong, or not obviously right, or provably wrong with a little bit of research and I won't slam you. Sheesh!
I decided it was more productive to try to educate people
Telling people things that are wrong is not helpful. Telling people things that you KNOW are wrong is even less helpful.
-russ
So people are willing to pay infinite amounts of money to avoid infinitesimally small amounts of pollution? I don't think so. That means that every pollution has its price. If it's easier for you to be paid to stay out of the way of the pollution than it is for the producer to avoid creating the pollution, then you should get the money. Or else the producer should pay. Either way, the price of that product goes up, so that if a competing or substituting product is cheaper, people can reduce pollution just by buying cheap.
Yes, I know this isn't obvious, but if it was obvious, there wouldn't be a Nobel prize for economics.
-russ
Capitalists will never give a damn for the environment. Why? It's too long-term.
I will pay you $1 per year for the next hundred years, or I will pay you $5 right now.
-russ
More to the point: capitalism makes the assumption that people are intelligent and rational. Having worked tech support for three years, I can say with authority that they are not.
If you assume the opposite, then you can't make ANY predictions. At least if you assume people are rational, you'll be right half the time.
-russ
even intelligent and concerned consumers cannot really understand the full implications of the products they buy...
Yes they can. They look at the price of one thing, and compare it to the price of another. AS LONG as everyone's property rights are recognized, and air and water pollution is paid for by those producing it, then all the social and environmental factors can be considered just by comparing prices.
You should read Leonard Read's "I, Pencil".
-russ
Economic growth is not the same as physical growth. You can make money from using less resources. Look at the bottling industry. Bottles (milk, soda) use 50% less plastic than fifteen years ago, and the bottles are cheaper to produce. That's economic growth through physical shrinkage.
It must be tiring to work so hard at being so wrong.
-russ
Silly dweeb! So you use two of them! Computers are like jellybeans. If you only have one of them working for you at any time, you're impoverishing yourself.
-russ
All the GPL can do is require that you stop distributing infringing code, unless you can prove actual damages. Before they would do anything as dumb as argue that they're separate programs, Microsoft would just rewrite the code from scratch.
Then again, I would have never believed that Microsoft would pursue business as usual with the DOJ breathing down their neck. So who knows what they would really do?
-russ
Why would the companies sell them at or below the current market price? They know that they have more customers than they do bananas, so they know that they can get more from their existing customers.
No, it's not a lame example. Translate it into the right to kill at will. How much would a rich person have to pay to get that right? The answer is: everything they have, and more.
I know that a bought legislator doesn't have to accept money from both sides. All they have to do is stay bought. And that's my point -- that a fixed amount of money is sufficient to buy a legislator to put the political fix on a market. And that's necessary because markets dynamically adjust their prices to counteract any fixing anyone tries.
-russ
You can't force someone else to release their code. You can only force them to stop distributing yours. So if they stop, that's the end of it, unless you can prove damages. How do you prove damages on a program you charge nothing for?
But markets don't work that way! Whoever told you that was wrong. If you think it's common sense, then it's your common sense that's confusing you.
Okay, let's work through an example. How do you suppose bananas get into stores? Do you think wealthy people control this process? Let's say that a wealthy person decided, for some irrational reason, that they wanted to buy all the bananas. Obviously, bananas are produced by multiple companies in multiple countries. The rich person would have to start with one of them. As soon as they did, that would reduce the supply of bananas. Everyone else still wants bananas on their morning cereal, so the price they have to pay goes up. Very few of them care that much whether bananas cost $1.00 per pound or $1.10. However, the wealthy person now has to cough up 10% more to buy the next batch of bananas. And so on, until they start competing against other rich people (and there are a LOT of rich people in America who want bananas on their cereal and who are completely price-insensitive). There is no price for which they could buy up the last banana. And in actuality, they would run out of interest or money long before they got to that point.
In other words, they don't have 80 or 90% of the control, not when it comes to competing against the rest of society's interest. They have maybe 10% of the control, which is only appropriate since they are 10% of the population.
Contrast this with the political process, whereby a bought legislator stays bought. A legislator who accepted someone's money in return for favors, and didn't provide those favors because someone from the opposite position paid more would soon find that they got no money from anyone.
-russ
Sure, there's gazillions of commodities produced by very large, very wealthy companies, for which most people have very little brand loyalty. Without those purchases the wealthy minority would rapidly become much less wealthy. That's why these large companies are always kissing our butts and pandering to our every need.
It's also why those same companies try to buy politicians -- because it's a lot cheaper to buy favors from politicians (who don't care about the quality of your product) than it is to buy favors from your customers (who care only for the quality of your product).
And that's why we don't want politicians to interfere with the market -- because it distracts companies from what's important: pleasing us.
-russ
I used 1/2" (id) ENT (electrical non-metallic tubing), aka smurf tubing, so-called because of its baby-blue color. Yeah, but if you run plenums, you need to use plenum-grade wire.
-russ
Quite true. How many bananas do you think they buy in a day? How many yachts do you think the rest of us buy in a year? Not all markets are equally democratic. Some are for the rich and by the rich. Others, particularly the things that most of us buy most of the time in modest quantities, are completely uninfluenced by the activities of the wealthy minority.
"None of the above" would just cause another election. Eventually someone would be elected.
Government -- imagine Microsoft with nuclear weapons. Now try to run Linux, or *BSD, or Solaris.
-russ