And not all that much has changed between NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X. Anyone who used NeXTSTEP back in the day knows how remarkably little has changed since Apple took it over.
O.o
If a complete lift-and-replace of the GUI/display subsystem, massive kernel updates, major userspace updates, major API revisions, multiple new APIs, a new GUI and a port to a new hardware platform means "little has changed", exactly what needs to be done to say "a lot has changed" ?
Proof of even one flaw due directly to unique ties between IE and the Windows OS is proof that it is less secure because the others do not have those ties.
No it wouldn't, because DRM does not work. DRM is the technological attempt to stop piracy. They wouldn't bother with legal attempts if it was possible for DRM to work.
You have this completely backwards.
The reason that most DRM schemes aren't particularly strong is precisely *because* there is the fallback of copyright law.
They've been trying DRM for over 20 years, starting in the 1980s when it was called copy protection. No scheme has yet to work. And so long as we don't have "defective by design" hardware, it is logically impossible for DRM to ever work.
"Defective by design" hardware, as you childishly put it, is exactly what you would have if there was not copyright law. Without the force of law to be the ultimate backup, DRM schemes would be a lot harder, and involve things like devices calling home, hardware dongles, and the like.
Even if they could build DRM into the hardware ("treacherous computing"), so that users really could not make unauthorized copies, it still wouldn't stop piracy.
The objective is not to stop piracy. The objective is to shift the typical cost-benefit analysis such that purchasing is a more attractive option.
Windows Vista was a complete failure on the DRM front, and many users quickly figured out that they were sold a bill of goods, that in this respect Vista was a giant step backward from XP.
The DRM in Vista is either irrelevant, or useful, depending on whether you have any DRM-encumbered material. Exactly the same as the DRM in XP.
Many heard that the big reason why Vista was slower and flakier was all the DRM checking it does.
Indeed. The FUD about Vista's DRM was extensive.
And too many schemes involving authorization servers have burned users when the servers had to be shut down, or they couldn't connect for whatever reason. Why else has Apple switched to DRM free mp3 files?
I can guarantee you it's not because they have any philosophical disagreements with copyright, patents and DRM. One need only look at the Psystar situation to realise that.
Nonsense. There are all the reasons that existed before copyright. In the Middle Ages, before there was copyright, universities by necessity shared knowledge, in contrast to the practices of guilds. As we can fund universities, so we can also fund innovation and art.
The corporations today *are* the guilds in that analogy, and there's no incentive for them to "share" unless they can be reasonably confident that everyone else will as well. Hence (in a desparate attempt to bring this back on topic) why the assertion that without copyright, there is no need for the GPL, is false - because without something like that there is zero incentive for anyone in a profit-driven situation to share (more accurately, give away) their work.
h incentives, marketing help and all sorts of bad behavior is going on to prevent this market from developing because they KNOW everyone wants a $100 cheap little web tablet/netbook that doesn't weigh much and gets great battery life [...]
I don't. Much like tablet computers, I have never been able to figure out what I'd use a netbook for (especially an ARM-based one).
You are asking for more from an absence of copyright than what copyleft (GPL + copyright) can do now.
No, I'm not. In fact, I'm not asking for anything, I'm pointing out that without copyright - or something pretty much identical - you *cannot* have what copyleft delivers now. You can have a bunch of other things, but not what copyleft delivers.
There are many ways to lock things up despite copyleft, and if there was no copyright or copyleft, there would still be many ways to lock things up.
Which is irrelevant to the point. I'm not suggesting otherwise.
I've seen this kind of thinking before. People will overlook that a proposal is superior overall because they concentrate too much on a few supposed flaws, and do not consider that the current system also can't do what they say they want. It's like refusing to use electric cars because they can't go 500 mph, overlooking that gasoline cars also can't go that fast.
I'm not making any comment on whether copyright should or should not be abolished, I'm highlighting why the argument "if there was no copyright or patent law, there would be no need for the GPL" is false.
In an environment where there is no copyright law, the sticks and carrots I mentioned in the GP would have a better chance of persuading them to share than the current environment.
It would not. If there were no copyright law, everything would be locked up _properly_ with DRM, unlike the half-arsed schemes that are implemented now as a nod towards trying to prevent piracy. There is zero incentive to "share" in a system where there is no reason for anyone else to share either.
Another thing that copyleft can't force is the sharing of modified GPL software that is only used internally. And yet another is software as a service. Instead of selling a black box, they sell only access to black boxes they keep in their own possession. It's exactly like running a website on a LAMP stack. The website operators can improve the LAMP software all they want, and so long as they don't try to sell copies of their improved versions, cannot be forced to share those improvements, despite copyleft.
Indeed. And they're all irrelevant to my point.
I do not think the BSDL is adequate so long as there is copyright law. Copyleft unlocks what copyright locks up. Without locks, there is no need for keys.
Removing copyright *doesn't* remove the locks, it just swaps keys for combination pads. Similarly, copyleft doesn't "unlock what copyright locks up", it leverages the way copyright locks things up to ensure accessibility to copyrighted works and their derivatives. As I said earlier, without copyright, the GPL is equivalent to the BSDL today (as would be essentially _all_ OSS licenses).
Microsoft would KILL to do this. Honestly, they would literally go out and kill puppies, kittens and baby seals all day long if it would allow them to control everything you install.
This is pretty much completely bass-ackwards. Microsoft knows perfectly well that the reason Windows is so popular is because of it's openness to developers. They're not even close to being stupid enough to kill that goose.
Microsoft could tie Windows up as tight as a drum if they really wanted to - and the security benefits from doing so would be significant. But it would be an insanely stupid move to make from a business perspective.
Accessibility to source code is more than just having it visible. Code that can be examined but not legally changed might be considered open, but is not free. The GPL is as much or more about preventing that as about prying open black boxes.
"Acessibility" was meant to include everything the GPL permits.
The GPL is all about "prying open black boxes". It's practically the fundamental motivation for creating it.
Does that answer you?
No. None of your "solutions" provide the same thing the GPL does. They are all "what ifs", "maybes" and "perhaps". None of them provide what the GPL does.
Look at it this way. Without copyright, there is no difference between the GPL and the BSDL. If you think the BSDL is an adequate license, then you shouldn't have a problem with no copyright. If you think the BSDL is inadequate, and only the GPL provides sufficient "freedom", then you *need* copyright to achieve that.
Please note that Churchill was English. Liberal and conservative are totally different over there. Liberal means anti-government intervention, conservative means the opposite.
This is not correct. In UK (and other Commonwealth countries) politics, "Liberal" is used to describe economic policies while "Conservative" is used to describe a social policies. They're classifications on two sides of a square, not two ends of a line.
If there was no copyright or patent law, there would be no need for the GPL.
False.
The whole point of the GPL is to stop businesses from locking up or "paywalling" software via copyright and patent law.
No, the whole point of the GPL is to provide accessibility to source code. There is nothing in the GPL that dictates code must be made available to *everyone*.
That is not a big problem for us enthusiasts who get and understand every information about that CPU. But to less tech savy people I will always suggest AMD.
It's irrelevant to "less tech savvy people" because these sort of details simply don't matter to them.
100 years ago, you'd be fortunate to see some first cousins once or twice in your lifetime. Now it is common to see most of them several times a year, along with any other common relatives
That sounds completely backwards. I would have expected that in historically closer-knit communities, with relatively much less travel and relocation than the modern world, the exact opposite to be true.
Open Source software, unlike proprietary software, can be supported in-house better, more easily, and more cheaply than via outside support. Large "enterprises", at least those that take proper advantage of scale and hire competent engineers, have less of a need to pay for outside Linux support than your small "consulting gigs" do.
This is pretty much completely backwards. Medium to big business is where you're going to find the highest proportion of commercial software. It's only the huge players like Google (for whom extensive in-depth in-house expertise and customisation is cost-effective) and the tiny players (where even hundreds of dollars matter) who are not going to be a good fit.
Big companies use software like Oracle. Oracle support will not even speak to you if you are running their software on an unsupported OS. In the context of the hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars even a medium sized business will be paying for software like Oracle, and the millions to tens of millions they will be paying in salaries and related expenses, the few tens of - maybe a hundred - thousands it might cost for RHEL licenses is barely a rounding error.
Mercedes are not known for being wimpy vehicles in the power department.
The 300D had 90kw and weighed over 1600kg. A Honda Civic of the day would have been able to outrun it. You might *just* break 100 (mph) with one (though be prepared to take several minutes getting there).
The article itself basically presents the facts, but it does mention that it's interesting that a bunch of companies that otherwise compete with each other are in fact cooperating to develop Linux.
Firstly, they're not competing at developing Linux, they're competing at delivering the services and/or software they tie to Linux to make it commercially viable.
Secondly, they're not "co-operating", they're following the conditions of the licensing under which Linux is distributed.
I would personally agree that MySQL is not of the same quality as even PostgreSQL, but people ARE using it for business- and performance- critical applications regardless of its shortcomings.
But no-one doing so would have considered Oracle as an alternative. Ergo, no overlap.
Mac OS X managed to move from MacOS to a Unix - a far more significant change than anything Windows has done - without breaking much at all. Same with PowerPC to x86.
The move from DOS-based Windows to NT-based Windows was at least as significant.
Neither of Apple's migrations were without their problems, either.
What won't happen ? An outage ? Some sort of data loss ? You have _got_ to be kidding. The average IT infrastructure would be lucky to go more than a few weeks without these sorts of things happening somewhere - not even a few days if you're talking about frontline user support.
POSIX? (From wikipedia: "POSIX... is the name of a family of related standards specified by the IEEE to define the application programming interface (API), along with shell and utilities interfaces for software compatible with variants of the Unix operating system...")
A quick look at the significant differences between POSIX compliant UNIXes should be all you need to put that idea to rest.
As of Leopard, Mac OS X is fully POSIX compliant.
Windows NT 3.1 was POSIX compliant. It's not particularly meaningful or useful standard in this context.
One reason I don't like to upgrade to newer versions of IE is because they seem to have HUGE memory leaks. Although I almost always use Firefox, [...]
Firefox is at least as bad. Here I am with 3 separate Firefox instances, each chewing up over 500MB of RAM (admittedly with about 100 tabs open in each, but still...).
Slashdot Mirror
And not all that much has changed between NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X. Anyone who used NeXTSTEP back in the day knows how remarkably little has changed since Apple took it over.
O.o
If a complete lift-and-replace of the GUI/display subsystem, massive kernel updates, major userspace updates, major API revisions, multiple new APIs, a new GUI and a port to a new hardware platform means "little has changed", exactly what needs to be done to say "a lot has changed" ?
Now I entirely grant that this is Microsoft's browser running on Microsoft's OS and thus it gains unfair advantages [...]
Why ? Which of your 3 piece of of functionality is/are not available for any software to use ?
Proof of even one flaw due directly to unique ties between IE and the Windows OS is proof that it is less secure because the others do not have those ties.
What are these "unique ties" ?
No it wouldn't, because DRM does not work. DRM is the technological attempt to stop piracy. They wouldn't bother with legal attempts if it was possible for DRM to work.
You have this completely backwards.
The reason that most DRM schemes aren't particularly strong is precisely *because* there is the fallback of copyright law.
They've been trying DRM for over 20 years, starting in the 1980s when it was called copy protection. No scheme has yet to work. And so long as we don't have "defective by design" hardware, it is logically impossible for DRM to ever work.
"Defective by design" hardware, as you childishly put it, is exactly what you would have if there was not copyright law. Without the force of law to be the ultimate backup, DRM schemes would be a lot harder, and involve things like devices calling home, hardware dongles, and the like.
Even if they could build DRM into the hardware ("treacherous computing"), so that users really could not make unauthorized copies, it still wouldn't stop piracy.
The objective is not to stop piracy. The objective is to shift the typical cost-benefit analysis such that purchasing is a more attractive option.
Windows Vista was a complete failure on the DRM front, and many users quickly figured out that they were sold a bill of goods, that in this respect Vista was a giant step backward from XP.
The DRM in Vista is either irrelevant, or useful, depending on whether you have any DRM-encumbered material. Exactly the same as the DRM in XP.
Many heard that the big reason why Vista was slower and flakier was all the DRM checking it does.
Indeed. The FUD about Vista's DRM was extensive.
And too many schemes involving authorization servers have burned users when the servers had to be shut down, or they couldn't connect for whatever reason. Why else has Apple switched to DRM free mp3 files?
I can guarantee you it's not because they have any philosophical disagreements with copyright, patents and DRM. One need only look at the Psystar situation to realise that.
Nonsense. There are all the reasons that existed before copyright. In the Middle Ages, before there was copyright, universities by necessity shared knowledge, in contrast to the practices of guilds. As we can fund universities, so we can also fund innovation and art.
The corporations today *are* the guilds in that analogy, and there's no incentive for them to "share" unless they can be reasonably confident that everyone else will as well. Hence (in a desparate attempt to bring this back on topic) why the assertion that without copyright, there is no need for the GPL, is false - because without something like that there is zero incentive for anyone in a profit-driven situation to share (more accurately, give away) their work.
h incentives, marketing help and all sorts of bad behavior is going on to prevent this market from developing because they KNOW everyone wants a $100 cheap little web tablet/netbook that doesn't weigh much and gets great battery life [...]
I don't. Much like tablet computers, I have never been able to figure out what I'd use a netbook for (especially an ARM-based one).
You are asking for more from an absence of copyright than what copyleft (GPL + copyright) can do now.
No, I'm not. In fact, I'm not asking for anything, I'm pointing out that without copyright - or something pretty much identical - you *cannot* have what copyleft delivers now. You can have a bunch of other things, but not what copyleft delivers.
There are many ways to lock things up despite copyleft, and if there was no copyright or copyleft, there would still be many ways to lock things up.
Which is irrelevant to the point. I'm not suggesting otherwise.
I've seen this kind of thinking before. People will overlook that a proposal is superior overall because they concentrate too much on a few supposed flaws, and do not consider that the current system also can't do what they say they want. It's like refusing to use electric cars because they can't go 500 mph, overlooking that gasoline cars also can't go that fast.
I'm not making any comment on whether copyright should or should not be abolished, I'm highlighting why the argument "if there was no copyright or patent law, there would be no need for the GPL" is false.
In an environment where there is no copyright law, the sticks and carrots I mentioned in the GP would have a better chance of persuading them to share than the current environment.
It would not. If there were no copyright law, everything would be locked up _properly_ with DRM, unlike the half-arsed schemes that are implemented now as a nod towards trying to prevent piracy. There is zero incentive to "share" in a system where there is no reason for anyone else to share either.
Another thing that copyleft can't force is the sharing of modified GPL software that is only used internally. And yet another is software as a service. Instead of selling a black box, they sell only access to black boxes they keep in their own possession. It's exactly like running a website on a LAMP stack. The website operators can improve the LAMP software all they want, and so long as they don't try to sell copies of their improved versions, cannot be forced to share those improvements, despite copyleft.
Indeed. And they're all irrelevant to my point.
I do not think the BSDL is adequate so long as there is copyright law. Copyleft unlocks what copyright locks up. Without locks, there is no need for keys.
Removing copyright *doesn't* remove the locks, it just swaps keys for combination pads. Similarly, copyleft doesn't "unlock what copyright locks up", it leverages the way copyright locks things up to ensure accessibility to copyrighted works and their derivatives. As I said earlier, without copyright, the GPL is equivalent to the BSDL today (as would be essentially _all_ OSS licenses).
Microsoft would KILL to do this. Honestly, they would literally go out and kill puppies, kittens and baby seals all day long if it would allow them to control everything you install.
This is pretty much completely bass-ackwards. Microsoft knows perfectly well that the reason Windows is so popular is because of it's openness to developers. They're not even close to being stupid enough to kill that goose.
Microsoft could tie Windows up as tight as a drum if they really wanted to - and the security benefits from doing so would be significant. But it would be an insanely stupid move to make from a business perspective.
Accessibility to source code is more than just having it visible. Code that can be examined but not legally changed might be considered open, but is not free. The GPL is as much or more about preventing that as about prying open black boxes.
"Acessibility" was meant to include everything the GPL permits.
The GPL is all about "prying open black boxes". It's practically the fundamental motivation for creating it.
Does that answer you?
No. None of your "solutions" provide the same thing the GPL does. They are all "what ifs", "maybes" and "perhaps". None of them provide what the GPL does.
Look at it this way. Without copyright, there is no difference between the GPL and the BSDL. If you think the BSDL is an adequate license, then you shouldn't have a problem with no copyright. If you think the BSDL is inadequate, and only the GPL provides sufficient "freedom", then you *need* copyright to achieve that.
Please note that Churchill was English. Liberal and conservative are totally different over there. Liberal means anti-government intervention, conservative means the opposite.
This is not correct. In UK (and other Commonwealth countries) politics, "Liberal" is used to describe economic policies while "Conservative" is used to describe a social policies. They're classifications on two sides of a square, not two ends of a line.
If there was no copyright or patent law, there would be no need for the GPL.
False.
The whole point of the GPL is to stop businesses from locking up or "paywalling" software via copyright and patent law.
No, the whole point of the GPL is to provide accessibility to source code. There is nothing in the GPL that dictates code must be made available to *everyone*.
There'd be other ways.
For example ?
I blame it on the Linux and Windows kernels' poor support for multi-processing and seedy memory management.
Compared to what ?
That is not a big problem for us enthusiasts who get and understand every information about that CPU. But to less tech savy people I will always suggest AMD.
It's irrelevant to "less tech savvy people" because these sort of details simply don't matter to them.
100 years ago, you'd be fortunate to see some first cousins once or twice in your lifetime. Now it is common to see most of them several times a year, along with any other common relatives
That sounds completely backwards. I would have expected that in historically closer-knit communities, with relatively much less travel and relocation than the modern world, the exact opposite to be true.
Which is why we should have a VAT, rather than an income tax. A VAT actually taxes wealth.
Huh ? Sales taxes are about as regressive as you can get.
Open Source software, unlike proprietary software, can be supported in-house better, more easily, and more cheaply than via outside support. Large "enterprises", at least those that take proper advantage of scale and hire competent engineers, have less of a need to pay for outside Linux support than your small "consulting gigs" do.
This is pretty much completely backwards. Medium to big business is where you're going to find the highest proportion of commercial software. It's only the huge players like Google (for whom extensive in-depth in-house expertise and customisation is cost-effective) and the tiny players (where even hundreds of dollars matter) who are not going to be a good fit.
Big companies use software like Oracle. Oracle support will not even speak to you if you are running their software on an unsupported OS. In the context of the hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars even a medium sized business will be paying for software like Oracle, and the millions to tens of millions they will be paying in salaries and related expenses, the few tens of - maybe a hundred - thousands it might cost for RHEL licenses is barely a rounding error.
Mercedes are not known for being wimpy vehicles in the power department.
The 300D had 90kw and weighed over 1600kg. A Honda Civic of the day would have been able to outrun it. You might *just* break 100 (mph) with one (though be prepared to take several minutes getting there).
For modern context, today's
Speaking as the owner of a 1983 Mercedes 300D turbo diesel [...]
Maybe you missed the part where this is there to prevent _high speed_ chases ? ;)
The article itself basically presents the facts, but it does mention that it's interesting that a bunch of companies that otherwise compete with each other are in fact cooperating to develop Linux.
Firstly, they're not competing at developing Linux, they're competing at delivering the services and/or software they tie to Linux to make it commercially viable.
Secondly, they're not "co-operating", they're following the conditions of the licensing under which Linux is distributed.
I would personally agree that MySQL is not of the same quality as even PostgreSQL, but people ARE using it for business- and performance- critical applications regardless of its shortcomings.
But no-one doing so would have considered Oracle as an alternative. Ergo, no overlap.
So, Microsoft could at least have fixed this in Windows 7 (according to Wikipedia: "released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009").
No, they could not have.
Mac OS X managed to move from MacOS to a Unix - a far more significant change than anything Windows has done - without breaking much at all. Same with PowerPC to x86.
The move from DOS-based Windows to NT-based Windows was at least as significant.
Neither of Apple's migrations were without their problems, either.
On average it won't happen.
What won't happen ? An outage ? Some sort of data loss ? You have _got_ to be kidding. The average IT infrastructure would be lucky to go more than a few weeks without these sorts of things happening somewhere - not even a few days if you're talking about frontline user support.
How can you say there is a ROI involved in being able to recover everything within 5 hours, versus 300 hours, or versus no recovery at all?
"How much will it cost if the business is completely stopped for 5 hours, 300 hours, or ever ?"
POSIX? (From wikipedia: "POSIX... is the name of a family of related standards specified by the IEEE to define the application programming interface (API), along with shell and utilities interfaces for software compatible with variants of the Unix operating system...")
A quick look at the significant differences between POSIX compliant UNIXes should be all you need to put that idea to rest.
As of Leopard, Mac OS X is fully POSIX compliant. Windows NT 3.1 was POSIX compliant. It's not particularly meaningful or useful standard in this context.
One reason I don't like to upgrade to newer versions of IE is because they seem to have HUGE memory leaks. Although I almost always use Firefox, [...]
Firefox is at least as bad. Here I am with 3 separate Firefox instances, each chewing up over 500MB of RAM (admittedly with about 100 tabs open in each, but still...).