Only rabid Linux advocacy is okay? Look, OS X is a great UNIX system with the best GUI most people have ever used. What's wrong with pushing it as a functional alternative to Microsoft along with Linux? We never see "Slashdot is a Linux advocacy site!" complaints in Linux articles. What, you thought Linux would be the only good alternative geek OS forever?
What amazes me most is how short of a time it took for OS X to get put together. Most everyone agrees that the first release was more of a public beta, but even X.0 was an amazingly mature product for something completely new that had been started mere years earlier. I heard a report that as many as 10,000 engineers had worked on OS X at some point in the course of its development years.
I'm sure it didn't hurt to have NextStep to build off of.
Personally, I believe its ethically right and in fact a duty to download and spread music on P2P.
Okay, I'll bite.
When you buy a CD, cents worth goes to the artist.
That's irrelevant. Artists willingly sign their contrasts. Regardless, there is no magical transfer of copyright to pirates simply because they feel there aren't enough pennies going to artists. All you're doing is ensuring the artists don't even get THAT much. I'm very confused; how is that better?
A 4-man group that sells 250,000 CDs ends up with $16,000, while the RIAA pockets 3 million.
No, they don't. This is the very demonization I was talking about. Slashdot has painted the RIAA as this amorphous evil blob for so long.
The RIAA is just a lobbying group for various record labels. The 4-man group worked out a deal between lawyers for a contract that the 4-man group willingly signed between them and the record label they willingly decided to sign with.
Its better to deprive the musicians of a few cents, deprive the RIAA of 20 bucks, and help increase the popularity of the music (directly giving the musicians more money through concerts and such)
So, to put it in Slashdot terms:
1.) Make sure artist is never compensated for album. 2.) Make sure album never sees any sales, thereby making sure record labels won't take chances on that music ever again. 3.) Use the "free advertising" ploy. That is, it's free advertising that will make some other person go to a concert. They'll make their money from tickets. Some other person will buy them, so it's okay if I don't pay for this album now. Kind of like how people litter the highway and think some other person will clean it up. 4.) ??? 5.) Profit!
I hate to tell you this, but not everyone goes to concerts. Albums have broader popularity then concerts, because not everyone can go to a concert or afford to (have you seen ticket prices compared to the cost of an album?). Not to mention studio bands who don't want to tour. Why should they be forced to in order to make a living? The Beatles stopped touring in order to put out a series of classic studio albums.
than to buy the CD and perpetuate the problem.
So don't buy a CD. Download music through iTunes or Napster instead.
Every CD you buy is money the RIAA uses to abuse more musicians.
More vague accusations toward the amorphous blob. Every CD you don't buy is money that doesn't go to the artists. Artists have entertainment lawyers who make sure their contracts are fair. Musicians willingly sign contracts every day. Do you think Coldplay had a gun to their head when they signed up for an RIAA label? Was Velvet Revolver kidnapped and taken to the label offices to sign a contract under duress? Was Skindred told that their children would be killed if they didn't sign their contract?
It's not to say the music industry is a perfect industry. No industry is, and there are disputes between clients over their contracts JUST LIKE IN ANY OTHER INDUSTRY.
But the skewed mindset invented here only exists to shift blame away from downloaders and onto a faceless entity. "I'm not the bad guy--the RIAA made me do it!"
2.) You claim that if there were no intellectual property laws, then the GPL wouldn't be needed. Wrong. The GPL is provided to do one thing--make sure that people always provide the source code and credit original authors. If there is no intellectual property law, then the GPL can't demand that at all. The GPL is not opposed to intellectual property; it is BASED on it.
Let's put it this way. What legal basis do you have to ask me to follow the GPL? What's to stop me from using GPL code without attribution and without provide the source code to my new project? The idea of intellectual property, that's what.
The GPL relies on the idea of intellectual property and copyright law. However, P2P piracy is against both. To be for piracy and for the GPL is a contradiction.
Let's examine what you say:
GPL is about liberating copyright from the whole "copying" restriction, while maintining the credits associated with being the author of a GPL'd program
Why should I have to credit anybody if I use GPL code? Why should I have to follow that license? What's the basis for the GPL?
If someoneone is in support of infringing on copyright, then how can they get angry if I violate the usage restrictions of the GPL? You're asking me to follow a license based on nothing more than a text file telling me to. What's your basis?
I'll tell you. Intellectual property and copyright.
Agreed. But you'll get little in the way of support on/., because a lot of people have used demonization as a way to shift blame away from themselves. Nobody wants to just admit that piracy is about people wanting to get stuff for free. It's not a freedom fighter movement to protect the artists against an evil, corporate-controlled world.
I've pirated music in the past. I fully admit it. I'm not going to pretend I did anything for the artists other than not pay them for music I would have otherwise had to pay for. Pirates reap all the benefits of piracy, which is highly convenient.
iTunes lets me choose individual songs for a buck, often ripped directly from the master tapes for higher quality then even CDs offer. I can spare 99 goddamn cents.
Of course, the solution would be to provide some sort of infrastructure for removing copyrighted materials from a P2P network, but people would hack around that immediately just to keep on pirating stuff, thereby invalidating all the arguments that P2P networks are peaceful, benign technologies only abused by a small minority. Come on, we're not idiots here. We all know that probably 90+% of P2P traffic is copyrighted materials you would otherwise be compensating the owner for. Clearly, pirates don't want to compensate anybody. I call that freeloading.
It boils down to this. Some people, having grown used the convenience of getting anything for free for so long, will defend it with any justification they can. The very idea that they might have to start setting foot in a store again to spend money makes them lash out to protect their activities. Now, instead of talking about ways to advance technology so that legal online music is even better, people just paint the RIAA as evil all the time without even citing specific examples of abuse (I haven't seen a CD for $20 in a couple of years now...and like I said, I get them for half that anyway).
The people mysteriously missing from the equation is always the artist. It's always "RIAA this, RIAA that. The actual people who rented the studio, the gear, the recording engineer, the mastering house, did the gigs and rehearsals, and wrote and recorded the thing for three months simply don't get mentioned at all. They're automatically assumed to not exist or not care that something they obviously intended to be compensated for (by virtue of the fact they put it out for sale as per the contracts they willingly signed with the record label) is being distributed around by people for the sole purpose of NOT having to pay for it.
The technology is fantastic. The people suck. Eventually, the issue will boil to a head and either a compromise will be reached (though in my opinion, that compromise already exists with things like iTunes), or something extreme will happen from either side that ruins it for everybody.
Why should "intellectual property owners" have special privileges with regard to their products which allow them to override normal private property rights?
In that case, I guess the GPL doesn't matter. Right?
Barring that, your analogy doesn't even make sense. Someone buying a cabinet isn't able to make exact copies of the cabinet and distribute them to everyone in the neighborhood for free, putting the actual cabinet maker out of business. What right do you have to distribute his cabinet?
Since when did a cabinet become "intellectual property" anyway? What a stupid analogy.
It's very telling that this completely normal post was marked as "Troll" by some sheep.
The truth is very simple in this situation.
1.) P2P file-sharing is just a technology, neither good nor bad.
2.) Copyright infringement of other people's stuff, no matter how many people try to justify it, is ethically wrong.
The big struggle with this is coming from frightened content owners who realize that people are lazy and don't care and will pirate anything they can get their hands on, simply because human nature is such that if you can get something without paying for it, you will. Frankly, piracy is wrong and always will be wrong, and legal downloading like iTunes is already taking off, which means most pirates are so cheap that they're not willing to spend 99 cents on a song. However, there is nothing wrong with the technology itself, like with VCRs.
Yeah, and there are some that are run by businesses selling ads and spyware. Those are the companies being talked about in the article, not the stuff that lets you pirate for free with no strings attached.
Regardless, it's great that the EU rejected Microsoft's suggested name of "Reduced Media Edition." That was just Microsoft's attempt to discourage people from buying a version of Windows that didn't have a pointlessly bundled media player. "Hey, this one say 'Reduced Media,' so it must not be as good as the normal version." All that's different is that Windows Media Player isn't tied into the OS and is available for download seperately, as are any other media players. But a normal person wouldn't have known that from the name. Nice try, Microsoft.
Wrong. I do value freedoms. What I don't value is building up ideals into entire, untouchable belief systems. You know what those are called? Religions.
And once morethe FOSS community illustrates how it kills itself. A free, viable, functioning alternative to Office, and people get upset because it doesn't fit their personal definition of "free" enough.
Get some priorities. Sheesh. Only in this community do these minor issues get blown up into huge flamewars over nothing. "It's not FREE enough!" Who the hell cares, it works and it's free to use!
I'm still trying to figure out how it was posted on/. It's sure to just confuse a bunch of people who read the summary and think it's all about how 'the finder sux'... which is the shortest section in there.
Yes, these are the kinds of tech articles/. used to post on a regular basis, before it started dumbing down the hardcore techie stuff to get more ad views. Now, it's "Linus did this today," "A new way Microsoft sucks," and "P2P piracy is great, oh, and here's a GPL violation article to get pissed over." Blah.
I've been told that most of the reason had to do with the fact that Mac apps take advantage of drag-and-drop more than Windows apps do, so it made sense to always have other apps showing. Notice that Powerbooks and Apple monitors are usually wider than PC monitors.
And yet, expect computer nerds to continue to give themselves ego-boosting labels like "hacker" instead of recognizing that the vast majority of society, not to mention the very origin of the term, uses the word to denote nefarious activity.
This just stems from people liking to call themselves a "hacker" without it meaning anything negative. Face it; the term is negative.
Actually, most of them were people who studied/taught at universities or worked at places like HP, AT&T, etc. At the least, they had formal, academic training.
I can't find any details on this. Does anyone know if the next version of Photoshop will be taking advantage of CoreImage on Macs? OpenGL-accelerated filters would help a lot on my Powerbook.
You're kidding! Blogging is a new form of media? How could I possibly have missed this through all the endless articles and mainstream media hype over it starting in 2004?
Welcome to why OSS never took off in the desktop market. The attitude that user feedback is useless and that users should just do everything their own damn selves.
I always have more up-to-date software than any other distro, it's simple to set options for various software, and there's never any version conflicts.
And people wonder why Gentoo users are stereotyped? All three of those statements aren't always true.
1.) So, where's your Gnome 2.10 then? Before anybody mentions ~x86, that's no different from unstable on Debian or just installing the package yourself on any other distro.
2.) There are sometimes configuration issues with Gentoo; they are mentioned elsewhere in this discussion. For instance, etc-update absolutely sucks and the Gentoo devs refuse to replace it with better solutions that have already been offered.
3.) Gentoo's packaging system sometimes creates versioning conflicts. I've personally had to fix a broken system twice. Check the Gentoo forums for all the other issues users sometimes have.
I'm not bashing people who use Gentoo. I'm just saying, it's not some perfect distro that does everything great. And compilation is so overrated and provides no benefits. I wiped my three year old Gentoo install once I discovered Ubuntu, so that's just me.
Slashdot Mirror
Only rabid Linux advocacy is okay? Look, OS X is a great UNIX system with the best GUI most people have ever used. What's wrong with pushing it as a functional alternative to Microsoft along with Linux? We never see "Slashdot is a Linux advocacy site!" complaints in Linux articles. What, you thought Linux would be the only good alternative geek OS forever?
What amazes me most is how short of a time it took for OS X to get put together. Most everyone agrees that the first release was more of a public beta, but even X.0 was an amazingly mature product for something completely new that had been started mere years earlier. I heard a report that as many as 10,000 engineers had worked on OS X at some point in the course of its development years.
I'm sure it didn't hurt to have NextStep to build off of.
Personally, I believe its ethically right and in fact a duty to download and spread music on P2P.
Okay, I'll bite.
When you buy a CD, cents worth goes to the artist.
That's irrelevant. Artists willingly sign their contrasts. Regardless, there is no magical transfer of copyright to pirates simply because they feel there aren't enough pennies going to artists. All you're doing is ensuring the artists don't even get THAT much. I'm very confused; how is that better?
A 4-man group that sells 250,000 CDs ends up with $16,000, while the RIAA pockets 3 million.
No, they don't. This is the very demonization I was talking about. Slashdot has painted the RIAA as this amorphous evil blob for so long.
The RIAA is just a lobbying group for various record labels. The 4-man group worked out a deal between lawyers for a contract that the 4-man group willingly signed between them and the record label they willingly decided to sign with.
Its better to deprive the musicians of a few cents, deprive the RIAA of 20 bucks, and help increase the popularity of the music (directly giving the musicians more money through concerts and such)
So, to put it in Slashdot terms:
1.) Make sure artist is never compensated for album.
2.) Make sure album never sees any sales, thereby making sure record labels won't take chances on that music ever again.
3.) Use the "free advertising" ploy. That is, it's free advertising that will make some other person go to a concert. They'll make their money from tickets. Some other person will buy them, so it's okay if I don't pay for this album now. Kind of like how people litter the highway and think some other person will clean it up.
4.) ???
5.) Profit!
I hate to tell you this, but not everyone goes to concerts. Albums have broader popularity then concerts, because not everyone can go to a concert or afford to (have you seen ticket prices compared to the cost of an album?). Not to mention studio bands who don't want to tour. Why should they be forced to in order to make a living? The Beatles stopped touring in order to put out a series of classic studio albums.
than to buy the CD and perpetuate the problem.
So don't buy a CD. Download music through iTunes or Napster instead.
Every CD you buy is money the RIAA uses to abuse more musicians.
More vague accusations toward the amorphous blob. Every CD you don't buy is money that doesn't go to the artists. Artists have entertainment lawyers who make sure their contracts are fair. Musicians willingly sign contracts every day. Do you think Coldplay had a gun to their head when they signed up for an RIAA label? Was Velvet Revolver kidnapped and taken to the label offices to sign a contract under duress? Was Skindred told that their children would be killed if they didn't sign their contract?
It's not to say the music industry is a perfect industry. No industry is, and there are disputes between clients over their contracts JUST LIKE IN ANY OTHER INDUSTRY.
But the skewed mindset invented here only exists to shift blame away from downloaders and onto a faceless entity. "I'm not the bad guy--the RIAA made me do it!"
1.) Fix your caps lock. Please.
2.) You claim that if there were no intellectual property laws, then the GPL wouldn't be needed. Wrong. The GPL is provided to do one thing--make sure that people always provide the source code and credit original authors. If there is no intellectual property law, then the GPL can't demand that at all. The GPL is not opposed to intellectual property; it is BASED on it.
Let's put it this way. What legal basis do you have to ask me to follow the GPL? What's to stop me from using GPL code without attribution and without provide the source code to my new project? The idea of intellectual property, that's what.
The GPL relies on the idea of intellectual property and copyright law. However, P2P piracy is against both. To be for piracy and for the GPL is a contradiction.
Let's examine what you say:
GPL is about liberating copyright from the whole "copying" restriction, while maintining the credits associated with being the author of a GPL'd program
Why should I have to credit anybody if I use GPL code? Why should I have to follow that license? What's the basis for the GPL?
If someoneone is in support of infringing on copyright, then how can they get angry if I violate the usage restrictions of the GPL? You're asking me to follow a license based on nothing more than a text file telling me to. What's your basis?
I'll tell you. Intellectual property and copyright.
It was a joke, man. :) I was mocking the random conclusion of the very post you were originally addressing.
Agreed. But you'll get little in the way of support on /., because a lot of people have used demonization as a way to shift blame away from themselves. Nobody wants to just admit that piracy is about people wanting to get stuff for free. It's not a freedom fighter movement to protect the artists against an evil, corporate-controlled world.
I've pirated music in the past. I fully admit it. I'm not going to pretend I did anything for the artists other than not pay them for music I would have otherwise had to pay for. Pirates reap all the benefits of piracy, which is highly convenient.
iTunes lets me choose individual songs for a buck, often ripped directly from the master tapes for higher quality then even CDs offer. I can spare 99 goddamn cents.
Of course, the solution would be to provide some sort of infrastructure for removing copyrighted materials from a P2P network, but people would hack around that immediately just to keep on pirating stuff, thereby invalidating all the arguments that P2P networks are peaceful, benign technologies only abused by a small minority. Come on, we're not idiots here. We all know that probably 90+% of P2P traffic is copyrighted materials you would otherwise be compensating the owner for. Clearly, pirates don't want to compensate anybody. I call that freeloading.
It boils down to this. Some people, having grown used the convenience of getting anything for free for so long, will defend it with any justification they can. The very idea that they might have to start setting foot in a store again to spend money makes them lash out to protect their activities. Now, instead of talking about ways to advance technology so that legal online music is even better, people just paint the RIAA as evil all the time without even citing specific examples of abuse (I haven't seen a CD for $20 in a couple of years now...and like I said, I get them for half that anyway).
The people mysteriously missing from the equation is always the artist. It's always "RIAA this, RIAA that. The actual people who rented the studio, the gear, the recording engineer, the mastering house, did the gigs and rehearsals, and wrote and recorded the thing for three months simply don't get mentioned at all. They're automatically assumed to not exist or not care that something they obviously intended to be compensated for (by virtue of the fact they put it out for sale as per the contracts they willingly signed with the record label) is being distributed around by people for the sole purpose of NOT having to pay for it.
The technology is fantastic. The people suck. Eventually, the issue will boil to a head and either a compromise will be reached (though in my opinion, that compromise already exists with things like iTunes), or something extreme will happen from either side that ruins it for everybody.
In that case, I guess the GPL doesn't matter. Right?
Barring that, your analogy doesn't even make sense. Someone buying a cabinet isn't able to make exact copies of the cabinet and distribute them to everyone in the neighborhood for free, putting the actual cabinet maker out of business. What right do you have to distribute his cabinet?
Since when did a cabinet become "intellectual property" anyway? What a stupid analogy.
It's very telling that this completely normal post was marked as "Troll" by some sheep.
The truth is very simple in this situation.
1.) P2P file-sharing is just a technology, neither good nor bad.
2.) Copyright infringement of other people's stuff, no matter how many people try to justify it, is ethically wrong.
The big struggle with this is coming from frightened content owners who realize that people are lazy and don't care and will pirate anything they can get their hands on, simply because human nature is such that if you can get something without paying for it, you will. Frankly, piracy is wrong and always will be wrong, and legal downloading like iTunes is already taking off, which means most pirates are so cheap that they're not willing to spend 99 cents on a song. However, there is nothing wrong with the technology itself, like with VCRs.
More proof that you, enforcer999, are working not for small business, but big business. Sigh.
Yeah, and there are some that are run by businesses selling ads and spyware. Those are the companies being talked about in the article, not the stuff that lets you pirate for free with no strings attached.
I hereby announce that I am the new owner of the Internet. Contact me and I will give you my home IP to route all your packets through.
then go out and buy another copy of uncrippled Windows when they realise their mistake.
Or, they won't spend another equivalent $100 US and will instead realize they can download Windows Media Player, or any other player, for free.
It's not "crippled." It just doesn't ship with a non-removable Windows Media Player installed. Please explain exactly how that "cripples" Windows.
Regardless, it's great that the EU rejected Microsoft's suggested name of "Reduced Media Edition." That was just Microsoft's attempt to discourage people from buying a version of Windows that didn't have a pointlessly bundled media player. "Hey, this one say 'Reduced Media,' so it must not be as good as the normal version." All that's different is that Windows Media Player isn't tied into the OS and is available for download seperately, as are any other media players. But a normal person wouldn't have known that from the name. Nice try, Microsoft.
Wrong. I do value freedoms. What I don't value is building up ideals into entire, untouchable belief systems. You know what those are called? Religions.
And once morethe FOSS community illustrates how it kills itself. A free, viable, functioning alternative to Office, and people get upset because it doesn't fit their personal definition of "free" enough.
Get some priorities. Sheesh. Only in this community do these minor issues get blown up into huge flamewars over nothing. "It's not FREE enough!" Who the hell cares, it works and it's free to use!
I'm still trying to figure out how it was posted on /. It's sure to just confuse a bunch of people who read the summary and think it's all about how 'the finder sux'... which is the shortest section in there.
/. used to post on a regular basis, before it started dumbing down the hardcore techie stuff to get more ad views. Now, it's "Linus did this today," "A new way Microsoft sucks," and "P2P piracy is great, oh, and here's a GPL violation article to get pissed over." Blah.
Yes, these are the kinds of tech articles
I've been told that most of the reason had to do with the fact that Mac apps take advantage of drag-and-drop more than Windows apps do, so it made sense to always have other apps showing. Notice that Powerbooks and Apple monitors are usually wider than PC monitors.
And yet, expect computer nerds to continue to give themselves ego-boosting labels like "hacker" instead of recognizing that the vast majority of society, not to mention the very origin of the term, uses the word to denote nefarious activity.
This just stems from people liking to call themselves a "hacker" without it meaning anything negative. Face it; the term is negative.
Actually, most of them were people who studied/taught at universities or worked at places like HP, AT&T, etc. At the least, they had formal, academic training.
I can't find any details on this. Does anyone know if the next version of Photoshop will be taking advantage of CoreImage on Macs? OpenGL-accelerated filters would help a lot on my Powerbook.
Well, I hate to tell you this, but you don't need Gentoo to hand-edit configuration files. :)
You're kidding! Blogging is a new form of media? How could I possibly have missed this through all the endless articles and mainstream media hype over it starting in 2004?
Thank you for setting me upon the Path.
Welcome to why OSS never took off in the desktop market. The attitude that user feedback is useless and that users should just do everything their own damn selves.
And people wonder why Gentoo users are stereotyped? All three of those statements aren't always true.
1.) So, where's your Gnome 2.10 then? Before anybody mentions ~x86, that's no different from unstable on Debian or just installing the package yourself on any other distro.
2.) There are sometimes configuration issues with Gentoo; they are mentioned elsewhere in this discussion. For instance, etc-update absolutely sucks and the Gentoo devs refuse to replace it with better solutions that have already been offered.
3.) Gentoo's packaging system sometimes creates versioning conflicts. I've personally had to fix a broken system twice. Check the Gentoo forums for all the other issues users sometimes have.
I'm not bashing people who use Gentoo. I'm just saying, it's not some perfect distro that does everything great. And compilation is so overrated and provides no benefits. I wiped my three year old Gentoo install once I discovered Ubuntu, so that's just me.