I am associated with one of the groups providing input on these decisions, the University of Agder. I think the actual recommendation attaches some technical notes to the suggestion to use PDF, such that the PDF does not employ encryption and is a particular subset of PDF without proprietary features. Also I think there may be recommendations regarding handicap accessibility - some PDF is a blind man's misery because it doesn't preserve the document structure.
All of that said, proper PDF is PostScript. You can feed it to the PostScript interpreter and it will render. It's not full PostScript, but a subset that is easier to process and isn't a full interpretive language as PostScript is. I've wrtten programs in PostScript that have nothing to do with printing, it's a bit similar to Forth.
If it ever happens that they are all gone, which we will of course try to prevent from happening, someone else will want to make use of that valuable radio spectrum for communicating and will have the same objections. And internet over power lines at that point will be so far obsolete, nobody will want it. Indeed, it's really only marginal today. Those wires just weren't made to hold that sort of signal.
Fiber to the home is really the only viable way to meet future bandwidth needs.
Pardon me, but the Morse code argument is OVER. There is no Morse code requirement any longer, anywhere, with the possible exception of Russia.
Unfortunately, this came a few decades too late. We did not get an increase in new people becoming hams. A lot of existing hams upgraded their licenses, but the overall number of radio amateurs is declining today. New hams are not enrolling in sufficient amounts to replace those with expiring licenses (who are probably mostly dead).
We've heard of cell-phone bombs before, with an explosive device taking the place of part of the battery, but they are usually used to deliver a killing blow to the victim's head, not chest. They were also more practical before the phones got quite as small as they are now.
This is just silly. The guy got killed, and his phone got smashed too.
This has previously been discussed on LWN and I concur with the analysis there. The Linux folks had a legal right to use the GPL in one of two ways: 1.) In making any additions to the overall work that they wished, which would put the combined work under the GPL and 2.) Even if they didn't have #1, the work was dual-licensed with the GPL by a previous author before the BSD folks worked on it. That said, was it the right thing to do? Maybe not. Having taken that work from BSD, the spirit of cooperation might have best been satisfied by making the result under BSD. However, so many of us hate to see folks take our work private in proprietary software that we resist using BSD licensing. So, I can't blame the developers for this one.
Of all the different movements you mentioned, except for the organic foods movement the specific product is not important to the goals of the movement. For example, here in Berkeley we have labor cooperatives that make baked goods and that sell and service bicycles. While each collective contains enthusiasts for those particular products, the overall goal of the movement is conditions for the laborer and not the product at all. In contrast, the goal of the Free Software movement is Free Software.
That said, the organic foods movement might have significant parallels. I'll think about it.
Thanks for representing yourself openly. I don't really like the use of handles online. Lots of folks take them as a license to throw stones from a hiding place. This is doubly the case with the anonymous coward on slashdot.
Unfortunately, it has become standard practice for tech PR firms to work Slashdot postings and moderation without representing themselves as such. Even my own business has had innocent but ill-considered "can you digg this for us, please" emails to the all-staff address. RMS has been the recipient of much muck-throwing over the past few years that (like the OSDL-Forbes thing) had a clear commercial connection.
I don't think you can; for one thing, the Free Software movement is hardly even "close to unique" among social movements in making real products on the scale it does.
Care to name some?
Excluding, quite visibly, Linus Torvalds, and quite likely a very large number of others that are doing the "actual production" of Free Software.
Linus acknowledges Stallman in his own bio, and talks about seeing him lecture in Helsinki in 1990 and how that influenced him to GPL the kernel.
I would be happy to recommend a good voice-to-text program to RMS.
It's not as if you could get him to use Dragon Dictate. He lives the way he would have you live. RMS has Sphinx II available to him, and human beings who will take dictation all day. These are no replacement for good fingers.
I am confused why people espouse this "RMS is special but Linus is not" nonsense.
Well, IMO Richard is a genius and Linus is a good programmer. Big companies pay CEOs who can see 10 to 20 years into the future and make coherent plans about it tremendous salaries. We have one who works for free. When he founded the FSF, he saw the path that proprietary software would lead us down and told us about it. Few believed him then. It's taken 20 years for many of us to appreciate his vision.
Perhaps Linus' language was undiplomatic in his criticism, but his most recent comments are rather conciliatory.
Yes, like this:
In other words, I just think the GPLv3 is too petty and selfish.
You have said previously that your job is to convince companies of the benefits of open source. Has it occurred to you that the bizarre RMS cult-of-personality, into which you appear to have bought, is one reason why companies need so much convincing?
Customers don't complain to me about RMS or GPL3. Once they have gone through license training, many of them want to use the GPL because it's so good at restraining the competition from running away with their product. Indeed, it is not so much that I have to convince companies to use Open Source any longer. I have to get the front office to look at how much their company is already using Open Source and then make their policies catch up with it.
And, before you attempt to criticize me as a corporate shill (as you did that anonymous coward above), you should be aware that I work for a not-for-profit organization.
Well, you might have thought that's convincing, but it could be CompTIA, the American Competitiveness Institute, or the Alexis de Toqueville Institute (organizations that have been active in anti-Open-Source FUD as mouthpiece of some corporate). So, how about you work for a hospital or the ASPCA?
Actually, RMS doesn't ask for the credit for Linux. RMS' entire point in that regard is that Linux is just the kernel. I have called it "Linux" with him next to me, in front of a big audience, and as long as I say "Linux kernel" he's cool with that.
But RMS point is that Linus came along after the system was 95% done and named the whole thing after himself.
RMS asks for things to be named very precisely because he wants you, and the whole world, to think about freedom. This doesn't sound like a bad thing to want.
Hey, I just declined to be on 60 Minutes but for another reason. RMS pushes his points very strongly with reporters, with everyone. I'm glad someone does.
RMS isn't writing much lately because he blew out his fingers with RSI writing as much as he did. He still has pain and can't help it. I'm sure it is a source of continuing sadness to him that he can't code as he once did.
IMO, if Linus had not come along with a working kernel, someone else would have.
Well, look at what Linus has said about GPL3 on a number of occassions. RMS is not responding in kind. RMS response is much more even-tempered than that of Linus.
I think you can consider that Richard is the leading philosopher of a social movement that is close to unique in that it makes real products, and in large scale. The philosophy was critically important to the folks who did the actual production, as was the practical legal work (after all, RMS wrote GPL2, he only got advice from a lawyer). I think there is a difference between philosophy and mere advocacy. Philosophy is an act of creation just as programming is.
The only comparable close-to-contemporary thinker I can compare RMS to, as far as his huge impact is concerned, would be Keynes.
Well, people might call Richard "utopian" but his practical effect on the world has been so huge (look at all of that software and where it is) that it's really difficult to make the "utopian" label stand.
Linus belongs much more closely to the "Open Source" movement [ESR]
Eric has for many years felt that it was important for him to deprecate RMS and even GPL. I have never understood why. Open Source is just another way of talking about Free Software, that can be better received by some business poeple. They are the same thing. Now that Eric is mostly out of the picture, I try to make the point that Open Source and Free Software are two ways of talking about one phenomenon wherever possible.
Eric at some point felt that Richard was an embarassment. Some of us didn't feel so great about Eric because of that, but it doesn't matter any longer because nobody sees much of Eric these days. Who knows what's wrong there.
Given what happened with the GPL3 committee and its industry participation, it's clear that business can work with RMS. There was an OSDL director who tried to smear Richard by pitching a really nasty article to Forbes. That caused the OSDL guy's job to disappear, OSDL was rapidly dismantled by its own membership (big companies) and reopened under the management of the Free Standards Group.
[Linus] doesn't put himself out in front, but seems to recognize that people are going to ask his opinion because of his position with Linux.
IMO this is the problem with Linus. Licensing policy is important, and Linus just doesn't like to think about it. It's too political, and it politics brings up some old resentment that Linus has which precedes his involvement in software. So, IMO, he says stuff without considering it enough.
Linus still doesn't accept Richard's stance on tivio-ization (Richard is against locking up Free code with DRM, and IMO Richard has a good point). Linus has recently slammed Richard's stance on this with much hostility. Richard's response was much more measured, and IMO more than a fair reposte.
Oh, thanks terribly much, anonymous coward and the PR firm behind you. FYI, although lots of you are out to smear him because he threatens the company that hired you, I speak pretty often at conferences together with Stallman, and he's consistently clean. You, on the other hand, are not worthy to lick his boots.
Sometime in the early 1980's, Stallman forecast what the world would be like today with astonishing accuracy. He didn't like what he saw, and decided to do something about it. He devoted his life to it entirely, something that Linus doesn't do. And Linus would be nowhere without him, Linus wouldn't even have had the tools to get started.
Unfortunately, while Linus is a really good engineer, he hates politics. This isn't a bad thing, I'm sure that Richard would rather spend his life making code too, but Richard sees where his duty is. Duty isn't pleasant. Since Linus won't spend the time he should on policy rather than programming, he should really leave it to other folks on the kernel team and stop talking about it, because almost every time he opens his mouth about licensing he hasn't given it enough consideration and says something that ultimately damages us.
You may have noticed that I'm an "Open Source" evangelist. I understand Richard's position and am the first to admit that we're all standing on his shoulders. When I talk about "Open Source", I'm promoting the same thing as Richard, just from another angle that is tailored to win over business people rather than programmers. It would be nice if Linus would help with that rather than get in the way.
It is entirely possible that he has been fooling himself for the 40 years or so he's been trying to make a flying car. But that doesn't mean anyone else should be fooled and I'm not sure that an abiding but irrational faith in yourself should absolve one of fraud charges. There are some successful (meaning that they really flew) flying vehicles in the Hiller Museum that meant to address a similar market, and were made in a few years by competent aeronautical engineers.
if you legally obtain a copy of a copyrighted work, you can pass that on to someone else, via sale, rental, gift, etc., without needing the permission of the copyright holder.
I can't see why this is germane, since both parties are still bound by all terms of the license except any terms that might otherwise have prohibited sale.
Regarding the concept of vouchers being strange, you can view it a different way: Suppose I contract with a fulfillment house to sell copies of CDs for me. I give the fulfillment house a list of people to ship to instead of vouchers. The copyright holder of the CDs asserts that I am not licensed to distribute them. I then attempt to convince a judge that I am not a party to the distribution at all, and that I only transmitted some information about the address where the material was to be sent.
I don't think this has to be in copyright law to be valid in a case, because it's just a circumstance of the distribution.
First, they are not retroactive. The coupons are still out there waiting to be redeemed, Microsoft could withdraw them but does not care to do so.
Second, this is at worst a tit-for-tat defense after Microsoft and Novell engineered a pernicious loophole avoiding the stated intent of the GPL. After that, a tactic that has the effect of closing the loophole is fair game.
Once the Recipient has received the software from Microsoft, anything the Recipient does with it is between him and the copyright holder.
Your analysis doesn't seem to match the facts as Microsoft states them. Although Microsoft has stated that they do not accept GPL3, they have not stated affirmatively that they accept GPL2 on the software set that comes with SuSE. Their stance seems to be that they are not distributing at all.
Microsoft can not offer the availability of GPL2 as a shield from GPL3, because if Microsoft accepted GPL2 and thus admitted that they were distributing, the GPL2 patent terms would apply. The effect would not be particularly different from that of the GPL3 patent terms.
There is room for litigation concerning whether the terms of the GPL are enforceable, at least in California
That finding is not relevant to the GPL because JMRI used the Artistic License, which gives away just about all rights until it's like public domain with attribution - and that fact was important to the case. So, this is more relevant to BSD and Apache licenses than to the GPL, which very clearly does not give away all rights.
The finding did not say the license was unenforcible, but that it had to be enforced as a contract rather than through copyright law. This precludes treble damages and an initial prohibition on distribution before the trial starts, but still gives the copyright holder rights to enforce the license.
But anyway, this is not of precedent to any other case until it gets by some appeals courts, and IMO it would not get by them - knowledgable commentators believe the judge misread the law.
You're welcome to take this position, of course, however be aware it definitely give the impression that the GPL is "viral" in nature, not only in print but the forceful actions of it's proponents.
The proper term is "share and share alike".
Showing business people that we fight back against folks who engineer loopholes in our licenses just says that we're not suckers. Sure, every business person wants us to use BSD licensing on everything and never ask for anything back. But ask them to do that with their own product, and you'll hear a different tune. The ones who last in business have learned to accept the concept of reciprocity.
Oh, sorry, I didn't consider that point. There is a estoppel regarding the last versions of GNU tools that Microsoft themselves distributed. That won't terminate, and could be used to defend us regarding algorithms that appear in those versions of those tools, including when those algorithms are used in other GPL software. It's just that this estoppel applies to many fewer things than are in SuSE.
Slashdot Mirror
All of that said, proper PDF is PostScript. You can feed it to the PostScript interpreter and it will render. It's not full PostScript, but a subset that is easier to process and isn't a full interpretive language as PostScript is. I've wrtten programs in PostScript that have nothing to do with printing, it's a bit similar to Forth.
Bruce
Never mind, stupid pilot error here. Sometimes poor color-blind Bruce can't tell what page he's on.
Look at the front page. As I write this, Slashdot seems to have lost its stories from Wednesday and Thursday.
Fiber to the home is really the only viable way to meet future bandwidth needs.
Bruce
Unfortunately, this came a few decades too late. We did not get an increase in new people becoming hams. A lot of existing hams upgraded their licenses, but the overall number of radio amateurs is declining today. New hams are not enrolling in sufficient amounts to replace those with expiring licenses (who are probably mostly dead).
Bruce
This is just silly. The guy got killed, and his phone got smashed too.
Bruce
1.) In making any additions to the overall work that they wished, which would put the combined work under the GPL and
2.) Even if they didn't have #1, the work was dual-licensed with the GPL by a previous author before the BSD folks worked on it.
That said, was it the right thing to do? Maybe not. Having taken that work from BSD, the spirit of cooperation might have best been satisfied by making the result under BSD. However, so many of us hate to see folks take our work private in proprietary software that we resist using BSD licensing. So, I can't blame the developers for this one.
Bruce
That said, the organic foods movement might have significant parallels. I'll think about it.
Bruce
Thanks for representing yourself openly. I don't really like the use of handles online. Lots of folks take them as a license to throw stones from a hiding place. This is doubly the case with the anonymous coward on slashdot.
Unfortunately, it has become standard practice for tech PR firms to work Slashdot postings and moderation without representing themselves as such. Even my own business has had innocent but ill-considered "can you digg this for us, please" emails to the all-staff address. RMS has been the recipient of much muck-throwing over the past few years that (like the OSDL-Forbes thing) had a clear commercial connection.
Bruce
Bruce
Well, IMO Richard is a genius and Linus is a good programmer. Big companies pay CEOs who can see 10 to 20 years into the future and make coherent plans about it tremendous salaries. We have one who works for free. When he founded the FSF, he saw the path that proprietary software would lead us down and told us about it. Few believed him then. It's taken 20 years for many of us to appreciate his vision.
Yes, like this:That's from a recent efytimes article. It's not even an argument, just name-calling. Customers don't complain to me about RMS or GPL3. Once they have gone through license training, many of them want to use the GPL because it's so good at restraining the competition from running away with their product. Indeed, it is not so much that I have to convince companies to use Open Source any longer. I have to get the front office to look at how much their company is already using Open Source and then make their policies catch up with it.Well, you might have thought that's convincing, but it could be CompTIA, the American Competitiveness Institute, or the Alexis de Toqueville Institute (organizations that have been active in anti-Open-Source FUD as mouthpiece of some corporate). So, how about you work for a hospital or the ASPCA?Bruce
But RMS point is that Linus came along after the system was 95% done and named the whole thing after himself.
RMS asks for things to be named very precisely because he wants you, and the whole world, to think about freedom. This doesn't sound like a bad thing to want.
Hey, I just declined to be on 60 Minutes but for another reason. RMS pushes his points very strongly with reporters, with everyone. I'm glad someone does.
Bruce
IMO, if Linus had not come along with a working kernel, someone else would have.
Well, look at what Linus has said about GPL3 on a number of occassions. RMS is not responding in kind. RMS response is much more even-tempered than that of Linus.
Bruce
The only comparable close-to-contemporary thinker I can compare RMS to, as far as his huge impact is concerned, would be Keynes.
Well, people might call Richard "utopian" but his practical effect on the world has been so huge (look at all of that software and where it is) that it's really difficult to make the "utopian" label stand.
Eric at some point felt that Richard was an embarassment. Some of us didn't feel so great about Eric because of that, but it doesn't matter any longer because nobody sees much of Eric these days. Who knows what's wrong there.
Given what happened with the GPL3 committee and its industry participation, it's clear that business can work with RMS. There was an OSDL director who tried to smear Richard by pitching a really nasty article to Forbes. That caused the OSDL guy's job to disappear, OSDL was rapidly dismantled by its own membership (big companies) and reopened under the management of the Free Standards Group.
Bruce
Linus still doesn't accept Richard's stance on tivio-ization (Richard is against locking up Free code with DRM, and IMO Richard has a good point). Linus has recently slammed Richard's stance on this with much hostility. Richard's response was much more measured, and IMO more than a fair reposte.
Bruce
Sometime in the early 1980's, Stallman forecast what the world would be like today with astonishing accuracy. He didn't like what he saw, and decided to do something about it. He devoted his life to it entirely, something that Linus doesn't do. And Linus would be nowhere without him, Linus wouldn't even have had the tools to get started.
Unfortunately, while Linus is a really good engineer, he hates politics. This isn't a bad thing, I'm sure that Richard would rather spend his life making code too, but Richard sees where his duty is. Duty isn't pleasant. Since Linus won't spend the time he should on policy rather than programming, he should really leave it to other folks on the kernel team and stop talking about it, because almost every time he opens his mouth about licensing he hasn't given it enough consideration and says something that ultimately damages us.
You may have noticed that I'm an "Open Source" evangelist. I understand Richard's position and am the first to admit that we're all standing on his shoulders. When I talk about "Open Source", I'm promoting the same thing as Richard, just from another angle that is tailored to win over business people rather than programmers. It would be nice if Linus would help with that rather than get in the way.
Bruce
It is entirely possible that he has been fooling himself for the 40 years or so he's been trying to make a flying car. But that doesn't mean anyone else should be fooled and I'm not sure that an abiding but irrational faith in yourself should absolve one of fraud charges. There are some successful (meaning that they really flew) flying vehicles in the Hiller Museum that meant to address a similar market, and were made in a few years by competent aeronautical engineers.
Regarding the concept of vouchers being strange, you can view it a different way: Suppose I contract with a fulfillment house to sell copies of CDs for me. I give the fulfillment house a list of people to ship to instead of vouchers. The copyright holder of the CDs asserts that I am not licensed to distribute them. I then attempt to convince a judge that I am not a party to the distribution at all, and that I only transmitted some information about the address where the material was to be sent.
I don't think this has to be in copyright law to be valid in a case, because it's just a circumstance of the distribution.
Bruce
Second, this is at worst a tit-for-tat defense after Microsoft and Novell engineered a pernicious loophole avoiding the stated intent of the GPL. After that, a tactic that has the effect of closing the loophole is fair game.
Bruce
Microsoft can not offer the availability of GPL2 as a shield from GPL3, because if Microsoft accepted GPL2 and thus admitted that they were distributing, the GPL2 patent terms would apply. The effect would not be particularly different from that of the GPL3 patent terms.
Thanks
Bruce
That finding is not relevant to the GPL because JMRI used the Artistic License, which gives away just about all rights until it's like public domain with attribution - and that fact was important to the case. So, this is more relevant to BSD and Apache licenses than to the GPL, which very clearly does not give away all rights.
The finding did not say the license was unenforcible, but that it had to be enforced as a contract rather than through copyright law. This precludes treble damages and an initial prohibition on distribution before the trial starts, but still gives the copyright holder rights to enforce the license.
But anyway, this is not of precedent to any other case until it gets by some appeals courts, and IMO it would not get by them - knowledgable commentators believe the judge misread the law.
Bruce
The proper term is "share and share alike".
Showing business people that we fight back against folks who engineer loopholes in our licenses just says that we're not suckers. Sure, every business person wants us to use BSD licensing on everything and never ask for anything back. But ask them to do that with their own product, and you'll hear a different tune. The ones who last in business have learned to accept the concept of reciprocity.
Bruce
Thanks
Bruce