The way the license is written, if you use any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source.
At the risk of being modded "redundant,", no, that's not how the GPL is written. Unless you redefine "your software" to mean something entirely different from what it normally means.
"Jesus, I can't believe the crazy 'logic' that has led people to consider something like a corporate death penalty. Corporations are imaginary--they are a legal fiction."
Then you go on:
Just because the State has to approve the creation of a corporation does not mean the State created it.
You contradict yourself. Only the State can make a "legal fiction." Without the State the corporation is a mere bunch of investors, otherwise known as a partnership. Those investors can talk all they want, but their legal fiction doesn't exist until the State says it does.
Unlike your house and building permit example, where the house is a real thing that exists independently of any State action.
I think she should try the state labor agency first, and if that doesn't work out quickly she should retain an attorney to recover damages from the former employer.
While the corporate death penalty sounds like a good idea on the surface, take a look at the precedents it sets. Basically, you have the US government stepping in and abridging the right to freedom of association.
No you aren't.
A business partnership is an example of free association. A corporation is an entity created by the state. They're two entirely different things.
I say, if an entity is spamming, or its mailing-list subscriptions don't require a double-opt-in, then that entity should be kicked off the internet and forced to take netiquette classes.
But don't let the spammers abuse language that way. It's not "double opt-in." it's confirmed opt-in. The former is supposed to sound complicated and burdensome. The latter is much more accurate and doesn't carry the baggage.
I can name THESE sites that SPAM you FAR worse than Macromedia (ie, have "opt out" systems when registering software or signing up for services)... Think MAPS will block THEM anytime soon?
Real Networks
Microsoft
Doubleclick and most other ad servers...
Real has been listed by MAPS for years now, because they spam and will not shape up.
As for doubleclick, MAPS has never had a policy of blocking for web ads or cursor update thingies. Just spam.
To sum up, there is no "correct" answer to whether you made money from the $6-$5 book. Over periods of time, the entire firm can be seen to make money or not, but it's always in the context of what came before and what position they'll be left in for the future.
That's why I'm so amused to see those newspaper articles that claim such-and-such NFL team (for example) lost money last year.
Accounting in sports (and e-businesses) is complex enough that a wide, wide range of results can be plausibly supported depending on the desired result.
If you want to impress the shareholders, pick a lower loss reserve value and make other optimistic assumptions. If you want pity from the public, pick pessimistic assumptions. The questions are sufficiently subjective that either end of the range can be considered reasonable.
Government also has to weigh the total good of the people when it makes policy. This includes public health and the environment. A corporation isn't bound to consider any of these things. They'll cheerfully put more mercury in your food if it makes them an extra dollar. You'd really prefer to put your fate in the hands of such people?
It's worse than that. The corporation is bound not to consider the public good unless that's written into its charter.
"Public" corporations (i.e., those that have their stock traded widely) are legally bound to maximize shareholder value. Their officers can be successfully sued by shareholders for not doing so.
The main reason is that because corporations have "personhood" under the law, but no one has to pay the price of any wrong they do. Also, these "persons" can afford the best lawyers and the best politicians to get their way. So they have the rights of normal people, but none of the responsibility, and the money to do pretty much anything they want. There's also no way to really attack them, because the corporation can just vanish, and the money it generated can go toward another different corporation with none of the liabilities of the first.
Concrete example.
My neighbor, who used to drive a truck for Company A, now drives for Company B. Company B, you see, bought (profitable) Company A. B took A's assets (trucks, contracts with terminals, etc.) but not its liabilities (basically normal cash debts). The truckers suspect that Company B will fairly soon dissolve Company A, leaving A's creditors in the lurch.
Of course, A has already fired all their drivers and let them be re-hired by B at a lower wage. (This could have happened without the corporate shell game though, since the truckers are non-union and don't have a written contract with a guaranteed wage. But the shuffle made it look slightly more legit, maybe.)
So, the truckers get paid less and the creditors are left out in the cold while Company B gets the benefit of a shiny new truck fleet.
This maneuver wouldn't have been possible without the legal fiction of corporate personhood. Without it, Company A's liabilities would have been stuck on a real person (or group of people) who would still be liable after the transfer of assets.
No sane person, in the place of Company A, would have let this asset-stripping happen for "nothing.". But because Company A isn't a real person, it doesn't have to feel the pain of being broke and unable to pay its bills.
I think legislators should decide whether corporations are more like robots (in which case they shouldn't have rights) or more like people (in which case they shouldn't be owned and manipulated like slaves).
It's the combination of having "personhood" powers at the same time that they can't feel personal deprivation that makes the corporate idea so undemocratic.
It's wrong that a corporation can by its actions commit felonies but not actually serve jail time. It's wrong that a corporation can in some cases commit first-degree murder but not feel the pain of a death sentence. It's wrong that a corporation can even botch its own affairs badly enough to face bankruptcy but not have to deal with the realities of feeding, clothing, and sheltering itself without money.
(Why yes, of course my business is incorporated. I'll give up my "corporate shield" when everyone else gives up theirs.)
Most software shops have a standard (sad) working model. One self promoted primadonna coding 70% of the application... often isn't even the best coder on the team but surely is the most bullish and opinionated and thus grabs all the exciting work. Everyone else is just supposed to feel inferior and work on some tiny pet project of their own. This is not only grossly underutilises the rest of the team but usually at some point puts the project in jeopardy because the primadonna has now found another company to prey on.
I worked on a project like that once.
The client never figured out that Primadonna Guy was spending most of his (billable contractor) time on "make-work" and leaving so little for the rest of us to do that they eventually had to scale back the whole project just to get costs back in line.
So the software never really got completed, it's unnecessarily hard to maintain, and a couple of other contractors are looking for work elsewhere.
That's a shop where XP might have been a good idea. I doubt that Primadonna Guy would have stuck around if he knew that there'd be ongoing reality checks.
Oh no it's finally happened... Software literature has become facile and meaningless as management pulp. The central tenets here are tautological: the central tenet of making good soup is to to find the essential elements of good soup and use them.
I'm amazed at the number of times in a normal week (in programming and in normal life) I find myself telling someone, "There's no substitute for doing things The Right Way."
If it takes a book and a methodology to get people to understand reflexive logic, so be it.
But it's unfair to ask questions like "Why is your security so poor?" and then complain that the answer was inadequate.
It was a perfectly reasonable question. The dude asked why they prioritize cute features over security. The Microsoft guy neither answered the question nor denied its premise. He just went on about how hard they're working to fix the bugs. But that wasn't anything like the point of the question.
If someone had asked Linus why he chose to make Linux more geek-oriented than user-oriented, and Linus replied that he had dozens of helpers working on user interface improvements, that would have been a non-answer too.
Yup. Their Childhood Leukemia book rules, but I heard it's going out of print because of the obviously limited market. As the author says, how can you possibly break even on something you can only sell 4000 copies of?
The government is a contractee, just like anyone else, and they're governed by the same laws. If they didn't specify licensing in the contract, and the contractor is the rightful owner of the code, then the government is stuck. The owner gets to name the license.
I've found it to be very helpful to spell this out in the contract before doing any work on the system in question.
Currently, as an example, I'm doing a database project for a local nonprofit organization. I explained to them that I really want to specify in the contract that I retain copyright to the work, because that way I won't have to keep running back to them for permission every time I might want to reuse some code on another project. The client organization, however, is licensed to do anything they please with the code, including modifying and/or redistributing it. (Sort of a private GPL.) They agreed to this, as it gives them all the useful things that copyright would have given them.
And I furthermore told them, although it wasn't necessary to put this into the contract, that I was planning on GPLing the result when I was done. Not having anything to gain from keeping the source closed, the client said that was fine with them too.
CSS uses the principle of "graceful degradation." In other words, if the browser can't or won't use the style sheet, the resulting view should still be readable and useful.
The Web Standards Project (feh) doesn't know what it's talking about.
You know, that's a bit too strong a statement on my part. The WSP has a generally clued outlook, and their goal is to reinforce standards instead of making things more complicated, but I don't think forced upgrading is a great idea.
Web authors should write standards-compliant HTML and apply compliant CSS where needed. Browsers that can't render that should be upgraded. But users of those browsers don't need or won't benefit from this kind of campaign.
I just posted the above message and it said "posted at 8:20pm EDT". But I'm sitting here in Toronto in the Eastern Daylight Time zone and it's definitely around 7:23pm.
Am I missing something?
Yes.
You're currently on Eastern Standard Time, not Daylight. The server might be a little confused.
CSS uses the principle of "graceful degradation." In other words, if the browser can't or won't use the style sheet, the resulting view should still be readable and useful.
The Web Standards Project (feh) doesn't know what it's talking about.
I think the worst thing about censorware is the fact that most parents:
a) have no clue about the software
b) frequently have the child install the software because the kid is more computer literate
c) the pc is usually in the kids room
Thanks for the validation. I'm pretty pleased that the kid's PC is in the dining room, for that reason among others. We don't automate any filtering; we just observe the BOFHlets at play on the computer the same way we watch 'em at the playground or in the backyard.
At some time in the future I might put something on the network to log HTTP accesses, "just in case," but I'm really not interested in filtering. Too inflexible and intrusive.
Slashdot Mirror
No it does not.
The GPL is here. It claims no such thing.
Please stop promoting FUD.
re-quoting Ballmer:
At the risk of being modded "redundant,", no, that's not how the GPL is written. Unless you redefine "your software" to mean something entirely different from what it normally means.
"Jesus, I can't believe the crazy 'logic' that has led people to consider something like a corporate death penalty. Corporations are imaginary--they are a legal fiction."
Then you go on: Just because the State has to approve the creation of a corporation does not mean the State created it.
You contradict yourself. Only the State can make a "legal fiction." Without the State the corporation is a mere bunch of investors, otherwise known as a partnership. Those investors can talk all they want, but their legal fiction doesn't exist until the State says it does.
Unlike your house and building permit example, where the house is a real thing that exists independently of any State action.
I think she should try the state labor agency first, and if that doesn't work out quickly she should retain an attorney to recover damages from the former employer.
No you aren't.
A business partnership is an example of free association. A corporation is an entity created by the state. They're two entirely different things.
But don't let the spammers abuse language that way. It's not "double opt-in." it's confirmed opt-in. The former is supposed to sound complicated and burdensome. The latter is much more accurate and doesn't carry the baggage.
Real has been listed by MAPS for years now, because they spam and will not shape up.
As for doubleclick, MAPS has never had a policy of blocking for web ads or cursor update thingies. Just spam.
That's why I'm so amused to see those newspaper articles that claim such-and-such NFL team (for example) lost money last year.
Accounting in sports (and e-businesses) is complex enough that a wide, wide range of results can be plausibly supported depending on the desired result.
If you want to impress the shareholders, pick a lower loss reserve value and make other optimistic assumptions. If you want pity from the public, pick pessimistic assumptions. The questions are sufficiently subjective that either end of the range can be considered reasonable.
It's worse than that. The corporation is bound not to consider the public good unless that's written into its charter.
"Public" corporations (i.e., those that have their stock traded widely) are legally bound to maximize shareholder value. Their officers can be successfully sued by shareholders for not doing so.
Concrete example.
My neighbor, who used to drive a truck for Company A, now drives for Company B. Company B, you see, bought (profitable) Company A. B took A's assets (trucks, contracts with terminals, etc.) but not its liabilities (basically normal cash debts). The truckers suspect that Company B will fairly soon dissolve Company A, leaving A's creditors in the lurch.
Of course, A has already fired all their drivers and let them be re-hired by B at a lower wage. (This could have happened without the corporate shell game though, since the truckers are non-union and don't have a written contract with a guaranteed wage. But the shuffle made it look slightly more legit, maybe.)
So, the truckers get paid less and the creditors are left out in the cold while Company B gets the benefit of a shiny new truck fleet.
This maneuver wouldn't have been possible without the legal fiction of corporate personhood. Without it, Company A's liabilities would have been stuck on a real person (or group of people) who would still be liable after the transfer of assets.
No sane person, in the place of Company A, would have let this asset-stripping happen for "nothing.". But because Company A isn't a real person, it doesn't have to feel the pain of being broke and unable to pay its bills.
I think legislators should decide whether corporations are more like robots (in which case they shouldn't have rights) or more like people (in which case they shouldn't be owned and manipulated like slaves).
It's the combination of having "personhood" powers at the same time that they can't feel personal deprivation that makes the corporate idea so undemocratic.
It's wrong that a corporation can by its actions commit felonies but not actually serve jail time. It's wrong that a corporation can in some cases commit first-degree murder but not feel the pain of a death sentence. It's wrong that a corporation can even botch its own affairs badly enough to face bankruptcy but not have to deal with the realities of feeding, clothing, and sheltering itself without money.
(Why yes, of course my business is incorporated. I'll give up my "corporate shield" when everyone else gives up theirs.)
Make sure you include the part where there's two posts decrying the "collective mind" for every one example of same.
The whole site's gone meta-kneejerk.
Always grep for "FIXME" before releasing.
I worked on a project like that once.
The client never figured out that Primadonna Guy was spending most of his (billable contractor) time on "make-work" and leaving so little for the rest of us to do that they eventually had to scale back the whole project just to get costs back in line.
So the software never really got completed, it's unnecessarily hard to maintain, and a couple of other contractors are looking for work elsewhere.
That's a shop where XP might have been a good idea. I doubt that Primadonna Guy would have stuck around if he knew that there'd be ongoing reality checks.
I'm amazed at the number of times in a normal week (in programming and in normal life) I find myself telling someone, "There's no substitute for doing things The Right Way."
If it takes a book and a methodology to get people to understand reflexive logic, so be it.
Yeah, it's "voluntary" the way the cops might say a suspect talked to them "voluntarily". It's voluntary until you choose not to comply.
The quotes you link to only confirm that interpretation.
It was a perfectly reasonable question. The dude asked why they prioritize cute features over security. The Microsoft guy neither answered the question nor denied its premise. He just went on about how hard they're working to fix the bugs. But that wasn't anything like the point of the question.
If someone had asked Linus why he chose to make Linux more geek-oriented than user-oriented, and Linus replied that he had dozens of helpers working on user interface improvements, that would have been a non-answer too.
"Everyone seems to forget" that because it's not true. Viz. Tinker et al. v. Des Moines Independent Community School District et al., 393 U.S. 503.
Yup. Their Childhood Leukemia book rules, but I heard it's going out of print because of the obviously limited market. As the author says, how can you possibly break even on something you can only sell 4000 copies of?
I've found it to be very helpful to spell this out in the contract before doing any work on the system in question.
Currently, as an example, I'm doing a database project for a local nonprofit organization. I explained to them that I really want to specify in the contract that I retain copyright to the work, because that way I won't have to keep running back to them for permission every time I might want to reuse some code on another project. The client organization, however, is licensed to do anything they please with the code, including modifying and/or redistributing it. (Sort of a private GPL.) They agreed to this, as it gives them all the useful things that copyright would have given them.
And I furthermore told them, although it wasn't necessary to put this into the contract, that I was planning on GPLing the result when I was done. Not having anything to gain from keeping the source closed, the client said that was fine with them too.
I just posted:
You know, that's a bit too strong a statement on my part. The WSP has a generally clued outlook, and their goal is to reinforce standards instead of making things more complicated, but I don't think forced upgrading is a great idea.
Web authors should write standards-compliant HTML and apply compliant CSS where needed. Browsers that can't render that should be upgraded. But users of those browsers don't need or won't benefit from this kind of campaign.
Yes.
You're currently on Eastern Standard Time, not Daylight. The server might be a little confused.
Agreed.
CSS uses the principle of "graceful degradation." In other words, if the browser can't or won't use the style sheet, the resulting view should still be readable and useful.
The Web Standards Project (feh) doesn't know what it's talking about.
I think the worst thing about censorware is the fact that most parents:
Thanks for the validation. I'm pretty pleased that the kid's PC is in the dining room, for that reason among others. We don't automate any filtering; we just observe the BOFHlets at play on the computer the same way we watch 'em at the playground or in the backyard.
At some time in the future I might put something on the network to log HTTP accesses, "just in case," but I'm really not interested in filtering. Too inflexible and intrusive.
I find it strange that among a couple hundred comments only one AC mentions Qwest's well-established reputation as a spamhaus.
They host spammers and spamvertized websites. They won't remove their spammers no matter how much you complain.
Shhhhhh. This appears to be legit as far as I understand the law, but it makes a hell of a loophole, doesn't it?
The insurance companies haven't caught on to this, nor has the government. Don't tell them!