MS is fighting to prevent you from freely receiving and communicating information. The ability to pass knowledge from one person to another and from one generation to another is what separates us from animals. Ms is fighting the very core of what it means to be a human being. This my friend is much more severe then a couple of people being hung.
"Now, my best advice I can pass on to you is dont piss people off who have guns. They will shoot at you. Plain and simple."
Well that's exactly what I said. People will shoot you if you piss them off. Usually if you have bumper sticker that says "save the salmon" it pisses off people in oregon who WILL SHOOT YOU!. The penalty for being a liberal is death without a judge, jury or a trial.
Yes I've been to Eugene and it's liberal (it's a collage town after all) but I have also been to medford and klamath falls and roseburg too. As I have said before most people who live in cities are liberal people who live out in the boonies are conservative.
And I would bet my money that St. Louis, Branson, and Kansas city usually vote democratic while the rest of missouri votes republican.
BTW P.J is an elitist asshole. I once saw him on letterman and most of his jokes were about how poor people are stupid and have no manners. He was making fun of people who go to red lobster and comparing them to people who go to the tavern on the green as if your average poor person could even dream of stepping foot in the tavern on the green.
I disagree. MS has a history of destroying technically superior products with lies, threats, extortion, and rackateering. If you fight MS by "only" making a superior product MS will crush you.
You have to fight back with everything you have. Your brain, your mouth, your money anything less then 100% commitment will mean the end of linux. MS has billions of dollars in the bank, hundreds of politicians in their pocket, thousands of lawyers on the payroll. They will crush us like so many cockroaches.
As for your hardware comment it's plain weird. They got twice the performance and spent twice as much. This is practically unheard of. Ususally you have to spend exponential amounts of money to get linear improvements in speed. They can be proud of their accomplishments.
California an exception notice I said most of the west. Once you leave california (or possibly washington) things get ugly for liberals (and also minorities and gays BTW).
There are islands of sanity clustered around collage towns (boise versus the rest of idaho for example).
Most of the west is rural and is populated by people who don't like other people too much. They moved there to get away from other people and would never want to live in a city where they would have to interact frequently with other people. Whereever there are large populations of people living together it's liberal wherever people want to distance themselves from their neighbors it's conservative. That point is so obvious from the election map of counties that voted for Bush and Gore. Even though Gore got the majority of votes the map shows mostly (geographically) Bush. About half the country is liberal and lives in cities the other half is conservative and lives in sparsely populated areas.
It's easy to express your beliefs in an anonymous setting like slashdot. In fact for me it's the only safe way to do so. If I was to say these things in the real world I live in there would be a cross burning on my lawn in no time.
It's hate nevertheless. Even more so because the measure of civility of a nation can be measured by how it handles dissention and protest. The measure of a police officer or a soldier is how he or she reacts to stressful situations.
In most of the west being liberal can get you killed. Putting a liberal bumper sticker on your car is an invitation to get your headlights smashed or your car riddles with bullet holes. Not only is being liberal a crime it is punishable by death without a judge or jury. I know because it's happened to people I know.
I know better then to advertise my beliefs.
When they buy a toyota they get a choice of engines, more then that they can choose not to buy a toyota at all. Besides Toyotas are exceptional products which work as advertised and have guarantees that assure the buyer that if anything goes wrong they will get fixed for free.
Microsft is a corporation. As such it is a soul-less immortal being which according to most religions is in fact an evil creature. Sure some corporations are better then others but nobody will argue that MS is an ethical or good corporation.
Many people work at MS and I guess their conscience does not bother them (it would bother me to help further their cause). Maybe they rationalize by saying that they don't really conribute to the evil that MS is spreading. Maybe they say "sure Steve Ballmer lies everytime he speaks to the press but I don't lie that much" who knows what rationalization they use?
In the end evil is as evil does. Ms has been found guilty in one court of law. They will probably win the appeals becuase their ex employee is now the head of the justice dept. Ashcroft will prosecute MS the way he defended the roadless rule by filing a two sentence brief and throw the case.
MS has corrupted the very justice system which underpins all of our freedoms how can you not call that evil?
Hate is blowing up a federal building and killing hundreds, hate is firing live bullets into a crowd of protesters, hate is carpet bombing cambodia.
Hate is not posting on slashdot.
When Bill Gates dies at the hand of a user subjected to a lifetime of windows that will be hate.
As long as the good does not fight back the evil will win. MS is well funded, well armed, and very experienced at destroying competition. Sitting idly and saying we are the good guys will result in MS killing us all.
Once again it was the responsibility of the teachers and the principles to judge the mental stability of the person they were talking to. If you are unable to judge the mental state of your students, if you are unable to communicate properly with your students so that they understand what you are talking about you should be fired. If the result of your gross incompetence is a dead student then you should be sued and have your life ruined.
No he has never said said that free software is inherent superior then non free software. His quest has nothing to do with quality. What he has said many many times is that free software is better for the society as a whole, better for human beings. He wan't to create a society whereby knowledge is not hidden from people where everybody can see, learn from, improve and use information. The current state of IP laws allow corporations to hide information from the people. He created the GPL in order to prevent corporations to benefit from free software without giving something back.
Originally GPL was called copyleft. He has said many times that the idea of copyleft and GPL is use IP laws against itself. GNU is a recusive acronym, and the GPL is a recursive license. I guess we should expect that from a person whose favorite language is lisp.
Neither I nor He gives a flying fuck what you find it hard to believe but everybody admits the man is on a crusade. People who don't believe passionately don't devote their lives to causes. Stallman wakes up and works like a dog every day even at the age of 60 in order to make this world more like what he thinks it ought to be. Most people like me go to work, do our 9 to 5 and sit in front of the tube. He is a believer and I (and the other 95% of the world) are users.
I salute your courage to say what you did. I have not heard many jews expressing these thoughts. The voices of moderate and sane jews and muslims seems to be getting lost in the fury of bombs and bullets over there.
The violence has to stop! Let the civilized members of both parties begin the healing process.
It's neither hypocritical nor unsubstanciated. He has said many times that he the IP laws of this country have got be seriously overhauled. He has also stated many times that the GPL was invented to use IP laws against itself. As long as IP laws exist as they do today the GPL is an effective tool to minimize their damage. The minute IP laws are changed the GPL will not be needed. There is no doubt in my mind that the GPL is a means to an end just like GNU and FSF are means to an end.
Stallman is NOT saying one thing and doing another. He has found a way to poison the IP well using IP itself. It's recursive not hypocritical.
"kid decides to go ahead and kill himself because of the POSSIBILITY that he may be suspended,"
No he did not kill himself because of a possiblity of suspention. He was told he was going to jail (I probably figure he was also told that he would be raped in jail because that's what adults seem to use to scare kids straight but that's just conjecture). If he was told he was merely going to be suspended then he would not have written a suicide note saying he did not want to go to jail.
The problem with your reasoning is that you seem to think that every act has ONLY one responsible party. In this this case you have decided that the kid has 100% responsibility for the suicide and the adult who scared the shit out of him unnecessarily is 0% responsible for this event. Unfortunately life is not that simple. Every act and every person has thousands of forces acting on them all of these forces are partially responsible for the resultant action. I think it's prefectly reasonable to say that the school shoulders some percentage of the blame here.
This act is especially troublesome considering that the principle and the teachers of the student had some responsibility to judge the mental stability of the student. They are supposedly trained to detect suicidal teens.
I figure the parents will sue the school and win a big money damages and the school will be more careful the next time they try to scare the shit out of some 13 year old. Too bad nobody had the insight at school to prevent this in the first place.
Amen to that. The software industry is like a septic tank. All the big chunks of shit have risen to the top and now they are stinking up the place something awful.
Look I realize that the janitor analogy is not perfect (which anology is?). the bottom line is that the GPL comes closest to what I want to do. Yest I mind it if some corporation takes my code and uses it internally but no license is going to stop them from that. How would I know? How could I stop them? I don't have lawyers and I don't have a million dollars sitting around in some offshore bank account. By GPLing my code I can let the FSF fight them if they attempt to redistribute the code or if somehow some product that they ship becomes contaminated by my code. I am hoping that the fear of contamination will stop them from using my code at all and go steal code from somebody who does not mind so much.
In the end most businesses don't give a shit about right and wrong they just want money. They will steal any code they think they can, they will do anything they think they can get away with in order to provide shareholder value. For some corporations this means killing people for others it means fraud and theft, for most it means sleeping with a guilty conscience because you spent the entire day lying to everybody you spoke with and screwed over half of your customers. I don't want to be associated with cretins like that in any way whatsoever.
"Ohh, right. You need a B.CS. to even install it, much less configure it, or figure out how everything works"
Not really anybody of average intelligence can install mandrake or redhat. Of course most windows users are below intelligence but that's another story alltogether.
Here is the difference.
You don't own software you wond the car. You can sell your car to somebody else you can't sell your software. You can buy a used car, you can't buy used software. You can let anybody you want fix your car, you can't let anybody fix windows except MS. The car comes with a warranty the software does not. There are lemon laws which protect the buyers of cars, there are no laws protecting the buyers of software. If cars are defective the govt fill force them to do a recall to fix the car, software comapnies can sell you worthless buggy shit all they want.
I won't go on I hope by now you understand the difference between owning something like a car, toaster or a television and licensing software.
Well duh isn't that exactly what I said.
I object to other people making obcene profit off of my code. I want them to use it, I want them to extend it, I want them to debug it (if they want) but I don't want them to ungodly profit off of it. I realize that the GPL does not really forbid profits but it does discourage price gauging and overcharging.
Like I said I would never volunteer to clean any companies toilets for free no matter if they are big or small. By the same token I don't want the provide programming either. There is pleanty of other code out there they can steal and use any way they want. They are also paying big bucks to programmers and should demand that those people produce good quality code for them.
They do nothing for me and I do nothing for them. See it works our wonderfully.
The GPL does pretty close to what I want and it's backed by a well organized if underfunded organization. By using that license (or even better by turning my code over to the FSF) the license can be defended better. If I made own no commercial license I would be laughed out of court the instant the judge found out what my bank account balance was.
GPL is the best license if you object to working for other people for free. If you release your code to the public domain or under a less restrictive license you are providing free labor to a corporation. Great for the corporations but not all people want to provide free labor for corporations. I would never volunteer to clean exxons toilets in my free time and I would never want to code for them in my free time either.
For people like me the GPL is only vehicle this guarantees this. Of course I could make up my own license but the GPL does what I want and the FSF is commited to defending it. If I made own license it's effectiveness is only as good as my ability to defend it court which is ZERO.
Luckily for both of us we still have a choice. You could continue coding for companies that don't pay you and I could continue coding for everybody else that does not pay me.
"So does Microsoft, just today I got *granted* the rights to use Outlook Express Hooray!"
You are right. MS does not have to let you use their software for free. They can make you pay for it if they want. They are being nice to you by granting the right to use this piece of software. You have no inherent right to use other peoples software.
By the exact same token RMS is granting you the right to use his software. Except he goes further then MS and not only lets you use it but it lets you see the code and modify it. He even let's you redistribute the the code or the binaries (which MS does not) if you are willing to do one simple thing and that is make sure you distribute the code with the binary.
you seem confused by the word restrict. You have no right to other peoples code. No right to use other peoples software, no right to see other peoples code, no right to sell or redistribute other peoples software. MS gives you very limited rights if you give them a bunch of money. RMS gives you a whole lot more rights for free but limits you ability to redistribute (not to modify for your own uses). Public domain software gives you unfettered access to do whatever you want.
All of these licenses GIVE you something not take something away from you because as long as IP laws exists you have ZERO rights ot other peoples labors.
BTW I have never heard RMS whine about anything. People ask him questions and he answers, people attack him and he defends himself. If I was him I would be shooting people who still confused open source with free software which despite the billions of words written on the subject every single MS employee and reporter in the world is still confused about.
Slashdot Mirror
MS is fighting to prevent you from freely receiving and communicating information. The ability to pass knowledge from one person to another and from one generation to another is what separates us from animals. Ms is fighting the very core of what it means to be a human being. This my friend is much more severe then a couple of people being hung.
"Now, my best advice I can pass on to you is dont piss people off who have guns. They will shoot at you. Plain and simple."
Well that's exactly what I said. People will shoot you if you piss them off. Usually if you have bumper sticker that says "save the salmon" it pisses off people in oregon who WILL SHOOT YOU!. The penalty for being a liberal is death without a judge, jury or a trial.
Yes I've been to Eugene and it's liberal (it's a collage town after all) but I have also been to medford and klamath falls and roseburg too. As I have said before most people who live in cities are liberal people who live out in the boonies are conservative.
And I would bet my money that St. Louis, Branson, and Kansas city usually vote democratic while the rest of missouri votes republican.
BTW P.J is an elitist asshole. I once saw him on letterman and most of his jokes were about how poor people are stupid and have no manners. He was making fun of people who go to red lobster and comparing them to people who go to the tavern on the green as if your average poor person could even dream of stepping foot in the tavern on the green.
I disagree. MS has a history of destroying technically superior products with lies, threats, extortion, and rackateering. If you fight MS by "only" making a superior product MS will crush you.
You have to fight back with everything you have. Your brain, your mouth, your money anything less then 100% commitment will mean the end of linux. MS has billions of dollars in the bank, hundreds of politicians in their pocket, thousands of lawyers on the payroll. They will crush us like so many cockroaches.
As for your hardware comment it's plain weird. They got twice the performance and spent twice as much. This is practically unheard of. Ususally you have to spend exponential amounts of money to get linear improvements in speed. They can be proud of their accomplishments.
California an exception notice I said most of the west. Once you leave california (or possibly washington) things get ugly for liberals (and also minorities and gays BTW).
There are islands of sanity clustered around collage towns (boise versus the rest of idaho for example).
Most of the west is rural and is populated by people who don't like other people too much. They moved there to get away from other people and would never want to live in a city where they would have to interact frequently with other people. Whereever there are large populations of people living together it's liberal wherever people want to distance themselves from their neighbors it's conservative. That point is so obvious from the election map of counties that voted for Bush and Gore. Even though Gore got the majority of votes the map shows mostly (geographically) Bush. About half the country is liberal and lives in cities the other half is conservative and lives in sparsely populated areas.
It's easy to express your beliefs in an anonymous setting like slashdot. In fact for me it's the only safe way to do so. If I was to say these things in the real world I live in there would be a cross burning on my lawn in no time.
It's hate nevertheless. Even more so because the measure of civility of a nation can be measured by how it handles dissention and protest. The measure of a police officer or a soldier is how he or she reacts to stressful situations.
"Being Liberal should be a Crime!"
In most of the west being liberal can get you killed. Putting a liberal bumper sticker on your car is an invitation to get your headlights smashed or your car riddles with bullet holes. Not only is being liberal a crime it is punishable by death without a judge or jury. I know because it's happened to people I know.
I know better then to advertise my beliefs.
When they buy a toyota they get a choice of engines, more then that they can choose not to buy a toyota at all. Besides Toyotas are exceptional products which work as advertised and have guarantees that assure the buyer that if anything goes wrong they will get fixed for free.
Microsft is a corporation. As such it is a soul-less immortal being which according to most religions is in fact an evil creature. Sure some corporations are better then others but nobody will argue that MS is an ethical or good corporation.
Many people work at MS and I guess their conscience does not bother them (it would bother me to help further their cause). Maybe they rationalize by saying that they don't really conribute to the evil that MS is spreading. Maybe they say "sure Steve Ballmer lies everytime he speaks to the press but I don't lie that much" who knows what rationalization they use?
In the end evil is as evil does. Ms has been found guilty in one court of law. They will probably win the appeals becuase their ex employee is now the head of the justice dept. Ashcroft will prosecute MS the way he defended the roadless rule by filing a two sentence brief and throw the case.
MS has corrupted the very justice system which underpins all of our freedoms how can you not call that evil?
Hate is blowing up a federal building and killing hundreds, hate is firing live bullets into a crowd of protesters, hate is carpet bombing cambodia.
Hate is not posting on slashdot.
When Bill Gates dies at the hand of a user subjected to a lifetime of windows that will be hate.
As long as the good does not fight back the evil will win. MS is well funded, well armed, and very experienced at destroying competition. Sitting idly and saying we are the good guys will result in MS killing us all.
Once again it was the responsibility of the teachers and the principles to judge the mental stability of the person they were talking to. If you are unable to judge the mental state of your students, if you are unable to communicate properly with your students so that they understand what you are talking about you should be fired. If the result of your gross incompetence is a dead student then you should be sued and have your life ruined.
No he has never said said that free software is inherent superior then non free software. His quest has nothing to do with quality. What he has said many many times is that free software is better for the society as a whole, better for human beings. He wan't to create a society whereby knowledge is not hidden from people where everybody can see, learn from, improve and use information. The current state of IP laws allow corporations to hide information from the people. He created the GPL in order to prevent corporations to benefit from free software without giving something back.
Originally GPL was called copyleft. He has said many times that the idea of copyleft and GPL is use IP laws against itself. GNU is a recusive acronym, and the GPL is a recursive license. I guess we should expect that from a person whose favorite language is lisp.
Neither I nor He gives a flying fuck what you find it hard to believe but everybody admits the man is on a crusade. People who don't believe passionately don't devote their lives to causes. Stallman wakes up and works like a dog every day even at the age of 60 in order to make this world more like what he thinks it ought to be. Most people like me go to work, do our 9 to 5 and sit in front of the tube. He is a believer and I (and the other 95% of the world) are users.
I salute your courage to say what you did. I have not heard many jews expressing these thoughts. The voices of moderate and sane jews and muslims seems to be getting lost in the fury of bombs and bullets over there.
The violence has to stop! Let the civilized members of both parties begin the healing process.
The kid wrote on the suicide note that he would rather die then go to jail. I wonder how he got the idea that he was going to jail?
It's neither hypocritical nor unsubstanciated. He has said many times that he the IP laws of this country have got be seriously overhauled. He has also stated many times that the GPL was invented to use IP laws against itself. As long as IP laws exist as they do today the GPL is an effective tool to minimize their damage. The minute IP laws are changed the GPL will not be needed. There is no doubt in my mind that the GPL is a means to an end just like GNU and FSF are means to an end.
Stallman is NOT saying one thing and doing another. He has found a way to poison the IP well using IP itself. It's recursive not hypocritical.
"kid decides to go ahead and kill himself because of the POSSIBILITY that he may be suspended,"
No he did not kill himself because of a possiblity of suspention. He was told he was going to jail (I probably figure he was also told that he would be raped in jail because that's what adults seem to use to scare kids straight but that's just conjecture). If he was told he was merely going to be suspended then he would not have written a suicide note saying he did not want to go to jail.
The problem with your reasoning is that you seem to think that every act has ONLY one responsible party. In this this case you have decided that the kid has 100% responsibility for the suicide and the adult who scared the shit out of him unnecessarily is 0% responsible for this event. Unfortunately life is not that simple. Every act and every person has thousands of forces acting on them all of these forces are partially responsible for the resultant action. I think it's prefectly reasonable to say that the school shoulders some percentage of the blame here.
This act is especially troublesome considering that the principle and the teachers of the student had some responsibility to judge the mental stability of the student. They are supposedly trained to detect suicidal teens.
I figure the parents will sue the school and win a big money damages and the school will be more careful the next time they try to scare the shit out of some 13 year old. Too bad nobody had the insight at school to prevent this in the first place.
Amen to that. The software industry is like a septic tank. All the big chunks of shit have risen to the top and now they are stinking up the place something awful.
Look I realize that the janitor analogy is not perfect (which anology is?). the bottom line is that the GPL comes closest to what I want to do. Yest I mind it if some corporation takes my code and uses it internally but no license is going to stop them from that. How would I know? How could I stop them? I don't have lawyers and I don't have a million dollars sitting around in some offshore bank account. By GPLing my code I can let the FSF fight them if they attempt to redistribute the code or if somehow some product that they ship becomes contaminated by my code. I am hoping that the fear of contamination will stop them from using my code at all and go steal code from somebody who does not mind so much.
In the end most businesses don't give a shit about right and wrong they just want money. They will steal any code they think they can, they will do anything they think they can get away with in order to provide shareholder value. For some corporations this means killing people for others it means fraud and theft, for most it means sleeping with a guilty conscience because you spent the entire day lying to everybody you spoke with and screwed over half of your customers. I don't want to be associated with cretins like that in any way whatsoever.
"Ohh, right. You need a B.CS. to even install it, much less configure it, or figure out how everything works"
Not really anybody of average intelligence can install mandrake or redhat. Of course most windows users are below intelligence but that's another story alltogether.
Here is the difference.
You don't own software you wond the car. You can sell your car to somebody else you can't sell your software. You can buy a used car, you can't buy used software. You can let anybody you want fix your car, you can't let anybody fix windows except MS. The car comes with a warranty the software does not. There are lemon laws which protect the buyers of cars, there are no laws protecting the buyers of software. If cars are defective the govt fill force them to do a recall to fix the car, software comapnies can sell you worthless buggy shit all they want.
I won't go on I hope by now you understand the difference between owning something like a car, toaster or a television and licensing software.
Well duh isn't that exactly what I said.
I object to other people making obcene profit off of my code. I want them to use it, I want them to extend it, I want them to debug it (if they want) but I don't want them to ungodly profit off of it. I realize that the GPL does not really forbid profits but it does discourage price gauging and overcharging.
Like I said I would never volunteer to clean any companies toilets for free no matter if they are big or small. By the same token I don't want the provide programming either. There is pleanty of other code out there they can steal and use any way they want. They are also paying big bucks to programmers and should demand that those people produce good quality code for them.
They do nothing for me and I do nothing for them. See it works our wonderfully.
The GPL does pretty close to what I want and it's backed by a well organized if underfunded organization. By using that license (or even better by turning my code over to the FSF) the license can be defended better. If I made own no commercial license I would be laughed out of court the instant the judge found out what my bank account balance was.
Most people on slashdot are posers. They don't even use linux they just hang out here and pretend they are cool.
GPL is the best license if you object to working for other people for free. If you release your code to the public domain or under a less restrictive license you are providing free labor to a corporation. Great for the corporations but not all people want to provide free labor for corporations. I would never volunteer to clean exxons toilets in my free time and I would never want to code for them in my free time either.
For people like me the GPL is only vehicle this guarantees this. Of course I could make up my own license but the GPL does what I want and the FSF is commited to defending it. If I made own license it's effectiveness is only as good as my ability to defend it court which is ZERO.
Luckily for both of us we still have a choice. You could continue coding for companies that don't pay you and I could continue coding for everybody else that does not pay me.
"So does Microsoft, just today I got *granted* the rights to use Outlook Express Hooray!"
You are right. MS does not have to let you use their software for free. They can make you pay for it if they want. They are being nice to you by granting the right to use this piece of software. You have no inherent right to use other peoples software.
By the exact same token RMS is granting you the right to use his software. Except he goes further then MS and not only lets you use it but it lets you see the code and modify it. He even let's you redistribute the the code or the binaries (which MS does not) if you are willing to do one simple thing and that is make sure you distribute the code with the binary.
you seem confused by the word restrict. You have no right to other peoples code. No right to use other peoples software, no right to see other peoples code, no right to sell or redistribute other peoples software. MS gives you very limited rights if you give them a bunch of money. RMS gives you a whole lot more rights for free but limits you ability to redistribute (not to modify for your own uses). Public domain software gives you unfettered access to do whatever you want.
All of these licenses GIVE you something not take something away from you because as long as IP laws exists you have ZERO rights ot other peoples labors.
BTW I have never heard RMS whine about anything. People ask him questions and he answers, people attack him and he defends himself. If I was him I would be shooting people who still confused open source with free software which despite the billions of words written on the subject every single MS employee and reporter in the world is still confused about.