Then again, these are not Mr Paul's words or views ("The Ron Paul Campaign" ?) --They have been sterilised, vetted, re-vetted and possibly not even drafted by Paul.
When's the last time you signed an agreement to hold a car manufacturer or builder harmless in case their product broke down or fell apart? Amateur software authors produce some of the most important and well-tested code used today, while the professionals at, say, Microsoft, have a proven record of producing insecure crap. How would licensing change this?
In Canada, corporations that provide engineering services are required to hold a "Certificate of Authorization". This certificate can be suspended or revoked (and individual engineers disciplined) in the case of incompetence. One can easily imagine that this could happen to a Microsoft.
Actually I see this as complementing the open-source system by formalizing peer review of code. Also, I would suggest that most of the people who designed open source software are not necessarily amateurs; they may have other jobs in software, and many of them are paid for their open-source contributions.
You are not allowed to call yourself a "software engineer" in Canada, not because the discipline lacks rigor, but because it lacks professionalism.
A profession is formed for the public good, in order for experts in the field to supervise, regulate, and discipline one another. In Canada this is carried out through non-governmental professional associations, and there is one engineering association per province. It serves public safety well and is an excellent alternative to both "buyer beware" and governmental intervention. Doctors, nurses, lawyers, and teachers are similarly regulated.
I'm personally sympathetic to the professionalization of software engineering. Basically this would mean that you would need a license to practice, all your code would be signed by its author, and the association would discipline any software author who wrote bad software, either maliciously or accidentally. Although it means hobbyists could no longer tinker, we are at the point where that hobbyist tinkering could have significant implications for the international system of computing infrastructure. Why should unlicensed software authors be any different from unlicensed doctors? Both can cause harm; in the former case, potentially more harm.
Aside from the fundamental disagreement on most issues of substance, I'm not supporting Ron Paul (or wouldn't, if I were an American) precisely because of the rabid fanboyism that has sprung up around him, best exemplified by your incoherent post. Frankly, if Ron Paul had any chance of getting elected, I would find him kind of frightening.
Exactly my point. Here's your shiny new free operating system... with your downgraded photo software. You say you want to buy the real Photoshop instead? Sorry, can't do that.
I'm getting irritated by the pervasive use of the tag "suddenbreakoutofcommonsense" on anything involving giving stuff away for free. It's not common sense, many times this tag is used; it's counterintuitive and probably incorrect
"Quite frankly, the whole point of slashdot is to have this big public wanking session with people getting together and making their own "insightful" comment on any random topic, whether they know anything about it or not."
RIAA thinks every time you listen to a mp3 you are screwing them on money. No you're not. You're just not listening to the radio as much as you used to.
That's more of an oblique way to screw them on money, since they get paid royalties for each play on the radio. Fewer radio listeners drives down advertising rates and radio revenues, and creates downward pressure on royalties.
I think that would feed rather than quash the patent trolls. What if a patent can only be transferred n times, and you are the nth guy in the chain? Then your only way to make money from that patent is to license and litigate. So, when the (n-1)th guy gets tired of owning the patent, off to the patent troll it goes, who gets the patent at a nice discount since nobody else is interested in buying it.
Not obviously. An artist in business for themselves will spend a lot of time on business, unless they're so successful that they can afford a manager and staff. That's a lot of time soaked up, possibly more than a part-time job would require. Heck, it could be more than what a full-time job would require. If 1% of active bands make it that far, I'd be amazed. And I'm sure not even 1% of actors or painters or writers make it that far.
That 1%, or whatever fraction, of artists who practice their art full time includes pretty much all of the artists who are widely considered to be great, and even those considered merely good. It works in the converse too: the vast majority of great or good artists do not have a day job. This suggests that, in order to produce great art, one must do so full time.
Just as bad, once you try to live off your art, you are obliged to produce marketable art rather than what you think is best. That presumably leads to less variety.
Go visit some contemporary galleries and modern art museums. If the modern art world lacks for anything, it is certainly not variety.
Even assuming your notion that being a full-time artist leads to more and better culture than being a part-time one, I'm not sure the paradox follows. File-sharing may kill large music companies, but it's not clear that means less total money to artists, or fewer full-time artists.
So, now you're arguing that artists will still be able to practice full time, maybe even moreso? Before you wanted to do them a favor by restricting the money supply and making them all work at Starbucks. It seems like you should be opposed to file-sharing.
As a counter-example, look at software. If the Internet was going to kill anything, it should have been the commercial software industry, with programmer wages taking a steep dive too. But both are doing amazingly well, and it has given us an open-source movement that has hugely enriched us.
The software industry, as a whole, has essentially nothing to do with the art world. As but one example, artists are generally unable to make money from technical support.
In general, it seems to me that you have no idea what you're talking about.
Taking your comment at face value, it would seem that artists who need to support themselves through means other than art would end up producing less. So let's say that's true: file sharing will lead to an overall decrease in the amount of available music.
Do you think this is an acceptable tradeoff? If so, why? Because I think that's kind of paradoxical: it would mean that culture is suffering so that you can have easier access to culture. And if that's not an acceptable tradeoff, isn't the purpose of the law to rectify these kinds of imbalances?
In two other instances in large jets of engine failure by fuel starvation (Air Transat 236 and Air Canada 143), the failure of the engines was not simultaneous: one engine kept working for a few minutes longer than the other.
The fact that the engines responded the same way, at the same time, strongly suggests a single point of failure in an electronic flight control system.
What happened to unions being for the working class person getting stepped on by big business?
Well, say NBC wanted to use some of your blog posts as the basis for an episode of a sitcom. Without doing a lot of research on your own, and/or hiring your own lawyer (out of your own pocket), how would you ensure that NBC was offering fair compensation and not screwing you over? That's generally what these collective contracts are about.
This is getting increasingly off topic, but marbling -- the presence of fat within the muscle tissue -- is irrelevant to ground beef. If you want fattier ground beef, you can just grind up some fat with it.
I think that's bizarre. If anything a world without copyright would see less incentive to release source, since the only value in information would be secrecy. Do you have a citation for your statement?
Well, that is pretty much RMS's goal - the copyleft is just a hack of copyright law to use it against itself. The abolishment of copyright is pretty much an indirect goal.
I don't think that's true, or at least it isn't true anymore. For example, GPLv3 and AGPL (which was included in an early draft of GPLv3) defend against two phenomena that would be impossible to prevent in a copyright-free world: Tivoization, and web services derived from modified open source, respectively. If RMS truly wanted a world without copyright, he never would have released these licenses.
The article at the link suggests that a majority of NYU students would give up their right to vote for $1 million. Supposing you could scale that up to the size of the population, for 1/2 * (population of USA) * $1,000,000 = $151 trillion, you could obtain a slate of candidates in each state legislature who would agree to any constitutional amendment you wished to propose.
Given that the GDP of the USA is $13 trillion, that's a reasonably attractive leveraged buyout -- you would earn back your investment in 12 years or so.
A more interesting question would be to ask a PC game maker if they'd release their game with no copyright, if their publishers/retailers allowed them to. Right now, they have no choice-- given the choice, which would they make?
Let's turn that around. Would you agree to take a prominent GPLed software package, say the Linux kernel, and remove the copyright (and hence the GPL)? If not, why not? Probably a related answer will hold for the games industry.
I lead by example. Then, when someone comes to me with his IE problem, I (honestly) tell him that I'm sorry but I can't help him with that because I use a better browser instead and point him to Firefox.
Lead by example? That's my way of (politely) not giving free technical support to moochers.
Relying on the details in the summary, without knowing anything about the way in which the polls were conducted, the geographical distribution of voters, or any other significant details, I would have to say that the likelihood is somewhere between 0 and 100 per cent.
But it does lend more weight to the theory that we don't really pick our leaders but we have the illusion that we pick our leaders.
I am amused by the irony of your statement. Supposing that there really was a conspiracy, it turns out that it made the race more competitive and more potentially representative. Had Obama won, the media would have been falling all over themselves to anoint him as the Democrats' nominee -- and the financial contributors would have followed them. To put this in perspective, Iowa and New Hampshire, which together account for 1-2% of the American population. Now the rest of the country's democrats actually get to cast a meaningful vote, starting with Michigan (3 times larger than Iowa and New Hampshire put together).
Also, why would the establishment try to rig the election so that Hillary "vast right-wing conspiracy" Clinton would have a better chance of being President?
I think you're not paying any attention to the current situation.
First, if you believe that GPLv3 is an improvement on GPLv2, then surely you would agree that BSD is worse than both of them. Yet, if you think of OSX as a flavour of BSD, that OS is beating the pants off Linux in the desktop marketplace. The "flaws" in GPLv2 are irrelevant from an operational perspective, and users don't care about them.
Second, the lesson of SCO is not that a license change will protect you from patent trolls. Linux could adopt GPLv3 tomorrow and still be vulnerable. The lesson is that, when the patent trolls come knocking, you had better have bigger friends with deeper pockets (like IBM) who have your back. As long as IBM, Google, and others support Linux, it's very difficult to imagine that a big player such as Microsoft will wade in to litigation.
Third, no company -- much less Sun -- will get behind a GPLv3 "linux killer" because of the controversy surrounding the issue. As we've established, users don't give a rat's ass about the benefits of GPLv3, so good luck doing better than Microsoft at killing Linux; and the ill will generated by such a move would more than offset the "huge props and creds" (isolated to a narrow community) for doing it. To see why this is: "those of us who look forward to a better future with FOSS can move on, and the political and business luddites can stay stuck back in time, and to each their own" -- seriously?? Thanks for being so patronizing, and call me back when you can turn self-righteousness into dollars.
I disagree, I think Stallman did the right thing for the wrong reasons when he wrote GPLv2, which I still think is a remarkable and beautiful contribution. I think the lesson of Linux is that GPLv2 is an excellent way for both individuals and large corporations to cooperate on mutually beneficial software (such as an operating system) without worrying that their partners are going to steal their ideas without giving anything back in return.
History is going to judge GPLv3 harshly for (a) hewing very closely to ideology rather than practicality, pretty much guaranteeing that it will not be adopted in commercial applications; and (b) splitting the free software community by releasing a non-backward-compatible license, and then aggressively pushing it with a "with-us-or-against-freedom" pitch. Whether Stallman minds that or not is his own issue.
That message was written at kernel version 0.12, when the number of developers was small and few people had even heard of Linux.
It is now a serious, production operating system that has received significant support and input from several of the largest tech companies in the world.
Are you seriously suggesting that Linus could simply write a short message saying, "I'm gonna change the license to GPLv3, kthxbye", without kicking off a shitstorm of controversy, and possibly exposing himself to litigation? Especially given the passionate disagreement over the issue, even among members of the community who do not have financial stake in the licensing question.
Slashdot Mirror
Then again, these are not Mr Paul's words or views ("The Ron Paul Campaign" ?) --They have been sterilised, vetted, re-vetted and possibly not even drafted by Paul.
Just like the Ron Paul newsletters! Right?
When's the last time you signed an agreement to hold a car manufacturer or builder harmless in case their product broke down or fell apart? Amateur software authors produce some of the most important and well-tested code used today, while the professionals at, say, Microsoft, have a proven record of producing insecure crap. How would licensing change this?
In Canada, corporations that provide engineering services are required to hold a "Certificate of Authorization". This certificate can be suspended or revoked (and individual engineers disciplined) in the case of incompetence. One can easily imagine that this could happen to a Microsoft.
Actually I see this as complementing the open-source system by formalizing peer review of code. Also, I would suggest that most of the people who designed open source software are not necessarily amateurs; they may have other jobs in software, and many of them are paid for their open-source contributions.
You are not allowed to call yourself a "software engineer" in Canada, not because the discipline lacks rigor, but because it lacks professionalism.
A profession is formed for the public good, in order for experts in the field to supervise, regulate, and discipline one another. In Canada this is carried out through non-governmental professional associations, and there is one engineering association per province. It serves public safety well and is an excellent alternative to both "buyer beware" and governmental intervention. Doctors, nurses, lawyers, and teachers are similarly regulated.
I'm personally sympathetic to the professionalization of software engineering. Basically this would mean that you would need a license to practice, all your code would be signed by its author, and the association would discipline any software author who wrote bad software, either maliciously or accidentally. Although it means hobbyists could no longer tinker, we are at the point where that hobbyist tinkering could have significant implications for the international system of computing infrastructure. Why should unlicensed software authors be any different from unlicensed doctors? Both can cause harm; in the former case, potentially more harm.
Aside from the fundamental disagreement on most issues of substance, I'm not supporting Ron Paul (or wouldn't, if I were an American) precisely because of the rabid fanboyism that has sprung up around him, best exemplified by your incoherent post. Frankly, if Ron Paul had any chance of getting elected, I would find him kind of frightening.
Exactly my point. Here's your shiny new free operating system ... with your downgraded photo software. You say you want to buy the real Photoshop instead? Sorry, can't do that.
I'm getting irritated by the pervasive use of the tag "suddenbreakoutofcommonsense" on anything involving giving stuff away for free. It's not common sense, many times this tag is used; it's counterintuitive and probably incorrect
"Quite frankly, the whole point of slashdot is to have this big public wanking session with people getting together and making their own "insightful" comment on any random topic, whether they know anything about it or not."
-- Linus Torvalds
(source: http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95)
RIAA thinks every time you listen to a mp3 you are screwing them on money. No you're not. You're just not listening to the radio as much as you used to.
That's more of an oblique way to screw them on money, since they get paid royalties for each play on the radio. Fewer radio listeners drives down advertising rates and radio revenues, and creates downward pressure on royalties.
I think that would feed rather than quash the patent trolls. What if a patent can only be transferred n times, and you are the nth guy in the chain? Then your only way to make money from that patent is to license and litigate. So, when the (n-1)th guy gets tired of owning the patent, off to the patent troll it goes, who gets the patent at a nice discount since nobody else is interested in buying it.
Not obviously. An artist in business for themselves will spend a lot of time on business, unless they're so successful that they can afford a manager and staff. That's a lot of time soaked up, possibly more than a part-time job would require. Heck, it could be more than what a full-time job would require. If 1% of active bands make it that far, I'd be amazed. And I'm sure not even 1% of actors or painters or writers make it that far.
That 1%, or whatever fraction, of artists who practice their art full time includes pretty much all of the artists who are widely considered to be great, and even those considered merely good. It works in the converse too: the vast majority of great or good artists do not have a day job. This suggests that, in order to produce great art, one must do so full time.
Just as bad, once you try to live off your art, you are obliged to produce marketable art rather than what you think is best. That presumably leads to less variety.
Go visit some contemporary galleries and modern art museums. If the modern art world lacks for anything, it is certainly not variety.
Even assuming your notion that being a full-time artist leads to more and better culture than being a part-time one, I'm not sure the paradox follows. File-sharing may kill large music companies, but it's not clear that means less total money to artists, or fewer full-time artists.
So, now you're arguing that artists will still be able to practice full time, maybe even moreso? Before you wanted to do them a favor by restricting the money supply and making them all work at Starbucks. It seems like you should be opposed to file-sharing.
As a counter-example, look at software. If the Internet was going to kill anything, it should have been the commercial software industry, with programmer wages taking a steep dive too. But both are doing amazingly well, and it has given us an open-source movement that has hugely enriched us.
The software industry, as a whole, has essentially nothing to do with the art world. As but one example, artists are generally unable to make money from technical support.
In general, it seems to me that you have no idea what you're talking about.
Taking your comment at face value, it would seem that artists who need to support themselves through means other than art would end up producing less. So let's say that's true: file sharing will lead to an overall decrease in the amount of available music.
Do you think this is an acceptable tradeoff? If so, why? Because I think that's kind of paradoxical: it would mean that culture is suffering so that you can have easier access to culture. And if that's not an acceptable tradeoff, isn't the purpose of the law to rectify these kinds of imbalances?
Committing copyright violation is not theft.
But it is illegal.
In two other instances in large jets of engine failure by fuel starvation (Air Transat 236 and Air Canada 143), the failure of the engines was not simultaneous: one engine kept working for a few minutes longer than the other.
The fact that the engines responded the same way, at the same time, strongly suggests a single point of failure in an electronic flight control system.
What happened to unions being for the working class person getting stepped on by big business?
Well, say NBC wanted to use some of your blog posts as the basis for an episode of a sitcom. Without doing a lot of research on your own, and/or hiring your own lawyer (out of your own pocket), how would you ensure that NBC was offering fair compensation and not screwing you over? That's generally what these collective contracts are about.
This is getting increasingly off topic, but marbling -- the presence of fat within the muscle tissue -- is irrelevant to ground beef. If you want fattier ground beef, you can just grind up some fat with it.
I think that's bizarre. If anything a world without copyright would see less incentive to release source, since the only value in information would be secrecy. Do you have a citation for your statement?
Well, that is pretty much RMS's goal - the copyleft is just a hack of copyright law to use it against itself. The abolishment of copyright is pretty much an indirect goal.
I don't think that's true, or at least it isn't true anymore. For example, GPLv3 and AGPL (which was included in an early draft of GPLv3) defend against two phenomena that would be impossible to prevent in a copyright-free world: Tivoization, and web services derived from modified open source, respectively. If RMS truly wanted a world without copyright, he never would have released these licenses.
Buying electoral college votes puts the fraud right out in the open, it's basically a big "fuck you!" to the American people.
Well, given that most people wouldn't mind having their vote bought, it's not so insulting to most people as you might imagine.
The article at the link suggests that a majority of NYU students would give up their right to vote for $1 million. Supposing you could scale that up to the size of the population, for 1/2 * (population of USA) * $1,000,000 = $151 trillion, you could obtain a slate of candidates in each state legislature who would agree to any constitutional amendment you wished to propose.
Given that the GDP of the USA is $13 trillion, that's a reasonably attractive leveraged buyout -- you would earn back your investment in 12 years or so.
why aren't you working with artists from day one to get the UI right?
Maybe because, since you're not interested in selling copies, you don't have an incentive to involve them in the development process?
For extra points, does the "selling service" model generally give an incentive to produce better or worse UIs than "selling licenses"? Discuss.
A more interesting question would be to ask a PC game maker if they'd release their game with no copyright, if their publishers/retailers allowed them to. Right now, they have no choice-- given the choice, which would they make?
Let's turn that around. Would you agree to take a prominent GPLed software package, say the Linux kernel, and remove the copyright (and hence the GPL)? If not, why not? Probably a related answer will hold for the games industry.
I lead by example. Then, when someone comes to me with his IE problem, I (honestly) tell him that I'm sorry but I can't help him with that because I use a better browser instead and point him to Firefox.
Lead by example? That's my way of (politely) not giving free technical support to moochers.
Relying on the details in the summary, without knowing anything about the way in which the polls were conducted, the geographical distribution of voters, or any other significant details, I would have to say that the likelihood is somewhere between 0 and 100 per cent.
But it does lend more weight to the theory that we don't really pick our leaders but we have the illusion that we pick our leaders.
I am amused by the irony of your statement. Supposing that there really was a conspiracy, it turns out that it made the race more competitive and more potentially representative. Had Obama won, the media would have been falling all over themselves to anoint him as the Democrats' nominee -- and the financial contributors would have followed them. To put this in perspective, Iowa and New Hampshire, which together account for 1-2% of the American population. Now the rest of the country's democrats actually get to cast a meaningful vote, starting with Michigan (3 times larger than Iowa and New Hampshire put together).
Also, why would the establishment try to rig the election so that Hillary "vast right-wing conspiracy" Clinton would have a better chance of being President?
I think you're not paying any attention to the current situation.
First, if you believe that GPLv3 is an improvement on GPLv2, then surely you would agree that BSD is worse than both of them. Yet, if you think of OSX as a flavour of BSD, that OS is beating the pants off Linux in the desktop marketplace. The "flaws" in GPLv2 are irrelevant from an operational perspective, and users don't care about them.
Second, the lesson of SCO is not that a license change will protect you from patent trolls. Linux could adopt GPLv3 tomorrow and still be vulnerable. The lesson is that, when the patent trolls come knocking, you had better have bigger friends with deeper pockets (like IBM) who have your back. As long as IBM, Google, and others support Linux, it's very difficult to imagine that a big player such as Microsoft will wade in to litigation.
Third, no company -- much less Sun -- will get behind a GPLv3 "linux killer" because of the controversy surrounding the issue. As we've established, users don't give a rat's ass about the benefits of GPLv3, so good luck doing better than Microsoft at killing Linux; and the ill will generated by such a move would more than offset the "huge props and creds" (isolated to a narrow community) for doing it. To see why this is: "those of us who look forward to a better future with FOSS can move on, and the political and business luddites can stay stuck back in time, and to each their own" -- seriously?? Thanks for being so patronizing, and call me back when you can turn self-righteousness into dollars.
I disagree, I think Stallman did the right thing for the wrong reasons when he wrote GPLv2, which I still think is a remarkable and beautiful contribution. I think the lesson of Linux is that GPLv2 is an excellent way for both individuals and large corporations to cooperate on mutually beneficial software (such as an operating system) without worrying that their partners are going to steal their ideas without giving anything back in return.
History is going to judge GPLv3 harshly for (a) hewing very closely to ideology rather than practicality, pretty much guaranteeing that it will not be adopted in commercial applications; and (b) splitting the free software community by releasing a non-backward-compatible license, and then aggressively pushing it with a "with-us-or-against-freedom" pitch. Whether Stallman minds that or not is his own issue.
That message was written at kernel version 0.12, when the number of developers was small and few people had even heard of Linux.
It is now a serious, production operating system that has received significant support and input from several of the largest tech companies in the world.
Are you seriously suggesting that Linus could simply write a short message saying, "I'm gonna change the license to GPLv3, kthxbye", without kicking off a shitstorm of controversy, and possibly exposing himself to litigation? Especially given the passionate disagreement over the issue, even among members of the community who do not have financial stake in the licensing question.