>But you can exclude nearly everything related to development, most network daemons, databases, most >libraries, most scripting languages, and most applications.
Win2K has a complete scripting language, Windows Script Host, so it would be fair to include a Perl or Python in the mix. And, since WinNT/Win2K have a rudimentary POSIX system, it seems only sane to give Linux a rudimentary Win32 system and include Wine.
We should also include a modern browser, probably either Communicator or Mozilla, either of which will raise our bug count severely.
Win2K also includes some basic network functionality that NT was missing (under the strange moniker "Services for Unix"), like a telnetd and the like, so removing network daemons is not actually fair. There's Dynamic DNS, so we'll include BIND, which actually is less capable. Also encrypted filesystems, Kerberos (hey, it's not strictly correct, but it's in there), IPsec, telephony, OpenGL & DirectX...
And, IIS, XML parsing, COM system, PPTP, Distributed File System, ActiveDirectory -- you'd need Apache, PHP, probably Mozilla for XML, some ORBish system, any of the horribly buggy PPTP implementations for Linux, Coda? AFS?, OpenLDAP....
The list goes on and on. To say that Win2K is analagous to a stripped-down Linux distro is really not correct -- there's a LOT in there, way more than in the average Linux distro.
None of which is a defense of Win2K; I just think it's important not to use the 63K alleged bug count as FUD ammo -- I could file 63,000 bugs against ANY Linux distro if our definition of 'bug' is the same one used for the Win2K count -- anything that displeases the tester, even as small as tiny aesthetic visual issues with a program.
>Of course, we also don't have Microsoft's legions of full-time, paid developers and testers working >on the core components of a Linux distribution, either.
That's kind of an excuse, and gets really pretty close to saying that expensive commercial software should have fewer bugs than Open Source since they have more money to throw at it.
In all fairness, comparing 95 known bugs in the Linux kernel with 63K bugs in all of Windows 2000's kernel, GUI, services, userland programs, games, icons/graphics/media files, POSIX subsystem, scripting language, and so forth is comparing apples to oranges.
It would be a more fair comparison to get hold of an entire distribution's count of todo's and bugfixes, including X, Wine, sendmail, python, GNOME, and on and on. I bet you could get right up there near 65K pretty easily if you aggregate all the TODO and KNOWN BUGS lists in all the SRPMS in Red Hat 6.2, for instance.
It's nice to see more and more people realizing (and speaking up) that Open Source itself is just a better means to an end, but not itself the better end -- just because code is Open Source doesn't mean it IS superior (except arguably in the political/philosophical sense), just that it's easier to get there.
>And what makes you say that? Want to elaberate a little?
Love to.
>I really feel that Open Source code is at least as good as propriety, if not better. It isn't >allways better, of course, but nearly allways it is.
See, that's the thing. "I really feel." Show me the numbers.
For every buggy proprietary program you want to show as evidence, I can dig up some splinter version of identd or MAME launcher or desktop environment that's as Open Source as the day is long, but still is horribly broken and terribly coded.
Being Open Source doesn't INHERENTLY create quality. It provides the _mechanism_, the _opportunity_ for better code, for all of the reasons we all know and love.
But opening the source to a program doesn't automatically mean it will suddenly get an interested multitude of good developers with excellent coding and communications skills to wrangle out all of the bugs and comment all of the files. That CAN happen, but there's no guarantees that it will.
Being Open Source is good for many things, finding and fixing bugs more easily, keeping programs from being orphanned, creating public libraries of known-good code. But it's still software development like any other software development, and without a dedicated core team of talented engineers, you're not going to make another Apache or Linux kernel just because of your license choice.
Or, to sum up, saying Open Source code is at least as good as proprietary code makes no sense. Open Source code ranges from idiotic to sublime, just like proprietary code. Neither one is 'nearly always' better than the other in any measure that's not purely philosophical.
>Code written behind closed doors tends to stay that way for a reason (it is usually pretty embarassing.)
Hmmn. And how much of this behind-closed-doors have you read in order to get a data set to make this generalization? I'd imagine that a lot of proprietary code, for financial and military institutions, for instance, is some of the finest in the art.
First, we make the incorrect generalization that all Open Source code is innately better than all proprietary code; now we're leaping off of that shaky premise to the conclusion that all proprietary code is, in fact, shoddy and embarassing?
Not sure I'm going to buy into this line of thought.
>Is it just me, or is the US getting absolutely zip out of this deal? I mean, by letting these >other countries in on the project, do we gain leverage in global trade disputes, the Security >Council, strategic arms treaties, or conflict negotiations?
(*sigh)
No. And that's a good thing, because nationalistic gain is not the point of this venture.
As a US citizen, I'm increasingly ashamed of the culture of personal and national selfishness that we've grown into in the past quarter century. There are perfectly good reasons to participate in a project that doesn't give immediate gimme-gimme satisfaction, reasons that could be labeled with quaint words like "noble" and "selfless," as well as more mundane ones like "far-sighted" and "cooperative."
Unfortunately, such reasoning gets tarred with the same brush as 'protest movements' and the like, and therefore slandered into submission before the American corporate juggernaut's bottom line.
You can call it 'touchy-feely' or any other name you want, but as a citizen of the human race first and an American second, I applaud the idea of the United States using some of its vast wealth and power for something besides accumulating more wealth and power; it gives me a tiny nugget of hope in a bleak, graceless age.
OK, I know this sounds like a troll, but it's true: Go to Jeeves and ask "will you blow me" (or any of a number of similar propositions)....
The first hit that comes up, "Wouldn't you rather take a nice, cold shower," is amusing enough in and of itself, but clicking it will prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that the Jeeves staff has too much time on their hands.
Make sure you have a spare 15 minutes or so before trying this.... --
>I don't see why Bruce had to draw attention to what he already believes is a simple, honest >mistake. It would have been more professional to deal with it privately and only make it a >community issue if Be ignored him or refused to fix the problem.
Because dealing with it quietly and professionally wouldn't generate nearly so many ad banner impressions for Andover and technocrat.net as making a big loud angry controversy out of it has... self-serving tabloid journalism at its finest.
The Thompson hack included the secondary hack that if the source to the compiler itself were recompiled, the backdoor-creating code would be silently re-inserted into the output copy of the compiler, as well as another copy of the secondary hack itself.
Meaning access to the source of the compiler wouldn't help -- all the source review you cared to do would not point out this 'compiler feature' if you had a compromised compiler in the first place.
Unless you're planning to start from first principles and code your compiler from hand in raw machine code to bootstrap yourself into being able to compile C source, you're going to HAVE to rely on someone else's potentially-compromised binaries at some point, if only to compile a new copy of your compiler.
Which gets back around to the bulk of your insightful point about who do you trust, but your original paragraph about the openness of the source is incorrect -- Thompson worked around that problem very neatly.
--
Re:No, you're geography is questionable.
on
G3 Solar Storm
·
· Score: 1
I was referring to bulk in terms of population, not land area. If the northern half of the land mass of the contiguous 48 states have a decreasing-to-zero-as-you-go-south chance of seeing the northern lights, and definitionally the large bulk of that population lives in the larger light-emitting cities, I think it's safe to say that the vast bulk of the POPULATION of the US will never see the Northern Lights.
So, I was a tiny bit unclear, but most folks at least seemed to know what I meant. --
The VAST bulk of the United States will not be able to see the northern lights, ever, and anyone with a whit of geography under their belt will know that.
It's pretty clear to me that the 'where it still matters' refers to people waking up and seeing this story while it's still dark in the Deep North or Deep South where this might have a chance of being visible. It has nothing to do with the relative worth of non-United-States nations, and I really can't see how it could be mistaken as such.
To misuse the metaphor, though, when all you have is an axe to grind, everything starts looking like a tree.
I think you could safely take "beowulf cluster" and "about the problems of massively parallel computing" out of your first sentence, and probably be even closer to the truth.
Andy Griffith, not Dick Van Dyke. And that was the late 70's IIRC.
Started with a made-for-TV movie about going to the moon in a ship they build from salvaged bits to get all the old Apollo trash and resell it. The series had them wandering all over in their strangely-reusable Saturn-V-looking craft, getting into all sorts of interesting adventures. Great fun show for preteens of that era....
I don't think I've ever been so COMPLETELY misunderstood in the years I've been posting here. I guess when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
> Debatable: 'Protecting one's copyrights' is censorship.
No, because censorship can only be performed by a governing body, definitionally(*). A private party (including a massive corporation) using the body of law to protect its interest again another private party is not censorship. It might be objectionable and annoying, the laws might be wrongheaded and stupid, but it's not censorship.
(*) At least as far as the US legal definition goes. YMMV. --
>So I need a license that says "you are free to distrubute this content unchanged for >non-commercial use" while withholding both ultimate ownership and right to profit for the >copyright holder (I'd say artist, but that's not the reality). Which is where copyright law comes >in.
And what makes you think there won't be a grillion folks out there saying "some rules NEED to be smashed" and breaking your license right and left for their own profit, just like you're doing to the existing schemes? And what do you do if they do? Threaten them with legal action? Try to get a restraining order on whatever hypothetical share-for-profit Open-Source analog to Gnutella comes along?
Not to say you're not on the right track, but all of a sudden doing a bitflip and saying that copyright law will be your friend after alleging "some laws need to be smashed so hard their teeth fall out," or whatever... sits weird. It kind of reaffirms my opinion that this whole Slashdot crowd hypocritically rallies behind copyright only when it supports their ends....
>If you've got the VC I'm ready to go.
This also sits funny with me. If what we're on about is getting paid from the end user directly to the artist in some strange math, what startup do we need? Shouldn't some free MP3 encoding tools and cheap webspace work, analagous to Metallica becoming the #1 metal band in America strictly based on tape-to-tape cassette copies being handed around the scene freely? Why can't you be doing this already out of wahcentral.net? If you think we need VC to do this, you're already thinking like that which you claim to despise.
I know I'm being a bit of an antagonistic asshole, but I'm not 100% sure that you've thought completely through these good seeds of ideas you have. --
(Turning off my +1 because this looks like a long night....)
You're starting to get somewhere, but you're changing the subject. I'm just answering your question "if I have all the diskspace in the world, and I fill it up with stuff that I got free that's actually being charged for by the author, what's wrong with that?"
And it's rather self-evident. The authors and the artists and so forth have released this product with certain terms. You may or may not agree with them, but to violate them is to disrespect the artist's wishes. You're free to do that, but don't expect later arguments about supporting artists to hold any water. If the artists want to give it away free, they will. If their labels won't let them, they'll ditch the labels and do it their own way. If they don't do that, well, then, obviously the money is more important to them than the freedom, and therefore IT'S NOT YOURS TO TAKE FOR FREE.
Now, I like your scenario of everyone doing music for the love of it, and popular artists somehow getting paid just for being popular (although the math is kind of vague in there). I really do. But until and unless such a scheme exists, it's vaporware, and you're pointing to it and saying "SEEEEE, it COULD work!!!" and taking and taking and taking, and not giving back anything to these popular artists that are supposed to be getting paid for being popular.
You want this scheme to work, make it work: set up a record label that gives the music away free. Go on, do it. Get artists to sign up, come up with a business plan that gets people paid somehow for this, and I'll be the first one, really, the VERY FIRST ONE to sign up and help out. C'mon, let's do it, lets figure out free (in the GNU sense) music.
But until it's there, and it ain't there now, you're still just taking free (in the beer sense) music away from people who are trying to make a living selling it on a per-unit basis. And scrambling to justify it with a lot of what-ifs and if-only's.
I'm totally right on with everything you say, but thought it worthwhile to point out that emmett wasn't the author of the text you're taking issue with, that was Frater219. The only parts emmett wrote was "Frater219 writes" and "Good piece, go read it."
>Please explain to me how having 600,000 songs at my fingertips is wrong when I'm paying for >bandwidth, diskspace, and promotion. (equivelent to reproduction, distrubution, and promotion in >the old world)
Because that doesn't at all take into account paying the people that created the music, the artists, the engineers, the producers, the graphic design folk that make the album covers and so forth.
The current model SUCKS at that; the artists get cheated and gypped. I'm the first to say it. But your model sucks even more -- the artists don't see ANYTHING -- not a red cent.
You can pay for all the bandwidth, disk space, and promotion you want, but you're still just being a warez d00d, collecting other peoples' work without paying anyone, and there's no way do dance around it.
>How bright is this?
Brighter than a future where no art gets produced because y'all take away the sole source of artists income without offering anything in return or coming up with any alternatives... But, hey, information wants to be free, gimme gimme gimme.
The way music is distribted now doesn't work well.
The way you'd like to have it distributed won't work at all.
I wonder how the FSF feels about the GNU name being to promote a piece of software whose authors allege they won't give out its source code until the 1.0 release is done, which now looks exceedingly unlikely ever to happen?
I wonder why Slashdot keeps talking about this software as if it were open source and GNU-happy, when it's not, and may never be?
I wonder if this community is really as strict about its beliefs as it would like to believe, or if it has degraded, as I've long been suspecting, into a what-can-I-get-for-free-as-in-beer crew, just a tiny step above warez d00ds in the ecological chain?
Preach it, brother. And somehow in spite of this, we keep hearing the denial-based mantra "Slashdot is not a Linux advocacy site." Folks, proof positive right there in one of the actual editors' own words.
In the last article on this, I put a link to my old Electronic Musician article about Linux MIDI + sound, but it was really late in the lifespan of the Slashdot article, so I'm pretty sure most readers missed it. It lives on my site because EM's site managed to munge the archives for 06/99, when it was published.
I'm posting it again, along with a link to Electronic Musician magazine itself, because they're a great magazine, and had the forethought to commission an article on Linux music support over a year ago. Check them out, and check out the article. --
>While the FSF appears more moderate than it is, don't pretend to think that free software is based >in copyright law...the copyleft is an intentional, legalistic, snub of the copyright system.
There being no 'copyleft law,' the FSF's only actual legal coverage is in existing copyright law. They can call it whatever cute name they want, and couch it in other terms, but the body of copyright law is the ONLY thing that will stand behind the GPL.
The copyleft is all well and good and nice, but it only exists because the body of precedent surrounding copyright is compatible with its goals. Copyleft is not innately legal, it's just so far unchallenged, and its core assumptions are those that copyright law enables: that an author has the right to license work in any method he/she chooses.
>If it violates a couple of copyrights - then who cares? Who is going to stop it?:-)
Not good enough. Recall that copyright is the basis for ALL licensing, including the GPL. You can't just violate the copyrights that happen to annoy you.
Closed source is annoying, but don't cut off your nose to spite your face. Copyright is a VERY important part of what makes Open Source work.
At my work, we have a handful of Ultra-10's that we're decommissioning as servers to replace with E250s and so forth, mostly because we'd rather do that than play around with cramming SCSI cards into the U10's to get more disk space, and we're starting to need enterprise-class hardware for these roles.
Those machines would make nice desktop boxes (that being really what they were designed for), and Mandrake is a better desktop daily-use OS than Solaris for the average person.
(*shrug) Just one place this might be welcome here in a month or three.
Slashdot Mirror
>But you can exclude nearly everything related to development, most network daemons, databases, most
>libraries, most scripting languages, and most applications.
Win2K has a complete scripting language, Windows Script Host, so it would be fair to include a Perl or Python in the mix. And, since WinNT/Win2K have a rudimentary POSIX system, it seems only sane to give Linux a rudimentary Win32 system and include Wine.
We should also include a modern browser, probably either Communicator or Mozilla, either of which will raise our bug count severely.
Win2K also includes some basic network functionality that NT was missing (under the strange moniker "Services for Unix"), like a telnetd and the like, so removing network daemons is not actually fair. There's Dynamic DNS, so we'll include BIND, which actually is less capable. Also encrypted filesystems, Kerberos (hey, it's not strictly correct, but it's in there), IPsec, telephony, OpenGL & DirectX...
And, IIS, XML parsing, COM system, PPTP, Distributed File System, ActiveDirectory -- you'd need Apache, PHP, probably Mozilla for XML, some ORBish system, any of the horribly buggy PPTP implementations for Linux, Coda? AFS?, OpenLDAP....
The list goes on and on. To say that Win2K is analagous to a stripped-down Linux distro is really not correct -- there's a LOT in there, way more than in the average Linux distro.
None of which is a defense of Win2K; I just think it's important not to use the 63K alleged bug count as FUD ammo -- I could file 63,000 bugs against ANY Linux distro if our definition of 'bug' is the same one used for the Win2K count -- anything that displeases the tester, even as small as tiny aesthetic visual issues with a program.
>Of course, we also don't have Microsoft's legions of full-time, paid developers and testers working
>on the core components of a Linux distribution, either.
That's kind of an excuse, and gets really pretty close to saying that expensive commercial software should have fewer bugs than Open Source since they have more money to throw at it.
--
In all fairness, comparing 95 known bugs in the Linux kernel with 63K bugs in all of Windows 2000's kernel, GUI, services, userland programs, games, icons/graphics/media files, POSIX subsystem, scripting language, and so forth is comparing apples to oranges.
It would be a more fair comparison to get hold of an entire distribution's count of todo's and bugfixes, including X, Wine, sendmail, python, GNOME, and on and on. I bet you could get right up there near 65K pretty easily if you aggregate all the TODO and KNOWN BUGS lists in all the SRPMS in Red Hat 6.2, for instance.
--
MAN, I wish I had moderator points today.
+1, Insightful-intelligent-well-spoken.
It's nice to see more and more people realizing (and speaking up) that Open Source itself is just a better means to an end, but not itself the better end -- just because code is Open Source doesn't mean it IS superior (except arguably in the political/philosophical sense), just that it's easier to get there.
--
>And what makes you say that? Want to elaberate a little?
Love to.
>I really feel that Open Source code is at least as good as propriety, if not better. It isn't
>allways better, of course, but nearly allways it is.
See, that's the thing. "I really feel." Show me the numbers.
For every buggy proprietary program you want to show as evidence, I can dig up some splinter version of identd or MAME launcher or desktop environment that's as Open Source as the day is long, but still is horribly broken and terribly coded.
Being Open Source doesn't INHERENTLY create quality. It provides the _mechanism_, the _opportunity_ for better code, for all of the reasons we all know and love.
But opening the source to a program doesn't automatically mean it will suddenly get an interested multitude of good developers with excellent coding and communications skills to wrangle out all of the bugs and comment all of the files. That CAN happen, but there's no guarantees that it will.
Being Open Source is good for many things, finding and fixing bugs more easily, keeping programs from being orphanned, creating public libraries of known-good code. But it's still software development like any other software development, and without a dedicated core team of talented engineers, you're not going to make another Apache or Linux kernel just because of your license choice.
Or, to sum up, saying Open Source code is at least as good as proprietary code makes no sense. Open Source code ranges from idiotic to sublime, just like proprietary code. Neither one is 'nearly always' better than the other in any measure that's not purely philosophical.
Sense?
--
>Code written behind closed doors tends to stay that way for a reason (it is usually pretty embarassing.)
Hmmn. And how much of this behind-closed-doors have you read in order to get a data set to make this generalization? I'd imagine that a lot of proprietary code, for financial and military institutions, for instance, is some of the finest in the art.
First, we make the incorrect generalization that all Open Source code is innately better than all proprietary code; now we're leaping off of that shaky premise to the conclusion that all proprietary code is, in fact, shoddy and embarassing?
Not sure I'm going to buy into this line of thought.
--
>Is it just me, or is the US getting absolutely zip out of this deal? I mean, by letting these
>other countries in on the project, do we gain leverage in global trade disputes, the Security
>Council, strategic arms treaties, or conflict negotiations?
(*sigh)
No. And that's a good thing, because nationalistic gain is not the point of this venture.
As a US citizen, I'm increasingly ashamed of the culture of personal and national selfishness that we've grown into in the past quarter century. There are perfectly good reasons to participate in a project that doesn't give immediate gimme-gimme satisfaction, reasons that could be labeled with quaint words like "noble" and "selfless," as well as more mundane ones like "far-sighted" and "cooperative."
Unfortunately, such reasoning gets tarred with the same brush as 'protest movements' and the like, and therefore slandered into submission before the American corporate juggernaut's bottom line.
You can call it 'touchy-feely' or any other name you want, but as a citizen of the human race first and an American second, I applaud the idea of the United States using some of its vast wealth and power for something besides accumulating more wealth and power; it gives me a tiny nugget of hope in a bleak, graceless age.
--
OK, I know this sounds like a troll, but it's true: Go to Jeeves and ask "will you blow me" (or any of a number of similar propositions)....
The first hit that comes up, "Wouldn't you rather take a nice, cold shower," is amusing enough in and of itself, but clicking it will prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that the Jeeves staff has too much time on their hands.
Make sure you have a spare 15 minutes or so before trying this....
--
>I don't see why Bruce had to draw attention to what he already believes is a simple, honest
>mistake. It would have been more professional to deal with it privately and only make it a
>community issue if Be ignored him or refused to fix the problem.
Because dealing with it quietly and professionally wouldn't generate nearly so many ad banner impressions for Andover and technocrat.net as making a big loud angry controversy out of it has... self-serving tabloid journalism at its finest.
Color me unimpressed, too.
--
The Thompson hack included the secondary hack that if the source to the compiler itself were recompiled, the backdoor-creating code would be silently re-inserted into the output copy of the compiler, as well as another copy of the secondary hack itself.
Meaning access to the source of the compiler wouldn't help -- all the source review you cared to do would not point out this 'compiler feature' if you had a compromised compiler in the first place.
Unless you're planning to start from first principles and code your compiler from hand in raw machine code to bootstrap yourself into being able to compile C source, you're going to HAVE to rely on someone else's potentially-compromised binaries at some point, if only to compile a new copy of your compiler.
Which gets back around to the bulk of your insightful point about who do you trust, but your original paragraph about the openness of the source is incorrect -- Thompson worked around that problem very neatly.
--
I was referring to bulk in terms of population, not land area. If the northern half of the land mass of the contiguous 48 states have a decreasing-to-zero-as-you-go-south chance of seeing the northern lights, and definitionally the large bulk of that population lives in the larger light-emitting cities, I think it's safe to say that the vast bulk of the POPULATION of the US will never see the Northern Lights.
So, I was a tiny bit unclear, but most folks at least seemed to know what I meant.
--
Um, friend, slow down.
The VAST bulk of the United States will not be able to see the northern lights, ever, and anyone with a whit of geography under their belt will know that.
It's pretty clear to me that the 'where it still matters' refers to people waking up and seeing this story while it's still dark in the Deep North or Deep South where this might have a chance of being visible. It has nothing to do with the relative worth of non-United-States nations, and I really can't see how it could be mistaken as such.
To misuse the metaphor, though, when all you have is an axe to grind, everything starts looking like a tree.
--
I think you could safely take "beowulf cluster" and "about the problems of massively parallel computing" out of your first sentence, and probably be even closer to the truth.
--
Andy Griffith, not Dick Van Dyke. And that was the late 70's IIRC.
Started with a made-for-TV movie about going to the moon in a ship they build from salvaged bits to get all the old Apollo trash and resell it. The series had them wandering all over in their strangely-reusable Saturn-V-looking craft, getting into all sorts of interesting adventures. Great fun show for preteens of that era....
--
I don't think I've ever been so COMPLETELY misunderstood in the years I've been posting here. I guess when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
--
> Debatable: 'Protecting one's copyrights' is censorship.
No, because censorship can only be performed by a governing body, definitionally(*). A private party (including a massive corporation) using the body of law to protect its interest again another private party is not censorship. It might be objectionable and annoying, the laws might be wrongheaded and stupid, but it's not censorship.
(*) At least as far as the US legal definition goes. YMMV.
--
>So I need a license that says "you are free to distrubute this content unchanged for
>non-commercial use" while withholding both ultimate ownership and right to profit for the
>copyright holder (I'd say artist, but that's not the reality). Which is where copyright law comes
>in.
And what makes you think there won't be a grillion folks out there saying "some rules NEED to be smashed" and breaking your license right and left for their own profit, just like you're doing to the existing schemes? And what do you do if they do? Threaten them with legal action? Try to get a restraining order on whatever hypothetical share-for-profit Open-Source analog to Gnutella comes along?
Not to say you're not on the right track, but all of a sudden doing a bitflip and saying that copyright law will be your friend after alleging "some laws need to be smashed so hard their teeth fall out," or whatever... sits weird. It kind of reaffirms my opinion that this whole Slashdot crowd hypocritically rallies behind copyright only when it supports their ends....
>If you've got the VC I'm ready to go.
This also sits funny with me. If what we're on about is getting paid from the end user directly to the artist in some strange math, what startup do we need? Shouldn't some free MP3 encoding tools and cheap webspace work, analagous to Metallica becoming the #1 metal band in America strictly based on tape-to-tape cassette copies being handed around the scene freely? Why can't you be doing this already out of wahcentral.net? If you think we need VC to do this, you're already thinking like that which you claim to despise.
I know I'm being a bit of an antagonistic asshole, but I'm not 100% sure that you've thought completely through these good seeds of ideas you have.
--
(Turning off my +1 because this looks like a long night....)
You're starting to get somewhere, but you're changing the subject. I'm just answering your question "if I have all the diskspace in the world, and I fill it up with stuff that I got free that's actually being charged for by the author, what's wrong with that?"
And it's rather self-evident. The authors and the artists and so forth have released this product with certain terms. You may or may not agree with them, but to violate them is to disrespect the artist's wishes. You're free to do that, but don't expect later arguments about supporting artists to hold any water. If the artists want to give it away free, they will. If their labels won't let them, they'll ditch the labels and do it their own way. If they don't do that, well, then, obviously the money is more important to them than the freedom, and therefore IT'S NOT YOURS TO TAKE FOR FREE.
Now, I like your scenario of everyone doing music for the love of it, and popular artists somehow getting paid just for being popular (although the math is kind of vague in there). I really do. But until and unless such a scheme exists, it's vaporware, and you're pointing to it and saying "SEEEEE, it COULD work!!!" and taking and taking and taking, and not giving back anything to these popular artists that are supposed to be getting paid for being popular.
You want this scheme to work, make it work: set up a record label that gives the music away free. Go on, do it. Get artists to sign up, come up with a business plan that gets people paid somehow for this, and I'll be the first one, really, the VERY FIRST ONE to sign up and help out. C'mon, let's do it, lets figure out free (in the GNU sense) music.
But until it's there, and it ain't there now, you're still just taking free (in the beer sense) music away from people who are trying to make a living selling it on a per-unit basis. And scrambling to justify it with a lot of what-ifs and if-only's.
--
I'm totally right on with everything you say, but thought it worthwhile to point out that emmett wasn't the author of the text you're taking issue with, that was Frater219. The only parts emmett wrote was "Frater219 writes" and "Good piece, go read it."
--
>Please explain to me how having 600,000 songs at my fingertips is wrong when I'm paying for
>bandwidth, diskspace, and promotion. (equivelent to reproduction, distrubution, and promotion in
>the old world)
Because that doesn't at all take into account paying the people that created the music, the artists, the engineers, the producers, the graphic design folk that make the album covers and so forth.
The current model SUCKS at that; the artists get cheated and gypped. I'm the first to say it. But your model sucks even more -- the artists don't see ANYTHING -- not a red cent.
You can pay for all the bandwidth, disk space, and promotion you want, but you're still just being a warez d00d, collecting other peoples' work without paying anyone, and there's no way do dance around it.
>How bright is this?
Brighter than a future where no art gets produced because y'all take away the sole source of artists income without offering anything in return or coming up with any alternatives... But, hey, information wants to be free, gimme gimme gimme.
The way music is distribted now doesn't work well.
The way you'd like to have it distributed won't work at all.
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I wonder how the FSF feels about the GNU name being to promote a piece of software whose authors allege they won't give out its source code until the 1.0 release is done, which now looks exceedingly unlikely ever to happen?
I wonder why Slashdot keeps talking about this software as if it were open source and GNU-happy, when it's not, and may never be?
I wonder if this community is really as strict about its beliefs as it would like to believe, or if it has degraded, as I've long been suspecting, into a what-can-I-get-for-free-as-in-beer crew, just a tiny step above warez d00ds in the ecological chain?
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Preach it, brother. And somehow in spite of this, we keep hearing the denial-based mantra "Slashdot is not a Linux advocacy site." Folks, proof positive right there in one of the actual editors' own words.
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In the last article on this, I put a link to my old Electronic Musician article about Linux MIDI + sound, but it was really late in the lifespan of the Slashdot article, so I'm pretty sure most readers missed it. It lives on my site because EM's site managed to munge the archives for 06/99, when it was published.
I'm posting it again, along with a link to Electronic Musician magazine itself, because they're a great magazine, and had the forethought to commission an article on Linux music support over a year ago. Check them out, and check out the article.
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>While the FSF appears more moderate than it is, don't pretend to think that free software is based
>in copyright law...the copyleft is an intentional, legalistic, snub of the copyright system.
There being no 'copyleft law,' the FSF's only actual legal coverage is in existing copyright law. They can call it whatever cute name they want, and couch it in other terms, but the body of copyright law is the ONLY thing that will stand behind the GPL.
The copyleft is all well and good and nice, but it only exists because the body of precedent surrounding copyright is compatible with its goals. Copyleft is not innately legal, it's just so far unchallenged, and its core assumptions are those that copyright law enables: that an author has the right to license work in any method he/she chooses.
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>If it violates a couple of copyrights - then who cares? Who is going to stop it? :-)
Not good enough. Recall that copyright is the basis for ALL licensing, including the GPL. You can't just violate the copyrights that happen to annoy you.
Closed source is annoying, but don't cut off your nose to spite your face. Copyright is a VERY important part of what makes Open Source work.
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At my work, we have a handful of Ultra-10's that we're decommissioning as servers to replace with E250s and so forth, mostly because we'd rather do that than play around with cramming SCSI cards into the U10's to get more disk space, and we're starting to need enterprise-class hardware for these roles.
Those machines would make nice desktop boxes (that being really what they were designed for), and Mandrake is a better desktop daily-use OS than Solaris for the average person.
(*shrug) Just one place this might be welcome here in a month or three.
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