That's not really the case. The GPL's guarantee of continued code freedom is more useful to a developer than an end user for the simple reason that developers code and end users don't.
It's possible to look at it this way, but you need to remember two things:
Just because someone is a user doesn't mean they don't know how to code.
Anyone can hire a programmer to modify some code.
The second point is far more important than the first. In fact, even people who *can* code will frequently hire someone else to modify a free software program simply because it's easier and more cost effective.
DRM isn't doing anything outside the fundamental spirit and purpose of copyright (that is, it's giving the owners of the content as much control over it as possible).
That was never the fundamental purpose of copyright except in the wild fantasies of some distributors, and more recently in the minds of their pet legislators. Except for its very beginnings as a tool for censorship, the purpose of copyright has always been monopoly profits for the distributors (promoted as profits for authors).
Don't let the US copyright industry frame the debate. I would like to suggest, very strongly, that you watch this video: Rick Falkvinge talks at Google, where the founder of the Swedish Pirate Party covers the interaction between copyright law and civil liberties and how we can fix that problem without needing to completely eliminate copyright in one go.
How a patent like this ever passes the laugh test, I don't know.
Simple: the patent office doesn't apply the laugh test. If they did, the patent lawyers would challenge them on it to the legislators. ("Either there is a good legal reason to deny the application or it should be accepted. This isn't the time or place for gut feelings.")
I'm starting to come to the conclusion that in the end the FSF and the RIAA/MPAA/BSA are actually allies chasing after the same goal. Both groups are trying to keep people from stealing intellectual property from the owner. They only differ slightly in how the intellectual property is distributed downstream of the owner, which is really a minor technicality.
In that case, you're reading too many trolls on Slashdot for your information (or are trolling yourself).
The FSF has published their rationale for all of their decisions and their actions have been very consistent with their claimed position. I suggest you actually go read some of the position statements that the FSF has published. I think you'll find that "protecting intellectual property" has very little to do with it.
Both are trying to protect their intellectual property with law. That is how it is related.
Ahh... now I see where you're coming from.
Copyright law has worked very well for hundreds of years as an industrial regulation. Legally restricting how and what companies sell actually works pretty well. The problem with copyright law starts when people expect it to restrict non-commercial private uses by individuals.
The GPL works fine because it treats copyright law as an industrial regulation. If a company violates the GPL, there is an obvious entity to sue and get a court ruling against. The violation is embodied in a product - frequently even a physical product like a router or a TIVO box, but there is always money involved for a court to be interested in. You're probably right that the GPL can do nothing about the case where someone distributes modified binaries without source on ThePirateBay, but that doesn't seem to come up in practice.
Legislation supported DRM on the other hand *is* pointless. The activity it tries to restrict happens in private and non-commercially, so the law doesn't really apply to it in practice. Copyright law works well enough to stop bootleg DVDs in stores, but trying to constrain non-commercial private activity is pointless.
Not exactly that VM since it doesn't need to be GPLV3 can be locked in.
Yea, the GPL doesn't restrict how you redistribute non-GPL software.
Trust me just as with DRM trying to legislate technology just will not work.
I'm not sure how this is related to anything. The GPL is a software license, not a law. Using software licenses to restrict the legal copying and redistribution of software has worked for a very long time.
Sure, but it violates what the FSF was working towards...
The single and only purpose of the anti-tivoizaton clause is to allow every user to modify any GPLv3 software they receive and then actually use their modification. It isn't intended to do anything else. Anti-DRM text was considered for GPLv3 and later dropped.
This technique doesn't prove the anti-tivoization requirement in the GPL futile at all. The requirement in the GPLv3 is to allow people to run modified versions of the GPLed software - and this is exactly what this technique allows the end user to do. This isn't thwarting the GPL - this is the GPL succeeding.
If you don't like the way a company is being run, buy it. Otherwise, it's no one's fault but your own.
I'm sure you're just trolling, but that's actually an interesting suggestion. Unfortunately, it doesn't solve the problem. Our economic market is structured in such a way that socially undesirable near-monopolies tend to form, thus naturally tending to create the socially undesirable situation I described.
The solution you suggest could, with organizational effort equivalent to running a major national political campaign, allow billions of dollars to be spent to temporarily correct one market. That's like trying to reverse the flow of a river by carrying single buckets of water back upstream.
In order to actually solve the problem, we'd need to study the markets themselves and see *why* Walmart, Microsoft, and SBC are local equilibria and see if any regulations can be changed to promote a different result. In the case of Microsoft and SBC, there are government granted monopolies that can potentially be removed.
Walmart is a much more interesting case - it may be necessary to *add* regulation to restore market competition. I'm not currently convinced that it's even possible to do that productively in a situation where the monopolist has as much lobbying power as Walmart does.
So how does someone who relies on donated hardware run GNU/Linux? At some point, buying a Windows license becomes cheaper than buying hardware supported by Linux.
That's true. And if minimizing your immediate cash expenditures while using all of your donated hardware is your goal, then that's the point when you'll have to buy a Windows license. My guess is that using GNU/Linux has other advantages that you'd want to figure in to your decision making.
Luckily, most hardware happens to be supported. For many "random" computers, the only hardware component that is unsupported is a Broadcom wireless card. In that case, you have a third option: Plug in an ethernet cable. That's probably cheaper than either a wireless card or a Windows license.
Hell, it's even possible that futzing with ndiswrapper is a good cost / benefit tradeoff for you, especially if you have a bunch of similar machines that the same ndiswrapper setup will work on. I'm just really, really tired of hearing about how "GNU/Linux isn't ready for the desktop" because someone wasted six hours trying to follow poor forum directions about how to get ndiswrapper to work when even that doesn't support their specific chipset.
There's a big difference between supporting platform specific IPC mechanisms in an application and integrating those mechanisms into file format that you claim can be implemented on other platforms.
So, in other words, to continue to grow, it has to continue providing value to its customers, and to remain a monopoly, it has to *compete* with its potential competitors.
That market state is economically efficient, but not socially desirable. The only time the monopolist needs to drop their prices to what would be the competitive equilibrium is when they're in the process of bankrupting some foolish entrepreneur. In addition to resulting in higher prices for consumers, the monopolist will tend to generate massive profits - which in practice get used to lobby for laws that will support the monopoly. Eventually, your effective competitor has a government granted monopoly in practice without any single monopoly grant for detractors to point to.
Natural monopolies are a troubling case, however. With or without government coercion, natural monopolies will tend to exist at some regional level, due to some structural reason regarding infrastructural investment costs. There is less of a case for this these days for telecoms, where one can argue that land line, cable-phone, cellular, an emerging wifi all represent means by which non-entrenched competitors can enter the market.
Natural monopolies are academically interesting, but they aren't a huge problem in practice unless they are government reinforced. Cable Television, for example, may or may not have been a natural monopoly at any given point in the past - but today it's the government granted monopolies that are keeping competitors out of that market.
Enforcing a natural monopoly with a government granted monopoly is a terrible idea overall. Either the government should actively try to encourage competition (like they could in the ISP market) or they should socialize the infrastructure (like they do for municipal water).
If anyone has an opinion that conflicts with your own, they must be idiot's who haven't used it, because honestly how could they be right and you wrong!
Statistically, with "Linux isn't ready for the desktop" posts on Slashdot (and Digg), that seems to be a reasonably safe assumption.
People are very, very willing to jump from "I couldn't get Slackware to work after spending two hours trying in 1999" to "Ubuntu 7.04 is utter crap". In this case I was wrong. It turns out that ryanw is actually just an anti-GPL troll instead.
Working on Linux is not profitable. Everything you do for linux has to be done for free. I don't understand how Linux will ever rise above software that actually can sustain income to pay their developers a hefty salary.
If there were a Linux fork with the BSD license, you would see progress that might even attract some serious commercial support from Adobe and such.
That's false. You are either confused or intentionally spreading lies.
The GPL license does not imply that software developers work for free.
Unless you think that the programmers at Red Hat, IBM, MySQL AB, Zimbra, Sun Microsystems, all work for free. If anything, the GPL means more work for software developers - because they can charge money to add features to existing programs.
Selling propretary software for Linux works fine.
Sure, trying to sell an office suite that's worse than Open Office or a web browser that's worse than Firefox isn't going to work. There's no reason why it should. It's not like with Mac OS X either where people manage to sell low quality propretary text editors somehow. But numerous companies manage to make money selling high quality propretary software for Linux. Like the 3D Modeler Maya. Or Quake 4. Or Adobe Acrobat Distiller. Or anything on this list.
When donated unsupported hardware (such as a birthday gift or gift to non-profit organization) costs $0, what would one choose? When unsupported hardware that was paid for before one considered switching to another operating system costs $0, what would one choose?
In this case, the cost of seriously switching to another operating system includes the cost of any necessary hardware alterations. When you have an unsupported wireless card, running Ubuntu costs $30. In the worst case, switching to Ubuntu may have a similar monetary cost to switching to a Mac - you may have to buy a whole new computer with Ubuntu pre-installed.
Sure, it would be nice if Ubuntu supported every piece of hardware in the world - but that's simply not possible. Not even Windows can do that. Luckily, we don't actually need to support every piece of hardware - we just need to be able to get hardware that is supported, and that's not a problem.
If you accept any license and fail to live up to the details of the license, it is contractual up to that point. There has to be a step in which you are aware that the license has been removed. This cannot be automatic if you think you are fulfilling it.
If there is an active copyright infringement suit, as in my example, having a license is simply a defense against copyright infringement. Having a license that auto-terminates works fine - it's simply up to the court to determine if A.) the defendant is in compliance or B.) the defendant is not in compliance so the license is terminated and is therefore not a valid defense in the suit.
Is there any reason that any of the features that you describe are incompatible with a flat text config file that can still be hand edited? Unix systems are pretty damn good at dealing with text files - throwing away all those capabilities for no actual gains would be a mistake.
When unsupported hardware plus a Windows license costs less than supported hardware, what would one choose?
I would chose the system that runs the software that I want to use. Every time. Unsupported hardware is completely useless, so there's no reason for me to even consider buying it.
In that case, your donor may have given you Windows-only hardware. The fact that there's no one actually screwed up doesn't mean that you can run Linux on it, unfortunately. Linux, like any other OS, still only runs well on supported hardware.
Are those really major Linux distributions, or are they just something you found on a list somewhere? More relevantly, how many distributions are worth considering as serious options for a given application? I don't think anyone's going to seriously consider Slackware, Gentoo, or MEPIS for a corporate workstation.
I will even give you a very specific example. I recently went looking for visual studio plugin for SVN. I tried anhk, an OSS version and visualsvn, which is $50 and pretty much just a wrapper for tortise svn. visualsvn pissed on anhk from great heights. well worth the $50. the reason? lack of polish, shoddy features and poorly thought out interface.
So... you're saying that for a plugin for a proprietary Windows program, another proprietary program happened to be higher quality than one specific open source program? I'm entirely willing to believe that, and I don't see how it reflects in any way on the quality of F/OSS software on a F/OSS platform.
The rest are just Windows Ultra Super Cool Edition with various things removed
I'm pretty sure that Windows Vista and Windows Server 2003 are innately different OS distributions, and that having them on different CDs is actually beneficial to the end user.
Linux itself (the kernel) usually does not differ between kernels in ways a user would notice.
Well, unless it's compiled for a different architecture. But generally the kernel isn't what differs between distributions - usually different distributions are created for different use cases - just like the editions of Windows.
Unless you really think that Mobilinux, MiniMyth, and Ubuntu all need to be installable off the same CD.
So... you've had to use the command line because you tried to install an OS on unsupported hardware. You get zero pity from me. You chose unsupported hardware when fully supported hardware has been readily available for years. You wouldn't complain about having to use the command line to install Mac OS X on the same system, or to install Windows on a PS3, why is Ubuntu any different?
Slashdot Mirror
It's possible to look at it this way, but you need to remember two things:
The second point is far more important than the first. In fact, even people who *can* code will frequently hire someone else to modify a free software program simply because it's easier and more cost effective.
That was never the fundamental purpose of copyright except in the wild fantasies of some distributors, and more recently in the minds of their pet legislators. Except for its very beginnings as a tool for censorship, the purpose of copyright has always been monopoly profits for the distributors (promoted as profits for authors).
Don't let the US copyright industry frame the debate. I would like to suggest, very strongly, that you watch this video: Rick Falkvinge talks at Google, where the founder of the Swedish Pirate Party covers the interaction between copyright law and civil liberties and how we can fix that problem without needing to completely eliminate copyright in one go.
Simple: the patent office doesn't apply the laugh test. If they did, the patent lawyers would challenge them on it to the legislators. ("Either there is a good legal reason to deny the application or it should be accepted. This isn't the time or place for gut feelings.")
In that case, you're reading too many trolls on Slashdot for your information (or are trolling yourself).
The FSF has published their rationale for all of their decisions and their actions have been very consistent with their claimed position. I suggest you actually go read some of the position statements that the FSF has published. I think you'll find that "protecting intellectual property" has very little to do with it.
Ahh... now I see where you're coming from.
Copyright law has worked very well for hundreds of years as an industrial regulation. Legally restricting how and what companies sell actually works pretty well. The problem with copyright law starts when people expect it to restrict non-commercial private uses by individuals.
The GPL works fine because it treats copyright law as an industrial regulation. If a company violates the GPL, there is an obvious entity to sue and get a court ruling against. The violation is embodied in a product - frequently even a physical product like a router or a TIVO box, but there is always money involved for a court to be interested in. You're probably right that the GPL can do nothing about the case where someone distributes modified binaries without source on ThePirateBay, but that doesn't seem to come up in practice.
Legislation supported DRM on the other hand *is* pointless. The activity it tries to restrict happens in private and non-commercially, so the law doesn't really apply to it in practice. Copyright law works well enough to stop bootleg DVDs in stores, but trying to constrain non-commercial private activity is pointless.
Yea, the GPL doesn't restrict how you redistribute non-GPL software.
I'm not sure how this is related to anything. The GPL is a software license, not a law. Using software licenses to restrict the legal copying and redistribution of software has worked for a very long time.
The single and only purpose of the anti-tivoizaton clause is to allow every user to modify any GPLv3 software they receive and then actually use their modification. It isn't intended to do anything else. Anti-DRM text was considered for GPLv3 and later dropped.
This technique doesn't prove the anti-tivoization requirement in the GPL futile at all. The requirement in the GPLv3 is to allow people to run modified versions of the GPLed software - and this is exactly what this technique allows the end user to do. This isn't thwarting the GPL - this is the GPL succeeding.
I'm sure you're just trolling, but that's actually an interesting suggestion. Unfortunately, it doesn't solve the problem. Our economic market is structured in such a way that socially undesirable near-monopolies tend to form, thus naturally tending to create the socially undesirable situation I described.
The solution you suggest could, with organizational effort equivalent to running a major national political campaign, allow billions of dollars to be spent to temporarily correct one market. That's like trying to reverse the flow of a river by carrying single buckets of water back upstream.
In order to actually solve the problem, we'd need to study the markets themselves and see *why* Walmart, Microsoft, and SBC are local equilibria and see if any regulations can be changed to promote a different result. In the case of Microsoft and SBC, there are government granted monopolies that can potentially be removed.
Walmart is a much more interesting case - it may be necessary to *add* regulation to restore market competition. I'm not currently convinced that it's even possible to do that productively in a situation where the monopolist has as much lobbying power as Walmart does.
That's true. And if minimizing your immediate cash expenditures while using all of your donated hardware is your goal, then that's the point when you'll have to buy a Windows license. My guess is that using GNU/Linux has other advantages that you'd want to figure in to your decision making.
Luckily, most hardware happens to be supported. For many "random" computers, the only hardware component that is unsupported is a Broadcom wireless card. In that case, you have a third option: Plug in an ethernet cable. That's probably cheaper than either a wireless card or a Windows license.
Hell, it's even possible that futzing with ndiswrapper is a good cost / benefit tradeoff for you, especially if you have a bunch of similar machines that the same ndiswrapper setup will work on. I'm just really, really tired of hearing about how "GNU/Linux isn't ready for the desktop" because someone wasted six hours trying to follow poor forum directions about how to get ndiswrapper to work when even that doesn't support their specific chipset.
There's a big difference between supporting platform specific IPC mechanisms in an application and integrating those mechanisms into file format that you claim can be implemented on other platforms.
That market state is economically efficient, but not socially desirable. The only time the monopolist needs to drop their prices to what would be the competitive equilibrium is when they're in the process of bankrupting some foolish entrepreneur. In addition to resulting in higher prices for consumers, the monopolist will tend to generate massive profits - which in practice get used to lobby for laws that will support the monopoly. Eventually, your effective competitor has a government granted monopoly in practice without any single monopoly grant for detractors to point to.
Natural monopolies are academically interesting, but they aren't a huge problem in practice unless they are government reinforced. Cable Television, for example, may or may not have been a natural monopoly at any given point in the past - but today it's the government granted monopolies that are keeping competitors out of that market.
Enforcing a natural monopoly with a government granted monopoly is a terrible idea overall. Either the government should actively try to encourage competition (like they could in the ISP market) or they should socialize the infrastructure (like they do for municipal water).
Statistically, with "Linux isn't ready for the desktop" posts on Slashdot (and Digg), that seems to be a reasonably safe assumption.
People are very, very willing to jump from "I couldn't get Slackware to work after spending two hours trying in 1999" to "Ubuntu 7.04 is utter crap". In this case I was wrong. It turns out that ryanw is actually just an anti-GPL troll instead.
That's false. You are either confused or intentionally spreading lies.
The GPL license does not imply that software developers work for free.
Unless you think that the programmers at Red Hat, IBM, MySQL AB, Zimbra, Sun Microsystems, all work for free. If anything, the GPL means more work for software developers - because they can charge money to add features to existing programs.
Selling propretary software for Linux works fine.
Sure, trying to sell an office suite that's worse than Open Office or a web browser that's worse than Firefox isn't going to work. There's no reason why it should. It's not like with Mac OS X either where people manage to sell low quality propretary text editors somehow. But numerous companies manage to make money selling high quality propretary software for Linux. Like the 3D Modeler Maya. Or Quake 4. Or Adobe Acrobat Distiller. Or anything on this list.
In this case, the cost of seriously switching to another operating system includes the cost of any necessary hardware alterations. When you have an unsupported wireless card, running Ubuntu costs $30. In the worst case, switching to Ubuntu may have a similar monetary cost to switching to a Mac - you may have to buy a whole new computer with Ubuntu pre-installed.
Sure, it would be nice if Ubuntu supported every piece of hardware in the world - but that's simply not possible. Not even Windows can do that. Luckily, we don't actually need to support every piece of hardware - we just need to be able to get hardware that is supported, and that's not a problem.
If there is an active copyright infringement suit, as in my example, having a license is simply a defense against copyright infringement. Having a license that auto-terminates works fine - it's simply up to the court to determine if A.) the defendant is in compliance or B.) the defendant is not in compliance so the license is terminated and is therefore not a valid defense in the suit.
Is there any reason that any of the features that you describe are incompatible with a flat text config file that can still be hand edited? Unix systems are pretty damn good at dealing with text files - throwing away all those capabilities for no actual gains would be a mistake.
I would chose the system that runs the software that I want to use. Every time. Unsupported hardware is completely useless, so there's no reason for me to even consider buying it.
In that case, your donor may have given you Windows-only hardware. The fact that there's no one actually screwed up doesn't mean that you can run Linux on it, unfortunately. Linux, like any other OS, still only runs well on supported hardware.
Are those really major Linux distributions, or are they just something you found on a list somewhere? More relevantly, how many distributions are worth considering as serious options for a given application? I don't think anyone's going to seriously consider Slackware, Gentoo, or MEPIS for a corporate workstation.
So... you're saying that for a plugin for a proprietary Windows program, another proprietary program happened to be higher quality than one specific open source program? I'm entirely willing to believe that, and I don't see how it reflects in any way on the quality of F/OSS software on a F/OSS platform.
I'm pretty sure that Windows Vista and Windows Server 2003 are innately different OS distributions, and that having them on different CDs is actually beneficial to the end user.
Well, unless it's compiled for a different architecture. But generally the kernel isn't what differs between distributions - usually different distributions are created for different use cases - just like the editions of Windows.
Unless you really think that Mobilinux, MiniMyth, and Ubuntu all need to be installable off the same CD.
And how do you propose we use this supposed development money to wrest hardware documentation from uncooperative vendors?
Actually, that's pretty easy. You buy Broadcom.
So... you've had to use the command line because you tried to install an OS on unsupported hardware. You get zero pity from me. You chose unsupported hardware when fully supported hardware has been readily available for years. You wouldn't complain about having to use the command line to install Mac OS X on the same system, or to install Windows on a PS3, why is Ubuntu any different?