The first half of the book was an extremely effective exposé of the meatpacking industry as it was at the time. I have my doubts about it these days as well. It was also intended to highlight the exploitation of cheap immigrant labor.
The second half of the book is harder going. Mr. Sinclair's cure for all this would be socialism; the variety described would be lot closer to Marxism than the variety practiced by Western countries. At the time it wasn't associated with totalitarian brutality but there was suspicion of it just the same. It sounded great if you were the exploited labor. It sounded creepy if were even the slightest bit above that station. It doesn't seem like much has changed.
Sinclair himself said: "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach,"
The book WAS pretty much the reason for the Pure Food And Drug act.
I encountered yet another example just this week: D-Link refuses to publish the source code for the firmware inside its DFL-80 firewall router -- even though it clearly has GPLed code inside. (The log messages betray this.) Why do many companies do this? Because they recognize that the GPL's enforceability is questionable. And they are, quite likely, right.
All true but where this gets interesting is if a third party gets Sveasoft binaries and asks for the source to them per the GPL. None of this subscription business model stuff applies. The third party is at most obligated to pay realistic duplication costs for the source. $50 is not realistic IMHO.
They can charge for it but the $50.00 being asked is out of line as GPL states that only duplication costs can be charged for in this case. The only time much more than duplication cost can be charged is if binary and source are being offered to party that initially has neither for a fee. The only time this scenario is practical is if the work was commissioned. If a third party gets a binary then they are entitled to the source for no more than duplication costs. One could claim $50 is the cost but that likely wouldn't sit well with an alert judge.
If the object could actually reach C, then it would have to radiate any excess energy. Anything with mass can get arbitrarily close to C but cannot reach C itself; more and more energy is needed for less and less acceleration. It would take infinite energy to accelerate a bit of mass to C. So if your hypothetical object had mass then it would only be accelerated a tiny bit closer to C.
I've read some of his stuff. I didn't get that he believed in Time Travel. What he said (wildly paraphrasing) is that other physicists will look at you as though you have two heads when you talk about time travel. If time travel is impossible, that is fine. But just exactly why it is impossible should be permissible to study.
Perhaps IBM was making their position clear to others with patents. "Mess with our business and we will pull out all the stops." Bloodying up SCO who is being funded by MS is an excellent way to make the point.
I don't so much mind the one-way street from BSD to GPL, but I mind those same people turning around and yelling at me for being less free while they do it.
True. Zealotry is never pretty. RMS is the spiritual leader of those who argue so. I find the GPL/LGPL useful on pragmatic grounds. There is some validity to the moral arguments but flaming fanboys and people with abrasive personalities may not be the best ones to make them.
The BSD camp isn't short on zealots either. I think it'd be cute to have Brett Glass, Stallman, and Gates shake hands at the same time. The resultant fireball would make that thing the Soviets tested in the sixties look like a firecracker.
Those are somewhat valid points but TCP/IP and the Internet were both around long before Windows and predate all of those things you mention. I think it is a big stretch to attribute the success of TCP/IP to those large companies.
For every Apple that is a good citizen and gives back, there is a proprietary company or three that takes the code, makes a barrel of money off it, and doesn't give anything back. That behaivor is at least as bad copping an attitude. I do not see bitching about this. It is inconsistent to bitch about words and turn a blind eye to actions.
I've also noted that most of the Real Coders aren't vocal; they just make stuff and use the license that matches their morals and intentions. I'll also note that the GPL doesn't stop reimplementation of anything done covered under the license. Even if a project wants to be a leech and not contribute back upstream, nothing stops a BSD upstream from looking over the changes and reimplementing them if they are all that great.
The RIGHT thing to do, if you are a GPL advocate and want others to respect your code is to TREAT other code as though it was under the GPL. If you use Public Domain code, put your code into the Public Domain, if you use BSD code, put your code under the BSD license. That is following the Golden Rule.
This is again inconsistent with tenets that are often advanced by BSD advocates. BSD advocates often stress that the right to relicense code is more important or at least as important as any other freedom. BSD advocates will point even to a leech proprietary company and say "That's FREEDOM!" BSD advocates often say that GPL isn't free at all because it doesn't allow downstream recipients to relicense. I'll grant that you may not share that position but it won't take long to come up in any GPL vs BSD flamewar.
I also don't think GPL forks of BSD codebases are evil leeches; especially if completely closing up a fork is perfectly moral according to most BSD advocates. And especially if the fork is done quietly and without acrimony. Some people simply aren't going be uncompensated labor for big corporations. Any ideas in the fork can be re-implemented and some devs want the protection from certain types of exploitation that the GPL/LGPL offers.
It may be more accurate to say that the rights of downstream users and developers are every bit as important as the original developer. At least, this conception of rights is important to many who chose the GPL/LGPL. The GPL also has pragmatic benefits to for-profit entities who want to open something up without giving their competitors a total free-for-all. GPL-is-bad-for-business bashers usually miss this subtle point.
Those restrictions insure that everyone who comes in contact with the code and its derivatives has a particular set of freedoms. If you want more than those freedoms then you have to negotiate with the copyright holders. It is indeed about "living breathing people".
"Code migrates from BSD to Linux (but not Linux to BSD) because of GPL."
I never understood the anger over this myself. If some BSD code is turned proprietary, the BSD fanboys say "That's great! People are using the code! Hooray for us!" If a GPL project uses it, the dirty-commie-hippy ephitets start getting thrown around. If those aren't thrown around, the BSD-is-more-free arguments get trotted out. That may be true for some dimensions of freedom but where is the bitching about proprietary licensing which is far less free than either license no matter your point of view? This is especially true if the BSD codebase in question maintained slowly or not at all. That means the version of the code most likely to be in use isn't free in any sense whatsoever. It gets even worse if that proprietary fork gets some patent landmines planted in it.
I'll also note that the BSD fanboys and actual BSD coders aren't often the same people. It seems Real Coders have better things to do than rant on Slashdot.
PHP code licensed under the GPL isn't a problem. I've done that myself. The problems got started when MySQL changed/clarified their license. PHP had to be linked against MySQL for the MySQL integration to work. This made using the very popular LAMP software stack legally ambiguous to distribute. You could still legally use such a stack but you had to build and link PHP yourself to get the MySQL integration.
What we have here is a spat between the Zend and MySQL people. RMS as usual fanned the flames just by having a public opinion. I really think the FSF would do better with people like Moglen and Lessig as the public faces. The message is the same but they don't seem to be as accomplished at throwing the dirty-commie-hippy brain shutoff switches.
e.g. GPL) states that future revisions of the license may be used so updating the Linux code from GPL2 to GPL3 (when it arrives and assuming Linus wishes to use it) will not be a problem.
Linus struck the "or any later version" from the license when he started the project. Since the Linux kernel has hundreds of contributers, it's license is practically stuck at version 2 of the GPL. The GPL as written is in line with Torvald's pragmatic purposes. He apparently did not trust future versions of the license to remain so. Its also bandied about that Torvalds and RMS don't particularly like each other.
This worries me a little because I understand the upcoming version of the license will have some heavy duty mutual defense clauses against software patents. I believe they're trying to come up a legal way of saying filing a software patent suit revokes all rights to distribute and probably use any software under a mutual defense license. The Apache license has such clauses and it is rumored that the new GPL will be fully compatible with it and more compatible with other OSS licenses.
If such a disaster befell the FSF, it still wouldn't be easy to revoke the rights of all downstream recipients. All of those projects would immediately fork and the corrupt version of the projects would have zero street cred. What happened with XFree86 was nowhere near as evil but it does illustrate what the reaction to disagreeable licensing by evil new owners will be.
There so much FSF code that most of it wouldn't be worth jack shit if it lost its maintainers. The only real booty would be what the usurpers could maintain and release themselves. There would be a shitload of admins and end users who wouldn't touch those versions with a 10,000 foot pole. Screwing with the FSF in that way would be a waste of your hypothetical half a billion dollars.
I and millions of other developers and sysadmins have a looooooooooooooooonnnggg memory. If you MS decide to do this, we will do everything we can to make it cost you. You would be well advised to compete on the merits of your products and services. FOSS software being as large as it is today is largely a reaction to customers and developers being sick and tired of being bullied and treated like cash cows. More bullying can only help you in the short term. Pissing off your customers like a version of SCO on steriods will only assure your slow death.
If I absolutely positively have no choice but to run all proprietary software on all proprietary platforms (Which is a situation I won't tolerate. You can buy senators till the cows come home. I still won't tolerate it.), I will be damn sure my dollars go to your most credible competitors.
Do yourselves some favors. Make products people actually want without sleazy lock-in tactics and start diversifying. Your products are rapidly becoming a continuous cost center to those who use them. Any sane business will try to allievate this. No amount of lawyers will prevent it.
Malaysia will just find out the hard way that private forks are expensive to maintain. The parent projects will continue to evolve from the point that Malaysia adopts them. If Malaysia doesn't want to contribute their fixes and enhancements back they'll have to port them forward whenever a sufficiently compelling new release comes out. A few rounds of this may suffice to change their minds.
The reverse applies as well and the money you would spend on a closed source tool can be used to fund the creation of an open source tool. Each dollar spent on open source makes you that much more free from a small set of vendors....foreign vendors. That little realizations is getting to be more and more of a no-brainer as time goes on.
When the US government started using Hollerith cards to do the 1890 census, they spent quite a few millions more on that than the last census. It wasn't that the cards were more inefficient, far from it! Those tabulators worked so well compared to humans sorting tally sheets that the government would do card-run after card-run to find say all farmers in the Midwest with more than 4 children. The equipment was just begging to be used and they used the hell out of it.
Something similar could happen as FOSS takes more hold. As FOSS codebases grow, we'll see more and more minutely detailed projects from businesses an d government agencies. The so-called TCO may well go up some but the flexibility of FOSS will let the equipment be used more fully.
I think it'll be interesting and I'm optimistic about how things will turn out. Can't let fear prevent you from taking a step toward progress.
More to the point, that reminds me of an ephitet my Dad uses often: "You can't stop progress." This would be his reaction to the way things used to be changing. Now it's MS and the xxAAs who are going to see a little progress. Dad was right though. Money, lawyers and lobbying can slow down progress but they won't stop it.
That is why the antics of MS and xxAAs don't piss me off as much as they used to. They'll have to adapt or die.
When Company A can afford the same amount of legal representation as Company B and both have portfolios then mutual deterrence applies. The problems start when big Company A wants to strong arm small Company C and opensource project D. Then there is Company E which sells nothing but has a patent portfolio they can brandish at everybody with little fear of retaliation.
It may come down to kill 'em all and let $DEITY sort 'em out.
The grandparent is a joke. Those are the three directives that govern Robocop. There was also a hidden Directive 4 that didn't allow Robocop to harm or enforce the law against the officers of the corporation that created him.
If God created us in his image, then what happens when we create beings in ours?
Healthy cynicism tells me that they'll be be slaves to start with and will continue to be until some sentient self-replicators evolve beyond our control. I couldn't say how things would play out after that.
John Sladek wrote a novel called Tik-Tok in which the title character's "asimov circuits" are either malfunctioning or nonexistant. The consequences of this are extremely bloody and hilarious. Tik-Tok even manages to gleefully violate the zeroth law a few times. Yes, Tik-Tok is the name of a mechanical man in Return to Oz. Two children in the story named Tik-Tok that because they liked the Oz books.
Slashdot Mirror
The first half of the book was an extremely effective exposé of the meatpacking industry as it was at the time. I have my doubts about it these days as well. It was also intended to highlight the exploitation of cheap immigrant labor.
The second half of the book is harder going. Mr. Sinclair's cure for all this would be socialism; the variety described would be lot closer to Marxism than the variety practiced by Western countries. At the time it wasn't associated with totalitarian brutality but there was suspicion of it just the same. It sounded great if you were the exploited labor. It sounded creepy if were even the slightest bit above that station. It doesn't seem like much has changed.
Sinclair himself said: "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach,"
The book WAS pretty much the reason for the Pure Food And Drug act.
if there is no copyright, there is no need to agree to the terms of the GPL to be allowed to use the software.
That is true anyway. The GPL does not require agreement to use the software. It only governs distribution.
I encountered yet another example just this week: D-Link refuses to publish the source code for the firmware inside its DFL-80 firewall router -- even though it clearly has GPLed code inside. (The log messages betray this.) Why do many companies do this? Because they recognize that the GPL's enforceability is questionable. And they are, quite likely, right.
Umm. You were saying Brett?
Should I just let my head explode now and get it over with? I feel like a cheezy sci-fi computer that has just been fed a good dose of contridiction.
DOES NOT COMPUTE!
NOT COMPUTE!
BLAM!
All true but where this gets interesting is if a third party gets Sveasoft binaries and asks for the source to them per the GPL. None of this subscription business model stuff applies. The third party is at most obligated to pay realistic duplication costs for the source. $50 is not realistic IMHO.
They can charge for it but the $50.00 being asked is out of line as GPL states that only duplication costs can be charged for in this case. The only time much more than duplication cost can be charged is if binary and source are being offered to party that initially has neither for a fee. The only time this scenario is practical is if the work was commissioned. If a third party gets a binary then they are entitled to the source for no more than duplication costs. One could claim $50 is the cost but that likely wouldn't sit well with an alert judge.
If the object could actually reach C, then it would have to radiate any excess energy. Anything with mass can get arbitrarily close to C but cannot reach C itself; more and more energy is needed for less and less acceleration. It would take infinite energy to accelerate a bit of mass to C. So if your hypothetical object had mass then it would only be accelerated a tiny bit closer to C.
I've read some of his stuff. I didn't get that he believed in Time Travel. What he said (wildly paraphrasing) is that other physicists will look at you as though you have two heads when you talk about time travel. If time travel is impossible, that is fine. But just exactly why it is impossible should be permissible to study.
Perhaps IBM was making their position clear to others with patents. "Mess with our business and we will pull out all the stops." Bloodying up SCO who is being funded by MS is an excellent way to make the point.
I don't so much mind the one-way street from BSD to GPL, but I mind those same people turning around and yelling at me for being less free while they do it.
True. Zealotry is never pretty. RMS is the spiritual leader of those who argue so. I find the GPL/LGPL useful on pragmatic grounds. There is some validity to the moral arguments but flaming fanboys and people with abrasive personalities may not be the best ones to make them.
The BSD camp isn't short on zealots either. I think it'd be cute to have Brett Glass, Stallman, and Gates shake hands at the same time. The resultant fireball would make that thing the Soviets tested in the sixties look like a firecracker.
Those are somewhat valid points but TCP/IP and the Internet were both around long before Windows and predate all of those things you mention. I think it is a big stretch to attribute the success of TCP/IP to those large companies.
For every Apple that is a good citizen and gives back, there is a proprietary company or three that takes the code, makes a barrel of money off it, and doesn't give anything back. That behaivor is at least as bad copping an attitude. I do not see bitching about this. It is inconsistent to bitch about words and turn a blind eye to actions.
I've also noted that most of the Real Coders aren't vocal; they just make stuff and use the license that matches their morals and intentions. I'll also note that the GPL doesn't stop reimplementation of anything done covered under the license. Even if a project wants to be a leech and not contribute back upstream, nothing stops a BSD upstream from looking over the changes and reimplementing them if they are all that great.
The RIGHT thing to do, if you are a GPL advocate and want others to respect your code is to TREAT other code as though it was under the GPL. If you use Public Domain code, put your code into the Public Domain, if you use BSD code, put your code under the BSD license. That is following the Golden Rule.
This is again inconsistent with tenets that are often advanced by BSD advocates. BSD advocates often stress that the right to relicense code is more important or at least as important as any other freedom. BSD advocates will point even to a leech proprietary company and say "That's FREEDOM!" BSD advocates often say that GPL isn't free at all because it doesn't allow downstream recipients to relicense. I'll grant that you may not share that position but it won't take long to come up in any GPL vs BSD flamewar.
I also don't think GPL forks of BSD codebases are evil leeches; especially if completely closing up a fork is perfectly moral according to most BSD advocates. And especially if the fork is done quietly and without acrimony. Some people simply aren't going be uncompensated labor for big corporations. Any ideas in the fork can be re-implemented and some devs want the protection from certain types of exploitation that the GPL/LGPL offers.
It may be more accurate to say that the rights of downstream users and developers are every bit as important as the original developer. At least, this conception of rights is important to many who chose the GPL/LGPL. The GPL also has pragmatic benefits to for-profit entities who want to open something up without giving their competitors a total free-for-all. GPL-is-bad-for-business bashers usually miss this subtle point.
Those restrictions insure that everyone who comes in contact with the code and its derivatives has a particular set of freedoms. If you want more than those freedoms then you have to negotiate with the copyright holders. It is indeed about "living breathing people".
"Code migrates from BSD to Linux (but not Linux to BSD) because of GPL."
I never understood the anger over this myself. If some BSD code is turned proprietary, the BSD fanboys say "That's great! People are using the code! Hooray for us!" If a GPL project uses it, the dirty-commie-hippy ephitets start getting thrown around. If those aren't thrown around, the BSD-is-more-free arguments get trotted out. That may be true for some dimensions of freedom but where is the bitching about proprietary licensing which is far less free than either license no matter your point of view? This is especially true if the BSD codebase in question maintained slowly or not at all. That means the version of the code most likely to be in use isn't free in any sense whatsoever. It gets even worse if that proprietary fork gets some patent landmines planted in it.
I'll also note that the BSD fanboys and actual BSD coders aren't often the same people. It seems Real Coders have better things to do than rant on Slashdot.
PHP code licensed under the GPL isn't a problem. I've done that myself. The problems got started when MySQL changed/clarified their license. PHP had to be linked against MySQL for the MySQL integration to work. This made using the very popular LAMP software stack legally ambiguous to distribute. You could still legally use such a stack but you had to build and link PHP yourself to get the MySQL integration.
What we have here is a spat between the Zend and MySQL people. RMS as usual fanned the flames just by having a public opinion. I really think the FSF would do better with people like Moglen and Lessig as the public faces. The message is the same but they don't seem to be as accomplished at throwing the dirty-commie-hippy brain shutoff switches.
e.g. GPL) states that future revisions of the license may be used so updating the Linux code from GPL2 to GPL3 (when it arrives and assuming Linus wishes to use it) will not be a problem.
Linus struck the "or any later version" from the license when he started the project. Since the Linux kernel has hundreds of contributers, it's license is practically stuck at version 2 of the GPL. The GPL as written is in line with Torvald's pragmatic purposes. He apparently did not trust future versions of the license to remain so. Its also bandied about that Torvalds and RMS don't particularly like each other.
This worries me a little because I understand the upcoming version of the license will have some heavy duty mutual defense clauses against software patents. I believe they're trying to come up a legal way of saying filing a software patent suit revokes all rights to distribute and probably use any software under a mutual defense license. The Apache license has such clauses and it is rumored that the new GPL will be fully compatible with it and more compatible with other OSS licenses.
If such a disaster befell the FSF, it still wouldn't be easy to revoke the rights of all downstream recipients. All of those projects would immediately fork and the corrupt version of the projects would have zero street cred. What happened with XFree86 was nowhere near as evil but it does illustrate what the reaction to disagreeable licensing by evil new owners will be.
There so much FSF code that most of it wouldn't be worth jack shit if it lost its maintainers. The only real booty would be what the usurpers could maintain and release themselves. There would be a shitload of admins and end users who wouldn't touch those versions with a 10,000 foot pole. Screwing with the FSF in that way would be a waste of your hypothetical half a billion dollars.
I and millions of other developers and sysadmins have a looooooooooooooooonnnggg memory. If you MS decide to do this, we will do everything we can to make it cost you. You would be well advised to compete on the merits of your products and services. FOSS software being as large as it is today is largely a reaction to customers and developers being sick and tired of being bullied and treated like cash cows. More bullying can only help you in the short term. Pissing off your customers like a version of SCO on steriods will only assure your slow death.
If I absolutely positively have no choice but to run all proprietary software on all proprietary platforms (Which is a situation I won't tolerate. You can buy senators till the cows come home. I still won't tolerate it.), I will be damn sure my dollars go to your most credible competitors.
Do yourselves some favors. Make products people actually want without sleazy lock-in tactics and start diversifying. Your products are rapidly becoming a continuous cost center to those who use them. Any sane business will try to allievate this. No amount of lawyers will prevent it.
Malaysia will just find out the hard way that private forks are expensive to maintain. The parent projects will continue to evolve from the point that Malaysia adopts them. If Malaysia doesn't want to contribute their fixes and enhancements back they'll have to port them forward whenever a sufficiently compelling new release comes out. A few rounds of this may suffice to change their minds.
The reverse applies as well and the money you would spend on a closed source tool can be used to fund the creation of an open source tool. Each dollar spent on open source makes you that much more free from a small set of vendors....foreign vendors. That little realizations is getting to be more and more of a no-brainer as time goes on.
When the US government started using Hollerith cards to do the 1890 census, they spent quite a few millions more on that than the last census. It wasn't that the cards were more inefficient, far from it! Those tabulators worked so well compared to humans sorting tally sheets that the government would do card-run after card-run to find say all farmers in the Midwest with more than 4 children. The equipment was just begging to be used and they used the hell out of it.
Something similar could happen as FOSS takes more hold. As FOSS codebases grow, we'll see more and more minutely detailed projects from businesses an d government agencies. The so-called TCO may well go up some but the flexibility of FOSS will let the equipment be used more fully.
I think it'll be interesting and I'm optimistic about how things will turn out. Can't let fear prevent you from taking a step toward progress.
More to the point, that reminds me of an ephitet my Dad uses often: "You can't stop progress." This would be his reaction to the way things used to be changing. Now it's MS and the xxAAs who are going to see a little progress. Dad was right though. Money, lawyers and lobbying can slow down progress but they won't stop it.
That is why the antics of MS and xxAAs don't piss me off as much as they used to. They'll have to adapt or die.
When Company A can afford the same amount of legal representation as Company B and both have portfolios then mutual deterrence applies. The problems start when big Company A wants to strong arm small Company C and opensource project D. Then there is Company E which sells nothing but has a patent portfolio they can brandish at everybody with little fear of retaliation.
It may come down to kill 'em all and let $DEITY sort 'em out.
The grandparent is a joke. Those are the three directives that govern Robocop. There was also a hidden Directive 4 that didn't allow Robocop to harm or enforce the law against the officers of the corporation that created him.
If God created us in his image, then what happens when we create beings in ours?
Healthy cynicism tells me that they'll be be slaves to start with and will continue to be until some sentient self-replicators evolve beyond our control. I couldn't say how things would play out after that.
John Sladek wrote a novel called Tik-Tok in which the title character's "asimov circuits" are either malfunctioning or nonexistant. The consequences of this are extremely bloody and hilarious. Tik-Tok even manages to gleefully violate the zeroth law a few times. Yes, Tik-Tok is the name of a mechanical man in Return to Oz. Two children in the story named Tik-Tok that because they liked the Oz books.