Like Microsoft with their Ireland operation.
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IRS Auditing Google
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Microsoft was doing spectacular tax transfers for a decade through Ireland. Now that other places have joined the race to the bottom in terms of throwing tax loopholes at big companies, Microsoft has "diversified".
Hint: Remember how Ballmer was saying that the Skype purchase wouldn't impact Microsoft because the funds were being repatriated from elsewhere? How do you think those billions in "loose change" got there in the first place? You "park" them elsewhere until you can bring them back onshore at the absolute lowest impact to your operation.
The thing is, most people really don't want to run arbitrary code on their devices. They're not you or me, and they're not Apple's target market. They actually are happier when arbitrary code cannot be run - they don't like it when they get p0wned in a drive-by.
They have the right to prefer that, and while it would drive ME crazy, I don't have the right to say "no, you're wrong, that walled garden is a trap", because for them, it's not a trap.
Look at a somewhat comparative situation wrt linux and bsd compared to windows. Linux has a simple one-stop updater for all your installed software. zypper -dup and everything gets upgraded (when you have 5,000 packages installed, it's a lot better than having to visit each web site:-). FreeBSD is even better - the ports collection is always consistent, because they exert much more control. Updating a FreeBSD box makes updating a Linux box look like the patched-together system that it is, in large part because FreeBSD is much better controlled, and much better integrated. I had to ssh into old BSD boxes that hadn't been upgraded in 18 releases to upgrade them, and it went fine. Can you imagine doing that with a linux box? Doing a remote in-place upgrade from, say, the first release of Ubuntu to the latest? Or a pre-9 version of opensuse to todays? Things would break.
Windows, of course, is even worse. You simply wouldn't be able to update everything remotely from some ancient version to Win7 - just finding all the update packages for each piece of non-Microsoft product you have installed will kill your week. You just know some driver is going to barf up a hairball, and you're looking at a 500-mile road trip each way.
So, if you were going to build an OS from another one, the best one to go with is one of the BSDs, because it's more stable to begin with and more mature as far as the underpinnings are concerned. That the license is more flexible is just an added bonus.
As an admin, which would you rather deal with? It's the same for end users. They try something where everything "just works" and they do not want to even hear about alternatives any more. It's like "Windows, you're cursing at your computer. Linux, you're cursing at yourself. Apple, you're cursing that you didn't make the switch earlier." That's a very powerful incentive.
(Then there are people like me who, confronted with an iMac, keep going "why do I have to do it this way - it's so much easier under linux/bsd" - so I'm not the target Apple customer).
And if you want to sell Apple customers software apps, they simply don't want to go through the hassle of dealing outside the store, of wondering if it's going to work properly, of having to track you down in the first place to even see what you have to offer. It's like someone who's been to West Edmonton Mall (largest shopping center in N. America, used to be the largest in the world, complete with submarine rides and indoor skating rink, NHL hockey rink, largest indoor water park in the world, etc). You have your store located miles away - people are going to the mall anyway, it's going to be the first place they look for anything. Your shop is just not going to do any business unless it's REALLY unique and caters to a special clientele.
It's the same thing with linux. When I'm looking for software, I look in my distros' repo first. If there's something there that I think will do the job, it gets first pick. That's "my" default app store. If it isn't in the repo, it simply stands much less chance of getting installed.
One of the problems with phones is that Apple doesn't get to control the whole experience. They have to make darn sure that the phones work no matter what, and that includes crappy carriers, areas of bad coverage, etc. They can't have iPhone customers flooding the carriers with complaints about how phones stopped working properly after some app was installed by the customer. Lose a carrier contract, you lose billions a year, and you also ha
I guess you didn't follow the news. He always gave credit to the people he worked with. When he returned to Apple, at one of his annual addresses, he took the time to say that the employees had had years of being told they were losers, crap, etc., and they are not. That the competition was trying to lure them away with 2x and 3x the pay, but they were sticking it out to build the new apple.
Acknowledging that to the world, that you believe in your employees and co-workers, and that you're fully aware that they're sticking by you and each other to go forward, is the sort of team-building story that runs contrary to what you claim.
He made it clear that he was demanding because (1) it was necessary to survive when he came back and Apple was on the ropes, and (2) he had the confidence that they could make the stretch to step up their game as a team and achieve greatness.
It worked.
As for rebalancing incomes, you'll get further by throwing a few dozen banksters in jail, banning corporate political donations, fixing your tax system so that those with more income pay more taxes, and returning the stock market to its original purpose (raising funds for companies) instead of a high-stakes, high-speed lottery, by introducing a sales tax on each share transaction.
For the quote, sorry - I should have directed you to this quiz.
For the violations? Well, lets see... VLC is not available as an iOS app - it was pulled by Apple for violating the terms of the App Store. The Wesnoth developers, on the other hand, gave explicit permission for the program to be ported to the App Store. The firmware on Android phones is not gpl code, same as the firmware on your computer isn't.
Tivo? Linus himself has said that it is appropriate for TiVo to use digital signatures to limit what software may run on the systems that they sell. Torvalds has stated that he believes the use of private digital signatures on software is a beneficial security tool, and believes that software licenses should attempt to control only software, not the hardware on which it runs. So, as long as one has access to the software, and can modify it to run on some other hardware, Torvalds believes there is nothing unethical about using digital signatures to prevent running modified copies of Linux. I happen to agree with Linus. I wish the world were different, but it's not...
So again, who cares? You said it was "happening all the time", but it clearly isn't. When it happens, then let's look at it, and if they're in the wrong, I'll be squawking right there with you. However, Stallman has been making the rounds for 2 months throwing up boogieman scenarios that don't currently exist. In his own way, he's just as bad as Florian Mueller. When I first read the FSF fud about linux and android being a risky platform because of the version of the GPL license they use, I thought it was more Mueller crap. I was shocked to find that it was from the FSF. The more I looked into it, the less respect I had for the FSF and Stallman - to the point where I'm ashamed I ever defended the man, because the warning signs have been there for years, and I ignored them. I'm usually not THAT stupid.
As Freud said "I don't have problems with my enemies. My friends, on the other hand..." Stallman has become, if possible, increasing erratic. He needs to step down asap, or we need to disavow him forcefully or be tarred with the same brush. In the meantime, instead of hiding the problem or being in denial, we need to expose it.
Now, on the issue of DRM, rootkits and stuff like that is clearly wrong. DRM should not be invasive, and should be under the control of the creator or owner of the data (programs are also data, at least for the sake of this discussion), without harming any system it runs on. In the case of your data, that would be you. This would include anything such as your photo posted on Facebook. They should not be able to use it for whatever they want, any more than you should be allowed to take someone else's work and do the same without their permission.
Now, if you agreed to let them do what they wanted, that's another kettle of fish. Don't like their ToS? Then be careful of what you stick on there, or boycott it. The same goes for gmail. I was using gmail before it went public, and quickly got bored with it (and had privacy concerns) and went back to using my own email on a few of my domains instead. When G++ came out, I logged in (after recovering the password - it's been years), used it, started using gmail again, stopped using gmail again for the same reasons (privacy concerns), and don't use G++ very much either.
When a domain is less than $10 a year, and hosting is dirt cheap, there's no reason why people can't have their own email accounts independent of the freemail providers. You can even have web access. If you think your privacy isn't worth ten cents a day, then you have a very low self-worth. But that's just me. Lots of people must disagree, since they depend on freemail for everything.
If a programmer sells their software, then the buyer has paid for a copy -- what right is it of the programmer's to demand that the buyer not
The "risk" of Android and other non-GPLv3 software is that someone can take it and wrap it up in DRM and make sure you don't have control over your computing. That is not a lie: it is quite clearly true that that is possible, as it happens all the time. If you don't think this is a problem, then you are not required to listen to Stallman, but that does not make what he said a lie.
First, it does not "happen all the time". And if it did, really, who cares. Stallman has already gone on record that it's okay to steal software and violate licenses because those developers are doing evil and deserve it. So what's good for the goose... (and you're going to have a hard time complaining that your rights are violated when you publicly say that others should have their same rights violated). The man is a big stinking steaming pile of hypocrisy.
Second, let's take a little test.
Do you believe that you should control your own data? Yes or no?
If yes, then how do you justify your wanting the right to manage your digital information, whilst condemning others (such as programmers) for wanting the same rights for their work product?
In the future, we're all going to demand that we have complete DRM over our own data. There's a market for that, and the first one to offer it will be rich. Privacy legislation isn't enough.
I'm not going to get into an argument about software licensing, but Stallman is free to promote his new license.
That doesn't excuse him using the FSF to promote lies about Linux and Android being a risk because they are not GPLv3. It also doesn't excuse his lies about there being a back door in OSX.
Starting this Thanksgiving I am going to write a complete Unix-compatible software system called GNU (for Gnu's Not Unix), and give it away free(1) to everyone who can use it. Contributions of time, money, programs and equipment are greatly needed.
To begin with, GNU will be a kernel plus all the utilities needed to write and run C programs
That sure worked out well, didn't it? HURD anyone using it?
And you are still being intellectually dishonest by ignoring the actual complete text of the quote, and how it originated.
'As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, "I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone."
Daley had just kicked the bucket. The obvious interpretation, in both cases is, "if him dying is what it took, it's worth it."
As far as Stallman is concerned, Jobs was evil. As far as most observers are concerned, zealotry is the greater evil.
But since Stallman likes to dish it out, let's see how much he and his zealots can take it when the shoe's on the other foot...
Most people don't stick their hands into tablesaw blades out of willful idiocy, but due to carelessness, tiredness, or trying to do something the machine really isn't well-suited for
And that's where the power-tool analogy falls apart. Nobody sincerely tries to use software by accident.
"What do you mean, I can't just import the entire database into my spreadsheet. It doesn't have to show me all 20 billion records at once, just enough to fit on the screen one page at a time".
"Why won't my email program let me email this dvd movie as an attachment?"
"Why is the formatting all messed up when I open it on my computer at home?" (because you pressed ENTER every time your cursor got to the right side of the screen instead of letting it automatically word-wrap, you ID-10-T, and yes, it's a true story).
"This graphics program is garbage. I needed to expand this 7k jpeg of my cat into a wallpaper and it looks like hell!"
"My computer won't send a fax. I keep holding the page up to the screen and clicking send, but they only get a blank page."
"My desktop computer is broken." "What does it say when you try to boot it?" "I can't tell - we're having a power failure."
"I can't move my mouse to the left side of the screen" (they've "hit the edge" of their mouse pad, another true story).
"I typed in everything and it doesn't work." (press ENTER). Next day... "I'm having the same problem, I thought you fixed it!" (press ENTER). Next day... "This program is crap. Why don't you write something to replace it." (press ENTER you moron! another true story).
"I file all my documents in the recycle bin - this way, I know where to find anything when I need a copy. What do you mean they're all gone? Don't be an idiot, it's a recycle bin, not a trashcan!"
The power tool analogy is 100% apt. Just like a power tool, people will abuse, misuse, and otherwise mess up with software.
And then there's those who lie, and claim that the users/clients are asking for a specific "must-have" feature, and when you call them on their BS and talk directly with the customer, it turns out that they not only never asked for it, they were thinking of asking for something that would directly conflict with it.
It's not "turtles all the way down", it's stupidity, and insistence on playing "broken telephone" rather than proper management and empowering people.
"Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?" Brian Kernighan, "The Elements of Programming Style", 2nd edition, chapter 2
The answers are:
[_] Get a bigger hammer (BFMI^2)
[_] Open-source it, tell the end user to RTFM, and file it as either NOT_A_BUG or WONT_FIX in the bug tracker.
[_] Write a program to debug it, duh! because programs that debug programs are almost as happy as programs that write programs
[_] Finally sit down and write the documentation, and enlightenment will happen (this actually works often enough to warrant trying it)
[_] More printfs.
[_] assert() is your friend.
[_] Programming is a journey. Getting there is half the fun.
[_] By becoming even more clever at debugging. It's not like I stopped learning the moment I entered the door, you know... (YMMV on this one, depending on the school or workplace, and the number of Powerpoint presentations you've been subjected to over your lifetime)
[_] Offer a bounty, because most bugs just need a fresh set of eyeballs, not new insights.
[_] Ask Slashdot - it's what everyone does with their homework.
[_] Change the specs and FEATURE IT!
[_] By being stupid, of course. Looking at every line like I'm a total dumb-ass, and eventually I'll find the line where I *was* a total dumb-ass. It's the "method acting school of debugging".
[_] By looking for the constant that isn't or the variable that doesn't, double-duh!
[_] "Taint." "Huh?" "It was assigned to CowboyNeal, so 'tain't my problem any more."
[_] "That'll be fixed in the next version. If we fix it now, why would anyone want to upgrade?" (Sales and Marketing will be on your side on this one, for once).
[_] "Have you tried tech support?" (from the BOfH "Hey, if I'm going to go through hell fixing it, let them go through hell reporting it" school of thought).
[_] You say "Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place". Do you have any formal proof of this, or is that just one of those "Everyone knows..." that really means "Everyone assumes..."? (a polite way of saying go away, you're bugging me).
[_] Allocate twice as long to debugging as to coding. Then, if I'm really clever, I should be able to slack off 2/3 of the time. If not, I'm still within the time budget, so what's the problem again?
[_] "Oh, that's only a prototype."
[_] "That's strange. It works for everyone else. Are you sure you don't have a virus or you're not doing something wrong?" (Give them list of long things to check that have zero to do with the issue... by the time they get back to you, it'll either be someone else's problem, or more important issues will have surfaced, or you'll be able to say "that version is no longer supported").
Absolutely. If you're doing c++ and you can't code your own strings, stacks, and linked lists, what are you going to do when you NEED something non-standard?
The answer I was given (when I had to build a thread-safe crc64 class) was "why don't you just look for it on the web?"
To which my answer was "It'll take me more time to find it and make sure it works as advertised than it would to write it from scratch."
Sure enough, the "proposed solution" tested fine for relatively small datasets (100 million records), but had multiple collisions on datasets of a billion or more, whereas my implementation had zero collisions on a test run of 30 billion. Turns out that some bright spark thought you really could make a crc64 out of two crc32s (which coincidentally was my boss's first proposal... and which I had to *prove* wrong in practice by implementing it rather than him accepting "trust me, it really, really doesn't work that way").
He thought I was a bit nuts to implement my own string classes, but like I told him, "I've been writing my own for so long that it only takes me a few minutes to pound a basic one out from scratch, and we don't need any STL_LOCK/STL_UNLOCK. It's the only way to get the performance you want in a thread-safe manner, unless you want me to code it in assembler."
Oh, don't you worry about consequences for Stallman: he's been at this longer than you have likely been alive.
Worry instead about the long term reputation of your favorite company and the legacy of your favorite monopolist. People may say nice things about Jobs out of politeness right now, but that's going to wear off. And the company is in already trouble for the same reasons it was in trouble 10 years ago: it's all marketing flash and no substance.
My favorite company? It's neither Apple (I have never owned any of their products) nor Microsoft (I only boot into Windows when I need to do compatibility testing), so I don't know who you could be referring to. Suse? RedHat? Slackware?!!! Or maybe FreeBSD with its' near-monopoly and ease of use (at least for me - I *like* being able to ssh into a box to fix it quickly, and most FreeBSD fixes are quick - if yours aren't, you're doing it wrong).
I'll assume you were referring to Apple... they're not in trouble because they know their customers. Case in point, I found out this weekend that my daughter's computer finally gave up the ghost a few months ago. She hasn't bothered to ask me to look at it. Instead, she uses her iPhone. And if she ever wants another computer, you can bet she's going to buy Apple, especially since the cost difference isn't what it used to be (and at the high end, Apple is often the same or cheaper).
That's the sort of enabling/disruptive technology and marketing that everyone else is now following.
Look at his exact words. People have a serious issue with the phrasing. It is not "equivalent", and your arguments to try to make it so are intellectually dishonest.
Also,
He has never acted in any interest other than that of the computer-using public
I'm not buying it. The man's actions speak very loudly - he is self-centered in the extreme - to the point where he is not able to consider any point of view other than his own as having any validity. A paranoid narcissist. In other words, a whack-pack who did NOT invent the "free software movement", contrary to his shameless self-promotion - Bill Joy was compiling and distributing BSD alsmost a decade before he even started. Bill Joy - the guy who wrote ex and vi. So it really is a vi vs emacs thing.
Stop trying to defend the indefensible - it shows the same lack of class and inability to acknowledge new information that Stallman has.
So, a massive cerebral hemorrhage, a bullet to the head that left him a vegetable, a mental degenerate disease, or even something that just left him physically too debilitated to continue to do his, job, would have been fine with Stallman. Read the entirety of what he wrote, and you'll see that there's no other interpretation.
That's a ridiculous thing to say. A much fairer interpretation of Stallman's words would be "I would not wish for any physical harm to come to Jobs, but his influence was bad for society and it is good for society that his influence has been removed." His retirement was sufficient to remove that influence. You should not be putting words into Stallman's mouth that he would have been happy for Jobs to become physically debilitated.
If Stallman had wanted to say what you wrote, he could have. Instead, he chose to use a quote about corrupt Chicago Mayor Daly. Also, Stallman doesn't believe that Jobs death is an occasion for sadness any more than he believes that children are a source of happiness. From telling mothers to remove their "spawn" from his presence to telling coders that contributing to emacs is something more worthy than their own children, the guy is the whole package - if the package you're looking for is rude, crude, and totally self-centered.
It's not "all about marketing.: When Apple was developing the Mac, IBM was outspending them in both R&D and marketing by something like 100:1.
If that is all that it took for a product to succeed, GM would not have gone bankrupt, you'd still be able to buy a new Hummer, and WinPhone7 would be #1 in the market instead of 1%.
Stallman has the right to say what he did, just like he has the right to eat his own foot cheese. That doesn't mean that sane, rational people have to give up their right to be disgusted in both cases.
Stallman wrote it the way he did, with the timing he did, in the full knowledge it would get attention it did. Same tactics that Fred Phelps of Westboro Baptist used when he said he and his church were going to protest Jobs funeral.
Two nutjobs using the same tactics to push their own brand of zealotry. Neither merits respect.
It's because more people are becoming aware of it.
Just like more people are aware that Stallman did not "invent" the idea and practice of free software (Bill Joy was distributing BSD 1 back in the '70s).
And that Stallman lies and FUDs so that he can push his own agenda, which is more along the lines of attention-seeking than promoting the interests of free software.
Of course, having videos on youtube of him eating his foot cheese during a talk adds a further dimension to all the stories of his questionable personal hygiene, adding credence to the multiple reports of eating stuff from his hair and nose, B.O. (maybe be because most soap and shampoo a proprietary closed-source formula), sexist attitude towards women, hatred of children, and hypocrisy in demanding that others put up with his behaviour when he is so thin-skinned himself.
For the record? (pardon the pun:-) It was the music industry, not Apple, that demanded the DRM restrictions.
As for "creating a religion based on ridiculous premises", the same could be said with Stallman's economic model for software. To cast programmers as unethical if they don't release source code is to take away the freedom of programmers to decide how their work can be used.
The simple fact is that for most developers, the only way they're going to be able to pay the bills is to produce closed software. If they can, at the same time, contribute to open software, so much the better, but they should be free to decide, and not to have their choices cast as some ethical failure.
Stallman has no dog in this fight, since he hasn't written code in years. It's simply beyond him now. It happens... some programmers reach a certain age, and they lose the ability to code consistently.
As for Stallman, nobody gives a shit whether you like him or what you think about him.
If I were the only one who thought this way, you'd be 99.99999% right. However, this time IS different. His latest eruption of crassness has provoked a LOT of debate, and as more people speak out against Stallman, this encourages still others to voice their reservations. It's no longer possible to dismiss this as "some over-sensitive women who can't take a joke" or "opponents of free software".
Stallman is an activist with almost no money. The only way he is going to be heard is by being controversial.
That same tactic is working really well for Fred Phelps and Westboro Baptist. They certainly get their message out! People sure are flocking to his church in droves... oops, they're not.
But you're right - it takes loads of money to be heard. Ghandi must have been richer than Bill Gates. Nelson Mandella, the Kent State students, the Mothers Against Drunk Driving - all richer than Croesus and Midas combined.
No, you're wrong. Stallman's juvenile attention-seeking behaviour is ultimately just as self-defeating as Fred Phelps, and "getting the message out" is no excuse for being rude and crude. He "got the message out" all right - that he's a total dick. He's forced everyone to choose to either condemn his actions publicly or tacitly condone them with their silence.
He was free to write what he wrote, and he's free to suffer the consequences.
Jobs never claimed to be an engineer. As he pointed out, his job was not just to decide what should be done, but more importantly, to decide the thousands of competing things that should NOT be done.
He was doing something right - as he pointed out after his return, when he was turning Apple around, competitors were offering 2 and 3 times as much to Apple workers to jump ship, and yet they stayed. Why? What kept Apple from bleeding out it's devs, except the hope that Jobs could turn it around?
So he wasn't just a genius at marketing, but at motivating and keeping talent.
The same goes with the switch to Intel cpus. A gutsy move that could have killed the company for any number of reasons, there were all sorts of nay-sayers at the time. Today, we see in retrospect that it was inevitable if the company were to remain competitive.
He rejected the first two iPhone prototypes. Want to bet Microsoft would have shipped either of them and called it good?
You might want to check out Apple's opensource contributions, which include extensive work taking khtml and turning it into webkit - the same webkit that is used in Chrome.
Job also invited the KHTML people on-stage to thank them for their work, and when the KHTML project complained that the patch dumps they were receiving were not fine-grained enough to be usable to port back into KHTML, put the code in an svn repo for them. That's well beyond the requirements of the license.
As a business, Apple can't open everything and survive. That's the way it is, and people like RMS don't "get it". REad the comments here, particularly the one that begins
Richard Stallman is the L Ron Hubbard of the OSS community, unfortunately. The social and moral theory underneath The Manifesto is, to be polite, dubious at best. There is a reason that there are no open source plumbers, no open source sock mills, no open source dentists. Its an ideology that simultaneously lifts up and devalues software developers and other creative people. The idea that free software would create millions of jobs for local developers to support and modify local free apps was so wrong - at the time, and vastly more so in retrospect.
...
I would note that Stallman, safely ensconced in his ivory tower, feasting off of speaking engagements, need not worry about the mass exodus of development to wage slaves in 3rd world countries. Apparently his own "creativity" need not be given away for free.
There's both the room and the need for both closed and open source. Stallman is (literally) too stupid to realize this. Then again, he's shown time and again that he lacks maturity and can't learn from his mistakes, so why would anyone expect differently now?
Aside from the fact that he was quoting someone, I don't see how you can possibly interpret his comments this way.
He wasn't "just quoting someone." He picked that particular quote because it expressed his own personal sentiment.
And frankly, I'm sick of every even mildly relevant person becoming a saint when they die -- we remember the good and forget the bad.
And to paraphrase you, frankly, I'm sick of everyone who lies by claiming that we suddenly portray someone as a saint when they die, as yet another way to "excuse" the continued rude and stupid behavior of Stallman. The man hasn't done anything relevant in 20 years, unlike Jobs.
The trouble isn't his message, it is how he tries to deliver it. For most people, he just comes across as a crazy, ranting lunatic, which probably hurts his cause more than it helps.
Stallman's GNUstapo would not approve of you using a smartphone, just like he doesn't use a web browser/
For personal reasons, he generally does not actively browse the web from his computer; rather, he uses wget and reads the fetched pages from his e-mail mailbox, claiming to limit direct access via browsers to a few sites such as his own or those related to his work with GNU and the FSF.
Nope - the GNU/HURD.phone would be as big as a fridge (not counting the 60-foot antenna), because it would have to combine the abilities of a phone with the ability to act as it's own cell tower, so you can talk to the 2 others who use GNU/HURDphones. And its command interface would be EMACS.
So, a massive cerebral hemorrhage, a bullet to the head that left him a vegetable, a mental degenerate disease, or even something that just left him physically too debilitated to continue to do his, job, would have been fine with Stallman. Read the entirety of what he wrote, and you'll see that there's no other interpretation.
06 October 2011 (Steve Jobs)
Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died.
As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, "I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone." Nobody deserves to have to die - not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs' malign influence on people's computing.
Unfortunately, that influence continues despite his absence. We can only hope his successors, as they attempt to carry on his legacy, will be less effective.
Stallman is no longer relevant, and his latest whining just underlines that.
What if I'm okay with people seeing the source, so they can audit it and make sure that it is what it says it is, and combine it with any other code they have kicking around, and even selling the result, but not of modifying it (including in too many cases "filing off" the copyright notices)... you know, like a book?
The GPL isn't the only license out there, and it imposes more restrictions on programmers than the non-copyleft licenses (licenses where you're not obliged to distribute your source), such as BSD.
Stallman has more in common with Bill Gates than he'd care to admit. No style, a history of questionable personal hygiene, and (by requiring copyright assignment instead of just a license for 3rd-party gnu code), a "gotta own it all" mentality.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft was doing spectacular tax transfers for a decade through Ireland. Now that other places have joined the race to the bottom in terms of throwing tax loopholes at big companies, Microsoft has "diversified".
Hint: Remember how Ballmer was saying that the Skype purchase wouldn't impact Microsoft because the funds were being repatriated from elsewhere? How do you think those billions in "loose change" got there in the first place? You "park" them elsewhere until you can bring them back onshore at the absolute lowest impact to your operation.
The thing is, most people really don't want to run arbitrary code on their devices. They're not you or me, and they're not Apple's target market. They actually are happier when arbitrary code cannot be run - they don't like it when they get p0wned in a drive-by.
They have the right to prefer that, and while it would drive ME crazy, I don't have the right to say "no, you're wrong, that walled garden is a trap", because for them, it's not a trap.
Look at a somewhat comparative situation wrt linux and bsd compared to windows. Linux has a simple one-stop updater for all your installed software. zypper -dup and everything gets upgraded (when you have 5,000 packages installed, it's a lot better than having to visit each web site :-). FreeBSD is even better - the ports collection is always consistent, because they exert much more control. Updating a FreeBSD box makes updating a Linux box look like the patched-together system that it is, in large part because FreeBSD is much better controlled, and much better integrated. I had to ssh into old BSD boxes that hadn't been upgraded in 18 releases to upgrade them, and it went fine. Can you imagine doing that with a linux box? Doing a remote in-place upgrade from, say, the first release of Ubuntu to the latest? Or a pre-9 version of opensuse to todays? Things would break.
Windows, of course, is even worse. You simply wouldn't be able to update everything remotely from some ancient version to Win7 - just finding all the update packages for each piece of non-Microsoft product you have installed will kill your week. You just know some driver is going to barf up a hairball, and you're looking at a 500-mile road trip each way.
So, if you were going to build an OS from another one, the best one to go with is one of the BSDs, because it's more stable to begin with and more mature as far as the underpinnings are concerned. That the license is more flexible is just an added bonus.
As an admin, which would you rather deal with? It's the same for end users. They try something where everything "just works" and they do not want to even hear about alternatives any more. It's like "Windows, you're cursing at your computer. Linux, you're cursing at yourself. Apple, you're cursing that you didn't make the switch earlier." That's a very powerful incentive.
(Then there are people like me who, confronted with an iMac, keep going "why do I have to do it this way - it's so much easier under linux/bsd" - so I'm not the target Apple customer).
And if you want to sell Apple customers software apps, they simply don't want to go through the hassle of dealing outside the store, of wondering if it's going to work properly, of having to track you down in the first place to even see what you have to offer. It's like someone who's been to West Edmonton Mall (largest shopping center in N. America, used to be the largest in the world, complete with submarine rides and indoor skating rink, NHL hockey rink, largest indoor water park in the world, etc). You have your store located miles away - people are going to the mall anyway, it's going to be the first place they look for anything. Your shop is just not going to do any business unless it's REALLY unique and caters to a special clientele.
It's the same thing with linux. When I'm looking for software, I look in my distros' repo first. If there's something there that I think will do the job, it gets first pick. That's "my" default app store. If it isn't in the repo, it simply stands much less chance of getting installed.
One of the problems with phones is that Apple doesn't get to control the whole experience. They have to make darn sure that the phones work no matter what, and that includes crappy carriers, areas of bad coverage, etc. They can't have iPhone customers flooding the carriers with complaints about how phones stopped working properly after some app was installed by the customer. Lose a carrier contract, you lose billions a year, and you also ha
I guess you didn't follow the news. He always gave credit to the people he worked with. When he returned to Apple, at one of his annual addresses, he took the time to say that the employees had had years of being told they were losers, crap, etc., and they are not. That the competition was trying to lure them away with 2x and 3x the pay, but they were sticking it out to build the new apple.
Acknowledging that to the world, that you believe in your employees and co-workers, and that you're fully aware that they're sticking by you and each other to go forward, is the sort of team-building story that runs contrary to what you claim.
He made it clear that he was demanding because (1) it was necessary to survive when he came back and Apple was on the ropes, and (2) he had the confidence that they could make the stretch to step up their game as a team and achieve greatness.
It worked.
As for rebalancing incomes, you'll get further by throwing a few dozen banksters in jail, banning corporate political donations, fixing your tax system so that those with more income pay more taxes, and returning the stock market to its original purpose (raising funds for companies) instead of a high-stakes, high-speed lottery, by introducing a sales tax on each share transaction.
For the quote, sorry - I should have directed you to this quiz.
For the violations? Well, lets see... VLC is not available as an iOS app - it was pulled by Apple for violating the terms of the App Store. The Wesnoth developers, on the other hand, gave explicit permission for the program to be ported to the App Store. The firmware on Android phones is not gpl code, same as the firmware on your computer isn't.
Tivo? Linus himself has said that it is appropriate for TiVo to use digital signatures to limit what software may run on the systems that they sell. Torvalds has stated that he believes the use of private digital signatures on software is a beneficial security tool, and believes that software licenses should attempt to control only software, not the hardware on which it runs. So, as long as one has access to the software, and can modify it to run on some other hardware, Torvalds believes there is nothing unethical about using digital signatures to prevent running modified copies of Linux. I happen to agree with Linus. I wish the world were different, but it's not ...
So again, who cares? You said it was "happening all the time", but it clearly isn't. When it happens, then let's look at it, and if they're in the wrong, I'll be squawking right there with you. However, Stallman has been making the rounds for 2 months throwing up boogieman scenarios that don't currently exist. In his own way, he's just as bad as Florian Mueller. When I first read the FSF fud about linux and android being a risky platform because of the version of the GPL license they use, I thought it was more Mueller crap. I was shocked to find that it was from the FSF. The more I looked into it, the less respect I had for the FSF and Stallman - to the point where I'm ashamed I ever defended the man, because the warning signs have been there for years, and I ignored them. I'm usually not THAT stupid.
As Freud said "I don't have problems with my enemies. My friends, on the other hand ..." Stallman has become, if possible, increasing erratic. He needs to step down asap, or we need to disavow him forcefully or be tarred with the same brush. In the meantime, instead of hiding the problem or being in denial, we need to expose it.
Now, on the issue of DRM, rootkits and stuff like that is clearly wrong. DRM should not be invasive, and should be under the control of the creator or owner of the data (programs are also data, at least for the sake of this discussion), without harming any system it runs on. In the case of your data, that would be you. This would include anything such as your photo posted on Facebook. They should not be able to use it for whatever they want, any more than you should be allowed to take someone else's work and do the same without their permission.
Now, if you agreed to let them do what they wanted, that's another kettle of fish. Don't like their ToS? Then be careful of what you stick on there, or boycott it. The same goes for gmail. I was using gmail before it went public, and quickly got bored with it (and had privacy concerns) and went back to using my own email on a few of my domains instead. When G++ came out, I logged in (after recovering the password - it's been years), used it, started using gmail again, stopped using gmail again for the same reasons (privacy concerns), and don't use G++ very much either.
When a domain is less than $10 a year, and hosting is dirt cheap, there's no reason why people can't have their own email accounts independent of the freemail providers. You can even have web access. If you think your privacy isn't worth ten cents a day, then you have a very low self-worth. But that's just me. Lots of people must disagree, since they depend on freemail for everything.
First, it does not "happen all the time". And if it did, really, who cares. Stallman has already gone on record that it's okay to steal software and violate licenses because those developers are doing evil and deserve it. So what's good for the goose ... (and you're going to have a hard time complaining that your rights are violated when you publicly say that others should have their same rights violated). The man is a big stinking steaming pile of hypocrisy.
Second, let's take a little test.
Do you believe that you should control your own data? Yes or no?
If yes, then how do you justify your wanting the right to manage your digital information, whilst condemning others (such as programmers) for wanting the same rights for their work product?
In the future, we're all going to demand that we have complete DRM over our own data. There's a market for that, and the first one to offer it will be rich. Privacy legislation isn't enough.
That doesn't excuse him using the FSF to promote lies about Linux and Android being a risk because they are not GPLv3. It also doesn't excuse his lies about there being a back door in OSX.
Stallman's initial stated goal was to create a free unix
That sure worked out well, didn't it? HURD anyone using it?
And you are still being intellectually dishonest by ignoring the actual complete text of the quote, and how it originated.
Daley had just kicked the bucket. The obvious interpretation, in both cases is, "if him dying is what it took, it's worth it."
As far as Stallman is concerned, Jobs was evil. As far as most observers are concerned, zealotry is the greater evil.
But since Stallman likes to dish it out, let's see how much he and his zealots can take it when the shoe's on the other foot ...
"What do you mean, I can't just import the entire database into my spreadsheet. It doesn't have to show me all 20 billion records at once, just enough to fit on the screen one page at a time".
"Why won't my email program let me email this dvd movie as an attachment?"
"Why is the formatting all messed up when I open it on my computer at home?" (because you pressed ENTER every time your cursor got to the right side of the screen instead of letting it automatically word-wrap, you ID-10-T, and yes, it's a true story).
"This graphics program is garbage. I needed to expand this 7k jpeg of my cat into a wallpaper and it looks like hell!"
"My computer won't send a fax. I keep holding the page up to the screen and clicking send, but they only get a blank page."
"My desktop computer is broken." "What does it say when you try to boot it?" "I can't tell - we're having a power failure."
"I can't move my mouse to the left side of the screen" (they've "hit the edge" of their mouse pad, another true story).
"I typed in everything and it doesn't work." (press ENTER). Next day ... "I'm having the same problem, I thought you fixed it!" (press ENTER). Next day ... "This program is crap. Why don't you write something to replace it." (press ENTER you moron! another true story).
"I file all my documents in the recycle bin - this way, I know where to find anything when I need a copy. What do you mean they're all gone? Don't be an idiot, it's a recycle bin, not a trashcan!"
The power tool analogy is 100% apt. Just like a power tool, people will abuse, misuse, and otherwise mess up with software.
And then there's those who lie, and claim that the users/clients are asking for a specific "must-have" feature, and when you call them on their BS and talk directly with the customer, it turns out that they not only never asked for it, they were thinking of asking for something that would directly conflict with it.
It's not "turtles all the way down", it's stupidity, and insistence on playing "broken telephone" rather than proper management and empowering people.
The answers are:
[_] Get a bigger hammer (BFMI^2) ... (YMMV on this one, depending on the school or workplace, and the number of Powerpoint presentations you've been subjected to over your lifetime)
..." that really means "Everyone assumes ..."? (a polite way of saying go away, you're bugging me).
... by the time they get back to you, it'll either be someone else's problem, or more important issues will have surfaced, or you'll be able to say "that version is no longer supported").
[_] Open-source it, tell the end user to RTFM, and file it as either NOT_A_BUG or WONT_FIX in the bug tracker.
[_] Write a program to debug it, duh! because programs that debug programs are almost as happy as programs that write programs
[_] Finally sit down and write the documentation, and enlightenment will happen (this actually works often enough to warrant trying it)
[_] More printfs.
[_] assert() is your friend.
[_] Programming is a journey. Getting there is half the fun.
[_] By becoming even more clever at debugging. It's not like I stopped learning the moment I entered the door, you know
[_] Offer a bounty, because most bugs just need a fresh set of eyeballs, not new insights.
[_] Ask Slashdot - it's what everyone does with their homework.
[_] Change the specs and FEATURE IT!
[_] By being stupid, of course. Looking at every line like I'm a total dumb-ass, and eventually I'll find the line where I *was* a total dumb-ass. It's the "method acting school of debugging".
[_] By looking for the constant that isn't or the variable that doesn't, double-duh!
[_] "Taint." "Huh?" "It was assigned to CowboyNeal, so 'tain't my problem any more."
[_] "That'll be fixed in the next version. If we fix it now, why would anyone want to upgrade?" (Sales and Marketing will be on your side on this one, for once).
[_] "Have you tried tech support?" (from the BOfH "Hey, if I'm going to go through hell fixing it, let them go through hell reporting it" school of thought).
[_] You say "Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place". Do you have any formal proof of this, or is that just one of those "Everyone knows
[_] Allocate twice as long to debugging as to coding. Then, if I'm really clever, I should be able to slack off 2/3 of the time. If not, I'm still within the time budget, so what's the problem again?
[_] "Oh, that's only a prototype."
[_] "That's strange. It works for everyone else. Are you sure you don't have a virus or you're not doing something wrong?" (Give them list of long things to check that have zero to do with the issue
Any others?
Absolutely. If you're doing c++ and you can't code your own strings, stacks, and linked lists, what are you going to do when you NEED something non-standard?
The answer I was given (when I had to build a thread-safe crc64 class) was "why don't you just look for it on the web?"
To which my answer was "It'll take me more time to find it and make sure it works as advertised than it would to write it from scratch."
Sure enough, the "proposed solution" tested fine for relatively small datasets (100 million records), but had multiple collisions on datasets of a billion or more, whereas my implementation had zero collisions on a test run of 30 billion. Turns out that some bright spark thought you really could make a crc64 out of two crc32s (which coincidentally was my boss's first proposal ... and which I had to *prove* wrong in practice by implementing it rather than him accepting "trust me, it really, really doesn't work that way").
He thought I was a bit nuts to implement my own string classes, but like I told him, "I've been writing my own for so long that it only takes me a few minutes to pound a basic one out from scratch, and we don't need any STL_LOCK/STL_UNLOCK. It's the only way to get the performance you want in a thread-safe manner, unless you want me to code it in assembler."
My favorite company? It's neither Apple (I have never owned any of their products) nor Microsoft (I only boot into Windows when I need to do compatibility testing), so I don't know who you could be referring to. Suse? RedHat? Slackware?!!! Or maybe FreeBSD with its' near-monopoly and ease of use (at least for me - I *like* being able to ssh into a box to fix it quickly, and most FreeBSD fixes are quick - if yours aren't, you're doing it wrong).
I'll assume you were referring to Apple ... they're not in trouble because they know their customers. Case in point, I found out this weekend that my daughter's computer finally gave up the ghost a few months ago. She hasn't bothered to ask me to look at it. Instead, she uses her iPhone. And if she ever wants another computer, you can bet she's going to buy Apple, especially since the cost difference isn't what it used to be (and at the high end, Apple is often the same or cheaper).
That's the sort of enabling/disruptive technology and marketing that everyone else is now following.
Also,
So, it's in the interest of the computer-using public for the FSF, of which he is president, to spread FUD about Linux and Android licensing because the GPLv3 is not getting any love? Or for him to get his jollies by publicly demeaning women? Or by telling people that their time would be better spent working on patching emacs (his baby) than with their baby?
I'm not buying it. The man's actions speak very loudly - he is self-centered in the extreme - to the point where he is not able to consider any point of view other than his own as having any validity. A paranoid narcissist. In other words, a whack-pack who did NOT invent the "free software movement", contrary to his shameless self-promotion - Bill Joy was compiling and distributing BSD alsmost a decade before he even started. Bill Joy - the guy who wrote ex and vi. So it really is a vi vs emacs thing.
Stop trying to defend the indefensible - it shows the same lack of class and inability to acknowledge new information that Stallman has.
If Stallman had wanted to say what you wrote, he could have. Instead, he chose to use a quote about corrupt Chicago Mayor Daly. Also, Stallman doesn't believe that Jobs death is an occasion for sadness any more than he believes that children are a source of happiness. From telling mothers to remove their "spawn" from his presence to telling coders that contributing to emacs is something more worthy than their own children, the guy is the whole package - if the package you're looking for is rude, crude, and totally self-centered.
If that is all that it took for a product to succeed, GM would not have gone bankrupt, you'd still be able to buy a new Hummer, and WinPhone7 would be #1 in the market instead of 1%.
Stallman has the right to say what he did, just like he has the right to eat his own foot cheese. That doesn't mean that sane, rational people have to give up their right to be disgusted in both cases.
Stallman wrote it the way he did, with the timing he did, in the full knowledge it would get attention it did. Same tactics that Fred Phelps of Westboro Baptist used when he said he and his church were going to protest Jobs funeral.
Two nutjobs using the same tactics to push their own brand of zealotry. Neither merits respect.
It's because more people are becoming aware of it.
Just like more people are aware that Stallman did not "invent" the idea and practice of free software (Bill Joy was distributing BSD 1 back in the '70s).
And that Stallman lies and FUDs so that he can push his own agenda, which is more along the lines of attention-seeking than promoting the interests of free software.
Of course, having videos on youtube of him eating his foot cheese during a talk adds a further dimension to all the stories of his questionable personal hygiene, adding credence to the multiple reports of eating stuff from his hair and nose, B.O. (maybe be because most soap and shampoo a proprietary closed-source formula), sexist attitude towards women, hatred of children, and hypocrisy in demanding that others put up with his behaviour when he is so thin-skinned himself.
For the record? (pardon the pun :-) It was the music industry, not Apple, that demanded the DRM restrictions.
As for "creating a religion based on ridiculous premises", the same could be said with Stallman's economic model for software. To cast programmers as unethical if they don't release source code is to take away the freedom of programmers to decide how their work can be used.
The simple fact is that for most developers, the only way they're going to be able to pay the bills is to produce closed software. If they can, at the same time, contribute to open software, so much the better, but they should be free to decide, and not to have their choices cast as some ethical failure.
Stallman has no dog in this fight, since he hasn't written code in years. It's simply beyond him now. It happens ... some programmers reach a certain age, and they lose the ability to code consistently.
If I were the only one who thought this way, you'd be 99.99999% right. However, this time IS different. His latest eruption of crassness has provoked a LOT of debate, and as more people speak out against Stallman, this encourages still others to voice their reservations. It's no longer possible to dismiss this as "some over-sensitive women who can't take a joke" or "opponents of free software".
That same tactic is working really well for Fred Phelps and Westboro Baptist. They certainly get their message out! People sure are flocking to his church in droves ... oops, they're not.
But you're right - it takes loads of money to be heard. Ghandi must have been richer than Bill Gates. Nelson Mandella, the Kent State students, the Mothers Against Drunk Driving - all richer than Croesus and Midas combined.
No, you're wrong. Stallman's juvenile attention-seeking behaviour is ultimately just as self-defeating as Fred Phelps, and "getting the message out" is no excuse for being rude and crude. He "got the message out" all right - that he's a total dick. He's forced everyone to choose to either condemn his actions publicly or tacitly condone them with their silence.
He was free to write what he wrote, and he's free to suffer the consequences.
Jobs never claimed to be an engineer. As he pointed out, his job was not just to decide what should be done, but more importantly, to decide the thousands of competing things that should NOT be done.
He was doing something right - as he pointed out after his return, when he was turning Apple around, competitors were offering 2 and 3 times as much to Apple workers to jump ship, and yet they stayed. Why? What kept Apple from bleeding out it's devs, except the hope that Jobs could turn it around?
So he wasn't just a genius at marketing, but at motivating and keeping talent.
The same goes with the switch to Intel cpus. A gutsy move that could have killed the company for any number of reasons, there were all sorts of nay-sayers at the time. Today, we see in retrospect that it was inevitable if the company were to remain competitive.
He rejected the first two iPhone prototypes. Want to bet Microsoft would have shipped either of them and called it good?
You might want to check out Apple's opensource contributions, which include extensive work taking khtml and turning it into webkit - the same webkit that is used in Chrome.
Job also invited the KHTML people on-stage to thank them for their work, and when the KHTML project complained that the patch dumps they were receiving were not fine-grained enough to be usable to port back into KHTML, put the code in an svn repo for them. That's well beyond the requirements of the license.
As a business, Apple can't open everything and survive. That's the way it is, and people like RMS don't "get it". REad the comments here, particularly the one that begins
There's both the room and the need for both closed and open source. Stallman is (literally) too stupid to realize this. Then again, he's shown time and again that he lacks maturity and can't learn from his mistakes, so why would anyone expect differently now?
He wasn't "just quoting someone." He picked that particular quote because it expressed his own personal sentiment.
And to paraphrase you, frankly, I'm sick of everyone who lies by claiming that we suddenly portray someone as a saint when they die, as yet another way to "excuse" the continued rude and stupid behavior of Stallman. The man hasn't done anything relevant in 20 years, unlike Jobs.
Pastafarians.
FTFY
After all, a smartphone uses the closed cell phone networks, and forget Android, because the Linux kernel's GPLv-only licensing is (according to the FSF) a risk.
Nope - the GNU/HURD.phone would be as big as a fridge (not counting the 60-foot antenna), because it would have to combine the abilities of a phone with the ability to act as it's own cell tower, so you can talk to the 2 others who use GNU/HURDphones. And its command interface would be EMACS.
The one trolling was Stallman. He was, , ""I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone."
So, a massive cerebral hemorrhage, a bullet to the head that left him a vegetable, a mental degenerate disease, or even something that just left him physically too debilitated to continue to do his, job, would have been fine with Stallman. Read the entirety of what he wrote, and you'll see that there's no other interpretation.
Stallman is no longer relevant, and his latest whining just underlines that.
What if I'm okay with people seeing the source, so they can audit it and make sure that it is what it says it is, and combine it with any other code they have kicking around, and even selling the result, but not of modifying it (including in too many cases "filing off" the copyright notices) ... you know, like a book?
The GPL isn't the only license out there, and it imposes more restrictions on programmers than the non-copyleft licenses (licenses where you're not obliged to distribute your source), such as BSD.
Stallman has more in common with Bill Gates than he'd care to admit. No style, a history of questionable personal hygiene, and (by requiring copyright assignment instead of just a license for 3rd-party gnu code), a "gotta own it all" mentality.
Anyone using TPB should be able to figure out how to get around the block, or know someone who can show them how, so it's really a non-issue.