One way would be to figure out a way to decentralise the database. Rather than living on 350 servers perhaps it could live in 35,000,000 screen savers, all communicating peer to peer?
How? Beats me. Maybe start by experimenting with moving mediawiki's change tracking to modeled on Arch? Rendering a wikipedia article would then become an exercise in gathering all the necessary changesets from the P2P network. Instead of querying wikipedia's servers, you could just query your screen saver. Editing an article would consist of making a change then publishing the changeset on the P2P network.
Any other ideas? These are just random musings. There are plenty of people who are seriously studying this stuff.
At least here in Australia a single dance move is not copyrightable. A dance school I once went to tested that in court by losing when they tried to stop former students from starting up in competition. A sequence of moves can be copyrighted. I guess it is roughly like trying to copyright a musical interval compared to an entire song.
It seems at bit strange that the choreographer is trying to stop "bad dancing". The essence of his complaint seems to be "I want to use copyright law to stop these people from doing the Electric Slide because they are not doing the Electric Slide". Spot the inconsistency? Who is to say that these people aren't doing the Electric Slide, but their own dance which looks vaguely like it?
By definition rights aren't given. The quote the Oxford dictionary
what one is entitled to
One cannot grant rights as they are there by default. They can only be taken away. That's why the US constitution doesn't grant Habeas Corpus, because it is there by default.
Gonzales is a dangerous man, as his position is "you have no human rights". The constitution writers position was "you have human rights, but at times we will take them away from you".
Interesting that when you "configure" the computer the "operating systems" button is still a windows logo. The only option available is "FreeDOS". (I was trawling to see if Dell would let me configure an open-source machine with the windows operating system. They don't.)
Obtain the screenshots and other stuff being used by the RIAA as evidence.
Post a slashdot story, linking to the screenshots and other evidence, asking slashdotters to do their best with creating/modifying it to show different IP addresses and generally undetectably changing the evidence to implicate as many innocent parties as possible. (Bonus points for making the "evidence" show that the RIAA boss or presiding judge is guilty.)
Slashdotters post their results back, with descriptions of how they did it.
Present all the doctored screenshots/evidence to the court to show how arbitrary the information in a screenshot is.
Let's face it, the Novell-MS deal is probably about divide and conquer as much as anything else. Cut the deal, divide the FOSS world into "Free Software" and "Open Source" then try and bring them down one at a time, ideally using one against the other.
Perhaps MS has found a way to bring "Open Source" into the fold, making it impossible for "Free Software" to work with "Open Source" without compromising principles?
The more I think about it, I'm coming around to the idea that the DMCA (and its ilk) might not be the end of the world.
Think about it... What would your reaction be if you were in business and your chief competitor cut their own legs off at the knee caps? Would you view it as a bad thing?
Now recast that as RIAA and friends vs. Creative Commons and friends. Surely the DMCA will only serve to drive people towards the Commons?
So in the absence of the abolition of copyright, perhaps copyright+DMCA is a better position for the producers of Free content than copyright-DMCA? Think of the DMCA as the equivalent of the GPL's "liberty or death" clause, applied to the RIAA's content. The DMCA ensures that non-free content will die, leaving Free content to take its place.
I strongly disagree. I see a role for Wikipedia as the repository of all public knowledge under a Free license. The web may be a huge repository, but hardly any of it is Free.
The rise of the Wikipedia administrator will be the death of Wikipedia as we know it. One the administrators get under enough people's skin there will be a revolt by non-administrator Wikipedians against their overlords, resulting in either a forking of Wikipedia or the abolition of administrator status.
Cell phones are synced to at least microsecond (us) accuracy due to the signaling protocols used. It is worth noting that civilian GPS provides 1us timing accuracy, so in practice phone base stations are probably synced to better then 1us. At 1.9GHz wavelength is 16cm, so with stable oscillators and multiple base stations location to centimetre resolution could be done.
Compare with carrier phase tracking GPS. GPS (L1) is 1575.42 MHz while cell phones are typically 1900MHz. Being a similar frequency cell phones have the potential to be as accurate as carrier phase tracking GPS.
Carrier phase tracking GPS can provide relative accuracy of the order of millimetres.
According to c/net it was the internal microphone. They give some consideration to the possibility of a separate bug but conclude the weight of evidence points to the internal microphone being activated without the owner's knowledge.
While I'm at it I'll repeat a comment I posted on Technocrat:
Given that all mobile/cell phones are required to be locatable (its for your own safety remember?) and need to be accurately synchronised with a base station, what are the chances of forming a phased array using all microphones within a certain radius of a point? That way one could eavesdrop on a conversation well away from the nearest mobile phone.
I would guess that there is no need for a super accurate location or time. Measure the two as close as possible then record all streams from mobiles in the area. Next feed the whole lot into a super computer and do a big cross correlation with sliding windows centred about the best guess at relative phase (based on the measured location and time).
It is worth noting that the wavelength of the radio signals a mobile phone uses is comparable to the wavelength of the audio frequencies of the human voice. Thus in theory it is possible for a mobile phone base station to locate a mobile phone to within a fraction of an audio wavelength, exactly what is needed for a phased array.
Some people aren't into DIY, so they use the web to look for someone to buy from.
Some people are into DIY and use the web for things other than shopping.
In my case, some of the things I have used the web for are:
Information on growing food in my garden: varieties of plants, propagating from seed, care of plants,...
Information on caring for and chemistry of swimming pools.
Design of irrigation systems and rainwater collection systems
Investigating the feasibility of systems to supplement my house's electricity supply
Information on house maintenance and how to do various jobs
Furniture and cabinet making
Probably not the things a person in a developing country might look for, but that is because I don't live in a developing country. It does demonstrate that the web is a useful reference library, and I contend that the web contains information that is useful to a person in a developing country, that they would otherwise miss out on.
For example I've heard of villagers using the web to monitor world prices for various crops they grow, placing them in a stronger bargaining position when the people they sell to try to understate prices.
I don't think there is any question that the developing world needs the Internet. The question is how to best get it to them. Many people seem to view the Internet as a luxury, which it is if used for entertainment or amusement. The flip side of the Internet is textbooks, meteorological reports, market prices and the like, which are necessities for anything but a subsistence life style. Maybe people in developed countries take these necessities for granted, so don't notice the Internet's role in providing them?
If not OLPC what then? Information can be distributed on paper but as the volume and timeliness of information picks up the Internet is cheaper. OLPC seems like a cute misnomer for "Internet without infrastructure".
Add to my argument that the burning I proposed does not eliminate any ideas. A burner is free to transcribe any ideas the item being burned embodies and release it under whaterver terms they choose (probably copyleft given the action they have just carried out). A non-burner is free to ignore the whole thing and just keep watching their Disney video.
Your comparison is false (libellous?), misrepresents my words and qualifies as a straw man. The Nazis burned other people's books seeking to eliminate ideas. My statement is only made in relation to people's own possessions, which they have made a free decision to dispose of themselves. Quite different to a Nazi with a gun forcing them to burn books, or a Nazi with a gun telling them they cannot burn possessions.
Compare it to someone burning a national flag if you will. The person owns the flag, seeks to make a point, and the burning does not harm the country (apart from pissing some people off very much). Flag burning is protected by the US consitution as free speech.
Are you arguing that free speech is the domain of a Nazi?
I don't think I need a plan. If I do it and my position makes sense others will follow. If my position is sensible the chances are that others already have the same idea and are working in the same direction.
By making it sound like my idea, my goals (and consequently that I must have a plan to spread it) you pay me far too much credit. I'm just on a path that thousands of people like Richard Stallman are already walking. A better description is that the actions of my government are causing my path to more closely follow the footsteps of those ahead of me.
Over the last decade, since I first learned of GNU, I've been slowly coming to the realisation that Stallman, FSF and the GNU have got it pretty right. This isn't about software, convenience or better models of development. It's about the philosphy and mind set.
I don't have to convince others. All I have to do is let them know that there is an alternative and what that alternative is. The opponents of copyleft will see to the convincing.
There is a simple solution: don't have anything to do with anything whose copyright is owned by ARIA and friends.
I've already put the word out to our extended family. No licensed products for our newborn son. Pooh Bear, Thomas the Tank Engine, Disney anything. All these trojan horses will be refused. I will allow the original books my Milne and Awdry, that's where Pooh and Thomas belong, in the books by their original authors. My son will be brought up in the knowledge that these are characters in a book, to live in his imagination, not on his lunchbox, bed sheets, or anything else. Licensed products are just too dangerous to have anything to do with.
From this point on I aim to only listen to copylefted music. Movies and TV? I'd rather have fun making a copylefted movie than killing my brain cells and liberty with an MPAA offering.
Maybe right after we have written to out politicians we should hold a protest in Sydney? Everyone brings their Pooh Bears and Disney characters, CDs, DVDs and we have a great big "cleansing" where we burn them in the streets and pledge to lead fruitful "copylefted lives"?
Customers becoming ex-customers. Now that would scare ARIA. If we can do it to Microsoft we can do it to the RIAA, MPAA and ARIA.
As much as I would like to see the possible payoffs from such research, my personal feelings are that the Australian parliament has fallen into the trap of allowing the end to justify the means. As explained by Catalyst, the plan is to insert human DNA into a rabbit's egg. That really is a significant step to be making, even if the human/animal hybrid is a single cell.
Business people might believe Forbes, but it doesn't follow that the article is credible. The magazine as a whole might be credible, but individual articles can still be incredible. A wise business person would take each article on its own merits (or lack thereof).
"is laughable at best and hippocritical at worse"
Please show me evidence to back this claim. You might think so, but that opinion is probably based on misunderstanding and reading too many Forbes articles.
"...since what individual would pay for something he can get for free?"
Some altruistic individuals might. Most wouldn't. The point you are missing though is that most free software is not zero cost to the majority of people. There is the cost of knowing where to get it from, what is the best of the multitude of options, knowing how to set it up, the cost of making sure it is available when required and so on. These are all things that cost time and money and that people are prepared to pay for. There is a business in selling Free software.
Simple economics dictates that you can make a reasonable profit out of free software. If you can't make a profit either your expectations are not reasonable or someone is undercutting your costs so you need to become more efficient. The model of "write a program, sit on your bum and profit selling copies" is dead. The Internet has made distribution so efficient that you will instantly be undercut. The problem isn't the GPL. It's people flogging a business model that is a dead horse.
There are plenty of people making money off free software. It's just that it tends to be thousands of small companies rather than a few multinationals.
It's not splitting hairs. The GPL is quite specific:
"...have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for this service if you wish),..."
and
"You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee."
The GPL distinguishes between licensing and distribution. You may not charge for the right to copy the program ("...to be licensed as a whole at no charge..."). You may charge for the act of distributing the program (see above).
The GPL does not dictate that you must give someone a copy of a program. You are free to say no when someone asks for a copy of a program without paying money.
If you choose to sell a copy of a program to someone you may distribute it as a source or binary.
If you distribute it as source take the money, give them the source code and that is the end of the transaction. There is no limit to the money you can legally charge as the GPL does not come into play until the transaction is complete.
If you distribute it as binary take the money, give them the binary. Again there is no limit to the money you can legally charge under the GPL for distributing the copy. In the case of distributing the binary you must also offer to provide the source at a minimum cost of distribution. This is fair as you have already made your profit on the distribution of the binary. It's worth noting that the offer to distribute source for minimal cost only comes into play once you have distributed a binary. Distribute source initially and you can charge what you want for it.
The low cost of GPLd software is a consequence of unfettered competion, not the GPL. Something to warm the heart of every capitalist.
I find it hard to take Frobes seriously when they start out by misrepresenting the postion of the person they are talking about (Stallman).
"Richard M. Stallman is a 53-year-old anticorporate crusader who has argued for 20 years that most software should be free of charge. He and a band of anarchist acolytes long have waged war on the commercial software industry, dubbing tech giants "evil" and "enemies of freedom" because they rake in sales and enforce patents and copyrights--when he argues they should be giving it all away."
Stallman does not argue that "most software should be free of charge". The GPL, which he wrote, specifically says one is allowed to charge for GPLd software.
Stallman doesn't argue that "they should be giving it all away." He does argue that they shouldn't have a monopoly, which is very different to "giving it all away".
The philosophy you describe is the "bloatware" philosophy, where a single tool (program) tries to do everything.
What happens is the program starts off not being able to do anything, it then grows to do something well. As circle drawing and shopping list features are added it grows to become unwieldy. Eventually it becomes unmaintainable and falls into decay, at which point someone starts a new project to write a "simpler tool". This bloats and the cycle repeats again forever. It's ideal if your aim as a developer or company is is to keep yourself in a job and make money for life.
The Unix approach is that one tool does a single job and does it well. For example: tar bundles mutiple files into one, compress makes files smaller and gimp does photo editing. Indeed under the Unix philosophy, gimp should really be seen as a graphical user interface wrapped around a bunch of other tools. One tool might do thresholding, another might do convolutional filtering and so on. The idea with the "one tool one job" philosophy is that each tool gets written once and is simple to maintain and upgrade. Whenever that job needs to be done a program calls the relevant tool rather than trying to do a mediocre job itself.
The unix approach is IMO the better. It leads to less needlessly replicated effort and gives higher quality results. Modularisation is one of the fundamental tools of computer science, used to reduce complexity to the point where a persoan can handle it.
Asking gimp to draw pictures is a bit like asking a plumber to paint your house and expecting a first class job of it. It's just not gimp's job to be a drawing package. If you want a drawing/photoediting tool maybe the right way is to write a new supertool, which does its work by calling gimp and inkscape, rather than trying to make gimp and inkscape do each other's job? You as the customer gets what you what, and gimp continues to do its job well.
Note: The customer might be allowed to demand a result, but I contend that the customer has no right to dictate the method of arriving at the result. That is for the experts. For example, if the customer wants a drawing and photoediting program the customer has no right to demand that the solution be provided by modifying gimp to do the job.
No. The GPL says if the end user distributes a binary, they must distribute source with it. The end user is free to refuse to distribute the binary AND the source. For example, a person might do this if they add a confidential extension which they use themselves and don't want a competitor to use.
Here is the GPL "truth table"
Distribute Distribute OK under binary source the GPL no no yes no yes yes yes no no yes yes yes
As an aside, here is the Microsoft truth table
Distribute Distribute OK under binary source the MS EULA no no no no yes no yes no no yes yes no
Slashdot Mirror
One way would be to figure out a way to decentralise the database. Rather than living on 350 servers perhaps it could live in 35,000,000 screen savers, all communicating peer to peer?
How? Beats me. Maybe start by experimenting with moving mediawiki's change tracking to modeled on Arch? Rendering a wikipedia article would then become an exercise in gathering all the necessary changesets from the P2P network. Instead of querying wikipedia's servers, you could just query your screen saver. Editing an article would consist of making a change then publishing the changeset on the P2P network.
Any other ideas? These are just random musings. There are plenty of people who are seriously studying this stuff.
At least here in Australia a single dance move is not copyrightable. A dance school I once went to tested that in court by losing when they tried to stop former students from starting up in competition. A sequence of moves can be copyrighted. I guess it is roughly like trying to copyright a musical interval compared to an entire song.
It seems at bit strange that the choreographer is trying to stop "bad dancing". The essence of his complaint seems to be "I want to use copyright law to stop these people from doing the Electric Slide because they are not doing the Electric Slide". Spot the inconsistency? Who is to say that these people aren't doing the Electric Slide, but their own dance which looks vaguely like it?
By definition rights aren't given. The quote the Oxford dictionary
One cannot grant rights as they are there by default. They can only be taken away. That's why the US constitution doesn't grant Habeas Corpus, because it is there by default.
Gonzales is a dangerous man, as his position is "you have no human rights". The constitution writers position was "you have human rights, but at times we will take them away from you".
Interesting that when you "configure" the computer the "operating systems" button is still a windows logo. The only option available is "FreeDOS". (I was trawling to see if Dell would let me configure an open-source machine with the windows operating system. They don't.)
and here it is!
Suggestion:
Let's face it, the Novell-MS deal is probably about divide and conquer as much as anything else. Cut the deal, divide the FOSS world into "Free Software" and "Open Source" then try and bring them down one at a time, ideally using one against the other.
Perhaps MS has found a way to bring "Open Source" into the fold, making it impossible for "Free Software" to work with "Open Source" without compromising principles?
The more I think about it, I'm coming around to the idea that the DMCA (and its ilk) might not be the end of the world.
Think about it... What would your reaction be if you were in business and your chief competitor cut their own legs off at the knee caps? Would you view it as a bad thing?
Now recast that as RIAA and friends vs. Creative Commons and friends. Surely the DMCA will only serve to drive people towards the Commons?
So in the absence of the abolition of copyright, perhaps copyright+DMCA is a better position for the producers of Free content than copyright-DMCA? Think of the DMCA as the equivalent of the GPL's "liberty or death" clause, applied to the RIAA's content. The DMCA ensures that non-free content will die, leaving Free content to take its place.
I strongly disagree. I see a role for Wikipedia as the repository of all public knowledge under a Free license. The web may be a huge repository, but hardly any of it is Free.
The rise of the Wikipedia administrator will be the death of Wikipedia as we know it. One the administrators get under enough people's skin there will be a revolt by non-administrator Wikipedians against their overlords, resulting in either a forking of Wikipedia or the abolition of administrator status.
Cell phones are synced to at least microsecond (us) accuracy due to the signaling protocols used. It is worth noting that civilian GPS provides 1us timing accuracy, so in practice phone base stations are probably synced to better then 1us. At 1.9GHz wavelength is 16cm, so with stable oscillators and multiple base stations location to centimetre resolution could be done.
Compare with carrier phase tracking GPS. GPS (L1) is 1575.42 MHz while cell phones are typically 1900MHz. Being a similar frequency cell phones have the potential to be as accurate as carrier phase tracking GPS.
Carrier phase tracking GPS can provide relative accuracy of the order of millimetres.According to c/net it was the internal microphone. They give some consideration to the possibility of a separate bug but conclude the weight of evidence points to the internal microphone being activated without the owner's knowledge.
While I'm at it I'll repeat a comment I posted on Technocrat:
Given that all mobile/cell phones are required to be locatable (its for your own safety remember?) and need to be accurately synchronised with a base station, what are the chances of forming a phased array using all microphones within a certain radius of a point? That way one could eavesdrop on a conversation well away from the nearest mobile phone.
I would guess that there is no need for a super accurate location or time. Measure the two as close as possible then record all streams from mobiles in the area. Next feed the whole lot into a super computer and do a big cross correlation with sliding windows centred about the best guess at relative phase (based on the measured location and time).
It is worth noting that the wavelength of the radio signals a mobile phone uses is comparable to the wavelength of the audio frequencies of the human voice. Thus in theory it is possible for a mobile phone base station to locate a mobile phone to within a fraction of an audio wavelength, exactly what is needed for a phased array.
It depends on the person.
Some people aren't into DIY, so they use the web to look for someone to buy from.
Some people are into DIY and use the web for things other than shopping.
In my case, some of the things I have used the web for are:
Probably not the things a person in a developing country might look for, but that is because I don't live in a developing country. It does demonstrate that the web is a useful reference library, and I contend that the web contains information that is useful to a person in a developing country, that they would otherwise miss out on.
For example I've heard of villagers using the web to monitor world prices for various crops they grow, placing them in a stronger bargaining position when the people they sell to try to understate prices.
I don't think there is any question that the developing world needs the Internet. The question is how to best get it to them. Many people seem to view the Internet as a luxury, which it is if used for entertainment or amusement. The flip side of the Internet is textbooks, meteorological reports, market prices and the like, which are necessities for anything but a subsistence life style. Maybe people in developed countries take these necessities for granted, so don't notice the Internet's role in providing them?
If not OLPC what then? Information can be distributed on paper but as the volume and timeliness of information picks up the Internet is cheaper. OLPC seems like a cute misnomer for "Internet without infrastructure".
Add to my argument that the burning I proposed does not eliminate any ideas. A burner is free to transcribe any ideas the item being burned embodies and release it under whaterver terms they choose (probably copyleft given the action they have just carried out). A non-burner is free to ignore the whole thing and just keep watching their Disney video.
Okay, the language is a bit over the top.
Your comparison is false (libellous?), misrepresents my words and qualifies as a straw man. The Nazis burned other people's books seeking to eliminate ideas. My statement is only made in relation to people's own possessions, which they have made a free decision to dispose of themselves. Quite different to a Nazi with a gun forcing them to burn books, or a Nazi with a gun telling them they cannot burn possessions.
Compare it to someone burning a national flag if you will. The person owns the flag, seeks to make a point, and the burning does not harm the country (apart from pissing some people off very much). Flag burning is protected by the US consitution as free speech.
Are you arguing that free speech is the domain of a Nazi?
Please send me an email and I will reply. My email address is on my home page.
I don't think I need a plan. If I do it and my position makes sense others will follow. If my position is sensible the chances are that others already have the same idea and are working in the same direction.
By making it sound like my idea, my goals (and consequently that I must have a plan to spread it) you pay me far too much credit. I'm just on a path that thousands of people like Richard Stallman are already walking. A better description is that the actions of my government are causing my path to more closely follow the footsteps of those ahead of me.
Over the last decade, since I first learned of GNU, I've been slowly coming to the realisation that Stallman, FSF and the GNU have got it pretty right. This isn't about software, convenience or better models of development. It's about the philosphy and mind set.
I don't have to convince others. All I have to do is let them know that there is an alternative and what that alternative is. The opponents of copyleft will see to the convincing.
There is a simple solution: don't have anything to do with anything whose copyright is owned by ARIA and friends.
I've already put the word out to our extended family. No licensed products for our newborn son. Pooh Bear, Thomas the Tank Engine, Disney anything. All these trojan horses will be refused. I will allow the original books my Milne and Awdry, that's where Pooh and Thomas belong, in the books by their original authors. My son will be brought up in the knowledge that these are characters in a book, to live in his imagination, not on his lunchbox, bed sheets, or anything else. Licensed products are just too dangerous to have anything to do with.
From this point on I aim to only listen to copylefted music. Movies and TV? I'd rather have fun making a copylefted movie than killing my brain cells and liberty with an MPAA offering.
Maybe right after we have written to out politicians we should hold a protest in Sydney? Everyone brings their Pooh Bears and Disney characters, CDs, DVDs and we have a great big "cleansing" where we burn them in the streets and pledge to lead fruitful "copylefted lives"?
Customers becoming ex-customers. Now that would scare ARIA. If we can do it to Microsoft we can do it to the RIAA, MPAA and ARIA.
Explanation of the science from Catalyst a science show on the ABC.
A summary of the moral issues from the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference
These are authorative sources.
As much as I would like to see the possible payoffs from such research, my personal feelings are that the Australian parliament has fallen into the trap of allowing the end to justify the means. As explained by Catalyst, the plan is to insert human DNA into a rabbit's egg. That really is a significant step to be making, even if the human/animal hybrid is a single cell.
Show me the DNA.
Business people might believe Forbes, but it doesn't follow that the article is credible. The magazine as a whole might be credible, but individual articles can still be incredible. A wise business person would take each article on its own merits (or lack thereof).
"is laughable at best and hippocritical at worse"
Please show me evidence to back this claim. You might think so, but that opinion is probably based on misunderstanding and reading too many Forbes articles.
"...since what individual would pay for something he can get for free?"
Some altruistic individuals might. Most wouldn't. The point you are missing though is that most free software is not zero cost to the majority of people. There is the cost of knowing where to get it from, what is the best of the multitude of options, knowing how to set it up, the cost of making sure it is available when required and so on. These are all things that cost time and money and that people are prepared to pay for. There is a business in selling Free software.
Simple economics dictates that you can make a reasonable profit out of free software. If you can't make a profit either your expectations are not reasonable or someone is undercutting your costs so you need to become more efficient. The model of "write a program, sit on your bum and profit selling copies" is dead. The Internet has made distribution so efficient that you will instantly be undercut. The problem isn't the GPL. It's people flogging a business model that is a dead horse.
There are plenty of people making money off free software. It's just that it tends to be thousands of small companies rather than a few multinationals.
It's not splitting hairs. The GPL is quite specific:
"...have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for this service if you wish),..."
and
"You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee."
The GPL distinguishes between licensing and distribution. You may not charge for the right to copy the program ("...to be licensed as a whole at no charge..."). You may charge for the act of distributing the program (see above).
The GPL does not dictate that you must give someone a copy of a program. You are free to say no when someone asks for a copy of a program without paying money.
If you choose to sell a copy of a program to someone you may distribute it as a source or binary.
If you distribute it as source take the money, give them the source code and that is the end of the transaction. There is no limit to the money you can legally charge as the GPL does not come into play until the transaction is complete.
If you distribute it as binary take the money, give them the binary. Again there is no limit to the money you can legally charge under the GPL for distributing the copy. In the case of distributing the binary you must also offer to provide the source at a minimum cost of distribution. This is fair as you have already made your profit on the distribution of the binary. It's worth noting that the offer to distribute source for minimal cost only comes into play once you have distributed a binary. Distribute source initially and you can charge what you want for it.
The low cost of GPLd software is a consequence of unfettered competion, not the GPL. Something to warm the heart of every capitalist.
I find it hard to take Frobes seriously when they start out by misrepresenting the postion of the person they are talking about (Stallman).
"Richard M. Stallman is a 53-year-old anticorporate crusader who has argued for 20 years that most software should be free of charge. He and a band of anarchist acolytes long have waged war on the commercial software industry, dubbing tech giants "evil" and "enemies of freedom" because they rake in sales and enforce patents and copyrights--when he argues they should be giving it all away."
It's a difference in philosophy.
The philosophy you describe is the "bloatware" philosophy, where a single tool (program) tries to do everything. What happens is the program starts off not being able to do anything, it then grows to do something well. As circle drawing and shopping list features are added it grows to become unwieldy. Eventually it becomes unmaintainable and falls into decay, at which point someone starts a new project to write a "simpler tool". This bloats and the cycle repeats again forever. It's ideal if your aim as a developer or company is is to keep yourself in a job and make money for life.
The Unix approach is that one tool does a single job and does it well. For example: tar bundles mutiple files into one, compress makes files smaller and gimp does photo editing. Indeed under the Unix philosophy, gimp should really be seen as a graphical user interface wrapped around a bunch of other tools. One tool might do thresholding, another might do convolutional filtering and so on. The idea with the "one tool one job" philosophy is that each tool gets written once and is simple to maintain and upgrade. Whenever that job needs to be done a program calls the relevant tool rather than trying to do a mediocre job itself.
The unix approach is IMO the better. It leads to less needlessly replicated effort and gives higher quality results. Modularisation is one of the fundamental tools of computer science, used to reduce complexity to the point where a persoan can handle it.
Asking gimp to draw pictures is a bit like asking a plumber to paint your house and expecting a first class job of it. It's just not gimp's job to be a drawing package. If you want a drawing/photoediting tool maybe the right way is to write a new supertool, which does its work by calling gimp and inkscape, rather than trying to make gimp and inkscape do each other's job? You as the customer gets what you what, and gimp continues to do its job well.
Note: The customer might be allowed to demand a result, but I contend that the customer has no right to dictate the method of arriving at the result. That is for the experts. For example, if the customer wants a drawing and photoediting program the customer has no right to demand that the solution be provided by modifying gimp to do the job.
It's a lesson in the cathedral and bazaar.
GCHQ = cathedral
Silicon Valley = bazaar
Which one do you think won?
No. The GPL says if the end user distributes a binary, they must distribute source with it. The
end user is free to refuse to distribute the binary AND the source. For example, a person
might do this if they add a confidential extension which they use themselves and don't want
a competitor to use.
Here is the GPL "truth table"
Distribute Distribute OK under
binary source the GPL
no no yes
no yes yes
yes no no
yes yes yes
As an aside, here is the Microsoft truth table
Distribute Distribute OK under
binary source the MS EULA
no no no
no yes no
yes no no
yes yes no