I seriously doubt that Jonas, the guy who runs GNU-Friends, is sexist in any way. And I for one would also like to see some interviews with some female hackers.
If you mail the people who are running that site and suggest some female hackers who do good GPL'd work, I daresay you might actually see some of those interviews go up too. I know they'd attract a lot of attention, and they'd be a good change of pace, you're right.
Now, not to be sexist, I know that there are GNU hackers out there that are female, but I really can't think of any of their names off of the top of my head. Many people have heard of some of the core GNU hackers, but I'm having a hard time remembering the names of some of the female ones I've heard about.
Change that! Mail the people at gnu-friends and make some suggestions! Please just don't sit back and gripe about the lack of interviews with women if you're not willing to suggest anyone.:)
This type of book will no doubt help people write more secure applications, but security in larger projects still needs to be engineered in, rather than added on at a later date as a "feature".
For example, Freenetstarts with the assumption that nodes on the network will sometimes be hostile to the network, and that they will fail without reason. That fundamental assumption makes their network stronger IMHO than it would have been if they started with a blue-sky look at the network and added code to prevent certain types of attacks.
Also, it seems to me that security in applications is probably something won by hard experience. I'm not even sure if it's possible for somebody whose been hacking for just 1 year to build a fundamentally secure application, but trying to learn never hurts.:)
Ximian is going to develop Mono - that much is clear. It doesn't matter what anyone says, they're going to use it.
The second part of that is wrong - they're a company, and they don't have the luxury like non-paid independent free software hackers of not caring what other people think of their project. Since they're going to be using it eventually to either drive revenue, or support something that will drive revenue, they do care what other people think.
It seems that you're saying that they're going to do what they're going to do, so there's no sense complaining about it. I'm not sure I necessarily agree with everything in this article that was posted, but if there are dangers, it DEFINATELY makes sense to complain about it, because ximian CAN be swayed. (They're a company - companies tend to listen to large portions of their customer bases when they have to)
Gnome is GPL - what's everyone so scared about?
Aggregation of software! Your package foo might be GPL'd, and might be a part of GNOME, but if you base it on Mono and components written by Intel that have patent problems, you could quickly find yourself unable to distribute your application depending on what Intel wants to do with their patents.
If a GPL'd application links to a library, or in some other way uses software that's encumbered, problems can spill over. So it's not necessarily safe to say that since Gnome is GPL'd, we'll never have any problems.
The perfect way to avoid problems is to link GPL'd software only with GPL'd software that isn't covered by patents. That's *not* what Ximian is doing, and not what they have in mind for GNOME.
Wine is actually a trojan horse of a strategic nature. Microsoft, along with the Illuminati, the Republican National Party, and the Yeti, funnel millions of dollars into the development of Wine behind the scenes. The idea is that people on other platforms should still be tied to applications on Windows. At a certain point, hapless GNU/Linux users will awake to the startling reality that even though they're running linux, they spend all of their time running Windows applications. They'll all eventually cave in and return to the warm bosom of Microsoft, never again to stray from the teat that provides them the poison they love so dearly.
It's all a conspiracy. I'm starting to think that ESR with his "open source" nonsense is actually also an operative for Microsoft, working deep, deep undercover to bastardize the "free software" philosophy by dumbing it down into "open source", all the while accepting licenses like the APSL, moving step by step, inch by inch, to fully proprietary licenses at which point he can join hands with Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and Baalzebub rejoicing in their victory over the good things in the world.
Of course, all of this could be simply about the developers of Wine wanting to change to a copyleft license to prevent some bastard company from coming along, stealing everything, repackaging it with a 2KB patch, and closing the source.
You may want to go back and read the article. The article is a vote on whether or not to switch to a copyleft style license. This means that they would be switching from a permissive free software license (like BSD/X11) to a copyleft license (GPL/LGPL)
In other words, Wine is going against the trend you are accusing them of.
So basically, I found your post relatively informative except for the fact that all of the content in it was 180 degrees from the situation that is unfolding currently in reality.
Let any software company to use it with their products in a way that WineHQ and the SoftwareCompany both beneffit from it.
The LGPL accomplishes that.
But, of course, the terms "GPL", and "Open Source" are a heavy obstacle (but untrue) for companies interested in making money in any platform. Specially when they associate GPL and OpenSource with and "Viral License".
Many people see companies and industry as this large immovable object, and we in the linux community can have our fun, but ultimately we need to make concessions in order to "fit in". Frequently, one of those concessions is people not talking about free software, and sometimes not even talking about open source. Well, these concessions are just plain wrong. Using free software, linux *muscled* its way into business and industry, simply by being better, by respecting people's freedom, and giving them what they want. There's no reason to believe that process can't continue just like it's going now.
Many people get wrapped up in the popularity aspect of the software - what can we do to make it more popular - and end up losing sight of all of the things that made it cool and attracted you to it in the first place.
I don't think that free software/LGPL/GPL talk is going to turn anybody away. Not any more than it has in the past, and let's look at the past track record - linux has gone from a quick hack by some nameless finnish student to one of the most used server operating systems on the planet. Talk about and develop linux in the way that it has originally appealed to all of us, and things will come naturally.
I've been mulling over the GPL and BSD licenses for some time, trying to think of a way that businesses can make money while the community still benefits. (Isn't everybody?) So where does this come together?
Cooperation between business and free software would be a cool thing, but is that necessarily the end-all be-all of software?
Why? I know that Ximian has to attend to the economic realities of the marketplace, but why is it that you were so sure that Intel would never go along with the GPL that you had to relicense? I realize it's still a free software license, but the MIT X11 license opens the community up to non-free forks. Anybody on the planet can now take the Mono class libraries, not even add anything and repackage it as proprietary software. What happens if Mono fails? (Somebody will pick up the class libraries, not necessarily someone with the communities best interests in mind)
Free software is great, (by the way, I'm hoping that you were misquoted in the news article that had you talking about "open source") and the MIT X11 license is fine, but it takes all of the teeth out of the software and lets anybody who wants to come along, repackage the software and steal subsequent users of their version's freedom. Why?
You seem to have come up with by far the most effective way to make people throw out or completely ignore their computers. Yes, this would waste far more money than buying 3 copies of windows for every PC in the country.
Do you think that Joe Factory worker who works 60 hours a week is going to give a rats ass about operating systems and all of the pages of technical documentation he's going to have to read just to boot the thing? He's going to ignore the computer and put it in a closet, or throw it out.
Whose interests were served then?
Re:Neat. How many of these do we really need?
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Gnumeric 1.0 Has Arrived
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· Score: 5, Insightful
People see duplication of effort and they assume that it must be a bad thing, but it's not.
Thinking that it is a bad thing is based on the assumption that these people who are "reinventing the wheel" would have worked on a more established project of the same type if they hadn't done what they did, which isn't true. These coders are all voluteers, and they ONLY hack on things that are INTERESTING to them.
Besides, a lot of the failed projects of today are going to be the start of tomorrow's best hackers. Don't bitch about what people choose to do for free.
One of the reasons that hard drives are lousy back up medium is because they don't address some of the needs of serious backup systems.
Sure if it's removable then you're probably mostly OK, but if some power accident fries your box, and your backup hard drive is in there, oh well.
Another principle of good backups is to have another copy in another location, since having an extra hard drive won't help you if your house burns down.
For average users, I think the only real solution to backups is going to come when network storage is dirt cheap and bandwidth is just as cheap. God how I'd love to backup my data with one entry in a crontab:
Here's an app that might be interesting to some people:
GTKeyboard. This is an on-screen keyboard for X11 that allows redirection of keypresses to foreign windows, remapping keyboards, multiple layouts, and lots of other features. This is a type of application that's listed in the GNOME accessibility page, although it doesn't have any particular affiliation with GNOME.
Or are you honestly suggesting that you should have the right to use every single piece of code I've ever written, ever, whether I've chosen to release it or not?
Absolutely not - part of free software is the freedom to privacy - one of the reasons why GNU has rejected some certified "open source" licenses as not being free software was because they don't respect people's privacy. They insisted that the person writing the code contribute the code back to a central repository. (I think the Apple APSL does this, but I'm not sure) You don't have to release software if you don't want to. But if you do, it should come with freedom.
The problem with your two scenarios is that they make the assumption that you'd never release the software unless you could control the source code. That might be true for some people, but it's not for the majority of people. If you insist that the software should be free, chances are it will be released, because regardless of whether the software is free or not, the author gets more benefit out of it when released than when held privately.
By the way, you might be interested in this which addresses your privacy concerns directly. In the GPL FAQ no less.
You could make that bullshit claim about anything. Why not books? or television shows? or movies? how about music?
Because society doesn't advance any slower or any faster based on how many fiction novels or movies come out. As for books, it depends on which ones you're talking about. Some books do contain generally useful technical information which is why there is such thing as the GNU Free Documentation License.
Why is it that nobody has patented math? Why is it that that idea strikes us as absurd? Because it's generally useful technical information. When you think about it, programs are really just algorithms, or methods of doing things, and that is generally useful technical information. The same cannot be said of the latest Ken Follet novel, so no, you cannot make that claim about anything.
how does copying binaries of programs have anything to do with "free speech"?
Who said that it did? When we're talking about software freedom, we're not talking about free speech. (Which is important too, but unrelated to this discussion)
It's just a way to get out of paying for something, and a great excuse for the "freedom of the internet".
Oh come on, that's a cop out. Do you think that people saying mathematics should be free is just an elaborate scheme to cheat someone out of money? Free software doesn't mean cheap - the FSF sells collection CDs for something like 5 grand, and people pay it.
If you're going to disagree with anything, disagree with the assertion that programs are generally useful technical information.
Re:On the nature of power
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Freedom or Power?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
It'll be interesting to hear your explanation of how I can "take freedom from other people" by writing my own software and offering it under license terms of my own choosing
Simple - people should have the freedom to use software. See the free software definition. When you license software under a non-free software license, you take away my freedoms as listed by the free software definition.
Programs, like math formulas, like cooking recipies, like common sense, are generally useful technical information. They help advance society, and it's wrong for someone to deny that to people, just like it's wrong to deny people the ability to use common sense ideas and methods, (read: one click shopping) just like it's wrong to deny people to make use of information that can help them. (think of banning people from using calculus unless they paid a licensing fee)
If you honestly believe what you wrote, you're not talking about power, or even ideology. You're talking about religion
Huh? Where did you get this? My feeling is that you're just trying to brand an idea a religion, (read up on the definition, and I think you'll see the error in this) so that you can slag it. That's what we call a strawman argument.
In his own way he is just as bad as Bill Gates, for they are both trying to dictate the terms under which we can distribute the software we write, or use the software we use that has been written by others
The only thing he attempts to prevent people from doing is taking freedom away from other people.
I reject both of them for trying to control what I do with the code I write. When I write something, _I_ should have control under the provisions it is licensed under.
One of the underlying assumptions that GNU has, (which I happen to agree with) is that programs are generally useful technical information, just like mathematical formulas or cooking recipies. If you invented a new way of doing math, would you think that you have the right come hell or high water to keep people from using it if you wanted to? Most people don't think so because they realize that math is something too important and too useful to let one person have a chokehold over. Same goes with programs.
So you reject someone dictating terms to you about how you distribute your program. I reject your bullshit laws that throw me in prison for helping a friend out by copying software, and your nonsense regulations telling me I can't use a common sense algorithm in my programs, that instead I am mandated by law to go around my elbow to get to my ass.
Please, resist the temptation to turn a serious debate into a silly game of semantics.
Given the definitions of both, it's clear that you could work out a plausible arugment semantically speaking that freedom implies power, or that power implies freedom, (since if you have power no one can stop you from doing certain things, etc).
None of that has anything to do with GNU, Linux, software, the freedom to run software, or anything else. This is not a cute semantic game, this is a discussion about software, and what rights people should have to the software that controls many aspects of their lives, whether they like it or not.
I think RMS and the FSF are going to start losing ground, because they're going to fall into the trap of many politicians who want to change the world: they're going to offend the moderates
You seem to be thinking of all of this as some primarily political abstract dance whose only consequence is who seems more popular in the public eye.
This is about SOFTWARE. Not about popularity. Not about who has the most money. It's about whether or not people are going to have the ability to control the software that controls many aspects of their lives. It's not some political debate where the person who kisses the most babies wins, it's about freedom.
Several years ago, fans of GNU and Linux were always talking about what a "revolution" it was, and how it was fundamentally different thinking, and how everything was going to change. Now, they seem to have abandoned that in favor of discussions about whether or not a particular "open source" company is going to make money or not, political arguments about whose the better speaker, (Tim O'Reilly or ESR, etc) and who can better represent "the community". (Implicit in all of that talk is the assumption that you or I know what is best for the community, how they are best represented, or what is easist)
Well screw the politics. GNU is offering you freedom in your software. Nobody's forcing you to take it. If you'd rather have the shackles of proprietary software, go use the proprietary software, and you may just find out why everybody's been talking about GNU/Linux for so long.
And forcing me to choose a license that meets the FSF's approval is an attempt to assert what?
Could it be...?
Power?
Nope...if you read the article, you will find that power is when you affect other people more than yourself. When pushing for free software, they are clearly trying to affect themselves - their ability to run the software, modify it, and so on.
They are trying to prevent people from doing one thing, and that is taking freedom away from others. But taking freedom away from others is no more a "right" or a "freedom" than taking people's property from them or their lives. Nobody complains that their inability to rob people is "the government taking their freedoms away from them".
Similarly, the ONLY action GNU wants to take away from you is your ability to take freedom away from other people. I think that's perfectly spelled out in the GPL. People don't have the right to take freedom from other people.
Say what you want about GNU, but they are the only voice in the free software or open source community that has the balls to stand up for what's right, rather than spending their time worrying which "open source" company is making their profit margins, whether or not we'll be taken seriously by Bill Gates (the answer is - who cares) and worrying about whether or not free software or open source is a "viable business model".
They stand for freedom, they stand for high quality software, and they got GNU/Linux to where it is today. Or maybe you'd like to try running Linux without the GNU system. Good luck.
People will attack them with glib wordplay like you've done in your post, but take them out of the equation, and you've got all the proprietary abuses you had with your Micros~1 software, just that it's a different cabal that would be running things.
Another way to look at this...
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Freedom or Power?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
GNU wants to give you freedom.
Nobody has the freedom to do things that are harmful to others. Nobody complains about not having the "freedom" to kill people, because that's not a freedom people have.
Similarly, GNU grants you every freedom except one - you can't take freedom away from other people by relicensing the software with restrictive conditions that don't give the people the same freedom you had.
To take freedom away from people, (i.e. not giving them the freedom that you had) is not a freedom - it's an issue of power. Just as taking someone's life or property away from them is not a freedom, taking someone's freedom away from them is also not a freedom with respect to software.
So it's not that GNU is "denying" you the freedom to license as you see fit, they just want to deny you the ability to take freedom away from other people, which itself isn't a freedom.
Aaah...that key word. "Trusted". Like we trust ICANN? Like we trust the W3C and their RAND policies? Like we trust the government and their key-escrow schemes, along with carnivore surveillance?
The whole idea of the internet is to decentralize and share the work, as well as broaden the system to avoid one point of failure. Creating a central "trusted" facility to take care of these payments puts control of the flow of information in one place, since they control payments, who can make them, how they can make them, who they can make them to, what their cut is, (because it isn't going to be free) and a host of other things that sound like tiny details until they totally change the way people access the web.
There is no central organization that everybody can trust.
Ratings are a really weird moral artifact - I sometimes wonder why they still exist.
Oh sure, everybody wants content labeling so they know what they're getting, and god forbid some little kid should see guts splashed on the walls, but there are things about the rating system that seem to ooze enforcement of a moral standard nobody voted on.
For example, most scenes of full-frontal nudity or drug use automatically get you an R, regardless of the context. You probably couldn't film Michaelangelo sculpting "David" without getting an R. If you do a movie about drug use and how it will lead you down the path of destruction, you're going to get an R if you show anybody smoking a cigarette that is *insinuated* as being a joint. Better not show a person taking allergy shots, because that heroine abuse will get you an R!
And then there's the all-feared NC-17. The rating that knocks things out of theaters, makes studio execs cower in fear, and little babies all over the nation cry. Mostly sexual content lands you an NC-17. And not "pornography". Anything that has sexual content outside of what you see in "morally wholesome" movies will get you an NC-17. Since NC-17 is such a financial death sentence, no movie wants one and consequentially no content that would get you an NC-17 is ever released to the general public.
Now I'm not saying that I like all of my movies to have porn, violence, and drug use, but we're adults here. (Well, maybe I shouldn't say that on slashdot, but you know what I mean) Ratings seem appropriate *MAYBE* to protect little kids, (we'll ignore the fact that the parents should be doing that instead of the MPAA, but anyway) but I'm an adult and I don't want to be protected from anything.
Ratings make me uncomfortable because I know for a fact that there's content I don't see due to them, (like some things getting NC-17s) because it's a system built upon a "moral foundation" that I don't share. (Guns & death are better than sex and drugs) and because they're shoved down the throats of all age groups despite the fact that they only really pertain to a small subsection of the population.
Let's not figure out methods of moving from one rating to another, let's figure out how to fix or eliminate them.
Unless a person wanted to go through a payment form to pay their $0.01 per page, (and of course each page of the payment form would cost another $0.01) these payments would have to be done automagically with credit cards, cookies, etc.
This penny/page idea seems to be suggesting that we all enable cookies and give our financial information to every single site that we visit. Because how else are we going to pay them? The mechnanics of getting the money from me to them means that I'm going to have to give up a lot of my privacy, and that's unacceptable.
I know it's getting hard to surf anonymously these days, but why are people so hell-bent to make it utterly impossible?
Make it a penny/nickel/dime a day for access to a whole domain, depending on the quantity and nature of the content within, and I might be interested
I agree with your points about how companies would segment articles to make you pay more, but at the same time, I don't think this idea would work either. What if you're mirroring an FTP site - should you pay $0.05 for sucking down 4GB of data in a day while the loser who just wanted to buy a t-shirt from the online site pays the same?
Also the larger problem is that both of these ideas, (yours and the penny-per-page thing) are too web/HTML centric. Is a 5MB shockwave file a page? 10 pages? What about mirroring an FTP site? What about embedded audio in a page? What about downloading trial software?
My guess is that if any micropayment system is put in place, a lot of content will start to migrate away from the web to other formats. (NNTP, Gopher, FTP, whatever - just something free as in beer) After all, Web != Internet
In-house development in large companies can often run into dozens or even hundreds of projects. Aside from the complexity of individually managing all of those, centrally locating all projects to have one interface, one set of tools, and one locus of control could be seen as very positive in a lot of organizations. Also, whenever large-scale software development is going on, most of the disparate pieces are really quite related. For example, when developing evolution, they developed loads of libraries that did specific things. Sure, they were written to be generic, but their source trees, release schedules, build frameworks and so on were still built to be related to the original project.
For example, there isn't a GNOME CVS. You can't check out the source code for GNOME. You check out the source code for about 50 different projects, all of which put together make up GNOME.
All of this is kind of silly though. Let's let VA worry about how to market their own stuff. IANABA (I am not a business analyst) and my guess is that 99.99999% of the people on this site aren't either. Leave that guessing for the bean counters. Far more interesting in this story are the implications for free software. The FSF has a lot of good points that they raised in their article, most of which are being wholly ignored by the threads here today.
Slashdot Mirror
I seriously doubt that Jonas, the guy who runs GNU-Friends, is sexist in any way. And I for one would also like to see some interviews with some female hackers.
:)
If you mail the people who are running that site and suggest some female hackers who do good GPL'd work, I daresay you might actually see some of those interviews go up too. I know they'd attract a lot of attention, and they'd be a good change of pace, you're right.
Now, not to be sexist, I know that there are GNU hackers out there that are female, but I really can't think of any of their names off of the top of my head. Many people have heard of some of the core GNU hackers, but I'm having a hard time remembering the names of some of the female ones I've heard about.
Change that! Mail the people at gnu-friends and make some suggestions! Please just don't sit back and gripe about the lack of interviews with women if you're not willing to suggest anyone.
This type of book will no doubt help people write more secure applications, but security in larger projects still needs to be engineered in, rather than added on at a later date as a "feature".
:)
For example, Freenet starts with the assumption that nodes on the network will sometimes be hostile to the network, and that they will fail without reason. That fundamental assumption makes their network stronger IMHO than it would have been if they started with a blue-sky look at the network and added code to prevent certain types of attacks.
Also, it seems to me that security in applications is probably something won by hard experience. I'm not even sure if it's possible for somebody whose been hacking for just 1 year to build a fundamentally secure application, but trying to learn never hurts.
Ximian is going to develop Mono - that much is clear. It doesn't matter what anyone says, they're going to use it.
The second part of that is wrong - they're a company, and they don't have the luxury like non-paid independent free software hackers of not caring what other people think of their project. Since they're going to be using it eventually to either drive revenue, or support something that will drive revenue, they do care what other people think.
It seems that you're saying that they're going to do what they're going to do, so there's no sense complaining about it. I'm not sure I necessarily agree with everything in this article that was posted, but if there are dangers, it DEFINATELY makes sense to complain about it, because ximian CAN be swayed. (They're a company - companies tend to listen to large portions of their customer bases when they have to)
Gnome is GPL - what's everyone so scared about?
Aggregation of software! Your package foo might be GPL'd, and might be a part of GNOME, but if you base it on Mono and components written by Intel that have patent problems, you could quickly find yourself unable to distribute your application depending on what Intel wants to do with their patents.
If a GPL'd application links to a library, or in some other way uses software that's encumbered, problems can spill over. So it's not necessarily safe to say that since Gnome is GPL'd, we'll never have any problems.
The perfect way to avoid problems is to link GPL'd software only with GPL'd software that isn't covered by patents. That's *not* what Ximian is doing, and not what they have in mind for GNOME.
Wine is actually a trojan horse of a strategic nature. Microsoft, along with the Illuminati, the Republican National Party, and the Yeti, funnel millions of dollars into the development of Wine behind the scenes. The idea is that people on other platforms should still be tied to applications on Windows. At a certain point, hapless GNU/Linux users will awake to the startling reality that even though they're running linux, they spend all of their time running Windows applications. They'll all eventually cave in and return to the warm bosom of Microsoft, never again to stray from the teat that provides them the poison they love so dearly.
It's all a conspiracy. I'm starting to think that ESR with his "open source" nonsense is actually also an operative for Microsoft, working deep, deep undercover to bastardize the "free software" philosophy by dumbing it down into "open source", all the while accepting licenses like the APSL, moving step by step, inch by inch, to fully proprietary licenses at which point he can join hands with Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and Baalzebub rejoicing in their victory over the good things in the world.
Of course, all of this could be simply about the developers of Wine wanting to change to a copyleft license to prevent some bastard company from coming along, stealing everything, repackaging it with a 2KB patch, and closing the source.
Course that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
You may want to go back and read the article. The article is a vote on whether or not to switch to a copyleft style license. This means that they would be switching from a permissive free software license (like BSD/X11) to a copyleft license (GPL/LGPL)
In other words, Wine is going against the trend you are accusing them of.
So basically, I found your post relatively informative except for the fact that all of the content in it was 180 degrees from the situation that is unfolding currently in reality.
Won't you join us? (In reality, that is)
Keep the Seurce Code Open
The LGPL accomplishes that.
Let any software company to use it with their products in a way that WineHQ and the SoftwareCompany both beneffit from it.
The LGPL accomplishes that.
But, of course, the terms "GPL", and "Open Source" are a heavy obstacle (but untrue) for companies interested in making money in any platform. Specially when they associate GPL and OpenSource with and "Viral License".
Many people see companies and industry as this large immovable object, and we in the linux community can have our fun, but ultimately we need to make concessions in order to "fit in". Frequently, one of those concessions is people not talking about free software, and sometimes not even talking about open source. Well, these concessions are just plain wrong. Using free software, linux *muscled* its way into business and industry, simply by being better, by respecting people's freedom, and giving them what they want. There's no reason to believe that process can't continue just like it's going now.
Many people get wrapped up in the popularity aspect of the software - what can we do to make it more popular - and end up losing sight of all of the things that made it cool and attracted you to it in the first place.
I don't think that free software/LGPL/GPL talk is going to turn anybody away. Not any more than it has in the past, and let's look at the past track record - linux has gone from a quick hack by some nameless finnish student to one of the most used server operating systems on the planet. Talk about and develop linux in the way that it has originally appealed to all of us, and things will come naturally.
I've been mulling over the GPL and BSD licenses for some time, trying to think of a way that businesses can make money while the community still benefits. (Isn't everybody?) So where does this come together?
Cooperation between business and free software would be a cool thing, but is that necessarily the end-all be-all of software?
Some people don't think so
Miguel:
Why? I know that Ximian has to attend to the economic realities of the marketplace, but why is it that you were so sure that Intel would never go along with the GPL that you had to relicense? I realize it's still a free software license, but the MIT X11 license opens the community up to non-free forks. Anybody on the planet can now take the Mono class libraries, not even add anything and repackage it as proprietary software. What happens if Mono fails? (Somebody will pick up the class libraries, not necessarily someone with the communities best interests in mind)
Free software is great, (by the way, I'm hoping that you were misquoted in the news article that had you talking about "open source") and the MIT X11 license is fine, but it takes all of the teeth out of the software and lets anybody who wants to come along, repackage the software and steal subsequent users of their version's freedom. Why?
You seem to have come up with by far the most effective way to make people throw out or completely ignore their computers. Yes, this would waste far more money than buying 3 copies of windows for every PC in the country.
Do you think that Joe Factory worker who works 60 hours a week is going to give a rats ass about operating systems and all of the pages of technical documentation he's going to have to read just to boot the thing? He's going to ignore the computer and put it in a closet, or throw it out.
Whose interests were served then?
People see duplication of effort and they assume that it must be a bad thing, but it's not.
Thinking that it is a bad thing is based on the assumption that these people who are "reinventing the wheel" would have worked on a more established project of the same type if they hadn't done what they did, which isn't true. These coders are all voluteers, and they ONLY hack on things that are INTERESTING to them.
Besides, a lot of the failed projects of today are going to be the start of tomorrow's best hackers. Don't bitch about what people choose to do for free.
One of the reasons that hard drives are lousy back up medium is because they don't address some of the needs of serious backup systems.
:)
Sure if it's removable then you're probably mostly OK, but if some power accident fries your box, and your backup hard drive is in there, oh well.
Another principle of good backups is to have another copy in another location, since having an extra hard drive won't help you if your house burns down.
For average users, I think the only real solution to backups is going to come when network storage is dirt cheap and bandwidth is just as cheap. God how I'd love to backup my data with one entry in a crontab:
0 * * * * scp -r / myaccount@bigcheapstorage.com:/home/myaccount
(Using the SSH keysystem to avoid entering passwords, of course)
Here's an app that might be interesting to some people:
GTKeyboard. This is an on-screen keyboard for X11 that allows redirection of keypresses to foreign windows, remapping keyboards, multiple layouts, and lots of other features. This is a type of application that's listed in the GNOME accessibility page, although it doesn't have any particular affiliation with GNOME.
Or are you honestly suggesting that you should have the right to use every single piece of code I've ever written, ever, whether I've chosen to release it or not?
Absolutely not - part of free software is the freedom to privacy - one of the reasons why GNU has rejected some certified "open source" licenses as not being free software was because they don't respect people's privacy. They insisted that the person writing the code contribute the code back to a central repository. (I think the Apple APSL does this, but I'm not sure) You don't have to release software if you don't want to. But if you do, it should come with freedom.
The problem with your two scenarios is that they make the assumption that you'd never release the software unless you could control the source code. That might be true for some people, but it's not for the majority of people. If you insist that the software should be free, chances are it will be released, because regardless of whether the software is free or not, the author gets more benefit out of it when released than when held privately.
By the way, you might be interested in this which addresses your privacy concerns directly. In the GPL FAQ no less.
You could make that bullshit claim about anything. Why not books? or television shows? or movies? how about music?
Because society doesn't advance any slower or any faster based on how many fiction novels or movies come out. As for books, it depends on which ones you're talking about. Some books do contain generally useful technical information which is why there is such thing as the GNU Free Documentation License.
Why is it that nobody has patented math? Why is it that that idea strikes us as absurd? Because it's generally useful technical information. When you think about it, programs are really just algorithms, or methods of doing things, and that is generally useful technical information. The same cannot be said of the latest Ken Follet novel, so no, you cannot make that claim about anything.
how does copying binaries of programs have anything to do with "free speech"?
Who said that it did? When we're talking about software freedom, we're not talking about free speech. (Which is important too, but unrelated to this discussion)
It's just a way to get out of paying for something, and a great excuse for the "freedom of the internet".
Oh come on, that's a cop out. Do you think that people saying mathematics should be free is just an elaborate scheme to cheat someone out of money? Free software doesn't mean cheap - the FSF sells collection CDs for something like 5 grand, and people pay it.
If you're going to disagree with anything, disagree with the assertion that programs are generally useful technical information.
It'll be interesting to hear your explanation of how I can "take freedom from other people" by writing my own software and offering it under license terms of my own choosing
Simple - people should have the freedom to use software. See the free software definition. When you license software under a non-free software license, you take away my freedoms as listed by the free software definition.
Programs, like math formulas, like cooking recipies, like common sense, are generally useful technical information. They help advance society, and it's wrong for someone to deny that to people, just like it's wrong to deny people the ability to use common sense ideas and methods, (read: one click shopping) just like it's wrong to deny people to make use of information that can help them. (think of banning people from using calculus unless they paid a licensing fee)
If you honestly believe what you wrote, you're not talking about power, or even ideology. You're talking about religion
Huh? Where did you get this? My feeling is that you're just trying to brand an idea a religion, (read up on the definition, and I think you'll see the error in this) so that you can slag it. That's what we call a strawman argument.
Who appointed Stallman God?
Nobody, of course you're free to ignore him.
In his own way he is just as bad as Bill Gates, for they are both trying to dictate the terms under which we can distribute the software we write, or use the software we use that has been written by others
The only thing he attempts to prevent people from doing is taking freedom away from other people.
I reject both of them for trying to control what I do with the code I write. When I write something, _I_ should have control under the provisions it is licensed under.
One of the underlying assumptions that GNU has, (which I happen to agree with) is that programs are generally useful technical information, just like mathematical formulas or cooking recipies. If you invented a new way of doing math, would you think that you have the right come hell or high water to keep people from using it if you wanted to? Most people don't think so because they realize that math is something too important and too useful to let one person have a chokehold over. Same goes with programs.
So you reject someone dictating terms to you about how you distribute your program. I reject your bullshit laws that throw me in prison for helping a friend out by copying software, and your nonsense regulations telling me I can't use a common sense algorithm in my programs, that instead I am mandated by law to go around my elbow to get to my ass.
Please, resist the temptation to turn a serious debate into a silly game of semantics.
Given the definitions of both, it's clear that you could work out a plausible arugment semantically speaking that freedom implies power, or that power implies freedom, (since if you have power no one can stop you from doing certain things, etc).
None of that has anything to do with GNU, Linux, software, the freedom to run software, or anything else. This is not a cute semantic game, this is a discussion about software, and what rights people should have to the software that controls many aspects of their lives, whether they like it or not.
I think RMS and the FSF are going to start losing ground, because they're going to fall into the trap of many politicians who want to change the world: they're going to offend the moderates
You seem to be thinking of all of this as some primarily political abstract dance whose only consequence is who seems more popular in the public eye.
This is about SOFTWARE. Not about popularity. Not about who has the most money. It's about whether or not people are going to have the ability to control the software that controls many aspects of their lives. It's not some political debate where the person who kisses the most babies wins, it's about freedom.
Several years ago, fans of GNU and Linux were always talking about what a "revolution" it was, and how it was fundamentally different thinking, and how everything was going to change. Now, they seem to have abandoned that in favor of discussions about whether or not a particular "open source" company is going to make money or not, political arguments about whose the better speaker, (Tim O'Reilly or ESR, etc) and who can better represent "the community". (Implicit in all of that talk is the assumption that you or I know what is best for the community, how they are best represented, or what is easist)
Well screw the politics. GNU is offering you freedom in your software. Nobody's forcing you to take it. If you'd rather have the shackles of proprietary software, go use the proprietary software, and you may just find out why everybody's been talking about GNU/Linux for so long.
And forcing me to choose a license that meets the FSF's approval is an attempt to assert what?
Could it be...?
Power?
Nope...if you read the article, you will find that power is when you affect other people more than yourself. When pushing for free software, they are clearly trying to affect themselves - their ability to run the software, modify it, and so on.
They are trying to prevent people from doing one thing, and that is taking freedom away from others. But taking freedom away from others is no more a "right" or a "freedom" than taking people's property from them or their lives. Nobody complains that their inability to rob people is "the government taking their freedoms away from them".
Similarly, the ONLY action GNU wants to take away from you is your ability to take freedom away from other people. I think that's perfectly spelled out in the GPL. People don't have the right to take freedom from other people.
Say what you want about GNU, but they are the only voice in the free software or open source community that has the balls to stand up for what's right, rather than spending their time worrying which "open source" company is making their profit margins, whether or not we'll be taken seriously by Bill Gates (the answer is - who cares) and worrying about whether or not free software or open source is a "viable business model".
They stand for freedom, they stand for high quality software, and they got GNU/Linux to where it is today. Or maybe you'd like to try running Linux without the GNU system. Good luck.
People will attack them with glib wordplay like you've done in your post, but take them out of the equation, and you've got all the proprietary abuses you had with your Micros~1 software, just that it's a different cabal that would be running things.
GNU wants to give you freedom.
Nobody has the freedom to do things that are harmful to others. Nobody complains about not having the "freedom" to kill people, because that's not a freedom people have.
Similarly, GNU grants you every freedom except one - you can't take freedom away from other people by relicensing the software with restrictive conditions that don't give the people the same freedom you had.
To take freedom away from people, (i.e. not giving them the freedom that you had) is not a freedom - it's an issue of power. Just as taking someone's life or property away from them is not a freedom, taking someone's freedom away from them is also not a freedom with respect to software.
So it's not that GNU is "denying" you the freedom to license as you see fit, they just want to deny you the ability to take freedom away from other people, which itself isn't a freedom.
A trusted third party takes care of all that
Aaah...that key word. "Trusted". Like we trust ICANN? Like we trust the W3C and their RAND policies? Like we trust the government and their key-escrow schemes, along with carnivore surveillance?
The whole idea of the internet is to decentralize and share the work, as well as broaden the system to avoid one point of failure. Creating a central "trusted" facility to take care of these payments puts control of the flow of information in one place, since they control payments, who can make them, how they can make them, who they can make them to, what their cut is, (because it isn't going to be free) and a host of other things that sound like tiny details until they totally change the way people access the web.
There is no central organization that everybody can trust.
Ratings are a really weird moral artifact - I sometimes wonder why they still exist.
Oh sure, everybody wants content labeling so they know what they're getting, and god forbid some little kid should see guts splashed on the walls, but there are things about the rating system that seem to ooze enforcement of a moral standard nobody voted on.
For example, most scenes of full-frontal nudity or drug use automatically get you an R, regardless of the context. You probably couldn't film Michaelangelo sculpting "David" without getting an R. If you do a movie about drug use and how it will lead you down the path of destruction, you're going to get an R if you show anybody smoking a cigarette that is *insinuated* as being a joint. Better not show a person taking allergy shots, because that heroine abuse will get you an R!
And then there's the all-feared NC-17. The rating that knocks things out of theaters, makes studio execs cower in fear, and little babies all over the nation cry. Mostly sexual content lands you an NC-17. And not "pornography". Anything that has sexual content outside of what you see in "morally wholesome" movies will get you an NC-17. Since NC-17 is such a financial death sentence, no movie wants one and consequentially no content that would get you an NC-17 is ever released to the general public.
Now I'm not saying that I like all of my movies to have porn, violence, and drug use, but we're adults here. (Well, maybe I shouldn't say that on slashdot, but you know what I mean) Ratings seem appropriate *MAYBE* to protect little kids, (we'll ignore the fact that the parents should be doing that instead of the MPAA, but anyway) but I'm an adult and I don't want to be protected from anything.
Ratings make me uncomfortable because I know for a fact that there's content I don't see due to them, (like some things getting NC-17s) because it's a system built upon a "moral foundation" that I don't share. (Guns & death are better than sex and drugs) and because they're shoved down the throats of all age groups despite the fact that they only really pertain to a small subsection of the population.
Let's not figure out methods of moving from one rating to another, let's figure out how to fix or eliminate them.
Getting around quickly...hmmmm...
Unless a person wanted to go through a payment form to pay their $0.01 per page, (and of course each page of the payment form would cost another $0.01) these payments would have to be done automagically with credit cards, cookies, etc.
This penny/page idea seems to be suggesting that we all enable cookies and give our financial information to every single site that we visit. Because how else are we going to pay them? The mechnanics of getting the money from me to them means that I'm going to have to give up a lot of my privacy, and that's unacceptable.
I know it's getting hard to surf anonymously these days, but why are people so hell-bent to make it utterly impossible?
Make it a penny/nickel/dime a day for access to a whole domain, depending on the quantity and nature of the content within, and I might be interested
I agree with your points about how companies would segment articles to make you pay more, but at the same time, I don't think this idea would work either. What if you're mirroring an FTP site - should you pay $0.05 for sucking down 4GB of data in a day while the loser who just wanted to buy a t-shirt from the online site pays the same?
Also the larger problem is that both of these ideas, (yours and the penny-per-page thing) are too web/HTML centric. Is a 5MB shockwave file a page? 10 pages? What about mirroring an FTP site? What about embedded audio in a page? What about downloading trial software?
My guess is that if any micropayment system is put in place, a lot of content will start to migrate away from the web to other formats. (NNTP, Gopher, FTP, whatever - just something free as in beer) After all, Web != Internet
In-house development in large companies can often run into dozens or even hundreds of projects. Aside from the complexity of individually managing all of those, centrally locating all projects to have one interface, one set of tools, and one locus of control could be seen as very positive in a lot of organizations. Also, whenever large-scale software development is going on, most of the disparate pieces are really quite related. For example, when developing evolution, they developed loads of libraries that did specific things. Sure, they were written to be generic, but their source trees, release schedules, build frameworks and so on were still built to be related to the original project.
For example, there isn't a GNOME CVS. You can't check out the source code for GNOME. You check out the source code for about 50 different projects, all of which put together make up GNOME.
All of this is kind of silly though. Let's let VA worry about how to market their own stuff. IANABA (I am not a business analyst) and my guess is that 99.99999% of the people on this site aren't either. Leave that guessing for the bean counters. Far more interesting in this story are the implications for free software. The FSF has a lot of good points that they raised in their article, most of which are being wholly ignored by the threads here today.