- If you assume providing communications to all citizens is important, why only the postal service? My network connection is both far more important and far less reliable. For many other people I know, it's the telephone. The vast majority of the USPS's job, today, seems to be delivering spam.
Straw man. I don't recall mOdQuArK saying that only the postal service is important.
- Even if you assume it needs to be postal service, why isn't the free market handling this? FedEx and UPS both ship to some pretty tiny, remote places. Where, exactly, is the free market failing to deliver to?
Some tiny remote places? Do they ship to all of them? Do they charge the same for delivering to "tiny remote places" as for large cities?
- Even if you assume it needs to be provided by the government, what's the reason for it being provided by the federal government? If there is a remote place which isn't handled by FedEx/UPS (see above), it seems like something which the state government could easily pay them to cover, for less than the price of an entire postal service.
Please explain why you think it would be cheaper for each state to operate its own independent postal service than for the federal government to operate a country-wide postal service.
- Even if you assume it needs to be implemented by the federal government, what's the reason the service needs sovereign immunity? USPS drivers are the worst drivers on the road, but as citizens we can't do squat about it. Whenever people have taken USPS employees to court, the offense invariably gets thrown out, due exclusively to their sovereign immunity. No other division of the federal government seems to require this protection.
Straw man again. mOdQuArK didn't say that the USPS should have sovereign immunity.
The parent didn't say that it did. It said that the "GPL explicitly allows redistribution at no cost", which is perfectly true.
That means selling GPLed code is not in itself a sustainable business model, unless you are careful not to sell the code to anyone who would redistribute it at a lower cost.
I don't know whether or not Microsoft actually used the BSD TCP/IP code or not, but if they did, it is one of the best arguments ever for the BSD license over GPL: interoperability. When free code can interoperate with well-established commercial code, it increases its chances of being used.
This is only an argument for BSD over GPL if you believe that a software license is superior if it leads to the code being used more widely.
What some opponents of the GPL are apparently unable to comprehend is that many, if not most, GPL advocates don't care whether their code is the most widely used; they care about whether the users of their code are able to use it in freedom.
Suppose back in the day, when Microsoft first added Internet capability to its operating systems, they decided not to use standard BSD code but instead wrote their own "TCP/IP stack". And suppose, as Microsoft often does, they had done it in a non-standard way, with non-standard extensions. Given the huge installed base of Windows PCs in businesses and homes, which set of standards do you think would have won out? The open Unix type TCP/IP, or the new, proprietary, Windows version of TCP/IP, with its undocumented and possibly patented extensions and incompatibilities?
TCP/IP vendors already have undocumented and patented extensions and incompatibilities.
Microsoft are able to get away with incompatible implementations of HTML because they control most HTML user agents.
In networking, it is far more difficult to be incompatible. If Microsoft had decided to implement an incompatible version of TCP/IP, then Windows computers would not have been able to talk to the majority of the nodes on the Internet, including the really important ones: the routers.
They would effectively have created their own partitioned-off version of the Internet, a kind of Microsoft Network, if you will. Which, of course, is exactly what Microsoft tried to do with the first incarnation of MSN.
Despite the "huge installed base", that attempt failed because the customers didn't want an incompatible Internet service. Microsoft used the BSD-licensed stack so they wouldn't miss the Internet bandwagon. If they had actually been in a position to develop a proprietary set of protocols which would lock consumers into using Windows with the Internet, they would have completely ignored the BSD stack.
Suppose you run a business or charity that finds sponsors to help battered women in relationships start a new life by getting affordable housing, jobs, lawyers for divorce and custody cases and so on. Now suppose my political ideals are that women should have no rights, be barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen. Should I be able to wear a shirt saying "the world went to hell when women got the vote" while working at your organization?
You wouldn't be working at my organization, if I knew your "political ideals" were directly opposed to the goals of the organization. Why would I trust to do your job? It'd be like a Christian Scientist being a surgeon.
I wish it weren't so (and I submit all my papers to http://www.arxiv.org/ as well to the journals), but the fact is, closed journals provide significant value both to the reader and to the submitting author. I'm not really trying to defend the system here, by the way, I'm just trying to explain what purpose it serves (and what an open alternative would have to match).
I think you're talking about "open" in a completely different way to the parent. You seem to be using it in the sense of "accepts articles from anybody without any kind of review", whilst the parent was clearly talking about making the journals open "for others to read".
Referees and Peer-Review
Peer review is great, but you don't have to charge the readers of your journal to be able to review papers before they are published.
Prestige and Selection
Charging people to read the journal creates only a false sense of prestige. Genuine prestige arises from the quality of the articles in the journal. If Nature was made freely available tomorrow, do you think many scientists would stop submitting articles to it because of that?
Review Articles
Nothing prevents an editor writing a review article for a journal you don't have to pay to read.
Editing
Yes, editing is very useful, but just because people don't have to pay to read a paper, that doesn't mean it can't be edited.
Access
I think a paper you can read for free can just about match the accessibility of a paper you have to pay to read.
Brutal honesty, we don't really care about the access restrictions. Every university has license to pretty much all the major journals. We can get them from wherever with a quick login and so can everyone we know. Sorry, but that's the truth.
Ah, here's your real argument. You don't care that almost everyone can't read many journals for free, because you can.
"A person acts as an investigations company for the purposes of this chapter if the person... engages in the business of obtaining... information related to... the cause... for... damage... to property."
For example, obtaining information related to the cause of damage to a computer.
Slashdot Mirror
- If you assume providing communications to all citizens is important, why only the postal service? My network connection is both far more important and far less reliable. For many other people I know, it's the telephone. The vast majority of the USPS's job, today, seems to be delivering spam.
Straw man. I don't recall mOdQuArK saying that only the postal service is important.
- Even if you assume it needs to be postal service, why isn't the free market handling this? FedEx and UPS both ship to some pretty tiny, remote places. Where, exactly, is the free market failing to deliver to?
Some tiny remote places? Do they ship to all of them? Do they charge the same for delivering to "tiny remote places" as for large cities?
- Even if you assume it needs to be provided by the government, what's the reason for it being provided by the federal government? If there is a remote place which isn't handled by FedEx/UPS (see above), it seems like something which the state government could easily pay them to cover, for less than the price of an entire postal service.
Please explain why you think it would be cheaper for each state to operate its own independent postal service than for the federal government to operate a country-wide postal service.
- Even if you assume it needs to be implemented by the federal government, what's the reason the service needs sovereign immunity? USPS drivers are the worst drivers on the road, but as citizens we can't do squat about it. Whenever people have taken USPS employees to court, the offense invariably gets thrown out, due exclusively to their sovereign immunity. No other division of the federal government seems to require this protection.
Straw man again. mOdQuArK didn't say that the USPS should have sovereign immunity.
The parent didn't say that it did. It said that the "GPL explicitly allows redistribution at no cost", which is perfectly true.
That means selling GPLed code is not in itself a sustainable business model, unless you are careful not to sell the code to anyone who would redistribute it at a lower cost.
I don't know whether or not Microsoft actually used the BSD TCP/IP code or not, but if they did, it is one of the best arguments ever for the BSD license over GPL: interoperability. When free code can interoperate with well-established commercial code, it increases its chances of being used.
This is only an argument for BSD over GPL if you believe that a software license is superior if it leads to the code being used more widely.
What some opponents of the GPL are apparently unable to comprehend is that many, if not most, GPL advocates don't care whether their code is the most widely used; they care about whether the users of their code are able to use it in freedom.
Suppose back in the day, when Microsoft first added Internet capability to its operating systems, they decided not to use standard BSD code but instead wrote their own "TCP/IP stack". And suppose, as Microsoft often does, they had done it in a non-standard way, with non-standard extensions. Given the huge installed base of Windows PCs in businesses and homes, which set of standards do you think would have won out? The open Unix type TCP/IP, or the new, proprietary, Windows version of TCP/IP, with its undocumented and possibly patented extensions and incompatibilities?
TCP/IP vendors already have undocumented and patented extensions and incompatibilities.
Microsoft are able to get away with incompatible implementations of HTML because they control most HTML user agents.
In networking, it is far more difficult to be incompatible. If Microsoft had decided to implement an incompatible version of TCP/IP, then Windows computers would not have been able to talk to the majority of the nodes on the Internet, including the really important ones: the routers.
They would effectively have created their own partitioned-off version of the Internet, a kind of Microsoft Network, if you will. Which, of course, is exactly what Microsoft tried to do with the first incarnation of MSN.
Despite the "huge installed base", that attempt failed because the customers didn't want an incompatible Internet service. Microsoft used the BSD-licensed stack so they wouldn't miss the Internet bandwagon. If they had actually been in a position to develop a proprietary set of protocols which would lock consumers into using Windows with the Internet, they would have completely ignored the BSD stack.
Suppose you run a business or charity that finds sponsors to help battered women in relationships start a new life by getting affordable housing, jobs, lawyers for divorce and custody cases and so on. Now suppose my political ideals are that women should have no rights, be barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen. Should I be able to wear a shirt saying "the world went to hell when women got the vote" while working at your organization?
You wouldn't be working at my organization, if I knew your "political ideals" were directly opposed to the goals of the organization. Why would I trust to do your job? It'd be like a Christian Scientist being a surgeon.
I wish it weren't so (and I submit all my papers to http://www.arxiv.org/ as well to the journals), but the fact is, closed journals provide significant value both to the reader and to the submitting author. I'm not really trying to defend the system here, by the way, I'm just trying to explain what purpose it serves (and what an open alternative would have to match).
I think you're talking about "open" in a completely different way to the parent. You seem to be using it in the sense of "accepts articles from anybody without any kind of review", whilst the parent was clearly talking about making the journals open "for others to read".
Referees and Peer-Review
Peer review is great, but you don't have to charge the readers of your journal to be able to review papers before they are published.
Prestige and Selection
Charging people to read the journal creates only a false sense of prestige. Genuine prestige arises from the quality of the articles in the journal. If Nature was made freely available tomorrow, do you think many scientists would stop submitting articles to it because of that?
Review Articles
Nothing prevents an editor writing a review article for a journal you don't have to pay to read.
Editing
Yes, editing is very useful, but just because people don't have to pay to read a paper, that doesn't mean it can't be edited.
Access
I think a paper you can read for free can just about match the accessibility of a paper you have to pay to read.
Brutal honesty, we don't really care about the access restrictions. Every university has license to pretty much all the major journals. We can get them from wherever with a quick login and so can everyone we know. Sorry, but that's the truth.
Ah, here's your real argument. You don't care that almost everyone can't read many journals for free, because you can.
You say that you're "just trying to explain what purpose it serves". So what are you saying here? The purpose of closed journals is to ensure that only the élite can read them?
"A person acts as an investigations company for the purposes of this chapter if the person ... engages in the business of obtaining ... information related to ... the cause ... for ... damage ... to property."
For example, obtaining information related to the cause of damage to a computer.
It's not rocket science.