Or how about a server that you stick in a wall socket of your bedroom and forget about? If the server registers its IP address on a global website, you could go to any PC anywhere, log onto the website, and communicate with your own mail server.
Add a distributed social network, Status.net, a photo gallery, etc. and you've got something. (BTW, one of the big conversation topics at the XSF Summit was about XMPP usage in the browser -- see my sig. This along with local cache would solve most of our problems.)
Let's be absolutely clear on this: by choosing a BSD-style license, Banshee devs were saying "Do anything you want with this program, up to and including closing it completely and selling it. Just give us credit." This move by Canonical is a far cry from closing, selling, and keeping all profits for themselves. No fouls.
Ummm. That's not my position at all. Instead, I say "If you don't violate the rules which were set by the people you are dealing with, it's OK," which is pretty much the definition of being polite. The devs chose the MIT license, presumably with forethought. You see, in your analogy, you're following the local law at the expense of the people you cut in on, but in reality, Banshee devs have been carrying signs which say "Sure, cut in line on me. I don't mind. This line is MIT licensed." If you cut in on that line, there's no big deal, right? You didn't take anything that they hadn't willingly offered.
Totally different than following the law but fucking people over.
What?!?! I'm not familiar with that story, but if it's this one, the Blender press release highlights the problem:
The Blender Foundation has issued a press release, a portion of which reads: On their web pages they intentionally hide that the products are distributions of GNU GPL licensed software, and that the software is freely downloadable as well. More-over, even after contacting them several times, they don’t remove copyrighted content from their websites. A lot of text and images have been copied from blender.org and random images – not even from blender – were copied from various CG websites.
In short, the problem is not that FLOSS is being sold, which the FSF itself endorses and which has a long history going back to Emacs early days, or even that someone other than the original developer is selling FLOSS (which the FSF doesn't care about in the least), but that there were copyright violations both on the product's website and on the program itself for not following the GPL requirements.
This is completely unlike the Banshee / Canonical situation because Canonical is complying with the license. Banshee isn't even GPL -- it's MIT:
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. [emphasis mine]
You need to learn more about the licensing of specific projects before you pull out the paintball gun to start smearing.
You don't seem to understand the difference between freeware and FLOSS. FLOSS never has anything to do with "the original dev's wishes." In fact, the Open Source Definition paragraphs 3-9 really show that devs don't get to have their wishes on use honored, and that definition is much more relaxed than the FSF's.
Almost every distribution's packagers modify the upstream packages in some way without forking or recognizing "the original dev's wishes." If Banshee doesn't want this kind of thing to happen, the devs will use a modified MIT on the store plugins, but they don't want to do that. Think back to Wine versus Transgaming and Wine's subsequent license change, and you'll realize that's true.
I'm not a huge fan of Canonical, but this argument over modifying an open-source application is silly. (In addition, Canonical contributes a good amount to FLOSS given its size, though not necessarily to the kernel itself -- Launchpad, U1 client, app indicators, and Unity are just recent examples.)
Everyone realizes this is Open Source Software, right? Every distro (Arch, recommended above, Debian, and Red Hat) all "take" other people's software and make money off of it. Canonical isn't under any obligation to cut GNOME or Banshee in at all. If Banshee didn't want it this way, the devs should have released freeware.
Yes. Used it extensively, both personally and for assignments I've given to students. Your "editor makes changes as the document evolves. There's both creation and brainstorming happening at the same time. What GDocs lacks in formatting is no problem since your "editor" can take the final document and make final formatting changes in a more featureful editor. Collaborative art for projects is even more amazing to watch.
A comment from someone in the government shows that this isn't going down without a fight. The FO's answers to inquiries claimed driver costs were high. Officials say that something's wrong if writing drivers costs more than refitting the entire bureau with new Win/Office licenses.
Do yourself a favor. Don't link to an eight-month-old article on a codec that is seeing constant development in both Google's libvpx and FFmpeg's ffvp8. The results don't mean anything anymore.
I'd argue that Chrome isn't niche at 10%. If it's niche, then Mac certainly is. Firefox, Chrome, and Opera together, though, definitely aren't niche. In fact, they'e approaching 50% in Europe. Android will almost certainly be WebM, too, by the way.
I have groups and went into custom before I posted. I gave you the only options FB gave me. If I can't figure out how to do it by going in two levels, it's not easy.
I only see two ways for FB to be dethroned in the short term, and both of them leverage current user bases which dwarf Facebook's. The first is that webmail providers like Google. Yahoo!, and Hotmail fight back against their inevitably declining numbers by integrating a standard and federated social network. Google has tried unsuccessfully to promote OpenID and Open Social, but oddly didn't make Buzz open. None of these leaders has managed to get real cooperation, but they could take over from FB if they worked together, and smaller providers could easily jump on that bus once it got rolling. The second possibility is in my sig -- that major browsers integrate XMPP and identity into the browser. ChromeOS is practically there, but I'm talking about real integration.
Either one of these is possible, but the window of opportunity is closing.
Slashdot Mirror
Or how about a server that you stick in a wall socket of your bedroom and forget about? If the server registers its IP address on a global website, you could go to any PC anywhere, log onto the website, and communicate with your own mail server.
Add a distributed social network, Status.net, a photo gallery, etc. and you've got something. (BTW, one of the big conversation topics at the XSF Summit was about XMPP usage in the browser -- see my sig. This along with local cache would solve most of our problems.)
Let's be absolutely clear on this: by choosing a BSD-style license, Banshee devs were saying "Do anything you want with this program, up to and including closing it completely and selling it. Just give us credit." This move by Canonical is a far cry from closing, selling, and keeping all profits for themselves. No fouls.
Ummm. That's not my position at all. Instead, I say "If you don't violate the rules which were set by the people you are dealing with, it's OK," which is pretty much the definition of being polite. The devs chose the MIT license, presumably with forethought. You see, in your analogy, you're following the local law at the expense of the people you cut in on, but in reality, Banshee devs have been carrying signs which say "Sure, cut in line on me. I don't mind. This line is MIT licensed." If you cut in on that line, there's no big deal, right? You didn't take anything that they hadn't willingly offered.
Totally different than following the law but fucking people over.
What?!?! I'm not familiar with that story, but if it's this one, the Blender press release highlights the problem:
The Blender Foundation has issued a press release, a portion of which reads:
On their web pages they intentionally hide that the products are distributions of GNU GPL licensed software, and that the software is freely downloadable as well. More-over, even after contacting them several times, they don’t remove copyrighted content from their websites. A lot of text and images have been copied from blender.org and random images – not even from blender – were copied from various CG websites.
In short, the problem is not that FLOSS is being sold, which the FSF itself endorses and which has a long history going back to Emacs early days, or even that someone other than the original developer is selling FLOSS (which the FSF doesn't care about in the least), but that there were copyright violations both on the product's website and on the program itself for not following the GPL requirements.
This is completely unlike the Banshee / Canonical situation because Canonical is complying with the license. Banshee isn't even GPL -- it's MIT:
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
all copies or substantial portions of the Software. [emphasis mine]
You need to learn more about the licensing of specific projects before you pull out the paintball gun to start smearing.
You don't seem to understand the difference between freeware and FLOSS. FLOSS never has anything to do with "the original dev's wishes." In fact, the Open Source Definition paragraphs 3-9 really show that devs don't get to have their wishes on use honored, and that definition is much more relaxed than the FSF's.
Almost every distribution's packagers modify the upstream packages in some way without forking or recognizing "the original dev's wishes." If Banshee doesn't want this kind of thing to happen, the devs will use a modified MIT on the store plugins, but they don't want to do that. Think back to Wine versus Transgaming and Wine's subsequent license change, and you'll realize that's true.
SPI is the official sponsor of the Debian Foundation and Arch takes donations. Canonical makes some money off of FLOSS, but is not making a profit yet.
I'm not a huge fan of Canonical, but this argument over modifying an open-source application is silly. (In addition, Canonical contributes a good amount to FLOSS given its size, though not necessarily to the kernel itself -- Launchpad, U1 client, app indicators, and Unity are just recent examples.)
It's like Ubuntu because it's based on Ubuntu, but Mint changes stuff and takes donations. It's kind of like Ubuntu's relationship with Banshee.
Everyone realizes this is Open Source Software, right? Every distro (Arch, recommended above, Debian, and Red Hat) all "take" other people's software and make money off of it. Canonical isn't under any obligation to cut GNOME or Banshee in at all. If Banshee didn't want it this way, the devs should have released freeware.
Yes. Used it extensively, both personally and for assignments I've given to students. Your "editor makes changes as the document evolves. There's both creation and brainstorming happening at the same time. What GDocs lacks in formatting is no problem since your "editor" can take the final document and make final formatting changes in a more featureful editor. Collaborative art for projects is even more amazing to watch.
Insync. Google Docs on your desktop.
You've got to love Slashdot, where everyone has a say, and no one ever RTFA (or even uses the product commented on).
Let's get this straight: MS Office doesn't have RT collab -- MS Office + Sharepoint does.
I can't understand why someone would willingly use C++ to develop user applications ( not systems dev ) in 2011. Even Android promotes Java for this.
Then use JavaScript.
A comment from someone in the government shows that this isn't going down without a fight. The FO's answers to inquiries claimed driver costs were high. Officials say that something's wrong if writing drivers costs more than refitting the entire bureau with new Win/Office licenses.
The spec doesn't matter much because there's a BSD-licensed reference implementation. The Internet was founded on such things.
Do yourself a favor. Don't link to an eight-month-old article on a codec that is seeing constant development in both Google's libvpx and FFmpeg's ffvp8. The results don't mean anything anymore.
I'd argue that Chrome isn't niche at 10%. If it's niche, then Mac certainly is. Firefox, Chrome, and Opera together, though, definitely aren't niche. In fact, they'e approaching 50% in Europe. Android will almost certainly be WebM, too, by the way.
Well, time on site passed Google in May. Does that count?
Yeah. Preview! The link was good, though. ;)
I have groups and went into custom before I posted. I gave you the only options FB gave me. If I can't figure out how to do it by going in two levels, it's not easy.
I teach high school, and all my kids are obsessed with Facebook.
Ummm. They are. Facebook surpasses Google as the Internet's top dog
Since we got Friends and Foes years ago. As an AC, you might not be aware of that
No it doesn't (at least my version). Friends only, friends of friends, or individuals. There is no easy way to post to groups.
I only see two ways for FB to be dethroned in the short term, and both of them leverage current user bases which dwarf Facebook's. The first is that webmail providers like Google. Yahoo!, and Hotmail fight back against their inevitably declining numbers by integrating a standard and federated social network. Google has tried unsuccessfully to promote OpenID and Open Social, but oddly didn't make Buzz open. None of these leaders has managed to get real cooperation, but they could take over from FB if they worked together, and smaller providers could easily jump on that bus once it got rolling. The second possibility is in my sig -- that major browsers integrate XMPP and identity into the browser. ChromeOS is practically there, but I'm talking about real integration.
Either one of these is possible, but the window of opportunity is closing.