"I don't have a problem with discrimination as long as I am not the one being discriminated against."
I don't have a problem with discrimination, period. Even it it's directed at me. This is an obvious and straightforward consequence of that most basic of right, freedom of association. You don't have to interact with me, and I don't have to interact with you.
Personally, I think discrimination based purely on age or race or gender is fundamentally stupid in a commercial context most of the time, but people have the right to be stupid when they choose. They do not have the right to force others to contract (buy / sell / employ / etc.) against their will.
The only way to separate infrastructure from services that use it are laws though.
Hardly. I could go start a co-op right now that was arranged as I described. The only way to force everyone, everywhere to adopt such a structure involuntarily, of course, is to pass laws making it mandatory. If that's what you want then we'll simply have to agree that our goals are mutually exclusive, however much our preferences may be aligned.
Therefore a co-op can be just as efficient or inefficient as any other corporation.
I'm well aware that a co-op is a form of corporation (which is why I added the "independently owned" qualifier for contrast). And it's true that there's nothing that says any given co-op can't be as efficient as a corresponding C or S Corporation. However, a co-op is, by definition, limited by its forced equality. It's perfect, of course, for the rare cases where its members actually have a near-equal stake in its decisions. However, it's only fair for the weight of a given shareholder's wishes to correspond to that shareholder's investment in the corporation, and at the same time it's hardly ideal for every member's investment to be limited to the least common denominator the way it is in a co-op. Fairness aside, you wouldn't get that additional investment without giving such investors' choices additional weight.
There is also a basic principle in capitalism that the greatest profit results from fulfilling the most urgent needs. Its corollary is that, in general, those with the greatest accumulation of past profits (i.e. those with the most to invest) tend to make the most efficient decisions. Forcing an equal share in the decisions when the members have manifestly unequal decision-making abilities is hardly efficient.
I have no problem with a stockholder owning shares in both the infrastructure owner and a service provider. A problem I will have is if the management is the same for both . ..
The managers are chosen by the shareholders. They don't have to be the same people, provided their policies (again determined, ultimately, by the shareholders) are compatible. If you don't mandate separate ownership any other policies are guaranteed to prove ineffective in the long run.
When I say I support separation of infrastructure and services, I mean that I like the idea of the infrastructure owner being a different entity from the ISP. I think it would be more efficient, and less open to conflict-of-interest. Specific infrastructure is important to me, because it's tied to my physical location, which suggests to me a co-op (even though I generally consider co-ops less efficient than independently owned corporations). Specific ISPs are not important to me; I'd rather have a choice of several providers competing primarily on price and not geography.
When you say you support separation of infrastructure and services, you apparently mean that any given group of shareholders shouldn't be permitted to both own the telecommunications infrastructure and provide services over it. Aside from the general consideration that there's no way to know whether separation is always the best policy, I see no way of enforcing such a decree in a manner consistent with my principles. Those principles only permit the use of force or threat of force in proportional response to prior aggression. Voluntary combination of infrastructure ownership and provision of service is not aggression, thus the use or threat of force is not justified. And thus I could never support a law mandating separation of infrastructure and service any more than I could support theft or murder.
. . . emulating the other platform only helps short-term and hurts badly long-term. . . . Fortunately more critical apps are becoming cross-platform . . .
If you favor cross-platform applications, why not support WINE? The goal of WINE is essentially to make all Windows(tm) applications cross-platform.
Look at it this way: with WINE (or cross-platform development), an application can run on Linux or Windows, with no advantage to either. Without WINE that application is almost certain to only run on Windows. The way to give Linux the advantage is to support Windows-only programs through WINE, while either creating better Linux-only programs to entice people to switch -- or demonstrating that Linux can run even designed-for-Windows programs better than Windows itself can (which may not be as difficult as it sounds; some programs already run more efficiently under WINE).
So far as I'm concerned taking back the fiber infrastructure isn't theft at all but repossession!
I'm well aware of that part of the telco's history, and if things are as bad as the rumors indicate I would agree that the existing infrastructure could subject to repossession. However, making plans to deceive the telco's just long enough for them to invest in a whole new fibre infrastructure, and then take it from them without any compensation -- those are the actions of a thief.
In any event I suspect the "promise" was made by organizations that no longer exist as separate entities, and the "contract" -- if there ever was such a thing -- was not made binding on whatever organization that might aquire the original telco's assets in a sale or merger. If this "promise" was never codified as a formal regulation or law, and is not part of a contract binding on the present telco companies, there's probably not much anyone can do about it that would not be an obvious act of aggression. (This issue -- loose contracts -- appears to be a common issue with "public/private partnerships". It's part of the general and ever-present inefficiency of government.)
While I don't generally like too many laws, I don't know how to separate ownership of infrastructure from ownership of services without laws.
You can't envision a co-op or similar owning the local infrastructure and buying bulk Internet services from a separate provider without either the co-op or the ISP being forced into such an arrangement? I find that hard to believe.
If it's a good idea no one should have to be forced into implementing it; they'd do so out of their own self-interest. Conversely, if you needed to use force to make people separate infrastructure from services that would prove that it's a bad idea, which eliminates any reason to make it mandantory.
Oh, I agree. As I said many tymes [sic] I think ownership of some infrastructure should be separate from the services that it provides. For instance I think it might be better for a community to build and own the infrastructure but allow open access for any services the infrastructure can provide.
For the most part I concur, provided you're not suggesting enshrining such separation into law. It would be a reasonable way to divide up the existing telco system, since the primary complaint seems to be that the infrastructure was publically funded in the first place, while the actual services are -- for the most part -- privately funded from current revenues.
Personally I've always thought communications infrastructure was a good opportunity for a community co-op, for the same reasons that power and natural gas are often provided by co-ops: local control over local infrastructure. The co-op could either purchase Internet access on behalf of its members, or just act as a large LAN that its members could use to communicate directly with each other and with various independent ISPs of their choice.
It makes sense to have the fiber in before requiring it be open.
Provided, of course, that one has no aversion to being exposed as a common thief.
I'd be the first to recognize that the history of the telco industry is insanely complicated, but the solution is to find a way to divide things up that takes both the private and public investments in the infrastructure into account and then leave things that way, with a clear division between public and private domains. Preferably the public part should be as small as possible to minimize the tragedy-of-the-commons issue. What's really insane is leaving the telecommunications infrastructure in its current half-public/half-private state. Trying to turn a private company into a quasi-government organization by way of intrusive regulation and handouts can only result in a combination of the worst aspects of bureaucratic inefficiency and regulatory capture.
Yes, you can use BSD code inside a GPL program, that's the whole... point of the BSD license. It let's the code be used anywhere and everywhere.
Provided you maintain the BSD license text, which is an additional restriction on distribution that a reasonable interpretation of the GPL might not allow. You can certainly combine GPL and BSD code, but the intersection of the two licenses might not let anyone distribute the result.
People pay for bottled water all the time. What's your point?
The points, as I spelled out carefully in my original comment, were that (a) the amount someone would be willing to pay for a good from a particular source has very little to do with the worth of that good to them; and (b) just because someone is "trying to make a living" from supplying a particular good is no reason not to choose a similar good from their competitors instead. There is no right to profit, only the right to seek profit through purely voluntary exchange.
Nobody is trying to make a living making air for you to breathe.
Actually they do -- just not for places where you already have all the air you need. Plenty of places supply air for underwater use, for example. They even have different varieties (mixtures) for different circumstances.
If it's worth nothing ($0.00) to you, don't download it, because it's worth nothing to you and therefore you have no need of it.
I could buy the air I need to breath -- it's certainly worth enough to me, being necessary for life and all, and people do sell bottled air for underwater use and the like -- but since I'm not under water and here air is superabundant ("not scarce") I don't have to pay anything for it, and quite logically choose not to. I'm sure the air-bottlers would love to eliminate their free competition, but unlike the music publishers they haven't managed to buy themselves a legislative distribution monopoly.
Translation: when a good is available for free from one source it's hardly surprising that people won't pay more for the same thing elsewhere. It has nothing to do with the good's "worth" and everything to do with the available alternatives -- which in this case are nearly identical in quality and as close to "free" as one is likely to find.
Because your support alone, is not enough to keep them afloat. You have to "hope" either way that the other parties will donate.
What if you could make the donation conditional? E.g. "I donate $5 provided the band releases no less than three new songs approved by [independent-rating-agency] in the next two years." The money could be held in trust and refunded (possibly with interest) if the band doesn't meet the conditions for whatever reason -- including the case where not enough others provided similar support.
Fans would probably be much more likely to donate if they could be sure of getting something in return, or their money back if things don't work out. Theoretically this could even scale up for very large projects, like motion pictures or medical R&D.
Windows NT was doing this more than half a decade before OS X was even released.
It's always been an option, assuming all the applications supported it, and it may have even been the default for the server versions like NT. However it must not have been the default for all post-NT versions of Windows or no one would be complaining about them starting to write protect program files in Vista.
Actually the point of CC wasn't to create a specific license, but rather to create a set of generic, standard, universal licenses representing the entire spectrum from all-permissive to all-restrictive, combined with a standard way of identifying each kind of license (the formulaic names, and the type-specific CC logos) and indicating them programmaticly (via XML) for filtering in e.g. file-sharing applications. I would say they've done fairly well on all these goals.
As for license proliferation, most of the existing licenses you refer to were designed specifically for code and have uncertainly applicability to artwork, prose, music, etc. E.g. the BSD license makes reference to documentation accompanying the work; what exactly would that mean for a sound recording? The CC licenses were designed to cover these other varieties of media.
now when bob needs some space and he goes to rm -f bobs_file the link to the file will go away, but the file will hang around and unless bob looks in/tmp he'll have no idea why.
If you think that's an issue I have an even stranger use case: if a program is running and you unlink the executable file, the space won't be freed until the program exits even though no dentry links to it remain in the filesystem. Since this is normal and expected behavior -- at least if you expect it to allow the file to be removed, unlike on Windows -- I don't think too many people are going to complain about that space not being freed up. If "bob" really wanted to know whether he could easily free the space all he needed to do was look at the reference count before deleting the file. (In your example it should've changed from three to four after running ln.)
The pre-installed parts, and programs installed through the package manager, are installed in/Applications. Programs can also be distributed in self-contained directories, in which case the executable would be owned by the user who installed it -- I think these generally go in a user-specific ~/Applications directory rather than the system version. I chose to use the less protected application directories for my example.
I don't have a Mac myself, but a relative of mine does and I occasional do tech support for it.
Any app should be able to mess with itself as much as it pleases, just not other apps.
False. Any multi-user system -- in other words, all modern operating systems -- have a primary goal of protecting users from the actions of their peers. This includes separate virtual memory, CPU scheduling, and write-protection for all shared files that are not specifically intended to be collaborative. Program files are particularly important because if you can modify or replace a program that another user later runs you can perform actions as if you were that user. (Due to the way Windows works you can modify the operation of a program by placing a key DLL file in its directory even if the program itself is write-protected, which makes it even worse.)
All other modern operating systems either have per-user copies of programs (Mac OS X) or only allow programs to write to per-user directories (UNIX). Windows was (very) late to implement this measure, but protecting applications from unauthorized modification is only the most basic common sense from a security point-of-view.
Yes, they shouldn't keep taxing the same money every time it changes hands. The government should just take their percentage directly as it rolls off the printing presses, and be done with it. (tongue planted firmly in cheek, if that's not obvious)
Don't know why you said that tongue-in-cheek; it seemed like a good idea to me. At least that way they can set the money aside while it's still in their hands, rather than taking it by force after it's been distributed. As a side benefit such a system would eliminate all the reporting and enforcement costs associated with regular taxes. It also divides the cost of government spending almost perfectly across the economy -- all money is devalued exactly the same amount -- and puts the focus on the amount spent, which is more significant economically than the amount collected since spending is much more focused on particular areas.
The only downside, of course, is the inevitable inflation, but they don't seem to have a problem with causing inflation at present and it seems to me that you'd get a similar result (higher real, inflation-adjusted prices) from any attempt to divert production toward less economically efficient goals, which is all government spending really accomplishes in the end. If they're going to manipulate the market they might as well do it by the least intrusive means possible.
. . . if your currency is backed by gold, what happens if the value of gold should go down due to a glut in the production market? Answer is nothing, because it *can't*.
No, the answer is that all the prices would adjust to reflect the new state of the market, just as when the value of a fiat currency (e.g. the U.S. dollar) varies relative to other goods.
If money is backed by gold then you can't logically trade gold separately from money.
Obviously, since they're the same thing. You can't trade dollars separately from money either.
This means that gold is artificially valued, and the prices of things that use gold would increase for no sound economic reason.
There's nothing "artificial" about value resulting from marketability, but I will allow that a rising demand for use of gold as currency would lead to a price increase for items incorporating gold. The "sound economic reason" for the increase is simple: scarcity, combined with the fact that gold is about the best substance around for a commodity currency. Very few other substances are as uniform, durable and divisible, and at the same time have the right density and scarcity for convenient trade.
we used to have one, and it didn't really work out that well. (sterling's return to the gold standard after WW1; collapse of Bretton Woods agreement in the 70s.)
I don't know much about your second example, but the problem with the return of the pound sterling to a commodity gold standard was that the sterling had been inflated since it was taken off the gold standard and they wanted to return to the standard at the old exchange rate. The resulting mess was a predictable result of trying to enforce an exchange rate between currency and gold that no longer applied; such attempts have the same issues as all other forms of price-fixing. Bimetallism -- two simultaneous commodity currencies with a rigid exchange rate -- consistently fails for similar reasons.
Of course, there are also several different types of "gold standard": actual trade in gold coins, trade in "warehouse receipts" exchangeable 1:1 for gold (like e-gold), and trade in bills denominated in (but not actually redeemable for) gold. My personal favorite is the system the U.S. had before treasury notes replaced gold as the base international currency, where their currency was bills denominated in quantities of gold ($1, $5, etc.) but said bills were only redeemable to other governments -- not individuals -- and only at an exchange rate so antiquated and artificial ($4.25 vs. $20+ market rate) as to heavily penalize any attempt to exercise even that limited priviledge.
Very well; I see I was being too narrow by using the term "commits". What I meant was all the code used in the project, whether part of the main program or any of its library dependencies; basically anything the final program could be considered a derivative work of.
. . . if you can meet the terms of that license (which by my reading would require removing any dependency on BSD-licensed code since the additional permissions cannot be meaningfully removed in accordance with section 7 of the GPL v3)
An important point, but if you re-read my original comment you'll notice that it does not apply to such cases, since not all the commits were GPLv2-or-later.
Something licensed that way can be used by both GPLv2 and GPLv3 projects, but can't use GPL3 code itself without converting to GPL3.
I know that. I meant the code is released under the GPLv3 in addition to whatever other licenses apply (like the GPLv2). Of course it's still available under the GPLv2 terms, at least until someone accepts a non-GPLv2 patch (GPLv3-only / GPLv3-or-later). For that matter the historical versions will remain under (at least) the GPLv2 no matter what patches are later accepted.
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I don't have a problem with discrimination, period. Even it it's directed at me. This is an obvious and straightforward consequence of that most basic of right, freedom of association. You don't have to interact with me, and I don't have to interact with you.
Personally, I think discrimination based purely on age or race or gender is fundamentally stupid in a commercial context most of the time, but people have the right to be stupid when they choose. They do not have the right to force others to contract (buy / sell / employ / etc.) against their will.
Hardly. I could go start a co-op right now that was arranged as I described. The only way to force everyone, everywhere to adopt such a structure involuntarily, of course, is to pass laws making it mandatory. If that's what you want then we'll simply have to agree that our goals are mutually exclusive, however much our preferences may be aligned.
I'm well aware that a co-op is a form of corporation (which is why I added the "independently owned" qualifier for contrast). And it's true that there's nothing that says any given co-op can't be as efficient as a corresponding C or S Corporation. However, a co-op is, by definition, limited by its forced equality. It's perfect, of course, for the rare cases where its members actually have a near-equal stake in its decisions. However, it's only fair for the weight of a given shareholder's wishes to correspond to that shareholder's investment in the corporation, and at the same time it's hardly ideal for every member's investment to be limited to the least common denominator the way it is in a co-op. Fairness aside, you wouldn't get that additional investment without giving such investors' choices additional weight.
There is also a basic principle in capitalism that the greatest profit results from fulfilling the most urgent needs. Its corollary is that, in general, those with the greatest accumulation of past profits (i.e. those with the most to invest) tend to make the most efficient decisions. Forcing an equal share in the decisions when the members have manifestly unequal decision-making abilities is hardly efficient.
The managers are chosen by the shareholders. They don't have to be the same people, provided their policies (again determined, ultimately, by the shareholders) are compatible. If you don't mandate separate ownership any other policies are guaranteed to prove ineffective in the long run.
I think we have a fractured-language issue here.
When I say I support separation of infrastructure and services, I mean that I like the idea of the infrastructure owner being a different entity from the ISP. I think it would be more efficient, and less open to conflict-of-interest. Specific infrastructure is important to me, because it's tied to my physical location, which suggests to me a co-op (even though I generally consider co-ops less efficient than independently owned corporations). Specific ISPs are not important to me; I'd rather have a choice of several providers competing primarily on price and not geography.
When you say you support separation of infrastructure and services, you apparently mean that any given group of shareholders shouldn't be permitted to both own the telecommunications infrastructure and provide services over it. Aside from the general consideration that there's no way to know whether separation is always the best policy, I see no way of enforcing such a decree in a manner consistent with my principles. Those principles only permit the use of force or threat of force in proportional response to prior aggression. Voluntary combination of infrastructure ownership and provision of service is not aggression, thus the use or threat of force is not justified. And thus I could never support a law mandating separation of infrastructure and service any more than I could support theft or murder.
If you favor cross-platform applications, why not support WINE? The goal of WINE is essentially to make all Windows(tm) applications cross-platform.
Look at it this way: with WINE (or cross-platform development), an application can run on Linux or Windows, with no advantage to either. Without WINE that application is almost certain to only run on Windows. The way to give Linux the advantage is to support Windows-only programs through WINE, while either creating better Linux-only programs to entice people to switch -- or demonstrating that Linux can run even designed-for-Windows programs better than Windows itself can (which may not be as difficult as it sounds; some programs already run more efficiently under WINE).
I'm well aware of that part of the telco's history, and if things are as bad as the rumors indicate I would agree that the existing infrastructure could subject to repossession. However, making plans to deceive the telco's just long enough for them to invest in a whole new fibre infrastructure, and then take it from them without any compensation -- those are the actions of a thief.
In any event I suspect the "promise" was made by organizations that no longer exist as separate entities, and the "contract" -- if there ever was such a thing -- was not made binding on whatever organization that might aquire the original telco's assets in a sale or merger. If this "promise" was never codified as a formal regulation or law, and is not part of a contract binding on the present telco companies, there's probably not much anyone can do about it that would not be an obvious act of aggression. (This issue -- loose contracts -- appears to be a common issue with "public/private partnerships". It's part of the general and ever-present inefficiency of government.)
You can't envision a co-op or similar owning the local infrastructure and buying bulk Internet services from a separate provider without either the co-op or the ISP being forced into such an arrangement? I find that hard to believe.
If it's a good idea no one should have to be forced into implementing it; they'd do so out of their own self-interest. Conversely, if you needed to use force to make people separate infrastructure from services that would prove that it's a bad idea, which eliminates any reason to make it mandantory.
For the most part I concur, provided you're not suggesting enshrining such separation into law. It would be a reasonable way to divide up the existing telco system, since the primary complaint seems to be that the infrastructure was publically funded in the first place, while the actual services are -- for the most part -- privately funded from current revenues.
Personally I've always thought communications infrastructure was a good opportunity for a community co-op, for the same reasons that power and natural gas are often provided by co-ops: local control over local infrastructure. The co-op could either purchase Internet access on behalf of its members, or just act as a large LAN that its members could use to communicate directly with each other and with various independent ISPs of their choice.
Provided, of course, that one has no aversion to being exposed as a common thief.
I'd be the first to recognize that the history of the telco industry is insanely complicated, but the solution is to find a way to divide things up that takes both the private and public investments in the infrastructure into account and then leave things that way, with a clear division between public and private domains. Preferably the public part should be as small as possible to minimize the tragedy-of-the-commons issue. What's really insane is leaving the telecommunications infrastructure in its current half-public/half-private state. Trying to turn a private company into a quasi-government organization by way of intrusive regulation and handouts can only result in a combination of the worst aspects of bureaucratic inefficiency and regulatory capture.
Provided you maintain the BSD license text, which is an additional restriction on distribution that a reasonable interpretation of the GPL might not allow. You can certainly combine GPL and BSD code, but the intersection of the two licenses might not let anyone distribute the result.
The points, as I spelled out carefully in my original comment, were that (a) the amount someone would be willing to pay for a good from a particular source has very little to do with the worth of that good to them; and (b) just because someone is "trying to make a living" from supplying a particular good is no reason not to choose a similar good from their competitors instead. There is no right to profit, only the right to seek profit through purely voluntary exchange.
Actually they do -- just not for places where you already have all the air you need. Plenty of places supply air for underwater use, for example. They even have different varieties (mixtures) for different circumstances.
I could buy the air I need to breath -- it's certainly worth enough to me, being necessary for life and all, and people do sell bottled air for underwater use and the like -- but since I'm not under water and here air is superabundant ("not scarce") I don't have to pay anything for it, and quite logically choose not to. I'm sure the air-bottlers would love to eliminate their free competition, but unlike the music publishers they haven't managed to buy themselves a legislative distribution monopoly.
Translation: when a good is available for free from one source it's hardly surprising that people won't pay more for the same thing elsewhere. It has nothing to do with the good's "worth" and everything to do with the available alternatives -- which in this case are nearly identical in quality and as close to "free" as one is likely to find.
What if you could make the donation conditional? E.g. "I donate $5 provided the band releases no less than three new songs approved by [independent-rating-agency] in the next two years." The money could be held in trust and refunded (possibly with interest) if the band doesn't meet the conditions for whatever reason -- including the case where not enough others provided similar support.
Fans would probably be much more likely to donate if they could be sure of getting something in return, or their money back if things don't work out. Theoretically this could even scale up for very large projects, like motion pictures or medical R&D.
It's always been an option, assuming all the applications supported it, and it may have even been the default for the server versions like NT. However it must not have been the default for all post-NT versions of Windows or no one would be complaining about them starting to write protect program files in Vista.
Actually the point of CC wasn't to create a specific license, but rather to create a set of generic, standard, universal licenses representing the entire spectrum from all-permissive to all-restrictive, combined with a standard way of identifying each kind of license (the formulaic names, and the type-specific CC logos) and indicating them programmaticly (via XML) for filtering in e.g. file-sharing applications. I would say they've done fairly well on all these goals.
As for license proliferation, most of the existing licenses you refer to were designed specifically for code and have uncertainly applicability to artwork, prose, music, etc. E.g. the BSD license makes reference to documentation accompanying the work; what exactly would that mean for a sound recording? The CC licenses were designed to cover these other varieties of media.
If you think that's an issue I have an even stranger use case: if a program is running and you unlink the executable file, the space won't be freed until the program exits even though no dentry links to it remain in the filesystem. Since this is normal and expected behavior -- at least if you expect it to allow the file to be removed, unlike on Windows -- I don't think too many people are going to complain about that space not being freed up. If "bob" really wanted to know whether he could easily free the space all he needed to do was look at the reference count before deleting the file. (In your example it should've changed from three to four after running ln.)
The pre-installed parts, and programs installed through the package manager, are installed in /Applications. Programs can also be distributed in self-contained directories, in which case the executable would be owned by the user who installed it -- I think these generally go in a user-specific ~/Applications directory rather than the system version. I chose to use the less protected application directories for my example.
I don't have a Mac myself, but a relative of mine does and I occasional do tech support for it.
Since when is 3.8GHz one of the unlicensed bands?
False. Any multi-user system -- in other words, all modern operating systems -- have a primary goal of protecting users from the actions of their peers. This includes separate virtual memory, CPU scheduling, and write-protection for all shared files that are not specifically intended to be collaborative. Program files are particularly important because if you can modify or replace a program that another user later runs you can perform actions as if you were that user. (Due to the way Windows works you can modify the operation of a program by placing a key DLL file in its directory even if the program itself is write-protected, which makes it even worse.)
All other modern operating systems either have per-user copies of programs (Mac OS X) or only allow programs to write to per-user directories (UNIX). Windows was (very) late to implement this measure, but protecting applications from unauthorized modification is only the most basic common sense from a security point-of-view.
Don't know why you said that tongue-in-cheek; it seemed like a good idea to me. At least that way they can set the money aside while it's still in their hands, rather than taking it by force after it's been distributed. As a side benefit such a system would eliminate all the reporting and enforcement costs associated with regular taxes. It also divides the cost of government spending almost perfectly across the economy -- all money is devalued exactly the same amount -- and puts the focus on the amount spent, which is more significant economically than the amount collected since spending is much more focused on particular areas.
The only downside, of course, is the inevitable inflation, but they don't seem to have a problem with causing inflation at present and it seems to me that you'd get a similar result (higher real, inflation-adjusted prices) from any attempt to divert production toward less economically efficient goals, which is all government spending really accomplishes in the end. If they're going to manipulate the market they might as well do it by the least intrusive means possible.
No, the answer is that all the prices would adjust to reflect the new state of the market, just as when the value of a fiat currency (e.g. the U.S. dollar) varies relative to other goods.
Obviously, since they're the same thing. You can't trade dollars separately from money either.
There's nothing "artificial" about value resulting from marketability, but I will allow that a rising demand for use of gold as currency would lead to a price increase for items incorporating gold. The "sound economic reason" for the increase is simple: scarcity, combined with the fact that gold is about the best substance around for a commodity currency. Very few other substances are as uniform, durable and divisible, and at the same time have the right density and scarcity for convenient trade.
I don't know much about your second example, but the problem with the return of the pound sterling to a commodity gold standard was that the sterling had been inflated since it was taken off the gold standard and they wanted to return to the standard at the old exchange rate. The resulting mess was a predictable result of trying to enforce an exchange rate between currency and gold that no longer applied; such attempts have the same issues as all other forms of price-fixing. Bimetallism -- two simultaneous commodity currencies with a rigid exchange rate -- consistently fails for similar reasons.
Of course, there are also several different types of "gold standard": actual trade in gold coins, trade in "warehouse receipts" exchangeable 1:1 for gold (like e-gold), and trade in bills denominated in (but not actually redeemable for) gold. My personal favorite is the system the U.S. had before treasury notes replaced gold as the base international currency, where their currency was bills denominated in quantities of gold ($1, $5, etc.) but said bills were only redeemable to other governments -- not individuals -- and only at an exchange rate so antiquated and artificial ($4.25 vs. $20+ market rate) as to heavily penalize any attempt to exercise even that limited priviledge.
Very well; I see I was being too narrow by using the term "commits". What I meant was all the code used in the project, whether part of the main program or any of its library dependencies; basically anything the final program could be considered a derivative work of.
I concede. I missed the part where you included yourself.
An important point, but if you re-read my original comment you'll notice that it does not apply to such cases, since not all the commits were GPLv2-or-later.
I know that. I meant the code is released under the GPLv3 in addition to whatever other licenses apply (like the GPLv2). Of course it's still available under the GPLv2 terms, at least until someone accepts a non-GPLv2 patch (GPLv3-only / GPLv3-or-later). For that matter the historical versions will remain under (at least) the GPLv2 no matter what patches are later accepted.
Not quite: it's under GPLv2 and GPLv3.