Real freedom will be when everyone has to use only free licenses.
The GPL is not a free as in freedom license, it is restrictive. You are confused due to the fact that the restrictions are benevolent in nature to a rather large segment of the community. Don't confuse benevolence and freedom, they are not the same.
Nope, sorry, doesn't work that way. They'd like to think so, but any and all licensing and such has to be done prior to the sale. After the sale, normal law applies. You don't need a license to use things you purchased. Software companies like to pretend like they are special, but thus far all the court cases I'm aware of where this has come up (there aren't many) have held that click thru and/or shrink wrap EULAs are unenforceable. You paid for the merchandise, their time to get you to agree to a license is past.
I believe you are citing obsolete cases. More recently I believe courts have ruled that if the license is available to the consumer, on a website or available from the retailer, and the box refers to this then the shrinkwrapped EULA is enforcable.
Buddy, every buck the company saves pays a yacht tied to the piers of Monaco or the French Riviera,...
Uh, this is Gateway. About all they can afford is a canoe on a lake in North Dakota.
... but the product doesn't get any cheaper.
But it may delay a price increase, or a reduction in features. In any case the cost of a good is only one factor in its pricing, the willingness to pay of the consumer is a far more important factor and in your scenario it hasn't changed so neither has the price.
Actually your question indicated a real problem and the person who responded did a little dance to FUD the issue. You are entirely correct. Nothing stops someone from taking a GPL'd product and reselling it themselves. At local computer swap meets there were no shortage of people selling Red Hat and other distributions, people who have no association with Red Hat and who do not pass any of their proceeds back to Red Hat. With respect to the retail boxes, Red Hat dramatically reduced their retail package efforts due to low sales. You can get the DVD for a quarter of the prices from a 3rd party, or have it bundled with a book, etc. In short, trying to sell GPL'd software is very risky, and the risk increases as you become more well known. To describe the GPL as a commercial license is to take and entirely literal and unrealistic viewpoint.
WoW has also borrowed many ideas from the games before it, you could as well have said that WoW is an Asheron's Call or Everquest clone.
Not really. When a game triples or quadruples the number of players in a given genre it is not a clone of the earlier endeavors. It did something the others did not, and did so in a very very big way. See http://www.mmogchart.com/, click on "Subscribers 120+".
The biggest bully on the block never minds abuse of the rules, in their favor.
That's a poor assessment of this situation. MS is a bully but they are not using their patents. Their patent warchest seems defensive in nature. MS has deep pockets and is a prime target for the lawsuit happy patent portfolio companies that create nothing other than lawsuits. For a company with deep pockets, the patent warchest is an unfortunate necessity.
"The term Seabee Ingenuity grew from deeds recorded during the Solomon campaign. A Seabee Warrant Officer repurchased equipment from customers to set up shop. Bulldozer head gaskets were fashioned from scraps of metal and paper. Waxed paper and tinfoil from cigarette packages served as condensers while 55-gallon drums replaced worn-out radiators. Tires were filled with sawdust and concrete. One Seabee turned his dozer into a piece of combat equipment and wiped out a gun emplacement in the Treasury Islands. The work accomplished by these new Construction Battalions seemed almost impossible and yet the CAN DO standards set the precedence for the battalions that followed."
Now, imagine a similar situation involving software...
I can't. Are you familiar with the WW2 era Seabees. They weren't necessarily your teenage volunteers/draftees. Many were "old men" in their 30s and 40s who the Navy would have turned away due to their "advanced age", however these "old men" had many years of experience in construction, engineering and related disciplines so the Navy made an exception for the Seabees. So most of the people hacking away on FOSS would not be a similar fit experience wise, quality product wise, etc.
I was under the impression that one of the key points of fair use was for criticism and parody.. both forms of "republishing" as you describe it.
I'm not sure how that is relevant. Reviews contain excerpts not the entire work, and guitartabs was publishing neither reviews nor parodies. It essentially publishes a form of sheet music.
""Publishing" is not "personal, private usage". Fair use is not republishing. Fair use is sitting in your personal space looking at the tablature and playing."
In that case, no book reviews or movie reviews or any other review would ever be legal without express permission.
That is a straw man argument. It is also severely flawed on its face, reviews contain excerpts not the entire work.
Are we to believe that there has been some new revolution in the ability of a musician to transcribe things by ear? Why would this longstanding exemption suddenly need changing?
That is a misrepresentation, a straw man. Transcribing is not the issue. Publishing the transcription, in effect republishing the original artist's work, is the issue.
hmmm... perhaps Greed?
Who's greed? The greed of the owner of the copyrighted work who wishes to control publication or the greed of the web site operator who wants ad revenue?
What's the difference between listening to a song so you can guess at the tablature and publishing that... This is about personal, private usage.
"Publishing" is not "personal, private usage". Fair use is not republishing. Fair use is sitting in your personal space looking at the tablature and playing. It probably includes looking at your tablature and performing it in a public venue with the appropriate payments made to whatever organization "collects" the performance royalties. However publishing that tablature on the web (distribution) is something entirely different. I *am not* saying it is something bad, just that it is something that is not fair use.
The problem with "truly free software" is that companies/people are free to make it non-free. While that would be great for companies like Tivo, it is bad for end users, since they do NOT get the freedom to further enhance the proprietary fork of the code.
Proprietary forks are rarely bad for end users in general. The vast majority have no interest in enhancing the code, or getting someone to enhance it for them. However end users in general benefit from the proprietary code forking off of open code. Compare Apple's Mac OS X to Microsoft's Windows. Consider Microsoft's use of the TCP/IP stack. GPL 3 type tactics merely encourage companies to reinvent the wheel, to indulge in not-invented-here tendencies. Such tactics also deter investors and make it that much more difficult from startups to form or succeed. It squeezes the middle between the hobbyists at one end and the big companies at the other. I'd argue that end users benefit when there is a healthy and vibrant startup community.
But americans tend not to be aware of it, because a certain egomanicial general by the name of McArthur had this nasty tendency to ignore allies and claim that everything was done by the Americans.
Australia had, and still has, excellent soldiers. Mac Arthur was an egomaniac and no one other than Mac Arthur got credit for anything, regardless of whether they were American or Australian. However things are not as simple as you suggest. Australia had many of its forces in Europe trying to save England. Recall that the war had started in Europe years earlier than in the Pacific and England was just barely hanging on and absolutely needed Canadian, Australian, South African, etc forces. When Mac Arthur was ordered/tricked to leave the Philippines he was expecting to mount a counterattack to rescue the American forces left behind. When he arrived in Australia he found no counterattack/rescue force, not even enough of a force to defend Australia should Japan attempt a major invasion. The Australian generals were planning to trade most of the country for time and only defend the south eastern (?) quarter, to be fair that was where most of the population and development was located.
Instead of worrying what type of cable to run in the walls, run PVC pipe from every room down to a room in the basement. As standards change, it will make it a lot easier to re-run new cable to a central point.
Be very careful when buying plastic conduits. The stuff suitable for in home conduits is not necessarily what you will find in the gardening section for your lawn sprinklers. Some PVC pipes, glues, etc will emit some pretty nasty stuff when burning. Check your local building codes.
I'd do the networking all as Cat5-e with Gigabit Ethernet...
I've cooled on that idea quite a bit over the years, network jacks in every room is so 90s / dot bombish. I'd vote for running conduit to all room but only install boxes/jacks in very very select locations. For example the bedroom/den/loft serving as the serious home office and the garage (attic in NO?) with the noisy servers, let the rest of the house with the more consumer needs just go wireless. If things change, or there is a new owner, the conduit behind the wall provides a lot of flexibility, a selling point.
But now we're moving away from altruism and towards selfish reasons...
But that is my point, one benefits from altruistic behavior.
... We must then ask: is the ingrained human altruism "pure" altruism, or is it some kind of selfish variety? I would guess it must be the former, or the whole thing would hardly be newsworthy.
It is the later, or there would be no genetic predisposition developed through natural selection. The topic is newsworthy because most people have not studied math, behavioral science, Maslow, etc and have a superficial or romantic understanding of altruism. Or they are religious and believe that altruism exists in our genetic makeup because it is part of God's design for us.
"People who are being altruistic are satisfying *their* own needs."
The question remains as to why we have such needs. There is nothing inherently rational in wanting to help other people (apart from kin etc.) and so it seems irrational that we should gain pleasure from doing so. Why, then, have we evolved in such a way?
It raises one's self esteem, which raises one's confidence, which increases one's inclination to meet and overcome challenges. It also raises one's prestige within a group, so there are indirect benefits from other people. You could even expand this later point to indirect benefits from God, Karma, etc.
TFA is talking about finding that humans are not making the pure rational decisions (like the examples above) and it is hard wired.
People who are being altruistic are satisfying *their* own needs. Self-actualization, self-esteem, and belonging. There is nothing irrational about it. See Maslow's Hierarchy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of _needs
There are also mathematical models that show the best strategy is to cooperate until the "other person" cheats you, or you are facing the last interaction with that person. This extends to the "extended family". If I look after children of the group, the group looks after my child when I am not there. Again, all very rational.
The motivation for corn-based ethanol is political.
Only in part. There is also a national security angle. Replacing a gallon of foreign fuel with a gallon of domestic fuel is a good thing, and may very well outweigh the slight increase in energy required for production. Keep in mind that the world's demand for fuel is rapidly increasing as more nations become more developed. The demand is growing far faster than the ability for alternative energy sources to supply.
It drives up the price of corn and could lead to severe malnutrition in Mexico and other poor countries which cannot afford higher prices for basic food items.
FUD. The governments of poor countries can limit the use of corn for fuel if such issues exist.
That's always my first question when I see an article like this; who could ever think this was a good idea? Obviously not someone who reads Slashdot.
I don't know how much Microsoft is paying, but it must be alot if people are thinking that such a ridiculous idea makes sense.
This is precisely the sort of thing that Google is working on as well. It is all about targeted advertising, and Microsoft wants to be a provider of targeted advertising like Google. Q. Why did you think that Google offers you free email service? A. So they can build up their personal profile of you and provided better targeted advertising.
... designed by a bunch of educators... school history curriculum, desgined by educators...
Having attended public school in the US I am not overly impressed with "professional educators". Their competency levels vary wildly. The best history teachers I had were those who had little respect for the curriculum and deviated from it. You are going to have to do far more than toss out a fancy title to be convincing.
I used to think that too until I saw Intel branded computers being rolled in for hardened industrial use in the 90s. I don't know if they still do this. However I do recall that these Intel machines rocked, during electrostatic testing they kept on running long after Dells and HPs were dead and smoking.
Slashdot Mirror
Real freedom will be when everyone has to use only free licenses.
The GPL is not a free as in freedom license, it is restrictive. You are confused due to the fact that the restrictions are benevolent in nature to a rather large segment of the community. Don't confuse benevolence and freedom, they are not the same.
Nope, sorry, doesn't work that way. They'd like to think so, but any and all licensing and such has to be done prior to the sale. After the sale, normal law applies. You don't need a license to use things you purchased. Software companies like to pretend like they are special, but thus far all the court cases I'm aware of where this has come up (there aren't many) have held that click thru and/or shrink wrap EULAs are unenforceable. You paid for the merchandise, their time to get you to agree to a license is past.
I believe you are citing obsolete cases. More recently I believe courts have ruled that if the license is available to the consumer, on a website or available from the retailer, and the box refers to this then the shrinkwrapped EULA is enforcable.
Buddy, every buck the company saves pays a yacht tied to the piers of Monaco or the French Riviera, ...
... but the product doesn't get any cheaper.
Uh, this is Gateway. About all they can afford is a canoe on a lake in North Dakota.
But it may delay a price increase, or a reduction in features. In any case the cost of a good is only one factor in its pricing, the willingness to pay of the consumer is a far more important factor and in your scenario it hasn't changed so neither has the price.
2) They aren't an exchange.
:-), you receiving a license to use copyright material.
Note the "L" in "EULA"
Actually your question indicated a real problem and the person who responded did a little dance to FUD the issue. You are entirely correct. Nothing stops someone from taking a GPL'd product and reselling it themselves. At local computer swap meets there were no shortage of people selling Red Hat and other distributions, people who have no association with Red Hat and who do not pass any of their proceeds back to Red Hat. With respect to the retail boxes, Red Hat dramatically reduced their retail package efforts due to low sales. You can get the DVD for a quarter of the prices from a 3rd party, or have it bundled with a book, etc. In short, trying to sell GPL'd software is very risky, and the risk increases as you become more well known. To describe the GPL as a commercial license is to take and entirely literal and unrealistic viewpoint.
WoW has also borrowed many ideas from the games before it, you could as well have said that WoW is an Asheron's Call or Everquest clone.
Not really. When a game triples or quadruples the number of players in a given genre it is not a clone of the earlier endeavors. It did something the others did not, and did so in a very very big way. See http://www.mmogchart.com/, click on "Subscribers 120+".
The biggest bully on the block never minds abuse of the rules, in their favor.
That's a poor assessment of this situation. MS is a bully but they are not using their patents. Their patent warchest seems defensive in nature. MS has deep pockets and is a prime target for the lawsuit happy patent portfolio companies that create nothing other than lawsuits. For a company with deep pockets, the patent warchest is an unfortunate necessity.
"The term Seabee Ingenuity grew from deeds recorded during the Solomon campaign. A Seabee Warrant Officer repurchased equipment from customers to set up shop. Bulldozer head gaskets were fashioned from scraps of metal and paper. Waxed paper and tinfoil from cigarette packages served as condensers while 55-gallon drums replaced worn-out radiators. Tires were filled with sawdust and concrete. One Seabee turned his dozer into a piece of combat equipment and wiped out a gun emplacement in the Treasury Islands. The work accomplished by these new Construction Battalions seemed almost impossible and yet the CAN DO standards set the precedence for the battalions that followed."
...
Now, imagine a similar situation involving software
I can't. Are you familiar with the WW2 era Seabees. They weren't necessarily your teenage volunteers/draftees. Many were "old men" in their 30s and 40s who the Navy would have turned away due to their "advanced age", however these "old men" had many years of experience in construction, engineering and related disciplines so the Navy made an exception for the Seabees. So most of the people hacking away on FOSS would not be a similar fit experience wise, quality product wise, etc.
I was under the impression that one of the key points of fair use was for criticism and parody.. both forms of "republishing" as you describe it.
I'm not sure how that is relevant. Reviews contain excerpts not the entire work, and guitartabs was publishing neither reviews nor parodies. It essentially publishes a form of sheet music.
""Publishing" is not "personal, private usage". Fair use is not republishing. Fair use is sitting in your personal space looking at the tablature and playing."
In that case, no book reviews or movie reviews or any other review would ever be legal without express permission.
That is a straw man argument. It is also severely flawed on its face, reviews contain excerpts not the entire work.
Are we to believe that there has been some new revolution in the ability of a musician to transcribe things by ear? Why would this longstanding exemption suddenly need changing?
That is a misrepresentation, a straw man. Transcribing is not the issue. Publishing the transcription, in effect republishing the original artist's work, is the issue.
hmmm... perhaps Greed?
Who's greed? The greed of the owner of the copyrighted work who wishes to control publication or the greed of the web site operator who wants ad revenue?
What's the difference between listening to a song so you can guess at the tablature and publishing that ... This is about personal, private usage.
"Publishing" is not "personal, private usage". Fair use is not republishing. Fair use is sitting in your personal space looking at the tablature and playing. It probably includes looking at your tablature and performing it in a public venue with the appropriate payments made to whatever organization "collects" the performance royalties. However publishing that tablature on the web (distribution) is something entirely different. I *am not* saying it is something bad, just that it is something that is not fair use.
When they are free to proprietarize the open code, then _everyone else_ has to reinvent the wheel.
You subscribe to a fallacy, open code remains open. Only their changes, not the open code, are proprietary.
The problem with "truly free software" is that companies/people are free to make it non-free. While that would be great for companies like Tivo, it is bad for end users, since they do NOT get the freedom to further enhance the proprietary fork of the code.
Proprietary forks are rarely bad for end users in general. The vast majority have no interest in enhancing the code, or getting someone to enhance it for them. However end users in general benefit from the proprietary code forking off of open code. Compare Apple's Mac OS X to Microsoft's Windows. Consider Microsoft's use of the TCP/IP stack. GPL 3 type tactics merely encourage companies to reinvent the wheel, to indulge in not-invented-here tendencies. Such tactics also deter investors and make it that much more difficult from startups to form or succeed. It squeezes the middle between the hobbyists at one end and the big companies at the other. I'd argue that end users benefit when there is a healthy and vibrant startup community.
But americans tend not to be aware of it, because a certain egomanicial general by the name of McArthur had this nasty tendency to ignore allies and claim that everything was done by the Americans.
Australia had, and still has, excellent soldiers. Mac Arthur was an egomaniac and no one other than Mac Arthur got credit for anything, regardless of whether they were American or Australian. However things are not as simple as you suggest. Australia had many of its forces in Europe trying to save England. Recall that the war had started in Europe years earlier than in the Pacific and England was just barely hanging on and absolutely needed Canadian, Australian, South African, etc forces. When Mac Arthur was ordered/tricked to leave the Philippines he was expecting to mount a counterattack to rescue the American forces left behind. When he arrived in Australia he found no counterattack/rescue force, not even enough of a force to defend Australia should Japan attempt a major invasion. The Australian generals were planning to trade most of the country for time and only defend the south eastern (?) quarter, to be fair that was where most of the population and development was located.
Instead of worrying what type of cable to run in the walls, run PVC pipe from every room down to a room in the basement. As standards change, it will make it a lot easier to re-run new cable to a central point.
Be very careful when buying plastic conduits. The stuff suitable for in home conduits is not necessarily what you will find in the gardening section for your lawn sprinklers. Some PVC pipes, glues, etc will emit some pretty nasty stuff when burning. Check your local building codes.
I'd do the networking all as Cat5-e with Gigabit Ethernet...
I've cooled on that idea quite a bit over the years, network jacks in every room is so 90s / dot bombish. I'd vote for running conduit to all room but only install boxes/jacks in very very select locations. For example the bedroom/den/loft serving as the serious home office and the garage (attic in NO?) with the noisy servers, let the rest of the house with the more consumer needs just go wireless. If things change, or there is a new owner, the conduit behind the wall provides a lot of flexibility, a selling point.
"It also raises one's prestige within a group"
...
... We must then ask: is the ingrained human altruism "pure" altruism, or is it some kind of selfish variety? I would guess it must be the former, or the whole thing would hardly be newsworthy.
But now we're moving away from altruism and towards selfish reasons
But that is my point, one benefits from altruistic behavior.
It is the later, or there would be no genetic predisposition developed through natural selection. The topic is newsworthy because most people have not studied math, behavioral science, Maslow, etc and have a superficial or romantic understanding of altruism. Or they are religious and believe that altruism exists in our genetic makeup because it is part of God's design for us.
"People who are being altruistic are satisfying *their* own needs."
The question remains as to why we have such needs. There is nothing inherently rational in wanting to help other people (apart from kin etc.) and so it seems irrational that we should gain pleasure from doing so. Why, then, have we evolved in such a way?
It raises one's self esteem, which raises one's confidence, which increases one's inclination to meet and overcome challenges. It also raises one's prestige within a group, so there are indirect benefits from other people. You could even expand this later point to indirect benefits from God, Karma, etc.
TFA is talking about finding that humans are not making the pure rational decisions (like the examples above) and it is hard wired.
f _needs
People who are being altruistic are satisfying *their* own needs. Self-actualization, self-esteem, and belonging. There is nothing irrational about it. See Maslow's Hierarchy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_o
There are also mathematical models that show the best strategy is to cooperate until the "other person" cheats you, or you are facing the last interaction with that person. This extends to the "extended family". If I look after children of the group, the group looks after my child when I am not there. Again, all very rational.
I'm far more comfortable with server-side monitoring than with client-side monitoring.
Google does both server and client side.
The motivation for corn-based ethanol is political.
Only in part. There is also a national security angle. Replacing a gallon of foreign fuel with a gallon of domestic fuel is a good thing, and may very well outweigh the slight increase in energy required for production. Keep in mind that the world's demand for fuel is rapidly increasing as more nations become more developed. The demand is growing far faster than the ability for alternative energy sources to supply.
It drives up the price of corn and could lead to severe malnutrition in Mexico and other poor countries which cannot afford higher prices for basic food items.
FUD. The governments of poor countries can limit the use of corn for fuel if such issues exist.
That's always my first question when I see an article like this; who could ever think this was a good idea? Obviously not someone who reads Slashdot. I don't know how much Microsoft is paying, but it must be alot if people are thinking that such a ridiculous idea makes sense.
This is precisely the sort of thing that Google is working on as well. It is all about targeted advertising, and Microsoft wants to be a provider of targeted advertising like Google. Q. Why did you think that Google offers you free email service? A. So they can build up their personal profile of you and provided better targeted advertising.
... designed by a bunch of educators ... school history curriculum, desgined by educators ...
Having attended public school in the US I am not overly impressed with "professional educators". Their competency levels vary wildly. The best history teachers I had were those who had little respect for the curriculum and deviated from it. You are going to have to do far more than toss out a fancy title to be convincing.
Intel doesn't make computers, they make chips.
I used to think that too until I saw Intel branded computers being rolled in for hardened industrial use in the 90s. I don't know if they still do this. However I do recall that these Intel machines rocked, during electrostatic testing they kept on running long after Dells and HPs were dead and smoking.