Actually, RMS is more a John The Baptist than a saint - railing against the establishment, morally pure, living in the desert eating naught but locusts and honey and using over the top, fire and brimstone sermons to try and draw the masses towards salvation. And abso-fucking-loutley batshit crazy.
He is however, necessary if we are to make it to the promised land.;-)
"morally pure" in a subjective sense, not an absolute sense. I'm reluctant to use the word "cult" because of the negative connotations but there is a little bit of cult-like behaviour going on here and like many cults a superior morality is attributed to the leader. In reality RMS is a guy with a good idea and a good piece of code or two, but also a guy who thinks he has more answers than he does in reality. Coming from an academic environment he had the luxury of giving away code so the personal sacrifice angle may be overblown. Yes, he deserves credit. Yes, if he offers you some koolaid it will be safe to drink. Yes, it would be safe for a Congressman to visit him at home. But there is a little bit of a cult thing going on here, mostly harmless though.
Stallman probably deserves more credit than he gets among most Linux users for basically founding the Free Software movement, but his relevance to what the movement has become since then is fading.
Actually I think his contribution is overstated. Don't get me wrong, he deserves credit, but his contribution is more coining a name for a movement, not creating the movement, and of course writing a license. People were sharing code, posting code they needed help with and more importantly getting help, long before any "movement" existed. Personally I think the open source movement benefited more from technology than human enthusiasm. PC ownership reaching a critical mass, dropping in price, and the internet becoming accessible to all. It sure beat posting code to various BBS'. There was an active community before Linux, before FreeBSD, before the net, etc. The real change was the ease of communication and collaboration, not a license or a movement, they were secondary IMHO.
Really, I see "Apple" and an Apple logo in iTMS
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On Apple vs Apple
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Go open iTMS right now. There is no Apple logo anywhere on the front page or any of their other pre-produced pages. Good thing we need a lawsuit to clear up the status quo.
Are you basis this on what a Mac advocate told you, sure you have not actually run iTunes? After launching iTunes and selecting the Music Store I find a big black Apple logo.
So you argue the larger/richer corp should win?
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On Apple vs Apple
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Apple Comp. is not cutting records of bands and selling it.
So their business is not growing but they still are in business. Are you arguing that the small businesss should roll over and accomodate the wishes of the larger growing corporation? That is in fact what you are arguing whether or not you had intended to do so.
True there was an agreement before but frankly it should have never been signed.
(1) So you are arguing that large corporation are above the law, that they may enter into contracts when convenient and break them without consequence when convenient to do so? Perhaps when what has changed is merely that they are now far stronger and their opponent far weaker? That is in fact what you are arguing whether or not you had intended to do so.
(2) "Never should have been signed"? How self serving a conclusion, have you considered that Apple Computer was about to *lose* the case and the settlement was the less risky alternative?
I own a Mac, I own an iPod, I will most likely own more in the future. However liking the products does not mean liking the corporation. Apple is every bit as evil as MS, they have merely had fewer opportunities and they have much much better public relations. The later can't be hurt by Jobs being a saleman rather than a geek like Gates.
But nothing TOO different please. Please don't change the status quo TOO much. Don't rock the boat if you're in it. I don't want to put my music on this interweb thingy...
Let who put it on the internet? A company that you were nice to and gave a break to by letting them use your name if they stayed out of the music business. Despite the fact that the two founders were from a generation intimately familiar with the Beatles and probably 100% aware of Apple Records. You gave them the benefit of the doubt. Decades later when they need to reinvent the company (face it, it is more of an iPod company than a computer company in the eyes of most consumers and investors) they broke their word and entered the music business. To add insult to injury they then sue you to steal your name in your primary business.
I own a Mac, I own an iPod, I will most likely own more in the future. However liking the products does not mean liking the corporation. Apple is every bit as evil as MS, they have had just had fewer opportunities and they have much much better public relations. The later can't be hurt by Jobs being a saleman rather than a geek like Gates.
If I was the chinese and I wanted to conduct industrial espionage wouldn't I target phones instead of PCs?
Yes and no. To possibly get inside a decision making process, phones may be useful. To get "dirt" in order to coerce/blackmail, phones would seem quite useful. However phones only access a tiny fraction of the valuable data that computers have access to. Consider a company that makes the "material" that covers stealth aircraft, it might be useful to trickle out all purchase orders to chemical supply companies. Actually a more plausable scenario would be the other direction, trickle out all purchase orders at the chemical supply company and look for those from the defense contractor. The preceding is oversimplified to illustrate a point. However if you can become a supplier to a large cross section of companies in various industries collecting and mining data could provide useful info.
Xenophobia. I have nothing further to add, because that word sums it all up. While there are valid threats against the USA and in the intelligence community there are measures to tap into restricted data, they are NOT going to mess with PCs for fuck's sake! If someone has high security requirements that entity is not going to buy from a consumer level shop ANYWAY.
That's terribly naive. You fail to realize that most espionage is industrial. Billions of dollars are lost due to industrial espionage, foreign countries acquire R&D info that saves them time and money, their military tech is advanced by years,...
Also naive is to think that people with high security are the only target. In the real world espionage often goes for indirect info. What companies are supplying the goods and services, are their changes in orders, their production, etc. You don't have to get the general's plan for an invasion, you may only need to identify his preparations.
Any built-in addition features in the hardware, the bios or even the preinstalled operating system would be immediately detected and destroy the entire PC business of Lenovo abroad.
Not necessarily. They could claim that they were infiltrated by a government agent who made a substitution/alteration. It actually is plausible, the government might not want to trust management or more importantly the fewer people who know the less likely it is to leak. They could successfully argue that any corporation or manufacturing process in any country is subject to such infiltration.
Dell, HP, IBM, Apple, and many, many others are most of the time built right next to each other in China.
However US corporations can inspect the goods returned from manufacturing, verifying that the ROMs and the installed software matches what they provided. I'd imagine they would be doing so already, due to QA and antivirus concerns. A foreign agent would need to infiltrate the US corp to alter the expected results. Plauable but more difficult than the corp and the manufacturing being in an "unfriendly" country.
All you damn Apple freaks need to shut the hell up about saying that Apple somehow paid for BSD licensing.
No, I said Apple helped pay for the original BSD development and some of that code remains at the heart of OpenBSD today.
The pure zealousness of you mac people scare me.
You're stupidity frightens me, although calling me a Mac zealot is personally quite amusing given the arguments I've had with real zealots. I mention Apple because they were cited as a company who leeches off of BSD. Now I do own a Mac, but I also own several PCs that boot Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD. I even support OpenBSD by purchasing a set of CDs every year.
Oh I see, making money for Theo was the whole idea of OpenBSD? NOW you tell us!
Unless they are academics and thereby have their open source development efforts subsidized they have to generate some sort of income to keep their pet projects going and avoid having to get "real" jobs.
"A BSD based project is more likely to get inside a corporation and possibly more likely to create consulting work."
Which is a good thing if you are planning to make people appropriate, modify and sell your code while not letting you look at it ever again, in hopes that somehow your celebrity status will make some of them hire you.
Not celebrity status, expertise with the code. It takes time for a 3rd party to learn and become proficient with someone else's code. The most cost effective way of getting the changes you want may easily be to hire the original author.
Which, in most cases, as Theo is finding the hard way, is the only type of return expected from commercial involvment in your project. Hoping to get hired by someone using your code is wishful thinking in vast majority of cases. GPL folks understand that, and operate accordingly.
In part that is another fallacy. Most work on GPL'd code is never seen by the original authors or the community. Most software is internal, it is not distributed outside the company, and the GPL does *not* require the changes to be returned to the community unless thers is public distribution. Technically you only have to share the changes with those you distribute executables to, so two companies could share work and keep the community in the dark. FWIW, the majority of software being for internal consumption is the real lock Microsoft has on the market.
Look, you keep spouting that crap.
They paid for BSD.
That is different than FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, BSDOS, or any of the other things that forked off it long long ago.
Not really, the code Apple and others paid for is still at the core of those projects. Apologies if reality conflicts with your politics.
They paid for ancient BSD development. However after the court cases were over, that went away.
They have every *legal* right to use it.
They have an ethical responsibility to contribute but this is in no way required.
It's not so ancient: "Copyright 1979, 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved". An this code remains at the heart of the *BSD projects.
Morality is individual, so were you talking about a person it would be their choice as to what their morality is. As you're discussing corporations, they inherently and as required by law are entirely amoral.
Completely false. They are permitted by law to be amoral in some respect, they are not required to be. A corporation can choose to act in a moral fashion. In any case Apple satisfies the "open source morality" issue since they have also made recent contributions, for example their formerly closed source HFS+ code.
The thing to me that most sucks was that Stallman and the BSD folks basically made a bet on human nature.
The optomists are losing badly.
Untrue. We've seen various GPL based projects in financial trouble and begging for donations as well, including Linux distributions. Also, in general profit with open source is often said to be from consulting. Whether a project is GPL or BSD based has little effect, you could even argue that BSD has an advantage since it is easier to get into a corporation and a corporation may not want to share the changes they paid for.
"BSD vs GPL is not relevant. Theo's bed was made by driving away potential sources of income like DARPA."
Yes it is, as a part of a very long list of good advice he received over the years on a lot of things
No, that's a fallacy. In general under open source the money is in consulting, not in the development. A BSD based project is more likely to get inside a corporation and possibly more likely to create consulting work. Whether a project is BSD or GPL, if someone doesn't want to code themselves, they can hire others to do the work. The only difference is whether that work goes back to the community at large and for the company that needed specialized changes that is irrlevant and it may even be counterproductive to the company. The GPL is not some magic pill. We've seen numerous GPL based projects in financial trouble and begging for donations around here as well.
GPL based distributions have to beg too. I have rough recollections of several such requests appearing on slashdot in recent memory, I don't recall the details but a quick google finds:
"The first public signs of financial trouble at MandrakeSoft appeared in March 2002 when Mandrake began asking users for donations and changed their support structure to get a new revenue stream." http://geek.com/news/geeknews/2003Jan/osg200301160 18188.htm
Theo's bed was made by driving away potential sources of income like DARPA, not his choice of BSD over GPL.
This is a perfect example of the problem with BSD licencing. Under the various BSD licences, its perfectly OK to take a piece of code and sell it, either modified or exactly as found, without in any way recognising or contrubuting to the project.
And BSD developers know that, accept that, and often want corporations to use their stuff. With easier corporate acceptance there is more opportunity for consulting. Unfortunately with someone like Theo scaring away corporations his pet projects suffer, I'm thinking the DARPA incident.
I've mentioned this in another post but be careful with words like "contributing". As California corporations and taxpayers companies like Apple and SCO paid for BSD's development. Apple have every moral and ethical right to use it.
Some of the OpenSSH freeloaders, like Apple Computer and The SCO Group, are notorious for reaping financial rewards from selling open source software bundled with their proprietary products.
What part of the BSD license does Theo not understand? Apple and SCO aren't "freeloaders", they are using the software under the intended license.
No, it's far simpler than that. Apple and SCO *paid for* BSD. BSD was paid for by the taxpayers of California, including corporations like Apple and SCO. Perhaps Theo noticed a "Copyright 1979, 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved" somewhere in his review of the source code. Perhaps Apple and SCO believe they have contributed more than Theo. Besides cash Apple has also contributed formerly closed source, for example the HFS+ support in Darwin. Self serving, so what, Theo, RMS, and a host of others aren't?
I use OpenBSD and despite Theo's nonsense I support it by buying a CD every year. If Theo want's his pet projects funded he needs to learn to stop pissing off large potential contibutors, DARPA for example.
...that some feel are taking advantage of the free software without giving anything back.
Damn. I wonder if there was anything they could have done about that?
No there wasn't, BSD as in Berkeley Software Distribution, as in University of California Berkeley, as in "Copyright 1979, 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.", as in paid for by California taxpayers including corporations and individuals who should not be denied access to what they paid for.
BTW, you shouldn't confuse BSD with a very talented but potentially mismanaged team that has a tendency to piss off lucrative sources of income.
A "record" is the viny disc that Steve Jobs and many others used to listen to music on. Think CD, but bigger, analog, breakable, however the packaging/jacket was larger so you could have cooler artwork.
"Gramophone records were the primary technology used for personal music reproduction for most of the 20th century. They replaced the phonograph cylinder in the 1910s, and although they were supplanted in popularity in the 1990s by digital media, they continue to be manufactured and sold as of 2006. Considering that many audio formats such as the 8-track had a heyday lasting only a few years, the longevity of the record is remarkable."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramophone_record
My state of discontent with this derives from the fact that people just love to nitpick at Apple Computing for what ever reason they see fit, regradless of it's validity of lack of.
Apple Records, not Apple Computer, was the nice one here. They gave Apple Computer a break, they agreed to drop their lawsuit if Apple Computer stayed away from the music business. They tried to be nice, reasonable, and got screwed. This is one topic where Apple Computer rightfully draws criticism.
A company that is truly trying to advance modern technolgy in a friendly, cohesive, manner should not be so widely scrutinized for trying to make such advancements.
Apple is not friendly. They have screwed over many companies when in their corporate best interest. Steve also has a bit of a temper and isn't afraid to exercise his power and influence. The difference between Microsoft and Apple has more to do with the opportunity to abuse others not the willingness to abuse others. You are confusing a carefully and expertly crafted corporate image with reality. Their computers are great, but don't be naive and think they are saints or something.
They didn't win a name change in the first battle, so should have waived any rights to battle over future name-related damages.
Apple Corp did win, Apple Computer caved and paid them for use of the name and *promised* to stay out of the music business. Those *two* terms were sufficient to Apple Corp and they dropped the suit. Apple Corp was being nice, not playing hardball, doing the live and let live thing,... unfortunately Apple Computer screwed them. This is why businesses generally don't play nice, nice guys get walked all over.
Ulterior motives, that's what. Discussing the fine points of the standard to make it better is one thing, but deliberately arguing over uninportant stuff with the intent of delaying the standards group is entirely another -- and that's what I (and everybody else on Slashdot, apparently) suspect Microsoft is planning to do.
I appreciate what you are saying but the "and everybody else on Slashdot" just sucks the life out of your argument. It's creepy, it feels like "and everyone else at the church of scientology thinks battlefield earth is going to be a blockbuster movie".
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, RMS is more a John The Baptist than a saint - railing against the establishment, morally pure, living in the desert eating naught but locusts and honey and using over the top, fire and brimstone sermons to try and draw the masses towards salvation. And abso-fucking-loutley batshit crazy. He is however, necessary if we are to make it to the promised land. ;-)
"morally pure" in a subjective sense, not an absolute sense. I'm reluctant to use the word "cult" because of the negative connotations but there is a little bit of cult-like behaviour going on here and like many cults a superior morality is attributed to the leader. In reality RMS is a guy with a good idea and a good piece of code or two, but also a guy who thinks he has more answers than he does in reality. Coming from an academic environment he had the luxury of giving away code so the personal sacrifice angle may be overblown. Yes, he deserves credit. Yes, if he offers you some koolaid it will be safe to drink. Yes, it would be safe for a Congressman to visit him at home. But there is a little bit of a cult thing going on here, mostly harmless though.
Stallman probably deserves more credit than he gets among most Linux users for basically founding the Free Software movement, but his relevance to what the movement has become since then is fading.
Actually I think his contribution is overstated. Don't get me wrong, he deserves credit, but his contribution is more coining a name for a movement, not creating the movement, and of course writing a license. People were sharing code, posting code they needed help with and more importantly getting help, long before any "movement" existed. Personally I think the open source movement benefited more from technology than human enthusiasm. PC ownership reaching a critical mass, dropping in price, and the internet becoming accessible to all. It sure beat posting code to various BBS'. There was an active community before Linux, before FreeBSD, before the net, etc. The real change was the ease of communication and collaboration, not a license or a movement, they were secondary IMHO.
Go open iTMS right now. There is no Apple logo anywhere on the front page or any of their other pre-produced pages. Good thing we need a lawsuit to clear up the status quo.
Are you basis this on what a Mac advocate told you, sure you have not actually run iTunes? After launching iTunes and selecting the Music Store I find a big black Apple logo.
Apple Comp. is not cutting records of bands and selling it.
So their business is not growing but they still are in business. Are you arguing that the small businesss should roll over and accomodate the wishes of the larger growing corporation? That is in fact what you are arguing whether or not you had intended to do so. True there was an agreement before but frankly it should have never been signed.
(1) So you are arguing that large corporation are above the law, that they may enter into contracts when convenient and break them without consequence when convenient to do so? Perhaps when what has changed is merely that they are now far stronger and their opponent far weaker? That is in fact what you are arguing whether or not you had intended to do so.
(2) "Never should have been signed"? How self serving a conclusion, have you considered that Apple Computer was about to *lose* the case and the settlement was the less risky alternative?
I own a Mac, I own an iPod, I will most likely own more in the future. However liking the products does not mean liking the corporation. Apple is every bit as evil as MS, they have merely had fewer opportunities and they have much much better public relations. The later can't be hurt by Jobs being a saleman rather than a geek like Gates.
But nothing TOO different please. Please don't change the status quo TOO much. Don't rock the boat if you're in it. I don't want to put my music on this interweb thingy...
Let who put it on the internet? A company that you were nice to and gave a break to by letting them use your name if they stayed out of the music business. Despite the fact that the two founders were from a generation intimately familiar with the Beatles and probably 100% aware of Apple Records. You gave them the benefit of the doubt. Decades later when they need to reinvent the company (face it, it is more of an iPod company than a computer company in the eyes of most consumers and investors) they broke their word and entered the music business. To add insult to injury they then sue you to steal your name in your primary business.
I own a Mac, I own an iPod, I will most likely own more in the future. However liking the products does not mean liking the corporation. Apple is every bit as evil as MS, they have had just had fewer opportunities and they have much much better public relations. The later can't be hurt by Jobs being a saleman rather than a geek like Gates.
If I was the chinese and I wanted to conduct industrial espionage wouldn't I target phones instead of PCs?
Yes and no. To possibly get inside a decision making process, phones may be useful. To get "dirt" in order to coerce/blackmail, phones would seem quite useful. However phones only access a tiny fraction of the valuable data that computers have access to. Consider a company that makes the "material" that covers stealth aircraft, it might be useful to trickle out all purchase orders to chemical supply companies. Actually a more plausable scenario would be the other direction, trickle out all purchase orders at the chemical supply company and look for those from the defense contractor. The preceding is oversimplified to illustrate a point. However if you can become a supplier to a large cross section of companies in various industries collecting and mining data could provide useful info.
Xenophobia. I have nothing further to add, because that word sums it all up. While there are valid threats against the USA and in the intelligence community there are measures to tap into restricted data, they are NOT going to mess with PCs for fuck's sake! If someone has high security requirements that entity is not going to buy from a consumer level shop ANYWAY.
...
That's terribly naive. You fail to realize that most espionage is industrial. Billions of dollars are lost due to industrial espionage, foreign countries acquire R&D info that saves them time and money, their military tech is advanced by years,
Also naive is to think that people with high security are the only target. In the real world espionage often goes for indirect info. What companies are supplying the goods and services, are their changes in orders, their production, etc. You don't have to get the general's plan for an invasion, you may only need to identify his preparations.
Any built-in addition features in the hardware, the bios or even the preinstalled operating system would be immediately detected and destroy the entire PC business of Lenovo abroad.
Not necessarily. They could claim that they were infiltrated by a government agent who made a substitution/alteration. It actually is plausible, the government might not want to trust management or more importantly the fewer people who know the less likely it is to leak. They could successfully argue that any corporation or manufacturing process in any country is subject to such infiltration.
Dell, HP, IBM, Apple, and many, many others are most of the time built right next to each other in China.
However US corporations can inspect the goods returned from manufacturing, verifying that the ROMs and the installed software matches what they provided. I'd imagine they would be doing so already, due to QA and antivirus concerns. A foreign agent would need to infiltrate the US corp to alter the expected results. Plauable but more difficult than the corp and the manufacturing being in an "unfriendly" country.
According to Stallman, if I'm a hairdresser or a butcher, I can sell my services, if I'm a programmer I can sell my services too!
And if you are BSD or GPL you still sell your services, there is not GPL advantage here.
All you damn Apple freaks need to shut the hell up about saying that Apple somehow paid for BSD licensing.
No, I said Apple helped pay for the original BSD development and some of that code remains at the heart of OpenBSD today.
The pure zealousness of you mac people scare me.
You're stupidity frightens me, although calling me a Mac zealot is personally quite amusing given the arguments I've had with real zealots. I mention Apple because they were cited as a company who leeches off of BSD. Now I do own a Mac, but I also own several PCs that boot Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD. I even support OpenBSD by purchasing a set of CDs every year.
Oh I see, making money for Theo was the whole idea of OpenBSD? NOW you tell us!
Unless they are academics and thereby have their open source development efforts subsidized they have to generate some sort of income to keep their pet projects going and avoid having to get "real" jobs.
"A BSD based project is more likely to get inside a corporation and possibly more likely to create consulting work."
Which is a good thing if you are planning to make people appropriate, modify and sell your code while not letting you look at it ever again, in hopes that somehow your celebrity status will make some of them hire you.
Not celebrity status, expertise with the code. It takes time for a 3rd party to learn and become proficient with someone else's code. The most cost effective way of getting the changes you want may easily be to hire the original author.
Which, in most cases, as Theo is finding the hard way, is the only type of return expected from commercial involvment in your project. Hoping to get hired by someone using your code is wishful thinking in vast majority of cases. GPL folks understand that, and operate accordingly.
In part that is another fallacy. Most work on GPL'd code is never seen by the original authors or the community. Most software is internal, it is not distributed outside the company, and the GPL does *not* require the changes to be returned to the community unless thers is public distribution. Technically you only have to share the changes with those you distribute executables to, so two companies could share work and keep the community in the dark. FWIW, the majority of software being for internal consumption is the real lock Microsoft has on the market.
Look, you keep spouting that crap. They paid for BSD. That is different than FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, BSDOS, or any of the other things that forked off it long long ago.
Not really, the code Apple and others paid for is still at the core of those projects. Apologies if reality conflicts with your politics.
They paid for ancient BSD development. However after the court cases were over, that went away. They have every *legal* right to use it. They have an ethical responsibility to contribute but this is in no way required.
It's not so ancient: "Copyright 1979, 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved". An this code remains at the heart of the *BSD projects.
Morality is individual, so were you talking about a person it would be their choice as to what their morality is. As you're discussing corporations, they inherently and as required by law are entirely amoral.
Completely false. They are permitted by law to be amoral in some respect, they are not required to be. A corporation can choose to act in a moral fashion. In any case Apple satisfies the "open source morality" issue since they have also made recent contributions, for example their formerly closed source HFS+ code.
The thing to me that most sucks was that Stallman and the BSD folks basically made a bet on human nature. The optomists are losing badly.
Untrue. We've seen various GPL based projects in financial trouble and begging for donations as well, including Linux distributions. Also, in general profit with open source is often said to be from consulting. Whether a project is GPL or BSD based has little effect, you could even argue that BSD has an advantage since it is easier to get into a corporation and a corporation may not want to share the changes they paid for.
"BSD vs GPL is not relevant. Theo's bed was made by driving away potential sources of income like DARPA."
Yes it is, as a part of a very long list of good advice he received over the years on a lot of things
No, that's a fallacy. In general under open source the money is in consulting, not in the development. A BSD based project is more likely to get inside a corporation and possibly more likely to create consulting work. Whether a project is BSD or GPL, if someone doesn't want to code themselves, they can hire others to do the work. The only difference is whether that work goes back to the community at large and for the company that needed specialized changes that is irrlevant and it may even be counterproductive to the company. The GPL is not some magic pill. We've seen numerous GPL based projects in financial trouble and begging for donations around here as well.
GPL based distributions have to beg too. I have rough recollections of several such requests appearing on slashdot in recent memory, I don't recall the details but a quick google finds:
0 18188.htm
"The first public signs of financial trouble at MandrakeSoft appeared in March 2002 when Mandrake began asking users for donations and changed their support structure to get a new revenue stream."
http://geek.com/news/geeknews/2003Jan/osg20030116
Theo's bed was made by driving away potential sources of income like DARPA, not his choice of BSD over GPL.
I say onto Theo: Tough Cookies! You made your bed, you sleep in it!
BSD vs GPL is not relevant. Theo's bed was made by driving away potential sources of income like DARPA.
Does Yahoo pay for FreeBSD, does Apple?
As California taxpayers they *paid for* BSD in the first place.
This is a perfect example of the problem with BSD licencing. Under the various BSD licences, its perfectly OK to take a piece of code and sell it, either modified or exactly as found, without in any way recognising or contrubuting to the project.
And BSD developers know that, accept that, and often want corporations to use their stuff. With easier corporate acceptance there is more opportunity for consulting. Unfortunately with someone like Theo scaring away corporations his pet projects suffer, I'm thinking the DARPA incident.
I've mentioned this in another post but be careful with words like "contributing". As California corporations and taxpayers companies like Apple and SCO paid for BSD's development. Apple have every moral and ethical right to use it.
Some of the OpenSSH freeloaders, like Apple Computer and The SCO Group, are notorious for reaping financial rewards from selling open source software bundled with their proprietary products. What part of the BSD license does Theo not understand? Apple and SCO aren't "freeloaders", they are using the software under the intended license.
No, it's far simpler than that. Apple and SCO *paid for* BSD. BSD was paid for by the taxpayers of California, including corporations like Apple and SCO. Perhaps Theo noticed a "Copyright 1979, 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved" somewhere in his review of the source code. Perhaps Apple and SCO believe they have contributed more than Theo. Besides cash Apple has also contributed formerly closed source, for example the HFS+ support in Darwin. Self serving, so what, Theo, RMS, and a host of others aren't?
I use OpenBSD and despite Theo's nonsense I support it by buying a CD every year. If Theo want's his pet projects funded he needs to learn to stop pissing off large potential contibutors, DARPA for example.
...that some feel are taking advantage of the free software without giving anything back.
Damn. I wonder if there was anything they could have done about that?
No there wasn't, BSD as in Berkeley Software Distribution, as in University of California Berkeley, as in "Copyright 1979, 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.", as in paid for by California taxpayers including corporations and individuals who should not be denied access to what they paid for.
BTW, you shouldn't confuse BSD with a very talented but potentially mismanaged team that has a tendency to piss off lucrative sources of income.
records? what the fug is a record?
A "record" is the viny disc that Steve Jobs and many others used to listen to music on. Think CD, but bigger, analog, breakable, however the packaging/jacket was larger so you could have cooler artwork.
"Gramophone records were the primary technology used for personal music reproduction for most of the 20th century. They replaced the phonograph cylinder in the 1910s, and although they were supplanted in popularity in the 1990s by digital media, they continue to be manufactured and sold as of 2006. Considering that many audio formats such as the 8-track had a heyday lasting only a few years, the longevity of the record is remarkable." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramophone_record
My state of discontent with this derives from the fact that people just love to nitpick at Apple Computing for what ever reason they see fit, regradless of it's validity of lack of.
Apple Records, not Apple Computer, was the nice one here. They gave Apple Computer a break, they agreed to drop their lawsuit if Apple Computer stayed away from the music business. They tried to be nice, reasonable, and got screwed. This is one topic where Apple Computer rightfully draws criticism.
A company that is truly trying to advance modern technolgy in a friendly, cohesive, manner should not be so widely scrutinized for trying to make such advancements.
Apple is not friendly. They have screwed over many companies when in their corporate best interest. Steve also has a bit of a temper and isn't afraid to exercise his power and influence. The difference between Microsoft and Apple has more to do with the opportunity to abuse others not the willingness to abuse others. You are confusing a carefully and expertly crafted corporate image with reality. Their computers are great, but don't be naive and think they are saints or something.
They didn't win a name change in the first battle, so should have waived any rights to battle over future name-related damages.
... unfortunately Apple Computer screwed them. This is why businesses generally don't play nice, nice guys get walked all over.
Apple Corp did win, Apple Computer caved and paid them for use of the name and *promised* to stay out of the music business. Those *two* terms were sufficient to Apple Corp and they dropped the suit. Apple Corp was being nice, not playing hardball, doing the live and let live thing,
Ulterior motives, that's what. Discussing the fine points of the standard to make it better is one thing, but deliberately arguing over uninportant stuff with the intent of delaying the standards group is entirely another -- and that's what I (and everybody else on Slashdot, apparently) suspect Microsoft is planning to do.
I appreciate what you are saying but the "and everybody else on Slashdot" just sucks the life out of your argument. It's creepy, it feels like "and everyone else at the church of scientology thinks battlefield earth is going to be a blockbuster movie".