Why doesn't IPv7 just scrap the binary address and let routers do string lookups? IP headers should be like HTTP headers, a few lines of text followed by a blank line. Your kernel grows by 1k or so, but your resolver and the whole DNS become just bad memories.
Yeah, and the traffic on the net quadruples or so. The average IP packet on the net is less than a hundred bytes long; turning IP headers into text gains very little - someone still has to coordinate names, after all - and really adds to the load. --
Looks to me like NSI's scare tactics and general inteansigence are working...they may succeed in keeping their monopoly at this rate. If ICANN succeeds, NSI loses, and there's no reason for NSI to cooperate in their own demise. --
The term "viral" carries so many negative connotations
This is exactly what I had in mind when I coined the term General Public Virus in 1990. I don't think there's serious disagreement that software viruses are bad. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that there is disagreement over the desirability of RMS' software communist utopia...look how long it took for the Soviet Union to collapse form its own internal rot...
Drop viral. It doesn't help us move forward.
I'll drop the term "virus" when the GPV no longer merits it.
I feel compelled to point out that this is exactly the argument RMS rejects from advocates of the term "open source"... --
if you read RMS's article on/. from a couple of weeks ago, you will notice that he in no way attempts to call ESR and the OSI "heretics to be burned at the stake at the first opportunity".
You're right to call me on this; I overstated the case a bit for humor. RMS's rhetoric is seldom this flammable. The members of The Church of the Holy GNU, OTOH...
you should not insult GPL by mistyping its proper name.
This one falls in the category of calling a spade a fscking shovel. The GPV is exactly that: a legal virus that contaminates all it touches. Insulting it is exactly what I have in mind. My hope is that this debate does not die away, and that people realize that there are alternatives to the GPV for truly free software.
I realize that this will make me, in the eyes of a nontrivial portion of the community, an Evil Bad Guy Who's Out to Make Money, and thus a Danger to the Movement. I'm willing to accept that, because it also makes me more palatable to the folks who make real world decisions, and right now I care more about getting freely available software adopted in the real world than whether RMS' utopia ever comes to pass. --
Depends on how you define "intelligence"; it's said, around the Johnson Space Center, that you can't make anything astronaut-proof because astronauts are so darned ingenious... --
(shaking off the effects of a trip down memory lane) Shame you posted that as an AC...it's been a long time since anyone has called me that, and I'd like to have known who was still around that remembered it...
this is just like saying that a company's Intellectual Property Agreement is coercive. Of course it isn't. You don't have to work for them.
That's not your only choice, though. It happens that I've had this discussion in the recent past, in a setting where it mattered, and such agreements are generally negotiable in a manner satisfactory to both sides. Neither deed restrictions nor the GPV are. --
Do you prefer to impose NO restrictions? then you leave the door open for others do deprive me of freedom by pursuit of their version thereof; this is the BSD way.
I'm STILL missing something. How, exactly, has the BSD code become less free even though others have adopted it and made it part of their proprietary, non-free (by either definition) code? What, exactly, IS the NetBSD source tree I'm tracking (for three different platforms)?
I contend that the BSD code is MORE truly free than GPV-infected code because I can do with it whatever I wish. Doing so in no way affects your freedom to do with it whatever YOU wish.
So, man, drop the political shit and get that anti-GNU chip of your shoulder. We are not the enemy.
You (collectively) are the enemy, at least for one of my main objectives: seeing freely available software gain acceptance in the real world. I'd much rather work ith Linux and BSD for a living than, say, Windows 2000. RMS' repeated posturing that his way is The One and Only Pure Path to Freedom and Enlightenment and that ESR and the OSI are heretics to be burned at the stake at the first opportunity do nothing to advance that cause at all. Writings such as Russ Nelson's and ESR's do quite a bit to advance that cause. --
A voluntary agreement is by definition not coercive.
Would you call a deed restriction you must agree to before purchasing a house voluntary? Many folks do, arguing that you always have the choice not to buy the house. I believe that it, like the GPV, is what's known as a "contract of adhesion": an agreement that is not negotiable, and therefore not a true "meeting of the minds", but rather a take-it-or-leave-it proposition that's attached to something else.
(Those who claim that shrinkwrap software licenses fall in this category will get no argument from me, either.)
The GPV coerces me to join RMS' utopia if I wish to partake of the benefits of his "free" code. I do not think that's either freedom, or acceptable. --
This is the entire bone of contention between the followers of The Church of the Holy GNU and those of us who believe that calling something free does not necessarily make it so. It may set us free from one evil, but I contend it binds us to another: RMS' software communist utopia. I do not accept that evil either.
It's not coercion to make someone do the moral thing by law.
The objection here is the same as the objection to legislating morality in other areas: Whose morality? There are some moral values, like "killing without cause is wrong", that are noncontroversial; legislating those is not a Bad Thing. OTOH, legislating your morality is no better than legislating the entire Christian fundamentalist agenda would be. --
This is just another dumb peice of propaganda from the non-free software crowd.
You must not know who Russ Nelson is. He's the guy responsible for the existence of the overwhelming majority of the freely available driver code for Ethernet cards out there. He was releasing driver source code long before it was fashionable.
You keep posting things that directly or indirectly assault everything we stand for. What a bunch a turncoats! OSI does not have you're best interests at heart.
To borrow a famous punch line, "What's this 'we' shit, white man?" You do not speak for me, or the large group of folks who believe the GPV is anything but "free". I do not stand for coercively making software freely available.
They are a tool of business, created by Tim Oreilly and his flunky, Eric Raymond. There are trying to make money, not free software.
Your point is?
Let me put this another way: I'd like to see you walk up to the checkout counter at your local grocery store and pay the bill with a freshly updated copy of GNU EMACS. Like it or not, money is the only widely accepted medium of exchange, and making money is necessary to survive...that is, unless you enjoy living on the street. --
I can indeed drive a mouse...it'd be hard for me to be typing this into Netscape on an SGI Indigo 2 if I couldn't. If your snide remark was meant to convey that there's a more intuitive info reader out there than the text-based one that looks a lot like EMACS, I'm certainly willing to reevaluate my view.
The GPL does not incorprate RMS's view of IP in general - rather it is a legal document.
This is disingenuous at best. The GPV is a legal document designed to spread RMS' philosophy on IP as much as he felt was possible.
By complaining about it what you are really saying is that yopu want to use other people's software under conditions other than those that its authors have laid down. That sounds like plain old theft to me.
Please don't put words in my mouth. I'm complaining about the GPV because I don't believe it's right for someone to place restrictions on what I may do with my software because I wish to use their code within it, all the while proclaiming that their restrictions are really The Highest Form of Freedom for All. --
Let me start by saying that I find the term "GPV" very insulting. Now, I am not in any way associated with GNU, yet I still find it insulting. What is the purpose to such a statement besides trolling?
You mean besides calling a spade a fscking shovel?
The simple truth of the matter is that the GNU General Public Virus is exactly that: it's a legal virus that contaminates everything it touches. That's exactly as RMS intended it when he drafted the thing, and that's exactly what it's become. I've been complaining about it for 9 years, ever since its intent struck me full in the face, and as long as it remains a legal virus, I'll call it one.
You claim that the GPL forces us to share. In many ways this is true. And that is exactly what makes the GPL a good license.
I hate to break it to you, but most folks stopped having to be forced to share in first grade. Forcing people to share as adults 1) turns them off - they hate being treated like kindergarteners - and 2) makes them avoid the situation in the first place. I truly believe that Linux would have flourished as thoroughly under a BSD license as it has under the (Linus-modified) GPV.
On a similar note, if somebody finds the idea of somebody else taking their free software and using it in a proprietary piece of software distastefull, then they have the right to prevent this. Again, IT IS THEIR CHOICE. There is nothing wrong with it.
Unless you count the false advertising inherent in calling such software "free", that is. That's Tom's whole point throughout this argument. It's not free (as in liberty, which is RMS' definition) if you can't use it as you need to. --
...which, as it applies to cryptographic software, has (at least in one Federal appeals court jurisdiction) been struck down - on the grounds that it violates the First Amendment's guarantees of free speech. (Yes, I agree ITAR is silly, and yes, I agree it should go...we're not perfect either; my claim is that the US is much closer to guaranteeing basic human freedoms than Canada, one that I truly believe.)
I agree with Tom Clancy: Any country with an Official Secrets Act has no business lecturing the US on rights. --
You obviously haven't tried to dredge your way through the glibc documentation for a function's semantics. I have yet to do so successfully. The info readers I've seen are extremely nonintuitive for an EMACS-hater like myself to navigate, and the FSF's dogmatic anti-manpage position hurts, rather than helps, their cause. (Gee, isn't this becoming a familiar theme?)
OTOH, the camel book - which has Tom Christiansen's name right on the cover - is easy to navigate and find exactly the info I need. --
Please correct me if I'm mistaken...but doesn't Canada have an Official Secrets Act, which allows the government to prevent publication of material it doesn't like? If so, that doesn't sound like a guarantee of freedom of the press, but rather a governmental abridgement of it. For that matter, outlawing hate speech when there is no immediate intent to incite violence, as Canada does, is not a guarantee of freedom of speech, either, no matter how much a politician tries to warp it into one. I'm not going to even get into the idea that a free citizenry is one that its government doesn't distrust to the point that it refuses it to arm itself... --
Freedom of speech is guaranteed in our charter of rights and freedoms.
For suitably small values of "guaranteed"...any country that can abridge basic freedoms in the name of public safety cannot be truthfully said to be guaranteeing them. --
The world may be anti-RMS, but you wouldn't know it to read Slashdot...even the slightest suggestion that the GPV might be a Bad Idea or that RMS isn't the best thing ever to hit the world of computing is immediately toasted to a crackly crunch.
Tom wrote an entertaining parody of the standard RMS anti-"open source" and pro-"free" (HIS definition, not the one in common use) software rant. He skewered RMS brilliantly, and I, for one, greatly enjoyed it. It's needed balance on here against the fawning RMS minions. --
Since non-copylefted code will sooner or later be coopted by proprietary developers (witness BSD code in SunOS, Ultrix, BSD/i, etc.), the only solution is to copyleft as much as possible.
What am I missing? The BSD code you cite is still freely available - or is the NetBSD source tree I track a figment of my imagination? --
However, I would not take the stance that GNU is being attacked because it is communist-like. Far from it. The entire Linux community is communist-like. We all share our goods!
The difference here is not one of sharing, but rather one of coercion: RMS, through the GPV, would force us all to share; the community that has grown up around Linux shares because it wishes to. --
No, but if you wish to take advantage of one of RMS' goals - software reuse - as it happens to be embodied in GPV-infected software, then you're forcibly dragged into the utopia of the GPV.
If enabling software reuse is something RMS wants, then the GPV is actually antithetical to his goal, since there's a lot of code out there that cannot and will never be placed under GPV licensing. --
Re:The international Geek union
on
GEEK Unions?
·
· Score: 1
There are plenty of examples of laws that the geek community pretty much unanimously saw was evil. Remember the CDA?
This could work for us: if we united against something, it would REALLY be a Bad Thing, and that makes the words carry that much more weight... --
Marketshare, yes. Mindshare, no. People were converted without ever being tought the mindshare, and because of this you get licenses like the Sun Community License, which have all the benefits of Open Source, and none of the benefits of Free Software.
Your mindshare. Not mine, and not that of a large part of the community. If making effective use of Linux and other stuff that goes with it were to require buying into RMS' utopia, as you seem to want, then we wouldn't be having this discussion at all: Linux would be a laboratory curiosity.
OSI was completely unnecessary; maybe even harmful. The only thing OSI's tactics did was draw in a few commercial companies, a few clueless users, and a bit of attention from Microsoft before we're ready for it. We don't really need commercial companies.
Speak for yourself. Without OSI and the idea that open source software could be liberated from RMS' utopia, Linux wouldn't even be close to the point it is now...where major corporations are using it more and more for real, mission-critical work, and where those who speak it are in more and more demand to provide their professional expertise....Oh, right, you're from the People's Republic of MIT, where real-world success is something to be spat upon, not sought.
I can't think of any polite way to say this: Fuck you ESR. You're the last person I expected to make this statement, and RMS was the last person I expected this statement to be made about. RMS has written more code than any other person in the community. He spends an insane amount of time coding. He wrote Emacs, the original gcc, and a dozen other free software projects. No offense, but you've written jack squat in terms of useful code.
Ignoring for now that fetchmail is a complete rewrite of popclient, and one of the most stable programs on my system, I would say that ESR's saying just what you are: RMS' contributions in the area of the code itself far, far outshine anyone's, and those contributions alone make a better and more eloquent case than his code plus his political writings (which include the GPV) make. In other words, his political writings detract from his massive contributions, not add to them. Thus, were RMS to indeed "shut up and show us the code", we'd all be farther ahead. --
Slashdot Mirror
Why doesn't IPv7 just scrap the binary address and let routers do string lookups? IP headers should be like HTTP headers, a few lines of text followed by a blank line. Your kernel grows by 1k or so, but your resolver and the whole DNS become just bad memories.
Yeah, and the traffic on the net quadruples or so. The average IP packet on the net is less than a hundred bytes long; turning IP headers into text gains very little - someone still has to coordinate names, after all - and really adds to the load.
--
Looks to me like NSI's scare tactics and general inteansigence are working...they may succeed in keeping their monopoly at this rate. If ICANN succeeds, NSI loses, and there's no reason for NSI to cooperate in their own demise.
--
This is exactly what I had in mind when I coined the term General Public Virus in 1990. I don't think there's serious disagreement that software viruses are bad. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that there is disagreement over the desirability of RMS' software communist utopia...look how long it took for the Soviet Union to collapse form its own internal rot...
Drop viral. It doesn't help us move forward.
I'll drop the term "virus" when the GPV no longer merits it.
I feel compelled to point out that this is exactly the argument RMS rejects from advocates of the term "open source"...
--
You're right to call me on this; I overstated the case a bit for humor. RMS's rhetoric is seldom this flammable. The members of The Church of the Holy GNU, OTOH...
you should not insult GPL by mistyping its proper name.
This one falls in the category of calling a spade a fscking shovel. The GPV is exactly that: a legal virus that contaminates all it touches. Insulting it is exactly what I have in mind. My hope is that this debate does not die away, and that people realize that there are alternatives to the GPV for truly free software.
I realize that this will make me, in the eyes of a nontrivial portion of the community, an Evil Bad Guy Who's Out to Make Money, and thus a Danger to the Movement. I'm willing to accept that, because it also makes me more palatable to the folks who make real world decisions, and right now I care more about getting freely available software adopted in the real world than whether RMS' utopia ever comes to pass.
--
Depends on how you define "intelligence"; it's said, around the Johnson Space Center, that you can't make anything astronaut-proof because astronauts are so darned ingenious...
--
(shaking off the effects of a trip down memory lane) Shame you posted that as an AC...it's been a long time since anyone has called me that, and I'd like to have known who was still around that remembered it...
this is just like saying that a company's Intellectual Property Agreement is coercive. Of course it isn't. You don't have to work for them.
That's not your only choice, though. It happens that I've had this discussion in the recent past, in a setting where it mattered, and such agreements are generally negotiable in a manner satisfactory to both sides. Neither deed restrictions nor the GPV are.
--
I'm STILL missing something. How, exactly, has the BSD code become less free even though others have adopted it and made it part of their proprietary, non-free (by either definition) code? What, exactly, IS the NetBSD source tree I'm tracking (for three different platforms)?
I contend that the BSD code is MORE truly free than GPV-infected code because I can do with it whatever I wish. Doing so in no way affects your freedom to do with it whatever YOU wish.
So, man, drop the political shit and get that anti-GNU chip of your shoulder. We are not the enemy.
You (collectively) are the enemy, at least for one of my main objectives: seeing freely available software gain acceptance in the real world. I'd much rather work ith Linux and BSD for a living than, say, Windows 2000. RMS' repeated posturing that his way is The One and Only Pure Path to Freedom and Enlightenment and that ESR and the OSI are heretics to be burned at the stake at the first opportunity do nothing to advance that cause at all. Writings such as Russ Nelson's and ESR's do quite a bit to advance that cause.
--
A voluntary agreement is by definition not coercive.
Would you call a deed restriction you must agree to before purchasing a house voluntary? Many folks do, arguing that you always have the choice not to buy the house. I believe that it, like the GPV, is what's known as a "contract of adhesion": an agreement that is not negotiable, and therefore not a true "meeting of the minds", but rather a take-it-or-leave-it proposition that's attached to something else.
(Those who claim that shrinkwrap software licenses fall in this category will get no argument from me, either.)
The GPV coerces me to join RMS' utopia if I wish to partake of the benefits of his "free" code. I do not think that's either freedom, or acceptable.
--
This is the entire bone of contention between the followers of The Church of the Holy GNU and those of us who believe that calling something free does not necessarily make it so. It may set us free from one evil, but I contend it binds us to another: RMS' software communist utopia. I do not accept that evil either.
It's not coercion to make someone do the moral thing by law.
The objection here is the same as the objection to legislating morality in other areas: Whose morality? There are some moral values, like "killing without cause is wrong", that are noncontroversial; legislating those is not a Bad Thing. OTOH, legislating your morality is no better than legislating the entire Christian fundamentalist agenda would be.
--
You must not know who Russ Nelson is. He's the guy responsible for the existence of the overwhelming majority of the freely available driver code for Ethernet cards out there. He was releasing driver source code long before it was fashionable.
You keep posting things that directly or indirectly assault everything we stand for. What a bunch a turncoats! OSI does not have you're best interests at heart.
To borrow a famous punch line, "What's this 'we' shit, white man?" You do not speak for me, or the large group of folks who believe the GPV is anything but "free". I do not stand for coercively making software freely available.
They are a tool of business, created by Tim Oreilly and his flunky, Eric Raymond. There are trying to make money, not free software.
Your point is?
Let me put this another way: I'd like to see you walk up to the checkout counter at your local grocery store and pay the bill with a freshly updated copy of GNU EMACS. Like it or not, money is the only widely accepted medium of exchange, and making money is necessary to survive...that is, unless you enjoy living on the street.
--
The GPL does not incorprate RMS's view of IP in general - rather it is a legal document.
This is disingenuous at best. The GPV is a legal document designed to spread RMS' philosophy on IP as much as he felt was possible.
By complaining about it what you are really saying is that yopu want to use other people's software under conditions other than those that its authors have laid down. That sounds like plain old theft to me.
Please don't put words in my mouth. I'm complaining about the GPV because I don't believe it's right for someone to place restrictions on what I may do with my software because I wish to use their code within it, all the while proclaiming that their restrictions are really The Highest Form of Freedom for All.
--
You mean besides calling a spade a fscking shovel?
The simple truth of the matter is that the GNU General Public Virus is exactly that: it's a legal virus that contaminates everything it touches. That's exactly as RMS intended it when he drafted the thing, and that's exactly what it's become. I've been complaining about it for 9 years, ever since its intent struck me full in the face, and as long as it remains a legal virus, I'll call it one.
You claim that the GPL forces us to share. In many ways this is true. And that is exactly what makes the GPL a good license.
I hate to break it to you, but most folks stopped having to be forced to share in first grade. Forcing people to share as adults 1) turns them off - they hate being treated like kindergarteners - and 2) makes them avoid the situation in the first place. I truly believe that Linux would have flourished as thoroughly under a BSD license as it has under the (Linus-modified) GPV.
On a similar note, if somebody finds the idea of somebody else taking their free software and using it in a proprietary piece of software distastefull, then they have the right to prevent this. Again, IT IS THEIR CHOICE. There is nothing wrong with it.
Unless you count the false advertising inherent in calling such software "free", that is. That's Tom's whole point throughout this argument. It's not free (as in liberty, which is RMS' definition) if you can't use it as you need to.
--
...which, as it applies to cryptographic software, has (at least in one Federal appeals court jurisdiction) been struck down - on the grounds that it violates the First Amendment's guarantees of free speech. (Yes, I agree ITAR is silly, and yes, I agree it should go...we're not perfect either; my claim is that the US is much closer to guaranteeing basic human freedoms than Canada, one that I truly believe.)
I agree with Tom Clancy: Any country with an Official Secrets Act has no business lecturing the US on rights.
--
...especially if I were doing it all in the name of "freedom"...like the classic "fucking for virginity".
--
You obviously haven't tried to dredge your way through the glibc documentation for a function's semantics. I have yet to do so successfully. The info readers I've seen are extremely nonintuitive for an EMACS-hater like myself to navigate, and the FSF's dogmatic anti-manpage position hurts, rather than helps, their cause. (Gee, isn't this becoming a familiar theme?)
OTOH, the camel book - which has Tom Christiansen's name right on the cover - is easy to navigate and find exactly the info I need.
--
Please correct me if I'm mistaken...but doesn't Canada have an Official Secrets Act, which allows the government to prevent publication of material it doesn't like? If so, that doesn't sound like a guarantee of freedom of the press, but rather a governmental abridgement of it. For that matter, outlawing hate speech when there is no immediate intent to incite violence, as Canada does, is not a guarantee of freedom of speech, either, no matter how much a politician tries to warp it into one.
I'm not going to even get into the idea that a free citizenry is one that its government doesn't distrust to the point that it refuses it to arm itself...
--
No, I'm not on Tim O'Reilly's payroll, though I wouldn't mind being. Nevertheless, I think Tom hit it right on the head.
--
Freedom of speech is guaranteed in our charter of rights and freedoms.
For suitably small values of "guaranteed"...any country that can abridge basic freedoms in the name of public safety cannot be truthfully said to be guaranteeing them.
--
The world may be anti-RMS, but you wouldn't know it to read Slashdot...even the slightest suggestion that the GPV might be a Bad Idea or that RMS isn't the best thing ever to hit the world of computing is immediately toasted to a crackly crunch.
Tom wrote an entertaining parody of the standard RMS anti-"open source" and pro-"free" (HIS definition, not the one in common use) software rant. He skewered RMS brilliantly, and I, for one, greatly enjoyed it. It's needed balance on here against the fawning RMS minions.
--
Since non-copylefted code will sooner or later be coopted by proprietary developers (witness BSD code in SunOS, Ultrix, BSD/i, etc.), the only solution is to copyleft as much as possible.
What am I missing? The BSD code you cite is still freely available - or is the NetBSD source tree I track a figment of my imagination?
--
However, I would not take the stance that GNU is being attacked because it is communist-like. Far from it. The entire Linux community is communist-like. We all share our goods!
The difference here is not one of sharing, but rather one of coercion: RMS, through the GPV, would force us all to share; the community that has grown up around Linux shares because it wishes to.
--
No, but if you wish to take advantage of one of RMS' goals - software reuse - as it happens to be embodied in GPV-infected software, then you're forcibly dragged into the utopia of the GPV.
If enabling software reuse is something RMS wants, then the GPV is actually antithetical to his goal, since there's a lot of code out there that cannot and will never be placed under GPV licensing.
--
There are plenty of examples of laws that the geek community pretty much unanimously saw was evil. Remember the CDA?
This could work for us: if we united against something, it would REALLY be a Bad Thing, and that makes the words carry that much more weight...
--
Your mindshare. Not mine, and not that of a large part of the community. If making effective use of Linux and other stuff that goes with it were to require buying into RMS' utopia, as you seem to want, then we wouldn't be having this discussion at all: Linux would be a laboratory curiosity.
OSI was completely unnecessary; maybe even harmful. The only thing OSI's tactics did was draw in a few commercial companies, a few clueless users, and a bit of attention from Microsoft before we're ready for it. We don't really need commercial companies.
Speak for yourself. Without OSI and the idea that open source software could be liberated from RMS' utopia, Linux wouldn't even be close to the point it is now...where major corporations are using it more and more for real, mission-critical work, and where those who speak it are in more and more demand to provide their professional expertise.
I can't think of any polite way to say this: Fuck you ESR. You're the last person I expected to make this statement, and RMS was the last person I expected this statement to be made about. RMS has written more code than any other person in the community. He spends an insane amount of time coding. He wrote Emacs, the original gcc, and a dozen other free software projects. No offense, but you've written jack squat in terms of useful code.
Ignoring for now that fetchmail is a complete rewrite of popclient, and one of the most stable programs on my system, I would say that ESR's saying just what you are: RMS' contributions in the area of the code itself far, far outshine anyone's, and those contributions alone make a better and more eloquent case than his code plus his political writings (which include the GPV) make. In other words, his political writings detract from his massive contributions, not add to them. Thus, were RMS to indeed "shut up and show us the code", we'd all be farther ahead.
--
I wouldn't be so sure about that. According to ESR's Geeks with Guns page, RMS is a pretty good shot himself...
--