I've got a different comment to offer. There is very little of substance in this article. The only part that comes close is buried, in fact it's the last paragraph of the article:
""You know what I found? Right in the [Linux] kernel, in the heart of the operating system, I found a developer's comment that said, 'Does this belong here?' "Lok says. "What kind of confidence does that inspire? Right then I knew it was time to switch.""
But even that lacks any indication of what the comment was talking about. Perhaps the comment author was wrong and whatever the comment referred to does belong in the kernel. Maybe some superfluous code makes it into the Linux kernel once in a while, but without more information it is impossible to tell if this really is junk code (as the article would have us believe) or something far more negligible -- not something significantly offensive to be worth considering to bolster the claims made in this article. This information has to come from those who posit the argument; readers shouldn't have to defend the speakers' arguments for them.
I blame Forbes for what went wrong in this article. Theo de Raadt has the experience, skill, and requirement to cite specific evidence to support his argument. But for all we readers know, he was never asked for such evidence. The article is written for laypeople, who know nothing about programming, yet the entire article hinges on one's ability to understand programming issues. Forbes should know their audience. This was a poor choice of article for Forbes to run and they executed it in a particularly poor way by not challenging their audience to try and keep up with the material which should have been presented.
Even though the parent was moderated flamebait, I'd have to concur with the overall sentiment given my experience dealing with both the Apple Server software and Apple the company while working with MacOS X Server for a client of mine who had had good experiences with MacOS in the past and thought that that experience would somehow translate into a good OS choice for web service. A client of mine bought one of the early dual G4 machines Apple offered and a copy of MacOS X Server. I think that Apple started selling this OS way too early, well before they were ready to support it in any serious way. The software was sorely underdocumented (and one shouldn't have to buy additional books to get documentation on the software one has already purchased) and Apple's employees were not responsive to problems. Apple leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to packaging. Keeping up with what's going on in Perl and Apache to fix bugs pertinant to the reason the server machine was brought in, for instance, is not easy when one has to compete with Apple's related packages thus risking Apple updates that don't install (or don't install correctly) because your installed software is more advanced than what Apple ships.
Also, I don't see why I would want to run a GUI on a machine that would run headless most of the time. Service records can either be generated automatically and sent somewhere else or I can ask for them when I need them from another machine. I'm just fine with ssh-ing into the server to get jobs done on the command line.
I don't have any statistics to offer on how much more slowly things ran under MacOS X, but I found their cutesy front-end apps to be inadequate or just plain wrong, so I ended up spending a lot of time working on things that I wouldn't have had to with another OS (GNU/Linux or OpenBSD, to name a couple free software systems); I ended up being slower to work because of the needless work I had to do. All of this for a proprietary system that costs considerable money in the first place.
Consumers are taught to take whatever is put in front of them, regardless of whose interests are being served.
Your post is particularly ironic given that so many technocrats argue along the "build a better mousetrap" philosophy. Ogg Vorbis has better tagging support, fewer encumberances (even for proprietors), and, according to every blind listening test I have read, sounds better at comparable filesizes to an MP3 encoding of the same audio. But for years Apple has not added any Ogg Vorbis compatibility to QuickTime, so Apple users can't even make Ogg Vorbis audio files out of their own copyrighted audio files if they want to. Media conference organizers (like the one which just happened in St. Louis) are only available if one gets proprietary QuickTime software (both the archive files they distributed for a while and the live stream were only for QuickTime users). And these are the folks who are ostensibly sensitized to the problem of restricting media access to the large corporate players! It takes a trip to Brazil or Spain to see Ogg Vorbis+Ogg Theora live coverage of conferences, simultaneously broadcasting what happens in multiple rooms.
[...] funny how many people abandon their ideals or principals so easily
On/., all you have to do is point the readership to the next sci-fi movie. Your posts get moderated down if you dare to mention that this is one way the multinational movie corporations make money which they use to bring you horrible new copyright laws. The concept of not funding one's own oppression is not something corporate media publishers want you to dwell upon.
According to the state of Massachusetts, proprietary or encumbered Microsoft Office formats are "open formats". Massachusetts state law is not federal law, but you can see how a lack of deep understanding and resolve to demand something better from business ends up hurting the public interest. Here's hoping that federally this receives more citizen-oriented thought. This is a political problem that will require ongoing political pressure to resolve in favor of the citizenry.
By the same token, don't tell anyone that their choice is wrong or doesn't work or whatever.
What software Jamie Zawinski chooses isn't terribly interesting, but far more interesting debates center on the ethics of keeping users from sharing and modifying software (proprietors are often, and rightly, noted as harmful to those who want to maintain their software freedom). There's a lot of important and interesting discussion on how the pursuit of software freedom ties into building and maintaining a society where people retain their freedom to communicate. These discussions often involve pointing out that computers and software play a role in answering the most important question we can ask--how should we treat other people?
Even along the narrow confines of the argument Zawinski presents, where convenience trumps everything else, his argument doesn't include socially relevant issues with serious consequences for all of us. We shouldn't accept everyone's choices nor should we only consider computer use as a selfish endeavor--do what's right for you. That selfishness may mean wielding power over other users.
It's particularly ironic that this topic concerns Apple and multimedia because Apple is an exemplar of wielding this power: Apple apparently refuses to distribute any codecs to make or play older free software-compatible and unencumbered formats out of the box (e.g., Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, Speex, and Theora, to name a few). Through subsequent "upgrades" to the software downloaded and installed through the software upgrade program, Cory Doctorow says that the popular iPod portable digital audio player has become less capable over time. He has documented numerous downgrades on his blog. So not only does Apple not want to support multimedia well enough that QuickTime becomes a one-stop-shop for media, but Apple doesn't even want to make it easy for you to choose to encode your own copyrighted works with free and unencumbered codecs.
Corporations are set up to be undemocratic institutions, "private tyrranies that are unaccountable to the public" as Noam Chomsky reminds us (I believe he was paraphrasing Walter Lippman here). It seems unsurprising therefore that Microsoft, one of the largest multinational corporations, would both go beyond what Chinese law actually requires of it along the line of making it even slightly more difficult to find what one is looking for, and to choose to have this to say about democracy.
Generally, no. If what you want to do is distribute proprietary derivatives (as is the wont of so many proprietors who base their work on new BSD or MIT X11-licensed code), then that's a power not a freedom. If what you want to do is share and modify the code in such a way that you distribute the same freedoms you had, then you are choosing not to leverage that power, but the power remains. But in the latter case, if you want to do this so that you only share with those that share with you (using copyright power to enforce a "share and share alike" situation), you should seek a copylefted free software license. Given the over moderation of your post (your question isn't actually insightful), I see that the BSD-licensing fans have moderation power today.
It is expected that the GPL3 will say something about patent licensing, perhaps telling distributors of GPL3-licensed works that they can't use patents to take away any of the rights the GPL3 grants to licensees. When the GPL3 comes out it will be interesting to see if there's another revision of the BSD license that covers software patents, something the current BSD licenses say nothing about.
Don't let two decades of history pass you by.
on
Drafting GPL3
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· Score: 2, Informative
You hit the nail on the head. OSS is not place for for power struggles.
The GNU GPL version 3 will be the first revision of the GPL anyone involved in the open source movement will have had anything to do with. It's ahistorical to call the GPL anything to do with "open source" except that the OSI set their terms for license approval widely enough to allow the GPL to get the OSI's stamp of approval. Nobody at the OSI wrote the GPL and that organization (and the movement it started) didn't exist when the GPL was written. The FSF wrote the GPL (most notably, Richard Stallman) and RMS points out very clearly that the free software movement is distinct from the open source movement. There are very good reasons why you will find no references to "open" anything and numerous references to software freedom in the GPL.
Even if this discussion concerned "open source software", proprietors would disagree that "OSS is not the place for power struggles" because proprietors wield power over their users all the time and don't like it when there is a suitable replacement for their program licensed to its users under more amenable terms. Proprietors spend millions of dollars on lobbyists who convince legislators to make anti-free software law. The power struggle for letting users control their computers has been going on for over 20 years now.
Besides, I've never understood how there can be a single codified GPL. It defies legal precedent.
What you're saying here makes no sense. The GPL is a license (that's what the "L" stands for), and there are two revisions of this license. Licensors have the power to choose the terms under which they wish to license their copyrighted work to others. Licenses are written because otherwise it is hard for licensees to know what their rights are concerning the copyrighted work.
Why work to shut down discussion?
on
Drafting GPL3
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I'm not sure what, exactly, constitutes "stirring up a tempest" but politics are at the heart of the matter when discussing licensing, certainly when comparing licenses that maintain a commons versus those that never say no. Accusations of this kind often come off as little more than attempts to shut people up without actually framing and defending any substantive issue; hardly discussion worthy of being called "insightful".
The GNU GPL is the most popular free software license, hence any changes to it will naturally attract attention. This doesn't mean that the FSF is causing problems or doing something harmful to licensees by engaging the public in the formation of the next version of the GPL. Quite to the contrary, if the FSF wrote the GPLv3 without input from anyone, they'd be rightly accused of being insular and they would run the risk of publishing a license that few would adopt. The commons they seek to create by using this license could shrink as a result. There were some substantive debates over the philosophy behind the GNU FDL (in part because it appeared that revision discussion was not taken into account or replied to) and, at first blush, it looks like the FSF would like to avoid repeating that.
The new BSD license, by contrast, is chosen chiefly by those who want to make a gift of code to all comers. This is an inherently political concern. The concept of creating a commons of code one can use copyright law to defend is not particularly attractive to these licensors. This doesn't mean they are taking a path worthy of less criticism.
Beagle delivered desktop search before Apple.
on
The Death of Folders?
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· Score: 1, Interesting
Obviously apple is the first to give a solid attempt at implementing this [...]
Vague qualifier of lacking 'solidity' notwithstanding, Beagle, a free software desktop search program, was up and running before Apple shipped Spotlight. I'm not saying that Beagle was the first to do this job, but since it was distributed before Spotlight, I don't think that it is fair for Apple to get credit for being first here.
People benefit from gaining the freedom to share and modify computer software, and one cannot gain one's freedom by switching from one master to another.
Adobe also helped put Dmitry Sklyarov in jail. Adobe is not an organization we ought to do business with because they treat people so badly. Bad laws don't deserve respect either, and I realize that Adobe is not a legislative body. However, the damage Adobe helped bring on is real, and their actions against Sklyarov show us that they're willing and able to wield that power against others. We should hold in contempt those that would stump for and use the power bad laws give them to stifle our freedoms.
It's ironic that you should quote RMS in your signature, because he would be the first to point out that McAfee and Grisoft's programs are both proprietary software -- the opposite of free software. Thus, these proprietary programs have nothing to offer users in the free world and these organizations are merely treating the free software community as a market.
Doubly ironic that so many people consider anti-virus programs to be a part of good security because using a proprietary virus scanner is like asking a fox to guard the henhouse; you have no chance to learn what that virus scanner is doing nor do you know if you can trust it to only do what you want it to do. If, somehow, you learned that the program did something you didn't want it to do, you have no way to improve it and no legal means to distribute the improved version to help others. You are at the mercy of organizations that started this relationship by treating you badly.
When one considers that viruses are often brought in through the weaknesses of proprietary software, one sees fodder for a good joke (sadly, a joke at the user's expense) and affirmation of the importance of software freedom.
From the/. story: "The story is on the AP Newswire as well.".
The Associated Press may have a story along these lines, but the link currently pointed to by Slashdot will not take you to that story. That link, copied from/.'s front page, takes the reader to a Static Control Components press release which happens to be carried on Yahoo! (a site that also happens to carry copies of AP wire stories).
This sounds to me like an appeal to popularity -- if you're not running some OS, you're insufficiently popular. The reason to run particular software should hinge on something significant, like how we ought to treat other people.
But this means we have to pay attention to software freedom, not mere popularity.
Free software is worth fighting for because it allows you to treat other people nicely and respect their freedom to share and modify the software. MacOS X continues to be non-free, parts of that OS are proprietary. Sharing it is a problem, not because it infringes on Apple's copyright, but because it means giving your friends and neighbors something they can't inspect (and therefore can't trust by default). They couldn't even hire someone to tell them what the proprietary parts of the OS do. You will become a bulwark for a proprietor, encouraging others to put their data into the metaphorical hands of an organization that treats us as a market. That's not what friends do.
Value software freedom in its own right.
on
The Return of GPLFlash
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Even if Macromedia had distributed something for users on a variety of OSes (not just GNU/Linux systems) on non-Intel-like hardware (such as Mac PPC), this would be a great development for everyone because it gives us something Macromedia isn't giving us: software freedom. The freedom to share and modify should be valued in its own right, not just because it is less expensive or can be recompiled for less popular combinations of hardware and operating system.
Are we to draw the same ahistorical conclusion for older versions of the Linux kernel, which Linus Torvalds gets untold amounts of adulation for?
Torvalds began what would become the Linux kernel, but Torvalds doesn't work on every line of Linux code anymore, he hasn't for some years now. Older versions of the Linux kernel aren't under Torvalds' managerial control because he has passed on the task of maintenance to other people (such as Marcello Tosatti who took over Alax Cox's job overseeing the 2.4 version). And we musn't forget the other forks of the kernel maintained and distributed by various GNU/Linux distributions, or the private derivatives (like the variant of the Linux kernel running on my machine right now) which contain code these maintainers never see.
Torvalds gets a lot of credit for work he did not do -- even going so far as to not correct anyone who calls "Linux" an operating system, not just a kernel -- very few people bother to mention Cox, Tosatti, or other maintainers of their distribution's derivative of the Linux kernel (various people at IBM, Red Hat, Novell, Canonical, etc.). This might be a side effect of the name "Linux" itself, which serves as a reminder of Linus Torvalds.
But you would have us believe that GCC (which contains no mention of Stallman by name) should grant Stallman no credit. Interesting, that in one respect this is part of an unbroken line of attempts to deny Stallman credit for valuable work he's begun or done, but also interesting in that it denies the iterative improvements that are at the heart of human achievements in art and science. Everyone stands on someone's shoulders and I think it's a big step in the wrong direction to deny credit to someone who's work has been of such enormous value to us all.
Where can I find references for these so-called dumb laws? For example, how do they figure that "Spitting is forbidden" in Chicago? Without references this could easily be something people mostly made up.
The issue at hand has nothing to do with being perfect. Such a comparison is a way to railroad people into accepting your conclusion without any real consideration of alternatives. It says that on the one hand we have Apple with whatever behavior they wish to engage in, on the other we have perfection. Since perfection is never available anywhere for anything, the perfection "alternative" goes away leaving only what was offered first; thus there is really no alternative at all.
You're also trying to position convenience above ethical treatment of other people and this is very dangerous position. People of a variety of political standpoints agree that Nike products are manufactured by underpaid workers who labor in unreasonable working conditions, earning far less than a living wage. Nike makes a great deal of money on the backs of workers who are treated unethically. See the evidence presented in the book and movie "The Corporation" for first-hand accounts and price evidence retreived from Nike's garbage.
Yet Nike products are sold at most athletic shoe stores. We are not better off by encouraging people to do business with Nike because what they offer is convenient. Particularly for those wealthy enough to afford Nike shoes (or Apple computers), other options are available which will serve a comparable function.
In the software realm, we are better off by doing what we can to encourage writing more free software, software which respects the users ability to share and modify programs, and we are also better off by doing away with software patents entirely. We should encourage hacking on free software to make it easier to use for most people most of the time. But we cannot afford to believe (as so many who frequent this site do) that ethical treatment of people is separable from computer software, or that technical convenience should trump how we treat other people.
We must not judge a company by just one thing that they do. Apple also distributes proprietary software as part of MacOS X which denies its users the ability to learn what their computer is really doing. They hold and acquire software patents which stop all software developers and users from implementing software described in the patent and using that software without permission from the patent holder. One of Apple's patents stops free software developers from distributing software to render fonts in a more aesthetically pleasing way.
Thus, I don't think it's fair to describe Apple as having "good busines integrity" when they harm all citizens of certain countries as they do. Some business practices can be appropriate, others are unquestionably harmful.
Better to help fund or contribute work toward the programming of PSPP, a free software replacement for SPSS. The questioner did ask specifically about free software.
In this thread, CNet is spinning the topic to focus on the open source movement, not the free software movement. There are differences between the movements and, while members of them work together in practical projects, the two movements are quite different philosophically. One of those differences has to do with discussing freedoms at all (the open source movement was designed not to discuss freedom, but the free software movement focuses on it) and another difference in practice concerns the preservation of freedoms in derivative works (the open source movement makes no difference between what the free software movement calls "copylefted" and "non-copylefted" licenses).
And here I though Free Software was about choice.
Please do cite where you would get this misinformation, because it has never been true and for a very good reason: "choice" is a way to railroad someone into losing their freedom. The free software movement is about giving all computer users the freedom to share and modify computer software. Choice is an argument that might appear to tend toward that end, but is actually quite different.
Some time ago, three graphical web browsers were the most popular web browsers around: Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, and Opera. Since there are at least two browsers in the set, choice is satisified. But software freedom is not satisfied at all because all of those browsers are proprietary software; none of these programs give you all of the freedoms of free software.
Today, Firefox is increasingly popular, but it is being pitched by the Mozilla Foundation on this weaker argument of "choice". Software freedom is a better argument which goes unmentioned by the Mozilla Foundation because they choose to follow the open source movement. The advantage to them is that if they ever want to make Firefox into a non-free browser, they can do so without altering their argument on why one should choose Firefox. Free software advocates, however, would lose interest in Firefox if it became non-free.
There are a lot of moderators using their modpoints to make a statement instead of posting. It's also clear that a lot of moderation goes on without reading the article within the context of the thread in which it appears.
I recently linked to a Democracy Now! episode which provided some background on the thread's main topic--Giuliana Sgrena's rescue by Italian intelligence agent Nicola Calipari. At the time I posted, nobody else had linked to Sgrena talking about the situation in her own words; an obviously relevant and informative pointer which somehow merited being modded down from 1 point to 0 points as "overrated". Given the amount of time this has persisted, I can only imagine that this post has gone through metamoderation as well and its score has remained intact.
And posts about the moderation system are almost always modded down. Moderators don't like to be criticized or identified. I'm not new here, but it's a shame more moderators aren't correcting mis-moderation. If you become a moderator, please consider reading all of the posts and moderating by reading posts in context.
20th Century Fox loves copyright term extension, the DMCA, placing people in prison for years for copyright infringement, and the power to buy more media outlets. I don't.
Slashdot Mirror
But even that lacks any indication of what the comment was talking about. Perhaps the comment author was wrong and whatever the comment referred to does belong in the kernel. Maybe some superfluous code makes it into the Linux kernel once in a while, but without more information it is impossible to tell if this really is junk code (as the article would have us believe) or something far more negligible -- not something significantly offensive to be worth considering to bolster the claims made in this article. This information has to come from those who posit the argument; readers shouldn't have to defend the speakers' arguments for them.
I blame Forbes for what went wrong in this article. Theo de Raadt has the experience, skill, and requirement to cite specific evidence to support his argument. But for all we readers know, he was never asked for such evidence. The article is written for laypeople, who know nothing about programming, yet the entire article hinges on one's ability to understand programming issues. Forbes should know their audience. This was a poor choice of article for Forbes to run and they executed it in a particularly poor way by not challenging their audience to try and keep up with the material which should have been presented.
Even though the parent was moderated flamebait, I'd have to concur with the overall sentiment given my experience dealing with both the Apple Server software and Apple the company while working with MacOS X Server for a client of mine who had had good experiences with MacOS in the past and thought that that experience would somehow translate into a good OS choice for web service. A client of mine bought one of the early dual G4 machines Apple offered and a copy of MacOS X Server. I think that Apple started selling this OS way too early, well before they were ready to support it in any serious way. The software was sorely underdocumented (and one shouldn't have to buy additional books to get documentation on the software one has already purchased) and Apple's employees were not responsive to problems. Apple leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to packaging. Keeping up with what's going on in Perl and Apache to fix bugs pertinant to the reason the server machine was brought in, for instance, is not easy when one has to compete with Apple's related packages thus risking Apple updates that don't install (or don't install correctly) because your installed software is more advanced than what Apple ships.
Also, I don't see why I would want to run a GUI on a machine that would run headless most of the time. Service records can either be generated automatically and sent somewhere else or I can ask for them when I need them from another machine. I'm just fine with ssh-ing into the server to get jobs done on the command line.
I don't have any statistics to offer on how much more slowly things ran under MacOS X, but I found their cutesy front-end apps to be inadequate or just plain wrong, so I ended up spending a lot of time working on things that I wouldn't have had to with another OS (GNU/Linux or OpenBSD, to name a couple free software systems); I ended up being slower to work because of the needless work I had to do. All of this for a proprietary system that costs considerable money in the first place.
What, exactly, is so unapproachable or unclear about RMS' talks and essays?
Consumers are taught to take whatever is put in front of them, regardless of whose interests are being served.
Your post is particularly ironic given that so many technocrats argue along the "build a better mousetrap" philosophy. Ogg Vorbis has better tagging support, fewer encumberances (even for proprietors), and, according to every blind listening test I have read, sounds better at comparable filesizes to an MP3 encoding of the same audio. But for years Apple has not added any Ogg Vorbis compatibility to QuickTime, so Apple users can't even make Ogg Vorbis audio files out of their own copyrighted audio files if they want to. Media conference organizers (like the one which just happened in St. Louis) are only available if one gets proprietary QuickTime software (both the archive files they distributed for a while and the live stream were only for QuickTime users). And these are the folks who are ostensibly sensitized to the problem of restricting media access to the large corporate players! It takes a trip to Brazil or Spain to see Ogg Vorbis+Ogg Theora live coverage of conferences, simultaneously broadcasting what happens in multiple rooms.
On /., all you have to do is point the readership to the next sci-fi movie. Your posts get moderated down if you dare to mention that this is one way the multinational movie corporations make money which they use to bring you horrible new copyright laws. The concept of not funding one's own oppression is not something corporate media publishers want you to dwell upon.
According to the state of Massachusetts, proprietary or encumbered Microsoft Office formats are "open formats". Massachusetts state law is not federal law, but you can see how a lack of deep understanding and resolve to demand something better from business ends up hurting the public interest. Here's hoping that federally this receives more citizen-oriented thought. This is a political problem that will require ongoing political pressure to resolve in favor of the citizenry.
What software Jamie Zawinski chooses isn't terribly interesting, but far more interesting debates center on the ethics of keeping users from sharing and modifying software (proprietors are often, and rightly, noted as harmful to those who want to maintain their software freedom). There's a lot of important and interesting discussion on how the pursuit of software freedom ties into building and maintaining a society where people retain their freedom to communicate. These discussions often involve pointing out that computers and software play a role in answering the most important question we can ask--how should we treat other people?
Even along the narrow confines of the argument Zawinski presents, where convenience trumps everything else, his argument doesn't include socially relevant issues with serious consequences for all of us. We shouldn't accept everyone's choices nor should we only consider computer use as a selfish endeavor--do what's right for you. That selfishness may mean wielding power over other users.
It's particularly ironic that this topic concerns Apple and multimedia because Apple is an exemplar of wielding this power: Apple apparently refuses to distribute any codecs to make or play older free software-compatible and unencumbered formats out of the box (e.g., Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, Speex, and Theora, to name a few). Through subsequent "upgrades" to the software downloaded and installed through the software upgrade program, Cory Doctorow says that the popular iPod portable digital audio player has become less capable over time. He has documented numerous downgrades on his blog. So not only does Apple not want to support multimedia well enough that QuickTime becomes a one-stop-shop for media, but Apple doesn't even want to make it easy for you to choose to encode your own copyrighted works with free and unencumbered codecs.
Corporations are set up to be undemocratic institutions, "private tyrranies that are unaccountable to the public" as Noam Chomsky reminds us (I believe he was paraphrasing Walter Lippman here). It seems unsurprising therefore that Microsoft, one of the largest multinational corporations, would both go beyond what Chinese law actually requires of it along the line of making it even slightly more difficult to find what one is looking for, and to choose to have this to say about democracy.
Generally, no. If what you want to do is distribute proprietary derivatives (as is the wont of so many proprietors who base their work on new BSD or MIT X11-licensed code), then that's a power not a freedom. If what you want to do is share and modify the code in such a way that you distribute the same freedoms you had, then you are choosing not to leverage that power, but the power remains. But in the latter case, if you want to do this so that you only share with those that share with you (using copyright power to enforce a "share and share alike" situation), you should seek a copylefted free software license. Given the over moderation of your post (your question isn't actually insightful), I see that the BSD-licensing fans have moderation power today.
It is expected that the GPL3 will say something about patent licensing, perhaps telling distributors of GPL3-licensed works that they can't use patents to take away any of the rights the GPL3 grants to licensees. When the GPL3 comes out it will be interesting to see if there's another revision of the BSD license that covers software patents, something the current BSD licenses say nothing about.
The GNU GPL version 3 will be the first revision of the GPL anyone involved in the open source movement will have had anything to do with. It's ahistorical to call the GPL anything to do with "open source" except that the OSI set their terms for license approval widely enough to allow the GPL to get the OSI's stamp of approval. Nobody at the OSI wrote the GPL and that organization (and the movement it started) didn't exist when the GPL was written. The FSF wrote the GPL (most notably, Richard Stallman) and RMS points out very clearly that the free software movement is distinct from the open source movement. There are very good reasons why you will find no references to "open" anything and numerous references to software freedom in the GPL.
Even if this discussion concerned "open source software", proprietors would disagree that "OSS is not the place for power struggles" because proprietors wield power over their users all the time and don't like it when there is a suitable replacement for their program licensed to its users under more amenable terms. Proprietors spend millions of dollars on lobbyists who convince legislators to make anti-free software law. The power struggle for letting users control their computers has been going on for over 20 years now.
What you're saying here makes no sense. The GPL is a license (that's what the "L" stands for), and there are two revisions of this license. Licensors have the power to choose the terms under which they wish to license their copyrighted work to others. Licenses are written because otherwise it is hard for licensees to know what their rights are concerning the copyrighted work.
I'm not sure what, exactly, constitutes "stirring up a tempest" but politics are at the heart of the matter when discussing licensing, certainly when comparing licenses that maintain a commons versus those that never say no. Accusations of this kind often come off as little more than attempts to shut people up without actually framing and defending any substantive issue; hardly discussion worthy of being called "insightful".
The GNU GPL is the most popular free software license, hence any changes to it will naturally attract attention. This doesn't mean that the FSF is causing problems or doing something harmful to licensees by engaging the public in the formation of the next version of the GPL. Quite to the contrary, if the FSF wrote the GPLv3 without input from anyone, they'd be rightly accused of being insular and they would run the risk of publishing a license that few would adopt. The commons they seek to create by using this license could shrink as a result. There were some substantive debates over the philosophy behind the GNU FDL (in part because it appeared that revision discussion was not taken into account or replied to) and, at first blush, it looks like the FSF would like to avoid repeating that.
The new BSD license, by contrast, is chosen chiefly by those who want to make a gift of code to all comers. This is an inherently political concern. The concept of creating a commons of code one can use copyright law to defend is not particularly attractive to these licensors. This doesn't mean they are taking a path worthy of less criticism.
Vague qualifier of lacking 'solidity' notwithstanding, Beagle, a free software desktop search program, was up and running before Apple shipped Spotlight. I'm not saying that Beagle was the first to do this job, but since it was distributed before Spotlight, I don't think that it is fair for Apple to get credit for being first here.
People benefit from gaining the freedom to share and modify computer software, and one cannot gain one's freedom by switching from one master to another.
Adobe also helped put Dmitry Sklyarov in jail. Adobe is not an organization we ought to do business with because they treat people so badly. Bad laws don't deserve respect either, and I realize that Adobe is not a legislative body. However, the damage Adobe helped bring on is real, and their actions against Sklyarov show us that they're willing and able to wield that power against others. We should hold in contempt those that would stump for and use the power bad laws give them to stifle our freedoms.
It's ironic that you should quote RMS in your signature, because he would be the first to point out that McAfee and Grisoft's programs are both proprietary software -- the opposite of free software. Thus, these proprietary programs have nothing to offer users in the free world and these organizations are merely treating the free software community as a market.
Doubly ironic that so many people consider anti-virus programs to be a part of good security because using a proprietary virus scanner is like asking a fox to guard the henhouse; you have no chance to learn what that virus scanner is doing nor do you know if you can trust it to only do what you want it to do. If, somehow, you learned that the program did something you didn't want it to do, you have no way to improve it and no legal means to distribute the improved version to help others. You are at the mercy of organizations that started this relationship by treating you badly.
When one considers that viruses are often brought in through the weaknesses of proprietary software, one sees fodder for a good joke (sadly, a joke at the user's expense) and affirmation of the importance of software freedom.
From the /. story: "The story is on the AP Newswire as well.".
The Associated Press may have a story along these lines, but the link currently pointed to by Slashdot will not take you to that story. That link, copied from /.'s front page, takes the reader to a Static Control Components press release which happens to be carried on Yahoo! (a site that also happens to carry copies of AP wire stories).
This sounds to me like an appeal to popularity -- if you're not running some OS, you're insufficiently popular. The reason to run particular software should hinge on something significant, like how we ought to treat other people.
But this means we have to pay attention to software freedom, not mere popularity.
Free software is worth fighting for because it allows you to treat other people nicely and respect their freedom to share and modify the software. MacOS X continues to be non-free, parts of that OS are proprietary. Sharing it is a problem, not because it infringes on Apple's copyright, but because it means giving your friends and neighbors something they can't inspect (and therefore can't trust by default). They couldn't even hire someone to tell them what the proprietary parts of the OS do. You will become a bulwark for a proprietor, encouraging others to put their data into the metaphorical hands of an organization that treats us as a market. That's not what friends do.
Even if Macromedia had distributed something for users on a variety of OSes (not just GNU/Linux systems) on non-Intel-like hardware (such as Mac PPC), this would be a great development for everyone because it gives us something Macromedia isn't giving us: software freedom. The freedom to share and modify should be valued in its own right, not just because it is less expensive or can be recompiled for less popular combinations of hardware and operating system.
Are we to draw the same ahistorical conclusion for older versions of the Linux kernel, which Linus Torvalds gets untold amounts of adulation for?
Torvalds began what would become the Linux kernel, but Torvalds doesn't work on every line of Linux code anymore, he hasn't for some years now. Older versions of the Linux kernel aren't under Torvalds' managerial control because he has passed on the task of maintenance to other people (such as Marcello Tosatti who took over Alax Cox's job overseeing the 2.4 version). And we musn't forget the other forks of the kernel maintained and distributed by various GNU/Linux distributions, or the private derivatives (like the variant of the Linux kernel running on my machine right now) which contain code these maintainers never see.
Torvalds gets a lot of credit for work he did not do -- even going so far as to not correct anyone who calls "Linux" an operating system, not just a kernel -- very few people bother to mention Cox, Tosatti, or other maintainers of their distribution's derivative of the Linux kernel (various people at IBM, Red Hat, Novell, Canonical, etc.). This might be a side effect of the name "Linux" itself, which serves as a reminder of Linus Torvalds.
But you would have us believe that GCC (which contains no mention of Stallman by name) should grant Stallman no credit. Interesting, that in one respect this is part of an unbroken line of attempts to deny Stallman credit for valuable work he's begun or done, but also interesting in that it denies the iterative improvements that are at the heart of human achievements in art and science. Everyone stands on someone's shoulders and I think it's a big step in the wrong direction to deny credit to someone who's work has been of such enormous value to us all.
Where can I find references for these so-called dumb laws? For example, how do they figure that "Spitting is forbidden" in Chicago? Without references this could easily be something people mostly made up.
The issue at hand has nothing to do with being perfect. Such a comparison is a way to railroad people into accepting your conclusion without any real consideration of alternatives. It says that on the one hand we have Apple with whatever behavior they wish to engage in, on the other we have perfection. Since perfection is never available anywhere for anything, the perfection "alternative" goes away leaving only what was offered first; thus there is really no alternative at all.
You're also trying to position convenience above ethical treatment of other people and this is very dangerous position. People of a variety of political standpoints agree that Nike products are manufactured by underpaid workers who labor in unreasonable working conditions, earning far less than a living wage. Nike makes a great deal of money on the backs of workers who are treated unethically. See the evidence presented in the book and movie "The Corporation" for first-hand accounts and price evidence retreived from Nike's garbage.
Yet Nike products are sold at most athletic shoe stores. We are not better off by encouraging people to do business with Nike because what they offer is convenient. Particularly for those wealthy enough to afford Nike shoes (or Apple computers), other options are available which will serve a comparable function.
In the software realm, we are better off by doing what we can to encourage writing more free software, software which respects the users ability to share and modify programs, and we are also better off by doing away with software patents entirely. We should encourage hacking on free software to make it easier to use for most people most of the time. But we cannot afford to believe (as so many who frequent this site do) that ethical treatment of people is separable from computer software, or that technical convenience should trump how we treat other people.
We must not judge a company by just one thing that they do. Apple also distributes proprietary software as part of MacOS X which denies its users the ability to learn what their computer is really doing. They hold and acquire software patents which stop all software developers and users from implementing software described in the patent and using that software without permission from the patent holder. One of Apple's patents stops free software developers from distributing software to render fonts in a more aesthetically pleasing way.
Thus, I don't think it's fair to describe Apple as having "good busines integrity" when they harm all citizens of certain countries as they do. Some business practices can be appropriate, others are unquestionably harmful.
Better to help fund or contribute work toward the programming of PSPP, a free software replacement for SPSS. The questioner did ask specifically about free software.
In this thread, CNet is spinning the topic to focus on the open source movement, not the free software movement. There are differences between the movements and, while members of them work together in practical projects, the two movements are quite different philosophically. One of those differences has to do with discussing freedoms at all (the open source movement was designed not to discuss freedom, but the free software movement focuses on it) and another difference in practice concerns the preservation of freedoms in derivative works (the open source movement makes no difference between what the free software movement calls "copylefted" and "non-copylefted" licenses).
Please do cite where you would get this misinformation, because it has never been true and for a very good reason: "choice" is a way to railroad someone into losing their freedom. The free software movement is about giving all computer users the freedom to share and modify computer software. Choice is an argument that might appear to tend toward that end, but is actually quite different.
Some time ago, three graphical web browsers were the most popular web browsers around: Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, and Opera. Since there are at least two browsers in the set, choice is satisified. But software freedom is not satisfied at all because all of those browsers are proprietary software; none of these programs give you all of the freedoms of free software.
Today, Firefox is increasingly popular, but it is being pitched by the Mozilla Foundation on this weaker argument of "choice". Software freedom is a better argument which goes unmentioned by the Mozilla Foundation because they choose to follow the open source movement. The advantage to them is that if they ever want to make Firefox into a non-free browser, they can do so without altering their argument on why one should choose Firefox. Free software advocates, however, would lose interest in Firefox if it became non-free.
There are a lot of moderators using their modpoints to make a statement instead of posting. It's also clear that a lot of moderation goes on without reading the article within the context of the thread in which it appears.
I recently linked to a Democracy Now! episode which provided some background on the thread's main topic--Giuliana Sgrena's rescue by Italian intelligence agent Nicola Calipari. At the time I posted, nobody else had linked to Sgrena talking about the situation in her own words; an obviously relevant and informative pointer which somehow merited being modded down from 1 point to 0 points as "overrated". Given the amount of time this has persisted, I can only imagine that this post has gone through metamoderation as well and its score has remained intact.
And posts about the moderation system are almost always modded down. Moderators don't like to be criticized or identified. I'm not new here, but it's a shame more moderators aren't correcting mis-moderation. If you become a moderator, please consider reading all of the posts and moderating by reading posts in context.
20th Century Fox loves copyright term extension, the DMCA, placing people in prison for years for copyright infringement, and the power to buy more media outlets. I don't.