MacOS X doesn't printer support significantly better than some GNU/Linux distributions do (like Ubuntu Hoary Hedgehog or Fedora Core 3). Perhaps MacOS X gets things right (just plug it in, turn it on, let it autoconfig, print a document to test) with Zeroconf/Rendevous printers, but I don't know anyone who has one of those, so that didn't help me with my situations at all.
I wanted to hook up a Brother HL-1270N for the whole house to use and I wanted to hook it up directly to a computer. A friend of mine runs MacOS X and wanted to share the printer when he visited my house.
There was just as much technical nonsense going on with MacOS X as with the free software systems when I wanted to hook up a printer the whole house could share (a network printer). The printer was easy enough to set up -- the default settings were reasonable -- and it exposes itself via a number of protocols which CUPS understands.
The problem was none of the operating systems did the leg work to search the LAN for available printers and let me click on an icon representing the printer I wanted (or, if after searching all interfaces, there's only one printer available, simply make that the default printer). This would be a fine solution for most users most of the time, but instead users have to know the IP address of their printer and they have to know what protocol their remote printer should use. By the standards of "Just Works", this is not ready for ordinary users.
Even when hooking up a printer to the machine directly, MacOS X didn't fare as well as its free software competition. Only Fedora Core 3 GNU/Linux made it relatively easy to get the right thing done, thanks to kuzdu, the hardware configuration program.
I find printer support in MacOS X to be considerably overrated. With MacOS X, you're paying for software some of which is proprietary. If I'm going to give up my software freedom, I expect far better than what Apple ships.
But it's not recommended to do this on all systems in which CUPS is used.
For example, on Fedora Core 3 GNU/Linux when one tries to manage printers by visiting http://localhost:631 with a web browser, one sees "Use system-config-printer to edit this!". For those who don't know, "system-config-printer" is a supplied printer configuration program which is probably most commonly accessed through the main menu (in GNOME, pick Applications->System Settings->Printing).
What's deliciously ironic that the law they used to step on Sklyarov is now, they say, working against them.
But it's not really working against them, it's working exactly as large corporate proprietors intended it to work--to railroad users into losing their software freedom and doing business with organizations (like Adobe) that treat users poorly.
Adobe can simply purchase a per-seat license for Nikon's decryption software which grants Adobe to link it into Photoshop but not to inspect it or modify it. Nikon and Adobe get what they want--control over the user and more money.
If Adobe bitches about not wanting to ship software under their name and brand that they don't control, we'll get another chuckle of irony out of the deal.
Meanwhile, I recommend going with another camera vendor and using the GIMP. Don't spend your money to let someone hurt you. Spend your money on GIMP and dcRAW developers who are helping you (and would probably help you more if you paid them).
When a potential buyer looks at Photoshop and sees that it isn't supporting the D2X/H fully because of some retarded move by Nikon to try and make money they are likely going to find another camera.
If they do, then that points to an interesting hypocrisy regarding FLOSS--many free software and open source operating systems don't ship with software to do things users want to do including making and playing scrambled DVDs, making and playing MP3s, and there probably won't any free software to decrypt Nikon's white balance encryption shipped by default in free software OSes. Yet it's accepted among many reviewers (including those one would think would know better) to blame the OS and not blame various laws preventing such software from being distributed freely worldwide.
So, perhaps Adobe should use some of their millions to negotiate a license for proprietary software to link into Adobe Photoshop so Nikon camera users can decrypt the white balance encryption. Nikon gets money and Photoshop users continue to be denied software freedom. When Adobe says they want to be able to inspect and modify the software they distribute we'll have another opportunity for a schadenfreude chuckle.
Nothing is preventing anyone from paying the one-time license fee for MP3 decoding. According to mp3licensing.com this one-time license fee is "US$ 50 000.00 - US$ 60 000.00". But there are some problems with that plan:
This license fee only covers MP3 decoding, not MP3 encoding. Nowadays people want to make compressed audio files, not just play them. At best, this only covers half of what users want to do.
The license fee is potentially incompatible with free software. It's possible that the license one pays for states that it does not apply to software which is licensed to share and modify. I don't know if this is the case, I've never read the license text for the one-time paid up MP3 decoder license, but it would be within the patent holder's power to do such a thing. Fraunhofer could decide to simply not license any free software distributor for an MP3 decoder license. Either would be a simple and effective showstopper for any free software MP3 player.
Eventually, the patents covering MP3 will expire everywhere in the world. At this point, you'll probably see MP3 encoders and decoders popping up in all free software and open source OSes. Ogg Vorbis will still be technically superior. Thus, the more time that passes, the more expensive any one-time license fee becomes because this fee grants one legal permission to do something one can do now (with better quality and tagging information) for no license fee. Paying this much money for something we don't strictly need is hard to justify to investors and small businesses.
That's a lot of money for a free software project to raise or justify paying just to cave in to popularity. And the money would be paid to underscore something that should not exist in the first place (software patents) and would give users no reason to investigate using something we should be using instead (Ogg Vorbis).
As is the case with proprietors. Instead of relying on the proprietor and hoping they'll fix what you want fixed, it's better to depend on free software where you get the freedom to develop the software yourself, or pay someone to do it for you.
What the free software community needs to do is make it easier for people to find developers who are willing to do this kind of work. They are out there, but they aren't very well advertised.
In addition to being copyright infringement, these proprietary codecs don't work on non-i386-based platforms. One of the hallmarks of FLOSS is portability. I think it's a good thing that I can give someone a copy of an Ogg Vorbis file and not have to care what hardware they're using because I know it's likely that there's a program to play the audio file on their computer. Now, even portable digital audio players play Ogg Vorbis files, so people can hear high-quality compressed audio without being near their computer.
This is part of the reason why I'm anxiously awaiting Dirac and why I'm reading the Theora spec. I want to be able to point to a complete and competitive FLOSS codecs which are genuinely useful for movies.
We also ought to promote the use of these codecs and not be so eager to distribute copies of files encoded with proprietary or patent-encumbered codecs.
The Free Software Foundation is the chief proponent of the GNU General Public License because they wrote the license years before there was an "open-source" movement. If anyone is going to have a field day, it will be those who want to advertise how they don't understand when the GPL is meant to be used and also want to make fun of the freedoms the GPL was written to protect.
They care, that's why they (like so many people around the world) are leery of accepting Monsanto's offer for seeds which farmers can't save (an ancient farming practice), and which mainly serve to line Monsanto's pocket instead of working with farmers to feed people. Many other large groups of people around the world are leery of genetically modified foods because of the control it places in few organizations (multinational corporations, no less), and how some of the testing of these foods are done by placing them in the market and seeing what happens.
Much of your post is flamebait, but I'll note that Stallman has nothing to do with the open source movement. He has taken time to explain the differences between the movements. Stallman started the GNU Project to make the freedoms of free software real, and the rights free software confers upon the user are infectious--one can easily see how sharing and modifying software is critical to preserving freedom of speech, critical for restoring competition in the marketplace, and democratizing software development.
As for trying to use a license to prevent Nike from running a program because you object to their labor practices, you desire the kind of power over licensees that the Hacktivismo Enhanced-Source Software License Agreement tries to leverage. The FSF has explained why this license is a non-free license.
Unlike you writing and selling Harry Potter books (which, actually, I wouldn't object to you doing but given your writing sample here, I doubt you could match what fans of that series are used to reading), I need my computer to express myself politically in the way I choose to do and I use a computer to cooperate with other people in the way people in ethical societies should do. This includes distributing software for a fee, if I choose. Distribution is key to spreading copies of programs that help people, or spreading copies of improved programs. Distributing copies of a program for a fee is a great way to justify writing more free software. To maintain that I shouldn't be able to do these things is to advocate for a power we don't grant readers of books or other published works--I can buy and sell copies of other copyrighted works by leveraging my rights under the first sale doctrine. Ultimately, free software sets a better standard against which we can compare other software and see if the rights we have with free software are also granted to us. I'm not willing to give up these rights, so I place them high on my priority list when evaluating a program.
In short, I do it myself. I have downloaded Shorten files (and, if possible, their WAV equivalents so I don't have to run the non-free shorten program) and then recompressed the uncompressed data with FLAC. archive.org carries a lot of Shorten files you can use for testing.
Every time I test this, I see that FLAC compresses more tightly than Shorten. But I'm told there are other lossless audio compressors out there that do a better job than FLAC. I've seen the results of some of them, but I don't know where to point you to to test this except to try making your own tests and compare file sizes and compression/decompression times.
It's not difficult to write a shell script to do this for you.
I'm no kernel developer so I have no clue as to if Linus is "[being] a real idiot". However I do have a goodly bit of management experience and this kind of talk is bad no matter how you slice it.
You don't need to be a software developer of any kind to understand that it's a bad thing when Linus Torvalds told Andrew Tridgell to stop developing his free software network-compatible replacement for BitKeeper. If McVoy's retelling is accurate, I find it very disturbing and so should everyone else in the free software community. This is a very big sign that Torvalds is not the free software "posterboy" some take him to be. We don't tell one another what programs to write or not write without paying them, and we certainly don't impede another's desire to promote a free software alternative to a proprietary program. Impeding free software is harmful to the community.
This is remarkably one-sided of Torvalds as well. I'm sure Microsoft doesn't appreciate Samba servers being used instead of Microsoft Windows servers, yet the reason Samba is so good at what it does (and can replace some Microsoft SMB servers) is because Tridgell and the other Samba developers did the reverse-engineering work to figure out how the SMB protocols work in practice. I don't recall reading about Torvalds defending proprietary software being distributed by Microsoft by telling Tridgell to stop his Samba work; but BitMover's proprietary software has received that kind of attention from Torvalds. Torvalds is serving as a buttress for BitMover here.
As for Torvalds sometimes being a "real idiot", I can attest to that although I would never have called him names. I can think of instances where Torvalds inadvertantly embarassed himself when his opinion was sought on political matters. In such instances it is clear to all but the most ardent Torvalds fans that his reach exceeds his grasp. If I recall correctly, a recent Newsforge.com interview asked him what he thought of the upcoming GNU GPL v3 (possibly years before it comes out). This struck me as unwise since he does not closely examine copyright law or its ethical import for society (two of the things one needs to have down pat to offer critique worth considering regarding the GPL). For this advice I would have instead asked Eben Moglen or RMS, both authorities on the issues surrounding the GPL. By contrast, asking Torvalds about Linux kernel programming would be perfectly appropriate. I'd never think to go to Moglen or RMS for this information.
Saying these kinds of things to the press can only hurt the whole OSS movement as it give all the MS, Sun, et all shills plenty of ammo to use. [...]
You shouldn't fear "spin". You need to trust that people will examine what happened and be reasonable, discuss the situation, and find better arguments. Microsoft will distort history regardless of what we do. They've proven this with their college campus tours and interviews when they declare that free software is a "cancer" or will eat your "intellectual property" like Pac-Man. Brad Kuhn (former executive director of the FSF) said at a talk in Urbana, IL that the annual budget for the FSF is what Microsoft makes in 30 seconds, yet Microsoft has said that the FSF is a threat to software development worldwide. When we see something unethical going on, we need to speak up about it, no matter who is at fault. The cure for bad speech is more speech.
I know that a number of GPL'ed projects offer a GPL license and a Commercial license.
You know of a number of GPL'ed projects which distribute under the GPL or a proprietary license. The GNU General Public License (GPL) is a commercial license because business is done under this license. GPL-covered works are distributed for a fee. The GPL is in no way anti-business. Ironically, I've pointed out some significant ways in which the open source movement fails to speak to business interests as well as free software speaks to all computer users (the open source definition ignores any requirement for private derivatives, for instance).
But, if you want to create a closed-source/proprietary project [...]
The free software movement does not want to be confused with the open source movement and the open source movement works hard to distance themselves from freedom talk. Please reconsider trying to conflate the real and important differences between the two movements. The open source movement deserves far less credit than it receives with regard to the GNU GPL, considering they had nothing to do with writing it, building a community around it, and that the open source movement doesn't frame anything in terms of software freedom. Their work in bringing people to freedom is to be commended, but I think when associating a movement with the license (particularly in an article focusing on the license itself), it's important that we give credit to the FSF and associate it with the free software movement.
It would be shameful if Monkey's Audio's license became an OSI-approved license. It would point to a profound irony as well. Consider the situation from a business perspective and don't forget that the open source movement's chief audience is businesses.
According to the Monkey's Audio developer site: "If you're trying to make money, in any way, talk to me first.". This is a restatement of section 2 of the Monkey's Audio license ("2. The use of Monkey's Audio or the Monkey's Audio source code for any commercial purposes including, but not limited to, implementation in shareware packages is strictly prohibited without first obtaining written permission from the author.").
This means that you need additional permission beyond the license to do something you deserve the right to do--distribute modified or verbatim copies of the covered work for a fee; something you would have the right to do if Monkey's Audio license qualified as a free software license, which it clearly does not. The copyright holder could deny your business permission ad hoc. Choosing to deal with licensors like this means that you are choosing to build your business on sand (metaphorically speaking).
I can hardly believe I need to tell open source proponents about the value of paying attention to all computer users, including those in business. Semi-free software is insufficient. We should not exclude profit-minded users from free software. We should insist that everyone can enjoy the freedoms of free software.
So why is Monkey's Audio and so many of their users describing the software as "open source"? Because of a different shame, a failed attempt to supplant the free software movement by substituting a weaker definition tied to a different term that the OSI thought would address the ambiguity of the English word "free". Just like the FSF describes, "open source" here is probably being taken to mean the ability to view the source code. Anyone who has read the open source definition knows that merely seeing source code is explicitly not what the term "open source" means, yet this is the misunderstanding many come away with. So, now we have two movements: the older free software movement using an English word with multiple meanings provoking initial misunderstanding (which non-English speakers have no problem understanding to mean freedom not price). Free software is tied to the rights computer users need. The open source movement offers a misunderstood term (which remains misunderstood around the world), and which is tied to watered-down rights primarily aimed at benefitting businesses.
FLAC remains the easy choice primarily because it is free software. It might not compress best (but it compresses better than Shorten), but it works well enough and its inherent freedom offers a compelling case for long-term archiving.
If "design[ing] from the ground up to be more secure" is actually a point of the open source movement it is a mistake. After a certain amount of complexity, people are sure to inadvertantly write buggy programs. There's nothing wrong with trying to design secure programs from the start, but inevitably bugs will be found. Therefore to promise secure design from the start is a lie.
The free software movement, by contrast, avoids that lie because it offers a different message. The free software movement's message says that free software is inherently better because people have the freedom to share and modify free programs. Thus when bugs are discovered they can be fixed and the fixed version can be shared with the community. Nowhere does the free software message hinge on secure design from the start, however secure-by-design may be another side effect of the freedoms of free software. It makes far more sense to admit that humans are fallible, regardless of intention, and will design insecure software as a result.
For more on the differences between the movements, please read the FSF's essay.
You're right, I was thinking of the tri-licensed Mozilla Suite (which, I gather, is no longer being developed by the Mozilla Foundation). Fortunately the MPL 1.1 is a free software license. At the same time, the GPL is a far more practical choice considering how much other software is already licensed under that license.
Prior to learning about the no endorsement section, I would have agreed with you. Now, I'm not so fast to conclude as you do. A good deal of the speech I make is political. I'd be disappointed to learn I had been paying BBC license fees ultimately to be told that I couldn't build on these works "to promote political, charitable, or other campaigning purposes".
On the other hand, I've gained a newfound respect for the public domain and the importance of the preservation and growth of the public domain.
I'm quite pleased that a GNU GPL-covered web browser is making so many inroads on so many desktops around the world. The FLOSS OS distributors are all doing fantastic work helping to promote its use, and of course the Firefox website is quite popular after every mention in the New York Times. I hope that people will use Firefox as a means to moving to a free software system someday.
What matters here is not what percentage of traffic is used to infringe copyright, but that the principal of substantial non-infringing use still applies and that it's a good thing that copyright holders have to pursue due diligence when investigating alleged copyright infringement. We don't need more people making mistakes between what's infringing use and what merely occupies a lot of bandwidth. We need to preserve our rights and make sure we get our day in court.
It would be a shame if a lack of public pressure on ISPs to observe our legal rights did not prevent a vocal minority of copyright holders from further pursuing a leakproof pipe from their publishers to your eyes and ears. Your rights should matter more than their profits.
First, the GNU General Public License is not "open source" except that the Open Source Initiative happened to define their terms broadly enough to allow the GPL to qualify as an OSI-approved license. The GPL was written by the FSF (most notably RMS) for the free software movement years before the open source movement existed. Even a cursory glance of the GPL's terms will confirm it speaks to a philosophy the open source movement rejects.
Second, to equate a corporate agenda to a social movement's agenda is to understand the import of neither. The GPL grants all of the meaningful rights of copyright law to licensees in exchange for terms built to maintain licensee equality. Corporate-made licenses are far more likely to grant power to the licensor beyond that which copyright law already does. The intitial versions of the Apple Public Source License, for example, required notifying a central authority of changes and publishing one's changed version of an APSL-covered program in most instances so that the central authority could pick up a copy and incorporate the changes in their fork of the program if they desired. Apple was that central authority. Apple wanted not just an OSI-approved license, but a free software license as well, so they made the v2 revision that qualified for FSF imprimateur. But what this really points to is that the free software definition stands for something more beneficial to users than the open source definition, thus giving Apple (and all other licensors) something better to aspire to.
Third, the GNU GPL is the most popular free software license. It is a major practical problem to write software that is licensed in a GPL-incompatible way. Programmers in the free software community want to make improved versions of programs by sharing code. Copying code from one program into another program requires license compatibility in most cases (outside of fair use).
Your assessment vastly oversimplifies the situation and glosses over some of the most important reasons why the free software community was formed in the first place. The people working for the GNU project (most notably again, RMS) knew these things would come and wrote licenses and software to give us our software freedom. My account discounts the open source movement's input because most of the foundation for this work happened well before the open source movement began. It's a shame that your article has received such a high moderation. Perhaps it points to how much misunderstanding there is amongst hackers and how much education has yet to be done.
That's the same logic Linus Torvalds used to decide which source code revision tracking program he should pick. It's the logic that puts users in the hands of the proprietors which places them at risk of unwittingly losing features (see Cory Doctorow on iTunes), losing security (Internet Explorer on Microsoft Windows variants), and losing privacy (proprietary software makes an excellent means of acquiring backdoors, keyloggers, and other kinds of software people generally don't want).
Just like with so many other things in life, it's time we recognize that we are connected in what we want and we need the freedom to help one another. With regard to computer software, this means paying attention to one's software freedom and teaching others why software freedom matters.
The article cites Torvalds summarizing McVoy's position:
"You can compete with me, but you can't do so by riding on my coat-tails. Solve the problems on your own, and compete _honestly_. Don't compete by looking at my solution."
Compatibility is honest competition and it requires understanding protocols to work as a drop-in replacement. There is nothing so original about BitKeeper that it would pass the criteria of this statement. But the next statement from Torvalds underscores a theme on why we should not place Torvalds in the position of "posterboy" for a long-term movement:
"And that is what the BK license boils down to. It says: "Get off my coat-tails, you free-loader". And I can't really argue against that."
Well, I can, and Torvalds ought to be able to. In science and art (and perhaps those categories draw an artificial difference which is much more blurry in reality) everyone rides someone's coat-tail. Again, the work done by the speaker would not pass the test suggested by these statements. The Linux kernel does a lot of things that are not original. One of the major reasons it was able to become a practical kernel is because of its design--HURD developers talk of the difficulty of debugging a multithreaded kernel replacement which slows down their development progress. A monolithic kernel, it has been said, is easier to debug and faster to add new features to. The GNU/Linux operating system benefits from Samba and OpenOffice.org which are built on reverse engineering Microsoft's underdocumented and changing protocols and file formats.
This is part of why I believe Linus Torvalds is about to make the same mistake twice, choosing a non-free program for Linux kernel maintenance because he values popularity and short-term technical gains like more than software freedom.
No, I won't. I won't rent or buy a copy of it on home video either. The chief beneficiaries of my buying a ticket will be organizations that want to control how we use our computers, that promote extending the term of copyright, that want to turn our libraries into pay-per-view centers, that push for technological control laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and that export these and other horrible ideas around the world in trade treaties. We are being offered these ongoing restrictions on our freedoms in exchange for a couple of hours of entertainment. I don't see this as a beneficial exchange. Therefore, I will not help them hurt me.
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MacOS X doesn't printer support significantly better than some GNU/Linux distributions do (like Ubuntu Hoary Hedgehog or Fedora Core 3). Perhaps MacOS X gets things right (just plug it in, turn it on, let it autoconfig, print a document to test) with Zeroconf/Rendevous printers, but I don't know anyone who has one of those, so that didn't help me with my situations at all.
I wanted to hook up a Brother HL-1270N for the whole house to use and I wanted to hook it up directly to a computer. A friend of mine runs MacOS X and wanted to share the printer when he visited my house.
There was just as much technical nonsense going on with MacOS X as with the free software systems when I wanted to hook up a printer the whole house could share (a network printer). The printer was easy enough to set up -- the default settings were reasonable -- and it exposes itself via a number of protocols which CUPS understands.
The problem was none of the operating systems did the leg work to search the LAN for available printers and let me click on an icon representing the printer I wanted (or, if after searching all interfaces, there's only one printer available, simply make that the default printer). This would be a fine solution for most users most of the time, but instead users have to know the IP address of their printer and they have to know what protocol their remote printer should use. By the standards of "Just Works", this is not ready for ordinary users.
Even when hooking up a printer to the machine directly, MacOS X didn't fare as well as its free software competition. Only Fedora Core 3 GNU/Linux made it relatively easy to get the right thing done, thanks to kuzdu, the hardware configuration program.
I find printer support in MacOS X to be considerably overrated. With MacOS X, you're paying for software some of which is proprietary. If I'm going to give up my software freedom, I expect far better than what Apple ships.
But it's not recommended to do this on all systems in which CUPS is used.
For example, on Fedora Core 3 GNU/Linux when one tries to manage printers by visiting http://localhost:631 with a web browser, one sees "Use system-config-printer to edit this!". For those who don't know, "system-config-printer" is a supplied printer configuration program which is probably most commonly accessed through the main menu (in GNOME, pick Applications->System Settings->Printing).
Please explain how reverse engineering Bitkeeper's network protocol is immoral.
What's deliciously ironic that the law they used to step on Sklyarov is now, they say, working against them.
But it's not really working against them, it's working exactly as large corporate proprietors intended it to work--to railroad users into losing their software freedom and doing business with organizations (like Adobe) that treat users poorly.
Adobe can simply purchase a per-seat license for Nikon's decryption software which grants Adobe to link it into Photoshop but not to inspect it or modify it. Nikon and Adobe get what they want--control over the user and more money.
If Adobe bitches about not wanting to ship software under their name and brand that they don't control, we'll get another chuckle of irony out of the deal.
Meanwhile, I recommend going with another camera vendor and using the GIMP. Don't spend your money to let someone hurt you. Spend your money on GIMP and dcRAW developers who are helping you (and would probably help you more if you paid them).
If they do, then that points to an interesting hypocrisy regarding FLOSS--many free software and open source operating systems don't ship with software to do things users want to do including making and playing scrambled DVDs, making and playing MP3s, and there probably won't any free software to decrypt Nikon's white balance encryption shipped by default in free software OSes. Yet it's accepted among many reviewers (including those one would think would know better) to blame the OS and not blame various laws preventing such software from being distributed freely worldwide.
So, perhaps Adobe should use some of their millions to negotiate a license for proprietary software to link into Adobe Photoshop so Nikon camera users can decrypt the white balance encryption. Nikon gets money and Photoshop users continue to be denied software freedom. When Adobe says they want to be able to inspect and modify the software they distribute we'll have another opportunity for a schadenfreude chuckle.
Nothing is preventing anyone from paying the one-time license fee for MP3 decoding. According to mp3licensing.com this one-time license fee is "US$ 50 000.00 - US$ 60 000.00". But there are some problems with that plan:
That's a lot of money for a free software project to raise or justify paying just to cave in to popularity. And the money would be paid to underscore something that should not exist in the first place (software patents) and would give users no reason to investigate using something we should be using instead (Ogg Vorbis).
As is the case with proprietors. Instead of relying on the proprietor and hoping they'll fix what you want fixed, it's better to depend on free software where you get the freedom to develop the software yourself, or pay someone to do it for you.
What the free software community needs to do is make it easier for people to find developers who are willing to do this kind of work. They are out there, but they aren't very well advertised.
In addition to being copyright infringement, these proprietary codecs don't work on non-i386-based platforms. One of the hallmarks of FLOSS is portability. I think it's a good thing that I can give someone a copy of an Ogg Vorbis file and not have to care what hardware they're using because I know it's likely that there's a program to play the audio file on their computer. Now, even portable digital audio players play Ogg Vorbis files, so people can hear high-quality compressed audio without being near their computer.
This is part of the reason why I'm anxiously awaiting Dirac and why I'm reading the Theora spec. I want to be able to point to a complete and competitive FLOSS codecs which are genuinely useful for movies.
We also ought to promote the use of these codecs and not be so eager to distribute copies of files encoded with proprietary or patent-encumbered codecs.
The Free Software Foundation is the chief proponent of the GNU General Public License because they wrote the license years before there was an "open-source" movement. If anyone is going to have a field day, it will be those who want to advertise how they don't understand when the GPL is meant to be used and also want to make fun of the freedoms the GPL was written to protect.
And where, exactly, did you get the idea that RMS intended the GNU GPL to be "the perfect solution for every situation"?
They care, that's why they (like so many people around the world) are leery of accepting Monsanto's offer for seeds which farmers can't save (an ancient farming practice), and which mainly serve to line Monsanto's pocket instead of working with farmers to feed people. Many other large groups of people around the world are leery of genetically modified foods because of the control it places in few organizations (multinational corporations, no less), and how some of the testing of these foods are done by placing them in the market and seeing what happens.
Much of your post is flamebait, but I'll note that Stallman has nothing to do with the open source movement. He has taken time to explain the differences between the movements. Stallman started the GNU Project to make the freedoms of free software real, and the rights free software confers upon the user are infectious--one can easily see how sharing and modifying software is critical to preserving freedom of speech, critical for restoring competition in the marketplace, and democratizing software development.
As for trying to use a license to prevent Nike from running a program because you object to their labor practices, you desire the kind of power over licensees that the Hacktivismo Enhanced-Source Software License Agreement tries to leverage. The FSF has explained why this license is a non-free license.
Unlike you writing and selling Harry Potter books (which, actually, I wouldn't object to you doing but given your writing sample here, I doubt you could match what fans of that series are used to reading), I need my computer to express myself politically in the way I choose to do and I use a computer to cooperate with other people in the way people in ethical societies should do. This includes distributing software for a fee, if I choose. Distribution is key to spreading copies of programs that help people, or spreading copies of improved programs. Distributing copies of a program for a fee is a great way to justify writing more free software. To maintain that I shouldn't be able to do these things is to advocate for a power we don't grant readers of books or other published works--I can buy and sell copies of other copyrighted works by leveraging my rights under the first sale doctrine. Ultimately, free software sets a better standard against which we can compare other software and see if the rights we have with free software are also granted to us. I'm not willing to give up these rights, so I place them high on my priority list when evaluating a program.
In short, I do it myself. I have downloaded Shorten files (and, if possible, their WAV equivalents so I don't have to run the non-free shorten program) and then recompressed the uncompressed data with FLAC. archive.org carries a lot of Shorten files you can use for testing.
Every time I test this, I see that FLAC compresses more tightly than Shorten. But I'm told there are other lossless audio compressors out there that do a better job than FLAC. I've seen the results of some of them, but I don't know where to point you to to test this except to try making your own tests and compare file sizes and compression/decompression times.
It's not difficult to write a shell script to do this for you.
You don't need to be a software developer of any kind to understand that it's a bad thing when Linus Torvalds told Andrew Tridgell to stop developing his free software network-compatible replacement for BitKeeper. If McVoy's retelling is accurate, I find it very disturbing and so should everyone else in the free software community. This is a very big sign that Torvalds is not the free software "posterboy" some take him to be. We don't tell one another what programs to write or not write without paying them, and we certainly don't impede another's desire to promote a free software alternative to a proprietary program. Impeding free software is harmful to the community.
This is remarkably one-sided of Torvalds as well. I'm sure Microsoft doesn't appreciate Samba servers being used instead of Microsoft Windows servers, yet the reason Samba is so good at what it does (and can replace some Microsoft SMB servers) is because Tridgell and the other Samba developers did the reverse-engineering work to figure out how the SMB protocols work in practice. I don't recall reading about Torvalds defending proprietary software being distributed by Microsoft by telling Tridgell to stop his Samba work; but BitMover's proprietary software has received that kind of attention from Torvalds. Torvalds is serving as a buttress for BitMover here.
As for Torvalds sometimes being a "real idiot", I can attest to that although I would never have called him names. I can think of instances where Torvalds inadvertantly embarassed himself when his opinion was sought on political matters. In such instances it is clear to all but the most ardent Torvalds fans that his reach exceeds his grasp. If I recall correctly, a recent Newsforge.com interview asked him what he thought of the upcoming GNU GPL v3 (possibly years before it comes out). This struck me as unwise since he does not closely examine copyright law or its ethical import for society (two of the things one needs to have down pat to offer critique worth considering regarding the GPL). For this advice I would have instead asked Eben Moglen or RMS, both authorities on the issues surrounding the GPL. By contrast, asking Torvalds about Linux kernel programming would be perfectly appropriate. I'd never think to go to Moglen or RMS for this information.
You shouldn't fear "spin". You need to trust that people will examine what happened and be reasonable, discuss the situation, and find better arguments. Microsoft will distort history regardless of what we do. They've proven this with their college campus tours and interviews when they declare that free software is a "cancer" or will eat your "intellectual property" like Pac-Man. Brad Kuhn (former executive director of the FSF) said at a talk in Urbana, IL that the annual budget for the FSF is what Microsoft makes in 30 seconds, yet Microsoft has said that the FSF is a threat to software development worldwide. When we see something unethical going on, we need to speak up about it, no matter who is at fault. The cure for bad speech is more speech.
You know of a number of GPL'ed projects which distribute under the GPL or a proprietary license. The GNU General Public License (GPL) is a commercial license because business is done under this license. GPL-covered works are distributed for a fee. The GPL is in no way anti-business. Ironically, I've pointed out some significant ways in which the open source movement fails to speak to business interests as well as free software speaks to all computer users (the open source definition ignores any requirement for private derivatives, for instance).
The free software movement does not want to be confused with the open source movement and the open source movement works hard to distance themselves from freedom talk. Please reconsider trying to conflate the real and important differences between the two movements. The open source movement deserves far less credit than it receives with regard to the GNU GPL, considering they had nothing to do with writing it, building a community around it, and that the open source movement doesn't frame anything in terms of software freedom. Their work in bringing people to freedom is to be commended, but I think when associating a movement with the license (particularly in an article focusing on the license itself), it's important that we give credit to the FSF and associate it with the free software movement.
It would be shameful if Monkey's Audio's license became an OSI-approved license. It would point to a profound irony as well. Consider the situation from a business perspective and don't forget that the open source movement's chief audience is businesses.
According to the Monkey's Audio developer site: "If you're trying to make money, in any way, talk to me first.". This is a restatement of section 2 of the Monkey's Audio license ("2. The use of Monkey's Audio or the Monkey's Audio source code for any commercial purposes including, but not limited to, implementation in shareware packages is strictly prohibited without first obtaining written permission from the author.").
This means that you need additional permission beyond the license to do something you deserve the right to do--distribute modified or verbatim copies of the covered work for a fee; something you would have the right to do if Monkey's Audio license qualified as a free software license, which it clearly does not. The copyright holder could deny your business permission ad hoc. Choosing to deal with licensors like this means that you are choosing to build your business on sand (metaphorically speaking).
I can hardly believe I need to tell open source proponents about the value of paying attention to all computer users, including those in business. Semi-free software is insufficient. We should not exclude profit-minded users from free software. We should insist that everyone can enjoy the freedoms of free software.
So why is Monkey's Audio and so many of their users describing the software as "open source"? Because of a different shame, a failed attempt to supplant the free software movement by substituting a weaker definition tied to a different term that the OSI thought would address the ambiguity of the English word "free". Just like the FSF describes, "open source" here is probably being taken to mean the ability to view the source code. Anyone who has read the open source definition knows that merely seeing source code is explicitly not what the term "open source" means, yet this is the misunderstanding many come away with. So, now we have two movements: the older free software movement using an English word with multiple meanings provoking initial misunderstanding (which non-English speakers have no problem understanding to mean freedom not price). Free software is tied to the rights computer users need. The open source movement offers a misunderstood term (which remains misunderstood around the world), and which is tied to watered-down rights primarily aimed at benefitting businesses.
FLAC remains the easy choice primarily because it is free software. It might not compress best (but it compresses better than Shorten), but it works well enough and its inherent freedom offers a compelling case for long-term archiving.
If "design[ing] from the ground up to be more secure" is actually a point of the open source movement it is a mistake. After a certain amount of complexity, people are sure to inadvertantly write buggy programs. There's nothing wrong with trying to design secure programs from the start, but inevitably bugs will be found. Therefore to promise secure design from the start is a lie.
The free software movement, by contrast, avoids that lie because it offers a different message. The free software movement's message says that free software is inherently better because people have the freedom to share and modify free programs. Thus when bugs are discovered they can be fixed and the fixed version can be shared with the community. Nowhere does the free software message hinge on secure design from the start, however secure-by-design may be another side effect of the freedoms of free software. It makes far more sense to admit that humans are fallible, regardless of intention, and will design insecure software as a result.
For more on the differences between the movements, please read the FSF's essay.
You're right, I was thinking of the tri-licensed Mozilla Suite (which, I gather, is no longer being developed by the Mozilla Foundation). Fortunately the MPL 1.1 is a free software license. At the same time, the GPL is a far more practical choice considering how much other software is already licensed under that license.
Prior to learning about the no endorsement section, I would have agreed with you. Now, I'm not so fast to conclude as you do. A good deal of the speech I make is political. I'd be disappointed to learn I had been paying BBC license fees ultimately to be told that I couldn't build on these works "to promote political, charitable, or other campaigning purposes".
On the other hand, I've gained a newfound respect for the public domain and the importance of the preservation and growth of the public domain.
Who are you saying is angry?
I'm quite pleased that a GNU GPL-covered web browser is making so many inroads on so many desktops around the world. The FLOSS OS distributors are all doing fantastic work helping to promote its use, and of course the Firefox website is quite popular after every mention in the New York Times. I hope that people will use Firefox as a means to moving to a free software system someday.
What matters here is not what percentage of traffic is used to infringe copyright, but that the principal of substantial non-infringing use still applies and that it's a good thing that copyright holders have to pursue due diligence when investigating alleged copyright infringement. We don't need more people making mistakes between what's infringing use and what merely occupies a lot of bandwidth. We need to preserve our rights and make sure we get our day in court.
It would be a shame if a lack of public pressure on ISPs to observe our legal rights did not prevent a vocal minority of copyright holders from further pursuing a leakproof pipe from their publishers to your eyes and ears. Your rights should matter more than their profits.
First, the GNU General Public License is not "open source" except that the Open Source Initiative happened to define their terms broadly enough to allow the GPL to qualify as an OSI-approved license. The GPL was written by the FSF (most notably RMS) for the free software movement years before the open source movement existed. Even a cursory glance of the GPL's terms will confirm it speaks to a philosophy the open source movement rejects.
Second, to equate a corporate agenda to a social movement's agenda is to understand the import of neither. The GPL grants all of the meaningful rights of copyright law to licensees in exchange for terms built to maintain licensee equality. Corporate-made licenses are far more likely to grant power to the licensor beyond that which copyright law already does. The intitial versions of the Apple Public Source License, for example, required notifying a central authority of changes and publishing one's changed version of an APSL-covered program in most instances so that the central authority could pick up a copy and incorporate the changes in their fork of the program if they desired. Apple was that central authority. Apple wanted not just an OSI-approved license, but a free software license as well, so they made the v2 revision that qualified for FSF imprimateur. But what this really points to is that the free software definition stands for something more beneficial to users than the open source definition, thus giving Apple (and all other licensors) something better to aspire to.
Third, the GNU GPL is the most popular free software license. It is a major practical problem to write software that is licensed in a GPL-incompatible way. Programmers in the free software community want to make improved versions of programs by sharing code. Copying code from one program into another program requires license compatibility in most cases (outside of fair use).
Your assessment vastly oversimplifies the situation and glosses over some of the most important reasons why the free software community was formed in the first place. The people working for the GNU project (most notably again, RMS) knew these things would come and wrote licenses and software to give us our software freedom. My account discounts the open source movement's input because most of the foundation for this work happened well before the open source movement began. It's a shame that your article has received such a high moderation. Perhaps it points to how much misunderstanding there is amongst hackers and how much education has yet to be done.
That's the same logic Linus Torvalds used to decide which source code revision tracking program he should pick. It's the logic that puts users in the hands of the proprietors which places them at risk of unwittingly losing features (see Cory Doctorow on iTunes), losing security (Internet Explorer on Microsoft Windows variants), and losing privacy (proprietary software makes an excellent means of acquiring backdoors, keyloggers, and other kinds of software people generally don't want).
Just like with so many other things in life, it's time we recognize that we are connected in what we want and we need the freedom to help one another. With regard to computer software, this means paying attention to one's software freedom and teaching others why software freedom matters.
The article cites Torvalds summarizing McVoy's position:
Compatibility is honest competition and it requires understanding protocols to work as a drop-in replacement. There is nothing so original about BitKeeper that it would pass the criteria of this statement. But the next statement from Torvalds underscores a theme on why we should not place Torvalds in the position of "posterboy" for a long-term movement:
Well, I can, and Torvalds ought to be able to. In science and art (and perhaps those categories draw an artificial difference which is much more blurry in reality) everyone rides someone's coat-tail. Again, the work done by the speaker would not pass the test suggested by these statements. The Linux kernel does a lot of things that are not original. One of the major reasons it was able to become a practical kernel is because of its design--HURD developers talk of the difficulty of debugging a multithreaded kernel replacement which slows down their development progress. A monolithic kernel, it has been said, is easier to debug and faster to add new features to. The GNU/Linux operating system benefits from Samba and OpenOffice.org which are built on reverse engineering Microsoft's underdocumented and changing protocols and file formats.
This is part of why I believe Linus Torvalds is about to make the same mistake twice, choosing a non-free program for Linux kernel maintenance because he values popularity and short-term technical gains like more than software freedom.
No, I won't. I won't rent or buy a copy of it on home video either. The chief beneficiaries of my buying a ticket will be organizations that want to control how we use our computers, that promote extending the term of copyright, that want to turn our libraries into pay-per-view centers, that push for technological control laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and that export these and other horrible ideas around the world in trade treaties. We are being offered these ongoing restrictions on our freedoms in exchange for a couple of hours of entertainment. I don't see this as a beneficial exchange. Therefore, I will not help them hurt me.