The license for Microsoft's FrontPage (a proprietary webpage editor) prohibits users from using the program to write webpages which disparage Microsoft. BitKeeper's license once said that it was not to be used to develop a competing program (perhaps it still says that).
Software proprietors often encourage users to not act in their own interests, but instead to act in favor of the proprietor's interests. Some do this by making it look like the proprietor is doing them a favor--calling the inherent domination over the user non-free software poses "a very symbiotic relationship". This poster also chose to use some fearmongering to drive the point home--confusing commercial and proprietary, this poster tells us "Either grow-up, trust others to do the right thing, and invite commerical enterprises into Linux passed just the shops that develop the big iron or doom yourselves to an existence where Linux only runs on servers and has no commercial packages avaliable.". So, if we don't accept that proprietors want to treat the free software community like a market and not contribute to it, they might go away!
GNU stands for software freedom, not "open source"
on
Linus Drops BitKeeper
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· Score: 1
It is a mistake to conflate "open source" and GNU.
GNU started over a decade before (1984) the open source movement (1998).
GNU was started to make an entire free software operating system.
"Open source advocates do contribute to our community, when they work on free software packages, but our community is older than that movement, and owes its existence to the idealism that movement rejects. It was built by the free software movement, so it is the free software community. If you help us, please keep in mind that what you're helping is the free software movement."
Hardware manufacturers need to be challenged to negotiate better contracts or put money into writing the software and building the hardware themselves so that they can sell hardware which we can support ourselves.
As for "gain[ing] the best market share": first, it's not my concern to think of their market share. But it is worth noting that this is not the either-or case the proprietors argue. The manufacturers most people think of when this discussion comes around largely haven't tried any other way but secrecy, so they have no idea how much "market share" awaits them by helping people preserve their freedom in a legally defensible way (such as releasing GPL-covered source code for drivers and firmware). If they were to advertise on this basis, software freedom could be more of a market value and help them pursue a largely underserved market. Many of these proprietors are already paying programmers to update their proprietary software anyhow, they could tell the community to do this themselves. I'm sure the hackers at X.org and OpenBSD would appreciate this effort.
You misrepresent what the free software community is asking for and has defended with 20 years of hard work and cooperation amongst ourselves (and with business) by glibly dismissing our concerns with "Bla Bla" and saying that we call corporations "Evil". Such language also dismisses genuine harm brought on corporations as though it's not worth considering. Users don't have to trade away all of our freedom in exchange for some meager technical improvement. We can value our freedom, teach others to value their freedom, and in so doing, create change amongst these corporations.
Free software has already demonstrated their power to make change: the most powerful software corporation continues to make tours of college campuses denouncing our effort by calling us "unamerican" and a "cancer" to "intellectual property", maintain a large slush fund so they can offer zero cost copies of proprietary software to would-be large-seat licensees, hire disreputable research firms to lie about GNU/Linux, and conflate what began with the GNU project as "open source" because they know they can't compete with software freedom (which the open source movement doesn't talk about) so they pick the movement which pitches a different message aimed at being friendly to businesses. Other organizations demonize and try to marginalize the free software community in other ways. I see that behavior and I see that we have political power when we work together toward freedom.
As far as Linus Torvalds is concerned, it's okay to become dependent upon a proprietary revision system (BitKeeper), take credit for more work than he did (allowing interviewers to talk to him about the "Linux operating system" without correction that he is merely the initial author of a kernel), and generally position popularity as a higher priority than freedom. When it comes to the inner workings of the Linux kernel, you should certainly turn to him. But I strongly doubt that the free software community would have gotten as far as it has in the past 20 years if Torvalds' philosophy of pragmatism had been set out instead of RMS' philosophy of pursuing software freedom. The FSF has a great entry in their GNU/Linux FAQ" on this issue.
As for the value of these secrets, they're overrated and irrelevant. I'll have to leave it to others to find a somewhat recent post on Slashdot allegedly from someone who works at a video card manufacturer who said that the value of these secrets is highly overrated. There's also the conflict between what Linus Torvalds initially wrote and the value of these alleged secrets--if the secrets are so valuable, we dare not run any software which we can all inspect, share, and modify. It's also ahistorical--hardware manufacturers didn't always behave this way.
But what's really disturbing about the argument for helping proprietors preserve secrets is that it takes the side of those who would divide us and keep us helpless rather than help us acheive freedom while simultaneously making an honorable buck. Frankly, it's worth it to give up that innovation in exchange for more freedom. Innovation will come regardless, don't give up your freedom in the belief that we can't have freedom if someone claims that they won't innovate anymore. If they leave, there are plenty of other innovative people to replace them. The most innovative stuff, the reasons people buy and use computers came in freedom (e-mail and the web). It's our struggle to keep it free that really matters.
"[...] I'd rather have a fully functional, if closed, Nvidia driver than a reverse-engineered one that limps along."
Giving up long-term goals for short-term gains is the hallmark of people who don't understand the struggle or the consequences (or are using popular hardware and don't care to think about how software freedom scales up). This is probably why the author frames the issue in the language of the open source movement -- "closed" software -- the movement which doesn't insist upon your ability to freely share and modify software.
Software freedom is valuable in itself, and proprietary software is rarely a means toward achieving that end. Accepting a proprietary program is a risky proposition because it can mean that people will become satisfied with the proprietary software and thus become less likely to write a free replacement. But even for those who dismiss the freedom to share and modify software, they should appreciate the ability to run the driver on different platforms anywhere, anytime, and maintain those programs as we go. It's not good to have to wait for some proprietor to cater to your computer's architecture, whether this means waiting for nVidia to update its i386 drivers for the latest Linux kernel revision, or hoping that some proprietor will distribute a driver for your wireless hardware in your non-i386-based computer.
We should value software which we can freely share and modify so that we aren't dependent on proprietors and they can't dictate to us what computers we use, how they run, and what interesting things we are allowed to do with them. It takes a little more effort to find hardware that works with free software, it can mean denying oneself some glitzy features, but it is worth insisting on freedom. The free software community has come a long way in the past two decades. As FSF legal counsel says, let's not give up the struggle because "we're a little closer to the front of the bus".
The algorithms used to make and decode MP3s are patented by Fraunhofer Gesellschaft (licenses are paid through Thomson). Thus, in countries which observe software patents (such as the US), any implementation of those algorithms cannot be legally distributed without paying a patent license fee. Fraunhofer and Thomson claim that the relevant patents apply in many countries besides the US (warning: this page lists patents you might not wish to become familiar with). The patent holder determines what the fee is and they can change the fee at any time or refuse to issue a license to a particular would-be licensee. Most patent holding corporations tie the license fee to the number of copies of programs distributed (which means such payment schemes are incompatible with free software).
mp3licensing.com, the site which lists the license schedule, lists a one-time payment for the MP3 decoder (between US$50,000 and US$60,000), but as far as I know, nobody has paid that fee. The encoder has no one-time fee, and thus cannot be legally distributed as free software in countries where software patents exist.
I suspect that in some years when these patents have expired, there will be a lot of GNU/Linux distributions picking up support to make and play MP3 files. Ogg Vorbis will still be a better option on technical grounds, however. If you're encoding human spoken voice, consider Speex with or without the Ogg container. I'm very impressed with what it can do in such a small file.
The review fails to convey any comprehension of why MP3 support is missing in the most widely-used GNU/Linux distributions ("I confess to not knowing all of the specifics regarding the legalities of MP3 playback [...]")? This point was apparently important enough to the reviewer to lower the overall score of SUSE and recommend installing the proprietary RealPlayer software (turning what might otherwise be a free software system into something far less trustworthy, sharable, and inspectable).
What is impressive (and depressing at the same time) is how many people reviewing various free software operating systems don't seem to understand why there's no MP3 encoding/decoding software bundled with the OS, despite the availability of such software online.
As for using Ogg Vorbis instead of MP3, I say you're right on. Perhaps more people should examine the situation from an ethical standpoint: it's not ethical to distribute media files and software that will get the users into trouble with the law, particularly when there's an unencumbered alternative which sounds better at comparable compression rates and has better tagging facilities. If you must distribute MP3s, distribute Ogg Vorbis files right along side the MP3s, so people have to risk committing patent infringement if they don't want to. If you want to be a really nice distributor, make sure both lossy encodings are generated from the same source file--don't transcode one lossy encoding into another if you don't have to. In so many situations I see online, people who stress "best tool for the job" cave into a self-fulfilling argument of popularity (Ogg Vorbis will not be more popular if you don't use it).
A similar situation exists for FLAC versus Shorten; I see a lot of Shorten files on archive.org and it makes me sad to see that happen because Shorten is non-free and even the zero cost Shorten source code is not irrevocably licensed. This is hardly an appropriate choice for long-term archiving. Meanwhile, FLAC reference source code is licensed under an irrevocable free software license, FLAC is not patent encumbered (as far as I know), FLAC is supported in some portable digital audio players, FLAC compresses better than Shorten, and FLAC lets you easily apply an Ogg wrapper (giving one all the advantages Ogg brings). There is currently a problem dealing with Ogg FLAC files, but I suspect that this is not a showstopper and can be remedied with some improvements in software. I doubt you'll find all of these ethical and technical advantages in other lossless compressors. On top of all that, Josh Coalson (the author of FLAC) seems to be a cooperative developer who solicits working with those trying to add FLAC support to their programs.
First, I'm very glad to see you recommend a free software program to do the job. I'm also glad to hear you point out the irony in the movement you helped start--here is an instance where pushing aside software freedom is not practical. I believe there are many more instances like this.
For those of you who don't get what I'm addressing, it's ironic that someone involved in starting the Open Source Initiative and the open source movement is telling you that this decision to go with BitKeeper was not practical. The open source movement, in its desire to talk to business, dismisses software freedom and makes a pitch on "solid pragmatic grounds" (according to the opensource.org website). This movement does not mind adopting proprietary software in much the same way as Linus Torvalds recommends that we do--use proprietary software when it is convenient because proprietary software is slightly less efficient than an "open source" program to do the same job. Torvals' message sets a very bad example and people would be far more wise to demand their software freedom.
Please stop giving credit to the wrong movement.
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Sun's Schwartz Attacks GPL
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· Score: 4, Informative
The ZDNet article headline reads "Sun criticizes popular open-source license". Calling the GNU General Public License an "open-source" license is ahistorical and gives credit to the wrong movement, hiding the name of the real author of the license and the name of the movement for which the license was written.
By calling the GPL an "open source" license, the open source movement is allowed to grab credit for a trivial bit of work: constructing a set of rules which allow the GPL to be given the Open Source Initiative's imprimateur. This is nothing compared to writing the GPL and starting the free software movement.
The GPL was written many years before the OSI started. Nobody who would form the OSI wrote the GPL. The GPL was written by the FSF (most notably, RMS, who gets far too little credit for his work here on Slashdot). The OSI has dismissed software freedom for a message which does not preserve user's software freedoms (for instance, the open source definition does not guarantee a user's privacy--the OSI approved the early revisions of the Apple Public Source License which required publication and notification of a central authority upon changing APSL-covered software in most instances. The FSF did not give its imprimateur to the APSL v1.x revisions, holding out until Apple changed the license in what would become the v2.x revisions.).
Let's give credit where credit is due. I think just as RMS tells us (repeatedly) that GCC is a free software program, not an open source program because it misstates the authorship and reason why the program was written (RMS was the initial author of GCC which he wrote to provide software freedom for GNU), we ought to give the author and intentions of the GPL proper mention by calling it a free software license. That cannot be done by calling it an open source license.
There's nothing in the GPL that prevents the GIMP's developers from copying or building on the changes. But there might be other reasons for not adopting the changes.
The GIMP is a part of the GNU project. The GNU project began over a decade before the open source movement in order to give people an OS that respects users freedom to share and modify software.
The GIMP's license (the GNU GPL, the most popular and probably most important free software license) is listed as acceptable by the Open Source Initiative, but the GPL was written by the FSF years before the open source movement existed. The OSI merely set their terms of acceptance such that the extant GPL would comply. I don't know if this was planned, but planned or not, the open source movement has received a lot of attention for work it did not do. Not all OSI-approved licenses give users software freedom.
It's time that we recognize the relative contributions of these organizations and give free software its due by asking for free software by name.
I suggest that you not refer to this as "reciprocity" or as a quid pro quo because you'll convey something you don't intend to convey--distributors of modified versions of MySQL owe the copyright holder (or some other specific entity) a copy of their modified source code upon distribution. This mutual exchange is what does not exist. It's possible the copyright holder will eventually get copies of the changes (the modifier might even send patches to the copyright holder). But what exists in the GPL is a requirement to pass on the rights and complete corresponding source code (or a written promise valid for 3 years for said source code) so that people can take advantage of the rights the license grants. That's simply not the same thing.
I think this is an important difference to make because some licenses have a notification requirement so that the copyright holder can come by and pick up a copy of the modified source code (the 1.x Apple Public Source Licenses, for instance). The APSL 1.x licenses were non-free licenses partially because of this requirement; one must reciprocate with Apple. Thus, describing the GPL in a similar way is naturally confusing.
I suggest that you describe the distribution requirement as an implementation of "copyleft" or as a requirement that distributed derivatives of GPL-covered works must also be licensed under only the GNU GPL. The Creative Commons organization describes a similar arrangement as "ShareAlike". These descriptions either repeat or come far closer to the language the FSF uses to describe their license. I know of no instances where they describe this distribution requirement as reciprocity.
I'm happy to learn that you understand that the GPL doesn't require sharing changes upstream with the copyright holder because prior to now, I was under a different impression. I believed that MySQL intended to leverage their would-be customer's ignorance of the GPL's terms. The benefit of doing this is perfectly obvious: MySQL AB may end up selling more seats under the non-GPL license if they can scare people into believing that the GPL doesn't fit their needs.
The so-called "reciprocity" requirement of the GNU GPL does not exist. There is no requirement for me to seek out MySQL AB so I can send them a copy of a distributed MySQL derivative. Under the GPL, I don't even have to notify you that this MySQL derivative exists nor that I have distributed it to others. The way you word things, it sounds like you believe that I have an obligation to share my changes upstream. I can find no language in the GPL v2 to support this.
Also, the GPL is a commercial license. It's perfectly fine for me to distribute copies of MySQL or a MySQL derivative for a fee. I can develop a MySQL derivative or distribute verbatim copies of it for a fee as part of a business.
You can ask those who are making money with MySQL to pay you or to seek you out to make sure you get a copy of their improvements to the program, but the GPL does not require these things.
Brewster Kahle talked about some related matters in his recent Library of Congress talk. C-SPAN re-aired his LoC talk last night and it's on their website in some proprietary format like RealVideo or Windows Media (unfortunately).
Some of what I've gleaned from his talk and related discussions on archive.org: no matter what media you purchase you will want backups so keep multiple copies in different locations under different management strategies, make sure one uses free software file formats (even hiring programmers to write free software to create such formats when needed is cheaper than relying on a proprietor to do this work) so prefer FLAC to Shorten (for example), and keep one's budget on the same order of magnitude for multiple neighboring cycles (if you say a cycle between making whole-archive copies is 15 years, think about 30 or 45 years down the road) so that one can afford to buy a set of storage devices that hold significantly more than what one has now (hard drives, for instance, hold a lot more data now than they did 15 years ago).
His plans involve storing digital copies of all published work (scanning and OCRing all books, storing copies of all published CDs, digitizing all LP records, etc.) and when he laid out the numbers it seemed quite approachable when one considers the budget of the Library of Congress.
If you were putting together machines for poor people in your town by refurbishing machines people are willing to donate to your cause, you would care about how large the OS is and how much RAM it requires to do ordinary tasks.
Nor is RMS, but lots of free software hackers work for corporations (for instance, good GCC work has been done by Cygnus and now by Red Hat). But it's important that we don't come away thinking that "Linux" is an operating system (it's a kernel) or that Linus Torvalds alone represents all of the work one finds on a GNU/Linux system. The result of many people's participation is found in a modern GNU/Linux system.
I think the reason ST:ENT is being cancelled is because Star Trek no longer has the huge following it once did. The Nielsen ratings indicate that not as many people watch ST:ENT as watched ST:TNG, ST:DS9, or even ST:VOY.
Adding another blog will not change this. There are already many Internet outlets for discussion of Star Trek affairs, Viacom runs some of them. Star Trek fans give their opinions and anyone who writes for Star Trek can get feedback there.
As for involving the public more in scriptwriting, everyone knows about the collaborative power which the Internet makes possible. There are reasons why this doesn't happen for Star Trek. Legally, there comes a point where this communal involvement would run the risk of lawsuits where people demand credit and/or payment. Viacom runs Star Trek shows to make money on merchandising, not to pay money to lawyers to defend Star Trek fan-based lawsuits. There are also problems of getting qualified writers to do that work for free by posting their ideas to strangers online. Good writers are not so common that you're likely to find them by reading Star Trek websites or Usenet discussion groups.
Paying too much attention to the fans is a bad risk as well. Artistically, there's the danger of writing a show that is so narrowly focused on the desires of the fans that the show would appeal to nobody else. This means that the audience for Star Trek would shrink over time as the audience matures and leaves the show behind (this is one of the reasons why I stopped watching Star Trek shows and movies). New fans would be hard to come by because the show is so insular and unapproachable to those who haven't followed it.
No. I think paying attention to the difference between democracy and rule by the minority is always a good thing to keep in mind, and particularly apropos when discussing DRM; an idea that is championed primarily by the wealthy minority media corporations and imposed on the users. I think any discussion of user's rights ought to include critique of a system which inherenly supports disfavoring the user.
One note on an otherwise appropriately-moderated fine post -- please don't honor the concept of "voting with one's wallet". It is meant to sound like democracy in action, but it is actually just the opposite of democratic control.
In a democracy, everyone gets one vote. Voting with one's wallet means rich people get more "votes" than poor people (who may get no vote at all). Hence, voting with one's wallet is a means of reinforcing the power of the rich to regulate how culture will be used by everyone else.
I doubt people rejected Divx (or whatever the Circuit City proprietary DVD was called) because they insisted on preserving their right of first sale. Most people have no idea what right of first sale is, even if they leverage it when they buy used media at stores and garage sales. Without evidence supporting the assertion, arguing that consumers are working to preserve isn't convincing.
I would be much more likely to buy an explanation that jibes with what I hear from consumers (and jibes with what I'm seeing multinational corporations teach consumers). For example, incompatibilities with their everyday lives, sort of like the lame reasons why people reject e-books: computers aren't portable and cheap like paper, they can't be read as easily in all the conditions in which one reads a paperback book, and so on. I call these reasons "lame" because they are so easily addressed (and thus resistence is so easily undermined) by sufficiently advanced technology. The more interesting and important issues have to do with the law (right of first sale, as you brought up, for instance) and ethics (how should we treat one another?).
I should add that I'm not saying any of this to stifle any attempt to educate the public about more important reasons to critically examine DRM or related efforts in "trusted computing" attestation ability. We need more people talking about what to look for when old ideas are transferred to new technology (reading books on computers instead of bound paper volumes, listening to music on portable digital audio players instead of carting around playable media, etc.).
Groklaw has more on this today -- Mass. is soliciting user feedback until April 1st (8 days away).
No clear word on why Mass. caved into Microsoft's wishes and used their "open" program to give official imprimateur to Microsoft's proprietary nonsense. Hence, I suspect Mass. is getting some reduced price proprietary software licenses in exchange.
Another victory for the watered-down open source movement, I guess.
On Jan. 14th, 2005, Eric Kriss, Secretary for the Executive Office of the Administration of Finance for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, gave a speech wherein he described what they called "Open Standards" work the state had been doing for a year and why this work mattered. They were extending their work to cover what they called "Open Formats" as well.
Briefly, the state wants to preserve public electronic documents for future use and in order to do that, they need to make sure they can read the document. "Open Formats" are "specifications for data file formats that are based on an underlying open standard, developed by an open community and affirmed by a standards body; or, de facto format standards controlled by other entities that are fully documented and available for public use under perpetual, royalty-free, and nondiscriminatory terms.". By filtering out software that doesn't support "open formats" they could avoid falling into a trap. Things looked rosy and bright for a while, as if the state wasn't going to do their government work with a file format that they might not be able to read 100 years from now because some proprietor leveraged their DMCA-backed power to shut off access.
By the end of the month, Betanews reported that Kriss had announced a change--"Under the change, Microsoft Office file formats could be considered open by the Commonwealth, depending on the terms of usage.". Kriss also included that "[...] it is our expectation that the next iteration of the Open Format standard will include some Microsoft proprietary formats". Microsoft has changed the terms of usage for "end users who merely open and read government documents". Note that "merely open[ing] and read[ing] government documents" might not include doing a number of other useful things with documents such as: printing, copying, or excerpting material from documents.
One wonders if Massachusetts did this in exchange for some low-cost licenses.
Few understand RFID; dismissing debate won't help.
on
RFID Music Player
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· Score: 1, Insightful
I think very few people know what RFID is, so it isn't meaningful to judge if most people are "getting worked up" over RFID.
Your examination leaves much to be desired, besides. RFID gives us opportunities to do things (including tracking at a short distance and publishing uniquely coded RFID tags) which we couldn't do with barcodes, so RFID is not fairly described as "glorified barcodes". Calling it "just a technology" and "evil" reads like an attempt to marginalize anyone's ethical critique of RFID rather than engaging in fruitful rational discussion of how it works and what the social implications are. Hardly the work of someone presenting insight for others to glean.
Given this, I think your post is quite overrated (currently at +2 insightful).
First, I'm not interested in "open sourc[ing]" anything. I'm interested in software freedom, the message which the open source movement works hard to ignore or marginalize (for examples see Chris DiBona's interview where he gets the difference between open source and free software very wrong, or Mark Webbink's essay on licensing where he goes around the barn to not use the word "copyleft" even though that's the concept he finds so useful, or the OSI's FAQ where they describe free software as "ideological tub-thumping". Then contrast that to the more clear and respectful description of the difference between the two movements published by the FSF).
Second, I don't think there's anything wrong with asking nVidia to make the software for their 3D drivers free software, nor do I think there's anything wrong with asking Adobe to make Photoshop free software. I don't think there's anything wrong with purposefully not getting involved with these programs (or buying from these companies) until they distribute freedom to their customers.
As history shows, there is competition in many markets where people put the effort into making competition happen. The GIMP and Photoshop are competitors, there is interest in making a 3D video card that uses free software to drive it. There was a time when the Linux kernel was not advanced enough to do real work with, but now it is useful for everyday work by millions around the world.
We should not be so quick to accept whatever some proprietor is handing us just because it is available here and now.
Slashdot Mirror
The license for Microsoft's FrontPage (a proprietary webpage editor) prohibits users from using the program to write webpages which disparage Microsoft. BitKeeper's license once said that it was not to be used to develop a competing program (perhaps it still says that).
Software proprietors often encourage users to not act in their own interests, but instead to act in favor of the proprietor's interests. Some do this by making it look like the proprietor is doing them a favor--calling the inherent domination over the user non-free software poses "a very symbiotic relationship". This poster also chose to use some fearmongering to drive the point home--confusing commercial and proprietary, this poster tells us "Either grow-up, trust others to do the right thing, and invite commerical enterprises into Linux passed just the shops that develop the big iron or doom yourselves to an existence where Linux only runs on servers and has no commercial packages avaliable.". So, if we don't accept that proprietors want to treat the free software community like a market and not contribute to it, they might go away!
It is a mistake to conflate "open source" and GNU.
As RMS has said in regards to working on GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection:
PowerNotebooks.com
Hardware manufacturers need to be challenged to negotiate better contracts or put money into writing the software and building the hardware themselves so that they can sell hardware which we can support ourselves.
As for "gain[ing] the best market share": first, it's not my concern to think of their market share. But it is worth noting that this is not the either-or case the proprietors argue. The manufacturers most people think of when this discussion comes around largely haven't tried any other way but secrecy, so they have no idea how much "market share" awaits them by helping people preserve their freedom in a legally defensible way (such as releasing GPL-covered source code for drivers and firmware). If they were to advertise on this basis, software freedom could be more of a market value and help them pursue a largely underserved market. Many of these proprietors are already paying programmers to update their proprietary software anyhow, they could tell the community to do this themselves. I'm sure the hackers at X.org and OpenBSD would appreciate this effort.
You misrepresent what the free software community is asking for and has defended with 20 years of hard work and cooperation amongst ourselves (and with business) by glibly dismissing our concerns with "Bla Bla" and saying that we call corporations "Evil". Such language also dismisses genuine harm brought on corporations as though it's not worth considering. Users don't have to trade away all of our freedom in exchange for some meager technical improvement. We can value our freedom, teach others to value their freedom, and in so doing, create change amongst these corporations.
Free software has already demonstrated their power to make change: the most powerful software corporation continues to make tours of college campuses denouncing our effort by calling us "unamerican" and a "cancer" to "intellectual property", maintain a large slush fund so they can offer zero cost copies of proprietary software to would-be large-seat licensees, hire disreputable research firms to lie about GNU/Linux, and conflate what began with the GNU project as "open source" because they know they can't compete with software freedom (which the open source movement doesn't talk about) so they pick the movement which pitches a different message aimed at being friendly to businesses. Other organizations demonize and try to marginalize the free software community in other ways. I see that behavior and I see that we have political power when we work together toward freedom.
As far as Linus Torvalds is concerned, it's okay to become dependent upon a proprietary revision system (BitKeeper), take credit for more work than he did (allowing interviewers to talk to him about the "Linux operating system" without correction that he is merely the initial author of a kernel), and generally position popularity as a higher priority than freedom. When it comes to the inner workings of the Linux kernel, you should certainly turn to him. But I strongly doubt that the free software community would have gotten as far as it has in the past 20 years if Torvalds' philosophy of pragmatism had been set out instead of RMS' philosophy of pursuing software freedom. The FSF has a great entry in their GNU/Linux FAQ" on this issue.
As for the value of these secrets, they're overrated and irrelevant. I'll have to leave it to others to find a somewhat recent post on Slashdot allegedly from someone who works at a video card manufacturer who said that the value of these secrets is highly overrated. There's also the conflict between what Linus Torvalds initially wrote and the value of these alleged secrets--if the secrets are so valuable, we dare not run any software which we can all inspect, share, and modify. It's also ahistorical--hardware manufacturers didn't always behave this way.
But what's really disturbing about the argument for helping proprietors preserve secrets is that it takes the side of those who would divide us and keep us helpless rather than help us acheive freedom while simultaneously making an honorable buck. Frankly, it's worth it to give up that innovation in exchange for more freedom. Innovation will come regardless, don't give up your freedom in the belief that we can't have freedom if someone claims that they won't innovate anymore. If they leave, there are plenty of other innovative people to replace them. The most innovative stuff, the reasons people buy and use computers came in freedom (e-mail and the web). It's our struggle to keep it free that really matters.
From the article:
Giving up long-term goals for short-term gains is the hallmark of people who don't understand the struggle or the consequences (or are using popular hardware and don't care to think about how software freedom scales up). This is probably why the author frames the issue in the language of the open source movement -- "closed" software -- the movement which doesn't insist upon your ability to freely share and modify software.
Software freedom is valuable in itself, and proprietary software is rarely a means toward achieving that end. Accepting a proprietary program is a risky proposition because it can mean that people will become satisfied with the proprietary software and thus become less likely to write a free replacement. But even for those who dismiss the freedom to share and modify software, they should appreciate the ability to run the driver on different platforms anywhere, anytime, and maintain those programs as we go. It's not good to have to wait for some proprietor to cater to your computer's architecture, whether this means waiting for nVidia to update its i386 drivers for the latest Linux kernel revision, or hoping that some proprietor will distribute a driver for your wireless hardware in your non-i386-based computer.
We should value software which we can freely share and modify so that we aren't dependent on proprietors and they can't dictate to us what computers we use, how they run, and what interesting things we are allowed to do with them. It takes a little more effort to find hardware that works with free software, it can mean denying oneself some glitzy features, but it is worth insisting on freedom. The free software community has come a long way in the past two decades. As FSF legal counsel says, let's not give up the struggle because "we're a little closer to the front of the bus".
The algorithms used to make and decode MP3s are patented by Fraunhofer Gesellschaft (licenses are paid through Thomson). Thus, in countries which observe software patents (such as the US), any implementation of those algorithms cannot be legally distributed without paying a patent license fee. Fraunhofer and Thomson claim that the relevant patents apply in many countries besides the US (warning: this page lists patents you might not wish to become familiar with). The patent holder determines what the fee is and they can change the fee at any time or refuse to issue a license to a particular would-be licensee. Most patent holding corporations tie the license fee to the number of copies of programs distributed (which means such payment schemes are incompatible with free software).
mp3licensing.com, the site which lists the license schedule, lists a one-time payment for the MP3 decoder (between US$50,000 and US$60,000), but as far as I know, nobody has paid that fee. The encoder has no one-time fee, and thus cannot be legally distributed as free software in countries where software patents exist.
I suspect that in some years when these patents have expired, there will be a lot of GNU/Linux distributions picking up support to make and play MP3 files. Ogg Vorbis will still be a better option on technical grounds, however. If you're encoding human spoken voice, consider Speex with or without the Ogg container. I'm very impressed with what it can do in such a small file.
Check out http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/PortablePlayers for a wiki page on portable digital audio players that play Ogg Vorbis files.
The review fails to convey any comprehension of why MP3 support is missing in the most widely-used GNU/Linux distributions ("I confess to not knowing all of the specifics regarding the legalities of MP3 playback [...]")? This point was apparently important enough to the reviewer to lower the overall score of SUSE and recommend installing the proprietary RealPlayer software (turning what might otherwise be a free software system into something far less trustworthy, sharable, and inspectable).
What is impressive (and depressing at the same time) is how many people reviewing various free software operating systems don't seem to understand why there's no MP3 encoding/decoding software bundled with the OS, despite the availability of such software online.
As for using Ogg Vorbis instead of MP3, I say you're right on. Perhaps more people should examine the situation from an ethical standpoint: it's not ethical to distribute media files and software that will get the users into trouble with the law, particularly when there's an unencumbered alternative which sounds better at comparable compression rates and has better tagging facilities. If you must distribute MP3s, distribute Ogg Vorbis files right along side the MP3s, so people have to risk committing patent infringement if they don't want to. If you want to be a really nice distributor, make sure both lossy encodings are generated from the same source file--don't transcode one lossy encoding into another if you don't have to. In so many situations I see online, people who stress "best tool for the job" cave into a self-fulfilling argument of popularity (Ogg Vorbis will not be more popular if you don't use it).
A similar situation exists for FLAC versus Shorten; I see a lot of Shorten files on archive.org and it makes me sad to see that happen because Shorten is non-free and even the zero cost Shorten source code is not irrevocably licensed. This is hardly an appropriate choice for long-term archiving. Meanwhile, FLAC reference source code is licensed under an irrevocable free software license, FLAC is not patent encumbered (as far as I know), FLAC is supported in some portable digital audio players, FLAC compresses better than Shorten, and FLAC lets you easily apply an Ogg wrapper (giving one all the advantages Ogg brings). There is currently a problem dealing with Ogg FLAC files, but I suspect that this is not a showstopper and can be remedied with some improvements in software. I doubt you'll find all of these ethical and technical advantages in other lossless compressors. On top of all that, Josh Coalson (the author of FLAC) seems to be a cooperative developer who solicits working with those trying to add FLAC support to their programs.
First, I'm very glad to see you recommend a free software program to do the job. I'm also glad to hear you point out the irony in the movement you helped start--here is an instance where pushing aside software freedom is not practical. I believe there are many more instances like this.
For those of you who don't get what I'm addressing, it's ironic that someone involved in starting the Open Source Initiative and the open source movement is telling you that this decision to go with BitKeeper was not practical. The open source movement, in its desire to talk to business, dismisses software freedom and makes a pitch on "solid pragmatic grounds" (according to the opensource.org website). This movement does not mind adopting proprietary software in much the same way as Linus Torvalds recommends that we do--use proprietary software when it is convenient because proprietary software is slightly less efficient than an "open source" program to do the same job. Torvals' message sets a very bad example and people would be far more wise to demand their software freedom.
The ZDNet article headline reads "Sun criticizes popular open-source license". Calling the GNU General Public License an "open-source" license is ahistorical and gives credit to the wrong movement, hiding the name of the real author of the license and the name of the movement for which the license was written.
By calling the GPL an "open source" license, the open source movement is allowed to grab credit for a trivial bit of work: constructing a set of rules which allow the GPL to be given the Open Source Initiative's imprimateur. This is nothing compared to writing the GPL and starting the free software movement.
The GPL was written many years before the OSI started. Nobody who would form the OSI wrote the GPL. The GPL was written by the FSF (most notably, RMS, who gets far too little credit for his work here on Slashdot). The OSI has dismissed software freedom for a message which does not preserve user's software freedoms (for instance, the open source definition does not guarantee a user's privacy--the OSI approved the early revisions of the Apple Public Source License which required publication and notification of a central authority upon changing APSL-covered software in most instances. The FSF did not give its imprimateur to the APSL v1.x revisions, holding out until Apple changed the license in what would become the v2.x revisions.).
Let's give credit where credit is due. I think just as RMS tells us (repeatedly) that GCC is a free software program, not an open source program because it misstates the authorship and reason why the program was written (RMS was the initial author of GCC which he wrote to provide software freedom for GNU), we ought to give the author and intentions of the GPL proper mention by calling it a free software license. That cannot be done by calling it an open source license.
There's nothing in the GPL that prevents the GIMP's developers from copying or building on the changes. But there might be other reasons for not adopting the changes.
The GIMP is a part of the GNU project. The GNU project began over a decade before the open source movement in order to give people an OS that respects users freedom to share and modify software.
The GIMP's license (the GNU GPL, the most popular and probably most important free software license) is listed as acceptable by the Open Source Initiative, but the GPL was written by the FSF years before the open source movement existed. The OSI merely set their terms of acceptance such that the extant GPL would comply. I don't know if this was planned, but planned or not, the open source movement has received a lot of attention for work it did not do. Not all OSI-approved licenses give users software freedom.
It's time that we recognize the relative contributions of these organizations and give free software its due by asking for free software by name.
I suggest that you not refer to this as "reciprocity" or as a quid pro quo because you'll convey something you don't intend to convey--distributors of modified versions of MySQL owe the copyright holder (or some other specific entity) a copy of their modified source code upon distribution. This mutual exchange is what does not exist. It's possible the copyright holder will eventually get copies of the changes (the modifier might even send patches to the copyright holder). But what exists in the GPL is a requirement to pass on the rights and complete corresponding source code (or a written promise valid for 3 years for said source code) so that people can take advantage of the rights the license grants. That's simply not the same thing.
I think this is an important difference to make because some licenses have a notification requirement so that the copyright holder can come by and pick up a copy of the modified source code (the 1.x Apple Public Source Licenses, for instance). The APSL 1.x licenses were non-free licenses partially because of this requirement; one must reciprocate with Apple. Thus, describing the GPL in a similar way is naturally confusing.
I suggest that you describe the distribution requirement as an implementation of "copyleft" or as a requirement that distributed derivatives of GPL-covered works must also be licensed under only the GNU GPL. The Creative Commons organization describes a similar arrangement as "ShareAlike". These descriptions either repeat or come far closer to the language the FSF uses to describe their license. I know of no instances where they describe this distribution requirement as reciprocity.
I'm happy to learn that you understand that the GPL doesn't require sharing changes upstream with the copyright holder because prior to now, I was under a different impression. I believed that MySQL intended to leverage their would-be customer's ignorance of the GPL's terms. The benefit of doing this is perfectly obvious: MySQL AB may end up selling more seats under the non-GPL license if they can scare people into believing that the GPL doesn't fit their needs.
The so-called "reciprocity" requirement of the GNU GPL does not exist. There is no requirement for me to seek out MySQL AB so I can send them a copy of a distributed MySQL derivative. Under the GPL, I don't even have to notify you that this MySQL derivative exists nor that I have distributed it to others. The way you word things, it sounds like you believe that I have an obligation to share my changes upstream. I can find no language in the GPL v2 to support this.
Also, the GPL is a commercial license. It's perfectly fine for me to distribute copies of MySQL or a MySQL derivative for a fee. I can develop a MySQL derivative or distribute verbatim copies of it for a fee as part of a business.
You can ask those who are making money with MySQL to pay you or to seek you out to make sure you get a copy of their improvements to the program, but the GPL does not require these things.
Brewster Kahle talked about some related matters in his recent Library of Congress talk. C-SPAN re-aired his LoC talk last night and it's on their website in some proprietary format like RealVideo or Windows Media (unfortunately).
Some of what I've gleaned from his talk and related discussions on archive.org: no matter what media you purchase you will want backups so keep multiple copies in different locations under different management strategies, make sure one uses free software file formats (even hiring programmers to write free software to create such formats when needed is cheaper than relying on a proprietor to do this work) so prefer FLAC to Shorten (for example), and keep one's budget on the same order of magnitude for multiple neighboring cycles (if you say a cycle between making whole-archive copies is 15 years, think about 30 or 45 years down the road) so that one can afford to buy a set of storage devices that hold significantly more than what one has now (hard drives, for instance, hold a lot more data now than they did 15 years ago).
His plans involve storing digital copies of all published work (scanning and OCRing all books, storing copies of all published CDs, digitizing all LP records, etc.) and when he laid out the numbers it seemed quite approachable when one considers the budget of the Library of Congress.
If you were putting together machines for poor people in your town by refurbishing machines people are willing to donate to your cause, you would care about how large the OS is and how much RAM it requires to do ordinary tasks.
Nor is RMS, but lots of free software hackers work for corporations (for instance, good GCC work has been done by Cygnus and now by Red Hat). But it's important that we don't come away thinking that "Linux" is an operating system (it's a kernel) or that Linus Torvalds alone represents all of the work one finds on a GNU/Linux system. The result of many people's participation is found in a modern GNU/Linux system.
I think the reason ST:ENT is being cancelled is because Star Trek no longer has the huge following it once did. The Nielsen ratings indicate that not as many people watch ST:ENT as watched ST:TNG, ST:DS9, or even ST:VOY.
Adding another blog will not change this. There are already many Internet outlets for discussion of Star Trek affairs, Viacom runs some of them. Star Trek fans give their opinions and anyone who writes for Star Trek can get feedback there.
As for involving the public more in scriptwriting, everyone knows about the collaborative power which the Internet makes possible. There are reasons why this doesn't happen for Star Trek. Legally, there comes a point where this communal involvement would run the risk of lawsuits where people demand credit and/or payment. Viacom runs Star Trek shows to make money on merchandising, not to pay money to lawyers to defend Star Trek fan-based lawsuits. There are also problems of getting qualified writers to do that work for free by posting their ideas to strangers online. Good writers are not so common that you're likely to find them by reading Star Trek websites or Usenet discussion groups.
Paying too much attention to the fans is a bad risk as well. Artistically, there's the danger of writing a show that is so narrowly focused on the desires of the fans that the show would appeal to nobody else. This means that the audience for Star Trek would shrink over time as the audience matures and leaves the show behind (this is one of the reasons why I stopped watching Star Trek shows and movies). New fans would be hard to come by because the show is so insular and unapproachable to those who haven't followed it.
No. I think paying attention to the difference between democracy and rule by the minority is always a good thing to keep in mind, and particularly apropos when discussing DRM; an idea that is championed primarily by the wealthy minority media corporations and imposed on the users. I think any discussion of user's rights ought to include critique of a system which inherenly supports disfavoring the user.
One note on an otherwise appropriately-moderated fine post -- please don't honor the concept of "voting with one's wallet". It is meant to sound like democracy in action, but it is actually just the opposite of democratic control.
In a democracy, everyone gets one vote. Voting with one's wallet means rich people get more "votes" than poor people (who may get no vote at all). Hence, voting with one's wallet is a means of reinforcing the power of the rich to regulate how culture will be used by everyone else.
I doubt people rejected Divx (or whatever the Circuit City proprietary DVD was called) because they insisted on preserving their right of first sale. Most people have no idea what right of first sale is, even if they leverage it when they buy used media at stores and garage sales. Without evidence supporting the assertion, arguing that consumers are working to preserve isn't convincing.
I would be much more likely to buy an explanation that jibes with what I hear from consumers (and jibes with what I'm seeing multinational corporations teach consumers). For example, incompatibilities with their everyday lives, sort of like the lame reasons why people reject e-books: computers aren't portable and cheap like paper, they can't be read as easily in all the conditions in which one reads a paperback book, and so on. I call these reasons "lame" because they are so easily addressed (and thus resistence is so easily undermined) by sufficiently advanced technology. The more interesting and important issues have to do with the law (right of first sale, as you brought up, for instance) and ethics (how should we treat one another?).
I should add that I'm not saying any of this to stifle any attempt to educate the public about more important reasons to critically examine DRM or related efforts in "trusted computing" attestation ability. We need more people talking about what to look for when old ideas are transferred to new technology (reading books on computers instead of bound paper volumes, listening to music on portable digital audio players instead of carting around playable media, etc.).
Groklaw has more on this today -- Mass. is soliciting user feedback until April 1st (8 days away).
No clear word on why Mass. caved into Microsoft's wishes and used their "open" program to give official imprimateur to Microsoft's proprietary nonsense. Hence, I suspect Mass. is getting some reduced price proprietary software licenses in exchange.
Another victory for the watered-down open source movement, I guess.
On Jan. 14th, 2005, Eric Kriss, Secretary for the Executive Office of the Administration of Finance for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, gave a speech wherein he described what they called "Open Standards" work the state had been doing for a year and why this work mattered. They were extending their work to cover what they called "Open Formats" as well.
Briefly, the state wants to preserve public electronic documents for future use and in order to do that, they need to make sure they can read the document. "Open Formats" are "specifications for data file formats that are based on an underlying open standard, developed by an open community and affirmed by a standards body; or, de facto format standards controlled by other entities that are fully documented and available for public use under perpetual, royalty-free, and nondiscriminatory terms.". By filtering out software that doesn't support "open formats" they could avoid falling into a trap. Things looked rosy and bright for a while, as if the state wasn't going to do their government work with a file format that they might not be able to read 100 years from now because some proprietor leveraged their DMCA-backed power to shut off access.
By the end of the month, Betanews reported that Kriss had announced a change--"Under the change, Microsoft Office file formats could be considered open by the Commonwealth, depending on the terms of usage.". Kriss also included that "[...] it is our expectation that the next iteration of the Open Format standard will include some Microsoft proprietary formats". Microsoft has changed the terms of usage for "end users who merely open and read government documents". Note that "merely open[ing] and read[ing] government documents" might not include doing a number of other useful things with documents such as: printing, copying, or excerpting material from documents.
One wonders if Massachusetts did this in exchange for some low-cost licenses.
I think very few people know what RFID is, so it isn't meaningful to judge if most people are "getting worked up" over RFID.
Your examination leaves much to be desired, besides. RFID gives us opportunities to do things (including tracking at a short distance and publishing uniquely coded RFID tags) which we couldn't do with barcodes, so RFID is not fairly described as "glorified barcodes". Calling it "just a technology" and "evil" reads like an attempt to marginalize anyone's ethical critique of RFID rather than engaging in fruitful rational discussion of how it works and what the social implications are. Hardly the work of someone presenting insight for others to glean.
Given this, I think your post is quite overrated (currently at +2 insightful).
First, I'm not interested in "open sourc[ing]" anything. I'm interested in software freedom, the message which the open source movement works hard to ignore or marginalize (for examples see Chris DiBona's interview where he gets the difference between open source and free software very wrong, or Mark Webbink's essay on licensing where he goes around the barn to not use the word "copyleft" even though that's the concept he finds so useful, or the OSI's FAQ where they describe free software as "ideological tub-thumping". Then contrast that to the more clear and respectful description of the difference between the two movements published by the FSF).
Second, I don't think there's anything wrong with asking nVidia to make the software for their 3D drivers free software, nor do I think there's anything wrong with asking Adobe to make Photoshop free software. I don't think there's anything wrong with purposefully not getting involved with these programs (or buying from these companies) until they distribute freedom to their customers.
As history shows, there is competition in many markets where people put the effort into making competition happen. The GIMP and Photoshop are competitors, there is interest in making a 3D video card that uses free software to drive it. There was a time when the Linux kernel was not advanced enough to do real work with, but now it is useful for everyday work by millions around the world.
We should not be so quick to accept whatever some proprietor is handing us just because it is available here and now.