Some proprietary file formats are licensed to other proprietors allowing migration from one program to another. Some proprietors port their software to multiple platforms allowing migration between platforms.
But none of these "choices" deliver software freedom for users. There's no real competition when users can't inspect, share, or modify the program or get someone else to do it for them.
"Choice" is one of those seemingly attractive arguments that wooes the naive into believing they can have what they want, while they're actually being corralled (by presenting nothing but bad choices) into something that gives proprietors control.
Neither open standards in general nor the state of Massachusetts program (which was recently interpreted to allow in Microsoft's proprietary formats) mean that users get software freedom. For this, one has to request the freedoms of free software and avoid software which doesn't users these freedoms. So, no, it's not "all about standards", it's partially about standards. Free software (with a mature license that has something to say about modern-day freedom-removing dangers like DRM and software patents) will give you open standards, but open standards will not give you software freedom.
Photoshop's ability to load and save PNG files doesn't mean I can inspect, share, or modify Photoshop to suit my needs. Depending on the license agreement and the method by which I have to install the program, I might even be restricted from running the software whenever I want. The closest free software image editing program to Photoshop is The GIMP. The GIMP's native image format is well-documented, at the very least, within the source code of that program which all are free to inspect, share, and modify.
There's no way to verify that the data won't leak. I'm guessing that plenty of Choicepoint clients believed their claim about supporting the highest level of security as well. Recent history and common sense suggests that I'd be a lot better off not sharing my sensitive bookmarks in the first place than trusting that some site will care about my privacy as much as I do. For all I know, there are people willing to pay money for individual or aggregate information about what's in people's bookmarks.
There are some caveats to publishing one's bookmarks or participating in collaborative bookmarking which less technical users might not catch at first glance: you probably don't want to publish anything about your browsing if you bookmark:
links to sensitive materials
subjective and revealing title of bookmark (a bookmark called "Here's where John Smith lied to me about Jane" which points to a post on an e-mail list mirror)
saved copies of a document in the bookmark tree (so if the browser can't reach the URL, it shows the saved webpage archive file instead)
"Warning: mysql_pconnect(): Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (2) in/home/ourmedia/htdocs/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 31
Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (2)"
I'm getting a mirrored copy of a MySQL error from ourmedia.org; in other words, Coral Cache is working fine, it's the ourmedia.org hosting service that is apparently still not quite ready for the popularity.
I forgot to mention this in my previous follow-up: your description of why you rejected PostgreSQL lacked many salient details including: any detail on what you organization used a database for, how Oracle was able to cater to that need better than PostgreSQL, why performance matters so much as to outweigh placing your client's data into a proprprietary program, how performance was being measured, and what the figures for performance were.
It's not possible to draw insight from such a description, hence I question why your post was moderated as insightful.
The portion of your post I agree with is the first part about making sure a replacement program fits your needs before switching to it. It seems like a lot of organizations don't do this, so they end up sticking with programs that leak information to untrusted parties and cost a lot of money to maintain, or require time-consuming and expensive upgrades; some of the shortcomings of denying oneself software freedom.
Your post was going along pretty well until your conclusion. It's reasonable to make sure any program does what you need it to do before you switch to using it exclusively. However, one has to apply that advice consistently, not just in a manner that stumps for proprietary software.
However, it's naive and wrong to say that being free software or open source cannot be one of one's needs ("choose based on your needs, not based on the fact that one is open and the other isn't.").
I recommend downloading talk shows that feature interesting guests and conversation. Two such shows are on my local community radio station, News from Neptune and Mediageek. Episodes of both are available are available online in a variety of formats including Ogg Vorbis format (no patent restrictions, no DRM, it's just a regular file) and they licensed to share. When I get a domain name, I will add episodes of my show Digital Citizen to that list.
I don't know why more developers of all kinds are not joining this effort. But when it comes to the development of the Linux kernel, I wonder how much inspiration comes from following Linus Torvalds' philosophy of favoring short-term pragmatism. Torvalds endorses using proprietary software to help maintain his fork of the Linux kernel and this choice adversely impacts the community in which he operates. As more people emulate his example, they will think it's okay to become dependant on binary drivers for all sorts of things citing some immediate convenience as in support of their behavior (not recognizing that whatever technical advantage they cite is undoubtedly temporary).
As deservedly highly-rated as both your post and the grandparent posts are, the sentiments expressed are not the norm. There are many Slashdot sycophants who have championed buying nVidia video cards and dependence on nVidia to release the latest version of their binary-only video software.
Not if read in the context of the thread -- one cannot have all possible freedoms and powers because some conflict (paraphrasing the FSF's example: my freedom to walk down the street in safety versus your power to drive your car anywhere you wish). So, societies have to decide which are worth more and in what context. The FSF decided that the freedoms of free software are so important that they wanted to preserve them for all recipients of a GPL-covered program and any derivative of that program. When someone strips away the software freedom from a program they are restricting what recipients of that program can do with the program. The GPL says that this is not allowed; the GPL leverages the power copyright law gives a copyright holder to place conditions on distributing a copyrighted work to say you can't deny others the freedom you have with the program (hence the "share and share alike" quality of the license).
Except that GNU was started for software freedom years before the open source movement existed. GNU was not about pushing anything "open source". Making a fork of GNU into a proprietary OS would definately not be considered any kind of advantage because such a program would deny software freedom to its users. Nor is the focus of the free software movement an issue of perfecting a development model aimed at rallying unpaid labor to work on one's program.
There is no need to order the sequence of social advances. Free software won't fix a lot of problems, but that's okay. We can all do multiple things simultaneously, and giving people the freedoms of free software is one social advance more people need.
ISTM you feel you'd get some kind of kudos from the label `open source', but don't want to actually do what earns that kudos (letting go to some small extent of your creation).
Over the years, many companies have contributed to free software development. Some of these companies primarily developed non-free software, but the two activities were separate; thus, we could ignore their non-free products, and work with them on free software projects. Then we could honestly thank them afterward for their free software contributions, without talking about the rest of what they did.
We cannot do the same with these new companies, because they won't let us. These companies actively invite the public to lump all their activities together; they want us to regard their non-free software as favorably as we would regard a real contribution, although it is not one. They present themselves as ``open source companies,'' hoping that we will get a warm fuzzy feeling about them, and that we will be fuzzy-minded in applying it.
This manipulative practice would be no less harmful if it were done using the term ``free software.'' But companies do not seem to use the term ``free software'' that way; perhaps its association with idealism makes it seem unsuitable. The term ``open source'' opened the door for this.
...because, in the end, you'll pay some studio to see it; the same studio that helps worsen far more important things like copyright law and creating laws to control technological development so the "owners" of bits that flow through your machine have more say in how that machine works than you do. This applies in the US and abroad.
The same can be said of the latest Star Wars and Lord of the Rings advertisements that come on Slashdot from time to time.
I'm talking about leveraging the freedoms of free software for software, not the entirety of one's business or home. Anyone who takes their business seriously takes seriously the idea of not leaving their "enterprise" in the hands of an organization that can afford to do without one's business. Lots of American businesses run Microsoft software and are foolish for doing so because it means that those businesses care more about Microsoft's welfare than Microsoft does about the welfare of most of their clients.
Doesn't matter, the perception is that GPL is limiting redistribution (which it is, even if you are right). If you want choice in the matter (and most companies do), the GPL is not for you. Example, you have a bunch of propietary extensions to some GPL project and you are using it internally (so far so good you say). Then some partner company asks for permission to use your tool. You don't say no to friends so you want to give the software to them. Price is not the issue but opening up the proprietary stuff is. The GPL forces you to choose here and that is a very sound reason to not touch any GPL software that you want to extend.
What a funny use of "friends"--it's okay to leverage one's power to exclude some "friends" from inspecting, distributing, or building further on an improved PostgreSQL, but it's bad to keep other "friends" from linking a GPL-derivative with GPL-incompatibly licensed programs.
Perhaps more organizations should learn who their real friends are and pay for the program under a free software license so they can build on the GPL'd programs they wish and distribute their improved versions. What's remarkable about all this in the context of PostgreSQL is that the companies doing work with PostgreSQL cited in this interview (and some other consultants I know of) make their money from selling PostgreSQL-related services.
The GPL doesn't deny anyone "choice". One must choose to distribute the work; one should choose to comply with the licensing terms under which the work is made available to them particularly because they're so generous. The GPL places conditions on distribution so that nobody can exert power to restrict what receipients can do with the software down the line. It's funny how the concept of share-and-share-alike is so easily perverted into something limiting when software is viewed through the false dichotomy of being either a gift to society (as PostgreSQL is) or proprietary.
Software freedom left out of debate again.
on
NeroLinux vs. K3b
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Nero is asking the user to give up their software freedom in addition to providing a more clumsy UI and charging money for all of this. It's perfectly fair to compare Nero to K3B, just as countless people compare OpenOffice.org to Microsoft Windows or the GIMP to Adobe Photoshop (and never hesitate to point out how the proprietary alternatives are "better" by some standard that usually doesn't include software freedom).
Nero is not providing "Linux[sic] support", they are using the free software community as a market, not contributing to it.
It's freedom for you to make your own choice about wether you wish to have your icons included in the distribution [...]
Actually, it's a power when you deciding whether others can distribute copies of your digital work; that's licensing, telling others what they are allowed to do with the covered work. It would be a freedom if you were deciding for yourself whether to incorporate the work in something of yours. It's ironic that you bring up RMS later on in your post, because he reminds us that the difference between power and freedom hinges on who's affected -- "Freedom is being able to make decisions that affect mainly you. Power is being able to make decisions that affect others more than you. If we confuse power with freedom, we will fail to uphold real freedom.". This means that licensing anything is a power. Freedom means making a decision whose outcome chiefly affects you.
I think the CC is the best step forward for licensing in general. Three clicks and you have a human readable license- both clear and concise and in standard legalese. RMS might have founded GNU and the FSF but Lessig perfected it.
I think that CC does us all a great service as well, but I think that the FSF and CC's work are complimentary and they serve different ends. RMS and Lessig aren't working on licensing the same kinds of works, for example -- RMS' licenses are for computer software and documentation, the Creative Commons licenses are not intended for licensing computer software.
I can think of two reasons off the top of my head:
It's insufficiently clear, believe it or not, for audiences that take copyright power seriously. Copyright grants powers that should be clearly qualified or dismissed if you want to convince most large commercial organizations that you're seriously placing no terms on the work. Debian, to name a group/. readers are probably familiar with, would criticize the license because it doesn't explicitly give permission to copy the work, make derivative works, distribute copies of the work or derivatives of the work.
It's unnecessary. If you're genuinely interested in leveraging no copyright power over the work, the work could be placed into the public domain. People know what the public domain is and people build on works in the public domain. The Creative Commons organization has a public domain dedication to make things easy. If anyone doesn't trust a modern work being in the public domain, perhaps there is another license that achieves the same ends you want but is more widely accepted (such as the new BSD and MIT X11 licenses are for computer software).
I don't see how either of those disqualify one from being a worthy source of information. Instead, it looks like you're using poor criteria to give yourself no reason to justify looking into the information further by calling the MEAA Board or MOD Films and asking them for their input into the situation, or looking around for other coverage. So, if you insist on dismissing the account, I'd ask that you do so for a better reason than stylized spelling.
That's better than nothing -- thanks. But I was hoping for some GUI program that would scan the disc for CD-TEXT, or (failing that) find the appropriate FreeDB entry, then prepare a CD label which is ready to print on CD labels I have.
I'm ready to buy whatever labels it works with or tell it the dimensions and layout of my extant labels.
But this would appear to be a hole in the services one can find for free software desktops. If anyone is interested in writing such a program for me, I'd be happy to discuss payment for commissioning a work for hire.
Are there any good CD label making programs for GNOME? Preferably something that will look up audio CDs in FreeDB (which appears to be integrated into GNOME) so I don't have to type so much in?
If that were all he's interested in, he'd use some simple and brief non-copylefted free software license like the new BSD license or the MIT X11 license.
There is considerably more in the new BitTorrent license than in either of those licenses. Among other things, the new BitTorrent license specifies which licenses can be used as sublicenses and how much one can charge for distributing the source code of sublicensed derivatives.
Pride in one's work doesn't come from a license and people aren't going to give him money because of the license.
Slashdot Mirror
Some proprietary file formats are licensed to other proprietors allowing migration from one program to another. Some proprietors port their software to multiple platforms allowing migration between platforms.
But none of these "choices" deliver software freedom for users. There's no real competition when users can't inspect, share, or modify the program or get someone else to do it for them.
"Choice" is one of those seemingly attractive arguments that wooes the naive into believing they can have what they want, while they're actually being corralled (by presenting nothing but bad choices) into something that gives proprietors control.
Neither open standards in general nor the state of Massachusetts program (which was recently interpreted to allow in Microsoft's proprietary formats) mean that users get software freedom. For this, one has to request the freedoms of free software and avoid software which doesn't users these freedoms. So, no, it's not "all about standards", it's partially about standards. Free software (with a mature license that has something to say about modern-day freedom-removing dangers like DRM and software patents) will give you open standards, but open standards will not give you software freedom.
Photoshop's ability to load and save PNG files doesn't mean I can inspect, share, or modify Photoshop to suit my needs. Depending on the license agreement and the method by which I have to install the program, I might even be restricted from running the software whenever I want. The closest free software image editing program to Photoshop is The GIMP. The GIMP's native image format is well-documented, at the very least, within the source code of that program which all are free to inspect, share, and modify.
There's no way to verify that the data won't leak. I'm guessing that plenty of Choicepoint clients believed their claim about supporting the highest level of security as well. Recent history and common sense suggests that I'd be a lot better off not sharing my sensitive bookmarks in the first place than trusting that some site will care about my privacy as much as I do. For all I know, there are people willing to pay money for individual or aggregate information about what's in people's bookmarks.
There are some caveats to publishing one's bookmarks or participating in collaborative bookmarking which less technical users might not catch at first glance: you probably don't want to publish anything about your browsing if you bookmark:
I'm getting a mirrored copy of a MySQL error from ourmedia.org; in other words, Coral Cache is working fine, it's the ourmedia.org hosting service that is apparently still not quite ready for the popularity.
I forgot to mention this in my previous follow-up: your description of why you rejected PostgreSQL lacked many salient details including: any detail on what you organization used a database for, how Oracle was able to cater to that need better than PostgreSQL, why performance matters so much as to outweigh placing your client's data into a proprprietary program, how performance was being measured, and what the figures for performance were.
It's not possible to draw insight from such a description, hence I question why your post was moderated as insightful.
The portion of your post I agree with is the first part about making sure a replacement program fits your needs before switching to it. It seems like a lot of organizations don't do this, so they end up sticking with programs that leak information to untrusted parties and cost a lot of money to maintain, or require time-consuming and expensive upgrades; some of the shortcomings of denying oneself software freedom.
Your post was going along pretty well until your conclusion. It's reasonable to make sure any program does what you need it to do before you switch to using it exclusively. However, one has to apply that advice consistently, not just in a manner that stumps for proprietary software.
However, it's naive and wrong to say that being free software or open source cannot be one of one's needs ("choose based on your needs, not based on the fact that one is open and the other isn't.").
I recommend downloading talk shows that feature interesting guests and conversation. Two such shows are on my local community radio station, News from Neptune and Mediageek. Episodes of both are available are available online in a variety of formats including Ogg Vorbis format (no patent restrictions, no DRM, it's just a regular file) and they licensed to share. When I get a domain name, I will add episodes of my show Digital Citizen to that list.
I don't know why more developers of all kinds are not joining this effort. But when it comes to the development of the Linux kernel, I wonder how much inspiration comes from following Linus Torvalds' philosophy of favoring short-term pragmatism. Torvalds endorses using proprietary software to help maintain his fork of the Linux kernel and this choice adversely impacts the community in which he operates. As more people emulate his example, they will think it's okay to become dependant on binary drivers for all sorts of things citing some immediate convenience as in support of their behavior (not recognizing that whatever technical advantage they cite is undoubtedly temporary).
As deservedly highly-rated as both your post and the grandparent posts are, the sentiments expressed are not the norm. There are many Slashdot sycophants who have championed buying nVidia video cards and dependence on nVidia to release the latest version of their binary-only video software.
Not if read in the context of the thread -- one cannot have all possible freedoms and powers because some conflict (paraphrasing the FSF's example: my freedom to walk down the street in safety versus your power to drive your car anywhere you wish). So, societies have to decide which are worth more and in what context. The FSF decided that the freedoms of free software are so important that they wanted to preserve them for all recipients of a GPL-covered program and any derivative of that program. When someone strips away the software freedom from a program they are restricting what recipients of that program can do with the program. The GPL says that this is not allowed; the GPL leverages the power copyright law gives a copyright holder to place conditions on distributing a copyrighted work to say you can't deny others the freedom you have with the program (hence the "share and share alike" quality of the license).
Except that GNU was started for software freedom years before the open source movement existed. GNU was not about pushing anything "open source". Making a fork of GNU into a proprietary OS would definately not be considered any kind of advantage because such a program would deny software freedom to its users. Nor is the focus of the free software movement an issue of perfecting a development model aimed at rallying unpaid labor to work on one's program.
I suggest learning more about the difference between software freedom and what the open source movement is pitching.
There is no need to order the sequence of social advances. Free software won't fix a lot of problems, but that's okay. We can all do multiple things simultaneously, and giving people the freedoms of free software is one social advance more people need.
Indeed, according to the FSF, that's a major reason the open source movement exists:
...because, in the end, you'll pay some studio to see it; the same studio that helps worsen far more important things like copyright law and creating laws to control technological development so the "owners" of bits that flow through your machine have more say in how that machine works than you do. This applies in the US and abroad.
The same can be said of the latest Star Wars and Lord of the Rings advertisements that come on Slashdot from time to time.
I'm talking about leveraging the freedoms of free software for software, not the entirety of one's business or home. Anyone who takes their business seriously takes seriously the idea of not leaving their "enterprise" in the hands of an organization that can afford to do without one's business. Lots of American businesses run Microsoft software and are foolish for doing so because it means that those businesses care more about Microsoft's welfare than Microsoft does about the welfare of most of their clients.
Ah, the irony of using one proprietary program to clean up the publicly visible ill effects of other proprietary software.
What a funny use of "friends"--it's okay to leverage one's power to exclude some "friends" from inspecting, distributing, or building further on an improved PostgreSQL, but it's bad to keep other "friends" from linking a GPL-derivative with GPL-incompatibly licensed programs.
Perhaps more organizations should learn who their real friends are and pay for the program under a free software license so they can build on the GPL'd programs they wish and distribute their improved versions. What's remarkable about all this in the context of PostgreSQL is that the companies doing work with PostgreSQL cited in this interview (and some other consultants I know of) make their money from selling PostgreSQL-related services.
The GPL doesn't deny anyone "choice". One must choose to distribute the work; one should choose to comply with the licensing terms under which the work is made available to them particularly because they're so generous. The GPL places conditions on distribution so that nobody can exert power to restrict what receipients can do with the software down the line. It's funny how the concept of share-and-share-alike is so easily perverted into something limiting when software is viewed through the false dichotomy of being either a gift to society (as PostgreSQL is) or proprietary.
Nero is asking the user to give up their software freedom in addition to providing a more clumsy UI and charging money for all of this. It's perfectly fair to compare Nero to K3B, just as countless people compare OpenOffice.org to Microsoft Windows or the GIMP to Adobe Photoshop (and never hesitate to point out how the proprietary alternatives are "better" by some standard that usually doesn't include software freedom).
Nero is not providing "Linux[sic] support", they are using the free software community as a market, not contributing to it.
Actually, it's a power when you deciding whether others can distribute copies of your digital work; that's licensing, telling others what they are allowed to do with the covered work. It would be a freedom if you were deciding for yourself whether to incorporate the work in something of yours. It's ironic that you bring up RMS later on in your post, because he reminds us that the difference between power and freedom hinges on who's affected -- "Freedom is being able to make decisions that affect mainly you. Power is being able to make decisions that affect others more than you. If we confuse power with freedom, we will fail to uphold real freedom.". This means that licensing anything is a power. Freedom means making a decision whose outcome chiefly affects you.
I think that CC does us all a great service as well, but I think that the FSF and CC's work are complimentary and they serve different ends. RMS and Lessig aren't working on licensing the same kinds of works, for example -- RMS' licenses are for computer software and documentation, the Creative Commons licenses are not intended for licensing computer software.
I can think of two reasons off the top of my head:
I don't see how either of those disqualify one from being a worthy source of information. Instead, it looks like you're using poor criteria to give yourself no reason to justify looking into the information further by calling the MEAA Board or MOD Films and asking them for their input into the situation, or looking around for other coverage. So, if you insist on dismissing the account, I'd ask that you do so for a better reason than stylized spelling.
That's better than nothing -- thanks. But I was hoping for some GUI program that would scan the disc for CD-TEXT, or (failing that) find the appropriate FreeDB entry, then prepare a CD label which is ready to print on CD labels I have.
I'm ready to buy whatever labels it works with or tell it the dimensions and layout of my extant labels.
But this would appear to be a hole in the services one can find for free software desktops. If anyone is interested in writing such a program for me, I'd be happy to discuss payment for commissioning a work for hire.
Are there any good CD label making programs for GNOME? Preferably something that will look up audio CDs in FreeDB (which appears to be integrated into GNOME) so I don't have to type so much in?
Thanks.
Time for an update: EFF says they'll appeal.
If that were all he's interested in, he'd use some simple and brief non-copylefted free software license like the new BSD license or the MIT X11 license.
There is considerably more in the new BitTorrent license than in either of those licenses. Among other things, the new BitTorrent license specifies which licenses can be used as sublicenses and how much one can charge for distributing the source code of sublicensed derivatives.
Pride in one's work doesn't come from a license and people aren't going to give him money because of the license.