I think that's a false dichotomy--use binary drivers or have no 3D support at all. I have 3D and free software drivers because I choose video cards for which the 3D support works. Maybe it's not as technically sophisticated as your binary drivers, but I play 3D games and use 3D charting programs that depend on OpenGL just fine with my Radeon cards (9200se, 9000, and friends of mine use more advanced cards) all with X.org.
As for what video card makers will do, power concedes nothing without a demand. When users are willing to buy what they're selling without freedom, there is no reason for them to consider changing their ways.
You have just described why price is not the most important aspect of free software: proprietors are willing to distribute their software at zero price in order to get you to pay later and restrict what you can do when you get the non-free software.
When this happens (when Microsoft insists on not losing a sale, so they distribute Windows and Office to a big customer at no fee), if there is no mention of software freedom, the proprietor will get what they want. Focusing on price instead of freedom is a trap because you are tossing aside the only thing free software can compete on for something that plays into the hands of proprietors.
While I can understand that logic, I can also understand the contrary logic of "doing nothing is easier than doing something" where users merely become more used to running non-free software because their computer came with non-free software and their friends are running non-free software, so they stick with what they "know". If more free software is better than less free software, then running The GIMP, OpenOffice.org, or Firefox on Microsoft Windows would be better than exclusively using their proprietary counterparts, but the question is whether users actually move to freedom.
So, I'll believe that users actually move to freedom because of free software on non-free OSes when I see random phone poll survey data that confirms this. So far, all I read are theories about how users would behave.
Therefore I will have to ask some of my survey-conducting friends how I would go about doing this in a way that would produce reliable data on which to build an informed opinion. Perhaps there has already been a study of this.
How fortunate it is, then, for the programmers of some of those programs that the GNU GPL and LGPL exist.
You claim that RMS is not "pushing for wider adoption of free software" but that's why he goes on speaking tours around the world. Eben Moglen too, talks to groups about his work with the FSF (and recently his take on the whole SCO debacle). I'd hardly call it petty to remind people to preserve software freedom, certainly in comparison with what I'm reminded of when I'm asked to call the whole system "Linux".
When it comes to free software adoption by government, my experience differs from your views. Brad Kuhn, executive vice president of the FSF, went on the record saying that governments should use free software in a talk at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Earlier this year, I wrote an article published on Counterpunch.org about free software voting machines and RMS wrote me to thank me for writing the article. He and I both acknowledge that free software voting machines are not enough to overcome our current electronic voting machine problems, but they are a step in the right direction and this would solve a problem many districts will face later on.
If you read the FSF's FAQ on the matter, I think you'll find that they respect everyone's freedom to call the system what they want, and that they ask that people name the principal parts of the system, of which they ask that you consider GNU and Linux (not Linux alone) to be such parts:
Q: Many other projects contributed to the system as it is today; it includes TeX, X11, Apache, Perl, and many more programs. Don't your arguments imply we have to give them credit too? (But that would lead to a name so long it is absurd.)
A: What we say is that you ought to give the system's principal developer a share of the credit. The principal developer is the GNU Project.
If you feel even more strongly about giving credit where it is due, you might feel that some secondary contributors also deserve credit in the system's name. If so, far be it from us to argue against it. If you feel that X11 deserves credit in the system's name, and you want to call the system GNU/X11/Linux, please do. If you feel that Perl simply cries out for mention, and you want to write GNU/Linux/Perl, go ahead.
Since a long name such as GNU/X11/Apache/Linux/TeX/Perl/Python/FreeCiv becomes absurd, at some point you will have to set a threshold and omit the names of the many other secondary contributions. There is no one obvious right place to set the threshold, so wherever you set it, we won't argue against it.
Different threshold levels would lead to different choices of name for the system. But one name that cannot result from concerns of fairness and giving credit, not for any possible threshold level, is "Linux". It can't be fair to give all the credit to one secondary contribution (Linux) while omitting the principal contribution (GNU).
You apparently consider Apache and BSD code to be significant contributions, yet you hide their contributions by calling the whole system "Linux".
I do count the Hurd as a kernel replacement because otherwise it is hard to explain what GNU/Hurd is and how it differs from the way in which most people use GNU (with the Linux kernel). Some people are running GNU/Hurd on their computers right now, so this isn't just an idea in someone's head. Granted, the complete GNU OS (which includes the Hurd) isn't ready for everyone's use yet and is nowhere nearly as popular as GNU/Linux, but in the past the Linux kernel was used by only a few technical people and in no way fit for everyday use. I don't think decisions of fairness and accuracy need to hinge on popularity.
Who's doing the porting hardly qualifies as relevant criteria. When I see that the programmers who make Sky OS ported Firefox (a recent/. thread), I wouldn't say that the Firefox program has undergone some transformation that makes it significantly different from what Firefox users on other OSes are using.
I want to give credit to the projects that I'm discussing, I want to be more clear in what I'm describing, and I want to be accurate to what I'm describing. Therefore, I don't see a problem with giving GNU a share of the credit when I'm talking about the union of the GNU OS with the Linux kernel. These days, the Linux kernel shows up in so many places that I need to differentiate between where it is being used with GNU, where it is being used alone, and where Linux is being used with something else.
There are other instances where it is simply inaccurate to call something by another name--calling the "free software" movement "open source", for instance, is simply wrong, as is trying to link the open source movement (or Open Source Initiative) to the GNU GPL in a substantive way. I would be happy to explain more on this if you're curious, but generally I think this explains why I use language in a way you claim nobody does.
I've seen Microsoft Windows 2000 crash by running a program running as a user (not Administrator). A friend of mine was running a Nintendo64 emulator (which was running a colorful scrolling text demo that also played music). It worked for a few minutes, and then the entire OS went down. Why the OS crashed wasn't apparent without running a debugger, but since we didn't care that much to learn what apparently buggy system calls were being made, we didn't pursue this any further. I don't think simply stating that Microsoft Windows 2000 or XP cannot be crashed by a single application is worth +4 Informative.
Re:Give credit where credit is due.
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It has nothing to do with popularity, and the reason to not include it now has nothing to do with it being a legal document. I'd guess that "open source" won't appear in GPLv3 even though many people like to tie together "open source" with the GNU GPL.
By contrast, the phrase "free software" is in the GPL numerous times, not just to say "Free Software Foundation". So, apparently, there is a point to using the phrase "free software" in the document. I think the point is to frame the issues being dealt with in the license from the perspective of that movement.
Give credit where credit is due.
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GPL intentionally drives a wedge between the open and closed source communities.
I realize that success has many parents and failure dies an orphan, and the GPL is clearly successful in spreading software freedom (it is also the most widely used free software license), but these differences are real and should not be ignored because they conflict with one's mistaken view that what we're seeing today started with the open source movement (and therefore should be framed exclusively in light of that movement's values, ignoring any discussion of software freedom).
Misstating this difference gives the impression that the Open Source Initiative (OSI) or the open source movement as a whole had something to do with writing the GPL (any version). The GPL predates the open source movement and all the OSI did was write their rules for license acceptance such that they could place the GPL on a list of approved licenses. Writing the seminal license of the free software community is a far more significant act than placing a license on a list of licenses.
There would be no need to clarify this in GPLv3 because it's not a GPL issue per se. However, it is covered in the GPL FAQ because it comes up a lot with regards to the GPL:
In general this is legally impossible; copyright law does not give you any say in the use of the output people make from their data using your program. If the user uses your program to enter or convert his own data, the copyright on the output belongs to him, not you. More generally, when a program translates its input into some other form, the copyright status of the output inherits that of the input it was generated from.
So the only way you have a say in the use of the output is if substantial parts of the output are copied (more or less) from text in your program. For instance, part of the output of Bison (see above) would be covered by the GNU GPL, if we had not made an exception in this specific case.
You could artificially make a program copy certain text into its output even if there is no technical reason to do so. But if that copied text serves no practical purpose, the user could simply delete that text from the output and use only the rest. Then he would not have to obey the conditions on redistribution of the copied text.
Don't quote Torvalds, instead cite RMS & Mogle
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He has consistently taken that position--read old interviews with Linus Torvalds and you'll see much the same view. What more is there to say? There is a lot more to say, actually. But Linus Torvalds is not the man to go to to understand what more there is to say. He doesn't give the impression that he understands the varied and subtle ways in which copyright law has changed and how those changes make it necessary to revise licenses that preserve software freedom (as the free software GNU GPL does). He doesn't explain how patent law has changed since the free software movement has existed and how these changes affect all software development. He conveys no understanding of why the GPL doesn't mention "open source" at all.
For detailed explanations or quick summaries on those topics, one needs to go to RMS or Eben Moglen, not coincidentally the two authors of the upcoming GPLv3.
But, really, this is/. and your overrated post has more to do with being a Torvalds fan (and being moderated up by other Torvalds fans) than understanding the pertinant details on who is qualified to speak on this issue. If I wanted to learn more about the Linux kernel, I'd seek the advice of Linux kernel programmers including Torvalds. But this thread concerns the development of the GPL, and Torvalds is particularly unqualified. Stop giving Torvalds more credit than he's due and find the authors of the GPL instead.
You would pay for someone to work on it to improve it and make it into the program that looks and feels the way you want it to. Apparently sitting around and waiting for someone to do the work isn't producing code fast enough for you. Hence you would hire someone to do the job. You would draw up a contract which stipulates the work to be done, the time frame in which it would be done, and list the negotiated price for the job--like any other for-hire work.
Since you haven't cited any quotes, I suspect you too don't know how much money it would take to get this done. You also appear to have not done any work on pitching this to the community of people who complain about a lack of native Mac OS X OO.o. Hence, it makes no sense to conclude that the price is too high for you to pay or to raise from a community of others. The folks who bought Blender (the now free software rendering program) bought the program for 100,000 EUR which strikes me as a lot of money (about $133,839.67, according to xe.com's money converter as of the time/date stamp on this post).
I somehow suspect that most reputable companies would be reluctant to give out their source code as well as porting, probably adding an extra cost.
Not at all, the source code to OO.o is already freely available under a license which allows sharing and modification. The programmers porting OO.o would get paid for the job of porting, not distributing proprietary binaries to people (nor would the license on OO.o allow them to do so). Assuming you hired programmers in a country which honors contract law and copyright law like the US, the programmers would not have the option of violating either your contract or copyright law. You could make it a condition of the donations from the public that the software would be released as free software, thus making it possible to be merged into the OO.o tree.
Even if the software were proprietary, the programmers would have no incentive for doing anything beyond the contract. Take Omni's porting of FrameMaker to NeXTSTEP 3.x (if I recall correctly): years ago, they got paid (what I assume was) 100% of the money they would ever make on this job by porting the software to what was the latest NS API. They did the work, and then they were done. The fruits of that labor are wholly owned by whomever hired them (Frame, I'd guess, which was later bought by Adobe, but my memory on this is hazy). I suspect that none of Omni's pay hinged on how many copies of that program were sold; I'm guessing Omni got a flat fee for their work. Omni wasn't distributing the software, only porting it. They were hired probably because of their understanding of the NS API.
In the beginning of the popularity of the Internet, finding an ISP wasn't that easy. Today you can flip open a phone book and find an ISP, but it was not always this way. That doesn't mean finding one was impossible or not worthwhile. A comparable situation exists for programmers today. If MacOS X users are unwilling to do the work of writing a proper port of OO.o, hiring someone is another option. Finding excuses to wait for someone else to do the heavy lifting without pay, and complaining about their lack of progress often doesn't produce the kinds of results one would like, but hope springs eternal.
Not many users want to pay now for something they may or may not get sometime in the future. Also, it would cost a great deal of money to hire enough engineers to make it work any time soon.
Much of your comments add nothing new, but this section clearly demonstrates that you are missing something pertinant to the thread. Exactly how many is "not many"? And do these users realize that they would be entering into a contract with a programmer, not asking a favor of a friend? Exactly how much is "a great deal of money"? I ask these questions because it doesn't look like you have done enough homework to know the answers to these questions.
So, it sounds to me like you have a golden opportunity to blaze some trails here: help your MacOS X friends consider another alternative and use that money which they "would be happy to pay" for something which they can share, modify, or distribute for a fee. If buying a ready-made office suite is lucrative, you might make your money back. You could get started by: asking for consultants on a OO.o mailing list (users, discuss, or social look appropriate at first glance), asking Ask Slashdot about hiring programmers, looking up "mac os x programmer OR consultant hire" on Google (I got some hits on this, including people looking for comparable services and you could ask them), or ask Omni (who makes OmniWeb)--they did some porting for NeXTSTEP years ago. If they're still doing programming for hire, you could talk to them.
I care about software freedom; I am a member of the free software movement. The freedom that allows me to liberate myself from the whim of a proprietor is important to me. Therefore, I was willing to move away from a semi-free OS to a free software OS and run free software on top of that OS. If you care to move away from.doc to something native to OO.o, but continue running MacOS X, you have options. I wish you good luck in your endeavors.
Apparently, some MacOS X users have a desire to use OpenOffice.org and complaining isn't getting them what they want. Telling others that you want people to do the programming work for you at no charge to you apparently is not convincing people to see things your way. So, it's time to try something different.
What happened when they tried to put their money together to hire a programmer to port OpenOffice.org to MacOS X? This requires no programming skill nor does it require reading manuals. As more people join the effort, less money is needed per person to accomplish the goal. Everyone already has the permission they need to do any modification work they want to do. You don't need to wait to get cues from anyone else. With free software, you are as dependent as you make yourself.
I understand that most people aren't programmers. I also understand that most people aren't plumbers, yet they have pipes that clog. When their pipes clog, they hire someone to clear their pipes, or they learn to do the work themselves. Lack of serious action toward reaching the goal tells others where their priorities are.
I fail to understand how any part of that response lies "on the other hand"--if anyone doesn't like what they get with free software, they have options. Two of those options are to learn to program and do the work themselves, or purchase the time and expertise of a programmer.
This SF Gate story says stacks of new releases for hungry video game enthusiasts mean it's boom time for an industry now even bigger than Hollywood. The $10 billion video game industry, which generates more revenue than Hollywood [...]
The video game industry (and probably the computer industry as well) may make more money than the American movie industry, but copyright law is influenced by corporate American movie studios far more than those who make computers or video games. To the extent it is appropriate to separate these "industries" (Disney presents a particularly complex case, owning television networks, movie distribution labels, record distribution labels, and more), it's ironic that the relatively smaller American movie industry has so much say about how computer hardware and software are allowed to work or how long copyrighted works of all kinds will stay under copyright.
Although I like some features from Firefox for web browsing, Firefox has one showstopper flaw for me: Firefox doesn't let you turn off URL bar autocomplete. I feel like I'm losing my privacy every time I type in a URL into Firefox.
Mozilla suite makes it trivially easy to turn off URL bar autocomplete. You don't have to lose your history.
Opening links into tabs with the middle mouse button was nice in Firefox, and downloading files to my Desktop with alt-click is nice too, but I don't think I should have to reveal where I've browsed lately to onlookers just because I want to go somewhere else by typing in a URL.
Microsoft does something to help shore up a weakness in their OS products, and somehow its still evil.
Microsoft distributes a buggy OS and withholds the freedom for users to inspect how it works, modify it to work better, and distribute the improved version. Users need these freedoms to make their computers work for them, even if they're not programmers themselves (in which case they can benefit from software freedom by running software others inspected, improved, and distributed).
From the perspective of software freedom, Microsoft isn't evil, but they are denying users their freedoms users deserve, and they employ obstructionist policies instead of competing, and that is anti-social behavior.
It's important not to judge them purely on the basis of features because this ignores a far more socially important issue of how people ought to treat each other. Placing people in positions of dependency where nobody can provide their own support or help their community by distributing improved versions of the software is something we should not overlook.
But in the free software world, the user gets the freedom to share and modify the programs, any time they want and for any purpose, without ever having to reveal to anyone what they did or why. This freedom allows the user to decide where they want to buy their support or to learn the program enough to provide their own support. Neither of those options are possible with proprietary software. Hence, it is quite different from what any proprietor (not just Microsoft) is offering.
What proprietors do is a time-honored social problem of creating a problem and (eventually) providing a "solution". You don't get the freedom to break out of that dependency until you get away from proprietary software.
In the interest of expanding the amount of free software you run, I'll try to address a few of your gripes. In short, some of your substantive gripes are addressed with extensions. All of the extensions I've found are free software, so one could modify them to suit one's needs. I think Firefox could use better session saving functionality (it's possible to save a bookmark for a tab which takes one to the website's front page, not to the search one was in the middle of doing when Firefox crashed or when one had to quit the Firefox session).
Being able to close all tabs and not close the browser. I hate accidentally closing the last tab in Firefox and having the browser close.
Point #6 of this extension's feature set seems to address this concern ("When the last tab is closed with Ctrl+W pressed or with Close Tab command, the main Firefox window can be kept, the tab is only made blank (as if Close Tab button is clicked).").
Ability to identify itself as another browser - really only helpful from some asinine IE-only pages.
I use Prefbar to do this, but I'm sure there are other extensions available to accomplish the same thing.
Configurability - I like the way in which Opera allows you to configure things.
Pop-ups. I like the way Opera does it better than Moz/Firefox.
These gripes are far too vague to address and will probably be viewed as unreasonable to mimic without identifying precisely what functionality is worth duplicating or improving upon.
Why did you move "Preferences" from under "Edit" to "Tools"? That is something that always bugged me about IE, now everyone does it. Arghh.
This seems picayune, but on Fedora Core 3, Firefox has Edit->Preferences. On issues like this, I favor consistency and both choices make sense to me, so I don't really care where the menu option is.
I recently read Colin Charles' blog and came across his announcement of FC3 for PPC is in testing. He notes that "the release is known to not boot on G5's, and we are working on re-building another tree, which we can push out soon", would this new Linux kernel patch help with this?
For Peruvian Congressman Villanueva, use of free software and free formats was critical--his letter to Microsoft on why he was rejecting their arguments explains how important not being locked in is to doing transparent government work in addition to treating citizens well. I'm sure he's not the only one, but his letter to Microsoft is well worth reading.
The government (anybody's government) is a huge bureaucratic organization that is comprised of people who primarily want stability.
Peruvian Congressman Villanueva wrote a scathing letter to a Microsoft representative who tried to railroad him into an argument centered on price and how practical it would be to let Microsoft fulfill all of one's technical needs (Villanueva did not take the bait and debunked every one of the MS rep's arguments, noting in part that "it is not enough that it [the software] is technically capable of fulfilling a task"). Villanueva demanded the freedoms of free software (he was particular about which movement he sides with) and free formats for goverment use. His bill did not require free software to be used in Peruvian government work nor does it require Microsoft to change its executives.
The free software movement makes no demands who is or becomes Microsoft's executives, yet Microsoft is nervous. Microsoft has toured the country proclaiming the GNU General Public License to be like a cancer and destructive to one's "intellectual property". They are losing seats (hence their willingness to give away Microsoft Windows in some cases) and Microsoft is losing the web server market to Apache, Firefox is eating into their web browser dominance, and most importantly Microsoft provides no software freedom for their most popular programs. Even if we look at this issue in the narrow terms of market popularity, if their market lead were only vulnerable by those who somehow "convince them to hire mediocre executive leadership" they would not need to expend any effort denouncing copylefted free software.
I'd wonder if the whole negotiation was over price; the UK Register article seems to focus on price. If the discussions mainly centered on costs, using the philosophy of the open source movement (which focuses on practical goals for programs in their bid to speak to business) is sure to lose because serious proprietors including Microsoft are ready to lower their price to free to keep a competitor away ("lose no sale to Linux[sic]" is what I recall reading in a NYT article which quoted an internal Microsoft memo).
Discussing software freedom may be uncomfortable for some, but this issue reframes the debate on something no proprietor can deliver. This means raising an issue which the open source movement was designed not to raise and it means paying attention to the free software movement's central message of including ethics in one's pitch.
[...] I'm wondering what it would take to lobby the city to start switching over to open source software. Has anyone ever tried to lobby your local council to make the jump away from expensive, closed software?
My guess is that it will take more than just an argument over price to win people to software under a license approved by the Open Source Initiative. Serious proprietors looking at a big potential client will reduce their price to free if need be in order to secure the deal.
Microsoft revealed that they were willing to do this (I recall reading a New York Times article which included a quote from an internal a memo which clearly indicated they were to "lose no sale to Linux[sic]"). So if you're only prepared to go into the debate talking only about price and practical advantage, you could very well lose to a proprietor, perhaps even acting as a buttress for the proprietor.
Sooner or later these users will be invited to switch back to proprietary software for some practical advantage. Countless companies seek to offer such temptation, and why would users decline? Only if they have learned to value the freedom free software gives them, for its own sake. It is up to us to spread this idea--and in order to do that, we have to talk about freedom. A certain amount of the ``keep quiet'' approach to business can be useful for the community, but we must have plenty of freedom talk too.
For example, making private derivatives could be important to pursuing your town's specific needs. Yet permission to make private derivatives are not included in the definition of "open source" because of that movement's values (this is why the Apple Public Source License which used to require reporting some changes to Apple or publishing changes qualified as an open source license but not a free software license. Changes to the APSL have been made and v2.0 of the APSL qualifies as a free software license. These improvements would not have been made without someone pushing for them). Hence, if you genuinely seek software freedom for the users of this software, I suggest conveying the importance of focusing on user's freedoms to share and modify software.
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I think that's a false dichotomy--use binary drivers or have no 3D support at all. I have 3D and free software drivers because I choose video cards for which the 3D support works. Maybe it's not as technically sophisticated as your binary drivers, but I play 3D games and use 3D charting programs that depend on OpenGL just fine with my Radeon cards (9200se, 9000, and friends of mine use more advanced cards) all with X.org.
As for what video card makers will do, power concedes nothing without a demand. When users are willing to buy what they're selling without freedom, there is no reason for them to consider changing their ways.
You have just described why price is not the most important aspect of free software: proprietors are willing to distribute their software at zero price in order to get you to pay later and restrict what you can do when you get the non-free software.
When this happens (when Microsoft insists on not losing a sale, so they distribute Windows and Office to a big customer at no fee), if there is no mention of software freedom, the proprietor will get what they want. Focusing on price instead of freedom is a trap because you are tossing aside the only thing free software can compete on for something that plays into the hands of proprietors.
While I can understand that logic, I can also understand the contrary logic of "doing nothing is easier than doing something" where users merely become more used to running non-free software because their computer came with non-free software and their friends are running non-free software, so they stick with what they "know". If more free software is better than less free software, then running The GIMP, OpenOffice.org, or Firefox on Microsoft Windows would be better than exclusively using their proprietary counterparts, but the question is whether users actually move to freedom.
So, I'll believe that users actually move to freedom because of free software on non-free OSes when I see random phone poll survey data that confirms this. So far, all I read are theories about how users would behave.
Therefore I will have to ask some of my survey-conducting friends how I would go about doing this in a way that would produce reliable data on which to build an informed opinion. Perhaps there has already been a study of this.
How fortunate it is, then, for the programmers of some of those programs that the GNU GPL and LGPL exist.
You claim that RMS is not "pushing for wider adoption of free software" but that's why he goes on speaking tours around the world. Eben Moglen too, talks to groups about his work with the FSF (and recently his take on the whole SCO debacle). I'd hardly call it petty to remind people to preserve software freedom, certainly in comparison with what I'm reminded of when I'm asked to call the whole system "Linux".
When it comes to free software adoption by government, my experience differs from your views. Brad Kuhn, executive vice president of the FSF, went on the record saying that governments should use free software in a talk at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Earlier this year, I wrote an article published on Counterpunch.org about free software voting machines and RMS wrote me to thank me for writing the article. He and I both acknowledge that free software voting machines are not enough to overcome our current electronic voting machine problems, but they are a step in the right direction and this would solve a problem many districts will face later on.
If you read the FSF's FAQ on the matter, I think you'll find that they respect everyone's freedom to call the system what they want, and that they ask that people name the principal parts of the system, of which they ask that you consider GNU and Linux (not Linux alone) to be such parts:
You apparently consider Apache and BSD code to be significant contributions, yet you hide their contributions by calling the whole system "Linux".
I do count the Hurd as a kernel replacement because otherwise it is hard to explain what GNU/Hurd is and how it differs from the way in which most people use GNU (with the Linux kernel). Some people are running GNU/Hurd on their computers right now, so this isn't just an idea in someone's head. Granted, the complete GNU OS (which includes the Hurd) isn't ready for everyone's use yet and is nowhere nearly as popular as GNU/Linux, but in the past the Linux kernel was used by only a few technical people and in no way fit for everyday use. I don't think decisions of fairness and accuracy need to hinge on popularity.
/. thread), I wouldn't say that the Firefox program has undergone some transformation that makes it significantly different from what Firefox users on other OSes are using.
Who's doing the porting hardly qualifies as relevant criteria. When I see that the programmers who make Sky OS ported Firefox (a recent
I want to give credit to the projects that I'm discussing, I want to be more clear in what I'm describing, and I want to be accurate to what I'm describing. Therefore, I don't see a problem with giving GNU a share of the credit when I'm talking about the union of the GNU OS with the Linux kernel. These days, the Linux kernel shows up in so many places that I need to differentiate between where it is being used with GNU, where it is being used alone, and where Linux is being used with something else.
There are other instances where it is simply inaccurate to call something by another name--calling the "free software" movement "open source", for instance, is simply wrong, as is trying to link the open source movement (or Open Source Initiative) to the GNU GPL in a substantive way. I would be happy to explain more on this if you're curious, but generally I think this explains why I use language in a way you claim nobody does.
I've seen Microsoft Windows 2000 crash by running a program running as a user (not Administrator). A friend of mine was running a Nintendo64 emulator (which was running a colorful scrolling text demo that also played music). It worked for a few minutes, and then the entire OS went down. Why the OS crashed wasn't apparent without running a debugger, but since we didn't care that much to learn what apparently buggy system calls were being made, we didn't pursue this any further. I don't think simply stating that Microsoft Windows 2000 or XP cannot be crashed by a single application is worth +4 Informative.
It has nothing to do with popularity, and the reason to not include it now has nothing to do with it being a legal document. I'd guess that "open source" won't appear in GPLv3 even though many people like to tie together "open source" with the GNU GPL.
By contrast, the phrase "free software" is in the GPL numerous times, not just to say "Free Software Foundation". So, apparently, there is a point to using the phrase "free software" in the document. I think the point is to frame the issues being dealt with in the license from the perspective of that movement.
I realize that success has many parents and failure dies an orphan, and the GPL is clearly successful in spreading software freedom (it is also the most widely used free software license), but these differences are real and should not be ignored because they conflict with one's mistaken view that what we're seeing today started with the open source movement (and therefore should be framed exclusively in light of that movement's values, ignoring any discussion of software freedom).
The FSF has asked that their work not be lumped in with the work of the open source movement because the two movements (free software and open source) are different and have different ramifications. There is good reason why, despite the GPL being frequently misattributed as an "open source" license, you won't find the phrase "open source" anywhere in the GPL.
Misstating this difference gives the impression that the Open Source Initiative (OSI) or the open source movement as a whole had something to do with writing the GPL (any version). The GPL predates the open source movement and all the OSI did was write their rules for license acceptance such that they could place the GPL on a list of approved licenses. Writing the seminal license of the free software community is a far more significant act than placing a license on a list of licenses.
There would be no need to clarify this in GPLv3 because it's not a GPL issue per se. However, it is covered in the GPL FAQ because it comes up a lot with regards to the GPL:
He has consistently taken that position--read old interviews with Linus Torvalds and you'll see much the same view. What more is there to say? There is a lot more to say, actually. But Linus Torvalds is not the man to go to to understand what more there is to say. He doesn't give the impression that he understands the varied and subtle ways in which copyright law has changed and how those changes make it necessary to revise licenses that preserve software freedom (as the free software GNU GPL does). He doesn't explain how patent law has changed since the free software movement has existed and how these changes affect all software development. He conveys no understanding of why the GPL doesn't mention "open source" at all.
/. and your overrated post has more to do with being a Torvalds fan (and being moderated up by other Torvalds fans) than understanding the pertinant details on who is qualified to speak on this issue. If I wanted to learn more about the Linux kernel, I'd seek the advice of Linux kernel programmers including Torvalds. But this thread concerns the development of the GPL, and Torvalds is particularly unqualified. Stop giving Torvalds more credit than he's due and find the authors of the GPL instead.
For detailed explanations or quick summaries on those topics, one needs to go to RMS or Eben Moglen, not coincidentally the two authors of the upcoming GPLv3.
But, really, this is
You would pay for someone to work on it to improve it and make it into the program that looks and feels the way you want it to. Apparently sitting around and waiting for someone to do the work isn't producing code fast enough for you. Hence you would hire someone to do the job. You would draw up a contract which stipulates the work to be done, the time frame in which it would be done, and list the negotiated price for the job--like any other for-hire work.
Since you haven't cited any quotes, I suspect you too don't know how much money it would take to get this done. You also appear to have not done any work on pitching this to the community of people who complain about a lack of native Mac OS X OO.o. Hence, it makes no sense to conclude that the price is too high for you to pay or to raise from a community of others. The folks who bought Blender (the now free software rendering program) bought the program for 100,000 EUR which strikes me as a lot of money (about $133,839.67, according to xe.com's money converter as of the time/date stamp on this post).
Not at all, the source code to OO.o is already freely available under a license which allows sharing and modification. The programmers porting OO.o would get paid for the job of porting, not distributing proprietary binaries to people (nor would the license on OO.o allow them to do so). Assuming you hired programmers in a country which honors contract law and copyright law like the US, the programmers would not have the option of violating either your contract or copyright law. You could make it a condition of the donations from the public that the software would be released as free software, thus making it possible to be merged into the OO.o tree.
Even if the software were proprietary, the programmers would have no incentive for doing anything beyond the contract. Take Omni's porting of FrameMaker to NeXTSTEP 3.x (if I recall correctly): years ago, they got paid (what I assume was) 100% of the money they would ever make on this job by porting the software to what was the latest NS API. They did the work, and then they were done. The fruits of that labor are wholly owned by whomever hired them (Frame, I'd guess, which was later bought by Adobe, but my memory on this is hazy). I suspect that none of Omni's pay hinged on how many copies of that program were sold; I'm guessing Omni got a flat fee for their work. Omni wasn't distributing the software, only porting it. They were hired probably because of their understanding of the NS API.
In the beginning of the popularity of the Internet, finding an ISP wasn't that easy. Today you can flip open a phone book and find an ISP, but it was not always this way. That doesn't mean finding one was impossible or not worthwhile. A comparable situation exists for programmers today. If MacOS X users are unwilling to do the work of writing a proper port of OO.o, hiring someone is another option. Finding excuses to wait for someone else to do the heavy lifting without pay, and complaining about their lack of progress often doesn't produce the kinds of results one would like, but hope springs eternal.
Much of your comments add nothing new, but this section clearly demonstrates that you are missing something pertinant to the thread. Exactly how many is "not many"? And do these users realize that they would be entering into a contract with a programmer, not asking a favor of a friend? Exactly how much is "a great deal of money"? I ask these questions because it doesn't look like you have done enough homework to know the answers to these questions.
So, it sounds to me like you have a golden opportunity to blaze some trails here: help your MacOS X friends consider another alternative and use that money which they "would be happy to pay" for something which they can share, modify, or distribute for a fee. If buying a ready-made office suite is lucrative, you might make your money back. You could get started by: asking for consultants on a OO.o mailing list (users, discuss, or social look appropriate at first glance), asking Ask Slashdot about hiring programmers, looking up "mac os x programmer OR consultant hire" on Google (I got some hits on this, including people looking for comparable services and you could ask them), or ask Omni (who makes OmniWeb)--they did some porting for NeXTSTEP years ago. If they're still doing programming for hire, you could talk to them.
I care about software freedom; I am a member of the free software movement. The freedom that allows me to liberate myself from the whim of a proprietor is important to me. Therefore, I was willing to move away from a semi-free OS to a free software OS and run free software on top of that OS. If you care to move away from .doc to something native to OO.o, but continue running MacOS X, you have options. I wish you good luck in your endeavors.
Apparently, some MacOS X users have a desire to use OpenOffice.org and complaining isn't getting them what they want. Telling others that you want people to do the programming work for you at no charge to you apparently is not convincing people to see things your way. So, it's time to try something different.
What happened when they tried to put their money together to hire a programmer to port OpenOffice.org to MacOS X? This requires no programming skill nor does it require reading manuals. As more people join the effort, less money is needed per person to accomplish the goal. Everyone already has the permission they need to do any modification work they want to do. You don't need to wait to get cues from anyone else. With free software, you are as dependent as you make yourself.
I understand that most people aren't programmers. I also understand that most people aren't plumbers, yet they have pipes that clog. When their pipes clog, they hire someone to clear their pipes, or they learn to do the work themselves. Lack of serious action toward reaching the goal tells others where their priorities are.
I fail to understand how any part of that response lies "on the other hand"--if anyone doesn't like what they get with free software, they have options. Two of those options are to learn to program and do the work themselves, or purchase the time and expertise of a programmer.
The video game industry (and probably the computer industry as well) may make more money than the American movie industry, but copyright law is influenced by corporate American movie studios far more than those who make computers or video games. To the extent it is appropriate to separate these "industries" (Disney presents a particularly complex case, owning television networks, movie distribution labels, record distribution labels, and more), it's ironic that the relatively smaller American movie industry has so much say about how computer hardware and software are allowed to work or how long copyrighted works of all kinds will stay under copyright.
Although I like some features from Firefox for web browsing, Firefox has one showstopper flaw for me: Firefox doesn't let you turn off URL bar autocomplete. I feel like I'm losing my privacy every time I type in a URL into Firefox.
Mozilla suite makes it trivially easy to turn off URL bar autocomplete. You don't have to lose your history.
Opening links into tabs with the middle mouse button was nice in Firefox, and downloading files to my Desktop with alt-click is nice too, but I don't think I should have to reveal where I've browsed lately to onlookers just because I want to go somewhere else by typing in a URL.
Microsoft distributes a buggy OS and withholds the freedom for users to inspect how it works, modify it to work better, and distribute the improved version. Users need these freedoms to make their computers work for them, even if they're not programmers themselves (in which case they can benefit from software freedom by running software others inspected, improved, and distributed).
From the perspective of software freedom, Microsoft isn't evil, but they are denying users their freedoms users deserve, and they employ obstructionist policies instead of competing, and that is anti-social behavior.
It's important not to judge them purely on the basis of features because this ignores a far more socially important issue of how people ought to treat each other. Placing people in positions of dependency where nobody can provide their own support or help their community by distributing improved versions of the software is something we should not overlook.
But in the free software world, the user gets the freedom to share and modify the programs, any time they want and for any purpose, without ever having to reveal to anyone what they did or why. This freedom allows the user to decide where they want to buy their support or to learn the program enough to provide their own support. Neither of those options are possible with proprietary software. Hence, it is quite different from what any proprietor (not just Microsoft) is offering.
What proprietors do is a time-honored social problem of creating a problem and (eventually) providing a "solution". You don't get the freedom to break out of that dependency until you get away from proprietary software.
In the interest of expanding the amount of free software you run, I'll try to address a few of your gripes. In short, some of your substantive gripes are addressed with extensions. All of the extensions I've found are free software, so one could modify them to suit one's needs. I think Firefox could use better session saving functionality (it's possible to save a bookmark for a tab which takes one to the website's front page, not to the search one was in the middle of doing when Firefox crashed or when one had to quit the Firefox session).
Point #6 of this extension's feature set seems to address this concern ("When the last tab is closed with Ctrl+W pressed or with Close Tab command, the main Firefox window can be kept, the tab is only made blank (as if Close Tab button is clicked).").
I use Prefbar to do this, but I'm sure there are other extensions available to accomplish the same thing.
These gripes are far too vague to address and will probably be viewed as unreasonable to mimic without identifying precisely what functionality is worth duplicating or improving upon.
This seems picayune, but on Fedora Core 3, Firefox has Edit->Preferences. On issues like this, I favor consistency and both choices make sense to me, so I don't really care where the menu option is.
I recently read Colin Charles' blog and came across his announcement of FC3 for PPC is in testing. He notes that "the release is known to not boot on G5's, and we are working on re-building another tree, which we can push out soon", would this new Linux kernel patch help with this?
For Peruvian Congressman Villanueva, use of free software and free formats was critical--his letter to Microsoft on why he was rejecting their arguments explains how important not being locked in is to doing transparent government work in addition to treating citizens well. I'm sure he's not the only one, but his letter to Microsoft is well worth reading.
Peruvian Congressman Villanueva wrote a scathing letter to a Microsoft representative who tried to railroad him into an argument centered on price and how practical it would be to let Microsoft fulfill all of one's technical needs (Villanueva did not take the bait and debunked every one of the MS rep's arguments, noting in part that "it is not enough that it [the software] is technically capable of fulfilling a task"). Villanueva demanded the freedoms of free software (he was particular about which movement he sides with) and free formats for goverment use. His bill did not require free software to be used in Peruvian government work nor does it require Microsoft to change its executives.
The free software movement makes no demands who is or becomes Microsoft's executives, yet Microsoft is nervous. Microsoft has toured the country proclaiming the GNU General Public License to be like a cancer and destructive to one's "intellectual property". They are losing seats (hence their willingness to give away Microsoft Windows in some cases) and Microsoft is losing the web server market to Apache, Firefox is eating into their web browser dominance, and most importantly Microsoft provides no software freedom for their most popular programs. Even if we look at this issue in the narrow terms of market popularity, if their market lead were only vulnerable by those who somehow "convince them to hire mediocre executive leadership" they would not need to expend any effort denouncing copylefted free software.
I'd wonder if the whole negotiation was over price; the UK Register article seems to focus on price. If the discussions mainly centered on costs, using the philosophy of the open source movement (which focuses on practical goals for programs in their bid to speak to business) is sure to lose because serious proprietors including Microsoft are ready to lower their price to free to keep a competitor away ("lose no sale to Linux[sic]" is what I recall reading in a NYT article which quoted an internal Microsoft memo).
Discussing software freedom may be uncomfortable for some, but this issue reframes the debate on something no proprietor can deliver. This means raising an issue which the open source movement was designed not to raise and it means paying attention to the free software movement's central message of including ethics in one's pitch.
The poster asks
My guess is that it will take more than just an argument over price to win people to software under a license approved by the Open Source Initiative. Serious proprietors looking at a big potential client will reduce their price to free if need be in order to secure the deal.
Microsoft revealed that they were willing to do this (I recall reading a New York Times article which included a quote from an internal a memo which clearly indicated they were to "lose no sale to Linux[sic]"). So if you're only prepared to go into the debate talking only about price and practical advantage, you could very well lose to a proprietor, perhaps even acting as a buttress for the proprietor.
The Free Software Foundation warned against this in their essay about the differences between the free software and open source movements. That difference is quite pertinant here for your question:
For example, making private derivatives could be important to pursuing your town's specific needs. Yet permission to make private derivatives are not included in the definition of "open source" because of that movement's values (this is why the Apple Public Source License which used to require reporting some changes to Apple or publishing changes qualified as an open source license but not a free software license. Changes to the APSL have been made and v2.0 of the APSL qualifies as a free software license. These improvements would not have been made without someone pushing for them). Hence, if you genuinely seek software freedom for the users of this software, I suggest conveying the importance of focusing on user's freedoms to share and modify software.