I read that the following Javascript code is sufficient to cause a crash in many Javascript-enabled browsers (Lynx need not apply, and you will need to turn on Javascript to have any chance to see this work):
<HTML> <SCRIPT> a = new Array(); while (1) { (a = new Array(a)).sort(); } </SCRIPT> <SCRIPT> a = new Array(); while (1) { (a = new Array(a)).sort(); } </SCRIPT> </HTML>
Copy that into a text file, open it with your favorite web browsers and be prepared to lose work.
But I'm having odd results in two copies of Firefox 1.0. In my installation of Firefox 1.0 (from Fedora Core 3, fully updated) I get a prompt that lets me cancel running the scripts (I get prompted once per SCRIPT element). Running Firefox 1.0 from mozilla.org on Fedora Core 2 (again, fully updated) the browser quickly crashes.
Any hints as to why one Firefox is crashing and the other not? I'm guessing that there is a Javascript execution timeout setting I could adjust with about:config in the FC2 Firefox 1.0 which crashes? If so, which settings are relevant?
Yes, creativity does beget more creativity because that's how creativity works. Programmers understand this quite well because most programs build on something already written (something most likely not written by that programmer). Lawyers understand this quite well too, the work they do is building on casework that came before.
Statements about turning out something "good" are remarkably subjective and not convincing in the least. One hit wonders in the popular music world conflates creativity with the a profit-minded process music studios.
The question isn't whether it is easy to do ("isn't like turning on a faucet"), the question is who will be able to determine the course of culture, those with a lot of published copyrighted works which are heard or seen daily (and therefore have financial incentive to pursue monopoly) or the people living in that culture who don't have the same use of the publicly owned airwaves and established movie theaters.
I think Lawrence Lessig who has studied this at length would disagree with your assertions.
From March 2005 SVG becomes part of the standard Mozilla/FireFox build.
But the link provided doesn't indicate that SVG builds will become standard in Mozilla (suite, I assume) or Firefox builds. Where did this information about SVG becoming standard come from?
I agree with you that what the FSF has achieved here is remarkable. However, the FSF doesn't argue for "OSS". They argue for free software. Perhaps that is why they are called the "Free Software Foundation Europe". When the FSF started in the US, "open source" did not exist. The start of the open source movement was over a decade away and the OSI's founders chose to stand for different values, most notably pushing aside software freedom so they could more easily speak to their primary audience: business.
This is a substantial piece of progress for widespread recognition and acceptance of OSS.
No, it is a substantial piece of progress for widespread recognition and acceptance of the older free software movement. The FSFE doesn't speak for "OSS" (open source software). In fact the FSF tells us that the two movements are not the same. This essay explains much and is one of the most underrated essays the FSF has published.
While I'm sure that the open source movement will get some increased publicity from this (largely from people who don't understand what "open source" really means or don't know the difference between the philosophies of the two movements), it's important to understand recent history and see how the messages of the FSF and OSI differ. It's also important and fair to give credit where credit is due. Here, that means using the phrase "free software". I don't know who wrote the blurb at Wikinerds, but they were wrong. The FSFE's press release doesn't mention "open source" or "OSS" at all. Your article is vastly overrated.
It would be refreshing to see people become comfortable by giving others credit for what they did instead of overstating the case. Linus Torvalds started writing the Linux kernel (which is not an operating system). Years before Torvalds began his work, RMS started a social movement called the free software movement, he began the GNU project, and (to make GNU a reality) he started writing a number of programs including GCC and Emacs (now GNU Emacs to differentiate it from XEmacs and the other Emacs variants).
Perhaps I wasn't clear enough: I understand the design and the intention because I'm familiar with NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP. MacOS X is doing the same thing those systems did. But in practice, appwrappers aren't being used consistently and proprietary software running as an admin is inherently untrustworthy.
While I appreciate the simplicity that approach appears to offer, I doubt it is consistently that simple.
Once an app runs, it can install files anywhere the user could. So if the user runs with administrator access (which one would want sometimes, to allow multiple accounts to share the same installed apps instead of each user installing their own copy of some program), the program could silently unpackage and place copies of files in various places outside the appwrapper. Deleting the appwrapper won't delete these (now unneeded) additional files. This behavior might not be in vogue, it might raise hackles in a small userbase, but that same userbase will tolerate it for apps that provide a unique proprietary function--playing Microsoft Windows Media files, for instance.
I want a system that is that easy to maintain, I want apps that are that easy to acquire and upgrade (and easy for the developer to package for me--waiting for mozilla.org to ship an RPM of the latest Firefox increases the time until I can try it on Fedora Core GNU/Linux, for example). But I'm not convinced that the NeXTSTEP (now MacOS X) appwrapper approach is going to achieve this end with the kind of consistency that I can rely on. And I'm not willing to give up my software freedom to acquire the ease of installation/uninstallation which appwrappers ostensibly provide.
Bad packages (RPMs, Debs, etc.) exist, to be sure; I am not seeking perfection (which never exists). However, in my experience, bad packages are far fewer in number than the number of installers I've seen for MacOS X that drop files wherever and don't leave any easy way to uninstall the files (in addition, the spectre of proprietary software adds another wrinkle to the mix: uninspectable and unchangeable software means that any installer logs of installation activity are untrustworthy because they could be incomplete).
Finally, the MacOS X Installer.app approach isn't as functional as its NeXTSTEP sibling was. The older Install.app installed, uninstalled, and repackaged packages and had a fairly easy to use interface for the end-user. The aforementioned limitations were still a problem, of course (NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP were not free software systems and they were made useful chiefly through proprietary software), but at least some handy functionality was there. The last time I saw the MacOS X installer app it didn't do these things.
I prefer Mozilla Suite over Firefox for one reason: I can't turn off autocompleting URLs in Firefox. I want to keep a history of where I've been, but I wish to turn off autocomplete. I know of no way to accomplish this in Firefox, but it is quite easy to do in the Mozilla Suite. Every extension I use has been written for Firefox, Firefox does some things a little differently but not so much that I can't get used to the Firefox way of doing them. However, I view the autocomplete issue as a security problem because I'm not interested in revealing where I've been to onlookers who happen to watch me browse with a laptop computer.
If any of you know how to turn off URLbar autocomplete in Firefox, I'd appreciate telling me how to accomplish this.
Yes, and it struck me as unclearly worded because it's natural to advocate for a particular purpose. Hence, asking about where RMS was advocating for the overall point of this thread: OpenBSD developers want to be able to share verbatim copies of non-free wireless card software so as to make wireless device use more convenient.
This has been under consideration for over 2 years
on
GPL Revision Coming Soon
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The Affero General Public License is a free software license, copyleft, and incompatible with the GNU GPL. It consists of the GNU GPL version 2, with one additional section that Affero added with FSF approval. The new section, 2(d), covers the distribution of application programs through web services or computer networks. The Affero GPL is incompatible with the GNU GPL version 2 because of section 2(d); however, the section is written so that we can make GNU GPL version 3 upward compatible with the Affero GPL. That is why we gave our approval for Affero to modify the GNU GPL in this way.
Some of our most vocal proponents, such as ESR, RMS, and Linus, have somewhat taken on this responsibility, but even they are flamed and criticized.
What are you talking about as a responsibility? And where, exactly, can I find an example of RMS advocating for people to spread copies of non-free software to make wireless devices work more conveniently?
The GPL works very well at the moment. Introducing a new version could confuse what is at the moment a very easy to understand concept-- if you alter GPLed code you have to let everyone use your alterations as GPLed code as well-- as well as creating schisms in OSS development.
Actually, private derivatives are allowed. Having the freedom to make derivatives one does not share with others in any form is required by the definition of free software:
You should also have the freedom to make modifications and use them privately in your own work or play, without even mentioning that they exist.
Also, use of a program (that is, merely executing the program) is not a power regulated by US copyright law. And the GPLv2 specifically states that it does not control this activity:
Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted [...]
So, no, "if you alter GPLed code you have to let everyone use your alterations as GPLed code as well" is untrue.
Also, you have (perhaps inadvertantly) repeated one of the most misleading parts of the article (and the editorial linked to the article): Associating the GPL with the open source movement profound miscredits who did what and what goals the GPL was written to achieve.
This latest revision of the GPL has almost nothing to do with "OSS" development. The open source movement (which doesn't like to talk about software freedom) did not exist when the current version of the GPL (version 2) was written. The free software movement (which is based on software freedom) predates the open source movement by over a decade. This upcoming version (version 3) of the GPL will be the first version of the GPL written since the open source movement started. As far as I know, nobody from the open source movement is writing the next revision of the GPL; it is still written by the people at the FSF (most notably, RMS and Eben Moglen, both of whom make it quite clear in their speeches that they are doing work to promote software freedom). So, the open source movement is receiving a great deal of credit for work it did not do and the danger of tying the GPL with the open source movement is that the open source movement's philosophy, which doesn't object to proprietary software, will be conflated with a license built to create and maintain a commons where software freedom is the rule.
Then EB is behind the times in an inappropriate way as well as being grossly incorrect in what it publishes today (again, by McHenry's ridiculous standards which would render every encyclopedia useless--one bad article and you're out). The free software movement is 20 years old this year. It began in 1984 with RMS' announcement of the GNU project.
It's ironic that you picked Mozilla as an example to bolster your point ultimately aimed at debunking the need for the freedom to share and modify because the history of Mozilla is rife with the need for these freedoms. Mozilla came to be what we know through the hard work of the extant free software community, the community that preceeded the Mozilla project by over a decade. Mozilla is licensed under three licenses, two of which came from the FSF (the GPL and LGPL). The open source movement started in reaction to Netscape's distribution of the source code that began the Mozilla project. Wikipedia's priority apparently includes distributing their work under a free documentation license (the GFDL, yet another license written by the FSF). Granting people the freedom to do useful things with the work continues to be important to them and to me, and that makes me enjoy the Wikipedia all the more. It's a shame this gets such short shrift in McHenry's review, but perhaps that is because he isn't interested in people learning how these freedom empower them to work together to replace what he made his living doing.
And professional librarians have also voiced deep concerns about the archivability of electronic media, due to physical media failure and format obselesence. This and the census issue highlight the value of dead trees, not the opposite.
When we lost the 1960 and 1970 censuses we lost the work of the typists put in to transcribe the data into electronic format. Only some of the data from those censuses is available today. You can't statistically examine this volume of data without computers, and computers can't work on dead tree formatted data, they need electronic copies of data. At least with computers we can pay attention to keeping things in free formats and periodically copying data so as to keep it ready for statistical analysis whenever we want. Dead trees are not as useful here.
Furthermore, the 1960 and 1970 censuses were distributed on tapes, hence the need for the Dualabs compression program. I'm told that around 1880 there may have been a fire which prevents getting paper records for censuses before that time. Other than that, you should be free to scan in the microfiche facsimilies and recreate the data for many censuses with much typing (far more work than it would be to create a copying program to put data in a desired new format). Maybe you should look up the story of how the Dualabs problem came to be and why it matters so much to data archivists. Perhaps, someday, EB will come around to describe this issue.
Time gives both the detachment and additional information not available in the heat of the moment to write accurate articles.
I hope you won't deny us the fruit of your gift to tell us exactly what day it will be acceptable and proper to publish these articles.
If Wikipedia is trying to cover these things as well, it's an interesting experiment, but as the battles over articles such as the Rove entry shows, it has it problems and it's not what an encylopedia does.
Then you agree with McHenry that the encyclopedia should be judged by a handful of entries (or perhaps just one). I see no acknowledgment of survey research methods or the concept of outliers in either of your contributions. If McHenry's thesis is ever shown to be correct, it will be because someone rejected his intellectual laziness and actually conducted the survey work to establish guidelines for acceptability and then did research on a random sample of articles in Wikipedia.
If you bought a dead trees EB, then it's yours. even if they company goes belly up, no one's going to come and take your pages of high-quality printed reproduced text and images. But for Wikipedia, if those servers stop responding, either because of a problem at your end or theirs, it's gone: very few people will have the wherewithal to cache a local copy of the database, and then of course there's the issue of staying up to date with the always changing database.
Actually, what kind of control I have over dead tree copies is unclear because of the combination of EB's restrictive license and an increasingly punitive and broad copyright regime--freedoms we used to have go away and the license doesn't secure these freedoms in perpetuity (or even in the case that EB goes out of business). Free documentation licenses (and some free software licenses) try hard to make this not happen.
I'm willing to live with a snapshot of a free work, because it comes with the freedoms to share and modify. This snapshot serves my needs for an evolving work better than a rotting archive of content-stagnant pages that are harder to read over time. With a Wikipedia snapshot I can develop it independently of the Wikipedia website because of the license. Thus Wikipedia's content is not gone, it's just unavailable to people that don't get a copy from someone else. I can cache as much or as little of it as I like and work on a replacement movement (or participate in an extant one) to collectively enhance the work. EB offers me none of these freedoms.
If you're talking about preserving the information in EB for posterity or whatever, etc, etc, I would point out, for example, that most scientific research is published in copyrighted journals, and people don't worry that we're going to lose that knowledge even if Nature and Science went bust.
Then those people are foolish in two senses:
Preservation of ideas is not the only issue, preservation of the specific expressions one paid good money for is. There are a lot of people who do worry that publishing in restrictively-licensed journals is a bad idea, hence the organization that went into making smaller journals and the Public Library of Science.
The lessons from the 1960 and 1970 US census data compression debacle are key. Let's not repeat the loss we suffered because the US Government didn't have the foresight to get the source code to the compression programs they hired Dualabs to write. Preserving data for posterity is an ongoing issue and preserving user's rights to maintain the data is a key part of that.
I'm not surprised. The EB editorial office isn't there to do research for readers. They've produced an article, the rest is up to you.
How do they justify doing any research for their articles if they don't
Perhaps this "crofty old coot" can never be made happy because he has an economic relationship with EB, thus his one-article sample(!) was designed to downplay Wikipedia's strengths and freedoms. I debunk the validity of his one-article sample approach elsewhere in this thread.
We don't know what most readers would do with EB if they were given the freedom to change and distribute it because they are not given that freedom. Even McHenry concedes that the Wikipedia claim is true--they were able to get a lot of volunteers to edit and revise. He must say this because he tries to use it to justify a poor review of Wikipedia later on. This freedom to make copies, change the work, and distribute copies (verbatim or modified) is one of the issues Wikipedia takes up (the first in its list of values, in fact). This sense of freedom (not zero price) is apparently quite important for Wikipedia ("The license we use grants free access to our content in the same sense as free software is licensed freely." from Wikipedia:Copyrights).
And that, right there, is why Britannica and its brethern win. When something is wrong or slanted in Britannica, no-one blames the readers. It's an editor or contributer who gets the rap.
Taking the blame doesn't help anything if it doesn't result in getting problems fixed. EB's approach is about framing the debate in terms they are comfortable with an excluding others from building on their work. The practical outcome of this for me is that too many encyclopedias I've seen fail to address important social movements of the day (like the free software movement, encouraging an ethical approach to computer software, and the only significant challenge to one of the largest monopolies of our day--Microsoft's proprietary software), or they are updated too infrequently to talk about things I want to learn more about (like the recent goings-on and the history of the anti-war movement).
Other practical considerations are left out too: What if I want to make a copy of EB in case EB goes away? EB is under a restrictive license which doesn't allow me to do things I want to do. Contacting EB has not produced the kind of feedback I was looking for, including pointers to primary sources and essays written by people in the know on topics I care about. The end result of this is that I can't help myself by helping like-minded neighbors find these topics either.
To review Wikipedia, McHenry presents something closer to an all-or-nothing case ("assessing an encyclopedia...can't be done in any thoroughgoing way") where a complete reading is infeasible but clearly one must read something from the encyclopedia or else one can't say anything about its content. And then he says that he "chose a single article, the biography of Alexander Hamilton.". McHenry actively arguing against sampling--assessing the figurative lay of the land by looking at many places, not by looking at one hand-picked part and making that review stand for the rest.
But since he thinks this one-article approach is an appropriate yardstick, I figure two can play that game. I chose to look up something from the online EB about the free software movement and I found no entry (not even in the subscriber's short list). "GNU", in the context of computer software, seemed to elicit no response, neither did "open source" (which could have pointed to how the open source and free software movements differ), but "GNU/Linux" provides a hit (only because of the word "Linux"). Unfortunately EB falls into a trap much like the reviewer cited for Wikipedia's Hamilton entry--he picked the Alexander Hamilton entry because he knew that Hamilton's birthdate was likely to be wrong (and thus set up bad dates for the remainder of the entry), and that is exactly what he found. In my setup to fail, I know that exactly what Linux is and how it ought to be credited is controversial. Yet EB goes on boldly claiming that Linux is an operating system (when actually it is only part of an operating system called a "kernel"), and EB seems to make no distinction between free as in price and free as in the freedoms to share and
"[...] Opera's future seems uncertain as Firefox's growing popularity may hurt Opera by stealing potential customers. With Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari all free, is there room for a non-free browser in the market?"
Isn't this (1) outcompeting to get more (2) users? I doubt most Firefox users are Mozilla Foundation customers because I doubt most Firefox users paid for their copy of Firefox (which is okay by me, sharing at whatever price we choose is fundamental to software freedom). As for the first point, isn't it possible people are choosing Firefox because it works well for what most web users want most of the time?
And speaking of software freedom: MSIE, Safari, and Firefox are not free in the same way. You pay for MSIE and Safari when you buy the Microsoft Windows and MacOS X operating systems (if not in other ways by buying other Microsoft and Apple products), and if you pay you still don't get software freedom with either browser (although, to be fair, the Mozilla Foundation endorses the open source movement). Firefox is free in both the sense of software freedom and the side-effect that freedom grants us: free to share for zero price.
Reading this, I realize someone might misinterpret the reversal of concession as some kind of legally binding prerequisite. It is not, however it will not happen even if Kerry did somehow get the votes needed to win key states (and thus their electoral votes). I believe that the Democrats are firmly committed to not putting the country through a long pursuit of determining who actually won.
Nader was actually one of the first to demand a recount. On Tuesday, November 9, 2004, Jay Leno got his witless jab in at Nader's recount call. But, ironically, this recount will end up being little more than an academic excercise if Kerry doesn't recant his premature concession.
Also ironic that the man (and, now, a party) who the Democrats spent so much time and money on in order to prevent appearance on the ballot are now those who ask for democracy in the form of counting all the ballots (and accounting for the ballots). Also, ironic that the Greens are so vocal in asking for this: Cobb's stumped for Kerry in contested states, yet the Democrats tried to keep Greens off the ballot as well this year. Meanwhile, in Illinois, the Democrats are changing the law to make sure the Republicans got their candidate on Illinois ballots.
Nader's campaign platform more closely matched what Democratic party voters wanted (most importantly, getting out of the occupation of Iraq). Yet Democrats lost with a combination of "lesser evil" and fearmongering.
What does the future for the Democrats hold? I think not much of interest for those who don't like corporate-funded good-cop/bad-cop: When Nader says
"You will know within a week whether there'll be a turn around in the Democratic Party. There'd have to be a complete turnover of personnel; a clean out of the stables."
I look at the Democrats and I look forward to seeing such action.
It's catering to what the proprietors want you to do--become more dependent on their products and work under their licenses. Ultimately, the copyright holder holds the power. In the Qlogic example, it was not any "threat" that gave Qlogic incentive to do what it did. de Raadt is trying to make this seem like OpenBSD held the power in this relationship. Qlogic realized that it had the opportunity to avoid a minor PR hassle and simultaneously not forgo sales of its hardware when it allowed others (including those ostensibly dedicated to "open"ness) become their buttress by distributing their copyrighted proprietary code.
What the OpenBSD team is doing is in line with the idea of gaining favorable cachet of "open source" to chase after technical convenience at the expense of a user's freedom to inspect, modify, and alter computer software to suit their needs. Proprietors know that users will give up their freedom if they never learn to value software freedom, and if they are provided with a frictionless path to doing what you want them to do. OpenBSD is working hard to build that frictionless path to becoming yet another proprietary software distributor.
What other proprietary software would also "benefit" "open source" operating systems? Since this is all being done in the name of convenience for the user, why not admit it and ship more software that the user might find convenient so the OpenBSD system is even more useful out of the box?
As much as the OpenBSD team cares about making software that commercial developers can build on (even to make proprietary derivatives), these proprietary firmware packages will not be available under such terms. There will be vastly different licenses for portions of OpenBSD--one license for each of the proprietary binary firmware files, and one license for the rest of the OS (the new BSD license).
When such firmware is built into the Linux kernel, that variant of the kernel becomes non-redistributable because one can't meet the terms of the GNU GPL (complete corresponding source code cannot be supplied). The OpenBSD system will remain redistributable (except for the oddity concerning distributing verbatim copies of the OpenBSD discs). And "open source" will again demonstrate its ability to trade away the practical idealism that built the free software community in exchange for convenience.
First, I wouldn't believe a claim like that without backing from primary sources.
Second, assuming this can be illustrated with primary source backing, I would want to know how far this goes--does this include 802.11b wireless cards as well? I know they're not the latest technology, but if this is just another place where software freedom temporarily requires having less than the state-of-the-art, that's fine (and, frankly, 802.11b isn't bad at all for most people most of the time). I don't say this as if to offer some kind of exception from software freedom. I say this to offer a feasible compromise where software freedom doesn't take a back seat to convenience.
These days, I don't ask because I'll do no better than getting proprietary software in exchange for the asking, which is not what I would want. In the past, it wasn't this way which is why I don't buy the excuse about how the economics of hardware work. Vendors have come to realize that people are willing to pay for hardware they can't fully use without the vendor's proprietary software. Since the public doesn't know about software freedom, they don't value it. Since they don't value software freedom, they have no qualms about jumping from master to master on the basis of chasing pragmatism. If I had the time and skill, I'd reverse engineer the products and release that information to the community. Instead, I'm willing to pay for products I can use in freedom which means preferring products developed with full specs made available to me and helping other people reverse engineer hardware.
Open Source is a fairly practical solution to an Engineering problem. It's applying the age old solution of scientific peer review to the world of software. The freedom is incidental, but most of the original great science was fairly publicly available.
Actually, this story is about how that is precisely what the movement is not doing. When one obtains proprietary software (and that's all that the OpenBSD people are really doing), that software is not subject to peer review. No specifications change hands. The OpenBSD team doesn't better understand the inner workings of the hardware. One can pass copies of the binary firmware on (this is all the OpenBSD team apparently seeks to do) and that's about it. That is, as the essay I linked to said, one of the big differences between the free software and open source movements. For the open source movement, proprietary software is acceptable because (as you say) "freedom is incidental".
Slashdot Mirror
I read that the following Javascript code is sufficient to cause a crash in many Javascript-enabled browsers (Lynx need not apply, and you will need to turn on Javascript to have any chance to see this work):
Copy that into a text file, open it with your favorite web browsers and be prepared to lose work.
But I'm having odd results in two copies of Firefox 1.0. In my installation of Firefox 1.0 (from Fedora Core 3, fully updated) I get a prompt that lets me cancel running the scripts (I get prompted once per SCRIPT element). Running Firefox 1.0 from mozilla.org on Fedora Core 2 (again, fully updated) the browser quickly crashes.
Any hints as to why one Firefox is crashing and the other not? I'm guessing that there is a Javascript execution timeout setting I could adjust with about:config in the FC2 Firefox 1.0 which crashes? If so, which settings are relevant?
Thanks.
Yes, creativity does beget more creativity because that's how creativity works. Programmers understand this quite well because most programs build on something already written (something most likely not written by that programmer). Lawyers understand this quite well too, the work they do is building on casework that came before.
Statements about turning out something "good" are remarkably subjective and not convincing in the least. One hit wonders in the popular music world conflates creativity with the a profit-minded process music studios.
The question isn't whether it is easy to do ("isn't like turning on a faucet"), the question is who will be able to determine the course of culture, those with a lot of published copyrighted works which are heard or seen daily (and therefore have financial incentive to pursue monopoly) or the people living in that culture who don't have the same use of the publicly owned airwaves and established movie theaters.
I think Lawrence Lessig who has studied this at length would disagree with your assertions.
wombatmobile claims
But the link provided doesn't indicate that SVG builds will become standard in Mozilla (suite, I assume) or Firefox builds. Where did this information about SVG becoming standard come from?
Thanks.
More devices could be made WiFi-ready and they don't have to use all the physical space of a laptop computer.
I agree with you that what the FSF has achieved here is remarkable. However, the FSF doesn't argue for "OSS". They argue for free software. Perhaps that is why they are called the "Free Software Foundation Europe". When the FSF started in the US, "open source" did not exist. The start of the open source movement was over a decade away and the OSI's founders chose to stand for different values, most notably pushing aside software freedom so they could more easily speak to their primary audience: business.
No, it is a substantial piece of progress for widespread recognition and acceptance of the older free software movement. The FSFE doesn't speak for "OSS" (open source software). In fact the FSF tells us that the two movements are not the same. This essay explains much and is one of the most underrated essays the FSF has published.
While I'm sure that the open source movement will get some increased publicity from this (largely from people who don't understand what "open source" really means or don't know the difference between the philosophies of the two movements), it's important to understand recent history and see how the messages of the FSF and OSI differ. It's also important and fair to give credit where credit is due. Here, that means using the phrase "free software". I don't know who wrote the blurb at Wikinerds, but they were wrong. The FSFE's press release doesn't mention "open source" or "OSS" at all. Your article is vastly overrated.
It would be refreshing to see people become comfortable by giving others credit for what they did instead of overstating the case. Linus Torvalds started writing the Linux kernel (which is not an operating system). Years before Torvalds began his work, RMS started a social movement called the free software movement, he began the GNU project, and (to make GNU a reality) he started writing a number of programs including GCC and Emacs (now GNU Emacs to differentiate it from XEmacs and the other Emacs variants).
Perhaps I wasn't clear enough: I understand the design and the intention because I'm familiar with NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP. MacOS X is doing the same thing those systems did. But in practice, appwrappers aren't being used consistently and proprietary software running as an admin is inherently untrustworthy.
While I appreciate the simplicity that approach appears to offer, I doubt it is consistently that simple.
Once an app runs, it can install files anywhere the user could. So if the user runs with administrator access (which one would want sometimes, to allow multiple accounts to share the same installed apps instead of each user installing their own copy of some program), the program could silently unpackage and place copies of files in various places outside the appwrapper. Deleting the appwrapper won't delete these (now unneeded) additional files. This behavior might not be in vogue, it might raise hackles in a small userbase, but that same userbase will tolerate it for apps that provide a unique proprietary function--playing Microsoft Windows Media files, for instance.
I want a system that is that easy to maintain, I want apps that are that easy to acquire and upgrade (and easy for the developer to package for me--waiting for mozilla.org to ship an RPM of the latest Firefox increases the time until I can try it on Fedora Core GNU/Linux, for example). But I'm not convinced that the NeXTSTEP (now MacOS X) appwrapper approach is going to achieve this end with the kind of consistency that I can rely on. And I'm not willing to give up my software freedom to acquire the ease of installation/uninstallation which appwrappers ostensibly provide.
Bad packages (RPMs, Debs, etc.) exist, to be sure; I am not seeking perfection (which never exists). However, in my experience, bad packages are far fewer in number than the number of installers I've seen for MacOS X that drop files wherever and don't leave any easy way to uninstall the files (in addition, the spectre of proprietary software adds another wrinkle to the mix: uninspectable and unchangeable software means that any installer logs of installation activity are untrustworthy because they could be incomplete).
Finally, the MacOS X Installer.app approach isn't as functional as its NeXTSTEP sibling was. The older Install.app installed, uninstalled, and repackaged packages and had a fairly easy to use interface for the end-user. The aforementioned limitations were still a problem, of course (NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP were not free software systems and they were made useful chiefly through proprietary software), but at least some handy functionality was there. The last time I saw the MacOS X installer app it didn't do these things.
I prefer Mozilla Suite over Firefox for one reason: I can't turn off autocompleting URLs in Firefox. I want to keep a history of where I've been, but I wish to turn off autocomplete. I know of no way to accomplish this in Firefox, but it is quite easy to do in the Mozilla Suite. Every extension I use has been written for Firefox, Firefox does some things a little differently but not so much that I can't get used to the Firefox way of doing them. However, I view the autocomplete issue as a security problem because I'm not interested in revealing where I've been to onlookers who happen to watch me browse with a laptop computer.
If any of you know how to turn off URLbar autocomplete in Firefox, I'd appreciate telling me how to accomplish this.
Yes, and it struck me as unclearly worded because it's natural to advocate for a particular purpose. Hence, asking about where RMS was advocating for the overall point of this thread: OpenBSD developers want to be able to share verbatim copies of non-free wireless card software so as to make wireless device use more convenient.
The FSF has been working with Affero to address this issue. Check out the list of GPL-incompatible free software licenses under the section called "Affero General Public License" which says:
The Affero General Public License is online as well. I'm sure both organizations would welcome your feedback.
What are you talking about as a responsibility? And where, exactly, can I find an example of RMS advocating for people to spread copies of non-free software to make wireless devices work more conveniently?
Actually, private derivatives are allowed. Having the freedom to make derivatives one does not share with others in any form is required by the definition of free software:
Also, use of a program (that is, merely executing the program) is not a power regulated by US copyright law. And the GPLv2 specifically states that it does not control this activity:
So, no, "if you alter GPLed code you have to let everyone use your alterations as GPLed code as well" is untrue.
Also, you have (perhaps inadvertantly) repeated one of the most misleading parts of the article (and the editorial linked to the article): Associating the GPL with the open source movement profound miscredits who did what and what goals the GPL was written to achieve.
This latest revision of the GPL has almost nothing to do with "OSS" development. The open source movement (which doesn't like to talk about software freedom) did not exist when the current version of the GPL (version 2) was written. The free software movement (which is based on software freedom) predates the open source movement by over a decade. This upcoming version (version 3) of the GPL will be the first version of the GPL written since the open source movement started. As far as I know, nobody from the open source movement is writing the next revision of the GPL; it is still written by the people at the FSF (most notably, RMS and Eben Moglen, both of whom make it quite clear in their speeches that they are doing work to promote software freedom). So, the open source movement is receiving a great deal of credit for work it did not do and the danger of tying the GPL with the open source movement is that the open source movement's philosophy, which doesn't object to proprietary software, will be conflated with a license built to create and maintain a commons where software freedom is the rule.
Then EB is behind the times in an inappropriate way as well as being grossly incorrect in what it publishes today (again, by McHenry's ridiculous standards which would render every encyclopedia useless--one bad article and you're out). The free software movement is 20 years old this year. It began in 1984 with RMS' announcement of the GNU project.
It's ironic that you picked Mozilla as an example to bolster your point ultimately aimed at debunking the need for the freedom to share and modify because the history of Mozilla is rife with the need for these freedoms. Mozilla came to be what we know through the hard work of the extant free software community, the community that preceeded the Mozilla project by over a decade. Mozilla is licensed under three licenses, two of which came from the FSF (the GPL and LGPL). The open source movement started in reaction to Netscape's distribution of the source code that began the Mozilla project. Wikipedia's priority apparently includes distributing their work under a free documentation license (the GFDL, yet another license written by the FSF). Granting people the freedom to do useful things with the work continues to be important to them and to me, and that makes me enjoy the Wikipedia all the more. It's a shame this gets such short shrift in McHenry's review, but perhaps that is because he isn't interested in people learning how these freedom empower them to work together to replace what he made his living doing.
When we lost the 1960 and 1970 censuses we lost the work of the typists put in to transcribe the data into electronic format. Only some of the data from those censuses is available today. You can't statistically examine this volume of data without computers, and computers can't work on dead tree formatted data, they need electronic copies of data. At least with computers we can pay attention to keeping things in free formats and periodically copying data so as to keep it ready for statistical analysis whenever we want. Dead trees are not as useful here.
Furthermore, the 1960 and 1970 censuses were distributed on tapes, hence the need for the Dualabs compression program. I'm told that around 1880 there may have been a fire which prevents getting paper records for censuses before that time. Other than that, you should be free to scan in the microfiche facsimilies and recreate the data for many censuses with much typing (far more work than it would be to create a copying program to put data in a desired new format). Maybe you should look up the story of how the Dualabs problem came to be and why it matters so much to data archivists. Perhaps, someday, EB will come around to describe this issue.
I hope you won't deny us the fruit of your gift to tell us exactly what day it will be acceptable and proper to publish these articles.
Then you agree with McHenry that the encyclopedia should be judged by a handful of entries (or perhaps just one). I see no acknowledgment of survey research methods or the concept of outliers in either of your contributions. If McHenry's thesis is ever shown to be correct, it will be because someone rejected his intellectual laziness and actually conducted the survey work to establish guidelines for acceptability and then did research on a random sample of articles in Wikipedia.
Actually, what kind of control I have over dead tree copies is unclear because of the combination of EB's restrictive license and an increasingly punitive and broad copyright regime--freedoms we used to have go away and the license doesn't secure these freedoms in perpetuity (or even in the case that EB goes out of business). Free documentation licenses (and some free software licenses) try hard to make this not happen.
I'm willing to live with a snapshot of a free work, because it comes with the freedoms to share and modify. This snapshot serves my needs for an evolving work better than a rotting archive of content-stagnant pages that are harder to read over time. With a Wikipedia snapshot I can develop it independently of the Wikipedia website because of the license. Thus Wikipedia's content is not gone, it's just unavailable to people that don't get a copy from someone else. I can cache as much or as little of it as I like and work on a replacement movement (or participate in an extant one) to collectively enhance the work. EB offers me none of these freedoms.
Then those people are foolish in two senses:
How do they justify doing any research for their articles if they don't
Perhaps this "crofty old coot" can never be made happy because he has an economic relationship with EB, thus his one-article sample(!) was designed to downplay Wikipedia's strengths and freedoms. I debunk the validity of his one-article sample approach elsewhere in this thread.
We don't know what most readers would do with EB if they were given the freedom to change and distribute it because they are not given that freedom. Even McHenry concedes that the Wikipedia claim is true--they were able to get a lot of volunteers to edit and revise. He must say this because he tries to use it to justify a poor review of Wikipedia later on. This freedom to make copies, change the work, and distribute copies (verbatim or modified) is one of the issues Wikipedia takes up (the first in its list of values, in fact). This sense of freedom (not zero price) is apparently quite important for Wikipedia ("The license we use grants free access to our content in the same sense as free software is licensed freely." from Wikipedia:Copyrights).
Taking the blame doesn't help anything if it doesn't result in getting problems fixed. EB's approach is about framing the debate in terms they are comfortable with an excluding others from building on their work. The practical outcome of this for me is that too many encyclopedias I've seen fail to address important social movements of the day (like the free software movement, encouraging an ethical approach to computer software, and the only significant challenge to one of the largest monopolies of our day--Microsoft's proprietary software), or they are updated too infrequently to talk about things I want to learn more about (like the recent goings-on and the history of the anti-war movement).
Other practical considerations are left out too: What if I want to make a copy of EB in case EB goes away? EB is under a restrictive license which doesn't allow me to do things I want to do. Contacting EB has not produced the kind of feedback I was looking for, including pointers to primary sources and essays written by people in the know on topics I care about. The end result of this is that I can't help myself by helping like-minded neighbors find these topics either.
To review Wikipedia, McHenry presents something closer to an all-or-nothing case ("assessing an encyclopedia...can't be done in any thoroughgoing way") where a complete reading is infeasible but clearly one must read something from the encyclopedia or else one can't say anything about its content. And then he says that he "chose a single article, the biography of Alexander Hamilton.". McHenry actively arguing against sampling--assessing the figurative lay of the land by looking at many places, not by looking at one hand-picked part and making that review stand for the rest.
But since he thinks this one-article approach is an appropriate yardstick, I figure two can play that game. I chose to look up something from the online EB about the free software movement and I found no entry (not even in the subscriber's short list). "GNU", in the context of computer software, seemed to elicit no response, neither did "open source" (which could have pointed to how the open source and free software movements differ), but "GNU/Linux" provides a hit (only because of the word "Linux"). Unfortunately EB falls into a trap much like the reviewer cited for Wikipedia's Hamilton entry--he picked the Alexander Hamilton entry because he knew that Hamilton's birthdate was likely to be wrong (and thus set up bad dates for the remainder of the entry), and that is exactly what he found. In my setup to fail, I know that exactly what Linux is and how it ought to be credited is controversial. Yet EB goes on boldly claiming that Linux is an operating system (when actually it is only part of an operating system called a "kernel"), and EB seems to make no distinction between free as in price and free as in the freedoms to share and
An anonymous reader contends that
Isn't this (1) outcompeting to get more (2) users? I doubt most Firefox users are Mozilla Foundation customers because I doubt most Firefox users paid for their copy of Firefox (which is okay by me, sharing at whatever price we choose is fundamental to software freedom). As for the first point, isn't it possible people are choosing Firefox because it works well for what most web users want most of the time?
And speaking of software freedom: MSIE, Safari, and Firefox are not free in the same way. You pay for MSIE and Safari when you buy the Microsoft Windows and MacOS X operating systems (if not in other ways by buying other Microsoft and Apple products), and if you pay you still don't get software freedom with either browser (although, to be fair, the Mozilla Foundation endorses the open source movement). Firefox is free in both the sense of software freedom and the side-effect that freedom grants us: free to share for zero price.
Reading this, I realize someone might misinterpret the reversal of concession as some kind of legally binding prerequisite. It is not, however it will not happen even if Kerry did somehow get the votes needed to win key states (and thus their electoral votes). I believe that the Democrats are firmly committed to not putting the country through a long pursuit of determining who actually won.
Nader was actually one of the first to demand a recount. On Tuesday, November 9, 2004, Jay Leno got his witless jab in at Nader's recount call. But, ironically, this recount will end up being little more than an academic excercise if Kerry doesn't recant his premature concession.
Also ironic that the man (and, now, a party) who the Democrats spent so much time and money on in order to prevent appearance on the ballot are now those who ask for democracy in the form of counting all the ballots (and accounting for the ballots). Also, ironic that the Greens are so vocal in asking for this: Cobb's stumped for Kerry in contested states, yet the Democrats tried to keep Greens off the ballot as well this year. Meanwhile, in Illinois, the Democrats are changing the law to make sure the Republicans got their candidate on Illinois ballots.
I'm guessing that in 3 years this will all be forgotten and we'll see an unapologetic Democratic party ready to spread more lies and half-truths about their left-leaning competition (this time, the smear job included failing to point out the orders of magnitude more Republican financial support that went to the Kerry campaign versus the Nader campaign: $10.7 Million for Kerry vs. $111,700 for Nader, according to Counterpunch). Ah, if only that time and money had gone to winning senate seats instead, the Democrats could have won back the senate.
Nader's campaign platform more closely matched what Democratic party voters wanted (most importantly, getting out of the occupation of Iraq). Yet Democrats lost with a combination of "lesser evil" and fearmongering.
What does the future for the Democrats hold? I think not much of interest for those who don't like corporate-funded good-cop/bad-cop: When Nader says
I look at the Democrats and I look forward to seeing such action.
It's catering to what the proprietors want you to do--become more dependent on their products and work under their licenses. Ultimately, the copyright holder holds the power. In the Qlogic example, it was not any "threat" that gave Qlogic incentive to do what it did. de Raadt is trying to make this seem like OpenBSD held the power in this relationship. Qlogic realized that it had the opportunity to avoid a minor PR hassle and simultaneously not forgo sales of its hardware when it allowed others (including those ostensibly dedicated to "open"ness) become their buttress by distributing their copyrighted proprietary code.
What the OpenBSD team is doing is in line with the idea of gaining favorable cachet of "open source" to chase after technical convenience at the expense of a user's freedom to inspect, modify, and alter computer software to suit their needs. Proprietors know that users will give up their freedom if they never learn to value software freedom, and if they are provided with a frictionless path to doing what you want them to do. OpenBSD is working hard to build that frictionless path to becoming yet another proprietary software distributor.
What other proprietary software would also "benefit" "open source" operating systems? Since this is all being done in the name of convenience for the user, why not admit it and ship more software that the user might find convenient so the OpenBSD system is even more useful out of the box?
As much as the OpenBSD team cares about making software that commercial developers can build on (even to make proprietary derivatives), these proprietary firmware packages will not be available under such terms. There will be vastly different licenses for portions of OpenBSD--one license for each of the proprietary binary firmware files, and one license for the rest of the OS (the new BSD license).
When such firmware is built into the Linux kernel, that variant of the kernel becomes non-redistributable because one can't meet the terms of the GNU GPL (complete corresponding source code cannot be supplied). The OpenBSD system will remain redistributable (except for the oddity concerning distributing verbatim copies of the OpenBSD discs). And "open source" will again demonstrate its ability to trade away the practical idealism that built the free software community in exchange for convenience.
First, I wouldn't believe a claim like that without backing from primary sources.
Second, assuming this can be illustrated with primary source backing, I would want to know how far this goes--does this include 802.11b wireless cards as well? I know they're not the latest technology, but if this is just another place where software freedom temporarily requires having less than the state-of-the-art, that's fine (and, frankly, 802.11b isn't bad at all for most people most of the time). I don't say this as if to offer some kind of exception from software freedom. I say this to offer a feasible compromise where software freedom doesn't take a back seat to convenience.
These days, I don't ask because I'll do no better than getting proprietary software in exchange for the asking, which is not what I would want. In the past, it wasn't this way which is why I don't buy the excuse about how the economics of hardware work. Vendors have come to realize that people are willing to pay for hardware they can't fully use without the vendor's proprietary software. Since the public doesn't know about software freedom, they don't value it. Since they don't value software freedom, they have no qualms about jumping from master to master on the basis of chasing pragmatism. If I had the time and skill, I'd reverse engineer the products and release that information to the community. Instead, I'm willing to pay for products I can use in freedom which means preferring products developed with full specs made available to me and helping other people reverse engineer hardware.
Actually, this story is about how that is precisely what the movement is not doing. When one obtains proprietary software (and that's all that the OpenBSD people are really doing), that software is not subject to peer review. No specifications change hands. The OpenBSD team doesn't better understand the inner workings of the hardware. One can pass copies of the binary firmware on (this is all the OpenBSD team apparently seeks to do) and that's about it. That is, as the essay I linked to said, one of the big differences between the free software and open source movements. For the open source movement, proprietary software is acceptable because (as you say) "freedom is incidental".