I never said the issue was the driver. The word "driver" in a quote in my post, not my words, so I don't see how you could misinterpret my post that way. More importantly, the location of the software and how it is installed in the device is a red herring. I see no reason to believe that proprietary firmware somehow negates the need for software freedom.
The Computer Associates Trusted Open Source License (CATOSL) apparently qualifies as an "open source" license, but it would probably not qualify as a "free software" license. The focus on user's software freedom found in the free software movement is important in interpreting what powers the license grants and what the license claims to regulate.
Section 10.1 tries to control use of the program--if one's rights under the license terminates, the license claims that that user's rights to use the program terminate as well. But the FSF tells us that US copyright law doesn't permit setting conditions on merely running a computer program (outside of a license or encryption manager) and that if this were to become accepted, would extend copyright law in a dangerous way. This was part of the rationale for saying the first and second revisions of the Apple Public Source License were not free software licenses.
Section 11.4 of the CATOSL claims that no licensee will bring a legal action under the license more than once a year. When one does bring a legal action, one is supposed to waive a jury trial and hold the trial in the state of New York. Licensees in other districts may enjoy rights which the state of New York does not recognize or grant, including the right to bring suit more than once a year; rights licensees would want to retain should they need to go to court.
I'm sure a more thorough examination of the CATOSL would reveal more problems for users. I don't recommend getting involved with programs licensed under the CATOSL. This shouldn't pose a practical problem for anyone because there are excellent database programs under more amenable licenses, including PostgreSQL (licensed under the new BSD license) and MySQL (licensed under the GNU GPL). I also don't recommend licensing one's own programs under the CATOSL.
They don't want you getting a driver from some shady site that put a virus in it, and thus giving their company a bad name (at least for dumb-computer-users).
Licensing to disallow distribution of proprietary software doesn't prevent this from occurring, whether the software is "firmware" or an "operating system".
All that is gained with this petition is the ability to help an proprietor more efficiently distribute their non-free software. Users still have no idea what that software will do in the future or how it works now. Users don't gain the ability to fix it when it breaks or improve it to make it do something better.
The proponents of this petition and letter-writing drive are clear in their intent: they are stressing popularity over software freedom; their users are gaining the ability to help their neighbor more conveniently lose their software freedom. In a way, it is ironic that this plea to become proprietary software distributors is championed by those who criticize the strong copyleft in the GNU GPL (which the OpenBSD folks are known to do, putting in time to replacing GNU GPL-covered programs with new BSD-licensed replacements).
It's no accident that this call for increased popularity and out-of-the-box utility is being done in the name of "open source". That movement pushes aside software freedom in pursuit of a message to make businesses feel more comfortable. For the open source movement, proprietary software is merely a less technically efficient way of speaking to businesses. Popularity, to them, is more valuable than software freedom. And that's a shame because history teaches that popularity won't get users freedom. Proprietors are chiefly looking to sell users software which denies users their freedom. Proprietors want to treat users as a market, not contribute to the free software community. The open source philosophy makes this more politically feasible.
From the essay:
The main argument for the term ``open source software'' is that ``free software'' makes some people uneasy. That's true: talking about freedom, about ethical issues, about responsibilities as well as convenience, is asking people to think about things they might rather ignore. This can trigger discomfort, and some people may reject the idea for that. It does not follow that society would be better off if we stop talking about these things.
I realize that not being able to use the latest hardware is inconvenient. But one's software freedom should not take a back seat to convenience.
I have used raidweb.com enclosures in the past and they work quite well. They handle all the RAID configuration inside the box and appear as one drive to the host (hence the boxes are totally host independent). The connection between the box and the host is SCSI and I've used off-the-shelf high-end SCSI controllers for this. Their boxes have redundant fans and power supplies. They sound like a jet taking off, but my experience is that they're stable and rock solid. They're rack mountable too.
The only big disadvantage I experienced at the time was the lack of docs on the serial controller, so I only had the audio buzzer signal to go on when a drive failed. I think the box would have sent a signal over the serial link to the host indicating a failure. Then the host could do something interesting with that signal like send e-mail, call a pager, and so on. It would have been nice to have remote signaling, but in this case I didn't need it. The install site always has someone there to handle taking out the bad drive and plugging in the cold spare.
I don't want to display my previously visited URLs to onlookers as I type in the URL for some website. Mozilla suite makes this easy to accomplish--simply turn off the autocomplete feature.
How do I accomplish the same thing in Firefox? A few notes:
The preference for this appears to be missing from the GUI and I don't see it in about:config's list of settable preferences.
I know of no extension to do this job. Do you?
I don't want to kill my history, but even doing that won't accomplish this task (really, try the following: clear your history and set retention to 0 days. Visit a website by typing in its URL, say "www.google.com". Then visit some other website by typing in its URL, "www.slashdot.org". Then type "www.g" and watch as Firefox offers an autocompletion of Google's URL).
Turning off saved form information has nothing to do with the issue at hand.
I figured there were some more skilled Firefox users here who might know how to do this.
That's part of the problem of thinking in terms of "IP" (intellectual property). One doesn't learn to recognize the numerous and important differences between these areas of law. These powers work differently, have different histories, last for different amounts of time, cost different amounts of money to acquire and sustain, and most importantly, they affect society in different ways. The term invites one to mash them all together as if they share some common theme and only differ from one another in minor ways, hence, once you learn the theme you can toss the terms "trademark", "copyright", and "patent" about as if there were no real differences between them.
Another big problem with that term is that we're invited to think about these (and other) disparate areas of law as "property". That framing of the issue is only one possible way to think about them, and if we are going to understand how they work now and how a better system would work, we must not prejudice our thinking by limiting it to property talk.
And there's that pesky bit about copyright working to provide incentive to publish new work. Perpetual exclusive power doesn't incentivize publication, it incentivizes leaving copyrighted works on the shelf to rot (only restoring them when there's profit to be made in distributing authorized copies of the restored version). Adding copyright power to already published works can't incentivize those authors to publish more in the past (and it can't incentivize dead authors either).
The present extension will produce a
copyright period of protection that, even under conservative assumptions, is worth more than 99.8% of protection in perpetuity (more than 99.99% for a songwriter like Irving Berlin and a song like Alexander's Ragtime Band).
I appreciate the software freedom GNU/Linux and other free software grant me; this is the main reason I stick with GNU/Linux and why I advocate its use elsewhere. But there is a lot of room for improvement. I look back over the past 20 years and see all the progress that has been made, so I'm not raising these issues as an alarm. These things can and will be improved. It's about whittling down how they should work and making them work that way (and ignoring the technocrats who want to overburden the situation with a vast array of preferences and tweaks).
What follows is long, but it gives a more complete picture of what I've been through with GNU/Linux and a brief bit about my experience with a couple of non-free OSes. I thought your question deserved a full response.
Installing K3B is not done by default and the name ("K3B") means nothing to someone looking for a CD/DVD burner. If you do install it, you have to run it as root to make it work (obviously a showstopper for a multi-user installation and not a good idea for a single-user laptop or desktop system either). Nautilus tries but doesn't work due to (I'm told) a kernel issue. Nautilus also won't burn a number of CD formats K3B can burn, including audio (which I think a lot of users would want to burn).
OCR is available as free software but isn't shipped in Fedora Core (or Ubuntu, as far as I know). There is another free software OCR program (whose name escapes me at the moment) and it is trainable because it is aimed at reading ancient texts. This approach might be useful to academes, but it is very complex to use for ordinary text one comes across in newspapers and magazines, and it doesn't come with training by default. The interface for both programs are each quite unlike other programs which steepens the learning curve. Right now, OCR doesn't "just work" on GNU/Linux.
Plug and play access to hotplug devices still eludes GNU/Linux for the most part. If I hook up a printer, I want that to be my default printer. Same for modems, fax modems, scanners, joysticks, and anything else I can hotplug. I can get scanning to work when there is only one scanner--plugging in my Epson Perfection 1260 via USB and starting up XSane (with its non-HIG interface) does work on Fedora Core. I am not sure what would happen if I had two or three scanners.
Without significant technical reconfiguration, Fedora Core doesn't like USB memory sticks. They don't do the right thing as far as I can tell. Does Mandrake handle multiple USB memory sticks correctly? Or is it really just a hack that isn't exposed until you have more than one plugged in at the same time?
I realize hotplug stuff in general is being worked on and should improve. I'm describing the state of affairs as they are today. I look forward to seeing improvements and paying to see more improvements implemented as free software.
The last time I tried Mandrake it couldn't get my printer (a Brother HL-1270N connected via ethernet) working and the install screen offered absolutely no help. Mandrake also made a user login for me that I couldn't actually log into and use. I had to use root for everything and even then many things were obviously screwed up by default so I couldn't get jobs done which I knew other GNU/Linux distributions could do with ease. I switched back to Fedora Core. I'll try Mandrake again later, when I can see someone else's installation doing things I want to do with no reconfiguration at the command line.
Documentation to fix these things is often non-existant ("Read the source, Luke") or geared at the technical user (man pages with lots of references to things that are never introduced, or man pages for programming add-on software). I have yet to get Samba working well, for instance, because the interface to doing this is too clumsy and the docs are quite poor. I'm making my way through one of those Samba in 24 hour books. I'm told NFS is a pain to keep going and yet GNU/Linux offers no simple disk and printer sharing n
Maybe the cost of optimizing for a lower power bill through lower power computers is more expensive and time-consuming than continuing to use their extant computers and paying the power bill they have now.
Which would put it on a par with how useful the Linux kernel was when it was young. It wasn't useful unless one was extremely technical, and even then it lacked a lot of hardware support and one couldn't do a lot of commonly useful things with it. In time, the HURD can mature and become competitive. This doesn't mean GNU/Linux is a piece of cake for jobs people want to do.
But what I find interesting is Torvalds' answer to the question following his HURD answer:
Preston: When do you think Linux will take over desktop market from Microsoft?
Linus Torvalds: Oh, I think it's started already, it's just slow. You don't realize just _how_ slow it is, unless you've been looking at Linux over the last ten years. People kind of expect it to suddenly be "good enough" and take off like a rocket, but that's not how these things work. It gets better very gradually, and people get used to it very gradually. So I look back ten years, and think about how Linux was back then, and I have to chuckle a bit. The desktop of today is a bit better than it was a year ago, but you don't _really_ see the differences unless you step back a lot more..
Here, unlike in previous questions, I think Torvalds uses the word "Linux" to mean a complete operating system in which the Linux kernel is being used (typically, a GNU/Linux system), so I'll interpret the answer in that vein.
The main point I wanted to draw out is that it took ten years, by Torvalds' estimate, to get where things are now. I'd argue that that estimate is wrong by half (the free software community began 20 years ago), but even if we take the ten year figure at face value, the HURD hasn't been running on anyone's machine for ten years yet. And even now there are people (such as a fellow I had on my radio show last week who was addressing a caller saying the same thing) saying that the modern GNU/Linux system is too hard to use, too complex to install and to complex to do some jobs with when compared against Microsoft Windows or MacOS X. Those jobs include:
formatting an additional HD and adding it to one's system
configuring a FAX modem
doing optical code reading (OCR)
burning CDs and DVDs on some distributions (like Fedora Core)
sharing printers or disks via Samba
All of these jobs are possible but way more difficult to simply do than they ought to be. And few (if any) distributions make it easy to do these things by including the free software packages available to make them work right out of the box.
Configuration is too hard; getting these things working rely on one's skill with a command line interface or editing technical configuration files. ESR's printer essay was right on the mark when it came to his perspective on hooking up a printer--adding a printer should be automatic and the system should do more network scanning and autoconfiguration to suit what most people most of the time will want.
So, even for those who would complain the GNU/HURD system is too far out of reach, I'd say look closer to home and see the problems that exist for GNU/Linux. GNU/Linux is a heck of a lot closer to what I think people yearn for, but that's no reason to trash GNU/HURD.
Quite right, I was referring to the Democratic Party president (since we're talking about Kerry "defang[ing]" the DMCA), but thanks for the clarification.
Good for you. Bullies thrive on getting you to do self-censorship so they don't have to work so hard.
By the way, the parent's overrated post seems to leave out the main feature of RFID, remote readability. Reading IDs used to require direct physical access to the prosthetic in question. Now it can be done remotely and in secret.
It's not reasonable to walk up to a woman with breast implants and ask her to rip the implants out of her breasts so you can examine the ID code. But with a signal that can be read remotely, anyone with an RFID scanner can get this information without the subject's knowledge. She becomes trackable. As RFID scanners become cheaper, setting up a network of them becomes viable just so people can be tracked as they make their way around town (or the country, depending on the size of the scanner deployment).
It's not about the "gummint" coming to get us, it's about the private sector doing the invasive privacy-taking work for anyone who is willing to pay. This could be the government, or it could be a network of privately-run databases filled with possibly inaccurate information on which big decisions will be based (people's health care in the US, and hiring potential, to name a couple). And free market supporters think this is okay because with enough people participating in this dot-eat-dog way, somehow magically things problems work themselves out.
over at DNE.com, Dan Rathernot has just gotten the word that Kerry has announced that he would "never defang such a wonderful law. We need to protect every individual's rights to intellectual property."
I can't find this on http://dne.com/. This doesn't look like a blog or news site. And I see no mention of anyone named "Dan Rathernot" (a pseudonym? "Dan Rather Not"?).
Getting back to the thread, three of the biggest copyright offenses occurred under the Democrats: the DMCA, the Copyright Term Extension Act, and the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (part of which lifted caps on media ownership).
In 1996 few people cared about the caps being lifted, in 2003 many people from a wide variety of political leanings cared. Few people cared about the CTEA until the case went to the Supreme Court (Eldred). I have yet to see widespread concern about the DMCA (perhaps it will take some high-profile cases to wake people up, like a woman being stalked electronically where the stalker gets the information by filing bogus copyright infringement claims under the DMCA. If most ISPs are willing to divulge information on you and the market has yet to make privacy a marketable concern, this should be easy to accomplish. Yet feminist groups haven't begun to complain about the power this bill poses to those trying not to be harassed.).
If you don't pay big bucks for Kerry's campaign, you will have no say about his administration. The same is true for Bush. I'm not even convinced that having millions of people walking in the streets over copyright concerns will change anything for the better (it didn't work for the anti-war movement and on that issue tens of thousands of lives were at stake). I'd find it entertaining and I'd certainly join the march against the DMCA, but I wouldn't do it with hopes of making life better.
Has Microsoft ever faced this kind of competition?
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Firefox - The Platform
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Hey...it's not like MS has never utterly crushed a rival browser before, huh?
A free software and open source web browser with an audience (increasing numbers of people getting the browser, the press talking about it, and lots of third-party add-ons)? I don't think Microsoft has ever faced that kind of web browser before.
The Creative Commons organization always had multiple licenses with different terms; it never meant just one thing (so the complaint was never valid). But more importantly, this matches "free software" licensing and "open source" licensing which are also varied in what is allowed and what copyright powers are retained. You can't know that a program is "free software" or "open source" and know that everything you might want to do with the work is allowed (most licenses don't cover software patents, for instance); you can't be sure what is allowed downstream for derivatives from your derivative (some licenses don't have a copyleft, for instance).
How is this new set of CC licenses new? I can't answer that for everyone, but only one thing changes for me: I host "Digital Citizen" on alternate Wednesdays from 8-10p on my local community radio station (WEFT 90.1 FM). On my show, I air only things which can be copied and distributed (at least verbatim). CC-licensed music and talks make up a good deal of my show (in the language of CC licenses, I make a "Collective" work).
The Sampling license doesn't allow the entire work to be copied and distributed. But the other sampling licenses (Sampling Plus, and Non-Commercial Sampling Plus) do allow the entire work to be copied and distributed. So, for the first time, knowing that a work is a CC-licensed work is not enough to merit inclusion in my show. I have to make sure a CC-licensed work is not licensed to me under the Sampling license.
How feasible would it be to pay for something like this by screwing the citizens out of some privacy they now enjoy? Set up a node with an RFID scanner + a GPS unit + a WiFi card on a small mainboard (perhaps a mini-ITX or somesuch). Place the nodes where the electricity already is (light posts, city street corners, people's homes), and install a free software OS and a daemon that reports RFID data to some central database(s) as people, cars, etc. walk by with their RFID tags.
The point of all this being that one could collect data to track people's movements and then one could make money by selling this data to advertisers or vendors. Of course, technically, one is tracking the RFID tag, not the person, but I doubt most people will be savvy enough to know that they have RFID tagged items on them (clothing, shoes) or are using them (car parts).
Theoretically, the people get the ubiquitous WiFi they desire, and the bills are paid by citizens being tracked all over town.
Or, one could levy a tax on the town and pay for things that way. Only those who insist on paying no more taxes for anything ever would object.
Your points are refuted by history. Twenty years ago people insisted that the free software movement was doomed because nobody would work to produce high-quality code without being paid. GNU showed them differently as did a number of other free software operating systems. Today, it is copylefted free software that makes Microsoft nervous.
Building GNU didn't involve anyone else doing the R&D for GNU then handing over a fully finished product. It involved using an extant design (UNIX) and writing all new pieces to fit that design. Initially, the parts were built using proprietary programs (because that was all one had to work with in the mid to late 1980s) but eventually self-hosting environments were possible and now people (such as myself) run GNU/Linux and use nothing but free software to build new software.
Fortunately for us, the hard work of protecting the commons was supplied by the Free Software Foundation. With strongly copylefted free software, one doesn't need to worry about embrace and extend. This is why Microsoft hates the GNU GPL and calls it names (using similarly unnecessary harsh language to what you use in order to make an equally poor point). The GPL lets me distribute software freedom and not fear that my source code will be distributed as proprietary software because I can win a lawsuit against anyone or any organization that infringes. It doesn't bother me who distributes copies of free software for a fee. The program wouldn't be free software if anyone or any organization were prohibited from distributing copies for a fee. Services atop the software aren't to be feared either, they're grounds for competition.
And the work one can get from this is quite real. Brad Kuhn came to the University of Illinois some months ago and told the audience about a consulting firm (whose name escapes me at the moment, but there is a recording of his speech on audio-video.gnu.org if you care to hear it) that deals exclusively in GCC enhancements (this was some firm other than Cygnus, but Cygnus did this work too). According to Kuhn, this firm has a long waiting list and can charge a premium. Competition would work here. The question is who's up to the challenge. I've been hired to do programming work on free software. I got paid a living wage and I will do it again because I'm a self-employed consultant. My clients like that they can hire other people to do the work I did; that they're not locked into hiring me (but they come back to me because I don't lock them in; people like being treated kindly). They know that what they're paying for is my time and having someone to work on their problem in a way that suits them. Just like hiring a plumber, an electrician, or a mechanic, people have no problem paying for custom services and individualized attention. Perhaps its your language and attitude that makes this path an unviable one for you.
Finally, conflating the two definitions of free only shows how unwilling you are to be cordial. It's widely known (particularly here on Slashdot) that tying price and freedom to the same word is a weakness of English, not a genuine problem for the free software movement. Genuine problems for the free software community include software patents (patents on algorithms used in software production), a community that is focused on features instead of ethics and freedom, not getting politically active and recognizing what political issues are (as opposed to technological issues), and not teaching the values of software freedom to newcomers as quickly as they enter the community. All of these problems are fixable, but they require time and effort, not namecalling and harsh language. History shows that with time and effort we can make great things happen.
It's a shame that you're choosing to be so rude and condescending in your remarks. Had you been nicer, we could have had a more fruitful discussion about the misperceptions of the free software movement and how the community that grew from that movement works.
So, I guess this puts the lie to how we can all relax and the market will provide? Now it seems we're being told that even when what we want is available at low cost (last I recall, Ogg Vorbis support was royalty-free and non-copylefted free software is available), it's still too much to actually ask for what we want and hold out buying until we get it.
On a more technical note, perhaps it would be better to make a small portable more generic computer and load it with software that will do what we want. We might not get the stylized interface, but it could give gapless playback of all the free software/open source codecs we like.
Free software dies off just like proprietary software.
Actually, free software is always available for anyone to make into whatever they want. If a free software program goes unused it is likely that the program was of low value. But the great thing is that you get to make this call for yourself; I maintain old versions of programs I care about for myself so that when I switch platforms the programs I like move with me. I don't have that power with non-free software. In this situation with Borland, until Borland decides to continue development of their C++ Builder, nobody can move away from the platform on which the previous versions run without losing the function of the Borland software. So, as long as these users pledge allegiance to this program they are granting Borland the power to keep them helpless to do anything but continue to beg Borland.
What does the free market dictate? YOU GO SOMEWHERE ELSE [...]
Interesting that this is being critiqued from a free market perspective; proprietors want to insulate themselves from the competition a free market would permit. That's why they don't release their programs as free software and then charge you to get a copy from them. They know that someone or some organization would distribute the program (possibly with improvements) for less money and they would have to outcompete. An effective way of insulating oneself from the ravages of a competitive free market is to divide the users with restrictive licensing terms keeping them helpless to get real help from anyone but the proprietor.
If the market really did cater to people's demonstrated needs, this story would not be as interesting because there would be an alternative popular drop-in replacement program. There is no drop-in replacement for Borland C++ Builder right now from anyplace else. Someone could build a free software replacement for it that functioned identically and worked with the files the Borland program reads. This would allow Borland's former users to continue working with a program that they enjoy and then grant them the freedom to move to whatever platform suited them best.
Whether you take your "business" to free software or not is your choice. THAT IS FREEDOM.
Of course it is, and paying for free software would be a fine choice for the petitioners to make because it gives them the most flexibility at the lowest price and simultaneously allows the widest array of competition. Jumping from one proprietor to another is merely selecting a new master, that is not freedom. Free software is socially important because it grants people the freedom to make their computers behave in the way they wish. This is the right way to treat other people, not keeping users divided and helpless as the petitioners apparently are now.
At the risk of feeding the trolls, please do take the time to read the article I linked to. It is quite clear that the operative definition of "free" is freedom, not zero price ("``Free software'' is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of ``free'' as in ``free speech,'' not as in ``free beer.''"). If we had been conversing in another language, odds are this would have been more immediately clear.
Voters supporting Kerry might be "more in tune with the events and world attitudes surrounding the war in Iraq" but few recognize that Kerry is pro-war, Kerry voted to confirm Scalia, Kerry's health care plan won't cover everyone, and Kerry has not announced a plan on exactly what he'll give European countries to woo them to put more soldiers into this war. Kerry won't even call Bush a liar. The anti-war movement risks gutting its legitimacy by giving their vote to support someone who will plow billions more into this war and then asking him to please stop the war after they've given away their only bargaining chip.
This, of course, assumes that Kerry actually wants to win and isn't just playing the "good cop" to Bush's "bad cop" where both major parties are looking to drive more profits into their largely corporate campaign funders. Gore/Lieberman failed to convince on this ground after not acting to challenge those thousands of largely Black and Latino voters in Florida who were "scrubbed" from the rolls without good cause (most of whom would have voted Democrat, and most of whom still don't have their voting rights restored according to Greg Palast).
[...] In a last-ditch effort to convince Borland to support them, users have put together a letter justifying (and begging) for continued support.
Slashdot places this story in the "fight-the-man dept.".
Asking or begging a proprietor to do what you want is not fighting anyone, it's acknowledging that you are not livin in freedom. Placing yourself in a dependant position by not choosing free software to do the job doesn't bode well for leveraging a free market to supply the desired changes or improvements. Ironically, all the customers the letter cites are capable of paying for the support they want. Perhaps these developers should put some money and/or time into getting someone to distribute a free software program that does what they want so they won't be in this position.
Re:Running to the Right requires undemanding voter
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The Nader Factor
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· Score: 1
Thanks for responding. I understand your dilemma even if I don't share it. I happened to come across this speech by Ralph Nader where he asks the question I asked (not that he got it from me, I probably got it from him years ago or from some other Progressive). Put aside that this is meant to encourage you to vote for Nader/Camejo. I'd encourage you (and every other/. reader) to listen with an ear to the message of how duopoly power works to oppress. Much of what he says here could work just as well to talk about other political parties and independents you don't often hear from.
If you have time, I'd like to get an answer to the question I closed with: what is your breaking point? I ask the question in all sincerity. Different people will legitimately answer with different times. I'm perfectly comfortable with that. What I fear is that there is no breaking point for anyone who opposes the Corporatists.
What is really at risk under a Kerry admin.?
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The Nader Factor
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· Score: 4, Interesting
That colosally misstates Nader's take. Nader has said that Kerry would make a marginally better choice than Bush.
However there is an argument for Bush: Under Clinton the Left fell asleep. It would be horrible if that happened again.
NOW (the National Organization for Women), for instance, had some tough financial times during the Clinton years. They chose to take money from Clinton in exchange for keeping quiet on the Monica Lewinsky affair. Tammy Bruce, former head of the (LA, i think) chapter of NOW talked about this in her book "The New Thought Police".
There was very little criticism from the Left on the 1996 Telecommunications Act which (in part) deregulated media. By 2003, the FCC's proposed deregulation raised more mail than the FCC had ever seen.
Clinton killed more Arabs with sanctions (500,000 of them were children) than the invasion and occupation of Iraq under Bush. Clinton's secretary of State Madeline Albright went on 60 Minutes and said that that was a hard choice but ultimately "worth it". The anti-war movement marched millions of people in the streets in opposition to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. No comparable action occurred over the sanctions.
Perhaps we're risking another Leftists-asleep-at-the-wheel under Kerry:
The occupation will continue (the anti-war movement insists that they'll pick up marching again after they've given Kerry their only leverage--their vote).
The draft may pick up (it's hard to know where else the US would get the 40,000 troops Kerry wants to add; European countries aren't going to come up with troops without being given something incredibly valuable in exchange, something Kerry has yet to name).
The power to make war anywhere anytime without Congressional approval will live on in a Kerry administration (Kerry voted for this resolution and he supports it even now).
Kerry's health care plan is unlikely to be passed because Kerry takes money from HMOs and HMOs aren't willing to give up potential customers. Clinton's complex health care proposal also offered to keep HMOs in place. By proposing yet another health care plan that people don't want and that is unlikely to pass, Americans are disincentivized to fight for universal single-payer health care.
People are going to lose money and services under either Bush or Kerry, so it's not a question of harming the poor; the poor will suffer no matter which of the two major parties gets their candidate into the White House.
Sequencing is not how people work politically.
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The Nader Factor
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· Score: 3, Insightful
This time around the Greens are trying very hard to avoid being called spoilers by endorsing Kerry in contested states. This, despite how the Democrat platform has more in common with the Republican platform than the Green platform. This had little to do with avoiding a one-candidate party but real differences of opinion on when the Greens were deciding to run anyone for president and whether to run a 50-state campaign.
Part of the support the Greens got in 1996 and 2000 came from the awareness raised by Ralph Nader's presidential campaigns--campaigns that were endorsed by the Green Party.
Politics doesn't work according to the sequencing you're mentioning. Working together on specific issues is a great way to get things done, but first local, then national simply isn't how the Greens got the attention they now have.
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I never said the issue was the driver. The word "driver" in a quote in my post, not my words, so I don't see how you could misinterpret my post that way. More importantly, the location of the software and how it is installed in the device is a red herring. I see no reason to believe that proprietary firmware somehow negates the need for software freedom.
The Computer Associates Trusted Open Source License (CATOSL) apparently qualifies as an "open source" license, but it would probably not qualify as a "free software" license. The focus on user's software freedom found in the free software movement is important in interpreting what powers the license grants and what the license claims to regulate.
Section 10.1 tries to control use of the program--if one's rights under the license terminates, the license claims that that user's rights to use the program terminate as well. But the FSF tells us that US copyright law doesn't permit setting conditions on merely running a computer program (outside of a license or encryption manager) and that if this were to become accepted, would extend copyright law in a dangerous way. This was part of the rationale for saying the first and second revisions of the Apple Public Source License were not free software licenses.
Section 11.4 of the CATOSL claims that no licensee will bring a legal action under the license more than once a year. When one does bring a legal action, one is supposed to waive a jury trial and hold the trial in the state of New York. Licensees in other districts may enjoy rights which the state of New York does not recognize or grant, including the right to bring suit more than once a year; rights licensees would want to retain should they need to go to court.
I'm sure a more thorough examination of the CATOSL would reveal more problems for users. I don't recommend getting involved with programs licensed under the CATOSL. This shouldn't pose a practical problem for anyone because there are excellent database programs under more amenable licenses, including PostgreSQL (licensed under the new BSD license) and MySQL (licensed under the GNU GPL). I also don't recommend licensing one's own programs under the CATOSL.
Licensing to disallow distribution of proprietary software doesn't prevent this from occurring, whether the software is "firmware" or an "operating system".
All that is gained with this petition is the ability to help an proprietor more efficiently distribute their non-free software. Users still have no idea what that software will do in the future or how it works now. Users don't gain the ability to fix it when it breaks or improve it to make it do something better.
The proponents of this petition and letter-writing drive are clear in their intent: they are stressing popularity over software freedom; their users are gaining the ability to help their neighbor more conveniently lose their software freedom. In a way, it is ironic that this plea to become proprietary software distributors is championed by those who criticize the strong copyleft in the GNU GPL (which the OpenBSD folks are known to do, putting in time to replacing GNU GPL-covered programs with new BSD-licensed replacements).
It's no accident that this call for increased popularity and out-of-the-box utility is being done in the name of "open source". That movement pushes aside software freedom in pursuit of a message to make businesses feel more comfortable. For the open source movement, proprietary software is merely a less technically efficient way of speaking to businesses. Popularity, to them, is more valuable than software freedom. And that's a shame because history teaches that popularity won't get users freedom. Proprietors are chiefly looking to sell users software which denies users their freedom. Proprietors want to treat users as a market, not contribute to the free software community. The open source philosophy makes this more politically feasible.
From the essay:
I realize that not being able to use the latest hardware is inconvenient. But one's software freedom should not take a back seat to convenience.
I have used raidweb.com enclosures in the past and they work quite well. They handle all the RAID configuration inside the box and appear as one drive to the host (hence the boxes are totally host independent). The connection between the box and the host is SCSI and I've used off-the-shelf high-end SCSI controllers for this. Their boxes have redundant fans and power supplies. They sound like a jet taking off, but my experience is that they're stable and rock solid. They're rack mountable too.
The only big disadvantage I experienced at the time was the lack of docs on the serial controller, so I only had the audio buzzer signal to go on when a drive failed. I think the box would have sent a signal over the serial link to the host indicating a failure. Then the host could do something interesting with that signal like send e-mail, call a pager, and so on. It would have been nice to have remote signaling, but in this case I didn't need it. The install site always has someone there to handle taking out the bad drive and plugging in the cold spare.
I don't want to display my previously visited URLs to onlookers as I type in the URL for some website. Mozilla suite makes this easy to accomplish--simply turn off the autocomplete feature.
How do I accomplish the same thing in Firefox? A few notes:
I figured there were some more skilled Firefox users here who might know how to do this.
That's part of the problem of thinking in terms of "IP" (intellectual property). One doesn't learn to recognize the numerous and important differences between these areas of law. These powers work differently, have different histories, last for different amounts of time, cost different amounts of money to acquire and sustain, and most importantly, they affect society in different ways. The term invites one to mash them all together as if they share some common theme and only differ from one another in minor ways, hence, once you learn the theme you can toss the terms "trademark", "copyright", and "patent" about as if there were no real differences between them.
Another big problem with that term is that we're invited to think about these (and other) disparate areas of law as "property". That framing of the issue is only one possible way to think about them, and if we are going to understand how they work now and how a better system would work, we must not prejudice our thinking by limiting it to property talk.
And there's that pesky bit about copyright working to provide incentive to publish new work. Perpetual exclusive power doesn't incentivize publication, it incentivizes leaving copyrighted works on the shelf to rot (only restoring them when there's profit to be made in distributing authorized copies of the restored version). Adding copyright power to already published works can't incentivize those authors to publish more in the past (and it can't incentivize dead authors either).
In Eldred, Justice Breyer did the math and noted in his dissenting opinion that we now have over 99% of the value of an (unconstitutional) unending term of copyright:
I appreciate the software freedom GNU/Linux and other free software grant me; this is the main reason I stick with GNU/Linux and why I advocate its use elsewhere. But there is a lot of room for improvement. I look back over the past 20 years and see all the progress that has been made, so I'm not raising these issues as an alarm. These things can and will be improved. It's about whittling down how they should work and making them work that way (and ignoring the technocrats who want to overburden the situation with a vast array of preferences and tweaks).
What follows is long, but it gives a more complete picture of what I've been through with GNU/Linux and a brief bit about my experience with a couple of non-free OSes. I thought your question deserved a full response.
Installing K3B is not done by default and the name ("K3B") means nothing to someone looking for a CD/DVD burner. If you do install it, you have to run it as root to make it work (obviously a showstopper for a multi-user installation and not a good idea for a single-user laptop or desktop system either). Nautilus tries but doesn't work due to (I'm told) a kernel issue. Nautilus also won't burn a number of CD formats K3B can burn, including audio (which I think a lot of users would want to burn).
OCR is available as free software but isn't shipped in Fedora Core (or Ubuntu, as far as I know). There is another free software OCR program (whose name escapes me at the moment) and it is trainable because it is aimed at reading ancient texts. This approach might be useful to academes, but it is very complex to use for ordinary text one comes across in newspapers and magazines, and it doesn't come with training by default. The interface for both programs are each quite unlike other programs which steepens the learning curve. Right now, OCR doesn't "just work" on GNU/Linux.
Plug and play access to hotplug devices still eludes GNU/Linux for the most part. If I hook up a printer, I want that to be my default printer. Same for modems, fax modems, scanners, joysticks, and anything else I can hotplug. I can get scanning to work when there is only one scanner--plugging in my Epson Perfection 1260 via USB and starting up XSane (with its non-HIG interface) does work on Fedora Core. I am not sure what would happen if I had two or three scanners.
Without significant technical reconfiguration, Fedora Core doesn't like USB memory sticks. They don't do the right thing as far as I can tell. Does Mandrake handle multiple USB memory sticks correctly? Or is it really just a hack that isn't exposed until you have more than one plugged in at the same time?
I realize hotplug stuff in general is being worked on and should improve. I'm describing the state of affairs as they are today. I look forward to seeing improvements and paying to see more improvements implemented as free software.
The last time I tried Mandrake it couldn't get my printer (a Brother HL-1270N connected via ethernet) working and the install screen offered absolutely no help. Mandrake also made a user login for me that I couldn't actually log into and use. I had to use root for everything and even then many things were obviously screwed up by default so I couldn't get jobs done which I knew other GNU/Linux distributions could do with ease. I switched back to Fedora Core. I'll try Mandrake again later, when I can see someone else's installation doing things I want to do with no reconfiguration at the command line.
Documentation to fix these things is often non-existant ("Read the source, Luke") or geared at the technical user (man pages with lots of references to things that are never introduced, or man pages for programming add-on software). I have yet to get Samba working well, for instance, because the interface to doing this is too clumsy and the docs are quite poor. I'm making my way through one of those Samba in 24 hour books. I'm told NFS is a pain to keep going and yet GNU/Linux offers no simple disk and printer sharing n
Maybe the cost of optimizing for a lower power bill through lower power computers is more expensive and time-consuming than continuing to use their extant computers and paying the power bill they have now.
Which would put it on a par with how useful the Linux kernel was when it was young. It wasn't useful unless one was extremely technical, and even then it lacked a lot of hardware support and one couldn't do a lot of commonly useful things with it. In time, the HURD can mature and become competitive. This doesn't mean GNU/Linux is a piece of cake for jobs people want to do.
But what I find interesting is Torvalds' answer to the question following his HURD answer:
Here, unlike in previous questions, I think Torvalds uses the word "Linux" to mean a complete operating system in which the Linux kernel is being used (typically, a GNU/Linux system), so I'll interpret the answer in that vein.
The main point I wanted to draw out is that it took ten years, by Torvalds' estimate, to get where things are now. I'd argue that that estimate is wrong by half (the free software community began 20 years ago), but even if we take the ten year figure at face value, the HURD hasn't been running on anyone's machine for ten years yet. And even now there are people (such as a fellow I had on my radio show last week who was addressing a caller saying the same thing) saying that the modern GNU/Linux system is too hard to use, too complex to install and to complex to do some jobs with when compared against Microsoft Windows or MacOS X. Those jobs include:
All of these jobs are possible but way more difficult to simply do than they ought to be. And few (if any) distributions make it easy to do these things by including the free software packages available to make them work right out of the box.
Configuration is too hard; getting these things working rely on one's skill with a command line interface or editing technical configuration files. ESR's printer essay was right on the mark when it came to his perspective on hooking up a printer--adding a printer should be automatic and the system should do more network scanning and autoconfiguration to suit what most people most of the time will want.
So, even for those who would complain the GNU/HURD system is too far out of reach, I'd say look closer to home and see the problems that exist for GNU/Linux. GNU/Linux is a heck of a lot closer to what I think people yearn for, but that's no reason to trash GNU/HURD.
Quite right, I was referring to the Democratic Party president (since we're talking about Kerry "defang[ing]" the DMCA), but thanks for the clarification.
Good for you. Bullies thrive on getting you to do self-censorship so they don't have to work so hard.
By the way, the parent's overrated post seems to leave out the main feature of RFID, remote readability. Reading IDs used to require direct physical access to the prosthetic in question. Now it can be done remotely and in secret.
It's not reasonable to walk up to a woman with breast implants and ask her to rip the implants out of her breasts so you can examine the ID code. But with a signal that can be read remotely, anyone with an RFID scanner can get this information without the subject's knowledge. She becomes trackable. As RFID scanners become cheaper, setting up a network of them becomes viable just so people can be tracked as they make their way around town (or the country, depending on the size of the scanner deployment).
It's not about the "gummint" coming to get us, it's about the private sector doing the invasive privacy-taking work for anyone who is willing to pay. This could be the government, or it could be a network of privately-run databases filled with possibly inaccurate information on which big decisions will be based (people's health care in the US, and hiring potential, to name a couple). And free market supporters think this is okay because with enough people participating in this dot-eat-dog way, somehow magically things problems work themselves out.
I can't find this on http://dne.com/. This doesn't look like a blog or news site. And I see no mention of anyone named "Dan Rathernot" (a pseudonym? "Dan Rather Not"?).
Getting back to the thread, three of the biggest copyright offenses occurred under the Democrats: the DMCA, the Copyright Term Extension Act, and the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (part of which lifted caps on media ownership).
In 1996 few people cared about the caps being lifted, in 2003 many people from a wide variety of political leanings cared. Few people cared about the CTEA until the case went to the Supreme Court (Eldred). I have yet to see widespread concern about the DMCA (perhaps it will take some high-profile cases to wake people up, like a woman being stalked electronically where the stalker gets the information by filing bogus copyright infringement claims under the DMCA. If most ISPs are willing to divulge information on you and the market has yet to make privacy a marketable concern, this should be easy to accomplish. Yet feminist groups haven't begun to complain about the power this bill poses to those trying not to be harassed.).
If you don't pay big bucks for Kerry's campaign, you will have no say about his administration. The same is true for Bush. I'm not even convinced that having millions of people walking in the streets over copyright concerns will change anything for the better (it didn't work for the anti-war movement and on that issue tens of thousands of lives were at stake). I'd find it entertaining and I'd certainly join the march against the DMCA, but I wouldn't do it with hopes of making life better.
A free software and open source web browser with an audience (increasing numbers of people getting the browser, the press talking about it, and lots of third-party add-ons)? I don't think Microsoft has ever faced that kind of web browser before.
The Creative Commons organization always had multiple licenses with different terms; it never meant just one thing (so the complaint was never valid). But more importantly, this matches "free software" licensing and "open source" licensing which are also varied in what is allowed and what copyright powers are retained. You can't know that a program is "free software" or "open source" and know that everything you might want to do with the work is allowed (most licenses don't cover software patents, for instance); you can't be sure what is allowed downstream for derivatives from your derivative (some licenses don't have a copyleft, for instance).
How is this new set of CC licenses new? I can't answer that for everyone, but only one thing changes for me: I host "Digital Citizen" on alternate Wednesdays from 8-10p on my local community radio station (WEFT 90.1 FM). On my show, I air only things which can be copied and distributed (at least verbatim). CC-licensed music and talks make up a good deal of my show (in the language of CC licenses, I make a "Collective" work).
The Sampling license doesn't allow the entire work to be copied and distributed. But the other sampling licenses (Sampling Plus, and Non-Commercial Sampling Plus) do allow the entire work to be copied and distributed. So, for the first time, knowing that a work is a CC-licensed work is not enough to merit inclusion in my show. I have to make sure a CC-licensed work is not licensed to me under the Sampling license.
This isn't a big deal, but it is a change.
How feasible would it be to pay for something like this by screwing the citizens out of some privacy they now enjoy? Set up a node with an RFID scanner + a GPS unit + a WiFi card on a small mainboard (perhaps a mini-ITX or somesuch). Place the nodes where the electricity already is (light posts, city street corners, people's homes), and install a free software OS and a daemon that reports RFID data to some central database(s) as people, cars, etc. walk by with their RFID tags.
The point of all this being that one could collect data to track people's movements and then one could make money by selling this data to advertisers or vendors. Of course, technically, one is tracking the RFID tag, not the person, but I doubt most people will be savvy enough to know that they have RFID tagged items on them (clothing, shoes) or are using them (car parts).
Theoretically, the people get the ubiquitous WiFi they desire, and the bills are paid by citizens being tracked all over town.
Or, one could levy a tax on the town and pay for things that way. Only those who insist on paying no more taxes for anything ever would object.
Your points are refuted by history. Twenty years ago people insisted that the free software movement was doomed because nobody would work to produce high-quality code without being paid. GNU showed them differently as did a number of other free software operating systems. Today, it is copylefted free software that makes Microsoft nervous.
Building GNU didn't involve anyone else doing the R&D for GNU then handing over a fully finished product. It involved using an extant design (UNIX) and writing all new pieces to fit that design. Initially, the parts were built using proprietary programs (because that was all one had to work with in the mid to late 1980s) but eventually self-hosting environments were possible and now people (such as myself) run GNU/Linux and use nothing but free software to build new software.
Fortunately for us, the hard work of protecting the commons was supplied by the Free Software Foundation. With strongly copylefted free software, one doesn't need to worry about embrace and extend. This is why Microsoft hates the GNU GPL and calls it names (using similarly unnecessary harsh language to what you use in order to make an equally poor point). The GPL lets me distribute software freedom and not fear that my source code will be distributed as proprietary software because I can win a lawsuit against anyone or any organization that infringes. It doesn't bother me who distributes copies of free software for a fee. The program wouldn't be free software if anyone or any organization were prohibited from distributing copies for a fee. Services atop the software aren't to be feared either, they're grounds for competition.
And the work one can get from this is quite real. Brad Kuhn came to the University of Illinois some months ago and told the audience about a consulting firm (whose name escapes me at the moment, but there is a recording of his speech on audio-video.gnu.org if you care to hear it) that deals exclusively in GCC enhancements (this was some firm other than Cygnus, but Cygnus did this work too). According to Kuhn, this firm has a long waiting list and can charge a premium. Competition would work here. The question is who's up to the challenge. I've been hired to do programming work on free software. I got paid a living wage and I will do it again because I'm a self-employed consultant. My clients like that they can hire other people to do the work I did; that they're not locked into hiring me (but they come back to me because I don't lock them in; people like being treated kindly). They know that what they're paying for is my time and having someone to work on their problem in a way that suits them. Just like hiring a plumber, an electrician, or a mechanic, people have no problem paying for custom services and individualized attention. Perhaps its your language and attitude that makes this path an unviable one for you.
Finally, conflating the two definitions of free only shows how unwilling you are to be cordial. It's widely known (particularly here on Slashdot) that tying price and freedom to the same word is a weakness of English, not a genuine problem for the free software movement. Genuine problems for the free software community include software patents (patents on algorithms used in software production), a community that is focused on features instead of ethics and freedom, not getting politically active and recognizing what political issues are (as opposed to technological issues), and not teaching the values of software freedom to newcomers as quickly as they enter the community. All of these problems are fixable, but they require time and effort, not namecalling and harsh language. History shows that with time and effort we can make great things happen.
It's a shame that you're choosing to be so rude and condescending in your remarks. Had you been nicer, we could have had a more fruitful discussion about the misperceptions of the free software movement and how the community that grew from that movement works.
So, I guess this puts the lie to how we can all relax and the market will provide? Now it seems we're being told that even when what we want is available at low cost (last I recall, Ogg Vorbis support was royalty-free and non-copylefted free software is available), it's still too much to actually ask for what we want and hold out buying until we get it.
On a more technical note, perhaps it would be better to make a small portable more generic computer and load it with software that will do what we want. We might not get the stylized interface, but it could give gapless playback of all the free software/open source codecs we like.
Actually, free software is always available for anyone to make into whatever they want. If a free software program goes unused it is likely that the program was of low value. But the great thing is that you get to make this call for yourself; I maintain old versions of programs I care about for myself so that when I switch platforms the programs I like move with me. I don't have that power with non-free software. In this situation with Borland, until Borland decides to continue development of their C++ Builder, nobody can move away from the platform on which the previous versions run without losing the function of the Borland software. So, as long as these users pledge allegiance to this program they are granting Borland the power to keep them helpless to do anything but continue to beg Borland.
Interesting that this is being critiqued from a free market perspective; proprietors want to insulate themselves from the competition a free market would permit. That's why they don't release their programs as free software and then charge you to get a copy from them. They know that someone or some organization would distribute the program (possibly with improvements) for less money and they would have to outcompete. An effective way of insulating oneself from the ravages of a competitive free market is to divide the users with restrictive licensing terms keeping them helpless to get real help from anyone but the proprietor.
If the market really did cater to people's demonstrated needs, this story would not be as interesting because there would be an alternative popular drop-in replacement program. There is no drop-in replacement for Borland C++ Builder right now from anyplace else. Someone could build a free software replacement for it that functioned identically and worked with the files the Borland program reads. This would allow Borland's former users to continue working with a program that they enjoy and then grant them the freedom to move to whatever platform suited them best.
Of course it is, and paying for free software would be a fine choice for the petitioners to make because it gives them the most flexibility at the lowest price and simultaneously allows the widest array of competition. Jumping from one proprietor to another is merely selecting a new master, that is not freedom. Free software is socially important because it grants people the freedom to make their computers behave in the way they wish. This is the right way to treat other people, not keeping users divided and helpless as the petitioners apparently are now.
At the risk of feeding the trolls, please do take the time to read the article I linked to. It is quite clear that the operative definition of "free" is freedom, not zero price ("``Free software'' is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of ``free'' as in ``free speech,'' not as in ``free beer.''"). If we had been conversing in another language, odds are this would have been more immediately clear.
Voters supporting Kerry might be "more in tune with the events and world attitudes surrounding the war in Iraq" but few recognize that Kerry is pro-war, Kerry voted to confirm Scalia, Kerry's health care plan won't cover everyone, and Kerry has not announced a plan on exactly what he'll give European countries to woo them to put more soldiers into this war. Kerry won't even call Bush a liar. The anti-war movement risks gutting its legitimacy by giving their vote to support someone who will plow billions more into this war and then asking him to please stop the war after they've given away their only bargaining chip.
This, of course, assumes that Kerry actually wants to win and isn't just playing the "good cop" to Bush's "bad cop" where both major parties are looking to drive more profits into their largely corporate campaign funders. Gore/Lieberman failed to convince on this ground after not acting to challenge those thousands of largely Black and Latino voters in Florida who were "scrubbed" from the rolls without good cause (most of whom would have voted Democrat, and most of whom still don't have their voting rights restored according to Greg Palast).
Poster writes
Slashdot places this story in the "fight-the-man dept.".
Asking or begging a proprietor to do what you want is not fighting anyone, it's acknowledging that you are not livin in freedom. Placing yourself in a dependant position by not choosing free software to do the job doesn't bode well for leveraging a free market to supply the desired changes or improvements. Ironically, all the customers the letter cites are capable of paying for the support they want. Perhaps these developers should put some money and/or time into getting someone to distribute a free software program that does what they want so they won't be in this position.
Thanks for responding. I understand your dilemma even if I don't share it. I happened to come across this speech by Ralph Nader where he asks the question I asked (not that he got it from me, I probably got it from him years ago or from some other Progressive). Put aside that this is meant to encourage you to vote for Nader/Camejo. I'd encourage you (and every other /. reader) to listen with an ear to the message of how duopoly power works to oppress. Much of what he says here could work just as well to talk about other political parties and independents you don't often hear from.
If you have time, I'd like to get an answer to the question I closed with: what is your breaking point? I ask the question in all sincerity. Different people will legitimately answer with different times. I'm perfectly comfortable with that. What I fear is that there is no breaking point for anyone who opposes the Corporatists.
That colosally misstates Nader's take. Nader has said that Kerry would make a marginally better choice than Bush.
However there is an argument for Bush: Under Clinton the Left fell asleep. It would be horrible if that happened again.
Perhaps we're risking another Leftists-asleep-at-the-wheel under Kerry:
People are going to lose money and services under either Bush or Kerry, so it's not a question of harming the poor; the poor will suffer no matter which of the two major parties gets their candidate into the White House.
This time around the Greens are trying very hard to avoid being called spoilers by endorsing Kerry in contested states. This, despite how the Democrat platform has more in common with the Republican platform than the Green platform. This had little to do with avoiding a one-candidate party but real differences of opinion on when the Greens were deciding to run anyone for president and whether to run a 50-state campaign.
Part of the support the Greens got in 1996 and 2000 came from the awareness raised by Ralph Nader's presidential campaigns--campaigns that were endorsed by the Green Party.
Politics doesn't work according to the sequencing you're mentioning. Working together on specific issues is a great way to get things done, but first local, then national simply isn't how the Greens got the attention they now have.