Now that Linux has maybe 5% real desktop share (as distinct from market share) and a few serious 3D games, and growing, this will change.
Perhaps, but if the drivers are proprietary then we stand to gain virtually nothing. Our community doesn't benefit from being treated as a market. If the card manufacturers are willing to work with us and release complete specs that can be developed into free software drivers or license code to us under a free software license, I think many would be willing to enthusiastically encourage the purchase of those cards.
If the GNU/Linux OS grows toward popularity and gives up software freedom this OS will never become popular enough to compete in the way that will make Microsoft Windows a less attractive option. But if GNU/Linux popularity increases on the basis of keeping software freedom then we will have something to offer which no proprietor can compete with -- something which will constitute a genuine contribution to society.
Some lawyers are, like other practitioners of other fields of work, quite skilled in their misuse of language. Consider the number of lawyers that use the phrase "intellectual property" which hurts us in at least two ways: it helps secure the validity of turning a commons into ownable chunks (by structuring the debate so we accept the property model before we've debated it), and tries to mash together a bunch of disparate laws as though they share more in common than they differ. I can understand why lawyers would do this; lawyers benefit from more lawsuits. The more things viewed as property, the more disputes there will be over ownership, license, and control of that "property". But at a recent community wireless conference, I heard one of the speakers say he wanted to do away with the term "commons" while he had no problem making his point in terms of "intellectual property". The conference was aiming to municipalize wireless access to the Internet, precisely the opposite of turning spectrum use into private property.
Officials in Nye County couldn't read the data on one computer but weren't overly worried. If they couldn't tease the results out of the machine -- which held an unknown number of votes -- they could count paper ballots by hand instead.
Computers should never be used to tabulate voting results in the first place. If the computer's reported results don't trip someone's suspicion, they can still be wholly wrong and hand victory to an unelected candidate (particularly in close races). Computers are wonderful for preparing a voter-verified paper ballot (for instance, there are significant advantages to using a computerized machine which grant blind and illiterate voters anonymous voting power). But any computer tabulation of votes can lead to what Bev Harris is demonstrating in the Diebold tabulator machines (she has pinned the story to the top of her website because it is so important). The equipment machine used by the voter can be done excellently, including running on free software. But if the votes are passed to an unaccountable system where recounts are meaningless, elections can easily be subverted. I understand that people want results quickly, and I know that quick returns is one of the promises of electronic voting. However, I prefer results that can be verified meaningfully and I'm willing to wait to get those results. Therefore, I think the best way to count ballots is to get rooms full of people at tables hand-counting ballots. In my opinion, a knowable error rate is better than a unknown error rate.
I'm on the committee to recommend voting machine equipment to the County Board in Champaign, IL. A number of us on the recommendation board get together once a month (more often if there are pressing issues before us including field trips to see various machines and ask questions of people in the field using the equipment) and discuss these issues with a goal of arriving at something we can stand behind and recommend.
The parent post is not a troll (as it was mistakenly moderated), but it could use some elucidation. The open source movement champions selecting software that is technically more advanced. Thus, this strategy will sometimes result in choosing proprietary software over so-called "open source" software. If we look at these advances in X.org as merely technical improvements, it's logical to arrive at the conclusion which the parent poster expressed and note that other systems have had these advances for quite some time.
Another movement, older than the open source movement, frames the issue in another way. The free software movement pitches a message of freedom to share and modify programs. When measured by this criteria, X.org offers something these other systems don't: You get what this movement calls "free software", freedoms which give people the opportunity to develop the technical advances which implement the fancy look-and-feel.
There is more than one GNU license -- the GNU General Public License, which disallows proprietary derivatives, and the GNU Lesser General Public License, which allows proprietary derivatives. Then there's the GNU Free Documentation License which is intended for something else.
If you meant a license the Free Software Foundation calls a "free software" license, then there's even more licenses to consider. All this raises the question: which license are you referring to?
Then we need to teach corporations what is enough. The concept of a trade-off is missing in this debate, that with more corporate power, we trade away our freedom to share even noncommercial verbatim copies with our neighbors. Society needs to restructure corporate power so that they can pursue sufficient profit, not endless profit at the expense of anything else. This is a non-trivial task but it is possible; we're not dealing with a natural system. Corporate power arrived through a series of legal decisions which created the near-person status and assigned them the power to pursue profit without regard for other things. We can take that power away and we should before more damage is done.
I learned that denying people an inherently sharable commodity was hoarding and selfish. So when I brought something to school, I had to bring enough to share. Later when I learned about computers, I learned that it's unusual to "take" data; typically data is copied, not moved, from one computer to another. Still later, when I read more about the history of various media businesses, I learned that they got started doing what today they call "piracy" (even though, ironically, that term in the illicit copying sense was once used by authors to describe what publishers sometimes did).
I think all of these lessons and many others have made me increasingly appreciate free software over the years.
If you only focus on cost, you have no reason to reject an illicit copy of a proprietary OS (a zero-cost copy of Microsoft Windows which Microsoft is ready to provide under certain circumstances, for example). Regardless of how much money you paid, you get no freedom to share or modify non-free software. The real costs of the software are hidden from you. If you have the freedoms to share and modify software, you can distribute the software at any cost and you have the freedom to make the program do what you want. These are the freedoms that make proprietors nervous because these are the freedoms no proprietor delivers; these are points on which no proprietor can compete.
I see it as a freedom because I think practical use is ambiguous and limited in scope. But I think you'll find that we agree more than we disagree. You're right: The open source movement very much focuses on practical utility (that movement's message is a development methodology). But they don't always include the users in that message. I want complete source code under an irrevocable license that allows me to share and modify the software. Software freedom is always defined in terms of what a user is allowed to do.
But my experience is that many people don't see it that way; practical utility is defined very narrowly: the debate is framed in terms of immediate use -- "Can I run the thing now?". Lots of people are willing to buy into a monopoly if they want to do something their old computer system won't let them do. These users have been successfully divided and kept helpless by these monopolies.
If we frame the issue of supporting hardware like they do, we'll confuse a monopoly for genuine support (nVidia graphics cards work well, I'm told, when you install their proprietary drivers, if you define "work[ing]" as something other than software freedom). We, as a culture, have to learn to value sharing and modification so that we can make the devices do what we want them to do. This is why I prefer to frame the debate in terms of freedom to do what I want to do, rather than making the device work according to what functions the manufacturer approves of.
Some people actually want to share programs with complete corresponding source code. Therefore, they don't like to have proprietary code on their system. There are (as other posters have described) practical problems with non-free programs too.
I hope people don't frame this issue in terms of practical utility (because down that road lies giving up software freedom for whatever is convenient to proprietors) but instead, frame the issue in terms of our ability to do what made the systems we cherish -- preserve our freedom to share and modify software.
This is one of those moments where you have to reflect on how freedoms work and then recognize that we cannot afford to support those who would take other freedoms away.
Software proprietors like the new BSD license (among others) because it allows them to build on the program and not share their improvements in a form which allows others to excercise their software freedom to inspect, share, and modify the software. As you have pointed out, Microsoft has done this.
We don't gain or retain software freedom by trying to grant all possible freedoms to all people and all organizations. Extending such power to those who would build on our commons and then take our commons away from us with their superior advertising or patent acquisition power is unwise. Their proprietary variant of the program could become the de facto standard. Then we would either end up working for them by continuing to make gifts of code to them (thus treating a business like a charity and competing against a derivative of our own code) or we would be defeated in our struggle to maintain a software commons. If their new algorithms are patented, we lose the opportunity to outcompete until the patent expires, no matter how skilled a programmer we are. Waiting for patents to expire means our software will be less competitive, possibly obsolete.
It is not our job in society to look out for businesses. However, time has shown that businesses are willing to share and modify code as equals under a strong copylefted license like the GPL. This kind of cooperation is beneficial in more important ways than adding hackers to a project. I'm not anti-business, I'm against giving business the power to step on my software freedom. I'm all for giving people choices in licensing, but I want more people to realize the ramifications of that power, not select a license because of some enclosure-movement-friendly misinterpretation of freedom and power.
Present drives won't read these new discs, but will the new discs require a carrying or storage device that has different dimensions than a common CD/DVD jewel case? If so, that sounds like a pain to deal with to me.
Keeping defaults is what most users do, so that doesn't bother me. But since you see a problem here, you should leverage your freedom to improve the Mozilla programs and then share your improvements with us. If you're not a programmer, perhaps you would be willing to hire one or get one of your programmer friends to supply said improvement.
You're quick to portray open source as a democracy, and Microsoft (along with other large corporations) as a despotism.
While I'm not familiar with the Mozilla developers, I can say that most open source projects are effectively an oligarchy. [...] While everyone is given the right to modify open source software, few people actually have the means to do so.
I've recently addressed this misunderstanding, so I'll point to that response rather than repeat myself here.
Actually, Mozilla and Firefox will tell you when new versions come along.
However, your post is wrong in a much more profound way--arguing from perfection. Arguing from perfection is a form of a false dichotomy. This scheme presents two alternatives: perfection, and what the speaker wishes to railroad you into. Since perfection is never really available in anything, the only remaining option is the one the speaker wants to railroad you into.
No network program of the complexity you'll commonly use (like a web browser, chat client, or e-mail client) is "totally safe". That frame is a useless one with which to understand the problem. Far better to analyze it from the frame of providing everyone the freedom to share and modify the program so people can find problems, fix them (or make enhancements), and then help the rest of us by sharing their improved version of the program. This frame gives a realistic means to weigh which programs can be genuinely useful and which can be shown to be consistently bad.
Microsoft (being a corporation) has a profit motive behind working on MSIE. Thus once they have achieved market dominance there is little interest in improving the program further. Only competition will pressure them to improve the program, and then it will only be improved along lines that not determined by the users of the program. Users get no opportunity to determine what is valuable for the next release because corporations are not democratically run organizations and the software is not free for sharing and modification. This doesn't just apply to Microsoft, it applies to any other proprietary software. But we happen to be talking about this situation in the context of how Microsoft fails to address reasonable safety when web browsing.
Some of the bugs and insecurities that have been discussed are years old and service pack after service pack passes without fixing these problems. All of the problems are unfixable by the masses of talented programmers out there because MSIE is proprietary. I fail to see how IS "just works" or "are getting slowly worked out".
The parent post is currently moderated at +4, insightful. I'd hardly call that "anti-microsoftism" (as if that is bad when one considers how they came out of the largest antitrust case in US history not looking at all good).
No, it's quite right because it's a great start.
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By this logic, the GNU project never should have been started at all and neither should have the Linux kernel. Even by the narrow dictates of popularity, in order to make something popular one first must make something. This particular work is licensed to allow sharing, improvement, and commercial distribution which strikes me as being remarkably generous. We can't afford to believe that we must sequence our steps of progress because if we do we'll never accomplish anything.
I think it would be far healthier to continue to let a thousand flowers bloom.
Relicensing to any other license is unlikely to happen for the Linux kernel because many Linux kernel hackers contribute their code to Linus Torvalds but retain the copyright themselves. Torvalds doesn't collect copyright assignments. However, a switch to a non-copylefted free software license (like the new BSD license) would adversely affect the free software community:
Such a switch means reduced freedom to share and modify derivatives. People are going to be tempted to give up their software freedom for some technical advantage. In the long run, this probably means that some hackers will end up working against a non-free derivative of their own code.
The new feature could be patented. The GPL (unlike many other free software licenses such as the new BSD license) contains language to help you retain your freedom to share and modify patented ideas which are implemented in distributed derivatives. This, in turn, helps makes it possible for some hacker to do as you instruct -- "[make] their own enhancements that do equivalent things". I recall reading somewhere that the next revision of the GPL will clarify this language and make it more obvious that patent grants are being made for the covered program as well.
With free and open versions of Linux still available they would also have to make something extremely compelling to garner any interest. That would not be an easy task. I find it very unlikely that they would sell many copies.
How successful they would be on their own terms is not relevant. The GPL was written to help the GNU project fulfill its goal of spreading software freedom. Thus it is pertinant to determine if any proprietor is able to stifle the spread of software freedom, not how much profit they can acquire in the process of stifling our software freedom.
Stephen H. Wildstrom is asking for the free software community to turn share-and-share-alike into a gift to proprietors. Wildstrom uses specious logic that will result in us losing our ability to preserve software freedom for derivatives. He and BusinessWeek should be told to encourage their business audience to compete and provide something better instead of trying to get something of value for nothing. If there is to be real competition, that competition must be free software as well. The frame of the debate has shifted sometime over the past 20 years and there's a new factor to consider -- software freedom.
If I wanted to take some GPL'd libraries and framework to create a program for Open Gaming, I'd be unable to--as the GPL is likely incompatable with the OGL (see www.opengamingfoundation.org) despite being very compatable in intent and even outlook & purpose. And so, I wind up just using the OGL (or my own license, or someone else's) and when you want to use my code and RMS's code to make something new, you can't.
What's interesting here is that the onus of responsibility falls on the GPL to allow these derivatives rather than taking the authors of the OGL to task for writing a GPL-incompatible license (despite the GPL's clear popularity when the OGL was written). What is particularly ironic about this incompability is that the Open Gaming Foundation claims to be "based on the Free Software GNU General Public License ". But even if you're not willing to do that, all is not lost -- what happened when you asked the copyright holders of the two works for permission to make this derivative? Copyrighted works can be licensed any number of ways to any number of other parties. Perhaps they would grant you special permission to make your work. Also, why is it any GPL licensor's duty to let you create such a derivative by default?
Before Linux, MS actually sold a flavor of UNIX. Had "Free Software" not ran so contrary to their basic business model, we'd probably have MS Office for UNIX now. Rather that throwing the baby out with the bathwater, the collaborative features that MS Office has had for years might actually work with the Free Software OS RMS and LT happily put together.
Linux is a kernel, not an operating system. GNU predates the release of the Linux kernel. The existence of GNU and/or the Linux kernel does not prevent Microsoft from continuing the development of their UNIX-like system nor does it prevent them from writing MS Office for any OS they wish (including any free software OS). It seems to me that Microsoft's decision to can a program you appear to want is best addressed by talking to them, not chastising RMS. It appears that the Free Software Foundation is not interested in throwing aside their goals for mere popularity:
People justify adding non-free software in the name of the "popularity of Linux"--in effect, valuing popularity above freedom. Sometimes this is openly admitted. For instance, Wired Magazine says Robert McMillan, editor of Linux Magazine, "feels that the move toward open source software should be fueled by technical, rather than political, decisions." And Caldera's CEO openly urged users to drop the goal of freedom and work instead for the "popularity of Linux".
Adding non-free software to the GNU/Linux system may increase the popularity, if by popularity we mean the number of people using some of GNU/Linux in combination with non-free software. But at the same time, it implicitly encourages the community to accept non-free software as a good thing, and forget the goal of freedom. It is no use driving faster if you can't stay on the road.
I think we can all agree that when the term "Linux/Open Source/Free Software Zealot" is used, RMS is usually thought about.
Sadly, on/., the term zealot is coupled with RMS almost exclusively despite the pay off from his detailed attention to licensing, patent law, and understanding the differences between the laws lumped together as "intellectual property". Some posters don't hesitate to argue their point by namecalling (such as you calling RMS "a wack job") which doesn't advance the conversation. By contrast, I don't see people calling open source movement advocates names. I get the impression that stumping for businesses is far more popular and more widely recognized on as a genuine good by those who post on/. than stumping for everyone's software freedom.
That "zealotry" helped build a license (the GNU General Public License) which in turn helped create a movement. It's funny how people are called names when they advocate for their freedom.
Heh, no, just don't assume that everyone who is involved with writing open source software shares the same ideas that are very popular among GPL proponents.
I did not do this. I would not do this because the GPL expresses a very different philosophy from the open source movement. I stated something that is true for all free software, including FreeBSD. Whatever motivates FreeBSD developers to continue their work isn't the point; the work they produce is licensed such that everyone (including users) gains software freedom. Therefore I'm grateful that FreeBSD's developers deliver software freedom to all of their users. Therefore I find it ironic that a user would choose to throw away this freedom and add on software which is completely uninspectable, unmodifiable, and possibly can't even be shared (the nVidia software). It seems more reasonable to me to get a different video card from a developer that doesn't treat you this way.
Specifically, when looking at BSD licensed software, as is the case with FreeBSD (just in case you didn't notice yet, we were discussing FreeBSD, not Linux here), you may actually notice that the people designign and writing it don't care that much about 'the open source methodology' but about making something that is usable to everyone. You make closed source software? fine. Makign a card with closed source drivers? perfect, we don't care.
I understand that this is not a discussion of the Linux kernel. I'm looking at this situation in terms of what is being delivered, not why. But if I turn my attention to motivation it seems to me that you don't see the similarity between the motivations you're talking about.
The open source philosophy is a design methodology that aims to make more software available to businesses. For the open source movement, proprietary software is merely less technically efficient or sub-optimal than open source software. But the open source movement doesn't object to proprietary software. This movement can endorse software which doesn't qualify for being called "open source". Hence, delivering a gift of code on which anyone can build any other program (even proprietary programs) is compatible with what the open source movement aims to do. Also, Linus Torvalds' fork of the Linux kernel is developed with comparable motivation; Torvalds licensed the kernel under the GPL but he has made exceptions and given interpretations of the GPL which he believes allow for proprietary derivatives (such as the nVidia software).
Talking about software freedom rankles the open source movement because that movement was designed to get away from freedom talk. Freedom talk tends to make people think of user's rights which, in turn, leads to users distancing themselves from what proprietors offer. One famous software proprietor, Bill Gates, came to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign a few months ago and compared the GPL to the new BSD license along these lines stating how it was appropriate for universities to license under the new BSD license and inappropriate to license under the GPL. Gates was looking out for Microsoft's interests (and thus his own interests) essentially saying that it is a university's job to give Microsoft a gift of code.
I'm not against non-copylefted free software licenses. I think that programs licensed under them are a gift to everyone. Being a gift to everyone, there is a real risk that the developer and the free software community can suffer when a proprietor with superior advertising power makes a proprietary derivative and that derivative becomes accepted. A developer can end up competing against a derivative of their own code and the community can watch a proprietary incompatible modification make their version of the program functionally obsolete.
[...]don't try to express and pursue a political and social goal with their license.
I think this was the most revealing part of your post -- don't dare express yourself politically because we can't handle any of that kind of discussion in here. One wonders then in what sense the user is in any way free with FreeBSD if one is relegated to backing such stifling anti-discussion.
This is not about what you can currently do. This is about putting yourself in a position where independence is possible. If you choose to remain dependant when given enough information to behave otherwise, that's a choice that chiefly affects you (a freedom). But not having the information in the first place adversely affects everyone, even those with the skill and will to help themselves and others (a power). Some of us do read ingredient labels on food and cook from recipes because we care about what we eat. Some of us care about industrial processes that affect our air and water (such as plastic production) and, therefore, fight for an increased say in how we get plastic goods.
This kind of support for open source users is what keeps me coming back to certain hardware manufacturers. The more companies realize this, the better it is for everyone.
One can only hope those "certain hardware manufacturers" aren't the ones that treat you like nVidia does. This is not "support", this is an opportunity to acquire a set of chains. Fans of the open source methodology ought to see how accepting proprietary code isn't going to make your system better--you're choosing to toss out the developmental advantages that open source advocates focus on (or instead not recognizing the limitations in ignoring software freedom for users). The free software community wasn't built by catering to software proprietors and it won't be sustained by giving into them.
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Perhaps, but if the drivers are proprietary then we stand to gain virtually nothing. Our community doesn't benefit from being treated as a market. If the card manufacturers are willing to work with us and release complete specs that can be developed into free software drivers or license code to us under a free software license, I think many would be willing to enthusiastically encourage the purchase of those cards.
If the GNU/Linux OS grows toward popularity and gives up software freedom this OS will never become popular enough to compete in the way that will make Microsoft Windows a less attractive option. But if GNU/Linux popularity increases on the basis of keeping software freedom then we will have something to offer which no proprietor can compete with -- something which will constitute a genuine contribution to society.
Some lawyers are, like other practitioners of other fields of work, quite skilled in their misuse of language. Consider the number of lawyers that use the phrase "intellectual property" which hurts us in at least two ways: it helps secure the validity of turning a commons into ownable chunks (by structuring the debate so we accept the property model before we've debated it), and tries to mash together a bunch of disparate laws as though they share more in common than they differ. I can understand why lawyers would do this; lawyers benefit from more lawsuits. The more things viewed as property, the more disputes there will be over ownership, license, and control of that "property". But at a recent community wireless conference, I heard one of the speakers say he wanted to do away with the term "commons" while he had no problem making his point in terms of "intellectual property". The conference was aiming to municipalize wireless access to the Internet, precisely the opposite of turning spectrum use into private property.
From the article:
Computers should never be used to tabulate voting results in the first place. If the computer's reported results don't trip someone's suspicion, they can still be wholly wrong and hand victory to an unelected candidate (particularly in close races). Computers are wonderful for preparing a voter-verified paper ballot (for instance, there are significant advantages to using a computerized machine which grant blind and illiterate voters anonymous voting power). But any computer tabulation of votes can lead to what Bev Harris is demonstrating in the Diebold tabulator machines (she has pinned the story to the top of her website because it is so important). The equipment machine used by the voter can be done excellently, including running on free software. But if the votes are passed to an unaccountable system where recounts are meaningless, elections can easily be subverted. I understand that people want results quickly, and I know that quick returns is one of the promises of electronic voting. However, I prefer results that can be verified meaningfully and I'm willing to wait to get those results. Therefore, I think the best way to count ballots is to get rooms full of people at tables hand-counting ballots. In my opinion, a knowable error rate is better than a unknown error rate.
I'm on the committee to recommend voting machine equipment to the County Board in Champaign, IL. A number of us on the recommendation board get together once a month (more often if there are pressing issues before us including field trips to see various machines and ask questions of people in the field using the equipment) and discuss these issues with a goal of arriving at something we can stand behind and recommend.
The parent post is not a troll (as it was mistakenly moderated), but it could use some elucidation. The open source movement champions selecting software that is technically more advanced. Thus, this strategy will sometimes result in choosing proprietary software over so-called "open source" software. If we look at these advances in X.org as merely technical improvements, it's logical to arrive at the conclusion which the parent poster expressed and note that other systems have had these advances for quite some time.
Another movement, older than the open source movement, frames the issue in another way. The free software movement pitches a message of freedom to share and modify programs. When measured by this criteria, X.org offers something these other systems don't: You get what this movement calls "free software", freedoms which give people the opportunity to develop the technical advances which implement the fancy look-and-feel.
There is more than one GNU license -- the GNU General Public License, which disallows proprietary derivatives, and the GNU Lesser General Public License, which allows proprietary derivatives. Then there's the GNU Free Documentation License which is intended for something else.
If you meant a license the Free Software Foundation calls a "free software" license, then there's even more licenses to consider. All this raises the question: which license are you referring to?
Then we need to teach corporations what is enough. The concept of a trade-off is missing in this debate, that with more corporate power, we trade away our freedom to share even noncommercial verbatim copies with our neighbors. Society needs to restructure corporate power so that they can pursue sufficient profit, not endless profit at the expense of anything else. This is a non-trivial task but it is possible; we're not dealing with a natural system. Corporate power arrived through a series of legal decisions which created the near-person status and assigned them the power to pursue profit without regard for other things. We can take that power away and we should before more damage is done.
I learned that denying people an inherently sharable commodity was hoarding and selfish. So when I brought something to school, I had to bring enough to share. Later when I learned about computers, I learned that it's unusual to "take" data; typically data is copied, not moved, from one computer to another. Still later, when I read more about the history of various media businesses, I learned that they got started doing what today they call "piracy" (even though, ironically, that term in the illicit copying sense was once used by authors to describe what publishers sometimes did).
I think all of these lessons and many others have made me increasingly appreciate free software over the years.
Software freedom does not come down to money.
If you only focus on cost, you have no reason to reject an illicit copy of a proprietary OS (a zero-cost copy of Microsoft Windows which Microsoft is ready to provide under certain circumstances, for example). Regardless of how much money you paid, you get no freedom to share or modify non-free software. The real costs of the software are hidden from you. If you have the freedoms to share and modify software, you can distribute the software at any cost and you have the freedom to make the program do what you want. These are the freedoms that make proprietors nervous because these are the freedoms no proprietor delivers; these are points on which no proprietor can compete.
I see it as a freedom because I think practical use is ambiguous and limited in scope. But I think you'll find that we agree more than we disagree. You're right: The open source movement very much focuses on practical utility (that movement's message is a development methodology). But they don't always include the users in that message. I want complete source code under an irrevocable license that allows me to share and modify the software. Software freedom is always defined in terms of what a user is allowed to do.
But my experience is that many people don't see it that way; practical utility is defined very narrowly: the debate is framed in terms of immediate use -- "Can I run the thing now?". Lots of people are willing to buy into a monopoly if they want to do something their old computer system won't let them do. These users have been successfully divided and kept helpless by these monopolies.
If we frame the issue of supporting hardware like they do, we'll confuse a monopoly for genuine support (nVidia graphics cards work well, I'm told, when you install their proprietary drivers, if you define "work[ing]" as something other than software freedom). We, as a culture, have to learn to value sharing and modification so that we can make the devices do what we want them to do. This is why I prefer to frame the debate in terms of freedom to do what I want to do, rather than making the device work according to what functions the manufacturer approves of.
Some people actually want to share programs with complete corresponding source code. Therefore, they don't like to have proprietary code on their system. There are (as other posters have described) practical problems with non-free programs too.
I hope people don't frame this issue in terms of practical utility (because down that road lies giving up software freedom for whatever is convenient to proprietors) but instead, frame the issue in terms of our ability to do what made the systems we cherish -- preserve our freedom to share and modify software.
This is one of those moments where you have to reflect on how freedoms work and then recognize that we cannot afford to support those who would take other freedoms away.
Software proprietors like the new BSD license (among others) because it allows them to build on the program and not share their improvements in a form which allows others to excercise their software freedom to inspect, share, and modify the software. As you have pointed out, Microsoft has done this.
We don't gain or retain software freedom by trying to grant all possible freedoms to all people and all organizations. Extending such power to those who would build on our commons and then take our commons away from us with their superior advertising or patent acquisition power is unwise. Their proprietary variant of the program could become the de facto standard. Then we would either end up working for them by continuing to make gifts of code to them (thus treating a business like a charity and competing against a derivative of our own code) or we would be defeated in our struggle to maintain a software commons. If their new algorithms are patented, we lose the opportunity to outcompete until the patent expires, no matter how skilled a programmer we are. Waiting for patents to expire means our software will be less competitive, possibly obsolete.
It is not our job in society to look out for businesses. However, time has shown that businesses are willing to share and modify code as equals under a strong copylefted license like the GPL. This kind of cooperation is beneficial in more important ways than adding hackers to a project. I'm not anti-business, I'm against giving business the power to step on my software freedom. I'm all for giving people choices in licensing, but I want more people to realize the ramifications of that power, not select a license because of some enclosure-movement-friendly misinterpretation of freedom and power.
Present drives won't read these new discs, but will the new discs require a carrying or storage device that has different dimensions than a common CD/DVD jewel case? If so, that sounds like a pain to deal with to me.
Keeping defaults is what most users do, so that doesn't bother me. But since you see a problem here, you should leverage your freedom to improve the Mozilla programs and then share your improvements with us. If you're not a programmer, perhaps you would be willing to hire one or get one of your programmer friends to supply said improvement.
No, I did not mention anything about "open source". I wrote about granting the freedom to share and modify computer software to everyone -- users included -- and as the late 1998 trade show example toward the end of this essay shows, the open source message of improving programs for faster and better development doesn't always include users. The latter point is obvious of the corporate structure which is designed to be an undemocratic tyranny.
I've recently addressed this misunderstanding, so I'll point to that response rather than repeat myself here.
Actually, Mozilla and Firefox will tell you when new versions come along.
However, your post is wrong in a much more profound way--arguing from perfection. Arguing from perfection is a form of a false dichotomy. This scheme presents two alternatives: perfection, and what the speaker wishes to railroad you into. Since perfection is never really available in anything, the only remaining option is the one the speaker wants to railroad you into.
No network program of the complexity you'll commonly use (like a web browser, chat client, or e-mail client) is "totally safe". That frame is a useless one with which to understand the problem. Far better to analyze it from the frame of providing everyone the freedom to share and modify the program so people can find problems, fix them (or make enhancements), and then help the rest of us by sharing their improved version of the program. This frame gives a realistic means to weigh which programs can be genuinely useful and which can be shown to be consistently bad.
Microsoft (being a corporation) has a profit motive behind working on MSIE. Thus once they have achieved market dominance there is little interest in improving the program further. Only competition will pressure them to improve the program, and then it will only be improved along lines that not determined by the users of the program. Users get no opportunity to determine what is valuable for the next release because corporations are not democratically run organizations and the software is not free for sharing and modification. This doesn't just apply to Microsoft, it applies to any other proprietary software. But we happen to be talking about this situation in the context of how Microsoft fails to address reasonable safety when web browsing.
Some of the bugs and insecurities that have been discussed are years old and service pack after service pack passes without fixing these problems. All of the problems are unfixable by the masses of talented programmers out there because MSIE is proprietary. I fail to see how IS "just works" or "are getting slowly worked out".
The parent post is currently moderated at +4, insightful. I'd hardly call that "anti-microsoftism" (as if that is bad when one considers how they came out of the largest antitrust case in US history not looking at all good).
By this logic, the GNU project never should have been started at all and neither should have the Linux kernel. Even by the narrow dictates of popularity, in order to make something popular one first must make something. This particular work is licensed to allow sharing, improvement, and commercial distribution which strikes me as being remarkably generous. We can't afford to believe that we must sequence our steps of progress because if we do we'll never accomplish anything.
I think it would be far healthier to continue to let a thousand flowers bloom.
Relicensing to any other license is unlikely to happen for the Linux kernel because many Linux kernel hackers contribute their code to Linus Torvalds but retain the copyright themselves. Torvalds doesn't collect copyright assignments. However, a switch to a non-copylefted free software license (like the new BSD license) would adversely affect the free software community:
How successful they would be on their own terms is not relevant. The GPL was written to help the GNU project fulfill its goal of spreading software freedom. Thus it is pertinant to determine if any proprietor is able to stifle the spread of software freedom, not how much profit they can acquire in the process of stifling our software freedom.
Stephen H. Wildstrom is asking for the free software community to turn share-and-share-alike into a gift to proprietors. Wildstrom uses specious logic that will result in us losing our ability to preserve software freedom for derivatives. He and BusinessWeek should be told to encourage their business audience to compete and provide something better instead of trying to get something of value for nothing. If there is to be real competition, that competition must be free software as well. The frame of the debate has shifted sometime over the past 20 years and there's a new factor to consider -- software freedom.
What's interesting here is that the onus of responsibility falls on the GPL to allow these derivatives rather than taking the authors of the OGL to task for writing a GPL-incompatible license (despite the GPL's clear popularity when the OGL was written). What is particularly ironic about this incompability is that the Open Gaming Foundation claims to be "based on the Free Software GNU General Public License ". But even if you're not willing to do that, all is not lost -- what happened when you asked the copyright holders of the two works for permission to make this derivative? Copyrighted works can be licensed any number of ways to any number of other parties. Perhaps they would grant you special permission to make your work. Also, why is it any GPL licensor's duty to let you create such a derivative by default?
Linux is a kernel, not an operating system. GNU predates the release of the Linux kernel. The existence of GNU and/or the Linux kernel does not prevent Microsoft from continuing the development of their UNIX-like system nor does it prevent them from writing MS Office for any OS they wish (including any free software OS). It seems to me that Microsoft's decision to can a program you appear to want is best addressed by talking to them, not chastising RMS. It appears that the Free Software Foundation is not interested in throwing aside their goals for mere popularity:
Sadly, on /., the term zealot is coupled with RMS almost exclusively despite the pay off from his detailed attention to licensing, patent law, and understanding the differences between the laws lumped together as "intellectual property". Some posters don't hesitate to argue their point by namecalling (such as you calling RMS "a wack job") which doesn't advance the conversation. By contrast, I don't see people calling open source movement advocates names. I get the impression that stumping for businesses is far more popular and more widely recognized on as a genuine good by those who post on /. than stumping for everyone's software freedom.
What exactly does "splintering" a license mean? How, precisely, is interoperability curtailed by the free software movement?
That "zealotry" helped build a license (the GNU General Public License) which in turn helped create a movement. It's funny how people are called names when they advocate for their freedom.
I did not do this. I would not do this because the GPL expresses a very different philosophy from the open source movement. I stated something that is true for all free software, including FreeBSD. Whatever motivates FreeBSD developers to continue their work isn't the point; the work they produce is licensed such that everyone (including users) gains software freedom. Therefore I'm grateful that FreeBSD's developers deliver software freedom to all of their users. Therefore I find it ironic that a user would choose to throw away this freedom and add on software which is completely uninspectable, unmodifiable, and possibly can't even be shared (the nVidia software). It seems more reasonable to me to get a different video card from a developer that doesn't treat you this way.
I understand that this is not a discussion of the Linux kernel. I'm looking at this situation in terms of what is being delivered, not why. But if I turn my attention to motivation it seems to me that you don't see the similarity between the motivations you're talking about.
The open source philosophy is a design methodology that aims to make more software available to businesses. For the open source movement, proprietary software is merely less technically efficient or sub-optimal than open source software. But the open source movement doesn't object to proprietary software. This movement can endorse software which doesn't qualify for being called "open source". Hence, delivering a gift of code on which anyone can build any other program (even proprietary programs) is compatible with what the open source movement aims to do. Also, Linus Torvalds' fork of the Linux kernel is developed with comparable motivation; Torvalds licensed the kernel under the GPL but he has made exceptions and given interpretations of the GPL which he believes allow for proprietary derivatives (such as the nVidia software).
Talking about software freedom rankles the open source movement because that movement was designed to get away from freedom talk. Freedom talk tends to make people think of user's rights which, in turn, leads to users distancing themselves from what proprietors offer. One famous software proprietor, Bill Gates, came to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign a few months ago and compared the GPL to the new BSD license along these lines stating how it was appropriate for universities to license under the new BSD license and inappropriate to license under the GPL. Gates was looking out for Microsoft's interests (and thus his own interests) essentially saying that it is a university's job to give Microsoft a gift of code.
I'm not against non-copylefted free software licenses. I think that programs licensed under them are a gift to everyone. Being a gift to everyone, there is a real risk that the developer and the free software community can suffer when a proprietor with superior advertising power makes a proprietary derivative and that derivative becomes accepted. A developer can end up competing against a derivative of their own code and the community can watch a proprietary incompatible modification make their version of the program functionally obsolete.
I think this was the most revealing part of your post -- don't dare express yourself politically because we can't handle any of that kind of discussion in here. One wonders then in what sense the user is in any way free with FreeBSD if one is relegated to backing such stifling anti-discussion.
This is not about what you can currently do. This is about putting yourself in a position where independence is possible. If you choose to remain dependant when given enough information to behave otherwise, that's a choice that chiefly affects you (a freedom). But not having the information in the first place adversely affects everyone, even those with the skill and will to help themselves and others (a power). Some of us do read ingredient labels on food and cook from recipes because we care about what we eat. Some of us care about industrial processes that affect our air and water (such as plastic production) and, therefore, fight for an increased say in how we get plastic goods.
One can only hope those "certain hardware manufacturers" aren't the ones that treat you like nVidia does. This is not "support", this is an opportunity to acquire a set of chains. Fans of the open source methodology ought to see how accepting proprietary code isn't going to make your system better--you're choosing to toss out the developmental advantages that open source advocates focus on (or instead not recognizing the limitations in ignoring software freedom for users). The free software community wasn't built by catering to software proprietors and it won't be sustained by giving into them.