Moral of the story: STOP BUYING CRAP from manufacturers that refuse to cooperate with the Linux community and only support those willing to disclose the information needed to use their products!!!
One would hope this is obvious -- not doing business with organizations that don't treat you well -- but I'm pleasantly surprised to see someone else echoing this concern.
I have an Epson Perfection 1260 and I've found that they are plug and play with Fedora Core GNU/Linux 1 and 2. I imagine any other free software OS will work well too. The only problems with this scanner:
Make sure you are using SANE version 1.0.10 or higher. Previous versions will cause your scanner to blow its power supply fuse at high resolutions. This can be fixed (there are two links from that page. This might not be a prominent issue anymore, recent distributions of various free software OSes will probably ship with SANE post-1.0.10. But it's something to look out for when you hook up your scanner for the first time.
The colors might not be as correct as you can make them after some color processing. For the scanning I do, this isn't an issue, but this might be a software issue.
I have had almost the opposite experience with a Brother HL-1240N (a "network" laser printer; the printer can be connected via ethernet in addition to parallel port and/or USB). I chose to use the ethernet option because that makes the printer available to my entire network without the need for a host computer. I might have chosen differently if I cared more about spooling.
Microsoft Windows 2000 had a lot of problems with the supplied drivers and I had I not used the printer's native ability to connect to the network via ethernet, I never would have gotten it working through Microsoft Windows. On a slight tangent: I don't think network printing is something most home users care about. ESR tried to make a similar point to yours in a complaint about the complexity of printing under GNU/Linux (using Fedora Core, if I recall correctly), but his fictional novice home user "Aunt Tillie" was trying to set up a network printer and that's where I knew he was doing something no ordinary home user would do. I don't doubt that network printing is valuable or that it should be easier, I doubt that most home users care about the functionality.
Getting back to my story, using the same printer (still on the ethernet interface) with CUPS in Fedora Core 1 and 2 is quite easy. Using my other printer, a color Epson inkjet connected locally via the parallel port, was even easier under Fedora Core 1 and 2. There were some silly prompts (I had to pick a driver even though the print panel knew the make and model of the printer by querying the printer), but it works.
The three improvements I would suggest are:
1. Printing should work from all applications all the time. For some reason, printing the same JPEG file from some programs fails. Worse yet, printing from different apps fails differently depending on the program (sometimes I get a text dump of PS output, sometimes I get jibberish). I don't know enough about how printing works on GNU/Linux to better assess the problem.
2. Most of ESR's suggestions are apropos -- the printer setup should be minimal, the LAN should be searched for printers, and if I connect a printer whose make and model can be discovered automatically, that should be enough to get going with the printer.
3. Let users change the resolution of their printing without needing the root password. I can't make my Epson inkjet print in its high resolution mode without changing the system-wide printer definition to high-res. But doing so means all users by default print in the slow high-res mode. I only want to change modes for a particular user's default and sometimes for one particular job.
What makes all of this worse for most users is how difficult it is to know who to talk to on this topic -- are feature ideas welcome? If so, where should they be sent? If not, is that because someone is waiting to be hired to develop this code? If so, whom should one hire?
Good question -- and is this spam filter as easy to use as Mozilla Mail or Thunderbird's spam filtering?
I appreciate the programmatic advantages of modular code and programs doing one thing and doing them well, but I also appreciate integration (or even the appearance of integration) that makes it trivially easy to use advanced functionality. I've been programming and using computers for decades. As I get older and less tolerant of bad user interfaces, I place more importance on the latter.
Everybody should care because the DMCA is a very effective weapon to stop people from being able to express themselves freely. Just ask Dmitry Sklyarov or revisit the article describing how easy it was to illustrate how much power ISPs posess to stifle legal copying. Your position as stated takes an entirely too narrow view on things; that because one instance eventually did not result in killing a project, your view suggests that we can afford to dismiss the situtation. There is a larger more significant harm going on here that needs to be properly acknowledged and the public needs to be educated on what harm has occurred because of the DMCA.
Since all the software available on the website is available for free download, and its all GPL, yes it is. As well as people have previously asked SuSE and they've said yes as long as you don't distribute for profit.
This makes no sense to me. If all the software SUSE distributes on this ISO is licensed under the GNU GPL (or if it is all licensed under any set of free software licenses), anyone should be able to distribute copies for profit. One of the criteria for a license to qualify as a free software license is that it must allow commercial distribution.
Archiving the files together in a package makes it easy for people to share the two together. It's a good idea to package a copy of the applicable license so recipients know what their rights are. Websites come and go, but a text file is easy to read anywhere and very small compared to the size of the movie.
I was thinking a Theora+Vorbis encoding would be interesting to compare with (now that Theora I is finalized, it's safe to encode movies in it). But I don't have the video file from which the WMV was made, and transcoding won't show off Theora or Vorbis. Perhaps someone who made the movie will read this and make a Theora+Vorbis encoding (it would be even nicer if it were licensed under a Creative Commons license and packaged with a copy of the applicable license so we know we can legally share it with our friends).
Because the open source movement pursues popularity and taking credit for the works of others is a convenient way to attain that goal without having to do the hard work of actually writing the licenses and defining the concepts that helped define and build our now 20-year-old community. Consider the GNU General Public License which was written well before the Open Source Initiative began and speaks of a different philosophy than that which the open source movement speaks to. The OSI defined the terms of license acceptance such that they could add the GPL to their approved license list. The Free Software Foundation wrote the license and started the free software community about 2 decades ago.
Mark Webbink, counsel for Red Hat, wrote an essay on licenses used in the open source movement. Webbink, like Red Hat, is a proponent of "open source". In this essay Webbink goes to some effort to reinvent the concept of copyleft without once calling it by that name. He obviously finds value in breaking up licenses into groups along those that are copylefted and those that are not, but nowhere is any credit given to the people that invented this concept and assigned that name to it about 20 years before his essay came out.
Eric Raymond responded to AdTI's error-riddled argument about the Linux kernal. Raymond cited a number of "open-source projects" to bolster his argument, unfortunately one of them was Emacs co-written by founder of the free software movement -- Richard Stallman -- years before the OSI existed. I've written here about this before, so I won't repeat the details. It's safe to assume that RMS does not do any of his work for the benefit of the open source movement.
He, and others (myself included), are grateful that open source proponents do so much work helping to bring users to software freedom by increasing the use of free software licenses (chiefly the GNU GPL). But there's no honor in taking credit for someone else's work. And there's no sense in conflating placing a license on a list of approved licenses with writing a license and creating a community. Building on the work of others is not the same as appropriating it. Given the number of times I've seen "free software" mistranslated or inaccurately conveyed as "open source", particularly when describing the endeavors of those outside the US, I would not be surprised if the Reuters article was completely wrong in its summary (as well as its statement about what "open source" is, which has been partially debunked elsewhere in this thread). Software freedom is something worth pursuing, helping business more efficiently find and use unpaid labor is not something many are eager to help with doing.
Both stories come from the directors who spoke after their respective movie was shown at the Roger Ebert Overlooked Film Festival (known better to Champaign and Urbana, Illinois locals as "Ebertfest").
* Bernard Rose, director of "Paperhouse", had to (and I'm using the term correctly here) steal the reels to this movie after it was shown at Ebertfest a couple of years ago. Sony Classics was unwilling to distribute the movie in formats for home video and Rose wanted more people to see the movie. So he took the reels after it was shown in the Virginia Theatre (a theatre in Champaign, Illinois where the Ebertfest movies are shown).
* Jonathan Caouette directed "Tarnation" which was made on his computer for what is described as "an initial cost of $187" by the Ebertfest literature. Caouette later discovered that clearing the rights for the snippets of other movies used in Tarnation would cost roughly half a million dollars.
I think it certainly would -- I believe no computer program has ever entered the public domain through an expiring copyright but a lot of computer programs are completely unavailable to us today because the only copies of them are lost or rare and in the hands of people who (for various reasons) don't want to share (Marble Madness 2, I'm told, is an example of the latter). The market for computer software is remarkably short, far shorter than their copyright. Even with all the impressive work MAME's programmer's have done, there are still plenty of programs I played in the arcades which are not emulated (perhaps because nobody has found or dumped the ROM for them yet).
Check out News from Neptune -- an hour-long weekly news and commentary show from WEFT 90.1 FM. The News from Neptune site is being worked on (one of the co-host bios has not yet been written) but there are shows up under a Creative Commons license in DRM-free Ogg Vorbis and Speex format (current show in Ogg Vorbis, archive shows in Speex). Download, share, and enjoy. I helped put the show online and I host another show at the same station.
Everything has political impact, certainly choosing a license or the background of an important license such as the GNU GPL. I hope your sarcasm won't get in the way of appreciating the value of understanding recent history for what actually happened instead of what some would like to recast it to be.
The GNU General Public License (GPL) was written years before there was an "open source" movement. Linking together the open source movement with the GPL misstates history and authorship. The language used in the GPL and the freedoms it talks about are not part of the philosophy of the open source movement, they are part of the free software movement which created the free software community we still enjoy today 20 years later. The real author of the GPL is the FSF (most notably, Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen). In a post to the GCC mailing list responding to someone who wanted to help the "open source community", RMS said
Open source advocates do contribute to our community, when they work on free software packages, but our community is older than that movement, and owes its existence to the idealism that movement rejects. It was built by the free software movement, so it is the
free software community. If you help us, please keep in mind that what you're helping is the free software movement.
ESR would similarly miscredit the open source movement when he referred to a number of programs as "open-source" projects even though they were written before that movement existed:
[...] Many other open-source projects of the order of complexity of the early Linux kernel predated it; the BSD Unixes, for example, or the Emacs editor. [...]
Maybe the authors of the various BSD OSes and the authors of the Linux kernal don't mind being lumped in with that movement, but ESR also includes Emacs which was co-written by RMS, founder of the free software movement. Emacs was most certainly not written with the open source movement in mind nor to benefit those ideals. Emacs was written to benefit the free software movement. RMS has repeatedly stated how he does not want to be lumped in with the open source movement. The FSF provides a concise and informative description of the differences between the two movements which includes RMS asking the reader to know enough about the movements to distinguish between their philosophies.
So what did the open source movement do? The Open Source Initiative placed the GPL on a list of approved licenses. Open source advocates have contributed to practical projects and endorsed the GPL. I'm sure the free software advocates have no issue with endorsing the GPL and increasing its use. But the reason this license protects ones freedoms to share and modify software so well is not due to anything anyone at the OSI or the open source movement has done. Thus it is not fair for that movement to receive credit for the GPL.
Free Software and Open Source geeks don't need to hold conferences, or have an agenda set by some cabal from above -- they do, quite simply, what they want, and that self-centered view has given us Linux, GNU, KDE, GNOME, and other great pieces of software. Why attempt to change that with some yearly "conference" and excercise in self-aggrandizement for a mish-mash of genuine techies and blogging "celebrities"?
For free software advocates this is easy to answer: if you don't teach people to value software freedom, people will trade it away. We wouldn't have the free software community if it weren't for people doing the work of writing the software, but for some time the community has been expanding faster than we can teach people what makes this community so interesting; faster than we can teach the newcomers why we need to defend our freedom to share and modify software. Conferences help with this because people listen to interesting talks and get to ask questions they might not think to ask in e-mail.
Not everyone will give that perspective on the issue (Eben Moglen probably will) but since they don't all share the same philosophy, one would expect there to be differences (your text doesn't clearly indicate that you understand the differences between the two movements). I've not seen any free software conference that had to do with celebrity creation or self-aggrandizement. I've seen genuine opportunities for learning and sharing. Very interesting conversations are started at these conventions and they always go beyond the conference rooms.
Perhaps most importantly, conferences give the participants a chance to politically mobilize one another by talking face-to-face. The free software community is far less organized than it should be (particularly in the USA) about signficant threats including software patents. My experience with electoral politics (trying to get a local man on the ballot for Congress and then trying to get people to vote for him) tells me that face-to-face interaction is far more likely to get results than sending e-mail or trying to get someone to visit your blog. Electronic communication is very easily ignored.
This conference is not just a free software conference, which is good. It places free software in a larger more significant context which includes media reform. This will help educate free software people on other related issues and give free software enthusiasts a chance to help others learn about our community.
We can't judge a company by only one of the things it does. MacOS X is not licensed under a license approved by the Open Source Initiative. Parts of that operating system are proprietary. Darwin may entirely be licensed under an open source license, but the convenience and features people associate with MacOS X are not found in Darwin.
Furthermore, it's no accident that Apple has "embraced open source" because the open source movement's philosophy and criteria for license acceptance was crafted to cater to business.
tbray writes "They just had this huge OSS conference in Brazil. One good write-up by Simon Phipps is here. And hey, down there, OSS and Java play nice together."
No, they just had this huge free software conference in Brazil. Even robotic translation software gets this right. Lots of people around the world understand free software as being distinct from "open source software" (OSS). Not everyone is so eager to back a movement which caters to the percieved needs of businesses.
If I do that I am still a subordinate to Apple's format and their non-free software. I'd rather spend my money on a machine that runs on free software and directly supports the formats that let me keep my freedom.
Because there is no quality loss in converting between Apple Lossless and flac, it really doesn't matter that iPods don't support flac.
Software freedom matters. Apple has their customer's money and they deliver increased dependence in exchange. That matters. I don't mind paying for things, but I do mind buying into a monopoly. FLAC files give me software freedom because I can make them and play them on my free software computers. I can't say the same for non-free formats like Apple's lossless format.
Accessibility support interoperating seamlessly with
Web, email, office applications, and other GUI toolkits.
Does this mean I'll be able to search inside OpenOffice.org and Abiword documents for textual content through the Nautilus file finder? This would be very nice. A friend recently switched to using RTF documents so he could do this (OO.org documents are compressed and not easily searched from the Nautilus search panel).
Mozilla ships the Firefox browser, which has similar goals to
GNOME's Epiphany browser. We would like to work with the
Mozilla foundation to settle on a common direction for the web
browser.
I like how integrated Epiphany is into the GNOME functionality and how easy Epiphany is to use. I would not expect Mozilla Firefox to be so integrated into any desktop because it would decrease portability.
MacOS X's packages leave much to be desired.
on
The GNOME Roadmap
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Do it in "bundles" like OS X, where applications install to folders in an Applications directory, and you can remove the program just by dragging the folder to the trash.
Even on MacOS X that's not true. NeXTSTEP had a far more functional Installer.app which would install, uninstall, and archive packages based on the bill of materials (essentially a list of files that belonged to the package) and this was more useful than the current MacOS X strategy (except that the NS Installer didn't handle conflicts at all).
On MacOS X you can't be sure that a package's content are only in the.app directory because some apps are installed with an installer program that does who-knows-what to your system. Programs that come with the OS are not always desired and don't come with uninstallers (how does one properly uninstall Microsoft Internet Explorer and be sure that all of its parts are gone; how can we know all the parts are in the.app folder? Why can't the installer let you tell it what not to install if you are reinstalling the OS and you know you don't want some program?). Many MacOS X users commonly run their machines as administrative users where they have the ability to write to system directories. Therefore it's possible for a program to see that some file isn't installed somewhere else (like a system dir) and then place a file there. Also the.app directory grants virtually no dependency tracking (modulo that which is built into an application). If program A depends on program B and B is removed, there ought to be a complaint and some kind of extra effort required to break program A but none will occur. As a result, programmers are implicitly urged to not reuse code in this way.
Then there's the inconsistent uninstall procedure -- uninstalling the developer packages appears to have somehow messed up a friend's ability to use Software Update on his iBook running MacOS X. He was lucky there happened to be a Perl script to do this job in the first place -- the developer packages install a lot of stuff in a lot of different places. Software Update complained of a permissions error on a/tmp subdir it was trying to write to. A reinstall of the OS fixed this (and also forced making a backup of personal data which was needed anyhow, so this wasn't a complete waste of time) but it sure seemed like overkill. Depending on each program to supply its own uninstall seems problematic and unnecessary particularly when you have the installer "receipt" which lists what files belong to which package and you could let packagers run a pre- and post-uninstall script to do things that aren't strictly file-based.
Making all of this worse is that so many programs on MacOS X are non-free software; inspecting the program's source code to see what the program really does is not possible. In the end, I think Apple sacrificed a lot for perceived simplicity that ended up not being so simple after all. I think MacOS X has some important user interface improvements other systems would be wise to build upon, but this way of doing package management is not one of them.
As for making a printer (and, for that matter, a scanner) work, I prefer the approach I've used in Fedora Core GNU/Linux: plug in the USB printer and run the printer manager program wizard. The wizard could be improved to automatically sense the new printer and configure itself (or the desktop could do this), but no additional software was needed. Scanning was even easier for me with my Epson scanner -- plug in the USB scanner, start the scanner program, scan. OS X required additional non-free software to do both of these tasks and that means another dependency I have no ability to share, modify, or inspect. I'm not willing to give up my software freedom for user interface enhancements and I don't think I should have to. Looking at how things used to be, history suggests I don't have to either.
IBM, the corporation which holds the most patents, never wants to go to court. In "Think" magazine, an IBM rep said that they get 10X more value from their patents by cross-licensing than from license fees. Since lawsuits (even cases they win) represent a loss of money and time (time spent suing is time not spent filing more patent applications), I think the cross-licensing aspect is quite important.
I use an ATI Radeon 9000 and I have yet to have problems or difficulties with the card. It was plug and play for Fedora Core 1 and 2 and this card performs well for the 3D games I occasionally play (bzflag, armagetron, neverball, and the miniature golf game based on neverball code the name of which I have forgotten because I don't have it installed yet).
The Radeon 9000 AGP card is fairly inexpensive too ($30-$40).
Use "in your own code". That doesn't suggest runtime to me, but maybe you regularly include running binaries in your code?
One of the biggest disputes concerning GNU GPL compliance has to do with binaries that are uploaded to equipment (sometimes called firmware) and binaries that are executed or run on the computer as drivers. Sometimes the complete corresponding source code is not supplied thus creating a situation where the complete GPL-covered work becomes non-distributable because one cannot comply with all of the requirements in the GPL. Part of the discussion concerns what is sometimes called "glue code". Since RMS is co-author of the GPL, it helps to read what he says on the matter. From a recent post he made to Debian-legal:
The idea that "glue code" makes it ok to combine GPL-covered code with
non-free code has no basis in the GPL. The GPL applies to the entire
combination of code that is combined into a larger program. If a.o is
under the GPL and talks to b.o which talks to c.o, the GPL covers all
three files, if all three are combined as one program.
Linus [Torvalds] has implicitly and sometimes explicitly given permission for
some kinds of non-free dynamically loaded modules; perhaps the concept
of "glue code" is relevant in terms of the permission he has given.
I'm not the one to ask about that kind of issue.
Provided under the same terms "to end users". That suggests he's talking about programs that have been distributed to me.
Then you would probably not be able to pass the GNU GPL quiz or be a very good GPL compliance person. Programmers are also end users of programs, and yet programmer employees of the same organization can share GPL-covered code amongst themselves without their sharing qualifying as a distributed copy the covered work. Hubbard's essay contains too brief a summary of the GPL and his lack of warning to get lawyers to review the licenses businesses like (the non-copylefted free software licenses) is also unwise and telling. Those licenses do nothing to grant you (the ostensible open source advocate who is willing to give your time and expertise to businesses at no charge) a license to deal in any patents that cover the algorithms you might need to do the work. By the way, I passed the aforementioned quiz with a perfect score.
I fully understand that this article is coming from an open source advocate and therefore it will reflect that movement's philosophy. The same thing could be said of Mark Webbink's article about licensing and much (if not all of) ESR's articles. But I don't think that means there is license to misstate history. Hubbard notes:
The Free Software Foundation launched the GNU project in 1984 with the initial aim of creating a complete operating system environment (the GNU system). It may not have succeeded in creating a mainstream operating system, but it did create some excellent tools along the way. Among these are the Emacs editor, the GCC (GNU C Compiler), and the GDB (GNU Debugger). [...]
A relatively minor correction: the GNU project began before the Free Software Foundation. Therefore the FSF did not launch the GNU project. GCC was renamed to mean the GNU Compiler Collection some time ago when it compiled multiple programming languages.
What's more important to note is that GNU was not just at attempt at only making a complete OS, its ultimate goal is to give people software freedom (a concept not discussed in the open source movement because software freedom is perceived to get in the way of speaking to this movement's target audience--businesses). RMS launched GNU with that aim and GNU continues to be developed with that aim today. Understanding this focus will pay off in Hubbard's next paragraph.
GNU is not properly discussed in the past tense just as it is inappropriate to speak in the past tense about various BSD systems (despite the running gag here on Slashdot that BSD is dying); all of these systems and others based on them continue to be developed.
The greatest caveat to using software from the GNU project is probably its licensing terms. GNU software is released predominately under the GPL (GNU General Public License), with some of its software released under the less-restrictive but still formidable LGPL (GNU Lesser General Public License). Anyone interested in incorporating GPL- or LGPL-licensed software in their own products should certainly read the section on evaluating licenses in this article.
Here we get a clear indication that this article is chiefly aimed at managers who want their businesses to be treated as charities. The GNU project's aim to deliver software freedom would be hindered if that freedom could be taken away in derivative works. So the chief license of the GNU project (and the entire free software community) requires that all the power of the license be granted to licensees.
Later we'll see that the most agreeable licenses are the non-copylefted licenses (forgive me for using free software terminology here but the open source movement doesn't differentiate on the basis of freedom preservation and as Webbink's intellectually dishonest essay illustrates, this is a useful distinction): most notably the MIT X11 license and the new BSD license. It's key to remember that this essay is not about businesses licensing their programs under the new BSD or MIT X11 license; it's about what licenses to look for in other people's work that allow businesses to build on what they have done and exclusively control the derivative program. Given this, it's odd that these licenses are championed for their ability to let businesses sublicense derivative works and yet (in the last part of the essay) businesses are warned not to "establish a reputation, either fairly or unfairly, as a "taker" who has no interest in giving something back".
In the second section, Hubbard summarizes the GNU GPL:
GPL. You are allowed to use GPL'd software in your own code as long as your own code is also licensed under the GPL and provided under the same terms (basically free of charge and in source form) to end users.
Slashdot Mirror
One would hope this is obvious -- not doing business with organizations that don't treat you well -- but I'm pleasantly surprised to see someone else echoing this concern.
I have an Epson Perfection 1260 and I've found that they are plug and play with Fedora Core GNU/Linux 1 and 2. I imagine any other free software OS will work well too. The only problems with this scanner:
I have had almost the opposite experience with a Brother HL-1240N (a "network" laser printer; the printer can be connected via ethernet in addition to parallel port and/or USB). I chose to use the ethernet option because that makes the printer available to my entire network without the need for a host computer. I might have chosen differently if I cared more about spooling.
Microsoft Windows 2000 had a lot of problems with the supplied drivers and I had I not used the printer's native ability to connect to the network via ethernet, I never would have gotten it working through Microsoft Windows. On a slight tangent: I don't think network printing is something most home users care about. ESR tried to make a similar point to yours in a complaint about the complexity of printing under GNU/Linux (using Fedora Core, if I recall correctly), but his fictional novice home user "Aunt Tillie" was trying to set up a network printer and that's where I knew he was doing something no ordinary home user would do. I don't doubt that network printing is valuable or that it should be easier, I doubt that most home users care about the functionality.
Getting back to my story, using the same printer (still on the ethernet interface) with CUPS in Fedora Core 1 and 2 is quite easy. Using my other printer, a color Epson inkjet connected locally via the parallel port, was even easier under Fedora Core 1 and 2. There were some silly prompts (I had to pick a driver even though the print panel knew the make and model of the printer by querying the printer), but it works.
The three improvements I would suggest are:
1. Printing should work from all applications all the time. For some reason, printing the same JPEG file from some programs fails. Worse yet, printing from different apps fails differently depending on the program (sometimes I get a text dump of PS output, sometimes I get jibberish). I don't know enough about how printing works on GNU/Linux to better assess the problem.
2. Most of ESR's suggestions are apropos -- the printer setup should be minimal, the LAN should be searched for printers, and if I connect a printer whose make and model can be discovered automatically, that should be enough to get going with the printer.
3. Let users change the resolution of their printing without needing the root password. I can't make my Epson inkjet print in its high resolution mode without changing the system-wide printer definition to high-res. But doing so means all users by default print in the slow high-res mode. I only want to change modes for a particular user's default and sometimes for one particular job.
What makes all of this worse for most users is how difficult it is to know who to talk to on this topic -- are feature ideas welcome? If so, where should they be sent? If not, is that because someone is waiting to be hired to develop this code? If so, whom should one hire?
Good question -- and is this spam filter as easy to use as Mozilla Mail or Thunderbird's spam filtering?
I appreciate the programmatic advantages of modular code and programs doing one thing and doing them well, but I also appreciate integration (or even the appearance of integration) that makes it trivially easy to use advanced functionality. I've been programming and using computers for decades. As I get older and less tolerant of bad user interfaces, I place more importance on the latter.
Everybody should care because the DMCA is a very effective weapon to stop people from being able to express themselves freely. Just ask Dmitry Sklyarov or revisit the article describing how easy it was to illustrate how much power ISPs posess to stifle legal copying. Your position as stated takes an entirely too narrow view on things; that because one instance eventually did not result in killing a project, your view suggests that we can afford to dismiss the situtation. There is a larger more significant harm going on here that needs to be properly acknowledged and the public needs to be educated on what harm has occurred because of the DMCA.
This makes no sense to me. If all the software SUSE distributes on this ISO is licensed under the GNU GPL (or if it is all licensed under any set of free software licenses), anyone should be able to distribute copies for profit. One of the criteria for a license to qualify as a free software license is that it must allow commercial distribution.
Archiving the files together in a package makes it easy for people to share the two together. It's a good idea to package a copy of the applicable license so recipients know what their rights are. Websites come and go, but a text file is easy to read anywhere and very small compared to the size of the movie.
I was thinking a Theora+Vorbis encoding would be interesting to compare with (now that Theora I is finalized, it's safe to encode movies in it). But I don't have the video file from which the WMV was made, and transcoding won't show off Theora or Vorbis. Perhaps someone who made the movie will read this and make a Theora+Vorbis encoding (it would be even nicer if it were licensed under a Creative Commons license and packaged with a copy of the applicable license so we know we can legally share it with our friends).
Because the open source movement pursues popularity and taking credit for the works of others is a convenient way to attain that goal without having to do the hard work of actually writing the licenses and defining the concepts that helped define and build our now 20-year-old community. Consider the GNU General Public License which was written well before the Open Source Initiative began and speaks of a different philosophy than that which the open source movement speaks to. The OSI defined the terms of license acceptance such that they could add the GPL to their approved license list. The Free Software Foundation wrote the license and started the free software community about 2 decades ago.
Mark Webbink, counsel for Red Hat, wrote an essay on licenses used in the open source movement. Webbink, like Red Hat, is a proponent of "open source". In this essay Webbink goes to some effort to reinvent the concept of copyleft without once calling it by that name. He obviously finds value in breaking up licenses into groups along those that are copylefted and those that are not, but nowhere is any credit given to the people that invented this concept and assigned that name to it about 20 years before his essay came out.
Eric Raymond responded to AdTI's error-riddled argument about the Linux kernal. Raymond cited a number of "open-source projects" to bolster his argument, unfortunately one of them was Emacs co-written by founder of the free software movement -- Richard Stallman -- years before the OSI existed. I've written here about this before, so I won't repeat the details. It's safe to assume that RMS does not do any of his work for the benefit of the open source movement.
He, and others (myself included), are grateful that open source proponents do so much work helping to bring users to software freedom by increasing the use of free software licenses (chiefly the GNU GPL). But there's no honor in taking credit for someone else's work. And there's no sense in conflating placing a license on a list of approved licenses with writing a license and creating a community. Building on the work of others is not the same as appropriating it. Given the number of times I've seen "free software" mistranslated or inaccurately conveyed as "open source", particularly when describing the endeavors of those outside the US, I would not be surprised if the Reuters article was completely wrong in its summary (as well as its statement about what "open source" is, which has been partially debunked elsewhere in this thread). Software freedom is something worth pursuing, helping business more efficiently find and use unpaid labor is not something many are eager to help with doing.
Both stories come from the directors who spoke after their respective movie was shown at the Roger Ebert Overlooked Film Festival (known better to Champaign and Urbana, Illinois locals as "Ebertfest").
* Bernard Rose, director of "Paperhouse", had to (and I'm using the term correctly here) steal the reels to this movie after it was shown at Ebertfest a couple of years ago. Sony Classics was unwilling to distribute the movie in formats for home video and Rose wanted more people to see the movie. So he took the reels after it was shown in the Virginia Theatre (a theatre in Champaign, Illinois where the Ebertfest movies are shown).
* Jonathan Caouette directed "Tarnation" which was made on his computer for what is described as "an initial cost of $187" by the Ebertfest literature. Caouette later discovered that clearing the rights for the snippets of other movies used in Tarnation would cost roughly half a million dollars.
I think it certainly would -- I believe no computer program has ever entered the public domain through an expiring copyright but a lot of computer programs are completely unavailable to us today because the only copies of them are lost or rare and in the hands of people who (for various reasons) don't want to share (Marble Madness 2, I'm told, is an example of the latter). The market for computer software is remarkably short, far shorter than their copyright. Even with all the impressive work MAME's programmer's have done, there are still plenty of programs I played in the arcades which are not emulated (perhaps because nobody has found or dumped the ROM for them yet).
Check out News from Neptune -- an hour-long weekly news and commentary show from WEFT 90.1 FM. The News from Neptune site is being worked on (one of the co-host bios has not yet been written) but there are shows up under a Creative Commons license in DRM-free Ogg Vorbis and Speex format (current show in Ogg Vorbis, archive shows in Speex). Download, share, and enjoy. I helped put the show online and I host another show at the same station.
Everything has political impact, certainly choosing a license or the background of an important license such as the GNU GPL. I hope your sarcasm won't get in the way of appreciating the value of understanding recent history for what actually happened instead of what some would like to recast it to be.
I agree that the open source movement pitches unpaid labor to businesses but that is part of their philosophy.
The GNU General Public License (GPL) was written years before there was an "open source" movement. Linking together the open source movement with the GPL misstates history and authorship. The language used in the GPL and the freedoms it talks about are not part of the philosophy of the open source movement, they are part of the free software movement which created the free software community we still enjoy today 20 years later. The real author of the GPL is the FSF (most notably, Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen). In a post to the GCC mailing list responding to someone who wanted to help the "open source community", RMS said
ESR would similarly miscredit the open source movement when he referred to a number of programs as "open-source" projects even though they were written before that movement existed:
Maybe the authors of the various BSD OSes and the authors of the Linux kernal don't mind being lumped in with that movement, but ESR also includes Emacs which was co-written by RMS, founder of the free software movement. Emacs was most certainly not written with the open source movement in mind nor to benefit those ideals. Emacs was written to benefit the free software movement. RMS has repeatedly stated how he does not want to be lumped in with the open source movement. The FSF provides a concise and informative description of the differences between the two movements which includes RMS asking the reader to know enough about the movements to distinguish between their philosophies.
So what did the open source movement do? The Open Source Initiative placed the GPL on a list of approved licenses. Open source advocates have contributed to practical projects and endorsed the GPL. I'm sure the free software advocates have no issue with endorsing the GPL and increasing its use. But the reason this license protects ones freedoms to share and modify software so well is not due to anything anyone at the OSI or the open source movement has done. Thus it is not fair for that movement to receive credit for the GPL.
For free software advocates this is easy to answer: if you don't teach people to value software freedom, people will trade it away. We wouldn't have the free software community if it weren't for people doing the work of writing the software, but for some time the community has been expanding faster than we can teach people what makes this community so interesting; faster than we can teach the newcomers why we need to defend our freedom to share and modify software. Conferences help with this because people listen to interesting talks and get to ask questions they might not think to ask in e-mail.
Not everyone will give that perspective on the issue (Eben Moglen probably will) but since they don't all share the same philosophy, one would expect there to be differences (your text doesn't clearly indicate that you understand the differences between the two movements). I've not seen any free software conference that had to do with celebrity creation or self-aggrandizement. I've seen genuine opportunities for learning and sharing. Very interesting conversations are started at these conventions and they always go beyond the conference rooms.
Perhaps most importantly, conferences give the participants a chance to politically mobilize one another by talking face-to-face. The free software community is far less organized than it should be (particularly in the USA) about signficant threats including software patents. My experience with electoral politics (trying to get a local man on the ballot for Congress and then trying to get people to vote for him) tells me that face-to-face interaction is far more likely to get results than sending e-mail or trying to get someone to visit your blog. Electronic communication is very easily ignored.
This conference is not just a free software conference, which is good. It places free software in a larger more significant context which includes media reform. This will help educate free software people on other related issues and give free software enthusiasts a chance to help others learn about our community.
We can't judge a company by only one of the things it does. MacOS X is not licensed under a license approved by the Open Source Initiative. Parts of that operating system are proprietary. Darwin may entirely be licensed under an open source license, but the convenience and features people associate with MacOS X are not found in Darwin.
Furthermore, it's no accident that Apple has "embraced open source" because the open source movement's philosophy and criteria for license acceptance was crafted to cater to business.
No, they just had this huge free software conference in Brazil. Even robotic translation software gets this right. Lots of people around the world understand free software as being distinct from "open source software" (OSS). Not everyone is so eager to back a movement which caters to the percieved needs of businesses.
If I do that I am still a subordinate to Apple's format and their non-free software. I'd rather spend my money on a machine that runs on free software and directly supports the formats that let me keep my freedom.
Software freedom matters. Apple has their customer's money and they deliver increased dependence in exchange. That matters. I don't mind paying for things, but I do mind buying into a monopoly. FLAC files give me software freedom because I can make them and play them on my free software computers. I can't say the same for non-free formats like Apple's lossless format.
From the roadmap post:
Does this mean I'll be able to search inside OpenOffice.org and Abiword documents for textual content through the Nautilus file finder? This would be very nice. A friend recently switched to using RTF documents so he could do this (OO.org documents are compressed and not easily searched from the Nautilus search panel).
I like how integrated Epiphany is into the GNOME functionality and how easy Epiphany is to use. I would not expect Mozilla Firefox to be so integrated into any desktop because it would decrease portability.
Is this going to be based on Coaster?
Even on MacOS X that's not true. NeXTSTEP had a far more functional Installer.app which would install, uninstall, and archive packages based on the bill of materials (essentially a list of files that belonged to the package) and this was more useful than the current MacOS X strategy (except that the NS Installer didn't handle conflicts at all).
On MacOS X you can't be sure that a package's content are only in the .app directory because some apps are installed with an installer program that does who-knows-what to your system. Programs that come with the OS are not always desired and don't come with uninstallers (how does one properly uninstall Microsoft Internet Explorer and be sure that all of its parts are gone; how can we know all the parts are in the .app folder? Why can't the installer let you tell it what not to install if you are reinstalling the OS and you know you don't want some program?). Many MacOS X users commonly run their machines as administrative users where they have the ability to write to system directories. Therefore it's possible for a program to see that some file isn't installed somewhere else (like a system dir) and then place a file there. Also the .app directory grants virtually no dependency tracking (modulo that which is built into an application). If program A depends on program B and B is removed, there ought to be a complaint and some kind of extra effort required to break program A but none will occur. As a result, programmers are implicitly urged to not reuse code in this way.
Then there's the inconsistent uninstall procedure -- uninstalling the developer packages appears to have somehow messed up a friend's ability to use Software Update on his iBook running MacOS X. He was lucky there happened to be a Perl script to do this job in the first place -- the developer packages install a lot of stuff in a lot of different places. Software Update complained of a permissions error on a /tmp subdir it was trying to write to. A reinstall of the OS fixed this (and also forced making a backup of personal data which was needed anyhow, so this wasn't a complete waste of time) but it sure seemed like overkill. Depending on each program to supply its own uninstall seems problematic and unnecessary particularly when you have the installer "receipt" which lists what files belong to which package and you could let packagers run a pre- and post-uninstall script to do things that aren't strictly file-based.
Making all of this worse is that so many programs on MacOS X are non-free software; inspecting the program's source code to see what the program really does is not possible. In the end, I think Apple sacrificed a lot for perceived simplicity that ended up not being so simple after all. I think MacOS X has some important user interface improvements other systems would be wise to build upon, but this way of doing package management is not one of them.
As for making a printer (and, for that matter, a scanner) work, I prefer the approach I've used in Fedora Core GNU/Linux: plug in the USB printer and run the printer manager program wizard. The wizard could be improved to automatically sense the new printer and configure itself (or the desktop could do this), but no additional software was needed. Scanning was even easier for me with my Epson scanner -- plug in the USB scanner, start the scanner program, scan. OS X required additional non-free software to do both of these tasks and that means another dependency I have no ability to share, modify, or inspect. I'm not willing to give up my software freedom for user interface enhancements and I don't think I should have to. Looking at how things used to be, history suggests I don't have to either.
IBM, the corporation which holds the most patents, never wants to go to court. In "Think" magazine, an IBM rep said that they get 10X more value from their patents by cross-licensing than from license fees. Since lawsuits (even cases they win) represent a loss of money and time (time spent suing is time not spent filing more patent applications), I think the cross-licensing aspect is quite important.
I use an ATI Radeon 9000 and I have yet to have problems or difficulties with the card. It was plug and play for Fedora Core 1 and 2 and this card performs well for the 3D games I occasionally play (bzflag, armagetron, neverball, and the miniature golf game based on neverball code the name of which I have forgotten because I don't have it installed yet).
The Radeon 9000 AGP card is fairly inexpensive too ($30-$40).
One of the biggest disputes concerning GNU GPL compliance has to do with binaries that are uploaded to equipment (sometimes called firmware) and binaries that are executed or run on the computer as drivers. Sometimes the complete corresponding source code is not supplied thus creating a situation where the complete GPL-covered work becomes non-distributable because one cannot comply with all of the requirements in the GPL. Part of the discussion concerns what is sometimes called "glue code". Since RMS is co-author of the GPL, it helps to read what he says on the matter. From a recent post he made to Debian-legal:
Then you would probably not be able to pass the GNU GPL quiz or be a very good GPL compliance person. Programmers are also end users of programs, and yet programmer employees of the same organization can share GPL-covered code amongst themselves without their sharing qualifying as a distributed copy the covered work. Hubbard's essay contains too brief a summary of the GPL and his lack of warning to get lawyers to review the licenses businesses like (the non-copylefted free software licenses) is also unwise and telling. Those licenses do nothing to grant you (the ostensible open source advocate who is willing to give your time and expertise to businesses at no charge) a license to deal in any patents that cover the algorithms you might need to do the work. By the way, I passed the aforementioned quiz with a perfect score.
I fully understand that this article is coming from an open source advocate and therefore it will reflect that movement's philosophy. The same thing could be said of Mark Webbink's article about licensing and much (if not all of) ESR's articles. But I don't think that means there is license to misstate history. Hubbard notes:
A relatively minor correction: the GNU project began before the Free Software Foundation. Therefore the FSF did not launch the GNU project. GCC was renamed to mean the GNU Compiler Collection some time ago when it compiled multiple programming languages.
What's more important to note is that GNU was not just at attempt at only making a complete OS, its ultimate goal is to give people software freedom (a concept not discussed in the open source movement because software freedom is perceived to get in the way of speaking to this movement's target audience--businesses). RMS launched GNU with that aim and GNU continues to be developed with that aim today. Understanding this focus will pay off in Hubbard's next paragraph.
GNU is not properly discussed in the past tense just as it is inappropriate to speak in the past tense about various BSD systems (despite the running gag here on Slashdot that BSD is dying); all of these systems and others based on them continue to be developed.
Here we get a clear indication that this article is chiefly aimed at managers who want their businesses to be treated as charities. The GNU project's aim to deliver software freedom would be hindered if that freedom could be taken away in derivative works. So the chief license of the GNU project (and the entire free software community) requires that all the power of the license be granted to licensees.
Later we'll see that the most agreeable licenses are the non-copylefted licenses (forgive me for using free software terminology here but the open source movement doesn't differentiate on the basis of freedom preservation and as Webbink's intellectually dishonest essay illustrates, this is a useful distinction): most notably the MIT X11 license and the new BSD license. It's key to remember that this essay is not about businesses licensing their programs under the new BSD or MIT X11 license; it's about what licenses to look for in other people's work that allow businesses to build on what they have done and exclusively control the derivative program. Given this, it's odd that these licenses are championed for their ability to let businesses sublicense derivative works and yet (in the last part of the essay) businesses are warned not to "establish a reputation, either fairly or unfairly, as a "taker" who has no interest in giving something back".
In the second section, Hubbard summarizes the GNU GPL:
"Use" is a tricky word because it