They also have fewer titles to work with, have complete source code, and have taken years longer to produce what is probably less portable code. But what's interesting is not these petty technical issues, it's what effect this software has on society. Neither MAME nor Midway's software are free software. You could help make MAME become free software or find a free software emulator and work on that. This way we could have a much improved state of affairs.
I don't know who's opinion you're attempting to summarize, but it certainly isn't mine. I look at the Midway Arcade Treasures collection as something the community did for itself long before Midway decided it would be a good idea to release this collection (or any of their other similar collections). We weren't able to get these works for many years and I don't endorse allowing the term of copyright to stay overlong or stop work to reduce it because a handful of these works come onto the market.
All copyrighted works should enter the PD without exception and in far fewer years because copyright is about incentivizing authors and publishers to publish more work not granting a perpetual ability to exclude. By the way, Dover press might differ with you about the ability to sell copies of works in the PD (virtually every publisher worth their salt has a classics line with many PD works). We need to recognize that the new comes from the old and we are losing our ability to deal in our own culture when we allow everlasting copyright (whether outright or on the installment plan). Far too much attention is paid to the proprietors looking for government to relieve them of what US copyright was meant to achieve. Far too little attention is paid to what happens when we endlessly indulge commercial interests. I encourage you to compare Mark Twain and J.D. Salinger in terms of published work--one had to publish to keep the money coming in, the other wrote a hit book and has been coasting on that for decades. The US is very grateful that Twain kept writing (Twain is often referred to as America's best writer), but he wouldn't have kept writing if he had a term of copyright that we do now.
MAME has raised the bar for this kind of work and put the lie to these proprietors who are coming along years after the fact doing what MAME has done in a far more portable fashion. This kind of work is a perfect reason to support The Public Domain Enhancement Act--we already know that the public can and will provide for themselves in this space. We don't need the proprietors to do the archiving and distribution work as we once did.
I've experienced sound problems with two mainboards, only one of which I know the make and model. One was an old AMD K6-based eMachines mini-tower. Installing Red Hat 9 GNU/Linux on it produced no working sound until I ran the sound configure application for old sound hardware. I was able to get the sound working by trying a variety of configurations with that application. The second was far more trivial problem--an Asus A7V8X-X mainboard with a misstamped metal backplate that indicated what port served what function. The line-level audio out was not where the metal plate said it was, so some time was lost trying to get sound to come out of the mic-level audio input jack. Once I thought to experiment and place the 1/8" speaker plug in another port and heard my test signal I knew what had happened.
However there are still mixing problems--on Fedora Core 1 GNU/Linux I can't get many applications to simultaneously play their audio. The OS stays up and running but some applications can't be heard at the same time as others.
If I run bzflag, for instance, I know I won't hear audio from GAIM. XMMS seems particularly uncooperative with other applications preventing me from hearing KPFA while also hearing sounds from Totem. Sometimes Tux Racer (the version that ships with FC1) will play its theme song for a minute or two and then not play any other audio. Quitting Tux Racer becomes impossible after the sound dies unless I kill -9 the program.
I don't have a complete list of applications that conflict in this way and I'm guessing that compiling such a list would not reveal the real problem. Obviously, I'd like to be able to run any number of programs and hear all their sounds simultaneously.
Will switching to a Linux version 2.6 kernal-based distribution (like Fedora Core 2 when it comes out later this year) help solve the sound mixing problems I've had?
I don't see this as a showstopper problem, just a hurdle that can be overcome with time, effort, and sharing information. I've experienced this problem with other OSes (even proprietary ones) so I'd hardly say this is something to fret about. Just something I'd like to better understand and ultimately fix.
Sadly, this is so; another example is lossy audio formats: Slashdotters are quite interested in MP3s even while they chat up the technological superiority of Ogg Vorbis. It's a popularity chase that grabs the attentions of many here, not that of ethics (the grounds of the free software movement--how should we treat other people) or even consistency on technical grounds (picking the best tool for the job as I've read so many say here as they champion the open source movement's message).
Ironically, this tracking ability could be something that spurs city, state, and the federal government to municipalize wireless bandwidth. A series of virtually disposable RFID readers inside lightpoles wirelessly transmitting data to some data collection agency which sells data subsetting service could be a big reason to get your town to become wireless on the taxpayer's dime. Not only would this drastically reduce privacy for most citizens, the same Internet connection could be shared by people who have portable computers (checking e-mail, sports scores, watching movies in the park, etc.).
I think this thread exemplifies the reason why the FSF asks people to consider giving GNU a share of the credit (not just the Linux kernal) and encourage people to teach those who join our community to value software freedom.
Having a choice in programs is a far weaker criteria than having freedom. One can have two proprietary programs to choose from (XNews and Microsoft Outlook, for news reading) and choice is satisfied. More choices might be preferable, but one can't complain that there are no choices available. So if we focus on software choice we're less likely to think anything is wrong so long as proprietors serve our needs. Software freedom, on the other hand, remains unsatisfied with these two choices. It isn't until one introduces free software like Pan, slrn, and Mozilla that one can begin to satisfy the desire to share and modify software and build self-sufficient communities around these freedoms. We can provide choice for ourselves if we have the freedom to do so.
One of the most underrated FSF essays I've read is the one describing the difference between the free software and open source movements. I highly suggest reading it, whether one is familiar with these movements or not. The story it retells about what happens when we dismiss software freedom and accept mere openness (what happened at the "Open Source Developers Day" meeting in August 1998) is instructive and the logic about why we should value software freedom (in the section called "Fear of Freedom") is compelling.
Perhaps you should become more familiar with what RMS says and realize that the major underlying justification of the free software movement is its ethical basis; the main questions for a social movement (such as the free software movement) address what kind of world we want to live in and how we should treat each other. I can think of no way to answer that question that forgoes an examination of one's ethics.
This is not "blather" as you so discourteously put it, nor is your response insightful (as some moderators have apparently chosen to say). Questions of ethics are some of the most important questions in society. I think your objection to the matter says more about you than about RMS or his way of conveying the importance of software freedom.
In a nutshell, some people are willing to go the extra mile for software freedom. I'm one of those people. I've paid for free software before and I'll do it again. I dig it, I thoroughly enjoy being a part of the free software community, and I enjoy being able to make copies of free software for my friends and help them get jobs done. All without breaking the law or compromising my values.
ROMs are a great reason to support HR2601 -- the Public Domain Enhancement Act. Copyrighted works that aren't commercially viable stand a chance to enter the public domain after 50 years. If you live in the US, I think you should write you Congressional representatives to co-sponsor this bill.
MacOS X not as easy as advertised, GNU not as hard
on
Making Things Easy Is Hard
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I tried getting my network printer up and running with a friend's MacOS X box and it was nowhere near as easy as some Slashdotters make it seem. I had to know the location of the printer on my LAN (MacOS X did not search my LAN for acceptable printers, nor did it discover that this Brother HL1270N is the only printer on the LAN--two items ESR says would improve the GNOME druid he tried in Fedora Core 1) and I also had to know the make and model of the printer. Nothing was auto-discovered, nothing was automatically configured for me.
Conversely, adding the same printer to my GNU/Linux box was about as easy. No automatic configuration there either, but the GNOME druid guided me through the prompts ESR complained about. Yes, much of what ESR had to say was apropos--this process could be made far better along the lines he discussed, but I did not find MacOS X to be anywhere nearly as easy as even this topic's lead-in would suggest.
Adding my Epson inkjet color printer was a different situation. This job was easy when I connected the printer to the GNU/Linux box via the parallel port. My Fedora Core 1 box saw it, configured it on start up (I believe Kudzu did this and it appears to work), and I was left with a printer I could use right out of the box. So I don't completely understand where the "(Side note: parallel port? What year is it in the Raymond household?)" quip came from--some of the printers on LinuxPrinting.org state that autodetection works with the parallel port, not USB.
It was my experiences with printing under Fedora Core 1 that led me to recommend this distribution to friends (even making duplicate copies of my install discs to give them). So I'm left thinking that we're fortunate to have free software so the community can improve the software that needs improvement and we don't have to wait for someone or some organization to do it for us. I'd happily pay for improved free software if I couldn't do the job myself.
Using one proprietary application to prove another's trustworthiness doesn't strike me as sound reasoning. I think you're still better off with the freedoms of free software.
I don't know what "base" quality means, but you are repeating the self-conflicting philosophy of the open source movement. If we exclude making value judgements on software we can't determine which program is better at doing a particular job, nor can we accomplish the more important task of helping society by identifying software we can share and modify. It's not a question of making decisions absent value judgements, it's a question of deciding what to value.
People are working on improving the quality of software all the time. Every subsequent version of a program is ostensibly better (on some technical ground) than what came before. But we don't have enough people actively teaching newcomers to our community about how the free software community started and why software freedom is important. If users arrived because of the wonderful features that free software offers over a proprietary alternative, they will leave just as quickly when some proprietor outcompetes our offering. What will keep the people in the free software community is to teach them about the freedoms of free software. People can't value what they are unaware of. One must learn about software freedom to "come to value" it.
Something similar can be said for purchasing athletic shoes--if we expect people to reject Nike shoes without teaching them that Nike's shoes are made by workers who receive less than a living wage (woefully inadequate wages, actually) and work under harsh conditions, we won't get what we want. We have to teach people to think about human rights when they shop. We have to teach people that they can't divorce their purchasing power from politics. It would be irrational to expect people to reject Nike shoes without information on how Nike's workers are treated.
At the same time, we have to provide competitive functional software (or, in the shoe corollary, inexpensive high-quality athletic shoes made by well-treated workers). Thankfully, in the software world, this is perhaps more easily done than making shoes because we can find people to work with who can collectively dedicate a lot of time to fixing bugs and adding features.
I don't think most people set out to make shoddy software. But I do think some people set out to make non-free software.
You'll never know if they or any other software proprietor removed the spying software because their software's complete corresponding source code is a secret, all you get is a binary. Tax software doesn't need to be proprietary, people should be willing and able to pay for the guarantee and be able to share and modify the program. If you don't pay someone willing to sell you a correct tax computation guarantee, you would have no recourse if the program messes up your taxes. For a reasonable fee I think most people would be willing to buy the insurance.
Who cares about OpenOffice.org? People who want free software and recognize that software freedom is worth the work of development and the wait (or the cost, if one pays for it). Your post reminds me of one of the big differences between the free software and open source movements--and why the open source movement can be self-defeating at times.
Proprietors can't compete with software freedom; by definition, they cannot supply it. This makes free software superior if you learn to value software freedom (as the free software movement advocates). If you play down software freedom and instead favor technical superiority (as the open source movement teaches), you will face an ironic situation: you will be compelled to use and recommend software that is not "open source".
With time and effort, free software becomes better on a technical scale. So the challenge is to teach people to value software freedom.
For the most part, I have no problem with what these essays say--better user interfaces are needed and so is documentation that ordinary users have a chance of understanding if they ever get around to reading it. But I think one of the conclusions toward the end is remarkably unproductive:
It's been twenty years since the GNU Manifesto and nearly seven since The Cathedral and the Bazaar. I think it's time we stopped congratulating ourselves quite so much on our dedication to freedom [...]
I've never seen people "congratulating [them]selves [...] on their dedication to freedom" on Slashdot or in anything from the open source movement. From both of these groups I've seen calls endorsing non-free software if that software is perceived to get people on with their task, and I've seen much maligning of RMS (usually coming from posters who apparently haven't read or heard what he actually endorses). It's ironic that ESR's self-described rant will only be taken seriously and/or fixed because of software freedom. If this were proprietary software he were complaining about, the most skilled hackers could do nothing but wait for the proprietors to make things better. Fortunately we are dealing with free software. If the people who's feedback he lists really think that the issue of freedom is so important and these problems with CUPS are crucial, they can write the software to fix the interface and improve the documentation, or they can hire someone to do these jobs for them. With a completely free software system you can do that, no matter what part of the system you're dealing with.
This also calls for an unnecessary ordering of attention (first we must stop paying attention to this, then we must start paying attention to this other thing) because there's no reason why we should drop software freedom in exchange for some practical technical advance. It's the open source movement (which ESR and others started over a decade after the free software movement began) that encourages users to dismiss software freedom for a development methodology. There's nothing wrong with having both software freedom and a better UI with applications that figure out your setup so you don't have to.
I appreciate the complaints he's making because I've raised similar ones myself in other forums (unlike him, I have experienced a great deal of trouble with printing with MacOS X and scanning with Microsoft Windows, while printing and scanning with Fedora Core 1 has been plug-and-play for my printer and scanner). I don't want anyone to stop raising issues and writing well-worded complaints (such as ESR's is). At the same time, I see far too little software freedom talk and I don't think we need to stifle freedom talk to get to the heart of the problem on improving UIs and documentation. GNOME hackers had demonstrated their commitment to improving their UI well before ESR's rant was written and it looks like Project Utopia will make things even better.
Microsoft lies by omission the same way Bill Gates did when he recently visited the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign--don't mention software freedom, anytime someone mentions "free software" only talk about price (where proprietary software often fails to compete). I certainly appreciate the opportunity to inspect, share, and modify software to suit my needs. Whether I take advantage of it is up to me. I don't have that option with proprietary software. When you focus on software freedom, you focus on something software proprietors cannot, by definition, compete with.
The Free Software Society at UIUC is currently working to arrange a response talk where issues of software freedom can be addressed. I host "Digital Citizen" on WEFT 90.1 FM every other Wednesday; two weeks ago I had Brad Kuhn, executive director of the FSF, and Chris Foster, founder of the Free Software Society, on my show to respond to Bill Gates' speech in which he took a question from someone asking about the Linux kernal. When I arrange for some web hosting, I'll post a copy of the show and other episodes of the show under a Creative Commons license.
Even on technical features, Microsoft fails to point out that their programs run on all the operating systems (which makes their "networked, highly collaborative world" claim hard to swallow unless you have committed yourself to always using Microsoft Windows for all things). I'm well aware that over 90% of the world's PCs run Microsoft Windows, but as more people hear about Microsoft's illegalities and lenient treatment by the world's governments, as well as all the viruses and trojan horses that spread so quickly via Microsoft programs, I think this will change.
I believe Omni's port updated the FrameMaker that had already been written for NeXTSTEP (and I vaguely recall that FrameMaker shipped with NeXT machines at one time). Omni's work made FrameMaker compile when NeXTSTEP went multiplatform (a "fat" binary had a binary for multiple architectures in it).
The "slap on the wrist" analogy is often used to show that a penalty is too light, but in fact the whole point of a slap on the wrist is to get your attention and change your way of thinking and acting.
According to the article, Microsoft is projecting making $8.6B this quarter and the top fine the EU chooses to stick them with is $3.43B. It's hard for me to believe that this rises to the level of a slap on the wrist; this is something Microsoft could literally write a check for which covers the maximum possible fine then dismiss the matter entirely; call it the cost of doing business. It seems to me that Microsoft's Gutierrez is raising his objection chiefly for show, to give the public the appearance that this fine will "get [their] attention and change [their] way of thinking and acting" (in your words) but we all know that it won't change anything about Microsoft.
I have to wonder, how badly does a corporation have to behave before the public (which ostensibly elects the lawmakers) thinks it's okay to take action against that corporation and actually work to put people in office who will pass reasonable laws? And what, exactly, would be done against that corporation if this were a more democratic decision? Could a corporation do anything to merit being liquidated entirely (a corporate death penalty)? Or disincorporated and have their top 15% wage earners become personally liable for the corporation's fines and losses to investors due to their misbehavior?
So RMS actually thinks he could live off his open source activities if he had to?
No, absolutely not. As he has said many times now, RMS doesn't have anything to do with the open source movement. He even said as much in the transcript I pointed you to before ("I do free software. Open source is a different movement."), he was correcting an introduction that included the same error you made.
But he has already shown that he can and does live off his free software developments. Perhaps you didn't know that the free software community--which RMS founded over a decade before the open source movement began--started with his work on a number of still-popular free software programs including Emacs and GCC.
Of course, they would have been in a pretty pickle if we'd all followed their advice, since they were dependent on us for things like access to a telephone and the occasional hot shower.
I fail to see how this applies to free software (which seems eminently practical) or RMS (who seems incredibly wise, looking back at his fight for software freedom over the past 20 years). I also think there's a serious imbalance of credit being taken for all the problems brought on by large-scale modernization you refer to. Finally, can you point to any evidence where RMS rejects modernization simply because it is available? Even RMS' post about the security system at his old building had to do with being unnecessarily (and, I'm guessing he would argue unethically) pushed into exclusion.
He has all these social theories that he's never had to test in the real world, because he's spent his entire professional career subsisting on grant money.
Actually, RMS said that at one time he made enough money from distributing free software for a fee that he could live on it. He also mentions that he lives inexpensively. So, not only did he test these theories in the real world, he lived on them.
I've
never had a job since quitting MIT in January 1984. So, [in 1985] I was looking for some way I could make money through my work on free software, and therefore I started a free software business. I announced, "Send me $150 dollars, and I'll mail you a tape of Emacs." And the orders began dribbling in. By the middle of the year they were trickling in.
I was getting 8 to 10 orders a month. And, if necessary, I could have lived on just that, because I've always lived cheaply. I live like a student, basically. And I like that, because it means that money is not telling me what to do. I can do what I think is important for me to do. It freed me to do what seemed worth doing. So make a real effort to
avoid getting sucked into all the expensive lifestyle habits of typical Americans. Because if you do that, then people with the money will dictate what you do with your life. You won't be able to do what's really important to you.
He also earned awards which paid well and allowed him to do interesting things with the money. This is a far cry from the description you offer which tries to make it sound like he has no idea what he's talking about.
To this day other organizations have tested these theories in the real world, and now there is an operating system one can run that proves his theories do work in the real world.
I just get very tired of the way the "Free Software" folk insist that they've transcended the evils of software "ownership". Which they've never actually done. Their bills are paid for by revenues from the very businesses they are too pure to work for.
Do you mean businesses like IBM, Red Hat, SUSE, and Novell? I think many people work for those businesses. In what way was has free software not "transcended the evils of software ''ownership''"? The most popular free software license (the GNU General Public License, or GNU GPL) grants us all the freedom to do virtually anything we want to do with the software, certainly the majority of things most hackers want to do most of the time, even though these hackers don't hold the copyright to the program they are improving or sharing.
Dumb licenses might kill Linux before Microsoft does.
Precisely what are you referring to here? It seems to me that the GNU GPL (the license for the Linux kernal) is one of the most impressive licenses out there.
This takes nothing away from what the OpenBSD team is doing--I think their work is great and their license makes that work a genuine contribution to our community. That's why I bought OpenBSD 3.0 and a t-shirt and I don't regret the decision.
I doubt Microsoft can outcompete free software and I think their fight will go to exclusion by patents (which means IBM and perhaps HP are their only competitors). This is why I look forward to seeing clarified patent commons-maintenance language in GPLv3.
I asked multiple questions. I don't understand which question you're responding to nor do I see a specific quote to indicate what was said. It's not reasonable to drop a name someone might recognize and expect them to fill in all the blanks for you.
Comparing anything to perfection is unproductive; it serves to reinforce our biases by presenting us with a false dichotomy (you can have whatever argument is being proposed or you can have perfection, which is never available). Let's look at specific claims.
As much as there are some FSF fans wish that the GPL was the only software license [...]
Please name who these people are and cite the evidence that gives you this impression.
[...] it's not the one-size-fits-all solution for everybody. That's why the LGPL exists. That's why Creative Commons exists. That's why many common open-source programs have forked the GPL to make it their own.
Consider PowerNotebooks.com. I'm using one right now (a PowerPro) and it works well running Fedora Core GNU/Linux. You can get PowerNotebooks to install some GNU/Linux distribution for you or you can get it without an OS and avoid paying the Microsoft tax. I don't work for them or make anything for referrals.
Slashdot Mirror
They also have fewer titles to work with, have complete source code, and have taken years longer to produce what is probably less portable code. But what's interesting is not these petty technical issues, it's what effect this software has on society. Neither MAME nor Midway's software are free software. You could help make MAME become free software or find a free software emulator and work on that. This way we could have a much improved state of affairs.
I don't know who's opinion you're attempting to summarize, but it certainly isn't mine. I look at the Midway Arcade Treasures collection as something the community did for itself long before Midway decided it would be a good idea to release this collection (or any of their other similar collections). We weren't able to get these works for many years and I don't endorse allowing the term of copyright to stay overlong or stop work to reduce it because a handful of these works come onto the market.
All copyrighted works should enter the PD without exception and in far fewer years because copyright is about incentivizing authors and publishers to publish more work not granting a perpetual ability to exclude. By the way, Dover press might differ with you about the ability to sell copies of works in the PD (virtually every publisher worth their salt has a classics line with many PD works). We need to recognize that the new comes from the old and we are losing our ability to deal in our own culture when we allow everlasting copyright (whether outright or on the installment plan). Far too much attention is paid to the proprietors looking for government to relieve them of what US copyright was meant to achieve. Far too little attention is paid to what happens when we endlessly indulge commercial interests. I encourage you to compare Mark Twain and J.D. Salinger in terms of published work--one had to publish to keep the money coming in, the other wrote a hit book and has been coasting on that for decades. The US is very grateful that Twain kept writing (Twain is often referred to as America's best writer), but he wouldn't have kept writing if he had a term of copyright that we do now.
MAME has raised the bar for this kind of work and put the lie to these proprietors who are coming along years after the fact doing what MAME has done in a far more portable fashion. This kind of work is a perfect reason to support The Public Domain Enhancement Act--we already know that the public can and will provide for themselves in this space. We don't need the proprietors to do the archiving and distribution work as we once did.
I've experienced sound problems with two mainboards, only one of which I know the make and model. One was an old AMD K6-based eMachines mini-tower. Installing Red Hat 9 GNU/Linux on it produced no working sound until I ran the sound configure application for old sound hardware. I was able to get the sound working by trying a variety of configurations with that application. The second was far more trivial problem--an Asus A7V8X-X mainboard with a misstamped metal backplate that indicated what port served what function. The line-level audio out was not where the metal plate said it was, so some time was lost trying to get sound to come out of the mic-level audio input jack. Once I thought to experiment and place the 1/8" speaker plug in another port and heard my test signal I knew what had happened.
However there are still mixing problems--on Fedora Core 1 GNU/Linux I can't get many applications to simultaneously play their audio. The OS stays up and running but some applications can't be heard at the same time as others.
If I run bzflag, for instance, I know I won't hear audio from GAIM. XMMS seems particularly uncooperative with other applications preventing me from hearing KPFA while also hearing sounds from Totem. Sometimes Tux Racer (the version that ships with FC1) will play its theme song for a minute or two and then not play any other audio. Quitting Tux Racer becomes impossible after the sound dies unless I kill -9 the program.
I don't have a complete list of applications that conflict in this way and I'm guessing that compiling such a list would not reveal the real problem. Obviously, I'd like to be able to run any number of programs and hear all their sounds simultaneously.
Will switching to a Linux version 2.6 kernal-based distribution (like Fedora Core 2 when it comes out later this year) help solve the sound mixing problems I've had?
I don't see this as a showstopper problem, just a hurdle that can be overcome with time, effort, and sharing information. I've experienced this problem with other OSes (even proprietary ones) so I'd hardly say this is something to fret about. Just something I'd like to better understand and ultimately fix.
Sadly, this is so; another example is lossy audio formats: Slashdotters are quite interested in MP3s even while they chat up the technological superiority of Ogg Vorbis. It's a popularity chase that grabs the attentions of many here, not that of ethics (the grounds of the free software movement--how should we treat other people) or even consistency on technical grounds (picking the best tool for the job as I've read so many say here as they champion the open source movement's message).
Ironically, this tracking ability could be something that spurs city, state, and the federal government to municipalize wireless bandwidth. A series of virtually disposable RFID readers inside lightpoles wirelessly transmitting data to some data collection agency which sells data subsetting service could be a big reason to get your town to become wireless on the taxpayer's dime. Not only would this drastically reduce privacy for most citizens, the same Internet connection could be shared by people who have portable computers (checking e-mail, sports scores, watching movies in the park, etc.).
I think this thread exemplifies the reason why the FSF asks people to consider giving GNU a share of the credit (not just the Linux kernal) and encourage people to teach those who join our community to value software freedom.
Having a choice in programs is a far weaker criteria than having freedom. One can have two proprietary programs to choose from (XNews and Microsoft Outlook, for news reading) and choice is satisfied. More choices might be preferable, but one can't complain that there are no choices available. So if we focus on software choice we're less likely to think anything is wrong so long as proprietors serve our needs. Software freedom, on the other hand, remains unsatisfied with these two choices. It isn't until one introduces free software like Pan, slrn, and Mozilla that one can begin to satisfy the desire to share and modify software and build self-sufficient communities around these freedoms. We can provide choice for ourselves if we have the freedom to do so.
One of the most underrated FSF essays I've read is the one describing the difference between the free software and open source movements. I highly suggest reading it, whether one is familiar with these movements or not. The story it retells about what happens when we dismiss software freedom and accept mere openness (what happened at the "Open Source Developers Day" meeting in August 1998) is instructive and the logic about why we should value software freedom (in the section called "Fear of Freedom") is compelling.
Perhaps you should become more familiar with what RMS says and realize that the major underlying justification of the free software movement is its ethical basis; the main questions for a social movement (such as the free software movement) address what kind of world we want to live in and how we should treat each other. I can think of no way to answer that question that forgoes an examination of one's ethics.
This is not "blather" as you so discourteously put it, nor is your response insightful (as some moderators have apparently chosen to say). Questions of ethics are some of the most important questions in society. I think your objection to the matter says more about you than about RMS or his way of conveying the importance of software freedom.
In a nutshell, some people are willing to go the extra mile for software freedom. I'm one of those people. I've paid for free software before and I'll do it again. I dig it, I thoroughly enjoy being a part of the free software community, and I enjoy being able to make copies of free software for my friends and help them get jobs done. All without breaking the law or compromising my values.
ROMs are a great reason to support HR2601 -- the Public Domain Enhancement Act. Copyrighted works that aren't commercially viable stand a chance to enter the public domain after 50 years. If you live in the US, I think you should write you Congressional representatives to co-sponsor this bill.
I tried getting my network printer up and running with a friend's MacOS X box and it was nowhere near as easy as some Slashdotters make it seem. I had to know the location of the printer on my LAN (MacOS X did not search my LAN for acceptable printers, nor did it discover that this Brother HL1270N is the only printer on the LAN--two items ESR says would improve the GNOME druid he tried in Fedora Core 1) and I also had to know the make and model of the printer. Nothing was auto-discovered, nothing was automatically configured for me.
Conversely, adding the same printer to my GNU/Linux box was about as easy. No automatic configuration there either, but the GNOME druid guided me through the prompts ESR complained about. Yes, much of what ESR had to say was apropos--this process could be made far better along the lines he discussed, but I did not find MacOS X to be anywhere nearly as easy as even this topic's lead-in would suggest.
Adding my Epson inkjet color printer was a different situation. This job was easy when I connected the printer to the GNU/Linux box via the parallel port. My Fedora Core 1 box saw it, configured it on start up (I believe Kudzu did this and it appears to work), and I was left with a printer I could use right out of the box. So I don't completely understand where the "(Side note: parallel port? What year is it in the Raymond household?)" quip came from--some of the printers on LinuxPrinting.org state that autodetection works with the parallel port, not USB.
It was my experiences with printing under Fedora Core 1 that led me to recommend this distribution to friends (even making duplicate copies of my install discs to give them). So I'm left thinking that we're fortunate to have free software so the community can improve the software that needs improvement and we don't have to wait for someone or some organization to do it for us. I'd happily pay for improved free software if I couldn't do the job myself.
Using one proprietary application to prove another's trustworthiness doesn't strike me as sound reasoning. I think you're still better off with the freedoms of free software.
I don't know what "base" quality means, but you are repeating the self-conflicting philosophy of the open source movement. If we exclude making value judgements on software we can't determine which program is better at doing a particular job, nor can we accomplish the more important task of helping society by identifying software we can share and modify. It's not a question of making decisions absent value judgements, it's a question of deciding what to value.
People are working on improving the quality of software all the time. Every subsequent version of a program is ostensibly better (on some technical ground) than what came before. But we don't have enough people actively teaching newcomers to our community about how the free software community started and why software freedom is important. If users arrived because of the wonderful features that free software offers over a proprietary alternative, they will leave just as quickly when some proprietor outcompetes our offering. What will keep the people in the free software community is to teach them about the freedoms of free software. People can't value what they are unaware of. One must learn about software freedom to "come to value" it.
Something similar can be said for purchasing athletic shoes--if we expect people to reject Nike shoes without teaching them that Nike's shoes are made by workers who receive less than a living wage (woefully inadequate wages, actually) and work under harsh conditions, we won't get what we want. We have to teach people to think about human rights when they shop. We have to teach people that they can't divorce their purchasing power from politics. It would be irrational to expect people to reject Nike shoes without information on how Nike's workers are treated.
At the same time, we have to provide competitive functional software (or, in the shoe corollary, inexpensive high-quality athletic shoes made by well-treated workers). Thankfully, in the software world, this is perhaps more easily done than making shoes because we can find people to work with who can collectively dedicate a lot of time to fixing bugs and adding features.
I don't think most people set out to make shoddy software. But I do think some people set out to make non-free software.
You'll never know if they or any other software proprietor removed the spying software because their software's complete corresponding source code is a secret, all you get is a binary. Tax software doesn't need to be proprietary, people should be willing and able to pay for the guarantee and be able to share and modify the program. If you don't pay someone willing to sell you a correct tax computation guarantee, you would have no recourse if the program messes up your taxes. For a reasonable fee I think most people would be willing to buy the insurance.
Who cares about OpenOffice.org? People who want free software and recognize that software freedom is worth the work of development and the wait (or the cost, if one pays for it). Your post reminds me of one of the big differences between the free software and open source movements--and why the open source movement can be self-defeating at times.
Proprietors can't compete with software freedom; by definition, they cannot supply it. This makes free software superior if you learn to value software freedom (as the free software movement advocates). If you play down software freedom and instead favor technical superiority (as the open source movement teaches), you will face an ironic situation: you will be compelled to use and recommend software that is not "open source".
With time and effort, free software becomes better on a technical scale. So the challenge is to teach people to value software freedom.
For the most part, I have no problem with what these essays say--better user interfaces are needed and so is documentation that ordinary users have a chance of understanding if they ever get around to reading it. But I think one of the conclusions toward the end is remarkably unproductive:
I've never seen people "congratulating [them]selves [...] on their dedication to freedom" on Slashdot or in anything from the open source movement. From both of these groups I've seen calls endorsing non-free software if that software is perceived to get people on with their task, and I've seen much maligning of RMS (usually coming from posters who apparently haven't read or heard what he actually endorses). It's ironic that ESR's self-described rant will only be taken seriously and/or fixed because of software freedom. If this were proprietary software he were complaining about, the most skilled hackers could do nothing but wait for the proprietors to make things better. Fortunately we are dealing with free software. If the people who's feedback he lists really think that the issue of freedom is so important and these problems with CUPS are crucial, they can write the software to fix the interface and improve the documentation, or they can hire someone to do these jobs for them. With a completely free software system you can do that, no matter what part of the system you're dealing with.
This also calls for an unnecessary ordering of attention (first we must stop paying attention to this, then we must start paying attention to this other thing) because there's no reason why we should drop software freedom in exchange for some practical technical advance. It's the open source movement (which ESR and others started over a decade after the free software movement began) that encourages users to dismiss software freedom for a development methodology. There's nothing wrong with having both software freedom and a better UI with applications that figure out your setup so you don't have to.
I appreciate the complaints he's making because I've raised similar ones myself in other forums (unlike him, I have experienced a great deal of trouble with printing with MacOS X and scanning with Microsoft Windows, while printing and scanning with Fedora Core 1 has been plug-and-play for my printer and scanner). I don't want anyone to stop raising issues and writing well-worded complaints (such as ESR's is). At the same time, I see far too little software freedom talk and I don't think we need to stifle freedom talk to get to the heart of the problem on improving UIs and documentation. GNOME hackers had demonstrated their commitment to improving their UI well before ESR's rant was written and it looks like Project Utopia will make things even better.
Microsoft lies by omission the same way Bill Gates did when he recently visited the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign--don't mention software freedom, anytime someone mentions "free software" only talk about price (where proprietary software often fails to compete). I certainly appreciate the opportunity to inspect, share, and modify software to suit my needs. Whether I take advantage of it is up to me. I don't have that option with proprietary software. When you focus on software freedom, you focus on something software proprietors cannot, by definition, compete with.
The Free Software Society at UIUC is currently working to arrange a response talk where issues of software freedom can be addressed. I host "Digital Citizen" on WEFT 90.1 FM every other Wednesday; two weeks ago I had Brad Kuhn, executive director of the FSF, and Chris Foster, founder of the Free Software Society, on my show to respond to Bill Gates' speech in which he took a question from someone asking about the Linux kernal. When I arrange for some web hosting, I'll post a copy of the show and other episodes of the show under a Creative Commons license.
Even on technical features, Microsoft fails to point out that their programs run on all the operating systems (which makes their "networked, highly collaborative world" claim hard to swallow unless you have committed yourself to always using Microsoft Windows for all things). I'm well aware that over 90% of the world's PCs run Microsoft Windows, but as more people hear about Microsoft's illegalities and lenient treatment by the world's governments, as well as all the viruses and trojan horses that spread so quickly via Microsoft programs, I think this will change.
I believe Omni's port updated the FrameMaker that had already been written for NeXTSTEP (and I vaguely recall that FrameMaker shipped with NeXT machines at one time). Omni's work made FrameMaker compile when NeXTSTEP went multiplatform (a "fat" binary had a binary for multiple architectures in it).
According to the article, Microsoft is projecting making $8.6B this quarter and the top fine the EU chooses to stick them with is $3.43B. It's hard for me to believe that this rises to the level of a slap on the wrist; this is something Microsoft could literally write a check for which covers the maximum possible fine then dismiss the matter entirely; call it the cost of doing business. It seems to me that Microsoft's Gutierrez is raising his objection chiefly for show, to give the public the appearance that this fine will "get [their] attention and change [their] way of thinking and acting" (in your words) but we all know that it won't change anything about Microsoft.
I have to wonder, how badly does a corporation have to behave before the public (which ostensibly elects the lawmakers) thinks it's okay to take action against that corporation and actually work to put people in office who will pass reasonable laws? And what, exactly, would be done against that corporation if this were a more democratic decision? Could a corporation do anything to merit being liquidated entirely (a corporate death penalty)? Or disincorporated and have their top 15% wage earners become personally liable for the corporation's fines and losses to investors due to their misbehavior?
No, absolutely not. As he has said many times now, RMS doesn't have anything to do with the open source movement. He even said as much in the transcript I pointed you to before ("I do free software. Open source is a different movement."), he was correcting an introduction that included the same error you made.
But he has already shown that he can and does live off his free software developments. Perhaps you didn't know that the free software community--which RMS founded over a decade before the open source movement began--started with his work on a number of still-popular free software programs including Emacs and GCC.
I fail to see how this applies to free software (which seems eminently practical) or RMS (who seems incredibly wise, looking back at his fight for software freedom over the past 20 years). I also think there's a serious imbalance of credit being taken for all the problems brought on by large-scale modernization you refer to. Finally, can you point to any evidence where RMS rejects modernization simply because it is available? Even RMS' post about the security system at his old building had to do with being unnecessarily (and, I'm guessing he would argue unethically) pushed into exclusion.
Actually, RMS said that at one time he made enough money from distributing free software for a fee that he could live on it. He also mentions that he lives inexpensively. So, not only did he test these theories in the real world, he lived on them.
He also earned awards which paid well and allowed him to do interesting things with the money. This is a far cry from the description you offer which tries to make it sound like he has no idea what he's talking about.
To this day other organizations have tested these theories in the real world, and now there is an operating system one can run that proves his theories do work in the real world.
Do you mean businesses like IBM, Red Hat, SUSE, and Novell? I think many people work for those businesses. In what way was has free software not "transcended the evils of software ''ownership''"? The most popular free software license (the GNU General Public License, or GNU GPL) grants us all the freedom to do virtually anything we want to do with the software, certainly the majority of things most hackers want to do most of the time, even though these hackers don't hold the copyright to the program they are improving or sharing.
Precisely what are you referring to here? It seems to me that the GNU GPL (the license for the Linux kernal) is one of the most impressive licenses out there.
This takes nothing away from what the OpenBSD team is doing--I think their work is great and their license makes that work a genuine contribution to our community. That's why I bought OpenBSD 3.0 and a t-shirt and I don't regret the decision.
I doubt Microsoft can outcompete free software and I think their fight will go to exclusion by patents (which means IBM and perhaps HP are their only competitors). This is why I look forward to seeing clarified patent commons-maintenance language in GPLv3.
I asked multiple questions. I don't understand which question you're responding to nor do I see a specific quote to indicate what was said. It's not reasonable to drop a name someone might recognize and expect them to fill in all the blanks for you.
Comparing anything to perfection is unproductive; it serves to reinforce our biases by presenting us with a false dichotomy (you can have whatever argument is being proposed or you can have perfection, which is never available). Let's look at specific claims.
Please name who these people are and cite the evidence that gives you this impression.
That explanation barely gets into why the LGPL exists. The Creative Commons doesn't recommend their licenses for software. The GNU project started over a decade before the open source movement began and the GNU project was founded to talk about software freedom, not a development methodology. I'd also be interested to learn who, besides the Affero General Public License has "forked" the GNU GPL. The Creative Commons has listed the GNU GPL, not forked it.
Who, exactly, is doing this and what, exactly, are they saying?
Consider PowerNotebooks.com. I'm using one right now (a PowerPro) and it works well running Fedora Core GNU/Linux. You can get PowerNotebooks to install some GNU/Linux distribution for you or you can get it without an OS and avoid paying the Microsoft tax. I don't work for them or make anything for referrals.