Forewarning: The open source community is not portrayed in positive light so you might want to skip reading this.
There are differences between the Free Software and Open Source movements, one of them being that it was the FSF (not the OSI) that wrote the GNU General Public License years befpre the current version of the GPL (version 2) was written. The OSI merely placed the GPL on a list of approved licenses. Continually citing the GPL as an Open Source license hides this fact and gives the reader the idea that not only are there no differences between "free software" and "open source" but that the latter community (or an organization thereof) wrote the GPL. The OSI helps popularize the GPL, and that's great, but we shouldn't lose sight of what the two movements stand for and how they accomplish their goals.
Second, I would not skip reading it at all, certainly not because someone is "not portrayed in [a] positive light". Forbes is an internationally read magazine and website, and has the power to lead a great many people to misunderstand how the GPL works. This article is inconsistent with itself in a number of places (in addition to being just wrong with the facts). It deserves (and shall receive) a thorough debunking. I intend on doing so both on my radio show ("Digital Citizen" airs alternate Wednesdays, 8-10p WEFT 90.1 FM in Champaign, IL) and online (a letter to Forbes, posts here, and articles wherever people will read them).
We appreciate your interest and your support of our security research efforts over the past several years. Please join with us in being part of the solution.
Try Mozilla or Konqueror instead--two fine free software web browsers (and there are many others). Then consider switching to a free software operating system so you don't bump into holes in other applications and have to wait for the proprietor to fix them for you. If you want to inspect, copy, distribute, or modify free software programs you can do so (or get someone else to do so for you). Freedom is really worthwhile.
The Mac got hit pretty hard with an autorun virus that ended up shipping on many cd's. As a result many Mac users disabled this in OS 9, and I believe OS X has it disabled by default.
But can't one use Applescript to tie the execution of a program to opening a directory? It seems to me this would be useful to someone trying to get MacOS users to run a program without the user's consent, essentially working around the lack of (or disabled) autorun. And, of course, just as much a security hole as autorun.
Doesn't this "[work] fine" only because the same proprietary RealAudio code is being executed, but this time under the auspices of mplayer instead of some Real-supplied front-end?
I'm sure everyone has at least seen one article where they tell you to NEVER install software from a company you've either never heard of, or don't trust.
Which is silly advice that completely misses an important point. The key is software freedom. It doesn't matter who made the software, what matters are the freedoms to inspect, run, modify, and share the software so these kinds of problems can be minimized and trust can be earned.
Taken logically, if everyone behaved as those articles suggest, nobody would ever run software from organizations that start up tomorrow (and they might run proprietary software from older organizations even though proprietary software is inherently untrustworthy). We need the ability to leverage the freedoms of free software to make software trustworthy and useful. Shunning software because it comes from an unknown company isn't going to help us do that. Companies that used to be untrustworthy and try to become trustworthy by shipping Free Software should be supported.
Copyright, as was originally written in the constitution, was supposed to last for about 15 years in order for the creator/inventor to get some money from the work they created.
Actually, US copyright was set up to incentivize authors (not "creator[s]", or "inventor[s]"--a term that is typically used when discussing patent law, not copyright law) to write and publish more work. Copyright in the US was set up entirely for the benefit of the public. RMS has a very readable summary of the background of copyright and the common arguments used in discussions like these. It is aptly titled "Misinterpreting Copyright". It addresses virtually all of your points. I think you'll find that many of the ideas the GNU project expresses on these matters are quite interesting and worth repeating.
This was meant to be a very carefully balanced compromise between the needs of the individual and the needs of the group.
No, there is no "balance" being reached by copyright nor was there ever intended to be one. From the aforementioned text:
"It is often said that U.S. copyright law is meant to "strike a balance" between the interests of publishers and readers. Those who cite this interpretation present it as a restatement of the basic position stated in the Constitution; in other words, it is supposed to be equivalent to the copyright bargain.
But the two interpretations are far from equivalent; they are different conceptually, and different in their implications. The balance concept assumes that the readers' and publishers' interests differ in importance only quantitatively, in "how much weight" we should give them, and in what actions they apply to. The term "stakeholders" is often used to frame the issue in this way; it assumes that all kinds of interest in a policy decision are equally important. This view rejects the qualitative distinction between the readers' and publishers' interests which is at the root of the government's participation in the copyright bargain."
RMS' essay goes on to explain how the "balance" concept actually ends up reversing the underlying basis of copyright where, practically speaking, the public has to justify not giving publishers all sorts of new power under copyright law. This is exactly backwards from how copyright was intended to work--readers' interests are an end unto themselves, benefits for the publishers can only be justified so as to benefit the readers.
As a result I believe that it is more than moral to play a 15+ year old game without having to pay since if some greedy people didn't insist on changing the laws in their favor it would be in the public domain anyway.
Actually, you're shooting your own argument in the foot by conflating ethics with law. Ethical conduct does not spring from laws. Although the following comes from a discussion of the word "theft" as the word is commonly misapplied to describing illicit copying, I think one particular paragraph of that essay is valuable here:
"The idea that laws decide what is right or wrong is mistaken in general. Laws are, at their best, an attempt to achieve justice; to say that laws define justice or ethical conduct is turning things upside down."
Sharing is neighborly and good and we should not build laws or use terms that suggests sharing is bad (like when some people, thankfully not you, call others "pirates").
You are confusing physical property with intellectual property, they are not the same and should not be compared.
I'm glad to see more people talking about the difference between transferring physical property versus
[...]
so that it continues to serve its purpose with the right balance between the copyright holder and the consumer of the material.
That is not its purpose. Copyright exists for the benefit of the public. Consider reading this essay by Richard Stallman. Many of the points you raise are responded to (almost directly) in this essay.
This ignores the fact that doing so is still commercially damaging to the copyright holder, and thus depriving them of the compensation that copyright is supposed to guarantee in exchange for offering their work to the world.
The public does not bear the onus of responsibility to showing that publishers won't be hurt if we change copyright in some way. From Stallman's essay, talking about the difference between the copyright bargain and the "balance" between the public and authors or publishers:
As a practical matter, the consequence of the "balance" concept is to reverse the burden of justification for changes in copyright law. The copyright bargain places the burden on the publishers to convince the readers to cede certain freedoms. The concept of balance reverses this burden, practically speaking, because there is generally no doubt that publishers will benefit from additional privilege. So unless harm to the readers can be proved, sufficient to "outweigh" this benefit, we are led to conclude that the publishers are entitled to almost any privilege they request.
Since the idea of "striking a balance" between publishers and readers denies the readers the primacy they are entitled to, we must reject it.
Furthermore, although Stallman's point trumps this one: commercial publisher's loss of income is largely assumed, not proven. There is not and never was a "guarantee" of income under copyright. Copyright was supposed to be a mechanism for incentivizing authors to publish more work--a behavioral change that benefits the public. Stallman clearly explains how copyright does not exist for the sake of authors and publishers, it exists for the sake of the public. Thus, when we consider copyright it is paramount to consider the public's needs. Not publisher's needs, not author's needs, the public's needs.
First, it is very easy to skip over your post entirely. If you didn't know this already, your anonymous post is more likely to be read if you get an account. Slashdot makes it very easy to skip most anonymous posts.
By context here, "liberal" would seem to imply it is flexible. If you cannot dynamically link to software without your own software becoming GPL then it is most definitely not "liberal" in the context of this sentence.
My use of the word liberal means that rights you wouldn't otherwise have are being granted to you by the GNU GPL. The GPL isn't alone in doing this, but no other license is on-topic for this thread. The GNU General Public License grants many powers copyright takes away from you by default. The GPL only asks you to do something when you publish your copy or derivative work, and all for the purpose of preventing GPL'd derivatives from becoming non-free. If you want to maintain your privacy, the GPL respects that and makes it so you don't even have to tell anyone your work exists.
Perhaps that implies that you believe moderation is not intended for ranking posts of interest but in fact is a voting/polling mechanism based around your agenda and politics.
Enough with the straw arguments. I understand full well how the moderation system on Slashdot works and what it purports to achieve. When a post I'm following up to gets a moderation I don't think it deserves, I'll continue to feel free to say as much.
Isn't it odd how, according to Joe Slashdot, copyright is so important when it relates to the GPL, but so irrelevant when it relates to music or movies?
The same legal regime covers both, but don't think that all license terms are the same just because they are all leveraging copyright law. Some licenses demand things they could not get from copyright law alone and grant powers to the licensor far in excess of what the licensee gets in exchange (Apple's APSL is an example of both of these points: Apple tries to restrict merely running APSL-covered software and tries to leverage this restriction if you bring a patent infringement suit against Apple). You don't see proponents of the GNU GPL stumping for the radical expansionist policy of the DMCA. Those who advocate for software freedom generally want a shorter term of copyright, reduced penalties for infringement, and legal exemptions for non-commercial verbatim copying and distribution. Possibly also non-commercially distributed derivative works. I think that would be a bold step in the right direction of balancing commercial interests with the public's need to share human knowledge.
I won't be at all surprised if Linksys wriggles free of all charges on a legal technicality, just as numerous blatant copyright infringers have done when prosecuted by the big media groups.
I'm not aware of "numerous blatant copyright infringers" who have "[wriggled] free of all charges on a legal technicality". I'm aware of people sued by the RIAA settling with the RIAA for far less than they might have been ordered to pay had they lost their suits.
It's just a shame that we have evolved a culture where copyright lacks respect to such a degree, and now the hard workers who create good things like the Linux kernel suffer because of the prevailing greed of song-swappers and the pirate movie business.
Plenty of people respect copyright law, but society is discovering that there are some important freedoms we can't leverage in current copyright law. We allowed government to bargain away our freedom to non-commercially distribute verbatim copies of copyrighted works. Back in the early days of the printing press few could take advantage of this freedom because the printing press was expensive. Now network-capable computers are inexpensive and people want to share information with their friends and neighbors. Even making derivative works is easier than ever before. So, I think people are coming closer (ever so slowly) to realizing that the public needs to renegotiate copyright law to suit our needs.
I'd be much happier if companies were forced to release good, unhindered specs/APIs... I don't care if you didn't give out your specific implementation, fine... whatever... but give me the means to create my own implementation that can function the same as theirs. Is that soo much to ask?
This work is being distributed under the GNU General Public License so anything short of that (such as distributing specifications) it is not sufficient. Also, the GNU GPL covers patented implementations, making it possible for you to reimplement their APIs without infringing a licensor's patents. So your request is actually too little to ask here.
If Linksys did not want to comply with the GNU GPL, they should have chosen a work under a different license to distribute and modify. They are being granted a valuable work under a liberal license; they did not have the right to infringe the copyrights of the kernel contributors and there is no moral justification for doing so. But, given the high moderation on the parent comment, I'm guessing that many/. readers want to grant corporate copyright infringers anything they say they need to make money.
Everything plays with open-source Freeamp/Zinf. If you care.
I think Magnatune's idea is a fine one, and I look foward to being able to preview their music. But right now I would have to violate US patent law to do it. I don't have a license for playing MP3s and I want to do so with my Free Software system but still be able to leverage the freedoms of Free Software. The MP3 decoders available to me (such as LAME) don't appear to be a legal option for US users without MP3 patent licenses (such as me).
It's an interesting conundrum:
I want to hear good music and abide by the law.
I want to preview music before purchasing it.
The MP3 format is popular, but I'm guessing most United States GNU/Linux users are violating US patent law by distributing and using LAME.
So, Magnatune's offer is asking me to violate patent law to take advantage of Magnatune's generous copyright licensing. I asked Magnatune if they would consider Ogg Vorbis tracks for previewing (their plan page talks about "allow[ing] purchasers to download highest-quality VBRs as well as WAV files, and Ogg Vorbis files." with no word on Ogg Vorbis preview tracks).
"You gave Linux, the operating system, to the world free, in effect jump-starting the open-source movement."
First, Linux is not an operating system and it never was. What Linus Torvalds began was a kernel -- a necessary and valuable portion of a complete GNU/Linux operating system, but not the entirety of it. Linux is now being collectively developed by many people around the world, including Torvalds. In 1984, Richard Stallman began working on GNU years before Torvalds began working on what would become Linux. Many people would join Stallman and develop that operating system. Second, According to the Open Source Initiative, the Open Source movement was a reaction to Netscape releasing the source code for its web browser. It was this act that "jump-start[ed]" the Open Source movement. The people who started that movement did so in 1998, seven years after Torvalds released Linux.
Lots of patches and OpenSource = GOOD!
Lots of patches and M$ = BAD!
Actually, it is the lack of software freedom that is bad. You can't understand the value of software freedom unless you look at who may make and distribute the patches and who can not. With proprietary software no matter how talented a hacker you are you can't fully inspect or modify the software installed on your computer.
With free software, how much you can inspect, modify, and share code depends on your situation (often how much time and effort you put into developing code). I wouldn't want to buy a car only one garage could fix, I wouldn't want to be limited to one electrician or plumber for my house. I don't want to be limited to one organization for getting improvements to the software I depend on.
Yes, RMS warned about these kinds of situations, which is why he's a hardliner on the concept that you shouldn't use anything but open source.
If you want freedom, use open source. In this case, you have a choice to trade that freedom for features. The freedom you trade might be some of that freedom you have to work on open source software.
The Open Source movement isn't the enemy of the Free Software movement, in fact the Open Source proponents have brought a lot of awareness to many free licenses (including the GNU GPL). There's a difference in philosophy that doesn't prevent working together, but it does mean there's a difference in focus. The Open Source movement seems more interested in the practical consequences of software freedom (particularly as they can benefit businesses) than the freedoms to share and modify software.
Your post is more likely to be read if it is not made anonymously. Slashdot makes it very easy to skip past "Anonymous Coward" posts.
Just like when a book author writes a book and they do a few thousand hours research, you don't get all that research, you just get the end product. Nor do you get an electronic copy in full mark-up.
I understand you don't get these things with the work today, but I'm addressing how copyright should work, not how it works now. Simply restating the status quo doesn't justify the status quo.
Publishing research for a computer program is entirely different from publishing source code when the program enters the public domain. Research that leads to something is different from seeing the preferred form for modifying the work. But different kinds of works are hard to discuss simultaneously because they are put together differently and function differently in the world. With books, for instance, you already have a good deal of the material that comes closest to being the analog of computer source code--the work itself. I would consider requiring the distribution of electronic markup for the book, however. With computer programs there is a different situation. It is possible to obscure the source code in such a way that one effectively denies the public the opportunity to do the modifications that the public should be allowed to do with a PD computer program.
Applying copyright in order to push a specific political agenda is plain wrong.
Then you must not like copyright at all because that is what copyright originally set out to do in the US--give authors an incentive to write and publish more work. In exchange, the government gives up some of the public's natural rights. The question is which of the possible ways to strike the copyright bargain is the best way for the public (because that is who copyright was built to benefit).
In fact, it's an attept to do exactly what so many here accuse the RIAA of doing, enforcing a business-model into profit by law.
But it's okay to deny the public the ability to modify the PD work fully because it may somehow interfere with commercial gain? I say no, when a work enters the public domain modifying the work should no longer be the exclusive domain of the former copyright holder. This means distributing source code when the work enters the public domain.
One possible method is to reduce copyright privileges in stages, and observe the results. By seeing if and when measurable diminutions in publication occur, we will learn how much copyright power is really necessary to achieve the public's purposes. We must judge this by actual observation, not by what publishers say will happen, because they have every incentive to make exaggerated predictions of doom if their powers are reduced in any way.
The entire essay is well worth anyone's time to read because it is so useful in debunking people's arguments which try to justify placing the publisher's copyright privilege at the same level of importance as the public's (or above that of the public). RMS makes it quite clear why this is wholly wrong and misguided.
I've never seen anyone refer to zero price beer as "freeware": "We're having a party and there will be chips, salsa, and freeware at every table" sounds confusing to me--will there be beer or computer software at every table? Perhaps you were referring to "Free as in beer"?
Software that is gratis (free+ware). Since no one has to pay to get g77, it's freeware. I wish the FSF would stop trying to redefine the English language. --
Open source, without that fishy smell. FreeBSD
It's ironic that someone who misstates the phrase the FSF uses accuses the FSF of "trying to redefine the English language". As the link I pointed to clearly illustrates, other languages don't use the same word to mean freedom or gratis and leave it up to you to figure out which meaning is intended. The distinction the FSF makes about kinds of software is not understood by talking about price. You're right that you can get g77 without paying for it but that is a side-effect of the freedom to share. One would think someone who hawks FreeBSD in their sig would appreciate this useful distinction.
Until 1978, copyright only lasted 52 years in the U.S. -- and then only if you remembered to renew it. There were other technical lapses that could result in the inadvertent loss of copyright -- it wasn't really user-friendly.
Sure it was, once you realize that copyright was never meant to grant a copyright holder perpetual income. Copyright was meant to be an incentive to publish, part of a bargain with the public. So a limited term of copyright (which we don't have today thanks to retroactive term extension) that expires well within someone's lifetime (which we also don't have today) were both good things. Mark Twain fought this and we (as a society) are better off for his not having gotten his wish in his lifetime. If the term of copyright was then what it is now, we wouldn't have as many of his works to share (we might not have any, they might all be tightly controlled by his estate like Mitchell or Gershwin's estate handles their works). You don't spur society to publish more work by granting them everlasting power to deem how the work can be disseminated and built upon.
I think it's reasonable to say far more works would have been lost to time because nobody could legally preserve them by copying them (a time-honored means of saving knowledge for future readers). The Public Domain Enhancement Act (H.R. 2601) attempts to restore a more reasonable effective term of copyright without violating on the Bern treaty. I encourage everyone to contact their congresspeople to co-sponsor this act.
Once you recognize that nobody makes ideas in a vacuum and we all base everything we think and do on the work of others, you get to a point where you begin to question the underlying assumptions of copyright and anyone who pitches copyright as property (a prejudicial term, at the least). I wonder about a far shorter term of copyright and whether society would benefit from not allowing certain expressions to not have copyright power at all (such as non-free software which remains non-free even after it would enter the public domain because the source code for the program is never revealed).
Free Software answers these points well.
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New VOIP App. Profiled
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· Score: 2, Interesting
So long as it is non-free you'll never know the complete story on what it's doing on your computer. For all we really know, it could have spyware that goes undetected by the masses for a long time. Proprietary encryption is inhererently untrustworthy. Yet again, on practical grounds and on freedom grounds you want Free Software.
But I would not be surprised to learn that reporters are uninterested in talking about free replacements for this. They appear to be uninterested in talking about the groundbreaking GNU Radio project which has been doing interesting things for a while now. So, if there is a free VoIP app out there (perhaps one with strong encryption too), I wouldn't wait for mainstream news to catch up to it.
The death throes of the RIAA's clients.
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RIAA Bits
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· Score: 1
You aren't necessarily going to be the one to come up with an alternative, but you do deserve a chance to see if you prefer that alternative, regardless of who offers it.
We'll get "a chance to see if [we] prefer that alternative" whether we invent it or not. So far these plans have failed because they all ask us to give up freedoms we don't want to trade away. The idea that we had better come up with an alternative profitable plan is the RIAA's clients way of stating their entitlement to remain in business. Studios are not owed business. They are lucky the public is engaging in this debate on their terms as far as it has gone.
This isn't really about a new business model for the RIAA.
That's right, it's about getting RIAA's clients to devise a new business plan. Society needs to realize that just because someone has a legal right to do what they're doing doesn't mean what they're doing is ethical or likely to give them the money they want to stay in business.
If you want the lawsuits to stop, there needs to be a new system (or people need to stop sharing RIAA files).
Or the RIAA needs to stop suing people. Nobody is being sued for "sharing RIAA files" because the RIAA doesn't hold the copyright to any of the files they're suing people over. Understanding this is crucial to understanding why the RIAA's amnesty program is a sham for the public.
I think the public should consider:
Technology has put people into and out of work before and the record companies are no more entitled to stay in business than the horse and buggy salespeople were. Big publishers don't need more oppressive copyright law to make money or stay in business, they need to recognize that their expertise in developing and distributing copyrighted works should be sold in a different form. There's always a market for experts.
David Bowie said it before, and plenty have said it before him: Music tracks have to be seen in a new light--as an introducer to a performer--not as the product in itself. It's ludicrous that people in studios still don't get this, even for works that are explicitly advertisements (such as digitized movie "trailers"). Artists compete in an attention economy long before they compete for profit. It's not about guaranteeing business, it's about increasing the odds that business will occur.
Musicians are highly unlikely to be as commercially successful as Britney Spears or the Rolling Stones. According to a recent Chicago Tribune article on the music industry, over 80% of bands are in debt because of their one-sided contracts with studios. Performers should shoot for more reasonable goals and try new models of distribution: champion putting more people on the Internet to share recorded works, support finding a viable micropayment system, and encourage unobtrusive means to send the band a dollar (or less). With such a scheme the performers will make about as much as they'd make with a major studio contract and the performers will retain control of the copyrights to their recorded performances.
The public traded away non-commercial distribution of copyrighted works when copyright began because it was something the public couldn't take advantage of. Few could afford a printing press but many wanted more published works, so this was an excellent bargain back then--trading away a freedom you can't use for something you want is always a good deal. But that time has passed; now we can take advantage of this freedom. It's time to renegotiate copyright policy to allow unauthorized verbatim non-commercial distribution of copyrighted works because it is valuable for the public to have this freedom.
"I'm just waiting for someone to scan the book in and put the book on the Net in free electronic form. The book is Creative Commons Licensed, so you're free to do that. I'm not releasing the book on my own in an electronic format, at least for now, because I get better legal protections shipping real paper books than selling electronic books."
We should encourage people to buy the book in addition to getting their copy electronically (for those that haven't read the article, the book is licensed under a Creative Commons license that will allow scanning the book in and distributing electronic copies). This is a great chance not only to show how the DMCA stifles free speech but to point out the hypocrisy of thinking of electronic distribution of information is somehow less worthy of free speech protection than traditional paper books. Huang is probably right that paper books enjoy more free speech protection than electronic distribution and that is sad.
It's notable because now thousands of geeks are going to flock to the theater to see whether or not they can tell which bits were done in 1946 and which were done on Maya in 2003.
Sadly, yes, they will even though it means doing business with the corporation that was a strong proponent of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998. This bill became law and stifles our ability to build on Disney's work like Disney built on Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill Jr.. We can't share and preserve countless other copyrighted works that aren't selling but are disappearing because of an overly long term of copyright. I wonder how many Slashdot readers have too short a memory to act effectively in defiance of the laws they rail against in other threads.
I'll be glad to do business with Disney when they advocate for a more reasonable copyright regime, one in which society's need to share and build on copyrighted works is balanced with publisher's need to make money.
I don't like software patents, either. But had MS ever actually sued another company over one of their software patents?
No large patent holder has to actually do this. IBM holds the most patents and they said in their "Think" magazine that they get 10X the value from cross-licensing that they do from licensing patents. Considering suing for infringement involves spending money, not necessarily making money, it stands to reason that cross-licensing would still be far more valuable than winning patent infringement lawsuits too.
Also, consider the scare factor.
RMS happened to browse the weekly patent column in the New York Times when he came across a listing for a patent that appeared to cover a data compression method that the GNU project was going to use in a compressor they were about to release. That patent, and the implicit threat of losing an infringement lawsuit, killed this program before it was released. Nobody had to sue the FSF to get this result. Later the GNU project released gzip which went on to become a defacto standard, but it would have been nice if we could compete (as you say) "on actually making and selling software" instead of locking up ideas in an artificial economy so as to kill competition before it has a chance to benefit the end-user. RMS describes the experience and explodes the myth of patents benefitting software developers in his talk (or if you prefer, read the transcript).
"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today. [...] The solution is patenting as much as we can. A future startup with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high. Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors."
Patents push people into an arms race of sorts--as Gates obliquely illustrates, the patent system makes people react out of fear, not what's in the best interests of community or consumers. By creating this system and issuing software patents, the US Government has abdicated any desire to allow consumers to benefit by picking from a healthy competitive marketplace. After hearing what RMS has to say, I don't see how anyone can come away thinking those who don't sue for infringement are substantially better than those who do.
Slashdot Mirror
There are differences between the Free Software and Open Source movements, one of them being that it was the FSF (not the OSI) that wrote the GNU General Public License years befpre the current version of the GPL (version 2) was written. The OSI merely placed the GPL on a list of approved licenses. Continually citing the GPL as an Open Source license hides this fact and gives the reader the idea that not only are there no differences between "free software" and "open source" but that the latter community (or an organization thereof) wrote the GPL. The OSI helps popularize the GPL, and that's great, but we shouldn't lose sight of what the two movements stand for and how they accomplish their goals.
Second, I would not skip reading it at all, certainly not because someone is "not portrayed in [a] positive light". Forbes is an internationally read magazine and website, and has the power to lead a great many people to misunderstand how the GPL works. This article is inconsistent with itself in a number of places (in addition to being just wrong with the facts). It deserves (and shall receive) a thorough debunking. I intend on doing so both on my radio show ("Digital Citizen" airs alternate Wednesdays, 8-10p WEFT 90.1 FM in Champaign, IL) and online (a letter to Forbes, posts here, and articles wherever people will read them).
From the site:
Try Mozilla or Konqueror instead--two fine free software web browsers (and there are many others). Then consider switching to a free software operating system so you don't bump into holes in other applications and have to wait for the proprietor to fix them for you. If you want to inspect, copy, distribute, or modify free software programs you can do so (or get someone else to do so for you). Freedom is really worthwhile.
But can't one use Applescript to tie the execution of a program to opening a directory? It seems to me this would be useful to someone trying to get MacOS users to run a program without the user's consent, essentially working around the lack of (or disabled) autorun. And, of course, just as much a security hole as autorun.
Doesn't this "[work] fine" only because the same proprietary RealAudio code is being executed, but this time under the auspices of mplayer instead of some Real-supplied front-end?
Which is silly advice that completely misses an important point. The key is software freedom. It doesn't matter who made the software, what matters are the freedoms to inspect, run, modify, and share the software so these kinds of problems can be minimized and trust can be earned.
Taken logically, if everyone behaved as those articles suggest, nobody would ever run software from organizations that start up tomorrow (and they might run proprietary software from older organizations even though proprietary software is inherently untrustworthy). We need the ability to leverage the freedoms of free software to make software trustworthy and useful. Shunning software because it comes from an unknown company isn't going to help us do that. Companies that used to be untrustworthy and try to become trustworthy by shipping Free Software should be supported.
Actually, US copyright was set up to incentivize authors (not "creator[s]", or "inventor[s]"--a term that is typically used when discussing patent law, not copyright law) to write and publish more work. Copyright in the US was set up entirely for the benefit of the public. RMS has a very readable summary of the background of copyright and the common arguments used in discussions like these. It is aptly titled "Misinterpreting Copyright". It addresses virtually all of your points. I think you'll find that many of the ideas the GNU project expresses on these matters are quite interesting and worth repeating.
No, there is no "balance" being reached by copyright nor was there ever intended to be one. From the aforementioned text:
RMS' essay goes on to explain how the "balance" concept actually ends up reversing the underlying basis of copyright where, practically speaking, the public has to justify not giving publishers all sorts of new power under copyright law. This is exactly backwards from how copyright was intended to work--readers' interests are an end unto themselves, benefits for the publishers can only be justified so as to benefit the readers.
Actually, you're shooting your own argument in the foot by conflating ethics with law. Ethical conduct does not spring from laws. Although the following comes from a discussion of the word "theft" as the word is commonly misapplied to describing illicit copying, I think one particular paragraph of that essay is valuable here:
Sharing is neighborly and good and we should not build laws or use terms that suggests sharing is bad (like when some people, thankfully not you, call others "pirates").
I'm glad to see more people talking about the difference between transferring physical property versus
Thanks for the info, and thanks for supporting Ogg Vorbis. As an aside, in the words of Carsten "Purple" Haese, "it's Ogg, not OGG".
That is not its purpose. Copyright exists for the benefit of the public. Consider reading this essay by Richard Stallman. Many of the points you raise are responded to (almost directly) in this essay.
The public does not bear the onus of responsibility to showing that publishers won't be hurt if we change copyright in some way. From Stallman's essay, talking about the difference between the copyright bargain and the "balance" between the public and authors or publishers:
Furthermore, although Stallman's point trumps this one: commercial publisher's loss of income is largely assumed, not proven. There is not and never was a "guarantee" of income under copyright. Copyright was supposed to be a mechanism for incentivizing authors to publish more work--a behavioral change that benefits the public. Stallman clearly explains how copyright does not exist for the sake of authors and publishers, it exists for the sake of the public. Thus, when we consider copyright it is paramount to consider the public's needs. Not publisher's needs, not author's needs, the public's needs.
First, it is very easy to skip over your post entirely. If you didn't know this already, your anonymous post is more likely to be read if you get an account. Slashdot makes it very easy to skip most anonymous posts.
My use of the word liberal means that rights you wouldn't otherwise have are being granted to you by the GNU GPL. The GPL isn't alone in doing this, but no other license is on-topic for this thread. The GNU General Public License grants many powers copyright takes away from you by default. The GPL only asks you to do something when you publish your copy or derivative work, and all for the purpose of preventing GPL'd derivatives from becoming non-free. If you want to maintain your privacy, the GPL respects that and makes it so you don't even have to tell anyone your work exists.
Enough with the straw arguments. I understand full well how the moderation system on Slashdot works and what it purports to achieve. When a post I'm following up to gets a moderation I don't think it deserves, I'll continue to feel free to say as much.
The same legal regime covers both, but don't think that all license terms are the same just because they are all leveraging copyright law. Some licenses demand things they could not get from copyright law alone and grant powers to the licensor far in excess of what the licensee gets in exchange (Apple's APSL is an example of both of these points: Apple tries to restrict merely running APSL-covered software and tries to leverage this restriction if you bring a patent infringement suit against Apple). You don't see proponents of the GNU GPL stumping for the radical expansionist policy of the DMCA. Those who advocate for software freedom generally want a shorter term of copyright, reduced penalties for infringement, and legal exemptions for non-commercial verbatim copying and distribution. Possibly also non-commercially distributed derivative works. I think that would be a bold step in the right direction of balancing commercial interests with the public's need to share human knowledge.
I'm not aware of "numerous blatant copyright infringers" who have "[wriggled] free of all charges on a legal technicality". I'm aware of people sued by the RIAA settling with the RIAA for far less than they might have been ordered to pay had they lost their suits.
Plenty of people respect copyright law, but society is discovering that there are some important freedoms we can't leverage in current copyright law. We allowed government to bargain away our freedom to non-commercially distribute verbatim copies of copyrighted works. Back in the early days of the printing press few could take advantage of this freedom because the printing press was expensive. Now network-capable computers are inexpensive and people want to share information with their friends and neighbors. Even making derivative works is easier than ever before. So, I think people are coming closer (ever so slowly) to realizing that the public needs to renegotiate copyright law to suit our needs.
This work is being distributed under the GNU General Public License so anything short of that (such as distributing specifications) it is not sufficient. Also, the GNU GPL covers patented implementations, making it possible for you to reimplement their APIs without infringing a licensor's patents. So your request is actually too little to ask here.
If Linksys did not want to comply with the GNU GPL, they should have chosen a work under a different license to distribute and modify. They are being granted a valuable work under a liberal license; they did not have the right to infringe the copyrights of the kernel contributors and there is no moral justification for doing so. But, given the high moderation on the parent comment, I'm guessing that many /. readers want to grant corporate copyright infringers anything they say they need to make money.
I think Magnatune's idea is a fine one, and I look foward to being able to preview their music. But right now I would have to violate US patent law to do it. I don't have a license for playing MP3s and I want to do so with my Free Software system but still be able to leverage the freedoms of Free Software. The MP3 decoders available to me (such as LAME) don't appear to be a legal option for US users without MP3 patent licenses (such as me).
It's an interesting conundrum:
So, Magnatune's offer is asking me to violate patent law to take advantage of Magnatune's generous copyright licensing. I asked Magnatune if they would consider Ogg Vorbis tracks for previewing (their plan page talks about "allow[ing] purchasers to download highest-quality VBRs as well as WAV files, and Ogg Vorbis files." with no word on Ogg Vorbis preview tracks).
From the article's first question:
First, Linux is not an operating system and it never was. What Linus Torvalds began was a kernel -- a necessary and valuable portion of a complete GNU/Linux operating system, but not the entirety of it. Linux is now being collectively developed by many people around the world, including Torvalds. In 1984, Richard Stallman began working on GNU years before Torvalds began working on what would become Linux. Many people would join Stallman and develop that operating system. Second, According to the Open Source Initiative, the Open Source movement was a reaction to Netscape releasing the source code for its web browser. It was this act that "jump-start[ed]" the Open Source movement. The people who started that movement did so in 1998, seven years after Torvalds released Linux.
One would have thought the stream of nationally-announced embarrasments would have encouraged the RIAA to do more thorough investigations of these situations before launching into lawsuits.
Actually, it is the lack of software freedom that is bad. You can't understand the value of software freedom unless you look at who may make and distribute the patches and who can not. With proprietary software no matter how talented a hacker you are you can't fully inspect or modify the software installed on your computer.
With free software, how much you can inspect, modify, and share code depends on your situation (often how much time and effort you put into developing code). I wouldn't want to buy a car only one garage could fix, I wouldn't want to be limited to one electrician or plumber for my house. I don't want to be limited to one organization for getting improvements to the software I depend on.
Actually, the freedoms the Free Software movement talks about were defined over a decade before the Open Source movement came into being. RMS has been quite careful to distinguish the Free Software movement from the Open Source movement.
The Open Source movement isn't the enemy of the Free Software movement, in fact the Open Source proponents have brought a lot of awareness to many free licenses (including the GNU GPL). There's a difference in philosophy that doesn't prevent working together, but it does mean there's a difference in focus. The Open Source movement seems more interested in the practical consequences of software freedom (particularly as they can benefit businesses) than the freedoms to share and modify software.
Your post is more likely to be read if it is not made anonymously. Slashdot makes it very easy to skip past "Anonymous Coward" posts.
I understand you don't get these things with the work today, but I'm addressing how copyright should work, not how it works now. Simply restating the status quo doesn't justify the status quo.
Publishing research for a computer program is entirely different from publishing source code when the program enters the public domain. Research that leads to something is different from seeing the preferred form for modifying the work. But different kinds of works are hard to discuss simultaneously because they are put together differently and function differently in the world. With books, for instance, you already have a good deal of the material that comes closest to being the analog of computer source code--the work itself. I would consider requiring the distribution of electronic markup for the book, however. With computer programs there is a different situation. It is possible to obscure the source code in such a way that one effectively denies the public the opportunity to do the modifications that the public should be allowed to do with a PD computer program.
Then you must not like copyright at all because that is what copyright originally set out to do in the US--give authors an incentive to write and publish more work. In exchange, the government gives up some of the public's natural rights. The question is which of the possible ways to strike the copyright bargain is the best way for the public (because that is who copyright was built to benefit).
But it's okay to deny the public the ability to modify the PD work fully because it may somehow interfere with commercial gain? I say no, when a work enters the public domain modifying the work should no longer be the exclusive domain of the former copyright holder. This means distributing source code when the work enters the public domain.
I think RMS' advice in his essay on misinterpreting copyright regarding how to strike a new copyright bargain is helpful:
The entire essay is well worth anyone's time to read because it is so useful in debunking people's arguments which try to justify placing the publisher's copyright privilege at the same level of importance as the public's (or above that of the public). RMS makes it quite clear why this is wholly wrong and misguided.
I've never seen anyone refer to zero price beer as "freeware": "We're having a party and there will be chips, salsa, and freeware at every table" sounds confusing to me--will there be beer or computer software at every table? Perhaps you were referring to "Free as in beer"?
It's ironic that someone who misstates the phrase the FSF uses accuses the FSF of "trying to redefine the English language". As the link I pointed to clearly illustrates, other languages don't use the same word to mean freedom or gratis and leave it up to you to figure out which meaning is intended. The distinction the FSF makes about kinds of software is not understood by talking about price. You're right that you can get g77 without paying for it but that is a side-effect of the freedom to share. One would think someone who hawks FreeBSD in their sig would appreciate this useful distinction.
Haggle over the technical merit of g77 all you want, but free software is not the same as "free-ware".
From the article:
Sure it was, once you realize that copyright was never meant to grant a copyright holder perpetual income. Copyright was meant to be an incentive to publish, part of a bargain with the public. So a limited term of copyright (which we don't have today thanks to retroactive term extension) that expires well within someone's lifetime (which we also don't have today) were both good things. Mark Twain fought this and we (as a society) are better off for his not having gotten his wish in his lifetime. If the term of copyright was then what it is now, we wouldn't have as many of his works to share (we might not have any, they might all be tightly controlled by his estate like Mitchell or Gershwin's estate handles their works). You don't spur society to publish more work by granting them everlasting power to deem how the work can be disseminated and built upon.
I think it's reasonable to say far more works would have been lost to time because nobody could legally preserve them by copying them (a time-honored means of saving knowledge for future readers). The Public Domain Enhancement Act (H.R. 2601) attempts to restore a more reasonable effective term of copyright without violating on the Bern treaty. I encourage everyone to contact their congresspeople to co-sponsor this act.
Once you recognize that nobody makes ideas in a vacuum and we all base everything we think and do on the work of others, you get to a point where you begin to question the underlying assumptions of copyright and anyone who pitches copyright as property (a prejudicial term, at the least). I wonder about a far shorter term of copyright and whether society would benefit from not allowing certain expressions to not have copyright power at all (such as non-free software which remains non-free even after it would enter the public domain because the source code for the program is never revealed).
So long as it is non-free you'll never know the complete story on what it's doing on your computer. For all we really know, it could have spyware that goes undetected by the masses for a long time. Proprietary encryption is inhererently untrustworthy. Yet again, on practical grounds and on freedom grounds you want Free Software.
But I would not be surprised to learn that reporters are uninterested in talking about free replacements for this. They appear to be uninterested in talking about the groundbreaking GNU Radio project which has been doing interesting things for a while now. So, if there is a free VoIP app out there (perhaps one with strong encryption too), I wouldn't wait for mainstream news to catch up to it.
We'll get "a chance to see if [we] prefer that alternative" whether we invent it or not. So far these plans have failed because they all ask us to give up freedoms we don't want to trade away. The idea that we had better come up with an alternative profitable plan is the RIAA's clients way of stating their entitlement to remain in business. Studios are not owed business. They are lucky the public is engaging in this debate on their terms as far as it has gone.
That's right, it's about getting RIAA's clients to devise a new business plan. Society needs to realize that just because someone has a legal right to do what they're doing doesn't mean what they're doing is ethical or likely to give them the money they want to stay in business.
Or the RIAA needs to stop suing people. Nobody is being sued for "sharing RIAA files" because the RIAA doesn't hold the copyright to any of the files they're suing people over. Understanding this is crucial to understanding why the RIAA's amnesty program is a sham for the public.
I think the public should consider:
From the interview, Bunnie Huang said:
We should encourage people to buy the book in addition to getting their copy electronically (for those that haven't read the article, the book is licensed under a Creative Commons license that will allow scanning the book in and distributing electronic copies). This is a great chance not only to show how the DMCA stifles free speech but to point out the hypocrisy of thinking of electronic distribution of information is somehow less worthy of free speech protection than traditional paper books. Huang is probably right that paper books enjoy more free speech protection than electronic distribution and that is sad.
In an effort to make this book easier to find and buy, visit this site and support presses that help society freely distribute information. If you have objections to buying from Amazon (who is listed on isbn.nu's price index), there are other places with better prices and availability. Buying direct from the press gives the press the most money.
Sadly, yes, they will even though it means doing business with the corporation that was a strong proponent of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998. This bill became law and stifles our ability to build on Disney's work like Disney built on Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill Jr.. We can't share and preserve countless other copyrighted works that aren't selling but are disappearing because of an overly long term of copyright. I wonder how many Slashdot readers have too short a memory to act effectively in defiance of the laws they rail against in other threads.
I'll be glad to do business with Disney when they advocate for a more reasonable copyright regime, one in which society's need to share and build on copyrighted works is balanced with publisher's need to make money.
No large patent holder has to actually do this. IBM holds the most patents and they said in their "Think" magazine that they get 10X the value from cross-licensing that they do from licensing patents. Considering suing for infringement involves spending money, not necessarily making money, it stands to reason that cross-licensing would still be far more valuable than winning patent infringement lawsuits too.
Also, consider the scare factor.
RMS happened to browse the weekly patent column in the New York Times when he came across a listing for a patent that appeared to cover a data compression method that the GNU project was going to use in a compressor they were about to release. That patent, and the implicit threat of losing an infringement lawsuit, killed this program before it was released. Nobody had to sue the FSF to get this result. Later the GNU project released gzip which went on to become a defacto standard, but it would have been nice if we could compete (as you say) "on actually making and selling software" instead of locking up ideas in an artificial economy so as to kill competition before it has a chance to benefit the end-user. RMS describes the experience and explodes the myth of patents benefitting software developers in his talk (or if you prefer, read the transcript).
Bill Gates once said:Patents push people into an arms race of sorts--as Gates obliquely illustrates, the patent system makes people react out of fear, not what's in the best interests of community or consumers. By creating this system and issuing software patents, the US Government has abdicated any desire to allow consumers to benefit by picking from a healthy competitive marketplace. After hearing what RMS has to say, I don't see how anyone can come away thinking those who don't sue for infringement are substantially better than those who do.