Enderle is the one who called Linux users "terrorists" and who thinks that SCO should win its case...
So, ummm, why would anyone listen to that guy, again? I mean, he decides to fling allegations of "terrorism" when he gets hatemail for being an idiot online, and (worse!) tend to discredit or disbelieve his oh-so-insightful analysis.
The man may be oft-quoted, but he's not exactly the brightest I've ever met... Seems to be one of the "contrarian" archetypes--that is, those who think that anything widely believed must be wrong. That includes, of course, both popular misconceptions and utter nonsense...
It's true--CS courses encourage terrible coding practices (never use libraries, using features because you're "supposed to," and other unmaintainable and insane practices).
On the other hand, there are plenty of good coders who don't know what the hell they're doing. They don't understand when or how to use simple data structures like linked lists, hash tables, etc. and can't do anything unless there's a library call for it.
Now then, why is this important? True, CS types may go into research, but half of us are out looking for some type of coding job. The thing of it is, I'm glad to know all those algorithms, but if I didn't know how to code, none of that would do me any good. And so CS degrees without coding skills are useless to most of us, unless we only want to pursue research.
And yes, I do know who Knuth is. I suspect more than you might think would have heard of him, at least, if they had any idea what the KMP in the KMP string matching algorithm stood for...
They had a small rise this morning, and when I saw it hit the news, there was about a 0.20 drop. Granted, it's not a lot for them by any means, but it was a rather sharp line downwards at the time I saw it.
Anyhow, the more important part is that more people are taking note of this (outside of slashdot types) and so SCO is unlikely to get any more large cash infusions, barring someone with a vested interest in this funding them...
As another poster mentioned, SCO's POS[1] deployments are primarily in retailers[2], this also is likely to prevent people from doing business with SCO, even moreso than usual.
So it's nothing really that new to us, but it's new that other people who hadn't payed attention to this are hearing more about it.
[1] By which I mean "point of sale," though you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise...
[2] I've heard McDonalds and Pizza Hut mentioned as using their systems... or was that Dominoes? I forget exactly; they could even have systems in both.
Perhaps because they wanted the data to arrive reliably?
UDP just sends off the data without caring whether it actually arrives intact at the other end, you know. TCP, on the other hand, actually gives delivery guarantees...
>> I issue a call for Google to encrypt your mail to avoid these issues
> No... I have a better idea, instead of getting the government involved if you don't like it then you can choose to use a email service more to your liking.
You should have RTFA a bit more carefully, perhaps? Don't get me wrong, I intend to use gmail myself, when I can, so I'm not one of those who is completely spooked by gmail, but...
That specific comment about encryption in the article was about avoiding a 180 day provision in the law that would allow warrantless searches by the government on that data. The provision is something to the effect of saying that if it's been there 180 days, we're no longer 'wiretapping' and thus don't need the warrant to do wiretapping, though IANAL and I'm playing fast & loose with my understanding here. This affects all email providers, BTW, but Google seems to encourage the archiving moreso than other systems.
I understand that encryption would somehow avoid this provision (as the law was meant to address something *very* different than it would be applied to here--sattelite broadcasts are at issue here, I think) and thus avoid the problem.
I just don't like the thought of the government googling through all the old mail on a whim, even though I have nothing to hide, really. Of course, if I'm reading things right, they at least have to inform you about the searching they're doing. I have no idea if the PATRIOT Act could be used to get around that, however.
So I would like it if Google could encrypt things server-side somehow, even if it was just ROT 13. Actually, if ROT 13 were "good enough" legally to avoid the warrantless searches, ROT 13 has the advantage that you can just ROT 13 the keywords in the query, too, and search normally, pretty much... *hmmm*:]
Damn, it scares me to think that something that trivial is probably patentable these days, even if it's just a property of many simple character/byte/bit-shifting schemes... Oh well, hopefully this post would be prior art now, against any such inanity?:]
The anti-spam and anti-virus scripts already parse all of your mail. This is simply a different bit of parsing.
Also Google can and most likely will, due to the outcry as well as their own code of ethics, limit how much an advertiser can infer from what ad you clicked.
Ideally, it would be no more than anyone gives away by clicking ads in the search results (and I note that you need never click these ads if you don't want to...). This is something no one had a problem with before, after all, however much it told them about your searches (and we all should know by now that every single worthwhile log parsing scripts pulls out the keywords people visit your site via... right?).
Honestly, I'm more worried about the warrantless search provisions and such this could fall prey to. Even so, I trust Google far more than the other services which are undoubtably now copying them for this.
Honestly, I'd almost like them to patent a few provisions of this (provided the patent was narrow enough) and simply keep others from copying Google and doing the whole service badly, in a way that would be horrible from a privacy standpoint...
All they have to do is a simple redirect and the advertisers might never know anything more than the keywords which triggered the email (nor even that it was *from* an email and not a web search).
In other words, no more than they know if you click on a Google sponsored link right now.
So, umm, in that case, don't sign up for a free trial of Out if you don't want one? *shrug*:]
Honestly, MSN, Yahoo & co. can do all of this right now, should they desire, and they have very little incentive to tell us about it. Well, maybe in the UK it might be illegal, but if they exclude all people who are from it from the policy and never tell anyone... (as if that were meaningful considering how many fill in utterly false info there...)
Hell, look at this current snip from the MSN Privacy Policy, which governs Hotmail:
MSN keeps track of the pages our customers visit within MSN, in order to determine what MSN sites and services are the most popular.
MSN also collects certain information about your computer hardware and software. This information may include: your IP address, browser type, domain names, access times and referring Web site addresses.
Certain MSN services may be co-branded and offered in conjunction with another company. If you register for or use such services, both MSN and the other company may receive information collected in conjunction with the co-branded services.
[...]
MSN Web pages may contain electronic images known as Web beacons - sometimes called single-pixel gifs - that allow MSN to count users who have visited those pages and to deliver co-branded services. MSN may include web beacons in promotional e-mail messages or MSN Newsletters in order to count how many messages have been opened and acted upon.
Web beacons collect only a limited set of information including a cookie number, time and date of a page view, and a description of the page on which the Web beacon resides. MSN Web pages may also contain Web beacons placed there by third parties in order to compile aggregated statistics and to help determine the effectiveness of our joint promotional or advertising campaigns. MSN prohibits web beacons from being used to access your personal information.
[...]
In addition, MSN allows other companies, called third-party ad servers or ad networks, to display advertisements on MSN Web pages. Some of these ad networks may place a persistent cookie on your computer. Doing this allows the ad network to recognize your computer each time they send you an online advertisement. In this way, ad networks may compile information about where you, or others who are using your computer, saw their advertisements and determine which ads are clicked on. This information allows an ad network to deliver targeted advertisements that they believe will be of most interest to you. Microsoft does not have access to or control of the cookies that may be placed by the third-party ad servers or ad networks.
MSN maintains relationships with a number of the third-party ad networks currently operating such as: Ad4Ever; AdCentric Online; Ad Dynamix; AdSolution; Avenue A; BlueStreak; BridgeTrack; DoubleClick; efluxa; Enliven; Flycast; i33; Mediaplex; PlanetActive; Pointroll; Profero; Qksrv; RealMedia; RedAgency; TangoZebra; TargetGraph; TrackStar; Travelworm; Unicast. Those ad networks that use persistent cookies may offer you a way to opt out of ad targeting. You may find more information at the Web site of either the individual ad network or the Network Advertising Initiative.
Where was this fuss over these terms? I at least trust Google more than MSN...
It also discusses the flame-out of Akamai after its tremendous IPO.
More reason to hope Google doesn't have an IPO?
Granted, I'm not convinced that an IPO would necessarily be a bad thing for Google (and I imagine that it might give a significant financial windfall for the current stockholders). Even so, I can imagine an IPO creating more trepidation that Google might, in the future, abandon its "don't be evil" policy and become a more "normal" company in that regard...
Which is probably a pretty sad commentary about what we consider to be "normal" for companies these days...:/
My understanding is that SCI (Secure, Compartmented Information) clearances aren't necessarily "higher" than any others, though I'm sure they may well be classified.
You can also fail the polygraph. It doesn't help much knowing their false positive rate.
You can also be considered too irresponsible, though the debt and drug use bit covers much of that.
That said, I'd still jump at the chance to get a clearance--you're not kidding about how much they're worth:]
You only see the accepted applicants, though, it would seem. Unless your workplace meets the requirements allowing temporary work authorizations, that is...
I know of plenty of folks who were rejected who aren't exactly particularly untrustworthy. Then again, I suppose that I don't know what all would be found in a full background investigation of them...
The other issue is that it's expensive to do these, so they avoid going through the whole screening process,if they can.
Well, actually you're right, but you're not telling them the whole story.
The big ticket item there is the security clearance. Those are *very* expensive to get (no, YOU do not and can not pay for one, you have to be sponsored by an employer/the military who says that you need one). He's right about how badly having done drugs (this includes going out & getting drunk a lot, too, folks!) or marrying non-US citizens. Hell, extensive foreign travel and any number of other things can make you look suspicious. There was an article posted about this somewhere on slashdot. I've seen other articles. Bottom line? A security clearance is *VERY* hard to get, all told, there's no guarantee that you ever will get one, but if you do, it IS positively golden (mostly *because* it is such a PITA to get).
I'll spare you the full details, though Google is your friend for more info, but expect background checks (hope your old neighbors liked you?), credit checks (bad credit == less trustworthy), and polygraph tests (they're inaccurate, but they're after voluntary admissions here... they have something like a 1 in 3 false positive rate [DOD study, even when used by trained experts] so I hope you're feeling lucky!).
It's funny, but I don't think the medium (necessarily) dictates how trustworthy a site is, but rather the site's standards reflect its trustworthiness.
As you mentioned, the New York Times wasn't very careful about catching that guy who just made up his stories. Forbes is another publication that has failed to exercise reasonable editorial control over their writers (*cough*Daniel Lyons*cough*) who was allowed to publish some lame attempt at character assassination. Ironically, it was directed at PJ of Groklaw fame who had chided him for just parroting press releases from SCO instead of doing research. Surprise, surprise, his article was also weak and poorly researched. He cited trolls as a source, for crying out loud (worse, by trolls I mean the obscene & idiotic ones, not merely those who try to make opposing views into flamebait). Frankly, I feel that Forbes does some of the shoddiest research ever. You could skip them entierly and just read the PR Newswire directly.
But I grant you, Slashdot itself is pretty much just a rumor mill most of the time, yet we (hopefully) all know by now to take the stories here with a grain of salt, as the articles are generally a bit sensational.
There are only a handful of sources online that I trust all that much, frankly. I like Google news for giving me a broad overview of the news (since I can get stories from many sources, I can usually filter out much of the bias). The Christian Science Monitor may have been started by Mary Baker Eddie's odd little sect, but it's a rather good newspaper because it was founded to have high journalistic ethics, since the church who founded it disliked the sensational pieces about their sect.
Last but not least, I appreaciate Groklaw. Not only has PJ sit on some stories until she could get a second source for confirmation (as good journalists are supposed to do...), but she links to all the PDFs and other documents so that no one, not even SCO, has to take her word for it.
what exactly has been the cause of every major war in the past 100,000 years?
Power.
People have used every means available to get and maintain power (including religion), and made all sorts of scapegoats, etc.
But power is the common thread behind it. It's just that one of the best ways to get power is to control some aspect of what people believe in. And when I say "believe" here, it need not be a religious belief at all... it can be some form of patriotism/statism/whatever.
This is why they moderated that as a troll; you've managed to both overgeneralize[1], and undergeneralize[2] in the same breath. Impressive.
[1] There are plenty of sects which have never been involved in war in any meaningful way. But you don't seem to know anything about them; somehow I'm not surprised. [2] The reason religion is used so often is to gain power. You may notice that they also use various other reasons, to appeal to as many people as they might in the quest for power.
Okay, Canter & Siegel, the original scumba^W spammers were lawyers, but many of them seem only to make cartoonish legal threats (hence the name "cartoony") which get passed around the newsgroups for people to laugh at.
Yes, I grant you, the spammers have hired lawyers before, but since everyone in the USA has the right to counsel in any criminal prosecution, I cannot seriously imagine that the cops would be deterred from enforcing the laws against them merely because they were going to be represented by a lawyer...
There are something like 23 definitions of "free."
And there are three different perspectives to look at this from: original developer, secondary developer(s) [those who make the derivative works], and the end users.
For the original developer, his own work is free to him. Under BSD, he can be denied the right to use any extensions to his own work if someone adds to it (though he retains his rights to the original). Under the GPL he cannot be (unless he has a dual license scheme).
For the secondary developer(s), the original work and any derivatives they make are free to them in either license (THEY made it, THEY can do as they please). The only difference is that this developer MUST make it free to all others to use if it's GPL'd (AND if they DISTRIBUTE it... if they never distribute it, they have NO obligations under the GPL whatsoever).
For the end users, the original will always be free (provided it's given under a free license, obviously), but any derivative works will only be available if they, too, are given freely.
Now then, looking at "free" in terms of "what we can do with it" instead of "what obligations do we have if we distribute the software," I don't see why so many people are so worried at the obligations placed on the secondary developers?
They don't HAVE to put up with them; they can write ALL their own, damned code if they want to and they won't be obligated to do anything. But if they bind themselves and don't like it, that's their problem...
GPL'd software is free of charge, and free for modification / redistribution, but it's only free so long as you only ever want to do the same things with it as RMS wants you to. ----
You mean it's only free so long as you share it. Moreover, for the GPL to apply, your work has to be a derivative work of a GPL'd work, or part of a GPL'd work.
If you don't like that, write your own code, or negotiate a separate license from the copyright holders.
What "RMS wants you to [do]" is of no relevance; you are beholden to the copyright holder whose copyright you would infringe upon were you not using the permission granted you by the GPL to do whatever it is that you're doing.
Moreover, GPL'd software is not necessarily free of charge, as I can buy even Debian CDs at cheapbytes.com and similar places. Of course, I can download it myself, too, for no charge, but there are no prohibitions on selling.
Lastly, authors sure as hell CAN choose whatever license they please. You can dual license it and all sorts of other things (e.g. pay for a BSD-like license to the source, release it as GPL'd for everyone).
So, umm, RMS may be a kook in other ways, but your post is pretty much completely wrong.
With that low a UID, just how long have you been trolling about this, anyhow?:P
Slashdot Mirror
Enderle is the one who called Linux users "terrorists" and who thinks that SCO should win its case...
So, ummm, why would anyone listen to that guy, again? I mean, he decides to fling allegations of "terrorism" when he gets hatemail for being an idiot online, and (worse!) tend to discredit or disbelieve his oh-so-insightful analysis.
The man may be oft-quoted, but he's not exactly the brightest I've ever met... Seems to be one of the "contrarian" archetypes--that is, those who think that anything widely believed must be wrong. That includes, of course, both popular misconceptions and utter nonsense...
You know, you need both.
It's true--CS courses encourage terrible coding practices (never use libraries, using features because you're "supposed to," and other unmaintainable and insane practices).
On the other hand, there are plenty of good coders who don't know what the hell they're doing. They don't understand when or how to use simple data structures like linked lists, hash tables, etc. and can't do anything unless there's a library call for it.
Now then, why is this important? True, CS types may go into research, but half of us are out looking for some type of coding job. The thing of it is, I'm glad to know all those algorithms, but if I didn't know how to code, none of that would do me any good. And so CS degrees without coding skills are useless to most of us, unless we only want to pursue research.
And yes, I do know who Knuth is. I suspect more than you might think would have heard of him, at least, if they had any idea what the KMP in the KMP string matching algorithm stood for...
Personally I never believe any company is dying until Netcraft confirms it.
:]
Will this do?
They had a small rise this morning, and when I saw it hit the news, there was about a 0.20 drop. Granted, it's not a lot for them by any means, but it was a rather sharp line downwards at the time I saw it.
Anyhow, the more important part is that more people are taking note of this (outside of slashdot types) and so SCO is unlikely to get any more large cash infusions, barring someone with a vested interest in this funding them...
As another poster mentioned, SCO's POS[1] deployments are primarily in retailers[2], this also is likely to prevent people from doing business with SCO, even moreso than usual.
So it's nothing really that new to us, but it's new that other people who hadn't payed attention to this are hearing more about it.
[1] By which I mean "point of sale," though you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise...
[2] I've heard McDonalds and Pizza Hut mentioned as using their systems... or was that Dominoes? I forget exactly; they could even have systems in both.
The irony is that SCO dropped the "GPL is unconstitutional" claims just a few days ago. See this story on Groklaw.
I thought he said crackheads? ;]
...)
(Besides, this is as good an excuse as any to Googlebomb SCO further
Perhaps because they wanted the data to arrive reliably?
UDP just sends off the data without caring whether it actually arrives intact at the other end, you know. TCP, on the other hand, actually gives delivery guarantees...
>> I issue a call for Google to encrypt your mail to avoid these issues
:]
:]
> No... I have a better idea, instead of getting the government involved if you don't like it then you can choose to use a email service more to your liking.
You should have RTFA a bit more carefully, perhaps? Don't get me wrong, I intend to use gmail myself, when I can, so I'm not one of those who is completely spooked by gmail, but...
That specific comment about encryption in the article was about avoiding a 180 day provision in the law that would allow warrantless searches by the government on that data. The provision is something to the effect of saying that if it's been there 180 days, we're no longer 'wiretapping' and thus don't need the warrant to do wiretapping, though IANAL and I'm playing fast & loose with my understanding here. This affects all email providers, BTW, but Google seems to encourage the archiving moreso than other systems.
I understand that encryption would somehow avoid this provision (as the law was meant to address something *very* different than it would be applied to here--sattelite broadcasts are at issue here, I think) and thus avoid the problem.
I just don't like the thought of the government googling through all the old mail on a whim, even though I have nothing to hide, really. Of course, if I'm reading things right, they at least have to inform you about the searching they're doing. I have no idea if the PATRIOT Act could be used to get around that, however.
So I would like it if Google could encrypt things server-side somehow, even if it was just ROT 13. Actually, if ROT 13 were "good enough" legally to avoid the warrantless searches, ROT 13 has the advantage that you can just ROT 13 the keywords in the query, too, and search normally, pretty much... *hmmm*
Damn, it scares me to think that something that trivial is probably patentable these days, even if it's just a property of many simple character/byte/bit-shifting schemes... Oh well, hopefully this post would be prior art now, against any such inanity?
The anti-spam and anti-virus scripts already parse all of your mail. This is simply a different bit of parsing.
Also Google can and most likely will, due to the outcry as well as their own code of ethics, limit how much an advertiser can infer from what ad you clicked.
Ideally, it would be no more than anyone gives away by clicking ads in the search results (and I note that you need never click these ads if you don't want to...). This is something no one had a problem with before, after all, however much it told them about your searches (and we all should know by now that every single worthwhile log parsing scripts pulls out the keywords people visit your site via... right?).
Honestly, I'm more worried about the warrantless search provisions and such this could fall prey to. Even so, I trust Google far more than the other services which are undoubtably now copying them for this.
Honestly, I'd almost like them to patent a few provisions of this (provided the patent was narrow enough) and simply keep others from copying Google and doing the whole service badly, in a way that would be horrible from a privacy standpoint...
In other words, no more than they know if you click on a Google sponsored link right now.
So, umm, in that case, don't sign up for a free trial of Out if you don't want one? *shrug*
Honestly, MSN, Yahoo & co. can do all of this right now, should they desire, and they have very little incentive to tell us about it. Well, maybe in the UK it might be illegal, but if they exclude all people who are from it from the policy and never tell anyone... (as if that were meaningful considering how many fill in utterly false info there...)
Hell, look at this current snip from the MSN Privacy Policy, which governs Hotmail:
Where was this fuss over these terms? I at least trust Google more than MSN...
It also discusses the flame-out of Akamai after its tremendous IPO.
:/
More reason to hope Google doesn't have an IPO?
Granted, I'm not convinced that an IPO would necessarily be a bad thing for Google (and I imagine that it might give a significant financial windfall for the current stockholders). Even so, I can imagine an IPO creating more trepidation that Google might, in the future, abandon its "don't be evil" policy and become a more "normal" company in that regard...
Which is probably a pretty sad commentary about what we consider to be "normal" for companies these days...
My understanding is that SCI (Secure, Compartmented Information) clearances aren't necessarily "higher" than any others, though I'm sure they may well be classified.
:]
You can also fail the polygraph. It doesn't help much knowing their false positive rate.
You can also be considered too irresponsible, though the debt and drug use bit covers much of that.
That said, I'd still jump at the chance to get a clearance--you're not kidding about how much they're worth
You only see the accepted applicants, though, it would seem. Unless your workplace meets the requirements allowing temporary work authorizations, that is...
,if they can.
I know of plenty of folks who were rejected who aren't exactly particularly untrustworthy. Then again, I suppose that I don't know what all would be found in a full background investigation of them...
The other issue is that it's expensive to do these, so they avoid going through the whole screening process
I wish!
:]
Well, actually you're right, but you're not telling them the whole story.
The big ticket item there is the security clearance. Those are *very* expensive to get (no, YOU do not and can not pay for one, you have to be sponsored by an employer/the military who says that you need one). He's right about how badly having done drugs (this includes going out & getting drunk a lot, too, folks!) or marrying non-US citizens. Hell, extensive foreign travel and any number of other things can make you look suspicious. There was an article posted about this somewhere on slashdot. I've seen other articles. Bottom line? A security clearance is *VERY* hard to get, all told, there's no guarantee that you ever will get one, but if you do, it IS positively golden (mostly *because* it is such a PITA to get).
I'll spare you the full details, though Google is your friend for more info, but expect background checks (hope your old neighbors liked you?), credit checks (bad credit == less trustworthy), and polygraph tests (they're inaccurate, but they're after voluntary admissions here... they have something like a 1 in 3 false positive rate [DOD study, even when used by trained experts] so I hope you're feeling lucky!).
That said, they're golden. Wish I had one!
Heh, no, but I figured the OP might ;P
You like looking at the IE error page? Weirdo ;P
Everyone should know that it is ATTRITION.org, anyhow (and, at least, the link is correct).
Just think if the NY Times had a policy of publishing every letter sent to the editor. Now that will keep you honest.
Not the trolls, though, I should hope...
The thought of opening a newspaper, only to find a picture of the Goatse man on the oppinion page just sent a chill down my spine. Ugh!
It's funny, but I don't think the medium (necessarily) dictates how trustworthy a site is, but rather the site's standards reflect its trustworthiness.
As you mentioned, the New York Times wasn't very careful about catching that guy who just made up his stories. Forbes is another publication that has failed to exercise reasonable editorial control over their writers (*cough*Daniel Lyons*cough*) who was allowed to publish some lame attempt at character assassination. Ironically, it was directed at PJ of Groklaw fame who had chided him for just parroting press releases from SCO instead of doing research. Surprise, surprise, his article was also weak and poorly researched. He cited trolls as a source, for crying out loud (worse, by trolls I mean the obscene & idiotic ones, not merely those who try to make opposing views into flamebait). Frankly, I feel that Forbes does some of the shoddiest research ever. You could skip them entierly and just read the PR Newswire directly.
But I grant you, Slashdot itself is pretty much just a rumor mill most of the time, yet we (hopefully) all know by now to take the stories here with a grain of salt, as the articles are generally a bit sensational.
There are only a handful of sources online that I trust all that much, frankly. I like Google news for giving me a broad overview of the news (since I can get stories from many sources, I can usually filter out much of the bias). The Christian Science Monitor may have been started by Mary Baker Eddie's odd little sect, but it's a rather good newspaper because it was founded to have high journalistic ethics, since the church who founded it disliked the sensational pieces about their sect.
Last but not least, I appreaciate Groklaw. Not only has PJ sit on some stories until she could get a second source for confirmation (as good journalists are supposed to do...), but she links to all the PDFs and other documents so that no one, not even SCO, has to take her word for it.
what exactly has been the cause of every major war in the past 100,000 years?
Power.
People have used every means available to get and maintain power (including religion), and made all sorts of scapegoats, etc.
But power is the common thread behind it. It's just that one of the best ways to get power is to control some aspect of what people believe in. And when I say "believe" here, it need not be a religious belief at all... it can be some form of patriotism/statism/whatever.
This is why they moderated that as a troll; you've managed to both overgeneralize[1], and undergeneralize[2] in the same breath. Impressive.
[1] There are plenty of sects which have never been involved in war in any meaningful way. But you don't seem to know anything about them; somehow I'm not surprised.
[2] The reason religion is used so often is to gain power. You may notice that they also use various other reasons, to appeal to as many people as they might in the quest for power.
I've often wondered why Google doesn't put up an "unsafe" image search option? (e.g. leave out all the images it deems "safe").
Then again, it hardly needs to most of the time...
Spammers have lawyers now!?
Okay, Canter & Siegel, the original scumba^W spammers were lawyers, but many of them seem only to make cartoonish legal threats (hence the name "cartoony") which get passed around the newsgroups for people to laugh at.
Yes, I grant you, the spammers have hired lawyers before, but since everyone in the USA has the right to counsel in any criminal prosecution, I cannot seriously imagine that the cops would be deterred from enforcing the laws against them merely because they were going to be represented by a lawyer...
And my cookies expire at the end of each session :]
*shrug*
How could you forget "Admiral Crunch" and "Archduke Chocula"? ;]
There are something like 23 definitions of "free."
And there are three different perspectives to look at this from: original developer, secondary developer(s) [those who make the derivative works], and the end users.
For the original developer, his own work is free to him. Under BSD, he can be denied the right to use any extensions to his own work if someone adds to it (though he retains his rights to the original). Under the GPL he cannot be (unless he has a dual license scheme).
For the secondary developer(s), the original work and any derivatives they make are free to them in either license (THEY made it, THEY can do as they please). The only difference is that this developer MUST make it free to all others to use if it's GPL'd (AND if they DISTRIBUTE it... if they never distribute it, they have NO obligations under the GPL whatsoever).
For the end users, the original will always be free (provided it's given under a free license, obviously), but any derivative works will only be available if they, too, are given freely.
Now then, looking at "free" in terms of "what we can do with it" instead of "what obligations do we have if we distribute the software," I don't see why so many people are so worried at the obligations placed on the secondary developers?
They don't HAVE to put up with them; they can write ALL their own, damned code if they want to and they won't be obligated to do anything. But if they bind themselves and don't like it, that's their problem...
GPL'd software is free of charge, and free for modification / redistribution, but it's only free so long as you only ever want to do the same things with it as RMS wants you to.
:P
----
You mean it's only free so long as you share it. Moreover, for the GPL to apply, your work has to be a derivative work of a GPL'd work, or part of a GPL'd work.
If you don't like that, write your own code, or negotiate a separate license from the copyright holders.
What "RMS wants you to [do]" is of no relevance; you are beholden to the copyright holder whose copyright you would infringe upon were you not using the permission granted you by the GPL to do whatever it is that you're doing.
Moreover, GPL'd software is not necessarily free of charge, as I can buy even Debian CDs at cheapbytes.com and similar places. Of course, I can download it myself, too, for no charge, but there are no prohibitions on selling.
Lastly, authors sure as hell CAN choose whatever license they please. You can dual license it and all sorts of other things (e.g. pay for a BSD-like license to the source, release it as GPL'd for everyone).
So, umm, RMS may be a kook in other ways, but your post is pretty much completely wrong.
With that low a UID, just how long have you been trolling about this, anyhow?