There was a project called Fuse, (File system in User SpacE) that aimed to make a kernel module that would let linux users actually mount anything that the KDE I/O Slaves can handle. This seemed like a great idea to me; it would let non-KDE apps and the command line have access to all those networked devices. But the project seems kind of dead:
Montgomery: The explosion would also generate a 16ft high wave that could sink a small craft.
La Palma: Scientists predict that it will generate a wave that will be almost inconceivably destructive, far bigger than anything ever witnessed in modern times. It will surge across the entire Atlantic in a matter of hours, engulfing the whole US east coast, sweeping away everything in its path up to 20km inland. Boston would be hit first, followed by New York, then all the way down the coast to Miami and the Caribbean.
> the senator must have read my letter and the reply since he signed it, right?
No. The signature is from an autopen, done by a staffer.
Email really isn't worth one fiftieth of a phone call to the DC office, as outlined in the parent post. If you want to exert some influence, that's the way to go.
>[the funding] comes from the PUBLIC (hence the name). And goes to the PUBLIC. Except in this case, where it also goes to all sorts of other PUBLICs (ie: those of us who don't pay UK taxes) at a very real cost to the broadcasters.
You're right. Whenever I'm not watching a publicly subsidized broadcaster, instead of thinking "why should I pay for something I don't use," I should think "How happy I am that my taxes are subsidizing things that I don't use, but tht I have the right to use... and how doubly happy I am that I am further subsidizing the creation of various DRM schemes to prevent other people who want to use these things from doing so, even though their viewing the content would cost me nothing further!!! Yes, I am happy indeed."
Look: the funding comes from the public. We subsidize public broadcasters with our taxes and government-mandated fees. We pay whether or not we watch or listen to the shows. We don't have a choice about paying. We pay (allegedly) not just for the quid-pro-quo of consuming the content but for the public good it provides.
That being the case, how does preventing the public from sharing the content, and from using the content to create new works and sharing those, serve the public interest? If I paid for it, and its supposed to be serving the common good, why shouldn't I be able to share it?
You argue that my sharing the content (which I paid for with my tax dollars) comes at a "very real cost to the broadcasters." This is what I meant by a **AA mentality. The logic is nonsenical enough for commercial content producers. They claim that if someone shares an MP3 they lose a dollar because the recipient would surely otherwise have paid for it.
If a public broadcaster is going to be acting like a commercial broadcaster what is the difference and why should they get subsidies at all?
Instead of mindlessly embracing the **AA mentality of "ownership of everything," why not ask yourself this: if the BBC, and PBS, and NPR, and other PUBLIC broadcasters produced their programs for the PUBLIC domain instead of trying to hoard it, what would be the effect? The public could redistribute the content, saving them the money of creating new strange DRM schemes, massive bandwidth requirements, etc. The public could use the content to create new interesting works. More people all around the world would have access to more interesting and useful information. Governments and industry wouldn' need to spend untold billions on ultimately futile DRM schemes and legal enforcement that restricts peoples freedoms with no overall social benefit.
> Making the content free to everyone would seriously undermine the license-fee model... License-fee payers will object to paying for programs that non-license payers can freely watch.
If the point of the licence fee model is to make sure everyone pays for what they watch, and that no one gets to watch anything they haven't paid for... why do we need public broadcasting at all? Commercial broadcasters and cable companys can do this much more efficiently, and can only charge people who want their services instead of everyone with a TV, or in the case of the US, everyone who pays taxes regardless of whether they watch TV or not.
We need PUBLIC broadcasters to serve the PUBLIC, and make content for the PUBLIC domain. If you want to argue that no one should get anything they haven't paid for, why should there even be a pubic domain?
> The BBC in part funds it's creative content by licensing their content... This money is vital...
This is exactly the problem. Broadcasters that were set up as publicly-funded entitys designed to serve the public have increasingly become commercialized.
The BBC and other public broadcasters were created to serve the PUBLIC. They should be creating and fostering new content for the PUBLIC domain.
There are already plenty of commercial broadcasters and content producers producing "owned" content. We don't need the BBC to be another one.
If their mentality is to be one of "ownership" and "control" why should they be entitled to public subsidy at all?
And if publicly-subsidized broadcasters won't support the public domain, and commercial media lobbys legislatures to eternally extend copyrights, what the hell will be in the public domain?
It doesn't explicitly say, but the tone of the article suggests that the BBC's mentality is not much different from the **AA bunch.
"If we don't enter this market, then exactly what happened to the music industry could happen to us... everybody starts posting the content up there and ripping us off."
What would be wrong with the public freely sharing the content? They are subsidizing the creation of it with their tax payments.
Why don't allegedly "public" broadcasters, like the BBC in Brittan or PBS or NPR in the US, produce and release content under Creative Commons type, or other Free licences? That way the public could use, share, and redistribute the content freely. People could even re-edit the content and create new and interesting works. Wouldn't that be a good thing? Isn't the idea behind public broadcasting to serve the public, instead of seek profits?
Instead, the "public" broadcasters have developed the same control-freak mentality of the rest of the media that effectively opposes the very idea of a public domain and favors every byte having a DRM restricted ownership sticker. If that is the case, what is the point of the public subsidizing these broadcasters... and why should they even exist?
Hold it, hold it. Let me get this straight: Microsoft is distributing code under the GPL license??!??!
The same licence they have been warning businesses about? The one they told the their customers, and the world, "We recommend you obtain counsel from your lawyer" before using?
The licence they called "viral?" The one they warned could "infect" your code?
"Have you considered the risk that GPL code might infringe on third party intellectual property rights?" Isn't that what they asked? Couldn't "the author of a GPL program unilaterally withdraw your right to distribute the program?" Weren't they so, so, worried about all this before? It's all in their GPL analysis FAQ.
I don't know if this is the first time they have distributed code under the GPL or not. In any case this shocks me. How could Microsoft be so irresponsible as to expose their customers to a licence that could lead them to disaster? And if it did, couldn't the customers hold Microsoft financially accountable? Why would they take such a risk?
It almost makes you think that Microsoft wasn't being honest when they said those things about the GPL... that they were simply trying to frighten people from what they knew, in fact, to be a very good, safe licence for their customers.
No, he did not "mearly state what the RIAA/MPAA likely reaction...would be." It is very clear that he opposes P2P. Read the WHOLE article before you post.
Getting everybody's home machine out from being a NAT box should make possible a lot of interesting applications that are either very difficult
or downright impossible today. And in all likelihood, some of those applications will not be popular with the Recording Industry Association of
America or the Motion Picture Association of America, both of which have taken the lead against peer-to-peer networks. As soon as they understand
what a threat IPv6 is to their police actions, they are likely to start fighting against.
I have no strong opinions on the technical merits of IPv6 but I want to address the above statement, and the (IMHO) wrongheaded mentality behind
it.
Why should the fact that these monopolistic groups oppose new, useful technologies, lead anyone to the conclusion that those technologies should
be abandoned? Shouldn't we rather abolish the MPAA and RIAA?
When the light bulb was invented, did anyone argue we should abandon it because the candlestick industry would oppose it?
The truth is that new digital technologies are making "content" businesses like those represented by the *AA's obsolete. There is no benefit to
society to engage in costly, counterproductive and futile "wars" against P2P and other useful new technologies in the name of enforcing "intelectual
property" laws created in a different era that now benefit only special interests and not the public interest.
How many times does this need to be pointed out? QT/KDE does
NOT require the purchase of a licence to be used in developing
commercial products!!
Read
the QT FAQ. You can freely (free as in speech and as in beer) develop
software for whatever purpose you desire using QT, including commercial
purposes. Millions of people use software developed with free QT for
commercial purposes every day.
To make this even more clear: QT
is released under the GPL. The GPL forbids anyone from restricting the
use of QT or products derived from QT under that licence. In other
words, you CANNOT develop a product derived from GPL'd code and say
"you can only use this for non-commecial purposes."
The GPL is
an excellent licence for commercial software for reasons to numerous to
mention, vastly superior to, say, a typical Microsoft licence.
Lets
say a business has to choose between two software products with equal
capability but different licences. The first product is free to use,
can be used on many machines, comes with its source code, and can be
modified and redistributed. The second product needs to be licenced
seperately for each machine it runs on, cannot be copied internal let
alone redistributed externaly, and does not even reveal its source let
alone allow for it to be modified. Which is product is superior for
commercial purposes?
I think this confusion about licencing
arises because far too many people confuse COMMERCIAL software
development with CLOSED SOURCE software development. COMMERCIAL does
not equal CLOSED SOURCE!!! I use Free (open source) Software every day
for commercial purposes. Millions of people do.
Now, for those
people who want to write a closed source software product, they can
also use QT for this purpose... however in that case they must purchase
a commercial licence from TrollTech, instead of licencing it under the GPL. This is only logical... if you
want to sell a software product under a closed source, proprietary
licence, and not allow your customers to get the source or have the
right to freely use it, why the hell should Trolltech (and other
developers of Free software) have to give you THEIR source for free?
This
is why I think that QT/KDE has a SUPERIOR licencing scheme to that of
GTK/Gnome... QT/KDE allows for closed source development but ENCOURAGES
open source.
I have great respect for Bruce Perens, but he is
way off base on this. If there must be only one desktop environment in
UserLinux it should be KDE. It is very disapointing to see him get
behind the platform that is LESS beneficial to free software.
Some people have said that Gnome has an advantage over KDE because you need to buy a licence to make commercial software with QT.
First of all, this is wrong. Read the QT FAQ. Developers can write commercial apps to their hearts content using QT with complete freedom (beer & speech) as long as your apps are GPL'd. Now, if a developer wants to write PROPRIETARY, NON-FREE apps -- programs where the developer keeps the source code secret and does not allow the users to review, change, or share the program or source with others -- well, the developer can do that, but then they need to buy a QT commercial licence from Trolltech.
And what is wrong with that? If a developer refuses to share his source freely with others, why should Trolltech have to share their source with him??!
This kind of licenceing encourages the development of free (as in speech) software (including commercial free software--COMMERCIAL NON-FREE). Isn't advancing free software supposed to be the whole point of userlinux?
Lets you easily give a different email address to each different list/website/company you deal with, to limit the amount of mail you get to each address, plus set up trusted senders... works well.
> The extra buttons on the juk toolbar are there in the interest of consistency with other KDE apps. > Almost all KDE apps have those buttons in the same place.
So buttons that never get clicked should be present... to be "consistent?" That's like saying that my radio should have brightness and contrast knobs to be "consistent" with my televison....
Some people seem to want voters to get a receipt showing who they voted for. This is a bad idea.
A receipt of this sort would destroy the secrecy of the ballot. It would allow people with money to buy votes, and people with power to intimidate voters to vote the "right" way.
For example, if there were voting receipts, your employer, the patriarch of your family, or local ward boss could ask to see your receipt... if you didn't vote for the "right" guy or refused to show your receipt, there could be negative consequences, especially for people without power.
Even if asking for your receipt was illegal, people would still do it... or intimidate voters with the mere possibility that they might demand to see their receipt.
I think that if the voting system is changed, it should certainly NOT include receipts, neither paper nor electronic.
There should be strong audit trails, of course, but it should be impossible to determine who an individual voter voted for.
Let me get this straight: we already have numerous P2P networks through which people can freely share digital media. These guys have created a system that distributes ANALOG versions of digital songs; only distributes data deigned appropriate by a central authority; only distributes locally, not worldwide; only allows users to hear the music from their TV, and not move it elsewhere.
And this is supposed to be a good thing?
No wonder Microsoft is funding the research... creating "innovations" that make people's lives worse instead of better seems to be their specialty.
The only "benefit" I can see from the MIT system over P2P file sharing is that the MIT system allows the RIAA executives to continue to harvest extreme wealth from the creativity of underpaid artists and the greed of contribution-hungry politician.
Instead of creating technical kludges that make our lives worse instead of better, would it not be better to junk the DMCA and other obsolete copyright laws bought and paid for by the RIAA and friends?
I found the article extremely insightful and persuasive, and I would urge everyone to read it carefully. It's important to note that the author is NOT in favor of the hellish "Secure Internet" of the future:
>"Certainly you can't be advocating this!"
>Well, duh . . . of course not! But this is where
>we are going, unless we change course, and soon.
He is absolutely right, and people who say otherwise are burying their heads in the sand. But it is important to realize that we as individuals can have an impact on whether this happens or not, based on our actions. We must act, and act in concert, to protect our freedom.
Our strategy must be to strengthen the countervailing forces that act as a check against the power of the "ownership class" which seeks to recentralize power in their hands. We can do this by building up a community of people who get benefits from the Free Internet, understand those benefits, and are politically organized to resist the coming attacks on the Free Internet.
Encouraging the growth and acceptance of GNU/Linux is a big part of this. Encouraging the growth and acceptance of P2P is another part. Educating the average computer user about his or her rights and freedoms is another part, and organizing ourselves politicalcally is the final and most challenging stage. We have numbers on our side, they have money. What can we do to start? Join the FSF and the EFF.
If we get organized we can prevail. If we don't, the power of the Internet to empower the individual will slip away. The decicion is ours. As Walker concludes:
>That decision will determine whether the long
>dawn of the Internet was, itself, a false dawn,
>or will continue to brighten into a new day for
>humanity.
> The GPL license however has been concocted to prove a point, politically.
No, the GPL has been created to advance freedom. BSD zealots share this goal, but the GPL uses a much more active, powerful and practical to achieving this goal, IMHO.
Given that you undoubtedly agreed to allow the proprietary software to do a full body cavity search on you when you clicked through the EULA, the publisher has the right to do just that. Even if you're using a "legal" copy.
YOU have the right to refuse to use binary-only, spyware infected, jump-through-hoops licenced programs. Use Free Software instead.
"But I depend on the proprietary software to do my job." Then support the Free Software movement so someday you won't need to depend on proprietary software anymore.
> Like everyone I have to eat, and I'm already overworked.
First of all, let me say: thank you. Thank you for the work you do for a free software project. I should have made clear in my earlier post that I truly appreciate the work that you and the other developers put into this.
I want to see GnuCash succeed. My criticism is meant to be constructive and its not directed at you personally but at the project, collectively.
My point is, first of all, that the collective development process that the project follows needs to be able to PRIORITIZE things that are critical and FOCUS ITS LIMITED RESOURCES onto those areas first. Online banking is CRITICAL to the success of the project. If you are too busy to work on OFX yourself, can't anyone else help you out? Can't this be made a priority? Quicken and other proprietary programs have been doing online banking for years. During the past six years I have seen feature after feature being added to GnuCash, but Online banking (the most requested, and undoubtedly most critical missing piece) languishes.
Second, the project needs to realize that the solution to every probelm may not be more coding. You guys need to PUT YOUR HEADS TOGETHER and figure this out.
Here are a few suggestions:
1) If the banks are uncooperative, why not to to organize GnuCash users to lobby their banks to cooperate with you? To start with you could set up a web page where customers can sign up and say what bank they use... then connect those people with the same bank together and have them contact their banks and ask that they help you.
2) Maybe you could form a partnership with a bank or banks and have them contribute to making online banking work for GnuCash in exchange for advertising on your site or somewhere.
3) Maybe you could organize one or more of the desktop Linux distributions to sponser work on this. It would contribute significantly to making Linux more competitive on the desktop.
Yes, implmenting these ideas will take time, resources, and leadership. I'm not saying it will be easy. Maybe it will require getting new people involved in the project besides programers. But the open source movement needs to start thinking this way more in order to gain mainstream acceptance on the desktop.
GnuCash, from the begining, has suffered from a major disconnect between the developers and its (potential) users. Besides the absurd dependency problem which makes installing it nearly impossible, after six years in development, it STILL has no true online banking capability... how is this possible?
Yes, there are many barriers to implementing this capability. But the project has never given it the priority it needs (and seems to still be unlikely to... Gregoire says he will work on it "if I can just find time").
it's his product, protected by his license, and he can do anything he damn well pleases with it
The real point is not whether he has a right to set the terms of his licence as he chooses, it's whether the users of his product will have the forsight to recognize the long term problems that these terms cause, and, based on that recogntion, take appropriate action.
"now it seems many of the non-free concerns were warranted"
This seems to be the way these things usually work:
1) RMS issues a warning 2) He is immediately subjected to a massive number of vicious personal attacks, accusing him of being paranoid, being extreme, being ideological, etc. 3) Some time later, it becomes obvious his warning was correct 4) Few if any of his critics apologize or even acknowlege their error... they are too busy attacking RMS over his next warning.
Slashdot Mirror
There was a project called Fuse, (File system in User SpacE) that aimed to make a kernel module that would let linux users actually mount anything that the KDE I/O Slaves can handle. This seemed like a great idea to me; it would let non-KDE apps and the command line have access to all those networked devices. But the project seems kind of dead:
http://kde.ground.cz/tiki-index.php?page=KIO+Fuse+ Gateway
Does anyone know what happened to it and if there are any other projects that would do this?
That's not a time bomb.
This is a time bomb!!!
Montgomery:
The explosion would also generate a 16ft high wave that could sink a small craft.
La Palma:
Scientists predict that it will generate a wave that will be almost inconceivably destructive, far bigger than anything ever witnessed in modern times. It will surge across the entire Atlantic in a matter of hours, engulfing the whole US east coast, sweeping away everything in its path up to 20km inland. Boston would be hit first, followed by New York, then all the way down the coast to Miami and the Caribbean.
I use abcde for CD ripping and mp3cd for CD burning.
> the senator must have read my letter and the reply since he signed it, right?
No. The signature is from an autopen, done by a staffer.
Email really isn't worth one fiftieth of a phone call to the DC office, as outlined in the parent post. If you want to exert some influence, that's the way to go.
>[the funding] comes from the PUBLIC (hence the name). And goes to the PUBLIC. Except in this case, where it also goes to all sorts of other PUBLICs (ie: those of us who don't pay UK taxes) at a very real cost to the broadcasters.
You're right. Whenever I'm not watching a publicly subsidized broadcaster, instead of thinking "why should I pay for something I don't use," I should think "How happy I am that my taxes are subsidizing things that I don't use, but tht I have the right to use... and how doubly happy I am that I am further subsidizing the creation of various DRM schemes to prevent other people who want to use these things from doing so, even though their viewing the content would cost me nothing further!!! Yes, I am happy indeed."
Look: the funding comes from the public. We subsidize public broadcasters with our taxes and government-mandated fees. We pay whether or not we watch or listen to the shows. We don't have a choice about paying. We pay (allegedly) not just for the quid-pro-quo of consuming the content but for the public good it provides.
That being the case, how does preventing the public from sharing the content, and from using the content to create new works and sharing those,
serve the public interest? If I paid for it, and its supposed to be serving the common good, why shouldn't I be able to share it?
You argue that my sharing the content (which I paid for with my tax dollars) comes at a "very real cost to the broadcasters." This is what I meant by a **AA mentality. The logic is nonsenical enough for commercial content producers. They claim that if someone shares an MP3 they lose a dollar because the recipient would surely otherwise have paid for it.
If a public broadcaster is going to be acting like a commercial broadcaster what is the difference and why should they get subsidies at all?
Instead of mindlessly embracing the **AA mentality of "ownership of everything," why not ask yourself this: if the BBC, and PBS, and NPR, and other PUBLIC broadcasters produced their programs for the PUBLIC domain instead of trying to hoard it, what would be the effect? The public could redistribute the content, saving them the money of creating new strange DRM schemes, massive bandwidth requirements, etc. The public could use the content to create new interesting works. More people all around the world would have access to more interesting and useful information. Governments and industry wouldn' need to spend untold billions on ultimately futile DRM schemes and legal enforcement that restricts peoples freedoms with no overall social benefit.
> Making the content free to everyone would seriously undermine the license-fee model... License-fee payers will object to paying for programs that non-license payers can freely watch.
If the point of the licence fee model is to make sure everyone pays for what they watch, and that no one gets to watch anything they haven't paid for... why do we need public broadcasting at all? Commercial broadcasters and cable companys can do this much more efficiently, and can only charge people who want their services instead of everyone with a TV, or in the case of the US, everyone who pays taxes regardless of whether they watch TV or not.
We need PUBLIC broadcasters to serve the PUBLIC, and make content for the PUBLIC domain. If you want to argue that no one should get anything they haven't paid for, why should there even be a pubic domain?
> The BBC in part funds it's creative content by licensing their content... This money is vital...
This is exactly the problem. Broadcasters that were set up as publicly-funded entitys designed to serve the public have increasingly become commercialized.
The BBC and other public broadcasters were created to serve the PUBLIC. They should be creating and fostering new content for the PUBLIC domain.
There are already plenty of commercial broadcasters and content producers producing "owned" content. We don't need the BBC to be another one.
If their mentality is to be one of "ownership" and "control" why should they be entitled to public subsidy at all?
And if publicly-subsidized broadcasters won't support the public domain, and commercial media lobbys legislatures to eternally extend copyrights, what the hell will be in the public domain?
It doesn't explicitly say, but the tone of the article suggests that the BBC's mentality is not much different from the **AA bunch.
"If we don't enter this market, then exactly what happened to the music industry could happen to us... everybody starts posting the content up there and ripping us off."
What would be wrong with the public freely sharing the content? They are subsidizing the creation of it with their tax payments.
Why don't allegedly "public" broadcasters, like the BBC in Brittan or PBS or NPR in the US, produce and release content under Creative Commons type, or other Free licences? That way the public could use, share, and redistribute the content freely. People could even re-edit the content and create new and interesting works. Wouldn't that be a good thing? Isn't the idea behind public broadcasting to serve the public, instead of seek profits?
Instead, the "public" broadcasters have developed the same control-freak mentality of the rest of the media that effectively opposes the very idea of a public domain and favors every byte having a DRM restricted ownership sticker. If that is the case, what is the point of the public subsidizing these broadcasters... and why should they even exist?
Hold it, hold it. Let me get this straight: Microsoft is distributing code under the GPL license??!??!
The same licence they have been warning businesses about? The one they told the their customers, and the world, "We recommend you obtain counsel from your lawyer" before using?
The licence they called "viral?" The one they warned could "infect" your code?
"Have you considered the risk that GPL code might infringe on third party intellectual property rights?" Isn't that what they asked? Couldn't "the author of a GPL program unilaterally withdraw your right to distribute the program?" Weren't they so, so, worried about all this before? It's all in their GPL analysis FAQ.
I don't know if this is the first time they have distributed code under the GPL or not. In any case this shocks me. How could Microsoft be so irresponsible as to expose their customers to a licence that could lead them to disaster? And if it did, couldn't the customers hold Microsoft financially accountable? Why would they take such a risk?
It almost makes you think that Microsoft wasn't being honest when they said those things about the GPL... that they were simply trying to frighten people from what they knew, in fact, to be a very good, safe licence for their customers.
But that couldn't be... could it?
No, he did not "mearly state what the RIAA/MPAA likely reaction...would be." It is very clear that he opposes P2P. Read the WHOLE article before you post.
Getting everybody's home machine out from being a NAT box should make possible a lot of interesting applications that are either very difficult or downright impossible today. And in all likelihood, some of those applications will not be popular with the Recording Industry Association of America or the Motion Picture Association of America, both of which have taken the lead against peer-to-peer networks. As soon as they understand what a threat IPv6 is to their police actions, they are likely to start fighting against.
I have no strong opinions on the technical merits of IPv6 but I want to address the above statement, and the (IMHO) wrongheaded mentality behind it.
Why should the fact that these monopolistic groups oppose new, useful technologies, lead anyone to the conclusion that those technologies should be abandoned? Shouldn't we rather abolish the MPAA and RIAA?
When the light bulb was invented, did anyone argue we should abandon it because the candlestick industry would oppose it?
The truth is that new digital technologies are making "content" businesses like those represented by the *AA's obsolete. There is no benefit to society to engage in costly, counterproductive and futile "wars" against P2P and other useful new technologies in the name of enforcing "intelectual property" laws created in a different era that now benefit only special interests and not the public interest.
How many times does this need to be pointed out? QT/KDE does NOT require the purchase of a licence to be used in developing commercial products!!
Read the QT FAQ. You can freely (free as in speech and as in beer) develop software for whatever purpose you desire using QT, including commercial purposes. Millions of people use software developed with free QT for commercial purposes every day.
To make this even more clear: QT is released under the GPL. The GPL forbids anyone from restricting the use of QT or products derived from QT under that licence. In other words, you CANNOT develop a product derived from GPL'd code and say "you can only use this for non-commecial purposes."
The GPL is an excellent licence for commercial software for reasons to numerous to mention, vastly superior to, say, a typical Microsoft licence.
Lets say a business has to choose between two software products with equal capability but different licences. The first product is free to use, can be used on many machines, comes with its source code, and can be modified and redistributed. The second product needs to be licenced seperately for each machine it runs on, cannot be copied internal let alone redistributed externaly, and does not even reveal its source let alone allow for it to be modified. Which is product is superior for commercial purposes?
I think this confusion about licencing arises because far too many people confuse COMMERCIAL software development with CLOSED SOURCE software development. COMMERCIAL does not equal CLOSED SOURCE!!! I use Free (open source) Software every day for commercial purposes. Millions of people do.
Now, for those people who want to write a closed source software product, they can also use QT for this purpose... however in that case they must purchase a commercial licence from TrollTech, instead of licencing it under the GPL. This is only logical... if you want to sell a software product under a closed source, proprietary licence, and not allow your customers to get the source or have the right to freely use it, why the hell should Trolltech (and other developers of Free software) have to give you THEIR source for free?
This is why I think that QT/KDE has a SUPERIOR licencing scheme to that of GTK/Gnome... QT/KDE allows for closed source development but ENCOURAGES open source.
I have great respect for Bruce Perens, but he is way off base on this. If there must be only one desktop environment in UserLinux it should be KDE. It is very disapointing to see him get behind the platform that is LESS beneficial to free software.
Some people have said that Gnome has an advantage over KDE because you need to buy a licence to make commercial software with QT.
First of all, this is wrong. Read the QT FAQ. Developers can write commercial apps to their hearts content using QT with complete freedom (beer & speech) as long as your apps are GPL'd. Now, if a developer wants to write PROPRIETARY, NON-FREE apps -- programs where the developer keeps the source code secret and does not allow the users to review, change, or share the program or source with others -- well, the developer can do that, but then they need to buy a QT commercial licence from Trolltech.
And what is wrong with that? If a developer refuses to share his source freely with others, why should Trolltech have to share their source with him??!
This kind of licenceing encourages the development of free (as in speech) software (including commercial free software--COMMERCIAL NON-FREE). Isn't advancing free software supposed to be the whole point of userlinux?
http://spamgourmet.com/
Lets you easily give a different email address to each different list/website/company you deal with, to limit the amount of mail you get to each address, plus set up trusted senders... works well.
> The extra buttons on the juk toolbar are there in the interest of consistency with other KDE apps.
> Almost all KDE apps have those buttons in the same place.
So buttons that never get clicked should be present... to be "consistent?" That's like saying that my radio should have brightness and contrast knobs to be "consistent" with my televison....
Some people seem to want voters to get a receipt showing who they voted for. This is a bad idea.
A receipt of this sort would destroy the secrecy of the ballot. It would allow people with money to buy votes, and people with power to intimidate voters to vote the "right" way.
For example, if there were voting receipts, your employer, the patriarch of your family, or local ward boss could ask to see your receipt... if you didn't vote for the "right" guy or refused to show your receipt, there could be negative consequences, especially for people without power.
Even if asking for your receipt was illegal, people would still do it... or intimidate voters with the mere possibility that they might demand to see their receipt.
I think that if the voting system is changed, it should certainly NOT include receipts, neither paper nor electronic.
There should be strong audit trails, of course, but it should be impossible to determine who an individual voter voted for.
Let me get this straight: we already have numerous P2P networks through which people can freely share digital media. These guys have created a system that distributes ANALOG versions of digital songs; only distributes data deigned appropriate by a central authority; only distributes locally, not worldwide; only allows users to hear the music from their TV, and not move it elsewhere.
And this is supposed to be a good thing?
No wonder Microsoft is funding the research... creating "innovations" that make people's lives worse instead of better seems to be their specialty.
The only "benefit" I can see from the MIT system over P2P file sharing is that the MIT system allows the RIAA executives to continue to harvest extreme wealth from the creativity of underpaid artists and the greed of contribution-hungry politician.
Instead of creating technical kludges that make our lives worse instead of better, would it not be better to junk the DMCA and other obsolete copyright laws bought and paid for by the RIAA and friends?
I found the article extremely insightful and persuasive, and I would urge everyone to read it carefully. It's important to note that the author is NOT in favor of the hellish "Secure Internet" of the future:
>"Certainly you can't be advocating this!"
>Well, duh . . . of course not! But this is where
>we are going, unless we change course, and soon.
He is absolutely right, and people who say otherwise are burying their heads in the sand. But it is important to realize that we as individuals can have an impact on whether this happens or not, based on our actions. We must act, and act in concert, to protect our freedom.
Our strategy must be to strengthen the countervailing forces that act as a check against the power of the "ownership class" which seeks to recentralize power in their hands. We can do this by building up a community of people who get benefits from the Free Internet, understand those benefits, and are politically organized to resist the coming attacks on the Free Internet.
Encouraging the growth and acceptance of GNU/Linux is a big part of this. Encouraging the growth and acceptance of P2P is another part. Educating the average computer user about his or her rights and freedoms is another part, and organizing ourselves politicalcally is the final and most challenging stage. We have numbers on our side, they have money. What can we do to start? Join the FSF and the EFF.
If we get organized we can prevail. If we don't, the power of the Internet to empower the individual will slip away. The decicion is ours. As Walker concludes:
>That decision will determine whether the long
>dawn of the Internet was, itself, a false dawn,
>or will continue to brighten into a new day for
>humanity.
> The GPL license however has been concocted to prove a point, politically.
No, the GPL has been created to advance freedom. BSD zealots share this goal, but the GPL uses a much more active, powerful and practical to achieving this goal, IMHO.
Isn't it enough of a victory for the profession that they have used an academically based operating system rather than a commercial one?
They could conceivably switch to Windows.
That's like saying a rape victim should consider it a victory that the rapist decided to make use of her rather than switch to prostitutes.
Given that you undoubtedly agreed to allow the proprietary software to do a full body cavity search on you when you clicked through the EULA, the publisher has the right to do just that. Even if you're using a "legal" copy.
YOU have the right to refuse to use binary-only, spyware infected, jump-through-hoops licenced programs. Use Free Software instead.
"But I depend on the proprietary software to do my job." Then support the Free Software movement so someday you won't need to depend on proprietary software anymore.
> Like everyone I have to eat, and I'm already overworked.
First of all, let me say: thank you. Thank you for the work you do for a free software project. I should have made clear in my earlier post that I truly appreciate the work that you and the other developers put into this.
I want to see GnuCash succeed. My criticism is meant to be constructive and its not directed at you personally but at the project, collectively.
My point is, first of all, that the collective development process that the project follows needs to be able to PRIORITIZE things that are critical and FOCUS ITS LIMITED RESOURCES onto those areas first. Online banking is CRITICAL to the success of the project. If you are too busy to work on OFX yourself, can't anyone else help you out? Can't this be made a priority? Quicken and other proprietary programs have been doing online banking for years. During the past six years I have seen feature after feature being added to GnuCash, but Online banking (the most requested, and undoubtedly most critical missing piece) languishes.
Second, the project needs to realize that the solution to every probelm may not be more coding. You guys need to PUT YOUR HEADS TOGETHER and figure this out.
Here are a few suggestions:
1) If the banks are uncooperative, why not to to organize GnuCash users to lobby their banks to cooperate with you? To start with you could set up a web page where customers can sign up and say what bank they use... then connect those people with the same bank together and have them contact their banks and ask that they help you.
2) Maybe you could form a partnership with a bank or banks and have them contribute to making online banking work for GnuCash in exchange for advertising on your site or somewhere.
3) Maybe you could organize one or more of the desktop Linux distributions to sponser work on this. It would contribute significantly to making Linux more competitive on the desktop.
Yes, implmenting these ideas will take time, resources, and leadership. I'm not saying it will be easy. Maybe it will require getting new people involved in the project besides programers. But the open source movement needs to start thinking this way more in order to gain mainstream acceptance on the desktop.
GnuCash, from the begining, has suffered from a major disconnect between the developers and its (potential) users. Besides the absurd dependency problem which makes installing it nearly impossible, after six years in development, it STILL has no true online banking capability... how is this possible?
Yes, there are many barriers to implementing this capability. But the project has never given it the priority it needs (and seems to still be unlikely to... Gregoire says he will work on it "if I can just find time").
it's his product, protected by his license, and he can do anything he damn well pleases with it
The real point is not whether he has a right to set the terms of his licence as he chooses, it's whether the users of his product will have the forsight to recognize the long term problems that these terms cause, and, based on that recogntion, take appropriate action.
RMS's solution seems pretty sensible to me.
"now it seems many of the non-free concerns were warranted"
This seems to be the way these things usually work:
1) RMS issues a warning
2) He is immediately subjected to a massive number of vicious personal attacks, accusing him of being paranoid, being extreme, being ideological, etc.
3) Some time later, it becomes obvious his warning was correct
4) Few if any of his critics apologize or even acknowlege their error... they are too busy attacking RMS over his next warning.