... if something was truly 100% free, it wouldn't have or need a license at all.
The idea behind the GPL isn't free software, nor even freedom for software. It's to preserve your freedom to see, modify and share software. That takes a license.
BSD comes closest to that.
Well, that would be right for your original misunderstanding.
Unfortunately, the BSD license is better at preserving your freedom to take away my freedoms than it is at preserving my freedom to see, modify and share.
Pretend for a moment that you live in Japan, or Russia, and you actually use websites that use these IDN characters.
Pretend, also, that you occasionally use paypal.com. Wouldn't you like to see that the background changes from the familiar red to a soothing white for the real paypal link?
Making the colors configurable (maybe via two simple options: ``I regularly use IDN.'' and ``I don't usually use IDN.'') would take away most of the remaining objections.
I'll bet you believe your vote is actually counted too.
Two weeks ago I got a letter from the State Division of Elections saying that my vote had been counted, and I have good reason to believe them. Since this is a strongly pro-Bush state, my vote wasn't going to change anything, so I voted a straight libertarian ticket, just to help them keep ballot access.
Just thought you should know that you can't count on the system being broken.
Actually IIRC much of the reason for the fork was due to a license change that many groups/people thought was too restrictive and incompatible with the popular OSS licencies (GPL/BSD/APACHE etc...)
I remember that, and I agree it was the straw that broke the camel's back, but I also recall that there had been long-standing, wide-spread dissatisfaction with the pace of development and the access to the process.
I was exaggerating when I said that Xfree isn't being developed; it still seems to be lumbering along at about the same old pace. I think that the pace at which x.org is moving will have nearly as much to do with its success as the new, improved (actually, same old?) license.
Well, if nothing has changed since the fork, the answer is probably: ``Not really.'' Wasn't the glacial pace and control-freak policies of Xfree the reason for the fork in the first place?
1) Fire everyone who knows what he's doing. Keep the manager and his secretary. This will save your oodles on labor.
2) Use the savings to hire a consultant at twice the laid-off workers' hourly rate, claiming that he'll do the work in one quarter the hours.
3) Update your resume with this triumphant accomplishment and find another, higher-paying job, fast, before the house of cards comes crashing down.
4) Profit!
This is a good plan, since there's no x) ????? step.
It gets me wondering why consumer is willing to pay $4999 for a Plasma TV that has a specific (say 20,000 hours) lifespan,...
If you watch TV 8 hours a day, five days a week, that translates to a 10 year lifespan. I realize that you probably picked that figure out of the air, but here's a site that says 30,000 hours.
Hardware used to last for 10-20 years (like old radios), but hardly live past 3 years nowadays,...
A 10 to 15 year lifespan isn't too terrible for hardware, which naturally wears out. Plasma TVs seem to be about as long-lasting as cars.
... but can't stand paying a $49 software that has an expiry date.
As another post mentioned, most folks are willing to accept the idea that hardware naturally wears out, even if well made. In contrast, the idea of paying for something that is made to die before it wears out, just to make you pay for it again, rubs most of us the wrong way.
I sneeze quite often, and there's *always* someone around who says, "Blesh you."
Blesh is what I say when I smell the dog poop on your shoes. Either they aren't saying ``blesh'', or it's not the sneeze that's prompting it.
YOU DO REALIZE I'M AN ATHIEST, RIGHT?
That's between you and God; why should I worry? By the way, it's from A (meaning without) and the Greek Theos (meaning God), therefore it's spelled atheist (meaning without God). Notice that the e comes before the i.
Stop pretending the Compaq merger was a good idea.... Get those scientific instruments and calculator business back.
Rather than HP getting back the scientific instruments (Agilent) and calculators, maybe Agilent should buy the calculator division (whatever's left of it) from HP? Then we'd have the old HP back, in everything but name. A few years later, when Dell and Carly's legacy has driven HP into bankruptcy, Agilent can buy the HP name and we have the whole shooting match together again.
The printers and computers were a bad idea from the start. A low-volume, high-ticket, high-margin, high-tech business like a maker of scientific instruments can't sell low-cost consumer crap to Walmart: the business models are just too different to have under the same management.
The teacher and rest of the students didn't seem to see the inherent flaw in the story: an entire village ended up with one stinking pot of soup.
The idea behind that story was that everyone had enough to survive, but nobody had enough variety to make anything good. When they all threw it into the same pot, they still had plenty of food, but now it tasted better. No more food, no less food, just better food.
Fortunately for Linux, there's plenty of "soup" to go around. Our bowl can be indefinitely replenished.
You got the point! Information is different.
Information can be shared without diminishing your own share. With information, ``sharing makes it better'' is equivalent to ``sharing makes more of it''.
How did MS's IE beat Netscape? By integrating IE it into Windows. Don't you think that the MS plans to make this search technology 'hard wired' into future (or even current) Windows releases to circumvent users's access or choice in using Google?
If Win-whatever has a browser, Google isn't circumvented. I suppose that IE could be built to always redirect google.com to MSNsearch.com, but that would be pretty bold, even by Microsoft's ``standards''. I really don't see how they can make searching via google hard enough to keep folks from using it, as long as google is clearly better.
I really think that Microsoft will have to compete on quality on this one. They must be scared.
I'm looking at the roots of the tree in that second link. I see:
Snobol, which didn't spread much, but eventually merged with a Fortran derivative to beget Perl.
Flowmatic, which became Cobol, then Rexx.
Fortran 1, which became pretty much everything else, via Algol. This is the main part of the main stream.
Lisp, the other main stream, which joined with Fortran to make Scheme, and joined with it again to make Dylan.
Prolog, which joined up with Lisp
APL, which continues today (unlike Snobol) and has some recognizable descendants (unlike Snobol and Flowmatic).
ISWIM and
ML which are the only ones that I'd never heard of before, though I recognize their descendants Haskel and Camel.
This ignores sh and SEQUEL, which stand almost entirely alone.
There are two main streams, Snobol/Flowmatic/Fortran and Lisp/Prolog. There isn't much communication between them. Their two points of convergence, Scheme and Dylan, so far show no signs of spawning the sort of tree of descendants which sprung from their ancestors, Fortran and Lisp.
ISWIM/ML and APL have almost no communication with either of the mainstreams. Chopping either of them out of the picture would leave few orphaned hybrids.
Boys play with dump trucks and military characters and Legos and Erector sets (more individual, technically-creative toys), while girls play with Barbies and lipstick and new clothes (more social, more fashionably-creative items)?
When my son plays with dolls, they [the dolls, under his control] fight and build things. When my daughter plays with trucks, the mommy truck takes care of the baby trucks. The boy builds guns and forts with legos, the girl builds houses for the mommy truck and the baby trucks.
In our family, at least, different play styles lead to different choices in toys. It's not different toys leading to different play styles!
One fact that no liberal and no feminist seems to want to accept is that boys and girls are different.
I keep saying that there is no loss from the IBM offer (I agree that gift is not quite the ideal description). There may or may not be any gain, for any individual, but definitely, there is no loss. In the worst case, your situation will be the same as if IBM had never made their offer.
I mentioned that IBM might not choose to retract their offer if you sued. That possibility isn't why I say that there is no loss to you: I say you don't lose because, in the worst case, your situation is the same as if IBM had never made you that offer.
You keep asking what you could gain from IBM's offer, and my answer is that it doesn't matter! The gain may be positive, it may be zero, but we know that it isn't negative, so you can be no worse off because of it. Note that you can't really ``accept'' it, since it requires no action from you. It's my understanding that that's radically different from Sun's offer.
If you want to build a business on Open or Libre software, do it. Don't read the patents, whether you think you'll sue IBM or not, because reading the patents opens you to greater liability, for IBM's patents, and for any which might be referenced in them. Knowing violation of a patent is exactly 3 times more serious than unknowing violation, so never be aware of patents! If you don't sue IBM, their offer means one less worry. If you do sue IBM or their Linux-loving minions, you are no worse off for IBM having made their offer, because you would have built your business around the same patents, offer or no, because you should never read the patents.
If you choose to build a business specifically around one of those IBM patents, specifically relying on their offer, you are potentially giving up some nebulous future lawsuit for a very real, present benefit. You might find it more profitable to negotiate a separate contract with them, and IBM's offer doesn't preclude that. You are still no worse off for their having made the offer.
To bring this thread back on topic:
What IBM's offer boils down to is: ``We won't use some few of our patents to initiate attacks on Libre developers.'' That's a weak promise, but we're none of us worse off for their having made it.
I think we've agreed that Sun's offer could taint developers who take advantage of it, and leave them unable to contribute to Libre software.
That possibility of harm is present in the Sun offer, absent in the IBM offer, and that's why there's complaint about one and not about the other. I'm not very excited about IBM's offer, but I'm not worried by it, either. Sun worries me a bit.
My understanding is that anyone who chooses to sue may (at IBM's option) go back in the pre-IBM-gift status quo, while anyone who chooses to not sue gets a better deal.
The ones who file a suit IBM doesn't like don't gain, but they don't lose, either!
Have I missed something? Does anyone go in the hole as a result of the IBM patent gift? Remember, we need to compare before and after the gift, not compare the gift to some better gift we wish we had.
Well, as I said, the worst thing that could come of IBM's gift is the pre-gift status quo, if you file a lawsuit they interpret as an attack on Libre software (or IBM, I'm sure).
If that's correct, the worth of IBM's gift could turn out to be zero, in the worst case. For the vast majority of us, who will never file such a suit, the worth is clearly positive.
The vague terms of the promise--terms that would receive criticism in other contexts--make it hard to know what lawsuit to avoiding filing, assuming you want to act to continue access to these patents. I can't easily say how much this access is worth to me, and therefore, I can't conclude that I'm actually under less risk than I was before IBM published the pledge.
You are clearly ``under less risk'' until you file the lawsuit, and are under no more risk after the lawsuit. That's the point I've been trying to make: without IBM's gift, suers face the same risk they do with IBM's gift. You aren't giving up anything if you don't sue. You are going back to the pre-gift status quo if you do sue. My understanding is that there are no new penalties, period. Post-gift, there is something to gain if we don't sue, no new problems if we do sue.
IBM has had the big stick of those patents all along. Now they've told us that they usually won't hit us with it. That's a better deal than we had before.
But you can't generalise from that to arguing that because many (or most) of his positions are correct, all of them are correct.
I re-read my post, and I'm pretty sure I didn't make that generalization. Quoting myself:
As time passes, it becomes more and more clear that RMS is dead on in
most [emphasis added] of his positions, and the people who say otherwise are beginning to open themselves up to comparisons with MLK's detractors...
And it's not fair, reasonable, or useful to imply that people who disagree with him are doing so because of his behaviour.
I have to admit I didn't make myself clear on this one. I meant that people attack him personally because they don't like what he stands for, just as modern-day closet racists attack MLK's (admittedly imperfect) character, because that's safer than attacking his policies directly.
Yes, reasonable people can disagree on the correct level of legal protection for ideas. Those reasonable people aren't calling him a whacked-out paranoid communist zealot on slashdot. People who try to make sensible arguments against the man's positions aren't included in that condemnation.
Disliking RMS doesn't make you evil, or a racist, but making that dislike your only argument for attacking his positions seems adequate qualifications for being considered a big fool or worse.
IBM's patent pledge gets considerable praise from RMS here...
Do you think that RMS hasn't read that section you quote? Or that he forgot to mention it? Thoroughness seems to be one of his faults.
... he [RMS] says that IBM's step is a substantive one--you are gaining increased access to 500 more patents than you had access to before.
Makes sense to me. In a way, it would seem better if IBM were to leave the ``except'' out of the ``irrevocable except'' clause. On the other hand, that would weaken IBM's hand when it came time to defend against patent or other infringement claims by some MS-funded shill
company. If RMS is keeping silent about that clause because it's the best compromise our imperfect world allows, I think I'd agree with him.
Under that IBM ``irrevocable except'' clause, if you were to sue Red Hat for plagarizing your blog, IBM could decide to revoke your licenses on those patents. Even if RH asked IBM to do that, IBM might decide it's not in their best interest to do so.
It seems to me that IBM has given us quite a bit, and the worst scenario you've come up with, I think, is that by filing the wrong lawsuit, one could go back to the pre-IBM-gift status quo. It's really hard to criticise IBM for that.
Contrast that to the worst-case scenario for the Sun offering, where participating in their ``gift'' could taint you, and keep you from contributing to Libre software. That's clearly worse than the pre-Sun-``gift'' status quo. It's really hard not to criticise Sun for that.
They have one thing in common: they're both single-minded about an issue. And they're both right.
Ok, they've got just two things in common: they're both single-minded about an issue, and they're both right. And, they're unpopular because of those things.
Right! They've got just three things in common: they're both single-minded about an issue and they're both right and they're unpopular because of those things. And, they face a lot of ad hominem attacks.
Four! They have only four things in common! They're both single-minded about an issue and they're both right and they're unpopular because of those things and they face a lot of ad hominem attacks. And...
Slashdot Mirror
The idea behind the GPL isn't free software, nor even freedom for software. It's to preserve your freedom to see, modify and share software. That takes a license.
BSD comes closest to that.
Well, that would be right for your original misunderstanding.
Unfortunately, the BSD license is better at preserving your freedom to take away my freedoms than it is at preserving my freedom to see, modify and share.
Pretend, also, that you occasionally use paypal.com. Wouldn't you like to see that the background changes from the familiar red to a soothing white for the real paypal link?
Making the colors configurable (maybe via two simple options: ``I regularly use IDN.'' and ``I don't usually use IDN.'') would take away most of the remaining objections.
``Simple and obvious'' does not mean ``wrong''.
Two weeks ago I got a letter from the State Division of Elections saying that my vote had been counted, and I have good reason to believe them. Since this is a strongly pro-Bush state, my vote wasn't going to change anything, so I voted a straight libertarian ticket, just to help them keep ballot access.
Just thought you should know that you can't count on the system being broken.
At Information Week, their poll shows that 84% of their voters are of the same opinion: Mike Nash is full of crap.
I remember that, and I agree it was the straw that broke the camel's back, but I also recall that there had been long-standing, wide-spread dissatisfaction with the pace of development and the access to the process.
I was exaggerating when I said that Xfree isn't being developed; it still seems to be lumbering along at about the same old pace. I think that the pace at which x.org is moving will have nearly as much to do with its success as the new, improved (actually, same old?) license.
Well, if nothing has changed since the fork, the answer is probably: ``Not really.'' Wasn't the glacial pace and control-freak policies of Xfree the reason for the fork in the first place?
2) Use the savings to hire a consultant at twice the laid-off workers' hourly rate, claiming that he'll do the work in one quarter the hours.
3) Update your resume with this triumphant accomplishment and find another, higher-paying job, fast, before the house of cards comes crashing down.
4) Profit!
This is a good plan, since there's no x) ????? step.
If MS would just package up their software as debs and use apt-get to handle their installs, you wouldn't have those problems.
Or, you could just give up on that WinCE idea and stick to Debian. Linux is worth what Microsoft's stuff costs, and more.
If you watch TV 8 hours a day, five days a week, that translates to a 10 year lifespan. I realize that you probably picked that figure out of the air, but here's a site that says 30,000 hours.
Hardware used to last for 10-20 years (like old radios), but hardly live past 3 years nowadays, ...
A 10 to 15 year lifespan isn't too terrible for hardware, which naturally wears out. Plasma TVs seem to be about as long-lasting as cars.
As another post mentioned, most folks are willing to accept the idea that hardware naturally wears out, even if well made. In contrast, the idea of paying for something that is made to die before it wears out, just to make you pay for it again, rubs most of us the wrong way.
Blesh is what I say when I smell the dog poop on your shoes. Either they aren't saying ``blesh'', or it's not the sneeze that's prompting it.
YOU DO REALIZE I'M AN ATHIEST, RIGHT?
That's between you and God; why should I worry? By the way, it's from A (meaning without) and the Greek Theos (meaning God), therefore it's spelled atheist (meaning without God). Notice that the e comes before the i.
Rather than HP getting back the scientific instruments (Agilent) and calculators, maybe Agilent should buy the calculator division (whatever's left of it) from HP? Then we'd have the old HP back, in everything but name. A few years later, when Dell and Carly's legacy has driven HP into bankruptcy, Agilent can buy the HP name and we have the whole shooting match together again.
The printers and computers were a bad idea from the start. A low-volume, high-ticket, high-margin, high-tech business like a maker of scientific instruments can't sell low-cost consumer crap to Walmart: the business models are just too different to have under the same management.
It was a Gartner article. Have they ever said anything useful? Clueless articles for clueless dweebs who are looking for CYA material.
The idea behind that story was that everyone had enough to survive, but nobody had enough variety to make anything good. When they all threw it into the same pot, they still had plenty of food, but now it tasted better. No more food, no less food, just better food.
Fortunately for Linux, there's plenty of "soup" to go around. Our bowl can be indefinitely replenished.
You got the point! Information is different.
Information can be shared without diminishing your own share. With information, ``sharing makes it better'' is equivalent to ``sharing makes more of it''.
If Win-whatever has a browser, Google isn't circumvented. I suppose that IE could be built to always redirect google.com to MSNsearch.com, but that would be pretty bold, even by Microsoft's ``standards''. I really don't see how they can make searching via google hard enough to keep folks from using it, as long as google is clearly better.
I really think that Microsoft will have to compete on quality on this one. They must be scared.
Well, the spam said: ``Our pills add six inches to your biometric overnight.''
- Snobol, which didn't spread much, but eventually merged with a Fortran derivative to beget Perl.
- Flowmatic, which became Cobol, then Rexx.
- Fortran 1, which became pretty much everything else, via Algol. This is the main part of the main stream.
- Lisp, the other main stream, which joined with Fortran to make Scheme, and joined with it again to make Dylan.
- Prolog, which joined up with Lisp
- APL, which continues today (unlike Snobol) and has some recognizable descendants (unlike Snobol and Flowmatic).
- ISWIM and
- ML which are the only ones that I'd never heard of before, though I recognize their descendants Haskel and Camel.
This ignores sh and SEQUEL, which stand almost entirely alone.There are two main streams, Snobol/Flowmatic/Fortran and Lisp/Prolog. There isn't much communication between them. Their two points of convergence, Scheme and Dylan, so far show no signs of spawning the sort of tree of descendants which sprung from their ancestors, Fortran and Lisp.
ISWIM/ML and APL have almost no communication with either of the mainstreams. Chopping either of them out of the picture would leave few orphaned hybrids.
All those languages from just seven big ideas.
When my son plays with dolls, they [the dolls, under his control] fight and build things. When my daughter plays with trucks, the mommy truck takes care of the baby trucks. The boy builds guns and forts with legos, the girl builds houses for the mommy truck and the baby trucks.
In our family, at least, different play styles lead to different choices in toys. It's not different toys leading to different play styles!
One fact that no liberal and no feminist seems to want to accept is that boys and girls are different.
43, youngest child under 2.
Funny you should say that. I was just figuring how much I'd need to retire for good, and $500,000 was the number I settled on.
I mentioned that IBM might not choose to retract their offer if you sued. That possibility isn't why I say that there is no loss to you: I say you don't lose because, in the worst case, your situation is the same as if IBM had never made you that offer.
You keep asking what you could gain from IBM's offer, and my answer is that it doesn't matter! The gain may be positive, it may be zero, but we know that it isn't negative, so you can be no worse off because of it. Note that you can't really ``accept'' it, since it requires no action from you. It's my understanding that that's radically different from Sun's offer.
If you want to build a business on Open or Libre software, do it. Don't read the patents, whether you think you'll sue IBM or not, because reading the patents opens you to greater liability, for IBM's patents, and for any which might be referenced in them. Knowing violation of a patent is exactly 3 times more serious than unknowing violation, so never be aware of patents! If you don't sue IBM, their offer means one less worry. If you do sue IBM or their Linux-loving minions, you are no worse off for IBM having made their offer, because you would have built your business around the same patents, offer or no, because you should never read the patents.
If you choose to build a business specifically around one of those IBM patents, specifically relying on their offer, you are potentially giving up some nebulous future lawsuit for a very real, present benefit. You might find it more profitable to negotiate a separate contract with them, and IBM's offer doesn't preclude that. You are still no worse off for their having made the offer.
To bring this thread back on topic:
That possibility of harm is present in the Sun offer, absent in the IBM offer, and that's why there's complaint about one and not about the other. I'm not very excited about IBM's offer, but I'm not worried by it, either. Sun worries me a bit.
My understanding is that anyone who chooses to sue may (at IBM's option) go back in the pre-IBM-gift status quo, while anyone who chooses to not sue gets a better deal.
The ones who file a suit IBM doesn't like don't gain, but they don't lose, either!
Have I missed something? Does anyone go in the hole as a result of the IBM patent gift? Remember, we need to compare before and after the gift, not compare the gift to some better gift we wish we had.
If that's correct, the worth of IBM's gift could turn out to be zero, in the worst case. For the vast majority of us, who will never file such a suit, the worth is clearly positive.
The vague terms of the promise--terms that would receive criticism in other contexts--make it hard to know what lawsuit to avoiding filing, assuming you want to act to continue access to these patents. I can't easily say how much this access is worth to me, and therefore, I can't conclude that I'm actually under less risk than I was before IBM published the pledge.
You are clearly ``under less risk'' until you file the lawsuit, and are under no more risk after the lawsuit. That's the point I've been trying to make: without IBM's gift, suers face the same risk they do with IBM's gift. You aren't giving up anything if you don't sue. You are going back to the pre-gift status quo if you do sue. My understanding is that there are no new penalties, period. Post-gift, there is something to gain if we don't sue, no new problems if we do sue.
IBM has had the big stick of those patents all along. Now they've told us that they usually won't hit us with it. That's a better deal than we had before.
I re-read my post, and I'm pretty sure I didn't make that generalization. Quoting myself:
And it's not fair, reasonable, or useful to imply that people who disagree with him are doing so because of his behaviour.
I have to admit I didn't make myself clear on this one. I meant that people attack him personally because they don't like what he stands for, just as modern-day closet racists attack MLK's (admittedly imperfect) character, because that's safer than attacking his policies directly.
Yes, reasonable people can disagree on the correct level of legal protection for ideas. Those reasonable people aren't calling him a whacked-out paranoid communist zealot on slashdot. People who try to make sensible arguments against the man's positions aren't included in that condemnation.
Disliking RMS doesn't make you evil, or a racist, but making that dislike your only argument for attacking his positions seems adequate qualifications for being considered a big fool or worse.
Do you think that RMS hasn't read that section you quote? Or that he forgot to mention it? Thoroughness seems to be one of his faults.
Makes sense to me. In a way, it would seem better if IBM were to leave the ``except'' out of the ``irrevocable except'' clause. On the other hand, that would weaken IBM's hand when it came time to defend against patent or other infringement claims by some MS-funded shill company. If RMS is keeping silent about that clause because it's the best compromise our imperfect world allows, I think I'd agree with him.
Under that IBM ``irrevocable except'' clause, if you were to sue Red Hat for plagarizing your blog, IBM could decide to revoke your licenses on those patents. Even if RH asked IBM to do that, IBM might decide it's not in their best interest to do so.
It seems to me that IBM has given us quite a bit, and the worst scenario you've come up with, I think, is that by filing the wrong lawsuit, one could go back to the pre-IBM-gift status quo. It's really hard to criticise IBM for that.
Contrast that to the worst-case scenario for the Sun offering, where participating in their ``gift'' could taint you, and keep you from contributing to Libre software. That's clearly worse than the pre-Sun-``gift'' status quo. It's really hard not to criticise Sun for that.
They have one thing in common: they're both single-minded about an issue. And they're both right.
Ok, they've got just two things in common: they're both single-minded about an issue, and they're both right. And, they're unpopular because of those things.
Right! They've got just three things in common: they're both single-minded about an issue and they're both right and they're unpopular because of those things. And, they face a lot of ad hominem attacks.
Four! They have only four things in common! They're both single-minded about an issue and they're both right and they're unpopular because of those things and they face a lot of ad hominem attacks. And ...