Given that terrorism isn't going to go away, and that it can send multiple coordinated suicide airliners into your buildings, how exactly is a no-privacy surveillance state worse?
It's a good question. Having crypto, privacy, and the ability to secretly communicate with anyone anywhere in the world, means one thing when the 'risk' of it is that someone will take a car bomb and blow up a building. And that is what we have tended to think of, when we think of terrorist action- and a lot of us have been ready to accept that, in exchange for the freedom of the many, and personal privacy.
When the 'private' thing turns out to be a fucking all-out assault on NEW YORK CITY levelling the World Trade Center with multiple fucking suicide airliners, never mind the simultaneous attacks on many other targets... well, just how bad _do_ you need to be private? Does your need for privacy in your harmless personal stuff balance out with organisations that can use the same privacy to send fucking AIRLINERS into the World Trade Center until the buildings fall over with God knows what loss of life? This isn't like a car-bomb.
I'm not sure I'm ready to place my privacy rights over the ability of my government to find out about these things and act to stop or block them. Supposing the government literally did read my hard drive anytime they wanted, looked at my naughty pictures, respected no boundary to my electronic privacy... and in so doing, someone found out about Tuesday, September 11th 2001 before it happened?
Because it is an insult, and unjust, to have some government spook peeking through my data- but right now the World Trade Center is destroyed by multiple coordinated suicide airliner crashes. And that actually happened- it wasn't some NSA spook making scare stories to improve their budget, it HAPPENED. Some of those NSA spooks are probably dead in the wreckage of the Pentagon. With all their Carnivore stuff, all their attempts (bitterly protested by slashdotters and others) to spy out signs of possible danger... they didn't spot THIS. And it couldn't have happened without extensive communications.
Now that we have proof that organisations (not even just countries!) can coordinate staggering attacks and damned near take out whole cities, do we tell the spooks to pack up their wiretaps and go home?
Of course it's politics. The notion of the US being the 'Great Satan' is politics. The way the US has been inflicting uncontrolled freemarket capitalism on the rest of the world is politics, and the people who freak out over this are also politics.
Attempting to destroy New York City is beyond politics- that's war. The response will be war.
But the _causes_ of this are politics. I've seen a few brave posters from outside the US saying, "Um, you really think this is unprovoked?" and they should be listened to.
In my opinion, we are obviously heading into a world where the nation-state is no longer the focus. I've heard the terrorist organisation responsible for this is multinational and extends all over the world. That's much like the corporations we have, which do things like try and sue Indian farmers over growing rice that was native to India in the first place, which try and tie economic relief to a political system, which try and inflict our screwed-up intellectual property notions on the rest of the world- and those guys are multinational too, and often with economic coercion to rival actual countries.
I'm not sure there is a country that could have done us as much damage, in a conventional military attack, as this multinational 'terrorist' organization did in its attack.
As to the democrat/republican thing: hell, I voted Green/Progressive, and lost. I believe if Gore had won, this day would still have happened. BOTH the Dems and Reps represent a particular type of American political system- one that obviously has insane, fanatical enemies.
The fact that the enemies are fanatics making suicide attacks does not make the American political system right. The fact that we need to fight back now does not make us blameless- we just happen to be the ones expected to deliver the counterstrike. When we've done that, we damn well better take a look at whether we're really 'all that and a bag of chips' ourselves. How can we face ourselves knowing that our country wields huge force in the world, and yet half of us won't even vote for _President_ much less pay attention to what our country is doing? That's got to stop- we've got to smarten up and take responsibility.
If we want all the world to _agree_ that we aren't 'the great satan', we have got to pay closer attention to what our country, our capitalist economic system, our political system, are doing out there. This didn't come out of nowhere. We've known about the resentment for a long time, over all sorts of things and in all sorts of ways, and mostly we've just flat out ignored anyone who dared to suggest we weren't the apex of creation.
Once we've got through this next bit, we have _got_ to grow up...
"You might also want to think about why this attack occurred. How did the USA get into a position where someone hates it *so* much that they'd suicide themselves in revenge?"
We need to be able to think of that _while_ also retaliating harshly.
The fact that we have been brutally attacked does not make us automatically righteous. I've felt for a long time that US interests, in many ways, have been waging war on the rest of the world- but more like a siege. Mostly we have not been gunning people down- mostly our corporations have not been gunning people down- and we certainly haven't engaged in this sort of all-out assault recently.
We're up again, and clearly we're going to be smashing the hell out of _somebody_... but we have got to take a minute afterwards, to ask: just how unprovoked was it? What have we been doing? Are we even aware of what our country may have been doing in our names? If more than half of us don't even _vote_ much less pay attention to what our country is doing with its massive weaponry and economic coercion, is that okay?
It looks like we've got to smash somebody. In fact, it looks like the people we'll be hitting are fanatics. The fact that they are fanatics does not make us angels, and we gotta remain aware of that as we move into a 21st century and see multinational organizations taking over from nation-states.
Yeah, but it's an alarmingly stupid move. People will hold off buying X-Box because they're waiting for X-Box II to come out... especially in an unenthusiastic economy.
Metalhed says, unkarmically, "except talent IS scarce, and the music industry still screws em over, they still become stars, and they still make money. Sucks don't it?"
How old are you?
Please, please, please grow up. You are talking somebody's completely artificial dream-fantasy, God knows who's been telling you these things but God help you if it's your manager- somebody's conning you, but good.
The ONLY way to do what you say in the music business is to be one hell of a businessman and finance yourself every step of the way, spending heavily and fighting ruthlessly. Talent has nothing to do with that, one way or the other- there's no correlation. You're talking like a 1940s movie musical about New York.
I am looking to my right over at three electric basses and six electric guitars and I am clapping and cheering at what you have just said, gnovos.
I make music because there is something I want to hear that doesn't exist until I play it- and because it's fun! It's as fun as biking, or juggling I suppose. I earn money doing other things, and when I can I spend some money on my music, and it makes me happy to have a new (inexpensive, soon to be all rebuilt and doctored up) guitar.
I can make some people- one or two people who are looking for just that sort of music- tremble with awe and delight at how nicely my music suits them.
This is not an entitlement. This is a gift.
To some extent, art is what you are doing when you are not thinking about money. If you can swing a pick-axe or a drumstick so well, as a craft, that you can get paid for this, that's wonderful- but you'd better have an idea of what the market is. Nobody owes you anything. What do you have to offer?
Brett, it's slashdot. Deal with it. I am surprised the story even ran, because it's a bit of a dumb rant. I mean, leaves me wondering what you'd think about common practices in the real music industry, which are every bit as capable of depriving you of money, or even conning you out of your 'property'. (Gee, what does work for hire mean?) (That's okay, Johnny- they overthrew that brief period when your work was automatically work for hire, protecting you! So now you can sign under those words willingly.) (Duh, OK...)
Honestly, this particular license isn't likely to go real far, and it wouldn't matter much if it did- if you don't like being exploited DON'T be a musician or singer. Charging up and trying to protect musicians against the big bad OAL is beyond laughable. My god, you consider THIS the big threat for the modern-day independent musician?
I do it in a slow-ish heavily GUI 'toy language' with its own memory management and elaborate, pre-made objects, because there's only so much I _can_ do, and I have goals. There are particular things I want the software to do. I choose a weird interface (very text oriented!) for the program, but within that interface if I need to shuffle the positions of the parameters for high frequency sidechain compression, I want to select pictures of the things and drag them to the new places and build the app and have it run, just like that.
If I decide that the delay lines, measured in feet or millisecond of delay, must have the control's background a shade of gray that relates to how 'far' the echo is, for quick visual appraisal of the state of the app, I want to type in a quick me.color = rgb(255-HowFar, 255-HowFar, 255-HowFar). Yes, to some extent this is OOP- but where do I find the place to type that code? In the environment I'm using, I look at the mocked-up app and doubleclick the box and a code browser pops up, open to the _wrong_ event of the _right_ control. It's not perfect, but it gets me there...
GUI isn't about making Super-Genius-Coding-Man more effective. SGCM is already effective, the closer to the raw words and letters and symbols of code the better. It's all in SGCM's head. GUI is about making _me_ effective.
And if you're SGCM, you are perfectly free to feel totally superior to me, but you know what? I can hardly code, but what I'm trying to do is push the boundaries of digital audio mastering and wordlength reduction, and this is very specialized stuff.
If you are SuperGeniusCodingMan, are you programming something original- or are you strutting because you can use raw C and hand-hacked makefiles to produce... an IRC client? >:)
And this contradicts what I said... how? You can't go by what their silly 'lockers' do this week. Everything I said is true, and most of it you're not even addressing. The only point you're raising is that if you delete a song, even though they do keep it anyhow, they theoretically will not use it even though the legal document you agree to says nothing about your being able to get material back. In fact, if I remember correctly, they gain permanent nonexclusive rights for the purposes of 'secure accounts'. Surely 'mymp3' lockers count, so their deleting the song speaks more to the fact that they'd rather have Vivendi acts filling the lockers than internet no-names.
They very nearly did- I believe concepts like 'wings' were thought to be public domain, as anyone could look at a bird and go 'I could do that!'. I believe the Wrights patented wing warping for ailerons? Sure enough- nobody uses wing warping for ailerons now.
If all flight research was GPLed... it might have made no difference. Certainly companies like Boeing amassed huge amounts of crucial data and 'intellectual property', but NACA also contributed greatly to research, plus you have to understand that in aviation, corporate espionage is as old as aviation itself. You're expecting that if people GPLed aviation research, everyone would honor this and go 'oh darn, now I can't use that without opening all my research!', and you're expecting that WITHOUT the GPL, everyone goes, 'woop! That information is not open source, therefore I'd better not steal it or anything!'. This is naivete.
Methinks somebody's a day trader doing a really large amount of short selling and desperate to make the stock hit a certain low at a certain time;) good call on rejecting that! It is not newsworthy.
Quaint of you to think that all significant software is _invented_ by large commercial entities with large R+D expenditures. I'm not sure if I can think of a single case to support you. From PageMaker to AutoCAD to the Web itself, the significant software starts out as one of the half-finished toy projects because corporate innovation is over: get over it. Things are too competitive now to risk _real_ R+D. Apple blew over a million dollars developing OpenDoc and the Cyberdog set of component Internet tools- and got armtwisted into using IE officially, and threw away what they had done. Even Microsoft is going to fail with.NET... and X-Box. Corporate innovation is over until such time when the struggle for survival lessens and allows money to be wasted on research again. Currently it's corporate suicide.
Well... I trust Microsoft less than just about any company I could name, because they lie, break the law, and PLAN EXTENSIVELY. That doesn't mean they'll always win, mind you, but it does mean that any little thing they do probably has an ulterior motive. They are manipulative and incredibly fond of spin and deception, where an AOL is much stodgier and stupider.
AOL deletes your account by mistake and ignores you when you scream at them.
Microsoft develops a new feature for Media Player that rips CDs to WMA and hosts them on MSN for you, then sets off the trigger in the WMA files causing you to pay per listen to them since they're of copyrighted material and you haven't filed requests for them to be considered as original works, and also collects $2000 from the RIAA for turning you over to the police. In jail, you get a glossy brochure for the next Media Player feature. This time, you can rip DVDs:D
Seriously, how can you get lower trust ratings than Microsoft? They are proven liars, criminals and have been doing what they do for decades. The only people who support them are paid employees and dead people;)
Distrust of Microsoft is a litmus test for having a smidgeon of common sense and a rudimentary connection to reality;)
I'd love to see someone like you say that to, say, Congress or the Senate in public hearings. "This is not what I spent 20 years in the military defending". Do you realise the power of that statement viewed as a PR weapon? Talk about a sound bite.
"Freedom means freedom to be ethical and freedom to be unethical... tactics that are unethical, but common and to be expected."
No. The body of law having to do with this sort of behavior is called 'fraud' law, and no, you do not have the freedom to committ fraud any more than you have the freedom to rob banks, and no, these tactics are not to be expected.
Um- I'm pretty sure I have never posed as a dead person to lobby anything. I think I would have noticed;)
The correct opinion is not 'halfway in between'. The correct opinion is, 'gee, Microsoft attempts to turn off the antitrust case with a massive lobbying effort lying to people and using the names of dead people'. You know, when government officials get caught carrying on like that we just about run them out of town on a rail. Why are we supposed to extend extra consideration to Microsoft? They deserve to get gutted for this. Bluntly, they are fucking with our government.
The artist agreement provides that mp3.com keeps rights to anything you give them, _permanently_, and can also be changed at any point without your awareness or consent. It's up to you to constantly monitor the language of the agreement, because for every little (or big) change, you have something like seven days to read it, understand it, stay or bail. Of course, if you bail, they still keep your material...
Did you not notice when they were bought out? Have you not read the contract/artist agreement mp3.com artists are required to agree to that gives Vivendi PERMANENT RIGHTS over the artist's music even after you leave? Did you not notice that they are leaving it open for mp3.com to insert promotional materials INTO that music via language that gives them carte blanche to edit and alter what you give 'em?
mp3.com IS the stranglehold of a major label. Vivendi. Read the contract- better yet, run it by an entertainment lawyer if you don't believe me. mp3.com DESERVES to be destroyed to keep people like you from mistakenly touting it as some kind of independent resource when it is now a wholly owned part of Vivendi and YOU PAY THEM to participate in the 'royalty' like programs they have- which, I might add, are arbitrary and obscure, meaning that they are free to simply never pay you!
Go ahead, people, sue mp3.com! You're really just suing Vivendi- which probably doesn't care whether mp3.com lives or dies. Buying out mp3.com was a purely strategic move, and now Vivendi artists top the charts at mp3.com, with indie acts actually kicked off the service and their 'money' withheld through trumped-up charges if they have the nerve to chart higher than the Vivendi acts... do some googling for 'Analog Pussy mp3 vivendi artist activity', see for yourself.
Nonsense. OSX takes Windows share, not Linux share. Totally different demographic. Linux may still take Windows share too, but OSX will take Grandma and people who are doing graphics work and people with Aeron chairs and new VWs, while Linux will take people who build their own PCs and can actually make a Windows machine work effectively by knowing all the arcane workarounds and failure modes and what to fix if it breaks.
There will be no death of Linux. (and this is from someone who expects to be running OSX, thank you...) In fact, Linux will siphon off all the people who are truly gifted in the computer domain. (OSX will siphon off Grandma- and many people who are truly gifted in other domains. Artists, writers, inventors- hell, there's a guy designing a new type of autogyro, a real airplane, using a brilliant flight sim (http://www.x-plane.com/)... on a G4 Powermac. (fullsize pic: http://www.x-plane.com/images/misc/fullsize/cc2.jp g))
Linux is going to get many of the people who program the programs that make computers go. There will be no death of Linux, just because OSX is all that and an autogyro design tool;)
If people use altered versions of the GPL, versions that have not been proofed by lawyers like the official wording has been, the body of code will be fragmented.
In particular, if people en masse take to deleting the 'or any future version' clause in the GPL, there is a substantial risk involved. Let's pretend, for a moment, that the wording of the current GPL is so completely perfect that there can be no flaw in it of any kind.
Enter several hundred highly paid Microsoft lawyers and just _one_ corrupt judge willing to be bribed- or just _one_ prejudiced judge wanting to rule in favor of Microsoft because of how much business they do, and against the smelly hacker commies.
Curtain rises on a court case, in which the GPL is tested, and despite the so-perfect wording (IANAL- are you, and ready to swear the GPL will stand up against any and all future conditions ever to arise?) the ruling goes against the FSF- the GPL is ruled equivalent to public domain, or to the BSD license, or some other major catastrophic failing is applied to it. The ruling may be wrong but it is still the law. Result: the entire body of GPLed code is immediately compromised and no longer provides the effect of 'if you use any of this you must share yourself' that is desired.
At this point, any code that uses the true FSF version of the GPL or LGPL can rapidly be transferred to a new version written to work around the catastrophic ruling. Effectively a snapshot of the entire Free software world gets given to the sharks. "Gee thanks! *CHOMP*" But the active development can immediately transition to a new 'if you use any of this you must share yourself' version written to not be a giveaway to proprietary coders.
Meanwhile, what of the people who went along with Ulrich Drepper's very bad idea to lock code permanently to one version of the license? Surprise! All that code _continues_ to require the now-compromised-and-useless version of the license. In fact, if you are a recipient of the code you can't change that! You're compelled to use the version that's been rendered useless, and you are compelled to do a big give-away to proprietary coders with every line of code you write, who give you nothing in return. Fun huh? And all that needed to happen to produce this state of affairs was for some crazed lawyer and hostile judge to invalidate _one_ version of the GPL- the version you use, the same version that you stubbornly stick to because you don't trust the FSF (who wrote the damn thing!) to be able to release a new version in future without screwing you over. In fact, the only reason you can think of to release a new version is to be screwing you over, and you couldn't imagine anyone ever legally blowing a hole in the version of the GPL you've tied yourself to, although you are not a lawyer. Surprise!
This is the risk in listening to the suggestions Ulrich Drepper is making. You might as well write your own damn license and start over if you're going to carry on like this. As just an ordinary, not-very-important GPL-using developer, I figure I have as good a right as anybody to beg people not to go along with this dangerous nonsense- I think only original authors are really entitled to play with the wording in this way, and even for them the risk of doing so is an absolute timebomb.
This idea is potentially a lot more damaging than any amount of 'things named Gnu*' bickering, and I am stunned that Ulrich Drepper is advocating it. Please don't listen.
Given that Richard Stallman sticks with incomparable stubbornness not only to the principles and philosophies that caused me to USE the GPL in the first place, but even to details of word use and phrasing that I don't care about, why in the world would I conclude that Stallman is _ever_ going to 'screw me'?
I'm sorry- if you don't use the GPL you have no say here. I use it, by choice, and RMS is the _last_ person I would expect to hose me with license term changes. I can't think of anything he would plausibly do, even in terminology issues and word use, that would faze me.
Yeesh! Do you think people choose the GPL because it enhances their individuality and ability to take their ball and go home? I'd really like to know how many of the people flaming RMS here _use_ the GPL. If you don't, is it any of your business?
And can anyone explain how you are supposed to do a hostile takeover on an LGPLed library that was originally developed by the FSF in the first place?
I'm sorry, but my sympathies are so with RMS on this one that it would make your head spin. This is an ego clash, nothing more: on the one hand, it's a guy wanting people to say 'gnu' before things, and on the other hand, it's a guy wanting people to routinely make changes in possibly the most important Free Software license out there when they use it, wanting to anchor large amounts of software to one version of the license splitting the codebase into code that can be adapted to new conditions, and code that cannot.
Supposing someone (naming no names) managed to pull off a legal challenge that blew a hole in the current wording of the GPL? Any code only accessible under the current wording would be _permanently_ compromised. Only the stuff with 'any future version' in the wording would be available to a new GPL that was revised to fix the legal problem.
...which is a beautiful example of the priorities here. Once you start asserting individual privileges over the _public_ license, you can be picked off by hostile action. If you go with the FSF version, the _public_ version, you're extending a trust and what you get is that if the license _does_ blow a seam (or get a hole blown in it by hostile lawyers), your stuff can be covered under a newer version written to avoid the problem.
Ulrich is a damn cowboy- in the legal sense. I don't care how well he codes or project-maintains: he seems to not understand the reality of the situation, and his recommendation to use altered versions of the GPL is a _risk_. I didn't take to using the GPL with the idea that its own erstwhile supporters would start stupidly weakening it. I will do no such thing. That clause is in there for a reason that is far more important than fiddly little terminology and naming issues. I don't care _what_ RMS calls my GPLed code- as long as I can be sure that it will occupy the role I intended for it. Ulrich threatens that without even having the clear-headedness to realise how he's threatening it.
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Given that terrorism isn't going to go away, and that it can send multiple coordinated suicide airliners into your buildings, how exactly is a no-privacy surveillance state worse?
When the 'private' thing turns out to be a fucking all-out assault on NEW YORK CITY levelling the World Trade Center with multiple fucking suicide airliners, never mind the simultaneous attacks on many other targets... well, just how bad _do_ you need to be private? Does your need for privacy in your harmless personal stuff balance out with organisations that can use the same privacy to send fucking AIRLINERS into the World Trade Center until the buildings fall over with God knows what loss of life? This isn't like a car-bomb.
I'm not sure I'm ready to place my privacy rights over the ability of my government to find out about these things and act to stop or block them. Supposing the government literally did read my hard drive anytime they wanted, looked at my naughty pictures, respected no boundary to my electronic privacy... and in so doing, someone found out about Tuesday, September 11th 2001 before it happened?
Because it is an insult, and unjust, to have some government spook peeking through my data- but right now the World Trade Center is destroyed by multiple coordinated suicide airliner crashes. And that actually happened- it wasn't some NSA spook making scare stories to improve their budget, it HAPPENED. Some of those NSA spooks are probably dead in the wreckage of the Pentagon. With all their Carnivore stuff, all their attempts (bitterly protested by slashdotters and others) to spy out signs of possible danger... they didn't spot THIS. And it couldn't have happened without extensive communications.
Now that we have proof that organisations (not even just countries!) can coordinate staggering attacks and damned near take out whole cities, do we tell the spooks to pack up their wiretaps and go home?
Attempting to destroy New York City is beyond politics- that's war. The response will be war.
But the _causes_ of this are politics. I've seen a few brave posters from outside the US saying, "Um, you really think this is unprovoked?" and they should be listened to.
In my opinion, we are obviously heading into a world where the nation-state is no longer the focus. I've heard the terrorist organisation responsible for this is multinational and extends all over the world. That's much like the corporations we have, which do things like try and sue Indian farmers over growing rice that was native to India in the first place, which try and tie economic relief to a political system, which try and inflict our screwed-up intellectual property notions on the rest of the world- and those guys are multinational too, and often with economic coercion to rival actual countries.
I'm not sure there is a country that could have done us as much damage, in a conventional military attack, as this multinational 'terrorist' organization did in its attack.
As to the democrat/republican thing: hell, I voted Green/Progressive, and lost. I believe if Gore had won, this day would still have happened. BOTH the Dems and Reps represent a particular type of American political system- one that obviously has insane, fanatical enemies.
The fact that the enemies are fanatics making suicide attacks does not make the American political system right. The fact that we need to fight back now does not make us blameless- we just happen to be the ones expected to deliver the counterstrike. When we've done that, we damn well better take a look at whether we're really 'all that and a bag of chips' ourselves. How can we face ourselves knowing that our country wields huge force in the world, and yet half of us won't even vote for _President_ much less pay attention to what our country is doing? That's got to stop- we've got to smarten up and take responsibility.
If we want all the world to _agree_ that we aren't 'the great satan', we have got to pay closer attention to what our country, our capitalist economic system, our political system, are doing out there. This didn't come out of nowhere. We've known about the resentment for a long time, over all sorts of things and in all sorts of ways, and mostly we've just flat out ignored anyone who dared to suggest we weren't the apex of creation.
Once we've got through this next bit, we have _got_ to grow up...
We need to be able to think of that _while_ also retaliating harshly.
The fact that we have been brutally attacked does not make us automatically righteous. I've felt for a long time that US interests, in many ways, have been waging war on the rest of the world- but more like a siege. Mostly we have not been gunning people down- mostly our corporations have not been gunning people down- and we certainly haven't engaged in this sort of all-out assault recently.
We're up again, and clearly we're going to be smashing the hell out of _somebody_... but we have got to take a minute afterwards, to ask: just how unprovoked was it? What have we been doing? Are we even aware of what our country may have been doing in our names? If more than half of us don't even _vote_ much less pay attention to what our country is doing with its massive weaponry and economic coercion, is that okay?
It looks like we've got to smash somebody. In fact, it looks like the people we'll be hitting are fanatics. The fact that they are fanatics does not make us angels, and we gotta remain aware of that as we move into a 21st century and see multinational organizations taking over from nation-states.
And boy, are we ever in the 21st century. :(
Yeah, but it's an alarmingly stupid move. People will hold off buying X-Box because they're waiting for X-Box II to come out... especially in an unenthusiastic economy.
How old are you?
Please, please, please grow up. You are talking somebody's completely artificial dream-fantasy, God knows who's been telling you these things but God help you if it's your manager- somebody's conning you, but good.
The ONLY way to do what you say in the music business is to be one hell of a businessman and finance yourself every step of the way, spending heavily and fighting ruthlessly. Talent has nothing to do with that, one way or the other- there's no correlation. You're talking like a 1940s movie musical about New York.
How old are you?
I make music because there is something I want to hear that doesn't exist until I play it- and because it's fun! It's as fun as biking, or juggling I suppose. I earn money doing other things, and when I can I spend some money on my music, and it makes me happy to have a new (inexpensive, soon to be all rebuilt and doctored up) guitar.
I can make some people- one or two people who are looking for just that sort of music- tremble with awe and delight at how nicely my music suits them.
This is not an entitlement. This is a gift.
To some extent, art is what you are doing when you are not thinking about money. If you can swing a pick-axe or a drumstick so well, as a craft, that you can get paid for this, that's wonderful- but you'd better have an idea of what the market is. Nobody owes you anything. What do you have to offer?
Honestly, this particular license isn't likely to go real far, and it wouldn't matter much if it did- if you don't like being exploited DON'T be a musician or singer. Charging up and trying to protect musicians against the big bad OAL is beyond laughable. My god, you consider THIS the big threat for the modern-day independent musician?
I do it in a slow-ish heavily GUI 'toy language' with its own memory management and elaborate, pre-made objects, because there's only so much I _can_ do, and I have goals. There are particular things I want the software to do. I choose a weird interface (very text oriented!) for the program, but within that interface if I need to shuffle the positions of the parameters for high frequency sidechain compression, I want to select pictures of the things and drag them to the new places and build the app and have it run, just like that.
If I decide that the delay lines, measured in feet or millisecond of delay, must have the control's background a shade of gray that relates to how 'far' the echo is, for quick visual appraisal of the state of the app, I want to type in a quick me.color = rgb(255-HowFar, 255-HowFar, 255-HowFar). Yes, to some extent this is OOP- but where do I find the place to type that code? In the environment I'm using, I look at the mocked-up app and doubleclick the box and a code browser pops up, open to the _wrong_ event of the _right_ control. It's not perfect, but it gets me there...
GUI isn't about making Super-Genius-Coding-Man more effective. SGCM is already effective, the closer to the raw words and letters and symbols of code the better. It's all in SGCM's head. GUI is about making _me_ effective.
And if you're SGCM, you are perfectly free to feel totally superior to me, but you know what? I can hardly code, but what I'm trying to do is push the boundaries of digital audio mastering and wordlength reduction, and this is very specialized stuff.
If you are SuperGeniusCodingMan, are you programming something original- or are you strutting because you can use raw C and hand-hacked makefiles to produce... an IRC client? >:)
Sorry- you are wrong :)
If all flight research was GPLed... it might have made no difference. Certainly companies like Boeing amassed huge amounts of crucial data and 'intellectual property', but NACA also contributed greatly to research, plus you have to understand that in aviation, corporate espionage is as old as aviation itself. You're expecting that if people GPLed aviation research, everyone would honor this and go 'oh darn, now I can't use that without opening all my research!', and you're expecting that WITHOUT the GPL, everyone goes, 'woop! That information is not open source, therefore I'd better not steal it or anything!'. This is naivete.
Methinks somebody's a day trader doing a really large amount of short selling and desperate to make the stock hit a certain low at a certain time ;) good call on rejecting that! It is not newsworthy.
Quaint of you to think that all significant software is _invented_ by large commercial entities with large R+D expenditures. I'm not sure if I can think of a single case to support you. From PageMaker to AutoCAD to the Web itself, the significant software starts out as one of the half-finished toy projects because corporate innovation is over: get over it. Things are too competitive now to risk _real_ R+D. Apple blew over a million dollars developing OpenDoc and the Cyberdog set of component Internet tools- and got armtwisted into using IE officially, and threw away what they had done. Even Microsoft is going to fail with .NET... and X-Box. Corporate innovation is over until such time when the struggle for survival lessens and allows money to be wasted on research again. Currently it's corporate suicide.
Seriously, how can you get lower trust ratings than Microsoft? They are proven liars, criminals and have been doing what they do for decades. The only people who support them are paid employees and dead people ;)
Distrust of Microsoft is a litmus test for having a smidgeon of common sense and a rudimentary connection to reality ;)
I'd love to see someone like you say that to, say, Congress or the Senate in public hearings. "This is not what I spent 20 years in the military defending". Do you realise the power of that statement viewed as a PR weapon? Talk about a sound bite.
No. The body of law having to do with this sort of behavior is called 'fraud' law, and no, you do not have the freedom to committ fraud any more than you have the freedom to rob banks, and no, these tactics are not to be expected.
They are to be arrested.
...signed, Lenin ;)
The correct opinion is not 'halfway in between'. The correct opinion is, 'gee, Microsoft attempts to turn off the antitrust case with a massive lobbying effort lying to people and using the names of dead people'. You know, when government officials get caught carrying on like that we just about run them out of town on a rail. Why are we supposed to extend extra consideration to Microsoft? They deserve to get gutted for this. Bluntly, they are fucking with our government.
I think my headline kicked butt over the winning submission, though...
Microsoft Lobbies With Dead People
The artist agreement provides that mp3.com keeps rights to anything you give them, _permanently_, and can also be changed at any point without your awareness or consent. It's up to you to constantly monitor the language of the agreement, because for every little (or big) change, you have something like seven days to read it, understand it, stay or bail. Of course, if you bail, they still keep your material...
Good luck. mp3.com is taking an intentional dive. Vivendi bought 'em. Good luck trying to buy them back from Vivendi.
MP3.COM IS VIVENDI.
Did you not notice when they were bought out? Have you not read the contract/artist agreement mp3.com artists are required to agree to that gives Vivendi PERMANENT RIGHTS over the artist's music even after you leave? Did you not notice that they are leaving it open for mp3.com to insert promotional materials INTO that music via language that gives them carte blanche to edit and alter what you give 'em?
mp3.com IS the stranglehold of a major label. Vivendi. Read the contract- better yet, run it by an entertainment lawyer if you don't believe me. mp3.com DESERVES to be destroyed to keep people like you from mistakenly touting it as some kind of independent resource when it is now a wholly owned part of Vivendi and YOU PAY THEM to participate in the 'royalty' like programs they have- which, I might add, are arbitrary and obscure, meaning that they are free to simply never pay you!
Go ahead, people, sue mp3.com! You're really just suing Vivendi- which probably doesn't care whether mp3.com lives or dies. Buying out mp3.com was a purely strategic move, and now Vivendi artists top the charts at mp3.com, with indie acts actually kicked off the service and their 'money' withheld through trumped-up charges if they have the nerve to chart higher than the Vivendi acts... do some googling for 'Analog Pussy mp3 vivendi artist activity', see for yourself.
mp3.com are NOT YOUR FRIEND.
There will be no death of Linux. (and this is from someone who expects to be running OSX, thank you...) In fact, Linux will siphon off all the people who are truly gifted in the computer domain. (OSX will siphon off Grandma- and many people who are truly gifted in other domains. Artists, writers, inventors- hell, there's a guy designing a new type of autogyro, a real airplane, using a brilliant flight sim (http://www.x-plane.com/)... on a G4 Powermac. (fullsize pic: http://www.x-plane.com/images/misc/fullsize/cc2.jp g))
Linux is going to get many of the people who program the programs that make computers go. There will be no death of Linux, just because OSX is all that and an autogyro design tool ;)
In particular, if people en masse take to deleting the 'or any future version' clause in the GPL, there is a substantial risk involved. Let's pretend, for a moment, that the wording of the current GPL is so completely perfect that there can be no flaw in it of any kind.
Enter several hundred highly paid Microsoft lawyers and just _one_ corrupt judge willing to be bribed- or just _one_ prejudiced judge wanting to rule in favor of Microsoft because of how much business they do, and against the smelly hacker commies.
Curtain rises on a court case, in which the GPL is tested, and despite the so-perfect wording (IANAL- are you, and ready to swear the GPL will stand up against any and all future conditions ever to arise?) the ruling goes against the FSF- the GPL is ruled equivalent to public domain, or to the BSD license, or some other major catastrophic failing is applied to it. The ruling may be wrong but it is still the law. Result: the entire body of GPLed code is immediately compromised and no longer provides the effect of 'if you use any of this you must share yourself' that is desired.
At this point, any code that uses the true FSF version of the GPL or LGPL can rapidly be transferred to a new version written to work around the catastrophic ruling. Effectively a snapshot of the entire Free software world gets given to the sharks. "Gee thanks! *CHOMP*" But the active development can immediately transition to a new 'if you use any of this you must share yourself' version written to not be a giveaway to proprietary coders.
Meanwhile, what of the people who went along with Ulrich Drepper's very bad idea to lock code permanently to one version of the license? Surprise! All that code _continues_ to require the now-compromised-and-useless version of the license. In fact, if you are a recipient of the code you can't change that! You're compelled to use the version that's been rendered useless, and you are compelled to do a big give-away to proprietary coders with every line of code you write, who give you nothing in return. Fun huh? And all that needed to happen to produce this state of affairs was for some crazed lawyer and hostile judge to invalidate _one_ version of the GPL- the version you use, the same version that you stubbornly stick to because you don't trust the FSF (who wrote the damn thing!) to be able to release a new version in future without screwing you over. In fact, the only reason you can think of to release a new version is to be screwing you over, and you couldn't imagine anyone ever legally blowing a hole in the version of the GPL you've tied yourself to, although you are not a lawyer. Surprise!
This is the risk in listening to the suggestions Ulrich Drepper is making. You might as well write your own damn license and start over if you're going to carry on like this. As just an ordinary, not-very-important GPL-using developer, I figure I have as good a right as anybody to beg people not to go along with this dangerous nonsense- I think only original authors are really entitled to play with the wording in this way, and even for them the risk of doing so is an absolute timebomb.
This idea is potentially a lot more damaging than any amount of 'things named Gnu*' bickering, and I am stunned that Ulrich Drepper is advocating it. Please don't listen.
I'm sorry- if you don't use the GPL you have no say here. I use it, by choice, and RMS is the _last_ person I would expect to hose me with license term changes. I can't think of anything he would plausibly do, even in terminology issues and word use, that would faze me.
Yeesh! Do you think people choose the GPL because it enhances their individuality and ability to take their ball and go home? I'd really like to know how many of the people flaming RMS here _use_ the GPL. If you don't, is it any of your business?
And can anyone explain how you are supposed to do a hostile takeover on an LGPLed library that was originally developed by the FSF in the first place?
I'm sorry, but my sympathies are so with RMS on this one that it would make your head spin. This is an ego clash, nothing more: on the one hand, it's a guy wanting people to say 'gnu' before things, and on the other hand, it's a guy wanting people to routinely make changes in possibly the most important Free Software license out there when they use it, wanting to anchor large amounts of software to one version of the license splitting the codebase into code that can be adapted to new conditions, and code that cannot.
Supposing someone (naming no names) managed to pull off a legal challenge that blew a hole in the current wording of the GPL? Any code only accessible under the current wording would be _permanently_ compromised. Only the stuff with 'any future version' in the wording would be available to a new GPL that was revised to fix the legal problem.
Ulrich is a damn cowboy- in the legal sense. I don't care how well he codes or project-maintains: he seems to not understand the reality of the situation, and his recommendation to use altered versions of the GPL is a _risk_. I didn't take to using the GPL with the idea that its own erstwhile supporters would start stupidly weakening it. I will do no such thing. That clause is in there for a reason that is far more important than fiddly little terminology and naming issues. I don't care _what_ RMS calls my GPLed code- as long as I can be sure that it will occupy the role I intended for it. Ulrich threatens that without even having the clear-headedness to realise how he's threatening it.