The GPLv3 (even more so than the GPLv2) is a cleverly worded attempt to control how users use GPLed software. It's just like DRM, but instead of technical measures they are using purely legal measures.
Utterly false. Neither GPL 2 nor 3 places additional restrictions on end users beyond those imposed by copyright law. Both grant users additional rights, provided they meet certain conditions. If you're allergic to the GPL, you're free to ignore it and pretend the software is under standard copyright, but you gain nothing by doing so.
Maximum efficiency for markets can easily deplete a given resource
When you have a product that's currently widely available but is being used up quickly, some people might realize that it will become more scarce in the future, and try to lock in a guaranteed supply. If enough people do that, the price rises, thereby discouraging rapid consumption. Of course, when this is done with oil, we call them evil speculators and demand that they be stopped so we can have artificially cheap gas (while simultaneously demanding that we "do something" about global warming).
If the people at Y0 paid 10% more, you'd have gotten Y+15 of reasonable prices. Charging more up front artificially can result in net financial savings, something raw supply and demand could not provide.
I was able to install Edgy on my MBP with only slight trickery as described here. The LiveCD booted with no problems at all. The only shortcoming is no wireless; trying to use ndiswrapper produced kernel panics on boot.
If you use a GPL product as part of a wireless router product, for example, and make changes to the source support your wireless router, and you do not release those changes you can be in violation of the GPL.
No, you're in violation of copyright, and you can't invoke the GPL as a defense. If the product was released under standard copyright without the GPL, you'd still be in violation and you wouldn't have the option to comply by releasing your code.
GPL doesn't restrict anything. Copyright laws do. GPL, as the L in the initials says, is a license that exempt you from the no-distribution no-derivative-work limitations that is the core of the copyright concept, as long as you agree with the GPL conditions. How can people distort that simple reality and say GPL restricts freedom is a mystery to me.
Well said.
It is simple as that. Without GPL, fair use aside, you cannot (legally) use, you cannot derive, you cannot distribute.
Actually, you don't need a license to merely run software you've legally acquired. See 17 USC 117. That's why the copyright lobbies keep making the inane argument that when you walk into a store and exchange money for a product, you don't actually own anything.
And so far as you're concerned, it's nice that you have multiple advanced degrees and all, but explain to me how that has anything to do with the kind of employment being lost to the United States today: manufacturing jobs, mostly, because of all the production that's been sent to China.
Are you similarly outraged about the telephone operators and secretaries that were replaced by technology? Even China is losing manufacturing jobs due to automation. Being able to produce more with less is good, even though it may hurt certain people in the short run.
Those who take a personal stand to advocate free software usually tend to be on the left.
True, which is disappointing because there's an excellent case for free software on economic grounds. Some conservatives oppose it because they think it destroys jobs and hurts commercial software companies, but that's just a variation of the broken window fallacy. Free software is good for the economy, just like a free nonpolluting energy source would be good for the economy even if it put the oil companies out of business.
The more schooling you've had, in terms of "high school" vs. "4-year degree" vs. "graduate degree" and so on, the more likely you are to be liberal.
Got a source? I don't, but I recall a couple of studies that found that those at both the top and the bottom of the educational spectrum tended to the left, while those in the middle (high school plus up to 4 years of college) tended to the right. That made intuitive sense to me: as an overbroad generalization those with little education want government to take care of them, and those who are highly educated believe that they can make government work well.
Wake me up when Libertarians solve the basic problem of people acting like self-centred greedy fucks
That's an unavoidable issue with every political system. Greedy fucks with government guns can do quite a bit of damage, and libertarianism tries to minimize that threat.
This makes perfect sense though. Business want a paper trail that they can go back on if problems arise later. You may now say "no license is required...it's public domain". But what if 5 years from now, you decide to sue them for copyright infringement?
And how many times has something like this happened? Compare to the number of para-military BSA raids on users of commercial software. If you're going to be paranoid, at least be consistently paranoid.
I thought the dual CPU G5 machines were rated at 1 teraflop.
IIRC the best case for Altivec is 8 flops/cycle (fused multiply/add of 4 32-bit floats), so a quad G5 at 2.5GHz would have a maximum of 80 GFlops. With perfectly scheduled code you could get some additional ops out of the integer and FP units, but not close to a teraflop.
If Apple wants it fly they need to open the device to 3rd party apps, full stop. A small touch screen OSX machine that you can't add software to is so intellectually offensive that it hurts.
Agreed. If it was running some random embedded OS then I wouldn't mind so much, but it's exceptionally disappointing that there are so many existing Mac apps that could be available with a recompile (and probably minor UI tweaks for the smaller screen), except that Steve has forbade them. My collection of board games would work very well, and with Rendezvous support you could possibly play against random people on the subway. And no, playing Ataxx or Checkers is not going to take out Cingular's network.
You can't fight an idea, but you can arrange things so that people don't have any motive to blow themselves up.
Certainly; we could adopt sharia and allow them to exterminate the Jews. Islamic extremists are not otherwise rational people who are only striking at us because of our injustices. In their own countries they're stoning homosexuals and adulterers/rape victims, forbidding women from learning to read, and violently suppressing other religions. We didn't make them do that. We could cease all military involvement in the Middle East (which I'm all for, step 1 is lots of nuke plants), but they'd still have plenty of problems with us.
Many of the most vocal commentators against Islam in the so-called "neo-conservative" are atheist or agnostic.
Yep. As an agnostic conservative/libertarian, I condemn all forms of religious extremism, and it's blatantly obvious that the Muslim world has a particular problem in that area. (And no, the rare abortion clinic bombing by a deranged lunatic doesn't remotely compare to government-sanctioned stoning of homosexuals). It's amazing how so many on the left will defend the most illiberal regimes on the planet, in order to avoid admitting that conservatives might have a point. If Bush being pro-life upsets you, you should be absolutely infuriated with the treatment of women under Muslim theocracies. The enemy of your enemy is not your friend.
Oil refinery polluting? Add $1 per gallon, coke plant polluting? Add $0.50 per bottle, etc. Yeah, people will stop driving cars or drinking cola because the producers up'ed the cost to cover the pollution fines.
Correct, unless the Law of Demand has been repealed when I wasn't paying attention. If raising prices by $1/gallon wouldn't have any impact on consumption, why wouldn't the producers already have done it?
Do people really think that the key to energy conservation is to badly micromanage every possible decision that people might make that involves energy use, rather than more simply charging for the externalties of energy production as they are incurred?
Yes, they do. The idea is that taxes hurt people, but intrusive regulations are free. Of course anyone with the slightest understanding of economics knows that's utterly false, but unfortunately that criteria excludes the majority of the voting public.
Well said. Rational economic thought is distressingly rare here.
Environmentalists: isn't that solution a LOT better than setting up millions of pages of regulations for how big a house you can have, how fuel-efficient your car can be, who needs to get a prescription for a light bulb, etc?
For the environentalists who actually want to improve the environment, yes. For the "environmentalists" whose real goal is to force us to change our decadent materialist lifestyles (for our own good of course), no.
DRM makes the business model of online rental possible.
And it doesn't even do that, since all DRM can be defeated. Anyone with the slightest degree of technical skill can rip every DVD they get from Netflix, yet the world has not come to an end. It's contract law combined with people's honesty and/or laziness that makes rental possible.
An enemy of the information society.
Exactly. It's baffling to me that we're even considering crippling the technology industry which has contributed a staggering amount to human progress in the last several decades, just so Hollywood can make slightly higher profits.
If I purchase a copy of Redhat Linux, I don't have the right to change the source, and re-sell it without the source-code.
Copyright prevents that, not the GPL. The GPL grants specific rights that you would normally not have (in this case, the ability to distribute modifications, but only if you do so under the GPL). If you tried to sell closed-source software derived from RedHat, you'd be sued for copyright infringement, not "violating the GPL".
Again, you are not the owner of a copy of the work
Sure I am. I paid MicroCenter for the box with the disc, I own the copy. That a EULA pretends to retroactively alter this arrangement is irrelevant.
you don't have a license unless you agree to the conditions of the license
Fine. So I disagree with the conditions of the license, and then use it without a license as I would any other copyrighted work, which as others have noted includes the ability to make the copies necessary in order to run the software.
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The GPLv3 (even more so than the GPLv2) is a cleverly worded attempt to control how users use GPLed software. It's just like DRM, but instead of technical measures they are using purely legal measures.
Utterly false. Neither GPL 2 nor 3 places additional restrictions on end users beyond those imposed by copyright law. Both grant users additional rights, provided they meet certain conditions. If you're allergic to the GPL, you're free to ignore it and pretend the software is under standard copyright, but you gain nothing by doing so.
Maximum efficiency for markets can easily deplete a given resource
When you have a product that's currently widely available but is being used up quickly, some people might realize that it will become more scarce in the future, and try to lock in a guaranteed supply. If enough people do that, the price rises, thereby discouraging rapid consumption. Of course, when this is done with oil, we call them evil speculators and demand that they be stopped so we can have artificially cheap gas (while simultaneously demanding that we "do something" about global warming).
If the people at Y0 paid 10% more, you'd have gotten Y+15 of reasonable prices. Charging more up front artificially can result in net financial savings, something raw supply and demand could not provide.
Evidence?
I was able to install Edgy on my MBP with only slight trickery as described here. The LiveCD booted with no problems at all. The only shortcoming is no wireless; trying to use ndiswrapper produced kernel panics on boot.
If you use a GPL product as part of a wireless router product, for example, and make changes to the source support your wireless router, and you do not release those changes you can be in violation of the GPL.
No, you're in violation of copyright, and you can't invoke the GPL as a defense. If the product was released under standard copyright without the GPL, you'd still be in violation and you wouldn't have the option to comply by releasing your code.
GPL doesn't restrict anything. Copyright laws do. GPL, as the L in the initials says, is a license that exempt you from the no-distribution no-derivative-work limitations that is the core of the copyright concept, as long as you agree with the GPL conditions. How can people distort that simple reality and say GPL restricts freedom is a mystery to me.
Well said.
It is simple as that. Without GPL, fair use aside, you cannot (legally) use, you cannot derive, you cannot distribute.
Actually, you don't need a license to merely run software you've legally acquired. See 17 USC 117. That's why the copyright lobbies keep making the inane argument that when you walk into a store and exchange money for a product, you don't actually own anything.
Does Apple usually give credit to bugs found?
Yes, see their latest security update for example. Apparently a "credit to" line wasn't good enough for Maynor and Ellch...
And so far as you're concerned, it's nice that you have multiple advanced degrees and all, but explain to me how that has anything to do with the kind of employment being lost to the United States today: manufacturing jobs, mostly, because of all the production that's been sent to China.
Are you similarly outraged about the telephone operators and secretaries that were replaced by technology? Even China is losing manufacturing jobs due to automation. Being able to produce more with less is good, even though it may hurt certain people in the short run.
Those who take a personal stand to advocate free software usually tend to be on the left.
True, which is disappointing because there's an excellent case for free software on economic grounds. Some conservatives oppose it because they think it destroys jobs and hurts commercial software companies, but that's just a variation of the broken window fallacy. Free software is good for the economy, just like a free nonpolluting energy source would be good for the economy even if it put the oil companies out of business.
The more schooling you've had, in terms of "high school" vs. "4-year degree" vs. "graduate degree" and so on, the more likely you are to be liberal.
Got a source? I don't, but I recall a couple of studies that found that those at both the top and the bottom of the educational spectrum tended to the left, while those in the middle (high school plus up to 4 years of college) tended to the right. That made intuitive sense to me: as an overbroad generalization those with little education want government to take care of them, and those who are highly educated believe that they can make government work well.
Wake me up when Libertarians solve the basic problem of people acting like self-centred greedy fucks
That's an unavoidable issue with every political system. Greedy fucks with government guns can do quite a bit of damage, and libertarianism tries to minimize that threat.
This makes perfect sense though. Business want a paper trail that they can go back on if problems arise later. You may now say "no license is required...it's public domain". But what if 5 years from now, you decide to sue them for copyright infringement?
And how many times has something like this happened? Compare to the number of para-military BSA raids on users of commercial software. If you're going to be paranoid, at least be consistently paranoid.
I thought the dual CPU G5 machines were rated at 1 teraflop.
IIRC the best case for Altivec is 8 flops/cycle (fused multiply/add of 4 32-bit floats), so a quad G5 at 2.5GHz would have a maximum of 80 GFlops. With perfectly scheduled code you could get some additional ops out of the integer and FP units, but not close to a teraflop.
If Apple wants it fly they need to open the device to 3rd party apps, full stop. A small touch screen OSX machine that you can't add software to is so intellectually offensive that it hurts.
Agreed. If it was running some random embedded OS then I wouldn't mind so much, but it's exceptionally disappointing that there are so many existing Mac apps that could be available with a recompile (and probably minor UI tweaks for the smaller screen), except that Steve has forbade them. My collection of board games would work very well, and with Rendezvous support you could possibly play against random people on the subway. And no, playing Ataxx or Checkers is not going to take out Cingular's network.
You can't fight an idea, but you can arrange things so that people don't have any motive to blow themselves up.
Certainly; we could adopt sharia and allow them to exterminate the Jews. Islamic extremists are not otherwise rational people who are only striking at us because of our injustices. In their own countries they're stoning homosexuals and adulterers/rape victims, forbidding women from learning to read, and violently suppressing other religions. We didn't make them do that. We could cease all military involvement in the Middle East (which I'm all for, step 1 is lots of nuke plants), but they'd still have plenty of problems with us.
Many of the most vocal commentators against Islam in the so-called "neo-conservative" are atheist or agnostic.
Yep. As an agnostic conservative/libertarian, I condemn all forms of religious extremism, and it's blatantly obvious that the Muslim world has a particular problem in that area. (And no, the rare abortion clinic bombing by a deranged lunatic doesn't remotely compare to government-sanctioned stoning of homosexuals). It's amazing how so many on the left will defend the most illiberal regimes on the planet, in order to avoid admitting that conservatives might have a point. If Bush being pro-life upsets you, you should be absolutely infuriated with the treatment of women under Muslim theocracies. The enemy of your enemy is not your friend.
Python is not free software, it's open source.
It's both. "Free software" is a superset of "GPL software".
Yeah, I hate it when corporations release improved products. Those bastards.
Do you want a pretty house, or do you want a planet that supports life?
False dichotomies are fun. Do you want civil liberties, or do you want to be safe from terrorists?
Oil refinery polluting? Add $1 per gallon, coke plant polluting? Add $0.50 per bottle, etc. Yeah, people will stop driving cars or drinking cola because the producers up'ed the cost to cover the pollution fines.
Correct, unless the Law of Demand has been repealed when I wasn't paying attention. If raising prices by $1/gallon wouldn't have any impact on consumption, why wouldn't the producers already have done it?
Do people really think that the key to energy conservation is to badly micromanage every possible decision that people might make that involves energy use, rather than more simply charging for the externalties of energy production as they are incurred?
Yes, they do. The idea is that taxes hurt people, but intrusive regulations are free. Of course anyone with the slightest understanding of economics knows that's utterly false, but unfortunately that criteria excludes the majority of the voting public.
Well said. Rational economic thought is distressingly rare here.
Environmentalists: isn't that solution a LOT better than setting up millions of pages of regulations for how big a house you can have, how fuel-efficient your car can be, who needs to get a prescription for a light bulb, etc?
For the environentalists who actually want to improve the environment, yes. For the "environmentalists" whose real goal is to force us to change our decadent materialist lifestyles (for our own good of course), no.
DRM makes the business model of online rental possible.
And it doesn't even do that, since all DRM can be defeated. Anyone with the slightest degree of technical skill can rip every DVD they get from Netflix, yet the world has not come to an end. It's contract law combined with people's honesty and/or laziness that makes rental possible.
An enemy of the information society.
Exactly. It's baffling to me that we're even considering crippling the technology industry which has contributed a staggering amount to human progress in the last several decades, just so Hollywood can make slightly higher profits.
If I purchase a copy of Redhat Linux, I don't have the right to change the source, and re-sell it without the source-code.
Copyright prevents that, not the GPL. The GPL grants specific rights that you would normally not have (in this case, the ability to distribute modifications, but only if you do so under the GPL). If you tried to sell closed-source software derived from RedHat, you'd be sued for copyright infringement, not "violating the GPL".
Not to mention that fact that you'd have to load the TPM chips with the Apple keys
OS X doesn't use the TPM.
Again, you are not the owner of a copy of the work
Sure I am. I paid MicroCenter for the box with the disc, I own the copy. That a EULA pretends to retroactively alter this arrangement is irrelevant.
you don't have a license unless you agree to the conditions of the license
Fine. So I disagree with the conditions of the license, and then use it without a license as I would any other copyrighted work, which as others have noted includes the ability to make the copies necessary in order to run the software.