but you also gotta ask why in the world would FRANCE care about Nazi auctions?
Read the article and you'll find out : it's not FRANCE that cares about it but two associations, the international league against racism and antisemitism(LICRA), and the French union of Jewish students. Makes more sense ? See, I'm French, but I never asked for this lawsuit.
It would be nice if/.'d stop reporting stories as "this country did this" each time it takes place outside the States.
Something else I wanted to get straight : this isn't a move by the French government either. This is a court decision. France being a democracy just like the USA, there's separation of powers, so the government is not supposed to interfere with decisions taken in courts.
Universal Access ? Very funny ; I'd be interested in learning what percentage of the world's population has the "basic supplies" it takes to connect a computer to the Net, like home electricity, phone lines... I'm affraid it's not a very high one. Come on Jon, do you have any idea of the way most people live in the so-called "underdeveloped world" ? Or even poor Americans ?
Don't get me wrong, I love computers, and I'm all the more ready to believe that hooking up to the Net has all the positive impact you state. Yes, it's nice that Intel and others are giving away computers to their employees. But calling this Universal Access is a joke. It isn't universal at all, as it is restricted to the minority that can afford it. And even if it weren't a joke, for most people in this planet there's many more problems to solve before they can consider to surf the Web. Would you give a fuck about a computer if you were starving ?
Again, I think what you call universal access should be a Good Thing (tm). But please don't mix it with problems of poverty or underdevelopement, as it is completely irrelevant to these issues.
Of course it's cool to dream about the effects of a true universal access like C.J.R. Licklider and Jon Postel did. But no matter what Ford and the others do, for now it's still utopia.
What if someone steals your finger? I know it sounds sick, but it has happened.
I've heard about that too. Does anybody have information on where and how it happened ? Story link anyone ? I'm sure there's fingerprint protected stuff valuable enough to steal for something like that to happen but OTOH this sounds a lot like the average urban legend...
I'm affraid you are (partially) wrong. Outlook 98 and Outlook Express will execute script attachements when previewing e-mails if the security zone they're running in allows them to do so. Here is a chart from ntbugtraq showing the behavior of Outlook wrt various situations/configs.
My understanding is that Outlook's default security zone disables automatical script execution. However I'm not MS-fluent enough to know if changing that security zone config is a common/useful thing to do with Outlook.
My point is, yes it's flamebait to say that all Outlook versions/configs do this, but it isn't true either to say that Outlook "doesn't do this and never did". This also shows that the ILOVEYOU trojan wasn't only propagated by stupid users double-clicking on the script. It also took stupid configuration by stupid users/sysadmins to achieve such a great success:)))
OK, with these explanations it makes a bit more sense...
However, since Motif userbase (coders I mean) does'nt like Motif, and the OSS coders don't like Motif very much (and not only because of its former license regarding the posts in that/. story I've mentionned in my previous post), what's the point in releasing that source code ?
The FAQ on the Open Group's website says that "The public availability of Motif will allow the many Motif applications to more easily be made available on Open Source platforms". But a lot of those applications have already been cloned/emulated/ported with Gtk/Qt, haven't they ?
Pretty funny and weird that they opensource the Motif monster after the not-that old Motif's not dead story featuring featuring that interview where that Motif guy explains how the "Motif community" is different from Open Source, being all about "Secrecy, intellectual property rights, and long-term, large-scale projects".
And now, OpenSource Motif ?! Wonder what happened to the great philosophy of the Motif community ? What do you mean, that community's been dead for ages ??:)))
More seriously, we've been doing fine without Motif for a long time. There may be some interesting stuff in that source code but I wonder if somebody will take the time to read it and use it now that GTK and Qt are out there.
But you can find plenty of people that state or imply that.com is for US commercial interests.
Yep, not surprising since USofAers are unlikely to visit non-US.com sites. However, down here in France everybody, and especially companies wants a.com domain rather than a.fr one, possibly because it sounds more "professional". There's also the fact that if you simply type "foo", most browsers will try to reach "www.foo.com" but not "www.foo.fr". I guess it's the same in other countries, and so we have that stupid *.com flat hierarchy
Nope, no VB on Linux though IIRC the Gnumeric people have such a project in order to improve compatibility with Excel files....
Linux will start to be attacked by viruses as soon as Linux is installed on enough large systems that the attack will make it in the newspapers. When you give the code to everybody, you're begging for people to exploit it.
There's somtehing wrong here. It's true that 31337 the script kiddie could find a security hole in the source code since it's available, assuming he has the skills. However, if 31337 can find that hole, there's a great chance that somebody would have found it before him, and fixed it. I'm not saying this can't happen, just that it's rather unlikely
What exactly does "information wants to be free" mean?
And, what does "information" mean anyway ? OK, I understand this is supposed to be information like in Shannon's theory of information (e.g.) the bits transmitted over the networks. However it seems to me that using the very same word for music, source code, binaries, images, text in every IP issue that comes around is stupid. It may all come down to "information" on a very generalistic point of view, but still those are very different issues. For example, there's not a great deal of interest in enforcing the right to modify music whereas allowing it for source code has helped creating great software. Having some big theory and applying it blindly simply doesn't work.
And, anyway, is it free as in beer or free as in speech ?:)))
This is even more related than what you think. Though English words usually make it into dictionnary as a result of common use (in which case I'm all in favor of it), sometimes stupid journalists think it is "cool" to use an English term when there already is a French one, and start to repeat it over and over hoping it will make it into the mainstream. That's dumb and I don't think it should be favoured. Interestingly, this is just what happened to the word 'hacker', the media seem to have picked it because it sounded more frightening than 'cracker'. Well now 'hacker' with the wrong meaning did make it to the mainstream I guess it's time to move on. It's pretty sad though, as I don't think the language should be defined neither by some group of auto-proclaimed 'experts' (fuck the French Academie!) nore by stupid journalists, but by common use. Unfortunately the medias sometimes have way too much power over that
FYI, and as far as I know, the French law only forbids the use of English with no French translation in manuals and commercials. The point of those laws is not to prevent the corruption of the pure French language by the evil English language. Thing is, the vast majority of the French are really terrible at English. The purpose of those laws is to make sure that people get proper information about a product before they buy it (for commercials - if ther ever was any such thing as an informative commercial), and that they get instructions about how to use them (for manuals). Some have argued that those laws might make the GPL illegal in France as the FSF refuses to realease official translations, but that's another matter... BTW your examples are bad ; internet is accepted because it's just the name of the network, and there's no need for translations for such things ; and as for 'computer', nobody uses that (at least in France) since there already is 'ordinateur'. Kind of interrestingly different ways to consider those machines : the English "computer", well, computes things, the French "ordinateur" sets them into order. Don't know which is more relevant though...
Your post was funny ; I'm not responding because I felt offended, not at all. It simply inspired me those overlengthy and partially OT remarks.
Dude, they've spent a lot of time building that brand. There is no good reason why you should be able to call your product the same as another product. If anyone could use the term 'for dummies' then it would be worthless to IDG.
Contrarily to what IDG and you seem to think, not every website's purpose is to sell "products". octapod.org and others who have been threatened by IDG are not-for-profit groups who are not trying to sell anything by using the words "for dummies".
Your MS and Sony analogies are flawed. From the former "CVS for dummies" site's correspondance with IDG
"... to be actionable the use must not fall within any of the statutory exemptions. Under the Act, 'fair use' of a mark in comparative advertising, 'non- commercial' use of a mark, and news reporting and commentary are not actionable."
They quote that from the '1995 Trademark Dilution Act', as IANAL and not even American I got no idea wheter this has been changed by newer laws but don't think so.
Besides, some of us think that the use trademarks and the likes to decide what you should be allowed to say/write in fora, non-commercial websites and other public domain areas is an idea for dummies. As you seem to think otherwise, I guess you should be worrying about your blatant infrigement of the registered trademarks "IDG(tm)" "Microsoft(tm)" and "IDG(tm)" (not counting your unfair allusions about the honourable Sony Corp. producing crappy products). Hope for you that their lawiers don't read/....
Windows would be nothing without it's additional features that makes it a pleasure for developers to develop on. Imagine windows without basic services like COM or Explorer. What will happen to windows in the future is major services like Voice Recognition etc will not get integrated into windows because of any split up. MS has been researching this kindo f stuff for years, and it's absolutely idiotic to prevent them from adding these features to their OS.
This'd happen if the DoJ's ruling is to break up MS and nothing else. But if they're required to really open up the source, or at least to realease full doc of the API/internals then anybody could add these features to the OS with full integration. Sure MS has been reasearching Voice Recognition for a long time, but they're not the only one. Why should they be the only company to integrate those features within their OS ?
Especially since when they do, everyone else copies them (just like webbrowsing and every other feature in Windows now days).
Wow, I didn't know MS invented webbrowsing. Guess they should sue those people at CERN then.
More seriously, you need to get a better kowledge of computer reasearch history if you think MS has ever invented anything. They may get copied a lot (like GNOME/KDE), but they too have copied former work to build their OS. I see nothing wrong with that.
This would be a Good Thing if the offer actually conveyed some meaning. They would open the source code of some "parts" of the system. Which parts ? How would they choose those parts ? To whom would that source code be available ? What license ?
For the time being sof/hardware company CAN get the source code by paying big $$ to MS. It would be easy for them to stick to that offer without actually changing their policy.
I agree that it'd be stupid to say that this annoucement is evil just because it's from Microsoft. But it's so imprecise that it isn't possible to say that it's good until they tell us what they'd really be doing with that source code.
? Do you really think SCO's shareholders would read that interview on slashdot to see if he says something they don't like ? Or did they check on his answers before he sent them back ? I'm sure some marteking/legal departements at SCO did, but as for shareholders... I would'nt expect them to watch the company's president THAT closely. And, anyway, if it was so sure that we would get proto-marketodroid answers from that guy, why interview him in the first place ?
There's a life outside computers and the Net, you know. In Real Life, offline, I don't see those "groups of people" in action very often. I don't see many free (beer/speech too) products except software distributed on the Net. I don't see many people succeeding in breaking the rules created by corps (especially when they turn those into laws), etc... It's thanks to the network that hackers are able to gather to realease free software, outpass the obnoxious rules created by megacorps and do all this nice stuff we are told about on/. . Now, take that away, what's left ? And as Jon said, that free Internet thing(free as in speech this time:))) ) is clearly under siege...
Regarding drug laws -- I am not in any way convinced that legalization of drugs will reduce imprisonment numbers. While alcohol is legal for many, a huge number of people end up commiting harmful acts as a result of their alcohol consumption. The same applies to currently illegal drugs.
Alright, but what if alcohol use was made illegal ? I bet there'd be a tremendous increase in imprisonment numbers ! With current legislation, you might go to jail for drug use, even if you don't have committed any other crime. I think that's the way legalization would reduce imprisonment number. Of course most imprisoned aren't
You acknowledge the fact that marijuana is less dangerous than alcohol, so why should marijuana users go to jail ?
Of course if some drug was legalized its addicts would still be held responsible for their actions. As you said, some people commit "harmful acts as a result of their alcohol consumption". I guess they don't get away with these acts in court by saying "yes I did this but I was drunk".
disclaimer : I don't do drugs nor advertise their use. Coding is my drug. This I do advertise, and am glad it's legal.
BTW I'm French and arguing about US drug legislation, but as I happen to be interested in this issue I have reasearched it and found out that the laws are pretty much alike in both countries
If he persists with his idealistic crusade against paying for software
He never engaged any such crusade. Quoting the GPL preamble : Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for this service if you wish) RMS actually has made a living for a long time by charging people to send them emacs copies.
Getting a bit more ontopic with the philosophical issue, I think that there *ARE* cases where there's a right opinion and a wrong one, mostly in "scientific issues". Galileo was right. People stating the sun rotates around the earth were proven wrong.
Now, this sure does not apply to personal beliefs ; nobody should for example say that RMS is "wrong" to be an atheist. But either there is a god or there is no god, so he is "right" or "wrong". Point is, we have no means to objectively know, so we should respect both opinions (well, this might be a bad example, as there may be more than two opinions in this issue ; I'm sorry this is all I managed to come up with at the time being:-( ).
Statements like "propietary software is wrong" fall in between. You can certainly show how proprietary stuff does harm to its users, but you can also show the contrary.
Though I think relativism is necessary, so that you acknowledge the fact that your 'opponent' may be right in those issue where you can't prove who's right, I also believe that it is a bit hypocritical to pretend to be a pure relativist. When you say "I am a firm believer", you obviously think that you are right on your views about relativism. You need to hold certain things for true just to live. You need to have ideas about what's right and wrong to build your personal ethics ; RMS needed to believe that propietary software is wrong to start the GNU project.
So that was what I think of relativism. I may be wrong, but I think I'm right:))).
This lawsuit is pretty surprising coming from Metallica who are known to have a 'Grateful-Dead-like' attitude towards bootlegs. Where I live, bootleg CDS are sold at about three times the price of a regular CD, so I guess that the people who sell them do indeed make money on their back.
They pretend to do this because the way Napster users trade their songs hurt their artistical feelings, but I think they're only choosing the easy target. It's easier to sue Napster and some colleges than to find out who makes money out of pirate tapes.
How hypocrit of them to justify this with their artistic ideas. If they don't like the idea of their art being traded like a commodity , I don't see how they could condone the bootleg market.
...it's mostly either "yeah they're right RedHat sucks blablabla... RPM.... blablabla" or "this is stupid blablabla... get real... RedHat is the major Linux distro (blablabla)". But this is not an anti-RedHat crusade, it's a protest against the confusion RedHat == Linux, especially in the medias. Their best ideas are to point out incompatibilities between distros and to get commercial vendors to support Linux as a whole and not just RedHat.
So IMHO it's a good idea, and not too tough to accomplish. People tend to exagerate differences between distros. Come on : if you can support RedHat, you can simply support Linux
BTW I'm running Mandrake, I wonder if that makes me fall under the 'RedHat goon' category:))
I've seen on some gnu.org's page that you don't want to release official translations of the GPL, because it would be too difficult and expensive to check that the translated license really has the same meaning as the original GPL. Though that makes sense, in France there's a law that states that (software) licenses should be written in French to be valid. I guess other non-speaking countries have similar legislations, in order to make sure that people really understand what they agree to when they get to use a product. Considering these laws, some people think that the GPL may not be applied in France or in any non-english speaking country with similar legislations. Now of course there are unofficial translations, but they are well, unofficial, and refering to the original GPL in english. Do you think this is an issue ? Do your have more information about it ? Will the FSF ever release official translations or are non english speaking users of free software stuck to "hope" the GPL is valid in their country until someone takes it to court ? Not that it prevents us from using/writing GPL'd software, but it's a bit funny when you think about it...
...is about Linux having no UI standard. That's a nightmare. I mean I'm the first one to agree that everybody should be able to customize their applications to look/work the way they want. But there are apps I'm not interested at all in customizing, because I don't use them really often , or simply cause I don't care. These apps should all function according to the same default standards. I should'nt have to waste my time customizing them to work/look the same way...
So this shows that, true enough, that Linux lacks a UI standard. The hard point about designing such a standard is that there's Gnome, KDE, plus gazillions of different window managers with each their own look and fell. That's good but it sure makes it a hard task to have apps following a default behavior. What's the solution ?
Slashdot Mirror
but you also gotta ask why in the world would FRANCE care about Nazi auctions?
/.'d stop reporting stories as "this country did this" each time it takes place outside the States.
Read the article and you'll find out : it's not FRANCE that cares about it but two associations, the international league against racism and antisemitism(LICRA), and the French union of Jewish students. Makes more sense ? See, I'm French, but I never asked for this lawsuit.
It would be nice if
Something else I wanted to get straight : this isn't a move by the French government either. This is a court decision. France being a democracy just like the USA, there's separation of powers, so the government is not supposed to interfere with decisions taken in courts.
Who was it that said something to the effect "I disagree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
...
:)))
Ahem... it was the French philosopher
Wow, just too funny that you quote a Frenchman to illustrate the American position on free speech vs the French position
Universal Access ? Very funny ; I'd be interested in learning what percentage of the world's population has the "basic supplies" it takes to connect a computer to the Net, like home electricity, phone lines... I'm affraid it's not a very high one. Come on Jon, do you have any idea of the way most people live in the so-called "underdeveloped world" ? Or even poor Americans ?
Don't get me wrong, I love computers, and I'm all the more ready to believe that hooking up to the Net has all the positive impact you state. Yes, it's nice that Intel and others are giving away computers to their employees. But calling this Universal Access is a joke. It isn't universal at all, as it is restricted to the minority that can afford it. And even if it weren't a joke, for most people in this planet there's many more problems to solve before they can consider to surf the Web. Would you give a fuck about a computer if you were starving ?
Again, I think what you call universal access should be a Good Thing (tm). But please don't mix it with problems of poverty or underdevelopement, as it is completely irrelevant to these issues.
Of course it's cool to dream about the effects of a true universal access like C.J.R. Licklider and Jon Postel did. But no matter what Ford and the others do, for now it's still utopia.
What if someone steals your finger? I know it sounds sick, but it has happened.
I've heard about that too. Does anybody have information on where and how it happened ? Story link anyone ? I'm sure there's fingerprint protected stuff valuable enough to steal for something like that to happen but OTOH this sounds a lot like the average urban legend...
I'm affraid you are (partially) wrong. Outlook 98 and Outlook Express will execute script attachements when previewing e-mails if the security zone they're running in allows them to do so. Here is a chart from ntbugtraq showing the behavior of Outlook wrt various situations/configs.
:)))
My understanding is that Outlook's default security zone disables automatical script execution. However I'm not MS-fluent enough to know if changing that security zone config is a common/useful thing to do with Outlook.
My point is, yes it's flamebait to say that all Outlook versions/configs do this, but it isn't true either to say that Outlook "doesn't do this and never did". This also shows that the ILOVEYOU trojan wasn't only propagated by stupid users double-clicking on the script. It also took stupid configuration by stupid users/sysadmins to achieve such a great success
oops, big mistake in that comment...
I meant "since Motif userbase doesn't like OpenSource"
OK, with these explanations it makes a bit more sense...
/. story I've mentionned in my previous post), what's the point in releasing that source code ?
However, since Motif userbase (coders I mean) does'nt like Motif, and the OSS coders don't like Motif very much (and not only because of its former license regarding the posts in that
The FAQ on the Open Group's website says that "The public availability of Motif will allow the many Motif applications to more easily be made available on Open Source platforms". But a lot of those applications have already been cloned/emulated/ported with Gtk/Qt, haven't they ?
Pretty funny and weird that they opensource the Motif monster after the not-that old Motif's not dead story featuring featuring that interview where that Motif guy explains how the "Motif community" is different from Open Source, being all about "Secrecy, intellectual property rights, and long-term, large-scale projects".
:)))
And now, OpenSource Motif ?! Wonder what happened to the great philosophy of the Motif community ? What do you mean, that community's been dead for ages ??
More seriously, we've been doing fine without Motif for a long time. There may be some interesting stuff in that source code but I wonder if somebody will take the time to read it and use it now that GTK and Qt are out there.
But you can find plenty of people that state or imply that .com is for US commercial interests.
.com sites. However, down here in France everybody, and especially companies wants a .com domain rather than a .fr one, possibly because it sounds more "professional". There's also the fact that if you simply type "foo", most browsers will try to reach "www.foo.com" but not "www.foo.fr". I guess it's the same in other countries, and so we have that stupid *.com flat hierarchy
Yep, not surprising since USofAers are unlikely to visit non-US
Nope, no VB on Linux though IIRC the Gnumeric people have such a project in order to improve compatibility with Excel files. ...
Linux will start to be attacked by viruses as soon as Linux is installed on enough large systems that the attack will make it in the newspapers. When you give the code to everybody, you're begging for people to exploit it.
There's somtehing wrong here. It's true that 31337 the script kiddie could find a security hole in the source code since it's available, assuming he has the skills. However, if 31337 can find that hole, there's a great chance that somebody would have found it before him, and fixed it. I'm not saying this can't happen, just that it's rather unlikely
What exactly does "information wants to be free" mean?
:)))
And, what does "information" mean anyway ? OK, I understand this is supposed to be information like in Shannon's theory of information (e.g.) the bits transmitted over the networks. However it seems to me that using the very same word for music, source code, binaries, images, text in every IP issue that comes around is stupid. It may all come down to "information" on a very generalistic point of view, but still those are very different issues. For example, there's not a great deal of interest in enforcing the right to modify music whereas allowing it for source code has helped creating great software. Having some big theory and applying it blindly simply doesn't work.
And, anyway, is it free as in beer or free as in speech ?
This is even more related than what you think. Though English words usually make it into dictionnary as a result of common use (in which case I'm all in favor of it), sometimes stupid journalists think it is "cool" to use an English term when there already is a French one, and start to repeat it over and over hoping it will make it into the mainstream. That's dumb and I don't think it should be favoured. Interestingly, this is just what happened to the word 'hacker', the media seem to have picked it because it sounded more frightening than 'cracker'. Well now 'hacker' with the wrong meaning did make it to the mainstream I guess it's time to move on. It's pretty sad though, as I don't think the language should be defined neither by some group of auto-proclaimed 'experts' (fuck the French Academie!) nore by stupid journalists, but by common use. Unfortunately the medias sometimes have way too much power over that
FYI, and as far as I know, the French law only forbids the use of English with no French translation in manuals and commercials. The point of those laws is not to prevent the corruption of the pure French language by the evil English language. Thing is, the vast majority of the French are really terrible at English. The purpose of those laws is to make sure that people get proper information about a product before they buy it (for commercials - if ther ever was any such thing as an informative commercial), and that they get instructions about how to use them (for manuals). Some have argued that those laws might make the GPL illegal in France as the FSF refuses to realease official translations, but that's another matter... BTW your examples are bad ; internet is accepted because it's just the name of the network, and there's no need for translations for such things ; and as for 'computer', nobody uses that (at least in France) since there already is 'ordinateur'. Kind of interrestingly different ways to consider those machines : the English "computer", well, computes things, the French "ordinateur" sets them into order. Don't know which is more relevant though...
Your post was funny ; I'm not responding because I felt offended, not at all. It simply inspired me those overlengthy and partially OT remarks.
Contrarily to what IDG and you seem to think, not every website's purpose is to sell "products". octapod.org and others who have been threatened by IDG are not-for-profit groups who are not trying to sell anything by using the words "for dummies".
Your MS and Sony analogies are flawed. From the former "CVS for dummies" site's correspondance with IDG
They quote that from the '1995 Trademark Dilution Act', as IANAL and not even American I got no idea wheter this has been changed by newer laws but don't think so.
Besides, some of us think that the use trademarks and the likes to decide what you should be allowed to say/write in fora, non-commercial websites and other public domain areas is an idea for dummies. As you seem to think otherwise, I guess you should be worrying about your blatant infrigement of the registered trademarks "IDG(tm)" "Microsoft(tm)" and "IDG(tm)" (not counting your unfair allusions about the honourable Sony Corp. producing crappy products). Hope for you that their lawiers don't read
Windows would be nothing without it's additional features that makes it a pleasure for developers to develop on. Imagine windows without basic services like COM or Explorer. What will happen to windows in the future is major services like Voice Recognition etc will not get integrated into windows because of any split up. MS has been researching this kindo f stuff for years, and it's absolutely idiotic to prevent them from adding these features to their OS.
This'd happen if the DoJ's ruling is to break up MS and nothing else. But if they're required to really open up the source, or at least to realease full doc of the API/internals then anybody could add these features to the OS with full integration. Sure MS has been reasearching Voice Recognition for a long time, but they're not the only one. Why should they be the only company to integrate those features within their OS ?
Especially since when they do, everyone else copies them (just like webbrowsing and every other feature in Windows now days).
Wow, I didn't know MS invented webbrowsing. Guess they should sue those people at CERN then.
More seriously, you need to get a better kowledge of computer reasearch history if you think MS has ever invented anything. They may get copied a lot (like GNOME/KDE), but they too have copied former work to build their OS. I see nothing wrong with that.
This would be a Good Thing if the offer actually conveyed some meaning. They would open the source code of some "parts" of the system. Which parts ? How would they choose those parts ? To whom would that source code be available ? What license ?
For the time being sof/hardware company CAN get the source code by paying big $$ to MS. It would be easy for them to stick to that offer without actually changing their policy.
I agree that it'd be stupid to say that this annoucement is evil just because it's from Microsoft. But it's so imprecise that it isn't possible to say that it's good until they tell us what they'd really be doing with that source code.
? Do you really think SCO's shareholders would read that interview on slashdot to see if he says something they don't like ? Or did they check on his answers before he sent them back ? I'm sure some marteking/legal departements at SCO did, but as for shareholders... I would'nt expect them to watch the company's president THAT closely. And, anyway, if it was so sure that we would get proto-marketodroid answers from that guy, why interview him in the first place ?
There's a life outside computers and the Net, you know. In Real Life, offline, I don't see those "groups of people" in action very often. I don't see many free (beer/speech too) products except software distributed on the Net. I don't see many people succeeding in breaking the rules created by corps (especially when they turn those into laws), etc... It's thanks to the network that hackers are able to gather to realease free software, outpass the obnoxious rules created by megacorps and do all this nice stuff we are told about on /. . Now, take that away, what's left ? And as Jon said, that free Internet thing(free as in speech this time :))) ) is clearly under siege...
Regarding drug laws -- I am not in any way convinced that legalization of drugs will reduce imprisonment numbers. While alcohol is legal for many, a huge number of people end up commiting harmful acts as a result of their alcohol consumption. The same applies to currently illegal drugs.
Alright, but what if alcohol use was made illegal ? I bet there'd be a tremendous increase in imprisonment numbers ! With current legislation, you might go to jail for drug use, even if you don't have committed any other crime. I think that's the way legalization would reduce imprisonment number. Of course most imprisoned aren't
You acknowledge the fact that marijuana is less dangerous than alcohol, so why should marijuana users go to jail ?
Of course if some drug was legalized its addicts would still be held responsible for their actions. As you said, some people commit "harmful acts as a result of their alcohol consumption". I guess they don't get away with these acts in court by saying "yes I did this but I was drunk".
disclaimer : I don't do drugs nor advertise their use. Coding is my drug. This I do advertise, and am glad it's legal.
BTW I'm French and arguing about US drug legislation, but as I happen to be interested in this issue I have reasearched it and found out that the laws are pretty much alike in both countries
If he persists with his idealistic crusade against paying for software
:-( ).
:))).
He never engaged any such crusade. Quoting the GPL preamble : Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for this service if you wish) RMS actually has made a living for a long time by charging people to send them emacs copies.
Getting a bit more ontopic with the philosophical issue, I think that there *ARE* cases where there's a right opinion and a wrong one, mostly in "scientific issues". Galileo was right. People stating the sun rotates around the earth were proven wrong.
Now, this sure does not apply to personal beliefs ; nobody should for example say that RMS is "wrong" to be an atheist. But either there is a god or there is no god, so he is "right" or "wrong". Point is, we have no means to objectively know, so we should respect both opinions (well, this might be a bad example, as there may be more than two opinions in this issue ; I'm sorry this is all I managed to come up with at the time being
Statements like "propietary software is wrong" fall in between. You can certainly show how proprietary stuff does harm to its users, but you can also show the contrary.
Though I think relativism is necessary, so that you acknowledge the fact that your 'opponent' may be right in those issue where you can't prove who's right, I also believe that it is a bit hypocritical to pretend to be a pure relativist. When you say "I am a firm believer", you obviously think that you are right on your views about relativism. You need to hold certain things for true just to live. You need to have ideas about what's right and wrong to build your personal ethics ; RMS needed to believe that propietary software is wrong to start the GNU project.
So that was what I think of relativism. I may be wrong, but I think I'm right
This lawsuit is pretty surprising coming from Metallica who are known to have a 'Grateful-Dead-like' attitude towards bootlegs. Where I live, bootleg CDS are sold at about three times the price of a regular CD, so I guess that the people who sell them do indeed make money on their back.
They pretend to do this because the way Napster users trade their songs hurt their artistical feelings, but I think they're only choosing the easy target. It's easier to sue Napster and some colleges than to find out who makes money out of pirate tapes.
How hypocrit of them to justify this with their artistic ideas. If they don't like the idea of their art being traded like a commodity , I don't see how they could condone the bootleg market.
...it's mostly either "yeah they're right RedHat sucks blablabla ... RPM .... blablabla" or "this is stupid blablabla ... get real ... RedHat is the major Linux distro (blablabla)". But this is not an anti-RedHat crusade, it's a protest against the confusion RedHat == Linux, especially in the medias. Their best ideas are to point out incompatibilities between distros and to get commercial vendors to support Linux as a whole and not just RedHat.
:))
So IMHO it's a good idea, and not too tough to accomplish. People tend to exagerate differences between distros. Come on : if you can support RedHat, you can simply support Linux
BTW I'm running Mandrake, I wonder if that makes me fall under the 'RedHat goon' category
Try looking there : http://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html
Think what you want of RMS, but if there ever was a good programmer that has contributed code
who is also a GNU/Linux advocate, that's the man.
Now, I'll leave it up to you to decide if he's a wacko...
Nope. A moral person is a collective person as opposed to an individual. A company, an association, any kind of organization but NOT a real person.
I've seen on some gnu.org's page that you don't want to release official translations of the GPL, because it would be too difficult and expensive to check that the translated license really has the same meaning as the original GPL. Though that makes sense, in France there's a law that states that (software) licenses should be written in French to be valid. I guess other non-speaking countries have similar legislations, in order to make sure that people really understand what they agree to when they get to use a product. Considering these laws, some people think that the GPL may not be applied in France or in any non-english speaking country with similar legislations. Now of course there are unofficial translations, but they are well, unofficial, and refering to the original GPL in english. Do you think this is an issue ? Do your have more information about it ? Will the FSF ever release official translations or are non english speaking users of free software stuck to "hope" the GPL is valid in their country until someone takes it to court ? Not that it prevents us from using/writing GPL'd software, but it's a bit funny when you think about it...
...is about Linux having no UI standard. That's a nightmare. I mean I'm the first one to agree that everybody should be able to customize their applications to look/work the way they want. But there are apps I'm not interested at all in customizing, because I don't use them really often , or simply cause I don't care. These apps should all function according to the same default standards. I should'nt have to waste my time customizing them to work/look the same way...
So this shows that, true enough, that Linux lacks a UI standard. The hard point about designing such a standard is that there's Gnome, KDE, plus gazillions of different window managers with each their own look and fell. That's good but it sure makes it a hard task to have apps following a default behavior. What's the solution ?