It may seem that the licenses let one _distribute_ it under either
license, but this interpretation of the license is false -- it is
still illegal to break up, cut up, or modify someone else's legal
document, and, it cannot be replaced by another license because it may
not be removed. Hence, a dual licensed file always remains dual
licensed, every time it is distributed.
Theo's vehemence (or perhaps translation) has caused him to be unclear in the part of his sentence you quoted. You omitted his clarification which totally agrees what I've been trying to explain to you.
The fact that you interpret Theo's words to mean that dual licenses are XOR not AND means either you didn't bother to read the rest of his sentence or you are deliberately twisting his words around to mean the exact opposite of what he intended.
Just to be clear, when Theo says "under either license" here he means literally with just the text of one license or the other, which the part of the sentence you omitted makes clear. You are free to distribute the code under the terms of either license but you are not allowed to alter the license(s).
Finally, the correct interpretation of a dual license does not add extra restriction and thus is not in conflict with the GPL.
You have still confused "distribute under one branch of a dual license" with "rewrite the license of someone else's code". A dual license does not automatically grant you the right to re-license the code under just one branch of the license even if that makes one branch of the dual license seem pointless.
Unless you are specifically granted permission to re-write the license, you are not allowed to change the license on someone else's code.
You have further confused the purpose and use of the dual license. You seem to assume (perhaps as a strawman argument) that if a user (of dual licensed code) can't delete one of the licenses then both must be enforced. Not true. The user of the code is free to select either branch of the license but they are not free to modify or delete the license(s).
I recently released some code under a dual BSD+GPL license. I had added a BSD licensed library to a GPL'ed project. I sure as hell didn't re-write the license on the BSD code. But I did add an independent interface to the library with some extra features. I gave this home-grown code the dual BSD+GPL license. I tend to work on GPL projects and if I release stand-alone code it is licensed under the GPL. I added a BSD license to my interface as a way of giving back to the BSD community. People are free to include my code in a BSD project. Something they wouldn't be able to do if it was GPL only.
If someone else wants to put my code into an all GPL project, they are free to do that as well (although this is probably unlikely). If yet another person got my code from the all-GPL project, they could take my dual licensed code and put it into a BSD project.
The QT situation is different. They don't have two different licenses attached to one piece of code, they have two copies of the code-base released under two different licenses.
They say:
The Commercial license does not allow the incorporation of code developed with the Open Source Edition of Qt into a proprietary product.
which reinforces the point that the code-bases are different.
In all of these cases the dual licenses tell you how you can use and distribute the code but none of them give you permission to change the license.
However, if you are standing in front of the White House with a sign that says "Bush is a punk-ass chump!", then no, you are not a traitor.
But if the sign says "U.S. Out of Iraq Now!" (an attempt to disrupt the current insane policy) and there is a threat of violent acts at the demonstration then this executive order allows Bush et al. to take away all my money.
The problem is similar to the problem with an anti-terrorism law that they recently tried to enact in our State. When all you require is (a) a threat of violence; and (b) motivation to change/disrupt policy; then you are criminalizing political protest. The problem arises when a person's political motivations make an action illegal that would otherwise be legal without the political motivation.
You then get the ridiculous situation where the same threat of violence at the same demonstration is perfectly legal for supporters of the President but is illegal for people who are against him.
In fact, political acts are included and guilt will only be determined through a secret process outside the courts.
ArcherB replied:
I don't see this in the order. I see things like (i) to have committed, or to pose a significant risk of committing, an act or acts of violence that have the purpose or effect of: This is not a "political act", but an act of treason. I feel these people would be getting off light.
Then I suggest you go back and
read it a third time.
From the Whitehouse link, right before the section you quoted, it says:
any person determined by the Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense
FYI, the Secretaries of Treasury, State, and Defense are all part of the Executive branch, not the Judicial, hence the apt phrase "secret process outside the courts" which you objected to.
Your claim that the well defined legal term treason is identical to
the secret determination of a group of three members of the Bush administration that I merely pose a risk of committing violence in order to change their insane policies in Iraq (which they could easily interpret as undermining their efforts there) is worthy of Kafka.
According to you, if I go to a large demonstration against the Bush Iraq policies and there is a significant threat that there may be violence there then I am a traitor to my country. Sheesh. There is a significant threat of violence just driving to the damned demonstration.
This woman should just leave it alone, she already caught a break with the charges being dropped.
WTF? They sued her and tried to ruin her life even after they knew they had no credible evidence against her and you think it was her lucky day when they dropped their case right before the judge was about to throw it out of the court anyway on summary judgment?
If someone intentionally runs you down with their car are you lucky if they run away when the cops arrive? (for the metaphorically impaired: I'm equating the cops arriving with the impending summary judgments that led the MAFIAA to drop their case). Wouldn't you try to sue them for you medical bills? How is that any different from her suing them for the legal bills they caused her to incur to defend herself against their bogus charges?
Internet radio differs from broadcast radio in the same way that recording tapes from a CD differs from uploading to a P2P network: you can reach thousands more people, and you can get perfect copies of the broadcasts by stream ripping. Hence they use this excuse as a far greater potential revenue loss as compared to regular radio,
Excellent point. But this also shows exactly why the *IAA are hated and reviled in the tech community. You are saying that the RIAA wants to shut down Internet music distribution simply because it is a more efficient system and such efficiency hurts their profits. This is upside down and backward. The whole capitalist mantra is that efficiency is the ultimate good. The RIAA is dead set against an efficient market. They are fighting against doing their job well. They deserve to die (as a company and business plan but not as people).
The patents in question for example may be third party ones I can't freely license even if I wanted to.
Third party patents are not affected by the GPL. It is not magical.
And Linus wants to keep his keys private so he can differentiate between code provided by a trusted party and an untrusted one.
Torvalds would be able to keep his private signing keys private even with the GPLv3. This FUD was debunked over a year ago. As long as he isn't trying to use his private key to control what GPLv3 software other people can run on their own hardware, he's fine.
It seems that you're arguing for the essentially elitist and undemocratic idea that a small group of experts should be responsible for deciding what improvements to make, and anyone that disagrees is either dumb or worse dishonest.
Are you sure you are in the right thread? It seems you are implying that the extremely open process of crafting and refining the lastest version of the GPL was somehow elitist. It was, in fact, one of the most open processes in the history of mankind. The FSF went on a world tour telling anybody and everybody who would listen about their ideas for the new license. The had an interactive version of the license online where anybody could post comments linked directly to any word or phrase in the license and everybody could see all the posted comments. They also encouraged people to email comments. All comments were read and considered by a bunch of committees that were composed of basically everyone who was at all interested in participating.
My calling people who disagree with the GPLv3 "dumb or dishonest" seems to be a figment of your imagination. I've always insisted that people are free to use whatever license they want for their own code. I haven't called them dumb or dishonest for making that choice.
Lots of big companies would work with GPL2 but can't accept GPL3.
SUN and IBM seem happy with the GPLv3. TiVo is not happy because they won't be able to use GPLv3 code without passing on the four freedoms and Microsoft seems horrified by the GPLv3.
The GPLv3 does a better job at enforcing freedom. People or corporations who are against freedom will be against the GPLv3. That's fine. But even if a lot of corporations (besides TiVo and Microsoft) were against the GPLv3 I don't think it would be wise to amend it just to cater to them. Most of our world now seems to cater to the large corporations: the mass media is corporate controlled; and even the Congress and the president (both parties) seem to be controlled by the corporations. Would it be such a sin to have one tiny little corner of the world that does not kowtow to the corporations?
Free software should not be neutered in order to cater to the whims of people who don't want software to be free.
And it's absurd for deveopers to leave in the "version X or later" clause when GPL4 or GPL5 may allow end users of the software to make demands on them which they may not legally be able to meet.
No license or contract can force someone to break the law. If you distrust the FSF so much then you shouldn't use the "any later version" clause in your licenses. That's fine. That's your choice. If you are part of a massive project involving many developers then license upgrades will be difficult, perhaps even impossible. I chose to trust the FSF so I kept the "any later version" clause when I licensed my software. That is my choice. I gave up some control in exchange for an easier upgrade path especially for other people who might want to use some of my code in a new project.
Now GPLv3 is trying to restrict people's use of HARDWARE as well.
The TiVO hardware is compatible with the GPLv3 according to Jim Barton, the CTO of TiVO who said in an
ACM article:
Each TiVo DVR includes a secure microprocessor to which are delegated all public-key-based operations. This secure microprocessor contains a unique public/private key pair for each DVR, so that there are no global secrets for DVR authentication.
Even existing TiVos could be made GPLv3 compliant if the TiVo corporation made the private keys for each TiVo available to the owner. It is all about the freedom. It's not a hardware issue at all.
samkass also said:
But you can't use your own code on TiVo's hardware.
I'm afraid I'm in the camp that thinks GPL has no business telling people what they can and can't do on their hardware.
The GPL is all about giving people control over their own hardware, not anyone else's. Nothing in the GPL gives me the right to crack into TiVo's servers and run my own code on them. The TiVo boxes are owned by the people who bought them from the TiVo corporation. It is the TiVo corporation that is in the business of telling people what they can and cannot run on their own hardware. They are always free to do this with proprietary or BSD (or even GPLv2) code. People who don't want their code used in this way are free to upgrade to the GPLv3 which would prevent TiVo from distributing their code without also passing on the four freedoms.
The big news in free software land is the patent peace deal between Microsoft and Novell and the SUSE vouchers Microsoft is planning to sell. The vouchers have no expiration date so if just one voucher is redeemed after SUSE releases any GPLv3'ed software then all recipients of that GPLv3'ed software are safe from any Microsoft patent attacks. It is expected that a lot of the packages that make up the GNU+Linux operating system will be switching over to the GPLv3 once it is finalized.
Unfortunately the heart of the GNU+Linux operating system, the Linux kernel does not have the "any later version" clause so the kernel code will not enjoy the patent protection that the GNU code will have. Linus has said that it will be almost impossible to upgrade the kernel license because so many people are involved.
Licenses are like code, they need to be upgraded over the course of time. The major difference is that licenses are upgraded over a longer time scale than code. Removing the "any later version" clause for the kernel was extremely short-sighted IMO. It was like burning code into ROM and providing no way for patches to be applied. This works fine for a while but sooner or later either due to a bug or due to changing external circumstances, you really, really want to change the code, but you cannot and you are screwed.
It's the same thing with a license. The GPLv2 is showing its age. There is the loophole TiVo found that lets them legally use GPLv2 code while denying end users one of the four basic freedoms. The patent landscape has changed significantly and Microsoft has been threatening to attack FOSS with its huge patent portfolio. I realize that Linus thinks the TiVo is a good thing, but he would really like to have better patent protection than what the GPLv2 provides. Finally, unlike the GPLv2, the GPLv3 will be compatible with the Apache license.
The "any later version" clause was put in to make it easier for large projects to do license upgrades when it is hard or impossible to get in touch with all of the diverse authors. It is somewhat ironic that the project that would have benefited the most from this feature, the Linux kernel, was licensed with that clause removed.
Please give an example of a library licensed under the GPLv2 (not the LGPLv2) with the "any later version" clause removed. There is probably a very small intersection between the people who would use the GPL (not the LGPL) for a library and the people who distrust the FSF so much that they would remove the "any later version" clause.
If you link with GPL libraries it is considered by many that your code has to be licensed under that license.
This is misleading at best. Many GPL'ed libraries, including GNU's own glibc, are licensed with the LGPL (lesser/library GPL). This license lets anyone link to the code.
What you say is true only if a library is licensed under the GPL (and not the LGPL).
A police officer notices someone doing something slightly suspicious, so he approaches the individual and asks some questions. Not fully sure a law is being broken, he does his homework. After finding out that a law was indeed broken, he swears out a warrant for his arrest.
I have to say, I don't see anything wrong with that.
Since the chief of police didn't know if the law was being broken, it is possible, perhaps likely that the "offender" didn't realize he was breaking the law either. Instead of swearing out a warrant for the man's arrest, the chief should have simply informed the man he was breaking the law and told him to move along.
If the police "just did their job" and wrote out a warrant for every unintentional infraction of the law, no matter how minor then every person in America would eventually get arrested.
Doubting that somebody is guilty simply because the victim knew somebody who committed the same type of crime sounds like unreasonable doubt to me.
Your statement is correct but you misrepresent the facts. Nina Reiser did not just casually know Sturgeon. She had a relationship with him and she broke it off because she wasn't in to the S&M that Sturgeon liked. Simply knowing a murder might be unreasonable doubt but recently breaking up with one is a whole other kettle of fish.
The RIAA has been breaking new ground with the legal branch of their customer service division. A large portion of the law is not in the laws that have been passed by legislatures, it is in previous decisions by the judicial system and is called case law.
Since the RIAA's new approach to customer service is, shall we say, innovative decisions in earlier cases can have a great effect on later cases. For example, in a previous RIAA story on Slashdot it was reported that when the RIAA draws a blank in discovery against a particular custo^H^H defendant, then they are liable for the defendants legal fees. This could be a serious blow to the RIAA's current shotgun approach.
Likewise, if this current ruling stands it could help establish limits on how far the RIAA can go poking their nose into other people's business. IMO, the RIAA (like SCO) has greatly abused the legal system to pursue their own selfish and greedy ends. It's great news that the legal system is responding and is putting in limits on how far the RIAA can go.
WHEREAS, George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney conspired
with others to defraud the United States of America by
intentionally misleading congress and the public regarding the
threat from Iraq in order to justify a war in violation of
Title 18 United States Code, Section 371; and
WHEREAS, George W. Bush has admitted to ordering the
national security agency to conduct electronic surveillance of
American civilians without seeking warrants from the foreign
intelligence surveillance court of review, duly constituted by
congress in 1978, in violation of Title 50 United States Code,
Section 1805; and
WHEREAS, George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney conspired to
commit the torture of prisoners in violation of Title 18 United
States Code, Chapter 113C, the United Nations Convention
Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment
or Punishment and the Geneva Conventions, which under Article
VI of the United States constitution are part of the "supreme
Law of the Land"; and
WHEREAS, George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney acted to
strip American citizens of their constitutional rights by
ordering indefinite detention without access to legal counsel,
without charge and without the opportunity to appear before a
civil judicial officer to challenge the detention, based solely
on the discretionary designation by the president of a United
States citizen as an "enemy combatant", all in subversion of
law;
[...]
You know, pretty much the usual stuff you would impeach someone for.
The chairman of the Democratic party in my county pulled a trick to prevent a motion to
initiate impeachment of President Bush
from even getting voted on. There was great outrage among local Democrats. We had a county Democratic convention today. It was early Saturday morning but I showed up. It was the first convention I've ever attended but I was pissed off that the will of the people had been subverted.
A new more progressive chair and vice-chair were voted in unanimously.
You can make a difference, especially by starting at the local level and working your way up.
It can't go the the Supreme Court until after the subpoenas are issued and the executive branch refuses to honor them. Then Congress can ask the Supreme Court to get involved. If the Court chooses not to intervene then the Executive Branch wins this battle and the people don't have to show up.
The Supremes could also take the case and side with the Executive Branch. The only way Congress wins is if the Supremes take the case and sides with Congress. If the Supreme Court decides to get involved and sides with Congress then this could spell the downfall of the Bush Regime. You might think that the Supremes would steer clear of it for exactly this reason. But on the other hand, this is about investigating possible political firings of federal prosecutors (perhaps we should call it fire-gate). If all the federal prosecutors are replaced with political hacks then the Supreme Court would suffer because the federal prosecutors have a lot of control over which cases the Supreme Court gets to see.
If this makes it to the Supreme Court, it will be very interesting to see what they decide to do.
I think all this talk about it being long and ugly is BS. It didn't take the Supreme Court very long to reach a decision in the Watergate case. I think the long and ugly story is being spread because of the point I make above that the Supreme Court may well decide in Congress's favor because it would be in its own best interest. Bush et al. don't want to testify and don't want the Supreme Court to get involved. I suggest you avoid air travel for a little while.;-)
IMO the lack of social skills will not be improved by having more meetings. And even if you are able to improve social skills it will only be at the expense of technical skills since it appears that for those with Asperger's the brain space used for social skills is currently being used for technical skills. The premise I disagree with is that people with Asperger's can be taught social skills. It would be like teaching a tall person to be short, or as I alluded to earlier, teaching a pig to sing.
Instead of trying to change the workers to adapt to your preconceived (and IMO erroneous) conception of how they should interact with others, I think it would be better for everyone (you included) if the work situation were adapted to best suit the workers.
Claiming that we should never meet seems defeatist to me. Meeting together and working on our social skills looks like a better choice to me. If we start out by recognizing we need to practice our social skills, we can improve.
I very much disagree with the premise behind these statements. You seem to be ignoring the very existence of Asperger's Syndrome.
From The Geek Syndrome:
Asperger's Syndrome is another term for high-functioning autism. Individuals with Aspergers (also known as "aspies") exhibit a different way of socialising. The main traits of Aspergers are obessive interests, extremely logical and literal thinking, visual/spatial thinking, difficulties with friendships and relationships.
Asperger's syndrome and autism are not a mental illness or disease. The brain is wired differently, and it is a neurological difference rather than an abnormality.
Advantages can be the ability to focus strongly on interests, such as computing, being an individual and not following the herd. Having unique thinking patterns that are unusual and creative.
Since people are already comfortable working together via email, if you add an extra requirement for face-to-face meetings you are adding an extra hurdle that may trip some folks up, especially if your intent is to improve their social skills. It would be like adding a math or programming requirement to the job of a salesperson in order to improve his or her math skills. You would lose a lot of good salespeople that way.
I am reminded of the Heinlein quote about teaching pigs to sing, it frustrates you and annoys the pig.
It is not sad that Asperger's is so prevalent in our community. But it is sad when its negative aspects are treated as if they were merely the result of lack of effort.
Your most recent post has several harsh, unfair mischaracterizations.
I do wonder why the FSF doesn't take the moral high-ground and let Linus be. If he doesn't want to be saved, why force him?
The FSF has consistently taken the high moral ground.
They have always said that Torvalds (and everyone one else) has a right to use any license they choose for the software they write. The FSF even helped Tivo develop the loophole that let Tivo adhere the the letter of the GPLv2 while violating its spirit.
The FSF has not tried to force Torvalds to change to the GPLv3. What I object to is the anti-GPLv3 FUD that Torvalds launched. For example, he completely mis-read the anti-DRM provisions of an earlier version of the GPLv3 and claimed that everyone would have have to give up their private signing keys. This led to the "OMG! Linus can't sign his kernels" furore. Torvalds later retracted this outlandish claim but refrained from undoing the damage he had caused.
Torvalds choose to very publicly criticize the GPLv3 without first carefully reading it or sharing his criticism with the FSF (who would have helped him corrected his errors). The FSF did not respond in kind. How can you possibly interpret these events as the FSF relinquishing the high moral ground?
The FSF wants to alter its license and definition of freedom, not the other way around.
It is true that the FSF wants to fix the GPL now that the Tivo exploit is in the wild, but it is not true that the FSF is changing their definition of freedom.
Their intent has been to make the GPL the least restrictive license possible that ensures that re-distributors are required to pass on the four freedoms. This has not changed.
Although I see the FSF point to OSS and Linus as 'heretics',...
This is over the top and unfair. The FSF has not called OSS or Torvalds 'heretics'. Your saying so falsely implies that the FSF is filled with evangelical, religious-like zeal. If you have even a shred of evidence to support your absurd implication, please provide it.
Isn't it arrogant of the FSF to force compliance outside the realm of software?
I disagree with your premise that the FSF is trying to force compliance outside the realm of software. [We stopped beating our wives years ago.] The anti-tivoization clauses of the GPLv3 prevent re-distributors from using a combination of hardware and software to thwart the intent of the GPL by not passing on the freedoms they enjoyed when they received the software.
As I have said many times elsewhere, even the Tivo is hardware compatible with the GPLv3. In an
ACM article, Jim Barton, the Tivo CTO says:
Each TiVo DVR includes a secure microprocessor to which are delegated all public-key-based operations. This secure microprocessor contains a unique public/private key pair for each DVR, so that there are no global secrets for DVR authentication.
Therefore, all Tivo need do to become GPLv3 compatible is to share the private key that belongs to each Tivo device with the owner of that device. No hardware changes would be required. Nor would this compromise their security model unless you insist that the Tivo owners are a security risk to their own machines (and no one else's).
How could anyone prevent the creation of a software license?
I would accomplish the task by spreading alarmist lies and misunderstandings about the license (many of which
you, AlXtreme, have repeated in your most recent post). Then I would get a group of prominent and influential members of the FOSS community to sign
a
position paper outlining the "Dangers and Problems" with the new license, concluding with:
You don't argue for why you believe Linus shares your misconceptions, I haven't seen anything from him that indicates that.
If by my "misconceptions" you mean my statement that FS != OSS, then you must be the only member of the FSF who slept though the entire debate over whether the Linux kernel devs should consider using the GPL-v3.
For example here is an article from
Business Week that states:
On one side is Richard Stallman and his Free Software Foundation. When Stallman says "free" he doesn't mean price, he means freedom. He believes all software should be freely available to be modified by the public. And for him, this is nothing short of a moral fight.
On the other is Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux. He and others in his open-source camp believe that freely sharing code simply produces the best software, but if other people want to hide their code, that's fine, too.
Torvalds has repeatedly stated that he is okay with the Tivo using his code. He says the code is available for the user/owners to see and they can contribute changes upstream and this is all that matters to him. He calls this "Open Source" which is different from "Free Software". Free Software forces people who redistribute code to also redistribute the four freedoms.
Here is
a page from the FSF which you claim to belong to.
In it, Richard Stallman says:
: Linus Torvalds objects, with an irrational kind of stubbornness, to one of our goals. Namely, preventing tivoisation. He wants people to be able to tivoise the products that you use, and thus take away your freedom.
This should not be surprising. Linus Torvalds never supported the Free Software movement. He sort of accidentally drifted into making a contribution to the Free Software community, but not because he ever supported our goals. And so he has actually said that he is against our aims of defending freedom for all users. What can you do?
Well, he doesn't have to use it if he doesn't want to.
Torvalds explains this by claiming he is for Open Source Software, not Free Software. That's fine. He has the right to support whatever kind of license suits his fancy. But my mind boggles to think that a member of the FSF since 2003 is totally oblivious to this well known difference of opinion.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that you interpret Theo's words to mean that dual licenses are XOR not AND means either you didn't bother to read the rest of his sentence or you are deliberately twisting his words around to mean the exact opposite of what he intended.
Just to be clear, when Theo says "under either license" here he means literally with just the text of one license or the other, which the part of the sentence you omitted makes clear. You are free to distribute the code under the terms of either license but you are not allowed to alter the license(s).
Finally, the correct interpretation of a dual license does not add extra restriction and thus is not in conflict with the GPL.
You have further confused the purpose and use of the dual license. You seem to assume (perhaps as a strawman argument) that if a user (of dual licensed code) can't delete one of the licenses then both must be enforced. Not true. The user of the code is free to select either branch of the license but they are not free to modify or delete the license(s).
I recently released some code under a dual BSD+GPL license. I had added a BSD licensed library to a GPL'ed project. I sure as hell didn't re-write the license on the BSD code. But I did add an independent interface to the library with some extra features. I gave this home-grown code the dual BSD+GPL license. I tend to work on GPL projects and if I release stand-alone code it is licensed under the GPL. I added a BSD license to my interface as a way of giving back to the BSD community. People are free to include my code in a BSD project. Something they wouldn't be able to do if it was GPL only.
If someone else wants to put my code into an all GPL project, they are free to do that as well (although this is probably unlikely). If yet another person got my code from the all-GPL project, they could take my dual licensed code and put it into a BSD project.
The QT situation is different. They don't have two different licenses attached to one piece of code, they have two copies of the code-base released under two different licenses. They say: which reinforces the point that the code-bases are different. In all of these cases the dual licenses tell you how you can use and distribute the code but none of them give you permission to change the license.
The question has never been about whether a dual license (GPL + BSD) allows you to distribute the code under the GPL. You can.
The question has always been whether a dual license allows you to remove one of the licenses. You can't.
The problem is similar to the problem with an anti-terrorism law that they recently tried to enact in our State. When all you require is (a) a threat of violence; and (b) motivation to change/disrupt policy; then you are criminalizing political protest. The problem arises when a person's political motivations make an action illegal that would otherwise be legal without the political motivation.
You then get the ridiculous situation where the same threat of violence at the same demonstration is perfectly legal for supporters of the President but is illegal for people who are against him.
From the Whitehouse link, right before the section you quoted, it says: FYI, the Secretaries of Treasury, State, and Defense are all part of the Executive branch, not the Judicial, hence the apt phrase "secret process outside the courts" which you objected to.
Your claim that the well defined legal term treason is identical to the secret determination of a group of three members of the Bush administration that I merely pose a risk of committing violence in order to change their insane policies in Iraq (which they could easily interpret as undermining their efforts there) is worthy of Kafka.
According to you, if I go to a large demonstration against the Bush Iraq policies and there is a significant threat that there may be violence there then I am a traitor to my country. Sheesh. There is a significant threat of violence just driving to the damned demonstration.
If someone intentionally runs you down with their car are you lucky if they run away when the cops arrive? (for the metaphorically impaired: I'm equating the cops arriving with the impending summary judgments that led the MAFIAA to drop their case). Wouldn't you try to sue them for you medical bills? How is that any different from her suing them for the legal bills they caused her to incur to defend herself against their bogus charges?
My calling people who disagree with the GPLv3 "dumb or dishonest" seems to be a figment of your imagination. I've always insisted that people are free to use whatever license they want for their own code. I haven't called them dumb or dishonest for making that choice. SUN and IBM seem happy with the GPLv3. TiVo is not happy because they won't be able to use GPLv3 code without passing on the four freedoms and Microsoft seems horrified by the GPLv3. The GPLv3 does a better job at enforcing freedom. People or corporations who are against freedom will be against the GPLv3. That's fine. But even if a lot of corporations (besides TiVo and Microsoft) were against the GPLv3 I don't think it would be wise to amend it just to cater to them. Most of our world now seems to cater to the large corporations: the mass media is corporate controlled; and even the Congress and the president (both parties) seem to be controlled by the corporations. Would it be such a sin to have one tiny little corner of the world that does not kowtow to the corporations? Free software should not be neutered in order to cater to the whims of people who don't want software to be free. No license or contract can force someone to break the law. If you distrust the FSF so much then you shouldn't use the "any later version" clause in your licenses. That's fine. That's your choice. If you are part of a massive project involving many developers then license upgrades will be difficult, perhaps even impossible. I chose to trust the FSF so I kept the "any later version" clause when I licensed my software. That is my choice. I gave up some control in exchange for an easier upgrade path especially for other people who might want to use some of my code in a new project.
samkass also said: The GPL is all about giving people control over their own hardware, not anyone else's. Nothing in the GPL gives me the right to crack into TiVo's servers and run my own code on them. The TiVo boxes are owned by the people who bought them from the TiVo corporation. It is the TiVo corporation that is in the business of telling people what they can and cannot run on their own hardware. They are always free to do this with proprietary or BSD (or even GPLv2) code. People who don't want their code used in this way are free to upgrade to the GPLv3 which would prevent TiVo from distributing their code without also passing on the four freedoms.
The big news in free software land is the patent peace deal between Microsoft and Novell and the SUSE vouchers Microsoft is planning to sell. The vouchers have no expiration date so if just one voucher is redeemed after SUSE releases any GPLv3'ed software then all recipients of that GPLv3'ed software are safe from any Microsoft patent attacks. It is expected that a lot of the packages that make up the GNU+Linux operating system will be switching over to the GPLv3 once it is finalized.
Unfortunately the heart of the GNU+Linux operating system, the Linux kernel does not have the "any later version" clause so the kernel code will not enjoy the patent protection that the GNU code will have. Linus has said that it will be almost impossible to upgrade the kernel license because so many people are involved.
Licenses are like code, they need to be upgraded over the course of time. The major difference is that licenses are upgraded over a longer time scale than code. Removing the "any later version" clause for the kernel was extremely short-sighted IMO. It was like burning code into ROM and providing no way for patches to be applied. This works fine for a while but sooner or later either due to a bug or due to changing external circumstances, you really, really want to change the code, but you cannot and you are screwed.
It's the same thing with a license. The GPLv2 is showing its age. There is the loophole TiVo found that lets them legally use GPLv2 code while denying end users one of the four basic freedoms. The patent landscape has changed significantly and Microsoft has been threatening to attack FOSS with its huge patent portfolio. I realize that Linus thinks the TiVo is a good thing, but he would really like to have better patent protection than what the GPLv2 provides. Finally, unlike the GPLv2, the GPLv3 will be compatible with the Apache license.
The "any later version" clause was put in to make it easier for large projects to do license upgrades when it is hard or impossible to get in touch with all of the diverse authors. It is somewhat ironic that the project that would have benefited the most from this feature, the Linux kernel, was licensed with that clause removed.
Please give an example of a library licensed under the GPLv2 (not the LGPLv2) with the "any later version" clause removed. There is probably a very small intersection between the people who would use the GPL (not the LGPL) for a library and the people who distrust the FSF so much that they would remove the "any later version" clause.
If the police "just did their job" and wrote out a warrant for every unintentional infraction of the law, no matter how minor then every person in America would eventually get arrested.
Your statement is correct but you misrepresent the facts. Nina Reiser did not just casually know Sturgeon. She had a relationship with him and she broke it off because she wasn't in to the S&M that Sturgeon liked. Simply knowing a murder might be unreasonable doubt but recently breaking up with one is a whole other kettle of fish.
The RIAA has been breaking new ground with the legal branch of their customer service division. A large portion of the law is not in the laws that have been passed by legislatures, it is in previous decisions by the judicial system and is called case law.
Since the RIAA's new approach to customer service is, shall we say, innovative decisions in earlier cases can have a great effect on later cases. For example, in a previous RIAA story on Slashdot it was reported that when the RIAA draws a blank in discovery against a particular custo^H^H defendant, then they are liable for the defendants legal fees. This could be a serious blow to the RIAA's current shotgun approach.
Likewise, if this current ruling stands it could help establish limits on how far the RIAA can go poking their nose into other people's business. IMO, the RIAA (like SCO) has greatly abused the legal system to pursue their own selfish and greedy ends. It's great news that the legal system is responding and is putting in limits on how far the RIAA can go.
The chairman of the Democratic party in my county pulled a trick to prevent a motion to initiate impeachment of President Bush from even getting voted on. There was great outrage among local Democrats. We had a county Democratic convention today. It was early Saturday morning but I showed up. It was the first convention I've ever attended but I was pissed off that the will of the people had been subverted.
A new more progressive chair and vice-chair were voted in unanimously. You can make a difference, especially by starting at the local level and working your way up.
If she turned around you would see the knife that Novell plunged into her back when they sold out to Microsoft.
It can't go the the Supreme Court until after the subpoenas are issued and the executive branch refuses to honor them. Then Congress can ask the Supreme Court to get involved. If the Court chooses not to intervene then the Executive Branch wins this battle and the people don't have to show up.
;-)
The Supremes could also take the case and side with the Executive Branch. The only way Congress wins is if the Supremes take the case and sides with Congress. If the Supreme Court decides to get involved and sides with Congress then this could spell the downfall of the Bush Regime. You might think that the Supremes would steer clear of it for exactly this reason. But on the other hand, this is about investigating possible political firings of federal prosecutors (perhaps we should call it fire-gate). If all the federal prosecutors are replaced with political hacks then the Supreme Court would suffer because the federal prosecutors have a lot of control over which cases the Supreme Court gets to see.
If this makes it to the Supreme Court, it will be very interesting to see what they decide to do.
I think all this talk about it being long and ugly is BS. It didn't take the Supreme Court very long to reach a decision in the Watergate case. I think the long and ugly story is being spread because of the point I make above that the Supreme Court may well decide in Congress's favor because it would be in its own best interest. Bush et al. don't want to testify and don't want the Supreme Court to get involved. I suggest you avoid air travel for a little while.
IMO the lack of social skills will not be improved by having more meetings. And even if you are able to improve social skills it will only be at the expense of technical skills since it appears that for those with Asperger's the brain space used for social skills is currently being used for technical skills. The premise I disagree with is that people with Asperger's can be taught social skills. It would be like teaching a tall person to be short, or as I alluded to earlier, teaching a pig to sing.
Instead of trying to change the workers to adapt to your preconceived (and IMO erroneous) conception of how they should interact with others, I think it would be better for everyone (you included) if the work situation were adapted to best suit the workers.
It is not sad that Asperger's is so prevalent in our community. But it is sad when its negative aspects are treated as if they were merely the result of lack of effort.
The FSF has consistently taken the high moral ground. They have always said that Torvalds (and everyone one else) has a right to use any license they choose for the software they write. The FSF even helped Tivo develop the loophole that let Tivo adhere the the letter of the GPLv2 while violating its spirit.
The FSF has not tried to force Torvalds to change to the GPLv3. What I object to is the anti-GPLv3 FUD that Torvalds launched. For example, he completely mis-read the anti-DRM provisions of an earlier version of the GPLv3 and claimed that everyone would have have to give up their private signing keys. This led to the "OMG! Linus can't sign his kernels" furore. Torvalds later retracted this outlandish claim but refrained from undoing the damage he had caused.
Torvalds choose to very publicly criticize the GPLv3 without first carefully reading it or sharing his criticism with the FSF (who would have helped him corrected his errors). The FSF did not respond in kind. How can you possibly interpret these events as the FSF relinquishing the high moral ground?
It is true that the FSF wants to fix the GPL now that the Tivo exploit is in the wild, but it is not true that the FSF is changing their definition of freedom. Their intent has been to make the GPL the least restrictive license possible that ensures that re-distributors are required to pass on the four freedoms. This has not changed.
This is over the top and unfair. The FSF has not called OSS or Torvalds 'heretics'. Your saying so falsely implies that the FSF is filled with evangelical, religious-like zeal. If you have even a shred of evidence to support your absurd implication, please provide it.
I disagree with your premise that the FSF is trying to force compliance outside the realm of software. [We stopped beating our wives years ago.] The anti-tivoization clauses of the GPLv3 prevent re-distributors from using a combination of hardware and software to thwart the intent of the GPL by not passing on the freedoms they enjoyed when they received the software.
As I have said many times elsewhere, even the Tivo is hardware compatible with the GPLv3. In an ACM article, Jim Barton, the Tivo CTO says:
Therefore, all Tivo need do to become GPLv3 compatible is to share the private key that belongs to each Tivo device with the owner of that device. No hardware changes would be required. Nor would this compromise their security model unless you insist that the Tivo owners are a security risk to their own machines (and no one else's).
I would accomplish the task by spreading alarmist lies and misunderstandings about the license (many of which you, AlXtreme, have repeated in your most recent post). Then I would get a group of prominent and influential members of the FOSS community to sign a position paper outlining the "Dangers and Problems" with the new license, concluding with:
For example here is an article from Business Week that states: Torvalds has repeatedly stated that he is okay with the Tivo using his code. He says the code is available for the user/owners to see and they can contribute changes upstream and this is all that matters to him. He calls this "Open Source" which is different from "Free Software". Free Software forces people who redistribute code to also redistribute the four freedoms.
Here is a page from the FSF which you claim to belong to. In it, Richard Stallman says: Torvalds explains this by claiming he is for Open Source Software, not Free Software. That's fine. He has the right to support whatever kind of license suits his fancy. But my mind boggles to think that a member of the FSF since 2003 is totally oblivious to this well known difference of opinion.