Most interesting is that you attempt to separate religion and faith. I do not subscribe to that tactic.
I assure you it's not a "tactic"; I've never been a fan of organized religion, but it has been only recently where my investigation leads me to believe that much of religion today is man-made rituals. That is religion. Choosing to believe in God on a personal level, that is faith.
Why Christianity and not Buddhism, Hindu, etc
You assume I subscribe to Christianity because I talk about Jesus. I'm actually a Jew who has found out that this Jesus guy is actually the messiah my ancestor's religion (Judaism) has pointed to since the beginning.
To answer your question, Christianity is not "the religion" of God. Again, I don't believe God has a "religion", but rather, a group of people who follow him. I really don't think God cares whose set of rituals is best, or who worships on which day; I think God cares more about who follows him. Religion is built around the idea of God, but it is largely a man-made attempt to get closer to God.
When God came to Abraham -- as Muslims, Christians, and Jews believe -- did he say, "Abraham, go to church on Sunday and worship me, I am your God </loud thundering voice>? No, he didn't. Despite the 3 big religions being Abrahamic faiths, Abraham did not start any new religion. Furthermore, some Christians might crap their pants to know that Jesus also didn't start a new religion, in fact, he followed the previous faith in God perfectly, following the law and fulfilling the prophets that spoke of him. It wasn't until several years after Christ's death that his followers were called "Christians", and even then, they were still meeting in synagogues and very largely following Mosaic law. Christianity as we know it today didn't become a new religion until about the 3rd century CE, when a Roman emperor by the name of Constantine decided it would be a good way to unite all the tribes under his rule, thereby starting the Roman Catholic Church.
A better question might be, "How do you know your faith in God is in the right God?"
This is a question I've been asked often. I'll tell you how I came to my conclusion that the God of Abraham is God. I've done much research on world religions. You'd be surprised to find out that a vast majority of religions have their roots in the Babylonian Mystery Religion. I won't go into details for lack of time, but I will point you to my blog post that covers some of the Babylonian Mystery Religion. The false godhood of Nimrod, Ishtar, and Tammuz was spread over much of the known world: Egypt adopted Ishtar as Isis, the Moabites adopted her as Astarte, the Zidonians and some Israelits as Ashtoreth, the Greeks as Aphrodite, the Babylonians as Ishtar, the Anglo-Saxons as Eostre, the Latin speaking peoples as Juno, the Assyrians as Ashtar, to name a few examples. Basically, this religion and its variants are responsible for many of the religions spawned throughout history. Even today, we have remnants of this religion in our festivals: our "Easter" is named after the Anglo-Saxon Eostre, "Lent" was originally a a Tammuz celebration.
So how does this pertain to my belief in God? Throughout the history of mankind, going back about 4000 years, there has been a struggle between the people who worship the God of Abraham and the people (often much of the known world) who followed the Babylonian myths. It is obvious to me that despite the vast majority of the known world believing in the Babylonian Mystery religion, my God always comes out on top: he blessed Abraham's descendants, promising that Abraham's descendants would be a Godly people, different from the rest of the world, and that from him would come many nations. Guess what? It happened! Abraham is the father of all Arab nations, the geneological progenitor of both Arabs and Jews. And d
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Good points all around. I'll end my side of this discussion by saying that I don't think our views are that far apart; I'm with you guys on the sharing information idea, I just think that it may not be in the best interest of everyone, everywhere to make all software open source. But least you and I can talk about these things civily, which is more than can be said for a majority of this peanut gallery.
Interesting. I had read somewhere on the web that they issued a statement saying the supposed curse on the black race was over. Come to think of that, that isn't really a retraction...
Mormons are definitely in darkness. Categorically speaking, they're a cult.
That in mind, chief cult leaders #1 and #2, Joseph Smith and Brigham Young respectively, both taught that polygamy was A-OK. They also taught rejection of modern Christianity, church pastors as workers of Satan. Further, they taught that God had cursed the Negroid race, causing them to be black.
It wasn't until the late 70's, I believe, when the Mormon cult retracted their views on blacks, and it wasn't until the very recent massive PR campaign that they try to be acceptable to both the politically correct world and the modern Christian church (even trying to be seen as Yet Another Protestant Denomination).
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Interesting conversation, Per. I think our fundamental differences lie in the purpose of corporation: I say they exist to make money, you say otherwise. You mention that companies started by super-rich people make money incidentally, or justify decisions based on ego, prestige, and so on. All those may be true, but don't address my point: the commercial company still exists for the purpose of making money, not for the betterment of mankind, noble as that may be. Even though Steve Jobs and Bill Gates may have enough money to last several lifetimes, they still compete like hell, putting new & expensive products on the market, to bring in more money and make themselves more powerful. It is the essence of business: do some trade, end up with more money than you started with.
Frankly, I don't care much whether open source software becomes better than closed source. It doesn't really concern me. What concerns me is that I can make a living writing software so I can provide for my beautiful wife and cool 5 year old son. As long as I can do that, this whole "make mankind better through knowledge sharing" is a nice, altruistic theory, but I don't go to work every day for altruism, I go to work to make money and provide for my family.
Like I said, the only thing I don't like about this movement is how people get so religious about it. There are more important things to discuss and concern ourselves with than software licenses.
I don't believe in religion. Religion is about man-made rituals and practices. That's all dead to me.
I do believe that there was and is an author to the universe, and that author is who we call God.
Like developers creating software, God authored the universe, giving beings in his universe a freewill choice to follow or rebel. It makes sense that those who rebel think of God as a foolish belief, and those that follow know it to be right.
I believe that God has provided a way to get back to him: Christ, a messiah who did so others can live free of sin, free of the addictions that are everywhere in the rebellious world.
Christ said an interesting thing: you can tell what is right and what is wrong by looking at what the world believes. It is easy to rebel against God and be worldly, sinful, addicted to your sinful pleasures. The world will follow this way because it is the easy road. That is the wrong way: the one the world takes. The right way is just the opposite: it is a difficult road to follow, and not many truely follow it.
I encourage you and your friend to look deeper than the superficial veil that religion is today. It's true that everyone claims to be right, yet very few are. I choose to believe that the world and its sinful nature is wrong in its belief that God is dead. What benefit is there to denying God? You drown in your own sin, whether that be drinking or drug addictions, pornography, whatever your vice might be. I've struggled with my own, and have overcome because I believe God helped me overcome. That is a single benefit of God in my life: overcoming unhealthy addictions (sins) that I couldn't overcome on my own.
And with God, I've got a new love for my family and the family I'm now the father of. Jesus made an interesting point: when the religious teachers of his time came to him asking what is the greatest law in all Scripture, he said to love others and love God. With that in mind, it's obvious to see modern religion has failed miserably: too many in "the church" are bigotted, hate filled, and prejudiced. That's not God's way. I believe Jesus when he said that God's way is about love. You can't go wrong with love, the world needs more of it. And hey, if I can't go wrong with love, then I don't care if I'm right or wrong, because I know I'm at least on the right path.
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I don't dispute it. The interesting question is: Could your company benefit hunanity more by going the Free Software route, while still remaining profitable? I don't know the answer, but don't rule it out.
I agree, and I personally have not ruled it out. If I was all-powerful emperor of the company, I would seriously consider open sourcing it. But since I neither own the company nor spend the money on development, I cannot make such a decision. Making a decision like this would involve a risk, obviously, and companies generally don't like to take risks, especially if the perceived benefits are low.
You realize what you're saying here? The "bottom line" trumps all other considerations.
Exactly. Do you know many commercial companies that put money below #1 priority? I doubt it! Companies exist to make money, a critical point that often gets missed in these kinds of discussions.
Now it's certainly not my place to ask you to jeoparize your business or make major financial sacrifices. My point is that there is a lot of fear that "they" will "steal our ideas", but I suspect a lot of this fear is just that.
Yes, I agree with you here. Our codebase is so large that another company would be simply better off writing their own solution than retrofitting our code to their project; yet managers are concerned with protecting code at all costs. In my utterly humble opinion, it is unfounded fear on the part of managers, but OTOH, there is still risk involved, so perhaps some of that fear is valid.
But it is also perfectly ok for me to hope and work towarsd your business becoming obsolete.
Ouch! You want my business to become obsolete because I don't give away my code? I hope you meant 'business model' rather than business; cursing my company for not being open source does nothing to improve the OSS movement's image of fanatical zealotry. For now, I'll assume you meant "closed source business model", and if you're working towards destroying such models, there are bigger fish to fry, for instance, a big Redmond-based competitor of ours.
I think this is why Paul downplayed circumcision; not that it was bad, but that all the man-made, religious baggage that accompanied it (and many other Torah laws) created an unnecessary obstacle for Gentile believers.
Well said, I've been making this point to many gentile believers (I'm a Jewish believer myself): Paul came very strongly against Oral Law, what became the Talmud, not necessarily the Biblical Law, which Paul himself grew up in and followed (we read of his circumcising Timothy, his taking a Nazarite vow, and so on).
Hey, if you have some free time, you might enjoy my blog, I touch on these subjects often. See my.sig below. God bless!
The wise man I mentioned, the originator of this quote, actually already answered your question: have a look.
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Oh, don't get me wrong, other licenses are allowed, however, they are all measured against the GPL. "GPL-incompatible" is an RMS-created term, for example.
By doing this, anything not GPL, like the GPL, derived from the GPL, is labeled with the negative connotation as being "GPL incompatible". It's as if I said, here are my list of religions. Some of these are alright: Judaism, Islam, Zorostrianism, but they aren't "Christian-compatible", so you should shy away from these. See what I mean? There's an ulterior motive at work, I think, behind the GPL push: everything is measured agains the GPL, only to raise it up over the others. With RMS's rather megalomaniac attitude, it wouldn't surprise me if this is largely an ego boost for him.
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Per, I guess we come from very different worlds. My company writes closed source software that saves people & companies money over equivalent Microsoft solutions. I see that as benefiting humanity.
Sure, open sourcing our product would benefit humanity's knowledge bank, in theory, but it could also hurt us as competitors (including Microsoft) would have complete access to our algorithms, trade secrets, and other proprietary software intricacies. If that can hurt our company, I can't convince my boss to give away that which we've invested several years and hundreds of thousands of dollars into. Do you see where I'm taking this? If going open source can negatively affect our bottom line, then the whole "help the world by sharing your code" line is totally irrelevant to us. If giving our code away means losing dollars, our company may no longer exist, and therefore neither the "helping world by saving money" nor the "helping world by sharing information" lines are applicable.
I just wish people wouldn't get so religious about the GPL, Linux, and free software in general. Free software is a good idea, and has a place in the world: it introduces new ideas fused from a wide variety of developers, competition for commercial software, and a software model that isn't affected by money, among other things. That said, I strongly believe going the free software route is not the only way to develop software, nor should it be: commercial software, including closed source software, has a place.
I respectfully disagree. The idea of a messiah was nothing new in Judaism. Read any of the gospels, you'll see many men asking Jesus, even the apostles, whether he was the messiah, the one who would restore the kingdom to Israel (since, at that time, Israel was comprised only of the Jews [Judah's, Benjamin's, & Levi's descendants], whereas the rest of Israel was taken into captivity, lost to this day).
Unfortunately for many Jews at that time, they were expecting a political messiah, rather than a spiritual one. While the NT foretells of Jesus' return as a political king, the Jews are still looking for him to this day.
Case in point, "Christianity" did not exist in Jesus' time. Jesus was a Jew, a descendant of Judah, who taught in the synagogues and in the Temple in Jerusalem, followed the Law perfectly (and fulfilled it, Mat. 5:17), and fulfilled the prophets with his coming.
In all points, Jesus is the capital of Judaism; He followed the Law perfectly and fulfilled both the Torah and the prophets; everything in Judaism points to Him.
The idea of "Christianity" didn't come until later, when the Romans adopted it and didn't want to associate with "those dispicable Jews", so they threw off pretty much all the Old Covenant and created their own religion based off the writings of the New Covenant. As a result, today we see many false teachings, such as replacement theology, that teach God is done with the Jews, when in fact, all God is concerned about is a people that follow Him, Israel. (see my blog in my sig below, I recently touched on this)
Constantine definitely had ulterior motives: he wanted to unite the vast kingdoms under Rome. You could conquer a people, but if they didn't merge into your culture, they would eventually revolt. A great way unite various peoples & cultures, as he discovered, was to convert everybody to the same religion. He is the true founder of the Catholic Church today, sadly, and his actions were certainly not one an honest Christian would be proud of.
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Yes, corporations have an obligation to not hurt humanity. Surely you're not arguing closed source software hurts humanity?
So the FSF recognizes licenses outside the GPL, yep. But RMS et al have largely convinced the majority of OSS developers that GPL-incompatibility makes a license evil. Take Sun's recent license governing Solaris, for instance, and that flak it's taken in peanut galleries like this one.
RMS rejects the term "open source", as well as the term "Linux" -- does that make him against either? No, rather, he'd rather to have his name go alongside these things, probably due to his being a megalomaniac, e.g. GNU/Linux. It's rather pointless in this particular debate, however, since we are talking ethics and morality, not naming conventions.
The progenitor of this thread was largely correct when he likened RMS to a religious fundamentalist: RMS has become your messiah, the GPL is your Scripture, and the FSF is your church. But hey, everyone's got to have faith in something, for some it's God, for others it's a software license.
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Morality, I would argue, is about doing the right thing, not about doing more than required. If I was required to work 8 hours a day, then work 10, getting paid nothing extra, I am not on a higher level of morality than you.
A source of the problem lies in RMS's view (and apparently your's too) that corporations are obligated to improve humanity. The reality isn't such a cheerie rainbow, I'm afriad: corporations exist to make money.
By condemning others licenses, and smearing anything "GPL-incompatible", RMS is very much pushing his ideas on everyone, as is obvious from this very forum we speak in; if it's not GPL-compatible, then it's not open source. That's the agenda you get on Slashdot.
There are certainly licenses that may increase the public good more than others, however, that doesn't concern corporations, and in fact, can (for certain companies) have a detrimental effect on the underlying reason for a corporation's very existence!
And I personally believe the spiritual world exists. Why be so mocking of spirituality as to make an analogy with Santa Clause? That analogy is purposefully divisive and belittling, not to mention tired.
A man once said, "To an unbeliever, the ways of God are foolishness."
I agree on almost all what you say there. Paul's letters indicate there was a lot of debate about whether to keep the Law, including circumcision and biblical festivals. That validates my point, in that Christianity wasn't a "new religion" to begin with, and there was confusion among non-Jewish believers about whether to continue in the ways of the religion they were seemingly part of.
You're right on the transfusing among pagan religions, as well as the Sunday idea; there were many others from 135-300 CE that pushed the anti-Jewish ideas and "new religion" ideas; I mentioned Constantine because he was the one who championed the ideas and brought them to fruition.
Actually, religions tend to be self-evolving too, both across religions and within itself. There are lots of man-made ideas in modern religion, and many of them are wrong.
Take Christianity, for instance. It started off as a sect of Judaism, and remained largely so until a Roman Emperor, Constantine, made it the official religion of Rome, transfusing it with practices for the surrounding pagan religions (e.g. Sunday worship named after Constantine's former sun-worshipping ways, the Easter/Ishtar festivals, Lent/Tammuz festivals, even Christmas was borrowed from Babylonian myths).
The difference between science and religion is one is dealing largely with the concrete, physical world, another with the spirtual world. I don't necessarily think the two ideas are exclusive; they can by all means co-exist.
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For starters, sharing, co-operation, and working for the common good is not always moral, e.g. sharing copyrighted music, co-operating with criminals, or working for your own version of the common good (which doesn't apply to everyone everywhere); those things have to be measured against some higher standard.
Finally, not everyone has choice in the matter. A vast majority of developers in this world, not RMS's, write code for corporations, and a vast majority of those corporations write closed-source software. A corporation is at no obligation to provide the source to software it's developed. Furthermore, if time and money was invested by the corporation into the development of the software, the corporation may have moral & ethical obligations to its employees and shareholds, therefore they must protect trade secrets and proprietary algorithms found in the said code.
It's not as black-and-white as RMS would have us all believe. Rather, there are equal, if not greater, moral questions on the reverse side: is it ethical forcing everyong to conform to a single license? Is it ethical condemning others who choose not to conform to the said license?
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If his ethics and morality are based around software, let him, it's his license and his own invention of morality. But when he pushes that morality on others -- for instance, his recent stating how anyone who uses non-GPL'd software is, ahem, immoral -- then we have a problem.
If he's under the GPL, let him judge himself, not others, according to his own idea of what is moral.
Now when we get sued by the RIAA/MPAA, we can point them to this Slashdot thread and they will no doubt drop all of their lawsuits because Joi Ito has a larger fan base thanks to BT.
Hitler's hatred of the Jews wasn't based on his religion. Hitler was largely an occultist.
His hatred on the Jews was based on his secular, humanistic ideas of a powerful, elite race of humans, one that was stronger, more fit that other races (survival of the fittest). To Hitler's misfortune, either the Aryans are not the fittest, or they are not fit enough to destroy all the other races.
Windows devs like myself never use 'managed code' to differentiate.NET and Java. In fact, we consider Java to be managed code also because the JVM is managing the security, memory allocations and so on. We say 'managed' only to differentiate between native code and code managed by a runtime. It's not a consiparcy by an evil corporation, but whatever.
In the Windows world, it's a commonly used term for meaning any code that is controlled by a runtime, in particular, the.NET CLR (common language runtime).
Since we're talking about Windows and.NET, I used the appropriate term.
Slashdot Mirror
Most interesting is that you attempt to separate religion and faith. I do not subscribe to that tactic.
I assure you it's not a "tactic"; I've never been a fan of organized religion, but it has been only recently where my investigation leads me to believe that much of religion today is man-made rituals. That is religion. Choosing to believe in God on a personal level, that is faith.
Why Christianity and not Buddhism, Hindu, etc
You assume I subscribe to Christianity because I talk about Jesus. I'm actually a Jew who has found out that this Jesus guy is actually the messiah my ancestor's religion (Judaism) has pointed to since the beginning.
To answer your question, Christianity is not "the religion" of God. Again, I don't believe God has a "religion", but rather, a group of people who follow him. I really don't think God cares whose set of rituals is best, or who worships on which day; I think God cares more about who follows him. Religion is built around the idea of God, but it is largely a man-made attempt to get closer to God.
When God came to Abraham -- as Muslims, Christians, and Jews believe -- did he say, "Abraham, go to church on Sunday and worship me, I am your God </loud thundering voice>? No, he didn't. Despite the 3 big religions being Abrahamic faiths, Abraham did not start any new religion. Furthermore, some Christians might crap their pants to know that Jesus also didn't start a new religion, in fact, he followed the previous faith in God perfectly, following the law and fulfilling the prophets that spoke of him. It wasn't until several years after Christ's death that his followers were called "Christians", and even then, they were still meeting in synagogues and very largely following Mosaic law. Christianity as we know it today didn't become a new religion until about the 3rd century CE, when a Roman emperor by the name of Constantine decided it would be a good way to unite all the tribes under his rule, thereby starting the Roman Catholic Church.
A better question might be, "How do you know your faith in God is in the right God?"
This is a question I've been asked often. I'll tell you how I came to my conclusion that the God of Abraham is God. I've done much research on world religions. You'd be surprised to find out that a vast majority of religions have their roots in the Babylonian Mystery Religion. I won't go into details for lack of time, but I will point you to my blog post that covers some of the Babylonian Mystery Religion. The false godhood of Nimrod, Ishtar, and Tammuz was spread over much of the known world: Egypt adopted Ishtar as Isis, the Moabites adopted her as Astarte, the Zidonians and some Israelits as Ashtoreth, the Greeks as Aphrodite, the Babylonians as Ishtar, the Anglo-Saxons as Eostre, the Latin speaking peoples as Juno, the Assyrians as Ashtar, to name a few examples. Basically, this religion and its variants are responsible for many of the religions spawned throughout history. Even today, we have remnants of this religion in our festivals: our "Easter" is named after the Anglo-Saxon Eostre, "Lent" was originally a a Tammuz celebration.
So how does this pertain to my belief in God? Throughout the history of mankind, going back about 4000 years, there has been a struggle between the people who worship the God of Abraham and the people (often much of the known world) who followed the Babylonian myths. It is obvious to me that despite the vast majority of the known world believing in the Babylonian Mystery religion, my God always comes out on top: he blessed Abraham's descendants, promising that Abraham's descendants would be a Godly people, different from the rest of the world, and that from him would come many nations. Guess what? It happened! Abraham is the father of all Arab nations, the geneological progenitor of both Arabs and Jews. And d
Good points all around. I'll end my side of this discussion by saying that I don't think our views are that far apart; I'm with you guys on the sharing information idea, I just think that it may not be in the best interest of everyone, everywhere to make all software open source. But least you and I can talk about these things civily, which is more than can be said for a majority of this peanut gallery.
Interesting. I had read somewhere on the web that they issued a statement saying the supposed curse on the black race was over. Come to think of that, that isn't really a retraction...
Mormons are definitely in darkness. Categorically speaking, they're a cult.
GP poster was a joke.
That in mind, chief cult leaders #1 and #2, Joseph Smith and Brigham Young respectively, both taught that polygamy was A-OK. They also taught rejection of modern Christianity, church pastors as workers of Satan. Further, they taught that God had cursed the Negroid race, causing them to be black.
It wasn't until the late 70's, I believe, when the Mormon cult retracted their views on blacks, and it wasn't until the very recent massive PR campaign that they try to be acceptable to both the politically correct world and the modern Christian church (even trying to be seen as Yet Another Protestant Denomination).
Interesting conversation, Per. I think our fundamental differences lie in the purpose of corporation: I say they exist to make money, you say otherwise. You mention that companies started by super-rich people make money incidentally, or justify decisions based on ego, prestige, and so on. All those may be true, but don't address my point: the commercial company still exists for the purpose of making money, not for the betterment of mankind, noble as that may be. Even though Steve Jobs and Bill Gates may have enough money to last several lifetimes, they still compete like hell, putting new & expensive products on the market, to bring in more money and make themselves more powerful. It is the essence of business: do some trade, end up with more money than you started with.
Frankly, I don't care much whether open source software becomes better than closed source. It doesn't really concern me. What concerns me is that I can make a living writing software so I can provide for my beautiful wife and cool 5 year old son. As long as I can do that, this whole "make mankind better through knowledge sharing" is a nice, altruistic theory, but I don't go to work every day for altruism, I go to work to make money and provide for my family.
Like I said, the only thing I don't like about this movement is how people get so religious about it. There are more important things to discuss and concern ourselves with than software licenses.
I don't believe in religion. Religion is about man-made rituals and practices. That's all dead to me.
I do believe that there was and is an author to the universe, and that author is who we call God.
Like developers creating software, God authored the universe, giving beings in his universe a freewill choice to follow or rebel. It makes sense that those who rebel think of God as a foolish belief, and those that follow know it to be right.
I believe that God has provided a way to get back to him: Christ, a messiah who did so others can live free of sin, free of the addictions that are everywhere in the rebellious world.
Christ said an interesting thing: you can tell what is right and what is wrong by looking at what the world believes. It is easy to rebel against God and be worldly, sinful, addicted to your sinful pleasures. The world will follow this way because it is the easy road. That is the wrong way: the one the world takes. The right way is just the opposite: it is a difficult road to follow, and not many truely follow it.
I encourage you and your friend to look deeper than the superficial veil that religion is today. It's true that everyone claims to be right, yet very few are. I choose to believe that the world and its sinful nature is wrong in its belief that God is dead. What benefit is there to denying God? You drown in your own sin, whether that be drinking or drug addictions, pornography, whatever your vice might be. I've struggled with my own, and have overcome because I believe God helped me overcome. That is a single benefit of God in my life: overcoming unhealthy addictions (sins) that I couldn't overcome on my own.
And with God, I've got a new love for my family and the family I'm now the father of. Jesus made an interesting point: when the religious teachers of his time came to him asking what is the greatest law in all Scripture, he said to love others and love God. With that in mind, it's obvious to see modern religion has failed miserably: too many in "the church" are bigotted, hate filled, and prejudiced. That's not God's way. I believe Jesus when he said that God's way is about love. You can't go wrong with love, the world needs more of it. And hey, if I can't go wrong with love, then I don't care if I'm right or wrong, because I know I'm at least on the right path.
I don't dispute it. The interesting question is: Could your company benefit hunanity more by going the Free Software route, while still remaining profitable? I don't know the answer, but don't rule it out.
I agree, and I personally have not ruled it out. If I was all-powerful emperor of the company, I would seriously consider open sourcing it. But since I neither own the company nor spend the money on development, I cannot make such a decision. Making a decision like this would involve a risk, obviously, and companies generally don't like to take risks, especially if the perceived benefits are low.
You realize what you're saying here? The "bottom line" trumps all other considerations.
Exactly. Do you know many commercial companies that put money below #1 priority? I doubt it! Companies exist to make money, a critical point that often gets missed in these kinds of discussions.
Now it's certainly not my place to ask you to jeoparize your business or make major financial sacrifices. My point is that there is a lot of fear that "they" will "steal our ideas", but I suspect a lot of this fear is just that.
Yes, I agree with you here. Our codebase is so large that another company would be simply better off writing their own solution than retrofitting our code to their project; yet managers are concerned with protecting code at all costs. In my utterly humble opinion, it is unfounded fear on the part of managers, but OTOH, there is still risk involved, so perhaps some of that fear is valid.
But it is also perfectly ok for me to hope and work towarsd your business becoming obsolete.
Ouch! You want my business to become obsolete because I don't give away my code? I hope you meant 'business model' rather than business; cursing my company for not being open source does nothing to improve the OSS movement's image of fanatical zealotry. For now, I'll assume you meant "closed source business model", and if you're working towards destroying such models, there are bigger fish to fry, for instance, a big Redmond-based competitor of ours.
I think this is why Paul downplayed circumcision; not that it was bad, but that all the man-made, religious baggage that accompanied it (and many other Torah laws) created an unnecessary obstacle for Gentile believers.
.sig below. God bless!
Well said, I've been making this point to many gentile believers (I'm a Jewish believer myself): Paul came very strongly against Oral Law, what became the Talmud, not necessarily the Biblical Law, which Paul himself grew up in and followed (we read of his circumcising Timothy, his taking a Nazarite vow, and so on).
Hey, if you have some free time, you might enjoy my blog, I touch on these subjects often. See my
The wise man I mentioned, the originator of this quote, actually already answered your question: have a look.
Oh, don't get me wrong, other licenses are allowed, however, they are all measured against the GPL. "GPL-incompatible" is an RMS-created term, for example.
By doing this, anything not GPL, like the GPL, derived from the GPL, is labeled with the negative connotation as being "GPL incompatible". It's as if I said, here are my list of religions. Some of these are alright: Judaism, Islam, Zorostrianism, but they aren't "Christian-compatible", so you should shy away from these. See what I mean? There's an ulterior motive at work, I think, behind the GPL push: everything is measured agains the GPL, only to raise it up over the others. With RMS's rather megalomaniac attitude, it wouldn't surprise me if this is largely an ego boost for him.
Per, I guess we come from very different worlds. My company writes closed source software that saves people & companies money over equivalent Microsoft solutions. I see that as benefiting humanity.
Sure, open sourcing our product would benefit humanity's knowledge bank, in theory, but it could also hurt us as competitors (including Microsoft) would have complete access to our algorithms, trade secrets, and other proprietary software intricacies. If that can hurt our company, I can't convince my boss to give away that which we've invested several years and hundreds of thousands of dollars into. Do you see where I'm taking this? If going open source can negatively affect our bottom line, then the whole "help the world by sharing your code" line is totally irrelevant to us. If giving our code away means losing dollars, our company may no longer exist, and therefore neither the "helping world by saving money" nor the "helping world by sharing information" lines are applicable.
I just wish people wouldn't get so religious about the GPL, Linux, and free software in general. Free software is a good idea, and has a place in the world: it introduces new ideas fused from a wide variety of developers, competition for commercial software, and a software model that isn't affected by money, among other things. That said, I strongly believe going the free software route is not the only way to develop software, nor should it be: commercial software, including closed source software, has a place.
I respectfully disagree. The idea of a messiah was nothing new in Judaism. Read any of the gospels, you'll see many men asking Jesus, even the apostles, whether he was the messiah, the one who would restore the kingdom to Israel (since, at that time, Israel was comprised only of the Jews [Judah's, Benjamin's, & Levi's descendants], whereas the rest of Israel was taken into captivity, lost to this day).
Unfortunately for many Jews at that time, they were expecting a political messiah, rather than a spiritual one. While the NT foretells of Jesus' return as a political king, the Jews are still looking for him to this day.
Case in point, "Christianity" did not exist in Jesus' time. Jesus was a Jew, a descendant of Judah, who taught in the synagogues and in the Temple in Jerusalem, followed the Law perfectly (and fulfilled it, Mat. 5:17), and fulfilled the prophets with his coming.
In all points, Jesus is the capital of Judaism; He followed the Law perfectly and fulfilled both the Torah and the prophets; everything in Judaism points to Him.
The idea of "Christianity" didn't come until later, when the Romans adopted it and didn't want to associate with "those dispicable Jews", so they threw off pretty much all the Old Covenant and created their own religion based off the writings of the New Covenant. As a result, today we see many false teachings, such as replacement theology, that teach God is done with the Jews, when in fact, all God is concerned about is a people that follow Him, Israel. (see my blog in my sig below, I recently touched on this)
Constantine definitely had ulterior motives: he wanted to unite the vast kingdoms under Rome. You could conquer a people, but if they didn't merge into your culture, they would eventually revolt. A great way unite various peoples & cultures, as he discovered, was to convert everybody to the same religion. He is the true founder of the Catholic Church today, sadly, and his actions were certainly not one an honest Christian would be proud of.
Yes, corporations have an obligation to not hurt humanity. Surely you're not arguing closed source software hurts humanity?
So the FSF recognizes licenses outside the GPL, yep. But RMS et al have largely convinced the majority of OSS developers that GPL-incompatibility makes a license evil. Take Sun's recent license governing Solaris, for instance, and that flak it's taken in peanut galleries like this one.
RMS rejects the term "open source", as well as the term "Linux" -- does that make him against either? No, rather, he'd rather to have his name go alongside these things, probably due to his being a megalomaniac, e.g. GNU/Linux. It's rather pointless in this particular debate, however, since we are talking ethics and morality, not naming conventions.
The progenitor of this thread was largely correct when he likened RMS to a religious fundamentalist: RMS has become your messiah, the GPL is your Scripture, and the FSF is your church. But hey, everyone's got to have faith in something, for some it's God, for others it's a software license.
Interesting idea.
Morality, I would argue, is about doing the right thing, not about doing more than required. If I was required to work 8 hours a day, then work 10, getting paid nothing extra, I am not on a higher level of morality than you.
A source of the problem lies in RMS's view (and apparently your's too) that corporations are obligated to improve humanity. The reality isn't such a cheerie rainbow, I'm afriad: corporations exist to make money.
By condemning others licenses, and smearing anything "GPL-incompatible", RMS is very much pushing his ideas on everyone, as is obvious from this very forum we speak in; if it's not GPL-compatible, then it's not open source. That's the agenda you get on Slashdot.
There are certainly licenses that may increase the public good more than others, however, that doesn't concern corporations, and in fact, can (for certain companies) have a detrimental effect on the underlying reason for a corporation's very existence!
And I personally believe the spiritual world exists. Why be so mocking of spirituality as to make an analogy with Santa Clause? That analogy is purposefully divisive and belittling, not to mention tired.
A man once said, "To an unbeliever, the ways of God are foolishness."
I agree on almost all what you say there. Paul's letters indicate there was a lot of debate about whether to keep the Law, including circumcision and biblical festivals. That validates my point, in that Christianity wasn't a "new religion" to begin with, and there was confusion among non-Jewish believers about whether to continue in the ways of the religion they were seemingly part of.
You're right on the transfusing among pagan religions, as well as the Sunday idea; there were many others from 135-300 CE that pushed the anti-Jewish ideas and "new religion" ideas; I mentioned Constantine because he was the one who championed the ideas and brought them to fruition.
Actually, religions tend to be self-evolving too, both across religions and within itself. There are lots of man-made ideas in modern religion, and many of them are wrong.
Take Christianity, for instance. It started off as a sect of Judaism, and remained largely so until a Roman Emperor, Constantine, made it the official religion of Rome, transfusing it with practices for the surrounding pagan religions (e.g. Sunday worship named after Constantine's former sun-worshipping ways, the Easter/Ishtar festivals, Lent/Tammuz festivals, even Christmas was borrowed from Babylonian myths).
The difference between science and religion is one is dealing largely with the concrete, physical world, another with the spirtual world. I don't necessarily think the two ideas are exclusive; they can by all means co-exist.
For starters, sharing, co-operation, and working for the common good is not always moral, e.g. sharing copyrighted music, co-operating with criminals, or working for your own version of the common good (which doesn't apply to everyone everywhere); those things have to be measured against some higher standard.
Finally, not everyone has choice in the matter. A vast majority of developers in this world, not RMS's, write code for corporations, and a vast majority of those corporations write closed-source software. A corporation is at no obligation to provide the source to software it's developed. Furthermore, if time and money was invested by the corporation into the development of the software, the corporation may have moral & ethical obligations to its employees and shareholds, therefore they must protect trade secrets and proprietary algorithms found in the said code.
It's not as black-and-white as RMS would have us all believe. Rather, there are equal, if not greater, moral questions on the reverse side: is it ethical forcing everyong to conform to a single license? Is it ethical condemning others who choose not to conform to the said license?
If his ethics and morality are based around software, let him, it's his license and his own invention of morality. But when he pushes that morality on others -- for instance, his recent stating how anyone who uses non-GPL'd software is, ahem, immoral -- then we have a problem.
If he's under the GPL, let him judge himself, not others, according to his own idea of what is moral.
Now when we get sued by the RIAA/MPAA, we can point them to this Slashdot thread and they will no doubt drop all of their lawsuits because Joi Ito has a larger fan base thanks to BT.
Hitler's hatred of the Jews wasn't based on his religion. Hitler was largely an occultist.
His hatred on the Jews was based on his secular, humanistic ideas of a powerful, elite race of humans, one that was stronger, more fit that other races (survival of the fittest). To Hitler's misfortune, either the Aryans are not the fittest, or they are not fit enough to destroy all the other races.
Chris,
I'd like to contribute. I was a student last year, and will be going back next semester. Am I eligible?
Windows devs like myself never use 'managed code' to differentiate .NET and Java. In fact, we consider Java to be managed code also because the JVM is managing the security, memory allocations and so on. We say 'managed' only to differentiate between native code and code managed by a runtime. It's not a consiparcy by an evil corporation, but whatever.
In the Windows world, it's a commonly used term for meaning any code that is controlled by a runtime, in particular, the .NET CLR (common language runtime).
.NET, I used the appropriate term.
Since we're talking about Windows and