The presidential pardon only applies to criminal, not civil, judgements. Nor could (Clinton, Gore/Bush) exempt MS from antitrust law - it isn't the perogative of the executive to make law.
A new attorney-general, probably under a Bush administration, could stop the prosecution, or at least starve it of resources (letting MS get a much better deal on appeal) but that's as far as it would go - and the states are unlikely to fold as easily.
The suit against Microsoft is being pursued in US Federal Court, which makes the federal apellate courts (which are federal apppointees) the forum where the penalties will be finally decided.
The preference of the state and federal attorneys-general is immaterial at this stage *unless* Microsoft seeks an extrajudicial settlement; I'm sure that Microsoft is equally dissatisfied by the findings of fact (which, thank god, are more or less irreversible), but the reality of the situation is that it's an exercise for the judiciary from here on in.
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Not insufficient tech, but too little bureaucracy
on
The Year 1000
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I agree and disagree with you (no doubt this is typical slashdot behaviour).
Prisons were reserved for notorious criminals (to a point, given the plethora of capital crimes - not that there was a common law worthy of the name at that point) and rich people (for practical reasons - a rich man at that time would be a feudal lord in his own right, with a more or less substantial fighting force at his disposal. Personal incarceration was a way of demonstrating one's power over them, and was generally a political rather than a criminal act.) Agreed, prisons as such did exist.
It's more interesting to uncover why they were so reserved. It wasn't because they preferred to deal out harsh and physical punishments, but because there was no way to set up the administrative apparatus to finance and run a system of incarceration. You have to go all the way to the eighteenth century to see that happening - and as soon as it did, crime "boomed". The first part of Hughes' The Fatal Shore covers this in gruesome detail - prisons throughout the land were packed with the overflow caged in hulks, and executions were performed in wholesale. Australia was a safety valve, especially for political prisoners, although the majority of deportees were petty criminals.). In other words, it may have been possible to build a prison, but not to run the system to fill it, staff it, and empty and refill it.
What is important to note is that there were no public records save ecclesiastical ones (baptisms, deaths) until the seventeenth century or thereabouts. A modern criminal system, which incorporates the concept of incarceration, penance (as in penitentiary), and rebirth of the criminal into civil society (see the reformer Jeremy Bentham for more on that topic), requires such records, even if for mere criminal records, to gauge the quality and quantity of punishment. In other words, the appropriateness of punishment.
Older criminal systems did not consider the necessity for penance on the part of the criminal. It simply wasn't part of their moral calculus. In this sense they did not believe that when you committed a crime you should be punished for it; they believed that a crime was an offense against the power of the sovereign, and it was on these grounds that you were punished (Foucault, both Madness and Civilization and Discipline and Punish).
At least in the UK, rapid industrialization significantly depressed median incomes (or at least our estimates of median incomes) due to the mechanization of agriculture. These people flowed into the large cities to work in the factories; the surplus of unskilled labour pushed rates to the very bottom.
Unfortunately, rather than taking up the slack and improving production, rates stayed there. There was simply no upward pressure on wages. Life in the cities was crowded and disease-ridden, resulting in a drop in estimated life expectancy.
This doesn't mean that agrarian feudalism was a walk in the park, though. It was nasty and brutish. Nor am I rejecting my own cushy existence which is made possible by industrialism. I merely make the observation that for several generations the industrial revolution, although inevitable, resulted in a significant downturn in standards of living.
The same trend occurred to a lesser extent in the US's new england states and in Canada, merely time-shifted.
I hope that when you take all this into account, the increased poverty, the disease, the overall wretchedness, you'll come to the conclusion that capitalism, despite where it has brought us, was a poor alternative to agrarian feudalism for the great majority of people. It is a characteristic of any major social-economic revolution; look at post-Communist Russia.
I think that, pragmatically, single password authentication is all you can expect users to adop and managers to approve. So we agree.
However, I would disagree that we should keep people away from their folly by not advocating and more secure authentication schemes. After all, if a more secure authentication scheme is not available, who, in fact, is the fool - the fool that has to use the scheme, or the fool that designed and implemented it in the first place?
If that's your definition of communism (that the government runs all and owns all), then China hasn't been communist since the late seventies. The PRC has allowed private ownership of property and private economic ventures since at least that time, and probably before (remember "to grow rich is glorious"?).
If you look at history, you'll see that communism turned out to be a particularly bad idea. But if you looked at the 19th century, you'd come to the same conclusion about capitalism. Don't forget that communism was a reaction to the horrors of the industrial-capitalist state. No doubt libertarianism, especially the objectivist strains, is a reaction to the horrors of the communist state. I don't hold any great hopes for libertarian utopias, however.
I think that you misunderstand the central concepts of communism. The ruling class is supposed to govern for the benefit of the working class (the workers are presumably the bulk of the population). The benefit or ill of individual citizens is secondary to the "big picture" and the good of the masses. Dissolving and collectively owning property is the means to the end, which is a government for the people; a state without individual property is presumably a state of peers (this is demonstrably false, but is rarely pointed out) with interests in common.
Chinese and Russian communism started out on what Marx would consider the absolute wrong foot - agrarian economies, where they had to appeal to small landholders and tenant farmers, and had to go through the process of accumulating capital to industrialize - and it goes without saying that communism is probably the worst system for accumulating capital. With ongoing industrialization, they created further class distinctions. Perhaps they did it better than the nineteenth-century western economies, and perhaps not, but it certainly wasn't pretty and the result isn't pretty.
As for ESR, I think that he should get his knee looked at. It's perfectly possible to indulge in volunteerism in a communist society; it's perfectly possible to indulge in volunteerism in a capitalist society, too. (Of course, in Eric's libertarian-anarchist political ramblings, there's nothing but volunteerism). Still, volunteerism is whollly tangential to developing in an open-source environment; the point is, and always was, to promote further and faster development for the sake of development and developers rather than venture capitalists and entrepreneurs.
I wouldn't call it openmindedness and a drive to censor so much as an unwillingness to participate in religious debates.
Every group tends to have hot topics which attract fanatics. Distribution vs. distribution on Linux groups; GPL vs. BSD on advocacy groups (check my user profile for what may well be the one non-vitriolic discussion on the merits of the GPL and BSD license, ever) Canon vs. Nikon on photo groups; objectivism/libertarianism vs. the rest of the world on all groups:).
The point is that when the religious debate pops up, critical thought goes out the window. Should everyone who wants to fruitfully participate in a group be forced to witness rehash after rehash of this? I'm not claiming that I'm innocent of rehashing, because I'm not. In the past, I've blown as hard as any other blowhard. I hope I've grown up since, though.
Moderation is a method of peer evaluation. And people can be moderated up even after being moderated down - somebody moderated down an article of mine, once upon a time, calling it "flamebait" or "irrelevant"; it ended up at +3 after a few more moderators passed through and disagreed with the first. The point is that no moderation is irrevocable.
Not to mention: moderation down isn't the same as removal. You are moderated down, not removed. If people want to read what you have to say, they can. If you still consider moderation to be censorship, perhaps you could extend the label to literary criticism, for example, since less people will read a book with a bad review.
Often, I've heard people say the GPL's spirit is "here's a gift, now where's mine?' That doesn't make either bad, but the gift does seem to loose meaning.
That's an excellent way of putting it, but I wouldn't characterize a GPL'ed work as a gift. There's no basis for a exchange as equals, especially between the individual and the corporation.
The BSD development paradigm, with a centralized core team, either within or without the academy, probably lends itself better to a BSD license, because the core team can represent themselves collectively to a corporation; it becomes an exchange between equals in an environment of mutual expect.
The BSD license is probably also better suited for think-tanks and academic work for the above reasons, and also because in many cases they are not subject to the freeloader dilemna since the teams are self-contained.
The Linux development paradigm, with no centralized authority directing and controlling development (other than Linux Torvalds, but he's more a moderator or mediator than an architect), is probably better suited for the GPL because there is no exchange between equals. Given that even Linus cannot represent the entire developer community, there can be no such relationship. In the absence of the relationship, formal or informal, between corporation and development team, it becomes attractive indeed to cut and run.
The GPL, by posing restrictions on freeloading, formalizes the relationship between entrepreneur and developer where they are not peers. You get mine, and I get yours; one enforces sharing where there is no motivation to share.
(That isn't to say that there aren't entrepreneurs who would freely share their code, but that entrepreneurs, by definition, do not easily give up their intellectual property).
I've really enjoyed this back-and-forth in this thread; it may well be the first sane discussion of BSD and GPL ever:).
That's why the tobacco companies managed to get by for so long without losing a lawsuit (that, and employing a lot of lawyers).
Actually, IIRC, they managed to go so long without losing a lawsuit for two reasons:
Firstly, the evidence for tobacco causing cancer is statistical and epidemiological. When you deal with discrete cases, it's very hard to pin it on a single causal factor. Lawyers know this; expert witnesses know this, and they can team up and rip great big holes in a study-based argument. (This is why it was such a big jump for a tobacco executive to concede that tobacco could cause harm a couple of years ago; it was their collective policy to deny, deny, deny)
Secondly, big tobacco decided to play the hardest of all hardball and did so very well for decades, both inside and outside a court. They also played it on the political arena; tobacco was up there with aerospace and defense industries when it came to political donations in the eighties. This bought influence paid off handsomely. When the government turned against big tobacco, OTOH, that was the beginning of the end.
I don't think that I claimed that freeloading would destroy an open version (after all, you can always use the older version), however, by implementing an advanced version in closed-source form, you penalize people who wish to retain access to source.
I should have been more specific during my ramble - you can't remove the original code from circulation, but you can make the original code less relevant (and tending to irrelevance) by releasing closed source versions.
Citing sendmail as an example of successful BSD licensing producing a value-added product is rather disingenuous, since the value-added closed source version of Sendmail is quite a recent innovation. Sendmail grew in popularity when the main development stayed open, and seems to presently be on the wane.
Do take it in context, btw. At the moment that RMS created the GPL, the MIT Lab for Computer Science and MIT Media Lab was being quite literally plundered by DEC, by Symbolics, by Thinking Machines and many others, all of whom took many developers and their accumulated knowledge without offering anything to the academic community in return. Freeloading both code and people is a threat in this situation.
More to the point, allowing freeloading offers no benefit to the available code base, because changes are not returned to it. You can do the same with a GPL'ed work by not releasing or selling it to the public, of course.
This, as you assert, might have been Bill Joy's intention, to allow freeloading. I believe you when you say it was. However, the concept is just as relevant for BSD'ed applications as for GPL'ed; they're just as dependent, for the most part, on collective development.
Technologies (at least patentable technologies) and the like are generally feats of engineering, not pure science per se.
I, for one, have never heard of a fundamental discovery being packaged into a patent; however, I've heard of lots of fundamental discoveries being used to create patentable technology.
For example, let's look at the RC4 algorithm, produced by Rivest et al, three bright mathematicians with nothing better to do:). The fundamental advances in mathematical science are there for all to see. Putting them into a useful form (RC4) was what Rivest did - anyone else could have done the same, and a large part of cryptanalysis is, in fact, doing the same.
The point is that while RC4 was reasonably innovative, and was certainly publishable in the scientific literature, it wasn't an advance in science in and of itself. No new mathematics were harmed in its creation; it's merely their child.
I agree that licensing terms involve a trade-off between freedoms; that's a very insightful comment. Now, if I might add my 0.02$ worth:
The GPL is a license by and for developers: you get the priviledge of code reuse, you grant the priviledge of code reuse, you contribute to the body of code available for reuse. It is what would happen in a large corporation or think tank (or, in RMS's case, the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science) where all researchers can borrow code and ideas from each other.
I can understand why critics call RMS a flaming communist. For what it's worth, he probably is a flaming communist. If you subscribe to RMS-as-Marx, however, you have to admit that he, with the GPL, treats his proletariat (developers) very well. Exploiters of the proletariat (entrepreneurs) do less well.
The BSD license is an excellent compromise if you feel like compromising; entrepreneurs can use it with only the requirement to give credit for credit due. It's entirely legitimate for a developer to adopt a dual role as entrepreneur, or envision a dual role as entrepreneur, which is an excellent reason to use the BSD.
However, and I think that this is a fear which is always in RMS's mind: BSD's software can be moved from open to closed source by such entrepreneurs, who profit from the freely available work of other people - it's the apex of freeloading.
Most companies prevent freeloading by closing their source. The GPL prevents it in another way; the code becomes totally open so long as it stays out of the hands of entrepreneurs who would close it off.
You will see something like this in wills; some will have a clause which reads something like this: if (so and so) challenges the legitimacy of this will, this bequest to them is withdrawn. It's an entirely valid tactic; after all, as the estate belongs (or belonged) to the deceased, the code belongs to the copyright holder and not the licensee.
The freeloading problem's an interesting one and it strikes to the heart of copyright and licensing dilemnas (not to mention patent law or any other kind of intellectual property law). I'd willingly listen to someone who had another take on it.
"The general scientific consensus for years has been that EM in any strength is completely harmless."
I'm afraid I can't agree with you here; the electromagnetic spectrum contains much nastiness, from gamma rays all the way down to sunburn. The problem isn't the frequency; it's the energy that is pumped through the device and how much is absorbed by the brain.
On a similar note, not so way back when I was studying psychology, experimenters used low-frequency RF (I believe somewhere in the AM or microwave band) to destroy areas of the brain in order to simulate lesions. They localized the damage by introducing it with probes, although I'm sure they could have fried a brain from outside the skull given enough power.
You are posing an interersting thought experiment. I happen to think that, yes, if Slashdot's colour scheme turned out to rot the brain one day, Cmdr Taco should end up in the dock for it. However, damages should suit the crime: if there was no knowledge that it could call damage at the time, if there was no malice and no negligence, then damages should reflect that.
That Big Tobacco knew of and withheld evidence on the deadliness of tobacco was certainly an aggravating circumstance, but it wasn't the basis for the charges. When Big Tobacco started producing cigarettes which would eventually kill people, they were liable; when they found out it was deadly but decided to go on marketing it, they were malicious or negligent.
Saying that a lack of maliciousness and negligence excuses the ill is the ultimate "I didn't mean to" defense. It doesn't, so to speak, wear well.
There is a credible body of experimental work which links acetylcholine to memory (consolidation and retrieval). However, you're correct, the article does not successfully link in the experiment with the pre-existing evidence - although he tries hard to insinuate it.
I think that it is fair to make companies liable ex post facto (after the fact). Even if no malice is present, their product did cause damage through normal operation. It's the same argument where tobacco companies would be liable for cancer deaths (which they are) and Ford would be liable for exploding Pintos (which it was).
I'm not one to disparage the scientific method, but the more important fact is what particular mechanism in RF exposure to the brain might be causing the acetylcholine deficit.
We can start the process of generalizing and extending theories when we know the how and why of the subject. Alone, this experiment is scientific trivia: not uninteresting, but unattached to the greater body of knowledge.
I'd think that knowledge of this mechanism would be important for a fair bit more than cell phones - think about all the things that we use which give off some kind of signal. This makes further research in this vein quite relevant and necessary.
Likewise, we should consider the nature of the study data. Is it replicable to humans, most importantly. Although ethics considerations may preclude testing directly, evidence of a long-term memory deficit could possibly be teased out of an epidemiological or statistical study.
In any case, my own cell phone is staying where it usually does: in my coat pocket and turned off.
Well, if he's going to write violent, blood-curdling horror, I can't think of anything better to read in jail than the Bible:). And I can't think of anything better to eat than a Taco Hell bean burrito... if that little rat-dog can't raise you to a homicidal mania, then ice water runs in your veins.
Free cd's of any type are like cannon fodder; they're delivered to the field with the knowledge that most will go unused, much less browsed through.
The point, however, is not to target users; it's to get a copy into everyone's hands, to overwhelm the natural inertia of computer users and unwillingness to pay for one more thing, much less one more thing that they don't know much about.
Of course, it'll be a pain for Corel to support. Those are the breaks. It's the consequence of sending out your distribution as cannon fodder, to preach to the unwashed masses.
It's nice to say that one shouldn't pander to "blithering idiots", and convenient, but the truth of the matter is that market prices for many stocks are determined by such "blithering idiots".
Like the poster before you mentioned, stock prices do go up following a split. Whether you choose to cater to "blithering idiots" or not, you can't deny that the jump is predictable and real.
This is all well and good; you're more than able to eschew speculation which doesn't reflect underlying value on your own part. The point at hand, however, is the use of market tools and accounting tools to circumvent calculation of real value. This undermines both momentum-based speculation and value-based speculation.
The Regents of the University of California claim-credit clause (section 3) was abandoned by the Regents about a month ago.
The BSD license covers only redistributions, not derivative works. You are free to derive your own work from BSD-licensed code, and now need give no attribution (as above). This is one of the main selling points of BSD.
I think that your post boiled down to these two only.
Let's say you called a colour black. If you had a standards body who determined what was black and what wasn't, you'd lose all the other colours who weren't black.
It's somewhat of a tautology, in other words. If you had a standards body to determine what was/is open source (sort of like Debian's open source guidelines, methinks), then it would determine what was open source. If someone doesn't want to license it as open source, then so much the worse - so long as they don't call it open source, which is completely misleading.
Conflating "free software" and "open source" does no one a favour, least of all the developers and package/distribution maintainers. The FSF draws a distinction between free as in speech (ie, open source) and free as in beer (ie, freeware). Perhaps we should all be as careful with our words.
You have it backwards: the BSD allows redistribution and modification under any license. Including, not excluding, the GPL. If I wanted to modify your program and redistribute it under the GPL, that would be my right, just like I could modify and release it under a user-pay license.
It's ironic that, in slamming the GPL, you're favourably attributing GPL properties to the BSD license.
Bear in mind that the author retains copyright. Any GPL'ed piece of work is freely redistributable and relatively impregnable (inasmuch as people respect property rights) to use in a closed source product.
If company X wants to use your code, they can do what any company does when it wants to work from an external codebase; they send lawyers over and work out a deal for the rights to or an alternative license to said code.
That's the way the world works. As open source becomes more acceptable in the wider world, I think you're going to have more and more IT managers dealing with it in a serious manner.
Colour me surprised, but I've never seen quibbling about licensing as a totally fruitless act. Religious debates aside, criticism is valuable. Apple, for example, changed its open licensing sceme after receiving criticism from Bruce Perens and other members of the open source community.
The way I see it, the point of free software isn't software for its own good; it is freedom for its own good. If open source software lags behind commercial ventures, then so be it. The importance is that it is free and can never be taken away. I think that this is what RMS is trying to say, and I think that it's the point that is lost five seconds after he says it; the debate degenerates into a matter of faith, not reason, that fast.
Slashdot Mirror
The presidential pardon only applies to criminal, not civil, judgements. Nor could (Clinton, Gore/Bush) exempt MS from antitrust law - it isn't the perogative of the executive to make law.
A new attorney-general, probably under a Bush administration, could stop the prosecution, or at least starve it of resources (letting MS get a much better deal on appeal) but that's as far as it would go - and the states are unlikely to fold as easily.
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The suit against Microsoft is being pursued in US Federal Court, which makes the federal apellate courts (which are federal apppointees) the forum where the penalties will be finally decided.
The preference of the state and federal attorneys-general is immaterial at this stage *unless* Microsoft seeks an extrajudicial settlement; I'm sure that Microsoft is equally dissatisfied by the findings of fact (which, thank god, are more or less irreversible), but the reality of the situation is that it's an exercise for the judiciary from here on in.
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I agree and disagree with you (no doubt this is typical slashdot behaviour).
Prisons were reserved for notorious criminals (to a point, given the plethora of capital crimes - not that there was a common law worthy of the name at that point) and rich people (for practical reasons - a rich man at that time would be a feudal lord in his own right, with a more or less substantial fighting force at his disposal. Personal incarceration was a way of demonstrating one's power over them, and was generally a political rather than a criminal act.) Agreed, prisons as such did exist.
It's more interesting to uncover why they were so reserved. It wasn't because they preferred to deal out harsh and physical punishments, but because there was no way to set up the administrative apparatus to finance and run a system of incarceration. You have to go all the way to the eighteenth century to see that happening - and as soon as it did, crime "boomed". The first part of Hughes' The Fatal Shore covers this in gruesome detail - prisons throughout the land were packed with the overflow caged in hulks, and executions were performed in wholesale. Australia was a safety valve, especially for political prisoners, although the majority of deportees were petty criminals.). In other words, it may have been possible to build a prison, but not to run the system to fill it, staff it, and empty and refill it.
What is important to note is that there were no public records save ecclesiastical ones (baptisms, deaths) until the seventeenth century or thereabouts. A modern criminal system, which incorporates the concept of incarceration, penance (as in penitentiary), and rebirth of the criminal into civil society (see the reformer Jeremy Bentham for more on that topic), requires such records, even if for mere criminal records, to gauge the quality and quantity of punishment. In other words, the appropriateness of punishment.
Older criminal systems did not consider the necessity for penance on the part of the criminal. It simply wasn't part of their moral calculus. In this sense they did not believe that when you committed a crime you should be punished for it; they believed that a crime was an offense against the power of the sovereign, and it was on these grounds that you were punished (Foucault, both Madness and Civilization and Discipline and Punish).
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On the topic of XIX century capitalism:
At least in the UK, rapid industrialization significantly depressed median incomes (or at least our estimates of median incomes) due to the mechanization of agriculture. These people flowed into the large cities to work in the factories; the surplus of unskilled labour pushed rates to the very bottom.
Unfortunately, rather than taking up the slack and improving production, rates stayed there. There was simply no upward pressure on wages. Life in the cities was crowded and disease-ridden, resulting in a drop in estimated life expectancy.
This doesn't mean that agrarian feudalism was a walk in the park, though. It was nasty and brutish. Nor am I rejecting my own cushy existence which is made possible by industrialism. I merely make the observation that for several generations the industrial revolution, although inevitable, resulted in a significant downturn in standards of living.
The same trend occurred to a lesser extent in the US's new england states and in Canada, merely time-shifted.
I hope that when you take all this into account, the increased poverty, the disease, the overall wretchedness, you'll come to the conclusion that capitalism, despite where it has brought us, was a poor alternative to agrarian feudalism for the great majority of people. It is a characteristic of any major social-economic revolution; look at post-Communist Russia.
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I agree and disagree with you here.
I think that, pragmatically, single password authentication is all you can expect users to adop and managers to approve. So we agree.
However, I would disagree that we should keep people away from their folly by not advocating and more secure authentication schemes. After all, if a more secure authentication scheme is not available, who, in fact, is the fool - the fool that has to use the scheme, or the fool that designed and implemented it in the first place?
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If that's your definition of communism (that the government runs all and owns all), then China hasn't been communist since the late seventies. The PRC has allowed private ownership of property and private economic ventures since at least that time, and probably before (remember "to grow rich is glorious"?).
If you look at history, you'll see that communism turned out to be a particularly bad idea. But if you looked at the 19th century, you'd come to the same conclusion about capitalism. Don't forget that communism was a reaction to the horrors of the industrial-capitalist state. No doubt libertarianism, especially the objectivist strains, is a reaction to the horrors of the communist state. I don't hold any great hopes for libertarian utopias, however.
I think that you misunderstand the central concepts of communism. The ruling class is supposed to govern for the benefit of the working class (the workers are presumably the bulk of the population). The benefit or ill of individual citizens is secondary to the "big picture" and the good of the masses. Dissolving and collectively owning property is the means to the end, which is a government for the people; a state without individual property is presumably a state of peers (this is demonstrably false, but is rarely pointed out) with interests in common.
Chinese and Russian communism started out on what Marx would consider the absolute wrong foot - agrarian economies, where they had to appeal to small landholders and tenant farmers, and had to go through the process of accumulating capital to industrialize - and it goes without saying that communism is probably the worst system for accumulating capital. With ongoing industrialization, they created further class distinctions. Perhaps they did it better than the nineteenth-century western economies, and perhaps not, but it certainly wasn't pretty and the result isn't pretty.
As for ESR, I think that he should get his knee looked at. It's perfectly possible to indulge in volunteerism in a communist society; it's perfectly possible to indulge in volunteerism in a capitalist society, too. (Of course, in Eric's libertarian-anarchist political ramblings, there's nothing but volunteerism). Still, volunteerism is whollly tangential to developing in an open-source environment; the point is, and always was, to promote further and faster development for the sake of development and developers rather than venture capitalists and entrepreneurs.
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I wouldn't call it openmindedness and a drive to censor so much as an unwillingness to participate in religious debates.
:).
Every group tends to have hot topics which attract fanatics. Distribution vs. distribution on Linux groups; GPL vs. BSD on advocacy groups (check my user profile for what may well be the one non-vitriolic discussion on the merits of the GPL and BSD license, ever) Canon vs. Nikon on photo groups; objectivism/libertarianism vs. the rest of the world on all groups
The point is that when the religious debate pops up, critical thought goes out the window. Should everyone who wants to fruitfully participate in a group be forced to witness rehash after rehash of this? I'm not claiming that I'm innocent of rehashing, because I'm not. In the past, I've blown as hard as any other blowhard. I hope I've grown up since, though.
Moderation is a method of peer evaluation. And people can be moderated up even after being moderated down - somebody moderated down an article of mine, once upon a time, calling it "flamebait" or "irrelevant"; it ended up at +3 after a few more moderators passed through and disagreed with the first. The point is that no moderation is irrevocable.
Not to mention: moderation down isn't the same as removal. You are moderated down, not removed. If people want to read what you have to say, they can. If you still consider moderation to be censorship, perhaps you could extend the label to literary criticism, for example, since less people will read a book with a bad review.
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(see subject line. Damn typos.)
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Often, I've heard people say the GPL's spirit is "here's a gift, now where's mine?' That doesn't make either bad, but the gift does seem to loose meaning.
:).
That's an excellent way of putting it, but I wouldn't characterize a GPL'ed work as a gift. There's no basis for a exchange as equals, especially between the individual and the corporation.
The BSD development paradigm, with a centralized core team, either within or without the academy, probably lends itself better to a BSD license, because the core team can represent themselves collectively to a corporation; it becomes an exchange between equals in an environment of mutual expect.
The BSD license is probably also better suited for think-tanks and academic work for the above reasons, and also because in many cases they are not subject to the freeloader dilemna since the teams are self-contained.
The Linux development paradigm, with no centralized authority directing and controlling development (other than Linux Torvalds, but he's more a moderator or mediator than an architect), is probably better suited for the GPL because there is no exchange between equals. Given that even Linus cannot represent the entire developer community, there can be no such relationship. In the absence of the relationship, formal or informal, between corporation and development team, it becomes attractive indeed to cut and run.
The GPL, by posing restrictions on freeloading, formalizes the relationship between entrepreneur and developer where they are not peers. You get mine, and I get yours; one enforces sharing where there is no motivation to share.
(That isn't to say that there aren't entrepreneurs who would freely share their code, but that entrepreneurs, by definition, do not easily give up their intellectual property).
I've really enjoyed this back-and-forth in this thread; it may well be the first sane discussion of BSD and GPL ever
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That's why the tobacco companies managed to get by for so long without losing a lawsuit (that, and employing a lot of lawyers).
Actually, IIRC, they managed to go so long without losing a lawsuit for two reasons:
Firstly, the evidence for tobacco causing cancer is statistical and epidemiological. When you deal with discrete cases, it's very hard to pin it on a single causal factor. Lawyers know this; expert witnesses know this, and they can team up and rip great big holes in a study-based argument. (This is why it was such a big jump for a tobacco executive to concede that tobacco could cause harm a couple of years ago; it was their collective policy to deny, deny, deny)
Secondly, big tobacco decided to play the hardest of all hardball and did so very well for decades, both inside and outside a court. They also played it on the political arena; tobacco was up there with aerospace and defense industries when it came to political donations in the eighties. This bought influence paid off handsomely. When the government turned against big tobacco, OTOH, that was the beginning of the end.
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I don't think that I claimed that freeloading would destroy an open version (after all, you can always use the older version), however, by implementing an advanced version in closed-source form, you penalize people who wish to retain access to source.
I should have been more specific during my ramble - you can't remove the original code from circulation, but you can make the original code less relevant (and tending to irrelevance) by releasing closed source versions.
Citing sendmail as an example of successful BSD licensing producing a value-added product is rather disingenuous, since the value-added closed source version of Sendmail is quite a recent innovation. Sendmail grew in popularity when the main development stayed open, and seems to presently be on the wane.
Do take it in context, btw. At the moment that RMS created the GPL, the MIT Lab for Computer Science and MIT Media Lab was being quite literally plundered by DEC, by Symbolics, by Thinking Machines and many others, all of whom took many developers and their accumulated knowledge without offering anything to the academic community in return. Freeloading both code and people is a threat in this situation.
More to the point, allowing freeloading offers no benefit to the available code base, because changes are not returned to it. You can do the same with a GPL'ed work by not releasing or selling it to the public, of course.
This, as you assert, might have been Bill Joy's intention, to allow freeloading. I believe you when you say it was. However, the concept is just as relevant for BSD'ed applications as for GPL'ed; they're just as dependent, for the most part, on collective development.
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Technologies (at least patentable technologies) and the like are generally feats of engineering, not pure science per se.
:). The fundamental advances in mathematical science are there for all to see. Putting them into a useful form (RC4) was what Rivest did - anyone else could have done the same, and a large part of cryptanalysis is, in fact, doing the same.
I, for one, have never heard of a fundamental discovery being packaged into a patent; however, I've heard of lots of fundamental discoveries being used to create patentable technology.
For example, let's look at the RC4 algorithm, produced by Rivest et al, three bright mathematicians with nothing better to do
The point is that while RC4 was reasonably innovative, and was certainly publishable in the scientific literature, it wasn't an advance in science in and of itself. No new mathematics were harmed in its creation; it's merely their child.
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I agree that licensing terms involve a trade-off between freedoms; that's a very insightful comment. Now, if I might add my 0.02$ worth:
The GPL is a license by and for developers: you get the priviledge of code reuse, you grant the priviledge of code reuse, you contribute to the body of code available for reuse. It is what would happen in a large corporation or think tank (or, in RMS's case, the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science) where all researchers can borrow code and ideas from each other.
I can understand why critics call RMS a flaming communist. For what it's worth, he probably is a flaming communist. If you subscribe to RMS-as-Marx, however, you have to admit that he, with the GPL, treats his proletariat (developers) very well. Exploiters of the proletariat (entrepreneurs) do less well.
The BSD license is an excellent compromise if you feel like compromising; entrepreneurs can use it with only the requirement to give credit for credit due. It's entirely legitimate for a developer to adopt a dual role as entrepreneur, or envision a dual role as entrepreneur, which is an excellent reason to use the BSD.
However, and I think that this is a fear which is always in RMS's mind: BSD's software can be moved from open to closed source by such entrepreneurs, who profit from the freely available work of other people - it's the apex of freeloading.
Most companies prevent freeloading by closing their source. The GPL prevents it in another way; the code becomes totally open so long as it stays out of the hands of entrepreneurs who would close it off.
You will see something like this in wills; some will have a clause which reads something like this: if (so and so) challenges the legitimacy of this will, this bequest to them is withdrawn. It's an entirely valid tactic; after all, as the estate belongs (or belonged) to the deceased, the code belongs to the copyright holder and not the licensee.
The freeloading problem's an interesting one and it strikes to the heart of copyright and licensing dilemnas (not to mention patent law or any other kind of intellectual property law). I'd willingly listen to someone who had another take on it.
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"The general scientific consensus for years has been that EM in any strength is completely harmless."
I'm afraid I can't agree with you here; the electromagnetic spectrum contains much nastiness, from gamma rays all the way down to sunburn. The problem isn't the frequency; it's the energy that is pumped through the device and how much is absorbed by the brain.
On a similar note, not so way back when I was studying psychology, experimenters used low-frequency RF (I believe somewhere in the AM or microwave band) to destroy areas of the brain in order to simulate lesions. They localized the damage by introducing it with probes, although I'm sure they could have fried a brain from outside the skull given enough power.
You are posing an interersting thought experiment. I happen to think that, yes, if Slashdot's colour scheme turned out to rot the brain one day, Cmdr Taco should end up in the dock for it. However, damages should suit the crime: if there was no knowledge that it could call damage at the time, if there was no malice and no negligence, then damages should reflect that.
That Big Tobacco knew of and withheld evidence on the deadliness of tobacco was certainly an aggravating circumstance, but it wasn't the basis for the charges. When Big Tobacco started producing cigarettes which would eventually kill people, they were liable; when they found out it was deadly but decided to go on marketing it, they were malicious or negligent.
Saying that a lack of maliciousness and negligence excuses the ill is the ultimate "I didn't mean to" defense. It doesn't, so to speak, wear well.
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There is a credible body of experimental work which links acetylcholine to memory (consolidation and retrieval). However, you're correct, the article does not successfully link in the experiment with the pre-existing evidence - although he tries hard to insinuate it.
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I think that it is fair to make companies liable ex post facto (after the fact). Even if no malice is present, their product did cause damage through normal operation. It's the same argument where tobacco companies would be liable for cancer deaths (which they are) and Ford would be liable for exploding Pintos (which it was).
Malice, of course, is an aggravating factor.
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I'm not one to disparage the scientific method, but the more important fact is what particular mechanism in RF exposure to the brain might be causing the acetylcholine deficit.
We can start the process of generalizing and extending theories when we know the how and why of the subject. Alone, this experiment is scientific trivia: not uninteresting, but unattached to the greater body of knowledge.
I'd think that knowledge of this mechanism would be important for a fair bit more than cell phones - think about all the things that we use which give off some kind of signal. This makes further research in this vein quite relevant and necessary.
Likewise, we should consider the nature of the study data. Is it replicable to humans, most importantly. Although ethics considerations may preclude testing directly, evidence of a long-term memory deficit could possibly be teased out of an epidemiological or statistical study.
In any case, my own cell phone is staying where it usually does: in my coat pocket and turned off.
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Well, if he's going to write violent, blood-curdling horror, I can't think of anything better to read in jail than the Bible :). And I can't think of anything better to eat than a Taco Hell bean burrito ... if that little rat-dog can't raise you to a homicidal mania, then ice water runs in your veins.
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Free cd's of any type are like cannon fodder; they're delivered to the field with the knowledge that most will go unused, much less browsed through.
The point, however, is not to target users; it's to get a copy into everyone's hands, to overwhelm the natural inertia of computer users and unwillingness to pay for one more thing, much less one more thing that they don't know much about.
Of course, it'll be a pain for Corel to support. Those are the breaks. It's the consequence of sending out your distribution as cannon fodder, to preach to the unwashed masses.
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It's nice to say that one shouldn't pander to "blithering idiots", and convenient, but the truth of the matter is that market prices for many stocks are determined by such "blithering idiots".
Like the poster before you mentioned, stock prices do go up following a split. Whether you choose to cater to "blithering idiots" or not, you can't deny that the jump is predictable and real.
This is all well and good; you're more than able to eschew speculation which doesn't reflect underlying value on your own part. The point at hand, however, is the use of market tools and accounting tools to circumvent calculation of real value. This undermines both momentum-based speculation and value-based speculation.
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Your points in order:
The Regents of the University of California claim-credit clause (section 3) was abandoned by the Regents about a month ago.
The BSD license covers only redistributions, not derivative works. You are free to derive your own work from BSD-licensed code, and now need give no attribution (as above). This is one of the main selling points of BSD.
I think that your post boiled down to these two only.
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That's a contradiction in terms.
Let's say you called a colour black. If you had a standards body who determined what was black and what wasn't, you'd lose all the other colours who weren't black.
It's somewhat of a tautology, in other words. If you had a standards body to determine what was/is open source (sort of like Debian's open source guidelines, methinks), then it would determine what was open source. If someone doesn't want to license it as open source, then so much the worse - so long as they don't call it open source, which is completely misleading.
Conflating "free software" and "open source" does no one a favour, least of all the developers and package/distribution maintainers. The FSF draws a distinction between free as in speech (ie, open source) and free as in beer (ie, freeware). Perhaps we should all be as careful with our words.
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You have it backwards: the BSD allows redistribution and modification under any license. Including, not excluding, the GPL. If I wanted to modify your program and redistribute it under the GPL, that would be my right, just like I could modify and release it under a user-pay license.
It's ironic that, in slamming the GPL, you're favourably attributing GPL properties to the BSD license.
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Bear in mind that the author retains copyright. Any GPL'ed piece of work is freely redistributable and relatively impregnable (inasmuch as people respect property rights) to use in a closed source product.
If company X wants to use your code, they can do what any company does when it wants to work from an external codebase; they send lawyers over and work out a deal for the rights to or an alternative license to said code.
That's the way the world works. As open source becomes more acceptable in the wider world, I think you're going to have more and more IT managers dealing with it in a serious manner.
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Colour me surprised, but I've never seen quibbling about licensing as a totally fruitless act. Religious debates aside, criticism is valuable. Apple, for example, changed its open licensing sceme after receiving criticism from Bruce Perens and other members of the open source community.
The way I see it, the point of free software isn't software for its own good; it is freedom for its own good. If open source software lags behind commercial ventures, then so be it. The importance is that it is free and can never be taken away. I think that this is what RMS is trying to say, and I think that it's the point that is lost five seconds after he says it; the debate degenerates into a matter of faith, not reason, that fast.
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