Wow, aren't we smug? Maybe you might learn something if you paid attention instead of contriving haughty comebacks to "you people".
Red Hat is modifying the kernel, don't read the headlines? Although it won't effect the userland, try apply many existing patches against the existing Red hat source code. There will be problems.
Wow, big fucking deal. Your patches might not apply against a particular vendor's private source tree. Why is this an issue for Linux application programmers again?
There are many X11 implementations and they are very much compatible, though some are at different levels of specification advancement.
We'll have to wait and see.
Wait and see? X11 has been around for, oh I don't know, 15 years now? How much longer do you have to wait to be convinced that designing an open, extensible spec from the beginning is a recipe for interoperability and compatibility, whether you like open source or prefer your software nice and closed.
It's fragmentation. There's no reason why KDE couldn't have used GTK. But they didn't, and now programs are less portable.
No reason? How about the fact that GTK+ was pretty much unusable in 1998? How about the fact that KDE developers typically prefer a native C++ GUI library? Is there no room for individual choice or competition in the world of software development? Do you really think GTK+ would be as advanced as it is today if it hadn't been for the hundreds of people hacking on it who were sneering at Qt and saying "We can do it better"?
Only recently have these toolkits even approached a decent level of functionality. To coincide with that, interoperability standards began to be published on freedesktop.org. If KDE or GNOME does not conform to those standards, it is considered a bug. How much more can you ask for? Tell me you prefer Motif or something, since you seem to be sucking Sun's cock so cheerfully.
You admit it's fragmentation, good. You're learning.
You really do resent people having choices in this world, don't you? GNU is free to implement whatever extensions they want. They also provide -ansi and -std=? to ensure that if you want no part of those extensions, none will slip by. GCC for years had things that the C99 standard just showed up with, such as inline functions, variadic macros, etc etc. What's better, an extension that can be disabled at the programmer's option to avoid straying from the standards, or nothing at all?
Then you're a fool. There are millions of reasons why Java will fragment if it goes open source. The C standards are solid standards, but GNU made extensions anyway. Open source developers do what they want, standards or not.
Out of millions of reasons, you haven't bothered to list one. Look at Mono. Is it "fragmenting"? Why would anyone bother? Sun's Java distribution would be the reference Java distribution of the entire free software world. Far from encouraging forking and incompatibility, I think developers would leave the various incomplete Java projects behind and work on the one true Java. You're welcome to your opinion, but you have provided absolutely no prior occurrences to back up your baseless assertions that Open implies Forking and that Forking implies Incompatibility.
Open source zealots would choose an open version over Suns clean-room version. It's what
you people do. Sooner or later, the Sun version isn't mainstream.
Please, a little more vitriol in your sneering. Have you ever considered that Sun might want to wash its hands of being the primary supporter of Java? You don't know one way or the other, so making sarcastic comments about what might happen is pointless.
You couldn't play Starcraft over TCP/IP without going through Battle.net. That is why Vivendi made such a big stink about it. They had a great plan to tie Internet multiplayer in with the copy protection, so that people who played unlicensed copies of Blizzard games would not be able to play them over the Internet. Thus, unlicensed copies would have much less value than a licensed copy.
Unfortunately, bnetd showed up and unwittingly threw a wrench in that scheme by providing a method for people who made illegal copies of Blizzard games to play over the Internet. Never mind that there were other good reasons for using a third-party Battle.net-compatible server to play games on; the perceived loss of leverage to get people to buy legal copies of Blizzard games is what drew the lawsuits from Vivendi. The DMCA just happened to be the only law broad enough for them to have had any ground to stand on.
Those legalities have a basis in whether or not what you are doing would infringe on other people's rights. In the case of building a nuclear waste site in your backyard, your neighbors object because it poses a grave danger to their life that can only be regulated through your competence, and they most likely are not willing to place faith in your competence.
Playing your DVD that you bought in whatever manner you see fit, on the other hand, harms no one except the people who would like to charge you a toll for using the product you already paid for. In any case, it does not infringe on their rights at all, only causes a loss of potential revenue. That is why DMCA is stupid; it is not protecting rights of copyright holder, only revenue stream.
Proof by assertion doesn't make your point valid. If some fact or process can be discovered from examining the product that is sold, it is well established by case law that it cannot possibly be a trade secret. Give me one example where a trade secret claim has been upheld against someone who independently discovered some information about a product that was sold to them.
The big discussion was because the latest XFree license(v.1.1) holds a clause that makes it incompatible with GPL, which then might produce massive problems with anything linked to it.
It only produces "massive problems" in the FSF's interpretation of the GPL. I don't share their interpretation of dynamic linking as creating a derived work, and without that interpretation, there is no problem writing dynamically linked applications with the new license.
It's very similar to SCO's claim that writing your code against the UNIX ABI somehow causes it to be a derived work of SCO's code. At least the FSF doesn't try to claim ownership of such code, though.
There is no way around the fact that dynamic linking happens at runtime, on the user's system, and under the control of the user. There is no possible way that a distributor could be held responsible for what a user does with the software. The only thing that could be argued is intent on the behalf of the distributor, if he distributed the GPL binary with linker references to a proprietary library within the same archive or from the same web site. But even that is shaky.
IMO, the dynamic vs static linking distinction should be dropped from GPLv3. It is a source of much confusion and dubious gain, while seeming almost like a EULA clause cloaked in sheep's clothing in that it tries to control what happens on the end user's system. Make no claim whatsoever about dynamic linking, but disallow distribution of statically linked proprietary applications and reserve that for LGPL licensed apps.
Another thing GPLv3 could do is specifically enumerate categories of license clauses which are not part of GPLv3 itself, but are nevertheless considered not to be non-free. Thus when you link software under GPLv3 and another free license, you don't have the silly problems caused by GPLv2's "You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein." The GPLv2 is preventing software which is under perfectly reasonable free software licenses (even according to the FSF!) from being aggregated with GPL works, simply because they have added a term to their license which is not non-free in the least, but nevertheless "imposes a further restriction" and causes its license to be incompatible with the GPL.
AFS has disconnected operation so should be much better..
No, it doesn't. If a volume goes offline, you will be unable to access any files within it, even if they are stored in the local cache. This is precisely what Coda attempted to improve upon, as it is essentially a genetically modified AFS.
Is it unethical for a computer maker not to include the gerbers for the mother board and the masks for the chips when they sell you a system?
Why make analogies to completely unrelated things? Tell me which is within the user's means to modify or pay others to modify: a piece of software or a hardware ASIC. Tell me which one is naturally predisposed to making infinite copies with no generation loss at zero marginal cost. Tell me which one is restricted from duplication solely by artificial government intervention.
Are you seriously inferring that software is not a special case? Is it not different from physical materials which perform a fixed function, and printed works which describe something, while yet encompassing properties of both?
It is not so simple, and blithe analogies do little to underscore your position. I sympathize with your position though, as we all need profit to survive. Luckily, I am able to work in an area (web development) where I can hand the keys to the customer and it doesn't affect my chances of landing another job, as long as we have managed to please the customer.
Licensing the source code to your customers under the GPL isn't as damaging as you might think. Most companies would not even dream of giving away the custom application that they paid to have developed, to a competitor in their line of business. At worst they might sell it to a competitor, but are they equipped to develop and support it the same way you are? Experience has shown that this back-stabbing by business customers is rarely an issue. For consumer software, it might be quite a different case, because there is a strong incentive for sharing among friends.
RMS would have a better time convincing people of his position if he would work towards providing models under which people can write this "ethical" free software, and feed and clothe themselves and their families as well.
Maybe one idea would be to sell a proprietary package with the guarantee that at the time when support ceases or the product is no longer for sale, the software will be freed. Or say that once X units have been sold, it will be freed. Buyers who have the money will have an incentive to pay (because they don't get the software until after X people have paid), and in the long run, the users aren't stuck with an unmodifiable, non-redistributable, non-working piece of software that they paid good money for.
What are you saying? That because a majority of the people in the world use Windows, Gentoo should have a flashy installer?
No. That we should not exclude features because they serve no purpose other than to make the computer easier to use for the uninitiated. A flashy installer may be "pointless cruft" or whatever, but a flashy installer in no way inconveniences someone who options to drop to a shell for the installation, and it holds the hand of one who is just getting his feet wet. If someone wanted to create a flashy installer, I get the feeling that Gentoo and BSD types would reject the notion outright, citing technical grounds, but in reality due to the fact that it would threaten their elitism.
If we give all the distros flashy installers and gear them to be simple and not as powerful, I will be in chains with the rest of them, so lets cut the nonsense.
Nonsense, indeed. What is it that causes a flashy installer and a power-user installer to be mutually exclusive?
People use Windows/Mac/Fedora/Gentoo/BSD/Amiga/etc because they want to, and that what fits them best.
Maybe people like you, the elite, use an operating system because you identify with it as a person. Most people actually choose an operating system on a cost/benefit basis. If it gets the job done, and it's within the budget, it gets used. If I catch wind of something better that comes along, I might evaluate it. If the new is no better than the old, then I stick with the old.
Of course, it's possible that I might not hear about a new platform or its specific advantages unless someone told me about it. Those people are called advocates. When they advocate their platform without paying attention to me or my needs, they are referred to as zealots. Zealots insist that their way is the best way and that you should mend your ways to fit their worldview if you want to use their elite OS.
Unfortunately, this is not such a good formula if you really believe your platform is better and wish to increase its userbase so that it can be even more successful. It is a great formula, however, for remaining on the fringe and ensuring that a minimum of "lame" people use your platform, which is a primary goal of most elitists.
Nothing against zealotry, after all, to each his own. But if you want your operating system to gain mindshare, it is the wrong way to approach advocacy.
It makes sense, and there is nothing wrong with any of those choices. Stop trying to save those that don't want saving.
It's not about "saving", no matter how you try to marginalize advocates as religious whackos pushing some lost cause on unwilling people. It's about improving accessibility, and with that comes an improvement in the cost/benefit ratio of your platform. That property in and of itself will draw people to migrate to your platform if the difference is significant enough from what they are currently using.
One part of accessibility is having an easy way to evaluate the software. For most people, that means that they need an installer that will not destroy their existing setup, requires little to no knowledge of the system they are installing, and makes sane decisions regarding their system setup, so they don't have to modprobe this and compile this and that after installing just to get a mouse or a sound card to work, or know what a crontab or resolv.conf is.
If I have the law-given right to make a backup copy then I also presumably have the right to use that copy.
Only the original copy or the backup may be in use at any one time. Otherwise, you are correct.
If they won't let me use it out of the box (DeCSS) then I'll have to break things (encryption or mod chips) to use it. And I'm not breaking any laws by doing so.
Wishful thinking. See DMCA.
If these companies were truly smart they wouldn't put this type of copy protection in place. All it does is make it harder for us ligitimate users to get buy. It does nothing to deter or slow down the hardcore pirates.
Wrong. Requiring the DMCA to be broken to make a copy gives them grounds for criminal action in addition to the usual civil claims against copyright infringers. It's about making sure that if a copy is made, as many laws as possible are broken in the process to ensure maximum implication for the pirates.
No you don't, unless you're makeing a parody. You're creating a derivative work in this case, and trying to sell your new artistic creation IS illegal, unless you were explicitly given the rights to do so or the work is in the public domain.
Troll. How much more full of shit could you be? Please explain to me how copyright law would restrict the sale of a work when you have made no copy of it.
Perhaps you should read the grandparent's post more carefully. He said he was PHYSICALLY REMOVING the objectionable parts and selling the hacked tape, not making a copy of the content with the parts removed and selling the copy.
The only thing that would prevent selling an altered medium is first the DMCA, and secondly this ridiculous notion that creators have moral rights not to have their works altered in any way and resold. It's like saying it should be illegal for me to purchase a painting, draw a moustache on it, and resell it. There is no basis in US law or case law to support such a claim.
Furthermore, I only play emulators for which I own the original games. I'm uptight that way, so sue me.
Wishful thinking, but unless you dumped the games yourself from the original media and are never using that backup copy at the same time as the original, that doesn't make it any more legal than if you had just downloaded them without owning them. Whoever distributed them to you still committed copyright infringement on their own (since they were not authorized to make a copy and distribute it), and if you knew they weren't supposed to be sending you a copy but downloaded it anyway, that can leave you guilty of conspiracy and/or contributory infringement.
I'm not saying this is something you should not be allowed to do, but the thought that it is legal under current US laws is just a dream, so please wake up.
I use mod chips, and I am only an occasional infringer of the try-before-you-buy sort, preferring the homebrew/porting scene to making unlawful copies of commercial games.
Outlaw the tool, or punish the illegal uses of the tool?
You can't have it both ways -- I'm either paying for the software license (in which case I have the right to make a backup or archival copy and they don't have the right to include technology that stops me from doing this) or I'm paying for the CD itself.
Yes, they want to have their cake and eat it too. Unfortunately, they are getting away with it.
And if I'm paying for the CD itself then it ought to cost a few bucks -- not $50.
That's not your decision to make. They charge the price that maximizes profit. If you consider it to be unreasonable, don't buy it. Note that asking a high price does not give others the right to make illegal copies.
Hell if I pay for the software license who says I have to use the software off the CD?
Where else are you going to obtain it? Anyone else who distributes it to you is violating copyright law. If you download something willfully knowing that you are breaking the law in doing so, you can also be guilty of conspiracy or contributory infringement.
Is it really illegal for me to go and download something off Kazaa that I already own?
Yes. Whoever sent it to you, if they are not the copyright holder and do not have permission to do so, is breaking the law. If you know they are breaking the law and download it anyway, you can be implicated.
Ditto for mp3s of songs that I already own the album for.
Ditto, indeed.
You have the right to make one non-transferable backup copy of a recorded medium under copyright law. That backup copy cannot be distributed to others, and it must be destroyed when the original copy is destroyed or its ownership is transfered. All other copying and redistribution rights are reserved by the copyright holder. This should not be a difficult notion to understand. If you disagree with the terms under which most copyrighted material is distributed, you may feel morally justified in breaking the rules, but it doesn't change the fact that doing so is against the law and opens you up to action from the copyright holder. Anything else is just wishful thinking.
And then there are the sort of folks who look around us and see the whole world in chains, and feel a moral obligation to do something about it.
Enjoy your ivory tower; meanwhile, the rest of us are sacrificing our time and money to make the real world better for everyone, including even those lowly lame people who can't figure out an elite OS like Gentoo or BSD.
We could live without having to rebuild the desktop after an unclean shutdown, though. That was really never any fun. Alt-F1, makeini, bla bla bla. Sigh.
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Only recently have these toolkits even approached a decent level of functionality. To coincide with that, interoperability standards began to be published on freedesktop.org. If KDE or GNOME does not conform to those standards, it is considered a bug. How much more can you ask for? Tell me you prefer Motif or something, since you seem to be sucking Sun's cock so cheerfully.
You really do resent people having choices in this world, don't you? GNU is free to implement whatever extensions they want. They also provide -ansi and -std=? to ensure that if you want no part of those extensions, none will slip by. GCC for years had things that the C99 standard just showed up with, such as inline functions, variadic macros, etc etc. What's better, an extension that can be disabled at the programmer's option to avoid straying from the standards, or nothing at all?Out of millions of reasons, you haven't bothered to list one. Look at Mono. Is it "fragmenting"? Why would anyone bother? Sun's Java distribution would be the reference Java distribution of the entire free software world. Far from encouraging forking and incompatibility, I think developers would leave the various incomplete Java projects behind and work on the one true Java. You're welcome to your opinion, but you have provided absolutely no prior occurrences to back up your baseless assertions that Open implies Forking and that Forking implies Incompatibility.Please, a little more vitriol in your sneering. Have you ever considered that Sun might want to wash its hands of being the primary supporter of Java? You don't know one way or the other, so making sarcastic comments about what might happen is pointless.Unfortunately, bnetd showed up and unwittingly threw a wrench in that scheme by providing a method for people who made illegal copies of Blizzard games to play over the Internet. Never mind that there were other good reasons for using a third-party Battle.net-compatible server to play games on; the perceived loss of leverage to get people to buy legal copies of Blizzard games is what drew the lawsuits from Vivendi. The DMCA just happened to be the only law broad enough for them to have had any ground to stand on.
Playing your DVD that you bought in whatever manner you see fit, on the other hand, harms no one except the people who would like to charge you a toll for using the product you already paid for. In any case, it does not infringe on their rights at all, only causes a loss of potential revenue. That is why DMCA is stupid; it is not protecting rights of copyright holder, only revenue stream.
It's very similar to SCO's claim that writing your code against the UNIX ABI somehow causes it to be a derived work of SCO's code. At least the FSF doesn't try to claim ownership of such code, though.
There is no way around the fact that dynamic linking happens at runtime, on the user's system, and under the control of the user. There is no possible way that a distributor could be held responsible for what a user does with the software. The only thing that could be argued is intent on the behalf of the distributor, if he distributed the GPL binary with linker references to a proprietary library within the same archive or from the same web site. But even that is shaky.
IMO, the dynamic vs static linking distinction should be dropped from GPLv3. It is a source of much confusion and dubious gain, while seeming almost like a EULA clause cloaked in sheep's clothing in that it tries to control what happens on the end user's system. Make no claim whatsoever about dynamic linking, but disallow distribution of statically linked proprietary applications and reserve that for LGPL licensed apps.
Another thing GPLv3 could do is specifically enumerate categories of license clauses which are not part of GPLv3 itself, but are nevertheless considered not to be non-free. Thus when you link software under GPLv3 and another free license, you don't have the silly problems caused by GPLv2's "You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein." The GPLv2 is preventing software which is under perfectly reasonable free software licenses (even according to the FSF!) from being aggregated with GPL works, simply because they have added a term to their license which is not non-free in the least, but nevertheless "imposes a further restriction" and causes its license to be incompatible with the GPL.
Are you seriously inferring that software is not a special case? Is it not different from physical materials which perform a fixed function, and printed works which describe something, while yet encompassing properties of both?
It is not so simple, and blithe analogies do little to underscore your position. I sympathize with your position though, as we all need profit to survive. Luckily, I am able to work in an area (web development) where I can hand the keys to the customer and it doesn't affect my chances of landing another job, as long as we have managed to please the customer.
Licensing the source code to your customers under the GPL isn't as damaging as you might think. Most companies would not even dream of giving away the custom application that they paid to have developed, to a competitor in their line of business. At worst they might sell it to a competitor, but are they equipped to develop and support it the same way you are? Experience has shown that this back-stabbing by business customers is rarely an issue. For consumer software, it might be quite a different case, because there is a strong incentive for sharing among friends.
RMS would have a better time convincing people of his position if he would work towards providing models under which people can write this "ethical" free software, and feed and clothe themselves and their families as well.
Maybe one idea would be to sell a proprietary package with the guarantee that at the time when support ceases or the product is no longer for sale, the software will be freed. Or say that once X units have been sold, it will be freed. Buyers who have the money will have an incentive to pay (because they don't get the software until after X people have paid), and in the long run, the users aren't stuck with an unmodifiable, non-redistributable, non-working piece of software that they paid good money for.
Of course, it's possible that I might not hear about a new platform or its specific advantages unless someone told me about it. Those people are called advocates. When they advocate their platform without paying attention to me or my needs, they are referred to as zealots. Zealots insist that their way is the best way and that you should mend your ways to fit their worldview if you want to use their elite OS.
Unfortunately, this is not such a good formula if you really believe your platform is better and wish to increase its userbase so that it can be even more successful. It is a great formula, however, for remaining on the fringe and ensuring that a minimum of "lame" people use your platform, which is a primary goal of most elitists.
Nothing against zealotry, after all, to each his own. But if you want your operating system to gain mindshare, it is the wrong way to approach advocacy.
It's not about "saving", no matter how you try to marginalize advocates as religious whackos pushing some lost cause on unwilling people. It's about improving accessibility, and with that comes an improvement in the cost/benefit ratio of your platform. That property in and of itself will draw people to migrate to your platform if the difference is significant enough from what they are currently using.One part of accessibility is having an easy way to evaluate the software. For most people, that means that they need an installer that will not destroy their existing setup, requires little to no knowledge of the system they are installing, and makes sane decisions regarding their system setup, so they don't have to modprobe this and compile this and that after installing just to get a mouse or a sound card to work, or know what a crontab or resolv.conf is.
Perhaps you should read the grandparent's post more carefully. He said he was PHYSICALLY REMOVING the objectionable parts and selling the hacked tape, not making a copy of the content with the parts removed and selling the copy.
The only thing that would prevent selling an altered medium is first the DMCA, and secondly this ridiculous notion that creators have moral rights not to have their works altered in any way and resold. It's like saying it should be illegal for me to purchase a painting, draw a moustache on it, and resell it. There is no basis in US law or case law to support such a claim.
I'm not saying this is something you should not be allowed to do, but the thought that it is legal under current US laws is just a dream, so please wake up.
Outlaw the tool, or punish the illegal uses of the tool?
You have the right to make one non-transferable backup copy of a recorded medium under copyright law. That backup copy cannot be distributed to others, and it must be destroyed when the original copy is destroyed or its ownership is transfered. All other copying and redistribution rights are reserved by the copyright holder. This should not be a difficult notion to understand. If you disagree with the terms under which most copyrighted material is distributed, you may feel morally justified in breaking the rules, but it doesn't change the fact that doing so is against the law and opens you up to action from the copyright holder. Anything else is just wishful thinking.
Enjoy your ivory tower; meanwhile, the rest of us are sacrificing our time and money to make the real world better for everyone, including even those lowly lame people who can't figure out an elite OS like Gentoo or BSD.