As far as I'm concerned, begging manufacturers to open source their drivers is whining. I don't think the OSS spirit is about forcing people to open their code.
I'm curious. How have you reached an equivalency of 'whining' with 'forcing' here? Let me guess, you're one of those people who contend that RMS is 'forcing' everyone to refer to a Linux distribution as GNU/Linux?
I think the implication that people would use force to get their way is thrown around just a little too lightly these days. A request for something that you disagree with, no matter how insistent and nonsensical, is not equivalent to a threat.
Occasionally, you will see a C programmer write something like if (0==strlen(x)), putting the constant on the left hand side of the == . This is a really good sign. It means that they were stung once too many times by confusing = and == and have forced themselves to learn a new habit to avoid that trap.
WTF? What kind of compiler would let you assign 0 to strlen(x) which is not a storage location?
I meant incentive in terms of bringing a product to market that would not have otherwise been invented, not incentive to get more patents to use as weapons. If something is brought to market, then society has gained something in trade for that govt-granted monopoly.
I'd have to second this. I bought two different swivel sockets and both of them broke the first time I used them. I returned them and the AZ guy was pretty much saying, "Yea, I'd have to agree that our tools are pretty crappy" and gave me my money back.
Parent was referring to patents, so I assumed you were too. Of course physical property makes more sense as a analogue for copyright law. But it is still flawed; in most cases involving copyright infringement (example: downloading a song) you have not harmed the copyright holder in any measurable way, whereas with theft they have lost what you have gained. See this previous post for clarification.
There are many facets innate to copyright that do not allow it to neatly fit within a property rights context (though it can certainly be shoe-horned into property rights if that sort of treatment reflects politicians' desires).
What are you talking about? The SX4 has a DIMM slot as well as a hardware parity engine. It's not as good as a dedicated RAID processor, but it's better than all the software "RAID" cards (including those from Promise) with _no_ onboard RAID processor or memory, and it's cheaper than the 3Ware solutions.
The problem is that the partially-host-dependent implementation doesn't really map well into what we already have support for; hardware RAID cards where the implementation details of the RAID are not exposed to the block driver, and software "RAID" cards which do nothing more than set up arrays in the BIOS and expect the host-based driver to pick up the array configuration stored on the disks, and do all the RAID work on the CPU (most HPT and Promise chips work like this).
Red Hat, which is a public company (which did yield a significant "going public benefit" to their founders) and is profiting from the work of countless unpaid volunteers and enthusiasts, is a very clever, but deeply unethical entity.
Why exactly is this "deeply unethical"? The authors of the code they are selling licensed it explicitly in a way that allows such use. If the original authors were anti-profit, they would have put one of those obnoxious no-commerce clauses in their licenses.
People who publish code under the GPL aren't bothered with other people commercializing their code, because they know that the purpose of the GPL is to ensure that no other entity can further restrict the right of the recipient of that code to modify and redistribute it. Because of this, third parties will usually have very little commercial leverage with GPL code, but nobody is stopping them from trying. The more copies of Red Hat's distribution are sold, the wider the audience for my software is, and the more patches get sent in to improve it for my own uses. Sounds like a damn good deal to me.
If you don't want to pay simply because you can copy it, you are engaging in theft- it's no different than any other good in the marketplace.
Wrong. It _is_ different, because patent law is not property law. Perhaps you are arguing that ideas _should_ be no different than any other physical good in the marketplace, but not spreading misconceptions while presenting your opinion would be preferable.
Also, consider the possibility that the same process was independently developed. Is it still "theft"? It doesn't map as easily onto property law now, does it? Yet independently developing a process which happens to be covered by a patent is still a breach of patent law.
IMHO, returning a corporation to its original status of a group of accountabe individuals with individual rights and copyrights, rather than the current status of an untouchable person, would correct many of our current problems.
When was it _ever_ like this? The entire point of a corporation is to limit individual liability in the case of a business failure. If you make individuals "touchable", then they can be completely wiped out by a failed business venture, instead of the general economy absorbing the loss due to the risk. Not a good recipe for motivating people to start up businesses. Let's not throw the baby out with the dirty water.
I agree with your sentiment that copyrights should be owned by an individual, but they should certainly be transferable to other individuals. How would GNU gain copyright for code I submit to the GCC project otherwise? Every project with more than 1 contributor would be a horrendous mess of keeping track of who owns what part of the code, what is a derivative of what else, etc, instead of adopting a policy of "anything you submit to this project becomes (C) The Project" like most open source projects do (notable exceptions: XFree86, Linux). An individual should be able to choose to sign his copyright away under any terms he chooses. The benefit of this is that when individuals leave companies, their works (and the works of those who have assigned their rights to that person as a steward) travel with that person, instead of remaining a monopoly grab bag for that corporation, which may exist indefinitely (as well as the copyrights themselves).
Uh-huh. Try doing that when your computer no longer runs code that isn't "trusted" (trusted by your friends at MicroSoft, that is). At best, it's a short term kludge around the problem.
1) Require the patent to be used within X period of time in a product which is made available for sale. This may or may not work for smaller inventors who might need time to capitalize before offering the product. Or if they try to sell the product to a company, the company can just refuse, knowing the inventor wouldn't be able to market it himself, and just use his idea when the patent short-circuits due to non-use.
2) Simply invalidate patents in areas where patents are being used purely as anticompetitive measures instead of as incentive. Example: patents on software concepts or Internet business models. I think this is a much better approach. Even if patents are granted in these areas, a judge can easily strike them down just by categorical analysis.
All sarcasm aside, people have always preferred free to paying for something but, the creators of the copyrighted material do deserve to make a living off of their work.
No. They deserve the _opportunity_ to make a living off of their work. They do not deserve a free ride just because they are "creators of copyrighted material". What if their creation sucks? Of course, in a planned economy, your argument would probably have more weight.
In this country, I think it is a better idea to allow competition. Even if that competition sells a competing product for a lower price. Even if it means Kid Rock will be starving in the street because people preferred to listen to local bands at the coffee house for free instead of buying his latest album. If we reject the necessity of competition and consumer alternatives in avoiding societal stagnation, we might as well throw away capitalism and start over.
Consider: every theorem (including algorithms) in existence today was already contained implicitly in the fundamental axioms and definitions by which it was proved. So who gets the credit?
The universe is not based upon the "fundamental" axioms and definitions that we use to model its behavior. It is arguable that by observation we will never be able to determine what the true fundamentals of the universe are, because there for every n observed behaviors, the (n+1)'th behavior might break the model that we established for the first n events.
People spend their time observing physical events to derive the set of universal models known to us, of which a certain subset are useful models for a given application. It is this time spent in research and thought that we seek to reward, because having a more diverse and accurate range of models available for use is valuable to industries that use them.
As long as we don't have a hotline to the Creator of the Universe (if the Universe was a planned thing, that is), there will be a demand for people to create those models. If we allow people that are predisposed toward that line of work to protect their creations for a limited time so that they may live securely, they will be more inclined to pursue the higher education and immense amounts of experimental time necessary to devise the models that industry wants. Otherwise, who would bother? I'm going to spend 10 years after a PhD on the hopes that some company will hire me, because I can't protect the work I produce on my own? That's not a good formula for incentive, at least as far as human motivation goes.
Huh? Doing a block copy from a disc (i.e. dd) will give you the 'cooked' image, in other words, the ISO filesystem image. Try it on a CD sometime. You will get a 2048 byte/sector ISO filesystem image.
Sometimes people refer to 'raw' images as ISO images and even tag them with an ISO extension, which is wrong. To get a raw image, you need a program to use the special device ioctls to read subchannel/ECC data, for example cdrdao does this. The resulting image is a 2352 bytes/sector image and cannot be loop mounted as an ISO filesystem.
The sooner we make more Windows boxes secure by default, the sooner the federal government will stop trying to wrestle control and governance of the Internet away from private interests.
Wow, really insightful. Could be summed up as "gimme gimme gimme the code with no strings attached, your personal opinion as the creator of the work doesn't matter".
How about looking at it in terms of economic motivation? For certain types of people (arguably, most people), the GPL provides incentive to create free software where otherwise one wouldn't have bothered. Without the GPL, some of them might begrudgingly release code under a public domain-ish license, but most these people would either be coding proprietary software or not at all.
Which world would you rather have? A world with the GPL as a licensing option, or a world without it? The first world has more free software available, software that respects the rights of the user instead of trying to control the user through EULAs and insidious distribution terms. Regardless of the moaning of anti-GPL types like yourself I'll take the first world where I have more choice as a user and as a creative producer. Begrudging others of their choices when it comes at no cost to you is simply ridiculous. Nobody is going to be sympathetic to your whining because you can't have others' work on YOUR terms.
News flash: you can run software with virtually any license as long as you agree to the conditions.
Anyone who tells you otherwise is a EULA proponent. While technically EULAs might be enforceable contracts, they have never been tested in the courts, and currently serve as nothing more than a glimmer of hope by proprietary software companies that they might be able to legally control the end user of their software.
News flash: you can run software with virtually any license as long as you agree to the conditions. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a EULA proponent. While technically EULAs might be enforceable contracts, they have never been tested in the courts, and currently serve as nothing more than a glimmer of hope by proprietary software companies that they might be able to legally control the end user of their software.
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I think the implication that people would use force to get their way is thrown around just a little too lightly these days. A request for something that you disagree with, no matter how insistent and nonsensical, is not equivalent to a threat.
LGPL partially relaxes this, but you still can't statically link with a LGPL library without providing object modules for the user to re-link.
There are many facets innate to copyright that do not allow it to neatly fit within a property rights context (though it can certainly be shoe-horned into property rights if that sort of treatment reflects politicians' desires).
apt-get source foo
cd foo && patch < ~/my-foo-patches
debuild && debi
or if you just like building everything from source like gentoo people, man apt-src.
apt-get source foo
cd foo && patch debuild && debi
The problem is that the partially-host-dependent implementation doesn't really map well into what we already have support for; hardware RAID cards where the implementation details of the RAID are not exposed to the block driver, and software "RAID" cards which do nothing more than set up arrays in the BIOS and expect the host-based driver to pick up the array configuration stored on the disks, and do all the RAID work on the CPU (most HPT and Promise chips work like this).
People who publish code under the GPL aren't bothered with other people commercializing their code, because they know that the purpose of the GPL is to ensure that no other entity can further restrict the right of the recipient of that code to modify and redistribute it. Because of this, third parties will usually have very little commercial leverage with GPL code, but nobody is stopping them from trying. The more copies of Red Hat's distribution are sold, the wider the audience for my software is, and the more patches get sent in to improve it for my own uses. Sounds like a damn good deal to me.
Also, consider the possibility that the same process was independently developed. Is it still "theft"? It doesn't map as easily onto property law now, does it? Yet independently developing a process which happens to be covered by a patent is still a breach of patent law.
I agree with your sentiment that copyrights should be owned by an individual, but they should certainly be transferable to other individuals. How would GNU gain copyright for code I submit to the GCC project otherwise? Every project with more than 1 contributor would be a horrendous mess of keeping track of who owns what part of the code, what is a derivative of what else, etc, instead of adopting a policy of "anything you submit to this project becomes (C) The Project" like most open source projects do (notable exceptions: XFree86, Linux). An individual should be able to choose to sign his copyright away under any terms he chooses. The benefit of this is that when individuals leave companies, their works (and the works of those who have assigned their rights to that person as a steward) travel with that person, instead of remaining a monopoly grab bag for that corporation, which may exist indefinitely (as well as the copyrights themselves).
1) Require the patent to be used within X period of time in a product which is made available for sale. This may or may not work for smaller inventors who might need time to capitalize before offering the product. Or if they try to sell the product to a company, the company can just refuse, knowing the inventor wouldn't be able to market it himself, and just use his idea when the patent short-circuits due to non-use.
2) Simply invalidate patents in areas where patents are being used purely as anticompetitive measures instead of as incentive. Example: patents on software concepts or Internet business models. I think this is a much better approach. Even if patents are granted in these areas, a judge can easily strike them down just by categorical analysis.
In this country, I think it is a better idea to allow competition. Even if that competition sells a competing product for a lower price. Even if it means Kid Rock will be starving in the street because people preferred to listen to local bands at the coffee house for free instead of buying his latest album. If we reject the necessity of competition and consumer alternatives in avoiding societal stagnation, we might as well throw away capitalism and start over.
People spend their time observing physical events to derive the set of universal models known to us, of which a certain subset are useful models for a given application. It is this time spent in research and thought that we seek to reward, because having a more diverse and accurate range of models available for use is valuable to industries that use them.
As long as we don't have a hotline to the Creator of the Universe (if the Universe was a planned thing, that is), there will be a demand for people to create those models. If we allow people that are predisposed toward that line of work to protect their creations for a limited time so that they may live securely, they will be more inclined to pursue the higher education and immense amounts of experimental time necessary to devise the models that industry wants. Otherwise, who would bother? I'm going to spend 10 years after a PhD on the hopes that some company will hire me, because I can't protect the work I produce on my own? That's not a good formula for incentive, at least as far as human motivation goes.
Sometimes people refer to 'raw' images as ISO images and even tag them with an ISO extension, which is wrong. To get a raw image, you need a program to use the special device ioctls to read subchannel/ECC data, for example cdrdao does this. The resulting image is a 2352 bytes/sector image and cannot be loop mounted as an ISO filesystem.
How about looking at it in terms of economic motivation? For certain types of people (arguably, most people), the GPL provides incentive to create free software where otherwise one wouldn't have bothered. Without the GPL, some of them might begrudgingly release code under a public domain-ish license, but most these people would either be coding proprietary software or not at all.
Which world would you rather have? A world with the GPL as a licensing option, or a world without it? The first world has more free software available, software that respects the rights of the user instead of trying to control the user through EULAs and insidious distribution terms. Regardless of the moaning of anti-GPL types like yourself I'll take the first world where I have more choice as a user and as a creative producer. Begrudging others of their choices when it comes at no cost to you is simply ridiculous. Nobody is going to be sympathetic to your whining because you can't have others' work on YOUR terms.