I'll give the same old trite response: apples, oranges. You own the car. With software, you only own the right to use one instance of it - right to use, not right to do whatever you want.
It isn't apples and oranges. You own the copy of the software. That's why you can, for example, sell your copy of the software just like you can sell your car. You cannot sell a copy of the software because that would violate copyright, but that's not what we're talking about.
Certainly software companies would like for it to work the way you describe, and are doing their best to pressure lawmakers into making it happen. They'd love it if you couldn't use their word processor to write critical reviews of the word processor, or use their compiler to write Free Software, or if you couldn't reverse engineering their crappy code. Well, too bad for them and you.
Just like a radio station can't go buy a cd at a store and then play it over the airways - when you buy it at the store, you don't buy the rights to do anything and everything you want with it.
It isn't like that at all. Why can't a radio station broadcast a CD? Because that is considered a public performance, and thus would violate copyright. The station needs a license from the copyright holder in order to perform the music.
Reverse engineering has nothing to do with copyright... well, again until the DMCA, but in theory only when reverse engineering a copy-protection mechanism. You are the one with the apples-to-oranges comparison.
If you'd like a starter course on property law, someone else will have to give it to you.
You got that right.
Me, I truly believe information should be free, and only personal information (like, your bank account #'s, passcodes, etc) has any business being private. I'm a big supporter of all our little neo-communist mechanisms in the OSS movement. But really...don't get ownership of a car confused with ownership of software.
Don't get right to privacy confused with a right to reverse engineer! I disagree that only a handful of things should be allowed to be private, but as soon as I distribute something in the form of a car or software then the information contained therein should be discoverable.
Ownership of cars and software are not confused, they are parallel. Software isn't magic.
So the Chineese govt. murders 800-2600 peaceful protesters in Tiananmen Square in Peking in 1989.
But Beijing said they were very, very sorry about that. Um... didn't they? Erm...
Do any of these rotten bastards have any sense of proportion?
Of course they do! Piracy hurts their business in some way, and killing protestors or otherwise oppressing the Chinese population doesn't. Who cares if the people have the right to disent, or even to choose whether or not to reproduce, so long as they are buying legitimate copies of Alien Vs. Predator?
Remember when the government used to vocal about China's human rights abuses, back when their economy was nascent and both their politics and economics were strictly totalitarian? Well, they liberalized their economy, drawing in tons of foreign investment, and experienced a boom without liberalizing their politics at all. U.S. (et. all.) business interests dove in like starving hyenas, and now there's no way our government would hurt these business interests by trying to pressure China to reform politically. On the contrary; now they're being pressured for being too liberal economically, and not respecting our government-granted monopolies!
Frankly, I don't know what else you need to see in order to believe that our government is run by business interests at the expense of everyone else. Human rights? We've heard of it; maybe we can use it to negotiate a better trade agreement...
You've made a common amateur mistake when benchmarking vegetables. You see, vegetables are very shy and in fact won't race at all while you are watching. Don't try putting a camera on them either; their evolved shyness allows them to easily detect when they are being observed.
So put your vegetables back on the track, and leave them alone so they can race in privacy. They'll certainly have moved back to their starting positions by the time you return, but I'm sure you'll find them in concensus that the celery won handily. They didn't get their reputation for nothing!
The author of code that is released under the GPL still retains the copyright, and thus is perfectly free to release their own code under any license they want.
However if they wish to incorporate GPL code into their own code, or vice versa, then they must distribute the combination under the GPL.
So they absolutely have the choice -- use the GPL code and therefore release their own modifications under the GPL. Or don't.
Most wars are about resources. Whether it's land for farming or population growth, slaves, gold, or oil.
Oh... you meant why do the people agree to go to war when they aren't going to be seeing much if any benefit assuming they even come back alive? Then yes, religious fundamentalism is probably number one. Nationalism or racism are also popular.
Logically you'd expect Intel, IBM or AMD to snatch them up as some sort of IP asset or leverage against a competitor, but Intel's scrambling against AMD, which hasn't exactly had lots of money to burn on other fronts, which left IBM who probably will pick up the ashes, unless Microsoft does and uses it for their Windows Processor...
Naw, they'll just snarf up as many of the good engineers as they can, which is what they've been doing all along. Cheaper in the short run, and more valuable in the long run. What would you rather have -- some IP that you may or may not ever use in an actual product, or the minds that came up with that IP and made it work in the first place?
for putting publicly available but apparently embarassing information in a highly visible place.
Are they as irrelevent now as SCO will be after they lose their case? Yes. Do I still want to hear about it when it happens so I can laugh at them? Yes. Yes I do.
There is a good reason to be leary of machines: automated fuckups.
The blessing and curse of machines is that they can do the same thing a thousand times over precisely and very quickly. If it's the right thing, they're great. If it's the wrong thing, you're really screwed. To manipulate your example, if 100 people stupidly forwarded a virus-laden email to all their friends, that would be bad. When someone invents an email client that can do the forwarding automatically without the human doing anything, you get "I Love You". Or imagine a nurse filling a dozen syringes with the wrong dosage versus a machine filling several cabinets full.
Machines are great, but I am absolutely for having only the highest of standards for their use for medical purposes. The laws should not however be based around banning machines, but around nailing anyone to the wall who sells a faulty machine due to negligence, inadequate testing, or fraud. I'd like to think the mechanism and laws for this are in place, but recently the FDA has been, shall we say, dissapointing.
Then how exactly can you justify the GPL? It's a control mechanism that restricts what you can do with the "stuff", and by your own logic is a civil rights issue, and should be "immoral".
Are you deliberately misunderstanding me, or do you seriously think I was advocating anarchy? What you can do with your "stuff" is a civil rights issue, but that doesn't mean any restriction is immoral, and I didn't come close to saying otherwise.
The GPL gives you the freedom to use, modify, and distribute the software however you want. The only restriction is that when distributing you cannot take these freedoms away from others. Do you feel less free because your "freedom" to lock people up in your basement has been taken away? Or are you more free because others don't have the right to do this to you?
The freedom to do anything except take others' freedom away is the greatest level of freedom for everyone.
I'm surprised that this is so difficult for some people to understand.
The GPL tries to artificially create a condition in which it's impossible for intellectual property to exist. It does this be compelling those that adhere to it to follow restrictions. It is, itself, the very thing that it abhors. You don't see the hypocricy in that?
That's not hypocrisy, that's called "working within the system". "Intellectual property" is what is artificial. Using copyright law against itself to ensure freedom isn't hypocrisy, it's genius.
That's a straw man, since we're not talking about the government here. We're talking about individuals intellectual creations, and the restrictions placed ont those creations by those that inspired them.
No, it's hyperbole to illustrate how "stuff" can become a civil rights issue. And what does it matter if it's the government saying you can't wear white shoes or if it's Nike saying you can't wear white shoes with government enforcement? Either way you wind up in jail and/or shot.
Also note the subtle misdirection -- you probably didn't even inted it -- in your statement. The copyrights are typically held by the corporation, and the licenses are meant to benefit that entity. The actual creators experience at best a tiny fraction of that benefit.
The problem with that, is that it discourages more advanced (and expensive) creation if there is no control at all. I might be willing to whip out a lymeric, but i'm less likely to write a 1500 page novel if I have no way to compensate myself for the time lost when I could be earning a living doing something else.
So the theory goes, but centuries of creation before copyright suggests otherwise.
Creativity should be rewarded. Depending on creativity only from those who seek no reward is a VERY slow pace of innovation.
That old false dichotomy: proprietary software, or no compensation whatsoever. Let's ignore all the people innovating behind closed doors with custom software benefiting their business, and all the people getting paid to develop Free Software. And lets forget all the innovations that result from companies being able to use free software and thus devote more resources to creating.
You know, I used to feel very impassioned by these discussions. I believed strongly in the cause and in the results it could achieve, but they felt ephemeral. These days, with numerous companies large and small developing and benefiting and profiting from software libre I feel the conclusion is basically proven. Free software can and does produce innovation, both with profit motive and without. Thus it doesn't bother me that some don't recognize it.
Did it ever occur to you that people work on proprietary software to make money, because they like to buy all sorts of things that require money, and they don't see software as a movement, but rather as "stuff" that runs on a computer? The main issue the people you cannot understand have is you try to equate the 1's and 0's of binary software with the issues involving civil rights or religious freedom or democracy. They're not the same. Software is just a "thing" that people use. The others are real issues that are important to fight and die for. One really sounds like a loser when one tries to elevate software to that level. I know the first thought in *MY* mind is "Why don't you find a REAL cause instead of pretending you have a valid crusade with this free software business"?
Everything is just "stuff"; programs are just "stuff" than run on a computer and books are just "stuff" that are spewed out by a printing press. Would you call me a crackpot for equating the 'A's 'B's and 'C's of the printed page with civil liberties?
The question of civil liberties is never about the "stuff", because it's just "stuff". The question arises when humans decide what they're going to allow other humans to do with the stuff. When you're allowed to have a printing press, but restricted in what you can print with it or in whether you can change how it operates, that is a civil rights issue.
The computer is the printing press of our time. It has been made abundantly clear that certain forces wish to take as much control of this society-changing invention out of the people's hands and into their hands as possible. All the speculative warnings about where non-free software is taking us is coming frighteningly close to reality. The only reason this may fail is because some people started to treat this like a civil rights issue ten, twenty years ago and now a system that respects your rights exists.
Nobody has had to fight and die for these rights; thank God. That doesn't make it a non-issue. And I guarantee you I would fight and die for them just like I would fight against a person who said a printing press was just "stuff".
Its like trying to make a moral issue out of wearing white shoes after labor day.
Yeah, that's ridiculous, because shoes are just stuff! By the way, I'm the government and if you wear white shoes after labor day you'll be imprisoned and/or shot. Have a nice day.
Do you mean 1854? There are pictures of the moon from before 1954 (they could have been forged, but there's a lot of them), but I can't find any pictures of the moon prior to the 1850s. Hmm...
The third thing that makes Wikipedia unlike any other encylopedia, in my mind just as important as the two you mention, is the existence of a change history. By itself this makes Wiki better than any of the other encyclopedias.
We can talk about revert wars, and in fact we can see how they happened. When you pick up your Encylopedia Britannica, can you see what disagreements existed between the author, the editor, and the publisher? Can you see what changed between one revision and the next? Being able to see how the encyclopedia got to where it is -- be that an excellent article or a terrible one -- is a great advantage.
Keep in mind that when we're talking about GPL compliance, "use" generally means "modifying and/or redistributing". So the patent clause would prevent you from distributing GPL software.
China oh China when will you give up, and be democratic.. so that you can kick our American financial butts?
See, there's a huge problem with this thinking: Democracy is a political system and Capitalism is an economic system.
We here in the States have been taught to equate the two, but China is demonstrating that they don't have to be. They are becoming more and more capitalist in economics, while not becoming any more Democratic in politics. They seem to have realized that a strictly managed economy just doesn't allow for the growth and foreign investment that capitalism does, and so they're loosening the reigns on the economy. Granted some of this effects the freedom of their people -- e.g. they have an internet which despite the best intentions of Beijing is not completely censored of "dangerous" thought. But on the other hand you have Google voluntarily disappearing news articles because the alternative is to not do business in China.
I really wish we could use economics to generate political change in China, but that doesn't seem to be what is happening. Our corporations are way to eager to get their hands on that Chinese market, so we're giving them all the benefit while asking for nothing in return. once we're done transfering our entire manufacturing and IT base over to China, what lever are we going to have to spur them towards Democracy? What will stop them from kicking our butts financially while remaining as oppressive as ever?
Remember, just because a Democratic Capitalist country has been winning the economic wars of the last sixty years doesn't mean the winner must always be Democratic Capitalist. Especially if the Democratic Capitalist can't stop their CEOs from gleefully shipping all their money to the Totalitarian Capitalist state.
You've got the conflict down, but the solution isn't quite there, i don't think.
Remember, the purpose of Trusted Computing is that they (meaning MS, RIAA, etc) don't trust you. The point is to stop you from running a program that might not, say, respect the RIAA's wishes for what you do with music files. In this sense, GPL and all free software is a complete anathema to the regime of Trusted Computing.
From the not-so-evil standpoint of security, this still may not work since then all an attacker needs to do is figure out how to invoke the compiler and they can produce trusted binaries.
Anyway, I don't think trusted computing is good for free software in any way.
Yeah, Mr. AC already pointed that out. I would have been correct if I said "That's why Version 2 allows you to specify than recipients can use any later version, and the FAQ suggests that you do"
Good point. Section 9 specifies that you may receive a copy that specifies "Version X or any later version" or no version at all (and then you can use whatever version you want).
I know, this is obvious. Though the company could release their entire program under the GPL if they wanted to avoid possible fines and damages. But yeah, the penalty for violating the GPL is pretty much the same as violating any other copyright, and anything else is FUD.
Re:The GPL should be a little friendler.
on
Revising the GPL
·
· Score: 1, Troll
I would like to be able to use pattened by me technology in my Open Source Program but I don't want just everyone to use it, I don't mind if everyone sees it or alters it a bit but I don't want it to become part of MS Office without me getting some Bucks for it.
First, fuck you* for wanting to patent math. That's what software is: Iterative math.
Second, I don't think the intent is that MS would be able to use your patent in Office without releasing Office under the GPL -- which would be fine if they did, right? The article wasn't specific, but surely the FS lawyers involved in creating Version 3 will only want the grant of patent rights to be for the purposes of the GPL software.
Patents are fundamentally a monopoly on an idea. GPL is about releasing an idea into the commons. You pretty much can only pick one or the other.
* don't get offended; as Lewis Black once said regarding New Yorkers "'fuck' isn't a word, it's a comma". If you're still offended, well, fuck you.:)
Um, no you douche, it's right because it's a clear and consice statement of what every GPL (or similar license) supporter fundamentally wants.
Linus has been totally wrong before. He's a normal guy. Yet the fact remains that he is a very intelligent and insightful normal guy, and this is a perfect example of it.
There's idol worship, and there's recognizing when someone is smart and worth listening to. There may be plenty of the former around here, but this is definitely an example of the latter.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll give the same old trite response: apples, oranges. You own the car. With software, you only own the right to use one instance of it - right to use, not right to do whatever you want.
It isn't apples and oranges. You own the copy of the software. That's why you can, for example, sell your copy of the software just like you can sell your car. You cannot sell a copy of the software because that would violate copyright, but that's not what we're talking about.
Certainly software companies would like for it to work the way you describe, and are doing their best to pressure lawmakers into making it happen. They'd love it if you couldn't use their word processor to write critical reviews of the word processor, or use their compiler to write Free Software, or if you couldn't reverse engineering their crappy code. Well, too bad for them and you.
Just like a radio station can't go buy a cd at a store and then play it over the airways - when you buy it at the store, you don't buy the rights to do anything and everything you want with it.
It isn't like that at all. Why can't a radio station broadcast a CD? Because that is considered a public performance, and thus would violate copyright. The station needs a license from the copyright holder in order to perform the music.
Reverse engineering has nothing to do with copyright... well, again until the DMCA, but in theory only when reverse engineering a copy-protection mechanism. You are the one with the apples-to-oranges comparison.
If you'd like a starter course on property law, someone else will have to give it to you.
You got that right.
Me, I truly believe information should be free, and only personal information (like, your bank account #'s, passcodes, etc) has any business being private. I'm a big supporter of all our little neo-communist mechanisms in the OSS movement. But really...don't get ownership of a car confused with ownership of software.
Don't get right to privacy confused with a right to reverse engineer! I disagree that only a handful of things should be allowed to be private, but as soon as I distribute something in the form of a car or software then the information contained therein should be discoverable.
Ownership of cars and software are not confused, they are parallel. Software isn't magic.
So the Chineese govt. murders 800-2600 peaceful protesters in Tiananmen Square in Peking in 1989.
But Beijing said they were very, very sorry about that. Um... didn't they? Erm...
Do any of these rotten bastards have any sense of proportion?
Of course they do! Piracy hurts their business in some way, and killing protestors or otherwise oppressing the Chinese population doesn't. Who cares if the people have the right to disent, or even to choose whether or not to reproduce, so long as they are buying legitimate copies of Alien Vs. Predator?
Remember when the government used to vocal about China's human rights abuses, back when their economy was nascent and both their politics and economics were strictly totalitarian? Well, they liberalized their economy, drawing in tons of foreign investment, and experienced a boom without liberalizing their politics at all. U.S. (et. all.) business interests dove in like starving hyenas, and now there's no way our government would hurt these business interests by trying to pressure China to reform politically. On the contrary; now they're being pressured for being too liberal economically, and not respecting our government-granted monopolies!
Frankly, I don't know what else you need to see in order to believe that our government is run by business interests at the expense of everyone else. Human rights? We've heard of it; maybe we can use it to negotiate a better trade agreement...
I'm not off in the woods killing bunnies for the sake of killing bunnies.
But... you can go off into the woods to kill bunnies just for the sake of killing bunnies, can't you? I sure hope so. Damn bunnies...
You've made a common amateur mistake when benchmarking vegetables. You see, vegetables are very shy and in fact won't race at all while you are watching. Don't try putting a camera on them either; their evolved shyness allows them to easily detect when they are being observed.
So put your vegetables back on the track, and leave them alone so they can race in privacy. They'll certainly have moved back to their starting positions by the time you return, but I'm sure you'll find them in concensus that the celery won handily. They didn't get their reputation for nothing!
Absolutely and completely false at every level.
The author of code that is released under the GPL still retains the copyright, and thus is perfectly free to release their own code under any license they want.
However if they wish to incorporate GPL code into their own code, or vice versa, then they must distribute the combination under the GPL.
So they absolutely have the choice -- use the GPL code and therefore release their own modifications under the GPL. Or don't.
Most wars are about resources. Whether it's land for farming or population growth, slaves, gold, or oil.
Oh... you meant why do the people agree to go to war when they aren't going to be seeing much if any benefit assuming they even come back alive? Then yes, religious fundamentalism is probably number one. Nationalism or racism are also popular.
That leaves about 6 square inches that is safe for stapling.
Hmmm... about 6 inches... where have I heard that before?
If you're talking about what I think you are, and it's only six square inches, you should probably start saving for a sports car right now.
"You have the freedom to do anything but deny freedom to others" are not big fat chains, and are only strings to the sociopathically greedy.
Logically you'd expect Intel, IBM or AMD to snatch them up as some sort of IP asset or leverage against a competitor, but Intel's scrambling against AMD, which hasn't exactly had lots of money to burn on other fronts, which left IBM who probably will pick up the ashes, unless Microsoft does and uses it for their Windows Processor ...
Naw, they'll just snarf up as many of the good engineers as they can, which is what they've been doing all along. Cheaper in the short run, and more valuable in the long run. What would you rather have -- some IP that you may or may not ever use in an actual product, or the minds that came up with that IP and made it work in the first place?
for putting publicly available but apparently embarassing information in a highly visible place.
Are they as irrelevent now as SCO will be after they lose their case? Yes. Do I still want to hear about it when it happens so I can laugh at them? Yes. Yes I do.
To Infinium Labs: Ha ha!
There is a good reason to be leary of machines: automated fuckups.
The blessing and curse of machines is that they can do the same thing a thousand times over precisely and very quickly. If it's the right thing, they're great. If it's the wrong thing, you're really screwed. To manipulate your example, if 100 people stupidly forwarded a virus-laden email to all their friends, that would be bad. When someone invents an email client that can do the forwarding automatically without the human doing anything, you get "I Love You". Or imagine a nurse filling a dozen syringes with the wrong dosage versus a machine filling several cabinets full.
Machines are great, but I am absolutely for having only the highest of standards for their use for medical purposes. The laws should not however be based around banning machines, but around nailing anyone to the wall who sells a faulty machine due to negligence, inadequate testing, or fraud. I'd like to think the mechanism and laws for this are in place, but recently the FDA has been, shall we say, dissapointing.
Are you deliberately misunderstanding me, or do you seriously think I was advocating anarchy? What you can do with your "stuff" is a civil rights issue, but that doesn't mean any restriction is immoral, and I didn't come close to saying otherwise.
The GPL gives you the freedom to use, modify, and distribute the software however you want. The only restriction is that when distributing you cannot take these freedoms away from others. Do you feel less free because your "freedom" to lock people up in your basement has been taken away? Or are you more free because others don't have the right to do this to you?
The freedom to do anything except take others' freedom away is the greatest level of freedom for everyone.
I'm surprised that this is so difficult for some people to understand.
That's not hypocrisy, that's called "working within the system". "Intellectual property" is what is artificial. Using copyright law against itself to ensure freedom isn't hypocrisy, it's genius.
No, it's hyperbole to illustrate how "stuff" can become a civil rights issue. And what does it matter if it's the government saying you can't wear white shoes or if it's Nike saying you can't wear white shoes with government enforcement? Either way you wind up in jail and/or shot.
Also note the subtle misdirection -- you probably didn't even inted it -- in your statement. The copyrights are typically held by the corporation, and the licenses are meant to benefit that entity. The actual creators experience at best a tiny fraction of that benefit.
So the theory goes, but centuries of creation before copyright suggests otherwise.
That old false dichotomy: proprietary software, or no compensation whatsoever. Let's ignore all the people innovating behind closed doors with custom software benefiting their business, and all the people getting paid to develop Free Software. And lets forget all the innovations that result from companies being able to use free software and thus devote more resources to creating.
You know, I used to feel very impassioned by these discussions. I believed strongly in the cause and in the results it could achieve, but they felt ephemeral. These days, with numerous companies large and small developing and benefiting and profiting from software libre I feel the conclusion is basically proven. Free software can and does produce innovation, both with profit motive and without. Thus it doesn't bother me that some don't recognize it.
Did it ever occur to you that people work on proprietary software to make money, because they like to buy all sorts of things that require money, and they don't see software as a movement, but rather as "stuff" that runs on a computer? The main issue the people you cannot understand have is you try to equate the 1's and 0's of binary software with the issues involving civil rights or religious freedom or democracy. They're not the same. Software is just a "thing" that people use. The others are real issues that are important to fight and die for. One really sounds like a loser when one tries to elevate software to that level. I know the first thought in *MY* mind is "Why don't you find a REAL cause instead of pretending you have a valid crusade with this free software business"?
Everything is just "stuff"; programs are just "stuff" than run on a computer and books are just "stuff" that are spewed out by a printing press. Would you call me a crackpot for equating the 'A's 'B's and 'C's of the printed page with civil liberties?
The question of civil liberties is never about the "stuff", because it's just "stuff". The question arises when humans decide what they're going to allow other humans to do with the stuff. When you're allowed to have a printing press, but restricted in what you can print with it or in whether you can change how it operates, that is a civil rights issue.
The computer is the printing press of our time. It has been made abundantly clear that certain forces wish to take as much control of this society-changing invention out of the people's hands and into their hands as possible. All the speculative warnings about where non-free software is taking us is coming frighteningly close to reality. The only reason this may fail is because some people started to treat this like a civil rights issue ten, twenty years ago and now a system that respects your rights exists.
Nobody has had to fight and die for these rights; thank God. That doesn't make it a non-issue. And I guarantee you I would fight and die for them just like I would fight against a person who said a printing press was just "stuff".
Its like trying to make a moral issue out of wearing white shoes after labor day.
Yeah, that's ridiculous, because shoes are just stuff! By the way, I'm the government and if you wear white shoes after labor day you'll be imprisoned and/or shot. Have a nice day.
Wouldn't the danger be greater from telephoto cameras than from spy satellites? Or maybe a camera carried by two swallows...
Do you mean 1854? There are pictures of the moon from before 1954 (they could have been forged, but there's a lot of them), but I can't find any pictures of the moon prior to the 1850s. Hmm...
The third thing that makes Wikipedia unlike any other encylopedia, in my mind just as important as the two you mention, is the existence of a change history. By itself this makes Wiki better than any of the other encyclopedias.
We can talk about revert wars, and in fact we can see how they happened. When you pick up your Encylopedia Britannica, can you see what disagreements existed between the author, the editor, and the publisher? Can you see what changed between one revision and the next? Being able to see how the encyclopedia got to where it is -- be that an excellent article or a terrible one -- is a great advantage.
FYI: The parent post was completely made up nonsense.
Keep in mind that when we're talking about GPL compliance, "use" generally means "modifying and/or redistributing". So the patent clause would prevent you from distributing GPL software.
China oh China when will you give up, and be democratic.. so that you can kick our American financial butts?
See, there's a huge problem with this thinking: Democracy is a political system and Capitalism is an economic system.
We here in the States have been taught to equate the two, but China is demonstrating that they don't have to be. They are becoming more and more capitalist in economics, while not becoming any more Democratic in politics. They seem to have realized that a strictly managed economy just doesn't allow for the growth and foreign investment that capitalism does, and so they're loosening the reigns on the economy. Granted some of this effects the freedom of their people -- e.g. they have an internet which despite the best intentions of Beijing is not completely censored of "dangerous" thought. But on the other hand you have Google voluntarily disappearing news articles because the alternative is to not do business in China.
I really wish we could use economics to generate political change in China, but that doesn't seem to be what is happening. Our corporations are way to eager to get their hands on that Chinese market, so we're giving them all the benefit while asking for nothing in return. once we're done transfering our entire manufacturing and IT base over to China, what lever are we going to have to spur them towards Democracy? What will stop them from kicking our butts financially while remaining as oppressive as ever?
Remember, just because a Democratic Capitalist country has been winning the economic wars of the last sixty years doesn't mean the winner must always be Democratic Capitalist. Especially if the Democratic Capitalist can't stop their CEOs from gleefully shipping all their money to the Totalitarian Capitalist state.
You've got the conflict down, but the solution isn't quite there, i don't think.
Remember, the purpose of Trusted Computing is that they (meaning MS, RIAA, etc) don't trust you. The point is to stop you from running a program that might not, say, respect the RIAA's wishes for what you do with music files. In this sense, GPL and all free software is a complete anathema to the regime of Trusted Computing.
From the not-so-evil standpoint of security, this still may not work since then all an attacker needs to do is figure out how to invoke the compiler and they can produce trusted binaries.
Anyway, I don't think trusted computing is good for free software in any way.
Yeah, Mr. AC already pointed that out. I would have been correct if I said "That's why Version 2 allows you to specify than recipients can use any later version, and the FAQ suggests that you do"
Good point. Section 9 specifies that you may receive a copy that specifies "Version X or any later version" or no version at all (and then you can use whatever version you want).
I know, this is obvious. Though the company could release their entire program under the GPL if they wanted to avoid possible fines and damages. But yeah, the penalty for violating the GPL is pretty much the same as violating any other copyright, and anything else is FUD.
I would like to be able to use pattened by me technology in my Open Source Program but I don't want just everyone to use it, I don't mind if everyone sees it or alters it a bit but I don't want it to become part of MS Office without me getting some Bucks for it.
:)
First, fuck you* for wanting to patent math. That's what software is: Iterative math.
Second, I don't think the intent is that MS would be able to use your patent in Office without releasing Office under the GPL -- which would be fine if they did, right? The article wasn't specific, but surely the FS lawyers involved in creating Version 3 will only want the grant of patent rights to be for the purposes of the GPL software.
Patents are fundamentally a monopoly on an idea. GPL is about releasing an idea into the commons. You pretty much can only pick one or the other.
* don't get offended; as Lewis Black once said regarding New Yorkers "'fuck' isn't a word, it's a comma". If you're still offended, well, fuck you.
Um, no you douche, it's right because it's a clear and consice statement of what every GPL (or similar license) supporter fundamentally wants.
Linus has been totally wrong before. He's a normal guy. Yet the fact remains that he is a very intelligent and insightful normal guy, and this is a perfect example of it.
There's idol worship, and there's recognizing when someone is smart and worth listening to. There may be plenty of the former around here, but this is definitely an example of the latter.