Why can't they just put anything they feel like in their license, and never have it reviewed by the court, effectively ending "fair use" protections?
Because then you could just say "I don't agree to this license", and then the work is covered by copyright law only, which allows fair use.
That's exactly what happens when you don't agree with the GPL. It just happens that the GPL allows you to do a lot more than copyright law by itself does.
But you are right, it does have a value. That need and want gives it value.
My main contention regarding the "freedom to restrict freedoms" is that in the libertarian extreme, you can make someone your slave if you're the only one who can give them food, a job, an easy to use operating system, etc. Or if you can market your way into making them think you are.
Value in software isn't hard to duplicate given time. Some licenses make it easier to duplicate the idea with smaller retributions. That retribution, is the one freedom of the GPL, that is not a freedom at all sometimes. Especially in the software industry, where money is made at being a service, selling software, or just providing support (redhat), that retirbution is a big deal.
I don't understand your usage of the word "retribution" in this paragraph. I think you mean the GPL's source distribution requirement prevents the spread of good software ideas by people trying to make money off that software. If so, fair enough. But again, I could be wrong.
I view the BSD license to the old fishing proverb. Teach a man to fish, he can fish for life. More to fit, you give me the code to a firewall, I can now use the code at my own free will. With the GPL, I get the feeling I must teach everyone else. Not bad for some things, but has a value in itself sometimes.
Several years ago, I remember the leader of the FreeBSD project (name escapes me) saying essentially that his goal was to make software suck less. If he produced good code, and a corporation wanted to use it so they could make a less sucky product for their customers (even if the product had a very non-free license), he considered that a good thing. It certainly raised my respect for the project and the license. For that goal, surely the BSD license has advantages. My goal is simply a little different: freedom first, then less sucking.:)
The purpose of the GPL is to make sure that anyone using the software cannot claim it as their own (and distribute it). We agree on that much.
Not really. Copyright prevents you from claiming it as your own. The GPL is to make sure that anyone using the software is guaranteed the freedom to use that software.
But there's one freedom I value as well... the freedom to be closed.
The freedom to restrict others' freedom. You value it, I despise it. The only way to ensure all freedom is to lack that particular freedom. That is why I say the GPL is more free. Freedom without anything that ensures it is nothing. See China's constitution vs. the United States'.
Well, my freedom to own slaves, shoot people at will, have sex with minors and what not are freedoms that are tollerable to lose. I do have less freedoms, but with the extra benefit that people can't shoot me, have sex with my kids (if i had) or to own me as a slave.
Right. Your freedom (to live, do as you choose, not be harmed) depends on others not having the freedom to do those things to you. In this way, freedom for everyone is maximized. We don't disallow those "freedoms" because they're "tollerable to lose", we disallow them because they are expressly at odds with the freedoms of others.
You do not have the right to take away my rights. Very simple.
Software can't own me, but I can own software. That's where the analogy fails.:)
No, because the analogy is still about people. The software is just the thing you need/want. It is the person giving it to you who wishes to own you, and the license is the legal mechanism.
Apples and oranges. You are making bad analogies. Once I have a copy of something in the BSD lisence, it's free for life.
I believe you misunderstand the analogy because you misunderstand who it is who is the slave. It isn't the software; software can no more have freedom than my chair can. People have or lack freedom. Software is called free or not because it allows/restricts the freedom of people. So while the BSD software has a free license, when you take that BSD software and redistribute it to users under a restrictive license, you are taking away their freedoms. The GPL ensures that those people you give the software to will have those freedoms.
The purpose of the GPL is to unsure that recipients of the software have freedom for life. Because it does a better job of ensuring the freedom of the people who receive the software, I call it more free than the BSD license.
It sounds rational to call the assurance of freedom a "restriction" that necessarily results in less freedom. Call it a restriction if you want -- the conclusion that the restriction "you cannot take away the freedoms of others" results in less freedom does not follow. The analogy with slavery is meant to illustrate this; do you truly believe your inability to own slaves means you have less freedom?
If cracking tools are widely available, they will be used to more quickly exploit whatever vulnerabilities exist, giving the author less time to patch. It's better for everyone if these tools are hard to come by.
Cracking tools are and will be widely available. How effective were the courts at stopping the spread of DeCSS? Tools already exist. They will either be written or pirated, and passed around on IRC. You can't stop them from existing. You can use them yourself, for your own benefit.
Attempting to get rid of widely available free tools that white hats could use to their benefit so that black hats won't have them isn't Security through Obscurity. It's Secruity through Wishful Thinking.
The only reasonable way to go forward with security is that your machine must be secure in spite of the existence of cracking tools. The best way to do this is to use the tools yourself, not to try to prevent them from existing. "Outlaw cracking tools, and only outlaws will have cracking tools" may be cliche, but poor prose can still be true.
It's pretty obvious that Robertson knew MS would sue him. It's also pretty obvious that he thought he'd win, and he was winning until MS decided to start shopping around the world for a court that would listen to him. In fact MS is in danger of having "Windows" declared a generic term, essentially invalidating their trademark.
Which would be fine, because "windows" is a generic term. It was in wide use in reference to graphical systems long before Bill came onto the scene.
I don't know any of the details of the foreign litigation. Are they countries where trademarking of generic terms is allowed? Did the court not understand the existing usages of the term "windows"? Bad luck? I don't know,
In other news, you are not a very good predictor of Linus' behavior, as another poster I think suitably explained.
Nobody takes the time to do any research. The concept of "investigative reporting" is virtually dead. Actually research an issue themselves? Why, when they can just use corporate PR as their source? The can paint the picture they want, and they still get the eyeballs. Turns out most people can't tell the difference between well-reaserched journalism and mostly made up pulp. Or people can, and whatever feedback mechanism is supposed to correct this simply isn't working.
No, no, the title is correct. In the original draft, the author speculated about the effects that time-travel would have on the travel industry, and the possibility of accidentally sending the entire planet earth back in time. If that happens then before it happens we'll see an earth from the future appear in our orbit. We'll of course our earth gravitationally attracted to the earth from the future, thus "How Will We Get Around Near-Future Earth". Later editing made the submitter's title seem oddly un-proofread. Uh... I'm assuming.
See, Telsa fanatics are your own worst enemy, trying to make a valid point but then go all crazy and make patently false, wildly exaggerated claims way out of proportion.
I think it's more people who are just pedantic critics because they can be, and pretend not to be able to tell unserious hyperbole from a claim of true scientific fact.
Frankly, I'm all for lobbing our trash as fast as possible in a direction perpendicular to the plane of our solar system and wishing the retreating garbage-barge the best. Nobody wants tons and tons of nuclear waste around -- even when it's no longer radioactive, it's still toxic. Some of our waste carries dangers we don't even know about. So ship that stuff as far away as possible. It's like the ultimate carpet to sweep things under -- cubic light years of empty space.
I really can't see any downsides. Even if a million years from now some alien lifeform shows up on our planet to complain that our radioactive trash crashed on their planet, we'll very easily be able to claim that we launched it a million years ago and couldn't possibly have predicted that it would hit any world at all, much less an inhabited one.
Um... unless they see this post. Better mod me down, just to be safe.
Not that any long-term prediction about computing by Bill Gates is really worth listening too, but it should be obvious what world Bill wants to live in: Where the only thing of any value at all in a computer system is the part that he owns. I'm sure Intel, AMD, Via, etc all love to hear that.
Of course it is nothing but wishful thinking on Gate's part. Clearly the trend is going to be somewhat opposite. Software -- his software -- is going to get cheaper. It must. He knows that, which is why he has salesmen (and the occasional exec) out making deals to stop people from switching to Linux.
Hardware will get cheaper as well, but there isn't a source of comparable yet completely free hardware to drive those prices down. Hardware is a physical object, software isn't. Software has R&D costs; hardware has R&D costs plus a cost to manufacture. It's obvious which one is going to have the per-unit cost that approaches zero.
So nice dreaming Billy. Maybe ten years ago you could have tricked the hardware makers into making a system that could only run your software and let themselves be eaten alive. Nowadays, no matter how much they suck up to you, they have their handle on the Linux escape lever and they're waiting to pull.
hey give you a default desktop. In mandrake's case, that is KDE. They give you one browser (Konqueror). One email client (kmail). The alternative apps are buried in menus, but those apps are NOT immediately viewable to the user.
Right, the result of which is even better than NineNine's "don't give me a choice" method of simplicity. The distro makes a good default choice, yet still provides the other choices, should you decide you want to try them.
It's the best of both worlds! I love Software Libre.;)
And what about the niche channel you like (TechTV maybe?) that the general populace couldn't care less about? Will you be happy when they go under because only a select few people want to pay for it?
But on the other hand, wouldn't this give the cable cos more of an incentive to add new channels? You see ads for stations that say "Ask your local cable provider to add BlahTV!" Why would the cable company care, if I'm already subscribing to their package deal? This way there's an easy way to correlate requests for channels with increased revenue.
You'll certainly see some channels being abandoned, but you can also see that there will be more incentive to add new channels as well.
Re:What about other carbon arrangements?
on
Buckyballs Kill Fish
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Please don't remind me that mg = 1E-3 g. I probably screwed up the math. That's what I get for doing it at 5am. Let's see... I assumed a 10g mouse and a 70kg me. (0.0005g/10g)*70000g = 3.5g. So I was off by two (?!) orders of magnitude, since last time I ended up with 350g. Thus, I have mathematically proven that I am a dumbass.
Re:"hazards and risks are poorly understood"
on
Buckyballs Kill Fish
·
· Score: 1
It specifically mentioned lipids in the brain -- lipids being a good portion of brain tissue. But that doesn't mean you aren't right. Remember the old joke? "Get rid of 20 lbs of useless fat...";)
Re:What about other carbon arrangements?
on
Buckyballs Kill Fish
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Not that the results shouldn't raise warning flags, but does this look like another "give mouse 1000x the maximum exposure they'd ever really see, and watch them, surprisingly, die". 0.5mg of nanotubes in one dose?! That'd be like me inhaling almost a pound of nanotubes. Put a pound of almost anything in my lungs, and I can bet my health wouldn't be the best.
Re:"hazards and risks are poorly understood"
on
Buckyballs Kill Fish
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
According to the article I read last night -- which I can't remember the newspaper or find in google news -- the buckyballs were destroying lipids in the fish's brain. Which is bad, because that gives no reason to think it wouldn't do the same thing in humans -- lipids are just fats.
I was going to try to find the link, but then I realized why bother? Until these findings have undergone peer review, there's not a lot of point in trying to figure out what it means.
Slashdot Mirror
Why can't they just put anything they feel like in their license, and never have it reviewed by the court, effectively ending "fair use" protections?
Because then you could just say "I don't agree to this license", and then the work is covered by copyright law only, which allows fair use.
That's exactly what happens when you don't agree with the GPL. It just happens that the GPL allows you to do a lot more than copyright law by itself does.
But you are right, it does have a value. That need and want gives it value.
:)
My main contention regarding the "freedom to restrict freedoms" is that in the libertarian extreme, you can make someone your slave if you're the only one who can give them food, a job, an easy to use operating system, etc. Or if you can market your way into making them think you are.
Value in software isn't hard to duplicate given time. Some licenses make it easier to duplicate the idea with smaller retributions. That retribution, is the one freedom of the GPL, that is not a freedom at all sometimes. Especially in the software industry, where money is made at being a service, selling software, or just providing support (redhat), that retirbution is a big deal.
I don't understand your usage of the word "retribution" in this paragraph. I think you mean the GPL's source distribution requirement prevents the spread of good software ideas by people trying to make money off that software. If so, fair enough. But again, I could be wrong.
I view the BSD license to the old fishing proverb. Teach a man to fish, he can fish for life. More to fit, you give me the code to a firewall, I can now use the code at my own free will. With the GPL, I get the feeling I must teach everyone else. Not bad for some things, but has a value in itself sometimes.
Several years ago, I remember the leader of the FreeBSD project (name escapes me) saying essentially that his goal was to make software suck less. If he produced good code, and a corporation wanted to use it so they could make a less sucky product for their customers (even if the product had a very non-free license), he considered that a good thing. It certainly raised my respect for the project and the license. For that goal, surely the BSD license has advantages. My goal is simply a little different: freedom first, then less sucking.
The purpose of the GPL is to make sure that anyone using the software cannot claim it as their own (and distribute it). We agree on that much.
:)
Not really. Copyright prevents you from claiming it as your own. The GPL is to make sure that anyone using the software is guaranteed the freedom to use that software.
But there's one freedom I value as well... the freedom to be closed.
The freedom to restrict others' freedom. You value it, I despise it. The only way to ensure all freedom is to lack that particular freedom. That is why I say the GPL is more free. Freedom without anything that ensures it is nothing. See China's constitution vs. the United States'.
Well, my freedom to own slaves, shoot people at will, have sex with minors and what not are freedoms that are tollerable to lose. I do have less freedoms, but with the extra benefit that people can't shoot me, have sex with my kids (if i had) or to own me as a slave.
Right. Your freedom (to live, do as you choose, not be harmed) depends on others not having the freedom to do those things to you. In this way, freedom for everyone is maximized. We don't disallow those "freedoms" because they're "tollerable to lose", we disallow them because they are expressly at odds with the freedoms of others.
You do not have the right to take away my rights. Very simple.
Software can't own me, but I can own software. That's where the analogy fails.
No, because the analogy is still about people. The software is just the thing you need/want. It is the person giving it to you who wishes to own you, and the license is the legal mechanism.
Apples and oranges. You are making bad analogies. Once I have a copy of something in the BSD lisence, it's free for life.
I believe you misunderstand the analogy because you misunderstand who it is who is the slave. It isn't the software; software can no more have freedom than my chair can. People have or lack freedom. Software is called free or not because it allows/restricts the freedom of people. So while the BSD software has a free license, when you take that BSD software and redistribute it to users under a restrictive license, you are taking away their freedoms. The GPL ensures that those people you give the software to will have those freedoms.
The purpose of the GPL is to unsure that recipients of the software have freedom for life. Because it does a better job of ensuring the freedom of the people who receive the software, I call it more free than the BSD license.
It sounds rational to call the assurance of freedom a "restriction" that necessarily results in less freedom. Call it a restriction if you want -- the conclusion that the restriction "you cannot take away the freedoms of others" results in less freedom does not follow. The analogy with slavery is meant to illustrate this; do you truly believe your inability to own slaves means you have less freedom?
It can't be the cops, there wasn't any mention of Freecell...
Yeah, because they were in the Krispy Kreme taking a break from Freecell in their squad cars.
If cracking tools are widely available, they will be used to more quickly exploit whatever vulnerabilities exist, giving the author less time to patch. It's better for everyone if these tools are hard to come by.
Cracking tools are and will be widely available. How effective were the courts at stopping the spread of DeCSS? Tools already exist. They will either be written or pirated, and passed around on IRC. You can't stop them from existing. You can use them yourself, for your own benefit.
Attempting to get rid of widely available free tools that white hats could use to their benefit so that black hats won't have them isn't Security through Obscurity. It's Secruity through Wishful Thinking.
The only reasonable way to go forward with security is that your machine must be secure in spite of the existence of cracking tools. The best way to do this is to use the tools yourself, not to try to prevent them from existing. "Outlaw cracking tools, and only outlaws will have cracking tools" may be cliche, but poor prose can still be true.
So far, Lindows has been allowed in the U.S.
It's pretty obvious that Robertson knew MS would sue him. It's also pretty obvious that he thought he'd win, and he was winning until MS decided to start shopping around the world for a court that would listen to him. In fact MS is in danger of having "Windows" declared a generic term, essentially invalidating their trademark.
Which would be fine, because "windows" is a generic term. It was in wide use in reference to graphical systems long before Bill came onto the scene.
I don't know any of the details of the foreign litigation. Are they countries where trademarking of generic terms is allowed? Did the court not understand the existing usages of the term "windows"? Bad luck? I don't know,
In other news, you are not a very good predictor of Linus' behavior, as another poster I think suitably explained.
Why is there no +1 Anal mod?
/.? You really need to ask?
On
Are you saying north A. and south A. are separate continents?
Yes. Yes they are.
You can be North American or South American, if you are from the respective continent.
There is no continent called "America". Only the people of the United States are called Americans.
Sorry. Just the way it is.
But since only the error rate is an aspect of floppies, what that means is that by using floppies you're getting 1/3rd fewer viruses. ;)
Nobody takes the time to do any research. The concept of "investigative reporting" is virtually dead. Actually research an issue themselves? Why, when they can just use corporate PR as their source? The can paint the picture they want, and they still get the eyeballs. Turns out most people can't tell the difference between well-reaserched journalism and mostly made up pulp. Or people can, and whatever feedback mechanism is supposed to correct this simply isn't working.
No, no, the title is correct. In the original draft, the author speculated about the effects that time-travel would have on the travel industry, and the possibility of accidentally sending the entire planet earth back in time. If that happens then before it happens we'll see an earth from the future appear in our orbit. We'll of course our earth gravitationally attracted to the earth from the future, thus "How Will We Get Around Near-Future Earth". Later editing made the submitter's title seem oddly un-proofread. Uh... I'm assuming.
As Chris Rock said: "Oh, it's the media. When I'm at the ATM machine, I'm not looking over my shoulder for the media."
So when the mugger reaches for your iPod, he grabs your handgun instead?
Oh, that's a wonderful idea.
See, Telsa fanatics are your own worst enemy, trying to make a valid point but then go all crazy and make patently false, wildly exaggerated claims way out of proportion.
I think it's more people who are just pedantic critics because they can be, and pretend not to be able to tell unserious hyperbole from a claim of true scientific fact.
Sheesh, dosn't anybody remember how to deal with these guys anymore?
Frankly, I'm all for lobbing our trash as fast as possible in a direction perpendicular to the plane of our solar system and wishing the retreating garbage-barge the best. Nobody wants tons and tons of nuclear waste around -- even when it's no longer radioactive, it's still toxic. Some of our waste carries dangers we don't even know about. So ship that stuff as far away as possible. It's like the ultimate carpet to sweep things under -- cubic light years of empty space.
I really can't see any downsides. Even if a million years from now some alien lifeform shows up on our planet to complain that our radioactive trash crashed on their planet, we'll very easily be able to claim that we launched it a million years ago and couldn't possibly have predicted that it would hit any world at all, much less an inhabited one.
Um... unless they see this post. Better mod me down, just to be safe.
Not that any long-term prediction about computing by Bill Gates is really worth listening too, but it should be obvious what world Bill wants to live in: Where the only thing of any value at all in a computer system is the part that he owns. I'm sure Intel, AMD, Via, etc all love to hear that.
Of course it is nothing but wishful thinking on Gate's part. Clearly the trend is going to be somewhat opposite. Software -- his software -- is going to get cheaper. It must. He knows that, which is why he has salesmen (and the occasional exec) out making deals to stop people from switching to Linux.
Hardware will get cheaper as well, but there isn't a source of comparable yet completely free hardware to drive those prices down. Hardware is a physical object, software isn't. Software has R&D costs; hardware has R&D costs plus a cost to manufacture. It's obvious which one is going to have the per-unit cost that approaches zero.
So nice dreaming Billy. Maybe ten years ago you could have tricked the hardware makers into making a system that could only run your software and let themselves be eaten alive. Nowadays, no matter how much they suck up to you, they have their handle on the Linux escape lever and they're waiting to pull.
There's an article on The Reg right now that goes into slightly more detail... Apparently they were specifically looking for "lipid peroxidation".
:)
I noticed the 10L thing, but hadn't put it together. I'd imagine both groups of fish had problems other than lipid peroxidation.
hey give you a default desktop. In mandrake's case, that is KDE. They give you one browser (Konqueror). One email client (kmail). The alternative apps are buried in menus, but those apps are NOT immediately viewable to the user.
;)
Right, the result of which is even better than NineNine's "don't give me a choice" method of simplicity. The distro makes a good default choice, yet still provides the other choices, should you decide you want to try them.
It's the best of both worlds! I love Software Libre.
And what about the niche channel you like (TechTV maybe?) that the general populace couldn't care less about? Will you be happy when they go under because only a select few people want to pay for it?
But on the other hand, wouldn't this give the cable cos more of an incentive to add new channels? You see ads for stations that say "Ask your local cable provider to add BlahTV!" Why would the cable company care, if I'm already subscribing to their package deal? This way there's an easy way to correlate requests for channels with increased revenue.
You'll certainly see some channels being abandoned, but you can also see that there will be more incentive to add new channels as well.
Please don't remind me that mg = 1E-3 g. I probably screwed up the math. That's what I get for doing it at 5am. Let's see... I assumed a 10g mouse and a 70kg me. (0.0005g/10g)*70000g = 3.5g. So I was off by two (?!) orders of magnitude, since last time I ended up with 350g. Thus, I have mathematically proven that I am a dumbass.
It specifically mentioned lipids in the brain -- lipids being a good portion of brain tissue. But that doesn't mean you aren't right. Remember the old joke? "Get rid of 20 lbs of useless fat..." ;)
Not that the results shouldn't raise warning flags, but does this look like another "give mouse 1000x the maximum exposure they'd ever really see, and watch them, surprisingly, die". 0.5mg of nanotubes in one dose?! That'd be like me inhaling almost a pound of nanotubes. Put a pound of almost anything in my lungs, and I can bet my health wouldn't be the best.
According to the article I read last night -- which I can't remember the newspaper or find in google news -- the buckyballs were destroying lipids in the fish's brain. Which is bad, because that gives no reason to think it wouldn't do the same thing in humans -- lipids are just fats.
I was going to try to find the link, but then I realized why bother? Until these findings have undergone peer review, there's not a lot of point in trying to figure out what it means.