Huh? Is the free in free software something that carries the You are as free as I let your be type freedom? I mean we can redefine freedom to mean you can't use it either. I guess that would make it more free for some, wouldn't it? Well, maybe if they said it would.
Free software doesn't enter into it. They are free to do as they please within the terms of the licence. However, they might nevertheless be wise not to aggravate the community of developers who produce so much of the code they sell. And if they do deliberately set out to subvert the clear intent of those developers as reflected in their choice of licence, well they needn't act all baffled when people get angry with them.
As for those who made it? Novell/SuSE has planted a lot of code there. You would think that someone wanting respect from a company over code that company wrote would be willing to give some respect in it's own right.
They had plenty until they decided to do an end run around the terms of the GPL. They might have plenty again if they stop. In the meantime, it's not their code to do with as they please, and until they understand that, they may find respect a little harder to come by.
Is this more of a case of the GPL being overtaken by zealots and losing practical meaning?
See, a lot of the people getting upset are the people who wrote the code. I think they're entitled to an opinion on
the subject, and I don't really think you can dismiss them as zealots.
Like Jeremy Allison said - if we found a loophole that let us sell MS office legally, do you suppose Microsoft would be happy? Or slow to close it? Why then do Novell suppose free software developers would feel any differently?
I think they key was "from Microsoft's perspective".
I'll grant that it's not phrased with her usual clarity, but I don't think she was trying to suggest that RedHat sales were somehow irrelevant, or had gone away.
What Ms. Jones doesn't seem to realize is that competition between software companies is a good thing. It leads to more innovation and a better end-user experience
That largely depends on how they compete though. If I compete with you by blowing up one of your offices, that doesn't improve the quality of my software, and does nothing for the end user. If you compete back by killing my top developers, the only innovation we're going to see will be in weaponry.
You can see this in Microsoft: world class PR machine, but in terms of software... well, they can't even design a power-off button without five years of committees, meetings, and focus groups.
all sales are Microsoft sales to some degree now.
Except they're not.
mmm... you cut that paragraph a little too short, I think. Here's a longer section:
He actually says that before this deal, a customer wanting Linux would go 100% Linux. Microsoft was out of the picture. Now that the deal is in place, Microsoft gets to stay involved with Novell on the sales calls, staying in the picture, and don't forget that Novell is paying Microsoft, so I guess you could say that from Microsoft's perspective, all sales are Microsoft sales to some degree now.
Keep on like that, and you'll have to change your handle to "quotes_out_of_context"
This is the first Groklaw article I've read and if this hyperbole is typical of its offerings I'm amazed so many people listen to it. This is of the quality one would typically find in a slashdot rant. I thought groklaw was actually a well respected website.
Go read some of the legal research. Look at how closely the Groklaw analyse the legal filing in the SCO case. Look at the care they take to be accurate. That's why PJ is so widely respected. For her hard work and dedication to defending free software from a threat against which of the Linux hackers wouldn't have known where to start.
Granted, when she moves off law and on to wider subjects, she can sometimes go a bit over the top. I don't think she has in this particular article, but even if she did - I figure all that hard work earns her the right to voice the occasional opinion.
Seriously, so fricking what? This is how marketing works. If Linux wants to make it good in the big, bad business world, it needs marketing.
Fair enough. And just as soon as Novell get of their arses and write their own operating system, they can market it however they like without fear of criticism.
But until that glorious day should come, I would urge them to show a little more respect for the people whose hard
work makes it possible for them to bring a product to market.
I think the thing that particularly set her off was Novell's Justin Steinman claiming that "the community was no longer upset about the deal" (quoting PJ, not Steinman). She disagrees, and I think the intention of the article was to bring to a wider audience the way Novell are misrepresenting the situation.
And I have to say, I think it's an valid point. I won't claim that we've been unanimous in condemning Novell, but to claim all the objections are yesterdays news smacks of either deliberate deception, or a worrying detachment from reality.
I am not sure what you are suggesting here... Should people who feel that the GPL license is heading in a disastrous direction just STFU?
Well, no. On the other hand, the post to which the GP was responding seems to be implying that a GPLv3 GCC will infect its output, on account of its being "poisonous and viral". Either that, or it's a
screaming non-sequiteur and totally off topic. You can't blame the GP for giving a poster the benefit of the doubt.
It really doesn't matter if the new license affects the compiled code.
What a strange thing to say! I most certainly does matter if a compiler imposes its licencing
terms on any programs it compiles. This would be a major show stopper for all sorts of
deployment scenarios.
Happily, GCC has never imposed such restrictions. You could argue that the point is moot in
this case, but it's hardly unimportant.
In this case the message is that BSD licensing looks better every day.
I can't see why. It's not like the FSF will (or could) discontinue the GPLv2.
If it was a good licence before v3 (and it was) then GPLv2 is still a good licence now.
I feel dumber even after typing that, knowing it is sarcasm and false...
That's not really fair.
I think it's fairly clear that Mundie is referring to the sudden increase in global data flow that coincided
with the advent of the Internet. In effect, I think he's making the claim that without Microsoft's
valiant attempts to choke off this dataflow, without its deliberate obfuscations and distortions, without
the calculated policies of embrace and extend... I think he's suggesting that without these factors, there would be no need for Google; that without Microsoft fscking it up for the rest of us, we wouldn't need Google to find useful information. And to that extent at least, I think he has a point.
All the same, I still think he's giving MS too much credit: The main problem was that even despite MS' best efforts,
there was still to much information to easily organise.
But don't blame the retailer (in spite of the suckage) because the manufacturer is the one that screwed you. The retailer just was unfortunate enough to be the messenger.
Oh, by all means, blame the retailer. It's their responsibility, certainly under UK law.
If enough customer pressure is applied to someone as big as PC World, they are more than capable of passing the grief back to their suppliers. And if PC World thing they are going to lose sales because of the OEM's abusive warranties, they'll start pushing machines from supplies that will fix hardware problems regardless of the OS.
I have two PC World laptops running Gentoo Linux. If they're going to play this sort of silly buggers, I'll not be buying a third from them.
I'm pretty sure I've seen comments to the effect that where they can release material without restriction, their eventual goal is to do so. It's just that they prefer to focus on the most popular material first, and that is also the area where the legal issues tend to get in the way.
And that, I think, is the heart of the matter.I think that's exactly back to front.
What's the point of releasing the popular shows? I mean any of the Beeb's hits tends to get shown two three times a week anyway. If I miss "Heroes" on Wednesday, there's at least one repeat - "another chance to see" I should say - in the week, and for most of the popular shows there's two or more. That, along with the widely used video recorder and a bandwidth overhead that is going to challenge most viewer's broadband cap, is going to make the service pretty much irrelevant. I could understand it if they wanted to make the shows available outside their normal broadcast area... but they don't. That's one of the things this iPlayer is designed to prevent. And the cost in bandwidth might make the deal worthwhile if you could keep the download - but no, that's also prevented by the iPlayer. If they were going to take down the repeat slots and replace them with new content there might be a point... but that's not going to happen. The whole point of the release slot is that it's a cheap way to fill dead air.
I think that shift is starting to happen, as Big Media catches on only a decade or so after everyone else that DRM basically isn't helping them much in practice and is alienating the very people who would otherwise support them.
I think that, without feedback, how will they know that the DRM is a bad idea? If they really are unaware of how badly
thought out this scheme is, then our standing by and applauding isn't going to speed that cultural change in any way.
Beside which - the beeb already get it; they had ogg streamed content years ago. Then they withdrew that in favour of realplayer's crappy interface - which at least was cross platform in a bare-minimum sort of way. Now they're moving towards a MS proprietary streamer that will probably support other platforms, someday. Well, Vista anyway. The movement is in the wrong direction. and I don't think its coming from beeb grass roots, either.
I prefer not to criticise them for going with the flow rather than going out on a limb that can only isolate them right at this moment.
I think the whole thing is so fundamentally flawed, I think it has to be criticised. In fact, if in addition to the points raised above
you also consider the intrinsic flaws in any DRM scheme, then we have: A solution that will not work, to a problem that should not exist, caused by a service that no one needs. I think that's pretty damning, myself.
Firstly, you already pay the licence fee for the existing facilities. It's not going up significantly to support the new offerings, so you're not losing out.
I'd like to see you support that. I remember those ads the Beeb pelted us with a while back. "The reason we can afford all this is because of the unique the BBC is funded..." etc etc etc. So if we were paying for the Corporation as a package back then, I reckon we still are now. I think that as a Licence payer, I'm entitled to a say in the matter.
As for the rest of... I've done a bit more reading into the matter. I can see the point where material that's been outsourced to independant production companies might need DRM if they're going to be able to put it online. (Which just goes to underline how the Beeb outsourcing so much of its production facilities in the first place was a stupid thing to do - but that's a whole new argument). And I assume this is what you mean when you say they have no choice in the matter.
And there, I think, I still take issue with you. They do have a choice; they could simply not make available anything for which they do
not have the rights. I mean, it's not as if video recorders and DVD-Rs are scarce. How much trouble is it to set the recorder for "Life On Mars"? Less, on the whole, than spending 45 mins at 2Mb downloading the damn thing. Especially if you have a broadband cap.
I think they could better use this to put some of their "long tail" material on line. I mean there probably aren't enough fans of The Goon Show left alive to make it worthwhile pressing a DVD - but they could put the lot of it online for very little cost.
As for the rest of it - the usual economic arguments don't carry such force with the BBC. They're not responsible to a board of shareholders, they're responsible to the licence fee payers. So there's no obligation to maximise profit above all else as with a normal corporation. As for overseas licencing revenue - well, it's debatable how much of a hit that would cause (it's not hard to find Doctor Who on bittorrent - and I still own the DVDs) and it's debateable how much protection the DRM will afford.
So at the end of the day, respect to Mark Thompson for trying to do a good thing here, but I have to question his priorities,
and his judgment in the matter.
If you still think my position is unclear, inconsistent, or defeated by trivial arguments about Ogg, licence fees or whatever, then come on back and we'll talk.
If you've made a substantial argument, I'll try respond with substance of my own.
let me rephrase that, it doesn't automatically include everything, but at the same time it doesn't automatically include stuff you don't need
mmm... have you looked on cpan.org lately? Or in/usr/lib/perl5, or wherever it lurks on your machine? There is a hell of a lot of stuff Perl doesn't include by default, but you can import with "use".
I have written a lot of perl applications where I didn't need regular expressions for example, but that library was included by default.
Well... yeah. Perl is the Practical Extraction and Report Language. Regular expressions are at the heart of Perl.
You could cut them out, but what would be the point? It'd be like taking Simula and hacking out all that unnecessary concurrency malarkey.
Who knows how many things were automatically included that I didn't need beyond that?
I'm sorry, but that sounds more like political scaremongering than an honest concern. If it runs fast enough for you
(and Perl runs just fine on some old, old hardware), then the bloat isn't
that much of a problem. If it's lagging (and Larry Wall would be the first to admit that Perl isn't the Answer to
Everything), then use something else.
This isn't "Highlander": There Can Be More Than One.
I somehow knew someone would bring up Ogg before long.
Well yes. Given that its existence so thoroughly undermines the point of your previous post,
it's not at all surprising that someone brought it up. I expect if you went to NASA and gave a presentation about
the Earth being flat, you'd get a few people bring up the whole "orbital photograph" business as well.
But the predictability of the response doesn't make you right. Not in your last post, and not in this one either.
Given that it is economically and legally implausible that the BBC distribute content in a completely unrestricted format to completely unrestricted viewers any time in the near future
Right: so you're conceding the point about cross-platform open format, and the problem about DRM?
That's the second time you've changed your point in three posts.
And it still doesn't help. If the BBC depended on video sales for their income, maybe you;d have a point.
But they don't. I've already paid for that content, as a UK licence payer. I don't see they shouldn't
distribute it in an open format.
It's not as if there's not some sympathy for this viewpoint in the BBC, either. Just look at their
recent free-to-download classical music week.
Python may not include everything you need... I'd say it beat perl in the bloat context hands down.
I think missing the point a little. I think "bloat" has to be a measure of size/functionality. Otherwise, the only sane program to run would be no-op; a single instruction that doesn't do anything.
I suppose you could beat that with an empty file, but then I don't know an OS that would execute it, so
that's a technical disqualification right there
Admittedly, the Mac Theora support seems to be in its early days, but it's not like there's a
shortage of cross platform video codecs.
... but that doesn't make it any less true.
The fact that people are disagreeing with you is not what makes your assertion untrue. However, the facts don't appea to be agreeing with you either. You're either dead wrong, or else you're not communicating at all clearly.
You think it's wrong to support the current version of the most popular operating system first?
And here I was thinking that Vista was a whole new operating system. I'm sure that's what the nice people at Redmond have been saying.
I can understand them wanting to support XP first, certainly. Describing Vista as "popular" however would seem to be a bit of a stretch. You might just about get away with "probably going to become widely deployed OS, someday". Not exactly a reason to prioritise support however.
Especially seeing as - as has been pointed out elsewhere, if they'd used an open format the
problem would not have arisen. It's a bit like cutting off a fellow's leg, and then telling him there are people ahead of him in the queue for prosthetic limbs.
And it will take a while for all of the documentation to get published as well. (I hear the 2D docs will come first, followed after a period of time by the 3D docs.) So people will have to be patient.
I wonder why that should be. You'd think a company like AMD would have the specs in electronic format already. Why not release them right away, all together?
This is exciting news, and stands to change my graphics card buying habits. But I'm going to wait until
I see those 3D specs released and deemed useful.
In the BSD version, instead of planting a single tree and setting restrictions on it, the boy planted a tree for the village and gave away seeds from the tree to anyone that wanted them, and they were able to do whatever they wanted with their own seeds
... as long as they put a sign outside their orchards saying who game them the seeds in the first place:)
So, that would be you conceding the need for some sort of protection for copyleft IP? That is, after all,
the point I was trying to make to Brandybuck.
Now if you want to argue the point that Stallman is occasionally a bit of a dick,
I won't work up too much of a sweat defending him. If you want to argue that the
fellow who tried to strip the BSD licence from a patch submitted to LKML yesterday was in the
wrong, I'll have to agree.
On the other hand, you seem to be trying to suggest that the occasional stupidities of
certain GPL adherents implies that the licence itself is in some way broken. And it that's
sufficient reason for brokenness, why then there's nothing at all that works. There isn't
anything on Earth, be it an MS EULAs; the GPL, the BSD Licence; or even public domain;
there's not a single one so good that you can't find idiots aplenty making inappropriate
gestures in their defence.
Actually, it has everything to do with the situation. Software is like that apple tree. No matter how many times you copy software, it remains undamaged. So there is no reason to "protect" it with restrictive licenses.
I think the problem here is that you haven't told the parable in its entirety:
Then one day, a powerful lord heard about the magical apple tree and sent his soldiers to build a wall around the
orchard. "These are MY apples now", he told the villagers. "Anyone who wants one of these apples must buy it from me".
And the villagers thought this to be most unfair, but they could do nothing against all the lord's soldiers.
However, in the village there was a young boy who saved some seeds from the magic tree, and in later years he moved to a
new village and planted a tree of his own. And around this tree, the villages set up a fence and a notice that
said "Anyone is free to take these apples. They may eat them, sell them, give them away, or plant magic apple trees
of their own. The only thing you may not do is build a wall around the tree to prevent others from picking their own
apples".
Honestly, the way some people talk about "Freedom",
you'd think it was something you could buy by the wheelbarrow load.
Freedom isn't something that exists in and of itself. It only exists in
relation to people and activities.
To say that the BSD licence hinders freedom is just insane: it grants
close to maximum freedom TO users, developers, and distributors TO DO
pretty much whatever they like.
v
The GPL on the other hand deliberately restricts the freedom of one of those
stakeholder groups - the distributors - in order to preserve the freedom
of the users and developers in the longer term.
If you say that the GPL licence is more or less free than the BSD licence,
all you are really doing is criticising a group of developers for their
failure to share your own priorities. That always strikes me as an ugly,
intolerant, narrow minded way of thinking.
This whole mess has the stink of FUD about it. There are a lot of people
who would like nothing better than to get the GPL devs and the BSD guys together
and say "hey, why don't you and them fight?"
I have a suggestion to make: let's disappoint them.
Slashdot Mirror
Free software doesn't enter into it. They are free to do as they please within the terms of the licence. However, they might nevertheless be wise not to aggravate the community of developers who produce so much of the code they sell. And if they do deliberately set out to subvert the clear intent of those developers as reflected in their choice of licence, well they needn't act all baffled when people get angry with them.
They had plenty until they decided to do an end run around the terms of the GPL. They might have plenty again if they stop. In the meantime, it's not their code to do with as they please, and until they understand that, they may find respect a little harder to come by.
See, a lot of the people getting upset are the people who wrote the code. I think they're entitled to an opinion on the subject, and I don't really think you can dismiss them as zealots.
Like Jeremy Allison said - if we found a loophole that let us sell MS office legally, do you suppose Microsoft would be happy? Or slow to close it? Why then do Novell suppose free software developers would feel any differently?
I think they key was "from Microsoft's perspective".
I'll grant that it's not phrased with her usual clarity, but I don't think she was trying to suggest that RedHat sales were somehow irrelevant, or had gone away.
That largely depends on how they compete though. If I compete with you by blowing up one of your offices, that doesn't improve the quality of my software, and does nothing for the end user. If you compete back by killing my top developers, the only innovation we're going to see will be in weaponry.
You can see this in Microsoft: world class PR machine, but in terms of software... well, they can't even design a power-off button without five years of committees, meetings, and focus groups.
mmm... you cut that paragraph a little too short, I think. Here's a longer section:
Keep on like that, and you'll have to change your handle to "quotes_out_of_context"
Go read some of the legal research. Look at how closely the Groklaw analyse the legal filing in the SCO case. Look at the care they take to be accurate. That's why PJ is so widely respected. For her hard work and dedication to defending free software from a threat against which of the Linux hackers wouldn't have known where to start.
Granted, when she moves off law and on to wider subjects, she can sometimes go a bit over the top. I don't think she has in this particular article, but even if she did - I figure all that hard work earns her the right to voice the occasional opinion.
Fair enough. And just as soon as Novell get of their arses and write their own operating system, they can market it however they like without fear of criticism.
But until that glorious day should come, I would urge them to show a little more respect for the people whose hard work makes it possible for them to bring a product to market.
I think the thing that particularly set her off was Novell's Justin Steinman claiming that "the community was no longer upset about the deal" (quoting PJ, not Steinman). She disagrees, and I think the intention of the article was to bring to a wider audience the way Novell are misrepresenting the situation.
And I have to say, I think it's an valid point. I won't claim that we've been unanimous in condemning Novell, but to claim all the objections are yesterdays news smacks of either deliberate deception, or a worrying detachment from reality.
Either way, it reflects poorly on Novell.
Well, no. On the other hand, the post to which the GP was responding seems to be implying that a GPLv3 GCC will infect its output, on account of its being "poisonous and viral". Either that, or it's a screaming non-sequiteur and totally off topic. You can't blame the GP for giving a poster the benefit of the doubt.
What a strange thing to say! I most certainly does matter if a compiler imposes its licencing terms on any programs it compiles. This would be a major show stopper for all sorts of deployment scenarios.
Happily, GCC has never imposed such restrictions. You could argue that the point is moot in this case, but it's hardly unimportant.
I can't see why. It's not like the FSF will (or could) discontinue the GPLv2. If it was a good licence before v3 (and it was) then GPLv2 is still a good licence now.
That's not really fair.
I think it's fairly clear that Mundie is referring to the sudden increase in global data flow that coincided with the advent of the Internet. In effect, I think he's making the claim that without Microsoft's valiant attempts to choke off this dataflow, without its deliberate obfuscations and distortions, without the calculated policies of embrace and extend... I think he's suggesting that without these factors, there would be no need for Google; that without Microsoft fscking it up for the rest of us, we wouldn't need Google to find useful information. And to that extent at least, I think he has a point.
All the same, I still think he's giving MS too much credit: The main problem was that even despite MS' best efforts, there was still to much information to easily organise.
Still, I can see where the man is coming from.
Oh, by all means, blame the retailer. It's their responsibility, certainly under UK law.
If enough customer pressure is applied to someone as big as PC World, they are more than capable of passing the grief back to their suppliers. And if PC World thing they are going to lose sales because of the OEM's abusive warranties, they'll start pushing machines from supplies that will fix hardware problems regardless of the OS.
I have two PC World laptops running Gentoo Linux. If they're going to play this sort of silly buggers, I'll not be buying a third from them.
And that, I think, is the heart of the matter.I think that's exactly back to front.
What's the point of releasing the popular shows? I mean any of the Beeb's hits tends to get shown two three times a week anyway. If I miss "Heroes" on Wednesday, there's at least one repeat - "another chance to see" I should say - in the week, and for most of the popular shows there's two or more. That, along with the widely used video recorder and a bandwidth overhead that is going to challenge most viewer's broadband cap, is going to make the service pretty much irrelevant. I could understand it if they wanted to make the shows available outside their normal broadcast area... but they don't. That's one of the things this iPlayer is designed to prevent. And the cost in bandwidth might make the deal worthwhile if you could keep the download - but no, that's also prevented by the iPlayer. If they were going to take down the repeat slots and replace them with new content there might be a point... but that's not going to happen. The whole point of the release slot is that it's a cheap way to fill dead air.
I think that, without feedback, how will they know that the DRM is a bad idea? If they really are unaware of how badly thought out this scheme is, then our standing by and applauding isn't going to speed that cultural change in any way.
Beside which - the beeb already get it; they had ogg streamed content years ago. Then they withdrew that in favour of realplayer's crappy interface - which at least was cross platform in a bare-minimum sort of way. Now they're moving towards a MS proprietary streamer that will probably support other platforms, someday. Well, Vista anyway. The movement is in the wrong direction. and I don't think its coming from beeb grass roots, either.
I think the whole thing is so fundamentally flawed, I think it has to be criticised. In fact, if in addition to the points raised above you also consider the intrinsic flaws in any DRM scheme, then we have: A solution that will not work, to a problem that should not exist, caused by a service that no one needs. I think that's pretty damning, myself.
I'd like to see you support that. I remember those ads the Beeb pelted us with a while back. "The reason we can afford all this is because of the unique the BBC is funded..." etc etc etc. So if we were paying for the Corporation as a package back then, I reckon we still are now. I think that as a Licence payer, I'm entitled to a say in the matter.
As for the rest of... I've done a bit more reading into the matter. I can see the point where material that's been outsourced to independant production companies might need DRM if they're going to be able to put it online. (Which just goes to underline how the Beeb outsourcing so much of its production facilities in the first place was a stupid thing to do - but that's a whole new argument). And I assume this is what you mean when you say they have no choice in the matter.
And there, I think, I still take issue with you. They do have a choice; they could simply not make available anything for which they do not have the rights. I mean, it's not as if video recorders and DVD-Rs are scarce. How much trouble is it to set the recorder for "Life On Mars"? Less, on the whole, than spending 45 mins at 2Mb downloading the damn thing. Especially if you have a broadband cap.
I think they could better use this to put some of their "long tail" material on line. I mean there probably aren't enough fans of The Goon Show left alive to make it worthwhile pressing a DVD - but they could put the lot of it online for very little cost.
As for the rest of it - the usual economic arguments don't carry such force with the BBC. They're not responsible to a board of shareholders, they're responsible to the licence fee payers. So there's no obligation to maximise profit above all else as with a normal corporation. As for overseas licencing revenue - well, it's debatable how much of a hit that would cause (it's not hard to find Doctor Who on bittorrent - and I still own the DVDs) and it's debateable how much protection the DRM will afford.
So at the end of the day, respect to Mark Thompson for trying to do a good thing here, but I have to question his priorities, and his judgment in the matter.
Nope, I'msaying it's the ultimate in bloat-free computing. Any smaller than that, though, and I don't think it should count.
If you've made a substantial argument, I'll try respond with substance of my own.
I'll see you over there.
mmm... have you looked on cpan.org lately? Or in /usr/lib/perl5, or wherever it lurks on your machine? There is a hell of a lot of stuff Perl doesn't include by default, but you can import with "use".
Well... yeah. Perl is the Practical Extraction and Report Language. Regular expressions are at the heart of Perl. You could cut them out, but what would be the point? It'd be like taking Simula and hacking out all that unnecessary concurrency malarkey.
I'm sorry, but that sounds more like political scaremongering than an honest concern. If it runs fast enough for you (and Perl runs just fine on some old, old hardware), then the bloat isn't that much of a problem. If it's lagging (and Larry Wall would be the first to admit that Perl isn't the Answer to Everything), then use something else.
This isn't "Highlander": There Can Be More Than One.
Well yes. Given that its existence so thoroughly undermines the point of your previous post, it's not at all surprising that someone brought it up. I expect if you went to NASA and gave a presentation about the Earth being flat, you'd get a few people bring up the whole "orbital photograph" business as well.
But the predictability of the response doesn't make you right. Not in your last post, and not in this one either.
Right: so you're conceding the point about cross-platform open format, and the problem about DRM? That's the second time you've changed your point in three posts.
And it still doesn't help. If the BBC depended on video sales for their income, maybe you;d have a point. But they don't. I've already paid for that content, as a UK licence payer. I don't see they shouldn't distribute it in an open format.
It's not as if there's not some sympathy for this viewpoint in the BBC, either. Just look at their recent free-to-download classical music week.
I think missing the point a little. I think "bloat" has to be a measure of size/functionality. Otherwise, the only sane program to run would be no-op; a single instruction that doesn't do anything.
I suppose you could beat that with an empty file, but then I don't know an OS that would execute it, so that's a technical disqualification right there
I wonder why that might be?
Ogg Vorbis on Windows
Ogg Vorbis on Mac
Ogg Vorbis on Mac
Ogg Theora on Windows
Ogg Theora on Mac
Admittedly, the Mac Theora support seems to be in its early days, but it's not like there's a shortage of cross platform video codecs.
The fact that people are disagreeing with you is not what makes your assertion untrue. However, the facts don't appea to be agreeing with you either. You're either dead wrong, or else you're not communicating at all clearly.
And here I was thinking that Vista was a whole new operating system. I'm sure that's what the nice people at Redmond have been saying.
I can understand them wanting to support XP first, certainly. Describing Vista as "popular" however would seem to be a bit of a stretch. You might just about get away with "probably going to become widely deployed OS, someday". Not exactly a reason to prioritise support however.
Especially seeing as - as has been pointed out elsewhere, if they'd used an open format the problem would not have arisen. It's a bit like cutting off a fellow's leg, and then telling him there are people ahead of him in the queue for prosthetic limbs.
Ah, you're probably right. I suppose if you spend too much time looking for FUD, you start seeing it everywhere.
From the link:
I wonder why that should be. You'd think a company like AMD would have the specs in electronic format already. Why not release them right away, all together?
This is exciting news, and stands to change my graphics card buying habits. But I'm going to wait until I see those 3D specs released and deemed useful.
It's not so much that I think it's evil - more that I find myself profoundly distrustful of Microsoft's motives.
I mean it's possible the leopard really has changed its spots this time. But that's not the smart way to bet.
So, that would be you conceding the need for some sort of protection for copyleft IP? That is, after all, the point I was trying to make to Brandybuck.
Now if you want to argue the point that Stallman is occasionally a bit of a dick, I won't work up too much of a sweat defending him. If you want to argue that the fellow who tried to strip the BSD licence from a patch submitted to LKML yesterday was in the wrong, I'll have to agree.
On the other hand, you seem to be trying to suggest that the occasional stupidities of certain GPL adherents implies that the licence itself is in some way broken. And it that's sufficient reason for brokenness, why then there's nothing at all that works. There isn't anything on Earth, be it an MS EULAs; the GPL, the BSD Licence; or even public domain; there's not a single one so good that you can't find idiots aplenty making inappropriate gestures in their defence.
I think the problem here is that you haven't told the parable in its entirety:
There you go: fixed that for you :)
Honestly, the way some people talk about "Freedom", you'd think it was something you could buy by the wheelbarrow load. Freedom isn't something that exists in and of itself. It only exists in relation to people and activities.
To say that the BSD licence hinders freedom is just insane: it grants close to maximum freedom TO users, developers, and distributors TO DO pretty much whatever they like. v The GPL on the other hand deliberately restricts the freedom of one of those stakeholder groups - the distributors - in order to preserve the freedom of the users and developers in the longer term.
If you say that the GPL licence is more or less free than the BSD licence, all you are really doing is criticising a group of developers for their failure to share your own priorities. That always strikes me as an ugly, intolerant, narrow minded way of thinking.
This whole mess has the stink of FUD about it. There are a lot of people who would like nothing better than to get the GPL devs and the BSD guys together and say "hey, why don't you and them fight?"
I have a suggestion to make: let's disappoint them.
What's more, I'm sure Bill Gates agrees with you wholeheartedly.