Geez. I have to assume you have heard the FSF party line by now: "Without copyright the GPL would be unenforceable. It would also be unnecessary".
That's not the way I've ever heard or read it. I've always read it just like that, but without the last sentence. Because that doesn't make any damned sense; why would the absence of copyright law make the GPL unnecessary? I can see how it would make it unenforceable, but it seems to me that in a world without copyright law companies would easily be able to take free (GPL) software and distribute it binary-only without releasing their changes or the source. Which is to say, the GPL would still be necessary if you want to accomplish its goals......it's just that the necessity would be unfulfillable, and it would simply be impossible to do the things that the GPL does. Well, without hired goons.
Why? Because copyright is a good thing. It just needs to be used for the right purposes. Enforcing the GPL is one of them.
There are a couple of ways that this is different, and more acceptable, than the RIAA's enforcement tactics.
First, this type of action follows the time-honored tradition of only enforcing copyright violations where people are profiting from their infringement...the RIAA's suits against incomeless teenagers sharing music for free, while legally permissable, are looked at as extremely sleazy by the general public, because, well, they're extremely sleazy. They are also pretty much unprecedented in U.S. copyright history. The GPL enforcers are fighting businesses that are using code that's supposed to be freely available to sell products that are closed....much closer to the normal, accepted method.
Perhaps more importantly, lots of us around here have newer, more radical ideas about how intellectual property should be owned, distributed, and controlled. The GPL comes down on the "right" side of this from our perspective, because it uses copyright law (and yes, its enforcement) to protect this new model of distribution. The companies who aren't complying are subverting what we feel is the correct direction for software's future. The RIAA, by contrast, is doing everything in its power to protect the older, in our view obsolete, model.
And then there's the business model question from which that stems. The RIAA's members make their money by taking other people's work, packaging and distributing it, and selling it at flat per-recording rates. Technology has made that physical distribution unnecessary, and the market is subsequently rejecting the labels' role. So they break out all these lawsuits to force people to buy these effectively obsolete products. In contrast, the GPL and those who enforce it are hoping to make certain that this kind of forcable lock-in does not take place. So we like that.
And then there's the fact that the RIAA is one of the biggest historical assholes around...these guys tried to outlaw the player piano, they habitually underpay artists and overcharge customers, and they push crap music on our impressionable youth. By contrast, the GPL-partisans give the customers the product for free, help developers work together, empower device manufacturers, and help produce a quality product.
In short, this is a lot different. We don't have a problem with copyright law per se, just when it's used to further evil goals.
I just love this shit. It's hilarious. And it always happens, without fail. When everybody brings out their anecdotes about hardware reliability, someone trashes on pretty much everybody's gear, somebody's worked at a place where any given manufacturer's stuff was junk, and someone out there has had any given vendor's stuff work perfectly.
At least everyone can agree that everyone's stuff used to be reliable. They sure don't meake 'em like they used to...
Yes, Debian is the Hurd of distros. Only people who aren't complete idiots and aren't full of bull-shit use it.
Huh? Look man, if you're trying to tell us that you're doing anything with a HURD system beyond trying to see if it actually works, you're the one full of bullshit. And using it on a production system would be a clear qualification for idiocy too.
It's faster than everything else because it doesn't have all the data integrity features that a RDBMS does.
I stick everything into the application layer, so MySQL lacking these features doesn't bother me a bit.
So, you use the database because its lack of features makes it faster. But then you reinvent the wheel by writing those features into the application. Surely you realize how likely it is that you are wasting all that speed and more in the application layer trying to do a bunch of stuff that your database is supposed to handle for you. Unless you really think you are so superior to the coders at Postgres that you keep an advantage (good luck), you are wasting your time and adding foolish complexity to your apps for no reason.
Thanks, Bruce, for the authoritative ratification of my hunch...that some (fairly pompous, as it happened) random guy on the mailing list basically saying "You guys should cash it in and just help with our distro" was in fact not causing revolt in the UL ranks;-)
Seriously. That fellow's tone is all wrong. That's not much of an invitation; "come check all your packages into Ubuntu so we can kipe your work."
Well, whatever. "A rose by any other name" and whatnot. Maybe fewer people will use a "Limited Edition" release, but then fewer people would upgrade to a minor version upgrade than Mdk 11, so I guess I just don't see the same significance in the change.
But that's not really the point either. The thrust of my joke was that the real issue you have here is that the decision was made...not so much that it wasn't announced. Because it was announced, as witnessed by these complaints about the announcement.
I was quite disappointed when I discovered that a new roadmap has been announced and that there will NOT be any 10.2 release, without anybody announcing it to the community.
I know just what he means; nothing pisses me off like somebody telling me something, and not telling me about it. Bastards.
Well, I have to say that at least so far, I'm unimpressed.
I didn't have long to mess with it, but the few searches I did do came up with tables of contents and/or copyright pages, and either no text at all or a few page excerpt. In each case the pages had "Copyrighted material" on the margins...even the copy of Voltaire's Candide. Somehow it seems to me that a book published in 1759 should be public domain by now...
No, no, the point is just that deer and some other animal populations will overpopulate annually...however many "extra" deer the population carries into the winter will starve. So, as long as our hunting/sport activities don't bring the population below the sustainable number, we're just doing them all a favor; we're trading a quick and relatively painless shooting death for a starvation.
It's not that we have to do this. It's just that it's more "humane" to the deer population to hunt them than to let them starve back to the right numbers.
Of course, when I talk to vegetarians, my first question is usually "what do you have against cows?"...their species wouldn't be nearly as successful if we weren't eating them.
Oh, and in general, this ridiculousness about "we shouldn't mess with nature" is really hard to wrap a human brain around...the messing with nature thing is pretty much our whole schtick. You know...planting crops, making clothing, and websites to banally banter upon.....once He gave us that thumb, He knew we were gonna fuck with everything. Hell, if you listen to Peter, He told us it was cool.
What if there existed an open standard for an operating system driver API?
You mean, like the current Linux driver API?
Or did you mean to say, "what if Microsoft signed on to an open standard for an operating system driver API?"
By the way, it's clear that John's just being a dumbass. With his logic, OS/2 would have won. It was compatible up and down with Windows, with simple technical additions that made it much more usable and robust. Unfortunately for them, people aren't interested in buying a retread, even if it is better than the bald tire it's replacing.
Oh, and in other news, there isn't anything wrong with Linux's drivers or hardware support. There hasn't been for years. There are a few, minor, instances of manufacturers not playing ball, and they will take care of themselves as this snowball keeps rolling.
Excuse you? For what? You do realize that the post goes one to explain why this is the case. If you don't think those reasons hold up, by all means let's hear your reasons...there's already been some discussion on the subject. Or just haughtily respond with "excuse me?" like the whole assertion is so ridiculous it's below you. That'll make you sound really smart.
Hey, before the next 20000 people come in here mumbling this crap, do you guys want to at least look at the various posts talking about why Google is a bad idea?
See, I just don't see this in the kind of "class-warfare" motif you seem to be pushing. I don't see what's so "obviously 'windows-centric'" about Liz Claiborne. Or Disney or Best Buy or Sonyfor that matter. All are hosted on *nix and work perfectly without complaint here with my Firefox/Gentoo. And now each has recorded a hit from me for WebSideStory. Happier?
These are just sites that see a lot of visitors, and are run by reputable outfits, and coded in such a fashion that they can accurately count users. I don't see how the conflict against the "pretty people" holds sway here.
I wondered whether some jackass would come flapping his jaw over this line. Of course, it was perfectly obvious from the context of my post that I meant "a real human at a web-browser, as opposed to the effects of someone's runaway popup windows or a web-bot/spider or a DDOS attack or any of a thousand other things that represent themselves as browsers but aren't physical users looking at the web." But that doesn't always matter around here...
Track from Google. Really.... when your company name has become a verb meaning "to search for on the internet" it's a safe bet that a statisticly relelvant sample size can be garnered from your site.
Right...except, not at all. Actually, the very fact that Google is so pervasive is the reason why it doesn't give a good sample. A significant percentage of Google's hits come from automated processes, rather than actual web users. Since those processes typically identify themselves to Google as a browser (I'd wager IE most of the time), that pretty much screws everything up.
That's the biggest problem in my opinion. However, Google itself came up with a longer list of inaccuracies when it pulled the browser stats off its site because too many people were taking them seriously. Right from the horse's mouth....Google says using Google hits to track browser usage is a bad idea.
Humm, I'm a mozilla and/or firefox user, running linux of course. And I'll let you guess how many times I've been recorded at any of those sites....
First, you don't have any idea how many times you were recorded by WebSideStory. They offered these 3 sites as examples...the idea is that they are tracking on a lot of high-traffic websites from major providers. These aren't supposed to be the only 3 sites they are watching.
Second, complaining that this system is inaccurate because you weren't in the sample is just plain dumb. Are you going to bitch and moan about how polling is inaccurate (or TV ratings?) because you don't get the phone calls?
OTOH, to rely on data from a list of sites such as those, is IMNSHO, a builtin bias toward IE. It cannot be otherwise.
Ok, wait, you've lost me. You didn't give a single shred of evidence supporting the idea that these sites are biased toward IE. Adding "It cannot be otherwise" to the end of your wild conclusion doesn't give it any more legitimacy.
(For the record, I am writing this in Firefox on Gentoo)
Also, the websites they use probably skew the results as well...
If they want accuracy they should try throwing a few porn sites in, or maybe popular search engines.
Granted, their method isn't perfect...that probably isn't possible. But it's a lot better than your idea. These guys want a picture of normal, actual internet users that they can count. Neither search engines nor porn will provide that.
In the porno case, you just hand everything to IE, as all those hits from the popup windows roll in. Also, the control in those situations is passed mostly from the user to the site, which isn't ideal for these tests either. And search engines are visited by scripts a lot, most of which misidentify themselves as one browser or another. So, either way you're adding a lot to your inaccuracies.
Choosing high-traffic sites from major providers does sound like favoritism (or at least just corporate whoring), but it's really probably about as accurate a picture as we can get of how people browse.
Well, there are probably lots of injustices in the transition, but in my opinion that takes a seriously back-seat role when compared with the absolute idiocy of the tax burden distribution under this system. The working poor and middle class get totally crushed here. Of course, we've been steadily working toward that in this country for around 25 years, so I guess I shouldn't be as surprised as I am.
Slashdot Mirror
If drugs got into their beer then they would have some serious problems.
Wait, what was the point of beer again? I'd say the big problems would start if the drugs somehow got left out.
Geez. I have to assume you have heard the FSF party line by now: "Without copyright the GPL would be unenforceable. It would also be unnecessary".
That's not the way I've ever heard or read it. I've always read it just like that, but without the last sentence. Because that doesn't make any damned sense; why would the absence of copyright law make the GPL unnecessary? I can see how it would make it unenforceable, but it seems to me that in a world without copyright law companies would easily be able to take free (GPL) software and distribute it binary-only without releasing their changes or the source. Which is to say, the GPL would still be necessary if you want to accomplish its goals......it's just that the necessity would be unfulfillable, and it would simply be impossible to do the things that the GPL does. Well, without hired goons.
Why? Because copyright is a good thing. It just needs to be used for the right purposes. Enforcing the GPL is one of them.
There are a couple of ways that this is different, and more acceptable, than the RIAA's enforcement tactics.
First, this type of action follows the time-honored tradition of only enforcing copyright violations where people are profiting from their infringement...the RIAA's suits against incomeless teenagers sharing music for free, while legally permissable, are looked at as extremely sleazy by the general public, because, well, they're extremely sleazy. They are also pretty much unprecedented in U.S. copyright history. The GPL enforcers are fighting businesses that are using code that's supposed to be freely available to sell products that are closed....much closer to the normal, accepted method.
Perhaps more importantly, lots of us around here have newer, more radical ideas about how intellectual property should be owned, distributed, and controlled. The GPL comes down on the "right" side of this from our perspective, because it uses copyright law (and yes, its enforcement) to protect this new model of distribution. The companies who aren't complying are subverting what we feel is the correct direction for software's future. The RIAA, by contrast, is doing everything in its power to protect the older, in our view obsolete, model.
And then there's the business model question from which that stems. The RIAA's members make their money by taking other people's work, packaging and distributing it, and selling it at flat per-recording rates. Technology has made that physical distribution unnecessary, and the market is subsequently rejecting the labels' role. So they break out all these lawsuits to force people to buy these effectively obsolete products. In contrast, the GPL and those who enforce it are hoping to make certain that this kind of forcable lock-in does not take place. So we like that.
And then there's the fact that the RIAA is one of the biggest historical assholes around...these guys tried to outlaw the player piano, they habitually underpay artists and overcharge customers, and they push crap music on our impressionable youth. By contrast, the GPL-partisans give the customers the product for free, help developers work together, empower device manufacturers, and help produce a quality product.
In short, this is a lot different. We don't have a problem with copyright law per se, just when it's used to further evil goals.
I just love this shit. It's hilarious. And it always happens, without fail. When everybody brings out their anecdotes about hardware reliability, someone trashes on pretty much everybody's gear, somebody's worked at a place where any given manufacturer's stuff was junk, and someone out there has had any given vendor's stuff work perfectly.
At least everyone can agree that everyone's stuff used to be reliable. They sure don't meake 'em like they used to...
I hate to say it, because I truly love using Microsoft's well-engineered products...
Bwahahahaha! Yeah! +5 Funny!
Yes, Debian is the Hurd of distros. Only people who aren't complete idiots and aren't full of bull-shit use it.
Huh? Look man, if you're trying to tell us that you're doing anything with a HURD system beyond trying to see if it actually works, you're the one full of bullshit. And using it on a production system would be a clear qualification for idiocy too.
It's faster than everything else because it doesn't have all the data integrity features that a RDBMS does.
I stick everything into the application layer, so MySQL lacking these features doesn't bother me a bit.
So, you use the database because its lack of features makes it faster. But then you reinvent the wheel by writing those features into the application. Surely you realize how likely it is that you are wasting all that speed and more in the application layer trying to do a bunch of stuff that your database is supposed to handle for you. Unless you really think you are so superior to the coders at Postgres that you keep an advantage (good luck), you are wasting your time and adding foolish complexity to your apps for no reason.
Is that really stable enough for a Debian stable release?
No. Glad I could help.
Thanks, Bruce, for the authoritative ratification of my hunch...that some (fairly pompous, as it happened) random guy on the mailing list basically saying "You guys should cash it in and just help with our distro" was in fact not causing revolt in the UL ranks ;-)
Seriously. That fellow's tone is all wrong. That's not much of an invitation; "come check all your packages into Ubuntu so we can kipe your work."
Offtopic? Come now guys, this is the pun we've all been waiting for.
Well, whatever. "A rose by any other name" and whatnot. Maybe fewer people will use a "Limited Edition" release, but then fewer people would upgrade to a minor version upgrade than Mdk 11, so I guess I just don't see the same significance in the change.
But that's not really the point either. The thrust of my joke was that the real issue you have here is that the decision was made...not so much that it wasn't announced. Because it was announced, as witnessed by these complaints about the announcement.
I was quite disappointed when I discovered that a new roadmap has been announced and that there will NOT be any 10.2 release, without anybody announcing it to the community.
I know just what he means; nothing pisses me off like somebody telling me something, and not telling me about it. Bastards.
Well, I have to say that at least so far, I'm unimpressed.
I didn't have long to mess with it, but the few searches I did do came up with tables of contents and/or copyright pages, and either no text at all or a few page excerpt. In each case the pages had "Copyrighted material" on the margins...even the copy of Voltaire's Candide. Somehow it seems to me that a book published in 1759 should be public domain by now...
No, no, the point is just that deer and some other animal populations will overpopulate annually...however many "extra" deer the population carries into the winter will starve. So, as long as our hunting/sport activities don't bring the population below the sustainable number, we're just doing them all a favor; we're trading a quick and relatively painless shooting death for a starvation.
It's not that we have to do this. It's just that it's more "humane" to the deer population to hunt them than to let them starve back to the right numbers.
Of course, when I talk to vegetarians, my first question is usually "what do you have against cows?" ...their species wouldn't be nearly as successful if we weren't eating them.
Oh, and in general, this ridiculousness about "we shouldn't mess with nature" is really hard to wrap a human brain around...the messing with nature thing is pretty much our whole schtick. You know...planting crops, making clothing, and websites to banally banter upon.....once He gave us that thumb, He knew we were gonna fuck with everything. Hell, if you listen to Peter, He told us it was cool.
What if there existed an open standard for an operating system driver API?
You mean, like the current Linux driver API?
Or did you mean to say, "what if Microsoft signed on to an open standard for an operating system driver API?"
By the way, it's clear that John's just being a dumbass. With his logic, OS/2 would have won. It was compatible up and down with Windows, with simple technical additions that made it much more usable and robust. Unfortunately for them, people aren't interested in buying a retread, even if it is better than the bald tire it's replacing.
Oh, and in other news, there isn't anything wrong with Linux's drivers or hardware support. There hasn't been for years. There are a few, minor, instances of manufacturers not playing ball, and they will take care of themselves as this snowball keeps rolling.
it is critical that we at least one inflammatory troll
Were you going to use a verb in there? I can suggest a few that would work...
Absolutely. Even my IGP mobile athlon works perfectly (w/ accel) in 6.8.1 without screwing with anything or getting special drivers.
Excuse you? For what? You do realize that the post goes one to explain why this is the case. If you don't think those reasons hold up, by all means let's hear your reasons...there's already been some discussion on the subject. Or just haughtily respond with "excuse me?" like the whole assertion is so ridiculous it's below you. That'll make you sound really smart.
Hey, before the next 20000 people come in here mumbling this crap, do you guys want to at least look at the various posts talking about why Google is a bad idea?
See, I just don't see this in the kind of "class-warfare" motif you seem to be pushing. I don't see what's so "obviously 'windows-centric'" about Liz Claiborne. Or Disney or Best Buy or Sonyfor that matter. All are hosted on *nix and work perfectly without complaint here with my Firefox/Gentoo. And now each has recorded a hit from me for WebSideStory. Happier?
These are just sites that see a lot of visitors, and are run by reputable outfits, and coded in such a fashion that they can accurately count users. I don't see how the conflict against the "pretty people" holds sway here.
What exactly is a "normal, actual internet user"?
I wondered whether some jackass would come flapping his jaw over this line. Of course, it was perfectly obvious from the context of my post that I meant "a real human at a web-browser, as opposed to the effects of someone's runaway popup windows or a web-bot/spider or a DDOS attack or any of a thousand other things that represent themselves as browsers but aren't physical users looking at the web." But that doesn't always matter around here...
Track from Google. Really.... when your company name has become a verb meaning "to search for on the internet" it's a safe bet that a statisticly relelvant sample size can be garnered from your site.
Right...except, not at all. Actually, the very fact that Google is so pervasive is the reason why it doesn't give a good sample. A significant percentage of Google's hits come from automated processes, rather than actual web users. Since those processes typically identify themselves to Google as a browser (I'd wager IE most of the time), that pretty much screws everything up.
That's the biggest problem in my opinion. However, Google itself came up with a longer list of inaccuracies when it pulled the browser stats off its site because too many people were taking them seriously. Right from the horse's mouth....Google says using Google hits to track browser usage is a bad idea.
Humm, I'm a mozilla and/or firefox user, running linux of course. And I'll let you guess how many times I've been recorded at any of those sites....
First, you don't have any idea how many times you were recorded by WebSideStory. They offered these 3 sites as examples...the idea is that they are tracking on a lot of high-traffic websites from major providers. These aren't supposed to be the only 3 sites they are watching.
Second, complaining that this system is inaccurate because you weren't in the sample is just plain dumb. Are you going to bitch and moan about how polling is inaccurate (or TV ratings?) because you don't get the phone calls?
OTOH, to rely on data from a list of sites such as those, is IMNSHO, a builtin bias toward IE. It cannot be otherwise.
Ok, wait, you've lost me. You didn't give a single shred of evidence supporting the idea that these sites are biased toward IE. Adding "It cannot be otherwise" to the end of your wild conclusion doesn't give it any more legitimacy.
(For the record, I am writing this in Firefox on Gentoo)
Also, the websites they use probably skew the results as well...
If they want accuracy they should try throwing a few porn sites in, or maybe popular search engines.
Granted, their method isn't perfect...that probably isn't possible. But it's a lot better than your idea. These guys want a picture of normal, actual internet users that they can count. Neither search engines nor porn will provide that.
In the porno case, you just hand everything to IE, as all those hits from the popup windows roll in. Also, the control in those situations is passed mostly from the user to the site, which isn't ideal for these tests either. And search engines are visited by scripts a lot, most of which misidentify themselves as one browser or another. So, either way you're adding a lot to your inaccuracies.
Choosing high-traffic sites from major providers does sound like favoritism (or at least just corporate whoring), but it's really probably about as accurate a picture as we can get of how people browse.
Well, there are probably lots of injustices in the transition, but in my opinion that takes a seriously back-seat role when compared with the absolute idiocy of the tax burden distribution under this system. The working poor and middle class get totally crushed here. Of course, we've been steadily working toward that in this country for around 25 years, so I guess I shouldn't be as surprised as I am.