Sadly it's not just my MP, but it's the experience of other folks living in different areas too.
I'm not saying they're all like that, but a myself and several friends have had any faith they had left in British democracy shaken from them by this sort of behaviour.
In any event, writing to your MP is the most effective recourse for a UK citizen who has a problem with the political establishment and most MPs take their duty seriously.
ROFL.
The experience of most people I know who have written to their MPs (and it's quite a few now) is that they wait months for a reply, and the reply usually makes it clear that not only do they not understand the position that the petitioner was coming from, but haven't even read the letter. And this is snail mail.
"Facetime" apparently only works over WiFi, unless you have a jailbroken phone. Probably exactly because the networks aren't ready for hoards of people (who have had video-call capable phones for years) suddenly discovering that an iPhone can do it and using it for a month.
Why does not knowing how it works mean that you would buy the chepest one that works?
Hell, I don't know much about cars and don't really want to, but I like a car that looks good and has a bit of power.
And no, you don't need to know anything about the internals to be a decent driver. Just like you don't need to know what a cache hit is to write a word document.
"If the game had strong DRM, so that you could not pirate it, people in the third group would be enticed to buy the game."
The word is could, not would. Could, maybe be enticed to buy the game. I know folks who have money and pirate anyway, that fall into that group. If they can't pirate a particular game they'd probably just pirate another one and play that for half an hour instead.
If all games had this mythical, unbreakable DRM, I dunno what those sorts of folks would do. Probably not game much, or go back to the console.
Right, so the free jacket was just a PR move? They announced a program that will cost them a few million just because of a few tech blogs, there was no real problem above any other phone and Apple had to do this because their PR department couldn't make it disappear because there's no history of the Apple faithful putting up with problems because they love their gear so much?
Some might say you're the one that needs a dose of reality.
That was all over 20 years ago. Seriously, if it was cost effective to do heavy industry in the UK it would have been re-established by now. Clearly it isn't.
The incessant Thatcher obsession by the left is hilarious.
It's doing precisely what she did: blaming a previous socialist government for over-spending
Which they did, without any doubt at all
proudly announcing in the first few months of Thatcher - who was a fine orator for the easily soundbitten - how she would save the country with her laissez faire mantra.
Which she did, I'm sorry if your sensibilities were offended, but she unloaded some deeply unprofitable industry from the state and thus stopped the profitable sectors from being tied down with mega-taxes to support continuing, economically non-viable industry in areas like coal mining.
And, within the first two years of government, you must divert all attention to some enemy: the Argentinians, the Russkies, the Arabs. I dread to think what Cameron will come up with.
Sorry, WTF? After the Iraq fiasco you're saying the Tories will invent enemies!?!?!!!
Jesus, hope it's fun living in la-la land, sounds like you've been there a while.
I've been hearing this from bitter labour voters since before the election and I have yet to hear about the UK scrapping the NHS in favour of the US insurance model, or any other radically right-wing policies.
Now, it's entirely possible that I missed it, as I emigrated to australia a month or so before the election, but to me all this Tory hatred I hear is just bitterness and fear-mongering from the section of the population that relied too heavily on labour handouts in the last parliament.
Sure, the original code is not closed. But the new code, derived from the FOSS contributors code, can be closed. Furthermore people who receive the new binaries don't get the source or the ability to redistribute. Major loss of rights to them.
GPL ensures that everyone in the chain gets the source if they want it. That's the whole damn point.
1. Crap! I'm older than I thought! Computing class was actually nearer 20 years ago...
2. We had the C64 in the 80s, I programmed and played with other things after that. There was an implied chronology in my original post. Or there was meant to be, perhaps I left it out.
"When a construction company uses a hammer, does the manufacturer bitch and whine about how that company is profiting from their hammer without sharing back?"
When a construction company uses a hammer, modifies it slightly and sells it on for a lot of money, still with the patented and trademarked aspects of the original hammer in place.... sure as hell the original manufacturer whines and then sues. What's your point?
And you might also want to check out the Linux kernel license file which has the following exception -
"NOTE! This copyright does *not* cover user programs that use kernel services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use of the kernel, and does *not* fall under the heading of "derived work"."
Which rather blows your equivalence of library and kernel use out of the water.
If you are a commercial entity dynamic linking against a GPL library I would advise you to get legal counsel quick-sharp. Legal counsel that has had experience in this area, because you are entering a huge and potentially dangerous grey area.
Not only that but you are expressly contravening the wishes of the person or people that wrote the library and put it under GPL. I would be VERY careful with that approach, and personally would never take it as I consider it immoral to use someone's work against their wishes when it is given as a gift to the OSS community.
"However the user application did not require any of the library source code to compile (only the prototypes in a header at the most), so use of the library is on the same level as running under the Linux kernel (which you can do with closed source applications under the GPL)."
Also not true.
You'll notice that the C and posix libraries are what your program is linked to, and those are licensed differently.
"The LGPL for libraries removes this issue, but I think it shouldn't be necessary."
That's because you want to make use of people's work without their permission, working around a community spirited license.
Which is exactly the aim of the GPL license. Don't want to play? Then you aren't part of the community and you can do it yourself.
Your example, by the way, is disingenuous. Counterexample - The developer finds something he wants to use and it's BSD licensed. His company take it, modify it and put it into the firmware of the router they're selling. There's no obligation to open anything so the WAG54G community never happens. Net loss for progress.
I did basic on my C64, and various other things on other machines we had at home. Then we had school computing class which taught us how to size and colour a font, put together a spreadsheet and other such guff.
Later I got a programmable casio calculator and programmed that. Somehow it didn't occur to me to actually go into computers until I was 18. No thanks at all to the school.
Depends. Maybe someone sees a version string somewhere, or an interface that looks familiar. Maybe on some machines they have a way to get to the binaries and extract strings and symbols from them.
The GPL vs BSD license argument never gets old for some folk does it?
Some say BSD-like licenses are bad because they permit people to use the code in a closed, non-free way. Some say GPL-like licenses are bad because they forbid the same behaviour.
Each to their own, but the GPL allows people who contribute to the public good to make sure that their work is not abused (as they see it), by taking their effort, profiting from it and not sharing back. If that's not the way you roll, so be it, but it gives freedom to users that the BSD license does not.
Slashdot Mirror
N900 owner here. I'm above the iPhone numbers personally :)
Sadly it's not just my MP, but it's the experience of other folks living in different areas too.
I'm not saying they're all like that, but a myself and several friends have had any faith they had left in British democracy shaken from them by this sort of behaviour.
In any event, writing to your MP is the most effective recourse for a UK citizen who has a problem with the political establishment and most MPs take their duty seriously.
ROFL.
The experience of most people I know who have written to their MPs (and it's quite a few now) is that they wait months for a reply, and the reply usually makes it clear that not only do they not understand the position that the petitioner was coming from, but haven't even read the letter. And this is snail mail.
"Facetime" apparently only works over WiFi, unless you have a jailbroken phone. Probably exactly because the networks aren't ready for hoards of people (who have had video-call capable phones for years) suddenly discovering that an iPhone can do it and using it for a month.
Why does not knowing how it works mean that you would buy the chepest one that works?
Hell, I don't know much about cars and don't really want to, but I like a car that looks good and has a bit of power.
And no, you don't need to know anything about the internals to be a decent driver. Just like you don't need to know what a cache hit is to write a word document.
"If the game had strong DRM, so that you could not pirate it, people in the third group would be enticed to buy the game."
The word is could, not would. Could, maybe be enticed to buy the game. I know folks who have money and pirate anyway, that fall into that group. If they can't pirate a particular game they'd probably just pirate another one and play that for half an hour instead.
If all games had this mythical, unbreakable DRM, I dunno what those sorts of folks would do. Probably not game much, or go back to the console.
Right, so the free jacket was just a PR move? They announced a program that will cost them a few million just because of a few tech blogs, there was no real problem above any other phone and Apple had to do this because their PR department couldn't make it disappear because there's no history of the Apple faithful putting up with problems because they love their gear so much?
Some might say you're the one that needs a dose of reality.
Except they don't, which is rather the point of this.
All phones suffer from signal attenuation to some degree, when the hand is in the way. The iPhone has an additional flaw that others don't.
Funny
When the likes of IBM are switching to FOSS office suites and moving (slowly) to linux desktops. No, it must be that they're wrong, not you.
If you can't get linux running properly on a laptop then get the hell out of my slashdot.
Is this a troll?
'cos that page you link to is 8 years old.
That was all over 20 years ago. Seriously, if it was cost effective to do heavy industry in the UK it would have been re-established by now. Clearly it isn't.
The incessant Thatcher obsession by the left is hilarious.
"British heavy industry today, OTOH... well, pretty much doesn't exist."
I wonder if that's because it just isn't cost effective? And would be a drain on government resources had it not been ditched in the 80s? Hmmm...
Nationalised British industry as a whole was a complete clusterfsck. It's a good thing that the government is out of it.
Benefit scroungers? Hell no, I'm talking about the public sector!
It's doing precisely what she did: blaming a previous socialist government for over-spending
Which they did, without any doubt at all
proudly announcing in the first few months of Thatcher - who was a fine orator for the easily soundbitten - how she would save the country with her laissez faire mantra.
Which she did, I'm sorry if your sensibilities were offended, but she unloaded some deeply unprofitable industry from the state and thus stopped the profitable sectors from being tied down with mega-taxes to support continuing, economically non-viable industry in areas like coal mining.
And, within the first two years of government, you must divert all attention to some enemy: the Argentinians, the Russkies, the Arabs. I dread to think what Cameron will come up with.
Sorry, WTF? After the Iraq fiasco you're saying the Tories will invent enemies!?!?!!!
Jesus, hope it's fun living in la-la land, sounds like you've been there a while.
How have they sold off the NHS?
I've been hearing this from bitter labour voters since before the election and I have yet to hear about the UK scrapping the NHS in favour of the US insurance model, or any other radically right-wing policies.
Now, it's entirely possible that I missed it, as I emigrated to australia a month or so before the election, but to me all this Tory hatred I hear is just bitterness and fear-mongering from the section of the population that relied too heavily on labour handouts in the last parliament.
Sure, the original code is not closed. But the new code, derived from the FOSS contributors code, can be closed. Furthermore people who receive the new binaries don't get the source or the ability to redistribute. Major loss of rights to them.
GPL ensures that everyone in the chain gets the source if they want it. That's the whole damn point.
1. Crap! I'm older than I thought! Computing class was actually nearer 20 years ago...
2. We had the C64 in the 80s, I programmed and played with other things after that. There was an implied chronology in my original post. Or there was meant to be, perhaps I left it out.
"When a construction company uses a hammer, does the manufacturer bitch and whine about how that company is profiting from their hammer without sharing back?"
When a construction company uses a hammer, modifies it slightly and sells it on for a lot of money, still with the patented and trademarked aspects of the original hammer in place.... sure as hell the original manufacturer whines and then sues. What's your point?
And you might also want to check out the Linux kernel license file which has the following exception -
"NOTE! This copyright does *not* cover user programs that use kernel services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use of the kernel, and does *not* fall under the heading of "derived work"."
Which rather blows your equivalence of library and kernel use out of the water.
Using a dynamic link does not "solve" the issue.
If you are a commercial entity dynamic linking against a GPL library I would advise you to get legal counsel quick-sharp. Legal counsel that has had experience in this area, because you are entering a huge and potentially dangerous grey area.
Not only that but you are expressly contravening the wishes of the person or people that wrote the library and put it under GPL. I would be VERY careful with that approach, and personally would never take it as I consider it immoral to use someone's work against their wishes when it is given as a gift to the OSS community.
"However the user application did not require any of the library source code to compile (only the prototypes in a header at the most), so use of the library is on the same level as running under the Linux kernel (which you can do with closed source applications under the GPL)."
Also not true.
You'll notice that the C and posix libraries are what your program is linked to, and those are licensed differently.
"The LGPL for libraries removes this issue, but I think it shouldn't be necessary."
That's because you want to make use of people's work without their permission, working around a community spirited license.
Which is exactly the aim of the GPL license. Don't want to play? Then you aren't part of the community and you can do it yourself.
Your example, by the way, is disingenuous. Counterexample - The developer finds something he wants to use and it's BSD licensed. His company take it, modify it and put it into the firmware of the router they're selling. There's no obligation to open anything so the WAG54G community never happens. Net loss for progress.
About 15 years ago.
I did basic on my C64, and various other things on other machines we had at home. Then we had school computing class which taught us how to size and colour a font, put together a spreadsheet and other such guff.
Later I got a programmable casio calculator and programmed that. Somehow it didn't occur to me to actually go into computers until I was 18. No thanks at all to the school.
Depends. Maybe someone sees a version string somewhere, or an interface that looks familiar. Maybe on some machines they have a way to get to the binaries and extract strings and symbols from them.
With a tv, I have no idea though.
The GPL vs BSD license argument never gets old for some folk does it?
Some say BSD-like licenses are bad because they permit people to use the code in a closed, non-free way.
Some say GPL-like licenses are bad because they forbid the same behaviour.
Each to their own, but the GPL allows people who contribute to the public good to make sure that their work is not abused (as they see it), by taking their effort, profiting from it and not sharing back. If that's not the way you roll, so be it, but it gives freedom to users that the BSD license does not.