Re:The next "One major danger"...
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GPLv2 Vs. GPLv3
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Bravo! Pity this was posted AC. Never underestimate the power of a ideologically driven movement. Although frankly the 'purer' the GPL becomes ideologically the more they'll lose users.
Re:"consumer products" only
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GPLv2 Vs. GPLv3
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· Score: 1, Troll
Well, open source in general shills (unknowningly, I guess) for Big Blue's software services strategy. They love open source because they lost the software products war (we know who won) so they want to devalue software by opening up the source so that services dominate. And lest you forget, IBM Global Services is one of the biggest providers of services and can market their stuff better than most companies.
Also, if you look at IBM's software offerings, they've tended to go up the business chain (they were planning to launch Websphere for verticals at one point, not sure if they've done that yet) so over time you'll see infrastructure code become open-source commodities no one makes much money out of, whereas all the money is made on delivering services on top of Websphere for Healthcare, etc. This sounds good in theory (in fact there are parts to this strategy I actually agree with) except for the fact that it encourages building ever larger, ever more Byzantine pieces of software that are actually worth something in services revenue. People who come up simple, innovative software solutions will find themselves OSS-cloned in no time.
Also, what happened to closing the ASP loophole?:-) I guess the FSF doesn't want to cause too much pain to folk like Google.
Anyhow, I commented on a related issue in the Tivo thread, and RMS fanboys are still splitting hairs replying to that. So if any of them have come here to carp about this post, hi!:-)
> Representative democracy often becomes just another branch of capital or religion. Direct participatory democracy is better.
Direct participatory democracy has a scaling problem, so unless you're in Switzerland, it's not very useful. I agree that representatives are also dickwads, which is why we need term limits on legislators, just like we have a 2-term limit on the President. It would also have the side effect that professionals (engineers, scientists) would be more inclined (than lawyers) to seek public office.
We could have this if people's ideas about politics and ethics weren't warped by capital and the church. What if scientists had equal access to the media and school system as religious people do? What if parents had no right to force their children to go to church? What if advertising became useless because consumers would research products based on independent reports instead of listening to the marketing propaganda? What if bosses became useless because companies would be directly managed through democratic unions. Why not vote on hiring and firing and other important workplace decisions?
> What if parents had no right to force their children to go to church?
If you're saying that the state should micro-manage how parents rear their kids, sorry, I don't agree. I'm not religious, but if anyone wants to raise their kids to be religious, so be it. It's their kids, after all -- not yours.
> What if bosses became useless because companies would be directly managed through democratic unions.
They already exist. They're called co-operatives. They have scaling issues. And yes, they have bosses. Go study organization theory to find out why. Btw, it could be argued that a public company where workers own signficant stock is a form of a democratically-owned company. I think SAS Software is an example (but I could be wrong). Again, there are scaling issues and the pesky issue of how you can equitably divide up a company.
> Why not vote on hiring and firing and other important workplace decisions?
Because that works so well on _American Idol_. The talent really floats to the top. Not.
> You're previous posts indicated that you would defend dictatorships.
I think you just saw in them what you wanted to see. My posts are on the record and I think any clear-headed individual can decide for himself or herself if I was 'defending dictatorships'. Look inside you and ask where the violence comes from.
> Did Bach, Bethoven, Davinci require a 100 year copyright?
No, they needed patronage. Without patronage they would not have had the money/lifestyle necessary to create great art. And because patronage is scarce, art from their period was scarce as well -- nothing like the explosion of books, music and movies of all tastes (not just highbrow) we've seen in the 20th century.
> Would Einstien have invented more if he had patented his ideas for 20 years?
No, because scientific theories cannot be patented -- in his time or ours. Also, he really didn't invent much.
> Have patent laws sped up the development of the automobile?
They have made automobiles significantly better. Amidst all the bitching about Detroit, the Japanese came in with improved factory processes (many of which they were able to patent) to make cars cheaper and more reliable. Anyone used to 50s automobiles would be astonished at the safety of a modern car-- and this is reflected in national and international automobile accident stats.
> What would the world look like if there are no open standards and no public domain?
There is a case for open standards and the public domain (btw, many open standards are based on patented technology. Example: the CD. They're just licensed on a RAND basis.) However those are not adequate cause for the destruction of all intellectual property rights.
I don't really know what MS's official line on the GPL is (it was "anti-American" at one point, I have no idea what they think now) but my point of view comes from interacting with real businesses looking at open source. The bottom line is: just when they were starting to get comfortable with GPL2, the new buzz about GPL3 has increased legal scrutiny of the use of any open source beyond the trivial (by that I mean using Linux workstations, writing PHP pages and using MySQL databases)
> At least until the moment you decide to distribute the software, which is only possibly under the GPL if you don't negotiate a specific arrangement with the copyright holders.
The problem is, TiVo was not in the business of distributing software under the GPL2. They were in the business of distributing a box. Now, under GPL3, they are suddenly vulnerable. To companies, this says: if the OSS community does not like you, they'll get you when they change license agreements. Note that most of them do get the "you're free to continue using the current license" routine and will take it into account, but being cut-off from updates because your upstream provider changed the license one fine day is a scary prospect.
> GPL is just another business tool that serves a number of companies very well.
Indeed. IBM loves open source because it devalues software companies (they lost that war, and how) and promotes software services, which Big Blue can market better than anyone else. The worst of it is that RMS doesn't even see that he's basically shilling for Big Blue's business strategy. Welcome to a world where the only business software worth selling is software that so Byzantine that it takes an army of IBM Global Services consultants to install it for you.
> Your argument is that because dictators are good at oppressing people and some people will always try to be dictators, that therefore we must support dictatorship?
Nope. The argument was never that dictators are good at oppressing people. The argument was that in any human society there will be dickwads, because selfishness and evil are part of the human nature too. The solution is as much representative democracy as you can afford.
> You're a fucking asshole and if I ever encounter you in a revolutionary situation, I will fucking kill you
LOL! At last the dickwad hidden inside you emerges (amazing how a murderous lout hides inside all you revolutionary types, isn't it?). Thanks for proving my point.
So the US code describes "computer program"? So what? We're supposed to get all our collective nouns from the US Code now?
> It does not define "intellectual property", nor does it apply the same restrictions to the respective subject matter of copyrights, patents, and trademarks.
Imagine that! A collective noun not describing every one of its members completely!
OTOH, the term 'intellectual property' has been used -- with a long history -- in the legislative and judicial process when framing laws regarding copyrights, patents, trademarks, etc. So at this point it's a valid word de facto, and the anyone who argues otherwise sounds like those ossified Académie française intellectuals who get hot and bothered every time someone mentions "software" or "walkman".
> Moreover, when capitalism returned to the USSR, poverty, disease, homelessness, malnutrition, and nearly every human indicator got worse.
Because we all know that the human indicators published during the Soviet era were the gospel truth. The Kremlin would never lie. No sirree.
> The USSR was ruled by a military bureaucratic elite, not by the majority of the population.
And the point you keep missing is that in whatever egalitarian fantasy you dream up, people will organise themselves into hierarchies and jostle for power and position. In the USSR it was a military bureaucratic elite, in your next utopia it will be something else. It doesn't matter. They won't have Stalin, they'll have some other dickwad. That's because dickwadism, like altruism, is central to human nature. Forming a society that denies the existence of the baser elements of human nature is a prescription for disaster or too many hits on the bong.
To repeat, the problem with the USSR was design, not implementation.
> This is factually wrong WRT trademarks. Trademarks do not protect any 'works of mind'
No, *you* are factually wrong. Trademarks are visual, auditory or physical objects created by human minds to identify a business. They did not spawn themselves de novo.
As for the rest of your post, I'm sure we could have a very deep discussion on the epistemology of taxonomic systems, but ultimately it would be very academic and pointless.
The sole reason they get conflated is that companies want them conflated because they want their copyrights to do things only patents can or their trademarks to do things only copyrights can.
Heh. That was pretty funny. Meanwhile, in reality, companies and lawyers refer to IP law because it is a convenient shorthand to a wide range of laws that protect intangible (i.e., not physical things like cars, factories, etc) objects. Just like they refer to tort law, Constitutional law, etc. You don't have to like their legal jargon, just like they don't have to like your computer jargon of "Web 2.0", "social networks", and "Beowulf clusters".
Ok, so let's wave a magic wand and nullify all IP laws. No more 'intellectual property'. Great! What have we done? We've created a world where land (and things built on land) are the only things with value. Bingo, you've brought back an age of neo-feudalism, where he who has more land (and things that require lots of money to build, like factories built on land) gets more rich.
So much for a lower middle-class Steve Jobs creating one of the most richest companies on Earth. So much for a social-security-receiving JK Rowling becoming richer than the Queen. They would need the patronage of those with land and money or not produce their art at all.
Honestly, when I hear the IP-bashing on/. I can't figure out whether you're deluded or feudal stooges. I hope it's the former.
> Private ownership of the means of production is theft. Land and factories should be managed by workers and consumers, not rich people.
You do realize that the last experiment in that (the USSR) resulted in a lot of lines with people hungry for bread? Put simply, communitarian management (I'll avoid the loaded word "communist") does not work because, as I noted in another post, humans are social animals not worker ants and will always form hierarchies. And hierarchies introduce social tensions and jealousies, which ultimately destroy the communitarian ethos. That is why the USSR didn't work, it was a design not implementation problem.
I applaud your idealism, but I'll also say that you're seriously deluded about what you want to achieve. Get yourself an education in economics and public policy and perhaps you'll find a way to combine the idealism with some realism about how the world works and actually improve human society.
Human beings are naturally intelligent and curious. We want to learn about the world around us. It takes years of schooling and corporate media exposure to drive the ability to think out of a perfectly functional human.
I partly agree. Where I think you're going wrong is that you believe everyone's smart and curious. I believe any statistically large cluster of humans will follow the bell curve, and that means a large number of them will be merely average and WON'T be very interested in knowing too much about the world around them (except of course for the latest Brangelina gossip). And attempts to educate them all will fail because you'll have to dumb down the curriculum to the point where it's no longer very interesting to the brightest in the class (ah, the perils of lowest-common-denominator state education).
Put another way -- in the days before schooling and corporate media you did have people creating crazy shit in their garages. But you also had a lot of ignorance and bigotry. Today we've removed a whole bunch of bigoted behaviors, but there's no longer much incentive to do stuff yourself, because most of modern technology is way too complicated for one man (see also "the death of the lone innovator").
> If we're ever to live in a free society, one without politicians and bosses, we need to start taking charge of our own lives
Sociologically impossible. Man is a social animal and creates hierarchies. This has been true in every human society ever. Including supposedly egalitarian ones like the USSR and present-day Cuba (great article in the NYT recently about how party officials get way better care than regular folk).
> They aren't really property rights, and they certainly cannot reasonably be thought of in a collective fashion.
What part of rights to _immaterial objects_ do you not get?
Property rights were a great innovation at a time when you had *no* rights (chiefly land rights) if you weren't royalty or had a royal grant. This transformed feudal society to a post-Magna Carta agragrian society and enabled the rise of gentleman farmers. Intellectual Property Rights were a big innovation on Plain Old Property Rights because it meant that land and trade weren't the only things of value any more. You could use your brain and come up with something (a device, a piece of art/book/whatever) and could justifiably hope to make money off it. Different mechanisms exist to protect different classes of work (patents tend to protect devices, copyright tends to protect works without form, like books and music). But they all protect the same thing, works of the mind. And that's where the term "intellectual property rights" come from.
> Generally when you are talking about copyrights, you say copyrights, when talking about patents, you say patents, and so on.
Geez. Yes. But sometimes I also want to talk about rights inherent in works of the mind in general. A drug is covered by patents. The appearance of the drug is protected by a design trademark. The drug's name and its manufacturer's name are protected by trademark law. Instructions, artwork, etc accompanying the packet it comes in may be copyrighted. To sum up, that box you buy at the pharmacy is protected by a whole class of Intellectual Property Rights.
Finally, one thing that's not directly related to your post but instead related to a very general anti-IP position on Slashdot. Yes, there are misapplications of patent law, especially w.r.t software. So change the patenting process -- something lots of people are working on. Yes, companies have too much power these days and they often wield it using laws designed to protect IP (simply because much of their property is generated from the human mind). So lobby your legislators for corporate reform so that organisations like the RIAA/MPAA can't sue little kids again.
But don't throw the baby out with the bathwater and childishly cry out against IP. Without IP, the only things actually worth anything in this world would be land and expensive objects (factories, etc) built on land. And that's not a world you'd like to live in.
> The GPL2 has no terms of expiration. Anyone useing anything GPLv2 is free and clear forever.
Except the right to updates. Which is a pretty big right for software infrastructure. Which every responsible software vendor gives you, once you accept the EULA. Even in the worst case (MS), if you've accepted the EULA to XP, you get updates for seven years per their lifecycle policy. Some of the updates provide "additional functionality", e.g., Windows Update->Microsoft Update delivers additional functionality and requires an additional update. Or Windows Media Player 11 adds new DRM features and requires agreement to a rather nasty EULA, but you still get updates to WMP9, which XP came with, even if you don't agree to the updated EULA.
> What the FSF is doing here probablly amounts to one of the most evenhanded and kind resolutions to a contract dispute in HISTORY.
What the FSF is doing here is shaping the GPL to suit its ideological needs, twisting the meaning of "freedom" to really mean "whatever RMS is really keen on". You might want to read the rest of my response here.
> (I also agree with Richard Stallman that we need to stop using the term "Intellectual Property". I've seen too many people confuse copyrights, patents, licenses, trademarks, trade secrets, etc.
That's like saying: I've seen way too many people confuse the term "operating system", "distribution", and "application". So let's stop using the term "software"!
People use the term "Intellectual Property" s because they are collectively a class of property rights of immaterial objects. RMS and his fanboys need a remedial grammar course. Normal folk get confused because -- well, normal folk get confused about a lot of things not related to their everyday lives. Let's see YOU not get confused about the type of tar to use on a highway if you're not a civil engineer.
> GPL is when they forget that it is a normal copyright license. It's about freedom, but with obligation.
I'm still waiting for people to acknowledge that the GPL's version of "freedom" not free as in speech, but "free" as in "RMS' idea of what freedom should be". Frankly, for an organisation that celebrates freedom so much, they are essentially targeting specific organisations, e.g. the embedded hardware guys and Microsoft/Novell.
This is a shame because the embedded hardware guys who embed Linux you dismiss are an important part of the Linux market and are probably responsible for getting Linux into more users' homes than most distros!). As for MS/Novell, well, $deity forbid that we make it easy for commercial software and OSS to work together.
Here's why the GPL3 is bad for business: it has shown itself for what it is: an ideologically-driven legal document. And those *always* make for bad business, because you cannot predict where it will go next. If you're laughing at Novell now, what happens if/when in a few years *you* are on the FSF's shitlist and the GPLvNext comes out?
(An obvious target, which RMS wanted to target in the GPL3 but backed away from, are ASPs, i.e., anyone who provides software as a service over a website. I work for an ASP btw and am relieved our use of GPL-licensed software is pretty much limited to using gcc and PHP.)
Freedom my ass. If the bill of rights were written based on current expediencies like the GPL is, we'd be living in a ideological gulag reminiscent of the Soviet Union's less-than-stellar days.
And for those of you saying "oh the _current_ license won't change, they can always stay where they are", you know that's a meaningless statement. The right to use a program object (executable, library, whatever) programmatically is a very limited right when divorced from the right to updates to that object. Most library vendors know this and provide lifecycle policies for this. Hell, even Microsoft -- notorious for slipstreaming license terms -- provides for _seven years_ of updates, even for people who _don't_ accept slipstreamed updates but did accept the original EULA. I still see nothing about a sunset period or grace period in the current GPL3 drafts.
> I replied to the parent poster about their mistaken belief that current GPL2 code in use would change license
Eh. As you and I both noted, the chance that the kernel would change is practically zero. Now, the problem is other code. If package foo changes to GPL3, and you depend on it being GPL2, you've got a problem and you have to fork the last-known GPL2'd version so that your legal liability is limited. So yeah, your existing code won't change license, but in practice that doesn't mean anything -- the codebase you depend upon *will* change license (if the maintainers switch from v2 to v3) and you've got to do something about it.
For key infrastructure projects, you'll probably see some corporations banding together to provide a GPL2 fork. And an increasing interest in BSD-derived userland tools.
So, basically, Microsoft was right when it called the GPL viral (in the sense of its negative connotation)?
Way to shaft all the people who bet their business on your software, bub, by changing the license terms. And the/. crowd complain about Microsoft licensing practices.
Of course, in reality it won't come to that. Prediction: if the GPL3 comes out the way RMS has been saying it will, Ubuntu, IBM and others will fork the GNU system in a heartbeat (the kernel will remain GPL2, of course). It will be XEmacs vs GNU Emacs all over again, proving RMS learnt nothing from that fiasco.
> I think politicians in general are the scum of the world. Everywhere.
Couldn't have put it better myself.
One thing about this, as well as the too-many-legislators-are-lawyers point another poster brought up. I've often thought of this w.r.t the US: why can't Reps/Senators have term limits? Two terms back to back, after that you cool your heels for 4 years. That'd make our democracy far more representative and make life tougher for lobbyists because it'd force them to rebuild relationships every few terms. It'd also make it far more likely that more people would consider taking a sabbatical and hold public office for a term or two.
The problem with lobbying is that if you ban it, things just move underground and become unaccounted for. This way at least you know who's in bed with whom. If you think legislators from Europe (say, or really anywhere in the world) don't have special interests, you're dreaming.
The ability of simple chemicals to bond and form progressively more complex sensors and computation units shows just how primitive our top-down-engineered silicon computers are. Makes you wonder what our computers and I/O devices will be like when we get to the point where we really grok biochemistry.
Gates by all accounts was a bit of a twat in his salad days, what with maniacally rocking during product reviews, saying things like "I could write this better all by myself", and generally being a dick. However most people also agree that marriage/kids has mellowed him considerably and he takes his current "elder statesman of tech/philanthropist" role pretty seriously.
So no, Gates is not the "f-ing kill you" sort of guy. He _was_ more of the "you're f-ing stupid" kind of guy. Which oddly makes him pretty similar to many/.-ers:-)
> This reminds of a funny story. I was eating breakfast with my cousin one morning and I had organic orange juice. He looked at it and said to me "err.. what does it taste like?":)
Astonishingly enough, organic orange juice doesn't taste any different from oranges from a tree to which *reasonable* quantities of chemical fertilizer has been applied. Try some blind tests if you wish.
Of course, I'm pretty sceptical about most of the organic produce on the market being 100% chem-fertilizer free. In fact, the anti-fertilizer bias *ads for organic products* seek to produce is as harmful as its opposite, i.e., hyper-industrialized farming.
Slashdot Mirror
Bravo! Pity this was posted AC. Never underestimate the power of a ideologically driven movement. Although frankly the 'purer' the GPL becomes ideologically the more they'll lose users.
> Releasing the source-code for a DRM system is a pretty stupid thing to do
Although Sun has a team working on it: http://www.openmediacommons.org/.
Well, open source in general shills (unknowningly, I guess) for Big Blue's software services strategy. They love open source because they lost the software products war (we know who won) so they want to devalue software by opening up the source so that services dominate. And lest you forget, IBM Global Services is one of the biggest providers of services and can market their stuff better than most companies.
:-) I guess the FSF doesn't want to cause too much pain to folk like Google.
:-)
Also, if you look at IBM's software offerings, they've tended to go up the business chain (they were planning to launch Websphere for verticals at one point, not sure if they've done that yet) so over time you'll see infrastructure code become open-source commodities no one makes much money out of, whereas all the money is made on delivering services on top of Websphere for Healthcare, etc. This sounds good in theory (in fact there are parts to this strategy I actually agree with) except for the fact that it encourages building ever larger, ever more Byzantine pieces of software that are actually worth something in services revenue. People who come up simple, innovative software solutions will find themselves OSS-cloned in no time.
Also, what happened to closing the ASP loophole?
Anyhow, I commented on a related issue in the Tivo thread, and RMS fanboys are still splitting hairs replying to that. So if any of them have come here to carp about this post, hi!
> Representative democracy often becomes just another branch of capital or religion. Direct participatory democracy is better.
Direct participatory democracy has a scaling problem, so unless you're in Switzerland, it's not very useful. I agree that representatives are also dickwads, which is why we need term limits on legislators, just like we have a 2-term limit on the President. It would also have the side effect that professionals (engineers, scientists) would be more inclined (than lawyers) to seek public office.
We could have this if people's ideas about politics and ethics weren't warped by capital and the church. What if scientists had equal access to the media and school system as religious people do? What if parents had no right to force their children to go to church? What if advertising became useless because consumers would research products based on independent reports instead of listening to the marketing propaganda? What if bosses became useless because companies would be directly managed through democratic unions. Why not vote on hiring and firing and other important workplace decisions?
> What if parents had no right to force their children to go to church?
If you're saying that the state should micro-manage how parents rear their kids, sorry, I don't agree. I'm not religious, but if anyone wants to raise their kids to be religious, so be it. It's their kids, after all -- not yours.
> What if bosses became useless because companies would be directly managed through democratic unions.
They already exist. They're called co-operatives. They have scaling issues. And yes, they have bosses. Go study organization theory to find out why. Btw, it could be argued that a public company where workers own signficant stock is a form of a democratically-owned company. I think SAS Software is an example (but I could be wrong). Again, there are scaling issues and the pesky issue of how you can equitably divide up a company.
> Why not vote on hiring and firing and other important workplace decisions?
Because that works so well on _American Idol_. The talent really floats to the top. Not.
> You're previous posts indicated that you would defend dictatorships.
I think you just saw in them what you wanted to see. My posts are on the record and I think any clear-headed individual can decide for himself or herself if I was 'defending dictatorships'. Look inside you and ask where the violence comes from.
> Did Bach, Bethoven, Davinci require a 100 year copyright?
No, they needed patronage. Without patronage they would not have had the money/lifestyle necessary to create great art. And because patronage is scarce, art from their period was scarce as well -- nothing like the explosion of books, music and movies of all tastes (not just highbrow) we've seen in the 20th century.
> Would Einstien have invented more if he had patented his ideas for 20 years?
No, because scientific theories cannot be patented -- in his time or ours. Also, he really didn't invent much.
> Have patent laws sped up the development of the automobile?
They have made automobiles significantly better. Amidst all the bitching about Detroit, the Japanese came in with improved factory processes (many of which they were able to patent) to make cars cheaper and more reliable. Anyone used to 50s automobiles would be astonished at the safety of a modern car-- and this is reflected in national and international automobile accident stats.
> What would the world look like if there are no open standards and no public domain?
There is a case for open standards and the public domain (btw, many open standards are based on patented technology. Example: the CD. They're just licensed on a RAND basis.) However those are not adequate cause for the destruction of all intellectual property rights.
I don't really know what MS's official line on the GPL is (it was "anti-American" at one point, I have no idea what they think now) but my point of view comes from interacting with real businesses looking at open source. The bottom line is: just when they were starting to get comfortable with GPL2, the new buzz about GPL3 has increased legal scrutiny of the use of any open source beyond the trivial (by that I mean using Linux workstations, writing PHP pages and using MySQL databases)
> At least until the moment you decide to distribute the software, which is only possibly under the GPL if you don't negotiate a specific arrangement with the copyright holders.
The problem is, TiVo was not in the business of distributing software under the GPL2. They were in the business of distributing a box. Now, under GPL3, they are suddenly vulnerable. To companies, this says: if the OSS community does not like you, they'll get you when they change license agreements. Note that most of them do get the "you're free to continue using the current license" routine and will take it into account, but being cut-off from updates because your upstream provider changed the license one fine day is a scary prospect.
> GPL is just another business tool that serves a number of companies very well.
Indeed. IBM loves open source because it devalues software companies (they lost that war, and how) and promotes software services, which Big Blue can market better than anyone else. The worst of it is that RMS doesn't even see that he's basically shilling for Big Blue's business strategy. Welcome to a world where the only business software worth selling is software that so Byzantine that it takes an army of IBM Global Services consultants to install it for you.
> Your argument is that because dictators are good at oppressing people and some people will always try to be dictators, that therefore we must support dictatorship?
Nope. The argument was never that dictators are good at oppressing people. The argument was that in any human society there will be dickwads, because selfishness and evil are part of the human nature too. The solution is as much representative democracy as you can afford.
> You're a fucking asshole and if I ever encounter you in a revolutionary situation, I will fucking kill you
LOL! At last the dickwad hidden inside you emerges (amazing how a murderous lout hides inside all you revolutionary types, isn't it?). Thanks for proving my point.
So the US code describes "computer program"? So what? We're supposed to get all our collective nouns from the US Code now?
> It does not define "intellectual property", nor does it apply the same restrictions to the respective subject matter of copyrights, patents, and trademarks.
Imagine that! A collective noun not describing every one of its members completely!
OTOH, the term 'intellectual property' has been used -- with a long history -- in the legislative and judicial process when framing laws regarding copyrights, patents, trademarks, etc. So at this point it's a valid word de facto, and the anyone who argues otherwise sounds like those ossified Académie française intellectuals who get hot and bothered every time someone mentions "software" or "walkman".
> Moreover, when capitalism returned to the USSR, poverty, disease, homelessness, malnutrition, and nearly every human indicator got worse.
Because we all know that the human indicators published during the Soviet era were the gospel truth. The Kremlin would never lie. No sirree.
> The USSR was ruled by a military bureaucratic elite, not by the majority of the population.
And the point you keep missing is that in whatever egalitarian fantasy you dream up, people will organise themselves into hierarchies and jostle for power and position. In the USSR it was a military bureaucratic elite, in your next utopia it will be something else. It doesn't matter. They won't have Stalin, they'll have some other dickwad. That's because dickwadism, like altruism, is central to human nature. Forming a society that denies the existence of the baser elements of human nature is a prescription for disaster or too many hits on the bong.
To repeat, the problem with the USSR was design, not implementation.
> This is factually wrong WRT trademarks. Trademarks do not protect any 'works of mind'
No, *you* are factually wrong. Trademarks are visual, auditory or physical objects created by human minds to identify a business. They did not spawn themselves de novo.
As for the rest of your post, I'm sure we could have a very deep discussion on the epistemology of taxonomic systems, but ultimately it would be very academic and pointless.
The sole reason they get conflated is that companies want them conflated because they want their copyrights to do things only patents can or their trademarks to do things only copyrights can.
Heh. That was pretty funny. Meanwhile, in reality, companies and lawyers refer to IP law because it is a convenient shorthand to a wide range of laws that protect intangible (i.e., not physical things like cars, factories, etc) objects. Just like they refer to tort law, Constitutional law, etc. You don't have to like their legal jargon, just like they don't have to like your computer jargon of "Web 2.0", "social networks", and "Beowulf clusters".
Ok, so let's wave a magic wand and nullify all IP laws. No more 'intellectual property'. Great! What have we done? We've created a world where land (and things built on land) are the only things with value. Bingo, you've brought back an age of neo-feudalism, where he who has more land (and things that require lots of money to build, like factories built on land) gets more rich.
/. I can't figure out whether you're deluded or feudal stooges. I hope it's the former.
So much for a lower middle-class Steve Jobs creating one of the most richest companies on Earth. So much for a social-security-receiving JK Rowling becoming richer than the Queen. They would need the patronage of those with land and money or not produce their art at all.
Honestly, when I hear the IP-bashing on
> Private ownership of the means of production is theft. Land and factories should be managed by workers and consumers, not rich people.
You do realize that the last experiment in that (the USSR) resulted in a lot of lines with people hungry for bread? Put simply, communitarian management (I'll avoid the loaded word "communist") does not work because, as I noted in another post, humans are social animals not worker ants and will always form hierarchies. And hierarchies introduce social tensions and jealousies, which ultimately destroy the communitarian ethos. That is why the USSR didn't work, it was a design not implementation problem.
I applaud your idealism, but I'll also say that you're seriously deluded about what you want to achieve. Get yourself an education in economics and public policy and perhaps you'll find a way to combine the idealism with some realism about how the world works and actually improve human society.
Human beings are naturally intelligent and curious. We want to learn about the world around us. It takes years of schooling and corporate media exposure to drive the ability to think out of a perfectly functional human.
I partly agree. Where I think you're going wrong is that you believe everyone's smart and curious. I believe any statistically large cluster of humans will follow the bell curve, and that means a large number of them will be merely average and WON'T be very interested in knowing too much about the world around them (except of course for the latest Brangelina gossip). And attempts to educate them all will fail because you'll have to dumb down the curriculum to the point where it's no longer very interesting to the brightest in the class (ah, the perils of lowest-common-denominator state education).
Put another way -- in the days before schooling and corporate media you did have people creating crazy shit in their garages. But you also had a lot of ignorance and bigotry. Today we've removed a whole bunch of bigoted behaviors, but there's no longer much incentive to do stuff yourself, because most of modern technology is way too complicated for one man (see also "the death of the lone innovator").
> If we're ever to live in a free society, one without politicians and bosses, we need to start taking charge of our own lives
Sociologically impossible. Man is a social animal and creates hierarchies. This has been true in every human society ever. Including supposedly egalitarian ones like the USSR and present-day Cuba (great article in the NYT recently about how party officials get way better care than regular folk).
> They aren't really property rights, and they certainly cannot reasonably be thought of in a collective fashion.
What part of rights to _immaterial objects_ do you not get?
Property rights were a great innovation at a time when you had *no* rights (chiefly land rights) if you weren't royalty or had a royal grant. This transformed feudal society to a post-Magna Carta agragrian society and enabled the rise of gentleman farmers. Intellectual Property Rights were a big innovation on Plain Old Property Rights because it meant that land and trade weren't the only things of value any more. You could use your brain and come up with something (a device, a piece of art/book/whatever) and could justifiably hope to make money off it. Different mechanisms exist to protect different classes of work (patents tend to protect devices, copyright tends to protect works without form, like books and music). But they all protect the same thing, works of the mind. And that's where the term "intellectual property rights" come from.
> Generally when you are talking about copyrights, you say copyrights, when talking about patents, you say patents, and so on.
Geez. Yes. But sometimes I also want to talk about rights inherent in works of the mind in general. A drug is covered by patents. The appearance of the drug is protected by a design trademark. The drug's name and its manufacturer's name are protected by trademark law. Instructions, artwork, etc accompanying the packet it comes in may be copyrighted. To sum up, that box you buy at the pharmacy is protected by a whole class of Intellectual Property Rights.
Finally, one thing that's not directly related to your post but instead related to a very general anti-IP position on Slashdot. Yes, there are misapplications of patent law, especially w.r.t software. So change the patenting process -- something lots of people are working on. Yes, companies have too much power these days and they often wield it using laws designed to protect IP (simply because much of their property is generated from the human mind). So lobby your legislators for corporate reform so that organisations like the RIAA/MPAA can't sue little kids again.
But don't throw the baby out with the bathwater and childishly cry out against IP. Without IP, the only things actually worth anything in this world would be land and expensive objects (factories, etc) built on land. And that's not a world you'd like to live in.
> The GPL2 has no terms of expiration. Anyone useing anything GPLv2 is free and clear forever.
Except the right to updates. Which is a pretty big right for software infrastructure. Which every responsible software vendor gives you, once you accept the EULA. Even in the worst case (MS), if you've accepted the EULA to XP, you get updates for seven years per their lifecycle policy. Some of the updates provide "additional functionality", e.g., Windows Update->Microsoft Update delivers additional functionality and requires an additional update. Or Windows Media Player 11 adds new DRM features and requires agreement to a rather nasty EULA, but you still get updates to WMP9, which XP came with, even if you don't agree to the updated EULA.
> What the FSF is doing here probablly amounts to one of the most evenhanded and kind resolutions to a contract dispute in HISTORY.
What the FSF is doing here is shaping the GPL to suit its ideological needs, twisting the meaning of "freedom" to really mean "whatever RMS is really keen on". You might want to read the rest of my response here.
> (I also agree with Richard Stallman that we need to stop using the term "Intellectual Property". I've seen too many people confuse copyrights, patents, licenses, trademarks, trade secrets, etc.
That's like saying: I've seen way too many people confuse the term "operating system", "distribution", and "application". So let's stop using the term "software"!
People use the term "Intellectual Property" s because they are collectively a class of property rights of immaterial objects. RMS and his fanboys need a remedial grammar course. Normal folk get confused because -- well, normal folk get confused about a lot of things not related to their everyday lives. Let's see YOU not get confused about the type of tar to use on a highway if you're not a civil engineer.
> GPL is when they forget that it is a normal copyright license. It's about freedom, but with obligation.
I'm still waiting for people to acknowledge that the GPL's version of "freedom" not free as in speech, but "free" as in "RMS' idea of what freedom should be". Frankly, for an organisation that celebrates freedom so much, they are essentially targeting specific organisations, e.g. the embedded hardware guys and Microsoft/Novell.
This is a shame because the embedded hardware guys who embed Linux you dismiss are an important part of the Linux market and are probably responsible for getting Linux into more users' homes than most distros!). As for MS/Novell, well, $deity forbid that we make it easy for commercial software and OSS to work together.
Here's why the GPL3 is bad for business: it has shown itself for what it is: an ideologically-driven legal document. And those *always* make for bad business, because you cannot predict where it will go next. If you're laughing at Novell now, what happens if/when in a few years *you* are on the FSF's shitlist and the GPLvNext comes out?
(An obvious target, which RMS wanted to target in the GPL3 but backed away from, are ASPs, i.e., anyone who provides software as a service over a website. I work for an ASP btw and am relieved our use of GPL-licensed software is pretty much limited to using gcc and PHP.)
Freedom my ass. If the bill of rights were written based on current expediencies like the GPL is, we'd be living in a ideological gulag reminiscent of the Soviet Union's less-than-stellar days.
And for those of you saying "oh the _current_ license won't change, they can always stay where they are", you know that's a meaningless statement. The right to use a program object (executable, library, whatever) programmatically is a very limited right when divorced from the right to updates to that object. Most library vendors know this and provide lifecycle policies for this. Hell, even Microsoft -- notorious for slipstreaming license terms -- provides for _seven years_ of updates, even for people who _don't_ accept slipstreamed updates but did accept the original EULA. I still see nothing about a sunset period or grace period in the current GPL3 drafts.
> I replied to the parent poster about their mistaken belief that current GPL2 code in use would change license
Eh. As you and I both noted, the chance that the kernel would change is practically zero. Now, the problem is other code. If package foo changes to GPL3, and you depend on it being GPL2, you've got a problem and you have to fork the last-known GPL2'd version so that your legal liability is limited. So yeah, your existing code won't change license, but in practice that doesn't mean anything -- the codebase you depend upon *will* change license (if the maintainers switch from v2 to v3) and you've got to do something about it.
For key infrastructure projects, you'll probably see some corporations banding together to provide a GPL2 fork. And an increasing interest in BSD-derived userland tools.
So, basically, Microsoft was right when it called the GPL viral (in the sense of its negative connotation)?
/. crowd complain about Microsoft licensing practices.
Way to shaft all the people who bet their business on your software, bub, by changing the license terms. And the
Of course, in reality it won't come to that. Prediction: if the GPL3 comes out the way RMS has been saying it will, Ubuntu, IBM and others will fork the GNU system in a heartbeat (the kernel will remain GPL2, of course). It will be XEmacs vs GNU Emacs all over again, proving RMS learnt nothing from that fiasco.
> I think politicians in general are the scum of the world. Everywhere.
Couldn't have put it better myself.
One thing about this, as well as the too-many-legislators-are-lawyers point another poster brought up. I've often thought of this w.r.t the US: why can't Reps/Senators have term limits? Two terms back to back, after that you cool your heels for 4 years. That'd make our democracy far more representative and make life tougher for lobbyists because it'd force them to rebuild relationships every few terms. It'd also make it far more likely that more people would consider taking a sabbatical and hold public office for a term or two.
The problem with lobbying is that if you ban it, things just move underground and become unaccounted for. This way at least you know who's in bed with whom. If you think legislators from Europe (say, or really anywhere in the world) don't have special interests, you're dreaming.
The ability of simple chemicals to bond and form progressively more complex sensors and computation units shows just how primitive our top-down-engineered silicon computers are. Makes you wonder what our computers and I/O devices will be like when we get to the point where we really grok biochemistry.
> I picture a "that's the most retarded idea I've ever heard" guy.
Yes, that probably describes him better than what I wrote before. He's actually used that line in product reviews.
Gates by all accounts was a bit of a twat in his salad days, what with maniacally rocking during product reviews, saying things like "I could write this better all by myself", and generally being a dick. However most people also agree that marriage/kids has mellowed him considerably and he takes his current "elder statesman of tech/philanthropist" role pretty seriously.
/.-ers :-)
So no, Gates is not the "f-ing kill you" sort of guy. He _was_ more of the "you're f-ing stupid" kind of guy. Which oddly makes him pretty similar to many
> This reminds of a funny story. I was eating breakfast with my cousin one morning and I had organic orange juice. He looked at it and said to me "err.. what does it taste like?" :)
Astonishingly enough, organic orange juice doesn't taste any different from oranges from a tree to which *reasonable* quantities of chemical fertilizer has been applied. Try some blind tests if you wish.
Of course, I'm pretty sceptical about most of the organic produce on the market being 100% chem-fertilizer free. In fact, the anti-fertilizer bias *ads for organic products* seek to produce is as harmful as its opposite, i.e., hyper-industrialized farming.