Running on Rails has forced us to deal with scaling issues - issues that any growing site eventually contends with - far sooner than I think we would on another framework.
That is probably true. However, I would count that as an advantage -- better to deal with them sooner than later.
At this point in time there's no facility in Rails to talk to more than one database at a time.
There are many, many ways to talk to more than one database in Rails. In fact, it is possible to swap out the entire database layer of Rails and use another ORM, or no ORM at all. On the bleeding edge -- and Twitter might actually be a good candidate for this -- people have wired up Rails to CouchDB, which provides trivially scalable multimaster replication, and which, being HTTP, can be thrown behind any old load balancer -- which brings this back to a "just throw hardware at it" problem.
All the convenience methods and syntactical sugar that makes Rails such a pleasure for coders ends up being absolutely punishing, performance-wise.
Some of them do -- a good example would be Symbol.to_proc.
However, Merb proves that this is not actually a Ruby problem, it is a Rails problem. And Rails and Merb are merging some point in the near future.
It's also worth mentioning that there shouldn't be doubt in anybody's mind at this point that Ruby itself is slow. [...] I think it's worth being frank that this isn't one of those relativistic language issues. Ruby is slow.
Somewhat true -- after all, Ruby 1.9.1 did double the performance of the language.
But, relative to what?
Turns out that, at least compared to other languages and frameworks (like PHP), Ruby is not slow.
It's also worth mentioning that while all of the Twitter alternatives may have enjoyed better uptime, they haven't had nearly the amount of traffic that Twitter does. We don't really know if they can scale -- but even supposing they can, Twitter was there first. And while they complain about those nice features being slow, they probably owe their success to those features for getting their product out the door faster than their competitors.
It's also worth mentioning that this interview is almost two years old. Rails changes a lot in two years. In fact, Twitter were early adopters -- two years before that interview, Rails had only just shared commit rights. Two years before that, it didn't exist at all.
It might be worth asking what version of Rails Twitter is using, and if they've noticed a change since then.
Well, Apple does more DRM, more vendor lock-in, more proprietary secrets, and more evil business practices (suing anyone who says bad things about them) than Microsoft ever did.
My assumption was that the only advantage of Apple is that there isn't a market where they have a huge enough marketshare to relax, especially when they have such a reputation for quality. So while Microsoft can put out Windows ME and Vista and still make money, a release like that could kill Apple.
So, if Apple ever stops "just working", you really do have a point.
However, Apple does ship with Perl preinstalled on every copy of OS X I've ever used. Leopard ships with Ruby on Rails, and Rubygems to make it easy to upgrade if you need to. Windows ships with neither of these things. So to have a feature fall short of "just working" when Microsoft doesn't have that feature at all isn't really a point MS has over Apple.
Then again, on Ubuntu, CPAN is something which usually Just Works.
how much stuff do you write today, that will actually compile in 15 years, and much more interesting be used by anyone?
Probably not much, but that is the point -- chances are, you're not going to still be selling it. Or if you are, it's at least a vastly new version.
I'd be glad to hear suggestions, but I chose those numbers carefully -- to be long enough that it'd be unreasonable to ask for longer protection, but short enough that it's not necessarily completely irrelevant.
An example: Doom was released in 1993. There's really no way id is making much money off the original, and the sequels were made within that time. In fact, id has released source to it, and people do still port Doom (and Quake) to new platforms all the time.
However, I wouldn't be surprised to see quite a lot of code from 1994 that is complete abandonware, at least partly due to licensing issues.
By the way: This isn't just for software. Certainly, we all watch movies and read books which are much older than that.
Suppose your a media company, X was created by a corporation in 1933. You like the story line and think a remake would be something the people would enjoy. According to US copyright law before the extension, it would be in public domain by 2008 (75 years) if it was a published work. You remake the film, add all these special effect to it, and then when promoting the movie release, you find that copyright had been filed on it in Europe and it's covered for another 15 years.
That tells me two things:
First, that was not a studio with millions to spend. A studio with millions to spend could certainly afford a few thousand dollars on a lawyer to teach them about the realities of copyright law. If there was a danger of it being pulled out of the public domain, they would never have made it.
Second, it tells me we aren't talking about creators. We're talking about remakers. It would be useful to talk to people who actually create original works and ask them if they really want their children and grandchildren to hold their work hostage for almost a century after they're dead.
It would also be worth considering: With the change in copyright law, your example film would never have been made. If copyright law had stayed sane, it could have been made without fear, as the original would've passed into the public domain in all countries long ago.
Is it too much to meet in the middle after they found that 20 year more was the lowest they could go?
Yes.
You are essentially saying that because X happened and Y found an advantage from it, that Y caused X.
Great strawman. Try attacking the argument I actually made.
Or do you really think the opinion of a major corporation, spending tons of money on lobbying -- before the fact -- would have zero influence?
A simple "yes" or "no" will do, thanks.
Or we can do it your way: X hadn't happened yet, and Y really wanted X to happen. So Y sent a bunch of money, flowers, and well-written letters to C, who gets to decide whether X happens. C might have decided Z would happen, but instead chose to make X happen. Later on, D calls S a conspiracy theorist for even mentioning the name of Y.
this attack has been known for several years and absolutely nothing has been done about it
I'm curious -- is there any desktop environment which provides the ability to have an icon launch a program, and is not vulnerable to this? Remember all those Windows.PIF file attacks, for example?
Little say, maybe, but much to contribute -- without them, the core developers would accomplish a lot less.
Your argument (and the GP's) seems to be roughly like saying that the employees of a company don't contribute nearly as much as the executives. And while executive salaries, bonuses, and golden parachutes might tend to support that theory, I call bullshit.
They would not be willing to license their own software that way (while some are willing to license code under some form of strong or weak copyleft.)
That seems unlikely. Some more common scenarios:
There might be an extremely strict copyleft-licensed version, and a commercial version. All patches submitted to the project are requested to sign over copyright to the project, so that they can be used in the commercial version -- or, alternatively, the copyleft license is structured to allow a single organization to create a proprietary fork.
In either case, the outcome is, the project is funded in part by companies licensing the commercial version for use in proprietary versions, while the copyleft version is used in open source projects, or by end-users who don't need commercial support.
Another example would be a project with an extremely relaxed license. Here, while it's unlikely to make any projects open which wouldn't otherwise be, it still encourages corporations to contribute code back to the community, if only in the form of bugfixes and enhancements to the core library. For example, if I am developing a web application, even a completely proprietary one, it is in my best interest to publish any changes I have to make to Rails, either as plugins or patches. If the Rails community picks them up and maintains them, all the better -- if not, I'm certainly no worse off, as my core business logic (that actually pays the bills) is still proprietary.
That is why Stallman prefers copyleft. It encourages companies to consider contributing code to the public.
Stallman is also out of touch.
Again, the above scenarios, I have actually encountered, personally, from both sides of the fence. Certainly, companies will contribute back to copyleft as well -- assuming they can use it. (Git can be as copyleft as you like, because my program won't be linked against it.)
On the other hand, I cannot find very many examples of companies contributing large chunks of valuable code back to the community because of GPL. The closest that comes to mind are the Linksys routers -- some of them ran Linux, so it forced Broadcom to release source code. Which they did, in the form of a tiny amount of glue code and a large binary blob. I suppose it was helpful, in its way, if you want to hack that particular router, but it certainly wasn't a significant contribution to the world of free software.
In fact, as cool as some of the open source Linksys projects are, I'd argue we'd have been better off without the whole thing. Linksys doesn't seem to be using Linux in many of the newer models, and other companies are probably similarly wary of Linux now, because of this apparent demonstration of the "viral" nature of the GPL.
Since when is that the case? Unless you're willing to do a lot of research up front, it's not as though there's a DefectiveByDesign label on it.
and you still buy the product
Then you should still have the right to reverse engineer it. The DMCA is what made this a government issue. Repeal that and I don't care about touching the constitution.
Here is a hint, if your source for anything regarding this even mentioned Steamboat Willie then your on a biased and misinformed site.
Like Wikipedia.
Here's a hint: The mere mention of something is not enough to assume bias. Context matters.
Someone named SanityInAnarchy moved into the neighborhood about 6 months ago...
See, that's not drawing the wrong conclusion from existing facts. That's inventing facts out of whole cloth.
With the US honoring European copyright and vice versa, there was a need to make them the same terms otherwise all US copyright could be default get extra time by registering in a European country.
I'm not sure I see why that's a problem. Nor do I see why creators would actually bother -- we're talking about something that won't happen until many years after you're dead.
Nor do I see why the US would cave to foreign pressure, instead of suggesting that Europe reduce its copyright by 20 years. By suggesting that domestic lobbying may have played a large role here, I am not declaring that the sky burns in the east. Rather, by suggesting that it played no role in that decision, you are putting your hand in the fire again and wondering if it will hurt this time -- you are ignoring the amount of influence that such media companies have, both here and abroad -- see the current Pirate Bay trial.
At the same time, what they are really doing here is no different than Freenet -- or Google, for that matter. They are facilitating the transfer of any file you want. Their only crime, I suppose, is not censoring access to copyrighted material -- as they are certainly not the ones posting such material.
the people pirating on the pirate bay, in large majority, just don't care about any of them.
I would guess that there is also a large majority of them who might not have started using the Pirate Bay if some of these larger issues had been addressed.
If Copyright were only 1 year, do you really think that people wouldn't still be pirating films by aXXo the day of DVD release?
Perhaps not. But I think if movies cost 50 cents or a dollar to download, were released simultaneously in all regions, and were available in an un-DRM'd format, far more people would buy them than pirate them. Especially if you then streamline the process, and provide added value that doesn't exist in the pirated version.
The Pirate Bay is about theft, plain and simple.
Clearly, you've ignored one of the GP's "real and relevant issues" -- The Pirate Bay is not about theft. If anything, it is about copyright infringement. Moreover, it is about free culture, through legal or illegal means -- I can cite at least one probably legal documentary (Good Copy Bad Copy) which has been released via The Pirate Bay. It has also been used for leaks -- in fact, go to ThePirateBay homepage, click on the banner, and find all kinds of leaked information about Scientology.
What's more, as long as you think the way you are thinking, you are simply not equipped to fight piracy. Regardless of the trial in Sweden, piracy will continue, and it will only get worse. The only way to fight it is to pretend it's legitimate competition, and figure out how to compete with it.
Speaking of which, watch Good Copy Bad Copy. You can download it from The Pirate Bay. I promise it's legal, and it's worth illustrating how it's not just a few "unique snowflakes" who are actually creating, not only without the benefit of copyright, but sometimes creating things which would not be possible if they respected copyright.
Any protection that prevents the code from being used in any situation will mean it won't be as well tested, it won't have as many opportunities for improvement,
Probably true. Or it might encourage some people who otherwise wouldn't to do those things, but with your restrictions, rather than in a completely proprietary fork.
and it won't be used as a basis for interoperability.
Actually, this part is not true. After all, there are plenty of standards under far more restrictive licenses than the GPL, which are used for interoperability.
In fact, this part is complete bullshit. Can you name a single public domain web browser? Have you noticed that the w3c's published specifications for such basic technologies as HTML don't seem to be under any license at all -- meaning, by default, they are copyrighted to the w3c?
And yet, can you name anything more interoperable than the Web?
why not keep the code to yourself instead of trying to control everyone else with restrictions?
I don't get it -- how can I be trying to control anyone by giving it away, moreso than by keeping it to myself? If you don't like it, don't use it. And like magic, you've broken my control!
Personally, I'm finding that I would rather not let my code be used as part of systems I consider to be evil, like DRM. However, I'm also finding that every license has problems, and I especially would not like to see a complete rewrite just to get away from whatever license I chose. I would much rather developers spend more time improving my code (and sending patches back) than worrying about licensing issues.
I was just reading up on copyright law, and it turns out that the original copyright law was 14 years, plus a possible (single) 14-year renewal by the author, if still alive -- which I believe they had to actively secure for themselves.
How about a license which says "This work passes into the public domain in 28 years," or better, "This work passes into the public domain in n years."
For anyone on Slashdot who has the legal expertise, I really don't know how to code that into law, or what pitfalls I should expect after that time. But I would like to at least dual-license some of my stuff under that, and it would be nice to know which of the existing licenses are compatible.
I think software copyright should be something like 15 years, and software patents more like 5 years. Honestly, in software, if you haven't made a profit off a program in 15 years, you're not going to, and if you haven't made a profit from a patent in 5 years, all that's left is patent-trolling.
In particular, it is well-known that Disney lobbied for this act, in the year in which Steamboat Willie would have gone public domain. I really don't think that makes me a "raving lunatic" for making that connection.
Granted, Europe already had that level of protection, but we should have been moving in the other direction.
Perhaps I should have worded it differently, but look at copyright as it was originally defined: 14 years with a 14-year renewal, if the author is still alive. That's a total of 28 years. Why isn't that sufficient? If you can't make a profit after 28 years, why not let it pass into the public domain? If you did make a profit, why should you be allowed to continue collecting royalties without working -- how is that better for the common good than forcing you to continue to create?
Just how much does 'sharing' contribute to open source anyway, considering that all the top projects are tightly controlled by a small number of lead developers who hold the keys to commitments and in accepting patches.
I think the problem is that RMS has encoded his values into his license, and one of those values is, "Proprietary software is evil."
My main problem with the proliferation of licenses is, even if using 100% open source, you're not necessarily in the clear -- BSD and GPL don't fix, for example. But, less than that, like the LGPL, is problematic because it could be linked into a proprietary program, not just free ones.
Lately, I have been leaning towards MIT-licensed stuff, mainly because the license is short, sweet, well-understood, and compatible with just about anything. I'd much rather have my work used for proprietary programs than become complete abandonware, even among open source, for licensing issues. And thanks to Steamboat Willie, a poor choice of license can't be fixed (except by explicit permission from all copyright holders, likely meaning all contributors) for over a hundred years -- so I'm actually really tempted to follow sqlite and release as public domain.
I would feel much differently if everything passed into the public domain in 15 years, and patents lasted 5 years.
Point taken -- probably not, but I'm not sure. Then again, the Wii is capable of 3D, so I would think that a 2D game would work well enough.
I'd imagine that llvm would also make a good target for the PC ports. I'd also imagine that a JVM port would work well, but I don't know if Nintendo has a decent one, with OpenGL bindings and everything... However, it is a PowerPC processor, so I don't think the JIT would be a problem.
Unfortunately, as another poster points out, the closest thing we have to cross platform + consoles is XNA, and that's only PC and Xbox 360.
get them ALL educated and more importantly angry enough to stop buying for a couple years.
Won't work. Far too many, even when they have a fair understanding of how things work, either don't care much -- they'll see it as a nuisance, not an issue of rights -- or will actually side with the corporations. It's a lot easier to see both sides if you're reasonably educated (and probably a pirate yourself, at least once).
The politicians won't listen. Their ears will be plugged with earplugs made out of the lobbying money from the media conglomerates.
That is the real problem. I imagine there will be at least one other major issue on which these politicians are taking lobbying money and acting against the public interest, perhaps one the public already cares about.
Like what? What could be MORE vulnerable than a Microsoft operating system without a firewall?
A mandatory Microsoft operating system, firewall or not, which can only connect to the Internet using your social security number, which is then tied to a unique ID on every website you visit. Or something similar -- leak that information, and anyone can impersonate you, or track you down from any website.
Probably combined with some custom software, complete with backdoors for all interested parties (Microsoft, the Government, etc.)
So, monoculture, lack of privacy, and single-point-of-failure. Joy.
I'm actually not feeling particularly inventive, so we could easily end up with something even worse. However, it seems unlikely that a net which doesn't allow for anonymity is going to be more secure. It seems likely that, at least for the end-user, it will be less secure, precisely because there's now a single identity, likely held by a single organization, which could be compromised.
Slashdot Mirror
Running on Rails has forced us to deal with scaling issues - issues that any growing site eventually contends with - far sooner than I think we would on another framework.
That is probably true. However, I would count that as an advantage -- better to deal with them sooner than later.
At this point in time there's no facility in Rails to talk to more than one database at a time.
There are many, many ways to talk to more than one database in Rails. In fact, it is possible to swap out the entire database layer of Rails and use another ORM, or no ORM at all. On the bleeding edge -- and Twitter might actually be a good candidate for this -- people have wired up Rails to CouchDB, which provides trivially scalable multimaster replication, and which, being HTTP, can be thrown behind any old load balancer -- which brings this back to a "just throw hardware at it" problem.
All the convenience methods and syntactical sugar that makes Rails such a pleasure for coders ends up being absolutely punishing, performance-wise.
Some of them do -- a good example would be Symbol.to_proc.
However, Merb proves that this is not actually a Ruby problem, it is a Rails problem. And Rails and Merb are merging some point in the near future.
It's also worth mentioning that there shouldn't be doubt in anybody's mind at this point that Ruby itself is slow. [...] I think it's worth being frank that this isn't one of those relativistic language issues. Ruby is slow.
Somewhat true -- after all, Ruby 1.9.1 did double the performance of the language.
But, relative to what?
Turns out that, at least compared to other languages and frameworks (like PHP), Ruby is not slow.
It's also worth mentioning that while all of the Twitter alternatives may have enjoyed better uptime, they haven't had nearly the amount of traffic that Twitter does. We don't really know if they can scale -- but even supposing they can, Twitter was there first. And while they complain about those nice features being slow, they probably owe their success to those features for getting their product out the door faster than their competitors.
It's also worth mentioning that this interview is almost two years old. Rails changes a lot in two years. In fact, Twitter were early adopters -- two years before that interview, Rails had only just shared commit rights. Two years before that, it didn't exist at all.
It might be worth asking what version of Rails Twitter is using, and if they've noticed a change since then.
We don't exactly have "package managers" in OS X.
Sure we do, a bunch of them. That's kind of the problem.
Can anyone give me a good reason Apple can't simply open up Software Update to third party developers, and end that debate?
For that matter, would it be terribly difficult for Microsoft to open up Microsoft Update?
Who would use OS X for serious Perl work anyway?
I suppose, people who prefer OS X to Linux. In fact, the Ruby community seems to be using OS X quite a lot, lately.
Well, Apple does more DRM, more vendor lock-in, more proprietary secrets, and more evil business practices (suing anyone who says bad things about them) than Microsoft ever did.
My assumption was that the only advantage of Apple is that there isn't a market where they have a huge enough marketshare to relax, especially when they have such a reputation for quality. So while Microsoft can put out Windows ME and Vista and still make money, a release like that could kill Apple.
So, if Apple ever stops "just working", you really do have a point.
However, Apple does ship with Perl preinstalled on every copy of OS X I've ever used. Leopard ships with Ruby on Rails, and Rubygems to make it easy to upgrade if you need to. Windows ships with neither of these things. So to have a feature fall short of "just working" when Microsoft doesn't have that feature at all isn't really a point MS has over Apple.
Then again, on Ubuntu, CPAN is something which usually Just Works.
how much stuff do you write today, that will actually compile in 15 years, and much more interesting be used by anyone?
Probably not much, but that is the point -- chances are, you're not going to still be selling it. Or if you are, it's at least a vastly new version.
I'd be glad to hear suggestions, but I chose those numbers carefully -- to be long enough that it'd be unreasonable to ask for longer protection, but short enough that it's not necessarily completely irrelevant.
An example: Doom was released in 1993. There's really no way id is making much money off the original, and the sequels were made within that time. In fact, id has released source to it, and people do still port Doom (and Quake) to new platforms all the time.
However, I wouldn't be surprised to see quite a lot of code from 1994 that is complete abandonware, at least partly due to licensing issues.
By the way: This isn't just for software. Certainly, we all watch movies and read books which are much older than that.
Suppose your a media company, X was created by a corporation in 1933. You like the story line and think a remake would be something the people would enjoy. According to US copyright law before the extension, it would be in public domain by 2008 (75 years) if it was a published work. You remake the film, add all these special effect to it, and then when promoting the movie release, you find that copyright had been filed on it in Europe and it's covered for another 15 years.
That tells me two things:
First, that was not a studio with millions to spend. A studio with millions to spend could certainly afford a few thousand dollars on a lawyer to teach them about the realities of copyright law. If there was a danger of it being pulled out of the public domain, they would never have made it.
Second, it tells me we aren't talking about creators. We're talking about remakers. It would be useful to talk to people who actually create original works and ask them if they really want their children and grandchildren to hold their work hostage for almost a century after they're dead.
It would also be worth considering: With the change in copyright law, your example film would never have been made. If copyright law had stayed sane, it could have been made without fear, as the original would've passed into the public domain in all countries long ago.
Is it too much to meet in the middle after they found that 20 year more was the lowest they could go?
Yes.
You are essentially saying that because X happened and Y found an advantage from it, that Y caused X.
Great strawman. Try attacking the argument I actually made.
Or do you really think the opinion of a major corporation, spending tons of money on lobbying -- before the fact -- would have zero influence?
A simple "yes" or "no" will do, thanks.
Or we can do it your way: X hadn't happened yet, and Y really wanted X to happen. So Y sent a bunch of money, flowers, and well-written letters to C, who gets to decide whether X happens. C might have decided Z would happen, but instead chose to make X happen. Later on, D calls S a conspiracy theorist for even mentioning the name of Y.
this attack has been known for several years and absolutely nothing has been done about it
I'm curious -- is there any desktop environment which provides the ability to have an icon launch a program, and is not vulnerable to this? Remember all those Windows .PIF file attacks, for example?
Little say, maybe, but much to contribute -- without them, the core developers would accomplish a lot less.
Your argument (and the GP's) seems to be roughly like saying that the employees of a company don't contribute nearly as much as the executives. And while executive salaries, bonuses, and golden parachutes might tend to support that theory, I call bullshit.
They would not be willing to license their own software that way (while some are willing to license code under some form of strong or weak copyleft.)
That seems unlikely. Some more common scenarios:
There might be an extremely strict copyleft-licensed version, and a commercial version. All patches submitted to the project are requested to sign over copyright to the project, so that they can be used in the commercial version -- or, alternatively, the copyleft license is structured to allow a single organization to create a proprietary fork.
In either case, the outcome is, the project is funded in part by companies licensing the commercial version for use in proprietary versions, while the copyleft version is used in open source projects, or by end-users who don't need commercial support.
Another example would be a project with an extremely relaxed license. Here, while it's unlikely to make any projects open which wouldn't otherwise be, it still encourages corporations to contribute code back to the community, if only in the form of bugfixes and enhancements to the core library. For example, if I am developing a web application, even a completely proprietary one, it is in my best interest to publish any changes I have to make to Rails, either as plugins or patches. If the Rails community picks them up and maintains them, all the better -- if not, I'm certainly no worse off, as my core business logic (that actually pays the bills) is still proprietary.
That is why Stallman prefers copyleft. It encourages companies to consider contributing code to the public.
Stallman is also out of touch.
Again, the above scenarios, I have actually encountered, personally, from both sides of the fence. Certainly, companies will contribute back to copyleft as well -- assuming they can use it. (Git can be as copyleft as you like, because my program won't be linked against it.)
On the other hand, I cannot find very many examples of companies contributing large chunks of valuable code back to the community because of GPL. The closest that comes to mind are the Linksys routers -- some of them ran Linux, so it forced Broadcom to release source code. Which they did, in the form of a tiny amount of glue code and a large binary blob. I suppose it was helpful, in its way, if you want to hack that particular router, but it certainly wasn't a significant contribution to the world of free software.
In fact, as cool as some of the open source Linksys projects are, I'd argue we'd have been better off without the whole thing. Linksys doesn't seem to be using Linux in many of the newer models, and other companies are probably similarly wary of Linux now, because of this apparent demonstration of the "viral" nature of the GPL.
If the DRM is disclosed up front
Since when is that the case? Unless you're willing to do a lot of research up front, it's not as though there's a DefectiveByDesign label on it.
and you still buy the product
Then you should still have the right to reverse engineer it. The DMCA is what made this a government issue. Repeal that and I don't care about touching the constitution.
Here is a hint, if your source for anything regarding this even mentioned Steamboat Willie then your on a biased and misinformed site.
Like Wikipedia.
Here's a hint: The mere mention of something is not enough to assume bias. Context matters.
Someone named SanityInAnarchy moved into the neighborhood about 6 months ago...
See, that's not drawing the wrong conclusion from existing facts. That's inventing facts out of whole cloth.
With the US honoring European copyright and vice versa, there was a need to make them the same terms otherwise all US copyright could be default get extra time by registering in a European country.
I'm not sure I see why that's a problem. Nor do I see why creators would actually bother -- we're talking about something that won't happen until many years after you're dead.
Nor do I see why the US would cave to foreign pressure, instead of suggesting that Europe reduce its copyright by 20 years. By suggesting that domestic lobbying may have played a large role here, I am not declaring that the sky burns in the east. Rather, by suggesting that it played no role in that decision, you are putting your hand in the fire again and wondering if it will hurt this time -- you are ignoring the amount of influence that such media companies have, both here and abroad -- see the current Pirate Bay trial.
At the same time, what they are really doing here is no different than Freenet -- or Google, for that matter. They are facilitating the transfer of any file you want. Their only crime, I suppose, is not censoring access to copyrighted material -- as they are certainly not the ones posting such material.
the people pirating on the pirate bay, in large majority, just don't care about any of them.
I would guess that there is also a large majority of them who might not have started using the Pirate Bay if some of these larger issues had been addressed.
If Copyright were only 1 year, do you really think that people wouldn't still be pirating films by aXXo the day of DVD release?
Perhaps not. But I think if movies cost 50 cents or a dollar to download, were released simultaneously in all regions, and were available in an un-DRM'd format, far more people would buy them than pirate them. Especially if you then streamline the process, and provide added value that doesn't exist in the pirated version.
The Pirate Bay is about theft, plain and simple.
Clearly, you've ignored one of the GP's "real and relevant issues" -- The Pirate Bay is not about theft. If anything, it is about copyright infringement. Moreover, it is about free culture, through legal or illegal means -- I can cite at least one probably legal documentary (Good Copy Bad Copy) which has been released via The Pirate Bay. It has also been used for leaks -- in fact, go to ThePirateBay homepage, click on the banner, and find all kinds of leaked information about Scientology.
What's more, as long as you think the way you are thinking, you are simply not equipped to fight piracy. Regardless of the trial in Sweden, piracy will continue, and it will only get worse. The only way to fight it is to pretend it's legitimate competition, and figure out how to compete with it.
Speaking of which, watch Good Copy Bad Copy. You can download it from The Pirate Bay. I promise it's legal, and it's worth illustrating how it's not just a few "unique snowflakes" who are actually creating, not only without the benefit of copyright, but sometimes creating things which would not be possible if they respected copyright.
Whoops, correction -- the w3c does have an explicit license. However, it does place a few restrictions on its use.
Why not ask them your question? It's certainly not public domain.
Any protection that prevents the code from being used in any situation will mean it won't be as well tested, it won't have as many opportunities for improvement,
Probably true. Or it might encourage some people who otherwise wouldn't to do those things, but with your restrictions, rather than in a completely proprietary fork.
and it won't be used as a basis for interoperability.
Actually, this part is not true. After all, there are plenty of standards under far more restrictive licenses than the GPL, which are used for interoperability.
In fact, this part is complete bullshit. Can you name a single public domain web browser? Have you noticed that the w3c's published specifications for such basic technologies as HTML don't seem to be under any license at all -- meaning, by default, they are copyrighted to the w3c?
And yet, can you name anything more interoperable than the Web?
why not keep the code to yourself instead of trying to control everyone else with restrictions?
I don't get it -- how can I be trying to control anyone by giving it away, moreso than by keeping it to myself? If you don't like it, don't use it. And like magic, you've broken my control!
Personally, I'm finding that I would rather not let my code be used as part of systems I consider to be evil, like DRM. However, I'm also finding that every license has problems, and I especially would not like to see a complete rewrite just to get away from whatever license I chose. I would much rather developers spend more time improving my code (and sending patches back) than worrying about licensing issues.
I was just reading up on copyright law, and it turns out that the original copyright law was 14 years, plus a possible (single) 14-year renewal by the author, if still alive -- which I believe they had to actively secure for themselves.
How about a license which says "This work passes into the public domain in 28 years," or better, "This work passes into the public domain in n years."
For anyone on Slashdot who has the legal expertise, I really don't know how to code that into law, or what pitfalls I should expect after that time. But I would like to at least dual-license some of my stuff under that, and it would be nice to know which of the existing licenses are compatible.
I think software copyright should be something like 15 years, and software patents more like 5 years. Honestly, in software, if you haven't made a profit off a program in 15 years, you're not going to, and if you haven't made a profit from a patent in 5 years, all that's left is patent-trolling.
So, what was CTEA about?
In particular, it is well-known that Disney lobbied for this act, in the year in which Steamboat Willie would have gone public domain. I really don't think that makes me a "raving lunatic" for making that connection.
Granted, Europe already had that level of protection, but we should have been moving in the other direction.
Perhaps I should have worded it differently, but look at copyright as it was originally defined: 14 years with a 14-year renewal, if the author is still alive. That's a total of 28 years. Why isn't that sufficient? If you can't make a profit after 28 years, why not let it pass into the public domain? If you did make a profit, why should you be allowed to continue collecting royalties without working -- how is that better for the common good than forcing you to continue to create?
Just how much does 'sharing' contribute to open source anyway, considering that all the top projects are tightly controlled by a small number of lead developers who hold the keys to commitments and in accepting patches.
Who's sending patches?
Remember that Richard is against software being copyrighted, and BSD licensing is pretty close to abandonment of copyright.
Richard seems to prefer "copyleft" to no copyright at all...
And why not go all the way and start public domaining stuff? SQLite is public domain, for example.
I think the problem is that RMS has encoded his values into his license, and one of those values is, "Proprietary software is evil."
My main problem with the proliferation of licenses is, even if using 100% open source, you're not necessarily in the clear -- BSD and GPL don't fix, for example. But, less than that, like the LGPL, is problematic because it could be linked into a proprietary program, not just free ones.
Lately, I have been leaning towards MIT-licensed stuff, mainly because the license is short, sweet, well-understood, and compatible with just about anything. I'd much rather have my work used for proprietary programs than become complete abandonware, even among open source, for licensing issues. And thanks to Steamboat Willie, a poor choice of license can't be fixed (except by explicit permission from all copyright holders, likely meaning all contributors) for over a hundred years -- so I'm actually really tempted to follow sqlite and release as public domain.
I would feel much differently if everything passed into the public domain in 15 years, and patents lasted 5 years.
http://liscofiber.com/
I cited my sources, he didn't cite his. So no, I won't take his "production expertise" on faith.
Point taken -- probably not, but I'm not sure. Then again, the Wii is capable of 3D, so I would think that a 2D game would work well enough.
I'd imagine that llvm would also make a good target for the PC ports. I'd also imagine that a JVM port would work well, but I don't know if Nintendo has a decent one, with OpenGL bindings and everything... However, it is a PowerPC processor, so I don't think the JIT would be a problem.
Unfortunately, as another poster points out, the closest thing we have to cross platform + consoles is XNA, and that's only PC and Xbox 360.
get them ALL educated and more importantly angry enough to stop buying for a couple years.
Won't work. Far too many, even when they have a fair understanding of how things work, either don't care much -- they'll see it as a nuisance, not an issue of rights -- or will actually side with the corporations. It's a lot easier to see both sides if you're reasonably educated (and probably a pirate yourself, at least once).
The politicians won't listen. Their ears will be plugged with earplugs made out of the lobbying money from the media conglomerates.
That is the real problem. I imagine there will be at least one other major issue on which these politicians are taking lobbying money and acting against the public interest, perhaps one the public already cares about.
Like what? What could be MORE vulnerable than a Microsoft operating system without a firewall?
A mandatory Microsoft operating system, firewall or not, which can only connect to the Internet using your social security number, which is then tied to a unique ID on every website you visit. Or something similar -- leak that information, and anyone can impersonate you, or track you down from any website.
Probably combined with some custom software, complete with backdoors for all interested parties (Microsoft, the Government, etc.)
So, monoculture, lack of privacy, and single-point-of-failure. Joy.
I'm actually not feeling particularly inventive, so we could easily end up with something even worse. However, it seems unlikely that a net which doesn't allow for anonymity is going to be more secure. It seems likely that, at least for the end-user, it will be less secure, precisely because there's now a single identity, likely held by a single organization, which could be compromised.