Something I was wondering about while reading your post: suppose Linus changes his mind and wants to go GPLv3 after all? In theory, won't he have to do the same thing?
Well, yes and no. He would have to do enough that he doesn't really consider it an option, and I don't think anyone can blame him.
Of course, he then goes and says nasty things about Stallman and the FSF to back up his decision, and he may even believe them. But I think it's really the practical problem that bothers him.
Since people have been contributing under "GPLv2 only" he won't be able to change the license to v3 either without going through the same procedure and asking all of them - right?
Basically, yes.
The difference is, Linus is in a position that a lot of people would listen if he genuinely wanted to do that. Also, if he got a significant number of people on board, it would still be a HUGE project, but when you get down to it, he could get 90% approval and then rewrite the remaining 10%. I think that would be legal, anyway.
Linus keeps talking about being just a technical guy and not caring too much about issues of morality.
I think that part is nice, actually. It lets him avoid a lot of arguments that really would not be good for the community.
But the problem is when he actually does turn that indifference into a moral judgment.
I'm sorry. You want me to contact the creators of every single one of the 280 software packages we use (many of which are bespoke, several of which were written so long ago the author is dead, some of which no longer have source code, etc) to find out whether their software will work with a patch in every other piece of software we use?
Not you, personally. Ideally, they'd already be working on it, and would (indirectly, through the distro) contact you.
Then, you, or some other maintainer, can look into however many are left -- which, as you say, the author is dead, or no longer have source code, etc -- but I bet that's the minority.
If it's that easy, go make yourself a tidy fortune doing it. Blue chips will pay vast sums for that headache to be removed.
Good idea. And I admit it wouldn't be easy...
Although I'm not entirely clear that there's money that can be made from this at all. It might work best as an entirely free and open system, one which I'd really have no control over once released into the wild.
I know you don't want to hear this. Really, I understand. But...
Just about everything is going to be a "fucking mess". And yes, every now and then, you'll find something truly elegant -- and every now and then, you'll find something that you're amazed even compiles (if it does). But right there in the middle, it's always a fucking mess.
And, someone ran a study -- I forget when, or what study, but what they found was, essentially, the ratio of bugs to lines of code was about constant, no matter what the programming language. That means languages like C++ and Java, which tend to be verbose, are likely to have more bugs than a language like Python, simply because Python will get it done in less code. (Incidentally, it also means libraries are better, especially if you don't have to write them yourself, because that one function call counts as one line of code for your project.)
In short, the most reliable way to reduce the number of bugs in your code is not to write more elegant code (which, sometimes, just means more obscure bugs), but to write less code.
It's not always an option, because frankly, I haven't found a language out there that doesn't suck in some way. It seems to pivot around Java -- either things are easier and more abstract than Java, but lack low-level features, the most annoying being real OS-level threading (Python pretends, but the GIL kills it) -- or they're harder and less abstract, like C and C++, but suddenly vulnerable to stupid things like memory leaks (uncommon in high-level languages) and segmentation faults (actually impossible, except by a serious bug in the language itself or a C library you link to).
I'm suggesting that a good package manager would support not delegating the work to the software itself, but to the developers responsible for it.
In other words, why should you, an IT person, be required to be a distro maintainer? And in any case, if Microsoft is rolling out a patch, shouldn't every developer be testing their own software against that patch? (And if they do that properly, I think your job is done -- the package manager would tell you whether a particular developer says their product works with a particular patch, and would automatically delay the upgrade for a particular machine until everything will work.)
Let's say VB was distributed using a good package management system. (I actually think all of them suck in subtle ways, and I may write my own sometime, but I digress. Assume for the moment it's good enough.)
And let's say all of the VB software you run is distributed with the same package management system.
Minor VB updates are things that should not possibly break anything, except badly-written software. If the software is being developed by people who also use a package management system, chances are they can't get away with anything that depends on exactly version 2.3.5 build 81345 or something, because it would constantly be breaking their stuff in development. But if they behave, then they should be OK until version 2.4.
Then, version 2.4 comes out, and the developer of software depending on version 2.3.5 test their stuff with 2.4, patch it if needed, and roll out a new package that depends on 2.4.
Linux distros, in particular, are usually set up in such a way that multiple versions of a library can be installed without conflicting with each other. So, our hypothetical package manager would install the new, updated library, and when all your apps have been tested to work with that version (by their respective vendors, not you), then the dependency on the old library is removed and it's cleaned out with the next reverse-dependency clean.
Also, package management would tend to make it easy to uninstall a package, or roll it back, in a worst-case scenario. These are not always easy on Windows, and not always possible, especially with something like VB or IE -- with Windows, I'd take disk images.
I'm not saying the problem becomes always trivial in all cases. A major glibc upgrade on Linux probably breaks more things than a VB upgrade on Windows. But a package manager does make it trivial to at least track what you're doing -- that way, your system knows exactly when the glibc upgrade is allowed.
you wouldn't need the 360 to use the hd-dvd drive on a pc. and last i heard it worked just fine on win and mac, shouldn't be too difficult on linux
Last I checked, the crack doesn't work on Linux yet. I could be wrong, there might be a way which involves downloading a key from somewhere, but the only crack I've seen which is entirely self-contained on a PC involved playing the disc in PowerDVD.
But you're retarded if you think there's a "legit" way to play it on Linux. Open source, by its very nature, means that if you can play it, you can rip it. So, even if I was going to just pop it in the drive and watch it, I'm still not buying it until I have the capability of ripping it -- because I wouldn't be able to watch it in the first place!
Incidentally, the above is still true of DVDs, and thanks to the DMCA, it is still illegal to watch a DVD on Linux.
but anyway, you don't really care about all that, you just like being anti-big-whatever.
Not particularly. I don't mind being pro-big-corporations which actually behave -- Google is usually pretty good.
"I can't be bothered to buy an Xbox 360 and a moddable HD-DVD drive just to rip Serenity"...... why exactly would you need to RIP content when you have the hardware and the original hard copy?
First, none of your fucking business. There's no need for you or any other MPAA flack to know what I want to do with my content, or why. I know it's not legally true, but as far as I'm concerned, I bought it, it's mine.
Second, as stated above, I need the ability to rip in order to play it on Linux.
But there are actually plenty of reasons. Why do people rip DVDs? Here's a few:
Backup. You know, some people have kids. You have a choice: Either buy them Toy Story and give them the real disc (which they will scratch to bits and then whine for a new copy), or burn them a copy and let them play with that. When they destroy it, it's $0.30 for another copy.
Lending it out. Not only the kids, but say your friend wants to watch a movie you have. Give them a burned copy, and demand it back when they're done -- you probably won't be watching it in the meantime. And if they don't give it back, at least it wasn't your original.
Video iPod. Rather than buying the same god damned movie again from iTunes, you just rip it from the DVD you already bought, re-encode it, and put it on your iPod.
Road trips. Or plane trips. Rip a few movies to your laptop and you're good to go -- much better than having to swap discs -- oh, and having to have those discs survive travel, which is a bit harder than "handling a god damned disc from case to drive without scratching it to the point where its unusable."
Convenience at home. Build a few terabytes of storage, store DVD images. Hook it up to a MythTV box. You now have all your stuff at the push of a button, not after looking through a bookshelf, popping open a case, putting it in the drive, pushing a button, and waiting.
Bypassing stupid fucking commercials that take your control away. This includes things like the WB logo, but there are actually DVDs out there that FORCE you to watch every single preview before you can start the movie. And all official players (those that don't actually crack the CSS) obey these restrictions.
Archival. Who knows when that original DVD is going to die? Not because of mishandling, but simply because of limitations of the media, or maybe you stored it in too hot a room, or maybe it actually did rot. Or maybe after years of watching the movie, even the most careful handling is going to put one scratch on after another until a chunk of the movie is gone.
Besides which, it isn't hard to rip media.
You know, your type annoys me, too. I bet you don't mind privacy invasions because you have "nothing to hide", right? I mean, those big corporations and governments are so trustworthy, they'd never hurt you -- right?
If you don't believe that proprietary software is immoral (and Linus doesn't) then you don't follow RMS. Why use his license?
It's not that I believe that proprietary software is necessarily immoral. However, I do believe that some is -- DRM, for instance -- and it's much harder to create free software that's immoral.
So my position is clear: If you want me to develop your proprietary software, then pay me for it. As in, a salary. Then all my base are belong to you.
Otherwise, you're certainly free to develop your proprietary software, but I'm not helping you -- not for free.
I think I have a new sig, then: "Not with my code."
GPL version 2 had no restrictions on what hardware was required upon which to run the software.
No, but it did have restrictions on what software could be linked against your software.
The license merely required that all modifications to the software were contributed back to the original work. It did not care how you used the software, merely how you contributed back to the project.
No, it absolutely did NOT.
In fact, this particular misconception was very painful for a company which attempted to build a business model around selling GPL software, with source code. This was entirely legal under the GPL, so long as users got both the software and the source code under the same terms -- meaning any user could easily fork their software and sell it, or give it away for free.
But a bunch of idiots like you, who apparently never read the GPL, started cracking their server, DoS-ing them to hell, sending death-threat letters, and so on, until they decided the open source community was too hostile to work in, and they left.
The license has absolutely nothing to do with the project. It's not about enforcing that you contribute back to the community, though it usually accomplishes that rather well. Its original intent and purpose has always been about enforcing the rights of the users. This means it's perfectly legal for TiVo to prevent anyone from downloading their modified source code without providing a valid TiVo serial number, but the intent of the GPL (any version) is to allow those users to modify that software and run their modified versions without restriction.
Version 3, on the other hand, makes statements about how software is distributed, just like Version 2 does.
Fixed that for you.
Anybody can use TiVo's source code modifications in their own hardware projects if they so desire. The software is still just as free as if TiVo decided to run it on a non-DRM'ed box.
If that were true, then you could use TiVo's source code modifications on their own hardware. You can't, so it's not "just as free."
And yes, it is valuable that you can use TiVo's source code in your own hardware projects. But that's a value to developers, and that's not who the GPL was designed to protect. It was designed to protect users. Not TiVo, you, the person who buys a TiVo. Even if you're not a hacker yourself, the GPLv3 is designed to make it so that, supposing you want your TiVo to do a certain thing or behave a certain way, you can hire someone to make it so, and that someone does not have to work for TiVo.
I realize that may be expensive enough to be impractical, but we already do that with bounties, and I believe there are websites set up to collect small donations from individuals who want a particular feature -- sort of a class-action bounty.
GPLv2 ensured that all software remained free.... GPLv3, on the other hand, makes restrictions upon what kind of hardware-software interactions are allowable.
Explain to me why it's OK to limit software-software interactions, but not hardware-software interactions?
Forcing people, corporations, or whomever to use freely available code in a certain way is contradictory to freedom.
So don't use it. Duh.
That's like saying that gay marriage is even an issue. You don't have to like it, support it, or even acknowledge it, and guess what? Nothing the gays do will have any effect on your own straight marriage.
It is also the argument against DRM.
Maybe so, but again... I don't like DRM, so I don't buy it. I encourage you to do the same. Nobody is holding a g
No problem, we can move to OpenSolaris just as we moved from XFree to Xorg.
Yeah, that's like saying "If Microsoft locks down Vista too much, no problem, we can move to Linux, just as we moved from Win2k to WinXP."
It may be a noble goal (and maybe not), but think about the sheer magnitude of what you're suggesting. Xorg was a fork of XFree, and note that none of the independent X projects (other than XFree) have ever managed to produce an X server that anyone uses. Even Apple's X11, I believe, uses XFree code.
OpenSolaris, if it goes GPLv3, may not use any GPLv2 code which has the clause Linux's GPLv2 does (this version and no later). This means that every single driver that has ever been written for Linux must be rewritten, from scratch, for OpenSolaris. That's a fucking HUGE project, even if you got every single Linux kernel developer to cooperate -- and I'm guessing at least 90% of them would tell you to fuck off, and go back to hacking on Linux.
It'd probably be far easier (again, if you can get enough people to cooperate) to simply send a mass-request to LKML for permission to release everyone's source as GPLv3, and slice out and rewrite only the parts for which you can't contact the original author, or the original author says "no". But the amount of time it would take to do that probably explains how little Linus understands GPLv3 -- he probably never really bothers, given that it just ain't gonna happen for Linux, no matter how good it is.
GPLv3 affects any hardware that the software is distributed with.
No, it simply limits the hardware that the software may be distributed with. This is no different than the GPLv2, in that respect -- GPLv2 does not "affect" any software that you link it to, it simply disallows you from distributing a version linked to non-GPL software.
In other words, there is nothing stopping you from simply distributing hardware without any GPLv3 software, if you're not willing to give us the kind of control we should have over that hardware, just as there's nothing stopping you from developing entirely proprietary software if you don't like releasing your software under GPLv2.
I'm pretty sure that this makes it viral *by definition*.
Well, it would be, if it really worked that way. As in, if I could load some GPLv3 software onto an iPhone, and it then magically twists and solders and abuses the hardware until it's hackable, that would be viral. If I could load some GPLv3 software onto an iPhone, then call up Apple and demand source code and hardware tweaks and schematics and chip fabs, then yes, it would be viral.
As it is, it's "viral" in the sense that if you pirate software, you might get fined. And it's exactly as retarded to suggest it's "viral" as it is to suggest that software you've pirated is "infecting" your wallet and your criminal record.
With quite a few of the applications moving to GPLv3, who is going to use a GPLv2-licensed kernel once a GPLv3 licensed kernel becomes available
Everyone, unless that GPLv3 kernel is Linux, which is practically very difficult to do, even if Linus wanted to.
Let me put it this way: Linux has more drivers, more experimental projects, more tweaking and optimization, and more developers than any other open source kernel. (I have no statistics for it, and I am pulling it out of my ass, but really, am I wrong?) There is nothing about a GPLv3 application that requires it to run on a GPLv3 kernel.
This in no way takes the teeth out of the GPLv3. TiVo could certainly use a GPLv2 Linux kernel, but if (say) mplayer went GPLv3, they couldn't use new versions of mplayer, no matter what kernel they run. To say otherwise is like saying the GPL doesn't apply to Windows applications...
If you're trying to say that people over 50 have a better memory, then sorry, you're wrong. My mother's over 50 and she frequently forgets nouns!
I swear, if I ever hear "Could you please get the thingy off the counter?" one more time... When gesturing at a counter stacked literally a foot high with junk, it helps to be more specific.
If anything, they're more creative. For instance, having forgotten the word for "bathroom", she might say "towel room".
Wake me up when one format is open, either by unilateral action by whoever controls the format (say, Sony gets a conscience), or by cracking it so thoroughly that we can have something like a libaacs to rival libdvdcss.
Or if it happens to both at once, the winner will be whichever has the best price/storage deal. (If it happens to both at once, I'm rooting for Blu-Ray, but that's only because I like the idea of using a real programming language (Java) instead of some hacked-together "menu" system.)
Until it's that well cracked, I won't buy them, because until it's cracked, the only way I can watch HD on my Linux box is either some HD cable/satellite, or downloading movies from people who have HD cable/satellite or have already cracked the crypto for me. (Right now, I can't be bothered to buy an Xbox 360 and a moddable HD-DVD drive just to rip Serenity.)
mplayer already does this. I believe VLC does, too.
Or am I misunderstanding how they work? (I know they normally extract the keys, like all other DVD players, but I'm fairly sure I've seen them brute-force a couple.)
The only gotcha is that while a vanilla download of VLC for OS X or Windows has everything you need, the Linux version of VLC, mplayer, and a few other things doesn't always come with all the codecs and DVD cracking stuff you'd want, particularly on Ubuntu and Debian. Fortunately, there are a few simple howtos for enabling those, and if you can play a DVD on Linux, you can rip it or play an image just as easily.
For that matter, as long as I'm talking about VLC, I believe it has some sort of encoding wizard built-in, if the commandline stuff is too hard... But then, you can always do the copy-the-Video-TS trick from Windows.
I can't comprehend why people continue to use platforms without package management, or why there has never been a serious project to bring a package manager to these other platforms.
If it was a large office full of, say, Linux desktops, which ran a nightly update off some repository stored in the office, then you just update that repository. If it breaks something, you roll back, or roll out a new patch to fix what it broke.
Maybe not easy, but certainly no harder than rolling out patches to a small or medium-sized office.
Come back when you actually understand what "whatever inane reason" actually is.
In my case, it arises from wanting to have my media (music, movies, TV shows, whatever) work on open source software, and without stupid restrictions. Note how people who actually buy DVDs are FORCED (yes, FORCED -- they tend to disable the fastforward/skip features) to watch anti-piracy bullshit, while the actual pirates that it's targeted at can either skip over or slice out the parts they don't like?
The other problem is one of paranoia. Simply put, it's partly the stupid restrictions that they've put there now, and partly the knowledge that they could put whatever the hell restrictions they want on it and you can't do anything about it -- unless you've already successfully pirated it, or ripped it using illegal tools (yes, it's ILLEGAL to rip a DVD), so you now actually have a copy that they can't do anything to, ever.
In any case, if I was going to buy music, I'd go buy it directly from the artist, or from a site which gives the artist a good chunk of the price -- more like 50%, instead of a couple pennies.
You ignore CSS, which doesn't let you just copy files to your hard drive
You obviously don't understand CSS.
I dare you. Try it. Pick up a CSS-encrypted DVD (that doesn't use other bullshit copy protection, like intentionally placing bad sectors in places a "normal" DVD player won't read), and follow the steps I just described. The files are copied, encryption and all.
Then use VLC to play them. It'll have to crack the crypto every time (I think, unless my method copies keys, too, which it probably does) -- but the amount of time that takes is not noticeable.
even so, you're also recommending that you change the TV setup, taking complex steps to make sure the DVD actually plays in Grandma's DVD player.
Who the fuck mentioned Grandma?
I suggested changing the TV setup as one way to ensure that it will play on a TV. But the OP didn't seem overly interested in that, seeing as they were fine with downloading instead of ripping anyway. I assume that if they've downloaded it, they're either watching on their computer, or they already have a decent TV setup.
Or you could just pay $10 and buy the damn thing, or get a Netflix subscription.
This could get to be an expensive habit, especially compared with $1-2 to rent the thing.
Right now, it's mostly laziness, and not financial concerns. I don't even think about "what do I want to rip today", I just notice a DVD lying around, pop it in the computer, and rip it. The ripping process is one command, and it doesn't disrupt anything else I'm doing with the computer, so saying "Or you could just..." doesn't make sense when this is the easiest thing I could do without hiring someone specifically for the purpose of buying my DVDs and loading them into the player. (I'll bet it's even easier than pay-per-view.)
For what I do download, not everything is out on DVD yet, and not everything ever will be out on DVD in the US, and it's no longer $10 when you're talking about an entire season or five of a TV show. At that point, it becomes a question of, do I download this show, or not watch it at all?
Actually, it is, on most computers, at least for ripping.
On mine, it's a little more complicated. I have to start playing the movie first with mplayer or something, to put the drive in "unlocked" mode, and then I have a script which limits the speed at which dd can work, so it doesn't magically switch out of whatever mode that is.
But it's still a bit-for-bit copy. You do NOT need to remove the CSS protection unless you're intending to burn it and watch it on a normal DVD player. (And there's actually a nice tool which ONLY removes CSS, and otherwise creates an identical image. Don't remember what it's called, though.)
I believe that'll also do a VIDEO_TS, but I'm not sure. You can also probably get it to create mpegs, but I don't usually bother, since the avis are easy to turn into mkvs.
While I could get these to play using DVD playing software, it sucked to have to stop and play each separate.VOB.
Then you're not listening. Go back and read the part you quoted.
I don't know about Apple's DVD player, but point VLC at the VIDEO_TS directory. NOT the files. The DIRECTORY.
Look at your VLC URL. If it ends in.VOB, just add a dvd:// to the front, and delete the foo.vob from the back (everything after the last / or \). If you did it right, you should be at your DVD menu.
Even if you couldn't do that, your software really must suck if it's that difficult to make a playlist of files. Then it'll still suck, because there would be a pause each time it changes files (probably), but you won't have to actually stop and do something else.
Is there a way to concatenate all the.VOBs into a single file?
There probably is, but you'd probably lose your menus and stuff, and it's easier just to play the VIDEO_TS directory. Also, it's much easier (on anything but Windows) to just rip an image of the whole DVD -- which is then a single file. But really, VLC can play either the file or the directory, it doesn't care.
In 99% of cases, this is absurdly easy. In fact, your OS already comes with all the tools you need to rip, and VLC will play the ripped image.
If you're on Windows, just right-click your DVD drive, "open", and copy all the files to a folder on your hard drive. If you're on OS X, open Disk Utility, click your DVD drive, and choose "Create Image", and choose a CD image format (not HFS or anything, and not compressed). If you're on Linux, "cp/dev/dvd foo.img" will create an image called "foo.img".
If these work at all, they will generally give you a disk image that can be used in place of the original disk. On Linux, just configure your favorite DVD player to use that file as the DVD device. For recent versions of VLC, you can simply open a dvd:// URL that points to the file (or folder, using the Windows way) -- so you do dvd:///home/somebody/movies/matrix.img or something. On Windows, probably dvd://c:/some/where... In any case, the easy way is to browse for it as if opening a file, then change file:// to dvd://
Basically, if VLC can play the DVD in the first place, than your OS (I don't care what OS it is) already comes with the tools to rip an image that will play with VLC. The downside is it does no compression and no decryption, so you can't burn this image directly, and it probably uses about 8 gigs of hard disk space.
The process of re-encoding is a bit longer, but not incredibly hard to get right. And I've discovered that ripping is really fast, encoding will take all night, but downloading in the same quality might take a few days -- and also, both ripping and encoding can be put on a low priority and run while I do other things, but downloading invariably lags me.
The hardest part is authoring an actual DVD that will play on an off-the-shelf player, but a video card with TV out is pretty cheap, and the best screen I own is my monitor anyway. So I usually just watch it once, and if I really want to keep it, I encode to h.264, sometimes turn the ac3 into Vorbis (and sometimes not, depends what the original quality is like and how much I like that movie), then combine that with the subtitles and chapters ripped straight off the DVD image. I end up with an mkv that's around 300-500 megs. If I find myself doing this enough, I'll probably write a script to automate it, but I've discovered a process that never seems to get the AV out of sync.
In any case, I don't bother unless I have the original DVD. But it's nice, I mean, downloading takes days and days, and there's the possibility of being caught and fined (or worse). Ripping means I just borrow the DVD from roommates for about 15 mins, then give it back, and the only way I get caught is if they seize my computer.
Blank dual-layer DVDs are still prohibitively expensive for casual users. Actual Hollywood DVDs are typically 7 or 8 gigs, which requires dual-layer. A single-layer DVD is more like 4.3 gigs.
Even if it weren't for that, I remember hearing that the CSS key is stored in a location that is not writable on consumer blank DVDs. So you can't do it directly in Nero, though there are several tools to easily strip out the CSS and create a version that is absolutely identical, but without the DRM. So, if DL media gets cheap enough, it will become MUCH quicker and easier to burn an exact copy of a DVD, but it's still not something you could do directly in Nero without Nero having to specifically code DeCSS support.
Right now, the process typically involves ripping the DVD, re-encoding it (or "requantizing" it, whatever the fsck that means) at a lower bitrate, and burning it. Or, you can rip only the movie (strip out the special features), and either burn it straight, or re-encode it if necessary. (It's probably also possible to split it into two separate DVDs, but nobody does that.)
Me, I rarely even try. I just encode down to a fifth or a tenth of the size, but in h.264 so it's watchable, and if I run low on space, I burn like five movies to one DVD-R. Watchable only on a computer, of course, but I can live with that.
There are a few versions (home, professional, etc) but the installation/upgrade user experience is common across all of them.
The same could be said of Linux. There are a few gotchas with each distro, but that is true of Windows, also -- the sheer number of things crippled in Home (or Home Basic on Vista) continues to amaze me.
Imagine if all of the programmer time and effort that goes towards packaging and installation programs for the various Linux distributions was spent on something important, like fixing bugs.....
Distros fix plenty of bugs. They also typically do the packaging themselves, and "installation programs" are something that's simply not needed. Unlike Windows, we have one package manager that installs everything. It could be compared to MSI, but it also handles dependencies.
Not sure what you're saying here. If humans didn't think in math,
I'm not saying something so bold as that humans can't ever really think in math. But you said:
mathematics is just the way in which meaning is expressed for machines
That can't be applied as easily to humans. The way in which meaning is expressed for humans is language. Mathematics can be used as a very small, specific subset of language, much like C can.
But I talk to you in words, not in $123, unless we're talking about a topic for which $123 makes sense -- and even then, as you've illustrated, 90% (at least) of our communication is English, not math or numbers.
Not sure, but it sounds like you're talking more about software engineering there
I'm finding that out. I'm also wondering if, when I go back to school, it might be a good idea to look for a software engineering degree instead of computer science. I'm not sure there was a difference at the time...
Slashdot Mirror
Well, yes and no. He would have to do enough that he doesn't really consider it an option, and I don't think anyone can blame him.
Of course, he then goes and says nasty things about Stallman and the FSF to back up his decision, and he may even believe them. But I think it's really the practical problem that bothers him.
Basically, yes.
The difference is, Linus is in a position that a lot of people would listen if he genuinely wanted to do that. Also, if he got a significant number of people on board, it would still be a HUGE project, but when you get down to it, he could get 90% approval and then rewrite the remaining 10%. I think that would be legal, anyway.
I think that part is nice, actually. It lets him avoid a lot of arguments that really would not be good for the community.
But the problem is when he actually does turn that indifference into a moral judgment.
Not you, personally. Ideally, they'd already be working on it, and would (indirectly, through the distro) contact you.
Then, you, or some other maintainer, can look into however many are left -- which, as you say, the author is dead, or no longer have source code, etc -- but I bet that's the minority.
Good idea. And I admit it wouldn't be easy...
Although I'm not entirely clear that there's money that can be made from this at all. It might work best as an entirely free and open system, one which I'd really have no control over once released into the wild.
I know you don't want to hear this. Really, I understand. But...
Just about everything is going to be a "fucking mess". And yes, every now and then, you'll find something truly elegant -- and every now and then, you'll find something that you're amazed even compiles (if it does). But right there in the middle, it's always a fucking mess.
And, someone ran a study -- I forget when, or what study, but what they found was, essentially, the ratio of bugs to lines of code was about constant, no matter what the programming language. That means languages like C++ and Java, which tend to be verbose, are likely to have more bugs than a language like Python, simply because Python will get it done in less code. (Incidentally, it also means libraries are better, especially if you don't have to write them yourself, because that one function call counts as one line of code for your project.)
In short, the most reliable way to reduce the number of bugs in your code is not to write more elegant code (which, sometimes, just means more obscure bugs), but to write less code.
It's not always an option, because frankly, I haven't found a language out there that doesn't suck in some way. It seems to pivot around Java -- either things are easier and more abstract than Java, but lack low-level features, the most annoying being real OS-level threading (Python pretends, but the GIL kills it) -- or they're harder and less abstract, like C and C++, but suddenly vulnerable to stupid things like memory leaks (uncommon in high-level languages) and segmentation faults (actually impossible, except by a serious bug in the language itself or a C library you link to).
I'm suggesting that a good package manager would support not delegating the work to the software itself, but to the developers responsible for it.
In other words, why should you, an IT person, be required to be a distro maintainer? And in any case, if Microsoft is rolling out a patch, shouldn't every developer be testing their own software against that patch? (And if they do that properly, I think your job is done -- the package manager would tell you whether a particular developer says their product works with a particular patch, and would automatically delay the upgrade for a particular machine until everything will work.)
Or at least, it distributes the process.
Let's say VB was distributed using a good package management system. (I actually think all of them suck in subtle ways, and I may write my own sometime, but I digress. Assume for the moment it's good enough.)
And let's say all of the VB software you run is distributed with the same package management system.
Minor VB updates are things that should not possibly break anything, except badly-written software. If the software is being developed by people who also use a package management system, chances are they can't get away with anything that depends on exactly version 2.3.5 build 81345 or something, because it would constantly be breaking their stuff in development. But if they behave, then they should be OK until version 2.4.
Then, version 2.4 comes out, and the developer of software depending on version 2.3.5 test their stuff with 2.4, patch it if needed, and roll out a new package that depends on 2.4.
Linux distros, in particular, are usually set up in such a way that multiple versions of a library can be installed without conflicting with each other. So, our hypothetical package manager would install the new, updated library, and when all your apps have been tested to work with that version (by their respective vendors, not you), then the dependency on the old library is removed and it's cleaned out with the next reverse-dependency clean.
Also, package management would tend to make it easy to uninstall a package, or roll it back, in a worst-case scenario. These are not always easy on Windows, and not always possible, especially with something like VB or IE -- with Windows, I'd take disk images.
I'm not saying the problem becomes always trivial in all cases. A major glibc upgrade on Linux probably breaks more things than a VB upgrade on Windows. But a package manager does make it trivial to at least track what you're doing -- that way, your system knows exactly when the glibc upgrade is allowed.
I agree, and I've written a sig which, if people would read and understand, might end this whole debate right here.
I don't restrict your freedom to do whatever you want, so long as it's not with my code.
You want my code? You play by my rules.
Last I checked, the crack doesn't work on Linux yet. I could be wrong, there might be a way which involves downloading a key from somewhere, but the only crack I've seen which is entirely self-contained on a PC involved playing the disc in PowerDVD.
But you're retarded if you think there's a "legit" way to play it on Linux. Open source, by its very nature, means that if you can play it, you can rip it. So, even if I was going to just pop it in the drive and watch it, I'm still not buying it until I have the capability of ripping it -- because I wouldn't be able to watch it in the first place!
Incidentally, the above is still true of DVDs, and thanks to the DMCA, it is still illegal to watch a DVD on Linux.
Not particularly. I don't mind being pro-big-corporations which actually behave -- Google is usually pretty good.
First, none of your fucking business. There's no need for you or any other MPAA flack to know what I want to do with my content, or why. I know it's not legally true, but as far as I'm concerned, I bought it, it's mine.
Second, as stated above, I need the ability to rip in order to play it on Linux.
But there are actually plenty of reasons. Why do people rip DVDs? Here's a few:
Besides which, it isn't hard to rip media.
You know, your type annoys me, too. I bet you don't mind privacy invasions because you have "nothing to hide", right? I mean, those big corporations and governments are so trustworthy, they'd never hurt you -- right?
It's not that I believe that proprietary software is necessarily immoral. However, I do believe that some is -- DRM, for instance -- and it's much harder to create free software that's immoral.
So my position is clear: If you want me to develop your proprietary software, then pay me for it. As in, a salary. Then all my base are belong to you.
Otherwise, you're certainly free to develop your proprietary software, but I'm not helping you -- not for free.
I think I have a new sig, then: "Not with my code."
You won't mind if I do the same, then...
No, but it did have restrictions on what software could be linked against your software.
No, it absolutely did NOT.
In fact, this particular misconception was very painful for a company which attempted to build a business model around selling GPL software, with source code. This was entirely legal under the GPL, so long as users got both the software and the source code under the same terms -- meaning any user could easily fork their software and sell it, or give it away for free.
But a bunch of idiots like you, who apparently never read the GPL, started cracking their server, DoS-ing them to hell, sending death-threat letters, and so on, until they decided the open source community was too hostile to work in, and they left.
The license has absolutely nothing to do with the project. It's not about enforcing that you contribute back to the community, though it usually accomplishes that rather well. Its original intent and purpose has always been about enforcing the rights of the users. This means it's perfectly legal for TiVo to prevent anyone from downloading their modified source code without providing a valid TiVo serial number, but the intent of the GPL (any version) is to allow those users to modify that software and run their modified versions without restriction.
Fixed that for you.
If that were true, then you could use TiVo's source code modifications on their own hardware. You can't, so it's not "just as free."
And yes, it is valuable that you can use TiVo's source code in your own hardware projects. But that's a value to developers, and that's not who the GPL was designed to protect. It was designed to protect users. Not TiVo, you, the person who buys a TiVo. Even if you're not a hacker yourself, the GPLv3 is designed to make it so that, supposing you want your TiVo to do a certain thing or behave a certain way, you can hire someone to make it so, and that someone does not have to work for TiVo.
I realize that may be expensive enough to be impractical, but we already do that with bounties, and I believe there are websites set up to collect small donations from individuals who want a particular feature -- sort of a class-action bounty.
Explain to me why it's OK to limit software-software interactions, but not hardware-software interactions?
So don't use it. Duh.
That's like saying that gay marriage is even an issue. You don't have to like it, support it, or even acknowledge it, and guess what? Nothing the gays do will have any effect on your own straight marriage.
Maybe so, but again... I don't like DRM, so I don't buy it. I encourage you to do the same. Nobody is holding a g
Yeah, that's like saying "If Microsoft locks down Vista too much, no problem, we can move to Linux, just as we moved from Win2k to WinXP."
It may be a noble goal (and maybe not), but think about the sheer magnitude of what you're suggesting. Xorg was a fork of XFree, and note that none of the independent X projects (other than XFree) have ever managed to produce an X server that anyone uses. Even Apple's X11, I believe, uses XFree code.
OpenSolaris, if it goes GPLv3, may not use any GPLv2 code which has the clause Linux's GPLv2 does (this version and no later). This means that every single driver that has ever been written for Linux must be rewritten, from scratch, for OpenSolaris. That's a fucking HUGE project, even if you got every single Linux kernel developer to cooperate -- and I'm guessing at least 90% of them would tell you to fuck off, and go back to hacking on Linux.
It'd probably be far easier (again, if you can get enough people to cooperate) to simply send a mass-request to LKML for permission to release everyone's source as GPLv3, and slice out and rewrite only the parts for which you can't contact the original author, or the original author says "no". But the amount of time it would take to do that probably explains how little Linus understands GPLv3 -- he probably never really bothers, given that it just ain't gonna happen for Linux, no matter how good it is.
No, it simply limits the hardware that the software may be distributed with. This is no different than the GPLv2, in that respect -- GPLv2 does not "affect" any software that you link it to, it simply disallows you from distributing a version linked to non-GPL software.
In other words, there is nothing stopping you from simply distributing hardware without any GPLv3 software, if you're not willing to give us the kind of control we should have over that hardware, just as there's nothing stopping you from developing entirely proprietary software if you don't like releasing your software under GPLv2.
Well, it would be, if it really worked that way. As in, if I could load some GPLv3 software onto an iPhone, and it then magically twists and solders and abuses the hardware until it's hackable, that would be viral. If I could load some GPLv3 software onto an iPhone, then call up Apple and demand source code and hardware tweaks and schematics and chip fabs, then yes, it would be viral.
As it is, it's "viral" in the sense that if you pirate software, you might get fined. And it's exactly as retarded to suggest it's "viral" as it is to suggest that software you've pirated is "infecting" your wallet and your criminal record.
Everyone, unless that GPLv3 kernel is Linux, which is practically very difficult to do, even if Linus wanted to.
Let me put it this way: Linux has more drivers, more experimental projects, more tweaking and optimization, and more developers than any other open source kernel. (I have no statistics for it, and I am pulling it out of my ass, but really, am I wrong?) There is nothing about a GPLv3 application that requires it to run on a GPLv3 kernel.
This in no way takes the teeth out of the GPLv3. TiVo could certainly use a GPLv2 Linux kernel, but if (say) mplayer went GPLv3, they couldn't use new versions of mplayer, no matter what kernel they run. To say otherwise is like saying the GPL doesn't apply to Windows applications...
If you're trying to say that people over 50 have a better memory, then sorry, you're wrong. My mother's over 50 and she frequently forgets nouns!
I swear, if I ever hear "Could you please get the thingy off the counter?" one more time... When gesturing at a counter stacked literally a foot high with junk, it helps to be more specific.
If anything, they're more creative. For instance, having forgotten the word for "bathroom", she might say "towel room".
Wake me up when one format is open, either by unilateral action by whoever controls the format (say, Sony gets a conscience), or by cracking it so thoroughly that we can have something like a libaacs to rival libdvdcss.
Or if it happens to both at once, the winner will be whichever has the best price/storage deal. (If it happens to both at once, I'm rooting for Blu-Ray, but that's only because I like the idea of using a real programming language (Java) instead of some hacked-together "menu" system.)
Until it's that well cracked, I won't buy them, because until it's cracked, the only way I can watch HD on my Linux box is either some HD cable/satellite, or downloading movies from people who have HD cable/satellite or have already cracked the crypto for me. (Right now, I can't be bothered to buy an Xbox 360 and a moddable HD-DVD drive just to rip Serenity.)
mplayer already does this. I believe VLC does, too.
Or am I misunderstanding how they work? (I know they normally extract the keys, like all other DVD players, but I'm fairly sure I've seen them brute-force a couple.)
The only gotcha is that while a vanilla download of VLC for OS X or Windows has everything you need, the Linux version of VLC, mplayer, and a few other things doesn't always come with all the codecs and DVD cracking stuff you'd want, particularly on Ubuntu and Debian. Fortunately, there are a few simple howtos for enabling those, and if you can play a DVD on Linux, you can rip it or play an image just as easily.
For that matter, as long as I'm talking about VLC, I believe it has some sort of encoding wizard built-in, if the commandline stuff is too hard... But then, you can always do the copy-the-Video-TS trick from Windows.
I can't comprehend why people continue to use platforms without package management, or why there has never been a serious project to bring a package manager to these other platforms.
If it was a large office full of, say, Linux desktops, which ran a nightly update off some repository stored in the office, then you just update that repository. If it breaks something, you roll back, or roll out a new patch to fix what it broke.
Maybe not easy, but certainly no harder than rolling out patches to a small or medium-sized office.
Come back when you actually understand what "whatever inane reason" actually is.
In my case, it arises from wanting to have my media (music, movies, TV shows, whatever) work on open source software, and without stupid restrictions. Note how people who actually buy DVDs are FORCED (yes, FORCED -- they tend to disable the fastforward/skip features) to watch anti-piracy bullshit, while the actual pirates that it's targeted at can either skip over or slice out the parts they don't like?
The other problem is one of paranoia. Simply put, it's partly the stupid restrictions that they've put there now, and partly the knowledge that they could put whatever the hell restrictions they want on it and you can't do anything about it -- unless you've already successfully pirated it, or ripped it using illegal tools (yes, it's ILLEGAL to rip a DVD), so you now actually have a copy that they can't do anything to, ever.
In any case, if I was going to buy music, I'd go buy it directly from the artist, or from a site which gives the artist a good chunk of the price -- more like 50%, instead of a couple pennies.
You obviously don't understand CSS.
I dare you. Try it. Pick up a CSS-encrypted DVD (that doesn't use other bullshit copy protection, like intentionally placing bad sectors in places a "normal" DVD player won't read), and follow the steps I just described. The files are copied, encryption and all.
Then use VLC to play them. It'll have to crack the crypto every time (I think, unless my method copies keys, too, which it probably does) -- but the amount of time that takes is not noticeable.
Who the fuck mentioned Grandma?
I suggested changing the TV setup as one way to ensure that it will play on a TV. But the OP didn't seem overly interested in that, seeing as they were fine with downloading instead of ripping anyway. I assume that if they've downloaded it, they're either watching on their computer, or they already have a decent TV setup.
This could get to be an expensive habit, especially compared with $1-2 to rent the thing.
Right now, it's mostly laziness, and not financial concerns. I don't even think about "what do I want to rip today", I just notice a DVD lying around, pop it in the computer, and rip it. The ripping process is one command, and it doesn't disrupt anything else I'm doing with the computer, so saying "Or you could just..." doesn't make sense when this is the easiest thing I could do without hiring someone specifically for the purpose of buying my DVDs and loading them into the player. (I'll bet it's even easier than pay-per-view.)
For what I do download, not everything is out on DVD yet, and not everything ever will be out on DVD in the US, and it's no longer $10 when you're talking about an entire season or five of a TV show. At that point, it becomes a question of, do I download this show, or not watch it at all?
Actually, it is, on most computers, at least for ripping.
On mine, it's a little more complicated. I have to start playing the movie first with mplayer or something, to put the drive in "unlocked" mode, and then I have a script which limits the speed at which dd can work, so it doesn't magically switch out of whatever mode that is.
But it's still a bit-for-bit copy. You do NOT need to remove the CSS protection unless you're intending to burn it and watch it on a normal DVD player. (And there's actually a nice tool which ONLY removes CSS, and otherwise creates an identical image. Don't remember what it's called, though.)
Well, if you don't care about size, you can turn it into an AVI with no loss of quality by doing this:
/some/where.img dvd://$TITLE -oac copy -ovc copy -o foo.avi
TITLE=1 # set this to the title you want to rip
mencoder dvd://$TITLE -oac copy -ovc copy -o foo.avi
Or, if it's in a file already:
mencoder -dvd-device
I believe that'll also do a VIDEO_TS, but I'm not sure. You can also probably get it to create mpegs, but I don't usually bother, since the avis are easy to turn into mkvs.
Then you're not listening. Go back and read the part you quoted.
I don't know about Apple's DVD player, but point VLC at the VIDEO_TS directory. NOT the files. The DIRECTORY.
Look at your VLC URL. If it ends in .VOB, just add a dvd:// to the front, and delete the foo.vob from the back (everything after the last / or \). If you did it right, you should be at your DVD menu.
Even if you couldn't do that, your software really must suck if it's that difficult to make a playlist of files. Then it'll still suck, because there would be a pause each time it changes files (probably), but you won't have to actually stop and do something else.
There probably is, but you'd probably lose your menus and stuff, and it's easier just to play the VIDEO_TS directory. Also, it's much easier (on anything but Windows) to just rip an image of the whole DVD -- which is then a single file. But really, VLC can play either the file or the directory, it doesn't care.
In 99% of cases, this is absurdly easy. In fact, your OS already comes with all the tools you need to rip, and VLC will play the ripped image.
If you're on Windows, just right-click your DVD drive, "open", and copy all the files to a folder on your hard drive. If you're on OS X, open Disk Utility, click your DVD drive, and choose "Create Image", and choose a CD image format (not HFS or anything, and not compressed). If you're on Linux, "cp /dev/dvd foo.img" will create an image called "foo.img".
If these work at all, they will generally give you a disk image that can be used in place of the original disk. On Linux, just configure your favorite DVD player to use that file as the DVD device. For recent versions of VLC, you can simply open a dvd:// URL that points to the file (or folder, using the Windows way) -- so you do dvd:///home/somebody/movies/matrix.img or something. On Windows, probably dvd://c:/some/where... In any case, the easy way is to browse for it as if opening a file, then change file:// to dvd://
Basically, if VLC can play the DVD in the first place, than your OS (I don't care what OS it is) already comes with the tools to rip an image that will play with VLC. The downside is it does no compression and no decryption, so you can't burn this image directly, and it probably uses about 8 gigs of hard disk space.
The process of re-encoding is a bit longer, but not incredibly hard to get right. And I've discovered that ripping is really fast, encoding will take all night, but downloading in the same quality might take a few days -- and also, both ripping and encoding can be put on a low priority and run while I do other things, but downloading invariably lags me.
The hardest part is authoring an actual DVD that will play on an off-the-shelf player, but a video card with TV out is pretty cheap, and the best screen I own is my monitor anyway. So I usually just watch it once, and if I really want to keep it, I encode to h.264, sometimes turn the ac3 into Vorbis (and sometimes not, depends what the original quality is like and how much I like that movie), then combine that with the subtitles and chapters ripped straight off the DVD image. I end up with an mkv that's around 300-500 megs. If I find myself doing this enough, I'll probably write a script to automate it, but I've discovered a process that never seems to get the AV out of sync.
In any case, I don't bother unless I have the original DVD. But it's nice, I mean, downloading takes days and days, and there's the possibility of being caught and fined (or worse). Ripping means I just borrow the DVD from roommates for about 15 mins, then give it back, and the only way I get caught is if they seize my computer.
Here's the problem:
Blank dual-layer DVDs are still prohibitively expensive for casual users. Actual Hollywood DVDs are typically 7 or 8 gigs, which requires dual-layer. A single-layer DVD is more like 4.3 gigs.
Even if it weren't for that, I remember hearing that the CSS key is stored in a location that is not writable on consumer blank DVDs. So you can't do it directly in Nero, though there are several tools to easily strip out the CSS and create a version that is absolutely identical, but without the DRM. So, if DL media gets cheap enough, it will become MUCH quicker and easier to burn an exact copy of a DVD, but it's still not something you could do directly in Nero without Nero having to specifically code DeCSS support.
Right now, the process typically involves ripping the DVD, re-encoding it (or "requantizing" it, whatever the fsck that means) at a lower bitrate, and burning it. Or, you can rip only the movie (strip out the special features), and either burn it straight, or re-encode it if necessary. (It's probably also possible to split it into two separate DVDs, but nobody does that.)
Me, I rarely even try. I just encode down to a fifth or a tenth of the size, but in h.264 so it's watchable, and if I run low on space, I burn like five movies to one DVD-R. Watchable only on a computer, of course, but I can live with that.
The same could be said of Linux. There are a few gotchas with each distro, but that is true of Windows, also -- the sheer number of things crippled in Home (or Home Basic on Vista) continues to amaze me.
Distros fix plenty of bugs. They also typically do the packaging themselves, and "installation programs" are something that's simply not needed. Unlike Windows, we have one package manager that installs everything. It could be compared to MSI, but it also handles dependencies.
I'm not saying something so bold as that humans can't ever really think in math. But you said:
That can't be applied as easily to humans. The way in which meaning is expressed for humans is language. Mathematics can be used as a very small, specific subset of language, much like C can.
But I talk to you in words, not in $123, unless we're talking about a topic for which $123 makes sense -- and even then, as you've illustrated, 90% (at least) of our communication is English, not math or numbers.
I'm finding that out. I'm also wondering if, when I go back to school, it might be a good idea to look for a software engineering degree instead of computer science. I'm not sure there was a difference at the time...