Great journalism. Report on what one person outside the shop hopes, instead of what actually happened in the shop.
Daka has five shops in the whole of Venezuela.
It's very hard to know what's happening in Venezuela when you don't live there. Most of the media is owned by foreign (US) companies, so it's hard to know what sources to trust. Coverage in foreign media is often just ridiculous.
> we came dangerously close to a world where Microsoft > Internet Explorer was the only accepted web browser.
We dodged that bullet but now we're heading to a world where facebook.com plus a small few other sites are the internet.
It's not Mozilla's fault but, as Stallman says, freedom is about controlling your computing on your computer, so it's a real problem that a lot of computing is being done on Facebook's servers.
(That said, it would be useful if Mozilla Firefox did more to make its users aware of what free software is - such as putting a clearer link in the menu or in the About dialogue box.)
The problems with Ubuntu are a big deal because getting people to switch to free software was supposed to be the solution to these privacy problems. We had a nice, simple message: "GNU/Linux doesn't spy on you". Ubuntu muddies the waters, which is annoying because solutions are pretty thin on the ground.
If it takes me 24 hours to read a book, and I pay full price, let's say 8 euro, that's 33 cents per hour. The price could be doubled and it would still be one of the cheapest pass times around. Your investment of time is always bigger than your cash investment for reading a book, so I reckon most people who complain about high book prices actually need to look at their overall spending....and you can sell the book 2nd hand afterward, and you can swap it and get a book for nothing.
"Driver plug-ins are released under a proprietary (non-open) license"
You run "hpsetup -i" and it displays a GPL notice, because the hpsetup program is free software, then it tries to download a proprietary binary blob driver and when you say no thanks, you're left with a useless HP printer that doesn't print.
Maybe HP decided to give up on free software when Bdale Garbee left HP last year. A real pity.
Avoiding "Computationally expensive" stuff isn't the reason for using Latex.
When I use Latex, it's because I need to make a complex document with footnotes etc. and I want to use a real (i.e. programmable) text editor (GNU Emacs in my case).
LibreOffice has its uses, but you can't grep.odt files.
(Actually, instead of "LaTeX quality wysiwyg", which sounds like you want software other than Latex, but which gives equal quality, you probably meant to say "wysiwyg LaTeX". If that's the case, I agree. But since I'd written my comment before I spotted this, I'm posting it anyway.)
If there's a law, and you interpret it as saying X, and the courts that are trying people interpret it as saying Y, then in all senses that matter, Y is the law.
I mean, I agree that the law prohibits software patents. But my opinion doesn't stop software developers from receiving fines and injunctions.
Until the US Supreme Court takes a software patent and throws it out the window, software patents are real and we need a law. It's also not certain that the Supreme Court would do what we hope. They could rule that some software patents are invalid and others valid, and maybe their distinction would be substantial or maybe it would be reduced to nothing by patent lawyers drafting their applications a little differently.
We probably agree on these points, I'm just less optimistic about the courts doing what we're hoping they'll do.
I love being corrected (I expand the en.swpat.org wiki each time), but my recollection is that India rejected a law that would have explicitly allowed software patents. They didn't change the existing law to block them.
This is really important because it's the first time that a country has explicitly banned software patents, with knowledge of what it's doing.
Other jurisdictions have legislation which says software can't be patentable, like the European Patent Convention, but because it was written before software patents became a problem there are debates about the intention of the text.
Thanks to New Zealand, we'll have an example of a developed economy banning software patents, so there will be proof that it doesn't make an economy collapse etc.
(Health or lifestyle is already taken into account. Mentally handicapped people get kidney transplants ahead of heavy drinkers. That's the case in Ireland at least. I don't know exactly how the scoring system is devised.)
The local laws here require approval from three doctors with no connection to the recipient, the "donor" and who will have no role in the transplant operations. (In urgent cases, two doctors is enough.) A report has to be made, saying how death was established and that has to be kept on file for ten years.
I think that's as much as one can expect be done to safeguard against such corruption.
Also, the hospitals here are government funded, even the "private" ones, so there's more transparency and accountability than you'd get in countries with privatised systems, so I'm not worried about corruption, be it covert or systematic.
I was surprised to learn that where I live, everyone is automatically considered an organ donor. The doctors can takes organs from my body when I die, even if my family object. If you object, you have to sign an opt-out.
Great system actually. The only way to avoid the horror stories of people being kidnapped for organs or, worse, the poor selling their organs, is to ensure there are enough donated organs available. A lot of people don't care about losing their organs after death, but requiring people to opt-in means that most just don't bother.
There were just two problems with China's policy. One is that the organs were given to the ruling class, rather than being distributed on a basis of need. The other is that it encourages judgements and policies which increase the number of people sentenced to death.
I wouldn't trust proprietary software to look after privacy.
You can see the javascript files, so at least there's transperancy, but since it's not free software, there's no community. Nobody's looking a the code and if there was a problem, no one could fork it and distribute a problem-free version.
> all this stuff can still be tracked from the site the content is actually coming from.
On a technical level, yes. But don't forget about the humans involved.
It would give the websites knowledge and control over what they're sending on to the data gatherers. When it's all via third-party servers, the website owners can turn a blind eye and say "I'm just adding a link", but if they had to receive a list of data to pass on and had to take an active role, they might think twice and at least limit the data or anonymise it first. And they could publish info about what data gets collected so the public would be aware.
It's definitely a good sign. I'm still waiting for integration of AdBlock plus. Being in the top 10 installed plugins means that users want this feature.
I'm not even against ads but I don't like being tracked by ads servers getting my IP address, my browser fingerprint ( https://panopticlick.eff.org/ ), and the page I was reading (referrer).
RequestPolicy and NoScript are two more good plugins for controlling what info your browser gives to who.
They're doing it to have free software that can replace proprietary software. Being free software means the user community knows exactly what the software is doing and can decide how it will be modified.
Proprietary software locks users in, adds back doors, imposes DRM, gathers personal info and sends it to advertisers, omits features so that users can be pushed to buy the more expensive version, and omits features that users want (i.e. to protect privacy) because the owner has a commercial relationship with advertisers, and other nasty things that users don't ask for.
That section says that if you give someone a device with software that's supposed to come with the freedom to run, study, modify, and redistribute, then you can't prevent them from modifying the software on that device and running it.
Where's the controversy?
The only problem is that some mega corps don't want to give those freedoms to users. If some companies won't keep their side of the deal, why should free software developers help them?
GPLv3 didn't create the problem of locked down devices. It's part of the solution but we've a long way to go.
> Please explain how apple is going to destroy a project that they contribute to, but do not own.
If Apple puts all it's best work into proprietary extensions, LLVM could find that in a few years their compiler doesn't support the latest hardware, doesn't work with modern tools (debuggers etc.), and is slower than the proprietary version.
Nothing gets "destroyed" in the sense of not existing any more, but who then would use LLVM?
Copyleft is share-alike. Everyone respects the same standards of freedom for users. The whole point is that all computer users, individually or collectively, should be able to control the software they use.
LGPL is a compromise. Apache is just giving up and saying "please use my code, Mr. Company, you don't have to pay me anything for my work and you can make proprietary forks that exclude me".
It's rare that the situation is so bad that we have to get that low. Ogg audio/video formats are a good example of where we have to beg companies to accept our donation of free work. The most important thing in that sector is to get away from non-free formats.
But there's almost no other examples. Using LGPL requires at least some cooperation from the companies benefiting from the code.
> GPLv3 which is incompatible with the way most software companies do business
Marketing FUD. What part of GPLv3 is anti-business? The part that says you can't give someone software and then sue them for patent infringement when they use it?
> They've released anything and everything related to it under BSD license
Apple's approach to free software is to use the BSD licence for stuff that already exists elsewhere (makes them look good and they get others to maintain it for free) and use a proprietary licence for the vast majority of code that would have contributed new functionality to the free software community.
Prime example: FreeBSD. I can download the kernel. Great. But we already had five highly functional kernels, including one that's clearly more functional, and the FreeBSD kernel was available for download before Apple came along anyway.
Has Apple brought FreeBSD to a higher level? Nope. Have they profited massively from the free labour? Yep.
Slashdot Mirror
Great journalism. Report on what one person outside the shop hopes, instead of what actually happened in the shop.
Daka has five shops in the whole of Venezuela.
It's very hard to know what's happening in Venezuela when you don't live there. Most of the media is owned by foreign (US) companies, so it's hard to know what sources to trust. Coverage in foreign media is often just ridiculous.
> we came dangerously close to a world where Microsoft
> Internet Explorer was the only accepted web browser.
We dodged that bullet but now we're heading to a world where facebook.com plus a small few other sites are the internet.
It's not Mozilla's fault but, as Stallman says, freedom is about controlling your computing on your computer, so it's a real problem that a lot of computing is being done on Facebook's servers.
(That said, it would be useful if Mozilla Firefox did more to make its users aware of what free software is - such as putting a clearer link in the menu or in the About dialogue box.)
Thanks for the warm show of support at the end. You're right that it's a huge task and that we'll need all the luck we can get.
The problems with Ubuntu are a big deal because getting people to switch to free software was supposed to be the solution to these privacy problems. We had a nice, simple message: "GNU/Linux doesn't spy on you". Ubuntu muddies the waters, which is annoying because solutions are pretty thin on the ground.
If it takes me 24 hours to read a book, and I pay full price, let's say 8 euro, that's 33 cents per hour. The price could be doubled and it would still be one of the cheapest pass times around. Your investment of time is always bigger than your cash investment for reading a book, so I reckon most people who complain about high book prices actually need to look at their overall spending. ...and you can sell the book 2nd hand afterward, and you can swap it and get a book for nothing.
George Orwell wrote a good piece about this:
http://theorwellprize.co.uk/george-orwell/by-orwell/essays-and-other-works/books-vs-cigarettes/
Bravo, France!
That list is a con. Here's an example of a printer which is listed as having "Full" support and being "Recommended" for users of GNU/Linux:
http://hplipopensource.com/hplip-web/models/laserjet/hp_laserjet_professional_p1102.html
"Driver plug-ins are released under a proprietary (non-open) license"
You run "hpsetup -i" and it displays a GPL notice, because the hpsetup program is free software, then it tries to download a proprietary binary blob driver and when you say no thanks, you're left with a useless HP printer that doesn't print.
Maybe HP decided to give up on free software when Bdale Garbee left HP last year. A real pity.
Sadly, most of HP's new printers don't print unless you install their non-free driver. This includes their laterjet printers.
HP used to be the most reliable for free software drivers, but not anymore.
Avoiding "Computationally expensive" stuff isn't the reason for using Latex.
When I use Latex, it's because I need to make a complex document with footnotes etc. and I want to use a real (i.e. programmable) text editor (GNU Emacs in my case).
LibreOffice has its uses, but you can't grep .odt files.
(Actually, instead of "LaTeX quality wysiwyg", which sounds like you want software other than Latex, but which gives equal quality, you probably meant to say "wysiwyg LaTeX". If that's the case, I agree. But since I'd written my comment before I spotted this, I'm posting it anyway.)
If there's a law, and you interpret it as saying X, and the courts that are trying people interpret it as saying Y, then in all senses that matter, Y is the law.
I mean, I agree that the law prohibits software patents. But my opinion doesn't stop software developers from receiving fines and injunctions.
Until the US Supreme Court takes a software patent and throws it out the window, software patents are real and we need a law. It's also not certain that the Supreme Court would do what we hope. They could rule that some software patents are invalid and others valid, and maybe their distinction would be substantial or maybe it would be reduced to nothing by patent lawyers drafting their applications a little differently.
We probably agree on these points, I'm just less optimistic about the courts doing what we're hoping they'll do.
> If you accept that mathematics is not patentable then you must accept that computer programs are not patentable.
Ok. But since UK and USA courts have upheld patents on math, this mantra doesn't get us as far as people think.
* http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Software_is_math#Some_judges_say_math_is_patentable
We need laws to exclude software from patentability. Like what New Zealand did last week (but with a bit of work we can write a better text).
Here's a page I'm in the process of writing:
* http://en.swpat.org/wiki/How_to_write_a_law_banning_software_patents
> India was there first :-)
I love being corrected (I expand the en.swpat.org wiki each time), but my recollection is that India rejected a law that would have explicitly allowed software patents. They didn't change the existing law to block them.
This is really important because it's the first time that a country has explicitly banned software patents, with knowledge of what it's doing.
Other jurisdictions have legislation which says software can't be patentable, like the European Patent Convention, but because it was written before software patents became a problem there are debates about the intention of the text.
Thanks to New Zealand, we'll have an example of a developed economy banning software patents, so there will be proof that it doesn't make an economy collapse etc.
More background here:
* http://en.swpat.org/wiki/New_Zealand_Patents_Bill_235
* http://en.swpat.org/wiki/New_Zealand
The only people I've met who are scared by corruption or psychopaths in the health care system are people in countries where it's privatised.
Oh.
I'm not a scientist or an engineer.
No organ transplants for me in your world.
(Health or lifestyle is already taken into account. Mentally handicapped people get kidney transplants ahead of heavy drinkers. That's the case in Ireland at least. I don't know exactly how the scoring system is devised.)
The local laws here require approval from three doctors with no connection to the recipient, the "donor" and who will have no role in the transplant operations. (In urgent cases, two doctors is enough.) A report has to be made, saying how death was established and that has to be kept on file for ten years.
I think that's as much as one can expect be done to safeguard against such corruption.
Also, the hospitals here are government funded, even the "private" ones, so there's more transparency and accountability than you'd get in countries with privatised systems, so I'm not worried about corruption, be it covert or systematic.
I was surprised to learn that where I live, everyone is automatically considered an organ donor. The doctors can takes organs from my body when I die, even if my family object. If you object, you have to sign an opt-out.
Great system actually. The only way to avoid the horror stories of people being kidnapped for organs or, worse, the poor selling their organs, is to ensure there are enough donated organs available. A lot of people don't care about losing their organs after death, but requiring people to opt-in means that most just don't bother.
There were just two problems with China's policy. One is that the organs were given to the ruling class, rather than being distributed on a basis of need. The other is that it encourages judgements and policies which increase the number of people sentenced to death.
I wouldn't trust proprietary software to look after privacy.
You can see the javascript files, so at least there's transperancy, but since it's not free software, there's no community. Nobody's looking a the code and if there was a problem, no one could fork it and distribute a problem-free version.
> all this stuff can still be tracked from the site the content is actually coming from.
On a technical level, yes. But don't forget about the humans involved.
It would give the websites knowledge and control over what they're sending on to the data gatherers. When it's all via third-party servers, the website owners can turn a blind eye and say "I'm just adding a link", but if they had to receive a list of data to pass on and had to take an active role, they might think twice and at least limit the data or anonymise it first. And they could publish info about what data gets collected so the public would be aware.
It's definitely a good sign. I'm still waiting for integration of AdBlock plus. Being in the top 10 installed plugins means that users want this feature.
I'm not even against ads but I don't like being tracked by ads servers getting my IP address, my browser fingerprint ( https://panopticlick.eff.org/ ), and the page I was reading (referrer).
RequestPolicy and NoScript are two more good plugins for controlling what info your browser gives to who.
But there's more hope of this sort of thing getting into a fork, such as GNU IceCat: https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/
> Are they doing this for only open-source sake?
They're doing it to have free software that can replace proprietary software. Being free software means the user community knows exactly what the software is doing and can decide how it will be modified.
Proprietary software locks users in, adds back doors, imposes DRM, gathers personal info and sends it to advertisers, omits features so that users can be pushed to buy the more expensive version, and omits features that users want (i.e. to protect privacy) because the owner has a commercial relationship with advertisers, and other nasty things that users don't ask for.
So it's not about "open source", but yes, it's about the distribution model. More specifically, "free software".
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html
That section says that if you give someone a device with software that's supposed to come with the freedom to run, study, modify, and redistribute, then you can't prevent them from modifying the software on that device and running it.
Where's the controversy?
The only problem is that some mega corps don't want to give those freedoms to users. If some companies won't keep their side of the deal, why should free software developers help them?
GPLv3 didn't create the problem of locked down devices. It's part of the solution but we've a long way to go.
> Please explain how apple is going to destroy a project that they contribute to, but do not own.
If Apple puts all it's best work into proprietary extensions, LLVM could find that in a few years their compiler doesn't support the latest hardware, doesn't work with modern tools (debuggers etc.), and is slower than the proprietary version.
Nothing gets "destroyed" in the sense of not existing any more, but who then would use LLVM?
Copyleft is share-alike. Everyone respects the same standards of freedom for users. The whole point is that all computer users, individually or collectively, should be able to control the software they use.
LGPL is a compromise. Apache is just giving up and saying "please use my code, Mr. Company, you don't have to pay me anything for my work and you can make proprietary forks that exclude me".
It's rare that the situation is so bad that we have to get that low. Ogg audio/video formats are a good example of where we have to beg companies to accept our donation of free work. The most important thing in that sector is to get away from non-free formats.
But there's almost no other examples. Using LGPL requires at least some cooperation from the companies benefiting from the code.
> The market-based restrictions on hardware products are anti-business
What part of the licence are you referring to?
https://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html
> GPLv3 which is incompatible with the way most software companies do business
Marketing FUD. What part of GPLv3 is anti-business? The part that says you can't give someone software and then sue them for patent infringement when they use it?
> They've released anything and everything related to it under BSD license
Apple's approach to free software is to use the BSD licence for stuff that already exists elsewhere (makes them look good and they get others to maintain it for free) and use a proprietary licence for the vast majority of code that would have contributed new functionality to the free software community.
Prime example: FreeBSD. I can download the kernel. Great. But we already had five highly functional kernels, including one that's clearly more functional, and the FreeBSD kernel was available for download before Apple came along anyway.
Has Apple brought FreeBSD to a higher level? Nope. Have they profited massively from the free labour? Yep.