I think the fact that vote trading would even have any effect is a pretty good indication that the election system in the US is pretty badly screwed up. Every vote should count for something.
I think the fear that Nader is "stealing" votes from Gore also brings up another problem with the election system in the US (and most other countries). I'm pretty sure game theory says something about the "fairness" of elections involving more than two candidates. Unfortunately, I can't find any references right now. I'm thinking that there's got to be something that's more fair than the current system though. Perhaps a system where each voter ranks the candidates would work.
Explain to me how showing the same frame twice for 1/48 seconds is and better than showing it once for 1/24 seconds? Answer: it isn't. In fact, there is a small delay between showing frames. If you show the frame twice for 1/48 second you're actually going to double the amount of time that there's nothing on the screen! (because you're effectivly "turning off" each frame for a small duration in the middle) This is like telling someone that if they blink really fast, it'll make the movie appear more smooth...
The reason film can get away with such a low frame rate while CRT can't is that film projectors don't scan each frame. They project the entire thing simultaneously.
I think this whole "they project each frame multiple times" thing is some weird urban legnd created by a guy who watched a rented movie frame-by-frame, noticed that some frames were doubled, and then made this totally incorrect conclusion. Either that, or you're getting confused by interlacing (which makes 30 frames/second into 60 fields/second in NTSC, 25 to 50 in PAL). Tricks like interlacing make no sense for film, because (once again) film is projected an entire frame at a time, unlike CRTs which scan the frame/field with a raster.
(If you watch a movie that was originally 24 FPS film and then converted to [30 FPS] NTSC, you'll see that every 5th frame is a duplicate of the preceeding frame. So for every 5 consecutive frames, there are really only 4 unique frames. 4/5 = 24/30)
Plenty of games have synchronous event handling. Faster framerate won't give you faster display but it will mean more responsiveness and/or more accurate physics in many games.
Even in that situation, is there any point in actually rendering to the card? You're not going to see that frame, since your monitor can't keep up. Instead, they could do event handling, and then wait the amount of time it would've taken to render the frame, or perhaps even done additional event handling cycles...
Of course, doing event handling synchronously with rendering is a bad idea from the start.
The wording of the bill is "No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic..." with no mention of use. Whatever you do for your own benefit is still protected.
Hello? How am I supposed to use something unless I or someone else "manufactures" it first? "Oh yes, you can use such a tool, but such a tool is not allowed to exist." O-kaaaay...
Just because you paid money for it doesn't mean it's yours under the law -- you can't print up copies of a book you bought for all your friends.
You're right, but you're assuming that he wanted to print up copies for his friends. That's already illegal under pre-DMCA copyright. DMCA isn't required to stop that.
I think that the original poster was alluding to the fact that under DMCA, one loses the ability to do a lot of things that are normally considered "fair-use". I'm allowed to copy my books, videos, CDs, etc., for archival purposes. I'm also allowed to change their format. I'm even allowed to record shows on TV so I can watch them later, or in a different place. As long as I don't broadcast these things, or distribute them, it's fair-use. Copy protection and region coding prevent me from being able to do these things.
It's bad enough that the publishers implement these technologies. It's even worse when they demand legal protection for people who circumvent the technologies, even when those people are doing it for purposes that fall under fair use.
To use an analogy: Imagine your next door neighbor has a problem with people tresspassing on their yard. Your neighbor decides to put up a fence, but their fence actully encloses a significant chunk of your yard in addition to their yard. I bet you'd be pretty annoyed, even if the fence was only 6 inches high. Now imagine your neighbor also went and got a restraining order, saying that you can't touch their fence, or cross over it.
That fence is copy protection. The part of your yard in their fence is fair-use. The restraining order is DMCA.
But he both relies on the notion of intellectual property to prevent the theft of that freedom and respects the rights of others to restrict their intellectual property.
Go read "Why Software Should Not Have Owners" and "Why Software Should Be Free". RMS does not believe in intellectual property. He doesn't think creators deserve any more control over their creations than anyone else. He uses IP laws only when it suits his purposes.
Huh? What's your point? I know about "about:blank". I was just saying that with Netscape you don't have to set your home page to about:blank, you can actually select "Browser starts with: Blank page", and then the "Home" button can still take you somewhere useful and non-blank.
When everything is a challenge, when you have to grit your teeth just to bear the ugliness, when every installation involves chmods and gzip on the command line. Yesiree, when you do something in Linux you really feel that you've achieved something!
Yeah, it's like those poor Windows users who have to move DLL's around by hand, and fill in all of the registry entries manually, or those Mac users that need to edit the resource fork of their applications with a hex editor to change the preferences...
Oh wait, you say Windows and Mac users don't need to do those things? Well, guess what Bubba, Linux users don't need to use chmod and gzip to install things either. Most distros use a package management system. RPM, for example, is very common. There several GUI-based package management tools that make the installation of RPM's very simple. Linux isn't nearly as difficult as you make it out to be. Stop basing your opinions on the Slackware 1.x you installed on your 386 6 years ago.
Incidently, I don't believe that Linux is for everyone, and I never said that either. In fact, I didn't even mention Linux in my original post..
There are advantages to open source. There are also advantages to being the most popular operating system (yes, I'm talking about MS Windows here, and the Mac in the DTP community). When deciding what to use, you have to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of each option. Sometimes the advantages of open source outweigh the advantages of the alternatives. Anyone who says "you should always use open source" or "you should never use open source" is obviously an extremist, and is letting their ideology interfere with their decision making process.
As for your examples... OS X is based on the NeXT legacy, a commercial effort only lately turned into Open Source.
NeXT is based on BSD, so the point is moot. OS X is based on open source no matter which way you slice it.
In Netscape you can actually set the browser to start with a blank page, yet have the "Home" button go to a URL. That way you don't need to see that page render every single time you open the browser, but you can get to it quick if you want to. I've actually got my home page set to a local HTML file with mini-forms for things like Google, dictionary.com, IMDB's search, etc...
When ideology is not a factor in your choice of software, Open Source is the last thing you want.
That isn't true. I'm certainly no open source zealot (check my previous posts), but I still think open source is great for technical and economic reasons. Ideology need not come into play. Hell, Apple is basing OS X on BSD. I guess you'd better stick with Windows. Oh wait, didn't they use zlib in Internet Explorer?
And then I could listen to all of you confused people discuss that one. No doubt people would think someone striped out the mac and built an x86 machine with the shell. and all kinds of crazy things just to say it was linux.
Well, actually the PS/2 would be running an 80286 with 3.5 inch drives (high density! 1.44 MB!) and the dear, departed Micro Channel Architecture. Of course it does have the PS/2 mouse port, so perhaps you can use your Cuecat with it?
There were PS/2s that had 8086s. In particular, the PS/2 25 had an 8086. I think you're right about the floppy drives though. The PS/2 5 my friend had had a 3.5" drive, and I'm pretty sure the 25 was the bottom-of-the-barrel PS/2...
Browsing the web on a VIC-20/C-64/PIC/etc. is not that impressive a hack if it won't run without being hooked to a specially programmed PC acting as a proxy. Stretching that just a bit, I could browse the web on an Etch-a-Sketch(tm) if I just used a "proxy" PC with a couple of robot arms to translate HTML into the native protocol (up/down and left/right knob twists).
For the most art, I agreed with the point of your post. However, I think it would be extrememly cool to have a web-enabled Etch-A-Sketch(tm), even (especially?) if it included a couple of robot arms that translated the HTML into knob twists...
You must be new here. Quickies have been around for a long time. And what do you mean "nothing was posted for a while"? There were 15 posts in the past 24 hours.
With free software, the amortization is in the source itself. There is a large body of paid-for code already out there that can be freely reused. In some cases, the needed changes amount to a minor revision and some glue.
That works out great for the people who add custom tweaks to existing applications. It doesn't work well for someone planning on developing a new application from scratch. The people doing 1% of the work end up getting 99% of the payments.
There's also the question of whether customizations are even useful to have "freed". Some of these will involve bug fixes and the addition of generic features, but a lot of customization work involves stuff that is of no use to anyone but the customer though.
On the other side of the transaction, I know that I would much rather be hired to make the changes than to re-implement apache from scratch. I find 'solving' a solved problem to be a drudgery while solving new problems is interesting.
So you think all unsolved problems can be solved by adding tweaks to existing software projects?
Voluntary amortization (donations or shares) could still work...
I doubt that voluntary contributions would work. Take a look at Fairtunes. They've been operating for a few months and they've been able to collect less than $4000 USD, for all musicians. How long would that pay even one software developer? Most people won't pay for something if they don't have to. And I don't see why developers who provide useful contributions should have to beg for donations in any case.
... the reliable way to share the burden is to collect the money up front and hire somebody to do the work. If I need a class of software, my competitors probably need it too, and posession of software isn't a worthwhile competitive advantage unless I hire the best coders in the industry to design and maintain it--if we all start with a well-tested base and customize it, we'll usually all come out ahead.
What if we're talking about software that would have millions of users? Who's going to fund that?
If you create a work derived from mine, "my" license cannot have contaminated "your" work, because both of us are the authors of that work, and it cannot be distributed (or even created) without the permission of us both.
IANAL, but I'm fairly certain that in copyright law, a work is only considered "derived" if it contains a copy of a significant portion of the original work, or a transformation of a significant portion of the original work. A binary executable that dynamically links to libreadline does not contain a significant portion of the contents of libreadline, hence it would not be considered a derived work by copyright law. However, RMS seems to be of the opinion that even programs that dynamically link with GPL code must be GPL themeselves.
Re:A remark from Don Knuth on the subject..
on
"e-mail" vs "email"
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· Score: 1
X is often used as a short-form for "trans". For instance:
"x-former" = transformer
"x-istor" = transistor
So an X-ray is a "trans-ray", or a "ray that can go through things".
(Okay, I admit, I just made that up. Let's see how long it takes for this to become "common knowledge"... heh heh)
In other words: All the people earning money with free software are people we've heard of, as far as we know. How insightful.
I think you're missing the point. There aren't many free software developers paid to write free software. Most of the people who write free software do it without pay. The few who are paid are the famous ones.
But since bits are free while labor is not, why don't we start paying people a fair wage to write the code and then let our civilization make maximal use of it?
That's an excellent (albeit obvious) idea. The question is, how do you accomplish this? The typical suggestion is "work for hire" type things... but who's going to hire a developer to write some code, unless they (the buyer) can turn around and charge others to use that code?
With commercial software, the large costs of development are ammortized over all of the paying users. So each user only pays a piece of the price for development. With free software and open source, ammortization schemes don't work, because any of the first few people to get a copy can then sell the exact same product but at a far lower price, and with higher profits (since they have near zero costs, while the company that paid for the development has relatively high costs).
I don't think that's true, and that shared libraries and modularization are making copyleft meaningless--we'll have to hold our nose and start using contracts to prevent proprietary abuse.
Yes, the freedoms that copyright gives are bad for copyleft. How ironic. freedom is slavery.
The OSD rationale makes the GPL's conformance clear--it's intended to permit bundling unrelated works, not enforce tolerance for proprietary derived works.
That still seems inconsistent to me. The OSD says:
"License Must Not Contaminate Other Software."
The Rationale says:
"Yes, the GPL is conformant with this requirement. GPLed libraries `contaminate' only software to which they will actively be linked at runtime, not software with which they are merely distributed."
So what if they "only" contaminate software they're linked with? The OSD says "must not contaminate other software period". Hence the GPL shouldn't be considered conformant. I think they're only letting it through because of the large base of existing GPL'ed code...
NO! The GPL is not a contract. It is a unilateral grant of rights above and beyond what copyright law allows, and it states precisely this.
Yes, it does state that, but it also isn't true. GPL does try to enforce some things that I doubt normal copyright law requires. For example, I'm not allowed to distribute a binary only program that I wrote, and then tel people to link it with libreadline. That's against the GPL, even though I'm not even distributing libreadline. Of course, it's perfectly acceptable for me to link against any other non-GPL library that happens to be on the user's system, according to copyright, because I'm not copying anything.
Of course, this is one of those grey areas. Is a program that uses libreadline, but which is distributed without libreadline "based on" libreadline? I would wager that copyright law would say no, but RMS seems to think the answer is yes, based on his past ramblings.
In any case, the other poster was pointing out that "Free Software" and "Open Source" are different. I was pointing out that the differences he mentioned don't seem to exist. If you think that the GPL isn't a contract, then I don't think any license that complies with OSD would be a contract either. In fact, I'm beginning to wonder if GPL even complies with the OSD. It's on the list of "OSI certified" licenses, yet it seems to violate clause 9.
RMS seems to be creating a win-win situation for those who have found a profitable business model while swapping code;
RMS has contributed little if anything towards helping people find a profitable business model for "free" software. The "open source" movement, on the other hand, has been attempting to find business models that work. (Of course, RMS seems to hate the open source movement... stealing his thunder) Unfortunately, most of the open source business models either only work in special circumstances (ie: writing device drivers), or not at all.
To the best of my knowledge, RMS has never held a gun to anyone's head and insisted that they release their code under GPL. I am also unaware of any lobbying activity on his part to make non-Free software illegal to produce.
No, instead he tries to convince users and developers that non-"free" software is "morally repugnant".
As I said before, I have no problem with free software. I use free software, and I've also contributed to several projects. However, I think that stating that non-"free" software is immoral is at worst immoral itself, and at best exceedingly childish.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the fact that vote trading would even have any effect is a pretty good indication that the election system in the US is pretty badly screwed up. Every vote should count for something.
I think the fear that Nader is "stealing" votes from Gore also brings up another problem with the election system in the US (and most other countries). I'm pretty sure game theory says something about the "fairness" of elections involving more than two candidates. Unfortunately, I can't find any references right now. I'm thinking that there's got to be something that's more fair than the current system though. Perhaps a system where each voter ranks the candidates would work.
Explain to me how showing the same frame twice for 1/48 seconds is and better than showing it once for 1/24 seconds? Answer: it isn't. In fact, there is a small delay between showing frames. If you show the frame twice for 1/48 second you're actually going to double the amount of time that there's nothing on the screen! (because you're effectivly "turning off" each frame for a small duration in the middle) This is like telling someone that if they blink really fast, it'll make the movie appear more smooth...
The reason film can get away with such a low frame rate while CRT can't is that film projectors don't scan each frame. They project the entire thing simultaneously.
I think this whole "they project each frame multiple times" thing is some weird urban legnd created by a guy who watched a rented movie frame-by-frame, noticed that some frames were doubled, and then made this totally incorrect conclusion. Either that, or you're getting confused by interlacing (which makes 30 frames/second into 60 fields/second in NTSC, 25 to 50 in PAL). Tricks like interlacing make no sense for film, because (once again) film is projected an entire frame at a time, unlike CRTs which scan the frame/field with a raster.
(If you watch a movie that was originally 24 FPS film and then converted to [30 FPS] NTSC, you'll see that every 5th frame is a duplicate of the preceeding frame. So for every 5 consecutive frames, there are really only 4 unique frames. 4/5 = 24/30)
Plenty of games have synchronous event handling. Faster framerate won't give you faster display but it will mean more responsiveness and/or more accurate physics in many games.
Even in that situation, is there any point in actually rendering to the card? You're not going to see that frame, since your monitor can't keep up. Instead, they could do event handling, and then wait the amount of time it would've taken to render the frame, or perhaps even done additional event handling cycles...
Of course, doing event handling synchronously with rendering is a bad idea from the start.
The wording of the bill is "No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic ..." with no mention of use. Whatever you do for your own benefit is still protected.
Hello? How am I supposed to use something unless I or someone else "manufactures" it first? "Oh yes, you can use such a tool, but such a tool is not allowed to exist." O-kaaaay...
Just because you paid money for it doesn't mean it's yours under the law -- you can't print up copies of a book you bought for all your friends.
You're right, but you're assuming that he wanted to print up copies for his friends. That's already illegal under pre-DMCA copyright. DMCA isn't required to stop that.
I think that the original poster was alluding to the fact that under DMCA, one loses the ability to do a lot of things that are normally considered "fair-use". I'm allowed to copy my books, videos, CDs, etc., for archival purposes. I'm also allowed to change their format. I'm even allowed to record shows on TV so I can watch them later, or in a different place. As long as I don't broadcast these things, or distribute them, it's fair-use. Copy protection and region coding prevent me from being able to do these things.
It's bad enough that the publishers implement these technologies. It's even worse when they demand legal protection for people who circumvent the technologies, even when those people are doing it for purposes that fall under fair use.
To use an analogy: Imagine your next door neighbor has a problem with people tresspassing on their yard. Your neighbor decides to put up a fence, but their fence actully encloses a significant chunk of your yard in addition to their yard. I bet you'd be pretty annoyed, even if the fence was only 6 inches high. Now imagine your neighbor also went and got a restraining order, saying that you can't touch their fence, or cross over it.
That fence is copy protection. The part of your yard in their fence is fair-use. The restraining order is DMCA.
But he both relies on the notion of intellectual property to prevent the theft of that freedom and respects the rights of others to restrict their intellectual property.
Go read "Why Software Should Not Have Owners" and "Why Software Should Be Free". RMS does not believe in intellectual property. He doesn't think creators deserve any more control over their creations than anyone else. He uses IP laws only when it suits his purposes.
Huh? What's your point? I know about "about:blank". I was just saying that with Netscape you don't have to set your home page to about:blank, you can actually select "Browser starts with: Blank page", and then the "Home" button can still take you somewhere useful and non-blank.
How does moving to Digital Creations fix this problem?
When everything is a challenge, when you have to grit your teeth just to bear the ugliness, when every installation involves chmods and gzip on the command line. Yesiree, when you do something in Linux you really feel that you've achieved something!
Yeah, it's like those poor Windows users who have to move DLL's around by hand, and fill in all of the registry entries manually, or those Mac users that need to edit the resource fork of their applications with a hex editor to change the preferences...
Oh wait, you say Windows and Mac users don't need to do those things? Well, guess what Bubba, Linux users don't need to use chmod and gzip to install things either. Most distros use a package management system. RPM, for example, is very common. There several GUI-based package management tools that make the installation of RPM's very simple. Linux isn't nearly as difficult as you make it out to be. Stop basing your opinions on the Slackware 1.x you installed on your 386 6 years ago.
Incidently, I don't believe that Linux is for everyone, and I never said that either. In fact, I didn't even mention Linux in my original post..
There are advantages to open source. There are also advantages to being the most popular operating system (yes, I'm talking about MS Windows here, and the Mac in the DTP community). When deciding what to use, you have to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of each option. Sometimes the advantages of open source outweigh the advantages of the alternatives. Anyone who says "you should always use open source" or "you should never use open source" is obviously an extremist, and is letting their ideology interfere with their decision making process.
As for your examples... OS X is based on the NeXT legacy, a commercial effort only lately turned into Open Source.
NeXT is based on BSD, so the point is moot. OS X is based on open source no matter which way you slice it.
In Netscape you can actually set the browser to start with a blank page, yet have the "Home" button go to a URL. That way you don't need to see that page render every single time you open the browser, but you can get to it quick if you want to. I've actually got my home page set to a local HTML file with mini-forms for things like Google, dictionary.com, IMDB's search, etc...
When ideology is not a factor in your choice of software, Open Source is the last thing you want.
That isn't true. I'm certainly no open source zealot (check my previous posts), but I still think open source is great for technical and economic reasons. Ideology need not come into play. Hell, Apple is basing OS X on BSD. I guess you'd better stick with Windows. Oh wait, didn't they use zlib in Internet Explorer?
And then I could listen to all of you confused people discuss that one. No doubt people would think someone striped out the mac and built an x86 machine with the shell. and all kinds of crazy things just to say it was linux.
Linux runs on a lot more than just x86. In fact, there are several PPC distros that work on the iMac.
I've got to admit that it is pretty weird to see an iMac with a (text) console login prompt though...
whois != nslookup
There were PS/2s that had 8086s. In particular, the PS/2 25 had an 8086. I think you're right about the floppy drives though. The PS/2 5 my friend had had a 3.5" drive, and I'm pretty sure the 25 was the bottom-of-the-barrel PS/2...
You must be new here. Quickies have been around for a long time. And what do you mean "nothing was posted for a while"? There were 15 posts in the past 24 hours.
With free software, the amortization is in the source itself. There is a large body of paid-for code already out there that can be freely reused. In some cases, the needed changes amount to a minor revision and some glue.
That works out great for the people who add custom tweaks to existing applications. It doesn't work well for someone planning on developing a new application from scratch. The people doing 1% of the work end up getting 99% of the payments.
There's also the question of whether customizations are even useful to have "freed". Some of these will involve bug fixes and the addition of generic features, but a lot of customization work involves stuff that is of no use to anyone but the customer though.
On the other side of the transaction, I know that I would much rather be hired to make the changes than to re-implement apache from scratch. I find 'solving' a solved problem to be a drudgery while solving new problems is interesting.
So you think all unsolved problems can be solved by adding tweaks to existing software projects?
Voluntary amortization (donations or shares) could still work...
... the reliable way to share the burden is to collect the money up front and hire somebody to do the work. If I need a class of software, my competitors probably need it too, and posession of software isn't a worthwhile competitive advantage unless I hire the best coders in the industry to design and maintain it--if we all start with a well-tested base and customize it, we'll usually all come out ahead.
I doubt that voluntary contributions would work. Take a look at Fairtunes. They've been operating for a few months and they've been able to collect less than $4000 USD, for all musicians. How long would that pay even one software developer? Most people won't pay for something if they don't have to. And I don't see why developers who provide useful contributions should have to beg for donations in any case.
What if we're talking about software that would have millions of users? Who's going to fund that?
If you create a work derived from mine, "my" license cannot have contaminated "your" work, because both of us are the authors of that work, and it cannot be distributed (or even created) without the permission of us both.
IANAL, but I'm fairly certain that in copyright law, a work is only considered "derived" if it contains a copy of a significant portion of the original work, or a transformation of a significant portion of the original work. A binary executable that dynamically links to libreadline does not contain a significant portion of the contents of libreadline, hence it would not be considered a derived work by copyright law. However, RMS seems to be of the opinion that even programs that dynamically link with GPL code must be GPL themeselves.
X is often used as a short-form for "trans". For instance:
"x-former" = transformer
"x-istor" = transistor
So an X-ray is a "trans-ray", or a "ray that can go through things".
(Okay, I admit, I just made that up. Let's see how long it takes for this to become "common knowledge"... heh heh)
In other words: All the people earning money with free software are people we've heard of, as far as we know. How insightful.
I think you're missing the point. There aren't many free software developers paid to write free software. Most of the people who write free software do it without pay. The few who are paid are the famous ones.
But since bits are free while labor is not, why don't we start paying people a fair wage to write the code and then let our civilization make maximal use of it?
That's an excellent (albeit obvious) idea. The question is, how do you accomplish this? The typical suggestion is "work for hire" type things... but who's going to hire a developer to write some code, unless they (the buyer) can turn around and charge others to use that code?
With commercial software, the large costs of development are ammortized over all of the paying users. So each user only pays a piece of the price for development. With free software and open source, ammortization schemes don't work, because any of the first few people to get a copy can then sell the exact same product but at a far lower price, and with higher profits (since they have near zero costs, while the company that paid for the development has relatively high costs).
I don't think that's true, and that shared libraries and modularization are making copyleft meaningless--we'll have to hold our nose and start using contracts to prevent proprietary abuse.
Yes, the freedoms that copyright gives are bad for copyleft. How ironic. freedom is slavery.
The OSD rationale makes the GPL's conformance clear--it's intended to permit bundling unrelated works, not enforce tolerance for proprietary derived works.
That still seems inconsistent to me. The OSD says:
"License Must Not Contaminate Other Software."
The Rationale says:
"Yes, the GPL is conformant with this requirement. GPLed libraries `contaminate' only software to which they will actively be linked at runtime, not software with which they are merely distributed."
So what if they "only" contaminate software they're linked with? The OSD says "must not contaminate other software period". Hence the GPL shouldn't be considered conformant. I think they're only letting it through because of the large base of existing GPL'ed code...
NO! The GPL is not a contract. It is a unilateral grant of rights above and beyond what copyright law allows, and it states precisely this.
Yes, it does state that, but it also isn't true. GPL does try to enforce some things that I doubt normal copyright law requires. For example, I'm not allowed to distribute a binary only program that I wrote, and then tel people to link it with libreadline. That's against the GPL, even though I'm not even distributing libreadline. Of course, it's perfectly acceptable for me to link against any other non-GPL library that happens to be on the user's system, according to copyright, because I'm not copying anything.
Of course, this is one of those grey areas. Is a program that uses libreadline, but which is distributed without libreadline "based on" libreadline? I would wager that copyright law would say no, but RMS seems to think the answer is yes, based on his past ramblings.
In any case, the other poster was pointing out that "Free Software" and "Open Source" are different. I was pointing out that the differences he mentioned don't seem to exist. If you think that the GPL isn't a contract, then I don't think any license that complies with OSD would be a contract either. In fact, I'm beginning to wonder if GPL even complies with the OSD. It's on the list of "OSI certified" licenses, yet it seems to violate clause 9.
RMS seems to be creating a win-win situation for those who have found a profitable business model while swapping code;
RMS has contributed little if anything towards helping people find a profitable business model for "free" software. The "open source" movement, on the other hand, has been attempting to find business models that work. (Of course, RMS seems to hate the open source movement... stealing his thunder) Unfortunately, most of the open source business models either only work in special circumstances (ie: writing device drivers), or not at all.
To the best of my knowledge, RMS has never held a gun to anyone's head and insisted that they release their code under GPL. I am also unaware of any lobbying activity on his part to make non-Free software illegal to produce.
No, instead he tries to convince users and developers that non-"free" software is "morally repugnant".
As I said before, I have no problem with free software. I use free software, and I've also contributed to several projects. However, I think that stating that non-"free" software is immoral is at worst immoral itself, and at best exceedingly childish.