For example, what prevents Google from using GPL'ed code in their servers?
Nothing. The GPL only deals with distribution. Google may right now be organizing orgiastic mixtures of GPL'ed code and all sorts of proprietary code and that'd be perfectly fine, as long as they do not distribute the result.
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Science vs. Homeopathy
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Western medicine is truly wonderful but it does have some blind spots, mostly in the areas that are not well suited to scientific study, like positive aspects of the mind-body connection.
How can anything be non-well suited to scientific study?
I'm talking of the analysis of capitalism, means of production, labor and so on written up in Marx's works---prominently The Capital.
Don't confuse that with whatever it is that propaganda has tried to make of it, nor with the implementation of a somewhat misguided plan barely related to that analysis that we saw during a big part of last century.
If someone's convinced by that argument, there's not much to hope about his or her logical abilities, so his or her code is probably not something one wouldbe interested in...
You seem to believe that the construction and protection of the social, legal and political circumstances that allow software to be used, distributed and developed is less important that the actual developing. You fool yourself. Think about it, and consider, for variety, also the cases of scientific knowledge, artistic products, and so on.
The Year of the Linux Desktop may be put off a while, but the Century of Content Control has been with us for quite a while now.
Exactly. The difference between "Free Software" (software should be free) and OSS (software should come along with it's source code) is huge. OSS makes sense from a technological point of view (e.g. security) while free software is basically some weird communist (or rather anarchist) philoshophy.
I guess you've never had a file trapped in a format which no word-processor which runs on the current generation of OSs/computers can read... Damn communistic librarian and archivists!
"Software should be free" is like saying that for every product or service you have to disclose the intellectual process behind it!
No, it isn't. Throwing around hyperboles is not as great way to reason...
Access to the means of production is quite basic to any kind of freedom.
That software comes in bits coded in the electromagnetic state of little pieces of silicon does not change that.
After all the time thyat's gone by and the many discussions of these matters, one would expect that the kind of analogies you make would already be unnecessary. Sadly, that is not the case. Thank you for spelling them out for the GGP.
You obviously have more political concerns than I, which probably looks to some like I'm either lazy or naïve, but all I need is a solid OS with the tools to get things done.
You actually need much more than a OS+tools package. The preservation and defense of the political conditions needed for the use of your tools is as imporant as the tools themselves. The illusion that the usage of tools is independent of the historical and political context is just an illusion.
People tend to see the word `political' and basically turn away, building a ficticious separation between what they are interested in (a solid OS + tools, say) and the political, historical and social conditions needed for them; that's how we got where we are...
I could point to Bourdieu's 'Practical Reasons' for a rather detailed and extensive analysis of this---last time I checked, though, it was not available in English.
What you need to know is all the stuff that XML doesn't specify.
That's the case with any XML document, whether Microsoft's or "open". The point seems moot.
No, it isn't!
The semantics of an XHTML file, for example, are precisely specified (and if that is not the case so that there be underspecified points, that is a bug in the specification and the intent of everyone involved is that it be corrected) MS's "open" format is nowhere close to that (neither wrt the specification of the semantics nor wrt the intent...)
Your observation makes as much sense as saying that there is no point in standarizing document formats because in the end every format is reduced to bits, and those are already standard.
Indeed. The attack would be: install subrepticiously a mp3 player in the box to be DoS'ed and make it play in a loop a mp3 silent file. There goes their network speed....
When I said I've never installed it I meant I've never installed it as an user. See, I have the source for my complete desktop environment, I can work out my way around quite well, I know my window managers, their related specs, and such stuff quite well (I am even guilty of having written a window manager in my youth) and I am actually one of the (essentially ex) maintainers for one piece of this desktop which gets quite a lot of exposure. I was in fact doing pretty well with Slackware back in mid '94, so if I used my own experience as a measure, the linux desktop has been around for over a decade. I do not judge the state of the venerable Linux Desktop according to how it affects me or what problems I have.
I still maintain that your comment that:
I never understand why we have to insist on having X, a desktop environment, AND a window manager for average desktop systems. I would absolutely kill for an all-in-one system geared for home use. No choice, no thousand and one options. I also wouldn't mind a distro to be tuned for at most 4 users at once.
makes essentially no sense.
BTW, I am quite convinced that the desktop sucks. All desktops. Unifying logically separate stacks into a big massive piece of code will not fix that (I am posit that it'd make changing window managers quite a bit more complicated, in fact!)
I do not think I know anyone who knows how to change the default window manager in Windows.
As for compiz, I'm quite sure clicking the appropriate checkbox in the aptly-named Add/Remove Software dialog that's invoked by the last item on the default Applications menu in FC7 will install compiz. I wouldn't know, as I have never found any use for it so I've never installed it.
In any case, `being able to install compiz' is hardly the bar for being desktop-ready. A default install of FC7 has 95% of what 97.5% of the people need for their home use, up to drivers and codecs. And no one needs compiz.
I never understand why we have to insist on having X, a desktop environment, AND a window manager for average desktop systems. I would absolutely kill for an all-in-one system geared for home use. No choice, no thousand and one options. I also wouldn't mind a distro to be tuned for at most 4 users at once.
The fact that the X server, the window manager, the window decorator, the compositor, the selection manager, and the `desktop environment' (which is really a big compositum of many many parts) are separate pieces is rather irrelevant for `home use' or for mostly any other use apart from developing them. Windows does separate some of those roles too (you can change the window manager, for example)
Most of the popular distros of the day do not really present a huge number of options. If you install Fedora, say, and unless you go to the lengths of looking for the options (which in particular means that you already know about them, and that you care about changing the defaults) you get presented with no thousand options for any of the pieces you mention. This week I installed Fedora 7 on a coworkers computer, and pressing the Next button a few times presents you with not much more choice than the username for the non-root user. She's been using Fedora since FC1 and I am quite sure she is not aware of the possibility of having a compositing manager which is different from the window manager which is different from the window decorator nor, really, of the fact that those entities exist at all.
One can hardly describe as 'trapping' the fact that the GPL allows developers to do things that, with a more standard license, would not be allowed. No license grants all rights to the party accepting it.
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Nothing. The GPL only deals with distribution. Google may right now be organizing orgiastic mixtures of GPL'ed code and all sorts of proprietary code and that'd be perfectly fine, as long as they do not distribute the result.
How can anything be non-well suited to scientific study?
Actually, Windows was originally written (mostly?) in Pascal. That's where the funny calling convention in very early APIs came from.
Microsoft ain't the only 'monoculture' in town.
You do realize that this sentence is a contradiction in terms, don't you?
From Adam Smith onwards (and before him, surely) it has been aggreed, by all parties analyzing the facts, that that is not the case.
I'm talking of the analysis of capitalism, means of production, labor and so on written up in Marx's works---prominently The Capital.
Don't confuse that with whatever it is that propaganda has tried to make of it, nor with the implementation of a somewhat misguided plan barely related to that analysis that we saw during a big part of last century.
If someone's convinced by that argument, there's not much to hope about his or her logical abilities, so his or her code is probably not something one wouldbe interested in...
You seem to believe that the construction and protection of the social, legal and political circumstances that allow software to be used, distributed and developed is less important that the actual developing. You fool yourself. Think about it, and consider, for variety, also the cases of scientific knowledge, artistic products, and so on.
The Year of the Linux Desktop may be put off a while, but the Century of Content Control has been with us for quite a while now.
I guess you've never had a file trapped in a format which no word-processor which runs on the current generation of OSs/computers can read... Damn communistic librarian and archivists!
"Software should be free" is like saying that for every product or service you have to disclose the intellectual process behind it!No, it isn't. Throwing around hyperboles is not as great way to reason...
Both formats are non-semantic in very bad ways, so you were both wrong, I'd say.
Access to the means of production is quite basic to any kind of freedom. That software comes in bits coded in the electromagnetic state of little pieces of silicon does not change that.
If people would ever actually read Marx...
After all the time thyat's gone by and the many discussions of these matters, one would expect that the kind of analogies you make would already be unnecessary. Sadly, that is not the case. Thank you for spelling them out for the GGP.
You actually need much more than a OS+tools package. The preservation and defense of the political conditions needed for the use of your tools is as imporant as the tools themselves. The illusion that the usage of tools is independent of the historical and political context is just an illusion. People tend to see the word `political' and basically turn away, building a ficticious separation between what they are interested in (a solid OS + tools, say) and the political, historical and social conditions needed for them; that's how we got where we are...
I could point to Bourdieu's 'Practical Reasons' for a rather detailed and extensive analysis of this---last time I checked, though, it was not available in English.
That's the case with any XML document, whether Microsoft's or "open". The point seems moot.
No, it isn't!
The semantics of an XHTML file, for example, are precisely specified (and if that is not the case so that there be underspecified points, that is a bug in the specification and the intent of everyone involved is that it be corrected) MS's "open" format is nowhere close to that (neither wrt the specification of the semantics nor wrt the intent...)
Your observation makes as much sense as saying that there is no point in standarizing document formats because in the end every format is reduced to bits, and those are already standard.
Hm. Is that possibly an Austen reference?
hmm. Do you know what a suppository is? Well, you may well know in fact, I guess...
Indeed. The attack would be: install subrepticiously a mp3 player in the box to be DoS'ed and make it play in a loop a mp3 silent file. There goes their network speed....
When I said I've never installed it I meant I've never installed it as an user. See, I have the source for my complete desktop environment, I can work out my way around quite well, I know my window managers, their related specs, and such stuff quite well (I am even guilty of having written a window manager in my youth) and I am actually one of the (essentially ex) maintainers for one piece of this desktop which gets quite a lot of exposure. I was in fact doing pretty well with Slackware back in mid '94, so if I used my own experience as a measure, the linux desktop has been around for over a decade. I do not judge the state of the venerable Linux Desktop according to how it affects me or what problems I have.
I still maintain that your comment that:
I never understand why we have to insist on having X, a desktop environment, AND a window manager for average desktop systems. I would absolutely kill for an all-in-one system geared for home use. No choice, no thousand and one options. I also wouldn't mind a distro to be tuned for at most 4 users at once.makes essentially no sense.
BTW, I am quite convinced that the desktop sucks. All desktops. Unifying logically separate stacks into a big massive piece of code will not fix that (I am posit that it'd make changing window managers quite a bit more complicated, in fact!)
I do not think I know anyone who knows how to change the default window manager in Windows.
As for compiz, I'm quite sure clicking the appropriate checkbox in the aptly-named Add/Remove Software dialog that's invoked by the last item on the default Applications menu in FC7 will install compiz. I wouldn't know, as I have never found any use for it so I've never installed it.
In any case, `being able to install compiz' is hardly the bar for being desktop-ready. A default install of FC7 has 95% of what 97.5% of the people need for their home use, up to drivers and codecs. And no one needs compiz.
The fact that the X server, the window manager, the window decorator, the compositor, the selection manager, and the `desktop environment' (which is really a big compositum of many many parts) are separate pieces is rather irrelevant for `home use' or for mostly any other use apart from developing them. Windows does separate some of those roles too (you can change the window manager, for example)
Most of the popular distros of the day do not really present a huge number of options. If you install Fedora, say, and unless you go to the lengths of looking for the options (which in particular means that you already know about them, and that you care about changing the defaults) you get presented with no thousand options for any of the pieces you mention. This week I installed Fedora 7 on a coworkers computer, and pressing the Next button a few times presents you with not much more choice than the username for the non-root user. She's been using Fedora since FC1 and I am quite sure she is not aware of the possibility of having a compositing manager which is different from the window manager which is different from the window decorator nor, really, of the fact that those entities exist at all.
Well, that's not exactly a show-stopper in the US, is it?
Maybe they should be used to feed the poor?
Huh?
I don't use MS's software. I do not whine about it. I don't like it, so I don't use it.
Anyways... Could you explain what relevance your comment has on this subdiscussion?
One can hardly describe as 'trapping' the fact that the GPL allows developers to do things that, with a more standard license, would not be allowed. No license grants all rights to the party accepting it.