No need to apologise; the WSIS isn't an attempt at a 'cure for world poverty' nor is it a forum for the castigation of the World's dictators and tyrants. It's about information technology and the internet, not medicine, agriculture, global climate or peacekeeping. What it should be about is ensuring freedom of access to information like online educational resources and medical information and free and open technologies and standards that can be employed by the poor to help themselves. Not (as it now seems to be) about how best the internet and information technology can be regulated, controlled and deployed in the interest of global software manufacturers and digital publishers, concerned not with leveraging I.T. to the benefit of the poor but only with the market opportunities developing nations represent. If you can't read or write and your village teacher can't afford the books and resources that are taken for granted in the west you'll probably stay that way. If the whole world is forced to bend to the will of the overreaching greed of entrenched proprietary interest groups and the proponents of laws like the DMCA, the EUCD, DRM etc, the effect will likely be a stagnatory one on the growth of education and technological uptake in countries whose populations cannot afford the high prices demanded of them.
Not every poor country is poor because of the ravages of despotic government; there are many countries that are poor because of unfair trade conditions and economic policies imposed on them by the likes of Western governments, the WTO and the IMF. It is as pointless to criticise the WSIS for failing to find a cure for poverty on the basis of the narrowness of it's remit as it is to criticise NASA for the lack of a cure for AIDS or malaria.
I notice that none of the articles mentioned the opposition to the corrupt way the WSIS has banned various interest groups and fudged their Declaration of Principles and Action Plan so as not to offend the mighty corporate interests who don't like the ideas of freedom of information and basic human rights.
This summit is a betrayal of it's original ideals, and especially of the World's poor. Various groups are intending to strongly oppose this travesty; there is more information and here.
Marvellous isn't it? - apparently $30 is the going rate these days for the right of access to each small advance in mathematical and scientific knowledge. Frankly, I find this disgusting and demeaning; an unnecessary and unpleasant stain on the lady's achievements. Even the notoriously greedy and aggressive Newton would have balked at the idea that advances in science should have a price put on them.
I wouldn't say it's hopelessly out of date but like everything else it certainly needs updating. As for it not being a reference manual, I don't think it should be; there's no point in just reproducing the man and info pages. Ideally it would have a better structure, as you said and I'd prefer that it only cover things in depth where other documentation is inadequate or the subjects are inherently complex or difficult.
The book itself says this about why it doesn't cover sendmail in depth:
"...because exim is so easy to configure, it is worthwhile replacing sendmail wherever you see it--there are at least three MTAs that are preferable to sendmail. I explain the minimum of what you need to know about sendmail later on and explain exim in detail."
and there's another big problem with writing documentation for GNU/Linux in general - there are so many different distros/mailservers/file-managers/window-managers etc. If your idea for a single GNU/Linux book were taken up wouldn't it be necessary to make some tough choices to keep it to a reasonable and printable length?
I've found rute to be most useful as an overview of what's available, how standard things like mail and X are set up and what they do and for examples of good ways of using some of the available tools. Considering it's the work of a single author it's pretty good but your idea of using it as the foundation for a community produced book would certainly make it better.
Yes but you said "A good user guide for the total unix newbie is still missing." which sounds like you're speaking more generally than about the GNU/Linux specific stuff at tldp.
It seems IBM withdrew support for voice recognition on GNU/Linux some time ago. I found a couple of other projects but the most promising of them (the others were effectivel dead) led me to this email on the project's mailing list:
From: Jessica P. Hekman Development of xvoice-sphinx 2003-10-06 08:36
For those of you who don't know xvoice's status, a quick summary:
xvoice depends on IBM's closed-source ViaVoice engine. Skimming recent
list messages will tell you that this engine is hard to get hold of, since
it is no longer distributed; and it is hard to get working on modern
Linuxes, since it is out of date and no longer supported. The
xvoice-sphinx project has been trying to get xvoice working with CMU
Sphinx, an open-source alternative.
xvoice-sphinx has been going for more than a year and I can't say we've
made significant progress; we haven't really even managed to get Sphinx
recognizing on the command line at an acceptable error rate, much less
even started integration with xvoice. There were several of us working on
the project at one point, but right now I'm the only person actively
working (others are very helpful with answering questions).
Lately it's been like pulling teeth to get myself to work on this stuff;
it's not enjoyable and I do not even have really high hopes that Sphinx
will ever do what we want. Sphinx isn't itself well-supported, and even if
we get it working, I'm concerned we'll have more problems like we do with
ViaVoice getting it running on various architectures.
I've pretty much decided to just stop work on this. The sad thing is that
that would doom xvoice: it's not going to manage to keep limping along
with ViaVoice forever. But I obviously can't do it all by myself and I
think it's time to stop pretending I can.
I'm not really sure what I'm asking all of you. I don't expect people to
leap out of the woodwork and offer to take over. I guess the right thing
to do is to shut down xvoice-sphinx, and then to keep holding xvoice's
hand until it's finally dead. Other suggestions are welcome.
Does anyone know what happened to this software? It mysteriously vanished from the IBM site nearly two years ago and I have never seen or heard any explanation.
"Determining whether the positive aspects outweigh the negative aspects, or
vice versa, is a very complex task. Unfortunately, as the Organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) acknowledges,
quantification of the associated costs and benefits is all but impossible..."
So then they go on and claim that they have effectively solved this all but impossible task. And how do they achieve this miracle you may well ask? Simple! They construct their 'analysis' with distortions, non sequiturs, solecism and downright lies:
"No commentator denies that longer copyright extension increases incentives; what is in dispute is the degree to which incentives increase."
Downright Lie. Linked below is Macaulay's 162 year old demolition of this particularly loathsome deception and the idea that no commentator denies the lies is absurd.
"...that many copyright creators do not make decisions using purely
`rational' criteria. The field of `behavioural economics' (a multi-
disciplinary field involving psychology and economics) suggests a
number of inter-related reasons why the pure critique of the incentive
theory advanced by economists may be limited -- that copyright
extends for such a long period may reduce the perception of risk
associated with creation of copyright works, and provide greater
confidence to creators when undertaking their endeavours. Additionally,
the `bequest motive', whereby people undertake certain actions to
benefit their descendents rather than themselves, also may explain why
an extra 20 years fifty years after death may still provide extra
motivation to create new copyright works..."
Distortion. The studies referred to are almost certainly those which found financial rewards to be the least significant of the incentives reported by creators as the motivation for their creative work.
"that existing incentives may actually be falling, and that it may be
necessary to extend the copyright term just to maintain them. In
possibly the major theoretical contribution to the economic analysis of
copyright,9 Landes and Posner suggest that as the cost of copying
declines copyright protection should expand. Thus, in 1989 they noted
that: "The current length of a copyright is the author's lifetime plus
fifty years. This reflects a long trend toward lengthening the term of
copyright... This trend is consistent with the fact that the cost of
copying has fallen over this period".10 Recent developments associated
with digitisation and distribution over the Internet have dramatically
reduced copying and distribution costs for many works and so there may
be a case for a corresponding increase in the copyright term to preserve
incentives."
Non sequitur as any halfwit can see - in fact it contains a double non sequitur and you don't see those very often.
I could go on but there's another 50 pages of this drivel and I feel a little sick already. I will have to counter the ill effects of contaminating my mind with this sewage by re-reading Macaulay's words on the subject.
Small company: "I think I have a great business plan here, I sure hope it survives the unpredictable rough and tumble of the free market."
Megacorp: "I have a perfect business plan and if my plan doesn't fit in with the vagaries of the free market, I'll coerce the government into legislating in my favour until it does."
"Hopefully, the European Parliament will be able to see through the dis-information spread by the FFII..."
What disinformation? The FFII is an organisation devoted to the clarification of the issues surrounding software patentability and to the refutation of the lies and fallacies used by parties with vested interests in promoting such patents in their most extreme form. It is unlikely most MEPs had ever heard of the free software movement or knew anything whatsoever about software development and patentability issues before this matter arose a few years ago.
Their only source of advice and information prior to the foundation of the FFII were organisations with vested interests in pushing software patents. The information they were given left many of them with the impression that software development is the exclusive domain of large and powerful corporations and that it was the wish of all software developers that software become patentable. It has taken a long time and a lot of hard work to counter the false impressions deliberately promulgated by those vested interests. It has worked well so far because our democratic representatives still seem to value the interests and concerns of the people who elected them and so they have taken notice when more than a quarter of a million people signed a petition and organisations representing two million European S.M.E.s stated their opposition to software patents.
In Europe we like to think we still value fundamental human rights like freedom of expression and that our laws are written by democrats rather than oligarchs. You offer no evidence to substantiate your unfounded and maximally incorrect assertion.
Seems to me your project wants to have it's cake and eat it. You call it open source but you don't want commercial organizations copying it. Why not? Is it because you intend to make a commercial product out of it yourselves in the end? If so then it looks like you're relying on the free labour of the open source community to help develop a product to make money for you. If you're not actually using such free resources like this, why can't you develop it without making it open source in the first place - use closed proprietary alternatives like any other company and get your developers to sign the usual contracts with secrecy clauses / non-disclosure agreements. If you fear your secrets being disclosed anyway, before you've got a mature product, well if nobody could patent software it wouldn't really matter would it? You'd already have a massive headstart on any competitor. If the project is purely non-commercial then why would you care if some company or other development team develops something similar in parallel? Are you afraid they'd make a better job of it and your own project might die? Well tough! You could still take pride in the fact that the original core ideas were yours and you'd still have copyright on the core code. I don't see why you *need* a patent especially in a world where nobody else gets to patent software either like the way it was even in the U.S. until recently. I don't recall there being a lack of exciting and innovative software development in those days.
"If you haven't stepped in this dogpile before..."
Unfortunately I have - many, many times and it smells worse each time. Every web based science forum I've seen seems to attract hordes of these demented parrots trotting out the same turgid nonsense over and over again - only retreating into hysterical insults and emotional outbursts when their arguments have all lengthily and painstakingly been torn apart by the same old counter-arguments for the gazillionth time. The next day they return and start all over again.
I consider/. to be a refreshingly intelligent relief from such fora which are often ruined by the sheer weight of unmoderated drivel they garner. I have come to believe that the worst of it is in fact the plausible sounding and apparently sincere stuff that seems to merit a response because many less experienced people will be taken in and will respond. The genuinely interesting stuff can end up being diluted out of existence, homeopathically perhaps.
I agree with what you say about bad ideas needing open discussion and refutation but I don't think the grandparent post fits into that category. It was a superficially reasonable post carrying a link that at the very least could be regarded as off topic. So I am glad that in the absence of a 'negative insightful' or 'sneakily offtopic' modifier this post was modded down as a troll. If it had been me I would've found it a tough call since the body of the post was so unexceptionable but I thought it was laudably conscientious of the moderator to actually follow the link and discover the hidden trollery (or whatever it was).
That reminds me of a friend of mine who was doing a computer science degree course with the gigantic Open University. He was entitled to a free personal computer with extras, so the O.U. sent him a catalog from the 'specialist suppliers to the education sector' that they use. This company was charging roughly twice the market average for the goods they supplied. Apparently the O.U. has the nerve to offer an economics degree course too.
When politicians tell me they could simultaneously cut taxes and increase spending on health or transport or whatever - by reducing wasteful and sloppy practices - I believe them. It's when they tell me they will do that I begin to doubt their honesty.
"Personally I keep hoping that open source usage will eventually increase to the point that people stop the continuous rewriting of essentially equivalent pieces of software that happens all the time right now."
No need to wait for open source solutions - soon there'll be enough software patents to prevent any rewriting of any pieces of software;)
Good point. It strikes me as very odd that people review and compare GNU/Linux and other free software with proprietary equivalents as though they were products from rival companies. In a review of a heavily marketed, expensive to buy and non-free s/w product one is entitled to sneer and carp if it fails to live up to it's own hype or stand up to the competition. To do the same to free software is ignorant and pathetic and shows a total lack of understanding of what free software is all about.
It seems to me that many people who actually use free software by preference these days are unaware of the true meaning of the word 'free' in 'free software' and make the mistake of classing themselves as (often disgruntled) users in a divided community of 'users' and 'developers' or 'buyers' and 'sellers' like the shrink-wrap junkies justifiably do. This approach may be valid for those who have purchased distros from the likes of SuSE or RedHat but in that case the complaints should be addressed exclusively to the company concerned.
That is very interesting: the Indix project is listed under the 'Ongoing Free Software projects in India:' -> 'Several GNU/Linux localization projects' link of fsf.org.in. Looks like they've taken their eyes off the ball at FSF India.
Perhaps because in those days there was only one General Dyer and his evil actions made the British Government ashamed. Today there are many Dyers and the Governments have no shame.
"Software Patents aren't an idealogy problem like these. They are instead a business vs. consumer problem. Yet, the business vs. consumer stance of europe makes so much more sense than America's sell-out policies."
Actually old bean, at least from where I stand, it is indeed a matter of ideology - the ideology of free speech, freedom to engage in the arts and sciences, freedom to communicate ideas and culture, freedom of thought.
It has been a long time since the failure of your great compatriot, Phil Salin and others to prevent the tragedy of ideas patenting in the U.S. and we Europeans have had the opportunity to prepare for this inevitable onslaught on our fundamental human rights. Yet it looks likely that the forces arrayed against us will prevail anyway.
I call them 'ideas patents' because that is what they really are - I am not primarily a software developer or a businessman but a mathematician and I see software patents from a rather different perspective than has been customary in the 'debates' in the E.U. Parliament. Ever since I first came across the abominations that are the RSA patent and the DHT transform patent and others like them I have become more and more disgusted and horrified at the level of intellect displayed by those charged with the responsibility of formulating and enacting laws on my behalf.
Every debate has centred on the economic consequences of patenting with no attention whatsoever paid to the rights of which I speak. Of course you'd think I needn't worry when a quarter of a million people (mostly programmers) signed a petition against software patents and an organization representing half a million European S.M.Es stated their opposition to them too. So it must be obvious to the MEPs that there isn't even an economic case to be made for patenting software - right?
Wrong! Unfortunately we have to contend with a level of disingenuity, stupidity or underhand venality - I don't know which - capable of making statements like this:
"With regards to calls for abolishing, within the EU, all patents on computer-implemented inventions, EU companies would be at a severe disadvantage in the global market place if they were not able to apply for a patent over their invention."
(From Arlene McCarthy's website). Even a child would laugh at such a cretinous non sequitur - not so your average MEP.
Slashdot Mirror
Not every poor country is poor because of the ravages of despotic government; there are many countries that are poor because of unfair trade conditions and economic policies imposed on them by the likes of Western governments, the WTO and the IMF. It is as pointless to criticise the WSIS for failing to find a cure for poverty on the basis of the narrowness of it's remit as it is to criticise NASA for the lack of a cure for AIDS or malaria.
This summit is a betrayal of it's original ideals, and especially of the World's poor. Various groups are intending to strongly oppose this travesty; there is more information and here.
Yes, except when people try to patent bits of it liks the DHT and RSA encryption.
PS. SCO is also known as RoBiN, HAL's evil twin.
Marvellous isn't it? - apparently $30 is the going rate these days for the right of access to each small advance in mathematical and scientific knowledge. Frankly, I find this disgusting and demeaning; an unnecessary and unpleasant stain on the lady's achievements. Even the notoriously greedy and aggressive Newton would have balked at the idea that advances in science should have a price put on them.
I wouldn't say it's hopelessly out of date but like everything else it certainly needs updating. As for it not being a reference manual, I don't think it should be; there's no point in just reproducing the man and info pages. Ideally it would have a better structure, as you said and I'd prefer that it only cover things in depth where other documentation is inadequate or the subjects are inherently complex or difficult.
The book itself says this about why it doesn't cover sendmail in depth:
"...because exim is so easy to configure, it is worthwhile replacing sendmail wherever you see it--there are at least three MTAs that are preferable to sendmail. I explain the minimum of what you need to know about sendmail later on and explain exim in detail."
and there's another big problem with writing documentation for GNU/Linux in general - there are so many different distros/mailservers/file-managers/window-managers etc. If your idea for a single GNU/Linux book were taken up wouldn't it be necessary to make some tough choices to keep it to a reasonable and printable length?
I've found rute to be most useful as an overview of what's available, how standard things like mail and X are set up and what they do and for examples of good ways of using some of the available tools. Considering it's the work of a single author it's pretty good but your idea of using it as the foundation for a community produced book would certainly make it better.
Yes but you said "A good user guide for the total unix newbie is still missing." which sounds like you're speaking more generally than about the GNU/Linux specific stuff at tldp.
Your GNU/Linux box must be badly misconfigured, I just copied a 30MB file in 0.36 seconds on a lower spec. box.
What is this then?
It seems IBM withdrew support for voice recognition on GNU/Linux some time ago. I found a couple of other projects but the most promising of them (the others were effectivel dead) led me to this email on the project's mailing list:
From: Jessica P. Hekman
Development of xvoice-sphinx
2003-10-06 08:36
For those of you who don't know xvoice's status, a quick summary:
xvoice depends on IBM's closed-source ViaVoice engine. Skimming recent
list messages will tell you that this engine is hard to get hold of, since
it is no longer distributed; and it is hard to get working on modern
Linuxes, since it is out of date and no longer supported. The
xvoice-sphinx project has been trying to get xvoice working with CMU
Sphinx, an open-source alternative.
xvoice-sphinx has been going for more than a year and I can't say we've
made significant progress; we haven't really even managed to get Sphinx
recognizing on the command line at an acceptable error rate, much less
even started integration with xvoice. There were several of us working on
the project at one point, but right now I'm the only person actively
working (others are very helpful with answering questions).
Lately it's been like pulling teeth to get myself to work on this stuff;
it's not enjoyable and I do not even have really high hopes that Sphinx
will ever do what we want. Sphinx isn't itself well-supported, and even if
we get it working, I'm concerned we'll have more problems like we do with
ViaVoice getting it running on various architectures.
I've pretty much decided to just stop work on this. The sad thing is that
that would doom xvoice: it's not going to manage to keep limping along
with ViaVoice forever. But I obviously can't do it all by myself and I
think it's time to stop pretending I can.
I'm not really sure what I'm asking all of you. I don't expect people to
leap out of the woodwork and offer to take over. I guess the right thing
to do is to shut down xvoice-sphinx, and then to keep holding xvoice's
hand until it's finally dead. Other suggestions are welcome.
Jessica
Does anyone know what happened to this software? It mysteriously vanished from the IBM site nearly two years ago and I have never seen or heard any explanation.
So then they go on and claim that they have effectively solved this all but impossible task. And how do they achieve this miracle you may well ask? Simple! They construct their 'analysis' with distortions, non sequiturs, solecism and downright lies:
"No commentator denies that longer copyright extension increases incentives; what is in dispute is the degree to which incentives increase."
Downright Lie. Linked below is Macaulay's 162 year old demolition of this particularly loathsome deception and the idea that no commentator denies the lies is absurd.
"...that many copyright creators do not make decisions using purely `rational' criteria. The field of `behavioural economics' (a multi- disciplinary field involving psychology and economics) suggests a number of inter-related reasons why the pure critique of the incentive theory advanced by economists may be limited -- that copyright extends for such a long period may reduce the perception of risk associated with creation of copyright works, and provide greater confidence to creators when undertaking their endeavours. Additionally, the `bequest motive', whereby people undertake certain actions to benefit their descendents rather than themselves, also may explain why an extra 20 years fifty years after death may still provide extra motivation to create new copyright works..."
Distortion. The studies referred to are almost certainly those which found financial rewards to be the least significant of the incentives reported by creators as the motivation for their creative work.
"that existing incentives may actually be falling, and that it may be necessary to extend the copyright term just to maintain them. In possibly the major theoretical contribution to the economic analysis of copyright,9 Landes and Posner suggest that as the cost of copying declines copyright protection should expand. Thus, in 1989 they noted that: "The current length of a copyright is the author's lifetime plus fifty years. This reflects a long trend toward lengthening the term of copyright ... This trend is consistent with the fact that the cost of
copying has fallen over this period".10 Recent developments associated
with digitisation and distribution over the Internet have dramatically
reduced copying and distribution costs for many works and so there may
be a case for a corresponding increase in the copyright term to preserve
incentives."
Non sequitur as any halfwit can see - in fact it contains a double non sequitur and you don't see those very often.
I could go on but there's another 50 pages of this drivel and I feel a little sick already. I will have to counter the ill effects of contaminating my mind with this sewage by re-reading Macaulay's words on the subject.
Megacorp: "I have a perfect business plan and if my plan doesn't fit in with the vagaries of the free market, I'll coerce the government into legislating in my favour until it does."
What disinformation? The FFII is an organisation devoted to the clarification of the issues surrounding software patentability and to the refutation of the lies and fallacies used by parties with vested interests in promoting such patents in their most extreme form. It is unlikely most MEPs had ever heard of the free software movement or knew anything whatsoever about software development and patentability issues before this matter arose a few years ago.
Their only source of advice and information prior to the foundation of the FFII were organisations with vested interests in pushing software patents. The information they were given left many of them with the impression that software development is the exclusive domain of large and powerful corporations and that it was the wish of all software developers that software become patentable. It has taken a long time and a lot of hard work to counter the false impressions deliberately promulgated by those vested interests. It has worked well so far because our democratic representatives still seem to value the interests and concerns of the people who elected them and so they have taken notice when more than a quarter of a million people signed a petition and organisations representing two million European S.M.E.s stated their opposition to software patents.
In Europe we like to think we still value fundamental human rights like freedom of expression and that our laws are written by democrats rather than oligarchs. You offer no evidence to substantiate your unfounded and maximally incorrect assertion.
Seems to me your project wants to have it's cake and eat it. You call it open source but you don't want commercial organizations copying it. Why not? Is it because you intend to make a commercial product out of it yourselves in the end? If so then it looks like you're relying on the free labour of the open source community to help develop a product to make money for you. If you're not actually using such free resources like this, why can't you develop it without making it open source in the first place - use closed proprietary alternatives like any other company and get your developers to sign the usual contracts with secrecy clauses / non-disclosure agreements. If you fear your secrets being disclosed anyway, before you've got a mature product, well if nobody could patent software it wouldn't really matter would it? You'd already have a massive headstart on any competitor. If the project is purely non-commercial then why would you care if some company or other development team develops something similar in parallel? Are you afraid they'd make a better job of it and your own project might die? Well tough! You could still take pride in the fact that the original core ideas were yours and you'd still have copyright on the core code. I don't see why you *need* a patent especially in a world where nobody else gets to patent software either like the way it was even in the U.S. until recently. I don't recall there being a lack of exciting and innovative software development in those days.
...which links to this article.
Unfortunately I have - many, many times and it smells worse each time. Every web based science forum I've seen seems to attract hordes of these demented parrots trotting out the same turgid nonsense over and over again - only retreating into hysterical insults and emotional outbursts when their arguments have all lengthily and painstakingly been torn apart by the same old counter-arguments for the gazillionth time. The next day they return and start all over again.
I consider /. to be a refreshingly intelligent relief from such fora which are often ruined by the sheer weight of unmoderated drivel they garner. I have come to believe that the worst of it is in fact the plausible sounding and apparently sincere stuff that seems to merit a response because many less experienced people will be taken in and will respond. The genuinely interesting stuff can end up being diluted out of existence, homeopathically perhaps.
I agree with what you say about bad ideas needing open discussion and refutation but I don't think the grandparent post fits into that category. It was a superficially reasonable post carrying a link that at the very least could be regarded as off topic. So I am glad that in the absence of a 'negative insightful' or 'sneakily offtopic' modifier this post was modded down as a troll. If it had been me I would've found it a tough call since the body of the post was so unexceptionable but I thought it was laudably conscientious of the moderator to actually follow the link and discover the hidden trollery (or whatever it was).
When politicians tell me they could simultaneously cut taxes and increase spending on health or transport or whatever - by reducing wasteful and sloppy practices - I believe them. It's when they tell me they will do that I begin to doubt their honesty.
No need to wait for open source solutions - soon there'll be enough software patents to prevent any rewriting of any pieces of software ;)
Good point. It strikes me as very odd that people review and compare GNU/Linux and other free software with proprietary equivalents as though they were products from rival companies. In a review of a heavily marketed, expensive to buy and non-free s/w product one is entitled to sneer and carp if it fails to live up to it's own hype or stand up to the competition. To do the same to free software is ignorant and pathetic and shows a total lack of understanding of what free software is all about.
It seems to me that many people who actually use free software by preference these days are unaware of the true meaning of the word 'free' in 'free software' and make the mistake of classing themselves as (often disgruntled) users in a divided community of 'users' and 'developers' or 'buyers' and 'sellers' like the shrink-wrap junkies justifiably do. This approach may be valid for those who have purchased distros from the likes of SuSE or RedHat but in that case the complaints should be addressed exclusively to the company concerned.
On the Download page read the 'Modified binaries -> README' file.
That is very interesting: the Indix project is listed under the 'Ongoing Free Software projects in India:' -> 'Several GNU/Linux localization projects' link of fsf.org.in. Looks like they've taken their eyes off the ball at FSF India.
No - it's just a typo - .6m instead of .06m
Why not?
Perhaps because in those days there was only one General Dyer and his evil actions made the British Government ashamed. Today there are many Dyers and the Governments have no shame.
Actually old bean, at least from where I stand, it is indeed a matter of ideology - the ideology of free speech, freedom to engage in the arts and sciences, freedom to communicate ideas and culture, freedom of thought.
It has been a long time since the failure of your great compatriot, Phil Salin and others to prevent the tragedy of ideas patenting in the U.S. and we Europeans have had the opportunity to prepare for this inevitable onslaught on our fundamental human rights. Yet it looks likely that the forces arrayed against us will prevail anyway.
I call them 'ideas patents' because that is what they really are - I am not primarily a software developer or a businessman but a mathematician and I see software patents from a rather different perspective than has been customary in the 'debates' in the E.U. Parliament. Ever since I first came across the abominations that are the RSA patent and the DHT transform patent and others like them I have become more and more disgusted and horrified at the level of intellect displayed by those charged with the responsibility of formulating and enacting laws on my behalf.
Every debate has centred on the economic consequences of patenting with no attention whatsoever paid to the rights of which I speak. Of course you'd think I needn't worry when a quarter of a million people (mostly programmers) signed a petition against software patents and an organization representing half a million European S.M.Es stated their opposition to them too. So it must be obvious to the MEPs that there isn't even an economic case to be made for patenting software - right?
Wrong! Unfortunately we have to contend with a level of disingenuity, stupidity or underhand venality - I don't know which - capable of making statements like this:
"With regards to calls for abolishing, within the EU, all patents on computer-implemented inventions, EU companies would be at a severe disadvantage in the global market place if they were not able to apply for a patent over their invention."
(From Arlene McCarthy's website). Even a child would laugh at such a cretinous non sequitur - not so your average MEP.
Indeed... YHBT - You Have Been Tricked!