Now consider some less focused, yet still popular, OSS projects: GNOME, KDE, Mozilla. They try to be all things to all people.
I don't think these examples really support your point. GNOME has been targeting a different audience than KDE since their 2.0 release by uncluttering and simplifying their desktop even to the point of alienating many old-school GNOME aficionados who had the (first) impression GNOME had been "dumbed down".
And as for Mozilla, remember it was based on a bloated and unfocused piece of proprietary software? First it had to be completely rewritten to be usable at all, and later there was a benign fork which turned out to be better. As a result, the Mozilla suite is now finally going modular. Could that have happened with a piece of proprietary software?
The difference between encryption and access control on the one hand and digital restrictions management on the other: one applies to private information or communication, and the other seeks to impose restrictions after the fact on information that has been published voluntarily by its copyright holder.
linux is an international collaboration, and although it may have hit a hitch in the USA, it hasn't anywhere else
I think this is a point that's not emphasized enough. The real scandal here is not only what SCO is doing: in a sense, they're just playing the system. The real scandal is that anyone can do this in the US and - apparently - get away with it.
Re:you know it's true
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All The Rave
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· Score: 0
You didn't make the music, and you don't have a natural right to listen to it.
Someone needs to reread the US Constitution and the relevant writings of the Founders. In the US legal tradition, copyright is quite sensibly considered not to exist in nature, meaning that basically, everyone has a natural right to use and copy every published work in every way they like. Now, according to the social contract that is copyright, the public renounces on some aspects of that natural right for a limited time, in order to make it easier for creators to draw financial profit from their creations. But this is neither a strictly necessary provision nor an immutable one. We could (and should) abolish copyright tomorrow if it were entirely clear that that would be in the best interest of society. I think few people believe that is the case. However, the gap between how many rights the public is actually willing to renounce on the one hand, and how many their representatives are renouncing in their name, definitely seems to be growing.
Re:Illegal versus unethical
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All The Rave
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· Score: 0
If everyone did that, the availability of music would likely decrease as fewer people could afford to produce it, and everyone would suffer.
Yeah, either that or... music would finally become art again (as opposed to just business), the world would be rid of all Britney and Backstreet Boys, and the untold numbers of great musicians who could never make it in today's music business (say, because they don't look like Britney) would actually for the first time have a chance to be heard by the masses, and not be drowned out by the mass-produced noise of mainstream commercial music...
Ok, I guess my question would be this: with the ability for everything to be digitized, we are experiencing a revolution or a renaissance of information in which all information can be shared. With this Pandora's Box opened, is it truly possible to keep information from being shared or do they believe that they are fighting a losing battle?
To expand on that, with the next generation of filesharing software, we will probably soon be experiencing a renaissance in which information can be shared reasonably anonymously. Thus, with the advent of anonymous and thus uncensorable and uncontrollable mass communication, how can anyone hope to enforce their monopoly on a piece of information, without (or even with) draconian measures such as random searches in the homes of private individuals?
What's more important is that Sun is apparently distributing Linux legitimately under the GPL, even according to SCO! Wouldn't that mean that any identical code in Linux and whatever SCO has is now officially and legitimately GPL'ed, and even SCO can't deny that?
Didn't you know? It was written by a Swedish guy called Linux Thorvald and is continually being improved by hundreds of thousands of "crunchies" worldwide. Based on forty-year-old Unix technology patented, copyrighted, and trademarked by SCO, Linux is distributed under an untested and probably unenforceable licence called the GNU Public Licence that forbids commercial use of the code and destroys any intellectual property within a radius of 100m.
...I tracked down some old versions of it [...] so I can get every single system of mine to run nothing but Linux. [...]...probably 20 more systems [...] now are being assembled, just so I can put Linux on them. [...] I was content to use my lowly three systems of Linux, but by the years end, I'll have at least 55 running Linux, all but 4 will be NOTHING but Linux!
Now technology has struck again--people are inventing new ways to make money.
People are "inventing" (i.e. thinking of) and patenting new ideas, not technology.
...we are demanding that they share them with us.
No, "we" are only demanding that they should not have the right to stop us from expressing or using certain ideas.
Instead of being free market, laisez-faire capitalists, we (by which I mean you, I don't subscribe to this) have turned into whiny littly communists.
If I'm not mistaken, a strictly libertarian point of view (which I do not subscribe to either) would be opposed to any government-granted monopoly (such as patents or copyrights). So... did your cheap ad hominem just backfire?
"It's too hard to make money when the other guy has a shiny new business model. [...]"
Um, make that a shiny new monopoly. And worse, a monopoly not on a technical invention but an abstract idea.
... we should just go back to using simple and descriptive units like "this is equal to so-and-so many Libraries of Congress" and "so-and-so many of these suckers when put all on top of each other, go right up to the surface of the moon".
Libel? Good bloody luck. You'd then be on the wrong side of the table -- you'd have to prove that their claims are false without ever seeing any of their documentation.
In the US maybe. In Germany, and I imagine in many other countries, they have to either put up or shut up if they make libellous claims. Which makes sense, when you think about it. Take an example. Let's say you don't like me, and you decide to damage my reputation by claiming publically that I do drugs. Should the onus now be on me to prove that I've never touched any illegal drugs? How do I even go about proving that kind of thing? No sir, if you make libellous public statements about me in a country with sensible laws, you'd better have evidence.
...developing free software even if you only contributed a very minor part of that software, could open you up to liability for a severe negligence claim.
[...]
If you're given it by a bunch of Free Sofware developers, you're in trouble as they'll be much more difficult to track, it'll be difficult to prove they're the right developers [etc.]
See the contradiction there? You can't have it both ways. There are three cases:
1) The customer is more likely to get compensation for bugs in Free Software they use than with proprietary software. Yay for customers!
2) The customer is less likely to get compensation for bugs in Free Software they use than with proprietary software. Yay for Free Software developers!
3) The customer is equally (un)likely to get compensation, regardless of whether they use Free or proprietary software. Uh... same difference.
Developers may be held liable... [...] And buyers of such software must be prepared that liability is limited to the criteria common for items given away for free, i.e. severe negligence only.
This makes software under GPL in no way different than any commercial software you buy in Germany from a liability point of view.
Actually, I think all this is typical self-contradictory FUD. As you see above, the study basically says that Free Software is bad for developers, because they expose themselves to liability. And then it turns around and says, oh, and Free Software is bad for customers, because that liability is limited! Translation: OK, in Germany, everyone is liable to a certain extent for the software they write (we knew that), but Free Software is actually better off.
I totally agree. Comparing Debian with a simple Linux distro is like apples and oranges. Debian aims to be a universal operating system. It runs on about a dozen different archs and is being ported to at least three different kernels besides Linux. So each release takes a little longer, but so what? We not being rushed by a marketing department. When will it be done? Sooner if you all help.
WTF? Does Redhat also provide over 4K packages in stable testing and unstable forms?
Slashdot Mirror
Now consider some less focused, yet still popular, OSS projects: GNOME, KDE, Mozilla. They try to be all things to all people.
I don't think these examples really support your point. GNOME has been targeting a different audience than KDE since their 2.0 release by uncluttering and simplifying their desktop even to the point of alienating many old-school GNOME aficionados who had the (first) impression GNOME had been "dumbed down".
And as for Mozilla, remember it was based on a bloated and unfocused piece of proprietary software? First it had to be completely rewritten to be usable at all, and later there was a benign fork which turned out to be better. As a result, the Mozilla suite is now finally going modular. Could that have happened with a piece of proprietary software?
Sorry, I thought you were replying to Jaysyn, because the AC post was at level 0. My bad.
Each time a major OS release comes out of Apple, they charge for it, yes. So does everyone else. Microsoft does it. SuSE does it.
Ever heard of Debian, Gentoo, or FreeBSD? Your parent was no flamebait at all.
The difference between encryption and access control on the one hand and digital restrictions management on the other: one applies to private information or communication, and the other seeks to impose restrictions after the fact on information that has been published voluntarily by its copyright holder.
... just flip the drive by 90 degrees. Instant storage!
Duh.
linux is an international collaboration, and although it may have hit a hitch in the USA, it hasn't anywhere else
I think this is a point that's not emphasized enough. The real scandal here is not only what SCO is doing: in a sense, they're just playing the system. The real scandal is that anyone can do this in the US and - apparently - get away with it.
Someone needs to reread the US Constitution and the relevant writings of the Founders. In the US legal tradition, copyright is quite sensibly considered not to exist in nature, meaning that basically, everyone has a natural right to use and copy every published work in every way they like. Now, according to the social contract that is copyright, the public renounces on some aspects of that natural right for a limited time, in order to make it easier for creators to draw financial profit from their creations. But this is neither a strictly necessary provision nor an immutable one. We could (and should) abolish copyright tomorrow if it were entirely clear that that would be in the best interest of society. I think few people believe that is the case. However, the gap between how many rights the public is actually willing to renounce on the one hand, and how many their representatives are renouncing in their name, definitely seems to be growing.
Yeah, either that or ... music would finally become art again (as opposed to just business), the world would be rid of all Britney and Backstreet Boys, and the untold numbers of great musicians who could never make it in today's music business (say, because they don't look like Britney) would actually for the first time have a chance to be heard by the masses, and not be drowned out by the mass-produced noise of mainstream commercial music...
To expand on that, with the next generation of filesharing software, we will probably soon be experiencing a renaissance in which information can be shared reasonably anonymously. Thus, with the advent of anonymous and thus uncensorable and uncontrollable mass communication, how can anyone hope to enforce their monopoly on a piece of information, without (or even with) draconian measures such as random searches in the homes of private individuals?
What's more important is that Sun is apparently distributing Linux legitimately under the GPL, even according to SCO! Wouldn't that mean that any identical code in Linux and whatever SCO has is now officially and legitimately GPL'ed, and even SCO can't deny that?
Didn't you know? It was written by a Swedish guy called Linux Thorvald and is continually being improved by hundreds of thousands of "crunchies" worldwide. Based on forty-year-old Unix technology patented, copyrighted, and trademarked by SCO, Linux is distributed under an untested and probably unenforceable licence called the GNU Public Licence that forbids commercial use of the code and destroys any intellectual property within a radius of 100m.
You forgot to say "Mwahahahaha!!!!!"
Boss: You're fired!!!
Employee: Are you sure you want me to quit? [Yes] [No]
(Yeah, yeah, I know, they are civil servants. What the hell.)
People are "inventing" (i.e. thinking of) and patenting new ideas, not technology.
No, "we" are only demanding that they should not have the right to stop us from expressing or using certain ideas.
Instead of being free market, laisez-faire capitalists, we (by which I mean you, I don't subscribe to this) have turned into whiny littly communists.
If I'm not mistaken, a strictly libertarian point of view (which I do not subscribe to either) would be opposed to any government-granted monopoly (such as patents or copyrights). So... did your cheap ad hominem just backfire?
"It's too hard to make money when the other guy has a shiny new business model. [...]"
Um, make that a shiny new monopoly. And worse, a monopoly not on a technical invention but an abstract idea.
... we should just go back to using simple and descriptive units like "this is equal to so-and-so many Libraries of Congress" and "so-and-so many of these suckers when put all on top of each other, go right up to the surface of the moon".
In the US maybe. In Germany, and I imagine in many other countries, they have to either put up or shut up if they make libellous claims. Which makes sense, when you think about it. Take an example. Let's say you don't like me, and you decide to damage my reputation by claiming publically that I do drugs. Should the onus now be on me to prove that I've never touched any illegal drugs? How do I even go about proving that kind of thing? No sir, if you make libellous public statements about me in a country with sensible laws, you'd better have evidence.
[...]
If you're given it by a bunch of Free Sofware developers, you're in trouble as they'll be much more difficult to track, it'll be difficult to prove they're the right developers [etc.]
See the contradiction there? You can't have it both ways. There are three cases:
1) The customer is more likely to get compensation for bugs in Free Software they use than with proprietary software. Yay for customers!
2) The customer is less likely to get compensation for bugs in Free Software they use than with proprietary software. Yay for Free Software developers!
3) The customer is equally (un)likely to get compensation, regardless of whether they use Free or proprietary software. Uh... same difference.
Developers may be held liable... [...] And buyers of such software must be prepared that liability is limited to the criteria common for items given away for free, i.e. severe negligence only.
This makes software under GPL in no way different than any commercial software you buy in Germany from a liability point of view.
Actually, I think all this is typical self-contradictory FUD. As you see above, the study basically says that Free Software is bad for developers, because they expose themselves to liability. And then it turns around and says, oh, and Free Software is bad for customers, because that liability is limited! Translation: OK, in Germany, everyone is liable to a certain extent for the software they write (we knew that), but Free Software is actually better off.
WTF? Does Redhat also provide over 4K packages in stable testing and unstable forms?
Make that over 8K, and closer to 9K, I think.Yeah, right, that's just what we need - Apple jumping into the fray and suing SCO for infringement for their trademark on the word iBillion...
Master Yoda? Is that you?