It makes perfect sense. If our government has forbidden in whole or part some of the very types of research a donor wishes to fund it makes tremendous sense to withold the funding.
It also makes sense in that it makes the news and points to the blatant idiocy and danger of government poking its nose into science on quite partisan and political grounds.
I am extremely greateful for any who act as Jim Clark did.
Free software is free as in free speech but I think you meant "free software" extremists. Is it wrong to be extremely devoted to what you consider right? Patrick Herny was an extremist. Jefferson was an extremist. Certainly one can also name less savory extremists. But the point is that being a fanatic or extreme in one's support of what one considers right is not automatically an ill.
I support the types of freedoms the FSF is for. I don't always support their wordings or attitudes or actions.
If there had never been a GNU and if it hadn't produced much of the non-OS code that makes up a unix like environment as free software, there would never have been a Linux that was the success it is. Linux build off of and uses extensively the FSF GNU codebase. Therefore GNU-Linux is very reasonable.
We want the information to be free..
on
Taming the Web
·
· Score: 1
Whether information is relatively free or not depends on the intent and focused efforts of ourselves. If we believe that some or all types of information need to be free and open to increase the well-being of ourselves and others then we need to lobby, demonstrate, create and spread memes and so on to that effect. The article makes the good point that information does not inherently want to be free and the internet will not inherently guarantee it is free. It leaves open the question of whether we the people want it to be free and what we can do about it if we do.
I can't see why this particular action is a worthwhile response to this case or the threat. Alan Cox says it is not the fault of Usenix. So why this action rather than one more to the point?
Of course it is not right to take matters into your own hands and arbitrary destroy property everytime you think some product is bad or potentially dangerous. This is highly criminal and should be punished fully.
There is a big difference between legitimate civil disobediance and destroying property as a punishment or way of forcing one's opinion on others. I don't see why there is even a question here.
Are you forgetting that Linux is Open Source? This means it is perfectly legal to make copies of Linux and give them to your friends. Talk of suing for this basic freedom we all flocked to Linux for is ridiculous.
You don't need BS like per-seat licensing for Linux to make money on Linux. We are supposed to have some differences from the proprietary world. I believe this is one place where we should be different.
They are very clever. First they propose a bogus notion of what Open Source and even the GPL/LGPL is and isn't about and does and doesn't require. Next they act as if their own slander and misrepresentation is true and put "protection" against the bogus danger in their contract. This can lead the way for other vendors doing work with Microsoft to infect their own contracts with similar bogus concerns and restrictions. To top it off they get/. to propagate their viral anti-OpenSource license.
Your email stays on any server you want. Including your own. Some things benefit by being server based or mediated or replicated through a network of machines. Others don't. Why do we keep trying to make single statements that cover all cases? There is no single magic bullet technology. When will we grow up enough to not forget that?
Network Computing is still a step into the past. Timesharing revisited. A system that ignores the power of user machines in favor of doing as much as possible on servers and to top it of uses only HTML for GUI is seriously broken and I am amazed it is even considered in this day and age. What a waste of the last 40 years of hardware and communication advances! We should be seeing massively P2P architectures and as much work as possible being offloaded to clients that have their configuration managed as automatically as possible.
If MS wants to play the Open Standard game then simply make sure the keeper of the Standard is independent and the standard is really Open and independently certifiable with no bogus gotchas that prevent Open Source implementations from being certified.
This is truly horrendous. If any signatory country's laws reach out and bite me in another country with very different laws then it effectively makes no difference what country I choose to live in. It treats the laws of all countries as being just as valid and binding as the laws of the country I agree to be a citizen of. It binds me by the decisions of people in another country where I have utterly no say in deciding what the laws are and are not.
This is tyranny, wholesale and without bounds. This must be opposed by all means possible.
COM is a particular distributed messaging protocol like CORBA. When the rest of the world went with CORBA, which is multi-platform and multi-language, Microsoft went with a version of a DEC protocol that only worked on its OS and with a handful of MS specific language implementations. To this day, talking to D/COM is not open. To get to do this if you are not on a MS platform you need to pay thousands of dollars in licensing to MS. There is are half-assed unix implementations but only (AFAIK) for talking client-server with a MS box.
If.NET is braced on COM then that is a major blow against it.
CORBA has been used with Smalltalk, C, C++, CLOS, Python, Perl, Scheme, Pascal, Fortran, COBOL and so on on about every OS imaginable. It sits underneath RMI for Java as well as being directly supported on Java.
Don't fall for MS hype. These people are not your friend and their code is not cool.
Maybe I've just been around too long to appreciate the "oh wow" of seeing things invented many years ago in the non-MS world dressed up in MS bullshit and trotted out on the stage.
No, this is NOT what we want. We want to bury closed source software under its own inefficiency. And most especially we do not want to embrace enemies of software freedom as if they have respectable opinions and we are lucky to have them address us in *our* conference.
Do people really not get that this is not a step forward?
I cannot believe this is happening. First O'Reilly embraces.NET. Now Craig Mundie, that lying utter ass of an Open Source opponent, is giving the keynote at the Open Source Conference???
Goodbye O'Reiley. You won't see me sanctioning this farce by attending this conference. Nor will I condone such fundamental hypocrisy by EVER buying anything you have a hand in again.
You almost were cool for a little while. But now you show your true colors. This is a GROSS INSULT to the Open Source community.
Uh, huh. Usenet is an open protocol. There is nothing to stop anyone at any time from hooking into it however they want. Have we all forgotten how to set up our own news servers? Is everyone clueless enough to think they have to depend on an ISP or a particular "portal" to do something so very basic?
If we become people who are that clueless then we will deserve to have Usenet be "controlled" by some one company.
Laws and regulations are public documents. There can be no limit on the right to publish such a document as long as it is not altered in the copying or misattributed. Anything less is madness.
The internet grew out of largely volunteer and academic hacking efforts. The internet was around long before the early nineties and highly used by academics, software people, librarians and others in the know at the time. Much of the infrastructure the explosion of the mid=90s rights on was developed a decade or two earlier by people who largely did not put up fences or when they did, noticed it didn't work so well.
The 90's explosion was not about b2c or b2b. It was about people to people. The business users came later. This is a very crucial hole in the speech. The importance of software is empowering people and increasing the flow and value of informaiton. Information increases in value by being accessed, winnowed and combined. The more sources of such functions are active the more valuable the information becomes.
Complex hubs of information are very old school. ONly a few types of applications benefit a lot by dense hubs and even they [can] gain by the network of peers offloading processing and local storage. Less and less is a middle man or a toll road needed on the internet highway.
MS talking about privacy and security? Hahaha.
.NET is not user centric. It is MS server centric.
Software communities are not just about developers. They are about users/developers. They are about dynamic growth from the components of software. Grwoth that cannot happen if the source is closed and or tightly controlled.
Does anyone believe that current EULAs are about protecting your rights or give you or acknowledge you have any "property rights" to the software you purchase under them?
There are 5 million MSDN developers because MS has pushed its technology really hard and you have to sign up to MSDN and have more money extorted from you in order to successfully keep up with their hodge-podge of closed and unresponsive krap.
There is no clear division between developers in a company and developers outside it and customers. Not in a knowledge economy. MS is doomed as long as it believes such a distinction is real.
Ah, the old forking myth. In practice forking is rare in OS and forking leading to bad consequences such as stranded users and community groups is nearly unknown. This is not at all the case with closed proprietary source. Let a company close its doors, be taken over by the wrong party or simply change its mind about priorities and software YOU depend on could dissappear or become an orphan overnight. You don't have the source or any rights to it even if you could read it. So you get no recourse. Remember the forks of commercial Unix back in the 80s?
GPL is not the only license. It does what it does well and with the LGPL is a quite legitimate and important instrument. There are others. GPL says that changes to a GPL'd program must be GPL'd. This includes linking if the code to be linked is GPL'd. That is why the LGPL was invented, so non-GPL code can be linked without becoming GPL. Other licensense were invented that give more leeway while protecting user and developer rights without lessening the power of software. But MS will not mentione these. Instead it concentrates on only the licence it feels can cause the most FUD as if it was the only point to consider.
It is my development talent that I sell for my daily bread. It is not the software itself. Some businesses I have worked for do try to sell the software itself as their main cash sources. Others find they make more money in Application add-ins, consulting, customization and so on than in direct per-seat costs.
I am a systems (infrastructure) developer. What I build cross-cuts any particular business except a speciality house in systems software. So what sense does it make for any one company that needs such software to own all rights to what I produce? That is not their business nor in my or thw general software world's interest.
I've worked 50-65 hrs a week for the last 20 years so I could stack up a pile of patents on every new idea and many of the picked up own ideas (those not already patented) that I ever invented or used. I did it so I could lock everyone else out of using every technique I invented or learned that wasn't nailed down unless they paid through the nose to me or my corporate gang of the moment.
Every single scrap of knowledge that led to my programming career was paid for in blood and money, every bit of science, all the math, all the computer time, everything. Yeah, right.
I was never into computers because I loved them and saw them as a way to change the world for the better. Neither was anyone else. It was always just for the money and the power.
And software is only a vehicle, only some static property to be sub-divided and parceled out and rented. It is not a dynamic body of knowledge ripe for cross-fertilization. Any cross-fertilization is an example of software rustling and should be a hanging offense. Pay the man to determine what you need and to negotiate with others in terms of money and power to form new blends that you will accept because you have no choice. Make the software mogul the richest man in the world regardless of whether the software does what you need or not. You are not free to change it, to look under its hood, to swap parts, to write about it without permission. All this and more is declared to be your good and your prosperity and the prosperity of the world.
The real world isn't better off for the freer flow of information and the self-expanding and growing knowledge base. It should be tightly metered and every cent squeezed out of it and if that stops the future geniuses that could have saved us from the current or next mess and enabled the next huge jump in our way of life, then so be it. At least they didn't rise up to threaten our pile of chips.
What two decades of economic success? What about the really deep inflation of the early 80s? What about the downturn of 87?
For a company that believes in IP rights Microsoft is sure into telling people what they can do with their IP. I choose to share my software wherever possible with others on my terms in exchange for them sharing theirs. It is my experience and considered opinion that this works better in the realm of software than models such as that proposed by MS. That is my right to do. By so doing I have become intellectually richer and professionally many times more productive than I could be otherwise and have seen more of the world touched and changed by software and computer technology than I believe would otherwise have been the case. And this is only the beginning.
Microsoft knows this. These are not misguided people. These are people fighting with all they have to stop a change in the way the world treats information and computing that undermines the source of their (not your or our) financial wealth.
If MS was right and you really couldn't create good software that people are very happy to have using Open Source models, then MS would not need to speak against it. It would be obvious to all concerned that no matter how idealistic OS is, it just doesn't work to produce better software that people want and use. Clearly this is not the case. Clearly there is a strong need for the many benefits of Open Source.
This is bogus. The LGPL exists precisely to allow linking with non-GPL code. All device drivers and other code that needs to be linked should be LGPL. GCC has been this way since forever.
There is no conflict. The government no more has the right to break GPL than it has the right to break any other license. The government is not in the business of making free software or any other kind that it did not create public domain.
The public domain software means anyone can pick it up, modify it somewhat to be incompatible, make it proprietary, close the source and do other things that directly infringe on the freedom of its users.
GPL does not prevent use of public information. It only prevents making free sofware un-free.
A very big problem is that there is a direct privacy violation in monitoring machine contents and the contents being passed around the internet just in case someone is violating copyright. It also puts a huge cost on all internet services and provider including P2P ones. And it limits the amount and kind of encryption and encoding that can be used.
Do you want a free (in the sense of rights and contents) internet or not? The real casualty of efforts like the MPAA is likely to be that freedom.
It is intimidation tactics. MPAA should not be going after anyone for sharing digital content. And it certainly should not be intimidating service providers to do their dirty work for them. It is time for MPAA to wake up and smell the internet coffee. They are trying to preserve expectations that are out-of-date. The attempt to do this robs us all.
Write really bloated code so you can do your part to keep people buying new computers so there is more money in the industry so hopefully you can get paid ever more to write ever more bloated code. ARGH. May be some truth to the theory that bad languages and poor IDEs and deranged wizards led to the need for ever faster machines for developers
But it is still sick and disgusting to force feed buying decisions by purposefully bad design and implementation practices. The idea is to gain ever more capable actual tools and augmentation of abilities, not to continuously buy fancier hardware in order to run more of the s.o.s.
Slashdot Mirror
It makes perfect sense. If our government has forbidden in whole or part some of the very types of research a donor wishes to fund it makes tremendous sense to withold the funding.
It also makes sense in that it makes the news and points to the blatant idiocy and danger of government poking its nose into science on quite partisan and political grounds.
I am extremely greateful for any who act as Jim Clark did.
Hawking says *we should* modify humans with technology. How did you get it backwards?
This isn't funny in the least.
Free software is free as in free speech but I think you meant "free software" extremists. Is it wrong to be extremely devoted to what you consider right? Patrick Herny was an extremist. Jefferson was an extremist. Certainly one can also name less savory extremists. But the point is that being a fanatic or extreme in one's support of what one considers right is not automatically an ill.
I support the types of freedoms the FSF is for. I don't always support their wordings or attitudes or actions.
If there had never been a GNU and if it hadn't produced much of the non-OS code that makes up a unix like environment as free software, there would never have been a Linux that was the success it is. Linux build off of and uses extensively the FSF GNU codebase. Therefore GNU-Linux is very reasonable.
Whether information is relatively free or not depends on the intent and focused efforts of ourselves. If we believe that some or all types of information need to be free and open to increase the well-being of ourselves and others then we need to lobby, demonstrate, create and spread memes and so on to that effect. The article makes the good point that information does not inherently want to be free and the internet will not inherently guarantee it is free. It leaves open the question of whether we the people want it to be free and what we can do about it if we do.
I can't see why this particular action is a worthwhile response to this case or the threat. Alan Cox says it is not the fault of Usenix. So why this action rather than one more to the point?
Of course it is not right to take matters into your own hands and arbitrary destroy property everytime you think some product is bad or potentially dangerous. This is highly criminal and should be punished fully.
There is a big difference between legitimate civil disobediance and destroying property as a punishment or way of forcing one's opinion on others. I don't see why there is even a question here.
Are you forgetting that Linux is Open Source? This means it is perfectly legal to make copies of Linux and give them to your friends. Talk of suing for this basic freedom we all flocked to Linux for is ridiculous.
You don't need BS like per-seat licensing for Linux to make money on Linux. We are supposed to have some differences from the proprietary world. I believe this is one place where we should be different.
They are very clever. First they propose a bogus notion of what Open Source and even the GPL/LGPL is and isn't about and does and doesn't require. Next they act as if their own slander and misrepresentation is true and put "protection" against the bogus danger in their contract. This can lead the way for other vendors doing work with Microsoft to infect their own contracts with similar bogus concerns and restrictions. To top it off they get /. to propagate their viral anti-OpenSource license.
Damn clever little monkeys.
Your email stays on any server you want. Including your own. Some things benefit by being server based or mediated or replicated through a network of machines. Others don't. Why do we keep trying to make single statements that cover all cases? There is no single magic bullet technology. When will we grow up enough to not forget that?
Network Computing is still a step into the past. Timesharing revisited. A system that ignores the power of user machines in favor of doing as much as possible on servers and to top it of uses only HTML for GUI is seriously broken and I am amazed it is even considered in this day and age. What a waste of the last 40 years of hardware and communication advances! We should be seeing massively P2P architectures and as much work as possible being offloaded to clients that have their configuration managed as automatically as possible.
If MS wants to play the Open Standard game then simply make sure the keeper of the Standard is independent and the standard is really Open and independently certifiable with no bogus gotchas that prevent Open Source implementations from being certified.
This is truly horrendous. If any signatory country's laws reach out and bite me in another country with very different laws then it effectively makes no difference what country I choose to live in. It treats the laws of all countries as being just as valid and binding as the laws of the country I agree to be a citizen of. It binds me by the decisions of people in another country where I have utterly no say in deciding what the laws are and are not.
This is tyranny, wholesale and without bounds. This must be opposed by all means possible.
COM is a particular distributed messaging protocol like CORBA. When the rest of the world went with CORBA, which is multi-platform and multi-language, Microsoft went with a version of a DEC protocol that only worked on its OS and with a handful of MS specific language implementations. To this day, talking to D/COM is not open. To get to do this if you are not on a MS platform you need to pay thousands of dollars in licensing to MS. There is are half-assed unix implementations but only (AFAIK) for talking client-server with a MS box.
.NET is braced on COM then that is a major blow against it.
If
CORBA has been used with Smalltalk, C, C++, CLOS, Python, Perl, Scheme, Pascal, Fortran, COBOL and so on on about every OS imaginable. It sits underneath RMI for Java as well as being directly supported on Java.
Don't fall for MS hype. These people are not your friend and their code is not cool.
Maybe I've just been around too long to appreciate the "oh wow" of seeing things invented many years ago in the non-MS world dressed up in MS bullshit and trotted out on the stage.
No, this is NOT what we want. We want to bury closed source software under its own inefficiency. And most especially we do not want to embrace enemies of software freedom as if they have respectable opinions and we are lucky to have them address us in *our* conference.
Do people really not get that this is not a step forward?
I cannot believe this is happening. First O'Reilly embraces .NET. Now Craig Mundie, that lying utter ass of an Open Source opponent, is giving the keynote at the Open Source Conference???
Goodbye O'Reiley. You won't see me sanctioning this farce by attending this conference. Nor will I condone such fundamental hypocrisy by EVER buying anything you have a hand in again.
You almost were cool for a little while. But now you show your true colors. This is a GROSS INSULT to the Open Source community.
Uh, huh. Usenet is an open protocol. There is nothing to stop anyone at any time from hooking into it however they want. Have we all forgotten how to set up our own news servers? Is everyone clueless enough to think they have to depend on an ISP or a particular "portal" to do something so very basic?
If we become people who are that clueless then we will deserve to have Usenet be "controlled" by some one company.
Laws and regulations are public documents. There can be no limit on the right to publish such a document as long as it is not altered in the copying or misattributed. Anything less is madness.
The internet grew out of largely volunteer and academic hacking efforts. The internet was around long before the early nineties and highly used by academics, software people, librarians and others in the know at the time. Much of the infrastructure the explosion of the mid=90s rights on was developed a decade or two earlier by people who largely did not put up fences or when they did, noticed it didn't work so well.
The 90's explosion was not about b2c or b2b. It was about people to people. The business users came later. This is a very crucial hole in the speech. The importance of software is empowering people and increasing the flow and value of informaiton. Information increases in value by being accessed, winnowed and combined. The more sources of such functions are active the more valuable the information becomes.
Complex hubs of information are very old school. ONly a few types of applications benefit a lot by dense hubs and even they [can] gain by the network of peers offloading processing and local storage. Less and less is a middle man or a toll road needed on the internet highway.
MS talking about privacy and security? Hahaha.
.NET is not user centric. It is MS server centric.
Software communities are not just about developers. They are about users/developers. They are about dynamic growth from the components of software. Grwoth that cannot happen if the source is closed and or tightly controlled.
Does anyone believe that current EULAs are about protecting your rights or give you or acknowledge you have any "property rights" to the software you purchase under them?
There are 5 million MSDN developers because MS has pushed its technology really hard and you have to sign up to MSDN and have more money extorted from you in order to successfully keep up with their hodge-podge of closed and unresponsive krap.
There is no clear division between developers in a company and developers outside it and customers. Not in a knowledge economy. MS is doomed as long as it believes such a distinction is real.
Ah, the old forking myth. In practice forking is rare in OS and forking leading to bad consequences such as stranded users and community groups is nearly unknown. This is not at all the case with closed proprietary source. Let a company close its doors, be taken over by the wrong party or simply change its mind about priorities and software YOU depend on could dissappear or become an orphan overnight. You don't have the source or any rights to it even if you could read it. So you get no recourse. Remember the forks of commercial Unix back in the 80s?
GPL is not the only license. It does what it does well and with the LGPL is a quite legitimate and important instrument. There are others. GPL says that changes to a GPL'd program must be GPL'd. This includes linking if the code to be linked is GPL'd. That is why the LGPL was invented, so non-GPL code can be linked without becoming GPL. Other licensense were invented that give more leeway while protecting user and developer rights without lessening the power of software. But MS will not mentione these. Instead it concentrates on only the licence it feels can cause the most FUD as if it was the only point to consider.
It is my development talent that I sell for my daily bread. It is not the software itself. Some businesses I have worked for do try to sell the software itself as their main cash sources. Others find they make more money in Application add-ins, consulting, customization and so on than in direct per-seat costs.
I am a systems (infrastructure) developer. What I build cross-cuts any particular business except a speciality house in systems software. So what sense does it make for any one company that needs such software to own all rights to what I produce? That is not their business nor in my or thw general software world's interest.
No one asked any developers to go hungry.
I've worked 50-65 hrs a week for the last 20 years so I could stack up a pile of patents on every new idea and many of the picked up own ideas (those not already patented) that I ever invented or used. I did it so I could lock everyone else out of using every technique I invented or learned that wasn't nailed down unless they paid through the nose to me or my corporate gang of the moment.
Every single scrap of knowledge that led to my programming career was paid for in blood and money, every bit of science, all the math, all the computer time, everything. Yeah, right.
I was never into computers because I loved them and saw them as a way to change the world for the better. Neither was anyone else. It was always just for the money and the power.
And software is only a vehicle, only some static property to be sub-divided and parceled out and rented. It is not a dynamic body of knowledge ripe for cross-fertilization. Any cross-fertilization is an example of software rustling and should be a hanging offense. Pay the man to determine what you need and to negotiate with others in terms of money and power to form new blends that you will accept because you have no choice. Make the software mogul the richest man in the world regardless of whether the software does what you need or not. You are not free to change it, to look under its hood, to swap parts, to write about it without permission. All this and more is declared to be your good and your prosperity and the prosperity of the world.
The real world isn't better off for the freer flow of information and the self-expanding and growing knowledge base. It should be tightly metered and every cent squeezed out of it and if that stops the future geniuses that could have saved us from the current or next mess and enabled the next huge jump in our way of life, then so be it. At least they didn't rise up to threaten our pile of chips.
What two decades of economic success? What about the really deep inflation of the early 80s? What about the downturn of 87?
For a company that believes in IP rights Microsoft is sure into telling people what they can do with their IP. I choose to share my software wherever possible with others on my terms in exchange for them sharing theirs. It is my experience and considered opinion that this works better in the realm of software than models such as that proposed by MS. That is my right to do. By so doing I have become intellectually richer and professionally many times more productive than I could be otherwise and have seen more of the world touched and changed by software and computer technology than I believe would otherwise have been the case. And this is only the beginning.
Microsoft knows this. These are not misguided people. These are people fighting with all they have to stop a change in the way the world treats information and computing that undermines the source of their (not your or our) financial wealth.
If MS was right and you really couldn't create good software that people are very happy to have using Open Source models, then MS would not need to speak against it. It would be obvious to all concerned that no matter how idealistic OS is, it just doesn't work to produce better software that people want and use. Clearly this is not the case. Clearly there is a strong need for the many benefits of Open Source.
This is bogus. The LGPL exists precisely to allow linking with non-GPL code. All device drivers and other code that needs to be linked should be LGPL. GCC has been this way since forever.
There is no conflict. The government no more has the right to break GPL than it has the right to break any other license. The government is not in the business of making free software or any other kind that it did not create public domain.
The public domain software means anyone can pick it up, modify it somewhat to be incompatible, make it proprietary, close the source and do other things that directly infringe on the freedom of its users.
GPL does not prevent use of public information. It only prevents making free sofware un-free.
A very big problem is that there is a direct privacy violation in monitoring machine contents and the contents being passed around the internet just in case someone is violating copyright. It also puts a huge cost on all internet services and provider including P2P ones. And it limits the amount and kind of encryption and encoding that can be used.
Do you want a free (in the sense of rights and contents) internet or not? The real casualty of efforts like the MPAA is likely to be that freedom.
It is intimidation tactics. MPAA should not be going after anyone for sharing digital content. And it certainly should not be intimidating service providers to do their dirty work for them. It is time for MPAA to wake up and smell the internet coffee. They are trying to preserve expectations that are out-of-date. The attempt to do this robs us all.
Tell them to stick it where their cute semi-transparent cases are irrelevant.
Write really bloated code so you can do your part to keep people buying new computers so there is more money in the industry so hopefully you can get paid ever more to write ever more bloated code. ARGH. May be some truth to the theory that bad languages and poor IDEs and deranged wizards led to the need for ever faster machines for developers
But it is still sick and disgusting to force feed buying decisions by purposefully bad design and implementation practices. The idea is to gain ever more capable actual tools and augmentation of abilities, not to continuously buy fancier hardware in order to run more of the s.o.s.