If we wanted to do good things for the environment, we'd have an mostly-nuclear merchant shipping fleet by now.
You are jesting, surely.
If you had any idea about the condition of the merchant ships and the way their crews are hired, you would have never said that.
Deep sea marine merchant fleets are governed by something which can only be described as a "law of the jungle", where the disposable crews (literally! I heard stories of men simply dumped in the next harbour, regardless of location, after losing arms or legs in accidents on the ship, without any concern about their means of medical care or transportation. Insurance? You gotta be kidding!) and rust-covered ships worked until they literally fall apart at sea, after which the owner simply collects more then their value, having shrewdly adjusted the insurance payout in anticipation. Any attempts at regulation usually result in the owners re-registering all of their ships in places in which bribery, corruption and non-existant regulation make up for an "ideal" merchant shipping home port. What did you think the words "flag of convenience" mean? Ever notice that all of those ships in the news which broke up on some rocks are flying weird flags from strange places, even though they are clearly owned by western conglomerates?
Adding nuclear power to this mix would be truly suicidal.
Why the hell would anyone pay that much money just to engage in the online equivalent of pissing against a force 10 gale?
You assumed that the narcisstic, vain, executive types, having landed in their positions straight from their MBA mutual-adoration "schools", actually have an ounce of a clue. That is a very dangerous assumption. These people are the new artistocracy. Their time is spent in adoring each other's golf swing on exclusive golf courses and a byzantine dance of trying to ingrate themselves with the "right" coctail party crowd, which then, if successful, leads to their occupation of new, ever more obscenely overpaid, musical seats on various boards of directors, finally ending in a massive "golden parachute" payout.
Well being of the companies, competence and the financial gains of shareholders have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with any of this.
Returning to the case in point: the overpaid clowns, not having a dimmest idea as to what they are doing (as the leaked emails plainly and painfully show), did what their kind usally does: played and postured at being "rent-a-cops" for their objects of adoration, the much better paid, and even more clueless, executives of various media conglomerates.
It is a little wonder that other buffoons would pay millions (usually comprised of some blue-collar worker's pention fund money) for this glorified circle jerk of "serious businessmen crime fighters".
One of the dimwits, seeing himself so much more competent that mere "techies", then proceeded to bypass all of the security measures of their email system by forwarding all of his mail to Gmail, and then used the very same account, with the very same password of "blahbob" to "investigate" one of the p2p sites.
In short, everything that is happening here is merely a sympthom of the state of total corruption to which the modern corporate world has descended, other indicators being known under the names of Enron, WorldCom, Haliburton etc.
It kills me everytime when I hear some suit-clad MBA blather about "music industry" and its "products". Art "industry" isn't. The notions of "industry" or "commerce" are the very anathema of art. Art, as I am sure you know very well, is an intrisic desire of an artist to share his vision of the world, his insights and his feelings with others. Artists receive pleasure from satisfying their desire to express themselves and are, if they are indeed artists, pleased if many, many people enjoy their art for what it is.
Kitschmanufacturers and peddlers on the other hand, see their "art" as means to an end: to get rich quick. To them, making of their "art" is akin to manufacturing some throw-away plastic doo-dad on an assembly line. They do not produce art, they produce a "product". And they are of course in full agreement with the various pointy-haired MBAs and "intellectual property" lawyers: the sucker, otherwise known as the "consumer", must be made to pay, or else their scheme would not work.
You are of course completely right that the creation of art would go on in the absence of these conmen, as it went on throughout the recorded history of humankind, and even before it - as the drawings on cave walls testify, looong before the self-appointed would-be "captains of industry" appeared on the scene.
And of course I concur that if the vulgar profit motive were to be removed, the only people left to create art would be... artists. Artists who, I am sure, given the modern dynamics of instant communication and easy money transfers, would receive enough donations to make a very comfortable living, enabling them to focus on their creative urges, but who would not become mega-millionare "wonders", whose wealth seems in reverse proportion to their talent and in direct proportion to marketing and media manipulation by their "handlers".
The info on the intertubes is that Mr. Maris, otherwise known as The Putz of the Century, after having forwarded all his corporate mail to his Gmail account, signed up for one of the p2p forums he was "investigating" using that very Gmail address and the same password as his gmail account had.
And he did so from an IP address already known to belong to Media Defenders.
I think he was looking for the execs' pay. The devs are likely at the bottom of the scale, like everywhere else in corporate world, perheaps except the secretaries and general office help (but even that is frequently not the case these days).
That is laughable given what many in the slashdot crowd consider evil. Developing closed source software for example.
"Evil" is an exaggeration. This dislike of closed-source comes from the fact that many here instinctively realize that information, such as computer programs, some forms of art, thoughts in people heads, large integer numbers etc, do not fall under the simplistic, inane attempts to mis-apply an economic model of a "market" to things which do not have the required attributes to become "private property" and thus are not subject to "trade".
This does not mean that we believe that artists and software developers have to go hungry, but it does mean that the method by which various misguided businessmen (usually the middle-men peddling the art/science and not creating it themselves) expect to make their living is fatally flawed (primarilly because it was constructed by businessmen for businessmen, with no regards to anything else) and, in order to be "successful", demands positively immoral and dangerous to society activities, such as attempts at truly totalitarian measures in efforts to control the flow of information in society.
As more and more people realize this, it is my hope that some time in the future this idiotic "copyright" regime will be replaced with something that actually reflects the nature of the information and the needs of the society.
My personal favourite for art, for example, is a modernized "patronage" system, with direct transfer of donations by patrons of art to artists themselves. Sicence is, as it should, funded by academia and as soon as the for-profit scientific journals are dispised of (efforts in this direction are under way) it will be free from this nonsense. Performance arts have no problem whatsoever since the performers are expecting payment for their labour at the gate. Etc and so on.
It is quite possible however that a better model exists. If so I am sure someone will come up with it. Whatever it is, the notions of "copyrights" and "patents" as they stand are... well... patent absurdities! And what we see is simple human reaction to that undeniable fact, particularly among the younger generation whose indoctrination in these mattters is not yet effective.
Really, what the terms force you to do is to communicate to the people who receive your derived work's source that, whatever license you chose for your work, there is an original work that it's based on, and that it's available under the terms of the BSD license; this is why you are required to reproduce those terms. You don't have to tell your recipients which parts are yours and which are from the original work--in fact, if you modify somebody else's code extensively, it's difficult in general to decide which parts belong to who.
I dunno about that. It seems to me that by not clearly indicating which parts are yours and which parts the original you create controversy as to which parts are BSD licensed. So what could result is someone saying: "Hey the whitespaces are GPL, the rest BSD, lets make this whole thing a part of our closed-source project! (after re-tabbing everything)" and you would have hard times fighting them as they would simply point out to the judge that there is no way of effectively determining the distinctions, and that you explicitely neglegted to do so, therefore any fault is yours and not theirs.
I'll keep that in mind next time we have a Tivo discussion.
Perheaps you noticed that the Tivo-isation is a result of an oversight in GPLv2 and that us why v3 was introduced? True, GPL phillosophy is contrary to what Tivo did, but besides moaning about it, there is nothing we can do because, as I said earlier, by allowing those activities, GPLv2 implicitely made them "right" from the point of view of law.
So the only recourse is to change the license. Which FSF did.
As pointed out elsewhere copyright makes plain what the problem is. It's not the BSDers fault that there are so many slashlawyers out there that don't understand.
Not really. Law by itself is frequently insufficient to determine with certainty the legal course of action. That is why it is open to interpretation by courts. The "slashlawyers" are entitled to have fun doing such interpretations. Real lawyers also rendered their opinions on this. For example, the chief FSF counsel indicates that it is all-right to take BSD code and release it under the GPL if an appropriate notice is included in the GPL code and/or original BSD code included or linked to.
I see. So essentially you would need to distribute the "original" BSD-licensed code from which you derrived your, GPL licensed one, before the changes with all the BSD notices intact. Or I presume just a link to it, or some such...
IANAL but I think that taking parts of the code and relicensing it under the GPL is not colliding with any of these rules.
Someone just pointed out to me that the BSD license requires its verbatim inclusion in the source distribution, which would then render all source containing the BSD-licanese... BSD-licensed. So, if the BSD code is included in any other code which must be distributed as source under any other license, say GPL, the licenses would immediately conflict. This problem does not occur with licenses which allow no-source distributions (even DRM encumbered for-profit ones). So in that context the BSD apparently does appear to say "its OK to steal it and sell it for profit, but not to borrow and share it".
This presents an interesting perspective of the BSD phillosophy.
All BSD licenses have one more requirement that the GPL does not: Reproduction of the exact words of the BSD licenses. Which there can be many of.
It seems you are right, I neglected to realize the implications of this. That means that the GPL code could include BSD (modified or not) code only if it were to be distributed exclusively as binary after that point or if it were to include the BSD license verbatim... which would then violate GPL in both cases. An interesting conundrum.
Yes, because there is only one distro of linux out there...
You are confusing distros with forks.
A distro is a particular cocktail of a miriad of available packages. A fork is a parallel code development tree of a particular project or a set of projects.
Linux itself does have forks, maintained for mostly experimental purposes, such as the various private trees of various kernel developers.
Honestly, I think Linux is just as vicious towards BSD as BSD is towards Linux.
That might be true in many cases, but IMHO it is a mere reaction which occurs because the GPL crowd is rather frequently confronted with various truly ridiculously hypocritical stances by the BSD proponents. Such as the one we are discussing.
As to why so many forks, the answer is definitely not technical as the distinctions you indicated make no sense. One can have fast and portable OS, just as well as one can have SMP capable and fast one, one with small memory footprint and portability. Etc and so on.
The true answer is different: Towering, Monumental, Gigiantic Egos of the various participants. Egos which have to be kept apart at astronomical distances lest explosions brighter then the Sun were to immediately occur otherwise.
If you release your stuff under a license that allows something, doing so, by definition, makes that something "right".
If you do believe that some things that can be done with your code are not "right", then you release under a license that specifically forbids those things.
In other words the BSD people want to have the cake and eat it too, choosing arbitrarily and willy-nilly which things they believe are "right" to do with their code and which are not, without actually changing the terms of the license! They want the BSD license to be preceived as "most free" while at the same time putting arbitrary (and uwritten!) restrictions on those whom they dislike, such as us, the GPL "communists".
You can't be serious. Another fork of BSD? I mean there are only 4 widely recognised free forks out there, plus lots more that may not be open, not recognizable as BSD, or not significant...
Actually I have the feeling that you are a secret Linux agent, trying to splinter the forces of BSD. Yes, that would make sense.
Perheaps the BSD crowd should do some soul-searching and ponder why there are four forks, each maintained by a crew which appears to be violently hostile to all the others (not to mention all "outsiders" and "interlopers", such as those building other Unix-like operating systems, say, Linux).
As an aid in your investigation, pay attention to these unseemly feral cries of "Mine! Mine! Mine!" emanating from the land of the supposedly "most free" (to use by anyone for anything, even closed source projects!) license, brought on by this very incident.
All proving to be rather amusing (and quite educational) experience.
Anyone can take BSD code, change it however they desire, and they don't have to give anything back if they don't want to. That's the whole *point* of the BSD license. The altered code can then be used in a closed source proprietary product if desired.
Some versions of the BSD license have one requirement which GPL does not: an advertisment clause. That is any "advertisment" of the software (or reference to the software in literature) must mention "University of California, Berkeley and its contributors". Newer versions of the BSD license (post 1999) do not have this clause but a lot of code is still licensed using the old 4-clause BSD license.
Yeah, it's not a gun... just a licence designed to force people to conform.
Aaah, yes! Those poor, poor people were all forced to release their software under the GPL by the means of... how exactly did RMS force them to do so? He did put a gun to their heads, surely?
Of course, if anybody knows a good data management program similar to MS Access that I can use to interface with a mysql server over an ssh tunnel, that would help us a lot.
Try this, although it was designed for PostgreSQL back-end (a better choice then MySQL long term anyway IMHO).
There are many more around, with different target audiences and design priorities. You just have to look around, find and try them.
That's a pretty bold statement that has many outspoken counter-examples. A lot of people believe in GPLv2's software sharing principles but think GPLv3's dictation of hardware usage crossed the line into the realm of DRM and other evils ("You must use your software how we say or you're in violation of our license").
You probably mean the "accidental" GPL users, chief amongst them Linus, who never really bothered to understand the ideology behind the GPL and simply used it out of "convenience". This "whatever works", "convenience-first" crowd is rather amusing since their success is pretty much dependant on a far greater number of contributors to their projects who do subscribe to the GPL ideology. Speaking of Linus, for an example of the consequences of his short-sighted, "technocratic" approach, witness the the Bitkeeper fiasco, amongst many other such examples.
I suspect, if nothing else, GPLv3 will drive a lot of software to remove the "and later" provision from their licenses, since they now realize that including it is essentially handing all control of their software's future to one man who seems to have gotten more extreme in recent years.
Again, that depends on if you actually subscribe to GPL ideology, or are merely using GPL because it is "convenient" or for some other such mis-guided reason. As to how many people are in this camp, I cannot even try to estimate. I would venture however to say that many of them do instinctively understand that GPL protects their work from being simply appropriated by some business for commercial use and that is what keeps them away from BSD.
Remember when Red Hat left out various codecs due to licenses?
This usually happens with proprietary, restrictive licenses, which is another discussion.
The ideology for both is out there for everyone who cares to look. I'm more worried about the GPL because basically one person controls the license, while the BSD has the community. Something about absolute power and all that.
The FSF is not a one man show and the process of crafting of GPLv3 involved public participation.
If you want to build an ideological fence around yourself? Be my guest. Just don't complain that the world isn't dumping what works for them and using your solution. Or complaining that hardware makers aren't cooperating with the GPL community.
Err... isn't the whole article about the supposed defectors from GPL to BSD, i.e. whining about something along the lines of as to why "the world" isn't "dumping what works for them and using your (BSD) solution"? Pot, kettle and all that jazz.
Or complaining that hardware makers aren't cooperating with the GPL community.
What hardware makers have to do with this, I cannot fathom. Neither GPL or BSD affects hardware in any way whatsoever.
It may just be me, but do I smell a bit of dislike for BSD?
I really do not care about BSD one way or another, nor do I care about X11, MIT and a whole bunch of other licenses out there. And I do believe that it is the absolute right of the creator of whatever open software to put whatever licence he/she wants on it (although I do have deep misgivings about the whole notion of "licensing" information in the first place - but that is another discussion).
What I do dislike is the propensity of the BSD crowd to paint themselves as ideology-free, impartial and objective defenders of "individual freedoms" while at the same time excusing outright profiteering by many individuals and corporations by simply close-sourcing other people's work. That sort of thing gets my proverbial goat. Their idea of "freedom" is pretty much defined as "freedom to profit from other people's work" and their main objection to GPL is that "restricts" their "freedom" to simply take GPL code, modify it and distribute it in some commercial venture of theirs without any sort of recompense.
The difference is of course ideological, and it originates with an understanding that "freedoms" can be both positive and negative and that allowing some "indivdual freedoms" is far too disastrous for the society to even contemplate. Such as "freedom to murder whomever you dislike" etc.
But again, that is another, non-software licensing related discussion although it has direct bearing on the topic.
Why? Simple. The users of both GPLv3 and BSD licensed software really do not see a difference at all. They usually load the software in binary form and it does whatever it does in both cases. But the GPL vs. BSD differences affect mostly programmers and distributors, i.e. the provisions of the license control changes to and distribution of the software.
And in the case of programmers, nothing has really changed. Those who believe in the ideology behind GPL (ideology which was never hidden by RMS or FSF) will continue to do so, and are pleased with the direction in which v3 is headed. Those who loathe that idology in favour of another, BSD centered, which is just as ideologically motivated as the GPL, except covertly and implicitly, will continue to use BSD and bemoan the "evil" and "anti-profit" nature of the GPL.
What will change is that various large corporate leechers, who sought to abuse the GPL to their own ends, will see it harder to achieve their aims. They indeed might consider BSD... or simply return to closed-source proprietary crud whence they came from in the first place.
It assumes nothing of the sort. It only assumes that it's not MY problem nor my Responsibility.
And assumes correctly. It is really simple you know: you are either a memeber of society and civilization, in which case you are automatically, without exceptions and excuses, responsible for doing your part in maintaining the well being of that society, or you are a hermit in a cave who are never allowed to make a single contact with another human being, in which case you are indeed not responsible for anyone else's plight, but in which case how come we are having this conversation using the Internet, a product of our civilization?
Given the choices, I'll take the ghetto full of dead children. They're not my children, after all.
You are then not fit to be a member of a civiliztion because clearly you are a deranged sociopath to be locked up for life in an insane asylum in a merciful society, or shot like a vicious, rabid dog you are in a less merciful one. And soon, lest your free-loading, selfish, greedy ways cause wide-spread damage around you.
I have a BETTER question: how am *I* responsible for their plight?
See above, you psychotic sociopath.
Firstly, I'm not a libertarian
Right, you are "only" a rabid, foaming at the snout, Ayn Rand "objectivist".
Secondly, 'roads' and 'bridges' are not paid for by public assistance. In fact, they'd probably be in better shape if my taxes were used for them instead of handed out to the clusterfscks of humanity.
Right, they are built for profit by deranged greedy sociopaths like you. That is why that mud road from your hut has a toll booth on it, no doubt.
You fail. What I want is self-determinism, which is undermined by being forced, at gunpoint, to give charity.
No, it is you who completely, utterly fail to satisfy the most basic of requirements to be a member of any society. If you want your kind of "self-determinism" then depart immediately for some remote cave, and while there do not make a single contact with anyone, by any means, for the rest of your miserable life on a penalty of having your diseased, "self-determined" brains blown out on sight. There, in that cave, you will pay no taxes, and no "welfare queens" will ever bother you. Take the knowledge of the English language as a parting, albeit completely undeserved, gift of the civilization, well in excess of what your festering mind would ever be capable of contributing back to it.
But because you are a deranged, rabid psychotic sociopath, what you really want is to partake in the civilization, while avoiding any of the responsibilities attendant with that act of participation. In short, you want to be a filthy thief and you are moaning and whining about how the cruel society is not letting you get away with it.
Bzzzt... I barely make a 30th of that, and I damn sure resent having to forgo the use of money I legitimately earned because someone else can't be bothered to earn their own.
This of course assumes, as all selfish greedy self-absorbed people always do, that the poor are not earning the money as a result of their choice, rather then the cause-and-effect result of the conditions of their "upbringing".
And don't give me any of that whiney shit about 'compassion', either. I don't doubt that for every 'good cause' individual, there's at least 5 fuckoff baby factories on the dole.
Then I give you this "whiney shit": would you rather have ghettos where streets are littered with bodies of dead children? Or perheaps where the poor organize into violent gangs raiding the wealtier neighbourhoods? Permanent barbed-wire encirceled "enclaves" and "work camps" for the "undesirables"? Is that your idea of a "civilization"? Or maybe you are one of those deluded "rugged individualists" who have wet dreams of a Mad Max style of "society"?
And a bonus question: how are those children being born to the "fuckoff baby factories" responsible for their plight?
Leave charity to the NPOs and get the hell off my paycheck, vultures.
Ah, yes, one of those Libertarians whose idea of "liberty" is to behave like he was a lone hermit in a cave in the mountains, with no obligations to anyone around him, since a hermit does not have anyone to interact with to call "a society", but at the same time trying to participate in the modern world, interacting and profiting from these interactions with people, and subsequently being given, for free, by the society around him, far more then he ever contributes.
In other words, you want to have it both ways, to be left "alone", and at the same time to bug everybody around you with your mere presence, taking advantage of their work and contributions, ranging from abstract such as "language" to solidly physical such as "roads" and "bridges".
Therfore your desire is to be a free-loader, and and your antagonism against those alledged "welfare queens" seems primarily originating in jealousy: you see them as "getting away" with what you really want to do!
Slashdot Mirror
You are jesting, surely.
If you had any idea about the condition of the merchant ships and the way their crews are hired, you would have never said that.
Deep sea marine merchant fleets are governed by something which can only be described as a "law of the jungle", where the disposable crews (literally! I heard stories of men simply dumped in the next harbour, regardless of location, after losing arms or legs in accidents on the ship, without any concern about their means of medical care or transportation. Insurance? You gotta be kidding!) and rust-covered ships worked until they literally fall apart at sea, after which the owner simply collects more then their value, having shrewdly adjusted the insurance payout in anticipation. Any attempts at regulation usually result in the owners re-registering all of their ships in places in which bribery, corruption and non-existant regulation make up for an "ideal" merchant shipping home port. What did you think the words "flag of convenience" mean? Ever notice that all of those ships in the news which broke up on some rocks are flying weird flags from strange places, even though they are clearly owned by western conglomerates?
Adding nuclear power to this mix would be truly suicidal.
You assumed that the narcisstic, vain, executive types, having landed in their positions straight from their MBA mutual-adoration "schools", actually have an ounce of a clue. That is a very dangerous assumption. These people are the new artistocracy. Their time is spent in adoring each other's golf swing on exclusive golf courses and a byzantine dance of trying to ingrate themselves with the "right" coctail party crowd, which then, if successful, leads to their occupation of new, ever more obscenely overpaid, musical seats on various boards of directors, finally ending in a massive "golden parachute" payout.
Well being of the companies, competence and the financial gains of shareholders have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with any of this.
Returning to the case in point: the overpaid clowns, not having a dimmest idea as to what they are doing (as the leaked emails plainly and painfully show), did what their kind usally does: played and postured at being "rent-a-cops" for their objects of adoration, the much better paid, and even more clueless, executives of various media conglomerates.
It is a little wonder that other buffoons would pay millions (usually comprised of some blue-collar worker's pention fund money) for this glorified circle jerk of "serious businessmen crime fighters".
One of the dimwits, seeing himself so much more competent that mere "techies", then proceeded to bypass all of the security measures of their email system by forwarding all of his mail to Gmail, and then used the very same account, with the very same password of "blahbob" to "investigate" one of the p2p sites.
In short, everything that is happening here is merely a sympthom of the state of total corruption to which the modern corporate world has descended, other indicators being known under the names of Enron, WorldCom, Haliburton etc.
As an artist, I knew you would understand.
It kills me everytime when I hear some suit-clad MBA blather about "music industry" and its "products". Art "industry" isn't. The notions of "industry" or "commerce" are the very anathema of art. Art, as I am sure you know very well, is an intrisic desire of an artist to share his vision of the world, his insights and his feelings with others. Artists receive pleasure from satisfying their desire to express themselves and are, if they are indeed artists, pleased if many, many people enjoy their art for what it is.
Kitsch manufacturers and peddlers on the other hand, see their "art" as means to an end: to get rich quick. To them, making of their "art" is akin to manufacturing some throw-away plastic doo-dad on an assembly line. They do not produce art, they produce a "product". And they are of course in full agreement with the various pointy-haired MBAs and "intellectual property" lawyers: the sucker, otherwise known as the "consumer", must be made to pay, or else their scheme would not work.
You are of course completely right that the creation of art would go on in the absence of these conmen, as it went on throughout the recorded history of humankind, and even before it - as the drawings on cave walls testify, looong before the self-appointed would-be "captains of industry" appeared on the scene.
And of course I concur that if the vulgar profit motive were to be removed, the only people left to create art would be ... artists. Artists who, I am sure, given the modern dynamics of instant communication and easy money transfers, would receive enough donations to make a very comfortable living, enabling them to focus on their creative urges, but who would not become mega-millionare "wonders", whose wealth seems in reverse proportion to their talent and in direct proportion to marketing and media manipulation by their "handlers".
The info on the intertubes is that Mr. Maris, otherwise known as The Putz of the Century, after having forwarded all his corporate mail to his Gmail account, signed up for one of the p2p forums he was "investigating" using that very Gmail address and the same password as his gmail account had.
And he did so from an IP address already known to belong to Media Defenders.
You figure out the rest.
LOL.
No, the dollar figures are yearly. I assume the first number is the monthly pay after tax deductions etc.
I think he was looking for the execs' pay. The devs are likely at the bottom of the scale, like everywhere else in corporate world, perheaps except the secretaries and general office help (but even that is frequently not the case these days).
"Evil" is an exaggeration. This dislike of closed-source comes from the fact that many here instinctively realize that information, such as computer programs, some forms of art, thoughts in people heads, large integer numbers etc, do not fall under the simplistic, inane attempts to mis-apply an economic model of a "market" to things which do not have the required attributes to become "private property" and thus are not subject to "trade".
This does not mean that we believe that artists and software developers have to go hungry, but it does mean that the method by which various misguided businessmen (usually the middle-men peddling the art/science and not creating it themselves) expect to make their living is fatally flawed (primarilly because it was constructed by businessmen for businessmen, with no regards to anything else) and, in order to be "successful", demands positively immoral and dangerous to society activities, such as attempts at truly totalitarian measures in efforts to control the flow of information in society.
As more and more people realize this, it is my hope that some time in the future this idiotic "copyright" regime will be replaced with something that actually reflects the nature of the information and the needs of the society.
My personal favourite for art, for example, is a modernized "patronage" system, with direct transfer of donations by patrons of art to artists themselves. Sicence is, as it should, funded by academia and as soon as the for-profit scientific journals are dispised of (efforts in this direction are under way) it will be free from this nonsense. Performance arts have no problem whatsoever since the performers are expecting payment for their labour at the gate. Etc and so on.
It is quite possible however that a better model exists. If so I am sure someone will come up with it. Whatever it is, the notions of "copyrights" and "patents" as they stand are ... well ... patent absurdities! And what we see is simple human reaction to that undeniable fact, particularly among the younger generation whose indoctrination in these mattters is not yet effective.
I dunno about that. It seems to me that by not clearly indicating which parts are yours and which parts the original you create controversy as to which parts are BSD licensed. So what could result is someone saying: "Hey the whitespaces are GPL, the rest BSD, lets make this whole thing a part of our closed-source project! (after re-tabbing everything)" and you would have hard times fighting them as they would simply point out to the judge that there is no way of effectively determining the distinctions, and that you explicitely neglegted to do so, therefore any fault is yours and not theirs.
Perheaps you noticed that the Tivo-isation is a result of an oversight in GPLv2 and that us why v3 was introduced? True, GPL phillosophy is contrary to what Tivo did, but besides moaning about it, there is nothing we can do because, as I said earlier, by allowing those activities, GPLv2 implicitely made them "right" from the point of view of law.
So the only recourse is to change the license. Which FSF did.
Not really. Law by itself is frequently insufficient to determine with certainty the legal course of action. That is why it is open to interpretation by courts. The "slashlawyers" are entitled to have fun doing such interpretations. Real lawyers also rendered their opinions on this. For example, the chief FSF counsel indicates that it is all-right to take BSD code and release it under the GPL if an appropriate notice is included in the GPL code and/or original BSD code included or linked to.
I see. So essentially you would need to distribute the "original" BSD-licensed code from which you derrived your, GPL licensed one, before the changes with all the BSD notices intact. Or I presume just a link to it, or some such...
Someone just pointed out to me that the BSD license requires its verbatim inclusion in the source distribution, which would then render all source containing the BSD-licanese ... BSD-licensed. So, if the BSD code is included in any other code which must be distributed as source under any other license, say GPL, the licenses would immediately conflict. This problem does not occur with licenses which allow no-source distributions (even DRM encumbered for-profit ones). So in that context the BSD apparently does appear to say "its OK to steal it and sell it for profit, but not to borrow and share it".
This presents an interesting perspective of the BSD phillosophy.
It seems you are right, I neglected to realize the implications of this. That means that the GPL code could include BSD (modified or not) code only if it were to be distributed exclusively as binary after that point or if it were to include the BSD license verbatim ... which would then violate GPL in both cases. An interesting conundrum.
You are confusing distros with forks.
A distro is a particular cocktail of a miriad of available packages. A fork is a parallel code development tree of a particular project or a set of projects.
Linux itself does have forks, maintained for mostly experimental purposes, such as the various private trees of various kernel developers.
That might be true in many cases, but IMHO it is a mere reaction which occurs because the GPL crowd is rather frequently confronted with various truly ridiculously hypocritical stances by the BSD proponents. Such as the one we are discussing.
As to why so many forks, the answer is definitely not technical as the distinctions you indicated make no sense. One can have fast and portable OS, just as well as one can have SMP capable and fast one, one with small memory footprint and portability. Etc and so on.
The true answer is different: Towering, Monumental, Gigiantic Egos of the various participants. Egos which have to be kept apart at astronomical distances lest explosions brighter then the Sun were to immediately occur otherwise.
This makes no sense to me.
If you release your stuff under a license that allows something, doing so, by definition, makes that something "right".
If you do believe that some things that can be done with your code are not "right", then you release under a license that specifically forbids those things.
In other words the BSD people want to have the cake and eat it too, choosing arbitrarily and willy-nilly which things they believe are "right" to do with their code and which are not, without actually changing the terms of the license! They want the BSD license to be preceived as "most free" while at the same time putting arbitrary (and uwritten!) restrictions on those whom they dislike, such as us, the GPL "communists".
Perheaps the BSD crowd should do some soul-searching and ponder why there are four forks, each maintained by a crew which appears to be violently hostile to all the others (not to mention all "outsiders" and "interlopers", such as those building other Unix-like operating systems, say, Linux).
As an aid in your investigation, pay attention to these unseemly feral cries of "Mine! Mine! Mine!" emanating from the land of the supposedly "most free" (to use by anyone for anything, even closed source projects!) license, brought on by this very incident.
All proving to be rather amusing (and quite educational) experience.
Some versions of the BSD license have one requirement which GPL does not: an advertisment clause. That is any "advertisment" of the software (or reference to the software in literature) must mention "University of California, Berkeley and its contributors". Newer versions of the BSD license (post 1999) do not have this clause but a lot of code is still licensed using the old 4-clause BSD license.
Other than that, you are completely right.
Aaah, yes! Those poor, poor people were all forced to release their software under the GPL by the means of ... how exactly did RMS force them to do so? He did put a gun to their heads, surely?
Try this, although it was designed for PostgreSQL back-end (a better choice then MySQL long term anyway IMHO).
There are many more around, with different target audiences and design priorities. You just have to look around, find and try them.
You probably mean the "accidental" GPL users, chief amongst them Linus, who never really bothered to understand the ideology behind the GPL and simply used it out of "convenience". This "whatever works", "convenience-first" crowd is rather amusing since their success is pretty much dependant on a far greater number of contributors to their projects who do subscribe to the GPL ideology. Speaking of Linus, for an example of the consequences of his short-sighted, "technocratic" approach, witness the the Bitkeeper fiasco, amongst many other such examples.
Again, that depends on if you actually subscribe to GPL ideology, or are merely using GPL because it is "convenient" or for some other such mis-guided reason. As to how many people are in this camp, I cannot even try to estimate. I would venture however to say that many of them do instinctively understand that GPL protects their work from being simply appropriated by some business for commercial use and that is what keeps them away from BSD.
This usually happens with proprietary, restrictive licenses, which is another discussion.
The FSF is not a one man show and the process of crafting of GPLv3 involved public participation.
Err... isn't the whole article about the supposed defectors from GPL to BSD, i.e. whining about something along the lines of as to why "the world" isn't "dumping what works for them and using your (BSD) solution"? Pot, kettle and all that jazz.
What hardware makers have to do with this, I cannot fathom. Neither GPL or BSD affects hardware in any way whatsoever.
I really do not care about BSD one way or another, nor do I care about X11, MIT and a whole bunch of other licenses out there. And I do believe that it is the absolute right of the creator of whatever open software to put whatever licence he/she wants on it (although I do have deep misgivings about the whole notion of "licensing" information in the first place - but that is another discussion).
What I do dislike is the propensity of the BSD crowd to paint themselves as ideology-free, impartial and objective defenders of "individual freedoms" while at the same time excusing outright profiteering by many individuals and corporations by simply close-sourcing other people's work. That sort of thing gets my proverbial goat. Their idea of "freedom" is pretty much defined as "freedom to profit from other people's work" and their main objection to GPL is that "restricts" their "freedom" to simply take GPL code, modify it and distribute it in some commercial venture of theirs without any sort of recompense.
The difference is of course ideological, and it originates with an understanding that "freedoms" can be both positive and negative and that allowing some "indivdual freedoms" is far too disastrous for the society to even contemplate. Such as "freedom to murder whomever you dislike" etc.
But again, that is another, non-software licensing related discussion although it has direct bearing on the topic.
Short answer: no.
Why? Simple. The users of both GPLv3 and BSD licensed software really do not see a difference at all. They usually load the software in binary form and it does whatever it does in both cases. But the GPL vs. BSD differences affect mostly programmers and distributors, i.e. the provisions of the license control changes to and distribution of the software.
And in the case of programmers, nothing has really changed. Those who believe in the ideology behind GPL (ideology which was never hidden by RMS or FSF) will continue to do so, and are pleased with the direction in which v3 is headed. Those who loathe that idology in favour of another, BSD centered, which is just as ideologically motivated as the GPL, except covertly and implicitly, will continue to use BSD and bemoan the "evil" and "anti-profit" nature of the GPL.
What will change is that various large corporate leechers, who sought to abuse the GPL to their own ends, will see it harder to achieve their aims. They indeed might consider BSD ... or simply return to closed-source proprietary crud whence they came from in the first place.
And assumes correctly. It is really simple you know: you are either a memeber of society and civilization, in which case you are automatically, without exceptions and excuses, responsible for doing your part in maintaining the well being of that society, or you are a hermit in a cave who are never allowed to make a single contact with another human being, in which case you are indeed not responsible for anyone else's plight, but in which case how come we are having this conversation using the Internet, a product of our civilization?
You are then not fit to be a member of a civiliztion because clearly you are a deranged sociopath to be locked up for life in an insane asylum in a merciful society, or shot like a vicious, rabid dog you are in a less merciful one. And soon, lest your free-loading, selfish, greedy ways cause wide-spread damage around you.
See above, you psychotic sociopath.
Right, you are "only" a rabid, foaming at the snout, Ayn Rand "objectivist".
Right, they are built for profit by deranged greedy sociopaths like you. That is why that mud road from your hut has a toll booth on it, no doubt.
No, it is you who completely, utterly fail to satisfy the most basic of requirements to be a member of any society. If you want your kind of "self-determinism" then depart immediately for some remote cave, and while there do not make a single contact with anyone, by any means, for the rest of your miserable life on a penalty of having your diseased, "self-determined" brains blown out on sight. There, in that cave, you will pay no taxes, and no "welfare queens" will ever bother you. Take the knowledge of the English language as a parting, albeit completely undeserved, gift of the civilization, well in excess of what your festering mind would ever be capable of contributing back to it.
But because you are a deranged, rabid psychotic sociopath, what you really want is to partake in the civilization, while avoiding any of the responsibilities attendant with that act of participation. In short, you want to be a filthy thief and you are moaning and whining about how the cruel society is not letting you get away with it.
Tough luck, fucker!
This of course assumes, as all selfish greedy self-absorbed people always do, that the poor are not earning the money as a result of their choice, rather then the cause-and-effect result of the conditions of their "upbringing".
Then I give you this "whiney shit": would you rather have ghettos where streets are littered with bodies of dead children? Or perheaps where the poor organize into violent gangs raiding the wealtier neighbourhoods? Permanent barbed-wire encirceled "enclaves" and "work camps" for the "undesirables"? Is that your idea of a "civilization"? Or maybe you are one of those deluded "rugged individualists" who have wet dreams of a Mad Max style of "society"?
And a bonus question: how are those children being born to the "fuckoff baby factories" responsible for their plight?
Ah, yes, one of those Libertarians whose idea of "liberty" is to behave like he was a lone hermit in a cave in the mountains, with no obligations to anyone around him, since a hermit does not have anyone to interact with to call "a society", but at the same time trying to participate in the modern world, interacting and profiting from these interactions with people, and subsequently being given, for free, by the society around him, far more then he ever contributes.
In other words, you want to have it both ways, to be left "alone", and at the same time to bug everybody around you with your mere presence, taking advantage of their work and contributions, ranging from abstract such as "language" to solidly physical such as "roads" and "bridges".
Therfore your desire is to be a free-loader, and and your antagonism against those alledged "welfare queens" seems primarily originating in jealousy: you see them as "getting away" with what you really want to do!