Cheap, easy and pretty good is to split your solution into audio and video parts. Skype does really well at audio. For video, you could use an ip camera and a browser or bolt in anything else you like.
If you want completely non-proprietary, ekiga is pretty good in its latest incarnation, though to get good video you have to use the non-free h.264 and for many-to-many you'd have to set up a sip router. That ends up harder.
But the SUCCESS of Linux is because a lot of those big companies (IBM, Sun/Oracle, Intel, Google,...) need a way to keep the Microsoft Windows monopoly in line.
No, the success is because GPL makes it economically favourable to build code for Linux.
Maybe you don't actually need erp as much as automating existing processes so that data is moved around automatically instead of being processed manually. Eg: take stuff from a database and make a spreadsheet out of it with perl dbi and perl ooolib, mailing it automatically to the right person. This is non-disruptive and frees up employee drudge time, and reduces errors.
Is an original oil painting more beautiful than a copy? No, it's the same picture. But the value of the original is higher. The difference in value comes from the possibility of detecting the uniqueness of the original. If the copy was a true identical copy, their values would also be identical.
Art and diamonds both rely on their rarity to have value. When you get to the stage where you can have as many identical copies of the original as you like, then the value of the item itself tends to commodity pricing. The new total item retail value then tends to become the commodity cost, plus the value of the perceived decoration it brings (rather than plus the hitherto perceived rarity value).
In the case of diamonds the total item value will tend towards a new and very low value.
If you look at the history of pearls, where cultured/artificial pearls wiped out the natural pearl market, you will understand that natural diamonds will crash in price within a few years.
Another free service: http://muzik.agnula.org, hosted by the guys who created the linux agnula music distro.
They need a reputation/grading system too though - there is some really awful stuff as well as some really good stuff.
Disclosurey sort of thingy: My stuff is here I don't *think* it is awful. Actually I think it is pretty good. Hey, maybe it will be the psychological turning point of your life. Or something.
Something I can add to the tales of what an all-round good guy he is:
The ORBIS flying eye hospital came to Delhi a few weeks ago and he dropped in to see it (here's a picture of him on the plane). He did the required politcal duty as required. But he also asked intelligent questions about the set-up and figured out there was a bottleneck in comms (the aim of the flying eye hospital is to spread knowledge about eye treatments, but they could only arrange for local broadcast of the videos of the surgeries). The President said he'd try and do something about it.
Shortly afterwards - blam! - we had a satelite uplink so that the surgery teaching sessions were broadcast via satelite to hospitals all over India.
Just think about it - Kalam could have done nothing and no-one would have begrudged him it. But he actually went beyond the polite chit chat, did some figuring out, and then went out his way to actually ease things in a way which make most political leaders seem like whiny midgets. No wonder he is one of the most-loved people in India, and no wonder people think he honours the office of president, rather than the other way round.
What I really like about Linus, unlike the likes of RMS, Perens and many slashdotters, is that he puts technical facts way ahead of political non-sense when making decisions.
The trouble is that political stuff does affect technical stuff eventually.
GPL is a bastion in the defense against evil political stuff. The licence of BK was dangerous to the progress of linux in the long term, (not the short-term). The long term is what the likes of RMS/Perens GPL supporters etc consider. Linus was thinking short-term when he chose BK.
Linus is a hero of mine alright, but hey, he is only human.
RMS is Jesus, Tridge the Holy Ghost (you don't see him but his spirit is moving things), Linus is St Peter on whose rocking kernel the Catholinux Church is founded.
We tend to hero-worship people like Linus, and often forget that a guy like him is just human after all. He is certainly not God like some geeks place him in their mental landscape.
Perhaps the whole pantheon of deities in the FLOSS movement is a bit like the Olympian gods who could do heroic stuff, but were also vulnerable to human passions and errors. These follies did make them very accessible to the Greeks, who composed epics and stuff about them.
I guess in Geek God mythology, RMS would be Cronos, who was overthrown by Linus (Zeus) or something. Maybe Tridge is Apollo, the Geek god of light, shining truth and enlightenment to the geeks. Hades may be....ah soddit. The analogy can only go so far:-)
Frankly, I hope Linus is big enough to see what is right and wrong here - his past record shows he can. But he is only human, after all, so I think it is also quite possible that he will not be able to, and that the kernel code base may fork.
Now if the EFF created an IP shell company who had the money....
That is an interesting strategy. a pure IP company that really is for defensive purposes, rather than the kind that exist to litigate real companies into giving them money. You would use it to fight against a company that threatens you with its own IP shell company. A bit like the 70's era superpowers having a proxy war.
Of course it does illustrate the whole patent madness is like the MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) nuclear policy.
Linus LEADS. He is the "queen bee" and as such he makes sure the Linux kernel is a great piece of software though he does little "honey gathering" himself.
Oh yes, and the developers are the flowers, and the grass is MS windows, and the users are the lamb, sheep and cattle that graze upon them, except for the non-MS users who are the cute little bunny rabbits hop-hop-hopping along, and meanwhile the kindly sun that beams down is the throbbing brain of coders that make it all work, while the gentle drizzle that patters down is the soft fall of money that runs off in to the rivulets of gadgets and geek toys, mixing with a light taint of the pesticide of RIAA and MPAA in the the babbling river Patent. And off in the distance the songbirds Stallman and Gates squabble their fight, heard by all but not really noticed, as the zephyr of human progress runs lightly through the pastoral scene.
Yes it is a problem that I have to have one network and one internet for my Windows machines and another for my Unix boxes. Oh wait, thats right, they both use the TCP/IP standard.
I said mid 90s in that post. I was also not talking about TCP/IP. Still, now that you mention it, I'd like to point out that TCP/IP was an open standard which MS and Novell tried to replace with their own (netbeui/ipx) before the web really took off.
Well, at least your right that I can't have my linux box auth against the AD using kerberos or LDAP. Holy shit it worked, must be those standards again.
Again, I was talking mid 90s. LDAP was a fledgling open standard at the time when MS tried to pre-empt it with its own AD.
At least you were right that I can't use an MS DNS or DHCP server to serve Linux clients, or use Bind for the DNS operations of the Active Directory. Nope, hm wrong again.
Again, back in the 90s DHCP was an open standard. MS win 2000 had a DHCP client that only talked nicely to its MS version in windows 2000 (IBM banned the use of win 2000 in production machines as a policy because of this). And DNS was the open standard which WINS tried to preempt with added netbeui goodness in NT4.
Do you see a pattern here?
So again, MS using standards and BSD software locks me in how? Exactly what interoperability problems were you referring to?
If you cannot see the pattern, then you are completely missing the way tactics being used and abandoned if necessary to advance MS strategy.
I am talking about the extend and extinguish phase. You are talking about the embrace phase.
Of course everything is going to interoperate ok when MS tries to stick to the standards that are pervasive nowadays. In the 90s MS was trying to embrace, extend and extinguish those particular standards pretty blatantly. I was drawing a lesson from history, the lesson being that if MS has a chance to lock people into their own proprietary standard it will pursue it. I am not making it up. The history of MS behaviour shows it. The Halloween memo documents it. The courts say MS is a convicted monopolist. I repeat, the lesson is that if MS has a chance to lock people into their own proprietary standards, it will pursue it.
GPL protects you from that lock in.
BSD feeds the very hand that tries to lock you in.
But, hey, it's a free country, and I respect your right to <heavy-metaphor patronize="on">plait the rope that the guy in the black mask and his mob of yokels will try to throttle you with. GPL/FSF will be the cavalry that saves your neck from getting stretched if that happens </heavy-metaphor>.
How does it do that? By forcing commercial vendors to come up with totally proprietary solutions this rendering GPL code completely irrelewant in the long run? GPL is good for _killing_ standards with its Magical Powers.
I don't understand why you think GPL "forces" commercial vendors that way. Can you give an illustrative case?
On the other hand, consider MS Word, Netbeui, and smb, which are proprietary solutions.
The GPL did not force the MS windows word "standard", or netbeui or samba. The monopolistic nature of a proprietary, closed source MS was pretty obviously the origin of that.
It's how things evolve naturally, when you come to think of it. Proprietary standards are encouraged by proprietary code. The nature of GPL encourages open standards.
But people are nonetheless free to trap themselves into a closed "standard" so they can be frog-marched into upgrade cycles with crazier and crazier EULAs. Sheep are equally free to run around in their pasture too before they are shorn of their wool and slaughtered.
You are welcome to a world with that kind of freedom. I prefer a different kind of freedom.
When Microsoft uses BSD code as a basis, they are at least easier to guess or work around.
Sure, that's nice (though not exactly intentional). But the code licence also helps them embrace, extend, extinguish - a policy MS pretty much documented in the leaked Halloween memo. EEE is bad for everyone other than MS. GPL protects against EEE, which is good for everyone - including MS, if they had based themselves on GPL to start with (which they haven't, so BSD is better for them).
How long has it taken the people working on Samba to under all of the SMB protocol? Many years at least. Even Stallman has said the BSD license is good for standards.
Yes, standards are good. The BSD licence is good for standards but allows EEE. The GPL is even better, because any EE can never become EEE.
BTW, the network stack in Windows has not been based on the BSD code for years.
How do you know? Have you looked at the code? Just curious. AFAIK, windows 2000 was the last implementation that could be proven beyond reasonable doubt to be BSD base. I don' t have any idea of what the status of XP is. But whatever the status, the way EEE works still stands in 2005 as much as it did in 2000 for all BSD licenced stuff.
[...GPL...] Protects coders from what? For example, when Microsoft embraces and extends a protocol (i.e., Kerberos, DNS, DHCP), they have no need for the source. They break the protocol. The GPL nor any other open source license would have power against that. You would need a patent (yuck).
If MS were using GPL and EEd a code, it wouldn't work. It would be so counterproductive to EEE that it would remain at EE. With a BSD base MS can EEE and it gets very hard to prevent it after the source is fenced off. That's what GPL protects you against. As for patenting stuff that is based on a GPL-code, section 7 of the GPL v2 protects GPL users against patent restrictions. (Basically, section 7 says patented GPL stuff grants patents use to GPL users.)
So, no, Ded Bob, the magic GPL powers can only be used for Good.
me:
> The freedom of BSD can restrict the coders in the long run.
Ded Bob: This is never true. I never need to use a proprietary vesion of open source.
You may be able to dodge it, but most people do use MS windows, hotmail, outlook, IE and are locked in, which means most coders are developing and using proprietary stuff.
Which version of Kerberos do you use? With BSD-licensed code, I have very few restrictions placed upon me as a coder. Fewer than using GPL-licensed code.
The restriction is that BSD-licenced code can be taken away, mangled and used to frogmarch others in a proprietary direction that harms you by making interoperatability hard.
I am curious: What exactly don't you like about GPL? How does its freedom harm you in the long run? Or short run for that matter?
Yes, protocol and implementation are different animals. But the point is really that MS-Kerberos being based on BSD code allows lock-in. GPL avoids that pitfall.
Not really. The existence of a BSD reference standard for Kerberos may have made such a fork easier to produce, but the GPL does not prevent a company from adding incompatible extensions to a protocol
Oh, a company is free to do that. But with GPLed code, fixing an incompatible extension is really easy. Fixing a closed, tweaked former BSD code is a nightmare. With GPLed code, the moment a company with said GPL code tries to add incompatible extensions to a protocol, it is made compatible again by others. If the company code goes completely daft, the code can always fork away from the daftness. Ie, a company can not succeed in trapping people in a lock-in with GPL.
Given the need to rapidly standardize on a secure login protocol, releasing under the MIT license rather than a more restrictive license was a good choice.
Absolutely. That kind of licence had a value when GPL was not around. In that sense BSD and Theo certainly deserve their recognition and respect.
0racle said: BTW, care to explain how MS locks me in by using BSD code that I can go and pick up just about anywhere else.
That's more or less illustrating the point that you and most sane people don't really understand the difference between the freedoms of BSD and GPL
To answer your question though, here is an example:
In the mid 90s When it was time to put in a network layer into MS windows, MS decided to take some BSD code. They then took standard protocols like Kerberos, DNS, DHCP etc and tweaked them to work MS style so that people would be locked in to using the MS versions only. It was an intentional interoperability problem to make things work MS-to-MS but not MS-to-nonMS. It was part of the MS policy of embrace extend and extinguish, a policy that is elaborated in their leaked "halloween" document.
You can't get hold of the propietary, extended code for windows networking to fix the operatability problem without NDA etc. You can only guess the BSD code up to the moment of forking. After the fork point, the code has been tweaked and closed and used to build a system that tries to lock you in forever after. That's the kind of danger the GPL protects you against.
The restriction of GPL protects the coders in the long run.
The freedom of BSD can restrict the coders in the long run.
Most sane people in both sides shares a common idea of what free software is.
Tsk. Most sane people don't actually know the difference. I think the difference is important enough to worry about.
The freedom of BSD has the danger of making you a prisoner of its distributed derivatives. GPL guarantees your freedom on distributed derivatives. That's why MS likes and uses BSD - because it can be used to lock you in - but fears the GPL - GPL code belongs to you for the asking. That is also why GPL will eventually out-evolve all other software.
Anyone who wants to put some of their music out under a CCL is also welcome to do it at muzik.agnula.org. Yeah, an awful lot of it up there is crap. I like to think our stuff is good, but hey, you can do what you like with it to improve it if you want to. That's freedom of the kind that used to be around before the RIAA and the Happy Birthday silliness was enshrined.
That's pretty cool of Stallman really. Showing respect and recognition to the importance of BSD, despite their mutual differences in ideology about what constitutes truly free software.
In other words, not free. And you always have to watch out for embrace, extend, extinguish tactics when dealing with Microsoft, which is a convicted monopolist.
Danila said:
All this is an inevitable outcome of capitalism.
Hmm. Capitalism is perfectly viable without patents and licence restrictions. It did just fine like that for most of history. Why do you think these sort of restrictions are an inevitable outcome of the capitalist system?
Well, you and I seem to be of the same conviction. I am sure there are many more people around like that on Slashdot
What you seem to be suggesting is that evolutionary pressure works against this kind of prohibition, and hence it is dangerous. You did not elaborate on why it is dangerous, and I would be interested in hearing your take on it.
I would argue that the reason restrictions are dangerous is because they fight against things that would otherwise naturally evolve. If you fight against evolution, you fall behind. If creative thought is restricted, then it will flourish elsewhere and your own culture will fall behind. If you restrict an economy, your economy falls behind. It is no coincidence that the countries with the best quality of life are also mostly the freest. (Actually, that link is a bit of a can of worms. it is a lagging index, where past achievements and good governance count. And Singapore is a remarkable and illustrative special case - free-market under a benevolent dictatorship. Let's not get into that tangent.)
Anyway, so the danger of restrictions is that they cripple progress in the long run. So, because of this danger, I believe restrictions as government policy should only come about in the rarest of rare cases, AND then only with a safeguard of constantly monitored good governance, AND only in cases where progress may otherwise be impeded. Patents and copyright of derivative works are bad restrictions because progress in the long term is impeded by having them.
Slashdot Mirror
Cheap, easy and pretty good is to split your solution into audio and video parts. Skype does really well at audio. For video, you could use an ip camera and a browser or bolt in anything else you like. If you want completely non-proprietary, ekiga is pretty good in its latest incarnation, though to get good video you have to use the non-free h.264 and for many-to-many you'd have to set up a sip router. That ends up harder.
But the SUCCESS of Linux is because a lot of those big companies (IBM, Sun/Oracle, Intel, Google, ...) need a way to keep the Microsoft Windows monopoly in line.
No, the success is because GPL makes it economically favourable to build code for Linux.
Yeah, you hard to search a bit for that one, troll-boy. Amazing what you can do when you take it out of context. It's a line from a parable.
Try weberp, compiere or erp5.
Maybe you don't actually need erp as much as automating existing processes so that data is moved around automatically instead of being processed manually. Eg: take stuff from a database and make a spreadsheet out of it with perl dbi and perl ooolib, mailing it automatically to the right person. This is non-disruptive and frees up employee drudge time, and reduces errors.
Maybe hire a geek to figure it out for you.
Art and diamonds both rely on their rarity to have value. When you get to the stage where you can have as many identical copies of the original as you like, then the value of the item itself tends to commodity pricing. The new total item retail value then tends to become the commodity cost, plus the value of the perceived decoration it brings (rather than plus the hitherto perceived rarity value).
In the case of diamonds the total item value will tend towards a new and very low value.
If you look at the history of pearls, where cultured/artificial pearls wiped out the natural pearl market, you will understand that natural diamonds will crash in price within a few years.
Another free service: http://muzik.agnula.org, hosted by the guys who created the linux agnula music distro.
They need a reputation/grading system too though - there is some really awful stuff as well as some really good stuff.
Disclosurey sort of thingy: My stuff is here
I don't *think* it is awful. Actually I think it is pretty good. Hey, maybe it will be the psychological turning point of your life. Or something.
The ORBIS flying eye hospital came to Delhi a few weeks ago and he dropped in to see it (here's a picture of him on the plane). He did the required politcal duty as required. But he also asked intelligent questions about the set-up and figured out there was a bottleneck in comms (the aim of the flying eye hospital is to spread knowledge about eye treatments, but they could only arrange for local broadcast of the videos of the surgeries). The President said he'd try and do something about it.
Shortly afterwards - blam! - we had a satelite uplink so that the surgery teaching sessions were broadcast via satelite to hospitals all over India.
Just think about it - Kalam could have done nothing and no-one would have begrudged him it. But he actually went beyond the polite chit chat, did some figuring out, and then went out his way to actually ease things in a way which make most political leaders seem like whiny midgets. No wonder he is one of the most-loved people in India, and no wonder people think he honours the office of president, rather than the other way round.
The trouble is that political stuff does affect technical stuff eventually.
GPL is a bastion in the defense against evil political stuff. The licence of BK was dangerous to the progress of linux in the long term, (not the short-term). The long term is what the likes of RMS/Perens GPL supporters etc consider. Linus was thinking short-term when he chose BK.
Linus is a hero of mine alright, but hey, he is only human.
RMS is Jesus, Tridge the Holy Ghost (you don't see him but his spirit is moving things), Linus is St Peter on whose rocking kernel the Catholinux Church is founded.
Perhaps the whole pantheon of deities in the FLOSS movement is a bit like the Olympian gods who could do heroic stuff, but were also vulnerable to human passions and errors. These follies did make them very accessible to the Greeks, who composed epics and stuff about them.
I guess in Geek God mythology, RMS would be Cronos, who was overthrown by Linus (Zeus) or something. Maybe Tridge is Apollo, the Geek god of light, shining truth and enlightenment to the geeks. Hades may be ....ah soddit. The analogy can only go so far :-)
Frankly, I hope Linus is big enough to see what is right and wrong here - his past record shows he can. But he is only human, after all, so I think it is also quite possible that he will not be able to, and that the kernel code base may fork.
Now if the EFF created an IP shell company who had the money....
That is an interesting strategy. a pure IP company that really is for defensive purposes, rather than the kind that exist to litigate real companies into giving them money. You would use it to fight against a company that threatens you with its own IP shell company. A bit like the 70's era superpowers having a proxy war.
Of course it does illustrate the whole patent madness is like the MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) nuclear policy.
If it spread outlook-style, you might call it sylpheelis.
Linus LEADS. He is the "queen bee" and as such he makes sure the Linux kernel is a great piece of software though he does little "honey gathering" himself.
Oh yes, and the developers are the flowers, and the grass is MS windows, and the users are the lamb, sheep and cattle that graze upon them, except for the non-MS users who are the cute little bunny rabbits hop-hop-hopping along, and meanwhile the kindly sun that beams down is the throbbing brain of coders that make it all work, while the gentle drizzle that patters down is the soft fall of money that runs off in to the rivulets of gadgets and geek toys, mixing with a light taint of the pesticide of RIAA and MPAA in the the babbling river Patent. And off in the distance the songbirds Stallman and Gates squabble their fight, heard by all but not really noticed, as the zephyr of human progress runs lightly through the pastoral scene.
Yes it is a problem that I have to have one network and one internet for my Windows machines and another for my Unix boxes. Oh wait, thats right, they both use the TCP/IP standard.
I said mid 90s in that post. I was also not talking about TCP/IP. Still, now that you mention it, I'd like to point out that TCP/IP was an open standard which MS and Novell tried to replace with their own (netbeui/ipx) before the web really took off.
Well, at least your right that I can't have my linux box auth against the AD using kerberos or LDAP. Holy shit it worked, must be those standards again.
Again, I was talking mid 90s. LDAP was a fledgling open standard at the time when MS tried to pre-empt it with its own AD.
At least you were right that I can't use an MS DNS or DHCP server to serve Linux clients, or use Bind for the DNS operations of the Active Directory. Nope, hm wrong again.Again, back in the 90s DHCP was an open standard. MS win 2000 had a DHCP client that only talked nicely to its MS version in windows 2000 (IBM banned the use of win 2000 in production machines as a policy because of this). And DNS was the open standard which WINS tried to preempt with added netbeui goodness in NT4.
Do you see a pattern here?
So again, MS using standards and BSD software locks me in how? Exactly what interoperability problems were you referring to?
If you cannot see the pattern, then you are completely missing the way tactics being used and abandoned if necessary to advance MS strategy.
I am talking about the extend and extinguish phase. You are talking about the embrace phase.
Of course everything is going to interoperate ok when MS tries to stick to the standards that are pervasive nowadays. In the 90s MS was trying to embrace, extend and extinguish those particular standards pretty blatantly. I was drawing a lesson from history, the lesson being that if MS has a chance to lock people into their own proprietary standard it will pursue it. I am not making it up. The history of MS behaviour shows it. The Halloween memo documents it. The courts say MS is a convicted monopolist. I repeat, the lesson is that if MS has a chance to lock people into their own proprietary standards, it will pursue it.
GPL protects you from that lock in.
BSD feeds the very hand that tries to lock you in.
But, hey, it's a free country, and I respect your right to <heavy-metaphor patronize="on">plait the rope that the guy in the black mask and his mob of yokels will try to throttle you with. GPL/FSF will be the cavalry that saves your neck from getting stretched if that happens </heavy-metaphor>.
I said
GPL protects against EEE
Kan said
How does it do that? By forcing commercial vendors to come up with totally proprietary solutions this rendering GPL code completely irrelewant in the long run? GPL is good for _killing_ standards with its Magical Powers.
I don't understand why you think GPL "forces" commercial vendors that way. Can you give an illustrative case?
On the other hand, consider MS Word, Netbeui, and smb, which are proprietary solutions.
The GPL did not force the MS windows word "standard", or netbeui or samba. The monopolistic nature of a proprietary, closed source MS was pretty obviously the origin of that.
It's how things evolve naturally, when you come to think of it. Proprietary standards are encouraged by proprietary code. The nature of GPL encourages open standards.
But people are nonetheless free to trap themselves into a closed "standard" so they can be frog-marched into upgrade cycles with crazier and crazier EULAs. Sheep are equally free to run around in their pasture too before they are shorn of their wool and slaughtered.
You are welcome to a world with that kind of freedom. I prefer a different kind of freedom.
Sure, that's nice (though not exactly intentional). But the code licence also helps them embrace, extend, extinguish - a policy MS pretty much documented in the leaked Halloween memo. EEE is bad for everyone other than MS. GPL protects against EEE, which is good for everyone - including MS, if they had based themselves on GPL to start with (which they haven't, so BSD is better for them).
How long has it taken the people working on Samba to under all of the SMB protocol? Many years at least. Even Stallman has said the BSD license is good for standards.
Yes, standards are good. The BSD licence is good for standards but allows EEE. The GPL is even better, because any EE can never become EEE.
BTW, the network stack in Windows has not been based on the BSD code for years.
How do you know? Have you looked at the code? Just curious. AFAIK, windows 2000 was the last implementation that could be proven beyond reasonable doubt to be BSD base. I don' t have any idea of what the status of XP is. But whatever the status, the way EEE works still stands in 2005 as much as it did in 2000 for all BSD licenced stuff.
[...GPL...] Protects coders from what? For example, when Microsoft embraces and extends a protocol (i.e., Kerberos, DNS, DHCP), they have no need for the source. They break the protocol. The GPL nor any other open source license would have power against that. You would need a patent (yuck).
If MS were using GPL and EEd a code, it wouldn't work. It would be so counterproductive to EEE that it would remain at EE. With a BSD base MS can EEE and it gets very hard to prevent it after the source is fenced off. That's what GPL protects you against. As for patenting stuff that is based on a GPL-code, section 7 of the GPL v2 protects GPL users against patent restrictions. (Basically, section 7 says patented GPL stuff grants patents use to GPL users.)
So, no, Ded Bob, the magic GPL powers can only be used for Good.
me: > The freedom of BSD can restrict the coders in the long run.
Ded Bob: This is never true. I never need to use a proprietary vesion of open source.
You may be able to dodge it, but most people do use MS windows, hotmail, outlook, IE and are locked in, which means most coders are developing and using proprietary stuff.
Which version of Kerberos do you use? With BSD-licensed code, I have very few restrictions placed upon me as a coder. Fewer than using GPL-licensed code.
The restriction is that BSD-licenced code can be taken away, mangled and used to frogmarch others in a proprietary direction that harms you by making interoperatability hard.
I am curious: What exactly don't you like about GPL? How does its freedom harm you in the long run? Or short run for that matter?
Yes, protocol and implementation are different animals. But the point is really that MS-Kerberos being based on BSD code allows lock-in. GPL avoids that pitfall.
Oh, a company is free to do that. But with GPLed code, fixing an incompatible extension is really easy. Fixing a closed, tweaked former BSD code is a nightmare. With GPLed code, the moment a company with said GPL code tries to add incompatible extensions to a protocol, it is made compatible again by others. If the company code goes completely daft, the code can always fork away from the daftness. Ie, a company can not succeed in trapping people in a lock-in with GPL.
Given the need to rapidly standardize on a secure login protocol, releasing under the MIT license rather than a more restrictive license was a good choice. Absolutely. That kind of licence had a value when GPL was not around. In that sense BSD and Theo certainly deserve their recognition and respect.
BTW, care to explain how MS locks me in by using BSD code that I can go and pick up just about anywhere else.
That's more or less illustrating the point that you and most sane people don't really understand the difference between the freedoms of BSD and GPL
To answer your question though, here is an example:
In the mid 90s When it was time to put in a network layer into MS windows, MS decided to take some BSD code. They then took standard protocols like Kerberos, DNS, DHCP etc and tweaked them to work MS style so that people would be locked in to using the MS versions only. It was an intentional interoperability problem to make things work MS-to-MS but not MS-to-nonMS. It was part of the MS policy of embrace extend and extinguish, a policy that is elaborated in their leaked "halloween" document.
You can't get hold of the propietary, extended code for windows networking to fix the operatability problem without NDA etc. You can only guess the BSD code up to the moment of forking. After the fork point, the code has been tweaked and closed and used to build a system that tries to lock you in forever after. That's the kind of danger the GPL protects you against.
The restriction of GPL protects the coders in the long run.
The freedom of BSD can restrict the coders in the long run.
Tsk. Most sane people don't actually know the difference. I think the difference is important enough to worry about.
The freedom of BSD has the danger of making you a prisoner of its distributed derivatives. GPL guarantees your freedom on distributed derivatives. That's why MS likes and uses BSD - because it can be used to lock you in - but fears the GPL - GPL code belongs to you for the asking. That is also why GPL will eventually out-evolve all other software.
Anyone who wants to put some of their music out under a CCL is also welcome to do it at muzik.agnula.org. Yeah, an awful lot of it up there is crap. I like to think our stuff is good, but hey, you can do what you like with it to improve it if you want to. That's freedom of the kind that used to be around before the RIAA and the Happy Birthday silliness was enshrined.
That's pretty cool of Stallman really. Showing respect and recognition to the importance of BSD, despite their mutual differences in ideology about what constitutes truly free software.
In other words, not free. And you always have to watch out for embrace, extend, extinguish tactics when dealing with Microsoft, which is a convicted monopolist.
All this is an inevitable outcome of capitalism.
Hmm. Capitalism is perfectly viable without patents and licence restrictions. It did just fine like that for most of history. Why do you think these sort of restrictions are an inevitable outcome of the capitalist system?
Well, you and I seem to be of the same conviction. I am sure there are many more people around like that on Slashdot
What you seem to be suggesting is that evolutionary pressure works against this kind of prohibition, and hence it is dangerous. You did not elaborate on why it is dangerous, and I would be interested in hearing your take on it.
I would argue that the reason restrictions are dangerous is because they fight against things that would otherwise naturally evolve. If you fight against evolution, you fall behind. If creative thought is restricted, then it will flourish elsewhere and your own culture will fall behind. If you restrict an economy, your economy falls behind. It is no coincidence that the countries with the best quality of life are also mostly the freest. (Actually, that link is a bit of a can of worms. it is a lagging index, where past achievements and good governance count. And Singapore is a remarkable and illustrative special case - free-market under a benevolent dictatorship. Let's not get into that tangent.)
Anyway, so the danger of restrictions is that they cripple progress in the long run. So, because of this danger, I believe restrictions as government policy should only come about in the rarest of rare cases, AND then only with a safeguard of constantly monitored good governance, AND only in cases where progress may otherwise be impeded. Patents and copyright of derivative works are bad restrictions because progress in the long term is impeded by having them.