if you're not sending.doc you might as well just send a random string of characters
Nonsense. Even MSWord is able to open non-Word document formats, such as RTF. It will choke on other proprietary formats though, but that's not the point. If there were open standards for documents, and which were more comprehensive than RTF, then MSWord would be able to open them automatically. It may munge the document when it subsequently saves it, but opening it should be no problem... if there were an open standard.
Re:Bullshit and baloney-Giving to the trough
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Why I Love The GPL
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· Score: 1
Actually, there are major parts of KDE that are under the BSD license (kwin, kicker, etc). But that's because KDE is not a GNU project. On the other hand, GNOME is a GNU project, and you won't find any BSD licensed code there. GNU has never once contributed any code to BSD under the BSD license, or to X under the MIT license.
Else, someone could claim to have the freedom to kill his neighbor
We're not talking about murder, manslaughter and death. We're talking about SOFTWARE. No one has ever been killed because the BSD license is too free. I know you don't really believe this, and are only trying to make a point, but when you make the moral equivalence between murder and not providing source code, you're priorities are surely out of whack.
In the real world of law, restrictions are necessary to maximize freedom. But that's because lives and properties can be destroyed. Murder and theft exist in the real world of flesh and blood. But information (and thus software) is different. Information cannot be destroyed. It cannot be murdered, killed, raped, imprisoned or stolen. No matter what the evil person does with their copy of the information, my copy is still perfectly safe and untouched by them.
Assuming that software needs to be protected by the same restrictions that protect human beings is ridiculous. The FSF does not understand the nature of information, and thus makes a mistake in trying to protect it from harm that cannot occur.
Most people didn't demand a Free Software X11 for SunOS or IRIX for the same reason they're not demanding a Free Software GDI and Win32 today. There simply wasn't a demand for it. Yet unlike GDI/Win32, there *WAS* a Free Software X11 nonetheless.
X11 is proof that you cannot steal software or destroy information. You can't shoot it with a gun or blow it up with a bomb. You can't burn it down or run it through a shredder. Sun and SGI couldn't destroy X11. Microsoft couldn't destroy Kerberos. Apple couldn't destroy BSD. They're all still here undamaged. Not even a scratch!
But that won't stop the GNU propaganda machine from claiming they were irrepairably harmed anyway...
Re:Pure ignorance - please read the BSD license.
on
Why I Love The GPL
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· Score: 1
I may not have the right to copy, modify and distribute the software, but I do have the right to use it. And that's a pretty damned big right. If I wasn't stupid enough to accidentally click a EULA, I also have the right to make backups, reverse engineer the software, and sell my copy when I am done with it.
My knickers are not in a pinch, I just want to stop the myth that all rights come from the GPL. Many of the arguments against proprietary software have to do with EULAs and not copyrights themselves.
Good arguments, but they do not require the GPL to come about. You're arguing in favor of Free Software, and not the GPL specifically.
Did you favorite application disappear? That's because it was proprietary. vi was my favorite editor twenty years ago. Guess what? It's still here, and not only is it still here, there are multiple outstanding versions of it to use, including the orginal. All Free Software. But vi was never under the GPL.
Like Frequent upgrades? I get that under FreeBSD, which doesn't use the GPL. Like fast turnaround for bug fixes? That doesn't require the GPL either.
The GPL may be the most popular Free Software license, but that does not mean you must use it any more than the popularity of Windows means it's what you have to use that as well.
t's like bringing a cake near your mouth but not letting you have it.
No, it's more like putting up a sign saying "free" in the middle of the park, then putting a sign on the enclosing fence saying "members only". If you're going to make the software free, then make it free. Don't go claiming it's free and then restrict its use.
GPL applications don't piss me off. As a user and non-contributor any Free Software license is sufficient. But GPL libraries do piss me off, because then their license restricts me. Everyone tells you they're free but in reality they're for members only. I'm not modifying, distributing or in any way harming the library when I use it, but it restricts me nonetheless.
They're pissed because they can't have a free ride.
That's not the reason I'm pissed. I'm pissed because I am not allowed to use what I legally possess. If I buy a commercial proprietary library, I get the right to link to it without regards to the license of my own software. But if I buy a GPL library I cannot do the same. It doesn't even matter if I don't distribute the library runtimes at all, I still can't do it. That's what pisses me off.
There are some libraries that Microsoft treats similarly. I can't use them without using the license Microsoft tells me to use. But guess what? I'm just as pissed at Microsoft for this! Don't pretend that you're the only ones BSD developers are pissed at! We are for Free Software, and are thus pissed at EVERYONE who restricts our rights to distribute our own software under the license of our choice. Fortunately most libraries don't fall into this category. Thank goodness for the LGPL...
You still haven't given me your version of history where a free product (X) didn't end up in a situation where something like XFree86 was needed.
I'll give you two examples, and they're both from the article: BSD and Kerberos. Both are still around today. Neither were destroyed by proprietary vendors. Neither required a separate project to "ressurect" them.
It's your history I find suspect. Some X implementations went proprietary, to be sure. But who did it? THE AUTHORS DID IT! The GPL would not have help one whit. Not at all. The old version would still have been under the GPL, but the new "improved" version would still have been proprietary. NOTHING WOULD HAVE CHANGED! The GPL does not restrict the author, it restricts the user.
You tell me. I sitting here right now with a Free Software version called X.org. The FSF says it is free. The OSI says it is open. I am able to download it, modify it, build it, utilize it, distribute it, and even fold, spindle and mutilate it.
If you're trying to argue that the MIT license makes X non-free, you're going to have to explain the presence of X.org on my system, last updated with fresh source a mere two weeks ago. And explain how I even have a choice between X.org and XFree86.
For a while, Unix platforms themselves were commercial (your word) products. Thus it wasn't a great strech of anyone's imagination to see that the X11 implementations that ran on them were commercial as well. But where are those commercial X11 packages today? Sun is on the verge of opening [sic] OpenWindows if they haven't already done so by the time I right this. MetroX is relegated to the niche market, and the company I worked for actually dumped it two years ago in favor of XFree86 for our embedded products. Any others still around?
Why is that today everyone uses GDI and not X?
Do you really need to ask that question? Everyon is using the GDI because everyone is using Windows. Duh! When 90% of users use Windows, then 90% of users use GDI. How much more basic can you get? Your implication that Microsoft would have otherwised use X is ludicrous. The system Microsoft designed GDI for was incapable of running any X11 implementation of the time.
So what? The BSD TCP/IP stack is available to everyone. E v e r y o n e! It was funded by the US government, and as part of US policy was subsequently made available to everyone. But GPL advocates hate this. They don't want freedom for everyone, they only want it for their friends.
GPL advocates say the BSD license is a license to steal. WTF! How the hell can it be stolen? By what possible mechanism can it be taken away from me? Did they imagine that Bill Gates would come to my door with armed brownshirts to wipe my harddrives? That is the attitude of the FSF. They truly do not understand the nature of information. They really think it can be stolen. They do not realize that information cannot be destroyed, only forgotten.
Proprietary vendors want to horde information and lock it away in vaults. But the FSF isn't much better. They want to keep information safely behind the fences of public preserves. They do not want people to do with it as they will.
Re:Pure ignorance - please read the BSD license.
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Why I Love The GPL
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· Score: 1
...then the items are simply governed by copyright law and they have NO rights.
Nonsense! Stop drinking the FSF Koolaid! Copyright does *NOT* grant all possible rights to the author. The author gets some right exclusively, but by no means does he get all rights. That's the reason why Microsoft and all other proprietary developers use EULAs, so they can get the user to click-away MORE rights than what the law provides.
This myth that copyright is the ultimate infringement against information must stop.
...the fact that you have to buy every little damn thing for it. $20 for focus follows mouse, $15 for a decent trackpd driver, $10 for that, $25 for something else. It's a never ending trail of money.
So it's all about the money then? You ought to tell the FSF about that. For some reason they think it's not about the money at all, but the free-ness. You guys need to get your stories straight.
Let's abolish everything, dammit! If we cannot have a perfect system, let's have no system at all. It's far better to let murderers and rapists roam our streets freely than to potentially embarass someone during an investigation.
But innocent people are charged all the time without even owning a Safeway Club Card. Banning such cards isn't going to prevent this from occuring. So why the fsck are we talking about how evil they are?
Of course he doesn't have ny references! 87% of all statistics are made up on the spot! But if you throw numbers at an argument and boldface selected words, people will believe you.
Everyone who has ever compiled a piece of Open Source software has used GNU's make.
It is quite possible to compile a piece of Open Source Software without GNU make. It's not easy, to be sure, since there are so many projects out there that require GNU make (automake doesn't help matters much), but it is possible. There is BSD make, Solaris make, Microsoft's strange nmake, and several others. GNU is but one of many, and it's not even the only free make.
The problem is that the make standard is so tepid that to get a decent make you need to extend it. So what we end up in reality is a lack of a make standard. I can write a complete C program that will compile with any standard C compiler. I can write a powerful bourne shell script that runs on any Bourne compliant shell. But to write a Makefile that will work under all makes is quite difficult.
I'm just always interested to see how people justify seemingly obvious contradictions like that.
The difference is coercive force. You must obey the government, but your relation with your employer is voluntary. If you don't like your employer, you can find another. But if you don't like your government, tough luck!
Some may argue that employers use economic coercion, but anarcho-capitalists dismiss this as socialist myth. It might seem sometimes that we are slaves to our employers, but in reality we are not. The options open to use for employment are many and varied. We can find another job. We can start our own business. We can reduce our economic lifestyle and be unemployed or retire early. Contrast that to the government, where the only choices you are given are to obey or be imprisoned.
I only "tend" towards anarcho-capitalism. Besides, since my post was not advocating anarcho-capitalism, and merely mentioned it, the fact that you took such great offense at my anarcho-capitalist tendencies seems to validate my point.
If you are having a discussion about completely eliminating taxation, no one will take you seriously.
They may not take the prospects of it every happening seriously (I myself don't), and they may have problems with the underlying premises of my argument, but the right, in general, will take ME seriously. They will not say "shut up you sound like an adolescent", but will genuinely listen to my arguments (and then patiently try to explain to be why I'm wrong). They may not take the idea itself seriously, but they certainly do take diversity of ideas seriously.
People may laugh at that last point, but it is true in my experience. If it doesn't look like you're arguing just to start a fight, and it doesn't appear you're arguing verbatum from some flyer you found at Whole Foods, then most people on the ideological right will genuinely respect you for your beliefs.
Marvin as a cute robot is perfect! Imagine that hypercute android speaking like the old depressed Marvin (it will be the same voice actor). It's going to be great! Remember, Marvin was designed by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporations. How else should he look?
That sounds like Lucas. He claims he had the full story line from episode I through VI all mapped out before he ever started. That's utter crap. The "Episode IV" title wasn't there originally. Really it wasn't. Han shot first, seriously.
No, I'm sorry, Adams does NOT sound like Lucas. Adams just constantly fiddles with the story. But Lucas takes WhiteOut to the past and claims it was never any other way.
Yet a discussion about the eliminating of taxation will not occur.
Sorry, I meant to include "with the left" in that sentence.
p.s. Of course, I don't mean everyone on the left (or the right). But having lived in both bright red and bright blue counties, I know that the generalization is reasonably accurate.
PC is a disease that infects both Left and Right; it may please right-wingers to pretend otherwise, but that's the way it is.
Not at all. While a tiny bit of PC infects all of us, it is only the left that elevates it to such an important position. If you tell a dirty joke to a white Baptist living in Alabama, you will be met with scorn and ostracism. If you tell the same dirty joke to a black feminist living in Berkeley, you will find your financial status in serious jeopardy as you are dragged through a lawsuit. If it happened at your workplace, you could lose your job.
I am a libertarian with anarcho-capitalist leanings. As such, I am politically incorrect to both the left and the right. Yet I can have a discussion about drug legalization with the right. Yet a discussion about the eliminating of taxation will not occur. They will not discuss this with you. I know this from experience. Both the left and the right think I'm wrong, but only the right respects my difference of opinion. The phrase "we must agree to disagree" will never be uttered by the left.
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if you're not sending .doc you might as well just send a random string of characters
Nonsense. Even MSWord is able to open non-Word document formats, such as RTF. It will choke on other proprietary formats though, but that's not the point. If there were open standards for documents, and which were more comprehensive than RTF, then MSWord would be able to open them automatically. It may munge the document when it subsequently saves it, but opening it should be no problem... if there were an open standard.
Actually, there are major parts of KDE that are under the BSD license (kwin, kicker, etc). But that's because KDE is not a GNU project. On the other hand, GNOME is a GNU project, and you won't find any BSD licensed code there. GNU has never once contributed any code to BSD under the BSD license, or to X under the MIT license.
Else, someone could claim to have the freedom to kill his neighbor
We're not talking about murder, manslaughter and death. We're talking about SOFTWARE. No one has ever been killed because the BSD license is too free. I know you don't really believe this, and are only trying to make a point, but when you make the moral equivalence between murder and not providing source code, you're priorities are surely out of whack.
In the real world of law, restrictions are necessary to maximize freedom. But that's because lives and properties can be destroyed. Murder and theft exist in the real world of flesh and blood. But information (and thus software) is different. Information cannot be destroyed. It cannot be murdered, killed, raped, imprisoned or stolen. No matter what the evil person does with their copy of the information, my copy is still perfectly safe and untouched by them.
Assuming that software needs to be protected by the same restrictions that protect human beings is ridiculous. The FSF does not understand the nature of information, and thus makes a mistake in trying to protect it from harm that cannot occur.
Most people didn't demand a Free Software X11 for SunOS or IRIX for the same reason they're not demanding a Free Software GDI and Win32 today. There simply wasn't a demand for it. Yet unlike GDI/Win32, there *WAS* a Free Software X11 nonetheless.
X11 is proof that you cannot steal software or destroy information. You can't shoot it with a gun or blow it up with a bomb. You can't burn it down or run it through a shredder. Sun and SGI couldn't destroy X11. Microsoft couldn't destroy Kerberos. Apple couldn't destroy BSD. They're all still here undamaged. Not even a scratch!
But that won't stop the GNU propaganda machine from claiming they were irrepairably harmed anyway...
I may not have the right to copy, modify and distribute the software, but I do have the right to use it. And that's a pretty damned big right. If I wasn't stupid enough to accidentally click a EULA, I also have the right to make backups, reverse engineer the software, and sell my copy when I am done with it.
My knickers are not in a pinch, I just want to stop the myth that all rights come from the GPL. Many of the arguments against proprietary software have to do with EULAs and not copyrights themselves.
Good arguments, but they do not require the GPL to come about. You're arguing in favor of Free Software, and not the GPL specifically.
Did you favorite application disappear? That's because it was proprietary. vi was my favorite editor twenty years ago. Guess what? It's still here, and not only is it still here, there are multiple outstanding versions of it to use, including the orginal. All Free Software. But vi was never under the GPL.
Like Frequent upgrades? I get that under FreeBSD, which doesn't use the GPL. Like fast turnaround for bug fixes? That doesn't require the GPL either.
The GPL may be the most popular Free Software license, but that does not mean you must use it any more than the popularity of Windows means it's what you have to use that as well.
t's like bringing a cake near your mouth but not letting you have it.
No, it's more like putting up a sign saying "free" in the middle of the park, then putting a sign on the enclosing fence saying "members only". If you're going to make the software free, then make it free. Don't go claiming it's free and then restrict its use.
GPL applications don't piss me off. As a user and non-contributor any Free Software license is sufficient. But GPL libraries do piss me off, because then their license restricts me. Everyone tells you they're free but in reality they're for members only. I'm not modifying, distributing or in any way harming the library when I use it, but it restricts me nonetheless.
They're pissed because they can't have a free ride.
That's not the reason I'm pissed. I'm pissed because I am not allowed to use what I legally possess. If I buy a commercial proprietary library, I get the right to link to it without regards to the license of my own software. But if I buy a GPL library I cannot do the same. It doesn't even matter if I don't distribute the library runtimes at all, I still can't do it. That's what pisses me off.
There are some libraries that Microsoft treats similarly. I can't use them without using the license Microsoft tells me to use. But guess what? I'm just as pissed at Microsoft for this! Don't pretend that you're the only ones BSD developers are pissed at! We are for Free Software, and are thus pissed at EVERYONE who restricts our rights to distribute our own software under the license of our choice. Fortunately most libraries don't fall into this category. Thank goodness for the LGPL...
You still haven't given me your version of history where a free product (X) didn't end up in a situation where something like XFree86 was needed.
I'll give you two examples, and they're both from the article: BSD and Kerberos. Both are still around today. Neither were destroyed by proprietary vendors. Neither required a separate project to "ressurect" them.
It's your history I find suspect. Some X implementations went proprietary, to be sure. But who did it? THE AUTHORS DID IT! The GPL would not have help one whit. Not at all. The old version would still have been under the GPL, but the new "improved" version would still have been proprietary. NOTHING WOULD HAVE CHANGED! The GPL does not restrict the author, it restricts the user.
Then you explain to me what happened to X.
You tell me. I sitting here right now with a Free Software version called X.org. The FSF says it is free. The OSI says it is open. I am able to download it, modify it, build it, utilize it, distribute it, and even fold, spindle and mutilate it.
If you're trying to argue that the MIT license makes X non-free, you're going to have to explain the presence of X.org on my system, last updated with fresh source a mere two weeks ago. And explain how I even have a choice between X.org and XFree86.
For a while, Unix platforms themselves were commercial (your word) products. Thus it wasn't a great strech of anyone's imagination to see that the X11 implementations that ran on them were commercial as well. But where are those commercial X11 packages today? Sun is on the verge of opening [sic] OpenWindows if they haven't already done so by the time I right this. MetroX is relegated to the niche market, and the company I worked for actually dumped it two years ago in favor of XFree86 for our embedded products. Any others still around?
Why is that today everyone uses GDI and not X?
Do you really need to ask that question? Everyon is using the GDI because everyone is using Windows. Duh! When 90% of users use Windows, then 90% of users use GDI. How much more basic can you get? Your implication that Microsoft would have otherwised use X is ludicrous. The system Microsoft designed GDI for was incapable of running any X11 implementation of the time.
So what? The BSD TCP/IP stack is available to everyone. E v e r y o n e! It was funded by the US government, and as part of US policy was subsequently made available to everyone. But GPL advocates hate this. They don't want freedom for everyone, they only want it for their friends.
GPL advocates say the BSD license is a license to steal. WTF! How the hell can it be stolen? By what possible mechanism can it be taken away from me? Did they imagine that Bill Gates would come to my door with armed brownshirts to wipe my harddrives? That is the attitude of the FSF. They truly do not understand the nature of information. They really think it can be stolen. They do not realize that information cannot be destroyed, only forgotten.
Proprietary vendors want to horde information and lock it away in vaults. But the FSF isn't much better. They want to keep information safely behind the fences of public preserves. They do not want people to do with it as they will.
...then the items are simply governed by copyright law and they have NO rights.
Nonsense! Stop drinking the FSF Koolaid! Copyright does *NOT* grant all possible rights to the author. The author gets some right exclusively, but by no means does he get all rights. That's the reason why Microsoft and all other proprietary developers use EULAs, so they can get the user to click-away MORE rights than what the law provides.
This myth that copyright is the ultimate infringement against information must stop.
...the fact that you have to buy every little damn thing for it. $20 for focus follows mouse, $15 for a decent trackpd driver, $10 for that, $25 for something else. It's a never ending trail of money.
So it's all about the money then? You ought to tell the FSF about that. For some reason they think it's not about the money at all, but the free-ness. You guys need to get your stories straight.
I used to joke that I could never be tried by a jury of my peers - my peers are too smart to be in jury duty.
And yet there you were, on a jury. You were so dumb as they were not to get off, so they obviously were your peers.
Let's abolish everything, dammit! If we cannot have a perfect system, let's have no system at all. It's far better to let murderers and rapists roam our streets freely than to potentially embarass someone during an investigation.
But innocent people are charged all the time without even owning a Safeway Club Card. Banning such cards isn't going to prevent this from occuring. So why the fsck are we talking about how evil they are?
Of course he doesn't have ny references! 87% of all statistics are made up on the spot! But if you throw numbers at an argument and boldface selected words, people will believe you.
Everyone who has ever compiled a piece of Open Source software has used GNU's make.
It is quite possible to compile a piece of Open Source Software without GNU make. It's not easy, to be sure, since there are so many projects out there that require GNU make (automake doesn't help matters much), but it is possible. There is BSD make, Solaris make, Microsoft's strange nmake, and several others. GNU is but one of many, and it's not even the only free make.
The problem is that the make standard is so tepid that to get a decent make you need to extend it. So what we end up in reality is a lack of a make standard. I can write a complete C program that will compile with any standard C compiler. I can write a powerful bourne shell script that runs on any Bourne compliant shell. But to write a Makefile that will work under all makes is quite difficult.
I'm just always interested to see how people justify seemingly obvious contradictions like that.
The difference is coercive force. You must obey the government, but your relation with your employer is voluntary. If you don't like your employer, you can find another. But if you don't like your government, tough luck!
Some may argue that employers use economic coercion, but anarcho-capitalists dismiss this as socialist myth. It might seem sometimes that we are slaves to our employers, but in reality we are not. The options open to use for employment are many and varied. We can find another job. We can start our own business. We can reduce our economic lifestyle and be unemployed or retire early. Contrast that to the government, where the only choices you are given are to obey or be imprisoned.
I only "tend" towards anarcho-capitalism. Besides, since my post was not advocating anarcho-capitalism, and merely mentioned it, the fact that you took such great offense at my anarcho-capitalist tendencies seems to validate my point.
If you are having a discussion about completely eliminating taxation, no one will take you seriously.
They may not take the prospects of it every happening seriously (I myself don't), and they may have problems with the underlying premises of my argument, but the right, in general, will take ME seriously. They will not say "shut up you sound like an adolescent", but will genuinely listen to my arguments (and then patiently try to explain to be why I'm wrong). They may not take the idea itself seriously, but they certainly do take diversity of ideas seriously.
People may laugh at that last point, but it is true in my experience. If it doesn't look like you're arguing just to start a fight, and it doesn't appear you're arguing verbatum from some flyer you found at Whole Foods, then most people on the ideological right will genuinely respect you for your beliefs.
Marvin as a cute robot is perfect! Imagine that hypercute android speaking like the old depressed Marvin (it will be the same voice actor). It's going to be great! Remember, Marvin was designed by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporations. How else should he look?
That sounds like Lucas. He claims he had the full story line from episode I through VI all mapped out before he ever started. That's utter crap. The "Episode IV" title wasn't there originally. Really it wasn't. Han shot first, seriously.
No, I'm sorry, Adams does NOT sound like Lucas. Adams just constantly fiddles with the story. But Lucas takes WhiteOut to the past and claims it was never any other way.
Yet a discussion about the eliminating of taxation will not occur.
Sorry, I meant to include "with the left" in that sentence.
p.s. Of course, I don't mean everyone on the left (or the right). But having lived in both bright red and bright blue counties, I know that the generalization is reasonably accurate.
PC is a disease that infects both Left and Right; it may please right-wingers to pretend otherwise, but that's the way it is.
Not at all. While a tiny bit of PC infects all of us, it is only the left that elevates it to such an important position. If you tell a dirty joke to a white Baptist living in Alabama, you will be met with scorn and ostracism. If you tell the same dirty joke to a black feminist living in Berkeley, you will find your financial status in serious jeopardy as you are dragged through a lawsuit. If it happened at your workplace, you could lose your job.
I am a libertarian with anarcho-capitalist leanings. As such, I am politically incorrect to both the left and the right. Yet I can have a discussion about drug legalization with the right. Yet a discussion about the eliminating of taxation will not occur. They will not discuss this with you. I know this from experience. Both the left and the right think I'm wrong, but only the right respects my difference of opinion. The phrase "we must agree to disagree" will never be uttered by the left.
Husband returns home from completely innocent business trip, where he received a $2 bill as change at a restaurant:
Husband: "I'm home!"
Wife: [sniff, sniff] "You two timing bastard!"