i am not saying that this means that cold fusion is real...
Wait! You just said that folks at Oak Ridge have repeated experiements "which resulted in a nuclear reaction taking place." Now you're saying you don't know if cold fusion is real. Which is it? If there's a repeatable experiment, then it's real. If there's not, then we continue our long twenty year wait of skepticism...
folks at Oak Ridge and the russian academy of science have both repeated experiments involving ultrasound and deuterated acetone which resulted in a nuclear reaction taking place...in a test tube.
Too bad they didn't tell the DOE about it, because they just released a report that says it's all bunk. Funny that timing...
Tell that to people in the rust belt who lost their manufacturing jobs in the 70s and haven't found a replacement in 30 years.
Screw that! What about all the people who lost their jobs when the buggy whip industry when belly up? They still haven't found a replacement in 100 years.
The game you describe as rolemaster, and the game I played called rolemaster, sound like two completely different games that happen to share the same name for some inexplicable reason, then.
If you find warriors overbalanced, are you remembering that they ONLY get two picks per level? A warrior's advantage is that he doesn't have to specialize in one weapon like most other classes have to. All of your arms and semi-mages get two picks as well. Not as cheap, but certainly cheap enough to buy double picks if they want.
My belief is pretty much that the rules give you some structure to build on - but provided the group is good the rules are close to invisible while you play.
That's true to a certain extent. With the right group of players, you might not even need to crack open the rule book for months. But even the most mild mannered player can transform into a rules lawyer during the climax of an adventure. I actually prefer it when the players do NOT know the rules, so they can't call me on a "mistake" or remind of a rule in the addendum to the errata of an optional rulebook that's been out of print for five years. (as you said, sometime's it's impossible to chuck a player).
With the right GM and the right group of players, I could handle AD&D. The last time I played AD&D it was very good. But the adventure was set in Discworld, and was so cornball it didn't matter what rules were used.
You are lying by claiming to know what I am thinking. Stop it.
That's what Miss Cleo told me, so if you have a problem, take it up with her:-)
If someone who wants to be good at X only has to buy one skill, while someone who wants to be good ay Y has to buy 10 because the skills are not the same narrowness as each other, then there's a problem.
Not at all. While I won't claim Rolemaster has all of their skills balanced perfectly, they're still pretty damned good. To be a decent fighter you need to know at least three skills well: you primary weapon, your off-hand weapon (typically a shield), and maneuvering in armor. But you would still be a lousy soldier if that's all you were good at.
I gamemastered Rolemaster for over ten years with at least two sessions a month. And not once did I run into the problem of warriors being overbalanced compared to any other class. I can't say the same thing about some of the optional classes from the companion books, but the official classes were all balanced.
But why should a GM need a ton of custom rules? Isn't that itself an indictment of the game? I judge game systems by the amount of additional house rules I need to come up with. AD&D isn't all that bad though, compared to some games. Check out Decipher's LOTR game. I swear they printed the first draft by mistake, and are stubbornly refusing to admit it.
Every GM is going to tweak any rules system to his or her own taste. But if those house rules expand beyond a page or two, it's time to look for a different system that better suits you.
The keyword there is "heroic". Rolemaster isn't for heroic games. One reason is because it treats the PCs as identical to NPCs. Another reason is that if you're fighting ten orcs, you're toast. That's because orcs are dangerous. No really, they are! If you want heroic games where the PCs never have a chance of dying, stick with AD&D.
the system is not balanced between fighters and other types
That's because you're still thinking in AD&D character class terms. A fighter does more than fighting. Take a "fighter" from any era in history and I GUARANTEE you that they will have more skills than merely using one specific weapon skill. In regards to Rolemaster (which I am not claiming as perfect, no way, no how), after you've spent those four points for two checks in swords, you still have more than a dozen points left to spend. They'll probably go to maneuvering skills, social skills, survival skills, communication skills, etc.
It's only unbalanced if you run a game where weapon combat dominates. However, in a campaign where an "acrobat" character would be useful, the fighter is going to be balanced very quickly. Heck, in most games he's going to be so boring no one will want to play him!
Besides, Rolemaster has rules for a non-profession profession, so use it if you don't want classes.
Sounds like more a complaint of most gamers than one of the D&D system.
I've got complaints about the system too. When v2 came out people said it was so much better, so I tried it again and it still sucked, even with a great adventure storyline and great GM. Ditto for v3.
I remember people saying v2 had added skills, so that people who liked skill-based systems (like me) should give it a try. Huh? Those weren't skills! Now they have "feats". Aaargh!
The problem is that AD&D/d20 is designed for/around a specific style of gaming, and does not work well elsewhere without a serious addition of house rules. You mention realism, but my complaint isn't about realism. The old Star Wars game (Mayfair's pre-d20 system) was in no way realistic, but it kicked d20's butt IMHO.
Role playing is about playing a role. Duh. That means characters. AD&D doesn't give you decent characters, it gives you walking magic item inventories with a name. Ask a Rolemaster, Runequest or Harnmaster player about their character and you'll hear about who they are and what they have done. Ask an AD&D player about his character and you'll hear about what levels and items and stats.
Am I being unfair to AD&D? Maybe. But I HAVE given it many chances to redeem itself. I HAVE gone back and tried it again. But always it ends up being the same munchkin game. If you're not running a munchkin AD&D, it's because as a gamemaster you've spent days and days "fixing" the rules for your non-munchkin campaign.
I do find it funny that you talk about people complaining that D&D is too difficult to learn and then turn around and say you like ROLEMASTER, of all things.
You sort of answer this yourself. Rolemaster (rollmonster) is a very simple game. You only need to learn a few basic rules to play the game. Everything else is just tons of charts using those simple rules.
Coming from a white collar family (teachers) I can say that we certainly DID have the idea of side jobs. My father had side jobs until he started making enough that he didn't need them anymore, and then he still a bit of landscaping in the neighborhood until the day he died. My mother quit teaching when she had children, but continued tutoring until not too long ago.
This isn't a blue collar versus white collar thing. All you need for a side job is the desire/need for a little bit more income, and the time to do it. I know many blue collar workers who don't have side jobs, and many white collar workers who do.
ADnD fills the Microsoft niche in RPG world. Like Windows, most roleplayers use it because they simply don't know that other games exist. Or they claim that it's too difficult to learn a new set of rules, yet gladly "upgrade" to d20/3.5 without skipping a beat.
I've never understood the appeal of ADnD. I stopped playing it the instant I bought my first non-TSR game twenty years ago. I never looked back. In the fantasy genre I've played MERP, Rolemaster, HarnMaster, RuneQuest and many other minor games. Also through in Traveller, Spacemaster, JB007, GURPS, etc. My favorites are Rolemaster (now pretty much defunct) and HarnMaster (still going strong with a tiny but awesome community).
RPGs shouldn't be about rolling dice and counting coup, but that's what the preteen munchkin wants. Sadly, that's the target market for RPGs. Double sadly, many munchkins never grow up. It's hard finding players interested in your storytelling style of gaming. They don't want political intrigue or realistic social settings. If the world doesn't have wall-to-wall dungeons with new-never-before-fought monsters on each floor, they're not interested. In the height of the LOTR movie mania it was difficult to find players for a LOTR game.
I think back to the beginnings of the industry and wonder why the TSR competitors didn't do better. They're like the Microsoft of RPG.
You sound so much like my old girlfriend. I still shudder at her memory. She once left her three year old kid home alone for the weekend because she had to go to a con. That was the last straw. The dad sued for custody and he won (in a state where dad's never get custody) by default because she was too busy playing DnD to show up to court. Is she still playing that LG vampire paladin after twenty five years? Probably.
I turned down the opportunity to take Six Sigma training. After the damage my brain went through during out CMM initiative, I don't think I could handle any more quality improvement. For those that don't know, CMM stands for "Crazy Madness Model", which rates companies by who baffling their software development processes are. If your developers still have time to code, you aren't doing CMM right.
If government is so wonderful, then why don't we have government do EVERYTHING? Why stop at police, fire, schools, healthcare and wifi? I say we need totalitarianism now! Make the government do everything. Have the government send me a maid to clean my room. Have them send me meals. Screw subsidized milk for the poor, I want free milk for me! Nationalize gardeners! Nationalize beauticians! I'm sick and tired of driving Hondas, Fords and Toyotas, it's time I got myself a gub'mint car!
Whew! I feel better now that I got that out of my system. The point is, there's a line between what the government should do and what the private individuals and groups should do. The only difference between the radical libertarian and the died in the wool socialist, and everyone in between, is where that line should be drawn.
Of course government works. But guess what? So does private business!
I'm taking a big gamble here, and hoping you're just not trolling for a cheap argument...
Why is it that in America, the private sector is placed on such a high pedastal?
It's not that the private sector is placed on a high pedestal, it's that the government isn't there either. The US started out as a rejection of large centralized government. Though it's now become one, that ethos is still there. We don't trust the government. I'm not talking about not trusting Clinton or not trusting Bush, I'm talking about not trusting the system itself. We don't trust congress and we don't trust the bureaucracies. The only government we do trust is local government, and that we only trust to a point.
There is a strong libertarian streak in the US psyche. It doesn't matter if you're conservative or liberal here, you believe in small government. Even the Green Party, which is very European in character, wants to reduce corporate welfare. We are all agreed that we want government to spend less and do less, we just disagree in the areas to spend and do less in.
Another reason is that the US is very pro business. That does NOT mean pro-corporation, as very few businesses are corporations. We are a nation of shopkeepers. We start businesses at a drop of a hat. "Mainstreet USA" refers to family businesses, not corporate franchises. Consequently, we're not automatically hostile to business, not even big business.
Because we have so many small businesses, we tend to understand business somewhat. Pretty much all of us know people who have started their own business from scratch. Many of us know people who have been very successful at it. Thus, when business is characterized as an amorphous corporate evil, we know better.
And if so, why do people let private industry run to the government for protection from such things like a community based wi-fi network?
In other words, why do people look to government to protect them from the ravages of government? Because there's no one else out there. It's the government with the cops and courts. It's sucks having to compete against tax funded wifi networks, but who else are you going to turn to to cry "foul"? If there were some organized crime mob going about time extorting protection money from Verizon customers, then Verizon could go to the police. But what do you do if it's the government doing the extortion?
This is a tax funded government network, and no amount of euphemistic "community based" terminology can change that fact.
With regards to municipal networks, most Americans won't have a problem with keeping it private. *NOT* because we want to screw the poor, but simply because we don't think it's the purview of the government. We don't want them doing it for the same reason we don't want them creating municipal hotdog stands. It's not their role in society. Every time the government has financed an industry's infrastructure we've ended up with monopolies.
GNU argues that the lack of multiple implementations is sufficient to warrant infringement, but I cannot agree because it doesn't make any sense. Let me QUOTE to you the copyright definition of derivation, because copyright law is the ONLY thing that matter. In fact, to skirt the borders of heresy, what copyright law says is supremely more important than the opinions of RMS or Eben Moglen (both of whom are quite necessarily biased in their legal interpretations).
A ?derivative work? is a work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a ?derivative work?.
By making use of a function I am not recasting the function. I am not transforming it. Nor am I adapting it. It hasn't been translated, arranged or dramatized. There are not revisions, annotations or other modifications to it. Also note the distinct lack of any reference to a "process memory space".
From one viewpoint it may be possible to say that a function call elaborates on a function. But in such a case the same occurs for runtime linkage. Are you prepared to say that the GPL expands to cover runtime linkage? Because GNU is already on record saying it does not.
Besides, copyright isn't a concrete absolute unalienable right granted by God to the author. Which is funny because GPL advocates act like it is. There is such as thing "fair use". If calling a function in a publicly available and "free" library isn't "fair use", I don't know what is.
RMS once wrote an essay pondering a world in which people didn't have the right to read. How ironic, because he's specifically advocating a world without the right to "use" libraries. There's not much difference between being forbidden to read a book without the author's permission, and not being able to call a function without the coder's permission.
Are you quite sure? Whether he is a sole proprietor or a corporation with one employee (himself), he is still personally liable for his actions.
I'm pretty sure. I once had to collect a judgement from a guy who was self-incorporated. It was a royal pain the ass. He filed personal bankruptcy, with himself as creditor. I couldn't collect from the corporation because the contract I was trying to collect on wasn't in the corporation's name. Doing a bit more research I discovered he had been doing this for over ten years.
The combining into a single address space is an argument that GNU uses, but it's a completely arbitrary distinction. This argues that the *mechanism* of linkage alone determines the derivation. Otherwise what's the difference between dynamic linkage, which GNU says infringes, and runtime linkage, which they say does not?
p.s. Static linkage is a different case because it actually incorporates and distributes the orginal work.
No, it's not elaboration. To take sqrt() itself, the program could be linking to GNU libc, Diet libc, Dinkumware, BSD libc, or even a homegrown sqrt(). It can't be derivative of all those libraries. The only thing being used is the signature, or in other words, the API, and the courts *have* ruled that you can't copyright an API.
That there are multiple implementations of sqrt() proves that it's an API. But you don't need multiple implementations to do this, all you need to do is make the signature publicly available to other projects for the purpose of linkage.
I believe it is. There are border cases but I believe this very clearly creates a derivative work.
My calling your function by its signature in no way expands, elaborates, translates, modifies or alters your function. In fact, I don't even need access to anything *BUT* the function signature to link to it.
With just that one command, it'd be piss-easy to take over the box...
Could you please explain to me why? I just want to be sure. The only thing I can imagine is that you could do something like "sudo cat newaccount >>/etc/shadow", but I suspect that this obvious backdoor was firmly slammed shut years ago.
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i am not saying that this means that cold fusion is real...
Wait! You just said that folks at Oak Ridge have repeated experiements "which resulted in a nuclear reaction taking place." Now you're saying you don't know if cold fusion is real. Which is it? If there's a repeatable experiment, then it's real. If there's not, then we continue our long twenty year wait of skepticism...
folks at Oak Ridge and the russian academy of science have both repeated experiments involving ultrasound and deuterated acetone which resulted in a nuclear reaction taking place...in a test tube.
Too bad they didn't tell the DOE about it, because they just released a report that says it's all bunk. Funny that timing...
Tell that to people in the rust belt who lost their manufacturing jobs in the 70s and haven't found a replacement in 30 years.
Screw that! What about all the people who lost their jobs when the buggy whip industry when belly up? They still haven't found a replacement in 100 years.
The game you describe as rolemaster, and the game I played called rolemaster, sound like two completely different games that happen to share the same name for some inexplicable reason, then.
If you find warriors overbalanced, are you remembering that they ONLY get two picks per level? A warrior's advantage is that he doesn't have to specialize in one weapon like most other classes have to. All of your arms and semi-mages get two picks as well. Not as cheap, but certainly cheap enough to buy double picks if they want.
My belief is pretty much that the rules give you some structure to build on - but provided the group is good the rules are close to invisible while you play.
That's true to a certain extent. With the right group of players, you might not even need to crack open the rule book for months. But even the most mild mannered player can transform into a rules lawyer during the climax of an adventure. I actually prefer it when the players do NOT know the rules, so they can't call me on a "mistake" or remind of a rule in the addendum to the errata of an optional rulebook that's been out of print for five years. (as you said, sometime's it's impossible to chuck a player).
With the right GM and the right group of players, I could handle AD&D. The last time I played AD&D it was very good. But the adventure was set in Discworld, and was so cornball it didn't matter what rules were used.
You are lying by claiming to know what I am thinking. Stop it.
:-)
That's what Miss Cleo told me, so if you have a problem, take it up with her
If someone who wants to be good at X only has to buy one skill, while someone who wants to be good ay Y has to buy 10 because the skills are not the same narrowness as each other, then there's a problem.
Not at all. While I won't claim Rolemaster has all of their skills balanced perfectly, they're still pretty damned good. To be a decent fighter you need to know at least three skills well: you primary weapon, your off-hand weapon (typically a shield), and maneuvering in armor. But you would still be a lousy soldier if that's all you were good at.
I gamemastered Rolemaster for over ten years with at least two sessions a month. And not once did I run into the problem of warriors being overbalanced compared to any other class. I can't say the same thing about some of the optional classes from the companion books, but the official classes were all balanced.
But why should a GM need a ton of custom rules? Isn't that itself an indictment of the game? I judge game systems by the amount of additional house rules I need to come up with. AD&D isn't all that bad though, compared to some games. Check out Decipher's LOTR game. I swear they printed the first draft by mistake, and are stubbornly refusing to admit it.
Every GM is going to tweak any rules system to his or her own taste. But if those house rules expand beyond a page or two, it's time to look for a different system that better suits you.
...but far too deadly for a heroic game.
The keyword there is "heroic". Rolemaster isn't for heroic games. One reason is because it treats the PCs as identical to NPCs. Another reason is that if you're fighting ten orcs, you're toast. That's because orcs are dangerous. No really, they are! If you want heroic games where the PCs never have a chance of dying, stick with AD&D.
the system is not balanced between fighters and other types
That's because you're still thinking in AD&D character class terms. A fighter does more than fighting. Take a "fighter" from any era in history and I GUARANTEE you that they will have more skills than merely using one specific weapon skill. In regards to Rolemaster (which I am not claiming as perfect, no way, no how), after you've spent those four points for two checks in swords, you still have more than a dozen points left to spend. They'll probably go to maneuvering skills, social skills, survival skills, communication skills, etc.
It's only unbalanced if you run a game where weapon combat dominates. However, in a campaign where an "acrobat" character would be useful, the fighter is going to be balanced very quickly. Heck, in most games he's going to be so boring no one will want to play him!
Besides, Rolemaster has rules for a non-profession profession, so use it if you don't want classes.
Sounds like more a complaint of most gamers than one of the D&D system.
I've got complaints about the system too. When v2 came out people said it was so much better, so I tried it again and it still sucked, even with a great adventure storyline and great GM. Ditto for v3.
I remember people saying v2 had added skills, so that people who liked skill-based systems (like me) should give it a try. Huh? Those weren't skills! Now they have "feats". Aaargh!
The problem is that AD&D/d20 is designed for/around a specific style of gaming, and does not work well elsewhere without a serious addition of house rules. You mention realism, but my complaint isn't about realism. The old Star Wars game (Mayfair's pre-d20 system) was in no way realistic, but it kicked d20's butt IMHO.
Role playing is about playing a role. Duh. That means characters. AD&D doesn't give you decent characters, it gives you walking magic item inventories with a name. Ask a Rolemaster, Runequest or Harnmaster player about their character and you'll hear about who they are and what they have done. Ask an AD&D player about his character and you'll hear about what levels and items and stats.
Am I being unfair to AD&D? Maybe. But I HAVE given it many chances to redeem itself. I HAVE gone back and tried it again. But always it ends up being the same munchkin game. If you're not running a munchkin AD&D, it's because as a gamemaster you've spent days and days "fixing" the rules for your non-munchkin campaign.
I do find it funny that you talk about people complaining that D&D is too difficult to learn and then turn around and say you like ROLEMASTER, of all things.
You sort of answer this yourself. Rolemaster (rollmonster) is a very simple game. You only need to learn a few basic rules to play the game. Everything else is just tons of charts using those simple rules.
Use < and > instead of brackets. Works every time. Now that's karma whoring!
Coming from a white collar family (teachers) I can say that we certainly DID have the idea of side jobs. My father had side jobs until he started making enough that he didn't need them anymore, and then he still a bit of landscaping in the neighborhood until the day he died. My mother quit teaching when she had children, but continued tutoring until not too long ago.
This isn't a blue collar versus white collar thing. All you need for a side job is the desire/need for a little bit more income, and the time to do it. I know many blue collar workers who don't have side jobs, and many white collar workers who do.
ADnD fills the Microsoft niche in RPG world. Like Windows, most roleplayers use it because they simply don't know that other games exist. Or they claim that it's too difficult to learn a new set of rules, yet gladly "upgrade" to d20/3.5 without skipping a beat.
I've never understood the appeal of ADnD. I stopped playing it the instant I bought my first non-TSR game twenty years ago. I never looked back. In the fantasy genre I've played MERP, Rolemaster, HarnMaster, RuneQuest and many other minor games. Also through in Traveller, Spacemaster, JB007, GURPS, etc. My favorites are Rolemaster (now pretty much defunct) and HarnMaster (still going strong with a tiny but awesome community).
RPGs shouldn't be about rolling dice and counting coup, but that's what the preteen munchkin wants. Sadly, that's the target market for RPGs. Double sadly, many munchkins never grow up. It's hard finding players interested in your storytelling style of gaming. They don't want political intrigue or realistic social settings. If the world doesn't have wall-to-wall dungeons with new-never-before-fought monsters on each floor, they're not interested. In the height of the LOTR movie mania it was difficult to find players for a LOTR game.
I think back to the beginnings of the industry and wonder why the TSR competitors didn't do better. They're like the Microsoft of RPG.
You sound so much like my old girlfriend. I still shudder at her memory. She once left her three year old kid home alone for the weekend because she had to go to a con. That was the last straw. The dad sued for custody and he won (in a state where dad's never get custody) by default because she was too busy playing DnD to show up to court. Is she still playing that LG vampire paladin after twenty five years? Probably.
I turned down the opportunity to take Six Sigma training. After the damage my brain went through during out CMM initiative, I don't think I could handle any more quality improvement. For those that don't know, CMM stands for "Crazy Madness Model", which rates companies by who baffling their software development processes are. If your developers still have time to code, you aren't doing CMM right.
If government is so wonderful, then why don't we have government do EVERYTHING? Why stop at police, fire, schools, healthcare and wifi? I say we need totalitarianism now! Make the government do everything. Have the government send me a maid to clean my room. Have them send me meals. Screw subsidized milk for the poor, I want free milk for me! Nationalize gardeners! Nationalize beauticians! I'm sick and tired of driving Hondas, Fords and Toyotas, it's time I got myself a gub'mint car!
Whew! I feel better now that I got that out of my system. The point is, there's a line between what the government should do and what the private individuals and groups should do. The only difference between the radical libertarian and the died in the wool socialist, and everyone in between, is where that line should be drawn.
Of course government works. But guess what? So does private business!
I'm taking a big gamble here, and hoping you're just not trolling for a cheap argument...
Why is it that in America, the private sector is placed on such a high pedastal?
It's not that the private sector is placed on a high pedestal, it's that the government isn't there either. The US started out as a rejection of large centralized government. Though it's now become one, that ethos is still there. We don't trust the government. I'm not talking about not trusting Clinton or not trusting Bush, I'm talking about not trusting the system itself. We don't trust congress and we don't trust the bureaucracies. The only government we do trust is local government, and that we only trust to a point.
There is a strong libertarian streak in the US psyche. It doesn't matter if you're conservative or liberal here, you believe in small government. Even the Green Party, which is very European in character, wants to reduce corporate welfare. We are all agreed that we want government to spend less and do less, we just disagree in the areas to spend and do less in.
Another reason is that the US is very pro business. That does NOT mean pro-corporation, as very few businesses are corporations. We are a nation of shopkeepers. We start businesses at a drop of a hat. "Mainstreet USA" refers to family businesses, not corporate franchises. Consequently, we're not automatically hostile to business, not even big business.
Because we have so many small businesses, we tend to understand business somewhat. Pretty much all of us know people who have started their own business from scratch. Many of us know people who have been very successful at it. Thus, when business is characterized as an amorphous corporate evil, we know better.
And if so, why do people let private industry run to the government for protection from such things like a community based wi-fi network?
In other words, why do people look to government to protect them from the ravages of government? Because there's no one else out there. It's the government with the cops and courts. It's sucks having to compete against tax funded wifi networks, but who else are you going to turn to to cry "foul"? If there were some organized crime mob going about time extorting protection money from Verizon customers, then Verizon could go to the police. But what do you do if it's the government doing the extortion?
This is a tax funded government network, and no amount of euphemistic "community based" terminology can change that fact.
With regards to municipal networks, most Americans won't have a problem with keeping it private. *NOT* because we want to screw the poor, but simply because we don't think it's the purview of the government. We don't want them doing it for the same reason we don't want them creating municipal hotdog stands. It's not their role in society. Every time the government has financed an industry's infrastructure we've ended up with monopolies.
By making use of a function I am not recasting the function. I am not transforming it. Nor am I adapting it. It hasn't been translated, arranged or dramatized. There are not revisions, annotations or other modifications to it. Also note the distinct lack of any reference to a "process memory space".
From one viewpoint it may be possible to say that a function call elaborates on a function. But in such a case the same occurs for runtime linkage. Are you prepared to say that the GPL expands to cover runtime linkage? Because GNU is already on record saying it does not.
Besides, copyright isn't a concrete absolute unalienable right granted by God to the author. Which is funny because GPL advocates act like it is. There is such as thing "fair use". If calling a function in a publicly available and "free" library isn't "fair use", I don't know what is.
RMS once wrote an essay pondering a world in which people didn't have the right to read. How ironic, because he's specifically advocating a world without the right to "use" libraries. There's not much difference between being forbidden to read a book without the author's permission, and not being able to call a function without the coder's permission.
Are you quite sure? Whether he is a sole proprietor or a corporation with one employee (himself), he is still personally liable for his actions.
I'm pretty sure. I once had to collect a judgement from a guy who was self-incorporated. It was a royal pain the ass. He filed personal bankruptcy, with himself as creditor. I couldn't collect from the corporation because the contract I was trying to collect on wasn't in the corporation's name. Doing a bit more research I discovered he had been doing this for over ten years.
But on the other side, I can't stand all these statist managed market fans thinking that the government is some miraculous economic powerhouse.
The combining into a single address space is an argument that GNU uses, but it's a completely arbitrary distinction. This argues that the *mechanism* of linkage alone determines the derivation. Otherwise what's the difference between dynamic linkage, which GNU says infringes, and runtime linkage, which they say does not?
p.s. Static linkage is a different case because it actually incorporates and distributes the orginal work.
No, it's not elaboration. To take sqrt() itself, the program could be linking to GNU libc, Diet libc, Dinkumware, BSD libc, or even a homegrown sqrt(). It can't be derivative of all those libraries. The only thing being used is the signature, or in other words, the API, and the courts *have* ruled that you can't copyright an API.
That there are multiple implementations of sqrt() proves that it's an API. But you don't need multiple implementations to do this, all you need to do is make the signature publicly available to other projects for the purpose of linkage.
I believe it is. There are border cases but I believe this very clearly creates a derivative work.
My calling your function by its signature in no way expands, elaborates, translates, modifies or alters your function. In fact, I don't even need access to anything *BUT* the function signature to link to it.
This is an example of usage, not derivation.
With just that one command, it'd be piss-easy to take over the box...
/etc/shadow", but I suspect that this obvious backdoor was firmly slammed shut years ago.
Could you please explain to me why? I just want to be sure. The only thing I can imagine is that you could do something like "sudo cat newaccount >>