The commercial gain has nothing to do with it. Zip, zilch, nada. In fact, the GPL encourages commercial gain. Start talking about GPL software being free-as-in-beer and you'll be shouted down. Commercial Redhat Corporation is on an equal footing with noncommercial Debian.
Second, the spirit of copyleft and copyright are absolutely identical: regulating the distribution of creative works. Start throwing binary-only derivations of GPL works on p2p networks and the FSF will become unglued with outrage. Not because you are subjugating users, but because you are violating copyright! Go and look at all the instances of GPL violations. About one percent of the rhetoric is about subjugating users. The rest is shouts of "you can't do that with my software!"
Frankly, it would be much easier to simply not give the students free internet access. Make them buy their own account, just like everyone else does in the real world. Then crack down hard on inappropriate use of the university network. I fail to understand why students and universities need special exceptions to the rules the rest of have no problems with.
That credo was invented by greedy, proprietary corporations.
But also a useful strategy for other businesses as well. Your funding runs out in three days. It will take three weeks to fix that last remaining nasty bug. Do you:
A) Fire all the employees and wistfully remark, "well, we tried"?
B) Release the software with that bug in it, issue a 1.1 version later, and retain your employees?
We should definitely lessen our impact on our environment. The first step is to abandon this "green" religion that's been pushed on it. It prevents any sort of rational thought on the matter.
The green way is to recycle aluminum cans, which involves significant energy and chemical expenditure for the recycling. The old fashioned way, before the greenies took over, was to use returnable bottles. It was called "conservation". People didn't waste resources simply because it was wasteful. Nowadays we can waste as much as we want so long as we separate our waste into the proper waste containers first.
You know, if people didn't go out and by new mobos every six months because they're substituting for diminished manhoods, then they wouldn't be trashing their old mobos every six months. This race to get the biggest and fasted CPU and GPU on the block is much more dangerous than the lead in a mobo that's being used past its planned obsolescence date.
I'm old enough to remember the conservation movement. It was about not wasting stuff. Then it got replaced by the environmentalism movement and suddenly people think it's perfectly fine to waste stuff, so long as they recycle what they waste. Common sense was replaced with a religion. Madness.
Yes, I have read the article. Have the moderators? I think not!
To quote from the article (to save the moderators from actually having to read it): "The most obvious step Google could take would be to encrypt a user's e-mail, searching index and other associated data, so it can only be accessed using the user's password, and of course that password should not be stored when an e-mail session is over."
Nowhere in this quote does it say or imply that the government is involved with this encryption. In short, this is merely a call to Google to encrypt your email. Voluntarily. Without resort to government coercion to force them to.
Please read the article. Then read the post I replied to. Then read my reply. You will see that it is completely apropos and on topic.
The original postulation was, "Debian is a community-developed project." The Debian community is not developing Debian, instead a self-selected subset of the Debian community is doing it. While this subset is indeed a community unto themselves, it is NOT the same as the Debian community.
If you go out into the world (or merely the Debian development lists) and ask "who is the Debian community", you will not be told it's only a thousand or so specific individuals. Instead you're going to be told about tens of thousands of users instead. Likewise, if you ask "who is the community of Midville", you will NOT be told "the city council of Midville".
By saying Debian is community-developed, you are trying to impart to Debian a quality that does not exist. This is not a bad thing, and should not be inferred as such.
If the GPL had a clause (or the kernel added an exception) that would allow binary firmware, then Debian would not care about this issue. Even though the spirit of the GPL would not have changed. Even though the Debian guidelines had not changed. Even though the relation between Debian users and the hardware manufacturers had not changed. Their actions in this matter are not based on ideology, but on adhering to the exact letter of a license even though other distributions that actually employ teams of lawyers have found no problems with it.
Extremes, by definition, are not pragmatic!
Precisely. Which is why I used that phrase. Not wanting to get sued is pragmatic. But their efforts to absolutely guarantee this move beyond pragmatism to absurdity.
Well the previous "news" site wasn't a news site. Any story that has more adjectives than nouns and adverbs than verbs is not giving you the news, it is giving you an extremely biased opinion at best, and a shameless lie at worst.
is he just being selective in his outrage and trying to play his leaving the LUG into an opportunity to get a better job with one of the LA antiwar groups?
Isn't it obvious? The purpose of protests is never to change the world, but only to boost the egos of the protest organizers and participants.
Not to disparage OpenBSD at all, but the mere fact that you're asking such questions means you're probably not their target user. At least not at the present.
The purpose of your system and your personal inclinations should guide your choice of BSD. If you want cutting edge software then OpenBSD may not be for you, because it stresses stability over recency. It's so conservative in this regard it makes Debian-stable seem daring.
No it's not. It is an oligarchy of those who have commit bits to the debian source tree. Just like every other project out there. Users don't get to decide stuff like this. Heck, this VERY ISSUE was decided by a single Debian developer!
Correct. The firmware might not even be software. It might be data that cannot be adequately represented by source code, even the manufacturer wanted to. Or it might be source that is useless without a specialized proprietary build tool.
In other words, that binary data could very well be the PREFERRED form of the firmware for everyone but the manufacturer, regardless of one's religious adherence to the GPL.
This is an example of a rare thing called "Integrity": sticking to your principles, even when it's inconvenient, or painful.
Except in this case the principle their sticking to is rabid legalism. It's pragmatism taken to an extreme. It has nothing to do with FSF style "save the users from themselves" ideology.
I think that's why all our jobs are going off to India. Those salaries are just too high for an entry level position. We need to humble ourselves and stop asking for professional level salaries. We call ourselves engineers but don't adhere to the same level of competence or rigorousness other engineering fields require. People with REAL engineering degrees rarely get entry level positions with those salaries.
Most employees will already be provided with the "necessary tools" they need. Many companies, mine included, will also provide these "necessary tools" to their telecommuting employees. If you've taken the company provided Windows machine and made it a dual-boot Linux machine, blame yourself before you blame your boss when you encounter incompatibilities.
For example, I made my company provided desktop dual boot to FreeBSD. Once in a while I will encounter a Word document that OpenOffice won't handle. I have no recourse but to boot into Windows to see it, and no one to blame but myself if it happens to be inconvenient.
As for clients, you deal with whatever they send you if you want them to be your client. If they're Mac users and they send you a something in Mac-only format, you either go get a Mac or you go get a new client. Ditto if they send it to you in a Microsoft-only format.
If it's your boss or client, then accept the Word document. After all, you're being paid to do so.
But a principle of a school is another matter. Don't tell him your politics. Don't try to convert him to your religion. In other words, don't tell him he's going to go to Hell for assuming you use Windows. Send him a quick note along the lines of "I"m sorry, but I use [name-of-OS] and am unable to read your Microsoft Word document. Could you please send it to me in a public format? PDF or HTML would be fine. Thank you."
And your mother is a third case. Don't confuse her with acronyms like "PDF" and "HTML", because she has enough problems with just using the mouse. Read them with OpenOffice and be glad she isn't calling you in the middle of your favorite show to discuss her gall bladder...
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The commercial gain has nothing to do with it. Zip, zilch, nada. In fact, the GPL encourages commercial gain. Start talking about GPL software being free-as-in-beer and you'll be shouted down. Commercial Redhat Corporation is on an equal footing with noncommercial Debian.
Second, the spirit of copyleft and copyright are absolutely identical: regulating the distribution of creative works. Start throwing binary-only derivations of GPL works on p2p networks and the FSF will become unglued with outrage. Not because you are subjugating users, but because you are violating copyright! Go and look at all the instances of GPL violations. About one percent of the rhetoric is about subjugating users. The rest is shouts of "you can't do that with my software!"
But it is NOT your right to compel your ISP to enable you to upload your music.
Why? If you don't like your ISP, get another. If you're on a university, buy your own damned account that they can't touch. It's simple really.
Frankly, it would be much easier to simply not give the students free internet access. Make them buy their own account, just like everyone else does in the real world. Then crack down hard on inappropriate use of the university network. I fail to understand why students and universities need special exceptions to the rules the rest of have no problems with.
That credo was invented by greedy, proprietary corporations.
But also a useful strategy for other businesses as well. Your funding runs out in three days. It will take three weeks to fix that last remaining nasty bug. Do you:
A) Fire all the employees and wistfully remark, "well, we tried"?
B) Release the software with that bug in it, issue a 1.1 version later, and retain your employees?
We should definitely lessen our impact on our environment. The first step is to abandon this "green" religion that's been pushed on it. It prevents any sort of rational thought on the matter.
The green way is to recycle aluminum cans, which involves significant energy and chemical expenditure for the recycling. The old fashioned way, before the greenies took over, was to use returnable bottles. It was called "conservation". People didn't waste resources simply because it was wasteful. Nowadays we can waste as much as we want so long as we separate our waste into the proper waste containers first.
You know, if people didn't go out and by new mobos every six months because they're substituting for diminished manhoods, then they wouldn't be trashing their old mobos every six months. This race to get the biggest and fasted CPU and GPU on the block is much more dangerous than the lead in a mobo that's being used past its planned obsolescence date.
I'm old enough to remember the conservation movement. It was about not wasting stuff. Then it got replaced by the environmentalism movement and suddenly people think it's perfectly fine to waste stuff, so long as they recycle what they waste. Common sense was replaced with a religion. Madness.
Yes, I have read the article. Have the moderators? I think not!
To quote from the article (to save the moderators from actually having to read it): "The most obvious step Google could take would be to encrypt a user's e-mail, searching index and other associated data, so it can only be accessed using the user's password, and of course that password should not be stored when an e-mail session is over."
Nowhere in this quote does it say or imply that the government is involved with this encryption. In short, this is merely a call to Google to encrypt your email. Voluntarily. Without resort to government coercion to force them to.
Please read the article. Then read the post I replied to. Then read my reply. You will see that it is completely apropos and on topic.
Google != government
The government is not involved when you call on Google to encrypt your email.
But enough about Fox News...
It seems that Fox's only purpose in the universe is to give people an excuse to ignore the blatant liberal bias on all other networks.
The original postulation was, "Debian is a community-developed project." The Debian community is not developing Debian, instead a self-selected subset of the Debian community is doing it. While this subset is indeed a community unto themselves, it is NOT the same as the Debian community.
If you go out into the world (or merely the Debian development lists) and ask "who is the Debian community", you will not be told it's only a thousand or so specific individuals. Instead you're going to be told about tens of thousands of users instead. Likewise, if you ask "who is the community of Midville", you will NOT be told "the city council of Midville".
By saying Debian is community-developed, you are trying to impart to Debian a quality that does not exist. This is not a bad thing, and should not be inferred as such.
It's called an account balance statement fee, and has nothing to do with quantum physics.
Please quote from your dictionary. It sounds like it might be an amusing diversion.
What's "rabid" or "legalistic" about that?
If the GPL had a clause (or the kernel added an exception) that would allow binary firmware, then Debian would not care about this issue. Even though the spirit of the GPL would not have changed. Even though the Debian guidelines had not changed. Even though the relation between Debian users and the hardware manufacturers had not changed. Their actions in this matter are not based on ideology, but on adhering to the exact letter of a license even though other distributions that actually employ teams of lawyers have found no problems with it.
Extremes, by definition, are not pragmatic!
Precisely. Which is why I used that phrase. Not wanting to get sued is pragmatic. But their efforts to absolutely guarantee this move beyond pragmatism to absurdity.
Well the previous "news" site wasn't a news site. Any story that has more adjectives than nouns and adverbs than verbs is not giving you the news, it is giving you an extremely biased opinion at best, and a shameless lie at worst.
is he just being selective in his outrage and trying to play his leaving the LUG into an opportunity to get a better job with one of the LA antiwar groups?
Isn't it obvious? The purpose of protests is never to change the world, but only to boost the egos of the protest organizers and participants.
Not to disparage OpenBSD at all, but the mere fact that you're asking such questions means you're probably not their target user. At least not at the present.
The purpose of your system and your personal inclinations should guide your choice of BSD. If you want cutting edge software then OpenBSD may not be for you, because it stresses stability over recency. It's so conservative in this regard it makes Debian-stable seem daring.
Debian is a community-developed project
No it's not. It is an oligarchy of those who have commit bits to the debian source tree. Just like every other project out there. Users don't get to decide stuff like this. Heck, this VERY ISSUE was decided by a single Debian developer!
Correct. The firmware might not even be software. It might be data that cannot be adequately represented by source code, even the manufacturer wanted to. Or it might be source that is useless without a specialized proprietary build tool.
In other words, that binary data could very well be the PREFERRED form of the firmware for everyone but the manufacturer, regardless of one's religious adherence to the GPL.
This is an example of a rare thing called "Integrity": sticking to your principles, even when it's inconvenient, or painful.
Except in this case the principle their sticking to is rabid legalism. It's pragmatism taken to an extreme. It has nothing to do with FSF style "save the users from themselves" ideology.
It could encourage vendors to provide firmware at all designed for linux.
Firmware is OS specific? The utility to load (or manipulate) the firmware might be, but I seriously doubt the firmeware itself is.
I think that's why all our jobs are going off to India. Those salaries are just too high for an entry level position. We need to humble ourselves and stop asking for professional level salaries. We call ourselves engineers but don't adhere to the same level of competence or rigorousness other engineering fields require. People with REAL engineering degrees rarely get entry level positions with those salaries.
Most employees will already be provided with the "necessary tools" they need. Many companies, mine included, will also provide these "necessary tools" to their telecommuting employees. If you've taken the company provided Windows machine and made it a dual-boot Linux machine, blame yourself before you blame your boss when you encounter incompatibilities.
For example, I made my company provided desktop dual boot to FreeBSD. Once in a while I will encounter a Word document that OpenOffice won't handle. I have no recourse but to boot into Windows to see it, and no one to blame but myself if it happens to be inconvenient.
As for clients, you deal with whatever they send you if you want them to be your client. If they're Mac users and they send you a something in Mac-only format, you either go get a Mac or you go get a new client. Ditto if they send it to you in a Microsoft-only format.
If it's your boss or client, then accept the Word document. After all, you're being paid to do so.
But a principle of a school is another matter. Don't tell him your politics. Don't try to convert him to your religion. In other words, don't tell him he's going to go to Hell for assuming you use Windows. Send him a quick note along the lines of "I"m sorry, but I use [name-of-OS] and am unable to read your Microsoft Word document. Could you please send it to me in a public format? PDF or HTML would be fine. Thank you."
And your mother is a third case. Don't confuse her with acronyms like "PDF" and "HTML", because she has enough problems with just using the mouse. Read them with OpenOffice and be glad she isn't calling you in the middle of your favorite show to discuss her gall bladder...
Go all the way back to the first post. It talked about the "US courts". In context I obviously used the word "government" in reference to "US courts".
Do you actually read the threads here, or do you pick out posts at random and flame them out of context?