You're still making the horrendous assumption that the US president is the cause of all evil in the world. I don't care what party he belongs to, he simply doesn't have that kind of power. Loosen that tinfoil hat, because I think it's cutting off oxygen to your brain.
If the shortcut is Ctrl-(4th key from the left, 3rd key from the top), then the untranslated key code is exactly what you want
But what makes you think that Ctrl-(4th key from the left, 3rd key from the top) is going to be an appropriate keycode? On my US QWERTY keyboard it is "F", but on a US Dvorak keyboard it is "U". Even without internationalization you've just screwed up the lives US Dvorak users who want to press Ctrl-F to bring up the Find dialog.
Shortcuts are symbolic because it makes them easier to remember. With your method you need to ship a keyboard overlay with the software. But even that won't work, because a different keyboard layout will have different scancodes.
If you translate key shortcuts, then you DO NOT have worry about shortcuts breaking when you switch langauges. You have to translate the menu items anyway, so what's so freaking hard about translating the shortcuts at the same time?
The best definition I can give for "freedom" is "lack of restrictions" or "lack of a specific restriction".
That is exactly the definition of freedom. The fewer the restrictions the greater the freedom. This is why proprietary software can be freer than copyleft encumbered software in some circumstances. Even the LGPL can turn out to be quite restrictive if you need to statically link your non-GPL app for an embedded system.
Nonsense. Without RMS we would still have had free and open source BSD. We might not have "Linux" as we know it, but we would still have a vibrant community of free software and operating systems.
The real solution is that key presses generate events containing the untranslated key code pressed, not the unicode character of the current language, and that is used for shortcut activation.
What good is the untranslated key code? For example, if a shortcut is Ctrl+E in English, and Ctrl+D in German, then someone has to translate that! Someone has to map Ctrl+E to "English" and Ctrl+D to "Deutsch". At some level the shortcuts MUST be translated, because the keycode for Ctrl+D won't get magically converted to the keycode Ctrl+E. No amount of wishing can change this. It doesn't matter if the keycodes are represented as strings, ints or something else, someone has to translate them!
Qt's method of translating the string representation of the keycode works and works well. The fact that QStrings are unicode is beside the point.
This is terrible - when you switch between languages, all shortcut keys break!
If you use Qt, it is trivial to translate shortcuts. They are like any other string. Wrap them in tr(), use lupdate utility to extract all those strings, then send the result off to your translators.
You didn't hear the answer the first time. Let me rephrase it differently. People no longer want brand-only stuff. They didn't like IE-only, they hated Netscape-only, and they abhor Firefox-only. It's not about being an open source browser, it's about FREEDOM to run a different browser than what the developer wants you to.
Functionality? What functionality?
on
Dvorak Adores YouTube
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· Score: 2, Interesting
"MarketWatch columnist John C. Dvorak tells the public to stop fretting about YouTube's business model and just start enjoying the functionality"
Functionality? What functionality? Since I don't use one of Macromedia's three approved operating systems, I can't watch any of their videos. Maybe if they decided to use something other than a proprietary video format, I might be able to. Hell, even patent encumbered MPEG4 is freer than this crap!
I had Ubuntu on my laptop (T60), and NOTHING worked out of the box. Well, audio worked, but that was it. No video beyond vesa, no wifi, no suspend, no bluetooth. I didn't don't a scanner though, so I can't comment on that. Maybe scanners do work out of the box on Ubuntu.
I figured if I had to do everything by hand, I might as well do everything by hand on an operating system I'm familiar with. So I installed FreeBSD.
I'm not ragging on Ubuntu. I'm ragging on the damned manufacturers and their Windows only crap.
Then by your own argument (that all natural rights can be traced back to the ownership of property), copyright isn't a natural right. Copyright is a restriction on the freedom to copy a work that, if it were treated the same way as all other property is treated, belongs to the possessor.
Possession does not define property. I can lend you my property, so that you possess it, but it is still my property. I can let people swim in my pool, but it is still my pool. Even if I put a sign up saying "free to use", it is still my pool.
I do agree with you however that copyright is an artificial property. I would shed no tears if copyright were abolished.
I think you're somewhat confused (but of course, there is always the possibility that it I who is confused). The FSF's support of the GPL (or, more precisely, the principles it embodies) is independent of the existence of copyright. They would support its stipulations whether or not copyright existed, because as you point out yourself, even if copyright didn't exist, restrictions could be enacted via contract. So the GPL would, in such an environment, likely be a contract rather than a license -- a contract whose purpose is to ensure that all parties are able to do examine, modify, and distribute the software in question.
The FSF takes great pains to emphasis that the GPL is NOT a contract. If they truly do not believe in copyright, then they can change their license to be a EULA.
But beyond that, the principals the GPL espouses are not natural rights. Reciprocity does not exist in nature. If software is not a property, then why must I pay for it via the payment of reciprocity? Why must I make modifications available. Another principle of the GPL is the availability of source. But what natural right does the user have to demand my source code? If in a world free of copyright, what prevents me from releasing binary-only software?
The "rights" of the GPL are not natural rights, and require the coercive power of the state to enforce. Even if the GPL were a EULA, the FSF still argues that these "rights" should exist for ALL software.
In short, the FSF is arguing against one legal system of intellectual property, in favor of their own legal system of intellectual property. They want to replace coercive copyright with coercive copyleft.
If they truly believed that software should not be owned, then they would not be actively arguing AGAINST the public domain.
Since you're recommending von Mises, I'm assuming you're a libertarian. Most libertarians support contract law. EULAs are contracts. A copyright free world does not imply a EULA free world. How does this fit into a libertarian's Free Software philosophy? Why is proprietarizing software via copyrights immoral, but proprietarizing it via contracts and agreements not?
Yup, that's what freedom is all about. Suing people! Thanks to the hard work of RMS and Ebon Moglen, we now have an legal instrument to sue the shit out of people!
That's the difference between GPL and BSD. BSD allows you to do anything you want, including restrict the rights of others. GPL does not allow you to restrict the rights of others (it allows you to restrict the actions of others that would, in turn, restrict the rights of others, but that is the limit of the restrictions it allows).
While on the surface this sounds pleasingly libertarian, it has a grave flaw, and that flaw is a fundamental misunderstanding of rights. A right is a property. All natural rights can be be traced back to the ownership of property, including the ownership of the self. Likewise, all good law can be traced back to a prohibition against trespass or violation of property. The reason why your right to swing your fist ends at my nose is because my nose is my property.
But what of the "right" to modify someone else's software? It depends on your view of copyright. If copyright is a "right", then you do not have the right to distribute someone else's software without their permission, as it is not your property. The FSF supports copyright and views copyright favorably, as evidenced by their rigorous arguments in favor of a copyright-based license.
But let's suppose that the FSF was tremendously confused, and really did favor the complete abolition of copyright, despite their actions to the contrary. In that case, formerly GPLd software would now be in the public domain. Ownerless. Software would no longer be property, but as free and malleable as the water we drink. But wait! If you put water in a container it becomes property, as evidenced by your getting arrested by stealing bottled water out of a store. Software can similary be put into containers of sorts. Encryption is one example. Or you can place it under a EULA (contract law still exists). You may have the right to distribute software that isn't owned, but you don't have the right to distribute software you legally agreed not to distribute.
But because we do have copyright in the real world, you don't have the right to distribute software other people have written. You can argue that you should have that right, that software should not be property. But if you do, you need to also argue AGAINST the GPL and other copyright-based licenses.
How? How can it possibly be made proprietary? Under what possible mechanism can this be done? Is Bill Gates going to come send some thugs over to my colo and physically steal the server hosting my software? Is he going to send thugs over to each of my users to physically rip the harddrives out of their systems?
Digital nformation (including software), can be infinitely and accurately copied without cost. This makes it impossible to unfree free software. Regardless of license. No one can take away my software or my users' software without their permission. The most they can do is to make a fork. But only the fork will be unfree. The original is still as free as the day it was released.
Since you have obviously not read either the pertinent sections of the GPLv3 or any of the explanations offered by its proponents, I will try to explain this to you again This isn't about the text of the GPLv3. This is about the moral difference between protecting code from modification by signing it versus protecting code from modification by burning it into a PROM.
And please don't quote the GPLv3 in your arguments regarding morality. Software licenses are NOT the basis of morality.
"...including a video of the Adventures of TurboMan."
Oh great. Yet another proprietary Windows/Mac/Linux only video. Remember last year when people actually used to curse Flash? Today it's the only format anyone will use. Why is no one concerned that Macromedia has a near total lock on online videos?
It's the new bigotry. If someone isn't a member of your "group" it's fair game to be hateful towards them. All "political" correctness has done is redefine the "group". Look at the group a college student hangs out with, and it contains other races, other genders, other sexual preferences. But it doesn't contain the elderly, so it's okay to rag on them, call them "old goat", call the police on them, etc.
The real problem, I think, is that RMS (via the FSF) is trying to force it down our throats as usual. He's a strange bird in that he really gets the freedom issue at one level while it flies totally over his head at another.
RMS's problem is that he defines "free" in terms of legalistic rules, regulations and restrictions, when in fact "free" is defined (in any language) as an absence of rules, regulations and restriction. He has given the GPL a level of legalism that would make the Pharisee's proud.
Slashdot Mirror
You're still making the horrendous assumption that the US president is the cause of all evil in the world. I don't care what party he belongs to, he simply doesn't have that kind of power. Loosen that tinfoil hat, because I think it's cutting off oxygen to your brain.
I am so so glad you're not designing user interfaces.
It's amazing how much power Bush has. Every evil in the world is his fault! Poor Australia. Poor poor Australia.
If the shortcut is Ctrl-(4th key from the left, 3rd key from the top), then the untranslated key code is exactly what you want
But what makes you think that Ctrl-(4th key from the left, 3rd key from the top) is going to be an appropriate keycode? On my US QWERTY keyboard it is "F", but on a US Dvorak keyboard it is "U". Even without internationalization you've just screwed up the lives US Dvorak users who want to press Ctrl-F to bring up the Find dialog.
Shortcuts are symbolic because it makes them easier to remember. With your method you need to ship a keyboard overlay with the software. But even that won't work, because a different keyboard layout will have different scancodes.
If you translate key shortcuts, then you DO NOT have worry about shortcuts breaking when you switch langauges. You have to translate the menu items anyway, so what's so freaking hard about translating the shortcuts at the same time?
The best definition I can give for "freedom" is "lack of restrictions" or "lack of a specific restriction".
That is exactly the definition of freedom. The fewer the restrictions the greater the freedom. This is why proprietary software can be freer than copyleft encumbered software in some circumstances. Even the LGPL can turn out to be quite restrictive if you need to statically link your non-GPL app for an embedded system.
Nonsense. Without RMS we would still have had free and open source BSD. We might not have "Linux" as we know it, but we would still have a vibrant community of free software and operating systems.
The real solution is that key presses generate events containing the untranslated key code pressed, not the unicode character of the current language, and that is used for shortcut activation.
What good is the untranslated key code? For example, if a shortcut is Ctrl+E in English, and Ctrl+D in German, then someone has to translate that! Someone has to map Ctrl+E to "English" and Ctrl+D to "Deutsch". At some level the shortcuts MUST be translated, because the keycode for Ctrl+D won't get magically converted to the keycode Ctrl+E. No amount of wishing can change this. It doesn't matter if the keycodes are represented as strings, ints or something else, someone has to translate them!
Qt's method of translating the string representation of the keycode works and works well. The fact that QStrings are unicode is beside the point.
This is terrible - when you switch between languages, all shortcut keys break!
If you use Qt, it is trivial to translate shortcuts. They are like any other string. Wrap them in tr(), use lupdate utility to extract all those strings, then send the result off to your translators.
Students tend to be free-thinkers
First of all, student tend not to think at all. Second, neither do free thinkers (hence the extraordinary uniformity of their opinions).
You didn't hear the answer the first time. Let me rephrase it differently. People no longer want brand-only stuff. They didn't like IE-only, they hated Netscape-only, and they abhor Firefox-only. It's not about being an open source browser, it's about FREEDOM to run a different browser than what the developer wants you to.
"MarketWatch columnist John C. Dvorak tells the public to stop fretting about YouTube's business model and just start enjoying the functionality"
Functionality? What functionality? Since I don't use one of Macromedia's three approved operating systems, I can't watch any of their videos. Maybe if they decided to use something other than a proprietary video format, I might be able to. Hell, even patent encumbered MPEG4 is freer than this crap!
And, why IS installing taken to be a Rosetta Stone, anyway?
:-)
Because in the Windows world it's the single most frequent task.
I had Ubuntu on my laptop (T60), and NOTHING worked out of the box. Well, audio worked, but that was it. No video beyond vesa, no wifi, no suspend, no bluetooth. I didn't don't a scanner though, so I can't comment on that. Maybe scanners do work out of the box on Ubuntu.
I figured if I had to do everything by hand, I might as well do everything by hand on an operating system I'm familiar with. So I installed FreeBSD.
I'm not ragging on Ubuntu. I'm ragging on the damned manufacturers and their Windows only crap.
Then by your own argument (that all natural rights can be traced back to the ownership of property), copyright isn't a natural right. Copyright is a restriction on the freedom to copy a work that, if it were treated the same way as all other property is treated, belongs to the possessor.
Possession does not define property. I can lend you my property, so that you possess it, but it is still my property. I can let people swim in my pool, but it is still my pool. Even if I put a sign up saying "free to use", it is still my pool.
I do agree with you however that copyright is an artificial property. I would shed no tears if copyright were abolished.
I think you're somewhat confused (but of course, there is always the possibility that it I who is confused). The FSF's support of the GPL (or, more precisely, the principles it embodies) is independent of the existence of copyright. They would support its stipulations whether or not copyright existed, because as you point out yourself, even if copyright didn't exist, restrictions could be enacted via contract. So the GPL would, in such an environment, likely be a contract rather than a license -- a contract whose purpose is to ensure that all parties are able to do examine, modify, and distribute the software in question.
The FSF takes great pains to emphasis that the GPL is NOT a contract. If they truly do not believe in copyright, then they can change their license to be a EULA.
But beyond that, the principals the GPL espouses are not natural rights. Reciprocity does not exist in nature. If software is not a property, then why must I pay for it via the payment of reciprocity? Why must I make modifications available. Another principle of the GPL is the availability of source. But what natural right does the user have to demand my source code? If in a world free of copyright, what prevents me from releasing binary-only software?
The "rights" of the GPL are not natural rights, and require the coercive power of the state to enforce. Even if the GPL were a EULA, the FSF still argues that these "rights" should exist for ALL software.
In short, the FSF is arguing against one legal system of intellectual property, in favor of their own legal system of intellectual property. They want to replace coercive copyright with coercive copyleft.
If they truly believed that software should not be owned, then they would not be actively arguing AGAINST the public domain.
Repeat after me. IPR is evil.
IPR is evil
GPL is IPR
GPL is evil
Since you're recommending von Mises, I'm assuming you're a libertarian. Most libertarians support contract law. EULAs are contracts. A copyright free world does not imply a EULA free world. How does this fit into a libertarian's Free Software philosophy? Why is proprietarizing software via copyrights immoral, but proprietarizing it via contracts and agreements not?
These people should be sued.
Yup, that's what freedom is all about. Suing people! Thanks to the hard work of RMS and Ebon Moglen, we now have an legal instrument to sue the shit out of people!
GPL: License to sue
That's the difference between GPL and BSD. BSD allows you to do anything you want, including restrict the rights of others. GPL does not allow you to restrict the rights of others (it allows you to restrict the actions of others that would, in turn, restrict the rights of others, but that is the limit of the restrictions it allows).
While on the surface this sounds pleasingly libertarian, it has a grave flaw, and that flaw is a fundamental misunderstanding of rights. A right is a property. All natural rights can be be traced back to the ownership of property, including the ownership of the self. Likewise, all good law can be traced back to a prohibition against trespass or violation of property. The reason why your right to swing your fist ends at my nose is because my nose is my property.
But what of the "right" to modify someone else's software? It depends on your view of copyright. If copyright is a "right", then you do not have the right to distribute someone else's software without their permission, as it is not your property. The FSF supports copyright and views copyright favorably, as evidenced by their rigorous arguments in favor of a copyright-based license.
But let's suppose that the FSF was tremendously confused, and really did favor the complete abolition of copyright, despite their actions to the contrary. In that case, formerly GPLd software would now be in the public domain. Ownerless. Software would no longer be property, but as free and malleable as the water we drink. But wait! If you put water in a container it becomes property, as evidenced by your getting arrested by stealing bottled water out of a store. Software can similary be put into containers of sorts. Encryption is one example. Or you can place it under a EULA (contract law still exists). You may have the right to distribute software that isn't owned, but you don't have the right to distribute software you legally agreed not to distribute.
But because we do have copyright in the real world, you don't have the right to distribute software other people have written. You can argue that you should have that right, that software should not be property. But if you do, you need to also argue AGAINST the GPL and other copyright-based licenses.
it can be turned proprietary at any time.
How? How can it possibly be made proprietary? Under what possible mechanism can this be done? Is Bill Gates going to come send some thugs over to my colo and physically steal the server hosting my software? Is he going to send thugs over to each of my users to physically rip the harddrives out of their systems?
Digital nformation (including software), can be infinitely and accurately copied without cost. This makes it impossible to unfree free software. Regardless of license. No one can take away my software or my users' software without their permission. The most they can do is to make a fork. But only the fork will be unfree. The original is still as free as the day it was released.
Free Software is a philosophy, and its the philosophy that gave you pretty much every program running on your Linux box now.
Except for X.org. And Apache. And Perl. And Python. Etc. Etc.
Since you have obviously not read either the pertinent sections of the GPLv3 or any of the explanations offered by its proponents, I will try to explain this to you again
This isn't about the text of the GPLv3. This is about the moral difference between protecting code from modification by signing it versus protecting code from modification by burning it into a PROM.
And please don't quote the GPLv3 in your arguments regarding morality. Software licenses are NOT the basis of morality.
"...including a video of the Adventures of TurboMan."
Oh great. Yet another proprietary Windows/Mac/Linux only video. Remember last year when people actually used to curse Flash? Today it's the only format anyone will use. Why is no one concerned that Macromedia has a near total lock on online videos?
It's the new bigotry. If someone isn't a member of your "group" it's fair game to be hateful towards them. All "political" correctness has done is redefine the "group". Look at the group a college student hangs out with, and it contains other races, other genders, other sexual preferences. But it doesn't contain the elderly, so it's okay to rag on them, call them "old goat", call the police on them, etc.
The real problem, I think, is that RMS (via the FSF) is trying to force it down our throats as usual. He's a strange bird in that he really gets the freedom issue at one level while it flies totally over his head at another.
RMS's problem is that he defines "free" in terms of legalistic rules, regulations and restrictions, when in fact "free" is defined (in any language) as an absence of rules, regulations and restriction. He has given the GPL a level of legalism that would make the Pharisee's proud.
What everyone seems to forget, is that RMS could have simply sold the printer and bought a different one.