Restricting the use of GPL'd software by companies that use government-enforced laws to kill Free Software is not against users' freedom, its against users' power.
Freedom is great, power to restrict others' freedoms not so great. Power to restrict others' powers to restrict freedoms - fine by me.
I never signed a EULA of any game I used. Nobody signed a EULA. Some people clicked "I Agree" buttons. "I Agree" click-through buttons are not recognizable consent of a legal agreement.
Since I am not making copies of Blizzard's games, only running it (constitutes fair use), I do not need their permission to do anything, and I can safely ignore their EULA.
I don't see why people think the EULA is a legal document at all.
Excuse me? It's THEIR CODE. They wrote it, and they should be entitled to do whatever they want with it. If they want to lock it away in a vault for the rest of their natural lives, bravo to them.
YOU are not entitled to do anything with their source code that they don't want to allow. If you don't like this, you're welcome to write your own.
Your basic premise is that copyright is a natural given right. Its not, its a government-enforced monopoly.
I don't care if they write whatever software they want, but as soon as they release it, they will not hold power upon all the users and restrict those users' freedoms.
There is no place for government-enforced laws that govern citizens inside their homes.
If companies don't have copyright to ride on, then I don't give a damn if they "close the source", because there is no money to be made in that model anymore. Companies will simply not invest huge amounts of money into closing software and giving it a competative edge when there are no copyright laws.
That should never have been a good defense to begin with. Guns may not kill people all by themselves, but having a gun makes it much easier and therefore more likely that you'll kill someone.
Legislation is the solution to all problems isn't it?
We just legislate guns away from everyone and all is well isn't it?
Too bad laws tend to affect the good guys, and not the bad guys.
Microsoft are at least taking steps to prevent these viruses from propagating. They do fix most of the bugs that these viruses exploit. Sharman Networks, despite being aware that their software is mostly used for illegal purposes, takes no steps to prevent this.
Microsoft distribute ftp.exe and other copyright-infringement-utilising programs (I have personally infringed on copyrights with them!). Surely they knew these tools would be used for those purposes? Are they not liable?
That one's pretty ridiculous. Information sharing is not a crime in most cases. And DARPA didn't initially build it for the corporations and individuals who are now abusing it. Sharman Networks can hardly say they didn't know their system would be used for copyright infringement.
Can DARPA say they didn't know that? Ofcourse the knew that. Its not their job to control how the tool they build will be used.
The production cost however still exist, so a fee is in order.
That's what copyright and licensing establishes, not anti-theft laws. The point is: Copyright infringement is against the law but it is not theft.
Theft is by definition denying the owner of that which is being stolen.
Go live in a communist country, and you are probably right.
Its the communist countries which had laws limiting the free distribution of information. You go live there.
You return the book after reading it. You do not have continuing profit from having borrowed this book.
Just like you may keep a copy of the book after returning it, it is possible to do the same with an mp3. It is also possible not to, in both cases. The differences are technical.
If software copyrights are abolished, then many people who are wasting away their programming at creating unfree code will stop programming. However, many of them will turn to program Free Software. Some for the fun of it, and some will be able to make money.
You should release your software as Free Software and not restrict your users, and sell the non-software information base that your software uses.
This is because restricting information distribution is not as bad as deciding what your users should, will or will not change or fix.
You will not decide what:
OS I will use to run your software.
Changes I will make to any software I run in order to accomodate my needs.
Sharing I will do with my neighbors who happen to need a certain piece of code from the software.
Also, by copyrighting your closed source, you are effectively labeling your software as end-of-the-road (bitrot) and for the state-of-the-art to be improved, someone will have to recreate all of it from scratch.
You are not entitled to both secrecy of your code and a de-facto perpetual copyright.
This was the purpose of patents, to encourage inventors to publicize their inventions without fear of them being stolen. In theory patents apply to things the author could still profit from by keeping it secret. Copyrights supposedly apply to things that you can only make money from by making it known.
No. Map-making was another crucial incentive to create copyright. Map makers would sell their maps which were results of tedious work, under non-disclosure agreements.
NDAs are a kind of secrecy that copyright is meant to remove. This is relevant with software these days, except that software is both secret and gets a copyright.
No, ensuring incentive is a purpose. Copyright can only create incentives, it cannot do more than that.
Copyright creates incentives, but what it does is the means towards an end, and not the end in itself.
You can promote science and the useful arts without wanting them to get bigger - you could give every single person in the country a book containing any novel ever written and every fact ever known, and you would be promoting science and the useful arts.
It is dubious that this would be promotion of science and useful arts, but this is irrelevant to copyright.
Copyright is not about that, it's about the wider issue of getting new content created.
Copyright is indeed about promoting science and useful arts. I suggest you read the US constitution.
The main purpose of copyright was to ensure that artists would have an incentive to create new content. Period.
Ensuring incentive is not a purpose, its a mean.
The explicit purpose was promoting science and useful arts. Science and useful arts are enhanced by a large public domain and derivative works, not by disallowing derivative works of any work in existence.
Copyright is becoming more and more a problem of civil liberty.
Any law that serves as an excuse to probe people's homes for "illegal activities" (the existence or inexistence of which does not harm any person) and bring them to court, possibly destroying their lives, must be abolished.
Copyright started out as a means to cover the costs of distribution and only affected those who could copy: Publishers. It gave incentive to distribute works for the inspiration of all and into the public domain.
Copyright ended up as a means to monopolize the use of content for high financial gains and now affects citizens in their homes. It gives incentive to create popular works that cannot inspire new works because no derivative works are allowed. It never ends up in the public domain.
You got lots of good stuff, but when your average linux-distro starts to break down, when stuff doesn't work automagicly, when hardware detetction fails and so on... Most users (and by most users I also mean powerusers) will have a really hard time fixing stuff, if they even manage to fix it at all. Not all of us are geeks who grew up with a keyboard.
Yes, when it breaks down its hard to fix. Not that it's very easy to fix the Windows registry when it breaks down, either.
I recently installed Kubuntu on a couple of computers, and it did a great job autodetecting most things, and did not require any special knowledge to configure or run anything. On the very-new-hardware one, it failed to detect sound and I had to manually download and install a new alsa not yet available as a package to get sound.
Kubuntu is in my opinion ready-for-the-desktop as Windows ever was, except that you better take care to use supported hardware, or just stay away from cutting-edge-hardware so it has time to become supported.
writing oo in c when you have c++ is stupid, you entirely fundamental basics of oo-concepts such as inheritance, encapsulation and the like.
Inheritance (at least single-inheritence) is easy in C, you can just create the first member of your object (struct) be an instance of another object. Thus, you can cast up (by dereferencing that member), the only difference being that the cast up is explicit (not necessarily such a bad thing!). And you can cast down implicitly by using casted function pointers that take the subclass pointer (works because it is the first member in the struct).
As for encapsulation, you get that in C simply by encapsulating all you want in the same module. Hiding the data and code you want in the C side and exposing what you want in the H side. Sure, you can't enforce the hiding the private data in your struct, but you can hide it by convention.
Also note that in C++, you can't really enforce the data hiding either, i.e:
Actually, since the females are smaller, one would guess that they'd be under higher evolutional pressure to become smart.
But women don't compete with the larger men for survival, while maybe compete with other women for a man's defense.
Mice are also smaller than humans, does this mean they are under higher evolutionary pressure to become smart?
Also, who's to say that intelligence developed in humans as a means for survival? It seems to me, that intelligence in humans is way beyond what is required to survive. It seems that like trees growing much higher than they need in order to survive alone, humans are growing much more intelligent than they need to survive alone - because they are competing with other humans.
As the joke goes: Two men see a huge angry bear running towards them. One man puts on his running shoes, the other says: "There's no way you can outrun the bear, even with these running shoes!" The man says: "I don't need to outrun the bear, I need to outrun you!"
I can't believe Blizzard has people thinking this.
bnetd was an implementation of the Battle.Net protocol, written from scratch as a Free Software project. It was implemented by reverse engineering the Battle.Net protocol. The only thing "illegal" about bnetd, is that it did not perform a CD key check, because Blizzard refused to give them the key check algorithm! Blizzard also refused to allow them to connect to Battle.Net proxies to check the CD key.
The only reason not doing the CD key check is illegal, is because the DMCA disallows anything, including free speech and Free Software, that works around a copyright protection mechanism. It is a ridiculous law that limits basic freedoms to protect software companies. The Press-Shift-To-Avoid-Autorun example is really a demonstration of the DMCA's absurdity.
You can play whatever game you want, but don't support a company that uses the DMCA. For me this is easy, as I believe copyright must be abolished and I have no problem infringing on copyright. If you think copyright infringement is bad, isn't supporting the DMCA worse?
The United States is slowly trading its freedoms and liberties with the rule of the rich. The DMCA goes against very basic freedoms, and Blizzard must not thrive by using it.
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It only restricts the freedoms of those that use their powers to restrict others.
Only those who choose to apply Software Patents become unacceptable users of Free Software, its an opt-in circle.
Restricting the use of GPL'd software by companies that use government-enforced laws to kill Free Software is not against users' freedom, its against users' power.
Freedom is great, power to restrict others' freedoms not so great. Power to restrict others' powers to restrict freedoms - fine by me.
I never signed a EULA of any game I used.
Nobody signed a EULA. Some people clicked "I Agree" buttons. "I Agree" click-through buttons are not recognizable consent of a legal agreement.
Since I am not making copies of Blizzard's games, only running it (constitutes fair use), I do not need their permission to do anything, and I can safely ignore their EULA.
I don't see why people think the EULA is a legal document at all.
Why do I need Blizzard's permission to implement a server of a protocol?
Excuse me? It's THEIR CODE. They wrote it, and they should be entitled to do whatever they want with it. If they want to lock it away in a vault for the rest of their natural lives, bravo to them.
YOU are not entitled to do anything with their source code that they don't want to allow. If you don't like this, you're welcome to write your own.
Your basic premise is that copyright is a natural given right. Its not, its a government-enforced monopoly.
I don't care if they write whatever software they want, but as soon as they release it, they will not hold power upon all the users and restrict those users' freedoms.
There is no place for government-enforced laws that govern citizens inside their homes.
If companies don't have copyright to ride on, then I don't give a damn if they "close the source", because there is no money to be made in that model anymore. Companies will simply not invest huge amounts of money into closing software and giving it a competative edge when there are no copyright laws.
Without copyright there is no need for the GPL.
"Your" signifies who authored the code in this case. Code should not have ownership.
That should never have been a good defense to begin with. Guns may not kill people all by themselves, but having a gun makes it much easier and therefore more likely that you'll kill someone.
Legislation is the solution to all problems isn't it?
We just legislate guns away from everyone and all is well isn't it?
Too bad laws tend to affect the good guys, and not the bad guys.
Microsoft are at least taking steps to prevent these viruses from propagating. They do fix most of the bugs that these viruses exploit. Sharman Networks, despite being aware that their software is mostly used for illegal purposes, takes no steps to prevent this.
Microsoft distribute ftp.exe and other copyright-infringement-utilising programs (I have personally infringed on copyrights with them!). Surely they knew these tools would be used for those purposes? Are they not liable?
That one's pretty ridiculous. Information sharing is not a crime in most cases. And DARPA didn't initially build it for the corporations and individuals who are now abusing it. Sharman Networks can hardly say they didn't know their system would be used for copyright infringement.
Can DARPA say they didn't know that?
Ofcourse the knew that. Its not their job to control how the tool they build will be used.
My personal experience is that the vast majority of content on such networks is infringing.
You only see what you search for.
How can you tell that the sender is indeed keeping a copy?
What if I distribute and immediately delete it?
Keep in mind that a book can be copied as well while it is burrowed, or before-so by its owner.
The differences are technical (copied or not copied by default).
The production cost however still exist, so a fee is in order.
That's what copyright and licensing establishes, not anti-theft laws.
The point is: Copyright infringement is against the law but it is not theft.
Theft is by definition denying the owner of that which is being stolen.
Go live in a communist country, and you are probably right.
Its the communist countries which had laws limiting the free distribution of information. You go live there.
You return the book after reading it. You do not have continuing profit from having borrowed this book.
Just like you may keep a copy of the book after returning it, it is possible to do the same with an mp3. It is also possible not to, in both cases. The differences are technical.
If software copyrights are abolished, then many people who are wasting away their programming at creating unfree code will stop programming.
However, many of them will turn to program Free Software. Some for the fun of it, and some will be able to make money.
You should release your software as Free Software and not restrict your users, and sell the non-software information base that your software uses.
This is because restricting information distribution is not as bad as deciding what your users should, will or will not change or fix.
You will not decide what:
Also, by copyrighting your closed source, you are effectively labeling your software as end-of-the-road (bitrot) and for the state-of-the-art to be improved, someone will have to recreate all of it from scratch.
You are not entitled to both secrecy of your code and a de-facto perpetual copyright.
This was the purpose of patents, to encourage inventors to publicize their inventions without fear of them being stolen. In theory patents apply to things the author could still profit from by keeping it secret. Copyrights supposedly apply to things that you can only make money from by making it known.
No. Map-making was another crucial incentive to create copyright. Map makers would sell their maps which were results of tedious work, under non-disclosure agreements.
NDAs are a kind of secrecy that copyright is meant to remove. This is relevant with software these days, except that software is both secret and gets a copyright.
No, ensuring incentive is a purpose. Copyright can only create incentives, it cannot do more than that.
Copyright creates incentives, but what it does is the means towards an end, and not the end in itself.
You can promote science and the useful arts without wanting them to get bigger - you could give every single person in the country a book containing any novel ever written and every fact ever known, and you would be promoting science and the useful arts.
It is dubious that this would be promotion of science and useful arts, but this is irrelevant to copyright.
Copyright is not about that, it's about the wider issue of getting new content created.
Copyright is indeed about promoting science and useful arts. I suggest you read the US constitution.
The main purpose of copyright was to ensure that artists would have an incentive to create new content. Period.
Ensuring incentive is not a purpose, its a mean.
The explicit purpose was promoting science and useful arts. Science and useful arts are enhanced by a large public domain and derivative works, not by disallowing derivative works of any work in existence.
that the main purpose of copyright, was to enhance the public domain.
Copyright is becoming more and more a problem of civil liberty.
Any law that serves as an excuse to probe people's homes for "illegal activities" (the existence or inexistence of which does not harm any person) and bring them to court, possibly destroying their lives, must be abolished.
Copyright started out as a means to cover the costs of distribution and only affected those who could copy: Publishers. It gave incentive to distribute works for the inspiration of all and into the public domain.
Copyright ended up as a means to monopolize the use of content for high financial gains and now affects citizens in their homes. It gives incentive to create popular works that cannot inspire new works because no derivative works are allowed. It never ends up in the public domain.
Copyright is now wrong, abolish it.
You got lots of good stuff, but when your average linux-distro starts to break down, when stuff doesn't work automagicly, when hardware detetction fails and so on... Most users (and by most users I also mean powerusers) will have a really hard time fixing stuff, if they even manage to fix it at all. Not all of us are geeks who grew up with a keyboard.
Yes, when it breaks down its hard to fix. Not that it's very easy to fix the Windows registry when it breaks down, either.
I recently installed Kubuntu on a couple of computers, and it did a great job autodetecting most things, and did not require any special knowledge to configure or run anything. On the very-new-hardware one, it failed to detect sound and I had to manually download and install a new alsa not yet available as a package to get sound.
Kubuntu is in my opinion ready-for-the-desktop as Windows ever was, except that you better take care to use supported hardware, or just stay away from cutting-edge-hardware so it has time to become supported.
writing oo in c when you have c++ is stupid, you entirely fundamental basics of oo-concepts such as inheritance, encapsulation and the like.
Inheritance (at least single-inheritence) is easy in C, you can just create the first member of your object (struct) be an instance of another object. Thus, you can cast up (by dereferencing that member), the only difference being that the cast up is explicit (not necessarily such a bad thing!). And you can cast down implicitly by using casted function pointers that take the subclass pointer (works because it is the first member in the struct).
As for encapsulation, you get that in C simply by encapsulating all you want in the same module. Hiding the data and code you want in the C side and exposing what you want in the H side. Sure, you can't enforce the hiding the private data in your struct, but you can hide it by convention.
Also note that in C++, you can't really enforce the data hiding either, i.e:
#define private public
#include "some_class.h"
Actually, since the females are smaller, one would
guess that they'd be under higher evolutional pressure to become smart.
But women don't compete with the larger men for survival, while maybe compete with other women for a man's defense.
Mice are also smaller than humans, does this mean they are under higher evolutionary pressure to become smart?
Also, who's to say that intelligence developed in humans as a means for survival? It seems to me, that intelligence in humans is way beyond what is required to survive. It seems that like trees growing much higher than they need in order to survive alone, humans are growing much more intelligent than they need to survive alone - because they are competing with other humans.
As the joke goes:
Two men see a huge angry bear running towards them. One man puts on his running shoes, the other says: "There's no way you can outrun the bear, even with these running shoes!"
The man says: "I don't need to outrun the bear, I need to outrun you!"
Software developers have the freedom to sell you a service and profit from it by keeping you from having complete access to the design.
Keeping people from having access is not a freedom, its a power.
Also, not distributing the source is not keeping them from knowing the design, it only makes it a lot more work to discover it.
I really wonder how you lay out your Perl code, or any other language for that matter...
You don't indent it?!
Visual Studio tends to create non-portable apps.
*nix tools tend to create portable apps.
Thus, Visual Studio is a great tool for creating low-quality applications.
Use *nix tools.
bnetd was not an illegal copy!
I can't believe Blizzard has people thinking this.
bnetd was an implementation of the Battle.Net protocol, written from scratch as a Free Software project. It was implemented by reverse engineering the Battle.Net protocol. The only thing "illegal" about bnetd, is that it did not perform a CD key check, because Blizzard refused to give them the key check algorithm! Blizzard also refused to allow them to connect to Battle.Net proxies to check the CD key.
The only reason not doing the CD key check is illegal, is because the DMCA disallows anything, including free speech and Free Software, that works around a copyright protection mechanism. It is a ridiculous law that limits basic freedoms to protect software companies. The Press-Shift-To-Avoid-Autorun example is really a demonstration of the DMCA's absurdity.
You can play whatever game you want, but don't support a company that uses the DMCA. For me this is easy, as I believe copyright must be abolished and I have no problem infringing on copyright. If you think copyright infringement is bad, isn't supporting the DMCA worse?
The United States is slowly trading its freedoms and liberties with the rule of the rich. The DMCA goes against very basic freedoms, and Blizzard must not thrive by using it.