I agree with everything in your post, but just for reference it was Richard Stallman who had the problem with the printer driver, not (Everybody Loves...) Eric Raymond.
I actually installed the community edition of SugarCRM a few years ago. My take on it is that it's got the right problem (a big, big, big part of creating a great piece of software), but that the system design and implementation is painfully amateurish. The database schema was an incoherent joke, the code meandering, verbose and inarticulate. There's no reason for code (even PHP) to be that bad.
I have more recent experience. My opinions are similar, but not quite as extreme as yours, so perhaps the code base has improved somewhat. The code is self-modifying which I don't approve of for security reasons (and don't forget to back up your webroot if the code has changed itself!). The database schema is... not inelegant, but certainly atypical. SugarCRM will create new tables to represent new modules (either downloaded, or ones the user creates) and preserves relationships between tables in another table. Keys are all based on timestamps. So the database schema is dynamic and relationships reflected in the database data rather than in the code (i.e. if a Contact module can be related to an Account module, there's no line of code the looks up Contacts for Accounts exactly, but a row in the relationships table that says Contacts are Many To One to Accounts, or along those lines, obviously I'm simplifying a little just to show the principle). Before any DBAs get upset at that, I'll point out that SugarCRM is exclusively MySQL, so half the things that this makes it difficult to do you wouldn't be able to do with MyISAM anyway.;)
The code base itself is a little erratic from what I saw. I don't rate it the best structured code I've ever seen, but I have seen worse. There are some howlers in the API though, I know that.
I'd be interested to know how well it scales. I suspect it scales adequately to a certain point so long as you throw sufficient hardware at it, but that due to the design, there will be a tipping point where things start going downhill quite quickly.
SugarCRM seems to serve its target market quite well - small to medium business that need some quick to deploy and easy to learn CRM software and don't want to get into coding something themself of course. I don't know that it would meet the needs of larger players. There's a possibility that it might become the MySQL of the CRM world. MySQL started off pretty flaky pre-5.0, but is now decent enough that you can make good use out of it and it's undeniably successful. But there could be a PostgreSQL out there ready to pounce too (PostgreSQL had excellent design from the start, but took a while to get up to speed. Now it matches MySQL punch for punch in performance and retains its more robust and feature rich capabilities). I don't know who PostgreSQL might represent in this analogy. Vtiger has been mentioned elsewhere, but I've not examined that one in much detail. Looks like it has potential.
So basically I agree with you, but I'd say it's not quite as bad as you describe any more. Time will tell. By the comments in this thread though, they might be better off either ditching the Free Software pretense or biting the bullet and going fully Libre. They'd need to move to a fully support-based income stream, but they might find big gains in terms of uptake and developer contributions.
That's a misconception. Zend offers the possibility to only provide encrypted PHP to your customers.
Yeeeesss. I considered whether I should add qualifications to what I said when I wrote, then didn't bother. Hey - it's Slashdot! No-one's going to fuss over the details!:D
I'm curious as to whether you've ever used Zend's encrypted PHP. The code obscuring would certainly be annoying, but far from insurmountable. The encoded PHP I don't have experience with. I would guess, given the nature of PHP deployment, it would necessarily be easy to build a decoder. For those reasons, I kind of skipped over this possibility in my reply. Curious for comments from anyone who is more familiar with this tool
No. It used to be fairly common to sell software with source code, with explicit restriction that it may not be redistributed: source was only provided for in-house use. That is certainly not open source.
I remember those days, believe it or not.:) No, that really was (and still is) open source. What we have going on here, is a group (the OSI) attempting to re-define Open Source to be synonymous with Free Software. Perhaps one day they will succeed and we'll have to start referring to any open source software that isn't also licensed under something like the GPL as "shared source". One day, perhaps, but (best Aragorn voice) it is not this day!.
Seriously, if you want to refer to software that is both open source and includes the right to distribute and modify, call it "Free Software" like the FSF, or "Libre" software. It's nice, unambiguous, is an existing term and doesn't confuse half the software world which is still filled with people like me who recall Open Source meaning only that the source code is available.
While it's true that open source does not mean free as in beer, it's pretty damned hard to lock out a segment of the user community (i.e. non-paying users) when the source code is released, allowing anybody to build the "missing" feature.
Heh heh! You're right in theory, wrong in practice. SugarCRM has an important system in it called "modules". These are analogues of various business concepts, so there's a Contacts module, a Product Catalogue module, et al. The Professional Edition comes with some significant modules which, I'd say 75% of companies really need. Yes, the Community Edition people can write their own versions of these modules (as far as I'm aware - I don't know if SugarCRM legally could or would come down on them for making very similar free versions), but a substantial part of the utility of SugarCRM is in these modules. So what you're talking about is a fair bit of work. Also, they'll inter-relate. So if you buy the Professional Edition and get to use the Leads module, you get the functionality that can transform Leads into Contacts, relate them to Accounts, etc. Finally, SugarCRM the company control the code base and drive it with their Professional Edition. So you might write something wonderful that they like and incorporate into the main code body, but you might also find that having spent three weeks writing a cool equivalent to one of their modules, SugarCRM shrugs, makes some changes that will break it and rolls out the latest version of the Community Edition. In theory, if you're really awesome, at that point you could create a fork and the rest of the Community Edition users would follow you. In practice, that's not going to happen.
So I appreciate where you're coming from - I expect you're an engineer of some variety and have the in-built assumption that everyone else works to maximise interoperabilty and flexibility that you do, but in fact this has not matched the reality in this instance, I'm sorry to say.:(
It's what Bruce Shneider terms "Badgeware" (afaik, the term originates with him). You're not entirely free to do what you want with it. You have to keep the SugarCRM logo and link in there unaltered and unadjusted. In practice this means you have to stick with their UI and you'll always have a big old footer at the bottom with their logo.
No, Snowgirl is right. Though I see you got your +1 Sounds Confident mods. What you are describing is Free (capital 'F') software, also known as "libre" software. Open Source does not mean anything other than you have the source available. For example, so you can inspect it for security reasons, so you can make in-house only changes. Free Software however, is what you get under the GPL. Free Software must of course be Open Source, but the inverse is not the case.
Hear that booming tread? That's Richard Stallman walking up your drive with a four hour lecture of the philosophy of information sharing. I'd hide under your desk if I were you.;)
Has anyone here actually read the article (I know, stupid assumption). SugarCRM has a dual licence. There's a "Community Edition" and a "Professional Edition" (also an Enterprise Edition, but that's not different from Professional - it's just the support offers sort of thing as far as I recall).
Now the Professional Version is obviously not "closed source" because it's a great sprawling PHP application so they have to give you the source. But that doesn't make it "Free Software". It requires a licence on a per user basis. In contrast, the Community Version is what we call "Badgeware". You can download it free, you can deploy it free with whatever users you like and you're free to make and distribute plugins and such for it. But you can't remove the SugarCRM logo and weblink for example. (In fact, there are some amusing little attempts to prevent people from doing that in the code, e.g. the legal notice that comes up if you alter the SugarCRM image doesn't appear as text in the files, but encoded as base64).
Anyway, there's an open sourcish community around the Community Edition that write tools for it. But, IMO, the whole thing doesn't feel very open sourcey. What it comes down to is not an issue of programming, so much as it comes down to business needs. SugarCRM has a system of "modules" - pluggable business entities such as Contacts, Product Lists, Accounts, etc. The great big difference between the Community and Professional versions is that the Professional version comes with additional modules. And for most businesses (I would say), they're modules that you really need. There are various other bits and pieces like the Professional Edition supports workflows whereas the Community Edition does not.
What it comes down to, is that SugarCRM has a community edition which serves as a good bit of PR, a hook to get in new users and a source of occasional free bug-fixes. But most serious businesses - the ones who actually are potential customers - will end up needing the features of the non-Free Professional Edition. There are attempts to replicate some of what the Professional Edition does in the Community one, but from what I've seen they don't really compare and of course the company itself isn't helping much because primarily they want people to buy the Professional Edition to get those features. Their forums are also littered with unanswered technical questions. If you're a paying customer and you file a support request with them, you get fixes (in my limited experience with them), but if you're a Community type asking questions on the forums, you take your chances. It would also be pretty difficult to make any substantial changes to the code base because you're always tailing the Professional Edition which SugarCRM control. So if you write a wonderful new thing for it (the do-it-yourself Open Source way), expect there to be a good chance that it will be incompatible shortly.
I actually quite like the model of a free version of software and then a paid-for pro version with extra coolness. It's a model that works well. But when you combine that with Open Source, it becomes a little more dubious (maybe) because there's the possibility that you use the name of Open Source but create a system where in practice, people can't meaningfully participate and it's primarily a hook into the paid version. This is where I feel SugarCRM are. I have no doubt that there are people using the Community Edition for business purposes, but I think what I describe is the bird's eye view of the situation.
Yes, but the people who believe in the heliocentric, non-flat Earth don't go around the whole time saying how they're being stifled and that the flat-earthers are driving the media. And that is the point. I didn't say anything about whether the science was right or wrong, I said the idea that proponents of AGW are somehow struggling to convince people is unsupportable, and yet that's how many AGW proponents keep acting.
I suggest you try being a public skeptic of AGW and see which side really controls the media and squashes dissent. The Independent, a major British newspaper, published a big opinion piece by their columnist Johan Hari, which basically boiled down to "we don't need evidence of AGW because we know it's real and you hate the world and all life upon it if you ask for any". When comments on the story were pointing out flaws in what he said (he's not a scientist by any stretch of the imagination) and politely making intelligent points against AGW, the newspaper deleted everyone's comments. Try being skeptical here on/. about AGW. You'll get a smattering of people that will actually engage what you say and a whole load of downmods, strawmen and personal attacks.
You and others keep saying that proponents of AGW are fighting some battle against media conspiracy and underhand tactics. The reality is that anyone publically skeptical of AGW gets viciously hammered. I might be able to get away with this post because of the irony factor, but the general case is that AGW proponents have an overwhelming influence in the media, in government and in academia. They ain't the underdogs. They're the Establishment.
So basically, you're saying that it's good to block attempts to peer-review stuff because the scientific method doesn't work very well unless "we accept areas of grey" ?
It's hard to refute an argument that has so little to do with its subject.
See, I knew we were more or less in agreement. I don't know if I'd want culprits released to the public - I'd prefer such things to be handled via normal legal channels. But it could be considered a public good, yes. Definitely showing how much of the Pirate Bay is used for illegal, rather than legal content would be great.
Regarding the extenuated verbiage, no offense (at least to myself, I obviously cannot speak for others) has been caused and, I must emphasize, the clarification, even though itself an ironic example of such profligate verbosity as to make Dogberry, (the comical character so prone to malapropisms in Shakespeare's, himself no miser with the tools of his trade, Much Ado About Nothing) seem briefer than a glutton's grace and, I must tell you, struck a chord with me for it is a weakness shared, though an affection for sub-clauses, born of a premature exposure to Quadratic Equations, is my true nemesis.
Don't be absurd. First you deny that it does so and in the next breath qualify why it does so - your post is a mass of contradictions
What? I said 'wikileaks don't do x, they do x to a particular subset of people'. It's not hypocritical for them to treat people in the subset differently - it's what they do. Might as well say it's hypocritical for the police to only arrest people who are committing crimes and not target people who aren't - it's what they do. (Okay, bad example given recent police behaviour but you get what I'm saying).
Anyway, perhaps we're talking at cross-purposes. I get the vague impression from your post that you think I'm defending the Pirate Bay by shooting down the wikileaks analogy. I'm not. I despise the pirate bay and piracy in general. I'm just shooting down a bad analogy that caught wikileaks in the collateral fire. It's understandable that one assumes any given post on/. is pro-piracy, but in fact there are many of us that give reasoned arguments against it. We're usually the ones that are modded down -1 Troll / Flamebait / Said Something We Didn't Like.
So, if someone actually filtered the list accordingly and gave it to Wikileaks, that should conceivably fall within its mission statement.
Conceivably. But that isn't what was proposed and I think it would fall more on the side of law-enforcement than wikileak's general stuff. Wikileaks are more about defending the masses from those in positions of power where the law might not otherwise pursue them, than they are about aiding prosecutions against individual people. True, mass-piracy has put people en masse into a position of power over companies and they are using that power to massively abuse those companies. But it doesn't fit the popular conception of "those in power."
Wikileaks: since they routinely host illegally obtained information (and even private information such as emails, memos, etc.) it would be hypocritical of them not to publish because it would go against their stated morality.
Wikileaks do not "host illegally obtained information (and even private information such as emails, memos, etc.)". Wikileaks host illegally obtained information (and even private information such as emails, memos, etc.) that is pertinent to the public good, e.g. evidence that the US military tortured, government corruption, etc. They don't just do it for the sake of it and refusing to host a bunch of random people's email addresses and passwords is not hypocritical at all. Ridiculous thing to say!
Why would it be hypocritical of him to complain about you sharing his information? He's not sharing anyone else's unless you know otherwise. It's hypocritical for the pirate bay to condemn people for sharing data though, because they do share other people's data.
Now if the airline were called "Air Cocaine", the analogy would be better. The pirate bay is for pirated movies, music, software. Everyone, certainly including the admins, knows this. It's amazing that the same weasel words and legal foot-shuffling that Slashdot would be up in arms about were this a politician or corporation, is celebrated as a great thing when done by people stealing movies and music.
I weep that you got modded up +4 insightful for saying that the RIAA is founded on extortion. People are forced to download movies and music are they? These are necessities of life? By that principle, a supermarket is extorting you by making you pay for your groceries.
No, my point is that GM is about making smaller, well understood changes vs other methods.
Transplanting genes from animals to plants, which is unprecedented, is neither a smaller, not a better understood process than species of plants breeding together and occasional mutations that produce plants that are still fertile.
Without GM crops, avoiding a monoculture is possible, with Monsanto's model of GM plants, it is not.
That's an entirely separate issue then what the original article is about, and different from most arguments made by the green movement, even if that fear of big business is probably the genesis of their other complaints.
It's not a separate issue. The many arguments against GM crops that you've seen in the comments here are made time and time again. But each time, a strawman is set up to say "you said GM were bad for you, and our study couldn't find any harm, so we're right and you're wrong". The strawman (if indeed GM's are all unharmful which I'm very far from allowing) in the linked article is entirely relevant because it is used as a deflection against all these other concerns. I mean look at the comments here - tonnes of people making intelligent, supportable arguments against Monsanto's business practices and the risks and effects of GM crops, and the only reply is always: "this study didn't find any evidence of harm".
You say most arguments from the "green movement". What do you think you are seeing in all the many comments in this thread if it isn't the concerns of people for their environment and our future well-being? Is this the latest version of the No True Scotsman? You're not an environmentalist unless you make arguments that spinkham can find flaws in? You talk about your strawman "green movement"? Take a look at all the comments attached to this story. The real greens are what you're bloody well looking at.
My point is this: GM is not totally safe. Neither is random mutation, which is often spured on by radiation and chemical means.
So you would rather small and gradual changes which emerge in local populations and therefore can be adopted or removed on a local basis are more risky than making radical changes and trying them out on vast segments of the World's population.
Slashdot Mirror
I think Superman got stuck in a revolving door.
I agree with everything in your post, but just for reference it was Richard Stallman who had the problem with the printer driver, not (Everybody Loves...) Eric Raymond.
I have more recent experience. My opinions are similar, but not quite as extreme as yours, so perhaps the code base has improved somewhat. The code is self-modifying which I don't approve of for security reasons (and don't forget to back up your webroot if the code has changed itself!). The database schema is... not inelegant, but certainly atypical. SugarCRM will create new tables to represent new modules (either downloaded, or ones the user creates) and preserves relationships between tables in another table. Keys are all based on timestamps. So the database schema is dynamic and relationships reflected in the database data rather than in the code (i.e. if a Contact module can be related to an Account module, there's no line of code the looks up Contacts for Accounts exactly, but a row in the relationships table that says Contacts are Many To One to Accounts, or along those lines, obviously I'm simplifying a little just to show the principle). Before any DBAs get upset at that, I'll point out that SugarCRM is exclusively MySQL, so half the things that this makes it difficult to do you wouldn't be able to do with MyISAM anyway. ;)
The code base itself is a little erratic from what I saw. I don't rate it the best structured code I've ever seen, but I have seen worse. There are some howlers in the API though, I know that.
I'd be interested to know how well it scales. I suspect it scales adequately to a certain point so long as you throw sufficient hardware at it, but that due to the design, there will be a tipping point where things start going downhill quite quickly.
SugarCRM seems to serve its target market quite well - small to medium business that need some quick to deploy and easy to learn CRM software and don't want to get into coding something themself of course. I don't know that it would meet the needs of larger players. There's a possibility that it might become the MySQL of the CRM world. MySQL started off pretty flaky pre-5.0, but is now decent enough that you can make good use out of it and it's undeniably successful. But there could be a PostgreSQL out there ready to pounce too (PostgreSQL had excellent design from the start, but took a while to get up to speed. Now it matches MySQL punch for punch in performance and retains its more robust and feature rich capabilities). I don't know who PostgreSQL might represent in this analogy. Vtiger has been mentioned elsewhere, but I've not examined that one in much detail. Looks like it has potential.
So basically I agree with you, but I'd say it's not quite as bad as you describe any more. Time will tell. By the comments in this thread though, they might be better off either ditching the Free Software pretense or biting the bullet and going fully Libre. They'd need to move to a fully support-based income stream, but they might find big gains in terms of uptake and developer contributions.
Yeeeesss. I considered whether I should add qualifications to what I said when I wrote, then didn't bother. Hey - it's Slashdot! No-one's going to fuss over the details! :D
I'm curious as to whether you've ever used Zend's encrypted PHP. The code obscuring would certainly be annoying, but far from insurmountable. The encoded PHP I don't have experience with. I would guess, given the nature of PHP deployment, it would necessarily be easy to build a decoder. For those reasons, I kind of skipped over this possibility in my reply. Curious for comments from anyone who is more familiar with this tool
I remember those days, believe it or not. :) No, that really was (and still is) open source. What we have going on here, is a group (the OSI) attempting to re-define Open Source to be synonymous with Free Software. Perhaps one day they will succeed and we'll have to start referring to any open source software that isn't also licensed under something like the GPL as "shared source". One day, perhaps, but (best Aragorn voice) it is not this day!.
Seriously, if you want to refer to software that is both open source and includes the right to distribute and modify, call it "Free Software" like the FSF, or "Libre" software. It's nice, unambiguous, is an existing term and doesn't confuse half the software world which is still filled with people like me who recall Open Source meaning only that the source code is available.
Heh heh! You're right in theory, wrong in practice. SugarCRM has an important system in it called "modules". These are analogues of various business concepts, so there's a Contacts module, a Product Catalogue module, et al. The Professional Edition comes with some significant modules which, I'd say 75% of companies really need. Yes, the Community Edition people can write their own versions of these modules (as far as I'm aware - I don't know if SugarCRM legally could or would come down on them for making very similar free versions), but a substantial part of the utility of SugarCRM is in these modules. So what you're talking about is a fair bit of work. Also, they'll inter-relate. So if you buy the Professional Edition and get to use the Leads module, you get the functionality that can transform Leads into Contacts, relate them to Accounts, etc. Finally, SugarCRM the company control the code base and drive it with their Professional Edition. So you might write something wonderful that they like and incorporate into the main code body, but you might also find that having spent three weeks writing a cool equivalent to one of their modules, SugarCRM shrugs, makes some changes that will break it and rolls out the latest version of the Community Edition. In theory, if you're really awesome, at that point you could create a fork and the rest of the Community Edition users would follow you. In practice, that's not going to happen.
:(
So I appreciate where you're coming from - I expect you're an engineer of some variety and have the in-built assumption that everyone else works to maximise interoperabilty and flexibility that you do, but in fact this has not matched the reality in this instance, I'm sorry to say.
Regards,
H.
It's what Bruce Shneider terms "Badgeware" (afaik, the term originates with him). You're not entirely free to do what you want with it. You have to keep the SugarCRM logo and link in there unaltered and unadjusted. In practice this means you have to stick with their UI and you'll always have a big old footer at the bottom with their logo.
No, Snowgirl is right. Though I see you got your +1 Sounds Confident mods. What you are describing is Free (capital 'F') software, also known as "libre" software. Open Source does not mean anything other than you have the source available. For example, so you can inspect it for security reasons, so you can make in-house only changes. Free Software however, is what you get under the GPL. Free Software must of course be Open Source, but the inverse is not the case.
Hear that booming tread? That's Richard Stallman walking up your drive with a four hour lecture of the philosophy of information sharing. I'd hide under your desk if I were you.
Has anyone here actually read the article (I know, stupid assumption). SugarCRM has a dual licence. There's a "Community Edition" and a "Professional Edition" (also an Enterprise Edition, but that's not different from Professional - it's just the support offers sort of thing as far as I recall).
Now the Professional Version is obviously not "closed source" because it's a great sprawling PHP application so they have to give you the source. But that doesn't make it "Free Software". It requires a licence on a per user basis. In contrast, the Community Version is what we call "Badgeware". You can download it free, you can deploy it free with whatever users you like and you're free to make and distribute plugins and such for it. But you can't remove the SugarCRM logo and weblink for example. (In fact, there are some amusing little attempts to prevent people from doing that in the code, e.g. the legal notice that comes up if you alter the SugarCRM image doesn't appear as text in the files, but encoded as base64).
Anyway, there's an open sourcish community around the Community Edition that write tools for it. But, IMO, the whole thing doesn't feel very open sourcey. What it comes down to is not an issue of programming, so much as it comes down to business needs. SugarCRM has a system of "modules" - pluggable business entities such as Contacts, Product Lists, Accounts, etc. The great big difference between the Community and Professional versions is that the Professional version comes with additional modules. And for most businesses (I would say), they're modules that you really need. There are various other bits and pieces like the Professional Edition supports workflows whereas the Community Edition does not.
What it comes down to, is that SugarCRM has a community edition which serves as a good bit of PR, a hook to get in new users and a source of occasional free bug-fixes. But most serious businesses - the ones who actually are potential customers - will end up needing the features of the non-Free Professional Edition. There are attempts to replicate some of what the Professional Edition does in the Community one, but from what I've seen they don't really compare and of course the company itself isn't helping much because primarily they want people to buy the Professional Edition to get those features. Their forums are also littered with unanswered technical questions. If you're a paying customer and you file a support request with them, you get fixes (in my limited experience with them), but if you're a Community type asking questions on the forums, you take your chances. It would also be pretty difficult to make any substantial changes to the code base because you're always tailing the Professional Edition which SugarCRM control. So if you write a wonderful new thing for it (the do-it-yourself Open Source way), expect there to be a good chance that it will be incompatible shortly.
I actually quite like the model of a free version of software and then a paid-for pro version with extra coolness. It's a model that works well. But when you combine that with Open Source, it becomes a little more dubious (maybe) because there's the possibility that you use the name of Open Source but create a system where in practice, people can't meaningfully participate and it's primarily a hook into the paid version. This is where I feel SugarCRM are. I have no doubt that there are people using the Community Edition for business purposes, but I think what I describe is the bird's eye view of the situation.
Yes, but the people who believe in the heliocentric, non-flat Earth don't go around the whole time saying how they're being stifled and that the flat-earthers are driving the media. And that is the point. I didn't say anything about whether the science was right or wrong, I said the idea that proponents of AGW are somehow struggling to convince people is unsupportable, and yet that's how many AGW proponents keep acting.
I suggest you try being a public skeptic of AGW and see which side really controls the media and squashes dissent. The Independent, a major British newspaper, published a big opinion piece by their columnist Johan Hari, which basically boiled down to "we don't need evidence of AGW because we know it's real and you hate the world and all life upon it if you ask for any". When comments on the story were pointing out flaws in what he said (he's not a scientist by any stretch of the imagination) and politely making intelligent points against AGW, the newspaper deleted everyone's comments. Try being skeptical here on
You and others keep saying that proponents of AGW are fighting some battle against media conspiracy and underhand tactics. The reality is that anyone publically skeptical of AGW gets viciously hammered. I might be able to get away with this post because of the irony factor, but the general case is that AGW proponents have an overwhelming influence in the media, in government and in academia. They ain't the underdogs. They're the Establishment.
So basically, you're saying that it's good to block attempts to peer-review stuff because the scientific method doesn't work very well unless "we accept areas of grey" ?
It's hard to refute an argument that has so little to do with its subject.
See, I knew we were more or less in agreement. I don't know if I'd want culprits released to the public - I'd prefer such things to be handled via normal legal channels. But it could be considered a public good, yes. Definitely showing how much of the Pirate Bay is used for illegal, rather than legal content would be great.
Regarding the extenuated verbiage, no offense (at least to myself, I obviously cannot speak for others) has been caused and, I must emphasize, the clarification, even though itself an ironic example of such profligate verbosity as to make Dogberry, (the comical character so prone to malapropisms in Shakespeare's, himself no miser with the tools of his trade, Much Ado About Nothing) seem briefer than a glutton's grace and, I must tell you, struck a chord with me for it is a weakness shared, though an affection for sub-clauses, born of a premature exposure to Quadratic Equations, is my true nemesis.
Cheers,
H.
What? I said 'wikileaks don't do x, they do x to a particular subset of people'. It's not hypocritical for them to treat people in the subset differently - it's what they do. Might as well say it's hypocritical for the police to only arrest people who are committing crimes and not target people who aren't - it's what they do. (Okay, bad example given recent police behaviour but you get what I'm saying).
/. is pro-piracy, but in fact there are many of us that give reasoned arguments against it. We're usually the ones that are modded down -1 Troll / Flamebait / Said Something We Didn't Like.
Anyway, perhaps we're talking at cross-purposes. I get the vague impression from your post that you think I'm defending the Pirate Bay by shooting down the wikileaks analogy. I'm not. I despise the pirate bay and piracy in general. I'm just shooting down a bad analogy that caught wikileaks in the collateral fire. It's understandable that one assumes any given post on
Conceivably. But that isn't what was proposed and I think it would fall more on the side of law-enforcement than wikileak's general stuff. Wikileaks are more about defending the masses from those in positions of power where the law might not otherwise pursue them, than they are about aiding prosecutions against individual people. True, mass-piracy has put people en masse into a position of power over companies and they are using that power to massively abuse those companies. But it doesn't fit the popular conception of "those in power."
I'm sympathetic. But I hardly think your case is the general one that applies to most users of the Pirate Bay.
Wikileaks do not "host illegally obtained information (and even private information such as emails, memos, etc.)". Wikileaks host illegally obtained information (and even private information such as emails, memos, etc.) that is pertinent to the public good, e.g. evidence that the US military tortured, government corruption, etc. They don't just do it for the sake of it and refusing to host a bunch of random people's email addresses and passwords is not hypocritical at all. Ridiculous thing to say!
Why would it be hypocritical of him to complain about you sharing his information? He's not sharing anyone else's unless you know otherwise. It's hypocritical for the pirate bay to condemn people for sharing data though, because they do share other people's data.
Now if the airline were called "Air Cocaine", the analogy would be better. The pirate bay is for pirated movies, music, software. Everyone, certainly including the admins, knows this. It's amazing that the same weasel words and legal foot-shuffling that Slashdot would be up in arms about were this a politician or corporation, is celebrated as a great thing when done by people stealing movies and music.
I weep that you got modded up +4 insightful for saying that the RIAA is founded on extortion. People are forced to download movies and music are they? These are necessities of life? By that principle, a supermarket is extorting you by making you pay for your groceries.
I read it and thought: 'who is Al?'
They need a better font.
Why?
By your logic, the most dangerous foods are the ones stored in tins and thrown at people's heads.
Transplanting genes from animals to plants, which is unprecedented, is neither a smaller, not a better understood process than species of plants breeding together and occasional mutations that produce plants that are still fertile.
Without GM crops, avoiding a monoculture is possible, with Monsanto's model of GM plants, it is not.
It's not a separate issue. The many arguments against GM crops that you've seen in the comments here are made time and time again. But each time, a strawman is set up to say "you said GM were bad for you, and our study couldn't find any harm, so we're right and you're wrong". The strawman (if indeed GM's are all unharmful which I'm very far from allowing) in the linked article is entirely relevant because it is used as a deflection against all these other concerns. I mean look at the comments here - tonnes of people making intelligent, supportable arguments against Monsanto's business practices and the risks and effects of GM crops, and the only reply is always: "this study didn't find any evidence of harm".
You say most arguments from the "green movement". What do you think you are seeing in all the many comments in this thread if it isn't the concerns of people for their environment and our future well-being? Is this the latest version of the No True Scotsman? You're not an environmentalist unless you make arguments that spinkham can find flaws in? You talk about your strawman "green movement"? Take a look at all the comments attached to this story. The real greens are what you're bloody well looking at.
So you would rather small and gradual changes which emerge in local populations and therefore can be adopted or removed on a local basis are more risky than making radical changes and trying them out on vast segments of the World's population.
Let me guess, you love online poker, right?