Let's presume for the moment, just for laughs, that this entire thread isn't just a completely fraudulent troll.
> Our logging information shows that 81% of attempted connects > from IP addresses claiming to be running Netscape, re-connect > later using IE4 or IE5.
Brilliant! So you're willing to throw away 19 percent of one fairly large subset of your employers's potential customers? Who did you say you work for? I'm sure they'd be interested in knowing how you're willing to chase off lots of paying customers simply because you're too sleepy and/or incompetent to add a few lines of HTML to your web pages. A few lines of HTML that my twelve year old daughter could knock out in a text editor, while at the same time talking on the phone and watching TV, in about fifteen seconds flat.
Oh yeah, you're posting as an Anonymous Coward. I can understand why. Unemployment sucks. I wouldn't want to lose my job either.
Actually, as far as you screwing your employers, I'm all for it. I hate capitalism and I hate capitalists and I figure they deserve to get fscked over by lazy slackers like you. If they're going to sequester all the surplus value, why should you work any harder than the minimum you can get away with?
> I am a member of the current most dominant species
No! I don't believe it. You're a cockroach?!
Incredulous, WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Re:Free speech, not free beer!
on
Giving Back
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· Score: 1
I guess it's OK for Microsoft to encourage people to use their software with a hundred million dollars worth of ads a year, then slap hand cuffs on those customers when they try release their own application under a different license that the Microsoft approved one.
Well, yes, it is OK. It's their software. So I'm not free, for example, to write a bunch of Excel macros, copy them together with the install files for Excel onto a CD, and then legally mass-market that CD as "WDK's EZ-calc." Does this strike you as an unacceptable infringement of my rights?
Microsoft licenses software that is their own property any way they like, and no one objects. If you don't like their licensing terms, then you are free not to use their product. If you write a program all on your own, then you can license it as you like, sell it, lease it, give it away, do whatever you want, and no one will object. What's so different about the FSF, that you complain about FSF developers exercising their own property rights?
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
what you need isn't what you get
on
LonelyNet
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· Score: 1
What you need and what you're going to get in this world are two different things. Better the damned net than nothing.
Sincerely, WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Re:You might find this shocking, but..
on
LonelyNet
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, I was going to pass this article by, but then Jon Katz's hand reached out through the glass tube of my monitor like something out of a Cronenberg movie, seized my wrist in a vise-like grip, and forced me to click on that link. Damn you Jon Katz!
Everybody in America howls at the very thought of an eight-year-old kid ever once taking a sip of beer (my father, who was born in Paris, drank 1/2 water and 1/2 wine at dinner every night past his fifth birthday) and there are decades-long prison sentences waiting for anyone caught supplying that kid with just one marijuana cigarette. But no one in this country full of idiots looks askance when parents by the million farce their sons as though they were the fucking Christmas turkey with daily doses of Ritalin, just because their kid acts like boys have always acted from before the beginning of recorded history.
Now have you ever taken a dose of Ritalin yourself? I have, once, about twenty-five years ago. Did you ever read the famous urban legend about a guy who strapped a JATO unit to a Chevy Impala? It's my experience that Ritalin straps a JATO to your cerebral cortex. That's one single dose, not the one thousand doses those poor kids get in less that three years of this so-called "therapy."
I shudder to think what it's got to be like kicking a chronic, iatrogenic stimulant-drug habit like that. But of course the American medical profession, one and all, don't give a fuck, not so long as the cash keeps rolling in.
> Who are you trying to discredit with this nonsense, and why?
He's trying to make me laugh, and succeeding so well I'm actually in physical pain. Far be it from me to speak for an anonymous other but I do believe he's poking fun at our friends the Randites. But he gives himself away as weak and merely a poseur where he asserts:
> > Wealth creation is the only human activity that can be morally > > justified. Anybody who wastes his time on anything else is a > > moral cripple, and is certain to be criminally inclined. Such > > people should be locked up pre-emptively before they > > give in to their criminal impulses.
Because if he really meant it with his whole heart he'd insist that those anarchist scum must be not just "locked up" but exterminated.
> Why, oh why, is everything ludicrous attributed to right-wingers?
Gee, I sometimes feel the same way: why is everything ludicrous falsely attributed to left-wingers? I'd really, really like to see a national health care program in the U.S.A.; therefore, according to many noisy right-wingers, that gasbag Limbaugh comes to mind as an example, that inclination makes me approximately equivalent to Pol Pot.
> I am just about as far-right-wing as you can get, and I assure that > my core beliefs do not condone censorship in any form.
Then, sir, sorry to disappoint you, but you are not as far-right as you can get. You want far-right? Look at Adolf Hitler. (And don't you dare give me that shit about "nazi" beng an acronym or "National Socialist." Pol Pot's government billed itself as "Democratic Kampuchea," but no sane person would blame either small-d or big-D democrats for the crimes of the Khmer Rouge.) Nor am I the farthest of far-leftists. You want far-left? Joseph Stalin comes to mind. The point being, both Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler were ruthless censors, whereas in contrast we two congenial, tolerant moderates are not.
> Man that really Chews my cud, It always seems the good guys have to > fight fair and justify their actions where as the bad guys, well... we > all know what they can get away with. But how does one let the people > on the fence see the truth?
The above comment was moderated down to -1 as a "troll." Not that it's such a big deal, I wouldn't want anyone to think I get all emotionally worked up about/. moderation or anything like that, but just wondering, in what way is this a troll? It seems like a legitimate and even thoughtful comment to me.
> The whole idea of 'memes' is an attempt to avoid responsibility > for thinking things through. Arguing for 'rights' when you've > adopted meme theory is just incoherant.
It may also be the politically responsible way of taking into consideration the fact that when you consider an issue, though you may have rationally thought things through, there are vast numbers of your fellow citizens - voters, that is - who have neither gotten hold of the relevant facts nor thought anything through, but instead make their decisions based on having insensibly inhaled these "memes" out of the circumambient atmosphere.
But I sure sympathize with your distaste for the word "memes," as I too hate that word, just hate hate hate it. In my opinion the word "memes" is vague, cultish, and precious; for most listeners, including well-read ones, what you mean by it is either unclear or unknown. Especially you should not use "memes" in any discussions with propagandistic intent, because your listener loses track of the point you're trying to make as he struggles to tack down what "memes" means in the current context.
If I'm trying to sway someone over a political issue, definitely I don't want to use any words which I'm likely to have to define for the listener, at least not if there exist common words which convey essentially the same idea. My listener is apt to be annoyed if he thinks I'm using a fancy oddball word, not to express ideas which more ordinary words can't conveniently compass, but just to show off my superior vocabulary.
> it's not the bogeyman that the US has been fighting for years.
But it is! The bogeyman is anything that threatens any capitalist's profits. It's pretty obvious that even today Linux is undercutting the profits of manufacturers of proprietary server software. As Linux gets more popular and begins to penetrate the desktop market, the situation can only get "worse." ("Worse" for big companies and their stockholders; hackers and/or end-users would probably not think it so bad to get superior software for free.) Why else do you think Metcalfe's got his shorts all in a bunch over it?
Conversely you can go far beyond Marxism, beyond Bolshevism, beyond even the wildest excesses of Maoism, and still win the approval of the U.S. State Department, provided that State decides your actions might somehow benefit capitalism in some tactical sense. Here I refer, of course, to the support, both covert and open, given by the U.S. government, under the Carter and Reagan Administrations, to the totally-berserk Khmer Rouge of Cambodia, after their genocidal "Democratic Kampuchea" regime was ousted in 1978 by the Vietnamese Army.
> The Nation...the most anti-capitalist magazine around today.
Don't be silly. I subscribe to at least one magazine far to the left of the good old moderate Nation, and I can think of several others.
Nice of you to come visit Frownland. I would have had a look at your web site too, but alas you are an Anonymous Coward with an "a". What's the matter, guy, are you afraid of voicing your unpopular and controversial anti-kommie viewpoint over your own naked signature? Don't worry, the worst that can happen to you after Der Tag is a few invigorating years in the healthy, primitive, "back-to-nature" environment of the People's Republic's Bourgeois-Reeducation camp. Hee hee, when you least expect it, ol' Karl's red-eyed revenge-mad ghost is gonna come drifting up out of Highgate Cemetery and get you! BOO!
Thank heaven for that. Last week my car got broken into and the idiot wrecked the ignition switch trying to steal it. (He did, on the other hand, manage to overlook my laptop computer in a briefcase in the back seat.) Anyway, I got to borrow a Jeep Cherokee with an automatic for a couple of days while I was waiting for it to get fixed. It was a pretty nice car, great visibility, comfortable, rather a gas hog, but driving it reminded me how much I always disliked automatics. But it sure is hard to find a new car without one these days.
Stick shifts, CLIs, books == GOOD. Automatics, GUIs, TV == SUCK. So my prejudices say, anyway.
> A Command Line Interface is an outdated user interface...
"PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN! THE GREAT OZ COMMANDS YOU!"
> What is a "book"?
A "book" is an outdated, obsolete user interface, useful only for, oh, this and that, boring stuff that only creeps n nerds would be interested in. It has been replaced in practical use by the "TV" which is much more effective and easier to use and which requires no mental effort whatsoever. The "TV" is my God! All hail the "TV"!
> It requires him or her to give away his or her work > to the entire world for free.
Yep, that it does.
> It's a Faustian bargain which asks too much
Linus and countless others don't think it's too much; they license under GPL entirely of their own free will. You're free to disagree, concerning your own original code. License that any way you like.
> and therefore should not be accepted.
Then don't accept it. But in that case, hands off the GPL code; it's not yours. If you can't accept the license terms, return the unopened package to the store where you bought it and I'm sure they'll give you your money back.
That's not true; that's grossly unfair. You can hack the living daylights out of GPL code, and then use it to your heart's content. What you can't do is pass on the GPL code - which belongs to the original owner, who was free to license his code any way he pleases - to the next guy and squeeze a profit out of the transaction, against the expressed desire of the original coder who wrote the program on which your additions rest.
How could you object to that? Here, for example, is a copy of Windows NT Workstation, which I am presently reinstalling (that famous Windows bit rot struck again) on my office PC. I have a CD burner; suppose I make a copy of the \i386 directory, and then add original improvements of my own design, and sell it as "WDK Windows NT 4.1++" Is that illegitimate? Obviously it is. OK, suppose I just take one little bitty MS application - say, NOTEPAD.EXE, so I can show how WINE works - and include it in my Linux distro? Is that illegitimate? Microsoft's corps of lawyers would argue that it is. So why does it suddenly become legitimate, and even morally righteous, to appropriate any part of an open-source program for your own profit in contravention to the desires of its creators and owners?
Why do you insist on holding GNU software to such vastly higher standards of selflessness than commercial software? Unlike proprietary software, GNU software gives you the program with source for free, and for unlimited use, but this isn't enough for you? I really don't get this attitude, and I have to admit I find it almost offensively grabby, like when a guy on the sidewalk asks me for spare change and I hand him a dollar, whereupon he starts demanding two dollars.
A third alternative would be to look at the evidence (in this case, read Metcalfe's thesis, together with the counter-arguments against it) and decide for yourself.
> Producing a small run of chips will likely cost you over $1000 per chip.
Producing the first copy of a commercial-quality word processor would cost you many millions of dollars. Even if you could somehow talk programmers into donating their labor for free, as RMS has successfully done on projects of similar magnitude, those donations would still be worth millions of dollars. At the lowest wages imaginable for computer programming professionals times the prodigious number of man-hours invested in that code, the contents of a Debian CD must be worth a staggering amount of money. I'd really like to know to within an order of magnitude just how many man-hours are represented on that CD.
It's an amazing thing that all those programmers have generously given their work away for free. According to many economists, especially of the pro-capitalism camp, it is more than merely amazing; it is simply impossible. Nonetheless, there we see it, as incomprehensible and terrifying as the sight of a ghost is to a strict rationalist. In fact I think I see this atavistic fear motivating Metcalfe's scarcely rational flame-column, and so many more similar columns he's written, where he speaks of "the open-sores movement" and the like. A calm, reasonable man would never write as he has done.
But you should not let the disorienting effect of all that unexampled generosity lead you to infer that all that code is literally valueless. Unlike Metcalfe, you have never experienced the trauma of Bolshevik partisans seizing your houses and lands, so you have no grounds to misjudge in panic as he so regrettably does.
Yeah, buddy. EMACS isn't enough. gcc isn't enough. RMS is supposed to crank out one of those and give it away to you for free every year or so for the rest of your life, or else you'll start to regard him as a jerk, which I'm sure he'll find emotionally devastating.
At least, thank God, that redeyed kommie RMS hasn't installed a Felix Dzerzhinski in office (yet) to force you, at gunpoint, to give up your code for the Greater Good of the State. You're still free to use software and an OS that have nothing to do with RMS; stuff with neither a trace nor even the touch of gcc for anything. And when you do you'll be a hundred percent more productive; what you do now will be easier and faster and what you want to do, and more, will be possible; and everything you do will be more fun.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
...dammit, what has Carl Friedrich Gauss done for me lately? that asshole...
After the fall of Kerensky's government, the Bolsheviks seized the Metcalfe family estates near Smolensk, as well as their summer home in St. Petersburg, and in the turmoil Bob Metcalfe's family were all forced to emigrate to Germany. A couple years later his father, Ivan Andreivich, was murdered by schismatic open source advocates at an emigres's meeting in Munich. These traumatic events molded young Bob's personality.
So naturally whenever he hears the phrase "open-source" he gets all angry and irrational. And he firmly believes Marx is the anti-Christ, even though, like so mant other intransigent critics, he only knows Marx's works third hand.
It's HIS! He can license it where you have to be standing on your head to use it, OK? He can license it for a million dollars a copy, he can withhold it from the market completely, he can do what he wants with it because he invented it and patented it and it's HIS.
And here he's giving it away for free to Linux users, to which I, as one, say "thank you," with all the feeling with which I usually say "thank you" when someone gives something of value which he owns to me for free. As far as FreeBSD people I'll bet he's willing to license it to them for free; or if his lawyer has reservations due to the mysterious FreeBSD license (hey I don't even really know the legal ramifications of the GPL, and I've never even read the FreeBSD license), probably he'd license it to them for one dollar "and other good and valuable considerations," as we phrase it in the land survey trade.
As far as GNU is concerned I'm sure he, they (well, I speak of RMS of course but I wouldn't want to scant the countless other worthy GNU-licensers either) is, are quite thoroughly against this sort of thing; this despite their natural reluctance to offend someone who is clearly trying to contribute to users of GNU software. So your "Maybe it's what GNUish people want, however" is an unjustified slur, I think. You know quite well that he, they insist on thrusting their excellent software into our hands in such an aggressive manner that it precludes ever extorting a cent from us by force of license. That even more extraordinary generosity of theirs eclipses even Mr. Yodaikin's admirable beneficence. So as I say "thank you" to Mr. Yodaikin I'd also like to shout a double "thank you" to the true GNU crew for all they do, and so should you.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's presume for the moment, just for laughs, that this entire thread isn't just a completely fraudulent troll.
> Our logging information shows that 81% of attempted connects
> from IP addresses claiming to be running Netscape, re-connect
> later using IE4 or IE5.
Brilliant! So you're willing to throw away 19 percent of one fairly large subset of your employers's potential customers? Who did you say you work for? I'm sure they'd be interested in knowing how you're willing to chase off lots of paying customers simply because you're too sleepy and/or incompetent to add a few lines of HTML to your web pages. A few lines of HTML that my twelve year old daughter could knock out in a text editor, while at the same time talking on the phone and watching TV, in about fifteen seconds flat.
Oh yeah, you're posting as an Anonymous Coward. I can understand why. Unemployment sucks. I wouldn't want to lose my job either.
Actually, as far as you screwing your employers, I'm all for it. I hate capitalism and I hate capitalists and I figure they deserve to get fscked over by lazy slackers like you. If they're going to sequester all the surplus value, why should you work any harder than the minimum you can get away with?
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Sounds like it would be real tasty: warm Diet Mountain Dew mixed half n half with tequila.
Try drinking that in the desert. It won't help you much but at least it would probably kill the buzzards too.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> I am a member of the current most dominant species
No! I don't believe it. You're a cockroach?!
Incredulous, WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
I guess it's OK for Microsoft to encourage people to use their software with a hundred million dollars worth of ads a year, then slap hand cuffs on those customers when they try release their own application under a different license that the Microsoft approved one.
Well, yes, it is OK. It's their software. So I'm not free, for example, to write a bunch of Excel macros, copy them together with the install files for Excel onto a CD, and then legally mass-market that CD as "WDK's EZ-calc." Does this strike you as an unacceptable infringement of my rights?
Microsoft licenses software that is their own property any way they like, and no one objects. If you don't like their licensing terms, then you are free not to use their product. If you write a program all on your own, then you can license it as you like, sell it, lease it, give it away, do whatever you want, and no one will object. What's so different about the FSF, that you complain about FSF developers exercising their own property rights?
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
What you need and what you're going to get in this world are two different things. Better the damned net than nothing.
Sincerely, WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Yeah, I was going to pass this article by, but then Jon Katz's hand reached out through the glass tube of my monitor like something out of a Cronenberg movie, seized my wrist in a vise-like grip, and forced me to click on that link. Damn you Jon Katz!
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Everybody in America howls at the very thought of an eight-year-old kid ever once taking a sip of beer (my father, who was born in Paris, drank 1/2 water and 1/2 wine at dinner every night past his fifth birthday) and there are decades-long prison sentences waiting for anyone caught supplying that kid with just one marijuana cigarette. But no one in this country full of idiots looks askance when parents by the million farce their sons as though they were the fucking Christmas turkey with daily doses of Ritalin, just because their kid acts like boys have always acted from before the beginning of recorded history.
Now have you ever taken a dose of Ritalin yourself? I have, once, about twenty-five years ago. Did you ever read the famous urban legend about a guy who strapped a JATO unit to a Chevy Impala? It's my experience that Ritalin straps a JATO to your cerebral cortex. That's one single dose, not the one thousand doses those poor kids get in less that three years of this so-called "therapy."
I shudder to think what it's got to be like kicking a chronic, iatrogenic stimulant-drug habit like that. But of course the American medical profession, one and all, don't give a fuck, not so long as the cash keeps rolling in.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> We Want Jesus Dead?
You got it. It's what the Pharisees said (Matthew 27:15-26).
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> Who are you trying to discredit with this nonsense, and why?
He's trying to make me laugh, and succeeding so well I'm actually in physical pain. Far be it from me to speak for an anonymous other but I do believe he's poking fun at our friends the Randites. But he gives himself away as weak and merely a poseur where he asserts:
> > Wealth creation is the only human activity that can be morally
> > justified. Anybody who wastes his time on anything else is a
> > moral cripple, and is certain to be criminally inclined. Such
> > people should be locked up pre-emptively before they
> > give in to their criminal impulses.
Because if he really meant it with his whole heart he'd insist that those anarchist scum must be not just "locked up" but exterminated.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Speaking from the left...
> Why, oh why, is everything ludicrous attributed to right-wingers?
Gee, I sometimes feel the same way: why is everything ludicrous falsely attributed to left-wingers? I'd really, really like to see a national health care program in the U.S.A.; therefore, according to many noisy right-wingers, that gasbag Limbaugh comes to mind as an example, that inclination makes me approximately equivalent to Pol Pot.
> I am just about as far-right-wing as you can get, and I assure that
> my core beliefs do not condone censorship in any form.
Then, sir, sorry to disappoint you, but you are not as far-right as you can get. You want far-right? Look at Adolf Hitler. (And don't you dare give me that shit about "nazi" beng an acronym or "National Socialist." Pol Pot's government billed itself as "Democratic Kampuchea," but no sane person would blame either small-d or big-D democrats for the crimes of the Khmer Rouge.) Nor am I the farthest of far-leftists. You want far-left? Joseph Stalin comes to mind. The point being, both Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler were ruthless censors, whereas in contrast we two congenial, tolerant moderates are not.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> Man that really Chews my cud, It always seems the good guys have to
> fight fair and justify their actions where as the bad guys, well... we
> all know what they can get away with. But how does one let the people
> on the fence see the truth?
The above comment was moderated down to -1 as a "troll." Not that it's such a big deal, I wouldn't want anyone to think I get all emotionally worked up about /. moderation or anything like that, but just wondering, in what way is this a troll? It seems like a legitimate and even thoughtful comment to me.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> The whole idea of 'memes' is an attempt to avoid responsibility
> for thinking things through. Arguing for 'rights' when you've
> adopted meme theory is just incoherant.
It may also be the politically responsible way of taking into consideration the fact that when you consider an issue, though you may have rationally thought things through, there are vast numbers of your fellow citizens - voters, that is - who have neither gotten hold of the relevant facts nor thought anything through, but instead make their decisions based on having insensibly inhaled these "memes" out of the circumambient atmosphere.
But I sure sympathize with your distaste for the word "memes," as I too hate that word, just hate hate hate it. In my opinion the word "memes" is vague, cultish, and precious; for most listeners, including well-read ones, what you mean by it is either unclear or unknown. Especially you should not use "memes" in any discussions with propagandistic intent, because your listener loses track of the point you're trying to make as he struggles to tack down what "memes" means in the current context.
If I'm trying to sway someone over a political issue, definitely I don't want to use any words which I'm likely to have to define for the listener, at least not if there exist common words which convey essentially the same idea. My listener is apt to be annoyed if he thinks I'm using a fancy oddball word, not to express ideas which more ordinary words can't conveniently compass, but just to show off my superior vocabulary.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> it's not the bogeyman that the US has been fighting for years.
But it is! The bogeyman is anything that threatens any capitalist's profits. It's pretty obvious that even today Linux is undercutting the profits of manufacturers of proprietary server software. As Linux gets more popular and begins to penetrate the desktop market, the situation can only get "worse." ("Worse" for big companies and their stockholders; hackers and/or end-users would probably not think it so bad to get superior software for free.) Why else do you think Metcalfe's got his shorts all in a bunch over it?
Conversely you can go far beyond Marxism, beyond Bolshevism, beyond even the wildest excesses of Maoism, and still win the approval of the U.S. State Department, provided that State decides your actions might somehow benefit capitalism in some tactical sense. Here I refer, of course, to the support, both covert and open, given by the U.S. government, under the Carter and Reagan Administrations, to the totally-berserk Khmer Rouge of Cambodia, after their genocidal "Democratic Kampuchea" regime was ousted in 1978 by the Vietnamese Army.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> The Nation...the most anti-capitalist magazine around today.
Don't be silly. I subscribe to at least one magazine far to the left of the good old moderate Nation, and I can think of several others.
Nice of you to come visit Frownland. I would have had a look at your web site too, but alas you are an Anonymous Coward with an "a". What's the matter, guy, are you afraid of voicing your unpopular and controversial anti-kommie viewpoint over your own naked signature? Don't worry, the worst that can happen to you after Der Tag is a few invigorating years in the healthy, primitive, "back-to-nature" environment of the People's Republic's Bourgeois-Reeducation camp. Hee hee, when you least expect it, ol' Karl's red-eyed revenge-mad ghost is gonna come drifting up out of Highgate Cemetery and get you! BOO!
Good night komrades! - WKiernan@concentric.net
Thank heaven for that. Last week my car got broken into and the idiot wrecked the ignition switch trying to steal it. (He did, on the other hand, manage to overlook my laptop computer in a briefcase in the back seat.) Anyway, I got to borrow a Jeep Cherokee with an automatic for a couple of days while I was waiting for it to get fixed. It was a pretty nice car, great visibility, comfortable, rather a gas hog, but driving it reminded me how much I always disliked automatics. But it sure is hard to find a new car without one these days.
Stick shifts, CLIs, books == GOOD. Automatics, GUIs, TV == SUCK. So my prejudices say, anyway.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> A Command Line Interface is an outdated user interface...
"PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN! THE GREAT OZ COMMANDS YOU!"
> What is a "book"?
A "book" is an outdated, obsolete user interface, useful only for, oh, this and that, boring stuff that only creeps n nerds would be interested in. It has been replaced in practical use by the "TV" which is much more effective and easier to use and which requires no mental effort whatsoever. The "TV" is my God! All hail the "TV"!
G'night, suckas! - Wkiernan@concentric.net
> "The EMACS *Commune*"
And your point is, Senator McCarthy?
Yours, D. Trumbo
> It requires him or her to give away his or her work
> to the entire world for free.
Yep, that it does.
> It's a Faustian bargain which asks too much
Linus and countless others don't think it's too much; they license under GPL entirely of their own free will. You're free to disagree, concerning your own original code. License that any way you like.
> and therefore should not be accepted.
Then don't accept it. But in that case, hands off the GPL code; it's not yours. If you can't accept the license terms, return the unopened package to the store where you bought it and I'm sure they'll give you your money back.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> It's the GPL that "takes, takes, takes."
That's not true; that's grossly unfair. You can hack the living daylights out of GPL code, and then use it to your heart's content. What you can't do is pass on the GPL code - which belongs to the original owner, who was free to license his code any way he pleases - to the next guy and squeeze a profit out of the transaction, against the expressed desire of the original coder who wrote the program on which your additions rest.
How could you object to that? Here, for example, is a copy of Windows NT Workstation, which I am presently reinstalling (that famous Windows bit rot struck again) on my office PC. I have a CD burner; suppose I make a copy of the \i386 directory, and then add original improvements of my own design, and sell it as "WDK Windows NT 4.1++" Is that illegitimate? Obviously it is. OK, suppose I just take one little bitty MS application - say, NOTEPAD.EXE, so I can show how WINE works - and include it in my Linux distro? Is that illegitimate? Microsoft's corps of lawyers would argue that it is. So why does it suddenly become legitimate, and even morally righteous, to appropriate any part of an open-source program for your own profit in contravention to the desires of its creators and owners?
Why do you insist on holding GNU software to such vastly higher standards of selflessness than commercial software? Unlike proprietary software, GNU software gives you the program with source for free, and for unlimited use, but this isn't enough for you? I really don't get this attitude, and I have to admit I find it almost offensively grabby, like when a guy on the sidewalk asks me for spare change and I hand him a dollar, whereupon he starts demanding two dollars.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
A third alternative would be to look at the evidence (in this case, read Metcalfe's thesis, together with the counter-arguments against it) and decide for yourself.
> Producing a small run of chips will likely cost you over $1000 per chip.
Producing the first copy of a commercial-quality word processor would cost you many millions of dollars. Even if you could somehow talk programmers into donating their labor for free, as RMS has successfully done on projects of similar magnitude, those donations would still be worth millions of dollars. At the lowest wages imaginable for computer programming professionals times the prodigious number of man-hours invested in that code, the contents of a Debian CD must be worth a staggering amount of money. I'd really like to know to within an order of magnitude just how many man-hours are represented on that CD.
It's an amazing thing that all those programmers have generously given their work away for free. According to many economists, especially of the pro-capitalism camp, it is more than merely amazing; it is simply impossible. Nonetheless, there we see it, as incomprehensible and terrifying as the sight of a ghost is to a strict rationalist. In fact I think I see this atavistic fear motivating Metcalfe's scarcely rational flame-column, and so many more similar columns he's written, where he speaks of "the open-sores movement" and the like. A calm, reasonable man would never write as he has done.
But you should not let the disorienting effect of all that unexampled generosity lead you to infer that all that code is literally valueless. Unlike Metcalfe, you have never experienced the trauma of Bolshevik partisans seizing your houses and lands, so you have no grounds to misjudge in panic as he so regrettably does.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
John Maynard Keynes disagrees.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Yeah, buddy. EMACS isn't enough. gcc isn't enough. RMS is supposed to crank out one of those and give it away to you for free every year or so for the rest of your life, or else you'll start to regard him as a jerk, which I'm sure he'll find emotionally devastating.
At least, thank God, that redeyed kommie RMS hasn't installed a Felix Dzerzhinski in office (yet) to force you, at gunpoint, to give up your code for the Greater Good of the State. You're still free to use software and an OS that have nothing to do with RMS; stuff with neither a trace nor even the touch of gcc for anything. And when you do you'll be a hundred percent more productive; what you do now will be easier and faster and what you want to do, and more, will be possible; and everything you do will be more fun.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
...dammit, what has Carl Friedrich Gauss done for me lately? that asshole...
...a tragic story.
After the fall of Kerensky's government, the Bolsheviks seized the Metcalfe family estates near Smolensk, as well as their summer home in St. Petersburg, and in the turmoil Bob Metcalfe's family were all forced to emigrate to Germany. A couple years later his father, Ivan Andreivich, was murdered by schismatic open source advocates at an emigres's meeting in Munich. These traumatic events molded young Bob's personality.
So naturally whenever he hears the phrase "open-source" he gets all angry and irrational. And he firmly believes Marx is the anti-Christ, even though, like so mant other intransigent critics, he only knows Marx's works third hand.
Yours, S. Freud - WKiernan@concentric.net
It's HIS! He can license it where you have to be standing on your head to use it, OK? He can license it for a million dollars a copy, he can withhold it from the market completely, he can do what he wants with it because he invented it and patented it and it's HIS.
And here he's giving it away for free to Linux users, to which I, as one, say "thank you," with all the feeling with which I usually say "thank you" when someone gives something of value which he owns to me for free. As far as FreeBSD people I'll bet he's willing to license it to them for free; or if his lawyer has reservations due to the mysterious FreeBSD license (hey I don't even really know the legal ramifications of the GPL, and I've never even read the FreeBSD license), probably he'd license it to them for one dollar "and other good and valuable considerations," as we phrase it in the land survey trade.
As far as GNU is concerned I'm sure he, they (well, I speak of RMS of course but I wouldn't want to scant the countless other worthy GNU-licensers either) is, are quite thoroughly against this sort of thing; this despite their natural reluctance to offend someone who is clearly trying to contribute to users of GNU software. So your "Maybe it's what GNUish people want, however" is an unjustified slur, I think. You know quite well that he, they insist on thrusting their excellent software into our hands in such an aggressive manner that it precludes ever extorting a cent from us by force of license. That even more extraordinary generosity of theirs eclipses even Mr. Yodaikin's admirable beneficence. So as I say "thank you" to Mr. Yodaikin I'd also like to shout a double "thank you" to the true GNU crew for all they do, and so should you.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net