Brian Behlendorf, one of the Apache web server's developers describes the their license this way:
"This type of license is ideal for promoting the use of a reference body of code that implements a protocol for common service. This is another reason why we choose it for the Apache group - many of us wanted to see HTTP survive and become a true multiparty standard, and would not have minded in the slightest if Microsoft or Netscape choose to incorporate our HTTP engine or any other component of our code into their products, if it helped further the goal of keeping HTTP common.
All this means that, strategically speaking, the project needs to maintain sufficient momentum, and that participants realize greater value by contributing their code to the project, even code that would have had value if kept proprietary.''
No, you cannot close up BSDL code. Nothing you do can make BSD code any less available and open. All you can do is keep *your* work closed.
If I take BSD code and use it in my own closed-source product, I have in no way closed or damaged that BSD code. It's still there for others to use however they see fit.
Neither the GPL nor the BSD license are necessary to keep the covered code available to users. The GPL, however, exists to force other code, developed by other people, to be just as open as the original code -- that being the "price" of using the original code.
The GPL is about making GPL'd software better. GPL'd code is not useful to developers using any of the other FOSS licenses, only to people using the GPL.
As far as the GPL is concerned, The Apache Group and Microsoft are both disqualified for cooperation.
The GPL exists to encourage the use of the GPL. The BSDL exists to encourage the creation of quality software, regardless of license.
Sure, but the vast majority of my CDs are material I still enjoy. Where many books lack sufficient re-readability to justify keeping, the same isn't true for nearly all of the music I buy.
I also resell my books from time to time, whenever I have a sufficiently large stack of books I'm pretty sure I'll never care to re-read.
If I had enough CDs to justify selling a whole bunch at once, I'd certainly have been far better off never having bought them in the first place.
I'm not comfortable using allofmp3. Even if they are technically legal, I feel that it's only via a loophole which I do not feel is appropriate to exploit. While they may fall within the letter of the law, I don't believe that allofmp3 operates within the spirit of the law.
I have no interest in pissing off the RIAA, so number 5 is hardly an endorsement to me.
It's convenient. I can go surfing around in iTMS, find a song I want, and be listening to it 20 seconds later. All at three in the morning from the comfort of my home.
With CDs the best case is that I order it from amazon.com and get it a few days later, along with 10 other tracks on the disc which I may or may not want. Worst case, I have to drive to the store and stand in line to pay.
iTMS wins the convenience and simplicity battle hands-down.
I never resell CDs, they just aren't worth enough to make it worth the bother. With iTMS tracks I don't waste space on storing physical media I never use.
Wait a minute -- what needs correcting? Media using the word "piracy" to refer to copyright infringment are not incorrect, they're not misusing the word, and they don't need correction. It's a well-accepted, widely-understood, and perfectly valid use of the word. Pretending otherwise does not help your cause.
Moreover, I think you're doing yourself a disservice in trying to convince yourself and others that dictionary handwringing is the core reason why most people consider piracy to be dishonest. It's not. People in general consider piracy to be dishonest because, well, because it is. Granted, on the scale of dishonesty it obviously ranks pretty low for many people, but I think you're being myopic to assert that people would be accepting of piracy if it weren't for the language used to describe it. That's absurd.
The perception that people hold towards piracy is spot-on. It isn't acceptable behavior. It is something that a person should avoid or at least feel a little bit guilty about. Most people understand this quite well on some level or another, and to try to blame a word for that rational viewpoint is ridiculous.
The mid '80s is downright modern. Use of the word "piracy" in reference to copyright infringement dates back to at least 1771 according to the Oxford English Dictionary. People have been calling copyright infringement "piracy" for longer than the United States has been a country.
Splitting hairs with the dictionary might make the original poster feel better, but it isn't going to sway anyone to his point of view. In the end, that sort of linguistic misdirection just makes a person appear disconnected from reality, harming their argument.
You remember this article? The one where legions of poor spellers furiously railed in the comments about how spelling and punctuation don't matter as long as the reader is able to comprehend meaning?
Here's a tangible counterpoint to that argument: There's no confusion -- pe1rxg has obviously mispelled "derivative" using two r's. I'm confident that any reader will completely understand the intent despite the misspelling.
But you know what? That one extra "r" conveys a message which completely overshadows what's been said. That extra "r" says "The person who has written this has no FUCKING idea what they are talking about." People who understand licenses do not misspell that word. People with the understanding and training necessary to tell you what a complicated license like the GPL requires do not misspell that word. With that one extra "r", pe1rxg has instantly demonstrated that his opinion on licensing issues have no merit.
I wouldn't hire a programmer who had difficulty spelling "include" and I sure as hell won't take legal advice on licensing issues from a person who doesn't know how to spell such a basic term of art like "derivative". You just can't develop an understanding of licensing issues without consequently developing a familiarity with the terms used in discussing licensing issues.
It's sort of the same way that everyone who uses command line ftp learns how to spell "anonymous":)
Reality doesn't really support that assertion. Free, open source web servers predate Linux. Free unixes predate linux. Open source predates linux by decades. There's absolutely no reason to presume that open source would not have survived with or without Linux.
Maybe I'll get lucky and Apple will release a personal accounting package. It'd probably be called 'Accounts' or 'Finances', since 'Money' is already taken.
Damn skippy. The lack of a decent personal finance management package is a real shortcoming for home users. I keep an XP box in the closet just to run Quicken. It's the only app I wasn't able to find an alternative for when I switched to OS X three years ago.
There are some money management apps for OS X, but they're all quite awful.
Please explain how apt-get's inability to function for non-root users is contributing in any way to system security. As others have pointed out, apt-get's shortcoming in this regard does absolutely nothing to prevent users from installing software without root privleges. It's nothing more than a shortcoming of apt-get that it doesn't support this activity.
If you, as an administrator, want to enforce the concept of no nonroot software installs, you'll have to do more than simply cripple the package manager. Since users do not have to be root to install software, your premise is flawed.
That's true on its face, but there's certainly no shortage of Windows critics whose most recent meaningful Windows experience dates back to Windows ME or Windows 98.
If you use the same password everywhere then CmdrTaco can log in to your bank account.
Login credentials are often stored unencrypted on the server side, leaving your password open for compromise by any legitimate admin of that site or anyone who manages to hack into it.
Do you want to trust your single password that you use to all sites to the least secure of all the crappy web boards you've got an account on?
DRM is the natural and unavoidable consequence of the rampant piracy that takes place today. It's every last slashbot bleating that it's their natural born right to donwload whatever content they wish, simply because technology enables them to do so with ease and with little risk of discovery that has led to the current climate of distrust and litigation in the media world.
There's a lot that's revolutionary in Tiger, it's just not all on the surface. John Siracusa's recent Tiger review for ARS Technica is a great read and covers a lot of the interesting improvements that exist in Tiger:
Almost correct, and nearly totally wrong.:) Since there is no "ASCII code" for those characters (despite that misleading page) using those numbers will only work for some users on some servers with some browsers. Any time the character set is accidently the same as you've assumed it is.
The proper solution is to use the named character entity references -- in this case ampersand + "eacute" + ; which will work regardless of the code page in use.
As refererence, I'd send you to the remarkable joelonsoftware article that explains why your approach fails to work in many cases:
Sorry Marco, but I don't see why I should respect the results of a "study" when the author doesn't distinguish between "P2P" and "people trading copyrighted data against the owner's wishes". This manifesto seems to perpetuate the myth that "P2P" is a synonym for "piracy". Heck, the paper can't even distinguish between a Macintosh computer and a MAC address.
With such obviously lacking intellectual rigor, why should we have any confidence in your conclusions on the overall issue, which is far more complicated than many of the trivial things which escaped you?
P2P should be about people freely choosing to share their creations with the world, not about consumers choosing to violate the license on commercial goods that they'd rather not pay for. You do a disservice to the future of P2P and information exchange when you perpetuate the myth that the two are the same thing.
The goal should be making free-distribution licenses mainstream, not making it easier to violate licenses.
Slashdot Mirror
No, you cannot close up BSDL code. Nothing you do can make BSD code any less available and open. All you can do is keep *your* work closed.
If I take BSD code and use it in my own closed-source product, I have in no way closed or damaged that BSD code. It's still there for others to use however they see fit.
Neither the GPL nor the BSD license are necessary to keep the covered code available to users. The GPL, however, exists to force other code, developed by other people, to be just as open as the original code -- that being the "price" of using the original code.
I like it, but it's not quite accurate.
The GPL is about making GPL'd software better. GPL'd code is not useful to developers using any of the other FOSS licenses, only to people using the GPL.
As far as the GPL is concerned, The Apache Group and Microsoft are both disqualified for cooperation.
The GPL exists to encourage the use of the GPL. The BSDL exists to encourage the creation of quality software, regardless of license.
Sure, but the vast majority of my CDs are material I still enjoy. Where many books lack sufficient re-readability to justify keeping, the same isn't true for nearly all of the music I buy.
I also resell my books from time to time, whenever I have a sufficiently large stack of books I'm pretty sure I'll never care to re-read.
If I had enough CDs to justify selling a whole bunch at once, I'd certainly have been far better off never having bought them in the first place.
I'm not comfortable using allofmp3. Even if they are technically legal, I feel that it's only via a loophole which I do not feel is appropriate to exploit. While they may fall within the letter of the law, I don't believe that allofmp3 operates within the spirit of the law.
I have no interest in pissing off the RIAA, so number 5 is hardly an endorsement to me.
It's convenient. I can go surfing around in iTMS, find a song I want, and be listening to it 20 seconds later. All at three in the morning from the comfort of my home.
With CDs the best case is that I order it from amazon.com and get it a few days later, along with 10 other tracks on the disc which I may or may not want. Worst case, I have to drive to the store and stand in line to pay.
iTMS wins the convenience and simplicity battle hands-down.
I never resell CDs, they just aren't worth enough to make it worth the bother. With iTMS tracks I don't waste space on storing physical media I never use.
synonym see WIT
sarchasm n. 1. The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the recipient who doesn't get it.
Wait a minute -- what needs correcting? Media using the word "piracy" to refer to copyright infringment are not incorrect, they're not misusing the word, and they don't need correction. It's a well-accepted, widely-understood, and perfectly valid use of the word. Pretending otherwise does not help your cause.
Moreover, I think you're doing yourself a disservice in trying to convince yourself and others that dictionary handwringing is the core reason why most people consider piracy to be dishonest. It's not. People in general consider piracy to be dishonest because, well, because it is. Granted, on the scale of dishonesty it obviously ranks pretty low for many people, but I think you're being myopic to assert that people would be accepting of piracy if it weren't for the language used to describe it. That's absurd.
The perception that people hold towards piracy is spot-on. It isn't acceptable behavior. It is something that a person should avoid or at least feel a little bit guilty about. Most people understand this quite well on some level or another, and to try to blame a word for that rational viewpoint is ridiculous.
The mid '80s is downright modern. Use of the word "piracy" in reference to copyright infringement dates back to at least 1771 according to the Oxford English Dictionary. People have been calling copyright infringement "piracy" for longer than the United States has been a country.
Splitting hairs with the dictionary might make the original poster feel better, but it isn't going to sway anyone to his point of view. In the end, that sort of linguistic misdirection just makes a person appear disconnected from reality, harming their argument.
You remember this article? The one where legions of poor spellers furiously railed in the comments about how spelling and punctuation don't matter as long as the reader is able to comprehend meaning?
:)
Here's a tangible counterpoint to that argument: There's no confusion -- pe1rxg has obviously mispelled "derivative" using two r's. I'm confident that any reader will completely understand the intent despite the misspelling.
But you know what? That one extra "r" conveys a message which completely overshadows what's been said. That extra "r" says "The person who has written this has no FUCKING idea what they are talking about." People who understand licenses do not misspell that word. People with the understanding and training necessary to tell you what a complicated license like the GPL requires do not misspell that word. With that one extra "r", pe1rxg has instantly demonstrated that his opinion on licensing issues have no merit.
I wouldn't hire a programmer who had difficulty spelling "include" and I sure as hell won't take legal advice on licensing issues from a person who doesn't know how to spell such a basic term of art like "derivative". You just can't develop an understanding of licensing issues without consequently developing a familiarity with the terms used in discussing licensing issues.
It's sort of the same way that everyone who uses command line ftp learns how to spell "anonymous"
Reality doesn't really support that assertion. Free, open source web servers predate Linux. Free unixes predate linux. Open source predates linux by decades. There's absolutely no reason to presume that open source would not have survived with or without Linux.
Neither does "Linux" describe Apache, *nix, open source, or vertical applications.
Quicken for Mac is abysmal. It's horrid. It's a pale sliver of the Windows version that's not only crippled but also unstable.
Truly awful stuff.
You are thinking of Fitt's Law. Some platforms get it right and some don't
Maybe I'll get lucky and Apple will release a personal accounting package. It'd probably be called 'Accounts' or 'Finances', since 'Money' is already taken.
Damn skippy. The lack of a decent personal finance management package is a real shortcoming for home users. I keep an XP box in the closet just to run Quicken. It's the only app I wasn't able to find an alternative for when I switched to OS X three years ago.
There are some money management apps for OS X, but they're all quite awful.
Please explain how apt-get's inability to function for non-root users is contributing in any way to system security. As others have pointed out, apt-get's shortcoming in this regard does absolutely nothing to prevent users from installing software without root privleges. It's nothing more than a shortcoming of apt-get that it doesn't support this activity.
If you, as an administrator, want to enforce the concept of no nonroot software installs, you'll have to do more than simply cripple the package manager. Since users do not have to be root to install software, your premise is flawed.
That's true on its face, but there's certainly no shortage of Windows critics whose most recent meaningful Windows experience dates back to Windows ME or Windows 98.
If you use the same password everywhere then CmdrTaco can log in to your bank account.
Login credentials are often stored unencrypted on the server side, leaving your password open for compromise by any legitimate admin of that site or anyone who manages to hack into it.
Do you want to trust your single password that you use to all sites to the least secure of all the crappy web boards you've got an account on?
I wish I had modpoints to +1 this post.
DRM is the natural and unavoidable consequence of the rampant piracy that takes place today. It's every last slashbot bleating that it's their natural born right to donwload whatever content they wish, simply because technology enables them to do so with ease and with little risk of discovery that has led to the current climate of distrust and litigation in the media world.
You also seem to be the one who has a hilariously overinflated sense of how much other people pay attention to him.
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars
It's a long read, but it's engaging and very informative. I cannot recommend the article more highly.
The proper solution is to use the named character entity references -- in this case ampersand + "eacute" + ; which will work regardless of the code page in use.
As refererence, I'd send you to the remarkable joelonsoftware article that explains why your approach fails to work in many cases:
The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)
This is slashdot. After the horse is dead, we skin it and learn to play drums.
Why not just buy the Mac? It's a real computer.
With such obviously lacking intellectual rigor, why should we have any confidence in your conclusions on the overall issue, which is far more complicated than many of the trivial things which escaped you?
P2P should be about people freely choosing to share their creations with the world, not about consumers choosing to violate the license on commercial goods that they'd rather not pay for. You do a disservice to the future of P2P and information exchange when you perpetuate the myth that the two are the same thing.
The goal should be making free-distribution licenses mainstream, not making it easier to violate licenses.