Whatever you learn when you're a child has a shallow learning curve. Kids learn. They learn about whatever's around them. That's what kids do, and they do it *very* well.
The only problems with the Linux learning curve is with adults who didn't grow up with computers, have little or no interest in computing, and who learned Windows because they had to for work or whatever, and whose neuronal pathways have pretty much hardened in 'Windows mode'. Thankfully, there is, and will only ever be, one generation of these guys.
Trouble with that theory is that this crippled XP has no support for multiple users or networked printers - both would be essential for any decent sized organisation, surely.
Erm, the advance is right there, right at the top, and it appears later on when it gets taken away again because, well, it's an advance.
The numbers don't add up because some are income, and some are expenditure (credits/debits, whatever) but the poster didn't take the time to distinguish properly between them. It's slightly clearer in the original, but not much.
If a spacecraft is about to leave the solar system, then surely we should at least leave it running for a couple of years in order to get some more data on the Pioneer anomaly - it would be a shame to pass up on the chance to study one of the few unexplained anomalies in elementary physics...
The problem isn't with the Post being found to have libelled someone, it's with them being found to be liable in Canada for something they said in Washington DC. The right course of action for this libel victim is to have sued them where the infringing actions took place, which is where the website is, and which is in the US.
If this sort of thing is allowed to continue, how long before I can be convicted under some foreign dictatorship's censorship laws for something I said a thousand miles away?
I was at the Edinburgh one, yes, it was nice. The one big disappointment was that the 'Spacewar' exhibit was running on a Vectrex, rather than on the hulking PDP-foo that had been stuffed and mounted beside it. Still, a very pleasant way to spend an afternoon.
"5: The BBC is not directly censored by any organisation outside the BBC. "
Well firstly, it does a good job of censoring itself sometimes - the BBC coverage of the Northern Ireland conflict, for example, was a disgrace - well over 50 programmes were censored (either not shown at all, or cut in some way) in some fashion due to the BBC, not including whatever censorship the daily news bulletin editors decided to impose. There was even an instance of a Star Trek:TNG episode not being shown due to an offhand comment on Northern Ireland made by one character.
And of course, there are probably hundreds of programmes that either weren't made or decided not to say anything that might offend whoever was in control.
Secondly, your statement is false - again, regarding Northern Ireland, in the late 1980s the Home Secretary did issue an edict stating that the voices of Sinn Fein members were not to be heard on British Television (including the advertising-supported channels).
The BBC is usually better than the commercial broadcasters, IMO, but it does have it's problems.
Re: the abc program - there is no compulsion for a user of GPLed software to distribute anything at all. You are allowed, for your own personal (or internal company) use, to glue proprietary and GPLed code together in any combination you see fit - the only restrictions are on distribution of the code. However if you plan to distribute someone else's GPLed code to any third parties, then all the code in there would have to be GPLed and the source code would have to be made available.
If YOU wrote all of b and c, then things are easier. Just put your code out under multiple licenses. You can GPL b and c and put it on a website AND license the same code to your company under a proprietary license for use in 'abc' - some companies, like Trolltech, actually make a living by producing GPLed code, and selling proprietary software companies the right to make derivative works of the same software under non-GPLed terms.
Nonsense. There's nothing inherently more difficult about using a normal Linux GUI interface than a Windows one. They perform the same function, in very slightly different ways, and, while there may be slight differences, for normal usage, they're pretty much equivalent. If you stick a child in front of a GUI-based computer and show them how to use the appropriate menus and icons (and even the CLI or whatever), they'll get along fine - far better than you because learning stuff is what children do. The only tricky bit is holding a child's interest long enough for them to learn something, which is the job of application developers.
There might be some differences in difficulty when it comes to software installation and configuration - but those shouldn't really be the child's problem, unless your child happens to show an interest in that sort of thing. You don't get your 11 year old to configure obscure network card drivers in Slackware, for instance, unless they really want to.
Where there is a difference in difficulty between using the user interfaces, it's in adults, and in particular, the Microsoft generation. People who grew up without computers, who need one for work or whatever, and who were never naturally inclined to geekery or gadgetry. Those poor buggers found it hard enough having to learn how to use the Windows GUI (badly) in the first place, and they really don't want to go to the trouble of learning another one. These are also the people who are also largely responsible for Bill Gates' vast fortune, and for virus-ridden, spyware-infested computers being used as spam-relays all over the net. To be fair, it's not really their fault though - they didn't have the opportunity to know any better. Thankfully there will only be one generation of computer-illiterate ignoramuses buying software.
But anyways, there's no problem with children learning to use Linux. Children learn ANYTHING they're inclined to. That's what children do, and the one thing that children are almost universally good at. If you don't believe me, go set up a Linux box in the living room for your own personal use and forbid your 12-year old child ever to use it. I bet you they'll have installed a rootkit within 6 months.
Well Maple IS nice and all, but Maxima is free (speech and beer), it's quite nice too, it uses a similar interface (Maple copied Maxima/Macsyma, in a look-and-feely kind of way) and is nicely apt-gettable from a net-connected Debian box.
Yes Maxima has been ported to Windows too, but then again, a lot of good open source software has - that's the nature of the beast. Showing the IT blokes/blokesses at the school a computer that doesn't get raped by spyware after 2 minutes of internet use is probably a bigger selling point.
"Who will benifit from no software patents, the small guy?"
Absolutely. The small guy benefits. Why do you think it's the IBMs and the Microsofts and the Nokias of this world who support the big patent regime, and the small companies and the random Free Software people who are against it?
Patents are expensive. You need money to take out a patent, and you need expensive lawyers to enforce them, and you need lots of money to bring lawsuits, and if you happen to inadvertantly treat on someone else's patent (which is easy to do, given the trivial things that can be patented in the US these days) then you need money to defend yourself against other people's patents. If software patents take hold, only the big companies with the lawyers will survive.
The only 'small' players who want software patents are the patent pool companies who make nothing, sell nothing, but buy up a patentable idea and then clobber the companies that are foolish enough to make things.
"First off, lots of European software companies own patents"
Europeans can be assholes too.
"Secondly, most of these European software companies also patent their inventions in the US, and are thus protected by US law against infringment of their patents in the US. "
See above. Though the problem is mostly with the fact that these guys are ALLOWED to do this. Businesses are amoral entities which extract profit from whatever system happens to be in place. Just because our asshole businessmen extract ill-gotten gains from your borked system doesn't mean we have to bork our system to let your businessleeches suck us dry.
"Thirdly, If a US company does the same, and patents their inventions in Europe, under the European system, and then nationalises their patent in any of the European countries, they are protected against infringment in the contries they have nationalised in. Thats fair enough isn't it? "
Erm, All software patents are bad. US ones, European ones, Papa New Guinean ones, whatever. I don't want an equal playing field between the US and Europe if it means we have to take on YOUR bullshit laws.
"Finally, what we are talking about are property rights"
No we are talking about *Monopoly* rights.
"Would you want someone to move in and take something that belongs to you, and not pay compensation? "
That's what patents are. I make some software. I use my code and my ideas, and because you happened to think of some small part of it first, you come along and charge me royalties.
"If you think you can ignore property rights, even ones you don't agree with, then thats a political issue."
Erm I can ignore these 'rights' if these 'property rights' don't exist yet. Software patents don't exist in Europe. So I can safely ignore them, nya nya.
"In Europe, I hope we are sophisticated enough in our appreciation of the compeating rights involved to be able to balance theese rights and accept that there is a place for patent laws that incentivise and reward creative thinking."
There's no shortage of creative thinking in the software world at the moment. People just love thinking up cool new things to do with software, and there's more software kicking around than ever before. The problem is turning whatever ideas people have into working, useful code, and copyright seems to be all the incentive people need (in fact, the vast glut of Free or Open Source software out there suggests that even copyright might not even be necessary).
Come back and try barking for these software patents at the unspecified time in the future when the world and his dog is complaining about the world software shortage. Then there might just be a case for the invocation of state violence to enforce monopolies in software, just so software gets made. There certainly is no case for it now.
What the hell are you talking about man? "show some restraint" to make for "happy advertisers"
I don't want happy advertisers. I want poor, miserable, broke, pissed off, starving advertisers. I want payback for each and every time an advertiser interrupted my favourite television program, nagged me with an intrusive web popup, or made me wait half an hour in a cinema for the film I paid to see. I want advertisers screwed over badly for each and every time a newspaper or magazine editor altered a story for the benefit of the advertisers rather than tell the truth to the poor bastards who payed money for what was sold to them as 'news'. I want advertisers kicked in the gonads for each and every scenic view that got spoiled with a billboard. I want junk snailmailers to have their nipples plugged into the electricity mains. I want email spammers tortured to death and hung from landmarks, as an example to others. I want telemarketers to have their jaws wired shut. I want the entire fucking advertising industry hurt, spat on, derided, kicked, punched, beaten and made to live as social outcasts. I want advertisers to die lonely, sad deaths in grotty bedsits, and to lie undiscovered for 2 years until the neighbours complain about the smell. I want their vast quantities of fucking mental pollution eradicated from every part of this planet, and them with it, if need be.
So if clicking on a weblink for no reason costs these bastards money, then good. Hope the costs add up, to the point of bankruptcy.
I'm thinking that what I need is a SETI-style screensaver thang that just pinged these ads silently while I sleep until these advertisers give the fuck up and fuck off out of my goddamn life.
Sorry, I tend to get carried away when the subject of advertising comes up.
All these serial number checks, dial-home schemes, registration schemes, digital "rights" management schemes, crippled 'starter' versions of windows, and now all sorts of anti-piracy checks whenever someone wants to patch ther Windows box - Microsoft does spend an awful lot of time and effort deliberately making sure their software doesn't work unless the customer jumps through the appropriate hoops.
Aren't you worried that this continual (and increasingly intrusive) process of deliberately breaking and/or crippling your own software is going to alienate some your customers and make them feel like criminals, particularly since the makers of the 'free software' operating systems that you're now competing against have no need of any of it and can concentrate all of their resources on trying to make their software work?
Here's some corroborating evidence. http://ceb.unsystem.org/documents/ISCC. Reports/rep ort5.html
This is a William Mcdonald Buck talking to the United Nations Information Systems Coordinating Committee on behalf of the IBRD, which is one of the main divisions of the World Bank.
There's also a William Mcdonald Buck who had difficulty booting his 2.5 kernel on the LKML (but wasn't subscribed) and a William Mcdonald Buck who's apparently done some sort of instructing at the CS department of George Mason University.
Obviously you didn't RTFA. He's not having a go at Sun because of their CDDL license, he's having a go at Sun because they're threatening F/OSS developers with patents (and spinning that they're good guys because they're not going after the Solaris developer base with those patents).
This isn't about what Sun does with it's software. It's about Sun threatening to charge you royalties for YOUR software, that you wrote yourself, on your own, with no help from them. See the difference?
Actually, you're wrong. 'Promissory estoppel' is the legal terminology in a number of english-speaking countries for promises which DO hold up in court. There are a number of circumstances where if I say 'You can do X without me suing you' then I legally can't sue you for X.
"e law is a vehicle for whatever you want it to be. Yes people use it to both get rich and stay rich, and I say why not? having all that money is like most things in this world, you will probably hate those with it until you join their ranks."
Why not? Because I thought the name of the game was to live in a democracy where everybody made the rules, not a plutocracy where we're pwned by those with money. If it's okay for the rich to make the rules, why was it not okay for, say, Stalin's communist party or Hitler's Nazi party to make the rules? You'd really hate those guys too until you join their ranks.
"You have never had to use proprietary software as you said and that doesn't make you economically crippled, not in the slightest."
I don't have to use roads either. By your foolish logic, that "wouldn't economically cripple me either". I just find another way to transport goods and people from A to B that's more efficient. You think of software as a luxury product. It's not. In this day and age, it's an essential piece of economic infrastructure.
"no one gave away a free, usable operating system until 1991" which I still would believe is incorrect"
Unless you want to nitpick as regards the freeness of pre-1991 BSDs, and for most people outside elite circles in academia or whatever, BSD wasn't an option anyway until 1990 or 1991 or so.
"they could have just copied the MS office code if they wanted and began from there and Linus could have just started with the DOS code and developed from there"
No they couldn't. That code was both secret and illegal to use.
"If the only problem free software makers faced was the possibility of all the ideas being bought up by MS, etc, then you have completely invalidated the idea that "creativity isn't scarce". you can only buy it all up when it is scarce."
Hehe, well spotted. You can't buy up all ideas per se. You CAN buy up all the useful ways of doing a particular thing though. It wouldn't be hard to patent all the *useful* knots for seamanship purposes, or all the worthwhile carpentry joints and set yourself up in a monopoly, if you were allowed to.
"Anyways, Microsoft has a competitor in every single one of its divisions. and usually, its a pretty major one."
Some of those markets are ones which Microsoft has just entered, such as the Xbox. I'll ignore those.
For the others, the alternatives are usually non-proprietary ones which don't force the reinvention of wheels. In operating systems for low-end desktops we have, what, Linux and OSX. Linux works because it simulates a copyright-less, trade secret-less world using the GPL. It wouldn't have ever existed using the normal mehods of copyright protection. OSX didn't reinvent many wheels, it just cribbed hugely from FreeBSD (BSD itself wasn't able to come into being in the marketplace to begin with, it was an academic project built on top of Unix code). Linux itself cribbed a bunch of BSD and ancient Unix code too.
"I suggest a socialist state. They are nice, none of that wealth inequality or the law holding the little person down."
You ARE joking, right? Socialist states are mostly nasty (at least the ones that the US lets exist for more than a couple of years without launching terror attacks of one flavour or another). I'm more of a non-statist socialist type person.
"just wondering, do you support any kind of patent or copyright, or are you just against them in softwares case?"
I'm totally opposed to software patents. Real patents I'm mostly agnostic about, since I don't pay that much attention to physical inventions.
Copyrights I don't really care too much about either way - the free copyright licenses are doing a good job of competing with the unfree ones, so abolishing copyrights, while it might be nice, isn't totally necessary. That's no reason not to denigrate unfree software whenever possible though.
The major worry with copyrights is the practical measures needed to enforce copyright in the digital age which are turning into dangerous impingents on everyone's freedom.
"the copy is illegal, is that really so hard to understand??"
I understand fine. I also understand that the law is a vehicle for the protection of wealth inequality through the use and threat of violence, and I also understand that software would still be made even without exclusionary property rights, so it's not even a necessary evil.
"If people don't like the lisense, no one forces them to by the product, not even windows."
The 'choice' you refer to is that, at least until recently, you didn't have to use proprietary software. You always had the choice of not using a computer at all and being crippled, economically.
It's a similar, though less harsh, choice to the 'work 14 hours in my sweatshop for a pittance or sift through other people's garbage for tin cans' that third world people often have to make.
"Hate you break it to you, but the information and alternatives have always been there."
The alternatives only came into being in 1991 or so.
"Those people aren't slaves, they are willingly bending over and taking it."
Well some people need to work using proprietary software and need to install said software at home. "Use proprietary software or lose your job" is not a choice, it's a threat.
"I argue copyright forces people to be even more creative. Not only allowing them to come up with something new but by reinventing something already there, possibly making it much better."
So that explains all the creative people I see reinventing proprietary PC operating systems and coming up with proprietary spreadsheets to compete with Excel, does it? You're trying to paint a monopolist's barriers to competition as though it was a stimulus to creativity.
Creative people have a choice too. When you raise barriers to competition too far, they have a choice of not competing. Competing with Microsoft in most areas is utterly unthinkable for a proprietary company these days - there are simply far too many wheels to reinvent.
Besides, you miss the point. Creativity isn't scarce. People come up with ideas all the time. It's one of the things that people just do. I'm not about to support the use of state violence to combat the global ideas shortage we aren't having.
The problem for a proprietary software producer isn't lack of ideas, it's getting enough suitably skilled manpower to turn those ideas into working code that matters. For free software, the problem is just making sure there aren't any artificial barriers for those that do want to put those ideas into practice. And that means stopping IBM and Microsoft from buying up all the ideas.
"most software companies make money by selling software."
Software which comes with dire threats attached if you make a copy for a friend.
"no major company makes a majority of its money from lawsuits"
And no dictator subjects the majority of his citizens to violence. He doesn't need to. The threat is already there, it's implicit and well-understood by everybody.
"you can't under any lisence take someone elses work, stick a EULA on it and sue someone for infringement on your copyright"
Technically yes. But any minor modification to a BSD-licensed program and the copyright on the mods are effectively yours. If I'm the first person to compile FreeBSD with a non-standard compiler, then I probably have copyright on the binaries, and I can slap on that fascist EULA. Even if that's not the case, I can still tweak a couple of lines of code for the same effect.
Of course, if that's what the author of the BSD-code wants, then that's fine. I have no problems with those nice BSD people offering their code under those sorts of conditions. However, I do resent being told by a third party that I'm a coward for not letting every proprietary hoarder use my code to enslave and threaten people.
No they weren't. You totally mischaracterised the GPL as an anti-commercial license, and said something about control-freakery into the bargain.
"I'm not arguing that anyone should do anything."
You did EXACTLY THAT! You told us that if we wanted our software to be free we should public domain it! You tried to bully GPL-developers by calling the license cowardly!
"If, however, their goal is to give away their work as a gift to the greater community, "
The proprietary software world doesn't need charity, it needs to be starved to death. Hope this helps.
"If, however, GIMP were released into the public domain, it would in short order raise the quality of every image editing program on the planet"
If GIMP was public domain, there's a good chance that it would be a shitty freeware utility with no developer base like all the other shitty freeware utilities out there, and would have contributed next to nothing to the community. Or do you mean they should develop their software under the GPL for a while until it turns out good, THEN public domain it? Perhaps you should ask the same of Adobe.
Free software works by getting a bunch of people with a huge bunch of different motives to work on one project. Some do it for the technical challenge. Some do it for the money. Some do it for the kudos. Some might even do it out of this charity motive you're talking about, (presumably because they saw the telethon on TV last night with pictures of Larry Ellison and Bill Gates and Steve Jobs all looking hungry with the words 'give generously' scrolling across the bottom of the screen). It doesn't really matter WHY they write the code, they just do.
The GPL does seem to be a bit better at the job of getting people with different motives to work on the same project than the public domain. Public domain software has been around as long as software has, the GPL has been around for only 20 years. That's a 40 year head start. Why hasn't a public domain GIMP showed up already?
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Whatever you learn when you're a child has a shallow learning curve. Kids learn. They learn about whatever's around them. That's what kids do, and they do it *very* well.
The only problems with the Linux learning curve is with adults who didn't grow up with computers, have little or no interest in computing, and who learned Windows because they had to for work or whatever, and whose neuronal pathways have pretty much hardened in 'Windows mode'. Thankfully, there is, and will only ever be, one generation of these guys.
Trouble with that theory is that this crippled XP has no support for multiple users or networked printers - both would be essential for any decent sized organisation, surely.
Erm, the advance is right there, right at the top, and it appears later on when it gets taken away again because, well, it's an advance.
The numbers don't add up because some are income, and some are expenditure (credits/debits, whatever) but the poster didn't take the time to distinguish properly between them. It's slightly clearer in the original, but not much.
Do it in the appropriate jurisdiction. I shouldn't be held to American libel laws if I'm in Canada or Honduras or wherever.
Civil matters are governed by national laws too, you know.
If a spacecraft is about to leave the solar system, then surely we should at least leave it running for a couple of years in order to get some more data on the Pioneer anomaly - it would be a shame to pass up on the chance to study one of the few unexplained anomalies in elementary physics...
The problem isn't with the Post being found to have libelled someone, it's with them being found to be liable in Canada for something they said in Washington DC. The right course of action for this libel victim is to have sued them where the infringing actions took place, which is where the website is, and which is in the US.
If this sort of thing is allowed to continue, how long before I can be convicted under some foreign dictatorship's censorship laws for something I said a thousand miles away?
I was at the Edinburgh one, yes, it was nice. The one big disappointment was that the 'Spacewar' exhibit was running on a Vectrex, rather than on the hulking PDP-foo that had been stuffed and mounted beside it. Still, a very pleasant way to spend an afternoon.
And erm, this changes anything I said er, how, exactly? Censorship is censorship and it's usually a very bad thing.
I'm not sure your last sentence is correct, since I don't recall the BBC getting voice actors to read out quotes. Channel 4 certainly did so though.
"5: The BBC is not directly censored by any organisation outside the BBC. "
Well firstly, it does a good job of censoring itself sometimes - the BBC coverage of the Northern Ireland conflict, for example, was a disgrace - well over 50 programmes were censored (either not shown at all, or cut in some way) in some fashion due to the BBC, not including whatever censorship the daily news bulletin editors decided to impose. There was even an instance of a Star Trek:TNG episode not being shown due to an offhand comment on Northern Ireland made by one character.
And of course, there are probably hundreds of programmes that either weren't made or decided not to say anything that might offend whoever was in control.
Secondly, your statement is false - again, regarding Northern Ireland, in the late 1980s the Home Secretary did issue an edict stating that the voices of Sinn Fein members were not to be heard on British Television (including the advertising-supported channels).
The BBC is usually better than the commercial broadcasters, IMO, but it does have it's problems.
Re: the abc program - there is no compulsion for a user of GPLed software to distribute anything at all. You are allowed, for your own personal (or internal company) use, to glue proprietary and GPLed code together in any combination you see fit - the only restrictions are on distribution of the code.
However if you plan to distribute someone else's GPLed code to any third parties, then all the code in there would have to be GPLed and the source code would have to be made available.
If YOU wrote all of b and c, then things are easier. Just put your code out under multiple licenses. You can GPL b and c and put it on a website AND license the same code to your company under a proprietary license for use in 'abc' - some companies, like Trolltech, actually make a living by producing GPLed code, and selling proprietary software companies the right to make derivative works of the same software under non-GPLed terms.
Hope this helps.
Nonsense. There's nothing inherently more difficult about using a normal Linux GUI interface than a Windows one. They perform the same function, in very slightly different ways, and, while there may be slight differences, for normal usage, they're pretty much equivalent. If you stick a child in front of a GUI-based computer and show them how to use the appropriate menus and icons (and even the CLI or whatever), they'll get along fine - far better than you because learning stuff is what children do. The only tricky bit is holding a child's interest long enough for them to learn something, which is the job of application developers.
There might be some differences in difficulty when it comes to software installation and configuration - but those shouldn't really be the child's problem, unless your child happens to show an interest in that sort of thing. You don't get your 11 year old to configure obscure network card drivers in Slackware, for instance, unless they really want to.
Where there is a difference in difficulty between using the user interfaces, it's in adults, and in particular, the Microsoft generation. People who grew up without computers, who need one for work or whatever, and who were never naturally inclined to geekery or gadgetry. Those poor buggers found it hard enough having to learn how to use the Windows GUI (badly) in the first place, and they really don't want to go to the trouble of learning another one. These are also the people who are also largely responsible for Bill Gates' vast fortune, and for virus-ridden, spyware-infested computers being used as spam-relays all over the net. To be fair, it's not really their fault though - they didn't have the opportunity to know any better. Thankfully there will only be one generation of computer-illiterate ignoramuses buying software.
But anyways, there's no problem with children learning to use Linux. Children learn ANYTHING they're inclined to. That's what children do, and the one thing that children are almost universally good at. If you don't believe me, go set up a Linux box in the living room for your own personal use and forbid your 12-year old child ever to use it. I bet you they'll have installed a rootkit within 6 months.
Well Maple IS nice and all, but Maxima is free (speech and beer), it's quite nice too, it uses a similar interface (Maple copied Maxima/Macsyma, in a look-and-feely kind of way) and is nicely apt-gettable from a net-connected Debian box.
Yes Maxima has been ported to Windows too, but then again, a lot of good open source software has - that's the nature of the beast. Showing the IT blokes/blokesses at the school a computer that doesn't get raped by spyware after 2 minutes of internet use is probably a bigger selling point.
"Who will benifit from no software patents, the small guy?"
Absolutely. The small guy benefits. Why do you think it's the IBMs and the Microsofts and the Nokias of this world who support the big patent regime, and the small companies and the random Free Software people who are against it?
Patents are expensive. You need money to take out a patent, and you need expensive lawyers to enforce them, and you need lots of money to bring lawsuits, and if you happen to inadvertantly treat on someone else's patent (which is easy to do, given the trivial things that can be patented in the US these days) then you need money to defend yourself against other people's patents. If software patents take hold, only the big companies with the lawyers will survive.
The only 'small' players who want software patents are the patent pool companies who make nothing, sell nothing, but buy up a patentable idea and then clobber the companies that are foolish enough to make things.
"First off, lots of European software companies own patents"
Europeans can be assholes too.
"Secondly, most of these European software companies also patent their inventions in the US, and are thus protected by US law against infringment of their patents in the US. "
See above. Though the problem is mostly with the fact that these guys are ALLOWED to do this. Businesses are amoral entities which extract profit from whatever system happens to be in place. Just because our asshole businessmen extract ill-gotten gains from your borked system doesn't mean we have to bork our system to let your businessleeches suck us dry.
"Thirdly, If a US company does the same, and patents their inventions in Europe, under the European system, and then nationalises their patent in any of the European countries, they are protected against infringment in the contries they have nationalised in. Thats fair enough isn't it? "
Erm, All software patents are bad. US ones, European ones, Papa New Guinean ones, whatever. I don't want an equal playing field between the US and Europe if it means we have to take on YOUR bullshit laws.
"Finally, what we are talking about are property rights"
No we are talking about *Monopoly* rights.
"Would you want someone to move in and take something that belongs to you, and not pay compensation? "
That's what patents are. I make some software. I use my code and my ideas, and because you happened to think of some small part of it first, you come along and charge me royalties.
"If you think you can ignore property rights, even ones you don't agree with, then thats a political issue."
Erm I can ignore these 'rights' if these 'property rights' don't exist yet. Software patents don't exist in Europe. So I can safely ignore them, nya nya.
"In Europe, I hope we are sophisticated enough in our appreciation of the compeating rights involved to be able to balance theese rights and accept that there is a place for patent laws that incentivise and reward creative thinking."
There's no shortage of creative thinking in the software world at the moment. People just love thinking up cool new things to do with software, and there's more software kicking around than ever before. The problem is turning whatever ideas people have into working, useful code, and copyright seems to be all the incentive people need (in fact, the vast glut of Free or Open Source software out there suggests that even copyright might not even be necessary).
Come back and try barking for these software patents at the unspecified time in the future when the world and his dog is complaining about the world software shortage. Then there might just be a case for the invocation of state violence to enforce monopolies in software, just so software gets made. There certainly is no case for it now.
So are these gizmos any more endangered than when we first reported this?
What the hell are you talking about man? "show some restraint" to make for "happy advertisers"
I don't want happy advertisers. I want poor, miserable, broke, pissed off, starving advertisers. I want payback for each and every time an advertiser interrupted my favourite television program, nagged me with an intrusive web popup, or made me wait half an hour in a cinema for the film I paid to see. I want advertisers screwed over badly for each and every time a newspaper or magazine editor altered a story for the benefit of the advertisers rather than tell the truth to the poor bastards who payed money for what was sold to them as 'news'. I want advertisers kicked in the gonads for each and every scenic view that got spoiled with a billboard. I want junk snailmailers to have their nipples plugged into the electricity mains. I want email spammers tortured to death and hung from landmarks, as an example to others. I want telemarketers to have their jaws wired shut. I want the entire fucking advertising industry hurt, spat on, derided, kicked, punched, beaten and made to live as social outcasts. I want advertisers to die lonely, sad deaths in grotty bedsits, and to lie undiscovered for 2 years until the neighbours complain about the smell. I want their vast quantities of fucking mental pollution eradicated from every part of this planet, and them with it, if need be.
So if clicking on a weblink for no reason costs these bastards money, then good. Hope the costs add up, to the point of bankruptcy.
I'm thinking that what I need is a SETI-style screensaver thang that just pinged these ads silently while I sleep until these advertisers give the fuck up and fuck off out of my goddamn life.
Sorry, I tend to get carried away when the subject of advertising comes up.
All these serial number checks, dial-home schemes, registration schemes, digital "rights" management schemes, crippled 'starter' versions of windows, and now all sorts of anti-piracy checks whenever someone wants to patch ther Windows box - Microsoft does spend an awful lot of time and effort deliberately making sure their software doesn't work unless the customer jumps through the appropriate hoops.
Aren't you worried that this continual (and increasingly intrusive) process of deliberately breaking and/or crippling your own software is going to alienate some your customers and make them feel like criminals, particularly since the makers of the 'free software' operating systems that you're now competing against have no need of any of it and can concentrate all of their resources on trying to make their software work?
Trolltech have just confused the terms 'proprietary' and 'commerical', just like a number of /. trolls. Perhaps that's where their name comes form.
Replace some instances of 'commercial' with 'proprietary' in their blurb and it reads better.
Here's some corroborating evidence.. Reports/rep ort5.html
http://ceb.unsystem.org/documents/ISCC
This is a William Mcdonald Buck talking to the United Nations Information Systems Coordinating Committee on behalf of the IBRD, which is one of the main divisions of the World Bank.
There's also a William Mcdonald Buck who had difficulty booting his 2.5 kernel on the LKML (but wasn't subscribed) and a William Mcdonald Buck who's apparently done some sort of instructing at the CS department of George Mason University.
Obviously you didn't RTFA. He's not having a go at Sun because of their CDDL license, he's having a go at Sun because they're threatening F/OSS developers with patents (and spinning that they're good guys because they're not going after the Solaris developer base with those patents).
This isn't about what Sun does with it's software. It's about Sun threatening to charge you royalties for YOUR software, that you wrote yourself, on your own, with no help from them. See the difference?
Actually, you're wrong. 'Promissory estoppel' is the legal terminology in a number of english-speaking countries for promises which DO hold up in court. There are a number of circumstances where if I say 'You can do X without me suing you' then I legally can't sue you for X.
"e law is a vehicle for whatever you want it to be. Yes people use it to both get rich and stay rich, and I say why not? having all that money is like most things in this world, you will probably hate those with it until you join their ranks."
Why not? Because I thought the name of the game was to live in a democracy where everybody made the rules, not a plutocracy where we're pwned by those with money. If it's okay for the rich to make the rules, why was it not okay for, say, Stalin's communist party or Hitler's Nazi party to make the rules? You'd really hate those guys too until you join their ranks.
"You have never had to use proprietary software as you said and that doesn't make you economically crippled, not in the slightest."
I don't have to use roads either. By your foolish logic, that "wouldn't economically cripple me either". I just find another way to transport goods and people from A to B that's more efficient. You think of software as a luxury product. It's not. In this day and age, it's an essential piece of economic infrastructure.
"no one gave away a free, usable operating system until 1991" which I still would believe is incorrect"
Unless you want to nitpick as regards the freeness of pre-1991 BSDs, and for most people outside elite circles in academia or whatever, BSD wasn't an option anyway until 1990 or 1991 or so.
"they could have just copied the MS office code if they wanted and began from there and Linus could have just started with the DOS code and developed from there"
No they couldn't. That code was both secret and illegal to use.
"If the only problem free software makers faced was the possibility of all the ideas being bought up by MS, etc, then you have completely invalidated the idea that "creativity isn't scarce". you can only buy it all up when it is scarce."
Hehe, well spotted.
You can't buy up all ideas per se. You CAN buy up all the useful ways of doing a particular thing though. It wouldn't be hard to patent all the *useful* knots for seamanship purposes, or all the worthwhile carpentry joints and set yourself up in a monopoly, if you were allowed to.
"Anyways, Microsoft has a competitor in every single one of its divisions. and usually, its a pretty major one."
Some of those markets are ones which Microsoft has just entered, such as the Xbox. I'll ignore those.
For the others, the alternatives are usually non-proprietary ones which don't force the reinvention of wheels. In operating systems for low-end desktops we have, what, Linux and OSX. Linux works because it simulates a copyright-less, trade secret-less world using the GPL. It wouldn't have ever existed using the normal mehods of copyright protection. OSX didn't reinvent many wheels, it just cribbed hugely from FreeBSD (BSD itself wasn't able to come into being in the marketplace to begin with, it was an academic project built on top of Unix code). Linux itself cribbed a bunch of BSD and ancient Unix code too.
"I suggest a socialist state. They are nice, none of that wealth inequality or the law holding the little person down."
You ARE joking, right? Socialist states are mostly nasty (at least the ones that the US lets exist for more than a couple of years without launching terror attacks of one flavour or another). I'm more of a non-statist socialist type person.
"just wondering, do you support any kind of patent or copyright, or are you just against them in softwares case?"
I'm totally opposed to software patents. Real patents I'm mostly agnostic about, since I don't pay that much attention to physical inventions.
Copyrights I don't really care too much about either way - the free copyright licenses are doing a good job of competing with the unfree ones, so abolishing copyrights, while it might be nice, isn't totally necessary. That's no reason not to denigrate unfree software whenever possible though.
The major worry with copyrights is the practical measures needed to enforce copyright in the digital age which are turning into dangerous impingents on everyone's freedom.
"the copy is illegal, is that really so hard to understand??"
I understand fine. I also understand that the law is a vehicle for the protection of wealth inequality through the use and threat of violence, and I also understand that software would still be made even without exclusionary property rights, so it's not even a necessary evil.
"If people don't like the lisense, no one forces them to by the product, not even windows."
The 'choice' you refer to is that, at least until recently, you didn't have to use proprietary software. You always had the choice of not using a computer at all and being crippled, economically.
It's a similar, though less harsh, choice to the 'work 14 hours in my sweatshop for a pittance or sift through other people's garbage for tin cans' that third world people often have to make.
"Hate you break it to you, but the information and alternatives have always been there."
The alternatives only came into being in 1991 or so.
"Those people aren't slaves, they are willingly bending over and taking it."
Well some people need to work using proprietary software and need to install said software at home. "Use proprietary software or lose your job" is not a choice, it's a threat.
"I argue copyright forces people to be even more creative. Not only allowing them to come up with something new but by reinventing something already there, possibly making it much better."
So that explains all the creative people I see reinventing proprietary PC operating systems and coming up with proprietary spreadsheets to compete with Excel, does it? You're trying to paint a monopolist's barriers to competition as though it was a stimulus to creativity.
Creative people have a choice too. When you raise barriers to competition too far, they have a choice of not competing. Competing with Microsoft in most areas is utterly unthinkable for a proprietary company these days - there are simply far too many wheels to reinvent.
Besides, you miss the point. Creativity isn't scarce. People come up with ideas all the time. It's one of the things that people just do. I'm not about to support the use of state violence to combat the global ideas shortage we aren't having.
The problem for a proprietary software producer isn't lack of ideas, it's getting enough suitably skilled manpower to turn those ideas into working code that matters.
For free software, the problem is just making sure there aren't any artificial barriers for those that do want to put those ideas into practice. And that means stopping IBM and Microsoft from buying up all the ideas.
"most software companies make money by selling software."
Software which comes with dire threats attached if you make a copy for a friend.
"no major company makes a majority of its money from lawsuits"
And no dictator subjects the majority of his citizens to violence. He doesn't need to. The threat is already there, it's implicit and well-understood by everybody.
"you can't under any lisence take someone elses work, stick a EULA on it and sue someone for infringement on your copyright"
Technically yes. But any minor modification to a BSD-licensed program and the copyright on the mods are effectively yours. If I'm the first person to compile FreeBSD with a non-standard compiler, then I probably have copyright on the binaries, and I can slap on that fascist EULA. Even if that's not the case, I can still tweak a couple of lines of code for the same effect.
Of course, if that's what the author of the BSD-code wants, then that's fine. I have no problems with those nice BSD people offering their code under those sorts of conditions. However, I do resent being told by a third party that I'm a coward for not letting every proprietary hoarder use my code to enslave and threaten people.
"the statements were all fair."
No they weren't. You totally mischaracterised the GPL as an anti-commercial license, and said something about control-freakery into the bargain.
"I'm not arguing that anyone should do anything."
You did EXACTLY THAT! You told us that if we wanted our software to be free we should public domain it! You tried to bully GPL-developers by calling the license cowardly!
"If, however, their goal is to give away their work as a gift to the greater community, "
The proprietary software world doesn't need charity, it needs to be starved to death. Hope this helps.
"If, however, GIMP were released into the public domain, it would in short order raise the quality of every image editing program on the planet"
If GIMP was public domain, there's a good chance that it would be a shitty freeware utility with no developer base like all the other shitty freeware utilities out there, and would have contributed next to nothing to the community. Or do you mean they should develop their software under the GPL for a while until it turns out good, THEN public domain it? Perhaps you should ask the same of Adobe.
Free software works by getting a bunch of people with a huge bunch of different motives to work on one project. Some do it for the technical challenge. Some do it for the money. Some do it for the kudos. Some might even do it out of this charity motive you're talking about, (presumably because they saw the telethon on TV last night with pictures of Larry Ellison and Bill Gates and Steve Jobs all looking hungry with the words 'give generously' scrolling across the bottom of the screen). It doesn't really matter WHY they write the code, they just do.
The GPL does seem to be a bit better at the job of getting people with different motives to work on the same project than the public domain. Public domain software has been around as long as software has, the GPL has been around for only 20 years. That's a 40 year head start. Why hasn't a public domain GIMP showed up already?