A) Insofar as they're free software in the 'wider' sense, they're Free Software in the FSF sense. What bizarre definitions of 'Free Software' and 'free software' are you using that makes them different. 'Free Software' as defined by the FSF includes a wide swathe of licenses. Nearly as many as the OSI-definition, and more than the DFSG definition. Of course, FreeBSD supports some binary-only drivers (are those 'free software' in your sense?), but the FSF would likely endorse almost everything about OpenBSD. In fact, they gave Theo an award for services to Free Software not so long ago.
B) Without GNU licensed code, BSD's are hugely crippled. For one reason: glibc. Not to mention they don't have gcc either, which is another big handicap. Delete your GNU licensed libraries from your favourite BSD and see how far you can go...
The game code is free software. The data files that you buy from your favourite retailer in the Quake 3 box aren't, however. I'm down with that.
However, to spoil your nitpick, but won't there be free third party data files (maybe even Id software's demo levels too) that you can use with your free software Quake 3 binary?
The article submitter seems to be a lot confused regarding the law. There's nothing unlawful about cracking a patented algorithm. It might be unlawful to market a device using the same encryption, in those parts of the unfree (softwarewise) world where software patents are implemented, but that's a different thing.
Cracking encryption algorithms is generally only unlawful where the encryption is a method of encrypting copyrighted material, AND the country involved has implemented some variant of the DMCA or EUCD. That's the legal machinery that DVD Jon had problems with. The Skype Protocol won't be covered by DMCA-like provisions.
Mighty respect to the Yak, n'all, and Sony are certainly a bunch of pisstakers, but Jeff did write the light synth that was bundled with the Xbox360 so he might not be a completely fair and unbiased observer here.
What do you mean 'not exactly DRM'? What you have is a machine that is allegely yours but won't run binaries that you wish to run, merely those that someone else wishes you to run.
No. You don't understand ebay's auctioning system. Ebay bids for you in small increments up to the maximum bid you've typed in, so if you win, you get the price at what ebay bid for you - which will be the second-highest maximum bid + some small increment.
"My counter-claim, equally unsupported, is that if everybody bidded my way, the final price of the auction goods would be insignificantly different."
Possibly true. But not everyone bids your way. That's the problem.
"I don't believe they have an inflationary effect. That effect is illusion. The "real price" is not the "current winning bid", it's "the highest someone will pay for it". Sniping has no effect whatsoever on the real number."
Do you believe in the existence of incremental bidders? Have you seen someone bid in ebay and then get outbid then bid again? Have you seen someone put in lots and lots of little bids until his latest one just outstrips the maximum bid.
If you change your statement to: The winning bid on ebay is the highest that someone will pay for it, *if they put their maximum bid in on time*, then I'll agree with you. Then I'll agree with you. The thing is, that the incremental bidders obviously aren't always placing their maximum bids. Sniping is just a way of making sure that they're less likely to.
"There are enough irrational bidders to push every item 5-10% over what I'd bid for them, because to them winning itself has value and it doesn't to me; I just want the item."
Sniping's job is to cut some of those guys out of the game, because the irrational bidders (the ones who will bid just-a-bit-more-than-the-other-guy) don't have a chance to irrationally bid.
Funnilly enough, I stopped ebaying ages ago too...
Not so. Snipers are perfectly logical. YOU might set your max-price-you're-willing-to-pay but there are hordes of ebayers out there who bid incrementally. Snipers just bid the max-price-they're-willing-to-pay for the item, just like you, but they do it as late as possible so as not to give the nonlogical incremental bidders the chance to outbid them. This means they've got more chance of getting the item and they're likely to get the item for less.
It's got nothing to do with 'beating the other guy' or 'resorting to sniping' or 'winning is the only goal' or any nonsense like that. It's just the optimal strategy for maximising the chance of winning and minimising the price paid for the item.
Everyone with a brain is agreed that a single maximum-price-you-want-to-pay bid is the best policy.
Your problem is that you don't realise that there are a lot of nonlogical people out there, who don't bid their maximum price, but put in a bid, then if they see they've been outbid, put in another one and so forth. To minimise the inflationary effect of those fools, bid as late as possible, not as early as possible.
That's why sniping is the smart move. It's not the snipers that are the cause of the "problem", it's those incremental bidders. Snipers are just keeping your price DOWN (despite all appearances to the contrary) to the benefit of all bidders...
No, it's not that simple. The idea is to change their behaviour so that they stop trying to inflict DRM on consumers. For that, they need to know WHY you're not buying their music, because otherwise they might just carry on saying 'these people aren't buying our music because uhhh, they're a bunch of pirates who need to be policed'. If we can boycott the fuckers out of business, yeah, fine, wonderful, but it's hardly likely to happen, so other tactics might be necessary.
"It sounds more like a bunch of people are going to be calling up and harassing people."
Bingo, you've got it in one. The whole idea is to make it more trouble than it's worth for these fuckers to take away everyone's freedom. Whenever two groups of people disagree over something, the side that can harass the other past the point where it's not worth it to fight any more wins. That's how politics works. That's how war works. That's how all human conflict works.
"It is intertesting that you resorted to all the name calling. It is almost if you don't have something witty or constructivly countering any of my arguments, name calling jumps in place of it."
No, retard. I debunk your pathetic arguments AND call you names. You deserve them. You're complaining because you don't get people to work for you for free. You need to be locked in a cage and have rotten faeces thrown at you by Mozilla devs until you see sense.
"They don't charge for support for anyone else, then why with windows 98?" The same reason I don't charge someone to write the code I want to write anyways.
"You know this isn't even the same reality. My god are you that desperate to prove a point that you will try to cloud the issues at hand just to get a one liner in?" It was a perfectly good analogy. You wanted someone to work for you gratis because they did something for you before.
"Nah.. thats just me looking behind the seens, determining that Win98 has a bigger market share then linux "
Fuckwit. Even assuming your link is true, you missed out a few obvious bits of reasoning, like the simple fact percentage of firefox users among *nix users is FAR higher than those among Win98 users. Mostly because a huge percentage of those Win98 users are the most moronic and useless computer users going. I don't count you in among those guys, you're your special own brand of stupid.
"Or is it just that the userbase is too small. Well if it is the later, then i would be worried about *nix support because the *nix base is even smaller" Maybe so. But then there are people who will develop for the sake of having free *nix apps for ideological reasons, and so that people can have a full, free OS. There's also the undeniable fact that Win98 is dead/dying, and *nix will continue to have a long and happy life. If a coder works to support Win98, it's like pissing all his labour and effort straight down the toilet, since nobody is paying him, nobody will remember him and nobody will be using his code in 5 years time. What's in it for him?
"I don't see much differenc ebetween this and microsoft or sun or IBM or any other company out to screww someone out of a dollar." By 'Screw someone out of a dollar' you mean 'Not work for free on the most tedious and unproductive thing that the firefox devs could think of doing'. You have the most egregious attitude problem I have ever seen of any supposed free software supporter. Seriously.
"But yes, if the bizarre is turning into the cathedral then I'm against it. this isn't demanding anything either."
Fuckwit. The whole fucking IDEA of the bazaar is that those contributing code get to choose what they want to do. "Every good Open source project starts with a programmer scratching his own itch" remember? Now if there's someone out there with an itch that needs scratching by supporting Firefox on Win98 then they're more than welcome to contribute code, and more power to them. If there's nobody prepared to do the work for free, they need to be paid for it somehow. If you're not willing to provide that incentive then tough shit, and if that's a problem to you, then go fuck yourself, shitforbrains.
"But my beef is with mozilla. You see they offer something that can make that dead end operating system viable for quite a while." Tough. Mozilla isn't a charity, it's a business. They have mouths to feed, and feeding whining cripples stuck on a rotten, shitty OS isn't top of their priority list.
"But they are putting proffits above users so i cannot support thier business model any more." Well how are you supporting it now? You use their software and you whinge a lot. Maybe you tell a couple of randoms about Firefox.Big fucking whoop. Whatever you do for Mozilla obviously isn't worth the time and effort of supporting your dead-end shitware.
"And i don't see it as someone doing free work either. " That's because you have the shittiest fucking attitude problem possible, Einstein.
"Mozilla is advertising it to the public not to the public the pays them. Is this free software or some strangle pay "
It's not irrelevant. The SOFTWARE is free, and you've got that already. Support you may have to pay for. The marginal cost of the software itself is zero - it costs nobody nothing for you to have a copy once the software is made in the first place, so being a freeloader is harmless (in fact beneficial for a number of reasons) to a free software product. The cost of upgrading and supporting and keeping the software alive, however, is non-zero. That means someone actually has to do some goddamn work. And workers need to eat. And to eat they must be paid. You see?
"Because they have been supporting it." Someone gave me an ice cream yesterday. Does that mean they have to give me one today?
Jesus H. Christ, how the fuck did a pathetic leeching slug like you make it into adulthood by demanding that other people work for you for free? Haven't you had your face punched out a few times already?
"They also have been taunting that you gain security by using mozilla/firefox compared to IE. They built this whole premis around being more secure and better. They are now telling me they only care about security if it is already built inot the operating system (ala 2000/XP)"
Hey, for starters, to say Windows XP has built-in security is pretty laughable. And yes, they only care about security for your operating system if it's not HUMUNGOUS AMOUNTS OF UNPAID WORK to support it. They don't care about security for the DOS Firefox or the Amiga 500 Firefox or the Cray sodding One firefox either. Nor should they, because, unlike you, they're not morons. They put their resources where they think it'll do the most good.
"Realy the only valid motivation being expresses for the decision is "it wil be easier". Kinda make you wonder if that really is the only reason."
What would Mozilla gain, otherwise? A loss of marketshare in exchange for a gain in developer resource seems like a fair tradeoff to me. If Microsoft is paying off it's only competitor, then we're talking anti-trust lawsuit time. Your paranoid theory about Mozilla stealing Microsoft's source code is laughable. Really. If that was the case, then the code would be written out pronto, and the person who submitted it would have his gonads diked out too, you mark my words. Why would Microsoft not just sue the shit out of Mozilla if they found a copyright breach? Kill the competition outright rather than risk yet another antitrust lawsuit by colluding with it.
"You act like no one has the right to differ in opinion from a companies position."
Oh you have the right to whine all you want about not getting free work from other people. But I have the right to call you a sponging freeloading whinging asshole. It's called freedom of speech, dumbass. When they put "Freedom From Criticism" in the Bill of Rights, then I might have to stop, but until that unhappy day, I'm calling you a leech. Get used to it.
"If your a fanboy who thinks mozilla can do no wrong, then that is your right. My discussing the difference, or disapointment of that company should not infere with you at all."
Course not. Neither should my discussing how much of a freeloading, whingeing wanker you are interfere with you? So what?
As for 'being a fanboy', hell no - I don't have much opinions on the Mozilla foundation, beyond 'Thanks for the neat software, guys!'. However, I do find it offensive when someone demands that other people work for them for free. I tell you what, we could broker a deal;they can support firefox on Win 98 forever, if you do whatever your job entails forever for them. Without getting paid. Sounds fair, yes? No?
"Imagine what could be done if they stoped development on everything other then windows XP and concentrated all inovations and resources on that. It would definatly save on "actively supporting and upgrading your software costs time, money and effort" area wich is your main reason for tha
Did it ever occur to you that actively supporting and upgrading your software costs time, money and effort? How much money or code have you contributed to the Mozilla project lately? Why the hell do you expect them to continue supporting your rotten, deprecated, old OS just because you want to keep using it? Instead of being grateful for having some zero cost software, complete with the source code and the liberal license terms to run on your machines, and for supporting Windows 98 for years, you're actually moaning about people not working for you forever *for free*? It's inconsiderate, selfish, tossers like you that make me tempted to turn into one of them libertarian assholes.
"I wonder if microsoft gave them some kickback or special priviledge of some sort. It is hard to tell."
No you moron, it's very easy to tell. They didn't. Mozilla isn't any kind of strategic ally of Microsoft, they're an enemy. It boils down to the firefox devs not wanting to divert large amounts of developer time and effort on something only a few thousand people actually need.
But hey, thanks to the amazing generosity and hard work of Netscape and Mozilla and others, you have the source code at your disposal. With those lovely free software licensing terms, you're more than welcome to support the browser yourself, or club together with others in your position to pay someone to do so. And before you come back with your whine of 'But I can't do that! It's so expensive and difficult and timeconsuming!', then might I remind you that that's the reason why Mozilla doesn't do it either...
Now take your freeloading whinging ass off my internets.
Welcome to the DRM age, citizen, where paying customers are turned into criminals and where 12 year olds do a much better job than the multibillion dollar music recording industry by providing the world with faster, cheaper, more convenient and better copies of other people's music .
The smart move here is to go back to downloading your music in free, unencumbered, formats without the artist's permission. If you have an overpowering urge to pay for the music you listen to, then by all means do so, but don't pay middlemen and marketroids to make your life difficult with DRM and any other fascist digital evil they throw at you - making DRM profitable is probably less ethical than freeloading music. Go to the gig and buy a T-shirt or some other merchandise, or just paypal them directly. The musicians get a *much* higher proportion of the proceeds that way (since they're basically getting the huge chunk allocated to the middlemen as well as the crumbs that were earmarked to them in the first place.
But when you execute that screensaver, it emails itself to other dumb windows users. Does this supposed OpenOffice 'virus' have any form of replication, human-assisted or otherwise? Without some form of replication, this is less of a virus than some Unix shell script that reads something like:
rm -rf/* #This virus uses the honour system. Please email this to all your friends before executing as root
The FSF support the ethical right to share information, so they're against the type of DRM you propose. They generally aren't too keen on copyright law, although they'll use the law as a tactic to enforce compliance with the GPL.
However, the actual technology of the DRM is probably fairly neutral, it's just the uses to which it's put that's the problem. I don't think the FSF would have a problem with the technology being under the control of the computer user or owner, and not the supposed owner of some random bitstream passing through the machine. After all, that would be a binary signing system, designed to give the user more control over what software he wants to run. I figure only Total Shitsuckers like CoolWebSearch or 180solutions or Sony would oppose that kind of DRM...
It was something Linus said in his recent CNN interview. 5000 was his rough outside estimate of the number of people who'd made any kind of contribution to Linux.
FSF owns copyright on the GPL for exactly that eventuality. If someone puts out a slightly-altered GPL that isn't the GPL to trap users, not only is it not enforceable if the victim inadvertantly 'breaches' it, but the FSF would, in all probability, sue and injunct the perpetrator the instant they noticed it.
And were you paying attention when I was telling you about how the various court circuits use Marginal Cost or similar measures (i.e. how much it costs you to give the product to the n+1'th person after giving it to n people) when deciding on issues of predatory pricing?
I got the point and answered it in my first post, but you were probably far too dumb to actually look up 'marginal cost' in the dictionary. There's really nothing I can do with someone as obtusely stupid as you other than throw well-warranted juvenile taunts in your direction.
"How does the hypothesis that anyone dumping will return to a profitable model once they've driven the competition out of business have anything to do with violation of anti-dumping laws?"
Because law in the Wallace case relates to his allegation of predatory pricing as per section 2 of the Sherman Act. The latest bit of relevant case law on the subject is the fourth circuit appeals court judgement on "Brooke Group Ltd vs Brown & Williamson" which has this to say on the subject:
"A plaintiff must prove (1) that the prices complained of are below an appropriate measure of its rival's costs and (2) that the competitor had a reasonable prospect of recouping its investment in below cost prices. Without recoupment, even if predatory pricing causes the target painful losses, it produces lower aggregate prices in the market, and consumer welfare is enhanced. "
Now stop making an ass of yourself in public, please.
I'm sorry. You didn't explain your idiotic argument in full detail, so I wasn't able to extrapolate this retarded theory of yours from your previous post. I'm not too good at reading the minds of people whose basic premises have some sort of passing acquiantance with reality, never mind fools who don't know the GPL from Theo De Raadt's asses' ass.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'free' here, but I'll tell you why you're an idiot either way.
If you mean 'free as in speech' free, then you're wrong. All works based on GPLed works must be distributed under the GPL. The only way that a non-free Linux kernel can appear is if either it's copyright runs out (which is effectively never under the current corrupt legal system) or a significant proportion of the kernel developers (which is apparently of the order of 5,000 these days) agrees to license the kernel on GPL-incompatible terms. Barring some sort of apocalypse, Linux can never be legally non-free.
If you mean 'free as in beer' then you're almost certainly wrong, in that anyone who pays for just one of these mostly 'non-free' Linux kernels has the right burn their own ISOs or put the GPLed work on their website for pretty much $0 per copy. The free market makes GPLed software more or less free, moneywise, although there are, of course, ways in which people can make money by charging for related services and products.
If you mean a Linux distro rather than a Linux kernel, then I'll remind you that distro's are never wholly under the GPL.
Are you finished yet? You're in danger of breaching your daily retardedness quota.
Dumping implies that the costs can be recouped later by raising prices. In the case of GPL'ed software, the GPL implies the distributor has no monopoly on the distribution so he can't raise his own prices after he 'destroys' the competition and expect the market to let him recoup the costs that way. His competitors can just keep dishing out the same GPL'ed code at the old price.
"at a value less than the cost of production"
The cost of production of someone else's GPLed software is next to nothing. The marginal cost of software distributed on the internet, even the stuff you yourself write, is next to nothing (and marginal cost, or similar measures of cost is generally the measure used for antitrust claims). At least three of the defendants in his lawsuits will happily sell their GPLed code to you for way above the cost of burning their CDs or whathaveyou.
"if you think coders' time is free, you're not much of a coder"
Danny wasn't alleging that the price of the code itself was fixed. He couldn't because the GPL explicitly says otherwise. You can charge money for writing GPLed code, and for copying or distributing the code.
The only thing you can't charge for is *permission* to use the code. How much money does it cost you to give one person permission to use the code? One measure would be the cost of typing 'cp/usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2.' just before you burn the iso or pack up the tarball divided by the number of people who then receive the code?
"This judge"
These two judges
"may have just vacated a couple of hundred trade laws..."
The judges didn't have to look at the trade laws because Danny was unable to write down exactly what damage it was that the GPL did to the software market, after about six or seven attempts in two courtrooms.
For such a small post you have managed to be completely wrong in quite a few different ways. I'm impressed. Is your name Danny Wallace by any chance?
Slashdot Mirror
You're wrong with the BSDs on two counts:
A) Insofar as they're free software in the 'wider' sense, they're Free Software in the FSF sense. What bizarre definitions of 'Free Software' and 'free software' are you using that makes them different. 'Free Software' as defined by the FSF includes a wide swathe of licenses. Nearly as many as the OSI-definition, and more than the DFSG definition.
Of course, FreeBSD supports some binary-only drivers (are those 'free software' in your sense?), but the FSF would likely endorse almost everything about OpenBSD. In fact, they gave Theo an award for services to Free Software not so long ago.
B) Without GNU licensed code, BSD's are hugely crippled. For one reason: glibc. Not to mention they don't have gcc either, which is another big handicap. Delete your GNU licensed libraries from your favourite BSD and see how far you can go...
You insensitive CLOD! Didn't you hear what happened to Kid Rock?
The game code is free software. The data files that you buy from your favourite retailer in the Quake 3 box aren't, however. I'm down with that.
However, to spoil your nitpick, but won't there be free third party data files (maybe even Id software's demo levels too) that you can use with your free software Quake 3 binary?
The article submitter seems to be a lot confused regarding the law. There's nothing unlawful about cracking a patented algorithm. It might be unlawful to market a device using the same encryption, in those parts of the unfree (softwarewise) world where software patents are implemented, but that's a different thing.
Cracking encryption algorithms is generally only unlawful where the encryption is a method of encrypting copyrighted material, AND the country involved has implemented some variant of the DMCA or EUCD. That's the legal machinery that DVD Jon had problems with. The Skype Protocol won't be covered by DMCA-like provisions.
Mighty respect to the Yak, n'all, and Sony are certainly a bunch of pisstakers, but Jeff did write the light synth that was bundled with the Xbox360 so he might not be a completely fair and unbiased observer here.
You might want to bear that small fact in mind...
What do you mean 'not exactly DRM'? What you have is a machine that is allegely yours but won't run binaries that you wish to run, merely those that someone else wishes you to run.
That IS exactly DRM.
Otherwise, yes.
No. You don't understand ebay's auctioning system. Ebay bids for you in small increments up to the maximum bid you've typed in, so if you win, you get the price at what ebay bid for you - which will be the second-highest maximum bid + some small increment.
"My counter-claim, equally unsupported, is that if everybody bidded my way, the final price of the auction goods would be insignificantly different."
Possibly true. But not everyone bids your way. That's the problem.
"I don't believe they have an inflationary effect. That effect is illusion. The "real price" is not the "current winning bid", it's "the highest someone will pay for it". Sniping has no effect whatsoever on the real number."
Do you believe in the existence of incremental bidders? Have you seen someone bid in ebay and then get outbid then bid again? Have you seen someone put in lots and lots of little bids until his latest one just outstrips the maximum bid.
If you change your statement to: The winning bid on ebay is the highest that someone will pay for it, *if they put their maximum bid in on time*, then I'll agree with you.
Then I'll agree with you. The thing is, that the incremental bidders obviously aren't always placing their maximum bids. Sniping is just a way of making sure that they're less likely to.
"There are enough irrational bidders to push every item 5-10% over what I'd bid for them, because to them winning itself has value and it doesn't to me; I just want the item."
Sniping's job is to cut some of those guys out of the game, because the irrational bidders (the ones who will bid just-a-bit-more-than-the-other-guy) don't have a chance to irrationally bid.
Funnilly enough, I stopped ebaying ages ago too...
Not so. Snipers are perfectly logical. YOU might set your max-price-you're-willing-to-pay but there are hordes of ebayers out there who bid incrementally. Snipers just bid the max-price-they're-willing-to-pay for the item, just like you, but they do it as late as possible so as not to give the nonlogical incremental bidders the chance to outbid them. This means they've got more chance of getting the item and they're likely to get the item for less.
It's got nothing to do with 'beating the other guy' or 'resorting to sniping' or 'winning is the only goal' or any nonsense like that. It's just the optimal strategy for maximising the chance of winning and minimising the price paid for the item.
Everyone with a brain is agreed that a single maximum-price-you-want-to-pay bid is the best policy.
Your problem is that you don't realise that there are a lot of nonlogical people out there, who don't bid their maximum price, but put in a bid, then if they see they've been outbid, put in another one and so forth. To minimise the inflationary effect of those fools, bid as late as possible, not as early as possible.
That's why sniping is the smart move. It's not the snipers that are the cause of the "problem", it's those incremental bidders. Snipers are just keeping your price DOWN (despite all appearances to the contrary) to the benefit of all bidders...
No, it's not that simple. The idea is to change their behaviour so that they stop trying to inflict DRM on consumers. For that, they need to know WHY you're not buying their music, because otherwise they might just carry on saying 'these people aren't buying our music because uhhh, they're a bunch of pirates who need to be policed'. If we can boycott the fuckers out of business, yeah, fine, wonderful, but it's hardly likely to happen, so other tactics might be necessary.
"It sounds more like a bunch of people are going to be calling up and harassing people."
Bingo, you've got it in one. The whole idea is to make it more trouble than it's worth for these fuckers to take away everyone's freedom. Whenever two groups of people disagree over something, the side that can harass the other past the point where it's not worth it to fight any more wins. That's how politics works. That's how war works. That's how all human conflict works.
Hey, you ARE aware that Shelley the Republican is just a good old-fashioned adequacy.org-style troll/pisstake site?
It's meant to be a) funny and b) get a letters page full of outraged howls of righteous indignation from people who don't spot the joke...
"I would never ship a game early (even a couple of months), for 500k.'"
This must be some new usage of the word 'early' that until now I have been unaware of.
"It is intertesting that you resorted to all the name calling. It is almost if you don't have something witty or constructivly countering any of my arguments, name calling jumps in place of it."
No, retard. I debunk your pathetic arguments AND call you names. You deserve them. You're complaining because you don't get people to work for you for free. You need to be locked in a cage and have rotten faeces thrown at you by Mozilla devs until you see sense.
"They don't charge for support for anyone else, then why with windows 98?"
The same reason I don't charge someone to write the code I want to write anyways.
"You know this isn't even the same reality. My god are you that desperate to prove a point that you will try to cloud the issues at hand just to get a one liner in?"
It was a perfectly good analogy. You wanted someone to work for you gratis because they did something for you before.
"Nah.. thats just me looking behind the seens, determining that Win98 has a bigger market share then linux "
Fuckwit. Even assuming your link is true, you missed out a few obvious bits of reasoning, like the simple fact percentage of firefox users among *nix users is FAR higher than those among Win98 users. Mostly because a huge percentage of those Win98 users are the most moronic and useless computer users going. I don't count you in among those guys, you're your special own brand of stupid.
"Or is it just that the userbase is too small. Well if it is the later, then i would be worried about *nix support because the *nix base is even smaller"
Maybe so. But then there are people who will develop for the sake of having free *nix apps for ideological reasons, and so that people can have a full, free OS. There's also the undeniable fact that Win98 is dead/dying, and *nix will continue to have a long and happy life. If a coder works to support Win98, it's like pissing all his labour and effort straight down the toilet, since nobody is paying him, nobody will remember him and nobody will be using his code in 5 years time. What's in it for him?
"I don't see much differenc ebetween this and microsoft or sun or IBM or any other company out to screww someone out of a dollar."
By 'Screw someone out of a dollar' you mean 'Not work for free on the most tedious and unproductive thing that the firefox devs could think of doing'. You have the most egregious attitude problem I have ever seen of any supposed free software supporter. Seriously.
"But yes, if the bizarre is turning into the cathedral then I'm against it. this isn't demanding anything either."
Fuckwit. The whole fucking IDEA of the bazaar is that those contributing code get to choose what they want to do. "Every good Open source project starts with a programmer scratching his own itch" remember? Now if there's someone out there with an itch that needs scratching by supporting Firefox on Win98 then they're more than welcome to contribute code, and more power to them. If there's nobody prepared to do the work for free, they need to be paid for it somehow. If you're not willing to provide that incentive then tough shit, and if that's a problem to you, then go fuck yourself, shitforbrains.
"But my beef is with mozilla. You see they offer something that can make that dead end operating system viable for quite a while."
Tough. Mozilla isn't a charity, it's a business. They have mouths to feed, and feeding whining cripples stuck on a rotten, shitty OS isn't top of their priority list.
"But they are putting proffits above users so i cannot support thier business model any more."
Well how are you supporting it now? You use their software and you whinge a lot. Maybe you tell a couple of randoms about Firefox.Big fucking whoop. Whatever you do for Mozilla obviously isn't worth the time and effort of supporting your dead-end shitware.
"And i don't see it as someone doing free work either. "
That's because you have the shittiest fucking attitude problem possible, Einstein.
"And as for free? I did
"Mozilla is advertising it to the public not to the public the pays them. Is this free software or some strangle pay "
It's not irrelevant. The SOFTWARE is free, and you've got that already. Support you may have to pay for. The marginal cost of the software itself is zero - it costs nobody nothing for you to have a copy once the software is made in the first place, so being a freeloader is harmless (in fact beneficial for a number of reasons) to a free software product. The cost of upgrading and supporting and keeping the software alive, however, is non-zero. That means someone actually has to do some goddamn work. And workers need to eat. And to eat they must be paid. You see?
"Because they have been supporting it."
Someone gave me an ice cream yesterday. Does that mean they have to give me one today?
Jesus H. Christ, how the fuck did a pathetic leeching slug like you make it into adulthood by demanding that other people work for you for free? Haven't you had your face punched out a few times already?
"They also have been taunting that you gain security by using mozilla/firefox compared to IE. They built this whole premis around being more secure and better. They are now telling me they only care about security if it is already built inot the operating system (ala 2000/XP)"
Hey, for starters, to say Windows XP has built-in security is pretty laughable. And yes, they only care about security for your operating system if it's not HUMUNGOUS AMOUNTS OF UNPAID WORK to support it. They don't care about security for the DOS Firefox or the Amiga 500 Firefox or the Cray sodding One firefox either. Nor should they, because, unlike you, they're not morons. They put their resources where they think it'll do the most good.
"Realy the only valid motivation being expresses for the decision is "it wil be easier". Kinda make you wonder if that really is the only reason."
What would Mozilla gain, otherwise? A loss of marketshare in exchange for a gain in developer resource seems like a fair tradeoff to me. If Microsoft is paying off it's only competitor, then we're talking anti-trust lawsuit time. Your paranoid theory about Mozilla stealing Microsoft's source code is laughable. Really. If that was the case, then the code would be written out pronto, and the person who submitted it would have his gonads diked out too, you mark my words. Why would Microsoft not just sue the shit out of Mozilla if they found a copyright breach? Kill the competition outright rather than risk yet another antitrust lawsuit by colluding with it.
"You act like no one has the right to differ in opinion from a companies position."
Oh you have the right to whine all you want about not getting free work from other people. But I have the right to call you a sponging freeloading whinging asshole. It's called freedom of speech, dumbass.
When they put "Freedom From Criticism" in the Bill of Rights, then I might have to stop, but until that unhappy day, I'm calling you a leech. Get used to it.
"If your a fanboy who thinks mozilla can do no wrong, then that is your right. My discussing the difference, or disapointment of that company should not infere with you at all."
Course not. Neither should my discussing how much of a freeloading, whingeing wanker you are interfere with you? So what?
As for 'being a fanboy', hell no - I don't have much opinions on the Mozilla foundation, beyond 'Thanks for the neat software, guys!'. However, I do find it offensive when someone demands that other people work for them for free. I tell you what, we could broker a deal;they can support firefox on Win 98 forever, if you do whatever your job entails forever for them. Without getting paid. Sounds fair, yes? No?
"Imagine what could be done if they stoped development on everything other then windows XP and concentrated all inovations and resources on that. It would definatly save on "actively supporting and upgrading your software costs time, money and effort" area wich is your main reason for tha
That's a lot of chutzpah to fit in a small mind.
Did it ever occur to you that actively supporting and upgrading your software costs time, money and effort? How much money or code have you contributed to the Mozilla project lately? Why the hell do you expect them to continue supporting your rotten, deprecated, old OS just because you want to keep using it? Instead of being grateful for having some zero cost software, complete with the source code and the liberal license terms to run on your machines, and for supporting Windows 98 for years, you're actually moaning about people not working for you forever *for free*? It's inconsiderate, selfish, tossers like you that make me tempted to turn into one of them libertarian assholes.
"I wonder if microsoft gave them some kickback or special priviledge of some sort. It is hard to tell."
No you moron, it's very easy to tell. They didn't. Mozilla isn't any kind of strategic ally of Microsoft, they're an enemy. It boils down to the firefox devs not wanting to divert large amounts of developer time and effort on something only a few thousand people actually need.
But hey, thanks to the amazing generosity and hard work of Netscape and Mozilla and others, you have the source code at your disposal. With those lovely free software licensing terms, you're more than welcome to support the browser yourself, or club together with others in your position to pay someone to do so. And before you come back with your whine of 'But I can't do that! It's so expensive and difficult and timeconsuming!', then might I remind you that that's the reason why Mozilla doesn't do it either...
Now take your freeloading whinging ass off my internets.
Welcome to the DRM age, citizen, where paying customers are turned into criminals and where 12 year olds do a much better job than the multibillion dollar music recording industry by providing the world with faster, cheaper, more convenient and better copies of other people's music .
The smart move here is to go back to downloading your music in free, unencumbered, formats without the artist's permission. If you have an overpowering urge to pay for the music you listen to, then by all means do so, but don't pay middlemen and marketroids to make your life difficult with DRM and any other fascist digital evil they throw at you - making DRM profitable is probably less ethical than freeloading music. Go to the gig and buy a T-shirt or some other merchandise, or just paypal them directly. The musicians get a *much* higher proportion of the proceeds that way (since they're basically getting the huge chunk allocated to the middlemen as well as the crumbs that were earmarked to them in the first place.
But when you execute that screensaver, it emails itself to other dumb windows users. Does this supposed OpenOffice 'virus' have any form of replication, human-assisted or otherwise? Without some form of replication, this is less of a virus than some Unix shell script that reads something like:
/* #This virus uses the honour system. Please email this to all your friends before executing as root
rm -rf
The FSF support the ethical right to share information, so they're against the type of DRM you propose. They generally aren't too keen on copyright law, although they'll use the law as a tactic to enforce compliance with the GPL.
However, the actual technology of the DRM is probably fairly neutral, it's just the uses to which it's put that's the problem. I don't think the FSF would have a problem with the technology being under the control of the computer user or owner, and not the supposed owner of some random bitstream passing through the machine. After all, that would be a binary signing system, designed to give the user more control over what software he wants to run. I figure only Total Shitsuckers like CoolWebSearch or 180solutions or Sony would oppose that kind of DRM...
It was something Linus said in his recent CNN interview. 5000 was his rough outside estimate of the number of people who'd made any kind of contribution to Linux.
FSF owns copyright on the GPL for exactly that eventuality. If someone puts out a slightly-altered GPL that isn't the GPL to trap users, not only is it not enforceable if the victim inadvertantly 'breaches' it, but the FSF would, in all probability, sue and injunct the perpetrator the instant they noticed it.
And were you paying attention when I was telling you about how the various court circuits use Marginal Cost or similar measures (i.e. how much it costs you to give the product to the n+1'th person after giving it to n people) when deciding on issues of predatory pricing?
I got the point and answered it in my first post, but you were probably far too dumb to actually look up 'marginal cost' in the dictionary. There's really nothing I can do with someone as obtusely stupid as you other than throw well-warranted juvenile taunts in your direction.
"How does the hypothesis that anyone dumping will return to a profitable model once they've driven the competition out of business have anything to do with violation of anti-dumping laws?"
Because law in the Wallace case relates to his allegation of predatory pricing as per section 2 of the Sherman Act. The latest bit of relevant case law on the subject is the fourth circuit appeals court judgement on "Brooke Group Ltd vs Brown & Williamson" which has this to say on the subject:
"A plaintiff must prove (1) that the prices complained of are below an appropriate measure of its rival's costs and (2) that the competitor had a reasonable prospect of recouping its investment in below cost prices. Without recoupment, even if predatory pricing causes the target painful losses, it produces lower aggregate prices in the market, and consumer welfare is enhanced. "
Now stop making an ass of yourself in public, please.
I'm sorry. You didn't explain your idiotic argument in full detail, so I wasn't able to extrapolate this retarded theory of yours from your previous post. I'm not too good at reading the minds of people whose basic premises have some sort of passing acquiantance with reality, never mind fools who don't know the GPL from Theo De Raadt's asses' ass.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'free' here, but I'll tell you why you're an idiot either way.
If you mean 'free as in speech' free, then you're wrong. All works based on GPLed works must be distributed under the GPL. The only way that a non-free Linux kernel can appear is if either it's copyright runs out (which is effectively never under the current corrupt legal system) or a significant proportion of the kernel developers (which is apparently of the order of 5,000 these days) agrees to license the kernel on GPL-incompatible terms. Barring some sort of apocalypse, Linux can never be legally non-free.
If you mean 'free as in beer' then you're almost certainly wrong, in that anyone who pays for just one of these mostly 'non-free' Linux kernels has the right burn their own ISOs or put the GPLed work on their website for pretty much $0 per copy. The free market makes GPLed software more or less free, moneywise, although there are, of course, ways in which people can make money by charging for related services and products.
If you mean a Linux distro rather than a Linux kernel, then I'll remind you that distro's are never wholly under the GPL.
Are you finished yet? You're in danger of breaching your daily retardedness quota.
How wrong can you be, let me count the ways.
/usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2 .' just before you burn the iso or pack up the tarball divided by the number of people who then receive the code?
"Dumping"
Dumping implies that the costs can be recouped later by raising prices. In the case of GPL'ed software, the GPL implies the distributor has no monopoly on the distribution so he can't raise his own prices after he 'destroys' the competition and expect the market to let him recoup the costs that way. His competitors can just keep dishing out the same GPL'ed code at the old price.
"at a value less than the cost of production"
The cost of production of someone else's GPLed software is next to nothing. The marginal cost of software distributed on the internet, even the stuff you yourself write, is next to nothing (and marginal cost, or similar measures of cost is generally the measure used for antitrust claims). At least three of the defendants in his lawsuits will happily sell their GPLed code to you for way above the cost of burning their CDs or whathaveyou.
"if you think coders' time is free, you're not much of a coder"
Danny wasn't alleging that the price of the code itself was fixed. He couldn't because the GPL explicitly says otherwise. You can charge money for writing GPLed code, and for copying or distributing the code.
The only thing you can't charge for is *permission* to use the code. How much money does it cost you to give one person permission to use the code? One measure would be the cost of typing 'cp
"This judge"
These two judges
"may have just vacated a couple of hundred trade laws..."
The judges didn't have to look at the trade laws because Danny was unable to write down exactly what damage it was that the GPL did to the software market, after about six or seven attempts in two courtrooms.
For such a small post you have managed to be completely wrong in quite a few different ways. I'm impressed. Is your name Danny Wallace by any chance?