Source RPMs solve nothing. If you are retreiving any software from an untrusted source, then running that either as root or as any user that ever switches to root from their account, you can be owned quite easily. The only solution is to verify that the software does what you want by reading the source, or having someone you trust (like a distribution or local admin) do it for you.
Offer to launch probes for high schools and colleges. Here are the specifications: NASA will provide standard power and telemetry, and a ride into space.
NASA offers a kind of catch-as-catch-can payload launching. Whenever they have some leftover space and weight, they offer to put X number of capsules in the payload bay, and activate them when they get into orbit. The cannisters are of a fixed size and weight, and can't do anything that might harm the shuttle (i.e. no EM interference, no emissions, no launching things), but other than some basic guidelines, you can do whatever you want.
They charge something in the $1K-$10K range, I think, but this is certainly affordable to most corporations; which might be talked into doing so to bolster community support for the corporation, get good PR, allow them the pick of the graduates, etc... You might also try getting a grant from a science foundation, or some other location.
If you want to spark interest in a lot of high schools around the country, you could start asking for donations, and once it became clear that you would get enough to send a capsule up, spread the word far and wide that you will donate the money to send up a capsule to the high school which submits the best capsule design.
Sorry I don't have a URL for the NASA program, but this program was in a book, and I don't have the book handy.:( Email me if you'ld like more info.
Interestingly, in a case of almost Orwellian revisionism, Stallman removed the bit about "seeing green"
I don't see any Orwellian tendencies in that at all. Are you claiming that the FSF is not allowed to change their web pages to make them more palatable to a wider audience?
The revised essay still encourages programmers to incorporate GPLed code in their work as a way of "monkey wrenching" private enterprise
No, it still does not. The case it talks about is when a company wants to take the changes made to an already-GPL'ed product and directly violate the license by selling the product without making the source available (clearly illegal). Are you suggesting that the FSF cannot put up a web page that says the blatantly obvious? Or that they cannot put up a page explaining why the GPL is what it is?
The shift to the word "proprietary," which has more negative connotations, cleared the way for another rhetorical device: the FSF's claim that Linux can be "commercial."
Once again, your misuse of words hampers your ability to communicate with your audience (if there even is much of an audience left). Communication dictates that you must use language that will be understood by the people you wish to communicate with. I don't speak Swahili to my neighbors, and I don't use "hacker" when speaking to clueless media people. If you wish to define what you mean by those two words, then I shall abide by those definitions for the remainder of this thread. Otherwise, you are bound by the common usage of those terms in this context, which would make your statement both obvious and unrelated to your argument (if a series of isomorphic rants can even be considered an argument).
I am not suggesting that Mr. Glass is benefitting himself or anyone else by his actions. It is myself that I wish to benefit, by creating responses. I would throw them in the bit bucket, but that would preclude Mr. Glass from responding, and thus not allow me to demonstrate the errors of second generation "spew".
I fully sympathize with the desire to occasionally do the world a favor by taking a complete moron out back and putting a bullet through his head, but that leaves me with minimal target practice, and not enough talking practice. I apologize if I have wasted your time.
On the other hand, the cynic in mean feels that any Slashdot subthread buried three levels deep is already in the bit bucket, so...;)
Au contraire! This presents a great challenge and opportunity: a challenge to sway the possibly unswayable, and an opportunity to hone your skills of argument. Which is better: the man who calls for another to be silenced, or the man who shows his opponent to be so utterly wrong that the other man shuts up to avoid further humiliation?
I urge you and others (no matter what your stance on a given issue) to join in with reasoned, well thought out arguments.
In fact, by stamping the GPL onto their code, they have forfeited any hope of compensation for their efforts.
I'm sure this will come as a great surprise to the many people who work for Red Hat, and take home paychecks every day by writing software to be licensed under the GPL.
... eliminating any opportunity to do parallel commercial licensing. (They don't own changes introduced by others, and so cannot license the latest version for money.)
I'm sure that this will come as a surprise to Red Hat, who is doing parallel commercial sales ("Power" vs. "Regular", or whatever they're calling it nowadays).
I advocate the release of open source software in such a way that anyone can build on it, advance the state of the art, and avoid needless duplication of effort.
As per your previous posts, this is something I doubt. However, I shall give you the benefit of the doubt; if this is truly what you mean, then you should be campaigning for the abolition of software copyright, not the abolition of copyleft. Removal of software copyright allows me to build on your software (albeit not as easily as I would be able to with the source), advance the state of the art, and (under some circumstances) reduce needless duplication of effort.
... code which no longer has market value.
Once again, you have built your argument upon shaky ground; there are two ways to go on this issue, and you keep attempting to straddle the fence. Are you for for government-imposed sharing (i.e. copyright+copyleft), or laissez-faire sharing (i.e. lack of software copyright)? I think you will find it untenable to support the one-sided argument you keep proposing.
This entire discussion is, alas, an example of the conflict that the misleading rhetoric of the GPL creates.
No, the GPL contains no rhetoric in and of itself; it merely has explanatory messages amongst the license, which is supposed to strengthen its legal enforcability. If you remove the explanatory messages from the GPL, you are left with a dry, boring license, which does exactly the same thing as the original. How do you propose that a software license is misleading rhetoric?
... you are flaming me and refusing to see the big picture.
I do see the big picture, or at least more of it than you appear to have seen. While there is certainly room for argument on a good number of points, it is apparent to a disinterested observer that you are losing this argument.
As a side note, my sole purpose for posting in this thread is to better my skills in rhetoric. How about you?
You are correct, that is not sharing. Nor was it what I was referring to. I will rephrase: sharing is two-way giving. The situation you refer to here is more appropriately termed "screwing over" - the employee is not there to "share" with the company, he's supposed to be working for it. This is no better than an employee who secretly tells the competition what they bid for a project. Your's is a strawman argument.
Which is what Stallman, and the FSF, have always intended the GPL to do.
No, they have always intended for the GPL to act as a "if you don't want to play nice with us, we won't play nice with you" type of force. You cannot claim that RMS's motives are unclear; you yourself refer to his many essays. Are you deliberately refusing to understand his stance, or are you trying (and failing) to understand it? Perhaps this is all just an elaborate ruse?
In short, Richard Stallman believes that it is legitimate to confiscate intellectual property to benefit the organization which he controls: the FSF.
This is a continuation of the above strawman argument. "Monkey wrenching" is unethical (and possibly illegal, depending on where you are). He has never (to my knowledge) supported the confiscation of "intellectual property", except insofar as he advocates the abolition of "intellectual property" altogether (which would itself remove the ability to "monkey wrench" in that way).
Second, the GPL does not in any way benefit the FSF. GPL'ed software benefits the people who need to use that software. The only software that "benefits" the FSF is changes to FSF-owned code; no other code has any relationship with the FSF.
The GPL is the instrument via which, he believes, he can harness government power to do this [IP confiscation].
No, he does not. You have fallen victim to your own strawman argument here; if you make a case based on a point, then your case falls apart if that point does. I have shown your argument to be false, so I shall take this shortcut to not show this statement to be false as well.
Insisting that the other person give up his or her livelihood... is not sharing; it is confiscation.
Of course it isn't. Just as it isn't sharing to insist the the mugger in front of me not take my wallet, or to force a rapist off the streets. In order for you to claim an inherent "right" to do what you currently do for a living, you must first show that it is inherently right for you to be doing it in the first place. This is not to say that it isn't right, but you certainly haven't shown that it is inherently right. If you would care to put forth an argument as to why I should be forced to give you my code, when you aren't willing to give me yours, I'd be happy to point out where you went wrong.
GPLed software is not commercial, because those who sell copies of it (e.g. Red Hat) do not own it and do not have the ability to license it.
OK. This is my third attempt to respond to your obviously misinformed posts. The GPL is not a long license as licenses go, but apparently you haven't read it. One of the rights given when licensing under the GPL is the ability to relicense all of the rights you got to anyone else. Hence, Red Hat most certainly does have the ability to license it.
You are not buying a license to use the software.
Yes, you are. You are paying for:
A physical instantiation of the software (i.e. the media)
A physical instantiation of the ocumentation
A license to use the software included on the media (with regards to GPL'ed software on the media, you get all the rights that Red Hat got)
Had you read the GPL, you would have understood that they are not only able to license the code to you, they are required to do so.
To say that Red Hat Linux, and other distributions of Linux which are published by companies like Red Hat, are "commercial" is intentionally misleading.
Only if your definition of "commercial" is far different than mine. The relevant definition from my handy dictionary is:
commercial: a. made or done primarily for sale or profit
which (I feel) fits Red Hat. Perhaps you might argue that their primary purpose is "for the good of the community", but that would be illegal, as they are now a publicly-traded corporation (they are required to maximize shareholder profit, and hence must work "primarily for sale or profit").
Alas, he appears to condone the use of deceptive rhetoric so long as it furthers his ultimate cause: the destruction of truly commercial software.
Ah, I see that you use the word "commercial" to mean "only available to companies". That definition goes far beyond even that of "proprietary" in terms of hostility to, and incapacitation of, non-companies (i.e. people). This "businesses can do whatever they want; screw the people" stance would logically extend towards allowing (for instance) car companies intentionally to make deathtraps. Surely you aren't advocating that businesses are more important, or are allowed to do more things than, people?
P.S. to other people - I realize that this guy is a lost cause. I'm just practicing ripping posts apart (and realizing I could be a lot better with practice and feedback). Please send me an email (or respond to this post) if you can see where I could improve my posts.
Wow. That's trippy. I could almost see the froth coming from your mouth.
...we must take action to dissuade programmers from using the GPL and to help them see through the deceptive rhetoric...
So you'd suggest re-education camps for everyone who uses copyleft? How about copyright?
If necessary, we may have to have the GPL's onerous "copyleft" provisions ruled invalid by a court of law
Uh... wow. Once again I find myself dumbstruck. You realize that removing the ability of people to license their software means that you'll have to sell your software instead of licensing it? That I'll have free reign to disassemble it, code a new version, and release mine for free with each AOL CD, and that you won't be able to do a damn thing about it? Are you sure that's what you want to do?
"Sharing" does not mean demanding something unreasonable in return -- which is, alas, what the GPL does. "Sharing" must be done willingly. If you start by demanding things in return, you are not sharing; you are negotiating a transaction.
You are mistaken here. "Giving" is done willingly, without demanding something in return. "Sharing" is done with the expectation that the other person will "share" back.
Demanding something unreasonable in return is neither of those, and nor does it pertain to the GPL. The GPL enforces sharing, the BSD license expects the other person to want to share. The businesses I have worked with in the past have absolutely no intention of ever sharing code, so I release under the GPL. If businesses in general were willing to share, I'd put my code in the public domain.
You are being adversarial, not cooperative.
No, I'm being realistic. If your experience with businesses and other people leads you to view the world as rosey, then feel free to BSD your code. I have a less-rosey view of businesses, so I GPL mine.
Yes. In the days of Standard Oil, you could buy oil from someone else, but it was made harder to do so by Standard Oil. You could make your own, but that was impractical (and still is). You do not have to have 100% of the market (i.e. every single barrel or disk) to be a monopoly, and you don't have to have 100% of the market to cause hurt to consumers and other businesses.
If you use things other than Windows, bravo! Consider yourself one of the pioneers of the PC (Personal Crude-oil) revolution. But the fact that you or I can do such things does not mean that Microsoft is not a monopoly.
Just about every news story I've seen cites Doom as the violent game, come to think of it, the quote is always "violent video games such as doom" with some slight semantic mangleing. Strange to think that all these violent kids ar ebehind the times..
How about a page/button where/. sends a cookie which is valid forever (or a year or so) - this way I don't have to keep logging in all the time?
Sometimes when reading the replies to an article, I want to temporarily change my comment threshold (e.g. to 0 for a freshly-minted article, 4 for an old article with lots of comments...). Could the pref bar on the article page be set to only change the threshold temporarily (i.e. for that page hit only?)
I'd like to second the motion for a preference regarding the default score for posts (i.e. 0 for ACs, 1 for non-ACs). This way an AC who posts something mildly interesting could be on the same footing as a non-AC who posts something mildly interesting.
Just some thoughts, keep up the good work! Now the prefs I implemented for my work's website look small in comparison.;)
Slashdot Mirror
Source RPMs solve nothing. If you are retreiving any software from an untrusted source, then running that either as root or as any user that ever switches to root from their account, you can be owned quite easily. The only solution is to verify that the software does what you want by reading the source, or having someone you trust (like a distribution or local admin) do it for you.
Offer to launch probes for high schools and colleges. Here are the specifications: NASA will provide standard power and telemetry, and a ride into space.
NASA offers a kind of catch-as-catch-can payload launching. Whenever they have some leftover space and weight, they offer to put X number of capsules in the payload bay, and activate them when they get into orbit. The cannisters are of a fixed size and weight, and can't do anything that might harm the shuttle (i.e. no EM interference, no emissions, no launching things), but other than some basic guidelines, you can do whatever you want.
They charge something in the $1K-$10K range, I think, but this is certainly affordable to most corporations; which might be talked into doing so to bolster community support for the corporation, get good PR, allow them the pick of the graduates, etc... You might also try getting a grant from a science foundation, or some other location.
If you want to spark interest in a lot of high schools around the country, you could start asking for donations, and once it became clear that you would get enough to send a capsule up, spread the word far and wide that you will donate the money to send up a capsule to the high school which submits the best capsule design.
Sorry I don't have a URL for the NASA program, but this program was in a book, and I don't have the book handy. :( Email me if you'ld like more info.
Interestingly, in a case of almost Orwellian revisionism, Stallman removed the bit about "seeing green"
I don't see any Orwellian tendencies in that at all. Are you claiming that the FSF is not allowed to change their web pages to make them more palatable to a wider audience?
The revised essay still encourages programmers to incorporate GPLed code in their work as a way of "monkey wrenching" private enterprise
No, it still does not. The case it talks about is when a company wants to take the changes made to an already-GPL'ed product and directly violate the license by selling the product without making the source available (clearly illegal). Are you suggesting that the FSF cannot put up a web page that says the blatantly obvious? Or that they cannot put up a page explaining why the GPL is what it is?
The shift to the word "proprietary," which has more negative connotations, cleared the way for another rhetorical device: the FSF's claim that Linux can be "commercial."
Once again, your misuse of words hampers your ability to communicate with your audience (if there even is much of an audience left). Communication dictates that you must use language that will be understood by the people you wish to communicate with. I don't speak Swahili to my neighbors, and I don't use "hacker" when speaking to clueless media people. If you wish to define what you mean by those two words, then I shall abide by those definitions for the remainder of this thread. Otherwise, you are bound by the common usage of those terms in this context, which would make your statement both obvious and unrelated to your argument (if a series of isomorphic rants can even be considered an argument).
I am not suggesting that Mr. Glass is benefitting himself or anyone else by his actions. It is myself that I wish to benefit, by creating responses. I would throw them in the bit bucket, but that would preclude Mr. Glass from responding, and thus not allow me to demonstrate the errors of second generation "spew".
I fully sympathize with the desire to occasionally do the world a favor by taking a complete moron out back and putting a bullet through his head, but that leaves me with minimal target practice, and not enough talking practice. I apologize if I have wasted your time.
On the other hand, the cynic in mean feels that any Slashdot subthread buried three levels deep is already in the bit bucket, so... ;)
Au contraire! This presents a great challenge and opportunity: a challenge to sway the possibly unswayable, and an opportunity to hone your skills of argument. Which is better: the man who calls for another to be silenced, or the man who shows his opponent to be so utterly wrong that the other man shuts up to avoid further humiliation?
I urge you and others (no matter what your stance on a given issue) to join in with reasoned, well thought out arguments.
In fact, by stamping the GPL onto their code, they have forfeited any hope of compensation for their efforts.
I'm sure this will come as a great surprise to the many people who work for Red Hat, and take home paychecks every day by writing software to be licensed under the GPL.
I'm sure that this will come as a surprise to Red Hat, who is doing parallel commercial sales ("Power" vs. "Regular", or whatever they're calling it nowadays).
I advocate the release of open source software in such a way that anyone can build on it, advance the state of the art, and avoid needless duplication of effort.
As per your previous posts, this is something I doubt. However, I shall give you the benefit of the doubt; if this is truly what you mean, then you should be campaigning for the abolition of software copyright, not the abolition of copyleft. Removal of software copyright allows me to build on your software (albeit not as easily as I would be able to with the source), advance the state of the art, and (under some circumstances) reduce needless duplication of effort.
Once again, you have built your argument upon shaky ground; there are two ways to go on this issue, and you keep attempting to straddle the fence. Are you for for government-imposed sharing (i.e. copyright+copyleft), or laissez-faire sharing (i.e. lack of software copyright)? I think you will find it untenable to support the one-sided argument you keep proposing.
This entire discussion is, alas, an example of the conflict that the misleading rhetoric of the GPL creates.
No, the GPL contains no rhetoric in and of itself; it merely has explanatory messages amongst the license, which is supposed to strengthen its legal enforcability. If you remove the explanatory messages from the GPL, you are left with a dry, boring license, which does exactly the same thing as the original. How do you propose that a software license is misleading rhetoric?
I do see the big picture, or at least more of it than you appear to have seen. While there is certainly room for argument on a good number of points, it is apparent to a disinterested observer that you are losing this argument.
As a side note, my sole purpose for posting in this thread is to better my skills in rhetoric. How about you?
This "monkey wrenching" is not sharing
You are correct, that is not sharing. Nor was it what I was referring to. I will rephrase: sharing is two-way giving. The situation you refer to here is more appropriately termed "screwing over" - the employee is not there to "share" with the company, he's supposed to be working for it. This is no better than an employee who secretly tells the competition what they bid for a project. Your's is a strawman argument.
Which is what Stallman, and the FSF, have always intended the GPL to do.
No, they have always intended for the GPL to act as a "if you don't want to play nice with us, we won't play nice with you" type of force. You cannot claim that RMS's motives are unclear; you yourself refer to his many essays. Are you deliberately refusing to understand his stance, or are you trying (and failing) to understand it? Perhaps this is all just an elaborate ruse?
In short, Richard Stallman believes that it is legitimate to confiscate intellectual property to benefit the organization which he controls: the FSF.
This is a continuation of the above strawman argument. "Monkey wrenching" is unethical (and possibly illegal, depending on where you are). He has never (to my knowledge) supported the confiscation of "intellectual property", except insofar as he advocates the abolition of "intellectual property" altogether (which would itself remove the ability to "monkey wrench" in that way).
Second, the GPL does not in any way benefit the FSF. GPL'ed software benefits the people who need to use that software. The only software that "benefits" the FSF is changes to FSF-owned code; no other code has any relationship with the FSF.
The GPL is the instrument via which, he believes, he can harness government power to do this [IP confiscation].
No, he does not. You have fallen victim to your own strawman argument here; if you make a case based on a point, then your case falls apart if that point does. I have shown your argument to be false, so I shall take this shortcut to not show this statement to be false as well.
Insisting that the other person give up his or her livelihood ... is not sharing; it is confiscation.
Of course it isn't. Just as it isn't sharing to insist the the mugger in front of me not take my wallet, or to force a rapist off the streets. In order for you to claim an inherent "right" to do what you currently do for a living, you must first show that it is inherently right for you to be doing it in the first place. This is not to say that it isn't right, but you certainly haven't shown that it is inherently right. If you would care to put forth an argument as to why I should be forced to give you my code, when you aren't willing to give me yours, I'd be happy to point out where you went wrong.
GPLed software is not commercial, because those who sell copies of it (e.g. Red Hat) do not own it and do not have the ability to license it.
OK. This is my third attempt to respond to your obviously misinformed posts. The GPL is not a long license as licenses go, but apparently you haven't read it. One of the rights given when licensing under the GPL is the ability to relicense all of the rights you got to anyone else. Hence, Red Hat most certainly does have the ability to license it.
You are not buying a license to use the software.
Yes, you are. You are paying for:
- A physical instantiation of the software (i.e. the media)
- A physical instantiation of the ocumentation
- A license to use the software included on the media (with regards to GPL'ed software on the media, you get all the rights that Red Hat got)
Had you read the GPL, you would have understood that they are not only able to license the code to you, they are required to do so.To say that Red Hat Linux, and other distributions of Linux which are published by companies like Red Hat, are "commercial" is intentionally misleading.
Only if your definition of "commercial" is far different than mine. The relevant definition from my handy dictionary is:
which (I feel) fits Red Hat. Perhaps you might argue that their primary purpose is "for the good of the community", but that would be illegal, as they are now a publicly-traded corporation (they are required to maximize shareholder profit, and hence must work "primarily for sale or profit").Alas, he appears to condone the use of deceptive rhetoric so long as it furthers his ultimate cause: the destruction of truly commercial software.
Ah, I see that you use the word "commercial" to mean "only available to companies". That definition goes far beyond even that of "proprietary" in terms of hostility to, and incapacitation of, non-companies (i.e. people). This "businesses can do whatever they want; screw the people" stance would logically extend towards allowing (for instance) car companies intentionally to make deathtraps. Surely you aren't advocating that businesses are more important, or are allowed to do more things than, people?
P.S. to other people - I realize that this guy is a lost cause. I'm just practicing ripping posts apart (and realizing I could be a lot better with practice and feedback). Please send me an email (or respond to this post) if you can see where I could improve my posts.
Wow. That's trippy. I could almost see the froth coming from your mouth.
...we must take action to dissuade programmers from using the GPL and to help them see through the deceptive rhetoric...
So you'd suggest re-education camps for everyone who uses copyleft? How about copyright?
If necessary, we may have to have the GPL's onerous "copyleft" provisions ruled invalid by a court of law
Uh... wow. Once again I find myself dumbstruck. You realize that removing the ability of people to license their software means that you'll have to sell your software instead of licensing it? That I'll have free reign to disassemble it, code a new version, and release mine for free with each AOL CD, and that you won't be able to do a damn thing about it? Are you sure that's what you want to do?
"Sharing" does not mean demanding something unreasonable in return -- which is, alas, what the GPL does. "Sharing" must be done willingly. If you start by demanding things in return, you are not sharing; you are negotiating a transaction.
You are mistaken here. "Giving" is done willingly, without demanding something in return. "Sharing" is done with the expectation that the other person will "share" back.
Demanding something unreasonable in return is neither of those, and nor does it pertain to the GPL. The GPL enforces sharing, the BSD license expects the other person to want to share. The businesses I have worked with in the past have absolutely no intention of ever sharing code, so I release under the GPL. If businesses in general were willing to share, I'd put my code in the public domain.
You are being adversarial, not cooperative.
No, I'm being realistic. If your experience with businesses and other people leads you to view the world as rosey, then feel free to BSD your code. I have a less-rosey view of businesses, so I GPL mine.
If you use things other than Windows, bravo! Consider yourself one of the pioneers of the PC (Personal Crude-oil) revolution. But the fact that you or I can do such things does not mean that Microsoft is not a monopoly.
This was not written by me. Sorry.
Just about every news story I've seen cites Doom as the violent game, come to think of it, the quote is always "violent video games such as doom" with some slight semantic mangleing. Strange to think that all these violent kids ar ebehind the times..
- How about a page/button where
/. sends a cookie which is valid forever (or a year or so) - this way I don't have to keep logging in all the time? - Sometimes when reading the replies to an article, I want to temporarily change my comment threshold (e.g. to 0 for a freshly-minted article, 4 for an old article with lots of comments...). Could the pref bar on the article page be set to only change the threshold temporarily (i.e. for that page hit only?)
- I'd like to second the motion for a preference regarding the default score for posts (i.e. 0 for ACs, 1 for non-ACs). This way an AC who posts something mildly interesting could be on the same footing as a non-AC who posts something mildly interesting.
Just some thoughts, keep up the good work! Now the prefs I implemented for my work's website look small in comparison.One suggested addition to the prefs page: How about a "YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS" date format, à la MySQL?