Thats what they say, yes. Thats like the old claim that the authors of Autoroute lost a few million on the ST version (which may still hold the prize for the nost heavily pirated piece of software ever). They did not, because 99% of the people who pirated could not afford, or would not have paid, the extortionate retail price. Same goes for CDs.
The patent system was set up to try to stop this from happening. It was felt that a limited monopoly would encourage people to make their discoveries public, thus serving the public interest better than they would as trade secrets.
I do not believe it is possible to talk well about politics in the kind of language usually used for technical discussions. Much of the heat and frenzy generated around discussions in these forums seems to be due to just that mistake. You actually need to be more precise, and I believe the kind of prose used in this article is good for that purpose.
As to this being an international forum - yes it is and that is a general problem with the internet. One needs to speak English, and quite a wide range of types of English to get along. I do not see that as a reason to reject things written in more complex English, especially if they would be hard to put in simpler language.
And yes I am condescending. You must admit that many people here do not give a good impression of their own literacy or education.
The author did in fact attack IP laws as they stand. He was not arguing in favour of freedom of ideas (which, I agree, the current system supports), but in favour of free use of their physical manifestations. If you read the article, I think its pretty clear.
Although I agree with this article, I have to say that there is a case for intellectual property which I find it hard to deny.
Given that most things are scarce and our world relies on an economic system that assumes scarcity, how do we encourage people to have ideas if they cannot profit from them by making them artificially scarce ?
The number of people winging about the English in this article is disturbing. Its just slightly archaic and complex, in the style commonly found in philosophy departments and victorian literature. Anyone half literate should be able to read it, but I guess that excludes a lot of Slashdotters,
People like 'the marketplace' because its some kind of objective test of whether something works. Its no substitute for beauty or functionality, but it is an imperfect judge of those things. To find whether something works for most people it is better to see whether they buy it than to listen to the prophets rant about it.
I think Gtk+ is OK, and better than any other toolkit other than (perhaps) Qt, which has other kinds of problems (that its in C++ primarily).
What I really take issue with is the idea that operator overloading, constructors and reference counting are OO features. They're features of C++ and its half-arsed class libraries - mostly added to try to hack around the problems with the whole design of the language.
The things you really need to be OO are encapsulation, polymorphism and inheritance. The only thing GTK+ does not quite do properly is polymorphism (and interface inheritance). The rest is perfectly OO.
M3 is not a beta. Its just a development milestone. They have no intention of creating something that can be used without knowledge about known bugs and problems.
Its not a half-arsed free license. It is a free software license. It preserves your freedom to modify the source and distribute the changes. I'm not going to accept his mud-slinging because its precisely this kind of person who gives us all a bad name as a bunch of fanatical uncooperative loonies.
You can use Qt. Its free. You've done nothing to substantiate your main point, which is that you think being asked to distribute patches separately from the originals is an imposition.
You 'suffer' from restrictions on what you can do with other people's code anyway. The purpose of the OSD is not to allow you to behave like a spoiled little brat, but to give you a certain minimum level of freedom. If you want more, you might benefit by being polite to the people who might give it to you.
Redhat did nothing wrong. They just said they couldn't include Qt in the base distribution, and wouldn't include KDE because of that. Its fair enough, really, isn't it ?
Xerox PARC originally did this for file systems. I nearly did my undergrad project on it. That would be 4 years ago, and it was not new then. Its neat though.
Things like this do indeed need to be discussed, but it would be better to discuss them with less acrimony and more emphasis on out common goals. The various Bruce, Eric and Richard shouting matches are destructive and they shouldn't be encouraged (even if all the rest of their work is excellent). Apple, IBM and all the rest are trying (from our point of view) to do the right thing. They should be encouraged and bickering about what is and is not and OS license to try to take the 'good words' away from them is not going to help at all. Bruce did the right thing in contacting Apple when he felt there was an issue, but the wrong thing in trying to deny that the APSL is an open source license when it clearly meets the guidelines.
Right. I've just read Bruce's essay in parallel with the Open Source definition, and the Debain free software guidelines (which are essentially the same). Whilst he raises a number (2) of legitimate points, none of the them clearly places this license outside the domain of free/open source software, by the rules as we've come to accept them.
Bruce makes 2 points. Firstly that the license is invalid if Apples goes under because you cannot submit changes back to Apple. IANAL, and therefore cannot comment on whether this would invalidate the whole license, but its definitely just a nit. The intent in such a situation is pretty clear, and anyway its much more likely Apple (or at least their IP rights) would be brought long before going bust.
Secondly, I do not accept that there is anything wrong with termination clauses. They simply give the company a way out of nasty lawsuits, by allowing it to do unilaterally what the courts would do anyway. All those 'reasonablies' and so forth can safely be ignored.
He also peeves about some of the code being BSDL'd. Well, you're allowed to add conditions when distributing BSD code, so IDC, and he shouldn't either.
Termination clauses as yet do not stop something being open source. My take is that its just a description of what would happen anyway in the case of patent violations being dragged through the courts. At to your other point, all that says is that apple may or may not open the rest of its source code. That is their right.
Slashdot Mirror
Thats what they say, yes. Thats like the old claim that the authors of Autoroute lost a few million on the ST version (which may still hold the prize for the nost heavily pirated piece of software ever). They did not, because 99% of the people who pirated could not afford, or would not have paid, the extortionate retail price. Same goes for CDs.
If Jobs does that, only months after cancelling the Newton, I shall beat him to death will my MP2000.
The patent system was set up to try to stop this from happening. It was felt that a limited monopoly would encourage people to make their discoveries public, thus serving the public interest better than they would as trade secrets.
I do not believe it is possible to talk well about politics in the kind of language usually used for technical discussions. Much of the heat and frenzy generated around discussions in these forums seems to be due to just that mistake. You actually need to be more precise, and I believe the kind of prose used in this article is good for that purpose.
As to this being an international forum - yes it is and that is a general problem with the internet. One needs to speak English, and quite a wide range of types of English to get along. I do not see that as a reason to reject things written in more complex English, especially if they would be hard to put in simpler language.
And yes I am condescending. You must admit that many people here do not give a good impression of their own literacy or education.
The author did in fact attack IP laws as they stand. He was not arguing in favour of freedom of ideas (which, I agree, the current system supports), but in favour of free use of their physical manifestations. If you read the article, I think its pretty clear.
"IP sucks and stuff" doesn't actually tell you why, though. Its just a dogmatic statement of opinion.
Although I agree with this article, I have to say that there is a case for intellectual property which I find it hard to deny.
Given that most things are scarce and our world relies on an economic system that assumes scarcity, how do we encourage people to have ideas if they cannot profit from them by making them artificially scarce ?
The number of people winging about the English in this article is disturbing. Its just slightly archaic and complex, in the style commonly found in philosophy departments and victorian literature. Anyone half literate should be able to read it, but I guess that excludes a lot of Slashdotters,
People like 'the marketplace' because its some kind of objective test of whether something works. Its no substitute for beauty or functionality, but it is an imperfect judge of those things. To find whether something works for most people it is better to see whether they buy it than to listen to the prophets rant about it.
I think Gtk+ is OK, and better than any other toolkit other than (perhaps) Qt, which has other kinds of problems (that its in C++ primarily).
What I really take issue with is the idea that operator overloading, constructors and reference counting are OO features. They're features of C++ and its half-arsed class libraries - mostly added to try to hack around the problems with the whole design of the language.
The things you really need to be OO are encapsulation, polymorphism and inheritance. The only thing GTK+ does not quite do properly is polymorphism (and interface inheritance). The rest is perfectly OO.
Superficial bugs are often the last things to get fixed. The development team has more important things to do than bow and scrape to you.
IE5's CSS support sucks very badly. Mozilla already has better support. Same for DOM support.
M3 is not a beta. Its just a development milestone. They have no intention of creating something that can be used without knowledge about known bugs and problems.
Its not a half-arsed free license. It is a free software license. It preserves your freedom to modify the source and distribute the changes. I'm not going to accept his mud-slinging because its precisely this kind of person who gives us all a bad name as a bunch of fanatical uncooperative loonies.
You can use Qt. Its free. You've done nothing to substantiate your main point, which is that you think being asked to distribute patches separately from the originals is an imposition.
You 'suffer' from restrictions on what you can do with other people's code anyway. The purpose of the OSD is not to allow you to behave like a spoiled little brat, but to give you a certain minimum level of freedom. If you want more, you might benefit by being polite to the people who might give it to you.
How ?
Qt and KDE are free. Even RMS says so.
Redhat did nothing wrong. They just said they couldn't include Qt in the base distribution, and wouldn't include KDE because of that. Its fair enough, really, isn't it ?
You never give up, do you ? They asked for it by making their toolkit Open Source. Yeh, they really deserve to be punished for that.
Xerox PARC originally did this for file systems. I nearly did my undergrad project on it. That would be 4 years ago, and it was not new then. Its neat though.
Things like this do indeed need to be discussed, but it would be better to discuss them with less acrimony and more emphasis on out common goals. The various Bruce, Eric and Richard shouting matches are destructive and they shouldn't be encouraged (even if all the rest of their work is excellent). Apple, IBM and all the rest are trying (from our point of view) to do the right thing. They should be encouraged and bickering about what is and is not and OS license to try to take the 'good words' away from them is not going to help at all. Bruce did the right thing in contacting Apple when he felt there was an issue, but the wrong thing in trying to deny that the APSL is an open source license when it clearly meets the guidelines.
QT 2.0 is free too.
Right. I've just read Bruce's essay in parallel with the Open Source definition, and the Debain free software guidelines (which are essentially the same). Whilst he raises a number (2) of legitimate points, none of the them clearly places this license outside the domain of free/open source software, by the rules as we've come to accept them.
Bruce makes 2 points. Firstly that the license is invalid if Apples goes under because you cannot submit changes back to Apple. IANAL, and therefore cannot comment on whether this would invalidate the whole license, but its definitely just a nit. The intent in such a situation is pretty clear, and anyway its much more likely Apple (or at least their IP rights) would be brought long before going bust.
Secondly, I do not accept that there is anything wrong with termination clauses. They simply give the company a way out of nasty lawsuits, by allowing it to do unilaterally what the courts would do anyway. All those 'reasonablies' and so forth can safely be ignored.
He also peeves about some of the code being BSDL'd. Well, you're allowed to add conditions when distributing BSD code, so IDC, and he shouldn't either.
Termination clauses as yet do not stop something being open source. My take is that its just a description of what would happen anyway in the case of patent violations being dragged through the courts. At to your other point, all that says is that apple may or may not open the rest of its source code. That is their right.