11 months to duplicate Moasaic ? I could do it ina week, mate. Ok, I'm being facetious, but IIRC web browsers in those days were a much simpler things than they are now. HTML 2.0, GIFS, HTTP 1.0, a plugin system, and thats it really, isn't it ?
If you're so sure Netscape stole, or somehow licensed, the Mosaic code base, please provide your source for this information. I've witnessed arguments between early Netscape employees and peope trying to say the same thing you are saying, and I've never seenm any conclusive proof that they stole anything.
Given that Netscape employed a lot of the original NCSA people, I do not find it incredible that they succeeded in duplicating Mosaic's functionality so fast. Any developer will tell you that even without actually copying any code it is much, much easier to rewrite something you have aleady written once than it is to write something new.
Interesting point of view. What does "politics" mean ? Russ Nelson seems to use it to mean "that thing which happens in Washington". Its only from this perspective that "secure private property rights" can be seen as an alternative to politics. I'd take a much broader view: politics is about power, and the organisation of society. The two things are deeply intertwined, as power is needed to orgnaise society, and secure private property rights are a form of power that leads to certain (relatively successful) forms of political organisation.
There is a view which says you can eliminate power, and thus politics, from a society, but fundamentally I cannot believe this. It tends to be anarchists (all stripes), anarchocapitalists and libertarians who suggest that this is possible. Inherently though, people will always be able to do things other people want, and people will always be able to hurt each other. Thus there will always be power, and thus there will always be politics.
Its interesting that we tend to use 'politics' these days to mean democratic politics. I consider this to be quite a feat of brain-washing. There are plently of sources of power that are not accountable to the electorate, and there are a lot of things we can do politically other than vote in elections. Quite a lot of the 'boredom' everyone expresses with politics is really because democratics politics is very limited in its scope. Politicians cannot change many of the things people would really like to change in the way society is run, and their scope for action is falling all the time.
Yes, but its not exactly constitutional literalism, is it ? "We support government by the constitution, except the bits we don't like much. Oh, and by the way, states should have the right to ceceded".
I love the way libertarians go on about how simple everything really is, with this amazing faith in the founders of the US, and "natural justice", but when pushed will cheerfully agree (implicitly) that their positions are really just as tendentious as everyone else's.
There's actually been a case on this very point in the supreme court recently. Someone was distributing films of children which, in their framing and general presentation were clearly intended as child pornography, but which contained no evidence of kidnapping or abuse, as they'd been filmed by a secret camera in a public place. The court found they counted as pornography (fair enough), and were therefore obscene (true), and found the defendant (who was not the producer) guilty.
My personal take on this is that, as you say, kidnapping and abuse are the problem, not pictures intended to excite perverts. Not that the pictures are not repugnant, of course, but if no actual harm is done in making them, there is a case for their not being illegal. Its a bit like gun control: should things closely correlated with harmful acts be made illegal in order to reduce the incidence of the harmful act itself ?
Stroustrup has always claimed C++ can use a GC, and it is almost true. There are conservative garbage collectors implemented by ignoring attempts to free memory, or regarding as mere hints, that will work both with C and C++. Its helpful to compile applications with a tendency to leak memory against these things, as it does reduce the problem.
However, most of the advantage of a garbage collector is that it saves developer time, and allows applications to have a structure more natural to what they actually do, rather than one twisted by the need to track memory usage, or by crufty reference counting schemes written by people who do not understand memory allocation (its rather a black art).
To be portable, C++ applications must assume they need to call delete, and that they need to take care of housekeeping. C++ programs written assuming a garbage collector are very unlikely to be portable. It must also be noted that conservative garbage collectors have rather poor performance characteristics compared to state-of-the-art GCs for languages without ad-hoc pointers.
You're confusing VMs and library implementations notably the AWT. Netscape did screw up the VM (that actually runs the bytecode) among other things by coupling it too tightly to the rest of their browser because they failed to understand that implementing a language runtime is really quite hard. This causes most of the crashes, especially when combined with glibc's rather over-sensitive malloc implementation. There are only small differences in VM implementations on different platforms (threading, mostly), and none of these should be user visible.
However, the cause of most of the incompatibility is the large number (actually its 3, Mac, Windows and Motif/Unix) of AWT and standard library implementations. Netscape tried to do it all themselves without licensing Sun's code. Given the speed Sun changed early versions of the platform at, that was fatal.
MacLeod and Vinge both got the terminology from elsewhere. I think the extropians may have invented the term.
I'm not sure Lanier thinks the singularity is a Bad Thing as much as he thinks its silly. As he says in the article (you have read the article ?), the requirements for it to happen have not been verified. The idea that a mind can exist in a computer has been mooted but never proven. The broader conception that the mind can be moved into some kind of machine is almost certainly correct, but its possible such a machine would not be capable of the self-enhancing explosive growth that a computer might. And on and on. Read the first 5 points of the article.
As to whether its good or bad, if its possible, its rather beyond that, no ? What's certainly true is that posthuman entities, where they to emerge quickly enough, will not have much time for humans, any more than we have for ants.
And no. I don't want my mind in a computer. Not if it means sacrificing my current brain and body, as initially it almost certainly would.
How could you tell if you'd found a bug in TeX ? Most of it is the formatting algorithm, which is inscrutable, and the rest is the interpreter, which is...... ummmm...... bad (though I hasten to add that its only bad because it was written before modern parsers were invented).
I dispute your last clause. Even historically, most things that are demonized are never successfully suppressed. Just look at Satanism: the churches invent a new, evil, religion so that they can accuse their enemies of practising it. What happens ? People say "that sounds fun" and actually start doing it.
Look at all the publicity around Napster and DeCSS. They may be illegal, but if the MPAA and RIAA had never tried to suppress them, they'd be little niche causes, supported by a few geeks. Now they're turning into (small) mass popular movements.
Regarding the breast implant thing, my recollection of the case is that there was a long running media "scandal" where various claims were made that the silicone used in implant was dangerous to health, especially if the implants rupture. Several lawsuits were introduced in various US, Canadian and British courts against the manufacturers, including Dow Corning, which was bankrupted by the affair, and had previously had an excellent reputation for ethical behaviour.
There actually seem to have been several efforts to use independent experts to resolve the case. The best reference appears to be this articel. There's so radical change to the usual common law way of doing things here, the judges just used independent experts to try to resolve conflicting claims and work out whose evidence to throw out.
I doubt this will really help with biased judges, or lawyers who fail to introduce relevant evidence (as seems to have happended in your jury story). Unfortunately this is the nature of our system: the lawyers decide what goes before the court and the judge decides whether its admissable. The Roman law "inquisitorial" jurisdictions (like France) have an advantage in that the magistrates can order new investigations and gather evidence themselves if they think it necessary. Of course, this still doesn't help if they're prejudiced, or can't see the need for new evidence.
Regarding your other comments: yeah, I agree the current system fails in the goal of transparency, and we already seem to be headed towards an elite cabal of technolawyers. I think we broadly agree that whats needed is some mechanism to ensure trials are not shrouded in gobbledegook of any kind, so the jury, and the watching public, can reach their conclusions.
I do believe this is a bad idea. Its a principle of common law, enshrined in the US constitution, that justice must not only be done but be seen to be done. Having a separate system of courts that deal in things that are supposedly too hard for ordinary (read: stupid) people to understand is not going to help that goal. The implicit statement is that only supersmart people who speak techiegook are competent to judge these cases, and only similarly rarefied souls are competent to testify in them.
The likely consequence would be that ordinary folk would be reluctant to bring cases to these courts for fear of being made to look foolish. You'd end up with a hoard of especially expensive technolawyers, mostly in the pay of big corporations, who'd be the only people who could afford them. This would be a recipe for more and more pro-corporate decisions.
I know there's a certain attraction to this idea. The concept of a discrete court system that "spoke our language" seems attractive, but I don't think it would be like that at all. You'd end up with great tottering piles of incomprehensible precedent couched in a combination of techspeak and lawyerese that would effectively make the whole thing a disaster for anyone but the lawyers working it.
I'm not saying the courts don't need technical advice, and I'm not saying the existing system, where different technical witnesses slag each other off in court works well, but the answer is not to set up a new court system with even higher barriers to entry than the existing one. I quite liked the way the "silicon implants cause cancer" case was handled, where the judge appointed an expert panel that questioned the two sides expert witnesses and then gave an evaluation of the evidence in terms "the court" (ie. judges and jurors) could understand.
Hold on there. If you're right, and source code is a blueprint, not a device, then object code is a device, and not a form of expression, and thus has not first ammendment protection. I do not think thats what we want.
/. sells eyeballs to advertisers, not comments. The comments are there to attract eyeballs. You get the satisfaction of seeing your drivel on the screen and knowing thousands of others will see it too./. get the ad money. The advertisers get eyeballs. Everyone is happy.
Mr Streettroll's "attack" on/.'s business model fails because the ads don't really impinge on the pleasure readers and commenters get from the sure. Your argument fails because clearly you are continuing to comment, so you must be happy with the system. And actually submitters retain a copyright on their messages.
Wouldn't work. You'd have to pay for the bandwidth, which if you get anything like the hits of the original slashdot would take a fair whack out of your pocket, and of course you'd have no banner ads and no customer loyalty to support you. Even if/. charged you'd have a hard time.
The economics of the situation are different. Slashdot doesn't take a huge slug of money from its readers to pay for monopoly profits and heavy image advertising, thus its not vulnerable to this kind of attack.
Of course, acknowledging the actual situation would make maintaining your trollish moral outrage a little harder, huh ?
Actually there is now a Linux player for Flash, though I'm not sure it does everything it certainly works OK for the usual annoying front page graphics.
Just another trick to generate ad revenue. It also badly (possibly willfully) misconceived the meaning of "information wants to be free". Obviously it attributes intentionality to something that doesn't have it, but so do well accepted aphorisms about "water seeking its own level", etc. These are statements about phenomena that say how they behave. Its certainly not a moral statement. Although, for one reason or another, many people also believe it to be a good thing, the statement itself is not "information should be free", or "I want information to be free", but "information behaves as if it were free".
It wasn't originally a statement about *price*, but one about *control*. As making copies of information and transmitting it (which are the same thing, in the final analysis) becomes easier and quicker, it becomes harder and harder to control access to information. This was initially thought to be a good thing because it could be used to circumvent *censorship*, not copyright.
Of course, the reasons for loss of control are economic: the cost of copying has fallen to almost zero, and thus the primary barrier which copyright holders and publishers used to control copying is fast disappearing.
And, of course, since censorship and copyright are both about controlling information, an increase in its "leakiness" will undermine both. This whole area is interesting and deserved a much better article than this weak troll full of stupid ranting about things being "just the way it is".
Its probably not worth it. They're just sending threatening letters with vague comments about "intellectual property". I fail to see any protectable intellectual property in what they do, or what the Linux drivers do. You can't copyright protocols, they have not patents I'm aware of, there's no trademark infringement. All thats been done is the reverse engineering of something they might consider to be a trade secret, but in themselves trade secrets have not legal protection.
They haven't a leg to stand on, and I doubt they'll even find grounds to sue.
Qt 2.0 *for Unix* has a proper free software license: the QPL, thus this problem will go away if the above poster is correct (which I'm unsure about).
Re:License wars are a waste of energy
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KDE Strikes Back
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· Score: 2
Fair point. I can see how that could be an issue. I guess in those cases the only way is to fall back on the OS exemption. This does still seem to hold water to me, but its less clear cut.
Simon
Re:Software Freedom is more important than you thi
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Men of Zeal
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· Score: 2
I don't get where you concept of moral worth is coming from.
You seem to start of saying that PGP is no better or worse than its commercial equivalents to the activists who use it. Thats an odd argument, given that it really has very few commercial competitors (I'm not aware of *any*). Even if it did, its *free* (beer), and well verified. It seems strange to claim that its of not more value to a human rights activist (and they do use it) than expensive and poorly verified (they usually are) commercial products.
Its similarly strange to say it has no more value than access to clean water: well obviously it has *less*, though I'd say both have *some*. I'd ask you what you think *does* have moral worth ?
Re:Spoken like a true blinkered zealot
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KDE Strikes Back
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· Score: 2
However many modifications and improvement to it made by the proprietary Unix vendors have not. On the other hand, if it were GPL's they may never have made these improvements. God, aren't license wars dull ?
Simon
Re:License wars are a waste of energy
on
KDE Strikes Back
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· Score: 3
Sigh. Its really not that simple; as the GPL contains a degree of ambiguity the case is arguable both ways. Section 3 of the GPL (covering the distribution of binaries) requires that if the Program is distributed in binary form it must be accompanied either by source, or an offer from some party of distribute source. It is implied that the Program includes all libraries required to run it, but that the components of the operating system are exempt unless they're distributed with the Program.
The ambiguities with KDE/Qt are twofold:
1. Since a GUI system and toolkit are generally considered parts of a modern OS, it is arguable that the OS exemption applies to Qt, and indeed could apply to KDE itself. The term "operating system" itself is ambiguous: the GPL implies a compiler is part of an OS, whereas MS would usually exclude it, but argue that a web browser is. Its doubly ambiguous in the case of Linux, where the bits are available separately, but are distributed in a wide range of combinations (which generally do include Qt and KDE).
2. KDE is licensed under the GPL and LGPL by its authors in full knowledge of the licensing terms for Qt. Thus it is only sensible to assume that in granting this particular license they intended to allow binaries of KDE to be distributed, providing source was available for them, without the source for Qt (since this has never been available under compatible terms). Given this, a judge is going to laught hysterically and award costs to the defendant if they were to try to sue someone for distributing their binaries.
Given point 2, I really have to wonder why people keep bringing up this infernal argument.
IANAL. This is legal advice, but comes entirely without warranty:-)
Slashdot Mirror
11 months to duplicate Moasaic ? I could do it ina week, mate. Ok, I'm being facetious, but IIRC web browsers in those days were a much simpler things than they are now. HTML 2.0, GIFS, HTTP 1.0, a plugin system, and thats it really, isn't it ?
If you're so sure Netscape stole, or somehow licensed, the Mosaic code base, please provide your source for this information. I've witnessed arguments between early Netscape employees and peope trying to say the same thing you are saying, and I've never seenm any conclusive proof that they stole anything.
Given that Netscape employed a lot of the original NCSA people, I do not find it incredible that they succeeded in duplicating Mosaic's functionality so fast. Any developer will tell you that even without actually copying any code it is much, much easier to rewrite something you have aleady written once than it is to write something new.
Interesting point of view. What does "politics" mean ? Russ Nelson seems to use it to mean "that thing which happens in Washington". Its only from this perspective that "secure private property rights" can be seen as an alternative to politics. I'd take a much broader view: politics is about power, and the organisation of society. The two things are deeply intertwined, as power is needed to orgnaise society, and secure private property rights are a form of power that leads to certain (relatively successful) forms of political organisation.
There is a view which says you can eliminate power, and thus politics, from a society, but fundamentally I cannot believe this. It tends to be anarchists (all stripes), anarchocapitalists and libertarians who suggest that this is possible. Inherently though, people will always be able to do things other people want, and people will always be able to hurt each other. Thus there will always be power, and thus there will always be politics.
Its interesting that we tend to use 'politics' these days to mean democratic politics. I consider this to be quite a feat of brain-washing. There are plently of sources of power that are not accountable to the electorate, and there are a lot of things we can do politically other than vote in elections. Quite a lot of the 'boredom' everyone expresses with politics is really because democratics politics is very limited in its scope. Politicians cannot change many of the things people would really like to change in the way society is run, and their scope for action is falling all the time.
Nope. The Culture is Socialist, materialist and anarchist. If you don't believe me , maybe you'll believe Iain.
Yes, but its not exactly constitutional literalism, is it ? "We support government by the constitution, except the bits we don't like much. Oh, and by the way, states should have the right to ceceded".
I love the way libertarians go on about how simple everything really is, with this amazing faith in the founders of the US, and "natural justice", but when pushed will cheerfully agree (implicitly) that their positions are really just as tendentious as everyone else's.
There's actually been a case on this very point in the supreme court recently. Someone was distributing films of children which, in their framing and general presentation were clearly intended as child pornography, but which contained no evidence of kidnapping or abuse, as they'd been filmed by a secret camera in a public place. The court found they counted as pornography (fair enough), and were therefore obscene (true), and found the defendant (who was not the producer) guilty.
My personal take on this is that, as you say, kidnapping and abuse are the problem, not pictures intended to excite perverts. Not that the pictures are not repugnant, of course, but if no actual harm is done in making them, there is a case for their not being illegal. Its a bit like gun control: should things closely correlated with harmful acts be made illegal in order to reduce the incidence of the harmful act itself ?
Stroustrup has always claimed C++ can use a GC, and it is almost true. There are conservative garbage collectors implemented by ignoring attempts to free memory, or regarding as mere hints, that will work both with C and C++. Its helpful to compile applications with a tendency to leak memory against these things, as it does reduce the problem.
However, most of the advantage of a garbage collector is that it saves developer time, and allows applications to have a structure more natural to what they actually do, rather than one twisted by the need to track memory usage, or by crufty reference counting schemes written by people who do not understand memory allocation (its rather a black art).
To be portable, C++ applications must assume they need to call delete, and that they need to take care of housekeeping. C++ programs written assuming a garbage collector are very unlikely to be portable. It must also be noted that conservative garbage collectors have rather poor performance characteristics compared to state-of-the-art GCs for languages without ad-hoc pointers.
You're confusing VMs and library implementations notably the AWT. Netscape did screw up the VM (that actually runs the bytecode) among other things by coupling it too tightly to the rest of their browser because they failed to understand that implementing a language runtime is really quite hard. This causes most of the crashes, especially when combined with glibc's rather over-sensitive malloc implementation. There are only small differences in VM implementations on different platforms (threading, mostly), and none of these should be user visible.
However, the cause of most of the incompatibility is the large number (actually its 3, Mac, Windows and Motif/Unix) of AWT and standard library implementations. Netscape tried to do it all themselves without licensing Sun's code. Given the speed Sun changed early versions of the platform at, that was fatal.
MacLeod and Vinge both got the terminology from elsewhere. I think the extropians may have invented the term.
I'm not sure Lanier thinks the singularity is a Bad Thing as much as he thinks its silly. As he says in the article (you have read the article ?), the requirements for it to happen have not been verified. The idea that a mind can exist in a computer has been mooted but never proven. The broader conception that the mind can be moved into some kind of machine is almost certainly correct, but its possible such a machine would not be capable of the self-enhancing explosive growth that a computer might. And on and on. Read the first 5 points of the article.
As to whether its good or bad, if its possible, its rather beyond that, no ? What's certainly true is that posthuman entities, where they to emerge quickly enough, will not have much time for humans, any more than we have for ants.
And no. I don't want my mind in a computer. Not if it means sacrificing my current brain and body, as initially it almost certainly would.
How could you tell if you'd found a bug in TeX ? Most of it is the formatting algorithm, which is inscrutable, and the rest is the interpreter, which is ...... ummmm ...... bad (though I hasten to add that its only bad because it was written before modern parsers were invented).
I dispute your last clause. Even historically, most things that are demonized are never successfully suppressed. Just look at Satanism: the churches invent a new, evil, religion so that they can accuse their enemies of practising it. What happens ? People say "that sounds fun" and actually start doing it.
Look at all the publicity around Napster and DeCSS. They may be illegal, but if the MPAA and RIAA had never tried to suppress them, they'd be little niche causes, supported by a few geeks. Now they're turning into (small) mass popular movements.
Regarding the breast implant thing, my recollection of the case is that there was a long running media "scandal" where various claims were made that the silicone used in implant was dangerous to health, especially if the implants rupture. Several lawsuits were introduced in various US, Canadian and British courts against the manufacturers, including Dow Corning, which was bankrupted by the affair, and had previously had an excellent reputation for ethical behaviour.
There actually seem to have been several efforts to use independent experts to resolve the case. The best reference appears to be this articel. There's so radical change to the usual common law way of doing things here, the judges just used independent experts to try to resolve conflicting claims and work out whose evidence to throw out.
I doubt this will really help with biased judges, or lawyers who fail to introduce relevant evidence (as seems to have happended in your jury story). Unfortunately this is the nature of our system: the lawyers decide what goes before the court and the judge decides whether its admissable. The Roman law "inquisitorial" jurisdictions (like France) have an advantage in that the magistrates can order new investigations and gather evidence themselves if they think it necessary. Of course, this still doesn't help if they're prejudiced, or can't see the need for new evidence.
Regarding your other comments: yeah, I agree the current system fails in the goal of transparency, and we already seem to be headed towards an elite cabal of technolawyers. I think we broadly agree that whats needed is some mechanism to ensure trials are not shrouded in gobbledegook of any kind, so the jury, and the watching public, can reach their conclusions.
He's not a lawyer. He's just a ****ing troll. Don't rise to it.
I do believe this is a bad idea. Its a principle of common law, enshrined in the US constitution, that justice must not only be done but be seen to be done. Having a separate system of courts that deal in things that are supposedly too hard for ordinary (read: stupid) people to understand is not going to help that goal. The implicit statement is that only supersmart people who speak techiegook are competent to judge these cases, and only similarly rarefied souls are competent to testify in them.
The likely consequence would be that ordinary folk would be reluctant to bring cases to these courts for fear of being made to look foolish. You'd end up with a hoard of especially expensive technolawyers, mostly in the pay of big corporations, who'd be the only people who could afford them. This would be a recipe for more and more pro-corporate decisions.
I know there's a certain attraction to this idea. The concept of a discrete court system that "spoke our language" seems attractive, but I don't think it would be like that at all. You'd end up with great tottering piles of incomprehensible precedent couched in a combination of techspeak and lawyerese that would effectively make the whole thing a disaster for anyone but the lawyers working it.
I'm not saying the courts don't need technical advice, and I'm not saying the existing system, where different technical witnesses slag each other off in court works well, but the answer is not to set up a new court system with even higher barriers to entry than the existing one. I quite liked the way the "silicon implants cause cancer" case was handled, where the judge appointed an expert panel that questioned the two sides expert witnesses and then gave an evaluation of the evidence in terms "the court" (ie. judges and jurors) could understand.
Hold on there. If you're right, and source code is a blueprint, not a device, then object code is a device, and not a form of expression, and thus has not first ammendment protection. I do not think thats what we want.
/. sells eyeballs to advertisers, not comments. The comments are there to attract eyeballs. You get the satisfaction of seeing your drivel on the screen and knowing thousands of others will see it too. /. get the ad money. The advertisers get eyeballs. Everyone is happy.
/.'s business model fails because the ads don't really impinge on the pleasure readers and commenters get from the sure. Your argument fails because clearly you are continuing to comment, so you must be happy with the system. And actually submitters retain a copyright on their messages.
Mr Streettroll's "attack" on
Wouldn't work. You'd have to pay for the bandwidth, which if you get anything like the hits of the original slashdot would take a fair whack out of your pocket, and of course you'd have no banner ads and no customer loyalty to support you. Even if /. charged you'd have a hard time.
The economics of the situation are different. Slashdot doesn't take a huge slug of money from its readers to pay for monopoly profits and heavy image advertising, thus its not vulnerable to this kind of attack.
Of course, acknowledging the actual situation would make maintaining your trollish moral outrage a little harder, huh ?
Actually there is now a Linux player for Flash, though I'm not sure it does everything it certainly works OK for the usual annoying front page graphics.
Just another trick to generate ad revenue. It also badly (possibly willfully) misconceived the meaning of "information wants to be free". Obviously it attributes intentionality to something that doesn't have it, but so do well accepted aphorisms about "water seeking its own level", etc. These are statements about phenomena that say how they behave. Its certainly not a moral statement. Although, for one reason or another, many people also believe it to be a good thing, the statement itself is not "information should be free", or "I want information to be free", but "information behaves as if it were free".
It wasn't originally a statement about *price*, but one about *control*. As making copies of information and transmitting it (which are the same thing, in the final analysis) becomes easier and quicker, it becomes harder and harder to control access to information. This was initially thought to be a good thing because it could be used to circumvent *censorship*, not copyright.
Of course, the reasons for loss of control are economic: the cost of copying has fallen to almost zero, and thus the primary barrier which copyright holders and publishers used to control copying is fast disappearing.
And, of course, since censorship and copyright are both about controlling information, an increase in its "leakiness" will undermine both. This whole area is interesting and deserved a much better article than this weak troll full of stupid ranting about things being "just the way it is".
Its probably not worth it. They're just sending threatening letters with vague comments about "intellectual property". I fail to see any protectable intellectual property in what they do, or what the Linux drivers do. You can't copyright protocols, they have not patents I'm aware of, there's no trademark infringement. All thats been done is the reverse engineering of something they might consider to be a trade secret, but in themselves trade secrets have not legal protection.
They haven't a leg to stand on, and I doubt they'll even find grounds to sue.
Qt 2.0 *for Unix* has a proper free software license: the QPL, thus this problem will go away if the above poster is correct (which I'm unsure about).
Fair point. I can see how that could be an issue. I guess in those cases the only way is to fall back on the OS exemption. This does still seem to hold water to me, but its less clear cut.
Simon
I don't get where you concept of moral worth is coming from.
You seem to start of saying that PGP is no better or worse than its commercial equivalents to the activists who use it. Thats an odd argument, given that it really has very few commercial competitors (I'm not aware of *any*). Even if it did, its *free* (beer), and well verified. It seems strange to claim that its of not more value to a human rights activist (and they do use it) than expensive and poorly verified (they usually are) commercial products.
Its similarly strange to say it has no more value than access to clean water: well obviously it has *less*, though I'd say both have *some*. I'd ask you what you think *does* have moral worth ?
However many modifications and improvement to it made by the proprietary Unix vendors have not. On the other hand, if it were GPL's they may never have made these improvements. God, aren't license wars dull ?
Simon
Sigh. Its really not that simple; as the GPL contains a degree of ambiguity the case is arguable both ways. Section 3 of the GPL (covering the distribution of binaries) requires that if the Program is distributed in binary form it must be accompanied either by source, or an offer from some party of distribute source. It is implied that the Program includes all libraries required to run it, but that the components of the operating system are exempt unless they're distributed with the Program.
:-)
The ambiguities with KDE/Qt are twofold:
1. Since a GUI system and toolkit are generally considered parts of a modern OS, it is arguable that the OS exemption applies to Qt, and indeed could apply to KDE itself. The term "operating system" itself is ambiguous: the GPL implies a compiler is part of an OS, whereas MS would usually exclude it, but argue that a web browser is. Its doubly ambiguous in the case of Linux, where the bits are available separately, but are distributed in a wide range of combinations (which generally do include Qt and KDE).
2. KDE is licensed under the GPL and LGPL by its authors in full knowledge of the licensing terms for Qt. Thus it is only sensible to assume that in granting this particular license they intended to allow binaries of KDE to be distributed, providing source was available for them, without the source for Qt (since this has never been available under compatible terms). Given this, a judge is going to laught hysterically and award costs to the defendant if they were to try to sue someone for distributing their binaries.
Given point 2, I really have to wonder why people keep bringing up this infernal argument.
IANAL. This is legal advice, but comes entirely without warranty
Simon