I am (gradualist) Anarcho-Capitalist - I don't believe anyone should have the "right" to vote away other people's Natural Rights. You have been brainwashed to believe in quasi-religious rituals that you are told somehow distinguish "taxation" from "theft", and so forth. I do not share this delusion.
That said, people do have a right to delegate their rights to others, as long as it is done on a voluntary basis - as is the case with corporations, but is not the case with the criminal enterprise that you'd call "government". Statist tyrants have a long history of empowering their collectivist institutions through government force, while denying rights to voluntary institutions that form in the free market: corporations, non-profit organizations, churches, homeowners associations, and so forth. "Divide and conquer" is what this is all about!
To conclude with a quote from a very different kind of anarchist, Leo Tolstoy: "I want only to say that it is always the simplest ideas which lead to the greatest consequences. My idea, in its entirety, is that if vile people unite and constitute a force, then decent people are obliged to do likewise; just that."
Corporations are voluntary contracts between individuals, and those individuals have rights, period. If some of you Slashdot commies fail to comprehend that, that is your problem and yours alone.
Firefox and its dependencies are locked away behind an iron wall of Copyleft and other restrictions. Every person who cares about personal liberty and free enterprise should use Chromium (or a less Google-entangled fork of it) instead!
Jeremy Allison is one of the top villains of the software world (Richard Stalinman of course being #1), locking away software behind the restrictive anti-free-market legal virus they call the GPL, instead of something closer to truly free software (i.e. BSD license or public domain) which is how it would have naturally ended up due to free market competition. Neither freedom nor the ability to earn a living, inevitably leading to government funding and control of all software - that's the GNU way!
Microsoft is a much lesser evil, and one that is much easier to avoid. It is noteworthy that Microsoft didn't start using patents aggressively until it has become a victim of government violence itself. Microsoft could do just fine without copyright / "intellectual property" bull entirely, as would be the case in a 100% free society where they would be forced to operate through contract law, while GNU is completely and utterly impossible in a 100% free society - government force is what it's all about!
The GNU fiends love using the sword of government to their benefit, but when it is used back against them, oh no - hell hath no fury like a software commie scorned! He'll rant and rave in his mother's basement or government-subsidized dorm room - "I am a victim, hear me roar!"
(Now watch as my karma here goes to negative infinity and beyond, tee hee hee.)
Technically the Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) license that's preferred by OpenBSD is "more permissive than any other license" that I know of, but the most libertarian arrangement of all is public domain.
What benefit does BSD give you over PD, really? That silly warranty clause would be completely unnecessary then. The Internet with its thousands of spider-bots is one giant timestamp mechanism - you could always prove that you wrote something first if you really wanted to...
Either way, big kudos to goruka for not locking away his code behind a restrictive anti-free-market license like (L)GPL!
The computer industry has been one of the most free-market, most globalized, least regulated, least unionized, most wealth-producing industries to come along in decades, so the socialist governments obviously hate that, especially when its rapid growth makes it very clear how much government intervention hurts other industries, most notably energy production. They want all software to be GPL'ed and mostly funded through government-controlled universities, and, like "net neutrality", they can then use it to further their own pro-government agenda. Good products and services -- including software, be it proprietary or open source (ex. Chromium is licensed as BSD) -- come from free market competition, not government force!
Spoken like a person who's clueless of the vast array of Anarcho-Capitalist literature debunking the mindless "we need an inherently-corrupt violent monopoly called government to gauge externalities" FUD to pieces...
Government apologists love to point at things like the space program as an example of a government success... Humbug!
You can't argue the effectiveness of something (building pyramids, putting a man on the moon, etc) without considering return on investment - what benefit that project brought, and to whom. Only voluntary action (i.e. free market capitalism) can organize society in such a way as to do things at the right time, in the right place, in the right way, for the right reasons, with the right person in every position, with the right people paying for it, and with the right people reaping the benefits.
All of governments' so-called accomplishments in reality created nothing but economic waste, while its tax-victims in the free market would have used the money to do more timely things and opened up space (tourism, asteroid mining, risk-free nuclear power, manufacturing, etc) when it was cost-effective to do so, with a much better outcome overall.
Free speech is useless in a society where an all-powerful government can steal the fruits of your labor and use them to cause a far greater effect than your speech ever could, including brainwashing all children to reject criticism of government from the first grade onward!
"Let them march all they want, as long as they pay their taxes." --Alexander Haig
RMS is a skilled manipulator. I guess you've read the same gnu.org page that I have read, but failed to see through the nuanced BS and recognize it for what it is: a defense "intellectual property" laws!
This isn't really about GPL vs BSD (I actually prefer public domain), this is about government force.
You do have the right to do whatever you want with reflections of other people's work in your own mind, or on your computer. Quoting my recent post from another forum:
You get to own yourself and the consequences of your actions (i.e. capital), but not their immaterial reflections in the minds of other people. By immaterial I mean absence of scarcity: you own your body, because it can only serve one owner at a time, but not a copy of your DNA on someone else's computer, which once acquired can be copied without limit. You own your face, but you cannot put a post-it note on your forehead that says "by seeing my face you agree to the following contract" and expect that to be enforceable.
You can own explicit contractual privileges, land, plants, animals, robots, and even entire planets, but there's just no such thing as a right to enslave other people (or "rational economic actors" - possibly including AI entities and extraterrestrials)!
Consider parents' rights for example: parents should rightfully get power over their children (to fill the initial gap in a child's ability to handle the rights to liberty and property), but parents' rights are limited by the rights of the children themselves, up to a point where (unless they have a mental disability) they can come to own themselves outright. The same thing applies to author's rights as well: when their ideas move out of their mind and onto the minds of others, the second-hander minds have rights as well.
You can always prove whose parent you are, and if you take certain steps you can prove that you thought of something first, and I strongly believe that a society should value those accomplishments by ostracizing plagiarists and children who don't take care of their parents, but that should all be done in absence of blunt government force.
Now, once again, this socialist-leaning forum is not a good place to have this debate, especially when outspoken points of view like mine are restricted to only 2 posts a day. If you want to debate this further then please go to a more libertarian / Anarcho-Capitalist forum instead, where dissenting views are likely to be treated more substantively, and not stifled as they are here.
No, libertarians who write books on Natural Rights apply econometric formulas to empirically identify which societal rulesets are necessary for a civilized society.
In reality, Natural Rights come from the principle of competitive advantage: a society that violates Natural Rights the least would have an empirically-observable materialistic advantage over other societies that violate them more. It's almost as clear-cut as penicillin, except of course you can't observe human societies through a microscope, and the lenses of history are blurred by pro-government bias that funds and controls most knowledge-related institutions.
A society that tolerates murder has never made it out of the hunter-gatherer phase of human development. A society that tolerates theft is very unlikely to build a successful and stable economy. A society that believes in a false construct called "animal rights" (which violates actual Natural Rights of humans) wouldn't advance as well scientifically, due to the necessity of using animals for lab experiments. A society that believes in various false constructs called "positive rights" (ex. right to free food, health-care, unicorns, etc) will discourage economic productivity, experience flight of brains and capital, higher taxes, and it will eventually simply run out of competent people to tax (read Ayn Rand). Etc.
No society with a complete monopoly on force in the hands of the government has ever prospered for more than a generation or two. Just compare gun-controlled Weimar Republic that lead to the rise of Hitler to Switzerland - which Hitler actually wanted to invade, but it simply wasn't cost-effective for him to do so, because of its armed populace being ready for an active campaign of disobedience. If the Jews in Germany were as well armed as the Swiss, then Hitler's rise to power would have been simply impossible! Gun control has cost hundreds of millions of lives in the 20th century alone, while the side-effects of gun control are minuscule in comparison!
Furthermore, it is inevitable that avoidance of liabilities in the free market (cost of insurance, risk externalities, tort, perfectly legitimate local gun control by private property owners, etc) would inevitably lead to proliferation of "less lethal" self-defense technologies, and concentrate more firepower in the hands of qualified professionals. It is the government that's creating economic pressure for more lethal technologies, and it most certainly takes a government to create something as economically retarded as an aircraft carrier or an atomic bomb!
Now, once again, this socialist-leaning forum is not a good place to have this debate, especially when outspoken points of view are restricted to only 2 posts a day. If you want to debate this further then please go to a more libertarian / Anarcho-Capitalist forum instead, where dissenting views are likely to be treated more substantively and not stifled, as they are here.
It is the Copyleft movement's position that freedom (to fork open source code and do with it whatever you see fit) is "tyranny". This implies that me closed-sourcing my own work (and only my own work, since the upstream code I've copied from remains open-sourced) is somehow an act of aggression, which clearly it isn't. I am not your slave, and GPL is not a legitimate contract that can dictate what I can or cannot do with my own computer and my own ability to write software!
Copyleft is utterly impossible without government force, without which all Copyleft code would be simply liberated into the public domain - this is why you see people like RMS so fiercely opposed to (semi)libertarian movements like the Pirate Party. And, returning to the topic at hand, here we see the violence inherent in Copyleft philosophy surface once again, attempting to get in the way of what millions of Sun and Oracle shareholders want to do with their own property!
I agree with you regarding reproductive freedom, freedom of speech, and freedom of (and from) religion - including freedom from the religion you're currently trying to impose. Freedom of speech does not include the freedom to take away other people's property, even if that property intimidates you. Please do try to read a book and understand what Natural Rights are before you go around imposing your wishful thinking on others.
I never claimed that gun ownership is a panacea that instantly leads to a better society, but it is a vital ingredient. The three countries you've mentioned have very oppressive governments and rank near the bottom of the Economic Freedom Index, in part due to their own problems and in part due to foreign aggression those countries have experienced in the past. Also Google "gun control Iran" (without quotes), for example, to see just how factually inaccurate your claims are. Remember that gun control isn't about not having any guns at all, it's about putting all guns in the hands of the politically-favored classes, thus creating an imbalance of power.
The first rule of "signature trolling" is to answer an injustice you cannot tolerate, but without subverting the thread too far off-topic. If you wish to have your blind faith in unlimited government power thoroughly debunked then please find a good libertarian / Anarcho-Capitalist forum and let's debate there.
I leave you with a quote from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a Nobel-prize winning writer and anti-Soviet dissident: "And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!"
The slave morality of MySQL freeloaders is mind-boggling here! People who choose to devote their time and talent to developing free software are not your slaves! They have rights too, including the right to do what's in their own personal interest. Free / open source software is a natural consequence of free market competition, not government force!
Gun ownership is a Natural Right, and an absolute necessity without which government tyranny is impossible to avoid. Natural Rights don't come from a historical piece of paper no living person has signed, as brilliant as that piece of paper might have been at the time when it was written, Natural Rights is an economic concept, no different than the laws of physics or mathematics. Unless human nature suddenly changes, power will continue to corrupt, and checks and balances on absolute government power will remain a necessity and a duty of every freedom-loving individual on this planet (and beyond)!
And Monty Widenius is trying so hard to win the "communist software troll of the decade" award even Richard M. Stalinman would blush!
What he's advocating is government tyranny against millions of Sun's and Oracle's shareholders, employees, customers, and other stakeholders, not to mention the European tax-victims who'll end up paying for a socialist software industry once they entirely succeed in destroying free market enterprise on that economically and demographically shrinking continent!
Those people have a right to manage their property however they see fit - they are not the serfs of their government overlords, nor are they the slaves of MySQL freeloaders. Life doesn't owe anyone a free ride! Free / open source software should come about as the natural result of market competition, not government force!
I'm not saying that LHC is dangerous, but it would definitely take a government to cause any serious damage to this planet. In a free society, doing anything potentially dangerous would result in you being flooded with demands for transparency and lawsuits from your neighbors (possibly millions of them) and their representatives, making many of the more insane scientific ventures downright impossible here on earth. That's what outer space is for! Most mining and manufacturing would eventually take place there anyway, and dangerous experiments should as well. And once you beat gravity getting offa this rock, getting to the other side of the solar system is no trouble at all.
We are just a few decades away from humanity starting to export all sorts of dirty industries into space, where solar and (post)nuclear power production, asteroid mining, and robotic manufacturing can take place at exponential productivity benefits compared to doing those things on earth, and with virtually no pollution liabilities to worry about! Government intervention has done much to delay this inevitability, which in a free market society would be the natural desire of every person who's every looked up at the night sky. Scramble as they might to clip the wings of the human civilization through scams like religion (including socialism and environmentalism), they are ultimately losing their struggle to control us. Governments must suppress the reality that we live in an abundant universe where science and the free market (which are really the same concept applied to different things) can liberate humanity forever!
He sells his joke of a database product to Sun, and now he wants Mommy Government to hurt two large companies and millions of their customers, employees, and investors just to push for some socialist political agenda! Hasn't he ever heard of forking?! Viral license or not, Oracle and Sun are not Monty's slaves!
Them GNU idiots are a cult, and rational people are right to stay as far away from them as possible. Good thing even before I knew anything about software licenses I was smart enough to specialize in PostgreSQL and SQLite based on their technological merits, which make MySQL look like a toy for retarded toddlers! Why anyone would use MySQL over PostgreSQL is beyond me - must be further evidence of the socialist bias in the open source community...
If the Sun-Oracle deal goes through, I swear, I will rewrite every piece of software myself from scratch rather than resort to using anything with a copyleft license ever again!
Copyleft / GPL software is only "free as in communism" - that is not free at all. It is a viral license that uses government force to spread itself, subverting the free market in software development (which naturally leads to the most common software components becoming open source and public domain, while the best developers are still able to make money selling cutting-edge innovations), and encouraging ever-more government funding and control of yet another important industry.
Permissive licenses aren't perfect, public domain is, but I don't think anyone in history has ever been sued over forgetting to give proper credit to the downstream authors, as the BSD license requires. The main point of the BSD license was to cover the legal butts of the original authors (i.e. no warranty, traceability, etc), which would be completely unnecessary under a more rational system of jurisprudence.
Responsibility comes from the rights of other human beings, and there is no such thing as the right to enslave others, which is what GPL claims of anyone who dares to borrow its code on his or her own terms.
(1) A story like this is a good candidate for the understatement of the millennium, given how many billions of lives the new environmentalist religion can destroy as it clips the wings of the human civilization and leads to a totalitarian dystopia from which humanity may never recover, but it's nice to see more little stories like this making it past the censors. Is the bubble finally bursting? Will people finally start crunching the numbers objectively and realize that the sky is not falling, and that the politically-motivated cure is tremendously worse than the alleged disease? If so, then the Powers That Be may need a new "enabling event", a crisis to justify maintaining and expanding government power over mankind...
(2) We wouldn't even need traffic lights in a government-free society, because of all the innovations that private ownership of transportation infrastructure would bring. Even before traffic lights were popularized in the beginning of the 20th century there were experiments with peer-to-peer signaling systems ("I yield to you", "please yield to me", etc) by the same people who invented turn signals. Just imagine what modern high-speed wireless communications could do - the cars could literally drive themselves! But in absence of the government-enforced energy famine and trillion-dollar wars for slightly cheaper oil, we'd probably all be flying (yes, flying) around at 400MPH in post-atomic-powered RV's by now!
I haven't seen that movie yet, but I heard it's about the "evil corporations" trying to screw the natives, or in this case a planet of blue-faced aliens, out of their natural resources...
Like most evil in the world, this is an issue of government force, not of technology or capitalism! The public has no wide-spread delusions about the "divine rights" of corporations to initiate aggression against others, they only have this delusion about government! No one would allow a corporation to control a school their children go to, pledge allegiance to a corporate flag, involuntarily pay taxes to a corporation, allow it to inflate their currency, fight a war for it, etc, etc, etc. Capitalism doesn't need government, but it does require a universal recognition of individual rights, including the right to own property - no matter your skin color, and no matter what planet you are from!
Slashdot Mirror
Good libertarian / Objectivist / Anarcho-Capitalist trolls at least try to post on topic... Watch me and learn, grasshopper. ;-)
Anyway, did MIT just figure out a way to make computers slower and GUI script kiddies more arrogant?! Yuck! C, perl, and OpenBSD FTW!
I am (gradualist) Anarcho-Capitalist - I don't believe anyone should have the "right" to vote away other people's Natural Rights. You have been brainwashed to believe in quasi-religious rituals that you are told somehow distinguish "taxation" from "theft", and so forth. I do not share this delusion.
That said, people do have a right to delegate their rights to others, as long as it is done on a voluntary basis - as is the case with corporations, but is not the case with the criminal enterprise that you'd call "government". Statist tyrants have a long history of empowering their collectivist institutions through government force, while denying rights to voluntary institutions that form in the free market: corporations, non-profit organizations, churches, homeowners associations, and so forth. "Divide and conquer" is what this is all about!
To conclude with a quote from a very different kind of anarchist, Leo Tolstoy: "I want only to say that it is always the simplest ideas which lead to the greatest consequences. My idea, in its entirety, is that if vile people unite and constitute a force, then decent people are obliged to do likewise; just that."
Corporations are voluntary contracts between individuals, and those individuals have rights, period. If some of you Slashdot commies fail to comprehend that, that is your problem and yours alone.
(More here.)
Freedom!
Chromium's license and dependencies are almost 100% restriction-free BSD. You can do whatever you want with it - without the fear that the Copyleft gang will drag you to court and make you waste millions on your defense and/or product launch delays / cancellations!
Firefox and its dependencies are locked away behind an iron wall of Copyleft and other restrictions. Every person who cares about personal liberty and free enterprise should use Chromium (or a less Google-entangled fork of it) instead!
Essential YouTube viewing:
Jeremy Allison is one of the top villains of the software world (Richard Stalinman of course being #1), locking away software behind the restrictive anti-free-market legal virus they call the GPL, instead of something closer to truly free software (i.e. BSD license or public domain) which is how it would have naturally ended up due to free market competition. Neither freedom nor the ability to earn a living, inevitably leading to government funding and control of all software - that's the GNU way!
Microsoft is a much lesser evil, and one that is much easier to avoid. It is noteworthy that Microsoft didn't start using patents aggressively until it has become a victim of government violence itself. Microsoft could do just fine without copyright / "intellectual property" bull entirely, as would be the case in a 100% free society where they would be forced to operate through contract law, while GNU is completely and utterly impossible in a 100% free society - government force is what it's all about!
The GNU fiends love using the sword of government to their benefit, but when it is used back against them, oh no - hell hath no fury like a software commie scorned! He'll rant and rave in his mother's basement or government-subsidized dorm room - "I am a victim, hear me roar!"
(Now watch as my karma here goes to negative infinity and beyond, tee hee hee.)
Technically the Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) license that's preferred by OpenBSD is "more permissive than any other license" that I know of, but the most libertarian arrangement of all is public domain.
What benefit does BSD give you over PD, really? That silly warranty clause would be completely unnecessary then. The Internet with its thousands of spider-bots is one giant timestamp mechanism - you could always prove that you wrote something first if you really wanted to...
Either way, big kudos to goruka for not locking away his code behind a restrictive anti-free-market license like (L)GPL!
The computer industry has been one of the most free-market, most globalized, least regulated, least unionized, most wealth-producing industries to come along in decades, so the socialist governments obviously hate that, especially when its rapid growth makes it very clear how much government intervention hurts other industries, most notably energy production. They want all software to be GPL'ed and mostly funded through government-controlled universities, and, like "net neutrality", they can then use it to further their own pro-government agenda. Good products and services -- including software, be it proprietary or open source (ex. Chromium is licensed as BSD) -- come from free market competition, not government force!
Spoken like a person who's clueless of the vast array of Anarcho-Capitalist literature debunking the mindless "we need an inherently-corrupt violent monopoly called government to gauge externalities" FUD to pieces...
Government apologists love to point at things like the space program as an example of a government success... Humbug!
You can't argue the effectiveness of something (building pyramids, putting a man on the moon, etc) without considering return on investment - what benefit that project brought, and to whom. Only voluntary action (i.e. free market capitalism) can organize society in such a way as to do things at the right time, in the right place, in the right way, for the right reasons, with the right person in every position, with the right people paying for it, and with the right people reaping the benefits.
All of governments' so-called accomplishments in reality created nothing but economic waste, while its tax-victims in the free market would have used the money to do more timely things and opened up space (tourism, asteroid mining, risk-free nuclear power, manufacturing, etc) when it was cost-effective to do so, with a much better outcome overall.
Free speech is useless in a society where an all-powerful government can steal the fruits of your labor and use them to cause a far greater effect than your speech ever could, including brainwashing all children to reject criticism of government from the first grade onward!
"Let them march all they want, as long as they pay their taxes." --Alexander Haig
RMS is a skilled manipulator. I guess you've read the same gnu.org page that I have read, but failed to see through the nuanced BS and recognize it for what it is: a defense "intellectual property" laws!
This isn't really about GPL vs BSD (I actually prefer public domain), this is about government force.
You do have the right to do whatever you want with reflections of other people's work in your own mind, or on your computer. Quoting my recent post from another forum:
You get to own yourself and the consequences of your actions (i.e. capital), but not their immaterial reflections in the minds of other people. By immaterial I mean absence of scarcity: you own your body, because it can only serve one owner at a time, but not a copy of your DNA on someone else's computer, which once acquired can be copied without limit. You own your face, but you cannot put a post-it note on your forehead that says "by seeing my face you agree to the following contract" and expect that to be enforceable.
You can own explicit contractual privileges, land, plants, animals, robots, and even entire planets, but there's just no such thing as a right to enslave other people (or "rational economic actors" - possibly including AI entities and extraterrestrials)!
Consider parents' rights for example: parents should rightfully get power over their children (to fill the initial gap in a child's ability to handle the rights to liberty and property), but parents' rights are limited by the rights of the children themselves, up to a point where (unless they have a mental disability) they can come to own themselves outright. The same thing applies to author's rights as well: when their ideas move out of their mind and onto the minds of others, the second-hander minds have rights as well.
You can always prove whose parent you are, and if you take certain steps you can prove that you thought of something first, and I strongly believe that a society should value those accomplishments by ostracizing plagiarists and children who don't take care of their parents, but that should all be done in absence of blunt government force.
Now, once again, this socialist-leaning forum is not a good place to have this debate, especially when outspoken points of view like mine are restricted to only 2 posts a day. If you want to debate this further then please go to a more libertarian / Anarcho-Capitalist forum instead, where dissenting views are likely to be treated more substantively, and not stifled as they are here.
No, libertarians who write books on Natural Rights apply econometric formulas to empirically identify which societal rulesets are necessary for a civilized society.
Quoting my recent post from another socialist-leaning software forum:
In reality, Natural Rights come from the principle of competitive advantage: a society that violates Natural Rights the least would have an empirically-observable materialistic advantage over other societies that violate them more. It's almost as clear-cut as penicillin, except of course you can't observe human societies through a microscope, and the lenses of history are blurred by pro-government bias that funds and controls most knowledge-related institutions.
A society that tolerates murder has never made it out of the hunter-gatherer phase of human development. A society that tolerates theft is very unlikely to build a successful and stable economy. A society that believes in a false construct called "animal rights" (which violates actual Natural Rights of humans) wouldn't advance as well scientifically, due to the necessity of using animals for lab experiments. A society that believes in various false constructs called "positive rights" (ex. right to free food, health-care, unicorns, etc) will discourage economic productivity, experience flight of brains and capital, higher taxes, and it will eventually simply run out of competent people to tax (read Ayn Rand). Etc.
No society with a complete monopoly on force in the hands of the government has ever prospered for more than a generation or two. Just compare gun-controlled Weimar Republic that lead to the rise of Hitler to Switzerland - which Hitler actually wanted to invade, but it simply wasn't cost-effective for him to do so, because of its armed populace being ready for an active campaign of disobedience. If the Jews in Germany were as well armed as the Swiss, then Hitler's rise to power would have been simply impossible! Gun control has cost hundreds of millions of lives in the 20th century alone, while the side-effects of gun control are minuscule in comparison!
Furthermore, it is inevitable that avoidance of liabilities in the free market (cost of insurance, risk externalities, tort, perfectly legitimate local gun control by private property owners, etc) would inevitably lead to proliferation of "less lethal" self-defense technologies, and concentrate more firepower in the hands of qualified professionals. It is the government that's creating economic pressure for more lethal technologies, and it most certainly takes a government to create something as economically retarded as an aircraft carrier or an atomic bomb!
Now, once again, this socialist-leaning forum is not a good place to have this debate, especially when outspoken points of view are restricted to only 2 posts a day. If you want to debate this further then please go to a more libertarian / Anarcho-Capitalist forum instead, where dissenting views are likely to be treated more substantively and not stifled, as they are here.
It is the Copyleft movement's position that freedom (to fork open source code and do with it whatever you see fit) is "tyranny". This implies that me closed-sourcing my own work (and only my own work, since the upstream code I've copied from remains open-sourced) is somehow an act of aggression, which clearly it isn't. I am not your slave, and GPL is not a legitimate contract that can dictate what I can or cannot do with my own computer and my own ability to write software!
Copyleft is utterly impossible without government force, without which all Copyleft code would be simply liberated into the public domain - this is why you see people like RMS so fiercely opposed to (semi)libertarian movements like the Pirate Party. And, returning to the topic at hand, here we see the violence inherent in Copyleft philosophy surface once again, attempting to get in the way of what millions of Sun and Oracle shareholders want to do with their own property!
I agree with you regarding reproductive freedom, freedom of speech, and freedom of (and from) religion - including freedom from the religion you're currently trying to impose. Freedom of speech does not include the freedom to take away other people's property, even if that property intimidates you. Please do try to read a book and understand what Natural Rights are before you go around imposing your wishful thinking on others.
I never claimed that gun ownership is a panacea that instantly leads to a better society, but it is a vital ingredient. The three countries you've mentioned have very oppressive governments and rank near the bottom of the Economic Freedom Index, in part due to their own problems and in part due to foreign aggression those countries have experienced in the past. Also Google "gun control Iran" (without quotes), for example, to see just how factually inaccurate your claims are. Remember that gun control isn't about not having any guns at all, it's about putting all guns in the hands of the politically-favored classes, thus creating an imbalance of power.
The first rule of "signature trolling" is to answer an injustice you cannot tolerate, but without subverting the thread too far off-topic. If you wish to have your blind faith in unlimited government power thoroughly debunked then please find a good libertarian / Anarcho-Capitalist forum and let's debate there.
I leave you with a quote from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a Nobel-prize winning writer and anti-Soviet dissident: "And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!"
The slave morality of MySQL freeloaders is mind-boggling here! People who choose to devote their time and talent to developing free software are not your slaves! They have rights too, including the right to do what's in their own personal interest. Free / open source software is a natural consequence of free market competition, not government force!
BSD is the most restrictive license a freedom-loving person should ever want to use. GPL is even more dependent on government force than proprietary software is, but usually doesn't come close to it in terms of quality or convenience.
Gun ownership is a Natural Right, and an absolute necessity without which government tyranny is impossible to avoid. Natural Rights don't come from a historical piece of paper no living person has signed, as brilliant as that piece of paper might have been at the time when it was written, Natural Rights is an economic concept, no different than the laws of physics or mathematics. Unless human nature suddenly changes, power will continue to corrupt, and checks and balances on absolute government power will remain a necessity and a duty of every freedom-loving individual on this planet (and beyond)!
And Monty Widenius is trying so hard to win the "communist software troll of the decade" award even Richard M. Stalinman would blush!
What he's advocating is government tyranny against millions of Sun's and Oracle's shareholders, employees, customers, and other stakeholders, not to mention the European tax-victims who'll end up paying for a socialist software industry once they entirely succeed in destroying free market enterprise on that economically and demographically shrinking continent!
Those people have a right to manage their property however they see fit - they are not the serfs of their government overlords, nor are they the slaves of MySQL freeloaders. Life doesn't owe anyone a free ride! Free / open source software should come about as the natural result of market competition, not government force!
(More about libertarian / Anarcho-Capitalist software philosophy here.)
Wow, that Matthew Dillon sure knows how to optimize the kernel & FS for long-term stability!
Compare that to a mascot that is confined to one geographic area, like, say, a penguin? ::rimshot::
(Hey I warned you it was lame. Write your own.)
I'm not saying that LHC is dangerous, but it would definitely take a government to cause any serious damage to this planet. In a free society, doing anything potentially dangerous would result in you being flooded with demands for transparency and lawsuits from your neighbors (possibly millions of them) and their representatives, making many of the more insane scientific ventures downright impossible here on earth. That's what outer space is for! Most mining and manufacturing would eventually take place there anyway, and dangerous experiments should as well. And once you beat gravity getting offa this rock, getting to the other side of the solar system is no trouble at all.
We are just a few decades away from humanity starting to export all sorts of dirty industries into space, where solar and (post)nuclear power production, asteroid mining, and robotic manufacturing can take place at exponential productivity benefits compared to doing those things on earth, and with virtually no pollution liabilities to worry about! Government intervention has done much to delay this inevitability, which in a free market society would be the natural desire of every person who's every looked up at the night sky. Scramble as they might to clip the wings of the human civilization through scams like religion (including socialism and environmentalism), they are ultimately losing their struggle to control us. Governments must suppress the reality that we live in an abundant universe where science and the free market (which are really the same concept applied to different things) can liberate humanity forever!
He sells his joke of a database product to Sun, and now he wants Mommy Government to hurt two large companies and millions of their customers, employees, and investors just to push for some socialist political agenda! Hasn't he ever heard of forking?! Viral license or not, Oracle and Sun are not Monty's slaves!
Them GNU idiots are a cult, and rational people are right to stay as far away from them as possible. Good thing even before I knew anything about software licenses I was smart enough to specialize in PostgreSQL and SQLite based on their technological merits, which make MySQL look like a toy for retarded toddlers! Why anyone would use MySQL over PostgreSQL is beyond me - must be further evidence of the socialist bias in the open source community...
If the Sun-Oracle deal goes through, I swear, I will rewrite every piece of software myself from scratch rather than resort to using anything with a copyleft license ever again!
Copyleft / GPL software is only "free as in communism" - that is not free at all. It is a viral license that uses government force to spread itself, subverting the free market in software development (which naturally leads to the most common software components becoming open source and public domain, while the best developers are still able to make money selling cutting-edge innovations), and encouraging ever-more government funding and control of yet another important industry.
Permissive licenses aren't perfect, public domain is, but I don't think anyone in history has ever been sued over forgetting to give proper credit to the downstream authors, as the BSD license requires. The main point of the BSD license was to cover the legal butts of the original authors (i.e. no warranty, traceability, etc), which would be completely unnecessary under a more rational system of jurisprudence.
Responsibility comes from the rights of other human beings, and there is no such thing as the right to enslave others, which is what GPL claims of anyone who dares to borrow its code on his or her own terms.
(More here.)
(1) A story like this is a good candidate for the understatement of the millennium, given how many billions of lives the new environmentalist religion can destroy as it clips the wings of the human civilization and leads to a totalitarian dystopia from which humanity may never recover, but it's nice to see more little stories like this making it past the censors. Is the bubble finally bursting? Will people finally start crunching the numbers objectively and realize that the sky is not falling, and that the politically-motivated cure is tremendously worse than the alleged disease? If so, then the Powers That Be may need a new "enabling event", a crisis to justify maintaining and expanding government power over mankind...
(2) We wouldn't even need traffic lights in a government-free society, because of all the innovations that private ownership of transportation infrastructure would bring. Even before traffic lights were popularized in the beginning of the 20th century there were experiments with peer-to-peer signaling systems ("I yield to you", "please yield to me", etc) by the same people who invented turn signals. Just imagine what modern high-speed wireless communications could do - the cars could literally drive themselves! But in absence of the government-enforced energy famine and trillion-dollar wars for slightly cheaper oil, we'd probably all be flying (yes, flying) around at 400MPH in post-atomic-powered RV's by now!
Emacs can't do one very important thing -- stop relying on government force -- the rest is irrelevant to me!
I haven't seen that movie yet, but I heard it's about the "evil corporations" trying to screw the natives, or in this case a planet of blue-faced aliens, out of their natural resources...
Like most evil in the world, this is an issue of government force, not of technology or capitalism! The public has no wide-spread delusions about the "divine rights" of corporations to initiate aggression against others, they only have this delusion about government! No one would allow a corporation to control a school their children go to, pledge allegiance to a corporate flag, involuntarily pay taxes to a corporation, allow it to inflate their currency, fight a war for it, etc, etc, etc. Capitalism doesn't need government, but it does require a universal recognition of individual rights, including the right to own property - no matter your skin color, and no matter what planet you are from!