Permissively-licensed software is doing very well: Apache, most scripting languages, X, WebKit, and so on. Pretty much every computer and smartphone out there has a few components from the BSD codebase (including Linux itself). Linux simply got lucky by arriving on the scene before BSD's legal issues were fully cleared up, and it has spread virally from there.
There have been free software components since the dawn of the computer age, and in most cases they really were 100% restriction free (i.e. public domain). The only thing that GPL adds is anti-capitalist restrictions backed by government force, and I consider that to be highly immoral.
I'm a big fan of Wikileaks. I run a local caching proxy (sorta like a mirror) that I and others access it through, and I certainly would encourage everyone to send a few bucks their way whenever possible (and I do try to follow that advice myself).
However, what comes to my mind when I read about the legal troubles of sites like that is a paraphrasing of a famous Alexander Haig quote: "Let them march all they want, as long as they pay their taxes." Winning back your right to march (or to Wikileak) is commendable, but it is not an end in of itself.
Free speech is only a small part of the battle for liberty, because dissent through speech alone is largely useless in the face of an all-powerful government that has near-total influence over public opinion. Dissenting opinions can not only be hijacked, marginalized, and ignored by the government-licensed media, but individuals can be preprogrammed to ignore them from their early childhood education onward! Tyranny 2.0 finds it more profitable to keep its slaves on longer chains, thus we can have things like the Internet, but those chains are nonetheless there lest you ever venture too far!
The best hope for resistance against such massive concentration of power comes in movements like the Free State Project (google it), which can make further tax resistance and secession movements possible in the future. Partisan democracy is a sham - only through intergovernmental competition can governments be forced to stop treating their citizens as subjects, and start treating them as consumers of their services who actually have a choice!
Cigwin has traditionally been slower than SFU, but it's MUCH easier to install lots of packages without having to figure out how to fix pkgsrc compilation problems and so on. I find that having an actual UNIX box to ssh to (physical or emulated) is the best solution of all.
I refuse to use Eclipse precisely because it is too close to (L)GPL in its licensing terms, which are "weak copyleft". The same applies to NetBeans as well. I simply use permissively-licensed text editors like vi or SciTE instead, and if I ever wanted a heavy Java-based IDE the first thing I'd check on is the recent permissively-licensed fork of IntelliJ IDEA (Community Edition).
Microsoft is not your slave. It has no obligation to write software on whatever terms satisfy Lord Maud'Dib, just as you are under no obligation to buy it. Free software is a natural result of free market competition - not government force, which is what GPL is all about.
I agree in part, but the main point of BSD-like licenses was to include the "no warranty" disclaimer and other things that would be completely unnecessary under a rational system of jurisprudence. I don't think anyone in history has ever been dragged to court and had to pay tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees after being accused of violating the BSD license, as is becoming a daily occurrence with GPL!
Exactly. Restrictive licenses like GPL only limit other people's freedom, waste millions of dollars in court fees, and should not be called "free software". Please use permissive licenses like BSD or Apache instead.
The freedom to potentially create a closed-source fork does not "restrict your freedom", it enables mine!
Enforcement of GPL licenses is a growing issue in the software industry, with anyone who's ever touched both a GPL and a proprietary codebase now in fear of legalistic aggression being used against them!
Software freedom should come from voluntary action and free market competition, not government force!
(2) There are many ways to defend your actual Natural Rights without a centralized power monopoly called "government", but that's a separate issue. There is no such thing as a Natural Right to initiate aggression against someone who used your tar-file without obeying your license.txt!
The government enforcement of unnatural constructs like "intellectual property" and the FCC drastically limits media competition, where content providers would be forced to find a way to attract viewers on the basis of viewer experience. Instead the government is all but forcing you to watch commercials A Clockwork Orange style by outlawing distribution alternatives like The Pirate Bay. And now they want to gain your loyalty by slapping this little bandaid on your viewing experience, while violating the rights of the broadcasters in the process... Ridiculous...
Restrictive licenses like (L)GPL rely on government force, which makes it no different ethically than proprietary software, and its viral and economically unsustainable nature makes it even worse!
Only permissively-licensed software like BSD and Apache is truly "free", and there's nothing wrong with using proprietary software if it makes economic sense to do so.
Software freedom should be driven by free market competition, not government force!
His Hitleresque consistency isn't the issue. You can't call a person who promotes an economically-unsustainable lifestyle "honest". If all programmers tried to live like him, they'd have to sell their children for medical experiments to pay for food and shelter. That's where government force comes in.
And only a part of his political agenda is pushed by him directly. (Read his Web-site at Stallman.org.) The politicians he already supports can do his public lying for him.
This will inevitably be used to introduce more government controls, and thus to limit Internet freedom for everyone...
I wouldn't be surprised if this was in part inspired by the heroic "Climategate" hacktivism (the responsibility for which I personally neither confirm nor deny at this time), liberating and bringing to light just a tiny crumb of the government's dirty laundry on just one of its power-grabbing scams...
No, it is "Global Warming" that will be remembered as a kooky religion centuries from now, along the lines of the Aztec Human Sacrifices and the Spanish Inquisition, though with far more dangerous consequences for the human civilization as a whole. You have absolutely no evidence to back up your alleged "moral imperative" for the socialist agenda that the AGW hoaxers are trying to push!
You keep ignoring the fact that the BURDEN OF PROOF is on YOU to conclusively prove: that climate is changing AND that the change is economically significant AND that the change is harmful AND that it is anthropogenic AND that the socialist plan they're pushing would be effective AND that it would be more effective than the more capitalist approaches (there'd be quite a few ideas on our side as well) AND that the benefits of implementing this plan would offset the costs in the long term. The only thing the power-hungry socialist elite that is pushing this bull has proven so far is their capacity for deceit!
Humanity has reached a fork in the road between reason and blind faith, with the latter being represented by socialist scams like this one, which serve the emerging global ruling class to the detriment of everyone else. They want to clip the wings of the human civilization so that they could remain in control, keep us from multiplying and spreading toward the stars, and utilizing existing technologies through which this solar system alone can feed trillions!
Not that I would expect some basic arithmetic to change your mind when you even fall for that "hottest month" mind-trick. Every year there's a hottest / coldest month in at least one of the world's thousands of cities, given that accurate temperature records are only several hundred months old, and given the "urban warming" effect that is completely different from GLOBAL warming!
And that's why I'm living in the freest spot in the known universe - New Hampshire, USA. (Google "Free State Project" for more info.) The rest of the world is hopelessly enslaved.
The data the government claims is unverifiable and not disprovable - only through blind faith in the criminal enterprise that calls itself "government" can anyone believe it. Much of it came from weather stations in the Soviet Union and the third world, which introduces a greater margin of error than the temperature changes they're claiming, and they are completely ignoring the possibility of little-understood natural cycles, which are very probable given that climatology wasn't very advanced until a few decades ago. Why don't you at least try to be objective and read from the sources not controlled by the government before you sell yourself and your children into communist slavery?
Wake up, sheeple, Global Warming is a commie hoax!
on
The Limits To Skepticism
·
· Score: -1, Troll
I've lived in the Soviet Union, but I must say that the communist brainwashing is now much worse than ever before! The alarmists' claims are completely baseless and unscientific! (Click my name to see my previous posts on this issue.)
The assertion isn't just that the "climate change" is significant and anthropogenic, but that their proposed socialist agenda is the ideal cure, even though it clearly has tremendous economic and social side-effects. This has been entirely lost in the government-licensed media's coverage of the issue - any problem the government alleges is guaranteed fatal if treated by anyone else, and any cure the government is pushing is a guaranteed panacea. How does that compare to real scientific traditions, like the Hippocratic Oath / primum non nocere?
It is perfectly clear that free market advancements are improving efficiency and reversing out-of-control population growth (in fact higher first-world fertility rates would be a good thing now). The only problem of the free market system is the part that government took it upon itself to monopolize: the attribution of liability for pollution and other negative externalities. (Not to mention retarding nuclear energy and trillion-dollar wars for cheaper oil.) This is yet another case of the government imposing its "solutions" by force, screwing up, and then using that as an excuse to impose even more tyrannical "solutions". How scientific is that?!
If GTK / GNOME would release a subsequent version of their software under a truly free license like BSD instead of the anti-free-market restrictive commie license like (L)GPL, it would be a tremendous boost for software industry, both open-source and proprietary, with users benefiting most of all!
(Click my name and see the arguments I've made in the past.)
Everything else, including Microsoft, is subject to free market competition.
They should be free to charge whatever the market will bare - which, in absence of government's alleged right to initiate aggression over copying 1's and 0's, would not be very much, but Microsoft could still make decent profits by bundling hardware, business contracts, services, certifications, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Permissively-licensed software is doing very well: Apache, most scripting languages, X, WebKit, and so on. Pretty much every computer and smartphone out there has a few components from the BSD codebase (including Linux itself). Linux simply got lucky by arriving on the scene before BSD's legal issues were fully cleared up, and it has spread virally from there.
There have been free software components since the dawn of the computer age, and in most cases they really were 100% restriction free (i.e. public domain). The only thing that GPL adds is anti-capitalist restrictions backed by government force, and I consider that to be highly immoral.
There's no such thing as a Natural Right to privacy and security - that's something you have to pay for.
If you engage in political activity, that is using the guns of the state to force your opinion down other people's throats - expect consequences.
Bill Gates wouldn't be so evil in absence of government force (i.e. anti-piracy laws, patents, etc).
Government truly is the root of all evil!
GPL
I'm a big fan of Wikileaks. I run a local caching proxy (sorta like a mirror) that I and others access it through, and I certainly would encourage everyone to send a few bucks their way whenever possible (and I do try to follow that advice myself).
However, what comes to my mind when I read about the legal troubles of sites like that is a paraphrasing of a famous Alexander Haig quote: "Let them march all they want, as long as they pay their taxes." Winning back your right to march (or to Wikileak) is commendable, but it is not an end in of itself.
Free speech is only a small part of the battle for liberty, because dissent through speech alone is largely useless in the face of an all-powerful government that has near-total influence over public opinion. Dissenting opinions can not only be hijacked, marginalized, and ignored by the government-licensed media, but individuals can be preprogrammed to ignore them from their early childhood education onward! Tyranny 2.0 finds it more profitable to keep its slaves on longer chains, thus we can have things like the Internet, but those chains are nonetheless there lest you ever venture too far!
The best hope for resistance against such massive concentration of power comes in movements like the Free State Project (google it), which can make further tax resistance and secession movements possible in the future. Partisan democracy is a sham - only through intergovernmental competition can governments be forced to stop treating their citizens as subjects, and start treating them as consumers of their services who actually have a choice!
Cigwin has traditionally been slower than SFU, but it's MUCH easier to install lots of packages without having to figure out how to fix pkgsrc compilation problems and so on. I find that having an actual UNIX box to ssh to (physical or emulated) is the best solution of all.
An obedient slave knows not of the whip...
I refuse to use Eclipse precisely because it is too close to (L)GPL in its licensing terms, which are "weak copyleft". The same applies to NetBeans as well. I simply use permissively-licensed text editors like vi or SciTE instead, and if I ever wanted a heavy Java-based IDE the first thing I'd check on is the recent permissively-licensed fork of IntelliJ IDEA (Community Edition).
Microsoft is not your slave. It has no obligation to write software on whatever terms satisfy Lord Maud'Dib, just as you are under no obligation to buy it. Free software is a natural result of free market competition - not government force, which is what GPL is all about.
A longer summary of my opinion on software freedom can be found here. Please at least try to learn some basic economics before you start calling people "idiots" and using the government force to get your way!
I agree in part, but the main point of BSD-like licenses was to include the "no warranty" disclaimer and other things that would be completely unnecessary under a rational system of jurisprudence. I don't think anyone in history has ever been dragged to court and had to pay tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees after being accused of violating the BSD license, as is becoming a daily occurrence with GPL!
(A longer summary of my opinion on software freedom can be found here.)
No, it isn't. Only permissively licensed software like BSD and Apache can be called truly free.
USA! USA! Woooo!
And we didn't even need a "department of industry" to do it. ;)
Exactly. Restrictive licenses like GPL only limit other people's freedom, waste millions of dollars in court fees, and should not be called "free software". Please use permissive licenses like BSD or Apache instead.
The freedom to potentially create a closed-source fork does not "restrict your freedom", it enables mine!
Enforcement of GPL licenses is a growing issue in the software industry, with anyone who's ever touched both a GPL and a proprietary codebase now in fear of legalistic aggression being used against them!
Software freedom should come from voluntary action and free market competition, not government force!
(1) Copying 1's and 0's is not theft.
(2) There are many ways to defend your actual Natural Rights without a centralized power monopoly called "government", but that's a separate issue. There is no such thing as a Natural Right to initiate aggression against someone who used your tar-file without obeying your license.txt!
The government enforcement of unnatural constructs like "intellectual property" and the FCC drastically limits media competition, where content providers would be forced to find a way to attract viewers on the basis of viewer experience. Instead the government is all but forcing you to watch commercials A Clockwork Orange style by outlawing distribution alternatives like The Pirate Bay. And now they want to gain your loyalty by slapping this little bandaid on your viewing experience, while violating the rights of the broadcasters in the process... Ridiculous...
Restrictive licenses like (L)GPL rely on government force, which makes it no different ethically than proprietary software, and its viral and economically unsustainable nature makes it even worse!
Only permissively-licensed software like BSD and Apache is truly "free", and there's nothing wrong with using proprietary software if it makes economic sense to do so.
Software freedom should be driven by free market competition, not government force!
(See my post history for more info.)
His Hitleresque consistency isn't the issue. You can't call a person who promotes an economically-unsustainable lifestyle "honest". If all programmers tried to live like him, they'd have to sell their children for medical experiments to pay for food and shelter. That's where government force comes in.
And only a part of his political agenda is pushed by him directly. (Read his Web-site at Stallman.org.) The politicians he already supports can do his public lying for him.
This will inevitably be used to introduce more government controls, and thus to limit Internet freedom for everyone...
I wouldn't be surprised if this was in part inspired by the heroic "Climategate" hacktivism (the responsibility for which I personally neither confirm nor deny at this time), liberating and bringing to light just a tiny crumb of the government's dirty laundry on just one of its power-grabbing scams...
No, it is "Global Warming" that will be remembered as a kooky religion centuries from now, along the lines of the Aztec Human Sacrifices and the Spanish Inquisition, though with far more dangerous consequences for the human civilization as a whole. You have absolutely no evidence to back up your alleged "moral imperative" for the socialist agenda that the AGW hoaxers are trying to push!
You keep ignoring the fact that the BURDEN OF PROOF is on YOU to conclusively prove: that climate is changing AND that the change is economically significant AND that the change is harmful AND that it is anthropogenic AND that the socialist plan they're pushing would be effective AND that it would be more effective than the more capitalist approaches (there'd be quite a few ideas on our side as well) AND that the benefits of implementing this plan would offset the costs in the long term. The only thing the power-hungry socialist elite that is pushing this bull has proven so far is their capacity for deceit!
Humanity has reached a fork in the road between reason and blind faith, with the latter being represented by socialist scams like this one, which serve the emerging global ruling class to the detriment of everyone else. They want to clip the wings of the human civilization so that they could remain in control, keep us from multiplying and spreading toward the stars, and utilizing existing technologies through which this solar system alone can feed trillions!
Not that I would expect some basic arithmetic to change your mind when you even fall for that "hottest month" mind-trick. Every year there's a hottest / coldest month in at least one of the world's thousands of cities, given that accurate temperature records are only several hundred months old, and given the "urban warming" effect that is completely different from GLOBAL warming!
And that's why I'm living in the freest spot in the known universe - New Hampshire, USA. (Google "Free State Project" for more info.) The rest of the world is hopelessly enslaved.
The data the government claims is unverifiable and not disprovable - only through blind faith in the criminal enterprise that calls itself "government" can anyone believe it. Much of it came from weather stations in the Soviet Union and the third world, which introduces a greater margin of error than the temperature changes they're claiming, and they are completely ignoring the possibility of little-understood natural cycles, which are very probable given that climatology wasn't very advanced until a few decades ago. Why don't you at least try to be objective and read from the sources not controlled by the government before you sell yourself and your children into communist slavery?
I've lived in the Soviet Union, but I must say that the communist brainwashing is now much worse than ever before! The alarmists' claims are completely baseless and unscientific! (Click my name to see my previous posts on this issue.)
The assertion isn't just that the "climate change" is significant and anthropogenic, but that their proposed socialist agenda is the ideal cure, even though it clearly has tremendous economic and social side-effects. This has been entirely lost in the government-licensed media's coverage of the issue - any problem the government alleges is guaranteed fatal if treated by anyone else, and any cure the government is pushing is a guaranteed panacea. How does that compare to real scientific traditions, like the Hippocratic Oath / primum non nocere?
It is perfectly clear that free market advancements are improving efficiency and reversing out-of-control population growth (in fact higher first-world fertility rates would be a good thing now). The only problem of the free market system is the part that government took it upon itself to monopolize: the attribution of liability for pollution and other negative externalities. (Not to mention retarding nuclear energy and trillion-dollar wars for cheaper oil.) This is yet another case of the government imposing its "solutions" by force, screwing up, and then using that as an excuse to impose even more tyrannical "solutions". How scientific is that?!
All tyrants are polite - before they come to power.
Stallman is clearly a socialist, and he wants the government to fund and control all software.
It's just a matter of time...
If GTK / GNOME would release a subsequent version of their software under a truly free license like BSD instead of the anti-free-market restrictive commie license like (L)GPL, it would be a tremendous boost for software industry, both open-source and proprietary, with users benefiting most of all!
(Click my name and see the arguments I've made in the past.)
Everything else, including Microsoft, is subject to free market competition.
They should be free to charge whatever the market will bare - which, in absence of government's alleged right to initiate aggression over copying 1's and 0's, would not be very much, but Microsoft could still make decent profits by bundling hardware, business contracts, services, certifications, etc.