It isn't only about choice. YOu've now got three definitions
Free as in beer Free as in speech and Free to choose
What you are doing is picking your own specific definition of freedom and then using that to argue that all the other kinds of freedom don't count. Its old and tired and lame, get over yourself.
errr... the last time a 747 flew low across downtown Manhattan, 3000 people died. That was 8 years ago. Statistically, these are very rare, very deadly events.
And the ten thousand times before that nothing happened.
having the source code doesn't mean you can do something about it
Since you chose to drag out that old and tired argument its pretty clear you don't understand RMS's position. You can't hire someone to fix software if the source is not available. Logistics mean nothing if the choice is not available in the first place.
Vocal OSS purists like RMS are, IMHO, driving the average person away from open source software. A good many people shy away from zealots and their goods.
Which is precisely why more money is made with GPL licensed software than any other.
What's wrong with finding a new suit if the original manufacturer raises his prices?
Because then you wasted your money on the original suit.
RMS's definition of freedom is not choice,
Correct RMS's definition of freedom is the ability to do whatever you want with what you purchase. He believes that freedom ought to be a fundamental characteristic of ALL choices.
World: Yeah, you know what? You only had one good idea
It's true. RMS has only had one good idea. That the end user should have the freedom to completely control their computing experience.
That's it.
Everytime someone like you gets all pissy about RMS's "latest idea" it just means you failed to understand the full ramifications of his one and only idea the first time around.
If you don't pay rent at your storage facility, they auction off your stuff to the highest bidder. It doesn't matter if its furniture or business records. If he's not paying for the service, why would they maintain his data? Storage is cheap, but it's not free.
They don't usually do it right away. Depends on the business, but it could easily be 6 months before they auction off abandoned stuff.
The problem is, paying for all that computing power, data storage, software development and other stuff may occasionally not be my goal. Sometimes I just want to browse a damn photo gallery or write an online document.
And it sure sucks when there is a bug on the server side that prevents it from working with your browser.
It's recently been made illegal to photograph the police in the UK because the pictures might be useful to terrorists - it doesn't matter if you intend to use such pictures for terrorism, only that a terrorist might possibly want to have one of the pictures.
This new law has predictably led to such Kafkaesque situations like this story as reported by an actual constable there.
If a company wants to become serious about this, they could make unofficial certifications and hand out prizes to the top x posters for the month.
They will need to be careful, start giving out tangible rewards and people will start to game the system.
For example, HP's web forums have long had a reward system that is fundamentally broken - if you ask a question, they expect you to give points out to anyone who responds, even if it is a totally useless response. Consequently they get idiots who drive-by post "make sure to plug in the keyboard" level answers to questions that are totally out of their league, just for the minimum points you are supposed to give them. Consequently, some of those idiots have very high rankings there. If HP were to start giving out tangible rewards I'm sure they would see even greater numbers of useless "answers."
But you do understand that the copyright law's intent is to encourage the creation of new works. With life plus 50 years, there are untold numbers of authors dead only 10 or 20 years who might be willing to rise and take a crack at just one more novel.
And the reason the term was extended is that most of them are in Chicago where they have the highest voting turn out among the dead. See? Your legislators do listen to the voters!
That is, rich people deserve to be rich and, furthermore, rich people should be admired and respected because they have contributed the most to society.
Prosperity Gospel - people are rich because Jesus wants them to be rich.
False dichotomy and not necessarily true even if you do accept it.
The best result is to correctly react because needless over-reaction has a cost. Maybe the cost is just boy-who-cried-wolf price, or maybe its more direct and all the resources expended on the needless over-reaction end up siphoned away from some other use that actually needs those resources to save lives.
Of course there might be missing data from the article, but they should explain a bit more.
That part was written in photochromic ink, you need to get a copy of the original publication and expose it to UV light in order to find out those details.
The IPI and other industry groups like to talk about the billions lost to piracy on the internet. But what they've done here dwarfs that. When you copy a song in violation of copyright you "steal" it once from one person or one company for a few years or however long goes by until you delete it or lose the disk its saved on.
But what has happened here is that the industry groups have stolen every single song written or recorded in the last 70 years from every single citizen of the EU for a duration of at least 20 whole years. The scale of their theft is many orders of magnitude greater than the worst case scenario for "internet piracy."
As far as I'm concerned, any rights owner that supports or benefits from any copyright term extension legislation has zero standing to complain about piracy. They broke the social contract that was in place when they created the music. Just because they have co-opted our so-called representatives to put a rubber-stamp of legality on their contract violation doesn't give them the moral high-ground in the conflict. They want new terms? Well, the only terms they deserve are a termination of their copyrights, termination with extreme prejudice.
An irony is that while the politicians get along pretty well, the rank-and-file citizenry of the Democrat and Republican parties in the US are practically at each others' throats, in no small part because they've been goaded there by fringe groups and media personalities.
And the human propensity for tribalism. We've all heard the famous (mis)quote, embraced by so many - "My Country, right or wrong!" The political parties just break it down internally, they might as well say "My Party, right or wrong!"
Slashdot Mirror
Freedom is about choice.
It isn't only about choice.
YOu've now got three definitions
Free as in beer
Free as in speech
and Free to choose
What you are doing is picking your own specific definition of freedom and then using that to argue that all the other kinds of freedom don't count.
Its old and tired and lame, get over yourself.
This is nothing to be ashamed of
Nor is it anything to be proud of or held as an example of heroic behaviour.
errr... the last time a 747 flew low across downtown Manhattan, 3000 people died. That was 8 years ago. Statistically, these are very rare, very deadly events.
And the ten thousand times before that nothing happened.
Nice try.But the fact is that you didn't correctly state RMS's definition of freedom.
Back up your facts.
Just because you lost at your own game of silly semantics doesn't make you right about anything.
Freedom for the end user -- that's all its about, nothing more and nothing less.
For most people a source tarbal doesn't enable them to control anything.
Its called necessary but not sufficient.
You would prefer that RMS advocate that all software also come with a free as in beer programmer too?
I really don't see what Stallmans problem here is. If some SaaS provider tries to screw me I can just stop using it.
Can you now? And if they don't provide a way to export your data whatchgonnado?
You keep your freedom by exercising your freedom... If you don't want to use a service, then don't use the service. Duh.
Wow! You said exactly what RMS has said. Apparently you are in 100% agreement with him.
claiming that making software open source will solve all our problems is, at best, overly simplistic.
Good thing RMS doesn't claim that then.
having the source code doesn't mean you can do something about it
Since you chose to drag out that old and tired argument its pretty clear you don't understand RMS's position.
You can't hire someone to fix software if the source is not available. Logistics mean nothing if the choice is not available in the first place.
Vocal OSS purists like RMS are, IMHO, driving the average person away from open source software. A good many people shy away from zealots and their goods.
Which is precisely why more money is made with GPL licensed software than any other.
What if what I want to do is take a GPL'd product I've purchased, modify it, and sell it as a closed source application?
Go ahead.
But as soon as someone purchases it and is unable to do whatever they want with it you are no longer in line with RMS's philosophy.
Running the code yourself doesn't prevent that, you know, even if you have access to the source code.
It lets you do something about it.
If you really want to understand RMS's position all you need to know is the story of the jammed printer.
Any time a question comes up in your mind about what would stallman do - just ask yourself how the parable of the jammed printer applies.
What's wrong with finding a new suit if the original manufacturer raises his prices?
Because then you wasted your money on the original suit.
RMS's definition of freedom is not choice,
Correct RMS's definition of freedom is the ability to do whatever you want with what you purchase.
He believes that freedom ought to be a fundamental characteristic of ALL choices.
World: Yeah, you know what? You only had one good idea
It's true. RMS has only had one good idea. That the end user should have the freedom to completely control their computing experience.
That's it.
Everytime someone like you gets all pissy about RMS's "latest idea" it just means you failed to understand the full ramifications of his one and only idea the first time around.
just so its clear
If you don't pay rent at your storage facility, they auction off your stuff to the highest bidder. It doesn't matter if its furniture or business records. If he's not paying for the service, why would they maintain his data? Storage is cheap, but it's not free.
They don't usually do it right away. Depends on the business, but it could easily be 6 months before they auction off abandoned stuff.
The problem is, paying for all that computing power, data storage, software development and other stuff may occasionally not be my goal. Sometimes I just want to browse a damn photo gallery or write an online document.
And it sure sucks when there is a bug on the server side that prevents it from working with your browser.
I'm no RMS fan (GPL2 all the way)
Huh? Who else gets credit for GPLv2?
It's recently been made illegal to photograph the police in the UK because the pictures might be useful to terrorists - it doesn't matter if you intend to use such pictures for terrorism, only that a terrorist might possibly want to have one of the pictures.
This new law has predictably led to such Kafkaesque situations like this story as reported by an actual constable there.
If a company wants to become serious about this, they could make unofficial certifications and hand out prizes to the top x posters for the month.
They will need to be careful, start giving out tangible rewards and people will start to game the system.
For example, HP's web forums have long had a reward system that is fundamentally broken - if you ask a question, they expect you to give points out to anyone who responds, even if it is a totally useless response. Consequently they get idiots who drive-by post "make sure to plug in the keyboard" level answers to questions that are totally out of their league, just for the minimum points you are supposed to give them. Consequently, some of those idiots have very high rankings there. If HP were to start giving out tangible rewards I'm sure they would see even greater numbers of useless "answers."
But you do understand that the copyright law's intent is to encourage the creation of new works. With life plus 50 years, there are untold numbers of authors dead only 10 or 20 years who might be willing to rise and take a crack at just one more novel.
And the reason the term was extended is that most of them are in Chicago where they have the highest voting turn out among the dead.
See? Your legislators do listen to the voters!
That is, rich people deserve to be rich and, furthermore, rich people should be admired and respected because they have contributed the most to society.
Prosperity Gospel - people are rich because Jesus wants them to be rich.
it is better to over-react than to under-react
False dichotomy and not necessarily true even if you do accept it.
The best result is to correctly react because needless over-reaction has a cost. Maybe the cost is just boy-who-cried-wolf price, or maybe its more direct and all the resources expended on the needless over-reaction end up siphoned away from some other use that actually needs those resources to save lives.
But what replaces live sports on cable TV?
Going outside and playing them yourself?
Of course there might be missing data from the article, but they should explain a bit more.
That part was written in photochromic ink, you need to get a copy of the original publication and expose it to UV light in order to find out those details.
The IPI and other industry groups like to talk about the billions lost to piracy on the internet. But what they've done here dwarfs that. When you copy a song in violation of copyright you "steal" it once from one person or one company for a few years or however long goes by until you delete it or lose the disk its saved on.
But what has happened here is that the industry groups have stolen every single song written or recorded in the last 70 years from every single citizen of the EU for a duration of at least 20 whole years. The scale of their theft is many orders of magnitude greater than the worst case scenario for "internet piracy."
As far as I'm concerned, any rights owner that supports or benefits from any copyright term extension legislation has zero standing to complain about piracy. They broke the social contract that was in place when they created the music. Just because they have co-opted our so-called representatives to put a rubber-stamp of legality on their contract violation doesn't give them the moral high-ground in the conflict. They want new terms? Well, the only terms they deserve are a termination of their copyrights, termination with extreme prejudice.
An irony is that while the politicians get along pretty well, the rank-and-file citizenry of the Democrat and Republican parties in the US are practically at each others' throats, in no small part because they've been goaded there by fringe groups and media personalities.
And the human propensity for tribalism. We've all heard the famous (mis)quote, embraced by so many - "My Country, right or wrong!"
The political parties just break it down internally, they might as well say "My Party, right or wrong!"