Same place it comes from for ALL students. I.e. only a teeny-tiny proportion from proprietary software. To imply otherwise is simply disingenuous.
You're claiming, with a straight face, that the vast majority of programmers don't work for companies developing proprietary products?
WTF? I'm claiming that the vast majority of students do not have their education paid for by proceeds from proprietary software, software engineering students or otherwise.
The rest of your response appears to be similar deliberate misunderstanding. Enjoy your red herrings, I hear the mercury is good for you.
And where does the money come from to pay for the degree while they're students?
Same place it comes from for ALL students. I.e. only a teeny-tiny proportion from proprietary software. To imply otherwise is simply disingenuous. To imply it matters to this argument is also disingenuous.
when was the last time a company paid for a support and consulting contract in lieu of a service contract with a proprietary vendor?
The last time a company choose a free software platform. There is no distinction between 'support and consulting contract' and 'service contract.' They are the same thing, just a matter of degree.
When was the last time an end user called Adobe or Microsoft?
This only applies where there isn't a tool they can buy that's adequate.
So what? Most tools are not optimal for the particular task at hand. You can fix that with free tools. You can't with closed ones. What's worth more, time or money? It all depends on the specifics of each case.
Hiring consultants is useful because the prospective hire has expert-level knowledge of the system you're using and has the power to effect changes.
You seem to have some pie in the sky notion that a support contract for free software is the same thing as hiring Accenture. Just about all of your argument is based on that premise. It is false.
Paying for support for free software costs more, since the proprietary software has already made money on license sales.
Lol! Which is it - "initial purchase price is an almost-insignificant piece of the TCO" or license sales are significant enough to subsidize support sales? The real point you missed here is that Free software does not have the same level of bring-up costs to begin with. The cost of the linux kernel has long ago been amortized. So while proprietary vendors have higher investment costs that must be recouped, Free software does not.
A competitive market might drive the labor rate down for support services, but the result of that is detrimental to the FOSS developer,
Sure, that's a risk of the free market. Do you believe in the free market or not? Or do you believe that it is just a zero-sum game to be manipulated for economic benefit of one group over another?
Ultimately your arguments fail the real-world test. There are tens of thousands of software engineers, maybe even hundreds of thousands, who make a living by working on and with free software.
PS. I'm still waiting for a citation to one of those many studies that says Free software depends on free labor.
Past surveys have shown that FOSS projects are almost always started and maintained by people who program proprietary, non-FOSS software for a living.
O'really? Please provide at least one citation of such a survey.
MY experience is that there are three groups of people who start and maintain free software:
1) Students, who are essentially doing it for the compensation of a degree and self-improvement ( creation of: linux, apache, the start of the BSDs,...) 2) Professionals who either do the work for companies like RedHat, HP, et al or are small independents who sell consulting services based on the software with which they have expertise (and sometimes fame) ( creation of: mysql, Qt, mozilla,...) 3) People who need the tools to get their real work done. Scientists, system admins, etc. ( creation of: perl, sendmail, octave,...)
The image of a free-software developer doing work on free software purely as a hobby without profit motive is, as far as I know, complete bunk.
If I get a piece of software for free but pay the same to support it as I would've a proprietary solution, I've gained little or nothing in the process.
Why do you think that you would "pay the same?" Do you not believe that a competitive market drives prices down?
After all, support contracts for proprietary systems are a monopoly - try getting patches to Oracle from someone other than Oracle, or Windows fixes from someone other than MS. Support contracts for free software are about as purely competitive as you can get - barrier to entry is almost nil. All it takes is access to the source and skill with it.
So, either you believe in the free market, or you don't.
And why wouldn't the heads of those companies want to make billions?
Uh, hello McFly?
If they can sell drug cocktails which earn them ~$10K per patient per month for the duration of the patients' lives versus a single cure that, say earns $50K, even $100K. That's still tons more money even in the short term.
Your conspiracy fails the most basic rule of thumb: No person has anything to gain.
Your refutation fails the most basic rule of thumb: simple math.
Big Pharma a cartel? laughable.
You clearly haven't been paying attention. Try naming just 5 cures - not preventatives and not treatments, actual cures - for any diseases or conditions that previously had long-term, never-ending treatment regimens.
The only one I can think of is antibiotics for peptic ulcers. Except funny thing, Big Pharma continues to push their long-term antacid treatments when they are only appropriate for less 1% of sufferers. Oh, and that the antibiotic treatment was discovered and published in 1982, so I guess that doesn't quite fit in the last decade...
So yea, they are partially to blame but so are we.
What's more is that the only reason the Iranian revolution succeeded is that two philosophically opposed groups joined forces under the belief that "mine enemy's enemy is my friend." Namely the religious right (mullahs, et al) and the radical left (student reformers). Together they were able to kick out the american-appointed dictator (the shaw).
But the students and reformers made a fatal mistake. They thought that once the shaw was out, they would be able to deal with the mullahs. They were wrong, The mullahs quickly kicked their former partner's asses - imprisoning many, killing others. So that by the time the dust had settled, the mullahs (whom live in vast palaces now, and enjoy great wealth against the tenants of Islam, for what that's worth) were solidly in control.
So to say that "they chose to radically overthrow their own government to put that ridiculous religion into power" is categorically false. The only reason the mullahs were able to come to power is because the democratic reformers felt they had no other choice. It wasn't the overthrow of the shaw that put the mullahs into power, it was the power-struggle that followed the overthrow that did it.
it's no less safe than riding a motorcycle and more fuel efficient to boot.
Yeah... not really the best way to convince the kind of woman who wants an SUV. Those types tend to absolutely freak out about how dangerous riding a bike can be.
The monitoring company typically has an emergency contact list. Contacting the utility is typically the last resort.
And just who is going to be on that list ahead of the utility company for the described case? The owners of the house? They aren't home. The cops? Doubt it, it's not police business and too much of that would earn the monitoring company a chicken-little rep. The fire department? Ditto.
Of course if the previous poster had called 911 it would have been taken care of too. As an individual he can make an occasional off-target call and still get good results.
The problem is, that idea only works if the drug companies are a cartel.
Let's say you're an executive for EvilCo, and your company develops that one month treatment for AIDS. You've got two choices:
1) Patent it, sell it for major short term profits 2) Sweep it under the rug, continue selling treatments for long term profits
(1) What makes you think "Big Pharma" is not a cartel?
(2) You left off the most realistic option -- the company never gets to the point of developing that 1-month treatment because that's a lot of money to produce something you are just going to shelve. Instead they have a corporate mindset that results in them only investigating avenues of research that are likely to lead to life-prolonging drugs rather than cures.
Hell, that kind of mindset does not even need to be a formal part of the process, it's likely to be internalized by the bureaucracy as a result of the environment (lots of government and insurance company involvement plus the oligopoly nature of the current market).
Let's not, since their use of linux is considered a loophole in following the letter of the license rather than the spirit and exactly what the previous poster referred to as "GNU 3" becoming more restrictive.
Instead, lets look at companies that follow the spirit as well as the letter of the license: Redhat, IBM, HP, Concurrent and Montavista - just off the top of my head - which actively contribute to kernel development AND sell linux. Then there are all the secondary users that use linux as a key part of their business, like Amazon with their Elastic Compute Cloud, Google running their search engine on linux, Asus which ships over a million copies per month of linux on their eeePC. And last and probably greatest, are all the 'little guys' the mom&pop type shops that do things like sell and support white-box systems with linux pre-installed to local busineses or who do custom programming (which is a market much larger than shrink-software) for local businesses.
note: I am not comparing free or open source software to communism. Just the arguments to arguments supporting communism
Gee, it sure sounds like that is exactly what you are doing.
Especially when the obvious rebuttal is that communism relied on 'central planning' to manage scarce resources, like labor and equipment while free software - and all other ideas - are abundant resources that remain the product of free markets in scarce resources labor and equipment.
Well, that would accomplish what he was trying to do. It's not likely the people put a sticker on the house with the water utility's phone number, and that's not something most people have memorized or programmed in their phones either.
And if there were no stickers at all, he would have been in exactly the same situation. At least this way, the home owners gain some benefit.
If the house had recently been painted and there was one of those little "painted by" advertising signs in the yard, would you have called them too?
Do you know what would have happened if they really had an alarm monitoring contract? As soon as you were done talking to them, they would have called the water utility too. Just because a phone number is posted on a sticker in a window doesn't mean the owner of the phone number has ultimate responsibility for the house.
Actually, his BSD-licensed (or public domain or similar) code is free forever too. What is not guaranteed to be free is any modification that someone else makes to it, but that in no way restricts the OP's freedom to use the code he himself wrote.
You are missing the point. If his BSD code is compiled and delivered to someone else in binary form, it is locked up. The recipient has no guarantee of access to that source. The GPL is not about freedom of the developer to access his own code, its about freedom of the end-user to access the source of any compiled version which he receives.
You seem unable to grasp the basic fact underlying the situation: Private companies in Canada do not have the same financial incentive to get hold of personal medical information.
You are an ass aren't you? You go on and on about not being telepathic, what a fuckwad excuse that is for acting like a fuckwad. And then you pull out some brand new argument that you have not even intimated at until just now. I refer you to your original point about giving information to complete strangers with security assurances that amount to little. THAT was your point, and by now it ought to be damn clear that in canada you give just as much information to people you don't know too, just you are personally foolish enough to believe a law riddled with loopholes makes it better than a law riddle with loopholes in the USA. Ignorance was bliss. If that wasn't your point, you should not have said it. Or do you expect me to be a telepath?
And that's the best you can do? A three-year-old link to a private company that doesn't even MENTION medical data?
No, it was just the first hit in google on the words "loophole" and "PIPEDA." PLENTY more where that came from. In fact, the link YOU posted actually gave a list of loopholes too. The only difference is that my link showed an actual exploitation of a loophole while yours just listed a few loopholes themselves and not how they could be exploited.
As a matter of fact, a relevant case is probably on its way to the Supreme Court of Canada.
Lolz! You read the link I posted. Such brilliant research skills on your part. Too bad you can't name the case since it wasn't in the article. Pretty funny for a guy acting all high and mighty about "the best you can do."
Which is nonsensical. Something placed in the public domain cannot be removed from it.
Lolz! Who said ANYTHING about the public domain? Do you see the word "Free" in "public domain?"
"RMS's 'Free' means that people are forced under penalty of State-enforced law to give away source they write/modify themselves".
Hard to reconcile that with any definition of "free" that the world at large would recognize.
Rrrrright. RMS is standing there with the US army forcing people to use GPL code to begin with. I guess your version of freedom does not include the right to choose. Eh?
Re:I believe you mean freedom # -1
on
A Year of GPLv3
·
· Score: 1
The particular (mis)features of the hardware do not put "onerous restrictions" on the people buying it,
Putting it in italics doesn't make it so.
There is no practical difference between "you may not use this software on hardware with misfeature X" and "you may only use this software on hardware without misfeature X."
It is, in fact, the very definition of onerous, even though that term itself never even appears in the GPL.
Re:Didn't even know it was "done"...
on
A Year of GPLv3
·
· Score: 1
I don't recall seeing it being used in anything I've come across to-date.
Does Qt or OpenOffice ring a bell?
Re:Political Views
on
A Year of GPLv3
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Er, no. The GPL builds upon state protected monopoly rights as well. Otherwise, how could it be enforced?
By market forces. The goal is that the market moves to the point where it will not accept a closed-source product, just as today the automobile market will not accept cars with their hoods welded shut. At that point there is no need for the GPL.
An accurate name for source licensed under GPL and similar licenses would be "Communal" -- or "Community" -- or perhaps "Cooperative" if you want to avoid the philosophically accurate association with "Communism". "Free", however, is not.
It all depends on your definition of "Free." RMS's "Free" applies to the liberty of the source code, not the liberty of the developer. RMS's "Free" means that the source can never be locked up in a proprietary prison. Your version of free seems to allow that. You are free today, GNU is free forever.
And for that matter, the bit about security officials searching mp3 players for illegal music? Let's not worry about the guys sneaking bombs into the terminal, let's worry about the guy with some Coldplay (ugh) mp3s!
Nah. You have to give them credit for that. The number of people with bombs is miniscule. The number of people with pirated music has got to be many orders of magnitude larger than that. The Thousands Standing Around need something to do to justify their existence, strip searching people for bootleg mp3s will yield many, many more busts than just searching for terrahists.
And please don't assume that we do things up here the way you do in the US. Your implication that I would "leave out all the loopholes" is offensive.
Oh grow up. I believe you left out the loopholes BECAUSE YOU DIDN"T KNOW ANY BETTER. Not because you were being disingenuous. "You people live that way." Give me a break.
By the way, I was right, you were wrong. There are loopholes and they are big enough to drive a truck through. It looks like they've been farming out the privacy invasion to companies outside of the country and the Canadian courts have interpreted the letter of the law to permit it. Surprise. I guess you live that way too.
Ontario's Personal Health Information Protection Act puts it like this: "Health care providers are not allowed to give your personal health information to people who do not provide you with health care, unless you specifically give them your permission".
That's the law, and there are some pretty severe criminal penalties for disobeying it. Clear enough?
Nope. I googled for that quotation and got no hits. If that was the literal law, I'm sure googled would have found it. Which leads me to believe that it is your interpretation of the law. Which leads me to believe that you left out all the loopholes. The same kinds of loopholes that HIPAA in the USA has as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Same place it comes from for ALL students. I.e. only a teeny-tiny proportion from proprietary software. To imply otherwise is simply disingenuous.
You're claiming, with a straight face, that the vast majority of programmers don't work for companies developing proprietary products?
WTF? I'm claiming that the vast majority of students do not have their education paid for by proceeds from proprietary software, software engineering students or otherwise.
The rest of your response appears to be similar deliberate misunderstanding.
Enjoy your red herrings, I hear the mercury is good for you.
And where does the money come from to pay for the degree while they're students?
Same place it comes from for ALL students. I.e. only a teeny-tiny proportion from proprietary software. To imply otherwise is simply disingenuous. To imply it matters to this argument is also disingenuous.
when was the last time a company paid for a support and consulting contract in lieu of a service contract with a proprietary vendor?
The last time a company choose a free software platform. There is no distinction between 'support and consulting contract' and 'service contract.' They are the same thing, just a matter of degree.
When was the last time an end user called Adobe or Microsoft?
Gee, I dunno, how about 10 minutes ago?
http://www.adobe.com/support/programs/photoshop/
This only applies where there isn't a tool they can buy that's adequate.
So what? Most tools are not optimal for the particular task at hand. You can fix that with free tools. You can't with closed ones. What's worth more, time or money? It all depends on the specifics of each case.
Hiring consultants is useful because the prospective hire has expert-level knowledge of the system you're using and has the power to effect changes.
You seem to have some pie in the sky notion that a support contract for free software is the same thing as hiring Accenture. Just about all of your argument is based on that premise. It is false.
http://www.canonical.com/services/support
http://www.redhat.com/rhel/renew/faqs/
http://www.mysql.com/about/legal/supportpolicies/policies-02.html#q02
etc -- all the same style as support contracts for 'proprietary' products.
Paying for support for free software costs more, since the proprietary software has already made money on license sales.
Lol! Which is it - "initial purchase price is an almost-insignificant piece of the TCO" or license sales are significant enough to subsidize support sales?
The real point you missed here is that Free software does not have the same level of bring-up costs to begin with. The cost of the linux kernel has long ago been amortized. So while proprietary vendors have higher investment costs that must be recouped, Free software does not.
A competitive market might drive the labor rate down for support services, but the result of that is detrimental to the FOSS developer,
Sure, that's a risk of the free market. Do you believe in the free market or not? Or do you believe that it is just a zero-sum game to be manipulated for economic benefit of one group over another?
Ultimately your arguments fail the real-world test. There are tens of thousands of software engineers, maybe even hundreds of thousands, who make a living by working on and with free software.
PS. I'm still waiting for a citation to one of those many studies that says Free software depends on free labor.
Past surveys have shown that FOSS projects are almost always started and maintained by people who program proprietary, non-FOSS software for a living.
O'really? Please provide at least one citation of such a survey.
MY experience is that there are three groups of people who start and maintain free software:
1) Students, who are essentially doing it for the compensation of a degree and self-improvement ( creation of: linux, apache, the start of the BSDs,...) ...) ...)
2) Professionals who either do the work for companies like RedHat, HP, et al or are small independents who sell consulting services based on the software with which they have expertise (and sometimes fame) ( creation of: mysql, Qt, mozilla,
3) People who need the tools to get their real work done. Scientists, system admins, etc. ( creation of: perl, sendmail, octave,
The image of a free-software developer doing work on free software purely as a hobby without profit motive is, as far as I know, complete bunk.
If I get a piece of software for free but pay the same to support it as I would've a proprietary solution, I've gained little or nothing in the process.
Why do you think that you would "pay the same?" Do you not believe that a competitive market drives prices down?
After all, support contracts for proprietary systems are a monopoly - try getting patches to Oracle from someone other than Oracle, or Windows fixes from someone other than MS. Support contracts for free software are about as purely competitive as you can get - barrier to entry is almost nil. All it takes is access to the source and skill with it.
So, either you believe in the free market, or you don't.
And why wouldn't the heads of those companies want to make billions?
Uh, hello McFly?
If they can sell drug cocktails which earn them ~$10K per patient per month for the duration of the patients' lives versus a single cure that, say earns $50K, even $100K. That's still tons more money even in the short term.
Your conspiracy fails the most basic rule of thumb: No person has anything to gain.
Your refutation fails the most basic rule of thumb: simple math.
Big Pharma a cartel? laughable.
You clearly haven't been paying attention. Try naming just 5 cures - not preventatives and not treatments, actual cures - for any diseases or conditions that previously had long-term, never-ending treatment regimens.
The only one I can think of is antibiotics for peptic ulcers. Except funny thing, Big Pharma continues to push their long-term antacid treatments when they are only appropriate for less 1% of sufferers. Oh, and that the antibiotic treatment was discovered and published in 1982, so I guess that doesn't quite fit in the last decade...
So yea, they are partially to blame but so are we.
What's more is that the only reason the Iranian revolution succeeded is that two philosophically opposed groups joined forces under the belief that "mine enemy's enemy is my friend." Namely the religious right (mullahs, et al) and the radical left (student reformers). Together they were able to kick out the american-appointed dictator (the shaw).
But the students and reformers made a fatal mistake. They thought that once the shaw was out, they would be able to deal with the mullahs. They were wrong, The mullahs quickly kicked their former partner's asses - imprisoning many, killing others. So that by the time the dust had settled, the mullahs (whom live in vast palaces now, and enjoy great wealth against the tenants of Islam, for what that's worth) were solidly in control.
So to say that "they chose to radically overthrow their own government to put that ridiculous religion into power" is categorically false. The only reason the mullahs were able to come to power is because the democratic reformers felt they had no other choice. It wasn't the overthrow of the shaw that put the mullahs into power, it was the power-struggle that followed the overthrow that did it.
it's no less safe than riding a motorcycle and more fuel efficient to boot.
Yeah... not really the best way to convince the kind of woman who wants an SUV. Those types tend to absolutely freak out about how dangerous riding a bike can be.
The monitoring company typically has an emergency contact list. Contacting the utility is typically the last resort.
And just who is going to be on that list ahead of the utility company for the described case?
The owners of the house? They aren't home.
The cops? Doubt it, it's not police business and too much of that would earn the monitoring company a chicken-little rep.
The fire department? Ditto.
Of course if the previous poster had called 911 it would have been taken care of too. As an individual he can make an occasional off-target call and still get good results.
The problem is, that idea only works if the drug companies are a cartel.
Let's say you're an executive for EvilCo, and your company develops that one month treatment for AIDS. You've got two choices:
1) Patent it, sell it for major short term profits
2) Sweep it under the rug, continue selling treatments for long term profits
(1) What makes you think "Big Pharma" is not a cartel?
(2) You left off the most realistic option -- the company never gets to the point of developing that 1-month treatment because that's a lot of money to produce something you are just going to shelve. Instead they have a corporate mindset that results in them only investigating avenues of research that are likely to lead to life-prolonging drugs rather than cures.
Hell, that kind of mindset does not even need to be a formal part of the process, it's likely to be internalized by the bureaucracy as a result of the environment (lots of government and insurance company involvement plus the oligopoly nature of the current market).
Let's start with Tivo...
Let's not, since their use of linux is considered a loophole in following the letter of the license rather than the spirit and exactly what the previous poster referred to as "GNU 3" becoming more restrictive.
Instead, lets look at companies that follow the spirit as well as the letter of the license: Redhat, IBM, HP, Concurrent and Montavista - just off the top of my head - which actively contribute to kernel development AND sell linux. Then there are all the secondary users that use linux as a key part of their business, like Amazon with their Elastic Compute Cloud, Google running their search engine on linux, Asus which ships over a million copies per month of linux on their eeePC. And last and probably greatest, are all the 'little guys' the mom&pop type shops that do things like sell and support white-box systems with linux pre-installed to local busineses or who do custom programming (which is a market much larger than shrink-software) for local businesses.
note: I am not comparing free or open source software to communism. Just the arguments to arguments supporting communism
Gee, it sure sounds like that is exactly what you are doing.
Especially when the obvious rebuttal is that communism relied on 'central planning' to manage scarce resources, like labor and equipment while free software - and all other ideas - are abundant resources that remain the product of free markets in scarce resources labor and equipment.
Well, that would accomplish what he was trying to do. It's not likely the people put a sticker on the house with the water utility's phone number, and that's not something most people have memorized or programmed in their phones either.
And if there were no stickers at all, he would have been in exactly the same situation.
At least this way, the home owners gain some benefit.
Phony alarm signs are just stupid.
If the house had recently been painted and there was one of those little "painted by" advertising signs in the yard, would you have called them too?
Do you know what would have happened if they really had an alarm monitoring contract?
As soon as you were done talking to them, they would have called the water utility too.
Just because a phone number is posted on a sticker in a window doesn't mean the owner of the phone number has ultimate responsibility for the house.
Reading the subject line just made me think of some elderly old maid rocking way too fast in her Cracker Barrel chair.
Made me think of a little old lady driving a giant cadillac at half the posted speed limit with a tail of 20 cars stuck behind her.
But really, she's just making excuses. What does she do during slow page loads? Take naps?
My guess is 4 cores in 2008, 4 cores in 2009, moving to 8 cores through 2010
AMD says 12 cores by 2010. (and 6 in 2009)
Actually, his BSD-licensed (or public domain or similar) code is free forever too. What is not guaranteed to be free is any modification that someone else makes to it, but that in no way restricts the OP's freedom to use the code he himself wrote.
You are missing the point. If his BSD code is compiled and delivered to someone else in binary form, it is locked up. The recipient has no guarantee of access to that source. The GPL is not about freedom of the developer to access his own code, its about freedom of the end-user to access the source of any compiled version which he receives.
You seem unable to grasp the basic fact underlying the situation: Private companies in Canada do not have the same financial incentive to get hold of personal medical information.
You are an ass aren't you? You go on and on about not being telepathic, what a fuckwad excuse that is for acting like a fuckwad. And then you pull out some brand new argument that you have not even intimated at until just now. I refer you to your original point about giving information to complete strangers with security assurances that amount to little. THAT was your point, and by now it ought to be damn clear that in canada you give just as much information to people you don't know too, just you are personally foolish enough to believe a law riddled with loopholes makes it better than a law riddle with loopholes in the USA. Ignorance was bliss. If that wasn't your point, you should not have said it. Or do you expect me to be a telepath?
And that's the best you can do? A three-year-old link to a private company that doesn't even MENTION medical data?
No, it was just the first hit in google on the words "loophole" and "PIPEDA." PLENTY more where that came from. In fact, the link YOU posted actually gave a list of loopholes too. The only difference is that my link showed an actual exploitation of a loophole while yours just listed a few loopholes themselves and not how they could be exploited.
As a matter of fact, a relevant case is probably on its way to the Supreme Court of Canada.
Lolz! You read the link I posted. Such brilliant research skills on your part. Too bad you can't name the case since it wasn't in the article. Pretty funny for a guy acting all high and mighty about "the best you can do."
# MTV as never *cool*, unless you define "cool" as being part of the "Under-15-OMFG-Gag-Me-With-A-Spoon!" crowd.
Spoken by someone who has never seen LiquidTV, The Head or The Maxx.
Which is nonsensical. Something placed in the public domain cannot be removed from it.
Lolz! Who said ANYTHING about the public domain? Do you see the word "Free" in "public domain?"
"RMS's 'Free' means that people are forced under penalty of State-enforced law to give away source they write/modify themselves".
Hard to reconcile that with any definition of "free" that the world at large would recognize.
Rrrrright. RMS is standing there with the US army forcing people to use GPL code to begin with.
I guess your version of freedom does not include the right to choose. Eh?
The particular (mis)features of the hardware do not put "onerous restrictions" on the people buying it,
Putting it in italics doesn't make it so.
There is no practical difference between "you may not use this software on hardware with misfeature X" and "you may only use this software on hardware without misfeature X."
It is, in fact, the very definition of onerous, even though that term itself never even appears in the GPL.
I don't recall seeing it being used in anything I've come across to-date.
Does Qt or OpenOffice ring a bell?
Er, no. The GPL builds upon state protected monopoly rights as well. Otherwise, how could it be enforced?
By market forces. The goal is that the market moves to the point where it will not accept a closed-source product, just as today the automobile market will not accept cars with their hoods welded shut. At that point there is no need for the GPL.
An accurate name for source licensed under GPL and similar licenses would be "Communal" -- or "Community" -- or perhaps "Cooperative" if you want to avoid the philosophically accurate association with "Communism". "Free", however, is not.
It all depends on your definition of "Free." RMS's "Free" applies to the liberty of the source code, not the liberty of the developer. RMS's "Free" means that the source can never be locked up in a proprietary prison. Your version of free seems to allow that. You are free today, GNU is free forever.
And for that matter, the bit about security officials searching mp3 players for illegal music? Let's not worry about the guys sneaking bombs into the terminal, let's worry about the guy with some Coldplay (ugh) mp3s!
Nah. You have to give them credit for that. The number of people with bombs is miniscule. The number of people with pirated music has got to be many orders of magnitude larger than that. The Thousands Standing Around need something to do to justify their existence, strip searching people for bootleg mp3s will yield many, many more busts than just searching for terrahists.
how do you pronounce musiced? is it musicked, museeced or muse-iced?
Musikekekeke
And please don't assume that we do things up here the way you do in the US. Your implication that I would "leave out all the loopholes" is offensive.
Oh grow up. I believe you left out the loopholes BECAUSE YOU DIDN"T KNOW ANY BETTER. Not because you were being disingenuous. "You people live that way." Give me a break.
By the way, I was right, you were wrong. There are loopholes and they are big enough to drive a truck through. It looks like they've been farming out the privacy invasion to companies outside of the country and the Canadian courts have interpreted the letter of the law to permit it. Surprise. I guess you live that way too.
http://www.privatech.ca/privacy-resources/past-issues/?C=147
Ontario's Personal Health Information Protection Act puts it like this: "Health care providers are not allowed to give your personal health information to people who do not provide you with health care, unless you specifically give them your permission".
That's the law, and there are some pretty severe criminal penalties for disobeying it. Clear enough?
Nope. I googled for that quotation and got no hits. If that was the literal law, I'm sure googled would have found it. Which leads me to believe that it is your interpretation of the law. Which leads me to believe that you left out all the loopholes. The same kinds of loopholes that HIPAA in the USA has as well.