I'm not particularly familiar with Asterisk, but Qt is under LGPL, and the other three (as well as Qt before the switch) have business models based on selling commercial licenses to other people who use them in their own software, and who cannot use the GPL version because they don't want to release their own code under GPL. If everything was under GPL, the way Stallman wants, this would not be a viable business model.
Taking a quick look at Asterisk licensing page, it looks like they also have a similar dual GPL/commercial licensing scheme. Though I expect them to make more money from SLAs - they are in one of those few niches where buying one would actually make sense (same as RedHat).
Because there is no viable business model behind it in most niches, as evidenced by the fact that very few companies actually manage to profit off GPL code that they write themselves. Seriously, aside from RedHat, name one that has been around for more than a few years.
The question was implying most of these can hardly be characterized as "effective", and asking him to provide examples to the contrary. Which is fair - if you claim that something is effective, then you should have ample examples demonstrating that to be the case.
Torvalds does come off as a jerk in some contexts (but is a very nice guy in others - it seems to be very much contextual). However, he's also a pragmatist. He makes things work, without spending all his time on abstract philosophical and ethical debates. Of course he's going to be respected more by engineers, for whom making things work is the essence of the trade.
Open source doesn't threaten people's cushy jobs. At this point, if you're in the industry, it's practically a given that any code you write will use some open source library or another. And many people actually work on and ship F/OSS products, while getting paid for that.
Stallman, though, doesn't care about open source - indeed. he hates the term with a passion. What he wants is "free software", which basically translates to copyleft. Now I don't know many people who feel threatened by copyleft - again, it has been quite successfully commercialized in the few niches where it has been successful (e.g. for operating systems, Android). But overall it's losing momentum: the vast majority of open source code these days is released under non-copyleft licenses like BSD, MIT and Apache, many of them produced by for-profit corporations. Try to think of any new major open source project that appeared in the past 5 years that is licensed under GPL, and that is widely known. The only thing I can think off is systemd (ha!). Meanwhile, corporate-sponsored non-copyleft OSS is actually squeezing established copyleft products out - just look at gcc vs clang.
So no, I doubt anyone is really feeling threatened. It's just that RMS is so obviously loony every time he opens his mouth that it's hard to not remark on it.
The problem, of course, is that his approach to the "ethical way" would result in a software market that is several orders of magnitude smaller than it is today. I very much doubt that the majority of users of said software would appreciate this, and consider it a reasonable price to pay for having the source code and modification & redistribution rights.
Does it, though? I mean, they've just passed a law that basically confirms NSA snooping authority while making largely decorative changes, and most people are quite happy with it. In fact, quite a few don't even think there was anything wrong with the original regime. Because terrorists and all that.
Or perhaps the neocons, with their "noble lie" approach to politics (masses are too dumb to make the right choices, so in a democracy, you have to feed lies to them if that advances an important goal that they would not otherwise support but that the elite knows needs to be achieved), are still in charge of the three-letter agencies?
You know, I used to think the same as you. Then I had to learn R.
Guys. JavaScript is an awesome language. Why, it's practically sane! Cherish what you have, you never know all the painful ways in which it can be taken away.
I don't know about schools, but laissez-faire economic libertarians have gotten to the point where they actually praise the Gilded Age as the great era of capitalist achievement - or, alternatively, presenting it as "still too much government". I'm not kidding.
And then, when they can't find a job, we put them on welfare, which requires them to prove that they're looking for a job.
Basically, the existing combination of minimum wage and unemployment insurance is effectively basic income in disguise, except that it has very non-transparent funding and a lot of unnecessary bureaucratic overhead.
Once we have UBI, we can drop minimum wage requirements altogether, and probably get rid of progressive income taxation, as well.
I don't know. We're seeing popular political candidates in the primaries openly endorsing higher taxes on capital gains for the first time in god knows how long. This alone would likely be sufficient to fund a reasonable basic income program.
Probably worth noting that Windows 10 seems to have apps "disappear" and need restarting on an hourly basis, and that's with light load. "Mail" seems to be the worst.
It's not a Win10 thing, it's a "buggy app is crashing a lot" thing.
I personally prefer that dirty socialist hippie, Thomas Jefferson.
"It is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all... It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common is the property for the moment of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society"
"A right of property in moveable things is admitted before the establishment of government. A separate property in lands, not till after that establishment. The right to moveables is acknowledged by all the hordes of Indians surrounding us. Yet by no one of them has a separate property in lands been yielded to individuals. He who plants a field keeps possession till he has gathered the produce, after which one has as good a right as another to occupy it. Government must be established and laws provided, before lands can be separately appropriated, and their owner protected in his possession. Till then, the property is in the body of the nation, and they, or their chief as trustee, must grant them to individuals, and determine the conditions of the grant."
"Whenever there is in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right."
"The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on. If for the encouragement of industry we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment be provided to those excluded from the appropriation. If we do not, the fundamental right to labor the earth returns to the unemployed."
"unequal division of property... occasions the numberless instances of wretchedness which... is to be observed all over Europe."
"I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable. But the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property, only taking care to let their subdivisions go hand in hand with the natural affections of the human mind."
Are you familiar with that new-fangled notion of "self-determination" and "human rights"? I understand that it's only a little bit more than a century old, so you might have not heard of it in your corner of the globe.
The average phone this day has USB OTG, allowing you to attach external hard drives of, essentially, arbitrary size to it. And not only Android itself has pretty much any app one can imagine (including, as I have already pointed out, BitTorrent clients and other things that generate massive volumes of traffic), but it can also run full-featured Linux in a chroot, complete with GUI. Not to mention that there are also Android tablets, some of which are actually more like laptops (like the entire Transformer line).
There is no point in distinguishing between data use "on the phone" and "off the phone" at this point.
Personally, I rarely tether, and I certainly don't use 2Tb a month (I don't think I've ever even hit the 5Gb limit that I have on my plan). But I wish that they either stopped deceptive advertising, or owned up to it.
"In the 1990s, Bhutan expelled or forced to leave most of its ethnic Lhotshampa population"
But I'm sure they happily hiked across the border all of their own volition, singing cheerful songs and thanking the citizens of Bhutan for their kind welcome.
Where communism ultimately fails is that it assumes that people will just always be willing to produce out of the goodness of their hearts for just any old need that somebody wants (which includes jobs that aren't fun and nobody wants to do them unless they're paid, such as being a garbage man or a janitor.)
Actually, idealistic communists (including the original Bolsheviks) have always assumed that those "nobody wants" jobs would be done by some fancy automation eventually. They were great believers in industrial revolution and scientific progress, and they also believed that the way they wanted to restructure their society after coming to power would result in a rapid surge in such development. It is especially evident if you read early Soviet sci-fi, such as Alexander Belyaev - they predicted a rapid pace of development that puts most Western sci-fi to shame.
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I'm not particularly familiar with Asterisk, but Qt is under LGPL, and the other three (as well as Qt before the switch) have business models based on selling commercial licenses to other people who use them in their own software, and who cannot use the GPL version because they don't want to release their own code under GPL. If everything was under GPL, the way Stallman wants, this would not be a viable business model.
Taking a quick look at Asterisk licensing page, it looks like they also have a similar dual GPL/commercial licensing scheme. Though I expect them to make more money from SLAs - they are in one of those few niches where buying one would actually make sense (same as RedHat).
Because there is no viable business model behind it in most niches, as evidenced by the fact that very few companies actually manage to profit off GPL code that they write themselves. Seriously, aside from RedHat, name one that has been around for more than a few years.
The question was implying most of these can hardly be characterized as "effective", and asking him to provide examples to the contrary. Which is fair - if you claim that something is effective, then you should have ample examples demonstrating that to be the case.
Torvalds does come off as a jerk in some contexts (but is a very nice guy in others - it seems to be very much contextual). However, he's also a pragmatist. He makes things work, without spending all his time on abstract philosophical and ethical debates. Of course he's going to be respected more by engineers, for whom making things work is the essence of the trade.
Open source doesn't threaten people's cushy jobs. At this point, if you're in the industry, it's practically a given that any code you write will use some open source library or another. And many people actually work on and ship F/OSS products, while getting paid for that.
Stallman, though, doesn't care about open source - indeed. he hates the term with a passion. What he wants is "free software", which basically translates to copyleft. Now I don't know many people who feel threatened by copyleft - again, it has been quite successfully commercialized in the few niches where it has been successful (e.g. for operating systems, Android). But overall it's losing momentum: the vast majority of open source code these days is released under non-copyleft licenses like BSD, MIT and Apache, many of them produced by for-profit corporations. Try to think of any new major open source project that appeared in the past 5 years that is licensed under GPL, and that is widely known. The only thing I can think off is systemd (ha!). Meanwhile, corporate-sponsored non-copyleft OSS is actually squeezing established copyleft products out - just look at gcc vs clang.
So no, I doubt anyone is really feeling threatened. It's just that RMS is so obviously loony every time he opens his mouth that it's hard to not remark on it.
The problem, of course, is that his approach to the "ethical way" would result in a software market that is several orders of magnitude smaller than it is today. I very much doubt that the majority of users of said software would appreciate this, and consider it a reasonable price to pay for having the source code and modification & redistribution rights.
I have personally witnessed him tell that much to a coworker during one of his talks in Moscow.
This presupposes that his ethics is actually to the "benefit of society as a whole", which is, to say the least, a heavily disputed point.
Does it, though? I mean, they've just passed a law that basically confirms NSA snooping authority while making largely decorative changes, and most people are quite happy with it. In fact, quite a few don't even think there was anything wrong with the original regime. Because terrorists and all that.
Or perhaps the neocons, with their "noble lie" approach to politics (masses are too dumb to make the right choices, so in a democracy, you have to feed lies to them if that advances an important goal that they would not otherwise support but that the elite knows needs to be achieved), are still in charge of the three-letter agencies?
Would you agree that the grand cause of many of our present difficulties may be traced to so many hordes of foreigners immigrating to America?
You know, I used to think the same as you. Then I had to learn R.
Guys. JavaScript is an awesome language. Why, it's practically sane! Cherish what you have, you never know all the painful ways in which it can be taken away.
I don't know about schools, but laissez-faire economic libertarians have gotten to the point where they actually praise the Gilded Age as the great era of capitalist achievement - or, alternatively, presenting it as "still too much government". I'm not kidding.
We do get to decide to tax them higher and redistribute the wealth, though.
And then, when they can't find a job, we put them on welfare, which requires them to prove that they're looking for a job.
Basically, the existing combination of minimum wage and unemployment insurance is effectively basic income in disguise, except that it has very non-transparent funding and a lot of unnecessary bureaucratic overhead.
Once we have UBI, we can drop minimum wage requirements altogether, and probably get rid of progressive income taxation, as well.
I don't know. We're seeing popular political candidates in the primaries openly endorsing higher taxes on capital gains for the first time in god knows how long. This alone would likely be sufficient to fund a reasonable basic income program.
If the ISP advertised the cap in advance, I don't see how they're at fault in any way.
Probably worth noting that Windows 10 seems to have apps "disappear" and need restarting on an hourly basis, and that's with light load. "Mail" seems to be the worst.
It's not a Win10 thing, it's a "buggy app is crashing a lot" thing.
I personally prefer that dirty socialist hippie, Thomas Jefferson.
"It is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all... It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common is the property for the moment of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society"
"A right of property in moveable things is admitted before the establishment of government. A separate property in lands, not till after that establishment. The right to moveables is acknowledged by all the hordes of Indians surrounding us. Yet by no one of them has a separate property in lands been yielded to individuals. He who plants a field keeps possession till he has gathered the produce, after which one has as good a right as another to occupy it. Government must be established and laws provided, before lands can be separately appropriated, and their owner protected in his possession. Till then, the property is in the body of the nation, and they, or their chief as trustee, must grant them to individuals, and determine the conditions of the grant."
"Whenever there is in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right."
"The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on. If for the encouragement of industry we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment be provided to those excluded from the appropriation. If we do not, the fundamental right to labor the earth returns to the unemployed."
"unequal division of property... occasions the numberless instances of wretchedness which... is to be observed all over Europe."
"I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable. But the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property, only taking care to let their subdivisions go hand in hand with the natural affections of the human mind."
Are you familiar with that new-fangled notion of "self-determination" and "human rights"? I understand that it's only a little bit more than a century old, so you might have not heard of it in your corner of the globe.
Yes, exactly like that.
The average phone this day has USB OTG, allowing you to attach external hard drives of, essentially, arbitrary size to it. And not only Android itself has pretty much any app one can imagine (including, as I have already pointed out, BitTorrent clients and other things that generate massive volumes of traffic), but it can also run full-featured Linux in a chroot, complete with GUI. Not to mention that there are also Android tablets, some of which are actually more like laptops (like the entire Transformer line).
There is no point in distinguishing between data use "on the phone" and "off the phone" at this point.
Personally, I rarely tether, and I certainly don't use 2Tb a month (I don't think I've ever even hit the 5Gb limit that I have on my plan). But I wish that they either stopped deceptive advertising, or owned up to it.
"In the 1990s, Bhutan expelled or forced to leave most of its ethnic Lhotshampa population"
But I'm sure they happily hiked across the border all of their own volition, singing cheerful songs and thanking the citizens of Bhutan for their kind welcome.
Where communism ultimately fails is that it assumes that people will just always be willing to produce out of the goodness of their hearts for just any old need that somebody wants (which includes jobs that aren't fun and nobody wants to do them unless they're paid, such as being a garbage man or a janitor.)
Actually, idealistic communists (including the original Bolsheviks) have always assumed that those "nobody wants" jobs would be done by some fancy automation eventually. They were great believers in industrial revolution and scientific progress, and they also believed that the way they wanted to restructure their society after coming to power would result in a rapid surge in such development. It is especially evident if you read early Soviet sci-fi, such as Alexander Belyaev - they predicted a rapid pace of development that puts most Western sci-fi to shame.
Sorry, messed up my formatting. It was supposed to have a link to this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...