You think freedom can be reduced to a popularity contest?
Up until recently, America was about voting issues, not people.
Some people find it incomprehensible that an elected representative of the people would find himself trying to implement the will of the people, rather than simply assuming that the election gave him license to implement his/her own ideas. (You do hear me muttering under my breath here, yes.)
This is entirely the point of having the people vote on so much.
It has something to do with the DIY mindset that also used to be rather typical of people from the USA.
So, yeah, I can tell you you can argue with me, and I can tell you your arguments are full of hot air.
In the case of BSD, there is an implicit element of the contract that bean-counters want to gloss over:
First is the moral obligation. Call it karma. People should show their appreciation for value received in ways that they can. Just because the license does not specify money or code or hardware or word-of-mouth advertizing in some specific forum, does not mean that it is moral or ethical to take and not give back.
Second is one of the ways that the karma comes back to you quickly, what is sometimes called enlightened self-interest. If you do not give back, all sorts of bad things happen. The project founders a bit and you can't get updates when you need them. Your unpublished custom code does not get the advantage of the many eyes phenomon. Maybe you want help down the road, but the project members are not happy that you took and didn't give back, so they refuse to accept your code when you finally do submit it, or maybe make you jump through lots of hoops first, things like showing lots of records of test design and implementation, cleaning up the code formatting and comments, etc.
The GPL is an expedient. Even RMS acknowledges that. All the legal code that tells you you have to give back is necessitated by people who understand neither moral obligation nor enlightened self-interest.
The BSD copyright notice is something of an assertion that the author would rather let people be ignorant, anti-social, and mis-guidedly selfish if they insist, along with something of a statement of trust. But using it, or a similar notice, does not preclude an author from telling people that their selfishness is stupid.
In the count of reserved words (built-in operators and other identifiers), as you seem to be suggesting?
In the size of the executable?
Or in the examples manual?
Or in the layers of abstraction over the hardware?
What about the initial steepness or overall height of the learning curve?
How about the part of the language executable that is not available to the run-time?
Oh, and FORTH is a perfectly valid way to write Forth, even though it is not an acronym, per se. At least one of the early manuals recommended capitalizing the name. (Of course, you hardly ever see people write ForTran or CoBOL any more, but they are not wrong.)
You may be perfectly fine with it defaulting to hogging some percentage of your available RAM.
My sister, the one who would supposedly benefit from the back-set driving, may only want to clean up some old photos. Her iBook is maxed out (for that model) at 768M. 256M would be plenty for her, but your optimistic 80% setting would have her copy of Gimp setting itself to run with 614M, leaving her with 154M for the OS, NeoOffice, AppleMail, Safari, iPhoto, iMovie,...
Sure. I should buy her a new MacBook with 2G.
And while we're dreaming, are you going to buy me that prototyping box for a little project I want to do with embedded CPUs, so I can afford to get her the MacBook? Or even a used sempron notebook that I can load Linux on and use on the train instead of staring into space?
Setting the amount of memory an app uses is a familiar concept to those of us who used Macs back in the pre-Mac-OS-X days. Some apps, the programers can guess by estimating average useage. Others, like image editors, need the user to tell them what's reasonable. There may be a good way of getting that feedback without too much burden on the user, but that wouldn't be an install dialog. And you'd want to avoid the not-so-odd case when a user test launched an app a couple of times before digging into serious use.
Well, the lack of control over the channels in the new business model is one thing that's causing the bean counters over there nightmares, I'm sure, but they have to get used to the fact that this world contains no real guarantees just like the rest of us.
And there ain't really any "or else" in this. There were no guarantees in this world before the big institutions were built up. The big institutions were able to give an illusion of guarantees, but that illusion has been stripped away by the power of the buyer when the buyer is informed and mobile.
Even the farmers have never had any guarantees.
They've just got to get used to living on spec just like the rest of us.
I don't know. I always thought it was morality that made a person good and lack of the same that made a person bad.
Yeah, it's a shame to mess up a relative's birthday. On the other hand, when the relative calms down, she might decide it was the best birthday present she ever got.
Freedom has its costs. One of them is being moral as best as one understands how.
Went to Costco in Amagasaki with some friends who have memberships.
There is a concessions area on the way out where you can eat American style pizza and such. So one could imagine some shifting of parcels from one bag to another.
And then there was an apparently new 5% surcharge on purchases by non-members. You pay the extra 5% to check out on your own or something. Otherwise, you have to let the person who you are with pay the money at the register, then give him the money later. So having to have a receipt meant that we had to wait while he ate lunch and leave with him.
(Not sure if the above proves anything in particular.)
You can't provide canned lecture when you use a blackboard (unless you have a lot of blackboard and no other class uses the room, perhaps, or unless you can write on the blackboard really fast). Canned lectures are a bad thing.
I taught English as a foreign language some ten years back with Clarisworks on a Mac with a projector. I rarely prepared materials, because I always taught an interactive lesson.
As the lesson progressed, I saved the stuff that went on screen. At the end of each period I gave the files to the students. (Yeah, that's backwards from the usual use of the tech.)
The students who took notes took notes anyway.
Some of the students shared their notes after class, of course, and then started sharing notes over the LAN during class. Because they knew they were getting what I was putting on screen, their notes tended to have some original work, which of course helped the students help each fill in the gaps. (Only paranoid teachers assume that all notes passed during class are discussions of cuteness, invitations to dates, and other off-topic junk.)
Education works much better when you create the content in class, interactively with the students. But you have to know your tools, and you have to use flexible tools that are transparent to the observers as well as to the user. That's why the blackboard is so great.
(The three disadvantages of the blackboard are the lack of advanced editing, the lack of ability to copy, and the lack of automatic interpretation of formulae, and I don't mean just math formulae. A good teacher uses those lacks to his or her advantage, however.)
There are some cool things that can be done with tagged text and prepared filters (programs), especially if you have a classroom where every student has a laptop, all hooked together by LAN. Some of it amounts to spontaneous interactive games.
Part of the reason I get bugged by Microsoft's XML is that they have cluttered up the tagged text market with tools that work exactly against that kind of class. Microsoft's junk tends to push the user towards canned content, and, as people have noted, canned content tends to kill education.
For math, the Mac's grapher, and similar programs can be useful, but you have to be willing to slow down, and to refrain from showing the complete graph until you've had the students work out some critical points by hand.
I think this is what the warnings above are all about:
Use the tech like a blackboard with extended capabilities.
DOS MSW3.1 MSWnt MSW95 MSW98 MSWme MSW2k MSWxp/home MSWxp/pro MSWvista^H^H^H^H^HLookMaNoHands.
One platform, in theory, but any theory that assured the market that Microsoft really knew what they were doing ahead of time was seriously flawed.
We did not know twenty years ago what a computer OS should do. (We still don't really know.) That is precisely the reason for competition, because competition allows the industry to find out what works and what doesn't through natural means.
What Microsoft has given us is the ability to push a bunch of buttons and do the same-old a little faster, generating even more of the same-old pollutions. We even have the RIAA and their ilk pushing for a return to the (same-old) system of government sponsered patronage, and Microsoft is trying to enable that.
Even the very fact of their existence should make them the subject of government controls. That is one of the reasons AT&T went along with the split relatively quietly, they could not legally compete as long as they were controlled, and they were controlled as long as they were a monopoly, even though they were _relatively_ well behaved.
But I have to wonder what the benefit of gold is, as well. I have the idea it would be hot in the summer and cold in the winter. You could run electrical current through it to heat it in the winter, maybe?
Hmm.
Maybe not. That would sure add to the greenhouse gases.
That is likely to be a deliberate fact, but it is a fact. (And it's part of the reason for their un-openXML.)
If breaking the monopoly is the goal, it has to go in multiple steps. Force them to
(1) Stop all product development. They are already all unsafe at any speed. (Spam/malware.)
(2) Force them to document the API. Finally. Including all legacy products, even if they have to find old dusty packages in someone else's garage and decompile and reverse them themselves because they've already thrown out all their own docs.
(3) Require that, in any split, the child companies must communicate with each other and any parent company that might remain only in open, public forii presided over by industry consortia in which neither the original parent company nor any child company can have any decision making role for ten years. Don't even allow them to make comments for the first two years after the splits.
(3) Split the company along functional lines in two or three steps:
(3b.1) Access Control Mechanisms, (3b.2) Network Mechanisms (servers, etc.), (3b.3) Text-oriented User Interface Shells (3b.4) Graphical User Interface Shells, (3b.n) Some other things I'm not going to take time for at the moment.
(3c.1) Personal Productivity, (3c.2) Office Productivity, (3c.3) Education Productivity, (3c.4) Industrial Creativity, (3c.n) Again, more similar things go here.
(3d.n) Dictionaries, Encyclopaedias, etc.
(3c.m.u) Productivity would be split along text, spreadsheet, data management, automation, etc.
(3c.n.v) Creativity would be split along the lines of sound, graphics, and educational entertainment, automation, etc.
(4) Require each child company to either show an existing competitor or split into competing companies under rules that would be very strict against even simple collaboration for ten years.
Now, I don't want this kind of thing to happen, because the above is their only formula for success.
I want Microsoft's products to all disappear. None of them are worth the time they take to learn, they are all oriented to the wrong optimizations: Do what you've always done, but do it by pushing buttons and leaving the results up to Micro$oft.
I want them all to go away, so I am happy to let Microsoft destroy themselves by doing what they keep doing.
Copyright law pretty much requires you not to attempt to steal someone else's copyright, as in by taking out their copyright notice.
The reason the BSD copyright notice containing the license requires keeping the copyright notice is that the BSD copyright notice is a bit more complicated than many copyright notices. Without the license part of the notice being explicit about that, some people might have thought it was okay to strip out the license part of the notice as long as they left that one line of copyright claim. (And the law itself has not been tested in this way, so it was good to be safe.)
It was okay for the original author to change the license until the derivitive work contained code from someone else. Once there is code from someone else, the authors of the additional code must be also consulted, and if they don't agree, the copyright claims (included the license, in this case) must remain intact.
Why do so many people seem to fail to read the licenses for comprehension before they assume what can and can't be done.
(And I'm not talking about the original author in this case, my guess is that part of his brain hadn't really quite fully registered that someone who had helped him with his creation might not think that removing the dual license was just a matter of tidying up, and once that was brought to his attention, he seems to have recognized the issues and taken care of it.)
joudanzuki
-- READ your licenses before you use the code. (And if you don't understand the license, don't use it.;-)
... for the obtuse who posted at length until here.
But there will be a potential license issue if the GPL-ed software is designed to be connected only to a closed-source attestation unit.
The question is how much difference there is in the way the license treats connections via dynamically linked libraries and the way it treats connections via a network.
Guess I need to go read the license.
Anyway, if adding code which will only run when connected to a closed-source dynamic license is against the letter of the GPL, clearly, this kind of supposed end-run is at very least against the spirit of the GPL.
Slashdot Mirror
Just vote for the MP?
You think freedom can be reduced to a popularity contest?
Up until recently, America was about voting issues, not people.
Some people find it incomprehensible that an elected representative of the people would find himself trying to implement the will of the people, rather than simply assuming that the election gave him license to implement his/her own ideas. (You do hear me muttering under my breath here, yes.)
This is entirely the point of having the people vote on so much.
It has something to do with the DIY mindset that also used to be rather typical of people from the USA.
joudanzuki
So, yeah, I can tell you you can argue with me, and I can tell you your arguments are full of hot air.
In the case of BSD, there is an implicit element of the contract that bean-counters want to gloss over:
First is the moral obligation. Call it karma. People should show their appreciation for value received in ways that they can. Just because the license does not specify money or code or hardware or word-of-mouth advertizing in some specific forum, does not mean that it is moral or ethical to take and not give back.
Second is one of the ways that the karma comes back to you quickly, what is sometimes called enlightened self-interest. If you do not give back, all sorts of bad things happen. The project founders a bit and you can't get updates when you need them. Your unpublished custom code does not get the advantage of the many eyes phenomon. Maybe you want help down the road, but the project members are not happy that you took and didn't give back, so they refuse to accept your code when you finally do submit it, or maybe make you jump through lots of hoops first, things like showing lots of records of test design and implementation, cleaning up the code formatting and comments, etc.
The GPL is an expedient. Even RMS acknowledges that. All the legal code that tells you you have to give back is necessitated by people who understand neither moral obligation nor enlightened self-interest.
The BSD copyright notice is something of an assertion that the author would rather let people be ignorant, anti-social, and mis-guidedly selfish if they insist, along with something of a statement of trust. But using it, or a similar notice, does not preclude an author from telling people that their selfishness is stupid.
joudanzuki
No, I didn't think so.
How about DS-UWB?
No, I'm not surprised about that, either.
Where do you measure bloat?
In the count of reserved words (built-in operators and other identifiers), as you seem to be suggesting?
In the size of the executable?
Or in the examples manual?
Or in the layers of abstraction over the hardware?
What about the initial steepness or overall height of the learning curve?
How about the part of the language executable that is not available to the run-time?
Oh, and FORTH is a perfectly valid way to write Forth, even though it is not an acronym, per se. At least one of the early manuals recommended capitalizing the name. (Of course, you hardly ever see people write ForTran or CoBOL any more, but they are not wrong.)
joudanzuki
That's the show stopper question.
...
You may be perfectly fine with it defaulting to hogging some percentage of your available RAM.
My sister, the one who would supposedly benefit from the back-set driving, may only want to clean up some old photos. Her iBook is maxed out (for that model) at 768M. 256M would be plenty for her, but your optimistic 80% setting would have her copy of Gimp setting itself to run with 614M, leaving her with 154M for the OS, NeoOffice, AppleMail, Safari, iPhoto, iMovie,
Sure. I should buy her a new MacBook with 2G.
And while we're dreaming, are you going to buy me that prototyping box for a little project I want to do with embedded CPUs, so I can afford to get her the MacBook? Or even a used sempron notebook that I can load Linux on and use on the train instead of staring into space?
Setting the amount of memory an app uses is a familiar concept to those of us who used Macs back in the pre-Mac-OS-X days. Some apps, the programers can guess by estimating average useage. Others, like image editors, need the user to tell them what's reasonable. There may be a good way of getting that feedback without too much burden on the user, but that wouldn't be an install dialog. And you'd want to avoid the not-so-odd case when a user test launched an app a couple of times before digging into serious use.
I'm guessing that after the next patch, it will mysteriously bloat to 80,286 bytes?
Well, the lack of control over the channels in the new business model is one thing that's causing the bean counters over there nightmares, I'm sure, but they have to get used to the fact that this world contains no real guarantees just like the rest of us.
And there ain't really any "or else" in this. There were no guarantees in this world before the big institutions were built up. The big institutions were able to give an illusion of guarantees, but that illusion has been stripped away by the power of the buyer when the buyer is informed and mobile.
Even the farmers have never had any guarantees.
They've just got to get used to living on spec just like the rest of us.
joudanzuki
Bottom of the 3rd page of TFriendlyA.
For some reason they can no longer use radio to push singles. They are looking for other avenues and focusing on (huh?) popular TV shows and the like.
Internet radio?
File sharing?
Do they not understand word-of-mouth? Have they no sense at all?
Well, big corporations are going the way of the dinosaur, which, in evolutionary terms, is appropriate.
joudanzuki
One reason he might be friendly was that you gave him a relatively cheap lesson in controlling his ego.
He sounds like he's headed the right way, towards turning out to be a good officer.
I don't know. I always thought it was morality that made a person good and lack of the same that made a person bad.
Yeah, it's a shame to mess up a relative's birthday. On the other hand, when the relative calms down, she might decide it was the best birthday present she ever got.
Freedom has its costs. One of them is being moral as best as one understands how.
Relatives crying out of mere fear is a minor cost.
Went to Costco in Amagasaki with some friends who have memberships.
There is a concessions area on the way out where you can eat American style pizza and such. So one could imagine some shifting of parcels from one bag to another.
And then there was an apparently new 5% surcharge on purchases by non-members. You pay the extra 5% to check out on your own or something. Otherwise, you have to let the person who you are with pay the money at the register, then give him the money later. So having to have a receipt meant that we had to wait while he ate lunch and leave with him.
(Not sure if the above proves anything in particular.)
You can't provide canned lecture when you use a blackboard (unless you have a lot of blackboard and no other class uses the room, perhaps, or unless you can write on the blackboard really fast). Canned lectures are a bad thing.
I taught English as a foreign language some ten years back with Clarisworks on a Mac with a projector. I rarely prepared materials, because I always taught an interactive lesson.
As the lesson progressed, I saved the stuff that went on screen. At the end of each period I gave the files to the students. (Yeah, that's backwards from the usual use of the tech.)
The students who took notes took notes anyway.
Some of the students shared their notes after class, of course, and then started sharing notes over the LAN during class. Because they knew they were getting what I was putting on screen, their notes tended to have some original work, which of course helped the students help each fill in the gaps. (Only paranoid teachers assume that all notes passed during class are discussions of cuteness, invitations to dates, and other off-topic junk.)
Education works much better when you create the content in class, interactively with the students. But you have to know your tools, and you have to use flexible tools that are transparent to the observers as well as to the user. That's why the blackboard is so great.
(The three disadvantages of the blackboard are the lack of advanced editing, the lack of ability to copy, and the lack of automatic interpretation of formulae, and I don't mean just math formulae. A good teacher uses those lacks to his or her advantage, however.)
There are some cool things that can be done with tagged text and prepared filters (programs), especially if you have a classroom where every student has a laptop, all hooked together by LAN. Some of it amounts to spontaneous interactive games.
Part of the reason I get bugged by Microsoft's XML is that they have cluttered up the tagged text market with tools that work exactly against that kind of class. Microsoft's junk tends to push the user towards canned content, and, as people have noted, canned content tends to kill education.
For math, the Mac's grapher, and similar programs can be useful, but you have to be willing to slow down, and to refrain from showing the complete graph until you've had the students work out some critical points by hand.
I think this is what the warnings above are all about:
Use the tech like a blackboard with extended capabilities.
In other words, Microsoft has found some security bug in MSWVista^H^H^H^H^HLook-Mah-No-Hands when running DHCP the corret way.
Maybe they think they are trying to wrap a man-in-the-middle vulnerability in some sort of protective covering?
exactly the point.
Saltpeter in your orange juice?
I don't think you really understand the alternatives that should have been.
DOS
MSW3.1
MSWnt
MSW95
MSW98
MSWme
MSW2k
MSWxp/home
MSWxp/pro
MSWvista^H^H^H^H^HLookMaNoHands.
One platform, in theory, but any theory that assured the market that Microsoft really knew what they were doing ahead of time was seriously flawed.
We did not know twenty years ago what a computer OS should do. (We still don't really know.) That is precisely the reason for competition, because competition allows the industry to find out what works and what doesn't through natural means.
What Microsoft has given us is the ability to push a bunch of buttons and do the same-old a little faster, generating even more of the same-old pollutions. We even have the RIAA and their ilk pushing for a return to the (same-old) system of government sponsered patronage, and Microsoft is trying to enable that.
It could have been a beautiful world.
Look up the way iNTEL muscled out its rivals in the UWB rumble.
We could have had real, functional, relatively secure replacements for bluetooth and wifi, but, no, iNTEL had to own UWB or force it down the tubes.
joudanzuki
Even the very fact of their existence should make them the subject of government controls. That is one of the reasons AT&T went along with the split relatively quietly, they could not legally compete as long as they were controlled, and they were controlled as long as they were a monopoly, even though they were _relatively_ well behaved.
the old royalty made over thrones.
But I have to wonder what the benefit of gold is, as well. I have the idea it would be hot in the summer and cold in the winter. You could run electrical current through it to heat it in the winter, maybe?
Hmm.
Maybe not. That would sure add to the greenhouse gases.
--
I don't think I'm going to claim this post.
without the right kind of help.
That's one of the reasons big is not good in the end.
They don't know them all.
That is likely to be a deliberate fact, but it is a fact. (And it's part of the reason for their un-openXML.)
If breaking the monopoly is the goal, it has to go in multiple steps. Force them to
(1) Stop all product development. They are already all unsafe at any speed. (Spam/malware.)
(2) Force them to document the API. Finally. Including all legacy products, even if they have to find old dusty packages in someone else's garage and decompile and reverse them themselves because they've already thrown out all their own docs.
(3) Require that, in any split, the child companies must communicate with each other and any parent company that might remain only in open, public forii presided over by industry consortia in which neither the original parent company nor any child company can have any decision making role for ten years. Don't even allow them to make comments for the first two years after the splits.
(3) Split the company along functional lines in two or three steps:
(3a) OS,
(3b) Infrastructure,
(3c) Application,
(3d) Content.
(3a.1) Kernel,
(3a.2) Drivers.
(3b.1) Access Control Mechanisms,
(3b.2) Network Mechanisms (servers, etc.),
(3b.3) Text-oriented User Interface Shells
(3b.4) Graphical User Interface Shells,
(3b.n) Some other things I'm not going to take time for at the moment.
(3c.1) Personal Productivity,
(3c.2) Office Productivity,
(3c.3) Education Productivity,
(3c.4) Industrial Creativity,
(3c.n) Again, more similar things go here.
(3d.n) Dictionaries, Encyclopaedias, etc.
(3c.m.u) Productivity would be split along text, spreadsheet, data management, automation, etc.
(3c.n.v) Creativity would be split along the lines of sound, graphics, and educational entertainment, automation, etc.
(4) Require each child company to either show an existing competitor or split into competing companies under rules that would be very strict against even simple collaboration for ten years.
Now, I don't want this kind of thing to happen, because the above is their only formula for success.
I want Microsoft's products to all disappear. None of them are worth the time they take to learn, they are all oriented to the wrong optimizations: Do what you've always done, but do it by pushing buttons and leaving the results up to Micro$oft.
I want them all to go away, so I am happy to let Microsoft destroy themselves by doing what they keep doing.
joudanzuki
I mean, think about it.
Bill Gates has never shown any signs of wanting to stop his press for his right to innovate his way into controlling our lives.
His company has been taking over the control points for sharing basically anything.
Once he forces his version of data labeling down our throats, what's left?
And the only way to opt out will be to act illegally, so how does he round up the holdouts?
Copyright law pretty much requires you not to attempt to steal someone else's copyright, as in by taking out their copyright notice.
;-)
The reason the BSD copyright notice containing the license requires keeping the copyright notice is that the BSD copyright notice is a bit more complicated than many copyright notices. Without the license part of the notice being explicit about that, some people might have thought it was okay to strip out the license part of the notice as long as they left that one line of copyright claim. (And the law itself has not been tested in this way, so it was good to be safe.)
It was okay for the original author to change the license until the derivitive work contained code from someone else. Once there is code from someone else, the authors of the additional code must be also consulted, and if they don't agree, the copyright claims (included the license, in this case) must remain intact.
Why do so many people seem to fail to read the licenses for comprehension before they assume what can and can't be done.
(And I'm not talking about the original author in this case, my guess is that part of his brain hadn't really quite fully registered that someone who had helped him with his creation might not think that removing the dual license was just a matter of tidying up, and once that was brought to his attention, he seems to have recognized the issues and taken care of it.)
joudanzuki
-- READ your licenses before you use the code. (And if you don't understand the license, don't use it.
... for the obtuse who posted at length until here.
But there will be a potential license issue if the GPL-ed software is designed to be connected only to a closed-source attestation unit.
The question is how much difference there is in the way the license treats connections via dynamically linked libraries and the way it treats connections via a network.
Guess I need to go read the license.
Anyway, if adding code which will only run when connected to a closed-source dynamic license is against the letter of the GPL, clearly, this kind of supposed end-run is at very least against the spirit of the GPL.
joudanzuki