I initially thought that was what he meant, until I read the "If you don't use the GPL, you won't have its' drawbacks" part - as the problem is not using the GPL, but using the code covered by it. He shifted the blame from the code, to the licence (and thus, minimized it... as rewriting functional code from scratch is not always feasible)
Anyway, without that nitpick and with your clarification, I agree with him. If one doesn't want to respect the GPL, one should avoid GPL code and redevelop ("refactor") every GPL library that he uses.
Basically, any major media company that buys into HTML 5 video tag will be strangled by the advocates who pushed it on them in the first place, monetarily. When the production studios offering the content find out that a free video application that plays their content without commercials (hypothetically) exists, they will pull out and said video site will collapse.
Not necessarily. It may be more convenient to stream it rather than to save it. Think about it, why would I want to download a video, if not to watch it when I can't otherwise access it? Why would I upload a copy of the video, when it could be easier to email a link? Why whould I go to the trouble of removing [unobtrusive - assuming that they are] commercials from a video I'm going to see only once?
Now, I can only give you my own anecdotal experience. I come from a country with very limited bandwidth (Cuba, but there may be others). If I can't let a 2-minutes video downloading overnight, the I can't watch it, commercials or no commercials. And if I download it, I really don't care if it has commercials, as ignoring a few seconds of them is easier than to cut it out (or, if the commercials are "interesting", showing them to other people may be fun by itself).
Right now, I'm in France for a few days. I have good bandwidth. I want to watch videos, and listen to music. And I want to watch them online. I don't want to go to the hassle of downloading them, see that I don't like them, and delete them. I want to click play. I want to show the clips I like to my advisor - not by downloading them to a pendrive and giving them to her, but just giving her a link.
Of course, I'd also want to download the clips I like, so when I return to my country, I can show them to others that would otherwise be unable to watch them, and to preserve the really special ones in case I lose the link or they get taken down.
If HTML5 takes off and it makes watching the clips even easier (specially for the "2-minutes-video-downloading-overnight situation"), it'll be even better - and I seriously wonder why would someone who can watch the videos online would choose to go through the trouble of downloading and storing every single thing he sees.
Colloquially, it's a trap. Commercial content needs protection because those watching it on the web do not own it.
Commercial content doesn't need anything. Commercial producerswant DRM, because they fail to see a way to profit (or maintain control) without it. But you have other kinds of copyrighted content already on the web (text and images), where the users can, and ocassionally, do, save to their disks, but it is by no means what they commonly do. If video and audio were as ubiquitous as images are today (in terms of client requirements), there would be little reason to save everything one sees online.
Remember, kids; GPL violation is only an issue with code that uses the GPL. If you don't use the GPL, you won't have its' drawbacks.
No, the GPL violation is only an issue if you use code that is only licenced under the GPL and is not yours. If you are the owner, GPL is not an issue. And if you are not the owner, then you can't relicence to BSD unless you rewrite the GPL portion from scratch.
So, if you don't use code covered by the GPL, you won't have its drawbacks... Unfortunately, you won't have the code either.
Now, while I agree with you that "stealing" is a horrible word to use in that context (as nothing was stolen), I tend to rationalize this usage by considering that the "stolen" thing is not the digital artifact, but the rights over derivative works that the author's gave to the users.
So, it would not be "stealing code from the authors", but "stealing rights from the users". Still, I'd rather not use that rationalization, at least to stop the trolls, that will certainly come claiming that it is the same thing as "stealing" music.
24 files, about 3 Mb per file, thousands of uploads (I'm going to assume at least 2, as you used a plural). That would be about 3*24*2000/1024.0 = 140.625 Gb uploaded.
Somehow, I found that hard to believe. Most likely, on average each file was downloaded only once or twice from her. So, %s/a CD/3 CDs/ on the parent.
So, do you have any evidence, or anything at all that can even support that she uploaded 140 Gb of songs?
But one would still need to risk going to trial and losing. If you have to violate the law in order to test its constitutionality, and you fail, then you'd have committed a crime.
But the law can restrict you even if you don't actually get sued. We see it all the time here: the law/may/ be ruled unconstitutional if it were to trial, but going to trial is a risky proposition. Thus, you may end up with people obeying the unfair law, as the alternative would mean a chance to lose a lot in a trial.
(Nevermind that only a few can pay enough to make it all the way through to the supreme court)
But if you expect that musicians, game developers and movie production staff will all have to work for you for free in future, my only response is "why?"
Well, I don't. But regardless of it, that's the way we are headed. You may dislike it, artists may dislike it and Sony's CEO surely dislike it, but there is very little they can do about it.
So, they must adapt. How? It is not me who has to answer this, it is them. The Internet has made a business model largely irrelevant, and society has spoken: it has chosen to be part of this new culture instead of protecting business models that are of little [perceived] benefit to it. People share what they like, that's our nature, and now that we can do it, you better have an extremely good reason to convince us to stop on behalf of third parties. And by "us" I don't mean me, I really mean everyone who finds sharing natural. Poor Sony's millionaire CEO crying that he is not getting richer is not a really good argument.
And I welcome this change. Its easier for me, as I'm a developer and professor, not an artist, and as a professor my job is to share. I don't think culture will suffer: it has never suffered. Individual artists may, we unadapted developers may, the "industry" certainly will, but they/we will be replaced by those who find a way to thrive.
Don't underestimate human creativity, nor our need to be part of society. Sharing, and thus culture (not the other way around), are firmly rooted in us.
Because one of the first clauses in any OSS license states that the software comes with NO WARRANTY, meaning that if it fucks your shit up, no one can be held accountable.
G. NO OTHER WARRANTIES. The limited warranty is the only direct warranty from Microsoft. Microsoft gives no other express warranties, guarantees or conditions. Where allowed by your local laws, Microsoft excludes implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement. If your local laws give you any implied warranties, guarantees or conditions, despite this exclusion, your remedies are described in the Remedy for Breach of Warranty clause above, to the extent permitted by your local laws.
And the remedies for the few things that the warranty does cover:
D. REMEDY FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY. Microsoft will repair or replace the software at no charge. If Microsoft cannot repair or replace it, Microsoft will refund the amount shown on your receipt for the software. It will also repair or replace supplements, updates and replacement software at no charge. If Microsoft cannot repair or replace them, it will refund the amount you paid for them, if any. You must uninstall the software and return any media and other associated materials to Microsoft with proof of purchase to obtain a refund. These are your only remedies for breach of the limited warranty.
(emphasis mine)
There is also the fact that there is no contractual obligation to continue support for the software.
I couldn't find anywhere on that EULA where are they in a contractual obligation to continue support for the software. I didn't look very hard, though.
Oh, sure, "It's open source, you can fix everything yourself!" This is one of my favorite idealistic arguments of FOSS proponents that doesn't take into account the man hours that would be required not only to learn and understand the code base, but then to make the required modifications. So, your safest option is to purchase a support contract, which of course means that you're "throwing" money at FOSS.
You have the option of throwing money at a support company if you need to, to deploy your own programmers if you consider it to be a more cost-effective solution, or not having support at all. And if you choose to pay a company, you will be getting your support in no uncertain terms, unlike the vague fuzzy feeling that just becuase you paid for a user license, the authors will provide you the support you need with no additional cost.
At this point, there is no real inherent benefit to using FOSS, and your choice in software is going to be based on it's quality and technical merits.
Yeah, there is no value whatsoever in being able to chose your support venue, instead of having to rely on petitions to the software maker when they decide to shut down theirs.
Even if it is so, and they become "unprotected" if Firefox becomes dominant, the situation would still be better. IE incompatibilities and lack of standards used to be an obstacle for using an alternative browser... But that is no more. If Firefox were to become dominant, it would still be a better situation, specially for those who later on chose to not use firefox.
Torture? We prevent Britney Spears from inflicting herself on you, and this is the thanks we get?:-)
Unfortunately, you have not been successful in that:(
That you haven't used the embargo to widen your trade beyond places willing to subsidize you for cheap sugar (mostly countries not much better than you, economically) is not our fault nor our problem.
That wasn't my point here (although it seems silly to dismiss so easily the embargo itself, if it were so harmless as you seem to claim, the US wouldn't be using it as a threat to force us to complain with their wishes). Regardless of my feelings and of the harmfulness of the embargo, the question stands: What right does BitZtream, or you, or the US Goverment has to interfere in our very internal decision of who is our leader? What moral high ground allows you to justify that interference?
What do you call Castro not giving up power for 50 years when thats all that would have been needed to end the conflict?
And what right do you, or your country, has to chose our leaders, and to demand Castro to be removed from power? Regardless of my own feelings on the matter, why do you care so much about it, that to achieve your goals, you are willing to torture the entire Cuban population? And what makes your wishes more important than ours?
Purchased copies: almost zero. Legit copies: exactly zero, tanking into account that Microsoft's EULAs explicitly forbid their use in Cuba. I'm yet to see an official (or unofficial, for that matter) Cuban facility where copyrights are respected. Even the TV shows and movies of our national TV channels come from there.
I'm a Cuban Free Software advocate, and that is the single reason why the migration path has been so hard in this country. Btw, in some instances, not even the GPL was respected. I know some members of the Nova team (the Cuban distro mentioned on the article - not the only one, btw), and they had to fight a lot to get permission from they university to publish Nova as free software... and they belong to the "free software faculty" of their university.
(In my opinion, in some cases, our disregard for foreign copyrights, specially American copyrights, would be the right thing to do... if it were done consistently and publicly.)
With the bread analogy, the other bakeries would sell their own bread (games), not the stale one.
My problem is with your analogy (which leads to the also incorrect "theft" analogy), not with your proposed solution. I can buy the bread I want from many places, but I cannot buy the game I want. The analogy shouldn't be that I can get my bread from someone else, because I can't. It be more like "this bread [Spore] is stale, so I wont buy bread at all, instead, I'll go buy a chicken [Another game... don't know game names]".
I don't buy or advertise DRM "content" in any way (actually, I try to not advertise non-free software in any way, but that's another matter).
The reason I get so worked up over people "cracking" their games, is that it makes the game seem better than it is.
Agreed. But the blame of how crappy it is resides on the maker, not on the user who unwittingly advertises it. You should not blame the user for solving his perceived need (to play Spore). He is not a thief, specially if he payed for the game.
People should be getting pissed that they can't play their game, not annoyed that they have to crack it to play it.
Indeed. Being in Cuba (where the only software you can legally acquire would be free/libre software), sometimes I'd wish they managed to build the "perfect" software DRM.
Well, I most certainly did not steal anything. Even if I were to copy it without authorization, that would still not be stealing.
But that was not my point. Your bread analogy is deeply flawed: you are assuming that there are several bread-makers, but in the case of this digital "property", there aren't. Not authorized, anyway. I can't legally chose another vendor, because no other legal vendor will sell me the product, but that doesn't mean that I'm going to get screwed instead of solving my need (without causing harm to anyone, by the way)
Oh, yes, I'm also disgusted with all DRM proponents. They won't see a cent from me, even when I can pay for it (not often, given that most of them are forbidden from accepting my money, but that's another matter). Given that premise, copying the game is obviously not stealing. To consider that steal shows a flawed line of reasoning.
(A little disclaimer... I don't copy games, at least not until they are so old that my illegitimate copies will not even benefit the publisher with "free advertising", and even then... I'm not a gamer, so I don't really copy much. My debian repository has all the games I need.
Toss it and buy your bread from someone who sells non-stale bread next time.
And that's the big difference here. I can buy my bread from whoever wants to sell it, but I can only buy Spore from EA.
Not that I've ever wanted to play Spore, but it's silly to believe that I should get screwed instead of turning to a third party to solve my hypothetical needs, and is quite insulting that you call that steal.
"Buffy the Vampire Slayer"... Would you happen to know where to get those ripped versions?
You see, I don't care about the FBI warnings... But they don't want to sell it in my country, with or without warnings. And even if they were to sell them, the prices (per season) are about 3 times my monthly income. And, after saving for a while to get a couple of seasons, they refuse to ship it...
So, to further your point, not only the ripped versions tend to be of higher quality (less warnings and intrusive menus), but sometimes, they are the only choice.
What you say is true, only IF one of those "exclusive rights" that belong to the copyright holder, is the right to use the product.
I don't know the specifics of USA copyright laws, but the fact that it is called copyright, suggest that it isn't. Do you need a licence to read a book you bought? Do you need a licence to listen to a CD? (even if in the case of the CD, the audio had to be format-shifted and copied from digital to analog to soundwaves) Do you need a licence to take notes from a textbook or article, to write on its margin, to mark or strike out words and sentences?
USA's copyright law may make you require any of that - I don't know, I've read too much about corruption. But if you truly believe that you should need a licence from the copyright holder to do any of that, congratulations: you've been successfully brainwashed.
"Sorry Timmy, you can't go to college. No money. Oh, and we just lost our house because some fat cat. But it's ok, it's not like that crime affects our lives." Isn't that what made them dangerous?
I'm certain that Timmy would prefer to get his college money back, than to see Enron executives rot in jail.
JesseStay: does he anticipate a fallout of original MySQL users or fork in the mysql code and how will they handle that if it does happen?
JonathanSchwartz: I'm not anticipating a fork - Marten Mickos (SVP, Database Group at Sun, former CEO, MySQL) made some comments saying he was considering making available certain MySQL add-ons to MySQL Enterprise subscribers only - and as I said on stage, leaders at Sun have the autonomy to do what they think is right to maximize their business value - so long as they remember their responsibility to the corporation and all of its communities (from shareholders to developers). Not just their silo.
I think Marten got some fairly direct and immediate feedback saying the idea was a bad one - and we have no plans whatever of "hiding the ball," of keeping any technology from the community. Everything Sun delivers will be freely available, via a free and open license (either GPL, LGPL or Mozilla/CDDL), to the community.
Actually, it's exactly the opposite. More of the members that joined in the last year voted against OOXML than for it. You know, countries like Brazil, Cuba, Venezuela, Ecuador, Iran, etc.. Cuba voted against OOXML, you say? You should check again the result of September's vote and how hard it was for us to reverse it.
Slashdot Mirror
I initially thought that was what he meant, until I read the "If you don't use the GPL, you won't have its' drawbacks" part - as the problem is not using the GPL, but using the code covered by it. He shifted the blame from the code, to the licence (and thus, minimized it... as rewriting functional code from scratch is not always feasible)
Anyway, without that nitpick and with your clarification, I agree with him. If one doesn't want to respect the GPL, one should avoid GPL code and redevelop ("refactor") every GPL library that he uses.
Basically, any major media company that buys into HTML 5 video tag will be strangled by the advocates who pushed it on them in the first place, monetarily. When the production studios offering the content find out that a free video application that plays their content without commercials (hypothetically) exists, they will pull out and said video site will collapse.
Not necessarily. It may be more convenient to stream it rather than to save it. Think about it, why would I want to download a video, if not to watch it when I can't otherwise access it? Why would I upload a copy of the video, when it could be easier to email a link? Why whould I go to the trouble of removing [unobtrusive - assuming that they are] commercials from a video I'm going to see only once?
Now, I can only give you my own anecdotal experience. I come from a country with very limited bandwidth (Cuba, but there may be others). If I can't let a 2-minutes video downloading overnight, the I can't watch it, commercials or no commercials. And if I download it, I really don't care if it has commercials, as ignoring a few seconds of them is easier than to cut it out (or, if the commercials are "interesting", showing them to other people may be fun by itself).
Right now, I'm in France for a few days. I have good bandwidth. I want to watch videos, and listen to music. And I want to watch them online. I don't want to go to the hassle of downloading them, see that I don't like them, and delete them. I want to click play. I want to show the clips I like to my advisor - not by downloading them to a pendrive and giving them to her, but just giving her a link.
Of course, I'd also want to download the clips I like, so when I return to my country, I can show them to others that would otherwise be unable to watch them, and to preserve the really special ones in case I lose the link or they get taken down.
If HTML5 takes off and it makes watching the clips even easier (specially for the "2-minutes-video-downloading-overnight situation"), it'll be even better - and I seriously wonder why would someone who can watch the videos online would choose to go through the trouble of downloading and storing every single thing he sees.
Colloquially, it's a trap. Commercial content needs protection because those watching it on the web do not own it.
Commercial content doesn't need anything. Commercial producers want DRM, because they fail to see a way to profit (or maintain control) without it. But you have other kinds of copyrighted content already on the web (text and images), where the users can, and ocassionally, do, save to their disks, but it is by no means what they commonly do. If video and audio were as ubiquitous as images are today (in terms of client requirements), there would be little reason to save everything one sees online.
Remember, kids; GPL violation is only an issue with code that uses the GPL. If you don't use the GPL, you won't have its' drawbacks.
No, the GPL violation is only an issue if you use code that is only licenced under the GPL and is not yours. If you are the owner, GPL is not an issue. And if you are not the owner, then you can't relicence to BSD unless you rewrite the GPL portion from scratch.
So, if you don't use code covered by the GPL, you won't have its drawbacks... Unfortunately, you won't have the code either.
Stealing? A digital artifact?
Now, while I agree with you that "stealing" is a horrible word to use in that context (as nothing was stolen), I tend to rationalize this usage by considering that the "stolen" thing is not the digital artifact, but the rights over derivative works that the author's gave to the users.
So, it would not be "stealing code from the authors", but "stealing rights from the users". Still, I'd rather not use that rationalization, at least to stop the trolls, that will certainly come claiming that it is the same thing as "stealing" music.
Hmm.
24 files, about 3 Mb per file, thousands of uploads (I'm going to assume at least 2, as you used a plural). That would be about 3*24*2000/1024.0 = 140.625 Gb uploaded.
Somehow, I found that hard to believe. Most likely, on average each file was downloaded only once or twice from her. So, %s/a CD/3 CDs/ on the parent.
So, do you have any evidence, or anything at all that can even support that she uploaded 140 Gb of songs?
But one would still need to risk going to trial and losing. If you have to violate the law in order to test its constitutionality, and you fail, then you'd have committed a crime.
But the law can restrict you even if you don't actually get sued. We see it all the time here: the law /may/ be ruled unconstitutional if it were to trial, but going to trial is a risky proposition. Thus, you may end up with people obeying the unfair law, as the alternative would mean a chance to lose a lot in a trial.
(Nevermind that only a few can pay enough to make it all the way through to the supreme court)
But if you expect that musicians, game developers and movie production staff will all have to work for you for free in future, my only response is "why?"
Well, I don't. But regardless of it, that's the way we are headed. You may dislike it, artists may dislike it and Sony's CEO surely dislike it, but there is very little they can do about it.
So, they must adapt. How? It is not me who has to answer this, it is them. The Internet has made a business model largely irrelevant, and society has spoken: it has chosen to be part of this new culture instead of protecting business models that are of little [perceived] benefit to it. People share what they like, that's our nature, and now that we can do it, you better have an extremely good reason to convince us to stop on behalf of third parties. And by "us" I don't mean me, I really mean everyone who finds sharing natural. Poor Sony's millionaire CEO crying that he is not getting richer is not a really good argument.
And I welcome this change. Its easier for me, as I'm a developer and professor, not an artist, and as a professor my job is to share. I don't think culture will suffer: it has never suffered. Individual artists may, we unadapted developers may, the "industry" certainly will, but they/we will be replaced by those who find a way to thrive.
Don't underestimate human creativity, nor our need to be part of society. Sharing, and thus culture (not the other way around), are firmly rooted in us.
Hmm.
Even better:
''.join(chr(int(i,16)) for i in s.split())
Because one of the first clauses in any OSS license states that the software comes with NO WARRANTY, meaning that if it fucks your shit up, no one can be held accountable.
Do you mean, like this one?
And the remedies for the few things that the warranty does cover:
(emphasis mine)
There is also the fact that there is no contractual obligation to continue support for the software.
I couldn't find anywhere on that EULA where are they in a contractual obligation to continue support for the software. I didn't look very hard, though.
Oh, sure, "It's open source, you can fix everything yourself!" This is one of my favorite idealistic arguments of FOSS proponents that doesn't take into account the man hours that would be required not only to learn and understand the code base, but then to make the required modifications. So, your safest option is to purchase a support contract, which of course means that you're "throwing" money at FOSS.
You have the option of throwing money at a support company if you need to, to deploy your own programmers if you consider it to be a more cost-effective solution, or not having support at all. And if you choose to pay a company, you will be getting your support in no uncertain terms, unlike the vague fuzzy feeling that just becuase you paid for a user license, the authors will provide you the support you need with no additional cost.
At this point, there is no real inherent benefit to using FOSS, and your choice in software is going to be based on it's quality and technical merits.
Yeah, there is no value whatsoever in being able to chose your support venue, instead of having to rely on petitions to the software maker when they decide to shut down theirs.
Even if it is so, and they become "unprotected" if Firefox becomes dominant, the situation would still be better. IE incompatibilities and lack of standards used to be an obstacle for using an alternative browser... But that is no more. If Firefox were to become dominant, it would still be a better situation, specially for those who later on chose to not use firefox.
Torture? We prevent Britney Spears from inflicting herself on you, and this is the thanks we get? :-)
Unfortunately, you have not been successful in that :(
That you haven't used the embargo to widen your trade beyond places willing to subsidize you for cheap sugar (mostly countries not much better than you, economically) is not our fault nor our problem.
That wasn't my point here (although it seems silly to dismiss so easily the embargo itself, if it were so harmless as you seem to claim, the US wouldn't be using it as a threat to force us to complain with their wishes). Regardless of my feelings and of the harmfulness of the embargo, the question stands: What right does BitZtream, or you, or the US Goverment has to interfere in our very internal decision of who is our leader? What moral high ground allows you to justify that interference?
What do you call Castro not giving up power for 50 years when thats all that would have been needed to end the conflict?
And what right do you, or your country, has to chose our leaders, and to demand Castro to be removed from power? Regardless of my own feelings on the matter, why do you care so much about it, that to achieve your goals, you are willing to torture the entire Cuban population? And what makes your wishes more important than ours?
Easy:
Purchased copies: almost zero. Legit copies: exactly zero, tanking into account that Microsoft's EULAs explicitly forbid their use in Cuba. I'm yet to see an official (or unofficial, for that matter) Cuban facility where copyrights are respected. Even the TV shows and movies of our national TV channels come from there.
I'm a Cuban Free Software advocate, and that is the single reason why the migration path has been so hard in this country. Btw, in some instances, not even the GPL was respected. I know some members of the Nova team (the Cuban distro mentioned on the article - not the only one, btw), and they had to fight a lot to get permission from they university to publish Nova as free software... and they belong to the "free software faculty" of their university.
(In my opinion, in some cases, our disregard for foreign copyrights, specially American copyrights, would be the right thing to do... if it were done consistently and publicly.)
With the bread analogy, the other bakeries would sell their own bread (games), not the stale one.
My problem is with your analogy (which leads to the also incorrect "theft" analogy), not with your proposed solution. I can buy the bread I want from many places, but I cannot buy the game I want. The analogy shouldn't be that I can get my bread from someone else, because I can't. It be more like "this bread [Spore] is stale, so I wont buy bread at all, instead, I'll go buy a chicken [Another game... don't know game names]".
I don't buy or advertise DRM "content" in any way (actually, I try to not advertise non-free software in any way, but that's another matter).
The reason I get so worked up over people "cracking" their games, is that it makes the game seem better than it is.
Agreed. But the blame of how crappy it is resides on the maker, not on the user who unwittingly advertises it. You should not blame the user for solving his perceived need (to play Spore). He is not a thief, specially if he payed for the game.
People should be getting pissed that they can't play their game, not annoyed that they have to crack it to play it.
Indeed. Being in Cuba (where the only software you can legally acquire would be free/libre software), sometimes I'd wish they managed to build the "perfect" software DRM.
Well, I most certainly did not steal anything. Even if I were to copy it without authorization, that would still not be stealing.
But that was not my point. Your bread analogy is deeply flawed: you are assuming that there are several bread-makers, but in the case of this digital "property", there aren't. Not authorized, anyway. I can't legally chose another vendor, because no other legal vendor will sell me the product, but that doesn't mean that I'm going to get screwed instead of solving my need (without causing harm to anyone, by the way)
Oh, yes, I'm also disgusted with all DRM proponents. They won't see a cent from me, even when I can pay for it (not often, given that most of them are forbidden from accepting my money, but that's another matter). Given that premise, copying the game is obviously not stealing. To consider that steal shows a flawed line of reasoning.
(A little disclaimer... I don't copy games, at least not until they are so old that my illegitimate copies will not even benefit the publisher with "free advertising", and even then... I'm not a gamer, so I don't really copy much. My debian repository has all the games I need.
Toss it and buy your bread from someone who sells non-stale bread next time.
And that's the big difference here. I can buy my bread from whoever wants to sell it, but I can only buy Spore from EA.
Not that I've ever wanted to play Spore, but it's silly to believe that I should get screwed instead of turning to a third party to solve my hypothetical needs, and is quite insulting that you call that steal.
Fortunately, the concept of 'Free Software' has nothing to do with 'being able to have a thing or service for free'.
(btw, it says so on the second sentence of the second paragraph of the FA)
"Buffy the Vampire Slayer"...
Would you happen to know where to get those ripped versions?
You see, I don't care about the FBI warnings... But they don't want to sell it in my country, with or without warnings. And even if they were to sell them, the prices (per season) are about 3 times my monthly income. And, after saving for a while to get a couple of seasons, they refuse to ship it...
So, to further your point, not only the ripped versions tend to be of higher quality (less warnings and intrusive menus), but sometimes, they are the only choice.
Wow. "sleep 8h"? My alarm clock used to be "sleep $((8*60*60))". Thanks, man!
Brazilian cities were able to know the election results in the same day of voting, before midnight. That's pretty damn efficient.
That's nothing, here on Argentina, we're able to know the election results months before voting. God bless democracy!
That's nothing, here on Cuba, we've been able to know the election results 40 years before voting. God bless democracy!
What you say is true, only IF one of those "exclusive rights" that belong to the copyright holder, is the right to use the product.
I don't know the specifics of USA copyright laws, but the fact that it is called copyright, suggest that it isn't. Do you need a licence to read a book you bought? Do you need a licence to listen to a CD? (even if in the case of the CD, the audio had to be format-shifted and copied from digital to analog to soundwaves) Do you need a licence to take notes from a textbook or article, to write on its margin, to mark or strike out words and sentences?
USA's copyright law may make you require any of that - I don't know, I've read too much about corruption. But if you truly believe that you should need a licence from the copyright holder to do any of that, congratulations: you've been successfully brainwashed.
Isilrion.
I was almost sure I had gotten this link from slashdot, but after googling around, I just can't find where.
Anyway, here is an " interview with Sun's CEO. For those lazy enough to not click the link:
JesseStay: does he anticipate a fallout of original MySQL users or fork in the mysql code and how will they handle that if it does happen?
JonathanSchwartz: I'm not anticipating a fork - Marten Mickos (SVP, Database Group at Sun, former CEO, MySQL) made some comments saying he was considering making available certain MySQL add-ons to MySQL Enterprise subscribers only - and as I said on stage, leaders at Sun have the autonomy to do what they think is right to maximize their business value - so long as they remember their responsibility to the corporation and all of its communities (from shareholders to developers). Not just their silo.
I think Marten got some fairly direct and immediate feedback saying the idea was a bad one - and we have no plans whatever of "hiding the ball," of keeping any technology from the community. Everything Sun delivers will be freely available, via a free and open license (either GPL, LGPL or Mozilla/CDDL), to the community.
Everything.
No exception.
I just hope it's true.