This is a reflection of the profession of a vast majority of slashdot people. In computer science particularly, patents have hindered, rather than fostered innovation; which is why computer scientists tend to be particularly dismissive of its virtues. Electrical Engineers are a little bit more sympathetic. Biotech Engineers (is there any such term) are far more supportive. Probably a reflection of the fixed costs involved in establishing a business in the respective fields.
The real problem is that India is way, way, WAAAAY too overpopulated. All the capitalism is the world won't save a country doubling in size every thirty years. Poverty can't be reined in when the majority of the population is teenaged, underemployed, and competing for ever-tighter resources. Trees? Almost gone. Burned for fuel. Wildlife, doomed. Political unrest? With half a billion teenagers? Guaranteed
Eh? The most densely populated part of India, the Gangetic plains, is less densely populated than netherlands. It *is* socialism, no matter what you think; and now with the Gandhi family back to the feeding trough with the help of the communists, prospects for poverty alleviation don't seem as bright as before. Exhibit 1: Reservation in educational institutions. Recently, the topper in a medical exam could not get a position because of reservation. Welcome to socialism!
You're only partially right. Axioms are statements that (1) can't be proven, and (2) you assume are true, and everything is built upon them. However, there are other, non-axiomatic, statements in any formal system that cannot be proven either true or false. That's what the parent was talking about (hence the mention of the Godel's incompleteness theorem).
BTW, if you're a CS major, you've encountered this in the form of the Halting Problem:)
In fact, much work has been done in the last few decades in the model-theory literature. It used to be believed that Goedel like unprovable, unfalsifiable statements were somehow unnatural and would never surface in "ordinary" mathematics. After all, except for theoretical computer science classes, where does the halting problem show up in ordinary computer science? Then came the Paris Harrington theorem, a result from generalized ramsey theory which was proved to be unprovable in peano arithmetic. Since then other natural unprovable results have been found as well.
"males have all the genetic information for both genders..."
except, that is, for the genetic info in the mitochondrial DNA. I think doing phylogeny on Y as well as mitochondrial DNA are going to be crucial for our species' history
Can you prove that general sorting cannot be less than O(n log n)?
Oh yes it can. It all depends on your model of computation. You are thinking of the situation where you are only allowed comparisons. If you are allowed to do bit-twiddling, and know that your objects are bounded in size, you can do better than n log n
Right now (from what I gather) simulating a non-deterministic system is a real PITA. And they're hard to code, too, becuase everything is happening at once. So you timeslice everything, but it's not quite the same.
Google for hybrid automata. Since things aren't finite anymore, the "usual" equivalence between non-deterministic and deterministic automata break down. Of course, for regular (finite) automata state-space explosion probably kills you as well. Also, starting to look interesting are things like tree-automata etc. These are useful in logic as well; once you can generate trees (at least DAG's) you can generate proofs.
But you also said:
Now what would be really, really useful would be a general-purpose analog computer. When you deal in the analog realm, you don't really have to do a lot of the gruntwork because the nature and properties of the medium take care of a lot of that. I think what analog computing boils down to is designing feedback loops - I have a vague understanding of analog computing, most of it from a lot of layman reading of cognitive sciences, genetics/genomics, etc. The downside is there may be on the order of a few hundred thousand or million interactions that need to be designed, but that probably compares favorably to the amount of code that'd be written otherwise.
People tried these before they tried the digital computers. Essentially, if you have circuits with differentiators, these are unstable. Reason: think of a signal with a small additive white noise. The differentiation will amplify the high frequency noise. Similar considerations apply to digital numerical codes as well, but non-linear filters are far easier to write in the digital domain...
That's one thing this is NOT about: free trade. Free trade is when an unemployed American computer scientist can go to India to get a job. Guess what? It's impossible for Americans to get work visas in India. Why? Because they are protectionist.
Do you mean legally impossible or practiacally impossible? The website you refer further down is out (probably slashdotted) so I have no way of knowing what you are talking about here.
However, two points
1. It is legal for foreigners to work in India so long they have some employer. If anyone tells you otherwise he or she is either misinformed or dishonest. I don't know how hard it is for an Indian company to do the relevant paperwork. It probably used to be much harder, but these days, with increasing frequency government departments' interface with the public gets computerized and it gets easier to do these things. I know from newspaper reports that Indian companies do hire foreigners. There was a high profile case some years ago of some South India based company hiring some Chinese engineers, and as is the case with ill-informed boors in all countries, people raised a stink about this. Furthermore, even Indian BPO companies are starting to hire young europeans and stationing them in India, to break into the non-English speaking European market. When I graduated from one of the IIT's in the mid-nineties, we had several classmates from places like Bangladesh, Nepal, Kenya etc. Some did fly away to the west, but several did (at least some years) in Indian firms. So there must have been well established processes even then. Finally, no matter how bad the implementation of the laws in India, the letter and the spirit of the laws tend to be extremely liberal, certainly more than most European countries. So my considered opinion is your statement is FUD.
2. As a practical matter, it is extremely hard for people outside the US (for example, but also applies to say UK, France etc.; Canada might be an exception) with no personal contact with employers within the country (and who actually want to hire him/her) to get a work visa to come to the US. Recent security measures have made things even harder for foreigners from European countries to come and work here. So the practicalities of going to work in another country is always hard.
What happens is that your trading partners, though they do everything better than you, are better at some things than at others. Their best move is to concentrate on their specialties and trade with you for whatever you're least worst at. They'll buy from you even though they could do better themselves, because they get more for their resources investing in their own specialties.
Exactly, so unless a country wants to insure against risks (of mis-estimated advantages, cost structure changes etc.) it should concentrate on only a few areas...
I always had an idea that bollywood movies would extremely well in latin america. I started seeing the hispanic tv stations here after taking a spanish lesson; and the similarity between the two genres is mind-blowing...
This begs the question, can grandma even *read* in Hindi, Bengali or any other language for that matter? What is the literacy rate for the 55+ population in India, anyway?
Ooh, literacy!
For the 55+ population whose child or grandchild can afford a personal computer, literacy (at least in the regional language) should be close to 100 percent
Aren't they setting themselves for a big upset by subpena Linus who has little to do with individual distributions?...
It strikes me that they want Linus to testify about his comment on the kernel list about the need to ignore patents. This might be some muddle headed strategy to declare linux public domain without actually attacking gpl... How beats me. Not that SCO legal strategy seems geared towards actually winning the case.
That's not true. If you are employed by a consulting organization *outside* the US, you can work in the US but get paid in your country of employment. I did an almost year long stint in Sweden working for a US consulting firm and certainly did not pay Swedish income taxes. I also did a 6 month project in Canada and did not pay Canadian income tax. If an Indian consultant works in the US but is employed in India, they also would not pay US income tax.
This depends on the specific tax treaty between US and the country you are going to work for. But why am I arguing here? The American Worker has risen and the target is India. The message, "open your country to our goods, but don't compete with us". Farm subsidies, enough to drown the world in a sea of maize; steel subsidies propping up inefficient mills in Pittsburg, (which incidentally hurt downstream industry in America, but I guess Detroit needs to exercise its first amendment rights more vigorously) and now more protection for java (substitute your favorite language) coders.
But as the article showed, it is *illegal* to hire Americans in India.
The article quoted an official saying this. It gave the impression that it was an Indian *government* official that said this. However, this is not the case. Indian laws are pretty similar to US. If a company wanted to hire foreigners it would have to go through an awful amount of red tape. When companies really want to hire someone badly, they will do it.
However, it is more likely that it just a TCS official that made this statement just to get out of an uncomfortable situation: an euphemism for "we don't want to hire you". They might have millions of reasons.
1. Plenty of well-trained graduates inside India
2. A perception that an American won't really want to work in India. (After all, where do you want to retire to? Do you really think that any retirement savings you make in India will contribute anything if you retire to the US? The exchange rate is about 1 dollar to 45 rupees; improving, true, but won't get above 30 rupees in the foreseeable future. and so on.)
3. There might be local (i.e. statewise) labour laws that forbid this; but somehow I doubt that.
4. There might be a perception that Americans would ask for American style labour laws etc. and if anything goes wrong would be more liable to sue, or drag the US government into the picture or generally create more hassles; and thus represent significantly more risk in terms of intangibles.
That said, it is a pity that we don't have free movement of labour. Once this was something that only people from the third world wanted. First worlders talked of "our culture". But freedom of domicile, like free trade and freedom of speech tends to improve matters for everyone concerned (except maybe fundamentalists).
I know that Indian companies hire non-Indians; at least in the higher ranks. Most of them, though tend to be of Indian origin and so are expected to understand the culture better...
What you are proposing is breaking the 1st freedom; it is not because they claim the GPL is invalid that we believe so and should break it. A more valid request is IMHO the one GCC did, is to refuse to accept SCO specifics in the later (from now onwards) GCC versions. If they do want the GCC compilers, they'll have to branch them and maintain them themselves...
Not really. From the statement of the gpl from the gnu site:
5. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying the Program or works based on it.
and
7. If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues), conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all. For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.
The relevant clause SCO is breaking is the redistribution clause. Under the gpl, if SCO does not accept gpl it cannot redistribute gpl-ed programs.
Eventually, some sort of laws will have to be created and instated, keeping companies from off-shoring all of their work.
Smacks of socialism. More seriously, suppose the wages in the US do fall to 1/3 of current values. I guess if living costs fall as well you should be fine, no? Isn't that what happened when the manufacturing jobs went to China?
You can obtain Indian citizenship by birth, descent, and marriage... this from dredging my civics class memories several decades ago... I think you can get work visas, probably even easier if you are from the commonwealth; but do you want to deal with the officialdom?
Again it would depend whether there are restrictions on flying in each case but since it is a planned procedure you could fly to Indian have the operation and stay in a recovery room there for fractions of the cost.
Indeed, this is what many britons started doing (fly to India on the start of some vacation time, and get planned surgery etc. there) I think the British Medical Society, in a move that sounded very similar to Prez. Bush's steel protectionism, objected strongly; but this isn't something that can be stopped very easily, particularly given the falling air fare
Actually, kde seems to have something like this already. A command line tool that lets you look at and manipulate the object structure of objects/programs using the qtlibs or kdelibs. What mit needs additionally is some kind of replacement for dispatch interfaces (from COM) and perl/python interpreters which respond to messages. Something like wrapping libperl and libpython to the kde/gnome object hieararchy (sp?)
> I feel that to systematically violate IP is not > right, is not prudent, will only help a nation > over a short time horizon and we should encourage > other nations to not do infringe.
This short term/ long term argument is stupid. In the long term, you are dead. More to the point, other countries will start thinking long term when it is in their interest to do so.
This does not happen in a vacuum. Needs a market. Arguably the market was slowly developing before the burst bubble stopped it. One possible way this market can develop is by getting the millions of mom and pop stores to start using computers/software for mundane stuff like inventory tracking etc. The problem, of course, is that even in the regional languages the literacy rates are low, between 50 and 60 percent, I would guess; though, that too is steadily increasing.
Besides, the point which Tanveer was making was that, India has been invaded in the past by Alexander, and the Afaghans and mongols besides others, but no India rules has ever invaded any other country. India(n) influence in other parts of the world is primarily cultural and socio-religious. Indian religions, and in which I include hinduism, skikhism, buddhism, jainism besides others, have always preached peace and not war ( for example "jihad") against others. Please get your facts right. thanks.
Quote ends
I don't know how far the above is true. There certainly was a greater India in South East Asia during the time of the Cholas (was it 7th Century? I forget my history.) Indian Kings had established colonies here. The colonies of course broke free of the motherland in an age when ships took ages to cross the seas...
I would agree with the main thrust of the post though, India certainly has been less agressive even at the height of her power.
In my opinion, the GPL is intended to build a strong software community at the expense of a strong commercial software business model.
Whether this is a bad thing or not is open to debate.
But, this is not correct. GPL was written to ensure that software which were originally free could not be copied by unscrupulous (or uninformed) companies and incorporated within their products.
GPL might not be such a good deal for software
writers, but it surely is a great deal for software buyers.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a reflection of the profession of a vast majority of slashdot people. In computer science particularly, patents have hindered, rather than fostered innovation; which is why computer scientists tend to be particularly dismissive of its virtues. Electrical Engineers are a little bit more sympathetic. Biotech Engineers (is there any such term) are far more supportive. Probably a reflection of the fixed costs involved in establishing a business in the respective fields.
Searching for "paris harrington theorem"
Google and yahoo gives decent results. (The top three are the same: mathworld, wikipedia, citeseer to the paper by paris and harrington)
msn barfs:
"
We couldn't find any results containing lb-blackcar.com/webride/asp/dispatcher.asp. Consider: lb black cat webgrade asp dispatchers
"
very informative I would say.
What surprised me is how good yahoo's results have become. If I were looking for a google replacement, I would look at yahoo first.
The real problem is that India is way, way, WAAAAY too overpopulated. All the capitalism is the world won't save a country doubling in size every thirty years. Poverty can't be reined in when the majority of the population is teenaged, underemployed, and competing for ever-tighter resources. Trees? Almost gone. Burned for fuel. Wildlife, doomed. Political unrest? With half a billion teenagers? Guaranteed
Eh? The most densely populated part of India, the Gangetic plains, is less densely populated than netherlands. It *is* socialism, no matter what you think; and now with the Gandhi family back to the feeding trough with the help of the communists, prospects for poverty alleviation don't seem as bright as before. Exhibit 1: Reservation in educational institutions. Recently, the topper in a medical exam could not get a position because of reservation. Welcome to socialism!
In fact, much work has been done in the last few decades in the model-theory literature. It used to be believed that Goedel like unprovable, unfalsifiable statements were somehow unnatural and would never surface in "ordinary" mathematics. After all, except for theoretical computer science classes, where does the halting problem show up in ordinary computer science? Then came the Paris Harrington theorem, a result from generalized ramsey theory which was proved to be unprovable in peano arithmetic. Since then other natural unprovable results have been found as well.
"males have all the genetic information for both genders..."
except, that is, for the genetic info in the mitochondrial DNA. I think doing phylogeny on Y as well as mitochondrial DNA are going to be crucial for our species' history
moot actually means debatable. However, in the expression "moot point" it seems to be used in the sense "tangential/unnecessary point"
Can you prove that general sorting cannot be less than O(n log n)?
Oh yes it can. It all depends on your model of computation. You are thinking of the situation where you are only allowed comparisons. If you are allowed to do bit-twiddling, and know that your objects are bounded in size, you can do better than n log n
Right now (from what I gather) simulating a non-deterministic system is a real PITA. And they're hard to code, too, becuase everything is happening at once. So you timeslice everything, but it's not quite the same.
Google for hybrid automata. Since things aren't finite anymore, the "usual" equivalence between non-deterministic and deterministic automata break down. Of course, for regular (finite) automata state-space explosion probably kills you as well. Also, starting to look interesting are things like tree-automata etc. These are useful in logic as well; once you can generate trees (at least DAG's) you can generate proofs.
But you also said:
Now what would be really, really useful would be a general-purpose analog computer. When you deal in the analog realm, you don't really have to do a lot of the gruntwork because the nature and properties of the medium take care of a lot of that. I think what analog computing boils down to is designing feedback loops - I have a vague understanding of analog computing, most of it from a lot of layman reading of cognitive sciences, genetics/genomics, etc. The downside is there may be on the order of a few hundred thousand or million interactions that need to be designed, but that probably compares favorably to the amount of code that'd be written otherwise.
People tried these before they tried the digital computers. Essentially, if you have circuits with differentiators, these are unstable. Reason: think of a signal with a small additive white noise. The differentiation will amplify the high frequency noise. Similar considerations apply to digital numerical codes as well, but non-linear filters are far easier to write in the digital domain...
That's one thing this is NOT about: free trade. Free trade is when an unemployed American computer scientist can go to India to get a job. Guess what? It's impossible for Americans to get work visas in India. Why? Because they are protectionist.
Do you mean legally impossible or practiacally impossible? The website you refer further down is out (probably slashdotted) so I have no way of knowing what you are talking about here.
However, two points
1. It is legal for foreigners to work in India so long they have some employer. If anyone tells you otherwise he or she is either misinformed or dishonest. I don't know how hard it is for an Indian company to do the relevant paperwork. It probably used to be much harder, but these days, with increasing frequency government departments' interface with the public gets computerized and it gets easier to do these things. I know from newspaper reports that Indian companies do hire foreigners. There was a high profile case some years ago of some South India based company hiring some Chinese engineers, and as is the case with ill-informed boors in all countries, people raised a stink about this. Furthermore, even Indian BPO companies are starting to hire young europeans and stationing them in India, to break into the non-English speaking European market. When I graduated from one of the IIT's in the mid-nineties, we had several classmates from places like Bangladesh, Nepal, Kenya etc. Some did fly away to the west, but several did (at least some years) in Indian firms. So there must have been well established processes even then. Finally, no matter how bad the implementation of the laws in India, the letter and the spirit of the laws tend to be extremely liberal, certainly more than most European countries. So my considered opinion is your statement is FUD.
2. As a practical matter, it is extremely hard for people outside the US (for example, but also applies to say UK, France etc.; Canada might be an exception) with no personal contact with employers within the country (and who actually want to hire him/her) to get a work visa to come to the US. Recent security measures have made things even harder for foreigners from European countries to come and work here. So the practicalities of going to work in another country is always hard.
What happens is that your trading partners, though they do everything better than you, are better at some things than at others. Their best move is to concentrate on their specialties and trade with you for whatever you're least worst at. They'll buy from you even though they could do better themselves, because they get more for their resources investing in their own specialties.
Exactly, so unless a country wants to insure against risks (of mis-estimated advantages, cost structure changes etc.) it should concentrate on only a few areas
I always had an idea that bollywood movies would extremely well in latin america. I started seeing the hispanic tv stations here after taking a spanish lesson; and the similarity between the two genres is mind-blowing...
(btw, can I patent that idea? )
This begs the question, can grandma even *read* in Hindi, Bengali or any other language for that matter? What is the literacy rate for the 55+ population in India, anyway?
Ooh, literacy!
For the 55+ population whose child or grandchild can afford a personal computer, literacy (at least in the regional language) should be close to 100 percent
Aren't they setting themselves for a big upset by subpena Linus who has little to do with individual distributions?...
It strikes me that they want Linus to testify about his comment on the kernel list about the need to ignore patents. This might be some muddle headed strategy to declare linux public domain without actually attacking gpl... How beats me. Not that SCO legal strategy seems geared towards actually winning the case.
That's not true. If you are employed by a consulting organization *outside* the US, you can work in the US but get paid in your country of employment. I did an almost year long stint in Sweden working for a US consulting firm and certainly did not pay Swedish income taxes. I also did a 6 month project in Canada and did not pay Canadian income tax. If an Indian consultant works in the US but is employed in India, they also would not pay US income tax.
This depends on the specific tax treaty between US and the country you are going to work for. But why am I arguing here? The American Worker has risen and the target is India. The message, "open your country to our goods, but don't compete with us". Farm subsidies, enough to drown the world in a sea of maize; steel subsidies propping up inefficient mills in Pittsburg, (which incidentally hurt downstream industry in America, but I guess Detroit needs to exercise its first amendment rights more vigorously) and now more protection for java (substitute your favorite language) coders.
But as the article showed, it is *illegal* to hire Americans in India.
The article quoted an official saying this. It gave the impression that it was an Indian *government* official that said this. However, this is not the case. Indian laws are pretty similar to US. If a company wanted to hire foreigners it would have to go through an awful amount of red tape. When companies really want to hire someone badly, they will do it.
However, it is more likely that it just a TCS official that made this statement just to get out of an uncomfortable situation: an euphemism for "we don't want to hire you". They might have millions of reasons.
1. Plenty of well-trained graduates inside India
2. A perception that an American won't really want to work in India. (After all, where do you want to retire to? Do you really think that any retirement savings you make in India will contribute anything if you retire to the US? The exchange rate is about 1 dollar to 45 rupees; improving, true, but won't get above 30 rupees in the foreseeable future. and so on.)
3. There might be local (i.e. statewise) labour laws that forbid this; but somehow I doubt that.
4. There might be a perception that Americans would ask for American style labour laws etc. and if anything goes wrong would be more liable to sue, or drag the US government into the picture or generally create more hassles; and thus represent significantly more risk in terms of intangibles.
That said, it is a pity that we don't have free movement of labour. Once this was something that only people from the third world wanted. First worlders talked of "our culture". But freedom of domicile, like free trade and freedom of speech tends to improve matters for everyone concerned (except maybe fundamentalists).
I know that Indian companies hire non-Indians; at least in the higher ranks. Most of them, though tend to be of Indian origin and so are expected to understand the culture better...
What you are proposing is breaking the 1st freedom; it is not because they claim the GPL is invalid that we believe so and should break it. A more valid request is IMHO the one GCC did, is to refuse to accept SCO specifics in the later (from now onwards) GCC versions. If they do want the GCC compilers, they'll have to branch them and maintain them themselves...
Not really. From the statement of the gpl from the gnu site:
5. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying the Program or works based on it.
and
7. If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues), conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all. For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.
The relevant clause SCO is breaking is the redistribution clause. Under the gpl, if SCO does not accept gpl it cannot redistribute gpl-ed programs.
Eventually, some sort of laws will have to be created and instated, keeping companies from off-shoring all of their work.
Smacks of socialism. More seriously, suppose the wages in the US do fall to 1/3 of current values. I guess if living costs fall as well you should be fine, no? Isn't that what happened when the manufacturing jobs went to China?
You can obtain Indian citizenship by birth, descent, and marriage ... this from dredging my civics class memories several decades ago... I think you can get work visas, probably even easier if you are from the commonwealth; but do you want to deal with the officialdom?
Again it would depend whether there are restrictions on flying in each case but since it is a planned procedure you could fly to Indian have the operation and stay in a recovery room there for fractions of the cost.
Indeed, this is what many britons started doing (fly to India on the start of some vacation time, and get planned surgery etc. there) I think the British Medical Society, in a move that sounded very similar to Prez. Bush's steel protectionism, objected strongly; but this isn't something that can be stopped very easily, particularly given the falling air fare
Actually, kde seems to have something like this already. A command line tool that lets you look at and manipulate the object structure of objects/programs using the qtlibs or kdelibs. What mit needs additionally is some kind of replacement for dispatch interfaces (from COM) and perl/python interpreters which respond to messages. Something like wrapping libperl and libpython to the kde/gnome object hieararchy (sp?)
> I feel that to systematically violate IP is not
> right, is not prudent, will only help a nation
> over a short time horizon and we should encourage
> other nations to not do infringe.
This short term/ long term argument is stupid. In the long term, you are dead. More to the point, other countries will start thinking long term when it is in their interest to do so.
This does not happen in a vacuum. Needs a market. Arguably the market was slowly developing before the burst bubble stopped it. One possible way this market can develop is by getting the millions of mom and pop stores to start using computers/software for mundane stuff like inventory tracking etc. The problem, of course, is that even in the regional languages the literacy rates are low, between 50 and 60 percent, I would guess; though, that too is steadily increasing.
Quote begins:
...
Besides, the point which Tanveer was making was that, India has been invaded in the past by Alexander, and the Afaghans and mongols besides others, but no India rules has ever invaded any other country. India(n) influence in other parts of the world is primarily cultural and socio-religious. Indian religions, and in which I include hinduism, skikhism, buddhism, jainism besides others, have always preached peace and not war ( for example "jihad") against others. Please get your facts right. thanks.
Quote ends
I don't know how far the above is true. There certainly was a greater India in South East Asia during the time of the Cholas (was it 7th Century? I forget my history.) Indian Kings had established colonies here. The colonies of course broke free of the motherland in an age when ships took ages to cross the seas
I would agree with the main thrust of the post though, India certainly has been less agressive even at the height of her power.
In my opinion, the GPL is intended to build a strong software community at the expense of a strong commercial software business model.
Whether this is a bad thing or not is open to debate.
But, this is not correct. GPL was written to ensure that software which were originally free could not be copied by unscrupulous (or uninformed) companies and incorporated within their products.
GPL might not be such a good deal for software writers, but it surely is a great deal for software buyers.
By which judge?