Let's see... you have the North American Clovis Point [wikipedia.org] people going extinct at the same time. So it isn't *who* killed them either. If the Clovis people had killed them off, you wouldn't have had them going extinct.
So when a population of predators (humans) kills off all their prey (large tasty mammals), you wouldn't expect them to go extinct?... What?
If you find this stuff interesting, I recommend the book Dirty Wars by Jeremy Scahill. It was recently recommended by someone on slashdot (in a similar context), so I went and ordered it on Amazon. I'm only a quarter of the way through, and holy fuck is it eye-opening.
It goes pretty far back to show how Iraq was in the crosshairs a looong time before 9/11. It also shows what lengths Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc. went to to corrupt our intel to ensure that we'd end up in Iraq, regardless of whether they had anything to do with it. A truly fascinating read, I highly recommend it.
A famous quote from the Vietnam War was a statement attributed to an unnamed U.S. officer by AP correspondent Peter Arnett in his writing about Bn Tre city on 7 February 1968:
"It became necessary to destroy the town to save it", a United States major said today. He was talking about the decision by allied commanders to bomb and shell the town regardless of civilian casualties, to rout the Vietcong.
This isn't much different than what we're being told today. "We need to sacrifice our freedom in order to preserve it."
Write to them again. Keep writing to them until they understand that their justification makes no fucking sense.
Hi cold fjord! I'm honored to have you respond to me directly. Your reputation precedes you.
Now, are you suggesting that the "Collateral Murder" video that Manning leaked didn't challenge real injustices opposed by society? I'll remind you:
The video showed an American helicopter firing on a group of men in Baghdad, one of them a journalist, and two other Reuters employees carrying cameras that the pilots mistook for anti-tank grenade launchers (RPG-7). The helicopter also fired on a van that had stopped to help the injured members of the first group; two children in the van were wounded and their father was killed.
--Wikipedia
I'm of the opinion that the actions depicted in this video are generally considered to be real injustices, and are indisputably opposed by society.
But let's not forget my allegation of barbarism, which you contest. Manning has consistently protested the conditions she is being held in, categorizing them as pre-trial punishment. For roughly one year, Manning was subject to either suicide watch or prevention of injury status. Juan E. Mendez, a United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture, published a report saying the detention conditions had been "cruel, inhuman and degrading." In early April 2011, 295 academics (most of them American legal scholars) signed a letter arguing that the treatment was a violation of the United States Constitution.
So that's the basis for my claim of barbarism. Do you have anything to back your claim that Manning's imprisonment is "hardly barbaric", beyond the fact that most of these issues were eventually resolved?
Actually, after some further thought, I realized you have a point.
There's a significant number of people that will never feel satisfied until Snowden pays the piper, so to speak. Not just people in the higher echelons of government that likely harbor a personal vendetta against him for making them look like liars, fools, and/or evildoers, but also ordinary folks that see his revelations as an affront to the patriotic values that they hold dear. You know, the people that call him a traitor.
Even if the impossible were to happen, even if Keith Alexander were to turn himself in to the FBI and confess to having intentionally and knowingly violated the US Constitution, even if every last soul in the US Government were to agree that Snowden did the right thing, there'd be quite a bunch of Americans still out for Snowden's blood. No matter how this turns out, Snowden will have to submit to the will of the government for many people to be satisfied that the outcome of all of this could be called justice.
So, after thinking about it, I realized that Snowden should man up and offer to turn himself in, just as you suggested. But only after the crimes he has revealed are prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. The ball would then be in "their" court, and it would be fun watching the government squirm to explain their inaction on that front. It would also shift the attention from "what does Snowden deserve" to "why aren't we prosecuting people for breaking the supreme law of the land", which I think is long overdue. It would also take Snowden from "hero" to "saint" status. People love a good martyr when the cause is just, and there is no cause more just than justice itself.
All that will accomplish is (as has happened in the past) that one of the existing entrenched parties will go away and we'll be back to a two party system with the same actors and issues (most likely by the next election cycle).
Oh, that's it? Totally not worth it, you're right. I mean, Greens vs Libertarians is pretty much the same thing as Democrats vs Republicans, right?
I hope you don't vote.
Such change will, by it's nature, have to happen WITHIN the present, broken, two party system.
Mod parent up. HILARIOUS.
I support WOLF-PAC's efforts to reduce the influence of money in politics, but if you think that's all that's required to fix the system, I envy you for your naivety.
Shameless plug: WOLF-PACneeds your help. Not your money (well, I'm sure money wouldn't hurt either), but your actual help calling state-level elected officials. Please find some time between your second and third jobs and lend a hand. Democracy doesn't work without the involvement of the constituency.
Indeed. The way they rigged the system is by convincing you and people like you that it is extremely difficult for anyone from a third-party to get elected.
I voted for Jill Stein. It wasn't any harder than voting for Obama or Romney. Why did you throw away your vote?
You forgot the part where the whole neighborhood read your newspaper ad and gave not one single fuck. Well, except for the weirdo computer nerd who's still talking about the pedo neighbor. I mean, fuck, we've got the Super Bowl in less than a week! Ain't nobody got time for pedo neighbor shit.
Yes, I can see how the continued barbaric imprisonment of Chelsea Manning has resulted in an outraged public, an increase in transparency, a new era of accountability in the armed forces, and a change in legislation.
The things you say are all true, but they're also apparently no longer applicable or effective in today's society.
I haven't seen anyone charged with crimes for black prisons, extraordinary renditions, and torture.
Perhaps it was before your time, but we have had people charged with crimes for torture, at least.
After World War II, we convicted several Japanese soldiers for waterboarding American and Allied prisoners of war. At the trial of his captors, then-Lt. Chase J. Nielsen, one of the 1942 Army Air Forces officers who flew in the Doolittle Raid and was captured by the Japanese, testified: "I was given several types of torture. . . . I was given what they call the water cure." He was asked what he felt when the Japanese soldiers poured the water. "Well, I felt more or less like I was drowning," he replied, "just gasping between life and death."
Nielsen's experience was not unique. Nor was the prosecution of his captors. After Japan surrendered, the United States organized and participated in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, generally called the Tokyo War Crimes Trials. Leading members of Japan's military and government elite were charged, among their many other crimes, with torturing Allied military personnel and civilians. The principal proof upon which their torture convictions were based was conduct that we would now call waterboarding.
So I'm re-reading this thread, and I just realized, GP made reference to "our enemies", and in my response, I referred to "the terrorists".
As someone who enjoys reflecting on his own thought processes, consciously believes that there is no meaningful terrorist threat to the US, and thinks that "the terrorists" are to a large extent a fictional boogeyman conjured up to force social change, this scares the shit out of me.
The effectiveness of, for lack of a better word, brainwashing, just left me with chills running down my spine. If I, someone who really doesn't buy into the terrorism myth, subconsciously replaced "enemy" with "terrorists", how the fuck do you think Joe Sixpack's brain is dealing with this shit?
Why is it that they went with LLVM and not GCC, if not for the kryptonite that is the GPL? I'm aware of the... mess... that is GCC, but the prevailing opinion in the comments here suggests that the license was a significant, if not primary factor in this decision. Presumably, Apple "gave back" their contributions to Clang and LLVM, but is XCode open source? Would it have to be if the compiler they used had been licensed under GPL?
Sure they are! If LLVM was GPLed then apple wouldn't be able to use it in XCode and all XCode users would no longer receive the benefits LLVM because apple would be forced to use or build another library.
Are you sure about that? Are you sure that Apple wouldn't be able to use a GPLed LLVM in XCode, even if they released XCode under the GPL as well? In this scenario, wouldn't both LLVM users and XCode users be better off than they are today?
What's that? Apple's greed prevents that from being a realistic scenario? Well then...
So you're saying licensing had nothing to do with Apple going with LLVM over GCC? That BSD vs GPL has nothing to do with it? That since Apple gave everything back to the community anyway, they complied with the GPL despite only being obligated to comply with BSD? That XCode is open-source and released under the BSD license?
Dislaimer: Those were earnest questions. I don't use LLVM, XCode, or any Apple software. I'm not familiar with the details of this story beyond what I've read in the comments.
Presumably, I care. Otherwise, why would I have brought it up? "Who cares" is about the most useless rhetorical device you could have blurted out here.
Their rights have not diminished in the slightest just because there is an additional option available to them.
Baseless claim. An additional option as compared against what? Are you saying that proprietary, closed-source software generally comes with the same freedoms as, for example, public domain software? Is there some logical argument for why software must be proprietary and closed-source, rather than public domain? I didn't think so. You're comparing locked down software against the absence of software. Obviously, locked down software is superior in this false dilemma. However, you're entirely missing the point by pretending that no other options exist.
If someome makes a non-trivial change, why should they also have to make that non-trivial change available for free?
Is this meant to be an earnest question? I'll bite. One reason might be to comply with any licensing restrictions imposed on them, like, for example, by the GPL. Of course, the GPL doesn't impose such a restriction; derivative works based on GPL code can still be sold for profit. However, there's no reason why a license that does impose restrictions on re-sale cannot exist.
Just because the original author didn't value their time or could afford to release the software without getting paid, it doesn't follow that other people doing non-trivial work are in the same position.
Nobody's forcing them to make derivative works. They could go do something else instead. Something that doesn't capitalize on the generosity and good-will of others.
That is, the cost for the modifications in question to be made was less than the cost being imposed on their customers. In a sense, this makes everyone's life worse
No. It makes no-one's life worse.
That's some fantastic job quoting me. Perhaps if you had included the rest of my sentence, you'd understand how your response is off-topic at best.
Well, hey, if you want to see who's better at selectively quoting someone to misrepresent their argument, I believe you said:
First of all, I am... G... a... y.
Please, sir or madam, keep your sexuality out of this thread. It has nothing to do with software licensing, and is likely to attract trolls.
However, think of the countless BSD projects that haven't suffered from this sort of parasitic adoption.
BSD isn't evil. BSD does have shortcomings, but so does GPL. Yes, it's easy to point out these shortcomings, on both sides. The shortcomings don't stem from insufficient lawyer-speak. They stem from the very core of the philosophy promoted by both licenses.
Analogy time: which society is more free, one where I can punch you in the face, or one where you're free from punches in the face? See how that works? It's, unfortunately, not possible to have your cake and eat it too. We can't have a society where you can punch people in the face while also being free from punches in the face.
In a sense, this is a very similar issue. By allowing [near] total freedom on the first round of licensing (as with BSD), we're limiting (or at least allowing the limiting of) the freedom of subsequent licensees. By limiting freedom on the first round of licensing (as with GPL), we're maximizing (or seeking to maximize) the freedom of subsequent licensees. At this point, there's nothing left to do but choose which license is most compatible with your own subjective views on freedom.
Also, we can stop with the religious wars. I know slashdot isn't too stupid to comprehend that neither license is "more free" by any objective measure. Either debate the underlying philosophies of freedom, or STFU, because after a decade or two, it's getting old.
That's not as crazy as you make it sound. Perhaps our enemies have a cancer incidence rate that is orders of magnitude greater than ours. Perhaps the US only has one cancer death a year, but "the terrorists" lose millions to cancer every day. Were this the case, then indeed, a cure for cancer would be a major setback to the US.
That's a more accurate version of your analogy. The freedom afforded by the BSD license has value to the users of software, indeed. But it has much greater value to those who would sell proprietary forks. For example, I run OpenBSD. I like that it's open source, and I like that I can do basically anything I want with it, so long as I preserve attribution information. However, I haven't modified the code, and I don't really get any meaningful value from being able to do so and then sell my fork as closed-source software. As a counterpoint, Apple likes LLVM. They've modified it, and they're selling their proprietary fork as XCode. They've found great value in the freedom afforded them by the BSD license. The users of XCode, however, aren't seeing much benefit from the BSD license, because it never got to them. Apple ate it along the way.
I think it's self-evident that the BSD license benefits "the enemy" (profit-generating businesses) more than it benefits "us" (the users of software), which renders your analogy misleading.
Of course, this is a dramatic oversimplification of the BSD vs GPL debate, as there are many more implications of choosing a license than what is detailed here. I'm no GPL fanboi, and I can see why developers would prefer BSD simply to avoid all the legal confusion that comes with GPL. However, to portray GPL as crazy, or senseless, or wrong, is to be quite myopic. There are valid arguments to be made in favor of either license, and the philosophical differences are deeper than many are capable of admitting.
Perhaps, in some sense, it does. But companies that appropriate BSD code, modify it, and sell proprietary forks for profit are making a profit. That is, the cost for the modifications in question to be made was less than the cost being imposed on their customers. In a sense, this makes everyone's life worse than if the customers had just organized amongst themselves, funded a development campaign to have these modifications made, and then distributed the end product with a permissive license like BSD.
See, your idea of "better" is misleading, in that it doesn't explicitly identify what you're comparing against. Yes, contributing code to a BSD project is better than not contributing code to a BSD project. But is it better than contributing code to a GPL project? For some parties (for example, LLVM and Apple), it's clearly better. For other parties (for example, users of XCode), it's clearly not. Stallman isn't concerned with the freedom of the folks working on LLVM or the folks at Apple so much as he's concerned with the freedom of users of software in general.
From a purely theoretical point of view, GPL is "better" at preserving the freedom of software users than BSD is. In practice, due to human nature, business concerns, and myriad other reasons, GPL may not actually be better. However, that's not a shortcoming of Stallman's ideology. It's a shortcoming of the human race: greed. Now, some may argue that a practically superior license is better than an ideologically superior one. Unfortunately, that's not the debate I see unfolding here. Instead, we're surrounded by fanbois rooting for their license of choice, claiming that it is "better", without really addressing any of the underlying philosophical underpinnings.
Perhaps you may see this as nitpicking, but... GP is right.
As a _user_ of GPL software, you can link it to whatever you want without having to care about the license one iota.
As a _distributor_ of GPL software, you're screwed. If you linked your proprietary code to some GPL software, you can only distribute this derivative work under the GPL, source and all. Of course, you can choose to forego distribution, and keep your proprietary code to yourself.
It's clear that BSD affords more freedom to the licensee (at the expense of the community), in that you get a copy of the software and you can do anything you want with it.
It's similarly clear that GPL affords more freedom to the community (at the expense of the licensee), in that the community gets a copy of all the improvements made to the software (provided that the modified software is distributed).
I don't understand why this "which is really more free?" argument keeps popping up. Stop being such rabid fanbois, take a step back, and understand that both licenses offer different degrees of freedom to different parties, and that neither is "more free" in any truly objective sense.
See, maybe we've heard of it, but we just don't understand it.
You're telling me that the web server is the presentation layer, not a web service? I thought a web server didn't present any content meant for presentation to a human at all. I thought a web server was a middle-tier service that handled web (http) requests, passing content between a data source and a data viewer. I thought a web browser was the presentation layer, or the piece of software that actually presents content to a human.
The problem is that people love trying to come up with novel ways of looking at something without actually considering whether they add any value. Client-server is great because it makes sense. Model-view-controller, on the other hand, does nothing to help us build better or more complex systems.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's see... you have the North American Clovis Point [wikipedia.org] people going extinct at the same time. So it isn't *who* killed them either. If the Clovis people had killed them off, you wouldn't have had them going extinct.
So when a population of predators (humans) kills off all their prey (large tasty mammals), you wouldn't expect them to go extinct? ... What?
If you find this stuff interesting, I recommend the book Dirty Wars by Jeremy Scahill. It was recently recommended by someone on slashdot (in a similar context), so I went and ordered it on Amazon. I'm only a quarter of the way through, and holy fuck is it eye-opening.
It goes pretty far back to show how Iraq was in the crosshairs a looong time before 9/11. It also shows what lengths Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc. went to to corrupt our intel to ensure that we'd end up in Iraq, regardless of whether they had anything to do with it. A truly fascinating read, I highly recommend it.
"It became necessary to destroy the town to save it", a United States major said today. He was talking about the decision by allied commanders to bomb and shell the town regardless of civilian casualties, to rout the Vietcong.
This isn't much different than what we're being told today. "We need to sacrifice our freedom in order to preserve it."
Write to them again. Keep writing to them until they understand that their justification makes no fucking sense.
Now, are you suggesting that the "Collateral Murder" video that Manning leaked didn't challenge real injustices opposed by society? I'll remind you:
The video showed an American helicopter firing on a group of men in Baghdad, one of them a journalist, and two other Reuters employees carrying cameras that the pilots mistook for anti-tank grenade launchers (RPG-7). The helicopter also fired on a van that had stopped to help the injured members of the first group; two children in the van were wounded and their father was killed.
--Wikipedia
I'm of the opinion that the actions depicted in this video are generally considered to be real injustices, and are indisputably opposed by society.
But let's not forget my allegation of barbarism, which you contest. Manning has consistently protested the conditions she is being held in, categorizing them as pre-trial punishment. For roughly one year, Manning was subject to either suicide watch or prevention of injury status. Juan E. Mendez, a United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture, published a report saying the detention conditions had been "cruel, inhuman and degrading." In early April 2011, 295 academics (most of them American legal scholars) signed a letter arguing that the treatment was a violation of the United States Constitution.
So that's the basis for my claim of barbarism. Do you have anything to back your claim that Manning's imprisonment is "hardly barbaric", beyond the fact that most of these issues were eventually resolved?
Actually, after some further thought, I realized you have a point.
There's a significant number of people that will never feel satisfied until Snowden pays the piper, so to speak. Not just people in the higher echelons of government that likely harbor a personal vendetta against him for making them look like liars, fools, and/or evildoers, but also ordinary folks that see his revelations as an affront to the patriotic values that they hold dear. You know, the people that call him a traitor.
Even if the impossible were to happen, even if Keith Alexander were to turn himself in to the FBI and confess to having intentionally and knowingly violated the US Constitution, even if every last soul in the US Government were to agree that Snowden did the right thing, there'd be quite a bunch of Americans still out for Snowden's blood. No matter how this turns out, Snowden will have to submit to the will of the government for many people to be satisfied that the outcome of all of this could be called justice.
So, after thinking about it, I realized that Snowden should man up and offer to turn himself in, just as you suggested. But only after the crimes he has revealed are prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. The ball would then be in "their" court, and it would be fun watching the government squirm to explain their inaction on that front. It would also shift the attention from "what does Snowden deserve" to "why aren't we prosecuting people for breaking the supreme law of the land", which I think is long overdue. It would also take Snowden from "hero" to "saint" status. People love a good martyr when the cause is just, and there is no cause more just than justice itself.
All that will accomplish is (as has happened in the past) that one of the existing entrenched parties will go away and we'll be back to a two party system with the same actors and issues (most likely by the next election cycle).
Oh, that's it? Totally not worth it, you're right. I mean, Greens vs Libertarians is pretty much the same thing as Democrats vs Republicans, right?
I hope you don't vote.
Such change will, by it's nature, have to happen WITHIN the present, broken, two party system.
Mod parent up. HILARIOUS.
I support WOLF-PAC's efforts to reduce the influence of money in politics, but if you think that's all that's required to fix the system, I envy you for your naivety.
Shameless plug: WOLF-PAC needs your help. Not your money (well, I'm sure money wouldn't hurt either), but your actual help calling state-level elected officials. Please find some time between your second and third jobs and lend a hand. Democracy doesn't work without the involvement of the constituency.
Indeed. The way they rigged the system is by convincing you and people like you that it is extremely difficult for anyone from a third-party to get elected.
I voted for Jill Stein. It wasn't any harder than voting for Obama or Romney. Why did you throw away your vote?
You forgot the part where the whole neighborhood read your newspaper ad and gave not one single fuck. Well, except for the weirdo computer nerd who's still talking about the pedo neighbor. I mean, fuck, we've got the Super Bowl in less than a week! Ain't nobody got time for pedo neighbor shit.
Yes, I can see how the continued barbaric imprisonment of Chelsea Manning has resulted in an outraged public, an increase in transparency, a new era of accountability in the armed forces, and a change in legislation.
The things you say are all true, but they're also apparently no longer applicable or effective in today's society.
I haven't seen anyone charged with crimes for black prisons, extraordinary renditions, and torture.
Perhaps it was before your time, but we have had people charged with crimes for torture, at least.
After World War II, we convicted several Japanese soldiers for waterboarding American and Allied prisoners of war. At the trial of his captors, then-Lt. Chase J. Nielsen, one of the 1942 Army Air Forces officers who flew in the Doolittle Raid and was captured by the Japanese, testified: "I was given several types of torture. . . . I was given what they call the water cure." He was asked what he felt when the Japanese soldiers poured the water. "Well, I felt more or less like I was drowning," he replied, "just gasping between life and death."
Nielsen's experience was not unique. Nor was the prosecution of his captors. After Japan surrendered, the United States organized and participated in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, generally called the Tokyo War Crimes Trials. Leading members of Japan's military and government elite were charged, among their many other crimes, with torturing Allied military personnel and civilians. The principal proof upon which their torture convictions were based was conduct that we would now call waterboarding.
Citation
See, apparently it's only torture if the one pouring the water isn't a red-blooded American.
What's the matter, couldn't spare the karma?
Unless you actually expect me to believe that an AC stumbled upon my response to you in a 3-day-old thread 24 minutes after it was posted...
Off-topic: Fuck my life.
So I'm re-reading this thread, and I just realized, GP made reference to "our enemies", and in my response, I referred to "the terrorists".
As someone who enjoys reflecting on his own thought processes, consciously believes that there is no meaningful terrorist threat to the US, and thinks that "the terrorists" are to a large extent a fictional boogeyman conjured up to force social change, this scares the shit out of me.
The effectiveness of, for lack of a better word, brainwashing, just left me with chills running down my spine. If I, someone who really doesn't buy into the terrorism myth, subconsciously replaced "enemy" with "terrorists", how the fuck do you think Joe Sixpack's brain is dealing with this shit?
Why is it that they went with LLVM and not GCC, if not for the kryptonite that is the GPL? I'm aware of the... mess... that is GCC, but the prevailing opinion in the comments here suggests that the license was a significant, if not primary factor in this decision. Presumably, Apple "gave back" their contributions to Clang and LLVM, but is XCode open source? Would it have to be if the compiler they used had been licensed under GPL?
Sure they are! If LLVM was GPLed then apple wouldn't be able to use it in XCode and all XCode users would no longer receive the benefits LLVM because apple would be forced to use or build another library.
Are you sure about that? Are you sure that Apple wouldn't be able to use a GPLed LLVM in XCode, even if they released XCode under the GPL as well? In this scenario, wouldn't both LLVM users and XCode users be better off than they are today?
What's that? Apple's greed prevents that from being a realistic scenario? Well then...
Does it come with the source code?
If not, then it really does mean the BSD license isn't helping ensure freedom, in at least one sense.
So you're saying licensing had nothing to do with Apple going with LLVM over GCC? That BSD vs GPL has nothing to do with it? That since Apple gave everything back to the community anyway, they complied with the GPL despite only being obligated to comply with BSD? That XCode is open-source and released under the BSD license?
Dislaimer: Those were earnest questions. I don't use LLVM, XCode, or any Apple software. I'm not familiar with the details of this story beyond what I've read in the comments.
But really, who cares about subsequent licensees?
Presumably, I care. Otherwise, why would I have brought it up? "Who cares" is about the most useless rhetorical device you could have blurted out here.
Their rights have not diminished in the slightest just because there is an additional option available to them.
Baseless claim. An additional option as compared against what? Are you saying that proprietary, closed-source software generally comes with the same freedoms as, for example, public domain software? Is there some logical argument for why software must be proprietary and closed-source, rather than public domain? I didn't think so. You're comparing locked down software against the absence of software. Obviously, locked down software is superior in this false dilemma. However, you're entirely missing the point by pretending that no other options exist.
If someome makes a non-trivial change, why should they also have to make that non-trivial change available for free?
Is this meant to be an earnest question? I'll bite. One reason might be to comply with any licensing restrictions imposed on them, like, for example, by the GPL. Of course, the GPL doesn't impose such a restriction; derivative works based on GPL code can still be sold for profit. However, there's no reason why a license that does impose restrictions on re-sale cannot exist.
Just because the original author didn't value their time or could afford to release the software without getting paid, it doesn't follow that other people doing non-trivial work are in the same position.
Nobody's forcing them to make derivative works. They could go do something else instead. Something that doesn't capitalize on the generosity and good-will of others.
That is, the cost for the modifications in question to be made was less than the cost being imposed on their customers. In a sense, this makes everyone's life worse
No. It makes no-one's life worse.
That's some fantastic job quoting me. Perhaps if you had included the rest of my sentence, you'd understand how your response is off-topic at best.
Well, hey, if you want to see who's better at selectively quoting someone to misrepresent their argument, I believe you said:
First of all, I am ... G ... a ... y.
Please, sir or madam, keep your sexuality out of this thread. It has nothing to do with software licensing, and is likely to attract trolls.
However, think of the countless BSD projects that haven't suffered from this sort of parasitic adoption.
BSD isn't evil. BSD does have shortcomings, but so does GPL. Yes, it's easy to point out these shortcomings, on both sides. The shortcomings don't stem from insufficient lawyer-speak. They stem from the very core of the philosophy promoted by both licenses.
Analogy time: which society is more free, one where I can punch you in the face, or one where you're free from punches in the face? See how that works? It's, unfortunately, not possible to have your cake and eat it too. We can't have a society where you can punch people in the face while also being free from punches in the face.
In a sense, this is a very similar issue. By allowing [near] total freedom on the first round of licensing (as with BSD), we're limiting (or at least allowing the limiting of) the freedom of subsequent licensees. By limiting freedom on the first round of licensing (as with GPL), we're maximizing (or seeking to maximize) the freedom of subsequent licensees. At this point, there's nothing left to do but choose which license is most compatible with your own subjective views on freedom.
Also, we can stop with the religious wars. I know slashdot isn't too stupid to comprehend that neither license is "more free" by any objective measure. Either debate the underlying philosophies of freedom, or STFU, because after a decade or two, it's getting old.
That's not as crazy as you make it sound. Perhaps our enemies have a cancer incidence rate that is orders of magnitude greater than ours. Perhaps the US only has one cancer death a year, but "the terrorists" lose millions to cancer every day. Were this the case, then indeed, a cure for cancer would be a major setback to the US.
That's a more accurate version of your analogy. The freedom afforded by the BSD license has value to the users of software, indeed. But it has much greater value to those who would sell proprietary forks. For example, I run OpenBSD. I like that it's open source, and I like that I can do basically anything I want with it, so long as I preserve attribution information. However, I haven't modified the code, and I don't really get any meaningful value from being able to do so and then sell my fork as closed-source software. As a counterpoint, Apple likes LLVM. They've modified it, and they're selling their proprietary fork as XCode. They've found great value in the freedom afforded them by the BSD license. The users of XCode, however, aren't seeing much benefit from the BSD license, because it never got to them. Apple ate it along the way.
I think it's self-evident that the BSD license benefits "the enemy" (profit-generating businesses) more than it benefits "us" (the users of software), which renders your analogy misleading.
Of course, this is a dramatic oversimplification of the BSD vs GPL debate, as there are many more implications of choosing a license than what is detailed here. I'm no GPL fanboi, and I can see why developers would prefer BSD simply to avoid all the legal confusion that comes with GPL. However, to portray GPL as crazy, or senseless, or wrong, is to be quite myopic. There are valid arguments to be made in favor of either license, and the philosophical differences are deeper than many are capable of admitting.
Because it makes everyone's life better.
Perhaps, in some sense, it does. But companies that appropriate BSD code, modify it, and sell proprietary forks for profit are making a profit. That is, the cost for the modifications in question to be made was less than the cost being imposed on their customers. In a sense, this makes everyone's life worse than if the customers had just organized amongst themselves, funded a development campaign to have these modifications made, and then distributed the end product with a permissive license like BSD.
See, your idea of "better" is misleading, in that it doesn't explicitly identify what you're comparing against. Yes, contributing code to a BSD project is better than not contributing code to a BSD project. But is it better than contributing code to a GPL project? For some parties (for example, LLVM and Apple), it's clearly better. For other parties (for example, users of XCode), it's clearly not. Stallman isn't concerned with the freedom of the folks working on LLVM or the folks at Apple so much as he's concerned with the freedom of users of software in general.
From a purely theoretical point of view, GPL is "better" at preserving the freedom of software users than BSD is. In practice, due to human nature, business concerns, and myriad other reasons, GPL may not actually be better. However, that's not a shortcoming of Stallman's ideology. It's a shortcoming of the human race: greed. Now, some may argue that a practically superior license is better than an ideologically superior one. Unfortunately, that's not the debate I see unfolding here. Instead, we're surrounded by fanbois rooting for their license of choice, claiming that it is "better", without really addressing any of the underlying philosophical underpinnings.
Perhaps you may see this as nitpicking, but... GP is right.
As a _user_ of GPL software, you can link it to whatever you want without having to care about the license one iota.
As a _distributor_ of GPL software, you're screwed. If you linked your proprietary code to some GPL software, you can only distribute this derivative work under the GPL, source and all. Of course, you can choose to forego distribution, and keep your proprietary code to yourself.
Which is really more free?
More free for whom?
It's clear that BSD affords more freedom to the licensee (at the expense of the community), in that you get a copy of the software and you can do anything you want with it.
It's similarly clear that GPL affords more freedom to the community (at the expense of the licensee), in that the community gets a copy of all the improvements made to the software (provided that the modified software is distributed).
I don't understand why this "which is really more free?" argument keeps popping up. Stop being such rabid fanbois, take a step back, and understand that both licenses offer different degrees of freedom to different parties, and that neither is "more free" in any truly objective sense.
Slap bracelets are just as awesome today as they were when I was a kid.
I bought one somewhat recently, and it's been rad.
Cowabunga.
See, maybe we've heard of it, but we just don't understand it.
You're telling me that the web server is the presentation layer, not a web service? I thought a web server didn't present any content meant for presentation to a human at all. I thought a web server was a middle-tier service that handled web (http) requests, passing content between a data source and a data viewer. I thought a web browser was the presentation layer, or the piece of software that actually presents content to a human.
The problem is that people love trying to come up with novel ways of looking at something without actually considering whether they add any value. Client-server is great because it makes sense. Model-view-controller, on the other hand, does nothing to help us build better or more complex systems.