Disclaimer: I don't have an iPod and don't plan to get one, but I don't see what you are complaining about.
Most small electronic gadgets use proprietary batteries now, e.g. digital cameras, mobile phones. This is because Li-Ion batteries can be made very flat, small and light.
You can buy an iPod new battery online and install it yourself if you want. This is hardish to do because the device is tiny but not beyond the skill of most people. If you don't feel like opening your iPod, Apple can do it for you for a fee.
It would be nice if the iPod simply used AAAs, however this would make the device larger and reduce its autonomy. It's a compromise. If you don't like it there are other devices on the market that have equivalent functionality to the iPod and use more standard batteries, but surprise, they are larger and heavier, to the point you maybe wouldn't put them in your pocket and carry them with you all the time, which is the *point* of the iPod.
Well first of all it's not a Free Speech problem like everyone is saying and as the MJ example illustrates. There are things in both the US and France that are not legal to trade. If you think MJ is fine then what about other kinds of drugs or kiddies porn? If there are things that are not legal to trade it is the court's job to enforce the law, end of story.
Second of all perhaps prohibiting the sale of MJ and other drugs is dumb, however this position is defended by a majority of people in the US (at least the people in power now are certainly not going to change this situation), so there must be some kind of cogent argument for this situation to be maintained. Similarly you might want to admit the possibility of a cogent argument being mounted to justify the illegality of the sale of Nazi artifacts. Maybe it just hasn't been presented to you.
I'm not a lawmaker so I can't give you an explanation, only guesswork. I think this is law is a handle to try and rein in Neo-Nazi groups. I do think trying to stop Neo-Nazi groups to spread is a good thing. Whether the law is effective is another debate.
Someone earlier in the thread was saying the law wasn't working because there was evidence of new Neo-Nazi activity in Europe recently. This is a catch-22 argument, akin to saying that antibiotics don't work because people still get bacterial infections.
Third of all any kind of argument that would amount to saying "well we don't have that law in the US therefore it is not neeeded" or "the US is the freest country in the world, follow our example and it will all work better" sort of ignores the situation on the ground. Laws don't come in a vacuum.
You know, there is no such thing as "the UN" as a separate, supra-national entity. The UN is just a forum where nations negociate, including the US. It has in fact almost exactly zero power except a small voluntary multi-national peacekeeping force.
The US is part of the UN just like every other nations. If you think "the UN" is run by morons then maybe the US should take a more active and productive role in making decisions, because this is all that can be done to improve it.
The alternative of ignoring what happens at the UN or disbanding it are in fact worse. The UN headquarters are in New-York City, go visit sometimes and learn how it operates.
What have they really given up? Freedom of speech is not the issue. You can talk about the Third Reich as much as you want in France. In fact many of the revisionists are in fact French (Maurisson most famously).
The *sale* of Nazi artifacts is indeed curtailed just as the sale of Marijuana is in the US. May I remind you that in many parts of Europe (admitedly not France) the sale of MJ is legal (in Spain and The Netherlands in particular).
If you were to advertise MJ for sale (other than for medicinal purposes I'd imagine) in the US through Yahoo or E-bay you'd be arrrested on the spot, wouldn't you? Yet people don't make it a freedom of speech issue in the US, more like a "war on drugs gone berserk" issue.
By making the sale of artifacts illegal France presumably make it easier to arrest Neo-nazi group members that indulge in such trade, just like gangsters who are arrested on tax issue in the US I guess.
I'm not saying this is wise but this is part of the reasoning I'm sure.
I'd love to have your certainty about the future. Europe is a changing entity, it is definitely getting bigger and more diverse yet possess the shadow of a uniting force. Right now it is experiencing growing pains but it may grow out of it in the fullness of time.
The US can decide not to listen to anybody but they do that at their own risk. It is nowhere more evident than with the Iraq fiasco. In this instance the old European powers were right, and so was Russia and a host of other countries. The US ignored the lot, and now look at the result.
The US can *try* to do whatever it wants and face the consequences alone. In international law there was no justification for the Iraq war (invading a country for the purpose of regime change, however hateful, is not allowed and can lead to war crime charges). At present it is American men and women who are dying in Iraq as a result of misguided US policies.
It didn't have to be that way. A bit of diplomacy can achieve a lot more than that.
There was no vote in the UN on that issue, the US did not put it on the table. There was no French embargo. The French did say beforehand that they would oppose any new resolution that would promote war against Iraq without firm evidence but that is all. The US tried to strongarm the rest of the security council to embarass France.
If France had been the only entity opposed to the war in Iraq at the UN security council a vote would definitely have taken place and the US would have been justified in saying that France was outstepping its role. However it transpired that a *majority* of the UN security council was in favour of the French position, i.e. no mandate for war. Had a vote taken place a majority of countries would have voted against it and it is the US who would have been embarrassed. Therefore it didn't happen.
France's opinion is the opinion of the *majority* of the world on that particular issue. Deal with it.
The US wanted to do it alone, they have to face the consequences unfortunately.
That was in the European elections. While the European Parliament is of increasing importance (see European Patent problem), it actually doesn't govern the individual member nations. The European elections are almost universaly seen as a forum to express discontentment with the current government, because it is seen as being consequence free (no longer true in fact) and there is a low turnout (the discontent have more of an incentive to go and vote and so are overrepresented).
The last French parliamentary elections were held in June 2002. The French parliament, the one which gets to vote on each and every new French law actually has a solid right-wing majority and the prime minister is Jean-Claude Raffarin, definitely right-wing.
So no, you don't know what you are talking about, sorry.
I believe this is a cultural artifact. In many nations you can be married to someone as young as 10 or 11. In the US this is child abuse. You can try to openly justify and display your practice of the marriage at 10 years of age in the US and see how long it will take before you get locked up.
In France and Europe in general neo-Nazi movements are alive and well. Freedom of speech on the Nazi issue is not going to help. If you remember, during the last French presidential election Jean-Marie Le Pen came second behind Jacques Chirac. Le Pen is an outspoken fascist and the more he talks the better he does, to a degree. Remember that Hitler was an excellent public speaker.
If you have a solution to this very serious problem I'm sure a lot of French people would like to hear it. Just mumbling "freedom of speech" without realizing that in the US that freedom is also severly curtailed in some areas (increasingly so in fact) also for good reasons is not helping.
The idea behind this law is that there are some kind of hate speech that should be prohibited, and for better or for worse the sale of Nazi artifacts is bundled into this, presumably for the reason that collectors have more to sell than just artifacts.
I wonder what the situation is in Israel, I'm pretty sure that it's at least as restricted as in France. Would you complain if it was an Israeli court who was after Yahoo?
The French courts are trying to enforce French laws. So far nothing wrong with it, in fact this is what they *have* to do. If some law start not being enforced then the whole edifice crumbles (oh, that's against the law, but doesn't matter...)
Now maybe the law is bad and uninforceable, this is a different issue and not for the courts to decide. So far they are doing their job.
> "I wonder which government routinely violates the > rights of other people in other countries more > than any other?" > > France
Wrong. Do your own research to find out. The Amnesty International report is a good place to start. Also look at the list of country who refused to sign the International War Crime Court treaty, then try to deduce who is committing war crimes today and doesn't want to be prosecuted.
The case in question refers to *use*. The university was sued for continuing to *use* patented inventions they had no license to. I believe this is still OK to re-implement a patented technique for the purpose of comparison with a novel technique that one has developed or that one plans to develop. The article you reference is short on details but I seem to understand that the university had no intention to work on the inventions to improve them. The article seems to imply that the inventions were used in some kind of production environment.
This is the whole idea of Patents, to disclose how an invention works so that others can improve on it. The purpose of patents is to foster creativity, not stifle it.
I work in image analysis research, and I occasionally do read papers in areas that are heavily patented, such as Bayer filter interpolation (to remove colour artifacts from digital camera due to the peculiar arrangement of the colour sensors) and motion estimation. Patents are commonly cited as references and authors readily show their improved results compared to a variety of patented techniques.
It is a common practice in my field to patent some technique and then publish it. The expectation is that people will re-implement what is disclosed in the paper and everyone seems to expects that this is legal.
There are freely available libraries like the VTK that provide reference implementations of famously patented techniques such as the Marching Cubes algorithm (to transform a cube of voxels into a triangulated surface, used everywhere in medical imaging). These algorithms are in a special "patented" directory. You can compile them and presumably compare your results to what these techniques do, but you are not allowed to *use* these techniques in any production enviroment, be it for or non-profit (e.g. a public hospital) without a license.
This state of things doesn't seem to be contradicted by the referenced article, at least that's my reading of it, and I'm not a patent lawyer.
In the fake example given, pseudo-Microsoft supposedly writes that they are patenting what the author has written and published under the BSD licence. This is simply fear-mongering.
Care to explain in which way exactly does Fedora suck? Personally I've seen continuous and steady improvement from RH9 to FC1 and now FC2. Many other distributions are also very good, I use a variety both at home and at work, and I can't see any particular problem with Fedora that I can't se in any other distro in one form or another.
If anything, things improved markedly from RH9. The support is better (try it!), access to updates is much easier and automated. The releases so far have been on time and the problems encountered have not been RedHat only (the infamous XP boot bug for example). If anything RHEL 3.0 appears distincly backwards (I also use that one at work occasionally) compared to the niceties of the FC series.
I suspect a lot of people who moved from RH9 to many other distros experienced a similar lever of improvement as if they had stayed with Fedora, and that problems with the distribution have been blown out of proportion.
Fedora users haven't been left to their own devices by a greedy company, quite the contrary. Redhat only botched the PR job.
Among the major thing that RedHat has contributed to the communities are that they have hired Allan Cox. He has done a splendid job on the kernel.
They have contributed a Free, high-quality Linux installer, which is used by Debian now. They have sponsored the Gnome effort significantly. They have done a great deal to make Linux look better from the artwork to the font rendering system. They have put together great documentation on how to install and maintain a Linux system. They do a lot of QA, more than most other distros (left to the developers), and a lot of translations. Of course I fail to mention RPM, the basis for a large proportion of Linux distributions today.
They also have lots of useful open-source projects like kudzu (hardware detection & database).
Best of all their core system is still 100% completely Free in all senses of the world with no strings attached.
It is perfectly OK for you not to like it but please don't spread uninformed FUD.
This is unfair, Fedora FC1 was (is) still much much better in all respects than RH9. Even the support is better (yum! no silly up2date!, and it can be cron'ed!). FC2 wasn't as stable when it came out but largely this was due to the new 2.6 kernel. All distros that shipped that kernel had the same problems but somehow Fedora got blamed more than the others.
Fedora is actually fine, it's just the RH PR job that was botched.
Myself I like Debian dearly but I've come off it a bit. There is one problem with Debian, and that is the lack of reasonably frequent releases. No one in their right mind is going to use Debian Stable on their desktop, and Testing is only marginally better. It is not a reasonable proposition to tell people to rely on "unstable" software even if it doesn't really mean that it is unstable (crashing), just maintaining it security-wise requires a lot of downloading and a reasonable degree of care.
It creates a problem for shops trying to standardize on Debian. Which version of the "unstable" tree are you going to offer on standard? Which upgrades/updates are necessary?
My experience is that is very time consuming and left to the experience of the sysadmin. Essentially the test of the stability of the entire system is left to the user.
At least with other distributions, you can just install whatever is the latest version plus all the updates, because you know they are all maintenance. Every 6 months consider upgrading to the new release if you feel the feature set is worth it. If you have a problem, bugzilla it as "release 2 with all updates" and the developers know what your system is running.
It must be a nightmare to be a Debian developers just trying to reproduce bugs people report.
This argument is a red herring (sigh). No one can force any corporation to open up their code and no company will ever lose ownership of what they have written over a GPL issue. If a company uses a GPL library, make their software proprietary (as they are not allowed to) and are then found out, no one can force them to open up their code. They have several ways around the problem:
- they can withdraw their software from distribution; - they can re-implement the library internally; - they can negociate different terms than the GPL with the copyright holders of the library; - they can interface to the library in other ways than linking with it; - they can *choose* to licence their own code under the GPL.
The company can *choose* between these five alternatives. No one can *force* them to do anything else.
Yes it's nice to be able to use a BSD library in a proprietary product but can see why authors would rather that it didn't happen, and no one can force authors to release code under any license if they don't want to. If something is released under the GPL that you find useful but you absolutely need to release your code in a proprietary matter, then count your blessings: you can use it internally, you can study the code, you can write a thin wrapper that interfaces to the library by providing a separate process server, etc. If none of these solution will work, then sorry, you have to re-implement it, but you are still better off than if you had nothing at all, because you have at least a reference implementation that will help you iron out the bugs in your own.
Business prefer the BSD license because they are greedy, short-sighted, bottom-line oriented entities (and good for them).
This is not quite correct. The objective of Patents is to publish how technology works in return for a limited-time monopoly on distribution. It is to encourage people to try and do better (innovate). It is absolutely 100% kosher to re-implement any patented technique in-house for R&D purposes. What you cannot do is distribute that software in any way shape or form, to mere users (but it's OK to do that to testers, for example, who can be mere users).
You are correct, and anyway if Linus chose to re-licence his kernel to BSD, then someone else would make a GPL fork just for the hell of it.
The BSD license does encourage the creation of proprietary forks, e.g. Microsoft's early TCP/IP stack, Apple's Darwin, BSDI, etc, as well as free ones.
In contrast Linux hasn't forked. The various kernels put out by RedHat, SuSE and others aren't really forks at all, more like variations on the main trunk, including freely released patches not yet included in the main trunk, back-ported sections from the development kernel into the stable one, etc. They are really maintenance/stopgap changes and at any rate most worthy changes make it back into the main kernel.
I'm certain than the vast majority of Palestinians want peace and their country back. I'm also certain that most Israeli want peace and the whole of Israel under their control. The two appear to be mutually exclusive. Logic dictates that there are only three possibilities for peace: a total destruction of one, of the other, or a compromise on land issues.
When you have Arafat on one side and Sharon on the other, how likely is it that a compromise will take place? It will take a miracle.
Slashdot Mirror
Correct, the NeXTDimension expansion card had one of them to run the 32-bit Display Postscript stuff.
Disclaimer: I don't have an iPod and don't plan to get one, but I don't see what you are complaining about.
Most small electronic gadgets use proprietary batteries now, e.g. digital cameras, mobile phones. This is because Li-Ion batteries can be made very flat, small and light.
You can buy an iPod new battery online and install it yourself if you want. This is hardish to do because the device is tiny but not beyond the skill of most people. If you don't feel like opening your iPod, Apple can do it for you for a fee.
It would be nice if the iPod simply used AAAs, however this would make the device larger and reduce its autonomy. It's a compromise. If you don't like it there are other devices on the market that have equivalent functionality to the iPod and use more standard batteries, but surprise, they are larger and heavier, to the point you maybe wouldn't put them in your pocket and carry them with you all the time, which is the *point* of the iPod.
Well first of all it's not a Free Speech problem like everyone is saying and as the MJ example illustrates. There are things in both the US and France that are not legal to trade. If you think MJ is fine then what about other kinds of drugs or kiddies porn? If there are things that are not legal to trade it is the court's job to enforce the law, end of story.
Second of all perhaps prohibiting the sale of MJ and other drugs is dumb, however this position is defended by a majority of people in the US (at least the people in power now are certainly not going to change this situation), so there must be some kind of cogent argument for this situation to be maintained. Similarly you might want to admit the possibility of a cogent argument being mounted to justify the illegality of the sale of Nazi artifacts. Maybe it just hasn't been presented to you.
I'm not a lawmaker so I can't give you an explanation, only guesswork. I think this is law is a handle to try and rein in Neo-Nazi groups. I do think trying to stop Neo-Nazi groups to spread is a good thing. Whether the law is effective is another debate.
Someone earlier in the thread was saying the law wasn't working because there was evidence of new Neo-Nazi activity in Europe recently. This is a catch-22 argument, akin to saying that antibiotics don't work because people still get bacterial infections.
Third of all any kind of argument that would amount to saying "well we don't have that law in the US therefore it is not neeeded" or "the US is the freest country in the world, follow our example and it will all work better" sort of ignores the situation on the ground. Laws don't come in a vacuum.
I hope this is clearer.
You know, there is no such thing as "the UN" as a separate, supra-national entity. The UN is just a forum where nations negociate, including the US. It has in fact almost exactly zero power except a small voluntary multi-national peacekeeping force.
The US is part of the UN just like every other nations. If you think "the UN" is run by morons then maybe the US should take a more active and productive role in making decisions, because this is all that can be done to improve it.
The alternative of ignoring what happens at the UN or disbanding it are in fact worse. The UN headquarters are in New-York City, go visit sometimes and learn how it operates.
Sorry for late reply
What have they really given up? Freedom of speech is not the issue. You can talk about the Third Reich as much as you want in France. In fact many of the revisionists are in fact French (Maurisson most famously).
The *sale* of Nazi artifacts is indeed curtailed just as the sale of Marijuana is in the US. May I remind you that in many parts of Europe (admitedly not France) the sale of MJ is legal (in Spain and The Netherlands in particular).
If you were to advertise MJ for sale (other than for medicinal purposes I'd imagine) in the US through Yahoo or E-bay you'd be arrrested on the spot, wouldn't you? Yet people don't make it a freedom of speech issue in the US, more like a "war on drugs gone berserk" issue.
By making the sale of artifacts illegal France presumably make it easier to arrest Neo-nazi group members that indulge in such trade, just like gangsters who are arrested on tax issue in the US I guess.
I'm not saying this is wise but this is part of the reasoning I'm sure.
I'd love to have your certainty about the future. Europe is a changing entity, it is definitely getting bigger and more diverse yet possess the shadow of a uniting force. Right now it is experiencing growing pains but it may grow out of it in the fullness of time.
The US can decide not to listen to anybody but they do that at their own risk. It is nowhere more evident than with the Iraq fiasco. In this instance the old European powers were right, and so was Russia and a host of other countries. The US ignored the lot, and now look at the result.
The US can *try* to do whatever it wants and face the consequences alone. In international law there was no justification for the Iraq war (invading a country for the purpose of regime change, however hateful, is not allowed and can lead to war crime charges). At present it is American men and women who are dying in Iraq as a result of misguided US policies.
It didn't have to be that way. A bit of diplomacy can achieve a lot more than that.
You are rewriting history.
There was no vote in the UN on that issue, the US did not put it on the table. There was no French embargo. The French did say beforehand that they would oppose any new resolution that would promote war against Iraq without firm evidence but that is all. The US tried to strongarm the rest of the security council to embarass France.
If France had been the only entity opposed to the war in Iraq at the UN security council a vote would definitely have taken place and the US would have been justified in saying that France was outstepping its role. However it transpired that a *majority* of the UN security council was in favour of the French position, i.e. no mandate for war. Had a vote taken place a majority of countries would have voted against it and it is the US who would have been embarrassed. Therefore it didn't happen.
France's opinion is the opinion of the *majority* of the world on that particular issue. Deal with it.
The US wanted to do it alone, they have to face the consequences unfortunately.
That was in the European elections. While the European Parliament is of increasing importance (see European Patent problem), it actually doesn't govern the individual member nations. The European elections are almost universaly seen as a forum to express discontentment with the current government, because it is seen as being consequence free (no longer true in fact) and there is a low turnout (the discontent have more of an incentive to go and vote and so are overrepresented).
The last French parliamentary elections were held in June 2002. The French parliament, the one which gets to vote on each and every new French law actually has a solid right-wing majority and the prime minister is Jean-Claude Raffarin, definitely right-wing.
So no, you don't know what you are talking about, sorry.
I believe this is a cultural artifact. In many nations you can be married to someone as young as 10 or 11. In the US this is child abuse. You can try to openly justify and display your practice of the marriage at 10 years of age in the US and see how long it will take before you get locked up.
In France and Europe in general neo-Nazi movements are alive and well. Freedom of speech on the Nazi issue is not going to help. If you remember, during the last French presidential election Jean-Marie Le Pen came second behind Jacques Chirac. Le Pen is an outspoken fascist and the more he talks the better he does, to a degree. Remember that Hitler was an excellent public speaker.
If you have a solution to this very serious problem I'm sure a lot of French people would like to hear it. Just mumbling "freedom of speech" without realizing that in the US that freedom is also severly curtailed in some areas (increasingly so in fact) also for good reasons is not helping.
The idea behind this law is that there are some kind of hate speech that should be prohibited, and for better or for worse the sale of Nazi artifacts is bundled into this, presumably for the reason that collectors have more to sell than just artifacts.
I wonder what the situation is in Israel, I'm pretty sure that it's at least as restricted as in France. Would you complain if it was an Israeli court who was after Yahoo?
Everybody including yourself is misunderstanding.
The French courts are trying to enforce French laws. So far nothing wrong with it, in fact this is what they *have* to do. If some law start not being enforced then the whole edifice crumbles (oh, that's against the law, but doesn't matter...)
Now maybe the law is bad and uninforceable, this is a different issue and not for the courts to decide. So far they are doing their job.
> "I wonder which government routinely violates the
> rights of other people in other countries more
> than any other?"
>
> France
Wrong. Do your own research to find out. The Amnesty International report is a good place to start. Also look at the list of country who refused to sign the International War Crime Court treaty, then try to deduce who is committing war crimes today and doesn't want to be prosecuted.
All the best.
Hi Bruce,
The case in question refers to *use*. The university was sued for continuing to *use* patented inventions they had no license to. I believe this is still OK to re-implement a patented technique for the purpose of comparison with a novel technique that one has developed or that one plans to develop. The article you reference is short on details but I seem to understand that the university had no intention to work on the inventions to improve them. The article seems to imply that the inventions were used in some kind of production environment.
This is the whole idea of Patents, to disclose how an invention works so that others can improve on it. The purpose of patents is to foster creativity, not stifle it.
I work in image analysis research, and I occasionally do read papers in areas that are heavily patented, such as Bayer filter interpolation (to remove colour artifacts from digital camera due to the peculiar arrangement of the colour sensors) and motion estimation. Patents are commonly cited as references and authors readily show their improved results compared to a variety of patented techniques.
It is a common practice in my field to patent some technique and then publish it. The expectation is that people will re-implement what is disclosed in the paper and everyone seems to expects that this is legal.
There are freely available libraries like the VTK that provide reference implementations of famously patented techniques such as the Marching Cubes algorithm (to transform a cube of voxels into a triangulated surface, used everywhere in medical imaging). These algorithms are in a special "patented" directory. You can compile them and presumably compare your results to what these techniques do, but you are not allowed to *use* these techniques in any production enviroment, be it for or non-profit (e.g. a public hospital) without a license.
This state of things doesn't seem to be contradicted by the referenced article, at least that's my reading of it, and I'm not a patent lawyer.
In the fake example given, pseudo-Microsoft supposedly writes that they are patenting what the author has written and published under the BSD licence. This is simply fear-mongering.
Care to explain in which way exactly does Fedora suck? Personally I've seen continuous and steady improvement from RH9 to FC1 and now FC2. Many other distributions are also very good, I use a variety both at home and at work, and I can't see any particular problem with Fedora that I can't se in any other distro in one form or another.
If anything, things improved markedly from RH9. The support is better (try it!), access to updates is much easier and automated. The releases so far have been on time and the problems encountered have not been RedHat only (the infamous XP boot bug for example). If anything RHEL 3.0 appears distincly backwards (I also use that one at work occasionally) compared to the niceties of the FC series.
I suspect a lot of people who moved from RH9 to many other distros experienced a similar lever of improvement as if they had stayed with Fedora, and that problems with the distribution have been blown out of proportion.
Fedora users haven't been left to their own devices by a greedy company, quite the contrary. Redhat only botched the PR job.
Among the major thing that RedHat has contributed to the communities are that they have hired Allan Cox. He has done a splendid job on the kernel.
They have contributed a Free, high-quality Linux installer, which is used by Debian now. They have sponsored the Gnome effort significantly. They have done a great deal to make Linux look better from the artwork to the font rendering system. They have put together great documentation on how to install and maintain a Linux system. They do a lot of QA, more than most other distros (left to the developers), and a lot of translations. Of course I fail to mention RPM, the basis for a large proportion of Linux distributions today.
They also have lots of useful open-source projects like kudzu (hardware detection & database).
Best of all their core system is still 100% completely Free in all senses of the world with no strings attached.
It is perfectly OK for you not to like it but please don't spread uninformed FUD.
This is unfair, Fedora FC1 was (is) still much much better in all respects than RH9. Even the support is better (yum! no silly up2date!, and it can be cron'ed!). FC2 wasn't as stable when it came out but largely this was due to the new 2.6 kernel. All distros that shipped that kernel had the same problems but somehow Fedora got blamed more than the others.
Fedora is actually fine, it's just the RH PR job that was botched.
Myself I like Debian dearly but I've come off it a bit. There is one problem with Debian, and that is the lack of reasonably frequent releases. No one in their right mind is going to use Debian Stable on their desktop, and Testing is only marginally better. It is not a reasonable proposition to tell people to rely on "unstable" software even if it doesn't really mean that it is unstable (crashing), just maintaining it security-wise requires a lot of downloading and a reasonable degree of care.
It creates a problem for shops trying to standardize on Debian. Which version of the "unstable" tree are you going to offer on standard? Which upgrades/updates are necessary?
My experience is that is very time consuming and left to the experience of the sysadmin. Essentially the test of the stability of the entire system is left to the user.
At least with other distributions, you can just install whatever is the latest version plus all the updates, because you know they are all maintenance. Every 6 months consider upgrading to the new release if you feel the feature set is worth it. If you have a problem, bugzilla it as "release 2 with all updates" and the developers know what your system is running.
It must be a nightmare to be a Debian developers just trying to reproduce bugs people report.
This argument is a red herring (sigh). No one can force any corporation to open up their code and no company will ever lose ownership of what they have written over a GPL issue. If a company uses a GPL library, make their software proprietary (as they are not allowed to) and are then found out, no one can force them to open up their code. They have several ways around the problem:
- they can withdraw their software from distribution;
- they can re-implement the library internally;
- they can negociate different terms than the GPL with the copyright holders of the library;
- they can interface to the library in other ways than linking with it;
- they can *choose* to licence their own code under the GPL.
The company can *choose* between these five alternatives. No one can *force* them to do anything else.
Yes it's nice to be able to use a BSD library in a proprietary product but can see why authors would rather that it didn't happen, and no one can force authors to release code under any license if they don't want to. If something is released under the GPL that you find useful but you absolutely need to release your code in a proprietary matter, then count your blessings: you can use it internally, you can study the code, you can write a thin wrapper that interfaces to the library by providing a separate process server, etc. If none of these solution will work, then sorry, you have to re-implement it, but you are still better off than if you had nothing at all, because you have at least a reference implementation that will help you iron out the bugs in your own.
Business prefer the BSD license because they are greedy, short-sighted, bottom-line oriented entities (and good for them).
This argument is a red herring.
You actually cannot patent something that has been published by someone else, the USPTO does look into this sort of thing.
Releasing something under your name with the BSD license constitutes publication. No one can patent BSD code except the authors.
This is not quite correct. The objective of Patents is to publish how technology works in return for a limited-time monopoly on distribution. It is to encourage people to try and do better (innovate). It is absolutely 100% kosher to re-implement any patented technique in-house for R&D purposes. What you cannot do is distribute that software in any way shape or form, to mere users (but it's OK to do that to testers, for example, who can be mere users).
You are correct, and anyway if Linus chose to re-licence his kernel to BSD, then someone else would make a GPL fork just for the hell of it.
The BSD license does encourage the creation of proprietary forks, e.g. Microsoft's early TCP/IP stack, Apple's Darwin, BSDI, etc, as well as free ones.
In contrast Linux hasn't forked. The various kernels put out by RedHat, SuSE and others aren't really forks at all, more like variations on the main trunk, including freely released patches not yet included in the main trunk, back-ported sections from the development kernel into the stable one, etc. They are really maintenance/stopgap changes and at any rate most worthy changes make it back into the main kernel.
I'm certain than the vast majority of Palestinians want peace and their country back. I'm also certain that most Israeli want peace and the whole of Israel under their control. The two appear to be mutually exclusive. Logic dictates that there are only three possibilities for peace: a total destruction of one, of the other, or a compromise on land issues.
When you have Arafat on one side and Sharon on the other, how likely is it that a compromise will take place? It will take a miracle.
Investing in WMDs is cheap and nasty.
One (compound) word: meta-moderate.
I found that if I send a comment, have it moderated up and I meta-moderate, presto, instand mod points.