Because you pay to play WoW. Companies have free sweepstakes all the time. The difference is that with a sweepstakes there's always an option to sign up to win the prize without actually buying anything. That process makes it not gambling. But if you have to pay to play WoW in order to be eligible to win the prizes, then that's gambling.
What you're suggesting is that WoW becomes an online gambling institution. Online gambling in the U.S. has Byzantine legal restrictions upon it thanks to our freedom-loving Republican Party.
Until those gambling laws are repealed, it ain't gonna happen.
Oh for God's sake. Every time somebody breaks a rule, somebody else wants to say that it's Civil Disobedience. This is not Civil Disobedience.
Civil Disobedience is when a party breaks a law knowingly, and advises the authorities about the rule breaking ahead of time in an effort to draw attention to the existence of a bad law.
This guy didn't break a law. He broke his company's rules. He didn't advise them about it ahead of time. He wasn't trying to highlight a bad rule. All he did was break a rule and get caught.
I think you're missing the point. Their goal is not to actually bring about a change in the real world. Their point is to take a principled stand so that they know that they're more pure than other people.
The simple answer is probably that from the 1700s until the 1930s American culture developed more or less in isolation, while at the same time the U.K. was exporting its culture through imperialism.
Now it's the U.S. who is the Imperialists. So perhaps in 100 years, Baseball and American Football will be popular all over the world.
Let's see. We live in a surveillance society under a burgeoning police state which is interested in tracking all your reading material to make sure that you're not reading anything too dangerous.
It's really handy that I can open my World Wide Web browser, and using TCP/IP, navigate to discovermagazine.com which uses PLONE running on Linux to serve an an HTML document telling me how useless open-source software is.
Oh, but it does matter. I experienced first hand why it matters. I, and many other bloggers, started using it when it was FOSS. Then one day without warning, they stopped releasing it open source, and released all subsequent versions closed up. So now I have a Website that I can't get security upgrades for, and there is no FOSS community capable of making security upgrades to the old version, since there was never any need for it.
Sure, we could build a developer community from scratch to patch a now forked and dead branch of a no-longer developed application, and do it in a big hurry, but what are the odds of that actually happening in real life? Very small.
And of course now I have time invested in programming themes and modules for Movable Type that are now worthless to me, unless I want to stick with version 2.2 forever.
So instead people moved to a different platform -- one that won't screw us over again.
Remember that Movable Type used to be free, and then they unexpectedly.started charging for it. I remember because I was using Movable Type for free at the time, and then found myself being told from out of the blue that I have to pay for an upgrade.
As soon as they slapped a price and legal requirements on the previously free Movable Type, hundreds of thousands of bloggers collectively said, "Oh gee, thanks a lot." and left. They felt snookered, and they were. They had been lead to expect that it was going to be a FOSS product in perpetuity, and it wasn't.
I don't care if they're GPLing this version of MT. Who knows when they'll change their mind again? And I'll get stuck with a broken system. Sure, Six Apart says now that it will be open source and free forever, but how are they bound to that advertising claim? I'm sure they could find a way to wriggle around it if they change their mind in the future just like they did before.
Is there a way to find out where and when the Googlemobile will be driving past my house so that I can be standing outside dressed as a pirate?
They have a schedule, it exists somewhere. How can I find it?
No right to exist? How exactly did you want to enforce that? The software police? Are the cops going to have to certify every piece of software as free enough before you're allowed to release it?
I would maintain that DRM has every right to exist, and that right should not be restricted by the government. If you're stupid enough to use DRM, then that's your own dumb fault.
Sound reproduction is technically better on a CD, however that's not all there is to being technically better. A well taken care of record collection can last for a very long time. A CD, with one scratch, becomes useless. Vinyl degrades gracefully, and that is a technically superiority.
I would suggest that you read more history. An armed revolution, even when backed by a just cause, will almost always merely institute chaos. The thing with a revolution is that you have to be able to practically guarantee that the country will be better after your revolution than it was before it.
Are there deeply seated problems with the functioning of our Republic right now? Yes. Will an armed revolution only make it worse? Yes.
What a good idea. Of course, if the nuclear powered shuttle encounters technical difficulties and (worst case scenario) explodes in flight, the atomic bomb fallout could kill millions of people.
But what am I worried about? It's not like a space shuttle has ever exploded. These things are safe, right?
But this Windows forced update was found out, and Windows users can switch to Linux today, and yet they're not. I just don't think users care nearly as much as both of us wish they did.
Who cares if its long term suicide if your one hit job on an apt-get repository gets you a big score?
And anyway, I'm still not buying your argument that it won't fly in OSS. It obviously flies in Windows. People are apparently ready, willing, and able to put up with it on one system. Why would it make any difference if it's on another operating system?
If, in some potential future, Ubuntu comes on every Dell, then the average user would have exactly as much OS installation expertise as they do now, which is to say, none. If Ubuntu replaces Windows, a break in at the apt-get repository (or a rogue admin on the inside) has enough power to do just about anything to millions of computers world wide. Open source or no, a centralized repository is a gold mine for a Bad Person.
You assume that users care, or even understand what you're talking about. If in some potential future everybody used Linux, the average computer user would still not have inclination to do anything but accept whatever is sent to him by his software source.
If the source is open, it still doesn't matter if most people don't understand what the source code means. Once a Linux distribution has a large enough user base, people will stick with what they know. If the repository is manipulated by ne'er-do-wells to ill ends, even if the nerds catch it, the average user still has to know enough to switch to a better distribution. Will the average user ever care that much? Doubtful.
"What is the single biggest issue that bothers open source advocates about proprietary software? It is probably the ability of the vendor to pull stunts like Microsoft's recent stealth software update...
Hey, I like Linux too, but there's nothing about open source software that prevents a software distributor from being able to do this exact same thing. Microsoft could have released their source code prior to this update and still been just as able to install this upgrade on computers worldwide without user consent.
If the people who maintain the apt-get repositories wanted to install a program on practically every Ubuntu computer in the world, they could do it too.
This is not an issue which concerns the antipathy between free/open source and proprietary/profit oriented software. It's an issue with a networked repository software version control system.
If you've decided to base your livelihood on the hope that people won't use a computer, a machine whose primary purpose is to copy bits, not to copy your bits, then you don't have a very good plan to begin with.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone can review Wikipedia, but in the real world, only people with spare time and adjendas do review Wikipedia.
Because you pay to play WoW. Companies have free sweepstakes all the time. The difference is that with a sweepstakes there's always an option to sign up to win the prize without actually buying anything. That process makes it not gambling. But if you have to pay to play WoW in order to be eligible to win the prizes, then that's gambling.
What you're suggesting is that WoW becomes an online gambling institution. Online gambling in the U.S. has Byzantine legal restrictions upon it thanks to our freedom-loving Republican Party.
Until those gambling laws are repealed, it ain't gonna happen.
Oh for God's sake. Every time somebody breaks a rule, somebody else wants to say that it's Civil Disobedience. This is not Civil Disobedience.
Civil Disobedience is when a party breaks a law knowingly, and advises the authorities about the rule breaking ahead of time in an effort to draw attention to the existence of a bad law.
This guy didn't break a law. He broke his company's rules. He didn't advise them about it ahead of time. He wasn't trying to highlight a bad rule. All he did was break a rule and get caught.
In Soviet Russia, SSH Multi-Threads You.
I think you're missing the point. Their goal is not to actually bring about a change in the real world. Their point is to take a principled stand so that they know that they're more pure than other people.
The simple answer is probably that from the 1700s until the 1930s American culture developed more or less in isolation, while at the same time the U.K. was exporting its culture through imperialism.
Now it's the U.S. who is the Imperialists. So perhaps in 100 years, Baseball and American Football will be popular all over the world.
You would think so, wouldn't you?
Except Joe Lieberman and John McCain just keep getting reelected.
Your conclusions don't match the facts. It would appear that one of your premises, or your reasoning is faulty.
Let's see. We live in a surveillance society under a burgeoning police state which is interested in tracking all your reading material to make sure that you're not reading anything too dangerous.
Remind me again why I don't go to the library?
It's really handy that I can open my World Wide Web browser, and using TCP/IP, navigate to discovermagazine.com which uses PLONE running on Linux to serve an an HTML document telling me how useless open-source software is.
(cite: http://plone.net/case-studies/discover-magazine)
Oh, but it does matter. I experienced first hand why it matters. I, and many other bloggers, started using it when it was FOSS. Then one day without warning, they stopped releasing it open source, and released all subsequent versions closed up. So now I have a Website that I can't get security upgrades for, and there is no FOSS community capable of making security upgrades to the old version, since there was never any need for it.
Sure, we could build a developer community from scratch to patch a now forked and dead branch of a no-longer developed application, and do it in a big hurry, but what are the odds of that actually happening in real life? Very small.
And of course now I have time invested in programming themes and modules for Movable Type that are now worthless to me, unless I want to stick with version 2.2 forever.
So instead people moved to a different platform -- one that won't screw us over again.
Remember that Movable Type used to be free, and then they unexpectedly.started charging for it. I remember because I was using Movable Type for free at the time, and then found myself being told from out of the blue that I have to pay for an upgrade.
As soon as they slapped a price and legal requirements on the previously free Movable Type, hundreds of thousands of bloggers collectively said, "Oh gee, thanks a lot." and left. They felt snookered, and they were. They had been lead to expect that it was going to be a FOSS product in perpetuity, and it wasn't.
I don't care if they're GPLing this version of MT. Who knows when they'll change their mind again? And I'll get stuck with a broken system. Sure, Six Apart says now that it will be open source and free forever, but how are they bound to that advertising claim? I'm sure they could find a way to wriggle around it if they change their mind in the future just like they did before.
Yeah. This will probably chance police policy. Cops really care what the U.N. thinks.
Is there a way to find out where and when the Googlemobile will be driving past my house so that I can be standing outside dressed as a pirate? They have a schedule, it exists somewhere. How can I find it?
You'd think that, and you'd be wrong. B&M Casinos are remarkably short sighted. However, they are starting to come around.
No right to exist? How exactly did you want to enforce that? The software police? Are the cops going to have to certify every piece of software as free enough before you're allowed to release it?
I would maintain that DRM has every right to exist, and that right should not be restricted by the government. If you're stupid enough to use DRM, then that's your own dumb fault.
Sound reproduction is technically better on a CD, however that's not all there is to being technically better. A well taken care of record collection can last for a very long time. A CD, with one scratch, becomes useless. Vinyl degrades gracefully, and that is a technically superiority.
I would suggest that you read more history. An armed revolution, even when backed by a just cause, will almost always merely institute chaos. The thing with a revolution is that you have to be able to practically guarantee that the country will be better after your revolution than it was before it.
Are there deeply seated problems with the functioning of our Republic right now? Yes. Will an armed revolution only make it worse? Yes.
What a good idea. Of course, if the nuclear powered shuttle encounters technical difficulties and (worst case scenario) explodes in flight, the atomic bomb fallout could kill millions of people.
But what am I worried about? It's not like a space shuttle has ever exploded. These things are safe, right?
But this Windows forced update was found out, and Windows users can switch to Linux today, and yet they're not. I just don't think users care nearly as much as both of us wish they did.
Who cares if its long term suicide if your one hit job on an apt-get repository gets you a big score?
And anyway, I'm still not buying your argument that it won't fly in OSS. It obviously flies in Windows. People are apparently ready, willing, and able to put up with it on one system. Why would it make any difference if it's on another operating system?
If, in some potential future, Ubuntu comes on every Dell, then the average user would have exactly as much OS installation expertise as they do now, which is to say, none. If Ubuntu replaces Windows, a break in at the apt-get repository (or a rogue admin on the inside) has enough power to do just about anything to millions of computers world wide. Open source or no, a centralized repository is a gold mine for a Bad Person.
You assume that users care, or even understand what you're talking about. If in some potential future everybody used Linux, the average computer user would still not have inclination to do anything but accept whatever is sent to him by his software source.
If the source is open, it still doesn't matter if most people don't understand what the source code means. Once a Linux distribution has a large enough user base, people will stick with what they know. If the repository is manipulated by ne'er-do-wells to ill ends, even if the nerds catch it, the average user still has to know enough to switch to a better distribution. Will the average user ever care that much? Doubtful.
Hey, I like Linux too, but there's nothing about open source software that prevents a software distributor from being able to do this exact same thing. Microsoft could have released their source code prior to this update and still been just as able to install this upgrade on computers worldwide without user consent.
If the people who maintain the apt-get repositories wanted to install a program on practically every Ubuntu computer in the world, they could do it too.
This is not an issue which concerns the antipathy between free/open source and proprietary/profit oriented software. It's an issue with a networked repository software version control system.
If you've decided to base your livelihood on the hope that people won't use a computer, a machine whose primary purpose is to copy bits, not to copy your bits, then you don't have a very good plan to begin with.
Ringle? Wasn't he the drummer for The Beatles?