First of all, I didn't say I had an objection to anything, nor did I say that I was upset with it. I was pointing out that those people who have the most to be upset with are in large part responsible for their own situation. Are you denying the facts behind my post, or are you just trying to twist my point so you can feel like you've proved me wrong? As for me, I am an Ivy League graduate, and I'm not in a position where the shift of job composition available to the working class towards low wage service positions is affecting me personally (at least in any direct way).
To your point about the purpose of a competitive market - a competitive market builds in a roughly fair (or "normal") profit margin for manufacturers, retailers, etc. Walmart isn't really a competitive market, because in many locales they have a location based monopoly on customers. And for many product manufacturing/marketing companies, Walmart makes up such a large portion of the market, that the market can't be considered terribly competitive from that end either. That's the precise reason that they have been able to single handedly shift the makeup of the job market, which would be quite difficult to do in a genuinely competitive market.
I have no objection to capitalism - I am an entrepreneur, I have raised money for several companies, and consider myself a willing participant in the capital markets. But I also don't have love for companies that abuse their position to take out or squeeze other companies that create goods and services that the market wants. A laissez-faire capitalist would say that Microsoft can do no wrong, because the market allows them to maintain their monopoly. A rational capitalist like myself recognizes that markets almost always are situated in the imperfection of the real world, and therefore don't always find globally optimal, moral or humane solutions to every problem.
I don't necessarily disagree with you, just pointing out the irony of the current situation of the working class in America. The question of what is "better" overall is a complicated one, since there is an issue of fragility and resiliency of an economy that's almost entirely based on services and intellectual property, rather than hard manufacturing. Laissez faire economics only works if everybody else buys into it too.
For example, a trade war with China would be devastating for the US economy at this point, and as a result our foreign policy choices are substantially constrained by our dependent relationship with a country that still has vestiges of old-style totalitarian communism along with a growing desire for empire. Tom Friedman would say that all of our hands are tied by globalization, and that's a good thing, but I'm not sure that it always is. Eventually it may get to the point where our need for China's manufacturing base is much greater than China's need for our customer base due to their increased presence in the rest of the world market - then what happens when China invades Taiwan? Can the US government afford to respond to protect an allied democratic government?
I've realized that a modest amount of regulation and control can be a good thing, since the market may be good at making efficient decisions, but it's definitely not always good at making humane decisions.
No, Walmart sells products that are made with machine tools though.
How about computer motherboards? No again?
Yes, they sell computers that contain computer motherboards. It's only one step away on the supply chain, and a very short step at that.
Steel sheet, bar, plate, tube, and specialty shapes? No luck, Huh?
Well maybe they sell iron castings. Ummm, guess not.
Well how exactly do you think the injection molded plastic parts on every gizmo at Walmart are made? Who casts the molds? Who mills the steel or aluminum? I'm sorry, but your point makes no sense. Do you think a blender company exists in a vacuum? The blender company bought blender blades and steel sheeting, and injection molding machinery, and plastic materials, and mold-making services, and mold-patterning services, and so on. Yes, I do know about the consumer products business as I'm quite involved with a company in that space. And these days, if you are getting something assembled in China, you usually source all your components in China too, since you lose the real cost savings otherwise, which means not just the blender makers, but everybody involved in the supply chain of all the components used to make the blenders.
As to whether EPA regulations have something to do with pushing manufacturers overseas, I have insufficient knowledge to comment, but I believe you that it is a factor. I never said "this is the _only_ reason jobs are moving overseas", I just said that this is _a_ reason that blue collar jobs have moved overseas, and the working class makes their own situation worse by buying into it and being the biggest patrons and defenders of Walmart.
Yes, I understand the economic forces behind why Walmart pays low skill retail workers what they pay them (I may not be an economist, but I took macro/micro and capital markets classes in college). And you missed my point entirely. The point is that Walmart's rise to retail dominance has essentially replaced higher skill, higher wage blue collar manufacturing jobs, and smaller retail businesses that created more wealth for small business owners with lots of low skill, low wage jobs.
I'm not saying that Walmart should pay other than what they pay given market conditions and legal restrictions, I'm saying that by patronizing Walmart as the working poor seem to do they are supporting an economic shift that has made them, on the whole, worse off by effecting the shift in job availability I described above. So those who purport that Walmart is good for the working class American because it makes products available at low prices are stopping short of analyzing the economic causes and consequences of those same low prices.
This is a myth. No, the part about the paycheck to paycheck people shopping at certain times is true, but the part about this being a "boon for the working class" is exactly the wrong conclusion. Do you know why the working class is poorer today than they used to be? Because they earn less money. Where do you think the jobs they used to have went? These people don't realize that by buying the cheaper products at Walmart they are quite literally subsidizing the loss of their own jobs.
Who do you think used to work at the manufacturers that were driven to source from China by Walmart? Do you think it was the educated urban elite? White collar technology workers? No, and no. It was the same working class people who are now finding themselves jobless or taking much worse jobs at lower pay than their old factory jobs, because the factories don't exist anymore, in large part due to Walmart and big box retailers disrupting the old supply chain.
You are free to think this is ultimate good or ultimately bad for the country and its citizens, but it's hard to deny that the working class has been complicit in their own demise in much of the country by being such steadfast patrons of Walmart, and active supporters in many cases. Ever talk to a person from rural Alabama and suggest to them that Walmart is bad for the country? Damn, that pisses them off, and for all the wrong reasons - they think Walmart could never do anything like this, because they employ nice local people and have senior citizens smiling and greeting you when you walk in the door. How could Walmart be costing them jobs, when you see how many people each Walmart employs? They just don't get it.
Agreed, it's one thing to expect an ISP or hosting company to put up resistance when a company sends meaningless cease and desist letters. It's another thing entirely when court orders show up on the CEO's desk and government agents show up to get the servers. What the hell would you do if you were Rackspace? Defy a court order? Tell the feds in both the US and the UK to get lost?
The biggest problem here is the gag order stuff and lack of information. I don't understand why Rackspace is unable to comment on the issue, and if they are really under a gag order, which government put that in place? It's bad enough to go around shutting down websites of even obnoxious groups like IndyMedia, but the whole super-secret double probation thing reeks of US anti-terrorist paranoid Republican bullshit. There is never a reason to not disclose why you are shutting down a journalistic organization (even of the nutty variety) or to squelch the free discussion of said shutdown by secret gag orders.
Bush's answer is misleading (surprise). Federal law only prohibits Federal courts from giving the death penalty to minor offenders. It doesn't prohibit the execution of minor offendors. As you said, if it did, it would apply to State courts as well, which it clearly doesn't since the practice goes on in several states.
This kind of answer mangling goes a bit beyond just trying to appeal to moderate young voters (which both Kerry and Bush are doing here, Nader doesn't give a shit since he's not running to win, so he says what he wants), it's genuinely misrepresentative of facts.
Explain if you will what exactly his association with her was? I was under the impression that the photo of them "together" has been fairly well debunked - they sat near each other at a rally that Jane Fonda spoke at once, and he happened to be in the background in a photo of her. See the Snopes page for details.
This was apparently well before the extremely controversial things that Jane Fonda did, and Kerry was there as a member of VVAW, along with lots of other Vietnam Veterans who opposed the war. And as far as I know they Kerry and Fonda may have even spoken directly to each other at that time, and have no other known association with each other. I went to several speeches in college given by people whose politics I agree or disagree with to various extents. So that means I'm in bed with them now?
Allow me to clue you in. Nader can afford to say what he wants because he's not going to win, he's in the race to make a point. I am a moderate Democrat and will be voting for Kerry in this election, and sure, it disappoints me that he doesn't always come out and say his point of view in a strong, clear-cut manner, but I accept that both Bush and Kerry are trying to make their positions as moderate and appealing to "swing voters" as possible right now.
For example, re: the last question, I know that Kerry doesn't plan on passing legislation to enforce his religious beliefs on the rest of the country, unlike Bush, regardless of matters of personal faith, which ought to be entirely personal. But I also know that for a lot of people in this country, they want to vote for somebody who will come out and say "I have faith, and that faith guides my moral decisions". Don't get me wrong, I do believe that Kerry is being honest and that he does have a certain degree of religious belief, but I also don't believe, based on his record and position on many other issues, that he intends to cross the line between letting his faith guide him and making faith policy.
While I appreciate what you are saying, the thing is you can assign a value to a product by asking the question "what would I have to pay a bunch of people to build this"? I don't really see how you can do that with air, since it's not produced by humans and thus not subject to monetary or economic motivations.
I agree that Linux's value to the community is "priceless" in that you can't really quantify very easily things like sense of community, the feeling of freedom and so on (well, you can generally quantify them for any one person in individual utilitarian terms, but that doesn't translate very well to dollars). But assigning a dollar value to a product in terms of creation-cost equivalence is not a completely unreasonable thing to do.
What on earth are you talking about? I don't think I've ever heard anybody on Slashdot of all places say that source-viewable is the same as Open Source. Sure, the words themselves, "Open" and "Free" are open to all sorts of vagueries of interpretation, but at least Open Source doesn't suffer from the awful confusion surrounding the catchphrase "Free Software" which seems to get translated to the altogether semantically different "freeware" as often as not in mass media articles.
As to this specific proposal, the software is not-really-open-source during the duration of the patent, it's merely source-viewable, with the guarantee that when it comes off patent it will be truly Open Source. The real difference here is that people in the Open Source camp are willing to work with corporations and accept compromises in order to ultimately expand the body of Open Source work, whereas people on the Free Software side tend to be much more absolutist, oppose software patents in all incarnations, and basically believe all software should be Free as in Speech (and beer, since it's fundamentally implied by the former condition no matter what some here may say with absurd scenario descriptions).
The OSI has a rather clear definition of Open Source available, and the very first part of the definition is Free Redistribution. You are welcome to harbor your own definition of "Open Source" or "Free Software" that differ from those endorsed by the OSI or the FSF, and nobody can stop you from doing so, but don't pretend that your definition represents that of the majority of the FOSS community, or software developers in general.
No, you missed the point. The time is put in once to make the product, and money is paid for the product by thousands of people. Unlike services where the time is paid for by the person who commissions the work. This is why software potentially has unlimited margins, and also why software is higher risk. When you run out on a barber or a software development contract, you are literally stealing somebody's time they used to perform the work. When you copy software illegally, the seller is not deprived of that time, they still have their product and are selling it. It's undeniably different and your analogy is false. I'm not saying it's right - the entire reason the developer invested the time to make the product is that they are counting on people to buy the product who want it - there is clearly a potential opportunity cost associated with the potential sale which you are depriving them of.
I've been on the receiving end of both of these, and they both feel bad (but the 15k of consulting work I got stiffed for felt much, much worse). I don't want to turn into the guy defending rampant copyright infringement, because I'm not that guy and I try not to do that. I was just trying to defend the position that the two acts aren't identical, and that the strict analogy and moral equivalence don't hold, which I still stand by.
You keep saying they've "taken something", when the software copier never took it at all, they just made a copy. The guy still has the original, unlike the chicken at Sam's Club. That doesn't make it right or okay, but it does break the moral equivalency between the actions.
I've developed plenty of commercial software, including some shareware, in the past, so I don't appreciate it at all when people try to copy my software illegally, so I usually take countermeasures against that, and accept that some people will still go to all sorts of ends to obtain software illegally, and it's just not worth worrying about them as long as enough people are being honest and playing by the rules.
Incidentally, there's a great pizza place in Harvard Square (Cambridge, MA) called Pinochio's - if you show up about 10 minutes before closing time and order one slice of pizza, they'll usually give you one or two extras for free, rather than throw the leftover away at the end of the night. Okay, I know, irrelevant to the argument at hand, but your chicken analogy reminded me of this.
I saw seven teenagers riding on one of these contraptions in the middle of 8th Avenue through early evening traffic in midtown Manhattan last week. Cabs swerving around this monstrosity, while two or three of their friends skateboarded alongside. I wanted to find all of their parents and beat them for allowing this. These things are neato and all, but they don't really belong in Manhattan. It's just a very bad accident waiting to happen.
What part of "deal without restriction" and "including, without limitation" don't you understand?
I understand those parts readily. It's the other questions that I mentioned in my previous post that are the puzzlers to me, namely (a) whether binary only distributions of incorporating works need include the license, and to what end, and (b) whether the intent of the license is to apply to incorporating works, like the GPL.
Sorry, I realized my post sounded obnoxious in that sentence - it was typed up rapidly, but wasn't made with that intent, as I realize your question was genuine.
To say that "copyright works this way" is to attribute licensing terms to convention, rather than to the terms specified in the license, such as the GPL as you point out. And as for the terms applying only to "this software"... I'm no linguist, but once that verbiage appears in a new piece of software, I'm pretty sure that convention holds that "this" now refers to the NEW software. Unless there exists some convention for explicitly scoping the terminology to apply to the original software; if so, I'd welcome hearing about such a convention.
Okay, let me respond to this in more detail then. If you included this license file in a text file included with a new work which met some definition of being a derived work _AND_ you didn't explicitly scope the license to apply to the portion of the software that was their copyrighted material, then you would be implying to the user that the license applied to the entire work. However, you do not have to do that. You can create a file called LICENSE.txt, include the licensing terms of your application, and at the bottom of the file, include a notice that says: "Portions of this work are Copyright (C) So-and-so. The following notice applies to these portions of the work...." Since you have been granted explicitly the permission to merge, distribute and sublicense (with no restriction that the entirety of your work must be placed under the same license) you would seem to be entirely within your rights to do this. When I said "this is the way copyright works" I meant that a grant of license applies within the scope of material copyrighted by the licensor only. The new or derived work is considered a separate work, with its own associated copyright, and thus can be licensed however the copyright holder wants, as long as any copyrighted works contained within that work are used within the scope of permitted license grants.
No, I truly am eager to understand. As a person with legal training, I know that if someone *can* argue something in a court of law, they *will*. That's why licenses and contracts get so explicit; to minimize the likelihood that somebody later will get confused as to who meant what.
I didn't say it was the best possible license, nor did I say it was one that I would use. However, the fact that it is commonly understood within the software community to mean one thing would definitely be a factor in the way a judge would rule on such a case. Your assertion that convention is not a part of licensing puzzles me - a large portion of jurisprudence in general is about convention, how a reasonable person would interpret a contract and so on.
However, as far as I know, the BSD and GPL licenses have a lot more substantive court time, settlements, and legal work into them. The MIT license doesn't seem to (probably because it's hard to violate and the people who use it have no intention of getting anything other than an included notice from their licenses).
On a modern project, you would be better served by using the Modified BSD, Apache Software License, or Academic Free License, which do roughly the same thing as the MIT License but are much more clear and explicit in their grants of rights, and the AFL is very clear about the "Original Work" and that the following license applies only to said "Original Work".
The license you find troublingly ambiguous is also known as the MIT License. It's identical. And the MIT License has been used for years on many successful software products. Is is as well-honed as the Modified BSD license? Not quite, but some people seem to prefer it because it's so damned simple. What part of "deal without restriction" and "including, without limitation" don't you understand? It means do whatever you want as long as you keep the Copyright notice intact somewhere in the software.
The license applies to binary and source form distributions, they are generally held to both be covered by copyright law, so they are both implicitly under the license. Almost EVERY Open Source license has this clause in it. People generally put the copyright notice in the documentation accompanying the binaries (documentation files are included in their definition of "the Software"), in a README file, or you can probably compile it as a string if you prefer. If the license doesn't specify, then anything that complies with the license can be presumed to be valid.
As for "this software", the license only applies to _this software_. Not to other software that you write, that links to this software - that's the way copyright law works, unless you put unusual clauses in place like the GPL does.
You are looking for surprises where there aren't any. This isn't some strange new license, it's just the simplest possible Open Source license (whether you think this means it's the best is a different issue).
Umm, did you look at the site? The guy rents these houses out. It's an investment property/business that doubles as a vacation home. You don't have to be insanely wealthy to do that, just have the time, energy and credit to get a mortgage for the place, and run it as a rental property. You can probably cover your mortgage payments, earn some income from it AND have an awesome vacation home in the Carribean. Frankly, I think that rocks.
However, in order to implements Leftist policies, a strong state would seem necessary.
Well, to a certain extent, a social safety net and so on do require some functions to be assumed by a central governing agency, yes. But those are beneficent functions, not authoritarian ones - a "strong" central government just means more authority is handled by that government than state or local governments. It doesn't mean the government is oppressive or seeks to deny people their personal freedoms, as an authoritarian government does.
But regardless of your stance on that, you are basically conflating two positions - economic liberalism with social liberalism. A social liberal is the diametric opposite of an authoritarian. If somebody happens to also be an economic liberal, they may be willing to accept certain tradeoffs in terms of personal freedoms (first of all, the freedom to keep 100% of your earned income to yourself) in exchange for the overall social benefit they perceive in a social safety net, national healthcare system, and other "left wing" economic policies.
Now, if you are talking about true communism, yes you absolutely need a strict authoritarian government to implement it. Even in the most egregious of welfare states, there can still be incentives to work, since people still earn money and personal property rights exist. In a communist system, at least in theory, none of these exist, so you have to motivate people to comply with the central planning commitees in some other way (usually a gun to their backs helps keep them marching forward).
The noise you hear from a PC is at least 80% from the CPU fan, power supply fan and case fan. A fanless PC is extremely quiet - hard drives do make noise, but it's quiet enough that you're not terribly likely to hear a proper, low noise harddrive in a living room unless you put your ear up right next to the box it's in.
But yes, in general, these things would be much better if they used lower power CPUs with heatpipes and fanless power supplies. In fact, more PCs in general should be designed this way as I can't stand the humming of fan noise anymore (guess I'm just getting older).
Hmm, I just found this bit, admittedly from the lead architect of C#, so I'll take with a grain of salt, but if this is true, it's a bit lame (I also found this, which is from a somewhat more trustworthy source). Damn.
Also, another piece from Bruce Eckel here. This is even more clear in its skewering of Java Generics. It really sounds like Sun dropped the ball on this one.
I would be a lot more excited about Java Generics if it was more than just syntactic sugar. It is really the worst possible template system I can think of.
I'm curious to understand this. I will admit, I've been out of the active Java development community for several years now, so I'm not exactly sure what you think is so terrible about Java generics. I just checked out the Java Generics tutorial PDF, and it looks like generics just compile to bytecode once, they don't result in separate bytecode junks for each different generic invocation, unlike a C++ template. I haven't really thought this out though, what downsides does this technique have? Presumably it means things aren't as fast as they would be without generics, but is this difference noticeable? What other problems are there with Java Generics?
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To your point about the purpose of a competitive market - a competitive market builds in a roughly fair (or "normal") profit margin for manufacturers, retailers, etc. Walmart isn't really a competitive market, because in many locales they have a location based monopoly on customers. And for many product manufacturing/marketing companies, Walmart makes up such a large portion of the market, that the market can't be considered terribly competitive from that end either. That's the precise reason that they have been able to single handedly shift the makeup of the job market, which would be quite difficult to do in a genuinely competitive market.
I have no objection to capitalism - I am an entrepreneur, I have raised money for several companies, and consider myself a willing participant in the capital markets. But I also don't have love for companies that abuse their position to take out or squeeze other companies that create goods and services that the market wants. A laissez-faire capitalist would say that Microsoft can do no wrong, because the market allows them to maintain their monopoly. A rational capitalist like myself recognizes that markets almost always are situated in the imperfection of the real world, and therefore don't always find globally optimal, moral or humane solutions to every problem.
For example, a trade war with China would be devastating for the US economy at this point, and as a result our foreign policy choices are substantially constrained by our dependent relationship with a country that still has vestiges of old-style totalitarian communism along with a growing desire for empire. Tom Friedman would say that all of our hands are tied by globalization, and that's a good thing, but I'm not sure that it always is. Eventually it may get to the point where our need for China's manufacturing base is much greater than China's need for our customer base due to their increased presence in the rest of the world market - then what happens when China invades Taiwan? Can the US government afford to respond to protect an allied democratic government?
I've realized that a modest amount of regulation and control can be a good thing, since the market may be good at making efficient decisions, but it's definitely not always good at making humane decisions.
No, Walmart sells products that are made with machine tools though.
How about computer motherboards? No again?
Yes, they sell computers that contain computer motherboards. It's only one step away on the supply chain, and a very short step at that.
Steel sheet, bar, plate, tube, and specialty shapes? No luck, Huh?
Well maybe they sell iron castings. Ummm, guess not.
Well how exactly do you think the injection molded plastic parts on every gizmo at Walmart are made? Who casts the molds? Who mills the steel or aluminum? I'm sorry, but your point makes no sense. Do you think a blender company exists in a vacuum? The blender company bought blender blades and steel sheeting, and injection molding machinery, and plastic materials, and mold-making services, and mold-patterning services, and so on. Yes, I do know about the consumer products business as I'm quite involved with a company in that space. And these days, if you are getting something assembled in China, you usually source all your components in China too, since you lose the real cost savings otherwise, which means not just the blender makers, but everybody involved in the supply chain of all the components used to make the blenders.
As to whether EPA regulations have something to do with pushing manufacturers overseas, I have insufficient knowledge to comment, but I believe you that it is a factor. I never said "this is the _only_ reason jobs are moving overseas", I just said that this is _a_ reason that blue collar jobs have moved overseas, and the working class makes their own situation worse by buying into it and being the biggest patrons and defenders of Walmart.
I'm not saying that Walmart should pay other than what they pay given market conditions and legal restrictions, I'm saying that by patronizing Walmart as the working poor seem to do they are supporting an economic shift that has made them, on the whole, worse off by effecting the shift in job availability I described above. So those who purport that Walmart is good for the working class American because it makes products available at low prices are stopping short of analyzing the economic causes and consequences of those same low prices.
Who do you think used to work at the manufacturers that were driven to source from China by Walmart? Do you think it was the educated urban elite? White collar technology workers? No, and no. It was the same working class people who are now finding themselves jobless or taking much worse jobs at lower pay than their old factory jobs, because the factories don't exist anymore, in large part due to Walmart and big box retailers disrupting the old supply chain.
You are free to think this is ultimate good or ultimately bad for the country and its citizens, but it's hard to deny that the working class has been complicit in their own demise in much of the country by being such steadfast patrons of Walmart, and active supporters in many cases. Ever talk to a person from rural Alabama and suggest to them that Walmart is bad for the country? Damn, that pisses them off, and for all the wrong reasons - they think Walmart could never do anything like this, because they employ nice local people and have senior citizens smiling and greeting you when you walk in the door. How could Walmart be costing them jobs, when you see how many people each Walmart employs? They just don't get it.
The biggest problem here is the gag order stuff and lack of information. I don't understand why Rackspace is unable to comment on the issue, and if they are really under a gag order, which government put that in place? It's bad enough to go around shutting down websites of even obnoxious groups like IndyMedia, but the whole super-secret double probation thing reeks of US anti-terrorist paranoid Republican bullshit. There is never a reason to not disclose why you are shutting down a journalistic organization (even of the nutty variety) or to squelch the free discussion of said shutdown by secret gag orders.
This kind of answer mangling goes a bit beyond just trying to appeal to moderate young voters (which both Kerry and Bush are doing here, Nader doesn't give a shit since he's not running to win, so he says what he wants), it's genuinely misrepresentative of facts.
This was apparently well before the extremely controversial things that Jane Fonda did, and Kerry was there as a member of VVAW, along with lots of other Vietnam Veterans who opposed the war. And as far as I know they Kerry and Fonda may have even spoken directly to each other at that time, and have no other known association with each other. I went to several speeches in college given by people whose politics I agree or disagree with to various extents. So that means I'm in bed with them now?
For example, re: the last question, I know that Kerry doesn't plan on passing legislation to enforce his religious beliefs on the rest of the country, unlike Bush, regardless of matters of personal faith, which ought to be entirely personal. But I also know that for a lot of people in this country, they want to vote for somebody who will come out and say "I have faith, and that faith guides my moral decisions". Don't get me wrong, I do believe that Kerry is being honest and that he does have a certain degree of religious belief, but I also don't believe, based on his record and position on many other issues, that he intends to cross the line between letting his faith guide him and making faith policy.
I agree that Linux's value to the community is "priceless" in that you can't really quantify very easily things like sense of community, the feeling of freedom and so on (well, you can generally quantify them for any one person in individual utilitarian terms, but that doesn't translate very well to dollars). But assigning a dollar value to a product in terms of creation-cost equivalence is not a completely unreasonable thing to do.
As to this specific proposal, the software is not-really-open-source during the duration of the patent, it's merely source-viewable, with the guarantee that when it comes off patent it will be truly Open Source. The real difference here is that people in the Open Source camp are willing to work with corporations and accept compromises in order to ultimately expand the body of Open Source work, whereas people on the Free Software side tend to be much more absolutist, oppose software patents in all incarnations, and basically believe all software should be Free as in Speech (and beer, since it's fundamentally implied by the former condition no matter what some here may say with absurd scenario descriptions).
The OSI has a rather clear definition of Open Source available, and the very first part of the definition is Free Redistribution. You are welcome to harbor your own definition of "Open Source" or "Free Software" that differ from those endorsed by the OSI or the FSF, and nobody can stop you from doing so, but don't pretend that your definition represents that of the majority of the FOSS community, or software developers in general.
Anybody who has Tacitus in his sig gets on my Friends list.
I've been on the receiving end of both of these, and they both feel bad (but the 15k of consulting work I got stiffed for felt much, much worse). I don't want to turn into the guy defending rampant copyright infringement, because I'm not that guy and I try not to do that. I was just trying to defend the position that the two acts aren't identical, and that the strict analogy and moral equivalence don't hold, which I still stand by.
I've developed plenty of commercial software, including some shareware, in the past, so I don't appreciate it at all when people try to copy my software illegally, so I usually take countermeasures against that, and accept that some people will still go to all sorts of ends to obtain software illegally, and it's just not worth worrying about them as long as enough people are being honest and playing by the rules.
Incidentally, there's a great pizza place in Harvard Square (Cambridge, MA) called Pinochio's - if you show up about 10 minutes before closing time and order one slice of pizza, they'll usually give you one or two extras for free, rather than throw the leftover away at the end of the night. Okay, I know, irrelevant to the argument at hand, but your chicken analogy reminded me of this.
I saw seven teenagers riding on one of these contraptions in the middle of 8th Avenue through early evening traffic in midtown Manhattan last week. Cabs swerving around this monstrosity, while two or three of their friends skateboarded alongside. I wanted to find all of their parents and beat them for allowing this. These things are neato and all, but they don't really belong in Manhattan. It's just a very bad accident waiting to happen.
And then enable the .NET framework, and turn debugging on too. They'll never Slashdot us now!
On Palm OS5 - so first you need to emulate 68k on ARM.
I understand those parts readily. It's the other questions that I mentioned in my previous post that are the puzzlers to me, namely (a) whether binary only distributions of incorporating works need include the license, and to what end, and (b) whether the intent of the license is to apply to incorporating works, like the GPL.
Sorry, I realized my post sounded obnoxious in that sentence - it was typed up rapidly, but wasn't made with that intent, as I realize your question was genuine.
To say that "copyright works this way" is to attribute licensing terms to convention, rather than to the terms specified in the license, such as the GPL as you point out. And as for the terms applying only to "this software"... I'm no linguist, but once that verbiage appears in a new piece of software, I'm pretty sure that convention holds that "this" now refers to the NEW software. Unless there exists some convention for explicitly scoping the terminology to apply to the original software; if so, I'd welcome hearing about such a convention.
Okay, let me respond to this in more detail then. If you included this license file in a text file included with a new work which met some definition of being a derived work _AND_ you didn't explicitly scope the license to apply to the portion of the software that was their copyrighted material, then you would be implying to the user that the license applied to the entire work. However, you do not have to do that. You can create a file called LICENSE.txt, include the licensing terms of your application, and at the bottom of the file, include a notice that says: "Portions of this work are Copyright (C) So-and-so. The following notice applies to these portions of the work. ..." Since you have been granted explicitly the permission to merge, distribute and sublicense (with no restriction that the entirety of your work must be placed under the same license) you would seem to be entirely within your rights to do this. When I said "this is the way copyright works" I meant that a grant of license applies within the scope of material copyrighted by the licensor only. The new or derived work is considered a separate work, with its own associated copyright, and thus can be licensed however the copyright holder wants, as long as any copyrighted works contained within that work are used within the scope of permitted license grants.
No, I truly am eager to understand. As a person with legal training, I know that if someone *can* argue something in a court of law, they *will*. That's why licenses and contracts get so explicit; to minimize the likelihood that somebody later will get confused as to who meant what.
I didn't say it was the best possible license, nor did I say it was one that I would use. However, the fact that it is commonly understood within the software community to mean one thing would definitely be a factor in the way a judge would rule on such a case. Your assertion that convention is not a part of licensing puzzles me - a large portion of jurisprudence in general is about convention, how a reasonable person would interpret a contract and so on.
However, as far as I know, the BSD and GPL licenses have a lot more substantive court time, settlements, and legal work into them. The MIT license doesn't seem to (probably because it's hard to violate and the people who use it have no intention of getting anything other than an included notice from their licenses).
On a modern project, you would be better served by using the Modified BSD, Apache Software License, or Academic Free License, which do roughly the same thing as the MIT License but are much more clear and explicit in their grants of rights, and the AFL is very clear about the "Original Work" and that the following license applies only to said "Original Work".
The license applies to binary and source form distributions, they are generally held to both be covered by copyright law, so they are both implicitly under the license. Almost EVERY Open Source license has this clause in it. People generally put the copyright notice in the documentation accompanying the binaries (documentation files are included in their definition of "the Software"), in a README file, or you can probably compile it as a string if you prefer. If the license doesn't specify, then anything that complies with the license can be presumed to be valid.
As for "this software", the license only applies to _this software_. Not to other software that you write, that links to this software - that's the way copyright law works, unless you put unusual clauses in place like the GPL does.
You are looking for surprises where there aren't any. This isn't some strange new license, it's just the simplest possible Open Source license (whether you think this means it's the best is a different issue).
Umm, did you look at the site? The guy rents these houses out. It's an investment property/business that doubles as a vacation home. You don't have to be insanely wealthy to do that, just have the time, energy and credit to get a mortgage for the place, and run it as a rental property. You can probably cover your mortgage payments, earn some income from it AND have an awesome vacation home in the Carribean. Frankly, I think that rocks.
However, in order to implements Leftist policies, a strong state would seem necessary.
Well, to a certain extent, a social safety net and so on do require some functions to be assumed by a central governing agency, yes. But those are beneficent functions, not authoritarian ones - a "strong" central government just means more authority is handled by that government than state or local governments. It doesn't mean the government is oppressive or seeks to deny people their personal freedoms, as an authoritarian government does.
But regardless of your stance on that, you are basically conflating two positions - economic liberalism with social liberalism. A social liberal is the diametric opposite of an authoritarian. If somebody happens to also be an economic liberal, they may be willing to accept certain tradeoffs in terms of personal freedoms (first of all, the freedom to keep 100% of your earned income to yourself) in exchange for the overall social benefit they perceive in a social safety net, national healthcare system, and other "left wing" economic policies.
Now, if you are talking about true communism, yes you absolutely need a strict authoritarian government to implement it. Even in the most egregious of welfare states, there can still be incentives to work, since people still earn money and personal property rights exist. In a communist system, at least in theory, none of these exist, so you have to motivate people to comply with the central planning commitees in some other way (usually a gun to their backs helps keep them marching forward).
But yes, in general, these things would be much better if they used lower power CPUs with heatpipes and fanless power supplies. In fact, more PCs in general should be designed this way as I can't stand the humming of fan noise anymore (guess I'm just getting older).
Or pickle/unpickle, if you're kinky. Or a Python programmer.
Also, another piece from Bruce Eckel here. This is even more clear in its skewering of Java Generics. It really sounds like Sun dropped the ball on this one.
I would be a lot more excited about Java Generics if it was more than just syntactic sugar. It is really the worst possible template system I can think of.
I'm curious to understand this. I will admit, I've been out of the active Java development community for several years now, so I'm not exactly sure what you think is so terrible about Java generics. I just checked out the Java Generics tutorial PDF, and it looks like generics just compile to bytecode once, they don't result in separate bytecode junks for each different generic invocation, unlike a C++ template. I haven't really thought this out though, what downsides does this technique have? Presumably it means things aren't as fast as they would be without generics, but is this difference noticeable? What other problems are there with Java Generics?