Fighting till the end is not about the honour. It's about resisting something that you can't tolerate, it's about being able to protect your own cultural and/or ethnic identity and way of thinking.
If you agree to lose that in order to survive, you lose a significant part of what you are. Sometimes it can't help you survive either (Jews, Slavic people).
You forget that there are enemies that cannot be reasoned with, that cannot be persuaded logically, bribed or anything and who oppose the very your existence. Surrendering to those forces is pointless, it's better to suicide.
That's why we Russians fought so fanatically at Moscow and in Stalingrad, when everything seemed to be lost and situation looked hopeless. You Europeans (except for the British, Finnish and Germans, who also fought till the end) cannot afford having your own way of life. You need someone to protect you from ones challenging that. You are an unreliable ally... sorry to say that.
Based on current trends, Russia's present population doesn't necessarily serve as an argument that it is a major player worth taking into account. The birthrate of ethnic Russians is going down quickly, the birthrate of minorities (many of which, like the Finno-Ugrian Mari, support Estonia against Moscow) is going up, not to mention the huge presence of Chinese squatters all over the Russian Far East. Russia is going from a big, strong important nation to one very close to being torn apart. That's why a lot of people think bullying Estonia and trying to re-establish a sphere of influence is a sign of desperation. You know, even if Russia's population halved today, it would still be larger than Iran, let alone Iraq. You can't ignore opinion of such a large group of people being in your direct neighbourhood, nor you can't prevent them from flooding the neighbouring EU countries (e.g. if civil war breaks out in Russia), and becoming an important minority in those.
Isolationist policy won't help here. It would help for overseas territories like US, but it won't for EU. EU is setting a time bomb by trying to isolate itself from Russia. The more open the borders are, the better people will understand (and know) each other -> better stability in the region. You won't consider guys you went to college with as your mortal enemies, at least it's not that likely:>
For Russians, the victory over Nazis is an important part of national identity. For Estonians, the enmity towards Russia is the same thing.
Both sides' behavior is immature. Estonia exaggerates Russia's role in the country's troubled past (some even go that far to claim that siding with Nazi Germany would be a better option, or at least no worse), and treats all of its past and present citizens siding with Russians as traitors, which is obviously wrong (if that's their cultural preference and/or heritage, why blame them for what they are, which only antagonizes them?). OTOH, Russians are ignorant about the outside world and don't really care about international opinion, behaving like Russia spanned the entire globe. Neither of country is trying to understand the other's POV.
Given the new barriers that are emerging between the countries (EU borders etc), I don't think that both sides will be able to learn more about each other. The stereotypes you are referring to are likely to remain and the situation will only get worse.
P.S. I'm a Russian citizen, though not pure Russian ethnically. Having said that, I am likely to be considered biased from now on, but I tried hard to abstract myself from any particular POV when writing this.
Estonians should get real and find the ways to cooperate with Russia, not to pretend that Russia does not exist. You just can't deliberately ignore a 100 mln people living next to you, not to mention enraging them. You should account for their feelings when making political decisions.
And that does not mean that Estonia should give up its sovereignty. You just cannot be totally independent from your neighbours. Estonia is no island.
Sure, proprietary software is also able to monopolize the market. But that situation can be fixed by means of anti-monopoly laws and/or software owner going bankrupt (what will eventually happen to Microsoft, hopefully). At the very least, you can make a bargain with software owner and pay for incorporating parts of its software into yours one.
With GPL everything is different. if GPL'd software dominates the market, it will likely stay that way for ever - over time, it'll become infeasible for proprietary software to rewrite everything from scratch to catch up with existing GPL'd application (and they cannot use GPL'd code). That market will be closed for all software except GPL'd forks/branches - see peer-to-peer software as an example.
In an extreme situation of the whole OS going GPL, you cannot even create a closed source application for that OS, unless you also implement your own non-GPL libc and all the other system libraries you link against.
So the bottom line is: GPL makes creation of closed source private-owned applications infeasible. That way, GPL'd software can be seen as a "community monopoly" in software market.
Well... and they are bad, aren't they? Sometimes they can be used for achieving something, that couldn't be achieved without them, but in general, the less often guns are used, the better.
What makes me sad is that my fellow countrymen are embracing community property again. Linux will now be mandatorily installed in schools instead of Windows (and already is being installed), even military created its own distro... But that's Russia with all its duality. I can't understand though why cybercommunism is that popular in such an individualist country as USA is.
I have read all the replies... Okay, I don't want to argue, it just gets me modded as Troll. But remember: community property is bad. We learned that hard way.
With GPL, a single product can monopolize the market. The community (or, more exactly, the largest organized group within community, e.g. a company like RedHat) will prevent smaller companies trying to "reinvent the wheel" with alternative (perhaps closed-source) products from joining the market.
If the whole world turns GPL, it will be the same collective labour we had in USSR (I'm Russian) when no one cares about the things being done and everyone "owns" everything (in theory), but only ones having real power (aforementioned Red Hat) will shape the development. How easy is it to create a competition to, say, gcc?
You can try immigrating abroad. Americans that come to Russia (and work for western companies) earn pretty good money... not to mention that they can allow themselves a better lifestyle.
Well... I'd rather predict the opposite: sooner or later cars will be sold with their engine compartment shut to prevent "unathorized" opening, so it can only serviced in service centers. That's how every industry grows: in the beginning every driver was also a technician, then the roles started to separate and finally they are completely independent of each other. Specialization is a tool that our society is built upon, so why do you think that anyone except software engineers will be interested in source code?
I'm software engineer myself, but I don't expect everyone to behave like me even now, let alone in the future, when our industry finally matures:-)
Just a sidenote: copyright is important for GFDL and GPL as well. Without copyright law, GPL'd code becomes essentially BSD-licensed one, if not public domain. That is what commercial software vendors doing here in Russia, since they perfectly know that it's really unlikely for any Russian court to even understand what GPL violation is, let alone punish it. Thus "free software" is also being pirated, not by its users, but by competing vendors.
Why not go for floating point color then? All the modern hardware is well optimized for floating point processing (SSE on CPU, CUDA on GPU etc etc). The memory impact is bearable given amount of RAM professional artists tend to have.
Yes, I remember that they still had VAX in my university (I'm Russian) even back in the 1990-s. We even had a few lessons on it (but not anything VMS- or architecture specific). From what I know, that VAX had been smuggled in 1980s with help of some African or Scandinavian proxy (COCOM made it impossible to buy from US firms directly), so it wasn't a clone (although clones did exist).
Russia had two major branches in its hardware industry: one based on reverse-engineered clones and a "domestic" one. Neither branch was superior to western designs (although "domestic" Elbrus was a kind of exception), and software side was exceptionally poor. We had Unix port, called DEMOS and also ports of RT-11. Infamous Chernobyl power plant ran a version of Soviet RT-11 clone as its control system.
And by the way, GPL is also widely violated in Russia - not only by end-users, who redistribute livecds with binary drivers installed, but by commercial software vendors as well. You'd be amazed to learn how often people don't understand that they just can't get the GPL'd code and cut'n'paste it into their own (closed source) program. There are also cases that people intentionally ignore GPL licensing terms, because they know that no Russian court will ever be able to even understand the matter, let alone punish them.
So the lack of "copyright monopoly" is a double-edged sword.
Well, yes, and you can buy "western" software in the shop for $3 and get a receipt for that - see here, here and here (pictures are from april'2006, so is the rouble/dollar exchange rate). Actually, most people don't really understand that they are doing something illegal - you have to explain them that Windows + Office don't cost that low and what they are buying is not original version. (To be frank, situation improved a bit since 2006, because of WTO requirements - now you can at least see legal software in the shops, though still mixed with pirated one).
But for me as a software developer, that's not really good. I like coding software and I want to be paid for that. I don't want to work as tech support consultant, doing coding in my free time (if I have one). Moreover, if I want to create computer games, I don't have an option of providing support - most games don't require extensive and prolonged support except for patching some driver problems and bugfixing, because end users are technically savvy enough.
So... Ok, Red Hat may be doing well with their business model (although I still suspect that they would have earned more if they were also able to sell the OS itself) because for large companies support is valued more than the software itself, but I don't see that possibility for desktop software vendors, whose users don't care about support that much and are too numerous to be effectively supported anyway...
Anyway, such 'monopoly' is non-existent in Russia:( We the ISV (or our publisher, to be more precise) have to prevent copying our stuff before enough copies are sold to pay for its development, and if the pirates manage to crack and mass-produce it before this, we lose. Our courts and government are too weak and slow to help enforce the copyright anyway, so it's basically up to us.
If you want the same situation in your country... well. Consider moving to Russia first to test how it feels;-)
Hmm... I don't know whether relying purely on support (like Red Hat) would provide us with enough income. And it would probably be harder to meet milestones/deadlines, too. I myself participate in an open source project in my free time (wormux) and there's always a problem to meet a milestone. It seems to me that the most of FOSS projects have the same problem as well (see Debian or FreeBSD for reference).
To sum it up: while you may be right with the first point, I strongly disagree with you on your second point. FOSS is developed mostly by people that have the free time (and who are paid from other sources, be it parents or academic institutions, sometimes commercial software development), while commercial software [usually] pays for itself... I don't see any government monopoly behind commercial software development (could you elaborate on this, if you please?), but that might be due to the fact that I'm Russian and don't know much about how US government works.
Ok, but if my company sells the software, how can it benefit from that magnification? It's pretty apparent that the project itself will get better, larger and so on after being open-sourced, but now everyone will be able to download the sources, compile them and use for themselves, without paying us anything.
Well, that's perhaps due to stereotype that you Americans have more control on your government than any other nation (widely popularized by US movie industry). And that's also due to the fact that people (everywhere) don't really like gray shades and blurred borders - it's easier to think about US as of homogeneous country where everyone holds the same opinion. You think the same of Russia as well (we're all enemy and communists), don't you?:-)
Well, I have an answer to my own question - all that matters is how unique the sequence is. That's actually a measure of how hard it is to generate the same sequence without any knowledge of the original.
Thus, the less unique your sequence is, the less you own it. That makes IP pretty different from usual "real life" property, which does not depend on the amount of work put into it (only its price does, but not the ownership).
"What the sequence represents" should not affect the ability to copyright it. Otherwise, it would mean that x86 users might not respect copyrights of PPC software (if they ever happen to pirate that) - the sequence in question is meaningless for them.
But binary executable, mp3 file, a movie file and all the other things that are copyrighted are ultimately just a sequence of numbers. You can theoretically copy them by remembering all those numbers if you have a phenomenal memory and ability to type quickly.
Code/music/data are no more than a sequence (pretty large sometimes) of numbers, that is, bytes.
If I came up with sequence, say, 5, 10, 11, 35, 255 - can I claim it to be my property and sue you for copying it? If not, how long should such sequence be in order to allow this?
Slashdot Mirror
Fighting till the end is not about the honour. It's about resisting something that you can't tolerate, it's about being able to protect your own cultural and/or ethnic identity and way of thinking.
If you agree to lose that in order to survive, you lose a significant part of what you are. Sometimes it can't help you survive either (Jews, Slavic people).
You forget that there are enemies that cannot be reasoned with, that cannot be persuaded logically, bribed or anything and who oppose the very your existence. Surrendering to those forces is pointless, it's better to suicide.
That's why we Russians fought so fanatically at Moscow and in Stalingrad, when everything seemed to be lost and situation looked hopeless. You Europeans (except for the British, Finnish and Germans, who also fought till the end) cannot afford having your own way of life. You need someone to protect you from ones challenging that. You are an unreliable ally... sorry to say that.
Isolationist policy won't help here. It would help for overseas territories like US, but it won't for EU. EU is setting a time bomb by trying to isolate itself from Russia. The more open the borders are, the better people will understand (and know) each other -> better stability in the region. You won't consider guys you went to college with as your mortal enemies, at least it's not that likely
For Russians, the victory over Nazis is an important part of national identity. For Estonians, the enmity towards Russia is the same thing.
Both sides' behavior is immature. Estonia exaggerates Russia's role in the country's troubled past (some even go that far to claim that siding with Nazi Germany would be a better option, or at least no worse), and treats all of its past and present citizens siding with Russians as traitors, which is obviously wrong (if that's their cultural preference and/or heritage, why blame them for what they are, which only antagonizes them?). OTOH, Russians are ignorant about the outside world and don't really care about international opinion, behaving like Russia spanned the entire globe. Neither of country is trying to understand the other's POV.
Given the new barriers that are emerging between the countries (EU borders etc), I don't think that both sides will be able to learn more about each other. The stereotypes you are referring to are likely to remain and the situation will only get worse.
P.S. I'm a Russian citizen, though not pure Russian ethnically. Having said that, I am likely to be considered biased from now on, but I tried hard to abstract myself from any particular POV when writing this.
Estonians should get real and find the ways to cooperate with Russia, not to pretend that Russia does not exist. You just can't deliberately ignore a 100 mln people living next to you, not to mention enraging them. You should account for their feelings when making political decisions.
And that does not mean that Estonia should give up its sovereignty. You just cannot be totally independent from your neighbours. Estonia is no island.
Sure, proprietary software is also able to monopolize the market. But that situation can be fixed by means of anti-monopoly laws and/or software owner going bankrupt (what will eventually happen to Microsoft, hopefully). At the very least, you can make a bargain with software owner and pay for incorporating parts of its software into yours one.
With GPL everything is different. if GPL'd software dominates the market, it will likely stay that way for ever - over time, it'll become infeasible for proprietary software to rewrite everything from scratch to catch up with existing GPL'd application (and they cannot use GPL'd code). That market will be closed for all software except GPL'd forks/branches - see peer-to-peer software as an example.
In an extreme situation of the whole OS going GPL, you cannot even create a closed source application for that OS, unless you also implement your own non-GPL libc and all the other system libraries you link against.
So the bottom line is: GPL makes creation of closed source private-owned applications infeasible. That way, GPL'd software can be seen as a "community monopoly" in software market.
Well... and they are bad, aren't they? Sometimes they can be used for achieving something, that couldn't be achieved without them, but in general, the less often guns are used, the better.
What makes me sad is that my fellow countrymen are embracing community property again. Linux will now be mandatorily installed in schools instead of Windows (and already is being installed), even military created its own distro... But that's Russia with all its duality. I can't understand though why cybercommunism is that popular in such an individualist country as USA is.
I have read all the replies... Okay, I don't want to argue, it just gets me modded as Troll. But remember: community property is bad. We learned that hard way.
With GPL, a single product can monopolize the market. The community (or, more exactly, the largest organized group within community, e.g. a company like RedHat) will prevent smaller companies trying to "reinvent the wheel" with alternative (perhaps closed-source) products from joining the market.
If the whole world turns GPL, it will be the same collective labour we had in USSR (I'm Russian) when no one cares about the things being done and everyone "owns" everything (in theory), but only ones having real power (aforementioned Red Hat) will shape the development. How easy is it to create a competition to, say, gcc?
GPL is a way to stagnation.
GPL can create a mega-corporation the same way as USSR created a mega-corporation out of itself (although it was supposed to be people's property).
You can try immigrating abroad. Americans that come to Russia (and work for western companies) earn pretty good money... not to mention that they can allow themselves a better lifestyle.
Well... I'd rather predict the opposite: sooner or later cars will be sold with their engine compartment shut to prevent "unathorized" opening, so it can only serviced in service centers. That's how every industry grows: in the beginning every driver was also a technician, then the roles started to separate and finally they are completely independent of each other. Specialization is a tool that our society is built upon, so why do you think that anyone except software engineers will be interested in source code?
:-)
I'm software engineer myself, but I don't expect everyone to behave like me even now, let alone in the future, when our industry finally matures
Just a sidenote: copyright is important for GFDL and GPL as well. Without copyright law, GPL'd code becomes essentially BSD-licensed one, if not public domain. That is what commercial software vendors doing here in Russia, since they perfectly know that it's really unlikely for any Russian court to even understand what GPL violation is, let alone punish it. Thus "free software" is also being pirated, not by its users, but by competing vendors.
Why not go for floating point color then? All the modern hardware is well optimized for floating point processing (SSE on CPU, CUDA on GPU etc etc). The memory impact is bearable given amount of RAM professional artists tend to have.
:)
16 bit sucks
Yes, I remember that they still had VAX in my university (I'm Russian) even back in the 1990-s. We even had a few lessons on it (but not anything VMS- or architecture specific). From what I know, that VAX had been smuggled in 1980s with help of some African or Scandinavian proxy (COCOM made it impossible to buy from US firms directly), so it wasn't a clone (although clones did exist).
Russia had two major branches in its hardware industry: one based on reverse-engineered clones and a "domestic" one. Neither branch was superior to western designs (although "domestic" Elbrus was a kind of exception), and software side was exceptionally poor. We had Unix port, called DEMOS and also ports of RT-11. Infamous Chernobyl power plant ran a version of Soviet RT-11 clone as its control system.
And by the way, GPL is also widely violated in Russia - not only by end-users, who redistribute livecds with binary drivers installed, but by commercial software vendors as well. You'd be amazed to learn how often people don't understand that they just can't get the GPL'd code and cut'n'paste it into their own (closed source) program. There are also cases that people intentionally ignore GPL licensing terms, because they know that no Russian court will ever be able to even understand the matter, let alone punish them.
So the lack of "copyright monopoly" is a double-edged sword.
Well, yes, and you can buy "western" software in the shop for $3 and get a receipt for that - see here, here and here (pictures are from april'2006, so is the rouble/dollar exchange rate). Actually, most people don't really understand that they are doing something illegal - you have to explain them that Windows + Office don't cost that low and what they are buying is not original version. (To be frank, situation improved a bit since 2006, because of WTO requirements - now you can at least see legal software in the shops, though still mixed with pirated one).
But for me as a software developer, that's not really good. I like coding software and I want to be paid for that. I don't want to work as tech support consultant, doing coding in my free time (if I have one). Moreover, if I want to create computer games, I don't have an option of providing support - most games don't require extensive and prolonged support except for patching some driver problems and bugfixing, because end users are technically savvy enough.
So... Ok, Red Hat may be doing well with their business model (although I still suspect that they would have earned more if they were also able to sell the OS itself) because for large companies support is valued more than the software itself, but I don't see that possibility for desktop software vendors, whose users don't care about support that much and are too numerous to be effectively supported anyway...
Ah, thanks... never thought about that this way.
:( We the ISV (or our publisher, to be more precise) have to prevent copying our stuff before enough copies are sold to pay for its development, and if the pirates manage to crack and mass-produce it before this, we lose. Our courts and government are too weak and slow to help enforce the copyright anyway, so it's basically up to us.
;-)
Anyway, such 'monopoly' is non-existent in Russia
If you want the same situation in your country... well. Consider moving to Russia first to test how it feels
Hmm... I don't know whether relying purely on support (like Red Hat) would provide us with enough income. And it would probably be harder to meet milestones/deadlines, too. I myself participate in an open source project in my free time (wormux) and there's always a problem to meet a milestone. It seems to me that the most of FOSS projects have the same problem as well (see Debian or FreeBSD for reference).
To sum it up: while you may be right with the first point, I strongly disagree with you on your second point. FOSS is developed mostly by people that have the free time (and who are paid from other sources, be it parents or academic institutions, sometimes commercial software development), while commercial software [usually] pays for itself... I don't see any government monopoly behind commercial software development (could you elaborate on this, if you please?), but that might be due to the fact that I'm Russian and don't know much about how US government works.
Ok, but if my company sells the software, how can it benefit from that magnification? It's pretty apparent that the project itself will get better, larger and so on after being open-sourced, but now everyone will be able to download the sources, compile them and use for themselves, without paying us anything.
Well, that's perhaps due to stereotype that you Americans have more control on your government than any other nation (widely popularized by US movie industry). And that's also due to the fact that people (everywhere) don't really like gray shades and blurred borders - it's easier to think about US as of homogeneous country where everyone holds the same opinion. You think the same of Russia as well (we're all enemy and communists), don't you? :-)
Ever tried programming for IBM's Cell?
Well, I have an answer to my own question - all that matters is how unique the sequence is. That's actually a measure of how hard it is to generate the same sequence without any knowledge of the original.
Thus, the less unique your sequence is, the less you own it. That makes IP pretty different from usual "real life" property, which does not depend on the amount of work put into it (only its price does, but not the ownership).
"What the sequence represents" should not affect the ability to copyright it. Otherwise, it would mean that x86 users might not respect copyrights of PPC software (if they ever happen to pirate that) - the sequence in question is meaningless for them.
But binary executable, mp3 file, a movie file and all the other things that are copyrighted are ultimately just a sequence of numbers. You can theoretically copy them by remembering all those numbers if you have a phenomenal memory and ability to type quickly.
Code/music/data are no more than a sequence (pretty large sometimes) of numbers, that is, bytes. If I came up with sequence, say, 5, 10, 11, 35, 255 - can I claim it to be my property and sue you for copying it? If not, how long should such sequence be in order to allow this?