While perhaps not well thought through, he is not suggesting we would be better off with no system at all. He is saying that the current system seems to lack legitimacy in his eyes. The system does not adequately represent him, not because his views are necessarily contrary to the democratic will of the people, but perhaps instead because the majority is ignorant of or apathetic to his concerns. Thus the laws with which he is concerned are not the representation of the democratic will of the people, but rather the will of an oligarchy, unchecked by the will of an ignorant and apathetic population.
And to be fair, (Leftist)Anarchists rarely advocate "no system". Instead they advocate greater direct democratic governance brought about by the flattening of power structures, greater transparency, and greater community level control.
Now, while this seems unrealistic given the seemingly essential national and now international modern world we find ourselves in, I can't say I'm not sympathetic to these concerns.
We can't throw all of our young people in prison. If they believe our system lacks legitimacy they need to get involved and work to change things, because as soon as they start hitting their 30s and 40s it will be their system. But we can't just pin it on them. The older generations need to get involved, get informed, and respond to government corruption, corporate control, and the perception of illegitimacy.
Considering the amount of fines copyright infringement can garner, five months in jail is probably better than being saddled with a debt level so high it would take several lifetimes to pay itoff. If I was faced some multi-million dollar fine (it could easily add up to this sort of money) or 5 months in jail, I'd stock up on paperbacks and head for the slammer.
Or tell them to fuck themselves and flee the country. Neither outcome - a lifetime of debt in imaginary restitution, or hard time in prison - should be lent legitimacy by a just society as punishment for contributing to the casual infringement by a bunch of internet dwelling poor teenagers of some silly moves. Should we destroy a young person's life for contributing to the infringing distribution of copies of Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy?
Isn't it enough that this guy is now a convicted felon? He is 23 years old. He was just a college student. But now for doing something stupid in school - something of which most college students know no shortage - he has lost his right to vote - his right to a voice in our democracy - for probably the rest of his life, he has lost the right to bear arms, and he will carry this mark on his record at every background check and job interview for years to come.
Is this the way to show the way for the next generation? Isn't this enough? But now we need to throw him in prison too?
We The People grant copyrights - temporary and limited monopolies on reproduction - to promote the Useful Arts and Sciences, not to promote the bottom line of large corporations. Somehow I find it hard to believe that the promotion of Useful Arts and Sciences afforded by some corporation making a few more bucks off of Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy outweighs the destruction of a young man's life.
I couldn't agree more. The punishment should be proportionate to the crime. Isn't this a widely accepted minimum standard of justice? I've heard it said that the "An eye for an eye" standard of the Torah can be considered progressive in that it restricts arbitrary, disproportionate punishments. Whether this meant anything in practice I do not know, but I think most would agree that judgments of "Your arm for a finger" or "Your life for an eye" would be unjust, and not just because of their brutal nature. There is something that seems fundamentally wrong to us about disproportionate punishment.
It is troubling that our society and our lawmakers seem to lose sense of this principal when it comes to monetary awards.
U.S. Code pertaining to Copyright on a plain layman's reading (and the hell if I'll be ruled by laws that can't be understood by the common man) explicitly states that the prosecution need not establish that the award sought is even porportionate to the cost to the copyright holder of the defendant's infringement. If I were to send you 10 copies of the latest Christina Agulera (sp?...) album - whatever that might be - the fact that under no circumstances would you have considered paying for the album does not factor in at all. In fact, there isn't even any requirement that the actual cost of the album be factored into the monetary judgment against me at all.
The amounts awarded in suits against casual file sharers are absurd.
Judgments of many thousands of dollars against students and working people who in practice most likely resulted in an actual loss to the copyright holder of - if anything - a small fraction of the monetary award, are miscarriages of justice.
And now jail time and a criminal record for facilitating casual infringement by a bunch of poor teenagers watching movies??? I personally don't infringe their copyrights primarily because I don't want their crap. But these vindictive bastards do not merit our money, and I would suggest in many cases neither do the artists who are in bed with them to make bucks.
And you're right, the only thing worse than lawyers backing big monetary awards to line their own pockets are lawyers literally writing (for corporations, through congressmen) our needlessly complex legal code while at the same time criminalizing laymen trying to interpret amongst themselves the very laws we are ruled by, without paying their exhorbitant fees.
It is no wonder our legal system lacks legitimacy in the eyes of the next generation.
You're in good company -- Thomas Jefferson always referred to them as "monopolies" (albeit without the "intellectual" part) too.
And don't forget the "limited" and "temporary" parts! Or the "we" part!
It's quite empowering to correct someone going on about ownership and theft of content by reminding them, "No, they own nothing. We The People permit them a temporary, limited monopoly on (in the case of copyright) reproduction of the material. We do so for the benefit of society as a whole, not on account of recognition of any inherent right to or ownership of it. We have the power through our legislative process to terminate their monopoly at any time we choose, for any reason."
Right. I certainly think that businesses have a legitimate interest in knowing that the GPL and LPGL are produced by an organization whose founding philosophy is a commitment to the elimination of a business model based on the production and distribution of proprietary software, and whose founder considers proprietary software vendors and those involved in its production to be morally bankrupt, being complicit in a conspiracy to deny users of morally significant essential liberties.
You should realize that he has on many occassions implied and even stated explicitly that proprietary software vendors and those involved in its production are morally unscrupulous, and he is apparently quite emphatic about this. He considers proprietary software vendors and producers to conspire to deprive software users of morally significant essential liberties.
I hardly think it's unexpected that some people, particularly those whose livelihood is the production of properity software, will find this statement quite inflammatory.
I personally don't care, but he sort of brings it on himself. Especially since most people, while they might think the freedoms granted by the GPL are nice ideas, do not consider them to be anything approaching essential liberties.
Most software developers don't consider themselves to be complicit in a wide scale conspiracy to deprive users of morally significant essential liberties.
What you as many others fail to understand is that RMS considers the freedoms to produce, distribute, and in some cases profit from proprietary software to stand in conflict with what he considers essential liberties (as in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) of the user.
This is often misunderstood, I think, because the freedoms granted by the GPL to the user are not widely recognized to be essential freedoms of a software user in anywhere near the sense of seriousness the FSF literature presents them.
Just as we restrict the freedom to murder because it is outweighed by the freedom to not be murdered, it is said we ought to restrict the freedom of the software vendor to distribute proprietary software to a user because it is outweighed by the user's freedom not to be denied the essential liberties granted by the GPL.
Just as we restrict the freedom to sell oneself into slavery or to enter into a contract against one's own life, the freedom of the user and proprietary software vendor to conspire to strip the user himself or herself of the essential liberties granted by the GPL ought to be restricted, it is said.
RMS appears to cite as the origin of his recognition of these essential liberties, his own experiences of the alienation caused by their denial: the alienation of oneself from one's work and the alienation of one's self from oneself community.
I suspect most people who find themselves strongly offended by or at odds with RMS's viewpoints are (as I am) involved in the production of proprietary software themselves. Afterall, RMS considers proprietary software producers and those involved in its production to be morally unscrupulous, and he is completely serious. Obviously it can be offensive to have the moral status of your livelihood called into question, more so when you do not recognize or even reject the ethical principles on which this evaluation is made.
Many proprietary software supporters - if they don't entirely ignore or dismiss him - seem to call him a communist or a hypocrite or launch into hateful tirades rather than attempt to understand his position and the personal experiences and perspectve that may have influenced it.
The point is that on RMS's view, the freedoms granted to the user by the GPL are more important than the freedoms of software producers to produce and profit from proprietary software. RMS considers the proprietary software industry to be morally bankrupt and those who earn their livelihood in it to be morally unscrupulous.
But the GPL's strings are undoubtedly freedom promoting. The same can't be said of the proprietary licenses you cite. And, I would argue, puts it in a position to be more freedom promoting than BSD like licenses, likely resulting in greater net freedom.
One of the objectives of the GPL (from the recommendation of use of GPL vs LGPL) is the production of valuable GPLd components and libraries to give software producers incentive to produce free software, where they might otherwise take proprietary, LGPL, or BSD like software or libraries and produce propietary software.
In fact, in many cases the presence of a BSD-like licensed solution works at counter purposes to the GPL.
Given the choice of BSD and GPL components or libraries of similar quality, many organizations will choose the BSD component. They choose the BSD component because they want to use the component to produce proprietary software - either as a requirement of their business model or to keep secrets from their users or competitors.
If however the BSD component were not available, the company would choose either a proprietary component and produce wholly proprietary software - in which case the community would lose nothing - or perhaps they would be persuaded by the value provided by the GPL component to choose to integrate it and thereby to produce more free software.
"Absolutely not. We should put faith into RMS's hands, as he is surely The Solution. All communist nutjobs say that the free market is the devil that needs to be eliminated and replaced by his brilliant centralized administration."
No one here, including RMS, is suggesting that the Free Market is "the devil". How does "don't place blind faith in the free market" become "the free market is the devil and needs to be eliminated"?
And your post is considered insightful? Talk about knee-jerk.
Do you hear Stallman calling for the socialization of the Free Software support industry? No. I think upon investigation you will find that RMS's "communist nutjob" agenda is not so far reaching as you might think. The Free Software Foundation is fundamentally not a communist organization; what tripe.
The GPL is not anti-commercial. It is anti-proprietary - although such a simplification hardly does it justice. Its origins are more practical than idealist.
Now, is there any hope of production of gold through fission or in particle accelerators (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmutation) becoming economically feasible in the near future?
Or is it probably safe to assume the energy cost will remain so high that by the time we might conceivably advance to the point where we have such an amount of energy at our disposal that this process becomes trivial, we will have moved beyond our fascination with shiny yellow metal?
The commoditization of gold... that woud be something to see indeed, considering its economic, political, and cultural significance.
Perhaps first we would see access to planets or moons where it is abundant at the surface. Although that might just mean exploiting our impoverished and oppressed peoples by sending them to the harsh moon mining colonies instead of exploiting them on good ole' Earth.
And the article we are commenting on here is one of the most blatant VC fishing jobs you'll see: Look at me! I'm Web 2.0. I "Get It"! Where's my money?
Fortunately VCs are smarter than that. If I were a VC I would be downright insulted by what this author has written. They're smarter than to throw money a guy whose sole accomplishment is apparently to make an under construction website - single web page rather - containing nothing but a bouncing and static text.
Wait, wait, hold the presses! This just in: the man is a college graduate, the CSO of his own company no less. He appears to be over the age of 22. We're still awaiting confirmation on this.
Clamor for power, divine little youth,
Struggle for the precipice of Iv'ry air
Make your name amongst the Kings of earth,
And claim the Triumphant Golden Chair.
Whether by dagger or the sharpened sword,
Or through some darksome crevasse schemes
Embrace your destiny to rule and to reign
Lest ever it continue to haunt your dreams. ...
I don't know about you all, but reading that evoked a sense of being punched in the gut. I think I puked a little in my mouth.
Perhaps only one question remains: Was this being cast down into the realm of men explicitly to devour souls, or does he have a day job too?
The day I meet my new manager who introduces himself as Skinner Layne, I think will be the day I end it all.
Shak-who? I imagine 50% of the population under 25 doesn't even remember why Shakespeare is significant.
And 49% don't think his work is relevant or even anything special - just boring romance novel/chic flick type pulp.
Under 25, eh? That's an interesting take. I would have guessed, if anything, that most people over - not under - 25 are the ones who pay his works no attention.
Honestly, what percentage of the post-highschool, post-college population do you think encounters or even seeks out Shakespeare, muchless ponders his cultural significance - sitting on the sofa in front of the tele with two beers down and a third in hand? Certainly no offense to you, but I have a difficult time imagining what social circumstances you find yourself in that you should consider such an estimation plausible.
What's your point? That's the nature of the "work around defects in the operating system" market. Eventually, even Microsoft fixes them, and you don't have a market anymore. I hate Microsoft, and I still can't blame them for this. It's not like they're the first vendor to include, say, a filesystem that doesn't require constant defragmentation, or a stateful firewall.
And what's your point? Lest you forget, Microsoft is a convicted monopolist. When you break the law, you have to play by a different set of rules. If Microsoft wasn't willing to do the time, it shouldn't have committed the crime. We are talking about a company which, had it not been for a new sympathetic administration, might very well have been split in two for its wrongdoings.
Malicious programs which infect and spread through true defects in the operating system are only one part of the target of these markets. No one is arguing that Microsoft shouldn't resolve true defects in its operating systems.
Do you even use Debian? When was the last time you contributed? What business should it be of yours that a group of volunteers choose to work together under a shared set of values? None of it, that's what.
If you don't want to allow distributions to make changes to software they redistribute to enhance system integration, user experience, and conform to distribution policies, perhaps you should instead spend your time petitioning the Mozilla project to consider going closed source.
And what is your problem with the DFSGs? They were influential in shaping what the very term Open Source means today.
Most users may not even know about the GPL. They just downloaded that CD ripping software or audio software or game off of Sourceforge because it was free as in beer.
Even if these users don't usually redistribute or modify and redistribute, if they are made aware of the GPL they might favor or even seek out GPL software over freeware or shareware software in the future because they feel good about the using software that shows this respect to them.
However, it can be done incorrectly. For example, users should not have to click an "I Agree" button in order to use GPLd software because the GPL does impose any restrictions on use.
Indeed. This is, i thought, why the MPL contains a clause (like the GPL) which requires prominent notice of modification as a condition to distribution of modifications.
Linus doesn't need to enforce the Linux trademark to prevent distribution of modified versions. The relative unity of Linux stems from quality and leadership, not from legal wrangling.
One of the points raised by the Debian maintainers is that distribution integration often requires modification. Modification is done for reasons ranging from conformance to distribution semantics to library integration, in order to provide uniform function and a consistent user experience.
I suspect, were you to take the time to understand the unique requirements and concerns of distribution maintainers, you would come to have a better appreciation of their concerns.
Especially considering section 3.3 of the MPL already carries the standard "prominent notice of change" distribution requirement that seems to work well enough for almost every other free software project out there.
Apparently this wasn't enough for the Mozilla project.
"Academic circular argument"? Changing the name to Dumo GMAC/Looney? I don't think you even understand what you are talking about.
What is it to you if a group of volunteers want to produce a GNU/Linux distribution that is compliant with their own ideological values? That's right: volunteers. And they didn't ask for your opinion. Yours was quite unsolicited.
When was the last time you contributed to the Debian project?
I thought so.
And I might add, I fail to see why the distribution requirements in section 3.3 of the MPL requiring prominent notice that the original work has been modified, shouldn't be enough for the Mozilla project. Most open source licenses have similar clauses, and these clauses appear to be good enough for most other projects.
I say good on Debian. It's better that they not waste their resources to promote a proprietary, commercial brand like Firefox.
I've never run a system I've been happier with than a Debian GNU/Linux stable release. Keep up the great work folks.
Is it really? It is a fact that restoring land to its owners prior to 1948-1967 is not an extreme or unreasonable expectation? Those are your words.
There were Jewish people (Palestinian Jews) in Palestine prior to 1948, alongside Arab people. Many also came as holocaust refugees and have no place else to return to. Many came after 1948 having been forced from neighboring nations outrightly or by persecution. And many more have arrived in the years since up until the present. Many who are there now were at no point themselves involved in the capture of land.
Now, indeed, many non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine prior to 1948-1967 were forced from their lands by military action. We have a fairly good idea of just what number were.
But in every case where you now might take back the land and return it to the owner prior to 1948-1967, or the descendent of this owner in the (likely) case that the original owner is deceased, you are at the same time displacing someone who may by most or all accounts be innocent of its original seizure. As the years march on and those immediately involved in and affected by the actions of 1948-1967 continue to pass away, this becomes clearer.
It can not be that the solution to the mideast Arab-Israeli conflict is to replace Arab refugee settlements with Jewish refugee settlements. Whatever else you may propose, to suggest that it is a legitimate expectation, IS an extreme and unreasonable view.
So it's just a little button that you click? I haven't seen Vista myself, but you'd think Microsoft would have learned its lesson by now about Yes/No and Ok/Cancel prompts.
It's painful to recall the number of infections I have encountered which originated from a user clicking Ok or Yes on a prompt box that he or she either clicked without reading at all, or read, failed to comprehend, and clicked figuring the computer knew best. That's not counting naive users who really did want to install Bonzai Buddy.
But I want to ask, do you really believe the OS X password prompt is significantly more effective? I use OS X almost exclusively at home and I have to say I don't feel that entering my password in a GUI prompt when installing an application makes me feel safer (assuming I initiated the installation action). Which is why I can count I one hand the number of 3rd party non-distribution applications I have installed across my machines. (Not counting Fink installed software, which I admit, I am, probably naively more trusting of than I should be.)
Whether it's clicking a button or inputting your password, all you really know is that your os may shortly be rendered inoperable, rooted, pwn3d, or all of the above.
My feeling is that an effective authorization scheme would be one where the application must present up front an exhaustive list of all specific object and operation authorization requests for review by the user: delete permission on foo, modify permission on bar, create permission in dir, etc. Algorithms would need to be developed to present to the user requests that were unusual and dangerous, without overwhelming the user. If I see in red highlight that the application is requesting delete permission to/, you better believe I'm gonna purge that bugger off my system! The challenge is communicating this to a user who doesn't that rm -rf / is something that shouldn't be happening.
There's no reason an application shouldn't be expected to describe what access it needs up front.
Microsoft has the power to take steps like this. Vendors jump when they say jump. If not this, there are surely enough smart people at the organization that they should be able to come up with something better than what we have today (and apparently have in Vista).
Slashdot Mirror
While perhaps not well thought through, he is not suggesting we would be better off with no system at all. He is saying that the current system seems to lack legitimacy in his eyes. The system does not adequately represent him, not because his views are necessarily contrary to the democratic will of the people, but perhaps instead because the majority is ignorant of or apathetic to his concerns. Thus the laws with which he is concerned are not the representation of the democratic will of the people, but rather the will of an oligarchy, unchecked by the will of an ignorant and apathetic population.
And to be fair, (Leftist)Anarchists rarely advocate "no system". Instead they advocate greater direct democratic governance brought about by the flattening of power structures, greater transparency, and greater community level control.
Now, while this seems unrealistic given the seemingly essential national and now international modern world we find ourselves in, I can't say I'm not sympathetic to these concerns.
We can't throw all of our young people in prison. If they believe our system lacks legitimacy they need to get involved and work to change things, because as soon as they start hitting their 30s and 40s it will be their system. But we can't just pin it on them. The older generations need to get involved, get informed, and respond to government corruption, corporate control, and the perception of illegitimacy.
Or tell them to fuck themselves and flee the country. Neither outcome - a lifetime of debt in imaginary restitution, or hard time in prison - should be lent legitimacy by a just society as punishment for contributing to the casual infringement by a bunch of internet dwelling poor teenagers of some silly moves. Should we destroy a young person's life for contributing to the infringing distribution of copies of Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy?
Isn't it enough that this guy is now a convicted felon? He is 23 years old. He was just a college student. But now for doing something stupid in school - something of which most college students know no shortage - he has lost his right to vote - his right to a voice in our democracy - for probably the rest of his life, he has lost the right to bear arms, and he will carry this mark on his record at every background check and job interview for years to come.
Is this the way to show the way for the next generation? Isn't this enough? But now we need to throw him in prison too?
We The People grant copyrights - temporary and limited monopolies on reproduction - to promote the Useful Arts and Sciences, not to promote the bottom line of large corporations. Somehow I find it hard to believe that the promotion of Useful Arts and Sciences afforded by some corporation making a few more bucks off of Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy outweighs the destruction of a young man's life.
I couldn't agree more. The punishment should be proportionate to the crime. Isn't this a widely accepted minimum standard of justice? I've heard it said that the "An eye for an eye" standard of the Torah can be considered progressive in that it restricts arbitrary, disproportionate punishments. Whether this meant anything in practice I do not know, but I think most would agree that judgments of "Your arm for a finger" or "Your life for an eye" would be unjust, and not just because of their brutal nature. There is something that seems fundamentally wrong to us about disproportionate punishment.
It is troubling that our society and our lawmakers seem to lose sense of this principal when it comes to monetary awards.
U.S. Code pertaining to Copyright on a plain layman's reading (and the hell if I'll be ruled by laws that can't be understood by the common man) explicitly states that the prosecution need not establish that the award sought is even porportionate to the cost to the copyright holder of the defendant's infringement. If I were to send you 10 copies of the latest Christina Agulera (sp?...) album - whatever that might be - the fact that under no circumstances would you have considered paying for the album does not factor in at all. In fact, there isn't even any requirement that the actual cost of the album be factored into the monetary judgment against me at all.
The amounts awarded in suits against casual file sharers are absurd.
Judgments of many thousands of dollars against students and working people who in practice most likely resulted in an actual loss to the copyright holder of - if anything - a small fraction of the monetary award, are miscarriages of justice.
And now jail time and a criminal record for facilitating casual infringement by a bunch of poor teenagers watching movies??? I personally don't infringe their copyrights primarily because I don't want their crap. But these vindictive bastards do not merit our money, and I would suggest in many cases neither do the artists who are in bed with them to make bucks.
And you're right, the only thing worse than lawyers backing big monetary awards to line their own pockets are lawyers literally writing (for corporations, through congressmen) our needlessly complex legal code while at the same time criminalizing laymen trying to interpret amongst themselves the very laws we are ruled by, without paying their exhorbitant fees.
It is no wonder our legal system lacks legitimacy in the eyes of the next generation.
And don't forget the "limited" and "temporary" parts! Or the "we" part!
It's quite empowering to correct someone going on about ownership and theft of content by reminding them, "No, they own nothing. We The People permit them a temporary, limited monopoly on (in the case of copyright) reproduction of the material. We do so for the benefit of society as a whole, not on account of recognition of any inherent right to or ownership of it. We have the power through our legislative process to terminate their monopoly at any time we choose, for any reason."
Right. I certainly think that businesses have a legitimate interest in knowing that the GPL and LPGL are produced by an organization whose founding philosophy is a commitment to the elimination of a business model based on the production and distribution of proprietary software, and whose founder considers proprietary software vendors and those involved in its production to be morally bankrupt, being complicit in a conspiracy to deny users of morally significant essential liberties.
You should realize that he has on many occassions implied and even stated explicitly that proprietary software vendors and those involved in its production are morally unscrupulous, and he is apparently quite emphatic about this. He considers proprietary software vendors and producers to conspire to deprive software users of morally significant essential liberties.
I hardly think it's unexpected that some people, particularly those whose livelihood is the production of properity software, will find this statement quite inflammatory.
I personally don't care, but he sort of brings it on himself. Especially since most people, while they might think the freedoms granted by the GPL are nice ideas, do not consider them to be anything approaching essential liberties.
Most software developers don't consider themselves to be complicit in a wide scale conspiracy to deprive users of morally significant essential liberties.
"Developers who would like to have freedom that users do not are the problem that the FSF was created to fix (or at least provide an alternative to)."
Or more directly: developers who wish to deny to the user what it considers essential liberties. are the target of the FSF.
What you as many others fail to understand is that RMS considers the freedoms to produce, distribute, and in some cases profit from proprietary software to stand in conflict with what he considers essential liberties (as in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) of the user.
This is often misunderstood, I think, because the freedoms granted by the GPL to the user are not widely recognized to be essential freedoms of a software user in anywhere near the sense of seriousness the FSF literature presents them.
Just as we restrict the freedom to murder because it is outweighed by the freedom to not be murdered, it is said we ought to restrict the freedom of the software vendor to distribute proprietary software to a user because it is outweighed by the user's freedom not to be denied the essential liberties granted by the GPL.
Just as we restrict the freedom to sell oneself into slavery or to enter into a contract against one's own life, the freedom of the user and proprietary software vendor to conspire to strip the user himself or herself of the essential liberties granted by the GPL ought to be restricted, it is said.
RMS appears to cite as the origin of his recognition of these essential liberties, his own experiences of the alienation caused by their denial: the alienation of oneself from one's work and the alienation of one's self from oneself community.
I suspect most people who find themselves strongly offended by or at odds with RMS's viewpoints are (as I am) involved in the production of proprietary software themselves. Afterall, RMS considers proprietary software producers and those involved in its production to be morally unscrupulous, and he is completely serious. Obviously it can be offensive to have the moral status of your livelihood called into question, more so when you do not recognize or even reject the ethical principles on which this evaluation is made.
Many proprietary software supporters - if they don't entirely ignore or dismiss him - seem to call him a communist or a hypocrite or launch into hateful tirades rather than attempt to understand his position and the personal experiences and perspectve that may have influenced it.
The point is that on RMS's view, the freedoms granted to the user by the GPL are more important than the freedoms of software producers to produce and profit from proprietary software. RMS considers the proprietary software industry to be morally bankrupt and those who earn their livelihood in it to be morally unscrupulous.
This is the foundation of the FSF.
But the GPL's strings are undoubtedly freedom promoting. The same can't be said of the proprietary licenses you cite. And, I would argue, puts it in a position to be more freedom promoting than BSD like licenses, likely resulting in greater net freedom.
One of the objectives of the GPL (from the recommendation of use of GPL vs LGPL) is the production of valuable GPLd components and libraries to give software producers incentive to produce free software, where they might otherwise take proprietary, LGPL, or BSD like software or libraries and produce propietary software.
In fact, in many cases the presence of a BSD-like licensed solution works at counter purposes to the GPL.
Given the choice of BSD and GPL components or libraries of similar quality, many organizations will choose the BSD component. They choose the BSD component because they want to use the component to produce proprietary software - either as a requirement of their business model or to keep secrets from their users or competitors.
If however the BSD component were not available, the company would choose either a proprietary component and produce wholly proprietary software - in which case the community would lose nothing - or perhaps they would be persuaded by the value provided by the GPL component to choose to integrate it and thereby to produce more free software.
"Absolutely not. We should put faith into RMS's hands, as he is surely The Solution. All communist nutjobs say that the free market is the devil that needs to be eliminated and replaced by his brilliant centralized administration."
No one here, including RMS, is suggesting that the Free Market is "the devil". How does "don't place blind faith in the free market" become "the free market is the devil and needs to be eliminated"?
And your post is considered insightful? Talk about knee-jerk.
Do you hear Stallman calling for the socialization of the Free Software support industry? No. I think upon investigation you will find that RMS's "communist nutjob" agenda is not so far reaching as you might think. The Free Software Foundation is fundamentally not a communist organization; what tripe.
The GPL is not anti-commercial. It is anti-proprietary - although such a simplification hardly does it justice. Its origins are more practical than idealist.
Now, is there any hope of production of gold through fission or in particle accelerators (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmutation) becoming economically feasible in the near future?
Or is it probably safe to assume the energy cost will remain so high that by the time we might conceivably advance to the point where we have such an amount of energy at our disposal that this process becomes trivial, we will have moved beyond our fascination with shiny yellow metal?
The commoditization of gold... that woud be something to see indeed, considering its economic, political, and cultural significance.
Perhaps first we would see access to planets or moons where it is abundant at the surface. Although that might just mean exploiting our impoverished and oppressed peoples by sending them to the harsh moon mining colonies instead of exploiting them on good ole' Earth.
And the article we are commenting on here is one of the most blatant VC fishing jobs you'll see: Look at me! I'm Web 2.0. I "Get It"! Where's my money?
Fortunately VCs are smarter than that. If I were a VC I would be downright insulted by what this author has written. They're smarter than to throw money a guy whose sole accomplishment is apparently to make an under construction website - single web page rather - containing nothing but a bouncing and static text.
Who's he kidding?
Wait, wait, hold the presses! This just in: the man is a college graduate, the CSO of his own company no less. He appears to be over the age of 22. We're still awaiting confirmation on this.
http://www.blogger.com/profile/7837801
A true renaissance man! Who better to teach me the ways of XMLHttpRequest masters?
Is postmodern philosophy not your thing? Then let Skinner woo you with his poetry:
http://www.skinnerlayne.com/
Clamor for power, divine little youth,Struggle for the precipice of Iv'ry air
Make your name amongst the Kings of earth,
And claim the Triumphant Golden Chair.
Whether by dagger or the sharpened sword,
Or through some darksome crevasse schemes
Embrace your destiny to rule and to reign
Lest ever it continue to haunt your dreams.
I don't know about you all, but reading that evoked a sense of being punched in the gut. I think I puked a little in my mouth.
Perhaps only one question remains: Was this being cast down into the realm of men explicitly to devour souls, or does he have a day job too?
The day I meet my new manager who introduces himself as Skinner Layne, I think will be the day I end it all.
Under 25, eh? That's an interesting take. I would have guessed, if anything, that most people over - not under - 25 are the ones who pay his works no attention.
Honestly, what percentage of the post-highschool, post-college population do you think encounters or even seeks out Shakespeare, muchless ponders his cultural significance - sitting on the sofa in front of the tele with two beers down and a third in hand? Certainly no offense to you, but I have a difficult time imagining what social circumstances you find yourself in that you should consider such an estimation plausible.
And what's your point? Lest you forget, Microsoft is a convicted monopolist. When you break the law, you have to play by a different set of rules. If Microsoft wasn't willing to do the time, it shouldn't have committed the crime. We are talking about a company which, had it not been for a new sympathetic administration, might very well have been split in two for its wrongdoings.
Malicious programs which infect and spread through true defects in the operating system are only one part of the target of these markets. No one is arguing that Microsoft shouldn't resolve true defects in its operating systems.
Do you even use Debian? When was the last time you contributed? What business should it be of yours that a group of volunteers choose to work together under a shared set of values? None of it, that's what.
If you don't want to allow distributions to make changes to software they redistribute to enhance system integration, user experience, and conform to distribution policies, perhaps you should instead spend your time petitioning the Mozilla project to consider going closed source.
And what is your problem with the DFSGs? They were influential in shaping what the very term Open Source means today.
Most users may not even know about the GPL. They just downloaded that CD ripping software or audio software or game off of Sourceforge because it was free as in beer.
Even if these users don't usually redistribute or modify and redistribute, if they are made aware of the GPL they might favor or even seek out GPL software over freeware or shareware software in the future because they feel good about the using software that shows this respect to them.
However, it can be done incorrectly. For example, users should not have to click an "I Agree" button in order to use GPLd software because the GPL does impose any restrictions on use.
Indeed. This is, i thought, why the MPL contains a clause (like the GPL) which requires prominent notice of modification as a condition to distribution of modifications.
Linus doesn't need to enforce the Linux trademark to prevent distribution of modified versions. The relative unity of Linux stems from quality and leadership, not from legal wrangling.
One of the points raised by the Debian maintainers is that distribution integration often requires modification. Modification is done for reasons ranging from conformance to distribution semantics to library integration, in order to provide uniform function and a consistent user experience.
I suspect, were you to take the time to understand the unique requirements and concerns of distribution maintainers, you would come to have a better appreciation of their concerns.
Especially considering section 3.3 of the MPL already carries the standard "prominent notice of change" distribution requirement that seems to work well enough for almost every other free software project out there.
Apparently this wasn't enough for the Mozilla project.
"Academic circular argument"? Changing the name to Dumo GMAC/Looney? I don't think you even understand what you are talking about.
What is it to you if a group of volunteers want to produce a GNU/Linux distribution that is compliant with their own ideological values? That's right: volunteers. And they didn't ask for your opinion. Yours was quite unsolicited.
When was the last time you contributed to the Debian project?
I thought so.
And I might add, I fail to see why the distribution requirements in section 3.3 of the MPL requiring prominent notice that the original work has been modified, shouldn't be enough for the Mozilla project. Most open source licenses have similar clauses, and these clauses appear to be good enough for most other projects.
I say good on Debian. It's better that they not waste their resources to promote a proprietary, commercial brand like Firefox.
I've never run a system I've been happier with than a Debian GNU/Linux stable release. Keep up the great work folks.
That may be. Although this situation is, I would say, more pressing.
There are indeed people still living whose land was seized by the 1948-1967 military aggression.
The problem is, of course, mirrored on the other side however. Those now living on the seized land may have had nothing to do with its seizure.
Is it really? It is a fact that restoring land to its owners prior to 1948-1967 is not an extreme or unreasonable expectation? Those are your words.
There were Jewish people (Palestinian Jews) in Palestine prior to 1948, alongside Arab people. Many also came as holocaust refugees and have no place else to return to. Many came after 1948 having been forced from neighboring nations outrightly or by persecution. And many more have arrived in the years since up until the present. Many who are there now were at no point themselves involved in the capture of land.
Now, indeed, many non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine prior to 1948-1967 were forced from their lands by military action. We have a fairly good idea of just what number were.
But in every case where you now might take back the land and return it to the owner prior to 1948-1967, or the descendent of this owner in the (likely) case that the original owner is deceased, you are at the same time displacing someone who may by most or all accounts be innocent of its original seizure. As the years march on and those immediately involved in and affected by the actions of 1948-1967 continue to pass away, this becomes clearer.
It can not be that the solution to the mideast Arab-Israeli conflict is to replace Arab refugee settlements with Jewish refugee settlements. Whatever else you may propose, to suggest that it is a legitimate expectation, IS an extreme and unreasonable view.
So it's just a little button that you click? I haven't seen Vista myself, but you'd think Microsoft would have learned its lesson by now about Yes/No and Ok/Cancel prompts.
/, you better believe I'm gonna purge that bugger off my system! The challenge is communicating this to a user who doesn't that rm -rf / is something that shouldn't be happening.
It's painful to recall the number of infections I have encountered which originated from a user clicking Ok or Yes on a prompt box that he or she either clicked without reading at all, or read, failed to comprehend, and clicked figuring the computer knew best. That's not counting naive users who really did want to install Bonzai Buddy.
But I want to ask, do you really believe the OS X password prompt is significantly more effective? I use OS X almost exclusively at home and I have to say I don't feel that entering my password in a GUI prompt when installing an application makes me feel safer (assuming I initiated the installation action). Which is why I can count I one hand the number of 3rd party non-distribution applications I have installed across my machines. (Not counting Fink installed software, which I admit, I am, probably naively more trusting of than I should be.)
Whether it's clicking a button or inputting your password, all you really know is that your os may shortly be rendered inoperable, rooted, pwn3d, or all of the above.
My feeling is that an effective authorization scheme would be one where the application must present up front an exhaustive list of all specific object and operation authorization requests for review by the user: delete permission on foo, modify permission on bar, create permission in dir, etc. Algorithms would need to be developed to present to the user requests that were unusual and dangerous, without overwhelming the user. If I see in red highlight that the application is requesting delete permission to
There's no reason an application shouldn't be expected to describe what access it needs up front.
Microsoft has the power to take steps like this. Vendors jump when they say jump. If not this, there are surely enough smart people at the organization that they should be able to come up with something better than what we have today (and apparently have in Vista).