The point is Bush is using patriotic fervor as a tool to deflect criticism and get his agenda passed, an agenda that includes reduction of civil liberties and intimidation of American citizens who are doing nothing wrong. Hitler used the same sort of approach to gain power, then used violence to gain domination over his citizens. Don't we owe it to ourselves, to this country, to speak up when something looks fishy so that doesn't happen here? History repeats itself, you might have heard. If you can't accept that, you're a blind apologist and a fool.
It is civic duty to blow whistles where appropriate, but I'm more worried about Bush going the way of Abraham Lincoln (who absolutely shredded the Bill of Rights during the Civil War). Hitler was explicitly granted extraordinary powers by the German legislature to essentially ascend to dictatorship; our own congress has been tenative with Bush (example: yesterday's extension of the Patriot Act by a month when Bush wanted it declared permanent), and like Lincoln he's acted outside the boundaries of presidential power and ignored his critics.
Jingoism is rapidly fading from fashion as the public has been reminded that wars hurt people including American soldiers, and I'd expect more doves to join congress in the next election. Assuming the '08 presidential race goes as expected, neither Hillary nor McCain will continue to support the Patriot Act if it even survives that long (amusing aside: protestors were shouting through bullhorns denouncing Bush's '08 campaign in Berkeley a few months back). Bush doesn't have Lincoln's justifications for his actions, but the methods they have used and the violations of liberty they have caused are far more similar to each other than either has been to Hitler.
Yeah, but I think the point of the other poster was that it is actually a restriction of the copyright itself (as a system), not that of the GPL. The rationale for this reasoning is that, if there were NO copyright-protections whatsoever (for instance, if *everything* ever written automatically became public property), there would be no need for the GPL.
I completely agree that the GPL is less draconian than default copyright law, but it is more draconian with regards to limitations on distribution than other licenses that the FSF defines as Free (e.g. the X11 License). It's a false dichotomy to present copyleft as the only alternative to copyright. Note I'm not saying that it makes the GPL worse than the X11 License, only that it's more restrictive for people who agree to it.
Because, if there was no restriction on that already-globally-in-place restriction, the freedom to use it would be less. I agree that, at first view, one could see that as an additional restriction, but the fact is, if one does not restrict the (copyright)restrictions, you become more restricted, not less.
Perhaps I should put it this way: the GPL (and copyleft in general) has restrictions that are not necessary to remove traditional copyright restrictions. There are non-copyleft OSS licenses that illustrate this. The grandparent of my original comment was saying that the GPL restrictions limit his personal rights with the software by enforcing behavior that wasn't part of the traditional public domain, and it was in that spirit I was replying to the parent of my original comment. The original position was that any license is more restrictive to individual freedom than public domain, which the parent of my post challenged.
It does not add any restrictions that were not there without it.
IANAL, but I have yet to see a source distribution requirement in any form in any copyright law.
Show me a freedom thats restricted that isn't first restricted by copyright law and isn't their to protect others free use of software as much as your own, and then you might have a leg to stand on.
You set up a straw man and knocked it down nicely with the middle of that sentence. Any limitation with good reason is still a limitation, so my original point stands--your qualification illutrates that you know why the GPL restricts the behavior of people who agree to it outside of normal copyright law, therefore you also know those restrictions exist in the first place. I never said "has artificial restrictions placed on them by the license in a way that doesn't protect public access"--apparently you decided to insert that qualifier as a value judgement on top of my comments and want me to defend it instead of what I actually typed.
I posted the GPL was good for end users (something I truely believe) to preemt any sort of reactionary zealotry stemming from my comment that it does limit personal choice... apparently that wasn't blunt enough. It's a simple fact that the GPL was designed to force publication of modified code, which is an artificial limitation on the personal freedom of authors in exchange for public accessibility. It's an equally simple fact that this limitation is intended to foster access to source code and nurture a highly open culture that should benefit everyone. Both statements can be true at the same time.
If you really want to know where I stand on source publication, you could google to find out that I've always republished my open source modifications, even with the license didn't demand it. My past actions speak clearly on whether I believe people should contribute back to the source code community.
It's not free to who? The person who gets to use it, or the person who has to let the other person use it?
The person who gets to use it has artificial restrictions placed on them by the license by the original author. The person who has to let the other person use it has identical artificial restrictions placed on them by the license by the original author. His point was that by definition a license restricts personal choice. The software is freely available, but those who use it must agree to rules specified by the original author or face a possible trip to court.
Every freedom is a tradeoff... swinging fists and noses and all that jazz. I bet the slaveowners were upset about their lost freedom when their ex-slaves found theirs.
What... no Nazi references? If you're going to ridiculously vilify someone who disagrees with you, you could at least call them fascist--even if it's 180 degrees from what they are saying like in this case, it's an Internet tradition.
"Information wants to be free" means "no one wants to pay anything for anything" as much as "lets start a company" means "I want to embezzle millions". Sure, some people who say one thing mean the other, but that doesn't define either movement.
I agree 100% with this bit.
Isn't it funny that you call the people using the GPL license as "cheapskates" when the only real cheapskate here is the people who took code other people wrote and called it their own product instead of investing their own time and money to develop a product that was truly theirs?
I think he was going for "control freaks" more than "cheapskates"--his final complaint is the exercise of control by the original author over users and the declaration of ownership that implies, not anything related to money.
So long as you aren't talking about the personal freedom of the license holder, who can be sued over what was acceptible behavior before the license. The nullification of property rights is contrary to traditional conceptions of freedom such as the American Declaration of Independance or the French Declaration of the Rights of Man. The FSF's idea that intangibles aren't subject to ownership isn't a universally held position, which is why the GPL exists in the first place.
Note that I didn't say that the GPL is a bad thing, and I agree that in many (most?) cases a GPL'd project will result in fewer problems for end users than a public domain one, especially once there is more than one author associated with the project.
If anything, Java was over-secure from the beginning, because you couldn't do anything.;-)
Unless you exploited one of the security holes that the article talks about. You can say that there is effectively "no security" or "limited security" (your pick) in a sandbox system that can be defeated through known security flaws. That isn't, however, the point of the article.
You did read the article before getting belligerent about it, right? The article is making a value judgement between two systems and saying one is better relative to the other for a list of concrete reasons. Instead of debating the merits of its comparisons, you are twisting its words into a statement Java is inherently bad or should not be used--a judgement that doesn't appear anywhere in its conclusions--and then attacking that newly invented premise.
Several of the specific complexities that proved to be problematic in Java have been avoided in the.NET design, although.NET introduced new complexities of its own. Despite.NET's design certainly not being perfect, it does provide encouraging evidence that system designers can learn from past security vulnerabilities and develop more secure systems. We have no doubts, however, that system designers will continue to relearn from these principles for many years to come.
-- final sentences of the article.
This article isn't bashing Java for the sake of bashing Java, and where it discusses a problem gives detailed, concrete information about its complaints. If you're upset that your language of choice isn't perfect, I suggest adapting to reality--no virutal machine, OS, or application has a perfect design. If you need to persist in arguing that Java has never had "limited security" (what is "unlimited security", anyway?), you could start by telling CVE every past vulnerability they've documented is imaginary. As others have pointed out, 10 of the issues are due to the MS virtual machine, which leaves only 35 for you to argue.
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The point is Bush is using patriotic fervor as a tool to deflect criticism and get his agenda passed, an agenda that includes reduction of civil liberties and intimidation of American citizens who are doing nothing wrong. Hitler used the same sort of approach to gain power, then used violence to gain domination over his citizens. Don't we owe it to ourselves, to this country, to speak up when something looks fishy so that doesn't happen here? History repeats itself, you might have heard. If you can't accept that, you're a blind apologist and a fool.
It is civic duty to blow whistles where appropriate, but I'm more worried about Bush going the way of Abraham Lincoln (who absolutely shredded the Bill of Rights during the Civil War). Hitler was explicitly granted extraordinary powers by the German legislature to essentially ascend to dictatorship; our own congress has been tenative with Bush (example: yesterday's extension of the Patriot Act by a month when Bush wanted it declared permanent), and like Lincoln he's acted outside the boundaries of presidential power and ignored his critics.
Jingoism is rapidly fading from fashion as the public has been reminded that wars hurt people including American soldiers, and I'd expect more doves to join congress in the next election. Assuming the '08 presidential race goes as expected, neither Hillary nor McCain will continue to support the Patriot Act if it even survives that long (amusing aside: protestors were shouting through bullhorns denouncing Bush's '08 campaign in Berkeley a few months back). Bush doesn't have Lincoln's justifications for his actions, but the methods they have used and the violations of liberty they have caused are far more similar to each other than either has been to Hitler.
Yeah, but I think the point of the other poster was that it is actually a restriction of the copyright itself (as a system), not that of the GPL. The rationale for this reasoning is that, if there were NO copyright-protections whatsoever (for instance, if *everything* ever written automatically became public property), there would be no need for the GPL.
I completely agree that the GPL is less draconian than default copyright law, but it is more draconian with regards to limitations on distribution than other licenses that the FSF defines as Free (e.g. the X11 License). It's a false dichotomy to present copyleft as the only alternative to copyright. Note I'm not saying that it makes the GPL worse than the X11 License, only that it's more restrictive for people who agree to it.Because, if there was no restriction on that already-globally-in-place restriction, the freedom to use it would be less. I agree that, at first view, one could see that as an additional restriction, but the fact is, if one does not restrict the (copyright)restrictions, you become more restricted, not less.
Perhaps I should put it this way: the GPL (and copyleft in general) has restrictions that are not necessary to remove traditional copyright restrictions. There are non-copyleft OSS licenses that illustrate this. The grandparent of my original comment was saying that the GPL restrictions limit his personal rights with the software by enforcing behavior that wasn't part of the traditional public domain, and it was in that spirit I was replying to the parent of my original comment. The original position was that any license is more restrictive to individual freedom than public domain, which the parent of my post challenged.
It does not add any restrictions that were not there without it.
IANAL, but I have yet to see a source distribution requirement in any form in any copyright law.
Show me a freedom thats restricted that isn't first restricted by copyright law and isn't their to protect others free use of software as much as your own, and then you might have a leg to stand on.
You set up a straw man and knocked it down nicely with the middle of that sentence. Any limitation with good reason is still a limitation, so my original point stands--your qualification illutrates that you know why the GPL restricts the behavior of people who agree to it outside of normal copyright law, therefore you also know those restrictions exist in the first place. I never said "has artificial restrictions placed on them by the license in a way that doesn't protect public access"--apparently you decided to insert that qualifier as a value judgement on top of my comments and want me to defend it instead of what I actually typed.
I posted the GPL was good for end users (something I truely believe) to preemt any sort of reactionary zealotry stemming from my comment that it does limit personal choice... apparently that wasn't blunt enough. It's a simple fact that the GPL was designed to force publication of modified code, which is an artificial limitation on the personal freedom of authors in exchange for public accessibility. It's an equally simple fact that this limitation is intended to foster access to source code and nurture a highly open culture that should benefit everyone. Both statements can be true at the same time.
If you really want to know where I stand on source publication, you could google to find out that I've always republished my open source modifications, even with the license didn't demand it. My past actions speak clearly on whether I believe people should contribute back to the source code community.
It's not free to who? The person who gets to use it, or the person who has to let the other person use it?
The person who gets to use it has artificial restrictions placed on them by the license by the original author. The person who has to let the other person use it has identical artificial restrictions placed on them by the license by the original author. His point was that by definition a license restricts personal choice. The software is freely available, but those who use it must agree to rules specified by the original author or face a possible trip to court.
Every freedom is a tradeoff... swinging fists and noses and all that jazz. I bet the slaveowners were upset about their lost freedom when their ex-slaves found theirs.
What... no Nazi references? If you're going to ridiculously vilify someone who disagrees with you, you could at least call them fascist--even if it's 180 degrees from what they are saying like in this case, it's an Internet tradition.
"Information wants to be free" means "no one wants to pay anything for anything" as much as "lets start a company" means "I want to embezzle millions". Sure, some people who say one thing mean the other, but that doesn't define either movement.
I agree 100% with this bit.
Isn't it funny that you call the people using the GPL license as "cheapskates" when the only real cheapskate here is the people who took code other people wrote and called it their own product instead of investing their own time and money to develop a product that was truly theirs?
I think he was going for "control freaks" more than "cheapskates"--his final complaint is the exercise of control by the original author over users and the declaration of ownership that implies, not anything related to money.
So long as you aren't talking about the personal freedom of the license holder, who can be sued over what was acceptible behavior before the license. The nullification of property rights is contrary to traditional conceptions of freedom such as the American Declaration of Independance or the French Declaration of the Rights of Man. The FSF's idea that intangibles aren't subject to ownership isn't a universally held position, which is why the GPL exists in the first place.
Note that I didn't say that the GPL is a bad thing, and I agree that in many (most?) cases a GPL'd project will result in fewer problems for end users than a public domain one, especially once there is more than one author associated with the project.
If anything, Java was over-secure from the beginning, because you couldn't do anything. ;-)
Unless you exploited one of the security holes that the article talks about. You can say that there is effectively "no security" or "limited security" (your pick) in a sandbox system that can be defeated through known security flaws. That isn't, however, the point of the article.
You did read the article before getting belligerent about it, right? The article is making a value judgement between two systems and saying one is better relative to the other for a list of concrete reasons. Instead of debating the merits of its comparisons, you are twisting its words into a statement Java is inherently bad or should not be used--a judgement that doesn't appear anywhere in its conclusions--and then attacking that newly invented premise.
This article isn't bashing Java for the sake of bashing Java, and where it discusses a problem gives detailed, concrete information about its complaints. If you're upset that your language of choice isn't perfect, I suggest adapting to reality--no virutal machine, OS, or application has a perfect design. If you need to persist in arguing that Java has never had "limited security" (what is "unlimited security", anyway?), you could start by telling CVE every past vulnerability they've documented is imaginary. As others have pointed out, 10 of the issues are due to the MS virtual machine, which leaves only 35 for you to argue.