For those books which are already out of copyright (i.e. usually more than 70 years old), you can already start today, here:
http://www.pgdp.net/c or if you want the list of what's going on there now (warning, listing of 900 books, please don't slashdot it) here: http://www.pgdp.net/c/list_etexts.php?x=b&sort=5
This version of Debian had many more bugs than MS Windows, but it runs on 11 architectures, and it includes not just the core system but also more than 15000 packages (whose bugs are included in the count), totalling 229 million SLOC.
And that was the previous stable version, not the current one from april 2007.
I think that is a non-issue (I haven't used it though but bear with me).
If the BBC decides to only serve their content under, say, Ogg Theora, how long do you think it would take before that HAD "the market penetration"?
Think about it from a end-user point of view:
end-user 1: "I want to watch the BBC on my PC/mobile/microwave oven but it doesn't work anymore"
(enlightened) end-user 2: "Click here to download the program that plays it and then it works"
Useful information like that spreads quickly.
There are no fundamental reasons why free video codecs, players, and servers should be a pain to install, you know:-)
If you can't install the server, hire someone who can. I'm sure the BBC would be able to find such people. The client is probably not an issue because wikipedia says (i quote) "125 millions of helix client empowered mobile phones have been shipped since 2006". It didn't say if all those clients (on e.g. Symbian mobile phones) can also play all of the media formats such as Ogg Theora, and I don't know.
The server seems to be available from RealNetworks under two different open source licenses RCSL and RPSL; I don't know the terms of those licenses but being open source it probably is possible and allowed to add Ogg Theora file format if it isn't provided already. Maybe RealNetworks demands that the modified server and client can always work with their.rm format; that would be a reasonable licensing condition, no?
Have some confidence that useful, non-evil technology can percolate through to mass-use. It happened in the past and it can happen again.
Those neutrality and review properties are dependent on OASIS.
- Able to deal with a reasonable subset of the features available today across the variety of word processors available.
From the fact that it's now a standard we can conclude that at least the members of the OASIS TC which formed this standard OK-ed it; that includes Adobe, IBM, Intel, Novell and Sun (if that committee webpage is correct). Others apparently the Society of Biblical Literature, KDE e.V, several individuals, etc. Other interested parties should join that TC if they want their word processor features included for saving/loading in ODF. IIRC Microsoft was specifically invited to join (by the European Union) but weren't interested back then.
Anyway, about compatibility:
This is a partial quote from section 1.5 of ODF v1.1 about conformance, not specifically compatibility; anyway I hope this helps:
Document Processing and Conformance
Documents that conform to the OpenDocument specification may contain elements and attributes not specified within the OpenDocument schema. Such elements and attributes must not be part of a namespace that is defined within this specification and are called foreign elements and attributes.
(...)
Conforming applications that read and write documents may preserve foreign elements and attributes.
In addition to this, (...)
Conforming applications shall read documents containing processing instructions and should preserve them.
There are no rules regarding the elements and attributes that actually have to be supported by conforming applications, except that applications should not use foreign elements and attributes for features defined in the OpenDocument schema. See also appendix D.
If you built a computer out of loose parts from different vendors and those vendors weren't completely anal about the specs, do you think it would work? ATX form factor is also a standard, you know. Would you buy a motherboard that was ATX standard "except the power-supply pins are spaced like on the Olivetti M20"?
A standard document format has to say something either like "spacing like they do in ISO standard xyz" or "spacing done with a multiplier parameter <spacing fact="1.01"> where fact = a multiplier factor for backward compatibility, use 1.01987 for wordperfect 6.0 and 1.00 for everything else" but NEVER "spacing like in the proprietary software product word perfect 6.0, go buy it and buy a computer that can still run it if you want to perform the experiments necessary to know how to implement this feature".
And ISTR Microsoft, as a MEMBER of OASIS, was invited and encouraged to help define the ODF? They declined the invitation. Otherwise, this special Microsoft spacing feature would have been in ODF already (if what you say is true -- I'm tired and can't be bothered to look up in the spec whether its functionality is already described anyway).
Finally, I think the point of most standards is
to be completely anal about supporting those with pixel-perfect representation as they originally appeared
. Think: contracts, design documentation of 30-year old airplanes, etc.
Not if they obey the laws of robotics of Philip K. Dick's second variety story!:-)
When I read that story as a boy it made my neck hairs stand on end:-)
Do you understand that China and India are going to so massively surpass the US and EU in emissions that any action taken by the US and EU will be meaningless, and there is absolutely no incentive at all right now for them to stop, or even slow down the growth? You won't be able to continue blaming only the US for long.
I understand your point, but I think in this case, if you can't lead by example, you can't lead at all, in a multipolar world as opposed to an American Empire (maybe one day to be replaced by an even more polluting empire).
I just hope that strict caps on CO2 emission will provide the companies in the EU (where I live) with incentives to make their production processes more efficient and competitive (more competitive with the rest of the world, that is). Then, when this government-enforced investment round is done, we'll see which economy is seen as an example to emulate. I make no bets but I hope and believe it's the modernized, less polluting ones instead of the old-fashioned industries that didn't get a kick in the backside from their governments. It may always be a punishment but I don't believe it's always detrimental for an industry to re-invent itself. Are car-makers now struggling to survive because they were all forced to put catalysts in their cars?
Quagmire means swamp, yes? Like 300 million years ago, when most of the earth was a hot swamp, in the Carboniferous period? Where did that name come from again.. oh yes, from coal! I wonder what happens to the climate when we humans turn all that coal back into CO2 in the coming few hundred years? (though the author of the first link seems to disagree here).
The BSD license (as I see it on a Debian computer,/usr/share/common-licenses/BSD) has no patent clauses at all; it's nice ans short and readable. So I'd think it would stand up in court but only be applicable to conflicts about copyright on your code.
"Intellectual property" is REALLY the wrong word in your response. IANAL but you're using the words "putting your code"... and "legally patent it" in one sentence. Patents are NOT about your code. Your code is copyrighted and shielded by the BSD licensed but *IRRELEVANT* w.r.t. the patent: The methods and concepts that are implemented by your code are what gets rubber-stamped with a 20 year software patent.
Next, the patent being granted, you have a good chance to as you say "eventually win in court": agreed. However this is only the case if you have the stomach and the money to litigate that "prior art" case to the end, which can seriously cost years of time and hundreds of thousands of dollars, during which you're not allowed to use or sell the software (because the USPTO has legally granted the monopoly right to the patentee).
Also I believe the USA has no rule that the loser pays the court costs so from a business point of view, your legal representative might advise you to give in to their demands because it's your only realistic option.
And what if you do litigate it to the end and the company "patent troll litigation version #21, Inc" suddenly goes bankrupt? You may get that one patent invalidated but you're poor. Next, you're suddenly sued by a newly sprung up company "patent troll litigation version #22, Inc" who discovered that you are violating one of *their* software patents because your program is more than 1000 lines long:-)
Oh I don't know.. I guess I just don't like the idea of software patents:-( you may now call me a zealot, I guess.
All the examples you give are border lines between your rights and the rights of others in society around you; this is simply not the case if you modify your Tivo, your neighbour's car alarm will not suddenly go haywire and the electricity company will not suddenly complain that your meter's running backwards. The Tivo is a consumer appliance and not regulated like e.g. a mobile phone; any modifications therefore involve only you (owner) and the appliance.
I'll now try to give some better counterexamples to your examples.
If I buy a book, it's exclusively mine, and I can sell it to a second hand book shop for whatever money they are willing to give (not possible with DRM). I'm also allowed to visit a second hand bookshop and legally buy books there.
If I own my house, I'm allowed to buy a different central heating system whenever I want; the state only demands that it's installed by a professional and that it's certified to work properly.
If a function on that Tivo is worthless and I can get a download of an improved version that someone wrote, but Tivo makes it impossible to install this non-signed binary, then I think it's exactly the same situation as your house analogy: you want to improve your property (to get a lower heating bill) but even though you're formally allowed to do so, the architect buried your heating system under 3 meters of concrete so you wouldn't be able to upgrade it.
The famous slashdot car analogy: just use the open-source analogy. What would you prefer to buy, a car with the hood welded shut or a car which you can get serviced at any licensed mechanic? "Tivoisation" is then where the source code is freely downloadable and fully upgradeable, you're just not allowed to actually run the upgraded version. Would this then be a car with a perspex hood that's still welded shut but at least you can see which bit the black smoke is billowing out of?
Tivo has a right to do what they want to their products. They decided to use software that they didn't have all rights to do what they want with; only what is permitted by the license. I think that they tried to do a run-around of that license, prompting the FSF to try to upgrade the license to prevent that specific kind of trick. So here we are now with GPLv3 a bit more mature and a bit more ugly than GPLv2:-).
BTW I agree that Tivo has the right to claim "warranty void when upgraded" and even to refuse to repair an upgraded Tivo. But nobody here disputes that right. A company cannot be held liable for what an army of "better idiots" can invent with their product (remember the story of the microwave oven and the dog; after the dog was parboiled, could the owner have sued to get a replacement microwave oven from the company because their current one smelled of dog?).
To pull that microwave analogy through: should there be a law that explicitly forbids consumers to use the products they bought for any other than the designated purpose (we could call it the "implicit tivoization law" or the "microwaved dog law" for all I care)? Imagine the effect THAT would have on society and innovation. Society is an ugly, mature compromise and Tivo stepped over an invisible border line.
I totally fail to see your point. Are you really saying that the toxic organometallics for silicon wafer production are more of a drain on our environment than nuclear waste from a nuclear breeder reactor would be?
Maybe I'm missing something, but I think that's bogus: those organometallics can be reclaimed and reprocessed (at a cost) but probably will be as they contain scarce and thus expensive elements *all of which can be re-used in the production process*. After reprocessing (= a drain on the environment), there will be some waste dumped in the environment that couldn't be reclaimed.
I just don't believe that in a nuclear breeder reactor no waste is produced that would just absorb the neutrons and dampen the chain reaction to the point of uselessness. Thus, from time to time, fuel rods would have to be taken out (at some danger and great cost) and transported and reprocessed in places like Windscale oh sorry Sellafield. This reclamation and reprocessing would be a *lot* more dangerous than of those organometallics you mentioned (because it's "hot"), and you'd end up with fresh fuel rods and highly active nuclear waste. You then only have to vitrify that and store it in a secure location guarded against corrosion, terrorists, earthquakes, tsunamis, revolutions, concrete rot, curious crackpots, water condensation, cost-cutting governments, construction steel strength degradation from irradiation, rising sea-levels etc. for several thousand years (or, re-build the storage location every fifty years or so), how clean is that w.r.t final cost of the energy production???
About your fifth point, power storage: here in europe there are ideas for a distributed power generation/consumption infrastructure, so that e.g. many small solar generators can be used in the daytime, the surplus being used for refrigeration warehouses, and at night the big power plant provides a baseline power level but some (industrial) consumers use less energy (those warehouses are refrigerated a few degrees too much during the daytime and slowly heat up until the morning when solar generated power kicks in again). Disclaimer: I don't know anything about the feasibility, I'm not an engineer. But it sounds like a plausible, cheap, low-tech solution to me. So we'll see if it ever gets implemented:-)
I think what pp means is that the cost of production of 1 wafer of ultra-pure crystallized silicon doesn't follow Moore's "law". I know it's made from sand which won't run out any time soon but the production process makes it expensive:-)
IIRC the dopants are much more scarce and thus expensive (Ga, As, In and such elements 1-off from group IV?) but you only need a tiny bit of them. Or maybe I'm confusing silicon transistor production with photovoltaics which might be totally different.
OK, I'll try a rational response:-) let's see how it works out (I'm really tired and just watched the BNN donor show on TV):
"The freedom to run the program, for any purpose"
IMHO what GPLv3 does is restrict that freedom in such a way, and with such a purpose, as to prevent any user of GPLv3 software (i.e. you) to restrict that same freedom further towards your down-stream users/developers.
I'm not very good at logic, but I can't put it any clearer than that (whew). So yes, it sounds counter-intuitive and wrong, but I do believe it makes sense.
An analogy would maybe be that in a society, no-one is allowed to use violence against another citizen, except for the police, but then in such a way, and with such a purpose, as to prevent any citizen to use violence against another citizen. You may not like the police but many people would say they have a definitive corrective function in a real-life society, as in that the netto result of a society *with* police is percieved as functioning much better than a society *without* police (depending on size of the society etc., see Jared Diamond's Guns Germs & Steel).
Any true-blooded follower of prince Pjotr Alekseyevich Kropotkin will probably disagree non-violently here;-) If so, please scan and OCR that mutual aid book and put it up on www.pgdp.net:-)
Comments, please? Did I understand it correctly? (I'd really like to know)
Hmm.. he seems to be still alive according to Wikipedia; maybe he could sit on that panel.
I liked his book "the cool war" from 1981 and can HIGHLY recommend it, especially now, 26 years later.
Imagine sort of a Foucault's pendulum, but then for terrorism:-).
Might not be the kind of storyline this U.S. administration is looking for though... hm. never mind..
X probably exercises a lot of memory, so have you ever tried to install a memory checker such as memtest86, reboot with it, and run it all night? It might catch memory errors that don't often show up under regular use. I don't know about the i810 driver, but if you experience problems when you do the exact same action (e.g. playing a 3-d game or something) then you might want to spend the energy to complain at your distribution maker that game Y always crashes or has weird stripes in 800x600 resolution with your kernel version and video card etc.
I'm as big a Linux fanboi as the next, but I would never claim that you're doing something wrong. That kind of behaviour (lockups and crashes) is simply unacceptable, I think everyone agrees. When you say X.org is still in its infancy I guess you refer to the version 7 split into modular system; do you mean you never had such lockups under a previous version? That might also be an important data point to tell in your bugreport.
As you said, you submit bug reports where possible: great. For other readers I'd just reiterate: don't expect anyone helping you out if you never send in a short formal bugreport with the details you (at your technical level) deem important. The authors of the software (X.org in this case) may have never tested it out in your exact configuration; PC hardware is very diverse. Complain to your distribution makers: they'll assess it and pass it on upstream (possibly after a long time; if you want instant results, hire somebody to solve it).
Try to see it from the X.org programmers' perspectives (no, I'm not one of them, I'm guessing here): if you receive a lot of similar, readable, not too ranty, detailed bug reports then maybe (if you have time) you can track and fix the issues. But you are not going to trawl general forums (like slashdot) to see if somebody complains "it doesn't work".
I'm curious, what didn't they like about adept or synaptic? To me (long-term Debian user) synaptic seems quite user-friendly (compared to dpkg at least:-))
When you use the word "platform" I'm assuming we're talking about the OS itself, i.e. excluding the applications. I'm not very familiar with MS Windows but I think Linux is doing excellent qua performance and stability, witness that it can be used for embedded applications (thanks a lot to FSF's gcc and binutils, methinks), can be used for real-time (with modifications, but I thought they are going to be folded into the mainline kernel), is quite secure (selinux) and most of all is usable for serious computing: how many of the top-500 supercomputers run a kind of Linux (on at least some of the nodes)? At first glance I'd say about 70%. How many run *any* special edition of MS Windows, or other non-unix-like OS? At first glance I'd say 0%. Can you imagine what a boost this is for e.g. HIV and cancer research (paragraph 3 on the page)? Now imagine the real-life effects on society, if research centers were forced to use Microsoft software. To how many CPUs does that scale? Let's not even get started on "Windows for Warships" (for brits and maybe argentinos: listen to their sci-fi radio show -- but I digress).
<fanboi mode off/>
Of course that doesn't imply Linux is also a good desktop platform but I can't at the moment think of any OS feature that is specific for desktop use and that Linux can't provide. I may be a fanboi but yes, I'd say "Linux is better than MS Windows" (njaa njaa njaa etc.; penile length etc.).
Now how this translates to "has the best applications" is a completely different matter, for which technical excellence is much less important than inertia, portability of existing software, existing market share, and marketing (Microsoft marketing budget for Windows XP was $ 1 000 000 000 BTW; I'd say that compensates a lot).
Slashdot Mirror
For those books which are already out of copyright (i.e. usually more than 70 years old), you can already start today, here: http://www.pgdp.net/c or if you want the list of what's going on there now (warning, listing of 900 books, please don't slashdot it) here: http://www.pgdp.net/c/list_etexts.php?x=b&sort=5
Otherwise, let me point you to secunia: Compare side-by-side Microsoft Windows XP (from october 2001) with Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 (sarge) (from june 2005).
This version of Debian had many more bugs than MS Windows, but it runs on 11 architectures, and it includes not just the core system but also more than 15000 packages (whose bugs are included in the count), totalling 229 million SLOC. And that was the previous stable version, not the current one from april 2007.
If the BBC decides to only serve their content under, say, Ogg Theora, how long do you think it would take before that HAD "the market penetration"?
Think about it from a end-user point of view:
end-user 1: "I want to watch the BBC on my PC/mobile/microwave oven but it doesn't work anymore" (enlightened) end-user 2: "Click here to download the program that plays it and then it works" Useful information like that spreads quickly.
There are no fundamental reasons why free video codecs, players, and servers should be a pain to install, you know :-)
If you can't install the server, hire someone who can. I'm sure the BBC would be able to find such people. The client is probably not an issue because wikipedia says (i quote) "125 millions of helix client empowered mobile phones have been shipped since 2006". It didn't say if all those clients (on e.g. Symbian mobile phones) can also play all of the media formats such as Ogg Theora, and I don't know.
The server seems to be available from RealNetworks under two different open source licenses RCSL and RPSL; I don't know the terms of those licenses but being open source it probably is possible and allowed to add Ogg Theora file format if it isn't provided already. Maybe RealNetworks demands that the modified server and client can always work with their .rm format; that would be a reasonable licensing condition, no?
Have some confidence that useful, non-evil technology can percolate through to mass-use. It happened in the past and it can happen again.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Microso ft
more generic stuff: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Astrotu rf
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Front_g roups
Anyway, about compatibility:
This is a partial quote from section 1.5 of ODF v1.1 about conformance, not specifically compatibility; anyway I hope this helps:
A standard document format has to say something either like "spacing like they do in ISO standard xyz" or "spacing done with a multiplier parameter <spacing fact="1.01"> where fact = a multiplier factor for backward compatibility, use 1.01987 for wordperfect 6.0 and 1.00 for everything else" but NEVER "spacing like in the proprietary software product word perfect 6.0, go buy it and buy a computer that can still run it if you want to perform the experiments necessary to know how to implement this feature".
And ISTR Microsoft, as a MEMBER of OASIS, was invited and encouraged to help define the ODF? They declined the invitation. Otherwise, this special Microsoft spacing feature would have been in ODF already (if what you say is true -- I'm tired and can't be bothered to look up in the spec whether its functionality is already described anyway).
Finally, I think the point of most standards is
. Think: contracts, design documentation of 30-year old airplanes, etc.Good grief.
Well, if they have an accident and fall in, luckily those second-variety teddy bear robots can come to rescue them.
Not if they obey the laws of robotics of Philip K. Dick's second variety story! :-)
When I read that story as a boy it made my neck hairs stand on end :-)
I just hope that strict caps on CO2 emission will provide the companies in the EU (where I live) with incentives to make their production processes more efficient and competitive (more competitive with the rest of the world, that is). Then, when this government-enforced investment round is done, we'll see which economy is seen as an example to emulate. I make no bets but I hope and believe it's the modernized, less polluting ones instead of the old-fashioned industries that didn't get a kick in the backside from their governments. It may always be a punishment but I don't believe it's always detrimental for an industry to re-invent itself. Are car-makers now struggling to survive because they were all forced to put catalysts in their cars?
Quagmire means swamp, yes? Like 300 million years ago, when most of the earth was a hot swamp, in the Carboniferous period? Where did that name come from again.. oh yes, from coal! I wonder what happens to the climate when we humans turn all that coal back into CO2 in the coming few hundred years? (though the author of the first link seems to disagree here).
"Intellectual property" is REALLY the wrong word in your response. IANAL but you're using the words "putting your code" ... and "legally patent it" in one sentence. Patents are NOT about your code. Your code is copyrighted and shielded by the BSD licensed but *IRRELEVANT* w.r.t. the patent: The methods and concepts that are implemented by your code are what gets rubber-stamped with a 20 year software patent.
Next, the patent being granted, you have a good chance to as you say "eventually win in court": agreed. However this is only the case if you have the stomach and the money to litigate that "prior art" case to the end, which can seriously cost years of time and hundreds of thousands of dollars, during which you're not allowed to use or sell the software (because the USPTO has legally granted the monopoly right to the patentee).
Also I believe the USA has no rule that the loser pays the court costs so from a business point of view, your legal representative might advise you to give in to their demands because it's your only realistic option.
And what if you do litigate it to the end and the company "patent troll litigation version #21, Inc" suddenly goes bankrupt? You may get that one patent invalidated but you're poor. Next, you're suddenly sued by a newly sprung up company "patent troll litigation version #22, Inc" who discovered that you are violating one of *their* software patents because your program is more than 1000 lines long :-)
Oh I don't know.. I guess I just don't like the idea of software patents :-( you may now call me a zealot, I guess.
I'll now try to give some better counterexamples to your examples.
If I buy a book, it's exclusively mine, and I can sell it to a second hand book shop for whatever money they are willing to give (not possible with DRM). I'm also allowed to visit a second hand bookshop and legally buy books there.
If I own my house, I'm allowed to buy a different central heating system whenever I want; the state only demands that it's installed by a professional and that it's certified to work properly. If a function on that Tivo is worthless and I can get a download of an improved version that someone wrote, but Tivo makes it impossible to install this non-signed binary, then I think it's exactly the same situation as your house analogy: you want to improve your property (to get a lower heating bill) but even though you're formally allowed to do so, the architect buried your heating system under 3 meters of concrete so you wouldn't be able to upgrade it.
The famous slashdot car analogy: just use the open-source analogy. What would you prefer to buy, a car with the hood welded shut or a car which you can get serviced at any licensed mechanic? "Tivoisation" is then where the source code is freely downloadable and fully upgradeable, you're just not allowed to actually run the upgraded version. Would this then be a car with a perspex hood that's still welded shut but at least you can see which bit the black smoke is billowing out of?
Tivo has a right to do what they want to their products. They decided to use software that they didn't have all rights to do what they want with; only what is permitted by the license. I think that they tried to do a run-around of that license, prompting the FSF to try to upgrade the license to prevent that specific kind of trick. So here we are now with GPLv3 a bit more mature and a bit more ugly than GPLv2 :-).
BTW I agree that Tivo has the right to claim "warranty void when upgraded" and even to refuse to repair an upgraded Tivo. But nobody here disputes that right. A company cannot be held liable for what an army of "better idiots" can invent with their product (remember the story of the microwave oven and the dog; after the dog was parboiled, could the owner have sued to get a replacement microwave oven from the company because their current one smelled of dog?).
To pull that microwave analogy through: should there be a law that explicitly forbids consumers to use the products they bought for any other than the designated purpose (we could call it the "implicit tivoization law" or the "microwaved dog law" for all I care)? Imagine the effect THAT would have on society and innovation. Society is an ugly, mature compromise and Tivo stepped over an invisible border line.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I think that's bogus: those organometallics can be reclaimed and reprocessed (at a cost) but probably will be as they contain scarce and thus expensive elements *all of which can be re-used in the production process*. After reprocessing (= a drain on the environment), there will be some waste dumped in the environment that couldn't be reclaimed.
I just don't believe that in a nuclear breeder reactor no waste is produced that would just absorb the neutrons and dampen the chain reaction to the point of uselessness. Thus, from time to time, fuel rods would have to be taken out (at some danger and great cost) and transported and reprocessed in places like Windscale oh sorry Sellafield. This reclamation and reprocessing would be a *lot* more dangerous than of those organometallics you mentioned (because it's "hot"), and you'd end up with fresh fuel rods and highly active nuclear waste. You then only have to vitrify that and store it in a secure location guarded against corrosion, terrorists, earthquakes, tsunamis, revolutions, concrete rot, curious crackpots, water condensation, cost-cutting governments, construction steel strength degradation from irradiation, rising sea-levels etc. for several thousand years (or, re-build the storage location every fifty years or so), how clean is that w.r.t final cost of the energy production???
Link: http://ec.europa.eu/research/energy/nn/nn_rt/nn_rt _dg/article_1158_en.htm. It should appeal to us internet-loving nerds ;-)
I think what pp means is that the cost of production of 1 wafer of ultra-pure crystallized silicon doesn't follow Moore's "law". I know it's made from sand which won't run out any time soon but the production process makes it expensive :-)
IIRC the dopants are much more scarce and thus expensive (Ga, As, In and such elements 1-off from group IV?) but you only need a tiny bit of them. Or maybe I'm confusing silicon transistor production with photovoltaics which might be totally different.
IMHO what GPLv3 does is restrict that freedom in such a way, and with such a purpose, as to prevent any user of GPLv3 software (i.e. you) to restrict that same freedom further towards your down-stream users/developers.
I'm not very good at logic, but I can't put it any clearer than that (whew). So yes, it sounds counter-intuitive and wrong, but I do believe it makes sense.
An analogy would maybe be that in a society, no-one is allowed to use violence against another citizen, except for the police, but then in such a way, and with such a purpose, as to prevent any citizen to use violence against another citizen. You may not like the police but many people would say they have a definitive corrective function in a real-life society, as in that the netto result of a society *with* police is percieved as functioning much better than a society *without* police (depending on size of the society etc., see Jared Diamond's Guns Germs & Steel).
Any true-blooded follower of prince Pjotr Alekseyevich Kropotkin will probably disagree non-violently here ;-) If so, please scan and OCR that mutual aid book and put it up on www.pgdp.net :-)
Comments, please? Did I understand it correctly? (I'd really like to know)
On the other hand, maybe I'm misunderstanding your point.
Imagine sort of a Foucault's pendulum, but then for terrorism :-).
Might not be the kind of storyline this U.S. administration is looking for though... hm. never mind..
That's funny.. when you mentioned Heinlein, I immediately thought of "Revolt in 2100" instead :-)
X probably exercises a lot of memory, so have you ever tried to install a memory checker such as memtest86, reboot with it, and run it all night? It might catch memory errors that don't often show up under regular use. I don't know about the i810 driver, but if you experience problems when you do the exact same action (e.g. playing a 3-d game or something) then you might want to spend the energy to complain at your distribution maker that game Y always crashes or has weird stripes in 800x600 resolution with your kernel version and video card etc.
I'm as big a Linux fanboi as the next, but I would never claim that you're doing something wrong. That kind of behaviour (lockups and crashes) is simply unacceptable, I think everyone agrees. When you say X.org is still in its infancy I guess you refer to the version 7 split into modular system; do you mean you never had such lockups under a previous version? That might also be an important data point to tell in your bugreport.
As you said, you submit bug reports where possible: great. For other readers I'd just reiterate: don't expect anyone helping you out if you never send in a short formal bugreport with the details you (at your technical level) deem important. The authors of the software (X.org in this case) may have never tested it out in your exact configuration; PC hardware is very diverse. Complain to your distribution makers: they'll assess it and pass it on upstream (possibly after a long time; if you want instant results, hire somebody to solve it).
Try to see it from the X.org programmers' perspectives (no, I'm not one of them, I'm guessing here): if you receive a lot of similar, readable, not too ranty, detailed bug reports then maybe (if you have time) you can track and fix the issues. But you are not going to trawl general forums (like slashdot) to see if somebody complains "it doesn't work".
Anyone have a comment on how well this Cromwell BIOS works already? Might be nice to own a heavily subsidized Linux computer.
I'm curious, what didn't they like about adept or synaptic? To me (long-term Debian user) synaptic seems quite user-friendly (compared to dpkg at least :-))
Are you saying that you're a planet?? Mother Gaea, is that you?
<fanboi mode on>
When you use the word "platform" I'm assuming we're talking about the OS itself, i.e. excluding the applications. I'm not very familiar with MS Windows but I think Linux is doing excellent qua performance and stability, witness that it can be used for embedded applications (thanks a lot to FSF's gcc and binutils, methinks), can be used for real-time (with modifications, but I thought they are going to be folded into the mainline kernel), is quite secure (selinux) and most of all is usable for serious computing: how many of the top-500 supercomputers run a kind of Linux (on at least some of the nodes)? At first glance I'd say about 70%. How many run *any* special edition of MS Windows, or other non-unix-like OS? At first glance I'd say 0%. Can you imagine what a boost this is for e.g. HIV and cancer research (paragraph 3 on the page)? Now imagine the real-life effects on society, if research centers were forced to use Microsoft software. To how many CPUs does that scale? Let's not even get started on "Windows for Warships" (for brits and maybe argentinos: listen to their sci-fi radio show -- but I digress).
<fanboi mode off/>
Of course that doesn't imply Linux is also a good desktop platform but I can't at the moment think of any OS feature that is specific for desktop use and that Linux can't provide. I may be a fanboi but yes, I'd say "Linux is better than MS Windows" (njaa njaa njaa etc.; penile length etc.).
Now how this translates to "has the best applications" is a completely different matter, for which technical excellence is much less important than inertia, portability of existing software, existing market share, and marketing (Microsoft marketing budget for Windows XP was $ 1 000 000 000 BTW; I'd say that compensates a lot).