If Linus had never come along, RMS would be running GNU tools on top of a BSD kernel and telling everyone why it should be called GNU/BSD.
Nope. BSD is not GPL'd, and the original licence of BSD is not even GPL-compatible. RMS really dislikes anything that is not GPL'd (his definition of being free).
Not at all for me. The first group of people is only a very small subset of the other group, not to mention that the real target users of DRM are hardly in the former group.
Sharing what you do not own (like music) is certainly not a God-given, unalienable right!
If everyone is good and does no evil, there can hardly be the need to have laws at all. Unfortunately this is not case, and the freedom of human beings is always restricted in some ways. I do not like DRM, either, but I think a person-oriented DRM is much, much better than a device-oriented DRM, and provides an acceptable balance between media companies and consumers.
What is not mentioned in the WSJ is the real reason why they shut down their blogs—I would called the journal report still a biased one. In fact, they did it as a humorous action, because 8 March is a special day in China: the Women's Day—no, I have read no Chinese words that they intended to give the Western reporters a lesson. However, since their words are ambiguous ("Due to unavoidable reasons with which everyone is familiar, this blog is temporarily closed."), it raised doubts in the West.
China is not at all perfect. China is not at all as bad as some think.
I do not like many of the behaviours of the Chinese government, and I personally dislike the idea of Chinese domain names.--In fact, it has existed in China for several years but not seriously taken by big corporations, possibly to make it easy for people abroad to access.--But it makes no harm to allow Chinese domain names as well. Really it is completely OK to access the same site using both Chinese domain names and International domain names. And it could be good for domestic companies and Web surfers.
Don't politicize everything China does. China does not want to be isolated from this globalizing world!
I disagree. I believe that no Google is better than some Google. It is much better to have no information that to have your brain filled with propaganda. The citizens won't be able to distinguish government propaganda from fact.
Personally, China needs to change its totalitarian policies. The government is evil, and its people will be oppressed as long as that government operates under its current methods. The free world should also do a better job developing and competing, before totalitarian China starts controlling everything. All of our goods already comes from there, and they are getting much more powerful each year. A powerful totalitarian government is dangerous to any free society in the world. What will happen if ultra-powerful China gets more evil and start attacking other countries?
What do you mean? Do you want all Chinese blind and deaf, and it is what you call `good'?
China is not something you ever imagined. The government is not satisfactory, but not `evil' as we would call. My brain is not full of propaganda, partly thanks to the Internet. If everyone follows your logic, then we Chinese might be really blind!
Chinese citizens are probably better off with a censored Google rather than no Google at all. That is true.
The "critics", such as they are, are mainly those people that love to point out hypocrisy in others. Google brought this on themselves, though, by obviously juxtopositioning themselves against Microsoft with the corporate philosophy of "Do no evil." Remember your SAT keywords; Google themselves said "no evil" - not "Do the lesser of two evils."
I do not feel any evil of Google. I am in China and I use Google often, and I can assure you Google has not done anything less, but only more. We used to be able to use only google.com, the connection to which is often reset when a `sensitive' key word is encountered (from your IP, which is extremely unlucky if you are in a corporate environment where many people use the same public IP address). Now this does not change, but we have access to a new google.cn, where content is censored but the access to it is never reset!
Of course I do not like censorship, but as a technical surfer I want `safe' information much more than `controversial' content. I am very happy Google now provides a choice to Chinese users like me (maybe 99% of all Web surfers) to always be able to access Google.
Emphasis: It is not about evil, but about compromise. In the real world everyone needs compromises except for idealists like RMS.
Thank you for making my point. If you are not allowed to use the SPEC to make your OWN player, it is, by definition, NOT OPEN.
Yes, I suppose it is not open. I am just curious to know why it is necessary to write Yet Another Flash Player. Is it so funny for you to re-create the wheels again and again? Do you want to redesign a Boeing because they do not release their code to control the aeroplanes?
Once I put my coat over a camera before giving my speech, when I learned it was webcasting in RealPlayer format.
Even if the webcasting is not in RealPlayer format, how can he dispense with the proprietary code embedded in the firmware in cameras etc? If he check around him, I bet he will need to build many things himself (let me think about it: is the microcode in the CPU free as in `free speech'?).
And didn't he take aeroplanes? I think there is a lot of embedded code controlling the aeroplanes too....
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Nope. BSD is not GPL'd, and the original licence of BSD is not even GPL-compatible. RMS really dislikes anything that is not GPL'd (his definition of being free).
Not at all for me. The first group of people is only a very small subset of the other group, not to mention that the real target users of DRM are hardly in the former group.
Sharing what you do not own (like music) is certainly not a God-given, unalienable right!
If everyone is good and does no evil, there can hardly be the need to have laws at all. Unfortunately this is not case, and the freedom of human beings is always restricted in some ways. I do not like DRM, either, but I think a person-oriented DRM is much, much better than a device-oriented DRM, and provides an acceptable balance between media companies and consumers.
What is not mentioned in the WSJ is the real reason why they shut down their blogs—I would called the journal report still a biased one. In fact, they did it as a humorous action, because 8 March is a special day in China: the Women's Day—no, I have read no Chinese words that they intended to give the Western reporters a lesson. However, since their words are ambiguous ("Due to unavoidable reasons with which everyone is familiar, this blog is temporarily closed."), it raised doubts in the West.
China is not at all perfect. China is not at all as bad as some think.
I do not like many of the behaviours of the Chinese government, and I personally dislike the idea of Chinese domain names.--In fact, it has existed in China for several years but not seriously taken by big corporations, possibly to make it easy for people abroad to access.--But it makes no harm to allow Chinese domain names as well. Really it is completely OK to access the same site using both Chinese domain names and International domain names. And it could be good for domestic companies and Web surfers. Don't politicize everything China does. China does not want to be isolated from this globalizing world!
What do you mean? Do you want all Chinese blind and deaf, and it is what you call `good'?
China is not something you ever imagined. The government is not satisfactory, but not `evil' as we would call. My brain is not full of propaganda, partly thanks to the Internet. If everyone follows your logic, then we Chinese might be really blind!
I do not feel any evil of Google. I am in China and I use Google often, and I can assure you Google has not done anything less, but only more. We used to be able to use only google.com, the connection to which is often reset when a `sensitive' key word is encountered (from your IP, which is extremely unlucky if you are in a corporate environment where many people use the same public IP address). Now this does not change, but we have access to a new google.cn, where content is censored but the access to it is never reset!
Of course I do not like censorship, but as a technical surfer I want `safe' information much more than `controversial' content. I am very happy Google now provides a choice to Chinese users like me (maybe 99% of all Web surfers) to always be able to access Google.
Emphasis: It is not about evil, but about compromise. In the real world everyone needs compromises except for idealists like RMS.
Thank you for making my point. If you are not allowed to use the SPEC to make your OWN player, it is, by definition, NOT OPEN.
Yes, I suppose it is not open. I am just curious to know why it is necessary to write Yet Another Flash Player. Is it so funny for you to re-create the wheels again and again? Do you want to redesign a Boeing because they do not release their code to control the aeroplanes?
Even if the webcasting is not in RealPlayer format, how can he dispense with the proprietary code embedded in the firmware in cameras etc? If he check around him, I bet he will need to build many things himself (let me think about it: is the microcode in the CPU free as in `free speech'?).
And didn't he take aeroplanes? I think there is a lot of embedded code controlling the aeroplanes too....