Personally, GPL licensors have always seemed insecure to me, in one of either two ways: (a) They don't trust that others will donate back to the community, as companies like Apple have, despite being under no legal obligation to do so; or (b) They want to prevent those who disagree with their software-should-be-free philosophy from benefiting from the use of their code. Particularly due to the seeming spitefulness of the latter (yeah yeah, greater political ends aside), I have much greater respect for people who release their code under BSD-style licenses.
Despite your beliefs, many corporations do in fact go above and beyond the bare minimum legal obligations when incorporating BSD-licensed code into their products, in some cases far beyond. Apple, for example, is under no obligation to distribute the source to Darwin, which borrows heavily from FreeBSD and Mach. The license of neither requires derivative works to be open sourced, yet Apple redistributes its modifications under the APSL.
Yes, but BSD-type coders don't see that as a problem, because--frankly?--the BSD mentality is fundamentally more generous than the borderline paranoia disguised as "freedom" the GPL wishes to force upon the rest of the world. People who don't mind their work being used by others have attained a Zen state of enlightenment; they don't see it as "stealing" for the simple reason that this was their intent all along. People who license their code under the GPL, on the other hand, are generally insecure crybabies.
Stallmanist zealot invokes the GPL to stop a Linux distro from including binary drivers, and you blame Microsoft. How typical.
This whole thing only goes to show that intelligence is GPL-incompatible. Programmers who aren't uptight, selfish misanthropes license their code under BSD.
The "rightness" of allowing the free exchange of ideas might not become immediately obvious... but the practical value to both society and the individual of such a position should become immediately clear
Ah, I very much agree. But then, I probably understand "practical value to... society and the individual" to mean about the same thing as do you--which is that the application of such a position sustains them (both society and individual), and is the surest guarantee that they will grow and prosper. And to say that this is better than the alternative relies, again, on a subjective judgment of permanence as preferable to transience, doesn't it?
We can all agree that society wouldn't be as robust, lacking the free exchange of ideas; we can agree that the cultures that survive are the ones with a history of using individual freedoms to promote a meritocracy of ideas. These assertions are compatible with both Confucian and Western thought, as far as I know. And I don't think it's common in China to want Chinese culture to die out, either.
So yes, there are things China could learn from Western values, and I am happy (as are the majority of China's citizens) to have seen the government over the past twenty years liberalizing, granting freedoms to the press, allowing intercommunication between citizens, and opening its borders to the outside world. But it misses the mark to criticize China's government for encouraging freedoms in ways that look to us like repression; things need to be seen in context to be understood, and it's all too common here in the West for people to offer opinions on Chinese freedoms incompletely informed by the context of Chinese culture. That, in short, is my beef.
Point being that if you want to live in a country where the "government" won't stop you from saying anything you like, Somalia's the place for you. It's an extreme example, but construed a certain way, you enjoy much less freedom of speech in the U.S. or China than in Somalia. That nobody "sane" (i.e. non-Somalian, essentially) wants to live there indicates that, hey, maybe there are things that said "sane" people value more than freedom of speech, no?
...I find it hard to argue that the particular cocktail of Shinto and Buddhism practiced in Japan is a roadmap to contentment when Japan's suicide rate is currently so shockingly high.
... says you.:-) I'd agree, but with the understanding that I, too, am influenced by imported (Western) values. In the '60s, my father's first wife killed herself. Without getting into the gory details, note that this was considered by both families an act of honor--something that I, as a product of my particular generation, have struggled to comprehend, but which I can respect as compatible with, and consistent within, their belief systems of the time.
It seems plausible, horrible as it sounds to my ears and yours, that had she not thrown herself in front of that train, the contentment of everyone involved may well have been diminished. At the very least, yours truly wouldn't even exist to be here spewing postmodern drivel if she had committed herself to Western prejudices against suicide, so there's at least one person for it the "happier." So even if one subscribes to a moral framework like Mill's original utilitarianism, there's grounds for an argument in favor of Japan retaining its existing value system (assuming you don't also want to throw out concepts like honor, face, and all the rest).
I'd point out that you're using a Western philosopher, central no less to the development of liberal Western thought, to justify a Western value system in Western terms. A Chinese scholar could paraphrase Confucius to assert that there exists no fundamental reason to promote, say, monogamy. And good luck convincing him otherwise, at least with an argument derived from Western principles.
That is the difference between Eastern Europe and China. I respect the Eastern Europeans.
So you respect Eastern Europeans for sharing your value system, but not citizens of China, who don't (appear to) value individual freedoms as much as we Westerners do?
It appears you know very little about modern China. This would have been a much more valid criticism during the regime of Mao, for instance.
In many respects, citizens of China are freer than citizens of, say, the U.K. or the U.S., especially--and I can tell you this from personal experience--if you're starting a small business or trying to do your taxes.
Orientalism and cultural bias as I use the terms have nothing to do with "bigotry against those with thin eyes"; it's just this pervasive Western blindness to the validity of value systems contrary to one's own. For example, I'm Japanese, and I can tell you that plenty of Japanese "Occidentalists" would criticize the West for its emphasis on permanence, to name one example, over acceptance of transience. Many Orientalists, I'm sure, as well as modern Japanese citizens would criticize our kamikaze ancestors' tradition of loyalty to the Emperor over rationality and individualism. It's not something I'm immune to either, but I consider understanding the nature of cultural bias essential to understanding the nature of other cultures in the first place.
Sure. Most Western regimes censor people who spread state secrets or who knowingly and with intent to mislead spread lies about others, like "Wolf Blitzer is a dirty Republican." This is usually called libel law. Would you like to live under a government that doesn't offer these protections? (Check out Somalia.)
No, he's presenting his viewpoint in a morally prescriptive language, which does not automatically render it invalid. It's simply a framework for communicating so that others, who do subscribe to such prescription, may derive understanding. The self-inconsistency you perceive only applies within this framework, which itself constrains the range of possible meaning. The usefulness of his viewpoint comes directly from its descriptive applicability, which even in this limiting external framework would appear to be far greater than the traditional Western moral absolutism that values freedom of speech, freedom of movement, etc. above all else.
I challenge you to show me a culture where anyone can say anything at anytime, and get away without suffering repercussions imposed upon them by their state or their society of peers. Here in the West we have laws against slander and libel, not to mention yelling radioactive holocaust in crowded cinemas. Some cultural regimes take this a step further, actively enforcing bans on e.g. Holocaust denial.
Ultimately the difference is where you decide to draw the line. And if China's citizens do indeed consider it worthwhile to restrict freedom of political speech to further their other goals--say, political stability in a country currently undergoing enormous transformations, not least of them rural-urban migrations unprecedented in human history; or even simple social cohesion, a goal anthropologists tell us the peoples of modern China have considered noble for longer than Greco-Roman tradition has even existed--then it's not for us to judge, except perhaps to note that they don't share our value systems constructed around individualistic freedoms.
That's why I tag some article summaries (not this one) with "orientalism" and "culturalbias." These tags haven't quite caught on yet, as far as I can tell.
CSS Zen Garden has to include a metric shit-ton of redundant div and span wrappers in its HTML to allow for flexibility in design, since CSS by itself isn't descriptive enough to allow, for example, rearranging elements to flow visually depending on context. All this extraneous code bloats the filesize and significantly increases the complexity of the document structure to the point where the underlying HTML is even worse than a table-based layout. I'd say it was the designers of the CSS standard who missed the point.
I think you've got it backwards; what Malda wants is a redesign, i.e. a facelift for its own sake. His stated criteria for judgment actually impede any meaningful realignment.
Actually, I disagree. OP's sites look much better than any Slashdot proposal I've seen. If you think his sites "reek of bad design," I have to wonder if you're not either (a) a frothing-at-the-mouth advocate of separation of content and presentation, a fundamentally flawed goal in itself, or (b) wholly lacking in aesthetic sensibilities. Or both.
Both designs (that aren't Slashdotted) look essentially identical to Slashdot's existing design, which I suppose was what Malda wanted all along. Honestly, if the proposals Malda likes the best are the ones that change the least, why bother having a contest at all?
"It's open source, so if you want a new feature, you can fork it and add it yourself. What, you expected us to improve our site?" -- Slashdot's modus operandi. As exemplified by this entire contest.
You jest, but some researchers think that's a very accurate description: "WHAT'S a girl to do when faced with the choice between a powerful action man who has great DNA but is likely to love her and leave her, and a carpet-and-slippers kind of bloke who will hang around and bring up the kids but may not be Mr Right in the genes department? Well, ideally, she should fool the latter into bringing up the former's children. And a piece of evidence that this is exactly what happens emerged this week from a research group led by Jan Havlicek of Charles University, in Prague."
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, GPL licensors have always seemed insecure to me, in one of either two ways: (a) They don't trust that others will donate back to the community, as companies like Apple have, despite being under no legal obligation to do so; or (b) They want to prevent those who disagree with their software-should-be-free philosophy from benefiting from the use of their code. Particularly due to the seeming spitefulness of the latter (yeah yeah, greater political ends aside), I have much greater respect for people who release their code under BSD-style licenses.
Despite your beliefs, many corporations do in fact go above and beyond the bare minimum legal obligations when incorporating BSD-licensed code into their products, in some cases far beyond. Apple, for example, is under no obligation to distribute the source to Darwin, which borrows heavily from FreeBSD and Mach. The license of neither requires derivative works to be open sourced, yet Apple redistributes its modifications under the APSL.
Yes, but BSD-type coders don't see that as a problem, because--frankly?--the BSD mentality is fundamentally more generous than the borderline paranoia disguised as "freedom" the GPL wishes to force upon the rest of the world. People who don't mind their work being used by others have attained a Zen state of enlightenment; they don't see it as "stealing" for the simple reason that this was their intent all along. People who license their code under the GPL, on the other hand, are generally insecure crybabies.
Stallmanist zealot invokes the GPL to stop a Linux distro from including binary drivers, and you blame Microsoft. How typical.
This whole thing only goes to show that intelligence is GPL-incompatible. Programmers who aren't uptight, selfish misanthropes license their code under BSD.
I'm enjoying this discussion, and I hope you are too--can we continue this after the weekend? I'm away until Monday.
We can all agree that society wouldn't be as robust, lacking the free exchange of ideas; we can agree that the cultures that survive are the ones with a history of using individual freedoms to promote a meritocracy of ideas. These assertions are compatible with both Confucian and Western thought, as far as I know. And I don't think it's common in China to want Chinese culture to die out, either.
So yes, there are things China could learn from Western values, and I am happy (as are the majority of China's citizens) to have seen the government over the past twenty years liberalizing, granting freedoms to the press, allowing intercommunication between citizens, and opening its borders to the outside world. But it misses the mark to criticize China's government for encouraging freedoms in ways that look to us like repression; things need to be seen in context to be understood, and it's all too common here in the West for people to offer opinions on Chinese freedoms incompletely informed by the context of Chinese culture. That, in short, is my beef.
Point being that if you want to live in a country where the "government" won't stop you from saying anything you like, Somalia's the place for you. It's an extreme example, but construed a certain way, you enjoy much less freedom of speech in the U.S. or China than in Somalia. That nobody "sane" (i.e. non-Somalian, essentially) wants to live there indicates that, hey, maybe there are things that said "sane" people value more than freedom of speech, no?
I'm speaking in terms comprehensible to both you and me. How else could one possibly construct a critique of absolutism?
It seems plausible, horrible as it sounds to my ears and yours, that had she not thrown herself in front of that train, the contentment of everyone involved may well have been diminished. At the very least, yours truly wouldn't even exist to be here spewing postmodern drivel if she had committed herself to Western prejudices against suicide, so there's at least one person for it the "happier." So even if one subscribes to a moral framework like Mill's original utilitarianism, there's grounds for an argument in favor of Japan retaining its existing value system (assuming you don't also want to throw out concepts like honor, face, and all the rest).
I'd point out that you're using a Western philosopher, central no less to the development of liberal Western thought, to justify a Western value system in Western terms. A Chinese scholar could paraphrase Confucius to assert that there exists no fundamental reason to promote, say, monogamy. And good luck convincing him otherwise, at least with an argument derived from Western principles.
How noble.
It appears you know very little about modern China. This would have been a much more valid criticism during the regime of Mao, for instance.
In many respects, citizens of China are freer than citizens of, say, the U.K. or the U.S., especially--and I can tell you this from personal experience--if you're starting a small business or trying to do your taxes.
Orientalism and cultural bias as I use the terms have nothing to do with "bigotry against those with thin eyes"; it's just this pervasive Western blindness to the validity of value systems contrary to one's own. For example, I'm Japanese, and I can tell you that plenty of Japanese "Occidentalists" would criticize the West for its emphasis on permanence, to name one example, over acceptance of transience. Many Orientalists, I'm sure, as well as modern Japanese citizens would criticize our kamikaze ancestors' tradition of loyalty to the Emperor over rationality and individualism. It's not something I'm immune to either, but I consider understanding the nature of cultural bias essential to understanding the nature of other cultures in the first place.
Sure. Most Western regimes censor people who spread state secrets or who knowingly and with intent to mislead spread lies about others, like "Wolf Blitzer is a dirty Republican." This is usually called libel law. Would you like to live under a government that doesn't offer these protections? (Check out Somalia.)
Ah, the most familiar criticism of postmodernity. Too bad it doesn't stand up to scrutiny, even in your own language; see here.
No, he's presenting his viewpoint in a morally prescriptive language, which does not automatically render it invalid. It's simply a framework for communicating so that others, who do subscribe to such prescription, may derive understanding. The self-inconsistency you perceive only applies within this framework, which itself constrains the range of possible meaning. The usefulness of his viewpoint comes directly from its descriptive applicability, which even in this limiting external framework would appear to be far greater than the traditional Western moral absolutism that values freedom of speech, freedom of movement, etc. above all else.
I challenge you to show me a culture where anyone can say anything at anytime, and get away without suffering repercussions imposed upon them by their state or their society of peers. Here in the West we have laws against slander and libel, not to mention yelling radioactive holocaust in crowded cinemas. Some cultural regimes take this a step further, actively enforcing bans on e.g. Holocaust denial.
Ultimately the difference is where you decide to draw the line. And if China's citizens do indeed consider it worthwhile to restrict freedom of political speech to further their other goals--say, political stability in a country currently undergoing enormous transformations, not least of them rural-urban migrations unprecedented in human history; or even simple social cohesion, a goal anthropologists tell us the peoples of modern China have considered noble for longer than Greco-Roman tradition has even existed--then it's not for us to judge, except perhaps to note that they don't share our value systems constructed around individualistic freedoms.
That's why I tag some article summaries (not this one) with "orientalism" and "culturalbias." These tags haven't quite caught on yet, as far as I can tell.
CSS Zen Garden has to include a metric shit-ton of redundant div and span wrappers in its HTML to allow for flexibility in design, since CSS by itself isn't descriptive enough to allow, for example, rearranging elements to flow visually depending on context. All this extraneous code bloats the filesize and significantly increases the complexity of the document structure to the point where the underlying HTML is even worse than a table-based layout. I'd say it was the designers of the CSS standard who missed the point.
I think you've got it backwards; what Malda wants is a redesign, i.e. a facelift for its own sake. His stated criteria for judgment actually impede any meaningful realignment.
Actually, I disagree. OP's sites look much better than any Slashdot proposal I've seen. If you think his sites "reek of bad design," I have to wonder if you're not either (a) a frothing-at-the-mouth advocate of separation of content and presentation, a fundamentally flawed goal in itself, or (b) wholly lacking in aesthetic sensibilities. Or both.
Both designs (that aren't Slashdotted) look essentially identical to Slashdot's existing design, which I suppose was what Malda wanted all along. Honestly, if the proposals Malda likes the best are the ones that change the least, why bother having a contest at all?
"It's open source, so if you want a new feature, you can fork it and add it yourself. What, you expected us to improve our site?" -- Slashdot's modus operandi. As exemplified by this entire contest.
I agree, but that would violate Slashdot's "sit back, let others do your gruntwork, don't lift a finger to help" approach to website maintenance.
You jest, but some researchers think that's a very accurate description: "WHAT'S a girl to do when faced with the choice between a powerful action man who has great DNA but is likely to love her and leave her, and a carpet-and-slippers kind of bloke who will hang around and bring up the kids but may not be Mr Right in the genes department? Well, ideally, she should fool the latter into bringing up the former's children. And a piece of evidence that this is exactly what happens emerged this week from a research group led by Jan Havlicek of Charles University, in Prague."