Given the nature of the open source community, I see the odds of such a repository (or several, with different views of "best") happening, at least for free software for the platform, to be so close to unity as makes no difference, whether or not the project sponsors do anything to encourage it -- assuming, of course, the project acheives anything like it hopes to in terms of simply distributing laptops.
Well, if not, someone else will build their own version from the last free source and compete with them -- the threat of that, itself, makes it likely that it will remain GPL. If they can't make money that way, they may go closed source and try to compete with whatever the community does, or abandon it entirely, but in any case, the open source versions up to the last one released won't disappear, and will, unless the community has moved on to something else, continue to be maintained and developed.
That's, from a pragmatic rather than abstract ideological perspective, the main benefit of "Free Software". Once its out there "Free", its "Free" forever. Even if the original manufacturer wants to take their ball and go home (back to the land of proprietary software) for their own future development.
Little Timmy drops the disk in. "You must agree to play the game." Timmy agrees. Timmy is 8. He can't sign a (legally binding) contract. His parents didn't sign the contract. The game lets him play anyhow -- he said yes. Timmy grows up and does not like Pokemon anymore and sells the disk at his family's garage sale.
Sue a kid over a non-enforcable contract?
The story is about technological tieing of the software to the hardware. So, if this was true at all, the person likely to sue would be the person to whom grown-up-Timmy sold the software, having claimed it was a playable game when, in fact, it was inert except on the console for which it was licensed, which Timmy, presumably, did not sell with the game.
Of course, it seems unlikely that this is practical with a game disk, unless it has a phone-home activation which then gets a key which is stored on writable media (memory card, hard disk), that depends on a second key which is unique to the hardware.
Does it matter? If the resale control is through a technological means of preventing a piece of software from being used accept on one piece of hardware, the ability to enter into a legal contract wouldn't matter, except that lacking capacity might reduce your liability for fraud when the disc you resell to someone claiming its a usable game doesn't work as anything but a very poorly designed frisbee.
Really, it seems to me this is wild speculation based on patent that Sony, a creator of lots of content aside from games, and a maker of lots of media-playing devices and technology besides game consoles, could use in many ways unrelated to controlling resale of game disks.
I might be being trolled, but Stallman doesn't refer to free as in money. He means the freedom for the users to modify the program according to their needs.
And to redistribute the modified copies, which means "free-as-in-GPL" implies in practice, even if not in theory, "free-as-in-no-charge", because as soon as somebody gets ahold of it that is willing to redistribute it free-of-charge, the ability to charge anyone for it (barring the ignorant who may be unaware of the free-of-charge vendor) goes away.
(Of course, a free software developer can profit from the software by other means, leveraging their unique depth of knowledge of what they developed into payments for support contracts, books, etc., but the nature of the "freedoms" with which Stallman defines free software makes it unlikely that anyone is going to be able to do much selling "free software" except in exceptional circumstances (such as when the freedoms aren't particularly realized despite a notionally free copyright license like the GPL, perhaps because of patent or other restrictions), particularly any piece of "free software" that has much exposure. And, whether or not Stallman says so, or even cares himself, I think that's a big -- and not necessarily bad -- motive of much of the "free software" movement.)
I've got two problems with Google's censorship here. The first is that people don't just use Google for "news", but for research of various kinds. That means that they need to find whatever is out there.
I've got two problems with your statement here. The first, is that this isn't censorship by Google. The second is that what people use "Google" for is irrelevant to a decision for what to include or exclude in "Google News".
The sites are not excluded from the Google search engine, but from the Google News news aggregator. So complaining that people need to find "everything" because they use Google for more than news misses the point -- these sites can still be found with Google.
They just aren't collected in Google News.
The second problem is that Google evidently has an overly broad notion of hate speech, as do many/-ers.
I think Google's definition of hate speech is appropriate to the domain in which it is being applied, which is not, e.g., the idea of exceptions to legal freedom of speech, but as distinguished from news. Meanings are, often, sensitive to context.
Criticism of a movement or ideology is not hate speech.
It certainly can be, though it isn't necessarily. OTOH, its also generally not news. Now, if there was a Google Social Criticism aggregator, and they were being excluded from that, drawing fine distinctions between social criticism and hate speech would be more important.
How about banning them for being *wrong*?
I started reading one of the articles, and saw the following:
"The liberal media report that suicides are up within the military, but they fail to report that the suicide rate within the military is less than half that of the general population."
Well, they are quite correct. The "liberal" media did report on the relation of the suicide rates to those in the general population but, as they claim, failed to report "that the suicide rate within the military is less than half that of the general population."
Of course, the right-wing nutballs fail to mention that the "liberal" media reported the actual general population rates, which are similar to those for the Army, and significantly lower than seen in Iraq and Kuwait.
For example, my newspaper kept referring to the may 1 protests as immigrant rights protests, when they really should have said illegal immigrant.
No, they really should have said "immigration", since the protests focussed on many issues related to immigration, including rights normalization of present illegal immigrants, and rights for future would-be immigrants including better avenues to legal immigration.
Calling them "illegal immigrant rights protests" is far more extreme political spin than the more neutral, though itself imperfect, description you complain about.
Google news sold itself as being the first truely machine-based news aggregator. The whole idea was that they were unbiased because they just polled the sites and made their lists based on things like PageRank (and other super-secret factors).
Well, now we see that's not the case. There are actually editorial decisions being made as to what is and is not considered news.
This is, at best, misleading. The issue here is not about editorial decisions about including particular articles, it is about decisions about removing sites from the aggregator based on review of their content. Google has never pretended that the decision as to whether a site was or was not a "news" site was automated, what is automated is the return of articles from among the news sites included in Google News.
Just if they are going to start filtering then they need to acknowledge it and drop any claims to a pure unbiased machine created news source.
Google has never claimed that Google News is "machine created", or that it is a "news source", they claim its a "news service", and that particular stories aren't chosen for inclusion or promotion by human intervention at Google, but rather by automated processes working on the product provided by the various sources Google News aggregates. They do not claim that included sites are chosen automatically.
How is all this not just as much a risk with the fact that multiple open-source Java implementations not dependent on the codebase of Sun's implementation already exist or are in development?
What I was doing was disagreeing with its validity, and alluding, through sarcasm, to facts in the real world which suggest that the concern it articulates is empirically unsupported.
I for one can't wait for there to be a million different versions of Java that aren't cross compatible, with various open and closed source projects using specific copies of each one, resulting in mass confusion.
Whether Sun open sources its implementation of Java is pretty much irrelevant to whether or not this happens (except that it not doing so creates a barrier to Sun incorporating innovations from other versions, making a split of the language more likely.)
See, the thing is, once there is one clean room implementation open-sourced -- which there is now -- Sun doesn't have control of the language as used based on its control of its implementation. People can take it anyway they want, and the only control is what people to choose to use, Sun or something else.
The principal aim has been to get governments to buy them for their whole school-age populations in bulk -- I suspect that most countries will have their own standard software package. Given the limited space, I think that keeping the packages slim is going to be essential, which may be a strike against a "standard" package of applications for the whole world, since (for one thing) unused languages are going to be a giant waste of space.
There are different concerns when you have 500MB of storage rather than the dozens -- or hundreds -- of gigabytes that most of us are used to on our main computers.
One thing to consider: China may attempt control the internet, but with lots and lots and lots of laptops with wireless connectivity designed for the purpose of creating mesh networks, it'll be a lot harder for them to police it.
So, giving OLPC laptops to China may be a great way to help undermine the authoritarian system.
Of course, if the Communist Party realizes this and blocks them, well, then China's next generation may be at a great competitive disadvantage compared to the countries that don't take that step, reducing the ability of the government to meet the material demands of the population while maintaining authoritarian control, and increasing the chance of the regime failing to maintain the support it needs to survive.
So, as regards China, I see OLPC has having the potential to be Win-Win for the cause of advancing freedom in the long term.
There are plenty of organizations dedicated to bringing food and shelter to the poor directly (the one my wife and I give to is "Food for the Poor", but there are certainly many to support.)
But direct food aid and shelter construction alleviates short-term problems, but longer-term solutions are needed to deal with the problems that create poverty than that kind of immediate aid. That's why you have organizations working to improve sustainable agriculture in the developing world, groups working on fostering local economic development through various programs including microcredit, and groups working to improve long-term economic prospects by improving the educational opportunities through getting cheap, functional computers in the hands of children in the developing world.
And that's exactly the problem. 20 minutes after Java goes "free", some idiot will start adding pointers to it.
Right. As you will note, the open-source implementations of Java all have been extended to use pointers, as have all other languages with open-source implementations.
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Wait, that's not true?
Actually, I've seen companies use "free software" quite a bit, though usually when its referring to "free-as-in-the-first-hit-of-crack" rather than "free-as-in-GPL"
Which is probably because, Stallman & Co's ideological desires aside, most people see "Free {Product X}" (e.g., "free software") as meaning free-of-charge rather than free-of-legal-restrictions, while "Free {Activity X}" (e.g., "free speech") is more likely to be seen in the latter sense.
From the millions of Windows-only trojans, viruses, etc.? Yeah, the most fruitful target will attract the most exploits (and also the most investment in countermeasures). The thesis was obvious, and this Word-only trojan is hardly the first demonstration of it.
Heck, it had already been well-demonstrated when it was first suggested.
OTOH, the biological analogy is flawed in many ways, most notably that computer systems don't reproduce themselves, and therefore the central risk associated with a monoculture (that a single hazard will reduce the population to below where it is reproductively viable) doesn't exist.
That neither the target systems nor the exploits evolve in the darwinian sense is also a critical difference which makes the dynamics radically disanalogous.
What uninformed rubbish. Google does index a lot of sites that denegrate Christianity and "these people" are yet to launch a single "Boycott Google" campaign.
Google indexes WND too. We're talking about the Google News aggregator, which is more actively filtered, not what sites Google indexes.
For example using DRM to protect your personal information that is in the hands of a large corporation or government.
Yeah, because laws like DMCA that criminalize circumvention technology will be observed by and enforced against the executive branch of the government by, erm, the executive branch of the government.
I really don't get how all this Anti-DRM / anti-crypto think that is out there.
Most anti-DRM people I know are very much pro-crypto, and pro-DRM types tend to be anti-crypto in many other contexts -- particularly, they tend to be for strong controls on who can use cryptography, and what mechanisms can be publicly used.
So, AFAICT, the thing you have trouble understanding doesn't actually exists, in the first place.
DRM is just another type of technology that should be used rightly.
DRM is pretty much impossible to use "rightly" because the "rights" its "manages" often don't, and should not, exclusively belong to the controller of the DRM: particularly, while the right to copy in some manners and for some purposes is, properly speaking, an exclusive right of the copyright holder, there are plenty of existing, necessary, and publicly beneficial exceptions to that exclusivity -- including, but not limited to, fair use -- that DRM is utterly incapable, by nature, of distinguishing.
Wii EDTV graphics will look as good as Xbox 360 EDTV graphics or PlayStation 3 EDTV graphics.
Given the processing power available on each machine, I doubt even that is really true. It would seem to mean that the Xbox 360 and Ps3 platforms are being grossly underutilized. (And, really, I should have said polygon-pushing instead of pixel-pushing.)
In addition, a lot of people neglect that a game needs input and output, and the Wii Remote will allow more involved input mechanisms.
That's a good point, though its a lot easier to add a new, radically different controller as an aftermarket option to a console supported by later games than to add a new, more powerful processor the same way.
Given that all the affordable TVs are either analog TVs or digital SDTVs, and given the decline in the buying power of the United States dollar over the last five years, I don't think too many people in Slashdot's home country have a lot of money to spend on gaming.
Define "affordable". I've seen 32" CRT HDTVs for, IIRC, under $400 -- mine, about 6 months ago, was closer to $600. And, while the dollar has been declining and income hasn't done well for most segments of society, the people most likely to be the early adopters of a luxury product are still doing okay.
Don't get me wrong. I think that from a console-features standpoint, for plenty of people, the Wii will be the better choice. For plenty the Xbox 360 will be. For plenty, the Playstation 3 will be.
And I think, as with the last generation, there will be quite a few people that, as popular as whining about price, particularly with the Playstation 3 is, will buy more than one console from this generation, even where one of them is a PS3.
Heck, I only bought I PS2 in the last generation, and both the Wii and the PS3 have some attraction (I don't imagine I'll buy a PS3 within a year of launch, though).
In the section entitled "Block quotes by the Dozen" the author mentions the so-called "gray area". That is PlagiarismToday's classification of the common blogger practice of re-using large blocks of text/content from the original article or source, even when the source is attributed."
That's not plagiarism, by definition. It might still be a copyright violation, but if the purpose is for commentary, if the excerpt (even if it is a "large block") is reasonable for that purpose, its quite likely fair use. And, I might add, that major newspapers and other traditional media do it all the time, its hardly unique to bloggers.
What is not "free market" about a private (even if non-profit) business deciding to sell a particular product only in a particular market, and considering a different version to sell in another market?
But the great thing about it is, if some parts are invalidated, the situation just reverts back to plain copyright law and whoever was breaking the GPL has even less permission than they did before.
A contract dispute doesn't mean anyone was actually breaking the license, any more than someone being charged with a crime means they are guilty.
And I'm not sure the prospect of the situation where the GPL was ruled invalid and everyone who has ever distributed any GPL software that they weren't the original creator of every piece of is now a copyright violator is "great"
Further, an invalid term doesn't necessarily render the entire contract invalid, a court might reform the invalid term or simply sever it from the contract.
Slashdot Mirror
Given the nature of the open source community, I see the odds of such a repository (or several, with different views of "best") happening, at least for free software for the platform, to be so close to unity as makes no difference, whether or not the project sponsors do anything to encourage it -- assuming, of course, the project acheives anything like it hopes to in terms of simply distributing laptops.
Well, if not, someone else will build their own version from the last free source and compete with them -- the threat of that, itself, makes it likely that it will remain GPL. If they can't make money that way, they may go closed source and try to compete with whatever the community does, or abandon it entirely, but in any case, the open source versions up to the last one released won't disappear, and will, unless the community has moved on to something else, continue to be maintained and developed.
That's, from a pragmatic rather than abstract ideological perspective, the main benefit of "Free Software". Once its out there "Free", its "Free" forever. Even if the original manufacturer wants to take their ball and go home (back to the land of proprietary software) for their own future development.
The story is about technological tieing of the software to the hardware. So, if this was true at all, the person likely to sue would be the person to whom grown-up-Timmy sold the software, having claimed it was a playable game when, in fact, it was inert except on the console for which it was licensed, which Timmy, presumably, did not sell with the game.
Of course, it seems unlikely that this is practical with a game disk, unless it has a phone-home activation which then gets a key which is stored on writable media (memory card, hard disk), that depends on a second key which is unique to the hardware.
Does it matter? If the resale control is through a technological means of preventing a piece of software from being used accept on one piece of hardware, the ability to enter into a legal contract wouldn't matter, except that lacking capacity might reduce your liability for fraud when the disc you resell to someone claiming its a usable game doesn't work as anything but a very poorly designed frisbee.
Really, it seems to me this is wild speculation based on patent that Sony, a creator of lots of content aside from games, and a maker of lots of media-playing devices and technology besides game consoles, could use in many ways unrelated to controlling resale of game disks.
And to redistribute the modified copies, which means "free-as-in-GPL" implies in practice, even if not in theory, "free-as-in-no-charge", because as soon as somebody gets ahold of it that is willing to redistribute it free-of-charge, the ability to charge anyone for it (barring the ignorant who may be unaware of the free-of-charge vendor) goes away.
(Of course, a free software developer can profit from the software by other means, leveraging their unique depth of knowledge of what they developed into payments for support contracts, books, etc., but the nature of the "freedoms" with which Stallman defines free software makes it unlikely that anyone is going to be able to do much selling "free software" except in exceptional circumstances (such as when the freedoms aren't particularly realized despite a notionally free copyright license like the GPL, perhaps because of patent or other restrictions), particularly any piece of "free software" that has much exposure. And, whether or not Stallman says so, or even cares himself, I think that's a big -- and not necessarily bad -- motive of much of the "free software" movement.)
Hate speech may be free, but that doesn't mean that it belongs in Google News.
I'm sure those sites will not be excluded when Google launches the Google Hate Speech aggregator.
No, they really should have said "immigration", since the protests focussed on many issues related to immigration, including rights normalization of present illegal immigrants, and rights for future would-be immigrants including better avenues to legal immigration.
Calling them "illegal immigrant rights protests" is far more extreme political spin than the more neutral, though itself imperfect, description you complain about.
This is, at best, misleading. The issue here is not about editorial decisions about including particular articles, it is about decisions about removing sites from the aggregator based on review of their content. Google has never pretended that the decision as to whether a site was or was not a "news" site was automated, what is automated is the return of articles from among the news sites included in Google News.
Google has never claimed that Google News is "machine created", or that it is a "news source", they claim its a "news service", and that particular stories aren't chosen for inclusion or promotion by human intervention at Google, but rather by automated processes working on the product provided by the various sources Google News aggregates. They do not claim that included sites are chosen automatically.
How is all this not just as much a risk with the fact that multiple open-source Java implementations not dependent on the codebase of Sun's implementation already exist or are in development?
What I was doing was disagreeing with its validity, and alluding, through sarcasm, to facts in the real world which suggest that the concern it articulates is empirically unsupported.
Whether Sun open sources its implementation of Java is pretty much irrelevant to whether or not this happens (except that it not doing so creates a barrier to Sun incorporating innovations from other versions, making a split of the language more likely.)
See, the thing is, once there is one clean room implementation open-sourced -- which there is now -- Sun doesn't have control of the language as used based on its control of its implementation. People can take it anyway they want, and the only control is what people to choose to use, Sun or something else.
The principal aim has been to get governments to buy them for their whole school-age populations in bulk -- I suspect that most countries will have their own standard software package. Given the limited space, I think that keeping the packages slim is going to be essential, which may be a strike against a "standard" package of applications for the whole world, since (for one thing) unused languages are going to be a giant waste of space. There are different concerns when you have 500MB of storage rather than the dozens -- or hundreds -- of gigabytes that most of us are used to on our main computers.
One thing to consider: China may attempt control the internet, but with lots and lots and lots of laptops with wireless connectivity designed for the purpose of creating mesh networks, it'll be a lot harder for them to police it.
So, giving OLPC laptops to China may be a great way to help undermine the authoritarian system.
Of course, if the Communist Party realizes this and blocks them, well, then China's next generation may be at a great competitive disadvantage compared to the countries that don't take that step, reducing the ability of the government to meet the material demands of the population while maintaining authoritarian control, and increasing the chance of the regime failing to maintain the support it needs to survive.
So, as regards China, I see OLPC has having the potential to be Win-Win for the cause of advancing freedom in the long term.
There are plenty of organizations dedicated to bringing food and shelter to the poor directly (the one my wife and I give to is "Food for the Poor", but there are certainly many to support.)
But direct food aid and shelter construction alleviates short-term problems, but longer-term solutions are needed to deal with the problems that create poverty than that kind of immediate aid. That's why you have organizations working to improve sustainable agriculture in the developing world, groups working on fostering local economic development through various programs including microcredit, and groups working to improve long-term economic prospects by improving the educational opportunities through getting cheap, functional computers in the hands of children in the developing world.
Actually, I've seen companies use "free software" quite a bit, though usually when its referring to "free-as-in-the-first-hit-of-crack" rather than "free-as-in-GPL" Which is probably because, Stallman & Co's ideological desires aside, most people see "Free {Product X}" (e.g., "free software") as meaning free-of-charge rather than free-of-legal-restrictions, while "Free {Activity X}" (e.g., "free speech") is more likely to be seen in the latter sense.
From the millions of Windows-only trojans, viruses, etc.? Yeah, the most fruitful target will attract the most exploits (and also the most investment in countermeasures). The thesis was obvious, and this Word-only trojan is hardly the first demonstration of it.
Heck, it had already been well-demonstrated when it was first suggested.
OTOH, the biological analogy is flawed in many ways, most notably that computer systems don't reproduce themselves, and therefore the central risk associated with a monoculture (that a single hazard will reduce the population to below where it is reproductively viable) doesn't exist.
That neither the target systems nor the exploits evolve in the darwinian sense is also a critical difference which makes the dynamics radically disanalogous.
Google indexes WND too. We're talking about the Google News aggregator, which is more actively filtered, not what sites Google indexes.
Talk about "uninformed rubbish".
Yeah, because laws like DMCA that criminalize circumvention technology will be observed by and enforced against the executive branch of the government by, erm, the executive branch of the government.
Most anti-DRM people I know are very much pro-crypto, and pro-DRM types tend to be anti-crypto in many other contexts -- particularly, they tend to be for strong controls on who can use cryptography, and what mechanisms can be publicly used.
So, AFAICT, the thing you have trouble understanding doesn't actually exists, in the first place.
DRM is pretty much impossible to use "rightly" because the "rights" its "manages" often don't, and should not, exclusively belong to the controller of the DRM: particularly, while the right to copy in some manners and for some purposes is, properly speaking, an exclusive right of the copyright holder, there are plenty of existing, necessary, and publicly beneficial exceptions to that exclusivity -- including, but not limited to, fair use -- that DRM is utterly incapable, by nature, of distinguishing.
The additional processing and pixel-pushing power to play more involved games with better graphics.
Whether that justifies the additional expense is, of course, largely a matter of how much money you have and how important that is to you.
What is not "free market" about a private (even if non-profit) business deciding to sell a particular product only in a particular market, and considering a different version to sell in another market?
Is market segmentation now communism?
A contract dispute doesn't mean anyone was actually breaking the license, any more than someone being charged with a crime means they are guilty.
And I'm not sure the prospect of the situation where the GPL was ruled invalid and everyone who has ever distributed any GPL software that they weren't the original creator of every piece of is now a copyright violator is "great"
Further, an invalid term doesn't necessarily render the entire contract invalid, a court might reform the invalid term or simply sever it from the contract.