I have quibbles with your quibbles.:-) For the second quibble, here's what he said:
"Like most people, I'd imagine, my ears and skills are a bigger problem than the weaknesses of whatever gear I'm using - if you don't know how to mix (guilty!) then the fidelity of your monitor speakers is the least of your worries."
Not that it doesn't matter, but that he's not able to take full advantage of the better stuff.
For the first quibble, I think this is the key part of his response:
"I don't want to be the guy who just tells everyone how great their lives would be if they quit their jobs, but for many people there's less justification than ever before for staying in a work situation that isn't rewarding for you. If you want to do stuff, go and do stuff. Who is stopping you?"
I don't read that as a categorical call for everyone to quit their job and endanger their family's security, and "if you want to do stuff, go and do stuff" can mean exactly what you say about continuing with your job while building up other work.
"In fact, I think they're wrong. I don't think the GPL is a bad economic fit for MySQL. I believe that Oracle sees clearly the nature of its business interests. It knows that MySQL is much, much more valuable to it alive than dead. In fact, Oracle has almost as much reason to improve MySQL as it has to improve its flagship product. For a small firm, like MySQL AB, dual-licensing revenue was the only efficient revenue source with which to develop the product. But for Oracle, service revenue is much more significant than dual-licensing royalties. As all parties who have spoken about the merger agree, regardless of which side they are on, enterprises that use Oracle are very likely to use MySQL also, because MySQL is the world leader in number of installs. Which means that companies that pay Oracle to service Oracle are very likely to pay Oracle to service MySQL as well, if Oracle is not only servicing MySQL but acting as primary funder and participant in a flourishing MySQL ecology. Even if Oracle were only willing to invest in MySQL the extent of its ability to increase the MySQL service business, Oracle would be the best thing that ever ichappened to MySQL. In fact, Oracle has an immense incentive to invest far more in MySQL than the extent of its increased winnings in the MySQL service market. MySQL driven technologically and economically by Oracle will be a price-zero full-GPL missile aimed at Microsoft SQL Server. "
It seems to me this is squarely in slashdot's sweet spot.
If the blurb doesn't interest you, give the story and the discussion a pass. There'll be another story soon enough that doesn't meet your specifications either.
"Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be--or to be indistinguishable from--self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time." -Neal Stephenson
Re #3, no kidding. I've been looking for some mention of him (or her?) and how they seem to be driving the slashdot story bus. Not that the Imaginary Property stories are bad -- they're actually just the kinds of things I'm interested in. But why the special treatment/status/access? I'd rather just follow that guy's blog if he had one.
Putting it in bold doesn't necessarily give your statements any additional weight or truth. Are you quoting a legal judgment, statement from the FSF, or otherwise? Or is that just your own misguided interpretation?
Here's my understanding of how this works. Jack writes software and releases it under GPLv2 with the "or later" clause. Janet and Christy start using that software in their own products. It is up to them if they want to use GPL v2 or v3 when *redistributing* derived software. (If they use it for their own private purposes, they have no obligations.)
If Jack later starts distributing the software under GPLv3, that only applies to software released after the date that he made the license change. Perhaps Janet is happy with GPLv3 and will continue to use software from Jack as the basis of her own product. But if Christy has been taking advantage of some loophole in GPL v2 to restrict the freedoms of her users, she is free to keep using the last version of the software that was released under v2.
Practically, if everyone else is moving to GPL v3, it may become difficult for Christy to manage all that code on her own, but that's why I said "tough noogies," because it wouldn't be a problem if she based her business model on the spirit of the license and the principles of the community behind the software. That's if the Jack and the community is moving to v3. If the community stays with v2 for various reasons, then Christy has no problems with this.
That may not be the best explanation for how this works, but it's certainly closer to the truth than your version.
TiVo has no such obligation. They can continue to use software released under GPLv2.
Yes, it may be a hardship if much of the active development and maintenance of that software moves to GPLv3, but if projects are moving to GPL3, it suggests that many people agree with its terms.
I'm not going to cry for TiVo. They may have complied with the letter of GPLv2, but not the spirit. (This is from a satisfied owner of two TiVos, with no desire to modify the software and run it on the same hardware. But other people should have that freedom.)
The competitor can get the source, but only if they become your client. As such, as a software provider you have won.
They can get the source from anybody else who has the source, which is anyone else you've sold it to, or anyone that they have in turn sold or given it to, and so on.
It won't take long for lower priced software to spread out and be available for free from many sources. If you had something that you sold for $1,000,000 to some company, they might not be so quick to give away the software in turn.
What I don't support is someone taking something that I created, putting their name on it without changing it in any significant way.
That's plagiarism, and I don't know of many people advocating that plagiarism is ok. I think 99.9% of the people downloading music are happy to give proper attribution of the work.
Would be interesting to read that. I did a quick search and turned up this byte interview from 1986 (it references publication of the GNU Manifesto in Dr. Dobbs in 1985):
I'm sure back in 1991, the GPLv2 looked like some commercially useless hippie fantasy also. Let's hope in 2020, we're not all enjoying a trusted platform world where we can't effectively modify the GPLv2 underpinning.
You misunderstand: I was trying to grant you the last word, as I can tell by your activity in this thread that you're determined to have it.
It's not that I don't want to participate in a discussion with someone I disagree with, it's just that I shouldn't get in to discussions about such a petty issue. Robots.txt exists for exactly this reason and there is no other standard that a crawler might follow right now. (As far as I know.) Yes, there are bots that don't respect robots.txt -- that's another issue. If you've had success scaring them off, good for you.
Now, please, have the last word. I mean that with all the graciousness I can muster.
Let's try to understand the difference between public and private. Your house: private. A sign in your yard, visible from the street: your private property, but the contents are public. Your publicly accessible web page: public. Your password protected web page: private. As I mentioned in another response, with robots.txt you have the ability to keep some visitors from accessing your public web page, so you have some abilities virtually that you don't have with your yard sign.
(I'm hoping to get out on this post -- I'm not sure why I've responded as much as I have. Good luck trying to manage your spit in the ocean.)
This is more like putting something on a billboard and expecting people not to take pictures of it. The difference is that you have the option at least of preventing tourists like Google and the Internet Archive from taking the pictures. If you don't want to do the very small amount of work to accomplish that, tough titty.
I didn't RTFA. It's hard for me to tell if that comment is serious or not. It has to be intended as a joke, right? If so, it's pretty funny. If meant serious... it's also pretty damn funny. And deliciously mind-exploding in its ignorance. But it has to be a joke, and not even that subtle of one, right? Right?!:-)
I've just started using OO.o Calc for personal use and it looks pretty good and I think will be fine for my needs, but I was curious about your scenario so I tried it out. With 2048 data pairs, you're right -- it's pretty slow for a simple line graph both in Windows and in Ubuntu with 1GB of RAM. I saw the same 30 seconds. In Excel, it's instantaneous.
I think Excel is a fantastic application, by the way, but I'm more interested in freedom. Especially for personal use. I know it's going to be harder to sell a corporation on the wonders of software freedom if there is a significant performance difference.
I went on to try Gnumeric in Ubuntu and it worked *much* better. It also can make the line graph instantly. I don't know how it will do on larger and more complicated operations, but it's easy enough to use Gnumeric and make further comparisons there. (I'm wondering now if I should start with Gnumeric, since I'm just starting the process of moving away from Excel.)
And while it sounds like you understand better, this:
Not if they don't remove that silly DRM clause. The very fact that Stallman et al are willing to use the GPLv3 as a bully pulpit for their political views (with which I happen to agree vis-a-vis DRM, BTW) compromises some of the legitimacy of the license and will make it look to many people like some kind of stand in favor of piracy.
suggests you're missing something. Stallman and the FSF are pressing forward with the same vision and agenda as they always have. Now that free software has achieved some mainstream acceptance -- despite being quite radical already -- you seem to be afraid of pushing the original goals of the project for fear of what short-sighted corporations might think. I'd rather see the goal of freedom be preserved, as I think you do also. Let's not worry about popularity contests. Stick with principal, and let the chips fall where they will. The original license was all about politics, as are all our decisions about how to conduct a free (or closed, or somewhere in between) society.
You wrote: "He theorizes that Google is looking to create a bandwidth shortage that will drive ISP/cable/telephone customers into it's open arms."
Please spell it out for me. What did Cringely write that suggests this sinister plot?
As far as I can tell, he is saying that Google is positioning themselves to be there when bandwidth requirements skyrocket. That's a lot different than causing a shortage to create the situation.
People, please RTFA article first before confusing the biased story summary with what Cringely actually said. It is a very interesting column, and of course quite speculative. I didn't get the impression that Bob was suggesting anything sinister on Google's part, certainly I don't think he was suggesting that they would create a bandwidth shortage. What nonsense.
Slashdot Mirror
I have quibbles with your quibbles. :-) For the second quibble, here's what he said:
"Like most people, I'd imagine, my ears and skills are a bigger problem than the weaknesses of whatever gear I'm using - if you don't know how to mix (guilty!) then the fidelity of your monitor speakers is the least of your worries."
Not that it doesn't matter, but that he's not able to take full advantage of the better stuff.
For the first quibble, I think this is the key part of his response:
"I don't want to be the guy who just tells everyone how great their lives would be if they quit their jobs, but for many people there's less justification than ever before for staying in a work situation that isn't rewarding for you. If you want to do stuff, go and do stuff. Who is stopping you?"
I don't read that as a categorical call for everyone to quit their job and endanger their family's security, and "if you want to do stuff, go and do stuff" can mean exactly what you say about continuing with your job while building up other work.
Google's calculator is just a front-end to "bc". :-)
I posted a link below to GPL true believer Eben Moglen's opinion about this takeover -- it may surprise you. :-)
The SFLC's Eben Moglen is okay with Oracle taking on MySQL:
http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/blog/cases/oracle-sun/ec-hearing-and-after.html?seemore=y
Among other interesting analysis:
"In fact, I think they're wrong. I don't think the GPL is a bad economic fit for MySQL. I believe that Oracle sees clearly the nature of its business interests. It knows that MySQL is much, much more valuable to it alive than dead. In fact, Oracle has almost as much reason to improve MySQL as it has to improve its flagship product. For a small firm, like MySQL AB, dual-licensing revenue was the only efficient revenue source with which to develop the product. But for Oracle, service revenue is much more significant than dual-licensing royalties. As all parties who have spoken about the merger agree, regardless of which side they are on, enterprises that use Oracle are very likely to use MySQL also, because MySQL is the world leader in number of installs. Which means that companies that pay Oracle to service Oracle are very likely to pay Oracle to service MySQL as well, if Oracle is not only servicing MySQL but acting as primary funder and participant in a flourishing MySQL ecology. Even if Oracle were only willing to invest in MySQL the extent of its ability to increase the MySQL service business, Oracle would be the best thing that ever ichappened to MySQL. In fact, Oracle has an immense incentive to invest far more in MySQL than the extent of its increased winnings in the MySQL service market. MySQL driven technologically and economically by Oracle will be a price-zero full-GPL missile aimed at Microsoft SQL Server. "
It seems to me this is squarely in slashdot's sweet spot.
If the blurb doesn't interest you, give the story and the discussion a pass. There'll be another story soon enough that doesn't meet your specifications either.
"Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be--or to be indistinguishable from--self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time." -Neal Stephenson
I was looking in to this recently and found lots of info at:
http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/net/wireless/cards.html
Close, but not quite.
It was actually all started by cHarles Hungar, and thus the "Hungarian" label.
I assumed he was talking about the human brain.
Re #3, no kidding. I've been looking for some mention of him (or her?) and how they seem to be driving the slashdot story bus. Not that the Imaginary Property stories are bad -- they're actually just the kinds of things I'm interested in. But why the special treatment/status/access? I'd rather just follow that guy's blog if he had one.
Putting it in bold doesn't necessarily give your statements any additional weight or truth. Are you quoting a legal judgment, statement from the FSF, or otherwise? Or is that just your own misguided interpretation?
Here's my understanding of how this works. Jack writes software and releases it under GPLv2 with the "or later" clause. Janet and Christy start using that software in their own products. It is up to them if they want to use GPL v2 or v3 when *redistributing* derived software. (If they use it for their own private purposes, they have no obligations.)
If Jack later starts distributing the software under GPLv3, that only applies to software released after the date that he made the license change. Perhaps Janet is happy with GPLv3 and will continue to use software from Jack as the basis of her own product. But if Christy has been taking advantage of some loophole in GPL v2 to restrict the freedoms of her users, she is free to keep using the last version of the software that was released under v2.
Practically, if everyone else is moving to GPL v3, it may become difficult for Christy to manage all that code on her own, but that's why I said "tough noogies," because it wouldn't be a problem if she based her business model on the spirit of the license and the principles of the community behind the software. That's if the Jack and the community is moving to v3. If the community stays with v2 for various reasons, then Christy has no problems with this.
That may not be the best explanation for how this works, but it's certainly closer to the truth than your version.
TiVo has no such obligation. They can continue to use software released under GPLv2.
Yes, it may be a hardship if much of the active development and maintenance of that software moves to GPLv3, but if projects are moving to GPL3, it suggests that many people agree with its terms.
I'm not going to cry for TiVo. They may have complied with the letter of GPLv2, but not the spirit. (This is from a satisfied owner of two TiVos, with no desire to modify the software and run it on the same hardware. But other people should have that freedom.)
The competitor can get the source, but only if they become your client. As such, as a software provider you have won.
They can get the source from anybody else who has the source, which is anyone else you've sold it to, or anyone that they have in turn sold or given it to, and so on.
It won't take long for lower priced software to spread out and be available for free from many sources. If you had something that you sold for $1,000,000 to some company, they might not be so quick to give away the software in turn.
What I don't support is someone taking something that I created, putting their name on it without changing it in any significant way.
That's plagiarism, and I don't know of many people advocating that plagiarism is ok. I think 99.9% of the people downloading music are happy to give proper attribution of the work.
Would be interesting to read that. I did a quick search and turned up this byte interview from 1986 (it references publication of the GNU Manifesto in Dr. Dobbs in 1985):
:-)
http://www.gnu.org/gnu/byte-interview.html
Which now I'll have to invest some time in reading.
I'm sure back in 1991, the GPLv2 looked like some commercially useless hippie fantasy also. Let's hope in 2020, we're not all enjoying a trusted platform world where we can't effectively modify the GPLv2 underpinning.
You misunderstand: I was trying to grant you the last word, as I can tell by your activity in this thread that you're determined to have it.
It's not that I don't want to participate in a discussion with someone I disagree with, it's just that I shouldn't get in to discussions about such a petty issue. Robots.txt exists for exactly this reason and there is no other standard that a crawler might follow right now. (As far as I know.) Yes, there are bots that don't respect robots.txt -- that's another issue. If you've had success scaring them off, good for you.
Now, please, have the last word. I mean that with all the graciousness I can muster.
Let's try to understand the difference between public and private. Your house: private. A sign in your yard, visible from the street: your private property, but the contents are public. Your publicly accessible web page: public. Your password protected web page: private. As I mentioned in another response, with robots.txt you have the ability to keep some visitors from accessing your public web page, so you have some abilities virtually that you don't have with your yard sign.
(I'm hoping to get out on this post -- I'm not sure why I've responded as much as I have. Good luck trying to manage your spit in the ocean.)
This is more like putting something on a billboard and expecting people not to take pictures of it. The difference is that you have the option at least of preventing tourists like Google and the Internet Archive from taking the pictures. If you don't want to do the very small amount of work to accomplish that, tough titty.
I didn't RTFA. It's hard for me to tell if that comment is serious or not. It has to be intended as a joke, right? If so, it's pretty funny. If meant serious... it's also pretty damn funny. And deliciously mind-exploding in its ignorance. But it has to be a joke, and not even that subtle of one, right? Right?! :-)
I've just started using OO.o Calc for personal use and it looks pretty good and I think will be fine for my needs, but I was curious about your scenario so I tried it out. With 2048 data pairs, you're right -- it's pretty slow for a simple line graph both in Windows and in Ubuntu with 1GB of RAM. I saw the same 30 seconds. In Excel, it's instantaneous.
I think Excel is a fantastic application, by the way, but I'm more interested in freedom. Especially for personal use. I know it's going to be harder to sell a corporation on the wonders of software freedom if there is a significant performance difference.
I went on to try Gnumeric in Ubuntu and it worked *much* better. It also can make the line graph instantly. I don't know how it will do on larger and more complicated operations, but it's easy enough to use Gnumeric and make further comparisons there. (I'm wondering now if I should start with Gnumeric, since I'm just starting the process of moving away from Excel.)
I love that bit.
And while it sounds like you understand better, this:
Not if they don't remove that silly DRM clause. The very fact that Stallman et al are willing to use the GPLv3 as a bully pulpit for their political views (with which I happen to agree vis-a-vis DRM, BTW) compromises some of the legitimacy of the license and will make it look to many people like some kind of stand in favor of piracy.
suggests you're missing something. Stallman and the FSF are pressing forward with the same vision and agenda as they always have. Now that free software has achieved some mainstream acceptance -- despite being quite radical already -- you seem to be afraid of pushing the original goals of the project for fear of what short-sighted corporations might think. I'd rather see the goal of freedom be preserved, as I think you do also. Let's not worry about popularity contests. Stick with principal, and let the chips fall where they will. The original license was all about politics, as are all our decisions about how to conduct a free (or closed, or somewhere in between) society.
You wrote: "He theorizes that Google is looking to create a bandwidth shortage that will drive ISP/cable/telephone customers into it's open arms."
Please spell it out for me. What did Cringely write that suggests this sinister plot?
As far as I can tell, he is saying that Google is positioning themselves to be there when bandwidth requirements skyrocket. That's a lot different than causing a shortage to create the situation.
People, please RTFA article first before confusing the biased story summary with what Cringely actually said. It is a very interesting column, and of course quite speculative. I didn't get the impression that Bob was suggesting anything sinister on Google's part, certainly I don't think he was suggesting that they would create a bandwidth shortage. What nonsense.