That's the problem with DRM. People who pay good money get screwed. This has happened, is happening, and will continue to happen. It's a bad idea for consumers and doesn't work economically, practically, or philosophically.
And the MOST killer thing was the DISability of IE to submit data through "input type img"
Maybe I'm not understanding what the claim is, but it's easy to demonstrate that this is not true. I just tried with IE7 to submit data on a form that uses an input type of image and see that it works fine.
This article has almost no information and it seems the only reason it was posted here is to stir up anti-Microsoft antagonism. (Now someone will say, "You must be new here."):-)
In my experience, IE7 is much better at supporting standards than IE6. A huge improvement in CSS support, so that now as I design in Firefox 2.0 and occasionally verify things in IE7, I see that they are very, very close. Most of what I'm doing is working with WordPress blogs so it's very possible I'm not using things that are now broken, but if anything Microsoft should be given some credit for improving their browser.
There's plenty of reason to not like Microsoft, but this article doesn't supply much (if any) ammunition, and it doesn't do the free software crowd much of a service to engage in our own unsupported FUD.
I've worked with programmers of varying abilities over the years. All the really good ones use vi or emacs.
That's a pretty broad and sweeping generalization. How would you rate John Carmack? I'm pretty sure he uses an IDE for development, and I think I read recently where he even touted the benefits of "code sense" kinds of interfaces -- the kind where you type the dot and you get a nice popup with your method choices. There's a lot to be said for being comfortable at the raw text file level, but I think you're missing out on a lot of productivity enhancers if you're going to write off all modern tools.
I think I do realize that. That's why we need to talk about it and help people learn what software freedom is and why it's important. I answered the way I did because the original commenter seemed to be speaking as if they also understood, when they clearly did not. (Of course, I didn't take the time to be particularly helpful in explaining the concepts involved.)
I think the answer is "no," we haven't gone too far. There are dangers to software freedom from DRM and patents (and to a lesser extent, copyright), and the GPLv3 is intended to address this.
To the people who think it is all some radical overreach, consider how radical the original vision of free software appeared and how accepted it is now (in the form of GPLv2). It's not surprising that the same kinds of opposition appear when bringing the license up to date.
For your DVD example, I don't think that's what the license draft says at all. Nothing says your modified code has to do anything. The requirement is that your modified code still be *able* to do what the original code does, *if you want it to*. This is to protect against the Tivoization problem.
You're absolutely right that what has been done can be lost. Lost to companies that use DRM and patents to take away our freedom. "Tivoization" is just a proof-of-concept. Without GPLv3, companies will start exploiting loopholes like that more and more, until one day people realize it really can be taken away.
The GPL has always been about promoting the agenda and goals of the Free Software Foundation. Yes, it's "just" a license. Licenses are always about furthering goals. Do you think Microsoft doesn't have an agenda and goals with their licenses?
I'm not sure from your description what the problem is with your project. If people had previously submitted code under GPLv2 only, then I would think most of the code would have to be GPLv2 only, so no change would be necessary? Is it possible to mix "GPLv2 and later" and "GPLv2 only"?
I think it's possible you have no idea what free software is about. You seem to have a grasp of free as in free beer, but not free as in freedom. Saying "maybe here is the source and don't sell without my permission" has nothing to do with free software.
Moreover, if this IS taken to be so, absolutely NO ONE will produce ANY form of work which can be copied for free, because they could never recapture what it cost them to produce it.
So - no more films, no more songs, no more plays... excepting in so much as there might be other ways to still make money from them (cinema showing, theatrical performances) which permit money still to be made.
This is demonstrably false. People have been making music and performing plays for thousands of years even though they can be more or less easily copied. Long before the invention of copyright. They're still doing it today. To give one example, the fashion "industry" is thriving despite not having copyright. People are producing all kinds of work and releasing it directly in to the public domain and allowing it to be used with Creative Commons licenses.
Times change, and culture adapts. Other people have rightly pointed out to you that culture comes from all of us. The idea that every innovator can control all future use of their innovation, if implemented as law, would stifle future creative output. We're all standing on the shoulders of others. I think it is very shortsighted to imagine whatever "new" work you have created does not rely on the input of countless thousands of others, and that if they or their descendants could lay claim to the parts that "belong" to them, you would never be able to afford your derivative.
A computer is a complex tool. You can use it easily like you can use a chainsaw easily. The chainsaw eliminating a couple of your fingers is enough deterrent that most people learn to use it properly before that happens.
Excellent. I like that. How dangerous then to have Chainbuntu, the Ubuntu-powered Chainsaw.:-)
I'd like to see some education, but I think we're really going to have to work on dummy-proof computing. (While realizing that the problem is that the fools are so darned ingenious.) The danger is too abstract for the average fool.
The point with software is that somebody else can and will reduce the few hundred thousand button presses (or clicks) to a single one, without the incentive of a patent. There's no need to grant monopoly to people to come up with good software ideas. I think a more pressing need is to disincentivize the word "incentivize."
Maybe you shouldn't, if you're concerned about not getting monopoly protection. No loss to the rest of us. Someone else will do it in your place. Patents are supposed to promote innovation for the benefit of society. Software patents just stifle people who are already working on making better algorithms with no interest in idea monopolies.
No, the U.S. economy is currently in pretty good shape. Keeping in mind that I don't really know how money works, isn't it true that savings accounts like ING's are based on prevailing interest rates, and lower interest rates indicate a healthier economy?
I've read a lot of authors who talk about all the people that come to them and say they've got a great idea. If the author will write it up, they can split the money. Ideas are all over the place, free for the taking. It's turning the idea in to a good story that is the hard part. If they start patenting story ideas, it just gives all these idea yahoos an extortionate claim on the hard work of the writer who actually made something out of it.
Who is the lemming? I think this is about it for me in reading comments in slashdot. Really has become too tiresome, with the boring anti-MS blah, blah, blah. And now possibly as the parent suggests, anti-Google blah, blah, blah.
The original poster's use of "meme" may have been borderline, but you certainly haven't enlightened anybody by regurgitating some impenetrable definition of the concept.
So it's in the jargon file. That doesn't mean it's not an annoying phrase to use. Why not just say *automatically.* If you don't feel like explaining it, don't. You can still use "automatic." "Automagically" is one of those cutesy words that we'd do better without. But that's strictly in my humble opinion, of course.
Now if there were only a way to automagically delete all occurrences of the word "automagically." What are you: Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer? Does our world frighten and confuse you? Your cell phone updates from the network because of software. There aren't little demons in there doing it.
In my opinion, the first two movies followed the books much too slavishly. (I've heard this was a condition set by Rowling.) Still, I agree that assumptions shouldn't be made about the books based on the movie.
As an empirical example of market failure, the typewriter keyboard has much appeal. The objective of the keyboard is fairly straightforward: to get words onto the recording medium. There are no conflicting objectives to complicate the interpretation of performance. But the evidence in the standard history of Qwerty versus Dvorak is flawed and incomplete. First, the claims for the superiority of the Dvorak keyboard are suspect. The most dramatic claims are traceable to Dvorak himself, and the best-documented experiments, as well as recent ergonomic studies, suggest little or no advantage for the Dvorak keyboard.
Second, by ignoring the vitality and variety of the rivals to the Remington machine with its Qwerty keyboard, the received history implies that Sholes's and McGurrin's choices, made largely as matters of immediate expediency, established the standard without ever being tested. More careful reading of historical accounts and checks of original sources reveal a different picture: there were touch-typists other than McGurrin: there were competing claims of speed records: and Remington was not so well established that a keyboard offering significant advantages could not have gained a foothold. If the fable is to carry lessons about the workings of markets, we need to know more than just who won. The victory of the tortoise is a different story without the hare.
And thank you for putting your sig line in your post and thus defeating my preference of not wanting to see them. But in answer to your sig, what if your application is not required to run under heavy loads with limited memory on an SMP machine? Would you also like everyone to test their code on an AS/400 or maybe on a Commodore 64?
Slashdot Mirror
That's the problem with DRM. People who pay good money get screwed. This has happened, is happening, and will continue to happen. It's a bad idea for consumers and doesn't work economically, practically, or philosophically.
And the MOST killer thing was the DISability of IE to submit data through "input type img"
Maybe I'm not understanding what the claim is, but it's easy to demonstrate that this is not true. I just tried with IE7 to submit data on a form that uses an input type of image and see that it works fine.
This article has almost no information and it seems the only reason it was posted here is to stir up anti-Microsoft antagonism. (Now someone will say, "You must be new here.") :-)
In my experience, IE7 is much better at supporting standards than IE6. A huge improvement in CSS support, so that now as I design in Firefox 2.0 and occasionally verify things in IE7, I see that they are very, very close. Most of what I'm doing is working with WordPress blogs so it's very possible I'm not using things that are now broken, but if anything Microsoft should be given some credit for improving their browser.
There's plenty of reason to not like Microsoft, but this article doesn't supply much (if any) ammunition, and it doesn't do the free software crowd much of a service to engage in our own unsupported FUD.
I've worked with programmers of varying abilities over the years. All the really good ones use vi or emacs.
That's a pretty broad and sweeping generalization. How would you rate John Carmack? I'm pretty sure he uses an IDE for development, and I think I read recently where he even touted the benefits of "code sense" kinds of interfaces -- the kind where you type the dot and you get a nice popup with your method choices. There's a lot to be said for being comfortable at the raw text file level, but I think you're missing out on a lot of productivity enhancers if you're going to write off all modern tools.
I think I do realize that. That's why we need to talk about it and help people learn what software freedom is and why it's important. I answered the way I did because the original commenter seemed to be speaking as if they also understood, when they clearly did not. (Of course, I didn't take the time to be particularly helpful in explaining the concepts involved.)
I think the answer is "no," we haven't gone too far. There are dangers to software freedom from DRM and patents (and to a lesser extent, copyright), and the GPLv3 is intended to address this.
To the people who think it is all some radical overreach, consider how radical the original vision of free software appeared and how accepted it is now (in the form of GPLv2). It's not surprising that the same kinds of opposition appear when bringing the license up to date.
For your DVD example, I don't think that's what the license draft says at all. Nothing says your modified code has to do anything. The requirement is that your modified code still be *able* to do what the original code does, *if you want it to*. This is to protect against the Tivoization problem.
You're absolutely right that what has been done can be lost. Lost to companies that use DRM and patents to take away our freedom. "Tivoization" is just a proof-of-concept. Without GPLv3, companies will start exploiting loopholes like that more and more, until one day people realize it really can be taken away.
The GPL has always been about promoting the agenda and goals of the Free Software Foundation. Yes, it's "just" a license. Licenses are always about furthering goals. Do you think Microsoft doesn't have an agenda and goals with their licenses?
I'm not sure from your description what the problem is with your project. If people had previously submitted code under GPLv2 only, then I would think most of the code would have to be GPLv2 only, so no change would be necessary? Is it possible to mix "GPLv2 and later" and "GPLv2 only"?
I think it's possible you have no idea what free software is about. You seem to have a grasp of free as in free beer, but not free as in freedom. Saying "maybe here is the source and don't sell without my permission" has nothing to do with free software.
Moreover, if this IS taken to be so, absolutely NO ONE will produce ANY form of work which can be copied for free, because they could never recapture what it cost them to produce it. So - no more films, no more songs, no more plays... excepting in so much as there might be other ways to still make money from them (cinema showing, theatrical performances) which permit money still to be made.
This is demonstrably false. People have been making music and performing plays for thousands of years even though they can be more or less easily copied. Long before the invention of copyright. They're still doing it today. To give one example, the fashion "industry" is thriving despite not having copyright. People are producing all kinds of work and releasing it directly in to the public domain and allowing it to be used with Creative Commons licenses.
Times change, and culture adapts. Other people have rightly pointed out to you that culture comes from all of us. The idea that every innovator can control all future use of their innovation, if implemented as law, would stifle future creative output. We're all standing on the shoulders of others. I think it is very shortsighted to imagine whatever "new" work you have created does not rely on the input of countless thousands of others, and that if they or their descendants could lay claim to the parts that "belong" to them, you would never be able to afford your derivative.
A computer is a complex tool. You can use it easily like you can use a chainsaw easily. The chainsaw eliminating a couple of your fingers is enough deterrent that most people learn to use it properly before that happens.
Excellent. I like that. How dangerous then to have Chainbuntu, the Ubuntu-powered Chainsaw. :-)
I'd like to see some education, but I think we're really going to have to work on dummy-proof computing. (While realizing that the problem is that the fools are so darned ingenious.) The danger is too abstract for the average fool.
The point with software is that somebody else can and will reduce the few hundred thousand button presses (or clicks) to a single one, without the incentive of a patent. There's no need to grant monopoly to people to come up with good software ideas. I think a more pressing need is to disincentivize the word "incentivize."
Maybe you shouldn't, if you're concerned about not getting monopoly protection. No loss to the rest of us. Someone else will do it in your place. Patents are supposed to promote innovation for the benefit of society. Software patents just stifle people who are already working on making better algorithms with no interest in idea monopolies.
----
Freedom is on the March!
http://www.movingtofreedom.org
No, the U.S. economy is currently in pretty good shape. Keeping in mind that I don't really know how money works, isn't it true that savings accounts like ING's are based on prevailing interest rates, and lower interest rates indicate a healthier economy?
No. It's not that funny.
Oh, please kill me now.
I've read a lot of authors who talk about all the people that come to them and say they've got a great idea. If the author will write it up, they can split the money. Ideas are all over the place, free for the taking. It's turning the idea in to a good story that is the hard part. If they start patenting story ideas, it just gives all these idea yahoos an extortionate claim on the hard work of the writer who actually made something out of it.
Have you ever read Kurzweil? He has impressive credentials.
Who is the lemming? I think this is about it for me in reading comments in slashdot. Really has become too tiresome, with the boring anti-MS blah, blah, blah. And now possibly as the parent suggests, anti-Google blah, blah, blah.
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
The original poster's use of "meme" may have been borderline, but you certainly haven't enlightened anybody by regurgitating some impenetrable definition of the concept.
Thank you for clarifying one of my biggest fears. Or curse you. One of those two things.
So it's in the jargon file. That doesn't mean it's not an annoying phrase to use. Why not just say *automatically.* If you don't feel like explaining it, don't. You can still use "automatic." "Automagically" is one of those cutesy words that we'd do better without. But that's strictly in my humble opinion, of course.
Now if there were only a way to automagically delete all occurrences of the word "automagically." What are you: Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer? Does our world frighten and confuse you? Your cell phone updates from the network because of software. There aren't little demons in there doing it.
In my opinion, the first two movies followed the books much too slavishly. (I've heard this was a condition set by Rowling.) Still, I agree that assumptions shouldn't be made about the books based on the movie.
From the conclusion:
As an empirical example of market failure, the typewriter keyboard has much appeal. The objective of the keyboard is fairly straightforward: to get words onto the recording medium. There are no conflicting objectives to complicate the interpretation of performance. But the evidence in the standard history of Qwerty versus Dvorak is flawed and incomplete. First, the claims for the superiority of the Dvorak keyboard are suspect. The most dramatic claims are traceable to Dvorak himself, and the best-documented experiments, as well as recent ergonomic studies, suggest little or no advantage for the Dvorak keyboard.
Second, by ignoring the vitality and variety of the rivals to the Remington machine with its Qwerty keyboard, the received history implies that Sholes's and McGurrin's choices, made largely as matters of immediate expediency, established the standard without ever being tested. More careful reading of historical accounts and checks of original sources reveal a different picture: there were touch-typists other than McGurrin: there were competing claims of speed records: and Remington was not so well established that a keyboard offering significant advantages could not have gained a foothold. If the fable is to carry lessons about the workings of markets, we need to know more than just who won. The victory of the tortoise is a different story without the hare.
And thank you for putting your sig line in your post and thus defeating my preference of not wanting to see them. But in answer to your sig, what if your application is not required to run under heavy loads with limited memory on an SMP machine? Would you also like everyone to test their code on an AS/400 or maybe on a Commodore 64?