> GPL protects the freedom of the code, not the freedom of the developer.
Considering that the people who choose the license are developers, and so are the people that might sign up to help the project, is it any wonder that these developers prefer to preserve their freedom?
> 43% will never use GPLv3. How does this compare to the number who will never use GPLv2 either (ie, the BSD folks)?
We might get some numbers from SourceForge:
There are currently 105950 projects registered. Of those, 68143 are using the GPL and 11979 are using the LGPL, for a total of 80122 projects. The remaining 25828 use different licenses, which I am too bored to break down.
43% of 105950 projects is 45558.
If we assume that only people who currently use the GPL (and not LGPL) will consider GPLv3, then only 7751 of them will be opposed to it, or 11%, which is certainly less. If the above assumption is true, it just means that the GPL camp will lose 11% of developers, or 25% if you include the LGPL people.
> Only 6% have adopted GPLv3. Because really, what's the rush?
When you release a new version of your product and only 6% of your customers decide to upgrade, it might be a good time to fire the person responsible for it.
Any project released "under the terms of the GPL v2 or later" gains nothing from GPLv3 since anybody can accept GPLv2 instead, and likely will. This means that all those new restrictions imposed by GPLv3 only apply to those people who want to abide by them, which obviously excludes any company trying to Tivoize that project or sue it for patent infringement. So to state that any "or later" project is now under GPLv3 is definitely incorrect. A chain is only as strong as the weakest link, and a multilicense project is only as restricted as its least restrictive license.
According to the logic of Quantum Mechanics, if a function is discontinuous, then it's just the way the universe works, and the numbers inside the break are declared "forbidden". Remember, kids, searching for causes is heresy! We can't ever really know how things "really are" and it is pointless to ask the question, so fire up your probability calculations and resign to the fact that answers between 65535 and 100000 must forever remain undetermined.
I used to wonder why we have all these people standing around in adventure games, offering quests to anybody who asks for them. Now we know that those people are still standing there because nobody but you, dear player, is willing to do their quests. And if their lines seem repetetive and stale it's only because they have had to say them so many times to indifferent adventurers who do not want a quest. This is indeed surprising, considering the amount of experience points and valuable enchanted objects that can be obtained only that way.
>> Thinking about ditching Windows for Linux? Think again. > Now that's just flamebait. My house is 100% Linux, my work is 98% Linux, and it's truly a great thing.
Well, sure some people can do this, but most of us like to play a game now and then. Considering that there are no games on Linux, aside from the multitude of simple puzzle games and alpha-stage ugly-looking bug-ridden clones; considering that the fabled Wine doesn't run any games I actually want to play; and considering that OpenOffice is an enormous pig compared to MSOffice and can't print a letter and a proper envelope (which is all a home user usually needs it for), Linux just doesn't seem like a great deal. Sure I run Linux. In fact I run it almost all the time, because I like coding in it, but I still can't ditch the Windows XP partition because I like an occasional game.
> The problem is that such people, if in trouble, cannot go to "Soviet Union" and ask for shelter
That's not entirely true. Although I am a Soviet citizen, I am also eligible (by birth) for the Russian citizenship, so all I would have to do is go to the embassy and apply for it. The reason I haven't is that it costs a lot of money.
Let's play "name a popular non-FPS game"! Do we have an entry? Anyone? Come on, I know there are some out there! That? Oh, no, that was released years ago. Try again. Sorry, that's just a crappy remake of a 1995 game. Oh well, maybe next year we'll have something...
I have had a memorable moment with du one day. I was trying to explain to my non-geek sister why some programs are bloated and some are not. "See, we have these things called source code files, and the more of them you have, the bigger the resulting program will be." (Please don't be pedantic; I was not brave enough to explain template inlining and other such things, and you wouldn't have been either) "We have a program, we call 'du' that tells us how much space our source code uses. Here we have the source code for a simple program called bash. [run du on the bash source] As you can see, there isn't a lot of code. And here, by comparison, we have OpenOffice..." I rand du on the OpenOffice tree at this point, ready to point gleefully at the result, which I expected to be about a thousand times larger. "And here, you see that OpenOffice is... is..." and we kept watching, entranced, as du scanned the whole huge gigabyte tree for a good ten minutes. My poor sister was quite impressed. Especially because, like many non-technical people, she kept asking "how can you read it so fast?", assuming no doubt that I was keeping a running total in my head, adding up the partial du numbers as they scrolled by at breathtaking speed...
It seems to me that the whole shooter genre is quickly moving away from regular people and becoming focused solely on hardcore players of the shooter genre, who know how to "circlestrafe" a monster, whatever that means. As a result, all those hardcore strafers like the game, and the rest of us stand scratching our heads and wondering what could any sane person like about it.
> The fact is that BioShock, at its best, is capable of evoking some complicated responses > from players--among them, shame, guilt, remorse, regret, and, yes, sadness--using not > only its story, but most interestingly, its gameplay.
Isn't it sad that people spend so much time making games to make us scared, shameful, and depressed, instead of using the genre to make us self-confident, satisfied, and happy?
>> To put it more bluntly, we need clarification on whether dual-licensing has any point in it at all. > Yes, it explicitly allows the code to be used by anybody either under the terms of the GPL or the BSD licenses.
What I see you saying is that a dual-licensed project is like two identical projects, one under the GPL, another under the BSD. This way, once you accept one license, you no longer care about the other. You can treat your derived work as sourcing from the GPL clone or the BSD clone, but once you make the choice, it can stay that way.
> If the BSD license terms truly make moot the alternative GPL terms, then this would be > pointless; however, if a court at some point decides that the licenses are actually > incompatible, then code that is dual-licensed is protected from the chaos than would ensue.
But the licenses really are incompatible, albeit only in one direction. You can make GPL derived works from BSD code. You can make GPL derived works from GPL code. You can not make BSD derived works from GPL code. If you release your code under BSD, both GPL and BSD derived works can be created. If you release your code under both the GPL and BSD, then both GPL and BSD derived works can be created. These scenarios are already in the license and no court decisions are needed to clarify them. So to repeat my previous question; what do you gain from dual-licensing that you don't get from BSD alone?
> The dual license to use the code under either the BSD or the GPL terms does not require > you to reproduce the BSD license terms in derived works that you give to other people. > However, if you do so, you are misrepresenting the license to those pieces of work; you > are telling your recipients that they must abide by the terms of the GPL if they want > to use the portions of your derived work that come from the original
I am still not quite getting it. When you make a derived work from dual-licensed source, are you or are you not accepting GPL or BSD? The problem is that if you accept the GPL, your derived work must be licensed under the GPL due to the viral nature of the GPL. If you accept the BSD, your derived work can have either license or be dual licensed just like the original. What I see you implying is that any derived works must be dual-licensed as well, which implies that you can not accept the GPL. I must clarify that I am asking about the status of the derived work, not of the original work, which, naturally, remains under the original licenses. Are you saying that dual-licensing is automatically viral?
> Seems pretty clear to me, you can do whatever the hell you want under the BSD license
The issue here is not what you can do with BSD licensed code, but what you can do with code licensed under both the BSD and the GPL licenses. Specifically, the question is whether you can accept one license and not the other; which is precisely the decision that precipitated the current debate.
To put it more bluntly, we need clarification on whether dual-licensing has any point in it at all. If it is valid, then all users must accept both licenses at once, which is impossible, since BSD and GPL are incompatible. If it is not valid, and people can just pick either license on a whim, then there is no benefit to dual-licensing; simply releasing the code under the BSD license would have the same effect.
IMO, people should just make up their mind what they want and use the one appropriate license that fits that want. Dual-licensing is something only a wishy-washy, uninformed doormat would do.
What we really need is the clarification of the legal consequences of dual-licensing something. If it is indeed legal to strip out one of the licenses of dual-licensed code and continue development under only that license, then all we need to do is state this fact clearly in some place where people usually look when considering licensing issues. This way anyone who releases dual-licensed code will be aware that his code might not keep them both and will be able to decide in advance if that is a good thing.
This is a fine example of why it is so much harder to wage war in a free market society. You have to pay for it, and you can't just print money at the Federal Reserve. If government had to turn a profit, do you think we would have had so many wars in the past hundred years? I think not.
In Russia, unlike in the United States, fathers are not considered inhuman income sources whose existence is not really necessary except to pay child support.
Air Force, this is Google-one, requesting fighter escort... Sorry Google-one, all our fighters are currently in Iraq. Air Force, would 13.4 million dollars help? Your fighters are on the way, Google-one.
> The essay was interesting, but is poorly presented.
I won't disagree too strongly with this; I did write it more or less off-the-cuff, without much editing:)
> The argument is left as an exercise for the reader;
The story was the argument. Ken Levine said Bioshock was a statement about Objectivism, and I described what the statement was. The problem, I suppose, is that most people do not see why the things I pointed out are so bad, since Objectivism is normally treated as some fringe religion. Unfortunately, to explain fully would take more text than any Slashdot reader would even try to read. The best I can do is assume that whoever wants to know, can read Ayn Rand's books on philosophy (she was not just a fiction writer, you know).
> the description of gameplay and the story is disorganized and fragmented;
So is the game itself. The philosophical point, as I described it, is fairly coherent, but if you are unaware of it, the game is just a series of rooms to shoot stuff in.
> the essay lacks a definitive conclusion.
It's hard to make a conclusion about a something that is not a logical argument. As I pointed out, the game does not reason, it appeals to emotion, and that is impossible to refute.
> Additionally, it doesn't seem like appropriate flamebait for the front page.
Oh, sure. I am well aware that Slashdot hates objectivists:) But I can still be a troll;)
I wrote a through plot review recently, but Slashdot doesn't accept anything written from an objectivist viewpoint... You might be interested if you cared about Levine's pre-game statements about the game being a statement on Objectivism.
I agree completely. There is no reason to waste time and effort on copy protection. Just require a license key, and, if it is shareware, disable or nag after the trial period. The point of any "protection" should be to remind the user to pay, not to force him to do so. Look at games - there is not a single one out there that isn't cracked. Not one. Bioshock, with its phone-home activation? Cracked in three weeks. Half-life with steam? Cracked in a month or so. Search for any game, and there is a crack available. All the games I have installed on my machine are cracked, even though I own them legitimately, because I don't want to swap CDs all the time. Trust me, there is nothing you can invent that a pirate can't crack, so just don't bother and concentrate on improving your software.
Slashdot Mirror
> GPL protects the freedom of the code, not the freedom of the developer.
Considering that the people who choose the license are developers, and so are the people that might sign up to help the project, is it any wonder that these developers prefer to preserve their freedom?
> 43% will never use GPLv3. How does this compare to the number who will never use GPLv2 either (ie, the BSD folks)?
We might get some numbers from SourceForge:
There are currently 105950 projects registered.
Of those, 68143 are using the GPL and 11979 are using the LGPL, for a total of 80122 projects.
The remaining 25828 use different licenses, which I am too bored to break down.
43% of 105950 projects is 45558.
If we assume that only people who currently use the GPL (and not LGPL) will consider GPLv3, then only 7751 of them will be opposed to it, or 11%, which is certainly less. If the above assumption is true, it just means that the GPL camp will lose 11% of developers, or 25% if you include the LGPL people.
> Only 6% have adopted GPLv3. Because really, what's the rush?
When you release a new version of your product and only 6% of your customers decide to upgrade, it might be a good time to fire the person responsible for it.
Any project released "under the terms of the GPL v2 or later" gains nothing from GPLv3 since anybody can accept GPLv2 instead, and likely will. This means that all those new restrictions imposed by GPLv3 only apply to those people who want to abide by them, which obviously excludes any company trying to Tivoize that project or sue it for patent infringement. So to state that any "or later" project is now under GPLv3 is definitely incorrect. A chain is only as strong as the weakest link, and a multilicense project is only as restricted as its least restrictive license.
According to the logic of Quantum Mechanics, if a function is discontinuous, then it's just the way the universe works, and the numbers inside the break are declared "forbidden". Remember, kids, searching for causes is heresy! We can't ever really know how things "really are" and it is pointless to ask the question, so fire up your probability calculations and resign to the fact that answers between 65535 and 100000 must forever remain undetermined.
What? No Pip-Boy jokes? You people are letting me down...
I used to wonder why we have all these people standing around in adventure games, offering quests to anybody who asks for them. Now we know that those people are still standing there because nobody but you, dear player, is willing to do their quests. And if their lines seem repetetive and stale it's only because they have had to say them so many times to indifferent adventurers who do not want a quest. This is indeed surprising, considering the amount of experience points and valuable enchanted objects that can be obtained only that way.
>> Thinking about ditching Windows for Linux? Think again.
> Now that's just flamebait. My house is 100% Linux, my work is 98% Linux, and it's truly a great thing.
Well, sure some people can do this, but most of us like to play a game now and then. Considering that there are no games on Linux, aside from the multitude of simple puzzle games and alpha-stage ugly-looking bug-ridden clones; considering that the fabled Wine doesn't run any games I actually want to play; and considering that OpenOffice is an enormous pig compared to MSOffice and can't print a letter and a proper envelope (which is all a home user usually needs it for), Linux just doesn't seem like a great deal. Sure I run Linux. In fact I run it almost all the time, because I like coding in it, but I still can't ditch the Windows XP partition because I like an occasional game.
> The problem is that such people, if in trouble, cannot go to "Soviet Union" and ask for shelter
That's not entirely true. Although I am a Soviet citizen, I am also eligible (by birth) for the Russian citizenship, so all I would have to do is go to the embassy and apply for it. The reason I haven't is that it costs a lot of money.
Let's play "name a popular non-FPS game"! Do we have an entry? Anyone? Come on, I know there are some out there! That? Oh, no, that was released years ago. Try again. Sorry, that's just a crappy remake of a 1995 game. Oh well, maybe next year we'll have something...
> crack the whip on registrars of non-countries like the Soviet Union
As someone who is still officially a citizen of the Soviet Union, I must vehemently disagree with your classification!
I have had a memorable moment with du one day. I was trying to explain to my non-geek sister why some programs are bloated and some are not. "See, we have these things called source code files, and the more of them you have, the bigger the resulting program will be." (Please don't be pedantic; I was not brave enough to explain template inlining and other such things, and you wouldn't have been either) "We have a program, we call 'du' that tells us how much space our source code uses. Here we have the source code for a simple program called bash. [run du on the bash source] As you can see, there isn't a lot of code. And here, by comparison, we have OpenOffice..." I rand du on the OpenOffice tree at this point, ready to point gleefully at the result, which I expected to be about a thousand times larger. "And here, you see that OpenOffice is... is..." and we kept watching, entranced, as du scanned the whole huge gigabyte tree for a good ten minutes. My poor sister was quite impressed. Especially because, like many non-technical people, she kept asking "how can you read it so fast?", assuming no doubt that I was keeping a running total in my head, adding up the partial du numbers as they scrolled by at breathtaking speed...
> Anyhow, just like everything else in life, something that only makes you happy gets boring pretty quickly.
So, is this a justification for the war in Iraq?
It seems to me that the whole shooter genre is quickly moving away from regular people and becoming focused solely on hardcore players of the shooter genre, who know how to "circlestrafe" a monster, whatever that means. As a result, all those hardcore strafers like the game, and the rest of us stand scratching our heads and wondering what could any sane person like about it.
> The fact is that BioShock, at its best, is capable of evoking some complicated responses
> from players--among them, shame, guilt, remorse, regret, and, yes, sadness--using not
> only its story, but most interestingly, its gameplay.
Isn't it sad that people spend so much time making games to make us scared, shameful, and depressed, instead of using the genre to make us self-confident, satisfied, and happy?
>> To put it more bluntly, we need clarification on whether dual-licensing has any point in it at all.
> Yes, it explicitly allows the code to be used by anybody either under the terms of the GPL or the BSD licenses.
What I see you saying is that a dual-licensed project is like two identical projects, one under the GPL, another under the BSD. This way, once you accept one license, you no longer care about the other. You can treat your derived work as sourcing from the GPL clone or the BSD clone, but once you make the choice, it can stay that way.
> If the BSD license terms truly make moot the alternative GPL terms, then this would be
> pointless; however, if a court at some point decides that the licenses are actually
> incompatible, then code that is dual-licensed is protected from the chaos than would ensue.
But the licenses really are incompatible, albeit only in one direction. You can make GPL derived works from BSD code. You can make GPL derived works from GPL code. You can not make BSD derived works from GPL code. If you release your code under BSD, both GPL and BSD derived works can be created. If you release your code under both the GPL and BSD, then both GPL and BSD derived works can be created. These scenarios are already in the license and no court decisions are needed to clarify them. So to repeat my previous question; what do you gain from dual-licensing that you don't get from BSD alone?
> The dual license to use the code under either the BSD or the GPL terms does not require
> you to reproduce the BSD license terms in derived works that you give to other people.
> However, if you do so, you are misrepresenting the license to those pieces of work; you
> are telling your recipients that they must abide by the terms of the GPL if they want
> to use the portions of your derived work that come from the original
I am still not quite getting it. When you make a derived work from dual-licensed source, are you or are you not accepting GPL or BSD? The problem is that if you accept the GPL, your derived work must be licensed under the GPL due to the viral nature of the GPL. If you accept the BSD, your derived work can have either license or be dual licensed just like the original. What I see you implying is that any derived works must be dual-licensed as well, which implies that you can not accept the GPL. I must clarify that I am asking about the status of the derived work, not of the original work, which, naturally, remains under the original licenses. Are you saying that dual-licensing is automatically viral?
> Seems pretty clear to me, you can do whatever the hell you want under the BSD license
The issue here is not what you can do with BSD licensed code, but what you can do with code licensed under both the BSD and the GPL licenses. Specifically, the question is whether you can accept one license and not the other; which is precisely the decision that precipitated the current debate.
To put it more bluntly, we need clarification on whether dual-licensing has any point in it at all. If it is valid, then all users must accept both licenses at once, which is impossible, since BSD and GPL are incompatible. If it is not valid, and people can just pick either license on a whim, then there is no benefit to dual-licensing; simply releasing the code under the BSD license would have the same effect.
IMO, people should just make up their mind what they want and use the one appropriate license that fits that want. Dual-licensing is something only a wishy-washy, uninformed doormat would do.
What we really need is the clarification of the legal consequences of dual-licensing something. If it is indeed legal to strip out one of the licenses of dual-licensed code and continue development under only that license, then all we need to do is state this fact clearly in some place where people usually look when considering licensing issues. This way anyone who releases dual-licensed code will be aware that his code might not keep them both and will be able to decide in advance if that is a good thing.
> If it is a long hair working as a code grunt/sysadmin in their it lot
Now, that could be dangerous...
> Emails of An RIAA Attack Dog Leaked
Evidently, unlike in the old times, these days it is easy for the whole internet to know you are a dog.
This is a fine example of why it is so much harder to wage war in a free market society. You have to pay for it, and you can't just print money at the Federal Reserve. If government had to turn a profit, do you think we would have had so many wars in the past hundred years? I think not.
In Russia, unlike in the United States, fathers are not considered inhuman income sources whose existence is not really necessary except to pay child support.
Air Force, this is Google-one, requesting fighter escort...
Sorry Google-one, all our fighters are currently in Iraq.
Air Force, would 13.4 million dollars help?
Your fighters are on the way, Google-one.
> The essay was interesting, but is poorly presented.
:)
:) But I can still be a troll ;)
I won't disagree too strongly with this; I did write it more or less off-the-cuff, without much editing
> The argument is left as an exercise for the reader;
The story was the argument. Ken Levine said Bioshock was a statement about Objectivism, and I described what the statement was. The problem, I suppose, is that most people do not see why the things I pointed out are so bad, since Objectivism is normally treated as some fringe religion. Unfortunately, to explain fully would take more text than any Slashdot reader would even try to read. The best I can do is assume that whoever wants to know, can read Ayn Rand's books on philosophy (she was not just a fiction writer, you know).
> the description of gameplay and the story is disorganized and fragmented;
So is the game itself. The philosophical point, as I described it, is fairly coherent, but if you are unaware of it, the game is just a series of rooms to shoot stuff in.
> the essay lacks a definitive conclusion.
It's hard to make a conclusion about a something that is not a logical argument. As I pointed out, the game does not reason, it appeals to emotion, and that is impossible to refute.
> Additionally, it doesn't seem like appropriate flamebait for the front page.
Oh, sure. I am well aware that Slashdot hates objectivists
I wrote a through plot review recently, but Slashdot doesn't accept anything written from an objectivist viewpoint... You might be interested if you cared about Levine's pre-game statements about the game being a statement on Objectivism.
I agree completely. There is no reason to waste time and effort on copy protection. Just require a license key, and, if it is shareware, disable or nag after the trial period. The point of any "protection" should be to remind the user to pay, not to force him to do so. Look at games - there is not a single one out there that isn't cracked. Not one. Bioshock, with its phone-home activation? Cracked in three weeks. Half-life with steam? Cracked in a month or so. Search for any game, and there is a crack available. All the games I have installed on my machine are cracked, even though I own them legitimately, because I don't want to swap CDs all the time. Trust me, there is nothing you can invent that a pirate can't crack, so just don't bother and concentrate on improving your software.