I mean, if I, as the prosecution, don't have to reveal to the court how I decrypted the "evidence", doesn't that give me just a wee bit too much power?
I wonder if that part would stand up to Supreme Court review?
Probably. They've okayed a number of cases in which the evidence against the defendant was not made public to the defense for reasons of "National Security". I don't know how it could be possibile to find justice in such a case -- isn't that why we have the right to confront our accusers? The bill Clinton pushed through a couple years ago on the heals of the Oklahoma bombing -- to fight "terrorism" -- increased the number of cases where such information could be restricted. Ironically there were no National Security issues that could have hindered the investigation of the Oklahoma bombing. But when Clinton sees the chance to decrease civil liberties... (and people would actually call him a liberal? Oh, ironies upon ironies)
Anyway, the Supreme Court can be very wimpy at times.
Face it, not everyone is going to agree to the DFSG, for whatever reasons. Does that mean we should not accept things people like that write? Or should it not be acceptable to be used for the general workings of something so complex and pretty much anarchy-based as the Internet? Sorry, but I do not agree. I feel that being reasonable on both sides is better than not.
Sure, some people will disagree with the DFSG. Those guidelines are there to draw a line between free software from unfree software (at least in the Debian organization's eyes). You could reasonably draw the line in a lot of different ways. So why not compromise when something potentially advantageous is just a little over the line?
But if you compromise the line will keep being drawn on the other side of more and more restrictive licenses. Do we consider BIND free on the whole, even if a piece of it isn't? Do we consider the old Qt license free because anyone making free software can use it? Do we consider the Sun Community Source License free because you can read the source code? Do we consider Explorer free because anyone can download it off the Internet?
The Golden Median is dumb -- the middle is only dependant on what you consider the edges to be. And if you allow the edges to be redefined then you'll just drift, controlled by whoever does the defining -- Security Dynamics?
Re:Incomplete packages released as Open Source...
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AOL Jilts Open Source
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· Score: 1
Who cares? AOL spent the marketing effort to get the users, those users are theirs and theirs alone.
What!?! They are not "their" users! They are AOL's customers, but that doesn't give AOL the right to treat them like commodities. And for you to then defend them, as though their aspirations at monopoly were just their way of making an honest buck... it might be their way of making a buck, but it's manipulative and has everything but the users' best interest in mind.
Empowering users is the right thing, but AOL has time and time again shown that it doesn't want to do that. It wants to make users dependant, and the features it offers are only to seduce, not to enable.
Gates did not start out in his garage. He was born a millionaire (thanks to a trust fund), his mother had connections to the board of trustees of IBM, his family is well connected in Seattle, he was rather manipulative in his early college programming days...
Bill Gates is not Ellison, Wozniak, or Jobs. He never risked anything real in his life -- lots of paper, perhaps his ego, but he never risked going hungry, not having a roof, or being forced to work in a fast food joint.
He has shown himself to be a very good businessman. I wouldn't confuse this with being a productive member of society. [Though to Gates' credit, most companies of Microsoft's size -- and the bussinessmen who lead them -- have done far worse things than MS]
There are a finite number of jobs in America. Jobs are a resource.
Those Mexicans would have been employed by the US one way or another. They can be employed in Mexico or the US, but the products always end up this side of the border eventually.
Now, the question is: do we employ them in this country or another country? If they are employed in this country people will feel a certain duty to let them live half-way decently -- not terribly well (proposition 187), but with some basics. But if they live in Mexico they can be payed little, die young, pollute their lands, have their unions busted and be put on blacklists, and then get roughed up just for trying to get someplace better.
Obviously there are those who want to keep them in Mexico, keep the living standard high by exporting our slums. But it's shameful, undefensible, immoral. People use bullshit economics to defend it, but that's all it is. Half the time they don't even bother to make up real economic theories. Neoliberalism, the IMF, NAFTA, the new world order...
Isn't there something wrong about a world that can make more and do more than ever before, yet most of the people are living worse than ever?
Yeah, it's a shame that people are starving and dying. But we can't save everyone, nor should we try. Coddling the weak produces more weak.
That quote is probably more of a condemnation of your ideas than anything I could say. It's cruel, patronizing, and ignorant all at once.
As for performance, true, NT is slightly (duh!) behind * nix but Oracle runs equally well under both - a credit to their engineers.
This probably has something to do with the fact that serious databases have very little to do with their hosting OS. They try to avoid the operating system where possible, because it allows the programmer to optimize everything without depending on the optimization the OS programmers did -- and speed is all-important in relational databases.
One example is raw filesystem access, where the database sidetracks the OS to access and organize the hard disk space itself. (Linux doesn't really support raw access yet)
I imagine that Oracle doesn't use any of libc, and only the most primitive operating system calls. [except of course on its shell -- the GUIs and even command-line interface]
Now, I don't how well NT works, but I'd imagine if you ran Oracle and nothing else on an NT box, the OS wouldn't be very noticable.
Does this mean that AD/NDS is a hack, of sorts, to make applications that weren't designed to be distributed work that way... i.e., that information can be written to a AD/NDS directory, shared, mirrored, locked, etc? All while looking like it's a normal filesystem? A distributed, hiarchical database, with files as the data and directories as the tables?
Everything I read is in heavy marketspeak, mostly directed towards the differences in Active Directory and NDS, rather than saying what they actually do, which is why I've remained confused despite sincere efforts to understand. I have very little experience with NT or Novell, so Unix terminology and analogies would be particularly helpful:-)
MS has already (quietly) admitted that the widely-hyped Active Directory is not a directory at all (in the sense of X.500 and LDAP) but rather a flat pseudo-directory.
Can someone explain just what Active Directory is? Or point, perhaps, to an online description. A lot of people seem to think it's the cat's meow...
[would the Hurd's translators be similar, or BSD shadow filesystems? Oh, I don't even have the slightest idea of what AD is, so it probably doesn't matter]
Now, delving slightly off-topic, I am of the school of thought that feels ad filters hurt the site. If a site like Slashdot has ads, it's because it needs the money to run. Companies pay for those ads based on how many times they think the ad is going to be viewed. If, say, 75% of the viewers of a page are filtering out that ad, then companies are going to question the value of buying that ad.
That's exactly why ad filters have the potential to be very effective. Viewers can't get ads to decrease by pleading -- pleading doesn't get anyone anywhere. They can't simply choose not to view ad-laden sites, because ads have become ubiquitous. Ad filters are the assertion of the viewers' power in a world dominated by the provider.
People aren't going to search for alternative means of monitary support for content unless the present system stops working. If ad filters become common then the issue can be forced. I don't see any other practical way to bring the issue forward.
Re:Facts from the con
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BO2K cracked
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· Score: 1
Does anyone have an mp3 that doesn't have psychadelic tones in the background? (Or am I doing something wrong?)
The speech sounds interesting, but only the parts that I can understand.
Re:Trojan horses are hard to protect against
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BO2K cracked
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· Score: 1
BO is a trojan horse. If you can get a user to run an executeable, you have him fscked. If I send someone a Linux executeable which modifies his login script to start a telnet server (modified to not require a login, of course) on some non standard (>1024) port, he has his account wide open. Anything he can do, you can log in and do as well. Is this a security flaw of Linux?
You cannot prevent users from doing such things, under any OS. As such I think Microsoft is right that this is not really a security problem in Windows.
This is a security flaw of Linux, just as it is for Windows NT. Theoretically these systems can be very secure, but practically they cannot -- assuming normal people use the system, add programs, etc.
Windows NT does not have exceptionally bad security compared to other OSes. But in defense of the future of CS, trojans are a problem that needs to be solved.
Sandboxes (as in Java) are one attempt to solve this. They aren't a very good solution, but more of a hack on underlying security problems.
I think capability systems provide the sort of fine-grained access that is needed. Eros is an OS that attempts to do this. There are some papers online there about capabilities -- What is a Capability, Anyway? might be a place to start.
What if the next version of DR-DOS caused Windows to stop running correcntly? MS wrote Windows with MS-DOS in mind, by adding a check to prevent it from running under DR-DOS they were simply trying to avoid the chance they would 10 zillion support calls from DR-DOS users wondering why Windows doesn't work.
If the problem had originated in DR-DOS they could have forwarded those support calls to Digital Research (or did Novell own it at this point? I forget). They were not obliged to answer problems that originated with DR-DOS.
MS did not have the right to exclude DR-DOS because Microsoft was a monopoly. This placed special restrictions on them that would not otherwise apply.
Also, by demanding that MS-DOS be used with MS-Windows, Microsoft was implicitly bundling. They couldn't actually sell them together and they had to pretend that they weren't completely dependant on each other, for legal reasons. But the effect and intent of their actions was to tie the two products together.
It is
just like what some game makers do now with NT. They check to see if the game is running under Win9x.
This is completely different. Game makers don't own NT or Windows 95. They aren't monopolies. Those two issues -- crossownership and monopoly-position -- are at the core of the case.
Overall I'm confused over this lawsuit. Microsoft wrote a graphical shell for THEIR OS. To me they have every right to inform their customers that there might be incompatibilities if you run that shell on a competitor's knock-off OS. Where is it written that just because everyone was using Windows that Microsoft had to spend the R&D money to make sure it worked on a competitor's product?
First, no one claimed that MS had any obligation to make Windows compatible with DR-DOS. However, Digital Research went to a great deal of effort to make DR-DOS compatible with MS-DOS. MS broke the law when they responded by deliberately making their products incompatible with DR-DOS. Intent is very important to this case.
Even the intent to make something incompatible would not be illegal if MS were not in a monopoly situation at that point. Regardless of how MS got to be a monopoly, when that happened it couldn't legally practice predatory practices using its monopoly as leverage.
The evidence seems pretty clear that they did act in a predatory manner.
If DR, Novel, Caldera (et. al.) wanted a graphical shell on DR DOS they should have written their own.
It should be quite obvious that this was not a viable option. If they had written their own shell, MS applications wouldn't have been compatible with it, MS-DOS very probably wouldn't have been compatible, and third-party apps mostly wouldn't be compatible because those third-parties would be compelled by Microsoft's monopoly position to develop primarily for MS-Windows.
Re:What a tangled web we weave...
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RMS Responds
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· Score: 1
What the GPL does is place a restriction on the freedom of anyone who choses to change a piece of GPL'd software: you may not give away your changes unless you give away the source. To say that placing this restriction on a person gives him greater freedom is simply Orwellian.
You must look at the larger picture. Does the GPL inhibit the way you can use the software? Does the GPL inhibit the way you distribute software? No. It only limits a person from limiting the software. In one, single instance this might seem like a restriction. However, in the larger picture this is the only way to keep there from being restrictions.
This postmodernist idea of complete tolerance, complete freedom, or whatever, is absurd in any practical circumstance. The result of the permissive, purportedly more "free", licenses is a situation in which there is less free software. Postmodernism is ineffective, and being ineffective is not a moral stance.
This is why the only political achievement of postmodernism is political correctness, hardly an achievement to be proud of. Significant achievements are generally made by people with enough confidence to be a bit more righteous.
Re:What a tangled web we weave...
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RMS Responds
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· Score: 2
I'll leave your obsession with language for another day. But this keeps coming up from many people:
The first myth is that the FSF has anything to do with free software. It doesn't. Free software is against their principles. [...]
What the FSF espouse is open software, not free software. They require only that software be forever open. This is not necessarily bad, of course. But it is not free to tell someone else what they can do with their lives. They do not allow it to be free in the libre sense, nor do they require it to be free in the gratis sense either.
The FSF does create and encourage free software. Free in the BSD sense is, I believe, considerably less free than the GPL sense.
What better frees a slave? To buy him away from his enslavement, or to abolish slavery? If you abolish slavery you ensure not only that he will be free forever, but so will his children and his family and all the slaves you hadn't even known. The GPL attempts to do the same thing (even if against a less clearly morally incorrect action as slavery).
First, the GPL demands the continued freedom of a piece of software. Never can it be made proprietary. To allow that sort of transition (as with BSD) is to accept and implicitly encourage proprietary software. That's fine if you accept proprietary software -- the FSF clearly does not, has not, and will not support proprietary software (much unlike the "Open Source" community).
Second, by being exclusionary, the GPL attempts to abolish proprietary programs. Of course, it can't do through legal methods -- copyright law is much too entrenched to be changed now. But by being viral it gives an advantage to free software than cannot be shared by proprietary software. And if GNU and the GPL are truly successful it will become more and more difficult to produce a good proprietary product (this is not the effect of LGPLed software, however).
These are all fitting with the goal of freedom as that the FSF pursues -- not every sort of freedom, but the freedom to use, change, and share software. This is not the semantically-anal "free" you speak of, but a pragmatic and effective free that goes far beyond it.
Maybe their tactics take choice away from people. But so does proprietary software, and there is real competition between the two. If you feel proprietary software is wrong, then you are obliged to attempt eliminate proprietary software. In doing so you won't be coercing the vast numbers of computer users, for whom the proprietary nature of some software is never a benefit, but only the (in comparison) small number of programmers and companies who create the aforementioned proprietary software.
Three-dimensional workspaces
would probably work better than two-deimensional ones, but only if the user has the capability of truely experiencing the 3-D reality.
But humans can't truly experience 3D reality. Our eyes are very 2D -- just a plane of retina on the backs of our eyes. We extrapolate the three-dimensionality from our 2D images.
We do have stereoscopic vision, but it's rather crude -- limited to close range, and with rather poor resolution. I don't think it offers much, especially since the necessary goggles would be a PITA.
Note that any data-representation will still be essentially 2D -- you can represent a 3D surface, but only a surface. You cannot represent the interior, because the surface will hide it. Again, we only see 2D, because a surface is just a twisted plane (the twisting has some informational content, but not a whole dimension's worth of it).
It is amazing, when you think about it, that we understand three dimensions at all. It shows there's a hell of a lot more going on inside our heads than our I/O can express.
Honestly, I think 3D UIs are mostly for looks, not for real use. IMHO they don't have the potential to significantly increase the efficiency of people's interaction with the computer.
I responded to someone wanting to add 3D to Gnome a while back. They felt you could express more information with a third dimension, but they overlooked the fact that human vision is inherently 2D.
In an already 3-dimensional context, it would be helpful to have a 3D extrapolation of the interface -- something that the aforementioned 3dwm seems to be trying to do. But to put a 3D interface onto a 2D display is just glitz.
The human mind does have a proficiency at creating an internal model of a 3D situation, even though it is only perceived with two dimensions. However, while this is useful for understanding inherently three-dimensional situations (as in CAD, for instance) it is not a good way at dealing with other information.
People naturally organize things in a two-dimensional fashion when given the choice. Be it shelves, stacks of papers, tabular information, etc. It is easier and more accessable.
While there are certainly more innovations left to be made in interface, the new directions are much more subtle than 3D.
I just remembered OS-9 from the volunteer computer teacher I had in elementary school, who was a big OS-9 enthusiast. He ran it on a CoCo-III we had there. We mostly used it for word processing, using something reminiscant of nroff. I later found him running a BBS with multitasking off of a 256K CoCo III. That's pretty damn tight.
Looking at the Microware website, it looks popular for embedded devices. I seem to remember some fairly recent video game system ran off OS-9 as well...?
Microkernels still probably makes some sense for realtime OSes. Maximum speed efficiency doesn't seem to be the primary goal on those platforms, but rather consistency and being generally lean.
Linux divorces the graphical user interface from the kernel thus ensuring stability
This only ensures stability on computers that don't use the GUI. It's a serious stability problem for any computer that does use the GUI (X).
X has crashed on me a number of times, cutting off the console and any ability to kill X or even safely reboot the machine. Sure, the Linux kernel wasn't at fault, it was chugging away happily. But it was at fault by negligence, because it didn't do it's job -- safely abstract the hardware.
Frame buffers are a start, though my understanding is that the X server based on the frame buffer is rather slow because it doesn't have any acceleration available to it. So it's only a start.
In many ways, NT is moving away from being microkernel, as it gives special priveledges to more services -- graphics particularly, but I think IIS had funny ties to the OS as well... (?)
MacOS X (and NeXTSTEP) are based on top of Mach, but I'm not sure if they really are microkernel. mkLinux is put ontop of Mach, I think in the same style as MacOS X -- just big monolithic services ontop of the microkernel. MacOS X is just BSD with a portability layer (Mach), and BSD is definately old-school monolithic.
Plan 9, Inferno, and HURD are experimental. I don't know anything about OSF/1.
QNX seems like the only microkernel in real use. I must say, it looks really cool, but I don't know much about it. OS-9 might be considered microkernel too (isn't it related to QNX?). But that's still slim offerings when compared to monolithic kernels.
Your being rather semantic with that first comment. But anyway...
Sure, some executives have a certain amount of risk. And some businesses fail. But that doesn't leave the execs destitute. When it goes really bad they have to live the middle-class lifestyle, instead of the upper-class lifestyle they were used to or aspired to. Oh, despair.
But I'm not sure about calling a small-time entrepreneur an executive is quite right. Anyway...
It's the last bit of wealth that counts most. The drop from upper-class to middle-class is hardly traumatic. It's not hard to regain your position. All you are really losing is a bit of comfort and a bit of ego. It's not that big a risk.
Re:Debian and KDE, the current situation (IIRC)
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qt 2.0 released
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· Score: 1
I didn't mean to imply KDE was being sinister. I do think that Troll Tech's Qt1 licensing was boarding on the sinister -- but only by free software standards. By business standards what they were doing was fairly normal. KDE was seduced by their offer, which wasn't great of them, but certainly not evil of them. Their ultimate motivations were noble.
RMS/FSF/GNU did think about this before, however. The widget thing has been a problem for a while, and until GTK there wasn't much of a solution. Xawe was the only free widget set, and Xawe is not exactly pretty or full-featured. (GNU) Emacs used it anyway, however, because that's all there was.
But many free applications used Motif, another non-free widget library. And many of those applications used static linking as well, which quite clearly violates the GPL. But no one did anything, because the alternative was no GUI at all. KDE people would often point to this because they thought there was a hypocracy in persecuting their use in Qt. They had a point.
Oh, and you can include gcc in your homemade OS. It's not uncommon. You can include any GPLed program. Many OSes already do. I think the qualification in the GPL is meant to keep you from including the OS with the program, not the other way around.
Re:Debian and KDE, the current situation (IIRC)
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qt 2.0 released
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· Score: 1
I wondered at first why the GPL was written this way, but I've realized that it's because RMS didn't want people distributing his software along with their proprietary operating systems.
I don't think this is the intent or effect of this clause. This is how I read it:
To allow portability to non-free operating systems, operating system-specific libraries can be linked against the program even though that would otherwise violate the GPL.
However, this is "unless that component itself accompanies the executable." I read this to say (and intend) that you not use this to justify taking some OS library and distributing it with the program. Like if some company made a GPL program dependant on their library (which they normally included with their OS), then distributed this GPLed program with their library, making the program only useful if you have the (proprietary) library.
This would be a way of coopting the GPL, since while a portion of the program would be free the actual working program would not be free.
This is actually very much what KDE did with Qt, trying to get a proprietary library in the back door (so to speak). It becomes more subtle with Qt 2.0, as the program is no longer less free because of its association with Qt (well, not much less free), but it is less GPLed, and the GPL doesn't make a distinction between non-free and non-GPL. (trying to make that distinction in the license would make it terribly unwieldy and vague)
These license incompatibilities all risks diluting the GPL and the collection of GPLed software. A minimal number of licenses makes for a much more powerful set of free software.
My post wasn't about economics. My post wasn't about describing how things work -- that's what economics tries to do.
I just asked: do these people deserve the money they've made? My claim was that they could not have deserved it. There's no way that their contribution could have been that much more than the average (or even above-average) person's.
Did they make a lot of money? Obviously, I cannot dispute the facts. The difference between what people deserve and what they get is what distinguishes a just and unjust system. I imply only that this system must be unjust by looking at what it creates.
Maybe your interpretation based on value and subjective judgement is correct (I don't think it is). Either way it is still unjust if it creates an unjust ends. It is certainly no justification.
So according to Raymond, one can in the short run call bug fixes and patches new versions and charge for them but this leads to a condition where you tend towards a single monopoly player and customers dissatisfied with poorly supported sofware - sound familiar?
It's exactly what Marx predicted in a capitalist economy -- that these starvation cycles will lead to monopolies, which defeat the concept of a free market. At times his interpretations seem more correct, more incorrect... but in the current economic/political cycle of neoliberalism and globalization... there is wisdom in his interpretations. Capitalism carries the seeds of its own destruction.
And if Free Software turns it all into a commodity... well, the days of the robber barons would be over at least.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyway, the Supreme Court can be very wimpy at times.
But if you compromise the line will keep being drawn on the other side of more and more restrictive licenses. Do we consider BIND free on the whole, even if a piece of it isn't? Do we consider the old Qt license free because anyone making free software can use it? Do we consider the Sun Community Source License free because you can read the source code? Do we consider Explorer free because anyone can download it off the Internet?
The Golden Median is dumb -- the middle is only dependant on what you consider the edges to be. And if you allow the edges to be redefined then you'll just drift, controlled by whoever does the defining -- Security Dynamics?
Empowering users is the right thing, but AOL has time and time again shown that it doesn't want to do that. It wants to make users dependant, and the features it offers are only to seduce, not to enable.
Bill Gates is not Ellison, Wozniak, or Jobs. He never risked anything real in his life -- lots of paper, perhaps his ego, but he never risked going hungry, not having a roof, or being forced to work in a fast food joint.
He has shown himself to be a very good businessman. I wouldn't confuse this with being a productive member of society. [Though to Gates' credit, most companies of Microsoft's size -- and the bussinessmen who lead them -- have done far worse things than MS]
Now, the question is: do we employ them in this country or another country? If they are employed in this country people will feel a certain duty to let them live half-way decently -- not terribly well (proposition 187), but with some basics. But if they live in Mexico they can be payed little, die young, pollute their lands, have their unions busted and be put on blacklists, and then get roughed up just for trying to get someplace better.
Obviously there are those who want to keep them in Mexico, keep the living standard high by exporting our slums. But it's shameful, undefensible, immoral. People use bullshit economics to defend it, but that's all it is. Half the time they don't even bother to make up real economic theories. Neoliberalism, the IMF, NAFTA, the new world order...
Isn't there something wrong about a world that can make more and do more than ever before, yet most of the people are living worse than ever?
That quote is probably more of a condemnation of your ideas than anything I could say. It's cruel, patronizing, and ignorant all at once.One example is raw filesystem access, where the database sidetracks the OS to access and organize the hard disk space itself. (Linux doesn't really support raw access yet)
I imagine that Oracle doesn't use any of libc, and only the most primitive operating system calls. [except of course on its shell -- the GUIs and even command-line interface]
Now, I don't how well NT works, but I'd imagine if you ran Oracle and nothing else on an NT box, the OS wouldn't be very noticable.
Everything I read is in heavy marketspeak, mostly directed towards the differences in Active Directory and NDS, rather than saying what they actually do, which is why I've remained confused despite sincere efforts to understand. I have very little experience with NT or Novell, so Unix terminology and analogies would be particularly helpful :-)
[would the Hurd's translators be similar, or BSD shadow filesystems? Oh, I don't even have the slightest idea of what AD is, so it probably doesn't matter]
People aren't going to search for alternative means of monitary support for content unless the present system stops working. If ad filters become common then the issue can be forced. I don't see any other practical way to bring the issue forward.
Maybe then we can stop whoring out our minds.
Junkbuster forever!
The speech sounds interesting, but only the parts that I can understand.
Windows NT does not have exceptionally bad security compared to other OSes. But in defense of the future of CS, trojans are a problem that needs to be solved.
Sandboxes (as in Java) are one attempt to solve this. They aren't a very good solution, but more of a hack on underlying security problems.
I think capability systems provide the sort of fine-grained access that is needed. Eros is an OS that attempts to do this. There are some papers online there about capabilities -- What is a Capability, Anyway? might be a place to start.
MS did not have the right to exclude DR-DOS because Microsoft was a monopoly. This placed special restrictions on them that would not otherwise apply.
Also, by demanding that MS-DOS be used with MS-Windows, Microsoft was implicitly bundling. They couldn't actually sell them together and they had to pretend that they weren't completely dependant on each other, for legal reasons. But the effect and intent of their actions was to tie the two products together.
This is completely different. Game makers don't own NT or Windows 95. They aren't monopolies. Those two issues -- crossownership and monopoly-position -- are at the core of the case.Even the intent to make something incompatible would not be illegal if MS were not in a monopoly situation at that point. Regardless of how MS got to be a monopoly, when that happened it couldn't legally practice predatory practices using its monopoly as leverage.
The evidence seems pretty clear that they did act in a predatory manner.
It should be quite obvious that this was not a viable option. If they had written their own shell, MS applications wouldn't have been compatible with it, MS-DOS very probably wouldn't have been compatible, and third-party apps mostly wouldn't be compatible because those third-parties would be compelled by Microsoft's monopoly position to develop primarily for MS-Windows.This postmodernist idea of complete tolerance, complete freedom, or whatever, is absurd in any practical circumstance. The result of the permissive, purportedly more "free", licenses is a situation in which there is less free software. Postmodernism is ineffective, and being ineffective is not a moral stance.
This is why the only political achievement of postmodernism is political correctness, hardly an achievement to be proud of. Significant achievements are generally made by people with enough confidence to be a bit more righteous.
What better frees a slave? To buy him away from his enslavement, or to abolish slavery? If you abolish slavery you ensure not only that he will be free forever, but so will his children and his family and all the slaves you hadn't even known. The GPL attempts to do the same thing (even if against a less clearly morally incorrect action as slavery).
First, the GPL demands the continued freedom of a piece of software. Never can it be made proprietary. To allow that sort of transition (as with BSD) is to accept and implicitly encourage proprietary software. That's fine if you accept proprietary software -- the FSF clearly does not, has not, and will not support proprietary software (much unlike the "Open Source" community).
Second, by being exclusionary, the GPL attempts to abolish proprietary programs. Of course, it can't do through legal methods -- copyright law is much too entrenched to be changed now. But by being viral it gives an advantage to free software than cannot be shared by proprietary software. And if GNU and the GPL are truly successful it will become more and more difficult to produce a good proprietary product (this is not the effect of LGPLed software, however).
These are all fitting with the goal of freedom as that the FSF pursues -- not every sort of freedom, but the freedom to use, change, and share software. This is not the semantically-anal "free" you speak of, but a pragmatic and effective free that goes far beyond it.
Maybe their tactics take choice away from people. But so does proprietary software, and there is real competition between the two. If you feel proprietary software is wrong, then you are obliged to attempt eliminate proprietary software. In doing so you won't be coercing the vast numbers of computer users, for whom the proprietary nature of some software is never a benefit, but only the (in comparison) small number of programmers and companies who create the aforementioned proprietary software.
We do have stereoscopic vision, but it's rather crude -- limited to close range, and with rather poor resolution. I don't think it offers much, especially since the necessary goggles would be a PITA.
Note that any data-representation will still be essentially 2D -- you can represent a 3D surface, but only a surface. You cannot represent the interior, because the surface will hide it. Again, we only see 2D, because a surface is just a twisted plane (the twisting has some informational content, but not a whole dimension's worth of it).
It is amazing, when you think about it, that we understand three dimensions at all. It shows there's a hell of a lot more going on inside our heads than our I/O can express.
I responded to someone wanting to add 3D to Gnome a while back. They felt you could express more information with a third dimension, but they overlooked the fact that human vision is inherently 2D.
In an already 3-dimensional context, it would be helpful to have a 3D extrapolation of the interface -- something that the aforementioned 3dwm seems to be trying to do. But to put a 3D interface onto a 2D display is just glitz.
The human mind does have a proficiency at creating an internal model of a 3D situation, even though it is only perceived with two dimensions. However, while this is useful for understanding inherently three-dimensional situations (as in CAD, for instance) it is not a good way at dealing with other information.
People naturally organize things in a two-dimensional fashion when given the choice. Be it shelves, stacks of papers, tabular information, etc. It is easier and more accessable.
While there are certainly more innovations left to be made in interface, the new directions are much more subtle than 3D.
Looking at the Microware website, it looks popular for embedded devices. I seem to remember some fairly recent video game system ran off OS-9 as well...?
Microkernels still probably makes some sense for realtime OSes. Maximum speed efficiency doesn't seem to be the primary goal on those platforms, but rather consistency and being generally lean.
X has crashed on me a number of times, cutting off the console and any ability to kill X or even safely reboot the machine. Sure, the Linux kernel wasn't at fault, it was chugging away happily. But it was at fault by negligence, because it didn't do it's job -- safely abstract the hardware.
Frame buffers are a start, though my understanding is that the X server based on the frame buffer is rather slow because it doesn't have any acceleration available to it. So it's only a start.
MacOS X (and NeXTSTEP) are based on top of Mach, but I'm not sure if they really are microkernel. mkLinux is put ontop of Mach, I think in the same style as MacOS X -- just big monolithic services ontop of the microkernel. MacOS X is just BSD with a portability layer (Mach), and BSD is definately old-school monolithic.
Plan 9, Inferno, and HURD are experimental. I don't know anything about OSF/1.
QNX seems like the only microkernel in real use. I must say, it looks really cool, but I don't know much about it. OS-9 might be considered microkernel too (isn't it related to QNX?). But that's still slim offerings when compared to monolithic kernels.
Sure, some executives have a certain amount of risk. And some businesses fail. But that doesn't leave the execs destitute. When it goes really bad they have to live the middle-class lifestyle, instead of the upper-class lifestyle they were used to or aspired to. Oh, despair.
But I'm not sure about calling a small-time entrepreneur an executive is quite right. Anyway...
It's the last bit of wealth that counts most. The drop from upper-class to middle-class is hardly traumatic. It's not hard to regain your position. All you are really losing is a bit of comfort and a bit of ego. It's not that big a risk.
RMS/FSF/GNU did think about this before, however. The widget thing has been a problem for a while, and until GTK there wasn't much of a solution. Xawe was the only free widget set, and Xawe is not exactly pretty or full-featured. (GNU) Emacs used it anyway, however, because that's all there was.
But many free applications used Motif, another non-free widget library. And many of those applications used static linking as well, which quite clearly violates the GPL. But no one did anything, because the alternative was no GUI at all. KDE people would often point to this because they thought there was a hypocracy in persecuting their use in Qt. They had a point.
Oh, and you can include gcc in your homemade OS. It's not uncommon. You can include any GPLed program. Many OSes already do. I think the qualification in the GPL is meant to keep you from including the OS with the program, not the other way around.
To allow portability to non-free operating systems, operating system-specific libraries can be linked against the program even though that would otherwise violate the GPL.
However, this is "unless that component itself accompanies the executable." I read this to say (and intend) that you not use this to justify taking some OS library and distributing it with the program. Like if some company made a GPL program dependant on their library (which they normally included with their OS), then distributed this GPLed program with their library, making the program only useful if you have the (proprietary) library.
This would be a way of coopting the GPL, since while a portion of the program would be free the actual working program would not be free.
This is actually very much what KDE did with Qt, trying to get a proprietary library in the back door (so to speak). It becomes more subtle with Qt 2.0, as the program is no longer less free because of its association with Qt (well, not much less free), but it is less GPLed, and the GPL doesn't make a distinction between non-free and non-GPL. (trying to make that distinction in the license would make it terribly unwieldy and vague)
These license incompatibilities all risks diluting the GPL and the collection of GPLed software. A minimal number of licenses makes for a much more powerful set of free software.
I just asked: do these people deserve the money they've made? My claim was that they could not have deserved it. There's no way that their contribution could have been that much more than the average (or even above-average) person's.
Did they make a lot of money? Obviously, I cannot dispute the facts. The difference between what people deserve and what they get is what distinguishes a just and unjust system. I imply only that this system must be unjust by looking at what it creates.
Maybe your interpretation based on value and subjective judgement is correct (I don't think it is). Either way it is still unjust if it creates an unjust ends. It is certainly no justification.
And if Free Software turns it all into a commodity... well, the days of the robber barons would be over at least.