RMS believes that it is wrong not to copy software if it will help someone out. In other words he believes that the issue of Free Software is so important that it justifies breaking the law.
no, what he believes is that the law is wrong. he doens't advocate breaking it, he advocates changing it, and if (or while) it's not changed, using exclusively Free Software. So, yes, he's extreme in his position, but he has a point. The basis for his opinion is more societal than moral, i.e it's not "does one have an inherent right to sell a piece of software and restrict copying", but "would society be better if one weren't allowed to do that?". so there are two parts to the argument: 1) the question that he's asking is the right one, because "intellectual property" is no natural right (unlike, arguably, the property of physical things); this is recognized by US law, which creates copyright only as a practical way to foster the creation of content. 2) he argues that society would indeed be better. this is a point where I'm personally undecided, but still closer to RMS's side. but I'm practical enough that I'll use proprietary software when it's the right tool for the job.
on second thought, I agree with you to a point; to go on with the same example, the GNOME people should publicly be fair to KDE, and vice-versa. but what I want to point out is that people who are devoting their time and effort to a project tend to have a skewed view of the project's importance, on its own and in relationship to others... and that that is perfectly understandable, and even a significant factor in their motivation. so I think it's bad criticism to whine when they're not fair to other projects. the whole basis of the free software movement is that your worth is measured by what you contribute -- not by how nicely and reasonably you speak.
so? when it's cheapbytes selling it to you, then it's cheapbytes that's doing the act of selling. when RH sells it to you, it's RH that's selling it to you. can it really be any more obvious? I can't believe anyone would claim that what RH does is "not really selling". whatever other money sources RH may have makes no difference on the question of whether they are selling software or not. (and besides, they *do* make a sizable chunk of money from sales of official RH products). as for documentation and support, well, commercial software also comes with a book and some support usually, does that make it "not really selling"?
from what I see, he keeps pointing out again and again that the FSF's arguments and comparisons don't have enough perspective. I quote:
This is the danger of single-issue proponents: they lose all sense of perspective and start thinking that their perceived "moral" problem is the only one that counts.
This doesn't make sense. In this age and time you expect people to have one, or a few subjects that they specialize in, and deeply care about. Of course war and poverty do much more damage than proprietary software; but RMS's issue is software, not war. There are NGOs that specialize in humanitarian aid, and there's the FSF and other organizations that specialize in making Free Software. You don't ask a leader to have perspective, you ask him to be great in his field.
Same thing goes within the free software world, btw. You don't ask Miguel de Icaza to be fair towards KDE; you're just thankful he's making GNOME better.
of course you "know". it's written in your e-mail address, even! does it ever occur to *you* that you might not be the ultimate holder of truth, knowledge and common sense? your points of view might get a warmer welcome, and less down moderation, if you were just a little bit less cocky with them.
yep, it's disrespectful, and that's the whole point of it. the whole domain registration issue has gotten so ridiculous that disrespect is quite a reasonable thing to do. then again, I don't see how that warrants an article; any idiot with an internet connection can run BIND and set up TLDs that no-one else will see unless they use his nameservers.
yeah, I don't know what he dislikes so much about teal, it looks like a pretty OK color to me, not the most distinctive out there, but very nice and very legible on a white background. IMO there *are* a few *really cardinal* sins in web design, and they're all usability/compatibility issues: requiring javascript for navigation, being unusable on systems with font sizes different from what the authors had, and a few more like that, using images without alt tags, etc.
No...it doesn't make sense at all. One of the advantages of a client-server architecture is distribution of the application.
of course it doesn't make sense at all with the net as it is. I just said that it makes some sense from the point of view of current, existing IP law. If you want to argue that IP law is braindead and outdated, of course I'll agree.
squid is a cache, it doesn't modify what it sends. if a web-site operator tried to sue an ISP for having a squid cache for its customers, they'd get pointed to the notion of "common carrier", and to the HTTP RFC and the Cache-control header.
re-read my post above. I'm arguing that ad-striping is definitely OK when implemented as a filter on your own computer, but that setting up a public-access ad-stripping web proxy is probably not OK by a strict interpretation of copyright law. I'll also add that IANAL, and that I do strip ads when I browse.
depends on your setup; if the server is its own firewall and is directly on the internet, then it has no reason to be getting private-IP packets at all. if it has two cards, one on the internet and one on a private IP, then you can do filtering based on the interface, which ipchains is perfectly able to do.
don't get me wrong, I see the point in having a separate firewall, which is to centralize security in one very secure machine with no services. but I don't think it's unreasonable to do it the other way either, if you only have a server or two to protect, and you have very tight control of their configurations.
hey, you're making fun of it, but I actually had someone argue to me that the jive filter was racist. a pretty humorless way to see things, if you ask me..
It makes sense to have a distinction between what you can do as a local user, and what you can do in a server and then retransmit to random people. In the first case, it's part of the browsing process; you browse with Netscape, your neighbor browses with IE, I browse with Lynx and my neighbor with w3m, and we're obviously allowed to, which pretty much amounts to setting up arbitrary filters between the incoming HTML and our screen. But if I grab a page from your server, modify the HTML, and send it along to another host, then I'm sending a derived work of your content, which is only OK by copyright law for a few situations. Parody is one of these situations, so (IMO, IANAL) the dialectizer should be OK as an auto-parodizer. But, say, a public access ad-stripping proxy might not be OK. For personal use and on your own computer, filters are just part of the viewing process, so they're always OK.
so? that *alone* is not a good reason to be using a firewall; you can just as easily deny NFS and mysql connections from the outside on the server itself, with ipchains (assumign Linux)
and also: because their firewall is a Bridging Firewall. As far as I know bridging firewall support doesn't exist on Linux, outside of some very alpha patches (it may have been integrated in 2.3.x, which is just as alpha anyway). bridging firewalls are neat, they filter and forward stuff without having to make extra subnets for routing. the right sort of thing to put in front of a load balancer.
good rant, but your argument is all based on the idea that outlook autoruns the attachment. The reports I hear from actual Windows users are that it doesn't, that people clicked on the thing. Now, even knowing that, I *still* think that it's largely Outlook's fault; running a non-sandboxed script (or executable) from an attachment is so dangerous that no MUA should do that on behalf of the user on the basis of a click or two.
paying for impressions is a fairly broken model, with the door wide open for abuse (download your own banners from a few IPs with a perl-LWN script faking a referer!). for web advertising to really work, it should reward only cliks, and only those clicks that give something of value to the target site (that can be a purchase for e-commerce sites, or a user registration for community sites, or a minimum number of pageviews from the same browser, etc). getting paid because someone downloaded an image is just broken.
There are no "conditions" on the web, unless explicitly spelled out by sites. HTML includes tags that hint to the browser about embedding other objects in the page (images, java applets, whatever). the browser can follow these hints or not depending on many different things, ultimately under the user's control. if I view a site with lynx, I'm not loading *any* images; would you have the gall to say I'm wrong? (fwiw, I always read slashdot, and all news sites and weblogs, with lynx, because it's much faster than netscape for sites where you care about the text).
I think you misunderstand the theory about how ads work. They don't work becaues anyone has any kind of moral obligation to give them attention; they watch because most people are apathetic enough not to bother avoiding them. It's easy to avoid ads on TV (change the channel, mute the sound, fast forward on taped shows or if you have a TiVo), it's easy to avoid ads on the web (use junkbuster, or put the big adservers in your/etc/hosts). yet most people don't care enough to do even that, and that's why the whole ad system keeps working and will keep working.
Yes, and *THAT* is what Mozilla should do; drop the lame "block images from this server" thing, and have a blacklist and a whitelist of URL patterns. it's not any harder to implement, and MUCH more flexible. and it can be used for ad blocking as well as for rudimentary parental control (another point for the checklist!).
now, the thing that I'd *really* like to see in Mozilla, is the ability to allow/disallow loading a URL, based on pattern matches on the URL itself and also on the referer. So I could say something like "doubleclick is blocked, unless it's from slashdot or another favorite site of mine". this puts control back where it belongs, in the hands of the user, and would let users choose to support a site or not.
wtf is my "entertainment center" and what makes them think I have or want one? is this the next step after the "home theater"? I've looked hard, but still can't find a theater in my home!
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well, if x86 users have made WINE to run Windows apps under Linux, nothing's preventing Linux on Mac users to write a MacOS X compatibility layer...
on second thought, I agree with you to a point; to go on with the same example, the GNOME people should publicly be fair to KDE, and vice-versa. but what I want to point out is that people who are devoting their time and effort to a project tend to have a skewed view of the project's importance, on its own and in relationship to others... and that that is perfectly understandable, and even a significant factor in their motivation. so I think it's bad criticism to whine when they're not fair to other projects. the whole basis of the free software movement is that your worth is measured by what you contribute -- not by how nicely and reasonably you speak.
so? when it's cheapbytes selling it to you, then it's cheapbytes that's doing the act of selling. when RH sells it to you, it's RH that's selling it to you. can it really be any more obvious? I can't believe anyone would claim that what RH does is "not really selling". whatever other money sources RH may have makes no difference on the question of whether they are selling software or not. (and besides, they *do* make a sizable chunk of money from sales of official RH products). as for documentation and support, well, commercial software also comes with a book and some support usually, does that make it "not really selling"?
This doesn't make sense. In this age and time you expect people to have one, or a few subjects that they specialize in, and deeply care about. Of course war and poverty do much more damage than proprietary software; but RMS's issue is software, not war. There are NGOs that specialize in humanitarian aid, and there's the FSF and other organizations that specialize in making Free Software. You don't ask a leader to have perspective, you ask him to be great in his field.
Same thing goes within the free software world, btw. You don't ask Miguel de Icaza to be fair towards KDE; you're just thankful he's making GNOME better.
excuse me? RedHat gives you a box with a bunch of CDs in exchange for money. how can this not be considered selling?
of course you "know". it's written in your e-mail address, even! does it ever occur to *you* that you might not be the ultimate holder of truth, knowledge and common sense? your points of view might get a warmer welcome, and less down moderation, if you were just a little bit less cocky with them.
yep, it's disrespectful, and that's the whole point of it. the whole domain registration issue has gotten so ridiculous that disrespect is quite a reasonable thing to do. then again, I don't see how that warrants an article; any idiot with an internet connection can run BIND and set up TLDs that no-one else will see unless they use his nameservers.
yeah, I don't know what he dislikes so much about teal, it looks like a pretty OK color to me, not the most distinctive out there, but very nice and very legible on a white background. IMO there *are* a few *really cardinal* sins in web design, and they're all usability/compatibility issues: requiring javascript for navigation, being unusable on systems with font sizes different from what the authors had, and a few more like that, using images without alt tags, etc.
squid is a cache, it doesn't modify what it sends. if a web-site operator tried to sue an ISP for having a squid cache for its customers, they'd get pointed to the notion of "common carrier", and to the HTTP RFC and the Cache-control header.
nah, it wasn't you, it wasn't on slashdot, and it wasn't a troll. and as a troll, I find it funny :)
re-read my post above. I'm arguing that ad-striping is definitely OK when implemented as a filter on your own computer, but that setting up a public-access ad-stripping web proxy is probably not OK by a strict interpretation of copyright law. I'll also add that IANAL, and that I do strip ads when I browse.
I don't know. Sue them for caching your homepage and we'll see :-)
don't get me wrong, I see the point in having a separate firewall, which is to centralize security in one very secure machine with no services. but I don't think it's unreasonable to do it the other way either, if you only have a server or two to protect, and you have very tight control of their configurations.
hey, you're making fun of it, but I actually had someone argue to me that the jive filter was racist. a pretty humorless way to see things, if you ask me..
It makes sense to have a distinction between what you can do as a local user, and what you can do in a server and then retransmit to random people. In the first case, it's part of the browsing process; you browse with Netscape, your neighbor browses with IE, I browse with Lynx and my neighbor with w3m, and we're obviously allowed to, which pretty much amounts to setting up arbitrary filters between the incoming HTML and our screen. But if I grab a page from your server, modify the HTML, and send it along to another host, then I'm sending a derived work of your content, which is only OK by copyright law for a few situations. Parody is one of these situations, so (IMO, IANAL) the dialectizer should be OK as an auto-parodizer. But, say, a public access ad-stripping proxy might not be OK. For personal use and on your own computer, filters are just part of the viewing process, so they're always OK.
so? that *alone* is not a good reason to be using a firewall; you can just as easily deny NFS and mysql connections from the outside on the server itself, with ipchains (assumign Linux)
and also: because their firewall is a Bridging Firewall. As far as I know bridging firewall support doesn't exist on Linux, outside of some very alpha patches (it may have been integrated in 2.3.x, which is just as alpha anyway). bridging firewalls are neat, they filter and forward stuff without having to make extra subnets for routing. the right sort of thing to put in front of a load balancer.
good rant, but your argument is all based on the idea that outlook autoruns the attachment. The reports I hear from actual Windows users are that it doesn't, that people clicked on the thing. Now, even knowing that, I *still* think that it's largely Outlook's fault; running a non-sandboxed script (or executable) from an attachment is so dangerous that no MUA should do that on behalf of the user on the basis of a click or two.
amen :)
paying for impressions is a fairly broken model, with the door wide open for abuse (download your own banners from a few IPs with a perl-LWN script faking a referer!). for web advertising to really work, it should reward only cliks, and only those clicks that give something of value to the target site (that can be a purchase for e-commerce sites, or a user registration for community sites, or a minimum number of pageviews from the same browser, etc). getting paid because someone downloaded an image is just broken.
I think you misunderstand the theory about how ads work. They don't work becaues anyone has any kind of moral obligation to give them attention; they watch because most people are apathetic enough not to bother avoiding them. It's easy to avoid ads on TV (change the channel, mute the sound, fast forward on taped shows or if you have a TiVo), it's easy to avoid ads on the web (use junkbuster, or put the big adservers in your /etc/hosts). yet most people don't care enough to do even that, and that's why the whole ad system keeps working and will keep working.
now, the thing that I'd *really* like to see in Mozilla, is the ability to allow/disallow loading a URL, based on pattern matches on the URL itself and also on the referer. So I could say something like "doubleclick is blocked, unless it's from slashdot or another favorite site of mine". this puts control back where it belongs, in the hands of the user, and would let users choose to support a site or not.
wtf is my "entertainment center" and what makes them think I have or want one? is this the next step after the "home theater"? I've looked hard, but still can't find a theater in my home!