Fred has always been a bit of a PHB...
on
Legacy-Free PCs
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· Score: 2, Troll
...and therefore does not, apparently, understand the reasons why not having a BIOS is an awful idea. Can you say, "machines that are locked into using only one OS?" "Microsoft Palladium inextricably inside?" "Machines crashing on boot due to crufty C code in ROM?" "Viruses that can make the hardware utterly useless... even more so than the Chernobyl virus?" Sure you can. The idea of a BIOS isn't a bad one just because it was invented many years ago. It's a classic concept that just works. And it's one of the reasons the PC architecture has been so successful and long-lived.
It seems to me that this problem could be solved with better data compression on the floppy. Right now, they're using gzip, which is many, many years old. Perhaps if they moved to something modern (and non-GPLed, in keeping with the BSD philosophy) such as bzip, it'd fit.
But most of the work that I've done for the Free Software Foundation in the past ten years wasn't about litigation. It wasn't about conflict at all; it was about helping people cooperate....
Interesting. Gangsters use exactly the same term -- "cooperate" -- when they coerce victims to pay them protection money or otherwise do their bidding. And the FSF now has, or so it says, a "compliance" engineer, specifically charged with finding people to coerce to give away their work.
It appears to me, at least, that the fact that the FSF needs a lawyer like Moglen to rattle sabers at people smacks of the exact opposite of freedom. What do you think?
I'm doing quite a large number of constructive projects right now -- some of them with BSD. However, one of the things that has driven me away from hacking on BSD is the nasty, ego-driven politics -- including incidents such as this one.
As for the GPL: Fortunately, those of us who believe in the BSD philosophy understand why it's absolutely vital that BSD does not become assimilated by the Borg (AKA FSF). One of the most irresponsible and foolish actions of the FreeBSD Core Team -- and a good reason for its impeachment -- has been to allow GPLed code into the base system. The code should be removed at once, along with anyone who will not enforce a strict no-GPL policy.
What's sad, Greg, is that the FreeBSD Core Team -- of which you are perhaps the most elitist member -- is acting like a bunch of immature children acting as if they were a Grand High Cabal... and ejecting one of their peers from the clubhouse.
By acting like a secretive club and making decisions such as this one behind closed doors, you are damaging the reputations of FreeBSD and the BSDs in general.
Alas, the above is not so. It is very easy, if one is doing dual licensing involving the GPL, to mistakenly accept a GPLed patch and thus bring the product exclusively under the GPL. What's more, if you even look at a GPLed patch and then reimplement it, you can be accused of having derived your modified patch from the GPLed one. Again, your entire product is now under the GPL, and must be licensed "at no cost" per the terms of the GPL. You have just been deprived of all rewards for your work.
The danger of GPL contamination, plus the simple economics of the situation (the functionality of code that's available at no cost has a market value of zero), make dual licensing dangerous. Don't let the GPL vampire in the door. Remember what the GPL was designed to do: to "ban" (Stallman's own words) good-paying jobs for programmers.
Here's why. When you offer a product for no cost, its market value -- that is, the amount which an educated and rational consumer will pay for it or an equivalent -- is forced to zero. At that point, any customer that licenses the code for money is paying for something that has no market value. The few that do (and there will be few!) are foolish.
This is why the vehemently anti-business fringe of the open source movement -- e.g. Bruce Perens -- actively advocates dual licensing. They're hoping that businesses will fall into the dual licensing trap.
Unfortunately, that return policy only applies if you bought the product directly from Intuit. If you bought it from a store, and the store won't take it back, you're stuck.
Just took a look at my copy of TurboTax, which I have decided to return due to the copy protection mentioned in this article. And, guess what? There's no contact information on the box.... Not even a phone number. Nor any information about where to return the product. (Most stores won't take back software.)
So, I called Intuit's "Customer Service" line, at 800-446-8848. Unfortunately, recordings at this number simply refer all questions to the Web site, which likewise has no information on how to return the product under the "guarantee." This is a bit reminiscent of the problems experienced by those seeking promised refunds for Windows. So much for the guarantee written clearly on the box. Again, Intuit is starting to seem an awful lot like Microsoft.
I've used TurboTax for more than a decade, and just bought a copy for this year.
It's going right back to the store.
Over the years, my TurboTax directories, complete with tax data, have followed me from machine to machine as I've upgraded my equipment. I've often needed to go back into my old returns -- either to look at the data or worksheets or to create forms for amended returns.
Apparently, Intuit now intends to deny me this capability. And I'm going to deny Intuit my business.
Incidentally, Intuit now also attempts to extract recurring fees from users of QuickBooks (whose tax functions likewise stop working after a year unless you pay more).
Clearly, this is why Intuit was almost acquired by Microsoft. The two companies are birds of a feather, equally rapacious and nasty to users. Goodbye, TurboTax!
It's not that looking at code will "curse" you, but rather that it will put you at risk of later accusations. Most tasks are done via straightforward, common sense algorithms, so your code to do something will likely look quite a lot like someone else's. So, if you looked at the other person's source, it's easy to claim derivativeness. Which, if you looked at GPLed code, means that you could be at risk of being deprived of all rewards for your work. And because the FSF -- thanks to Bradley Kuhn and Eben Moglen -- is getting more and more litigious, it simply isn't wise to look at GPLed code. All they need to do is decide that you're an "evil" commercial software vendor, and it makes no difference whether your work is derivative or not: the harrassment and legal costs you'll incur could be immense.
Rosen, however, neglects to point out that this problem is just as likely (maybe more likely) to occur if you read GPLed code -- especially the FSF's stuff. He only mentions the risk in connection with Microsoft's "Shared Source." This is more than a sign of bias: it shows a lack of ethics. Rosen is warning about a minor risk while failing to inform readers of a much larger one. (You're a lot more likely to have GPLed source code on your hard disk than to have Microsoft "Shared Source" there.)
Rosen's article is interesting because it shows glaring inconsistencies with other things he's written on the subject of copyrights.
In this essay, where he condemns Microsoft's "Shared Source" initiative, he points out (correctly!) that if you so much as look at Microsoft source code, anything similar that you write later could be declared to be a derivative work. (He uses, as an example, the George Harrison "My Sweet Lord" case, in which Harrison was convicted of "unconscious" copyright infringement because he had once heard a song with a similar melody.)
However, in the essay cited in this Slashdot article, Rosen doesn't warn of this danger. What's more, he does not warn in either essay that it's just as much a danger when one looks at GPLed code as when one looks at Microsoft code.
This is an issue which both Rosen and the FSF have consistently ducked. If you look at GPLed source, and later write something similar, you could potentially be sued for infringement and required to release your work under the GPL -- forfeiting any payment you might have been able to get for licensing it. (The GPL requires that you license derivative works "at no cost.")
In short, in the essay mentioned in this Slashdot item, Rosen both omits vital information and fails to warn of a serious danger. Worse still, he shows inappropriate bias: he points out that danger in the case of Microsoft's "shared source," but not in the case of the GPL. This brings his objectivity and reliability as a source into question. His advice to software authors on the subject of copyrights and derivative works should be factual and based on concrete principles. It shouldn't be biased by who -- the FSF or Microsoft -- happens to own the software.
Please tell me: Why should I covet a membership card for an organization which was founded -- as stated by its founder, Richard Stallman, -- to ensure that good jobs for programmers such as myself are "banned?" (Yes, he said this; read The GNU Manifesto.)
Why is this consortium coming out with a "new" storage standard when so many good ones already exist? The answer can be found at http://www.ivdr.org/consortium/consortium_e.html, which the three working groups developing the standard. One is doing the hardware, and another is developing a spec for the file system -- neither of which is rocket science. But the third is focused on "security" -- in other words, DRM. This is the main purpose of the entire effort: To get the industry to standardize on a medium that's copy-protected from the get-go.
While the chip's Linux orientation is interesting, it is also a drawback. I wouldn't want to use any CPU that locks you into any one operating system -- including Linux.
I'd feel a lot better using this chip if it also supported, say, NetBSD and/or OpenBSD (both of which are portable enough to be moved to it rather easily).
Programmers are not beneficiaries of the FSF at all. They're the ones who are most hurt by it. The FSF's goal, stated in Stallman's GNU Manifesto, is to "ban" good-paying jobs for programmers. (Read the document; it says so explicitly.)
Remember Stallman's history. The GPL is an instrument of revenge -- against programmers who wish to make a good living by programming.
The FSF also spends more money on lawyers than on creating software. It is highly likely that any money which the FSF garners due to its "membership" program will be used not to improve the state of the art in software, but rather to sue those who do not conform to Stallman's peculiar worldview.
No, you cannot sell GPLed software. You can sell media containing a copy of the software, but you cannot license the software for money. The GPL specifically requires that it be licensed "at no charge."
For what does the FSF need more money? It gets programming for free (and then turns around and makes money via sales of media with the code on it as well as T-shirts), so clearly the money won't go to pay people to produce code. So, what will the money be used for? A big office staff? (Why would it need one?) Speaking junkets for RMS? A hefty salary for Brad Kuhn? Or a Gestapo-like army of lawyers to threaten commercial interests whom the FSF does not like and who have touched GPLed code?
An organization like the FSF shouldn't need much funding. Before one contributes to or "joins" any organization, one should ask what the money will be used for. It may not be something which you want to support.
The GPL does, indeed, make software very un-free. And this is absollutely intentional! Remember why the GPL came to be: Stallman, upset that his colleagues at the MIT AI Lab were leaving to form for-profit software companies as their research funds dried up, sought revenge against them for -- as he saw it -- destroying the intellectual "Nirvana" of the Lab. Stallman's desire to destroy his colleagues, and all of their kind, is very well documented in Steven Levy's book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. A riveting book, a must-read both for its historical perspective and for its well supported, unvarnished account (derived from interviews with Stallman himself) of the origins of the GPL and the FSF.
Levy explains why Stallman sought revenge against his colleagues, and how he began the agenda of which the GPL is a crucial part.
What Theo should be doing, instead of sending a 5xx response (which, by the way, won't keep the message in the spammer's queue; a 5xx is a final rejection) is to redirect spammers' connections to a Teergrube (a spam "tarpit"). If enough people do this, the spammer will be slowed down greatly.
Slashdot Mirror
...and therefore does not, apparently, understand the reasons why not having a BIOS is an awful idea. Can you say, "machines that are locked into using only one OS?" "Microsoft Palladium inextricably inside?" "Machines crashing on boot due to crufty C code in ROM?" "Viruses that can make the hardware utterly useless... even more so than the Chernobyl virus?" Sure you can. The idea of a BIOS isn't a bad one just because it was invented many years ago. It's a classic concept that just works. And it's one of the reasons the PC architecture has been so successful and long-lived.
It seems to me that this problem could be solved with better data compression on the floppy. Right now, they're using gzip, which is many, many years old. Perhaps if they moved to something modern (and non-GPLed, in keeping with the BSD philosophy) such as bzip, it'd fit.
Does the DMCA impose penalties for modifying the bit?
It's obviously more portable than Linux.
Now, if only we could get a similar license for GNOME....
But most of the work that I've done for the Free Software Foundation in the past ten years wasn't about litigation. It wasn't about conflict at all; it was about helping people cooperate....
Interesting. Gangsters use exactly the same term -- "cooperate" -- when they coerce victims to pay them protection money or otherwise do their bidding. And the FSF now has, or so it says, a "compliance" engineer, specifically charged with finding people to coerce to give away their work.
It appears to me, at least, that the fact that the FSF needs a lawyer like Moglen to rattle sabers at people smacks of the exact opposite of freedom. What do you think?
I'm doing quite a large number of constructive projects right now -- some of them with BSD. However, one of the things that has driven me away from hacking on BSD is the nasty, ego-driven politics -- including incidents such as this one.
As for the GPL: Fortunately, those of us who believe in the BSD philosophy understand why it's absolutely vital that BSD does not become assimilated by the Borg (AKA FSF). One of the most irresponsible and foolish actions of the FreeBSD Core Team -- and a good reason for its impeachment -- has been to allow GPLed code into the base system. The code should be removed at once, along with anyone who will not enforce a strict no-GPL policy.
--Brett Glass
What's sad, Greg, is that the FreeBSD Core Team -- of which you are perhaps the most elitist member -- is acting like a bunch of immature children acting as if they were a Grand High Cabal... and ejecting one of their peers from the clubhouse.
By acting like a secretive club and making decisions such as this one behind closed doors, you are damaging the reputations of FreeBSD and the BSDs in general.
Has there ever been a henhouse that Bush hasn't appointed a corporate fox to guard? I haven't seen one yet.
The danger of GPL contamination, plus the simple economics of the situation (the functionality of code that's available at no cost has a market value of zero), make dual licensing dangerous. Don't let the GPL vampire in the door. Remember what the GPL was designed to do: to "ban" (Stallman's own words) good-paying jobs for programmers.
This is why the vehemently anti-business fringe of the open source movement -- e.g. Bruce Perens -- actively advocates dual licensing. They're hoping that businesses will fall into the dual licensing trap.
Smart ones won't.
Unfortunately, that return policy only applies if you bought the product directly from Intuit. If you bought it from a store, and the store won't take it back, you're stuck.
So, I called Intuit's "Customer Service" line, at 800-446-8848. Unfortunately, recordings at this number simply refer all questions to the Web site, which likewise has no information on how to return the product under the "guarantee." This is a bit reminiscent of the problems experienced by those seeking promised refunds for Windows. So much for the guarantee written clearly on the box. Again, Intuit is starting to seem an awful lot like Microsoft.
It's going right back to the store.
Over the years, my TurboTax directories, complete with tax data, have followed me from machine to machine as I've upgraded my equipment. I've often needed to go back into my old returns -- either to look at the data or worksheets or to create forms for amended returns.
Apparently, Intuit now intends to deny me this capability. And I'm going to deny Intuit my business.
Incidentally, Intuit now also attempts to extract recurring fees from users of QuickBooks (whose tax functions likewise stop working after a year unless you pay more).
Clearly, this is why Intuit was almost acquired by Microsoft. The two companies are birds of a feather, equally rapacious and nasty to users. Goodbye, TurboTax!
--Brett Glass
Rosen, however, neglects to point out that this problem is just as likely (maybe more likely) to occur if you read GPLed code -- especially the FSF's stuff. He only mentions the risk in connection with Microsoft's "Shared Source." This is more than a sign of bias: it shows a lack of ethics. Rosen is warning about a minor risk while failing to inform readers of a much larger one. (You're a lot more likely to have GPLed source code on your hard disk than to have Microsoft "Shared Source" there.)
In this essay, where he condemns Microsoft's "Shared Source" initiative, he points out (correctly!) that if you so much as look at Microsoft source code, anything similar that you write later could be declared to be a derivative work. (He uses, as an example, the George Harrison "My Sweet Lord" case, in which Harrison was convicted of "unconscious" copyright infringement because he had once heard a song with a similar melody.)
However, in the essay cited in this Slashdot article, Rosen doesn't warn of this danger. What's more, he does not warn in either essay that it's just as much a danger when one looks at GPLed code as when one looks at Microsoft code.
This is an issue which both Rosen and the FSF have consistently ducked. If you look at GPLed source, and later write something similar, you could potentially be sued for infringement and required to release your work under the GPL -- forfeiting any payment you might have been able to get for licensing it. (The GPL requires that you license derivative works "at no cost.")
In short, in the essay mentioned in this Slashdot item, Rosen both omits vital information and fails to warn of a serious danger. Worse still, he shows inappropriate bias: he points out that danger in the case of Microsoft's "shared source," but not in the case of the GPL. This brings his objectivity and reliability as a source into question. His advice to software authors on the subject of copyrights and derivative works should be factual and based on concrete principles. It shouldn't be biased by who -- the FSF or Microsoft -- happens to own the software.
Please tell me: Why should I covet a membership card for an organization which was founded -- as stated by its founder, Richard Stallman, -- to ensure that good jobs for programmers such as myself are "banned?" (Yes, he said this; read The GNU Manifesto.)
Why is this consortium coming out with a "new" storage standard when so many good ones already exist? The answer can be found at http://www.ivdr.org/consortium/consortium_e.html, which the three working groups developing the standard. One is doing the hardware, and another is developing a spec for the file system -- neither of which is rocket science. But the third is focused on "security" -- in other words, DRM. This is the main purpose of the entire effort: To get the industry to standardize on a medium that's copy-protected from the get-go.
I'd feel a lot better using this chip if it also supported, say, NetBSD and/or OpenBSD (both of which are portable enough to be moved to it rather easily).
Remember Stallman's history. The GPL is an instrument of revenge -- against programmers who wish to make a good living by programming.
The FSF also spends more money on lawyers than on creating software. It is highly likely that any money which the FSF garners due to its "membership" program will be used not to improve the state of the art in software, but rather to sue those who do not conform to Stallman's peculiar worldview.
No, you cannot sell GPLed software. You can sell media containing a copy of the software, but you cannot license the software for money. The GPL specifically requires that it be licensed "at no charge."
An organization like the FSF shouldn't need much funding. Before one contributes to or "joins" any organization, one should ask what the money will be used for. It may not be something which you want to support.
Levy explains why Stallman sought revenge against his colleagues, and how he began the agenda of which the GPL is a crucial part.
What Theo should be doing, instead of sending a 5xx response (which, by the way, won't keep the message in the spammer's queue; a 5xx is a final rejection) is to redirect spammers' connections to a Teergrube (a spam "tarpit"). If enough people do this, the spammer will be slowed down greatly.