only the GPL gives them any rights to distribute the code
Not true. The code does seem to be derivative of SCO's. This gives them an ownership interest in the code, which of course allows them to distribute it in any way they please.
Just because the GPL claims that it's the only thing that gives you right to code does not mean that it's true.
Changing names is a sound idea, an idea based on the scientific principle that underlies the field of marketing, which is: People are stupid. Marketing experts know that if you call something by a different name, people will believe it's a different thing.
That's how "undertakers" became "funeral directors." That's how "trailers" became "manufactured housing." That's how "We're putting
you on hold for the next decade" became "Your call is important to us."
are you saying SUSE 9 Professional boxed set, which makes SUSE money and is built from mostly-GPLed code, is not a "commercial product"?
The plastic disc, which can be sold for money, is a commercial product. The software on that disc, which cannot be licensed for money and which SuSE does not in fact even own, is not. This is one of the FSF's most common deceptions: trying to get gullible users and programmers to confuse the container with the thing contained.
Apparently, the "BSD is dead" trolls also have moderator points. The above was moderated down to zero shortly after it was posted. Hmmm; I wonder if some of the operators of Slashdot are posting the trolls? Certainly, the posters always seem to be lying in wait, 24x7, for any opportunity. A crazy theory, but given their utter devotion to Linux I do wonder.
Y'know, I really do wonder why the "BSD is dead" trolls invest so much time and effort in polluting every Slashdot article that involves BSD. One would almost think they felt threatened by BSD, and were "protesteth-ing too much" a la Hamlet.
Could they be stockholders in companies that have cast their lot in with Linux? Rabid adherents of the FSF (or the FSF itself)? I'd honestly like to know what the agenda is here.
GPL and BSD software are equally free in terms of use.
GPLed code is not free, because it is not reusable in commercial products. This is the highest and best use of code, and because the GPL forbids it, GPLed code is anything but free.
It is well known that Cygnus (whose name was chosen because it has "GNU" in the middle) eats, lives, sleeps and breathes the GPL. Is this the real reason they forked the project? It's interesting: The GPL "faithful" claim that forking is a bad thing and that their license prevents it (a claim which has never been demonstrated to be true), yet they certainly seem to have no compunctions about forking a project to bring it under the GPL!
I did some of the lab work for the PC Magazine analysis which determined what Gator and other "utilities" did... and, yes, it's spyware. See the article for more.
On the other hand I'm firmly against certain programs using the BSD licence - such as apache and samba.
Apparently, you're not familiar with the licensing of these products. Apache's license is essentially the BSD license, which is good. Code to serve and manipulate HTML should be available to anyone on a completely free basis.
Samba, unfortunately, is GPLed. Which is a terrible shame, since it prevents Microsoft's competitors from incorporating code that would let their systems network easily with Windows systems. If they were able to incorporate code from Samba, they'd be able to make greater inroads into Microsoft's installed base.
Why is BSD more or less a failure when it is supposed offer this stuff up for commercial use?
Have you stopped beating your wife yet?
Your question presupposes that BSD is not being used in commercial software. That's wrong. There's BSD code in every modern operating system (in fact, not a single one of the Linux distros would run if the BSD code was removed from it). BSD code is also pervasive in the libraries of all the popular C compilers (yes, including GCC), and the BSD TCP/IP code is ubiquitous. So, BSD is, in fact, a smashing success. It's everywhere.
It's good that the BSDs are going back to their own utilities. There's a general consensus that a monoculture is bad; we must recognize that it is equally bad whether it's a Bill Gates monoculture or a Richard Stallman monoculture. (Ironically, Stallman actually stated that he wanted the "GNU" utilities to create a monoculture; see The GNU Manifesto, where Stallman says that he expected his "GNU" project to eliminate all competitive offerings.)
What's more, the use of the GNU utilities in the BSDs is contrary to the BSD philosophy and defeates the very purpose of BSD. Remember how BSD got started: its goal was to give -- to any and all comers -- technology that could be used for any purpose, including as part of a product that made money. Including the GNU utilities in the BSDs poisons the well, as it were. It has a doubly negative effect: it keeps the BSD implementation from being wholly commercially reusable (thus creating licensing hassles), and it provides no source of code that can be used in that way.
If the BSDs don't provide truly free, reusable-by-anyone code for those functions, who will? Not the FSF, and certainly not Microsoft. So, the BSDs would be abandoning their mission if they did not provide BSD-licensed utilities of a caliber at least equal to that of the GNU-ish ones.
Not only does he persist in calling Linux "GNU/Linux" (Stallman's attempt to hijack Linus' bandwagon) and use the term "Free Software" (with caps, indicating a bias), but he knocks FreeBSD for what is one of its greatest strengths: its truly free and ethical licensing. It'd be nice to see a review that lacks this strong bias.
Here in Wyoming, we have an old expression which says that a bull "services" a cow. Verisign is "servicing" the Internet community in the same way, by effectively grabbing every unused ".com" or ".net" domain name for its own profit.
It's worth noting that "ordinary" typosquatters have to pay 7 to 35 dollars a year per domain. Given all the possible names on which Verisign can squat, how much money is it looting from users of the Net? Perhaps it should be required to contribute that amount to a worth Internet-related cause.
FreeBSD 5.x is clearly documented as being still "alpha-quality" and is certainly not for newcomers. 4.8-RELEASE (preferably with patches, since 4.9 is almost done) or 4.9-RELEASE (due in a week) would have been the proper platform for this new user.
The US Supreme Court recently ruled that personal information is "an article of commerce," which means that it is property and can be stolen. It's also found a right to privacy in the Constitution. But there are few if any laws penalizing people for stealing it (mainly due to pressure from large corporations). You can probably sue the company that was paying people to solicit credit card applications for fraud, but it's unlikely that you can win by suing for theft of personal information.
As the person who broke the full story on the TurboTax DRM, I'm glad to see that the company has reconsidered. It's a good step, and they may well get many of their old customers back. Some, however -- especially the ones whose multiple boot or RAID systems were disabled by C-Dilla -- are probably lost for good.
Hopefully, the company will also reconsider some of its other policies. Yes, their software does attempt to foist an installation of Internet Exploder on users, even though many of them have wisely disabled or removed it to avoid security problems. This is inappropriate and should be stopped.
Also, the company should reconsider its policy of demanding high fees to "update the tax tables" in QuickBooks.
Clearly, the tax tables aren't the real issue here. Intuit wants to collect the equivalent of "rent" on its software, which is absurd. (The double entry bookkeeping system hasn't changed in a couple of hundred years now, so there simply shouldn't be a need to buy accounting software for a business more than once.) Let the company charge more if it must; it should, however, not attempt to cripple businesses' accounting systems if they refuse to pay yearly ransom. None of the several businesses I've started have ever used QuickBooks because of this misfeature, and none will ever do so until they stop.
Of course, my choice alone won't persuade the company to play fair. But if enough people go elsewhere, perhaps it will listen.
Drive manufacturers have always used Base 10 arithmetic to describe drive capacity.
They 've always counted up their bytes just like nature intended,using all 10 fingers
and sticking with standard arithmetic.They 've had every right to count their drive
capacity in this manner.
This is not correct. In the late 80's and early 90's, hard drive manufacturers used 1024 bytes as a kilobyte, 1024 squared as a megabyte, etc. (I still have some old Seagate and CDC drives on my shelf that were tallied in this way.) The change came during the cut-throat competition of the early 90's, when manufacturers decided to compete with one another with inflated claims, rather than larger capacities. Once one of them inflated the claimed capacity of a drive, the others had to follow. The result: By the end of the 90's, no honest hard drive manufacturer remained.
Maybe the best way to discourage telemarketers is to create a public registry of their telephone numbers, which the public can then call to voice their opinions about telemarketers in general. (The telemarketers could hardly complain about this; after all, it's "free speech" and political speech to boot.) A continuous campaign might have an effect.
Why do OSS zealots want to establish artificial barriers to entry into the market for commercial software?
Not all supporters of open source software want to destroy businesses, business opportunities, or jobs. But the loudest -- in particular, those who support the GPL, and Richard Stallman's agenda -- do. (Stallman explicitly stated, in The GNU Manifesto, that the purpose of the GNU Project and the GPL was to destroy programmers' prospects of getting highly paid jobs.)
In fact, the GPL does not meet the criteria of the Open Source Definition. The OSD prohibits licenses that discriminate against a group of people or a field of endeavor, and the GPL -- as Stallman explicitly says -- is, by intent and by design, set up to discriminate against both. ("The GPL is not Mr. Nice Guy," said Stallman in one of his early essays.) Anyone can use GPLed software in the way which benefits him or her the most, except the programmer who is seeking to create a product which he can license for money.
My personal opinion (YMMV, of course) is that we must recognize that the GPL is not, by definition, an "Open Source" license. The only reason why it has been declared to be so on the opensource.org site is for expediency and to satisfy the zealotry of some of the members of that group, not because it actually meets the definition.
Bzzt. Incorrect. Sun is no more a hardware vendor than Apple. Sun's product is its version of UNIX, which it wraps in specialized hardware so that it can control the platform. This is why Sun tried to drop support for i386-family processors last year: it recognized that this commoditized its product.
There are none so blind as those who will not see.
The design goal of the GPL -- as stated by Stallman himself -- is to destroy jobs.
He says so, explicitly, in The GNU Manifesto, where he states that all high-paying programming jobs should be "banned" (his own word), and that the FSF and the GPL are the means by which he intends to do it.
And it's succeeding, mainly due to the gullibility and the naivete of the programmers who are deceived by it and embrace it.
GPL apologists (which, judging from the message above, you are) often attempt to point to companies which seem to be doing OK while doing consulting related to, and customization of, GPLed software.
Unfortunately, what they intentionally ignore is the fact that this strategy is akin to attempting to defy the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Yes, it's possible to decrease entropy in a limited portion of the universe, but only by increasing the entropy of the universe as a whole even more. But such companies have, historically, survived for a limited time, during which time they destroy the market for their own work. They then shrivel up and blow away, as so many have in recent years, as Stallman chortles. Why? Because, fundamentally, to write GPLed software is to destroy markets. And destroying markets, in turn, destroys jobs. Always. It may take time for the effects to settle in, but they always do. Yes, the jobs may move to India before they're destroyed altogether, but ultimately, they will disappear. The programmers cited in the above message (if they really exist at all!) will, in a few years, likely be wishing that they had not GPLed themselves out of a job.
The message above mentions that the author found three (Count them! Three!) companies producing commercial compilers on Google. Well, guess what? There used to be dozens. There's now very little choice indeed, because GCC -- a mediocre compiler at best -- has destroyed the market for better ones. The mediocre has, demonstrably, driven out the good.
Worse still, the GPL hobbles innovation by destroying incentives for programmers to make incremental improvements to the technology. If you modify a GPLed program (that is, assuming that the GPL is valid, which is open to question), you cannot make a dime by selling your work. If you're very lucky, you might get paid for the time you spent to do it -- providing some corporation happened to need that improvement. But you'll only get paid once... as a wage slave. (You will be, as Steve Ballmer once famously put it, "On a treadmill.") And if your innovation is truly great you will never get a just reward for your contribution.
When Stallman first told (or should I say, harangued) me about the GPL and his "master plan" 20 years ago, I told him that programmers wouldn't fall for it. My bad. Too many are obviously too naive about the ways of the world, and too easily taken in by deceptive rhetoric. And they are, bit by bit, destroying their own futures. While I love to program, it's a good thing I don't rely upon it for my livelihood now.
If programmers are foolish enough to self-destruct, they won't take me with them.
Sun did a similar thing: it embraced Linux, even though doing so was to feed and support something which was cannibalizing its core business. It is now regretting that decision. Will Wind River? Alas, I suspect so. Wind River has nothing to gain by supporting Linux.
We did get a patent for Talkback, one of several that were in the works before we sold the technology.
What is the number of that patent? It does not appear that Microsoft cited it in its application, which is a cardinal sin. If it failed to disclose prior art of which it had knowledge (and it did have knowledge of it because you spoke with them), it is guilty of defrauding the Patent Office and the patent is invalid.
Slashdot Mirror
Not true. The code does seem to be derivative of SCO's. This gives them an ownership interest in the code, which of course allows them to distribute it in any way they please.
Just because the GPL claims that it's the only thing that gives you right to code does not mean that it's true.
That's how "undertakers" became "funeral directors." That's how "trailers" became "manufactured housing." That's how "We're putting you on hold for the next decade" became "Your call is important to us."
--Dave Barry
The plastic disc, which can be sold for money, is a commercial product. The software on that disc, which cannot be licensed for money and which SuSE does not in fact even own, is not. This is one of the FSF's most common deceptions: trying to get gullible users and programmers to confuse the container with the thing contained.
Apparently, the "BSD is dead" trolls also have moderator points. The above was moderated down to zero shortly after it was posted. Hmmm; I wonder if some of the operators of Slashdot are posting the trolls? Certainly, the posters always seem to be lying in wait, 24x7, for any opportunity. A crazy theory, but given their utter devotion to Linux I do wonder.
It seems to suggest that hackers go flying off spontaneously....
Could they be stockholders in companies that have cast their lot in with Linux? Rabid adherents of the FSF (or the FSF itself)? I'd honestly like to know what the agenda is here.
GPLed code is not free, because it is not reusable in commercial products. This is the highest and best use of code, and because the GPL forbids it, GPLed code is anything but free.
It is well known that Cygnus (whose name was chosen because it has "GNU" in the middle) eats, lives, sleeps and breathes the GPL. Is this the real reason they forked the project? It's interesting: The GPL "faithful" claim that forking is a bad thing and that their license prevents it (a claim which has never been demonstrated to be true), yet they certainly seem to have no compunctions about forking a project to bring it under the GPL!
I did some of the lab work for the PC Magazine analysis which determined what Gator and other "utilities" did... and, yes, it's spyware. See the article for more.
Apparently, you're not familiar with the licensing of these products. Apache's license is essentially the BSD license, which is good. Code to serve and manipulate HTML should be available to anyone on a completely free basis.
Samba, unfortunately, is GPLed. Which is a terrible shame, since it prevents Microsoft's competitors from incorporating code that would let their systems network easily with Windows systems. If they were able to incorporate code from Samba, they'd be able to make greater inroads into Microsoft's installed base.
Why is BSD more or less a failure when it is supposed offer this stuff up for commercial use?
Have you stopped beating your wife yet?
Your question presupposes that BSD is not being used in commercial software. That's wrong. There's BSD code in every modern operating system (in fact, not a single one of the Linux distros would run if the BSD code was removed from it). BSD code is also pervasive in the libraries of all the popular C compilers (yes, including GCC), and the BSD TCP/IP code is ubiquitous. So, BSD is, in fact, a smashing success. It's everywhere.
What's more, the use of the GNU utilities in the BSDs is contrary to the BSD philosophy and defeates the very purpose of BSD. Remember how BSD got started: its goal was to give -- to any and all comers -- technology that could be used for any purpose, including as part of a product that made money. Including the GNU utilities in the BSDs poisons the well, as it were. It has a doubly negative effect: it keeps the BSD implementation from being wholly commercially reusable (thus creating licensing hassles), and it provides no source of code that can be used in that way.
If the BSDs don't provide truly free, reusable-by-anyone code for those functions, who will? Not the FSF, and certainly not Microsoft. So, the BSDs would be abandoning their mission if they did not provide BSD-licensed utilities of a caliber at least equal to that of the GNU-ish ones.
Not only does he persist in calling Linux "GNU/Linux" (Stallman's attempt to hijack Linus' bandwagon) and use the term "Free Software" (with caps, indicating a bias), but he knocks FreeBSD for what is one of its greatest strengths: its truly free and ethical licensing. It'd be nice to see a review that lacks this strong bias.
It's worth noting that "ordinary" typosquatters have to pay 7 to 35 dollars a year per domain. Given all the possible names on which Verisign can squat, how much money is it looting from users of the Net? Perhaps it should be required to contribute that amount to a worth Internet-related cause.
...which, likewise, customizes its display for returning users.
FreeBSD 5.x is clearly documented as being still "alpha-quality" and is certainly not for newcomers. 4.8-RELEASE (preferably with patches, since 4.9 is almost done) or 4.9-RELEASE (due in a week) would have been the proper platform for this new user.
The US Supreme Court recently ruled that personal information is "an article of commerce," which means that it is property and can be stolen. It's also found a right to privacy in the Constitution. But there are few if any laws penalizing people for stealing it (mainly due to pressure from large corporations). You can probably sue the company that was paying people to solicit credit card applications for fraud, but it's unlikely that you can win by suing for theft of personal information.
Hopefully, the company will also reconsider some of its other policies. Yes, their software does attempt to foist an installation of Internet Exploder on users, even though many of them have wisely disabled or removed it to avoid security problems. This is inappropriate and should be stopped.
Also, the company should reconsider its policy of demanding high fees to "update the tax tables" in QuickBooks.
Clearly, the tax tables aren't the real issue here. Intuit wants to collect the equivalent of "rent" on its software, which is absurd. (The double entry bookkeeping system hasn't changed in a couple of hundred years now, so there simply shouldn't be a need to buy accounting software for a business more than once.) Let the company charge more if it must; it should, however, not attempt to cripple businesses' accounting systems if they refuse to pay yearly ransom. None of the several businesses I've started have ever used QuickBooks because of this misfeature, and none will ever do so until they stop.
Of course, my choice alone won't persuade the company to play fair. But if enough people go elsewhere, perhaps it will listen.
Drive manufacturers have always used Base 10 arithmetic to describe drive capacity. They 've always counted up their bytes just like nature intended,using all 10 fingers and sticking with standard arithmetic.They 've had every right to count their drive capacity in this manner.
This is not correct. In the late 80's and early 90's, hard drive manufacturers used 1024 bytes as a kilobyte, 1024 squared as a megabyte, etc. (I still have some old Seagate and CDC drives on my shelf that were tallied in this way.) The change came during the cut-throat competition of the early 90's, when manufacturers decided to compete with one another with inflated claims, rather than larger capacities. Once one of them inflated the claimed capacity of a drive, the others had to follow. The result: By the end of the 90's, no honest hard drive manufacturer remained.
Maybe the best way to discourage telemarketers is to create a public registry of their telephone numbers, which the public can then call to voice their opinions about telemarketers in general. (The telemarketers could hardly complain about this; after all, it's "free speech" and political speech to boot.) A continuous campaign might have an effect.
Not all supporters of open source software want to destroy businesses, business opportunities, or jobs. But the loudest -- in particular, those who support the GPL, and Richard Stallman's agenda -- do. (Stallman explicitly stated, in The GNU Manifesto, that the purpose of the GNU Project and the GPL was to destroy programmers' prospects of getting highly paid jobs.)
In fact, the GPL does not meet the criteria of the Open Source Definition. The OSD prohibits licenses that discriminate against a group of people or a field of endeavor, and the GPL -- as Stallman explicitly says -- is, by intent and by design, set up to discriminate against both. ("The GPL is not Mr. Nice Guy," said Stallman in one of his early essays.) Anyone can use GPLed software in the way which benefits him or her the most, except the programmer who is seeking to create a product which he can license for money.
My personal opinion (YMMV, of course) is that we must recognize that the GPL is not, by definition, an "Open Source" license. The only reason why it has been declared to be so on the opensource.org site is for expediency and to satisfy the zealotry of some of the members of that group, not because it actually meets the definition.
Bzzt. Incorrect. Sun is no more a hardware vendor than Apple. Sun's product is its version of UNIX, which it wraps in specialized hardware so that it can control the platform. This is why Sun tried to drop support for i386-family processors last year: it recognized that this commoditized its product.
The design goal of the GPL -- as stated by Stallman himself -- is to destroy jobs.
He says so, explicitly, in The GNU Manifesto, where he states that all high-paying programming jobs should be "banned" (his own word), and that the FSF and the GPL are the means by which he intends to do it.
And it's succeeding, mainly due to the gullibility and the naivete of the programmers who are deceived by it and embrace it.
GPL apologists (which, judging from the message above, you are) often attempt to point to companies which seem to be doing OK while doing consulting related to, and customization of, GPLed software.
Unfortunately, what they intentionally ignore is the fact that this strategy is akin to attempting to defy the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Yes, it's possible to decrease entropy in a limited portion of the universe, but only by increasing the entropy of the universe as a whole even more. But such companies have, historically, survived for a limited time, during which time they destroy the market for their own work. They then shrivel up and blow away, as so many have in recent years, as Stallman chortles. Why? Because, fundamentally, to write GPLed software is to destroy markets. And destroying markets, in turn, destroys jobs. Always. It may take time for the effects to settle in, but they always do. Yes, the jobs may move to India before they're destroyed altogether, but ultimately, they will disappear. The programmers cited in the above message (if they really exist at all!) will, in a few years, likely be wishing that they had not GPLed themselves out of a job.
The message above mentions that the author found three (Count them! Three!) companies producing commercial compilers on Google. Well, guess what? There used to be dozens. There's now very little choice indeed, because GCC -- a mediocre compiler at best -- has destroyed the market for better ones. The mediocre has, demonstrably, driven out the good.
Worse still, the GPL hobbles innovation by destroying incentives for programmers to make incremental improvements to the technology. If you modify a GPLed program (that is, assuming that the GPL is valid, which is open to question), you cannot make a dime by selling your work. If you're very lucky, you might get paid for the time you spent to do it -- providing some corporation happened to need that improvement. But you'll only get paid once... as a wage slave. (You will be, as Steve Ballmer once famously put it, "On a treadmill.") And if your innovation is truly great you will never get a just reward for your contribution.
When Stallman first told (or should I say, harangued) me about the GPL and his "master plan" 20 years ago, I told him that programmers wouldn't fall for it. My bad. Too many are obviously too naive about the ways of the world, and too easily taken in by deceptive rhetoric. And they are, bit by bit, destroying their own futures. While I love to program, it's a good thing I don't rely upon it for my livelihood now.
If programmers are foolish enough to self-destruct, they won't take me with them.
--Brett Glass
Sun did a similar thing: it embraced Linux, even though doing so was to feed and support something which was cannibalizing its core business. It is now regretting that decision. Will Wind River? Alas, I suspect so. Wind River has nothing to gain by supporting Linux.
What is the number of that patent? It does not appear that Microsoft cited it in its application, which is a cardinal sin. If it failed to disclose prior art of which it had knowledge (and it did have knowledge of it because you spoke with them), it is guilty of defrauding the Patent Office and the patent is invalid.