Are you kidding? This is not a format specification. And it reflects badly on Microsoft and the engineers that authored this document: either they are too stupid to know that this is not a specification, or they are taking everybody else to be fools.
The license is fine, gplv2 works and all that, but you can like a license more than another license. For instance, I like steaks more than hamburgers.
Well, yes, you "can" do that. What I'm saying is that it's not a rational or sensible way of picking software licenses. A rational and sensible way of picking software licenses requires more than "likes" and "dislikes".
Seriously, you're not making very much sense, and your arguments can be broken down very easily.
I'm not telling you what license to use. I'm saying that your attacks on, and hostility towards, the GPLv3 are unwarranted and unfounded, and put your project into a bad light; if you don't like the license, just don't use it. Furthermore, you told us that your project is stuck with a set of licenses that you don't like, and I'm pointing out that that's your own fault, nobody else's.
Well, thanks for giving us this insight into the inner workings of the Adium project; sounds to me like you're in trouble.
Maybe if you are more hostile, even more people will buy into your awesome mindset.
Frankly, I don't give a damn about convincing people like 1155; he misrepresented what the GPL and the FSF stands for, and I corrected him.
At the same time, he demonstrated that Adium's project leadership is apparently in deep trouble, since they don't seem to know what they are doing in terms of open source licenses and feel like they have to attack other open source efforts. All that tells me that Adium simply isn't worth supporting any more.
GPLv3 will almost certainly not be compatible with v2 since its whole purpose is to add new restrictions,
That doesn't follow. Just like you can link GPLv2 and BSD code, you may well be able to link GPLv3 and GPLv2 code, even if the GPLv2 code isn't under an "or later" clause. Whether that is actually possible depends on what specifically the GPLv3 says, but I'm not aware of any restrictions in it that would prohibit it.
So, you should be able to convert those source files in your project that you have control over to GPLv3 and leave all the "GPLv2 only" files alone. If important files of your project can be converted to GPLv3, then that effectively makes the whole project GPLv3, even if a few GPLv2 files remain.
A lot of people take the GPL to be the opposite of free, masquerading as free.
The GPL isn't "masquerading", it defines what free-as-in-freedom software means, and it is quite explicit about it. Nor, for that matter, is the FSF religiously insisting on the GPL; quite to the contrary: they advocate that you think carefully about what licenses you use beforehand. I suspect that the FSF would well have considered it more sensible to make parts of Adium (like the protocol implementations) LGPL.
A group of folks on the Adium team in fact like the BSD 3 clause more than the GPL.
Then you still don't know what you're doing in terms of licenses; you can't "like" a license more than another license, you have to decide first what you want to accomplish, then decide what licenses accomplish what you want, and then pick the license accordingly. You should also be honest and up-front about your agenda (and you do have an agenda): Do you want to support Apple with free labor? Do you want to help open source? Do you just not give a damn?
We were investigating it in case we wanted to switch to even the lgpl at a later date, or some other random license, but it's proven most difficult, and not worth continuing.
In different words, you didn't think about licenses, you screwed up big time when you picked your original license, and now you're blaming the GPL for your poor choices.
When the UK government films people committing crimes and distributes the videos freely over cable TV throughout the neighborhood, at great taxpayer expense, it's OK.
When the criminals film and incriminate themselves, at no cost to the tax payer, then it's a problem?
How about something moderate? Good tool/job match? Decent balance among power, performance, and ease of use?
Yes, and C is never the optimal choice on purely technical grounds; C is full of flaws and design errors that can be fixed without affecting its expressiveness or performance in any way.
The only reason to use C (and I do) is because lots of other people are using it.
yeah, cause modern ISAs aren't designed to be easy to compile C for or nothin'.
Modern architectures try to accomodate C as much as possible, but they have lots of important functionality that isn't available from C. Therefore, C can be compiled for them, but C isn't a "high level assembly language" for them.
Conversely, some of the areas where modern architectures have tried to accomodate the C language have arguably led to bad architectural decisions and have held back the industry both on runtime safety and performance. That's yet another reason to ditch C.
C is just a poorly designed high-level language, nothing more. It was obsolete the day it was conceived.
Isn't mars more interesting with its weather patterns and erosion that possibly could have been caused by water(!)? Even if mars never had water present on the surface, the scale and topography is closer to earth.
I don't understand why it would be "more" interesting; in fact, given the similarity of Mars to earth, and given how much data we already have on it, it seems to me that more bodies rather than more data from Mars would be more interesting. Geologically, in addition to Titan, Io and Europa would be next on my list to explore in great detail.
Actually reaction kinetics as a rule drop off exponentially with decreasing temperature, although if you can think of an advantage I will certainly listen.
Yes, and reactions that are way too fast under normal conditions will work well at those temperatures. Besides, who said that things have to work on the same time scale? In addition, low temperatures may make available mechanisms to organisms that simply don't even have an analog at high temperatures at all.
Methane is non-polar and will not dissolve the multitude of ions needed to keep even a single celled organism alive.
Well, obviously, any biology on Titan would have to work rather differently, but I don't really see an intrinsic problem here. In our mostly-polar world, cells have managed to create non-polar environments, and in a world based on non-polar solvents, you'd get polar pockets. Furthermore, bacteria have adapted to numerous environments on earth where liquid water is not available.
I think it may well turn out that environments like Titan are where life originated, and that it took quite some time for it to adapt to the comparatively hellish environment on earth.
We are unable to contact some contributors to get their ok on using GPLv3,
AFAIK, the GPLv3 is backwards compatible with GPLv2, so you can move part of the files to GPLv3 and leave the rest under GPLv2. As a result, effectively, the entire work would be under GPLv3, even though some source files are still under GPLv2.
and rather than disrespect their contributions by pushing the bottom line of v3, we're going to have to keep using v2
You don't have to do that; you're merely rationalizing your own agenda.
v3 is about pushing an agenda within a license from what I can tell, rather than sticking to what it is, a license. It's their license, fine, but pushing their own goals through
"Their goals" and "their agenda" is simply to keep the source code that's published under the GPL open, free, and available. The GPLv2 had some bugs in that regard (vis Novell/Microsoft deal, Tivo, etc.), and the GPLv3 attempts to fix those bugs as best it can. Their goals and their agenda has not changed one bit; if you don't like it with GPLv3, you shouldn't have picked GPLv2, with or without the "or later" clause.
By distancing yourself from those goals, one has to conclude that it isn't your goal to keep Adium source code open, free, and available. So, for example, it wouldn't apparently bother you if Apple or Microsoft or some Chinese manufacturer takes your source code and distributes the binary without distributing usable source along with it, or if Microsoft slips in a piece of patented code (through an intermediary) and then a couple of years later demands licensing fees from anybody other than Novell customers, because that's what the bugs in the GPLv2 amount to.
Why aren't you being honest then and switch from GPLv2 (which gives the appearance of preserving those freedoms but can't quite do it because of bugs) to the BSD license (which explicitly doesn't preserve those freedoms)?
I can understand that if we found liquid water elsewhere in the solar system it should make news, but who cares about liquid methane?
Well, quite apart from biology, it's certainly an interesting comparison in terms of surface features and geology.
I doubt it is possible to drive any biologically important reactions at the temperatures present on Titan.
I don't see why not; biology has managed to cope with nearly the entire temperature range over which water is liquid on this planet, so why shouldn't biochemical reactions adapt to very low temperatures? If anything, all things being equal, lower temperatures would seem to be an advantage.
Harming animals far below human capabilities is thought unethical
That's hardly a universally accepted view; in fact, most people seem to have no trouble doing things that cause horrendous suffering to large numbers of animals.
would you ever feel bad about kicking a robot dog?
"Feeling bad" and "being unethical" are two different things. I'm not sure whether kicking a robot dog is unethical, but I'd feel bad about it, and I wouldn't trust anybody who wouldn't.
But it is also a highly fragmented industry with few common standards or platforms.
So, his answer is going to be to create another proprietary, overpriced platform that's two decades behind the state of the art, like he did with desktop operating systems?
I just hope the industry will be smarter than to fall for such idiocy a second time.
One could say that the government gives a temporary monopoly to anything you have.
No, one could not say that: the Constitution recognizes ownership of physical property, it does not recognize ownership of ideas. The government cannot arbitrarily limit your ownership of physical property to a certain period, but it can limit the temporary monopoly it gives you on exploiting your ideas.
I know people who don't know anything about Star Wars and they are perfectly fine.:)
No, they are not. They are out of touch with a common element of our culture, and they are as deficient as people with a limited vocabulary.
That's real culture and works of similar caliber simply won't be DRM candidates in the first place.
That's absolutely not true: the Criterion collection DVDs are just as locked up as the Star Wars DVDs.
People should keep in mind that a large part of the development of drugs is already financed by tax dollars. Yes: your tax dollars go towards drugs that drug companies then get a monopoly on in order to sell. It wasn't always so; I believe the law on that changed in 1980.
As I recall, Krugman did the calculation and computed how much tax dollars subsidize the development of patented drugs and how much tax payers end up paying for purchasing the resulting proprietary drugs, and he came to the conclusion that we'd be far better off if we simply abolished drug patents altogether and just paid for the entire drug development out of public funds.
An additional problem with the current patent-incentivized drug development system is that it meets aggregate market needs, not actual health needs. Concretely, it is more profitable for drug companies to develop endless variations on cold medicines that don't contribute significantly to health, and to develop drugs for treating the symptoms of diseases without healing the underlying diseases, than it is to develop drugs that quickly and effectively treat serious disease.
I love free markets, but for health care, they simply aren't working in their current form. If we want a free market-based health care system, we need to structure the health care market very differently, and that also includes massive changes to, or abolition of, drug patents.
Patents are simply recognizing the inventor's right to say, "I'll show you how to do X if you promise to do Y."
Unlike physical property, the Constitution does not recognize the existence of intellectual property or any other intrinsic rights to ideas or inventions.
Therefore, patents create that right, they don't recognize it. And they create that right only temporarily, only for a very limited set of ideas, and only if the inventor actually lives up to specific requirements.
In contrast to physical property, the only generally recognized ethical obligation people have with respect to ideas is that they have to attribute them correctly.
Well, the GP specifically talked about $40 LED lightbulbs, and, as I was saying, those just aren't bright or full spectrum enough to be used for regular lighting yet.
ColorKinetics's claim to fame is that they mix RGB for lighting effects, plus a bunch of ways of communicating with LEDs. But since they are using the same LEDs as everybody else, their lights aren't going to compete any better with CFLs than any of the other LED based lights. To make LED based lighting happen, either our existing LEDs need to get a lot cheaper, or they need to get a lot more efficient.
Incidentally, ColorKinetics patents a lot, but most of their patents seem to be for trivial and obvious engineering designs; I think they're evil, and I hope you won't support these people by buying their products.
I have a bunch of LED lights, and they are not a replacement for CFLs or regular light bulbs quite yet: too dim and not really full spectrum.
Re:Good going, France!
on
UFOs In the News
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Oh what short memories we have. 9-11 comes, tanks the economy, raises unemployment rates, scares the shit out of the country, and today all people can remember is the number 3,000.
Well, looks like you never quite figured it out. See, 9-11 "tanked the economy" and "raised unemployment rate" because people had the shit scared out of them. Why did they? Because politicians like Bush wanted to spread fear to distract from their incompetence and institutionalized corruption.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you kidding? This is not a format specification. And it reflects badly on Microsoft and the engineers that authored this document: either they are too stupid to know that this is not a specification, or they are taking everybody else to be fools.
The license is fine, gplv2 works and all that, but you can like a license more than another license. For instance, I like steaks more than hamburgers.
Well, yes, you "can" do that. What I'm saying is that it's not a rational or sensible way of picking software licenses. A rational and sensible way of picking software licenses requires more than "likes" and "dislikes".
Seriously, you're not making very much sense, and your arguments can be broken down very easily.
I'm not telling you what license to use. I'm saying that your attacks on, and hostility towards, the GPLv3 are unwarranted and unfounded, and put your project into a bad light; if you don't like the license, just don't use it. Furthermore, you told us that your project is stuck with a set of licenses that you don't like, and I'm pointing out that that's your own fault, nobody else's.
Well, thanks for giving us this insight into the inner workings of the Adium project; sounds to me like you're in trouble.
Maybe if you are more hostile, even more people will buy into your awesome mindset.
Frankly, I don't give a damn about convincing people like 1155; he misrepresented what the GPL and the FSF stands for, and I corrected him.
At the same time, he demonstrated that Adium's project leadership is apparently in deep trouble, since they don't seem to know what they are doing in terms of open source licenses and feel like they have to attack other open source efforts. All that tells me that Adium simply isn't worth supporting any more.
GPLv3 will almost certainly not be compatible with v2 since its whole purpose is to add new restrictions,
That doesn't follow. Just like you can link GPLv2 and BSD code, you may well be able to link GPLv3 and GPLv2 code, even if the GPLv2 code isn't under an "or later" clause. Whether that is actually possible depends on what specifically the GPLv3 says, but I'm not aware of any restrictions in it that would prohibit it.
So, you should be able to convert those source files in your project that you have control over to GPLv3 and leave all the "GPLv2 only" files alone. If important files of your project can be converted to GPLv3, then that effectively makes the whole project GPLv3, even if a few GPLv2 files remain.
A lot of people take the GPL to be the opposite of free, masquerading as free.
The GPL isn't "masquerading", it defines what free-as-in-freedom software means, and it is quite explicit about it. Nor, for that matter, is the FSF religiously insisting on the GPL; quite to the contrary: they advocate that you think carefully about what licenses you use beforehand. I suspect that the FSF would well have considered it more sensible to make parts of Adium (like the protocol implementations) LGPL.
A group of folks on the Adium team in fact like the BSD 3 clause more than the GPL.
Then you still don't know what you're doing in terms of licenses; you can't "like" a license more than another license, you have to decide first what you want to accomplish, then decide what licenses accomplish what you want, and then pick the license accordingly. You should also be honest and up-front about your agenda (and you do have an agenda): Do you want to support Apple with free labor? Do you want to help open source? Do you just not give a damn?
We were investigating it in case we wanted to switch to even the lgpl at a later date, or some other random license, but it's proven most difficult, and not worth continuing.
In different words, you didn't think about licenses, you screwed up big time when you picked your original license, and now you're blaming the GPL for your poor choices.
The problem here is you, not the FSF.
When the UK government films people committing crimes and distributes the videos freely over cable TV throughout the neighborhood, at great taxpayer expense, it's OK.
When the criminals film and incriminate themselves, at no cost to the tax payer, then it's a problem?
This is typical, twisted 1984-style thinking.
How about something moderate? Good tool/job match? Decent balance among power, performance, and ease of use?
Yes, and C is never the optimal choice on purely technical grounds; C is full of flaws and design errors that can be fixed without affecting its expressiveness or performance in any way.
The only reason to use C (and I do) is because lots of other people are using it.
yeah, cause modern ISAs aren't designed to be easy to compile C for or nothin'.
Modern architectures try to accomodate C as much as possible, but they have lots of important functionality that isn't available from C. Therefore, C can be compiled for them, but C isn't a "high level assembly language" for them.
Conversely, some of the areas where modern architectures have tried to accomodate the C language have arguably led to bad architectural decisions and have held back the industry both on runtime safety and performance. That's yet another reason to ditch C.
C is just a poorly designed high-level language, nothing more. It was obsolete the day it was conceived.
Isn't mars more interesting with its weather patterns and erosion that possibly could have been caused by water(!)? Even if mars never had water present on the surface, the scale and topography is closer to earth.
I don't understand why it would be "more" interesting; in fact, given the similarity of Mars to earth, and given how much data we already have on it, it seems to me that more bodies rather than more data from Mars would be more interesting. Geologically, in addition to Titan, Io and Europa would be next on my list to explore in great detail.
Actually reaction kinetics as a rule drop off exponentially with decreasing temperature, although if you can think of an advantage I will certainly listen.
Yes, and reactions that are way too fast under normal conditions will work well at those temperatures. Besides, who said that things have to work on the same time scale? In addition, low temperatures may make available mechanisms to organisms that simply don't even have an analog at high temperatures at all.
Methane is non-polar and will not dissolve the multitude of ions needed to keep even a single celled organism alive.
Well, obviously, any biology on Titan would have to work rather differently, but I don't really see an intrinsic problem here. In our mostly-polar world, cells have managed to create non-polar environments, and in a world based on non-polar solvents, you'd get polar pockets. Furthermore, bacteria have adapted to numerous environments on earth where liquid water is not available.
I think it may well turn out that environments like Titan are where life originated, and that it took quite some time for it to adapt to the comparatively hellish environment on earth.
We are unable to contact some contributors to get their ok on using GPLv3,
AFAIK, the GPLv3 is backwards compatible with GPLv2, so you can move part of the files to GPLv3 and leave the rest under GPLv2. As a result, effectively, the entire work would be under GPLv3, even though some source files are still under GPLv2.
and rather than disrespect their contributions by pushing the bottom line of v3, we're going to have to keep using v2
You don't have to do that; you're merely rationalizing your own agenda.
v3 is about pushing an agenda within a license from what I can tell, rather than sticking to what it is, a license. It's their license, fine, but pushing their own goals through
"Their goals" and "their agenda" is simply to keep the source code that's published under the GPL open, free, and available. The GPLv2 had some bugs in that regard (vis Novell/Microsoft deal, Tivo, etc.), and the GPLv3 attempts to fix those bugs as best it can. Their goals and their agenda has not changed one bit; if you don't like it with GPLv3, you shouldn't have picked GPLv2, with or without the "or later" clause.
By distancing yourself from those goals, one has to conclude that it isn't your goal to keep Adium source code open, free, and available. So, for example, it wouldn't apparently bother you if Apple or Microsoft or some Chinese manufacturer takes your source code and distributes the binary without distributing usable source along with it, or if Microsoft slips in a piece of patented code (through an intermediary) and then a couple of years later demands licensing fees from anybody other than Novell customers, because that's what the bugs in the GPLv2 amount to.
Why aren't you being honest then and switch from GPLv2 (which gives the appearance of preserving those freedoms but can't quite do it because of bugs) to the BSD license (which explicitly doesn't preserve those freedoms)?
It was addressed back in the '90s. It's called client-side Java.
Not really; over the last decade, people have found numerous security holes, not only in Sun's implementation, but also in the underlying Java design.
Maybe if the start-up problems in the VM are addressed, client-side Java will return
I think J2SE is far too bloated for that. But J2ME/MIDP might make a good basis for reviving applets.
I can understand that if we found liquid water elsewhere in the solar system it should make news, but who cares about liquid methane?
Well, quite apart from biology, it's certainly an interesting comparison in terms of surface features and geology.
I doubt it is possible to drive any biologically important reactions at the temperatures present on Titan.
I don't see why not; biology has managed to cope with nearly the entire temperature range over which water is liquid on this planet, so why shouldn't biochemical reactions adapt to very low temperatures? If anything, all things being equal, lower temperatures would seem to be an advantage.
The number of large, successful projects coded in C thoroughly mocks [sic] your viewpoint.
Heck, yes, by your argument, let's go back to DOS, Fortran, and COBOL, then. I mean, who even needs this, new-fangled C and UNIX stuff?
There are still things that need a genericized assembly language, so there is still a need for C!
C was a high-level assembly language for the PDP-11; it is not a high-level assembly language for modern architectures.
Harming animals far below human capabilities is thought unethical
That's hardly a universally accepted view; in fact, most people seem to have no trouble doing things that cause horrendous suffering to large numbers of animals.
would you ever feel bad about kicking a robot dog?
"Feeling bad" and "being unethical" are two different things. I'm not sure whether kicking a robot dog is unethical, but I'd feel bad about it, and I wouldn't trust anybody who wouldn't.
But it is also a highly fragmented industry with few common standards or platforms.
So, his answer is going to be to create another proprietary, overpriced platform that's two decades behind the state of the art, like he did with desktop operating systems?
I just hope the industry will be smarter than to fall for such idiocy a second time.
but it really is time to stop it already. We shouldn't be programming in C anymore.
Exclusive right...sounds an awful lot like ownership.
Well, very superficially, you might think that, but it isn't ownership, it is, as it says, an "exclusive right" "for limited times".
Well, case law and contract law disagree with you. There are cases of companies "owning" the ideas of their employees.
They don't disagree with me at all. Companies do not own ideas any more than inventors do; what they own is patents and copyrights.
One could say that the government gives a temporary monopoly to anything you have.
:)
No, one could not say that: the Constitution recognizes ownership of physical property, it does not recognize ownership of ideas. The government cannot arbitrarily limit your ownership of physical property to a certain period, but it can limit the temporary monopoly it gives you on exploiting your ideas.
I know people who don't know anything about Star Wars and they are perfectly fine.
No, they are not. They are out of touch with a common element of our culture, and they are as deficient as people with a limited vocabulary.
That's real culture and works of similar caliber simply won't be DRM candidates in the first place.
That's absolutely not true: the Criterion collection DVDs are just as locked up as the Star Wars DVDs.
People should keep in mind that a large part of the development of drugs is already financed by tax dollars. Yes: your tax dollars go towards drugs that drug companies then get a monopoly on in order to sell. It wasn't always so; I believe the law on that changed in 1980.
As I recall, Krugman did the calculation and computed how much tax dollars subsidize the development of patented drugs and how much tax payers end up paying for purchasing the resulting proprietary drugs, and he came to the conclusion that we'd be far better off if we simply abolished drug patents altogether and just paid for the entire drug development out of public funds.
An additional problem with the current patent-incentivized drug development system is that it meets aggregate market needs, not actual health needs. Concretely, it is more profitable for drug companies to develop endless variations on cold medicines that don't contribute significantly to health, and to develop drugs for treating the symptoms of diseases without healing the underlying diseases, than it is to develop drugs that quickly and effectively treat serious disease.
I love free markets, but for health care, they simply aren't working in their current form. If we want a free market-based health care system, we need to structure the health care market very differently, and that also includes massive changes to, or abolition of, drug patents.
Patents are simply recognizing the inventor's right to say, "I'll show you how to do X if you promise to do Y."
Unlike physical property, the Constitution does not recognize the existence of intellectual property or any other intrinsic rights to ideas or inventions.
Therefore, patents create that right, they don't recognize it. And they create that right only temporarily, only for a very limited set of ideas, and only if the inventor actually lives up to specific requirements.
In contrast to physical property, the only generally recognized ethical obligation people have with respect to ideas is that they have to attribute them correctly.
Well, the GP specifically talked about $40 LED lightbulbs, and, as I was saying, those just aren't bright or full spectrum enough to be used for regular lighting yet.
ColorKinetics's claim to fame is that they mix RGB for lighting effects, plus a bunch of ways of communicating with LEDs. But since they are using the same LEDs as everybody else, their lights aren't going to compete any better with CFLs than any of the other LED based lights. To make LED based lighting happen, either our existing LEDs need to get a lot cheaper, or they need to get a lot more efficient.
Incidentally, ColorKinetics patents a lot, but most of their patents seem to be for trivial and obvious engineering designs; I think they're evil, and I hope you won't support these people by buying their products.
I have a bunch of LED lights, and they are not a replacement for CFLs or regular light bulbs quite yet: too dim and not really full spectrum.
Oh what short memories we have. 9-11 comes, tanks the economy, raises unemployment rates, scares the shit out of the country, and today all people can remember is the number 3,000.
Well, looks like you never quite figured it out. See, 9-11 "tanked the economy" and "raised unemployment rate" because people had the shit scared out of them. Why did they? Because politicians like Bush wanted to spread fear to distract from their incompetence and institutionalized corruption.
There are a bunch of efforts at linking sites and identities together using either HTML or RDF, including XFN and FOAF.