That is why Java has a "finally" catch block. Code in it is run when the try block is exited for any reason -- including an exception being thrown that is caught higher up in the stack.
It is a bit weird that some of those consequences came from the US government.
http://www.tjcenter.org/muzzles.html#schouse
"For using the official power of government to condemn a citizen's exercise of her First Amendment rights, a 2004 Jefferson Muzzle goes to the South Carolina House of Representatives."
In North Carolina you are not legally allowed to call youself an Engineer unless you are certified as a Professional Engineer. There is no certification for Software Engineer so no one in that state may legally call themselves a Software Engineer. Universities have Engineering schools (with departments like Mechanical Eng, Chemical Eng, Electical Eng, Computer Eng.) However, getting a degree in engineering does not make you a Professional Engineer and does not give you the right to refer to yourself as such.
No driver licence for one month? That's what they are doing in my country for serious issues...
I have always liked that idea. However, the USA has been developed in such an auto-centric manner that losing your ability to drive to work almost certainly means economic death for most people. In most places over here, the public transportation systems are very poor (if they even exist).
Some level of public service hours might work better.
Classic prisoner's dilemma has a dominant strategy. If you are only playing one game against one opponent, your best strategy always to defect (vs cooperate).
_____ opponent
_____ C D
you C 2 0
___ D 3 1
If you are playing multiple times against the same opponent, then the game is called Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. The analysis here is a little trickier since it depends on the strategy that your opponent is playing.
If your opponent always cooperates, you should always defect.
If your opponent always defects, you should always defect.
Pure strategies are not very interesting in this game.
There are a LOT of other strategies. Here are two common ones.
Unforgiving strategy: Cooperate until your opponent defects, and then always defect. If you know this is your opponent, then your best strategy is to always cooperate. This strategy has problems in noisy environments (where you might THINK your opponent defected, but he didn't really).
Tit for Tat: Do whatever your opponent did in the last round. Start with cooperate. If you know that this is what your opponent does, then you should always cooperate until the last round. There is no penalty to defect in the last round. However, if your opponent knows you know this, then they will defect in the last round too. So that means you should defect in the second to last round. Repeat until you are both defecting.
How does this relate to driving? In most large cities, driving interactions are anonymous. If someone defects, you don't get to 'punish' them by defecting the next time. The game is always a one-shot prisoner's dilemma and the best strategy is to always defect.
There are two ways to fix this:
Make the interactions so they are not anonymous, or so that defectors can be identified. The paint-balls on top of the fire truck are a good example of this. Another way would be to have some sort of p2p network where you could enter the offending vehicle and identify offending vehicles (not really practical given today's technology, but with good machine vision and smart HUDs then maybe)
Change the utility function of the game by adding punishments for defecting. The problem here is that it is usually done with fines. People have different utility curves for money (if you make 7 figures, a $100 fine probably isn't going to phase you much). It is difficult to set up a market mechanism that significantly lowers everyone's payoff for defecting against cooperation.
As the parent noted, as would anybody who actually took the time to read the patent abstract (which apparently does NOT the original poster), this patent is for using the web as a place to migrate settings and data from one computer to another.
Except that that has been done before too. It looks like the company, Virtual Access Networks, Inc., may have been bought by Symantec. They had a product that uploaded settings and files on your old PC to a website and then downloaded them onto your new PC. It won best of show in the Enterprise Product category at Comde 2000 (I think that is the correct year). The company web site, thevan.com, is now redirected to Symantec ghost.
SunnComm is taking a stand here because we believe that those who own property, whether physical or digital, have the ultimate authority over how their property is used.
Once again we have a misunderstanding about ownership. If I buy a CD, I own the media and the data on the disk. I do not own a license to make and distribute copies the disk. If I own the data, then SunnComm would seem to agree that I can do anything I want with it, however they are selling a product that limits what I can do with it.
Of course, SunnComm believes that the owner of the copyright on that information is the owner of the data on the disk I bought. I wonder if the record company would agree with that? After all, they own the masters for many of their artists' songs, even though the artists own the copyrights. I bet in that case the record companies believe that they own the data and not the artists (because that lets them charge nice fees for doing the work of making copies -- with authorization from the artists of course).
Poki does opponent modelling. It is my understanding that it takes a large number of hands for it to get an accurate model -- more hands than is generally useful. As of last summer, the creator was still able to beat it fairly easily.
I don't think you mean that. I own a copy of WindowsXP I can sell that copy for money. I can duplicate that copy for my own needs. I can't sell those copies for money. Conversely Microsoft can produce and can sell them for money. So in some sense they seem to have more ownership of the information than I do.
In some sense that seems true, but it doesn't really fit with what I consider ownership. If you buy a copy of WindowsXP, MS cannot demand that you return their property because it does not belong to them. That information is yours (or, if you prefer, that copy of the information is yours -- media and bits). They have no more right to demand its return than they do of the Microsoft joystick you might have purchased (even if the design of the joystick is patented).
What do you consider ownership to mean? If to own something you have to have the right to do anything you want with it, then you don't really own anything.
I think you are missing a crucial point here. The law in general prohibits making any copies. It specifically allows certain types of copying. That is any copy made not for one of the enumerated purposes is an illicit copy which is the derivation of the term "copyright" i.e. the right to make copies.
Copyright limits your right to use copyrighted information that you own (and in doing so promotes the creation of more information). It also defines exceptions to those limitations. Outside of those restrictions, you can do anything at all that you want with the copyrighted information.
Strangely, the courts decided that the process of copying software from a disk to the computer is a copyright violation and requires a limited license to copy from the copyright holder. This led to EULAs and the general idea that you don't own software. Apparently, that meme is also bleeding into other forms of IP.
So our disagreement is on the definition of ownership. I see the ownership of a copy of information to be the same as ownership of information. I don't believe that information has some Platonic form over which ownership can be defined.
If I have possession of some piece of information, I can do anything I want except the things that copyright law reserves for the copyright holder. The law does not enumerate what rights I have -- it simply restricts the rights I would normally have over my property.
If I own a piece of land and the law says that I can't build a commercial structure there, it doesn't change the fact that I still own it. Laws generally do not list the things that you can do with property. Instead they list things you cannot do. Anything else is fair game.
Laws surrounding possession of information seems to follow these same rules. This is why I say I own the information that I purchase.
That depends on what you think it means to own information.
Owning the copyright on a piece of information is not the same as owning a piece of information.
Certainly, if I buy media containing information, that doesn't give me owership of the copyright on that information.
I think it does give me ownership of the information.
Conversely, ownership of copyright does not necessarily imply ownership of the information. I have heard that many record companies maintain ownership of master recordings. The artists own the copyright on those masters, but they have to pay the record company for the service of making copies to sell.
The artists do not have possession of the masters and it is a stretch, for me, to say they own the information. The studio owns the information -- they just don't have the right to copy it freely.
You're thinking patent/ip law. Copyright covers works that you create, e.g., you write a book, people can't copy it and sell it. If you want to go so far to say that you have a temporary monopoly over a book that you wrote, I guess you could put it that way, not that it makes a whole lot of sense.
Copyright is part of IP law. Ownership of copyright and ownership of the information protected by copyright are two different things.
Just ask a musician who owns the copyright on their master recordings, but whose record company owns the only copies of the master recordings.
In our universe a meteorite caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. A parallel universe exists in which the meteorite missed Earth, and possibly several others in which the meteorite struck another planet or was not formed at all. In a parallel universe Hitler did not invade Russia and consequently won the Second World War. In yet another, Elvis is still alive.
Better yet, what about caller id. If they don't send you the signal are they hiding the origin. Does this mean that they are legally required to provide caller id information to everyone?
If you want to add wealth to the economy and insure that it circulates the most it makes the most sense to add it to the bottom. I don't think that is the solution either. The economy grows when capital is used to create more capital. If you give it to the poorest people, they will most likely use it to pay bills, buy food, and possibly purchase luxery items. Some might even save it. Very few will use it to invest in a new business. It would, however, make a substantial difference in their quality of life for a short time. I think the best to give place tax cuts, with a goal of encouraging economic growth, is to owners of small businesses. There is the chance that they will just pocket the money, but the fact that they took the risk to start a business makes it more likely that they will take the risk to make the money grow in their business and create new jobs in the process.
But in context of the present discussion this is neither here nor there. Agreed
It's like arguing that men should live without sin; a laudable goal, but not a very useful one Societal expectations can influence behavior. Acceptance of selfish behavior as the norm makes it easier to act selfishly. I think that it is more than marginally useful to hold our elected officials to a higher standard.
they designed a system whereby the very best thing a legislator can do for his constituents is to act completely selfishly I don't quite agree with this. I think they designed a system that limits the damage that selfish behavior can cause. I don't think they were all followers of Adam Smith (but then I don't really have any evidence to support that statement).
I still maintain that pushing for global solutions instead of local solutions is the very best thing a legislator can do ('global' in a 'not-local' sense -- I do not necessarily mean world solutions).
However, I concede global solutions can be difficult to see and agree on. I agree that competing agendas of local electorates generally results in progress, and is the best approach when a global optimization is not obvious.
Using a government position to further a personal agenda -- especially one that directly benefits the representative financially -- is a different matter. I find acting on that form of self-interest reprehensible.
our works. And that's pretty much all there is to say about it. Fair enough.
1. The purpose of government is not to govern efficiently. It's to govern well. These are not the same thing. I did not phrase that very well. Of course the purpose of government is not to govern efficiently (meaning governing with little work or waste), but to govern well resulting in a system that works efficiently (meaning little loss due to red tape, idleness, or civil unrest). I maintain that following personal self interest in a leadership position interferes with the ability govern well.
2. Leaders will pursue their own self interests. It is not possible for it to be otherwise. Again, I find that acceptance of that assertion frightening.
I agree that a system that assumes its leaders will act for the common good against their own interests would be doomed to fail. Such an assumption would elicit neither checks nor balances and would most likely result in a dictatorship.
However, that fact, and the fact that we do have checks and balances, is not an excuse to abuse a leadership position to pursue self-interest.
When you are in a leadership position, you have a certain responsibility to subsume your own welfare in favor of the welfare of those you are leading. While it might be difficult to create laws that force our leaders to do this, we should still hold our leaders to those standards and chastise them when they abuse their power.
While I feel strongly about this on a moral level in regards our public servants, I feel less strongly in respect to our business leaders. In a private company, you should be perfectly free to screw over your employees and customers if you feel it is in your best interest (note that this is in a private company -- not one that is publicly traded). However, I am pretty sure that this type of behavior does not promote the growth of a company.
I have known of at least two companies under 30 people where the owners drew very large salaries with respect to the size of the company. Neither of these companies continued to grow and one of them has shrunk quite a bit.
On the other hand, Bill Gates has drawn a much smaller salary than the CEO's of similarly sized companies. The money saved on his salary was probably used to hire more employees, or perhaps to motivate and retain existing employees, and Mr. Gates has benefited greatly from this sacrifice. One could argue that he did this out of self interest, but there was no way for him to know that taking a fraction of the 'appropriate' salary for running a company that size would pay off so well. I find it more likely that Mr. Gates understands the responsibilities of leadership and that meeting those responsibilities has improved the conditions of the system he governs.
Putting a bunch of people, each motivated only by his own self interest, in a big room with some checks and balances to keep things steady and letting them fight it out is the best form of government ever devised by mankind.
Twirlip,
I generally find your posts to be informative, insightful, and entertaining. While I do not agree with everything you write, I generally do not respond unless something really bothers me.
The statement above really bothers me. In a complex system, local utility optimization generally results in a sub-optimal global utility. I think our country probably qualifies as a complex system. If our leaders simply pursue their own self-interests, they will not be running our country as efficiently as they could be.
I think there is a common perception that problems are created in Congress when riders, motivated by self interest and contrary to the common good, are attached to bills (self interest including state interests). Certainly, many anti-war proponents believe President Bush is pursuing the war with Iraq out of personal self interest.
I find idea that many people in government believe following the self-interest of our leaders is the best way to run our country really scary.
I agree that our system of government is probably one of the best systems devised by mankind, but that is not an excuse to stop looking for ways to manage our country better.
My point was that simply using the Readline library does not 'infect' your code with the GPL. You must release a binary linked with the GPLed Readline library to be 'infected'. You can write your program using Readline but swap the libraries before release and remain GPL free.
My second point was that GPL is not the only license that can 'infect' your work with legal definitions. If you link with a commercial version for which you do not have a license and distribute it then you are violating copyright. In this way your binary is 'infected' with a restrictive license. Any license agreement for a library you use affects the licensing of your work. Some people consider this viral (although most licenses do not replicate themselves in whole so they are not completely viral).
My third point was that MS-Word has viral properties.
I agree with your statement that the GPL is viral. I disagree with your rejection of other licenses and MS-Word not having viral properties. I didn't see any arguments for those ideas -- just statements -- so I thought I would add some.
The concept of Readline cannot be GPLed, only a specific implementation. I am sure there are non-GPL implementations of Readline. A 30 second search on Google revealed this one. There are probably implementations that you can purchase as well.
You keep using ReadLine as an example. While I agree that the GPL is viral, I really don't like this strawman example.
Using ReadLine itself does not infect your program with the GPL.
Linking your program with a GPLed library that includes ReadLine does.
If a friend gives you a library you use link to it and that library happened to be covered under the GPL then, your program will also be GPL. Releasing the program without releasing the source code is a copyright violation.
However, if your friend's library was released under a more traditional license, then simply releasing your binary could result in a copyright violation.
There is some sense that any license can be considered viral in that it transfers legal properties to information that you create. If you fail to research how the use of a library affects your work legally then there is a possibility that you will break a copyright.
In general you pay money for the right to distribute your software with a library. Under the GPL, your source code is the payment. If keeping your source code private is worth more to you than the licensing fees for a commercial package then I think you have an obvious decision to make.
I will agree that GPL is more viral than many other licenses in that it affects your source code. In fact, I bet if you asked RMS about this, he would agree and say that it was designed that way. GPL fans don't even like things released under LGPL (which allows you to code in a library) since it doesn't force people to release their code and contribute to the common good.
Also, there is a sense in which MS-Word can be considered viral. MS-Word can convert competetor's files to the Word format (specifically Lotus and WordPerfect), but it does not convert them back. This encourages the use of MS-Word files. Once a document is moved to the MS-Word format, it is difficult to change it back.
The format for MS-Word is closed, and (I have heard, but have no first-hand knowledge) MS makes small changes to the format with each release that break 3rd party readers. The result is you are required to use MS's product to read a MS-Word file. MS is continuing this tradition as they move the format to XML.
Why is this viral? Suppose you are working in WordPerfect and send a file to a coworker. They open the file in MS-Word, edit it, and send it back in Word. To read their changes, you have to use MS-Word. You might be lucky if they are using a version of MS-Word that your editor can read, but MS does things to reduce this probability. The end result is if your coworkers use MS-Word, you can be forced to use MS-Word as well. You may not know they use MS-Word when you start working with them, but you can catch MS-Word from them in the same way you might catch a cold from them. I consider that viral and I think MS takes action to protect that viral nature.
I do not intend to make any judgements on 'viral' techniques in this post (and I don't think you have been either). However, I think the word 'viral' generally has negative connotation although I believe that it probably should not.
I know of a company that hired an H1B holder because they couldn't find anyone here to work at the low salary they wanted to pay. However, once they got the person on board they were forced to pay fair market value for the person's skills which ended up be more than many of the people at the company make.
The sad thing is they could easily be hiring Americans for that price instead of importing workers (an paying them more anyway), but the owner is too thrifty to raise wages.
Slashdot Mirror
That is why Java has a "finally" catch block. Code in it is run when the try block is exited for any reason -- including an exception being thrown that is caught higher up in the stack.
It is a bit weird that some of those consequences came from the US government.
http://www.tjcenter.org/muzzles.html#schouse
"For using the official power of government to condemn a citizen's exercise of her First Amendment rights, a 2004 Jefferson Muzzle goes to the South Carolina House of Representatives."
In North Carolina you are not legally allowed to call youself an Engineer unless you are certified as a Professional Engineer. There is no certification for Software Engineer so no one in that state may legally call themselves a Software Engineer. Universities have Engineering schools (with departments like Mechanical Eng, Chemical Eng, Electical Eng, Computer Eng.) However, getting a degree in engineering does not make you a Professional Engineer and does not give you the right to refer to yourself as such.
Neo didn't save the kid. He saved himself.
Some level of public service hours might work better.
_____ opponent
_____ C D
you C 2 0
___ D 3 1
If you are playing multiple times against the same opponent, then the game is called Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. The analysis here is a little trickier since it depends on the strategy that your opponent is playing.
If your opponent always cooperates, you should always defect.
If your opponent always defects, you should always defect.
Pure strategies are not very interesting in this game.
There are a LOT of other strategies. Here are two common ones.
Unforgiving strategy: Cooperate until your opponent defects, and then always defect. If you know this is your opponent, then your best strategy is to always cooperate. This strategy has problems in noisy environments (where you might THINK your opponent defected, but he didn't really).
Tit for Tat: Do whatever your opponent did in the last round. Start with cooperate. If you know that this is what your opponent does, then you should always cooperate until the last round. There is no penalty to defect in the last round. However, if your opponent knows you know this, then they will defect in the last round too. So that means you should defect in the second to last round. Repeat until you are both defecting.
How does this relate to driving? In most large cities, driving interactions are anonymous. If someone defects, you don't get to 'punish' them by defecting the next time. The game is always a one-shot prisoner's dilemma and the best strategy is to always defect.
There are two ways to fix this:
As the parent noted, as would anybody who actually took the time to read the patent abstract (which apparently does NOT the original poster), this patent is for using the web as a place to migrate settings and data from one computer to another.
Except that that has been done before too. It looks like the company, Virtual Access Networks, Inc., may have been bought by Symantec. They had a product that uploaded settings and files on your old PC to a website and then downloaded them onto your new PC. It won best of show in the Enterprise Product category at Comde 2000 (I think that is the correct year). The company web site, thevan.com, is now redirected to Symantec ghost.
Once again we have a misunderstanding about ownership. If I buy a CD, I own the media and the data on the disk. I do not own a license to make and distribute copies the disk. If I own the data, then SunnComm would seem to agree that I can do anything I want with it, however they are selling a product that limits what I can do with it.
Of course, SunnComm believes that the owner of the copyright on that information is the owner of the data on the disk I bought. I wonder if the record company would agree with that? After all, they own the masters for many of their artists' songs, even though the artists own the copyrights. I bet in that case the record companies believe that they own the data and not the artists (because that lets them charge nice fees for doing the work of making copies -- with authorization from the artists of course).
Poki does opponent modelling. It is my understanding that it takes a large number of hands for it to get an accurate model -- more hands than is generally useful. As of last summer, the creator was still able to beat it fairly easily.
I don't think you mean that. I own a copy of WindowsXP I can sell that copy for money. I can duplicate that copy for my own needs. I can't sell those copies for money. Conversely Microsoft can produce and can sell them for money. So in some sense they seem to have more ownership of the information than I do.
In some sense that seems true, but it doesn't really fit with what I consider ownership. If you buy a copy of WindowsXP, MS cannot demand that you return their property because it does not belong to them. That information is yours (or, if you prefer, that copy of the information is yours -- media and bits). They have no more right to demand its return than they do of the Microsoft joystick you might have purchased (even if the design of the joystick is patented).
What do you consider ownership to mean? If to own something you have to have the right to do anything you want with it, then you don't really own anything.
I think you are missing a crucial point here. The law in general prohibits making any copies. It specifically allows certain types of copying. That is any copy made not for one of the enumerated purposes is an illicit copy which is the derivation of the term "copyright" i.e. the right to make copies.
Copyright limits your right to use copyrighted information that you own (and in doing so promotes the creation of more information). It also defines exceptions to those limitations. Outside of those restrictions, you can do anything at all that you want with the copyrighted information.
Strangely, the courts decided that the process of copying software from a disk to the computer is a copyright violation and requires a limited license to copy from the copyright holder. This led to EULAs and the general idea that you don't own software. Apparently, that meme is also bleeding into other forms of IP.
So our disagreement is on the definition of ownership. I see the ownership of a copy of information to be the same as ownership of information. I don't believe that information has some Platonic form over which ownership can be defined.
If I have possession of some piece of information, I can do anything I want except the things that copyright law reserves for the copyright holder. The law does not enumerate what rights I have -- it simply restricts the rights I would normally have over my property.
If I own a piece of land and the law says that I can't build a commercial structure there, it doesn't change the fact that I still own it. Laws generally do not list the things that you can do with property. Instead they list things you cannot do. Anything else is fair game.
Laws surrounding possession of information seems to follow these same rules. This is why I say I own the information that I purchase.
That depends on what you think it means to own information.
Owning the copyright on a piece of information is not the same as owning a piece of information.
Certainly, if I buy media containing information, that doesn't give me owership of the copyright on that information.
I think it does give me ownership of the information.
Conversely, ownership of copyright does not necessarily imply ownership of the information. I have heard that many record companies maintain ownership of master recordings. The artists own the copyright on those masters, but they have to pay the record company for the service of making copies to sell.
The artists do not have possession of the masters and it is a stretch, for me, to say they own the information. The studio owns the information -- they just don't have the right to copy it freely.
You're thinking patent/ip law. Copyright covers works that you create, e.g., you write a book, people can't copy it and sell it. If you want to go so far to say that you have a temporary monopoly over a book that you wrote, I guess you could put it that way, not that it makes a whole lot of sense.
Copyright is part of IP law. Ownership of copyright and ownership of the information protected by copyright are two different things.
Just ask a musician who owns the copyright on their master recordings, but whose record company owns the only copies of the master recordings.
My definition:
Art is an expression of the way someone views the world.
When you look at art, you are getting a glimse into how another person perceives the world.
Note that most famous artists have been "out there". They view the world very differently than most people and the rest of us find that interesting.
In our universe a meteorite caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. A parallel universe exists in which the meteorite missed Earth, and possibly several others in which the meteorite struck another planet or was not formed at all. In a parallel universe Hitler did not invade Russia and consequently won the Second World War. In yet another, Elvis is still alive.
Weren't those all episodes of "Sliders"?
Better yet, what about caller id. If they don't send you the signal are they hiding the origin. Does this mean that they are legally required to provide caller id information to everyone?
If you want to add wealth to the economy and insure that it circulates the most it makes the most sense to add it to the bottom.
I don't think that is the solution either. The economy grows when capital is used to create more capital. If you give it to the poorest people, they will most likely use it to pay bills, buy food, and possibly purchase luxery items. Some might even save it. Very few will use it to invest in a new business. It would, however, make a substantial difference in their quality of life for a short time.
I think the best to give place tax cuts, with a goal of encouraging economic growth, is to owners of small businesses. There is the chance that they will just pocket the money, but the fact that they took the risk to start a business makes it more likely that they will take the risk to make the money grow in their business and create new jobs in the process.
But in context of the present discussion this is neither here nor there.
Agreed
It's like arguing that men should live without sin; a laudable goal, but not a very useful one
Societal expectations can influence behavior. Acceptance of selfish behavior as the norm makes it easier to act selfishly. I think that it is more than marginally useful to hold our elected officials to a higher standard.
they designed a system whereby the very best thing a legislator can do for his constituents is to act completely selfishly
I don't quite agree with this. I think they designed a system that limits the damage that selfish behavior can cause. I don't think they were all followers of Adam Smith (but then I don't really have any evidence to support that statement).
I still maintain that pushing for global solutions instead of local solutions is the very best thing a legislator can do ('global' in a 'not-local' sense -- I do not necessarily mean world solutions).
However, I concede global solutions can be difficult to see and agree on. I agree that competing agendas of local electorates generally results in progress, and is the best approach when a global optimization is not obvious.
Using a government position to further a personal agenda -- especially one that directly benefits the representative financially -- is a different matter. I find acting on that form of self-interest reprehensible.
our works. And that's pretty much all there is to say about it.
Fair enough.
1. The purpose of government is not to govern efficiently. It's to govern well. These are not the same thing.
I did not phrase that very well. Of course the purpose of government is not to govern efficiently (meaning governing with little work or waste), but to govern well resulting in a system that works efficiently (meaning little loss due to red tape, idleness, or civil unrest). I maintain that following personal self interest in a leadership position interferes with the ability govern well.
2. Leaders will pursue their own self interests. It is not possible for it to be otherwise.
Again, I find that acceptance of that assertion frightening.
I agree that a system that assumes its leaders will act for the common good against their own interests would be doomed to fail. Such an assumption would elicit neither checks nor balances and would most likely result in a dictatorship.
However, that fact, and the fact that we do have checks and balances, is not an excuse to abuse a leadership position to pursue self-interest.
When you are in a leadership position, you have a certain responsibility to subsume your own welfare in favor of the welfare of those you are leading. While it might be difficult to create laws that force our leaders to do this, we should still hold our leaders to those standards and chastise them when they abuse their power.
While I feel strongly about this on a moral level in regards our public servants, I feel less strongly in respect to our business leaders. In a private company, you should be perfectly free to screw over your employees and customers if you feel it is in your best interest (note that this is in a private company -- not one that is publicly traded). However, I am pretty sure that this type of behavior does not promote the growth of a company.
I have known of at least two companies under 30 people where the owners drew very large salaries with respect to the size of the company. Neither of these companies continued to grow and one of them has shrunk quite a bit.
On the other hand, Bill Gates has drawn a much smaller salary than the CEO's of similarly sized companies. The money saved on his salary was probably used to hire more employees, or perhaps to motivate and retain existing employees, and Mr. Gates has benefited greatly from this sacrifice. One could argue that he did this out of self interest, but there was no way for him to know that taking a fraction of the 'appropriate' salary for running a company that size would pay off so well. I find it more likely that Mr. Gates understands the responsibilities of leadership and that meeting those responsibilities has improved the conditions of the system he governs.
Putting a bunch of people, each motivated only by his own self interest, in a big room with some checks and balances to keep things steady and letting them fight it out is the best form of government ever devised by mankind.
Twirlip,
I generally find your posts to be informative, insightful, and entertaining. While I do not agree with everything you write, I generally do not respond unless something really bothers me.
The statement above really bothers me. In a complex system, local utility optimization generally results in a sub-optimal global utility. I think our country probably qualifies as a complex system. If our leaders simply pursue their own self-interests, they will not be running our country as efficiently as they could be.
I think there is a common perception that problems are created in Congress when riders, motivated by self interest and contrary to the common good, are attached to bills (self interest including state interests). Certainly, many anti-war proponents believe President Bush is pursuing the war with Iraq out of personal self interest.
I find idea that many people in government believe following the self-interest of our leaders is the best way to run our country really scary.
I agree that our system of government is probably one of the best systems devised by mankind, but that is not an excuse to stop looking for ways to manage our country better.
My point was that simply using the Readline library does not 'infect' your code with the GPL. You must release a binary linked with the GPLed Readline library to be 'infected'. You can write your program using Readline but swap the libraries before release and remain GPL free.
My second point was that GPL is not the only license that can 'infect' your work with legal definitions. If you link with a commercial version for which you do not have a license and distribute it then you are violating copyright. In this way your binary is 'infected' with a restrictive license. Any license agreement for a library you use affects the licensing of your work. Some people consider this viral (although most licenses do not replicate themselves in whole so they are not completely viral).
My third point was that MS-Word has viral properties.
I agree with your statement that the GPL is viral. I disagree with your rejection of other licenses and MS-Word not having viral properties. I didn't see any arguments for those ideas -- just statements -- so I thought I would add some.
The concept of Readline cannot be GPLed, only a specific implementation. I am sure there are non-GPL implementations of Readline. A 30 second search on Google revealed this one. There are probably implementations that you can purchase as well.
You keep using ReadLine as an example. While I agree that the GPL is viral, I really don't like this strawman example.
Using ReadLine itself does not infect your program with the GPL.
Linking your program with a GPLed library that includes ReadLine does.
If a friend gives you a library you use link to it and that library happened to be covered under the GPL then, your program will also be GPL. Releasing the program without releasing the source code is a copyright violation.
However, if your friend's library was released under a more traditional license, then simply releasing your binary could result in a copyright violation.
There is some sense that any license can be considered viral in that it transfers legal properties to information that you create. If you fail to research how the use of a library affects your work legally then there is a possibility that you will break a copyright.
In general you pay money for the right to distribute your software with a library. Under the GPL, your source code is the payment. If keeping your source code private is worth more to you than the licensing fees for a commercial package then I think you have an obvious decision to make.
I will agree that GPL is more viral than many other licenses in that it affects your source code. In fact, I bet if you asked RMS about this, he would agree and say that it was designed that way. GPL fans don't even like things released under LGPL (which allows you to code in a library) since it doesn't force people to release their code and contribute to the common good.
Also, there is a sense in which MS-Word can be considered viral. MS-Word can convert competetor's files to the Word format (specifically Lotus and WordPerfect), but it does not convert them back. This encourages the use of MS-Word files. Once a document is moved to the MS-Word format, it is difficult to change it back.
The format for MS-Word is closed, and (I have heard, but have no first-hand knowledge) MS makes small changes to the format with each release that break 3rd party readers. The result is you are required to use MS's product to read a MS-Word file. MS is continuing this tradition as they move the format to XML.
Why is this viral? Suppose you are working in WordPerfect and send a file to a coworker. They open the file in MS-Word, edit it, and send it back in Word. To read their changes, you have to use MS-Word. You might be lucky if they are using a version of MS-Word that your editor can read, but MS does things to reduce this probability. The end result is if your coworkers use MS-Word, you can be forced to use MS-Word as well. You may not know they use MS-Word when you start working with them, but you can catch MS-Word from them in the same way you might catch a cold from them. I consider that viral and I think MS takes action to protect that viral nature.
I do not intend to make any judgements on 'viral' techniques in this post (and I don't think you have been either). However, I think the word 'viral' generally has negative connotation although I believe that it probably should not.
I know of a company that hired an H1B holder because they couldn't find anyone here to work at the low salary they wanted to pay. However, once they got the person on board they were forced to pay fair market value for the person's skills which ended up be more than many of the people at the company make.
The sad thing is they could easily be hiring Americans for that price instead of importing workers (an paying them more anyway), but the owner is too thrifty to raise wages.
Meaning "If you aren't going to force users to pay for our patents then we will".