So, anyone have any opinions on choosing freer-than-GPL software whenever possible?Roll your own.
So, anyone have any opinions on choosing freer-than-GPL software whenever possible?
I do what I want cuz a pirate is free, yarr! |
seems more and more folks are carrying around Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux... |
That's always bothered me about the GPL, too -- how is it "free" software if I'm not free to do whatever I want with it? |
Can a noncommercial website use the trademark of the entity it critiques in its domain name (http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/04/wikipedia-threatens-)? Surprisingly, it appears that the usually open-minded folks at Wikipedia (http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1192818/Wikipedia) think not.
The EFF (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Frontier_Foundation) reports that Scott Kildall (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Kildall) and Nathaniel Stern (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathaniel_Stern) have created a noncommercial website at WikipediaArt.org (http://wikipediaart.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page) intended to comment on the nature of art and Wikipedia. Since "Wikipedia" is a trademark owned by the Wikimedia Foundation (http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Home), the Foundation has demanded that the artists give up the domain name peaceably or it will attempt to take it by legal force.
"Wikipedia should know better. There is no trademark (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark) or cybersquatting (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybersquatting) issue here," writes the EFF's Corynne McSherry (http://www.eff.org/about/staff/corynne-mcsherry). "Moreover, even if US trademark laws somehow reached this noncommercial activity, the artists' use of the mark is an obvious fair use." It is hard to see what Wikipedia gains by litigating this matter but easy to see how they lose. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect)
From Slashdot -- Wikipedia Threatens Artists For Fair Use (http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/24/1239232) --QuoteCan a noncommercial website use the trademark of the entity it critiques in its domain name (http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/04/wikipedia-threatens-)? Surprisingly, it appears that the usually open-minded folks at Wikipedia (http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1192818/Wikipedia) think not.
The EFF (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Frontier_Foundation) reports that Scott Kildall (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Kildall) and Nathaniel Stern (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathaniel_Stern) have created a noncommercial website at WikipediaArt.org (http://wikipediaart.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page) intended to comment on the nature of art and Wikipedia. Since "Wikipedia" is a trademark owned by the Wikimedia Foundation (http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Home), the Foundation has demanded that the artists give up the domain name peaceably or it will attempt to take it by legal force.
"Wikipedia should know better. There is no trademark (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark) or cybersquatting (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybersquatting) issue here," writes the EFF's Corynne McSherry (http://www.eff.org/about/staff/corynne-mcsherry). "Moreover, even if US trademark laws somehow reached this noncommercial activity, the artists' use of the mark is an obvious fair use." It is hard to see what Wikipedia gains by litigating this matter but easy to see how they lose. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect)
This is particularly depressing. Notice how I haven't stopped linking to Wikipedia, even though they've banned me for calling Global Warming a hoax, and now this. I wanted, as a gag, to hyperlink everything I usually hyperlink to Wikipedia to other online encyclopedias, but they seem to be missing very basic articles, and are otherwise harder to work with... So then, is Wikipedia becoming a "natural monopoly" that cannot be forked, and is my addiction to it partially to blame? Switching away from an OS, an app, or a search engine is easy. Switching away from a service site like MySpace or YouTube is harder, but it still can be done. But Wikipedia, on the other hand... We're trapped! The horror... The horror... :|
While the GPL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License) powers as much as 77% of all SourceForge (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SourceForge) projects, Eric Raymond (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond) argues that the GPL is "a confession of fear and weakness" that "slows down open-source adoption (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=928)" because of the fear and uncertainty the GPL provokes. Raymond's argument seems to be that if openness is the winning strategy (http://opensolutionsalliance.org/osa/osaalert(apr09)-tiemann.html?x_lf_kt=2&_x_lf_kvid=b63e6e94-dd3f-4d5f-905b-9ea79a559ad8), an argument Michael Tiemann (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Tiemann) advocates, wouldn't it make sense to use the most open license?
Geir Magnusson (http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/geir/) of the Apache Software Foundation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Software_Foundation) suggests that there are few "pure" GPL-only open-source projects (http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/geir/archives/001690_not_just_the_gpl_or_no_one_would_use_it.html), as GPL-prone developers have to "modify it in some way to get around the enforcement of Freedom(SM) in GPL so people can use the project". But the real benefit of Apache-style licensing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_License) may not be for developers at all, and rather accrue to businesses hoping to drive adoption of their products: Apache licensing may encourage broader, deeper adoption than the GPL (http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10229817-16.html).
The old GPL vs. BSD (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses) / Apache debate may not be about developer preferences so much as new business realities.
So, anyone have any opinions on choosing freer-than-GPL software whenever possible?
I do what I want cuz a pirate is free, yarr!
Software licensing depends on coersive force. They all suck. |
Software licensing depends on coersive force. They all suck.
As I refuse to comply with unethical laws, I merely ignore all license and do what I want anyway.
I didn't know that... What an asshole... :xOpenBSD and NetBSD people are trying to make PCC a viable alternative (they don't like how GCC keeps dropping support for architectures they need it to support), OpenSolaris already uses Sun's compiler instead (though I don't think it's open source), and FreeBSD is trying to get itself to compile completely with Clang/LLVM ("almost works" except any C++). I even heard talk that Linux is trying to get itself independent from GCC, though not as hard as other free OSes are.
Unfortunately the FOSS world is stuck with some copyleft components that are still pretty much impossible to replace, like gcc (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Compiler_Collection) for example, and pretty much anything desktop-related. I just tried the latest snapshots of E17 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightenment_%28window_manager%29#E17) again - still sucks. :cry:
Yeah, I'm watching the Clang (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clang) / LLVM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Level_Virtual_Machine) projects and the attempts to integrate them into BSD with great anticipation, but it will probably take a couple of years before all ports (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ports_collection) can be reliably compiled and the GNU compiler / toolchain can be abandoned completely.
By the way, it's starting to look like Python will be the major scripting language of a GNU-free UNIX OS. Once again, the corporate hero there is Google with its unladen-swallow (http://code.google.com/p/unladen-swallow/) project (which also uses LLVM). Python is also the easiest way to script libtorrent (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libtorrent_%28Rasterbar%29) / python-ogg, because all major front-ends for those BSD libraries are either copyleft themselves or have copyleft dependencies.
I'm a big fan of Ousterhout's dichotomy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ousterhout%27s_dichotomy) - a language should either be system-oriented or scripting oriented. Unfortunately there's also a dichotomy between generations: the current (C for systems, Python for scripting) and Google's vision for the future (Go for systems, Web client / server-side JavaScript for scripting) - so that's 4 languages to be concerned with. Everything else (Java, Obj-C / C++, perl, ruby, PHP, lua, tcl, bash scripts, etc) should be phased out, the sooner the better. The older generation will be around for a long time, until JavaScript gradually gets more libraries than Python / PHP, and all systems software (including the kernels) are rewritten in Go. Then - singularity! :lol:
I wouldn't be disappointed with C and Python ruling the world together. :P |
If it's run on a "cloud", it ain't free. |
Palm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm,_Inc.) is being sued by Artifex Software over the PDF viewer (http://www.techworld.com.au/article/328719/lawsuit_alleges_palm_pre_violates_copyright) in Palm's Pre (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_Pre) smartphone, which may violate the GNU GPL. Artifex (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostscript#History) alleges that Palm has copied Artifex's PDF rendering engine, called muPDF, and integrated it into the Palm Pre's PDF viewer application without the proper licensing conditions. The entire application must be licensed under the GPL if muPDF is part of the application. [...]
The Software Freedom Law Center (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Freedom_Law_Center) has filed a lawsuit accusing fourteen companies, including Best Buy, Samsung and Westinghouse, of violating the GPL in nearly 20 separate products (http://www.softwarefreedom.org/news/2009/dec/14/busybox-gpl-lawsuit/). This is similar to earlier BusyBox GPL suits (http://yro.slashdot.org/story/08/03/17/1854252/Settlement-Reached-in-Verizon-GPL-Violation-Suit). The commercial uses of BusyBox must be much more prolific than anyone could have imagined. Having dealt with hundreds of compliance problems and finding an average of one violation per day (http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/11/10/1540242/SFLC-Finds-One-New-GPL-Violation-Per-Day), the SFLC recommends one thing: be responsive to their requests (they try to settle things in private first) lest you find one of these (http://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2009/busybox-complaint-2009-12-14.pdf) (PDF) in your inbox.
"I'm the creator of the Busybox program. I have released a statement on the past and current Busybox lawsuits (http://perens.com/blog/2009/12/15/23/), which do not represent my interest."
I didn't come (http://ubuntuforums.org/member.php?u=965147) to UbuntuForums.org (http://ubuntuforums.org/) to be a troll, but my outspokenness on Global Warming (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1353254&page=5) and especially on restrictive vs permissive "free" software licensing issues (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1355497) [2] (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1354778) will probably get me "in trouble" once again. [...]
There are many software components for which permissively-licensed equivalents simply don't exist... :cry:Roll your own.
Hi. I'm new on this forum, and what inspired me to seek more feedback from other libertarians / Anarcho-Capitalists today is an issue I've been wrestling with for the past several weeks: reorienting my career as a programmer / database administrator / general small business "computer guy" around a software philosophy that is the most compatible with my ideology.
Does proprietary software always violate the Non-Aggression Principle?
The obvious answer to that seems to be yes - companies like Microsoft rely on government force to punish people for copying 1's and 0's that originate from them, even though copying does not really constitute an initiation of aggression against Microsoft, and those users have no clear contractual obligation not to copy. (A good summary of the Anarcho-Capitalist position on the so-called "intellectual property" was recently presented in a series of episodes of the Complete Liberty (http://completeliberty.com/) podcast (http://completeliberty.libsyn.com/).)
It is very easy for me to imagine, however, how companies like Microsoft could still make a profit (though possibly a more modest one) in a government-free society by selling business contracts, student certification contracts, bundling software with other products and services, and so on. They might even do better in absence of taxation, tariffs, antitrust regulation, restrictions on hiring of labor, and so forth. There seems to be no limit to how far Microsoft's enemies will go to suppress the free market environment in which Microsoft is currently so dominant (without, of course, blaming Microsoft's use of government force, on which they also depend).
As a developer, I must also complement Microsoft on the recent improvement in the quality of their desktop products (http://bbs.freetalklive.com/index.php?topic=28047) - which lured me back out of the Linux-land earlier this year. And I certainly never had any problems pirating their software (I've pirated every MS OS since DOS 5.00), which has actually profited Microsoft in the long run because it enabled me to bring value to many companies that were shelling out obscene sums of money for legitimate licenses, and in most cases it actually did make objective business sense for them to do so. But my relationship with Microsoft has never been an easy one, knowing that they are in bed with the government and can betray their users' trust at any time.
Is restrictively-licensed "free" software really any better?
Over the past decade I've been using the GNU/Linux (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU/Linux_naming_controversy) software stack at every opportunity, although work commitments and hardware / software compatibility limitations have made that pretty difficult much of the time. Linux is the undisputed leader on Web servers, where most of my recent development work has taken place, and it is gradually catching up to Windows and Mac OS on the desktop, having recently surpassed the 1% market share (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems) in that category, though it still has a long way to go in terms of simplicity and noob (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newbie) appeal.
Unfortunately (at least from the point of view that ignorance was bliss), I've recently become aware of the fact that in reality the "copyleft (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft)" software movement relies on government force even more so than proprietary software does, and would be completely impossible without it. Consider, for example, Richard Stalinman (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman) (typo intentional - see his personal site (http://stallman.org/)) speaking out AGAINST (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pirate-party.html) the so-called Pirate Parties (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_Party) that were trying to limit the extent of government force in the name of the false construct called "intellectual property"!
It would have been natural to expect that free market competition would have quickly lead to over-saturation of some segments of the software market, resulting in prices stabilizing at the cost of distribution (essentially zero) and the competition of licensing terms resulting in software becoming open source and free of restrictive licenses, essentially public domain (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain). The "copyleft" socialists succeeded in jumping ahead of that bandwagon (as successful socialists tend to do) and convinced everybody that the only way software can ever be free is through the use of restrictive software licenses, most notably GPL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License).
Consider, for example, the case of the BusyBox (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BusyBox) software - most of that program's functionality was freely borrowed from permissively-licensed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_free_software_licence) UNIX code, and then released as restrictive GPL. When a number of companies tried to leverage that program for their benefit, however, the copyleft lobby used government force to initiate legal proceedings against them (http://linux.slashdot.org/story/09/12/14/210207/SFLC-Sues-14-Companies-For-BusyBox-GPL-Violations) (in spite of the fact that the BusyBox author wasn't entirely supportive of their actions (http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/12/15/1925257/Busybox-Developer-Responds-To-Andersen-SFLC-Lawsuits))!
A license like GPL has even less contractual validity than a proprietary EULA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_license_agreement#End-user_license_agreement), which could be argued comes about at the point of the sale. In a free society, a contract can be defined as a "meeting of minds", described in unambiguous written language, which is then insured by an arbitration authority (not necessarily a government monopoly (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycentric_law)) that is then responsible for its enforcement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_defense_agency). A "copyright" text-file inside a tar file you come across clearly isn't a legitimate contract that would hold up in a government-free society!
Due to its "viral" nature, GPL has spread throughout the open source noösphere like a hurricane! Gullible developers (most of whom spend all their time thinking about code and little time contemplating philosophy) who had doubts about the commercial value of their work were convinced that simply giving away their source code wasn't enough, they had to license it to keep the "evil corporations" from "taking advantage of it". In reality that's nothing but FUD, because a corporation that created a proprietary fork of your downstream work is only closed-sourcing their own contributions to it, which they should be free to do, while copies of your original code remain open source for anyone else to use as they see fit.
GPL forcefully demands that all derived works be released under the same restrictive license, and even static-linking to a GPL-licensed library usually requires that your work be GPL'ed also. The ambiguity of this issue has worked in GPL's favor, and I personally know many developers who were confused into thinking that the GPL license (which is pretty long and written in legalese) was more restrictive than it actually was, and thought they were obligated to release their code as GPL if they developed in on a GPL'ed system (ex. Linux) or with a GNU compiler (ex. gcc). While for now that usually isn't the case, there's always a chance that the GPL license will expands its powers in its future versions. Successful socialists know how to phase in their agenda gradually, to keep the frog mellow in its ever-warming water instead of jumping out from shock. The recently released GPL version 3 was more restrictive than its predecessor, and who knows what a future GPL v4, v5, or v6 would bring?
The copyleft-enforcement industry is still in its larval stages, but it can grow very quickly some time in the future, and they already claim to come across one GPL violation (a potential lawsuit) every single day. Of course most slaves don't need to be whipped every single day, and the mere fear of falling victim to a GPL lawsuit will be enough to force most people into compliance. Unfortunately, when it comes to software, proving that your code is original and didn't come from one of countless thousands of GPL projects can be very difficult, and two independently-written pieces of code that do the same thing can end up looking quite similar. Just like becoming a proficient writer in the English language requires one to do a lot of reading, serious programmers spend a lot of time reading other people's source code to pick up the best algorithms, and there usually is one way to do something that is more efficient than all others. Even if you're lucky enough to get a competent judge / jury and are found innocent, the legal proceeding are likely to have cost you weeks of your time and tends of thousands of dollars in legal fees!
That possibility can have a powerful chilling effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect_%28term%29) on the software industry. Even under reasonable legal standards for burden of proof - if you've worked on a GPL'ed database program when you were in college, can you ever go on to work on a proprietary database program when you graduate without fear that some of your code will end up looking "too similar"?
All this leads to ever-more people being forced to GPL their code, thus almost entirely destroying the free market in the software industry (support services being an exception). Much of the current open-source software was paid for with tax-victim dollars through military research and public universities (open source writers in some European countries enjoy free university education and even a government stipend (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stipend)), and some came about as the result of a short-term game theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory) phenomenon where companies like IBM and Oracle found it in their interest to hurt Microsoft as much as they can (which wouldn't be the case w/o Microsoft's intellectual property dominance, which is backed by government force). In the long term, this leads to an ever-greater fraction of the software industry being subsidized by the government, which some copyleft proponents actively lobby for, and with government subsidies greater government control is pretty much inevitable.
I am not against people using copyleft software any more than I am against people using proprietary software, but I do have a problem with them calling the former "free" and the latter "evil". True freedom comes from avoiding institutionalized aggression, not from trying to use the government force in the name of doing good, which historically has always backfired!
What other alternatives are there?
Several months ago I've started ranting about a "Software Freedom Scale (http://bbs.freetalklive.com/index.php?topic=28400)" that ranks different software licenses according to the amount of government force they are based on, public domain being the ideal. It is important to note, however, that aggression-free software isn't always 100% guaranteed to be zero-cost and open source - a programmer has no more obligation to release his source code than a book writer his research notes, or a sculptor a video of every stroke of his chisel. Having the software you use be open sourced is a very important benefit, but that benefit must come from qualitative competition between various alternatives, not from mandatory transparency through government force!
There is hardly any good software out there that exists in the public domain, but the next best thing seems to be permissively-licensed software whose licenses were actually intended to prevent someone else from suing the authors in case that software does something naughty (though such disclaimers would not be necessary in a society with rational jurisprudence). Some of those licenses also forcefully require proper attribution, which shouldn't be necessary in a free society because there are many other ways to prove who did what first, but I don't think there's any history or potential for that clause to be used as a trigger for substantial legal aggression.
It is also important to note that this "Freedom Scale" was simplified to ignore things like whether that software originated through government aggression (as is the case for much of it), and the ideology of the programmers involved (I was particularly upset by a recent example (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1451590&cid=30173908) of a programmer I idolize being a total commie). History is filled with evil things, and we are all standing on the shoulders of slave-traders, warmongers, and other savages - what matters is that we do the right thing going forward. (I have briefly considered the possibility of a license that specifically denies all rights to any government employees and other NAP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-aggression_principle) violators, but that would obviously be unenforceable and comically hypocritical.)
So this leaves us with permissively-licensed open source software, which isn't as popular as copyleft or proprietary software, but still gives us a solid foundation to leverage. The so-called "Anarcho-Capitalist software stack" begins with any of multiple competing BSD-licensed UNIX operating systems: FreeBSD (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD) (and its derivatives like PC-BSD (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-BSD), which are great for new users), OpenBSD (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenBSD), NetBSD (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetBSD), DragonFly BSD (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DragonFly_BSD) (my emerging favorite), and someday maybe even a derivative of MINIX 3 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MINIX_3). Although the BSD family of operating systems use competing implementation ideas, they voluntarily adhere to a common UNIX philosophy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_Free_or_Die#Unix) and industry standards (much more so than Linux), and it can be as easy to switch between different BSD's as it is between Linux distributions, especially when you're using a common package management system like pkgsrc (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pkgsrc). I must admit that Linux has just recently surpassed all BSD's in performance and portability, but that only happened due to a massive inflow of funds from companies like IBM, and the BSD projects could easily catch up and surpass Linux if more people started contributing, which is fairly likely to happen as more people come to see the down-side of copyleft aggression.
A lot of people use BSD and similarly licensed code, but they're more likely to release their own open source work as GPL for reasons stated above. It even could be argued that BSD-licensed operating systems have a 100% market share, because I can think of no noteworthy operating system that didn't borrow some code from them - most famously Mac OS X, but Windows and Linux as well! :wink:
The X server (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.Org_Server) (the core GUI foundations that most UNIX-based operating systems use) is permissively licensed, but most noob-friendly desktop environments (ex. KDE, Gnome, Xfce, ROX, etc) are not. There are a few less popular window managers that are permissively licensed (ex. Enlightenment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightenment_%28window_manager%29), Fluxbox (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluxbox), JWM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JWM), and the Compiz (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compiz) 3D effects engine), but that is becoming ever less relevant as more and more software is starting to function though the Web browser. This is good news, because there's finally a real possibility of a permissively-licensed open sourced Web browser coming about some time in the future, all thanks to Google's Chromium (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_%28web_browser%29)! The current version of that browser still isn't entirely stable, still married to Google's motives, and still uses some GPL code, but its BSD components will inevitably be used to create a new browser some time in the future, which I see becoming a backbone of a complete permissively licensed desktop environment with AJAX-powered widgets.
Fortunately my favorite database tools (PostgreSQL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostgreSQL) and SQLite (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostgreSQL)) are already permissively licensed, as are many other great server-side components (ex. apache (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_HTTP_Server), ssh (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Shell), pureftpd (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure-FTPd), bind (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIND), cyrus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_IMAP_server), qmail (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qmail), etc), and a sufficient selection of shell tools and scripting languages. I never found any serious need for a complete IDE (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_development_environment), so I've always used free non-copyleft editors like vi and SciTE (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SciTE). The biggest GPL'ed villain in an average developer's software stack is the GCC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Compiler_Collection) compiler and the rest of the GNU toolchain (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_toolchain), but it may soon be possible to replace it with Clang (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clang), and perhaps even new programming languages like Google's Go (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_%28programming_language%29), or Apache Foundation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Software_Foundation)'s noble efforts to rebuild all Java components (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Harmony) (and a complete application server (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Geronimo)) under their permissive business-friendly license.
Unfortunately there are still some gaps in the permissive software stack that current software just cannot fill. For example, we have a great BSD-licensed BitTorrent library (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libtorrent), but all of the GUI clients that use it are GPL'ed. We also have a similar situation with BSD-licensed multimedia codecs from Xiph.org (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiph.Org_Foundation) (ex. ogg, vorbis / theora), but there doesn't seem to be any permissive media player program out there (except playing them in Chromium via HTML5 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5) audio / video tags), and since most video you come across online is in other formats non-permissive software like FFmpeg or GStreamer is most often needed for conversion. Of course I have no moral qualms about just using a Windows box in addition to my primary BSD boxes, with the Windows box doing all my shady P2P and codec crunching for me and spitting out a nice standards-compliant HTML5 interface for playing any multimedia files that I need. ;)
Michael Dexter from BSD Fund (http://bsdfund.org/) writes in with an update on pcc (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_C_Compiler) developments:QuoteAnders Magnusson (ragge@) reports that pcc (http://pcc.ludd.ltu.se/) can now build a bootable OpenBSD (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenBSD) -current x86 kernel and that amd64 support is coming soon. Your testing using a fresh snapshot (http://pcc.ludd.ltu.se/downloads/) is greatly appreciated.
Please report any bugs in the pcc bug database (http://pcc.ludd.ltu.se/jira) and be as precise as possible. Code samples are welcome.
We'd like to thank Jonathan Gray (jsg@) for finding many code-generation bugs that were revealed by the kernel and also the dozen donors who contributed a total of over $750 to this effort this month, bringing us less than $3,000 from our goal.
This is great news for software projects in general, as it is another step to try to diminish the GCC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Compiler_Collection) monoculture and for OpenBSD specifically as this marks the first architecture kernel that can be compiled with this compiler with hopefully many more to come.
The PC-BSD (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-BSD) Team is pleased to announce the availability of PC-BSD 8.0-BETA (Hubble Edition), running FreeBSD (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD) 8.0-RELEASE, and KDE 4.3 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE_Software_Compilation_4#KDE_4.3).4
Version 8.0 contains a number of enhancements and improvements. For a full list of changes, please refer to the changelog (http://www.pcbsd.org/content/view/135/11/). Some of the notable changes are:
- FreeBSD 8.0-Release
- KDE 4.3.4
- Brand new System Installer, allows the install of PC-BSD or FreeBSD
- Run in Live mode directly from DVD
- Updated Software Manager, allows browsing and installing applications directly
- Support for 3D acceleration with NVIDIA drivers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia#Documentation_and_drivers) on amd64
Version 8.0-BETA of PC-BSD is available for download (http://www.pcbsd.org/content/view/137/11/) from our mirrors, and will be available shortly as bittorrent from www.gotbsd.net (http://www.gotbsd.net/). Also, our Pootle Translation (http://www.pcbsd.org:8080/) [WP] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pootle) page has been updated with the latest strings, translators should now be able to finish localizing PC-BSD into their language.
In order to prepare for 8.0-Release, please report any and all bugs to our Trac Database (http://trac.pcbsd.org/) [WP] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trac)!
- Download PC-BSD 8.0-BETA (http://www.pcbsd.org/content/view/137/11/)
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Code: [Select] Theo, |
The real irony here is I suspect rms is ready to hear the message of liberty.
I'll have to find a way to clone myself first. Unfortunately my clones are never perfect copies - they always forget to put breaks in their switches or dangle their curly braces in all sorts of ungodly places... :roll:
Richard Stalinman is enemy #1, or maybe second only to PETA in his nuttiness and hatred of individual rights.
Code: [Select] I am sorry but though I would like to reply in detail there is no |
Code: [Select] Theo, |
Code: [Select] Theo, |
Code: [Select] Theo, |
Code: [Select] I am not interested in talking to you. |
(http://openbsd.org/images/Superfish.jpg) (http://openbsd.org/lyrics.html#47) Some say that I'm a hero But I'm just being me With my filter I can hide My true identity :lol: |
Code: [Select] Subject: A question not entirely related to DragonFly |
(16:18:03) ArchGT: I am a marxist freebsd sysadmin/user and I share your hate for the gpl
(16:18:27) ArchGT: openbsd*
(16:19:03) AlexLibman: Are you a good Marxist or a bad Marxist?
(16:19:53) ArchGT: I think that depends on your point of view
(16:20:50) ArchGT: but hey! much of the points you made against the gpl I agree with
(16:21:08) ArchGT: and share with my linux-user friend
(16:21:18) ArchGT: users*
(16:21:24) AlexLibman: A "good" proponent of any ideology is willing to practice that ideology without initiating aggression against others. You can buy up some private land, invite people to join you there voluntarily, and share as much as you like.
(16:21:29) AlexLibman: I guess that question would only apply to communists, not Marxists specifically, since pretty much all of Marxist ideas are based on violence.
(16:22:30) ArchGT: I must be a bad marxist since I can not recall any of those violence based ideas
(16:23:03) AlexLibman: So then, if your political ideas are any good, why can't they be practised without theft and murder on a massive scale?
(16:23:51) AlexLibman: Libertarian movements grow organically - the greater the level of economic freedom (including property rights) within a society, the more brains and capital it attracts.
(16:24:02) ArchGT: no they can not
(16:24:09) ArchGT: it's called capitalism
(16:24:26) AlexLibman: Yes, and I am a capitalist. I own myself.
(16:25:13) AlexLibman: http://www.isil.org/resources/introduction.swf
(16:25:35) ArchGT: flash is hard in openbsd
(16:25:56) AlexLibman: Oh, right. My bad.
(16:25:57) ArchGT: I'll look at it later
(16:26:37) AlexLibman: You can use HTML5 or youtube-dl from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyEs5OP5Ahc
(16:27:35) ArchGT: ok
(16:27:38) ArchGT: saving...
(16:28:32) AlexLibman: There are obviously mountains of Objectivist / Anarcho-Capitalist literature to RTFM, but this short video sums up our ideas of self-ownership very nicely.
(16:28:44) ArchGT: I have read them
(16:29:12) ArchGT: FA Hayek is standing 2 feet from my head
(16:29:35) AlexLibman: And how does one go from reading and understanding Rand / Rothbard / Friedman / etc back to the religion of class-worship?
(16:30:40) ArchGT: quite easy, the explaination they offer is incomplete
(16:30:49) ArchGT: so you go somewhere else
(16:31:19) AlexLibman: How are they incomplete compared to Marxism?
(16:31:54) ArchGT: it's based on menger's value theory
(16:32:12) ArchGT: and it can not stand a breeze
(16:32:23) AlexLibman: Ah, the old "my emotions justify my violence" routine?
(16:32:45) ArchGT: I'm not familiar with that routine
(16:32:55) ArchGT: any url for that?
(16:34:01) AlexLibman: It is my summation for all of collectivist thought, from thousand-year-old religions to all modern socialist ideas. What gives you the right to initiate aggression against others? Emotion, nothing else.
(16:34:58) AlexLibman: All of human history is one econometric fact being repeated over and over again - capitalism works, collectivism doesn't. Objectivist epistemology and some other libertarian psychologists have done a very good job explaining why.
(16:35:16) ArchGT: and yet you can shoot to kill in order to defend your property
(16:35:37) ArchGT: making private property god-like or religion-like
(16:35:57) AlexLibman: I would rather use a "less lethal weapon" and take you alive - it's more profitable that way.
(16:36:06) ArchGT: certainly
(16:36:35) ArchGT: you have the name of one of those libertarian psychologists?
(16:36:47) ArchGT: I like to read you kno
(16:36:51) ArchGT: know
(16:36:55) AlexLibman: There is a logical foundation behind property rights. If you want to live within a "gift economy" you can still do that, but without violating the rights of the individuals who don't want to be a part of your "gift economy".
(16:38:11) AlexLibman: I'm a big fan of Stefan Molyneux, though he's not exactly a psychologist. And then there's Nathaniel Branden, obviously.
(16:39:18) ArchGT: I have this hipotesis of libertarian thinking being pushed by corporate america because, well, they get to look like heros on one side and the other being people tired of watching people on wellfare checks doing nothing?
(16:39:25) ArchGT: thanks for the names
(16:39:51) ArchGT: what you think about that?
(16:40:15) AlexLibman: Rights are only attributable to "rational economic actors" - that is entities that are capable of independent thought, independent action, and experiencing individual consequences of one's actions (capital or liability). An involuntary group of people cannot have "collective rights".
(16:41:19) AlexLibman: Corporate America hates free market. In the free market Microsoft wouldn't be able to bust software pirates who never entered into an explicit contractual agreement with them, and every BP shareholder would lose the shirt off his back.
(16:42:33) ArchGT: but the "less regulation" speech is making wonders to their pockets
(16:42:41) AlexLibman: Anarcho-Capitalism is a gradual transition toward individual ownership of means of production, and a triumph of [non-profit] market entities over for-profit ones (which we already see in industries like software).
(16:44:16) AlexLibman: No governmental regulation, but also no corporate welfare, no military-industrial complex crony-ism, no liability limitations, no artificial scarcity (ex. patents), no wide-spread "Mommy Government didn't ban it so it must be good for you" delusion, etc.
(16:45:57) AlexLibman: Regulation mostly benefits the big corporations who can afford to comply, and thus it raises barrier to entry for would-be competition. The benefit of economy of scale quickly reach a point of diminishing returns, which combined with a localism bias means in an Anarcho-Capitalist society WalMart would be more profitable as 10,000 independent stores than one giant corporation.
(16:47:21) ArchGT: and the process from here to there is free market?
(16:47:40) ArchGT: they profit less so shrink or die?
(16:47:57) ArchGT: and small business take over
(16:48:12) ArchGT: sound ok to me
(16:48:26) ArchGT: somewhat dreamy
(16:48:50) AlexLibman: Not in any "vote for Ron Paul" sort of sense. You can't get the plantation owners (governments) to free the slaves voluntarily, and the plantation owners have a lot more nukes than we do, you have to raise the cost of slavery to the point where it isn't profitable anymore.
(16:49:03) ArchGT: heavy industries don't fall into that
(16:49:17) ArchGT: they need to be large and already are
(16:49:37) AlexLibman: The way toward Anarcho-Capitalism is mostly based in political migration, and efforts like seasteading (someday spacesteading).
(16:49:37) ArchGT: and have monopoly power on strategic reserves
(16:50:28) ArchGT: their power is gobernment-backed which you hate
(16:50:33) AlexLibman: Corporations by themselves are not your enemy, they are just voluntary agreements between people. A marriage is a corporation. All the evil things you associate with corporations in reality come from government.
(16:52:50) ArchGT: and we are back into menger/marx's realm
(16:54:40) AlexLibman: Have you read Ayn Rand?
(16:56:30) AlexLibman: Yes, she was wrong about a number of things, mostly on anti-Soviet grounds, and most notably she was wrong on intellectual property, but she's really the first person to put together a complete secular philosophical system of free market capitalism.
(16:56:57) ArchGT: no I haven't
(16:57:22) AlexLibman: She definitely wouldn't have had a problem with FLOSS software, as long as it's not funded by government force (as often is the case).
(16:57:32) ArchGT: I hated the "atlas shruged" meme few years ago
(16:58:13) ArchGT: so I never read anything but the wikipedia page
(16:59:07) AlexLibman: That meme perfectly describes how capitalism has triumphed over socialism (Nazi Marxism, Soviet Marxism, etc) in the 20th century. All the smart people simply left, or became alcoholics, or made deliberate errors in their physics papers...
(16:59:22) ArchGT: so she would be ok with the bsd/isc license
(16:59:44) AlexLibman: I think she wouldn't like the B in BSD, hehe.
(16:59:56) ArchGT: xD
(16:59:59) ArchGT: right
(17:00:30) AlexLibman: But Google's use of the BSD license for their code is definitely something Ayn Rand would appreciate.
(17:01:30) ArchGT: google's use is the same as apple's
(17:02:18) ArchGT: and even google have some gpl software they modified and since the not released they don't have to share any source
(17:02:37) ArchGT: that bothers many gpl people
(17:03:27) AlexLibman: She wouldn't like governments releasing software under any license. Free market competition naturally leads to some goods being so cheap to produce / distribute that charging for them doesn't make any sort of business sense. In today's world this mostly applies to information and also some levels of access costs - you can go to a mall and park there and walk around all day and not buy anything.
(17:03:38) ArchGT: which is a good thing because they get to rethink the license
(17:05:07) ArchGT: well, I should leave the keyboard, nice to talk to you
(17:05:12) ArchGT: see you in #openbsd
(17:05:29) AlexLibman: As technology advances, more and more things will become free - agorists in New Hampshire build their own backyard greenhouses (and some have very large backyards), and their motivation is self-reliance, not profit, but when they grow too much they just give it away for free.
(17:05:58) AlexLibman: ok, TTYL. You can find me on forums by googling my name together with a term like "anarcho capitalism".
(17:06:25) ArchGT: I did
(17:07:36) AlexLibman: BTW, a quick question...
(17:08:00) AlexLibman: Do you happen to know anything about Theo's personal politics? As you see, I really wanna know...
(17:08:39) ArchGT: no, I'm totally in blank there
(17:08:41) ArchGT: sorry
(17:08:51) AlexLibman: ok, thanks anyway
(17:08:56) ArchGT: np
The leaders of all major software companies are socialists...
- Microsoft founder Bill Gates (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates) -- strong endorsement of Obama, "the president's team is on the right track" --
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(And Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Ballmer) donated to Nancy Pelosi, Edward Kennedy and others (http://www.newsmeat.com/billionaire_political_donations/Steve_Ballmer.php). Etc, etc, etc.)
More license bullying news as WordPress creator insists all temples / themes / plug-ins (http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/07/22/1935248/WordPress-Creator-GPL-Says-WP-Template-Must-Be-GPLd) must be released under the restrictive GPL license. The same logic could apply to plug-ins for browsers, editors, etc... Fine print can make or break your business (http://econsultancy.com/blog/6267-fine-print-can-make-or-break-your-business), as a related article puts it. All rational people should avoid using any piece of software with that communist license whenever possible - even proprietary freeware is most often more respectful of your freedom!