Posted on 08/31/2003 11:27:24 PM PDT by Coral Snake
Coral Snake you know as well as I that there are many great posters on FR. Unfortunately however there are quite a few that can't reason more than one level deep and therefore can't understand the distinction you are bringing forward. But thanks for your patience in dealing with them, I think you are making better points with them than you may fully understand.
Absolutely correct, and since I know this is currently going on, it is one of the main reasons I am against Linux in government use in practically all circumstances besides testing.
So what? The only rights are individual rights. Corporate rights are a fiction of judicial activism in the same vein as the "constitutional right to an abortion under the 4th amendment." I happen to be pro-choice, but let's call a spade a spade, neither exist in our constitution.
In fact, the govt is funding their competition.
The government is funding the opposition to the GPL-friendly companies when it pays for additional features in proprietary software. This is even worse, the public gets nothing out of that because the modifications are closed. Why should anyone ever have to pay taxes to support modifications to a commerical product that they'll not get for free? I'm a taxpayer and so are you, why should we not get the features that our tax dollars put into proprietary software for free?
If the federal govt was developing modifications to TrustedNT or Trusted Solaris, and giving them to the respective companies, the GPL bigots on this board would be going berzerk
And with good reason, no one should ever have to pay taxes to support commercial products that they don't get for free. That is corporate welfare. It is one thing to fund a proprietary OS for our military vehicles, it is another to fund modifications to commericial software like Solaris and Windows.
Their acceptance of the government's development of SE Linux just shows how quickly some conservatives will abandon their limited government principles at the thought of some pork/welfare spending going their way.
So the government should never be able to pay to have software tailored for its specific needs? I would rather the code be under the BSD license, but the GPL is not that bad. You want to talk pork/welfare, talk about the Army buying nearly $500M worth of MS software at near full retail cost.
"Why is our government developing operating system code in the first place?"
It isn't, it is customizing an existing product that is free and open to the public for its own needs. Does it ever occur to the critics of SELinux that the NSA may have the right idea? The government cannot control the quality of Solaris, HPUX, QNX and WindowsNT. It can control the quality of its internal versions of Linux and BSD.
Congradulations, you have made the first step toward the light and away from the dark side. You have admitted the IP is a construct that is often incompatable with the natural right of property.
You have no right of ownership.
And this is the problem, if you allowed for any real property rights then the system would collapse. The entire system is a fraud and a sham. The faster we abolish patents, trademarks and limit copyrights back to a modern version of the original copyright law, the better off we'll be.
You already have the physical rights of onwership in the sense that the CD you purchased can be used as you see fit, just not its contents.
Wrong. You have no true property rights even in the CD. If the medium employs a content restriction system you go to prison if you listen to the CD in a way not intended by the copyright holder. You are not even a property holder in anything but name with that CD. You don't even have a legal right to use it in your own home as you see fit!
You may read that book anywhere you see fit
Guess what? Your analogy doesn't apply to DVDs, "secure CDs," and SACDs. You have no legal right to view them on any device you want to in your own home. If you view a DVD on a Linux box with DeCSS you are now a felon. Your DVD, your box, no intent to distribute. You simply wanted to "watch your DVD anywhere you saw fit."
As I said, the open source crowd wants to prohibit intellectual proeprty rights, but they pee on our legs and tells us it is raining when they say it's about physical property rights.
Many OSS advocates want to abolish the serfdom of IP law and replace it with a de facto property rights law. Surely, if you are a capitalist you have to be sympathetic to this cause. Any copyright law that tells the computer industry what hardware and software they can make should be abolished. Same for any that goes beyond the spirit of what our founders gave us. You want to know what they thought of copyrights and IP in general? Look to the laws they gave us. Music wasn't even copyrightable back then in any form. That would have to be changed, but the spirit and duration should be returned to the copyright law of 1790.
Get the government out of the business of making sure that "no one gets left behind" economically. If your business model runs into a technological brickwall, the government shouldn't play the ER that resusitates it through legislation and subsidies. Progress, not fairness, is all that matters. It is one thing to stop someone from copying IP and selling it, it is another to prevent the creation of DVD-VCRs and stuff like that.
Wah bloody wah. Commercial trucking "in its current incarnations is a detriment to the US railroad industry." It's called competition. Linux has proven one thing: superior products don't win by being sold in the computer industry. If they did you'd be using BeOS on your PC and Windows would have be consigned to the dustheap of PC history. Yes, I think BeOS still does own both Windows and Linux in many ways.
The GPL/Linux softare package is as you state the product of foreigners and anti-American types
OMG those evil foreigners! If you were born in the 19th century I dare say you'd be one of the members of the Know Nothing party.
You sound like the right wing version of a lefty who calls every person who disagrees with him a racist. Patriotism is not blind allegance to one's country, that's called nationalism. You sound more like a nationalist.
unfairly competitive product that feasts off our own US proprietary software market
Where is your proof of this? Empirical evidence please? Microsoft has frequently gotten in hot water over IP violations. My conscience says that even if OSS developers abuse IP laws, all things being equal Microsoft is no better. In fact worse probably since it has the money to never violate anyone's copyrights.
These are NOT the kind of decisions we need American businesses to be making!
God forbid that American corporations move to a less expensive platform. Our economy will benefit more by the decreased spending on exorbinate licensing fees.
Thanks for standing up and speaking out on such an important topic astroturing for my company for free!
And who owns corporations? Individuals.
And if you believe that individuals cannot organize a corporation that has certain constitutional protections (such as copyright, property ownership, patents, etc.), then, to be consistent, you must believe that the GPL (which is a collectively-held, not individually-held) copyright, is invalid and not protected by US law. If not, please explain why not.
And you are mistaken about the GPL code. It is individually owned. Linus Torvalds could at any time remove his contributions from the Linux source tree, move the code to the BSD license and build a new Linux kernel under the BSD license. You retain the copyright to your code, but you agree to let others use it under the GPL. You are free to take your own code and dual license it. That's what TrollTech does with QT. They could legally take out outside contributions to the GPL code and still make releases that are proprietary under another license.
It should also be noted that even beyond the issue of generating 'goodwill', there's another reason for people to share their work. Suppose I think GIMP is a wonderful program, but it would be more useful to me if it could do X. If nobody else has modified GIMP to do X, making the improvement myself would afford me an immediate benefit: I'd now have a version of GIMP that could do X like I want.
At this point, I can either share the software or not. If I don't share the software, then any time someone else makes any improvements to GIMP that I'd like to use, I'll have to merge those improvements with my own. If, however, I instead release my improvements to GIMP, then I stand to lose very little but can gain at least four big ways if my improvement is a good one: (1) If my improvement is popular, it will likely get incorporated into a mainstream version of GIMP so I won't have to patch it into newer releases anymore; (2) If there are any bugs in my improvement, others may find them and tell me about them (and maybe offer a fix) before I would have found and fixed them myself; (3) Other people amy be able to further improve my improvement; if they do, I'll get the benefit of their having done so; (4) If my improvement to GIMP is a good one, publishing it reduces the likelihood of other people making changes to GIMP that would be incompatible with my improvement.
Thus, even someone who is merely trying to get work done, and for whom issues of goodwill, self-promotion, and pride are all irrelevant, can stand to benefit from involvement with open source software.
I don't think so. But I'll humor you for the moment... Show me the part in the GPL that allows Linus to remove his contributions from the kernel. And while you're at it, explain to everyone what they're supposed to do with their RedHat CD's that contains Linus' kernel source... Mail it back to Linus?
I am not a lawyer and so I am reliant on the analyses of others on this matter. However the fact that TrollTech can dual license under the GPL and QPL makes that point. They have contributed code as GPL code on one hand and they keep a proprietary tree of the same code under a different license. That is how they got KDE into a dominant position. The free and commercial versions of QT for Unix are the same AFAIK. You just choose which license to use. TrollTech is free at anytime to stop releasing new versions under the GPL.
And while you're at it, explain to everyone what they're supposed to do with their RedHat CD's that contains Linus' kernel source... Mail it back to Linus?
Keep using the code. You can keep using that version without the support of Torvalds, but all future versions of his code would be BSD. There's a fork of QT under the GPL that makes it run like a native non-X11 library on Win32. If TrollTech stopped releasing under the GPL they'd still be able to continue working on the Win32 version under the GPL.
Though on all of this don't get me wrong, I think the GPL is a fairly flawed license. I've been thinking about seeing if I can rewrite IDLE (the Python IDE) to use wxPython as opposed to Tkinter. If I get around to trying that I would avoid the GPL like the plague and go for the BSD license. I personally couldn't give a rat's ass whether someone else profits off of what I've written.
As I suspected, Linus cannot 'remove' his code from the Linux kernel. Once part of the GPL kernel, it is forever available under the GPL. If it was an 'individual license' as you purported earlier, this wouldn't be the case.
I agree that Linux can take his GPL contributions and place them elsewhere (proprietary, BSD, etc.). But that's not 'removing' them from Linux.
While many of the policies in the GPL are not unreasonable, I just read through it and the tone in parts of the FAQ is even more annoying than that of the license itself.
While I appreciate some of the goals of the GPL, I would think something between the GPL and LGPL would be appropriate for a lot of software, to wit: any distribution of a program which includes SGPL'ed (supercat's GPL) software must include all files necessary to rebuild the application after making changes to any incorporated source code.
In other words, if someone wants to use my SGPL'ed compression library, they would not have to release the source code for their entire project, but they would have to include any and all of my source code that they actually used, along with everything necessary to rebuild the application incorporating changes to my source code; the distribution could include a full set of source, but if desired parts could be released in object format only.
Actually, I think your example is somewhat similar to the point I was trying to make with the examples of frontier "small-c" communism (i.e. a barn-raising). The frontier folks contributed their labor TO SOMEONE ELSE'S "PROJECT" in order to be able to reap a benefit to their own "project" at some future time.
Sorry, that's what I meant. I was not trying to imply he can just pull his contributions, say "f$%^ you all" to the rest of the team and pull a SCO if they don't remove his code.
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