Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 31st Aug 2007 19:24 UTC, submitted by Anonymous
The latest issue of the FreeBSD newsletter contains a letter from the Vice President of the FreeBSD Foundation about the GPLv3. "On June 29th, the Free Software Foundation unveiled version 3 of the GNU General Public license. Even though the majority of software included in the FreeBSD distribution is not covered by any version of the GPL, our community cannot ignore this very popular license or its most recent incarnation. Through extremely successful evangelization, and the popularity of Linux, the misconception that OpenSource and the GPL are synonymous has become pervasive."
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Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2006-12-28
Microsoft monopoly is one reason why one would expect people to try to make the market *more* free.
And that is what the GPL is trying to do. By restricting only the right to take away freedom, yet removing all other restrictions, the GPL is trying to even the playing field. Think of it as an agreement to play fair, if that helps.
Instead, I see just the opposite: people bitching against free market, calling voluntary trade "enslavement", and calling the removal of choice "freedom".
In a totally free market, anybody has the right to lock you into they're solutions, especially in the software industry. Many countries have frameworks in place to curb such practices, and for good reason. If anybody has the right walk all over you, would you stick up for that right in the name of freedom?
You say that we should be trying to make the market more free. It is exactly this freedom, the freedom to take away freedom from someone else, that the GPL is trying to deal with. If that is the only restriction, then I'm all for it.
Really, it seems to me that you have miss understood the argument. If you want to release your software BSD, that's fine by me but if you want to help in a GPL project, you have to play by the rules, just as much as someone who uses your BSD software has to respect those terms. If I don't agree with your terms, then I don't use your software, period. That's called freedom of choice.
Member since:2005-07-07
By restricting only the right to take away freedom, yet removing all other restrictions, the GPL is trying to even the playing field.
If I buy a piece of closed-source software because it makes my life/work easier (and sometimes it happens; there's a lot of excellent open source software around, but there are cases in which you are better off with a commercial solution), you can repeat as much as you like that they're "taking away my freedom", or "abusing" me, it's still BS.
Reality is, people who would be glad to be able to prevent the developers from selling it to me - FSF says closed-source software is "immoral" (!) - are actually trying to take away my (and their) freedom.
In a totally free market, anybody has the right to lock you into they're solutions, especially in the software industry. Many countries have frameworks in place to curb such practices, and for good reason. If anybody has the right walk all over you, would you stick up for that right in the name of freedom?
This reveals an astounding lack of knowledge about fundamental economic issues, like the very definition of "free market".
Free market has nothing to do with abuse, or with people walking over other people. As a matter of fact, free market is possible only in a framework of justice that *prevents* abuse.
If a monopolist can adopt dirty techniques to prevent the raising of competitors, it means the market isn't completely free. If a vendor is allowed to play dirty tricks to lock in its customers, it means the market isn't completely free.
I strongly suggest you and the GPL proponents have a look at an excellent book, "Free to choose" by Nobel prize Milton Friedman. That would - hopefully - make you regain some touch with reality.
[Edit: typos]
Edited 2007-09-01 17:07
Member since:2006-06-21
Microsoft monopoly is one reason why one would expect people to try to make the market *more* free.
This isn't Oz, you know. You don't just snap your heels and "make" things "free". Freedom is not the natural state of inter-personal relationships. People are not equal. That's a fairy tale. In real life the strong dictate the rules and you need an edge to get ahead.
Now, you have a choice. You can agree that the strong one is a something like the government and let it enforce rules that give everybody a fair chance. Or you can let everybody do what they want, in which case natural selection will elect a 300 lbs guy with a shotgun.
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 22:43 UTC
The Verge pointed me to a blog post by Leap Motion - which reveals how their Kinect-like motion control works with Windows 8. "From the second you plug in your Leap Motion Controller, you'll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that's possible with multi-touch inputs - without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we'll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X." Quite cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 21:50 UTC
PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:15 UTC
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:11 UTC, submitted by Drumhellar
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 21:06 UTC
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 7:37 UTC
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Linked by fran on 05/18/13 1:38 UTC
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 23:35 UTC, submitted by kragil
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
Linked by MOS6510 on 05/17/13 22:22 UTC
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 22:15 UTC, submitted by Tom
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.More News »
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Member since:
2005-07-07
And how far did you have to dig to bury your head in the sand to ignore the Microsoft's monopoly?
Microsoft monopoly is one reason why one would expect people to try to make the market *more* free.
Instead, I see just the opposite: people bitching against free market, calling voluntary trade "enslavement", and calling the removal of choice "freedom".