subject:"Re\: GPL dustups"


Martin Franco wrote:

On Sun, Jun 15, 2008 at 08:08:41PM -0700, DJA wrote:
  

So, what is your antidote? What is your remedy? I haven't heard such
illogical nonsense since the '60's (when I was spouting the same thing
as I was being conscripted into fighting another
irrationally-justified,  corporate-sponsored war).


Anarchy--socialism organized not around a state, but around free
associations of people and managed by democracy/consensus of its
participants.
  



Why on Earth would you want a democracy?  I sure don't.  Thank God we 
don't live in a democracy.  That would be hell on Earth.




(77)

--
Ralph


Many of us have ideals that we are unable to live up to.
--John Malmberg


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Re: GPL dustups


DJA wrote:
And I personally get tired of hearing the implied argument that 
Artists produce art only for money. Artists produce art for art's 
sake, by definition. They'd scrawl on the wall with their own blood or 
perform in rags in the streets if they had to. It's not a profession, 
it's not a calling, it's an obsession whose only cure is death.



... whose only cure is manifesting the obsession.  The only alternative 
is death.




(89)

--
Ralph


Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary 
safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

--Benjamin Franklin

It's also true that those who would give up privacy for security are 
likely to end up with neither.

--Bruce Schneier


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Re: GPL dustups


Andrew Lentvorski wrote:

Todd Walton wrote:


Community is profit.


Disagree.  99.99% of everything is crap.  Adding to the crap makes the 
good stuff harder to find.  In that case, community is loss.


See: YouTube.

I'm not sure GooTube is a net loss, but it's not clearly a net plus, 
either.


-a





So what's your opinion on xTube?


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Re: GPL dustups


SJS wrote:

begin  quoting Tracy R Reed as of Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 04:13:20PM -0700:
  

Druppy wrote:

How does a company recoop R&D investments?  Let say we spend $3million 
and 5 years making a game and release it as open source.  What is stopping 
a bunch of server farms from running our stuff for free without ever 
having spent a dime on R&D and thus being able to sell the service for 
much less.
  
Most people sell advertising to support stuff like that it seems. Other 
than that perhaps you just can't make money that way. I'm fine with 
that. There are lots of things that you can't make money doing. And if 
it comes down to turning our country into a police state and giving up 
control of our computers so DRM can work so that a company can stop 
people making copies of their software I'm against anyone being able to 
make money that way.



Copy-protection is another thing entirely.

  
--

Copy protection should automatically revoke copyright.
Stewart Stremler


That sounds familiar somehow.




--
Ralph


I think that copy protection should invalidate copyright. Just as you 
can't both copyright and patent a work, we should extend the principle:

copyright, patent, trade secret, or copy protection
Pick one, and only one.
--Stewart Stremler


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Re: GPL dustups

2008-06-20 Thread Robert Donovan

On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 2:31 PM, Ralph Shumaker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> David Brown wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 06:08:18PM -0700, SJS wrote:
>>
>>> I look at Sun's logo, or Apple's, and I say "wow". I look at Linux's
>>> Tux, and say 'ugh' -- it's a terrible logo.  Complicated and busy and,
>>> well, not very nice at all.
>>>
>>> Contrast toyota, mitsubishi, audi, subaru, etc., with ford, or cadillac.
>>
>> My stuffed Tux is much more comfortable to hug than my Toyota logo :-)
>>
>> I think Porsche wins for ugliest logo, though, at least compared to the
>> somewhat simplified Cadillac logo.  The European horse-based logos aren't
>> any better than Tux.
>>
>> David
>>
>>
>
>
> I think Porsche wins for the ugliest sports cars.
>
> I don't remember seeing a Porsche that I liked its looks.
>
Is that why there is no substitute? ;-)

RD


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Re: GPL dustups


David Brown wrote:

On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 06:10:58PM -0700, SJS wrote:
begin  quoting [EMAIL PROTECTED] as of Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 
06:04:54PM -0700:

[snip]

SJS doesn't like GPL so therefore you *must* be wrong.

QED


Welcome to my killfile.


Do people really use killfiles like this?  In my mailinglist career, I 
can

think of one or two incidents that really warranted a killfile, and it
really needed to be thread based because the persons posts generated so
many replies that I could read all of their messages anyway.

Most of the time, it seems more the equivalent of sticking your 
fingers in
your ears and singing loudly.  I guess there are a few times where 
that is

an appropriate response in person, but it isn't common.

David





The closest I come to that is reading a few posts into a thread, 
sometimes just to find out what the original post in the thread was 
about.  After I determine that there is not much benefit for me, I 
generally just hit delete on successive postings in that thread.  
Sometimes, I follow a thread that has no benefit for me just because 
there are quite often surprising nuggets buried in there like hidden 
treasure.  But when (like now) I have 241 unread messages (originally 
997 downloaded about 72 hours ago) in kplug alone (not counting 
-kooler), I tend to ignore more than I normally would.  This particular 
thread has kept my interest even though there is not much appeal to me 
about the thread itself beyond the first several posts.





--
Ralph


Since all Joshua needed was extra sunlight, and most ancients believed 
the sun moves, not the Earth, a human author of a fictitious account 
would only have needed to refer to the sun stopping. [Joshua commanded 
both the sun *and* the moon to stop. So, how did he know?]



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Re: GPL dustups


David Brown wrote:

On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 06:08:18PM -0700, SJS wrote:


I look at Sun's logo, or Apple's, and I say "wow". I look at Linux's
Tux, and say 'ugh' -- it's a terrible logo.  Complicated and busy and,
well, not very nice at all.

Contrast toyota, mitsubishi, audi, subaru, etc., with ford, or cadillac.


My stuffed Tux is much more comfortable to hug than my Toyota logo :-)

I think Porsche wins for ugliest logo, though, at least compared to the
somewhat simplified Cadillac logo.  The European horse-based logos aren't
any better than Tux.

David





I think Porsche wins for the ugliest sports cars.

I don't remember seeing a Porsche that I liked its looks.




--
Ralph


Science is *not* happy to entertain hypothesis and experiments that are 
too far afield from the accepted dogma. It's a very human endeavor, and 
it shows, with fads and cliques and political backstabbing.

--Stewart Stremler


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Re: GPL dustups BIG VENT/RANT!!

2008-06-20 Thread Gregory K. Ruiz-Ade


On Jun 20, 2008, at 3:56 AM, Todd Walton wrote:

All this talk about Bill Gates, you guys are starting to sound  
jealous.



Only of his wealth.

:P

Gregory

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Re: GPL dustups BIG VENT/RANT!!

2008-06-20 Thread Todd Walton

All this talk about Bill Gates, you guys are starting to sound jealous.

-todd


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Re: GPL dustups BIG VENT/RANT!!

2008-06-19 Thread Steve M Bibayoff

Hello,

2008/6/19 James E. Henderson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:

> Windows was originally developed by Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center),
> who had no plans to release it, market it or even to claim originating it.
> It was in the public domain,

wo, what are you guys smoking/drinking down in SD?


Somehow the Comdex story where Bill Gates flew all the engineers down
to look at something called Gem and the Xerox Star(which was shown to
Steve jobs in exchange for some Apple stock) seems to have gotten left
out.


;-)

Steve


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Re: GPL dustups BIG VENT/RANT!!

2008-06-19 Thread James E. Henderson




Paul G. Allen wrote:

James E. Henderson wrote:

Even before DOS, Micro-Soft had a BASIC interpreter they developed 
from a public domain research project into proprietary software using 
"borrowed" time on a mainframe system. Their BASIC ran under the CP/M 
operating system developed by Digital Research, a company Micro-Soft 
soon destroyed.




The story goes that Bill Gates stole BASIC from someone in a 
university he attended. So, apparently, M$ didn't event write any of 
their versions of BASIC.
I'm pretty sure he wasn't attending the university. He had already 
dropped out. He just stole their computer time.


Time on a computer used to be very expensive. The federal government had 
developed the BASIC interpreter and had released it into the public 
domain, so Gates wasn't stealing BASIC, he was stealing computer time by 
claiming he was using it for something else. He converted the public 
domain program into proprietary software using that Midas touch of his, 
never revealing what changes he had made to cause his version not to be 
in the public domain.


Wish I could find the link I once had showing the history of M$ products.

PGA
At the time IBM wanted to release their new PC, Gates, who had already 
changed the company name from Micro-Soft to Microsoft, found an 
operating system developed by a kid in Seattle (I think) that would do 
much the same things as CP/M without some of its issues. He once more 
made some changes to the program, named it DOS, and claimed it as his 
own. The kid protested that DOS was supposed to be a joint development, 
that he hadn't sold all rights to it but by that time Microsoft could 
afford lots of lawyers and was able to litigate the kid into obscurity.


It was the DOS platform that showed Microsoft how profitable releasing 
pointless new versions of their operating systems could be: each version 
released was crippled in some way and Microsoft always announced that 
they were developing a new version with super new features. Then Digital 
Research, whose CP/M was being universally ignored by then, released 
their DR-DOS that fulfilled many of the promises Microsoft had been 
making. Each time Microsoft made a new release incorporating some of the 
features they imitated from DR-DOS, Digital Research had something new 
and better to hit them with.


Windows was originally developed by Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research 
Center), who had no plans to release it, market it or even to claim 
originating it. It was in the public domain, so both Apple and Microsoft 
snapped it up and made their own proprietary versions of it. Even though 
the Apple version was superior in many ways, it ran on a closed 
architecture monochrome system; the open architecture PC was more 
appealing although it took until version 3.0 for Windows to make it do 
anything useful and it was always pretty much of a kludge.



James



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Re: GPL dustups BIG VENT/RANT!!

2008-06-19 Thread Ryan Lewon

On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 06:38:54PM -0700, David Brown wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 11:53:23AM -0700, Paul G. Allen wrote:
>
>>> Although in this case it's "create and extend" since they created the
>>> standard in the first place.
>>
>> Um, no. C# is a modern version of J++, which was a M$ (read 
>> bastardized) version of Java. M$ was sued for Java license violations, 
>> and forced to remove J++ from their OS and stop selling it. Years 
>> later, it's re-released as C#.
>>
>> It's not new. They did not invent it.
>
> Depends on what you mean by "invent".  The same argument could be made that
> Sun didn't invent Java, since many of its concepts were borrowed from other
> languages.
>
> C# is very definitely not a hacked up version of Java.  It is definitely a
> similar family language, though, and both of them bother me in the same
> ways.
>
> I'm glad that Java has finally made people realize that memory management
> is a good thing to have in a language.  I can't say that I otherwise
> particularly like either language.
>
> David
>

Errr, actually C# was not even microsofts creation they "Bought" it. It was 
created by Anders Hejlsberg from Denmark. The story isn't clear on wikipedia 
and other sites, but the story remains that he was "Bought out" for his side 
development of this language as a few developers i've heard talk about this 
same subject multiple times.. 



>
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Re: GPL dustups BIG VENT/RANT!!

2008-06-19 Thread David Brown


On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 11:53:23AM -0700, Paul G. Allen wrote:


Although in this case it's "create and extend" since they created the
standard in the first place.


Um, no. C# is a modern version of J++, which was a M$ (read bastardized) 
version of Java. M$ was sued for Java license violations, and forced to 
remove J++ from their OS and stop selling it. Years later, it's re-released 
as C#.


It's not new. They did not invent it.


Depends on what you mean by "invent".  The same argument could be made that
Sun didn't invent Java, since many of its concepts were borrowed from other
languages.

C# is very definitely not a hacked up version of Java.  It is definitely a
similar family language, though, and both of them bother me in the same
ways.

I'm glad that Java has finally made people realize that memory management
is a good thing to have in a language.  I can't say that I otherwise
particularly like either language.

David


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Re: GPL dustups BIG VENT/RANT!!

2008-06-19 Thread Paul G. Allen


James G. Sack (jim) wrote:

Paul G. Allen wrote:

James E. Henderson wrote:


Even before DOS, Micro-Soft had a BASIC interpreter they developed
from a public domain research project into proprietary software using
"borrowed" time on a mainframe system. Their BASIC ran under the CP/M
operating system developed by Digital Research, a company Micro-Soft
soon destroyed.


The story goes that Bill Gates stole BASIC from someone in a university
he attended. So, apparently, M$ didn't event write any of their versions
of BASIC.


Well, that sounds different from what recall -- that the initial basic
was in fact the product of a decent programming effort on the part of
our friend Bill (and maybe Paul). Don't know about possible
incorporation or conversion of other people's code afterwards.

They had quite a decent macro-assembler and a reasonable c-compiler for
the CPM environment. Then came the PC, and the world changed.

I believe they essentially replaced their own 808x C-compiler with a
competitor they bought out - what was their name. again?


Wish I could find the link I once had showing the history of M$ products.


How about:
  http://www.thocp.net/companies/microsoft/microsoft_company.htm
which is consistent with what I remember.



No. What I'm thinking of is a site that had a table of all M$ products 
throughout the years. It chowed the product, the year the product was 
released, the origins of the product, and whether the original product 
was purchased, licensed, or otherwise acquired. It showed that M$ never 
invented anything, they only somehow acquired all the 
technology/products/standards they offer.


PGA
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Owner, Sr. Engineer
Random Logic Consulting Services
www.randomlogic.com


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Re: GPL dustups BIG VENT/RANT!!

2008-06-19 Thread Robert Donovan

On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 12:00 PM, Paul G. Allen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> James E. Henderson wrote:
>
>> Even before DOS, Micro-Soft had a BASIC interpreter they developed from a
>> public domain research project into proprietary software using "borrowed"
>> time on a mainframe system. Their BASIC ran under the CP/M operating system
>> developed by Digital Research, a company Micro-Soft soon destroyed.
>>
>
> The story goes that Bill Gates stole BASIC from someone in a university he
> attended. So, apparently, M$ didn't event write any of their versions of
> BASIC.
>
> Wish I could find the link I once had showing the history of M$ products.
>
I don't recall about BASIC, but I saw an episode of either Biography
or Modern Marvels about how Gates paid something like $50K for QDOS.
They interviewed the guy he bought it from. That guy said that he was
glad to get 50K and it never occurred to him to ask for some stock in
the company at the time. He admitted that, had he been a bit quicker
and smarter, he was pretty sure they would have given it to him.

RD


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Re: GPL dustups BIG VENT/RANT!!

2008-06-19 Thread James G. Sack (jim)

Paul G. Allen wrote:
> James E. Henderson wrote:
> 
>> Even before DOS, Micro-Soft had a BASIC interpreter they developed
>> from a public domain research project into proprietary software using
>> "borrowed" time on a mainframe system. Their BASIC ran under the CP/M
>> operating system developed by Digital Research, a company Micro-Soft
>> soon destroyed.
>>
> 
> The story goes that Bill Gates stole BASIC from someone in a university
> he attended. So, apparently, M$ didn't event write any of their versions
> of BASIC.

Well, that sounds different from what recall -- that the initial basic
was in fact the product of a decent programming effort on the part of
our friend Bill (and maybe Paul). Don't know about possible
incorporation or conversion of other people's code afterwards.

They had quite a decent macro-assembler and a reasonable c-compiler for
the CPM environment. Then came the PC, and the world changed.

I believe they essentially replaced their own 808x C-compiler with a
competitor they bought out - what was their name. again?

> 
> Wish I could find the link I once had showing the history of M$ products.

How about:
  http://www.thocp.net/companies/microsoft/microsoft_company.htm
which is consistent with what I remember.

Regards,
..jim

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Re: GPL dustups BIG VENT/RANT!!

2008-06-19 Thread Paul G. Allen


James E. Henderson wrote:

Even before DOS, Micro-Soft had a BASIC interpreter they developed from 
a public domain research project into proprietary software using 
"borrowed" time on a mainframe system. Their BASIC ran under the CP/M 
operating system developed by Digital Research, a company Micro-Soft 
soon destroyed.




The story goes that Bill Gates stole BASIC from someone in a university 
he attended. So, apparently, M$ didn't event write any of their versions 
of BASIC.


Wish I could find the link I once had showing the history of M$ products.

PGA
--
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Owner, Sr. Engineer
Random Logic Consulting Services
www.randomlogic.com


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Re: GPL dustups BIG VENT/RANT!!

2008-06-19 Thread Paul G. Allen


David Brown wrote:

On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 02:40:38PM -0700, Andrew Lentvorski wrote:


They've actually played fairly nicely with the CLR/C# standards.  This
isn't too surprising, since they're entering a market that already has a
well-established language and runtime.  I guess they figure they can
compete better by actually standardizing their implementation.


All together now: "Embrace and extend."


Although in this case it's "create and extend" since they created the
standard in the first place.


Um, no. C# is a modern version of J++, which was a M$ (read bastardized) 
version of Java. M$ was sued for Java license violations, and forced to 
remove J++ from their OS and stop selling it. Years later, it's 
re-released as C#.


It's not new. They did not invent it.



From my point of view, I see no advantage to anything .Net and only a 
whole lot of Microsoft pain if they somehow get the upper hand over 
Java.  Fortunately, most of the languages targeting the CLR also 
target the JVM, so I'm covered simply by making sure that I never use 
a Microsoft-specific language.


This, of course, is why I won't touch C# with a 20-foot pole.


I will not touch it for the reasons Andrew stated, and because, after 
researching it for a former employer, I found the licensing to be 
fscking insane! M$ licensing basically says you'd better be careful what 
you wire and what libraries you use or we will sue you. Sun Java 
licensing says, write what you want and use the libraries you want. In 
addition, if you want to extend the Java language, you can as long as 
you submit the changes/extensions back to Sun. Do that with C# (like 
they'd even give you the source to do it!) and you're in for a legal battle.




C# should be reasonably safe if you use a non-MS implementation of CLR and
the language.  It'll definitely keep you from using the extensions.

Its kind of unfortunate that Microsoft has such a way of ruining good
things, since I like CLR a lot better than JVM.  I do think both are too
heavily invested in a very specific class/object model, though.


I for one do not see C# as a good thing. I see it as something that made 
Java more like C++, with the addition of a bad license, which is a Very 
Bad Thing.


PGA
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Re: GPL dustups BIG VENT/RANT!!

2008-06-19 Thread DJA


Richard Reynolds wrote:

A lot of people do something about it.

I know, I also know some of them used to be on this list.

And without the help of KPLUG over all of these years I couldn't have 
learned how to use it so well.
I thought that also for a while. but lately I dont think you could prove 
that to anyone


OOH well its been fun while it lasted catch a few of you in other places.

Richard Reynolds
[EMAIL PROTECTED]


Who was that masked man, anyway?

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Re: GPL dustups BIG VENT/RANT!!

2008-06-19 Thread Richard Reynolds


A lot of people do something about it.

I know, I also know some of them used to be on this list.

And without the help of KPLUG over all of these years I couldn't have learned how to use 
it so well.

I thought that also for a while. but lately I dont think you could prove that 
to anyone

OOH well its been fun while it lasted catch a few of you in other places.

Richard Reynolds
[EMAIL PROTECTED] 



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Re: GPL dustups BIG VENT/RANT!!

2008-06-18 Thread David Brown


On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 02:40:38PM -0700, Andrew Lentvorski wrote:


They've actually played fairly nicely with the CLR/C# standards.  This
isn't too surprising, since they're entering a market that already has a
well-established language and runtime.  I guess they figure they can
compete better by actually standardizing their implementation.


All together now: "Embrace and extend."


Although in this case it's "create and extend" since they created the
standard in the first place.

From my point of view, I see no advantage to anything .Net and only a whole 
lot of Microsoft pain if they somehow get the upper hand over Java.  
Fortunately, most of the languages targeting the CLR also target the JVM, 
so I'm covered simply by making sure that I never use a Microsoft-specific 
language.


This, of course, is why I won't touch C# with a 20-foot pole.


C# should be reasonably safe if you use a non-MS implementation of CLR and
the language.  It'll definitely keep you from using the extensions.

Its kind of unfortunate that Microsoft has such a way of ruining good
things, since I like CLR a lot better than JVM.  I do think both are too
heavily invested in a very specific class/object model, though.

David


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Re: GPL dustups BIG VENT/RANT!!

2008-06-18 Thread Andrew Lentvorski


David Brown wrote:

On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 01:35:15AM -0700, DJA wrote:

Which standard has MS created or invented, or even actively promoted? 
There are lots of standards. You talk as if there is only One 
Standard(tm) in the computing world.


They've actually played fairly nicely with the CLR/C# standards.  This
isn't too surprising, since they're entering a market that already has a
well-established language and runtime.  I guess they figure they can
compete better by actually standardizing their implementation.


All together now: "Embrace and extend."


That doesn't keep them from their normal approach of going beyond the
standard and implementing all kinds of extra stuff to keep things
incompatible, though.


Ayup.  That's the Microsoft way.  And they will make sure to 
brainwash^Weducate their programmers that the Microsoft-specific way is 
the correct way.


From my point of view, I see no advantage to anything .Net and only a 
whole lot of Microsoft pain if they somehow get the upper hand over 
Java.  Fortunately, most of the languages targeting the CLR also target 
the JVM, so I'm covered simply by making sure that I never use a 
Microsoft-specific language.


This, of course, is why I won't touch C# with a 20-foot pole.


I suspect people are referring to the office file formats.  Standard or
not, these are close to the worst possibly file formats one could come up
with for interchange.  It's basically a serialized object dump of the
particular version of the program that wrote the file.  They have to
include support for all of the old versions.  It doesn't resemble a file
format that got any forethought.  It should receive a failing grade, or
have failed a design review.


As much as I hate Microsoft, this is neither the problem nor a black 
mark against Microsoft.


These formats are well-designed *for what they do*.  They were never 
meant for interchange.  They were meant to persistently store and load 
the internal state of the application *quickly*.


That's not an insignificant problem when the computer you are running on 
could be a 25MHx 486 with 8MB of RAM.  Then, once you write those files, 
you are stuck reading them for a ton of generations.


The problem is the fact that Microsoft just really doesn't want to play 
in an interoperable world.  Period.  And will do everything in their 
power to avoid doing so.



OOXML seems to be an XML representation of the same non-designed stream of
data.


Yes, that is what it is seems like it was supposed to be.

-a


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Re: GPL dustups BIG VENT/RANT!!

2008-06-18 Thread Andrew Lentvorski


Richard Reynolds wrote:

17 years and we dont have BETTER, we have an alternative. Its still not 
BETTER! its nice, and in many ways it is better, but its not BETTER.


Spoken like a Windows brainwashee.

For starters, Microsoft has been tail-end Charlie for a long time now. 
Firefox became so much better that even Microsoft had to move.  Let me 
turn your argument around so that you undestand how specious it is: "7 
years and we don't have BETTER!  Internet Explorer 7 is nice, and in 
many ways it is better, but its not BETTER!"


You argument, boiled down, is "Linux isn't compelling enough to make me 
learn something new."  Fair enough.  I don't make the students in my 
classes switch away from Windows if it works for them, either.  You are 
both poorer for you decision, in my opinion, but it's your call, not mine.


And, by the way, there are better operating systems.  People would argue 
that OS X is much better than Windows.  BeOS was certainly better than 
Windows at handling multimedia and still maintaining interactive rate. 
The *nix alternatives almost always stomp on Windows for both stability 
and security.  In fact, one of the untouted benefits to using Windows 
virtualization is the isolation of OS bugs relative to application bugs. 
 When Windows crashes, you can get at the actual failure point and 
check what happened.  For some reason, people don't seem to need this on 
the *nix systems.  And Microsoft's ability to handle Asian languages was 
so bad, for so long that a 20-year-old word processor appliance (and its 
later conversion to software) staved off Microsoft for better than a 
decade in Japan.  I can go on and on and on.


Windows is only demonstrably better in a single dimension--popularity.

Even if you consider *drivers*, which so many people tout as a Windows 
benefit, many of the drivers on Linux for the *same hardware* are 
better.  The issue is documentation-not quality of programming.


Lets try it this way how can we compete with toyota if everyone is 
building a better mousetrap! toyota (M$ in this example) already has a 
car everyone recognises, its got great economy, (low enough running 
costs), has a higher resale value vs its buying value. a NEW competitor 
to toyota cant come out with an ((insert your fav worst car)). even if 
you can get it in your choice of 2 to 4 seats, 3 to 6 cyclinder engines, 
air/auto ..


You need to go study your history a bit.  Toyota and Honda didn't just 
spring up as an alternative to GM/Ford/Chrysler.  They were subsidized 
by the government for a long time while they sucked.


So, the government should embark on a 20-year program to fund the next 
competitor to Microsoft, right?


Luckily for us, there seems to be a legion of programmers who already 
did so.


-a


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Re: GPL dustups BIG VENT/RANT!!

2008-06-18 Thread James E. Henderson




David Brown wrote:

On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 07:43:40PM -0700, Richard Reynolds wrote:

pre-microsoft computers were a pain.
microsoft did what they had to do to fix it.
and regardless of your like for them or dislike of them, they did 
alot.

What computers ?
Pre-M$ was Apple, and they were wonderful !

Very interesting is this the same thinking that M$ == Winhozed???

or am I forgetting my history lessons didnt apple come AFTER M$


Apple Macintosh: 1984
Windows 1.0: 1985

Windows 3.0 was in 1990 when it actually became something people ran.

Of course, depends on what you mean by "Microsoft", and whether you count
DOS in that.  The IBM P/C running DOS was 1981.  Eventually, it even had
exciting things like subdirectories and harddisk support.


Even before DOS, Micro-Soft had a BASIC interpreter they developed from 
a public domain research project into proprietary software using 
"borrowed" time on a mainframe system. Their BASIC ran under the CP/M 
operating system developed by Digital Research, a company Micro-Soft 
soon destroyed.



James

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Re: GPL dustups

2008-06-18 Thread Martin Franco

On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 10:10:36PM -0500, Todd Walton wrote:
> No, the fundamental rule of capitalism is that the means of production
> are in private hands.  Competition has been the historical modus
> operandi of the capitalist and it's served us very well while
> production truly was in the hands of private property owners.  But it
> is not fundamental.
Fundamental, defining charactoristic, 

> > When people become producers, whether free software hackers, independent 
> > musicians,
> > or whatever, their golden rule is often cooporation.
> 
> People *are* producers in a capitalist civilization.
I should have said 'own the means of production.'

> >> Community is profit.
> > Care to elaborate?  Profit is the difference between what the employees
> > of a company are paid and the value they produce.
> 
> If there were no other cost than employee time, you'd have a company
> that produced nothing.  Profit is the benefit a thing brings.  m-w.com
> says profit is:
So I over-simplified a little.  I didn't mean for it to be taken
literally and nit-picked.  I'm not writing a dictionary, after all.

> noun 1: a valuable return : gain 2: the excess of returns over
> expenditure in a transaction or series of transactions; especially :
> the excess of the selling price of goods over their cost 3: net income
> usually for a given period of time 4: the ratio of profit for a given
> year to the amount of capital invested or to the value of sales 5: the
> compensation accruing to entrepreneurs for the assumption of risk in
> business enterprise as distinguished from wages or rent
> 
> verb 1: to be of service or advantage : avail  2: to derive benefit :
> gain 3: to make a profit
> 
> There's a lot more than money there and I, for one, consider community
> a benefit in a great many cases.  It's why I'm here.
That is a pretty general definition.  What would the definition be if
you were to only consider capitalism?  Would non-economic incentives
have any place in a purely economic theory?

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Re: GPL dustups

2008-06-18 Thread Martin Franco

On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 12:28:22PM -0700, Robert Donovan wrote:
> If they are giving the work away for free, then they are engaged in a
> hobby and have nothing to complain about if they fail to make money
> from those works. If they are giving the works awsay to increase
> demand for their other works, then they are incurring a cost for
> advertising equal to the value they might have gotten for similar work
> they are trying to sell. If their works are not sufficiently popular
> to make enough money to pay for the cost of procdcution for the work
> they gave away and the work they sold, this tells them two things,
> first that the "community"(or, perhaps, just those who bought their
> product) doesn't consider the benefit gained by those works to be
> worth the money, and that they must either stop producing that
> particular product or find something else to do that will make them
> enough money to continue to engage in there hobby, however beneficial
> those who produce it might think it is to the comunity.
Good point, but what about when people like RMS give away a valuable
product for moral reasons?

> I'm not sure GNU/GPL is outside the framework of capitalism. It's a
> cost, pure and simple, which gets no income back if given away for
> free and gets progressively diminishing income, if sold, after the
> sale, because the producer has granted others the right to use and
> modify the product. It may stinulate other demand for other products
> or services, such as, as somebody has pointed out elsewhere, if
> GNU/linux enhances the production, delivery, or implementation of
> another paid product or service, but it's still a cost.
Copyright is very consistent with the idea of capital, of private
ownership.  Copyleft, on the other hand, leverages the existing system
to provide a communal ownership of something.  RMS and others of similar
ideals could have chosen to use copyright for thier projects and may be
a whole lot richer now (in monetary terms) if they had.  I'm glad they
didn't.

> >> Artists don't compete in the same way as the  typical business.
> >> They strive for the best performance, not the most  money or
> >> largest share of the market.
> 
> Many businesses strive to produce the best product the fact that you
> or I might not consider the product to be so not withstanding. Thus,
> artists compete exactly the same way as businesses do in that regard.
And why do they want the best product, if not to maximize profit?  And
what happens if there is no competing product on the market?  The most
profitable course of action would not be to release thier best product,
but to improve on an existing product, get people to upgrade, and then
incorporate another improvement into it.

> > This is probably the goal for most/all artists.  A corporation like the
> > RIAA, however, has a very different set of priorities.
> 
> Of course they do. The artists are producers of entertainment product,
> songs, books, concert performances, etc. The RIAA are distributors.
> Most artists can't distribute thier work as effectively as the RIAA
> can. This is the value they add. The RIAA can't produce songe people
> want to listen to. This is the value the artist adds. One can argue
> how much their take of the artists' income should be, but that's
> mostly between the artist and the RIAA. One can also argue how they
> are damaged when somebody copies a song that is not available in
> stores any longer, but the artist has a right to be paid for those
> works.
For the musician, the music is very important.  For the RIAA, the music
is incidental.  I wasn't comparing thier roles, but thier motives.

> If I had been a slave of the owner of Vons or anyone else, I would not
> have had the freedom do get where I am today. What you call freedom
> from restraint, I'd call benevolent, indirect slavery.
You have freedom from restraint; you are free to work those long hours
and move up the social ladder.  The freedom you don't have is
opportunity; you started at the bottom, while others started at the top.
How is that fair?

> >>> His income is not proportional to the work he does to get it.
> Really? So do you run a billion-dollar corporation? I mean, if there's
> not that much work involved . . . Over-simplification works both ways.
> Or how about this? I don't think programmers should get paid so much.
> All they're doing is typing on a keyboard, how much work is that, I
> mean, really what are they building???
> 
> You could say that his income is disproportional to the amount of
> manual labor he does to get it, but manual lagor is not the only kind
> of work. I think most people would agree that intellectual work can be
> far more valuable that certain kinds of manual labor and vise versa.
> Oh and one more thing, what makes you think that figuring out how to
> run a competitive business is any less a creative endaevor than
> picture art, writing, or music? It's a differnt kicreativity, not
> meant as entertainment, but re

Re: GPL dustups

2008-06-18 Thread Martin Franco

On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 08:53:37AM -0700, Bob La Quey wrote:
> My experience has been that very few people want to take on the
> responsibilities and risks of ownership. People want to share profits
> but rarely losses. In a world where all risk cannot be avoided one
> must come up with a mechanism for compensating the risk takers. How do
> you propose to do this?
Very few people have the real opportunity to take on those
responsibilities, and they are used to not having that opportunity.
Besides, the responsibility and potential for gain/loss would be much
less than it is now as it would be divided up among many more people.

An anarchist society would look very different from today's.  Excerpt
from section I.2 of the Anarchy Faq:

  "...the ultimate goal of anarchism, we stress, is not the
  self-management of existing workplaces or industries. However, a
  revolution will undoubtedly see the occupation and placing under
  self-management much of existing industry and we start our discussion
  assuming a similar set-up as exists today. This does not mean that an
  anarchist society will continue to be like this, we simply present the
  initial stages using examples we are all familiar with. It is the
  simply the first stage of transforming industry into something more
  ecologically safe, socially integrated and individually and
  collectively empowering for people."

> Profit = Resources retained for future use. Inequity of distribution
> exists in all known human systems. Inequity of risk also exists.
> Unfortunately classical Marxist analysis of all of these problems is
> superficial and impedes and real understanding of the problems.
Section C.2.9: Do profits reflect a reward for risk?  (short answer is
no)

> The Marxist systems have tended to degenerate into bureaucratic state
> monopolies of the worst possible kind.
Which is why anarchists have always opposed the state communist methods
of Marxism, advocating instead for a decentraled socialism.

> Anarchism, in the sense that you used it, has not ever been found to
> be persistent.
It seemed to be doing well during the anarchist revolution in Spain
circa 1936.  Average income went up, production increased, etc.  That
system was militarily destroyed, it did not collapse, though it did not
have a lot of time which which to do so (about 3 years, i think).  As
far as I know, that was the best chance anarchy has had to prove itself.
Should we throw it out only because we can't follow in the footsteps of
some other nation?

> A sustainable, equitable economy remains an open problem.  An open
> problem not likely to succumb to old dogmas.
Define 'old dogma.'  Anarchism had the spotlight in Spain for a few
years and proved it may be a viable system.  Is it a 'new dogma' if it
hasn't yet been definitively tested and has support (even if only a
small minority) today?

> It does not follow from the fact, which I accept, that the system is
> screwed up, that your suggestions contain even the hint of a solution.
Anarchy Faq: www.infoshop.org/faq/

> The problems that you are discussing (unfortunately with an incredibly
> poor grasp of basic accounting) are a small part of a much larger
> problem.
All the more reason to consider alternatives to the 'much larger
problem.'

> You might do well to learn a little something about accounting before
> you make a statement as absurd as:
> 
> "Profit is the difference between what the employees
> of a company are paid and the value they produce."
I can see oversimplified, but what is absurd about it?  The employees
produce something by a process which likely has costs of it's own
(materials, etc.).  They are paid for their efforts, and there is money
left over.  If that money is used to meet future demands of the
business, then it's not really a surplus, it's just another cost, but
not all of that surplus value is used in such a way.  Unless I am
seriously mistaken, that money taken over and above what whas necessary
for the function of the business is profit.

> And the capital equipment they use? and its cost and depreciation?
> The risk of that capital?
The machines people make to ease labor are not productive in and of
themselves; they represent a shift in the kind of labor and an increase
in the productivity of working people.  For the people using the
machines, they are just another cost of production.

> Expenses != Money paid to employees.
Expenses == pay to employees + production costs + ... (duh)

> Revenues  != Cash coming in. (Risk, timing, recognition, see futures,
> see derivatives.)
???

> Profit = Revenues - Expenses != value extorted from wage slaves.
Depends on where the profit goes.  If it goes back into the
organization, then no.  If it goes into someone else's pocket, then yes.

  "At the moment we live in a society in which there are two major
  classes - the bosses and the workers. The bosses own the factories,
  banks, shops, etc.  Workers don't. All we have is our labour, which we
  use to mak

Re: GPL dustups BIG VENT/RANT!!

2008-06-18 Thread David Brown


On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 01:35:15AM -0700, DJA wrote:

Which standard has MS created or invented, or even actively promoted? There 
are lots of standards. You talk as if there is only One Standard(tm) in the 
computing world.


They've actually played fairly nicely with the CLR/C# standards.  This
isn't too surprising, since they're entering a market that already has a
well-established language and runtime.  I guess they figure they can
compete better by actually standardizing their implementation.

That doesn't keep them from their normal approach of going beyond the
standard and implementing all kinds of extra stuff to keep things
incompatible, though.

I suspect people are referring to the office file formats.  Standard or
not, these are close to the worst possibly file formats one could come up
with for interchange.  It's basically a serialized object dump of the
particular version of the program that wrote the file.  They have to
include support for all of the old versions.  It doesn't resemble a file
format that got any forethought.  It should receive a failing grade, or
have failed a design review.

OOXML seems to be an XML representation of the same non-designed stream of
data.

David


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Re: GPL dustups BIG VENT/RANT!!

2008-06-18 Thread DJA


Richard Reynolds wrote:

Richard Reynolds wrote:


one of the things they did was to set standards, standards they 
aproved, and



If it were a standard we would be able to interoperate.


Granted M$ has not done it in a while, but they DID and they did so at a 
time this industry had NONE. I dont understand why people forget this!


Maybe MY memory is not so good (I only got into computers in 1982), but 
no they DIDN'T.


Which standard has MS created or invented, or even actively promoted? 
There are lots of standards. You talk as if there is only One 
Standard(tm) in the computing world.


What MS DID do it co-opt lots of perfectly working, well thought out, 
inter-operable, and widely accepted and used standards in lots of areas.


OOXML is an example of a standard MS approved. The problem is, most of 
the rest of the world has not approved. And one, by the way that no one, 
including MS, can implement, because it is not even fully specified (and 
probably never will be).



and why cant it?? I do all kinds of stuff with M$ files every day 
switching between different computers and computer systems including 
linux.


You only do that because either the file format existed before MS 
bought/stole/co-opted/claimed credit for it/caved in and used it, or 
because a lot of very talented people /outside/ Microsoft figured out 
how it worked well enough to allow their own software to understand it. 
Or they paid MS a pound of flesh to use it without being sued or 
extorted out of existence.



the only parts that dont work, will never work in linux, not 
because they cant, but because some developer thinks "its not a good 
idea" to do that.


It doesn't work because it's a proprietary format, the details of which, 
MS won't divulge, since it doesn't want interoperability. It wants 
monopoly. It doesn't work because as soon as it's reverse-engineered 
(oooh, I've said a naughty word!) MS changes it just a bit (Word .doc, 
SMB/CIFS).



Give it up, the developer isnt supposed to be saying 
you shouldnt, [s]he should be saying "ok but its less secure lets fix 
it" and still make it work


I don't understand what you just said. Maybe my English it not so good.


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Re: GPL dustups BIG VENT/RANT!!

2008-06-18 Thread DJA

Richard Reynolds wrote:
Pre-Microsoft computers* were no more a pain for those who learned on
them than were Microsoft computers* a pain for those who learned on them.

OK so that needed a comma "Pre-M$, computers were a pain"

then it becomes for those who learned on IT. because my blue computer
was completely different than my brown computer. Now ive gone and done
it, I know the blue one was blue, but was the brown one brown DANG
IT!!!

I'm sorry, maybe it's just me. But that was fairly incomprehensible.

if you want to work with M$ you can they will let you, you have to
pay, and you have to play by there rules, but it works.
After all, MS prefers zero competitors. Zero. Which is why "It" (your
"it" above) doesn't work most of the time.

Any business would prefere to have zero competition!

and according to
http://www.forbes.com/2008/03/05/richest-people-billionaires-billionaires08-cx_lk_0305billie_land.html

and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft

I'd say IT worked!!!
the poor dude is down to #3 such a bummer, his toilet water is probibly
more expensive than what I have in my bank account right now :D

Anyone who measures wealth and value in terms of money only is a poor
person indeed. (America's robber barons were wealthy also.)

* What is a Microsoft computer anyway? AFAIK, Microsoft has never made
computer.

I don't know :D however could one call a M$ computer any computer in
which say Intel/AMD changed plans in there processor family in order to
run M$ software better??? how about hard drives being designed to run
windows better?

Sorry, I hadn't heard of that one.

the list of hardware manufacturers that are tweaking
there hardware so it runs on M$ Winhozed better is long.

My experience is that while virtually all hardware runs on Windows, it
doesn't necessarily run better than it would on another OS. It's not
that manufacturers tweak their products so they run better on Windows,
it's so they run at all on Windows, given that almost no one knows what
the Windows API rules de jour are.

That's a result of MS never really divulging enough info about its OS to
any but a very, VERY small number of "Partners" (eventually to be road
kill under MS's wheels) in order to build a simple, robust, decently
working product. And that info is given only on the promise that it
won't be used to directly compete with MS.

I think I
remember something about that, at least every time a new piece of
hardware is released.

Why wouldn't a manufacturer build his products to inter-operate with the
dominant OS? That's not a measure of MS value, goodness, or usability.
Only of its market mass.

Or if your brain hurts how about an X-Box :D though thats hopefully clearly not
what I ment.

I guess the X-box slipped my mind because it's not a general purpose PC
(well, unless it's running Linux :P ), but marginally built game console
sold at a huge loss in order to subsidize an overvalued and tightly
controlled game publishing division.

I still dont see how another company deserves a handout to help them
compete.

Compared to what? Linux is free. Even OS X, while not cheap, is a far
better value. However even with the innovation of Apple (which is
eventually copied by MS three or four years later and called NEW!) they
have a very difficult time competing in a economic sector co-opted by MS
through decades of anti-competitive behavior and downright criminal
activity.

(Ironically, it's not Apple's innovation and marketing prowess that has
caused its market share to rise dramatically in recent years, but MS
being its own worst enemy: creating software, generally so broken,
finally pissing off enough people that they're starting to look for
something they don't want daily to throw through the closest window (pun
intended)).

Find a
marketing department to come up with a name, this will help you NOT come
up with stupid names like lindows. Create catchy advertisements. And in
one year spend 1/5 of what M$ spends on marketing in a day.

2. Get bought by Microsoft
4. ???
5. Profit

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Re: GPL dustups BIG VENT/RANT!!


Richard Reynolds wrote:
Want to compete. I'm ALL for it. Find a better product (who cares how) 
but it had better be better, not just an alternative. Because this "Its 
better because its not M$" is not going to work. Set a better price, ok 
how about a


In order to compete to the extent that it has today all Linux has had to 
do is gather together thousands of the worlds best programmers and get 
them to work together for 17 years for free and then give their work away 
for free. I just don't get why others can't compete with MS also.


Thats exactly my point!

17 years and we dont have BETTER, we have an alternative. Its still not 
BETTER! its nice, and in many ways it is better, but its not BETTER.


we can throw around words like "its more secure", "its more reliable","its 
free" and IT IS (to a point), but its a good starting point, and where linux 
is standing is in a good spot. but some programmers are over in the Gnome 
camp trying to make something better, some are in the KDE camp trying to 
make it better. some play with this, some play with that some are doing 
this some are doing that. great.


Lets try it this way how can we compete with toyota if everyone is building 
a better mousetrap! toyota (M$ in this example) already has a car everyone 
recognises, its got great economy, (low enough running costs), has a higher 
resale value vs its buying value. a NEW competitor to toyota cant come out 
with an ((insert your fav worst car)). even if you can get it in your choice 
of 2 to 4 seats, 3 to 6 cyclinder engines, air/auto ..



Richard Reynolds
[EMAIL PROTECTED]


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Re: GPL dustups BIG VENT/RANT!!


Richard Reynolds wrote:
Granted M$ has not done it in a while, but they DID and they did so at a 
time this industry had NONE. I dont understand why people forget this!


Indeed the industry had none. Despite Microsoft's best efforts to lobby 
us all to promote the use of one standard which we could all read and 
write our documents on no matter what platform we used. Er...wait...


and why cant it?? I do all kinds of stuff with M$ files every day switching 
between different computers and computer systems including linux. the only 
parts that dont work, will never work in linux, not because they cant, but 
because some developer thinks "its not a good idea" to do that. Give it up, 


I've never known a developer to say this. I've known a lot to say "We've 
been working to reverse-engineer the proprietary and non-standard 
Microsoft file formats so that we can be compatible for years but it is 
so convoluted and changes with every new version of Office that we can't 
keep up!"


If the computer HAS to stay on, then NO! but lets face it this isnt 
exclusive to windows!


Eryeah. It pretty much is. Linux/Unix patches rarely require reboots.

going to help. postscript isnt without a ton of faults, and unless I am 
missing something isnt postscript copywriten to adobe??? whats stoping them 
from pulling a compuserve when they wanted to collect royalaties out of 
every .gif user.


It is licensed with every printer that supports it. Ghostscript etc are 
free unencumbered implementations of postscript. So now, they can't pull 
a compuserv.


and lately I just look at what the whole mess and wonder  and get pissed 
off at the anti M$ for bashing beyond what M$ deserves.


They don't get anywhere near the bashing they deserve. Since when do we 
coddle scofflaws? They are convicted monopolists and owe 
$1,300,000,000.00 to the EU.


From http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/02/27/business/msft.php :

"Microsoft was the first company in 50 years of EU competition policy 
that the commission has had to fine for failure to comply with an 
antitrust decision," Kroes said in a statement. "I hope that today's 
decision closes a dark chapter in Microsoft's record of noncompliance 
with the commission's March 2004 decision."


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Re: GPL dustups BIG VENT/RANT!!


Richard Reynolds wrote:

pre-microsoft computers were a pain.


I'm SO glad computers are no longer a pain. And surely nobody else could 
have come along and solved the problem any better.
Honestly I find people more of a pain than computers these days :D :D I 
guess I am just weird. or do they call that a GEEK :D


one of the things they did was to set standards, standards they aproved, 
and

If it were a standard we would be able to interoperate.
Granted M$ has not done it in a while, but they DID and they did so at a 
time this industry had NONE. I dont understand why people forget this!


and why cant it?? I do all kinds of stuff with M$ files every day switching 
between different computers and computer systems including linux. the only 
parts that dont work, will never work in linux, not because they cant, but 
because some developer thinks "its not a good idea" to do that. Give it up, 
the developer isnt supposed to be saying you shouldnt, [s]he should be 
saying "ok but its less secure lets fix it" and still make it work


application. I dont see any progress here. we complain about stability, 
Ive seen NT4, 2000 and 2003 boxes run for as long as each has been out, 
no rebooting, complain about the desktops most get turned off at night 
anyways


So you never applied patches which required a mandatory reboot?
If the computer HAS to stay on, then NO! but lets face it this isnt 
exclusive to windows!


Its an excuse I put up with every day, none of my good printers are 
supported in linux, so my home/office server has vmware installed and a 
copy
If it isn't supported in Linux it doesn't do postscript which means it 
isn't a good printer.
to be fair 1 supports postscript "kinda" in that it produces better output 
when you dont! and doesnt require a zillion gigs of ram. but how is that 
going to help. postscript isnt without a ton of faults, and unless I am 
missing something isnt postscript copywriten to adobe??? whats stoping them 
from pulling a compuserve when they wanted to collect royalaties out of 
every .gif user.


A lot of people do something about it. If they didn't I wouldn't have all 
of this wonderful free software. And without the help of KPLUG over all of 
these years I couldn't have learned how to use it so well.
If I didnt mostly agree I know how to unsubscribe. but doing something and 
playing in the mud are a different things.


and lately I just look at what the whole mess and wonder  and get pissed 
off at the anti M$ for bashing beyond what M$ deserves.


Richard Reynolds
[EMAIL PROTECTED]






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Re: GPL dustups BIG VENT/RANT!!


Richard Reynolds wrote:
Want to compete. I'm ALL for it. Find a better product (who cares how) but 
it had better be better, not just an alternative. Because this "Its better 
because its not M$" is not going to work. Set a better price, ok how about a 


In order to compete to the extent that it has today all Linux has had to 
do is gather together thousands of the worlds best programmers and get 
them to work together for 17 years for free and then give their work 
away for free. I just don't get why others can't compete with MS also.


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Re: GPL dustups BIG VENT/RANT!!

Pre-Microsoft computers* were no more a pain for those who learned on them
than were Microsoft computers* a pain for those who learned on them.

OK so that needed a comma "Pre-M$, computers were a pain"

then it becomes for those who learned on IT. because my blue computer was
completely different than my brown computer. Now ive gone and done it, I
know the blue one was blue, but was the brown one brown DANG IT!!!

if you want to work with M$ you can they will let you, you have to pay,
and you have to play by there rules, but it works.
After all, MS prefers zero competitors. Zero. Which is why "It" (your "it"
above) doesn't work most of the time.

Any business would prefere to have zero competition!

and according to
http://www.forbes.com/2008/03/05/richest-people-billionaires-billionaires08-cx_lk_0305billie_land.html
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft

I'd say IT worked!!!
the poor dude is down to #3 such a bummer, his toilet water is probibly more
expensive than what I have in my bank account right now :D

an auto mechanic doesnt get paid on the same level if he has to use shop
tools! an electrition that shows up at your home or business with no
tools doesnt get the work (at least at my house), ever loan the plumber
your auger to run your sewer line for a clog??

Neither the mechanic nor the plumber is a monopolist.
I guess that point was lost, sorry! I was refering to the mechanic/plumber
as the computer user not M$. How many companies make snap-on tools? what
about that RIGID power auger. OOH I know that pro-mechanic can use
Craftsman HEHEHE

After just spending $2500 to keep current with M$ Id say Ill skip the
mechanic using Craftsman!!! On second thought that poor dude using Craftsman
might give me a break ive just spent $2500 on M$ :D :D :D

* What is a Microsoft computer anyway? AFAIK, Microsoft has never made
computer.
I don't know :D however could one call a M$ computer any computer in which
say Intel/AMD changed plans in there processor family in order to run M$
software better??? how about hard drives being designed to run windows
better? the list of hardware manufacturers that are tweaking there hardware
so it runs on M$ Winhozed better is long. I think I remember something about
that, at least every time a new piece of hardware is released. Or if your
brain hurts how about an X-Box :D though thats hopefully clearly not what I
ment.

& [My own rant] I can't comment on the rest of your self-described rant
because the run-on-forever sentences and lack of capitalization makes my
eyes hurt to much to finish reading it. If you want your opinion to be
taken seriously, at least present it in a manner that at least /tries/ to
appear intelligent (i.e. follow at least /some/ of the rules of grammar).

Im glad you read any of it at all.

I still dont see how another company deserves a handout to help them
compete.

Want to compete. I'm ALL for it. Find a better product (who cares how) but
it had better be better, not just an alternative. Because this "Its better
because its not M$" is not going to work. Set a better price, ok how about a
fair price Winhozed isnt really that expensive. Find a marketing department
to come up with a name, this will help you NOT come up with stupid names
like lindows. Create catchy advertisements. And in one year spend 1/5 of
what M$ spends on marketing in a day.

again thanks for the read

Richard Reynolds
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

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Re: GPL dustups BIG VENT/RANT!!


Richard Reynolds wrote:

or am I forgetting my history lessons didnt apple come AFTER M$


They were founded within a year of each other. Apple came first in my 
life. I had an Apple IIc long before I had ever even heard of Microsoft.


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Re: GPL dustups BIG VENT/RANT!!

2008-06-17 Thread David Brown


On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 07:43:40PM -0700, Richard Reynolds wrote:

pre-microsoft computers were a pain.
microsoft did what they had to do to fix it.
and regardless of your like for them or dislike of them, they did alot.

What computers ?
Pre-M$ was Apple, and they were wonderful !

Very interesting is this the same thinking that M$ == Winhozed???

or am I forgetting my history lessons didnt apple come AFTER M$


Apple Macintosh: 1984
Windows 1.0: 1985

Windows 3.0 was in 1990 when it actually became something people ran.

Of course, depends on what you mean by "Microsoft", and whether you count
DOS in that.  The IBM P/C running DOS was 1981.  Eventually, it even had
exciting things like subdirectories and harddisk support.

David


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Re: GPL dustups BIG VENT/RANT!!


Richard Reynolds wrote:

pre-microsoft computers were a pain.


I'm SO glad computers are no longer a pain. And surely nobody else could 
have come along and solved the problem any better.


one of the things they did was to set standards, standards they aproved, and 


If it were a standard we would be able to interoperate. We can't. They 
recently made their first try at a real standard (pitching OOXML to the 
ISO) and it failed in scandal.


application. I dont see any progress here. we complain about stability, Ive 
seen NT4, 2000 and 2003 boxes run for as long as each has been out, no 
rebooting, complain about the desktops most get turned off at night anyways 


So you never applied patches which required a mandatory reboot?

Its an excuse I put up with every day, none of my good printers are 
supported in linux, so my home/office server has vmware installed and a copy 


If it isn't supported in Linux it doesn't do postscript which means it 
isn't a good printer.


and so we sit here ranting about how M$ did us wrong because we have no 


Well, they are convicted monopolist both in the US and in the EU. They 
curently owe billions in fines which they are refusing to pay. So yeah, 
they did do us wrong. Americans and Europeans.


choice, pick any other area besides operating systems and you see it EVERY 
DAY, how many of us complain there. better yet how many do anything about 
it.


A lot of people do something about it. If they didn't I wouldn't have 
all of this wonderful free software. And without the help of KPLUG over 
all of these years I couldn't have learned how to use it so well.


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Re: GPL dustups

2008-06-17 Thread Todd Walton

On Sun, Jun 15, 2008 at 6:08 PM, Martin Franco <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 03:56:14PM -0500, Todd Walton wrote:
>> Capitalism != Consumerism
> No, but they are intrinsically related.  That is, however, besides the
> point.  The fundamental rule of capitalism is competition.

No, the fundamental rule of capitalism is that the means of production
are in private hands.  Competition has been the historical modus
operandi of the capitalist and it's served us very well while
production truly was in the hands of private property owners.  But it
is not fundamental.

> When people become producers, whether free software hackers, independent 
> musicians,
> or whatever, their golden rule is often cooporation.

People *are* producers in a capitalist civilization.

>> Community is profit.
> Care to elaborate?  Profit is the difference between what the employees
> of a company are paid and the value they produce.

If there were no other cost than employee time, you'd have a company
that produced nothing.  Profit is the benefit a thing brings.  m-w.com
says profit is:

noun 1: a valuable return : gain 2: the excess of returns over
expenditure in a transaction or series of transactions; especially :
the excess of the selling price of goods over their cost 3: net income
usually for a given period of time 4: the ratio of profit for a given
year to the amount of capital invested or to the value of sales 5: the
compensation accruing to entrepreneurs for the assumption of risk in
business enterprise as distinguished from wages or rent

verb 1: to be of service or advantage : avail  2: to derive benefit :
gain 3: to make a profit

There's a lot more than money there and I, for one, consider community
a benefit in a great many cases.  It's why I'm here.

-todd

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Re: GPL dustups BIG VENT/RANT!!


pre-microsoft computers were a pain.
microsoft did what they had to do to fix it.
and regardless of your like for them or dislike of them, they did alot.


What computers ?
Pre-M$ was Apple, and they were wonderful !

Very interesting is this the same thinking that M$ == Winhozed???

or am I forgetting my history lessons didnt apple come AFTER M$



Live on and Ride an 06 BMW R12GS HP2

Not a bad way to go! Ill keep my ZX-6r

but still not a bad way to go

Richard Reynolds
[EMAIL PROTECTED]




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Re: GPL dustups BIG VENT/RANT!!

2008-06-17 Thread DJA


Richard Reynolds wrote:

So im picking on an email. its been a long day/week/month and I wanna!!

I was just going to rant and press the delete key but if you can read 
this then I decided why not Im gona send it anyways just to see what 
happens



[snip]



pre-microsoft computers were a pain.
microsoft did what they had to do to fix it.
and regardless of your like for them or dislike of them, they did alot.


Pre-Microsoft computers* were no more a pain for those who learned on 
them than were Microsoft computers* a pain for those who learned on them.


Either you weren't there, or have forgotten the better parts of the 
Pre-Microsoftian era.



one of the things they did was to set standards, standards they aproved, 
and yea so you had to pay to see them but so what, they had help, they 
worked with companies to make it work. they pulled it off.


/It/ didn't set any standards really, other than by strong-arming itself 
into a market position which allowed it to unilaterally call the shots 
(read extort). It's certainly set a lot of bad precedents in code 
quality and design. That applies to the GUI as well.


And MS never works with anyone it doesn't plan on either subverting, 
buying, or destroying.



if you want 
to work with M$ you can they will let you, you have to pay, and you have 
to play by there rules, but it works. so you say why do I have to pay to 
play, well why not, everyone else does!


Pay indeed. There are many forms of currency with which that bill has 
been paid.


As for rules, MS's rules are continually changing. And it doesn't tell 
anyone some of them. After all, MS prefers zero competitors. Zero. Which 
is why "It" (your "it" above) doesn't work most of the time.



an auto mechanic doesnt get paid 
on the same level if he has to use shop tools! an electrition that shows 
up at your home or business with no tools doesnt get the work (at least 
at my house), ever loan the plumber your auger to run your sewer line 
for a clog??


Neither the mechanic nor the plumber is a monopolist.


Nothing M$ has done has stoped superior products from being 
developed yet


You can't prove a negative. But there have been more than a few superior 
products that disappeared from the market once MS decided it didn't fit 
into its long-term business plan.



I dont see a whole lot of superior products (its my rant, 
I know there are a few and I use them daily).


[major snip &]


Richard Reynolds
[EMAIL PROTECTED]


If you're including any MS products in that list, you should know that 
the odds are almost 100% that MS didn't invent any of them, but instead 
"acquired" them. You'll be hard-pressed to name a major MS product that 
was invented, or originally developed, by MS.


--
* What is a Microsoft computer anyway? AFAIK, Microsoft has never made 
computer.


& [My own rant] I can't comment on the rest of your self-described rant 
because the run-on-forever sentences and lack of capitalization makes my 
eyes hurt to much to finish reading it. If you want your opinion to be 
taken seriously, at least present it in a manner that at least /tries/ 
to appear intelligent (i.e. follow at least /some/ of the rules of grammar).


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  ~DJA.


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Re: GPL dustups BIG VENT/RANT!!


Richard Reynolds wrote:

So im picking on an email. its been a long day/week/month and I wanna!!

I was just going to rant and press the delete key but if you can read 
this then I decided why not Im gona send it anyways just to see what 
happens




Risk is only for the small fry, dontcha know.

YEA I know!!!

Please note: this is different from "we should take their money."  
While I am no Microsoft fan, I do not want to see them brought down.  
I *do* want to see others helped up so that they can provide viable 
alternatives.


I really dont like this viewpoint, I understand it. I just dont like it. 
im in no hurry to hurt M$ in any way. and I dont understand why anyone 
should get a help up!! sounds just like many completely broken social 
policies.


Well, it depends upon how you go about it.

Let's look at gas/energy policy.  We're currently at the mercy of a 
bunch of selfish, self-absorbed warlords who happen to be sitting on a 
bunch of black stuff.


So, how do we address this?  Well, we can create all kinds of arcane 
laws about fuel efficiency, energy rebates for alternative sources, etc. 
 These provide all kinds of loopholes for all manner miscreants.


Or, we can institute a 5 cent per gallon gas tax increase every month, 
forever.  After a couple of years, people will adjust the economy to the 
price and crude oil fluctuations will be a blip in the overall price.


Both solutions are a help to alternatives to oil.  However, one 
specifies specific behaviors and is doomed to failure while the other 
sets up a framework for the populace to make the appropriate choice.



pre-microsoft computers were a pain.
microsoft did what they had to do to fix it.
and regardless of your like for them or dislike of them, they did alot.


I disagree with you here.  People avoided Microsoft Windows and 
applications for a *LONG* time.  Somehow, those computers weren't *that* 
much of a pain.  Microsoft engaged in quite a lot of shady business 
practice to drive those things out.


Nothing M$ has done has stoped superior products from being 
developed yet I dont see a whole lot of superior products (its my rant, 
I know there are a few and I use them daily).


The evidence is against you here.  Sorry.

DOS alternatives, DOS utilities, filesystem compression/extenders, 
operating systems (BeOS and OS/2), removing NT from things other than 
x86 to solidify their market (other things ran on alternative 
architectures--can't have that), application software that Microsoft 
crushed and then abandoned (the length of time before Internet Explorer 
got updated after they crushed all viable competition is just the most 
visible), patenting interchange formats, etc.  Microsoft wiped out 
*lots* of superior things with shady business practices, hiring away 
developers, or, if they absolutely had to, buying the company and 
effectively letting it rot.


So, how do you fix this without being anti-Microsoft?  Well, if you look 
at many hardware things, the government requires a "second source".  A 
similar "second source" requirement for operating systems and software 
would handle the issue as well without doing things like banning 
commercial software.


This is, in fact, the fight Microsoft is currently engaging in 
surrounding OOXML.



is a choice always a good thing?


Almost always.  In certain cases, we decide to limit the choice not 
because choice is inherently bad but because the resources required to 
create the choice are problematic.  See: cable companies.  Cable 
companies weren't granted a monopoly because lack of choice was good, 
but because digging up the roads and stringing cable was more disruptive 
that providing that choice.


Of course, that decision looks quite poor in retrospect.  Had the cities 
 allowed lots of different people to lay in fiber, we would have had 
crappy roads for a while, but now we wouldn't be arguing about network 
neutrality.


and so we sit here ranting about how M$ did us wrong because we have no 
choice, pick any other area besides operating systems and you see it 
EVERY DAY, how many of us complain there. better yet how many do 
anything about it.


Excuse me, but practically every person on this list *is* doing 
something about it.  Every day.


-a


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Re: GPL dustups BIG VENT/RANT!!

2008-06-17 Thread Michael O'Keefe


pre-microsoft computers were a pain.
microsoft did what they had to do to fix it.
and regardless of your like for them or dislike of them, they did alot.


What computers ?
Pre-M$ was Apple, and they were wonderful !


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Re: GPL dustups


Bob La Quey wrote:


I agree. Back to risk being inequitably distributed. The poor are
at far greater risk generally than the rich.

This is a space though where it is easier to see the problems
than the solutions. The poor are hardly saints.


Agreed.  The Atlantic had an article recently talking about the fact 
that crime is spreading in the mid-tier cities.


Analysis of the statistics indicates that there is a high correlation 
between where the people from torn-down housing projects move to and an 
increase in crime rate.  Basically, instead of one very bad area you now 
have a bunch of marginal areas that get dragged down (because, of 
course, the people don't suddenly gain the resources to move into a good 
area, after all).  That's an own goal for the social engineering crowd.


Good intentions don't cut it.  You have to keep watching things and make 
sure that the evidence backs it up.


-a


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Re: GPL dustups BIG VENT/RANT!!


So im picking on an email. its been a long day/week/month and I wanna!!

I was just going to rant and press the delete key but if you can read this 
then I decided why not Im gona send it anyways just to see what happens




Risk is only for the small fry, dontcha know.

YEA I know!!!

Please note: this is different from "we should take their money."  While I 
am no Microsoft fan, I do not want to see them brought down.  I *do* want 
to see others helped up so that they can provide viable alternatives.


I really dont like this viewpoint, I understand it. I just dont like it. im 
in no hurry to hurt M$ in any way. and I dont understand why anyone should 
get a help up!! sounds just like many completely broken social policies.


im only partially against M$ being a small business owner I hate it when 
people say I have to do things "this way" in order to be "fair" competitive 
advantage is why I am a business owner!!! If I dont like HP printers (for 
the most part I dont) why should my clients get the choice to use them, they 
picked ME to buy from/maintain  I pick the printer! I take the risk of 
fixing something else if it beaks, I take the risk of buying a replacement. 
why should I be forced to allow HP printers to work with my software. in 
short im a small business and I am not required but more likely because no 
one is looking!!!


pre-microsoft computers were a pain.
microsoft did what they had to do to fix it.
and regardless of your like for them or dislike of them, they did alot.

one of the things they did was to set standards, standards they aproved, and 
yea so you had to pay to see them but so what, they had help, they worked 
with companies to make it work. they pulled it off. if you want to work with 
M$ you can they will let you, you have to pay, and you have to play by there 
rules, but it works. so you say why do I have to pay to play, well why not, 
everyone else does! an auto mechanic doesnt get paid on the same level if he 
has to use shop tools! an electrition that shows up at your home or business 
with no tools doesnt get the work (at least at my house), ever loan the 
plumber your auger to run your sewer line for a clog?? Nothing M$ has done 
has stoped superior products from being developed yet I dont see a whole lot 
of superior products (its my rant, I know there are a few and I use them 
daily). is a choice always a good thing? I dont see that either every M$ 
product looks the same, and everyone who develops and plays by the rules ON 
m$ products look the same, behave the same. I can navigate all M$ 
products I dont have to keep up on every new version of windows to navigate 
the product, sure the new vista and such has changed things but its not a 
big change, just some minor anoyances. yet if i come across a linux box 
being used as a desktop now all of the sudden I have to figure out what 
OS/windows manager/software is running so I can know wheather to single 
click or double click on the upper right or upper left to close the 
application. I dont see any progress here. we complain about stability, Ive 
seen NT4, 2000 and 2003 boxes run for as long as each has been out, no 
rebooting, complain about the desktops most get turned off at night anyways 
who cares if it cant run for 300 days in a row!!! M$ calls the business 
level software such for a reason live with it. yet I know I can get XP to 
run that long, why because when I use it I play by the rules! and what a 
thought the rules are made by M$! ever read the toyota manual before driving 
a ford (or whatever order you prefere) doesnt make sence to me! anyone got 
any reasoning why it should work that way?


lets pick on applications not made by M$ anyone ever play with photoshop 
find an open source equivelent??? OK so how about one that is native to 
linux, forgetting cost??? sure there are photo editors but nothing even 
close. how about premere got a linux equivelent yet???  Illistrator, 
quickbooks(talking business desktops here, the "you can run your quickbooks 
database on linux" is the biggest joke around, IF you can get it to work), 
how about a single PCI complient POS package? none of these are exclusively 
made by microsoft (M$ does have a POS software package, though not a very 
good one) if your a total geek they kinda hack there way in wine but not 
really and isnt the point of "you can run it in wine or vmware" missing 
the point major big time!!! its an excuse nothing more nothing less. though 
Its an excuse I put up with every day, none of my good printers are 
supported in linux, so my home/office server has vmware installed and a copy 
of 2000 runs inside it with the print drivers installed ready for me to 
print from wherever in the world I am, so now I dont need a seperate 2000 
box, NICE but its a MAJOR HACK, that I shouldnt be required to do. where is 
this lack of progress and if some small company in orange county can make a 
printer, create windows drivers, how is M$ limiting yo

Re: GPL dustups

2008-06-17 Thread Robert Donovan

On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 3:06 PM, Andrew Lentvorski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Bob La Quey wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 7:56 AM, Martin Franco <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>
 You imply that a business owner should take all the risks but at best
 break even, while only his employees make money?
>>>
>>> I meant to imply that there should be no business owner, that the
>>> business should be owned by its employees, not by a single/few
>>> individuals.
>>
>> My experience has been that very few people want to take on
>> the responsibilities and risks of ownership. People want to
>> share profits but rarely losses. In a world where all risk
>> cannot be avoided one must come up with a mechanism for
>> compensating the risk takers. How do you propose to do this?
>
> There is an implication that the business owners are taking risk.
>
> The current debacle on Wall Street highlights that those people are not
> expecting that there is risk involved.

I disagree, it highlights only that the long side gambled and lost,
and that most people are mathematically enumerate and economically
ignorant. The short sides of stocks and interest rates are probably
making money on balance right now. That congress is making political
hay by allowing those who gambled and lost to welch out indicates that
few people consider the consequences of losing before taking a risk,
and that congress hasn't a clue except where stirring up emotion to
get elected is concerned, which can hurt us all in extreme cases.

> Risk is only for the small fry, dontcha know.

Respecfully disagree again. Risk isn't just for the small fry, small
capital bases are. If you have a thousand dollars and I have ten
dollars we agree to bet that you win 2 cents for guessing heads or
tails correctly and lose one penny for calling the toss incorrectly,
as long as we bet a penny, I have little to fear. I would need to take
a thousand losses in a row before I couldn't bet any more. If,
however, we increase the bet size to a dollar per toss, now my capital
base is not enough to go up against yours. I could only survive ten
losses in a row before being wiped out. The risk is the same for both
of us, and the mathematical expectation is .5 for both of us. But you
can take bigger individual losses and longer strings of smaller losses
and still keep playing. I can't. Failure to understand the importance
of this phenomenon in the markets is responsible for countles examples
of spectacular gains followed by spectacular ruin. I used to teach
people to trade, and the students who grasped this early developed
into consistently profitable traders. One showed more talent that her
teacher and is now a millionairess. Those who didn't, or tried to
fight it, were just tragic, and there's nothing you can do about it.

>
>> Profit = Resources retained for future use. Inequity of distribution
>> exists in all known human systems. Inequity of risk also exists.
>> Unfortunately classical Marxist analysis of all of these problems
>> is superficial and impedes and real understanding of the problems.
>> The Marxist systems have tended to degenerate into bureaucratic
>> state monopolies of the worst possible kind. Anarchism, in the sense
>> that you used it, has not ever been found to be persistent. A
>> sustainable, equitable economy remains an open problem. An open
>> problem not likely to succumb to old dogmas.
>
> I don't think such a sustainable, fully-equitable economy exists.  There
> must be some inequity (originally spelled that inequitability--the Net
> really is making me stupid) to drive motion in the economy.  The goals
> should probably be A) a bottom level that we consider a fair starting point
> and B) the opportunity to rise from there without a lot of barriers.

Agreed, provided it's understood that there will always be somebody
for whom there is no fair starting point, for the same reasons that
inequity of distribution exists in all human systems, and that a risk
is not made unfair merely because one or more people risk, and lose.

> The problem currently is that we favor those who have already succeeded.
> People who have already succeeded should have *fewer* protections from risk
> rather than more.
>
> Please note: this is different from "we should take their money."  While I
> am no Microsoft fan, I do not want to see them brought down.  I *do* want to
> see others helped up so that they can provide viable alternatives.

I agree, for reasons already discussed this post involving capital
base size. Those who have already succeeded have more protection
against risk built-in to their larger capital base, provided they
decrease their "bet size" after a big loss. This is not always
possible, but a lot of that has to do with stupid tax and financial
regs, and a K-12 educational system that refuses to teach people how
to define and manage risk properly, moreso than anything else. IMNSHO.

Robert Donovan

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Re: GPL dustups

2008-06-17 Thread Bob La Quey

On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 3:11 PM, Andrew Lentvorski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Martin Franco wrote:
>
>> A key attribute of the state is that its decisions are backed with
>> threat of violence.  Are humans so bad that they cannot have
>> organization without doing so at gun-point?
>
> Humans are indeed so bad that they cannot have organization without threat.
>
> History has proven this.  Personal experience has proven this.
>
> Now, those threats may not be a *gun*.  However, they have no less force.
>
> In fact, I woudl argue that many of the ills we currently face as a society
> are the result of the fact that the "capitalist barons" are completely
> disconnected from consequences for their actions.

I agree. Back to risk being inequitably distributed. The poor are
at far greater risk generally than the rich.

This is a space though where it is easier to see the problems
than the solutions. The poor are hardly saints.

BobLQ


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Re: GPL dustups

2008-06-17 Thread Bob La Quey

On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 3:06 PM, Andrew Lentvorski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Bob La Quey wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 7:56 AM, Martin Franco <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>
 You imply that a business owner should take all the risks but at best
 break even, while only his employees make money?
>>>
>>> I meant to imply that there should be no business owner, that the
>>> business should be owned by its employees, not by a single/few
>>> individuals.
>>
>> My experience has been that very few people want to take on
>> the responsibilities and risks of ownership. People want to
>> share profits but rarely losses. In a world where all risk
>> cannot be avoided one must come up with a mechanism for
>> compensating the risk takers. How do you propose to do this?
>
> There is an implication that the business owners are taking risk.

Elsewhere I pointed out that risk is also not equitably distributed.
But, no matter how inequitably distributed risk, exists and will not
go away. Nearly everyone seeks to push risk off onto another.

> The current debacle on Wall Street highlights that those people are not
> expecting that there is risk involved.
>
> Risk is only for the small fry, dontcha know.

I understand your sarcasm. It is an accurate critique of the
system. But hard to cure.

>> Profit = Resources retained for future use. Inequity of distribution
>> exists in all known human systems. Inequity of risk also exists.
>> Unfortunately classical Marxist analysis of all of these problems
>> is superficial and impedes and real understanding of the problems.
>> The Marxist systems have tended to degenerate into bureaucratic
>> state monopolies of the worst possible kind. Anarchism, in the sense
>> that you used it, has not ever been found to be persistent. A
>> sustainable, equitable economy remains an open problem. An open
>> problem not likely to succumb to old dogmas.
>
> I don't think such a sustainable, fully-equitable economy exists.

I agree. But it might, though the chances are slim. So the problem
is open.

Perhaps we can all agree that the system could be more sustainable
and more equitable. Even if we agree upon that it is highly likely
that we will disagree upon how to make it so.

>There
> must be some inequity (originally spelled that inequitability--the Net
> really is making me stupid) to drive motion in the economy.  The goals
> should probably be A) a bottom level that we consider a fair starting point
> and B) the opportunity to rise from there without a lot of barriers.
>
> The problem currently is that we favor those who have already succeeded.
> People who have already succeeded should have *fewer* protections from risk
> rather than more.

But one of the incentives to rise, and a powerful incentive it is,
is so that people one cares for will have more protection from risk.
So the puzzle is how to balance these tendencies.

> Please note: this is different from "we should take their money."  While I
> am no Microsoft fan, I do not want to see them brought down.  I *do* want to
> see others helped up so that they can provide viable alternatives.

Other than "we" favors the successful. A good example is the network
effect, which acts as a powerfully conservative force once a network
is in place. True of social networks as well as ones like the Internet.

BobLQ


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Re: GPL dustups


Martin Franco wrote:


A key attribute of the state is that its decisions are backed with
threat of violence.  Are humans so bad that they cannot have
organization without doing so at gun-point?


Humans are indeed so bad that they cannot have organization without threat.

History has proven this.  Personal experience has proven this.

Now, those threats may not be a *gun*.  However, they have no less force.

In fact, I woudl argue that many of the ills we currently face as a 
society are the result of the fact that the "capitalist barons" are 
completely disconnected from consequences for their actions.


-a


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Re: GPL dustups


Bob La Quey wrote:

On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 7:56 AM, Martin Franco <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:


You imply that a business owner should take all the risks but at best
break even, while only his employees make money?

I meant to imply that there should be no business owner, that the
business should be owned by its employees, not by a single/few
individuals.


My experience has been that very few people want to take on
the responsibilities and risks of ownership. People want to
share profits but rarely losses. In a world where all risk
cannot be avoided one must come up with a mechanism for
compensating the risk takers. How do you propose to do this?


There is an implication that the business owners are taking risk.

The current debacle on Wall Street highlights that those people are not 
expecting that there is risk involved.


Risk is only for the small fry, dontcha know.


Profit = Resources retained for future use. Inequity of distribution
exists in all known human systems. Inequity of risk also exists.
Unfortunately classical Marxist analysis of all of these problems
is superficial and impedes and real understanding of the problems.
The Marxist systems have tended to degenerate into bureaucratic
state monopolies of the worst possible kind. Anarchism, in the sense
that you used it, has not ever been found to be persistent. A
sustainable, equitable economy remains an open problem. An open
problem not likely to succumb to old dogmas.


I don't think such a sustainable, fully-equitable economy exists.  There 
must be some inequity (originally spelled that inequitability--the Net 
really is making me stupid) to drive motion in the economy.  The goals 
should probably be A) a bottom level that we consider a fair starting 
point and B) the opportunity to rise from there without a lot of barriers.


The problem currently is that we favor those who have already succeeded. 
   People who have already succeeded should have *fewer* protections 
from risk rather than more.


Please note: this is different from "we should take their money."  While 
I am no Microsoft fan, I do not want to see them brought down.  I *do* 
want to see others helped up so that they can provide viable alternatives.


-a


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Re: GPL dustups

2008-06-17 Thread Todd Walton

On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 9:56 AM, Martin Franco <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Of particular interest to me is when something of great value is
> produced outside the framework of capitalism.  GNU/Linux, for example.
> I think that process is relevent when discussing capitalism, if only for
> comparison.

I don't think you know what capitalism is.

-todd


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Re: GPL dustups

2008-06-17 Thread Robert Donovan

On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 7:56 AM, Martin Franco <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 02:19:30PM -0700, DJA wrote:
>>> I'm talking about people who release thier music under creative commons
>>> on websites like jamendo.com, possibly remixes or otherwise based on
>>> other similarly released media.
>>
>> Those people may or may not be in the business of selling their work
>> product. Assuming they are not, then they are not businesses, and so to
>> me, outside the context of the discussion.
> They may not be selling thier works, but the free product could increase
> demand for thier services (live performances).  Are all free software
> projects to be exempted as well?

If they are giving the work away for free, then they are engaged in a
hobby and have nothing to complain about if they fail to make money
from those works. If they are giving the works awsay to increase
demand for their other works, then they are incurring a cost for
advertising equal to the value they might have gotten for similar work
they are trying to sell. If their works are not sufficiently popular
to make enough money to pay for the cost of procdcution for the work
they gave away and the work they sold, this tells them two things,
first that the "community"(or, perhaps, just those who bought their
product) doesn't consider the benefit gained by those works to be
worth the money, and that they must either stop producing that
particular product or find something else to do that will make them
enough money to continue to engage in there hobby, however beneficial
those who produce it might think it is to the comunity.

> Of particular interest to me is when something of great value is
> produced outside the framework of capitalism.  GNU/Linux, for example.
> I think that process is relevent when discussing capitalism, if only for
> comparison.

I'm not sure GNU/GPL is outside the framework of capitalism. It's a
cost, pure and simple, which gets no income back if given away for
free and gets progressively diminishing income, if sold, after the
sale, because the producer has granted others the right to use and
modify the product. It may stinulate other demand for other products
or services, such as, as somebody has pointed out elsewhere, if
GNU/linux enhances the production, delivery, or implementation of
another paid product or service, but it's still a cost.

>> I guess we need to agree on a definition of "Industry".  You really
>> can't lump all businesses together (as in all corporations are evil)
>> and then  cherry pick the members of that group as examples of a
>> counter group.
> Business != corporation.  A corporation is a legal entity, a "person",
> with a legal mandate to pursue profit.

All businesses are not corporations, but all corporations are
businesses, separate legal entity or not, and they are owned and
operated by people. That artist is in business if he or she is trying
to make enough money to survive and prosper, perhaps not incorporated,
but they are still in business. If they can run their business
profitably, they can continue to benefit the "comunity" indefinitely,
If they run at a loss, any benefit to the community will be lost. Also
to consider, if you can't convince others in "the community",
"society," or "the village" to buy your product, that's the community
saying to you that they don't think your product benefits them as much
as you do. That can be a painful blow to one's ego and sense of
importance. I know is to mine every time one of by books doesn't
become a runaway best seller, or people don't line up to have me
migrate them to Linux servers running LDAP rather than Windows. What
the heck's the matter with those people anyway?;-) It is however a
fact of life. People don't have to buy your product. You need to
prersuade them that it's worth the money.

> And when I think of a professional artist, I think of an artist who
> lives off the money made by practicing his art.  I expect most artists
> have a day job.

If they are living of the the money produced by their art, why would
they need a day job? If they are not able to make a living from their
art and require a day job, then they are not living off the money made
by practiceing their art, not entirely anyway. I offer a quote
attributed to Mark Twain when he was asked how he knew a book was good
enough to be released to the public. He responed that if he thought it
was a great masterpiece, he signed it and sent it in. If, however, he
thought it was idle dreck, he signed it and sent it in. Liturature, or
any other art form, or any other product survives because people like
it or find it useful to them in some way, not because the producer,
author, or a critic, declares it good. The buyer is the final arbiter
of value, not the producer. This is why it is very common for artists
to produce what they consider inferior work because it sells, and,
after having established themselves, they produce "art for the sake of
art." The artist may con

Re: GPL dustups

2008-06-17 Thread Bob La Quey

On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 7:56 AM, Martin Franco <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>
>> You imply that a business owner should take all the risks but at best
>> break even, while only his employees make money?
> I meant to imply that there should be no business owner, that the
> business should be owned by its employees, not by a single/few
> individuals.

My experience has been that very few people want to take on
the responsibilities and risks of ownership. People want to
share profits but rarely losses. In a world where all risk
cannot be avoided one must come up with a mechanism for
compensating the risk takers. How do you propose to do this?

>> Obviously, I and empirical data disagree. Not /all/ corporations exist
>> simply in order to satisfy their greed. BTW, there are many, many
>> corporations which consist of only a half-dozen* or fewer people. I'll
>> bet that case accounts for a large percentage of corporations. Are all
>> those people evil too?
> People have a wide range of motives, but the criteria for success under
> capitalism includes the pursuit of profit, and... that's pretty much it.
> If people can pursue profit and thier other ideals at the same time,
> great.  It's the rest of the time that worries me.

Profit = Resources retained for future use. Inequity of distribution
exists in all known human systems. Inequity of risk also exists.
Unfortunately classical Marxist analysis of all of these problems
is superficial and impedes and real understanding of the problems.
The Marxist systems have tended to degenerate into bureaucratic
state monopolies of the worst possible kind. Anarchism, in the sense
that you used it, has not ever been found to be persistent. A
sustainable, equitable economy remains an open problem. An open
problem not likely to succumb to old dogmas.

>>> Watch _The Corporation_[1] and _The Story of Stuff_[2] and tell me the
>>> system isn't screwed up. (They are free to download)

It does not follow from the fact, which I accept, that the system
is screwed up, that your suggestions contain even the hint of a
solution. The problems that you are discussing (unfortunately with
an incredibly poor grasp of basic accounting) are a small part of
a much larger problem.

>
> I'm a computer guy first, and it wasn't long ago that I was apathetic to
> politics and economics.  If you're not satisfied with my arguments, the
> Anarchy Faq goes into much greater detail in its arguments against
> capitalism and government, and ideas for thier replacement.

You might do well to learn a little something about accounting before
you make a statement as absurd as:

"Profit is the difference between what the employees
of a company are paid and the value they produce."

And the capital equipment they use? and its cost and depreciation?
The risk of that capital? Please Martin learn some simple facts
that apply to all forms of organization before you subject us to
any more of this.

Expenses != Money paid to employees.
Revenues  != Cash coming in. (Risk, timing, recognition, see futures,
see derivatives.)
Profit = Revenues - Expenses != value extorted from wage slaves.

But let us say that your statement were correct. Then in an
equitable world you would have the profit redistributed to
the employees.

Is this correct?

How do you propose to measure "the value that they produce?"

Now in every human situation that I have ever been involved in
some people produced more than others. This was often hard to
quantify, but is inarguably true.  According to your principles,
is it not theft to take from them and give to those who produce
less?

How do you propose to "solve" the problem of the inequitable
distribution of talent? Of basic genetic gifts? Of the distribution
of resources that result from the application of effort by a
diverse species like ours?

I applaud you for starting to think about these things. I suggest
though that you might want to supplement your own thought with a
few years of serious study.

Buena suerte,

BobLQ

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Re: GPL dustups

2008-06-17 Thread Martin Franco

On Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 02:19:30PM -0700, DJA wrote:
>> I'm talking about people who release thier music under creative commons
>> on websites like jamendo.com, possibly remixes or otherwise based on
>> other similarly released media.
>
> Those people may or may not be in the business of selling their work  
> product. Assuming they are not, then they are not businesses, and so to  
> me, outside the context of the discussion.
They may not be selling thier works, but the free product could increase
demand for thier services (live performances).  Are all free software
projects to be exempted as well?

Of particular interest to me is when something of great value is
produced outside the framework of capitalism.  GNU/Linux, for example.
I think that process is relevent when discussing capitalism, if only for
comparison.

> I guess we need to agree on a definition of "Industry".  You really
> can't lump all businesses together (as in all corporations are evil)
> and then  cherry pick the members of that group as examples of a
> counter group.
Business != corporation.  A corporation is a legal entity, a "person",
with a legal mandate to pursue profit.

And when I think of a professional artist, I think of an artist who
lives off the money made by practicing his art.  I expect most artists
have a day job.

> Artists don't compete in the same way as the  typical business. They
> strive for the best performance, not the most  money or largest share
> of the market.
This is probably the goal for most/all artists.  A corporation like the
RIAA, however, has a very different set of priorities.

> If society comes out ahead, that's a profit for society.
But how often does that happen?  How often does the opposite happen?  A
corporation will consider the difference in terms of dollars, so it
could easily go either way.  "Good" should be the first priority.

> One is in business to make money, not break even, and certainly not to
> lose money. If one wants to break even (merely work for wages) then
> one  should work for someone else.
I have no problem with making money, its taking money others have made
that I disagree with.  Here's an example:

A farmer owns 100 acres of land, and has 10 slaves that work his fields.
He feeds them, houses them, and lives off thier labor.

What if those 10 people were not slaves, but free men and women who are
forced by thier economic condition to sell thier labor to the farmer.
These people are paid a wage which allows them to purchase food and
housing, possibly even from the farmer himself.  The boss then lives off
the labors of his employees.

How are these two situations practically different?  The same
relationship exists between the farmer (owner/capitalist) and the worker
(everyone else).  'Free' means they could quit if they wanted to,
hopefully to be employed by someone else (under similar working
conditions).  It is a freedom from restraint, not a freedom to the
opportunity for equality/success/happiness/whatever.

>> His income is not proportional to the work he does to get it.
> Another gross generalization, as well as a value judgment. As with
> things, people are worth what someone else is willing to pay them.
And the people who are paying the capitalists are the employees (and the
capitalist himself, to a lesser degree the more people work under
him/her), and they don't have a choice in the matter.  They aren't
paying the capitalist so much as the capitalist is taking money from
them.

> You imply that a business owner should take all the risks but at best
> break even, while only his employees make money?
I meant to imply that there should be no business owner, that the
business should be owned by its employees, not by a single/few
individuals.

> Obviously, I and empirical data disagree. Not /all/ corporations exist
> simply in order to satisfy their greed. BTW, there are many, many
> corporations which consist of only a half-dozen* or fewer people. I'll
> bet that case accounts for a large percentage of corporations. Are all
> those people evil too?
People have a wide range of motives, but the criteria for success under
capitalism includes the pursuit of profit, and... that's pretty much it.
If people can pursue profit and thier other ideals at the same time,
great.  It's the rest of the time that worries me.

>> Watch _The Corporation_[1] and _The Story of Stuff_[2] and tell me the
>> system isn't screwed up. (They are free to download)
>
> Not necessary. It only takes one example to show that ALL corporations  
> are not bad.
I'll grant you 'not bad', at least in the sense that many corporations
are not in a position where they could really do much harm.  Still, 'not
bad' and 'good' are two different animals.

> Simple democracy is nothing more that mob rule.
Which is why consensus is preferable to democracy.  Democracy is a
faster process, so it has its place.

> Consensus is merely managed guessing as to what the mob wants.
Not if the 'mob' is small enough that they

Re: GPL dustups

2008-06-16 Thread DJA


Martin Franco wrote:

On Sun, Jun 15, 2008 at 08:08:41PM -0700, DJA wrote:
Ideally. But, for example, in practice at the present, allowing future  
works to be built upon current work is the /last/ thing the music  
industry (most professional musicians included) wants. Competition is  
certainly very, very ill in the entertainment industry.



I'm talking about people who release thier music under creative commons
on websites like jamendo.com, possibly remixes or otherwise based on
other similarly released media.


Those people may or may not be in the business of selling their work 
product. Assuming they are not, then they are not businesses, and so to 
me, outside the context of the discussion.




 And how many musicians actually make it
into the music industry anyway?  I would expect that to be a pretty
small minority.


I guess we need to agree on a definition of "Industry". You really can't 
lump all businesses together (as in all corporations are evil) and then 
cherry pick the members of that group as examples of a counter group.



And I personally get tired of hearing the implied argument that Artists  
produce art only for money.



When did I say that?


I feel it's implied whenever artists are grouped with businesses in 
economic discussions. Artists don't compete in the same way as the 
typical business. They strive for the best performance, not the most 
money or largest share of the market.




The two are polar opposites, and
its not surprising that its often hard to integrate the smaller
cooporative communities into the competitive framework of our economic
system, to make money with GPL'ed code, for example.


Sure, if you have very narrow definitions of success. If a  
freely-produced, freely-given product or service (e.g. GPL-licensed  
software or creative commons-licensed literature) improves that state of  
its respective industry or inspires similar work (Free or proprietary),  
then I'd call that both cooperative, successful, and profitable. If it  
improves some aspect of society as a whole, then where's the rub?



How is it then commercially profitable?  "improves... society as a
whole" and "profitable" are often at odds, in my opinion.


If society comes out ahead, that's a profit for society.


That's certainly not a definition of profit that's recognized in any  
conventional circles. By that definition, the barber down the street is  
a crook because he has money left over after expenses.



No, because the barber keeps all the value he produced. If that barber
has a boss, then some of that value goes to the boss whether he did
anything to earn it or not.


I was implying that the barber owns his own shop. He may indeed have 
employees, which makes him the boss. Maybe I should have chosen a 
different business for an example. But I stand by my argument.


One is in business to make money, not break even, and certainly not to 
lose money. If one wants to break even (merely work for wages) then one 
should work for someone else.



that's definition that's anti-business in general. Your basic definition  
 is based on the false assumption that the owner of a business  
necessarily contributes nothing to that business.



His income is not proportional to the work he does to get it.


Another gross generalization, as well as a value judgment. As with 
things, people are worth what someone else is willing to pay them. 
That's your capitalist, free-market economy at work. It's also result of 
competition.




He could
work himself to death or just go on vacation, and, so long as his
business is doing well, still have an incredible income.  That money
does not come from his efforts, but from the efforts of the employees of
his business.


So, no reward for risk? No reward for management skills. No reward for 
business decisions? You imply that a business owner should take all the 
risks but at best break even, while only his employees make money?




Even if that value was not taken from the people who produced it, the
objective of the corporation is not the benefit of the community, the
sustainable production of its goods and ecological preservation, or any
other lofty objective.


Says who? All corporations, or just some? That's a pretty broad brush.  
All of us could name at least several for which that is true. But those  
examples don't make such a sweeping generalization any truer. Especially  
when it's based on flawed "facts". See above.



All corporations, at least as far as all corporations act in a
capitalist manner (which they all do much/most of the time).


Obviously, I and empirical data disagree. Not /all/ corporations exist 
simply in order to satisfy their greed. BTW, there are many, many 
corporations which consist of only a half-dozen* or fewer people. I'll 
bet that case accounts for a large percentage of corporations. Are all 
those people evil too?




Watch _The Corporation_[1] and _The Story of Stuff_[2] and tell me the
system isn't screwed up. (They

Re: GPL dustups

2008-06-16 Thread Martin Franco

On Sun, Jun 15, 2008 at 08:08:41PM -0700, DJA wrote:
> Ideally. But, for example, in practice at the present, allowing future  
> works to be built upon current work is the /last/ thing the music  
> industry (most professional musicians included) wants. Competition is  
> certainly very, very ill in the entertainment industry.
I'm talking about people who release thier music under creative commons
on websites like jamendo.com, possibly remixes or otherwise based on
other similarly released media.  And how many musicians actually make it
into the music industry anyway?  I would expect that to be a pretty
small minority.

> And I personally get tired of hearing the implied argument that Artists  
> produce art only for money.
When did I say that?

>> The two are polar opposites, and
>> its not surprising that its often hard to integrate the smaller
>> cooporative communities into the competitive framework of our economic
>> system, to make money with GPL'ed code, for example.
>
> Sure, if you have very narrow definitions of success. If a  
> freely-produced, freely-given product or service (e.g. GPL-licensed  
> software or creative commons-licensed literature) improves that state of  
> its respective industry or inspires similar work (Free or proprietary),  
> then I'd call that both cooperative, successful, and profitable. If it  
> improves some aspect of society as a whole, then where's the rub?
How is it then commercially profitable?  "improves... society as a
whole" and "profitable" are often at odds, in my opinion.

> That's certainly not a definition of profit that's recognized in any  
> conventional circles. By that definition, the barber down the street is  
> a crook because he has money left over after expenses.
No, because the barber keeps all the value he produced.  If that barber
has a boss, then some of that value goes to the boss whether he did
anything to earn it or not.

>At the least,  
> that's definition that's anti-business in general. Your basic definition  
>  is based on the false assumption that the owner of a business  
> necessarily contributes nothing to that business.
His income is not proportional to the work he does to get it.  He could
work himself to death or just go on vacation, and, so long as his
business is doing well, still have an incredible income.  That money
does not come from his efforts, but from the efforts of the employees of
his business.


>> Even if that value was not taken from the people who produced it, the
>> objective of the corporation is not the benefit of the community, the
>> sustainable production of its goods and ecological preservation, or any
>> other lofty objective.
>
> Says who? All corporations, or just some? That's a pretty broad brush.  
> All of us could name at least several for which that is true. But those  
> examples don't make such a sweeping generalization any truer. Especially  
> when it's based on flawed "facts". See above.
All corporations, at least as far as all corporations act in a
capitalist manner (which they all do much/most of the time).

Watch _The Corporation_[1] and _The Story of Stuff_[2] and tell me the
system isn't screwed up. (They are free to download)

> So, what is your antidote? What is your remedy? I haven't heard such
> illogical nonsense since the '60's (when I was spouting the same thing
> as I was being conscripted into fighting another
> irrationally-justified,  corporate-sponsored war).
Anarchy--socialism organized not around a state, but around free
associations of people and managed by democracy/consensus of its
participants.

apt-get install anarchism
or read the anarchy faq online[3].

[1] www.thecorporation.org (~3 hrs)
[2] www.storyofstuff.org (20 min)
[3] www.infoshop.org/faq/

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Re: GPL dustups

2008-06-15 Thread DJA


Martin Franco wrote:

On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 03:56:14PM -0500, Todd Walton wrote:

On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 12:14 PM, Martin Franco <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

The whole picture, as I see it, is that an unintended side affect of the
availability of home computers is that people are gaining the means to
produce content of all kinds.

It wasn't unintended.

The internet was designed this way, but the designers were probably
thinking of universities and government applications.  Technology
advanced, pcs and workstations won over mainframes, common people got
computers, and the internet grew.  The designers of the internet are not
the same people who sell computers and internet service, and the battle
over net neutrality proves that the internet as it is today is not the
internet that the corporations would like it to be.


It's not the Internet that /most/ people would like it to be. 
Corporations have no exclusive claim to dissatisfaction there.




 That is why I think
the internet, in the public sector, at least, can be said to be an
unintented development.


As were many of the most important inventions and innovations in Human 
history. Why would one expect the Internet to have turned out differently?




Capitalism != Consumerism

No, but they are intrinsically related.  That is, however, besides the
point.  The fundamental rule of capitalism is competition.


Consumerism works best for the producer (usually != consumer) in an 
environment where competition is minimal or non-existent.




When people
become producers, whether free software hackers, independent musicians,
or whatever, their golden rule is often cooporation.  They collaborate
on thier works and release thier products under terms that allow future
ideas to be built off thier efforts.


Ideally. But, for example, in practice at the present, allowing future 
works to be built upon current work is the /last/ thing the music 
industry (most professional musicians included) wants. Competition is 
certainly very, very ill in the entertainment industry.


And I personally get tired of hearing the implied argument that Artists 
produce art only for money. Artists produce art for art's sake, by 
definition. They'd scrawl on the wall with their own blood or perform in 
rags in the streets if they had to. It's not a profession, it's not a 
calling, it's an obsession whose only cure is death.




The two are polar opposites, and
its not surprising that its often hard to integrate the smaller
cooporative communities into the competitive framework of our economic
system, to make money with GPL'ed code, for example.


Sure, if you have very narrow definitions of success. If a 
freely-produced, freely-given product or service (e.g. GPL-licensed 
software or creative commons-licensed literature) improves that state of 
its respective industry or inspires similar work (Free or proprietary), 
then I'd call that both cooperative, successful, and profitable. If it 
improves some aspect of society as a whole, then where's the rub?


As I'm fond of saying, we don't live in a black-and-white, binary 
universe. There need not be, and indeed are not only two exclusive paths 
to be taken, only one of which leads to progress and enlightenment.



Community is profit.

Care to elaborate?  Profit is the difference between what the employees
of a company are paid and the value they produce.  This difference goes
to the 'owners' of the corporation to which the employees belong, people
who, because of thier legal position, did not have to do any work to
recieve that surplus value.  These owners are, in a sense, robbing the
community.


That's certainly not a definition of profit that's recognized in any 
conventional circles. By that definition, the barber down the street is 
a crook because he has money left over after expenses. At the least, 
that's definition that's anti-business in general. Your basic definition 
 is based on the false assumption that the owner of a business 
necessarily contributes nothing to that business. I think the barber 
would take issue with that as well.




Even if that value was not taken from the people who produced it, the
objective of the corporation is not the benefit of the community, the
sustainable production of its goods and ecological preservation, or any
other lofty objective.


Says who? All corporations, or just some? That's a pretty broad brush. 
All of us could name at least several for which that is true. But those 
examples don't make such a sweeping generalization any truer. Especially 
when it's based on flawed "facts". See above.




The objective is money, and any benefit to the
community that arises from its pursuit is unintended, incidental.  A
corporation would just as easily destroy the world as save it,
deliberating by means of a cost-benefit analysis.


So, what is your antidote? What is your remedy? I haven't heard such 
illogical nonsense since the '60's (when I was spouting the same thing 
as I was being conscr

gmx.com question [was Re: GPL dustups]

2008-06-15 Thread James G. Sack (jim)

Martin Franco wrote:
.. about capitalism, etc

I notice the gmx.com email address, and wonder what their business model
is. Do they advertise on their webmail interface, perhaps?

I see that they are "United Internet", which has a large internet
presence, but W'pedia says gmx has "10,000,000 active users in Germany,
Austria and Switzerland", so they must have some way of paying for all that.

Seems like advertising must be involved somewhere -- anybody know?

Regards,
..jim


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Re: GPL dustups

2008-06-15 Thread Martin Franco

On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 03:56:14PM -0500, Todd Walton wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 12:14 PM, Martin Franco <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > The whole picture, as I see it, is that an unintended side affect of the
> > availability of home computers is that people are gaining the means to
> > produce content of all kinds.
> 
> It wasn't unintended.
The internet was designed this way, but the designers were probably
thinking of universities and government applications.  Technology
advanced, pcs and workstations won over mainframes, common people got
computers, and the internet grew.  The designers of the internet are not
the same people who sell computers and internet service, and the battle
over net neutrality proves that the internet as it is today is not the
internet that the corporations would like it to be.  That is why I think
the internet, in the public sector, at least, can be said to be an
unintented development.

> Capitalism != Consumerism
No, but they are intrinsically related.  That is, however, besides the
point.  The fundamental rule of capitalism is competition.  When people
become producers, whether free software hackers, independent musicians,
or whatever, their golden rule is often cooporation.  They collaborate
on thier works and release thier products under terms that allow future
ideas to be built off thier efforts.  The two are polar opposites, and
its not surprising that its often hard to integrate the smaller
cooporative communities into the competitive framework of our economic
system, to make money with GPL'ed code, for example.

> Community is profit.
Care to elaborate?  Profit is the difference between what the employees
of a company are paid and the value they produce.  This difference goes
to the 'owners' of the corporation to which the employees belong, people
who, because of thier legal position, did not have to do any work to
recieve that surplus value.  These owners are, in a sense, robbing the
community.

Even if that value was not taken from the people who produced it, the
objective of the corporation is not the benefit of the community, the
sustainable production of its goods and ecological preservation, or any
other lofty objective.  The objective is money, and any benefit to the
community that arises from its pursuit is unintended, incidental.  A
corporation would just as easily destroy the world as save it,
deliberating by means of a cost-benefit analysis.

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Re: GPL dustups


Martin Franco wrote:

On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 11:25:27AM -0700, Gregory K. Ruiz-Ade wrote:
In my experience, people who insist that the GPL is the answer and  
copyright should be abolished don't see the whole picture.

The free software and the scientific communities have a lot in common.
In both, it's often the case that making money off your work is
difficult, though sometimes possible if you leave the community (hoard
your knowledge, get patents or proprietary licenses, etc.).  Both
flourish in the least capitalist of places--universities, publicly
funded institutions (government), and labs of large corporations.


Actually, there is some evidence that the whole broadening of patents 
has damaged our research situation dramatically.


For instance, there is evidence that professors at several of the major 
universities were hoarding their good ideas for external compensation or 
starting a company and only allowing their students to work on ideas 
they expected would fail.


See analyses of the Bayh-Dole Act and modern patents.

-a


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Re: GPL dustups


Todd Walton wrote:


Community is profit.


Disagree.  99.99% of everything is crap.  Adding to the crap makes the 
good stuff harder to find.  In that case, community is loss.


See: YouTube.

I'm not sure GooTube is a net loss, but it's not clearly a net plus, either.

-a


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Re: GPL dustups


Todd Walton wrote:

On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 11:38 AM, Martin Franco <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

So be sure you're not violating the GPL, and ignore them, as best you
can.  If you're playing by the rules, they'll lose more money and time
trying to harass you than you will in taking it.


Are there any cases of MySQL actually unduly harassing someone?


The author of the original article I cited, IIRC.

-a


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Re: GPL dustups


Martin Franco wrote:

On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 03:13:41PM -0700, Andrew Lentvorski wrote:
In fact, this is what the MySQL did in the article: "Nice software you  
got there.  Are you *sure* you're in compliance with the GPL?  Shame if  
some lawyer found a violation and had to take you to court.  You oughta  
buy a commercial license as "insurance"."

So be sure you're not violating the GPL, and ignore them, as best you
can.  If you're playing by the rules, they'll lose more money and time
trying to harass you than you will in taking it.


You can "be sure" and still have to shell out a nice set of legal fees
to prove it when someone files against you.  The GPL does not exist in a
vacuum somehow separate from law.  The legal system and the GPL form a
*system* which allows the GPL to have force.

The commercial license will somehow manage to be a painful fraction of
the legal fees yet be sufficiently less than a full-on trial.

Blackmail at its finest.  Expensive enough to be profitable, but cheap
enough that it isn't worth fighting.

-a



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Re: GPL dustups

2008-06-13 Thread Todd Walton

On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 12:14 PM, Martin Franco <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> The whole picture, as I see it, is that an unintended side affect of the
> availability of home computers is that people are gaining the means to
> produce content of all kinds.

It wasn't unintended.

> We are finally becoming more than just
> consumers, and to the extent that we do so, we prove that capitalism is
> not the only viable economic theory.

Capitalism != Consumerism

> We prove that there is a better
> alternative whose goal is not profit but community.

Community is profit.

-todd


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Re: GPL dustups

2008-06-13 Thread Martin Franco

On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 11:25:27AM -0700, Gregory K. Ruiz-Ade wrote:
> In my experience, people who insist that the GPL is the answer and  
> copyright should be abolished don't see the whole picture.
The free software and the scientific communities have a lot in common.
In both, it's often the case that making money off your work is
difficult, though sometimes possible if you leave the community (hoard
your knowledge, get patents or proprietary licenses, etc.).  Both
flourish in the least capitalist of places--universities, publicly
funded institutions (government), and labs of large corporations.

As for abolishing copyright, there are other models to consider.
Copyright, patents, etc. are based on the idea of granting a monopoly to
a person or group of people so they can market it.  This is at odds with
the scientific and free software ideas of community.  People whose work
benefits the public as a whole can, and have been, rewarded for thier
contributions with public funding, without being granted exclusionary
rights to thier ideas.

This affects much more than software and science.  Books, music,
animations, even movies are being produced and released under thier
equivalents to free software licenses.  A couple of examples:
  http://freeculture.org/manifesto/
  http://www.elephantsdream.org

The whole picture, as I see it, is that an unintended side affect of the
availability of home computers is that people are gaining the means to
produce content of all kinds.  We are finally becoming more than just
consumers, and to the extent that we do so, we prove that capitalism is
not the only viable economic theory.  We prove that there is a better
alternative whose goal is not profit but community.

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Re: GPL dustups

2008-06-13 Thread Todd Walton

On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 11:38 AM, Martin Franco <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> So be sure you're not violating the GPL, and ignore them, as best you
> can.  If you're playing by the rules, they'll lose more money and time
> trying to harass you than you will in taking it.

Are there any cases of MySQL actually unduly harassing someone?

-todd


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Re: GPL dustups

2008-06-13 Thread Druppy



On Jun 12, 2008, at 3:48 PM, SJS wrote:



You can charge for server usage, or you can sell the product and
provide free server usage. The problem comes when you try to to both:
sell the game *and* charge for server access (pisses people off) or
give away the game *and* server access (no revenue stream).

Blizzard has done both -- Diablo I and II provided pay-for-game and
free servers; WoW is a free-as-in-beer game and a for-pay server.



That's not entirely accurate.  Just like with my game EQ2, even with  
WoW you have to buy the game and then subscribe.  You are probably  
thinking about the free trial CDs you can get just about anywhere  
these days; but if their model is still the same as ours (and I think  
it is) to active a full account you still have to buy a Key (which is  
really all you are buying when you buy the boxed game) and then start  
paying the subscription as well.  Most of our income surges come from  
releasing new expansions and having good box sales (these are very  
noticeable on royalty checks), but the subscriptions work well to keep  
things running / keep development going.



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Re: GPL dustups

2008-06-13 Thread Martin Franco

On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 03:13:41PM -0700, Andrew Lentvorski wrote:
> In fact, this is what the MySQL did in the article: "Nice software you  
> got there.  Are you *sure* you're in compliance with the GPL?  Shame if  
> some lawyer found a violation and had to take you to court.  You oughta  
> buy a commercial license as "insurance"."
So be sure you're not violating the GPL, and ignore them, as best you
can.  If you're playing by the rules, they'll lose more money and time
trying to harass you than you will in taking it.
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Re: GPL dustups

2008-06-13 Thread Todd Walton

2008/6/12 Gregory K. Ruiz-Ade <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> On Jun 11, 2008, at 6:04 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
>> SJS doesn't like GPL so therefore you *must* be wrong.
>>
>> QED
>
> This was perhaps the most pointless, least reasoned and simply the stupidest
> thing I've read here in quite some time.

Though the *plonk* comment came close.

-todd


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Re: GPL dustups

2008-06-12 Thread DJA


Gregory K. Ruiz-Ade wrote:


In my experience, people who insist that the GPL is the answer and 
copyright should be abolished don't see the whole picture.


Gregory


The only people who think that don't understand either Copyright law or 
the GPL (or any other software license for that matter).


The GPL (and BSD, and every other software license I've read) depends 
explicitly on copyright for its enforcement ("Obey the terms of this 
license or you have no right to a copy of this software"), without which 
its terms would be moot.


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Re: GPL dustups

begin  quoting Gregory K. Ruiz-Ade as of Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 11:25:27AM -0700:
> On Jun 12, 2008, at 10:34 AM, Bob La Quey wrote:
> 
> >Selling software = bad business.
> >Selling services enabled by software = good business.
> >
> >Just my take,
> 
> 
> Really, that seems to hit it on the head.  While there are definitely  
> customers that will want just the software and handle the service part  
> in-house, there are a great many other customers that will usually  
> just want whatever service you offer to be "someone else's problem."
> 
> Going back a couple steps, though, if you're an independent software  
> developer, doing it for your sole source of income, your options  
> really are only:
> 
>  * Sell the software under a restrictive/proprietary license (and be  
> very careful to avoid any and all GPL code.)

This tends to restrict the customer-base. One of the reasons I bought
a Mac (after the it's-a-laptop-it-runs-unix-squee primary reason) was
that I got tired of limited choice of software available at a price-point 
I could afford.

I like to keep my options open.

>  * Sell services which happen to depend on the software you've  
> developed.

Without a firm contract in place, you end up at the mercy of the service
provider; and I've had too many service providers change terms... what am
I going to do? Suck it up and deal with it, that's what.

>From a customer's point of view (well, my point of view as a customer), both
alternatives suck, but the second sucks more.

> It's really not much different if you're a small independent software  
> house.
> 
> It's very hard to make a living on your own by doing all your work for  
> free (i.e., releasing everything you do GPL.)  Yes, you might be hired  
> into a large firm, like Qualcomm, and be able to do it, but Qualcomm's  
> revenues are NOT based on GPL code.  The fact that they'd allow code  
> to be released GPL is a side-effect of their core business, which is  
> most certainly not GPL software.
> 
> Paying the rent without an income is hard.  Can't make a business out  
> of altruism, without finding another way to bring money in.
> 
> In my experience, people who insist that the GPL is the answer and  
> copyright should be abolished don't see the whole picture.

I think you made my point better than I ever did.

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Re: GPL dustups

begin  quoting Tracy R Reed as of Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 04:13:20PM -0700:
> Druppy wrote:
> > How does a company recoop R&D investments?  Let say we spend $3million 
> > and 5 years making a game and release it as open source.  What is stopping 
> >a bunch of server farms from running our stuff for free without ever 
> >having spent a dime on R&D and thus being able to sell the service for 
> >much less.
> 
> Most people sell advertising to support stuff like that it seems. Other 
> than that perhaps you just can't make money that way. I'm fine with 
> that. There are lots of things that you can't make money doing. And if 
> it comes down to turning our country into a police state and giving up 
> control of our computers so DRM can work so that a company can stop 
> people making copies of their software I'm against anyone being able to 
> make money that way.

Copy-protection is another thing entirely.

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Re: GPL dustups

2008-06-12 Thread Tracy R Reed


Druppy wrote:
 How does a company recoop R&D investments?  Let say we spend $3million and 5 years making a 
game and release it as open source.  What is stopping a bunch of server 
farms from running our stuff for free without ever having spent a dime 
on R&D and thus being able to sell the service for much less.


Most people sell advertising to support stuff like that it seems. Other 
than that perhaps you just can't make money that way. I'm fine with 
that. There are lots of things that you can't make money doing. And if 
it comes down to turning our country into a police state and giving up 
control of our computers so DRM can work so that a company can stop 
people making copies of their software I'm against anyone being able to 
make money that way.



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Re: GPL dustups

begin  quoting Bob La Quey as of Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 03:41:53PM -0700:
> On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 3:33 PM, SJS <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >> BobLQ "I like services"
> >
> > Heh.  I don't care for most services. I despise toll roads, for example.
> 
> Tolls are just one way to pay. I guess you like taxes.

I prefer taxes to tolls.

Eventually, it /has/ to be paid for, and will be. I get that.

> Do you provide your own water, electricity, highways? Damn you sure are
> one self-sufficient fellow.

Nope, nope, nope, and not really.

It's not that I wouldn't *like* to be.

> I despise SDG&E but I use them. I despise the city government but I use
> their services.

Yup.

> I still like services.

You also like to rent.

There ought to be room for both of us.

-- 
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Re: GPL dustups

begin  quoting Druppy as of Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 11:55:45AM -0700:
> 
> On Jun 12, 2008, at 10:34 AM, Bob La Quey wrote:
> >Selling software = bad business.
> >Selling services enabled by software = good business.
> >
> 
> I'm curious how this would break down in the B2C world as opposed to  
> the B2B world.  Business love service contracts but consumers do not.   

Some comsumers/users do, some don't, some are ambivalent.

> So let's say I make an awesome game and I want to see it, how does  
> that work with your model? Do I sell a service contract to my end  
> user, in case the game breaks?  For online games you can obviously  
> charge for server usage, but what about single player games? 

You can charge for server usage, or you can sell the product and
provide free server usage. The problem comes when you try to to both:
sell the game *and* charge for server access (pisses people off) or
give away the game *and* server access (no revenue stream).

Blizzard has done both -- Diablo I and II provided pay-for-game and
free servers; WoW is a free-as-in-beer game and a for-pay server.

Some of my favorite games are open source. For example, xpilot is
open, run on open servers, with open clients... but there's not
really a way to make money at it, except perhaps for advertising.

> How does  
> a company recoop R&D investments?  Let say we spend $3million and 5  
> years making a game and release it as open source.  What is stopping a  
> bunch of server farms from running our stuff for free without ever  
> having spent a dime on R&D and thus being able to sell the service for  
> much less.

Software should be free! You should just spend that money out of the
goodness of your heart!

> Maybe I am missing something though.

Sony or Nintendo could give away games for free and use 'em to sell
consoles; the problem is that eventually everone will have a console,
and then the market is dead.  A new console is required to jump-start
the whole process over again.

Of course, charging for games *and* consoles *and* services... that's
a business's wet dream, and a customer's nightmare.

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Re: GPL dustups

2008-06-12 Thread Bob La Quey

On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 3:33 PM, SJS <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>
>> BobLQ "I like services"
>
> Heh.  I don't care for most services. I despise toll roads, for example.

Tolls are just one way to pay. I guess you like taxes.

Do you provide your own water, electricity, highways? Damn you sure are
one self-sufficient fellow.

I despise SDG&E but I use them. I despise the city government but I use
their services.

I still like services.

BobLQ

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Re: GPL dustups

2008-06-12 Thread Andrew Lentvorski


[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 06:36:36PM -0500, Todd Walton wrote:

On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 5:55 PM, SJS <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

The GPL discourages* businesses from producing software

Google put $5.6 million into this year's Summer of Code.  Red Hat just
reported $500 million quarterly profits, and they make plenty of GPLd
software.  IBM makes GPLd code.  Sun makes GPLd code, and god knows
they're even stodgier than IBM these days.

I don't see how the GPL is discouraging business from producing
software, and I don't see how we should care if it is.


SJS doesn't like GPL so therefore you *must* be wrong.

QED


Ahem.  The capitalization of companies that produce proprietary software 
is at least one order of magnitude larger than companies that produce 
GPL software *even if I exclude Microsoft*.


And, you know what, I'd probably argue *two* orders of magnitude, and I 
might even be able to justify *three* orders of magnitude.


Successful GPL software companies are the exception, not the rule.

Next time, try to add something substantive to the discussion.

-a


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Re: GPL dustups

begin  quoting Bob La Quey as of Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 10:34:32AM -0700:
> On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 10:02 AM, SJS <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
[snip]
> > I think the problem is that I make a distinction between writing
> > software for release, and selling services that require software.
> > Some folks not only fail to see the distinction, but they fail
> > to see the possibility of any such distinction.
> 
> Selling software = bad business.
> Selling services enabled by software = good business.

Bad as in "a poor way to make money", or as in "morally reprehensible"?

> Just my take,

Fair nuff. 

> BobLQ "I like services"

Heh.  I don't care for most services. I despise toll roads, for example.

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Re: GPL dustups

2008-06-12 Thread Andrew Lentvorski


Martin Franco wrote:

I don't see how multi-licensing is relevent either.  If you can obtain
the software under one license you like, like the GPL, then the other
licenses do not apply to you.  If the company goes out of business or
changes the licensing terms, you still have the last free software
version to continue development if you want.  And if you can't get the
software under a free license, then it is not free software.


Just because GPL is a "free license" does not mean "no restrictions."

In fact, this is what the MySQL did in the article: "Nice software you 
got there.  Are you *sure* you're in compliance with the GPL?  Shame if 
some lawyer found a violation and had to take you to court.  You oughta 
buy a commercial license as "insurance"."


If it's licensed under the LGPL, the license itself doesn't have enough 
restrictions to allow the shakedown.


-a


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Re: GPL dustups

2008-06-12 Thread Bob La Quey

On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 11:55 AM, Druppy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> On Jun 12, 2008, at 10:34 AM, Bob La Quey wrote:
>>>
>>
>> Selling software = bad business.
>> Selling services enabled by software = good business.
>>
>>
>
> I'm curious how this would break down in the B2C world as opposed to the B2B
> world.  Business love service contracts but consumers do not.  So let's say
> I make an awesome game and I want to see it, how does that work with your
> model? Do I sell a service contract to my end user, incase the game breaks?
>  For online games you can obviously charge for server usage, but what about
> single player games?  How does a company recoop R&D investments?  Let say we
> spend $3million and 5 years making a game and release it as open source.
>  What is stopping a bunch of server farms from running our stuff for free
> without ever having spent a dime on R&D and thus being able to sell the
> service for much less.
>
> Maybe I am missing something though.

Keep some of the software as trade secret. Run it only on your servers.

This still is likely to mean that you can add a lot of less specialized
software to the GPL pool. And equally important you can use a lot of FOSS
and concentrate your $3 Million on what is your real value add.

I suppose one could come up with a FOSS license that required the
viral propagation of adds ;-( then get paid per click.

BobLQ "Not thinking much about games though."


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Re: GPL dustups

2008-06-12 Thread Gregory K. Ruiz-Ade


On Jun 12, 2008, at 11:25 AM, Gregory K. Ruiz-Ade wrote:


Selling software = bad business.
Selling services enabled by software = good business.


Really, that seems to hit it on the head.



Okay, to be clear, was meaning to agree with the second statement.

To be perfectly exact, I see it as:

"Selling" GPL software = bad business
Selling services enabled by software = good business

One could, optionally, leave off the "Selling" from the first point  
and still get my meaning.


Essentially, giving things away for free does not a business make.   
Giving things away for free that require your services, though, is  
known as a loss-leader, but requires greater care in order to get  
right and maintain a revenue stream.


Gregory

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Re: GPL dustups

2008-06-12 Thread Druppy



On Jun 12, 2008, at 10:34 AM, Bob La Quey wrote:




Selling software = bad business.
Selling services enabled by software = good business.




I'm curious how this would break down in the B2C world as opposed to  
the B2B world.  Business love service contracts but consumers do not.   
So let's say I make an awesome game and I want to see it, how does  
that work with your model? Do I sell a service contract to my end  
user, incase the game breaks?  For online games you can obviously  
charge for server usage, but what about single player games?  How does  
a company recoop R&D investments?  Let say we spend $3million and 5  
years making a game and release it as open source.  What is stopping a  
bunch of server farms from running our stuff for free without ever  
having spent a dime on R&D and thus being able to sell the service for  
much less.


Maybe I am missing something though.

~Nandy "I've yet to be paid for a single line of OS code I've written"  
Szots



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Re: GPL dustups

2008-06-12 Thread Gregory K. Ruiz-Ade


On Jun 12, 2008, at 10:34 AM, Bob La Quey wrote:


Selling software = bad business.
Selling services enabled by software = good business.

Just my take,



Really, that seems to hit it on the head.  While there are definitely  
customers that will want just the software and handle the service part  
in-house, there are a great many other customers that will usually  
just want whatever service you offer to be "someone else's problem."


Going back a couple steps, though, if you're an independent software  
developer, doing it for your sole source of income, your options  
really are only:


 * Sell the software under a restrictive/proprietary license (and be  
very careful to avoid any and all GPL code.)


 * Sell services which happen to depend on the software you've  
developed.


It's really not much different if you're a small independent software  
house.


It's very hard to make a living on your own by doing all your work for  
free (i.e., releasing everything you do GPL.)  Yes, you might be hired  
into a large firm, like Qualcomm, and be able to do it, but Qualcomm's  
revenues are NOT based on GPL code.  The fact that they'd allow code  
to be released GPL is a side-effect of their core business, which is  
most certainly not GPL software.


Paying the rent without an income is hard.  Can't make a business out  
of altruism, without finding another way to bring money in.


In my experience, people who insist that the GPL is the answer and  
copyright should be abolished don't see the whole picture.


Gregory

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Re: GPL dustups

2008-06-12 Thread Bob La Quey

On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 10:02 AM, SJS <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> begin  quoting Nicholas Wheeler as of Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 09:24:01AM -0400:
> [snip]
>> I work for a small government contractor, around 40 or 50 employees
>> and we sell various open source(GPL) content management systems (that
>> we've made) as a service, along with hosting, customizations, etc. We
>> seem to do alright ;-)
>
> If you're in business selling services, it makes sense to GPL the
> software.  I wouldn't call you a software-house, however.
>
> I think the problem is that I make a distinction between writing
> software for release, and selling services that require software.
> Some folks not only fail to see the distinction, but they fail
> to see the possibility of any such distinction.

Selling software = bad business.
Selling services enabled by software = good business.

Just my take,

BobLQ "I like services"


> --
> Government software should be automatically LGPL'd or better (public domain?).
> Stewart Stremler
>
>
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Re: GPL dustups

begin  quoting Nicholas Wheeler as of Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 09:24:01AM -0400:
[snip]
> I work for a small government contractor, around 40 or 50 employees
> and we sell various open source(GPL) content management systems (that
> we've made) as a service, along with hosting, customizations, etc. We
> seem to do alright ;-)

If you're in business selling services, it makes sense to GPL the
software.  I wouldn't call you a software-house, however.

I think the problem is that I make a distinction between writing
software for release, and selling services that require software.
Some folks not only fail to see the distinction, but they fail
to see the possibility of any such distinction.

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Stewart Stremler


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Re: GPL dustups

begin  quoting Doug LaRue as of Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 09:31:05AM -0700:
> ** Reply to message from SJS <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> on Wed, 11 Jun 2008 16:39:09
> -0700
> 
> > It's been argued that open-source has killed the market for software
> > development tools.
> 
> look at your beloved Microsoft for one big source of damage to software
[snip]

Oh, get a clue already.

Your pathetic ad-hominiem is so wrong it's laughable. Just ask around.

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Re: GPL dustups