Re: [ox-en] Germ of a new form of society or germ of a new form of business?
- From: "Niall Douglas" <s_fsfeurope2 nedprod.com>
- Date: Tue, 03 Feb 2004 04:04:48 -0000
On 2 Feb 2004 at 2:02, Benj. Mako Hill wrote:
That said, I've been able to be creative enough to pay myself to
produce GPL'd software for the last half decade.
You almost certainly come from the right background - I bet you're
white, speak english natively and come from at least a middle class
background with an expensive education. If you were Hispanic just
freshly arrived over the border from Mexico, could you make a living
from servicing GPL'ed software?
Have you ever considered that those who make a living from servicing
complex and arcane software are in fact practicising one of the most
fundamental forms of information control - that which requires
"expertness"?
Sure, the software itself is available with less restrictions. But
how useful is that really if only experts from rich backgrounds,
excellent education and a life of leisure can alter it?
It used to surprise me that all "computer geeks" are very similar. I
am just as much part of them. But then I realised we all have the
same socioeconomic background, all had plenty of free time in our
teenage years and all had expensive schooling (we're also all mostly
male).
You must understand that most people who are successful entrepreneurs
are so because they were born into the right conditions. They have no
god's gift, in fact they may be really crap at it but they'll still
succeed (eg; the Bush family) because they were born with the power.
FreeBSD is a better Unix on a technical level (which is why I used
"superior").
Which technical level is that? I just looked for technical comparisons
of the two and couldn't come up with anything that wasn't pure
marketing material or propaganda. I can think of quite a few things
that Linux does a lot better than FreeBSD (or that FreeBSD doesn't do
at all!).
Emm - try this site which is pretty good:
http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/bsd4linux1.php
How can it be that the identical binary DLL is being "stolen" just
because of what links to it?
Dynamic linking is, for all intents and purposes, just like taking a
given library, or bits of pieces of it, and including it in your
application. You link to a library because you don't want to write
that code yourself. Static linking, something that's only a compiler
flag difference from dynamic linking, will actually include the
library code into your binary. I shouldn't have to explain this all to
you.
No, static linking is VERY different from dynamic linking. In static
linking unused code is elided, in dynamic none is elided because you
can't know what the using binary(s) will want.
Also and more importantly for copyright law, none of the code in the
DLL ends up in the using binary. This means you can legitimately
claim it's not a derived work.
Answer my question: How can using the precise same DLL be stealing
depending on who uses it? It's like saying that a typewriter is being
stolen if someone else types on it!
How does anyone at all lose out by the exact same DLL being used by
closed source code? No modifications were made, no enhancements lost
or proprietised.
It's *identical* to person A losing nothing if person B reads their
book - /therein/ is the unique advantage of information, it's a gain-
always entity. And the GPL prohibits it :(
Cheers,
Niall