I think the picture included in the link below says it all.
http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/rms-ati-protest.html
http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/rms-ati-protest.html
epic
ATI - Enemy of your Freedom?
- Thread starter epicstruggle
- Start date
That's hilarious. A wee bit uptight at MIT, apparently. The boys in green must so not love "nvidious" as a term of affection (from the same article).
I thot that maybe software patents were their big beef, but it looks to be quite abit beyond that.
Don Quixote, call your office. . .
Edit: Tho for a header you'd think they'd have said "damaging anti-Free Software Policies". For a little while I thought it might be the programmers guild protesting giving it away for free or something.. .
I thot that maybe software patents were their big beef, but it looks to be quite abit beyond that.
Don Quixote, call your office. . .
Edit: Tho for a header you'd think they'd have said "damaging anti-Free Software Policies". For a little while I thought it might be the programmers guild protesting giving it away for free or something.. .
Aww, poor little multiple-personality schizophrenic ******.
I wonder if every time he turns on his pc he goes "What the f**k os this Nvidious card doing in here?!" and swaps it out for his Radeon. Then mid-gaming, flips a mental switch, sees the ATI logo and goes "What the f**k is this RADEON doing in here?!" et cetera.
Eh...would be mighty funny. But this guy is good for a laugh anyway.
I wonder if every time he turns on his pc he goes "What the f**k os this Nvidious card doing in here?!" and swaps it out for his Radeon. Then mid-gaming, flips a mental switch, sees the ATI logo and goes "What the f**k is this RADEON doing in here?!" et cetera.
Eh...would be mighty funny. But this guy is good for a laugh anyway.
the maddman
Regular
RMS is a unique individual. He holds to his ideal completely. It's good to have someone way over there to help balance the people that do want to DRM everything.
Hey, I'm all for RMS's concepts but I don't believe they can exist in a world ruled by capitalism.
Maybe when Gene Roddenberry's ideal of a more socialistic society prevails will his methodologies be embraced by competing companies. (that was sarcasm, btw.. I dont speak Klingon)
For now, though.. I do agree that the need to reverse engineer released hardware products in order to add support for them for "free" operating systems is just silly. Of course, the need to sign an NDA is really useless if you're attempt is to have an Open Source foundation for peer engineer, design and review.. so it's a total Catch-22.
Maybe when Gene Roddenberry's ideal of a more socialistic society prevails will his methodologies be embraced by competing companies. (that was sarcasm, btw.. I dont speak Klingon)
For now, though.. I do agree that the need to reverse engineer released hardware products in order to add support for them for "free" operating systems is just silly. Of course, the need to sign an NDA is really useless if you're attempt is to have an Open Source foundation for peer engineer, design and review.. so it's a total Catch-22.
DudeMiester
Regular
If you were really hardcore, you could "martyr" yourself by accepting and deliberatly breaking the NDAs. Suicide Informants.
What's not clear from that article is why Stallman was protesting ATI - he instead provided a link to another article where he seems to say it's because (he claims) ATI makes secret the details of their chips that would allow others to write free drivers for ATI cards. He's talking about Linux of course, where he apparently feels that ATI is doing the Linux an injustice because of their poor support of the OS.
Still sligtly confusing. If you go to the trouble of protesting at least make clear what exactly it is that you are protesting.
Still sligtly confusing. If you go to the trouble of protesting at least make clear what exactly it is that you are protesting.
Sharkfood said:
I'll never forget a line by Picard (Patrick Stewart) in one of the latter Next-Gen movies, where Picard says something like, "In the 21st century, we've done away with the need for money." I started thinking about all of the glorious starships that Picard and Kirk and other Enterprise captains have crashed and burned in their various heroic "save the world" adventures, and I wondered just who built those glorious ships, and how they were paid for designing and building them, if not with money...
Somehow, "foodstamps" and "free software" doesn't seem a likely replacement, or inducement, for building starships. It would have been nice if somebody in Star Trek along the way had ever manged to explain the practical replacement for "money" as those in the 21st century reportedly enjoy it (whatever it is) inside the Star Trek universe... One thing is certain: Roddenberry didn't write Star Trek for "free"--ever... And nobody ever since has, either.What I think is silly is to listen to people talk about what's "free"...
Nothing I've ever heard them talk about has ever been "free," of course, but is always paid for by *somebody's* money. Hey, I mean, if the Open Sourcers want to hide the info on who pays for Open Source just so they can pretend it's "free," then what's wrong with companies who design and manufacture their own products to pretend that those products are "proprietary" and to hide the details about them? Heh...IMO, the Open Sourcers are the biggest drag and drain on technological progress I might ever have imagined. In their quest to "socialize" technology they have to pretend that ideally it should be "free" when absolutely nothing else known to modern civilization suffers the same backwards-looking, ignorant stigma. Most governments around the world are studying ways to enrich their citizens economically so that they can buy the things they need and want, while these people are advocating that we should all pretend that software grows on trees in the wild and is a naturally occurring resource like H2O.
I guess open sourcers never heard the old adage about their being no such thing as a free lunch. Probably they know that truism very well, but they are forever enthusiastically and delusionally trying to deny it, for reasons known only to themselves. Indeed, just twenty years ago I cannot imagine anybody talking about "the open source movement" with a straight face, especially as the conversation well might be confused with some sort of laxative commercial on television at the time.
Hmm. I think there is certainly room for open source stuff. I've written a few of my own. It's typically software that i want to have and doesn't exist yet, but I'm not interested in charging any money for it to others who happen to also be able to use that software.
What's wrong with that? I personally love that you have software like beyond3d and audacity.
What's wrong with that? I personally love that you have software like beyond3d and audacity.
Arwin said:
Not a thing in the world is wrong with it...
Years ago, though, nobody called it "Open Source"--they called it Public Domain. On my Amigas more than a decade ago I ran lots of PD software, and what I ran was all very useful and much appreciated.Today's "open source" commentary, though, unfortunately has little to do with software in general and a whole lot more to do with indirect rants and raves of a political nature--and commonly the very pupose of so-called Open Source software is to slam established companies in some weird, zany fashion. The purpose of software imo should be software and not politics, of an economic kind or any other kind. Sadly, today what would've been called Public Domain a decade ago is now called "open source," and the software itself is rarely celebrated on its own merits, but is more often than not used as a proxy to lash out in some way against an established software company.
That's what I don't like--not the software itself, which I judge on its own merits. Sadly, when it comes to discussions of Open Source vs. corporate software today (both of a Public Domain nature like yours or of a corporate, money-making nature like Firefox, which I use, btw), there are few who are either willing or able to judge both kinds of software strictly on the merits. Like in the piece which is the subject of this topic, some kind of corporate politics (I should say anti-corporate politics) always seems to overshadow what's really of interest--the software itself. I submit that the politics is unimportant--the importance is in the software.
No, the public domain software you ran on your Amiga was almost always freeware, not open source; with freeware, you don't have the source, you can't modify the program, and you can't redistribute it. Believe me, I was FTPing wustl constantly back in 1992--I remember.WaltC said:Not a thing in the world is wrong with it...
Open source works because it allows both hobbyists (the guys who were writing public domain stuff on the Amiga 15 years ago) and corporations to improve code. If I find a bug in phpbb, I can fix it immediately on my own installation, without waiting for a patch, and submit my own fix back to the main source tree. Companies make money off of open source by supporting it. There are some (basically RMS) who turn it into a great ideological thing, but RMS is on the fringe even in the open source community. The vast, vast majority just wants to be able to improve the software they use whenever they feel like it and receive the collected improvements of others. It's a matter of better software--it doesn't have corporate politics associated with it. No marketing, no shipping pressures, just "when it's ready" because most of them aren't being paid for it.
As far as drivers go, most Linux drivers suck. ATI drivers, for a long time, were absolutely awful (they still are in some respects, although they have improved significantly). If you release the driver source under a reasonable license, you will suddenly have a lot of guys with the ability to fix driver problems and a reason to do it (improve support for the hardware that they own). That's what most people complain about, not "freedom." To them, it's just, "If you're not going to properly support Linux in the first place, why don't you let us do it for you?"
So yeah, you really have no idea what you're talking about with regards to open source. Unless you're just classifying all open source projects as RMS/GNU Open Source freedom nonsense, in which case you're probably just being a troll.
Balderdash. Back in my C64 and Amiga days, I routinely downloaded non-GPLed source, even non-BSD source. In the early 80s, source could be found easily on BBSes, on textfile magazines, on Compuserve, BIX, UUNET, et al. Comp.sources existed for just that purpose.
People were giving away source way before RMS arrived on the scene, they just did it informally. Most people simply had no need to keep source closed for hobbyist freeware because they never stood a chance to make money on the n-th clone of a utility that they wrote for a learning experience.
For example, allow me to reproduce Matt Dillon's "license" for D-Net for the Amiga
Dillon produced, among other things, DNet, DCC (free+source C compiler for Amiga), AmiUUCP (Amiga UUCP implementation), etc.
And then there are the oodles of MUDs/MUSHes/MUFes/MOOs/Dikus/LPs/etcera that don't carry "modern" Open Source licenses, but "old school" "Copyright by Me, use as you wish"
The GPL is an insidious license, one that denies the very idea of an honor system, of altruism, of *fun of coding*. It makes the assumption that in order to contribute one needs to be "paid back" by forcing others to give their contributions back to you. It mandates reciprocity and denies the main essense of the wellspring of open source which is people having fun and engaging in learning.
GPL people make alot of noise about the dire scenario of someone taking *your code*, modifying it, and distributing it to make money without you getting anything. For me personally, if someone else uses my code, that is reward in and of itself, like knowing that an orphan got a family. I personally could care less whether someone else uses it without giving back. That's why I prefer BSD licenses.
On top of this is the fact that the GPL is largely irrelevent these days since the majority of new applications are distributed via remote interfaces like the web, not distributed as installable client binaries, and therefore, no one can be compelled to contribute any beneficial modifications they've made to GPL code which they are running on a web server.
And the "dire scenario" didn't come to pass for BSD as many people expected. Instead of commercial companies "stealing" BSD and distributing BSD modified binaries without source, the major mode of theft (in the early days of Linux) was Linux GPL hackers stealing BSD driver code to bootstrap their own drivers they were writing.
The fact is, *huge* amounts of non-GPL viral code exists, like Firefox, like Apache licenses, like BSD, and despite the "flaws" in these licenses (according to GPL zealots), more than enough people exist in these communities to continue to push these applications.
People were giving away source way before RMS arrived on the scene, they just did it informally. Most people simply had no need to keep source closed for hobbyist freeware because they never stood a chance to make money on the n-th clone of a utility that they wrote for a learning experience.
For example, allow me to reproduce Matt Dillon's "license" for D-Net for the Amiga
Dillon produced, among other things, DNet, DCC (free+source C compiler for Amiga), AmiUUCP (Amiga UUCP implementation), etc.
And then there are the oodles of MUDs/MUSHes/MUFes/MOOs/Dikus/LPs/etcera that don't carry "modern" Open Source licenses, but "old school" "Copyright by Me, use as you wish"
The GPL is an insidious license, one that denies the very idea of an honor system, of altruism, of *fun of coding*. It makes the assumption that in order to contribute one needs to be "paid back" by forcing others to give their contributions back to you. It mandates reciprocity and denies the main essense of the wellspring of open source which is people having fun and engaging in learning.
GPL people make alot of noise about the dire scenario of someone taking *your code*, modifying it, and distributing it to make money without you getting anything. For me personally, if someone else uses my code, that is reward in and of itself, like knowing that an orphan got a family. I personally could care less whether someone else uses it without giving back. That's why I prefer BSD licenses.
On top of this is the fact that the GPL is largely irrelevent these days since the majority of new applications are distributed via remote interfaces like the web, not distributed as installable client binaries, and therefore, no one can be compelled to contribute any beneficial modifications they've made to GPL code which they are running on a web server.
And the "dire scenario" didn't come to pass for BSD as many people expected. Instead of commercial companies "stealing" BSD and distributing BSD modified binaries without source, the major mode of theft (in the early days of Linux) was Linux GPL hackers stealing BSD driver code to bootstrap their own drivers they were writing.
The fact is, *huge* amounts of non-GPL viral code exists, like Firefox, like Apache licenses, like BSD, and despite the "flaws" in these licenses (according to GPL zealots), more than enough people exist in these communities to continue to push these applications.
Whoa whoa whoa, I'm not a GPL proponent at all. I really don't like the GPL and much prefer BSD-style licenses.
I prefer the LGPL ( though there are some issues with it i.e. java ) cause essentially you are allowed to freely use a libary in commerical closed source product but if you make any changes to the libary you have to give them back to the community. I view it as an in-between of BSD and GPL.The Baron said:
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The Baron said:
I think DemoCoder summed it up nicely, and if you'd bother to read the post I responded to above, you'd understand what I was saying. The author of that post, like most people, equates "Open Source" with "free software"--period. He doesn't concern himself with GPL or BSD--or XYZ, for that matter. His definition of "open source" and yours are light years apart. Besides, if you want to make all of these formal distinctions, there wasn't only "freeware," there was "shareware" (which many considered "free") there was "trialware" and just basically a whole specturm of God-knows-what-ware, too...
The point of my post was to say that people who think "Open Source" is just an acronym for "Free Software written and compiled by armies of dedicated programmers who do all that they do for free out of their love for mankind" are the ones who don't actually know what Open Source really is, aren't they? I think your post demonstrated what it really is, with all its shades of *licensing* restriction and complexity.
Political hacks who "demonstrate" because companies who manufacture their own proprietry hardware don't dance to the tunes that they wish to dictate, imo, are the worst kind of hacks, imo. If anything, I think they give the concept of "open Source" its bad name--if, that is, we want to consider that the term "open source" has ever actually been intelligible.
Besides, that's just my opinion--nothing to get all worked up about as you've obviously got your opinion, too...
@WaltC - some good points.
I think OSS would go an awful lot further if people like RMS just disappeared. That and your averge slashdot flamer/zealot are by far the worst things associated with OSS. I dont think they realise that the image they're casting out on the wider software community (users and developers) is very off-putting.
On the flip side, they're doing a great job of isolating themselves as "extremists" that I can stay clear of them. I like the fact that they don't get in the way of people like myself who's just getting on with it.
My commercial software tends to be closed-source (there are many reasons for this) yet I write a lot of samples, tutorials and publish lots of code in online forums and my journal. The stuff I give away is always "as is" with no licence - basically, you can do whatever the hell you want with it but dont come crying back to me if you break it (or it breaks you).
Jack
I think OSS would go an awful lot further if people like RMS just disappeared. That and your averge slashdot flamer/zealot are by far the worst things associated with OSS. I dont think they realise that the image they're casting out on the wider software community (users and developers) is very off-putting.
On the flip side, they're doing a great job of isolating themselves as "extremists" that I can stay clear of them. I like the fact that they don't get in the way of people like myself who's just getting on with it.
My commercial software tends to be closed-source (there are many reasons for this) yet I write a lot of samples, tutorials and publish lots of code in online forums and my journal. The stuff I give away is always "as is" with no licence - basically, you can do whatever the hell you want with it but dont come crying back to me if you break it (or it breaks you
).Jack