Apple's Boot Camp beta

[WMD]

I officially don't want a Mac anymore BTW. In the future I will be trying hard to buy hardware whose developers have released enough documentation, and that'll probably mean choosing every piece of hardware myself, something I can't do with Macs.

AFAIK, the new Intel models ship with an Intel wireless card, for which Linux drivers exist.

[piratePenguin]

I agree, this is the main problem with proprietay software and closed sourced hardware. I don't think either are evil I just believe it's immoral to keep specfications secret and to this end any doing so is evil - I don't have a problem with someone making a closed source app and then making the file formats public.

Well, I think it's pretty fucked up when someone releases something which can very easily be copied and says you're not allowd to copy it. Fact is, you can copy it, easily. And the law shouldn't protect against copying, ever. If you depend on income from something which can be copied easily, you're not wise. You shouldn't be allowd to take action against anyone for copying anything.

The idea that the proprietary-software social system--the system that says you are not allowed to share or change software--is antisocial, that it is unethical, that it is simply wrong, may come as a surprise to some readers. But what else could we say about a system based on dividing the public and keeping users helpless? Readers who find the idea surprising may have taken proprietary-software social system as given, or judged it on the terms suggested by proprietary software businesses. Software publishers have worked long and hard to convince people that there is only one way to look at the issue.

When software publishers talk about "enforcing" their "rights" or "stopping piracy", what they actually *say* is secondary. The real message of these statements is in the unstated assumptions they take for granted; the public is supposed to accept them uncritically. So let's examine them.

One assumption is that software companies have an unquestionable natural right to own software and thus have power over all its users. (If this were a natural right, then no matter how much harm it does to the public, we could not object.) Interestingly, the US Constitution and legal tradition reject this view; copyright is not a natural right, but an artificial government-imposed monopoly that limits the users' natural right to copy.

Another unstated assumption is that the only important thing about software is what jobs it allows you to do--that we computer users should not care what kind of society we are allowed to have.

A third assumption is that we would have no usable software (or would never have a program to do this or that particular job) if we did not offer a company power over the users of the program. This assumption may have seemed plausible, before the free software movement demonstrated that we can make plenty of useful software without putting chains on it.

If we decline to accept these assumptions, and judge these issues based on ordinary common-sense morality while placing the users first, we arrive at very different conclusions. Computer users should be free to modify programs to fit their needs, and free to share software, because helping other people is the basis of society.

There is no room here for an extensive statement of the reasoning behind this conclusion, so I refer the reader to the web page, http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-free.html.

http://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html

AFAIK, the new Intel models ship with an Intel wireless card, for which Linux drivers exist.

That's good.

[Aloone_Jonez]

The same goes for any other electronic media like music and films recorded on CDs and it depends on your point of view, do you think copyright law should be scrapped altogeather then?

I'd be very interested to see what would happen, just thinking are there any countries where copyright doesn't exist?

EDIT:
Your above argument doesn't talk about closed hardware (not releasing technical info such as the instruction set). How is this any better than freeware where the copyright holder has decided not to limit copying but has just decided not to release the source code?

[KernelPanic]

I beleive people are having certain Airport success with the open-source bcm43xx drivers. These will be in the next major Linux kernel release BTW and can only improve from there.

I personally use bcm43xx on a (different) Broadcom chip in a x64 laptop environment and it does pretty damn well for a supposedly 'alpha' driver.

[piratePenguin]

The same goes for any other electronic media like music and films recorded on CDs and it depends on your point of view, do you think copyright law should be scrapped altogeather then?

Copying something should never mean breaking the law IMO. If copyright allows it to be, then copyright needs to be changed or removed. I'd say change it or replace it with something. If it was just removed then I wouldn't be able to make sure derivative works of software I write have the changes to the source code released to the public.

I'd be very interested to see what would happen, just thinking are there any countries where copyright doesn't exist?

I WISH. I used to wonder if there was, it would be my dream place to live (a sane country!), but there couldn't possibly, could there? Maybe Cuba, where I hear they've got some sort of communism setup.

Nice, I searched for "communist copyright" on google and found this! The picture of the GNU caught my eye

Okay, so I'm writing an essay on copyright for my English class.

Personally, I think copyright is utterly stupid. I think it should have been thrown out with the rest of the British monopoly when they cleaned that mess up.

What really gets me is that the ancient Greeks would have thought the ownership of ideas to be preposterous. Think about this one for a second. The ancient Greeks practiced slavery, but not copyright.

Greeks thought it was okay for people to own people, but the idea of owning an idea was ridiculous.

In either case, I figgure copyright's days are numbered. What with the anonymous copying allowed by the internet plus the philosophical shift brought forward by such types as the Creative Commons people or the Free Software Foundation, This shit can't last much longer

EDIT:
Your above argument doesn't talk about closed hardware (not releasing technical info such as the instruction set).

I thought we already agreed about that:

this is the main problem with proprietay software and closed sourced hardware. I don't think either are evil I just believe it's immoral to keep specfications secret and to this end any doing so is evil

How is this any better than freeware where the copyright holder has decided not to limit copying but has just decided not to release the source code?

I think the only "advantage" of developing freeware over free software, aside from not having to release the actual source code (setup a CVS server or whatever), is that in the future, when you've got a bigger userbase, you can start to charge for future non-freeware releases. The first kilo is gratis, that thing.

I don't think software developers should be obliged to release the source code, seeing as releasing source code always takes effort (signing up to sourceforge or savannah takes effort). But in basically all cases they'd be pretty fucking stupid not to. If it's freeware, then they probably plan on making it non-freeware in the future, charging for it and disallowing the copying of it, which shouldn't be allowd.

[WMD]

I beleive people are having certain Airport success with the open-source bcm43xx drivers. These will be in the next major Linux kernel release BTW and can only improve from there.

I personally use bcm43xx on a (different) Broadcom chip in a x64 laptop environment and it does pretty damn well for a supposedly 'alpha' driver.

This is news to me; I've never heard of this driver. :o

[Aloone_Jonez]

I desagree if copyright were abolished I think we'd loose a lot of great cinema and music as no one would ever invest money into a film is no one buys it and it and be shown to audiances for free.

If it's freeware, then they probably plan on making it non-freeware in the future, charging for it and disallowing the copying of it, which shouldn't be allowd.

Also if you keep the source code you also prevent people from hijacking it and fucking it up in many horrible ways like creating a different version that breakes compatability with yours or using in another program you hate.

[piratePenguin]

I desagree if copyright were abolished I think we'd loose a lot of great cinema and music as no one would ever invest money into a film is no one buys it and it and be shown to audiances for free.

I never said I wanted copyright abolished.

And noone would invest in software either if it can easily be copied without breaking the law? Then how do you explain the not-dead FSF, Novell, Red Hat, etc.?

Also if you keep the source code you also prevent people from hijacking it and fucking it up in many horrible ways like creating a different version that breakes compatability with yours or using in another program you hate.

If you're worried about people creating a different version then your version must suck, tbh.

[Aloone_Jonez]

I never said I wanted copyright abolished.

Copying something should never mean breaking the law IMO.

And noone would invest in software either if it can easily be copied without breaking the law? Then how do you explain the not-dead FSF, Novell, Red Hat, etc.?

That's software, it doesn't work the same for music, cinema or even video games.

If you're worried about people creating a different version then your version must suck, tbh.

No, just look at shit Linux distros like Linspire for example, if I hate a program then I certainly wouldn't want them to use my code so I wouldn't release it.

[piratePenguin]

I never said I wanted copyright abolished. Copying something should never mean breaking the law IMO.

Are they supposed to be incompatible?

That's software, it doesn't work the same for music, cinema or even video games.

Then point out the significant differences.

No, just look at shit Linux distros like Linspire for example, if I hate a program then I certainly wouldn't want them to use my code so I wouldn't release it.

So you're keeping all the code you write to yourself just for fear that Linspire will make use of it? Jesus Fucking Christ.

[H_TeXMeX_H]

Copyright is available for one reason, and one reason alone ... the provide profit to the one who copyrights whatever they may be copyrighting. If it's copyright no one else can copy it or sell it. It's an extremely greedy point of view that I fully disagree with.

If they still wanted to make a profit, but eliminate greedyness they should allow people to copy it, but not sell it. Like you can buy Adobe Photoshop, make copies and distribute to your friends for free ... if you charge them money though it would be illegal. Of course, this might also mean rather reduced profits for the company, but they make a shitload of money anyway, so it should be only a minor downturn ... and it promotes friendly behavior towards peers.

[Aloone_Jonez]

I never said I wanted copyright abolished. Copying something should never mean breaking the law IMO.


Are they supposed to be incompatible?

Making it legal to copy everything will have exactly the same effect as abolishing copyright law.

Then point out the significant differences.

Music and films are art, software is technology.

So you're keeping all the code you write to yourself just for fear that Linspire will make use of it? Jesus Fucking Christ.

Linspire was just an example, I might want to keep the code to stop someone from altering it or using it in a way I disagree with.

Copyright law was first introduced before computers even existed, it was origionally meant to stop people from copying books and selling them. Nowadays it's moved on a lot, it's meant to protect companies profits by stopping people from using their material without paying for it. You might argue that it makes no difference when people copy software/music/films becaue it costs nothing to do but it still hurts their profits and you talk about big companies, what about the smaller ones who struggle to survive?

I think copyright law used to be fair before all Microsoft's ELUA and DRM bullshit came into place. There needs to be a ballance, on one side people need to be granted fair use of software like the right to make a back up copy or to re-sell and hence transfer their rights to another part. Nowadays the ballance has swung too far in the direction of protecting against piracy at the expense of the consumer.

Copyright law part of a lager grop of laws involving interlectual property - the idea that ideas themselves are worth money. Scrapping copyright law brings up many other questions:

How about patents?

I certainly woudn't like it if I'd invested 5 milliion in developing a product and then someone copying it and making an inferiour competing product for a cheaper price. Having said that I'd be fucked off if I'd released a program only to discover that MS had just patented one of the features so I have to pay the royalties.

What about trademarks?

I'd be pretty pissed off if I'd come up with a brand name and a competitor decided to make an inferiour product with the same name and my customers got confused so I went down as a result. However I'd have my surname was Mcdonald and I have a burger restaurant as a familly bussiness and McDonalds sued me even if the sighns and pakagaing looked completely different to the big multinational's. By the way this has actually happened, I don't know whether they finally succeded in suing though.

As with everying a ballence needs to be  struck and this isn't easy by any means.

[piratePenguin]

Making it legal to copy everything will have exactly the same effect as abolishing copyright law.

Copyright can be used for more than straight-copy prevention. I can make sure any changes you make to code I write are also made available to the public through copyright ('copyleft').

Music and films are art, software is technology.

Ah, words.

[Aloone_Jonez]

Yes words with totally different meanings, art is just creative, technology is functional it has a design process involving drawings or source code. You can't have closed source art but you can have technoloy whether it be software or computer hardware, but the former is harder to copy than the latter.

By the way (just for the record) RMS is a fucking moron and I'm glad to know I'm not the only one who think this so I wish people would stop sucking him off. As far as I'm concerned RMS stands for Root Mean Square which is far more useful than some tosser who's up their own arse.

By the way I've already raised the concept of increasing consumer rights over the use of software to ballancethe rights of the author but no one gave a fuck. I would also extend this to music and add clauses saying public performance should be exempt from royalties provinding it isn't for profit and I'd apply the same to films, that way you couldn't get sued for playing music at a house party.

[piratePenguin]

Yes words with totally different meanings, art is just creative, technology is functional it has a design process involving drawings or source code. You can't have closed source art but you can have technoloy whether it be software or computer hardware, but the former is harder to copy than the latter.

What if da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa in the GIMP, and printed it out? He'd have the source XCF file and noone else would. It's no good trying to modify the printed image (much harder to do it properly without the layers and stuff).

Wouldn't that be "closed source" art?

"closed source" happens far more often with computer programs because only computers need to understand them, not humans. There's no need for the developers to release the source code. If the program needed to be understood by e.g. a Python interpreter then it won't be binary, and could easilly be understood and modified by humans. A binary file is very hard to modify.

By the way (just for the record) RMS is a fucking moron and I'm glad to know I'm not the only one who think this so I wish people would stop sucking him off.

Why don't you tell us why you think he's a "fucking moron"?

As far as I'm concerned RMS stands for Root Mean Square which is far more useful than some tosser who's up their own arse.

Oh great, you think root mean square is a fucking moron?

By the way I've already raised the concept of increasing consumer rights over the use of software to ballancethe rights of the author but no one gave a fuck. I would also extend this to music and add clauses saying public performance should be exempt from royalties provinding it isn't for profit and I'd apply the same to films, that way you couldn't get sued for playing music at a house party.

I'd add:

5. Copying and distributing the software/whatever.

Never gonna happen (on this blue, green and mostly brown planet), but meh.