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Apple's Boot Camp beta

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WMD:

--- Quote from: piratePenguin ---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.
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AFAIK, the new Intel models ship with an Intel wireless card, for which Linux drivers exist.

piratePenguin:

--- Quote from: Aloone_Jonez ---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.
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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.
--- Quote from: RMS (what a guy) ---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.
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http://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html

--- Quote from: WMD ---AFAIK, the new Intel models ship with an Intel wireless card, for which Linux drivers exist.
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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:

--- Quote from: 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?
--- End quote ---
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.

--- Quote ---
I'd be very interested to see what would happen, just thinking are there any countries where copyright doesn't exist?
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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 ;)
--- Quote ---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
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--- Quote ---
EDIT:
Your above argument doesn't talk about closed hardware (not releasing technical info such as the instruction set).
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I thought we already agreed about that:
--- Quote from: you ---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
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--- Quote ---
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?
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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.

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