> He seems out of touch even with modern emacs packages. He doesn't use any of them
And he believes the right thing for the core Emacs-developers to do is to spend their time trying get everyone in MELPA (a modern package repo, with a modern GUI, based on modern tools and workflows) to instead move their packages to ELPA, with all the change in tools, modernism’s and workflows that entails.
He seriously believes this is important because MELPA isn’t GNU, and that’s all he cares about. It’s not enough to be open-source and free. You must be GNU, or it doesn’t matter.
He may add things of value still, but I refuse to believe it’s not overshadowed by all the backwardisms he constantly tries to impose on the core developers actually doing the dirty work.
> which is the opposite of leadership and the opposite of an experienced person providing valuable guidance to the community.
Following the discussion on Emacs-devel it does seem quite the opposite: you often see people with progressive ideas moderating themselves to not get too out of line with RMS. People (unconsciously?) try beating around the bush, to avoid touching GNU dogma, rather than going straight to the point, communicating efficiently.
While I really appreciate what FSF and GNU has done for computing, I believe the limitations Emacs-developers are putting on themselves by religiously denying to integrate with anything non-GPL (another Stallmanism) is going to hurt Emacs long-term, rather than benefitting GPLed software.
> Since people are downvoting me ... let me make the point more explicit: no, Bob and Alice aren't literally going to have that conversation at work. I get that.
You were trying to use an outlier, an extremist situation (badly representing the opposing part) to frame a discussion about general principles for politics.
Of course you will get downvoted. It’s not a constructive contribution.
Clearly that’s not the case, unless you make it your mission to make it so.
> How does one avoid politics when calling someone 'he' or 'she' (either way) is a political act?
If you allow this to be a treated as a political act which can only 1. be applied by someone who wants to exercise power over others, and 2. Can be used by former group to claim discrimination universally...
> what does one do when a workplace bans politics
Clearly politics is not banned, only certain kinds of politics is. The other kind is being enforced hard.
> Clearly that’s not the case, unless you make it your mission to make it so.
I don't know if it is so clear, since the poster I'm responding to is explicitly claiming that trans women are not women, they are men. As far as I understand this is something referred to as politically charged subject matter.
> Clearly politics is not banned, only certain kinds of politics is. The other kind is being enforced hard.
Can you clarify? What is the other kind?
> If you allow this to be a treated as a political act
Is referring to a trans woman as a man or as a woman inherently apolitical, as it does not reflect on one's belief on if trans people are the gender they identify as?
> Is referring to a trans woman as a man or as a woman inherently apolitical, as it does not reflect on one's belief on if trans people are the gender they identify as?
My personal view is that people should be free to be who they are, and as long as it doesn't negatively impact others, it should be their own bloody business, and should have no legal implications.
So you're gay? You're a queer? Good for you! And no legal implications, please.
So you're legally man, with XY chromesomes, and you somehow feel like a woman, and maybe even like to dress as one? Good for you! Have fun, be proud, defy conventions! I do not hate you, but you are still a man, so no legal implications please.
To me, that's a statement of facts, and there's nothing awfully political about it.
The people who oppose that simple rationalist approach, are the ones who are rallying for a political platform, while at the same time claiming that opposing viewpoints must absolutely be denied a voice.
Despite the popular notion that these people are "liberals", there's nothing liberal or moderate about such a view, quite the contrary.
RFC 3161 timestamps are used because they let people do something Mozilla doesn't care about at all and which was largely irrelevant here.
Alice the OS Vendor wants to let Bob the Developer make certificates saying these are his Programs, she is worried Bob will screw up so his cert needs to have a short lifetime, but her OS needs to be able to accept the certs after that lifetime expires so users can still run their Programs. So, Bob makes certificates and uses Trent's public TSA that Alice authorised to prove they were made when they say they were. Alice only has to trust Trent (who is good at his job) for a long period, and Bob who can be expected to screw up gets only short-lived certificates.
But Mozilla's setup doesn't have these extra parties. There is intentionally no Bob in Mozilla's version of the story, they sign add-ons themselves, so timestamping plays no role. If a 25 year TSA would be appropriate (hint: it would not) then a 25 year intermediate cert would be just as appropriate and simpler to implement for Mozilla.
The real tragedy is that even after having a new generation born and grown up entirely digitally and connected, we still can’t rethink copyright into something which actually makes sense based on the world we now live in.
They provide ideological cover and propaganda support fire. Every time there is anything controversial about music copyright, artists’ associations roll out spokespersons to justify the moves, because it plays well with their members.
Not more than they are harmed by the looting of the public domain that media conglomerates are engaging in. Having a small public domain hurts everyone who can't afford a legal team to research and litigate for them. When you weigh the heavy costs against the slight benefits, it's a net loss.
I know a few artists that suffered quite a lot of theft primarily in art assets and concept work including their work being used as concept art for commercial projects and textures and 3D models even shipping in with some.
Even in such cases like bargain bin games which were made by a Russian and Chinese studios and were published in Europe by fairly large publishers and used stolen assets they had little to no legal recourse the Publisher didn’t care, the artists don’t have the money to fight a legal battle and even if they do win at best they’ll barely cover their legal fees if they even turn a profit and the game devs would just patch those assets out if they would even exist by the time the case is settled.
From their point of view it’s not that the public domain is too small but that the current copyright laws are too lax and can only be used by those with large legal teams on retainers.
What you are talking about was already covered by the old copyright system. The new copyright system only adds protection against uploading the stolen work on an asset store.
Also the big publishers can now just submit your work to the copyright collectives and you will receive rakedowns on assets you own. Good luck proving that though.
Just wanted to chime in that I agree with you. I had some artist friends who were pro strong copyright, but personally I don’t think they realize the vast groves of information everyone on earth is being deprived of for this scheme. We absolutely need to find ways to compensate artists but I think the cost of copyright is far too great.
I mostly just want to abandon copyright. Everything I create lately - software, robots, and writing - are released with unrestricted licenses. CC0 or BSD in most cases. I tried copyleft briefly but all it seemed to do was limit other people. I don’t want to do that anymore.
In theory, I believe copyright is a way for individuals to defend their rights against big corps. In practice, it will only benefit big corps which have enough resources for judicial procedures, and force individuals to give up their creations for free...
Maybe, but that’s speculative. Unless you’ve got some good examples of the BSD style of license failing where GPL has succeeded (I’d be genuinely interested!). I know GPL has had some good wins, but more and more I feel like we need to fight this battle in our culture, not through lawyers.
The recent kerfuffles with elastic, redis, and mongo will be interesting to follow and may provide examples where a strong copyleft, e.g. agpl3, would have been better than the Apache or mit/bad style licenses initially chosen.
Just to clarify, you don't need to provide changes to GPL software if you're not distributing said software and only using it internally.
However, in case something ends up being distributed and because I don't believe that's been tested in the courts, many companies have blanket policies against the inclusion of copyleft licenses.
That's also what I'm trying to do. Don't like non permissive copyright? Then just avoid it. However these filters are a threat to free software and the public domain. It wouldn't surprise me if github will wrongly take down projects in the future.
Generation has little to do with it. It's not the librarians who promulgated those stern warnings around the photocopiers providing support for the way things are, but rather the huge companies that continue to rake in gobs of money by claiming to own pieces of our culture in perpetuity.
I don't really get this "pieces of our culture" argument. I see it often in these discussions. Something "became part of our culture" after someone created it, after ownership was known, and 'we' allowed it to become meaningful to a large audience. Should that somehow transfer the ownership to those who find it more meaningful?
Some brands are "cultural icons" (like it or not), but that doesn't mean the culture has any right to tell the brand owner what to do with their trademark.
I don't know the history of copyright in other countries, but in the US copyright is explicitly to encourage the creation of artifacts that will then end up as public domain and part of our cultural legacy.
If it isn't performing that function well, then it's probably time for a rethink.
That's a terrible first step. Usually when regions have done that, nothing replaces it, and you get a number of warring powers fighting it out for their vision of what the region should look like, which usually involves far more personal enrichment and domination than the corruption they had before.
First step is to figure out what you want instead. The American Revolution had a century of Enlightenment figures thinking deeply about the rights of man and carefully observing revolutions and social developments that were going on in Europe at the time. Even so it took America 20 years to get it right, despite the revolution having been led by some of the most educated people in America.
We desperately need a Locke, Smith, Rousseau, and Voltaire of this generation. Unfortunately it seems like many of the most vocal political philosophy voices of this generation are playing for the other team, advocating "Dark Enlightenment" or neo-fascist worldviews.
I think you are on to something, but are jumping the gun. We ideally would want as much in the commons and would want people to continue to the commons as much as possible.
The problem is that our economy is based around the assumption that most resources are highly limited. Unfortunately that creates incentive to move resources from the commons to individual's balance sheets. Unfortunately our species had reached a point where this leads to potentially catastrophic consequences where resources are actually limited. At the same time the economy only works for resources that are limited as well. If you produce something that's naturally in the Commons like digital goods you cannot get access to the limited resources. Therefore we do these unnatural acts of constraining these resources so that people don't have to starve.
As we automate more and we got the limit of our exploitation of limited commons we need to stop individual exploitation of those commons. Fortunately at the same time we are also teaching a point where shitty jobs are getting more and more automated. I think we need something like basic income to allow people to not exploitation the Commons to survive and at the same time use that gained free time from automation to instead contribute to the Commons at their own discretion.
Capitalism thus would slowly be phased out as automation progresses. If we just abandon copyright overnight lots of people's work will go unrewarded. If we completely abandon capitalism right now, we end up back in Soviet communism because there is still too much shitty work left that's not automated yet.
The notion that everything that can be digitalized should be free is a pernicious notion and trivializes the effort creators put into their work. Journalists, musicians, authors, and artists deserve to be able to make a living from their work, and they can't do that if their work is distributed for free.
There is a vast gap between "able to make a living" and "able to stifle culture, censor citizenship, and lock up works for longer than a lifetime".
TBH, it's probably better to create a post scarcity society where a living isn't dependent on holding something hostage. Some variation of a basic income, that would support artists to create. But we don't have to go that far to say, copyright as it stands now is over-mighty and should have its claws harshly trimmed.
China has plenty of professional journalists, musicians, authors and artists. China's newspapers are heavily censored and vehicles for propaganda but people still write for them. Musicians make money in China the same way they do in the West, gigging. Rampant piracy doesn’t stop people trying and occasionally succeeding in making a living as authors or artists either, anymore than the small chance of making a good living at it in the West does.
No it isn't. It’s because no one speaks Mandarin and Chinese music and movies are dreadful by comparison. One of the hardest things about studying Chinese is finding media to watch to improve listening comprehension that are actually enjoyable to someone used to Western levels of quality in production, writing and story telling. Khatzumoto of AllJapaneseAllTheTime.com took s break from learning Mandarin and learned Cantonese instead because the corpus of good movies is better, and it’s mostly pre-handover Hong Kong stuff. Widespread censorship leads to terrible movies.
I live in China and I’d say it’s plausible that people watch more Japanese, Korean and Anglophone media than Chinese, dubbed and subtitled. I wouldn’t bet on it but it’s at least 30%. Chinese tv and movies are dreadful.
Movies? Bollywood movies sell more tickets in India than Hollywood does in US+Canada, releases more movies, etc. Sure, they make less money but India is considerably poorer than US+Canada.
> Journalists, musicians, authors, and artists deserve to be able to make a living from their work
At least in the US, that is not the purpose of copyright. The constitution lays out why congress has the power to grant copyrights and patents:
> To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries
> a new generation born and grown up entirely digitally and connected
The 'new generation' seems to want to sit on their collective arses and watch movies & music for free, but not contribute to the cost of their creation.
I'm all ears as to why their selfish, immediate-gratification desires should be considered.
'The old business model is broken!' they exclaim. Well then, stop consuming its output and go out there and CREATE better content. But most of them decline to do so. Hypocrites.
With more than 100.000 millennials taking to the streets in parts of Europe alone [0], and many suggestions on how to do it differently and better, ignored by „the internet is a series of tubes“ politicians, your claim of „collective passive consumption arse sitting“ doesn’t sit right with me.
That "new generation" seems perfectly happy paying for Netflix, Spotify, Apple Music, etc.
They also seem happy to create content on Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, etc, with a handful of them becoming stars as big as the pop stars and TV/movie stars of earlier generations.
Attributing simplistic traits to entire generations, comprising hundreds of millions of people spanning many different countries, cultures and classes, never really goes well.
At any point in time, people just choose the most appealing and cost-effective options of those available to them.
It's up to those offering products and services to make their economic model work, but the ability of the big content companies to generate big revenues, either via subscriptions or advertising, shows that there are various models that can work well.
I don't think people have an issue with contributing to the cost of creation, at least enough movies etc are being made and paid for that they are still making money.
As for changing the system, the current problem with copyright is that it mixes control and payment, leading to stupid things like HBO not being available unless you pay for a gazillon channels you don't need.
I see a future where producers have to declare their prizes, but must offer the same deal to anybody who is willing to buy it. Any exlusive deal is automatically a violation of monopoly laws.
