At Fri, 28 Apr 2006 14:45:32 +0200, Pierre THIERRY <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > [1 <multipart/signed (7bit)>] > [1.1 <text/plain; us-ascii (quoted-printable)>] > Scribit Marcus Brinkmann dies 28/04/2006 hora 01:47: > > Maybe you should wait for me to formalize my arguments until you jump > > to conclusions about why I am rejecting this. So far I only gave you > > the summary. > > I was about to ask you if you give us the whole story, indeed.
I am not yet ready to formalize the whole argument, sorry. But I gave you all the important information, the rest is just deduction and application to specific cases. > > I would recommend that Alice and Bob go to a keg party and have a beer > > over their differences. > > > > I would further educate Alice about [...] > > > > Furthermore, I would talk to Bob and warn him about [...] > > That's a faithful commitment to social progress in the world, and I can > only promote it, but it does not solve the problem here. Say Joe wants to shoot Sue, so Joe asks me for a gun. If I don't give him a gun to shoot Sue, but explain him why shooting Sue is really a bad idea, I have not solved the problem? Maybe, but then it was the wrong problem Joe was trying to solve :) There is one thing I didn't tell you yet, and this is the idea that user freedom also has to be secured. The mechanism that allow to do what you described are a security threat to the user's freedom to inspect his resources. So, now you have a conflict of goals: The freedom to do something, and the security to not lose the freedom to do something. These are always difficult situations, and will always involve a judgemement decision. In this case, my decision is that protecting the user's freedom has priority, and that a user should be required to do some conscious action (like, install extra software) to compromise his freedom. In the end, it will be at the discrimination of the machine owner if he allows to do such an operation or not, just as it is at the discrimination of the machine owner if he enables the DRM chip in the computer or not. For the Hurd, I don't want to make use of this feature, but that doesn't mean you can't add it if you really want to. > Your conclusions about the fact that reverse engineering is harder than > writing from scratch, that NDA are dangerous and than educating people > instead of limiting them are, at best, true in the general case. > > But building principles on the general or, worse, ideal case is a very > dogmatic position, IMHO. You seem to think that a principle and a dogma are two different things. I don't see why. They seem to differ mostly in what people connotate with them. > In fact, you do with the OS what you would tell Alice not to do with her > source code, I think. You should not prevent people to do morally > objectionable uses of the system. You should go educate them so they > don't want anymore. Who said I prevent anybody? Even if I wanted to, I couldn't. Even the DRM clause in the GPL v3 has only a very limited effect of preventing DRM, just enough to not allow somebody to compromise the copyleft. > > It's really sad that some students have swallowed up the story of > > "everybody against everybody" so early in childhood that they bring > > this attitude to university. It's something that we should work > > against, not support. > > That's not the matter here. The people I love around me somethimes have > to protect me from myself, and I sometimes have to protect them form > themsleves. And we are generally wery grateful that we did that to each > other. That could be the case between Alice and Bob here. Yes, but that is a social contract between Alice and Bob, and I don't think that's a good guiding principle for an operating system design. Or rather: I don't even know how to express such a relationship in an operating system. Probably it would mean that both, Alice and Bob, have access to each other's user account (and this is the opposite of what you wanted originally). Alice and Bob can achieve the goal you described in a number of different ways, by the way. For example, Alice could show a life demonstration of her program to Bob. Or Alice could run the program in her own account, and provide capabilities to it to Bob, which Bob could use to display and interact with the program. In this case, Alice would run her program as a service. That's OK with me. Thanks, Marcus _______________________________________________ L4-hurd mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/l4-hurd
