Re: nettime footnotes to geert lovink
Bifo, Thanks for posting this. I like the offhand summary format and the disclaimer. The timing of this lecture seems a little off though based on your summary. Many of us are just as rueful as we were in 96 about the promises of the internet even as it has eaten away at the facades of life outside the market driven need to sell something of yourself in order to wangle a meal. The recession story is so old hat though. Shouldn't it be something like oh no! here comes another boom. It sure feels that way in the Bay Area right now. It feels like 96 again, on the cusp of another boom, although perhaps this will be more of a jobless boom, or geeks only boom. Stupid money is flying around again. We do here nonsense about how people are being more careful with the money and the Indian team is de riguer, but the total amount of money is that much greater, and the Indians cannot ramp up fast enough it seems to take all the business. It's not just Web 2.0 or virtualization or open source or this or that yadda yadda but rather the sum total of all the need for new technology, to reinvent, to seek out markets or make them. To reinvest all that virtual money that the markets have made for trivial things like search engines. With each succeeding boom/bust the contradictions seem to be getting that much starker. We are like clement greenbergs little non representational painters, trying to find a place to... Except this time the game is that much further along. We are hunted back to the medium itself where the medium is thought rather than paint. Trying to find some room to think at all, let alone critique, is work. May you live in interesting times. May your job reqs and your cv look like a machine-only readable list of acronyms. The markets have moved on. # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: nettime Katrina: The Spectre of a Soviet-Style Crisis in the U.S.
Dear Michael, It might help if we were a little more precise in our descriptions of intra-urban lower 48 states's regions. I think of course that the growing wealth disparity is incontrovertible and the agrarian and post-industrial economic dead zones are a grim fact. There really aren't too many opportunities for young people in the economic dead zones and the military is often a good option, one that at least has the virtue of cultural and capital investment. The meth craze is much exaggerated and is the drug story du jour, an easy and dramatic peg for pop media consumption. Crack babies are just not that interesting any more I suppose. We now have meth babies; if you look closely at the stories that crossed the wires recently (what a lovely anachronism), you'll see that those foster care children were made so when their parents got busted for having the temerity to engage in open source organic chemistry (home cooked from from wal-mart purchased pseudo-ephedrine). I'm tempted to invoke zizek-style here and say that here we are confronted with pure ideology: the lost babies were made by the storyline to be the victims of drug use, not of overzealous state control. The state here is not some monolithic entity, but those agents entrusted to enforce the laws of our great congress, and those entrusted with caring for the deep damage done by such reckless experimentation. Those that break the law by taking organic chemistry into their own hands shall have their assets and their children seized. Dare you think that you have the autonomy to fiddle with a molecule without corporate and/or state sponsorship, in short without institutional imprimatur, you will lose even the illusion of autonomy. But, don't despair, we will blame the evil molecule and those who traffic in and benefit from it and not you the poor end user and little home cooker. poppycock. ideology. I'll take 50 cartons of sudafed and 30 cartons of shotgun shells. I think alternet, of all places, that bastion of new age left-liberal ideology, is going to address some of the complex story of Wal-Mart. The Simon Head piece in the NY review of books is quite good and Doug Henwood interviews him on one of his shows. On Mon, Sep 19, 2005 at 01:43:13AM -0700, Michael H Goldhaber wrote: Ricardo, If you want statistics, start with the state of education in this country compared with other industrialized countries or even China. Look at the growing general state of ignorance re news, the decreasing number of voters, growing income inequality, etc. ... # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: nettime GPL Version 3: Background to Adoption
Google and Amazon represent services as you said, and unless they redistribute their software, there is no conflict with the GPL. If there were an Amazon software distro, then you could expect that to be GPL'd. This, in fact, is the loophole on which many proprietary web services build on GPL software, Google and Amazon probably being among them. If the GPL version 3 will change that, expect interesting times in the Internet. That is not a loophole; that is by design. Don't hold your breath until Google GPLs their secret sauce. A salient point, to me, is that there is really nothing secret in what either Amazon or Google do; they are mostly about having an actually existing massively distributed network in place, that does things that everybody else knows how to do, only on a larger scale and with more data, and more services rendered. The interesting times are already here. You can build a massively distributed open source search engine right now with Apache's Lucene and Nutch. Google already beat you to it, and they have a little more capital to throw at pushing the edge of massive networking, oh well. Google can fiddle with modifying the Linux kernel, for example, all they want without redistributing those mods, just as you and I can, and there is nothing that binds them to release them. I don't know if their kernel hacking group is active in the linux kernel communities but I suspect that they are and that they are getting and trading ideas. I also suspect that the issues and limits they are fiddling with and running up against are quite well known, and that there is not really too much to what they are up to that someone else isn't working on. The difference might be just the fact that they do have a kernel group and that they are indeed running up against some interesting limits and problems in an area that not too many are: growing and maintaining a massively distributed Linux network. You can argue that these companies do gain from participation in free software communities and that formalized contribution is actually helpful to them, so they should do more of it. It is good for them. The most important aspect of free software is, nonetheless, the social aspect and the possibility for the expansion of literacy in an environment in which no aspect is occluded. In that light, Google's and Amazon's trivial contributions to computer science are much less interesting than the Python or the Perl communities or the many Linux communities. A very interesting edge is the nascent free chip design movement, the last bastion of the secret sauce. # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: nettime Silicon Valley, five years after
Steve, Thanks for posting this to nettime. It is interesting to see you mention the dotcom period now. I've been reading Keith Hart's The Hitman's Dilemna and some other interesting remarks by Keith and one with which I think I concur is that Bay Area markets and money and individual economic actors in the Bay Area and in the U.S. generally are that much more quick to to turn to new markets, new money. ascribe it to what you will, the absence of a welfare net, or some sui generis dynamism. I look and wonder at people I see as I ride my bike around San Francisco, how are these people getting their green? The renters market here stabilized a little but the home buyer's market has gone through the roof. The building and real estate industries are booming. Professional services are just as expensive as ever. etc. Programmers still get hired, for the same rates as before the most stupid of the stupid money days of IPO fever, stabilized. And things seem to have gradually picked up over the last two years. The city is as expensive to live in as it ever was and has not fallen off of any peak, in fact there is more wealth here than ever. The economy here has definitely shifted, as it did do dramatically during the bust phase that lasted really a short time. We are in some kind of wierd boom redux right now, or jobless recovery. People around here don't seem to be overemployed, but where the hell do they get their money? are they all growing weed in their basements or running a yoga studio? certainly they aren't making their green from commercial reuse of nettime postings! but just what are they up to? I see something of a revenge of the hardhat, of the builder, of the core engineering team perhaps. One nettimer said that the Banking industry is doing well, whatever that means. Also, let's not underestimate the stimulus of Defence and Homeland Security spending in the Valley. Is anyone tracking that? I do have anecdotal evidence of people in the Embedded Systems world are much in demand with contracts galore and also in the visualization software industries, and in data mining, networking, etc. It's obviously stimulating the D.C. area. That same nettimer mentioned the gradual proving of ecommerce as well. On Tue, Mar 15, 2005 at 04:08:32PM -0500, Steve Cisler wrote: San Jose, California. This past week has been a time to remember the bursting of the dot.com (and some would say the Internet) bubble. Starting with a five part series in the San Jose Mercury News, it was picked up by alternative papers, and of course local TV news teams. I saw a piece from the Guardian on this list. ... # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
nettime We are all Straussians now
In a mood of doleful irony Ovid lays out his rhymes, in lugubrious sputterings the rapper of late antiquity begins to tell a story in myths, in the distillates of wisdom, which must always be crude and naive in form, not because he believes but because he has so much to say, because he wields the accumulations folklore and folk wisdom. It's a big, ugly Perl script but it gets the job done. One is not necessarily proud, as if one were the creator, but rather more crafty. craft-like. Like Zizek's philosophy brut which endlessly repeats the folk wisdom of a loose tribe of open source critics or kritiks to use the nettimism, one doesn't care so much about this or that little piece of wisdom. One is playing unto an understanding of the totality, to use the anachronism. The anachronism is the point. It's the staging of the clashes, of the immense contradictions which are a matter of course in an advanced global money economy. Zizek is a true philosopher, if that means anything; it only means anything at this, our own late time, because of and not despite Leo Strauss, an irony Kojeve appreciated. Zizek calls this clashing by a straight name. He just calls it the deadlock. Welcome to the deadlock. You can't see it, because you are so deep in it, and you already know this riff. One must have the playfulness, the insouciance, to work these kind of games. One has recourse to old stories, to the fabric of myth, not as some Joseph Campbell thought he might, or even a Philip Wheelright but as Mohammed did or Northrop Frye or Norman O. Brown. As Blake did. It is a plaything, deep play if you want engage the folklore of kritiks. Or as Fellini did with his fake-looking sets that exposed the construction of worlds. It's the infrastructure, smarty. Not the tedious accumulation of facts, but the ability to read, to wield, to throw out a demo, a mock up. Zizek, for all the silliness of his mention of an Oriana Fallaci Passion of the West, reminds one more of what Norman O. Brown said about the seal of the prophets and that mastery of, that play with, that crushing of folklore, the Koran. In his reckoning with the greatness of the Koran, Brown starts with a damning quote from Carlyle about the text. We cannot read the Koran Brown says, and then he quotes Carlyle. A wearisome confused jumble, crude, incondite; endless iterations, long-windedness, entanglement; most crude, incondite;-insupportable stupidity, in short! It is not a book at all he then says. That's a summary that many would make of Zizek's Organs without Bodies. To those steeped in the folklore, the staging of the impossibility of thought in Zizek is right on and obvious; it points to something beyond itself; it is even revelatory in its failure to cohere, in its inconditeness Mohammed who renounces all miracles other than the book and the imagination, is actually that much closer to the minimal difference that the constellation agamben-badiou-zizek keep going on about than Jesus. Yes, the mount of olives is that split inside of god-man man-god and a confusing of the boundaries. Yes, the split is internal to the totality. ok as Zizek would say as he quickly sums up an argument before even more quickly moving on to the troubling part, the disturbing part. ok, But Jesus returns to Miracles. Muhammad is too late for miracles, but just in time for the book, or for the not even a book, for revelation. But not the idea of revelation that they might have taught you in school, but the kind that crushes you and knocks you off your mule. He lays bare the form of myth; he lays open the hidden heart in paroxysms of song, in yearning. In war and hunting, the two rivers of eden. Norman O. Brown said that a syncretism in late twentieth century thought opens a way to read the Koran and perhaps a way to read our own book. We must have the perspicacity, the shrewdness, to read our own book. And in many ways, Leo Strauss is our book, the problems he worked on, the questions he asked, the costs he saw in this game of nation states and global capital. Shadia Drury won't do. Nor will, I'm sorry to say, Earl Shorris as much as his heart breaking attempt to awaken the neocons to their lack of mercy arouses pity. One must have the perspicacity to read Leo Strauss, as that Russian import to the Gallic world of thought, Kochevnikoff, or Kojeve as they called him in France, did. We lose the accent on the first e of Kojeve in my ascii brut, but why not, since the French shortened it already? It's not that hard. Strauss is on the face of it, not that hard to read, and there is no excuse for even a tad of close reading in any kind of mention of Strauss. He's even a model of clear writing. The Harper's piece which Shorris wrote is ridiculous, and he spends precious ink gossiping about how hard it was for Strauss to land a job in the ridiculous academy. That is as laughable as the Strauss disciple Harry Jaffa saying that one need the necessary academic
Re: nettime Working on article about the need for a progressive press in US
Mark, Your technological or rather mediun determinism, remains as suggestive as ever, and I wouldn't dare try to think I could change or even alter your opinion. I'd just leave it that there is something to your point. I've gradually come to understand and respect and some of the Mcluhanesque critique. What I find funny and rather charming about such analyses are the grimness of them and the jaundiced eyed view of the hype centered around the latest fad in technology. It's not worth saying to you that yours is a narrow analysis. It's narrowness is its charm. The situation is indeed quite grim. grin or g as you so often add. Isn't the grin one of the first mediums for the expression of aggression? But, I think that Ronda's set of questions are worth attempting to answer on their own merits, that analysis in and of itself is a worthy task. Effectualness or effectuality is another matter. No one imagines, or maybe someone does, that Marx's years in the Library and his analyses, were directly effective in transforming social relations or in god forbid overthrowing the reign of global capital, the long twentieth century, as Arrighi playfully names a set of dynamics that were set into play in the 16th century. It was left to the Russian nihilists to attempt to act on Marx's critique, to what effect in the end? the long twentieth century goes on. So what of the recent elections in the US and of course this little thing folks are calling the internet? I don't thinks it's enough to lay WMD on the conservative media, this dud rather should be layed on the doorstop of the liberal media, and the newspapers of record, who were shown to be so dependent on access to various organs, as to just parrot what they are told by their sources. They are no match for a concerted campaign to control information that comes out of the official instutions of intelligence and the executive branch. Even well meaning liberal types are controlled by the protocols of access journalism. It's not the noble lie we saw with WMD, but the bald faced lie, or the beardless lie. They don't need to hide behind their beards, and no contemporary U.S. big time politician or even CEO has any visible facial hair. We like our lies bald and beardless I suppose. Mere opinion is indeed ineffectual, except perhaps to call everything into question. For every issue or even for what might be called empirical fact, there is contest, and it all seems to hang in a kind of weightless gelatin where even pointing out a lie has no effect. To each their media tunnel. Even old Leo Strauss, had no qualms about what he called empirical fact, because he still believed a science of politics was possible, and he would not dare argue with a fact. He missed this wonderful era when facts bend to the will of our great leaders. For obfuscation and for taking the sting out of criticism, opinion is very useful. You can neutralize almost any historical fact now, by enlisting legions of editorializers to spread a contrary narrative. And the do it for free now, even better, go bloggers go. On Mon, Jan 10, 2005 at 10:28:46AM -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Ronda: Perhaps you might consider an alternative view . . . the Internet makes even propaganda-about-propaganda obsolete. Opinions can no longer be manipulated; people simply believe whatever the believe in and they are likely to act on these beliefs. Unlike radio which actually *was* propaganda (as psychological ground) or television which worried about the dangers of propaganda (as psychological figure), the Internet makes all of this seem . . . silly. ... # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: nettime Re: Images and Official Language: The Gap or How not to Know
Thanks for responding, Alan. I was hoping that someone would remark on the intentionally naive questions i asked at the end of my post. But I must confess that I don't understand what your response is about, sorry for being horribly circular here, but you did bring up the dread ghost of deconstruction. 'About' implies cause and effect and representation - this painting is 'about' the natural order of things, this war is 'about' oil. And such is a peculiarly occidental approach, I believe, this aboutness which insists on causation in relation to ethos, which insists on origin insead of, perhaps, taint. The war is unjustifiable, cruel, and in many ways 'about' America, in the sense of implication. America is responsible; reasoning and reasons are left in the shadows, and there are as many as there are shadows and they are as indistinct as shadows are. The darkness of the photographs throw a little light on the subjects: it's the captors who stand out, who make sure they are _named_ and _visible,_ while the prisoners are hidden, faceless bodies, hooded. I want to thank you for pointing out the oddness of the word about, which in the phrase this war is about oil surely implies oil is a concern if not outright cause of this war, which it surely is. Political commentators on the right were quick to point out that the war was not about oil because it is the rest of the G7 that are much more dependent on Middle East Oil than the U.S. Obviously, the war is not simply about oil, as if oil were ever a simple thing itself, but it just as surely concerns oil, and the markets in oil, both official and black. Your pointing out that an attempt to understand more structural causes and reasons for this extremely bold gambit on the part of a particular U.S. administration, is occidental in its concern for cause and effect seems to me without meaning. Surely, you must think that the policy makers and war planners had reasons for taking what even they knew was an extreme gamble. The point of the naive questioning was to begin to look at what the interests of both global capital more largely and american empire in particular were and are that are at stake in invading and occupying Iraq. And to begin to ask those questions, I think it does help to clear the air of such psuedo causes as daddy, or wmd, or even that the war was and is about particular individual idiosyncracies. But I don't think it helps to throw out the very idea of interest or cause. It's not like pointing out the history of the failure of the sanctions process, and the growing black market in oil flowing out of Iraq, is some search for a lost or trascendental origin. It is more humbly, getting at the story. Which, by the way, I don't think I have, yet. And this reference to the notion of cause and effect as merely occidental seems to me at least to invoke some chimera of an east or an outside of global capital, as if there were a part of the globe that was not subject to the laws of capital or cause and effect. Finally it might even be added that 'about' implies some justification, however minimal. If this is 'real'ly 'about' oil, perhaps the oil will save lives elsewhere, But there is none of this, no balance, no reason. I would counter that we should be willing to ask the about question, not because we risk justification, but to attempt to understand precisely the reasons and reasoning of those in power, and not just in the United States, but in the entire G7. We can also ask how the populations in those countries more or less are complicit in what their governments are doing. But to say that all this is without reason is in my opinion to let the policy makers, global capital, and the citizens of the putative democracies off the hook. Thanks again, I found your post poetic is not quite comprehensible. On Mon, May 31, 2004 at 04:55:10PM -0400, Alan Sondheim wrote: I think to be fair here, that there is a process of contamination going on, which is becoming more and more evident; that the images by their very overdetermined nature, are a form of speeage that will not be contained, will not be defined by any particularization, whether it be a group of seven soldiers or the prison system itself. Hopefully the contamination will spread. Even so I agree, and what is appalling to me, even more, is the over two million in the US prisons today - a system where in Jeb Bush's Florida, there is a 30 percent incarceration rate for black males. Returning briefly to Iraq, I think stating what the war is 'about' misses the point - that the word 'about' must be deconstructed, that there is no 'about' - which 'systemics' perhaps implies as well. The war is not 'about' Daddy nor 'about' oil nor 'about' jeffersonian democracy' nor 'about' Saddam nor 'about' torture etc. etc. It certainly isn't 'about' 9/11. One might say it is 'about' those who ordered the war and managed it, but this hits a psychoanalytical deadend. 'About'
nettime Images and Official Language: The Gap or How not to Know
Alan, I started to write a response to Sontag's piece and rather than edit it, I thought I might send it off to you and nettime. It is intentionally rough and open ended. Your thoughts are appreciated as always, Ed Images and Official Language How not to Know What Your Government is Doing, Almost. Susan Sontag, in her recent essay on the images of torture at Abu Ghraib, captures the the endless digital picture and video taking, posing, and viewing that are so much a part of the contemporary condition. She also conveys how unstoppable and how difficult to refute are these images of torture, and she notes the attempt on the part of the administration to use official language to spin and soften the assault of the images. But does she capture the divide between that image realm and what she calls the words that alter and subtract, the official language that is disseminated first by administration officials and then repeated by the talking/writing media? That official language seems to keep a large portion of the population reassured about what their Governments are doing in their name. Does she capture the specific nature of the violence and the sadism and the way that it is, even in its excessive form, a part of a larger system of pacification and detention(both inside and outside of the G7), of restructuring that most people just don't care to know about. I dont' think so. She seems to conflate the excesses of the so-called personal freedoms of the day and of the image world, the porno and the vid violence with the systematic and even systemic torture of captives by military police. Isn't it the ways in the which the photos of torture are not us not our daily lives or not our daily responsibility that matter? Isn't it the way that torture is one of the parts of our system, and I use the denigrated term system purposively here, that people don't want to know about that is more important. If we just jump quickly to say that the pictures are us, we miss the gap that constitutes us. So what of this split? It's not so much that we are inurred to violence. Or that liberal democracy is a sick porno SM funhouse. Isn't the shock of these images the revealing of a gap between what we think we know about the bringing of democracy to failed states and what really goes on. There is a huge gap between our daily lives (evident for example in the soothing voices of reason on NPR) and the brutality involved in restructuring states, pacifying, and the large systems of detention both inside the large democracies and in failed states that are a part of the management of both. Remember Foucault's paranoid riffs on the prison, education, health system and the production of docile bodies? Perhaps we could use some popularized version of that kind of sociology as a corrective to the personality play we get through the major media. Zizek's recent attempts to theorize about the psychology and ideology of the liberal democratic citizen are helpful at pointing out this great gap. He quite simply sums it up as People don't want to know. If the public had thought it out when torture began to openly be discussed by certain intellectuals during the intial Afghan campaigns they would have been just as appalled as when these recent pictures started showing up in their media tunnels. If people thought about the violence that is entailed in 150,000 troops bringing democracy to a large state, they would be just as appalled. Zizek puts the mindset succinctly in his Doug Henwood interview I've paid my taxes. You do the dirty work, don't tell me about it. What are the cognitive investments that we have made, that allow us to not know? Why has that not wanting to know become the defining trait of our day. We don't even have to look that far or look in hidden places to find this will to not know. Things are hidden now in plain sight. A word that sticks out, a missing word in most of the main stream discourse is of course an old discredited leftist one, system and its bastard child, systemic. Seymour Hersh (in his interviews) and Susan Sontag here in this essay, use the apt word systematic. By which they mean that central plumbing and heating was involved in planning the torture. And this torture was certainly systematic in the sense in which they use it. Discussions will be made about how far up the chain of command this planning went, as they should. Nonetheless, the use of the word systemic would be helpful here, precisely because with that word an emphasis is taken away from the individual and the personality, and placed on the roles played by individuals, and on the violence inherent in any occupation by a relatively small force of a large population. One does not need to resurrect an entire sociological apparatus to start to look at the ways that the problem of torture is systemic, to begin to see the way that the focus on individuals, no matter how high up the chain of command is a partial distraction from what is
Re: nettime floss enforcement/compliance
Thanks Ben and Novica, I'm not knocking MySQL for making money or for having a commercial license in addition to a GPL version. In fact, a few years ago, I contributed in some small ways to the MySQL project myself. I think highly of Monty, etc. I wish them continued success. In fact, however, their licensing literature *is* incorrect on the small point of inter-organizational redistribution of MySQL and modifications to it or programs that use it. A relevant passage from the gpl-faq covers this issue: The GPL does not require you to release your modified version. You are free to make modifications and use them privately, without ever releasing them. This applies to organizations (including companies), too; an organization can make a modified version and use it internally without ever releasing it outside the organization. But if you release the modified version to the public in some way, the GPL requires you to make the modified source code available to the program's users, under the GPL. There is absolutely no aspect of the GPL that binds you to release your modifications as GPL software, unless you release your program to the public. As a long time zealot for free software, I don't see how the release of every trivial application that uses free software could be of benefit at this point. In fact we may have been better off if the Slash code for example had never been released. Mature free software projects benefit from extensive peer review and the promotion and use of best practices in software development. They also serve, most importantly I believe, as a way to promote and develop literacy. The releasing of trivial and half baked applications often lead to the spread of poor practices and bad habits. Certainly, I wouldn't want to restrict anyone's right to release even the ugliest hack, but neither would I call it a great benefit to the commons. Nor am I concerned with my own compliance or non-compliance here. I've never sold a whit of software, nor do I plan to. I find most of the supposed intellectual property that some software companies attempt to hold on to to be laughable. Most of them are hiding their bad ideas from the glare of peer review. So to continue with the example that I began with: If you are the government of Extremadura and you need to release an application to all your far flung Linux servers that does foo and stores bar in a MySQL database, you are free to distribute this on all your computers without formally having to inflict the ugly, just good enough to get the job done hack on the rest of us. Nor do you have to pay MySQL 450 or whatever dollars per install of the application. It seems to me that the biggest benefit again of free software is the way that it helps develop literacy and spread knowledge. It is interesting, nonetheless, to see MySQL attempt to use a kind of hybrid dual license business model. I think they are doing quite well and I wish them well. Scriptics, Jon Ousterhout's TCL company, attempted a kind of hybrid approach that ultimately failed for them. I was there when Richard Stallman quite dramatically called them parasites for attempting such. It was different in that TCL was not GPLed and that Ousterhout was attempting to sell proprietary tools on top of TCL. I thought at the time that it was an interesting approach for Jon to attempt, but that the model would probably decrease contributions from the community of users. It is interesting to see an attempt at a free software, propietary hybrid. On Sat, Feb 28, 2004 at 01:33:58PM +, Benjamin Geer wrote: ed phillips wrote: I'm curious. They seem in their licensing literature( http://www.mysql.com/products/opensource-license.html ) to be trying to scare non-Linux users, companies, and government organizations into purchasing commercial licenses. ... # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime floss enforcement/compliance
Novika, You hinted that you are familiar with MySQL? I'm curious. They seem in their licensing literature( http://www.mysql.com/products/opensource-license.html ) to be trying to scare non-Linux users, companies, and government organizations into purchasing commercial licenses. As long as you never distribute the MySQL software (internally or externally) you are free to use it for powering your application, irrespective of whether your application is under GPL license or not. As far as I have pondered this, this is incorrect or partial. You are free to use a GPL application or redistribute it as long as the license is intact. You are in no way obligated to pay a per seat fee as is done in the commercial database world. Not even if you write an application that uses MySQL and that is deployed on one thousand Extremadura Government computers. Nor are you obligated to release the trivial web app that uses MySQL as a database on those one thousand machines. You just saved 4 million dollars. Internal, within a company or within an entity, duplication of an application that uses GPL software carries with it no obligation to release that source code to a larger public. Of course we would all benefit from it, but there is no obligation. In fact the releasing of source code to a larger public carries with it the burden of having to get the code ready for public perusal and consumption and most users of free software do not or cannot dedicate the significant time that a full GPL release requires. MySQL seems to be saying to its users, either you have the resources to use the jargon of the trade, to release your application as GPL or you buy a commercial license of x hundred dollars per database. That seems to be both incorrect and not in the spirit of free software. True non-compliance would be the releasing of a commercial application that used GPL software and that attempted to restrict what others could do with the software, and that attempted to restrict the users' further modification of the software. Most casual and corporate users of MySQL do not fall into that category, and I would bet that very few do. There seems to be no obligation to pay any per working binary fee for a GPL application. Of course nothing stops MySQL's marketing department from trying to get the GPL wary to purchase commercial licenses. comments? On Thu, Feb 26, 2004 at 03:13:33PM +0100, Novica Nakov wrote: I understand from the FSF in the US that they deal with enforcement and compliance of the GPL. But do they (and I presume with the support of Prof Moglen) only do it within the US. That is within their jurisdiction? http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html says: Under US copyright law. only the copyright holder or someone having assignment of the copyright can enforce the license. ... # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
