101–110 of 582 posts
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I don't think you know what communism is.
It's a tiresome rhetorical device these days to pretend Communism only has one narrow meaning.
Is this some legal angle I’m missing which benefits the plaintiffs in some way?
There is no greater folly of contemporary human society than the purposeful restriction of such vast and easily shareable repositories of knowledge. Perhaps these schemes made sense in the past but with the advent of the internet and independent groups willing to fund all hosting fees, we should move to models of publishing that do not require this restriction of information. Library genesis exists but necessarily mu…
They can already choose to give it away for free if they wish. We already have the Creative Commons licenses, and there are many open textbook projects.
Is it legal? No, not as the law currently stands. You can support Robin Hood, but you shouldn't be shocked when Robin Hood is caught and sent to jail. It was a mistake and a huge legal risk for IA to do this. It could easily have brought down the whole organisation, and all that they've archived to date.
I wish a fraction of the people who are upset about this would actually commit a portion of their time to lobbying and organising for copyright reform. Copyright terms are too damn long, by half a century and then some. This isn't some iron law of nature, this could easily be changed if there were enough of a push for it.
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Is any word a number?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numeral_(linguistics) I'm not sure what your point was, but mine is that it doesn't necessarily represent a significant amount.
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"Such a system exists. You can publish a book and give it away freely. But few do. This is book communism and fails for the same reasons as regular communism. It is in nobody’s interest to do any hard work. If you don’t reward great effort, virtually nobody provides it." Why does open source / free software exist then? "Nobody puts in hard word if it's not rewarded" hasnt the cURL guy been maintaining cURL/libcurl fo…
Open source covers a very tiny set of use cases for software. How many paid products have an open source competitor at all? How many have a credible competitor (GIMP isn’t a credible alternative to PhotoShop for the people who pay for it for example). It is far from rendering paid software obsolete. And not nobody. Virtually nobody. Yes open source exists. Out of the hundreds of devs I have worked with, I know one wh…
Weird take. GIMP's been good enough for professional work for more than a decade, and lots of professionals use it. I paid for Paint Shop Pro ages ago, because it was better than Photoshop for my use cases. GIMP progressed and became better than PSP for the same. I've used it ever since. It's even been used for major motion pictures.
In the same way that software is eating the world, Free and Open Source software is eating software. Every year it does more and better. If GIMP doesn't work for your use case today, it likely will tomorrow, or the day after.
Some open source tools, like Blender, like Linux, exist at the top of their respective foodchains. Proprietary tools are working to try to compete with them.
There is no greater folly of contemporary human society than the purposeful restriction of such vast and easily shareable repositories of knowledge. Perhaps these schemes made sense in the past but with the advent of the internet and independent groups willing to fund all hosting fees, we should move to models of publishing that do not require this restriction of information. Library genesis exists but necessarily mu…
Why should an author be forced to give away their work for free? They can already choose to give it away for free if they wish. We already have the Creative Commons licenses, and there are many open textbook projects.