801–810 of 996 posts
It is a real pleasure to use.
(The one downside is that it does mean I have to use the same email address for each vendor.)
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Could it have been "probably the most financially successful video game of all time" if it hadn't agreed to the terms of the various consoles and phone stores?
I'm not sure why that's relevant. Am I only not dying of thirst because I agreed to the terms offered by the local water company? I think it's not contradictory to believe two things simultaneously: that people should not be held to the terms of a contract they signed when they were dying of thirst, and that it's okay that I needed to agree to certain terms with the water company in order to have running water in my…
It is if they have a monopoly on water.
Imagine their terms were manifestly unreasonable. If you want water service you'll have to pay $50,000/year. What would you do? If the answer is that it's reasonable to dig a well or something like that, they haven't got a monopoly. If the answer is to pay the $50,000/year because the only alternative is to die of thirst, there you are.
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It hasn’t been a quarter in which i haven’t told myself how richard stallman was right, and a visionary, and how much we were fools to consider him an extremist.
Sometimes he's off his rocker, but a lot of the time he's right. We can have both.
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In other words, Apple and Google are bad for taking a 30% cut, but Sony and Microsoft are not bad for taking a 30% cut plus having a (reportedly) vastly more onerous set of policies than Apple has.
When console makers start making the same profit margin on their devices as Apple does, as opposed to selling them at or even below cost, this argument will begin to make sense.
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The AGPL section 13 isn't about conveying the program itself, it's about making it available as a service for network interaction. It may be just a one paragraph difference, but that difference is what makes the AGPL into an EULA. It's a requirement on users . The GPLv3 has zero requirements on users , only on distributors . You might think this is a valid clause to include, and like its effects, and that's fine (tho…
No. It's not a requirement on users anymore than the GPL requiring you to distribute corresponding source on CDs was a requirement on users. Morally and legally, the distribution medium does not make a difference. When you make the software available over the network you are no longer the user -- the users of the software over the network are the users. When you convey the software over the network you are a network…
If I give you a CD with nginx, I'm distributing it.
If I send you a .tar.gz with nginx, I'm distributing it.
If I bring up nginx on a server, put some HTML files in the webroot, and give you a URL to it, I am not distributing nginx. I am merely using nginx, and offering you a service using nginx. I am not offering nginx itself. I am distributing my HTML website, and I am merely using nginx for it.
Cases 1 and 2 invoke copyright. Case 3 does not. In the absence of a license, you are not allowed to do 1 nor 2, but you are allowed to do 3. I can give you software I created, say nothing whatsoever about its license (which means, implicitly, "all rights reserved"), and international copyright law says you can not do 1 nor 2, but you can do 3.
The GPL, BSD, and other free software copyright licenses say you can do 1 or 2, under certain conditions.
The AGPL, and other EULAs, says you can NOT do 3, unless you meet certain conditions (other EULAs may, for example, limit the number of users, which would be typical for typical proprietary software server EULAs; the AGPL limits how you can serve the software, in that you must provide source changes to users of the service).
Therefore, the GPL and BSD strictly grant rights (to copy). The AGPL both grants rights to copy and restricts rights to use. It is therefore not a copyright license, but a contract, an EULA, a click-through usage agreement. And anyone who treats it as a copyright license (i.e. users are not expected to care) is doing a disservice to their users, because they are, in fact, not allowed to use the software without abiding by that contract (license).
If nginx were AGPL-licensed (thankfully it isn't), and I made a change to the source for personal use, then the AGPL would require me to stick a download link to that modified source in the footer of every website served using that copy of nginx, even if I am not serving the nginx binary itself.
The GPL is already perfectly suited to cover distributing software on the internet, as tarballs or whatever. The GPLv2 had some outdated provisions referencing a "medium" and written offers (e.g. the CD story), and the GPLv3 already covered that by saying you can just send the source via the same medium as the binary, e.g. from a network server.
The AGPL is a very different beast, and it has nothing to do with updating the GPL to allow for network transmission of the source, as you seem to imply.
Have an example: I run a Nextcloud instance for personal use. It is AGPL-licensed. Thankfully I have not made any changes to the code. However, if I touch a single php file in my /var/www/nextcloud (other than config files - hopefully, the AGPL is too vague to say for sure), that means I now need to figure out how to package and distribute that change to literally every visitor to my instance, which could be anyone on the internet (even if they just hit the login page). This is NOT possible with a purely copyright license. And my distribution did not warn me about it (like they did for proprietary software EULAs, which require an explicit ack), because they erroneously believe that the AGPL is not an EULA, because the FSF wrote it.
Does this make sense now?
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Right now, if I was running some open source OS on an open source hardware, with random 3rd party unverified apps, etc. - I would have no confidence in myself to keep that thing secure. I agree that things like openssh can be more secure because there is a huge number of individuals and corporations using it, there are a lot of eyes on it. It is open source and secure. That's not the same as something as big as an iP…
For some reason a lot dev's cannot seem to comprehend that a lot of people(Including myself) are not capable/wish to maintain/keep up with security. I rather use my brain cycles for something else. This is compounded for people who have no interest in tech but rather just want to use them to perform certain tasks. Are some of practices unfair sometimes to a small subset of companies/developers. Definitely yes, But wh…
It would be interesting to see if these users views stack up in practice or these are just beliefs that are not practically demonstrable.
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Sure, but for how long.
I expect development, offline, (and thus execution of novel/unsigned binaries) to remain possible on ARM Macs, so for at least the foreseeable future. People have been claiming the iOS-style trusted/treacherous computing cancer will hit macOS “any day now” for most of a decade at this point, and it’s still not even on the horizon.
What? It's basically all there. Apple just needs to remove the last workaround of popping up the preference pane and clicking allow for untrusted apps. I'm sure there's a flag for this somewhere.
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half the US market but how much of gaming market? Personally I have always used macs but I have a windows desktop specific for gaming. I don't think anybody somewhat into gaming would have bought an apple machine for that purpose.
A cursory google search indicated that mobile gaming represents about 45% of the total games industry [1]. That's quite a lot, I'd say that the potential risk here is well into "unacceptable" territory. [1] https://kommandotech.com/statistics/mobile-gaming-statistics... .
The enemy of my enemy is my friend. I'm going to buy all of Epic's games tonight for my PC. In the past, I was a bit annoyed that they plan to remove Rocket League from Steam but now that they're fighting Apple, I love this company. If this whole lawsuit thing doesn't work out, maybe they'll develop a phone so I can buy that too.