I really love my job, and when I am working on 'the good parts' of it, I find it very hard to stop at 40 hours (ok, honestly, usually it's a little bit more like 45). I do force myself to stop, in large part because I have a family at home who deserve to know me. But I've also found that when I not working, filling my time with some other things than work really does enrich my life, and I feel that my performance at work does increase, or at least is more consistent because of that.
In any case, I see very clearly, also in people around me, that loving your job and working extremely long days are not the same thing.
Honestly, though, if LWN was worried about this, they could put some sore of limit on the number of times a subscriber link could be used (per time unit?) or something. I don't think they are, and rightly so: the exposure to their content (which is very good value for the small amount of money they ask subscribers), as well as their liberal policy on these 'friend links' probably lead to more subscribers. Personally, I want to read the LWN articles when they appear there (on their RSS feed, to be precise), and not when someone gets around to posting a link on Hacker News.
I think the gist was: if you lose your license to distribute Busybox X, does that impact your rights with respect to Busybox Y?
My take on this (but IANAL) is that you do not really lose the rights to distribute a specific version, but the rights to distribute specific code (or compiled versions of it), and that would carry through to all code in version Y that was already in version X, but not any newer code that is unique to version Y. That won't be very useful, though.
[Edit] Just read the part of the article that deals with this question. Personally, I hold to my take on this matter -- that the scope is not a particular version of the distribution containing the code, but to all the bits of code of which the license was violated -- even if you also have access to the code in another way. My reasoning for this is that this could otherwise open up a pretty simple loop-hole: you'd only have to get someone else, whose license is not yet revoked, to fork the project, and release a new 'version' of the program, to get your rights to the code back. That can not have been the intention of that clause in the GPL.
Ah I thought you were naming BusyBox as an infringing work, not an infringed. Anyway, it does seem, as mentioned in the article, that if the copyright holder rereleases a similar work under a similar license, a past infringer gets a fresh shot, unless the author specifically publishes their revision history as a single work.
The point of the GPL really is about sharing, as the article suggests, not about punitive damages or post-violation injuctions. GPL-using authors do not want to prohibit infringers from future sharing, they want derived works published freely.
Much of the point of GPL and Free Software is about freedom for users, not making war against others. A past infringer gaining access to to code is not a loophole, it is part of the goal of the Free Software movement, which is unrestricted access for anyone to exploit software privately or to share it publicly (but not to allow public exploitation of non-shared code).
I think the position that it's about specific code is not defendable. What if I delete the file and retype it as a coder (see Theseus)? Is this the same file that was in a former release? If I automatically code format it, so no character is at the same position as it was before? Is it the same file? The only thing that makes sense is considering releases as the particular thing that is licensed (with each source file being a considered a part of the release, not a part in the history of the file).
<quote>Well, there is, technically, which is that some amazing breakthrough in technology suddenly makes us all a lot wealthier very quickly, which is such a long shot it's hardly worth talking about.</quote>
Wealth? Is there really a lack of wealth in the US? I though the problem was not a lack of wealth, but more a lack of those in the US that possess it in abundance to share it with those who don't (e.g., by paying taxes). Even if some 'technology' came along that could generate wealth, that would very likely still be owned by a minority of the population and would not solve any of the problems faced by the nation as a whole.
In this debate in particular, I think it's critically important to distinguish between "dollars", a currency controlled by the US government, and "wealth", the real things those dollars can buy. As has been pointed out, nobody denies that technically the US can spin up the printing presses and make as many dollars as it wants. However, even ignoring the other catastrophic consequences that would have, there's also the considerations of the real wealth consequences we're committing to. It isn't just "lots of money", it's also things like committing real people to build real facilities so that other real people will take care of the real old people living in those facilities for years at a time on the government's dime. To exaggerate for clarity, we can't afford to have an economy in which everybody is dedicated either to caring for old people, treating old people, or supporting those who do. Somebody's actually got to be able to produce something to feed the economy. Obviously we can't get to this point, but it's not clear how much of our real economy can actually be dedicated to these things, because the support networks can end up being a lot deeper than surface intuition would expect. Studying modern military logistics can be very helpful; in particular, look for the statistics about how many support personnel there are per front-line soldier doing the "actual" military work, and apply the lessons to the "real" economy.
I agree. "Wealth" is what is lost when workers who want to work sit idle because the fed decides that protecting the value of "dollars" is a more important mandate than full employment.
It'll be the way they handle this bug that will make/break my confidence. If they fix this quickly enough (even though they have this bug set to a low priority right now) then I won't mind too much.
> So far I have to rate google as still not getting social.
Well, they aren't, really. They're just using you to test their system, which I can understand.
Personally, if I got an invite, I'd use it to look around a bit, and then wait for the whole thing to completely open up before actually starting to use it (which would make me a poor tester from Google's perspective).
In any case, I see very clearly, also in people around me, that loving your job and working extremely long days are not the same thing.