Disqus - Latest Comments for Seth Schoen

Re: Blafkin on the GPL and Proprietary Software

Seth Schoen — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 13:23:26 -0000

"You can't incorporate [GPL] code into a product whose source isn't released [...] The BSD license gives people true freedom about what THEY want to do with code. [...] The BSD license gives power to the user."

Doesn't this depend on who gets to count as "people" and "the user"? In FSF's view, "the user" being protected is the end user (who is running the code). That does mean that "the user" who packages, distributes, sells, etc. the code or products containing it is not allowed to do things that restrict "the user" who runs it.

FSF set out this point in a different form at

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/freedom-or-power....

(This essay does slightly undermine Tim Lee's point about FSF's purported tolerance toward nonfree software licensing. But it makes clear that FSF is trying to protect users in the sense of people who run the software as distinct from users who package or distribute it. Of course, FSF wants to protect them, too, but not in the event that their intentions or interests conflict with those of end-users.)

This distinction does seem to me to be at the root of most of the disagreements between copyleft advocates and copyleft critics in the free software community. Thus when FSF wrote that "[t]o protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights", some people said "why is it OK to make any restrictions at all?" or "if someone denies freedoms to end users, isn't that that person's fault, not the original developer's fault for failing to prevent it?".

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Why both M and AO ratings for games?

Seth Schoen — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 14:38:39 -0000

X used to be an MPAA movie rating, but has subsequently been replaced by NC-17.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPAA_ratings#X_is_...

So MPAA doesn't retain NC-17 and X ratings side by side with one another.

Re: Network Neutrality == End-to-End Principle?

Seth Schoen — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 22:13:34 -0000

Larry Sheldon:

Selecting your own DNS server is not incompatible with the use of DHCP. DHCP does provide a means for an ISP or network operator to propose DNS servers that users can use, and most DHCP clients will, by default, accept these suggestions and configure the local resolver to obey these suggestions. However, there is no reason that DHCP clients must do so, and they could be configured not to. For example, I was able to find out quickly by looking at the documentation for pump that pump.conf files can use the nodns directive to simply ignore DNS server information provided by DHCP servers (so that manually-configured DNS settings would continue to be used, even as IP address and route and network configuration changed). I'm sure that many other DHCP clients have an equivalent option.

For example, the OpenDNS people have configuration suggestions for various operating systems and they show that Windows XP separates the concepts of obtaining an IP address automatically and obtaining DNS server addresses automatically:

https://www.opendns.com/start?device=windows-xp

I imagine that the other instructions at

https://www.opendns.com/start

would provide fairly straightforward means of choosing to use OpenDNS in lieu of ISP-provided resolvers from many different operating systems, even while continuing to use DHCP.

(I'm not sure that this resolves the question of what kind of service we ought to consider the DNS to be.)

Re: Republican Nominees for FCC

Seth Schoen — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 17:15:58 -0000

It always bothers me when the FCC seats are described as legally belonging to Republicans or Democrats. In fact, the legal rule is 47 USC §154(b)(5), which only provides:

"The maximum number of commissioners who may be members of the same political party shall be a number equal to the least number of commissioners which constitutes a majority of the full membership of the Commission."

So there is no requirement of any sort that any FCC seats have to be filled by anyone of any particular party. Members of the Senate conventionally assume (and expect) that there will be three Commission seats held by members of the President's political party and two seats held by members of the largest party in the Senate other than the President's party. However, this is not a legal requirement at all. Just as there is a Senator who does not belong to a political party, there can be an FCC Commissioner who does not belong to a political party, or there could be a third-party commissioner.

It's reasonable for someone writing about the FCC to predict that the tradition that all FCC Comissioners will be members of a political party will continue (only one past Commissioner, Ewell Jett, is listed by Wikipedia without an affiliation as a Republican or Democrat), but the basis of this tradition is solely the behavior of Senate caucuses, not the law.