Monthly Archive: October 2006

Originally published in Free Software Magazine, 2 October 2006.

Last week I mentioned that I enjoy programming in Visual Basic and suggested that people shouldn’t act so superior and look down at dweebs like me who program in dweeby languages. Today let’s talk about why Visual Basic is an awful programming language and anyone using it should run kicking-and-screaming away. (I’ll admit that kicking and running may be difficult to do at the same time.) Run away, not because it’s lame, but because it’s so horribly unfree.

Who owns this thing?

People sometimes question free software projects because very often no single organization stands behind them. Who are you going to hold responsible for Program X when it is causing a problem for Corporation Y? We’ve seen there are many support models to be had with free software, yet still there is this concern about ownership and responsibility.

It’s so …

Started reading Unbounded Freedom and ran in to a great excerpt from a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to Isaac McPherson in 1813 about the nature of ideas. It’s not the first time I’ve run across it, and like my Ben Franklin quote it has seen a lot of use in patent discussions, but it’s the kind of thing I think needs to be found on movingtofreedom.org. Looking at more of the letter:

It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, …

I added a comment preview feature, courtesy of Il Filosofo. Seems to be working great and wasn’t much trouble to get working. The only problem I’m seeing is that if I click on the W3C XHTML 1.0 link to validate the page, it complains that the page is not valid because no doctype is found. But there is a doctype, and if I view source and then manually paste that in to the W3C form, it validates fine. The only thing different from other pages I validate on here is that the url ends in .php. Does the validator make some kind of assumption when it sees that? My OCD will compel me to figure this out, but my ADD may allow me to wait until I attend to other things first.

Maybe this new feature will provide that added incentive you’ve been waiting for to chime in once in a while. You …

The billblog pointed me to a new book and blog about Creative Commons licensing, by Rosemary Bechler.

I enjoyed contributing some scattered and rambling observations to discussions here and here. I enjoyed it for the chance to fire off some thoughts, but not so much as a debate. This is one of those debates where people on both sides are pretty well set with what they believe. (As are most debates. Tastes great! Less filling!) We’re all talking and no one is listening.

It occurs to me that for some time I’ve been reading and have been influenced by people with whom I very much agree. Now I’m reading more of the other side and it’s a sharper divide than I realized. People are angry about the perceived threat of free culture. I guess this shouldn’t surprise …

Originally published in Free Software Magazine, 25 September 2006.

In my first post here at Free Software Magazine, I mentioned that I actually like using Microsoft Windows. People seemed to let this go or find it not worth commenting on, maybe because my goal is to move away from it. Not that I expected rabid opposition. Not at all. GNU/Linux users are well-known for being quite mild and reserved in their opinions. If we must go back to my drug use analogy, it could also be that readers here were supportive of my desire to seek treatment and rehabilitation and didn’t see the need to condemn me for past transgressions. (But really now, the drug metaphor has to go.) Perhaps just as egregious a violation of the principles of free software has been my use of Visual Basic over …