States do have rules against business entity names that mislead about regulated professions. California, for example, prohibits names that suggest an entity is a "professional corporation", a particular type of entity limited to regulated professions, when it is not. But I would be very surprised to learn that "Law" alone has been relegated to lawyer practice in any state of the union. Presumably so would organizations like Bloomberg Law, Westlaw, FindLaw, Free Law Project, Groklaw, etc.
Lawyers don't own law. The law belongs to the public. So says this active attorney member of the State Bar of California, and I'll stand on any law firm's conference table in my boots and say that.
What's difficult really depends on the languages you already know.
In addition to noun inflection, verb aspect, pronunciation stress, and punctuation trouble many native English speakers. That's in addition to all the simple irregularities, like irregular nouns and verbs.
Stress even troubles native speakers. When I lived there, I saw slideshow "where 's the stress?" quizzes used to fill time on screens in taxi buses, waiting rooms, and the like.
Stress is a bit of a rarer aspect, most words can be disambiguated with any stress placement, except for a few exceptions, i.e. зáмок (castle) /замóк (lock).
Punctuation is secondary, just put commas, colons and semicolons where you feel they should go, most Russians don't know any better themselves.
Noun and verb inflections you will master with enough practice, yeah.
Maybe overall a more difficult language than English or German, but not in the same league as Chinese or Arabic, in my humble opinion.
As an Arabic speaker I enjoyed learning Russian because we share verbless sentences, and you could just put the words together in any order and you get your idea across and you could be spot on too. So 'what is the time?'(Kotoryy chas) is 2 words as in Arabic for asking the time and other questions in conversation. And some Russian words have lovely music to my ears, as with ice cream and of-course, мороженое и, конечно.
> Stress is a bit of a rarer aspect, most words can be disambiguated with any stress placement
The difficulty is that the stress pattern is not fixed and needs to be memorized, and it often changes the inflection of the word. E.g. "домá" means "houses", while "дóма" means "at home". Another tripping point is that the stress placement is almost always different in Russian when compared to English.
I'm volunteering as an English teacher for Ukrainian refugees, and one of my rules of thumb is: "If an English word looks similar to a Russian word, then the stress is likely on a _different_ syllable". It works surprisingly well.
>If an English word looks similar to a Russian word, then the stress is likely on a _different_ syllable
Most of these are Latin and French loanwords where Russian (same as e.g. German) carried the accentuation over from the source language. English is the odd one out as it insists on putting the primary stress on either of the first two syllables, except in some recent loans (and those still get a secondary stress). With nouns the preference is for the first syllable. Russian surnames get similarly butchered, including notably Nabokov, which could have been adopted unchanged.
It seems like an extremely coarse classification. Category 3 contains languages with very different degrees of difficulty, while Bulgarian and Russian are both Slavic they are nothing alike in terms of difficulty since Bulgarian is the most analytic of Slavic languages (has the less inflection). That makes it extremely easy to learn compared to Russian.
What is also interesting is how written Russian was heavily influenced by old Bulgarian. In fact, written russian includes a lot of older written bulgarian vocabulary.
This results in a weird paradox: for literate Russians it is easy enough to read written bulgarian but almost impossible to understand the spoken language.
This happens in other languages too - danish and Norwegian are almost the same written, such that most products just combine the two on the packaging. But spoken it can be very difficult to comprehend
So... codified written languages are similar but real spoken ones have diverged? Is this only in the way things are pronouced or the differemce is deeper?
I speak Russian and some Bulgarian as third/forth languages, and while I agree that Russian is more difficult, I wouldn't say Bulgarian is "extremely easy" in comparison. It's maybe ~20% easier at best.
I think Bulgarian is considered the easiest Slavic language in terms of grammar because it has a simplified case system similar to how English dropped its cases over time.
On a superficial level that seems like a roughly correct ranking in my experience. On the other hand, I picked up one of the category 3 languages pretty easily. I think some of these are more "weird" to a native English speaker than "hard" per se.
The aspects that make languages difficult for a native English speaker vary quite a bit with the language. I would expect individual experiences with the languages to have high variance as a consequence.
As others hsve pointed out, it's a very coarse (and rather arbitrary) categorization.
E.g. both Turkish and Russian are in Category 3, but Turkish is trivial compared to Russian.
Turkish grammar is extremely regular, and follows easily defined rules that fit about two pages of easily digestible tables.
In comparison, Russian is a separate class tought in Russian schools for four years to native Russian speakers. And you still get people who can't properly inflect numerals, for example.
Turkish has a completely different vocabulary (loanwords aside) and a completely different grammar.
"I want to swim" in Russian is "ja hoću plavatj", "I" + "want" + "to swim". The only difficulties are the conjugation of "want" and the aspect of "to swim". In Turkish it's "yüzmek istiyorum", where "-mek" is "to" and "-um" is "I". Even if the system itself is straightforward, it's still alien to a native English speaker.
> Even if the system itself is straightforward, it's still alien to a native English speaker.
As a native Russian speaker who speaks English and Turkish:
The question isn't about alienness. It's about difficulty. Turkish is trivial compared to Russian. You can learn all the grammar rules you'd ever need in a week or so (though most study materials make it harder than necessary). The rest is just learning vocabulary. Which is just as alien to an English speaker as Russian.
As for the example...
Here's a valid three word sentence in Russian: Ya idu domoj (I'm going home).
Depending on context, mood, feel, etc. any permutation of those words is a valid sentence: ya domoj idu, idu ya domoj, idu domoj ya, domoj ya idu, domoj ya idu.
And that's before we get into inflections, conjugations, gender etc. that neither English nor Turkish have. Or somewhat arbitrary pronunciation rules (korova is pronounced kahrohva) whereas in Turkish every word is pronounced exactly as written (with very few quite regular contractions in regular speech like yapacağım -> yapıcam) etc.
Turkish is regular, has well specified rules you can learn in a week, is extremeley easy to read (pronounce as written, there's no floating/jumping/changing stress). Oh, and the alphabet is latin-based.
Russian: extremely complicated grammar using concepts entirely alien to English (declensions, inflections, conjugates, grammatical cases, genders, transgressives, and even plurals are weird), has free-form-not-really sentence structure, jumping stress. Oh, and a completely different alphabet to boot.
Not always well. One of the problems is that English speakers do not get taught the proper parts of speech. I learnt far more about English from learning other languages than I ever did in English class. We would get told off for bad spelling and grammar, but very little on the actual mechanics.
All through middle and high school, so for 7 years from around 10 to 16.
It did become one eventually in primary school, so probably the last 2 or 3 years there.
I have been generally successful at learning Russian as an adult, but tonal languages are something that I just struggle with on a fundamental level. I want to express meaning and connotation with tones, rather than denotation. On the other hand I've never been terribly motivated to learn a tonal language, so it probably could be overcome, but it's something that would take an immense amount of training to overwrite that tone=connotation/emotion/question instinct.
It is also quite frustrating when a native speaker is completely unable to understand something you say because of a tonal issue. To their ear it must sound entirely different, yet to a non-tonal ear it sounds like you're saying everything 'almost' exactly correct.
> I want to express meaning and connotation with tones, rather than denotation. On the other hand I've never been terribly motivated to learn a tonal language, so it probably could be overcome, but it's something that would take an immense amount of training to overwrite that tone=connotation/emotion/question instinct.
Why would you want to? Pitch also provides connotations / emotions in Mandarin.
> It is also quite frustrating when a native speaker is completely unable to understand something you say because of a tonal issue.
That will never happen. Your bad pronunciation can aggravate other problems, but if your sentence is otherwise good, ignoring the tones will still leave it fully intelligible.
(I once asked a student in a Chinese school whether a particular class wasn't occurring, and he responded "poss". After some confusion, he was frustrated that the pronunciation difference between "poss" and "pause" should make such a difference in communicating with an English speaker.
But of course, it doesn't. If "pause" were a valid way to respond to "is chemistry class happening today", I would have had no difficulty understanding "poss". His problem was in bad knowledge of the language, not bad pronunciation.
You appear to be making the same mistake here. If you try to communicate, and fail, that is not evidence that you are qualified to diagnose what the problem was.)
Only somewhat related: I was surprised by how simple and sound vietnamese grammar is when read through the latin alphabet. Tones are only a problem when speaking but it's increadibly easy to start understanding signs and labels in the country. Slavic and baltic languages i can read are MUCH harder to start with.
So i kind of suspect it might also be the case for chinese: tones and the alphabet are obscuring a clean grammar.
Conveying what I've heard from a few Vietnamese that also speak Chinese, so not any kind of firsthand experience since I speak neither: Vietnamese is more difficult to speak but is a simpler (less expressive) language.
I agree that written Vietnamese is relatively straightforward. It isn't that difficult to read to the eyes of someone used to latin script.
Fiendish logographic writing system (Chinese) vs fiendish grammar (Russian). I'm not a fan of Pinyin transliteration aesthetically.
Russian has a lot of words I can recognise in it. Not just loanwords either but words such as brat, dva, kot (brother, two (twa), cat). The other problem is the tonal system although Mandarin balances that out with simple grammar. Mandarin strikes me as mostly vowels and Russian as strings of consonants.
Iirc the issue with SSPL was that releasing the entire stack under SSPL would basically be impossible, since you wouldn't have the rights to release, for example, the Linux kernel, under it.
Yes. I also read it somewhere that, for example, if you hosted your service on Microsoft IIS, SSPL required you to publish IIS source, regardless of the fact that you don't have it.
If the intent is to stop it being used for a business, that's inherently at odds with part of the OSI's definition: "The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research".
Now technically maybe it could meet the OSD if it required a royalty for hosting the software as a SaaS product, instead of banning that - since it allows "free redistribution", and passes on the same right to anyone receiving it (it is defined in terms of prohibitions on what the licence can restrict, and there is no restriction on charging a set amount for use unless that requires executing a separate licence agreement).
Now arguably this is a deficiency in the OSD. But I imagine if you tried to exploit that, they might just update the definition and/or decline to list your licence.
Watching what we charitably call this debate flare up yet again gives me an odd mix of feelings. On the one hand, seeing people I've read and listened to for years heave time, attention, and more typing onto this tire fire evokes deep tragedy. On the other hand, I've been there, casting my own vanities to the bonfire, more than a few times. There's comfort in the familiar heat and glow.
I couldn't escape the waste until I was willing to give up the idea of myself as experienced, as an expert. Until I accepted that time served taught me lessons, but didn't bestow authority. Most people coming into this are new. They relearn what's useful and leave the rest behind. That's part of adaptation. I try to see their point of view.
If you ask a newer coder what "open source" means, they might say "like MIT?" or even just "like GitHub?" If you look "open" up in a good thesaurus, "available" is there. The Initiative---really, whoever's on the board now or later---will never own or effectively police the term "open source", much less "open source AI". And nobody claiming "open source" for good or ill will ever summon on themself the kind of attention or cachet that marketing bauble once commanded, no matter what their license says.
As for fellow oldheads, there's no resolving contradictions between ways we learned to frame these issues, decades ago. Can changes to a license be a solution to the funding problem? Can using freedom terms to buttress a business count as truly open? That bizarre conflict of ontologies won't decide where programming goes in the future, if it ever did. I doubt it will even be won or lost. It will just fade away, like the circumstances that started it.
DHH can kick the anthill. The activists can raise their old hue and cry. It's purely elective, demoded dramatics. The real problems of software politics today aren't expressible in either schema. They can even seem tautologically unsolvable. Meanwhile, we've got new aspirational generalities that aren't expressible in the old ways of speaking. "Sustainability", because many doing good aren't doing so well. "Decentralization", because we're all sharecropping on some platform now.
Sometimes I think the best I can do for the younger generations facing today is just to never impose petty trivia about "the movement" ever again. Never deign imply I know what they should consider important. If "free" and "open" meant something to me, let their inheritors tell me what they mean now, in practice. Tell me about the world they built and left for them.
Maybe I don't have to choose. After all, who reads blogs?
My point of view is clear, but what I see is complex. Things seemed simpler back when I believed what Slashdot told me, before I'd spent twenty years getting involved and looking closer.
If you're looking for a seer with a salvation plan---as technology, legal innovation, organizational form---I don't have hope to offer you.
Look at the figureheads of free and open, the "philosophers". The ones we remember succeeded, but not on the terms of the lofty gospels they preached. Very few practical systems are "free". Most competitive software is closed, and sharing code across orgs still sucks much of the time. Linus succeeded, but Linus just wanted to code, get respect, and make good money. Glad he did.
Thinking we'd seen the end of software history got us here. Now I see more willingness to try new things again. They mostly wither or fail, but so did most early attempts at "free". Mutation, selection, adaptation.
In my experience, most people underestimate what's negotiable across the board. Especially those making enough to do most of their business with mass-market operations, like big-box stores and retail service providers, that profit by doing many, many standardized transactions every day, with minimal discretion or even personal involvement.
Below that, lots of haggling and informal trade often help people get by. The costs of that process can be another burden on the poor. At the high end, it's worth involving people with discretion on the sell side. Additionally, sales are often one-off and customized. They may also bundle a bunch of different items and benefits without clear line-item breakdowns.
When hiring a lawyer, I'd nearly always recommend getting terms down in a written and signed engagement letter before work starts. That is very much a negotiation, but it's fine to ask questions and comparison shop.
If you're starting with a call, it's perfectly normal to start by asking whether initial consultation will be billed or not. If it will be, ask the rate. If it won't be, expect some limits on what can be discussed. The best lawyers I know aren't cheap or easily tricked into giving free advice on consultation calls with speedrunners, but they are up-front about what they charge for and how.
Copyright under US law does not require "artistic expression". One of the requirements is called "creativity", but it's very easy to meet. The key phrase is literally "some minimal degree of creativity".
The fundamental policy choice was to protect computer software under intellectual property law, with exclusive rights and market compensation. There were a number of ways that could have been done. Other jurisdictions toyed with new, software-specific laws. But in the end the call in the US was to bring it under existing copyright law with some tweaks to definitions and a small handful of software-specific rules.
Good question. They have a new Juki machine to sew these on directly, but I can't tell whether it will be practical to sew on by hand. I expect most tailor and seamstress shops won't be taking our loans to buy machines just to sew these new zippers in one size.
Lawyers don't own law. The law belongs to the public. So says this active attorney member of the State Bar of California, and I'll stand on any law firm's conference table in my boots and say that.