Slashdot Mirror

Admission is free and all are welcome. Pose your questions to the man himself...

Is that it's somewhat one-sided. We all know Tim O'Reilly, Larry Lessig, John Perry Barlow, Dan Gillmore, and Clay Shirky all believe in more or less the same thing: that information is not a product or property to be traded and sold, but a service to be provided, and that is the crux of this whole question. Now, if they had gotten one of the people whom Eben Moglen calls 'econodwarfs' or 'IPdroids' in his seminal essay: Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright the debate might have been much more interesting. Maybe if they got Jack Valenti or those other partisans of strong "intellectual property" rights to participate...

This not much but this site outlines the internet policy for the African continet. Also this site has an intersting over view of china's internet policies

You don't seem to understand how the MBone works. It's the opposite of concentrating on the backbone. Users behind the multicast router get real multicast, and the router tunnels it over unicast IPv4.

The lesson of the MBone is that even when you can put real multicast on people's desktops, the infrastructure still resists change.

If you're interested in running VOCAL, I'd recommend a Linux box running the old egcs 1.1.2 compiler. We use Redhat 6.2 internally for development. If you use Redhat 7 (or one of the newer 2.95 or 2.96 compilers), we have patches that help.

Yes, I know this compiler isn't really as ISO C++ as it ought to. But we wrote all of our code to this compiler, so it's the best supported one.

BSD would require porting (which I will be working on when I have a chance). The big issues are threads -- the code requires reasonable thread support, and can occasionally require preemption between threads, so some thread libraries (e.g. pth) may not be enough.

Solaris works, but you'll need the Forte Compiler (SunPro) to make it work easily.

Ethernet Phones

Then, you'll need some phones. I think the Cisco 7960 phones are nice, and you can get SIP for them (but they are expensive). Other manufacturers can be gotten from SipCenter's web site, as well as this German site. We are one floor above the Komodo guys, and their boxes are quite reasonably priced (although I'm not sure how to get a SIP version).

Another alternative would be to use a Linux box as a phone.

More expensive would be a quicknet card or two. They're $100-$200 dollars, and sound better then sound cards.

Cheapest is a sound card. We have soundcard support in vocal, but it's not great (although some of that is our fault).

Gateways

You don't strictly need one of these if you're just interested in trying out VoIP, want to do an intercom-type system, or are trying to make calls over the Internet, but if you want to be able to receive calls from or place calls to the PSTN (the "real" telephone network), you'll need to get a gateway or two. Here, I know that Cisco makes them, as well as some other guys (Sonus? Nuera? Look at Henning's page and SipCenter for more gateway manufacturers).

I hope this helps.

I recomend a Sun Sparcstation SLC or XLC. It is basically a complete diskless SPARC integrated with a 17" black and white monitor. A plus is that there is no fan involved.

I boot mine from my Linux box using the SLXT package (based on a linux kernel) and it works well. The only downside is that it takes several minutes to boot over the network. There's an (out of date) article about it at http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue27/little.html
An alternative to SLXT is XKernel

Steve.

Then there's 9892454959483. This one is the source code for Microsoft Word. In addition to being "copyrighted," this one is a trade secret. That means if you take this number from Microsoft and give it to anyone else you can be punished. Lastly, there's 588832161316. It doesn't do anything, it's just the square of 767354. As far as I know, it isn't owned by anybody under any of these rubrics. Yet.

When I first read this I laughed at the concept of a stream of numbers being copyrightable. But that is of course the current case. Of course it would be even more ridiculous that a naturally-occuring prime would be so subversive, wouldn't it?

My school has a number of online journal subscriptions accessible to anyone on the campus subnet (or authenticated to their proxy), including many of the ACS journals. Yes, this is full-text and complete. Indeed, one can often find journals online through this service that they don't even have in paper form in the physical library.
--
// mlc, user 16290

My school has a number of online journal subscriptions accessible to anyone on the campus subnet (or authenticated to their proxy), including many of the ACS journals. Yes, this is full-text and complete. Indeed, one can often find journals online through this service that they don't even have in paper form in the physical library.
--
// mlc, user 16290

My school has a number of online journal subscriptions accessible to anyone on the campus subnet (or authenticated to their proxy), including many of the ACS journals. Yes, this is full-text and complete. Indeed, one can often find journals online through this service that they don't even have in paper form in the physical library.
--
// mlc, user 16290

It already exists, and has existed for a number of years now... (since 1995)

It is called "xmove", and is available from ftp://ftp.cs.columbia.edu/pub/xmove/

If you're running Debian, then it's only an apt-get away.

If running Red Hat or any other RPM-based distribution, there is an i386 and src RPM available on the 'Net as well.

In addition, I suggest that you try out x2x. Think "Xinerama" across multiple desktops over the network. It's kind of like that. With the combination of x2x and xmove, you can actually move the displays of X applications across machines, and control all of the boxes from one control point. Good stuff. (:

While I don't disagree with you, I do remember a funny little law about blacks at the back of the bus.

I also remember Rosa Parks ignoring it.

Not caring about the law and caring that a particular law is stupid are two different things.

It is important to remember that the key to civil disobiedience is being *punished* for your apparent crimes. That is what separates those twits that burn down mink farms from true heroes like Steven Biko .

One had the balls to get caught anyway.

Toodles,
Nephs

I'm for science for the sake of science, but making any inferences on such limited social science data is dangerous, especially considering there has been extensive academic studies already done on the "doll preference test" (and cited in Brown v. Board of Education).

The doll preference test had a sample size of 16. http://varenne.tc.columbia.edu/class/common/dolls_ in_brown_vs_board.html contains an excerpt from the trial. She had a sample size of 30; double the number apparently considered adequate for "extensive academic studies." (She, also, seems to have reproduced the doll preference test results for children. So I don't quite understand what the complaint is. Did she get the "wrong" results for adults?)

Her experimental protocols may not be particularly sophisticated. But this is part of the learning process. Rather than being stomped on, she should be encouraged to refine and improve her experiments. Perhaps some more information on blind testing? Thus she is educated. That would be treatment I'd hope for anyone doing any exploration; not just science, not just social science.

http://www.nevis.columbia.edu/cgi-bin/man.sh?man=s sh Doesn't the wide distribution without the (TM) attribute prior to the P&TO issuance dilute these claims?

http://www.islandone.org/Treaties/BH595.html

http://www.ila-hq.org/pdf/SpaceLaw.pdf

http://www.seas.columbia.edu/~ah297/un-esa/paper-w inkler.html

The basic gist of all this is that the launching State is responsible for any damage caused by space vehicles or satellites.

See here for some background on this issue, including the letters from Pillsbury.

These bakeoffs are heald to test compatability between products that use the Session Initiation Protocol, which is going to be used to route calls and media for the next generation of wireless devices (PDA's, Cell phones, etc). 3G wireless promises 2Mbps transfer rates with roll outs starting as early as this summer (for the Isle of Man atleast). Rock on.

I don't see anywhere that the source code is linked to as the brief claims. Can someone point it out to me or did she pull the link in fear of getting a lawsuit herself? I'd imagine that she would have agreed to let them link to her site in the brief. It would be a real blow to the argument if she pulled the rug out from under them.

Maybe I missed it but I can't believe no one from Columbia has posted.
Website for tunnel maps for many university campuses with maps and lots of info on Columbia.

Columbia at one point had the third largest building tunnel system in the world, behind MIT and the Kremlin. It is famous for many things including the beginning of the Manhattan Project.

This 7M pdf also contains a good article on the history of Columbia's tunnels.

Tunnels are a major part of geek life at Columbia and tunneling has been incorporated into the traditions of many campus organizations. CUMB (Columbia University Marching Band) gives an underground tour at the beginning of every school year.

Maybe I missed it but I can't believe no one from Columbia has posted.
Website for tunnel maps for many university campuses with maps and lots of info on Columbia.

Columbia at one point had the third largest building tunnel system in the world, behind MIT and the Kremlin. It is famous for many things including the beginning of the Manhattan Project.

This 7M pdf also contains a good article on the history of Columbia's tunnels.

Tunnels are a major part of geek life at Columbia and tunneling has been incorporated into the traditions of many campus organizations. CUMB (Columbia University Marching Band) gives an underground tour at the beginning of every school year.

As someone else pointed out, you can download the Japanese IME for Windows 98 from Microsoft. It only allows you to input japanese text on web pages though, so it probably is of little use to you. (Information on the Windows Global IME
I've had the best luck using Windows 2000 - when you install the system, you can install a Japanese IME. If you then set your regional settings for Japan, it is also really easy to copy/cut/paste kanji, ICQ works right, etc. etc. It is pretty nice.
Of course, if you don't want to bother with getting IME input to work right at the OS level, you can get multibyte support for ntemacs up and running, which does have its own Japanese (and Chinese, Korean, Thai, etc.) IME.
If you are interested in reading Japanese web pages, then you will probably love www.rikai.com. The site uses a server side script to load in edict readings for each kanji which pops up on mouseover.
That's about all I have to say about that.
BTW, if you are interested, I'm currently translating the Great Teacher Onidzuka manga using a Win2k system with Japanese input (along with a Java client / server thing)

The protocol for 3G wireless devices is SIP (Session Initiation Protocol). 3G Wireless promises 2Mbps transfer rates which is well enough for live 2-way video feeds.

I don't think Ani DiFranco spends a whole lot of time suing people for copying her music, and the link will give you a little more detail about how to make a living as a musician outside the mainstream. If you want you can sift through this list of bands who oppose copyrighting and see if any are making any money. My guess is that none own their own jet, I'll grant you that.

You've defined your question in a somewhat difficult way, though, by insisting on an exception for "hippie musicians." You can take any example you are given and label them a hippie and therefore they don't count. The fact that they don't go around demanding royalties for their music can be taken as proof that they are hippies. So you want, what, like a Christian country western singer with a buzz cut who never sells recordings and only collects the ticket recipts? I'll go look; stay right there 'til I get back...

Check out the Session Initiation Protocol. Its the competing protocol against H.323 (blah). It supports mapping names to phone numbers, phone numbers to names, phone numbers to webpages, etc.

From your own statistics

That is NOT JUST USENET....

*sigh* no one seems to listen....

it is possible.... very possible.

Usenet traffic alone is over 100Gb a DAY.

They want to preserve that for 7 years.

That's 255.5 Terabytes, just for Usenet.

Usenet is a drop in the bucket compared to web traffic.

Columbia University estimates that Average data traffic for the year 2000 is 4.451 Terabits per SECOND.

By 2002, it's estimated to be 27.645 Terabits per second. That's worldwide, of course, not British.

I doubt there's enough disk and tape capacity worldwide to store a month of it, much less 7 years.

We're talking 298.566 Exabytes per day in 2002.

Perhaps these idiots should look at the statistics before they pass a law that they can't possibly fund.

-

A widely publicized Finnish study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association followed 29,000 male smokers for 5-8 years. Of those taking beta carotene supplements, 18% more developed lung cancer than those not taking the pills. Another trial, the CARET study looked at 18,000 men and women who smoked heavily or were exposed to asbestos. Although this study was not completed, researchers found 28% more lung cancer in those taking the beta- carotene - Vitamin A combination.

" in loco parentis" is the legal doctrine that the school has the responsibilities and privileges of a parent while the student is located in their educational facility. Since the tradition of corporeal discipline is more severe than merely inhibiting a child's supposed "right to privacy" it seems any taxpayer who is concerned about how his money is being spent is compelled to investigate how the public school system is running things.

The real problem is the misguided notion that there are universal standards of childrearing that can be applied across all children without damaging significant minorities of the children. For example, the fact that "spare the rod and spoil the child" is unnecessary for some parents is insufficient to support the presumption of government officials that it is unnecessary for all parents, and that therefore application of state force should remove it not only from the public schools but from the private relationships between parents and their children. Interesting that these same governments can later subject a young man, who has grown up without a strong guiding hand, to a prison system where he is likely to be subjected to all manner of physical abuse, including routine sexual sadism and lethal infections which government officials absolve themselves of responsibility for by blaming it on the behavior of prisoners themselves. 1% of the US population is now in such prisons -- more than any other Western country. How can a government with such a record of abuse of those under its authority dare to interfere in the parenting practices of its citizens?

Application of force to protect children from this fate is more justifiable than is the application of state force to impose univeral rules of child-rearing.

There are a number of good places to look on the web, including:

Info on Loopback Encryption
Information on using CFS (useful)
Faster Option and another. These people have gone about it a different way.

Columbia U.'s new media program is affiliated w/ its school of journalism.

Here's some advice from someone who:

1. Has a BA in Journalism.
2. Attends Grad school for C.S.
3. Has a real job.

Regarding work vs. school
Do both. Hook-up w/ a company offering tuition reimbursement. Get some real-world experience (grad schools like that). If, after working for a bit, you still want that masters or Ph.D go part time and let your company pay for it.

Granted, it will take longer, you will have less of a life but, you will drive a better car :-).

Regarding New Media
Find a good Computer Science program. It will take you farther.

If all you want is a job in New Media then go get one. More schooling won't help you be better at it. Besides, as journalist you already know how to communicate.

Since the New Media world rides on the tide of new technology, knowing the science behind it will help you stay afloat (sorry for the lame metaphor).

Luck.

I've got 2! a VR319 I do BnW stuff on (amazing resolution compared to a color monitor doing BnW) and a VRT19, 20" trinitron tube (that's the size of the image not the size of the monitor)

Got both of them of a skip, the trick is to be able to drive them because they only do fixed sync and worse, they sync-on-green (but I've seen on the net that you can solder in some resistors and get it driven by external sync, too!!!)

So how do you do fixed sync/ sync-on-green monitor to work with linux?

Get yourself a millennium 1/2 maybe the new G200/G400 do it too and stick a sync_on_green option in your XF86Config:

Section "Device"
Identifier "Primary Card"
VendorName "Unknown"
BoardName "Matrox Millennium II"
Option "sync_on_green"

Modeline "1280x1024" 130 1280 1300 1460 1696 1024 1027 1030 1069 +hsync -vsync

Don't forget your friendly

Visual "GrayScale"

That's for X, I haven't checked if SVGATextMode works with these monitors, 'coz driving characters at 1280x1024 maybe a little too fast for a millennium 2 but! you never know :-) Now, to get two of these suckers on your desk, use x2x or better, xfree86 4 (which I still have to try when I have time to spare)

If you are serious about imaging, buy yourself some of these OLD monitors, you won't regret it, they are well worth the 20$ you'll pay for them at a computer fair (because nobody knows how to drive them with PCs...)

Only drawback appart from being fixed frequency... they run hot... something to consider if you have them at home.

Back to the subject, olvwm is your WM if you run 256 colors. Slick and functional.

---

Columbia has also declined to ban Napster. The campus press published a story about it. The staff editorial of the day was in favor of not banning Napster, but there was a dissenting piece also.
--

Now the FCC will mostlikely NOT open AOL's IM network and make everyone use AOL's hack. Now a real IETF protocol can mature into the standard.

Developers mailing list archive - http://www.mail-archive.com/openssl-dev@openssl.or g/
SSLeay doco - http://www.columbia.edu/~ariel/ssleay/
SSLeay FAQ - http://www2.psy.uq.edu.au/~ftp/Crypto/
Dr Stephen Henson's home page - http://www.drh-consultancy.demon.co.uk/ Agreed, some of it's pretty sparse. Join the developer mailing list and ask a few questions - www.openssl.org

No one ever said IP laws are bad/wrong.

Actually, quite a few people have said that. Among them are Eben Moglen and Brian Martin. If you look at just a subset of the IP laws then there are a whole lot of people who've said they're bad... including the Free Software Foundation and The League for Programming Freedom.

Without them, the global economy would collapse

That's speculation. Perhaps you're right. Perhaps not. Even if you're right, is this really so terrible an outcome? Will there be riots in the streets of Paris if they can't get American movies? Will American college students invade Washington DC with firearms if they can't get Japanese anime?

The purpose of the GPL is to protect property and limit it's [sic] use

Others have already responded to this part, but it's important enough to warrant reiteration. The purpose of the GPL is to promote free software which is, at its core, the freedom to share with your friends and with the whole of society. The only denial of freedom in the GPL is the part that denies you the right to deny other people the right to share. A lot of people don't seem to grasp this, which is why we see this debate over and over (ad infinitum) on slashdot.

[...] reflect the new and drastically lower price of duplication and distribution and LET US LISTEN TO THE MUSIC WE'D GLADLY PAY FOR

Here, I think you're absolutely correct.

NYC Activists' Hosting Collective Discussion List is a brand new discussion list that is exploring ways to help activists in their causes by doing free administration, hosting, helping etc. Jesse Sanford jesse@columbia.edu is coordinating it so direct questions to him if you are interested.

Some comments on the following;

Furthermore, MANY VoIP routing solutions are entirely dependent on the H.323 or H.323v2 pseudo-standard, which uses UDP - an inherently unreliable transport - to transmit and recieve call routing information on a per-system per-port level. H.323v2 is also bandwidth intensive. And I have yet to see a system that can interconnect H.323v2 with SS7, which is the absolute standard for all telephone call routing, as defined by Telcordia/BellCore. The Lucent 5ESS runs SS7 for routing, I shouldn't need to say any more than that. This may have changed in the time that I have been out of VoIP, but I doubt it

H.323 is indeed bandwidth intensive. It takes a number of nailed up TCP(!) connections to maintain a 323 call. However, H.323 v1 and v2 do not support call connects over UDP. It wasn't until v3 that UDP based communication came in to play. SIP supports both TCP and UDP connections. It also greatly reduces the number messages needed to set up a connection between endpoints.
If you look at SIP and MGCP (IETF equivalents to H.323) there are a number of efforts to put in SS7 interoperability. ISUP traffic over SIP is in place today. And there are products available to do this. (See SIP-T which is SIP-Telephony interoperability). I'm not a huge fan but you might also want to look at http://www.softswitch.org/. Their are a number of companies attempting to build class 5 switches based on VoIP technology (see IPVerse, XyBridge, Lucent, etc).
If you're interested in AIN functionality over IP you can try the Generic Data Interface (Bellcore SR-3389). This is all North American. For ITU/ETSI you'll have to go do the legwork, I'm not sure there's anything specified.

To sum up, if any of you out there are actually interested in the current market for VoIP and the capabilities, go do your own legwork. Don't listen to one isolated experience on /.. The large majority of people in telecoms know jack shit about internet technology, and the same goes for internet folks coming in to telecoms. I'm not claiming that you don't know what's up RISCy, just that 1998 is eons ago in this industry and things are changing rapidly. The VoIP industry is blowing up right now and there's a lot of heavy shit going down. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in protocols. Here are some links:
SIP home page, great FAQ and Links.
Alright H.323 starter
Open source H.323 effort.
SIP-T starter.

For Real world examples try Dialpad.com, www.talkopia.com, etc, etc.

This This appears to be a good technical summary with lots of subsiduary references. Or try feeding "gender differences math" to the search engine of your choice.

One point must be made is that men and women are different. (and oh what a beautiful difference) This difference starts at a fundamental chemical level and is revealed in physical appearance and social behaviour.

One study which I saw some time ago and alas can no longer find study the way groups of high school math students solved problems. The females were happy to accept a solution, even a wrong one, that the majority of the group accepted. While individual males would support their solution against the majority if they considered it correct. (general disclaimer: whether other groups or individuals behave this way, who knows). What it does show is that social behaviours have a lot to with scientific investigation.

There was also that british study that showed that London taxi drivers grew their brains to better navigate the city. I am sure the amazing adaptable human body can make up for any basic gender differences if the appropriate training is provided.

The questions we should be asking are:

1) To what level should individuals be subjected to training that will change their natural gender tendancies.

2) What level of maturity is required before individuals are allowed to select such training for themselves or are others allowed to make against gender training decisions for them.

3) Is it desirable or detrimental to society as a whole to have the natural gender bias result in gender unbalanced professions. Or should some professions require that a reasonable balanced be maintained between the genders.

These are basic rights questions. We have the technology, should we and to what level be using it.

The general proposition on which Wayner's comments rest is that there is ambiguity concerning the meaning of "distribution" under the GPL. The first thing to be said is that the GPL is a copyright license, and when it refers to distribution it is using a term of art. "Distribution" under the GPL is distribution as copyright law understands it. Many people use the GPL to distribute software in many different places, but in what follows, for the sake of simplicity, I'm going to assume that the program being distributed is a copyrighted work of the Free Software Foundation, such as emacs or gcc. I'm also going to assume that the applicable copyright law is US copyright law. What I'm going to say is more general, but this will do for illustration.

To begin with, some of the problems Wayner associates with ambiguity about distribution are not about distribution at all. These problem are about whether code is part of a single GPL'd work when it is meant to communicate with, or operate in sequence or in parallel with, GPL'd code.

These questions are not being raised for the first time, and the Foundation has a single consistent position. Code which is statically or dynamically linked to GPL'd code constitutes a single derivative work of the GPL'd code, and must be distributed under the terms of the GPL. Code that is not linked to GPL'd code, but is distributed as part of a "mere aggregation" of works is not subject to the GPL, as section 2 makes clear. So when Wayner says that

it's easy now for people to write scripts that link seemingly disparate programs -- thousands of them, even -- and then execute them in concert. I know one company that uses Adobe Photoshop to process images created by a proprietary, in-house tool. Is the software linked together? The process is entirely automated and works with no human intervention once initiated.

Wayner presents a lengthy example concerning a weather database the purport of which isn't clear to me. The point seems to be that data produced by a GPL'd program might also be employed, through ordinary open network protocols, by non-GPL'd code. This situation also presents no ambiguity under the GPL. The GPL, again, is a copyright license, and it ony applies to copyrightable works which authors or assignees chose to license under its terms. Data compilations are not in general copyrighted works, and data produced as a result of the execution of GPL'd code is not in general subject to or controlled by the license on the code that produces it. There is nothing to prevent someone from writing and distributing non-GPL'd code that makes use of data produced, whether in real time or in stored form, by GPL'd programs. And there is nothing that prevents people from passing data between GPL'd programs and non-GPL'd programs, or from selling combinations of programs or services that mix GPL'd and non-GPL'd code.

Some of the questions Wayner raises are, however, about distribution. They are not more difficult than the non-distribution questions, but the legal background should again be slightly clarified.

Emacs, for example, is a copyrighted program, and unless you have a license from the FSF to engage in "distribution" of emacs, you can't do it at all. Under 17 U.S.C sect. 1001, the definitional provision of US copyright law,

''Distribute'' means to sell, lease, or assign a product to consumers in the United States, or to sell, lease, or assign a product in the United States for ultimate transfer to consumers in the United States.

Against that background, let me take up the specific questions Mr Wayner raised.

But imagine that MegaSoft decides that it really needs an internal editing system for filling out proprietary MegaSoft paperwork. The programmers love Emacs so they take GNU Emacs and add a few tweaks for providing the user with forms. Some of it is written in Emacs LISP and some of it requires a few neat extensions to the basic Emacs module. Everyone loves the software and they start shipping it to all of the PCs in the corporations. [He evidently means "corporation."]

Is this a distribution? Some might argue that it isn't. A corporation is just a legal fiction for a single person. It's not much different than Bob the hacker writing the code for his own use. Bob doesn't need to share the source code until Bob starts giving it to Alice, the other hacker. By this argument, MegaSoft doesn't need to share the source unless MegaSoft ships the software to another company or non-employee. Even if there are 100,000 employees in MegaSoft, there hasn't been a distribution.

Not quite. MegaSoft is not yet distributing its modified emacs to consumers. Its internal modifications are covered by the GPL, however, because it is copying as well as modifying the software, activities which are only permitted if you have a license, and the terms of the license specify what MegaSoft must do. If it keeps these modified copies on its own computers, it has no further responsibilities under its license. If it allows employees to remove the copies to their own computers, it is then engaged in distribution, and it must provide source and allow those employees to redistribute the modified software under the terms of the GPL.

The same principles explain the situation regarding acquisitions and divisions of the MegaSoft Corporation, as well as the question supposedly presented by the free software assets of the company in the event of insolvency or sale. All the code is covered by the GPL from the moment of its copying, modification, or distribution, and any distribution must occur under the GPL's terms.

Wayner also asks about the embedding situation, presenting the example of Tivo. Tivo distributes a quasi-embedded system in which a free software kernel is used to execute unfree software. This is an aggregation of components, and Tivo is responsible under the GPL for the compliant distribution of the free software components of that aggregation. It is not responsible for releasing any of its own code under the GPL. The test is not whether the user can "pry" them apart in the particular circumstances of an embedded system.

There are deeper problems on the horizon. Some companies are now "loaning" or "renting" software. In some cases, you don't even keep copies on your local machine. You just download it from the server and use it for a bit.

In fact, we can take this one step further. What is the real difference between using the software on their server and downloading it? Is there much difference between using the Hotmail web-based email system or running Eudora on your desktop? There isn't much difference to the user, even though there are big legal differences. In one case, Hotmail still owns the software and it's all proprietary. In the other, Eudora sold you a copy. Well, maybe they sold you a license. Well, who really knows?

The most important thing to note about all these situations is that the "loopholes" Wayner is wondering about don't have anything to do with the drafting of the GPL itself. The GPL simply uses the concept of distribution defined in the general copyright statute. If there is a "loophole" it is a matter of general copyright law and the GPL is neither more nor less affected than any other copyright license. Wayner has kind things to say about Richard Stallman's drafting, and as the lawyer who has assisted the FSF for a decade in the use and enforcement of the GPL, I entirely agree with him about the document's elegance and utility. But he gives the GPL too much credit and assigns it too much blame when he supposes that the questions he is asking are questions about the GPL and not about copyright law in general. Fortunately for copyright law, it is not quite as fragile a system (in this respect) as Wayner seems to think.

I also feel I ought to comment, on FSF's behalf, on a statement made in the course of the discussion by Matthew Smith:

So GPL doesn't benefit everyone. Just like communism it benefits those who are visible and loud but not those who work hard. A BSD coder can extend their code and one day decide they want to turn their effort into a product and they can do it. The freeloaders don't have the right to complain because they still have the old version which is free. For a GPL programmer this isn't an option, once communal always communal is the name of the game here.

I don't happen to agree with the way Mr Smith threw the word "communism" around. As I have mentioned in an essay on these subjects that a few people may have read, called Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright , I think there are closer political analogues to what's going on here. But in any event it should be clear that people who choose to employ the GPL are not having their farms, their computers, or their programs forcibly collectivized.

Good points, but I want to point out a couple things.

First, realize that the proportions of people being raised in poverty (which you've exaggerated -- see this link for ~20%), is exacerbated by the fact the people in poverty have more children. There's a frightening correlation, actually, between measured intelligence (IQ), socio-economic status, education level, and child bearing. The first 3 all correlate positively. The last correlates negatively with all others. IE, as IQ goes up, child birth rates go down. Ditto for SES and education level. Some part of that link is causal -- IE, I won't claim its IQ or education or SES, but one of them or a combination, definitely suppresses childbearing, and anecdotally, it seems obvious. People with better SES and education have careers, less time for children, more opportunities for birth control, and many other reasons. Other arguments might be made for IQ impacting it (such as more foresight into consequences), but they are less convincing.

As to the smartest kid anecdote, let me add that IQ and SES correlate positively. In other words, smarter people end up with better social economic status -- not as children, but as adults. It would be hard to convince me this was not partially causal, at least, and therefore raising intelligence is positive benefit to anyone.

Finally, you have to ask: what problem can we attack? No one wants poverty stricken children, but you can't stop the problem without stopping poverty-stricken adults from having children (especially children at a higher proportion than the rest of society). Even substantial public assistance can't stem the tide in many homes, where any extra money would be consumed in such a way it would not impact the children's well being. Poverty alone does not destroy children. But if you combine poverty, single parenthood (which is also VASTLY more common amongst low SES parents), and an absent "other parent" (not just single parenting with another out there, but solo with a deadbeat dad, etc), you get children who basically are not raised. They have a house, but no parents, no guidance, no role models, etc. And you get disaster. Genetics won't fix that -- unless you use it to stop the right to give birth unless certain conditions are met. And that is eugenics. There were are. However, the problem of poverty is a problem of resource scarcity. Genetics has the power to vastly increase our total capacity. We live in a society now where we make sure people who make the most foolish choices and do the most damage to their own and their children's live can always subsist -- but until we either remove that or spend a LOT more resources on them, we won't fix the problem.

First Monday had an excellent article by Eben Moglen, FSF's general counsel who was interviewed in the Linux Planet article mentioned above. It's called " Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright". It's written a bit in lawyerese, but it's reassuring to see the guy responsible for litigating all this actually has a clue. It discusses why the some of the arguments for and against IP are invalid -- even describing adherents as "IPdroids" and "Econodwarfs" ;) A quote from the article:

Section 2(b) of the GPL is sometimes called "restrictive," but its intention is liberating. It creates a commons, to which anyone may add but from which no one may subtract. Because of 2(b), each contributor to a GPL'd project is assured that she, and all other users, will be able to run, modify and redistribute the program indefinitely, that source code will always be available, and that, unlike commercial software, its longevity cannot be limited by the contingencies of the marketplace or the decisions of future developers. This "inheritance" of the GPL has sometimes been criticized as an example of the free software movement's anti-commercial bias. Nothing could be further from the truth. The effect of 2(b) is to make commercial distributors of free software better competitors against proprietary software businesses.

He then goes on to quote the Halloween memo! Hilarious.

1. Lots of empties. But anyway, why should the VFS know about specific details of other filesystems? Does it provide an advantage to those filesystems? Give us your thoughts, please. I.e., answer the questions. In case you haven't noticed, people aren't just harshing on poor Viro -- we actually want to know the answers to some questions! I.e., we're willing to engage in constructive dialogue. Why is there a big, ugly union in the VFS rather than having all filesystems use the generic pointer? Why is not not silly to require the VFS to understand FS-specific data? For control? Or is there a valid technical reason that it's better, at the expense of making otehr filesystems do ugly hacks?
   
   
   
2. Why do you think soft-updates are better then journaling? I really want to know. Someone else said that the "generic journaling" is really just going to be a way to deal with making sure inodes and transactions play nice. Is that true? Or what? You still haven't answered the question. Will the generic journaling turn out to be Ext3 journaling, or not? If not, what will it be?
   
   
   
3. Heh. Erez Zadoklike a friend of mine named Cyrus. His FiST stuff looks interesting; I looked it over several months ago. But back to my question, Why can't the VFS be made stackable and extensible? Or to phrase it taking your reply into account, why must an add-on kit be used? Do you not want to do it in the VFS itself? Why? Why not? Can you please answer the question?
   
   
4. You patch filesystems when you patch the VFS, was my understanding. So if you change the VFS to remove the union, as you said in your answer to #1, then what would you do? If someone wrote that patch for you, and went ahead and patched all the other filesystems to make it easier to deal with, what would you do? It has everything to do with the VFS, if you remove the union. You still didn't answer the question.
   
   
5. yeah, you're not Linus. But what percentage of your patches do get accepted, and how much debate and review do they go through before hand? Open question to Linus: so, what "technical merits" must a patch exhibit before you will include it? And is there any plan to provide open future-design docs?
   
   
6. Yeah. A little. So little as to almost not matter. Your attitude is still "read Ext2." Which pretty much clashes with your answer to #4. If you don't patch filesystems yourself, then why do you always tell people that Ext2 is the reference documentation for the VFS? Presumably you're keeping it up to date with your VFS changes.
   
   
7. The VFS is being used in more places -- shared memory, for instance. As it becomes more important to more kernel systems, should it not be made more flexible and documented better? Next year, each of your VFS patches VFS will break even more stuff. If the VFS had a cleaner interface, and better design docs and roadmaps, then VFS changes would not be so much of a problem. Do you agree that the VFS needs a cleaner, more capable, less frequently changed, better documented interface? Or not? Why in either case?
   
   

Who decides when a package is "unmaintained" or "orphaned?"

For example, in January 1998 I converted Columbia MM (the best mailer I have ever used) to an autoconf framework for improved portability. I wrote to the MM maintainers and asked for permission to release my modified source, but was told only that they would be happy to incorporate my patches. I submitted my patches, but no new release has been issued.

I do not mean to denigrate the maintainers. It is extremely difficult to hold down a full-time job and maintain an open-source project on your personal time. I hold no animosity for anyone who cannot give 100% to both jobs.

But it still leaves me in a quandary. The official Columbia MM maintainers are still alive, are reachable, are responsive, but they don't seem to do anything. I would love to release my source, but cannot.

If anything, this has persuaded me, more than anything else, about the fundamental importance of the the right to fork that the GPL/BSD licenses guarantee.

Hmm... :-)

SIP is the IETF standard for signalling of VoIP calls (as well as other multimedia conferences). It is supported in products by 3Com, Nortel, Cisco, ... Very cool.

You can check it out in the kdenonbeta package of KDE 2.0.

• Crossplatform - runs on Windows and *nix (Im not sure about Max or Bez et al)
• It has been tested and interoperates with more H323 stacks than you knew existed - Radware, Cisco...
• Free Software - which is the point of this article, right?

• Very complex ... just take a look at the codebase
• Control data is transmitted in binary form - most widely used protocols are based on ASCII (FTP, HTTP, SMTP)
• It uses a port assignment process which is virtually impossible to use through a NAT firewall.

But they adopted it from the image of the dashing, daring, and good-hearted pirates being portrayed on TV at the time in pirate and swashbuckling movies.

Basically, it's a reference to Hollywood pirates, not real pirates.

Even better, SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), is an IETF standard (rfc 2543) which (in some respects) replaces some of the functionality of H.323. Here's a nice comparison: http://www.cs.columbia.edu /~hgs/sip/h323-comparison.html. Also check out the SIP faq and columbia.edu's SIP Main Site. It defines the protocols for locating and setting up any type of multimedia call, be it voice, video, virtual presence, whatever...

Even better, SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), is an IETF standard (rfc 2543) which (in some respects) replaces some of the functionality of H.323. Here's a nice comparison: http://www.cs.columbia.edu /~hgs/sip/h323-comparison.html. Also check out the SIP faq and columbia.edu's SIP Main Site. It defines the protocols for locating and setting up any type of multimedia call, be it voice, video, virtual presence, whatever...

Even better, SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), is an IETF standard (rfc 2543) which (in some respects) replaces some of the functionality of H.323. Here's a nice comparison: http://www.cs.columbia.edu /~hgs/sip/h323-comparison.html. Also check out the SIP faq and columbia.edu's SIP Main Site. It defines the protocols for locating and setting up any type of multimedia call, be it voice, video, virtual presence, whatever...