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Red Hat Helps Fund EFF
DAldredge sent us linkage to a ZD Net article that talks about Red Hat announcing that it would be sending the EFF [?]
$70k to help with the defense in fair use and reverse engineering cases, specifically like the recent DeCSS hoopla. Update: 05/22 12:30 by CT : Marc Ewing wrote in to tell us that this $ actually came from the Red Hat Center, started by him and Bob Young.
Though Slashdot seem a bit coy about it (maybe for good reason): the RIAA are suing Superpimp Software, the guy(s) who make the Pan newsreader for Gnome, because, ummm, it decodes attachments. They want them to remove the program's MIME decoding capabilities because you can trade MP3s that way. The RIAA's final out-of-court offer was for Superpimp comply, they refused, and Andover are putting up money for the defence.
:-)
C'mon, guys, surely this is a story!
Matthew @ Bytemark Hosting
This article is amazing, this guy Lemos really "gets it". Not only does he know that DeCSS is NOT about piracy at all but about playing, he informs that the Evil DVD group want to force people to watch ads before they see the main menu.
I'm not sure how influential this ZD's investor site is, but this is definately very good press that goes towards people with money.
-- iCEBaLM
when's microsoft going to donate money
I believe that Microsoft does have a financial interest in opposing the DMCA. In fact, many corporations are adversely affected by the DMCA and should support challenges to it.
For example, the zdnet story on the DMCA hearings at Stanford said this: "In January, Streambox found itself on the pointy end of the legal stick when a federal judge granted RealNetworks Inc. a preliminary injunction blocking Streambox's distribution of software used to capture and save RealAudio and RealVideo streams." [i.e., StreamboxVCR]
Microsoft is a big investor in Streambox. Streambox allows users to convert from Real format to Windows Media format. The DMCA stands in the way of both user freedom and Microsoft's freedom to license its format and compatible programs.
Microsoft or anyone else can join or donate to EFF through mailto:membership@eff.org.
While this act by Red Hat may ultimately be self serving, it is at least enlightened self interest. Considering how rare enlightenment of any kind is getting to be, I think that they should be commended. By and large, and certainly for the short term, the interests of Red Hat coincide with the interests of the Linux community. The stronger we are, the stronger they are. The stronger they are, the stronger we are. While that may change some time in the future, it seems to be the case right now.
Anyone who thinks Red Hat could become another Microsoft does not understand much about Microsoft. The mindset that got them where they are today did not evolve from benevolence. It was there from day one. Red Hat at least started as a group of people trying to do good things. Even if they are eventually seduced by the dark side, the fact that they started their jouney in the light will help keep them from ultimate darkness (to mix a few literary metaphors).
Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation
Information is not Knowledge
Look at how many copies of RedHat Deluxe they have to sell to get $70,000 (not accounting for packaging expenses) to get a better handle on their generosity.
Besides, no one said it was the last gift and no one should expect RedHat to fund it all. Other companies whose business revolves around"free software" should be chipping in as well.
I say, "Bravo Redhat."
All the time, but they prefer to be called Lobbyists and Mr. Congressman.
...for one of the big companies making money to put some back for something like legal defense. Now what about VA? Andover? Penguin? etc.?
I contributed to the DeCSS cause by buying a T-Shirt with the decss_descramble code on it. It's nice to see someone with deeper pockets helping out too.
Who am I?
Why am here?
Where is the chocolate?
What is your Slash Rating?
ZDNet has an excellent article on the copyright cartels. It's very well written.
... "Be a beacon?"
On another note, Red Hat has been pretty quiet about the MPAA/RIAA/napster/wrapster brouhaha lately. It's good to see them weigh in!
--
"Give him head?"
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft Ad
see subject
If you need text styles to communicate then you don't have a message.
Another organization that has been important in the computing community is USENIX. I haven't seen them get any attention on slashdot, but they donated US$100,000 to EFF to help fight the DeCSS case as well as cryptography cases.
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
While 50K is a relativly trivial amount, it is not the money that is the important thing. Bill Gates can give 1 Gig $ to fund foreign immunizations (and nuff respect to him for doing so), but the thing is, that money is "cute" and non-controversial. It is a hand out that doesn't make any statements about changing the system.
Red Hat throwing their support behind the EFF makes a statement that they aren't about just business as usual. They are willing to throw money behind something controversial, and to say that a major company believes that the right to free speech is still important.
Although I still think if some of these companies could fight for something like a living wage and the end of the police state, rather then just the right to rip DVD's, but it's a start.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
This is a good thing, and Red Hat deserves credit for this, but I'd really like to see one day is a more global way of providing legal support for free/open source developers.
Reverse engineering is one side of the story, but there are others too. Pursuing violations of your copyleft for example. As a small developer, whom do you turn to for your legal assistance? I don't think most developers can afford to pay lawyers if they see their licenses violated.
If you use a GNU license, you can theoretically call the FSF for support. Theoretically that is, because things tend to get complicated if you didn't sign over your copyright, which is what most people do.
And if you use another sort of free license, you're totally in your own...
It would be nice to have some kind of organistion, funded by companies like Red Hat, to turn to.
Would it be feasible? I don't know.
--
GCP
It's very possible for companies to do good things
that don't directly support them. Certainly, there
may or may not be other motives (e.g. gaining
mindshare, or similar), but presenting things as
if companies are only capable of evil or neutral
acts is highly inaccurate.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
They know they've got the support this sort of thing or MS will simply use the UCITA/DMCA to kill all other OSes.
Until now we've been able to reverse engineer file systems and protocols, products like SAMBA are examples of what "we" have done with this.
But if the UCITA and DMCA are used to prevent reverse engineering, products like that won't just be impossible to write, but if we did, they'd be illegal. The only hope of any other OS vendor is to squash those laws before they become too broadly applied.
All MS needs to do under the DMCA is put a routine in the networking to check for valid serial numbers, then it becomes copy protection and even if we were able to get around UCITA restrictions (by doing it out of the USA) on reverse engineering, a compatible network protocol would break their copy protection and thus be illegal similar to DeCSS. (Or what the MPAA says about DeCSS.)
It's good to see RedHat join the fight.
It's good to see Redhat donate money to a cause that they believe in. So, when's microsoft going to donate money to common crooks?
No big surprise here, as their gnunix procuct contains so many reverse-engineered drivers and utilities.
And the point is? Until recently, the notion of reverse engineering being "wrong" was considered abhorrent.
If hardware manufacturers want RedHat to have drivers, then they would write drivers for Linux.
Why? Writing drivers is a loss for hardware companies. Each programmer they pay to write drivers is $50-$100K per year they lose, just so people can use their hardware.
Reverse engineering deprives manufacturers of revenue for innovation.
How?
Many standard features of RedHat and other gnunix distributions are reverse-engineered unix(tm) utilities or MIcrosoft Windows(R) interfaces.
So? There's also a smattering of Plan 9 and several other systems as well as a few unique ideas.
For example, Gnome and Kde desktops ripoffs of the Windows interface.
And Windows ripped off the Macintosh interface. BeOS' GUI is virtually identical to most other GUIs. I'm not quite sure what your point is.
Software piracy and reverse engineering are illegal.
Software piracy is. Reverse engineering hasn't been until the DMCA, and most people feel that the DMCA should be considered "unconstitutional" and that it's a violation of basic rights.
Manufacters have a right to protect their intellectual property rights with features which thwart attempts to reverse engineer or to copy without authorization.
Yep. And others have the right to attempt to thwart procedures that prevent their ability to reverse engineer or make legally allowed personal copies for backup.
--
Ben Kosse
Remember Ed Curry!