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Sigma Designs Accused of Copyright Infringement
Cygnus v1 writes "The XVID team has ceased development of the XVID video codec for the time being because they say that Sigma Designs' REALmagic MPEG-4 Video Codec software includes their code and has claimed it as Sigma Designs' own work. The current XVID homepage includes some binary-level comparisons." Update: 08/23 03:14 GMT by T : Apparently the folks at Sigma have seen that no good is likely to come from this; an anonymous reader submits a link to this release on Yahoo! which says "complete source code will be available for download starting August 23, free of charge, through Sigma's website."
But it's not just my right, right? How about your right to not be stuck supporting a religion that you disagree with? Just because you agree with the current state-sponsored religion doesn't mean that you always will, nor are there any guarantees that such a religion won't morph into something you find objectionable in the future. Unless you uncategorically accept as your God the gods of anyone who might end up in power, you should be concerned right along with me. Being offended is the least of my worries, really (and I don't necessarily agree that I even have a right "not to be offended" - that concept seems to have caused more harm than good in the last 20 years of jurisprudence). Supporting someone else's genocidal or psychotic idea of a Higher Being is much closer to the top of my worrying list.
Frankly, if the U.S. appeared to be less over-the-top fundamentalist Christian in our dealings with the world, and just based our foreign policy on secular concerns like more enlightened nations do, we would probably be better respected throughout the world. I imagine we would decrease our exposure to Islamic fundamentalism if it were less clear to the world that the U.S. is a bastion of Protestant Christian fundamentalism.
Sure, there's going to be some USA hatred one way or the other, based on other issues like power and money. But it's one less argument against us if our President George "Cowboy" Bush doesn't go around calling things a crusade. We don't have to make it any easier for religious leaders of the Middle East to incite hatred of U.S. citizens. Heck, they don't have state-sponsored religious schools in Pakistan, unlike in the USA.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Ouch, it was neither! I've been working full-time for 2 years on software that I've been giving away for free. I take this very personally, and very seriously.
I first tried a donationware approach, but far less than 1% ever helped out (and now I know that's fairly typical). So now I sell it instead.
If I had GPL'd my software, somebody else could just start selling it too, and give me nothing at all in return. Yes, they would have to publish it under the GPL too, but still they wouldn't have to give me anything.
And if they sell my code, but don't publish the software, I would need to take legal action. Everybody here seems to say "hire a lawyer, sue them, get rich" but that's not the way the world works.
If it seems questionable whether XVID will be able to attract a lawyer, how is a less known project to supposed to get so lucky?
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda