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Slashback: ODF Wars, Duval Layoff, French DRM
Mandriva CEO responds to Duval Layoff. UltimaGuy writes "Duval has detailed his side of the story, 'Fired. Yes. Simply fired, for economical reasons, along with a few other ones. More than 7 years after I created Mandrake-Linux and then Mandrakesoft, the current boss of Mandriva "thanks me" and I'm leaving, sad, with my two-month salary indemnity standard package. It's difficult to accept that back in 1998 I created my job and the one of many other people, and that recently, on a February afternoon, Mandriva's CEO called to tell me that I was leaving.' Mandriva's CEO has responded, stating that 'Gael was not fired. This term would imply something wrong on his part, which was not the case. He was laid off.'"
Apple responds to French DRM legislation. Sardon writes "In the aftermath of France's move to force companies to open their DRM, Apple has shot back. Calling the proposed legislation "state-sponsored piracy," Apple complained loudly about the prospects of opening up their DRM, arguing that DRM interoperability tools would just increase piracy. However, as the article points out, DRM interoperability isn't likely to make a significant contribution to piracy, seeing as how P2P networks are already flooded. If the measure passes the French Senate, Apple may consider closing its music operations in France."
Microsoft possibly undermining ODF ISO approval. Andy Updegrove writes "If you haven't been paying attention to the odf(oasis) vs. xmlrs(microsoft) format wars, here is what is happening... Both formats need iso approval. This process is very thorough all complaints and gripes are heard and reviewed, which takes quite a bit of time. It is easy for voters to slow this process down considerably. And, our good friends Microsoft joined a very small subcommittee called 'V1 Text Processing: Office and Publishing Systems Interface.' It just so happens that this small subcommittee (six companies - including Microsoft) is the entity charged with reconciling the votes that are being cast in the ISO vote to adopt the OASIS OpenDocument Format. So, presumably, Microsoft is going to delay ODF's ISO approval in hopes of xmlrs getting approval first and being the chosen format in Europe."
A more in-depth look at Fedora Core 5. LinuxForums has posted a much more in-depth look at the install process and functionality of the new Fedora Core 5 release. From the article: "I have to say though: this distribution impressed me in a way that no other distribution did before. Some things should of course be improved, such as the automatic hardware detection or, as mentioned above, the menus. But apart from these little details I can confidently say that Fedora Core 5 is the best desktop GNU/Linux distribution available at the moment."
More thoughts on the GPLv3. Guttata writes "Forbes has an interview with Richard Stallman on the upcoming GPLv3, which touches on Linus' stance on keeping the kernel at GPLv2. The article also shows Stallman's take on DRM, especially in reference to areas such as TiVo." Relatedly Glyn Moody writes "The FSF's General Counsel, Eben Moglen, explains why there is no situation in which the brokenness or otherwise of the GPL is ever an issue. Thanks to copyright law, GPL violators are always in the wrong."
Britannica strikes back at Wikipedia. tiltowait writes "Remember that study published by Nature magazine which likened Wikipedia's reliability to that of Encyclopedia Britannica? Well, Britannica has released -- not corrections -- but a corporate response stating that 'Nature's research was invalid [...] almost everything about the Nature's investigation was wrong and misleading.' So then, is this just one more example of how refereed journals can't be trusted?"
He was reassigned. He won't need to come into the office. He can do this job from home. Call it early retirement, but without pension.
Paul Grosfield - the quicker picker upper.
I'm not exactly a cheerleader for the P2P-ftw free-the-culture anarcho-whatever shite that gets punted around here sometimes, but for Christ's sake what is Apple on? People have been using Hymn and the like for ages, and if they're stripping the DRM out of bought files for use on other players they are still buying from Apple and giving Apple money for the privilege. By definition, they wouldn't be going to P2P. If anything, if they up and leave France, all that will happen is that either P2P will become the only option for iPod owners or people will buy Creative/Archos/other PlaysForSure players and Napster or whatever will get their money. The only way this could become a win for piracy is if Apple makes it one.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
Ho ho ho. "State sponsored piracy!" I like it. It has a nice ring to it. A bit like "state sponsored terrorism". Those bastard French people are trying to take away our freedom by taking restrictions out of DRM! Oh, wait...
Yes, naughty little French pirates. They need to be punished. They need to know what it feels like. I implore all Slashdotters to head over to Google Video and pirate some Alizee music videos. For those of you who have been living under a rock for the past couple of years, Alizee is a hot French babe... uhh, I mean, PIRATE!
let go...
relieved of command...
disestablished...
made redundant...
surplus to requirements...
it all amounts to the same thing at the end of the day: Yer Outta Here.
I am a leaf on the wind
Gael was not fired. He was laid off.
I'm sorry but the founder is not laid off. He quits if he tires of the company's direction or he's fired if he becomes an obstacle but he's not laid off. It's a question of morale: If the founder himself is of so little value that he can be laid off then every other employee is worthless too. When your employer shows they don't value your presence its past time to jump ship.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
After reading the RMS interview with Forbes, what really stuck out was the following question and his reply:
Would it be ethical to steal lines of unfree code from companies like Microsoft and Oracle and use them to create a "free" version of that program?
It would not be unethical, but it would not really work, since if Oracle ever found out, it would be able to suppress the use of that free software. The reason for my conclusion is that making a program proprietary is wrong. To liberate the code, if it is possible, would not be theft, any more than freeing a slave is theft (which is what the slave owner would surely call it).
Am I the only one that sees this statement as a dangerous precedent? I mean, for all intents and purposes, RMS feels that 'stealing' copyrighted code is justifiable, if it's done with the intent to "liberate it".
Maybe you might consider this a trolling or a flame, but I think that it is quotes such as these that may end up bringing the most amount of trouble for the RMS crowd... I think the man is losing touch with reality, and approaching a point where zealotry is clowding his judgment to a dangerous level. How can we convince businesses that using the GPL and open source is a GOOOD THING if one of the main characters is in effect condoning IP theft if done for the 'right reasons'?
"We'll need 2000 crickets, 4 cans of Easy Cheese, and the fluid from 18 glowsticks for this plan to work...." - ph0n1c
I believe the word Apple is looking for is "Privateer". A state-sponsored pirate is a privateer.
That would be "privateering". A country would issue a letter of marque to a ship-owner/captain giving them leave to attack all of their country's enemies". Sometimes a priviteer's definition of "country's enemies" was a bit loose, though.
-- Will program for bandwidth
I know in this instance France wants Apple to open their DRM. But who is to say that another state might want to close DRM?
What we might end up with is worse than DVD's that are region coded. We might get the hardware that is region specific, and no other method of opening data (music, files, movies).
I think the world will move in that direction. What other reason would Sony or Universal have for forcing regions with DVD's? Why are they opposed of me buying movies from Spain or Germany? And if a company is so paranoid, just imagine nation-states that are worried their culture is being corroded away.
You'll be telling us next that we should go round to France and collectively punish the French pirate babes by spanking them, or something. You're weird.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The same thing will happen with government/ISO sponsored document formats as happened with the OSI network stack: We'll all wasted shiploads of time mucking around trying it out and everybody ended up using TCP/IP anyway. The "winning" document format will continue to be the one that's used by default by the most popular word processor: Word.
"You talk like a press release."
-- David Rodriguez
He was also "laid off" due to economic pressure (ie the new directors turned a profitable $20 million a year in revenue company into something that burned through twice that amount in less than a year before imploding). If you want to see the whole story it's here.
Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
Call it "Freedom DRM".
They somehow think "competing" involves impeding the competitors rather than simply trying to be superior. And I think that's the crux of most people's problem with Microsoft.
I am referring to, of course, Microsoft's strange participation in the subcommittee involved in getting ODF ISO approved. They declined any and all participation in creating ODF and yet somehow they are involved in getting it ISO approved? Microsoft is now something along the lines of the fox guarding the henhouse.
And when I discuss Microsoft's "competitive" activities, I tend to think of elementary school kids running the 100 yard dash where Microsoft, instead of simply running as fast as it can, resorts to tying the laces of the shoes of other kids or to tripping them in some fashion.
Although "Competing" and "Impeding" rhyme nicely enough, they are certainly VERY different approaches when trying to win and one of them is often cause for legal retaliation.
Was Britannica ever a big deal? I used it in elementary school and stopped once I got to junior high. In high school, our teachers specifically told use not to use encyclopedias for our papers. And this was in the 80s.
And for some reason people still believe that line.
Yet Apple refuses to license (for more money!) their DRM and let someone ELSE sale music that will play on the ipod.
They're obviously either making money or planning to make money from music sales.
As for the GPL, it seems to me to be not much more than fixing loopholes. Back in the day, all computers were general-purpose, and there was not much concept of "firmware." Now, most peripherals can run software, and our computers are about to become far less general-purpose.
It used to be, if you modify my software to run on some other system, just giving me your modifications is useful to me, because naturally the system could also run software that I modify still further. Now, with the advent of 'appliances' running firmware, and with the threat of computers refusing to run, or to communicate with others running, unsigned code, that assumption no longer holds.
The term you want is privateer. Privateers had letters of marque which legitimized their attacks as being sponsored by a government. (Except for the Spanish, who had a habit of refusing to honor letters of marque and just hanged them as common pirates.) Buccaneers, on the other hand, were pirates who started out in the barbecue business.
No, seriously. Buccaneers were originally hunters who sold cooked meat, grilled over an open fire, to passing ships. Eventually, an enterprising band of buccaneers realized that the passing ships were poorly armed and captured the ship--much more profitable than selling barbecue.
They do have it all on their website, you know. I think you have to pay for full access, but it's a lot cheaper than a set of encyclopedias.
Or you could buy the circa-$50 disk version, and install that, if you're running Windows or using a PPC Mac (as of yet their product doesn't run on Intel Macs due to some component developed by a third party which hasn't been made universal). Then you'd have access to it all without even needing to be online.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
If DRM is permitted in works distributed under the GPL, then the GPL has no effect. A corporation can take your GPLed code, add DRM to it, and re-release it; then nobody else (including you) can modify/reuse that version as was intended by the GPL.
This is not some irrelevant issue. It's a significant loophole which the DRM-related clauses attempt to close.
attribution is intentionally left out of the GPL. in fact, the FSF's beef with the BSD license was the "advertising clause" - the attribution requirement.
the idea is this: on any given free software project, there may be work included from hundreds of authors. each of those hundreds of pieces has its own copyright controlled by a different person (the original author of that piece of the code). if the GPL required attribution (as the BSD license used to), a project would need to keep track of every contributor - every single one - in perpetuity.
for most projects, that's fine. most projects only have a handful of authors over their lifespan. but the kernel, for instance, probably has (copyrighted) contributions from thousands of people. were attribution required, a list of all of those thousands of people would need to accompany every binary and source copy of the kernel.
the FSF considers this a problem that is, in the general case, intractable, and attribution therefore impractical (and therefore a hinderance to modification and redistribution).
there may be other reasons, obviously, but that's the one I remember.
"Fired" is different, though. It implies you were canned because you were incompetent, or because you were engaged in something illegal, fraudulent or against company rules. You are fired when the problem is you, in other words, and presumably the company will need to hire or promote a replacement.
Most other terms (like the ones you list) is about the job disappearing. You were not doing anything wrong, but the job you were doing is either no longer necessary, or too expensive to continue doing at the current manpower level. You may be excellent at the job you were doing, but the result is no longer worth the expense for the company.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
I've moderated in this thread already, but I just have to respond to this.
I think it's sort of implied that when you license code under the GPL, you have set it "free". What this means is that the code is no longer really yours, it belongs to the collective pool of free software, from which anyone may draw freely.
It's true that there are some bad people out there who modify free software and re-sell it, but the problem is not them. It's is the people who have never heard of free software who are buying it. Why would you buy a copy of OpenOffice, or an office suite that looks exactly like it but is called something else?
The solution here is user education, not a tightening of the license..
DJ kRYPT's Free MP3s!
It's funny, Britannica says the reviewers did not provide any sources for their ascertions, and then they go and say for every criticism "We do not accept this." Well, as long as the all knowing Britannica does not accept it, it must be invalid. All bow to the true keepers of knowledge.
This is the first time since I've been using Fedora Core (and I've used it since Core 1) that I failed to be able to upgrade my server from the DVD-ROM.
I don't know what the deal was with it. At first it would "hang" at various stages of the install. Then, my system didn't seem to recognize the DVD as "bootable."
Finally, I tried a Yum upgrade, but it's just too soon after release for that--I actually had an easier time getting the DVD-R image via Bittorrent than using Yum. As it was, all the mirrors timed out--too busy.
FINALLY, I was able to follow this guy's recipe for setting the DVD up as a Yum repository, and that worked like a charm. I was even able to rsync the "updates" from kernel.org.
One HUGE saving grace though: For some reason, when I upgraded to FC4 last year, I completely lost X on my server. I have been running everything from the command line--not really that big a deal, but I couldn't even use remote X to get a graphical desktop. Puzzling.
Well, after the upgrade to FC5 as described above, *voila*! X is back! I now have that beautiful now Gnome desktop that FC5 has been getting raves for. It's just nice to have.
Anyway, that's the report from here.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
No, you still retain copyright and ownership. That means if a company approaches you and says they'll pay you some money in exchange for not having to open source their product based on your original code, you are free to make that deal. No other person who got the code via GPL has this right.
MS is doing DRM but also fights it. As a gigantic player it knows deep down that piracy hasn't exactly hurt it. MS software is pirated to hell and back yet the billions keep rolling in and it controls the OS and office software markets. Could there be a link? That software that is easy to pirate gets used a lot so that is what people know so companies that need to decide on what to buy choose the package that people are familiar with at home from their pirated version?
That because MS is what everyone knows when people buy a new PC they don't mind that MS software is installed "for free" giving MS a nice steady stream of hazzle free revenue (no messy boxes to sell) as long as people buy new pc's?
Then their is Sony, a favorite target for the anti-drm crowd and they certainly screwed up badly enough with their music cd drm debacle but lets not forget that it was sony who gave us unrestricted video recording.
Yet the hero is Apple who has always maintained the thightest control on its software. Isn't making sure only YOU can make the hardware that runs YOUR software and sell them bundled only the best DRM? Go ahead. Pirate Mac OS X. What are you going to use it for? You need to buy a Mac to run it on. Oh sure, the paid updates are pirated but the main revenue source is safe.
Apple has also been very active in trying to get movie drm in place.
The whole story that Steve Jobs only did DRM for iTunes to keep the record industry happy just doesn't ring true to me.
What I think that Steve Jobs has done is realize that you need to take baby steps when tackling a difficult subject.
iTunes DRM isn't the least he could get away with regarding the music industry.
iTunes DRM is the most he could get away with regarding the paying public.
He knew that existing DRM crippled music stores were not succeeding so he added as much DRM as he could without scaring off customers.
It worked.
Steve Jobs is very good at that. He knows exactly how far to push something that it is still accepted. iPod's really ain't all the great. Every other MP3 player would be slammed for not working as a straight HD (you need itunes to put songs onto it in any meaningfull way) and slammed even worse for renaming your songs.
Same with the price. It is just not high enough to piss people off. Just high enough to generate a shitload of cash but not high enough to be seen as insanely overpriced.
Same with Apple PC's. Every apple story has comments about their bad service even going so far as that when you order a Apple with more memory all of a sudden it is a custom build and you loose a lot of warranty. Dell would never get away with it but Steve Jobs just judged it right that Apple fans defend that a PC build entirely by Apple is still a custom build because you told them to plug in more memory and therefore you don't deserve full warranty.
Steve Jobs is more about DRM then any other playing in the market. Check out his speeches and proposals. If he has his way we will have trusted computing shoved down our throath and media DRM'ed till we choke on it.
Just for now he isn't big enough to rely force the issue and MS who could is still sitting on the fence.
There are some people at MS warning that in a DRM and trusted computing world there would be very little value to a open PC. If I can't do anything with my media anyway do I need anything more then a console to play it? MS knows that the console market is far harder to dominate then the PC market.
Killing the PC would be very very silly of MS if they are not 100% sure they are going to be selling everyone the replacement.
The old slashdot standby "replace Apple with MS/Sony and reread the story" advice still stands.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
http://www.theregister.com/2006/03/23/britannica_w ikipedia_nature_study/ Register has nice write up about it all. Apparently Nature cooked the study in a manner worthy of WMD spinmeisters pre IRAQ invasion.
And why should anyone be surprised? 14-year-old with too much time on his hands has as much weight in wikipedia as some 50-year-old senior academic in a given subject. More in practice as the said teenager can sit all night making revisions whereas the prof probably has classes and schoolwork to go over..
I find I *do* get Wikipedia results near the top for many of my queries lately... and I've started going there directly and skipping Google sometimes. I agree, I'm rarely disappointed. If I consult several sources, Wikipedia is usually the best.
More than that: Wikipedia is what Hypertext was originally meant to me. (See... well, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext ) And boy is it fun!
Britannica may or may not be more reliable for the subjects it covers, but it's also limited in scope. Would Britannica have an article about Matisyahu, for example? Britannica's front page claims 120,000 articles; Wikipedia, over a million, just for the English edition.
Share and Enjoy: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
A big problem for Wikipedia, that Brittanica addresses, is it's dynamic nature. Since the article in Nature, I'm sure all of the Wikipedia articles in question have been vandalized, fixed, vandalized again, likely fixed again, more information has been added, some information removed, and reorganized. The accuracy of the information in a Wikipedia article depends on the exact moment you view it.
Brittanica articles, on the other hand, remain the same for longer periods of time. Which means, it will remain accurate, and well organized longer, but, at the same time, errors will also exist longer than Wikipedia.
My point is, Wikipedia can claim also claim the Nature article as invalid, since the articles are constantly changing. The Nature article was doomed from the beginning.
I've mentioned the vandalizism problem on Wikipedia several times on Slashdot. My suggestion is to move to the opensource model of article development where anyone can contribute, but only people who have proven themselves can "release" articles to the public. I've finally finished a prototype which can be found at: www.lohipedia.com (Note: there are still many bugs to work out, and it's ugly). The goal is to find that optimum point of user contribution versus article control where the best article possible can be produced.
Nonsense. Teachers forbid the citing of encyclopedias because they are at best secondary sources. And since the academic norm is to only consider primary sources valid, it is merely common sense to instill that norm as soon as possible.
Mart"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
Reviewer comment: Yes, [Nature reviewer unclear here] in using the language of individual-level fitness and selection; but this was also a shortcoming of Hamilton's original formulation. Thus to say `They all carry the same genes...' (para 1) is misleading because what matters is not the totality of genes shared but the probability that relatives share a specific gene (strictly allele), in this case the one coding for the altruistic trait. By the same token, `individual fitness' is a proxy for allele fitness, again, in this case, specifically the allele for the altruistic trait. Kin selection is THE paradigm of the gene selection argument; it actually makes no sense when couched at the level of individual fitness. The problem cascades through the piece, thus: Par2, lines 4-5 - should be `A parent has a probability of 0.5 (or a half ) of sharing any given gene (again actually allele) with each progeny ...' and last line - should be `...because it increases the probability of transmission of the parental gene for caring.'
Britannica response: There is no inaccuracy here. We stand by our author, Francisco Ayala, who insists that the reviewer is wrong through and through: the altruistic behavior is favored by natural selection because relatives share (in fractions depending on the degree of relatedness) all their genes.
I can't see the original article (Britannica attacks Nature for not making their data available, but they're guilty of the same thing).
But it sounds like the reviewer was saying that the Britannica article conflates individual fitness with allele fitness.
Example: imagine a species S. A grenade is thrown at five individuals of species S. If one of them jumps on it, she will die but the other four will live. Else, each will die with probabilty 0.5. Should she do it? If we are looking at things from her individual point of view, she should not do it *no matter her relation to the other individuals*. Nobody's individual survival is benefitted by dying. But if we are looking at things from the point of view of her alleles, then her relation to the other four do make sense. If they are her clones, then the allele has a 0% chance of dying off at this moment if she does it, and a 1 in 32 chance if she doesn't. The average numbers of survivors is also higher: 4 vs 2.5.
It's true that the presence of altruistic individuals increases everyone's survival odds -- nonetheless, altruism is not justified on an individual level -- if it were, it wouldn't be altruism.
Ayala is wrong that altruistic behavior is favored by natural selection. Genes coding for altruistic behavior are favored; the behavior itself is not favored.
The thing is, I'm pretty sure Ayala understands this. Ayala thinks he's saying the right thing: in his brain, "altruistic behavior" is a shorthand for "genes coding for altruistic behavior", because he's an expert in kin selection and thinks about this all day. He just forgot that he was writing for a general encyclopedia. At least, that's the only theory I can come up with for why he insists that he's right..
Of course, if I later read the Britannica article and discover that it is correct, I'll be glad to retract this. Also, I'm not a geneticist -- I just like to think I understand some of genetics because I've read a bit about it; and this bit is basically game theory anyway. Perhaps a real geneticist will tell me that Ayala is using terms in the standard way, so the criticism fails on those grounds. If so, I'll accept that correction too.
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used