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Slashback: Kororaa GPL, ICANN .XXX, BellSouth NSA
Kororaa denies GPL violations. AlanS2002 writes "Chris Smart, of the Kororaa Project, has written an update about the accusation that the Kororaa XGL LiveCD is in violation of the GPL. According to Chris, he has been shown no evidence that the nVidia/ATI drivers are derived from any code in the Linux Kernel or that the drivers link to the Kernel. From the best information he has it appears that the drivers make system calls to public interfaces of the Kernel, in the same way that a web browser makes calls to public interfaces of a web server but are not considered to be linked to the web server (they do not link to private functions of the web server). However the Kororaa project has decided to let end users download and install the drivers themselves if need be, which defeats the purpose of continuing to develop their Live CD. As such their will be no Kororaa XGL LiveCD 0.3, however they will continue to make Kororaa XGL LiveCD 0.2 available."
BellSouth demands retraction to NSA story. An anonymous reader writes "CNN reports that BellSouth has moved from strongly denying participation in providing the NSA with calling records to requesting a retraction of the article from USA Today." From the article: "The telecommunications giant sent a letter to USA Today on Thursday asking it to retract last week's story that BellSouth and two other companies helped the NSA compile a massive database of records on domestic phone calls."
South Korea rejects Microsft antitrust appeal. mikesd81 writes "According to MSNBC, the Korean Fair Trade Commission has turned down Microsoft's appeal to separate it's Window's OS and it's media service. The February ruling also included a 34 million dollar fine. Apparently, The commission began investigating Microsoft after a local Internet portal, Daum Communications Corp., filed a complaint with the commission in 2001."
Tim Berners Lee continues net neutrality fight. Kortec writes "As reported by The BCC, Sir Tim Berners Lee has spoken out against the current US bias towards the destruction of network neutrality at the Edinburgh WWW2006 conference. The man behind it all is quoted as saying the two tier system proposed recently on the floor of Congress is not 'part of the internet model,' and that 'the web should remain neutral and resist attempts to fragment it in to different services.'"
ICANN possibly pressured to nix .XXX domain. mobiux writes "Fox News reporting that the US Government allegedly pressured ICANN into denying the .XXX domain, despite orders not to do so. ICM Registry says the e-mails show how the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, a branch of the U.S. Department of Commerce, was subjected to intense pressure to intervene on behalf of the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family, two socially conservative lobbying organizations."
Another side to Vista Beta2 reviews. lordgreg writes to tell us that while Slashdot already talked about Vista Beta 2 Major Problems, which Gary Krakow addressed in his review. DotProject claims to have the other side of Vista Beta2's Major Problems, the users themselves.
Vonage IPO shaping up to be the worst tech IPO in 2 years. fistfullast33l writes "Vonage went public to great fanfare and poor results today, with it's stock price falling 11% by closing time. Analysts have cited the fact that Vonage has yet to post a profit and increasing competition for the lack of interest. 'It's a wildly unprofitable company still selling at a very high valuation,' said Tom Taulli of Newport Coast, California, an IPO analyst. BusinessWeek also discusses growth barriers listed in Vonage's filings, including 'finding enough customer-support staffers and long delays in getting traditional phone companies to let customers take their existing phone numbers [to Vonage].'"
Of course, the alleged actions that Bell South is denying they performed-- and demanding USA Today retract their reporting of-- is... the same stuff Bell South is currently being sued for. Maybe if we all just close our eyes real hard and think about other things the lawsuits will go away?
In the good old days, a new company (such as Vonage) would go public long before it was "discovered", allowing early investors to get rich (like Microsoft, for example). In today's world, major banks provide working capital and the objective is to delay the IPO as long as possible, so that only the banks and the founders make any real money. I'm predicting the disappointment seen today with Vonage is going to become the norm for technology IPO's.
But, tautologically, these are not free, so XGL is completely useless to the free software community.
It lets me make use of better graphics on my linux box. Thus, it is useful to me. Now I may not be the free software community, but I like to consider myself a friendly neighbor. I use what works.
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable" - JFK
I'd like to reserve the word "evil" for things that are, you know, evil. Like holding prisoners in secret prisons scattered around the world so you can torture them. Selling software without giving away source may not be the best way to produce and deliver software (or maybe it is, I don't know) but isn't "evil".
You != "the free software community".
I am a rabid supporter of Free Software, and have been for many years. But I have no problem with closed source device drivers. Never have, never will.
Why? Because by their very nature, device drivers are not free to begin with, because you have to have possesion of that device to use them in the first place. Thus, "Freedom 0" as defined by the FSF is impossible. I guess RMS doesn't read his own manifestos?
Not to mention the fact that for both of these vendors, it is legally impossible to open their drivers because they license code from other 3rd party companies.
Don't agree with me? Fine, don't buy the hardware from these vendors, or contribute to the relevant projects to replace them. But don't go pushing your views on everyone else in the community - for a lot of us, drivers are a different class of software that do not neccessarily have to be free to be useful.
This sentence was a little confusing the first seven times I read it. So I did what I hardly ever do, go to the source, read the article and gain a fuller understanding of the situation... instead of just posting here about how the summary was confusing.
My misunderstanding stemmed from my thinking that the Kororaa project was just the Live CD. So I was thinking: if they decided to script the downloading and compiling of the nvidia modules why would they then go and decide to cancel the Live CD development? The key here is that they also have a non-live CD version called Kororaa 2005, and soon to be 2006. They are still continuing this distribution, which will prompt the user to download the modules manually as other distros do.
The author's reasoning was kind of strange though, he leads us on a very logical path towards concluding that the Kororaa Live CD does *not* violate the GPL in its current form. He even says For me, with the information at hand, I cannot see how the drivers constitute a GPL violation. Yet he still decides to discontinue the live CD. He also makes a good case about why he doesn't want to have the user download and compile the drivers themselves on boot.
I can't blame him though. He's clearly a supporter of the GPL. He's striving to adhere to the letter and spirit of the license. Oh well, maybe I should check out the standard Kororaa distribution.
We always knew Comcast was corrupt, here's the proof: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1909890&cid=34545432
Since the GOP controls Congress and the Executive, it would be quite easy for them to get together and "reform" ICANN out of existence, dump all the graybeards, and create a new Internet committee loaded with the usual party hacks. I think if the ICANN members have half a brain, they take GOP opinions on Internet governance very seriously.
.XXX issue was basically an internal GOP division -- some conservative groups wanted it, others didn't. The fact that ICANN was even considering it was an example of political influence, and if the conservatives were unified behind it, we'd most likely have it by now.
The entire
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
I've just read RMS's very well written essay about Java. It's not about Xgl, and you're mis-applying it to Xgl.
The authors of Sun Java have no (current) intention of making it free, so it's non-free by design and thus quite rightly gets RMS's ire. As RMS suggests, every enhancement that Sun makes to Java just makes matters worse.
In contrast, Xgl is currently tied to nVidia or ATI hardware only because the authors haven't yet made it work with anything else, but it could do so, so it's just a question of manpower and not a matter of non-free intent. It would probably work with Mesa anyway, but excruciatingly slowly.
Xgl is dependent on OpenGL, and you'd better not be complaining about that because it's the standard 3D API for free and open-source software. It just so happens that nVidia and ATI have the most efficient and widely used implementations of OpenGL for consumer PCs, that's all. The fact that the FOSS community hasn't yet fully implemented any competing 3D-accelerated version of OpenGL isn't Xgl's fault, nor is it OpenGL's fault --- there is no non-free OpenGL license blocking such implementations as there is with Java. (You might not be able to call it "OpenGL" unless it's validated, but that's peripheral.)
So, you're confusing the non-freeness of Java with nothing more evil than the early state of Xgl and the lack of 3D-accelerated non-proprietary implementations of OpenGL. Well, it may have escaped your attention, but a collosal proportion of all free programs are incomplete or still being worked on, and that doesn't make them non-free.
You need to use some commonsense here. By all means complain about ATI and nVidia, but not about OpenGL or Xgl. Xgl is free software, and OpenGL is an open standard. Xgl just needs some more work, as does our free OpenGL clone. Work in progress.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Then, fortunately, my brain kicked in. Why, if the Vonage IPO was going to be a blockbuster, would they give away so many shares to the unwashed masses?
Unless they needed the unwashed masses to drum up demand.
These finance guys aren't typically stupid. Yeah, sure, it was theoretically possible that they were giving out so many shares out of the goodness of their heart, but my experience in life is that there ain't no free lunch.
I'm glad my suspicians were borne out. I'd have been REALLY pissed if it shot up 10x or something. :D
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I'm sure I'm not the only one here who has wondered why we haven't seen wider circulation of this story and why immigration laws are suddenly the thing to discuss.
Domestic wiretap abuse is ancient news. Been going on since there were wires to tap. Look at the COINTELPRO stuff from half a century back to see some real dirty tricks.
The immigration thing, on the other hand, got 'WAY big when congress decided a fair "compromise" solution would be to add maybe 60 million Mexicans to the 300 million population of the US over the next 20 years - giving them full citizenship (including the vote).
Adding one new voter for every five now present - when the two major parties are so evenly matched that the presidency gets decided by a few hundred votes - sounded to a lot of citizens like an invasion.
Then consider that the people in question grew up in a country where the government is totally corrupt and the laws deserving of contempt, most of them came here, stay here, and work in violation of OUR laws (while our own politicians refuse to enforce them and reward the immigrants for breaking them), and are being educated by a system that keeps them isolated from the general culture. So they started to worry about what will happen to respect for law over the next few decades.
They pushed the congress critters and got ignored. Then they got mad.
The immigration issue is a reboot of US politics on the banana repulic model. If you thought you've seen government corruption in the last couple decades you ain't seen NOTHING yet.
And if it continues in the same vein for even a couple more years it could, in the opinion of many, literally start an avalanche that will lead to the second civil war.
So, yes, it's significantly more "the in thing to discuss" than a little traffic analysis on phone calls by the NSA.
As one slashdotter pointed out a couple weeks ago, the NSA makes Nixon look like an amateur.
Compared to the NSA Nixon's plumbers WERE amateurs. Heck - compared to the NSA the KGB were a garage shop (and NOT the hi-tek startup kind, either.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way