Hmm... that's interesting. I mean they do point out the inherent difficulties and suggest a different license...
It also causes major practical inconvenience, because modified sources can only be distributed as patches.
...but as you said, the FSF does consider this a Free Software licenses. Still, I'm not sold that this (and other patches-alongside-original-source licenses) should be considered a Free Software license. The FSF's definition of Free Software states:
The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs
And the GPLv2 states:
The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it.
And we can even quote the OSI definition:
The source code must be the preferred form in which a programmer would modify the program. Deliberately obfuscated source code is not allowed. Intermediate forms such as the output of a preprocessor or translator are not allowed.
Programmers don't work on patches, they work on patched code. Sure, Linus merges tons of patches into the main kernel branch all the time, but he's reviewing code one patch at a time and then collapsing that work down into a single file -- just like graphic artists flatten the layers in a multi-layer image file.
Given the way that something like Git works -- as a bunch of patches stacked together -- perhaps one could creatively argue that use of a Git repo could be a valid way to distribute source code under this license. But the fact that we have to reach that far in order to satisfy the license indicates to me that this license is not trying to be a Free Software license. The original creators and developers always can relicense the code however they wish, and so in that respect they have more power than subsequent developers, but to encode such inequality into the license itself -- especially when the original developers may only write 1% of the code in the final product -- seems contrary to the ideals of Free Software.
Mindshare gains are to not accomplished by wasting energy squabbling with your logical ally. AFTER sufficient mindshare has been won from closed source--then squabble and be stupid if you want to! But meanwhile--cooperate on the breakaway!!!! It makes for a better race!!
There's a lot of cooperation between the BSD and the GNU/Linux people. At least I think that there is. And there are a lot of people who call themselves "Open Source Programmers" who cooperate well with people who call themselves "Free Software Programmers".
But at the end of the day the differences that I observe, personally, is that people that tend to use the term "Open Source" have a certain mentality that opening the source code is a useful business model, while people that use the term "Free Software" have more of a belief in the general freedoms to read, modify, and share software.
As such, I don't think that you'll ever hear Microsoft or Apple talk about how they're contributing to the Free Software community. They'll always use the term Open Source because (again, my opinion) they don't believe in Free Software as a corporation. I mean, how could they and still sell MS-Windows and OSX?
Look at the Open Source Definition and compare that with the Free Software Definition. I'm using the definitions from OSI and the FSF because, for all intents and purposes, I think that they have a reasonable claim on defining the corresponding term.
* The NASA Open Source Agreement, version 1.3 * The Reciprocal Public License
I'm also a bit wary of this part of the OSD:
The license may restrict source-code from being distributed in modified form only if the license allows the distribution of "patch files" with the source code for the purpose of modifying the program at build time.
So that's saying that a license could be Open Source and not allow the distribution of patched files? That seems like a bizarre restriction. Their explanation doesn't really sell me:
Rationale: Encouraging lots of improvement is a good thing, but users have a right to know who is responsible for the software they are using. Authors and maintainers have reciprocal right to know what they're being asked to support and protect their reputations.
Accordingly, an open-source license must guarantee that source be readily available, but may require that it be distributed as pristine base sources plus patches. In this way, "unofficial" changes can be made available but readily distinguished from the base source.
The problems with this is that "distribution" can mean any conveyance. So that could mean that to install a program under such a license on a system, you might be required to patch and then compile the code on the actual device. Woe betide anyone who distributes code cross-compiled for a very low power handheld device that doesn't have much in the way of dev tools or system resources. Forget about checking your patched files into a publicly-accessible repository. And if you want to have a web viewer to look at the code, you better be using client-side javascript to do the patching or face the prospect of being in violation of "distribution" laws when you send a pre-patched filed across the Intertubes from your server to the user's browser.
It makes perfect sense to say "If you change this, you can't use our official name for it." I mean, if you bought a can of vegetarian beans and mixed in beef fat, you couldn't just turn around and sell it with the original packaging as you'd be misrepresenting the product. Similarly, if you take the MediaWiki codebase and mix in a few lines of your own code you can't tell people it's stock MediaWiki code. You can tell people that it's based on that codebase, or that you've only change 10 lines, or any other factual statement, but you can't misrepresent the item.
A much more sane rule (which is perhaps still too restrictive for Free Software) would be to request that distributors of modified code offer people the ability to see the diffs as well as the final (changed) code. That way you could take any code and change it and distribute it, but if a user asked for it, you'd need to show them the diffs between what you got from upstream and the changes you made. This would be especially important if the upstream distribution point disappears. For most FOSS projects today, people are using distributed version control like Git, Mercurial, Bazaar, etc... , so anyone can trivially get the diffs by just checking out the repo and looking at the patches.
Is there any indication that Google is interested in making that demo into a supported playback mechanism for all videos on YouTube? If so, that would be a huge benefit for Free Software OSes like Ubuntu.
Is there any License that will prevent transcoding original video produced by me, to another format, like.flv?
Hmmm... is transcoding a "derivative work" ? If so (and I'm not sure one way or the other) then something like CC-By-ND should do the trick.
I'd like to make my videos open source only, including the "container".
Hmm... now if you just want the video to remain in an open format, absent the general Fair Use rules that would allow someone to use short excerpts of your work in a file formatted as "Ultimate Proprietary Format 9000" or whatnot, I wonder if you could GPLv3 the sucker. If the video is available as GPLv3 only, then to quote from that license:
Each contributor grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free patent license under the contributor's essential patent claims, to make, use, sell, offer for sale, import and otherwise run, modify and propagate the contents of its contributor version.
So if I take your video X in an open file format and then transcode it to another open file format to make a new file Y, then I'm golden. But if I transcode X using H264 to make Z, then the entity 'Z' cannot be used, run, or sold without possible patent infringement claims, so Z is not valid for distribution under your license.
IANAL, and these are just my random mutterings. Be warned!
It might be nice, but it ain't gonna happen, unless google or someone gets really altruistic and foots the bill or MPEG LA changes their mind about licensing.
Dude, pray for the SCOTUS to rock Bilski and dump software patents like a load of bricks. That will solve MPEG patent licensing issues, ATSC patent issues, codec this and codec that issues, the Microsoft FAT patents, and basically magical elves will rain down from the sky and give you bags of f*cking gold!
Okay, so I'm not sure about the gold, but the rest of it could totally happen. So think happy thoughts and hope for the SCOTUS to do the right thing.
Hmmm... the coral cache is snappy for me; the original link is not even loading yet.
Here's the start of the article, in any case:
Jun 01. Virtual Failure: YippieMove switches from VMware to FreeBSD Jails
Our email transfer service YippieMove is essentially software as a service. The customer pays us to run some custom software on fast machines with a lot of bandwidth. We initially picked VMware virtualization technology for our back-end deployment because we desired to isolate individual runs, to simplify maintenance and to make scaling dead easy. VMware was ultimately proven to be the wrong choice for these requirements.
Ever since the launch over a year ago we used VMware Server 1 for instantiating the YippieMove back-end software. For that year performance was not a huge concern because there were many other things we were prioritizing on for YippieMove â09. Then, towards the end of development we began doing performance work. We switched from a data storage model best described as âoea huge pile of filesâ to a much cleaner sqlite3 design. The reason for this was technical: the email mover process opened so many files at the same time that weâ(TM)d hit various limits on simultaneously open file descriptors. While running sqlite over NFS posed its own set of challenges, they were not as insurmountable as juggling hundreds of thousands of files in a single folder....
others view the notion of 'freeloaders' as a relic of open source's Wild West era, when coding was a higher calling and free software a religion
I don't want to put words in anyone's mouth, but the way you paint it, "Open Source" is the whiny, shallow little brother of Free Software.
Maybe just using Open Source software gets your rocks off, and that's fine with me, but the primary reasons that I use and hack on Free Software is that *gasp* I believe in the idea. I make enough money at my job that I could go down and buy a tricked out machine, put Windows Super Awesome Spy Edition on it, load it up with Adobe Creative Juggernaut and even sprinkle some Maya on top. Sure. But I don't find that interesting or desirable.
If one of my friends comes to me and says "Hey, how can I do ____ on my computer?", then I like to (1) Find Free Software for them to do the job, and (2) Tell them a bit about how to do the job and/or what the computer is doing. I'm an engineer. I like to know how things work, and I like to teach other people how things work. It's empowering.
If I could wave my hands and make things happen, then I'd have a really tasty lunch in front of me right now. More importantly, I'd give everyone hardware and software that they could use and modify; I'd make sure everyone had access to tools that they could extend to do things that I haven't even dreamed up yet. That's what I like about Free Software. That's why I do what I do.
Are there companies out there reaping the benefits of Free and Open Source Software and not contributing code and money back to the community? Yes -- it's a simple fact. But I don't think that people should get too worked up about it when companies are abiding by the terms of the license. The reason we have GPLv3 and AGPLv3 is that those Free Software licenses are more precise in describing to companies how they may use the software and are more protective of developers and users of the code. One common concern, that of people using code as a hosted service and not contributing code back to the community, is now trivial to avoid by simply using the AGPL.
In the end it's all about education. If more companies (read: more management at companies) understand the benefits of Free and Open Source Software and are properly educated about how they can contribute to the community without sinking themselves financially, then I think this problem will resolve itself.
In theory, if you have an open format, then any app should be able to view/edit it.
Given a sufficiently precise spec, a computer with enough resources to support an application to use the spec, and someone willing to write the application to read/write the spec, then yes.
The issue is that not all open formats are created equally.
Sure -- just imagine a crappy format licensed under an open spec.
Score one for Microsoft. Check the link you listed and you'll see that the confusingly named "Office Open XML" format has nothing to do with OpenOffice.org. OOXML is Microsoft's so-called "open" XML file format for MS-Office docs.
You might be thinking of the file format of OpenOffice.org before it used ODF. That's called OpenOffice.org XML.
If you want something simple that will last a long time, people need to think more in terms of something like plain ASCII/UNICODE with lighweight markup
Project Gutenberg is all about Plain Vanilla ASCII. But if you need more markup than ASCII can provide, what's the next step up? Maybe HTML + CSS? I've heard talk of having a much more lightweight document format than ODF, but I haven't seen anything really running in practice.
Remember that ODF is a somewhat simple file format, basically comprising a zipped archive with XML and other data stored in files inside.
The article links to a local Ubuntu-friendly retailer ZaReason. Now I'm all about buying from local businesses, but given some of the text on their pages, I'm wondering if these guys got a little too "Berkeley," if you know what I mean:
SD/MMC slot -- download photos, anything from your phone (if it holds an SD card), your printer... extreme usability
Are they trying to tell me that I can "download a printer" or "download photos from my printer" ? I dunno about them, but usually photos come out of my printer, not the other way 'round.
No, really! I want to see the meat of this decision and perhaps some analysis.
I haven't taken a swim over to Groklaw yet, so maybe Pamela's already busted this out, but if this were covered over there they'd have 1) a link to the full text of the decision and 2) a legal analysis of what the wording meant, mostly importantly: how good we've got it or how bad we can be screwed.
First, the full text is available on the City of Vancouver website here. It's Matter #5, "Open Data, Open Standards and Open Source", and the motion is available as a PDF.
Next, let's take a look at the text of this motion:
Open and accessible data: The City of Vancouver will freely share with citizens, businesses and other jurisdictions the greatest amount of data possible while respecting privacy and security concerns.
I like the idea, but unfortunately "the greatest amount of data possible" is a very general statement. Given the fact that it is qualified with "respecting...security concerns," what is to prevent future government from classifying nearly all data as being relevant to security concerns? Without stating a metric directly in the document, the well-intentioned councilors have left this document without any teeth.
Open standards: The City of Vancouver will move as quickly as possible to adopt prevailing open standards for data, documents, maps and other formats of media.
But what open standards, and perhaps more importantly, whose definition of open standards will be used?
Open source software: The City of Vancouver, when replacing existing software or considering new applications, will place open source software on an equal footing with commercial systems during procurement cycles.
"Commercial software" is not the antithesis of "open source software". There are plenty of people who sell open source software and/or services for open source software products. I believe someone in a previous post suggested that perhaps a better way for this section to be phrased would be to consider the license of the software as a part of the procurement decision; if it's an open license, then that gives more power to the citizens, allowing them to distribute the software amongst themselves, etc...
The process of government and laws is an iterative one. I'm very pleased that Vancouver has taken this step, and although I have some questions about how this law will be implemented, I wish them the best of luck and hope that they are successful in implementing open standards in their city. If the motion as written is not specific enough to ensure that truly open formats and protocols are used, then I hope that the city council will reconvene to author more specific language.
furthering the creation of an open media infrastructure.
improving upon both the functionality of, and access to, open media solutions.
promoting an infrastructure that enables the creation, the streaming, and the viewing of digital content (using free software) in a legally conforming way.
I like the idea, but as you can see there are just too many hurdles to make this happen right now. I guess we'll have to continue along with the proprietary solutions for now...
Joking aside, I believe the idea is that by having the specification serve as the only transmission medium, the resultant code is based solely on the "distilled fundamental properties" of the original product. The argument is that these fundamental properties are the necessary components to, for example, create an interoperable product, and as such are not protected by copyright.
I'm not exactly sure how reverse engineering works if we're talking about patented file formats or protocols such as H.264. It is unclear how much (if any) software is patentable in the US at this point, however if a court were to uphold a software patent, I believe that even a cleanroom-produced spec could be found to be infringing.
I just went and nominated rtmpdump, and you, dear reader, should go nominate them, too!
I would find it deliciously amusing if we could get the/. editors to post this link as a new article, seeing as how/. shares corporate overlords with SourceForge.
Just as Prof. David Touretzky has his Gallery of DeCSS Descramblers, perhaps some other CS Prof would like to put up a website talking about the protocol?
I haven't looked at the code yet, but I'd assume that the bulk of it is considered acceptable by Adobe. So what small piece of it is the target of Adobe's DMCA takedown? Is it something that we can put on a T-shirt?:-)
Would you like to have control over the software that you run and use? Are you concerned about your software and/or hardware implementing things like the Broadcast Flag? Do you believe in Free Software because it gives you control over your computer?
If you answered "yes" to any of those questions, then you probably should care, as what's going on right now is making it difficult or impossible for you to run Free Software (or even to pick software) to interact with the RTMP protocol -- a protocol that a given website might require you to use to interact with their media content.
Can't seem to find the link to the video of the actual talk, but it must be somewhere around there.
The FOSDEM site doesn't seem to have links to the 2009 videos on their main page, but at least they don't have index files in the appropriate directories on their web server, allowing us to dig it up.
How many people must be sequenced until there is enough genetic coverage to interpolate?
I mean, I have a certain genetic code, and I share a good deal of that genetic code with my mother and father, right? And my siblings and I have similarities as well, I assume.
Using similar methods to those that we use for DNA testing of maternity or paternity, how many people in a given group must have their genes sequenced before you could, say, have a 50% chance of getting a match on a given bloodstain or fingernail at a crime scene (or get something close enough that a court would allow the police to go fishing for more DNA, do interviews, etc...)?
If the answer is "all of them," then perhaps genetic sequencing is relatively innocuous to us as a whole. Individuals can make the choice to be sequenced and it can be their exercise of Free Will to do so. But if the answer is "only a small percentage," then that means that these individual actions of persons today could have far-reaching consequences for generations of people to come.
Having control over one's own actions and own body has been an important right in many cultures; how strange it would be for us to have propelled science to a point that our personal actions could have such a devastating effect on our progeny and relatives, essentially robbing them of a piece of their personal privacy by giving up some of our own.
Put your source in a distributed version control system like Git. That way every checkout contains a full history automagically as a side effect. A checkout from a centralized system like CVS or SVN is nice, but only gives you a backup of the latest version.
A friend of mine argues that wikis should all use a version control backend. That way you can checkout the wiki and work on it when offline. If you implemented such a system then you could just have your users checkout the whole wiki + history and off they go. And you get your data backup for free.
If you have a huge wiki (say wikipedia) then you've got to come up with a different data backup plan, but if you're that big then you probably have someone on staff who's paid to deal with such sysadmin issues.
Okay, so that deals with the big chunks of data. But then you have users, accounts, email addresses, etc. Generally speaking you don't want to make all that data public. So you get a 1 TB external hdd from for under $100. Put it in a canvas sack and hang it on your wall. Maybe get 2 and rotate them each week.
Slashdot Mirror
The FSF considers the QPL a free software licence
Hmm... that's interesting. I mean they do point out the inherent difficulties and suggest a different license...
It also causes major practical inconvenience, because modified sources can only be distributed as patches.
...but as you said, the FSF does consider this a Free Software licenses. Still, I'm not sold that this (and other patches-alongside-original-source licenses) should be considered a Free Software license. The FSF's definition of Free Software states:
The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs
And the GPLv2 states:
The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it.
And we can even quote the OSI definition:
The source code must be the preferred form in which a programmer would modify the program. Deliberately obfuscated source code is not allowed. Intermediate forms such as the output of a preprocessor or translator are not allowed.
Programmers don't work on patches, they work on patched code. Sure, Linus merges tons of patches into the main kernel branch all the time, but he's reviewing code one patch at a time and then collapsing that work down into a single file -- just like graphic artists flatten the layers in a multi-layer image file.
Given the way that something like Git works -- as a bunch of patches stacked together -- perhaps one could creatively argue that use of a Git repo could be a valid way to distribute source code under this license. But the fact that we have to reach that far in order to satisfy the license indicates to me that this license is not trying to be a Free Software license. The original creators and developers always can relicense the code however they wish, and so in that respect they have more power than subsequent developers, but to encode such inequality into the license itself -- especially when the original developers may only write 1% of the code in the final product -- seems contrary to the ideals of Free Software.
Mindshare gains are to not accomplished by wasting energy squabbling with your logical ally. AFTER sufficient mindshare has been won from closed source--then squabble and be stupid if you want to! But meanwhile--cooperate on the breakaway!!!! It makes for a better race!!
There's a lot of cooperation between the BSD and the GNU/Linux people. At least I think that there is. And there are a lot of people who call themselves "Open Source Programmers" who cooperate well with people who call themselves "Free Software Programmers".
But at the end of the day the differences that I observe, personally, is that people that tend to use the term "Open Source" have a certain mentality that opening the source code is a useful business model, while people that use the term "Free Software" have more of a belief in the general freedoms to read, modify, and share software.
As such, I don't think that you'll ever hear Microsoft or Apple talk about how they're contributing to the Free Software community. They'll always use the term Open Source because (again, my opinion) they don't believe in Free Software as a corporation. I mean, how could they and still sell MS-Windows and OSX?
Anyhow, just an observation.
Look at the Open Source Definition and compare that with the Free Software Definition. I'm using the definitions from OSI and the FSF because, for all intents and purposes, I think that they have a reasonable claim on defining the corresponding term.
There are some licenses that are OSI-certified but not Free Software Licenses (according to the FSF). These include:
* The NASA Open Source Agreement, version 1.3
* The Reciprocal Public License
I'm also a bit wary of this part of the OSD:
The license may restrict source-code from being distributed in modified form only if the license allows the distribution of "patch files" with the source code for the purpose of modifying the program at build time.
So that's saying that a license could be Open Source and not allow the distribution of patched files? That seems like a bizarre restriction. Their explanation doesn't really sell me:
Rationale: Encouraging lots of improvement is a good thing, but users have a right to know who is responsible for the software they are using. Authors and maintainers have reciprocal right to know what they're being asked to support and protect their reputations.
Accordingly, an open-source license must guarantee that source be readily available, but may require that it be distributed as pristine base sources plus patches. In this way, "unofficial" changes can be made available but readily distinguished from the base source.
The problems with this is that "distribution" can mean any conveyance. So that could mean that to install a program under such a license on a system, you might be required to patch and then compile the code on the actual device. Woe betide anyone who distributes code cross-compiled for a very low power handheld device that doesn't have much in the way of dev tools or system resources. Forget about checking your patched files into a publicly-accessible repository. And if you want to have a web viewer to look at the code, you better be using client-side javascript to do the patching or face the prospect of being in violation of "distribution" laws when you send a pre-patched filed across the Intertubes from your server to the user's browser.
It makes perfect sense to say "If you change this, you can't use our official name for it." I mean, if you bought a can of vegetarian beans and mixed in beef fat, you couldn't just turn around and sell it with the original packaging as you'd be misrepresenting the product. Similarly, if you take the MediaWiki codebase and mix in a few lines of your own code you can't tell people it's stock MediaWiki code. You can tell people that it's based on that codebase, or that you've only change 10 lines, or any other factual statement, but you can't misrepresent the item.
A much more sane rule (which is perhaps still too restrictive for Free Software) would be to request that distributors of modified code offer people the ability to see the diffs as well as the final (changed) code. That way you could take any code and change it and distribute it, but if a user asked for it, you'd need to show them the diffs between what you got from upstream and the changes you made. This would be especially important if the upstream distribution point disappears. For most FOSS projects today, people are using distributed version control like Git, Mercurial, Bazaar, etc... , so anyone can trivially get the diffs by just checking out the repo and looking at the patches.
Is there any indication that Google is interested in making that demo into a supported playback mechanism for all videos on YouTube? If so, that would be a huge benefit for Free Software OSes like Ubuntu.
Is there any License that will prevent transcoding original video produced by me, to another format, like .flv?
Hmmm... is transcoding a "derivative work" ? If so (and I'm not sure one way or the other) then something like CC-By-ND should do the trick.
I'd like to make my videos open source only, including the "container".
Hmm... now if you just want the video to remain in an open format, absent the general Fair Use rules that would allow someone to use short excerpts of your work in a file formatted as "Ultimate Proprietary Format 9000" or whatnot, I wonder if you could GPLv3 the sucker. If the video is available as GPLv3 only, then to quote from that license:
Each contributor grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free patent license under the contributor's essential patent claims, to make, use, sell, offer for sale, import and otherwise run, modify and propagate the contents of its contributor version.
So if I take your video X in an open file format and then transcode it to another open file format to make a new file Y, then I'm golden. But if I transcode X using H264 to make Z, then the entity 'Z' cannot be used, run, or sold without possible patent infringement claims, so Z is not valid for distribution under your license.
IANAL, and these are just my random mutterings. Be warned!
It might be nice, but it ain't gonna happen, unless google or someone gets really altruistic and foots the bill or MPEG LA changes their mind about licensing.
Dude, pray for the SCOTUS to rock Bilski and dump software patents like a load of bricks. That will solve MPEG patent licensing issues, ATSC patent issues, codec this and codec that issues, the Microsoft FAT patents, and basically magical elves will rain down from the sky and give you bags of f*cking gold!
Okay, so I'm not sure about the gold, but the rest of it could totally happen. So think happy thoughts and hope for the SCOTUS to do the right thing.
Hmmm... the coral cache is snappy for me; the original link is not even loading yet.
Here's the start of the article, in any case:
Jun 01. Virtual Failure: YippieMove switches from VMware to FreeBSD Jails
Our email transfer service YippieMove is essentially software as a service. The customer pays us to run some custom software on fast machines with a lot of bandwidth. We initially picked VMware virtualization technology for our back-end deployment because we desired to isolate individual runs, to simplify maintenance and to make scaling dead easy. VMware was ultimately proven to be the wrong choice for these requirements.
Ever since the launch over a year ago we used VMware Server 1 for instantiating the YippieMove back-end software. For that year performance was not a huge concern because there were many other things we were prioritizing on for YippieMove â09. Then, towards the end of development we began doing performance work. We switched from a data storage model best described as âoea huge pile of filesâ to a much cleaner sqlite3 design. The reason for this was technical: the email mover process opened so many files at the same time that weâ(TM)d hit various limits on simultaneously open file descriptors. While running sqlite over NFS posed its own set of challenges, they were not as insurmountable as juggling hundreds of thousands of files in a single folder. ...
http://www.playingwithwire.com.nyud.net/2009/06/virtual-failure-yippiemove-switches-from-vmware-to-freebsd-jails/ Because otherwise it's hosed.
others view the notion of 'freeloaders' as a relic of open source's Wild West era, when coding was a higher calling and free software a religion
I don't want to put words in anyone's mouth, but the way you paint it, "Open Source" is the whiny, shallow little brother of Free Software.
Maybe just using Open Source software gets your rocks off, and that's fine with me, but the primary reasons that I use and hack on Free Software is that *gasp* I believe in the idea. I make enough money at my job that I could go down and buy a tricked out machine, put Windows Super Awesome Spy Edition on it, load it up with Adobe Creative Juggernaut and even sprinkle some Maya on top. Sure. But I don't find that interesting or desirable.
If one of my friends comes to me and says "Hey, how can I do ____ on my computer?", then I like to (1) Find Free Software for them to do the job, and (2) Tell them a bit about how to do the job and/or what the computer is doing. I'm an engineer. I like to know how things work, and I like to teach other people how things work. It's empowering.
If I could wave my hands and make things happen, then I'd have a really tasty lunch in front of me right now. More importantly, I'd give everyone hardware and software that they could use and modify; I'd make sure everyone had access to tools that they could extend to do things that I haven't even dreamed up yet. That's what I like about Free Software. That's why I do what I do.
Are there companies out there reaping the benefits of Free and Open Source Software and not contributing code and money back to the community? Yes -- it's a simple fact. But I don't think that people should get too worked up about it when companies are abiding by the terms of the license. The reason we have GPLv3 and AGPLv3 is that those Free Software licenses are more precise in describing to companies how they may use the software and are more protective of developers and users of the code. One common concern, that of people using code as a hosted service and not contributing code back to the community, is now trivial to avoid by simply using the AGPL.
In the end it's all about education. If more companies (read: more management at companies) understand the benefits of Free and Open Source Software and are properly educated about how they can contribute to the community without sinking themselves financially, then I think this problem will resolve itself.
Dear slashdot, why am I seeing an advertisement for scientology on the slashdot front page ?
Because they can't advertise on Wikipedia anymore?
They just won't tell you that the virgins look like Rush Limbaugh.
Well they are Monster cables....
In theory, if you have an open format, then any app should be able to view/edit it.
Given a sufficiently precise spec, a computer with enough resources to support an application to use the spec, and someone willing to write the application to read/write the spec, then yes.
The issue is that not all open formats are created equally.
Sure -- just imagine a crappy format licensed under an open spec.
The OpenOffice format http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML [wikipedia.org], IMHO, is a right mess (as in so complicated to grok).
Score one for Microsoft. Check the link you listed and you'll see that the confusingly named "Office Open XML" format has nothing to do with OpenOffice.org. OOXML is Microsoft's so-called "open" XML file format for MS-Office docs.
You might be thinking of the file format of OpenOffice.org before it used ODF. That's called OpenOffice.org XML.
If you want something simple that will last a long time, people need to think more in terms of something like plain ASCII/UNICODE with lighweight markup
Project Gutenberg is all about Plain Vanilla ASCII. But if you need more markup than ASCII can provide, what's the next step up? Maybe HTML + CSS? I've heard talk of having a much more lightweight document format than ODF, but I haven't seen anything really running in practice.
Remember that ODF is a somewhat simple file format, basically comprising a zipped archive with XML and other data stored in files inside.
The article links to a local Ubuntu-friendly retailer ZaReason. Now I'm all about buying from local businesses, but given some of the text on their pages, I'm wondering if these guys got a little too "Berkeley," if you know what I mean:
SD/MMC slot -- download photos, anything from your phone (if it holds an SD card), your printer... extreme usability
Are they trying to tell me that I can "download a printer" or "download photos from my printer" ? I dunno about them, but usually photos come out of my printer, not the other way 'round.
No, really! I want to see the meat of this decision and perhaps some analysis.
I haven't taken a swim over to Groklaw yet, so maybe Pamela's already busted this out, but if this were covered over there they'd have 1) a link to the full text of the decision and 2) a legal analysis of what the wording meant, mostly importantly: how good we've got it or how bad we can be screwed.
First, the full text is available on the City of Vancouver website here. It's Matter #5, "Open Data, Open Standards and Open Source", and the motion is available as a PDF.
Next, let's take a look at the text of this motion:
Open and accessible data: The City of Vancouver will freely share with citizens, businesses and other jurisdictions the greatest amount of data possible while respecting privacy and security concerns.
I like the idea, but unfortunately "the greatest amount of data possible" is a very general statement. Given the fact that it is qualified with "respecting...security concerns," what is to prevent future government from classifying nearly all data as being relevant to security concerns? Without stating a metric directly in the document, the well-intentioned councilors have left this document without any teeth.
Open standards: The City of Vancouver will move as quickly as possible to adopt prevailing open standards for data, documents, maps and other formats of media.
But what open standards, and perhaps more importantly, whose definition of open standards will be used?
Open source software: The City of Vancouver, when replacing existing software or considering new applications, will place open source software on an equal footing with commercial systems during procurement cycles.
"Commercial software" is not the antithesis of "open source software". There are plenty of people who sell open source software and/or services for open source software products. I believe someone in a previous post suggested that perhaps a better way for this section to be phrased would be to consider the license of the software as a part of the procurement decision; if it's an open license, then that gives more power to the citizens, allowing them to distribute the software amongst themselves, etc...
The process of government and laws is an iterative one. I'm very pleased that Vancouver has taken this step, and although I have some questions about how this law will be implemented, I wish them the best of luck and hope that they are successful in implementing open standards in their city. If the motion as written is not specific enough to ensure that truly open formats and protocols are used, then I hope that the city council will reconvene to author more specific language.
And what about open rich web media initiative..?
Oh sure, but we'd have to come up with a name like... I dunno.... Open Media Now!.
And we'd probably also want to come up with some goals like:
And then we'd have to find someone to lead us.
I like the idea, but as you can see there are just too many hurdles to make this happen right now. I guess we'll have to continue along with the proprietary solutions for now...
I'd rather see HDMI output. Then it's digital
I'm all for a digital signal, but doesn't HDMI have DRM built-in to the spec?
the IP is lost in translation
Yes, Coppola... :-)
Joking aside, I believe the idea is that by having the specification serve as the only transmission medium, the resultant code is based solely on the "distilled fundamental properties" of the original product. The argument is that these fundamental properties are the necessary components to, for example, create an interoperable product, and as such are not protected by copyright.
I'm not exactly sure how reverse engineering works if we're talking about patented file formats or protocols such as H.264. It is unclear how much (if any) software is patentable in the US at this point, however if a court were to uphold a software patent, I believe that even a cleanroom-produced spec could be found to be infringing.
I just went and nominated rtmpdump, and you, dear reader, should go nominate them, too!
I would find it deliciously amusing if we could get the /. editors to post this link as a new article, seeing as how /. shares corporate overlords with SourceForge.
Just as Prof. David Touretzky has his Gallery of DeCSS Descramblers, perhaps some other CS Prof would like to put up a website talking about the protocol?
I haven't looked at the code yet, but I'd assume that the bulk of it is considered acceptable by Adobe. So what small piece of it is the target of Adobe's DMCA takedown? Is it something that we can put on a T-shirt? :-)
OK WTF is that all about...
RTMP is the Real Time Messaging Protocol that Adobe has developed for streaming stuff over the Internet.
Red5 is a Free Software (LGPL) implementation of the RTMP.
Cygnal is the Gnash project's RTMP server (also Free Software).
Also see more docs on RTMP on the Gnash wiki, and RTMPE on this other wiki.
... and should I care?
Would you like to have control over the software that you run and use? Are you concerned about your software and/or hardware implementing things like the Broadcast Flag? Do you believe in Free Software because it gives you control over your computer?
If you answered "yes" to any of those questions, then you probably should care, as what's going on right now is making it difficult or impossible for you to run Free Software (or even to pick software) to interact with the RTMP protocol -- a protocol that a given website might require you to use to interact with their media content.
Can't seem to find the link to the video of the actual talk, but it must be somewhere around there.
The FOSDEM site doesn't seem to have links to the 2009 videos on their main page, but at least they don't have index files in the appropriate directories on their web server, allowing us to dig it up.
Reverse Engineering of Proprietary Network Protocols, Tools, and Techniques:
Ogg Theora (239M)
Xvid.avi (183M)
are you suggesting that they'll need Final Cut Pro on OSX in order to send email and communicate with each other?
Need? No. Want? Yes.
Does it make sense? No.
But we're dealing with users here. Just say "I'll look into that," and continue along as normal.
How many people must be sequenced until there is enough genetic coverage to interpolate?
I mean, I have a certain genetic code, and I share a good deal of that genetic code with my mother and father, right? And my siblings and I have similarities as well, I assume.
Using similar methods to those that we use for DNA testing of maternity or paternity, how many people in a given group must have their genes sequenced before you could, say, have a 50% chance of getting a match on a given bloodstain or fingernail at a crime scene (or get something close enough that a court would allow the police to go fishing for more DNA, do interviews, etc...)?
If the answer is "all of them," then perhaps genetic sequencing is relatively innocuous to us as a whole. Individuals can make the choice to be sequenced and it can be their exercise of Free Will to do so. But if the answer is "only a small percentage," then that means that these individual actions of persons today could have far-reaching consequences for generations of people to come.
Having control over one's own actions and own body has been an important right in many cultures; how strange it would be for us to have propelled science to a point that our personal actions could have such a devastating effect on our progeny and relatives, essentially robbing them of a piece of their personal privacy by giving up some of our own.
Oh, and I graduate with my MIS degree tonight! Sorry, just happy.
I initially read that as "I graduate with my MS degree tonight," and was wondering why you were so happy...
I don't use Linux, so I'm no fanboy...
Any particular reason why you don't? (I'm always curious)
Put your source in a distributed version control system like Git. That way every checkout contains a full history automagically as a side effect. A checkout from a centralized system like CVS or SVN is nice, but only gives you a backup of the latest version.
A friend of mine argues that wikis should all use a version control backend. That way you can checkout the wiki and work on it when offline. If you implemented such a system then you could just have your users checkout the whole wiki + history and off they go. And you get your data backup for free.
If you have a huge wiki (say wikipedia) then you've got to come up with a different data backup plan, but if you're that big then you probably have someone on staff who's paid to deal with such sysadmin issues.
Okay, so that deals with the big chunks of data. But then you have users, accounts, email addresses, etc. Generally speaking you don't want to make all that data public. So you get a 1 TB external hdd from for under $100. Put it in a canvas sack and hang it on your wall. Maybe get 2 and rotate them each week.