Yeah, see, the way the government works is, we have a thing called a constitution. This is the RFC document on the syntax that the government must follow. None of the constitution can be altered by simple law, there must be an amendment (upgrade if you will) to the constitution. Therefore, any law which violates the constitution can be ruled unconstitutional through the judicial system. Okay, so for the slow ones, IT DOESN'T MATTER IF THEY PASS THE LAW BECAUSE IT WILL VIOLATE THE CONSTITUTION AND DIE.
The gut of the matter is, you are correct. The main problem with the case is this: Currently the OS industry is dominated by Microsoft, but this will change fairly soon, meaning, by the time all the appeals are done, breaking Microsoft into a billion pieces wouldn't make a bit of difference, and all it WILL do is make a bunch of lawyers a little bit richer...
Although I'm not a lawyer, I'm fairly sure that unless microsoft presses legal action the matter can be dropped by either party at any point in time. Basically microsoft was pointing out what it thought was a violation of its rights to slashdot, nothing more than if I were to walk over to my stupid neighbor's house right now and ask them VERY politely to shut their [censored] dog up.
Having read the whole series at least a half-dozen times, I feel that MH is my favorite, although I know most of your readers do not feel the same way... What I would like to know is this: Is there a plan to write another book using the concept that in an equally infinite number of probable universes, the guide was never bought out by the Vogons? (or would answering that make the concept unusable?)
Here's the beef, to put up a simple clickthru agreement on a site (like the ones on warez sites and, of course, the one on quakelives.com) doesn't do a damn thing for protection. The simple fact of the matter is that to make an agreement (or even a full fledged contract) in regards to an ILLEGAL matter, simply means nothing. The whole 'you give up your rights upon entering this site' is irrelevant because by distributing the binaries to ANYONE regardless of WHO it is, as soon as THEY have the binary file, they immediately have a legal right to the source code which was used to write it, it is not totally in error to say that the source code is part of the binary file... I'm not exactly positive on this one, but I do think there are a few possible ways of getting around the 'security' problems Quakelives is having... One would be to release the binary in only insecure version, then to release a security patch that would go in and modify the Exe to the version that IS secure, this way, the patch's source could be kept closed source while the source to the actual quake binary could remain open (i know this is an added trouble to go through, but that's life)... Another way would be to use some open source compiler and modify the source of it so that it would require modified source code that would only compile under it (this way, no one else can compile it, you're fine) but I'm not much of a programming expert, so again, I'm entirely unsure of how easy and/or effective this method would be.... just a thought.
Carmack probably already wrote the proxy and is just waiting to release it. Seems logical enough, he could keep it closed source, its already probably done.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, see, the way the government works is, we have a thing called a constitution. This is the RFC document on the syntax that the government must follow. None of the constitution can be altered by simple law, there must be an amendment (upgrade if you will) to the constitution. Therefore, any law which violates the constitution can be ruled unconstitutional through the judicial system. Okay, so for the slow ones, IT DOESN'T MATTER IF THEY PASS THE LAW BECAUSE IT WILL VIOLATE THE CONSTITUTION AND DIE.
-HobophobE
The gut of the matter is, you are correct. The main problem with the case is this: Currently the OS industry is dominated by Microsoft, but this will change fairly soon, meaning, by the time all the appeals are done, breaking Microsoft into a billion pieces wouldn't make a bit of difference, and all it WILL do is make a bunch of lawyers a little bit richer...
HobophobE
-HobophobE
Although I'm not a lawyer, I'm fairly sure that unless microsoft presses legal action the matter can be dropped by either party at any point in time. Basically microsoft was pointing out what it thought was a violation of its rights to slashdot, nothing more than if I were to walk over to my stupid neighbor's house right now and ask them VERY politely to shut their [censored] dog up.
-HobophobE
Having read the whole series at least a half-dozen times, I feel that MH is my favorite, although I know most of your readers do not feel the same way... What I would like to know is this: Is there a plan to write another book using the concept that in an equally infinite number of probable universes, the guide was never bought out by the Vogons? (or would answering that make the concept unusable?)
-HobophobE
Here's the beef, to put up a simple clickthru agreement on a site (like the ones on warez sites and, of course, the one on quakelives.com) doesn't do a damn thing for protection. The simple fact of the matter is that to make an agreement (or even a full fledged contract) in regards to an ILLEGAL matter, simply means nothing. The whole 'you give up your rights upon entering this site' is irrelevant because by distributing the binaries to ANYONE regardless of WHO it is, as soon as THEY have the binary file, they immediately have a legal right to the source code which was used to write it, it is not totally in error to say that the source code is part of the binary file... I'm not exactly positive on this one, but I do think there are a few possible ways of getting around the 'security' problems Quakelives is having... One would be to release the binary in only insecure version, then to release a security patch that would go in and modify the Exe to the version that IS secure, this way, the patch's source could be kept closed source while the source to the actual quake binary could remain open (i know this is an added trouble to go through, but that's life)... Another way would be to use some open source compiler and modify the source of it so that it would require modified source code that would only compile under it (this way, no one else can compile it, you're fine) but I'm not much of a programming expert, so again, I'm entirely unsure of how easy and/or effective this method would be.... just a thought.
Carmack probably already wrote the proxy and is just waiting to release it. Seems logical enough, he could keep it closed source, its already probably done.