I can understand why some might be "asking the Free Software movement to find a new voice."
But if that happens because of this particular outspokenness, that might be yet another correct course of action taken for completely the wrong reason.
Generally, I code faster, and better, the second time around.
If you were the original author, there is some chance that a court would find that any second coding you do would be covered by the original copyright. You certainly wouldn't be able to claim "clean room" non-exposure to the original. And, whether the court would find that or not, that could still be an expensive proposition, if you coded something valuable enough for a post-bankruptcy assignee to decide that your second coding of it was interfering with their profits.
Small chance, you say? You're absolutely right. But OTOH, any company that wouldn't mind you using something that you yourself created the second time shouldn't really mind you using something you created the first time either.
No, I have to agree with the assessment of others that copyright assignment is a non-starter. There is a continuum of potential contributions, but at one end you have small bugfixes that are useless for any other piece of software, so nobody should care who owns the copyright. At the other end, you have major pieces of work that might contain large libraries of independently-useful functions. If you want to attract developers to create and contribute those then you shouldn't limit their ability to reuse their own creations.
Furthermore, if it's merely a license grant rather than a copyright assignment, then the damage that a wayward bankruptcy judge can do (think what happened to Novell's revenue stream in SCO) becomes quite limited.
If any patent is valid and infringed, then google may have some 'splainin to do about why they didn't think it was.
This line of questioning might have nothing at all to do with whether any of the patents are actually valid or infringed. It might just have to do with whether, if it was done, it was done willfully.
OTOH, it may be the judge's strategy to try to get google thinking about possible treble damages. He's probably trying for anything that might lead to a sooner settlement and cut his workload.
Am completely non-disruptive when I'm there, and wouldn't like someone disrupting my movie either.
In that case, when you make it over, you should go there. You'll do fine.
I just happen to be incensed by injustice wherever I see it, even if it's being done for my benefit.
Me too. But we certainly disagree about whether this is an injustice.
Part of running a business is that you bear the costs of dealing with problem customers.
And part of being a customer is that you bear the costs of dealing with problem businesses. Pretty symmetrical, really, but there are a lot more problematic businesses out there than the ones that tell you exactly what to expect, and then deliver.
all I remember is a chorus of people saying that large costs from problem customers are part of running a business
There you go. In a lot of cases, large costs from problem businesses are part of being a consumer. This lady didn't even get charged very much.
So you admit (swapping back into legal argument mode momentarily) that if the point at which payment were made were elsewhere it would be very hard for the theater operator to actually obtain the money?
Not at all. It would just take way more effort than it was worth, and would really make an enemy for life, as opposed to somebody who might sheepishly realize they do like going to the Drafthouse, but are going to behave better next time.
But merely because they already have the money in their possession and it's probably not worth it for the patron to use the courts to get it back, it's ok to keep it?
Again, not at all. If the patron really thinks she was wronged, she can sue to try to get back money for mental duress, legal fees, etc. Good luck with that, though.
You do realise that, as the amount at issue is less than $20, there won't BE a jury, right?
There very well could be a jury if the lady feels she was wronged. An extra $5.00 to the small claims court in Texas will get her that privilege, no matter how small the claim.
Also, since there don't seem to be any facts in dispute it would all be down to legal wrangling even if it were over $20.
Rules of evidence, laws vs. facts, etc. are very different in Texas small claims court. It's almost more like arbitration in some ways. Anyway, she seemed to be trying to say she was using a flashlight. I'm sure she could change her story again.
(Complications associated with a ban are) Not. [Your.] Problem.
Just because doing right by someone is expensive or complicated is not a justification for throwing your hands in the air and doing the wrong thing instead.
Right, which is why they chucked her out sans refund, instead of just telling the other customers there was nothing to be done.
Using your power as landowner to ban someone is the proper way to go about dealing with this, refusing a refund is not.
You seem to be completely fixated on some supposed god-given right to a refund. There is no legal, moral, or ethical reason why they should give her a refund.
It is not mandatory, when criticising a policy taken by someone else, to propose a better alternative - which seems to be the only argument against my position (except bald disagreement) which anyone has used.
I think you've completely missed several good points made by others, including that rewarding this sort of behavior will lead to its increase.
But even if all that's left is bald disagreement, and you actually, you know, really wanted them to change the policy to meet your strict moral criteria, you h
And my position is that they're asshats for that being the contract.
That's awesome. Their PSAs work so well that even jerks like you who had probably never heard of them before now know that you'll get chucked out on your ear for behavior you probably consider perfectly normal. I'm perfectly fine with you and your cellphone staying the hell away from the Alamo.
I don't know whether your ineducable or merely ignorant, but there are costs, not just direct costs, but stress and the possibility of violence, for theater employees to actually do the right thing and kick disruptive patrons out.
It is perfectly reasonable to try to assign as much of these costs to the perpetrators as possible. While it is difficult (though not impossible) to sue them for breach of contract, it is plenty easy to just not give them their money back and have them try to sue you.
I'd love to be on that jury...
The origin of the meme "the customer is always right" is not your completely unthoughtful notion that the customer needs to be on a higher footing than the business for some unknown humanitarian/communist reason. No, the origin of that meme is that the business wants to do everything possible to make the customer happy so the customer comes back.
But what if you actually don't want a customer back?
You have proposed the idea of a ban, which others have repeatedly pointed out is completely unworkable. Have you ever actually been to a busy theater? Do you know how many employees it takes to actually take tickets, etc.? Do you know how hard it would be to keep a violator out?
Why should the theater waste time and money on this "ban", when it already did the customer a huge favor by not having her arrested for disruptive behavior, and when simply keeping her money will actually have positive benefits for her behavior in the future?
I certainly hope you don't have any kids, or that the little monsters stay far, far away from me and my family. In fact, it's probably best for all concerned if you stay completely away from Texas. If you think this theater is obnoxious for not tolerating bad behavior, you haven't seen anything yet.
The contract provisions were spelled out in multiple places.
The person in question was informed verbally (warned twice) of the contract provisions.
Then the contract was enforced.
IMHO, they did her a huge favor. Many people spend orders of magnitude more than $9.00 on the simple lesson that contracts are meaningful, and here you are excoriating a business which provides this simple lesson at a bargain basement price.
ok, the thrust of my argument is that by attaching such conditions (and especially by enforcing them) they are behaving like asshats.
See, we all got that, but your argument is plain wrong.
My wife and I won't go anywhere else but the Alamo, because all the other theaters suck, because all the other theaters have this self-created tension because they're trying to adhere to the policy that "the customer is always right."
Well, guess what? Not all the customers are right.
If they had given this bitch her cash back, she might have come back and bothered another theater full of patrons later. What about them? You think (if you could call it that) the theater management is behaving like asshats; I know they are just trying to help ensure a better environment for the next time that bitch decides to go to the movies.
First of all, I started out reading the whole license. Then I was pointed by one of your devs to section 11.
Now you keep saying rude shit like "That's your problem." "Get your mind off section 11." "Still your problem."
In short, you have been quite rude and snide on multiple occasions. AND YOU STILL HAVEN'T EXPLAINED WHY IT'S APPENDIX C OF THE LICENSE THAT APPLIES, AND NOT THE NON-OPEN-SOURCE PART.
But let's get past that.
The only "open source" parts of the license are described in Appendixes A-C. Appendix A and B don't apply, so it must be appendix C. By the text of the appendix itself, that only applies to certain files:
The Software subject to this Open Source License Agreement
is the output files generated by the Provider's LatticeMico32 System.
So for this to work as you claim it did, what must have happened is that you must have (a) registered to get the software (which I'm not going to do and which you steadfastly refused to believe must be done to get the software for the longest time); (b) run their (proprietary?) program that puts together the SOC (which I don't see in your tarball and I apparently can't run without getting it from Lattice); and (c) THAT PROGRAM must have "output" those files by simply copying them from their initial install place to the output.
IF all that happened (if those files are considered "output" of their proprietary tool) THEN I can believe that you can legitimately call them open source and redistribute them.
But THEY don't explain that and YOU didn't explain that either, and the header on the file certainly doesn't indicate that it was run through their tool, or that their open source license applies, and neither does anything else in the tarball that I see. It is not a "generated" file in the normal sense of the word, so if that is how it becomes open source, I think you could have done a much better job addressing that.
Of course, neither fixing your documentation to explain why the license applies nor explaining it nicely could possibly be as much fun as simply berating people who don't stand a chance of being able to understand how you got there from the limited information you provided. It's assholes like you who give open source a bad name.
I wasn't talking to you. Rather, I was talking to somebody who thinks that "open source" is bad / GPL is good, and was apparently keying off the file header that I printed.
To the extent that the file header is correct, it doesn't match open source principles, and what he is saying is bullshit.
To the extent that the header is incorrect -- well, I'll reserve judgment on that. BTW, it is you who have been strongly asserting you know all about the license. I can't be "wrong" because I haven't figured it out yet. I also can't be the only one in this boat, or I wouldn't have been modded up. But go ahead and keep telling me how stupid I am, that's fine. And while you're at it, keep directing me to irrelevant sections of the license, not explaining the steps that mean that it really works, and responding to irrelevant side-comments that have nothing to do with the real question.
But only if those particular files are "generated" by a copy. They seem to be available at Lattice for registered users. I can't download them; perhaps you have a cookie set.
Who claimed that "section 11 of this license applies to those files"? Kristian Paul merely pointed to section 11.
Are you listening to yourself? You act like I can't read and have to be spoon-fed (which may well be true), but that's completely crazy. Why the hell would somebody explicitly point out section 11 if it didn't apply?
Let's see what Lattice says, you certainly wrote to them in the most disturbing style,
What's disturbing about it? It's purely factual, and asks a question I would like to know the answer to. And the answer may well be what you say, because they do go out of their way to claim that the thing is "open", but that's not the feel I personally get from reading either the source header or the license file.
There are legitimate things that gpl lovers and bsd lovers can agree to disagree about, but unless you can legitimately explain how a file can both meet the open source definition and be marked "confidential" please STFU.
Of course, them being lawyers, this discussion will probably be closed by the time they respond, but if not, I'll post the response here.
to: lic_admn@latticesemi.com
Dear sir or madam:
It has recently come to my attention that a public source code repository contains LatticeMico32 processor RTL files that have a Lattice copyright notice that claims the files are "confidential and proprietary software". For example, see:
However, they have offered no reasoning as to why they believe section 11 applies. The headers of the files in question do not claim they are licensed according to any sort of open-source exception; quite the opposite.
The LatticeMico32 looks interesting for my own project; please advise if these sources really can be freely distributed under section 11 of this license, whether it is Appendix A or Appendix B that applies to that redistribution, and whether I should update the file headers to reflect that fact upon redistribution.
Thank you for your time and attention to this matter.
I'm not going to spend any more time on that license. If you think it says what you say it says, spell it out for me, by chapter and verse. You can't just say that section 11 applies without saying why. Or alternatively, point me to a conversation with Lattice where they said it's all OK.
Forgot to mention that I did read section 11 that you point out to. It doesn't include all the source. There are plenty of files that self-identify as being under one of the licenses referenced by section 11, but the core CPU RTL files don't seem to fall into that category.
Color me naive/fearful/stupid/untrusting/whatever, but when I see a license that covers both open source components and non-open source components, and a source file with a copyright notice that doesn't say anything about the code inside being under any kind of open source license, and in fact starts off by saying "This confidential and proprietary software...", why the hell would I assume that the "open-source" parts of the license apply to that particular source file?
It's mostly gobbledy-gook, that you would need to study way too carefully before playing with the code.
In any case, unless there's something I'm completely missing, it looks like the milkymist guys were not supposed to share the code that I pulled that header from:
Lattice hereby grants to Licensee a non-exclusive, nontransferable license
to use the Software for Licensee's internal purposes only on any computer
possessed by Licensee on which the Software is designed to operate, such use
to be in accordance with and subject to the terms and conditions of this
Agreement.
Apparently, according to section 12 of the license, some of their tools will spit out code that is redistributable under an open source license, and if you use their tools to do that, then you can share the output. The license for that is in appendix C of that document, but it applies to "Software that identifies itself as licensed under the Lattice
Semiconductor Corporation Open Source License Agreement."
Did you see any such self-identification as open source in that header file? Me neither.
Before bothering with that, I actually tried figuring out the license by looking at Lattice, but other than reassuring verbiage about free, I came up blank when looking for an actual license:
And, of course, most of the Lattice junk in the source tarball, and the documentation at the milkymist site, can't even be retrieved from Lattice itself without registering and executing some sort of license agreement:
Slashdot Mirror
But if that happens because of this particular outspokenness, that might be yet another correct course of action taken for completely the wrong reason.
But I do care about when something was written.
It is mind-boggling how many academic papers out there that don't have a damn date on them.
C'mon people -- if you want to help out the knowledge of the world, you're not being serious if you can't help us put it in a timeline.
The only downside is that it's BGA, but if somebody else puts it down on a board for me, that's sweet.
If you were the original author, there is some chance that a court would find that any second coding you do would be covered by the original copyright. You certainly wouldn't be able to claim "clean room" non-exposure to the original. And, whether the court would find that or not, that could still be an expensive proposition, if you coded something valuable enough for a post-bankruptcy assignee to decide that your second coding of it was interfering with their profits.
Small chance, you say? You're absolutely right. But OTOH, any company that wouldn't mind you using something that you yourself created the second time shouldn't really mind you using something you created the first time either.
No, I have to agree with the assessment of others that copyright assignment is a non-starter. There is a continuum of potential contributions, but at one end you have small bugfixes that are useless for any other piece of software, so nobody should care who owns the copyright. At the other end, you have major pieces of work that might contain large libraries of independently-useful functions. If you want to attract developers to create and contribute those then you shouldn't limit their ability to reuse their own creations.
Furthermore, if it's merely a license grant rather than a copyright assignment, then the damage that a wayward bankruptcy judge can do (think what happened to Novell's revenue stream in SCO) becomes quite limited.
Do you really think they would be doing this if Apple weren't?
And it's only in the US.
Worldwide it's much grimmer for MS, but in the US it's pretty bad.
This line of questioning might have nothing at all to do with whether any of the patents are actually valid or infringed. It might just have to do with whether, if it was done, it was done willfully.
OTOH, it may be the judge's strategy to try to get google thinking about possible treble damages. He's probably trying for anything that might lead to a sooner settlement and cut his workload.
In that case, when you make it over, you should go there. You'll do fine.
Me too. But we certainly disagree about whether this is an injustice.
And part of being a customer is that you bear the costs of dealing with problem businesses. Pretty symmetrical, really, but there are a lot more problematic businesses out there than the ones that tell you exactly what to expect, and then deliver.
There you go. In a lot of cases, large costs from problem businesses are part of being a consumer. This lady didn't even get charged very much.
Not at all. It would just take way more effort than it was worth, and would really make an enemy for life, as opposed to somebody who might sheepishly realize they do like going to the Drafthouse, but are going to behave better next time.
Again, not at all. If the patron really thinks she was wronged, she can sue to try to get back money for mental duress, legal fees, etc. Good luck with that, though.
There very well could be a jury if the lady feels she was wronged. An extra $5.00 to the small claims court in Texas will get her that privilege, no matter how small the claim.
Rules of evidence, laws vs. facts, etc. are very different in Texas small claims court. It's almost more like arbitration in some ways. Anyway, she seemed to be trying to say she was using a flashlight. I'm sure she could change her story again.
Right, which is why they chucked her out sans refund, instead of just telling the other customers there was nothing to be done.
You seem to be completely fixated on some supposed god-given right to a refund. There is no legal, moral, or ethical reason why they should give her a refund.
I think you've completely missed several good points made by others, including that rewarding this sort of behavior will lead to its increase.
But even if all that's left is bald disagreement, and you actually, you know, really wanted them to change the policy to meet your strict moral criteria, you h
That's awesome. Their PSAs work so well that even jerks like you who had probably never heard of them before now know that you'll get chucked out on your ear for behavior you probably consider perfectly normal. I'm perfectly fine with you and your cellphone staying the hell away from the Alamo.
I don't know whether your ineducable or merely ignorant, but there are costs, not just direct costs, but stress and the possibility of violence, for theater employees to actually do the right thing and kick disruptive patrons out.
It is perfectly reasonable to try to assign as much of these costs to the perpetrators as possible. While it is difficult (though not impossible) to sue them for breach of contract, it is plenty easy to just not give them their money back and have them try to sue you.
I'd love to be on that jury...
The origin of the meme "the customer is always right" is not your completely unthoughtful notion that the customer needs to be on a higher footing than the business for some unknown humanitarian/communist reason. No, the origin of that meme is that the business wants to do everything possible to make the customer happy so the customer comes back.
But what if you actually don't want a customer back?
You have proposed the idea of a ban, which others have repeatedly pointed out is completely unworkable. Have you ever actually been to a busy theater? Do you know how many employees it takes to actually take tickets, etc.? Do you know how hard it would be to keep a violator out?
Why should the theater waste time and money on this "ban", when it already did the customer a huge favor by not having her arrested for disruptive behavior, and when simply keeping her money will actually have positive benefits for her behavior in the future?
I certainly hope you don't have any kids, or that the little monsters stay far, far away from me and my family. In fact, it's probably best for all concerned if you stay completely away from Texas. If you think this theater is obnoxious for not tolerating bad behavior, you haven't seen anything yet.
The contract provisions were spelled out in multiple places.
The person in question was informed verbally (warned twice) of the contract provisions.
Then the contract was enforced.
IMHO, they did her a huge favor. Many people spend orders of magnitude more than $9.00 on the simple lesson that contracts are meaningful, and here you are excoriating a business which provides this simple lesson at a bargain basement price.
Much simpler, puts the burden where it belongs, and (slightly) recompenses the theater for the burden of having to throw her ass out on the street.
See, we all got that, but your argument is plain wrong.
My wife and I won't go anywhere else but the Alamo, because all the other theaters suck, because all the other theaters have this self-created tension because they're trying to adhere to the policy that "the customer is always right."
Well, guess what? Not all the customers are right.
If they had given this bitch her cash back, she might have come back and bothered another theater full of patrons later. What about them? You think (if you could call it that) the theater management is behaving like asshats; I know they are just trying to help ensure a better environment for the next time that bitch decides to go to the movies.
It's 18 years old. If you don't care to know anything about existing languages, why would having newer ones bother you?
One zit-faced 13 year old gets to play for free, and that will "change the face of gaming as we know it?"
Now you keep saying rude shit like "That's your problem." "Get your mind off section 11." "Still your problem."
In short, you have been quite rude and snide on multiple occasions. AND YOU STILL HAVEN'T EXPLAINED WHY IT'S APPENDIX C OF THE LICENSE THAT APPLIES, AND NOT THE NON-OPEN-SOURCE PART.
But let's get past that.
The only "open source" parts of the license are described in Appendixes A-C. Appendix A and B don't apply, so it must be appendix C. By the text of the appendix itself, that only applies to certain files:
So for this to work as you claim it did, what must have happened is that you must have (a) registered to get the software (which I'm not going to do and which you steadfastly refused to believe must be done to get the software for the longest time); (b) run their (proprietary?) program that puts together the SOC (which I don't see in your tarball and I apparently can't run without getting it from Lattice); and (c) THAT PROGRAM must have "output" those files by simply copying them from their initial install place to the output.
IF all that happened (if those files are considered "output" of their proprietary tool) THEN I can believe that you can legitimately call them open source and redistribute them.
But THEY don't explain that and YOU didn't explain that either, and the header on the file certainly doesn't indicate that it was run through their tool, or that their open source license applies, and neither does anything else in the tarball that I see. It is not a "generated" file in the normal sense of the word, so if that is how it becomes open source, I think you could have done a much better job addressing that.
Of course, neither fixing your documentation to explain why the license applies nor explaining it nicely could possibly be as much fun as simply berating people who don't stand a chance of being able to understand how you got there from the limited information you provided. It's assholes like you who give open source a bad name.
To the extent that the file header is correct, it doesn't match open source principles, and what he is saying is bullshit.
To the extent that the header is incorrect -- well, I'll reserve judgment on that. BTW, it is you who have been strongly asserting you know all about the license. I can't be "wrong" because I haven't figured it out yet. I also can't be the only one in this boat, or I wouldn't have been modded up. But go ahead and keep telling me how stupid I am, that's fine. And while you're at it, keep directing me to irrelevant sections of the license, not explaining the steps that mean that it really works, and responding to irrelevant side-comments that have nothing to do with the real question.
Thanks.
But only if those particular files are "generated" by a copy. They seem to be available at Lattice for registered users. I can't download them; perhaps you have a cookie set.
Are you listening to yourself? You act like I can't read and have to be spoon-fed (which may well be true), but that's completely crazy. Why the hell would somebody explicitly point out section 11 if it didn't apply?
What's disturbing about it? It's purely factual, and asks a question I would like to know the answer to. And the answer may well be what you say, because they do go out of their way to claim that the thing is "open", but that's not the feel I personally get from reading either the source header or the license file.
There are legitimate things that gpl lovers and bsd lovers can agree to disagree about, but unless you can legitimately explain how a file can both meet the open source definition and be marked "confidential" please STFU.
https://www.latticesemi.com/account/login.cfm
Of course, them being lawyers, this discussion will probably be closed by the time they respond, but if not, I'll post the response here.
to: lic_admn@latticesemi.com
Dear sir or madam:
It has recently come to my attention that a public source code repository contains LatticeMico32 processor RTL files that have a Lattice copyright notice that claims the files are "confidential and proprietary software". For example, see:
https://github.com/milkymist/milkymist/blob/master/cores/lm32/rtl/lm32_icache.v
In conversation with the developers, they claim that section 11 of this license applies to those files:
https://github.com/milkymist/milkymist/blob/master/LICENSE.LATTICE
However, they have offered no reasoning as to why they believe section 11 applies. The headers of the files in question do not claim they are licensed according to any sort of open-source exception; quite the opposite.
The LatticeMico32 looks interesting for my own project; please advise if these sources really can be freely distributed under section 11 of this license, whether it is Appendix A or Appendix B that applies to that redistribution, and whether I should update the file headers to reflect that fact upon redistribution.
Thank you for your time and attention to this matter.
Best regards,
xxxxxxxxx
I'm not going to spend any more time on that license. If you think it says what you say it says, spell it out for me, by chapter and verse. You can't just say that section 11 applies without saying why. Or alternatively, point me to a conversation with Lattice where they said it's all OK.
Color me naive/fearful/stupid/untrusting/whatever, but when I see a license that covers both open source components and non-open source components, and a source file with a copyright notice that doesn't say anything about the code inside being under any kind of open source license, and in fact starts off by saying "This confidential and proprietary software ...", why the hell would I assume that the "open-source" parts of the license apply to that particular source file?
In any case, unless there's something I'm completely missing, it looks like the milkymist guys were not supposed to share the code that I pulled that header from:
Apparently, according to section 12 of the license, some of their tools will spit out code that is redistributable under an open source license, and if you use their tools to do that, then you can share the output. The license for that is in appendix C of that document, but it applies to "Software that identifies itself as licensed under the Lattice Semiconductor Corporation Open Source License Agreement."
Did you see any such self-identification as open source in that header file? Me neither.
Before bothering with that, I actually tried figuring out the license by looking at Lattice, but other than reassuring verbiage about free, I came up blank when looking for an actual license:
http://www.latticesemi.com/products/intellectualproperty/ipcores/mico32/mico32opensourcelicensing.cfm?source=sidebar
And, of course, most of the Lattice junk in the source tarball, and the documentation at the milkymist site, can't even be retrieved from Lattice itself without registering and executing some sort of license agreement:
http://www.latticesemi.com/dynamic/index.cfm?fuseaction=view_documents&sloc=01-01-08-11-48&source=sidebar
Lame. BTW, the main article links to http://www.milkymist.org/.
Which links to the SOC code page.