I'm not particularly happy about my chances of legally reusing code that starts like this:
// COPYRIGHT NOTICE // Copyright 2006 (c) Lattice Semiconductor Corporation // ALL RIGHTS RESERVED // This confidential and proprietary software may be used only as authorised by // a licensing agreement from Lattice Semiconductor Corporation. // The entire notice above must be reproduced on all authorized copies and // copies may only be made to the extent permitted by a licensing agreement from // Lattice Semiconductor Corporation. // // Lattice Semiconductor Corporation TEL : 1-800-Lattice (USA and Canada) // 5555 NE Moore Court 408-826-6000 (other locations) // Hillsboro, OR 97124 web : http://www.latticesemi.com/ // U.S.A email: techsupport@latticesemi.com
I've seen lots of people recommend Python, which I heartily agree with.
For normal Windows stuff (including COM/OLE/whatevertheheckitscallednow automation) you'll definitely want Mark Hammond's py2in32.
Even so, you'll be scratching your head and reinventing a few wheels if you want to do automation of arbitrary preexisting programs.
Last time I did any Windows automation (which was a long time ago because I stay as far away from windows as possible), I used the PyWinAuto module, which lets you interact with other programs quite handily from inside your Python script.
Yeah, but about $60 million of that is Android. Seriously, they're bleeding dumbphone business, and they need to move up the value chain before they become another Nokia. Don't be fooled, though -- they make a lot more handsets than Apple does, and love Android because it lets them do so for more than $30/handset. The thing is that ZTE's margins will never look like Apple's, but Apple needs to decide if it's going to cede the low end to ZTE, or allow its margins to look like ZTE's (
Well, according to Motorola's CEO, it seems like all Apple has to do to derail Android is to actually allow a carrier to sell the iPhone.....
BTW, last quarter on AT&T definitely had something to do with entrenchment -- they sold a lot of $0, $19, and $49 iPhones. Which just goes to show that there really is a price-sensitive market out there. When AT&T, which had the iPhone forever, can sell more than Verizon when Verizon brings it out (and it was known before the start of the quarter that Verizon was bringing it out, so it's not really apples and oranges), you know something squirrelly is up.
And you still don't get it that most companies would love to have HTC's problem of not yet catching up to Apple in total profit. "Not doing so great" describes Motorola, but not the phone businesses of HTC, ZTE, Samsung, or Huawei.
And instead of ever bothering to address my assertion that this legal fight is too late to help derail Android, you still keep harping on about profits, which, by your reckoning would seem to imply that Apple doesn't even need to worry about Android at all, because Android is for losers. Funny how Apple seems fixated on it, then.
And finally, you never saw fit to provide the more focused explanation I asked for:
Explain why a lame look and feel trademark and design patent lawsuit would make HTC, ZTE, or Samsung just throw up their hands and say "oh, Apple's right! Our bad. We're exiting the business."
Obviously, that's because you can't. No CEO of any of those companies is going to give up Android easily at this point in time.
I never even implied that Apple isn't making even more money hand over fist than the other companies. Still, in terms of growth, while Apple profit doubled, HTC profit tripled.
So, instead of properly answering the meat of my comment (that it's too late for Apple, et al, to successfully slow down Android's adoption via some sort of IP tax) you first try to show that only losers sell Android. Then confronted with evidence that that's a complete troll, you now pull out the "but Apple's making more money" card. While true, it's still a troll that completely misses my point.
Apple may still continue to suck most of the profit out of the cellphone market, but unless you can do something other than provide links to articles that are completely irrelevant to my point, you're still just pointing at wookies. Explain why a lame look and feel trademark and design patent lawsuit would make HTC, ZTE, or Samsung just throw up their hands and say "oh, Apple's right! Our bad. We're exiting the business."
That article is 8 months old and doesn't even discuss HTC and ZTE, and doesn't dive into the significant positive contribution to Samsung's bottom line that smartphones appear to be making. Are you ignorant or trolling?
the problem is that these companies currently can't charge your state's sales tax at the time of purchase unless they have a physical presence in the state.
No, the problem is that they don't have to charge your state's sales tax at the time of purchase unless they have a physical presence in the state, so in order to compete with other mail order outlets that aren't going to do that, they won't.
No state is going to complain if an out-of-state company correctly collects and remits sales tax for shipments going into the state.
The juror questionnaire (so the lawyers can figure out who to strike) has a lot of personal questions that are designed to try to be proxies to figure out things like racism/sexism.
So if you really aren't interested in being a juror on a particular trial, you can do worse than to simply list your religion as Branch Davidian.
why this isn't the exact same as the MS Java mess which everyone was cheering when Sun shut it down?
From a legal perspective, Java wasn't open-sourced back in the day. Microsoft had a copy of the source and a contract, and violated the contract, by changing the source to make it incompatible and still calling it java. Google has written a VM from the ground up which is different than what MS did. Sort of like Tivoization -- RMS didn't like it, but his license didn't allow it.
From a political perspective, what google's doing is about making the software work well on the platform, not about introducing deliberate incompatibilities.
And call me weird, but I still don't get why FOSS fans run to the defense of Google. They aren't letting you have the Android 3.0 source, they've historically kept the best bits like their file system (built on FOSS) to themselves to give them an advantage, and they've purposely gone out of their way to disallow any GPL V3 which means Android is most likely gonna end up TiVo'd, yet the FOSS fans run to their rescue? I just don't get it.
Because they have let us have the source to the bestselling smartphone platform ever, and we expect they will hand over Honeycomb source when they're happy with it (just as they did with the previous versions), and because the "O" is FOSS encompasses a huge community, some members of which think that if you want to share your source, that's awesome, but if you want to keep something locked up, that's OK too, and that RMS is a dickhead who seeks to divide the community while pretending to unite it.
Swallowing the claim that the open source world is worse off because of google's actions requires a significant helping of RMS's kool-aide. Making the claim can be done either with RMS's kool-aide, or with astroturf money from Microsoft.
Any company shipping a low-end phone that actually runs Android now will be able to ship one that runs Android a lot better within a year.
Once a handset company has invested in porting Android and learning how to port Android, that company has a lot less effort porting Android to its next phone.
Already 30% of cellphone users carry smartphones, so total smartphone growth will slow eventually.
But Android has been out for awhile now, and is a known quantity. And yet, in the 3 months measured by the comscore report, the growth in Android users was 3.25 times the growth in iPhone users.
Android growth could slow down a lot. Doesn't matter. They'll still be on top for a long time.
I don't do much development or admin on the laptop. It's basically just the Linux kernel and a browser and a few free and non-free codec and browser plugins, so I don't really care how well it runs "GNU".
Do they actually have the right to do close down Android? I thought every major component was Open Sourced?
Open source != GPL. And they haven't announced any intention of closing down Android, just that they're doing some cleanup of internal code before handing it over to the world.
I, for one, will certainly be bad-mounting Google until they change this. I was a vocal Android supporter until this morning, when I read this article. And I don't even own an Android device.
Go for it! Google thrust open source into the mainstream by delivering the dominant phone OS, but we should forget about all that and whine that sometimes the source code release lags the hardware release because they have different deadlines!
And also copyright works different in various countries, for example in my country we don't have a fair use clause.
Obviously, my analysis was extremely US-centric. I can see how it could get very messy with cross-border lawsuits in countries with different caselaw, and won't even pretend that I've been exposed to, much less thought about, all the different issues involved.
Unless it is considered to be a derivative work which takes us bak to the issue whether linking creates a derivative work or not .
I have never actually disputed that the act of linking creates a derivative work. My contention is that, if a derivative work is created, that derivative work is the linked product that actually contains the code it is derived from.
So, in development, I could (for example) create a program that uses GNU readline. It may be that I am creating a derivative work when I link my code to readline for testing, but the GPL explicitly allows me to do that, and even if it didn't, reasoning like that in Sega would almost certainly allow it.
If I ship just my code, without shipping readline, and let the customer link it, then I am off the hook, because the only portion of readline that "exists", as it were, in my code by itself, is the technical interface to its API, and all those decisions I showed you said that the actual interface that I coded to (the API) is not protectible by copyright, so to the extent my code is "derived" from the interface, it is not a derivative work of anything that is copyrightable.
Now it is possible, though unlikely, given the tenor of those decisions, that, absent a license, the customer commits a copyright violation when he links the code together, in which case I would be responsible for contributory infringement. However, this will never make it to court, either, as the GPL iteself explicitly grants the customer the absolute right to link readline with whatever he wants and run the resulting program, as long as he himself doesn't distribute the results. No underlying infringement == no contributory infringement.
The only party that could conceivably be in any real trouble is somebody who combines my code with readline (thus recreating the derivative work) and ships the code together. There is no question that, if this third party is some innocent distributor, that the FSF will cut them some slack, but that if they are deliberately misusing the GPLed software this way for profit, the FSF will have them for lunch. At this point, the FSF could try to go after me to set a contributory infringement example, and they might actually have some chance of success if I accepted payment from the bundler for the software. If I'm just giving closed source software away to all comers, however, they won't stand a chance and are smart enough that they won't even try.
Also, Google could be sued by anyone who created code that Google is using in Honeycomb (Andoid 3) outside the kernel, as they're refusing to release the source for it.
AFAIK, google's careful to keep the GPL away from any code above the kernel.
Google is already engaging in a compromise solution by releasing the source when they think it is ready, and it is not provable that your suggestion is any better from their perspective. A license that prohibits use in commercial products doesn't meet anybody's definition of open, and if huge sections of code are going to change, then early release might not be that useful for any audience except their direct competition Apple and RIM. It would certainly be extra work for google to maintain this differently licensed tree, and it's not clear to me there would be any benefit to them -- the contents of the whine would change, but the volume would remain constant.
I'll admit I haven't paid close attention to the previous release delays between when Google and a partner ships Android on a phone, and when it hits their open source repository. If this is a normal trend of theirs, then overall I'd say it's not very open.
This is a normal trend of theirs. Using this trend, google has dominated the smartphone market, by giving away (really giving, not forcing people to give back) software, including full source code. It's open source, but it's not developed in the bazaar model, and you fully admit "I think if Google moved away from the early and often mentality, it would help the Android image greatly" that it is in google's interest not to develop in this model.
It seems like the rest of your post is a rant that google let their partner Motorola ship the XOOM before the software was fully ready. Welcome to the real world of product development.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not particularly happy about my chances of legally
reusing code that starts like this:
// COPYRIGHT NOTICE
// Copyright 2006 (c) Lattice Semiconductor Corporation
// ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
// This confidential and proprietary software may be used only as authorised by
// a licensing agreement from Lattice Semiconductor Corporation.
// The entire notice above must be reproduced on all authorized copies and
// copies may only be made to the extent permitted by a licensing agreement from
// Lattice Semiconductor Corporation.
//
// Lattice Semiconductor Corporation TEL : 1-800-Lattice (USA and Canada)
// 5555 NE Moore Court 408-826-6000 (other locations)
// Hillsboro, OR 97124 web : http://www.latticesemi.com/
// U.S.A email: techsupport@latticesemi.com
s/py2in32/pywin32/
For normal Windows stuff (including COM/OLE/whatevertheheckitscallednow automation) you'll definitely want Mark Hammond's py2in32.
Even so, you'll be scratching your head and reinventing a few wheels if you want to do automation of arbitrary preexisting programs.
Last time I did any Windows automation (which was a long time ago because I stay as far away from windows as possible), I used the PyWinAuto module, which lets you interact with other programs quite handily from inside your Python script.
Of course, this being slashdot, I didn't RTFA.
Yes, but ZTE is hungry for more smartphone business. And they are going to get it. And no stupid Apple look and feel patent will stand in their way.
For some value of lowend. But this is a huge market, with no iTunes lock-in, so it won't look like the iPod.
Because of the discount they won't be able to keep up this quarter...
Yeah, but about $60 million of that is Android. Seriously, they're bleeding dumbphone business, and they need to move up the value chain before they become another Nokia. Don't be fooled, though -- they make a lot more handsets than Apple does, and love Android because it lets them do so for more than $30/handset. The thing is that ZTE's margins will never look like Apple's, but Apple needs to decide if it's going to cede the low end to ZTE, or allow its margins to look like ZTE's ( Well, according to Motorola's CEO, it seems like all Apple has to do to derail Android is to actually allow a carrier to sell the iPhone.....
Funny how it doesn't work that way in Europe. Maybe last quarter on Verizon had something to do with pent-up demand?
BTW, last quarter on AT&T definitely had something to do with entrenchment -- they sold a lot of $0, $19, and $49 iPhones. Which just goes to show that there really is a price-sensitive market out there. When AT&T, which had the iPhone forever, can sell more than Verizon when Verizon brings it out (and it was known before the start of the quarter that Verizon was bringing it out, so it's not really apples and oranges), you know something squirrelly is up.
And you still don't get it that most companies would love to have HTC's problem of not yet catching up to Apple in total profit. "Not doing so great" describes Motorola, but not the phone businesses of HTC, ZTE, Samsung, or Huawei.
And instead of ever bothering to address my assertion that this legal fight is too late to help derail Android, you still keep harping on about profits, which, by your reckoning would seem to imply that Apple doesn't even need to worry about Android at all, because Android is for losers. Funny how Apple seems fixated on it, then.
And finally, you never saw fit to provide the more focused explanation I asked for:
Obviously, that's because you can't. No CEO of any of those companies is going to give up Android easily at this point in time.
So, instead of properly answering the meat of my comment (that it's too late for Apple, et al, to successfully slow down Android's adoption via some sort of IP tax) you first try to show that only losers sell Android. Then confronted with evidence that that's a complete troll, you now pull out the "but Apple's making more money" card. While true, it's still a troll that completely misses my point.
Apple may still continue to suck most of the profit out of the cellphone market, but unless you can do something other than provide links to articles that are completely irrelevant to my point, you're still just pointing at wookies. Explain why a lame look and feel trademark and design patent lawsuit would make HTC, ZTE, or Samsung just throw up their hands and say "oh, Apple's right! Our bad. We're exiting the business."
That article is 8 months old and doesn't even discuss HTC and ZTE, and doesn't dive into the significant positive contribution to Samsung's bottom line that smartphones appear to be making. Are you ignorant or trolling?
Big vendors are making money hand over fist with Android.
Big vendors who are used to inevitable patent fights are making money hand over fist with Android.
Big vendors who have patents of their own are making money hand over fist with Android.
While the final price of Android won't be known until the dust settles, it's not going to be high enough to do Apple, Microsoft, or Oracle any good.
No, the problem is that they don't have to charge your state's sales tax at the time of purchase unless they have a physical presence in the state, so in order to compete with other mail order outlets that aren't going to do that, they won't.
No state is going to complain if an out-of-state company correctly collects and remits sales tax for shipments going into the state.
The juror questionnaire (so the lawyers can figure out who to strike) has a lot of personal questions that are designed to try to be proxies to figure out things like racism/sexism.
So if you really aren't interested in being a juror on a particular trial, you can do worse than to simply list your religion as Branch Davidian.
From a legal perspective, Java wasn't open-sourced back in the day. Microsoft had a copy of the source and a contract, and violated the contract, by changing the source to make it incompatible and still calling it java. Google has written a VM from the ground up which is different than what MS did. Sort of like Tivoization -- RMS didn't like it, but his license didn't allow it.
From a political perspective, what google's doing is about making the software work well on the platform, not about introducing deliberate incompatibilities.
Because they have let us have the source to the bestselling smartphone platform ever, and we expect they will hand over Honeycomb source when they're happy with it (just as they did with the previous versions), and because the "O" is FOSS encompasses a huge community, some members of which think that if you want to share your source, that's awesome, but if you want to keep something locked up, that's OK too, and that RMS is a dickhead who seeks to divide the community while pretending to unite it.
Swallowing the claim that the open source world is worse off because of google's actions requires a significant helping of RMS's kool-aide. Making the claim can be done either with RMS's kool-aide, or with astroturf money from Microsoft.
Once a handset company has invested in porting Android and learning how to port Android, that company has a lot less effort porting Android to its next phone.
Already 30% of cellphone users carry smartphones, so total smartphone growth will slow eventually.
But Android has been out for awhile now, and is a known quantity. And yet, in the 3 months measured by the comscore report, the growth in Android users was 3.25 times the growth in iPhone users.
Android growth could slow down a lot. Doesn't matter. They'll still be on top for a long time.
but not necessarily the consumer.
Since when did google ever do any bullying?
Oh, you mean Microsoft?
They're just bullying in a different way now.
I don't do much development or admin on the laptop. It's basically just the Linux kernel and a browser and a few free and non-free codec and browser plugins, so I don't really care how well it runs "GNU".
but I kept running out of wire.
Open source != GPL. And they haven't announced any intention of closing down Android, just that they're doing some cleanup of internal code before handing it over to the world.
Go for it! Google thrust open source into the mainstream by delivering the dominant phone OS, but we should forget about all that and whine that sometimes the source code release lags the hardware release because they have different deadlines!
Talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth.
Obviously, my analysis was extremely US-centric. I can see how it could get very messy with cross-border lawsuits in countries with different caselaw, and won't even pretend that I've been exposed to, much less thought about, all the different issues involved.
I have never actually disputed that the act of linking creates a derivative work. My contention is that, if a derivative work is created, that derivative work is the linked product that actually contains the code it is derived from.
So, in development, I could (for example) create a program that uses GNU readline. It may be that I am creating a derivative work when I link my code to readline for testing, but the GPL explicitly allows me to do that, and even if it didn't, reasoning like that in Sega would almost certainly allow it.
If I ship just my code, without shipping readline, and let the customer link it, then I am off the hook, because the only portion of readline that "exists", as it were, in my code by itself, is the technical interface to its API, and all those decisions I showed you said that the actual interface that I coded to (the API) is not protectible by copyright, so to the extent my code is "derived" from the interface, it is not a derivative work of anything that is copyrightable.
Now it is possible, though unlikely, given the tenor of those decisions, that, absent a license, the customer commits a copyright violation when he links the code together, in which case I would be responsible for contributory infringement. However, this will never make it to court, either, as the GPL iteself explicitly grants the customer the absolute right to link readline with whatever he wants and run the resulting program, as long as he himself doesn't distribute the results. No underlying infringement == no contributory infringement.
The only party that could conceivably be in any real trouble is somebody who combines my code with readline (thus recreating the derivative work) and ships the code together. There is no question that, if this third party is some innocent distributor, that the FSF will cut them some slack, but that if they are deliberately misusing the GPLed software this way for profit, the FSF will have them for lunch. At this point, the FSF could try to go after me to set a contributory infringement example, and they might actually have some chance of success if I accepted payment from the bundler for the software. If I'm just giving closed source software away to all comers, however, they won't stand a chance and are smart enough that they won't even try.
AFAIK, google's careful to keep the GPL away from any code above the kernel.
Google is already engaging in a compromise solution by releasing the source when they think it is ready, and it is not provable that your suggestion is any better from their perspective. A license that prohibits use in commercial products doesn't meet anybody's definition of open, and if huge sections of code are going to change, then early release might not be that useful for any audience except their direct competition Apple and RIM. It would certainly be extra work for google to maintain this differently licensed tree, and it's not clear to me there would be any benefit to them -- the contents of the whine would change, but the volume would remain constant.
This is a normal trend of theirs. Using this trend, google has dominated the smartphone market, by giving away (really giving, not forcing people to give back) software, including full source code. It's open source, but it's not developed in the bazaar model, and you fully admit "I think if Google moved away from the early and often mentality, it would help the Android image greatly" that it is in google's interest not to develop in this model.
It seems like the rest of your post is a rant that google let their partner Motorola ship the XOOM before the software was fully ready. Welcome to the real world of product development.