Ah. That's still insanely stupid, but barely less so.
The concept that copyright owners have control of derivative works is a fairly important part of copyright law. The GPL just give people an automatic license to distribute those works under.
The problem with SCO's argument is that people who create deriviate works are not in control of them anyway. If you create one, both you and the original copyright owner are in complete control of it, to do anything with it, you both have to agree. This is obvious, it would be insane to let people modify a work in any way and suddenly they control all the copyrights.
And, yes, it's completely insane for SCO to be making any argument of this type, as SCO has a license that apparently says 'If at any time a work is a derivative of our work, all versions of that work are under our complete control.', which copyright law certainly doen't allow at all.
The ability to restrict derivate works is such a hard and fast rule of copyright law I have no idea where SCO is going with this. Copyright owners execute control over copyright works all the time. For example, George Lucas lets people write Star Wars' books, and they have to follow certain rules. He owns the copyright for the universe and all the characters in it, he can set the rules. It would be absurd for a writer who has permission to write such a book writing one outside those bounds, and then claiming the contract was somehow invalid and hence he can do whatever he wants, because the contract lets him 'write a book'.
In fact, it's rather surreal, because if all their claims were true, they would have no claim on the Linux kernel, even it was somehow a derivative work of theirs.
But nothing in the GPL does alter anyone's rights under USC 17 to use the work.
And asking for limited rights over derivated works in return for allowing such derivated works to be made is a fairly standard setup. It happens all the time, although I'm not privy to any specific example. But, um, to make up an example, the Harry Potter movies. They are a derivative work of the book, and as such require permission. I'm sure part of this permission was that the author gets limited control of the end result.
What SCO is saying possibly applies to EULAs that restrict things like reinstalling on a different computer, but the GPL is not a EULA, and does not alter in any way rights that people have. People simply do not have the right to edit a work and redistribute it, which is the only thing the GPL puts restrictions on.
Whitewolf touched on this, but 'you may redistribute this software' is simply not a valid contract under the law. Even if everyone knows exactly what they are doing and want to sign a completely one-sided piece of paper, they are not valid contracts and you cannot be held to them.
That's why you get houses sold for things like 'For the total of one dollar and other valuable considerations...'. You can't legally create a contract giving a house away, it's impossible. You have to exchange it for some good or service or something. It could be 'for a single strand of hair' or 'mowing the grass at the (to be his as soon as he finishes) house', or whatever, but lawyers usually have no sense of humor and sell things for a dollar.
You know, that 'consideration' thing is one I hadn't thought about. The consideration for copying GPL code is that you GPL it. While minor sections of contracts can be voided, the fricking consideration can't be. Without a both sides gaining something, there's no contract in the first place. Void a consideration, and exactly the same thing happens, no contract.
It's like an employment contract. The non-compete clause can voided, lots of clauses can be, but if for some reason the employees' paycheck was voided (For example, he was to be paid in illegal drugs.), then the entire contract has to voided, because he gets no consideration from the contract and hence doesn't have to keep working for free.
The GPL says 'You can copy this code for free, and in return you have to give the community (and, hence, me) back the code.'. If you strike the second part, it's no longer a contract and completely void, as you gain nothing from letting them copy your code.
I fail to see how requiring less from someone than the law requires can be illegal. If it was illegal to sublicense out your work, pretty much every single book, TV show, movie, everythign, is a copyright violation. No writer prints their own books, no production studio prints their own DVDs.
Saying the GPL is illegal is like saying leases that let you do specific types of remodeling are illegal, because, under the law, you can't remodel a house you don't own. Well, obviously you can if the owner lets you! Likewise, copying Linux CDs is illegal under the law, but the copyright owner lets us.
In fact, copyright explicitly says that the copies must be authorized by the copyright owner. I don't know in what world that translates to 'A contract with a copyright owner giving you permission to make copies is illegal under copyright law.', but I suspect it's not this one.
Specifically, the 'derivative work' clause has always been the weakest part of the GPL. It's entirely possible that it's legal to 'library-tize' a GPL program and call it from a non-GPL program, despite the GPL explicting saying you can't do that, because linking to a library may not legally be a 'derivative work' of the library, and hence doesn't have to follow the GPL anyway.
But that's not incredibly important in this case. The key point to the GPL is that you can distribute it under said terms, as long as you don't change the terms. It's incredibly easy and clear to understand, and if the GPL is invalid, the judge would simply say 'Okay, you're going to have to come up with new, better terms for this.', and not throw copyright out the window.
The only contract that would really even be possible to throw out would be one that had *many* requirements, and a minor one was invalid, or alternately one that had so few requirements that didn't really benefit the author. (Something like notification-ware, for example, saying you can put up mirrors of software if you notify the owner. The intend of notification-ware is clearly to distribute the program freely, the notification is not actually payment. Note I'm not saying such contracts *aren't* legal, I'm saying that if the 'notification requirement' clause *wasn't* legal for whatever crazy reason, the judge would probably just decide you could mirror the software freely, as that doesn't really hurt the author.)
Frankly, I'm having a little difficulty figuring exactly why any part of the GPL would be thrown out anyway. Despite SCO's wackass claims, there is absolutly nothing in copyright law that stops you from allowing other people to make copies of your work, and in fact that's basically counter to the entire point of copyright law.
You can't give the voter a copy, that can be used to verify who he voted for. Which sounds good, until you realize proof of who you voted for just leads to vote buying.
I don't know why you're for punched cards, though. Print out ballots with an OCRable name, and printer number. Have a ballot box that scans the card and displays what's on it, and then keeps it inside. (Or lets you press 'reject' and dumps it into the 'rejected' box and doesn't count it.) Also it should print a code on on the back saying what machine read it and what it thinks it read.
Then you have five data points: Electronic records of all ballots that were printed, electronic records of all ballots that were submitted, electronic records of all ballots that were rejected, the physical ballots that were rejected, and the physical ballots that were rejected.
And, yes, before announcing the result, they should rescan all the cards. Even the rejected ones. Even so, it would be faster than currently, with punch cards or fill in the circle cards that require human intervention. These are printed by machines in specially OCRable fonts, and what's more there's only a limited number of text strings to recognize.
Five data point, and they damn well better match. The only thing that might be off is people who print ballots and then walk out without submitting them either way, but, you know what? I'd make that a crime, and not let people do it. You cannot make off with printed ballots, you must return them. You can say not to count it, but you have to return it.(That sounds extreme, but realize some places have manditory voting...I'm just mandating you *finish* voting, or at least cancel out your vote properly.)
There's basically no way of tampering with it, expecially if the three electronic totals were constantly recorded offsite.
The only thing I haven't figured out is write-in ballots, but in most elections those are negligable. I would, however, say that you cannot write in someone already on the ballot, and thus 9,999 times out of a 10,000 the write-ins couldn't possibly matter anyway.
Also there should be some physical security. Voting booths should have to be reset at the sign-in table, when you say who you are. They should also hand you the ballots to insert in the printer there. If you misvote and print an incorrect ballot, you have to submit it and choose reject, a red light comes on, and you have to walk out and go back to the table and physically get another ballot from them. They should have to push a button to reset the booth for every vote you print, *and* hand you the ballot themselves. I find it really crazy that if I stole some ballots, I could just stick them under my shirt and carry them into the voting booth and dump them all in. It should be one vote per person. Heck, it should be one vote per entrance-to-the-booth.
I point you to the SUPERCEDE command. Yes, it's disabled on most servers on Usenet due to forges, but hopefully you trust people in your organization not to run around forging SUPERCEDEs from other users.
However, Usenet is an insanely crappy idea for this. The correct solution is insanely obvious: You need some sort of system that will store documents online that people can access easily from their machine. Gee, I wonder what could do that.
As for worries about 'servers going down'...um, first of all, servers shouldn't be randomly going down, and second, that's why you mirror them, dumbass. Stick a 586 running Apache on Linux in each building, run rsync every few hours. Make sure each document has a 'link to definative version' that links to the furthest upstream point for that document so if people really really need the newest version they can get it.
If the servers are down, yes, it seems nice that you might have a local copy...but WHAT IF YOU DON'T? D'oh! That's the lamest solution I've ever heard of. And how exactly are you supposed to know when to update?
Um, because the 'dozens of countries' were, in fact, being set up as Soviet puppet states?
Good god, where were you during the cold war? Name a single communist country that wasn't set up with the 'help' of Soviet Russia. You can't, can you?
That's because no one in power would willingly convert a country to communism. The only 'communism' countries have been where the Soviets took over, and those didn't 'degenerate' into slavery and mass murder, those started as slavery and mass murder. In fact, the slavery and mass murder usually predated the communism.
Not that I think communism is a useful idea right now, it will only work when there is no competition over resources, and that will only happen when there is no scarcity. But there has never been an honestly communist government that I can think of...communism was either there as a result of the Soviets trying to take over, or there as a result of a revolutionary trying to appeal to the masses. And if it was the second, they eventually got overthrown by the US, joined the USSR, and/or didn't turn out communist at all once the revolution was over.
To get an honestly communist government nowadays, you'd need revolutionaries as pure-hearted as the American revolutionaries, willing to seize power and then let it go. In these days of American (and previously, Russian) meddling in revolutions, I find it increasingly unlikely that would happen.
It's better than the really stupid warnings, like 'Cigarettes contain Carbon Monoxide', which has to be the dumbest thing I've ever seen.
I mean, carbon monoxide is probably the least dangeous thing in cigarette smoke. You'd have to be pretty damn stupid to die from carbon monoxide in cigarette smoke.
What the FUCK are people talking about, 'commericalizing' the internet? What do you people think it is is NOW, run by magic fairy dust?
It's an agreement by a bunch of commerical entities, and, yes, some non-profit and eduational entities, to work together following certain rules. (And everyone is paying for access.)
In fact, one of the few government interference points is, suprise suprise, the thing that's giving Verisign the monopoly...ICANN not only claims to be able to dictate where the root servers are, and who is in control of them, but the government actually runs several of them.
The non-commercial aspects of the internet is one of the only things that kept Verisign's monopoly going in the first place! And there's no way in hell it actually wants it deregulated, instead, it wants to become 'owner' of this monopoly, instead of 'contractor paid to manage it'.
Basically, Verisign is a road construction and cleaning crew that's asking for deregulation of property ownership, and you people are falling for it hook, sink, sinker, and fishing rod. Property ownership already is privatized, and so is the internet. Yes, there are public parks and wildlife reserves, but that doesn't really change anything. Meanwhile, they're throwing all this nonsense around so they can start charging tolls on the public roads that they are paid by the government to maintain and build.
Verisign does not, has never, and will never own.com and.net, and they do not get to demand the right to inovate on them. They do not own the other root servers, or get to say who are the other root servers. They are not in charge in any way, they're the fucking maintence staff.
Re:Data labelling and ACID complience seem quite g
on
CNet on WinFS
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· Score: 1
You can get infinitely close to ACID complience incredibly easy on any OS.
You just need a program that renames the old version of the file, saves the new version, and then deletes the old.
At worse, you end up with no file by that name, and you have to hunt down what it renamed the old one as.
Any program that can possible cause you to lose your old (and new) data when saving new data is just broken.
Re:What about those of us
on
CNet on WinFS
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· Score: 1
I don't know in what universe any of this matters, as everyone's FAT is stored in the disk cache 90% of the time.
But, seriously, that's all I hear about, the fact you can pick up hookers and kill them. Like that's somehow worse than running over a work crew or gunning down random passerbys.
Slashdot Mirror
Which, of course, is a really stupid thing to do to a guilty person.
Well, at my fictional company, SPEWS has saved the world, twice, from being overrun by vampires. Since we're all making up unverifiable crap.
Please note the lack of the company name.
Maybe next time you won't support spam by giving money to such people.
The concept that copyright owners have control of derivative works is a fairly important part of copyright law. The GPL just give people an automatic license to distribute those works under.
The problem with SCO's argument is that people who create deriviate works are not in control of them anyway. If you create one, both you and the original copyright owner are in complete control of it, to do anything with it, you both have to agree. This is obvious, it would be insane to let people modify a work in any way and suddenly they control all the copyrights.
And, yes, it's completely insane for SCO to be making any argument of this type, as SCO has a license that apparently says 'If at any time a work is a derivative of our work, all versions of that work are under our complete control.', which copyright law certainly doen't allow at all.
The ability to restrict derivate works is such a hard and fast rule of copyright law I have no idea where SCO is going with this. Copyright owners execute control over copyright works all the time. For example, George Lucas lets people write Star Wars' books, and they have to follow certain rules. He owns the copyright for the universe and all the characters in it, he can set the rules. It would be absurd for a writer who has permission to write such a book writing one outside those bounds, and then claiming the contract was somehow invalid and hence he can do whatever he wants, because the contract lets him 'write a book'.
In fact, it's rather surreal, because if all their claims were true, they would have no claim on the Linux kernel, even it was somehow a derivative work of theirs.
And asking for limited rights over derivated works in return for allowing such derivated works to be made is a fairly standard setup. It happens all the time, although I'm not privy to any specific example. But, um, to make up an example, the Harry Potter movies. They are a derivative work of the book, and as such require permission. I'm sure part of this permission was that the author gets limited control of the end result.
What SCO is saying possibly applies to EULAs that restrict things like reinstalling on a different computer, but the GPL is not a EULA, and does not alter in any way rights that people have. People simply do not have the right to edit a work and redistribute it, which is the only thing the GPL puts restrictions on.
That's why you get houses sold for things like 'For the total of one dollar and other valuable considerations...'. You can't legally create a contract giving a house away, it's impossible. You have to exchange it for some good or service or something. It could be 'for a single strand of hair' or 'mowing the grass at the (to be his as soon as he finishes) house', or whatever, but lawyers usually have no sense of humor and sell things for a dollar.
Hence no judge would edit the GPL in that way.
It's like an employment contract. The non-compete clause can voided, lots of clauses can be, but if for some reason the employees' paycheck was voided (For example, he was to be paid in illegal drugs.), then the entire contract has to voided, because he gets no consideration from the contract and hence doesn't have to keep working for free.
The GPL says 'You can copy this code for free, and in return you have to give the community (and, hence, me) back the code.'. If you strike the second part, it's no longer a contract and completely void, as you gain nothing from letting them copy your code.
Saying the GPL is illegal is like saying leases that let you do specific types of remodeling are illegal, because, under the law, you can't remodel a house you don't own. Well, obviously you can if the owner lets you! Likewise, copying Linux CDs is illegal under the law, but the copyright owner lets us.
In fact, copyright explicitly says that the copies must be authorized by the copyright owner. I don't know in what world that translates to 'A contract with a copyright owner giving you permission to make copies is illegal under copyright law.', but I suspect it's not this one.
But that's not incredibly important in this case. The key point to the GPL is that you can distribute it under said terms, as long as you don't change the terms. It's incredibly easy and clear to understand, and if the GPL is invalid, the judge would simply say 'Okay, you're going to have to come up with new, better terms for this.', and not throw copyright out the window.
The only contract that would really even be possible to throw out would be one that had *many* requirements, and a minor one was invalid, or alternately one that had so few requirements that didn't really benefit the author. (Something like notification-ware, for example, saying you can put up mirrors of software if you notify the owner. The intend of notification-ware is clearly to distribute the program freely, the notification is not actually payment. Note I'm not saying such contracts *aren't* legal, I'm saying that if the 'notification requirement' clause *wasn't* legal for whatever crazy reason, the judge would probably just decide you could mirror the software freely, as that doesn't really hurt the author.)
Frankly, I'm having a little difficulty figuring exactly why any part of the GPL would be thrown out anyway. Despite SCO's wackass claims, there is absolutly nothing in copyright law that stops you from allowing other people to make copies of your work, and in fact that's basically counter to the entire point of copyright law.
Which actually works fairly well if you replace 'Gods' with 'the kernel'.
But, of course, that person was Linus.
I don't know why you're for punched cards, though. Print out ballots with an OCRable name, and printer number. Have a ballot box that scans the card and displays what's on it, and then keeps it inside. (Or lets you press 'reject' and dumps it into the 'rejected' box and doesn't count it.) Also it should print a code on on the back saying what machine read it and what it thinks it read.
Then you have five data points: Electronic records of all ballots that were printed, electronic records of all ballots that were submitted, electronic records of all ballots that were rejected, the physical ballots that were rejected, and the physical ballots that were rejected.
And, yes, before announcing the result, they should rescan all the cards. Even the rejected ones. Even so, it would be faster than currently, with punch cards or fill in the circle cards that require human intervention. These are printed by machines in specially OCRable fonts, and what's more there's only a limited number of text strings to recognize.
Five data point, and they damn well better match. The only thing that might be off is people who print ballots and then walk out without submitting them either way, but, you know what? I'd make that a crime, and not let people do it. You cannot make off with printed ballots, you must return them. You can say not to count it, but you have to return it.(That sounds extreme, but realize some places have manditory voting...I'm just mandating you *finish* voting, or at least cancel out your vote properly.)
There's basically no way of tampering with it, expecially if the three electronic totals were constantly recorded offsite.
The only thing I haven't figured out is write-in ballots, but in most elections those are negligable. I would, however, say that you cannot write in someone already on the ballot, and thus 9,999 times out of a 10,000 the write-ins couldn't possibly matter anyway.
Also there should be some physical security. Voting booths should have to be reset at the sign-in table, when you say who you are. They should also hand you the ballots to insert in the printer there. If you misvote and print an incorrect ballot, you have to submit it and choose reject, a red light comes on, and you have to walk out and go back to the table and physically get another ballot from them. They should have to push a button to reset the booth for every vote you print, *and* hand you the ballot themselves. I find it really crazy that if I stole some ballots, I could just stick them under my shirt and carry them into the voting booth and dump them all in. It should be one vote per person. Heck, it should be one vote per entrance-to-the-booth.
And you claimed it failed, when, of course, it hasn't.
The US won't use any system that allows you to prove who you voted for. Being able to prove who you voted for leads to vote buying and whatnot.
However, Usenet is an insanely crappy idea for this. The correct solution is insanely obvious: You need some sort of system that will store documents online that people can access easily from their machine. Gee, I wonder what could do that.
As for worries about 'servers going down'...um, first of all, servers shouldn't be randomly going down, and second, that's why you mirror them, dumbass. Stick a 586 running Apache on Linux in each building, run rsync every few hours. Make sure each document has a 'link to definative version' that links to the furthest upstream point for that document so if people really really need the newest version they can get it.
If the servers are down, yes, it seems nice that you might have a local copy...but WHAT IF YOU DON'T? D'oh! That's the lamest solution I've ever heard of. And how exactly are you supposed to know when to update?
Good god, where were you during the cold war? Name a single communist country that wasn't set up with the 'help' of Soviet Russia. You can't, can you?
That's because no one in power would willingly convert a country to communism. The only 'communism' countries have been where the Soviets took over, and those didn't 'degenerate' into slavery and mass murder, those started as slavery and mass murder. In fact, the slavery and mass murder usually predated the communism.
Not that I think communism is a useful idea right now, it will only work when there is no competition over resources, and that will only happen when there is no scarcity. But there has never been an honestly communist government that I can think of...communism was either there as a result of the Soviets trying to take over, or there as a result of a revolutionary trying to appeal to the masses. And if it was the second, they eventually got overthrown by the US, joined the USSR, and/or didn't turn out communist at all once the revolution was over.
To get an honestly communist government nowadays, you'd need revolutionaries as pure-hearted as the American revolutionaries, willing to seize power and then let it go. In these days of American (and previously, Russian) meddling in revolutions, I find it increasingly unlikely that would happen.
I mean, carbon monoxide is probably the least dangeous thing in cigarette smoke. You'd have to be pretty damn stupid to die from carbon monoxide in cigarette smoke.
Patching's not a substitute for just building the damn thing right in the first place, either.
It's an agreement by a bunch of commerical entities, and, yes, some non-profit and eduational entities, to work together following certain rules. (And everyone is paying for access.)
In fact, one of the few government interference points is, suprise suprise, the thing that's giving Verisign the monopoly...ICANN not only claims to be able to dictate where the root servers are, and who is in control of them, but the government actually runs several of them.
The non-commercial aspects of the internet is one of the only things that kept Verisign's monopoly going in the first place! And there's no way in hell it actually wants it deregulated, instead, it wants to become 'owner' of this monopoly, instead of 'contractor paid to manage it'.
Basically, Verisign is a road construction and cleaning crew that's asking for deregulation of property ownership, and you people are falling for it hook, sink, sinker, and fishing rod. Property ownership already is privatized, and so is the internet. Yes, there are public parks and wildlife reserves, but that doesn't really change anything. Meanwhile, they're throwing all this nonsense around so they can start charging tolls on the public roads that they are paid by the government to maintain and build.
Verisign does not, has never, and will never own .com and .net, and they do not get to demand the right to inovate on them. They do not own the other root servers, or get to say who are the other root servers. They are not in charge in any way, they're the fucking maintence staff.
You just need a program that renames the old version of the file, saves the new version, and then deletes the old.
At worse, you end up with no file by that name, and you have to hunt down what it renamed the old one as.
Any program that can possible cause you to lose your old (and new) data when saving new data is just broken.
I don't know in what universe any of this matters, as everyone's FAT is stored in the disk cache 90% of the time.
But, seriously, that's all I hear about, the fact you can pick up hookers and kill them. Like that's somehow worse than running over a work crew or gunning down random passerbys.
GTA has hookers in it. Which automatically makes it fifty times worse than shooting people in the face.
Damn, you're right. I'll stop supporting Linux and start supporting terrorism immediately. ;)