6 weeks ago, MSFT could have sued nearly anyone for using their patents, as implemented in Linux.
What has happened since then?
Novell is still involved in the patent commons and other anti-patent concerns. At the same time, they are living in the real world and playing the game. Hate the game, not the player
MSFT can still sue most everyone for not using patents, but with the deal there is blanket protection for all OSS developers (legally binding or not, it does make any potential future case less likely; MSFT would be even less likely to win, and if they do, less likley to even recover their legal costs in any settlement). This is at worst neutral, at best an improvement
MSFT can still sue non-Novell customers. MSFT may or may not be able to sue Novell customers. If you are not a Novell customer, no change. If you are a Novell customer, peace of mind
Protesting the agreement is dumb. You're not going to change anything. You are the one widening the gap between corporate acceptance and use of OSS and the OSS developer community. Given the litigious nature of corporations, and the minefield of software patents, with the theoretical risk to all OSS developers, and a higher risk to NOVL and their customers, this agreement is a victory. Its a shitty war, with shitty tools, but its the war and tools we have. So pretend for a minute that you exist in the real world and that some of us have practical concerns. Realize that this deal, while having some bad parts, is net-good. If you want to protest, set up a paypal account, collect donations, and deliver a truck load of anal lube to Nats house. Loosen up.
Olympic swimmers are all wearing high tech swimsuits. Now, I don't exactly recall the spoken content of the bit piece that I saw, but there is some kind of magicness in that fabric that I think does just what this is talking about, passively. Acres of spandex?! Let the dont-mind-long-voyages-away-from-women jokes begin!
What the now so-hard-we-wont-even-try technical stumbling block is these days. You have Wine - I'm sure if you throw money at Transgaming you can get a more friendly (well, for them) license. And you have Mono. Ditto for Novell.
So, what is the major technology that you can't fairly easily replace with some pseudo-OSS libraries?
Ah, I see your strategy now. Change your arguments mid-stream. Anyway:
- Anyone with a computer has all that is needed to hack on a BIOS. - You need tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to do a production run of a modern processor. If you have that kind of coin kicking around, then you could afford to buy into SPARC International, or the reference MIPS designs. If you want to dick around with toys like a Z80, get yourself a FPGA.
Well, cheap can mean both "very low total numerical price", "good value for your money", and possibly "low screwage from the manufacturer, distributor, retailer".
Intel and AMD processors may not be "very low total numerical price", with the good competition between the two of them, on the low end at least, there is "low screwage". I recall from one of the initial Cyrix marketing blurbs that the cost of manufacturer of the 6x86 processors was around $80/each. This was a decade ago, and they were made in low volume (almost by hand), so lets say that a modern processor built by AMD or Intel costs $45 to make. I think you could get a low end CPU for $90 (or less), 100% edge from cost-of-manufacture to in-the-consumers-hand isn't bad.
If you want "low total numerical price", get a Via "embedded" processor, around $50 for a 1GHZ C3; from 50 - 400x as fast as a the z80 @ 2.4-20MHZ, (ignoring that the z80 is 8bit and the Via 32). In price/MHZ, the Via comes out at ~1/3 of the cost. And a low end AMD or Intel chip still wins out over the Zilog, in price/performance, so "good value for your money" also qualifies.
I suppose there would be a huge market for some automatic facial recognition/pixelization software package. If such a thing existed, in a consumer-friendly package - then user generated content would explode[1].
The SPARC processor has (nearly) always been "open" for the 1990+/-5 definition of "open". Its design is managed by SPARC International, which besides Sun includes TI, Cypress Semiconductor, and Fujitsu.
But anyway...
The processor of a system is. Being "open" to change doesn't really get you anything. If you have enough money to do a production run of a modern CPU, then the costs of buying into SPARC International, or the reference design of MIPS, or an IBM POWER, etc, etc, is nothing. Getting a custom chip is more then just sitting around and thinking. BIOS is software. Writing a better BIOS is a matter of sitting around and thinking. (Well you see what I'm getting at here..) Getting a custom chip produced is not feasible for anyone but the most rich geeks, beyond the time sitting down with Verilog. Getting a custom BIOS, beyond sitting down in an IDE, is trivial.
In another comment on this subject, I noted the clear parallel between this deal and the actions of Novell and Red Hat offering indemnification over potential SCO lawsuits. RH defence was/is "its not a problem, but if it is, we offer insurance" (i.e. no real legal defense, just financial), whereas Novell offered "its not a problem because we own that code anway, but if it is, we offer insurance" (i.e. both a legal defense, as well as financial backing for any failure). These offerings applied to paying customers of the respective companies. I dont recal any significant attention to these deals.
How is Novell gaining legal standing to offer its paying customers protection against MSFT today any different from Novell and RH offering insurance against SCO to their paying customers yesterday?
Clearly there are many, many, scenarios where "commercial" and "non-commercial" (paying and non-paying being better words, I question the whole Samba letter with them getting this confused) users get different rights. Lets say there is a company, NerdCo, which sells some OSS package. With a purchase of said package, the paying customer gets a coupon to, say, ORA's Safari service to read the book. Some non-paying customer comes along, downloads the software, and then goes over to Tim and demands access to the book. Tim would tell the non-paying customer to go fuck himself, politely, of course. Support call centers, same deal.
This whole problem also points out an internal inconsistency to the FSF theory of the universe. One of the long-used examples of how to eat while writing FOSS was to sell warranties against problems. The FSF thus encourages software developers to treat their paying and non-paying users diferently.
The scenario a month ago was that MSFT had patents on various technologies and could at any time, sue anyone. Novell made a deal with MSFT that possibly violates the GPL (or rather, trigers a violation of the GPL), and probabaly violates what puritans think of as the spirt of the GPL. Others, pragmatists, and almost definitly most large companies wouldnt agree with the spirt-violation (or be willing to ignore it...). Novell has only introduced another scenario where they treat their paying customers and their non-paying users diferently, something that all developers do.
Thats not how patents work. Regardless of how one came into a technical ability, be it independent invention, partnership with someone else (who got it through independent invention, or partnership (*RECURSION*)), or whatever, if its patented its patented. Bob Smith could independently discover some method and contribute brand new code to Samba, and then Samba get sued if the method is under some MSFT patent. "We didn't know" isn't an excuse, though it may make a diference at sentencing.
I see great parallels here with the SCO case. Red Hat, and Novell, made promises of indemnification to their customers. Insurance, in effect, against SCO. Novell may actually have had some standing given the questionable ownership of the historical code, whereas RH is offering what ammounted to insurance. Anyway, what Novell here is doing is pre-emptivly providing their customers with some protection. There were no (or very few) complaints when RH and Novell offered indemnification to their paying customers. The Novell/MSFT deal allows Novell to do the same, against potential MSFT technologies. Perhaps it would be nice if the GPL covered all possible scenarios, but it doesn't; perhaps it would be nice of MSFT, through Novell, could offer these guarantees to everyone, but they won't, so they cant (respectively).
As for Mozilla, Novell is the largest external contributor. It would be not-quite fatal, but catastrophic if mozilla.org shut out Novell. Of course, since Mozilla has very little, if anything, to do with vitalization, this deal effects them not at all.
Yes, but if the GPL is broken, its broken closed. By default, you have zero rights to use arbitrary software (let alone compile it, change it, redistribute it). With the GPL, users are granted some rights (with some obligations). If the GPL is invalidated, then the code reverts back to the "no license" mode of distribution: not allowed to do anything with it. Contract failure-mode is to shut things down, not open them up.
The shuttle runs on three modified IBM 360 systems. Were pushing 35, almost 40 year old systems here.
Do you know how many eligible 35 year old computer bachelors there are out there? Ill tell you: none. Of course the shuttle computers can't get a date.
Thats not quite a fair analogy. Members of Congress (or their aids, which is what matters) have, Im sure, a fairly good idea of what kind of bills GWB will and will not sign. Its usually enough of a fight to get anything to 50%+1. 66%+1 (or whatever the meta-veto number is) is damm near impossible. So fuck it. There are only so many hours in the day, only so much work that can get done.
The only time that matters is seconds since Jan 1, 1970. Actual seconds. Not extra (or fewer) seconds to keep time nerds happy "reconciling" time with some unperdictable-on-the-scale-required, obsolete, phscial process that matters not at all. All that is just polish. And pointless polish at that.
The Explorer team also left a greeting card with the picture of a grumpy baby with the note: ``It's just not fair. Good people shouldn't have to feel bad. Best wishes, the IE team.'' [an error occurred while processing this directive] A helium-filled balloon taped to the logo reads, ``We love you.''
How history changes in 9 years.
Yes, but at a faster rate. Currently the requirement for R&D budgets is driven by hard core gamers demanding faster frame rates, and new games coming out demanding faster hardware. The system has reached an equilibrium and everyone is happy. CxOs don't mind spending money, what they have a problem with is change. If ATI and nVidia together open sourced their drivers (and while they wouldn't be on the stage sucking each others cocks while they did it, if one did so within a month the other would almost have to) that would mean the CxOs would have to deal with change. Initially, to ship the drivers: more tech writers, more (real) technical support; in response to this from the other guy: more people in research figuring out what the other guy is doing; and with the research in hand: more hardware developers now producing new systems more frequently; with shorter product life cycles: screw up your whole production/marketing systems.
This new-video-card-world-order may be obtainable and viable. But would it, at the end of the day, mean more profits? There is only so much money around looking for video cards, shipping newer things faster wont necessarily suck any more money from that stone. So, from a business perspective; its a good ride now; changing the system opens up a lot of work, risk, with questionable outcome.
Well, with/. or not, this would be a problem. The right way to do high-profile releases would be to populate "well-known"/friendly mirrors by hand. A level of master-mirrors, if you will. And/or populate some BT seeders by hand. So when it is inevitably leaked (and it will be leaked), itll alreay be to one level of mirrors.
And both of those are under OSS licenses, so if Oracle starts being a dick about them, MySQL AB can just fork'em. Depending on how much of a dick Oracle becomes, AB may be able to hire away entire dev teams and only miss a month or so of working time.
The question boils down to if you think Oracle bought these companies/products in an effort to shut them down, or to continue working on them and making money on them. The former is just absurd as the risk of failure (from Oracles perspective) is almost infinite: if Sleepycat was making money on an OSS product line, and Oracle buys, and kills off Sleepycat, then they diddn't kill the market: someone else can form Wakeycat tomorrow and continue.
Slashdot Mirror
Take those two things as a given.
What has happened since then?
Protesting the agreement is dumb. You're not going to change anything. You are the one widening the gap between corporate acceptance and use of OSS and the OSS developer community. Given the litigious nature of corporations, and the minefield of software patents, with the theoretical risk to all OSS developers, and a higher risk to NOVL and their customers, this agreement is a victory. Its a shitty war, with shitty tools, but its the war and tools we have. So pretend for a minute that you exist in the real world and that some of us have practical concerns. Realize that this deal, while having some bad parts, is net-good. If you want to protest, set up a paypal account, collect donations, and deliver a truck load of anal lube to Nats house. Loosen up.
Olympic swimmers are all wearing high tech swimsuits. Now, I don't exactly recall the spoken content of the bit piece that I saw, but there is some kind of magicness in that fabric that I think does just what this is talking about, passively. Acres of spandex?! Let the dont-mind-long-voyages-away-from-women jokes begin!
Most likely neither. Bubbles are loud. Bubbles are bad. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavitation
What the now so-hard-we-wont-even-try technical stumbling block is these days. You have Wine - I'm sure if you throw money at Transgaming you can get a more friendly (well, for them) license. And you have Mono. Ditto for Novell.
So, what is the major technology that you can't fairly easily replace with some pseudo-OSS libraries?
And: hahaha. NWN2 banner add while posting this.
Because "SELECT * FROM blah" is easer to type then "SELECT * FROM blah WHERE...".
Ah, I see your strategy now. Change your arguments mid-stream. Anyway:
- Anyone with a computer has all that is needed to hack on a BIOS.
- You need tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to do a production run of a modern processor. If you have that kind of coin kicking around, then you could afford to buy into SPARC International, or the reference MIPS designs. If you want to dick around with toys like a Z80, get yourself a FPGA.
Well, cheap can mean both "very low total numerical price", "good value for your money", and possibly "low screwage from the manufacturer, distributor, retailer".
Intel and AMD processors may not be "very low total numerical price", with the good competition between the two of them, on the low end at least, there is "low screwage". I recall from one of the initial Cyrix marketing blurbs that the cost of manufacturer of the 6x86 processors was around $80/each. This was a decade ago, and they were made in low volume (almost by hand), so lets say that a modern processor built by AMD or Intel costs $45 to make. I think you could get a low end CPU for $90 (or less), 100% edge from cost-of-manufacture to in-the-consumers-hand isn't bad.
If you want "low total numerical price", get a Via "embedded" processor, around $50 for a 1GHZ C3; from 50 - 400x as fast as a the z80 @ 2.4-20MHZ, (ignoring that the z80 is 8bit and the Via 32). In price/MHZ, the Via comes out at ~1/3 of the cost. And a low end AMD or Intel chip still wins out over the Zilog, in price/performance, so "good value for your money" also qualifies.
I suppose there would be a huge market for some automatic facial recognition/pixelization software package. If such a thing existed, in a consumer-friendly package - then user generated content would explode[1].
[1] sorry.
Perhaps your need for something more and more specific is a sign of getting old. I think they have a little pill for that.
What do you mean by "commodity"?
Cheap and ubiquitous? x86(_64) from Intel and AMD (and VIA, and...)
Single design, multiple vendors? SPARC and MIPS
The SPARC processor has (nearly) always been "open" for the 1990+/-5 definition of "open". Its design is managed by SPARC International, which besides Sun includes TI, Cypress Semiconductor, and Fujitsu.
But anyway...
The processor of a system is. Being "open" to change doesn't really get you anything. If you have enough money to do a production run of a modern CPU, then the costs of buying into SPARC International, or the reference design of MIPS, or an IBM POWER, etc, etc, is nothing. Getting a custom chip is more then just sitting around and thinking. BIOS is software. Writing a better BIOS is a matter of sitting around and thinking. (Well you see what I'm getting at here..) Getting a custom chip produced is not feasible for anyone but the most rich geeks, beyond the time sitting down with Verilog. Getting a custom BIOS, beyond sitting down in an IDE, is trivial.
Hey, Bruce.
In another comment on this subject, I noted the clear parallel between this deal and the actions of Novell and Red Hat offering indemnification over potential SCO lawsuits. RH defence was/is "its not a problem, but if it is, we offer insurance" (i.e. no real legal defense, just financial), whereas Novell offered "its not a problem because we own that code anway, but if it is, we offer insurance" (i.e. both a legal defense, as well as financial backing for any failure). These offerings applied to paying customers of the respective companies. I dont recal any significant attention to these deals.
How is Novell gaining legal standing to offer its paying customers protection against MSFT today any different from Novell and RH offering insurance against SCO to their paying customers yesterday?
Clearly there are many, many, scenarios where "commercial" and "non-commercial" (paying and non-paying being better words, I question the whole Samba letter with them getting this confused) users get different rights. Lets say there is a company, NerdCo, which sells some OSS package. With a purchase of said package, the paying customer gets a coupon to, say, ORA's Safari service to read the book. Some non-paying customer comes along, downloads the software, and then goes over to Tim and demands access to the book. Tim would tell the non-paying customer to go fuck himself, politely, of course. Support call centers, same deal.
This whole problem also points out an internal inconsistency to the FSF theory of the universe. One of the long-used examples of how to eat while writing FOSS was to sell warranties against problems. The FSF thus encourages software developers to treat their paying and non-paying users diferently.
The scenario a month ago was that MSFT had patents on various technologies and could at any time, sue anyone. Novell made a deal with MSFT that possibly violates the GPL (or rather, trigers a violation of the GPL), and probabaly violates what puritans think of as the spirt of the GPL. Others, pragmatists, and almost definitly most large companies wouldnt agree with the spirt-violation (or be willing to ignore it...). Novell has only introduced another scenario where they treat their paying customers and their non-paying users diferently, something that all developers do.
Thats not how patents work. Regardless of how one came into a technical ability, be it independent invention, partnership with someone else (who got it through independent invention, or partnership (*RECURSION*)), or whatever, if its patented its patented. Bob Smith could independently discover some method and contribute brand new code to Samba, and then Samba get sued if the method is under some MSFT patent. "We didn't know" isn't an excuse, though it may make a diference at sentencing.
I see great parallels here with the SCO case. Red Hat, and Novell, made promises of indemnification to their customers. Insurance, in effect, against SCO. Novell may actually have had some standing given the questionable ownership of the historical code, whereas RH is offering what ammounted to insurance. Anyway, what Novell here is doing is pre-emptivly providing their customers with some protection. There were no (or very few) complaints when RH and Novell offered indemnification to their paying customers. The Novell/MSFT deal allows Novell to do the same, against potential MSFT technologies. Perhaps it would be nice if the GPL covered all possible scenarios, but it doesn't; perhaps it would be nice of MSFT, through Novell, could offer these guarantees to everyone, but they won't, so they cant (respectively).
As for Mozilla, Novell is the largest external contributor. It would be not-quite fatal, but catastrophic if mozilla.org shut out Novell. Of course, since Mozilla has very little, if anything, to do with vitalization, this deal effects them not at all.
Yes, but if the GPL is broken, its broken closed. By default, you have zero rights to use arbitrary software (let alone compile it, change it, redistribute it). With the GPL, users are granted some rights (with some obligations). If the GPL is invalidated, then the code reverts back to the "no license" mode of distribution: not allowed to do anything with it. Contract failure-mode is to shut things down, not open them up.
Not "broken" as in "looks like it works, but without any security" but "broken" as in "broken". IPSec does not work through NAT. Period.
Which would be a problem only if they wire-wrapped in the gravity/time tables. Just update those, too.
The shuttle runs on three modified IBM 360 systems. Were pushing 35, almost 40 year old systems here.
Do you know how many eligible 35 year old computer bachelors there are out there? Ill tell you: none. Of course the shuttle computers can't get a date.
Thats not quite a fair analogy. Members of Congress (or their aids, which is what matters) have, Im sure, a fairly good idea of what kind of bills GWB will and will not sign. Its usually enough of a fight to get anything to 50%+1. 66%+1 (or whatever the meta-veto number is) is damm near impossible. So fuck it. There are only so many hours in the day, only so much work that can get done.
Its just formatting.
The only time that matters is seconds since Jan 1, 1970. Actual seconds. Not extra (or fewer) seconds to keep time nerds happy "reconciling" time with some unperdictable-on-the-scale-required, obsolete, phscial process that matters not at all. All that is just polish. And pointless polish at that.
As they say in Cape Breton (Canada): let us vote the day after, so we can get it right.
You don't need a law so much as you need shallow puddles and a willingness for people to use them.
The Explorer team also left a greeting card with the picture of a grumpy baby with the note: ``It's just not fair. Good people shouldn't have to feel bad. Best wishes, the IE team.'' [an error occurred while processing this directive] A helium-filled balloon taped to the logo reads, ``We love you.'' How history changes in 9 years.
Yes, but at a faster rate. Currently the requirement for R&D budgets is driven by hard core gamers demanding faster frame rates, and new games coming out demanding faster hardware. The system has reached an equilibrium and everyone is happy. CxOs don't mind spending money, what they have a problem with is change. If ATI and nVidia together open sourced their drivers (and while they wouldn't be on the stage sucking each others cocks while they did it, if one did so within a month the other would almost have to) that would mean the CxOs would have to deal with change. Initially, to ship the drivers: more tech writers, more (real) technical support; in response to this from the other guy: more people in research figuring out what the other guy is doing; and with the research in hand: more hardware developers now producing new systems more frequently; with shorter product life cycles: screw up your whole production/marketing systems.
This new-video-card-world-order may be obtainable and viable. But would it, at the end of the day, mean more profits? There is only so much money around looking for video cards, shipping newer things faster wont necessarily suck any more money from that stone. So, from a business perspective; its a good ride now; changing the system opens up a lot of work, risk, with questionable outcome.
Well, with /. or not, this would be a problem. The right way to do high-profile releases would be to populate "well-known"/friendly mirrors by hand. A level of master-mirrors, if you will. And/or populate some BT seeders by hand. So when it is inevitably leaked (and it will be leaked), itll alreay be to one level of mirrors.
And both of those are under OSS licenses, so if Oracle starts being a dick about them, MySQL AB can just fork'em. Depending on how much of a dick Oracle becomes, AB may be able to hire away entire dev teams and only miss a month or so of working time.
The question boils down to if you think Oracle bought these companies/products in an effort to shut them down, or to continue working on them and making money on them. The former is just absurd as the risk of failure (from Oracles perspective) is almost infinite: if Sleepycat was making money on an OSS product line, and Oracle buys, and kills off Sleepycat, then they diddn't kill the market: someone else can form Wakeycat tomorrow and continue.