Well, in some political regimes of the past (thankfully, many of which have been debunked and thrown away) ONLY a "community" can think.
Contrary to what a lot of stuffed-shirt academics claim from their ivory tower, most people don't throw away their idealism as they mature. (the process called "selling out" by people who have little of worth to sell) They just discover their ideals were wrong. It's called learning, and it never stops.
The ignorance about patents fostered by the people who run this site is staggering.
An idea is patented for 17 years. Then it is released to the public domain.
Before the Patent system was developed, Trade Secrets were the mechanism by which inventors got a return on the time invested developing their ideas. Discoveries were kept secret for FAR LONGER than 17 years.
The result of the end of the patent system would be LESS communications, because all ideas when they became public would be a free-for-all. There would be no mechanism to protect your ideas except keeping them secret.
It's also a unique discovery. The person who discovered it could have kept it secret and found clients to sell it to for their benefit alone, and kept it a trade secret. The end result would be tons of other people wasting time rediscovering the same thing, instead of the idea being licensed for wide use.
Why don't all the anti-patent people recognize that the alternative to the patent system is R&D buildings with machine guns at the guard desk to protect trade secrets?
Utopian pure-science ain't gonna happen, when there is significant value in scientific discovery.
Most scientists don't do their work with the sole goal of profit in mind. They do it for the love of their work.
What a bunch of hooey that one is! Yes, there are people who should probably instead have gone into the priesthood who fill academia. Generally they are people who just can't get it into their head that the big scary world out there beyond the wall that surrounds their campus is reality. There's a need for basic research, but generally these 'selfless' people are more concerned about tenure than they are about science for the sake of science. Economic incentive will drive scientific progress far more than a peer-reviewed bunch of ninnies who can't get it into their heads that Graduation means finding a job.
"The Greats" of science in the past weren't tenured civil-servants. People like Newton and Michaelangelo were practical men of the world, as well as scientists.
The "patent crisis on campus" with state-paid researching patenting everything left and right is the symptom of a problem that has an easy solution. Tell the scientists to get out and find a job! Found a company if your ideas are so bloody valuable.
Campuses should be about learning. The staff should be involved in teaching the basics. Advanced research should be off-campus at private R&D facilities, and/or contract research firms.
The O'Reilly books get a little bit spotty where it comes to BSD internals. You have to branch out to McKusick and Jolitz's books. I'd say adding Prentice Hall, Addison Wesley, and a few smaller publishing houses to the list fleshes it out, though.
The Microsoft culture is one that eats and breathes competetiveness and challange 24/7. I suspect that since they've been in dogfood mode with Windows 2000 for over a year now, that there has been plenty of pounding on the code to worm out bugs and problems before the release.
Of course, they don't have a bunch of clueless cretins poking around in the registry editor, so yes, there will be "customers" who find problems they didn't discover.
If you value your work, you probably have a whole bunch of machines on a 100 Mbit ethernet with two or three drives in each box. Then you back things up onto multiple drives. There only needs to be one CDR on the network, and a smallish drive reserved for it's use as a buffer.
Oh, right! I forgot. This is the dicksize discussion thread. A bunch of cheap smallish machines is off topic.
Did you even pay attention at the all hallowed presentation yesterday? There don't sound like there are going to be any desktop Crusoe motherboards, at least not in the immediate future. It's technology that's tuned for portable use.
And if you're going to try to convince them to adopt 'mandatory SCSI, no IDE' on their hardware, why not advocate solid gold circuit traces on the PC boards? Wintel doesn't do that either, and it's about as stupid as any other form of arbitrary 'spurning' activity on the part of a competetive business.
Wow! You're really clever with that book-in-a-bag analogy.
It can even be extended further! You can put Microsoft software into a computer that's in a case that doesn't even have Microsoft's brand on it! You can even sell that computer to a customer with a non-Microsoft brand on the carton it's shipped in! The truck it's delivered in doesn't even have to be a Microsoft truck!
However, going back to your favored book analogy, if you start cutting pages out of the book because the bookstore owner's daughter finds some of the language offensive, and try to foist it off as the complete work, you're in trouble.
You just explained why Linus, because he's already ignored people who infringe on the trademark, who he considers as following the same political agenda as he does. How many websites out there bandy around the Linux mark freely? Thousands.
You've already given it away, Linus. It's in the public domain. Give it up.
Linus has to broadly defend the Linux trademark. That means that any citation of it where the use could be interpreted as a trademark (meaning any company name, any commercialish website) has to receive the same degree of attention if the trademark's ownership isn't credited to him. He hasn't done this, instead he's chose to pick on just those places where it doesn't mesh with his political agenda.
He could very well lose rights to the mark before too much longer. This wouldn't be a loss to somebody else, it would just mean the former trademark Linux would belong to us all.
Would that be such a terrible thing? I don't particularly care if the word Linux serves any particular body of people's political agenda.
It looks like fairly standard trademark stuff to me. Linus has the trademark on the name Linux, and in order to retain it legally he has to take certain steps to protect it. That means formally licensing any use of the Linux name for use in describing something associated with Linux the OS kernel, even if the there is no licensing fee.
Yes, and it looks like Linus has never done the above thing. Where are the formal licensing agreements for everything else with Linux in it's name on the 'net? You can't say you're acting to "protect a trademark" and then take a cavalier attitude, picking on some users of the name and allowing others free rein.
If Xerox didn't attack each and every non-fair-use abuser of their trademark, the whole ball of yarn unravels and they loose their exclusive right to the mark.
So where is the paperwork from Linus that shows that the hundreds of URLs with the word Linux in them has been formally approved? To say nothing of all the companies with the word Linux in their name, their logo, etc.
It doesn't hurt to put out ideas of ways that companies in the future could get around the GPL. In fact, it's important to look at scenarios.
In the coming world of 'thin clients' (if they ever do in fact become the norm on the net) it seems to me that one way to keep clients really, really thin would be to use the X Window System or a system similar to it, to 'distribute' applications in the form of graphic primatives instead of actual binary code. If someone were to privately produce a highly enhanced Mozilla, for example, and provide the server-side power so that it could be run on the company computers, and only the result of it running would be 'delivered' to the customer, has an application been 'distributed' to the customer? It seems to me that the only actual software that's been distributed to the customer is an X server. Since the binaries are run at the server side, the source code can stay at the server side and never need leave the company. This could be a money making proposition. People are nervous about browsing the web because of the risks of running code on their unsecured personal computers. So there's potential something like this could become a very workable and lucrative business for companies with the skill to leverage GPL'd software and extend and sell it to clients.
Well, even if that is a loophole, if even one "employee" of NickSoft let the code out, there's not much NickSoft could do other than "fire" the employee, is there?,/I>
The problem with your response above is that the "employees" cited don't have the code, if you mean the source code. They have the binaries they became entitled to when they joined NickSoft. NickSoft still holds the source, can keep it proprietary, and new members can still pay to "join."
There is a problem in general with how some people refer to "Open Source" software.
Products which are GPL'd from the point of inception are "Open Source" in the truest sense, in that they start out as open projects with many contributors.
As Navigator demonstrates, when you use the new verb-phrase "Open the source" you encounter unique problems turning the project from a closed-team project to an open project.
I am certainly not an expert in these matters, but it seems that moving from a hierarchacal software development model radically changes how a project progresses. There are unique challanges that broad "Open Source" development encounters. In particular, when there isn't a widely known "reference design" out there for people to model their coding efforts on, as has been the case with Linux (it doesn't need an architect because people can just look at Unix in general for design guidelines), projects can run into trouble keeping a focus.
As a result, for example, human factors issues are weakly addressed in Linux and it's native GUI projects. The overall conciseness of a design suffers when wandering coders can, well.. just wander through the code extending it.
Hopefully people will use what I've just typed as an opportunity to extend the dialogue and not just flame the ideas I've put out for discussion.
In some of the older tube-type color TV sets that I used to work on for fun and troubleshooting experience, the high voltage rectifier tube was even wrapped in a lead-composite shield over the glass envelope.
The X-ray emissions of a CRT can be increased to hazardous levels in some cases simply by tweaking the high voltage to out-of-rating levels. Overdriving some color monitors can do this as well. You don't notice anything right away, because cataracts are long term eye damage.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of the successful people I know spend 4-8 years at a University and then get on with life.
Many of the losers I know plant their butt on a campus and shuffle papers around.
Well, in some political regimes of the past (thankfully, many of which have been debunked and thrown away) ONLY a "community" can think.
Contrary to what a lot of stuffed-shirt academics claim from their ivory tower, most people don't throw away their idealism as they mature. (the process called "selling out" by people who have little of worth to sell) They just discover their ideals were wrong. It's called learning, and it never stops.
The ignorance about patents fostered by the people who run this site is staggering.
An idea is patented for 17 years. Then it is released to the public domain.
Before the Patent system was developed, Trade Secrets were the mechanism by which inventors got a return on the time invested developing their ideas. Discoveries were kept secret for FAR LONGER than 17 years.
The result of the end of the patent system would be LESS communications, because all ideas when they became public would be a free-for-all. There would be no mechanism to protect your ideas except keeping them secret.
It's also a unique discovery. The person who discovered it could have kept it secret and found clients to sell it to for their benefit alone, and kept it a trade secret. The end result would be tons of other people wasting time rediscovering the same thing, instead of the idea being licensed for wide use.
Why don't all the anti-patent people recognize that the alternative to the patent system is R&D buildings with machine guns at the guard desk to protect trade secrets?
Utopian pure-science ain't gonna happen, when there is significant value in scientific discovery.
Most scientists don't do their work with the sole goal of profit in mind. They do it for the love of their work.
What a bunch of hooey that one is! Yes, there are people who should probably instead have gone into the priesthood who fill academia. Generally they are people who just can't get it into their head that the big scary world out there beyond the wall that surrounds their campus is reality. There's a need for basic research, but generally these 'selfless' people are more concerned about tenure than they are about science for the sake of science. Economic incentive will drive scientific progress far more than a peer-reviewed bunch of ninnies who can't get it into their heads that Graduation means finding a job.
"The Greats" of science in the past weren't tenured civil-servants. People like Newton and Michaelangelo were practical men of the world, as well as scientists.
The "patent crisis on campus" with state-paid researching patenting everything left and right is the symptom of a problem that has an easy solution. Tell the scientists to get out and find a job! Found a company if your ideas are so bloody valuable.
Campuses should be about learning. The staff should be involved in teaching the basics. Advanced research should be off-campus at private R&D facilities, and/or contract research firms.
The O'Reilly books get a little bit spotty where it comes to BSD internals. You have to branch out to McKusick and Jolitz's books. I'd say adding Prentice Hall, Addison Wesley, and a few smaller publishing houses to the list fleshes it out, though.
I just checked on the Novell site, and NDS and several variants of it are Novell trademarks.
It's only undoccumented to the kind of people who only seek out 'doccumentation' in IRC and on 'HOWTO' websites.
Your seething hatred shows through in your text, btw. Better work on that, not good for your blood pressure or your well being.
The Microsoft culture is one that eats and breathes competetiveness and challange 24/7. I suspect that since they've been in dogfood mode with Windows 2000 for over a year now, that there has been plenty of pounding on the code to worm out bugs and problems before the release.
Of course, they don't have a bunch of clueless cretins poking around in the registry editor, so yes, there will be "customers" who find problems they didn't discover.
Cruel and unusual punishment in 1689 was vivisection, or other forms of slow torture until death.
Humane punishment was a quick merciful execution by hanging.
I'm not suggesting either of these for this particular creep, but do try to keep within a historical context, if you're going to dredge up history.
Maybe he can "social engineer" some clueless secretary somewhere into typing in his interview responses. Since that's one of his greatest skills...
Yeah! Yeah! Get Kevin for an interview.
Let's even make him a prominent member of the Slashdot community.
I'll ask right here: is this the kind of guy we want as the Linux poster boy?
I would instead look at my lowly 8008 chip. If I could find it. At the moment it's lost in a sea of TTL down in the lab.
If you value your work, you probably have a whole bunch of machines on a 100 Mbit ethernet with two or three drives in each box. Then you back things up onto multiple drives. There only needs to be one CDR on the network, and a smallish drive reserved for it's use as a buffer.
Oh, right! I forgot. This is the dicksize discussion thread. A bunch of cheap smallish machines is off topic.
"Eats" one CPU a month? Sounds like a few hardware engineers need remedial training on good design practices.
Oh, yes, I know it sounds macho and kewl and all that stuff to have the big monster system that eats CPUs. My mom has a vaccum cleaner that eats dirt.
Did you even pay attention at the all hallowed presentation yesterday? There don't sound like there are going to be any desktop Crusoe motherboards, at least not in the immediate future. It's technology that's tuned for portable use.
And if you're going to try to convince them to adopt 'mandatory SCSI, no IDE' on their hardware, why not advocate solid gold circuit traces on the PC boards? Wintel doesn't do that either, and it's about as stupid as any other form of arbitrary 'spurning' activity on the part of a competetive business.
Wow! You're really clever with that book-in-a-bag analogy.
It can even be extended further! You can put Microsoft software into a computer that's in a case that doesn't even have Microsoft's brand on it! You can even sell that computer to a customer with a non-Microsoft brand on the carton it's shipped in! The truck it's delivered in doesn't even have to be a Microsoft truck!
However, going back to your favored book analogy, if you start cutting pages out of the book because the bookstore owner's daughter finds some of the language offensive, and try to foist it off as the complete work, you're in trouble.
You just explained why Linus, because he's already ignored people who infringe on the trademark, who he considers as following the same political agenda as he does. How many websites out there bandy around the Linux mark freely? Thousands.
You've already given it away, Linus. It's in the public domain. Give it up.
(does Metcalfe own the trademark on Open Sores?)
Linus has to broadly defend the Linux trademark. That means that any citation of it where the use could be interpreted as a trademark (meaning any company name, any commercialish website) has to receive the same degree of attention if the trademark's ownership isn't credited to him. He hasn't done this, instead he's chose to pick on just those places where it doesn't mesh with his political agenda.
He could very well lose rights to the mark before too much longer. This wouldn't be a loss to somebody else, it would just mean the former trademark Linux would belong to us all.
Would that be such a terrible thing? I don't particularly care if the word Linux serves any particular body of people's political agenda.
It looks like fairly standard trademark stuff to me. Linus has the trademark on the name Linux, and in order to retain it legally he has to take certain steps to protect it. That means formally licensing any use of the Linux name for use in describing something associated with Linux the OS kernel, even if the there is no licensing fee.
Yes, and it looks like Linus has never done the above thing. Where are the formal licensing agreements for everything else with Linux in it's name on the 'net? You can't say you're acting to "protect a trademark" and then take a cavalier attitude, picking on some users of the name and allowing others free rein.
If Xerox didn't attack each and every non-fair-use abuser of their trademark, the whole ball of yarn unravels and they loose their exclusive right to the mark.
So where is the paperwork from Linus that shows that the hundreds of URLs with the word Linux in them has been formally approved? To say nothing of all the companies with the word Linux in their name, their logo, etc.
It doesn't hurt to put out ideas of ways that companies in the future could get around the GPL. In fact, it's important to look at scenarios.
In the coming world of 'thin clients' (if they ever do in fact become the norm on the net) it seems to me that one way to keep clients really, really thin would be to use the X Window System or a system similar to it, to 'distribute' applications in the form of graphic primatives instead of actual binary code. If someone were to privately produce a highly enhanced Mozilla, for example, and provide the server-side power so that it could be run on the company computers, and only the result of it running would be 'delivered' to the customer, has an application been 'distributed' to the customer? It seems to me that the only actual software that's been distributed to the customer is an X server. Since the binaries are run at the server side, the source code can stay at the server side and never need leave the company. This could be a money making proposition. People are nervous about browsing the web because of the risks of running code on their unsecured personal computers. So there's potential something like this could become a very workable and lucrative business for companies with the skill to leverage GPL'd software and extend and sell it to clients.
Well, even if that is a loophole, if even one "employee" of NickSoft let the code out, there's not much NickSoft could do other than "fire" the employee, is there? ,/I>
The problem with your response above is that the "employees" cited don't have the code, if you mean the source code. They have the binaries they became entitled to when they joined NickSoft. NickSoft still holds the source, can keep it proprietary, and new members can still pay to "join."
There is a problem in general with how some people refer to "Open Source" software.
Products which are GPL'd from the point of inception are "Open Source" in the truest sense, in that they start out as open projects with many contributors.
As Navigator demonstrates, when you use the new verb-phrase "Open the source" you encounter unique problems turning the project from a closed-team project to an open project.
I am certainly not an expert in these matters, but it seems that moving from a hierarchacal software development model radically changes how a project progresses. There are unique challanges that broad "Open Source" development encounters. In particular, when there isn't a widely known "reference design" out there for people to model their coding efforts on, as has been the case with Linux (it doesn't need an architect because people can just look at Unix in general for design guidelines), projects can run into trouble keeping a focus.
As a result, for example, human factors issues are weakly addressed in Linux and it's native GUI projects. The overall conciseness of a design suffers when wandering coders can, well.. just wander through the code extending it.
Hopefully people will use what I've just typed as an opportunity to extend the dialogue and not just flame the ideas I've put out for discussion.
I just ordered my release copy of Windows 2000 direct from Microsoft last week. In the order confirmation the Product Description reads as follows:
Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Professional English Version/Product Upgrade North America CD Encryption Coded Software
I assume this means that there will be other non-North American releases and that it will have to do with the level of Encryption bundled with them.
In some of the older tube-type color TV sets that I used to work on for fun and troubleshooting experience, the high voltage rectifier tube was even wrapped in a lead-composite shield over the glass envelope.
The X-ray emissions of a CRT can be increased to hazardous levels in some cases simply by tweaking the high voltage to out-of-rating levels. Overdriving some color monitors can do this as well. You don't notice anything right away, because cataracts are long term eye damage.