No, this does not open up a hole for GPL, because there is a fundamental difference between GPL and most other licenses. GPL grants you rights you would not normally have, whereas other licenses try to take away rights you normally have.
Suppose someone were to violate GPL, and the copyright owner sued them. The copyright owner would NOT be claiming that the terms of GPL were violated. The copyright owner would sue claiming a copyright violation.
It is the defendant who would be bringing up GPL, as a defense to copyright infringement.
I'd better clarify one thing: when I say "the first PC that was widely available", I'm ignoring that one from Tandy that had a 68K and could run Xenix.
You are very confused. Pretty much every processor ever used in personal computers has been "multitasking capable". Hell, people built multitasking Z80 systems. You could even get Unix for the 8086 (PC/IX from Interactive).
The first PC that was widely available with memory protection sufficient to support Unix was the PC/AT, which used the 80286. The 80286 has a built-in MMU which is quit excellent at supporting a swapping system. If you were insane, you could even make System V Release 3 run on an 80286 (we did that at Interactive...porting from the 3B2 source...man, that was one pain-in-the-ass port!)
The 1984 Mac used the 68000, which did not have an MMU available from Motorola. Comanies like Sun, Fortune, Callan, etc., that built 68000-based Unix systems designed their own custom MMUs, which, like that in the 80286, supported swapping, but not paging. They did not do paging because the 68000 does not save enough information in the bus error stack to recover from a general page fault.
The first Macs did not support memory management. Apple did not have a Mac that could support memory management until the MacII, which included a socket for the optional MMU from Motorola.
Sun, and others doing Unix on 68K had to design their own MMUs, since Motorola did not have an MMU for the 68000.
Even with a custom MMU, you were limited to swapping, not paging, on a 68000, because it did not save enough information on a bus error to resume or restart in the general case. You needed a 68010 if you wanted to do paging.
Many years ago (long before the dot.com stuff), I worked at a small Unix workstation company (Callan Data Systems...anyone remember them?). We got behind in the payments on this big machine that did something with blueprints (I'm a programmer...I have no idea what this thing did...but it was big...about 6ft wide and 4ft long, and 3ft tall, and it weighed a lot).
The blueprint machine was in a room in the center of the engineering building. There were two entrances to the building. To go from the front entrance to the blueprint machine room, you would have to go past the office of one of the company owners, and the secretary, and a couple of engineer's offices.
To get to the blueprint machine room from the back door, you would have to go past my office, and the offices of four other programmers.
All the desks in all the aforementioned offices faced their doors, so anyone working could easily see anyone who went down the hall.
One day, the machine was repossesed. It happened between 11am (when someone last used it), and 1pm (when someone tried to use it, and found it was gone). During that time, none of the people in any of the offices I mentioned above went to lunch.
No one saw anything. Evidently, at least two people managed to walk in, go past several people, and carry the machine out, all without being seen.
What other major countries go back 200 years? Sure, many go back culturally far beyond that, but in terms of government, very few, if any, are as old as the United States.
If you want evidence of idiocy, look in a mirror: you just basically tried to tell someone that having the data integrated is worth $10/month to them. Not even Clea with her tarrot cards is that good.
You completely missed his point, which is that he evaluated the capabilities of Tivo *without* service, and found it did what he wanted. He bought it on that basis. They retroactively changed it to take away those features. Note that since he is not using their service, there is no reason for his unit to have the latest software.
The right way to design a product like Tivo is to make updates part of the service. For people who do not want the service, Tivo would then would be like regular VCRs...what comes out of the box when you buy it is what you get, and it continues to work like that until the hardware breaks.
In most of Europe, buying a painting a spraypainting curse words over it would violate copyright.
That, in fact, was one of the things that kept the United States out of the Berne Convention for a long time. Berne requires protection of certain rights called "moral rights" of authors, and one of those rights is the protection of the integrity of their work. This goes way beyond what the US thinks copyright should cover.
To get into Berne, the US enacted these moral rights, but only for a very small set of works, and then the Berne countries pretended that that was enough, and the US joined.
Re:Japanese (and American) revisionist history
on
Review: Pearl Harbor
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· Score: 1
The convincing refutation you cite wasn't all that convincing. Nor was the other stuff on that site (e.g., the stuff about the German's not really trying to kill the Jews).
I'm amazed that you'd actually try to seriously cite IHR for anything.
These have been readily available to big-dish owners for quite some time, so why this is a noteworthy story now just because the final episodes of Voyager got leaked online a few hours early is beyond me
Well, you might try reading the whole story paragraph, since it explains this. It's no longer just big dish owner, and their friends, getting these broadcasts. Now they show up on the internet, and millions of people can get them.
Another factor will be if there are other libraries that your code will link with just fine, other than the GPL'ed one
That's not a factor at all. Work X either is or is not a derivative work of work Y. The existence or lack thereof of another work, Z, that can be used in place of Y is irrelevant.
The combination of X and Y is a derivative of Y, of course, but X is not.
One of the comments in their forum was from someone saying basically that it doesn't matter if what they do meets the letter of the GPL or not...they should be respecting the wishes of the author of the GPL code.
Yet, the whole purpose of the product is to do something that is against the wishes of the authors of the DVDs that will be ripped with it.
My irony meter just exploded.
It would not be hard for Id to make the next patch for Quake III check for Asus cards, and refuse to run, or fall back to software rendering. Same for other game companies.
That would blow a giant smoking hole in Asus' card sales, since the vast majority of people buying these cards are consumers looking for good game performance.
A lot of people have pointed out you are nuts. Unfortunately, they are all wrong.
What they have all overlooked is that (1) while the details differ, the high level design of the low level I/O system is actually pretty much the same on Windows, Linux, and most other operating systems more advanced than DOS, and (2) the interface to the driver for a given class of device is usually designed around what the device does, and since the device does the same thing on all OSes, the interfaces end up very similar.
The difficulty is in the details. You have to thouroghly understand all of the following:
1. Exactly what Linux wants from a driver for the given class of hardware,
2. Exactly what Windows wants from a driver for the given class of hardware,
3. The Windows file formats for drivers.
4. The in-memory format of a Windows driver. E.g., how data is accessed, how relocation is done when the driver loads, etc.
So, it is a lot of work, but the actual code you'd end up with between the Linux and Windows code once the Windows driver is loaded would be a bunch of thunking code, that would not be too big and would not hurt performance noticably. The big task would be writing the loader, beacuse you'd have to figure out a lot of Windows stuff that is either not documented or poorly documented.
How many years has it been with no sign of native plugins to match the Windows plugins? How many more years will it be?
Having to boot Windows to get decent web access does a heck of a lot more to keep Linux in a niche than running Windows plugins on Linux will do.
Furthermore, native plugins, if hell froze over and someone actually wrote them, only address the past. What about the future? By running Windows plugins, Linux gets compatibility with any new format quickly.
I'm having trouble keeping track of this. Code forking used to be bad. Witness the reaction to the emacs/xemacs split a long time ago, and, more recently, to the general disapproval whenever someone tries to fork the Linux kernel.
But now Microsoft says code forking is bad, so that means it is really good?
You have this completely backwards (assuming the claim that Win2K has a log of BSD code is true).
Many companies take BSD code, and do proprietary things with it, and don't release anything they add under an open source license. That happens all the time, and since that is one of the things the license is meant to allow, no one bitches about it too much.
This is not a problem with Microsoft, because Microsoft is not trying to present themselves as an Open Source company. Apple is trying to present themselves as either an Open Source company, or at least one that is friendly to Open Source, and so this makes Apple much worse than Microsoft.
Eventually what is going to happen is that the music and movie industries are going to give up on using copyright law to control their material, and will switch to technological means of protection.
Say hello to Mr. Dongle.
Dongles aren't used now because they are slightly annoying, and the content-owners don't want to piss off the average user. At some point, rapidly approaching, the savings from stopping widespread infringement will be worth the loss from pissing off people with dongles.
And guess what...almost all PCs have USB, which gets rid of one of the major hassles with dongles.
Sure hope the dongle companies provide Linux versions.
You are confused, like most Slashdot readers are, because you do not realize that the question of where a lawsuit is heard is independent of the question of what law applies.
There where part is determined by what courts can obtain jurisdiction over the party that does not want to be involved in the suit.
Pretty much every contract in existence has a clause that specifies what state's contract law is to be applied. Grab any random contracts you have in your file cabinet or safe deposit box and read them, and you'll probably find such clauses.
So what happens if you live in, say, California, and your Delaware insurance company sues you? The trial takes place in California, but the California court applies Delaware law (if that's the law the contract specifies).
By that argument, if I ignore include some GPL'ed code in my proprietary software, no one should complain, because no one has lost anything...my users have merely gained.
What you have failed to recognize is that there are several rights associated with ownership of property. The right to use your property is only one of them. Another is the right to exclude others from your property.
The fundamental problem is that a free market economy does not work when it comes to production of things like music or computer programs or other intellectual property. Economists can mathematically prove that for market forces in a free market to lead to the right production level for a given thing, that thing has to have certain properties. Real property has those properties. Intellectual property does not.
This means that to have the right level of production of movies and music and computer software and other intellectual property, intervention is necessary.
Only two systems have been discovered that work.
1. The government pays for the production of intellectual property. Anyone may freely reproduce and distribute it.
2. The law restricts reproduction and distribution of intellectual property so as to give IP those same properties of real property that are necessary for a free market to make the right production decisions.
If anyone has a third system that would work, a lot of people would like to hear about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course you can give up "fair use" rights by contract. What's wrong with that?
Suppose someone were to violate GPL, and the copyright owner sued them. The copyright owner would NOT be claiming that the terms of GPL were violated. The copyright owner would sue claiming a copyright violation.
It is the defendant who would be bringing up GPL, as a defense to copyright infringement.
I'm ignoring it because I forgot about it. :-)
The first PC that was widely available with memory protection sufficient to support Unix was the PC/AT, which used the 80286. The 80286 has a built-in MMU which is quit excellent at supporting a swapping system. If you were insane, you could even make System V Release 3 run on an 80286 (we did that at Interactive...porting from the 3B2 source...man, that was one pain-in-the-ass port!)
The 1984 Mac used the 68000, which did not have an MMU available from Motorola. Comanies like Sun, Fortune, Callan, etc., that built 68000-based Unix systems designed their own custom MMUs, which, like that in the 80286, supported swapping, but not paging. They did not do paging because the 68000 does not save enough information in the bus error stack to recover from a general page fault.
Sun, and others doing Unix on 68K had to design their own MMUs, since Motorola did not have an MMU for the 68000.
Even with a custom MMU, you were limited to swapping, not paging, on a 68000, because it did not save enough information on a bus error to resume or restart in the general case. You needed a 68010 if you wanted to do paging.
The blueprint machine was in a room in the center of the engineering building. There were two entrances to the building. To go from the front entrance to the blueprint machine room, you would have to go past the office of one of the company owners, and the secretary, and a couple of engineer's offices.
To get to the blueprint machine room from the back door, you would have to go past my office, and the offices of four other programmers.
All the desks in all the aforementioned offices faced their doors, so anyone working could easily see anyone who went down the hall.
One day, the machine was repossesed. It happened between 11am (when someone last used it), and 1pm (when someone tried to use it, and found it was gone). During that time, none of the people in any of the offices I mentioned above went to lunch.
No one saw anything. Evidently, at least two people managed to walk in, go past several people, and carry the machine out, all without being seen.
What other major countries go back 200 years? Sure, many go back culturally far beyond that, but in terms of government, very few, if any, are as old as the United States.
You completely missed his point, which is that he evaluated the capabilities of Tivo *without* service, and found it did what he wanted. He bought it on that basis. They retroactively changed it to take away those features. Note that since he is not using their service, there is no reason for his unit to have the latest software.
The right way to design a product like Tivo is to make updates part of the service. For people who do not want the service, Tivo would then would be like regular VCRs...what comes out of the box when you buy it is what you get, and it continues to work like that until the hardware breaks.
You could just as easily argue that by letting his Tivo call up and get the upgrade, he was pirating the Tivo software.
Try replying in context. Why should the government fund GPL'ed code?
That, in fact, was one of the things that kept the United States out of the Berne Convention for a long time. Berne requires protection of certain rights called "moral rights" of authors, and one of those rights is the protection of the integrity of their work. This goes way beyond what the US thinks copyright should cover.
To get into Berne, the US enacted these moral rights, but only for a very small set of works, and then the Berne countries pretended that that was enough, and the US joined.
I'm amazed that you'd actually try to seriously cite IHR for anything.
Well, you might try reading the whole story paragraph, since it explains this. It's no longer just big dish owner, and their friends, getting these broadcasts. Now they show up on the internet, and millions of people can get them.
That's not a factor at all. Work X either is or is not a derivative work of work Y. The existence or lack thereof of another work, Z, that can be used in place of Y is irrelevant.
The combination of X and Y is a derivative of Y, of course, but X is not.
One of the comments in their forum was from someone saying basically that it doesn't matter if what they do meets the letter of the GPL or not...they should be respecting the wishes of the author of the GPL code. Yet, the whole purpose of the product is to do something that is against the wishes of the authors of the DVDs that will be ripped with it. My irony meter just exploded.
That would blow a giant smoking hole in Asus' card sales, since the vast majority of people buying these cards are consumers looking for good game performance.
Developers can put see through modes into their engine for use by designers, testers, and mod makers.
What they have all overlooked is that (1) while the details differ, the high level design of the low level I/O system is actually pretty much the same on Windows, Linux, and most other operating systems more advanced than DOS, and (2) the interface to the driver for a given class of device is usually designed around what the device does, and since the device does the same thing on all OSes, the interfaces end up very similar.
The difficulty is in the details. You have to thouroghly understand all of the following:
1. Exactly what Linux wants from a driver for the given class of hardware,
2. Exactly what Windows wants from a driver for the given class of hardware,
3. The Windows file formats for drivers.
4. The in-memory format of a Windows driver. E.g., how data is accessed, how relocation is done when the driver loads, etc.
So, it is a lot of work, but the actual code you'd end up with between the Linux and Windows code once the Windows driver is loaded would be a bunch of thunking code, that would not be too big and would not hurt performance noticably. The big task would be writing the loader, beacuse you'd have to figure out a lot of Windows stuff that is either not documented or poorly documented.
Having to boot Windows to get decent web access does a heck of a lot more to keep Linux in a niche than running Windows plugins on Linux will do.
Furthermore, native plugins, if hell froze over and someone actually wrote them, only address the past. What about the future? By running Windows plugins, Linux gets compatibility with any new format quickly.
But now Microsoft says code forking is bad, so that means it is really good?
Many companies take BSD code, and do proprietary things with it, and don't release anything they add under an open source license. That happens all the time, and since that is one of the things the license is meant to allow, no one bitches about it too much.
This is not a problem with Microsoft, because Microsoft is not trying to present themselves as an Open Source company. Apple is trying to present themselves as either an Open Source company, or at least one that is friendly to Open Source, and so this makes Apple much worse than Microsoft.
Say hello to Mr. Dongle.
Dongles aren't used now because they are slightly annoying, and the content-owners don't want to piss off the average user. At some point, rapidly approaching, the savings from stopping widespread infringement will be worth the loss from pissing off people with dongles.
And guess what...almost all PCs have USB, which gets rid of one of the major hassles with dongles.
Sure hope the dongle companies provide Linux versions.
There where part is determined by what courts can obtain jurisdiction over the party that does not want to be involved in the suit.
Pretty much every contract in existence has a clause that specifies what state's contract law is to be applied. Grab any random contracts you have in your file cabinet or safe deposit box and read them, and you'll probably find such clauses.
So what happens if you live in, say, California, and your Delaware insurance company sues you? The trial takes place in California, but the California court applies Delaware law (if that's the law the contract specifies).
You wrote the music you are sharing?
What you have failed to recognize is that there are several rights associated with ownership of property. The right to use your property is only one of them. Another is the right to exclude others from your property.
The fundamental problem is that a free market economy does not work when it comes to production of things like music or computer programs or other intellectual property. Economists can mathematically prove that for market forces in a free market to lead to the right production level for a given thing, that thing has to have certain properties. Real property has those properties. Intellectual property does not.
This means that to have the right level of production of movies and music and computer software and other intellectual property, intervention is necessary.
Only two systems have been discovered that work.
1. The government pays for the production of intellectual property. Anyone may freely reproduce and distribute it.
2. The law restricts reproduction and distribution of intellectual property so as to give IP those same properties of real property that are necessary for a free market to make the right production decisions.
If anyone has a third system that would work, a lot of people would like to hear about it.