OK, I know this is going to get voted way down as a troll attempt or something, but seriously--the real thing Google is doing wrong is using Linux. Since they want Android to be licensed as much as possible under more open licenses (they used Apache 2 for nearly all of their original code), they should have went with a BSD kernel. There's no real technical advantage to Linux over BSD in this kind of application, and it would sidestep all risk of this kind of potential license problem.
Same for all the various router manufacturers, set top box makers, TV makers, and so on that have run into GPL problems. I have no idea why no one has made something like BusyBox, but built around BSD and similarly licensed software.
The COPYING file you quote makes no mention of kernel headers. It merely says that using the kernel via the mechanism of invoking system calls at runtime is OK.
So, since the limitations of the GPL (distribution of source) have been expressly waived for userland programs that only call kernel services, there is NO copyright violation for using the header files in such a fashion, ever.
That does not follow. There are many possible ways to produce a program that makes system calls into the kernel. The fact that making such system calls is OK does not mean that all ways of producing such a program are OK.
No, there is no conflict with DRM and GPLv2. That's one of the reasons GPLv3 came about. See TiVo.
GPLv2 does not allow you to restrict users from exercising GPL rights via the imposition of additional license restrictions. Attempting to restrict the users by technological means instead of legal means is beyond the scope of GPL.
Nonsense. He's long been a leading figure in the fight against software patents. Groklaw has mounted a major FUD campaign against him because he violated the Groklaw prime directive ("Thou Shalt Not Criticize IBM") and that seems to be the ultimate source of most of the negative claims against him.
It's not the magnitude of the cap. It's that bandwidth - which is a momentary capacity, not a "month cycle" capacity - is being charged that way.
This ain't electricity or water, where there is a certain central pool quantity to draw from. It's on or off.
For your internet service to be useful, your ISP has to connect to the rest of the internet. The cost of that connection depends on how fast it is and how much data they transfer over it.
The problem that had been noted with VLC was that you had to go to a 'third party' site for the source, and you couldn't build the actual app and install it without additional hurdles.
No, none of those were the problem with VLC. The problem with VLC was that the terms of service of the App Store, which users must agree to in order to be allowed to download and install the app, conflict with GPLv2.
VLC wasn't a problem until a single contributor (and nokia employee) complained to Apple to have it removed.
Apple makes their gcc/etc source code available and the app store version of the gcc binary doesn't have any DRM and can be copied/modified so the FSF shouldn't have any reason to complain.
No need to mention DRM, since DRM does not inherently conflict with GPLv2. The problem with GPLv2 and app stores is with the terms of services of the app stores.
The first to file system only really works in a very specific context - where you have two inventors who filed an application on almost identical types of inventions within a short period of time.
I would argue that except in cases of corporate espionage, all such filings are, by definition, situations in which "the differences between the subject matter sought to be patented and the prior art are such that the subject matter as a whole would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which said subject matter pertains." (35 U.S.C. 103) The fact that we're even discussing first-to-patent versus first-to-file patent rules is illustrative of the fundamental brokenness of our patent system. If there is ever an argument about who should get the patent, then the patent is almost invariably too obvious to be deserving of a patent in the first place.
I think you overlooked a word in "obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art". The word "ordinary" is key there.
Isn't first to file REALLY bad? It helps patent trolls doesn't it?
Yes. It's a disaster. In effect if you invent something you now have to patent it or possibly suffer the consequences from a patent troll. It's a money spinner for the patent office if nothing else.
How do you figure? All this does is affect who wins in the case of two inventors both filing patents that cover the same thing. How does that have anything to do with patent trolls?
The iPad is still assembled by cheap Chinese labor who sometimes get suicidal and jump off the Foxconn factory roof so they installed nets. But hey, it's 33% thinner!!!!!
Pretty much every major electronics company uses Foxconn or other Chinese companies.
The difference is that Apple has taken serious steps to improve the situation, while most of the others ignore it. You've also overlooked that the Foxconn suicide rate is actually lower than what you'd expect based on the overall Chinese suicide rate.
Man, do you people think or do any research at all? Or do you just like trolling?
Mozilla Firefox (~30% of the browser market share) will never have support for H.264. Never.
Chrome (~11% of browser market share) no longer supports H.264.
H.264 cannot be the standard for HTML5 video because it is not royalty-free.
That's why WebM is a big deal.
Mozilla and Chrome both support H.264 on Windows via plug-ins from Microsoft. That takes care of most of that 30% and 11%, respectively.
Google, or at least the AOSP, did. The full Java is too big to implement on a phone (presumably), so they only implemented a subset, and thus they opened themselves up for patent damages.
That's not quite correct, as Dalvik is not an implementation of Java. It is a completely different virtual machine, with a different set of instructions and a fundamentally different architecture (register based rather than stack based). Google provides tools that can convert JVM machine code to Dalvik machine code.
Oracle is claiming patents on things that could easily be infringed by nearly any language and runtime that involves compiling the language to bytecode for a VM, such as Ruby, Python, Lua, and many others.
If you can't watch h.264 on your Linux box, you're doing it wrong
I can play H.264. I can't play H.264 in Firefox with HTML5 tags, because Firefox doesn't support it due to patent concerns.
Which part of 'play H.264 in your web browser' is proving so hard for you to understand?
H.264 video works fine on Linux in Firefox, via Flash. You didn't say anything in the post Beelzebud was responding to about HTML5 tags.
Firefox could use Flash to implement the HTML5 video tag, thus gaining H.264 support without patent worries. Or they could use gstreamer or something similar, and play whatever video formats the user has installed codecs for, again without patent worries. Or they could include an H.264 codec themselves but as an optional download, available only in countries where H.264 is not covered by patents (not their fault if some people choose to illegally import it).
What is each company's interest in supporting either side? Microsoft recognizes that anything that is good for alternative operating systems and devices is bad for their Windows monopoly, which is why they are pro-H.264. I'm not sure what Apple's motivation is, but maybe it's similarly because all of their devices and software support H.264, and they want to retain a competitive advantage, however small.
No, Microsoft is pro-H.264 because H.264 is the standard for video compression. It's an ISO standard. It is the dominant codec for DVD and Blu-Ray discs, for satellite TV, for broadcast TV, for cable TV, and for commercial streaming services. It is supported by pretty much all professional and prosumer video hardware and software, and a very large number of consumer devices that deal with video (portable players and gaming consoles).
Note that Microsoft is also supporting WebM in IE9. Microsoft doesn't care what format video is in. They just want Windows to be the best place to view video. Hence, IE9 will support H.264 and WebM, and they are making sure that on Windows users of Firefox and Chrome can also handle both. The bottom line for Microsoft is that Windows users will get a good out of the box experience with video, whereas Linux users, and to a lesser extent Mac users, might have to futz around to get the same.
Same goes for Apple. One of the major target audiences for Mac is creative professionals. They'd be laughed out of Hollywood if they tried to drop support for H.264. For web video, Safari uses Quicktime codecs, so handles whatever Quicktime handles. If a Mac user wants WebM, he will simply install a Quicktime plugin. So, Mac users who use Safari will easily have all their bases covered. I don't know if someone is going to to an H.264 plug-in for Firefox and Chrome on Mac like Microsoft is doing for Windows, so Mac users may not have it as easy as Windows users in this regard.
Is anyone else tired of the way that gets mindlessly repeated, but almost no one ever quotes it in context? The full quote is "On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other".
Jobs himself has said Apple started on the iPad before they started on the iPhone. During development of the iPad, they realized the interface would work great scaled down to a phone, and put the iPad on hold to developed the iPhone. See the Wikipedia article on the iPad for cites.
Is it so hard to tweak the Internet to make DDoS impossible?
For DDoS attacks at the scale Anonymous is capable of, there is no need as their attacks are pretty much ineffective. All they were able to take down were a few small sites. Against a big site, their attacks are so small as to be unlikely to even raise alarms. For instance, Twitter on average processes something like 76k requests per second. A good "Justin Bieber is dead" rumor will generate a bigger flash load on Twitter by an order of magnitude or two than even the biggest Anonymous attack can muster.
Same goes for Amazon. The only way Anonymous can have a noticeable effect on Amazon is if someone at a major Amazon data center laughs so hard at the attempt he falls over, and hits the emergency power shutoff.
You may have seen reports that Anonymous took down Mastercard and a few other credit card companies. What they actually took down were the general information sites those companies maintain. These sites are not involved in credit card processing, and most users of the cards will never visit them.
So I can make a web page full of Mickey Mouse cartoons and stuff? And it's all ok if I say "Copyright by Disney" way down at the bottom of it? I don't need to ask permission or anything? Wow, that's great! Thanks for the info!
That would be copyright infringement. It would not be plagiarism.
It's cheating because instead of generating good search results, they look at someone else's search results and output those.
Except that is not what they are doing. Their toolbar notices that someone searched for $search_term and then went to $site. It sends this information to Bing, which treats it as an indication that the user believes that $site has information relevant to $search_term. This goes into their page ranking algorithm, along with a large number of other facts they know about $site, and tends to slightly raise the position of $site in searches for $search_term.
Microsoft has not kept this secret. People have known that this is an input to their ranking for years.
Google makes it sound like they somehow have targeted Google and are actually grabbing Google's results. In reality, this probably works for anything done in the search field in IE, regardless of what search provider. It could also be done for any page, not just search results pages, by looking at tags on the URL to look for common search related tags. For instance, if you are on a page whose query string includes q=homoerotic+regurgitation, and you follow a link from that site to some other page, it is a reasonable guess that the page you go to has something to do with homoerotic regurgitation, and they could use that to influence that page's position in Bing searches for homoerotic regurgitation.
There's no cheating here. The only thing that might be questionable is whether or not user's have really consented to having their clicking used to help rate pages for search. They are told about this in the agreements they are supposed to have read, but most people just click through those.
The Moon is high ground relative to Earth, contains a ready source of very large rocks, and is a shallow enough gravity well that it would not be hard to throw the aforementioned rocks at the Earth with readily available technology.
There are in fact no Supreme Court cases backing up that claim. What there are, however, are Supreme Court cases where a brief filed by the losing side tried to make that claim and was thoroughly shot down. Lying assholes like yourself or the people you cite who are trying to rip people off by selling them the alleged secrets of how to pay no taxes quote those losing briefs, counting on the average person, if they go try to check the claims at all, failing to tell the difference between what the court said and what the lawyers argued.
Back when I was in law school, in order to practice legal research I made a hobby of investigating the so-called "tax protestor" or "patriot movement" claims. Every single one of them comes down to citing something like a losing brief, or quoting out of context, or citing quotes that don't exist (sometimes they cite a real case but the cited quote is not in it, and sometimes the case itself doesn't even exist), of blatant failure to comprehend English. (My favorite example of the later is there is some obscure provision in the tax code dealing with some weird thing like taxes on companies that invest in oil wells in the United States, or something like that, and the tax code says "For purposes of this section, 'United States' includes Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia". That "tax protestors" read that as saying that the United States is only Puerto Rico and DC, so if you live in one of the 50 states it does not apply. They also ignore the "for purposes of this section" part and take it to apply to every part of the tax code).
So how come, you might ask, do the people selling "pay no taxes" books and seminars manage to not go to jail for paying no taxes? Two ways. The first is that it can take a long time for the government to get around to nailing someone who simply stops paying taxes. The second is even simpler--how do you know they don't pay taxes? It's easy to claim you don't pay taxes, and a prudent thing to do when your business is convincing people they don't have to pay taxes.
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Header files also contain macros and inline functions, which go far beyond mere API.
OK, I know this is going to get voted way down as a troll attempt or something, but seriously--the real thing Google is doing wrong is using Linux. Since they want Android to be licensed as much as possible under more open licenses (they used Apache 2 for nearly all of their original code), they should have went with a BSD kernel. There's no real technical advantage to Linux over BSD in this kind of application, and it would sidestep all risk of this kind of potential license problem.
Same for all the various router manufacturers, set top box makers, TV makers, and so on that have run into GPL problems. I have no idea why no one has made something like BusyBox, but built around BSD and similarly licensed software.
The COPYING file you quote makes no mention of kernel headers. It merely says that using the kernel via the mechanism of invoking system calls at runtime is OK.
So, since the limitations of the GPL (distribution of source) have been expressly waived for userland programs that only call kernel services, there is NO copyright violation for using the header files in such a fashion, ever.
That does not follow. There are many possible ways to produce a program that makes system calls into the kernel. The fact that making such system calls is OK does not mean that all ways of producing such a program are OK.
Perhaps the glibc authors obtained permission?
No, there is no conflict with DRM and GPLv2. That's one of the reasons GPLv3 came about. See TiVo.
GPLv2 does not allow you to restrict users from exercising GPL rights via the imposition of additional license restrictions. Attempting to restrict the users by technological means instead of legal means is beyond the scope of GPL.
Nonsense. He's long been a leading figure in the fight against software patents. Groklaw has mounted a major FUD campaign against him because he violated the Groklaw prime directive ("Thou Shalt Not Criticize IBM") and that seems to be the ultimate source of most of the negative claims against him.
It's not the magnitude of the cap. It's that bandwidth - which is a momentary capacity, not a "month cycle" capacity - is being charged that way.
This ain't electricity or water, where there is a certain central pool quantity to draw from. It's on or off.
For your internet service to be useful, your ISP has to connect to the rest of the internet. The cost of that connection depends on how fast it is and how much data they transfer over it.
The problem that had been noted with VLC was that you had to go to a 'third party' site for the source, and you couldn't build the actual app and install it without additional hurdles.
No, none of those were the problem with VLC. The problem with VLC was that the terms of service of the App Store, which users must agree to in order to be allowed to download and install the app, conflict with GPLv2.
VLC wasn't a problem until a single contributor (and nokia employee) complained to Apple to have it removed.
Apple makes their gcc/etc source code available and the app store version of the gcc binary doesn't have any DRM and can be copied/modified so the FSF shouldn't have any reason to complain.
No need to mention DRM, since DRM does not inherently conflict with GPLv2. The problem with GPLv2 and app stores is with the terms of services of the app stores.
I would argue that except in cases of corporate espionage, all such filings are, by definition, situations in which "the differences between the subject matter sought to be patented and the prior art are such that the subject matter as a whole would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which said subject matter pertains." (35 U.S.C. 103) The fact that we're even discussing first-to-patent versus first-to-file patent rules is illustrative of the fundamental brokenness of our patent system. If there is ever an argument about who should get the patent, then the patent is almost invariably too obvious to be deserving of a patent in the first place.
I think you overlooked a word in "obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art". The word "ordinary" is key there.
Yes. It's a disaster. In effect if you invent something you now have to patent it or possibly suffer the consequences from a patent troll. It's a money spinner for the patent office if nothing else.
How do you figure? All this does is affect who wins in the case of two inventors both filing patents that cover the same thing. How does that have anything to do with patent trolls?
The iPad is still assembled by cheap Chinese labor who sometimes get suicidal and jump off the Foxconn factory roof so they installed nets. But hey, it's 33% thinner!!!!!
Pretty much every major electronics company uses Foxconn or other Chinese companies.
The difference is that Apple has taken serious steps to improve the situation, while most of the others ignore it. You've also overlooked that the Foxconn suicide rate is actually lower than what you'd expect based on the overall Chinese suicide rate.
Man, do you people think or do any research at all? Or do you just like trolling?
Mozilla Firefox (~30% of the browser market share) will never have support for H.264. Never. Chrome (~11% of browser market share) no longer supports H.264.
H.264 cannot be the standard for HTML5 video because it is not royalty-free.
That's why WebM is a big deal.
Mozilla and Chrome both support H.264 on Windows via plug-ins from Microsoft. That takes care of most of that 30% and 11%, respectively.
Most people do not break the Java specification.
Google, or at least the AOSP, did. The full Java is too big to implement on a phone (presumably), so they only implemented a subset, and thus they opened themselves up for patent damages.
That's not quite correct, as Dalvik is not an implementation of Java. It is a completely different virtual machine, with a different set of instructions and a fundamentally different architecture (register based rather than stack based). Google provides tools that can convert JVM machine code to Dalvik machine code.
Oracle is claiming patents on things that could easily be infringed by nearly any language and runtime that involves compiling the language to bytecode for a VM, such as Ruby, Python, Lua, and many others.
Google is being sued for not using Java.
If you can't watch h.264 on your Linux box, you're doing it wrong
I can play H.264. I can't play H.264 in Firefox with HTML5 tags, because Firefox doesn't support it due to patent concerns.
Which part of 'play H.264 in your web browser' is proving so hard for you to understand?
H.264 video works fine on Linux in Firefox, via Flash. You didn't say anything in the post Beelzebud was responding to about HTML5 tags.
Firefox could use Flash to implement the HTML5 video tag, thus gaining H.264 support without patent worries. Or they could use gstreamer or something similar, and play whatever video formats the user has installed codecs for, again without patent worries. Or they could include an H.264 codec themselves but as an optional download, available only in countries where H.264 is not covered by patents (not their fault if some people choose to illegally import it).
What is each company's interest in supporting either side? Microsoft recognizes that anything that is good for alternative operating systems and devices is bad for their Windows monopoly, which is why they are pro-H.264. I'm not sure what Apple's motivation is, but maybe it's similarly because all of their devices and software support H.264, and they want to retain a competitive advantage, however small.
No, Microsoft is pro-H.264 because H.264 is the standard for video compression. It's an ISO standard. It is the dominant codec for DVD and Blu-Ray discs, for satellite TV, for broadcast TV, for cable TV, and for commercial streaming services. It is supported by pretty much all professional and prosumer video hardware and software, and a very large number of consumer devices that deal with video (portable players and gaming consoles).
Note that Microsoft is also supporting WebM in IE9. Microsoft doesn't care what format video is in. They just want Windows to be the best place to view video. Hence, IE9 will support H.264 and WebM, and they are making sure that on Windows users of Firefox and Chrome can also handle both. The bottom line for Microsoft is that Windows users will get a good out of the box experience with video, whereas Linux users, and to a lesser extent Mac users, might have to futz around to get the same.
Same goes for Apple. One of the major target audiences for Mac is creative professionals. They'd be laughed out of Hollywood if they tried to drop support for H.264. For web video, Safari uses Quicktime codecs, so handles whatever Quicktime handles. If a Mac user wants WebM, he will simply install a Quicktime plugin. So, Mac users who use Safari will easily have all their bases covered. I don't know if someone is going to to an H.264 plug-in for Firefox and Chrome on Mac like Microsoft is doing for Windows, so Mac users may not have it as easy as Windows users in this regard.
Because information wants to be free!
Is anyone else tired of the way that gets mindlessly repeated, but almost no one ever quotes it in context? The full quote is "On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other".
Mod Skykk up, as he is in fact correct.
Jobs himself has said Apple started on the iPad before they started on the iPhone. During development of the iPad, they realized the interface would work great scaled down to a phone, and put the iPad on hold to developed the iPhone. See the Wikipedia article on the iPad for cites.
Is it so hard to tweak the Internet to make DDoS impossible?
For DDoS attacks at the scale Anonymous is capable of, there is no need as their attacks are pretty much ineffective. All they were able to take down were a few small sites. Against a big site, their attacks are so small as to be unlikely to even raise alarms. For instance, Twitter on average processes something like 76k requests per second. A good "Justin Bieber is dead" rumor will generate a bigger flash load on Twitter by an order of magnitude or two than even the biggest Anonymous attack can muster.
Same goes for Amazon. The only way Anonymous can have a noticeable effect on Amazon is if someone at a major Amazon data center laughs so hard at the attempt he falls over, and hits the emergency power shutoff.
You may have seen reports that Anonymous took down Mastercard and a few other credit card companies. What they actually took down were the general information sites those companies maintain. These sites are not involved in credit card processing, and most users of the cards will never visit them.
So I can make a web page full of Mickey Mouse cartoons and stuff? And it's all ok if I say "Copyright by Disney" way down at the bottom of it? I don't need to ask permission or anything? Wow, that's great! Thanks for the info!
That would be copyright infringement. It would not be plagiarism.
It's cheating because instead of generating good search results, they look at someone else's search results and output those.
Except that is not what they are doing. Their toolbar notices that someone searched for $search_term and then went to $site. It sends this information to Bing, which treats it as an indication that the user believes that $site has information relevant to $search_term. This goes into their page ranking algorithm, along with a large number of other facts they know about $site, and tends to slightly raise the position of $site in searches for $search_term.
Microsoft has not kept this secret. People have known that this is an input to their ranking for years.
Google makes it sound like they somehow have targeted Google and are actually grabbing Google's results. In reality, this probably works for anything done in the search field in IE, regardless of what search provider. It could also be done for any page, not just search results pages, by looking at tags on the URL to look for common search related tags. For instance, if you are on a page whose query string includes q=homoerotic+regurgitation, and you follow a link from that site to some other page, it is a reasonable guess that the page you go to has something to do with homoerotic regurgitation, and they could use that to influence that page's position in Bing searches for homoerotic regurgitation.
There's no cheating here. The only thing that might be questionable is whether or not user's have really consented to having their clicking used to help rate pages for search. They are told about this in the agreements they are supposed to have read, but most people just click through those.
Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 + the last clause of that section.
See "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" by Heinlein.
The Moon is high ground relative to Earth, contains a ready source of very large rocks, and is a shallow enough gravity well that it would not be hard to throw the aforementioned rocks at the Earth with readily available technology.
There are in fact no Supreme Court cases backing up that claim. What there are, however, are Supreme Court cases where a brief filed by the losing side tried to make that claim and was thoroughly shot down. Lying assholes like yourself or the people you cite who are trying to rip people off by selling them the alleged secrets of how to pay no taxes quote those losing briefs, counting on the average person, if they go try to check the claims at all, failing to tell the difference between what the court said and what the lawyers argued.
Back when I was in law school, in order to practice legal research I made a hobby of investigating the so-called "tax protestor" or "patriot movement" claims. Every single one of them comes down to citing something like a losing brief, or quoting out of context, or citing quotes that don't exist (sometimes they cite a real case but the cited quote is not in it, and sometimes the case itself doesn't even exist), of blatant failure to comprehend English. (My favorite example of the later is there is some obscure provision in the tax code dealing with some weird thing like taxes on companies that invest in oil wells in the United States, or something like that, and the tax code says "For purposes of this section, 'United States' includes Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia". That "tax protestors" read that as saying that the United States is only Puerto Rico and DC, so if you live in one of the 50 states it does not apply. They also ignore the "for purposes of this section" part and take it to apply to every part of the tax code).
So how come, you might ask, do the people selling "pay no taxes" books and seminars manage to not go to jail for paying no taxes? Two ways. The first is that it can take a long time for the government to get around to nailing someone who simply stops paying taxes. The second is even simpler--how do you know they don't pay taxes? It's easy to claim you don't pay taxes, and a prudent thing to do when your business is convincing people they don't have to pay taxes.