Do us all a favor and do something about your ignorance before posting next time: http://walmartwatch.com/
Do us all a favor and take your own advice. Watch the Penn & Teller 'Bullshit!' episode about Wal-Mart, where they thoroughly demolish the anti-Wal-Mart arguments.
What he should have done for the first example is take the original document, change that one cell from a formula to a constant, like he was trying to do in his by-hand edit, save out that document, and show the differences between it and his by-hand document. That would show us just what has to be changed to keep Excel happy.
Then we could judge if his example is reasonable or not. I realize we could all do this ourselves, but I for one am not going to go out and buy Excel 2007 just to do that!
What his first item seems to come down to, when you put all the parts together, is that if you want to change data in a spreadsheet that contains formulas that reference other cells, you have to write a program that understands spreadsheets that contain formulas that reference other cells, so you can make sure to update the reference and dependency information.
Wrong: Internal distribution is fine and doesn't really count as distribution regarding the GPL
I don't think the person you are responding to was talking about any particular license. Internal distribution most certainly IS copying, and does require permission from the copyright owner. This is well settled in case law. GPL is widely believed to grant that permission to things that are under it.
Its more like making sure the format war doesn't end. Blu Ray has been kicking HD DVD in the rear of late (2:1 sales ratio),
That's in the US. In Europe, it is decidedly in the other direction.
Furthermore, adoption rates of both are sufficiently low that one or two blockbuster movies can swing the lead right now, and the forced bundling of Blu-Ray with PS3 is contributing some, too. The studios are more interested in which will be more popular once it gets past the very early adopters and the PS3 users. If it goes like past formats have gone, the deciding factor will be cost, and the HD DVD side looks like they will be reaching low prices sooner.
Interesting point, but Skype is based in Luxembourg and has no obligation to US law
They specifically market their products to US consumers. That generally makes them, for those aspects of their business that involve those consumers, subject to US law.
The extent to which Luxembourg will cooperate with the US in enforcing those laws will depend on the details of whatever treaties are in place between the two. There's a vast web of such treaties, between pairs of countries, and between members of larger groups, covering taxes, civil law, and criminal law. It's one of the more interesting, and complicated, areas of law.
Deadlocked on a read operation of all things!? Bad, very bad.
A similar thing happens in MySQL. It's been a while since I had to deal with this, so I may be misremembering the details, but it was something like this. You get a read that takes a long time, and that causes a subsequent write to block. Now other reads block, waiting for that write.
We saw this a lot in a helpdesk system we were using. There was a user table, that kept information on the support technicians. Many reports that involved large, slow queries involved that table. But when a technician would log in, there would be a write to that table, noting that the technician was available. That write would get stuck if one of those big reports was running. And since pretty much everything a support technician would do involved a join on the user table to check permissions, those would all hang. (Again, it's been a while, so I may have the details wrong...the gist is right, though: long read, blocks write, blocks other reads).
The license meets every criteria for "Open Source" that OSI has published, and MS is following all the published procedures for approval.
They have no choice but to approve it, unless they want to lose credibility, and change "Open Source" to mean "whatever they happen to like", rather than "a license that meets this specified list of objective criteria".
All of the objections raises are very pointless. For example, there was the objection to how it does not get along with some other licenses. Hello! The same thing applies to many of the already-approved licenses. The objections from the Google guy are even worse--they don't seem to have anything whatsoever to do with the stated purpose of OSI. He's just using the mailing list as a soapbox.
Office on the Mac, while currently behind Windows Office, has often in the past been ahead. There is a fair amount of independence between the Windows Office people and the Mac Office people, and so they tend to leapfrog each other.
Christopher Hellwig has been on about this for about over a year now. No one from VMWare has responded. The fact is, that the vmkernel is a big binary blob loaded by a Linux kernel module. It can't run without Linux, so that makes it a derived work
The most likely reason VMWare hasn't responded is that whenever they ask their lawyers, they lose about a week's worth of productivity from said lawyers. That's how long it takes them to stop rolling on the floor laughing at the theory that "can't run without Linux" implies "derived work".
There's no support at all for that theory in the copyright statutes or case law. (Which is good, because otherwise you'd need Microsoft's permission to write a Windows program, Apple's permission to write a Mac program, Sun's permission to write a Java program, and so on!).
They are comparable in that--as the descriptions of both show--they do almost exactly the same thing, but SDL is cross-platform. Seems to me that you're being exceptionally pedantic, if they do the same thing then they are comparable, how they do it is irrelevant
The person who brought up SDL brought it up in the context of being something that could replace DirectX. Someone else had said that if DirectX falters, it might lead to people using OpenGL instead. That works, because OpenGL on Windows doesn't depend on DirectX. If Microsoft botches DirectX, OpenGL does not suffer.
On the other hand, if DirectX gets botched, then SDL gets botched on Windows, too.
A better analogy than your car analogy would be I/O in C. SDL is like stdio (fopen, fclose, fread, fwrite, fseek, ftell, printf, etc). DirectX is like the system call level interface (open/close/read/write/lseek/stat). Yes, they both provide interfaces that an application programmer can use, but stdio is just a layer on top of the system calls. (This example is for Unix. In a C implementation on Windows, stdio would be built on CreateFile, ReadFile, etc).
No, they are not comparable. On all platforms that it supports, SDL is a layer built on top of that platform's sound and graphics and input device services.
On Windows, SDL uses DirectDraw for graphics, DirectSound for sound. On Linux, it uses X11 for graphics and OSS for sound.
Companies/Developers like ID Software, Blizzard spent extra millions as an answer. They are using OpenGL and OpenAL not because "they are 133t", they use it to minimise effects of such crap by MS
World of Warcraft requires DirectX 9 on Windows. So does Quake 4 and Doom 3.
If management wants to switch from LAMP to.NET, I'd point out that if the company is going to go through the hassle of a major technology change, then it would make the most sense to throw this open for consideration all the available technologies. I'm sure.NET would provide a long-term productivity boost over LAMP, if the applications are big and complex, simply because you can use languages that are a lot better than PHP. But Java and Ruby also have that advantage. And depending on just what you'd do with.NET, you might be able to do exactly the same thing with Mono, without having to switch your servers away from Linux, giving you the.NET advantages without the disruption.
It doesn't make sense from a business perspective to go through the major disruption of switching to.NET without at least checking to see if there are things, such as Java, that would be even better for your particular needs than.NET and would not be any more disruptive to switch to.
LAMP: File a bug report. Wait. *OR* Look at the sources. Find the bug. Fix bug and move along. Problem solved
Fix the bug, move along, and watch someone down the line get royally screwed when they update a component of the LAMP stack, and find that the bug fix doesn't easily port to the new version, and so they have to choose with staying with the homegrown fork or going with the latest vendor update, which fixes a major security bug but brings back the bug.
It takes a lot of discipline within an organization to run a custom LAMP stack and not have it turn out very badly in the long run. Most organizations don't come anywhere close to having what it takes.
So although Microsoft may not be in any hot water, Novell still would be. Novell cannot distribute GPLv3 software if their patent deal with Microsoft doesn't allow them to pass on the patent rights Microsoft gives them in a way that is consistent with GPLv3 terms. This may also implicitly be the case with the GPLv2, but due to being implicit it's substantially shakier in that case.
Novell may even escape that. The part of GPLv3 that requires passing on the patent rights is this. I've marked in bold three very interesting parts:
If you convey a covered work, knowingly relying on a patent license, and the Corresponding Source of the work is not available for anyone to copy, free of charge and under the terms of this License, through a publicly available network server or other readily accessible means, then you must either (1) cause the Corresponding Source to be so available, or (2) arrange to deprive yourself of the benefit of the patent license for this particular work, or (3) arrange, in a manner consistent with the requirements of this License, to extend the patent license to downstream recipients. "Knowingly relying" means you have actual knowledge that, but for the patent license, your conveying the covered work in a country, or your recipient's use of the covered work in a country, would infringe one or more identifiable patents in that country that you have reason to believe are valid.
If Novell says they don't believe that Microsoft's patents that cover GPLv3 software are valid, or they don't know which patents are infringed, or they think there is some reason the patents aren't infringed, then they aren't knowingly relying on the patent license, and they escape. They can take the tack that they don't think the patent license is necessary for the user, but for users that might disagree and are worried, those users can buy from Novell and feel safe.
Note also that if the source is available under the terms of the license on a public server, then we don't even get to the patent license stuff. I'm not sure just what that means. Suppose, for example, GCC goes GPLv3, and suppose Novell makes no modifications to it, just keeping it exactly like it is on the official download sites. Then it is available, under the terms of the license. Does this mean that the things about passing on the patent license protection only even becomes a potential issue in the case of things that Novell modifies?
There's another part of GPLv3 which basically says you can't convey GPLv3 software if you are a party to an arrangement like the Microsoft/Novell arrangement. That seems on first reading to be pretty airtight, but it has a grandfather clause that exempts deals made before a certain date, and the Microsoft/Novell deal was earlier than that, so no problem for Novell there. It does stop anyone else from getting such a deal, though.
It's this last that I find most noteworthy. If Novell indeed can escape the first part because they aren't knowingly relying as defined in GPLv3, then that leaves them with a competitive advantage over the other enterprise Linux vendors when it comes to selling to nervous companies that worry about Microsoft's big patent portfolio. Yes, GPLv3 helps Novell!
Note that if Microsoft were to actually sue, say, a Redhat customer over a patent covering some software that is common to Novell and Redhat, and Microsoft won, then Novell now would know of an actual patent that is really infringed, and if they didn't stop including that software in SUSE, then they would be "knowingly relying" on the patent license, and so would be in violation of GPLv3. So what the deal with Microsoft really means, after GPLv3, is that if Microsoft gets litigious, and starts knocking things out of Linux distributions via patent suits, Novell will have to drop those things from its Linux distribution, so they won't have an advantage over, say, Redhat, in the content of their distribution.
Specifically, if it requires four years of college and three years of law school and the difficult bar exam to understand the laws that govern our society, something is very, very wrong
It's not as bleak as it would seem. Law school and the bar exam cover many areas of law. Even if you go into law school knowing you want to be, say, a tax lawyer or a trademark lawyer, you will take civil procedure, criminal procedure, evidence, contracts, torts, property, family law, legal research, and probably a course in legal ethics or professional responsibility. Most of this is stuff that an ordinary person does not need to know to anywhere near the level of detail a lawyer needs it, if at all. For example, I can't think of a time where, as an ordinary person, I've needed to know the details on what constitutes hearsay under the Federal Rules of Evidence and when hearsay is admissible.
Here in the US, if you don't sign something, it isn't a contract (yes, dramatically simplified)
Dramatically simplified to the point of having little connection with the law. For starters, just consider the effects of promissory estoppel. The vast majority of legal contracts in the US do not involve a signature.
Go visit http://www.groklaw.net/ if you want to research the differences between contracts and licenses. It has lots of the basics, and targets the geek community
Groklaw often has great legal advice--in the anonymous comments from lawyers correcting the errors in the sites articles. Groklaw is a wonderful illustration of why becoming a lawyer requires four years of college and three years of law school and the difficult bar exam, and becoming a paralegal requires a few evening courses at the community college.
If Microsoft does not follow the LICENSE then Microsoft cannot LEGALLY re-distribute the software. Doing so would put Microsoft in violation of basic copyright laws.
Microsoft isn't re-distributing the software. They are giving out certificates that were bought from Novell. The way the press releases are worded, it sounds like they received a batch of N certificates.
And if by some big stretch someone argues that distributing a certificate that is redeemable at another company for a copy of software counts as distributing the software (a notion that has no support in any case law or statute that I've seen...), Microsoft would still be off the hook, because of the first sale doctrine. They would be in exactly the same position as a bookstore that sells used books. Once the book is bought from the initial seller, the buyers can resell it ad infinitum with no need to get permission from the copyright holder. Certificates from Novell would be just like that--once Microsoft gets them from Novell, they are commodities that can be freely bought and sold.
(BTW, this is also why, if you sell something like your Tivo on eBay, you don't have an obligation to provide the source code to the buyer. You are distributing GPLed software when you sell a Tivo, but the first sale doctrine gets you off the hook).
I have no doubt that this is why the deal was structured around certificates. It puts Microsoft on safe, firm, legal grounds not only against GPLv3, but also against any other licenses used in software Novell includes in current or future versions of SUSE.
That's nice (although you got many of the years wrong). Now explain why you think time spent before publication counts when it comes to deciding what the first great works in a genre are. LotR was published in the mid '50s. Numerous Lankhmar stories were published between 1939 and the publication of LotR.
Don't forget Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories. Those arguably were the first great works of modern fantasy, and started will before LotR. If we are going to compare to past works of fantasy, those deserve to be among the works considered.
Slashdot Mirror
Do us all a favor and take your own advice. Watch the Penn & Teller 'Bullshit!' episode about Wal-Mart, where they thoroughly demolish the anti-Wal-Mart arguments.
Then we could judge if his example is reasonable or not. I realize we could all do this ourselves, but I for one am not going to go out and buy Excel 2007 just to do that!
Well, duh!
It is via /etc/passwd that you convert a UID to a user name.
I don't think the person you are responding to was talking about any particular license. Internal distribution most certainly IS copying, and does require permission from the copyright owner. This is well settled in case law. GPL is widely believed to grant that permission to things that are under it.
That's in the US. In Europe, it is decidedly in the other direction.
Furthermore, adoption rates of both are sufficiently low that one or two blockbuster movies can swing the lead right now, and the forced bundling of Blu-Ray with PS3 is contributing some, too. The studios are more interested in which will be more popular once it gets past the very early adopters and the PS3 users. If it goes like past formats have gone, the deciding factor will be cost, and the HD DVD side looks like they will be reaching low prices sooner.
They specifically market their products to US consumers. That generally makes them, for those aspects of their business that involve those consumers, subject to US law.
The extent to which Luxembourg will cooperate with the US in enforcing those laws will depend on the details of whatever treaties are in place between the two. There's a vast web of such treaties, between pairs of countries, and between members of larger groups, covering taxes, civil law, and criminal law. It's one of the more interesting, and complicated, areas of law.
A similar thing happens in MySQL. It's been a while since I had to deal with this, so I may be misremembering the details, but it was something like this. You get a read that takes a long time, and that causes a subsequent write to block. Now other reads block, waiting for that write.
We saw this a lot in a helpdesk system we were using. There was a user table, that kept information on the support technicians. Many reports that involved large, slow queries involved that table. But when a technician would log in, there would be a write to that table, noting that the technician was available. That write would get stuck if one of those big reports was running. And since pretty much everything a support technician would do involved a join on the user table to check permissions, those would all hang. (Again, it's been a while, so I may have the details wrong...the gist is right, though: long read, blocks write, blocks other reads).
They have no choice but to approve it, unless they want to lose credibility, and change "Open Source" to mean "whatever they happen to like", rather than "a license that meets this specified list of objective criteria".
All of the objections raises are very pointless. For example, there was the objection to how it does not get along with some other licenses. Hello! The same thing applies to many of the already-approved licenses. The objections from the Google guy are even worse--they don't seem to have anything whatsoever to do with the stated purpose of OSI. He's just using the mailing list as a soapbox.
Most business and professional users aren't writting their documents to put them on the web.
Office on the Mac, while currently behind Windows Office, has often in the past been ahead. There is a fair amount of independence between the Windows Office people and the Mac Office people, and so they tend to leapfrog each other.
The most likely reason VMWare hasn't responded is that whenever they ask their lawyers, they lose about a week's worth of productivity from said lawyers. That's how long it takes them to stop rolling on the floor laughing at the theory that "can't run without Linux" implies "derived work".
There's no support at all for that theory in the copyright statutes or case law. (Which is good, because otherwise you'd need Microsoft's permission to write a Windows program, Apple's permission to write a Mac program, Sun's permission to write a Java program, and so on!).
The person who brought up SDL brought it up in the context of being something that could replace DirectX. Someone else had said that if DirectX falters, it might lead to people using OpenGL instead. That works, because OpenGL on Windows doesn't depend on DirectX. If Microsoft botches DirectX, OpenGL does not suffer.
On the other hand, if DirectX gets botched, then SDL gets botched on Windows, too.
A better analogy than your car analogy would be I/O in C. SDL is like stdio (fopen, fclose, fread, fwrite, fseek, ftell, printf, etc). DirectX is like the system call level interface (open/close/read/write/lseek/stat). Yes, they both provide interfaces that an application programmer can use, but stdio is just a layer on top of the system calls. (This example is for Unix. In a C implementation on Windows, stdio would be built on CreateFile, ReadFile, etc).
That's exactly the same argument you are making for Windows.
No, they are not comparable. On all platforms that it supports, SDL is a layer built on top of that platform's sound and graphics and input device services.
On Windows, SDL uses DirectDraw for graphics, DirectSound for sound. On Linux, it uses X11 for graphics and OSS for sound.
World of Warcraft requires DirectX 9 on Windows. So does Quake 4 and Doom 3.
It doesn't make sense from a business perspective to go through the major disruption of switching to .NET without at least checking to see if there are things, such as Java, that would be even better for your particular needs than .NET and would not be any more disruptive to switch to.
Fix the bug, move along, and watch someone down the line get royally screwed when they update a component of the LAMP stack, and find that the bug fix doesn't easily port to the new version, and so they have to choose with staying with the homegrown fork or going with the latest vendor update, which fixes a major security bug but brings back the bug.
It takes a lot of discipline within an organization to run a custom LAMP stack and not have it turn out very badly in the long run. Most organizations don't come anywhere close to having what it takes.
Novell may even escape that. The part of GPLv3 that requires passing on the patent rights is this. I've marked in bold three very interesting parts:
If you convey a covered work, knowingly relying on a patent license, and the Corresponding Source of the work is not available for anyone to copy, free of charge and under the terms of this License, through a publicly available network server or other readily accessible means, then you must either (1) cause the Corresponding Source to be so available, or (2) arrange to deprive yourself of the benefit of the patent license for this particular work, or (3) arrange, in a manner consistent with the requirements of this License, to extend the patent license to downstream recipients. "Knowingly relying" means you have actual knowledge that, but for the patent license, your conveying the covered work in a country, or your recipient's use of the covered work in a country, would infringe one or more identifiable patents in that country that you have reason to believe are valid.If Novell says they don't believe that Microsoft's patents that cover GPLv3 software are valid, or they don't know which patents are infringed, or they think there is some reason the patents aren't infringed, then they aren't knowingly relying on the patent license, and they escape. They can take the tack that they don't think the patent license is necessary for the user, but for users that might disagree and are worried, those users can buy from Novell and feel safe.
Note also that if the source is available under the terms of the license on a public server, then we don't even get to the patent license stuff. I'm not sure just what that means. Suppose, for example, GCC goes GPLv3, and suppose Novell makes no modifications to it, just keeping it exactly like it is on the official download sites. Then it is available, under the terms of the license. Does this mean that the things about passing on the patent license protection only even becomes a potential issue in the case of things that Novell modifies?
There's another part of GPLv3 which basically says you can't convey GPLv3 software if you are a party to an arrangement like the Microsoft/Novell arrangement. That seems on first reading to be pretty airtight, but it has a grandfather clause that exempts deals made before a certain date, and the Microsoft/Novell deal was earlier than that, so no problem for Novell there. It does stop anyone else from getting such a deal, though.
It's this last that I find most noteworthy. If Novell indeed can escape the first part because they aren't knowingly relying as defined in GPLv3, then that leaves them with a competitive advantage over the other enterprise Linux vendors when it comes to selling to nervous companies that worry about Microsoft's big patent portfolio. Yes, GPLv3 helps Novell!
Note that if Microsoft were to actually sue, say, a Redhat customer over a patent covering some software that is common to Novell and Redhat, and Microsoft won, then Novell now would know of an actual patent that is really infringed, and if they didn't stop including that software in SUSE, then they would be "knowingly relying" on the patent license, and so would be in violation of GPLv3. So what the deal with Microsoft really means, after GPLv3, is that if Microsoft gets litigious, and starts knocking things out of Linux distributions via patent suits, Novell will have to drop those things from its Linux distribution, so they won't have an advantage over, say, Redhat, in the content of their distribution.
It's not as bleak as it would seem. Law school and the bar exam cover many areas of law. Even if you go into law school knowing you want to be, say, a tax lawyer or a trademark lawyer, you will take civil procedure, criminal procedure, evidence, contracts, torts, property, family law, legal research, and probably a course in legal ethics or professional responsibility. Most of this is stuff that an ordinary person does not need to know to anywhere near the level of detail a lawyer needs it, if at all. For example, I can't think of a time where, as an ordinary person, I've needed to know the details on what constitutes hearsay under the Federal Rules of Evidence and when hearsay is admissible.
You've mistaken long for thoughtful.
Dramatically simplified to the point of having little connection with the law. For starters, just consider the effects of promissory estoppel. The vast majority of legal contracts in the US do not involve a signature.
Groklaw often has great legal advice--in the anonymous comments from lawyers correcting the errors in the sites articles. Groklaw is a wonderful illustration of why becoming a lawyer requires four years of college and three years of law school and the difficult bar exam, and becoming a paralegal requires a few evening courses at the community college.
Microsoft isn't re-distributing the software. They are giving out certificates that were bought from Novell. The way the press releases are worded, it sounds like they received a batch of N certificates.
And if by some big stretch someone argues that distributing a certificate that is redeemable at another company for a copy of software counts as distributing the software (a notion that has no support in any case law or statute that I've seen...), Microsoft would still be off the hook, because of the first sale doctrine. They would be in exactly the same position as a bookstore that sells used books. Once the book is bought from the initial seller, the buyers can resell it ad infinitum with no need to get permission from the copyright holder. Certificates from Novell would be just like that--once Microsoft gets them from Novell, they are commodities that can be freely bought and sold.
(BTW, this is also why, if you sell something like your Tivo on eBay, you don't have an obligation to provide the source code to the buyer. You are distributing GPLed software when you sell a Tivo, but the first sale doctrine gets you off the hook).
I have no doubt that this is why the deal was structured around certificates. It puts Microsoft on safe, firm, legal grounds not only against GPLv3, but also against any other licenses used in software Novell includes in current or future versions of SUSE.
That's nice (although you got many of the years wrong). Now explain why you think time spent before publication counts when it comes to deciding what the first great works in a genre are. LotR was published in the mid '50s. Numerous Lankhmar stories were published between 1939 and the publication of LotR.
Don't forget Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories. Those arguably were the first great works of modern fantasy, and started will before LotR. If we are going to compare to past works of fantasy, those deserve to be among the works considered.