Under the old terms at the Apple store, you had to agree to not redistribute software you downloaded from the store. Even if that software came with a license that allowed redistribution, you had to obey Apple's requirement that you do not redistribute. That's an additional requirement under GPL, and runs afoul of clause 6.
This may no longer be a problem. The part of the Apple terms that said their Usage Rules applied in addition to any other license from the app developer have been removed. It might now be that if you have a license from the app developer, that is all that matters. If that is the case, no problem under clause 6 anymore
The issue isn't DRM, though. The issue is the Apple terms of service that the end user has to agree to in order to be allowed to use the store. It contained, as of last May, terms incompatible with the GPL (any version). (The terms were changed in June, and appear to no longer contain the incompatible terms).
Perhaps, but that's not really relevant from a licensing point of view. Free software licenses (including GPL) generally do not require that the tools you need to build or install the software be free. For instance, it is perfectly acceptable under GPL for me to take your GPL code, and translate it into some language for which the only compilers that exist are proprietary and cost money, or to adopt it to work on an operating system that costs money.
The VLC Team is sending a copyright infringement to Apple
Not quite. One VLC developer sent a copyright infringement notice. It is not the VLC team doing it. In fact, when that developer wrote about it on his planet VLC blog, his blog was temporarily removed from planet VLC because the VLC team was concerned it might look like they were complaining to Apple, rather than it being one developer who had a problem with Apple. (I believe his blog has been restored, and the particular entry has a disclaimed on it making it clear that it is a person action of the developer, not an action of the whole team).
On their mailing list, a couple other developers agree with the first developer. and some other developers disagree because Apple changed its terms after the GNU Go incident and they think the new terms remove the conflict with GPL.
Simple: GPL does not allow imposing additional restrictions on people you distribute GPL software to. If I give you GPL software (that I don't fully own the copyright to), I can't require you to agree not to redistribute it, I can't require you to agree not to reverse engineer it, I can't require you to agree to only run it on hardware you got from me, and so on.
If you want to end DRM, you need to support Apple since they are the only large company who has worked to end DRM and had some success.
You're an idiot. The whole Apple Store is DRM.
For an idiot, he seems to know a lot more than you do. Music on the Apple Store is completely DRM free, and has been for a long time. This came about because, back in the day when every music store that offered music from the major labels had DRM, Steve Jobs wrote an open letter to the labels, saying that they should drop DRM. EMI immediately agreed, and Apple started offering DRM-free music from EMI. The other labels called Jobs an idiot, and Warner went so far as saying they would never remove DRM.
The Apple/EMI experiment showed that Jobs was right and that removing DRM from music was a good idea. The other labels then came around, and removed DRM on all the stores that sold their music EXCEPT for Apple. No official reason for holding out on Apple was ever given. The common speculation was that either they wanted to wait a while so they wouldn't look completely foolish for reacting so negatively to Jobs' suggestion and then adopting it in a relatively short time, or that they hoped that by having Apple be the only major store with DRM they could put Apple at a competitive disadvantage and get some concessions out of Apple. Eventually, the labels did allow Apple to go DRM-free, although Apple at the same time gave the labels more price control (that's why the "every song is $0.99" thing ended and prices went up).
If it wasn't for Steve Jobs urging the labels to drop DRM, it is highly likely that the major labels would still be requiring DRM on their music at all the major stores.
According to the FSF, on how to satisfy the source requirement when you distribute GPLv2 software:
The GPL says you must offer access to copy the source code “from the same place”; that is, next to the binaries. However, if you make arrangements with another site to keep the necessary source code available, and put a link or cross-reference to the source code next to the binaries, we think that qualifies as “from the same place”.
Note, however, that it is not enough to find some site that happens to have the appropriate source code today, and tell people to look there. Tomorrow that site may have deleted that source code, or simply replaced it with a newer version of the same program. Then you would no longer be complying with the GPL requirements. To make a reasonable effort to comply, you need to make a positive arrangement with the other site, and thus ensure that the source will be available there for as long as you keep the binaries available.
Generally what people who have distributed GPLv2 software on the App Store seem to do is include a link to their site on their App Store page, and their site contains the source download, which is good enough according to the FSF's interpretation. In GPLv3, they have made it explicit in the license itself that putting the source on a different site and pointing to it is fine.
Suppose you have an expensive computer. I accidentally trip, knock over the table it is on, and the computer is destroyed. Is your position that I should not pay to replace the computer because it was an accident? You should have to eat the cost?
Distribution of copyrighted material requires permission of the copyright owner, with the notable exception of distributions that fall under the first sale doctrine. The first sale doctrine does not apply to the App Store.
The license they chose (GPL version 3) does not give Apple the ability to distribute this software. Had they chosen to stay with GPL Version 2, there would be no problem.
A different VLC developer disagrees and says the FSF is acting in bad faith and FUD.
Back in May, when the FSF complained about GNU Go on the App Store, the App Store was in fact definitely incompatible with GPL software. Apple makes copies and distributes them, so Apple needs permission of the copyright owner.
To get that permission under GPL, you have to obey GPL, including the part about not placing any additional restrictions on people you distribute copies to. Apple's end user terms of service placed many GPL-incompatible restrictions on the people Apple distributes to, so no GPL permission for Apple. If the developer owned all the GPL code in his application, then the act of submitting it to the store gives implicit (and there is probably something in the developer agreement that makes it explicit) permission to Apple to distribute. However, if the developer is using GPL code from other people, then there is a problem.
About a month after the FSF published their detailed explanation of the incompatibility, Apple changed the end user terms of service and the change appears to have removed the problem. It now says that if an app is covered by a EULA (and the GPL would count as a EULA, I believe) then that EULA governs. If there is no EULA, then Apple's default license governs, and it is Apple's default license that has the things the FSF objects to.
There was similar language before the June change, except that there was a set of "Usage Rules" and Apples terms states that those applied in addition to any EULA for the particular software, and it was the usage rules that contained the GPL-incomplatible stuff. With the June change, it seems that if the software has a EULA, the EULA is all that applies.
As a parent, you are in fact legally responsible for the actions of your kids. For instance, when your kids are old enough to play baseball, if they break a neighbor's window it is not going to be chocked up to an act of god--you are going to pay for that neighbors new window.
Also - just because there is an injury, doesn't mean someone else is liable. If she had been knocked over and injured by a gust of wind - would they sue the weather man?
If I throw a rock through your window, would you feel that I shouldn't be liable because a bird could have flown into your window and broke it?
Okay, a pair of four year olds on their bikes. Accidentally hit an old lady.
And they're going to sue the four year olds?
Okay guys. It really IS time to kill all the lawyers.
*Grabs a gun*
Would you like to explain exactly what problem you see in this? The accident caused serious injury, which means the family of the old lady probably is now facing a large medical bill. Do you think they should have to pay that, rather than having the parents of the kids pay it?
There is a point of view, however, that questions the legitimacy of HFT to begin with (that appears to be an agreement with parent). HFT contributes to a system which affects salaries, wages, retirement funds, mortgage rates, interest rates, insurance premiums, and a host of other factors important to people who have no control over the profit margin retained by stock market manipulators.
Even if true, that is all completely irrelevant to this trial. A former employee is accused of stealing his employer's code on his last day. That's what the trial is about.
Who was she talking to? (considering the lack of cell-phone towers)
Ugh.
Of all the reasons to suspect that this is not a time traveller, that is the dumbest one.
First of all, cell-phone towers are not required for mobile communications. They are required for one particular kind of mobile communication that is widespread now, but there is no reason to believe that a time traveller would be using that particular kind of mobile communication. She could be using something akin to a walkie-talkie, which is point to point, and is being used to communicate to someone else nearby (or not nearby--she could get away with a very high power walkie-talkie without drawing attention to herself in 1928, it is not like now where it would quickly draw the attention of the FCC). Or she could be using something akin to pre-cell mobile phones, which had one base station serving a large area, with the base station at the time traveller's 1928 base location (surely you are not assuming that there is a single time traveller?).
All of the above suggestions are realizable with technology we already have (and in fact is readily available). It is also reasonable that if someone has time travel, they have communication technology we don't have--such as mobile phones that communicate through time, so she could be talking to someone in the future or past.
Back in July, the Librarian of Congress officially made it legal to jailbreak your iPhone (or any phone). So why is it that the government is trying to prosecute Matthew Crippen for jailbreaking Xbox 360s?
I got dinner from Arby's tonight. So why is it raining outside?
Trading this fast brings the market closer to optimal economic efficiency, where prices at any instant accurately reflect value
I doubt this is true for real markets. Value ultimately comes down to human reactions to events in the real world, and how that affects our demand for goods. Since human perception speed and decision time is limited, I expect that there is some maximum trade rate, beyond which the market ceases to be optimal (if we measure optimality in terms of producing efficient allocation of real-world resources) and starts reacting to itself. I suspect that this is one of those areas where to get an optimal result, you need to inject some noise into the system (add random latency to trades).
Unfortunately, as Gosling correctly points out, the claim that apple is the only one doing this is simply not true. IBM, HP, and many other vendors supply their own implementation of Java for their hardware/systems
Not quite. Jobs was talking about consumer desktop systems, but Gosling seems to be talking about enterprise systems. If I go down to Walmart or Bestbuy and pick up an HP computer, does it come with HP Java? If not, do I download Java from HP? No, I download from Oracle. Same with desktop Linux. Same with Windows. Apple is the only consumer desktop system that's not using Java built by Oracle or using OpenJDK.
Open-source JVM's on OSX are highly incomplete and typically use X11. This is not ideal behavior, at all.
I don't see X11 as a problem. For the most part when you write Java stuff for desktop computers, you are aiming for a cross-platform application, and you don't really care if it has a native look-and-feel (especially since you can't really get a native look-and-feel anyway).
Because it rises the price of books for everyone else. Rather than getting a book for $2 from the bookstore, I'll have to buy it for $5 from Amazon
For every one book that you lose out on that way, and so pay an extra $3 for to get it from some remote seller on Amazon, there will likely be dozens of books that you would like to get, but that never show up at your local used bookstores or thrift shops or library sales at all, and that you can only get cheaply because people like him are finding them and making them available on Amazon.
It comes down to what is better for the reader--an occasional really great deal on a small number of books, or very good deals on a large number of books.
Slashdot Mirror
Under the old terms at the Apple store, you had to agree to not redistribute software you downloaded from the store. Even if that software came with a license that allowed redistribution, you had to obey Apple's requirement that you do not redistribute. That's an additional requirement under GPL, and runs afoul of clause 6.
This may no longer be a problem. The part of the Apple terms that said their Usage Rules applied in addition to any other license from the app developer have been removed. It might now be that if you have a license from the app developer, that is all that matters. If that is the case, no problem under clause 6 anymore
The issue isn't DRM, though. The issue is the Apple terms of service that the end user has to agree to in order to be allowed to use the store. It contained, as of last May, terms incompatible with the GPL (any version). (The terms were changed in June, and appear to no longer contain the incompatible terms).
Perhaps, but that's not really relevant from a licensing point of view. Free software licenses (including GPL) generally do not require that the tools you need to build or install the software be free. For instance, it is perfectly acceptable under GPL for me to take your GPL code, and translate it into some language for which the only compilers that exist are proprietary and cost money, or to adopt it to work on an operating system that costs money.
The VLC Team is sending a copyright infringement to Apple
Not quite. One VLC developer sent a copyright infringement notice. It is not the VLC team doing it. In fact, when that developer wrote about it on his planet VLC blog, his blog was temporarily removed from planet VLC because the VLC team was concerned it might look like they were complaining to Apple, rather than it being one developer who had a problem with Apple. (I believe his blog has been restored, and the particular entry has a disclaimed on it making it clear that it is a person action of the developer, not an action of the whole team).
On their mailing list, a couple other developers agree with the first developer. and some other developers disagree because Apple changed its terms after the GNU Go incident and they think the new terms remove the conflict with GPL.
Simple: GPL does not allow imposing additional restrictions on people you distribute GPL software to. If I give you GPL software (that I don't fully own the copyright to), I can't require you to agree not to redistribute it, I can't require you to agree not to reverse engineer it, I can't require you to agree to only run it on hardware you got from me, and so on.
If you want to end DRM, you need to support Apple since they are the only large company who has worked to end DRM and had some success.
You're an idiot. The whole Apple Store is DRM.
For an idiot, he seems to know a lot more than you do. Music on the Apple Store is completely DRM free, and has been for a long time. This came about because, back in the day when every music store that offered music from the major labels had DRM, Steve Jobs wrote an open letter to the labels, saying that they should drop DRM. EMI immediately agreed, and Apple started offering DRM-free music from EMI. The other labels called Jobs an idiot, and Warner went so far as saying they would never remove DRM.
The Apple/EMI experiment showed that Jobs was right and that removing DRM from music was a good idea. The other labels then came around, and removed DRM on all the stores that sold their music EXCEPT for Apple. No official reason for holding out on Apple was ever given. The common speculation was that either they wanted to wait a while so they wouldn't look completely foolish for reacting so negatively to Jobs' suggestion and then adopting it in a relatively short time, or that they hoped that by having Apple be the only major store with DRM they could put Apple at a competitive disadvantage and get some concessions out of Apple. Eventually, the labels did allow Apple to go DRM-free, although Apple at the same time gave the labels more price control (that's why the "every song is $0.99" thing ended and prices went up).
If it wasn't for Steve Jobs urging the labels to drop DRM, it is highly likely that the major labels would still be requiring DRM on their music at all the major stores.
According to the FSF, on how to satisfy the source requirement when you distribute GPLv2 software:
The GPL says you must offer access to copy the source code “from the same place”; that is, next to the binaries. However, if you make arrangements with another site to keep the necessary source code available, and put a link or cross-reference to the source code next to the binaries, we think that qualifies as “from the same place”. Note, however, that it is not enough to find some site that happens to have the appropriate source code today, and tell people to look there. Tomorrow that site may have deleted that source code, or simply replaced it with a newer version of the same program. Then you would no longer be complying with the GPL requirements. To make a reasonable effort to comply, you need to make a positive arrangement with the other site, and thus ensure that the source will be available there for as long as you keep the binaries available.
Generally what people who have distributed GPLv2 software on the App Store seem to do is include a link to their site on their App Store page, and their site contains the source download, which is good enough according to the FSF's interpretation. In GPLv3, they have made it explicit in the license itself that putting the source on a different site and pointing to it is fine.
For an extra $99/year, you can buy from Apple the ability to build and install open source apps on your phone.
Suppose you have an expensive computer. I accidentally trip, knock over the table it is on, and the computer is destroyed. Is your position that I should not pay to replace the computer because it was an accident? You should have to eat the cost?
Apple is simply the distributor
Distribution of copyrighted material requires permission of the copyright owner, with the notable exception of distributions that fall under the first sale doctrine. The first sale doctrine does not apply to the App Store.
The license they chose (GPL version 3) does not give Apple the ability to distribute this software. Had they chosen to stay with GPL Version 2, there would be no problem.
VLC is under GPLv2, not GPLv3.
A different VLC developer disagrees and says the FSF is acting in bad faith and FUD.
Back in May, when the FSF complained about GNU Go on the App Store, the App Store was in fact definitely incompatible with GPL software. Apple makes copies and distributes them, so Apple needs permission of the copyright owner.
To get that permission under GPL, you have to obey GPL, including the part about not placing any additional restrictions on people you distribute copies to. Apple's end user terms of service placed many GPL-incompatible restrictions on the people Apple distributes to, so no GPL permission for Apple. If the developer owned all the GPL code in his application, then the act of submitting it to the store gives implicit (and there is probably something in the developer agreement that makes it explicit) permission to Apple to distribute. However, if the developer is using GPL code from other people, then there is a problem.
About a month after the FSF published their detailed explanation of the incompatibility, Apple changed the end user terms of service and the change appears to have removed the problem. It now says that if an app is covered by a EULA (and the GPL would count as a EULA, I believe) then that EULA governs. If there is no EULA, then Apple's default license governs, and it is Apple's default license that has the things the FSF objects to.
There was similar language before the June change, except that there was a set of "Usage Rules" and Apples terms states that those applied in addition to any EULA for the particular software, and it was the usage rules that contained the GPL-incomplatible stuff. With the June change, it seems that if the software has a EULA, the EULA is all that applies.
Or you leverage existing data sources, combined with your own crawler, and you can do it for a lot less than billions. See DuckDuckGo.
As a parent, you are in fact legally responsible for the actions of your kids. For instance, when your kids are old enough to play baseball, if they break a neighbor's window it is not going to be chocked up to an act of god--you are going to pay for that neighbors new window.
Hint: the mechanism to determine whether or not someone else is responsible is called a "lawsuit".
Also - just because there is an injury, doesn't mean someone else is liable. If she had been knocked over and injured by a gust of wind - would they sue the weather man?
If I throw a rock through your window, would you feel that I shouldn't be liable because a bird could have flown into your window and broke it?
Okay, a pair of four year olds on their bikes. Accidentally hit an old lady.
And they're going to sue the four year olds?
Okay guys. It really IS time to kill all the lawyers.
*Grabs a gun*
Would you like to explain exactly what problem you see in this? The accident caused serious injury, which means the family of the old lady probably is now facing a large medical bill. Do you think they should have to pay that, rather than having the parents of the kids pay it?
There is a point of view, however, that questions the legitimacy of HFT to begin with (that appears to be an agreement with parent). HFT contributes to a system which affects salaries, wages, retirement funds, mortgage rates, interest rates, insurance premiums, and a host of other factors important to people who have no control over the profit margin retained by stock market manipulators.
Even if true, that is all completely irrelevant to this trial. A former employee is accused of stealing his employer's code on his last day. That's what the trial is about.
Who was she talking to? (considering the lack of cell-phone towers)
Ugh.
Of all the reasons to suspect that this is not a time traveller, that is the dumbest one.
First of all, cell-phone towers are not required for mobile communications. They are required for one particular kind of mobile communication that is widespread now, but there is no reason to believe that a time traveller would be using that particular kind of mobile communication. She could be using something akin to a walkie-talkie, which is point to point, and is being used to communicate to someone else nearby (or not nearby--she could get away with a very high power walkie-talkie without drawing attention to herself in 1928, it is not like now where it would quickly draw the attention of the FCC). Or she could be using something akin to pre-cell mobile phones, which had one base station serving a large area, with the base station at the time traveller's 1928 base location (surely you are not assuming that there is a single time traveller?).
All of the above suggestions are realizable with technology we already have (and in fact is readily available). It is also reasonable that if someone has time travel, they have communication technology we don't have--such as mobile phones that communicate through time, so she could be talking to someone in the future or past.
Back in July, the Librarian of Congress officially made it legal to jailbreak your iPhone (or any phone). So why is it that the government is trying to prosecute Matthew Crippen for jailbreaking Xbox 360s?
I got dinner from Arby's tonight. So why is it raining outside?
Trading this fast brings the market closer to optimal economic efficiency, where prices at any instant accurately reflect value
I doubt this is true for real markets. Value ultimately comes down to human reactions to events in the real world, and how that affects our demand for goods. Since human perception speed and decision time is limited, I expect that there is some maximum trade rate, beyond which the market ceases to be optimal (if we measure optimality in terms of producing efficient allocation of real-world resources) and starts reacting to itself. I suspect that this is one of those areas where to get an optimal result, you need to inject some noise into the system (add random latency to trades).
NASDAQ is under 100 usec.
Unfortunately, as Gosling correctly points out, the claim that apple is the only one doing this is simply not true. IBM, HP, and many other vendors supply their own implementation of Java for their hardware/systems
Not quite. Jobs was talking about consumer desktop systems, but Gosling seems to be talking about enterprise systems. If I go down to Walmart or Bestbuy and pick up an HP computer, does it come with HP Java? If not, do I download Java from HP? No, I download from Oracle. Same with desktop Linux. Same with Windows. Apple is the only consumer desktop system that's not using Java built by Oracle or using OpenJDK.
Open-source JVM's on OSX are highly incomplete and typically use X11. This is not ideal behavior, at all.
I don't see X11 as a problem. For the most part when you write Java stuff for desktop computers, you are aiming for a cross-platform application, and you don't really care if it has a native look-and-feel (especially since you can't really get a native look-and-feel anyway).
Because it rises the price of books for everyone else. Rather than getting a book for $2 from the bookstore, I'll have to buy it for $5 from Amazon
For every one book that you lose out on that way, and so pay an extra $3 for to get it from some remote seller on Amazon, there will likely be dozens of books that you would like to get, but that never show up at your local used bookstores or thrift shops or library sales at all, and that you can only get cheaply because people like him are finding them and making them available on Amazon.
It comes down to what is better for the reader--an occasional really great deal on a small number of books, or very good deals on a large number of books.