I don't understand why Slashdot has to report on every bullshit bill that comes before congress.
Because this stuff matters. Big companies are spending billions to influence politicians. The only power that we, the people, have against that is to make our wishes clear to our elected representatives. If you don't, these companies will get their way by default.
And in order to do something about these laws, you need to know about them. So get off your lazy behind and let your representatives know where you stand on these issues.
Except that Microsoft and other companies are trying to create the presumption that any and all open source software violates someone's copyrights or patents.
Microsoft is almost certainly already lobbying for laws that will place strong legal burdens and liabilities on open source software, with the intent of making it impossible for any serious business to run open source software.
Well, many of the patents probably have ample prior art. In addition, almost certainly pretty much all of them can be worked around.
How do we know that they can be worked around? Because the lifetime of patents is about 20 years. What did people use 20 years ago? UNIX workstations with colorful graphical user interfaces. They were doing desktop publishing, WYSIWYG editing, spreadsheet calculations, visual development, diagramming, E-mail, file up/downloads, chatting, VoIP, video conferencing, discussion boards, news reading, and all the other things people do today. There was C, the beginnings of C++, Objective C, several Java-like languages, several scripting languages, and Ingres. There were great IDEs (better than Eclipse or VisualStudio). The biggest changes since then have been the use of HTTP (replacing much of the functionality of NNTP and a few other protocols), the bloating of C++, theming, and window transparency in X11. Oh, and lots more memory, CPU, and bandwidth.
Whatever Microsoft may or may not have invented over the last 20 years, it's clearly not essential to modern desktop computer usage because modern desktop computer usage existed when Microsoft was still doing DOS.
IANAL, but it seems to me that FOSS projects should contact Microsoft's legal department with something like this: "Dear Microsoft, our project takes intellectual property seriously and we have a policy of not infringing patents. You have recently claimed that our project infringes upon some of your patents. We have examined our code and been unable to determine where this infringement occurs and we believe that our software does not infringe. We would appreciate if you could let us know specifically which patents and claims our code infringes according to you so that we can find a solution. Since you have already counted the number of instances, it should be easy for you to generate such a list." Send it with return receipt. I think if they don't respond, if they ever brought a claim, even though they are not strictly speaking required to respond, it would look quite bad for them.
Alternatively, just take Microsoft to court and ask for a declaratory judgement. One doesn't have to take it all the way to the end, just far enough for Microsoft to actually be forced to put their patents on the table. At that point, you look at them, implement the workarounds, and say "you may be right, but it's fixed now".
It's not so much that in 2007, free software developers all of a sudden all got jobs, it's more that in 2007, Microsoft finally figures out that free software isn't being developed by out of work hippies.
Mr. Hilf, just keep going. At this pace, you might figure the free software movement out in, oh, perhaps by the time that your market share will have dropped into the low teens.
A true FOSS-centric company would release the source code for the legacy product rather than turning away companies who wish to buy a license for it.
I don't think it would. A true FOSS-centric company picks and chooses carefully what is worth open sourcing, instead of dumping every last line of code on the world. Some software is best not open sourced.
I think the percentage of IBM's profit related to FOSS is greatly exaggerated.
I don't think so. I think most of their profits are related to FOSS.
The "service" IBM provides includes some of it own proprietary software
Sure, but there probably is no single big cash cow there.
and even in the last 5 years IBM has taken steps to protect it's proprietary software. They also sued Amazon over patents last year and that had nothing to do with being a "service" company.
I have no problem with that. The problem with Microsoft is not that they sell proprietary software or that they patent stuff, it's with how they do it.
IBM has a patent cross-licensing agreement with Microsoft right now. However, given that IBM is largely becoming a service company that installs, and provides enhancements to FOSS, they (1) have little to lose, and (2) no choice.
I don't think IBM is going to do anything hastily, but they may well do something sooner or later.
Furthermore, IBM's cross licensing agreement must allow sublicensing, so maybe IBM can simply sublicense the software, and may have done so implicitly under the GPL or Apache2 license already. Keep in mind that the cross licensing agreements were likely written in a climate where neither Microsoft nor IBM contemplated open source releases.
IBM is largely a consulting house these days, one with a big, fat patent portfolio. They're also not a consumer company; people don't get upset at them because most people barely perceive them. There's little Microsoft can do to their bottom line.
But: if Microsoft pisses of the wrong people enough and gets stuck with a bunch of patent lawsuits, their core businesses are in trouble: Windows, Office, Outlook, Exchange.
That's really the only question: which ones is Linux supposed to violate?
Give us a list and the case will evaporate within a couple of days, as the supposedly infringing code gets either replaced, or as people dig up the prior art.
Technically, even VESA drivers are also open source drivers for ATI cards. And that's provided that the announcement even means that they are going to be releasing open source drivers at all.
So, the question is: what exatly are they going to be releasing?
In general, I just wouldn't pay much attention to these announcements either way: it's open source once it's actually been released, no sooner.
With Compiz, Beryl, and XGL, excellent 3D graphics support has become a mainstream issue. Furthermore, Linux is widely used in science and engineering, and those users use excellent 3D graphics as well.
I like Python. I'd like more Linux stuff to be written in Python (and Mono), and less in C/C++. I believe in web-based applications and all that, and I'd like more of the local applications to turn in to local web-based services that I can also access over the Internet.
But first build the AJAXy replacements, then move people to them. And this can be done one application at a time. In fact, web based applications and server applications are moving into Linux-based distributions as fast as possible.
I think maybe a good focus right now for development would be Webmin/Usermin (or a tool like it with a somewhat cleaner codebase), and to get distributions to standardize on it.
It doesn't, ultimately, matter what the Constitution says if the majority of US citizens want something different. That's not a judgment, it's simple reality in a democratic system. Democracies frequently self-destruct if they lose the faith of their citizens.
So, harping on the Constitution doesn't change anything; if you want less centralized government and more liberties, you have to convince your fellow citizens to ignore the fear mongering by power-hungry politicians. Oddly enough (or perhaps not), the politicians that complain loudest about "centralized government" and "loss of states' rights" tend to be the same that are also the biggest fear mongers and the biggest proponents of government interference in individual rights, in areas such as taking away tens of thousands of each family's dollars to pay for bogus wars, limiting reproductive rights, limiting personal choice in sexual matters, imposing their religious philosophies, and limiting religious freedoms.
My Internet connection went away for a couple of hours last night; they were probably installing something. Those fools thought nobody would notice at 3am!
Lord knows anyone who uses Linux or free and open source software is dedicated to spreading the gospel of St. Linus Torvalds and St. Richard Stallman.
I don't particularly like or respect Linus as a person or as a technologist. I also find Stallman's proselytizing off-putting and don't particular subscribe to his grand philosophy.
I think a lot of open source users and developers are like me. So, you're way off when you're implying that people support open source because of some religious zeal. People support open source because it works better and costs less than other stuff.
but rather having them positioned in a particularly clever way, using the display to "pretend" you're seeing the touchpad beneath it (which, provided you believe in patents as a concept, warrants awarding one).
And my point is that it's simply a touch pad in absolute positioning mode and a display on the same device, doing what they always do. The "clever" part is the reframing of how they present it, not the design itself.
Instead of making the next generation IP standard a simple extension that makes address fields a little larger and maybe fixes one or two long standing bugs, the IPv6 people redesigned things from scratch.
It's no wonder people are reluctant to adopt IPv6.
So, the excuse for Congress to get involved in this is because tax payer's money got wasted?? Seems like they don't understand research: most research projects don't yield significant results, and many results are just simply wrong. Maybe this guy is right, maybe he is wrong, that's science; Congress should keep their noses out of it.
With a tricky result, he'd naturally help other groups trying to replicate the result.
Furthermore, I still don't think it's improper for him to omit himself. What counts is not whether he omitted himself or not, what counts is whether the people actually on the paper reproduced it. If they did, it's fine. If not, they committed fraud.
I think it would be a bad precedent to require everybody who has made a contribution to a paper to be on that paper if they don't want to be.
The limit on how fast you can read a text is comprehension, not perception. Therefore there is no point in speeding up perception any faster (if you really want to, there are plenty of existing techniques).
Also, it makes no sense that in 5000 years of writing, people settled on a supposedly bad system, not just once but dozens of times. Originally, people did start out writing in little bunched up blobs--very eye friendly. But almost all writing systems eventually evolve towards long skinny lines: it's fast enough, and it's otherwise convenient.
I don't know about Apple's overall corporate standing in terms of environment, and I don't think it matters that much. The fact is: computers are bad for the environment. The best thing you can do for the environment may be not to buy a new computer at all and keep using the old one. And the worst thing for the environment may ultimately be... the power hungry software upgrades that induce people to buy new hardware.
As for Apple, I wish they'd replace their styrofoam packaging with something recycled and biodegradable. Apple's packaging is like a throwback to the 70's.
Not quite. Making a commercial product does put you at risk of losing patentability, but it may not be sufficient to establish prior art. It's kind of a worst-of-both-worlds situation. So, either publish or patent.
Slashdot Mirror
Despite their accusations of infringement, they state they would rather do licensing deals instead of any legal action.
Of course, they do. That's because they know that their patents are worthless.
So, please go ahead and sue us.
I don't understand why Slashdot has to report on every bullshit bill that comes before congress.
Because this stuff matters. Big companies are spending billions to influence politicians. The only power that we, the people, have against that is to make our wishes clear to our elected representatives. If you don't, these companies will get their way by default.
And in order to do something about these laws, you need to know about them. So get off your lazy behind and let your representatives know where you stand on these issues.
Except that Microsoft and other companies are trying to create the presumption that any and all open source software violates someone's copyrights or patents.
Microsoft is almost certainly already lobbying for laws that will place strong legal burdens and liabilities on open source software, with the intent of making it impossible for any serious business to run open source software.
How on Earth would this "return in the hands of the consumers" be organized.
By suspending the levy entirely until the overpayments have been made up for.
Well, many of the patents probably have ample prior art. In addition, almost certainly pretty much all of them can be worked around.
How do we know that they can be worked around? Because the lifetime of patents is about 20 years. What did people use 20 years ago? UNIX workstations with colorful graphical user interfaces. They were doing desktop publishing, WYSIWYG editing, spreadsheet calculations, visual development, diagramming, E-mail, file up/downloads, chatting, VoIP, video conferencing, discussion boards, news reading, and all the other things people do today. There was C, the beginnings of C++, Objective C, several Java-like languages, several scripting languages, and Ingres. There were great IDEs (better than Eclipse or VisualStudio). The biggest changes since then have been the use of HTTP (replacing much of the functionality of NNTP and a few other protocols), the bloating of C++, theming, and window transparency in X11. Oh, and lots more memory, CPU, and bandwidth.
Whatever Microsoft may or may not have invented over the last 20 years, it's clearly not essential to modern desktop computer usage because modern desktop computer usage existed when Microsoft was still doing DOS.
IANAL, but it seems to me that FOSS projects should contact Microsoft's legal department with something like this: "Dear Microsoft, our project takes intellectual property seriously and we have a policy of not infringing patents. You have recently claimed that our project infringes upon some of your patents. We have examined our code and been unable to determine where this infringement occurs and we believe that our software does not infringe. We would appreciate if you could let us know specifically which patents and claims our code infringes according to you so that we can find a solution. Since you have already counted the number of instances, it should be easy for you to generate such a list." Send it with return receipt. I think if they don't respond, if they ever brought a claim, even though they are not strictly speaking required to respond, it would look quite bad for them.
Alternatively, just take Microsoft to court and ask for a declaratory judgement. One doesn't have to take it all the way to the end, just far enough for Microsoft to actually be forced to put their patents on the table. At that point, you look at them, implement the workarounds, and say "you may be right, but it's fixed now".
It's not so much that in 2007, free software developers all of a sudden all got jobs, it's more that in 2007, Microsoft finally figures out that free software isn't being developed by out of work hippies.
Mr. Hilf, just keep going. At this pace, you might figure the free software movement out in, oh, perhaps by the time that your market share will have dropped into the low teens.
A true FOSS-centric company would release the source code for the legacy product rather than turning away companies who wish to buy a license for it.
I don't think it would. A true FOSS-centric company picks and chooses carefully what is worth open sourcing, instead of dumping every last line of code on the world. Some software is best not open sourced.
I think the percentage of IBM's profit related to FOSS is greatly exaggerated.
I don't think so. I think most of their profits are related to FOSS.
The "service" IBM provides includes some of it own proprietary software
Sure, but there probably is no single big cash cow there.
and even in the last 5 years IBM has taken steps to protect it's proprietary software. They also sued Amazon over patents last year and that had nothing to do with being a "service" company.
I have no problem with that. The problem with Microsoft is not that they sell proprietary software or that they patent stuff, it's with how they do it.
IBM has a patent cross-licensing agreement with Microsoft right now. However, given that IBM is largely becoming a service company that installs, and provides enhancements to FOSS, they (1) have little to lose, and (2) no choice.
I don't think IBM is going to do anything hastily, but they may well do something sooner or later.
Furthermore, IBM's cross licensing agreement must allow sublicensing, so maybe IBM can simply sublicense the software, and may have done so implicitly under the GPL or Apache2 license already. Keep in mind that the cross licensing agreements were likely written in a climate where neither Microsoft nor IBM contemplated open source releases.
IBM is largely a consulting house these days, one with a big, fat patent portfolio. They're also not a consumer company; people don't get upset at them because most people barely perceive them. There's little Microsoft can do to their bottom line.
But: if Microsoft pisses of the wrong people enough and gets stuck with a bunch of patent lawsuits, their core businesses are in trouble: Windows, Office, Outlook, Exchange.
That's really the only question: which ones is Linux supposed to violate?
Give us a list and the case will evaporate within a couple of days, as the supposedly infringing code gets either replaced, or as people dig up the prior art.
Technically, even VESA drivers are also open source drivers for ATI cards. And that's provided that the announcement even means that they are going to be releasing open source drivers at all.
So, the question is: what exatly are they going to be releasing?
In general, I just wouldn't pay much attention to these announcements either way: it's open source once it's actually been released, no sooner.
With Compiz, Beryl, and XGL, excellent 3D graphics support has become a mainstream issue. Furthermore, Linux is widely used in science and engineering, and those users use excellent 3D graphics as well.
I like Python. I'd like more Linux stuff to be written in Python (and Mono), and less in C/C++. I believe in web-based applications and all that, and I'd like more of the local applications to turn in to local web-based services that I can also access over the Internet.
But first build the AJAXy replacements, then move people to them. And this can be done one application at a time. In fact, web based applications and server applications are moving into Linux-based distributions as fast as possible.
I think maybe a good focus right now for development would be Webmin/Usermin (or a tool like it with a somewhat cleaner codebase), and to get distributions to standardize on it.
It doesn't, ultimately, matter what the Constitution says if the majority of US citizens want something different. That's not a judgment, it's simple reality in a democratic system. Democracies frequently self-destruct if they lose the faith of their citizens.
So, harping on the Constitution doesn't change anything; if you want less centralized government and more liberties, you have to convince your fellow citizens to ignore the fear mongering by power-hungry politicians. Oddly enough (or perhaps not), the politicians that complain loudest about "centralized government" and "loss of states' rights" tend to be the same that are also the biggest fear mongers and the biggest proponents of government interference in individual rights, in areas such as taking away tens of thousands of each family's dollars to pay for bogus wars, limiting reproductive rights, limiting personal choice in sexual matters, imposing their religious philosophies, and limiting religious freedoms.
My Internet connection went away for a couple of hours last night; they were probably installing something. Those fools thought nobody would notice at 3am!
Lord knows anyone who uses Linux or free and open source software is dedicated to spreading the gospel of St. Linus Torvalds and St. Richard Stallman.
I don't particularly like or respect Linus as a person or as a technologist. I also find Stallman's proselytizing off-putting and don't particular subscribe to his grand philosophy.
I think a lot of open source users and developers are like me. So, you're way off when you're implying that people support open source because of some religious zeal. People support open source because it works better and costs less than other stuff.
but rather having them positioned in a particularly clever way, using the display to "pretend" you're seeing the touchpad beneath it (which, provided you believe in patents as a concept, warrants awarding one).
And my point is that it's simply a touch pad in absolute positioning mode and a display on the same device, doing what they always do. The "clever" part is the reframing of how they present it, not the design itself.
Instead of making the next generation IP standard a simple extension that makes address fields a little larger and maybe fixes one or two long standing bugs, the IPv6 people redesigned things from scratch.
It's no wonder people are reluctant to adopt IPv6.
So, the excuse for Congress to get involved in this is because tax payer's money got wasted?? Seems like they don't understand research: most research projects don't yield significant results, and many results are just simply wrong. Maybe this guy is right, maybe he is wrong, that's science; Congress should keep their noses out of it.
With a tricky result, he'd naturally help other groups trying to replicate the result.
Furthermore, I still don't think it's improper for him to omit himself. What counts is not whether he omitted himself or not, what counts is whether the people actually on the paper reproduced it. If they did, it's fine. If not, they committed fraud.
I think it would be a bad precedent to require everybody who has made a contribution to a paper to be on that paper if they don't want to be.
Apple patents putting a touchpad and a screen on a single device! What will they think of next?
The limit on how fast you can read a text is comprehension, not perception. Therefore there is no point in speeding up perception any faster (if you really want to, there are plenty of existing techniques).
Also, it makes no sense that in 5000 years of writing, people settled on a supposedly bad system, not just once but dozens of times. Originally, people did start out writing in little bunched up blobs--very eye friendly. But almost all writing systems eventually evolve towards long skinny lines: it's fast enough, and it's otherwise convenient.
I don't know about Apple's overall corporate standing in terms of environment, and I don't think it matters that much. The fact is: computers are bad for the environment. The best thing you can do for the environment may be not to buy a new computer at all and keep using the old one. And the worst thing for the environment may ultimately be... the power hungry software upgrades that induce people to buy new hardware.
As for Apple, I wish they'd replace their styrofoam packaging with something recycled and biodegradable. Apple's packaging is like a throwback to the 70's.
Not quite. Making a commercial product does put you at risk of losing patentability, but it may not be sufficient to establish prior art. It's kind of a worst-of-both-worlds situation. So, either publish or patent.