The "linking" violation really only applies if the resulting binary is statically linked and contains a copy of the GPL code inside itself. If it calls the code from a library or DLL, then it isn't infringing.
However, you still must follow the GPL/LGPL terms to the letter on the libraries distributed with your product, provide a copy of the GPL/LGPL licenses for the components used and provide full source upon demand. There's no wiggle room on that one.
This is interesting from a legal perspective. IIRC, in discovery the courts aren't supposed to require one of the litigants to start creating records that they wouldn't ordinarily have kept just to be able to produce them.
We haven't heard the last of this case. It's going to circuit court.
Actually, I wonder if this is the case that the Supreme Court's been apparently looking for to invalidate sofware patents entirely? I recall in the MS vs AT&T that one of the justices asked "This court has never actually ruled on the patentability of software, have we" (IIRC). They couldn't rule on SW patentability in that case because neither party brought the issue up.
Supremes have been tightening patentability left and right lately. It wouldn't be a stretch for them to whack SW patents completely. Google may well be the deep-pocket defendant to bring up the issue, and they can afford to litigate it all the way.
They certainly can't use the DMCA to block the unlocking. This is almost identical to the Lexmark International, Inc. v. Static Control Components, Inc. case a couple years ago. Basic upshot of that ruling is that DMCA doesn't cover hacking to unlock a device for interoperability and third-party components.
If they try to sue using DMCA, they will almost certainly lose.
I take a hard line on this one. If a university accepts one dime of public funding, then any and all research it does must be public domain, peioid. No exceptions, no "well, this was privately funded", no nothing.
We need a really good bright-line rule regarding public research spending.
In PA, it's state law that the courts can't convict for anything less than 10 MPH over the limit outside of 65 MPH zones, school zones, and construction areas. In those, it's 5 MPH, so it's not secret at all, just slightly obscure.
Interesting discovery that a high-voltage, high current discharge can produce high-energy photons. Who didn't know that one? Gammas and hard X-Rays are the same thing, just differentiated by their source. X-Rays come from electron interactions and gammas from nuclear processes.
Gotta figure that some electrons will be excited to higher than average energies during a lightning bolt and produce some really energetic X-Rays that will be detected as gammas.
Although, I have to admit I am still much more worried about being hit by the lightning bolt itself rather than a miniscule amount of radiation from the discharge. What are we talking about here, about 1 micro-REM per lifetime?
So? How's that the customer's fault?
I'd say they need to bump their OC-3s to OC-64s or OC-192s then, or roll out point-to-point full duplex 10 GbE links. Seriously, don't sell the bandwidth if there's no real intention of actually providing it.
They really need to build out the backbone properly. Comcast last quarter had a net income of $588 million, so figure about $2B a year. They can afford it easily, but the PHBs are just trying to milk their infrastructure until it breaks rather than actually reinvest in it to drive future profits.
Perhaps the AG position should require approval by both the Senate and the Supreme Court? I'd expect the SCOTUS justices would be really interesting to have grill a nominee on legal theory, Constitutional issues, and ethics.
Ever see a transcript of oral arguments before the Supreme Court? They are brutal to the attorneys arguing before them.
This is very cool and potentially useful. By itself, it wouldn't be enough to force compliance or win a violation suit, it could well be enough to meet the threshold for filing a suit and forcing source code analysis in discovery.
Really, it is a great tool to have to ensure that open source license terms are respected by removing the "code anonymity" inherent in a binary.
Spoken like a true and complete fascist. "After all, we must protec the Corporation!"
Puh-Lease.
Really, an "infraction" like a guy sitting outside for a short time with a laptop is De Mininimus. In other words...
"Who gives a shit!"
Why is it that I hear about ISPs in Japan, Korea, and Europe offering bandwidths up to 100Mb/s for prices under $30/month and in the USA we're still stuck in 1999 pricing and speed-wise?
Could it possibly be that the PHBs at the various ISP corporations are deliberately screwing us to avoid actually building out their backbone networks properly??
Just asking...
Personally, I'm not worried too much that the Bush administration will really abuse what they are doing. I do greatly worry abour what a future administration such as Hilary Clinton or Rudy Guliani would do with this power.
Therefore, let the court stop it before anyone too authoritarian gets into office.
It's actually exceptionally simple. To Bear means to carry, so any weapon one person can carry can never be made illegal to own or carry.
In modern armaments, this means weapons such as the AK-47, the M-16, BAR, Thompson SMG, Uzi, M-249 SAW, M-203 grenade launcher, LAW rocket, etc.
If the average infrantry soldier would carry it, then it's useful to the militia. End of story. Otherwise, the well regulated militia is pretty well screwed.
At least that's what the court rulings seem to say for the most part, although they usually seem to find some "narrow exception" to the rule depending on what the defendant is accused of posessing....
I block a ton of ad domains in my DNS server. Anyone in spyware/adware or serving up ads gets put into my DNS and mapped to an internal web server that just kicks back a "Ad Blocked" page for any URL.
It works for me!
Round numbers here...
200,000 acres * 365 days = 73M acres. 73M acres = 114,100 square miles. This would be a square about 337.75 miles to a side.
Iowa is 55,869.3 square miles.
Nebraska is 76,878 square miles.
Kansas is 81,823 square miles
Missouri is 68,898 square miles
In other words, just in a few Great Plains states we have more than enough land area, much of which is already growing crops. Using the waste stems/leaves etc. from these crops is a LOT of biomass to convert to fuel.
Rhode Island is a particularly small state. Compare with say, Texas at 268,601 square miles of area.
Really, we need a total area about the size of Texas to feed this thing with enough biomass to totally meet energy needs. It's a big area, but not in relation to the size of the country, and especially not since we have great big swaths of farmland already producing cornstalks and such that can be fed into it.
Build lots of these as small-scale plants located on farms, give the farmers the ability to sell the raw fuel produced, and we can probably also eliminate the need for farm subsidies, free the country from foriegn energy sources, and make the greenies happy with a carbon-neutral fuel source.
AND... it's important to realize that the carbon released from biomass fuels would end up in the atmosphere anyway in the form of methane and CO2 as the biomass degrades naturally. Thus it is a net zero emission, all you're doing is harnessing this currently wasted carbon to do useful work.
Slashdot Mirror
The "linking" violation really only applies if the resulting binary is statically linked and contains a copy of the GPL code inside itself. If it calls the code from a library or DLL, then it isn't infringing. However, you still must follow the GPL/LGPL terms to the letter on the libraries distributed with your product, provide a copy of the GPL/LGPL licenses for the components used and provide full source upon demand. There's no wiggle room on that one.
It isn't necessary to make the source accompany the binary, but it is absolutely required to make the GPL license accompany the binary.
This is interesting from a legal perspective. IIRC, in discovery the courts aren't supposed to require one of the litigants to start creating records that they wouldn't ordinarily have kept just to be able to produce them. We haven't heard the last of this case. It's going to circuit court.
If they want to lock the stuff down, why not just build the system with a BSD instead of using GPL code?
Actually, I wonder if this is the case that the Supreme Court's been apparently looking for to invalidate sofware patents entirely? I recall in the MS vs AT&T that one of the justices asked "This court has never actually ruled on the patentability of software, have we" (IIRC). They couldn't rule on SW patentability in that case because neither party brought the issue up.
Supremes have been tightening patentability left and right lately. It wouldn't be a stretch for them to whack SW patents completely. Google may well be the deep-pocket defendant to bring up the issue, and they can afford to litigate it all the way.
They certainly can't use the DMCA to block the unlocking. This is almost identical to the Lexmark International, Inc. v. Static Control Components, Inc. case a couple years ago. Basic upshot of that ruling is that DMCA doesn't cover hacking to unlock a device for interoperability and third-party components.
If they try to sue using DMCA, they will almost certainly lose.
Because the moment you achieve it, someone will just make an improved idiot.
I take a hard line on this one. If a university accepts one dime of public funding, then any and all research it does must be public domain, peioid. No exceptions, no "well, this was privately funded", no nothing. We need a really good bright-line rule regarding public research spending.
In PA, it's state law that the courts can't convict for anything less than 10 MPH over the limit outside of 65 MPH zones, school zones, and construction areas. In those, it's 5 MPH, so it's not secret at all, just slightly obscure.
Interesting discovery that a high-voltage, high current discharge can produce high-energy photons. Who didn't know that one? Gammas and hard X-Rays are the same thing, just differentiated by their source. X-Rays come from electron interactions and gammas from nuclear processes. Gotta figure that some electrons will be excited to higher than average energies during a lightning bolt and produce some really energetic X-Rays that will be detected as gammas. Although, I have to admit I am still much more worried about being hit by the lightning bolt itself rather than a miniscule amount of radiation from the discharge. What are we talking about here, about 1 micro-REM per lifetime?
So? How's that the customer's fault? I'd say they need to bump their OC-3s to OC-64s or OC-192s then, or roll out point-to-point full duplex 10 GbE links. Seriously, don't sell the bandwidth if there's no real intention of actually providing it. They really need to build out the backbone properly. Comcast last quarter had a net income of $588 million, so figure about $2B a year. They can afford it easily, but the PHBs are just trying to milk their infrastructure until it breaks rather than actually reinvest in it to drive future profits.
Perhaps the AG position should require approval by both the Senate and the Supreme Court? I'd expect the SCOTUS justices would be really interesting to have grill a nominee on legal theory, Constitutional issues, and ethics. Ever see a transcript of oral arguments before the Supreme Court? They are brutal to the attorneys arguing before them.
Didn't Alberta flat-out refuse to participate in the system?
This is very cool and potentially useful. By itself, it wouldn't be enough to force compliance or win a violation suit, it could well be enough to meet the threshold for filing a suit and forcing source code analysis in discovery. Really, it is a great tool to have to ensure that open source license terms are respected by removing the "code anonymity" inherent in a binary.
The moment they tried to distribute the code outside of Antigua, the copyrights and license kick back into full force.
I'm totally "anti-paper" in every way. My interview for anyone techie is very simple - show me what you've done."
Just nuke Darfur and be done with it already. I'm tired of hearing about it.
Ars is a good site.
Spoken like a true and complete fascist. "After all, we must protec the Corporation!" Puh-Lease. Really, an "infraction" like a guy sitting outside for a short time with a laptop is De Mininimus. In other words... "Who gives a shit!"
Why is it that I hear about ISPs in Japan, Korea, and Europe offering bandwidths up to 100Mb/s for prices under $30/month and in the USA we're still stuck in 1999 pricing and speed-wise? Could it possibly be that the PHBs at the various ISP corporations are deliberately screwing us to avoid actually building out their backbone networks properly?? Just asking...
Personally, I'm not worried too much that the Bush administration will really abuse what they are doing. I do greatly worry abour what a future administration such as Hilary Clinton or Rudy Guliani would do with this power. Therefore, let the court stop it before anyone too authoritarian gets into office.
It's actually exceptionally simple. To Bear means to carry, so any weapon one person can carry can never be made illegal to own or carry. In modern armaments, this means weapons such as the AK-47, the M-16, BAR, Thompson SMG, Uzi, M-249 SAW, M-203 grenade launcher, LAW rocket, etc. If the average infrantry soldier would carry it, then it's useful to the militia. End of story. Otherwise, the well regulated militia is pretty well screwed. At least that's what the court rulings seem to say for the most part, although they usually seem to find some "narrow exception" to the rule depending on what the defendant is accused of posessing....
I block a ton of ad domains in my DNS server. Anyone in spyware/adware or serving up ads gets put into my DNS and mapped to an internal web server that just kicks back a "Ad Blocked" page for any URL. It works for me!
Round numbers here... 200,000 acres * 365 days = 73M acres. 73M acres = 114,100 square miles. This would be a square about 337.75 miles to a side. Iowa is 55,869.3 square miles. Nebraska is 76,878 square miles. Kansas is 81,823 square miles Missouri is 68,898 square miles In other words, just in a few Great Plains states we have more than enough land area, much of which is already growing crops. Using the waste stems/leaves etc. from these crops is a LOT of biomass to convert to fuel. Rhode Island is a particularly small state. Compare with say, Texas at 268,601 square miles of area. Really, we need a total area about the size of Texas to feed this thing with enough biomass to totally meet energy needs. It's a big area, but not in relation to the size of the country, and especially not since we have great big swaths of farmland already producing cornstalks and such that can be fed into it. Build lots of these as small-scale plants located on farms, give the farmers the ability to sell the raw fuel produced, and we can probably also eliminate the need for farm subsidies, free the country from foriegn energy sources, and make the greenies happy with a carbon-neutral fuel source.
AND... it's important to realize that the carbon released from biomass fuels would end up in the atmosphere anyway in the form of methane and CO2 as the biomass degrades naturally. Thus it is a net zero emission, all you're doing is harnessing this currently wasted carbon to do useful work.