It's the continued criminalization of a tiny fraction of the population. Most people don't want to live in a trash heap, so they don't throw trash everywhere. When it comes to things like piracy, it's far more complex. With copyright, one can break the law and realize that its existence is better than its nonexistence. Many justify this (and I'm not arguing for or against here) in large part because the original purpose of copyright was not to stop individuals from copying things for personal use. That narrow interpretation of the law is a relatively recent abuse.
The purpose of modern copyright (for at least two centuries) has been to protect authors, composers, artists, and musicians, not the publishing industry. More to the point, a large part of its purpose was to protect those people from the industry---so that people who create an original work of authorship can shop it around to a publisher and have recourse if the publisher steals the work, publishes it without permission, and keeps the profits. It was primarily concerned with large-scale commercial copying, not individual copying---to such a degree that the impact on the commercial viability of the work is a consideration for a fair use defense. Indeed, when copyright was created, the notion of personal copying was absurd.
Indeed, the thought of prosecuting individuals wasn't really even a consideration (at least in the U.S.) before the 1980s and Sony v Universal. Indeed, we can largely blame this mentality on the dissenting arguments posed by Blackmun et al. Prior to that, small-scale copying was not only mostly ignored, but in the few cases where it came up (e.g. Williams & Wilkins Co. v. United States), they got smacked down by the courts pretty badly. Over the past thirty years or so, however, copyright has taken a rather dramatic right turn towards corporate welfare, with absurd term extensions that essentially eradicate the public domain as we know it, dramatic scaling back of fair use rights, lawsuits against individuals and small-scale copying, and various egregious anticompetitive practices like the absurd "three note rule" (The Chiffons v. George Harrison), all of which are intended to further tighten the publishing/recording/movie industry's grasp on the creations of we, the artists, musicians, authors, etc.
So even though I don't condone copyright infringement, even I as a composer, writer, and computer programmer have a hard time with the way copyright is being abused to go after two bit infringement, enough so that I'd rather see copyright law and enforcement rolled back to about 1970, but not enough so that I'd want to see copyright go away altogether. It still is very useful at preventing corporations from stealing people's creations... up until the point at which they sign the contract, anyway, at which point the content creators are usually screwed.... You know... maybe we should roll it back farther than 1970... or at least seriously revisit the notion of works for hire and seriously tighten up what constitutes a work for hire, seriously limit corporate ownership of copyrights, and in general take back copyright from the leachers... and I don't mean the ones on Bittorrent.
Odd. HR3458 seems pretty straightforward to me. By my reading, it grants the FCC the right to rulemaking that governs ISPs regarding network neutrality and specifies a series of basic principals on which those regulations should be based. I'm not seeing anything else in the full text of the bill. What am I missing?
The difference is that the GPLv2 didn't inspire corporations to work together to create open source replacements as GPLv3 has. GPLv2 was annoying to corporations, but not enough to throw it out and start over. GPLv3 has caused a pretty serious backlash among corporations, and when you're talking about projects that rely heavily on corporate source contributions to be viable, that's a dangerous game.
Don't get me wrong, I agree with you that locking down hardware is terrible (and in Sony's case, it probably has more to do with them being owned by a media company than anything else---I haven't bought a Sony product other than cheap ear buds in years). I just don't think that any software license is likely to do any good. If they can't use BusyBox, they'll just use a trimmed down FreeBSD, add an extra few MB of flash, charge their customers five bucks more, and nobody will be the wiser. It doesn't hurt the companies any, but it does hurt the projects themselves, assuming those corporations were actually posting back useful patches. And in the end, no matter how many people stand on principle, the customers still end up stuck with these boxes that they can't fix; they just pay a little more for the "privilege"....
What is really needed, rather than scaring away corporate backers, is *attracting* corporate backers who behave right. If, rather than tighten down the GPLv3, the FSF had contributed money and resources to making truly open systems like MythTV or OpenWRT polished enough for end users and convinced companies to build open plug-and-play boxes around them, TiVo and existing router vendors would fade into obsolescence. The only way to successfully fight proprietary software/hardware is by building open software/hardware that is better.:-)
BTW, the time thing on your Sony reminds me of the time zone change with my TiVo series 1. Same deal, but in that case, it was proprietary binaries that I couldn't fix easily even if I wanted to (short of disassembly). Eventually, they did release a fix, but.... You get the idea. I tried switching to MythTV, but the UI was just too bloated and clumsy with huge lag time after button presses, so I'm back on the S1 TiVo. Maybe I'll give it another shot one of these days....
Correction: locking the data into a closed service from which you cannot easily retrieve it, making you permanently dependent on their service for your contact information is worth more than the cost of the bandwidth. It's the Facebook of the cell phone world.
Ah, but it does point out a serious flaw in the very concept of cloud computing. Cloud computing is based on throwing your data out onto somebody else's servers and trusting them to back up the data for you. As soon as you do that, you are opening yourself up to lose everything if they don't perform regular backups. If you have to perform the regular backups yourself, complete with having the local infrastructure to do so, then you gain little to no benefit from cloud computing. Doubly so if the data is not useful without the proper functioning of their servers.
The notion of cloud computing is a silly pipe dream dreamt up by companies that want to sell software as a service so that they have a continuous revenue stream. It cannot work usefully because any software that is not on your machine cannot be relied upon. Period. Therefore, the entire concept of computing in the cloud is so fundamentally flawed that it cannot be fixed no matter how hard you try. If it is important enough to keep, it is important enough to back up yourself, and that means having a backup of the application AND the data, which means the application doesn't live on some server somewhere, and at least one copy of the data doesn't, either.
The concept of using servers for synchronization of data makes sense, however (e.g. Dot-Mac synching of contacts between your computers and your iPhone or whatever). It even makes some sense as a backup, with the caveat that bandwidth in the U.S. makes it rather impractical, as do storage limitations on pretty much any ISP in the world. Still, it's a good idea in principle. But in any case, the primary copy has to be local and the backup has to be remote. The reverse of that is a guarantee of business downtime, lost data, etc.
It also clearly failed because of their lack of certainty in their backups and their panicked pronouncement of this. They didn't trust their own backup strategy, which is not a vote of confidence, to say the least. If their immediate reaction had been, "Don't let your devices shut off because you might lose changes you've made recently. We hope to have full service restored in 3-5 days, but you should take precautions and write down anything you've changed in the past week just to be safe," then nobody would be freaking out.
The outage was not the problem, and would not have been a serious problem even if it had gone on for a week. They'd have a few people mad because they couldn't schedule meetings with each other---a minor inconvenience at best. The real problems were:
Your phone could lose all its contacts if it couldn't resync with the cloud. This one is absolute incompetence of the highest order.
The cloud might not be recoverable. This one is only a problem because of #1.
But instead of "We'll be up and running in a couple of days," their reaction was, "Don't let your devices shut off. We don't know if we will be able to restore ANY of the data and you may have to manually copy all of your contacts off of the device to avoid losing them." That's a failed backup strategy regardless of how things turned out in the end. That's downright inept and irresponsible. A couple of people very high up should be looking for work right about now....
I think it is more likely that they did something stupid like using a 32-bit auto-increment in some table somewhere and when it rolled over, things got royally screwed, destroying old database records that they then had to fix up from backups while migrating the data to a new table with a larger primary key (to avoid the risk of further data loss). That's the sort of situation where it takes days to recover because you have to do compare every value with the prior database data to determine which record changes were legit (by the right user) and which ones should have been with higher record IDs, then split out the conflicts into two records, restoring the old ones from backups. Royal pain in the backside.
If it were just a routine collapse of all their hardware, no matter how bad their backups are---even if they don't have any freezing or transaction support in their database at all---a trivial backup should still only lose a tiny, tiny fraction of a percent of the data.... For this to have been a hardware failure or similar just doesn't make sense unless they haven't done a full (non-incremental) backup in years or something....
Just say no to helical tape with badly designed transports. I can't think of a single time when I've taken a mini-DV tape from one camcorder to another and had the slightest problem with reading out the data. The transports automatically adjust the tape speed using dynamic tracking tricks and everything just works. Azimuth is wrong? Speed up or slow down both the speed of the transport and the rotation of the heads to compensate. There's just no excuse for helical scan not working. Don't use helical scan being "hard" as an excuse for bad engineering.:-)
The "Pink" project was a Microsoft creation based on their technology, NOT a Danger product. It was the brainchild of Microsoft's Roz Ho. Microsoft may have bought a terribly run company, but that happens all the time in the real world. After a year and a half under the leadership of Microsoft, problems can no longer be blamed on the previous company's leadership. Most of those people don't even work there anymore. It's all on Microsoft's head.
The problem is not that the Danger division is run like a separate company. The problem is that every little division of Microsoft is run like a separate company. That's their biggest flaw, and they really need to get an effective leader (as in replace Steve Ballmer) who isn't afraid to fire anyone who is more concerned about protecting his/her own empire than with the good of the company. That pretty much means replacing large swaths of the management hierarchy. That's the only thing that will save Microsoft from eventual total failure. That or a huge government bailout in twenty years for being "too big to fail".
Maybe their own software (not sure), but not the GPLed code. The whole Tivoization issue is that all binaries have to be signed if you want them to run on their hardware.
And nothing gives you the right to use their proprietary bits on third-party software, and even the GPLv3 doesn't change that; it doesn't apply to stuff that is installed with or distributed with GPLv3 software.
Finally, even if TiVo used GPLv3 bits, they could still make it impossible to modify it and still have a usable device. There are two ways that they can do this under GPLv3:
Put the GPLv3 software in ROM. The GPLv3 allows unmodifiable binaries if the designer of the system retains no means for themselves updating the software in question.
By making the proprietary code that USES the GPLv3 software do the checks. If the proprietary code does the checks and fails to operate, you still comply with the letter of the GPLv3. The GPLv3 as worded doesn't prevent modified GPLed binaries from turning the proprietary upper layers of the device into a complete brick. It just says that the modified binaries must themselves run.
In short, the GPLv3 is completely broken, doesn't solve what they were trying to solve, and does so in a way that diminishes the use of GPL-encumbered works by corporations, making those works less relevant in the long term than equivalent works under less restrictive licenses.
There are a fair number of things that are edge cases in the law, however. Linking: Galoob says it isn't a derivative work, but other cases say that it is. It's a sticky mess of special cases that don't set clear precedent either way. The GPL vs. LGPL distinction clarifies this somewhat, but it still isn't clear whether writing code that wraps a GPLed tool might potentially be a derivative work if the outside tool has no useful purpose without the GPL-based tool and if the GPLed tool is distributed with it, it's legally fuzzy. And so on.
The hardware can prevent the user from using the software on that hardware. If the point of buying the hardware is to use something other than the vendor-provided hardware, then unless you are the first person to buy the hardware with that notion in mind and don't know about the restriction, you have no room to complain. You should have bought hardware that didn't have those restrictions. Indeed, using the license to pressure vendors is entirely the wrong solution. That can't possibly work. It just ensures that those vendors use BSD-licensed software and probably don't contribute their changes back at all. The right solution is to pressure the vendor by NOT BUYING the locked-down products in the first place!
Either the goal of the GPL is to get people to make changes and fixes and enhancements available to everyone or it isn't. If it is, then limiting who can use GPL-licensed software in their products is entirely the wrong way to achieve that goal. If it isn't the goal, then what's the point of using the GPL in the first place? You might as well use a BSD license and allow source changes to be kept secret. The GPLv3 runs completely contrary to the public's best interests in this respect.
If that $30 router uses GPLv3 code in its firmware, then I've already bought a "real router".
By real router, I mean a router that doesn't artificially lock you into a specific firmware.
It also means that developers can release GPLv3 code and be assured that legally, no "fake" router can contain their code (barring fair use, of course).
What the heck are you talking about? GPLv3 does not ensure that a "fake" router cannot contain their code. By licensing the code under the GPLv3, they are agreeing that their code can be freely redistributed, which means it can be used on ANY hardware, even including that of their competitors. It means that their competitors can't use it in a locked-down product, but if anything, companies that choose the GPL for their software WANT their competitors' products to be more restrictive so that they look better to the geek audience by comparison.
Unless, of course, you're using "fake" to mean what you described as a "real router" that is locked down, in which case, yes, but again, why should I care whether somebody puts my software into a locked-down product? If the software is out there and I'm getting fixes back, my users are benefitting from that product. *Their* users are *possibly* hurting from the locked down product, but they aren't direct users of *my* software. They are users of *their* product. When they get mad about its locked down nature, they aren't going to complain about *my* software. They're going to complain about *their* router hardware, and the next time, they will learn to buy a product that isn't defective by design.
That argument makes no sense. Properly written software should be easily portable to *any* device unless it's a driver, performance considerations notwithstanding.
No, you can specifically state that by contributing code, you agree to license it and authorize the redistribution of it under both licenses. As soon as you do that, you're covered. If they want to write code and license it exclusively under the GPL, they are free to fork, but unless RMS himself decides to write a large chunk of code, it seems unlikely that anyone would do so.:-)
Where it becomes problematic is when you have a vendor-specific license and you want people to contribute under a "version X or later" of the vendor-specific license. A lot of people will balk at that.
That's silly. The hardware can't prevent the user from using the software. The user merely has to provide hardware without those restrictions. Nothing in TiVo prevents you from taking their GPLed kernel changes and applying them to a custom board that you design with similar chips or even a standard off-the-shelf PC with PCI cards that contain the relevant bits. The software is still every bit as useful even if you can't use it on a particular device. Boo hoo, my $30 router won't let me upgrade it with unsigned firmware. Buy a real router.
Because the GPLv2 is abandonware. If FSF wants to pick it up and spin a GPLv2.1 and an LGPLv2.1 off the GPLv2 branch, then maybe it would be a viable license. As it stands, as legal flaws are found in the license, your only choices are to move up to GPLv3 and accept all the baggage that comes with it, convince your developer community to all sign over copyright, or convince your developer community to all agree to a license change to a BSD or MIT license after the fact. Good luck with that.
On the contrary, the things you list are changes in the expression of human nature, not in human nature itself.
Although slavery is a particular expression of human nature and is thus not part of human nature per se, the drive to dominate and to profit from the work of others is part of human nature. As a result, slavery still exists today, as does indentured servitude that borders on slavery. Look at slavery in parts of Africa. Look at sweatshops in China. And so on. We do our best to suppress that part of human nature because we know it to be wrong, but it still remains just beneath the surface.
Similarly, hunting and gathering behavior is also part of human nature. People horde resources---money, food, cars, computers.... People hunt, too. In the southern U.S., it's a popular sport. And indeed, all sports are to some degree an expression of hunting and/or mating instincts. These days, we are more likely to hunt for a closer parking place at the mall than for a wild buffalo, but in either case, you're searching for your goal, then pouncing on it. Pickpockets search for their mark, then prey upon him or her. Same for thieves, serial killers, etc. It's all the same underlying instinct, just expressed in different ways.
Egalitarian behavior is anything but human nature. It is the way we culturally believe things should be, but human nature is for the strong to dominate the weak. That's why we have slavery, third-world nations, etc. Any egalitarian behavior is, by definition, a deliberate agreement by civilized people to suppress their innate tendencies for the good of society. Indeed, that ability to suppress one's nature is in itself a big part of human nature.
Violence is very clearly also a part of human nature. Again, we try to suppress it, but even in polite society, every time we hear about someone going postal or shooting up a high school or beating his/her wife or husband, we are reminded that the propensity for violence is very much there. Not all humans are particularly violent by nature, mind you, but looking at humanity as a whole, it is part of human nature. And even the least violent people you know can become violent in the right circumstances. If you haven't done so already, read about the Stanford prison experiment. It's eye opening.
As our environment changes, the expression of our innate tendencies changes along with it, but the basic tendencies themselves remain the same.
And the Internet has dramatically changed the way we interact with the people in our lives. Twenty years ago, if you moved thousands of miles from home, you would see those folks at your 20 year class reunion. Now, I'm talking with folks I haven't seen in over a decade on Facebook like I saw them yesterday. It has changed the dynamics of human relationships in ways that are rather profound.
However, you could also argue that human nature hasn't really changed at all at a fundamental level. We still care about our friends and families, still depend on the acceptance of others for some portion of our self esteem, etc. What has dramatically changed is the scale of interaction, the ease of interaction, and to some extent, the degree to which we take that interaction for granted. That's why some of the best science fiction is post-apocalyptic, showing how people get along after their technology has failed them.
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It's the continued criminalization of a tiny fraction of the population. Most people don't want to live in a trash heap, so they don't throw trash everywhere. When it comes to things like piracy, it's far more complex. With copyright, one can break the law and realize that its existence is better than its nonexistence. Many justify this (and I'm not arguing for or against here) in large part because the original purpose of copyright was not to stop individuals from copying things for personal use. That narrow interpretation of the law is a relatively recent abuse.
The purpose of modern copyright (for at least two centuries) has been to protect authors, composers, artists, and musicians, not the publishing industry. More to the point, a large part of its purpose was to protect those people from the industry---so that people who create an original work of authorship can shop it around to a publisher and have recourse if the publisher steals the work, publishes it without permission, and keeps the profits. It was primarily concerned with large-scale commercial copying, not individual copying---to such a degree that the impact on the commercial viability of the work is a consideration for a fair use defense. Indeed, when copyright was created, the notion of personal copying was absurd.
Indeed, the thought of prosecuting individuals wasn't really even a consideration (at least in the U.S.) before the 1980s and Sony v Universal. Indeed, we can largely blame this mentality on the dissenting arguments posed by Blackmun et al. Prior to that, small-scale copying was not only mostly ignored, but in the few cases where it came up (e.g. Williams & Wilkins Co. v. United States), they got smacked down by the courts pretty badly. Over the past thirty years or so, however, copyright has taken a rather dramatic right turn towards corporate welfare, with absurd term extensions that essentially eradicate the public domain as we know it, dramatic scaling back of fair use rights, lawsuits against individuals and small-scale copying, and various egregious anticompetitive practices like the absurd "three note rule" (The Chiffons v. George Harrison), all of which are intended to further tighten the publishing/recording/movie industry's grasp on the creations of we, the artists, musicians, authors, etc.
So even though I don't condone copyright infringement, even I as a composer, writer, and computer programmer have a hard time with the way copyright is being abused to go after two bit infringement, enough so that I'd rather see copyright law and enforcement rolled back to about 1970, but not enough so that I'd want to see copyright go away altogether. It still is very useful at preventing corporations from stealing people's creations... up until the point at which they sign the contract, anyway, at which point the content creators are usually screwed.... You know... maybe we should roll it back farther than 1970... or at least seriously revisit the notion of works for hire and seriously tighten up what constitutes a work for hire, seriously limit corporate ownership of copyrights, and in general take back copyright from the leachers... and I don't mean the ones on Bittorrent.
Odd. HR3458 seems pretty straightforward to me. By my reading, it grants the FCC the right to rulemaking that governs ISPs regarding network neutrality and specifies a series of basic principals on which those regulations should be based. I'm not seeing anything else in the full text of the bill. What am I missing?
Heh. Then 2.2. Actually, knowing CVS, it would be 2.1.0.0.46.1 or some such. :-)
The difference is that the GPLv2 didn't inspire corporations to work together to create open source replacements as GPLv3 has. GPLv2 was annoying to corporations, but not enough to throw it out and start over. GPLv3 has caused a pretty serious backlash among corporations, and when you're talking about projects that rely heavily on corporate source contributions to be viable, that's a dangerous game.
Don't get me wrong, I agree with you that locking down hardware is terrible (and in Sony's case, it probably has more to do with them being owned by a media company than anything else---I haven't bought a Sony product other than cheap ear buds in years). I just don't think that any software license is likely to do any good. If they can't use BusyBox, they'll just use a trimmed down FreeBSD, add an extra few MB of flash, charge their customers five bucks more, and nobody will be the wiser. It doesn't hurt the companies any, but it does hurt the projects themselves, assuming those corporations were actually posting back useful patches. And in the end, no matter how many people stand on principle, the customers still end up stuck with these boxes that they can't fix; they just pay a little more for the "privilege"....
What is really needed, rather than scaring away corporate backers, is *attracting* corporate backers who behave right. If, rather than tighten down the GPLv3, the FSF had contributed money and resources to making truly open systems like MythTV or OpenWRT polished enough for end users and convinced companies to build open plug-and-play boxes around them, TiVo and existing router vendors would fade into obsolescence. The only way to successfully fight proprietary software/hardware is by building open software/hardware that is better. :-)
BTW, the time thing on your Sony reminds me of the time zone change with my TiVo series 1. Same deal, but in that case, it was proprietary binaries that I couldn't fix easily even if I wanted to (short of disassembly). Eventually, they did release a fix, but.... You get the idea. I tried switching to MythTV, but the UI was just too bloated and clumsy with huge lag time after button presses, so I'm back on the S1 TiVo. Maybe I'll give it another shot one of these days....
Correction: locking the data into a closed service from which you cannot easily retrieve it, making you permanently dependent on their service for your contact information is worth more than the cost of the bandwidth. It's the Facebook of the cell phone world.
Does your employer lease rack space? :-D
Ah, but it does point out a serious flaw in the very concept of cloud computing. Cloud computing is based on throwing your data out onto somebody else's servers and trusting them to back up the data for you. As soon as you do that, you are opening yourself up to lose everything if they don't perform regular backups. If you have to perform the regular backups yourself, complete with having the local infrastructure to do so, then you gain little to no benefit from cloud computing. Doubly so if the data is not useful without the proper functioning of their servers.
The notion of cloud computing is a silly pipe dream dreamt up by companies that want to sell software as a service so that they have a continuous revenue stream. It cannot work usefully because any software that is not on your machine cannot be relied upon. Period. Therefore, the entire concept of computing in the cloud is so fundamentally flawed that it cannot be fixed no matter how hard you try. If it is important enough to keep, it is important enough to back up yourself, and that means having a backup of the application AND the data, which means the application doesn't live on some server somewhere, and at least one copy of the data doesn't, either.
The concept of using servers for synchronization of data makes sense, however (e.g. Dot-Mac synching of contacts between your computers and your iPhone or whatever). It even makes some sense as a backup, with the caveat that bandwidth in the U.S. makes it rather impractical, as do storage limitations on pretty much any ISP in the world. Still, it's a good idea in principle. But in any case, the primary copy has to be local and the backup has to be remote. The reverse of that is a guarantee of business downtime, lost data, etc.
It also clearly failed because of their lack of certainty in their backups and their panicked pronouncement of this. They didn't trust their own backup strategy, which is not a vote of confidence, to say the least. If their immediate reaction had been, "Don't let your devices shut off because you might lose changes you've made recently. We hope to have full service restored in 3-5 days, but you should take precautions and write down anything you've changed in the past week just to be safe," then nobody would be freaking out.
The outage was not the problem, and would not have been a serious problem even if it had gone on for a week. They'd have a few people mad because they couldn't schedule meetings with each other---a minor inconvenience at best. The real problems were:
But instead of "We'll be up and running in a couple of days," their reaction was, "Don't let your devices shut off. We don't know if we will be able to restore ANY of the data and you may have to manually copy all of your contacts off of the device to avoid losing them." That's a failed backup strategy regardless of how things turned out in the end. That's downright inept and irresponsible. A couple of people very high up should be looking for work right about now....
I think it is more likely that they did something stupid like using a 32-bit auto-increment in some table somewhere and when it rolled over, things got royally screwed, destroying old database records that they then had to fix up from backups while migrating the data to a new table with a larger primary key (to avoid the risk of further data loss). That's the sort of situation where it takes days to recover because you have to do compare every value with the prior database data to determine which record changes were legit (by the right user) and which ones should have been with higher record IDs, then split out the conflicts into two records, restoring the old ones from backups. Royal pain in the backside.
If it were just a routine collapse of all their hardware, no matter how bad their backups are---even if they don't have any freezing or transaction support in their database at all---a trivial backup should still only lose a tiny, tiny fraction of a percent of the data.... For this to have been a hardware failure or similar just doesn't make sense unless they haven't done a full (non-incremental) backup in years or something....
Just say no to helical tape with badly designed transports. I can't think of a single time when I've taken a mini-DV tape from one camcorder to another and had the slightest problem with reading out the data. The transports automatically adjust the tape speed using dynamic tracking tricks and everything just works. Azimuth is wrong? Speed up or slow down both the speed of the transport and the rotation of the heads to compensate. There's just no excuse for helical scan not working. Don't use helical scan being "hard" as an excuse for bad engineering. :-)
The "Pink" project was a Microsoft creation based on their technology, NOT a Danger product. It was the brainchild of Microsoft's Roz Ho. Microsoft may have bought a terribly run company, but that happens all the time in the real world. After a year and a half under the leadership of Microsoft, problems can no longer be blamed on the previous company's leadership. Most of those people don't even work there anymore. It's all on Microsoft's head.
The problem is not that the Danger division is run like a separate company. The problem is that every little division of Microsoft is run like a separate company. That's their biggest flaw, and they really need to get an effective leader (as in replace Steve Ballmer) who isn't afraid to fire anyone who is more concerned about protecting his/her own empire than with the good of the company. That pretty much means replacing large swaths of the management hierarchy. That's the only thing that will save Microsoft from eventual total failure. That or a huge government bailout in twenty years for being "too big to fail".
Maybe their own software (not sure), but not the GPLed code. The whole Tivoization issue is that all binaries have to be signed if you want them to run on their hardware.
And nothing gives you the right to use their proprietary bits on third-party software, and even the GPLv3 doesn't change that; it doesn't apply to stuff that is installed with or distributed with GPLv3 software.
Finally, even if TiVo used GPLv3 bits, they could still make it impossible to modify it and still have a usable device. There are two ways that they can do this under GPLv3:
In short, the GPLv3 is completely broken, doesn't solve what they were trying to solve, and does so in a way that diminishes the use of GPL-encumbered works by corporations, making those works less relevant in the long term than equivalent works under less restrictive licenses.
There are a fair number of things that are edge cases in the law, however. Linking: Galoob says it isn't a derivative work, but other cases say that it is. It's a sticky mess of special cases that don't set clear precedent either way. The GPL vs. LGPL distinction clarifies this somewhat, but it still isn't clear whether writing code that wraps a GPLed tool might potentially be a derivative work if the outside tool has no useful purpose without the GPL-based tool and if the GPLed tool is distributed with it, it's legally fuzzy. And so on.
The hardware can prevent the user from using the software on that hardware. If the point of buying the hardware is to use something other than the vendor-provided hardware, then unless you are the first person to buy the hardware with that notion in mind and don't know about the restriction, you have no room to complain. You should have bought hardware that didn't have those restrictions. Indeed, using the license to pressure vendors is entirely the wrong solution. That can't possibly work. It just ensures that those vendors use BSD-licensed software and probably don't contribute their changes back at all. The right solution is to pressure the vendor by NOT BUYING the locked-down products in the first place!
Either the goal of the GPL is to get people to make changes and fixes and enhancements available to everyone or it isn't. If it is, then limiting who can use GPL-licensed software in their products is entirely the wrong way to achieve that goal. If it isn't the goal, then what's the point of using the GPL in the first place? You might as well use a BSD license and allow source changes to be kept secret. The GPLv3 runs completely contrary to the public's best interests in this respect.
By real router, I mean a router that doesn't artificially lock you into a specific firmware.
What the heck are you talking about? GPLv3 does not ensure that a "fake" router cannot contain their code. By licensing the code under the GPLv3, they are agreeing that their code can be freely redistributed, which means it can be used on ANY hardware, even including that of their competitors. It means that their competitors can't use it in a locked-down product, but if anything, companies that choose the GPL for their software WANT their competitors' products to be more restrictive so that they look better to the geek audience by comparison.
Unless, of course, you're using "fake" to mean what you described as a "real router" that is locked down, in which case, yes, but again, why should I care whether somebody puts my software into a locked-down product? If the software is out there and I'm getting fixes back, my users are benefitting from that product. *Their* users are *possibly* hurting from the locked down product, but they aren't direct users of *my* software. They are users of *their* product. When they get mad about its locked down nature, they aren't going to complain about *my* software. They're going to complain about *their* router hardware, and the next time, they will learn to buy a product that isn't defective by design.
That argument makes no sense. Properly written software should be easily portable to *any* device unless it's a driver, performance considerations notwithstanding.
No, you can specifically state that by contributing code, you agree to license it and authorize the redistribution of it under both licenses. As soon as you do that, you're covered. If they want to write code and license it exclusively under the GPL, they are free to fork, but unless RMS himself decides to write a large chunk of code, it seems unlikely that anyone would do so. :-)
Where it becomes problematic is when you have a vendor-specific license and you want people to contribute under a "version X or later" of the vendor-specific license. A lot of people will balk at that.
You mean like the Affero GPL does? Ironic, no?
That's silly. The hardware can't prevent the user from using the software. The user merely has to provide hardware without those restrictions. Nothing in TiVo prevents you from taking their GPLed kernel changes and applying them to a custom board that you design with similar chips or even a standard off-the-shelf PC with PCI cards that contain the relevant bits. The software is still every bit as useful even if you can't use it on a particular device. Boo hoo, my $30 router won't let me upgrade it with unsigned firmware. Buy a real router.
Because the GPLv2 is abandonware. If FSF wants to pick it up and spin a GPLv2.1 and an LGPLv2.1 off the GPLv2 branch, then maybe it would be a viable license. As it stands, as legal flaws are found in the license, your only choices are to move up to GPLv3 and accept all the baggage that comes with it, convince your developer community to all sign over copyright, or convince your developer community to all agree to a license change to a BSD or MIT license after the fact. Good luck with that.
Was that before or after your car hit the bottom of the ravine?
235%, eh? I take it this person is very large.
On the contrary, the things you list are changes in the expression of human nature, not in human nature itself.
Although slavery is a particular expression of human nature and is thus not part of human nature per se, the drive to dominate and to profit from the work of others is part of human nature. As a result, slavery still exists today, as does indentured servitude that borders on slavery. Look at slavery in parts of Africa. Look at sweatshops in China. And so on. We do our best to suppress that part of human nature because we know it to be wrong, but it still remains just beneath the surface.
Similarly, hunting and gathering behavior is also part of human nature. People horde resources---money, food, cars, computers.... People hunt, too. In the southern U.S., it's a popular sport. And indeed, all sports are to some degree an expression of hunting and/or mating instincts. These days, we are more likely to hunt for a closer parking place at the mall than for a wild buffalo, but in either case, you're searching for your goal, then pouncing on it. Pickpockets search for their mark, then prey upon him or her. Same for thieves, serial killers, etc. It's all the same underlying instinct, just expressed in different ways.
Egalitarian behavior is anything but human nature. It is the way we culturally believe things should be, but human nature is for the strong to dominate the weak. That's why we have slavery, third-world nations, etc. Any egalitarian behavior is, by definition, a deliberate agreement by civilized people to suppress their innate tendencies for the good of society. Indeed, that ability to suppress one's nature is in itself a big part of human nature.
Violence is very clearly also a part of human nature. Again, we try to suppress it, but even in polite society, every time we hear about someone going postal or shooting up a high school or beating his/her wife or husband, we are reminded that the propensity for violence is very much there. Not all humans are particularly violent by nature, mind you, but looking at humanity as a whole, it is part of human nature. And even the least violent people you know can become violent in the right circumstances. If you haven't done so already, read about the Stanford prison experiment. It's eye opening.
As our environment changes, the expression of our innate tendencies changes along with it, but the basic tendencies themselves remain the same.
And the Internet has dramatically changed the way we interact with the people in our lives. Twenty years ago, if you moved thousands of miles from home, you would see those folks at your 20 year class reunion. Now, I'm talking with folks I haven't seen in over a decade on Facebook like I saw them yesterday. It has changed the dynamics of human relationships in ways that are rather profound.
However, you could also argue that human nature hasn't really changed at all at a fundamental level. We still care about our friends and families, still depend on the acceptance of others for some portion of our self esteem, etc. What has dramatically changed is the scale of interaction, the ease of interaction, and to some extent, the degree to which we take that interaction for granted. That's why some of the best science fiction is post-apocalyptic, showing how people get along after their technology has failed them.
Ob. Futurama reference:
And so, the Trek fans were killed in the manner most befitting virgins.
[Guy on mountain throws a Trek fan into a volcano.]
He's dead, Jim.
[Repeat]
How long ago was this? Google WiFi pretty much covers the entire city.
http://wifi.google.com/city/mv/apmap.html