So they paid SCO's mobsters. Disgusting, yes, but I see it as insurance... like having a plan for a second backup generator in case the fail-proof first backup generator fails. The chances of SCO prevailing are slim, but non-zero... just like the chances of the backup generator failing.
It is not insurance, it is anti-insurance. Now they have a contractual relationship with SCO, a contractual relationship which gives SCO the power to sue EV1, but does not offer EV1 any tangible protection whatsoever. See the groklaw analysis of the SCO licensing terms for specifics.
EV1 is now in a position where it can be sued by SCO and not have the lawsuit thrown out immediately... the rest of us are not in this position, SCO rhetoric and nonsensical ravings aside.
I'd say EV1 is likely in for a world of hurt, and their customers would be well advised to be looking around for alternatives.
I am 17 years old, and I have been working on open source software for a while now. I would never consider closed source software as a preferred alternative to open source simply because once I have a program "out there" as it were, the program is going to be so improved vastly by people who have vastly more knowledge than me.
Not only that, with GPLed software all of those improvements by "more knowledgable people" are guaranteed to benefit your project, and hence you. Not only can you leverage your own knowledge and skills in having created or supported a free software product (consultancy, writing, system integration, etc.), you get to leverage the skills, time, and expertise of many others... just as they get to leverage your skills in their endeavors. Worse, to use their products you have to agree to restrictions on your already limited rights to use or distribute the proprietary product you're trying to build your project on, which in turn limits your opportunities further.
Selling software for money directly is only one method of making a profit, and unless you are in a position to try and leverage the deepest underlying infrastructure in order to become a monopolist, it isn't a very interesting method. There is far more opportunity, and far more money, in selling services, turn key solutions, and other products built upon software, with value added by your work and expertise, than there is in selling software directly, and this can be done for more readilly, and far more profitably, upon free software than it can upon proprietary software. Not so much because free software tends to be gratis, but because free software is libre, giving one the freedom one requires to put together a compelling solution without running afoul of this or that EULA, or worse, finding one's vendor to be in direct competition and sabataging your product by deliberately breaking compatability at the operating system and C library level (as Microsoft did to numerous competitors in the 1990s, including Netscape).
The result is a rich environment full of financial opportunity. I am turning 40 this year, and have made a very fine living (probably much better than the author of this letter) for over a decade using and developing free software. I have benefitted immensly from the works of others, and others have benefitied immensly from my work (and I'm a very minor player in the free software world).
The opportunities for business and profit are far richer in the free software world than they are in the proprietary world, where for every Bill Gates or Bill Joy there are tens of thousands of programming serfs with no rights to their work (it being a work for hire assigned to one's employer) and no real way to leverage their skills and knowledge without walking a minefield of non-compete and non-disclosure agreements.
There is always someone in the world who can do something that you did, better, and that's what OSS is, doesn't that guy get it?
This guy is old guard, and frightened of the implications of a changing paradigm. He is doing what many frightened people do... trying to convince the next generation to go back to his way of thinking. It is a losing battle. Culture changes, economies change, and paradigms shift. The author of this open letter has missed the boat, and is trying to call it back.
When has the free market been a fallacy? In the situations you're describing, where employers abused employees, said abuses occurred only because government was involved! Business interests can only abuse when they have the power of coercion behind them.
That is flat out revisionist history, factually incorrect and disingenuous.
The worst excesses of business may occur when business manages to coopt government, but many, many appalling excesses occur in the absence of government, or in lassaiz-faire situations. Child labor of the 19th century in America (which WAS constitutional BTW), the diamond trade in Africa today, slavery in the middle east and parts of Africa today (where governments stand by and do not enforce their own laws, i.e. lassaiz-faire, and in places where government effectively doesn't exist), and the list goes on.
Just because government has been used by business to appalling ends in the past does not mean business doesn't engage in appalling practices when the government stands idly by.
The free market can be terribly coercive, whenever the balance of power or need is too disparate. Medical care, the need to eat, monopolies are all examples where one party is vastly more powerful and coercive than the other, and examples in which the free market breaks down completely.
If the toxins are secret, you still accepted the job. You accepted the risk. You accepted the reward. If you don't want risks, don't accept the reward of the salary offered. Work a job you know has low risks.
In a free market, no one forces anyone to work any job in any environment against their will. If you feel the job is unsafe, don't work at that rate in that environment.
Starvation or exposure to the elements (homelessness) is generally a much more immediate and convincing threat than medical issues five or ten years hence. When it comes to employer/employee relations of this nature, there is no true free market, as the employee must work to sustain their life (buy food, keep a roof over their head, etc.), giving a potential employer inordinate power to impose less than ideal, or (as we have seen) less than acceptable conditions that an employee, desperate to make a living, will be compelled to accept in order to eat today.
This fallacy that the free market will somehow lead to an acceptable, much less equitable, balance is debunked by centuries of abuse and misuse of power by business interests. Abuses sufficient to turn half the planet at one time toward communism (which turned out not to be a solution, but was certainly a strong indicator of the problem), to lead to US paramilitary suppression of workers and union movements in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and to which current administration policies, and attitudes such as expressed by you, seem to be returning us today.
If you are unsure of the chemicals you have in your environment, consult independent authorities on the subject and see if there are health risks.
And if you have no idea, because your employer is keeping the deadliness of the toxins you are being exposed to secret (or even the fact that you're being exposed to anything secret)? Or your wages are such that you cannot afford consulting costs? Or the independent authorities (e.g. the Bush administration's EPA) aren't so independent after all, and give you bad data? Etc. etc. ad nauseum.
Blaming the victim "because s/he should have know better" has apparently become a typical Republican response to these issues, and is as inappropraite now as it has always been. Next we'll see them coaching for Colorado.
This is burning bridges, but I really can't see SCO coming to their senses, so their users should get a feeling for the kind of situation which SCO is asking for.
I see a lot of this rhetoric in the corporate world, and to be blunt (nothing personal against you), it is utter crap.
I have, countless times, seen someone get utterly screwed by an employer, a boss, a collegue, a vendor, or a customer, and continue to "make nice" with them (while bemoaning the fact to anyone who will listen behind their back) out of fear of "burning bridges."
While it is true that one doesn't want to fly off the handle and torch relationships because of minor disagreements, when one has had their career torpedoed, the business ripped off, customers stolen away through dishonest means, etc, and one continues to maintain the ficade of cordiality in such situations for fear of "burning bridges" (this is almost always their precise verbiage BTW) one is IMHO throwing good money after bad, so to speak; investing time and effort into a destructive relationship which is already a net loss and has absolutely no chance of yielding anything of value down the road.
In other words, the other party burned the bridge long ago, and folks engaging in this sort of denial are trying to build a new bridge toward the hoards on the other side of the chasm who are awaiting them with torches and gasoline in hand.
$CO burned their bridges to the free software and open source community long ago. Invoking clause 4 of the GPL for SCO's flagrant and continuing violation of the license isn't burning anything, it is merely a recognition of the current state of things and an appropriate, measured response thereto.
Destructive relationships aren't worth maintaining, and bridges that facilitate an enemies attack should be taken down. I am amazed at how few people in the business world get this, and how much continuing damage they suffer as a result of their ingrained, irrational fear of "burning bridges."
_They_ (Microsoft) are not doing that. The patent system of the US is doing that.
Both are doing it. The patent system stifles innovation by its very design (a... presumably... unintended effect of granting monopoly entitlements; again, the Wright Brothers' story is an excellent example of the US Government's recognition of this fact).
However, this patent (and similiar ones filed in the past) appear to be a strategic effort by Microsoft specifically to limit the ability of others to innovate in the design of their products. Microsoft does not use a pager on its desktop, whereas X Window managers such as fvwm and KDE have done so for years. There is no rational way to stretch this patent and spin it as an effort by Microsoft to protect its own "innovations" against predatory patents filed by others... this is almost certainly a predatory patent filed by Microsoft for the purpose of banning innovation by the free software community.
Christ.
As an athiest, I doubt he will be of any help to you, grotesque and overhyped movies notwithstanding.
This application doesn't look like their trying to patent the concept of virtual desktop pagers, but a specific implementation of one. This patent app would fall under the broad cateogory of being an incremental improvement of an existing invention.
Worse, it looks to be broad enough to cover most (perhaps all) possible improvements on the desktop pager... which means Microsoft is now using patents directly as a means of preventing improvement in their competitors products.
In other words, patents are now being used strategically to do exactly what they purport to not do: to stifle and forbid innovation.
People really need to be informed about precisely what it is they are wasting their hard earned money on, and exactly what rights the copyright cartels are stripping away from them.
Only then will the mythical "free" market, or at least those of us who participate in it as customers, have a shred of a chance of making an informed decision.
Unfortunately distributing non-GPLd software with Linux is asking for trouble. Linux is the best-selling open software product and choosing any other license than GPL means an extra hurdle for your software.
What a load of absolute crap.
There is absolutely no problem distributing non-GPLed software (even proprietary software) with Linux. Just because the kernel is GPLed doesn't mean the software which runs under it must also be GPLed. glibc is LGPLed (ie. you can link non-GPLed and proprietary software against it), asn are nearly all of the core libraries.
Oracle ships with Linux, and it is proprietary. XFree (pre 4.4) ships with Linux, and has (had) a BSD-ish (but GPL compatible) license. Openssh ships with Linux and has a BSD license. And this list goes on.
There is absolutely no issue whatsoever in distributing non-GPLed software with a GPLed operating system.
There is an issue with combining code from non-GPLed products and GPLed products into a new product, which is why XFree 4.4 is going the way of the Dodo, with virtually every distribution under the sun sticking with 4.3 or going with one of the forks (freedesktop.org or what have you), but that is a result of the amount of GPLed software linked to X libraries no one is willing to give up, not a result of the Linux operating system.
This is why Apache is working toward a GPL-compatable license, and why the FreeBSD folks went through the effort they did to make their license GPL compatible... so that more people, including those who chose to release their software under the GPL, can make use of their code (which is the primary interest of the BSD folks).
And yes, this is the kind of Freedom RMS and others, such as myself, like: the freedom to chose the license we prefer for our code, which for many of us is a "share-alike" license such as the GPL.
And the results speak for themselves: the first viable competitor to go up against Microsoft in a generation (Linux), thousands of free software projects where the code is guaranteed to remain free in perpetuity, and widespread cooperation between two philosophical camps despite differing opinions on where to emphasize the freedom (developers a la the BSD, vs. users a la the GPL), rabblerousing from the proprietary sidelines via agent provocateurs, and their less intelligent cousins, trolls such as yourself, notwithstanding.
And therein lies the problem. No vendor, no matter how well placed, should just run off and try to implement a solution. Why? Because odds are good it will not take off. Everyone involved needs to agree on a solution THEN implement it.
As with any change to infrastructure, the conversion is likely best done in a phased approach.
Step 1: Impliment authentication, but don't block messages from unauthenticated servers.
Step 2: Adjust existing SPAM filters to weigh mail from unauthenticated servers as having x % (where x is initially some relatively low number) greater liklihood of being SPAM than messages from authenticated servers.
Step 3: Increase x gradually over time. At the end of some period (say, one year), x appraoches 90%, effectively blocking most mail not on whitelists from unauthenticated servers. Leave x at this high value for some time (say another year)
Step 4: stop accepting mail from anauthenticated servers completely.
End of SPAM? Probably not (as SPAM mailers can authenticate themselves, and Microsoft WORMS and Viruses can hijack legitimate mail servers which authenticate themselves and send SPAM anyway) but it is a start.
I suppose our militarization of the seas and the air was a mistake too? I suppose when China/Russia puts orbital weapons in space you won't mind? Aside from the sexier hookers and the better cafes, just what is it about "outside this stupid country" that you find so appealing?
Speaking as one American who has, in the past, lived for several years in Germany (pre and post reunification), the UK, Hong Kong (pre-reunification), and Japan, there is no "one" answer that applies to everywhere outside of this stupid country.
However, in Europe there is a great deal more personal freedom than in the United States in most areas (try drinking a beer in a public park in the US vs. England or Germany, for example). There is a great deal of protection against the distribution of personal information in Germany (read: virtaully no junk mail or junk phone calls). I have never had better health care than I had in Germany (and I have an excellent... by American standards... PPO now that is a pale and distant last place to the plans I had in Europe).
Crime is lower in all of the places I've lived outside of the United states. It is lower in Europe and so much lower in Japan that the mind boggles (for example, you can leave your wallet on the bar in most parts of Tokyo... American sailor hangouts excepted!... go use the toilet, come back, and no one will have touched it).
The list goes on. Every place has its pluses and minuses, but the United States, in its inability to be self critical and its profound policy of self-isolation and absolute denial of things that are obviously and painfully going wrong (such as the healthcare fiasco here; the massive debt; rising violent crime; the wholesale corporate export of well paying jobs; spiralling unemployment... remember, they stop counting people no longer eligable for unemployment benefits even though many are not reemployed in order to keep the numbers artificially, and dishonestly, low; etc.) has been accumulating a great deal of minuses, and losing many of its pluses.
Contrast this to the rest of the world, which remains a reasonable mix of pluses and minuses, and the outlook for quality of life in the United States gets grimmer by the day. Seing Bush on the Television touting his latest lies, and the passivity with which so many Americans are willing to accept them (rather than confront unpleasant truths about what we as a country have become) and the prognosis gets even worse.
It is a pity. The United States once stood for some very beautiful ideals, and was once a very nice place to live.
I wish they were doing this on another planet, preferably one in a distant orbit, or better yet orbiting another star. To wit:
The radiation from evaporating black holes in LHC experiments should signal their brief existence, say Dimopoulos and Landsberg. This would also confirm Hawking's prediction,
which has never yet been put to the test. [emphesis mine]
If Stephen Hawking is wrong (and the black holes do not evaporate) this could literally be the end of us all. This strikes me as at least as dangerous as the first thermonuclear explosion (in which scientist thought there was a small, but real, chance of igniting the atmosphere and literally roasting everyone and everything on the planet. IIRC it was something like 2% odds... horrifically high for such a terrible risk).
I'm no fan of Luddites who want to ban genetic research, GM foods sight unseen irrespective of the details, research into nano-technology, etc. but producing black holes on the surface of our planet without knowing for certain whether or not they will evaporate?
Red Hat distributes Apache, OpenSSL, xinetd, all with GPL-Incompatible, Free Software Licenses What is weird is Apache claims their license is compatible.
Because they aren't linked together into one application.
Every XFree applications either links to an X library, or links to a library that links to an X library (insert as many levels of indirection as you wish).
Now that the x library licenses are no longer GPL compatible, every GPL X application is no longer legal for use with XFree 4.4. Which is the death of XFree, as we aren't about to throw out Enlightenment, Gnome, Mozilla, etc.
Far easier and more sensible to start using Xouvert or FreeDesktop than to dump millions of man-hours of contributed work simply to appease the vanity and anti-GPL zealotry of a few, regardless of how great their contribution was in years past.
In other words: License compatability between independent apps isn't an issue (each app's license can be adhered to independent of the others). License compatability between apps and the libraries they link to is absolutely critical, and XFree 4.4 breaks this with most of the applications that link to it. Which means Sianara XFree 4.4.
As for what is the "best tool for the job", you might want to actually take a look at the new Yahoo results instead of blindly pimping Google. It looks entirely possible that the current Yahoo/Inktomi algorithm returns results that are more relevant than Google's current algorithm.
I just tried it (being search-engine-agnostic myself, having used yahoo, altavista, a bunch of others I no longer recall, and now google), and I must say, Google still wins hands down.
When I search for something on the 'Net, I want results that reflect what I'm looking for, not those who have paid to have their SPAM inserted into the list of what I'm looking for, and thereby adding noise to my signal. Until Yahoo stops placing paid-for results in their search results, they will not be winning any market share from those who use Google, and the flow of folks who discover Google and disregard Yahoo will continue.
all of our free licenses are written on its basis, and while it is fundamentally a medieval censorship regime, it is currently the only legal framework we have
"it" should read "copyright":
all of our free licenses are written on its basis, and while copyright is fundamentally a medieval censorship regime, it is currently the only legal framework we have
So I take a look at the new license. I'm thinking "What the hell is the problem?"
Run any GPLed X apps? Like, say Gnome, Enlightenment, or KDE? Mozilla perhaps?
If so, congratulations. By linking to XFree 4.4 and redistributing the program, you are now in violation of the GPL (at the very least) and, depending on EXACTLY what you do (how you link, what you display on your splash screen, etc.) perhaps the new XFree 4.4 license as well.
No distribution in its right mind is going to want to run afoul of the GPL and thereby the entire Linux community and the FSF. And rightly so... free software stands on its adherence to copyright law (all of our free licenses are written on its basis, and while it is fundamentally a medieval censorship regime, it is currently the only legal framework we have). Distributing KDE/Gnome et al in violation of its license, or XFree 4.4 in violation of its license, is unacceptable. So, we can either dump 14+ years of free software development of applications based on XFree (the vast majority of which are under the GPL, contributed and maintained by thousands of developers), or we can dump XFree 4.4 (developed and maintained by a handfull of core developers) and stick with one of the forks instead.
Guess which one loses (hint: the Community isn't about to dump 14+ years of development by countless thousands to appease the vanity and contrariness of a few).
Samsung 24" + ATI = 1920x1200 under Linux
on
Dell's Gaming Monster
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
WUXGA+ screen, which is 1920x1200 pixels.
What I want to know is, why is it you can buy a laptop with that flat panel installed, but you can't buy an LCD monitor for your desktop PC that can do that?
Actually, you can, for about $2500. My 24" Samsung does 1920x1200 and works beautifully under Linux with my ATI Radeon 9100, using the xfree DRI drivers.
Ethanol is a lot easier to transport, refill,... than hydrogen. I bet a lot of energy is wasted in the ethanol->hydrogen reaction. So why not just use the ethanol directly?
More energy is used to purify the ethanol to standards that make it compliant with current internal combustion engines than is ever won back from burning the ethanol. I.e. the ethanol must be modified to emulate gasoline in order to be burned directly, and that takes a lot of energy.
Ethanol having its hydrogen extracted doesn't require any such purification process, making the conversion of ethanol->hydrogen, then burning the hydrogen, vastly more effecient than burning the ethanol directly. three times more effecient, according to the article. This leads to a situation where we can remove traditional energy sources from the equation, using the sun+soil+water to grow the crop, using sun+some small amount of energy to ferment, using some small amount of energy to extract the hydrogen, then burning the hydrogen. As long as the energy won from the sun is greater than the energy used to ferment the ethanol and to extract the hydrogen we have a self-sustaining energy economy (assuming we aren't draining acquafers and the like).
Best of all, we can produce the energy here at home, and stop pouring dollars into countries with regressive religions and toxic idealogies...which in turn might do something to slow the spread of toxic idealogies in our own countries.
I hope you weren't planning on ever contributing to any Open Source projects after doing that. If it's later demonstrated that you had access to the W2K source and contributed vaguely similar code (even by accident) to a project, it could have severe repercussions for that project.
IANAL but I do read Groklaw, and from what I understand copyright restricts the act of copying (duplicating). You can study someone's implimentation of something as much as you like, then go impliment something similiar yourself. As long as you do not copy the code verbatim you are not in violation of copyright law.
Otherwise, no student would be able to code having once looked at examples in a text book... the textbook author would own all of your code.
The problem is, of course, proving one implimented the code oneself and did not in fact crib the whole thing from someone elses code, and the greater the similiarity (for code of sufficient complexity... trivial code will generally be similiar regardless) the more difficult that is.
In any event, it is a myth that, simply by looking at, or even studying, one set of code one is somehow "tainted" and unable to contribute to another, competing project, be it free or proprietary. To violate copyright law one must copy, not just receive inspiration from.
You know, maybe you are right. And I think we should also stop counting in base-10. I mean, we've been doing that for, like, forever. And it would be so cool to count in base-13.
Integer bases are so mundane. Innovative folks use base pi, and Real Men(tm) use base e.:-)
No, you're not. And if I'm the one meta-moderating the "funny" moderations, I'll meta-moderate them as "not funny." "Insightful" perhaps... in the sense that pointing out the underbelly of one's community (in this case, the slashdot community) is an important function.
Trolls and online vandals are indeed the vermin of the internet, and far too many of them foul the well of thought here on the 'net, and far too many foul the waters of slashdot (and now, apparently, wikipedia).
It most certainly *IS* legal to say that someone is "crazy" or "psychotic". This is clearly a matter of opinion; regardless free speech still applies.
Absolutely correct.
Now, I personally think he's a fuck-nut and is clearly psycho. Can he sue me for saying this? Not in a million years.
Unfortunately, you are wrong. In the united states, any fuck-nut, however psycho, can sue anyone, for anything, at any time, including for making the public observation that said fuck-nut is indeed a fuck-nut.
Now, he won't win the lawsuit, but he'll make you spend a lot of money defending yourself... probably more than you or most people can afford.
Which is one of the many reasons freedom of expression has become such a farce in the United States... even before Ashcroft and the Baby Bush administration's more blatent attacks on our fundamental liberties, litigious attorneys have been in a position to use barrotry and financial coercion to abridge our freedom of speech for decades.
It is an appalling state our judicial system has sunk to, "of, by, and for the lawyers," and it shows absolutely no signs of being reformed anytime soon.
In a ligitigious society, freedom of speech is a myth.
There has always been the possibility that the evidence could have been tampered with before. Since it is digital this only makes it slightly easier to do. It shouldn't matter however because it is always based on the honesty of the law enforcement official to do what is right.
Bullshit.
This should matter a lot.
Mark Furman's bigotry was enough to create the appearance of "reasonable" doubt as to the veracity of the DNA evidence that unequivocably linked O.J. Simpson to the murder of his ex wife and her friend. Nevermind that the evidence was almost certainly NOT tainted or modified... the fact that the jury recognized (and weighed most heavilly) was that the honesty of the law enforcement offical(s) was in serious doubt... and quite frankly, often is.
Digital evidence is as fleeting as the wind. I can copy a file to your hard drive, make a phone call, and the assumption will be you're guilty. Or a cop could walk in with a CD, do the same thing, and convict you.
Gnupg and similiar encryption tools, combined with date and time stamping (perhaps even authenticated date and time stamping via ntp servers) could be deployed relatively simply and make data tampering virtually impossible (e-mails are certain to be real, and have been created on such-and-such a date, etc).
Similiar schemes might be applicable to preserving the integrity of digital imagry, video, etc., and it is very important that these issues be addressed.
We know that the police and the FBI do tamper with evidence. We know that they bear false witness in court... indeed, we even know of at least one case where the FBI insured that an innocent man was convicted of murder and sent to prison in order to protect their own informant.
Law enforcement will tamper evidence on occasion, and making it easier for them to do so virtually insures that it will be tampered more often. In order to maintain (or even improve) the integrity of our justice system, we need to make modifying digital evidence as difficult (or impossible) as is possible, and we have numerous tools already to do so.
Dismissing this issue is foolish... unless you want a scenerio where any Jury with any technical knowhow whatsoever will always vote to acquit, on the grounds that digital evidence is no more valuable than a he-said/she-said argument.
Sadly, interest in things being open source is transitioning (my cynical colleagues might say it already has) from being about controlling quality and maintaining code that a corporation might 'sunset' to being more about religion.
In my experience (working in the financial industry), it goes more like: Happily, interest in things being open source is transitioning from being about controlling quality and maintaining code that a corporation might 'sunset' to being more about security from being held hostage by ones vendor.
In other words, businesses are recognizing the concern and need to have the freedom to conduct their business without coercion from outside, i.e. they are recognizing the value of freedom as being of even greater importance than the cooperative, peer-review paradigm that improves quality.
This is an important breakthrough in corporate mentality, and I have seen it spreading rather quickly among the suits of late.
Strategicly, software freedom (particularly at the infrastructure level such as an operating system) is very important to an enterprise: not just from the orphaning of software your comment implies, but from other forms of vendor lock-in and coercion, be it coercive upgrade cycles that disrupt one's business, security patches that sabatoge competitors products one's enterprise may be using (by submarining in incompatible DLLs, for example), and by having a mission critical, proprietary product yanked when one's vendor suddenly becomes one's competitor.
I've seen all of these things happen, and I suspect Siemens et. al. are very cognizant of this as well. These are scenerios that GPLed software does a great job of protecting against, BSD-licensed software protects against to a lesser degree, and proprietary products leave one completely vulnerable to.
There may be very compelling strategic reasons for these companies to switch to a (currently) inferior GPLed product over a proprietary product rather than risk having their mission critical vendor (Nokia today, Microsoft tommorrow) becoming their most ruthless adversary...reasons that have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with "religion."
Slashdot Mirror
So they paid SCO's mobsters. Disgusting, yes, but I see it as insurance... like having a plan for a second backup generator in case the fail-proof first backup generator fails. The chances of SCO prevailing are slim, but non-zero... just like the chances of the backup generator failing.
... the rest of us are not in this position, SCO rhetoric and nonsensical ravings aside.
It is not insurance, it is anti-insurance. Now they have a contractual relationship with SCO, a contractual relationship which gives SCO the power to sue EV1, but does not offer EV1 any tangible protection whatsoever. See the groklaw analysis of the SCO licensing terms for specifics.
EV1 is now in a position where it can be sued by SCO and not have the lawsuit thrown out immediately
I'd say EV1 is likely in for a world of hurt, and their customers would be well advised to be looking around for alternatives.
This guy has certainly lost the plot.
... just as they get to leverage your skills in their endeavors. Worse, to use their products you have to agree to restrictions on your already limited rights to use or distribute the proprietary product you're trying to build your project on, which in turn limits your opportunities further.
... trying to convince the next generation to go back to his way of thinking. It is a losing battle. Culture changes, economies change, and paradigms shift. The author of this open letter has missed the boat, and is trying to call it back.
Indeed he has.
I am 17 years old, and I have been working on open source software for a while now. I would never consider closed source software as a preferred alternative to open source simply because once I have a program "out there" as it were, the program is going to be so improved vastly by people who have vastly more knowledge than me.
Not only that, with GPLed software all of those improvements by "more knowledgable people" are guaranteed to benefit your project, and hence you. Not only can you leverage your own knowledge and skills in having created or supported a free software product (consultancy, writing, system integration, etc.), you get to leverage the skills, time, and expertise of many others
Selling software for money directly is only one method of making a profit, and unless you are in a position to try and leverage the deepest underlying infrastructure in order to become a monopolist, it isn't a very interesting method. There is far more opportunity, and far more money, in selling services, turn key solutions, and other products built upon software, with value added by your work and expertise, than there is in selling software directly, and this can be done for more readilly, and far more profitably, upon free software than it can upon proprietary software. Not so much because free software tends to be gratis, but because free software is libre, giving one the freedom one requires to put together a compelling solution without running afoul of this or that EULA, or worse, finding one's vendor to be in direct competition and sabataging your product by deliberately breaking compatability at the operating system and C library level (as Microsoft did to numerous competitors in the 1990s, including Netscape).
The result is a rich environment full of financial opportunity. I am turning 40 this year, and have made a very fine living (probably much better than the author of this letter) for over a decade using and developing free software. I have benefitted immensly from the works of others, and others have benefitied immensly from my work (and I'm a very minor player in the free software world).
The opportunities for business and profit are far richer in the free software world than they are in the proprietary world, where for every Bill Gates or Bill Joy there are tens of thousands of programming serfs with no rights to their work (it being a work for hire assigned to one's employer) and no real way to leverage their skills and knowledge without walking a minefield of non-compete and non-disclosure agreements.
There is always someone in the world who can do something that you did, better, and that's what OSS is, doesn't that guy get it?
This guy is old guard, and frightened of the implications of a changing paradigm. He is doing what many frightened people do
When has the free market been a fallacy? In the situations you're describing, where employers abused employees, said abuses occurred only because government was involved! Business interests can only abuse when they have the power of coercion behind them.
That is flat out revisionist history, factually incorrect and disingenuous.
The worst excesses of business may occur when business manages to coopt government, but many, many appalling excesses occur in the absence of government, or in lassaiz-faire situations. Child labor of the 19th century in America (which WAS constitutional BTW), the diamond trade in Africa today, slavery in the middle east and parts of Africa today (where governments stand by and do not enforce their own laws, i.e. lassaiz-faire, and in places where government effectively doesn't exist), and the list goes on.
Just because government has been used by business to appalling ends in the past does not mean business doesn't engage in appalling practices when the government stands idly by.
The free market can be terribly coercive, whenever the balance of power or need is too disparate. Medical care, the need to eat, monopolies are all examples where one party is vastly more powerful and coercive than the other, and examples in which the free market breaks down completely.
If the toxins are secret, you still accepted the job. You accepted the risk. You accepted the reward. If you don't want risks, don't accept the reward of the salary offered. Work a job you know has low risks.
Do you even listen to yourself?
In a free market, no one forces anyone to work any job in any environment against their will. If you feel the job is unsafe, don't work at that rate in that environment.
Starvation or exposure to the elements (homelessness) is generally a much more immediate and convincing threat than medical issues five or ten years hence. When it comes to employer/employee relations of this nature, there is no true free market, as the employee must work to sustain their life (buy food, keep a roof over their head, etc.), giving a potential employer inordinate power to impose less than ideal, or (as we have seen) less than acceptable conditions that an employee, desperate to make a living, will be compelled to accept in order to eat today.
This fallacy that the free market will somehow lead to an acceptable, much less equitable, balance is debunked by centuries of abuse and misuse of power by business interests. Abuses sufficient to turn half the planet at one time toward communism (which turned out not to be a solution, but was certainly a strong indicator of the problem), to lead to US paramilitary suppression of workers and union movements in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and to which current administration policies, and attitudes such as expressed by you, seem to be returning us today.
If you are unsure of the chemicals you have in your environment, consult independent authorities on the subject and see if there are health risks.
And if you have no idea, because your employer is keeping the deadliness of the toxins you are being exposed to secret (or even the fact that you're being exposed to anything secret)? Or your wages are such that you cannot afford consulting costs? Or the independent authorities (e.g. the Bush administration's EPA) aren't so independent after all, and give you bad data? Etc. etc. ad nauseum.
Blaming the victim "because s/he should have know better" has apparently become a typical Republican response to these issues, and is as inappropraite now as it has always been. Next we'll see them coaching for Colorado.
This is burning bridges, but I really can't see SCO coming to their senses, so their users should get a feeling for the kind of situation which SCO is asking for.
I see a lot of this rhetoric in the corporate world, and to be blunt (nothing personal against you), it is utter crap.
I have, countless times, seen someone get utterly screwed by an employer, a boss, a collegue, a vendor, or a customer, and continue to "make nice" with them (while bemoaning the fact to anyone who will listen behind their back) out of fear of "burning bridges."
While it is true that one doesn't want to fly off the handle and torch relationships because of minor disagreements, when one has had their career torpedoed, the business ripped off, customers stolen away through dishonest means, etc, and one continues to maintain the ficade of cordiality in such situations for fear of "burning bridges" (this is almost always their precise verbiage BTW) one is IMHO throwing good money after bad, so to speak; investing time and effort into a destructive relationship which is already a net loss and has absolutely no chance of yielding anything of value down the road.
In other words, the other party burned the bridge long ago, and folks engaging in this sort of denial are trying to build a new bridge toward the hoards on the other side of the chasm who are awaiting them with torches and gasoline in hand.
$CO burned their bridges to the free software and open source community long ago. Invoking clause 4 of the GPL for SCO's flagrant and continuing violation of the license isn't burning anything, it is merely a recognition of the current state of things and an appropriate, measured response thereto.
Destructive relationships aren't worth maintaining, and bridges that facilitate an enemies attack should be taken down. I am amazed at how few people in the business world get this, and how much continuing damage they suffer as a result of their ingrained, irrational fear of "burning bridges."
_They_ (Microsoft) are not doing that. The patent system of the US is doing that.
... presumably ... unintended effect of granting monopoly entitlements; again, the Wright Brothers' story is an excellent example of the US Government's recognition of this fact).
... this is almost certainly a predatory patent filed by Microsoft for the purpose of banning innovation by the free software community.
Both are doing it. The patent system stifles innovation by its very design (a
However, this patent (and similiar ones filed in the past) appear to be a strategic effort by Microsoft specifically to limit the ability of others to innovate in the design of their products. Microsoft does not use a pager on its desktop, whereas X Window managers such as fvwm and KDE have done so for years. There is no rational way to stretch this patent and spin it as an effort by Microsoft to protect its own "innovations" against predatory patents filed by others
Christ.
As an athiest, I doubt he will be of any help to you, grotesque and overhyped movies notwithstanding.
This application doesn't look like their trying to patent the concept of virtual desktop pagers, but a specific implementation of one. This patent app would fall under the broad cateogory of being an incremental improvement of an existing invention.
... which means Microsoft is now using patents directly as a means of preventing improvement in their competitors products.
Worse, it looks to be broad enough to cover most (perhaps all) possible improvements on the desktop pager
In other words, patents are now being used strategically to do exactly what they purport to not do: to stifle and forbid innovation.
A more descriptive term would be:
DRM: Draconian Restricted Media
People really need to be informed about precisely what it is they are wasting their hard earned money on, and exactly what rights the copyright cartels are stripping away from them.
Only then will the mythical "free" market, or at least those of us who participate in it as customers, have a shred of a chance of making an informed decision.
Unfortunately distributing non-GPLd software with Linux is asking for trouble. Linux is the best-selling open software product and choosing any other license than GPL means an extra hurdle for your software.
... so that more people, including those who chose to release their software under the GPL, can make use of their code (which is the primary interest of the BSD folks).
What a load of absolute crap.
There is absolutely no problem distributing non-GPLed software (even proprietary software) with Linux. Just because the kernel is GPLed doesn't mean the software which runs under it must also be GPLed. glibc is LGPLed (ie. you can link non-GPLed and proprietary software against it), asn are nearly all of the core libraries.
Oracle ships with Linux, and it is proprietary. XFree (pre 4.4) ships with Linux, and has (had) a BSD-ish (but GPL compatible) license. Openssh ships with Linux and has a BSD license. And this list goes on.
There is absolutely no issue whatsoever in distributing non-GPLed software with a GPLed operating system.
There is an issue with combining code from non-GPLed products and GPLed products into a new product, which is why XFree 4.4 is going the way of the Dodo, with virtually every distribution under the sun sticking with 4.3 or going with one of the forks (freedesktop.org or what have you), but that is a result of the amount of GPLed software linked to X libraries no one is willing to give up, not a result of the Linux operating system.
This is why Apache is working toward a GPL-compatable license, and why the FreeBSD folks went through the effort they did to make their license GPL compatible
And yes, this is the kind of Freedom RMS and others, such as myself, like: the freedom to chose the license we prefer for our code, which for many of us is a "share-alike" license such as the GPL.
And the results speak for themselves: the first viable competitor to go up against Microsoft in a generation (Linux), thousands of free software projects where the code is guaranteed to remain free in perpetuity, and widespread cooperation between two philosophical camps despite differing opinions on where to emphasize the freedom (developers a la the BSD, vs. users a la the GPL), rabblerousing from the proprietary sidelines via agent provocateurs, and their less intelligent cousins, trolls such as yourself, notwithstanding.
And therein lies the problem. No vendor, no matter how well placed, should just run off and try to implement a solution. Why? Because odds are good it will not take off. Everyone involved needs to agree on a solution THEN implement it.
As with any change to infrastructure, the conversion is likely best done in a phased approach.
Step 1: Impliment authentication, but don't block messages from unauthenticated servers.
Step 2: Adjust existing SPAM filters to weigh mail from unauthenticated servers as having x % (where x is initially some relatively low number) greater liklihood of being SPAM than messages from authenticated servers.
Step 3: Increase x gradually over time. At the end of some period (say, one year), x appraoches 90%, effectively blocking most mail not on whitelists from unauthenticated servers. Leave x at this high value for some time (say another year)
Step 4: stop accepting mail from anauthenticated servers completely.
End of SPAM? Probably not (as SPAM mailers can authenticate themselves, and Microsoft WORMS and Viruses can hijack legitimate mail servers which authenticate themselves and send SPAM anyway) but it is a start.
I suppose our militarization of the seas and the air was a mistake too? I suppose when China/Russia puts orbital weapons in space you won't mind? Aside from the sexier hookers and the better cafes, just what is it about "outside this stupid country" that you find so appealing?
... by American standards ... PPO now that is a pale and distant last place to the plans I had in Europe).
... American sailor hangouts excepted! ... go use the toilet, come back, and no one will have touched it).
... remember, they stop counting people no longer eligable for unemployment benefits even though many are not reemployed in order to keep the numbers artificially, and dishonestly, low; etc.) has been accumulating a great deal of minuses, and losing many of its pluses.
Speaking as one American who has, in the past, lived for several years in Germany (pre and post reunification), the UK, Hong Kong (pre-reunification), and Japan, there is no "one" answer that applies to everywhere outside of this stupid country.
However, in Europe there is a great deal more personal freedom than in the United States in most areas (try drinking a beer in a public park in the US vs. England or Germany, for example). There is a great deal of protection against the distribution of personal information in Germany (read: virtaully no junk mail or junk phone calls). I have never had better health care than I had in Germany (and I have an excellent
Crime is lower in all of the places I've lived outside of the United states. It is lower in Europe and so much lower in Japan that the mind boggles (for example, you can leave your wallet on the bar in most parts of Tokyo
The list goes on. Every place has its pluses and minuses, but the United States, in its inability to be self critical and its profound policy of self-isolation and absolute denial of things that are obviously and painfully going wrong (such as the healthcare fiasco here; the massive debt; rising violent crime; the wholesale corporate export of well paying jobs; spiralling unemployment
Contrast this to the rest of the world, which remains a reasonable mix of pluses and minuses, and the outlook for quality of life in the United States gets grimmer by the day. Seing Bush on the Television touting his latest lies, and the passivity with which so many Americans are willing to accept them (rather than confront unpleasant truths about what we as a country have become) and the prognosis gets even worse.
It is a pity. The United States once stood for some very beautiful ideals, and was once a very nice place to live.
If Stephen Hawking is wrong (and the black holes do not evaporate) this could literally be the end of us all. This strikes me as at least as dangerous as the first thermonuclear explosion (in which scientist thought there was a small, but real, chance of igniting the atmosphere and literally roasting everyone and everything on the planet. IIRC it was something like 2% odds
I'm no fan of Luddites who want to ban genetic research, GM foods sight unseen irrespective of the details, research into nano-technology, etc. but producing black holes on the surface of our planet without knowing for certain whether or not they will evaporate?
Fuck.
Red Hat distributes Apache, OpenSSL, xinetd, all with GPL-Incompatible, Free Software Licenses What is weird is Apache claims their license is compatible.
Because they aren't linked together into one application.
Every XFree applications either links to an X library, or links to a library that links to an X library (insert as many levels of indirection as you wish).
Now that the x library licenses are no longer GPL compatible, every GPL X application is no longer legal for use with XFree 4.4. Which is the death of XFree, as we aren't about to throw out Enlightenment, Gnome, Mozilla, etc.
Far easier and more sensible to start using Xouvert or FreeDesktop than to dump millions of man-hours of contributed work simply to appease the vanity and anti-GPL zealotry of a few, regardless of how great their contribution was in years past.
In other words: License compatability between independent apps isn't an issue (each app's license can be adhered to independent of the others). License compatability between apps and the libraries they link to is absolutely critical, and XFree 4.4 breaks this with most of the applications that link to it. Which means Sianara XFree 4.4.
As for what is the "best tool for the job", you might want to actually take a look at the new Yahoo results instead of blindly pimping Google. It looks entirely possible that the current Yahoo/Inktomi algorithm returns results that are more relevant than Google's current algorithm.
I just tried it (being search-engine-agnostic myself, having used yahoo, altavista, a bunch of others I no longer recall, and now google), and I must say, Google still wins hands down.
When I search for something on the 'Net, I want results that reflect what I'm looking for, not those who have paid to have their SPAM inserted into the list of what I'm looking for, and thereby adding noise to my signal. Until Yahoo stops placing paid-for results in their search results, they will not be winning any market share from those who use Google, and the flow of folks who discover Google and disregard Yahoo will continue.
all of our free licenses are written on its basis, and while it is fundamentally a medieval censorship regime, it is currently the only legal framework we have
"it" should read "copyright":
all of our free licenses are written on its basis, and while copyright is fundamentally a medieval censorship regime, it is currently the only legal framework we have
So I take a look at the new license. I'm thinking "What the hell is the problem?"
... free software stands on its adherence to copyright law (all of our free licenses are written on its basis, and while it is fundamentally a medieval censorship regime, it is currently the only legal framework we have). Distributing KDE/Gnome et al in violation of its license, or XFree 4.4 in violation of its license, is unacceptable. So, we can either dump 14+ years of free software development of applications based on XFree (the vast majority of which are under the GPL, contributed and maintained by thousands of developers), or we can dump XFree 4.4 (developed and maintained by a handfull of core developers) and stick with one of the forks instead.
Run any GPLed X apps? Like, say Gnome, Enlightenment, or KDE? Mozilla perhaps?
If so, congratulations. By linking to XFree 4.4 and redistributing the program, you are now in violation of the GPL (at the very least) and, depending on EXACTLY what you do (how you link, what you display on your splash screen, etc.) perhaps the new XFree 4.4 license as well.
No distribution in its right mind is going to want to run afoul of the GPL and thereby the entire Linux community and the FSF. And rightly so
Guess which one loses (hint: the Community isn't about to dump 14+ years of development by countless thousands to appease the vanity and contrariness of a few).
WUXGA+ screen, which is 1920x1200 pixels.
What I want to know is, why is it you can buy a laptop with that flat panel installed, but you can't buy an LCD monitor for your desktop PC that can do that?
Actually, you can, for about $2500. My 24" Samsung does 1920x1200 and works beautifully under Linux with my ATI Radeon 9100, using the xfree DRI drivers.
Ethanol is a lot easier to transport, refill,... than hydrogen. I bet a lot of energy is wasted in the ethanol->hydrogen reaction. So why not just use the ethanol directly?
More energy is used to purify the ethanol to standards that make it compliant with current internal combustion engines than is ever won back from burning the ethanol. I.e. the ethanol must be modified to emulate gasoline in order to be burned directly, and that takes a lot of energy.
Ethanol having its hydrogen extracted doesn't require any such purification process, making the conversion of ethanol->hydrogen, then burning the hydrogen, vastly more effecient than burning the ethanol directly. three times more effecient, according to the article. This leads to a situation where we can remove traditional energy sources from the equation, using the sun+soil+water to grow the crop, using sun+some small amount of energy to ferment, using some small amount of energy to extract the hydrogen, then burning the hydrogen. As long as the energy won from the sun is greater than the energy used to ferment the ethanol and to extract the hydrogen we have a self-sustaining energy economy (assuming we aren't draining acquafers and the like).
Best of all, we can produce the energy here at home, and stop pouring dollars into countries with regressive religions and toxic idealogies...which in turn might do something to slow the spread of toxic idealogies in our own countries.
I hope you weren't planning on ever contributing to any Open Source projects after doing that. If it's later demonstrated that you had access to the W2K source and contributed vaguely similar code (even by accident) to a project, it could have severe repercussions for that project.
... the textbook author would own all of your code.
... trivial code will generally be similiar regardless) the more difficult that is.
IANAL but I do read Groklaw, and from what I understand copyright restricts the act of copying (duplicating). You can study someone's implimentation of something as much as you like, then go impliment something similiar yourself. As long as you do not copy the code verbatim you are not in violation of copyright law.
Otherwise, no student would be able to code having once looked at examples in a text book
The problem is, of course, proving one implimented the code oneself and did not in fact crib the whole thing from someone elses code, and the greater the similiarity (for code of sufficient complexity
In any event, it is a myth that, simply by looking at, or even studying, one set of code one is somehow "tainted" and unable to contribute to another, competing project, be it free or proprietary. To violate copyright law one must copy, not just receive inspiration from.
You know, maybe you are right. And I think we should also stop counting in base-10. I mean, we've been doing that for, like, forever. And it would be so cool to count in base-13.
:-)
Integer bases are so mundane. Innovative folks use base pi, and Real Men(tm) use base e.
Am I the only one who thinks this isn't funny?
... in the sense that pointing out the underbelly of one's community (in this case, the slashdot community) is an important function.
No, you're not. And if I'm the one meta-moderating the "funny" moderations, I'll meta-moderate them as "not funny." "Insightful" perhaps
Trolls and online vandals are indeed the vermin of the internet, and far too many of them foul the well of thought here on the 'net, and far too many foul the waters of slashdot (and now, apparently, wikipedia).
Is that "Constitution" thing still intact?
The short answer is "NO."
I seem to recall a portion of it with some silly notion of "freedom of speech" or something, or was it repealed?
Effectively it has, for quite some time now. See my other post on the subject: In a Litigious Society, Freedom of Speech is a Myth.
It most certainly *IS* legal to say that someone is "crazy" or "psychotic". This is clearly a matter of opinion; regardless free speech still applies.
... probably more than you or most people can afford.
... even before Ashcroft and the Baby Bush administration's more blatent attacks on our fundamental liberties, litigious attorneys have been in a position to use barrotry and financial coercion to abridge our freedom of speech for decades.
Absolutely correct.
Now, I personally think he's a fuck-nut and is clearly psycho. Can he sue me for saying this? Not in a million years.
Unfortunately, you are wrong. In the united states, any fuck-nut, however psycho, can sue anyone, for anything, at any time, including for making the public observation that said fuck-nut is indeed a fuck-nut.
Now, he won't win the lawsuit, but he'll make you spend a lot of money defending yourself
Which is one of the many reasons freedom of expression has become such a farce in the United States
It is an appalling state our judicial system has sunk to, "of, by, and for the lawyers," and it shows absolutely no signs of being reformed anytime soon.
In a ligitigious society, freedom of speech is a myth.
There has always been the possibility that the evidence could have been tampered with before. Since it is digital this only makes it slightly easier to do. It shouldn't matter however because it is always based on the honesty of the law enforcement official to do what is right.
... the fact that the jury recognized (and weighed most heavilly) was that the honesty of the law enforcement offical(s) was in serious doubt ... and quite frankly, often is.
... indeed, we even know of at least one case where the FBI insured that an innocent man was convicted of murder and sent to prison in order to protect their own informant.
... unless you want a scenerio where any Jury with any technical knowhow whatsoever will always vote to acquit, on the grounds that digital evidence is no more valuable than a he-said/she-said argument.
Bullshit.
This should matter a lot.
Mark Furman's bigotry was enough to create the appearance of "reasonable" doubt as to the veracity of the DNA evidence that unequivocably linked O.J. Simpson to the murder of his ex wife and her friend. Nevermind that the evidence was almost certainly NOT tainted or modified
Digital evidence is as fleeting as the wind. I can copy a file to your hard drive, make a phone call, and the assumption will be you're guilty. Or a cop could walk in with a CD, do the same thing, and convict you.
Gnupg and similiar encryption tools, combined with date and time stamping (perhaps even authenticated date and time stamping via ntp servers) could be deployed relatively simply and make data tampering virtually impossible (e-mails are certain to be real, and have been created on such-and-such a date, etc).
Similiar schemes might be applicable to preserving the integrity of digital imagry, video, etc., and it is very important that these issues be addressed.
We know that the police and the FBI do tamper with evidence. We know that they bear false witness in court
Law enforcement will tamper evidence on occasion, and making it easier for them to do so virtually insures that it will be tampered more often. In order to maintain (or even improve) the integrity of our justice system, we need to make modifying digital evidence as difficult (or impossible) as is possible, and we have numerous tools already to do so.
Dismissing this issue is foolish
Sadly, interest in things being open source is transitioning (my cynical colleagues might say it already has) from being about controlling quality and maintaining code that a corporation might 'sunset' to being more about religion.
In my experience (working in the financial industry), it goes more like: Happily, interest in things being open source is transitioning from being about controlling quality and maintaining code that a corporation might 'sunset' to being more about security from being held hostage by ones vendor.
In other words, businesses are recognizing the concern and need to have the freedom to conduct their business without coercion from outside, i.e. they are recognizing the value of freedom as being of even greater importance than the cooperative, peer-review paradigm that improves quality.
This is an important breakthrough in corporate mentality, and I have seen it spreading rather quickly among the suits of late.
Strategicly, software freedom (particularly at the infrastructure level such as an operating system) is very important to an enterprise: not just from the orphaning of software your comment implies, but from other forms of vendor lock-in and coercion, be it coercive upgrade cycles that disrupt one's business, security patches that sabatoge competitors products one's enterprise may be using (by submarining in incompatible DLLs, for example), and by having a mission critical, proprietary product yanked when one's vendor suddenly becomes one's competitor.
I've seen all of these things happen, and I suspect Siemens et. al. are very cognizant of this as well. These are scenerios that GPLed software does a great job of protecting against, BSD-licensed software protects against to a lesser degree, and proprietary products leave one completely vulnerable to.
There may be very compelling strategic reasons for these companies to switch to a (currently) inferior GPLed product over a proprietary product rather than risk having their mission critical vendor (Nokia today, Microsoft tommorrow) becoming their most ruthless adversary...reasons that have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with "religion."