2 - Communism. Yeah so what if some FSF members support some whacked political theories. It doesn't have much bearing on the GPL. The GPL is not communism, it's more akin to realizing that software is much more like art or music than it is like a watch or an auto part, and the way we go about licensing, copyrighting, and patenting software should reflect this.
None of the FSF members support any such 'whacked' political theories AFAIK. Certainly not RMS, to whome such nonesense is most often attributed.
While your overall point is correct, you are inadvertently buying into a portion of the very disinformation and FUD you are trying to combat, specificially a great deal of the anti-RMS ad-homonem, and baseless, attacks that make such accusations in the complete absence of any evidence to substantiate them.
RMS isn't and never was a communist, regardless of what his detractors would have you believe. Lacking in tact, and often diplomancy, yet, but an adherent to 'whacked' political theories? No.
a license fee of one wet honey glazed ham is due if the software is used consecutively for more than sixty thousand years.
I find the terms of the MS compatible GPL to be far too restrictive.
First, 60,000 years is far too short. I fully intend to be alive, youthful, and in perfect health in 60,000,000 years. Second, at that time, swine from whence honey glazed ham is made may well be extinct, and while genetic decendents of Long Pigs such as Bill Gates and the Honorable Senator "Disney" Hollings may still be present, honey made hams made from such creatures may not strictly qualify under the terms of the license, making it impossible to adhere to the terms of the license at all upon its termination in a short 60,000 years.
Instead, may I recommend a termination date 60x10^4000 years, and a fee payable in 1 cm^3 of common hydrogen or the equivelent converted energy thereof, calculated from Einstein's e=mc^2, payable upon that date, or the final death of the universe, whichever comes first?
That would offer the freedom I require, and the payment option (a cubic centimeter of hydrogen) is likely to be obtainable even in 60x10^4000 years, assuming the other criteria of the license termination (the end of the universe itself) hasn't taken effect.
Why not get an iMac? They cost around $1000 (the CRT-based one), have a slot-loading CD drive, and come with a nice color screen. I think the Graphite one looks pretty good--nicer than a big, black box. And iTunes is very convenient for both capturing and playing back MP3s.
The whole point is that the hardware and software hack presented in this story supports Ogg Vorbis format. Many of us have our entire CD collections, several gigabytes worth of music, encoded in the Patent Free Ogg Vorbis format because (a) it sounds better that MP3 at similar bitrates and variable-bit-rates and (b) no one can go pull a Unisys on us and start demanding back royalties down the road or effectively make every free(dom) player/encoder illegal at the date and time of their choosing.
Now perhaps Itunes and Imac supports Ogg Vorbis playback as well... since I wouldn't own one of the ugly buggers (though I do lust after a high end G4 laptop with DVD-RW support, if they ever make such a beast) I don't know. But your post does seem to kind of miss the entire point of the story and the article it links to.
Microsoft owns most of the patents on DRM as applied to computing technology.
Passing the SSSCA/whatever-they-call-it-now will legislate the Microsoft Monopoly into unassailability. Microsoft favors the legislation, unlike every other company in the industry, large and small alike.
If this bill passes, Microsoft would be able to pick and choose which token 'competitors' survive by deciding to whome the would and would not license the mandated technology... and it certainly wouldn't be to GNU/Linux.
We are all discussing symptoms of a far greater problem. Indeed, this absurdity (sending advertisments at the cost of the recipient, such as Fax and Email SPAM is protected speech), logically follows from an even greater absurdity:
Corporations are defined as 'people' under the law, thanks to a bizarr and unprecedented court ruling some 80 year ago IIRC. That's right, McDonalds is considered a person, just like you and I, with the same constitutional protections that you and I enjoy.
This is not what the founding fathers intended... indeed early government was extremely reluctant to grant charters to companies in the early years of the republic, and executed 'corporate death sentences' (although the terminology isn't really correct for that era) fairly frequently whenever they considered a company to not be acting in the interest of the people. In other words they had no compunction about terminating a company's existence if it was determined to be detrimental to the people's interests. (Lassaiz faire economics and later corruption led to monopolies less than a century later, but even then, at its worst, corporations never enjoyed the same constitutional rights of you and I.)
If we consider corporations as people, then we can no more ban corporate speech than we can personal speech, which means advertisers can do pretty much anything they like short of yelling 'fire' in a crowded theatre.
The solution is clear. We need to end this stupid and profane notion that corporations are people. They aren't. They are organizations, nothing more, and are entitled to no constitutional protections whatsoever. They exist solely at our sufferance, and if they harm us we should be able to do away with them in relatively short order. Unlike real, physical people corporations do not have a basic right to exist, and it is past time the supreme court overturned that lower court ruling that has led to this mockery of our constitution and our law once and for all.
Determine that corporations and companies are not 'people', but merely organizations, and you can ban corporate speech such as SPAM without any problem whatsoever, and without trampling on the freedom of individual speech in any way.
A dark and confused Wesley, undoing all of the good happy-go-lucky touchy-feely history of the Federation and replacing it with something akin to the world inhabited by Spock-With-A-Beard! Yes, I know that is not what is described, but I kinda like the idea.:-)
Seriously, as much as I disliked Wesley the character (until near the end, when he started getting into trouble), I really like Wil Wheaton the actor. Anyone who has a good enough sense of humor to take the piss out of themselves in that manner is OK in my book...
MST3K is copyrighted and as such, is not part of a public commons. You cannot simply take their footage and reuse it without their permission (fair use excepted of course, but that is an entirely different topic).
Try taking an episode of MST3K, dubbing in images (and siloettes[sp]) of Kirk, Spock, Uhuru, and McCoy, but keeping the dialog from the original, distribute it widely on the internet, and see how long before the lawyers start sending you cease and desist letters (and getting your internet connection yanked).
Maybe then we wouldn't have to put up with Jar Jar for another two episodes.
You laugh, but had Star Wars been released under a free license a lot of us would have gladly edited out Jar Jar, not to mention the stupid, hollywood messiah-syndrome nonsense about Anakin being the "chosen one", returning the myth back to where it belongs: based on a more eastern notion of the "force" being a natural metaphysical thing, without prophecy, second commings, and other Christian nonsense.
Think of how much more enjoyable the knockoff films would have been, simply by undoing the huge gaffes Lucas managed to pull on SW Ep.1... not to mention the amount of really cool fan fiction set in that universe that could have been made into entertaining shorts and even 3rd party feature films.
That aspect of our pop culture would have been much richer for it... as would pretty much any aspect of popular culture were it not under the control of Cartels excersizing government granted and enforced monopolies.
From many of the comments here I can see that almost no one understands what Free Media is about. Not surprising, as numerous people posting the other threads don't understand what Free Software is about, and the two philosophies share a lot in common.
First, Free Media is not a new concept. Many of us have been kicking around the idea for some time. My own work, Autonomy is going to be licensed under a free license (you can see a draft of one possible license here), and there are numerous other projects as well (OpenContent and Copyright's Commons to name just two).
Free Media is about creating a public commons of content that others can use, modify, copy, redistribute, and incorporate into their own projects freely. There are caveates (like you have to make clear the end product is different from what the original creator may have intended), but the idea is that you could, for example, take an old Gilligan's Island rerun, colorize it, do some digital overlays, change the soundtrack, and add some more creative editing to create Alien Island... and let everyone watch the Skipper and Gilligan get hunted by Sigorny Weaver's Nemesis.
adamy writes "A ditital Camera, and A Website [is all you need]", adding "I don't think anyone would want the Raw footage, just the edited stuff." Again, this completely misses the point. Maybe you'd like to redo the special effects of an old movie and the original green-screen (or blue screen) footage is exactly what you want. Maybe you want to do a documentary on how documentaries slant information... in which case the raw footage, particularly that which isn't part of the final cut, is what interests you.
Free Media is about empowering artists to build upon the works of others, and to stop having to reinvent the wheel for every project (which really only the big studios can afford to do... and they can cross-license copyrighted works anyway). The idea that consumers get the product for little or no cost is completely irrelevant... a nice side effect of the Freedom being offered perhaps, but by no means the point of it.
As for 'Open Source' television already existing... not in any reasonable or analogous sense that we mean when we say 'open source' software. Shows on local access are copyrighted... you can't take them and incorporate them into your work, or rebroadcast them, or copy them, without express permission of the author. The are not free. The same goes for Zed by all accounts... they're happy to take your content (and pay you a nominal fee), then subject it to the same onerous copyright restrictions that plague the rest of the mass media offerings. Aside from a novel way of trolling for content it, too, is neither free nor open in the sense that slashdotters understand the word. That is not to say it isn't innovative (it is), but so long as others cannot take and build upon the work freely it is not free (as in freedom), and has nothing to do with Free Media and Cringley's flirtation with it.
Second, this all could have been avoided if Ian Gulliver hadn't freaked when he got the order. If he'd waited a bleeding 24 hours this would have been resolved and ORBZ could have gone on its merry way.
It's very easy to be an armchair general from the peanut gallary, especially since you have nothing at risk.
This was a (relatively rare) instance of a government excersizing some common sense. There was no guarantee that this would be the outcome.
Imagine if it had gone the other way (they pressed charges) and he had continued operating as before. Going in front of a judge and being forced to admint that "yes, I engaged in the same activity for which I was being prosecuted after having been served notice," is the kind of thing that results in penalties that tend toward the harsh, rather than linient, if convicted.
ORBZ was a service being provided for our benefit, for the "greater good" if you will (yes, I know how alien that phrase sounds in our Money Ueber Alles culture, but there do still exist people who spend their energy trying to better all of humankind, rather than merely themselves. They may be endangered, but they aren't extinct just yet). It is not at all reasonable to expect someone to risk fines, seizure of equipment, and possibly even jail time simply so they can go on doing everyone else a favor.
The government body in question may be contrite now, but the damage is done, and they are, ultimately, the cause of that damage. Whitewashing their responsiblity now behind the argument that "that's just how investigations are done" does nothing to alleviate their responsiblity, though it does underscore just how aggressive, flawed, and Orwellian many of our "standard investigative procedures" have become. Not that we needed any more examples, we seem to have been getting hit in the face with that fact every day lately.
Amen! That's the clause in my employment agreement. When I started doing open source development, I pulled it out and double checked. If I create it at work it's theirs. If I create it at home, it's mine.
Every university in the United States (I won't presume to speak of the entire world, though I think the same might apply to many other places as well) should have as part of its required curriculum a course that deals with contract negotiations, common pitfalls like this one, and other tidbits of wisdom that graduating students really need to effectively negotiate their way into the business world.
The vast majority of us, myself included, got absolutely reamed in our first job (and back then I had clauses like this too... thankfully I no longer do) because, while we were brilliant programmers and engineers, we knew nothing about law or even how to seriously negotiate.
But then, Universities attempt to abuse their students (and sometimes faculty/staff) in just such a manner, so I guess depending on them to actually educate their students about such thing is a little much to hope for.
True, which is why I said "suing and issuing the legal threats." Criminal charges are only filed if their is a complaint... so who is doing the complaining?
Incompetent admins? (Most likely) IBM? (only if they are profoundly stupid) SPAMMERs deliberately setting ORBZ up? (possible)
I'd be curious to know
on
ORBZ Shuts Down
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Why IBM decided to pursue criminal prosecution rather than releasing a simple bugfix is beyond me.
If it is IBM, they deserve to be bitchslapped. Hard.
However, I'd be very curious to know who is actually doing the suing and issuing the legal threats.
I suspect they are incompetent admins, trying to cover their own incompetency by pointing an accusing finger at the innocent, in this case ORBZ.
Incompetents banding together has to be one of the more sinister forces in our society: far more common than intelligent and neferious conspiracies (which probably can be counted on one hand, if that), far more wide reaching, and far more destructive.
OTOH, for the more paranoid: what are the odds that some SPAMMERs themselves have set up Domino servers with the explicit knowledge of this bug, in order to have legal grounds to threaten and sue one of their most effective opponents out of existence? Actually, I was writing the previous sentence as a joke, but as I type it I don't find the scenerio nearly as unlikely as I first thought.
OK, I know you're a troll but some uninformed person might actually read the nonsense you just wrote and without thinking actually ascribe it a value greater than it is worth, i.e. greater than zero.
Did you read my post at all? The Kompany is going to sell less of its products because their customers cannot be assured that it won't go bye-bye tommorow, taking the value of their stored data created with his proprietary, non-GPLed products with it. I touched on two different approaches that have been very successful in allowing companies like TrollTech to make good money while releasing their software under free licensing terms (as recognized by the FSF), and pointed out precisely why non-free, proprietary software that can be orphaned from one day to the next is of significantly lower value and appeal than software that has the kind of guaranteed longevity the GPL gives it. People who make informed decisions and are congnizant of the value of their data will not opt for potentially orphaned products at any price, and as data management and recovery become more commonplace this issue will grow in visibility. The Kompany is shooting themselves in the foot, and will likely lose business they can't afford to lose as a result.
But you knew and understood that already, didn't you troll?
He simply doesn't understand the value freedom would give his own software. Indeed, he doesn't appear to understand the free software/open source community at all, which will likely cost him his business in the end.
Contrary to popular myth many, probably most, free software users will pay for software if they see a clear benefit in it. However, there are certain things free software gives a person that many of us are not willing to sacrifice, whether the product is free-as-in-beer (like Blender was) or not.
One of these, and perhaps one of the greatest values of free software (although it has many, mind you), is that one will not be left with an orphaned product should a company go under.
I have hundreds of hours invested in Blender animations that are now essentially worthless (or soon to be, as soon as the binary I have stops working with current libraries and the older libraries become harder to get, and harder to make work). I will never put myself in that position again, which means I will never use any of the Kompany's products, with the possible exception of the one they GPLed. Period.
This isn't because I have some philisophical ax to grind against proprietary software, it is because I've been burned once and will not be burned again. It is because my data is far more valuable than the software I use and the hardware I use it on, combined. It is because companies do not necessarilly last, particularly in these post-boom times with the Microsoft Monopoly hovering over us all and likely to get away with the corporate equivelent of assault and murder with little more than a slap on the wrist, thanks the Bush Junior's DOJ snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory.
There are other models for making a profit on software and keeping the code free that he didn't address and likely hasn't explored. One is the service model, which he declines to use because it "doesn't fit" his business model. Fine. There are other approaches.
One, which fits any software product which improves and adds features over time is to "time shift" the freedom. The author of Ghostscript understood this well, in releasing a free version of his software about a year behind the non-free version. Want the latest drivers and features? Pay up (if you're using it for commercial use). Want the free version? That's okay too, just expect to wait about a year for the same features the paying customers are enjoying today.
This approach would at least insure their paying customers against the possible orphanage of their product (and is an approach Trolltech has used, with a little twist, quite successfully...indeed it makes their commercial product far more appealing than any of their competitors for that reason alone).
If blender had done that their animation community wouldn't have died with the company a week ago. If the Kompany were to do that, I would consider using their products.
But, having learned the lesson RMS, for all his abrasiveness, has been trying to teach us for the last several years the hard way, I will not be using any product that results in my data, my work, loosing its value and usefulness simply because the software seller goes out of business.
Which means the Kompany will never have me as a customer, and that is a shame, because contrary to popular myth about free software and GNU/Linux users, I do pay for software, as evidenced by a shelf full of commercial Linux apps, from Applixware to Mainactor to various and sundry Linux games.
He simply doesn't get it, and if he doesn't figure it out it will likely cost him his business as a result. And then his customers will be SOL, something they wouldn't have been had they insisted on some insurance... the kind only free software can really offer.
Blender file the.blend format is a binary only propriety NaN format. It is not.iv. But it can export rudimentary models (and maybe textures) to vrml 1.0. Which when renamed to.iv works with inventor. But you still have to fiddle around and edit the.iv file manually sometimes (texture file paths etc.,).
You are, regrettably, correct. I took the previous poster at their word that.blend files were in fact open inventor files, but discovered this weekend that you are right... the format of.blend files is a proprietary NaN format and, as such, my animation work is rapidly becoming worthless.
As I said before: never again. I will only use free(dom) software for any future animation/special effects work I do, even if that means I have to write the damn program myself.
Finally, the federal government has not built or maintained roads since the National Road was built from Washington to Vandalia, IL. Since then they've given the states money to build federal highways, which the states are then responsible for maintaining.
Which would be a perfectly fine solution, but to get there you have to first nationalize the infrastructure. Then, if you want, turn it over to the states for management and maintenance. But this local monopoly on the one information road into my home is rediculous, and far more damaging than the government equivelent would be.
There are some areas government needs to be involved in, like roads and information highways and the maintenance of a public commons, if you want to have any kind of non-monopoly marketplace whatsoever.
Oh, you can make all kinds of arguments about how competition on these kinds of networks doesn't really make sense, but these are primarily engineering arguments.
And they are misapplied arguments to boot. Comeptition with respect to roads and highways doesn't make much sense either, unless you want to pave the planet and have ten streets servicing your driveway.
The solution is simple. Make the road a public commons, accessible to all under the same terms and paid for as a public works, and allow competition to flourish where it does make sense: with car companies, shipping companies, taxicab companies, bicycles, etc.
Substitute "cable," or "fibre" for road and "ISP," "Telco," and "Cable Providor" for car companies, shipping companies, etc. and you get the idea.
The only way we are NOT going to have monopolies is by nationalizing the infrastructure and allowing business to compete for our patronage using the common, public wire on an equal basis.
I don't agree that 'no one was going to pay.' If the features being added are of sufficient value (if they're what people actually want), I think people are more than willing to pay. If I recall correctly, there were quite a few C-Key owners.
I'm sorry, I don't think I made myself clear.
People are generally not going to pay for something if they can (legally) get that exact thing for free under the exact same conditions.
They may pay for convinience, for receiving the product in a non-volitile (eg. CDR) medium, for additional documentation, or for additional features, or some other added value, but if one can download something at no cost, or pay $10 to download the exact same thing, with no additional immediate benefits, one is not very likely to pay the $10. Actually, I'm more likely to pay than most people, because I actually do buy things "to support the company," but most people don't.
The C-Key approach was one way of doing this (but the timing and circumstances were ugly, having just sold a book for "freeware" that suddenly became unfree after a bunch of us bought the books.). A far better approach was the one they adopted toward the end: pay and get the latest features today, or don't pay and get those features a few months from now.
Most of us would gladly pay to be able to use something today, rather than in six months. I certainly intended to, as soon as my tax refund check arrived.
Though the eventual effect of the ruling may stink, it can't be denied that in light of existing regulations the decision-makers have a point. The primary use of the lines in cable systems at this point is indeed information delivery, whether it be TV signals or data, and there are no open-access laws for info delivery services.
Once the information becomes bidirectional it can no longer reasonably be called "delivery."
But then, the entire notion of applying one set of rules to communications links that carry primarilly voice, vs. another set of rules for (often the same) infrastructure that primarilly carries digital (computer) data, vs. yet another set of rules for (often the same) infrastructure that primarilly carries video/entertainment data demonstrates how completely head-up-their-ass our government regulators really are.
It is absurd.
ISPs should operate under the same rules as Telcos and Cable providors, with the same priveleges (common carrier status) and the same requirements (allowing access by competitors to their wire/fibre/subspace beakon). Ideally, the latter should be nationalized (a dirty word, I know, but better than the mess we have now) and treated like a public road, with ISPs, Cable providors, and Telcos accessing the hardwire infrastructure under the same conditions and rules. Then, and only then, will we have real competition, and a flourishing market, in all of these arenas.
umm..your animation work is not wasted. blender files are just openinventor files (iv). just rename em and any 3D app can import em. ive used blender models with 3DS Max, Maya, TrueSpace and others. they even work ok as VRML files.
I did not know that. Thank you, I confess to being very, very relieved. Maybe my libraries of stuff aren't so useless after all.
I probably shouldn't feed the troll, but what the hell:
And yet no one was willing to pay a small chink of change to keep them in buisness. How ironic.
Demonstrably false, as other posts (and any casual perusal of the Blender Forums, now alas no longer accessible) prove.
However, it was only recently that they moved to a sustainable model of selling current features and giving away slightly older, slightly less feature rich versions for free. No one was going to buy something that is being given away for free (unless it has added value, like a book, convinient CD medium, or something else), but plenty of people will pay to have a new feature today instead of in six months, myself included.
It is unfortuante they took so long to find this approach, and even more unfortunate that they didn't "insure" those who paid by GPLing the delayed, free version as insurance against just these sort of events.
Maya (possibly the preeminent 3D animation app) is available under Linux. It's just out of your freebie pricerange.
Freebie? You're making an unfair baseless assumption about me. I do buy software, and did support Blender financially.
You can get your first copy for a mere $5500 or so, you cheap GNU/Linux user you!:-)
I agree. I've payed for plenty of apps under Linux, including Applix, various games, etc. But Maya's pricetag puts it well out of any hobbiests price range... and comes with the same uncertainty as blender: if and when the app disappears, or changes and becomes unsupported, what happens to the hours of animation work I've done? Am I forced to spend another $5k for an upgrade I can't afford or, even worse, left with no recourse (and useless, may-as-well-be-randomized data)?
I will do all my future animation work only under GPLed or BSDed software, even if that means writing modules myself to do what I need. The time I saved by using Blender I just lost, big time, with compounded interest. The animations I've done will grow less and less useful with time, ultimately (in a year or two) becoming worthless as it becomes more and more difficult to get the aging Blender binary I have (the latest version prior to their disappearance) running against current libraries and software versions.
RMS and the Free Software Foundation were right all along, and I, in my "pragmatism," was very shortsighted and very wrong.
I say give us more non-bank banks. If I could find an unregulated money-holder for me, I'd use it immediately IF they had good third party insurers, better interest, and less government big brother intrusion into my transactions.
Do what Osama does... use the cash-n-carry, fully trust-based money changers of the middle east. No regulations, no snooping, and the only requirement is trust...
Personally, I'm not fond of banking, or of banks, or of excessive regulation (and sometimes corrupt regulation that facilitates, for example, the "legitimate" seizure of an accounts assets for simply remaining idle for a few years), but what you propose is a recipe for another 1929 followed by a decade or more of depression. Not the soft-market, oh-no-I-can't-by-a-new-BMW-and-my-condo-didn't-dou ble-in-price-in-just-three-months recessions we experience from time to time, but a real you-are-likely-to-starve-along-with-the-rest-of-us and armed-revolution-really-might-happen depression like our grandparents used to go on about for hours on end to anyone who would listen.
Thaks, but with as annoying as I find regulated banks, I'll take that "disease" any day over your proposed "cure."
(Having said all that, I would like to see regulations eased and brought into line with those that a credit union has to obey... which isn't the same as no regulation and no accountability at all, which is what you get with pay-pal.)
Slashdot Mirror
2 - Communism. Yeah so what if some FSF members support some whacked political theories. It doesn't have much bearing on the GPL. The GPL is not communism, it's more akin to realizing that software is much more like art or music than it is like a watch or an auto part, and the way we go about licensing, copyrighting, and patenting software should reflect this.
None of the FSF members support any such 'whacked' political theories AFAIK. Certainly not RMS, to whome such nonesense is most often attributed.
While your overall point is correct, you are inadvertently buying into a portion of the very disinformation and FUD you are trying to combat, specificially a great deal of the anti-RMS ad-homonem, and baseless, attacks that make such accusations in the complete absence of any evidence to substantiate them.
RMS isn't and never was a communist, regardless of what his detractors would have you believe. Lacking in tact, and often diplomancy, yet, but an adherent to 'whacked' political theories? No.
a license fee of one wet honey glazed ham is due if the software is used consecutively for more than sixty thousand years.
I find the terms of the MS compatible GPL to be far too restrictive.
First, 60,000 years is far too short. I fully intend to be alive, youthful, and in perfect health in 60,000,000 years. Second, at that time, swine from whence honey glazed ham is made may well be extinct, and while genetic decendents of Long Pigs such as Bill Gates and the Honorable Senator "Disney" Hollings may still be present, honey made hams made from such creatures may not strictly qualify under the terms of the license, making it impossible to adhere to the terms of the license at all upon its termination in a short 60,000 years.
Instead, may I recommend a termination date 60x10^4000 years, and a fee payable in 1 cm^3 of common hydrogen or the equivelent converted energy thereof, calculated from Einstein's e=mc^2, payable upon that date, or the final death of the universe, whichever comes first?
That would offer the freedom I require, and the payment option (a cubic centimeter of hydrogen) is likely to be obtainable even in 60x10^4000 years, assuming the other criteria of the license termination (the end of the universe itself) hasn't taken effect.
Why not get an iMac? They cost around $1000 (the CRT-based one), have a slot-loading CD drive, and come with a nice color screen. I think the Graphite one looks pretty good--nicer than a big, black box. And iTunes is very convenient for both capturing and playing back MP3s.
... since I wouldn't own one of the ugly buggers (though I do lust after a high end G4 laptop with DVD-RW support, if they ever make such a beast) I don't know. But your post does seem to kind of miss the entire point of the story and the article it links to.
The whole point is that the hardware and software hack presented in this story supports Ogg Vorbis format. Many of us have our entire CD collections, several gigabytes worth of music, encoded in the Patent Free Ogg Vorbis format because (a) it sounds better that MP3 at similar bitrates and variable-bit-rates and (b) no one can go pull a Unisys on us and start demanding back royalties down the road or effectively make every free(dom) player/encoder illegal at the date and time of their choosing.
Now perhaps Itunes and Imac supports Ogg Vorbis playback as well
Microsoft owns most of the patents on DRM as applied to computing technology.
... and it certainly wouldn't be to GNU/Linux.
Passing the SSSCA/whatever-they-call-it-now will legislate the Microsoft Monopoly into unassailability. Microsoft favors the legislation, unlike every other company in the industry, large and small alike.
If this bill passes, Microsoft would be able to pick and choose which token 'competitors' survive by deciding to whome the would and would not license the mandated technology
We are all discussing symptoms of a far greater problem. Indeed, this absurdity (sending advertisments at the cost of the recipient, such as Fax and Email SPAM is protected speech), logically follows from an even greater absurdity:
... indeed early government was extremely reluctant to grant charters to companies in the early years of the republic, and executed 'corporate death sentences' (although the terminology isn't really correct for that era) fairly frequently whenever they considered a company to not be acting in the interest of the people. In other words they had no compunction about terminating a company's existence if it was determined to be detrimental to the people's interests. (Lassaiz faire economics and later corruption led to monopolies less than a century later, but even then, at its worst, corporations never enjoyed the same constitutional rights of you and I.)
Corporations are defined as 'people' under the law, thanks to a bizarr and unprecedented court ruling some 80 year ago IIRC. That's right, McDonalds is considered a person, just like you and I, with the same constitutional protections that you and I enjoy.
This is not what the founding fathers intended
If we consider corporations as people, then we can no more ban corporate speech than we can personal speech, which means advertisers can do pretty much anything they like short of yelling 'fire' in a crowded theatre.
The solution is clear. We need to end this stupid and profane notion that corporations are people. They aren't. They are organizations, nothing more, and are entitled to no constitutional protections whatsoever. They exist solely at our sufferance, and if they harm us we should be able to do away with them in relatively short order. Unlike real, physical people corporations do not have a basic right to exist, and it is past time the supreme court overturned that lower court ruling that has led to this mockery of our constitution and our law once and for all.
Determine that corporations and companies are not 'people', but merely organizations, and you can ban corporate speech such as SPAM without any problem whatsoever, and without trampling on the freedom of individual speech in any way.
A dark and confused Wesley, undoing all of the good happy-go-lucky touchy-feely history of the Federation and replacing it with something akin to the world inhabited by Spock-With-A-Beard! Yes, I know that is not what is described, but I kinda like the idea. :-)
Seriously, as much as I disliked Wesley the character (until near the end, when he started getting into trouble), I really like Wil Wheaton the actor. Anyone who has a good enough sense of humor to take the piss out of themselves in that manner is OK in my book...
("I'ma Sllllllllave for u, if you pay me 3500 credits")
Would that 35 mg or so of gold-pressed latinum?
And are Red Headed Rodent-Bonded Mindreading Postitute futures up or down in early trading on the Ferengi market?
Didn't MYSTY accomplish this in any way?
MST3K is copyrighted and as such, is not part of a public commons. You cannot simply take their footage and reuse it without their permission (fair use excepted of course, but that is an entirely different topic).
Try taking an episode of MST3K, dubbing in images (and siloettes[sp]) of Kirk, Spock, Uhuru, and McCoy, but keeping the dialog from the original, distribute it widely on the internet, and see how long before the lawyers start sending you cease and desist letters (and getting your internet connection yanked).
Maybe then we wouldn't have to put up with Jar Jar for another two episodes.
... not to mention the amount of really cool fan fiction set in that universe that could have been made into entertaining shorts and even 3rd party feature films.
... as would pretty much any aspect of popular culture were it not under the control of Cartels excersizing government granted and enforced monopolies.
You laugh, but had Star Wars been released under a free license a lot of us would have gladly edited out Jar Jar, not to mention the stupid, hollywood messiah-syndrome nonsense about Anakin being the "chosen one", returning the myth back to where it belongs: based on a more eastern notion of the "force" being a natural metaphysical thing, without prophecy, second commings, and other Christian nonsense.
Think of how much more enjoyable the knockoff films would have been, simply by undoing the huge gaffes Lucas managed to pull on SW Ep.1
That aspect of our pop culture would have been much richer for it
From many of the comments here I can see that almost no one understands what Free Media is about. Not surprising, as numerous people posting the other threads don't understand what Free Software is about, and the two philosophies share a lot in common.
... and let everyone watch the Skipper and Gilligan get hunted by Sigorny Weaver's Nemesis.
... in which case the raw footage, particularly that which isn't part of the final cut, is what interests you.
... and they can cross-license copyrighted works anyway). The idea that consumers get the product for little or no cost is completely irrelevant ... a nice side effect of the Freedom being offered perhaps, but by no means the point of it.
... not in any reasonable or analogous sense that we mean when we say 'open source' software. Shows on local access are copyrighted ... you can't take them and incorporate them into your work, or rebroadcast them, or copy them, without express permission of the author. The are not free. The same goes for Zed by all accounts ... they're happy to take your content (and pay you a nominal fee), then subject it to the same onerous copyright restrictions that plague the rest of the mass media offerings. Aside from a novel way of trolling for content it, too, is neither free nor open in the sense that slashdotters understand the word. That is not to say it isn't innovative (it is), but so long as others cannot take and build upon the work freely it is not free (as in freedom), and has nothing to do with Free Media and Cringley's flirtation with it.
First, Free Media is not a new concept. Many of us have been kicking around the idea for some time. My own work, Autonomy is going to be licensed under a free license (you can see a draft of one possible license here), and there are numerous other projects as well (OpenContent and Copyright's Commons to name just two).
Free Media is about creating a public commons of content that others can use, modify, copy, redistribute, and incorporate into their own projects freely. There are caveates (like you have to make clear the end product is different from what the original creator may have intended), but the idea is that you could, for example, take an old Gilligan's Island rerun, colorize it, do some digital overlays, change the soundtrack, and add some more creative editing to create Alien Island
adamy writes "A ditital Camera, and A Website [is all you need]", adding "I don't think anyone would want the Raw footage, just the edited stuff." Again, this completely misses the point. Maybe you'd like to redo the special effects of an old movie and the original green-screen (or blue screen) footage is exactly what you want. Maybe you want to do a documentary on how documentaries slant information
Free Media is about empowering artists to build upon the works of others, and to stop having to reinvent the wheel for every project (which really only the big studios can afford to do
As for 'Open Source' television already existing
Second, this all could have been avoided if Ian Gulliver hadn't freaked when he got the order. If he'd waited a bleeding 24 hours this would have been resolved and ORBZ could have gone on its merry way.
It's very easy to be an armchair general from the peanut gallary, especially since you have nothing at risk.
This was a (relatively rare) instance of a government excersizing some common sense. There was no guarantee that this would be the outcome.
Imagine if it had gone the other way (they pressed charges) and he had continued operating as before. Going in front of a judge and being forced to admint that "yes, I engaged in the same activity for which I was being prosecuted after having been served notice," is the kind of thing that results in penalties that tend toward the harsh, rather than linient, if convicted.
ORBZ was a service being provided for our benefit, for the "greater good" if you will (yes, I know how alien that phrase sounds in our Money Ueber Alles culture, but there do still exist people who spend their energy trying to better all of humankind, rather than merely themselves. They may be endangered, but they aren't extinct just yet). It is not at all reasonable to expect someone to risk fines, seizure of equipment, and possibly even jail time simply so they can go on doing everyone else a favor.
The government body in question may be contrite now, but the damage is done, and they are, ultimately, the cause of that damage. Whitewashing their responsiblity now behind the argument that "that's just how investigations are done" does nothing to alleviate their responsiblity, though it does underscore just how aggressive, flawed, and Orwellian many of our "standard investigative procedures" have become. Not that we needed any more examples, we seem to have been getting hit in the face with that fact every day lately.
Amen! That's the clause in my employment agreement. When I started doing open source development, I pulled it out and double checked. If I create it at work it's theirs. If I create it at home, it's mine.
... thankfully I no longer do) because, while we were brilliant programmers and engineers, we knew nothing about law or even how to seriously negotiate.
Every university in the United States (I won't presume to speak of the entire world, though I think the same might apply to many other places as well) should have as part of its required curriculum a course that deals with contract negotiations, common pitfalls like this one, and other tidbits of wisdom that graduating students really need to effectively negotiate their way into the business world.
The vast majority of us, myself included, got absolutely reamed in our first job (and back then I had clauses like this too
But then, Universities attempt to abuse their students (and sometimes faculty/staff) in just such a manner, so I guess depending on them to actually educate their students about such thing is a little much to hope for.
Criminal charges have nothing to do with suits
... so who is doing the complaining?
True, which is why I said "suing and issuing the legal threats." Criminal charges are only filed if their is a complaint
Incompetent admins? (Most likely)
IBM? (only if they are profoundly stupid)
SPAMMERs deliberately setting ORBZ up? (possible)
Why IBM decided to pursue criminal prosecution rather than releasing a simple bugfix is beyond me.
If it is IBM, they deserve to be bitchslapped. Hard.
However, I'd be very curious to know who is actually doing the suing and issuing the legal threats.
I suspect they are incompetent admins, trying to cover their own incompetency by pointing an accusing finger at the innocent, in this case ORBZ.
Incompetents banding together has to be one of the more sinister forces in our society: far more common than intelligent and neferious conspiracies (which probably can be counted on one hand, if that), far more wide reaching, and far more destructive.
OTOH, for the more paranoid: what are the odds that some SPAMMERs themselves have set up Domino servers with the explicit knowledge of this bug, in order to have legal grounds to threaten and sue one of their most effective opponents out of existence? Actually, I was writing the previous sentence as a joke, but as I type it I don't find the scenerio nearly as unlikely as I first thought.
OK, I know you're a troll but some uninformed person might actually read the nonsense you just wrote and without thinking actually ascribe it a value greater than it is worth, i.e. greater than zero.
Did you read my post at all? The Kompany is going to sell less of its products because their customers cannot be assured that it won't go bye-bye tommorow, taking the value of their stored data created with his proprietary, non-GPLed products with it. I touched on two different approaches that have been very successful in allowing companies like TrollTech to make good money while releasing their software under free licensing terms (as recognized by the FSF), and pointed out precisely why non-free, proprietary software that can be orphaned from one day to the next is of significantly lower value and appeal than software that has the kind of guaranteed longevity the GPL gives it. People who make informed decisions and are congnizant of the value of their data will not opt for potentially orphaned products at any price, and as data management and recovery become more commonplace this issue will grow in visibility. The Kompany is shooting themselves in the foot, and will likely lose business they can't afford to lose as a result.
But you knew and understood that already, didn't you troll?
He simply doesn't understand the value freedom would give his own software. Indeed, he doesn't appear to understand the free software/open source community at all, which will likely cost him his business in the end.
... the kind only free software can really offer.
Contrary to popular myth many, probably most, free software users will pay for software if they see a clear benefit in it. However, there are certain things free software gives a person that many of us are not willing to sacrifice, whether the product is free-as-in-beer (like Blender was) or not.
One of these, and perhaps one of the greatest values of free software (although it has many, mind you), is that one will not be left with an orphaned product should a company go under.
I have hundreds of hours invested in Blender animations that are now essentially worthless (or soon to be, as soon as the binary I have stops working with current libraries and the older libraries become harder to get, and harder to make work). I will never put myself in that position again, which means I will never use any of the Kompany's products, with the possible exception of the one they GPLed. Period.
This isn't because I have some philisophical ax to grind against proprietary software, it is because I've been burned once and will not be burned again. It is because my data is far more valuable than the software I use and the hardware I use it on, combined. It is because companies do not necessarilly last, particularly in these post-boom times with the Microsoft Monopoly hovering over us all and likely to get away with the corporate equivelent of assault and murder with little more than a slap on the wrist, thanks the Bush Junior's DOJ snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory.
There are other models for making a profit on software and keeping the code free that he didn't address and likely hasn't explored. One is the service model, which he declines to use because it "doesn't fit" his business model. Fine. There are other approaches.
One, which fits any software product which improves and adds features over time is to "time shift" the freedom. The author of Ghostscript understood this well, in releasing a free version of his software about a year behind the non-free version. Want the latest drivers and features? Pay up (if you're using it for commercial use). Want the free version? That's okay too, just expect to wait about a year for the same features the paying customers are enjoying today.
This approach would at least insure their paying customers against the possible orphanage of their product (and is an approach Trolltech has used, with a little twist, quite successfully...indeed it makes their commercial product far more appealing than any of their competitors for that reason alone).
If blender had done that their animation community wouldn't have died with the company a week ago. If the Kompany were to do that, I would consider using their products.
But, having learned the lesson RMS, for all his abrasiveness, has been trying to teach us for the last several years the hard way, I will not be using any product that results in my data, my work, loosing its value and usefulness simply because the software seller goes out of business.
Which means the Kompany will never have me as a customer, and that is a shame, because contrary to popular myth about free software and GNU/Linux users, I do pay for software, as evidenced by a shelf full of commercial Linux apps, from Applixware to Mainactor to various and sundry Linux games.
He simply doesn't get it, and if he doesn't figure it out it will likely cost him his business as a result. And then his customers will be SOL, something they wouldn't have been had they insisted on some insurance
Blender file the .blend format is a binary only propriety NaN format. It is not .iv. But it can export rudimentary models (and maybe textures) to vrml 1.0. Which when renamed to .iv works with inventor. But you still have to fiddle around and edit the .iv file manually sometimes (texture file paths etc.,).
.blend files were in fact open inventor files, but discovered this weekend that you are right ... the format of .blend files is a proprietary NaN format and, as such, my animation work is rapidly becoming worthless.
You are, regrettably, correct. I took the previous poster at their word that
As I said before: never again. I will only use free(dom) software for any future animation/special effects work I do, even if that means I have to write the damn program myself.
:-(
Finally, the federal government has not built or maintained roads since the National Road was built from Washington to Vandalia, IL. Since then they've given the states money to build federal highways, which the states are then responsible for maintaining.
Which would be a perfectly fine solution, but to get there you have to first nationalize the infrastructure. Then, if you want, turn it over to the states for management and maintenance. But this local monopoly on the one information road into my home is rediculous, and far more damaging than the government equivelent would be.
There are some areas government needs to be involved in, like roads and information highways and the maintenance of a public commons, if you want to have any kind of non-monopoly marketplace whatsoever.
Oh, you can make all kinds of arguments about how competition on these kinds of networks doesn't really make sense, but these are primarily engineering arguments.
And they are misapplied arguments to boot. Comeptition with respect to roads and highways doesn't make much sense either, unless you want to pave the planet and have ten streets servicing your driveway.
The solution is simple. Make the road a public commons, accessible to all under the same terms and paid for as a public works, and allow competition to flourish where it does make sense: with car companies, shipping companies, taxicab companies, bicycles, etc.
Substitute "cable," or "fibre" for road and "ISP," "Telco," and "Cable Providor" for car companies, shipping companies, etc. and you get the idea.
The only way we are NOT going to have monopolies is by nationalizing the infrastructure and allowing business to compete for our patronage using the common, public wire on an equal basis.
I don't agree that 'no one was going to pay.' If the features being added are of sufficient value (if they're what people actually want), I think people are more than willing to pay. If I recall correctly, there were quite a few C-Key owners.
I'm sorry, I don't think I made myself clear.
People are generally not going to pay for something if they can (legally) get that exact thing for free under the exact same conditions.
They may pay for convinience, for receiving the product in a non-volitile (eg. CDR) medium, for additional documentation, or for additional features, or some other added value, but if one can download something at no cost, or pay $10 to download the exact same thing, with no additional immediate benefits, one is not very likely to pay the $10. Actually, I'm more likely to pay than most people, because I actually do buy things "to support the company," but most people don't.
The C-Key approach was one way of doing this (but the timing and circumstances were ugly, having just sold a book for "freeware" that suddenly became unfree after a bunch of us bought the books.). A far better approach was the one they adopted toward the end: pay and get the latest features today, or don't pay and get those features a few months from now.
Most of us would gladly pay to be able to use something today, rather than in six months. I certainly intended to, as soon as my tax refund check arrived.
Though the eventual effect of the ruling may stink, it can't be denied that in light of existing regulations the decision-makers have a point. The primary use of the lines in cable systems at this point is indeed information delivery, whether it be TV signals or data, and there are no open-access laws for info delivery services.
Once the information becomes bidirectional it can no longer reasonably be called "delivery."
But then, the entire notion of applying one set of rules to communications links that carry primarilly voice, vs. another set of rules for (often the same) infrastructure that primarilly carries digital (computer) data, vs. yet another set of rules for (often the same) infrastructure that primarilly carries video/entertainment data demonstrates how completely head-up-their-ass our government regulators really are.
It is absurd.
ISPs should operate under the same rules as Telcos and Cable providors, with the same priveleges (common carrier status) and the same requirements (allowing access by competitors to their wire/fibre/subspace beakon). Ideally, the latter should be nationalized (a dirty word, I know, but better than the mess we have now) and treated like a public road, with ISPs, Cable providors, and Telcos accessing the hardwire infrastructure under the same conditions and rules. Then, and only then, will we have real competition, and a flourishing market, in all of these arenas.
umm..your animation work is not wasted. blender files are just openinventor files (iv). just rename em and any 3D app can import em. ive used blender models with 3DS Max, Maya, TrueSpace and others. they even work ok as VRML files.
I did not know that. Thank you, I confess to being very, very relieved. Maybe my libraries of stuff aren't so useless after all.
I probably shouldn't feed the troll, but what the hell:
And yet no one was willing to pay a small chink of change to keep them in buisness. How ironic.
Demonstrably false, as other posts (and any casual perusal of the Blender Forums, now alas no longer accessible) prove.
However, it was only recently that they moved to a sustainable model of selling current features and giving away slightly older, slightly less feature rich versions for free. No one was going to buy something that is being given away for free (unless it has added value, like a book, convinient CD medium, or something else), but plenty of people will pay to have a new feature today instead of in six months, myself included.
It is unfortuante they took so long to find this approach, and even more unfortunate that they didn't "insure" those who paid by GPLing the delayed, free version as insurance against just these sort of events.
Maya (possibly the preeminent 3D animation app) is available under Linux. It's just out of your freebie pricerange.
:-)
... and comes with the same uncertainty as blender: if and when the app disappears, or changes and becomes unsupported, what happens to the hours of animation work I've done? Am I forced to spend another $5k for an upgrade I can't afford or, even worse, left with no recourse (and useless, may-as-well-be-randomized data)?
Freebie? You're making an unfair baseless assumption about me. I do buy software, and did support Blender financially.
You can get your first copy for a mere $5500 or so, you cheap GNU/Linux user you!
I agree. I've payed for plenty of apps under Linux, including Applix, various games, etc. But Maya's pricetag puts it well out of any hobbiests price range
I will do all my future animation work only under GPLed or BSDed software, even if that means writing modules myself to do what I need. The time I saved by using Blender I just lost, big time, with compounded interest. The animations I've done will grow less and less useful with time, ultimately (in a year or two) becoming worthless as it becomes more and more difficult to get the aging Blender binary I have (the latest version prior to their disappearance) running against current libraries and software versions.
RMS and the Free Software Foundation were right all along, and I, in my "pragmatism," was very shortsighted and very wrong.
Never again will I make that mistake.
I say give us more non-bank banks. If I could find an unregulated money-holder for me, I'd use it immediately IF they had good third party insurers, better interest, and less government big brother intrusion into my transactions.
... use the cash-n-carry, fully trust-based money changers of the middle east. No regulations, no snooping, and the only requirement is trust ...
u ble-in-price-in-just-three-months recessions we experience from time to time, but a real you-are-likely-to-starve-along-with-the-rest-of-us and armed-revolution-really-might-happen depression like our grandparents used to go on about for hours on end to anyone who would listen.
... which isn't the same as no regulation and no accountability at all, which is what you get with pay-pal.)
Do what Osama does
Personally, I'm not fond of banking, or of banks, or of excessive regulation (and sometimes corrupt regulation that facilitates, for example, the "legitimate" seizure of an accounts assets for simply remaining idle for a few years), but what you propose is a recipe for another 1929 followed by a decade or more of depression. Not the soft-market, oh-no-I-can't-by-a-new-BMW-and-my-condo-didn't-do
Thaks, but with as annoying as I find regulated banks, I'll take that "disease" any day over your proposed "cure."
(Having said all that, I would like to see regulations eased and brought into line with those that a credit union has to obey