Well, Be *could* just GPL their other software. There'd be no change in functionality, and more software would be freed.
GPL is free as in speech but, just like commercial software, there is a "cost". For commercial products, the author wants money. Under GPL, the cost is that you must free your software. Some people think that's a good thing, and they release their software under the GPL. Some people don't want to pay this price. They're still free to link to it in these round-about ways, and they're also free to *not* use it.
Bruce happens to be someone that doesn't write software for a profit, but he wants more software to be free. Why should he make in convenient for Be to use his labor, with no compensation, and not follow his wishes? The GPL is his only defense if he wants his software to remain free. BSD and public domain are nice... if you don't care if your software remains free and don't mind people making millions off of your work.
> Can you explain what anyone gains from Be moving your code from one library to another?
Let's pretend that Be used commercial code and forgot to pay the cost of the license. Ask your question again:
"Can you explain what anyone gains from Be paying your license fee?"
In this case, the answer is simple: the author gains because he gets paid the license fee. The answer to your question is that Bruce gains because his software remains free. He would gain even more, and Be wouldn't have to work-around anything, if Be would free their software...
Re:Who Cares About The Vocal Minority?
on
Tech Stocks Tumble
·
· Score: 1
> I, like my friends, have started not to read/. on a daily basis
Yet you stil managed to post a comment to an article within two hours, and on a Sunday.
InternetNews Radio (http://stream.internet.com/) has an audio interview (April 14, 2000) with Rain Forest Puppy who discovered and was able to exploit the backdoor.
My site subsribes to newscast today (today.newscast.com), which is a fee-based news service that collects articles from several sources and gives you a common interface. I searched for "dvwssr.dll" and found only 3 stories, all from the WSJ. The one quoted above, and two copies of another article from April 14, "Microsoft Acknowledges Security Flaw". A couple of fair-use quotes:
Microsoft Corp. acknowledged yesterday that its engineers included in some of its Internet software a secret password... that could be used to gain illicit access to hundreds of thousands of Internet sites world-wide.
The manager of Microsoft's security-response center, Steve Lipner... described such a backdoor password as "absolutely against our policy" and a firing offense for the as yet unidentified employees.
... The company planned to warn customers as soon as possible with an e-mail bulletin and an advisory published on its corporate Web site.
... One of the experts who helped identify the file is a professional security consultant known widely among the Internet underground as "Rain Forest Puppy."
Well, it's hard not to be swayed by your use of the bold tag, but still...
The first regulation of industry in the US was the Interstate Commerce Committee (ICC) established around the turn of the last century. At that time it was thought that the railroad cartels were unfairly charging higher rates for less-popular routes. Consumer advocates of the day felt that the railroads should charge a few for distance and should not discriminate based on destination.
The first commissioner of the ICC was a former railroad lawyer. After all, who knows the industry better than a former member. His solution to the discriminatory pricing was to set uniform rates just like the advocates wanted. Of course, he set them at the *highest* rates, which the so-called cartels had always wanted in the first case but were never able to maintain. Thanks to the power of law and force of government, they were able to establish a working cartel.
Very little has changed in 100 years. Most regulators come from the industry they regulate. Most industries petition *for* government licensure. What better way to limit the competition than to increase the costs of entry?
There is, of course, competition for regulation. Economist George Stigler studied regulation in trucking vs. railroad. Trucking is, by most definitionsm an almost text-book example of perfect competition. The cost of entry is nothing compared to rail and one man can run the entire business. In addition to competing with each other, they also competed with railroads. Stigler found a strong correlation between the amount of rail and the truck weight regulations between the states. In some states, the trucking regulations were actually more severe between locations that were also served by rail.
History seems to be against the idea that we can create a regulatory body *and* keep it from being hijacked by the industry being regulated.
Of course 5 years from now [1992] that will be different, but 5 years from now everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5.
You missed a scripting lanuage: Tcl/Tk. It doesn't have the "write only" property that perl has.
See www.scriptics.com for more info. Tcl/Tk is free (speech, BSD-style), but scriptics also sells a debugger and a wrapper. The wrapper will hide your source code and allow you to distribute a stand-alone application so your customers won't need Tcl/Tk installed on their systems.
Tcl was designed as a glue language and if you find that some of your code runs too slow on Tcl, you can recode those modules in C and load them as an extension (you're C code will be most portable if you use Cygwin).
Yes, individuals can beat "referrer", but tickets.com won't be able to put a simple link on their site and expect anyone to get through. In fact, it's *because* the clients supply referrer (rather than, say the referrer) that makes it a good solution. You can't expect Joe Blow browsing your site to set up junkbuster to lie about the referrer...
> you have a bunch of little MSes that still have all the existing insider communication channels
The thing is, as a publicly traded company, each baby-Bill would have to file financial statements and be accountable to its stock holders. Let's assume they were split between the OS (Windows, NT, etc) and the Application (IE) companies.
Look at the findings of facts and you see that, among other things, MS gave away IE and actually paid off AOL's contract with Netscape. These are profitable to the big MS because they maintain their applications barrier to entry. Developers will continue to develop for Windows rather than cross-platform solutions which guarantees future Windows revenue.
If MS were split, the application company would have to give away IE and pay AOL to take it all to protect the profitability of the OS company.
If I were a shareholder of both companies, I'd sell all my MS-Apps stock and buy MS-OS. The OS company wouldn't be able to compensate the Apps company for its losses, and the Apps company would go under.
This is what MS was doing when they were "leveraging" their monopoly. They were willing to take losses in one part of the company to insure monopoly profits in the other. By splitting the company up, you take away the ability to cross-subsidize.
Do you work on SAMBA for the thrill of the challenge of reverse engineering SMB or just for the practical uses? If MicroSoft were to open their protocols (perhaps as part of a DoJ settlement), would you still find it as much fun?
Netscape 5 was out a *long* time ago. It was the original Open Source Netscape that went to mozilla.org. They never released it. They simply scrapped it and started from scratch with Gecko.
Note that this was all covered just over a month ago:
http://slashdot.org/articles/00/02/12/0827237.shtm l
The only news is the specific release date. In February, they simply said that they would launch it in the "Spring". Being that today is Spring, it's nice of them to give a specific time frame now.
You can install and launch the free version of BeOS from inside windows, OR you can install and launch the free version of BeOS without using any other OS. Ie. you can install it in its own partition and boot it directly from LILO or whatever.
Where do you get this information?
Read before you speak.
Well, I just re-read the whole FAQ and I still don't see anywhere that it says that I can install it without Windows. It does say that it is not actually running under Windows, but gives no indication that it can be started without Windows.
There is no FAQ that says "Q. Do I need Windows?" The closest is the one I quoted.
The BeNews article claimed that you could install w/out Windows, but claimed to glean this info from the FAQ. Even then, they're not outright stating that it possible but making their own deduction:
From this, you can deduce [emphasis theirs] that it's possible to boot Free BeOS 5 from bootloaders besides the Windows beos.com loader, which most likely means either a boot floppy or the standard BeOS boot loader.
If you have some other documentation, please quote or link to it. For now, I think the jury is still out...
> The RIAA page in question seems to be asserting that a computer isn't a "digital audio recording device"
In that case, Audio Home Recording Act simply doesn't apply *at all*. The Act doesn't say anything about devices that it doesn't define, so anything that is not a "digital audio recording device" falls under the older Title 17 regulations, which have always allowed for personal copies.
The whole point of defining devices based on their primary market was to only require *those* devices to implement SCMS and make royalty payments and to leave other devices alone.
Before the settlement of the RIO case, the judge had stated that the RIO was not a "digital audio recording device" and, therefore, not subject the AHRA and did not have to make royalty payments or implement SCMS.
I was simply expanding on the thoughts of the other poster. If we "owe" big business preferential treatment in the cyber-sphere, don't they also deserve extra property rights in all realms?
Well, I agree that legalese is hard to parse, but this is clearly protecting the consumer as well as manufacturer/importer:
"No action may be brought under this title alleging infringement of copyright *based on* the manufacture [of a device or medium]... **or** *based on* the noncommercial use by a consumer..."
The relevant part seems to be section 1008, which says "...No action may be brought under this title alleging infringement of copyright based on... the noncommercial use by a consumer..."
Slashdot Mirror
Well, Be *could* just GPL their other software. There'd be no change in functionality, and more software would be freed.
GPL is free as in speech but, just like commercial software, there is a "cost". For commercial products, the author wants money. Under GPL, the cost is that you must free your software. Some people think that's a good thing, and they release their software under the GPL. Some people don't want to pay this price. They're still free to link to it in these round-about ways, and they're also free to *not* use it.
Bruce happens to be someone that doesn't write software for a profit, but he wants more software to be free. Why should he make in convenient for Be to use his labor, with no compensation, and not follow his wishes? The GPL is his only defense if he wants his software to remain free. BSD and public domain are nice... if you don't care if your software remains free and don't mind people making millions off of your work.
> Can you explain what anyone gains from Be moving your code from one library to another?
Let's pretend that Be used commercial code and forgot to pay the cost of the license. Ask your question again:
"Can you explain what anyone gains from Be paying your license fee?"
In this case, the answer is simple: the author gains because he gets paid the license fee. The answer to your question is that Bruce gains because his software remains free. He would gain even more, and Be wouldn't have to work-around anything, if Be would free their software...
> I, like my friends, have started not to read /. on a daily basis
Yet you stil managed to post a comment to an article within two hours, and on a Sunday.
InternetNews Radio (http://stream.internet.com/)
has an audio interview (April 14, 2000) with Rain Forest Puppy who discovered and was able to exploit the backdoor.
Note: Available as an MP3!
Microsoft Corp. acknowledged yesterday that its engineers included in some of its Internet software a secret password ... that could be used to gain illicit access to hundreds of thousands of Internet sites world-wide.
The manager of Microsoft's security-response center, Steve Lipner ... described such a backdoor password as "absolutely against our policy" and a firing offense for the as yet unidentified employees.
Well, it's hard not to be swayed by your use of the bold tag, but still...
The first regulation of industry in the US was the Interstate Commerce Committee (ICC) established around the turn of the last century. At that time it was thought that the railroad cartels were unfairly charging higher rates for less-popular routes. Consumer advocates of the day felt that the railroads should charge a few for distance and should not discriminate based on destination.
The first commissioner of the ICC was a former railroad lawyer. After all, who knows the industry better than a former member. His solution to the discriminatory pricing was to set uniform rates just like the advocates wanted. Of course, he set them at the *highest* rates, which the so-called cartels had always wanted in the first case but were never able to maintain. Thanks to the power of law and force of government, they were able to establish a working cartel.
Very little has changed in 100 years. Most regulators come from the industry they regulate. Most industries petition *for* government licensure. What better way to limit the competition than to increase the costs of entry?
There is, of course, competition for regulation. Economist George Stigler studied regulation in trucking vs. railroad. Trucking is, by most definitionsm an almost text-book example of perfect competition. The cost of entry is nothing compared to rail and one man can run the entire business. In addition to competing with each other, they also competed with railroads. Stigler found a strong correlation between the amount of rail and the truck weight regulations between the states. In some states, the trucking regulations were actually more severe between locations that were also served by rail.
History seems to be against the idea that we can create a regulatory body *and* keep it from being hijacked by the industry being regulated.
Of course 5 years from now [1992] that will be different, but 5 years from now everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5.
I'd suggest Tim May's Cyphermonicon (not to be confused with Neal Stephenson's Cyrptomonicon).
You missed a scripting lanuage: Tcl/Tk. It doesn't have the "write only" property that perl has.
See www.scriptics.com for more info. Tcl/Tk is free (speech, BSD-style), but scriptics also sells a debugger and a wrapper. The wrapper will hide your source code and allow you to distribute a stand-alone application so your customers won't need Tcl/Tk installed on their systems.
Tcl was designed as a glue language and if you find that some of your code runs too slow on Tcl, you can recode those modules in C and load them as an extension (you're C code will be most portable if you use Cygwin).
> proxy the page from my server
But then you would be copying and redistributing the file and that *would* be a clear copyright infringement.
> b) Referrer is supplied by the client.
Yes, individuals can beat "referrer", but tickets.com won't be able to put a simple link on their site and expect anyone to get through. In fact, it's *because* the clients supply referrer (rather than, say the referrer) that makes it a good solution. You can't expect Joe Blow browsing your site to set up junkbuster to lie about the referrer...
Look at today's (Mary 27) HNN: http://www.hackernews.com/arch.html?0327 00
> you have a bunch of little MSes that still have all the existing insider communication channels
The thing is, as a publicly traded company, each baby-Bill would have to file financial statements and be accountable to its stock holders. Let's assume they were split between the OS (Windows, NT, etc) and the Application (IE) companies.
Look at the findings of facts and you see that, among other things, MS gave away IE and actually paid off AOL's contract with Netscape. These are profitable to the big MS because they maintain their applications barrier to entry. Developers will continue to develop for Windows rather than cross-platform solutions which guarantees future Windows revenue.
If MS were split, the application company would have to give away IE and pay AOL to take it all to protect the profitability of the OS company.
If I were a shareholder of both companies, I'd sell all my MS-Apps stock and buy MS-OS. The OS company wouldn't be able to compensate the Apps company for its losses, and the Apps company would go under.
This is what MS was doing when they were "leveraging" their monopoly. They were willing to take losses in one part of the company to insure monopoly profits in the other. By splitting the company up, you take away the ability to cross-subsidize.
> Higher levels of security (read encryption) between Samba only servers?
The SAMBA group has always maintained that their duty is only to replicate MicroSoft's protocols, not expand them.
> using the SMB protocol... instead of normal Unix file transfer protocols... that are better known
Ugh. Tell your PHBs that "Security through obscurity is no security". If they want security, use ssh and encrypt.
Do you work on SAMBA for the thrill of the challenge of reverse engineering SMB or just for the practical uses? If MicroSoft were to open their protocols (perhaps as part of a DoJ settlement), would you still find it as much fun?
> I thought Netscape 5 was coming soon
m l
Netscape 5 was out a *long* time ago. It was the original Open Source Netscape that went to mozilla.org. They never released it. They simply scrapped it and started from scratch with Gecko.
Note that this was all covered just over a month ago:
http://slashdot.org/articles/00/02/12/0827237.sht
The only news is the specific release date. In February, they simply said that they would launch it in the "Spring". Being that today is Spring, it's nice of them to give a specific time frame now.
> sent to almost a million people in Washington.
Correction: the article says he sent between 100,000 and 1 million spams PER WEEK, although not exclusively to Washington state residents.
The $39.95 packages were "How to Profit From the Internet," which I think is probably just a "you can be spammer too" kit.
Where do you get this information?
Read before you speak.
Well, I just re-read the whole FAQ and I still don't see anywhere that it says that I can install it without Windows. It does say that it is not actually running under Windows, but gives no indication that it can be started without Windows.
There is no FAQ that says "Q. Do I need Windows?" The closest is the one I quoted.
The BeNews article claimed that you could install w/out Windows, but claimed to glean this info from the FAQ. Even then, they're not outright stating that it possible but making their own deduction:
From this, you can deduce [emphasis theirs] that it's possible to boot Free BeOS 5 from bootloaders besides the Windows beos.com loader, which most likely means either a boot floppy or the standard BeOS boot loader.
If you have some other documentation, please quote or link to it. For now, I think the jury is still out...
According to the Free Be FAQ, yes you will need Windows:
Q: Will I be able to install BeOS 5 Free Version within operating systems other than Windows?
A:Not at this time.
For more info, check out this story from BeNews.
PS: No updates on GNU's Boycott Amazon page yet...
> Will this be folded into Debian Potato's US distro?
Considering that Potato is currently in a freeze, I would imagine not. Perhaps it will go into Woody...
> The RIAA page in question seems to be asserting that a computer isn't a "digital audio recording device"
In that case, Audio Home Recording Act simply doesn't apply *at all*. The Act doesn't say anything about devices that it doesn't define, so anything that is not a "digital audio recording device" falls under the older Title 17 regulations, which have always allowed for personal copies.
The whole point of defining devices based on their primary market was to only require *those* devices to implement SCMS and make royalty payments and to leave other devices alone.
Before the settlement of the RIO case, the judge had stated that the RIO was not a "digital audio recording device" and, therefore, not subject the AHRA and did not have to make royalty payments or implement SCMS.
I was simply expanding on the thoughts of the other poster. If we "owe" big business preferential treatment in the cyber-sphere, don't they also deserve extra property rights in all realms?
Well, I agree that legalese is hard to parse, but this is clearly protecting the consumer as well as manufacturer/importer:
... **or** *based on* the noncommercial use by a consumer ..."
"No action may be brought under this title
alleging infringement of copyright *based on* the manufacture [of a device or medium]
> Unfortunately, it does appear to do what the RIAA says.
Except for section 1008, which says noncommercial use is exempt from the Act.
The relevant part seems to be section 1008, which says "...No action may be brought under this title alleging infringement of copyright based on... the noncommercial use by a consumer..."