TIVO is just one of a large number of entities that attempted to find loopholes in GPL2, and not even the most serious.
TiVo didn't "find a loophole". Access to source and access to hardware are two totally unrelated things.
While client-server has existed for some time, there was no potential for client-server performance of anything but a phone system or broadcast media to the mass consumer when GPL2 was created.
So, what we have here are not changes in the basic goals of the license, to implement Free Software, but in the implementation itself. These were required by the changes in markets, the style of accessing computers, and law.
If RMS feels that way, why didn't he merge the AGPL into the GPLv3?
Nope. Copyright law has never been about restricting what you can do with a work.
I wish you could convince the US Congress of that, so that they'd overturn the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which is about restricting what you can do with a work.
GPL explicitly states that FOSS doesn't constitute an "effective prevention measure", so what Congress said in DMCA is irrelevant.
Thus, we had a loop-hole in that companies which performed the software over the net without ever distributing it can make substantive derivative works of the program from which they derive tremendous profit but have none of the obligations. Think of google in this context.
How exactly is that a loop-hole? They're not offering the program to other users, they're offering the results of their use of that program. That is not a loop-hole, that is the *express intent* of the GPLv2.
If somebody uses my software, even modified, to produce output, and then sells the output, why in the hell would I think that I'd have any right to force them to provide their modifications? They're producing the output, not the software.
The original goal of the GPL was to set the software free, not to force everybody to comply with some arbitrary socialist agenda.
I agree. If somebody uses Blender to make a movie, nobody seriously thinks said person needs to provide the relevant.blend files.
We made movies the algorithmic output of software at Pixar. They were protected under the performance right, and nobody doubted that the work was creative. I don't see a substantive difference where other software is concerned.
You're probably a troll, but I'll respond anyway because a) you might not be and b) some other people might be wondering about this.
It helps protect your idea because if it's published, you have a lesser chance of becoming the next Robert Jacobsen, who wrote an open-source java software package that a sleazy company used to build their product upon, patent, and then sue Jacobsen for infringing on their patent.
At least that's what he claims. And he must be right because indie open source developers are good, companies are evil and mean.
FTFA that the parent linked to:
In April, 2002, the JMRI project published a new capability in their code which allowed a computer to control the layout of a model railroad via a client/server protocol. Shortly after this publication, Katzer filed an application with the patent office which attempted to cover the new capability, and in March, 2003, the patent office granted this patent. [emphasis added]
How is that not prior art?
For the next several years, Jacobsen and Katzer engaged in a legal battle, resulting in the court demanding that by January 31st, 2008 Katzer "provide to Plaintiff basic supporting facts and legal argument sufficient to explain its position on validity, enforceability and infringement of the '329 patent." In response, on February 1st, 2009, Katzer filed two disclaimers with the U.S. Patent Office, effectively making two of his patents unenforceable in their entirety. After having disclaimed these patents, Katzer attempted to declare the patent claims in the case moot. Previously however, Katzer claimed that the JMRI project violated a number of his patents, and so Jacobsen is not satisfied with mooting these claims. At present Jacobsen is pursuing patent abuse litigation against Katzer. [all emphasis added]
Clearly Katzer is a patent troll (or at least it's acting like one)
So far they've won tens of thousands of dollars from him, as well as the tens of thousands he's spent defending himself, although he seems to be winning the latest round of lawsuits.
So so far the judges who have studied the subject much more than we have don't believe him. But they just must be wrong because judges (as government workers) are incompetent, ignorant end perhaps corrupted.
AFAIK burden of proof is on the person claiming the patent is invalid
Not to mock you personally but whenever I see Internet posts like these, I feel the urge to facepalm. If he is right, he probably eventually wins. If the courts - with judges who spend numerous hours studying the subject - can't be sure who is right, neither can anyone who read about the subject in the Internet.
No amount of money spent on more expensive lawyers is enough to change that. I do believe that more expensive lawyers could get the case prolonged, etc. to the extent that he could no longer fight... But I doubt they would be able to cause wrong rulings if the case is as obvious as you state.
They might be able to cost Jacobsen so much money that he has no choice but to settle. Besides, why should he have to waste his time and money on this crap?
(self-reply) Executive summary of my own (parent) post: *rant rant rant* UTF-8 is still broken, but someone went ahead and fixed the obvious testcases behind my back.
If I paste this into Firefox address bar, it works, but clicking the Slashfungarbulated link from this post's preview doesn't. Conclusion: Slashcode barfs on IDN. Bad Slashcode.
That's because you put an HTML entity in there instead of the real character. The real bug is that Slashcode can't handle true Unicode, which is pathetic. Proof: when I use the fake compose key on my keyboard, I get ä, which is valid unicode but garbage whatever-the-fuck-slashcode-uses.
Scratch that, it's not garbage in this particular incident. So your URL is http://anmälan.museum/
WTF Slashcode?! I didn't &-encode that! You are broken!
But this doesn't work: ¥øü å ဠæØñ üß. It's supposed to say, in very weird lettering, "All your charmap are belong to us". AFAICT it is valid unicode, although I'm too stupid to find the yen sign in charmap (it's not under currency symbols, and I'm too lazy to look elsewhere). So apparently SOMEONE partially fixed UTF-8 support behind my back *looks around suspiciously* and then that SOMEONE failed to completely fix it.
I wonder if anyone will wonder how this post is relevant after reading it (oh god^H^H^H FSM, recursion).
A little two factor authentication would be nice to see in American banks. Passwords just aren't adequate any more.
And how would an n-factor authentication scheme help when software on your computer is logging keystrokes, mouse gestures, and capturing images of your screen and then sending them near realtime to the bad guys?
If your computer has been compromised in this fashion, you've already lost. For you car enthusiasts, it's like adding additional locks to the car doors -- it doesn't help if the windows (haha) are already broken.
What if the token in question is a dongle? It could easily (these days) have several gigabytes of crypto, which you could use as a one-time pad or something... That's a lot of data to log/sniff...
I am quite happy to have a world with fewer programmers. The profession itself is evidence that computers are too complex.
If a program is written in such a fashion that the average citizen cannot understand it, let alone fix its bugs, their freedom to tinker is damaged.
The law is complex, because the world is complex. The alternative to complex law is arbitrary judgements, or the state retreating from adjudicating relationships among citizens and corporations. (OK, some wooly-eyed anarchist is going to salivate at the latter prospect, but personally, I prefer police and judges to arbitration by baseball bats.)
Who modded that flamebait? It may be controversial and sarcastic, but flamebait it ain't.
"...I used to be disappointed that so many of the best minds in the country were being devoted to this enterprise...I mean lawyers, after all, don't produce anything...and I worry that we are devoting too many of out best minds to this enterprise...I don't have any complaint about the quality of the council, except maybe we're wasting some of our best minds"
The skillset that makes you good at the law doesn't necessarily translate well into other fields. Take a hypothetical college student; likes philosophy, social science, literature, great analytical and verbal skills, but not especially strong technical or mathematical skills. What alternate career would you suggest? Through most of human history, being a skilled speaker, writer, and thinker could get you places, but in the modern world those skills aren't as valued.
Politics (ewww!)? Diplomacy (a bit hopeful...)? Anything else nontechnical that e.g. Ben Franklin did?
Who should be taxed more? A businessman (lets call him Warren) who earns a huge amount of money, but invests it back (creating more jobs), and lives a normal life; or a rich heiress (lets call her Paris) who earns a moderate amount, but spends a huge amount on consumer goods?
I like consumption tax, because it encourages people to live a balanced life.
If you want to help poor people, there are other ways. Improve buses. Fund public schools and hospitals. Etc.
Apples and oranges. Try comparing one of those people to a poor person (after all, that's supposed to be what makes a tax progressive or regressive...).
And yes, modern science has adopted even the first piece of anecdotal evidence in the quest to prove anthropogenic causes of global warming. That's science's failure, though, not it's advantage. Science cannot use anything BUT anecdotal evidence for proving AGW because there is no experiment that can be performed to disprove it.
That's correct -- all of those are insufficient to show causality. That's why all of the scientific theories you refer to were confirmed by substantially more thorough experimentation than you suggest.
As I understand it, causality is impossible to prove. (c.f. Hume et al)
It is possible to establish that X causes Y through thorough experimentation -- but that's not proof. If you want proof of something, it had better be mathematical.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see anything in the definition which precludes 3-clause BSD licenses, and as a matter of fact, they are open source. The definition does not preclude PD code either.
TIVO is just one of a large number of entities that attempted to find loopholes in GPL2, and not even the most serious.
TiVo didn't "find a loophole". Access to source and access to hardware are two totally unrelated things.
While client-server has existed for some time, there was no potential for client-server performance of anything but a phone system or broadcast media to the mass consumer when GPL2 was created.
So, what we have here are not changes in the basic goals of the license, to implement Free Software, but in the implementation itself. These were required by the changes in markets, the style of accessing computers, and law.
If RMS feels that way, why didn't he merge the AGPL into the GPLv3?
I wish you could convince the US Congress of that, so that they'd overturn the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which is about restricting what you can do with a work.
GPL explicitly states that FOSS doesn't constitute an "effective prevention measure", so what Congress said in DMCA is irrelevant.
Thus, we had a loop-hole in that companies which performed the software over the net without ever distributing it can make substantive derivative works of the program from which they derive tremendous profit but have none of the obligations. Think of google in this context.
How exactly is that a loop-hole? They're not offering the program to other users, they're offering the results of their use of that program. That is not a loop-hole, that is the *express intent* of the GPLv2.
If somebody uses my software, even modified, to produce output, and then sells the output, why in the hell would I think that I'd have any right to force them to provide their modifications? They're producing the output, not the software.
The original goal of the GPL was to set the software free, not to force everybody to comply with some arbitrary socialist agenda.
I agree. If somebody uses Blender to make a movie, nobody seriously thinks said person needs to provide the relevant .blend files.
We made movies the algorithmic output of software at Pixar. They were protected under the performance right, and nobody doubted that the work was creative. I don't see a substantive difference where other software is concerned.
That's because the input was creative.
You're probably a troll, but I'll respond anyway because a) you might not be and b) some other people might be wondering about this.
It helps protect your idea because if it's published, you have a lesser chance of becoming the next Robert Jacobsen, who wrote an open-source java software package that a sleazy company used to build their product upon, patent, and then sue Jacobsen for infringing on their patent.
At least that's what he claims. And he must be right because indie open source developers are good, companies are evil and mean.
FTFA that the parent linked to:
In April, 2002, the JMRI project published a new capability in their code which allowed a computer to control the layout of a model railroad via a client/server protocol. Shortly after this publication, Katzer filed an application with the patent office which attempted to cover the new capability, and in March, 2003, the patent office granted this patent. [emphasis added]
How is that not prior art?
For the next several years, Jacobsen and Katzer engaged in a legal battle, resulting in the court demanding that by January 31st, 2008 Katzer "provide to Plaintiff basic supporting facts and legal argument sufficient to explain its position on validity, enforceability and infringement of the '329 patent." In response, on February 1st, 2009, Katzer filed two disclaimers with the U.S. Patent Office, effectively making two of his patents unenforceable in their entirety . After having disclaimed these patents, Katzer attempted to declare the patent claims in the case moot. Previously however, Katzer claimed that the JMRI project violated a number of his patents, and so Jacobsen is not satisfied with mooting these claims. At present Jacobsen is pursuing patent abuse litigation against Katzer. [all emphasis added]
Clearly Katzer is a patent troll (or at least it's acting like one)
So far they've won tens of thousands of dollars from him, as well as the tens of thousands he's spent defending himself, although he seems to be winning the latest round of lawsuits.
So so far the judges who have studied the subject much more than we have don't believe him. But they just must be wrong because judges (as government workers) are incompetent, ignorant end perhaps corrupted.
AFAIK burden of proof is on the person claiming the patent is invalid
Not to mock you personally but whenever I see Internet posts like these, I feel the urge to facepalm. If he is right, he probably eventually wins. If the courts - with judges who spend numerous hours studying the subject - can't be sure who is right, neither can anyone who read about the subject in the Internet.
No amount of money spent on more expensive lawyers is enough to change that. I do believe that more expensive lawyers could get the case prolonged, etc. to the extent that he could no longer fight... But I doubt they would be able to cause wrong rulings if the case is as obvious as you state.
They might be able to cost Jacobsen so much money that he has no choice but to settle. Besides, why should he have to waste his time and money on this crap?
(self-reply)
Executive summary of my own (parent) post:
*rant rant rant* UTF-8 is still broken, but someone went ahead and fixed the obvious testcases behind my back.
How about IDN URLs? Example: http://anmälan.museum/
If I paste this into Firefox address bar, it works, but clicking the Slashfungarbulated link from this post's preview doesn't.
Conclusion: Slashcode barfs on IDN. Bad Slashcode.
That's because you put an HTML entity in there instead of the real character. The real bug is that Slashcode can't handle true Unicode, which is pathetic. Proof: when I use the fake compose key on my keyboard, I get ä, which is valid unicode but garbage whatever-the-fuck-slashcode-uses.
Scratch that, it's not garbage in this particular incident. So your URL is http://anmälan.museum/
WTF Slashcode?! I didn't &-encode that! You are broken!
But this doesn't work: ¥øü å ဠæØñ üß. It's supposed to say, in very weird lettering, "All your charmap are belong to us". AFAICT it is valid unicode, although I'm too stupid to find the yen sign in charmap (it's not under currency symbols, and I'm too lazy to look elsewhere). So apparently SOMEONE partially fixed UTF-8 support behind my back *looks around suspiciously* and then that SOMEONE failed to completely fix it.
I wonder if anyone will wonder how this post is relevant after reading it (oh god^H^H^H FSM, recursion).
In an ideal world, at least. :) In the real world, fingerprints are enough to get a conviction.
There, fixed that for you.
Ever since Men in black, I have been waiting for the shiny fingerprint removing sphere.
You can burn your fingerprints off on a flat heated surface, not that I tested it or anything. At least not on my hands...
Your original fingerprints will (eventually) grow back/be detectable.
I see no useful purpose in blathering to the world at large about what I had for breakfast.
That's Twitter.
I don't think parent was trying to be funny...
A little two factor authentication would be nice to see in American banks. Passwords just aren't adequate any more.
And how would an n-factor authentication scheme help when software on your computer is logging keystrokes, mouse gestures, and capturing images of your screen and then sending them near realtime to the bad guys?
If your computer has been compromised in this fashion, you've already lost. For you car enthusiasts, it's like adding additional locks to the car doors -- it doesn't help if the windows (haha) are already broken.
What if the token in question is a dongle? It could easily (these days) have several gigabytes of crypto, which you could use as a one-time pad or something... That's a lot of data to log/sniff...
I think it's also important that the number of iterations is not so large that the pool of suckers gets to be too small (or empty).
No, don't use threes, use fours!
(Note to kooks and overzealous mods: Yes, this post is in fact a joke.)
I've heard of negative feedback loops, but would this be a positive feedback loop taking care of things?
Negative feedback loops move towards equilibrium.
Positive feedback loops move away from "equilibrium"
In other words, no.
ObHell:Yes, it is frozen over!
ObTopic:$1 a day is not "income" by any reasonable definition (e.g. minimum wage) of the term.
I am quite happy to have a world with fewer programmers. The profession itself is evidence that computers are too complex.
If a program is written in such a fashion that the average citizen cannot understand it, let alone fix its bugs, their freedom to tinker is damaged.
The law is complex, because the world is complex. The alternative to complex law is arbitrary judgements, or the state retreating from adjudicating relationships among citizens and corporations. (OK, some wooly-eyed anarchist is going to salivate at the latter prospect, but personally, I prefer police and judges to arbitration by baseball bats.)
Who modded that flamebait? It may be controversial and sarcastic, but flamebait it ain't.
"...I used to be disappointed that so many of the best minds in the country were being devoted to this enterprise...I mean lawyers, after all, don't produce anything...and I worry that we are devoting too many of out best minds to this enterprise...I don't have any complaint about the quality of the council, except maybe we're wasting some of our best minds"
The skillset that makes you good at the law doesn't necessarily translate well into other fields. Take a hypothetical college student; likes philosophy, social science, literature, great analytical and verbal skills, but not especially strong technical or mathematical skills. What alternate career would you suggest? Through most of human history, being a skilled speaker, writer, and thinker could get you places, but in the modern world those skills aren't as valued.
Politics (ewww!)? Diplomacy (a bit hopeful...)? Anything else nontechnical that e.g. Ben Franklin did?
Which is probably why he's being sneaky by going to a federal court that he's *not* disbarred from.
"Disbarred" just means he's not a lawyer anymore. It doesn't mean he can't sue. IANAL.
But this one isn't even coherent!
[snip most of the post]
I nodded and tried to turn my attention back to the movie, but part of my brain was still going "what the fuck was that?"
The above post left me with the exact same feeling.
You must be new here.
Sales tax is regressive? Is that a problem?
Who should be taxed more? A businessman (lets call him Warren) who earns a huge amount of money, but invests it back (creating more jobs), and lives a normal life; or a rich heiress (lets call her Paris) who earns a moderate amount, but spends a huge amount on consumer goods?
I like consumption tax, because it encourages people to live a balanced life.
If you want to help poor people, there are other ways. Improve buses. Fund public schools and hospitals. Etc.
Apples and oranges. Try comparing one of those people to a poor person (after all, that's supposed to be what makes a tax progressive or regressive...).
Fixed that four you. One good deed deserves another, write? These days highering is at an awl-thyme low.
Fixed that for you (ignoring intentionally bad grammar). "Past" is correct there.
And yes, modern science has adopted even the first piece of anecdotal evidence in the quest to prove anthropogenic causes of global warming. That's science's failure, though, not it's advantage. Science cannot use anything BUT anecdotal evidence for proving AGW because there is no experiment that can be performed to disprove it.
So is AGW unfalsifiable?
That's correct -- all of those are insufficient to show causality. That's why all of the scientific theories you refer to were confirmed by substantially more thorough experimentation than you suggest.
As I understand it, causality is impossible to prove. (c.f. Hume et al)
It is possible to establish that X causes Y through thorough experimentation -- but that's not proof. If you want proof of something, it had better be mathematical.