But the point still stands: The offer is given to the original client, who can then hand over the offer to any third party. But initially, any third party can't demand access to the source... At least, that's how I understand it.
To clear up a common misunderstanding of the GPL. In brief, the GPL states that...
if you use GPL'd source code as the code base of your product, you can still sell your product for any price you want and you are allowed to ship your product without source code
you must, however, make the full source code available upon request to those who bought your product, and you are allowed to charge a reasonable fee for this service (which means, afaik, the copying and media cost, but not an added sales price)
and - now HERE'S THE CATCH - you can't dictate those who have access to your source code (i.e. the buyers of your product) what they do with it.
You can't stop your client from developing (and selling!) his own version of your original product, you can't stop your client from giving away the source for free, you can't stop your client from posting the source on a public internet server etc.
The philosophy of the GPL is NOT you must give out full free source code but you must allow access the full source code to your client AND you can't tell him what to do with it. This last part is the "free" in "free software".
Of course, as a result most GPL'd software isn't "sold" as a product, but as a service. I don't sell Apache to my clients, but they pay me for installing and maintaining their web servers, which is a service for them, not a software they buy.
E.g., when I modify a GPL'd software for a client (which I have done in the past), I charge my client by the hour for the service of modifying it, but I don't charge the client for, say, a license of "Hanno Mueller's version of XYZ version 0.1".
And since I have already been paid for the modification, I return the patch to the maintainers of the software, who may or may not use it.
Ok, what is it with those damn Germans and David Hasselhoff?
Oh, this was written by Austrians, so don't insult them by calling them Germans.
That said, being a German, I am as puzzled as you are about why Hasselhoff became so popular over here. Knight Rider was a nice afternoon TV show among the A-Team/The Fall Guy/etc. crowd, but why his "singing career" was mostly here in Germany: I don't know, I don't know.
Then again, you Americans have Yanni. So you have no reason to complain about Germany's music taste, either.
I just wish there was more laptop technology used in desktop components. Modern desktops, even the simple "just office work" PCs, are too power-hungry, too hot, too loud. If desktops used notebook CPUs, a major problem of these computers would be solved...
Yes, I'd love to buy a Transmeta desktop mainboard at my local PC reseller. At present, I can only get a developer board at high prices through imports. I want a consumer version. Please...
I am a technical person, I support copyright protection, believe in patents, have a brother working in the music industry and make my own music in a not-amateur-anymore band.
And yet I still think that the US patent system is horribly broken and that the music and movie industry are on the wrong path and that they must be stopped walking it.
That's what distributions are for... But currently, distributions rely that users check for updates every once in a while. Maybe distributions need an automated security upgrade status check whenever a system goes online.
I could imagine a ip-up.d script (for dialups) or cron job (for dedicated lines) that connects to a distribution mirror site, then asks for a current status of available security upgrades (using signed communication to avoid man-in-the-middle attacks).
If the system is found to run outdated packages, it could warn the user. If it runs dangerously insecure packages, it could even stop the insecure services, maybe even disconnect the machine.
In today's case, after dial-up the upgrade status check would stop any https-related services and tell the user how to update. If no update was available, it would allow the user to reactive the service but only after a stern warning that he should better wait for the updated packages.
And then: Don't forget to get a new admin if your old admin leaves the job.
Those machines that have an admin are usually taken care of. But most security issues I see are with clients who have a server that some guy did the setup for some two or three years ago, then left a year later and since then nobody looked after the machine.
As one ad's catchphrase put it correctly you never talk about the server until it fails.
Being the guy in my little company who's responsible for updating the clients' servers, I often experience how clients have a hard time understanding that software support, updates and log checks are necessairy -- because from their perspective this is work without "results".
They can't check if I really did something when I give them a month's bill with x hours for security updates on their machine.
I often explain to them that this server care is a bit like toothbrushing... (Which, btw, is the actual name of that task we use in my company.)
The local PC manufacturer and service company went bankrupt "directly" (they say) "because" its many local new media companies stopped paying their huge bills of hardware they already had delivered.
(Its the norm here in Germany to deliver the first merchandise after being paid with cash, but once you have a steady business with that client, deliver on bill. All these new media companies had a lot of cash to burn at the start, and did, and paid promptly, but we all know what happened at the end.)
This PC manufacturer was here in Hamburg for more than 20 years, so it wasn't a fly-by-night company that didn't know the trade. My own little company bought its computers there, they sold fine hardware and had good service. Yet once their shiny new media clients stopped paying, it was over.
I can also tell you about another hardware reseller I personally know who had a client that left a seven-digit Euro bill overdue for several months, endangering the very existence of his company.
he people selling real products to the.com companies got rich
Not quite, they just became part of the bubble. A number of these suppliers are now struggling because they...
1.) delivered expensive products to.COMs and then didn't get their money when suddenly all these.COMs went bankrupt one after another at more or less the same time.
(Also don't forget that many hardware products have a small profit margin despite being expensive, so that the manufacturer gets some profit when being paid, but loses a lot more when not being paid.)
2.) had to grow to follow the bubble - these companies increased staff, production output, products stocked in their warehouses etc. and now are too large for the remaining market after the burst.
That's one major reason why Telecom suppliers, server manufacturers, consulting firms and other suppliers to.COM companies are now firing staff by the thousands.
3.) and both 1 and 2 lead to a loss of stock value of those companies that are listed at the stock market, which can also create a shortage of cash and kill a company even if it was quite able to survive after 1 and 2. But the psychology of the stock market is completely different issue.
So to sum up, everyone who did well because of the internet bubble is having problems now. Quite a few of those companies were also going belly-up because they suddenly were too big after their.COM clients were gone.
...and their hilarious "Mars Propaganda Project" in preparation of upcoming Mars missions:
The purpose of the Mars Project is to create and deploy fossils and/or ruins suggesting the prior existence of life and/or civilisation on the surface of Mars. Possibilities include artefacts which connect to various aspects of the Bible or other Earth mythology. It is intended that this is accomplished before NASA or some other agency sends amanned mission to Mars.
Europe have much less censorchip of movies than the US!
Nope. Europe has a very different censorship than the US.
We in Europe don't mind nudity or sexuality on screen - as long as it serves the story. (Porn is usually defined as nudity/sexuality without a plot. The French take this very literally - there are movies that show explicit sexual intercourse but that are not rated "porn" in France.)
However, our censors get all giddy-up with violent / numb action movies.
The US seems to be the other way round. Violence is ok, even in kid's movies, while a nipple can already be enough to qualify for an R rating. Eddie Murphy's "Boomerang" made a nice parody on this where an advertisement featured all sorts of atrocities, but a woman's breast was too much for the target audience...
Oops, sorry about that. Nevertheless, PAL and SECAM both use 50 Hz, so there is no frequency change necessairy as in NTSC->PAL, which is what I really tried to say.
Japan and Europe both share DVD region 2, but some European TV sets can't display NTSC or the 60 Hz Pseudo-PAL created by some DVD players, which is something that non-technical won't understand.
Censorship. Most European countries have their own version on the MPAA rating scheme. What's OK in the UK might not be in France, and vice versa. So there end up being a dozen different little cuts that have to be made to get the rating
Wrong example. UK and France share the same region code 2 and both use the PAL system, so any French DVD will play just fine in the UK and vice versa.
While I also made my Samsung 811 player region-free using a simple button sequenceon the remote control, I never quite understood why these codes were _there_ and so _easy_ to find.
Sure, DVD players are an international product and the region is selected after manufacturing a player.
But those in the business who actually wanted the region protection to succeed could have easily forced the manufacturers to make region-hacks more difficult. Manufacturers could have been forced to actually lock the region-code some way or the other.
E.g. the Pioneer 444 requires changing its firmware and it doesn't use firmware-upgrades through CDs as many of the Asian DVD players do, so making it region-free requires a lot more effort and cost. It's been hacked, as well, but it's pricy.
So all in all, it seems almost as if the DVD player manufacturers did not want the movie industry's plan to succeed...
Any version from 3.0 onwards will have 600+ excellent quality TrueType and.pfb fonts
I'm neither a designer nor a typography expert, but even I remember that those 600+ excellent quality fonts where quite crappy for the most part. Some of them nice on paper, but almost all of them awful on screen.
I'm quite surprised about your comment. Did anybody actually tell you that you have to contribute design to OSS projects? Is anybody ungrateful that you don't? Really? I certainly don't care if you contribute or not.
If you don't like the design of an OSS project, and you know a way to improve it, the only one to change it is you. Scratch your own itch.
Our hobbies are our jobs and vice versa. We get paid doing something we truly love to do.
So do "we". Really, where's the difference to "us programmers"? You make a rather strict distinction between "your" camp and "our" camp, however I see no difference at all.
I get paid for programming. I work with several professional designers who get paid for design. Get paid a lot. These guys know nothing about programming, but they enjoy doing web, usability and gui design. They also contribute to some free projects. From time to time. When they enjoy the project. For the same reasons as myself when I contribute.
The biggest problem of most OSS projects is they do not make themselves available to people like me.
"We" do. There are people "like you" who contribute. "We" listen to them. "They" listen to us.
If you want to help, go ahead, do it. Don't complain in advance that noone will listen to you before you tried.
Nobody is stopping you from joining a mailing list and giving your design contributions. Nobody. If you want to contribute, start today.
Designers aren't as vein as many make them out to be. We take pride in having our work displayed but we also like to be compensated for our efforts.
People in OSS don't work for free just for vanity points. It's a part of the motivation, but it's not the reason.
Most OSS projects provide basic infrastructure. OS kernels, web servers, DNS servers, mail servers, GUI frameworks aren't exactly sexy projects. These things are initiated because someone wanted it and others helped because they saw a way to improve it according to their own needs: "Scratching an itch." If design is your itch, scratch it, for the benefit of others.
Show me a Web site that needs all that crap, THEN we have a deal.:)
Well, entertainment sites, like http://www.heavy.com, http://www.edgar.de or http://www.k1010.de - sure, nobody needs these sites. But such sites need these technologies.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry for the minor nitpick.
Thanks!
But the point still stands: The offer is given to the original client, who can then hand over the offer to any third party. But initially, any third party can't demand access to the source... At least, that's how I understand it.
- if you use GPL'd source code as the code base of your product, you can still sell your product for any price you want and you are allowed to ship your product without source code
- you must, however, make the full source code available upon request to those who bought your product, and you are allowed to charge a reasonable fee for this service (which means, afaik, the copying and media cost, but not an added sales price)
- and - now HERE'S THE CATCH - you can't dictate those who have access to your source code (i.e. the buyers of your product) what they do with it.
The philosophy of the GPL is NOT you must give out full free source code but you must allow access the full source code to your client AND you can't tell him what to do with it. This last part is the "free" in "free software".You can't stop your client from developing (and selling!) his own version of your original product, you can't stop your client from giving away the source for free, you can't stop your client from posting the source on a public internet server etc.
Of course, as a result most GPL'd software isn't "sold" as a product, but as a service. I don't sell Apache to my clients, but they pay me for installing and maintaining their web servers, which is a service for them, not a software they buy.
E.g., when I modify a GPL'd software for a client (which I have done in the past), I charge my client by the hour for the service of modifying it, but I don't charge the client for, say, a license of "Hanno Mueller's version of XYZ version 0.1".
And since I have already been paid for the modification, I return the patch to the maintainers of the software, who may or may not use it.
Ok, what is it with those damn Germans and David Hasselhoff?
Oh, this was written by Austrians, so don't insult them by calling them Germans.
That said, being a German, I am as puzzled as you are about why Hasselhoff became so popular over here. Knight Rider was a nice afternoon TV show among the A-Team/The Fall Guy/etc. crowd, but why his "singing career" was mostly here in Germany: I don't know, I don't know.
Then again, you Americans have Yanni. So you have no reason to complain about Germany's music taste, either.
Syncing is for the weak!
Hear my story: I synced all my Palm stuff with my laptop on a daily basis. Then a burglar targetted my hotel room - and took both PDA and laptop. Yay.
I just wish there was more laptop technology used
in desktop components. Modern desktops, even the
simple "just office work" PCs, are too
power-hungry, too hot, too loud. If desktops used
notebook CPUs, a major problem of these computers
would be solved...
Yes, I'd love to buy a Transmeta desktop mainboard
at my local PC reseller. At present, I can only
get a developer board at high prices through
imports. I want a consumer version. Please...
you led the engineering of MCI Mail, the first commercial email service to be connected to the Internet.
On a related note...
Spam is growing out of control and many
administrators now consider SMTP/email to
be broken by design.
Did the problem of unsolicited email, forged
addresses and falsified mail headers ever occur
in the early design of SMTP/email?
What was the opinion on internet abuse and
forgery back in the early days?
Do you think there is a possibility to replace
SMTP with a new design?
I am a technical person, I support copyright protection, believe in patents, have a brother working in the music industry and make my own music in a not-amateur-anymore band.
And yet I still think that the US patent system is horribly broken and that the music and movie industry are on the wrong path and that they must be stopped walking it.
Your point being?
What was the Church of Scientology thinking?
Allow me to point to two earlier postings to explain why Scientology does this:
They make enemies because they need enemies
Scientology is a pyramid scheme. The product? paranoia.
...WHY NIGERIAN SCAMMERS ALWAYS (ALWAYS!) WRITE IN ALL-CAPS.
These are pretty much the only messages I get written in all-caps.
Even the Korean spam I get uses a better writing style.
And all of the responses that the folks linked here got are written that way.
Are Africans for some reason obliged to write in all-caps?
P.S.: Slashdot's lameness filter stopped from writing this post in all-caps. So much for attempted humour.
Then buy the official Ghibli release.
This is not the official release, but a bootleg. The official release is region-coded. See nausicaa.net
There are official releases for Japan, Hongkong and Taiwan. All of them are region-coded.
That's what distributions are for... But currently, distributions rely that users check for updates every once in a while. Maybe distributions need an automated security upgrade status check whenever a system goes online.
I could imagine a ip-up.d script (for dialups) or cron job (for dedicated lines) that connects to a distribution mirror site, then asks for a current status of available security upgrades (using signed communication to avoid man-in-the-middle attacks).
If the system is found to run outdated packages, it could warn the user. If it runs dangerously insecure packages, it could even stop the insecure services, maybe even disconnect the machine.
In today's case, after dial-up the upgrade status check would stop any https-related services and tell the user how to update. If no update was available, it would allow the user to reactive the service but only after a stern warning that he should better wait for the updated packages.
Just a thought...
Easy. Hire an admin. Pay him to do it.
And then: Don't forget to get a new admin if your old admin leaves the job.
Those machines that have an admin are usually taken care of. But most security issues I see are with clients who have a server that some guy did the setup for some two or three years ago, then left a year later and since then nobody looked after the machine.
As one ad's catchphrase put it correctly you never talk about the server until it fails.
Being the guy in my little company who's responsible for updating the clients' servers, I often experience how clients have a hard time understanding that software support, updates and log checks are necessairy -- because from their perspective this is work without "results".
They can't check if I really did something when I give them a month's bill with x hours for security updates on their machine.
I often explain to them that this server care is a bit like toothbrushing... (Which, btw, is the actual name of that task we use in my company.)
Remember: "640 Kilobytes of computer memory ought to be enough for anybody."
I for one want a 6+ MPix consumer camera, just like I want a higher resolution DVD...
Oh boy, talk about not getting my facts right. It was a high five-digit Euro bill. Pretty hefty, nonetheless.
The local PC manufacturer and service company went bankrupt "directly" (they say) "because" its many local new media companies stopped paying their huge bills of hardware they already had delivered.
(Its the norm here in Germany to deliver the first merchandise after being paid with cash, but once you have a steady business with that client, deliver on bill. All these new media companies had a lot of cash to burn at the start, and did, and paid promptly, but we all know what happened at the end.)
This PC manufacturer was here in Hamburg for more than 20 years, so it wasn't a fly-by-night company that didn't know the trade. My own little company bought its computers there, they sold fine hardware and had good service. Yet once their shiny new media clients stopped paying, it was over.
I can also tell you about another hardware reseller I personally know who had a client that left a seven-digit Euro bill overdue for several months, endangering the very existence of his company.
This is what this business is like.
he people selling real products to the .com companies got rich
.COMs and then didn't get their money when suddenly all these .COMs went bankrupt one after another at more or less the same time.
.COM companies are now firing staff by the thousands.
.COM clients were gone.
Not quite, they just became part of the bubble. A number of these suppliers are now struggling because they...
1.) delivered expensive products to
(Also don't forget that many hardware products have a small profit margin despite being expensive, so that the manufacturer gets some profit when being paid, but loses a lot more when not being paid.)
2.) had to grow to follow the bubble - these companies increased staff, production output, products stocked in their warehouses etc. and now are too large for the remaining market after the burst.
That's one major reason why Telecom suppliers, server manufacturers, consulting firms and other suppliers to
3.) and both 1 and 2 lead to a loss of stock value of those companies that are listed at the stock market, which can also create a shortage of cash and kill a company even if it was quite able to survive after 1 and 2. But the psychology of the stock market is completely different issue.
So to sum up, everyone who did well because of the internet bubble is having problems now. Quite a few of those companies were also going belly-up because they suddenly were too big after their
...and their hilarious "Mars Propaganda Project" in preparation of upcoming Mars missions:
The purpose of the Mars Project is to create and deploy fossils and/or ruins suggesting the prior existence of life and/or civilisation on the surface of Mars. Possibilities include artefacts which connect to various aspects of the Bible or other Earth mythology. It is intended that this is accomplished before NASA or some other agency sends amanned mission to Mars.
Link to archived site since original page is down.
(Their faq is still a classic of internet humour...)
Europe have much less censorchip of movies than the US!
Nope. Europe has a very different censorship than the US.
We in Europe don't mind nudity or sexuality on screen - as long as it serves the story. (Porn is usually defined as nudity/sexuality without a plot. The French take this very literally - there are movies that show explicit sexual intercourse but that are not rated "porn" in France.)
However, our censors get all giddy-up with violent / numb action movies.
The US seems to be the other way round. Violence is ok, even in kid's movies, while a nipple can already be enough to qualify for an R rating. Eddie Murphy's "Boomerang" made a nice parody on this where an advertisement featured all sorts of atrocities, but a woman's breast was too much for the target audience...
Oops, sorry about that. Nevertheless, PAL and SECAM both use 50 Hz, so there is no frequency change necessairy as in NTSC->PAL, which is what I really tried to say.
Japan and Europe both share DVD region 2, but some European TV sets can't display NTSC or the 60 Hz Pseudo-PAL created by some DVD players, which is something that non-technical won't understand.
Censorship. Most European countries have their own version on the MPAA rating scheme. What's OK in the UK might not be in France, and vice versa. So there end up being a dozen different little cuts that have to be made to get the rating
Wrong example. UK and France share the same region code 2 and both use the PAL system, so any French DVD will play just fine in the UK and vice versa.
While I also made my Samsung 811 player region-free using a simple button sequenceon the remote control, I never quite understood why these codes were _there_ and so _easy_ to find.
Sure, DVD players are an international product and the region is selected after manufacturing a player.
But those in the business who actually wanted the region protection to succeed could have easily forced the manufacturers to make region-hacks more difficult. Manufacturers could have been forced to actually lock the region-code some way or the other.
E.g. the Pioneer 444 requires changing its firmware and it doesn't use firmware-upgrades through CDs as many of the Asian DVD players do, so making it region-free requires a lot more effort and cost. It's been hacked, as well, but it's pricy.
So all in all, it seems almost as if the DVD player manufacturers did not want the movie industry's plan to succeed...
Any version from 3.0 onwards will have 600+ excellent quality TrueType and .pfb fonts
I'm neither a designer nor a typography expert, but even I remember that those 600+ excellent quality fonts where quite crappy for the most part. Some of them nice on paper, but almost all of them awful on screen.
I'm quite surprised about your comment. Did anybody actually tell you that you have to contribute design to OSS projects? Is anybody ungrateful that you don't? Really? I certainly don't care if you contribute or not.
If you don't like the design of an OSS project, and you know a way to improve it, the only one to change it is you. Scratch your own itch.
Our hobbies are our jobs and vice versa. We get paid doing something we truly love to do.
So do "we". Really, where's the difference to "us programmers"? You make a rather strict distinction between "your" camp and "our" camp, however I see no difference at all.
I get paid for programming. I work with several professional designers who get paid for design. Get paid a lot. These guys know nothing about programming, but they enjoy doing web, usability and gui design. They also contribute to some free projects. From time to time. When they enjoy the project. For the same reasons as myself when I contribute.
The biggest problem of most OSS projects is they do not make themselves available to people like me.
"We" do. There are people "like you" who contribute. "We" listen to them. "They" listen to us.
If you want to help, go ahead, do it. Don't complain in advance that noone will listen to you before you tried.
Nobody is stopping you from joining a mailing list and giving your design contributions. Nobody. If you want to contribute, start today.
Designers aren't as vein as many make them out to be. We take pride in having our work displayed but we also like to be compensated for our efforts.
People in OSS don't work for free just for vanity points. It's a part of the motivation, but it's not the reason.
Most OSS projects provide basic infrastructure. OS kernels, web servers, DNS servers, mail servers, GUI frameworks aren't exactly sexy projects. These things are initiated because someone wanted it and others helped because they saw a way to improve it according to their own needs: "Scratching an itch." If design is your itch, scratch it, for the benefit of others.
Show me a Web site that needs all that crap, THEN we have a deal. :)
Well, entertainment sites, like http://www.heavy.com, http://www.edgar.de or http://www.k1010.de - sure, nobody needs these sites. But such sites need these technologies.
It's 4:24 in the morning at your place. There are different time zones around the world, imagine that. Oh, how I love the US-centric view... :-)