First off, I have looked at the (laundry) list of licenses and at who wrote the code, so what's your basis for saying that my comment is utter bullshit? What I had to say had nothing to do with whether or not the GPL is valid, preferable, or anything else. What I was trying (and did) say was that copyright is copyright. Could it hurt anything other than pride to ask the original copyright holders (if other than FSF) if they cared?
Obviously, you have your own opinions about the GPL which prevents you from seeing the points in my message. Once again, what I said was that RMS's editorial was very poorly worded in that the term "forgiveness" should have been striken and "permission" should be substituted (or something to that effect). After all, we're talking copyright assignments here, NOT (and I repeat NOT) whether or not the GPL is pinko-commie or whatever you personally believe.
Oh, just realised that you're posting as AC, so I guess I can forget about any reasonable discussion on this subject.
I'll start out with the usual "I'm definitely not a lawyer, but I play one on TV"...
Having dealt with copyright issues in the past, I can say this much: while poorly worded, RMS's notion that the KDE developers must write to the original copyright holders of any code that they "reused" is valid. Not that I'm saying that what they did was morally wrong (or even legally), but reuse of copyrighted materials is a touchy subject (despite licensing). I see it akin to using a quote or photo from a book in the library and then publishing the quote without proper credit or permission. Yes, the book is "freely available" and yes, the words and pictures within are as well, but the book is still subject to the copyrights of the publisher and/or author. Say someone pointed out that they knew that you used the quote/photo from the book and that proper permission was not obtained prior to you publishing your work. Even if you obtain permission, unless explicitely stated, the permission is NOT retroactive and won't cover anything that you've already distributed (it may even require a second printing) and the copyright holder is still entitled to royalties or damages based no whatever you've already vended.
Ok, that being said, let's take a look at this issue. Who knows if the copyright holders of the original software whose code the KDE team "reused" are upset about this? Who knows if they don't even want KDE to contain even so much as one line of their code? NOBODY...at least not until someone asks. While I'm not positive that this is what RMS is trying to say, I believe that's what he's really getting at. The KDE team needs to realise that clarifying licensing issues involves more than just changing words...it also involves making sure that any past transgressions are corrected to the best of their ability. If this means rewriting the offending code or asking the original authors of said code for their "stamp of approval" on their past, present, and future use of their code, then I don't see why they don't just do it? If they're serious about wanting to play in the GPL court, then why not put forth a bit more effort towards doing this correctly and a bit less effort towards making all of their "responces" so public.
First off, as I just wrote in a reply to another message, why is it that nobody has started class-action lawsuits against "information-gathering" companies for invasion of privacy? I think end-users and other people reverse-engineering hardware/software need to start playing the game the way the corporations do: proactively. Why spend tons of money on defending against these clowns when we should be suing them for the various things that corporations always seem to do: defamation of character, invasion of privacy, misuse of information that isn't explicitely given by the end-user, etc. I say, rather than only defending against them, countersue.
As always, IANAL, but I would be happy to ask a corporate law attorney about this type of situation (and probably will...I know a few). Coming from a background in the medical field as well, I know that, if a hospital were misusing your information, you'd be climbing all over them with lawyers. For instance, a patient who's been diagnosed with HIV or AIDS has privacy rights that extend so far that the doctor cannot even tell your spouse or blood relatives about your condition without explicit consent (which is often on paper and extremely rarely verbally given). After all, explicit and informed consent must be given to any member of the medical profession before any kind of release of information is legally allowed. Why aren't similar laws enacted that enable the same type of consent practices and protections in the technology fields? I personally don't mind if Digital Convergence gathers information about me and my scanning habits if I knowingly consent to this, but I do mind if they sell that information without my consent to a third party. A medical correlation would be me gathering patient info and selling disease and injury statistics from that info WITH patient names to a third party (which is just plain illegal).
As I see stories quite often involving privacy and personal property, I'm beginning to wonder just what in my house is actually legally owned by me (which is sad). I think it's time that we "draw the line" and establish that the individual has rights as well and that idle threats and suits by corporations shouldn't be tolerated by the common person. I'm quite aware of the fact that many/. readers are from outside of the USA and, if the companies want to start trying to file suit against you (see DeCSS case), then you need to study the laws of your respective countries and try to establish legal precendent in this arena as well (since it's been established that you're NOT immune from prosecution or attempted prosecution at this point). For the USA folks, write your congressmen and call your lawyers. Let them know that your privacy is being threatened and that corprations are using strong-armed tactics against the individual in order to protect their profit streams, no matter how poorly thought-out their business model is. Granted, we may not get far, but if even one person wins a case against a corporation in a situation like this, it will establish a legal precendent that can be used and referred to in later cases.
A better idea might be to file a class-action suit against them for invasion of privacy WRT their spying software. Why are we always trying to defend against the corporations when we haven't really tried playing their game? I think everyone should just sue them instead for profiting off of information that we did not knowingly and voluntarily offer.
I believe that the reasoning behind "stating" (and I use that term very loosely) that the defendants were advocates of piracy is to charaterise them more like defendants in a criminal trial rather than defendants in a civil suit, and thus trying to sway the opinion of the court (judge). I believe the wording, while intentional towards damaging the character of the defendants, not intended to be damaging to the rest of the Open Source/free software movement (doubt they intended on us reading it, actually). Let's put it this way, they want to convince a judge that the defendants should be held culpable for their actions regardless of their extra-state locales. The only way to do this is to characterise them as criminals and not as defendants in your common civil cases (you'd be surprised how stupid the average civil case is...makes The People's Court look serious).
Actually, I think they would refuse the FBI, honestly. They're EXTREMELY territorial about their duties and will cooperate with a law enforcement investigation, but only under very stringent conditions. Believe me, even the FBI doesn't like dealing with the USPS and would much rather tap a phone line than read your mail. It's just too much trouble to read your mail in most cases.
The FBI can't declare jurisdiction over USPS matters. The USPS is NOT a government agency (it's a wholly-owned subsidiary, but still a distinct, non-governmental entity), and therefore, the FBI needs to obtain even more paperwork than usual to be able to view anything that's carried by the USPS. Besides, if the FBI starts policing postal problems, then what would become of all of those Postal Police folks?
I have to admit, the USPS is one of the better public postal services in the world. Sure, things get screwed up here and there, but given the amount of correspondence that they handle, the percentage is EXTREMELY low (losing mail usually happens to me, so don't think I'm saying I'm a sparklingly happy customer).
The way I see it, this is just Step One in moving from the traditional "tree-killing" method of messaging to a more modern method. I personally prefer email (read: FASTER) over postal mail any day of the week.
My question is, when are they going to start assigning IPs to our houses?
In short, it's worth it. In addition to MANY new packages and bugfixes, Debian 2.2 is based on glibc 2.1.3 and (finally) the 2.2.x kernel series. Great pains were taken to make sure that this is the best release yet, quality- and quantity-wise.
Having known and worked with Joel over the years that I've been a Debian developer, I'm confident that he would be very proud of this release and the work that went into it (his included...he busted his a** to make sure that glibc issues were taken care of). I'm honoured to have put work into Debian 2.2 knowing that it would bear his name upon release.
Yes and no. I think they COULD have gone that route (and probably do this for some of their other projects), but the SETI@home project, in my estimation, is more about making people more aware of their mission. Also, SETI has *ALOT* of things going on and limited resources, so I'm guessing that this was probably an interesting solution to their resource allocation problems.
Is it just me or has this practice been going on for quite some time? Various things often entice journalists (and often entire magazines) to ally themselves with one particular company or software product, whether those things be free software, personal beliefs, or sometimes, boatloads of money and endorsements.
I find it a bit shady, though, that most of the "journalists" reporting on this don't even cite their sources, not to mention that they're reporting off of each other's stories, at this point. I'm not surprised that ZDNet picked up on this and spun it in the way that they did (since they've taken so much criticism and abuse from the Linux community in general), but for other sites to "continue" their story and research with very few direct quotes or names mentioned is ridiculous. When are the press-reading public going to realise that EVERY press agency and worker always inputs their own bias into every piece of work that they produce?
Like I said, this is a practice that's been going on probably since the first journalists. Who can honestly be objective about a subject that they have opinion about?
No problem. I made the point further in another post since more people than I thought were really taking that argument. It's really a shame that people feel the way that they do. It's also a shame that money is such an important factor and everyone who doesn't have a lot of money thinks that there's nothing that they can do about the problem overall. At least the NRC is recommending that NASA do the good thing rather than the idiotic thing. Hopefully, NASA will take the recommendation and run with it.
I think it's a shame that so many people are saying "why start now? NASA has been doing this for years". Yes, they have and we all know it, but does that make one more incident of "space pollution" any more right than the past? As I've already stated in a reply earlier, it's not about what WAS done, it's about what IS GOING TO BE done now. Using the arguments I've seen so far, it would be perfectly alright for the continued practices of slavery, non-consental human experimentation, unchecked slaughtering of endangered species, etc. After all, all of that stuff was "done before", so what would be the damage of doing it now? I find that to be a ridiculous argument/statement. It's like saying that people and agencies can't and shouldn't change their ways if they realise that they are wrong.
In this case, NASA wants to do "the right thing" for Europa and its potential and future. Yes, Galileo has basically lived out its usefulness and monetary budget, so it probably needs to be disposed of somehow, but why opt for the unsafe method? After all, Europa's water (or water-like compounds) may end up being used in the future by Earth space travellers in the future. Why take the time to clean it up then when we can just prevent the problem now?
I'm all for steering Galileo into the sun if everyone is so paranoid about Jupiter and Io also (which they shouldn't be...neither should be able to sustain even basic life on their own, not to mention any that Galileo might be carrying). But, given the options and probably time constraints, I would say Io and Jupiter are probably the best bets for a reasonably safe disposal.
Why should we start contaminating another orbiting rock, though? Yes, nobody disagrees that we should stop contaminating this planet, but just because the pollution of Earth is already ongoing, this doesn't excuse the decision to purposely contaminate another "world" that may end up in an evolutionary state eventually. Using the "why start now" excuse is very weak and doesn't even work here on Earth (why not just say "well, in the past, we've experimented on humans without their consent, so why not just keep doing it?"). The damage is done here, but not elsewhere yet, so why start now? If you disagree so strongly with the pollution of this planet, then you should surely object to intentionally polluting another. And, regarding your comments on the inhabitants of Europa getting pissed and saying something about it, I highly doubt that they would or could since conditions on Europa cannot support such a life form in our current estimation.
The argument about development and testing costs not being justified for little-used port platforms is easily rendered moot by one fact: they're giving this away. Sure, they may base a commercial product on it and, sure, that will cost money to develop and test on every platform/OS combination under the sun, so I could understand limited availability for commercial software. What I object to is that these "freely available" packages (especially JDKs, it seems) are really just a way for companies such as IBM, in this case, to tout their name as "supporting Linux". If they want to save a whole bunch of money on development and testing, give *US* the source and let us do the porting and tinkering that it takes. That's free labour! And would make the "lesser-used" port users happy as well. Also, bear in mind that some of the architectures, while technically in the minority as far as numbers go, are much more powerful and used more as larger scale servers than the often cheesy Intel machines that make up that "large market share". Let's face it, how many Intel-based desktops would it take to run some of the larger sites on the net?
I agree. I use and develop for Debian's Alpha release of Linux and it's getting horribly irritating how many companies claim to support "Linux" when they really only support Intel-based Linux systems. I've even emailed a few to offer porting help, but to date, I've only received probably two responces (both of which were basically "not interested"). Just goes to show that even in their support of Linux, the almighty dollar and market share motivate these companies more than proliferation of their technology.
Debian isn't about having the latest versions of everything, mostly for the reason that plagues RedHat with every release - namely stability. Debian releases are known more for stability and upgradability over all other factors. Sure, they don't have the lastest minor revision number of every piece of software available, but I've NEVER had a problem with maintaining, upgrading, or running Debian (not so of RedHat...I've got five machines running RH now and can't wait to convert them over to Debian).
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First off, I have looked at the (laundry) list of licenses and at who wrote the code, so what's your basis for saying that my comment is utter bullshit? What I had to say had nothing to do with whether or not the GPL is valid, preferable, or anything else. What I was trying (and did) say was that copyright is copyright. Could it hurt anything other than pride to ask the original copyright holders (if other than FSF) if they cared?
Obviously, you have your own opinions about the GPL which prevents you from seeing the points in my message. Once again, what I said was that RMS's editorial was very poorly worded in that the term "forgiveness" should have been striken and "permission" should be substituted (or something to that effect). After all, we're talking copyright assignments here, NOT (and I repeat NOT) whether or not the GPL is pinko-commie or whatever you personally believe.
Oh, just realised that you're posting as AC, so I guess I can forget about any reasonable discussion on this subject.
I'll start out with the usual "I'm definitely not a lawyer, but I play one on TV"...
Having dealt with copyright issues in the past, I can say this much: while poorly worded, RMS's notion that the KDE developers must write to the original copyright holders of any code that they "reused" is valid. Not that I'm saying that what they did was morally wrong (or even legally), but reuse of copyrighted materials is a touchy subject (despite licensing). I see it akin to using a quote or photo from a book in the library and then publishing the quote without proper credit or permission. Yes, the book is "freely available" and yes, the words and pictures within are as well, but the book is still subject to the copyrights of the publisher and/or author. Say someone pointed out that they knew that you used the quote/photo from the book and that proper permission was not obtained prior to you publishing your work. Even if you obtain permission, unless explicitely stated, the permission is NOT retroactive and won't cover anything that you've already distributed (it may even require a second printing) and the copyright holder is still entitled to royalties or damages based no whatever you've already vended.
Ok, that being said, let's take a look at this issue. Who knows if the copyright holders of the original software whose code the KDE team "reused" are upset about this? Who knows if they don't even want KDE to contain even so much as one line of their code? NOBODY...at least not until someone asks. While I'm not positive that this is what RMS is trying to say, I believe that's what he's really getting at. The KDE team needs to realise that clarifying licensing issues involves more than just changing words...it also involves making sure that any past transgressions are corrected to the best of their ability. If this means rewriting the offending code or asking the original authors of said code for their "stamp of approval" on their past, present, and future use of their code, then I don't see why they don't just do it? If they're serious about wanting to play in the GPL court, then why not put forth a bit more effort towards doing this correctly and a bit less effort towards making all of their "responces" so public.
First off, as I just wrote in a reply to another message, why is it that nobody has started class-action lawsuits against "information-gathering" companies for invasion of privacy? I think end-users and other people reverse-engineering hardware/software need to start playing the game the way the corporations do: proactively. Why spend tons of money on defending against these clowns when we should be suing them for the various things that corporations always seem to do: defamation of character, invasion of privacy, misuse of information that isn't explicitely given by the end-user, etc. I say, rather than only defending against them, countersue.
As always, IANAL, but I would be happy to ask a corporate law attorney about this type of situation (and probably will...I know a few). Coming from a background in the medical field as well, I know that, if a hospital were misusing your information, you'd be climbing all over them with lawyers. For instance, a patient who's been diagnosed with HIV or AIDS has privacy rights that extend so far that the doctor cannot even tell your spouse or blood relatives about your condition without explicit consent (which is often on paper and extremely rarely verbally given). After all, explicit and informed consent must be given to any member of the medical profession before any kind of release of information is legally allowed. Why aren't similar laws enacted that enable the same type of consent practices and protections in the technology fields? I personally don't mind if Digital Convergence gathers information about me and my scanning habits if I knowingly consent to this, but I do mind if they sell that information without my consent to a third party. A medical correlation would be me gathering patient info and selling disease and injury statistics from that info WITH patient names to a third party (which is just plain illegal).
As I see stories quite often involving privacy and personal property, I'm beginning to wonder just what in my house is actually legally owned by me (which is sad). I think it's time that we "draw the line" and establish that the individual has rights as well and that idle threats and suits by corporations shouldn't be tolerated by the common person. I'm quite aware of the fact that many /. readers are from outside of the USA and, if the companies want to start trying to file suit against you (see DeCSS case), then you need to study the laws of your respective countries and try to establish legal precendent in this arena as well (since it's been established that you're NOT immune from prosecution or attempted prosecution at this point). For the USA folks, write your congressmen and call your lawyers. Let them know that your privacy is being threatened and that corprations are using strong-armed tactics against the individual in order to protect their profit streams, no matter how poorly thought-out their business model is. Granted, we may not get far, but if even one person wins a case against a corporation in a situation like this, it will establish a legal precendent that can be used and referred to in later cases.
A better idea might be to file a class-action suit against them for invasion of privacy WRT their spying software. Why are we always trying to defend against the corporations when we haven't really tried playing their game? I think everyone should just sue them instead for profiting off of information that we did not knowingly and voluntarily offer.
I believe that the reasoning behind "stating" (and I use that term very loosely) that the defendants were advocates of piracy is to charaterise them more like defendants in a criminal trial rather than defendants in a civil suit, and thus trying to sway the opinion of the court (judge). I believe the wording, while intentional towards damaging the character of the defendants, not intended to be damaging to the rest of the Open Source/free software movement (doubt they intended on us reading it, actually). Let's put it this way, they want to convince a judge that the defendants should be held culpable for their actions regardless of their extra-state locales. The only way to do this is to characterise them as criminals and not as defendants in your common civil cases (you'd be surprised how stupid the average civil case is...makes The People's Court look serious).
Actually, I think they would refuse the FBI, honestly. They're EXTREMELY territorial about their duties and will cooperate with a law enforcement investigation, but only under very stringent conditions. Believe me, even the FBI doesn't like dealing with the USPS and would much rather tap a phone line than read your mail. It's just too much trouble to read your mail in most cases.
I have news for you, it already is, but not many pursue it due to the fact that most people can't claim real damages...
The FBI can't declare jurisdiction over USPS matters. The USPS is NOT a government agency (it's a wholly-owned subsidiary, but still a distinct, non-governmental entity), and therefore, the FBI needs to obtain even more paperwork than usual to be able to view anything that's carried by the USPS. Besides, if the FBI starts policing postal problems, then what would become of all of those Postal Police folks?
I have to admit, the USPS is one of the better public postal services in the world. Sure, things get screwed up here and there, but given the amount of correspondence that they handle, the percentage is EXTREMELY low (losing mail usually happens to me, so don't think I'm saying I'm a sparklingly happy customer).
The way I see it, this is just Step One in moving from the traditional "tree-killing" method of messaging to a more modern method. I personally prefer email (read: FASTER) over postal mail any day of the week.
My question is, when are they going to start assigning IPs to our houses?
In short, it's worth it. In addition to MANY new packages and bugfixes, Debian 2.2 is based on glibc 2.1.3 and (finally) the 2.2.x kernel series. Great pains were taken to make sure that this is the best release yet, quality- and quantity-wise.
Having known and worked with Joel over the years that I've been a Debian developer, I'm confident that he would be very proud of this release and the work that went into it (his included...he busted his a** to make sure that glibc issues were taken care of). I'm honoured to have put work into Debian 2.2 knowing that it would bear his name upon release.
Yes and no. I think they COULD have gone that route (and probably do this for some of their other projects), but the SETI@home project, in my estimation, is more about making people more aware of their mission. Also, SETI has *ALOT* of things going on and limited resources, so I'm guessing that this was probably an interesting solution to their resource allocation problems.
Is it just me or has this practice been going on for quite some time? Various things often entice journalists (and often entire magazines) to ally themselves with one particular company or software product, whether those things be free software, personal beliefs, or sometimes, boatloads of money and endorsements.
I find it a bit shady, though, that most of the "journalists" reporting on this don't even cite their sources, not to mention that they're reporting off of each other's stories, at this point. I'm not surprised that ZDNet picked up on this and spun it in the way that they did (since they've taken so much criticism and abuse from the Linux community in general), but for other sites to "continue" their story and research with very few direct quotes or names mentioned is ridiculous. When are the press-reading public going to realise that EVERY press agency and worker always inputs their own bias into every piece of work that they produce?
Like I said, this is a practice that's been going on probably since the first journalists. Who can honestly be objective about a subject that they have opinion about?
No problem. I made the point further in another post since more people than I thought were really taking that argument. It's really a shame that people feel the way that they do. It's also a shame that money is such an important factor and everyone who doesn't have a lot of money thinks that there's nothing that they can do about the problem overall. At least the NRC is recommending that NASA do the good thing rather than the idiotic thing. Hopefully, NASA will take the recommendation and run with it.
I think it's a shame that so many people are saying "why start now? NASA has been doing this for years". Yes, they have and we all know it, but does that make one more incident of "space pollution" any more right than the past? As I've already stated in a reply earlier, it's not about what WAS done, it's about what IS GOING TO BE done now. Using the arguments I've seen so far, it would be perfectly alright for the continued practices of slavery, non-consental human experimentation, unchecked slaughtering of endangered species, etc. After all, all of that stuff was "done before", so what would be the damage of doing it now? I find that to be a ridiculous argument/statement. It's like saying that people and agencies can't and shouldn't change their ways if they realise that they are wrong.
In this case, NASA wants to do "the right thing" for Europa and its potential and future. Yes, Galileo has basically lived out its usefulness and monetary budget, so it probably needs to be disposed of somehow, but why opt for the unsafe method? After all, Europa's water (or water-like compounds) may end up being used in the future by Earth space travellers in the future. Why take the time to clean it up then when we can just prevent the problem now?
I'm all for steering Galileo into the sun if everyone is so paranoid about Jupiter and Io also (which they shouldn't be...neither should be able to sustain even basic life on their own, not to mention any that Galileo might be carrying). But, given the options and probably time constraints, I would say Io and Jupiter are probably the best bets for a reasonably safe disposal.
Why should we start contaminating another orbiting rock, though? Yes, nobody disagrees that we should stop contaminating this planet, but just because the pollution of Earth is already ongoing, this doesn't excuse the decision to purposely contaminate another "world" that may end up in an evolutionary state eventually. Using the "why start now" excuse is very weak and doesn't even work here on Earth (why not just say "well, in the past, we've experimented on humans without their consent, so why not just keep doing it?"). The damage is done here, but not elsewhere yet, so why start now? If you disagree so strongly with the pollution of this planet, then you should surely object to intentionally polluting another. And, regarding your comments on the inhabitants of Europa getting pissed and saying something about it, I highly doubt that they would or could since conditions on Europa cannot support such a life form in our current estimation.
The argument about development and testing costs not being justified for little-used port platforms is easily rendered moot by one fact: they're giving this away. Sure, they may base a commercial product on it and, sure, that will cost money to develop and test on every platform/OS combination under the sun, so I could understand limited availability for commercial software. What I object to is that these "freely available" packages (especially JDKs, it seems) are really just a way for companies such as IBM, in this case, to tout their name as "supporting Linux". If they want to save a whole bunch of money on development and testing, give *US* the source and let us do the porting and tinkering that it takes. That's free labour! And would make the "lesser-used" port users happy as well. Also, bear in mind that some of the architectures, while technically in the minority as far as numbers go, are much more powerful and used more as larger scale servers than the often cheesy Intel machines that make up that "large market share". Let's face it, how many Intel-based desktops would it take to run some of the larger sites on the net?
I agree. I use and develop for Debian's Alpha release of Linux and it's getting horribly irritating how many companies claim to support "Linux" when they really only support Intel-based Linux systems. I've even emailed a few to offer porting help, but to date, I've only received probably two responces (both of which were basically "not interested"). Just goes to show that even in their support of Linux, the almighty dollar and market share motivate these companies more than proliferation of their technology.
Debian isn't about having the latest versions of everything, mostly for the reason that plagues RedHat with every release - namely stability. Debian releases are known more for stability and upgradability over all other factors. Sure, they don't have the lastest minor revision number of every piece of software available, but I've NEVER had a problem with maintaining, upgrading, or running Debian (not so of RedHat...I've got five machines running RH now and can't wait to convert them over to Debian).