I dispute that the BSDL is more free than the GPL. It is only more free at the point of origin. There is no incentive to keep derivatives open, and thus the code quickly becomes less free.
You seem to be taking a lot of things as absolutes that simply aren't. You should reread all these posts you've responded to, and consider them, as every one of them make a valid point.
But that seems like a stupid name for a search utility to people like me who don't know anything about hunting dogs. I mean, what does a blood sucking insect have to do with finding stuff?
Most people at least know what a beagle is, and can make the connection well enough to remember the name. (I almost said everyone, but I spent way too long trying to explain my "Citizens for a Poodle Free Montana" t-shirt to a chinese guy the other day).
Traditional file search isn't good enough since in addition to being too brain atrophied to navigate a file system, they also think that "Document 1" is a reasonable naming convention.
OK, but where does that meta-data come from? There has to be some amount of human input into the process of generating it, both in determining what catagories exist and what catagories an individual file belongs to. Is there really that much gained over simply using an intelligent directory structure? And, more importanttly, does that gain still exist for the people who don't bother to think about organizing their data now?
Large companies do actually pay themselves for their own products. Yeah, it seems kind of pointless and circular, but it's necessary to keep their accounting straight.
Now, it may be true that they aren't paying for service contracts or licensing fees, but if that's the case it's due to the nature of Linux, not an inherent benefit of eating their own dog food.
As pointed out above, there was a 7.3. There was also a 6.4. I don't pretend to understand what they're versioning system is based on, but I can say it's more complex than what you've laid out.
Please! If that were true, Active Directory would be more than just a cheap immitation of NDS, which in my admitedly limited experience is an absolute joy to work with.
It's called x500. It's an industry standard, much like the better known 7-layer networking stack. You can learn more than you ever wanted to know about it in your local community college's Network Operating Systems class.
Well, if we wanted it to be totally free for anyone to use with absulutely no restrictions, we'd make it Public Domain. Anything else implies a desire to maintain some sort of control.
The non-advertisement BSD is completely pointless. "I'm retaining copyright for absolutely no reason at all." Great. Why?
I think in most cases it comes down to compensation. It's a peculiar modernism that compensation must be financial. Seeing a project one started get adopted by a wider audience, and thus grow into something bigger and/or better is gratifying. Having someone come along and grab up all that work and horde it to themselves without any compensation isn't.
Likewise, when a community comes together to create a nice park for everyone to enjoy, it really sucks when some jackass comes in and trashes it.
A CD is more than just the music recorded on it. It also has artwork, liner notes, lyrics, etc, which can enhance the experience of the user. And yes, that is actually a big part of my reason for buying CDs.
Additionally, in most cases that realization is false. Musicians who are likely to have their music downloaded pretty much have to have their CD go gold, or in many cases beyond that, in order to break even on their recording contract. Yes, record label contracts really are that bad. 2% of sales is a typical artists cut, and all of that goes to the label until the advance is paid off, which is normally in the neighborhood of $300k (which seems like a lot, until you realize that's generally the entire production budget, including living expenses for the entire band for the year or so it takes to make a "real" album.)
Where these artists actually make their money is concert ticket sales and merchandise, such as t-shirts, which they generally retain the rights to.
Now, independent artists, like you might see at a local punk show or street fair, with CDs for sale at a small folding table presided over by the drummer's girlfriend, may actually make money from CD sales.
FWIW, I'm an ex-musician, and I know people involved in every facet of the music industry.
Actually, it's been done. In the particular article I read (Discover, 6+ years ago), a guy was using an evolutionary process to develope a chip that could differentiate between signals of 2 different frequencies without a reference clock. The designs he ended up with were up to an order of magnitude more efficient than the best available human design (in terms of transistors used to accomplish the task).
Since it was a Discover article, it was obviously short on details, but there was some indication that these designs were able to leverage some of the interactions that go on inside a chip that humans normally try to eliminate or compensate for, like "unconnected" cells being able to communicate with each other, possible through the substrate or maybe by induction. I also remember that at least one promising branch had to be disqualified as it turned out to be using some minor but consistent fluxuations in the test equipment as a reference, but not in a way that would work when it was hooked up to a different set of equipment.
Somehow I doubt the march of progress is going to stop here. It's far more likely that this is only the beginning, a jumping off point, like Columbus bumping into the West Indies.
Having the whole GPL licensing system depend on the voluntary efforts of one individual strikes me as a fragile setup.
So? That's how it's always been, for any licensing system. Some are inforced by a single average person, some are enforced by wealthy individuals, some are enforced by corporations or other economic constructs designed to distribute/dilute liability, but in the end it all comes down to one thing: the will to persue the claim and spend resources doing so that could have been devoted to something else.
That's inherent in any civil action, and I can think of no good reason to make IP infringement a criminal offense.
Welte donates his own time and takes all the financial risk... he's eventually going to get bored, get sick, get too involved in his day job, die, whatever.
That was his choice. I don't think anyone forced him to release his code under the GPL. Besides, if he does eventually become unwilling or incapable he can always assign his rights to the EFF, as many others have done.
This only works because everybody he's gone after has quietly backed down.
That's all anyone has ever done in the face of a GPL violation. That's because the GPL is an incredibly strong license, basically impossible to wriggle out of. You should read some of the thing Lawrence Lessig has to say about enforcing the GPL.
But suppose just one company takes the "fuck you" approach?
Then they get fucked.
There are very good reasons why this has never happened in the ~20 year history of the GPL. The GPL takes no rights away that one would normally have under copyright law, and grants rights that one would not otherwise have. The balance of give and take is in many cases the only thing that matters in contract/licensing disputes, and since the GPL is legally all give and no take, any dispute will start off heavily weighted in favor of it.
Even if the extremely unlikely event that the GPL is ruled invalid, then the "winner" in fact wins nothing, but only loses the rights the GPL granted them. So, there's really no incentive to even persue that course anyway.
Again, read some of Lessig's writings on the subject. He explains it better than I.
Anyway, the GPL is not at all frigile. That it has not been tested in court is actually evidence of its strength, as for that to happen someone would have to feel that they had found a weakness in it.
Well, at least you have someone. My wife works for the state of california, and IT in her office is done by a coworker who knows a few things and occasionally is able to find some spare time.
If you want your real job back, start documenting. If they're as bad as you say it shouldn't take too long for you to have enough data to prove it. Be sure to include a side-by-side comparison of how long it would take you to do the same thing, and if you're able to determine your burden rate, so you can give actual costs, that's even better.
Now for my related annecdote: at my previous company some manager decided they wanted to outsource my department (or as much of it as they could, anyway). When writing up the proposal they chose not to use our actual burden rate of ~$82, but rather our overtime billing rate of $150 (yes, billing, as in what we charged our customers). Why? Because they company they'd decided to outsource to charged $125 an hour.
Now, everyone knew what the guy did, and that his numbers were completely bogus. Management decided to bury their head in the sand, and even now, a few years later, they continue to outsource anything they can to this same company.
So, good luck. Any efforts you make may be in vain. OTOH, my leaving that company had nothing to do with their outsourcing attempts. My wife had to relocate for her job, and I chose to go with her.
If you don't protect your copyrights you can lose them.
You're confused. It's trademarks you have to protect. Copyright used to be that way, but isn't anymore.
And, if you've been around as long as you claim, you know that wasn't why AT&T "gave up", but rather that their code was so contaminated with unattributed BSD code that they were in serious danger of having the balance of offense tip against them.
And SCO has NEVER produced anything to say they got the UNIX copyrights from Caldera.
Dude, SCOX is Caldera. Where the hell have you been?
The history of UNIX is so damn convoluted and full of things no one would do today with IP that I'm not sure anyone involved can prove what they own and don't own.
I'll agree with that. But, SCOX clearly has something, and whatever it is, it's percieved value is greater than 0 (at least in some circles). One of the saying popular in corporate management today is "perception is reality". Therefore, it seems prudent to ask what happens to whatever it is SCOX has, and maybe keep an eye on it lest it end up in the hands of someone who's bought into McBrides version of things and this ends up being an ongoing problem.
Maybe you haven't been around long enough, or maybe you just weren't paying attention, but you simply don't know what the hell you're talking about. At the risk of being repetative, here it is again:
Before the current SCO v. Linux, et al, situation, during the transition from Caldera to SCOX, they open sourced a bunch of ancestral (i.e. pre-SysV) Unix code, and Novell didn't say shit about it, nor did anyone else. This is a fact. Feel free to search the slashdot archives, I'm sure you'll find a few articles about it.
This was NOT done by Novell, it was done by Caldera/SCO, and since Novell never said a word it is a reasonable bet that Caldera/SCO had the legal right to do so. This is a big part of their ownership claim on SysV. It is also a big part of of the Linux defense, since not only does SCO have to prove that there is Unix code residing in Linux, and that it doesn't derive from BSD, but also that it didn't come from the ancestral Unix code they themselves open-sourced.
Seriously, if you're going to start arguements over stuff like this, try learning the actual facts first.
I was a big fan of Nero back when I was a Windows user. Great software, especially compared to Adaptec/Roxio, but I honestly don't see what they have to offer the modern Linux user.
A few years ago I would have been really excited about this, but now it just seems like they're late to the party. Maybe I'm missing something, or have forgotten something in the 2+ years since I switched?
What claim SCO has to ancestral Unix is totally irrelevant to the IBM case, where SCO is trying to claim rights to code IBM wrote.
You must be very confused about the issues to be arguing my very simple and obvious origional point. It's you who needs to check the archives at Groklaw, specifically the agreements between SCO and Novell.
SCO clearly has some rights to Unix, even if there is confusion as to what those rights actually are. If you can't recognize that simple fact, then I see no reason to waste any more time on you.
Well, it's pretty common knowledge that acceptance letters go out in April. Trying to find out early is sort of trying to cheat the system.
Yeah, that's probably a case of hindsight being 20/20, and I can't say what I would have done if I were in that position, but that doesn't make it any less valid. That goes double in a situation where the school values ethics. It's not like real life isn't full of similar "grey areas".
I don't want to live in the kind of world where every little thing has to be spelled out, where anything that isn't explicitly forbiden is OK, or where ignorance of the law is a valid excuse. I've spent enough time in Corporate America to see that this is, in fact, exactly how most MBAs see things, and I think it's time for that to change.
Are you prepared to prove that every single line of ancestral Unix source they released was already public domain? If not, then you must concede that somebody owned the rights to at least some of that code, and since no one yelped when Caldera/SCO open sourced it, it seems a reasonable bet that their claim to it was strong.
Slashdot Mirror
I dispute that the BSDL is more free than the GPL. It is only more free at the point of origin. There is no incentive to keep derivatives open, and thus the code quickly becomes less free.
You seem to be taking a lot of things as absolutes that simply aren't. You should reread all these posts you've responded to, and consider them, as every one of them make a valid point.
Tell that to the PHBs.
But that seems like a stupid name for a search utility to people like me who don't know anything about hunting dogs. I mean, what does a blood sucking insect have to do with finding stuff?
Most people at least know what a beagle is, and can make the connection well enough to remember the name. (I almost said everyone, but I spent way too long trying to explain my "Citizens for a Poodle Free Montana" t-shirt to a chinese guy the other day).
Traditional file search isn't good enough since in addition to being too brain atrophied to navigate a file system, they also think that "Document 1" is a reasonable naming convention.
So, where does the meta-data come from?
OK, but where does that meta-data come from? There has to be some amount of human input into the process of generating it, both in determining what catagories exist and what catagories an individual file belongs to. Is there really that much gained over simply using an intelligent directory structure? And, more importanttly, does that gain still exist for the people who don't bother to think about organizing their data now?
Large companies do actually pay themselves for their own products. Yeah, it seems kind of pointless and circular, but it's necessary to keep their accounting straight.
Now, it may be true that they aren't paying for service contracts or licensing fees, but if that's the case it's due to the nature of Linux, not an inherent benefit of eating their own dog food.
As pointed out above, there was a 7.3. There was also a 6.4. I don't pretend to understand what they're versioning system is based on, but I can say it's more complex than what you've laid out.
Because Beagle provides functionality they feel is vital to the product?
(I know nothing about Beagle, but this just seems obvious to me)
Please! If that were true, Active Directory would be more than just a cheap immitation of NDS, which in my admitedly limited experience is an absolute joy to work with.
Hell, much of the terminology is identical
It's called x500. It's an industry standard, much like the better known 7-layer networking stack. You can learn more than you ever wanted to know about it in your local community college's Network Operating Systems class.
No, I think he means the old motorcycle company.
Well, if we wanted it to be totally free for anyone to use with absulutely no restrictions, we'd make it Public Domain. Anything else implies a desire to maintain some sort of control.
The non-advertisement BSD is completely pointless. "I'm retaining copyright for absolutely no reason at all." Great. Why?
I think in most cases it comes down to compensation. It's a peculiar modernism that compensation must be financial. Seeing a project one started get adopted by a wider audience, and thus grow into something bigger and/or better is gratifying. Having someone come along and grab up all that work and horde it to themselves without any compensation isn't.
Likewise, when a community comes together to create a nice park for everyone to enjoy, it really sucks when some jackass comes in and trashes it.
I disagree.
A CD is more than just the music recorded on it. It also has artwork, liner notes, lyrics, etc, which can enhance the experience of the user. And yes, that is actually a big part of my reason for buying CDs.
Additionally, in most cases that realization is false. Musicians who are likely to have their music downloaded pretty much have to have their CD go gold, or in many cases beyond that, in order to break even on their recording contract. Yes, record label contracts really are that bad. 2% of sales is a typical artists cut, and all of that goes to the label until the advance is paid off, which is normally in the neighborhood of $300k (which seems like a lot, until you realize that's generally the entire production budget, including living expenses for the entire band for the year or so it takes to make a "real" album.)
Where these artists actually make their money is concert ticket sales and merchandise, such as t-shirts, which they generally retain the rights to.
Now, independent artists, like you might see at a local punk show or street fair, with CDs for sale at a small folding table presided over by the drummer's girlfriend, may actually make money from CD sales.
FWIW, I'm an ex-musician, and I know people involved in every facet of the music industry.
Insightful? Hardly.
Actually, it's been done. In the particular article I read (Discover, 6+ years ago), a guy was using an evolutionary process to develope a chip that could differentiate between signals of 2 different frequencies without a reference clock. The designs he ended up with were up to an order of magnitude more efficient than the best available human design (in terms of transistors used to accomplish the task).
Since it was a Discover article, it was obviously short on details, but there was some indication that these designs were able to leverage some of the interactions that go on inside a chip that humans normally try to eliminate or compensate for, like "unconnected" cells being able to communicate with each other, possible through the substrate or maybe by induction. I also remember that at least one promising branch had to be disqualified as it turned out to be using some minor but consistent fluxuations in the test equipment as a reference, but not in a way that would work when it was hooked up to a different set of equipment.
Somehow I doubt the march of progress is going to stop here. It's far more likely that this is only the beginning, a jumping off point, like Columbus bumping into the West Indies.
Having the whole GPL licensing system depend on the voluntary efforts of one individual strikes me as a fragile setup.
So? That's how it's always been, for any licensing system. Some are inforced by a single average person, some are enforced by wealthy individuals, some are enforced by corporations or other economic constructs designed to distribute/dilute liability, but in the end it all comes down to one thing: the will to persue the claim and spend resources doing so that could have been devoted to something else.
That's inherent in any civil action, and I can think of no good reason to make IP infringement a criminal offense.
Welte donates his own time and takes all the financial risk... he's eventually going to get bored, get sick, get too involved in his day job, die, whatever.
That was his choice. I don't think anyone forced him to release his code under the GPL. Besides, if he does eventually become unwilling or incapable he can always assign his rights to the EFF, as many others have done.
This only works because everybody he's gone after has quietly backed down.
That's all anyone has ever done in the face of a GPL violation. That's because the GPL is an incredibly strong license, basically impossible to wriggle out of. You should read some of the thing Lawrence Lessig has to say about enforcing the GPL.
But suppose just one company takes the "fuck you" approach?
Then they get fucked.
There are very good reasons why this has never happened in the ~20 year history of the GPL. The GPL takes no rights away that one would normally have under copyright law, and grants rights that one would not otherwise have. The balance of give and take is in many cases the only thing that matters in contract/licensing disputes, and since the GPL is legally all give and no take, any dispute will start off heavily weighted in favor of it.
Even if the extremely unlikely event that the GPL is ruled invalid, then the "winner" in fact wins nothing, but only loses the rights the GPL granted them. So, there's really no incentive to even persue that course anyway.
Again, read some of Lessig's writings on the subject. He explains it better than I.
Anyway, the GPL is not at all frigile. That it has not been tested in court is actually evidence of its strength, as for that to happen someone would have to feel that they had found a weakness in it.
Well, at least you have someone. My wife works for the state of california, and IT in her office is done by a coworker who knows a few things and occasionally is able to find some spare time.
If you want your real job back, start documenting. If they're as bad as you say it shouldn't take too long for you to have enough data to prove it. Be sure to include a side-by-side comparison of how long it would take you to do the same thing, and if you're able to determine your burden rate, so you can give actual costs, that's even better.
Now for my related annecdote: at my previous company some manager decided they wanted to outsource my department (or as much of it as they could, anyway). When writing up the proposal they chose not to use our actual burden rate of ~$82, but rather our overtime billing rate of $150 (yes, billing, as in what we charged our customers). Why? Because they company they'd decided to outsource to charged $125 an hour.
Now, everyone knew what the guy did, and that his numbers were completely bogus. Management decided to bury their head in the sand, and even now, a few years later, they continue to outsource anything they can to this same company.
So, good luck. Any efforts you make may be in vain. OTOH, my leaving that company had nothing to do with their outsourcing attempts. My wife had to relocate for her job, and I chose to go with her.
If you don't protect your copyrights you can lose them.
You're confused. It's trademarks you have to protect. Copyright used to be that way, but isn't anymore.
And, if you've been around as long as you claim, you know that wasn't why AT&T "gave up", but rather that their code was so contaminated with unattributed BSD code that they were in serious danger of having the balance of offense tip against them.
And SCO has NEVER produced anything to say they got the UNIX copyrights from Caldera.
Dude, SCOX is Caldera. Where the hell have you been?
The history of UNIX is so damn convoluted and full of things no one would do today with IP that I'm not sure anyone involved can prove what they own and don't own.
I'll agree with that. But, SCOX clearly has something, and whatever it is, it's percieved value is greater than 0 (at least in some circles). One of the saying popular in corporate management today is "perception is reality". Therefore, it seems prudent to ask what happens to whatever it is SCOX has, and maybe keep an eye on it lest it end up in the hands of someone who's bought into McBrides version of things and this ends up being an ongoing problem.
Maybe you haven't been around long enough, or maybe you just weren't paying attention, but you simply don't know what the hell you're talking about. At the risk of being repetative, here it is again:
Before the current SCO v. Linux, et al, situation, during the transition from Caldera to SCOX, they open sourced a bunch of ancestral (i.e. pre-SysV) Unix code, and Novell didn't say shit about it, nor did anyone else. This is a fact. Feel free to search the slashdot archives, I'm sure you'll find a few articles about it.
This was NOT done by Novell, it was done by Caldera/SCO, and since Novell never said a word it is a reasonable bet that Caldera/SCO had the legal right to do so. This is a big part of their ownership claim on SysV. It is also a big part of of the Linux defense, since not only does SCO have to prove that there is Unix code residing in Linux, and that it doesn't derive from BSD, but also that it didn't come from the ancestral Unix code they themselves open-sourced.
Seriously, if you're going to start arguements over stuff like this, try learning the actual facts first.
Well, K3b takes care of that for me.
I was a big fan of Nero back when I was a Windows user. Great software, especially compared to Adaptec/Roxio, but I honestly don't see what they have to offer the modern Linux user.
A few years ago I would have been really excited about this, but now it just seems like they're late to the party. Maybe I'm missing something, or have forgotten something in the 2+ years since I switched?
What claim SCO has to ancestral Unix is totally irrelevant to the IBM case, where SCO is trying to claim rights to code IBM wrote.
You must be very confused about the issues to be arguing my very simple and obvious origional point. It's you who needs to check the archives at Groklaw, specifically the agreements between SCO and Novell.
SCO clearly has some rights to Unix, even if there is confusion as to what those rights actually are. If you can't recognize that simple fact, then I see no reason to waste any more time on you.
How very defeatist of you. "It's too hard to change things, so we should do nothing at all."
No, I don't think this is going to cause a sudden and dramatic shift in MBA thinking, but every little bit helps.
Well, it's pretty common knowledge that acceptance letters go out in April. Trying to find out early is sort of trying to cheat the system.
Yeah, that's probably a case of hindsight being 20/20, and I can't say what I would have done if I were in that position, but that doesn't make it any less valid. That goes double in a situation where the school values ethics. It's not like real life isn't full of similar "grey areas".
I don't want to live in the kind of world where every little thing has to be spelled out, where anything that isn't explicitly forbiden is OK, or where ignorance of the law is a valid excuse. I've spent enough time in Corporate America to see that this is, in fact, exactly how most MBAs see things, and I think it's time for that to change.
I'm aware of that.
Are you prepared to prove that every single line of ancestral Unix source they released was already public domain? If not, then you must concede that somebody owned the rights to at least some of that code, and since no one yelped when Caldera/SCO open sourced it, it seems a reasonable bet that their claim to it was strong.