I can upgrade a piece at a time, and thus conceal the true cost from my wife.
Until she reads about it on slashdot:)
Not likely, that's one of the advantages of using a true multi-user OS. Additionally, she considers not ever having to think about how to make the computer do the things she wants to be one of the advantages of being married to a geek.
Yes, that sort of thing does happen, especially in residential construction (I worked in construction for 10 years, I've seen plenty of it).
However, would you recommend doing your own surgery because some doctors cut corners? Or defending yourself in court because some lawyers are crooked?
There are times when a professional is called for. In construction, professionals are licensed and bonded, and you can really screw up their lives if you catch them doing shoddy work. You can also force them to fix it for free (in CA, YMMV).
Then again, IIRC what you describe is fully within code in many areas. But I mainly did carpentry, not electrical.
For me, my #8 and your #7 are the big ones (though #9 would cure #8 most likely). #2 is the only other one that matters to me. I actually have a good job, but I also have a family and simply can't justify spending that much on a computer at one time regardless of architecture. This is where x86 really shines for me; I can upgrade a piece at a time, and thus conceal the true cost from my wife. Even then, though, it works out to only about $400 a year or so. Yes, I read the discussion about the fairness of the price for what you get above, but as I said I just can't justify spending that much on any architecture.
Also, I know it's popular to disparage x86, but, well, it works, and the vast majority of software is available for it. Having the superior architecture doesn't mean much when you can't run your software.
Anyway, I'm sure someone will mark this as flamebait because of my disparaging remark regarding the Mac UI. Sorry, I know Apple's UI is supposed to be the end-all/be-all of UI design, but I have always found it confusing and cumbersome.
One of the lessons that seems to be "learned" time and again by the content industry is that the best way to combat piracy is to lower the price. For example: when I was a kid movies on VHS were fairly expensive ($60-80 IIRC), and everyone had at least a shelf full of movies they'd rented and copied, or taped off TV. Now that prices are reasonable ($10-15) nobody bothers to go to that trouble, and yet everyone I know still has at least a shelf full of movies, but now they're "origionals".
So, how does the record industry justify the current price of CDs? Doesn't it seem obvious, given the lessons of history, that the inflated price is the root cause of piracy?
I should note, perhaps, that I neither pirate nor buy CDs at this point. Why should I buy a CD when I can get a DVD of a major film, with all kinds of extras, for the same price? It seems to me that this has far more to do with the decline of CD sales than online filesharing.
Finally, I understand that CD prices were supposed to have dropped as a result of the recent lawsuit, but I haven't seen a difference in either record stores or mail-order record clubs, such as Columbia House. In fact, the prices seem to have gone up slightly.
The band gets some paultry amount ($0.10 for each CD?) which if they go platnium still makes them millionares.
No band makes millions on record sales. The paultry sum is normally around 2%, plus another 1.5% for the songwriter. The crucial part you're missing, though, is the advance.
You see, the musicians actually have to pay for the recording/production of the album. The record company generally gives them an advance of $200-300k to cover their expenses (which means after paying the engineers, renting the studio, etc, they have about $8-10k each to live on for the year or so between the start of production and the time the album actually hits record store shelves). The thing is, it's an advance, which means it's really just a loan against their future earnings. In other words, they have to pay it back, and that's generally acheived by the record company keeping their share. How it works out is that an album has to at least go gold before the band ever sees any actual money. It should also be noted that the band still has to pay the money back if album sales don't bring in enough to cover it.
How artists actually make money is touring and merchandise (especially merchandise sold at concerts). So, if you really want to support an artist, buy a t-shirt at a concert. They aren't making jack off CDs.
A simple process of elimination shows that FAT32 is the most portable filesystem that offers a realistic level of confidence that your OS wont trash the data.
I won't argue with the portability of FAT, but in my experience it can be painfully unreliable in certain applications. Having had that experience, I consider looking for alternatives to be a very wise move. I know that I would be very uncomfortable trusting my employers Very Important Data to FAT.
The argument being used in this incredibly weak attempt to overturn the GPL is that it violates copyright law because the creator of the work is offering terms more liberal than copyright's default restrictions.
The best part about this is that they're trying to use the Fair Use provisions as the basis of restriction. Fair Use only applies to end users, not publishers. The GPL is not an end user license, in fact it doesn't apply to end users at all; the GPL is a license to publish.
What SCO is suggesting is that a copyright holder doesn't have the right to to grant others the right to publish their works. Forget about open source licenses and commercial site licenses, SCO is saying that the entire publishing industry is illegal! If what they are suggesting were true, publishing companies would only be able to publish works-for-hire (a situation they would love, I'm sure, but clearly not reality) and authors who wished to retain ownership of their works would have to buy their own printing press and do all the typesetting, etc., themselves in order to have their work published (again, clearly not reality). Say goodby to the recording industry (if only...), musicians would have to burn their own CDs. Say goodby to songwriters too, since no one would be able to perform their songs but them. That would pretty much destroy the pop and country music scenes as they are today (though actual harm is debatable in those cases). No more newspapers, either; every journalist would have to put out their own newsletter to get their story out.
What SCO is proposing amounts to a nuclear strike on publishing in general.
I have here in front of me a shiny new box of Visual Studio.NET. I quote (from eula.txt): "Microsoft grants to you as an individual, a personal, nonexclusive license to use the Software, and to make and use copies of the Software for the purposes of designing, developing, testing, and demonstrating your software product(s), provided that you are the only individual using the Software." So I can make as many copies as I want, as long as I'm the only one using it.
You already have those rights under copyright law. That clause would be more accurately stated as; "We're aware that legal precedent says we can't revoke the Fair Use rights given to you under section 117 of the copyright code, so we'd like to make ourselves seem generous by pretending that we're granting you those rights."
How do you think you'll ever get any blood out of that turnip?
I once saw a skit on one of those Canadian comedy shows (may have been Kids in the Hall) That dealt with this basic concept. IIRC, it showed a girl throwing a rock, the rock hitting a guy in the head, knocking him down, and the girl saying, "It's a fact: You can get blood from a stone... if you throw it hard enough!"
Just because SCO's officers are out of the reach of the law doesn't mean they won't be subject to "collection activities".
so where do they go off thinking "the copyright law allows one"?
Section 117 (IIRC) of the copyright law allows the end user to make an archival (aka backup) copy. It's part of the whole Fair Use thing.
The supreme idiocy of their claim is that the GPL doesn't apply to end users, only to publishers. Since it isn't an end user license, and doesn't restrict in any way the rights of the end user, the Fair Use provisions don't apply to it.
i.e. because the law only gives your client the right to a single safety copy, you can not under any circumstances allow them to do more. Needless to say, this argumentation is so absurd that it's almost an insult to try to get away with this.
It seems to be based on a fundamental lack of understanding of the GPL and copyright law. The crucial fact that they're missing is that the GPL doesn't apply to software consumers (meaning users, not developers or distributers) at all, so none of the Fair Use provisions are even relevant to it. The GPL is a license to publish.
They seem to be arguing that the GPL invalidates itself since it doesn't seek to restrict how the work is distributed,
This is clearly false. The GPL does restrict how the work is distributed, and you need look no further than Microsoft's "viral license" accusations to find out how: the source code, and the source code of any modifications made to it, must be made available to the end user.
The arguement they're making might work against the BSD license, but I very much doubt it.
The federal courts, in Vault Corp. v. Quaid Software [harvard.edu], held that Title 17 Sec. 117 [gpo.gov] of the U.S. Code preempted terms in Vault's shrink-wrap licensing, so there's precedent for applying the preemption doctrine to private contracts in copyright litigation.
I don't think that provides a precedent for this at all. The critical difference is that in that case the copyright holder was trying to take away rights explicitely protected under copyright law. The GPL does exactly the opposite.
The complaint was NOT contributory infringement. The complaint was that the method used to reverse engineer the copy protection scheme was a direct infringement. You'll find that in the linked document under "B. Direct Copying" in "III. Vault's Federal Claims".
The important fact that you're missing is that it IS broke.
He can't reformat the drive as a single partition. Perhaps you missed the parts where he said "the built-in Disk Manager only lets me format 40GB partitions in FAT32" and "I do a lot of database work, so I often need to move 40GB+ database dumps". That's a serious usability problem.
Also, and I know this is hard to believe, there are very good reasons for not wanting to use FAT, especially in a professional situation where something like, say, not having your project files randomly corrupted might be important to you.
So, explain how exactly staticly linking a library is fundamentally different from just copy/pasting it into your source file.
The GPL allows you to copy/paste if you want to, but with the requirement that the resulting program is also under the GPL. That's as it should be: it's clearly a derived work. Static linking is effectively the same thing.
The amount lost by the copyright holder is easy to figure out: it's based on what the infringer was charging for it. The copyright holder doesn't have to have had any intention at all to ever sell the thing. This makes perfect sense, since the whole problem is the infringer profiting from something he has no rights to.
That isn't a flaw in the GPL, it's a flaw in copyright law in general.
However, there is plenty of precedent in regards to this sort of situation already. Click through and shrink wrap EULAs have been upheld in court, and they actually take away rights you would otherwise have. The GPL uses the exact same mechanism (implied agreement) but is much stronger, legally, because it gives rights rather than taking them away.
You can argue it all you want, but you'll just end up stuck in an endless loop. It comes down to this: you have to agree to the GPL when copying GPLed software because nothing else gives you the right to do so. Your arguement that they can just choose to break the law instead is a straw man. Every license ever conceived, for copyright or otherwise, is "vulnerable" to people deciding to break the law instead.
If the person can't be bothered to go through the immigration process they should not expect the state to pay for their medical expenses. The paramedics can make their own choices about what to do in that circumstance, but _I_ should not have to foot the bill.
Sorry, but your analogy is flawed. Books are not licensed, most software is. Since software is licensed it is covered under contract law in addition to copyright law.
Wrong. Software is governed under copyright law unless the vendor can trick you into agreeing to a contract before you can use it. There's a very big, and very important, difference there. There's nothing stopping a book publisher from shrinkwrap licensing their books, it just isn't an accepted practice in the book market and customers probably wouldn't buy a book packaged that way.
Unless the copyrighted work is also licensed, in which case they can certainly restrict you from using the software if you do not agree with the licensing terms (provided that the license is a valid contract).
Again, the license doesn't mean dick if there's a way to install and use the software without agreeing to it. Software is under copyright law, and there is absolutely nothing in copyright law that says you have to have a license to use the work. You only need a license to publish the work.
You believe that most click-thru software EULAs are invalid (I assume because you did not agree to the license before purchase), but this has not been proven by the courts.
I didn't say that. While I do think that a "contract" which is non-negotiable and which you effectively have to agree to before you even have a chance to read it should be invalid, I also recognize the legal reality. However, that's a whole other rant and has nothing to do with the GPL, since you only have to agree to it in order to publish the work, not in order to use or install it, which was my point.
Besides, many software licenses ARE reviewed and agreed to before purchase, such as volume purchases by businesses, so those licenses are certainly a legal and valid contract.
Obviously. See my previous point about negotiability and being able to read the agreement prior to purchase.
I should note, though, that I don't really have a problem with the typical click-through EULA as long as it's enforced on ALL involved parties. If I don't agree to the license, the guy who sold it needs to give me my money back. After all, if I'm bound by the license without reading it, then so should he, and the license says he'll give me a refund. He agreed to that by selling me software whose EULA included that clause.
Slashdot Mirror
I can upgrade a piece at a time, and thus conceal the true cost from my wife.
:)
Until she reads about it on slashdot
Not likely, that's one of the advantages of using a true multi-user OS. Additionally, she considers not ever having to think about how to make the computer do the things she wants to be one of the advantages of being married to a geek.
I think my secret is safe...
Yes, that sort of thing does happen, especially in residential construction (I worked in construction for 10 years, I've seen plenty of it).
However, would you recommend doing your own surgery because some doctors cut corners? Or defending yourself in court because some lawyers are crooked?
There are times when a professional is called for. In construction, professionals are licensed and bonded, and you can really screw up their lives if you catch them doing shoddy work. You can also force them to fix it for free (in CA, YMMV).
Then again, IIRC what you describe is fully within code in many areas. But I mainly did carpentry, not electrical.
Excellent advice, and marked as Redundant for a good reason (EVERYONE agrees).
Seriously, the mess you're in right now is quite likely the result of someone before you deciding NOT to hire a professional.
8) I hate the Mac UI
9) Does it run Linux?
For me, my #8 and your #7 are the big ones (though #9 would cure #8 most likely). #2 is the only other one that matters to me. I actually have a good job, but I also have a family and simply can't justify spending that much on a computer at one time regardless of architecture. This is where x86 really shines for me; I can upgrade a piece at a time, and thus conceal the true cost from my wife. Even then, though, it works out to only about $400 a year or so. Yes, I read the discussion about the fairness of the price for what you get above, but as I said I just can't justify spending that much on any architecture.
Also, I know it's popular to disparage x86, but, well, it works, and the vast majority of software is available for it. Having the superior architecture doesn't mean much when you can't run your software.
Anyway, I'm sure someone will mark this as flamebait because of my disparaging remark regarding the Mac UI. Sorry, I know Apple's UI is supposed to be the end-all/be-all of UI design, but I have always found it confusing and cumbersome.
One of the lessons that seems to be "learned" time and again by the content industry is that the best way to combat piracy is to lower the price. For example: when I was a kid movies on VHS were fairly expensive ($60-80 IIRC), and everyone had at least a shelf full of movies they'd rented and copied, or taped off TV. Now that prices are reasonable ($10-15) nobody bothers to go to that trouble, and yet everyone I know still has at least a shelf full of movies, but now they're "origionals".
So, how does the record industry justify the current price of CDs? Doesn't it seem obvious, given the lessons of history, that the inflated price is the root cause of piracy?
I should note, perhaps, that I neither pirate nor buy CDs at this point. Why should I buy a CD when I can get a DVD of a major film, with all kinds of extras, for the same price? It seems to me that this has far more to do with the decline of CD sales than online filesharing.
Finally, I understand that CD prices were supposed to have dropped as a result of the recent lawsuit, but I haven't seen a difference in either record stores or mail-order record clubs, such as Columbia House. In fact, the prices seem to have gone up slightly.
The band gets some paultry amount ($0.10 for each CD?) which if they go platnium still makes them millionares.
No band makes millions on record sales. The paultry sum is normally around 2%, plus another 1.5% for the songwriter. The crucial part you're missing, though, is the advance.
You see, the musicians actually have to pay for the recording/production of the album. The record company generally gives them an advance of $200-300k to cover their expenses (which means after paying the engineers, renting the studio, etc, they have about $8-10k each to live on for the year or so between the start of production and the time the album actually hits record store shelves). The thing is, it's an advance, which means it's really just a loan against their future earnings. In other words, they have to pay it back, and that's generally acheived by the record company keeping their share. How it works out is that an album has to at least go gold before the band ever sees any actual money. It should also be noted that the band still has to pay the money back if album sales don't bring in enough to cover it.
How artists actually make money is touring and merchandise (especially merchandise sold at concerts). So, if you really want to support an artist, buy a t-shirt at a concert. They aren't making jack off CDs.
A simple process of elimination shows that FAT32 is the most portable filesystem that offers a realistic level of confidence that your OS wont trash the data.
I won't argue with the portability of FAT, but in my experience it can be painfully unreliable in certain applications. Having had that experience, I consider looking for alternatives to be a very wise move. I know that I would be very uncomfortable trusting my employers Very Important Data to FAT.
The argument being used in this incredibly weak attempt to overturn the GPL is that it violates copyright law because the creator of the work is offering terms more liberal than copyright's default restrictions.
The best part about this is that they're trying to use the Fair Use provisions as the basis of restriction. Fair Use only applies to end users, not publishers. The GPL is not an end user license, in fact it doesn't apply to end users at all; the GPL is a license to publish.
What SCO is suggesting is that a copyright holder doesn't have the right to to grant others the right to publish their works. Forget about open source licenses and commercial site licenses, SCO is saying that the entire publishing industry is illegal! If what they are suggesting were true, publishing companies would only be able to publish works-for-hire (a situation they would love, I'm sure, but clearly not reality) and authors who wished to retain ownership of their works would have to buy their own printing press and do all the typesetting, etc., themselves in order to have their work published (again, clearly not reality). Say goodby to the recording industry (if only...), musicians would have to burn their own CDs. Say goodby to songwriters too, since no one would be able to perform their songs but them. That would pretty much destroy the pop and country music scenes as they are today (though actual harm is debatable in those cases). No more newspapers, either; every journalist would have to put out their own newsletter to get their story out.
What SCO is proposing amounts to a nuclear strike on publishing in general.
I have here in front of me a shiny new box of Visual Studio.NET. I quote (from eula.txt): "Microsoft grants to you as an individual, a personal, nonexclusive license to use the Software, and to make and use copies of the Software for the purposes of designing, developing, testing, and demonstrating your software product(s), provided that you are the only individual using the Software." So I can make as many copies as I want, as long as I'm the only one using it.
You already have those rights under copyright law. That clause would be more accurately stated as; "We're aware that legal precedent says we can't revoke the Fair Use rights given to you under section 117 of the copyright code, so we'd like to make ourselves seem generous by pretending that we're granting you those rights."
How do you think you'll ever get any blood out of that turnip?
I once saw a skit on one of those Canadian comedy shows (may have been Kids in the Hall) That dealt with this basic concept. IIRC, it showed a girl throwing a rock, the rock hitting a guy in the head, knocking him down, and the girl saying, "It's a fact: You can get blood from a stone... if you throw it hard enough!"
Just because SCO's officers are out of the reach of the law doesn't mean they won't be subject to "collection activities".
so where do they go off thinking "the copyright law allows one"?
Section 117 (IIRC) of the copyright law allows the end user to make an archival (aka backup) copy. It's part of the whole Fair Use thing.
The supreme idiocy of their claim is that the GPL doesn't apply to end users, only to publishers. Since it isn't an end user license, and doesn't restrict in any way the rights of the end user, the Fair Use provisions don't apply to it.
i.e. because the law only gives your client the right to a single safety copy, you can not under any circumstances allow them to do more. Needless to say, this argumentation is so absurd that it's almost an insult to try to get away with this.
It seems to be based on a fundamental lack of understanding of the GPL and copyright law. The crucial fact that they're missing is that the GPL doesn't apply to software consumers (meaning users, not developers or distributers) at all, so none of the Fair Use provisions are even relevant to it. The GPL is a license to publish.
They seem to be arguing that the GPL invalidates itself since it doesn't seek to restrict how the work is distributed,
This is clearly false. The GPL does restrict how the work is distributed, and you need look no further than Microsoft's "viral license" accusations to find out how: the source code, and the source code of any modifications made to it, must be made available to the end user.
The arguement they're making might work against the BSD license, but I very much doubt it.
It's worse than that.
According to the arguement SCO is trying to make, if the GPL is invalid then the entire publishing industry is illegal!
The federal courts, in Vault Corp. v. Quaid Software [harvard.edu], held that Title 17 Sec. 117 [gpo.gov] of the U.S. Code preempted terms in Vault's shrink-wrap licensing, so there's precedent for applying the preemption doctrine to private contracts in copyright litigation.
I don't think that provides a precedent for this at all. The critical difference is that in that case the copyright holder was trying to take away rights explicitely protected under copyright law. The GPL does exactly the opposite.
The complaint was NOT contributory infringement. The complaint was that the method used to reverse engineer the copy protection scheme was a direct infringement. You'll find that in the linked document under "B. Direct Copying" in "III. Vault's Federal Claims".
I agree that it doesn't apply here, though.
The important fact that you're missing is that it IS broke.
He can't reformat the drive as a single partition. Perhaps you missed the parts where he said "the built-in Disk Manager only lets me format 40GB partitions in FAT32" and "I do a lot of database work, so I often need to move 40GB+ database dumps". That's a serious usability problem.
Also, and I know this is hard to believe, there are very good reasons for not wanting to use FAT, especially in a professional situation where something like, say, not having your project files randomly corrupted might be important to you.
It took me way to long to realize that your sig wasn't part of your comment...
No kidding!
Daggerfall was a first person RPG and it came out in, what, '96?
That's the earliest one I can remember, but I doubt it was the first.
So, explain how exactly staticly linking a library is fundamentally different from just copy/pasting it into your source file.
The GPL allows you to copy/paste if you want to, but with the requirement that the resulting program is also under the GPL. That's as it should be: it's clearly a derived work. Static linking is effectively the same thing.
The amount lost by the copyright holder is easy to figure out: it's based on what the infringer was charging for it. The copyright holder doesn't have to have had any intention at all to ever sell the thing. This makes perfect sense, since the whole problem is the infringer profiting from something he has no rights to.
That isn't a flaw in the GPL, it's a flaw in copyright law in general.
However, there is plenty of precedent in regards to this sort of situation already. Click through and shrink wrap EULAs have been upheld in court, and they actually take away rights you would otherwise have. The GPL uses the exact same mechanism (implied agreement) but is much stronger, legally, because it gives rights rather than taking them away.
You can argue it all you want, but you'll just end up stuck in an endless loop. It comes down to this: you have to agree to the GPL when copying GPLed software because nothing else gives you the right to do so. Your arguement that they can just choose to break the law instead is a straw man. Every license ever conceived, for copyright or otherwise, is "vulnerable" to people deciding to break the law instead.
Most folks can't hack code. And even if they can, most projects have enough coders (remember what they say about too many cooks).
RTFA
The big problem is that they don't have enough coders! Money is not the issue, fixing bugs and documenting the interface is.
If the person can't be bothered to go through the immigration process they should not expect the state to pay for their medical expenses. The paramedics can make their own choices about what to do in that circumstance, but _I_ should not have to foot the bill.
Sorry, but your analogy is flawed. Books are not licensed, most software is. Since software is licensed it is covered under contract law in addition to copyright law.
Wrong. Software is governed under copyright law unless the vendor can trick you into agreeing to a contract before you can use it. There's a very big, and very important, difference there. There's nothing stopping a book publisher from shrinkwrap licensing their books, it just isn't an accepted practice in the book market and customers probably wouldn't buy a book packaged that way.
Unless the copyrighted work is also licensed, in which case they can certainly restrict you from using the software if you do not agree with the licensing terms (provided that the license is a valid contract).
Again, the license doesn't mean dick if there's a way to install and use the software without agreeing to it. Software is under copyright law, and there is absolutely nothing in copyright law that says you have to have a license to use the work. You only need a license to publish the work.
You believe that most click-thru software EULAs are invalid (I assume because you did not agree to the license before purchase), but this has not been proven by the courts.
I didn't say that. While I do think that a "contract" which is non-negotiable and which you effectively have to agree to before you even have a chance to read it should be invalid, I also recognize the legal reality. However, that's a whole other rant and has nothing to do with the GPL, since you only have to agree to it in order to publish the work, not in order to use or install it, which was my point.
Besides, many software licenses ARE reviewed and agreed to before purchase, such as volume purchases by businesses, so those licenses are certainly a legal and valid contract.
Obviously. See my previous point about negotiability and being able to read the agreement prior to purchase.
I should note, though, that I don't really have a problem with the typical click-through EULA as long as it's enforced on ALL involved parties. If I don't agree to the license, the guy who sold it needs to give me my money back. After all, if I'm bound by the license without reading it, then so should he, and the license says he'll give me a refund. He agreed to that by selling me software whose EULA included that clause.