I don't know much about... well, JFS for one thing. It would certainly be nice to get a journaling file system into the 2.4 kernel, but that might happen anyways.
What *is* interesting though, and very promising is that they've chosen to release it under the GPL. Of course under any other licence it would have been useless since it's kernel-level and the kernel *is* GPL. But it's a nice move away from the YAL (Yet Another Licence) syndrome that's been plagueing the first careful steps towards Open Source... wanting to reap benefit of the new paradigm, but not really daring to let go.
Is "I couldn't afford a lawyer to contest my restarining order." a valid defense? At least you'd have a court-appointed attourney at that point.
Well, you can always represent yourself, can't you? Plead that the corporation is trying to scare you into submission with the prospect of a costly trial.
Besides, those run in and out of the witness stand asking questions and answering them are always a hoot(*) smile.
-- Eythain *) I wonder how that would work in RL? Are there precedences?
And to all you people who say that the term GNU/Linux is a total travesty of fairness on the part of the FSF, the HURD is pretty much the last component of the GNU system that is needed. Whether they choose to call that GNU/HURD or just HURD is up to them.
Wouldn't the name be GNU? The GNU project (Gnu's Not Unix), was designed to make a complete Unix replacement (forgive me for saying so, but a good thing Linus came along, or we'd still be ten years away from the revolution (kidding!)).
The Herd would be the long awaited final component of the FSF's GNU project, and RMS for one has certainly stressed that the kernel is merely a small part of the OS, so calling it GNU/HURD doesn't make sense from that perspective. Using the name of the kernel for the OS is the Linux way.
I.E., does the license deny you the right to re-sell the DVD player or mandate that you keep the license intact when you transfer it ?
A new proposed law for the US (you know the one), proposes to make transactions of this sort a matter of licencing and not of purchase. As far as I've understood, you will in that case you get a strictly personal licence with no right to pass it on. So it's probably not at that point quite yet, but it's still scary.
Well, the DVD trials will be a landmark trial. Soon we will see where the land lies, and no matter the outcome, it will certainly set a precedence. Hopefully in the direction of free speech and thought, but unfortunately it's too early to tell.
In either case, what you'll need to worry about is what restrictions were put on the material you used. The problem with the DVD issue is that they use a shrink wrapped licence stating that you can't reverse engineer it, but as long as nothing like that applies (in which case you'd have to fight that what you're doing is covered by laws making it legal), what you need to worry about are the usual trouble spots in reimplemantation. Is it clean? Can you document that you at no time used unlawfully attained information? Did you have access to any information for which you're bound to NDAs? Etc.
The biggest problem, probably, is that the companies could sue you whether or not they thought they could win, to frighten you into submission. Assuming you live in the US of A where everyone has the God given right to sue anyone else, there is nothing you can do to prevent this, only fight and win.
But these are black holes we're talking about here.
Actually, no we aren't. Not in the important sense of a gravitational singularity. This is merely something that simulates some aspects of a black hole, namely that light goes in and doesn't come out. Theory suggests that this violates preservation of information, meaning that there must be some other force at work countering it. That's the radiation part. To examine this would be an interesting insight into a realm we don't know much about.
But this is not a dangerous experiment in any way. Your armageddon scenario fails because there isn't any actual singularity in the picture.
-- Eythain
PS Besides, the 30 minutes calculation for a real balck hole is way off, or rather, that would depend entirely on the mass of the black hole in question. A natural black hole from a collapsed neutron star would squish us before we even got close, whereas a quantum black hole we could concievably make would probably be so small it would evaporate, or even if it wasn't, it would not significantly affect the Earth (I mean, it's not likely we can make a black hole a significant fraction the mass of Earth, where would that mass come from?) while growing. Since a singularity this small is basically point sized (even the event horizon), it would be severely limited in how quickly it could swallow matter. So relax, we'd certainly have a century or so to evacuate, even in the worst case scenario.
A good book on that horror scenario would be Earth, by David Brin.
Since the day you were questioned, nothing more has really come up in the Norwegian news media as far as I've been able to see.
I would be curious to know whether you have any indication from the police of when they might conclude their investigation and either bring charges or return your machines.
Do you feel that you were you arrested because *your* government decided to, or because the U.S. government decided to?
When one of our ministers (I forget which department) was questioned about the DVD issue by a representative of the Norwegian Parliament, she refrained to go into it since it was an issue under police investigation. I don't think any government has made this decision. That's not where the authority lies, as it should be.
Could a Sorenson compatible codec be written from scratch, either using specs or reverse-engineered information?
I believe Soerensen is a patented codec, in which case, no. The information would actually be available (no reverse engineering necessary), but any implementation would infringe on the patent.
But c'mon fellas, QT Server is open source, and the protocols and codecs are open standards. I'm sure someone could whip up a client for QT media . ..
Last I heard QuickTime uses proprietary codecs like Soerensen. Even worse, the license is such that the owner of the Soerensen codec can't licence it to anyone else without Apple's permission (hence xanim can't use it).
In all this red tape it will be a cold day in hell before anything actually happens.
This issue seems to be a bit muddled the way it's presented, but these really have to be two wholly different issues, don't they?
A Quicktime client for Linux
A Open Source version without proprietary codecs.
The first of these would be within Apple's abilities, but the second isn't really. They can't give away proprietary codecs they don't themselves own, and the only alternative then is to not use those codecs which ain't gonna happen anytime soon.
And the actual petition just mentions a port, not an open source version.
Might be better than nothing, but on the other hand proprietary standards isn't something very desirable in and of itself.
-- Eythain
Re:Because the author of the GPL says it's wrong
on
GPL for Books?
·
· Score: 1
Notice that this license is much simpler than the GPL and accomplishes the desired purpose.
Yes, it is much simpler than the GPL, but it doesn't accomplish the desired purpose. You say that using the GPL would put an unneccessary burden on publishers to include the source code. But that is exactly the point! If you don't have the source code available to you, then modifying it is no easier than performing reverse engineering on any other program. Typesetting is not trivial. If you don't have the source code to work with, the right to modify is essentially useless, the barrier to do so is simply too high.
The +1 time is called British Summer Time, remember that and you cannot go too far wrong. So I'm in British Summer Time (+0100) ? Boy, your summers sure must stink!
It's not at all hard to remember that the US Eastern time zone is GMT -0500. It's one of the two most commonly-used time zones in the world, so you SHOULD know it.
Actually it is hard, since it's only -0500 half the year, the other half it's -0400. That is unless you're with the crowd that holds that this is EST DST (or EDT) and a wholly different timezone. Trust me, the only two time zones that count are MLT and YLT (respectively, my and your local time.)
Actually, I have less problems with EST than with GMT, since GMT doesn't change with Daylight's Saving's Time. That means I have to figure out which of the Winter and Summer time's is the standard GMT of propper UK time (which is -1 from where I live, easy as pie), which is something I never will (to prove my point: Eythain, is UK on GMT in winter or in summer? Eythain: I have no idea.)
In UK time, 6pm EST is 11pm, here in country time forgot (AKA Norway), it's midnight sharp.
This is silly. That would hold if GPL can only be used for C programs. A better suggestion would be: // This program is licenced under the GPL. See the included Copying.txt \title{MyBook} \author{MeMeMe!} \begin{document} \title \toc \section{Why this is a source} Blah! \end{document}
Compile with latex
-- Eythain P.S To see the source for my comment select "view source" on your browser.
Okay, okay, so I'm replying to my own piece.. At least I'm honest about it. Just some new thoughts come to mind while reading the OC licence... I'm not sure I like it.
It does not give you the right to source. Now, most people could easily forget that this is an issue for document, but it will be difficult to update the information if you don't have access to the source. Ever tried ammending a postscript? Not easy unless you have the filename.tex source.
It doesn't allow you to sell the OC. This is much stricter than GPL. This is something that takes care of itself through the Market with GPL, but here you get regulation. I won't mind a hardback sold at a profit. Old fashion printing and distribution needs the profit to make sense. Electronic copy& distribution is free, paper mill equivalents aren't.
I'm not sure I see the reason for YAL (Yet Another Licence) here. Presuming you use a language like LaTeX or XML or similar, the analogy holds perfectly. The source here *is* source code in every sense of the word, so the GPL would work here in just the same way as it does on any other program. And everything else follows as expected. If this is what you want, then I *really* don't see any reason why you need a different licence... remember that the GPL is the General Public Licence.
The reason why the name of the aliens (or rather the slang term for them) was changed from "the Buggers" to "Formics" and assorted silly variations on the theme was to distinguish it from the Bugs in Starship Troopers.
This makes some sense, however, IMHO, not anymore. I first heard about Starship Troopers mentioned in the same breath as the rumour of an Ender's Game movie (a third one mentioned was a Ringworld film, but this apparently never came about).
However, Starship Troopers came and went, and by the time Ender's Game will see the silver screen will be the rather distant memory of a somewhat cool movie quite some time ago.
So, changing the name no longer makes sense!
"Buggers" rolls off the tongue, "woolies" don't. It's my sincere hope that they'll realize they're solving a problem that doesn't exist and change the name back.
On other subjects, the Battleroom will apparently be entirely CGI. Which is the only thing that makes sense when you think about it.
As for the actor, the guy who played in the Sixth Sense has been suggested as a better Ender than Jake before, but unfortunately he doesn't fit on counts of age and size (OSC wants Ender to be smaller than the other kids (this at least Jake should be able to do)).
However OSC laments how he has to find good child actors for a dozen or so roles, so there's no reason he can't be used in another role. -- Eythain
Since so many assumed the compression could be used to get DVD's on a normal CD, I thought I'd calculate just how much space that would take. Since it's not obvious how a compression based on comparison in space can be extended to comparison in time in any trivial way, I'll assume that you'll have to just put them one after the other.
for 24 frames/second, if each frame is a 19Kb jpeg2k picture, and we're talking about a two hour feature film, this works out to about 3.2 Gb, or 5+ CD. In other words, no big win (if at all) over MPEG. -- Eythain
Since my 24x CD-ROM sounds like the coming of Armageddon or something when it spins up, and I half-expect the computer to fall apart before my eyes from the vibrations, I shudder to think what a 50x CD-ROM will sound like.
I just plain don't like the BSD licence. Not that I have anything against it in and of itself, that would be plain silly for anyone who believes in the freedom to do what you want with your own stuff. But I do have something against the claim that the BSD licence is better or more free than (usually) the GPL.
For one thing, any claim here is only as good as the definition of "freedom". When one group says the BSD licence is more free because it allows A, while another group says the GPL is more free because it allows B and A and B are mutually exclusive, something is definitly wrong.
The GPL limits some things you can do (I would stop long and hard before calling them freedoms), but I find that it usually does so for a good reason.
But on the other hand, I guess all that can be said about BSD vs. GPL (or vice versa) has been said. I would however like to add that BSD is the licence that allows others to make money off your code, and not the other way around. So, in the end, the only way to prevent this is to do it first. (Other's might feel different about this, but I wouldn't like it if other's could sell value-added versions of my program.)
Man, I saw that one a year or so ago, and it was *bad*. I mean, *horrible*. I'd never heard about it before, and the guy who'd gotten it said it was a special surprise. He stressed that he didn't say it would be good, just special, actually he said he would be surprised if anyone thought it was good. And it didn't disappoint, it was horrible. I mean, usually with American television, the commercials are pretty disturbing, but in this case watching commercials from the 70s was much more fun than the actual program.
I guess the only reason to see this is to be able to say that you did - and lived to tell the tale.
This IMO, is not good news. Since this excemption only applies to Netscape Communicator, it will presumably not extend to Mozilla as such.
I don't want a proprietary extension to the open source browser, I want strong encryption to come in the open source distribution.
The only good thing I can see in this is a thorn in the eye of Internet Explorer, but even as such I can't see it as having significant effect, the exportation laws are by neccessity more of a hinderance to truely international development efforts like the Open Source community than proprietary developers.
The silly exportation rule need to come down completely. Granted if this is a first step, that could be a good thing, but it will probably be long until the good old American paranoia steps back. Until then this can only serve to unfairly unbalance the market. Similar allowances will probably soon follow for IE, which means that browsers that distribute source with their programs will be the loser.
Slashdot Mirror
What *is* interesting though, and very promising is that they've chosen to release it under the GPL. Of course under any other licence it would have been useless since it's kernel-level and the kernel *is* GPL. But it's a nice move away from the YAL (Yet Another Licence) syndrome that's been plagueing the first careful steps towards Open Source... wanting to reap benefit of the new paradigm, but not really daring to let go.
Hopefully more will follow in this direction.
-- Eythain
Consistent appearance and behavior... makes your skin crawl, doesn't it?
-- Eythain
Well, you can always represent yourself, can't you? Plead that the corporation is trying to scare you into submission with the prospect of a costly trial.
Besides, those run in and out of the witness stand asking questions and answering them are always a hoot(*) smile.
-- Eythain
*) I wonder how that would work in RL? Are there precedences?
Wouldn't the name be GNU? The GNU project (Gnu's Not Unix), was designed to make a complete Unix replacement (forgive me for saying so, but a good thing Linus came along, or we'd still be ten years away from the revolution (kidding!)).
The Herd would be the long awaited final component of the FSF's GNU project, and RMS for one has certainly stressed that the kernel is merely a small part of the OS, so calling it GNU/HURD doesn't make sense from that perspective. Using the name of the kernel for the OS is the Linux way.
-- Eythain
A new proposed law for the US (you know the one), proposes to make transactions of this sort a matter of licencing and not of purchase. As far as I've understood, you will in that case you get a strictly personal licence with no right to pass it on. So it's probably not at that point quite yet, but it's still scary.
-- Eythain
In either case, what you'll need to worry about is what restrictions were put on the material you used. The problem with the DVD issue is that they use a shrink wrapped licence stating that you can't reverse engineer it, but as long as nothing like that applies (in which case you'd have to fight that what you're doing is covered by laws making it legal), what you need to worry about are the usual trouble spots in reimplemantation. Is it clean? Can you document that you at no time used unlawfully attained information? Did you have access to any information for which you're bound to NDAs? Etc.
The biggest problem, probably, is that the companies could sue you whether or not they thought they could win, to frighten you into submission. Assuming you live in the US of A where everyone has the God given right to sue anyone else, there is nothing you can do to prevent this, only fight and win.
-- Eythain
Actually, no we aren't. Not in the important sense of a gravitational singularity. This is merely something that simulates some aspects of a black hole, namely that light goes in and doesn't come out. Theory suggests that this violates preservation of information, meaning that there must be some other force at work countering it. That's the radiation part. To examine this would be an interesting insight into a realm we don't know much about.
But this is not a dangerous experiment in any way. Your armageddon scenario fails because there isn't any actual singularity in the picture.
-- Eythain
PS Besides, the 30 minutes calculation for a real balck hole is way off, or rather, that would depend entirely on the mass of the black hole in question. A natural black hole from a collapsed neutron star would squish us before we even got close, whereas a quantum black hole we could concievably make would probably be so small it would evaporate, or even if it wasn't, it would not significantly affect the Earth (I mean, it's not likely we can make a black hole a significant fraction the mass of Earth, where would that mass come from?) while growing. Since a singularity this small is basically point sized (even the event horizon), it would be severely limited in how quickly it could swallow matter. So relax, we'd certainly have a century or so to evacuate, even in the worst case scenario.
A good book on that horror scenario would be Earth, by David Brin.
I would be curious to know whether you have any indication from the police of when they might conclude their investigation and either bring charges or return your machines.
-- Eythain
When one of our ministers (I forget which department) was questioned about the DVD issue by a representative of the Norwegian Parliament, she refrained to go into it since it was an issue under police investigation. I don't think any government has made this decision. That's not where the authority lies, as it should be.
-- Eythain
I believe Soerensen is a patented codec, in which case, no. The information would actually be available (no reverse engineering necessary), but any implementation would infringe on the patent.
-- Eythain
Last I heard QuickTime uses proprietary codecs like Soerensen. Even worse, the license is such that the owner of the Soerensen codec can't licence it to anyone else without Apple's permission (hence xanim can't use it).
In all this red tape it will be a cold day in hell before anything actually happens.
-- Eythain
A Quicktime client for Linux
A Open Source version without proprietary codecs.
The first of these would be within Apple's abilities, but the second isn't really. They can't give away proprietary codecs they don't themselves own, and the only alternative then is to not use those codecs which ain't gonna happen anytime soon.
And the actual petition just mentions a port, not an open source version.
Might be better than nothing, but on the other hand proprietary standards isn't something very desirable in and of itself.
-- Eythain
Yes, it is much simpler than the GPL, but it doesn't accomplish the desired purpose. You say that using the GPL would put an unneccessary burden on publishers to include the source code. But that is exactly the point! If you don't have the source code available to you, then modifying it is no easier than performing reverse engineering on any other program. Typesetting is not trivial. If you don't have the source code to work with, the right to modify is essentially useless, the barrier to do so is simply too high.
-- Eythain
--Eythain
Actually it is hard, since it's only -0500 half the year, the other half it's -0400. That is unless you're with the crowd that holds that this is EST DST (or EDT) and a wholly different timezone. Trust me, the only two time zones that count are MLT and YLT (respectively, my and your local time.)
In UK time, 6pm EST is 11pm, here in country time forgot (AKA Norway), it's midnight sharp.
-- Eythain
// This program is licenced under the GPL. See the included Copying.txt
\title{MyBook}
\author{MeMeMe!}
\begin{document}
\title
\toc
\section{Why this is a source}
Blah!
\end{document}
Compile with latex
-- Eythain
P.S To see the source for my comment select "view source" on your browser.
It does not give you the right to source. Now, most people could easily forget that this is an issue for document, but it will be difficult to update the information if you don't have access to the source. Ever tried ammending a postscript? Not easy unless you have the filename.tex source.
It doesn't allow you to sell the OC. This is much stricter than GPL. This is something that takes care of itself through the Market with GPL, but here you get regulation. I won't mind a hardback sold at a profit. Old fashion printing and distribution needs the profit to make sense. Electronic copy& distribution is free, paper mill equivalents aren't.
-- Eythain
-- Eythain
This makes some sense, however, IMHO, not anymore. I first heard about Starship Troopers mentioned in the same breath as the rumour of an Ender's Game movie (a third one mentioned was a Ringworld film, but this apparently never came about).
However, Starship Troopers came and went, and by the time Ender's Game will see the silver screen will be the rather distant memory of a somewhat cool movie quite some time ago.
So, changing the name no longer makes sense!
"Buggers" rolls off the tongue, "woolies" don't. It's my sincere hope that they'll realize they're solving a problem that doesn't exist and change the name back.
On other subjects, the Battleroom will apparently be entirely CGI. Which is the only thing that makes sense when you think about it.
As for the actor, the guy who played in the Sixth Sense has been suggested as a better Ender than Jake before, but unfortunately he doesn't fit on counts of age and size (OSC wants Ender to be smaller than the other kids (this at least Jake should be able to do)).
However OSC laments how he has to find good child actors for a dozen or so roles, so there's no reason he can't be used in another role. -- Eythain
for 24 frames/second, if each frame is a 19Kb jpeg2k picture, and we're talking about a two hour feature film, this works out to about 3.2 Gb, or 5+ CD. In other words, no big win (if at all) over MPEG. -- Eythain
Eythain v. 22.2.1 (to stay on topic)
PS Does this mean I'm stable?
For one thing, any claim here is only as good as the definition of "freedom". When one group says the BSD licence is more free because it allows A, while another group says the GPL is more free because it allows B and A and B are mutually exclusive, something is definitly wrong.
The GPL limits some things you can do (I would stop long and hard before calling them freedoms), but I find that it usually does so for a good reason.
But on the other hand, I guess all that can be said about BSD vs. GPL (or vice versa) has been said. I would however like to add that BSD is the licence that allows others to make money off your code, and not the other way around. So, in the end, the only way to prevent this is to do it first. (Other's might feel different about this, but I wouldn't like it if other's could sell value-added versions of my program.)
I guess the only reason to see this is to be able to say that you did - and lived to tell the tale.
Eythain
I don't want a proprietary extension to the open source browser, I want strong encryption to come in the open source distribution.
The only good thing I can see in this is a thorn in the eye of Internet Explorer, but even as such I can't see it as having significant effect, the exportation laws are by neccessity more of a hinderance to truely international development efforts like the Open Source community than proprietary developers.
The silly exportation rule need to come down completely. Granted if this is a first step, that could be a good thing, but it will probably be long until the good old American paranoia steps back. Until then this can only serve to unfairly unbalance the market. Similar allowances will probably soon follow for IE, which means that browsers that distribute source with their programs will be the loser.
Eythain