I don't understand why it's beyond the capacity of the average Slashdotter to imagine that art, literature, and other parts of our culture could have some value equal to medical research and other 'practical' matters.
I think that's a nasty and unfair stereotype. I hardly think the single vocal idiot you responded to represents "the average Slashdotter".
Putting money into art is a large mistake and eventual waste of that money. There are many areas of research that actually acomplish something that are substantially under funded or that would benefit from this money. Art has never saved anyones life or accomplished anything of any worth for that matter.
Technology makes life comfortable. Art makes it worth living.
Because nearly half of the households in the U.S. don't have computers. And many of these do not have internet access. Even fewer have broadband... But most households have at least one CD player.
How is that an argument? Half of the households in Izbahkistan don't have electricity and use cow dung for heat. Would you now claim that the local dung seller isn't selling an out-of-date system of heating?
Even if this were not the case, the "out-of-date distribution system" argument would still be irrelevant. It is up to the people who own the copyright to determine how, when, where, and even whether to distribute the content. The fact that they do not distribute it the way you want them to does not give you the right to distribute it without their permission.
I never said anything about copying songs without permission. I'm not disputing that the RIAA can pick and choose the distribution system. I'm just challenging the idiotic claim that physical delivery of music is not out-of-date. Of course it bloody well is. The existence of companies who only distribute music via the Internet is proof that there is a new method of distribution, therefore proving that the old method is OUT OF DATE.
"...than with protecting the revenue stream created by an out-of-date distribution system."
Mod me down (I have plenty of karma to burn) but I am so sick and fucking tired of hearing this line of tripe. If you have something better than put your money where your mouth is otherwise shut the fuck up. Saying something over and over ad nauseum does not make it true.
How isn't the distribution system horribly out-of-date? The very concept of taking data, sticking it onto physical discs, putting those discs inside plastic wrappers, moving those discs via trucks, holding them inside stores, requiring the consumer to transport themselves several kilometres to buy the disc, then transport it home, simply so the customer can play music? That system makes sense for physical goods; not for pure data.
Internet distribution of music is modern, efficient and convenient. You can argue (though you didn't) that the current systems are broken because the artist isn't compensated, but I don't see how you could possibly argue that the physical distribution system is anything other than antiquated. It's a 100-year old distribution model that hasn't significantly changed despite several generations of telecommunication improvements.
No matter what people say, nor what the benchmarks show, Windows XP appears slow, and feels sluggish. Go to the Add/Remove Programs in the control panel.
Snap! I hate that. You click the Start button and I reckon I could read the entire Dune trilogy in the time it takes for something to appear.
Even worse is when you go to a submenu and it... just... takes... for... ev... er... to appear. This is a Pentium-4 with 512MB ram and I honestly feel like I've been transported back to the 1980s.
While IBM may have the Cravath firm, SCO has David Boies. Boies first made his name AS A PARTNER IN CRAVATH representing IBM in the private antitrust lawsuits in the 1970s. As I'm sure you know, he also won the federal government's case against Microsoft. He argued Gore's case to the Supreme Court; though he lost, I think most people thought he was by far the best advocate.
Ignoring the relative merits of the lawyers, I would have said that Microsoft deserved to lose. The evidence was heavily against them and there's really no arguing that they aren't a monopoly.
In IBM vs SCO I think the evidence is heavily against SCO. The fact that both sides have good lawyers is fine but predicting a judgement based on lawyers rather than factual merit seems... overly cynical.
You did, however, licence your linux software from the developers who wrote it and if they stole code, you, as a licencee, may be responsible, not for damages, but for payment of licencing fees on the code that was misappropriated.
You understand the GPL about as well as SCO's lawyers do. The GPL is not a user license.
I agree with your point but the parent poster didn't make a spelling mistake. Licence with a C is a perfectly acceptable variant.
And for that matter, which license would win? If GPL'd code was found in a product like Windows, would Microsoft be forced to open source the entire thing?
No. The GPL can't force an infringer to open source the derivative work. The GPL is merely invalidated and normal copyright law applies. So the copyright owner can settle out of court or sue for damages.
Settlement is fairly common. There have been GPL violations in the past and the copyright owners have basically said "stop distributing, apologise, and we'll leave it at that". Rather than face the courts the violators have usually complied. These cases are so common that they don't even make the headlines.
The copyright owner could conceivably take it to court and demand damages be paid. I think MySQL Inc did this. Though some projects might find it difficult justifying the value for monetary loss. That's not to say free software has no value; just that the calculation won't be as simple as "$X * n". The free software owners will almost certainly win: the GPL is a license and can be disputed but copyright law is indisputable!
But there is a third option. The violator can solve all of the problems by GPLing their changes. That way there is no GPL violation. They don't have to apologise and they don't have to go to court. The most famous example of this happened about a decade ago. NEXT violated the GPL by modifying GCC to create the Objective-C compiler and selling it with a binary-only license. FSF spoke quietly to them and NEXT suddenly released Objective-C under the GPL. Everybody wins.
If GPL code was found inside Windows then I'm sure Microsoft would pay damages or take it to court. There's very little chance of Windows being open-sourced while it's still as popular as it is. And I can't see Microsoft apologising for anything:-)
It would be nice if they (IBM, SGI) ran the ENTIRE Linux/GPL code base through a tokenized comparison with their reference SCO Unix trees. Thus GPL community could start identifying and removing any suspect code NOW, rather than wait for a trial outcome.
I don't think it'd help. SCO is using a very broad definition of "derivative work".
For example, SCO is claiming RCU and NUMA in Linux are derivative works of SYSV UNIX. There isn't going to be any SYSV UNIX code in either example. SCO apparently thinks RCU and NUMA are derivatives because Dynix and AIX (which are derivatives of SYSV UNIX) once included RCU and NUMA.
Also Groklaw has just linked to the updated SCOForum Powerpoint slides. SCO is now claiming that an IBM engineer who merely spoke about cache coherency in Linux was transferring "SYSV UNIX concepts" into Linux. This is beyond ludicrous. SCO is not even bothering with copyright; SCO is claiming ownership over concepts!
So removing infringing code - if there even is any - isn't going to appease SCO.
Bullshit...
Trying grepping for "Regents" or some other string that appears in the BSD copyright notice and you'll see that they do not appear. Those few matches don't seem to have anything whatsoever to do with a notice of BSD copyright.
Bullshit yourself. Microsoft's copyright notices explicitly list the Regents of the University of California. Do a strings on nslookup.exe. There's no disputing this, despite trolls like you attempting to rewrite history.
... that when a company doesn't put its kernel changes out immediately, there's calls for hanging them for violating the GPL, but when a linux company optimizes boot-up routines in the kernel, nobody is asking when the patches are going to be making it into the mainline kernel?
Because the GPL only guarantees your right to source code if you first receive the modified binaries. You can't demand the source code "immediately" once the change has been made. FSM could conceivably keep this project in-house forever without releasing the source code. However as soon as they distribute binaries they must provide the source code.
Isn't it odd how, according to Joe Slashdot, copyright is so important when it relates to the GPL, but so irrelevant when it relates to music or movies?
I'm not Joe Slashdot and I respect copyright on movies, music and code.
Ahh, thanks for the clarification. I'll remember that one for next time.
Re:Care to compare to the original?
on
SCO's Plan Examined
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Linus, in turn, used some Minix code to get started with Linux, but this was quickly replaced. Linux hasn't contained any Minix code for years.
Linus used Minix as a development platform but Linux has never contained any Minix code, ever. Minix code was encumbered by a "look but don't touch" license. Well, sort of. You could touch but you couldn't redistribute the modified version. This draconian license was the reason for the Minix/386 patchset that was very popular before Linux took over. Andy refused to integrate the 386 patches into Minix because it would ruin Minix as a teaching aide, but the 386 patches fixed many of the limitations in Minix (eg, maximum 64kB executables) so nearly everybody applied them. Linux could not have used any Minix code as even the earliest version of Linux was GPLd and this was incompatible with the Minix license.
"Linux is derived from Minix" and "Linux once contained Minix code" are myths. I've seen both myths repeated fairly often but I think this is just confusion because Linus cross-compiled his kernel and gnuserspace from a Minix platform. The easiest way to disprove the myth is to ask Linus himself.
"Although linux is a complete kernel, and uses no code from minix or
other sources, almost none of the support routines have yet been coded.
Thus you currently need minix to bootstrap the system. It might be
possible to use the free minix demo-disk to make a filesystem and run
linux without having minix, but I don't know..."
Linus Torvalds - Release Notes 0.01
By "bootstrap" he means create the Minix filesystem and copy across the Linux kernel and gnuserspace. Linux used the Minix filesystem before EXTFS was written but it was a clean-room implementation. No Minix code was used in the Linux implementation of minixfs.
FYI, I've read the entire Minix source tree (I own one of the earlier editions of the book), I've been using Linux since 1992, I've read one of the earliest Linux source trees, and I've never seen any matching code.
The law only trumps a contract if the contract is breaking or violating the law.
Requiring that your employees come to work on time is NOT breaking the law.
But docking their pay excessively for minor infringements might be. If you're fined $1000 for 1 minute tardiness, that doesn't sound legal. That's my point. There was an example in Australia just recently. Petrol station attendant was fined her entire week's wages because she forgot to take the license plate of a fuel-and-run (person who tanks up and zooms away without paying). There were no cameras to record the crime. That was found to be illegal: she can't be docked more than the damage she caused. In this case, her pay could only be docked the $50 worth of fuel.
Therefore firing them for being late, even a minute late, is perfectly legal and acceptable.
Firing them, maybe. Excessive penalties for minor infringements, probably not.
BTW: Congrats on being the *only* reply so far that wasn't crap.
How can a stripper complain about her employer during the *interview*. She's not employed, yet.
Clearly you are completely ignorant of the law.
There are many things you cannot ask in an interview.
Nobody claimed they could, dickhead. I was pointing out the idiocy of your example. You said the stripper was asked by an EMPLOYER during the INTERVIEW. If she's in an INTERVIEW then she isn't EMPLOYED yet, so there's NO CONTRACT. Your example is completely worthless as "proof" that contracts can transcend law, because there's NO CONTRACT.
You could have found it yourself, if you weren't so fucking imbecilic.
No my friend, it is you who are the imbecile.
Nah-uh, retard. I said "Any contract that violates the law isn't binding". You disputed this by saying "No, contracts can require obligations above the minimum the law requires". I gave you the Wiki link that would clear up your confusion. Apparently you read it and didn't understand. Read it again, loser.
"A contract is void if it is based on an illegal purpose or contrary to public policy. It will not be recognized by court or enforceable by either party."
Back to the original example. If labour laws say (hypothetical, just for argument's sake) that less than 5 minutes of tardiness per week cannot be penalised by the employer then THE CONTRACT CANNOT ENFORCE CONDITIONS OTHERWISE. If it does state conditions otherwise then the contract has an illegal purpose and is not binding. Do you get it, yet? How many times will you need this repeated before it sinks in?
BTW: Your insults are lame. I called you imbecilic and your response is an overly wordy version of "no, you are". That's the most pathetic attempt at an insult I've ever had the disgrace to hear. Try "I'm rubber you're glue" next time. At least that has rhythm.
The existance of the pr0n/sex industry tends to invalidate your assertion. Do you think say a stripper could complain of sexual harassment if an employer asked take her clothes off in an interview? No, contracts can require obligations above the minimum the law requires.
Try not to be stupid. It makes your mother cry.
1st, How can a stripper complain about her employer during the *interview*. She's not employed, yet.
2nd, You're pretty dumb if you equate being naked with being sexually harrassed.
3rd, You are simply wrong. Contracts cannot be used to negate or circumvent the law.
I'm literally amazed somebody as stupid as you can even type coherently. I would have thought drooling would have been about your limit for intellectual expression. Read this, moron. "A contract is void if it is based on an illegal purpose or contrary to public policy. It will not be recognized by court or enforceable by either party". You could have found it yourself, if you weren't so fucking imbecilic.
Your contract tells you your conditions of work. If you don't like having to be there at 7:30, read your contract. If they're the rules, and you still don't like it, you're free to get another job.
No. Things don't work like that. I know there
is this popular myth that contracts can transcend law, but the law always trumps. Imagine if a contract said "in this job you will be sexually harrassed and you can't complain about it". Not legal. Any contract that violates the law isn't binding.
In the scenario described, if he is 1 minute late 3 times in a month, his pay is docked. Pay docked for 3 minutes of tardiness per month? I'm sure there's a labour law that specifies a limit on penalties for tardiness. The contract cannot impose penalties higher than those limits.
Now for the rant. I'm really pissed off with cunts like you whose answer for everything is: "if you don't like it, leave". That's not a fucking answer. You're exactly like the braindead fucks who pretend that the way to fix a country is to get rid of all the dissenters. Fuck you.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that's a nasty and unfair stereotype. I hardly think the single vocal idiot you responded to represents "the average Slashdotter".
Technology makes life comfortable. Art makes it worth living.
How is that an argument? Half of the households in Izbahkistan don't have electricity and use cow dung for heat. Would you now claim that the local dung seller isn't selling an out-of-date system of heating?
I never said anything about copying songs without permission. I'm not disputing that the RIAA can pick and choose the distribution system. I'm just challenging the idiotic claim that physical delivery of music is not out-of-date. Of course it bloody well is. The existence of companies who only distribute music via the Internet is proof that there is a new method of distribution, therefore proving that the old method is OUT OF DATE.
And there are 3 books in the Dune Trilogy.
How isn't the distribution system horribly out-of-date? The very concept of taking data, sticking it onto physical discs, putting those discs inside plastic wrappers, moving those discs via trucks, holding them inside stores, requiring the consumer to transport themselves several kilometres to buy the disc, then transport it home, simply so the customer can play music? That system makes sense for physical goods; not for pure data.
Internet distribution of music is modern, efficient and convenient. You can argue (though you didn't) that the current systems are broken because the artist isn't compensated, but I don't see how you could possibly argue that the physical distribution system is anything other than antiquated. It's a 100-year old distribution model that hasn't significantly changed despite several generations of telecommunication improvements.
Snap! I hate that. You click the Start button and I reckon I could read the entire Dune trilogy in the time it takes for something to appear.
Even worse is when you go to a submenu and it ... just ... takes ... for ... ev ... er ... to appear. This is a Pentium-4 with 512MB ram and I honestly feel like I've been transported back to the 1980s.
Ignoring the relative merits of the lawyers, I would have said that Microsoft deserved to lose. The evidence was heavily against them and there's really no arguing that they aren't a monopoly.
In IBM vs SCO I think the evidence is heavily against SCO. The fact that both sides have good lawyers is fine but predicting a judgement based on lawyers rather than factual merit seems... overly cynical.
I agree with your point but the parent poster didn't make a spelling mistake. Licence with a C is a perfectly acceptable variant.
No. The GPL can't force an infringer to open source the derivative work. The GPL is merely invalidated and normal copyright law applies. So the copyright owner can settle out of court or sue for damages.
Settlement is fairly common. There have been GPL violations in the past and the copyright owners have basically said "stop distributing, apologise, and we'll leave it at that". Rather than face the courts the violators have usually complied. These cases are so common that they don't even make the headlines.
The copyright owner could conceivably take it to court and demand damages be paid. I think MySQL Inc did this. Though some projects might find it difficult justifying the value for monetary loss. That's not to say free software has no value; just that the calculation won't be as simple as "$X * n". The free software owners will almost certainly win: the GPL is a license and can be disputed but copyright law is indisputable!
But there is a third option. The violator can solve all of the problems by GPLing their changes. That way there is no GPL violation. They don't have to apologise and they don't have to go to court. The most famous example of this happened about a decade ago. NEXT violated the GPL by modifying GCC to create the Objective-C compiler and selling it with a binary-only license. FSF spoke quietly to them and NEXT suddenly released Objective-C under the GPL. Everybody wins.
If GPL code was found inside Windows then I'm sure Microsoft would pay damages or take it to court. There's very little chance of Windows being open-sourced while it's still as popular as it is. And I can't see Microsoft apologising for anything :-)
I don't think it'd help. SCO is using a very broad definition of "derivative work".
For example, SCO is claiming RCU and NUMA in Linux are derivative works of SYSV UNIX. There isn't going to be any SYSV UNIX code in either example. SCO apparently thinks RCU and NUMA are derivatives because Dynix and AIX (which are derivatives of SYSV UNIX) once included RCU and NUMA.
Also Groklaw has just linked to the updated SCOForum Powerpoint slides. SCO is now claiming that an IBM engineer who merely spoke about cache coherency in Linux was transferring "SYSV UNIX concepts" into Linux. This is beyond ludicrous. SCO is not even bothering with copyright; SCO is claiming ownership over concepts!
So removing infringing code - if there even is any - isn't going to appease SCO.
Bullshit yourself. Microsoft's copyright notices explicitly list the Regents of the University of California. Do a strings on nslookup.exe. There's no disputing this, despite trolls like you attempting to rewrite history.
Because the GPL only guarantees your right to source code if you first receive the modified binaries. You can't demand the source code "immediately" once the change has been made. FSM could conceivably keep this project in-house forever without releasing the source code. However as soon as they distribute binaries they must provide the source code.
I'm not Joe Slashdot and I respect copyright on movies, music and code.
I literally cheered when I read the /. headline. Alston is a drongo and we're happy to see the back of him.
I could shit on a bun and make a better hamburger than McDonalds.
Just say your piece. You don't need to prepend it with some chest-beating about your amazing powers of precognition.
Ahh, thanks for the clarification. I'll remember that one for next time.
Linus used Minix as a development platform but Linux has never contained any Minix code, ever. Minix code was encumbered by a "look but don't touch" license. Well, sort of. You could touch but you couldn't redistribute the modified version. This draconian license was the reason for the Minix/386 patchset that was very popular before Linux took over. Andy refused to integrate the 386 patches into Minix because it would ruin Minix as a teaching aide, but the 386 patches fixed many of the limitations in Minix (eg, maximum 64kB executables) so nearly everybody applied them. Linux could not have used any Minix code as even the earliest version of Linux was GPLd and this was incompatible with the Minix license.
"Linux is derived from Minix" and "Linux once contained Minix code" are myths. I've seen both myths repeated fairly often but I think this is just confusion because Linus cross-compiled his kernel and gnuserspace from a Minix platform. The easiest way to disprove the myth is to ask Linus himself.
By "bootstrap" he means create the Minix filesystem and copy across the Linux kernel and gnuserspace. Linux used the Minix filesystem before EXTFS was written but it was a clean-room implementation. No Minix code was used in the Linux implementation of minixfs.
FYI, I've read the entire Minix source tree (I own one of the earlier editions of the book), I've been using Linux since 1992, I've read one of the earliest Linux source trees, and I've never seen any matching code.
Metamoderation is moderation for the moderation, not moderation for the moderators.
Oh, for Pete's sake, how in hell did anybody think that was flamebait?
Slashcode needs moderation for the moderators.
Because they can afford it.
Poor people often work hard, too.
But docking their pay excessively for minor infringements might be. If you're fined $1000 for 1 minute tardiness, that doesn't sound legal. That's my point. There was an example in Australia just recently. Petrol station attendant was fined her entire week's wages because she forgot to take the license plate of a fuel-and-run (person who tanks up and zooms away without paying). There were no cameras to record the crime. That was found to be illegal: she can't be docked more than the damage she caused. In this case, her pay could only be docked the $50 worth of fuel.
Firing them, maybe. Excessive penalties for minor infringements, probably not.
BTW: Congrats on being the *only* reply so far that wasn't crap.
Nobody claimed they could, dickhead. I was pointing out the idiocy of your example. You said the stripper was asked by an EMPLOYER during the INTERVIEW. If she's in an INTERVIEW then she isn't EMPLOYED yet, so there's NO CONTRACT. Your example is completely worthless as "proof" that contracts can transcend law, because there's NO CONTRACT.
Nah-uh, retard. I said "Any contract that violates the law isn't binding". You disputed this by saying "No, contracts can require obligations above the minimum the law requires". I gave you the Wiki link that would clear up your confusion. Apparently you read it and didn't understand. Read it again, loser.
Back to the original example. If labour laws say (hypothetical, just for argument's sake) that less than 5 minutes of tardiness per week cannot be penalised by the employer then THE CONTRACT CANNOT ENFORCE CONDITIONS OTHERWISE. If it does state conditions otherwise then the contract has an illegal purpose and is not binding. Do you get it, yet? How many times will you need this repeated before it sinks in?
BTW: Your insults are lame. I called you imbecilic and your response is an overly wordy version of "no, you are". That's the most pathetic attempt at an insult I've ever had the disgrace to hear. Try "I'm rubber you're glue" next time. At least that has rhythm.
Try not to be stupid. It makes your mother cry.
1st, How can a stripper complain about her employer during the *interview*. She's not employed, yet.
2nd, You're pretty dumb if you equate being naked with being sexually harrassed.
3rd, You are simply wrong. Contracts cannot be used to negate or circumvent the law.
I'm literally amazed somebody as stupid as you can even type coherently. I would have thought drooling would have been about your limit for intellectual expression. Read this, moron. "A contract is void if it is based on an illegal purpose or contrary to public policy. It will not be recognized by court or enforceable by either party". You could have found it yourself, if you weren't so fucking imbecilic.
No. Things don't work like that. I know there is this popular myth that contracts can transcend law, but the law always trumps. Imagine if a contract said "in this job you will be sexually harrassed and you can't complain about it". Not legal. Any contract that violates the law isn't binding.
In the scenario described, if he is 1 minute late 3 times in a month, his pay is docked. Pay docked for 3 minutes of tardiness per month? I'm sure there's a labour law that specifies a limit on penalties for tardiness. The contract cannot impose penalties higher than those limits.
Now for the rant. I'm really pissed off with cunts like you whose answer for everything is: "if you don't like it, leave". That's not a fucking answer. You're exactly like the braindead fucks who pretend that the way to fix a country is to get rid of all the dissenters. Fuck you.