The fact that it can't happen. If you BSD license project A, and company M takes it and makes closed source project B with it, project A is *still* available from your site for free and open. Your code has not been magically closed, the only thing that is closed is *their* code which they used to make their project different from yours.
The purpose of the GPL is to keep the project as a whole "free" not just the original version. It keeps derivatives from being locked away in proprietary forms.
If a company or individual doesn't want to contribute to a project that is free that way then they still have the freedom to create their own purely proprietary project.
For some reason Hitslink gets quoted as a source quite often. However they just retroactively adjusted all of their numbers in a way that increases Windows and IE market share.
In the past, we reported only on our raw numbers. As of August 1st, we have implemented retroactive country-level weighting in our reports.
As examples of their changes:
Original: Windows total share April 2009 88.71% Revised: 92.67%
Original: Windows total share May 2009: 87.75% Revised: 92.17
Original: Mac total share May 2009: 9.81% Revised: 4.25%
Original: Firefox total share April 2009: 22.48% Revised: 23.84%
Original: Firefox total share May 2009: 22.49% Revised: 22.75%
Original: Internet Explorer total share April 2009: 66.1% Revised: 67.77%
Original: Internet Explorer total share May 2009: 65.59% Revised: 68.1%
To me retroactively changing their data really hurts their credibility.
Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it refers to four kinds of freedom, for the users of the software:
* The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
* The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
* The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
* The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The safest way to currently browse the internet on any OS and any browser is Vista or Win7 combined with IE7 or IE8, as it is the only solution that fully sandboxes the browser and subsuqent plugin/activex controls, and runs in a reduce security mode that can't even access or damage user level files let alone alter the OS, other procesess, or system files.
That is safer than using Firefox from a Linux LiveCD how? When using a LiveCD even if the OS is breached a reboot puts you right back where you were without any infection that might have occurred.
We could always speed up the rotation of Venus by throwing a moon-sized object into orbit around it. Might actually solve the magnetic field issue by spinning the Venusian metal core potentially generating a magnetic shield around Venus just as Earth is shielded.
Something closer to our current tech would be to plant ion drives all over the surface and take sulfur from the atmosphere as the reaction mass and use them to spin up the planet while removing the excess sulfur and releasing oxygen. Naturally this is beyond out tech and ideally the ion drives would have an exhaust velocity for closer to C than our current primitive ones.
Also you wouldn't need to wait a few million years for the planet to stabilize as the changes would be much more gradual than a lunar impact.
with mars, you're faced with the problem of making an atmosphere where there isn't any
There is a vast amount of CO2 absorbed into the rock and soil on Mars. If you raised the temperature a little some of that would come out. As the absorbed CO2 was released the green house effect would increase and even more would be released. The cycle would continue until all the CO2 was released and an air pressure that you could survive without a space suit would be available.
But lately, they've been producing new products at an astonishing rate. Taking the shotgun approach of seeing which spaghetti sticks to the wall,
Is it really just lately? It is also possible that a lot of these products have been in the pipeline for some time and we see them as they mature to the point of public testing. We may have seen things like GMail and Google maps sooner because they were early starts compared to what is coming out now. It takes time to start and mature a product to even a public beta testing level.
I incorrectly remembered the various 8-bit DOSes as licensed by Microsoft, but they were actually built in-house.
The original PC/MS DOS was licensed by Microsoft from Seattle Computer Products. Later they bought it. It was originally written for an 8086 kit computer SCP was selling.
Microsoft likely made some modifications before they shipped it as MS-DOS 1.0 but they didn't create it.
IBM was no more open than Apple. The clone makers made the x86 PC an open platform against IBMs will.
Both the Apple II and the IBM PC had slots that other companies could make add on cards for. Both were set up so other companies could easily create software for them. At that time of their being open neither was trying to block competitors making add on hardware and software.
With the Mac and IBM MCA machines they changed and the cloners took over the PC market and both Apple and IBM had to fight for relevance.
The clone makers were able to succeed because IBM chose standardized components rather than proprietary ones. Also because IBM created and used an open slot system for add on cards the cloners add a ready supply of add on cards (video cards and I/O cards for example) without having to design their own. An outside company doing a clean room clone of the BIOS (and no software patents to stop it) was the final piece.
Apple II cloners missed some of those things. Apples own proprietary (and innovative) floppy controller for example and no one did a clean room BIOS clone.
Apple brought desktop computing to the home user? Uh..... No... Apple was for some schools and a few geeks with no lives and way too much money.
Apple was the first with "mass market" success as a preassembled computer for the home market.
Microsoft being credited with bringing computers to home users neglects the facts namely that they did not create the PC or even create PC-DOS. IBM did the first and Microsoft bought DOS from the original creators. None of that was a Microsoft vision it was Microsoft moving into markets created by others, notably Apple.
In what way was the Apple II an open system? I owned a IIe and a IIgs and never thought of them as being especially open
The Apple II design was open, the later descendants not being open the same way does not change the original version from being open.
Little do you know of history of IBM.
IBM tried to proprietize the IBM PC with MCA bus [wikipedia.org] back in 1988.
I'm definitely aware of that. But that was much later and DID NOT WORK. Just as Apple failed to keep their hold on the home user when they locked up the Mac so did IBM fail when they attempted to do the same. It also doesn't change that it was the OPEN IBM PC that took the market from Apple, not Microsoft that did it.
Microsoft brought desktop computing to the home user.
I have to disagree there. Apple brought desktop computing to the home user. IBM brought it to the business user and took Microsoft along for the ride.
Apple lost the home with the Mac which was a totally closed system where the Apple II was an open system. IBM on the other hand brought an OPEN system to businesses along with the IBM name, people introduced to the computer at work then bought the same for home use. Microsoft just rode into the home on the back of IBM when IBM replaced Apple in the home.
My first access to a microcomputer was to a Heathkit H11 that I helped build.
EULAs and copyright licenses are wrong, yet the GPL is good.
Is there a fundamental difference between a EULA and the GPL? Yes there is. What is it? Namely that the EULA tries to remove rights that you have under the law while the GPL gives you more rights than the law does. Also when you get a patch to a GPL'd product the GPL stays the same for you as a end user, a product with a EULA may rewrite the EULA possibly making your use of it a EULA violation.
Why should a corporation be allowed to remove your rights under the law for their own convenience?
I go into a store and say "I'd like to buy a copy of [software product X]" and they sell me a copy. When I try to install it up pops a EULA claiming I didn't buy it. Yet when I try to return it to the store I can't since I opened it and the store is allowed not to refund the money for opened software. Why can the manufacturer change the terms of the PURCHASE after the purchase has been made?
If the law says the judge can award $80k per violation, while outrageous, there is nothing retarded about a judge doing so. Remember, you don't change laws in court, you change them in Congress.
Wasn't it the jury that made that award not the judge? Isn't there also a long history of excessive awards by juries being overturned?
With proportional representation the party leaders choose who represent you and you have no way to say no to a scummy person. Also independents effectively cannot be elected.
I would prefer larger electoral districts where anyone with at least 10% of the vote becomes a representative of the district and gets 1 vote per 1 full percent of the vote he received. As to pay the representative would get a percentage of the pay for that districts representatives that equals the % of the vote received. This allows the minority to be represented without handing more power to party leaderships and their cronies.
It is not intended to allow them to suppress material.
So what happens when a copyright owner does not publish their work and does not allow anyone else to do so? Do they lose the copyright? It amounts to suppressing it if they won't either distribute it or allow distribution by others.
The first question that occurred to me is whether she even has rights to the piece. If MySpace has one of those all-your-rights-are-belong-to-us TOS, she might not be in a position to bring a copyright claim at all.
Obligatory IANAL.
My understanding is that copyright has to be explicitly transferred in the U.S. by a document meeting certain standards. I doubt that an online TOS that varies over time would serve as such a document.
Give me a compelling reason to move from (DRM free) 2K Pro, and we can talk.
Windows 2000 Pro does have DRM, just less of it. I found that out the first time I tried to make a legal copy of a DVD (legal under Canadian law) and Windows blocked it stating it was "illegal". This is with a copy of Win2kPro bought in Canada.
Project started in 2003 and only 60% of the desktop have been migrated... Luckily I am not a Munich tax payer because I would seriously challenge this project justification....
Together with SuSE/Novell and IBM, the city worked out a detailed concept for the migration during 2003 and 2004. During summer 2004, the project was put on hold while a study was conducted to clear up legal insecurities related to software patents. The actual migration has been running since 2005.
Most parts of the city's administration choose a soft migration, first installing the open source applications Thunderbird, Firefox and OpenOffice on Windows computers. The migration to OpenOffice also introduces a new system for managing templates, called Wollmux. In a second phase, the departments then roll out the GNU/Linux basic client.
Notice it was delayed by patent FUD. Software patents are not valid in the EU.
Notice also that they are implementing it in stages, using Open Source on top of Windows and only some departments installing Linux at a given time. It has a time line going to 2012 for completion. Incremental migration is pretty normal on large projects.
Slashdot Mirror
After meeting politicians so pretty much the same.
Not quite right.
Now it's right.
The purpose of the GPL is to keep the project as a whole "free" not just the original version. It keeps derivatives from being locked away in proprietary forms.
If a company or individual doesn't want to contribute to a project that is free that way then they still have the freedom to create their own purely proprietary project.
Consider their pricing of XP Home on netbooks. It was a big enough change to affect their bottom line.
For some reason Hitslink gets quoted as a source quite often. However they just retroactively adjusted all of their numbers in a way that increases Windows and IE market share.
As examples of their changes:
To me retroactively changing their data really hurts their credibility.
Note: These numbers were arrived at by totaling the numbers on http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=11 this page.
Freedom for software the way Stallman means it. (From http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html)
#define $DEITY NULL
He shouldn't have pissed in our Maple Syrup.
Was that the reason or was it because it was the cheapest way to handle the antitrust violations in the E.U.?
That is safer than using Firefox from a Linux LiveCD how? When using a LiveCD even if the OS is breached a reboot puts you right back where you were without any infection that might have occurred.
Something closer to our current tech would be to plant ion drives all over the surface and take sulfur from the atmosphere as the reaction mass and use them to spin up the planet while removing the excess sulfur and releasing oxygen. Naturally this is beyond out tech and ideally the ion drives would have an exhaust velocity for closer to C than our current primitive ones.
Also you wouldn't need to wait a few million years for the planet to stabilize as the changes would be much more gradual than a lunar impact.
There is a vast amount of CO2 absorbed into the rock and soil on Mars. If you raised the temperature a little some of that would come out. As the absorbed CO2 was released the green house effect would increase and even more would be released. The cycle would continue until all the CO2 was released and an air pressure that you could survive without a space suit would be available.
Is it really just lately? It is also possible that a lot of these products have been in the pipeline for some time and we see them as they mature to the point of public testing. We may have seen things like GMail and Google maps sooner because they were early starts compared to what is coming out now. It takes time to start and mature a product to even a public beta testing level.
The original PC/MS DOS was licensed by Microsoft from Seattle Computer Products. Later they bought it. It was originally written for an 8086 kit computer SCP was selling.
Microsoft likely made some modifications before they shipped it as MS-DOS 1.0 but they didn't create it.
Both the Apple II and the IBM PC had slots that other companies could make add on cards for. Both were set up so other companies could easily create software for them. At that time of their being open neither was trying to block competitors making add on hardware and software.
With the Mac and IBM MCA machines they changed and the cloners took over the PC market and both Apple and IBM had to fight for relevance.
The clone makers were able to succeed because IBM chose standardized components rather than proprietary ones. Also because IBM created and used an open slot system for add on cards the cloners add a ready supply of add on cards (video cards and I/O cards for example) without having to design their own. An outside company doing a clean room clone of the BIOS (and no software patents to stop it) was the final piece.
Apple II cloners missed some of those things. Apples own proprietary (and innovative) floppy controller for example and no one did a clean room BIOS clone.
Apple was the first with "mass market" success as a preassembled computer for the home market.
Microsoft being credited with bringing computers to home users neglects the facts namely that they did not create the PC or even create PC-DOS. IBM did the first and Microsoft bought DOS from the original creators. None of that was a Microsoft vision it was Microsoft moving into markets created by others, notably Apple.
The Apple II design was open, the later descendants not being open the same way does not change the original version from being open.
I'm definitely aware of that. But that was much later and DID NOT WORK. Just as Apple failed to keep their hold on the home user when they locked up the Mac so did IBM fail when they attempted to do the same. It also doesn't change that it was the OPEN IBM PC that took the market from Apple, not Microsoft that did it.
I have to disagree there. Apple brought desktop computing to the home user. IBM brought it to the business user and took Microsoft along for the ride.
Apple lost the home with the Mac which was a totally closed system where the Apple II was an open system. IBM on the other hand brought an OPEN system to businesses along with the IBM name, people introduced to the computer at work then bought the same for home use. Microsoft just rode into the home on the back of IBM when IBM replaced Apple in the home.
My first access to a microcomputer was to a Heathkit H11 that I helped build.
Is there a fundamental difference between a EULA and the GPL? Yes there is. What is it? Namely that the EULA tries to remove rights that you have under the law while the GPL gives you more rights than the law does. Also when you get a patch to a GPL'd product the GPL stays the same for you as a end user, a product with a EULA may rewrite the EULA possibly making your use of it a EULA violation.
Why should a corporation be allowed to remove your rights under the law for their own convenience?
I go into a store and say "I'd like to buy a copy of [software product X]" and they sell me a copy. When I try to install it up pops a EULA claiming I didn't buy it. Yet when I try to return it to the store I can't since I opened it and the store is allowed not to refund the money for opened software. Why can the manufacturer change the terms of the PURCHASE after the purchase has been made?
That is why the EULA is bad and the GPL is good.
Wasn't it the jury that made that award not the judge? Isn't there also a long history of excessive awards by juries being overturned?
With proportional representation the party leaders choose who represent you and you have no way to say no to a scummy person. Also independents effectively cannot be elected.
I would prefer larger electoral districts where anyone with at least 10% of the vote becomes a representative of the district and gets 1 vote per 1 full percent of the vote he received. As to pay the representative would get a percentage of the pay for that districts representatives that equals the % of the vote received. This allows the minority to be represented without handing more power to party leaderships and their cronies.
So what happens when a copyright owner does not publish their work and does not allow anyone else to do so? Do they lose the copyright? It amounts to suppressing it if they won't either distribute it or allow distribution by others.
Obligatory IANAL.
My understanding is that copyright has to be explicitly transferred in the U.S. by a document meeting certain standards. I doubt that an online TOS that varies over time would serve as such a document.
Windows 2000 Pro does have DRM, just less of it. I found that out the first time I tried to make a legal copy of a DVD (legal under Canadian law) and Windows blocked it stating it was "illegal". This is with a copy of Win2kPro bought in Canada.
From the article at http://www.osor.eu/case_studies/declaration-of-independence-the-limux-project-in-munich#section-12/
Notice it was delayed by patent FUD. Software patents are not valid in the EU.
Notice also that they are implementing it in stages, using Open Source on top of Windows and only some departments installing Linux at a given time. It has a time line going to 2012 for completion. Incremental migration is pretty normal on large projects.