Yup. The patent holder wishes to ensure that his patents are free only for free software, not for others to use in non-free software, as he hopes to make money off of non-free use of the patents. BSD-type licensing doesn't prevent use in non-free software, so he chose GPL. I agree that I'd rather see all patent rights disclaimed (since software patents are evil), but this better than no free license at all.
Consider, if he additionally licensed the BSD people (but only them) to use the algorithms freely, could they still use them, knowing that the software would not be modifiable by others?
On advogato, crj writes about possible use of the patented algorithm in embedded systems, and the risk that although the authors distribute source code, the recipients may not be able to use it due to the unique nature of the embedded system.
(since I don't have an account there, I'll reply here)
This is not really a problem, as either 1) you'll still be able to follow the implementation logic or 2) the system will be so foreign to your environment that the source wouldn't do you any good. At work we occasionally program for data collectors and other non-standard systems, and yes, you do have to buy expensive toolkits to take advantage of the platform. But once you do, the programs can be free. And on these platforms, the code is exactly the same as for a PC, except for screen IO and low-level keyboard IO, so you can follow and adapt anything written for them.
In short the risk of "losing" embedded code is minimal -- either it will be mostly-translatable or it will be such a tight niche that you're not going to be using it anyway. By forcing them to use GPL you're going as far as you can to make their code a contribution to free software, but how many people really speak Z80 any more?
The rule is only a moratorium on new federal taxes. Local governments are still permitted to collect existing or new taxes. It just makes them look more evil to the voters, as Congress has gone public with an opposing view.
Hm. First, thanks for responding. It's good to see a calm, reasoned answer from a Microsoft person in this forum. Hope you've got your asbestos underwear handy:-).
I agree that the post of the text of the extension spec breaks MS's Trade Secret protection, however MS may have already broken it by publishing. And although I think one should be allowed to quote from the spec, I think that I agree that publishing the whole thing is a copyright violation. However, it's short and there may be a case that meaningful commentary requires the context of the whole thing, so I'll leave that one to the lawyers.
However, I think that you have the extensions issue right. I think that the MS engineers that designed it were using a wrongheaded method for extending Win2k security through Kerberos, in their own windows-centric sort of way, without worrying about Samba. But when I look at the whole standards interaction thing, I see that upper management and the lawyers probably did get together and say something like:
"hey, those standards people have a point. This could make it hard to run workstations without a Windows server. Bonus! Score!"
I agree that the legal thing was a dumb PR move, but again, I think you trust your lawyers too much if you imagine they weren't trying to prevent uncontaminated reverse engineering for interoperability. Heck, I don't even work in the private sector, and we often do things with two agendas -- the "if it flies, fine, but if they give us guff we'll spring the fine print on them" sort of thing. Your boss's boss does more than sign timesheets:-).
In short, although I agree that the inital concept was not to kill Samba, I very much doubt that the Samba-killing agenda didn't enter into the process at a higher level, and that Samba-killing might be behind the selection of the particular technological design that made the final cut, even if the engineer that proposed it didn't start there. Me, I'd have picked a more straightforward way to do it (like printing "Microsoft Kerberos Server Required" right on the box), but if I were a MS exec, I'd try to kill Samba too. It's not that they want to kill Samba or Kerberos, it's that they want to do it by sleight of hand, while promoting a false openness, that rankles.
Yup. Hopefully your contract to finish the work contained a clause that stipulates that all materials provided belong to the company that hired you, or they have obtained the necessary rights. Otherwise the other web folks may have a case, as they could have provided the code without rights to change it (create a derivative work). Some web folks I know have been stuck by that sort of thing ("Here, use this photo" when the company doesn't own the photo) and have been sued for copyright infringement.
Of course, I agree that it's different from open source software. Intel really doesnt need to fear anything, since no-one except them has the know-how and hardware to actually make the chip.
Actually, it's patents. Intel is (1) offering you the ability to interface, increasing the market and (2) offering you the ability to infringe their patents, so they can take your company:-). Of course, I don't think they're really expecting to get infringements, but it's a potential side benefit.
Besides the fact that this case is about win9x and Internet Explorer ONLY,
Bzzt! Wrong... this case is about Microsoft's illegal business practises, as exemplified by their leveraging the Windows monopoly to crush a browser competitor, and to control the PC desktop operating system market through unfair pricing, exclusivity in contracts and threatened denial of supply of a monopoly product.
The remedy must address future ability to carry out such activities, not just the products that have already been used for such activities.
True, (and it's (+), btw) but Oracle specifies Entry Level compatibility, and it delivers that. The outer join syntax is an optional level. MS SQL, on the other hand, will choke on valid entry level statements:-).
How about if I said, "I baked a great lemon pie! I'll give you the recipie!" Then I send you a recipie for a good pie, with a legal agreement that says you can't share it, or use it, oh and by the way, it's not really lemon, it's artificially flavored, but you can't tell anyone.
That's what MS is up to. They're offering you the recipie so that they can advertise (falsely) "lemon pie, with recipie".
We could hope that the OS line will be a loser, since MS has always used one line to support another. Bill as much as said so when he said they couldn't have developed Windows under these rules. Of course, maybe it's Word that would go away... Sadly, if the 60%-80% profit margin stories are true, it would be hard to lose in the WinOS or WinApps market -- there's a lot of price flexibility there.
The Dev Tools moving to the WinApps company actually sounds like a clever ploy to prevent development toolkits that are initially MS only, since the OS developers will need to buy them from the Apps company, and I'm sure exclusive dealings between the two will be a no-no.
Hmmm.. I wonder how much it would cost to buy, say, Iceland? All us IT intellegensia could move, establish our open source society and go head-to-head with the world's IT industry....right. --
It does, however, prevent us from interacting with that software. And what CEO is going to put in his shareholder report "yeah, this year we took a $2.6M hit when we discarded all commercial word-processor software"? Besides, if enacted as recommended, only commercial software producers are proteced. Us non-commercial people are still liable, and probably won't get our language right if we do craft a sufficiently crafty license. --
If it does become possible, it'll probably involve dissection, since we'll have to include all the conections between neurons as part of the model. So the first volunteers will all be suicidal. So they'll crash themselves on purpose. So we won't know it works.... --
SCSI is targeted at the enterprise consumer. That means $ for reliability, and higher margins ('cause you can). The household user will tolerate a drive that fails, businesses run them longer, harder and expect better performance. And since they'll pay for that, you can hit a higher price point. I'll bet if a producer would sell SCSI drives at the same reliability and for the same profit they get from EIDE, we'd see comparable prices.
What are the chances these fossils have been compressed during the mineralization process?
Not the End of GPL, just tabloid headlines.
on
Hole in GNU GPL?
·
· Score: 2
IANAL
Mr. Rideau is both correct and incorrect. He correctly points out that if the Corporation distributes a binary to the Employee, the GPL insists that the source, and all the rights to distribute the source, must also be made available. He incorrectly infers that the Corporation distributes the software to its employees, in order to use the code.
If the Corporation wishes to keep its mods secret, it may hire an employee to work on the code while insisting that the code not leave the Corporation's computers or premesis. This does not count as "distribution" because the employee does not gain custody of the code, except in the limited sense that you gain custody of your office window.
You are free to use the window while at work, but you may not take it home, modify it in unauthorized ways or redistribute it:-).
However, the GPL does enjoin the redistribution of the code under other licenses (section 4). So while you may make copies and keep them, or a Corporation may cause employees to make modified copies, but retain them, the Corporation cannot permit those copies to leave the premesis under any license except the GPL. If they do, government may prosecute them and the authors may sue them for copyright infringement.
Under section 8, Mr. Rideau's employee who redistributes the software (presumably against his employer's wishes, and against the terms of his employment) has in fact committed a legal foul, and is subject to penalty. The GPL does not excuse you from conditions or agreements that conflict with its terms, it only prevents you from distributing the code in those cases.
This will be good when it's built into my freezer. Then I can send an inquiry to the freezer to see what I've got, then order it to cook dinner before I leave work. Get home to a hot plate. Mmmmm...
Really, I've been learning Python this weekend, and the annoying thing hasn't been getting up to nuke a meal, or deciding how long. It's been the interval while it nukes... To be able to set a schedule for dinner production in advance, with or without polling for confirmation, that would be cool.
Just as a tonic, some friends of mine took options in leiu of a decent salary at a local startup. When the startup tanked, the prinicpals carried the product with them to their next venture, but the options became worth exactly $0.00. Less, if you count the lost salary...
In essence, options are a promise and incentive. If you make the company succeed, and it goes public, they become worth something. If the fellow offering them is having trouble meeting payroll... take em anyway! Chances are he doesn't have the money to pay you the big bucks anyway:-). It's when you're in the middle that you have to really sweat.
If you're a small site, this is about it. But if you have some resources or some expertise, most web-hosting companies or commercial ISP's will offer co-resident servers, where they give you some rack space, power, bandwidth and some low level of hardware support ("uh, Bob, could you hit the power on rack number 12 for me?").
This lets you at least take control of your own backup and recovery, and system administration, which can be important for a database-driven site. You do need to have a professional level of skill to keep the crackers out, but if you're a business and you have internal servers, or you're building a site with a big database, chances are you need someone like that anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Consider, if he additionally licensed the BSD people (but only them) to use the algorithms freely, could they still use them, knowing that the software would not be modifiable by others?
(since I don't have an account there, I'll reply here)
This is not really a problem, as either 1) you'll still be able to follow the implementation logic or 2) the system will be so foreign to your environment that the source wouldn't do you any good. At work we occasionally program for data collectors and other non-standard systems, and yes, you do have to buy expensive toolkits to take advantage of the platform. But once you do, the programs can be free. And on these platforms, the code is exactly the same as for a PC, except for screen IO and low-level keyboard IO, so you can follow and adapt anything written for them.
In short the risk of "losing" embedded code is minimal -- either it will be mostly-translatable or it will be such a tight niche that you're not going to be using it anyway. By forcing them to use GPL you're going as far as you can to make their code a contribution to free software, but how many people really speak Z80 any more?
However, the GPL permits your company to hang on to its changes if it does not redistribute the software.
The rule is only a moratorium on new federal taxes. Local governments are still permitted to collect existing or new taxes. It just makes them look more evil to the voters, as Congress has gone public with an opposing view.
... Big Guns....
I agree that the post of the text of the extension spec breaks MS's Trade Secret protection, however MS may have already broken it by publishing. And although I think one should be allowed to quote from the spec, I think that I agree that publishing the whole thing is a copyright violation. However, it's short and there may be a case that meaningful commentary requires the context of the whole thing, so I'll leave that one to the lawyers.
However, I think that you have the extensions issue right. I think that the MS engineers that designed it were using a wrongheaded method for extending Win2k security through Kerberos, in their own windows-centric sort of way, without worrying about Samba. But when I look at the whole standards interaction thing, I see that upper management and the lawyers probably did get together and say something like:
"hey, those standards people have a point. This could make it hard to run workstations without a Windows server. Bonus! Score!"
I agree that the legal thing was a dumb PR move, but again, I think you trust your lawyers too much if you imagine they weren't trying to prevent uncontaminated reverse engineering for interoperability. Heck, I don't even work in the private sector, and we often do things with two agendas -- the "if it flies, fine, but if they give us guff we'll spring the fine print on them" sort of thing. Your boss's boss does more than sign timesheets :-).
In short, although I agree that the inital concept was not to kill Samba, I very much doubt that the Samba-killing agenda didn't enter into the process at a higher level, and that Samba-killing might be behind the selection of the particular technological design that made the final cut, even if the engineer that proposed it didn't start there. Me, I'd have picked a more straightforward way to do it (like printing "Microsoft Kerberos Server Required" right on the box), but if I were a MS exec, I'd try to kill Samba too. It's not that they want to kill Samba or Kerberos, it's that they want to do it by sleight of hand, while promoting a false openness, that rankles.
Yup. Hopefully your contract to finish the work contained a clause that stipulates that all materials provided belong to the company that hired you, or they have obtained the necessary rights. Otherwise the other web folks may have a case, as they could have provided the code without rights to change it (create a derivative work). Some web folks I know have been stuck by that sort of thing ("Here, use this photo" when the company doesn't own the photo) and have been sued for copyright infringement.
Actually, it's patents. Intel is (1) offering you the ability to interface, increasing the market and (2) offering you the ability to infringe their patents, so they can take your company :-). Of course, I don't think they're really expecting to get infringements, but it's a potential side benefit.
Bzzt! Wrong... this case is about Microsoft's illegal business practises, as exemplified by their leveraging the Windows monopoly to crush a browser competitor, and to control the PC desktop operating system market through unfair pricing, exclusivity in contracts and threatened denial of supply of a monopoly product.
The remedy must address future ability to carry out such activities, not just the products that have already been used for such activities.
Aaahg! you got me. I haven't installed it since 6.5. After all, once you pay for Oracle, why use anything else?
True, (and it's (+), btw) but Oracle specifies Entry Level compatibility, and it delivers that. The outer join syntax is an optional level. MS SQL, on the other hand, will choke on valid entry level statements :-).
That's what MS is up to. They're offering you the recipie so that they can advertise (falsely) "lemon pie, with recipie".
The Dev Tools moving to the WinApps company actually sounds like a clever ploy to prevent development toolkits that are initially MS only, since the OS developers will need to buy them from the Apps company, and I'm sure exclusive dealings between the two will be a no-no.
Sol will probably hand us an eviction notice by then anyway, so let's start work on the ark. That way we can watch from a safe distance :-).
--
sl == ls
traec^H^Hcet^hrt\ohell == traceroute...
--
Hmmm.. I wonder how much it would cost to buy, say, Iceland? All us IT intellegensia could move, establish our open source society and go head-to-head with the world's IT industry....right.
--
It does, however, prevent us from interacting with that software. And what CEO is going to put in his shareholder report "yeah, this year we took a $2.6M hit when we discarded all commercial word-processor software"? Besides, if enacted as recommended, only commercial software producers are proteced. Us non-commercial people are still liable, and probably won't get our language right if we do craft a sufficiently crafty license.
--
If it does become possible, it'll probably involve dissection, since we'll have to include all the conections between neurons as part of the model. So the first volunteers will all be suicidal. So they'll crash themselves on purpose. So we won't know it works....
--
But that would be too easy...
--
What are the chances these fossils have been compressed during the mineralization process?
Mr. Rideau is both correct and incorrect. He correctly points out that if the Corporation distributes a binary to the Employee, the GPL insists that the source, and all the rights to distribute the source, must also be made available. He incorrectly infers that the Corporation distributes the software to its employees, in order to use the code.
If the Corporation wishes to keep its mods secret, it may hire an employee to work on the code while insisting that the code not leave the Corporation's computers or premesis. This does not count as "distribution" because the employee does not gain custody of the code, except in the limited sense that you gain custody of your office window.
You are free to use the window while at work, but you may not take it home, modify it in unauthorized ways or redistribute it :-).
However, the GPL does enjoin the redistribution of the code under other licenses (section 4). So while you may make copies and keep them, or a Corporation may cause employees to make modified copies, but retain them, the Corporation cannot permit those copies to leave the premesis under any license except the GPL. If they do, government may prosecute them and the authors may sue them for copyright infringement.
Under section 8, Mr. Rideau's employee who redistributes the software (presumably against his employer's wishes, and against the terms of his employment) has in fact committed a legal foul, and is subject to penalty. The GPL does not excuse you from conditions or agreements that conflict with its terms, it only prevents you from distributing the code in those cases.
Really, I've been learning Python this weekend, and the annoying thing hasn't been getting up to nuke a meal, or deciding how long. It's been the interval while it nukes... To be able to set a schedule for dinner production in advance, with or without polling for confirmation, that would be cool.
It doesn't. It makes it easier for the evaluators to evaluate. Once they get a set of winners, why don't we port 'em to C++?
In essence, options are a promise and incentive. If you make the company succeed, and it goes public, they become worth something. If the fellow offering them is having trouble meeting payroll... take em anyway! Chances are he doesn't have the money to pay you the big bucks anyway :-). It's when you're in the middle that you have to really sweat.
This lets you at least take control of your own backup and recovery, and system administration, which can be important for a database-driven site. You do need to have a professional level of skill to keep the crackers out, but if you're a business and you have internal servers, or you're building a site with a big database, chances are you need someone like that anyway.