They resort to much more earthly means... And since they're an extra-territorial entity in a country with a strong mafia presence, their own bank can play many special tricks to bless money coming from less-than-pious activities.
Just wait until Google (Apple, Microsoft) start releasing PCs (tablet, phones) which only allow these services as storage medium, and there you go, Stalin's dream in your hands. And once more RMS is proven to be less insane than he looks.
Only a couple of weeks ago everyone here was outraged because Sony wanted to share it players' high scores, but now that Google wants to take ownership of everything that passes from your PC it's OK. Bah.
Perhaps it works differently in the USA; in my country, properties are seized only if they
a) belong to a high-ranking criminal, as recognized by a judge;
b) belong to someone who is believed to be a name-lender for a high-ranking criminal, as recognized by a judge.
The "owner need not be judged guilty of any crime" part here means that you have to demonstrate where the money that you used to buy that activity came from, and where the profits go. If you can, then your property won't be seized.
I recognize that these are extreme measures, but at least here, they were made necessary by the fact that the mafia owned a large portion of the *legal* economy thanks to their unparalleled power of persuasion and availability of cash. So they controlled both the illegal economy and the legal one. Moreover, seizures have a highly symbolic meaning for those individuals: whereas justice, freedom, human life have no value whatsoever to them, being deprived of material possessions, especially land and houses, is a blow that even they can feel.
Tthe community of ROM hackers that grew around Android was able to develop only because the phone makers had to toss out the kernel tarballs for their devices - and they did it because of the GPL (they don't release the sources for Sense, or for certain glue between the kernel and Android). After that, the community convinced HTC to become more cooperative e.g. by unlocking the bootloaders, but this happened in a second moment.
Have you ever seen anybody hacking on the source of a Symbian handset? Symbian was open source with a permissive license, and as a result not a single handset has ever run a single line of user-compiled code. And what about iDevices, isn't XNU open source too?
The GPL in Linux hasn't prevented all Android phones from coming with binary-only drivers
Well, at least some kernel developers aren't exactly convinced that binary blobs don't violate the GPL. Certainly you can't blame the GPL if vendors behave in a way that goes against its spirit, if not against its letter.
It's possible, but to make a concrete example, as a user, the only reason I could upgrade my phone firmware after its manufacturer stopped supporting it is that Android's kernel is under the GPL. Users should always prefer GPL-licensed software as it only brings advantages for them. Instead, the trend today is to mark GPL as an extremist's license, because "software is a tool" and whatnot. Effectively cutting the branch on which we, as open source consumers, are sitting.
Permissive licenses are universally chosen by companies (Android) while the GPL is chosen by community projects (Linux, gcc).
MS-PL? Who on earth has ever heard of that license? Perhaps the fact that the only source of the data is a company that is connected to Microsoft has something to do with its mention? The fact that the same company has been emitting anti-GPL propaganda since 2008 is also interesting.
Google is a for-profit company that competes on the ad market. It makes money out of Chrome (proof of it is the fact that they're marketing it very aggressively through paid banners). The fact that they don't sell it directly is not relevant to the fact that they could attain a dominant position in the ad market. In that case they would be in the same situation as Microsoft in the OS market, so IMHO they could be forced to offer a "choice screen" when you install Chrome, just like Microsoft were forced to do with Windows.
Many comments here say that Chrome already offers such a screen; if it's so, then I think they're already OK.
I think that many countries find that being able to leverage USA's high investment in armed forces is well worth giving away some privacy. Especially when many of them are in a financial crisis and their own armed forces have become inefficient due to the fact that they haven't seen a war in almost a century.
This law is about creating an automated database of the movements of every single citizen to be sent to a foreign power, which is known for having little respect for foreigners, to the point of kidnapping people even inside the EU and torturing them.
On the other hand, I can't think of a single reason why I wouldn't want the government to know how much money I have in the bank, unless it's coming from illegal activities. What could a deranged government do with that information? Make me pay taxes?
Of course they can use the damn word if they refer to the language that you can write Android programs in. They just can't call their runtime in which they run the compiled programs "Java" or a "JVM". And they don't -- they call it "Dalvik". And they've written it themselves. And that's perfectly legal.
Oracle claims that you can't call "Java" a program that won't run on a "Java" platform. And to call a platform "Java", you either have to implement the full Java SE or pay Oracle for implementing Java ME. This is explicitly written in Java's license, and this is why two huge companies are spending millions in court, but you dismiss it with "of course they can". I wouldn't be so sure.
To avoid the problem, Google could have called their programming language "Dalvik", have the source code stored on files witht the ".dalvik" suffix, rename all Java APIs to "dalvik", and so on. But they didn't, because they wanted to leverage the existing Java ecosystem and developers. In doing this, they fragmented the Java language, as Microsoft had done in the 90s, so Oracle feel that they're being damaged. A judge will decide if they are.
Of course you don't have to pay license fees anytime you you the word "Java" in any technical sense. If you want, you can write a Java Framework for controlling a spacecraft or a coffee machine, brag "you can write programs for it in JAVA" in the documentation, sell it for thousands of dollars and not pay Oracle anything.
Of course - if the programs run on a Java VM. Otherwise, the company writing the VM that is running the said programs would be infringing Oracle's terms of use for Java.
The fact is, that they knew they needed a Java ME license
What? They didn't need one at all unless they wanted to provide a Java ME implementation, which would be a completely different thing. Do you even know what Java ME is? It's a spec defining a subset of J2ME plus lots of additional APIs, profiles and so on. Android doesn't contain any of that.
1) The email was written in the early days of Android. At the time, everyone hosting Java on a cell phone was licensing Java ME (Blackberry, Nokia, all feature phone makers...).
2) Android doesn't contain any of that - exactly because they created an incompatible fork of Java, to avoid paying money to Oracle, which is explicitly what was forbidden in Java's licensing terms.
3) I do know what Java ME is; unlike what you say, it' not a subset of J2ME, it's the new name for it.
What kind of warped statement is that? This is like saying the copyright on "Titanic" is impossible to work around because James Cameron wanted to make money. Knock it off, man.
What's warped with that? I'm all for pruning copyright laws, but while they're there, people have to abide them, or at least not act surprised when they get dragged into court.
Sun basically said that anyone could use the code so long as they DIDN'T call it Java. It's like the IceWeasel / Firefox thing. They have no choice. So not illegal, and not really immoral.
You have to decide. Either they could not use the Java name, and in this case they are MASSIVELY infringing, as their code / documentation / web sites contain thousands of times the word "Java", including the Android frontpage, or they can use it, and your justification of Google's sneaky behaviour does not hold.
Of course they were circumventing the need to have a Java ME license. That's not the issue, and not illegal. The question is, did they circumvent it properly, or did they get caught on the snags of not doing a proper job of it (i.e. can ANYONE make something Java-like or even use Java code without stepping on things that are IMPOSSIBLE to work around?). This is within the realm of reverse-engineering and IP-skirting. You don't want to pay for their patents, so you work to AVOID them instead. Again, hardly illegal or even immoral.
The fact is, that they knew they needed a Java ME license (Java SE didn't have licensing problems, but it wasn't technically appetible for them). Java ME's licensing model is of course designed to be impossible to work around, as the company that created it had this crazy aspiration to make money out of it. And Google decided NOT to pay for the license. "Immoral" does not belong to my vocabulary; a judge will decide if this is illegal.
The GPL thing? They didn't want to use GPL code. Simple as that. Nor do quite a few huge companies. That's their choice. And rather than that just plain infringe GPL code or get the GPL taken down in a court. Again - they didn't want to do something, their only legal avenue was to find an alternative and work around the problem. They can licence their own code under whatever license they want and they can start from ANY licence or licenced code that they choose as a basis to start from. Not illegal, not immoral.
My point never was that Google had to use GPL code or that not using GPL code is illegal, you're creating a magistral straw man argument. The point is that Google, a company that builds for itself an exterior image of an open source supporter, who has made billions by leveraging GPL-licensed code, calls the obligation to release a product's source code "an infection". Just like Microsoft. This is not illegal, by all means, it's just disappointing, hypocritical, or, in Google-speak, "evil".
Now, if it were Microsoft? I think they'd avoid the GPL like a plague too. Google didn't make up their own "open" licence though, that's basically useless for anyone trying to contribute, which Microsoft have in the past. And MS have DEFINITELY avoided using certain trademarked names (and tried to enforce trademarks on things like Windows in the past, etc.) and DEFINITELY worked around patents that others owned rather than licence them (their Office suite comes to mind).
(In your comparison, you forgot getting fined for impeding investigations and for privacy violation.) Are you trying to convince me that Google have become as "evil" as Microsoft? That was the main point of my post, actually.
The question really is, where's your bias come from?
I get called "a shill", "a sockpuppet", "a astroturfer" after almost any post I write on Slashdot. I got accused of being paid, among others, by Apple, Nokia, Sony... and Google. I take it with pride as I think it means that I'm doing something minimally useful to prevent Slashdot from becoming an useless echo chamber. Most people understand what kind of communities accuse the dissenters of being "the enemy".
After reading Oracle's slides, with Google's emails about them trying to hide the fact that they were circumventing the need to obtain a Java ME license ("scrub some Js", "do not demonstrate to Sun lawyers"), and the talk about the GPL "infecting" software, I think that "do no evil" turned from a motto into a joke. They behave as bad as Microsoft, plus they collect a plethora of personal information about every single individual on the net. They're starting to look like a prototype of evil.
Large corporations, all of them, get way less criticism than they deserve.
Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, etc all suck nowadays. They get propaganda from the media they control, either directly or by astroturfing, and get bashed by the media that are controlled by others.
The USA almost started the Third World War when the Soviet were silently planting missiles in Cuba, and the western media universally depicted the Soviet as evil rogues for doing that, yet it's now evident that the USA had been doing the same thing for decades.
They only contributed code that was needed to run Linux on their own product. And they were forced to do so by the GPL and way Linux development works. Their code won't be useful to anybody else. On the other hand, they're extremely active in trying to kill Linux through patent trolling and FUD spreading, and apparently their campaigns have reached Slashdot, too. Microsoft is as evil as ever. Linux does not owe them anything.
Why should I get excited about buying a crippled AMD PC that can't play used games? I hope these rumours aren't true, otherwise I see no reason at all to buy a console this generation. Not that the competition is doing much better, as the xbox 720 is rumoured not to play used games at all. I guess this means I'll be back to PC for gaming, after a long exodus. I hope PC games have improved in the meantime.
Slashdot Mirror
The Pope is elected.
They resort to much more earthly means... And since they're an extra-territorial entity in a country with a strong mafia presence, their own bank can play many special tricks to bless money coming from less-than-pious activities.
Only a couple of weeks ago everyone here was outraged because Sony wanted to share it players' high scores, but now that Google wants to take ownership of everything that passes from your PC it's OK. Bah.
a) belong to a high-ranking criminal, as recognized by a judge;
b) belong to someone who is believed to be a name-lender for a high-ranking criminal, as recognized by a judge.
The "owner need not be judged guilty of any crime" part here means that you have to demonstrate where the money that you used to buy that activity came from, and where the profits go. If you can, then your property won't be seized.
I recognize that these are extreme measures, but at least here, they were made necessary by the fact that the mafia owned a large portion of the *legal* economy thanks to their unparalleled power of persuasion and availability of cash. So they controlled both the illegal economy and the legal one. Moreover, seizures have a highly symbolic meaning for those individuals: whereas justice, freedom, human life have no value whatsoever to them, being deprived of material possessions, especially land and houses, is a blow that even they can feel.
Have you ever seen anybody hacking on the source of a Symbian handset? Symbian was open source with a permissive license, and as a result not a single handset has ever run a single line of user-compiled code. And what about iDevices, isn't XNU open source too?
The GPL in Linux hasn't prevented all Android phones from coming with binary-only drivers
Well, at least some kernel developers aren't exactly convinced that binary blobs don't violate the GPL. Certainly you can't blame the GPL if vendors behave in a way that goes against its spirit, if not against its letter.
There's nothing FUD about this at all. Yes, there is F, but we've progressed way past U and D with the busybox and Oracle lawsuits.
You mean that busybox and Oracle have started suing users of, say, Android phones?
It's possible, but to make a concrete example, as a user, the only reason I could upgrade my phone firmware after its manufacturer stopped supporting it is that Android's kernel is under the GPL. Users should always prefer GPL-licensed software as it only brings advantages for them. Instead, the trend today is to mark GPL as an extremist's license, because "software is a tool" and whatnot. Effectively cutting the branch on which we, as open source consumers, are sitting.
MS-PL? Who on earth has ever heard of that license? Perhaps the fact that the only source of the data is a company that is connected to Microsoft has something to do with its mention? The fact that the same company has been emitting anti-GPL propaganda since 2008 is also interesting.
Slashdot, please don't propagate astroturfing.
There's a choice screen before installing IE itself, so the problem is solved at a lowe level.
Many comments here say that Chrome already offers such a screen; if it's so, then I think they're already OK.
Yes, but still it would be a problem only for mafia bosses and drug dealers.
I think that many countries find that being able to leverage USA's high investment in armed forces is well worth giving away some privacy. Especially when many of them are in a financial crisis and their own armed forces have become inefficient due to the fact that they haven't seen a war in almost a century.
On the other hand, I can't think of a single reason why I wouldn't want the government to know how much money I have in the bank, unless it's coming from illegal activities. What could a deranged government do with that information? Make me pay taxes?
I suspect that for being inside NATO, most countries of the EU have much stronger obligations towards the USA than letting their planes fly over them.
Of course they can use the damn word if they refer to the language that you can write Android programs in. They just can't call their runtime in which they run the compiled programs "Java" or a "JVM". And they don't -- they call it "Dalvik". And they've written it themselves. And that's perfectly legal.
Oracle claims that you can't call "Java" a program that won't run on a "Java" platform. And to call a platform "Java", you either have to implement the full Java SE or pay Oracle for implementing Java ME. This is explicitly written in Java's license, and this is why two huge companies are spending millions in court, but you dismiss it with "of course they can". I wouldn't be so sure.
To avoid the problem, Google could have called their programming language "Dalvik", have the source code stored on files witht the ".dalvik" suffix, rename all Java APIs to "dalvik", and so on. But they didn't, because they wanted to leverage the existing Java ecosystem and developers. In doing this, they fragmented the Java language, as Microsoft had done in the 90s, so Oracle feel that they're being damaged. A judge will decide if they are.
Of course you don't have to pay license fees anytime you you the word "Java" in any technical sense. If you want, you can write a Java Framework for controlling a spacecraft or a coffee machine, brag "you can write programs for it in JAVA" in the documentation, sell it for thousands of dollars and not pay Oracle anything.
Of course - if the programs run on a Java VM. Otherwise, the company writing the VM that is running the said programs would be infringing Oracle's terms of use for Java.
The fact is, that they knew they needed a Java ME license
What? They didn't need one at all unless they wanted to provide a Java ME implementation, which would be a completely different thing. Do you even know what Java ME is? It's a spec defining a subset of J2ME plus lots of additional APIs, profiles and so on. Android doesn't contain any of that.
1) The email was written in the early days of Android. At the time, everyone hosting Java on a cell phone was licensing Java ME (Blackberry, Nokia, all feature phone makers...).
2) Android doesn't contain any of that - exactly because they created an incompatible fork of Java, to avoid paying money to Oracle, which is explicitly what was forbidden in Java's licensing terms.
3) I do know what Java ME is; unlike what you say, it' not a subset of J2ME, it's the new name for it.
What kind of warped statement is that? This is like saying the copyright on "Titanic" is impossible to work around because James Cameron wanted to make money. Knock it off, man.
What's warped with that? I'm all for pruning copyright laws, but while they're there, people have to abide them, or at least not act surprised when they get dragged into court.
Sun basically said that anyone could use the code so long as they DIDN'T call it Java. It's like the IceWeasel / Firefox thing. They have no choice. So not illegal, and not really immoral.
You have to decide. Either they could not use the Java name, and in this case they are MASSIVELY infringing, as their code / documentation / web sites contain thousands of times the word "Java", including the Android frontpage, or they can use it, and your justification of Google's sneaky behaviour does not hold.
Of course they were circumventing the need to have a Java ME license. That's not the issue, and not illegal. The question is, did they circumvent it properly, or did they get caught on the snags of not doing a proper job of it (i.e. can ANYONE make something Java-like or even use Java code without stepping on things that are IMPOSSIBLE to work around?). This is within the realm of reverse-engineering and IP-skirting. You don't want to pay for their patents, so you work to AVOID them instead. Again, hardly illegal or even immoral.
The fact is, that they knew they needed a Java ME license (Java SE didn't have licensing problems, but it wasn't technically appetible for them). Java ME's licensing model is of course designed to be impossible to work around, as the company that created it had this crazy aspiration to make money out of it. And Google decided NOT to pay for the license. "Immoral" does not belong to my vocabulary; a judge will decide if this is illegal.
The GPL thing? They didn't want to use GPL code. Simple as that. Nor do quite a few huge companies. That's their choice. And rather than that just plain infringe GPL code or get the GPL taken down in a court. Again - they didn't want to do something, their only legal avenue was to find an alternative and work around the problem. They can licence their own code under whatever license they want and they can start from ANY licence or licenced code that they choose as a basis to start from. Not illegal, not immoral.
My point never was that Google had to use GPL code or that not using GPL code is illegal, you're creating a magistral straw man argument. The point is that Google, a company that builds for itself an exterior image of an open source supporter, who has made billions by leveraging GPL-licensed code, calls the obligation to release a product's source code "an infection". Just like Microsoft. This is not illegal, by all means, it's just disappointing, hypocritical, or, in Google-speak, "evil".
Now, if it were Microsoft? I think they'd avoid the GPL like a plague too. Google didn't make up their own "open" licence though, that's basically useless for anyone trying to contribute, which Microsoft have in the past. And MS have DEFINITELY avoided using certain trademarked names (and tried to enforce trademarks on things like Windows in the past, etc.) and DEFINITELY worked around patents that others owned rather than licence them (their Office suite comes to mind).
(In your comparison, you forgot getting fined for impeding investigations and for privacy violation.) Are you trying to convince me that Google have become as "evil" as Microsoft? That was the main point of my post, actually.
The question really is, where's your bias come from?
I get called "a shill", "a sockpuppet", "a astroturfer" after almost any post I write on Slashdot. I got accused of being paid, among others, by Apple, Nokia, Sony... and Google. I take it with pride as I think it means that I'm doing something minimally useful to prevent Slashdot from becoming an useless echo chamber. Most people understand what kind of communities accuse the dissenters of being "the enemy".
After reading Oracle's slides, with Google's emails about them trying to hide the fact that they were circumventing the need to obtain a Java ME license ("scrub some Js", "do not demonstrate to Sun lawyers"), and the talk about the GPL "infecting" software, I think that "do no evil" turned from a motto into a joke. They behave as bad as Microsoft, plus they collect a plethora of personal information about every single individual on the net. They're starting to look like a prototype of evil.
The problem is that this article is about the USA, and most cars there have no clutch.
The computer was screwed up? Didn't the article just say that the problem was the mat stuck under the accelerator pedal?
Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, etc all suck nowadays. They get propaganda from the media they control, either directly or by astroturfing, and get bashed by the media that are controlled by others.
The USA almost started the Third World War when the Soviet were silently planting missiles in Cuba, and the western media universally depicted the Soviet as evil rogues for doing that, yet it's now evident that the USA had been doing the same thing for decades.
They only contributed code that was needed to run Linux on their own product. And they were forced to do so by the GPL and way Linux development works. Their code won't be useful to anybody else. On the other hand, they're extremely active in trying to kill Linux through patent trolling and FUD spreading, and apparently their campaigns have reached Slashdot, too. Microsoft is as evil as ever. Linux does not owe them anything.
By the way, how come slashdot didn't post any April 1 stories of his own this year? This place is getting sad.
That didn't prevent me from buying current hardware that wasn't assembled there.
Why should I get excited about buying a crippled AMD PC that can't play used games? I hope these rumours aren't true, otherwise I see no reason at all to buy a console this generation. Not that the competition is doing much better, as the xbox 720 is rumoured not to play used games at all. I guess this means I'll be back to PC for gaming, after a long exodus. I hope PC games have improved in the meantime.