Purely devil's advocate: if the copyrights rightfully belong to SCO
But they don't. SCO is asking for them to be turned over now, but they still rightfully belong to Novell at the moment. QED.
Your analogy fails because you don't currently own the copyrights to that hypothetical MS code. If it was your code--your copyright--and you had some agreement to turn it over to MS if they needed it, but in the meantime, you had GPL'd it, that would be a better analogy, and I don't see any reason why MS could argue that you shouldn't have GPL'd it while it was still yours. They can still use it, and if they get the copyrights, they won't need to comply with the GPL themselves, although everyone else still can. It's a win-win in any sane scenario (which of course, excludes any scenarios that SCO is involved with).
What SCO really wants to do (force people to distribute "their" code, and pay for the privilege, whether they want to or not) is simply not supported by current copyright laws. But that's another matter. Google for "duty to mitigate" if you're not clear on the concept. You can't try to make the damage worse in order to try to collect more money, which is exactly what SCO has been trying to do.
Also, the real kicker is that SCO themselves continued to distribute Linux long after they made public claims that it was infringing on Unix code (Novell's code), which means that even if they got the copyrights retroactively, it would still be GPL'd. By SCO.
it'd mean that SCO's case against IBM would have _some_ (and i say _some_) merit.
Getting the copyrights now shouldn't help them. All the code in Linux has been already distributed by the current Unix copyright holders under the terms of the GPL. Even if SCO gets the copyrights, they can't revoke the perfectly valid license that has already been granted to any Unix code that might happen to be in Linux.
Oh, and it was SCO (Caldera) that put Ancient Unix in the public domain. Ironically, they probably did so illegally, since Novell owned the copyrights, not that Novell is likely to complain at this late date.
I'm not saying you could choose any song or that the Rolling Stones are suddenly fair game. I'm saying that you might be able to use specific songs to make specific parodic points, e.g. "Sympathy for the Devil" to suggest that MS is evil or "19th Nervous Breakdown" to suggest that Windows will drive you insane....
The song would have to be an integral part of the humor for this to work, but to flatly claim that you can't use other Stones songs cuts off entire dimensions of humor that I believe would be protected speech.
a joke video about Windows using a Rolling Stones "start it up" parody would be allowed, since that was part of the Windows advertisement, but use of a different Rolling Stones song that Microsoft did not use is not allowed.
Actually, I think that might depend. As long as the song was integral to the parody, it might well be allowed. For example, playing "Sympathy for the Devil" while a mouse pointer clicks the start button, or "19th Nervous Breakdown" over a BSOD. In both cases, you're clearly riffing on MS's own use of the Stones' music while delivering a different message through the music.
(Personally, when it comes to Microsoft, I thin the most appropriate Stones' song is the line from Sweet Virginia: "You have to scrape that shit right off your shoes."):)
The GPL and CDDL (which ZFS is licensed under) are fundamentally incompatible with each other
That's true at the moment, but the company which just bought ZFS is known to be very active in Linux development, so it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to think that the license might change in the not-too-distant future, especially if Solaris looks to be reaching end-of-life.
The point of this article is that it doesn't matter, because almost every single person fixing bugs, enhancing it, and porting it to other platforms is employed by Oracle, and wouldn't be able to work on a fork. Nobody else is really contributing, so a fork would die quickly.
But what it overlooks is that most of the people who don't work at Oracle, but who could be fixing bugs, enhancing it, and porting it to other platforms, seem to prefer to work on Linux or BSD instead. The problem is not that the community can't support a free OS--the problem is that with several flavors of BSD and hundreds of Linux distros, the community may be starting to reach the limit on the number of free OSes it can support.
Of course, the article is purely speculative--up until now, Sun has been supporting OpenSolaris, so it's hard to say what would actually happen if it stopped. We might suddenly discover a bunch of lurkers who are willing to step up to the plate. It might go moribund for a year or two then suddenly get revived. Or it might die completely. At this point, any guesses are just that--guesses.
Ironically, people who smoke pot seem to be the most likely to use Torrent legally! (Torrent is used to distribute concert recordings by the Grateful Dead and Phish.):)
Not when you watch it at home--then it's like $20 flat--not per person. Going to a movie theater is more analogous to going to a video arcade than it is to playing a game at home.
But then you want popcorn and drinks, so actually it's $40.
And if you count the pizza and beer I drink while playing games, really the game costs more like $100 or more.
2.5 hours later the experience is permanently over
Games may last a little longer, but its a rare game that I want to play again after I've finished. And taking longer just means I end up spending even more on pizza and beer--we're still counting the costs for that, yes?:)
Re:your first sentence is technically flawed
on
Ubuntu on a Dime
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· Score: 1
As for home users - hell, no! You needed to be a real nerd to do anything with any Unix until at least 2007.
And this made it different from MS-DOS how? (We are talking Xenix-era here.) The skills required to type the name of an application at a prompt aren't much different, regardless of whether that prompt has a dollar-sign or a greater-than sign. Heck, I knew non-nerds who were able to master the CP/M "pip" command, back in the day. If they could do that, I don't think the missing vowels in the basic *NIX commands would really present that much of a challenge.
Why should people who did NOT write the works [...] ever be given control over the copyrights [...]?
(Referring to heirs.)
Well, for one thing, it greatly reduces the chances that creators will be murdered so that publishers can get access to their works. For another, it increases the motivation for the elderly and the terminally ill to create new works. I'm all for reducing copyright length, but I tend to think a fixed period is best/safest.
POSIX was just a bunch of unix vendors who got together and wrote a 'standard' that was loose enough to cover all the idiosyncrasies of most their current implementations with a little hog-trading thrown in for some of the outliers..
Worse than that--DEC's involvement caused some wags to quip that POSIX was DEC's attempt to prove that OpenVMS was the One True Unix.:)
Now, the Single Unix Spec (SUS) on the other hand....
Scox's lawsuit against IBM is based on scox's claim that ibm violated scox's UNIX/Linux copyrights, because ibm contributed to linux.
Not any more--they dropped the SysV copyright violation charges against IBM some time ago. Their current theory of the IBM case is based on a clause in the original SysV contract which says that SysV licensees can't reveal any part of SysV. SCO's argument is basically that the moment IBM added code to their version of SysV (AIX), that code became subject to the contract. This is particularly ironic in the case of the JFS2 code, which IBM developed for OS/2, and later added to both Linux and AIX.
The Novell case was purely about Unix and SysV, and the only tenuous connection to Linux is that SCO needed the copyrights to justify the SCOSource extortion scheme.
Not to the degree that you seem to be asking for. There is no exact percentage or number of characters/bytes that forms an exact legal boundary. It's judged on a case-by-case basis. A whole lot of law is based on the concept of what a "reasonable person" (e.g. a jury member) would conclude.
You didn't make a copy. Oh you copied part of it? How does that work without making use of the digit 1 infringement against every copyrighted work ever?
Ooh, I like your logic. Lets try that in syllogistic format:
An individual bit is a subset of a digital work; Individual bits are not subject to copyright, Therefore, all subsets of digital works are not subject to copyright.
Wow, if only I'd realized that all members of a set must be identical, it would have made my logic classes so much easier.
Horses eat hay; Horses are mammals, Therefore, all mammals eat hay.
Claiming that you have "the same exact views" as a moderately large and diverse group with a wide range of views sounds pretty crazy to me just to start with. Claiming that you magically know the "exact" views of a group of dead people whom we only know through their writings and can't ask for clarification sounds pretty crazy to me too, unless you're a time-traveling telepath. That's why I, instead, hold the same exact views as God--I know because He told me so.:)
In any case, the original poster's point works either way. If your employers are extremists or fanatics of some sort (left or right or even some totally other direction), and you hold opinions contrary to that group of extremists or fanatics, you may be in trouble.
I was tempted to write something snarky in reply, but upon reflection, I think I'd just like to ask where I can apply to emigrate to your planet.
On second thought, never mind. A place where people make decisions based on rational analysis of the relevant facts, rather than leaping to judgment based on emotion, hormones, prejudice and force of habit, is probably more than I can take. I'm only human, after all.:)
Ssh! Don't you know that the Democrats are all a bunch of peace-loving, lily-livered pansies who refuse to stand up to America's Enemies, and that with the Democrats in power, the triumph of global terrorism is virtually assured?!:)
Oh, I do! I wouldn't touch your KDE with a ten-foot pole!:p;)
Miguel may be clueless, but his connection with Gnome is pretty minor at this point, unlike the clueless KDE devs who used to insist that the Debian Project must be a bunch of Red Hat shills, simply because they didn't want to get involved with a self-cancelled license.
Yes, game companies should be allowed to do one-time-use codes in their games.
Only if they're clearly marked as such. They're claiming it's a feature of the game when it's not! If it were a feature of the game, then re-installing the game on a different machine wouldn't change things. Instead, it's a feature of the initial installation, not the game! It's false advertising!
Note that this has nothing to do with used games sales. I can give my copy of a game to a friend, and suddenly it doesn't work as advertised! And there's no indication on the box that that's the case.
Agreed. It [Stroustrup] isn't meant for raw beginners but it is still the best reference for the language and essential for a hard core C++ programmer to have as a reference.
Gotta disagree with you there. I thought the same until I picked up O'Reilly's C++ in a Nutshell one day on a whim. Since that day, the only time I've found myself turning to Stroustrup is when the Nutshell book is at another site. K&R was/is the best reference for C, and a lot of people (including me) assume(d) that the same magic applies with Stroustrup and C++, but I'm here to tell you that my search time for the answers to questions about C++ has dropped dramatically since I abandoned that notion.
Of course, Nutshell is even less suited to raw beginners, who have at least a chance of learning the language from Stroustrup.:)
I don't object to people not knowing words, but I have a real problem with them using words of which they do not know the definitions.
You obviously don't have any kids. Language acquisition is a fascinating process, and bears little resemblance to what I expected, even though I did it myself once upon a time.
Bottom line: if we tried to follow your rule, kids wouldn't be able to speak until they'd learned to read. Which might have some advantages, I admit, but seems unlikely to be practical.:)
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Purely devil's advocate: if the copyrights rightfully belong to SCO
But they don't. SCO is asking for them to be turned over now, but they still rightfully belong to Novell at the moment. QED.
Your analogy fails because you don't currently own the copyrights to that hypothetical MS code. If it was your code--your copyright--and you had some agreement to turn it over to MS if they needed it, but in the meantime, you had GPL'd it, that would be a better analogy, and I don't see any reason why MS could argue that you shouldn't have GPL'd it while it was still yours. They can still use it, and if they get the copyrights, they won't need to comply with the GPL themselves, although everyone else still can. It's a win-win in any sane scenario (which of course, excludes any scenarios that SCO is involved with).
What SCO really wants to do (force people to distribute "their" code, and pay for the privilege, whether they want to or not) is simply not supported by current copyright laws. But that's another matter. Google for "duty to mitigate" if you're not clear on the concept. You can't try to make the damage worse in order to try to collect more money, which is exactly what SCO has been trying to do.
Also, the real kicker is that SCO themselves continued to distribute Linux long after they made public claims that it was infringing on Unix code (Novell's code), which means that even if they got the copyrights retroactively, it would still be GPL'd. By SCO.
it'd mean that SCO's case against IBM would have _some_ (and i say _some_) merit.
Getting the copyrights now shouldn't help them. All the code in Linux has been already distributed by the current Unix copyright holders under the terms of the GPL. Even if SCO gets the copyrights, they can't revoke the perfectly valid license that has already been granted to any Unix code that might happen to be in Linux.
Oh, and it was SCO (Caldera) that put Ancient Unix in the public domain. Ironically, they probably did so illegally, since Novell owned the copyrights, not that Novell is likely to complain at this late date.
I'm not saying you could choose any song or that the Rolling Stones are suddenly fair game. I'm saying that you might be able to use specific songs to make specific parodic points, e.g. "Sympathy for the Devil" to suggest that MS is evil or "19th Nervous Breakdown" to suggest that Windows will drive you insane....
The song would have to be an integral part of the humor for this to work, but to flatly claim that you can't use other Stones songs cuts off entire dimensions of humor that I believe would be protected speech.
a joke video about Windows using a Rolling Stones "start it up" parody would be allowed, since that was part of the Windows advertisement, but use of a different Rolling Stones song that Microsoft did not use is not allowed.
Actually, I think that might depend. As long as the song was integral to the parody, it might well be allowed. For example, playing "Sympathy for the Devil" while a mouse pointer clicks the start button, or "19th Nervous Breakdown" over a BSOD. In both cases, you're clearly riffing on MS's own use of the Stones' music while delivering a different message through the music.
(Personally, when it comes to Microsoft, I thin the most appropriate Stones' song is the line from Sweet Virginia: "You have to scrape that shit right off your shoes.") :)
The GPL and CDDL (which ZFS is licensed under) are fundamentally incompatible with each other
That's true at the moment, but the company which just bought ZFS is known to be very active in Linux development, so it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to think that the license might change in the not-too-distant future, especially if Solaris looks to be reaching end-of-life.
The point of this article is that it doesn't matter, because almost every single person fixing bugs, enhancing it, and porting it to other platforms is employed by Oracle, and wouldn't be able to work on a fork. Nobody else is really contributing, so a fork would die quickly.
But what it overlooks is that most of the people who don't work at Oracle, but who could be fixing bugs, enhancing it, and porting it to other platforms, seem to prefer to work on Linux or BSD instead. The problem is not that the community can't support a free OS--the problem is that with several flavors of BSD and hundreds of Linux distros, the community may be starting to reach the limit on the number of free OSes it can support.
Of course, the article is purely speculative--up until now, Sun has been supporting OpenSolaris, so it's hard to say what would actually happen if it stopped. We might suddenly discover a bunch of lurkers who are willing to step up to the plate. It might go moribund for a year or two then suddenly get revived. Or it might die completely. At this point, any guesses are just that--guesses.
Ironically, people who smoke pot seem to be the most likely to use Torrent legally! (Torrent is used to distribute concert recordings by the Grateful Dead and Phish.) :)
With movies, now, you shell out $12 a person
Not when you watch it at home--then it's like $20 flat--not per person. Going to a movie theater is more analogous to going to a video arcade than it is to playing a game at home.
But then you want popcorn and drinks, so actually it's $40.
And if you count the pizza and beer I drink while playing games, really the game costs more like $100 or more.
2.5 hours later the experience is permanently over
Games may last a little longer, but its a rare game that I want to play again after I've finished. And taking longer just means I end up spending even more on pizza and beer--we're still counting the costs for that, yes? :)
As for home users - hell, no! You needed to be a real nerd to do anything with any Unix until at least 2007.
And this made it different from MS-DOS how? (We are talking Xenix-era here.) The skills required to type the name of an application at a prompt aren't much different, regardless of whether that prompt has a dollar-sign or a greater-than sign. Heck, I knew non-nerds who were able to master the CP/M "pip" command, back in the day. If they could do that, I don't think the missing vowels in the basic *NIX commands would really present that much of a challenge.
Why should people who did NOT write the works [...] ever be given control over the copyrights [...]?
(Referring to heirs.)
Well, for one thing, it greatly reduces the chances that creators will be murdered so that publishers can get access to their works. For another, it increases the motivation for the elderly and the terminally ill to create new works. I'm all for reducing copyright length, but I tend to think a fixed period is best/safest.
You get to program the fascinating Cell processor. For many of us, that is enough. The goal certainly wasn't to run GPL games.
Their flying images demo just kept on rolling when I tried it with firefox 3.6 on my slackware linux box.
Indeed, and IE produced exactly zero FPS on my Debian box!
To be fair, it also had zero CPU utilization, which is pretty impressive. :)
POSIX was just a bunch of unix vendors who got together and wrote a 'standard' that was loose enough to cover all the idiosyncrasies of most their current implementations with a little hog-trading thrown in for some of the outliers..
Worse than that--DEC's involvement caused some wags to quip that POSIX was DEC's attempt to prove that OpenVMS was the One True Unix. :)
Now, the Single Unix Spec (SUS) on the other hand....
Scox's lawsuit against IBM is based on scox's claim that ibm violated scox's UNIX/Linux copyrights, because ibm contributed to linux.
Not any more--they dropped the SysV copyright violation charges against IBM some time ago. Their current theory of the IBM case is based on a clause in the original SysV contract which says that SysV licensees can't reveal any part of SysV. SCO's argument is basically that the moment IBM added code to their version of SysV (AIX), that code became subject to the contract. This is particularly ironic in the case of the JFS2 code, which IBM developed for OS/2, and later added to both Linux and AIX.
The Novell case was purely about Unix and SysV, and the only tenuous connection to Linux is that SCO needed the copyrights to justify the SCOSource extortion scheme.
Not to the degree that you seem to be asking for. There is no exact percentage or number of characters/bytes that forms an exact legal boundary. It's judged on a case-by-case basis. A whole lot of law is based on the concept of what a "reasonable person" (e.g. a jury member) would conclude.
What's the lower bound on that?
Larger than a bit, smaller than the entire work; if it's truly a borderline case, the jury gets to decide.
You didn't make a copy. Oh you copied part of it? How does that work without making use of the digit 1 infringement against every copyrighted work ever?
Ooh, I like your logic. Lets try that in syllogistic format:
An individual bit is a subset of a digital work;
Individual bits are not subject to copyright,
Therefore, all subsets of digital works are not subject to copyright.
Wow, if only I'd realized that all members of a set must be identical, it would have made my logic classes so much easier.
Horses eat hay;
Horses are mammals,
Therefore, all mammals eat hay.
I'm going to save a lot of money on catfood! :)
Claiming that you have "the same exact views" as a moderately large and diverse group with a wide range of views sounds pretty crazy to me just to start with. Claiming that you magically know the "exact" views of a group of dead people whom we only know through their writings and can't ask for clarification sounds pretty crazy to me too, unless you're a time-traveling telepath. That's why I, instead, hold the same exact views as God--I know because He told me so. :)
In any case, the original poster's point works either way. If your employers are extremists or fanatics of some sort (left or right or even some totally other direction), and you hold opinions contrary to that group of extremists or fanatics, you may be in trouble.
I was tempted to write something snarky in reply, but upon reflection, I think I'd just like to ask where I can apply to emigrate to your planet.
On second thought, never mind. A place where people make decisions based on rational analysis of the relevant facts, rather than leaping to judgment based on emotion, hormones, prejudice and force of habit, is probably more than I can take. I'm only human, after all. :)
Here
Ssh! Don't you know that the Democrats are all a bunch of peace-loving, lily-livered pansies who refuse to stand up to America's Enemies, and that with the Democrats in power, the triumph of global terrorism is virtually assured?! :)
Please leave my KDE alone.
Oh, I do! I wouldn't touch your KDE with a ten-foot pole! :p ;)
Miguel may be clueless, but his connection with Gnome is pretty minor at this point, unlike the clueless KDE devs who used to insist that the Debian Project must be a bunch of Red Hat shills, simply because they didn't want to get involved with a self-cancelled license.
Yes, game companies should be allowed to do one-time-use codes in their games.
Only if they're clearly marked as such. They're claiming it's a feature of the game when it's not! If it were a feature of the game, then re-installing the game on a different machine wouldn't change things. Instead, it's a feature of the initial installation, not the game! It's false advertising!
Note that this has nothing to do with used games sales. I can give my copy of a game to a friend, and suddenly it doesn't work as advertised! And there's no indication on the box that that's the case.
Agreed. It [Stroustrup] isn't meant for raw beginners but it is still the best reference for the language and essential for a hard core C++ programmer to have as a reference.
Gotta disagree with you there. I thought the same until I picked up O'Reilly's C++ in a Nutshell one day on a whim. Since that day, the only time I've found myself turning to Stroustrup is when the Nutshell book is at another site. K&R was/is the best reference for C, and a lot of people (including me) assume(d) that the same magic applies with Stroustrup and C++, but I'm here to tell you that my search time for the answers to questions about C++ has dropped dramatically since I abandoned that notion.
Of course, Nutshell is even less suited to raw beginners, who have at least a chance of learning the language from Stroustrup. :)
I don't object to people not knowing words, but I have a real problem with them using words of which they do not know the definitions.
You obviously don't have any kids. Language acquisition is a fascinating process, and bears little resemblance to what I expected, even though I did it myself once upon a time.
Bottom line: if we tried to follow your rule, kids wouldn't be able to speak until they'd learned to read. Which might have some advantages, I admit, but seems unlikely to be practical. :)