Am I right that if they only distribute the patched binaries to customers who have support contracts, they only need to make the source available to those customers?
Can they also add clauses to the support contracts so that if those customers are found distributing the source code to others, they don't get to sign up for future support?
No, and no.
Actually, the answers are yes (conditionally) and no. If they deliver the source with the binaries, then they've met all their obligations under the GPL. So, if they only deliver the binaries to people with support contracts, and each binary delivery is bundled with the source, then they have no obligation to provide source to anyone else.
However, the GPL doesn't allow adding any further restrictions on redistribution beyond than those it already includes, so your second point is dead on. The moment they try to restrict what others can do with GPL'd code, they lose their license, and become liable to copyright infringement suits. Disguising it as a wholly separate support contract won't affect that, since only their agreement not to add conditions allows them to distribute in the first place.
As far as technical qualities go, MP3 is still king of audio, despite being the worst supported format out there, proprietary or otherwise.
What?
MP3 is the de-facto standard. OGG is bad supported, open, but still better. But it never got the momentum MP3 had.
Er, sorry, that was very badly phrased. I meant to say that MP3 is the worst (from a technical standpoint) of the widely supported formats, but still the defacto-standard ("king"). "Worst (of the) supported formats", not "worst-supported format.
if that wasn't a factor in your choice of phone, then my sympathy for you is nil.
Thats okay, I feel sympathy for the fact that you won't be able to watch as much stuff as I will since you have a codec that while open, is largely irrelevant as far as content is concerned
So, by your "logic", if my phone supports Vorbis, it can't possibly support other codecs? I assure you that's not the case.
Beyond you seem to have built a beautiful straw man, but since it bears no resemblance to me or my opinions, I see little point in arguing. But I will point out that Wikipedia only allows Ogg Vorbis and Midi for audio uploads, so your assertion that their requirement for open formats is new is utterly baseless.
Because closed formats have a company or companies willing to push it for reasons other than technical superiority.
And I listed several companies that will push Theora (or Dirac). Open source hasn't been just-for-hobbyists for a long time now.
So, only people who spend their valuable time and money getting an open phone instead of the iPhone are worthy of consideration in this debate?
As far as Wikipedia is concerned, yes. They already limit audio uploads to formats your iPhone won't support; why would you think they'd act differently for video?
To be fair, the format is entirely open, but patent encumbered.
A bit of an oxymoron there, but I know what you mean. The technical specifications are open; use is not. The latter may not be a factor for the typical home user whose license fee was bundled in with their hardware or OS, but it's going to be a factor for Wikipedia.
As far as technical qualities go, MP3 is still king of audio, despite being the worst supported format out there, proprietary or otherwise. Also, VHS beat Betamax. If history teaches us anything, it's that technical qualities are, at best, a very minor factor in success.
it makes more sense to have the more-bandwidth-friendly H.264
Not for Wikipedia. Their license won't allow it, so for Wikipedia, the choices are between Theora, maybe Dirac, and no video at all.
It's all nice and all, but if open video technology really wants to win, they have to be technically better. There is no other way.
Why? Closed formats don't seem to operate under that constraint. In fact, technical qualities seem to be a non-issue as far as success goes in general. The backing of big players seems to be what counts, and that's exactly what we have here. Whether Wikipedia + Firefox + RedHat + other open players is big enough remains to be seen (and I admit I have my doubts), but if "technically better" becomes an issue, I think it'll be the first time ever.
What I'm more worried about is that I cannot watch Wikipedia videos with any other device than my PC
Ah, now your real concern appears, I suspect. If Theora starts to get momentum, it'll appear on phones and similar devices quickly enough. My phone already supports Ogg Vorbis. (It may even support Theora; I haven't tried.) If yours doesn't, then perhaps you went with the wrong vendor. I didn't look for Vorbis support for my phone, but I did look for openness; if that wasn't a factor in your choice of phone, then my sympathy for you is nil. Especially if you want to connect with Wikipedia, whose commitment to openness is legendary.
If you want Wikipedia to go with your proprietary, encumbered format(s), your best be is to lobby the patent holders to donate the patents to the public domain. Good luck with that.:)
idiot american system of month.day instead of day.month
Actually, since we're ignoring year, the ISO 8601 format (yyyy-mm-dd) makes this Pi Day too--and given that there is an ISO date format, and given that it solves the sorting problem so thoroughly, I'd say that a format which uses day.month is, at best, less stupid. But still pretty stupid.
Really? I defy you to find a bug in my implementation of/bin/false.:)
What is true is that the chance of a bug appearing grows exponentially as the code increases in complexity, so that for any program of moderate or greater complexity, the chance that one or more bugs exist is near certainty, but I wouldn't be posting on slashdot if I didn't enjoy the occasional moment of nitpicking pedantry...:)
...that applies to big well known OS projects only. Obscure little one/two man projects don't have that big of a peer review. If those projects have few users, you can live with critical security holes for years without then even being known.
How secure do you imagine that obscure little one/two man proprietary, closed source projects are? The comparison doesn't just apply to big, popular OSS projects. Other things being equal, open source projects will tend to be more secure--if for no other reason, simply because people tend to be more careful when they know others will review their code. However, you're quite correct in pointing out that there are other factors than just open vs. closed, and it's important to factor those in as well.
Well, perhaps. Speaking as someone who lives in California, where multiple quakes occur on a daily basis, my notion of a "common" earthquake may be quite different from yours.:)
Anyway, the last earthquake of similar magnitude before the Sumatran one was over forty years ago (1964), and our technology was quite a bit more primitive then. This second biggie (and it is a huge quake) gives us an unparalleled opportunity to study the behavior of big ones, as we now have a sample size of two!:)
how did we let Warcraft users slowly replace the word "bug" with "glitch" ?! It's a bug!
A bug is a logic problem in the code; a glitch is misbehavior by the program. Glitches are normally associated with bugs, but faulty hardware or cosmic rays can also cause glitches. On the other hand, it is quite possible for a bug to exist without ever triggering a glitch, if the conditions that would trigger the bug are sufficiently remote, or if other code in the system corrects for the behavior of the bug (the latter is actually quite common).
In this case, I don't believe they've fixed the bug, but the glitch that is the manifestation of the bug is solved for now. If my understanding of what happened is correct, they should have nearly four years to ship a fix to the bug before the glitch reappears, so the fix will probably be bundled with the next system update.
If the headline had read "passage of time fixes bug", as you suggest, I would have had to call it an outright lie. As it is, however, I think the headline is exactly correct.
You mean the 9.1 near Sumatra in 2004? That was a little bigger, yes, but this "smaller quake" you treat so dismissively is among the five largest of the last century. So, in answer to your last question, no we don't have 8.8 quakes every few years.
SCO[1] still isn't a patent troll--no patents are involved in any of their lawsuits[2]. They could, perhaps, be considered a copyright troll, except that patent trolls usually own the patents they're suing over, while SCO doesn't seem to own any sue-worthy copyrights.
Just sayin'.
[1] Note that SCO (The SCO Group) is not the same company as The Santa Cruz Operation, so their history is not quite as extensive as their name might suggest.
[2] IBM did originally include patent claims in their countersuit, but they dropped those charges, and SCO has never sued anyone over any of their own patents, mostly because they don't have any.
No, DOCX is a separate de-facto standard--the XML format used by recent versions of MS Word. It is only tangentially related to MS's OOXML, the ISO-approved XML format not in use by anything or anyone.
Plus, knowing more than a minimum amount of mathematics (and in the US, the minimum is awfully minimal) puts you in danger of violating countless "software" and "business method" patents. Your own brain may become a tool for criminal activity unless you turn it off at every possible opportunity. (We won't even talk about all the copyright infringement that goes on as people copy information from books, movies and songs into their brains.) I think it's clear that the logical next step is to make owning or operating a brain illegal. The potential for abuse is just too great.
And for those who don't know, all you need to 'crack open' a DEB are the standard systems tools, ar and tar. No obscure, opaque binary headers to be stripped off with cryptic, overspecialized tools like rpm2cpio, and no need for bizarre, nearly obsolete tools like cpio. DEB just works, unlike that RPM crap!:)
(Note, I work with both package formats daily, and have never actually had a problem with either one, but it really does seem like the RPM dev team made some weird-ass decisions back in the day.)
Slashdot Mirror
Am I right that if they only distribute the patched binaries to customers who have support contracts, they only need to make the source available to those customers?
Can they also add clauses to the support contracts so that if those customers are found distributing the source code to others, they don't get to sign up for future support?
No, and no.
Actually, the answers are yes (conditionally) and no. If they deliver the source with the binaries, then they've met all their obligations under the GPL. So, if they only deliver the binaries to people with support contracts, and each binary delivery is bundled with the source, then they have no obligation to provide source to anyone else.
However, the GPL doesn't allow adding any further restrictions on redistribution beyond than those it already includes, so your second point is dead on. The moment they try to restrict what others can do with GPL'd code, they lose their license, and become liable to copyright infringement suits. Disguising it as a wholly separate support contract won't affect that, since only their agreement not to add conditions allows them to distribute in the first place.
Every other browser would crash or slow to a crawl
Don't have much experience with Lynx, Links or w3m, do you? :)
(I know what you meant, and even basically agree, but you did say "[e]very other browser".)
Don't forget pizza delivery! :)
As far as technical qualities go, MP3 is still king of audio, despite being the worst supported format out there, proprietary or otherwise.
What?
MP3 is the de-facto standard. OGG is bad supported, open, but still better. But it never got the momentum MP3 had.
Er, sorry, that was very badly phrased. I meant to say that MP3 is the worst (from a technical standpoint) of the widely supported formats, but still the defacto-standard ("king"). "Worst (of the) supported formats", not "worst-supported format.
if that wasn't a factor in your choice of phone, then my sympathy for you is nil.
Thats okay, I feel sympathy for the fact that you won't be able to watch as much stuff as I will since you have a codec that while open, is largely irrelevant as far as content is concerned
So, by your "logic", if my phone supports Vorbis, it can't possibly support other codecs? I assure you that's not the case.
Beyond you seem to have built a beautiful straw man, but since it bears no resemblance to me or my opinions, I see little point in arguing. But I will point out that Wikipedia only allows Ogg Vorbis and Midi for audio uploads, so your assertion that their requirement for open formats is new is utterly baseless.
Because closed formats have a company or companies willing to push it for reasons other than technical superiority.
And I listed several companies that will push Theora (or Dirac). Open source hasn't been just-for-hobbyists for a long time now.
So, only people who spend their valuable time and money getting an open phone instead of the iPhone are worthy of consideration in this debate?
As far as Wikipedia is concerned, yes. They already limit audio uploads to formats your iPhone won't support; why would you think they'd act differently for video?
To be fair, the format is entirely open, but patent encumbered.
A bit of an oxymoron there, but I know what you mean. The technical specifications are open; use is not. The latter may not be a factor for the typical home user whose license fee was bundled in with their hardware or OS, but it's going to be a factor for Wikipedia.
As far as technical qualities go, MP3 is still king of audio, despite being the worst supported format out there, proprietary or otherwise. Also, VHS beat Betamax. If history teaches us anything, it's that technical qualities are, at best, a very minor factor in success.
it makes more sense to have the more-bandwidth-friendly H.264
Not for Wikipedia. Their license won't allow it, so for Wikipedia, the choices are between Theora, maybe Dirac, and no video at all.
It's all nice and all, but if open video technology really wants to win, they have to be technically better. There is no other way.
Why? Closed formats don't seem to operate under that constraint. In fact, technical qualities seem to be a non-issue as far as success goes in general. The backing of big players seems to be what counts, and that's exactly what we have here. Whether Wikipedia + Firefox + RedHat + other open players is big enough remains to be seen (and I admit I have my doubts), but if "technically better" becomes an issue, I think it'll be the first time ever.
What I'm more worried about is that I cannot watch Wikipedia videos with any other device than my PC
Ah, now your real concern appears, I suspect. If Theora starts to get momentum, it'll appear on phones and similar devices quickly enough. My phone already supports Ogg Vorbis. (It may even support Theora; I haven't tried.) If yours doesn't, then perhaps you went with the wrong vendor. I didn't look for Vorbis support for my phone, but I did look for openness; if that wasn't a factor in your choice of phone, then my sympathy for you is nil. Especially if you want to connect with Wikipedia, whose commitment to openness is legendary.
If you want Wikipedia to go with your proprietary, encumbered format(s), your best be is to lobby the patent holders to donate the patents to the public domain. Good luck with that. :)
Clearly it was a case of circular logic.
I've always found it peculiar that circular logic is not a degenerate case of elliptical logic. :)
idiot american system of month.day instead of day.month
Actually, since we're ignoring year, the ISO 8601 format (yyyy-mm-dd) makes this Pi Day too--and given that there is an ISO date format, and given that it solves the sorting problem so thoroughly, I'd say that a format which uses day.month is, at best, less stupid. But still pretty stupid.
Code has bugs, it always will.
Really? I defy you to find a bug in my implementation of /bin/false. :)
What is true is that the chance of a bug appearing grows exponentially as the code increases in complexity, so that for any program of moderate or greater complexity, the chance that one or more bugs exist is near certainty, but I wouldn't be posting on slashdot if I didn't enjoy the occasional moment of nitpicking pedantry... :)
...that applies to big well known OS projects only. Obscure little one/two man projects don't have that big of a peer review. If those projects have few users, you can live with critical security holes for years without then even being known.
How secure do you imagine that obscure little one/two man proprietary, closed source projects are? The comparison doesn't just apply to big, popular OSS projects. Other things being equal, open source projects will tend to be more secure--if for no other reason, simply because people tend to be more careful when they know others will review their code. However, you're quite correct in pointing out that there are other factors than just open vs. closed, and it's important to factor those in as well.
Well, perhaps. Speaking as someone who lives in California, where multiple quakes occur on a daily basis, my notion of a "common" earthquake may be quite different from yours. :)
Anyway, the last earthquake of similar magnitude before the Sumatran one was over forty years ago (1964), and our technology was quite a bit more primitive then. This second biggie (and it is a huge quake) gives us an unparalleled opportunity to study the behavior of big ones, as we now have a sample size of two! :)
how did we let Warcraft users slowly replace the word "bug" with "glitch" ?! It's a bug!
A bug is a logic problem in the code; a glitch is misbehavior by the program. Glitches are normally associated with bugs, but faulty hardware or cosmic rays can also cause glitches. On the other hand, it is quite possible for a bug to exist without ever triggering a glitch, if the conditions that would trigger the bug are sufficiently remote, or if other code in the system corrects for the behavior of the bug (the latter is actually quite common).
In this case, I don't believe they've fixed the bug, but the glitch that is the manifestation of the bug is solved for now. If my understanding of what happened is correct, they should have nearly four years to ship a fix to the bug before the glitch reappears, so the fix will probably be bundled with the next system update.
If the headline had read "passage of time fixes bug", as you suggest, I would have had to call it an outright lie. As it is, however, I think the headline is exactly correct.
You mean the 9.1 near Sumatra in 2004? That was a little bigger, yes, but this "smaller quake" you treat so dismissively is among the five largest of the last century. So, in answer to your last question, no we don't have 8.8 quakes every few years.
If you're not playing high-end graphics-intensive video games on your PC, how much of a compromise is it, really?
(This message entered using a G400 that is older than the computer it's installed in.)
Heh, not sure if you were being sarcastic or not.
Hint: to recover the original quote, apply the rule s/Vermont/Springfield/
Aren't you a communist as well?
Everyone who breathes without paying for their air is a dirty commie! :)
SCO[1] still isn't a patent troll--no patents are involved in any of their lawsuits[2]. They could, perhaps, be considered a copyright troll, except that patent trolls usually own the patents they're suing over, while SCO doesn't seem to own any sue-worthy copyrights.
Just sayin'.
[1] Note that SCO (The SCO Group) is not the same company as The Santa Cruz Operation, so their history is not quite as extensive as their name might suggest.
[2] IBM did originally include patent claims in their countersuit, but they dropped those charges, and SCO has never sued anyone over any of their own patents, mostly because they don't have any.
There may already be one on the Hello Cthulhu site.
No, DOCX is a separate de-facto standard--the XML format used by recent versions of MS Word. It is only tangentially related to MS's OOXML, the ISO-approved XML format not in use by anything or anyone.
Plus, knowing more than a minimum amount of mathematics (and in the US, the minimum is awfully minimal) puts you in danger of violating countless "software" and "business method" patents. Your own brain may become a tool for criminal activity unless you turn it off at every possible opportunity. (We won't even talk about all the copyright infringement that goes on as people copy information from books, movies and songs into their brains.) I think it's clear that the logical next step is to make owning or operating a brain illegal. The potential for abuse is just too great.
And for those who don't know, all you need to 'crack open' a DEB are the standard systems tools, ar and tar. No obscure, opaque binary headers to be stripped off with cryptic, overspecialized tools like rpm2cpio, and no need for bizarre, nearly obsolete tools like cpio. DEB just works, unlike that RPM crap! :)
(Note, I work with both package formats daily, and have never actually had a problem with either one, but it really does seem like the RPM dev team made some weird-ass decisions back in the day.)
Parliament is sovereign
But surely the Monarch is still the head of the Church?