This is a security story. The lock logo would have been more appropriate. Oh, wait... every time MS is mentioned on/. you get a spike in ad revenue. Carry on.
If programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative programs, by the same token they deserve to be punished if they restrict the use of these programs.
This is one of his sayings that got me starting to see the FSF for what it really is. In RMS's perfect world, the government will come knocking on your door "Open up!" they will say. "We're here to free your source for the glorious people's revolution". Then you will do time in jail just for trying to profit on your work as journalists, novelists, and other IP workers have been doing for hundreds of years.
Well, we could agree to call it W_UTM. Then all we would have to do to compress it is send W_UTM and people would know what it was.
Of course the codec would eventually become infinitely large, but as long as our pace of discovering stuff like this doesn't outpace Moore's law, we are fine.
The idea that all IP is just "numbers" and can't be owned is a fallacy. Anything in the universe can be hashed to a numerical representation. My car has a number, and I most certainly can own it. To suggest otherwise is to advocate a communist system.
If you really believe that all IP is just a number, you are welcome to develop software by spewing bignums into a buffer and executing them to see whether or not they are useful.
I've thought of this before, but I didn't think they would do it on Earth. I was thinking that they should launch another Hubble and do it. In space you could easily move the telescopes closer together or further apart.
Of course, this increases the resolving power but it does nothing for light-gathering capability.
The problem is lenses. They simply have to be too big. What could we put in space that would act like a really big lens? The only way I know of to focus light without passing it directly through a lens or bouncing it off a mirror is with gravity.
It simply isn't practical for us to built a gravity telescope.
Is there anything else that will bend light? If we could create a large "light bending field" in space, we could get a lens the size of a planet. We would just have to be careful that we didn't put the Earth in the focus. Then again, maybe the Ant People from Andromeda are already planning to do that to us.
Anyone who thinks they need the support of armed police and federal agents, backing IP law, to make their living... then maybe you OUGHT to go broke. You exist at the expense of everyone else's freedom. You existance is too expensive.
Let's substitute some variables:
Anyone who thinks they need the support of armed police and federal agents, backing [real estate, property, labor, finance] law, to make their living... then maybe you OUGHT to go broke. You exist at the expense of everyone else's freedom. You existance is too expensive.
The only difference is that IP isn't physical. So what? It's still property. It still has value. Ultimately, all costs are labor costs if you think about it. Actually, money is becoming less and less physical all the time. Do you think we should throw out the SEC laws in the US just because they are enforced by Federal agents attempting to control bits of information?
Given that, I fail to see how IP law threatens freedom any more than any other law. Certainly, IP law taken to extreme is a threat to liberty, but so is any law.
At any rate, the Brittish experiment sounds exciting. It will give us an opportunity to see how things work under such a system. I'm less sanguine about them trying to push this through the EU, and the EU in general. Things like this--different nations doing things differently, are why One World government is wrong. One World govt. and economy is wrong for the same reason monoculture crops are wrong. One disease could kill the whole lot. Already the World economy causes problems, such as the US market having an impact overseas.
Frankly, the whole idea of GPL'd snippets is just ridiculous. Perhaps people are thinking that they can "contaminate" code with these snippets, but I doubt that would hold up in court.
Far be it from me to tell others what to do, but if the license is longer than the code, the code should probably just be public domain.
Not entirely true. The code can be licensed for money under the GPL, and there is no limit on the price you may charge.
In response to this I once quipped "sure I'll license my code under the GPL--for $50,000/copy".
Indeed, I have heard of one company that licenses gcc mods for $5000/copy. Since the user paid so much, this makes them less likely to give the product away, even though they have the right to do so if they wish.
Unfortunately these are special cases. The demand curve for most software is such that there are zero units produced at such prices. The extreme case would be one unit sold under GPL, and I believe this may have happened with RedHat and something, but I forget what.
So, unless you produce highly specialized custom software geared towards corporate clients willing to spend thousands, GPL software cannot be effectively commercialized.
the GPL does not discriminate against people who want to deny OSD rights to recipients of their code. Such people are perfectly free to modify and/or redistribute GPL'ed code.
This argument is only true for the originator of the software. The OSD is useless if you apply it only to the originator, since the originator has all the rights available to any author anyway.
Consistently apply the OSD with rights granted to users in mind. Then you will see that there is no way the GPL can fit the OSD.
Of course, you will almost certainly find some way to counter this argument. The GPL is included for political purposes. The OSI knows that it would become a pariah in the Free Software community if it took such a stand. OTOH, the abiding suspicion of business towards OSS would be aleviated if the right to proprietary forking were made an explicit part of the OSD.
In other words, the OSI has all the problems of a 3rd political party. Ultimately, all of these free vs. proprietary arguments are really just all the same old left vs. right arguments, with a geek twist.
Exactly how does one judge what has been deliberatly obfuscated
Exactly the same way you tell the difference between 1st degree murder, 2nd degree murder, and manslaughter in a trial. If it ever ends up in court, both sides will offer evidence to support the argument that the accused either did or didn't deliberately obfuscate the code. IANAL.
No, no, no. If you read the article, you'd realize they've created a plastic train conductor. It's all part of ATT's plan to duplicate the fanciful world of the Beatles "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds".
Perhaps the recording industry isn't charging us what the product is worth, maybe they're charging us what they know we will pay.
Ooo, your ignorance of basic economics is showing. What you've just described, without knowing it, is the law of supply and demand.
they would hear nothing of this venture that would have netted them BILLIONS
So, if they make MP3s available for download at $1 per unit, sales will increase by a factor of greater than 14? I don't think so. Apparently, a lot of managers with years of industry experience don't think so either. Let's see now, who knows this business better? The executives that run it, or some random guy on Slashdot?
It's too bad you identify yourself as a Canadian. What you are describing sounds a lot like the much maligned Laffer curve. If you were a U.S. Liberal Democrat, I could really call you on that one.
a distribution monopoly is forcing me to pay unreasonable prices for music
Exactly how did they force you? By playing songs on the radio, and making it known that you could purchase the CD for a price?
Hmmm... if it's possible to force people to buy things just by letting them know that they are for sale... that gives me an idea: HEY YOU!!! I HAVE SOMETHING TO SELL. YOU MUST BUY IT.
OK, while I'm waiting for everybody on Slashdot to send me money, let's see what else we have here:
Do I pay for any and all reasonably-priced software, games, music, and literature? You betcha
OK, so you get to name your own price. Wow! I never knew I could do that. Hey you! Yeah you, Mr. Mercedes dealer. I don't think that fully tricked out 4-door with the leather seats is worth $80,000. I'll give you $10,000 for it. What? That's not enough? Give me the keys. What? You don't want to give me the keys? Say what? SAY WHAT? You're telling me my old Buick is good enough? Who are you to tell me what I should drive? Well, I know how to pick the lock and hot-wire it. I found some cracks that let me disable the electronic ignition protection system and LoJack. Before that, stealing luxury autos was really hard, but thanks to the internet it's easy now, so I guess that makes it right. Hacked the DMV 'puter too. They'll never trace the VIN on this baby. All I gotta do is hop in and drive. Whaddaya say to that?
WINE: Good for users because you can use Windows applications on Linux.
LINE: Good for users because you can use Linux applications on Windows.
The problem some people having with the Windows part of this is that they want to see Linux do better. Users don't care which does better. They just want more and better choices, and LINE gives them another choice. Open source doesn't empower users (not directly anyway) because they can't modify source (most of them are not programmers). Additional choices empower the users, because they are all capable of making choices.
It sounds like you're coming from a server mentality, where uptime is a big concern. Most home users treat their computers like their TVs.
Todays computers are, with regards to starting, where the old black-n-white vacuum tube Philco TVs were. They took a while to warm up.
At some point in the future, people will reminisce over how computers used to take a minute to "boot up". Actually, as computing has progressed, boot times have been an on and off problem (no pun intended). The old 8-bit home machines loaded the OS from ROM and booted up virtually in an instant. In an ironic twist, the introduction of inexpensive hard drives for home PCs probably caused a big step backwards in terms of boot up time. It became cheaper to just load the OS from the HD. At some point, we'll figure out a way to have our cake and eat it too. I'm thinking that cheap, fast solid-state hard drives would be a great thing.
By then, computers will be so established that nobody will talk about operating systems anymore. What OS you run will matter as much as the details of the circuits in your TV. They will all perform about the same, and everybody will know how to build them so that they run with approximately the same reliability. That kind of puts the whole "free vs. proprietary" software debate in perspective. Given time, it simply won't matter because all technology tends to march slowly towards commoditization anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
I infinity bad Japanese translation you!!!
This is a security story. The lock logo would have been more appropriate. Oh, wait... every time MS is mentioned on /. you get a spike in ad revenue. Carry on.
If programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative programs, by the same token they deserve to be punished if they restrict the use of these programs.
This is one of his sayings that got me starting to see the FSF for what it really is. In RMS's perfect world, the government will come knocking on your door "Open up!" they will say. "We're here to free your source for the glorious people's revolution". Then you will do time in jail just for trying to profit on your work as journalists, novelists, and other IP workers have been doing for hundreds of years.
They cannot be compressed
Well, we could agree to call it W_UTM. Then all we would have to do to compress it is send W_UTM and people would know what it was.
Of course the codec would eventually become infinitely large, but as long as our pace of discovering stuff like this doesn't outpace Moore's law, we are fine.
I'm only semi-serious.
I did.
The idea that all IP is just "numbers" and can't be owned is a fallacy. Anything in the universe can be hashed to a numerical representation. My car has a number, and I most certainly can own it. To suggest otherwise is to advocate a communist system.
If you really believe that all IP is just a number, you are welcome to develop software by spewing bignums into a buffer and executing them to see whether or not they are useful.
See you in a googol years.
That page sucks. Blue on black so you can hardly read it, lousy javascript so you can't use your back button.
There was nothing about actors on it either.
I've thought of this before, but I didn't think they would do it on Earth. I was thinking that they should launch another Hubble and do it. In space you could easily move the telescopes closer together or further apart.
Of course, this increases the resolving power but it does nothing for light-gathering capability.
The problem is lenses. They simply have to be too big. What could we put in space that would act like a really big lens? The only way I know of to focus light without passing it directly through a lens or bouncing it off a mirror is with gravity.
It simply isn't practical for us to built a gravity telescope.
Is there anything else that will bend light? If we could create a large "light bending field" in space, we could get a lens the size of a planet. We would just have to be careful that we didn't put the Earth in the focus. Then again, maybe the Ant People from Andromeda are already planning to do that to us.
Anyone who thinks they need the support of armed police and federal agents, backing IP law, to make their living... then maybe you OUGHT to go broke. You exist at the expense of everyone else's freedom. You existance is too expensive.
Let's substitute some variables:
Anyone who thinks they need the support of armed police and federal agents, backing [real estate, property, labor, finance] law, to make their living... then maybe you OUGHT to go broke. You exist at the expense of everyone else's freedom. You existance is too expensive.
The only difference is that IP isn't physical. So what? It's still property. It still has value. Ultimately, all costs are labor costs if you think about it. Actually, money is becoming less and less physical all the time. Do you think we should throw out the SEC laws in the US just because they are enforced by Federal agents attempting to control bits of information?
Given that, I fail to see how IP law threatens freedom any more than any other law. Certainly, IP law taken to extreme is a threat to liberty, but so is any law.
At any rate, the Brittish experiment sounds exciting. It will give us an opportunity to see how things work under such a system. I'm less sanguine about them trying to push this through the EU, and the EU in general. Things like this--different nations doing things differently, are why One World government is wrong. One World govt. and economy is wrong for the same reason monoculture crops are wrong. One disease could kill the whole lot. Already the World economy causes problems, such as the US market having an impact overseas.
I wouldn't be surprised if they get and set bits either. Check out http://sourceforge.net/snippet/detail.php?type=sni ppet&id=100055.
Frankly, the whole idea of GPL'd snippets is just ridiculous. Perhaps people are thinking that they can "contaminate" code with these snippets, but I doubt that would hold up in court.
Far be it from me to tell others what to do, but if the license is longer than the code, the code should probably just be public domain.
Not entirely true. The code can be licensed for money under the GPL, and there is no limit on the price you may charge.
In response to this I once quipped "sure I'll license my code under the GPL--for $50,000/copy".
Indeed, I have heard of one company that licenses gcc mods for $5000/copy. Since the user paid so much, this makes them less likely to give the product away, even though they have the right to do so if they wish.
Unfortunately these are special cases. The demand curve for most software is such that there are zero units produced at such prices. The extreme case would be one unit sold under GPL, and I believe this may have happened with RedHat and something, but I forget what.
So, unless you produce highly specialized custom software geared towards corporate clients willing to spend thousands, GPL software cannot be effectively commercialized.
the GPL does not discriminate against people who want to deny OSD rights to recipients of their code. Such people are perfectly free to modify and/or redistribute GPL'ed code.
This argument is only true for the originator of the software. The OSD is useless if you apply it only to the originator, since the originator has all the rights available to any author anyway.
Consistently apply the OSD with rights granted to users in mind. Then you will see that there is no way the GPL can fit the OSD.
Of course, you will almost certainly find some way to counter this argument. The GPL is included for political purposes. The OSI knows that it would become a pariah in the Free Software community if it took such a stand. OTOH, the abiding suspicion of business towards OSS would be aleviated if the right to proprietary forking were made an explicit part of the OSD.
In other words, the OSI has all the problems of a 3rd political party. Ultimately, all of these free vs. proprietary arguments are really just all the same old left vs. right arguments, with a geek twist.
Exactly how does one judge what has been deliberatly obfuscated
Exactly the same way you tell the difference between 1st degree murder, 2nd degree murder, and manslaughter in a trial. If it ever ends up in court, both sides will offer evidence to support the argument that the accused either did or didn't deliberately obfuscate the code. IANAL.
No, no, no. If you read the article, you'd realize they've created a plastic train conductor. It's all part of ATT's plan to duplicate the fanciful world of the Beatles "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds".
Perhaps the recording industry isn't charging us what the product is worth, maybe they're charging us what they know we will pay.
Ooo, your ignorance of basic economics is showing. What you've just described, without knowing it, is the law of supply and demand.
they would hear nothing of this venture that would have netted them BILLIONS
So, if they make MP3s available for download at $1 per unit, sales will increase by a factor of greater than 14? I don't think so. Apparently, a lot of managers with years of industry experience don't think so either. Let's see now, who knows this business better? The executives that run it, or some random guy on Slashdot?
It's too bad you identify yourself as a Canadian. What you are describing sounds a lot like the much maligned Laffer curve. If you were a U.S. Liberal Democrat, I could really call you on that one.
a distribution monopoly is forcing me to pay unreasonable prices for music
Exactly how did they force you? By playing songs on the radio, and making it known that you could purchase the CD for a price?
Hmmm... if it's possible to force people to buy things just by letting them know that they are for sale... that gives me an idea: HEY YOU!!! I HAVE SOMETHING TO SELL. YOU MUST BUY IT.
OK, while I'm waiting for everybody on Slashdot to send me money, let's see what else we have here:
Do I pay for any and all reasonably-priced software, games, music, and literature? You betcha
OK, so you get to name your own price. Wow! I never knew I could do that. Hey you! Yeah you, Mr. Mercedes dealer. I don't think that fully tricked out 4-door with the leather seats is worth $80,000. I'll give you $10,000 for it. What? That's not enough? Give me the keys. What? You don't want to give me the keys? Say what? SAY WHAT? You're telling me my old Buick is good enough? Who are you to tell me what I should drive? Well, I know how to pick the lock and hot-wire it. I found some cracks that let me disable the electronic ignition protection system and LoJack. Before that, stealing luxury autos was really hard, but thanks to the internet it's easy now, so I guess that makes it right. Hacked the DMV 'puter too. They'll never trace the VIN on this baby. All I gotta do is hop in and drive. Whaddaya say to that?
WINE: Good for users because you can use Windows applications on Linux.
LINE: Good for users because you can use Linux applications on Windows.
The problem some people having with the Windows part of this is that they want to see Linux do better. Users don't care which does better. They just want more and better choices, and LINE gives them another choice. Open source doesn't empower users (not directly anyway) because they can't modify source (most of them are not programmers). Additional choices empower the users, because they are all capable of making choices.
It sounds like you're coming from a server mentality, where uptime is a big concern. Most home users treat their computers like their TVs.
Todays computers are, with regards to starting, where the old black-n-white vacuum tube Philco TVs were. They took a while to warm up.
At some point in the future, people will reminisce over how computers used to take a minute to "boot up". Actually, as computing has progressed, boot times have been an on and off problem (no pun intended). The old 8-bit home machines loaded the OS from ROM and booted up virtually in an instant. In an ironic twist, the introduction of inexpensive hard drives for home PCs probably caused a big step backwards in terms of boot up time. It became cheaper to just load the OS from the HD. At some point, we'll figure out a way to have our cake and eat it too. I'm thinking that cheap, fast solid-state hard drives would be a great thing.
By then, computers will be so established that nobody will talk about operating systems anymore. What OS you run will matter as much as the details of the circuits in your TV. They will all perform about the same, and everybody will know how to build them so that they run with approximately the same reliability. That kind of puts the whole "free vs. proprietary" software debate in perspective. Given time, it simply won't matter because all technology tends to march slowly towards commoditization anyway.
Anyone with a clue would realize they meant 8 bits per channel where a channel is red, green, blue, or alpha.
The page that you linked too was already featured in an older Slashdot article. Maybe that's why it was rejected when you submitted it.
Oh good grief. What were they thinking when they named it?
Pearl would be much better suited for this type of application, due to its strong typing and oo-features.
I didn't know there was a strongly typed language called Pearl. Is it anything like the weakly typed language called Perl?
Their Lawyers are trying to use this to wriggle out of the judgement,
That's their job. They're lawyers. They are paid to get people off. No, wait. That's prostitutes. Umm... same thing.
Or better yet, when people have to tell you you're being oppressed, something is most definitely amiss.
Hey you, yeah you typing in MS word. Did you know you were oppresed?
No. Really?
Yes, really.
What about the illegal aliens we keep chained to looms in the basement?
The looms run Linux. They're fine.
You mean GNU/Linux?
Yes, of course. Pardon me.
If you work in high tech, Austin is a small town of 1 million people.
If you don't work in high tech, Austin is a sprawling megalopolis of 20 million.