What Bruce said; but with a comment. The Free Software Foundation will accept contributions to many projects. You can write your code and agree to assign it to them. There may not be much benefit to you, but for others it may help with understanding the status of the code. There may also be some legal benefit for you in that you in that you will have less responsibility for the code. As ever, ask an expert lawyer to find out:-)
Bruce is 100% right here. There are two kinds of contribution agreement; those which promise to continue distributing the software on the same terms as you distributed it to them and those that cheat you. Canonical's agreements are the type which cheat you, whilst the agreements of the Fedora project, the FSF and most other FOSS projects are not. Groklaw has already done some serious investigation of Canonical and project harmony and that's probably the place to start.
What you want to watch out for is groups which take your code and establish a special advantage for themselves. Apart from the article above you might find the article "How to Tell When an Open Source Foundation Isn't About You" very useful. There are many examples of this danger, Oracle's recent mess being the latest. If a project won't accept your contribution then import it into Gitorious and fork it. Provide your changes as a patch and look for others doing the same. Eventually, when the project closes up you will have the basis of a free fork. Contributing to Canonical really looks like a thing to avoid unless it's really clear it's going to save you lots of effort and it's clear that someone else is maintaining a separate archive of the software ready to fork.
No, what gets me is that even the article tries to take the blame away from FitBits.
When you create a profile, the default privacy setting allows profiles to be found in search results (Google, Bing, etc). If you don’t unclick this setting, it will obviously make your profile public for anyone to find.
Safe defaults is the most important part of computer security and is exactly the bit Microsoft took years to learn (and still hasn't got completely). FitBits should default this to off and then turn it on gradually as they are convinced the user has understood the implications. They (along with FaceBook etc.) are 100% to blame.
100% right. The only possible thing which would even get noticed is if a third party candidates started winning ballots. Now if that happened, then the politicians that be would make sure the ballot committees ended up in real trouble. As long as that doesn't happen, the candidates are just happy that their own people are in charge of the vote counting.
sorry my sentence got chopped off; CVS introduced multi file commits and tracking entire directories on top of RCS. RCS was based on the idea of SCCS but moved to delta storage.
Is lack of copying also "relatively cheaply and efficiently proven"?
When sued by a corporation in the USA your only hope is a SLAPP lawsuit. Otherwise I guess it's going to cost.
Say I've written a song. How do I know whether I am the legitimate author or whether it's an unauthorized derivative work of something I had heard in grade school?
You know that because you know you didn't copy. This may or, more likely, may not help in court.
Real effective internet package downloading with full dependency tracking (RPM & DPKG)
Theres five and one for free. I'm sure you will be able to point out some systems which had part of the functionality of these, however that is the nature of innovation and why patents are wrong. Everybody's innovation builds on someone else's work to some extent.
The majority of recent innovations in software have originated in FOSS and then been copied into commercial software. For example, Microsoft's . Even re-implementations can be innovative in the way that they do those re-implementations and Linux certainly shows that.
Perhaps when FOSS moves beyond reimplementing proprietary operating systems, applications and tools this will become a more important issue.
There are 14 thousand packages available for my current system and although a large proportion of that are libraries, it compares with a few hundred in a plain system. I think we are beyond just implementing the base operating system.
Going a bit further, lets just look at a few random packages that happene to come to mind
libktorrent2 - the bittorrent protocol was invented in FOSS
bind - this is the server where the majority of the DNS system was invented before being copied by commercial entities
ruby / java / perl - all open source innovations
mono - well maybe there's some innovation in there:-)
cvs / git - CVS was the revision control system to introduce
X11 - it's old now, but it came straight out of a research project
haskell / Camel - these are what Microsoft's new "F#" language is based on.
Overall, the problem may be the opposite. Too much of FOSS is someone's research project with a bunch of random innovations thrown in there; it's lucky we can choose the best of many packages.
I use FOSS every day and support various project monetarily but lets be honest. Innovative applies to FOSS about as well as it applies to MicroSoft user interface development. Clippy being a notable exception and definite MS "innovation".
It's so sad that this just sounds like the standard line from a Microsoft troll. More likely, however you've been taken in by these people. Anyway, good for you in putting your money into FOSS; if you have done that then you really have funded lots of innovation.
That said, I'm really unhappy about the U.S. seriously considering moving away from the "first to invent" system. Yes, our system is more litigious, and therefore one can argue it's more costly, but also seems less fair if someone legitimately did invent something first but couldn't afford to beat the other guy to the patent office.
If he can't afford to file first, then he certainly can't afford to defend his patent. He should have published the idea. If he was planning to keep the idea secret instead, then I'm afraid to say that this is an example of the patent system actually working and achieving it's main aim; to encourage inventions to be published.
First not only am I not your lawyer, I'm not a lawyer at all, so this isn't legal advice; if you have questions like the above you probably want to go talk to the FSF or SFLC who are quite likely to be willing to arrange cheap legal advice.
What sakdoctor said is probably true that we need people in the free software community who actively patent. Having patented it however, the licensing not be like the GPL. You also don't want to get involved in people like the Open Patent Alliance. They seem to be a standard industry "patent pool" and as such their members will be looking for money from WIMAX producers, which of course basically rules out FOSS where it is impossible to control the number of copies out there. The most important thing to understand is that where in copyrights, copying is relatively cheaply and efficiently proven and so people respect them by default, the standard approach to patents is to ignore them.
In licensing, basically a level of aggression is needed otherwise your patent won't achieve anything and won't be worth the money. Basically, you have to be willing to sue companies that are willing to get involved in suing open source companies. That includes any company which has ever owned a patent involved in suing open source companies. If you don't do this then people like Microsoft will just sell their patents on to patent trolls whilst keeping a license for themselves and making sure the trolls know which targets to prioritize in order to get their next fix of patents. Probably the best way to do that is to transfer the patents to a well funded and very aggressive non practicing entity together with an agreement that a) they can't sell the patents on except with a similar agreement and b) they will not sue companies which agree never to sue FOSS software companies or to sell on patents except with a similar agreement.
The one organisation that I know of which comes even close is the Open Invention Network but they have completely failed to sue Microsoft during their recent patent attacks and as such I would say they seem to be pretty ineffective.
Finally, there's a moral question here. Some people believe that if you don't believe in a law you shouldn't benefit from it and so you shouldn't sue over patents. I wouldn't want to get money from patent lawsuit, but I strongly have the opposite belief. As long as patents only cause pain for FOSS people, the corporates and the politicians they buy will continue to support them. The correct way to get rid of the patent system is to maximise the pain for companies like Microsoft who are abusing the system themselves.
The Google Nexus S; the Nokia N900 is another, more flexible but less slick example. You have to buy them via internet retailers like Amazon in most places however. Lots of phones from Samsung and HTC are reportedly beginning to come without any need to root them.
I'm not sure you understand doing business in China. The profits from the organ donations go to the party member (or occasionally directly to the branch). So do the contract payments. You just get the peace and security of knowing that the local Linux users won't want to start reverse engineering your protocols.
I'll take one part of your comment out of order, because I think it shows a misunderstanding.
n
Two snipers could snipe over and over again, and eventually they'd reach their own limits--equivalent to placing their maximum bid as their first bid.
The entire point of a sniper is that they place their maximum bid as their first bid. A sniper will never bid again. Theoretically, if everybody had bid logically then there is no difference whatsoever between the two systems. If the sniper wins, all the people who have bid so far will look at the bid and decide that it is higher than their maximum and so skip the auction. If the sniper doesn't bid high enough, then the person who was going to win would win anyway.
Sniping is defined as, placing your maximum bid as your first bid as late as possible.
That's illogical. If that were true, the practice of sniping would gradually decline as people learned--but that's not the case.
The opposite. As people learn, they come to realise that sniping is the way to win auctions without needlessly pushing up the price. Eventually everybody becomes a sniper. When that happens the auction system begins to work as it was originally designed.
Sniping works because the system rewards it. Until that changes, sniping won't go away.
Agreed 100%. However viewed overall, sniping is probably a desirable thing for sellers. Sniping increases prices on an auction site by increasing pressure on other bidders to bid higher earlier.
What is needed is an option for sellers to use that would keep an auction going for a certain time after the last bid has been placed, even if the original auction period has expired--as mentioned in another comment. This way, sniping wouldn't work, because every time a sniper placed a bid, he'd extend the auction period.
This is an arguable situation. This would definitely stop sniping working. However, it will mean that those that snipe will be less likely to bid and so will probably reduce sale prices on that auction site. One of the main attractions of an auction site is the chance to get a bargain. Without sniping, intelligent long term repeat customers lose that hope since there are lots of people who bid based on the bids of others instead of making their own valuation. This means that those valuable customers do the work (valuing the item) but don't get the reward (buying the item).
Quite a few auction sites have tried your system. I don't think it's an accident that the successful one is the one which did not.
Everyone everywhere has "negligent" system adminstration by that definition. The question is, does the senior management run audits which check for it and then, once it's identified make sure it gets corrected or do they simply leave the system adminstrators with the responsibility for thing which they don't have enough power and resources to protect?
Thanks, I think that was a much clearer explanation. I do think that if the people understood E-bay, they would understand that their original bid should be their entire valuation and then they would not make the second bid.
I'm sorry, but there's simply no such article. There is also no such information in the Groklaw lawsuit records. It's almost impossible for me to prove a negative, but I am guessing that you misremembered. TomTom sent a cease and desist for their own countersuit, but that was after Microsoft had already sued them. If you know different then could you please provide a direct link to the article on which you are basing your knowledge.
The thing is that what you say would be correct in the ideal world where everybody understood E-bay. In real life, the other people do bid twice; they don't undersand how E-bay works and it is worth your while to do things a bit differently. If they see that you outbid them, the rethink and often bid higher. This pushes up the price you have to pay. These people have bid incorrectly; it's true; maybe if they understood ebay they would have bid higher, but it's not in your interest to let them have the chance to do that. If you bid at the very end, they don't realise they have been outbid until too late and so the overall auction price stays lower. For this reason sniping is a good strategy.
Even more interesting is that the existence of snipers is probably good because it means that early bidders come to understand quicker the way e-bay auction system and the need to bid their maximum bid on their first bid.
How about the opposite? It's a way to bid strange numbers without the possibility of being accused of collusive bidding. It's a standard strategy on auction sites to bid a strange ending. Newbies bid round numbers. People who want to win against newbies bid a bit more than a round number. People who want to win against people who want to win against Newbies bid a strange number.
If Google had bid more or less random strange numbers, then they could be accused of signalling. Since they bid obvious well known numbers, there's no real extra information in there so they are safe from accusations of cheating. The same thing is done by cryptographers who
To compare LulzSec with rapists or thugs is rediculous; comparing the CEOs to victims is so outrageous it's almost funny. There are plenty of serious "cyber" criminals who are hacking into people's systems for real money and causing real damage to people like you and me; the consumers who have their data being stored by these corporates. What makes LulzSec different is that, instead of just putting some charges on your credit card and never telling anyone where they got the data they published what they did. That's just bringing to the surface an issue which was already happening before LulzSec got involved.
LulzSec caused public nuisiance and annoyance but that makes them more stupid teenage vandals than thugs. The main bad thing they have done is embarassing the powerful and pointing out publicly what data was already available to the real black hats. It's not just that the corporates should have had better security, it's that:
they had no right to be gathering the data they were gathering in the first place.
if their security doesn't improve, someone sometime soon will cause real damage to all of us
the CEOs have been lying about the level of their security; they have put their customers at risk
For now I think there's quite a bit more value in pursuing the CEOs than the
They've indulged in a lot of patent-related FUD, but very few lawsuits.
Isn't that just because, when faced with Microsoft's quantity of money and lawyers, most companies have just ended up settling. Think Tom Tom, and lots of other people who have been threatened by MS.
Well, actually that's an interesting question. I really wonder how much Apple and company were willing to go up to. It seems to me that Google and Intel together would have been worth their while pushing their bid a fair bit more; the Microsoft/Apple cartel was clearly pretty desperate and I think they might well have bid above Tau.
To absolutely guarantee a win, I think Google would have been safe with going for their namesake a Googol. I doubt even Microsoft would be willing to outbid that, even if it was in Somali Cents. I have no idea why they didn't just go for it.
Slashdot Mirror
What Bruce said; but with a comment. The Free Software Foundation will accept contributions to many projects. You can write your code and agree to assign it to them. There may not be much benefit to you, but for others it may help with understanding the status of the code. There may also be some legal benefit for you in that you in that you will have less responsibility for the code. As ever, ask an expert lawyer to find out :-)
Bruce is 100% right here. There are two kinds of contribution agreement; those which promise to continue distributing the software on the same terms as you distributed it to them and those that cheat you. Canonical's agreements are the type which cheat you, whilst the agreements of the Fedora project, the FSF and most other FOSS projects are not. Groklaw has already done some serious investigation of Canonical and project harmony and that's probably the place to start.
What you want to watch out for is groups which take your code and establish a special advantage for themselves. Apart from the article above you might find the article "How to Tell When an Open Source Foundation Isn't About You" very useful. There are many examples of this danger, Oracle's recent mess being the latest. If a project won't accept your contribution then import it into Gitorious and fork it. Provide your changes as a patch and look for others doing the same. Eventually, when the project closes up you will have the basis of a free fork. Contributing to Canonical really looks like a thing to avoid unless it's really clear it's going to save you lots of effort and it's clear that someone else is maintaining a separate archive of the software ready to fork.
When you create a profile, the default privacy setting allows profiles to be found in search results (Google, Bing, etc). If you don’t unclick this setting, it will obviously make your profile public for anyone to find.
Safe defaults is the most important part of computer security and is exactly the bit Microsoft took years to learn (and still hasn't got completely). FitBits should default this to off and then turn it on gradually as they are convinced the user has understood the implications. They (along with FaceBook etc.) are 100% to blame.
100% right. The only possible thing which would even get noticed is if a third party candidates started winning ballots. Now if that happened, then the politicians that be would make sure the ballot committees ended up in real trouble. As long as that doesn't happen, the candidates are just happy that their own people are in charge of the vote counting.
sorry my sentence got chopped off; CVS introduced multi file commits and tracking entire directories on top of RCS. RCS was based on the idea of SCCS but moved to delta storage.
Is lack of copying also "relatively cheaply and efficiently proven"?
When sued by a corporation in the USA your only hope is a SLAPP lawsuit. Otherwise I guess it's going to cost.
Say I've written a song. How do I know whether I am the legitimate author or whether it's an unauthorized derivative work of something I had heard in grade school?
You know that because you know you didn't copy. This may or, more likely, may not help in court.
Theres five and one for free. I'm sure you will be able to point out some systems which had part of the functionality of these, however that is the nature of innovation and why patents are wrong. Everybody's innovation builds on someone else's work to some extent.
Innovations and inventions of FOSS?
The majority of recent innovations in software have originated in FOSS and then been copied into commercial software. For example, Microsoft's . Even re-implementations can be innovative in the way that they do those re-implementations and Linux certainly shows that.
Perhaps when FOSS moves beyond reimplementing proprietary operating systems, applications and tools this will become a more important issue.
There are 14 thousand packages available for my current system and although a large proportion of that are libraries, it compares with a few hundred in a plain system. I think we are beyond just implementing the base operating system.
Going a bit further, lets just look at a few random packages that happene to come to mind
Overall, the problem may be the opposite. Too much of FOSS is someone's research project with a bunch of random innovations thrown in there; it's lucky we can choose the best of many packages.
I use FOSS every day and support various project monetarily but lets be honest. Innovative applies to FOSS about as well as it applies to MicroSoft user interface development. Clippy being a notable exception and definite MS "innovation".
It's so sad that this just sounds like the standard line from a Microsoft troll. More likely, however you've been taken in by these people. Anyway, good for you in putting your money into FOSS; if you have done that then you really have funded lots of innovation.
That said, I'm really unhappy about the U.S. seriously considering moving away from the "first to invent" system. Yes, our system is more litigious, and therefore one can argue it's more costly, but also seems less fair if someone legitimately did invent something first but couldn't afford to beat the other guy to the patent office.
If he can't afford to file first, then he certainly can't afford to defend his patent. He should have published the idea. If he was planning to keep the idea secret instead, then I'm afraid to say that this is an example of the patent system actually working and achieving it's main aim; to encourage inventions to be published.
First not only am I not your lawyer, I'm not a lawyer at all, so this isn't legal advice; if you have questions like the above you probably want to go talk to the FSF or SFLC who are quite likely to be willing to arrange cheap legal advice.
What sakdoctor said is probably true that we need people in the free software community who actively patent. Having patented it however, the licensing not be like the GPL. You also don't want to get involved in people like the Open Patent Alliance. They seem to be a standard industry "patent pool" and as such their members will be looking for money from WIMAX producers, which of course basically rules out FOSS where it is impossible to control the number of copies out there. The most important thing to understand is that where in copyrights, copying is relatively cheaply and efficiently proven and so people respect them by default, the standard approach to patents is to ignore them.
In licensing, basically a level of aggression is needed otherwise your patent won't achieve anything and won't be worth the money. Basically, you have to be willing to sue companies that are willing to get involved in suing open source companies. That includes any company which has ever owned a patent involved in suing open source companies. If you don't do this then people like Microsoft will just sell their patents on to patent trolls whilst keeping a license for themselves and making sure the trolls know which targets to prioritize in order to get their next fix of patents. Probably the best way to do that is to transfer the patents to a well funded and very aggressive non practicing entity together with an agreement that a) they can't sell the patents on except with a similar agreement and b) they will not sue companies which agree never to sue FOSS software companies or to sell on patents except with a similar agreement.
The one organisation that I know of which comes even close is the Open Invention Network but they have completely failed to sue Microsoft during their recent patent attacks and as such I would say they seem to be pretty ineffective.
Finally, there's a moral question here. Some people believe that if you don't believe in a law you shouldn't benefit from it and so you shouldn't sue over patents. I wouldn't want to get money from patent lawsuit, but I strongly have the opposite belief. As long as patents only cause pain for FOSS people, the corporates and the politicians they buy will continue to support them. The correct way to get rid of the patent system is to maximise the pain for companies like Microsoft who are abusing the system themselves.
That's a cluster bomb. A cluster headache comes from inside your head.
The Google Nexus S; the Nokia N900 is another, more flexible but less slick example. You have to buy them via internet retailers like Amazon in most places however. Lots of phones from Samsung and HTC are reportedly beginning to come without any need to root them.
I'm not sure you understand doing business in China. The profits from the organ donations go to the party member (or occasionally directly to the branch). So do the contract payments. You just get the peace and security of knowing that the local Linux users won't want to start reverse engineering your protocols.
But what's a few dead, organ-harvested people under the bridge who voiced their opposition to the company town?
A business expense.
I'll take one part of your comment out of order, because I think it shows a misunderstanding. n
Two snipers could snipe over and over again, and eventually they'd reach their own limits--equivalent to placing their maximum bid as their first bid.
The entire point of a sniper is that they place their maximum bid as their first bid. A sniper will never bid again. Theoretically, if everybody had bid logically then there is no difference whatsoever between the two systems. If the sniper wins, all the people who have bid so far will look at the bid and decide that it is higher than their maximum and so skip the auction. If the sniper doesn't bid high enough, then the person who was going to win would win anyway.
Sniping is defined as, placing your maximum bid as your first bid as late as possible.
That's illogical. If that were true, the practice of sniping would gradually decline as people learned--but that's not the case.
The opposite. As people learn, they come to realise that sniping is the way to win auctions without needlessly pushing up the price. Eventually everybody becomes a sniper. When that happens the auction system begins to work as it was originally designed.
Sniping works because the system rewards it. Until that changes, sniping won't go away.
Agreed 100%. However viewed overall, sniping is probably a desirable thing for sellers. Sniping increases prices on an auction site by increasing pressure on other bidders to bid higher earlier.
What is needed is an option for sellers to use that would keep an auction going for a certain time after the last bid has been placed, even if the original auction period has expired--as mentioned in another comment. This way, sniping wouldn't work, because every time a sniper placed a bid, he'd extend the auction period.
This is an arguable situation. This would definitely stop sniping working. However, it will mean that those that snipe will be less likely to bid and so will probably reduce sale prices on that auction site. One of the main attractions of an auction site is the chance to get a bargain. Without sniping, intelligent long term repeat customers lose that hope since there are lots of people who bid based on the bids of others instead of making their own valuation. This means that those valuable customers do the work (valuing the item) but don't get the reward (buying the item).
Quite a few auction sites have tried your system. I don't think it's an accident that the successful one is the one which did not.
That seems to be 100% right. Samsung is still asserting the same claims, but now in the lawsuit Apple originally launched against them. They've also raised Apple another two patents.
Everyone everywhere has "negligent" system adminstration by that definition. The question is, does the senior management run audits which check for it and then, once it's identified make sure it gets corrected or do they simply leave the system adminstrators with the responsibility for thing which they don't have enough power and resources to protect?
Thanks, I think that was a much clearer explanation. I do think that if the people understood E-bay, they would understand that their original bid should be their entire valuation and then they would not make the second bid.
I'm sorry, but there's simply no such article. There is also no such information in the Groklaw lawsuit records. It's almost impossible for me to prove a negative, but I am guessing that you misremembered. TomTom sent a cease and desist for their own countersuit, but that was after Microsoft had already sued them. If you know different then could you please provide a direct link to the article on which you are basing your knowledge.
The thing is that what you say would be correct in the ideal world where everybody understood E-bay. In real life, the other people do bid twice; they don't undersand how E-bay works and it is worth your while to do things a bit differently. If they see that you outbid them, the rethink and often bid higher. This pushes up the price you have to pay. These people have bid incorrectly; it's true; maybe if they understood ebay they would have bid higher, but it's not in your interest to let them have the chance to do that. If you bid at the very end, they don't realise they have been outbid until too late and so the overall auction price stays lower. For this reason sniping is a good strategy.
Even more interesting is that the existence of snipers is probably good because it means that early bidders come to understand quicker the way e-bay auction system and the need to bid their maximum bid on their first bid.
How about the opposite? It's a way to bid strange numbers without the possibility of being accused of collusive bidding. It's a standard strategy on auction sites to bid a strange ending. Newbies bid round numbers. People who want to win against newbies bid a bit more than a round number. People who want to win against people who want to win against Newbies bid a strange number.
If Google had bid more or less random strange numbers, then they could be accused of signalling. Since they bid obvious well known numbers, there's no real extra information in there so they are safe from accusations of cheating. The same thing is done by cryptographers who
To compare LulzSec with rapists or thugs is rediculous; comparing the CEOs to victims is so outrageous it's almost funny. There are plenty of serious "cyber" criminals who are hacking into people's systems for real money and causing real damage to people like you and me; the consumers who have their data being stored by these corporates. What makes LulzSec different is that, instead of just putting some charges on your credit card and never telling anyone where they got the data they published what they did. That's just bringing to the surface an issue which was already happening before LulzSec got involved.
LulzSec caused public nuisiance and annoyance but that makes them more stupid teenage vandals than thugs. The main bad thing they have done is embarassing the powerful and pointing out publicly what data was already available to the real black hats. It's not just that the corporates should have had better security, it's that:
For now I think there's quite a bit more value in pursuing the CEOs than the
Tom Tom shot first - they sent Microsoft a cease and desist letter for their patents and Microsoft retaliated.
Citation needed on that. "That suit, filed earlier this month, was a reaction to Microsoft's".
They've indulged in a lot of patent-related FUD, but very few lawsuits.
Isn't that just because, when faced with Microsoft's quantity of money and lawyers, most companies have just ended up settling. Think Tom Tom, and lots of other people who have been threatened by MS.
Well, actually that's an interesting question. I really wonder how much Apple and company were willing to go up to. It seems to me that Google and Intel together would have been worth their while pushing their bid a fair bit more; the Microsoft/Apple cartel was clearly pretty desperate and I think they might well have bid above Tau.
To absolutely guarantee a win, I think Google would have been safe with going for their namesake a Googol. I doubt even Microsoft would be willing to outbid that, even if it was in Somali Cents. I have no idea why they didn't just go for it.