Folks, a reminder -- arguing about this here isn't going to accomplish much. The people making the decisions aren't reading Slashdot.
If you have an opinion, then now is the time to express it where it matters. Send a calm, reasoned note off to your Congressperson, expressing your concerns. Postal mail generally gets more attention than email, but the sheer bulk of email can matter as well. As a reminder, you can find (and write to) your Representative via this page:
Personally, I recommend urging calm and balance at this point. If you come off as an extremist, odds are you won't be listened to. Most Congresspeople right now are feeling an enormous pressure to Do Something Now. Make clear to them that, while the people may well want action taken against the terrorist threat, we're also paying attention to what those actions are. The appropriate steps need to be carefully designed to have the maximum effect upon actual threats, while minimizing the effect on civil liberties. Legislators are used to compromise; if you make it clear that their constituency cares about both sides of the issue, it may get through to them that extremism here is a bad idea.
(I'm quite certain that at least one or two truly stupid laws are going to come out of this mess. But injecting a note of calm may help to keep the number and severity down...)
Stupid thing also dumps files all over the network. It got into our net about two hours ago, and began to spew ".eml" files all over the place, on every machine on the subnet, one in every subdirectory it could find. (Where is the name of some real file on the system.) The contents are a readme.exe file, which is MIME-encoded to say that it's a WAV file. My guess is that, if you click on the.eml file, it launches things anew...
Why is Jorrit Tyberghein even bothering RMS about open-source, free software, or anything, when he's got a Non-disclosure agreement on his project?
This is a misreading of the situation. CrystalSpace (Jorrit's project) is entirely open source and unencumbered, and currently using the LGPL as its license. The problem is that folks would like to use it for the PS2 platform, which requires an NDA to develop upon. The question is, can the LGPL and the NDA be reconciled?
(I believe the answer is yes if you do some careful legal firewalling, mainly because CS is a highly modular engine. But it isn't strictly clear, so Jorrit felt it appropriate to ask RMS his opinion...)
Given that the Open Source movement != Free software Movement, it's a shame the OSM has chosen to nail its testicles to the GPL (or LGPL, which is an improvement but not a perfect one) rather than create a licence that acknowledges that programmers are not working in a free software isolation...
Actually, it's worth noting that the Mozilla license accomplishes much of what the LGPL set out to do, and is much more clearly written. It may well not be stringent enough for RMS' standards, but it manages to strike a very nice balance, keeping the open-source software's sources available while making the relationship with the closed-source software clearer...
Justin
Who has spent way too much time reading licenses lately...
I worry about whether they have managed to miss the whole point of why DIVX failed. It was never that there were technological problems; it was that most consumers found the idea idiotic. Lots of reasons were advanced why consumers ought to want DIVX, but they never managed to overcome the inherent goofiness of the idea in most peoples' minds.
On the other hand, the new tech does sound like it has one advantage over DIVX: it doesn't require consumers buying new equipment. If this actually works in conventional DVD players, then it shouldn't meet the deep consumer resistance that DIVX hit; they may only have to convince Blockbuster to support the idea. Still, I doubt many people will pay a premium to "buy" a self-destructive DVD instead of renting and returning a conventional one, so this process had better be cheap if it's to succeed...
Slashdot Mirror
Folks, a reminder -- arguing about this here isn't going to accomplish much. The people making the decisions aren't reading Slashdot.
f m
If you have an opinion, then now is the time to express it where it matters. Send a calm, reasoned note off to your Congressperson, expressing your concerns. Postal mail generally gets more attention than email, but the sheer bulk of email can matter as well. As a reminder, you can find (and write to) your Representative via this page:
http://www.house.gov/writerep/
and find your Senators' email addresses from this one:
http://www.senate.gov/contacting/index_by_state.c
Personally, I recommend urging calm and balance at this point. If you come off as an extremist, odds are you won't be listened to. Most Congresspeople right now are feeling an enormous pressure to Do Something Now. Make clear to them that, while the people may well want action taken against the terrorist threat, we're also paying attention to what those actions are. The appropriate steps need to be carefully designed to have the maximum effect upon actual threats, while minimizing the effect on civil liberties. Legislators are used to compromise; if you make it clear that their constituency cares about both sides of the issue, it may get through to them that extremism here is a bad idea.
(I'm quite certain that at least one or two truly stupid laws are going to come out of this mess. But injecting a note of calm may help to keep the number and severity down...)
Stupid thing also dumps files all over the network. It got into our net about two hours ago, and began to spew ".eml" files all over the place, on every machine on the subnet, one in every subdirectory it could find. (Where is the name of some real file on the system.) The contents are a readme.exe file, which is MIME-encoded to say that it's a WAV file. My guess is that, if you click on the .eml file, it launches things anew...
Why is Jorrit Tyberghein even bothering RMS about open-source, free software, or anything, when he's got a Non-disclosure agreement on his project?
This is a misreading of the situation. CrystalSpace (Jorrit's project) is entirely open source and unencumbered, and currently using the LGPL as its license. The problem is that folks would like to use it for the PS2 platform, which requires an NDA to develop upon. The question is, can the LGPL and the NDA be reconciled?
(I believe the answer is yes if you do some careful legal firewalling, mainly because CS is a highly modular engine. But it isn't strictly clear, so Jorrit felt it appropriate to ask RMS his opinion...)
Given that the Open Source movement != Free software Movement, it's a shame the OSM has chosen to nail its testicles to the GPL (or LGPL, which is an improvement but not a perfect one) rather than create a licence that acknowledges that programmers are not working in a free software isolation...
Actually, it's worth noting that the Mozilla license accomplishes much of what the LGPL set out to do, and is much more clearly written. It may well not be stringent enough for RMS' standards, but it manages to strike a very nice balance, keeping the open-source software's sources available while making the relationship with the closed-source software clearer...
Justin
Who has spent way too much time reading licenses lately...
I worry about whether they have managed to miss the whole point of why DIVX failed. It was never that there were technological problems; it was that most consumers found the idea idiotic. Lots of reasons were advanced why consumers ought to want DIVX, but they never managed to overcome the inherent goofiness of the idea in most peoples' minds.
On the other hand, the new tech does sound like it has one advantage over DIVX: it doesn't require consumers buying new equipment. If this actually works in conventional DVD players, then it shouldn't meet the deep consumer resistance that DIVX hit; they may only have to convince Blockbuster to support the idea. Still, I doubt many people will pay a premium to "buy" a self-destructive DVD instead of renting and returning a conventional one, so this process had better be cheap if it's to succeed...