Let me tell you that the editorial's title ("France Hostile To Open Source Software?") is very misleading for a very simple reason: the anti Free Software statements have been made by the SNEP and SCPP, which are --guest what-- 2 lobbying groups created by various music companies.
But the French government is going along with making the bill "urgent" which means that the french DMCA -- with this crazy rider making it impossible to have open source P2P apps -- is going to be voted on before christmas.
There's no rush, so why is the French govt rushing it?
It makes DRM mandatory in all software that enables P2P file transmission (that includes IM), and multimedia streaming. Open Source software is out of the game de facto
That's exactly what it does, although it takes a bit of reading to figure it out...
Also, that the french MPAA basically told the OSS people to fuck off at the recent meeting. They said that open source programmers must relicense their software unless they want to be criminals.
You wrote: "L'amendement "VU / SACEM / BSA / FT Division Contenus" au projet de loi DADVSI cherche à assimiler à un délit de contrefaçon l'édition, la diffusion et la promotion de tout logiciel susceptible d'être utilisé pour mettre à disposition des informations protégées par le droit d'auteur et n'intégrant pas un dispositif de contrôle et de traçage de l'usage privé." (source)
my translation:
The amendment "VU/SACEM/BSA/FT Division Contenus" for the DADVSI bill seeks to include into copyright infrigement the creation, dissemination, and promotion of all software that can be used to read IP-protected media and that does not integrate a method to control and trace this use by private individuals.
The law covers "the act of circumventing technical measures (of protection) or making available methods permitting such circumvention, understood that these methods have a limited commercial purpose or a limited use for purposes other than circumvention."
So, the law, if passed, will make it illegal to circumvent these protections, to make software that is capable of circumventing or that makes it easier to circumvent, its possession, promotion of such a system, communication for the same purpose, all with a penalty of 300 000 euros and 3 years in prison.
"You will stop the publication of software [...] [We are ready to] pursue the authors of Free software who continue to divulge their source code [...]". On 18 nov 2005, at the Culture ministry, the SACEM took the world to court.
SACEM is attacking Free software? This is not a fantasy, it's a reality supported by SNEP and SCPP, two other powerful defenders of music and the rights of authors in France. But where is the connection between these different guardians of culture and software? The answer is simply the vote on the amendment "VU/SACEM/BSA/FT Division Contenus" of the DADVSI law that we've talked so much about these last few weeks.
[...]
Pressure on the government:
The last meeting of the Commission Sirinelli of the CSPLA (superior advisors on intellectual property) finally ended in an agitated debate with three powerful organizations opposed against the advocates for Free software.
For Christophe Espern, the representative of Creative Commons France and co-founder of EUCD.INFO, the debate was nonsensical. "How can people pretend to defend culture and at the same time seek to stop the only software that allows everyone to access it? In my opinion, the contradiction is obvious: their intention is to control the public; culture is just a pretext."
But for SNEP and SCPP the objective is simple and clear: "You will change your licenses".
For whatever reason, the government is maintaining that the adoption of this bill is "urgent", which brings it to the forefront of debate and gives it priority treatment. As far as why it's so urgent - some people are asking why it's so urgent to pass a plan on intellectual property when the social issues related to the riots requires a national debate - nothing seems to justify this sudden interest in a subject unless it's the economic pressure of these powerful groups.
The amendment didn't have to be proposed immediately, but a special meeting was held on Nov 25, and the decision now rests in the hands of the Parliament.
*** This post is under CC-BY. Please feel free to edit/improve it***
This is weird because I heard the exact same thing about Waterloo (home of Research in Motion...). Some people were saying that no one can start up a company there any more because RIM sucks up all the good engineers.
Is this true or crap?
PS I'm hoping to open an office soon in waterloo for my startup...
A few years ago I had a Powerbook G3 and I was working at a company that made laptops so a few of us (interns) had a habit of taking our laptops apart just for the heck of it. Taking apart the screen was lots of fun, there were like five different layers on the thing and I had it spread all over the table. Then I decided to take apart the main part of the case.
Unfortunately I was in someone else's cube, a hardware hacker (I'm a software hacker) and he hada all the tools there. But his cube was a total mess. So basically I had to do the whole thing in my lap. Which was a bad idea, because usually I spread everything out and put all the little screws in nice rows that corresponded with how everything came out, so that when I put it back together I would know if I missed anything.
This time at the end I was missing one screw. Not good, but it was gone, everything was back together, and I didn't want to do it again because it takes like an hour and there's about a thousand bits in there.
So later on, (like maybe a month later) I noticed my computer had a rattle sometimes. I don't know if I really remembered about the screw or not. I didn't really worry about it. After all I had AppleCare protection, right?
So then, months and months later, I'm in a different country in a friend's office and I pick up my computer and turn it sideways. Suddenly everything goes out like a light. I thought it was static electricity or a bad battery or something but after a few days of trying to turn the damned thing on, no luck.
I used to try to fix everything myself in those days so I wound up swapping out the power board for a new one but no luck. Eventually I just gave it to AppleCare and said "you fix it"
Needless to say, when I got it back, they also had in a little bag a screw they found in it (and they had to replace the motherboard, daughterboard AND power card, worth about $1000). I guess the screw fell into just the wrong place and shorted something else.
My hardware hacking days are pretty much over now;-)
/.ers might be interested to know that I did all the building and compiling on Linux. Normally, you can't do that, but there's a free tool by Rudolf Koenig called sdk2unix that converts the windows sdk to a really cool makefile based system on linux.
and that's what I took away from the insightful Scoop piece. I never knew that Liebold's systems actually caused a serious amount of the screwups on election night 2000. CBS news says conclusively that if it weren't for the liebold machine's errors, they would never have called for Bush in the first place!
'The dispute, which was leaked to an Internet message board, offers a rare peek into the dark side of the free software movement--a view that contrasts with the movement's usual public image of happy software proles linking arms and singing the "Internationale" while freely sharing the fruits of their code-writing labor. '
Contract law is a basic part of capitalism. If a company does not read and understand a contract, they are still liable for breaking that contract. Enforcing contract right in a court of law, last time I checked, is an All-American activity.
And the GNU General Public License (GPL), is... a contract.
Forbes magazine might want to re-consider their editorial standards. If it looks like a contract and quacks like a contract, then it's a contract, not communism.
Since the freakin' Windows Media files won't play on OS X. Why not?
Because the most popular audio codecs used for Windows Media files are not supported in the OS X Windows Media client. Nor are they supported by MPlayer, or VideoLan Client (VLC) for that matter.
Perhaps when Windows Media Player 9 comes out for OS X (supposed to be "soon") this will be fixed.
The Canadians on-upped us by including copying rights into their legislation though. We just pay "compensation" taxes for the possibility of infringement by others. Damn clever Canadians...
more generally... Canadians try to think things through before they take action, whereas Americans tend to put the emphasis on RE-action.
So, go ahead and have your American reaction. Your judicial system is set up for it.
I have a completely different explanation for the NYT phenomenom. (read the article). It's the group mind, The speed of sharing ideas is accellerating rapdidly and it 's so much easier today than it was yesterday to absorb and reprocess information from so many sources. you can pick and choose your sources so much more carefully. This copying is actually the creative process of interpretation happening at a much higher speed and much greater scale.
I think you hit it exactly. The "future" has become mundane. People in the 50s dreamed of robots in our everyday lives. And now we have them, just not *exactly* how they envisioned them. Same with space travel and exploration.
Maybe the problem is that so many of the predictions of 50 years ago were supposed to happen in 2001 and never did. We DON'T have robots in our everyday lives, not like they envisioned them. We don't have space tourism, we don't have terraformed planets, we don't have ray guns, personal rocket packs, flying cars...
I think the problem is that we feel today, like we are living in the future already. There are so many amazing things happening in science that it's impossible to keep up, to make predictions about what's going to happen NEXT YEAR let alone 50, 100, 1000 years from now. I feel like there are so many variables that could completely change the way we live already moving today that science fiction is almost pointless.
I see two problems with this: 1. p2p networks are being actively promoted in middle east, china, etc. by the U.S. government (or so I hear) to undermine the censorship controls of foreign governments. Everyone agrees that p2p networks are on the road towards substantially greater freedom of communication than exists now
2. The idea that p2p networks do more to spread porno than email, website popup banners, email, etc is ridiculous. If anything p2p systems are getting better at ensuring that you get the real goods when you download music or videos, using file sizes, bitzi, etc.
who finds this a little disturbing? I mean, I don't smoke, so I don't walk around with flammables in my pockets all day. Are these things going to leak? Blow up occasionally? Or what? I don't like messing around with my car engine, and fuel cells sound kind of... car-engine-ish.
Slashdot Mirror
We won't let you play until you spell it properly
TUQUE.
And I'm afraid you'll have to completely give up on this "beanie" nonsense.
--simon
it says that it plans to put on the same level as counterfaiting
It's about copyright infringement, which is in french, the same word as counterfeiting.
--simon
Let me tell you that the editorial's title ("France Hostile To Open Source Software?") is very misleading for a very simple reason: the anti Free Software statements have been made by the SNEP and SCPP, which are --guest what-- 2 lobbying groups created by various music companies.
But the French government is going along with making the bill "urgent" which means that the french DMCA -- with this crazy rider making it impossible to have open source P2P apps -- is going to be voted on before christmas.
There's no rush, so why is the French govt rushing it?
--simon
It makes DRM mandatory in all software that enables P2P file transmission (that includes IM), and multimedia streaming.
Open Source software is out of the game de facto
That's exactly what it does, although it takes a bit of reading to figure it out...
Also, that the french MPAA basically told the OSS people to fuck off at the recent meeting. They said that open source programmers must relicense their software unless they want to be criminals.
--simon
You wrote: "L'amendement "VU / SACEM / BSA / FT Division Contenus" au projet de loi DADVSI cherche à assimiler à un délit de contrefaçon l'édition, la diffusion et la promotion de tout logiciel susceptible d'être utilisé pour mettre à disposition des informations protégées par le droit d'auteur et n'intégrant pas un dispositif de contrôle et de traçage de l'usage privé." (source)
my translation:
The amendment "VU/SACEM/BSA/FT Division Contenus" for the DADVSI bill seeks to include into copyright infrigement the creation, dissemination, and promotion of all software that can be used to read IP-protected media and that does not integrate a method to control and trace this use by private individuals.
***This post licensed under CC-BY***
My own translations.
D VSI.html :
e ls-libres.html :
from http://www.infos-du-net.com/actualite/5760-loi-DA
The law covers "the act of circumventing technical measures (of protection) or making available methods permitting such circumvention, understood that these methods have a limited commercial purpose or a limited use for purposes other than circumvention."
So, the law, if passed, will make it illegal to circumvent these protections, to make software that is capable of circumventing or that makes it easier to circumvent, its possession, promotion of such a system, communication for the same purpose, all with a penalty of 300 000 euros and 3 years in prison.
from http://www.infos-du-net.com/actualite/5837-logici
"You will stop the publication of software [...] [We are ready to] pursue the authors of Free software who continue to divulge their source code [...]". On 18 nov 2005, at the Culture ministry, the SACEM took the world to court.
SACEM is attacking Free software? This is not a fantasy, it's a reality supported by SNEP and SCPP, two other powerful defenders of music and the rights of authors in France. But where is the connection between these different guardians of culture and software? The answer is simply the vote on the amendment "VU/SACEM/BSA/FT Division Contenus" of the DADVSI law that we've talked so much about these last few weeks.
[...]
Pressure on the government:
The last meeting of the Commission Sirinelli of the CSPLA (superior advisors on intellectual property) finally ended in an agitated debate with three powerful organizations opposed against the advocates for Free software.
For Christophe Espern, the representative of Creative Commons France and co-founder of EUCD.INFO, the debate was nonsensical. "How can people pretend to defend culture and at the same time seek to stop the only software that allows everyone to access it? In my opinion, the contradiction is obvious: their intention is to control the public; culture is just a pretext."
But for SNEP and SCPP the objective is simple and clear: "You will change your licenses".
For whatever reason, the government is maintaining that the adoption of this bill is "urgent", which brings it to the forefront of debate and gives it priority treatment. As far as why it's so urgent - some people are asking why it's so urgent to pass a plan on intellectual property when the social issues related to the riots requires a national debate - nothing seems to justify this sudden interest in a subject unless it's the economic pressure of these powerful groups.
The amendment didn't have to be proposed immediately, but a special meeting was held on Nov 25, and the decision now rests in the hands of the Parliament.
*** This post is under CC-BY. Please feel free to edit/improve it***
I was also astonished that they would use SuSE. Who uses SuSE? This is a server ... you use either Debian or Fedora core.
--simon
I'm an extremely high value cellular customer (with Rogers, not Telus) and I always punch 0. I can't stand the IVR.
So I don't think the queue 0-punchers last strategy would be a good idea.
--simon
This is weird because I heard the exact same thing about Waterloo (home of Research in Motion...). Some people were saying that no one can start up a company there any more because RIM sucks up all the good engineers.
Is this true or crap?
PS I'm hoping to open an office soon in waterloo for my startup...
I've got a good one for this.
;-)
A few years ago I had a Powerbook G3 and I was working at a company that made laptops so a few of us (interns) had a habit of taking our laptops apart just for the heck of it. Taking apart the screen was lots of fun, there were like five different layers on the thing and I had it spread all over the table. Then I decided to take apart the main part of the case.
Unfortunately I was in someone else's cube, a hardware hacker (I'm a software hacker) and he hada all the tools there. But his cube was a total mess. So basically I had to do the whole thing in my lap. Which was a bad idea, because usually I spread everything out and put all the little screws in nice rows that corresponded with how everything came out, so that when I put it back together I would know if I missed anything.
This time at the end I was missing one screw. Not good, but it was gone, everything was back together, and I didn't want to do it again because it takes like an hour and there's about a thousand bits in there.
So later on, (like maybe a month later) I noticed my computer had a rattle sometimes. I don't know if I really remembered about the screw or not. I didn't really worry about it. After all I had AppleCare protection, right?
So then, months and months later, I'm in a different country in a friend's office and I pick up my computer and turn it sideways. Suddenly everything goes out like a light. I thought it was static electricity or a bad battery or something but after a few days of trying to turn the damned thing on, no luck.
I used to try to fix everything myself in those days so I wound up swapping out the power board for a new one but no luck. Eventually I just gave it to AppleCare and said "you fix it"
Needless to say, when I got it back, they also had in a little bag a screw they found in it (and they had to replace the motherboard, daughterboard AND power card, worth about $1000). I guess the screw fell into just the wrong place and shorted something else.
My hardware hacking days are pretty much over now
simon
The software shows you the URL before it loads it into the browser...
simon
/.ers might be interested to know that I did all the building and compiling on Linux. Normally, you can't do that, but there's a free tool by Rudolf Koenig called sdk2unix that converts the windows sdk to a really cool makefile based system on linux.
.
I wrote up my experiences here in this HOWTO,
HOWTO develop Symbian apps using Linux and OS X
Simon Woodside (semacode developer)
and that's what I took away from the insightful Scoop piece. I never knew that Liebold's systems actually caused a serious amount of the screwups on election night 2000. CBS news says conclusively that if it weren't for the liebold machine's errors, they would never have called for Bush in the first place!
simon
the conference is wholly without MERIT
(ducks/)
http://www.forbes.com/2003/10/14/cz_dl_1014linksys .html
... a contract.
'The dispute, which was leaked to an Internet message board, offers a rare peek into the dark side of the free software movement--a view that contrasts with the movement's usual public image of happy software proles linking arms and singing the "Internationale" while freely sharing the fruits of their code-writing labor. '
Contract law is a basic part of capitalism. If a company does not read and understand a contract, they are still liable for breaking that contract. Enforcing contract right in a court of law, last time I checked, is an All-American activity.
And the GNU General Public License (GPL), is
Forbes magazine might want to re-consider their editorial standards. If it looks like a contract and quacks like a contract, then it's a contract, not communism.
simon
Because the most popular audio codecs used for Windows Media files are not supported in the OS X Windows Media client. Nor are they supported by MPlayer, or VideoLan Client (VLC) for that matter.
Perhaps when Windows Media Player 9 comes out for OS X (supposed to be "soon") this will be fixed.
simon
http://www.bbcworld.com/content/template_clickonli ne.asp?pageid=666&co_pageid=20
Skip ahead to 13:00
Since the freakin' Windows Media files won't play on OS X.
simon
Of course humans will eventually be beat by computers. They have Moore's Law and we don't. End of story.
simon
more generally
So, go ahead and have your American reaction. Your judicial system is set up for it.
simon
I have a completely different explanation for the NYT phenomenom. (read the article). It's the group mind, The speed of sharing ideas is accellerating rapdidly and it 's so much easier today than it was yesterday to absorb and reprocess information from so many sources. you can pick and choose your sources so much more carefully. This copying is actually the creative process of interpretation happening at a much higher speed and much greater scale.
simon
Maybe the problem is that so many of the predictions of 50 years ago were supposed to happen in 2001 and never did. We DON'T have robots in our everyday lives, not like they envisioned them. We don't have space tourism, we don't have terraformed planets, we don't have ray guns, personal rocket packs, flying cars
Instead we have cell phones, lots of cell phones.
simon
I think the problem is that we feel today, like we are living in the future already. There are so many amazing things happening in science that it's impossible to keep up, to make predictions about what's going to happen NEXT YEAR let alone 50, 100, 1000 years from now. I feel like there are so many variables that could completely change the way we live already moving today that science fiction is almost pointless.
simon
I see two problems with this:
1. p2p networks are being actively promoted in middle east, china, etc. by the U.S. government (or so I hear) to undermine the censorship controls of foreign governments. Everyone agrees that p2p networks are on the road towards substantially greater freedom of communication than exists now
2. The idea that p2p networks do more to spread porno than email, website popup banners, email, etc is ridiculous. If anything p2p systems are getting better at ensuring that you get the real goods when you download music or videos, using file sizes, bitzi, etc.
simon
how the * did I get moderated "troll" for that one ?
who finds this a little disturbing? I mean, I don't smoke, so I don't walk around with flammables in my pockets all day. Are these things going to leak? Blow up occasionally? Or what? I don't like messing around with my car engine, and fuel cells sound kind of ... car-engine-ish.
simon