You're obviously right, because noone ever got sued because of file sharing in Germany before the implementation of this EU directive, as there was no basis to give out the data.
If they got a court order, they probably could get the data regardless of what the investigation was about. And even that practice has now been limited by the German Constitutional Court in a preliminary ruling.
If you cannot see the difference between that and "preventive" dragnet investigations (enabled by providing carte-blanche access to such data, mandatorily retained over very long periods of time), so be it.
When the EU directive was implemented in Germany, guess what changed for my ISP? Absolutely nothing, because they recorded everything the law requested already.
Previously such data all was protected by the privacy directive and its implementations, which meant that it had to be destroyed as soon as it was no longer necessary (e.g., to deal with spamming complaints or for billing purposes), and could not be made available to anyone except under very strict conditions (like having a court order or so).
With the directive/laws coming into effect, law enforcement agencies (and others) are pushing to turn all of this data into massive pools in which they can go on fishing expeditions, or at the very least they want to be able to trawl through it in the context of any "investigation" (no matter what about -- nevermind that the directive was of course pushed through with sob stories about kidnapped children and terrorists). This is no different in Germany.
Of course, subsequently that idiocy got challenged and largely curtailed by the German Constitutional Court.
People being all up in arms about it and acting all concerned, doesn't change the fact, that the EU directive doesn't actually accomplish much beyond legislating the present state into continuation.
Whatever makes you feel complacent in doing nothing and in anonymously wining about those who do (and who try to make sure that you can continue doing so)...
No, it's required in the entire EU by the directive. However, the directive does not lay down many limits, but mainly imposes some minima.
As a result, law enforcement agencies in many countries have been having constant wet dreams ever since and are pushing with all their might to extend the national implementations (massively) beyond those minima. While even those minima would already have made the STASI green with envy...
While the adoption of the data retention directive was a perfect example of backdoor decision making (to the extent that its rapporteur in the European Parliament had his name removed from it, because he did not want to be associated with the outcome), it's naive to think that without the EU this would never have happened.
In fact, Ireland already had such laws before the directive was adopted, and has been fighting the directive before the European Court of Justice because they have to *weaken* their current implementation to comply with the directive (no, this does not demonstrate how great the directive is, only how repugnant the Irish data retention laws are).
Belgium was also working on such legislation, but suspended that work when the directive was introduced, and is finishing it up now. Those are the two examples I know of, but I'm certain there are/were more.
For Dutch people: look here for a short FAQ regarding what to do about these letters (summary: ignore them, they're misleading and baseless if you just play music for yourself).
People! Yes, you too! Please stop going along with the whole "if we're going to collectively act like idiots, lets at least act like a collective of efficient idiots"-bullcrap that I was trying to point out (but apparently not clearly enough).
I was simply trying to express the sentiment that once upon a time (e.g., in the distant past of about 10 years ago), the only people that got fingerprinted where subjects of active investigations (give or take a few occasional abuses by law enforcement). And that therefore it would simply have been inconceivable, even if that word meant what you thought it meant, that requiring more than 10 seconds per person to fingerprint them would warrant $400K of government money to speed up the process.
As if any western government would start fingerprinting people like cattle gets earmarked...
And yes, times have changed, but that's my point exactly.
Yes, that's what my "police state" comment was referring to. Of course, why stop there? They might catch even more terrorists if they take more fingerprints.
Fingerprinting for Freedom! Did you already give a fingerprint today? Your fingerprint too could belong to a terrorist, so get fingerprinted now! Never forget: fingerprint early, and fingerprint often!
Your theory of a "right to control" derives from an extremely common misunderstanding of the purpose and origin of copyright,
Actually, it may derive from the fact that Europe is not part of the US. In (continental) Europe, many languages and laws don't talk about copyright, but about the equivalent of "author's rights" (auteursrecht, droit d'auteur, Urheberrecht). These author's rights encompass both commercial and moral rights. And these moral rights most include the right to decide, a.o., how a work can be displayed/performed, whether and if so how it may be modified, etc.
And these moral rights, by law (at least in Belgium), cannot be transferred. So they always remain with the creator, regardless of what any contract may say.
Think, people! How does a man who does venture capital for web startups NOT wind up being strongly in favor of copyright enforcement, software patents, and all the litigation that this board has come to despise?
About the software patents: by being sane like Benchmark Capital (one of the first investors in eBay) and several other venture capital firms.
If you recycle the waste then you dont need to dig up so much more, hence less pollution all round.
Except at least all round the reprocessing plants. You do realise that reprocessing plants continuously dump radioactive waste in the air and in the water, right?
And of course, the recycling is based on a future world full of breeder reactors. Currently, most of the end products from reprocessing are just dumped in Russia.
The GP talked about "pollution caused by uranium mining for the indigenous people", the GP was never talking about the workers.
Actually, the workers are mostly indigenous people. And they do get paid reasonably well and even get free health care. Of course, as you say they're not the only people affected by the mining dust.
And of course, when the mine is no longer profitable, the mining company leaves. Then it's over with the free hospitals. And given that most of the bad effects from radiation poisoning only occur on a long time scale (over multiple generations)...
And the water sources don't suddenly decontaminate themselves either.
No shiet you don't understand my point when you don't even read the part you quote. AdaCore != NeoOffice.
You simply did not get what I was trying to say.
Summary:
dbIII: the NeoOffice guys don't understand open source. They take a huge existing source base, add some stuff onto that, and then ask money for this. They have no right to do that, because the work they did is infinitesimal compared to the work that went into the rest of the product, which is being distributed for free.
me: The NeoOffice people are not doing anything wrong, and are respecting the open source license of the original authors. There is also nothing wrong with taking an existing open source base, adding stuff to that and asking money for that. Take e.g. AdaCore, which goes a step further in your line of reasoning: they take a huge existing open source code base, add stuff to that and don't even widely distribute the sources. There are simply many different kinds of open source business models.
you (aliquis): AdaCore are basically contractors and therefore don't have to distribute their changes
me: and the NeoOffice guys do distribute OpenOffice, and hence also the source code. So they also did nothing wrong.
I.o.w.: what you wrote was obviously correct, but I fail to see how it refuted anything I said. I should maybe have added So I still don't understand why NeoOffice are "not the nice guys" or why they "don't get open source".
In the case of AdaCore it sounds like they get hired for doing the changes, do them and whatever company rolls their own private version which isn't distributed so no need to share the code.
The NeoOffice people did and do distribute the complete source. You could also always download NeoOffice for free. The only reason to pay them was either to support them, or to get access to the latest beta version. So I'm not sure what your point is.
My point was simply that there are more ways to run an open source business than the ways e.g. CodeSourcery and Red Hat do, and that these ways are no by definition evil or clueless about how open source works.
This has nothing to do with communism nor with profiteering of other people's work. I personally think that you are missing one of the points of open source, namely "take the source and build something value-added on top of it for which people are willing to pay".
And I find it extremely prejudiced of you to assume that integrating a random X11 and Win32-based app with native Mac OS X functionality via a Java bridge is "very little work". It may be little compared to the amount of work that went into building the rest of OOo, but given its size so is the work that went into 80-90% of all open source/free software probably. That does not mean that writing all those other programs was "very little work", and saying so is very disdainful for no good reason, as far as I am concerned.
Personally I think they and a few other projects have completely missed the point of open source.
Again, it is you who is missing a point about open source: the one about creating common infrastructure so other people can build useful and value-added functionality on top of that without having to reinvent the wheel all the time. You are talking about copyleft, where the goal is not just optimising the way software is created, but also about moral views about how information should be distributed (although as far as I know, the NeoOffice people could even have done what they did if OOo were licensed under the GPL).
It is the iceing of a very large cake with an enormous amount of work put in by hundreds over more than a decade.
It's also the icing that made Open Office somewhat usable on Mac OS X. X11 apps are generally fine on Mac OS X if you are used to working with X11 apps, but that they don't integrate with 80% of the services on Mac OS X, they have completely different keyboard shortcuts, they have completely differently laid out dialogue boxes (e.g., the location of "ok" and "cancel" buttons is reversed to regular Mac programs, meaning that muscle memory makes you click the wrong button half the time), etc.
They're just inconvenient to work with if you are used to working with a Mac.
Good on them for getting in early and filing a niche but there is no need to shed tears for them now that there is a better alternative.
That was not what the GP suggested. He simply pointed to them as another example of Sun being unable to work with third parties. The NeoOffice people did open source their improvements. The only thing you got for paying them was early access to newer versions (and/or you could do it if you simply wanted to thank them for their work, e.g. as my father did who was happy that he could ditch MS Office for NeoOffice).
People were simply paying them for the service of integrating OOo with Mac OS X. I really fail to see what's so morally repugnant about that.
While the act of profiting from other buggers efforts
The whole point of open source *is* to enable others to profit from your work. And depending on the license you choose, you lay down whether and if so how these others should enable you to also profit from their work.
NeoOffice is an interesting project but they really missed the entire point of open source. Going around them is not being unfriendly to open source since the whole idea of NeoOffice is two guys doing the following:
Take someone else's work.
Make a few changes.
Attempt to get money for it.
As you mentioned later, they did not just make "a few changes", they made quite a lot of changes.
The whole idea of open source is sharing stuff that other people are sharing with you.
That's the idea of free software, not necessarily of open source. Anyway, from a business perspective *one* of the main motivations (there are obviously more) to open source software is usually to avoid having multiple companies waste a lot of money on re-implementing and maintaining basically the same basic infrastructure. Nobody really gets a competitive edge out of that in the long run, it just costs a lot of money.
So instead, everyone can share the development cost/work of developing the basic infrastructure, and then privately invest in adding value-added features on top for which their target market wants to pay (until these features lose their specific attraction or become common, at which point they can be added to the open source base).
IMHO (as someone unconnected to both projects) if you want to write MS Windows style shareware on a different platform it's best to start with your own work instead of pissing off the people that are giving the stuff to you for nothing.
Tell that to AdaCore. They take the GNU Ada compiler, and then on a contract basis implement new features for companies such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Everything is under the GPL. But they ask a lot of money for doing that work, and (initially at least) the changes only go to whoever paid them. And while that company is fully entitled to redistribute those changes under the GPL, they usually don't because they consider them to be a competitive advantage. And as far as I know, the GCC community holds no grudge against them at all.
Taking an open source work as your basic infrastructure, adding value to that for a particular (niche) market and making money that way (be it on a contract basis, via shareware, or some other way) is one of the possible ways to make an open source-based business work. And there's nothing wrong with that, as far as I am concerned.
And for the record: no, I've never used the above business model myself, and yes, I do contribute to various free software projects in my spare time.
Slashdot Mirror
You're obviously right, because noone ever got sued because of file sharing in Germany before the implementation of this EU directive, as there was no basis to give out the data.
If they got a court order, they probably could get the data regardless of what the investigation was about. And even that practice has now been limited by the German Constitutional Court in a preliminary ruling.
If you cannot see the difference between that and "preventive" dragnet investigations (enabled by providing carte-blanche access to such data, mandatorily retained over very long periods of time), so be it.
When the EU directive was implemented in Germany, guess what changed for my ISP? Absolutely nothing, because they recorded everything the law requested already.
Previously such data all was protected by the privacy directive and its implementations, which meant that it had to be destroyed as soon as it was no longer necessary (e.g., to deal with spamming complaints or for billing purposes), and could not be made available to anyone except under very strict conditions (like having a court order or so).
With the directive/laws coming into effect, law enforcement agencies (and others) are pushing to turn all of this data into massive pools in which they can go on fishing expeditions, or at the very least they want to be able to trawl through it in the context of any "investigation" (no matter what about -- nevermind that the directive was of course pushed through with sob stories about kidnapped children and terrorists). This is no different in Germany.
Of course, subsequently that idiocy got challenged and largely curtailed by the German Constitutional Court.
People being all up in arms about it and acting all concerned, doesn't change the fact, that the EU directive doesn't actually accomplish much beyond legislating the present state into continuation.
Whatever makes you feel complacent in doing nothing and in anonymously wining about those who do (and who try to make sure that you can continue doing so)...
Data retention is optional in mainland Europe
No, it's required in the entire EU by the directive. However, the directive does not lay down many limits, but mainly imposes some minima.
As a result, law enforcement agencies in many countries have been having constant wet dreams ever since and are pushing with all their might to extend the national implementations (massively) beyond those minima. While even those minima would already have made the STASI green with envy...
While the adoption of the data retention directive was a perfect example of backdoor decision making (to the extent that its rapporteur in the European Parliament had his name removed from it, because he did not want to be associated with the outcome), it's naive to think that without the EU this would never have happened.
In fact, Ireland already had such laws before the directive was adopted, and has been fighting the directive before the European Court of Justice because they have to *weaken* their current implementation to comply with the directive (no, this does not demonstrate how great the directive is, only how repugnant the Irish data retention laws are).
Belgium was also working on such legislation, but suspended that work when the directive was introduced, and is finishing it up now. Those are the two examples I know of, but I'm certain there are/were more.
For Dutch people: look here for a short FAQ regarding what to do about these letters (summary: ignore them, they're misleading and baseless if you just play music for yourself).
People! Yes, you too! Please stop going along with the whole "if we're going to collectively act like idiots, lets at least act like a collective of efficient idiots"-bullcrap that I was trying to point out (but apparently not clearly enough).
I was simply trying to express the sentiment that once upon a time (e.g., in the distant past of about 10 years ago), the only people that got fingerprinted where subjects of active investigations (give or take a few occasional abuses by law enforcement). And that therefore it would simply have been inconceivable, even if that word meant what you thought it meant, that requiring more than 10 seconds per person to fingerprint them would warrant $400K of government money to speed up the process.
As if any western government would start fingerprinting people like cattle gets earmarked...
And yes, times have changed, but that's my point exactly.
Yes, that's what my "police state" comment was referring to. Of course, why stop there? They might catch even more terrorists if they take more fingerprints.
Fingerprinting for Freedom! Did you already give a fingerprint today? Your fingerprint too could belong to a terrorist, so get fingerprinted now! Never forget: fingerprint early, and fingerprint often!
We may be turning the West into a collection of police states, but at least they'll be time-efficient police states.
Who'd have though it would ever be considered a problem if it took more than 10 seconds to take 10 finger prints...
Where's Roger Wilco when you need him...
... because they didn't want to see that crap or their kids to see that crap.
Whew, I couldn't agree more! Because it's been scientifically shown that exposures to gay people is what causes one to be gay.
Of course it does, just ask Ed Heeney.
This is about a completely different iBench. If you look at the the benchmark graphs, you'll note that
Your theory of a "right to control" derives from an extremely common misunderstanding of the purpose and origin of copyright,
Actually, it may derive from the fact that Europe is not part of the US. In (continental) Europe, many languages and laws don't talk about copyright, but about the equivalent of "author's rights" (auteursrecht, droit d'auteur, Urheberrecht). These author's rights encompass both commercial and moral rights. And these moral rights most include the right to decide, a.o., how a work can be displayed/performed, whether and if so how it may be modified, etc.
And these moral rights, by law (at least in Belgium), cannot be transferred. So they always remain with the creator, regardless of what any contract may say.
http://www.google.com/search?q=ipod+touch+microphone
That wooshing sound you just heard was not a Persian bullet.
I don't know why everyone got excited when Apple went DRM-free, I've been buying DRM free MP3 singles from Amazon for over a year.
Maybe because Amazon doesn't sell you any of those DRM-free tracks if you don't have a US credit card.
Ask the person who wrote this review
Think, people! How does a man who does venture capital for web startups NOT wind up being strongly in favor of copyright enforcement, software patents, and all the litigation that this board has come to despise?
About the software patents: by being sane like Benchmark Capital (one of the first investors in eBay) and several other venture capital firms.
If you recycle the waste then you dont need to dig up so much more, hence less pollution all round.
Except at least all round the reprocessing plants. You do realise that reprocessing plants continuously dump radioactive waste in the air and in the water, right?
And of course, the recycling is based on a future world full of breeder reactors. Currently, most of the end products from reprocessing are just dumped in Russia.
The GP talked about "pollution caused by uranium mining for the indigenous people", the GP was never talking about the workers.
Actually, the workers are mostly indigenous people. And they do get paid reasonably well and even get free health care. Of course, as you say they're not the only people affected by the mining dust.
And of course, when the mine is no longer profitable, the mining company leaves. Then it's over with the free hospitals. And given that most of the bad effects from radiation poisoning only occur on a long time scale (over multiple generations)...
And the water sources don't suddenly decontaminate themselves either.
Nuclear is only 'green' when you exclude the waste issue.
And the (radioactive) pollution caused by uranium mining for the indigenous people of northern Niger and other places.
No shiet you don't understand my point when you don't even read the part you quote. AdaCore != NeoOffice.
You simply did not get what I was trying to say.
Summary:
dbIII: the NeoOffice guys don't understand open source. They take a huge existing source base, add some stuff onto that, and then ask money for this. They have no right to do that, because the work they did is infinitesimal compared to the work that went into the rest of the product, which is being distributed for free.
me: The NeoOffice people are not doing anything wrong, and are respecting the open source license of the original authors. There is also nothing wrong with taking an existing open source base, adding stuff to that and asking money for that. Take e.g. AdaCore, which goes a step further in your line of reasoning: they take a huge existing open source code base, add stuff to that and don't even widely distribute the sources. There are simply many different kinds of open source business models.
you (aliquis): AdaCore are basically contractors and therefore don't have to distribute their changes
me: and the NeoOffice guys do distribute OpenOffice, and hence also the source code. So they also did nothing wrong.
I.o.w.: what you wrote was obviously correct, but I fail to see how it refuted anything I said. I should maybe have added So I still don't understand why NeoOffice are "not the nice guys" or why they "don't get open source".
In the case of AdaCore it sounds like they get hired for doing the changes, do them and whatever company rolls their own private version which isn't distributed so no need to share the code.
The NeoOffice people did and do distribute the complete source. You could also always download NeoOffice for free. The only reason to pay them was either to support them, or to get access to the latest beta version. So I'm not sure what your point is.
My point was simply that there are more ways to run an open source business than the ways e.g. CodeSourcery and Red Hat do, and that these ways are no by definition evil or clueless about how open source works.
Denmark has Internet filtering (which was kept secret until discovered)
This has nothing to do with communism nor with profiteering of other people's work. I personally think that you are missing one of the points of open source, namely "take the source and build something value-added on top of it for which people are willing to pay".
And I find it extremely prejudiced of you to assume that integrating a random X11 and Win32-based app with native Mac OS X functionality via a Java bridge is "very little work". It may be little compared to the amount of work that went into building the rest of OOo, but given its size so is the work that went into 80-90% of all open source/free software probably. That does not mean that writing all those other programs was "very little work", and saying so is very disdainful for no good reason, as far as I am concerned.
Personally I think they and a few other projects have completely missed the point of open source.
Again, it is you who is missing a point about open source: the one about creating common infrastructure so other people can build useful and value-added functionality on top of that without having to reinvent the wheel all the time. You are talking about copyleft, where the goal is not just optimising the way software is created, but also about moral views about how information should be distributed (although as far as I know, the NeoOffice people could even have done what they did if OOo were licensed under the GPL).
It is the iceing of a very large cake with an enormous amount of work put in by hundreds over more than a decade.
It's also the icing that made Open Office somewhat usable on Mac OS X. X11 apps are generally fine on Mac OS X if you are used to working with X11 apps, but that they don't integrate with 80% of the services on Mac OS X, they have completely different keyboard shortcuts, they have completely differently laid out dialogue boxes (e.g., the location of "ok" and "cancel" buttons is reversed to regular Mac programs, meaning that muscle memory makes you click the wrong button half the time), etc.
They're just inconvenient to work with if you are used to working with a Mac.
Good on them for getting in early and filing a niche but there is no need to shed tears for them now that there is a better alternative.
That was not what the GP suggested. He simply pointed to them as another example of Sun being unable to work with third parties. The NeoOffice people did open source their improvements. The only thing you got for paying them was early access to newer versions (and/or you could do it if you simply wanted to thank them for their work, e.g. as my father did who was happy that he could ditch MS Office for NeoOffice).
People were simply paying them for the service of integrating OOo with Mac OS X. I really fail to see what's so morally repugnant about that.
While the act of profiting from other buggers efforts
The whole point of open source *is* to enable others to profit from your work. And depending on the license you choose, you lay down whether and if so how these others should enable you to also profit from their work.
NeoOffice is an interesting project but they really missed the entire point of open source. Going around them is not being unfriendly to open source since the whole idea of NeoOffice is two guys doing the following:
Take someone else's work.
Make a few changes.
Attempt to get money for it.
As you mentioned later, they did not just make "a few changes", they made quite a lot of changes.
The whole idea of open source is sharing stuff that other people are sharing with you.
That's the idea of free software, not necessarily of open source. Anyway, from a business perspective *one* of the main motivations (there are obviously more) to open source software is usually to avoid having multiple companies waste a lot of money on re-implementing and maintaining basically the same basic infrastructure. Nobody really gets a competitive edge out of that in the long run, it just costs a lot of money.
So instead, everyone can share the development cost/work of developing the basic infrastructure, and then privately invest in adding value-added features on top for which their target market wants to pay (until these features lose their specific attraction or become common, at which point they can be added to the open source base).
IMHO (as someone unconnected to both projects) if you want to write MS Windows style shareware on a different platform it's best to start with your own work instead of pissing off the people that are giving the stuff to you for nothing.
Tell that to AdaCore. They take the GNU Ada compiler, and then on a contract basis implement new features for companies such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Everything is under the GPL. But they ask a lot of money for doing that work, and (initially at least) the changes only go to whoever paid them. And while that company is fully entitled to redistribute those changes under the GPL, they usually don't because they consider them to be a competitive advantage. And as far as I know, the GCC community holds no grudge against them at all.
Taking an open source work as your basic infrastructure, adding value to that for a particular (niche) market and making money that way (be it on a contract basis, via shareware, or some other way) is one of the possible ways to make an open source-based business work. And there's nothing wrong with that, as far as I am concerned.
And for the record: no, I've never used the above business model myself, and yes, I do contribute to various free software projects in my spare time.