I didn't say anything about the fact that the full Intel kernel source hasn't been released yet, nor about what Apple will do (or not) in the future.
When I said "I guess in case of XNU, things conflict(ed) too much with Apple's product secrecy policy...", I was referring to the fact that for external people it's very hard to do any fundamental work at all on XNU, since they don't know what Apple is doing in parallel and it's quite possible that by the next major Mac OS X release the part they worked on doesn't exist anymore in a matter of speaking (or is completely rewritten by Apple).
I contrasted this with the WebKit development, whose development can be followed live by pretty much everyone out there, and to which several external people have gotten commit access already.
I doubt the XNU secrecy policy of Apple will change any time soon, this is how they have always worked and it's an inherent part of their marketing strategy (opening up XNU development in the way they did with WebKit would either lay open their future hardware plans or at least increase the risks of "leakage", as well as possibly other surprises Steve jobs may want to announce at WWDC or MacWorld).
The point is that Apple has been saying what great OSS supporters they are, and now they are even discontinuing the tiny bit of code sharing they have done.
No, they are not. Apple's code sharing has always happened via its own website. OpenDarwin was not run by Apple, although several Apple engineers supported and actively participated in its various projects.
That doesn't mean that it's sad that Apple has not been able to create a satisfactory policy which allowed external developers work directly on Darwin and contribute to it. It's not like they can't do it in general, as in case of the WebKit project some external developers even got direct commit access (which is more than what the OpenDarwin people wanted, afaik they just wanted their fixes to be incorporated by Apple).
I guess in case of XNU, things conflict(ed) too much with Apple's product secrecy policy...
China is especially guilty of this. They have never had any regard for anyone's IP (good or ill.)
Neither do Western companies in general, except if it's their own or if it belongs to someone who's somehow dangerous to them. There is little or no "inherent respect for IP" anywhere, since in the end most of IPR law (in particular patents) is plain and simple trade policy.
Rai informed the meeting that a comprehensive draft report had been submitted to an ICAR committee to develop guidelines for intellectual property management and commercialisation of technologies in the national agricultural system under the ICAR.
Your comment reminds me of the large US hi-tech companies accusing the Chinese of "stealing their IP" and then getting caught with their pants down when it turns out they were not delivering the "IP" they promised in their contracts.
The "all the Chinese, Indians and other Asians can do is copy our great Western inventions" story is getting old very quickly, and more untrue every day. It would surprise me if they don't soon overtake the Western companies concerning the amount of awarded patents and things like that.
Capturing the printscreen output is subject to output colour adjustments and the quality of your decoder. Beyond that, however, it's perfect digital output in full resolution.
So is burning a protected iTunes song to an audio CD, which consequently can be ripped again to anything you want. Still, that doesn't stop people from complaining that the re-encoding will slightly degrade quality. So I bet the videophiles with their golden DVI cables running to their CRT monitors with 500MHz refresh rates won't accept this workaround...
AFAIK you can't get sued for patent abuse if you only release the source code - at least, this seems to be the consensus with a lot of MP3 libraries
You most certainly can be sued for patent infringement by simply releasing source code, but probably only for contributory infringement (although in case of program claims, the source code may event directly infringe on the patent).
Will Siemens cross licensing deal with MSFT apply to 'Nokia Siemens Networks'? Why don't they just call it 'retard networks' and get the software patent lobby to promote it?
Nokia and Siemens largely are the European software patent lobby (together with Philips, Ericsson and Alcatel)
being on the receiving end of a spamhaus complaint is immoral conduct.
Of course it isn't. Only the actions that lead to this listing could be immoral conduct.
You think spamhaus is perfect?
No.
While they are very, very good, given how blacklists are put together, nobody in the domain registration business should depend on them for the purpose of deciding whether or not to deliver the services customers pay them for.
GoDaddy strongly encourages people to report spam to them as well, and most people who report their spam know this. It would surprise me a lot if GoDaddy based their decision solely on Spamhaus' data.
You're right I used illegal as in "illegal and I agree it's bad". So I'll retract that and just keep it at the TOS level: in their TOS they reserve the right to suspend your account if you use it in connection with spamming or phishing.
According to this post, they are distributing a version of the Linux kernel with the pieces they claim copyright on removed (which also explains why it's a 2.5 kernel instead of 2.6).
That's a disingenuous myth. It's far, far better to have laws than self-policing.
You are creating a straw man argument, as I did not say that self-policing is (always) better than a law. I merely said that if there is a problem and you don't want involvement of the law, that you need some degree of self-policing to deal with the problems. And in this case it's simply a contract between a customer and a provider, which is common practice for all kinds of services.
As someone else pointed out, if they are really doing this for legitimate reasons, why is their reinstatement fee orders of magnitude greater than the initial registration fee?
Because they reserve the right to do that in their TOS, probably to discourage spammers from setting up shop with them.
Why is there no initial warning followed by a probationary period?
It would surprise me if that Russian reseller did not get an initial warning, although me nor you can know that for sure of course. That said, from the earlier mentioned TOS:
If Go Daddy determines that the services in question are being used in association with spam, Go Daddy will re-direct, suspend, or cancel any web site hosting, domain registration, email boxes or other applicable services for a period of no less than 2 days. The registrant or customer will be required to respond by email to Go Daddy stating that they will cease to send spam and/or have spam sent on their behalf. Go Daddy will require a non-refundable reactivation fee to be paid before the site, email boxes and/or services are reactivated.
I could imagine a hefty fine for repeat offenders, ultimately resulting in permanent removal of the domain registration, but a sudden $200 fee does not strike me as motivated by seeking justice. Especially when the judge and jury are a spam blacklist...
From the TOS it's clear that repeat offenders can be terminated (it doesn't say anything about fines for those), and that GoDaddy is the one which determines whether or not "the services in question are being used in association with spam".
Finally, to those who've defended spamhaus as one of the better spam blacklists, that's still not a good reason to use their judgement to impose such a large penalty. It does not take much of a configuration error to open your relay and end up on a blacklist.
Spamhaus does not list open relays. It lists websites used by major spammers to peddle their porn, pills and whatnot, as well as the hosting and dns providers for those sites.
Spammers have been using plain ip addresses in their spams for quite a while and still do it sometimes nowadays, but less because those same whippersnappers are much less likely to trust a website whose address consists of some strange numbers and which doesn't even start with www (omg!). Apart from that, they also need the domain names because they get kicked from ISP's and zombie machines all the time.
I don't know how the spamhaus people manage to get all their information, but you can bet they use a lot more than what whois can tell them. I also doubt whether Spamhaus&co would agree with you, although they are "those fighting against them".
And IMO, domain name registrars have just as much rights and responsibilities regarding what they allow their services to be used for as hosting providers.
That was even already in the summary. But RTFThread, this discussion was not about whether or not the measures were proportionate, but about whether or not Spamhaus/GoDaddy can determine which domains are used by spammers.
I guess I should repeat the disclaimers in this and this message in every post to avoid people like you replying to things which I'm not saying.
I see fundamental difference between the provision of naming and hosting/IP services. I believe naming should be provided on a "common carrier" basis, without regard to content.
If someone is abusing a service for illegal purposes, I don't see why that service shouldn't be taken away from him/her.
The precedent set today with spam will be applied to other disfavored content tomorrow.
As mentioned in another post, GoDaddy reserves the right in its TOS to do this if you spam or phish (and does not mention any other "disfavoured content" at first sight). That said, spam is not only disfavoured, but also illegal in at least the US and the EU.
If you, or that Russian spam services provider, don't like those terms, you/they are free to go somewhere else (again, like in that other post, noting the fact that in this case a bunch of innocent bystanders are hit as well, but that's not your point as I understand it).
I agree they should only be able to handle according to their TOS, but their TOS does specify that domains for spamming can be suspended or terminated. Of course, by blocking all domains of an entire reseller, they also hit innocent bystanders.
I was mainly reacting to the sentiment that self-policing is a bad thing because it would supposedly encourage laws to this end though. Imo, it's exactly the other way around.
Actually, you need some level of self-policing to curb the problem if you want to demonstrate that laws are not necessary. Why should a domain name registrar be less responsible for spammers than hosting ISPs? Especially, since spammers nowadays often host their sites on hacked Windows boxes, with the DNS switching from one machine to another all the time (thus making the domain name their most important asset).
It merely encourages reform which protects the big guys. It does not solve any real problems, and might even make it harder to solve those real problems (such as software patents): if they can get reforms through which make things less bad for them, they will be even less inclined to ever support abolishment of software patents.
My post simply summarized the first claim of the patent. The claims of a patent define the monopolies granted to the applicant. All conditions of a single claim must be fulfilled in order to infringe on that claim. So as soon as you use an if-the-else test in the way described in the first claim, you are infringing.
The abstract and description are merely used to help interpret the claim, but they have little or no legal value and do not directly define what the patent monopoly covers.
If that were all that the patent said, Microsoft's team of top lawyers would have ripped it to shreds in seconds. The fact is that Claim 1 just describes a component, for which no originality is claimed.
That is plain wrong. Every single claim is a granted monopoly, regardless of the number of the claim and of whether it's an independent or dependent claim.
The essence of the patent is that it takes a bunch of things, none of which are novel, and combines them in a way which is claimed to be novel. The patent itself says "its individual elements respond to prior art in the following areas: decision-support software and executive information systems, expert systems and expert system building tools,..." and it cites 7 examples of prior art just in the area of decision-support software.
The claims are the granted monopolies, regardless of what the rest of the patent says. And each claim on its own must be patentable subject matter, new, and useful in the US (in Europe, it's non-obviousness and industrial applicability instead of usefulness, but in practice it all largely amounts to the same thing).
The patent is bad because it is a software patent. But if software patents are allowed, then combining known elements in a new way qualifies for a patent, because there is over 100 years of precedent in awarding patents for just that in other fields.
I honestly wonder what the new way is in this case. And while what you say here in this last paragraph is 100% correct, it immediately demonstrates one of the core problems of software patents: this is exactly what programmers, just like mathematicians, do all day.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't say anything about the fact that the full Intel kernel source hasn't been released yet, nor about what Apple will do (or not) in the future.
When I said "I guess in case of XNU, things conflict(ed) too much with Apple's product secrecy policy...", I was referring to the fact that for external people it's very hard to do any fundamental work at all on XNU, since they don't know what Apple is doing in parallel and it's quite possible that by the next major Mac OS X release the part they worked on doesn't exist anymore in a matter of speaking (or is completely rewritten by Apple).
I contrasted this with the WebKit development, whose development can be followed live by pretty much everyone out there, and to which several external people have gotten commit access already.
I doubt the XNU secrecy policy of Apple will change any time soon, this is how they have always worked and it's an inherent part of their marketing strategy (opening up XNU development in the way they did with WebKit would either lay open their future hardware plans or at least increase the risks of "leakage", as well as possibly other surprises Steve jobs may want to announce at WWDC or MacWorld).
No, they are not. Apple's code sharing has always happened via its own website. OpenDarwin was not run by Apple, although several Apple engineers supported and actively participated in its various projects.
That doesn't mean that it's sad that Apple has not been able to create a satisfactory policy which allowed external developers work directly on Darwin and contribute to it. It's not like they can't do it in general, as in case of the WebKit project some external developers even got direct commit access (which is more than what the OpenDarwin people wanted, afaik they just wanted their fixes to be incorporated by Apple).
I guess in case of XNU, things conflict(ed) too much with Apple's product secrecy policy...
You missed the dept:
Indeed, IBM sees things quite a bit more clearly than Mr. "Darkman, Walkin Dude" two posts below yours. Thanks for the link.
Neither do Western companies in general, except if it's their own or if it belongs to someone who's somehow dangerous to them. There is little or no "inherent respect for IP" anywhere, since in the end most of IPR law (in particular patents) is plain and simple trade policy.
From the article:
Your comment reminds me of the large US hi-tech companies accusing the Chinese of "stealing their IP" and then getting caught with their pants down when it turns out they were not delivering the "IP" they promised in their contracts.
The "all the Chinese, Indians and other Asians can do is copy our great Western inventions" story is getting old very quickly, and more untrue every day. It would surprise me if they don't soon overtake the Western companies concerning the amount of awarded patents and things like that.
So is burning a protected iTunes song to an audio CD, which consequently can be ripped again to anything you want. Still, that doesn't stop people from complaining that the re-encoding will slightly degrade quality. So I bet the videophiles with their golden DVI cables running to their CRT monitors with 500MHz refresh rates won't accept this workaround...
Plurality also means "the fact or state of being plural". That phrasing is standard patent speak when you mean "several".
You most certainly can be sued for patent infringement by simply releasing source code, but probably only for contributory infringement (although in case of program claims, the source code may event directly infringe on the patent).
Nokia and Siemens largely are the European software patent lobby (together with Philips, Ericsson and Alcatel)
Of course it isn't. Only the actions that lead to this listing could be immoral conduct.
No.
You're right I used illegal as in "illegal and I agree it's bad". So I'll retract that and just keep it at the TOS level: in their TOS they reserve the right to suspend your account if you use it in connection with spamming or phishing.
According to this post, they are distributing a version of the Linux kernel with the pieces they claim copyright on removed (which also explains why it's a 2.5 kernel instead of 2.6).
You are creating a straw man argument, as I did not say that self-policing is (always) better than a law. I merely said that if there is a problem and you don't want involvement of the law, that you need some degree of self-policing to deal with the problems. And in this case it's simply a contract between a customer and a provider, which is common practice for all kinds of services.
Because they reserve the right to do that in their TOS, probably to discourage spammers from setting up shop with them.
It would surprise me if that Russian reseller did not get an initial warning, although me nor you can know that for sure of course. That said, from the earlier mentioned TOS:
If Go Daddy determines that the services in question are being used in association with spam, Go Daddy will re-direct, suspend, or cancel any web site hosting, domain registration, email boxes or other applicable services for a period of no less than 2 days. The registrant or customer will be required to respond by email to Go Daddy stating that they will cease to send spam and/or have spam sent on their behalf. Go Daddy will require a non-refundable reactivation fee to be paid before the site, email boxes and/or services are reactivated.
From the TOS it's clear that repeat offenders can be terminated (it doesn't say anything about fines for those), and that GoDaddy is the one which determines whether or not "the services in question are being used in association with spam".
Spamhaus does not list open relays. It lists websites used by major spammers to peddle their porn, pills and whatnot, as well as the hosting and dns providers for those sites.
Spammers have been using plain ip addresses in their spams for quite a while and still do it sometimes nowadays, but less because those same whippersnappers are much less likely to trust a website whose address consists of some strange numbers and which doesn't even start with www (omg!). Apart from that, they also need the domain names because they get kicked from ISP's and zombie machines all the time.
I don't know how the spamhaus people manage to get all their information, but you can bet they use a lot more than what whois can tell them. I also doubt whether Spamhaus&co would agree with you, although they are "those fighting against them".
And IMO, domain name registrars have just as much rights and responsibilities regarding what they allow their services to be used for as hosting providers.
That was even already in the summary. But RTFThread, this discussion was not about whether or not the measures were proportionate, but about whether or not Spamhaus/GoDaddy can determine which domains are used by spammers.
I guess I should repeat the disclaimers in this and this message in every post to avoid people like you replying to things which I'm not saying.
If someone is abusing a service for illegal purposes, I don't see why that service shouldn't be taken away from him/her.
As mentioned in another post, GoDaddy reserves the right in its TOS to do this if you spam or phish (and does not mention any other "disfavoured content" at first sight). That said, spam is not only disfavoured, but also illegal in at least the US and the EU.
If you, or that Russian spam services provider, don't like those terms, you/they are free to go somewhere else (again, like in that other post, noting the fact that in this case a bunch of innocent bystanders are hit as well, but that's not your point as I understand it).
Spamhaus collects domains used by major league spammers to host their sites, not domains appearing in the from-field of sent spam messages.
I agree they should only be able to handle according to their TOS, but their TOS does specify that domains for spamming can be suspended or terminated. Of course, by blocking all domains of an entire reseller, they also hit innocent bystanders.
I was mainly reacting to the sentiment that self-policing is a bad thing because it would supposedly encourage laws to this end though. Imo, it's exactly the other way around.
Actually, you need some level of self-policing to curb the problem if you want to demonstrate that laws are not necessary. Why should a domain name registrar be less responsible for spammers than hosting ISPs? Especially, since spammers nowadays often host their sites on hacked Windows boxes, with the DNS switching from one machine to another all the time (thus making the domain name their most important asset).
It merely encourages reform which protects the big guys. It does not solve any real problems, and might even make it harder to solve those real problems (such as software patents): if they can get reforms through which make things less bad for them, they will be even less inclined to ever support abolishment of software patents.
My post simply summarized the first claim of the patent. The claims of a patent define the monopolies granted to the applicant. All conditions of a single claim must be fulfilled in order to infringe on that claim. So as soon as you use an if-the-else test in the way described in the first claim, you are infringing.
The abstract and description are merely used to help interpret the claim, but they have little or no legal value and do not directly define what the patent monopoly covers.
That is plain wrong. Every single claim is a granted monopoly, regardless of the number of the claim and of whether it's an independent or dependent claim.
The claims are the granted monopolies, regardless of what the rest of the patent says. And each claim on its own must be patentable subject matter, new, and useful in the US (in Europe, it's non-obviousness and industrial applicability instead of usefulness, but in practice it all largely amounts to the same thing).
I honestly wonder what the new way is in this case. And while what you say here in this last paragraph is 100% correct, it immediately demonstrates one of the core problems of software patents: this is exactly what programmers, just like mathematicians, do all day.