As one of the people who voted in the one public election that ICANN held, I'm absolutely disgusted to see them entirely ditch the electoral process here. They have effectively wasted the time of everyone like myself who tried, in our small way, to have some voice in how the public network is run. 5 public positions is a minority but is still a way to have some input into the process; now everyone who contributed to that election is completely disenfranchised, and only the back room dealers are running the show.
I don't write my congressman for every thing that shows up on/., but I think I will on this one. This is blatant disregard for the democratic principles that the U.S. and many of the other nations of the world represent. It should not be allowed to stand.
If this were doable, I can really see a future of detente for the 'net. If you had a worm that would essentially take over the 'net, but you didn't know if it would really work or not, and the consequences for trying and failing were pretty severe, then you wouldn't want to try it out. You'd wait, and only if someone else released theirs would you fire off yours. Assuming that this idea isn't too tough for more than one group to figure out, within hours of the release of one superworm the 'net will be swarming with several different variants of the same idea, all fighting to ensure that their creators get a little piece of the soon-to-be balkanized network. Imagine not just tracking, fingerprinting, and distributing fixes for one of these plagues, but trying to fend off several at once, all of them able to almost instantly distribute defensive tactics, etc.
Frankly, the only way you could salvage the 'net (short of a complete reinstall on millions of machines) would be to partition it to cut down the communications avenues, and then sterilize each small subsection one by one. And unfortunately the triumph that is Internet-style routing probably means that partitioning the damn thing would be a lot tougher than you would think.
In the world after the global infection of the Internet by strains of Curious Yellow and the commercial
availability of strains of Curious Blue, computer users will have a choice. One can either have a
computer which is never connected to the Internet, risk almost certain infection and control by the
various factions controlling Curious Yellow, or intentionally give control to the creators of Curious
Blue.
I think the risk of infection and/or control can be minimized by not using platforms that are known virus vectors of the past, and by aggressively using up-to-date systems to get patches quickly.
In the worst case, you could have a "kill switch" manned by your OS platform provider, which when thrown will signal your machine to take itself off the 'net, or disable a particular service or daemon, until a patch is ready for the newest Curious Yellow vector. In some cases (if your TCP/IP stack was vulnerable, for instance) it would be pretty tough to get patched back up without getting infected, though.
My deepest sympathies. Everytime I'm a little unhappy with my management, someone on/. makes them look positively angelic and precognitive in comparison:)
Public domain means that redistribution rights to the work or any derivatives are available to everyone for free. It's essentially a universal nonexclusive copyright. If the government had retained exclusive copyright on the items, then they could re-release them as I was saying.
It's true - there's not much point in dual-licensing public domain and some other license X. Some projects seem to feel there's an advantage to dual-licensing GPL and Artistic licenses, or GPL and Mozilla Public License, etc. I don't really follow what their reasons are, although I use them as an example to point out that it's possible. I don't know of any that are doing public domain and some other license X.
I'm not sure that I want to go through all the pros and cons of the GPL at this point; others have made that argument far more concisely than I can.
The GPL serves to encourage software development that is open and will remain open for use by all, no matter what even the original author may have to say about it.
Furthermore, by requiring enhancements to also have their source code opened, the GPL has the effect of over time ensuring that the amount of code available to the public will increase.
An initial release of public domain software provides that software to the public, but doesn't necessarily encourage any further enhancements to be public.
So, if you think the public interest is served by increasing the pool of software which is available to the public and will remain so into the future, then the GPL is an advantage to the public. If you think the public interest is served by being able to take publicly-funded research and generate profit for proprietary software companies, then the GPL is probably not an advantage to the public. It depends on how you define the public advantage.
I would agree with the first category, since it favors power to the people rather than money to the few, but then I imagine my viewpoint is not a surprise at this point.
It's more likely the mud slides that will make it that far. The geology of the area shows significant mud slides in the past around there; no reason to think they won't happen again...
No one else may re-release it; only the copyright holder (the U.S. government) could re-release it. They can do so under any terms they like, as any could copyright holder do with their own work. I'm sorry if I didn't explain this very well from the start.
What is the benefit to dual licensing? Some projects apparently feel that the use of their code in both proprietary and GPL-d projects is more of an advantage than just straightforwardly advancing the goals of the FSF, so they dual-license.
I don't have a strong opinion on dual-licensing, I just wanted to respond to the comment that "Code released under the GPL, however, can never be re-released under another license. Ever.", which I don't think is true.
As far as the government, I agree that there's no point in dual-licensing public domain and GPL. I personally think there is some advantage for the country in economic terms in supporting the GPL, since it seems to foster stronger projects upon the base sources than public domain software does. However, the government would have to make more of a committment to managing the GPL'd project, or else someone else would have to (which probably would occur if the software was halfway useful). The government would have to be convinced of the benefits of GPL'd open source, which I don't think has occurred yet. They would have to trust the FSF to not issue a later GPL version with substantially different terms, since distributors of GPL'd software can at their option redistribute under the terms of a later GPL version. And there's the concern that if the government were to adopt a more-restrictive-than-public-domain license this time for a good cause, they might adopt a restrictive and bad license at some future point, which would be unfortunate. So if there is some risk of GPL usage leading the government down that slippery slope, the I say the government shouldn't GPL, if only to avoid the precedent of using somewhat restrictive licensing on publicly-supported software in the future.
I guess a non-governmental organization could always issue a GPL'd release of the public domain software and, on the strength of that license's process, make it the preeminent distribution of that software. That would probably be the appropriate model for demonstrating the strength of the free software model, since the GPL'd version would tend to accumulate publicly-usable features that would remain so over time for further improvement, as opposed to improvements on the public domain tree which would largely tend to be non-public.
I disagree with that interpretation on several grounds:
A BSD-licensed re-release of version 1 is not so much based on the GPL version 1 release as it is based on the pre-released copyrighted code. I don't think the FSF, RMS, or any other organization has made the claim that the original sources written by you with no distribution license are somehow retroactively constrained by some license that you might put on the code in the future. Thus, your original sources (pre-GPL) remain "untainted" by the GPL, and can be successfully re-released under the BSD license as well.
Similarly, for an work that's already been released once under the GPL, all of the copyright holders can contribute their pre-GPL'd source submissions (from version 1 and version 2) into a pool of essentially virgin software and re-release this new software pool (identical to the GPL'd version 2) under a non-GPL license. The software is not a derivative of the GPL'd software; it's more that the internally maintained software tree at one point sprouted a GPL'd release that was a derivative, and at a later point sprouted a BSD licensed release that was a similar derivative of the main internal tree. Releasing a BSD-licensed build doesn't, of course, revoke the GPL rights of anyone who gets a copy of the previous identical GPL release.
The GPL is a license to distribute, according to section 5 it is the only thing that gives non-copyright-owners the rights to redistribute the Program or derivatives. However, this is only useful for someone other than copyright owners; the owners themselves have every right under the law to distribute the code themselves under any terms of their choosing and could not legitimately remove their freedom to do so under the GPL, since they aren't bound by the GPL on their own copyrighted code anyway. It's only non-copyright-owners who would attain any benefit from the GPL and thus would be constrained by it.
I realize that this is splitting hairs; it's too bad the GPL doesn't spell out more clearly how the ordering of the derivative work creation happens. I would have to see the FSF or RMS advance an interpretation that the GPL works the way you say it does before I would agree with that interpretation; to my knowledge public comments to date have matched up with my understanding as stated above.
Only if is constituency is counted on a corporate-market-cap basis. Encouraging free software is better for the populace at large, so if he's counting actual people (you know, U.S. citizens, "we the people", etc.) who would be helped, the GPL would seem to still come out on top even for Bill Gates himself.
From what I hear, Bill doesn't see it that way, though:) I bet if he didn't have any money and needed a server yesterday, though, he might like free software a little better...
GPL arguments are based around destroying copyright through the use of copyright itself ("copyleft"). If it were legal to redistribute MP3s without the copyright holder's permission, then there would essentially be no copyright, the GPL's job would be finished, and it could fade away into oblivion (kinda like the Communist Party was supposed to once the worker's paradise had been established, if you'll pardon an out-there simile).
If there were no copyright, you could take Bill Gates' non-GPL and proprietary Windows code and redistribute it without fear of retribution. Essentially all code would be public domain at that point, which of course is even better than GPL. But it doesn't work if only some code is public domain; it's only once all code everywhere is effectively public domain that public domain becomes effectively better than the GPL.
As long as there is copyright that prevents MP3 sharing, the provisions of the GPL need to be enforceable via copyright in order to work towards creating a future where copyright is no longer significant.
That's not correct. The copyright holders of a piece of code can simultaneously release it under several different licenses if they want. There are currently several large software projects that allow either BSD or GPL licensing, for instance. The choice is entirely up to the copyright holders.
Now, if you accept changes from others for your GPL project without getting their copyright assignation (depends on the quantity of code they submit and "fair use" tradeoffs, I believe), and then you want to release the code under a non-GPL-compatible license, you may have the practical difficulty of getting all the copyright holders to agree. But it is theoretically entirely possible and many smaller projects with a more manageable set of copyright holders have switched to and from the GPL license.
What's confusing you is retroactive relicensing. If version 1.0's code is out there as GPL, and the copyright holders re-release version 1.0 as BSD licensed or release version 2.0 as BSD licensed, then that release or re-release doesn't revoke the GPL license on the original version 1.0 sources. Sources to version 1.0 that you get with a GPL license are governed under those license terms, and sources to version 1.0 that you get with a BSD license are BSD-licensed. There's no problem having multiple identical copies of the source out there under mutually incompatible licenses if the copyright holders see a reason to do so, and in fact many do.
Except it'd be more like having a revolution against God than against the Tsar. Sony owns the universe and can adjust the economy at their will; there's no effective way to seize the means of production for the sole use of the workers, or anything like that. The only way to influence Sony is by moving on to playing more egalitarian MMORPGS; essentially revolting against an unjust universe by moving on to a better one.
Boy, it's too bad real life isn't like that; I'd like to signal my unhappiness by moving to a universe with a little less entropy, for instance. On the other hand, maybe entropy promotes a physical economy in the same sense that scarcity motivates a monetary economy. So maybe I'd be disappointed in my quest.
The problem is the minimum required per year. If you're only streaming for a few listeners, you still have to pay that set amount per year, even though on a royalty basis you might not owe near that much. The deal that Helms has halted would have been OK for mid to small-sized webcasters, but still bad for micro-webcasters, which is where most of the broadcasting diversity is.
Unfortunately, since Congress is about to go home, I don't see there being much chance of any better deal occurring until after the election.
The problem is that coming up with innovative ideas is a lot more expensive than cloning existing ideas. Whatever Microsoft does innovate is going to cost them more than it will for free software to essentially duplicate it, because the benefit of the innovation (being the only person on the market with it) gets chipped away relatively quickly. Even assuming that Microsoft is innately more innovative than the free software world, out-innovating free software is going to be a lot more expensive than, say, out-innovating Netscape or Sun or Oracle. It may or may not be worth it in the long run to try to press a full-scale assault on free software that way - it's kind of like trying to fight back the tide. Eventually the tide will catch up to where you are; you can either head for higher ground or start swimming with the aquatic sea-birds.
Actually, both www.slashdot.org and slashdot.org work just fine, so I'm not sure how that backs up your point.
It takes all of 20 seconds to set up DNS so that people looking for either "www.site.com" or "site.com" can find it, and it's basically common courtesy at this point. Plenty of people are trained to type the www. first and will not understand if your site doesn't support this (we won't get into the people who assume that any web site ends with ".com"....) Anyone that's too lazy to spend a moment setting up their DNS properly probably isn't too interested in getting any traffic.
Well, it's three strikes, so you have to figure the chance of one lawmaker voting with the majority for three separate unconstitutional measures which were determined to be unconstitutional fairly shortly after they were passed. One would hope that the majority of Congress might have voted for one or two ringers, but not three in such a short time. To find themselves in this position, a congressperson would have to have a pretty blatant disregard for the Constitution; I wouldn't mind losing those representatives since they are clearly not interested in following their oaths to uphold the Constitution.
It could be 3 or 5 strikes, or we could alter the timeframe between the vote and the Supreme Court ruling to make it cut out only a certain level of bad legislating. And, come to think of it, shouldn't there be a penalty for the President for signing an unconstitutional bill into law? Although there's not really much of a way to discipline the Chief Executive short of removing him from office entirely.
Fair enough - it's true that the money will be out to defend against prospective copyright term contraction, whereas it definitely hasn't been there to defend against actual copyright term extension. So from a realpolitik perspective you are entirely correct.
Slashdot Mirror
As one of the people who voted in the one public election that ICANN held, I'm absolutely disgusted to see them entirely ditch the electoral process here. They have effectively wasted the time of everyone like myself who tried, in our small way, to have some voice in how the public network is run. 5 public positions is a minority but is still a way to have some input into the process; now everyone who contributed to that election is completely disenfranchised, and only the back room dealers are running the show.
I don't write my congressman for every thing that shows up on /., but I think I will on this one. This is blatant disregard for the democratic principles that the U.S. and many of the other nations of the world represent. It should not be allowed to stand.
If this were doable, I can really see a future of detente for the 'net. If you had a worm that would essentially take over the 'net, but you didn't know if it would really work or not, and the consequences for trying and failing were pretty severe, then you wouldn't want to try it out. You'd wait, and only if someone else released theirs would you fire off yours. Assuming that this idea isn't too tough for more than one group to figure out, within hours of the release of one superworm the 'net will be swarming with several different variants of the same idea, all fighting to ensure that their creators get a little piece of the soon-to-be balkanized network. Imagine not just tracking, fingerprinting, and distributing fixes for one of these plagues, but trying to fend off several at once, all of them able to almost instantly distribute defensive tactics, etc.
Frankly, the only way you could salvage the 'net (short of a complete reinstall on millions of machines) would be to partition it to cut down the communications avenues, and then sterilize each small subsection one by one. And unfortunately the triumph that is Internet-style routing probably means that partitioning the damn thing would be a lot tougher than you would think.
Exactly right.
I think the risk of infection and/or control can be minimized by not using platforms that are known virus vectors of the past, and by aggressively using up-to-date systems to get patches quickly.
In the worst case, you could have a "kill switch" manned by your OS platform provider, which when thrown will signal your machine to take itself off the 'net, or disable a particular service or daemon, until a patch is ready for the newest Curious Yellow vector. In some cases (if your TCP/IP stack was vulnerable, for instance) it would be pretty tough to get patched back up without getting infected, though.
My deepest sympathies. Everytime I'm a little unhappy with my management, someone on /. makes them look positively angelic and precognitive in comparison :)
Can't you just take the monitor off of it, and admin it remotely? Even Windows 2000 should be able to do something like this any more.
You're not talking about the HKN lounge on the banks of the Wabash, are you?
Public domain means that redistribution rights to the work or any derivatives are available to everyone for free. It's essentially a universal nonexclusive copyright. If the government had retained exclusive copyright on the items, then they could re-release them as I was saying.
It's true - there's not much point in dual-licensing public domain and some other license X. Some projects seem to feel there's an advantage to dual-licensing GPL and Artistic licenses, or GPL and Mozilla Public License, etc. I don't really follow what their reasons are, although I use them as an example to point out that it's possible. I don't know of any that are doing public domain and some other license X.
I'm not sure that I want to go through all the pros and cons of the GPL at this point; others have made that argument far more concisely than I can.
So, if you think the public interest is served by increasing the pool of software which is available to the public and will remain so into the future, then the GPL is an advantage to the public. If you think the public interest is served by being able to take publicly-funded research and generate profit for proprietary software companies, then the GPL is probably not an advantage to the public. It depends on how you define the public advantage.
I would agree with the first category, since it favors power to the people rather than money to the few, but then I imagine my viewpoint is not a surprise at this point.
It's more likely the mud slides that will make it that far. The geology of the area shows significant mud slides in the past around there; no reason to think they won't happen again...
No one else may re-release it; only the copyright holder (the U.S. government) could re-release it. They can do so under any terms they like, as any could copyright holder do with their own work. I'm sorry if I didn't explain this very well from the start.
What is the benefit to dual licensing? Some projects apparently feel that the use of their code in both proprietary and GPL-d projects is more of an advantage than just straightforwardly advancing the goals of the FSF, so they dual-license.
I don't have a strong opinion on dual-licensing, I just wanted to respond to the comment that "Code released under the GPL, however, can never be re-released under another license. Ever.", which I don't think is true.
As far as the government, I agree that there's no point in dual-licensing public domain and GPL. I personally think there is some advantage for the country in economic terms in supporting the GPL, since it seems to foster stronger projects upon the base sources than public domain software does. However, the government would have to make more of a committment to managing the GPL'd project, or else someone else would have to (which probably would occur if the software was halfway useful). The government would have to be convinced of the benefits of GPL'd open source, which I don't think has occurred yet. They would have to trust the FSF to not issue a later GPL version with substantially different terms, since distributors of GPL'd software can at their option redistribute under the terms of a later GPL version. And there's the concern that if the government were to adopt a more-restrictive-than-public-domain license this time for a good cause, they might adopt a restrictive and bad license at some future point, which would be unfortunate. So if there is some risk of GPL usage leading the government down that slippery slope, the I say the government shouldn't GPL, if only to avoid the precedent of using somewhat restrictive licensing on publicly-supported software in the future.
I guess a non-governmental organization could always issue a GPL'd release of the public domain software and, on the strength of that license's process, make it the preeminent distribution of that software. That would probably be the appropriate model for demonstrating the strength of the free software model, since the GPL'd version would tend to accumulate publicly-usable features that would remain so over time for further improvement, as opposed to improvements on the public domain tree which would largely tend to be non-public.
I disagree with that interpretation on several grounds:
I realize that this is splitting hairs; it's too bad the GPL doesn't spell out more clearly how the ordering of the derivative work creation happens. I would have to see the FSF or RMS advance an interpretation that the GPL works the way you say it does before I would agree with that interpretation; to my knowledge public comments to date have matched up with my understanding as stated above.
Monopoly aborted.
Only if is constituency is counted on a corporate-market-cap basis. Encouraging free software is better for the populace at large, so if he's counting actual people (you know, U.S. citizens, "we the people", etc.) who would be helped, the GPL would seem to still come out on top even for Bill Gates himself.
From what I hear, Bill doesn't see it that way, though :) I bet if he didn't have any money and needed a server yesterday, though, he might like free software a little better...
GPL arguments are based around destroying copyright through the use of copyright itself ("copyleft"). If it were legal to redistribute MP3s without the copyright holder's permission, then there would essentially be no copyright, the GPL's job would be finished, and it could fade away into oblivion (kinda like the Communist Party was supposed to once the worker's paradise had been established, if you'll pardon an out-there simile).
If there were no copyright, you could take Bill Gates' non-GPL and proprietary Windows code and redistribute it without fear of retribution. Essentially all code would be public domain at that point, which of course is even better than GPL. But it doesn't work if only some code is public domain; it's only once all code everywhere is effectively public domain that public domain becomes effectively better than the GPL.
As long as there is copyright that prevents MP3 sharing, the provisions of the GPL need to be enforceable via copyright in order to work towards creating a future where copyright is no longer significant.
That's not correct. The copyright holders of a piece of code can simultaneously release it under several different licenses if they want. There are currently several large software projects that allow either BSD or GPL licensing, for instance. The choice is entirely up to the copyright holders.
Now, if you accept changes from others for your GPL project without getting their copyright assignation (depends on the quantity of code they submit and "fair use" tradeoffs, I believe), and then you want to release the code under a non-GPL-compatible license, you may have the practical difficulty of getting all the copyright holders to agree. But it is theoretically entirely possible and many smaller projects with a more manageable set of copyright holders have switched to and from the GPL license.
What's confusing you is retroactive relicensing. If version 1.0's code is out there as GPL, and the copyright holders re-release version 1.0 as BSD licensed or release version 2.0 as BSD licensed, then that release or re-release doesn't revoke the GPL license on the original version 1.0 sources. Sources to version 1.0 that you get with a GPL license are governed under those license terms, and sources to version 1.0 that you get with a BSD license are BSD-licensed. There's no problem having multiple identical copies of the source out there under mutually incompatible licenses if the copyright holders see a reason to do so, and in fact many do.
Say it with me: char-nel house. charnel house. Stick to the script next time.
Thus proving that you can never be too smart or too cool to sell out.
Of course, the password hint was "Speak, friend, and enter", and we all know that money talks :)
Except it'd be more like having a revolution against God than against the Tsar. Sony owns the universe and can adjust the economy at their will; there's no effective way to seize the means of production for the sole use of the workers, or anything like that. The only way to influence Sony is by moving on to playing more egalitarian MMORPGS; essentially revolting against an unjust universe by moving on to a better one.
Boy, it's too bad real life isn't like that; I'd like to signal my unhappiness by moving to a universe with a little less entropy, for instance. On the other hand, maybe entropy promotes a physical economy in the same sense that scarcity motivates a monetary economy. So maybe I'd be disappointed in my quest.
The problem is the minimum required per year. If you're only streaming for a few listeners, you still have to pay that set amount per year, even though on a royalty basis you might not owe near that much. The deal that Helms has halted would have been OK for mid to small-sized webcasters, but still bad for micro-webcasters, which is where most of the broadcasting diversity is.
Unfortunately, since Congress is about to go home, I don't see there being much chance of any better deal occurring until after the election.
You, sir, should definitely be in a commercial. RedHat/United Linux folks, anybody reading? Hire him as your official SpokesSooner :)
The problem is that coming up with innovative ideas is a lot more expensive than cloning existing ideas. Whatever Microsoft does innovate is going to cost them more than it will for free software to essentially duplicate it, because the benefit of the innovation (being the only person on the market with it) gets chipped away relatively quickly. Even assuming that Microsoft is innately more innovative than the free software world, out-innovating free software is going to be a lot more expensive than, say, out-innovating Netscape or Sun or Oracle. It may or may not be worth it in the long run to try to press a full-scale assault on free software that way - it's kind of like trying to fight back the tide. Eventually the tide will catch up to where you are; you can either head for higher ground or start swimming with the aquatic sea-birds.
Actually, both www.slashdot.org and slashdot.org work just fine, so I'm not sure how that backs up your point.
It takes all of 20 seconds to set up DNS so that people looking for either "www.site.com" or "site.com" can find it, and it's basically common courtesy at this point. Plenty of people are trained to type the www. first and will not understand if your site doesn't support this (we won't get into the people who assume that any web site ends with ".com"....) Anyone that's too lazy to spend a moment setting up their DNS properly probably isn't too interested in getting any traffic.
I'd be more worried about the broken glass you ate, myself. Although if that was going to get you, it probably already would have.
I wonder if they make thermometers with safety glass, so that it doesn't shatter into sharp-edged little pieces?
Well, it's three strikes, so you have to figure the chance of one lawmaker voting with the majority for three separate unconstitutional measures which were determined to be unconstitutional fairly shortly after they were passed. One would hope that the majority of Congress might have voted for one or two ringers, but not three in such a short time. To find themselves in this position, a congressperson would have to have a pretty blatant disregard for the Constitution; I wouldn't mind losing those representatives since they are clearly not interested in following their oaths to uphold the Constitution.
It could be 3 or 5 strikes, or we could alter the timeframe between the vote and the Supreme Court ruling to make it cut out only a certain level of bad legislating. And, come to think of it, shouldn't there be a penalty for the President for signing an unconstitutional bill into law? Although there's not really much of a way to discipline the Chief Executive short of removing him from office entirely.
Fair enough - it's true that the money will be out to defend against prospective copyright term contraction, whereas it definitely hasn't been there to defend against actual copyright term extension. So from a realpolitik perspective you are entirely correct.