And in other news, Burger King is "aggressively lobbying" me to switch to eating Whoppers instead of Big Macs. What is the story here?
Nothing at all, of course! It is perfectly normal and acceptable for companies, especially in a troubled economy, to pare back and focus on their core competencies. The Post article is irresponsibly making a fuss over Microsoft leveraging two of its well-demonstrated core competencies: lying to the government and subverting democracy. These essential skills are central to Microsoft's operation, and it's an abuse of free speech to present them as something dangerous -- worse, it might panic the consumers!
Unquestionably, it is "idiotic and inflammatory", as you point out, for the newspaper of record in our nation's capital to report on these perfectly normal goings-on. The matter of which development efforts are funded by our tax monies has no bearing whatsoever on the public interest. It may be safely left up to our trusted government agencies and their staunch allies in large corporations and special interest groups.
After all, what would we commoners have to tell them? They're the experts, and should be left to run the military and the government without any bother from us civilians. And under our sacred and inviolable system of government, power vests in the State, its Employees, and its Contractors -- not in the unwashed masses. For a so-called "newspaper" to "inform" us about the government's activities is nothing short of treason.
PHANTOMa (caution: possible Lain spoilers)
on
Augmented Reality Quake
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
A while back, Slashdot ran a story comparing
some random wireless networking device or other to
the "Navi" computers from Serial Experiments
Lain. Yet those who watched the series
might find something even more familiar in this
"Augmented Reality Quake" -- a combat game
superimposed upon reality.
In Lain, the conspiratorial organization
known as the Knights of the Eastern Calculus
attempts to break down the boundaries between the
real world and the "wired", or online world. One
of their mechanisms for doing so is a game called
"PHANTOMa", an augmented-reality role-playing
game. As it happens, the particular technologies
the Knights use to "augment reality" have some
unfortunate psychological side effects for the players.
Augmented reality is an interesting idea, but I
really have to wonder whether we really need or
want any more mediation in experience
than we already get.
Please don't post "mod this up" messages in
response to my posts. Though I appreciate it that
you find what I have to say valuable, I don't play
the karma game, and I'm sure that you could find
more interesting ways to express what you
think on the subject at hand. If that's agreement,
okay; if not, okay; but either one is more welcome
than the equivalent of "ditto".
I've been around long enough to see both the
benefits and the costs of all sorts of moderation
systems. One of the first events of "Net history"
I witnessed, as a matter of fact, was the
bug-ridden abortive launch in 1993 of the world's
first USENET automoderation program -- Dick
Depew's ARMM. (The bug was that it issued
moderation messages for its own messages,
flooding the newsgroup it was intended to
protect.)
All moderation systems, like all voting systems,
have their strengths -- and weaknesses. Some are
susceptible to bias. Some have software bugs,
like ARMM. Some are overloaded by systematic
flooding, as "DipSlime" has proven on Usenet more
recently. Some can be mathematically manipulated.
It seems to me that one of the particular weaknesses
of the Slashdot system is that the randomness of
its "reinforcement" overinflates that reinforcement's
perceived importance. The same behaviorism, that
is, applies here that applies at the slot machine.
The chief use of the Slashdot moderation system
today seems to be that it cuts down on the need
to page through abusive off-topic flooding and
the ungrammatical hash of the repetitious and
dull. It doesn't elevate every
worthwhile post, and it can't without losing the
more valuable ability to suppress the
DipSlime-esque spam. Please don't ask it to.
Again, thanks for the vote of confidence -- but
don't bother trying to advise the moderators.
Think up your own response instead; it'll do both
you and the forum more good.
How can using linux halve the cost of a computer lab when the cost of operating system software is typically $100 per machine or less and the cost of hardware is typically $800 or more?
A computer lab isn't just a bunch of standalone
computers any more. The computers are networked,
and usually talk to at least a file/print
server. Students then can store their work on the
reliable server rather than on floppy disks or on
the individual computers' hard drives.
Once you introduce a file server into the system,
the costs of feeding the MS monkey on your back
rise rapidly. How come? Simple: Microsoft
servers require per-seat client licenses.
This is a foreign idea even in the commercial Unix
world, so it's understandable that Linux folks
might think it unconscionable, but it's how it is
for Microsoft-addicted organizations. Per-seat
licensing can easily drive your cost of operation
up, to the point where you may be paying several
times your hardware cost in license fees.
Another savings is that Linux-based OSes can
usually be made more efficient in their use of
hardware resources than Microsoft systems.
"Bloatware" is
no myth, which is why the "minimum hardware
requirements" for Windows keep escalating.
While there are some things you can do in Windows to
strip it down and make it more efficient, such as
substituting an alternate graphical shell for
Windows Explorer, these are not as well known
among Windows professionals as the equivalents
are among Linux and Unix professionals. Also, due
to the less well-designed integration of the
Windows system, such changes are more likely to
make it unstable.
There are other ways, as well, in which Microsoft
systems can cost your organization more. Microsoft
recommends, for instance, that you separate your
services out among several machines, so that if
one crashes, the others remain. While this design
is also used for Unix and Linux systems sometimes,
it is much less necessary -- you can usually "get
away with" less hardware without risking
instability.
And then, of course, there are the clerical costs
associated with license accounting... the legal
costs and downtime associated with license audits... and the miscellaneous other costs of
"compliance" with the lifestyle demands of a
Microsoft addiction. Like any other addiction,
dependency has opportunity costs and social costs
as well as the direct damage it causes.
So no, it is not at all surprising that a
Linux-based computer lab would cost dramatically
less to operate than a Windows lab, once you
factor in all the costs involved.
Re:The concept of intellectual property has got to
on
Fair IP Laws?
·
· Score: 2
The problem with your plan is that there would be no sharing of information. If you outlaw intellectual property, then there is very little incentive to share ideas with others. That would basically mean that companies and people would hide their ideas, and much time would be wasted by having multiple companies repeatedly inventing the same things.
It is possible that the economic inefficiency involved in a certain amount of reverse-engineering would be less (indeed, much less) than the economic inefficiency inherent to the thought-monopoly regime. Yes, reverse engineering
takes time and effort, but perhaps this time and effort would be less expensive
and more rewarding,
both to its direct beneficiaries and to society at large, than the various costs
of thought-monopoly.
What you call "intellectual property", recall, is merely a form of governmentally
enforced monopoly on the application of thought, hence my term thought-monopoly. Like any other
monopoly, or any other use of government force, it creates economic inefficiencies.
The "social contract" backing this monopoly -- as represented in the U.S. Constitution's
copyright clause -- is predicated on the belief
that the benefits of this monopoly outweigh its costs. This is not a necessarily true claim,
and where and when it is not true, thought monopoly is demonstrably unjustifiable on
economic grounds.
(I set aside the question of whether thought monopoly is justified, or even
permitted, on moral or "natural rights" grounds. I happen to believe it isn't,
but I think the economic argument, being a scientifically investigable one,
is more likely to be convincing than the moral one.)
On the other hand, telnet is (almost always) installed, while nc is rarely installed.
Surely that is a problem with your distribution,
not with the software itself! Certainly the fact
that the telnet Web browser is over
five times the size of nc should
suffice to prove it bloated and inefficient by
comparison. The fact that your distribution ships
a huge bloatware browser (97kB, compared to 17kB)
is just proof that you should use a less
overweight and Microsoftian distribution!!
Lurkers -- This is called "parody", not "trolling".
There's an awful lot of overhead in that one for a protocol you're not even using when you connect it to an HTTP server! Here's a lighter-weight alternative:
We've had a problem for YEARS with our legal beagles and the openSSH licence because the author thought he/she was being cute.
Are you sure you're talking about OpenSSH?
These were certainly problems with Tatu Ylonen's
SSH back in 1995.
However, the OpenSSH team has made a significant
point of taking patent-encumbered and otherwise
problematic code out of the OpenSSH code
base. For more information, see
the
OpenSSH FAQ.
That would be great except that the MS site licenses for universities require you to purchase licenses for every machine on your campus, wether it runs windows or not.
So don't use that option.
Let's say that you have 1000 computers,
100 of which run AxisOS, the Axis of Evil
Operating System. You can buy a "site license"
for $10 for each computer you own, or you can buy
the usual shrink-wrap license for $200 for each
computer that actually runs AxisOS.
$200 x 100 = $20,000 cost of indivudal licenses
$10 x 1000 = $10,000 cost of a site license
So for a moment it looks like it would be
cheaper to buy the site license. But if you buy
the site license, you are required to give the
Axis of Evil permission to "audit" (i.e. commit
terrorist acts using) all 1000 of your computers,
whereas with individual licenses they may only
terrorize the tenth of your computers that
actually run AxisOS.
Since you value the Homeland Security of your
900 patriotic computers much higher than $10,000,
you are actually better off with the individual
licenses.
The fundamental problem is: no one minds too much if a computer network is down. These things happen and people are used to it. But if the PHONE is out everyone from Grandpa to Little Susie is going to be complaining!
To put it another way, in a VoIP system the
reliability of the IP network forms an
upper limit upon the reliability of the
voice service. If your IP service has 99%
uptime -- that is, it is down 1% of the time --
then your phones will be down at least
1% of the time. In fact, since the VoIP system
itself has points of failure, you can predict
that your phones will be down rather more than
that.
It doesn't matter if your IP connectivity
downtime is due to power failure, routing
flakiness, or your ISP's obnoxious DHCP address
rotation policies. Unless your IP service is at
present at least as reliable as your voice phone
service, then moving to VoIP will
necessarily make your phones work less of
the time.
This may be a reasonable move for many
businesses. Business phone service is expensive,
and many businesses rely on their IP service at
least as much as their phones. They have service
guarantees for both. But for residential users,
a "utility" level of IP service reliability just
isn't here yet.
Or, to put it in modern American terms: Think
of the children! If your kid's trying to call
home and your ISP is being stupid, VoIP means your
phone doesn't ring.
Looking back, the commercialization
of the Internet (incl. Usenet, email, the Web)
seems more like a historical inevitability.
Perhaps this is a nitpick, but spamming isn't
"the commercialization of the Internet."
Commercialization is a matter of something being
used for trade, which is a voluntary exchange
between two parties. Spamming isn't voluntary on
the part of the recipient (or recipient's mail
host) -- it's an expense forced upon the
recipient by the sender. That's trespass and
involuntary conversion, not commercialization.
Yes, the Internet has become commercialized. The
first examples of that were UUNET and the other
early ISPs -- selling Internet access was a new
thing once upon a time. Another example would be
the commercialization of the Web -- the rise of
online stores and the like. Another would be
banner ads, which differ from spam in that they
are not "pushed" at the recipient; the recipient
instructs his computer to download them by
viewing a Web page.
Spam isn't commerce. It's crime. Let's not
malign honest businesspeople by conflating them
with those who "advertise" by spray-painting on
other people's property.
And even today, not all workstations have it. Try going to their workstation page and configure a Precision 340 (one of the two workstations they offer to large customers); I don't see an option for Linux on that machine. In fact, the only Linux workstation I see is a horribly overpriced Xeon-based Precision 530.
Just did! Working from the small business page (since I already knew it was possible from the higher education page -- working for scientists is like that) it was just a matter of selecting "Workstations", then the Precision 340, then a nice blue link just under the 340's picture that read "Click here for the Dell Precision 340 with Linux."
It sounds to me like your Dell "sales rep" is having some problems, if s/he can't even do what an untrained monkey such as myself can do using the online store. A paranoid person might suggest that this individual is receiving kickbacks from Microsoft which Dell's online store division isn't receiving. A more reasonable person might suggest that your sales rep is not terribly good at his or her job.
I have bought several Dell machines through work. You know: "workstations" for engineering and scientific applications. If that isn't where you would run Linux, I don't know where you would.
That is where "you would run Linux". That is also where a few hundred scientists for whom I work run Linux... on Dells. For a few years now, my employer (a hard-science research institution with about 1000 employees) has been recommending Dell workstations for scientists who want to run Linux. We continue to do so, and Dell continues to ship Red Hat 7.2 on Precision Workstation models and PowerEdge servers -- up to and including the highest-end systems such as the PowerEdge 8450.
The whole "Dell quits shipping Linux" deal has applied to "some machines [Dell] sells," to quote the Reuters article. Specifically, Dell has dropped Linux on "desktop" systems such as the OptiPlex and Dimension models. It has not dropped Linux support on workstations or servers, which you can still quite easily purchase with Red Hat preinstalled -- or with no operating system at all, or even with Novell (ick) -- through Dell's online store. It's true that these workstations cost more than Dell's desktops; this is because they're faster and don't use cheap WinHardware (which doesn't work well in Linux anyway).
(Looking over the number of Dell trademarks in this post, I feel compelled to make it clear that I don't get any money from recommending Dells. I just get fewer support hassles when my clients buy the same hardware rather than going to Joe's Discount PC Clones and Bait Shop.)
Please note that the linked article is a partisan opinion piece by a law professor. It isn't the work of a Fox columnist; it doesn't necessarily represent the opinions of Fox or its affiliates. Nonetheless, it is quite refreshing to see cogent arguments for freedom in the "mainstream" media.
FWIW, the "partisan opinion" in question is small-"L" libertarian Republican. What the author is arguing isn't just that the SSSCA is bad. It's that Republicans should take advantage of the fact that Democrats' support for the SSSCA makes Democrats look to be in bed with Big Business. I, for one, find it nice when either of the duopolistic parties adopt pro-freedom positions. It gives me hope that someday they might do so out of principle rather than just because it makes them look good. Is a pretense to virtue a possible antecedent to true virtue? I don't know.
You don't want to. It's just a couple of megs' worth of alt.binaries.* spam images printed on big sheets of lead. It's entirely unremarkable for its content -- it's the form which is exceptional and causes bookstores problems. (That, and the bookstores don't know how to deal with metals commodity traders who want to buy it to melt it down -- they don't like to sell to book-burners.)
Yeah, the quoted post was a troll. It gets my point across, though.
Standard vigilante tactics are to threaten people for running open relays, because it makes it easier for the spammers to send spam.
You've got it backwards. It's spammers who threaten anti-spam sysadmins and ISPs: sometimes with frivolous lawsuits, but sometimes even with death threats. Just take a look around news.admin.net-abuse.email.
All the anti-spam ISPs do is operate mail servers that refuse mail from spammers and those who host them. That's not "threatening"; it's just perfectly reasonable stewardship of their property. If every time I let you in my store you knock my stock off the shelves and crap on my floor, I'm going to pretty soon decide you don't get to do business with me any more.
Before we force Verio to force others to close their open relays, How about some evidence that closing open relays helps stop spam.
Take a look at the spam you receive. Where's it from? Most of the spam I get is from China and Korea. How come? Thanks to the anti-spam movement, the majority of domestic ISPs have shut down open relays and implemented anti-spam policies. The spammers have to go to places where the anti-spam movement hasn't reached in order to send their spam.
One of those places, evidently, is toad.com. No anti-spam ISP is going to "threaten" John Gilmore about that. They're just going to refuse to accept mail from him.
(The volume of spam is increasing for the same reason as the volume of email is increasing: there are more people online. Cities of one million people average more murders than villages of two hundred, too. That's why murder stats are reported per unit population.)
A lot of people would have made similar arguments for Napster. Turns out that there are a number of legal principles that override the "right to free speech" under various circumstances.
Yes, there are. Let's say I'm an officer of a bank. It's illegal for me to answer truthfully if someone comes up to me and says, "I want to rob your bank. What's the combination to the vault?" Or let's say I'm your next door neighbor. It's illegal for me to answer truthfully if someone comes up to me and says, "I want to frame dachshund for drug possession by dumping a bunch of crack vials in his/her house. What times is s/he away from home?"
What do these cases have in common? These are cases in which my speech would contribute materially to the commission of a crime. The argument you refer to regarding Napster is analogous: the crime is copyright infringement, and the allegation is that Napster is contributing to this crime by telling people how to find people willing to make illegal copies. (As it happens, I don't agree with this allegation, but that is not relevant here.)
However, it is not a crime for me to refuse to accept email from an open mail relay. My mail server is my property, and I may allow or refuse people access to it. By telling me which IP addresses harbor open mail relays, MAPS et al. are therefore not contributing to a crime, but rather helping me out with a perfectly legal act on my own property.
So no, an analogy between Napster and MAPS does not hold water.
No, actually, Verio doesn't. It's bound by the terms under which it (indirectly) acquired The Little Garden (tlg.net), which very clearly specified [toad.com] that there was to be no blocking of service on grounds of content.
Refusing to provide Internet service to an open mail relay is not "blocking of service on grounds of content." The attribute of being an open mail relay is a formal property of a mail server. It is defined without reference to the content of the messages transmitted or rejected by that mail server.
If Verio were blocking every message that contained the word "spam", then they would be blocking on the basis of content. If they were refusing service to John Gilmore because of the political views he expresses using that service, they would be blocking on the basis of (intended or past) content. They aren't doing that. They aren't inspecting the content of the messages at all -- just the formal (and thus content-neutral) attributes of the transmitting host.
Let's say Verio goes into the bookselling business, and promises to sell any book regardless of its content. I publish pornographic novels, and you publish travel books. One month, we both decide to publish books of our respective genres which weigh one ton apiece and are the size of a small car. Verio chooses not to sell these particular books, on the grounds that they will not fit on its shelves and will cause damage to its facilities due to their weight.
I then complain that Verio lied, and is not selling my pornographic book because of its content. Is my complaint valid? No, it is not. The decision wasn't on the basis of the content of the book, but its form. Verio chooses not to sell books which weigh a ton, regardless of their content, be they travel books or porn.
Part of John's complaint was that Verio was filtering mail to their customers based on the RBL, and that John couldn't send mail to his own ISP because of this.
So what? I'd say this might be a problem if he couldn't get in touch with Verio's administrators -- but he doesn't have any right to send email to Verio's other customers from his open relay. Even if he could not email Verio's administrators, I don't think that would be an issue of rights -- more an issue of Verio's competence or good sense. If he thinks they're incompetent, insensible, or malicious, he shouldn't keep sending them money.
I largely agree with what you said, but I think part of John's complaint which you missed is that Verio is making the decision for their customers as to whether or not to accept email from John's open relay, and not allowing their customers to make that decision themselves.
I don't think this changes the rights involved, although it may be a valid comment on Verio's desirability as one's ISP. (Spam filtering makes an ISP more desirable to me, but may make it less desirable to John Gilmore. Neither of us have the right, though, to impose our preference on any particular ISP.)
In general, do customers of a business have the right to force that business to change the services it offers? No. I don't have the right to force McDonald's to serve me a charbroiled hamburger made from USDA Choice beef, when all they are selling is fried hamburgers made from inferior beef. In fact, I wouldn't even have that right if there were no high-quality burger joints in my town.
McDonald's thinks it can do better by selling burgers I don't like. Good thing I don't have to eat them. Verio thinks it can do better by selling Internet service John Gilmore doesn't like. Good thing he doesn't have to use it. I think I can do better by not accepting mail from John Gilmore's open relay. Good thing I can choose to do so.
John Gilmore has every right to run an open mail relay.
Verio has every right not to sell Internet service to people who want to use it to run open mail relays. John Gilmore has no right to demand Internet service form Verio.
MAPS, ORDB, ORBZ, and the other blackhole lists have every right to tell me that John Gilmore is running an open relay. John Gilmore has no right to gag the blackhole lists' truthful speech about him.
I have every right to refuse to accept email from John Gilmore's open relay. I may do this on my own information, or on the advice of a blackhole list. John Gilmore has no right to force me to allow him or his traffic on my property.
So everyone's right, as long as everyone stays within their rights.
Perhaps the DoJ should consult with a librarian or data archivist the next time they find themselves obligated by a court to publish indexed documents online. In order to find a comment by author in their present system, one must first download a 1.8MB file (the index by author), then search it, then copy down the comment number, then go back to the main index, then choose the appropriate sub-page, then search for the comment number.
This system invites unnecessary load (in the form of reloads on that index file), makes it difficult to look up comments, and makes it impossible to search them. These are all problems that the worlds of library science and computer science have solved many times over, and the solutions are not being used.
Ignorance? Deterrence of public participation? Slap-dash job? Gross incompetence? The world may never know.
Not at all. You have the same fair-use rights with respect to a work licensed under the GPL that you have with respect to any other work. For instance, you have the right to publish reviews of a GPLed work, to quote briefly from it in doing so, etc. Nonetheless, nothing under fair use can give you the right to distribute someone else's work, whole and entire, as a portion of your own, and without that person's permission. That is what is involved in static linking of a library into a compiled program.
If I found a program like 'Netscape' freely available for anyone to download on the internet, is there anything illegial about making a new frontend for it that enhances 'Netscape' (such as Galeon does with Mozilla)? You might say I don't have any right to do that, but it's just not clear if I do or not.
Naturally, there might be several issues involved in what you propose, since what you propose is unclear, and made less clear by the vagaries of your grammar.
Do you propose, for instance, that you may download a copy of a closed-source program, make modifications to it, and distribute your modified version without the original creator's permission? I disagree; that strikes me as an obvious offense against the author's copyright in the work. A comparable offense would be for to take Frank Herbert's Dune, rewrite the ending, and publish the resulting work without the permission of the Herbert estate (the copyright holder).
By mentioning Netscape, Mozilla, and Galeon in particular you seem to be deliberately blurring the issue. Netscape Navigator is a piece of freely redistributable binary-only software (aka "freeware"), but the copyright holder does not give you permission to distribute derivative works. Mozilla, on the other hand, is a piece of open-source software (aka "free software"), wherein the copyright holder gives you limited permission to distribute derivative works. Galeon, as I understand it, is a legally made derivative work of Mozilla and of the GNOME libraries.
The interesting thing about the GPL is that most projects don't FORCE you to agree to it.
"Agreement to the GPL" is not relevant. The GPL is not a contract or "license agreement" which you may accept or reject. It is a unilateral grant of limited permission. If I place a piece of work of mine under the GPL, I am not proposing a contract to you, nor to the general public. I am granting permission to you and to the general public to do certain things with my work which would otherwise be illegal for you to do. The permission I grant is limited; I am not giving away all of my exclusive rights regarding my work. But I am granting you something (my permission) and I am not asking anything in return.
Yes, you read that right: I am not asking anything from you in return. After all, what would you have to give? It is a common misconception that you are "giving" me your "agreement" to only copy or distribute my work under the terms of the GPL. However, your "agreement" in this regard is not necessary. The GPL is the limit around the permission I have granted you. If you stray beyond its terms when copying my work, then you aren't "violating the GPL" -- you are simply copying and distributing a copyrighted work without its copyright holder's permission. In other words, you're violating copyright law. And by agreeing not to violate the law w.r.t. my works, you certainly wouldn't be giving me anything I didn't already have.
To clarify: When I release a piece of my work under the terms of the GPL (in common parlance, when I "GPL my work") I am not giving you the copyright over my work. That I retain. I am not giving you unlimited permission to copy my work. I am not contracting with you, or proposing a contract. I am simply giving you very carefully limited permission to copy and distribute my work.
Of course, I believe that not allowing you to change the GPL license itself (very un-GNU-ish) violates fair use by itself. (It's just a document, as long as you give credit, it should be perfectly legal.)
I suspect that you do not know what the expression fair use means. It does not mean, and has never meant, "I think my use is fair; therefore, what anybody else thinks does not matter." It means that copyrighted works may be used for certain purposes (namely "criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship... research... [or] [p]arody" according to chillingeffects.org) without infringing on copyright.
For you to create a derivative work from the GPL (which is a copyrighted work of the FSF) and publish it as a license to your software would not fall into any of those categories. Publishing it as a parody or a critique of the GPL might, I would strongly hope (though I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice). But the GPL itself is a copyrighted work, you don't have any right to coöpt the efforts and research of the FSF legal counsel by making knock-offs of the GPL without the copyright holder's permission.
Mind you, if the judgement turns out like I believe it will, I'll be the first downloading all the GPLed software I can, and making it freely downloadable under it's non-binding GPL v2 license!
If you believe that the invalidation of the GPL would allow you to relicense GPLed works under your choice of license, you are deluding yourself. In the absence of the GPL, those works revert to normal copyright protection -- the same as protects Dune and Microsoft Word. If the GPL were ruled invalid, you would be no more justified in distributing copies of GNU Emacs than you would in running off your own print run of Dune.
For example, if you're writing a program which decodes and formats web pages and you want to include a mechanism for playback of midi files, using a library distributed under the GPL is an impossibility, because even tho it might make up less than 1% of the total code of the product, linking to the library will force the terms of the GPL onto each and every other component. This is what the GPL says - if you dont like it, dont use the software. But is this using copyright to restrict rights beyond the intention of copyright law?
Not at all. Under copyright law, you have no right to include my code in your product without my permission. If you use my code without my permission, you're breaking the law. That is the default position from which the GPL (and all other source-code licenses) build.
When I place my code under the GPL, I'm giving you a limited right to copy it and include it in your work -- that is, a right to copy and include it in certain ways, for certain purposes. You don't get the right to include it in a proprietary, closed work. You don't get the right to lie to your customers and say that you wrote the whole thing.
The GPL doesn't create new restrictions upon your "right" to include my code in your product, because the default position under copyright law is that you don't have any such right. If you want to include it, all you need is my permission. The GPL just says "I give you limited permission. I give you permission to include my code in some kinds of products -- namely, GPLed ones. If you want to include my code in non-GPLed ones, you don't (yet) have my permission to do that."
Incidentally, there's no such thing as "violating the GPL." (Well, there is, but it would involve printing it out, rolling it up, and giving it to the goatse.cx guy.) If you include my code in a way that you don't have permission to, you are violating copyright law. It's exactly the same crime as if you included a copy of Microsoft Word in your code.
The e-mail, purportedly sent from an MSN.com address, was actually routed through the server of an elementary school in Chonnam, Korea. (emphasis mine)
It might be amusing for Wired, or one of Jones's opponents for that matter, to get in touch with the Korean embassy on this issue. I know (believe me, I know) that a lot of Korean sites are doing precious little about their open relays... but what, I wonder, would the Korean government think about its educational resources being stolen for the furtherance of an American politician's campaign?
"We've replaced this antispammer's whack-a-mole mallets with axes of evil. Let's see if he notices...."
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Nothing at all, of course! It is perfectly normal and acceptable for companies, especially in a troubled economy, to pare back and focus on their core competencies. The Post article is irresponsibly making a fuss over Microsoft leveraging two of its well-demonstrated core competencies: lying to the government and subverting democracy. These essential skills are central to Microsoft's operation, and it's an abuse of free speech to present them as something dangerous -- worse, it might panic the consumers!
Unquestionably, it is "idiotic and inflammatory", as you point out, for the newspaper of record in our nation's capital to report on these perfectly normal goings-on. The matter of which development efforts are funded by our tax monies has no bearing whatsoever on the public interest. It may be safely left up to our trusted government agencies and their staunch allies in large corporations and special interest groups.
After all, what would we commoners have to tell them? They're the experts, and should be left to run the military and the government without any bother from us civilians. And under our sacred and inviolable system of government, power vests in the State, its Employees, and its Contractors -- not in the unwashed masses. For a so-called "newspaper" to "inform" us about the government's activities is nothing short of treason.
In Lain, the conspiratorial organization known as the Knights of the Eastern Calculus attempts to break down the boundaries between the real world and the "wired", or online world. One of their mechanisms for doing so is a game called "PHANTOMa", an augmented-reality role-playing game. As it happens, the particular technologies the Knights use to "augment reality" have some unfortunate psychological side effects for the players.
Augmented reality is an interesting idea, but I really have to wonder whether we really need or want any more mediation in experience than we already get.
I've been around long enough to see both the benefits and the costs of all sorts of moderation systems. One of the first events of "Net history" I witnessed, as a matter of fact, was the bug-ridden abortive launch in 1993 of the world's first USENET automoderation program -- Dick Depew's ARMM. (The bug was that it issued moderation messages for its own messages, flooding the newsgroup it was intended to protect.)
All moderation systems, like all voting systems, have their strengths -- and weaknesses. Some are susceptible to bias. Some have software bugs, like ARMM. Some are overloaded by systematic flooding, as "DipSlime" has proven on Usenet more recently. Some can be mathematically manipulated. It seems to me that one of the particular weaknesses of the Slashdot system is that the randomness of its "reinforcement" overinflates that reinforcement's perceived importance. The same behaviorism, that is, applies here that applies at the slot machine.
The chief use of the Slashdot moderation system today seems to be that it cuts down on the need to page through abusive off-topic flooding and the ungrammatical hash of the repetitious and dull. It doesn't elevate every worthwhile post, and it can't without losing the more valuable ability to suppress the DipSlime-esque spam. Please don't ask it to.
Again, thanks for the vote of confidence -- but don't bother trying to advise the moderators. Think up your own response instead; it'll do both you and the forum more good.
A computer lab isn't just a bunch of standalone computers any more. The computers are networked, and usually talk to at least a file/print server. Students then can store their work on the reliable server rather than on floppy disks or on the individual computers' hard drives.
Once you introduce a file server into the system, the costs of feeding the MS monkey on your back rise rapidly. How come? Simple: Microsoft servers require per-seat client licenses. This is a foreign idea even in the commercial Unix world, so it's understandable that Linux folks might think it unconscionable, but it's how it is for Microsoft-addicted organizations. Per-seat licensing can easily drive your cost of operation up, to the point where you may be paying several times your hardware cost in license fees.
Another savings is that Linux-based OSes can usually be made more efficient in their use of hardware resources than Microsoft systems. "Bloatware" is no myth, which is why the "minimum hardware requirements" for Windows keep escalating. While there are some things you can do in Windows to strip it down and make it more efficient, such as substituting an alternate graphical shell for Windows Explorer, these are not as well known among Windows professionals as the equivalents are among Linux and Unix professionals. Also, due to the less well-designed integration of the Windows system, such changes are more likely to make it unstable.
There are other ways, as well, in which Microsoft systems can cost your organization more. Microsoft recommends, for instance, that you separate your services out among several machines, so that if one crashes, the others remain. While this design is also used for Unix and Linux systems sometimes, it is much less necessary -- you can usually "get away with" less hardware without risking instability.
And then, of course, there are the clerical costs associated with license accounting ... the legal
costs and downtime associated with license audits ... and the miscellaneous other costs of
"compliance" with the lifestyle demands of a
Microsoft addiction. Like any other addiction,
dependency has opportunity costs and social costs
as well as the direct damage it causes.
So no, it is not at all surprising that a Linux-based computer lab would cost dramatically less to operate than a Windows lab, once you factor in all the costs involved.
It is possible that the economic inefficiency involved in a certain amount of reverse-engineering would be less (indeed, much less) than the economic inefficiency inherent to the thought-monopoly regime. Yes, reverse engineering takes time and effort, but perhaps this time and effort would be less expensive and more rewarding, both to its direct beneficiaries and to society at large, than the various costs of thought-monopoly.
What you call "intellectual property", recall, is merely a form of governmentally enforced monopoly on the application of thought, hence my term thought-monopoly. Like any other monopoly, or any other use of government force, it creates economic inefficiencies. The "social contract" backing this monopoly -- as represented in the U.S. Constitution's copyright clause -- is predicated on the belief that the benefits of this monopoly outweigh its costs. This is not a necessarily true claim, and where and when it is not true, thought monopoly is demonstrably unjustifiable on economic grounds.
(I set aside the question of whether thought monopoly is justified, or even permitted, on moral or "natural rights" grounds. I happen to believe it isn't, but I think the economic argument, being a scientifically investigable one, is more likely to be convincing than the moral one.)
Surely that is a problem with your distribution, not with the software itself! Certainly the fact that the telnet Web browser is over five times the size of nc should suffice to prove it bloated and inefficient by comparison. The fact that your distribution ships a huge bloatware browser (97kB, compared to 17kB) is just proof that you should use a less overweight and Microsoftian distribution!!
Lurkers -- This is called "parody", not "trolling".
There's an awful lot of overhead in that one for a protocol you're not even using when you connect it to an HTTP server! Here's a lighter-weight alternative:
(What's nc?)
Are you sure you're talking about OpenSSH? These were certainly problems with Tatu Ylonen's SSH back in 1995. However, the OpenSSH team has made a significant point of taking patent-encumbered and otherwise problematic code out of the OpenSSH code base. For more information, see the OpenSSH FAQ.
So don't use that option.
Let's say that you have 1000 computers, 100 of which run AxisOS, the Axis of Evil Operating System. You can buy a "site license" for $10 for each computer you own, or you can buy the usual shrink-wrap license for $200 for each computer that actually runs AxisOS.
$200 x 100 = $20,000 cost of indivudal licenses
$10 x 1000 = $10,000 cost of a site license
So for a moment it looks like it would be cheaper to buy the site license. But if you buy the site license, you are required to give the Axis of Evil permission to "audit" (i.e. commit terrorist acts using) all 1000 of your computers, whereas with individual licenses they may only terrorize the tenth of your computers that actually run AxisOS.
Since you value the Homeland Security of your 900 patriotic computers much higher than $10,000, you are actually better off with the individual licenses.
Sounds like a Win to me.
To put it another way, in a VoIP system the reliability of the IP network forms an upper limit upon the reliability of the voice service. If your IP service has 99% uptime -- that is, it is down 1% of the time -- then your phones will be down at least 1% of the time. In fact, since the VoIP system itself has points of failure, you can predict that your phones will be down rather more than that.
It doesn't matter if your IP connectivity downtime is due to power failure, routing flakiness, or your ISP's obnoxious DHCP address rotation policies. Unless your IP service is at present at least as reliable as your voice phone service, then moving to VoIP will necessarily make your phones work less of the time.
This may be a reasonable move for many businesses. Business phone service is expensive, and many businesses rely on their IP service at least as much as their phones. They have service guarantees for both. But for residential users, a "utility" level of IP service reliability just isn't here yet.
Or, to put it in modern American terms: Think of the children! If your kid's trying to call home and your ISP is being stupid, VoIP means your phone doesn't ring.
Perhaps this is a nitpick, but spamming isn't "the commercialization of the Internet." Commercialization is a matter of something being used for trade, which is a voluntary exchange between two parties. Spamming isn't voluntary on the part of the recipient (or recipient's mail host) -- it's an expense forced upon the recipient by the sender. That's trespass and involuntary conversion, not commercialization.
Yes, the Internet has become commercialized. The first examples of that were UUNET and the other early ISPs -- selling Internet access was a new thing once upon a time. Another example would be the commercialization of the Web -- the rise of online stores and the like. Another would be banner ads, which differ from spam in that they are not "pushed" at the recipient; the recipient instructs his computer to download them by viewing a Web page.
Spam isn't commerce. It's crime. Let's not malign honest businesspeople by conflating them with those who "advertise" by spray-painting on other people's property.
That is a factually incorrect statement.
Please see Selling Free Software, an official FSF position document which encourages free software authors to sell software, for a counterexample.
Please retract your error.
Just did! Working from the small business page (since I already knew it was possible from the higher education page -- working for scientists is like that) it was just a matter of selecting "Workstations", then the Precision 340, then a nice blue link just under the 340's picture that read "Click here for the Dell Precision 340 with Linux."
It sounds to me like your Dell "sales rep" is having some problems, if s/he can't even do what an untrained monkey such as myself can do using the online store. A paranoid person might suggest that this individual is receiving kickbacks from Microsoft which Dell's online store division isn't receiving. A more reasonable person might suggest that your sales rep is not terribly good at his or her job.
That is where "you would run Linux". That is also where a few hundred scientists for whom I work run Linux ... on Dells. For a few years now, my employer (a hard-science research institution with about 1000 employees) has been recommending Dell workstations for scientists who want to run Linux. We continue to do so, and Dell continues to ship Red Hat 7.2 on Precision Workstation models and PowerEdge servers -- up to and including the highest-end systems such as the PowerEdge 8450.
The whole "Dell quits shipping Linux" deal has applied to "some machines [Dell] sells," to quote the Reuters article. Specifically, Dell has dropped Linux on "desktop" systems such as the OptiPlex and Dimension models. It has not dropped Linux support on workstations or servers, which you can still quite easily purchase with Red Hat preinstalled -- or with no operating system at all, or even with Novell (ick) -- through Dell's online store. It's true that these workstations cost more than Dell's desktops; this is because they're faster and don't use cheap WinHardware (which doesn't work well in Linux anyway).
(Looking over the number of Dell trademarks in this post, I feel compelled to make it clear that I don't get any money from recommending Dells. I just get fewer support hassles when my clients buy the same hardware rather than going to Joe's Discount PC Clones and Bait Shop.)
FWIW, the "partisan opinion" in question is small-"L" libertarian Republican. What the author is arguing isn't just that the SSSCA is bad. It's that Republicans should take advantage of the fact that Democrats' support for the SSSCA makes Democrats look to be in bed with Big Business. I, for one, find it nice when either of the duopolistic parties adopt pro-freedom positions. It gives me hope that someday they might do so out of principle rather than just because it makes them look good. Is a pretense to virtue a possible antecedent to true virtue? I don't know.
You don't want to. It's just a couple of megs' worth of alt.binaries.* spam images printed on big sheets of lead. It's entirely unremarkable for its content -- it's the form which is exceptional and causes bookstores problems. (That, and the bookstores don't know how to deal with metals commodity traders who want to buy it to melt it down -- they don't like to sell to book-burners.)
Yeah, the quoted post was a troll. It gets my point across, though.
You've got it backwards. It's spammers who threaten anti-spam sysadmins and ISPs: sometimes with frivolous lawsuits, but sometimes even with death threats. Just take a look around news.admin.net-abuse.email.
All the anti-spam ISPs do is operate mail servers that refuse mail from spammers and those who host them. That's not "threatening"; it's just perfectly reasonable stewardship of their property. If every time I let you in my store you knock my stock off the shelves and crap on my floor, I'm going to pretty soon decide you don't get to do business with me any more.
Take a look at the spam you receive. Where's it from? Most of the spam I get is from China and Korea. How come? Thanks to the anti-spam movement, the majority of domestic ISPs have shut down open relays and implemented anti-spam policies. The spammers have to go to places where the anti-spam movement hasn't reached in order to send their spam.
One of those places, evidently, is toad.com. No anti-spam ISP is going to "threaten" John Gilmore about that. They're just going to refuse to accept mail from him.
(The volume of spam is increasing for the same reason as the volume of email is increasing: there are more people online. Cities of one million people average more murders than villages of two hundred, too. That's why murder stats are reported per unit population.)
Yes, there are. Let's say I'm an officer of a bank. It's illegal for me to answer truthfully if someone comes up to me and says, "I want to rob your bank. What's the combination to the vault?" Or let's say I'm your next door neighbor. It's illegal for me to answer truthfully if someone comes up to me and says, "I want to frame dachshund for drug possession by dumping a bunch of crack vials in his/her house. What times is s/he away from home?"
What do these cases have in common? These are cases in which my speech would contribute materially to the commission of a crime. The argument you refer to regarding Napster is analogous: the crime is copyright infringement, and the allegation is that Napster is contributing to this crime by telling people how to find people willing to make illegal copies. (As it happens, I don't agree with this allegation, but that is not relevant here.)
However, it is not a crime for me to refuse to accept email from an open mail relay. My mail server is my property, and I may allow or refuse people access to it. By telling me which IP addresses harbor open mail relays, MAPS et al. are therefore not contributing to a crime, but rather helping me out with a perfectly legal act on my own property.
So no, an analogy between Napster and MAPS does not hold water.
Refusing to provide Internet service to an open mail relay is not "blocking of service on grounds of content." The attribute of being an open mail relay is a formal property of a mail server. It is defined without reference to the content of the messages transmitted or rejected by that mail server.
If Verio were blocking every message that contained the word "spam", then they would be blocking on the basis of content. If they were refusing service to John Gilmore because of the political views he expresses using that service, they would be blocking on the basis of (intended or past) content. They aren't doing that. They aren't inspecting the content of the messages at all -- just the formal (and thus content-neutral) attributes of the transmitting host.
Let's say Verio goes into the bookselling business, and promises to sell any book regardless of its content. I publish pornographic novels, and you publish travel books. One month, we both decide to publish books of our respective genres which weigh one ton apiece and are the size of a small car. Verio chooses not to sell these particular books, on the grounds that they will not fit on its shelves and will cause damage to its facilities due to their weight.
I then complain that Verio lied, and is not selling my pornographic book because of its content. Is my complaint valid? No, it is not. The decision wasn't on the basis of the content of the book, but its form. Verio chooses not to sell books which weigh a ton, regardless of their content, be they travel books or porn.
So what? I'd say this might be a problem if he couldn't get in touch with Verio's administrators -- but he doesn't have any right to send email to Verio's other customers from his open relay. Even if he could not email Verio's administrators, I don't think that would be an issue of rights -- more an issue of Verio's competence or good sense. If he thinks they're incompetent, insensible, or malicious, he shouldn't keep sending them money.
I don't think this changes the rights involved, although it may be a valid comment on Verio's desirability as one's ISP. (Spam filtering makes an ISP more desirable to me, but may make it less desirable to John Gilmore. Neither of us have the right, though, to impose our preference on any particular ISP.)
In general, do customers of a business have the right to force that business to change the services it offers? No. I don't have the right to force McDonald's to serve me a charbroiled hamburger made from USDA Choice beef, when all they are selling is fried hamburgers made from inferior beef. In fact, I wouldn't even have that right if there were no high-quality burger joints in my town.
McDonald's thinks it can do better by selling burgers I don't like. Good thing I don't have to eat them. Verio thinks it can do better by selling Internet service John Gilmore doesn't like. Good thing he doesn't have to use it. I think I can do better by not accepting mail from John Gilmore's open relay. Good thing I can choose to do so.
Verio has every right not to sell Internet service to people who want to use it to run open mail relays. John Gilmore has no right to demand Internet service form Verio.
MAPS, ORDB, ORBZ, and the other blackhole lists have every right to tell me that John Gilmore is running an open relay. John Gilmore has no right to gag the blackhole lists' truthful speech about him.
I have every right to refuse to accept email from John Gilmore's open relay. I may do this on my own information, or on the advice of a blackhole list. John Gilmore has no right to force me to allow him or his traffic on my property.
So everyone's right, as long as everyone stays within their rights.
This system invites unnecessary load (in the form of reloads on that index file), makes it difficult to look up comments, and makes it impossible to search them. These are all problems that the worlds of library science and computer science have solved many times over, and the solutions are not being used.
Ignorance? Deterrence of public participation? Slap-dash job? Gross incompetence? The world may never know.
Not at all. You have the same fair-use rights with respect to a work licensed under the GPL that you have with respect to any other work. For instance, you have the right to publish reviews of a GPLed work, to quote briefly from it in doing so, etc. Nonetheless, nothing under fair use can give you the right to distribute someone else's work, whole and entire, as a portion of your own, and without that person's permission. That is what is involved in static linking of a library into a compiled program.
Naturally, there might be several issues involved in what you propose, since what you propose is unclear, and made less clear by the vagaries of your grammar.
Do you propose, for instance, that you may download a copy of a closed-source program, make modifications to it, and distribute your modified version without the original creator's permission? I disagree; that strikes me as an obvious offense against the author's copyright in the work. A comparable offense would be for to take Frank Herbert's Dune, rewrite the ending, and publish the resulting work without the permission of the Herbert estate (the copyright holder).
By mentioning Netscape, Mozilla, and Galeon in particular you seem to be deliberately blurring the issue. Netscape Navigator is a piece of freely redistributable binary-only software (aka "freeware"), but the copyright holder does not give you permission to distribute derivative works. Mozilla, on the other hand, is a piece of open-source software (aka "free software"), wherein the copyright holder gives you limited permission to distribute derivative works. Galeon, as I understand it, is a legally made derivative work of Mozilla and of the GNOME libraries.
"Agreement to the GPL" is not relevant. The GPL is not a contract or "license agreement" which you may accept or reject. It is a unilateral grant of limited permission. If I place a piece of work of mine under the GPL, I am not proposing a contract to you, nor to the general public. I am granting permission to you and to the general public to do certain things with my work which would otherwise be illegal for you to do. The permission I grant is limited; I am not giving away all of my exclusive rights regarding my work. But I am granting you something (my permission) and I am not asking anything in return.
Yes, you read that right: I am not asking anything from you in return. After all, what would you have to give? It is a common misconception that you are "giving" me your "agreement" to only copy or distribute my work under the terms of the GPL. However, your "agreement" in this regard is not necessary. The GPL is the limit around the permission I have granted you. If you stray beyond its terms when copying my work, then you aren't "violating the GPL" -- you are simply copying and distributing a copyrighted work without its copyright holder's permission. In other words, you're violating copyright law. And by agreeing not to violate the law w.r.t. my works, you certainly wouldn't be giving me anything I didn't already have.
To clarify: When I release a piece of my work under the terms of the GPL (in common parlance, when I "GPL my work") I am not giving you the copyright over my work. That I retain. I am not giving you unlimited permission to copy my work. I am not contracting with you, or proposing a contract. I am simply giving you very carefully limited permission to copy and distribute my work.
I suspect that you do not know what the expression fair use means. It does not mean, and has never meant, "I think my use is fair; therefore, what anybody else thinks does not matter." It means that copyrighted works may be used for certain purposes (namely "criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship ... research ... [or] [p]arody" according to chillingeffects.org) without infringing on copyright.
For you to create a derivative work from the GPL (which is a copyrighted work of the FSF) and publish it as a license to your software would not fall into any of those categories. Publishing it as a parody or a critique of the GPL might, I would strongly hope (though I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice). But the GPL itself is a copyrighted work, you don't have any right to coöpt the efforts and research of the FSF legal counsel by making knock-offs of the GPL without the copyright holder's permission.
If you believe that the invalidation of the GPL would allow you to relicense GPLed works under your choice of license, you are deluding yourself. In the absence of the GPL, those works revert to normal copyright protection -- the same as protects Dune and Microsoft Word. If the GPL were ruled invalid, you would be no more justified in distributing copies of GNU Emacs than you would in running off your own print run of Dune.
Not at all. Under copyright law, you have no right to include my code in your product without my permission. If you use my code without my permission, you're breaking the law. That is the default position from which the GPL (and all other source-code licenses) build.
When I place my code under the GPL, I'm giving you a limited right to copy it and include it in your work -- that is, a right to copy and include it in certain ways, for certain purposes. You don't get the right to include it in a proprietary, closed work. You don't get the right to lie to your customers and say that you wrote the whole thing.
The GPL doesn't create new restrictions upon your "right" to include my code in your product, because the default position under copyright law is that you don't have any such right. If you want to include it, all you need is my permission. The GPL just says "I give you limited permission. I give you permission to include my code in some kinds of products -- namely, GPLed ones. If you want to include my code in non-GPLed ones, you don't (yet) have my permission to do that."
Incidentally, there's no such thing as "violating the GPL." (Well, there is, but it would involve printing it out, rolling it up, and giving it to the goatse.cx guy.) If you include my code in a way that you don't have permission to, you are violating copyright law. It's exactly the same crime as if you included a copy of Microsoft Word in your code.
It might be amusing for Wired, or one of Jones's opponents for that matter, to get in touch with the Korean embassy on this issue. I know (believe me, I know) that a lot of Korean sites are doing precious little about their open relays ... but what, I wonder, would the Korean government think about its educational resources being stolen for the furtherance of an American politician's campaign?
"We've replaced this antispammer's whack-a-mole mallets with axes of evil. Let's see if he notices ...."