As contradictory to the "Cause" as this may seem, doesn't anyone see that Bram is probably doing this because the RIAA/MPAA and other major industries are blaming his project, a project that produces a protocol, for the rampant copyright infringement on the Internet?
The irony here in recent news is that the RIAA/MPAA are directly blaming BitTorrent for the Star Wars EP3 leak, but its been repeatedly shown that the leaked copy came from inside, and was released before the movie hit the public.
...and somehow BitTorrent is to blame?
Are we blaming Boeing for the 9/11 tragedy too? Or blaming Kabar for making high-quality blades, because someone killed with one?
This is ridiculous, and I personally applaud Bram's efforts here to absolutely saturate the mainstream media and dark corners of the Internet with as much media as possible, using his legitimate tool. I personally don't care for any of the copyrighted dreck on television or the radio these days, but others might.
Also, whenever you can, please keep correcting people who regard this as "piracy", "stealing" or "theft". It is nothing of the sort. It is "copyright infringement", plain and simple. If I "steal" your bicycle, I have deprived you of something you previously owned, which I now posess. Making digitally-perfect copies of a work is not "stealing" or "theft", though it is very much illegal in most countries.
You can't steal profits that weren't already earned. You can't steal "projected" profits. Keep up the pressure on these companies who continue to misunderstand the terms they're spewing in public. There's a certain Heinekin commercial that is grossly misrepresenting the nature of copyright infringement.
I corrected a Wall Street Journal reporter for a front-page article in the Marketplace section of the dead-tree version for promoting the "sharing of music" by burning copies of music and handing it out.
He wrote a story that included how some woman (which he named), was bored with the looping music playing in her resort in the Caribbean islands and decided to use her laptop, complete with burner, to burn several CDs of her favorite music to give to the resort to play instead. He was promoting the "advance of technology" for "enabling" people to do these things. This is disgusting.
THIS is where we need to start directing our angst... at the mainstream media misrepresenting these technologies.
"If such an "attack" cannot even knock you down what chance does it have in a larger attack?"
My point was that 10k of data from 100 concurrent hosts is barely noticable on the radar, but 10k of data from 100,000 concurrent random and always changing hosts is very disruptive to production services.
I'm not denegrating the need for Tor, just that the OP stated that it couldn't be used to DDoS or abuse servers, and I've pointed out several cases where exactly that condition is occurring... daily.
I just did some more searching with geoip, and this is the current sorted, unique list of countries currently spamming us with this Poker trackback DDoS crap:
GeoIP Country Edition: AE, United Arab Emirates GeoIP Country Edition: AR, Argentina GeoIP Country Edition: AT, Austria GeoIP Country Edition: AU, Australia GeoIP Country Edition: BO, Bolivia GeoIP Country Edition: BR, Brazil GeoIP Country Edition: CA, Canada GeoIP Country Edition: CH, Switzerland GeoIP Country Edition: CI, Cote D'Ivoire GeoIP Country Edition: CN, China GeoIP Country Edition: CO, Colombia GeoIP Country Edition: CY, Cyprus GeoIP Country Edition: DE, Germany GeoIP Country Edition: DK, Denmark GeoIP Country Edition: DZ, Algeria GeoIP Country Edition: EE, Estonia GeoIP Country Edition: EG, Egypt GeoIP Country Edition: ES, Spain GeoIP Country Edition: FR, France GeoIP Country Edition: GB, United Kingdom GeoIP Country Edition: GR, Greece GeoIP Country Edition: GU, Guam GeoIP Country Edition: HK, Hong Kong GeoIP Country Edition: HN, Honduras GeoIP Country Edition: HU, Hungary GeoIP Country Edition: IL, Israel GeoIP Country Edition: IN, India GeoIP Country Edition: IP Address not found GeoIP Country Edition: IR, Iran, Islamic Republic of GeoIP Country Edition: IT, Italy GeoIP Country Edition: JO, Jordan GeoIP Country Edition: JP, Japan GeoIP Country Edition: KR, Korea, Republic of GeoIP Country Edition: KY, Cayman Islands GeoIP Country Edition: KZ, Kazakhstan GeoIP Country Edition: LB, Lebanon GeoIP Country Edition: MX, Mexico GeoIP Country Edition: MY, Malaysia GeoIP Country Edition: NG, Nigeria GeoIP Country Edition: NL, Netherlands GeoIP Country Edition: NO, Norway GeoIP Country Edition: NZ, New Zealand GeoIP Country Edition: PH, Philippines GeoIP Country Edition: PL, Poland GeoIP Country Edition: PT, Portugal GeoIP Country Edition: RO, Romania GeoIP Country Edition: RU, Russian Federation GeoIP Country Edition: SA, Saudi Arabia GeoIP Country Edition: SD, Sudan GeoIP Country Edition: SE, Sweden GeoIP Country Edition: SG, Singapore GeoIP Country Edition: SV, El Salvador GeoIP Country Edition: TH, Thailand GeoIP Country Edition: TN, Tunisia GeoIP Country Edition: TR, Turkey GeoIP Country Edition: TW, Taiwan GeoIP Country Edition: US, United States GeoIP Country Edition: VE, Venezuela GeoIP Country Edition: VN, Vietnam GeoIP Country Edition: ZA, South Africa GeoIP Country Edition: ZW, Zimbabwe
"But to say people are going to use this to ddos sites is just stupid. Use the network before making such claims and see for yourself how it works. People who ddos sites don't need tor and wouldn't bother, it's too slow, too easy to trace via timing analysis, and the convenience factor alone means it will probably remain slow due to contantly being overloaded."
You may think its stupid, but unfortunately, its reality. The reality is that even though it slower, its still effective.
Here is an example of some log entries of spammers using Tor to forge referers and trackback spam to domains I host. Whatever tool they're using "broke" the url because they lowercased it (the url is valid, if the 'q' is uppercased).
We survived 2 slashdottings 2 days in a row last week, barely a blip on our network radar, bu t a few days later, we were hit with this mountain of traffic from random locations, all within a 10-15 minute span, and only about an hour after I blocked the entire country of Brazil from reaching port 25 (the whole 200.0.0.0). Its definately maliscious, and definately intentional. I'm fending off attacks on our servers almost daily now, from netbios floods to SYN and TIME_WAIT attacks, to other things. I've been using the TARPIT module in iptables to slow things down, but they keep on coming, from thousands of unique IPs, across all range of our open ports (22, 53, 80, 2401, whatever).
So yes, Tor is most-definately being used to spam and DDoS sites, that is a fact and reality, which I can consistently prove with graphs, logs, and charts.
But it does serve a valid purpose, so I don't block the Tor IP range... yet.
Palmsource's migration to using the Linux kernel does NOT mean it will be running a Linux userland. They are replacing the legacy kernels they currently maintain (replete with all of their various bugs), with a Linux kernel.
They've said time and time again that they aren't migrating to Linux for the userland, they're leveraging the architecture and platform and driver support that the Linux kernel provides.
That being said, if they get the Linux kernel running on it, any enterprising young hackers can certainly turn it into a Linux-based PDA, complete with Linux userland applications as well, like Opie and the other original CRL iPAQ handhelds have been doing for close to 6 years.
But don't expect Palm applications to run in the context of a Linux userland (i.e. bash, ash, etc.), and don't expect PalmOS to be running Linux applications anytime soon...
Damn, I just made a reply to another post about this exact subject, and then read further down and caught your post.... here it is. They totally fucked this coworker of my wife's... badly.
My wife works for [insert biggest pharma company in the world here], and has for about 6 years. I used to work for them as well for 5-6 years myself. They were good when I was in, then things got "International", and I resigned quick before the walls started coming down.
In my wife's department (Cancer Biology), there are people who have been there for literally decades. They're so entrenched, they know every system, process, procedure ever made there. If you want to know an answer to some complicated question, these people will know it... and if they don't, they definately know who WILL know.
One person in particular had been there for 34 years, 11 months.. and they were going around looking for ways to "cut costs" in her department.
When you retire at 35-years or more into $PHARMA, you get a nice fat severance. Something like $100k/year for every year there + your stock earnings and benefits cashed out, which amounted to over $1M for this person. That's $100k * 35 + $1M (that's over $4.5M total to retire upon).
They fired him...
...30 days before his 35-year anniversary with the company. He got $60k total as a severance. They didn't want to have to pay out his retirement and severance, so they let him go 4 weeks before he would have earned it. If he had known, he probably could have used up 4 weeks of his vacation to eat up the time instead, but he never saw it coming. Nobody did.
"If I recall correctly, the drive inside the Mac Mini is a laptop (2.5") drive. Those aren't really known for great performance."
That may be true of the drives Apple is using, but it definately is not true of 2.5" drives. In fact, 2.5" drives are almost always going to be faster because of lower rotational mass, as well as other factors (caching on the drive, number of platters, etc.)
Right now my primary laptop drive is close to 40% faster than a brand-new Maxtor drive in a very fast server in the server room:
Laptop
/dev/hda: Timing cached reads: 2416 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1207.58 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 110 MB in 3.04 seconds = 36.20 MB/sec
/dev/hdc: Timing cached reads: 2416 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1206.98 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 102 MB in 3.04 seconds = 33.52 MB/sec
Server
/dev/hda: Timing cached reads: 556 MB in 2.01 seconds = 276.38 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 134 MB in 3.01 seconds = 44.51 MB/sec
/dev/hdb: Timing cached reads: 624 MB in 2.01 seconds = 310.65 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 102 MB in 3.01 seconds = 33.91 MB/sec
Why are we complaining that Microsoft is "under attack"? Haven't we all been under attack by hundreds of thousands of Microsoft Windows machines for the last 5-6 years, every day, all day?
Heck, a quick scan of my log today so far shows over 2,300 unique IPs trying to peck at different Windows-specific things on port 25 and port 80, not to mention the random noise from worms and trojans on port 135 and DCOM and other ports that I obviously don't use on FreeBSD and Linux machines.
I give them zero sympathy until they stop providing a platform that can be used to perform distributed attacks on our non-Windows machines.
No no, Microsoft has been attacking us for years. Its about time they own up to it, or get some pain coming back their way.
"Seems to me there is a market for some enterprising attorneys to seek out GPL violators and sue their asses off (on behalf of the violatee of course). I don't mean on a pro-bono basis either. I mean as a business (they would keep a % of the settlement)"
Ironic you should bring that up... about an hour after my post, I received an email from an attorney in Atlanta, GA. who specifically deals with this problem, from a commercial perspective. He wanted to hear the details of my story and some background on the process we used to discover, persue, follow the violation.
I spent about 30 minutes with him on the phone filling him in with more information than he problably wanted, from one OSS community's perspective.
Its happening, and awareness is happening, but it will take time...
"Worrying about some company making money off your work shows some selfishness."
You've missed my point.
I don't care if a company makes money from GPL code, and in fact I strongly enourage them to do so (as does the GPL itself).
What I do care about is a company taking my code, improving it, selling the version with those improvements, and not contributing those improvements back to the community that gave them the code in the first place.
It hurts the existing users of the code who can't take advantage of others improving that same code. Its restrictive.
I happen to appreciate lots of the snippets in the public domain, little "building blocks" that can be incorporated into other apps, but when a full application (covered by a license to redistribute, because licenses don't cover use, they cover redistribution) is created to help users and a selfish user or corporate entity refuses to help the same community that helped them (save money, save time, code, whatever), I have zero sympathy.
"Don't jump on me for saying Microsoft should write for Linux. Of course they should. It's unfathomable that they DONT support Linux. Heck, even monolithic old NOVELL is supporting their products on the triad of main OS'es now. Linux, MS-WIN and Mac. They're even migrating Netware to a Linux base."
Microsoft is a marketing company. They don't write software anymore. They acquire and purchase software, then integrate it into their core products (Outlook, MSIE, Visio, Excel just to name a few; none of which were written by Microsoft).
Microsoft maintains software and applications. It just so happens that one of those software ventures is an operating system. Why they don't consider writing/porting their applications to work on Linux strikes me as assinine.
With the stranglehold that Microsoft Office has on the desktop/corporate users (who are now migrating to Linux because the operating system is too expensive), would be more than willing to shell out real money for a Microsoft Office that ran on Linux just as well as the version that ran on their legacy Microsoft Windows machines.
"I'm sorry, that's rude, but the big problem with lawsuits isn't just having one thrown at you, it's the long and drawn-out process of having to see it all the way through to the end. Forget about the merits of the case, if you've got a lawsuit coming, and you're small, you're a hell of a lot less worried about a guilty verdict and a hell of a lot more worried about going bankrupt, because in the big time lawyers prey on fears of the latter more than the former."
How right you are.
I live about 10 miles from the biggest casino in the world (and its not in Vegas). There was a case years ago where an elderly couple here saved their entire lives to buy a plot of land right on a busy corner so they could invest in the Dunkin Donuts franchise as part of their retirement. They wanted to own the Dunkin Donuts on this corner and live off of the profits.
This plot of land was also in a key location for the nearby casino to put some advertising and an employee/patron parking lot... so they sued the elderly couple and took them to court (with absolutely no valid reason for the lawsuit).
Years later and many delays and continuances, the elderly couple's life savings was completely drained holding up their legal end of the battle. This couple already owned the land that they wanted to put this Dunkin Donuts on.
The casino gave them one final offer: Give us the deed to the land and we won't continue to sue you. Since the couple wanted some money to live off of for the rest of their golden years, they gave in and gave the casino the land.. and in exchange the casino dropped their lawsuit.
I have one word for them: FUCKERS ! (And I'm Native American too, but their abuses on this particular casino/reservation go WAY beyond tribal honor).
"I am very curious about why you should have trouble moving this case forward and/or obtaining representation. It looks to me like a shark would pick up this case and bloody this company for a big, juicy paycheck in a hearbeat, with no upfront costs to you."
Mostly because Wendy moved on to work for the EFF and all attempts to get a replacement pro-bono attorney from the FSF (with as much clue as Wendy) were unsuccessful.
And since we are wholly self-funded, putting up the retainer costs to talk to an attorney for 3-4 hours at his dime is not something we can just do, even if he decides to take the case as a "Slam Dunk" on his own merit.
Also, we're giving the company who is infringing some time to hang themselves while we gather more information. They're now selling "Their Solution(tm)" to a pretty serious mobile vendor who is incorporating it into ROM on their upcoming devices. If this is true, a lot of companies and partners are in a world of hurt.
"GPL is so flawed and adds restrictions, use BSD license which grants more freedoms."
...except for the part where it grants less freedoms, such as: the freedom for a commercial entity to take your code and modify it, sell it, and not contribute any useful additions to the code back to the community who will benefit from them...
When you talk about Freedom, the BSD license is always going to come out second to the GPL (and even third to the LGPL) because it allows (and in most cases, encourages) abuse without any penalty. Most companies are scared of the GPL (and as well they should be) because they know it has teeth.
Use whatever works, I personally will NEVER use the BSD license in any projects I distribute to the public because it has too many restrictions that I don't like (as above).
"I know of dozens of "appliance like" devices that are like this. When you ask the vendor they say "we wrote it all" and just by the look and field you know Squid/BSD/OpenSSL/SSH are at minimum inside."
This is called a "Lanham Act Violation" (false designation of origin), and can be prosecuted under the law. If some company takes your code and claims they wrote it, you have legal grounds to chew them into dust.
"PS: Not trolling, genuinely curious. All the focus seems to be on "Is the GPL enforcable", not "Who shall enforce it". And IMHO, both are important."
Its simple. Once violated, your rights to continue to use the GPL are revoked. This means every copy you allow to be downloaded, sold, or given away is now a US Copyright Violation, subject to $20k to $200k in penalties per-copy. Its easier to enforce if they filed their copyright with the US Copyright office (we did to fight just the same thing).
Most GPL violations settle out of court because the costs associated with going to court are enormous. Its hard to assess "damages" against a GPL project where the code is given away, copied, shared, downloaded, etc. for free.
In some cases, if the project taken by a commercial entity is used to "compete" with the free version (i.e. they claim they wrote it), it is also a "Lanhan Act" violation, or "False designation of origin".
It gets really ugly when the GPL is violated, but the good thing is that once violated, the GPL is no longer even an issue, its a clear-cut US Copyright violation.
GPL violations are a lot more common than most people think.
Just because it doesn't hit the mainstream media doesn't mean that thousands (yes, thousands of OSS projects out there are being actively violated by commercial enterprises). A few years ago I caught Sony doing this and reported about it (picked up by Slashdot here based on my account).
But that was relatively small potatoes to another GPL violation we've had to deal with. The CEO of a mobile company (who shall remain nameless, thousands know who he is) took our code, stripped our names and attribution out, removed the COPYING file (our copy of the GPL license), put his name all over it, and claimed he wrote it. He also waffled and lied over the years about which parts of our project he was and was not using. His stories changed back and forth (and I have all of the emails confirming these wishy-washy statements).
When we started seeing companies giving away binary versions of an application that looked suspisciously like ours (and I mean pixel-for-pixel identical) without any source, attribution or links back to the GPL, we started calling those companies and requesting the source for compliance. Since these companies had no idea who we were, they referred us back to the company they bought it from.. the original one who took our code from us outside of compliance with the GPL.
Then the threats started coming in... from the CEO of the company that originally took our source. My favorite quote from him:
"...if we end up in court, I'll bankrupt these guys..."
We were appointed an amazing attorney by the FSF, and she represented us well. I even went to NYC to meet with this CEO with Wendy to discuss how they could bring themselves into compliance. The CEO insisted that "..the GPL is not a license, its subject to interpretation... it was never reviewed by real attorneys or tested in court", and then proceeded to tell me to fire my attorney, right in front of her, because he said she wasn't giving me correct information about the law. Yeah ok, except she TEACHES law, and this CEO does what again? Oh yeah, steals other people's products for his own profitous gain.
He continued to threaten us for contacting his "partners" (who were also not transferred the GPL when he sold them "his" product [using our code]). Of course his threats fell on deaf ears, since it is our duty to require compliance with our code no matter who uses it.
The case goes on now, 4+ years later, but some interesting facts have come to light and we may have some official corporate backing from someone he believes is a partner of his... this is FAR from over, and he has absolutely no idea what mountain of legal stress is heading his way.
Wendy has moved on to the EFF now, and we have some new legal contacts at the FSF to try persue this further, but they're busy with lots of other cases.
If anyone is interested in hearing more details, feel free to contact me. If you want to support our case against companies like this, please visit our donation page and contribute to help us fund more legal support (or just because your appreciate our work: Don't forget to check out our Plucker eye-candy page).
Bill Gates and many other senior members of companies that produce operating systems delusionally believe that people somehow care about the OS that their computer or device runs.
They don't.
People care what their device DOES, not what their device is POWERED by.
If these devices run OS/2, Amiga, DOS, whatever... does not matter. If it does what they want, talks to their other devices in a non-confusing way, and can read their data formats (PIM data, documents, media formats, etc.), the OS does not matter.
In fact, with virtualization becoming more and more popular (and available), your hardware will be running multiple OS' at the same time and guess what... you won't care.
The data is what matters. The function is what matters. The OS does not matter.
The only reason we care about the OS right now, is because in most cases (i.e. Microsoft), the OS lacks that functionality, or the functionality it provides is horribly broken, so we fight with it, instead of work with it.
"She wasn't fired - not censored, fired - for her opinion. She was fired for producing a particularly odious example of yellow journalism and stepping over the line with a gross violation of privacy. One which may well be legally actionable."
You were right except the parts where you mention "Fired". MOG was not fired and in fact still holds the title of "Editor in Chief" there.
Her articles were pulled, but she was not fired. Where in the article did it say MOG was let go or fired?
"We know what we've done for the Open Source community today -- what have you done?"
I've only contributed patches, fixes, documentation and code to about 300 OSS projects over the last 10+ years. I only provide free, gratis hosting to OSS projects (using 100% Open Source tools, unlike SF.net). I only host dozens of mailing lists for OSS projects, gratis. I'm only the maintainer of about a dozen OSS projects myself.
Slashdot Mirror
As contradictory to the "Cause" as this may seem, doesn't anyone see that Bram is probably doing this because the RIAA/MPAA and other major industries are blaming his project, a project that produces a protocol, for the rampant copyright infringement on the Internet?
The irony here in recent news is that the RIAA/MPAA are directly blaming BitTorrent for the Star Wars EP3 leak, but its been repeatedly shown that the leaked copy came from inside, and was released before the movie hit the public.
...and somehow BitTorrent is to blame?
Are we blaming Boeing for the 9/11 tragedy too? Or blaming Kabar for making high-quality blades, because someone killed with one?
This is ridiculous, and I personally applaud Bram's efforts here to absolutely saturate the mainstream media and dark corners of the Internet with as much media as possible, using his legitimate tool. I personally don't care for any of the copyrighted dreck on television or the radio these days, but others might.
Also, whenever you can, please keep correcting people who regard this as "piracy", "stealing" or "theft". It is nothing of the sort. It is "copyright infringement", plain and simple. If I "steal" your bicycle, I have deprived you of something you previously owned, which I now posess. Making digitally-perfect copies of a work is not "stealing" or "theft", though it is very much illegal in most countries.
You can't steal profits that weren't already earned. You can't steal "projected" profits. Keep up the pressure on these companies who continue to misunderstand the terms they're spewing in public. There's a certain Heinekin commercial that is grossly misrepresenting the nature of copyright infringement.
I corrected a Wall Street Journal reporter for a front-page article in the Marketplace section of the dead-tree version for promoting the "sharing of music" by burning copies of music and handing it out.
He wrote a story that included how some woman (which he named), was bored with the looping music playing in her resort in the Caribbean islands and decided to use her laptop, complete with burner, to burn several CDs of her favorite music to give to the resort to play instead. He was promoting the "advance of technology" for "enabling" people to do these things. This is disgusting.
THIS is where we need to start directing our angst... at the mainstream media misrepresenting these technologies.
My point was that 10k of data from 100 concurrent hosts is barely noticable on the radar, but 10k of data from 100,000 concurrent random and always changing hosts is very disruptive to production services.
I'm not denegrating the need for Tor, just that the OP stated that it couldn't be used to DDoS or abuse servers, and I've pointed out several cases where exactly that condition is occurring... daily.
I just did some more searching with geoip, and this is the current sorted, unique list of countries currently spamming us with this Poker trackback DDoS crap:
You may think its stupid, but unfortunately, its reality. The reality is that even though it slower, its still effective.
Here is an example of some log entries of spammers using Tor to forge referers and trackback spam to domains I host. Whatever tool they're using "broke" the url because they lowercased it (the url is valid, if the 'q' is uppercased).
At first I thought it was a new worm hitting us, but its coming too fast from far too many IPs in a very predictable pattern to be a random worm. The list of countries represented is very un-wormlike.
We survived 2 slashdottings 2 days in a row last week, barely a blip on our network radar, bu t a few days later, we were hit with this mountain of traffic from random locations, all within a 10-15 minute span, and only about an hour after I blocked the entire country of Brazil from reaching port 25 (the whole 200.0.0.0). Its definately maliscious, and definately intentional. I'm fending off attacks on our servers almost daily now, from netbios floods to SYN and TIME_WAIT attacks, to other things. I've been using the TARPIT module in iptables to slow things down, but they keep on coming, from thousands of unique IPs, across all range of our open ports (22, 53, 80, 2401, whatever).
So yes, Tor is most-definately being used to spam and DDoS sites, that is a fact and reality, which I can consistently prove with graphs, logs, and charts.
But it does serve a valid purpose, so I don't block the Tor IP range... yet.
They've said time and time again that they aren't migrating to Linux for the userland, they're leveraging the architecture and platform and driver support that the Linux kernel provides.
That being said, if they get the Linux kernel running on it, any enterprising young hackers can certainly turn it into a Linux-based PDA, complete with Linux userland applications as well, like Opie and the other original CRL iPAQ handhelds have been doing for close to 6 years.
But don't expect Palm applications to run in the context of a Linux userland (i.e. bash, ash, etc.), and don't expect PalmOS to be running Linux applications anytime soon...
Damn, I just made a reply to another post about this exact subject, and then read further down and caught your post.... here it is. They totally fucked this coworker of my wife's... badly.
My wife works for [insert biggest pharma company in the world here], and has for about 6 years. I used to work for them as well for 5-6 years myself. They were good when I was in, then things got "International", and I resigned quick before the walls started coming down.
In my wife's department (Cancer Biology), there are people who have been there for literally decades. They're so entrenched, they know every system, process, procedure ever made there. If you want to know an answer to some complicated question, these people will know it... and if they don't, they definately know who WILL know.
One person in particular had been there for 34 years, 11 months.. and they were going around looking for ways to "cut costs" in her department.
When you retire at 35-years or more into $PHARMA, you get a nice fat severance. Something like $100k/year for every year there + your stock earnings and benefits cashed out, which amounted to over $1M for this person. That's $100k * 35 + $1M (that's over $4.5M total to retire upon).
They fired him...
...30 days before his 35-year anniversary with the company. He got $60k total as a severance. They didn't want to have to pay out his retirement and severance, so they let him go 4 weeks before he would have earned it. If he had known, he probably could have used up 4 weeks of his vacation to eat up the time instead, but he never saw it coming. Nobody did.
... after putting in 35 years with the company .
This kind of stuff sickens me.
That may be true of the drives Apple is using, but it definately is not true of 2.5" drives. In fact, 2.5" drives are almost always going to be faster because of lower rotational mass, as well as other factors (caching on the drive, number of platters, etc.)
Right now my primary laptop drive is close to 40% faster than a brand-new Maxtor drive in a very fast server in the server room:
Why are we complaining that Microsoft is "under attack"? Haven't we all been under attack by hundreds of thousands of Microsoft Windows machines for the last 5-6 years, every day, all day?
Heck, a quick scan of my log today so far shows over 2,300 unique IPs trying to peck at different Windows-specific things on port 25 and port 80, not to mention the random noise from worms and trojans on port 135 and DCOM and other ports that I obviously don't use on FreeBSD and Linux machines.
I give them zero sympathy until they stop providing a platform that can be used to perform distributed attacks on our non-Windows machines.
No no, Microsoft has been attacking us for years. Its about time they own up to it, or get some pain coming back their way.
Ironic you should bring that up... about an hour after my post, I received an email from an attorney in Atlanta, GA. who specifically deals with this problem, from a commercial perspective. He wanted to hear the details of my story and some background on the process we used to discover, persue, follow the violation.
I spent about 30 minutes with him on the phone filling him in with more information than he problably wanted, from one OSS community's perspective.
Its happening, and awareness is happening, but it will take time...
You've missed my point.
I don't care if a company makes money from GPL code, and in fact I strongly enourage them to do so (as does the GPL itself).
What I do care about is a company taking my code, improving it, selling the version with those improvements, and not contributing those improvements back to the community that gave them the code in the first place.
It hurts the existing users of the code who can't take advantage of others improving that same code. Its restrictive.
I happen to appreciate lots of the snippets in the public domain, little "building blocks" that can be incorporated into other apps, but when a full application (covered by a license to redistribute, because licenses don't cover use, they cover redistribution) is created to help users and a selfish user or corporate entity refuses to help the same community that helped them (save money, save time, code, whatever), I have zero sympathy.
Microsoft is a marketing company. They don't write software anymore. They acquire and purchase software, then integrate it into their core products (Outlook, MSIE, Visio, Excel just to name a few; none of which were written by Microsoft).
Microsoft maintains software and applications. It just so happens that one of those software ventures is an operating system. Why they don't consider writing/porting their applications to work on Linux strikes me as assinine.
With the stranglehold that Microsoft Office has on the desktop/corporate users (who are now migrating to Linux because the operating system is too expensive), would be more than willing to shell out real money for a Microsoft Office that ran on Linux just as well as the version that ran on their legacy Microsoft Windows machines.
It just boggles the mind.
How right you are.
I live about 10 miles from the biggest casino in the world (and its not in Vegas). There was a case years ago where an elderly couple here saved their entire lives to buy a plot of land right on a busy corner so they could invest in the Dunkin Donuts franchise as part of their retirement. They wanted to own the Dunkin Donuts on this corner and live off of the profits.
This plot of land was also in a key location for the nearby casino to put some advertising and an employee/patron parking lot... so they sued the elderly couple and took them to court (with absolutely no valid reason for the lawsuit).
Years later and many delays and continuances, the elderly couple's life savings was completely drained holding up their legal end of the battle. This couple already owned the land that they wanted to put this Dunkin Donuts on.
The casino gave them one final offer: Give us the deed to the land and we won't continue to sue you. Since the couple wanted some money to live off of for the rest of their golden years, they gave in and gave the casino the land.. and in exchange the casino dropped their lawsuit.
I have one word for them: FUCKERS ! (And I'm Native American too, but their abuses on this particular casino/reservation go WAY beyond tribal honor).
This stuff makes me want to vomit.
Mostly because Wendy moved on to work for the EFF and all attempts to get a replacement pro-bono attorney from the FSF (with as much clue as Wendy) were unsuccessful.
And since we are wholly self-funded, putting up the retainer costs to talk to an attorney for 3-4 hours at his dime is not something we can just do, even if he decides to take the case as a "Slam Dunk" on his own merit.
Also, we're giving the company who is infringing some time to hang themselves while we gather more information. They're now selling "Their Solution(tm)" to a pretty serious mobile vendor who is incorporating it into ROM on their upcoming devices. If this is true, a lot of companies and partners are in a world of hurt.
It'll happen, it just takes time.
...except for the part where it grants less freedoms, such as: the freedom for a commercial entity to take your code and modify it, sell it, and not contribute any useful additions to the code back to the community who will benefit from them...
When you talk about Freedom, the BSD license is always going to come out second to the GPL (and even third to the LGPL) because it allows (and in most cases, encourages) abuse without any penalty. Most companies are scared of the GPL (and as well they should be) because they know it has teeth.
Use whatever works, I personally will NEVER use the BSD license in any projects I distribute to the public because it has too many restrictions that I don't like (as above).
HAhAhAHAHaHhAahahhahhAHAHHAhAhA... great idea!
This is called a "Lanham Act Violation" (false designation of origin), and can be prosecuted under the law. If some company takes your code and claims they wrote it, you have legal grounds to chew them into dust.
Its simple. Once violated, your rights to continue to use the GPL are revoked. This means every copy you allow to be downloaded, sold, or given away is now a US Copyright Violation, subject to $20k to $200k in penalties per-copy. Its easier to enforce if they filed their copyright with the US Copyright office (we did to fight just the same thing).
Most GPL violations settle out of court because the costs associated with going to court are enormous. Its hard to assess "damages" against a GPL project where the code is given away, copied, shared, downloaded, etc. for free.
In some cases, if the project taken by a commercial entity is used to "compete" with the free version (i.e. they claim they wrote it), it is also a "Lanhan Act" violation, or "False designation of origin".
It gets really ugly when the GPL is violated, but the good thing is that once violated, the GPL is no longer even an issue, its a clear-cut US Copyright violation.
GPL violations are a lot more common than most people think.
Just because it doesn't hit the mainstream media doesn't mean that thousands (yes, thousands of OSS projects out there are being actively violated by commercial enterprises). A few years ago I caught Sony doing this and reported about it (picked up by Slashdot here based on my account).
But that was relatively small potatoes to another GPL violation we've had to deal with. The CEO of a mobile company (who shall remain nameless, thousands know who he is) took our code, stripped our names and attribution out, removed the COPYING file (our copy of the GPL license), put his name all over it, and claimed he wrote it. He also waffled and lied over the years about which parts of our project he was and was not using. His stories changed back and forth (and I have all of the emails confirming these wishy-washy statements).
When we started seeing companies giving away binary versions of an application that looked suspisciously like ours (and I mean pixel-for-pixel identical) without any source, attribution or links back to the GPL, we started calling those companies and requesting the source for compliance. Since these companies had no idea who we were, they referred us back to the company they bought it from.. the original one who took our code from us outside of compliance with the GPL.
Then the threats started coming in... from the CEO of the company that originally took our source. My favorite quote from him:
We were appointed an amazing attorney by the FSF, and she represented us well. I even went to NYC to meet with this CEO with Wendy to discuss how they could bring themselves into compliance. The CEO insisted that "..the GPL is not a license, its subject to interpretation... it was never reviewed by real attorneys or tested in court", and then proceeded to tell me to fire my attorney, right in front of her, because he said she wasn't giving me correct information about the law. Yeah ok, except she TEACHES law, and this CEO does what again? Oh yeah, steals other people's products for his own profitous gain.
He continued to threaten us for contacting his "partners" (who were also not transferred the GPL when he sold them "his" product [using our code]). Of course his threats fell on deaf ears, since it is our duty to require compliance with our code no matter who uses it.
The case goes on now, 4+ years later, but some interesting facts have come to light and we may have some official corporate backing from someone he believes is a partner of his... this is FAR from over, and he has absolutely no idea what mountain of legal stress is heading his way.
Wendy has moved on to the EFF now, and we have some new legal contacts at the FSF to try persue this further, but they're busy with lots of other cases.
If anyone is interested in hearing more details, feel free to contact me. If you want to support our case against companies like this, please visit our donation page and contribute to help us fund more legal support (or just because your appreciate our work: Don't forget to check out our Plucker eye-candy page).
Interesting, but useless. Why? Because Feedburner does not generate valid feeds.
Someday these services will get a clue and realize that the XML spec requires that invalid feeds be rejected.
Bill Gates and many other senior members of companies that produce operating systems delusionally believe that people somehow care about the OS that their computer or device runs.
They don't.
People care what their device DOES , not what their device is POWERED by.
If these devices run OS/2, Amiga, DOS, whatever... does not matter. If it does what they want, talks to their other devices in a non-confusing way, and can read their data formats (PIM data, documents, media formats, etc.), the OS does not matter.
In fact, with virtualization becoming more and more popular (and available), your hardware will be running multiple OS' at the same time and guess what... you won't care.
The data is what matters. The function is what matters. The OS does not matter.
The only reason we care about the OS right now, is because in most cases (i.e. Microsoft), the OS lacks that functionality, or the functionality it provides is horribly broken, so we fight with it, instead of work with it.
You were right except the parts where you mention "Fired". MOG was not fired and in fact still holds the title of "Editor in Chief" there.
Her articles were pulled, but she was not fired. Where in the article did it say MOG was let go or fired?
Correction, she was not fired. Nowhere in the article does it say she was fired.
They simply said her articles would not appear on any of their sites. She still remains Editor-in-Chief there though...
I've only contributed patches, fixes, documentation and code to about 300 OSS projects over the last 10+ years. I only provide free, gratis hosting to OSS projects (using 100% Open Source tools, unlike SF.net). I only host dozens of mailing lists for OSS projects, gratis. I'm only the maintainer of about a dozen OSS projects myself.
So you're right, not much at all.
Sure there is: