This is probably being posted late enough no one will read it, but just for the record, the giveaway bag that I got at the WWDC this year (i was using it as a bookbag) also broke at the shoulderstrap, about a week ago. I think perhaps the warranties for them just ran out in mid-december.
The FSF demands you to sign your righs over because they want to be able to effectively and easily defend the copyrights of all GNU software in court. For example, if GNU software is having its copyright infringed, they want to be able to go right ahead and act with immediate legal authority on that software, rather than having to track down every single contributor to that project-- some of whom may no longer be contactable-- and get permission to proceed with a legal action. They are open about this. They tell you this up front.
MySQL AB demands that you sign your rights over because they want to be able to take the code you contribute, repackage it as a commercial product, and sell it for their own profit. They are open about this. They tell you this up front.
While I don't think there's anything necessarily bad about what Mysql is doing, it seems pretty easy to me to state that there's a fundamental difference in "openness" between these two situations.
By sending out these clearly fraudulent DMCA notices-- which at best claim copyright over something which is uncopyrightable, and at worst is an attempt by a third party to claim that it is illegal for people to use the materials owned by the BSD raegents under the BSD license in the manner in which the BSD raegents intended the BSD license to be used-- has SCO opened itself up to legal action?
SCO has in the past managed to sidestep most allegations of fraud by being horrendously vague. They said that they were owned money but never sent any invoices, sidestepping mail fraud. They tried to present things as if you needed an SCO license to use linux, but if you tried to talk to talk to them, they were actually selling UnixWare licenses and not in the process actually distributing linux to you, sidestepping GPL violations. However, this is entirely non-vague. It seems to me that SCO has stepped over some sort of line here and this is actionable.
I know that the DMCA does not seem to have many consequences for people who send out bad takedown notices, but surely there must be something preventing company A from finding lists of competitor B's customers and sending them takedown notices for using some portion of competitor B's product that company A does not, in fact, own.
At the least, can this be added to the lanham act/ restraint of trade/ libel or whatever countersuits that Redhat and IBM have going? What are the options from here, and what will actually happen?
Bruce Perens is making a GNOME-only linux distro. There's no reason for you to try to stop him. It isn't like there aren't 9000 other distros to choose from. Heck, it isn't even like there aren't ten to thirty other linux standardization movements similar to what Perens is doing.
Perens is convinced that in order to do what he wants this distro to do, he needs to choose one desktop environment and focus to it. He's also convinced that GNOME was the right choice for this. You know what? If he's wrong, all that will happen is that his distro will fail. Life will go on, and only Bruce Perens will have lost any time from it. In the meantime, if you like, you can go and make a KDE-only linux distro of your own, and it will succeed or fail or whatever.
I think Perens has an interesting little experiment going on here. If he's wrong, he's wrong, and if he's right, you know what? Once he has something good, you can take what he did, fork it, and add/insert KDE. Huzzah. In the meantime, who cares?
Apple said they love open source. Not that they love linux. Apple is using materials from open source projects such as BSD and Konqueror, and they are contributing code back to those same projects. I don't see why this means they have an obligation to write some big complicated AAC library for UNIX when the UNIX OSes don't even seem to have a totally homogenous way to playback sound.
I'd concentrate on seeing what you can do to get Wine to accept iTunes if you want to use iTunes Music Store in Linux.
If you really want something native, MPlayer can play AAC already. All it needs to play iTMS purchases is to get past the DRM wrapper. The DRM wrapper on iTMS purchases is the technology sold by a company called "Fairplay". Perhaps you could try contacting Fairplay and asking if you could license their tech for playback in MPlayer? Or even better, you could perhaps just contact Apple directly and say you are interested in writing code to add iTMS playback support to MPlayer, and you would be willing to go under NDA and such... Wait, what's that you say? You don't have the time or linux programming knowledge to add FairPlay support to MPlayer? Well, apparently neither does Apple.
Performance improvements are a serious thing, though. I seem to remember the main gripe when iTunes for Windows was first released was mediocre-at-best performance.
How big are the performance improvements, has anyone gotten the chance to try this under windows?
why can't you just do the nice thing and say "Good Job guys keep it up!" instead of "crap we better get our arses in gear before the japs send their robots to control us"
Because it's SONY.
If Japanese or American government researchers or universities build a robot that can run, the logical reaction is to think, "Wow, that is truly a step forward for mankind."
If Sony or Time-Warner builds a robot that can run, the logical reaction is to think, "OH HOLY FUCK THEY'RE GOING TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD ROBOT DEATH ARMIES WILL BE RUNNING AFTER US HIDE SOMEWHERE".
Anyway, you should be afraid. Robots that can walk and run means mankind has lost their only defense against the robots-- climbing up a rope.
Apple makes no profit, so nobody can compete on price points and make a profit.
Except for Microsoft, who doesn't expect or even try to make a profit on anything except for Windows and Office. And who has an online music store coming out next year.
I don't think the public wants to see the code. I think what they want to see is the line numbers within linux that SCO considers to be infringing.
This isn't anything that could concievably be propreitary to SCO. It's a series of numbers describing sections of an already-publicly-available block of code, Linux.
IBM is not the only party that needs to know. The Linux maintainers need to know, as soon as possible, because if there is code which was illegally integrated into linux, this is a violation of the GPL by which the linux developers all agree to share their code with each other.
Your definition of "propeitary" is strange. Someone can read something and it would still be propeitary, and would still be covered fully under copyright. What it would not be is covered under trade secret law. Perhaps this is what you are thinking of.
Under what possible view of things does it make sense for SCO to claim Linux contains infringing code, but then not allow the Linux developers to know what said infringing code is so that they can remove it and fix the infringement?
Unfortunately this study does not take into effect the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) of the 12 Days of Christmas items. This makes it infeasible for an actual guide in gift giving.
For example, the geese and other birds must be fed. The dancing ladies must be paid at least the minimum wage for your state, or under some circumstances tips. And the Five Golden Rings were wrought by the hand of the Dark Lord Sauron, meaning they extract a price too heavy to be described in monetary terms, as they scorch your very soul, slowly dragging you bodily into a spiritual nether-world where you live as a wraith, neither dead nor alive, eternally locked in a heck-like existence where you live only to serve your dark master.
Man, it is going to be SOOOO much fun watching you guys when we begin to uncover cache after cache after cache.
The "there are no WMDs" line is not the message.
The message is, secondarily, "Saddam was not a real or credible threat to the U.S. or its interests". Primarily, the message is this: "Regardless of the 'just'ness of this war, George Bush acted wrongly in initiating it. He acted wrongly in rejecting the real, basic, and relatively quick diplomatic solutions to the problem he claimed to be going to war to solve. He acted wrongly in not only going against the will of, but actively flipping off the United Nations, finally and unquestionably destroying the convention that we have tried to hold since the end of WW2 that countries don't just go invading other countries just because they feel like it, even if those other countries are "bad". And he acted wrongly in brazenly, openly lying to the people of the United States and the entire world about his reasons for going to war."
The "there are no WMDs" line is just icing. It's a "isn't this pathetic, not ONLY was Saddam not a real or credible threat to the U.S. back before the war when we THOUGHT he had WMDs, he didn't even HAVE WMDs". If you want to claim Saddam having WMDs would be automatic proof he was a threat, let me put it to you this way: I know where to find the WMDs. No, really, I do. I know where they are. I'll tell you: They're in North Korea.
I wonder how many ways you'll be able to say: Yeah, but America still sucks and I hate George Bush.
Probably the same way that Bush supporters manage to find so many ways (when it's the better part of a year now and there's still no credible reason why the U.S. went to Iraq except to be the world's unilateral playground monitor) to say: Bush didn't lie to us.
Besides, there are so many excellent reasons to hate George Bush, and only a portion of them have anything to do with Iraq.
Everything you've mentioned is something that previously didn't work so well, and now it works well. Evolutionary change, not revolutionary. The only exception is the cell phone thing, that's roughly the only technological thing of 25 years I can think of at the moment that's really an upheaval.
Of course, that's the humans I'm talking about, there. Infectious diseases, meanwhile, have made absolutely massive technological strides in the same period of time. From a disease standpoint, the development of AIDS and Ebola can be considered a technical achievement about on the level of nanotech.
Anyway, while your points are nice and all, they maybe don't relate a lot to the post you're responding to. A manufacturable nanotech machine that could do *anything* particularly deterministic or of note would be a revolutionary upheaval on the scale of the first stored-program computer or the atomic bomb. If we can get to there by 2030, I'd consider that believable. But from there, there's some massive technical hurdles. You have to go through at least one more truly revolutionary leap to get to the point of nanomachines that can do something like manufacture thousands of miles of concrete, and several to ten evolutionary leaps of the size of the development of the transistor-- most having to do just with the *safety* of the thing-- before it could used to lay pipe in a project like this.
1) I was not discussing Finland. In fact, 98% of the comments in this discussion are not discussing Finland. The conversation has gone off of the topic of the story post. The person I was talking to was talking about the general case of whether Lindows is an okay trademark, so I responded in a general sense. Had he been talking about Finnish law, I would not have responded at all, because I lack knowledge in that area. However since he did not seem to be talking specifically about Finland or any other specific country, I chose to respond to his points from the viewpoint of the law of the country in which Lindows is based (America) and then explicitly state I did I did not know how the law in Finland worked.
You may stop reading here if you like.
-----
2) Just because I am not a citizen of a country does not mean that I do not have the right to criticize its laws. I do not have the right to do anything about them, but if I think they are stupid, I have every right to say so. Similarly, you will notice that slashdot frequently features discussions about American law in which non-Americans weigh in with opinions.
3) According to this, 66% of Finland has at least a passing grasp of English.
4) In my personal opinion, if a country's trademark law only recognizes the untrademarkable status of generics if they are in the native language, that is stupid. (Of course, I don't know whether they do or not.) Generics rules exist to demarcate that which is so common that it is unreasonable to grant only one company a use of it. If English were a language almost unheard of in Finland, that would be one thing. But English skills, at least basic ones, seem to be common there. I would use this same line of argument to argue that, for example, common spanish or french words would be untrademarkable for the products they describe in America. This is of course just my opinion.
You won't buy from the iTMS music store because despite taking your money they do pretty much nothing except distribute music to you, and almost all of the money goes to the corrupt music-industry middlemen, and you consider this Wrong.
So instead you are going to pay extra to buy from Best Buy or some other music retailer who despite taking your money does pretty much nothing except distribute the music to you, and almost all of the money goes to the corrupt music-industry middlemen, and you don't see anything wrong with this.
Or is the problem here entirely that you're angry the paper-thin DRM on iTMS store purchases is a little more intricate to convert to raw AIFF than a CD is, yet people will still buy it?
BTW, slashdot says this is my 900th logged-in post. Just for the record.
As I remember, What about Sun? What about Apple? What about Oracle?
These are not in any way relevant. If you will look, Sun, Apple and Oracle do not actually sell suns, apples, or oracles (unless you wish to argue that a relational database has shamanistic properties, which would be extremely interesting but would be a whole different argument).
You can name a music company, or a computer, "Apple" and that's an okay use of trademark. But you can't name a line of apples "Apple" or a line of apple pie "Apple" and then expect to defend this when someone else uses the term "Apple" to sell apples. Likewise, you can't name a window-based OS "Windows". Personally, I think Redhat would be able to put "Redhat Windows" in the stores and sell it and get away with it if they felt like it.
If Microsoft made a product called Winux, the same argument would apply.
And Microsoft would be able to keep its trademark on Winux for the same reason Lindows gets to keep their trademark in America. "Linux" itself, if you'll notice, was largely inspired by a similar product called "Minux". If Winux is a violation of Linux's trademark, then Linux is a violation of Minux's trademark...
The argument here is that Microsoft created a trademark that they do not have a right to defend.
Microsoft is essentially trying to legislate in the courts here. They purposefully chose to name their products after a wide range of generic names for product types they did not invent. They did this to try to enhance the perception their product is the only one. "Word" is "The Word Processor". "Windows" is "The Window Manager". "Office" is the only Office software there is. This is totally within their rights to do something like this. However, they have no right to take what is basically meant, under any sane copyright law, to be public property-- a common, predefined word like "Windows"-- sit on it for ten years, and then come crying to the courts that they have squatters rights when someone walks on the grass.
I'll throw my support behind Microsoft on this issue when and only when the Lindows corp. changes their name to "Licrosoft". Until then, I am supporting Lindows not because I want Lindows to get to use the name, but because I want Microsoft to not be able to get away with this reverse-copyright-dilution thing they have been trying to do to the english language for years and years.
MS "getting its copyright diluted" is just the natural consequence for MS of choosing to name their product a pre-diluted, undefendable word. A similar natural consequence is that if you go look at the Mac section of CompUSA, you will see a product named "Hancom Office" in a box that looks just about identical to MSOffice's and with the word "Hancom" in just leeeetle tiny letters in the corner...
Now, of course, I don't know what finnish and swedish law are. But I don't see any good justification for them being different.
You hypocrites would be jumping all over Microsoft if they came out with anything that looked like Gnome or sounded like Linux. I think Microsoft has shown remarkable restraint.
First off, if you ask me, Gnome and KDE BOTH look too much like MSWindows already, and that's their fault, not MS's.
Second off, Linus purposefully avoided registering a trademark on "Linux" for very many years. The only reason he owns one now is.. well, read the part under the "linux trademark" header on this page.
Lastly off, "sounds like Linux" is also a totally undefendable trademark. If MS chose to release "Winux" it would be totally within their rights to do so, because "inux" has become a common name for UNIX workalikes. Since "Linux" itself was largely inspired by a competing product called "Minux", I am pretty sure any hypothetical attempt by Linus to sue a product that rhymed with Linux would be laughed out of court.
How does a default setting regarding a specific directory's permissions plus the fact it doesn't use/etc/passwd make it "unfit for production"?
OS X doesn't use/etc. That's just how it works. It uses the NetInfo database. This is one of the few actually well-documented parts of OS X./etc is a vestigial limb, it's a dummy file which is involved in startup but it is not actually used for real user info. It's used in single user mode because single user mode is an emergency startup mode used for debugging, and NetInfo doesn't launch in this mode unless you launch it, because part of the single user mode's hypothetical purpose is to debug problems with NetInfo!
You might as well call Linux unfit for production because you can do some potentially nasty security-related things in some versions of Lilo.
Slashdot Mirror
This is probably being posted late enough no one will read it, but just for the record, the giveaway bag that I got at the WWDC this year (i was using it as a bookbag) also broke at the shoulderstrap, about a week ago. I think perhaps the warranties for them just ran out in mid-december.
Well, let's see.
The FSF demands you to sign your righs over because they want to be able to effectively and easily defend the copyrights of all GNU software in court. For example, if GNU software is having its copyright infringed, they want to be able to go right ahead and act with immediate legal authority on that software, rather than having to track down every single contributor to that project-- some of whom may no longer be contactable-- and get permission to proceed with a legal action. They are open about this. They tell you this up front.
MySQL AB demands that you sign your rights over because they want to be able to take the code you contribute, repackage it as a commercial product, and sell it for their own profit. They are open about this. They tell you this up front.
While I don't think there's anything necessarily bad about what Mysql is doing, it seems pretty easy to me to state that there's a fundamental difference in "openness" between these two situations.
By sending out these clearly fraudulent DMCA notices-- which at best claim copyright over something which is uncopyrightable, and at worst is an attempt by a third party to claim that it is illegal for people to use the materials owned by the BSD raegents under the BSD license in the manner in which the BSD raegents intended the BSD license to be used-- has SCO opened itself up to legal action?
SCO has in the past managed to sidestep most allegations of fraud by being horrendously vague. They said that they were owned money but never sent any invoices, sidestepping mail fraud. They tried to present things as if you needed an SCO license to use linux, but if you tried to talk to talk to them, they were actually selling UnixWare licenses and not in the process actually distributing linux to you, sidestepping GPL violations. However, this is entirely non-vague. It seems to me that SCO has stepped over some sort of line here and this is actionable.
I know that the DMCA does not seem to have many consequences for people who send out bad takedown notices, but surely there must be something preventing company A from finding lists of competitor B's customers and sending them takedown notices for using some portion of competitor B's product that company A does not, in fact, own.
At the least, can this be added to the lanham act/ restraint of trade/ libel or whatever countersuits that Redhat and IBM have going? What are the options from here, and what will actually happen?
This is a common misconception that it saddens me to see still being propigated.
Simply, there was no year zero. Y2K began on January 1, 19101
Bruce Perens is making a GNOME-only linux distro. There's no reason for you to try to stop him. It isn't like there aren't 9000 other distros to choose from. Heck, it isn't even like there aren't ten to thirty other linux standardization movements similar to what Perens is doing.
Perens is convinced that in order to do what he wants this distro to do, he needs to choose one desktop environment and focus to it. He's also convinced that GNOME was the right choice for this. You know what? If he's wrong, all that will happen is that his distro will fail. Life will go on, and only Bruce Perens will have lost any time from it. In the meantime, if you like, you can go and make a KDE-only linux distro of your own, and it will succeed or fail or whatever.
I think Perens has an interesting little experiment going on here. If he's wrong, he's wrong, and if he's right, you know what? Once he has something good, you can take what he did, fork it, and add/insert KDE. Huzzah. In the meantime, who cares?
Microsoft... uh... sucks?
Apple said they love open source. Not that they love linux. Apple is using materials from open source projects such as BSD and Konqueror, and they are contributing code back to those same projects. I don't see why this means they have an obligation to write some big complicated AAC library for UNIX when the UNIX OSes don't even seem to have a totally homogenous way to playback sound.
I'd concentrate on seeing what you can do to get Wine to accept iTunes if you want to use iTunes Music Store in Linux.
If you really want something native, MPlayer can play AAC already. All it needs to play iTMS purchases is to get past the DRM wrapper. The DRM wrapper on iTMS purchases is the technology sold by a company called "Fairplay". Perhaps you could try contacting Fairplay and asking if you could license their tech for playback in MPlayer? Or even better, you could perhaps just contact Apple directly and say you are interested in writing code to add iTMS playback support to MPlayer, and you would be willing to go under NDA and such... Wait, what's that you say? You don't have the time or linux programming knowledge to add FairPlay support to MPlayer? Well, apparently neither does Apple.
MPEG, and if you pay the 30 dollars for Quicktime Pro Quicktime should be able to export to MPEG from any format it plays for you, i'm pretty sure.
Performance improvements are a serious thing, though. I seem to remember the main gripe when iTunes for Windows was first released was mediocre-at-best performance.
How big are the performance improvements, has anyone gotten the chance to try this under windows?
why can't you just do the nice thing and say "Good Job guys keep it up!" instead of "crap we better get our arses in gear before the japs send their robots to control us"
Because it's SONY.
If Japanese or American government researchers or universities build a robot that can run, the logical reaction is to think, "Wow, that is truly a step forward for mankind."
If Sony or Time-Warner builds a robot that can run, the logical reaction is to think, "OH HOLY FUCK THEY'RE GOING TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD ROBOT DEATH ARMIES
WILL BE RUNNING AFTER US HIDE SOMEWHERE".
Anyway, you should be afraid. Robots that can walk and run means mankind has lost their only defense against the robots-- climbing up a rope.
It's still a beta
But let's pretend it's finished
Linus needs testers
Apple makes no profit, so nobody can compete on price points and make a profit.
Except for Microsoft, who doesn't expect or even try to make a profit on anything except for Windows and Office. And who has an online music store coming out next year.
I don't think the public wants to see the code. I think what they want to see is the line numbers within linux that SCO considers to be infringing.
This isn't anything that could concievably be propreitary to SCO. It's a series of numbers describing sections of an already-publicly-available block of code, Linux.
IBM is not the only party that needs to know. The Linux maintainers need to know, as soon as possible, because if there is code which was illegally integrated into linux, this is a violation of the GPL by which the linux developers all agree to share their code with each other.
Your definition of "propeitary" is strange. Someone can read something and it would still be propeitary, and would still be covered fully under copyright. What it would not be is covered under trade secret law. Perhaps this is what you are thinking of.
Under what possible view of things does it make sense for SCO to claim Linux contains infringing code, but then not allow the Linux developers to know what said infringing code is so that they can remove it and fix the infringement?
Unfortunately this study does not take into effect the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) of the 12 Days of Christmas items. This makes it infeasible for an actual guide in gift giving.
For example, the geese and other birds must be fed. The dancing ladies must be paid at least the minimum wage for your state, or under some circumstances tips. And the Five Golden Rings were wrought by the hand of the Dark Lord Sauron, meaning they extract a price too heavy to be described in monetary terms, as they scorch your very soul, slowly dragging you bodily into a spiritual nether-world where you live as a wraith, neither dead nor alive, eternally locked in a heck-like existence where you live only to serve your dark master.
Happy holidays!
No one is excited about the Phantom.
Man, it is going to be SOOOO much fun watching you guys when we begin to uncover cache after cache after cache.
The "there are no WMDs" line is not the message.
The message is, secondarily, "Saddam was not a real or credible threat to the U.S. or its interests". Primarily, the message is this: "Regardless of the 'just'ness of this war, George Bush acted wrongly in initiating it. He acted wrongly in rejecting the real, basic, and relatively quick diplomatic solutions to the problem he claimed to be going to war to solve. He acted wrongly in not only going against the will of, but actively flipping off the United Nations, finally and unquestionably destroying the convention that we have tried to hold since the end of WW2 that countries don't just go invading other countries just because they feel like it, even if those other countries are "bad". And he acted wrongly in brazenly, openly lying to the people of the United States and the entire world about his reasons for going to war."
The "there are no WMDs" line is just icing. It's a "isn't this pathetic, not ONLY was Saddam not a real or credible threat to the U.S. back before the war when we THOUGHT he had WMDs, he didn't even HAVE WMDs". If you want to claim Saddam having WMDs would be automatic proof he was a threat, let me put it to you this way: I know where to find the WMDs. No, really, I do. I know where they are. I'll tell you: They're in North Korea.
I wonder how many ways you'll be able to say: Yeah, but America still sucks and I hate George Bush.
Probably the same way that Bush supporters manage to find so many ways (when it's the better part of a year now and there's still no credible reason why the U.S. went to Iraq except to be the world's unilateral playground monitor) to say: Bush didn't lie to us.
Besides, there are so many excellent reasons to hate George Bush, and only a portion of them have anything to do with Iraq.
Everything you've mentioned is something that previously didn't work so well, and now it works well. Evolutionary change, not revolutionary. The only exception is the cell phone thing, that's roughly the only technological thing of 25 years I can think of at the moment that's really an upheaval.
Of course, that's the humans I'm talking about, there. Infectious diseases, meanwhile, have made absolutely massive technological strides in the same period of time. From a disease standpoint, the development of AIDS and Ebola can be considered a technical achievement about on the level of nanotech.
Anyway, while your points are nice and all, they maybe don't relate a lot to the post you're responding to. A manufacturable nanotech machine that could do *anything* particularly deterministic or of note would be a revolutionary upheaval on the scale of the first stored-program computer or the atomic bomb. If we can get to there by 2030, I'd consider that believable. But from there, there's some massive technical hurdles. You have to go through at least one more truly revolutionary leap to get to the point of nanomachines that can do something like manufacture thousands of miles of concrete, and several to ten evolutionary leaps of the size of the development of the transistor-- most having to do just with the *safety* of the thing-- before it could used to lay pipe in a project like this.
- Super Ugly Ultraman
And I will take gladly endorse that viewpoint just as soon as the same courtesy is extended to consumers and private citizens.
Um.
1) I was not discussing Finland. In fact, 98% of the comments in this discussion are not discussing Finland. The conversation has gone off of the topic of the story post. The person I was talking to was talking about the general case of whether Lindows is an okay trademark, so I responded in a general sense. Had he been talking about Finnish law, I would not have responded at all, because I lack knowledge in that area. However since he did not seem to be talking specifically about Finland or any other specific country, I chose to respond to his points from the viewpoint of the law of the country in which Lindows is based (America) and then explicitly state I did I did not know how the law in Finland worked.
You may stop reading here if you like.
-----
2) Just because I am not a citizen of a country does not mean that I do not have the right to criticize its laws. I do not have the right to do anything about them, but if I think they are stupid, I have every right to say so. Similarly, you will notice that slashdot frequently features discussions about American law in which non-Americans weigh in with opinions.
3) According to this, 66% of Finland has at least a passing grasp of English.
4) In my personal opinion, if a country's trademark law only recognizes the untrademarkable status of generics if they are in the native language, that is stupid. (Of course, I don't know whether they do or not.) Generics rules exist to demarcate that which is so common that it is unreasonable to grant only one company a use of it. If English were a language almost unheard of in Finland, that would be one thing. But English skills, at least basic ones, seem to be common there. I would use this same line of argument to argue that, for example, common spanish or french words would be untrademarkable for the products they describe in America. This is of course just my opinion.
- You won't buy from the iTMS music store because despite taking your money they do pretty much nothing except distribute music to you, and almost all of the money goes to the corrupt music-industry middlemen, and you consider this Wrong.
- So instead you are going to pay extra to buy from Best Buy or some other music retailer who despite taking your money does pretty much nothing except distribute the music to you, and almost all of the money goes to the corrupt music-industry middlemen, and you don't see anything wrong with this.
Or is the problem here entirely that you're angry the paper-thin DRM on iTMS store purchases is a little more intricate to convert to raw AIFF than a CD is, yet people will still buy it?BTW, slashdot says this is my 900th logged-in post. Just for the record.
Sorry. I got confused by the slashdot comment breakout and misunderstood the thrust of what you were trying to say.
As I remember, What about Sun? What about Apple? What about Oracle?
These are not in any way relevant. If you will look, Sun, Apple and Oracle do not actually sell suns, apples, or oracles (unless you wish to argue that a relational database has shamanistic properties, which would be extremely interesting but would be a whole different argument).
You can name a music company, or a computer, "Apple" and that's an okay use of trademark. But you can't name a line of apples "Apple" or a line of apple pie "Apple" and then expect to defend this when someone else uses the term "Apple" to sell apples. Likewise, you can't name a window-based OS "Windows". Personally, I think Redhat would be able to put "Redhat Windows" in the stores and sell it and get away with it if they felt like it.
If Microsoft made a product called Winux, the same argument would apply.
And Microsoft would be able to keep its trademark on Winux for the same reason Lindows gets to keep their trademark in America. "Linux" itself, if you'll notice, was largely inspired by a similar product called "Minux". If Winux is a violation of Linux's trademark, then Linux is a violation of Minux's trademark...
The argument here is that Microsoft created a trademark that they do not have a right to defend.
Microsoft is essentially trying to legislate in the courts here. They purposefully chose to name their products after a wide range of generic names for product types they did not invent. They did this to try to enhance the perception their product is the only one. "Word" is "The Word Processor". "Windows" is "The Window Manager". "Office" is the only Office software there is. This is totally within their rights to do something like this. However, they have no right to take what is basically meant, under any sane copyright law, to be public property-- a common, predefined word like "Windows"-- sit on it for ten years, and then come crying to the courts that they have squatters rights when someone walks on the grass.
I'll throw my support behind Microsoft on this issue when and only when the Lindows corp. changes their name to "Licrosoft". Until then, I am supporting Lindows not because I want Lindows to get to use the name, but because I want Microsoft to not be able to get away with this reverse-copyright-dilution thing they have been trying to do to the english language for years and years.
MS "getting its copyright diluted" is just the natural consequence for MS of choosing to name their product a pre-diluted, undefendable word. A similar natural consequence is that if you go look at the Mac section of CompUSA, you will see a product named "Hancom Office" in a box that looks just about identical to MSOffice's and with the word "Hancom" in just leeeetle tiny letters in the corner...
Now, of course, I don't know what finnish and swedish law are. But I don't see any good justification for them being different.
You hypocrites would be jumping all over Microsoft if they came out with anything that looked like Gnome or sounded like Linux. I think Microsoft has shown remarkable restraint.
First off, if you ask me, Gnome and KDE BOTH look too much like MSWindows already, and that's their fault, not MS's.
Second off, Linus purposefully avoided registering a trademark on "Linux" for very many years. The only reason he owns one now is.. well, read the part under the "linux trademark" header on this page.
Lastly off, "sounds like Linux" is also a totally undefendable trademark. If MS chose to release "Winux" it would be totally within their rights to do so, because "inux" has become a common name for UNIX workalikes. Since "Linux" itself was largely inspired by a competing product called "Minux", I am pretty sure any hypothetical attempt by Linus to sue a product that rhymed with Linux would be laughed out of court.
How does a default setting regarding a specific directory's permissions plus the fact it doesn't use /etc/passwd make it "unfit for production"?
/etc. That's just how it works. It uses the NetInfo database. This is one of the few actually well-documented parts of OS X. /etc is a vestigial limb, it's a dummy file which is involved in startup but it is not actually used for real user info. It's used in single user mode because single user mode is an emergency startup mode used for debugging, and NetInfo doesn't launch in this mode unless you launch it, because part of the single user mode's hypothetical purpose is to debug problems with NetInfo!
OS X doesn't use
You might as well call Linux unfit for production because you can do some potentially nasty security-related things in some versions of Lilo.
Oops. My bad :)