"it's an act of war! and using bush logic... slashdot is in the usa.. the usa is harboring slashdot...... declare war on usa!"
Almost there.
This wasn't done by the US government so it is an act of Terrorism, but given that the US are harboring/. then it is a fundamentalist christian (they always say God is on their side) terrorist State known to have weapons of mass destruction and willing to use them (they did that twice already) and Niue must liberate them because they are clearly a threat to their national security and to that of the rest of the Free world.
N
Re:PPC 970 confirmed as G5
on
Jaguar is Over
·
· Score: 1
Is it? Thanks for correcting me.
Re:PPC 970 confirmed as G5
on
Jaguar is Over
·
· Score: 1
D'oh, should be sweet, not seeet, damn fat fingers, time to exercise.
PPC 970 confirmed as G5
on
Jaguar is Over
·
· Score: 3, Funny
As seen here (and soon on/.): http://www.rumortracker.com/framesets/macrumors/in dex.html
# One more thing... some of you may have noticed on the net...there was a funny thing that happened last thursday... where specifications were posted.
# 3 responses: 1) Can't be true 2) It's true 3) It's great marketing
# "Premature specifications" - it was a mistake, and it's true.
# We are delivering today - the Worlds Fastest Personal Computer.
# The Chip - we turned to IBM several years ago.
# We're calling it the G5. It is a 64-bit processor. The first first 64-bit desktop processor. Runs our existing 32-bit apps no problems.
# fastest front sidebus - ever. designed for dual processor systems.
# Massivly parallel. Up to 250 inflight instructions. -- can be processed at the same time. The G4 can do 16. Floating point "monster". Two fully symetric integer units. massive branch prediction logic.
# This is a new generation architecture.
Of course everybody expected it, heck, even the Apple WWDC pages used the term Velocity Engine (IBM-ism) instead of Altivec (Motorola-ism) like here: http://developer.apple.com/wwdc/tracks.html (in the last item "Hardware")
Steve Jobs come on stage, talks about lots of nifty new stuff for a long while, then prepare to go away, turn back to face the crowd...
"Oh, and one more thing, I almost forgot to talk about Panther..."... Demonstrate Panther live...
Audience yawns, somebody yells "We already saw the sceenshots!"
Steve looks a little bit disoriented "euh, yes, hum"...
But quickly recovers "Oh, and one more thing, we have at the back a demonstration machine of the new PowerMacs coming to market next month, you are really going to shit in your pants with these"
A few Apple guys come on stage with a machine described by Steve as a dual G5 (970) 2GHz, audience yawns, somebody yells "Yes, we have known for THREE BLOODY DAYS".
Steve positively looks finished, his face looking down, his speech notes fall from his hands, the lights on stage dim out while he slowly turns to exit, he advances near the back of the stage, and stops!
A spot lights up on him, his hunched body straightens up, he turns back to face the crowd with a small smile on his face, advance to the podium with long strides and start speaking:
"You will have to excuse me but I almost forgot this one LAST thing due to ship in two month."
Curtains open, revealing another machine which Jobs describes as a dual PPC G5 (970) 2.5GHz with more bells and whistles than you can shake a stick at to an audience that stays here gobsmacked, not believing what they see.
After having written this I guess I will be labeled a deluded Mac Zealot but the truth is that while MacOSX makes me drool (figuratively of course) I never owned a Mac myself but if I was in Steve Jobs position with a long string of surprises at previous keynotes and with a new architecture that cannot be too surprising in itself given how badly it is needed and expected I probably would manufacture some rumours and faked leaks to dull people's expectancy into a big surprise and then I would use a wild card to shock and awe (to reuse an already overused term) the audience by its unexpectedness as much as by its intrinsic quality. Of course this is assuming that Apple does have such a card up its sleeve.
"The technology may be, but it's still a copyright violation if they directly copied the code from SCO."
True, but the IBM suit is about trade secret. If it is a trade secret it is hard to replace it (a patented technology claimed as a trade secret by a company that didn't invent it, wtf???) but if it isn't and is "just" a copyright violation then there isn't anything stopping the release of the code in question and its replacement thus limiting SCO's gain to whatever damage they can get.
I don't know how to consider your post; is it simply a misunderstanding of the meaning of the word license or are you trolling me? You make good points so probably not trolling. Anyway here is my response:
The GPL IS a license.
The first and obvious clue would be that it is called the General Public LICENSE.
The second clue is that the text of the GPL refers to the GPL itself by using the formulation "this license" (around 28 times in all).
More seriously: "The GPL is not a license, it is just a clause that explicitly outlines the conditions of copyright."
No, laws concerning copyright is what explicitely outlines the conditions of copyright. The GPL is a license that explicitely outlines how to obtain additional rights not available with plain copyright for a work that has been licensed under it. Note that if your use of the material does not need these additional rights then the GPL need not apply to you.
"The GPL doesn't supercede the copyright, it just outlines what conditions are necessary and sufficient to obtain permission from the real copyright holder(s) to redistribute the work."
Sounds like a license to me. EULAs are also considered licenses and yet they are the one that put so much restricting clauses that you can hardly say that they don't try to supercede copyright.
"You can read GPL'd code, be inspired by it, and write your own version of it without being subject to the GPL, as long as you did not actually copy any of the actual GPL'd code. [...] I'm pretty sure RMS would hate this loophole in the GPL"
Hmm, I'm pretty sure he does not consider it a loophole. The way you describe it is having a copyrighted algorithm be the same as a patented algorithm (the code protects the idea, not the implementation) and given RMS's anti software patent position he would most certainly NOT agree about a copyright system that would automatically grant a patent on the code without even the laughable attempt that the patent office pretend to be doing to prevent obvious stuff and invention with prior art to be patented.
To conclude dictionary.com gives this definition of license (among others, I simply took the one I thought applied most to our case, feel free to find one supporting your case that hte GPL is not a license but I couldn't find one myself):
"Official or legal permission to do or own a specified thing."
The GPL is an official permission to do what is specified in it that is not doable with only copyright laws (i.e. redistribution).
I don't intend to continue this conversation any further, if this doesn't seem to convince you that the GPL is indeed a license the neither you are trolling me (get a life then, or try trolling somebody more important than me) or thatyou really believe it not to be one and won't change your opinion so me persisting to try to would be pointless.
"4) Burn In - Everyone overclocks their systems as fast as they can stabily do so, then removes their fans. Last PC to catch fire wins. It's kind of like russian roulette."
Hmm, I don't know. At the Russian Roulette you have 1 chance in n to die; with the Burn In you have one chance in n that your computer will NOT die, seems more dangerous, like playing Russian Roulette with only one empty slot.
What I am interested is how much the penalty can be at worst (say all of SysV was copied in Linux by IBM) given how much they make, how much they can hope to make and whatever factor for punitive damage they apply.
In the abstract they could just as well have sued IBM for 100 trillions dollars but then nobody would have taken them seriously.
It's just that the amount reminds me so much of Dr Evil that I have a hard time not imagining Darl McBride putting his pinky to his mouth; it feels like a pulled-out-of-their-collective-ass number rather than a reasonable estimate of actual damage and just that makes it hard for me to take the whole thing completely seriously (well, that and their whole big-mouthed attitude).
I have seen many scenarios over the last few days that ask the question "what if SCO was right and there was some Unix code in Linux?"
But I am not sure this is so interesting to wonder about it.
Let's suppose that there is indeed many blocks of 10-15 lines of code that come from Unix and went into Linux (and not from a common source or the other way around). Let's further suppose that is was indeed put there by IBM (to avoid speculating about as yet nonexistent lawsuits against Linux companies). Now I ask the question:
Is that code really worth one frickin' BILLION dollars?
I mean, to prove that it was worth that much they would have not only to prove that it was there and that IBM put it there but also that it was crucial enough to transform Linux from a "bicycle" to a "sports car".
Also, I don't know how much SCO makes from Unix licenses each year but I wonder how long it would take for them to make one billion dollars from their Unix licensing program.
I also wonder how much less money they have made from said licensing program since IBM supposedly put that code here.
The more you look at it, no matter what angle, the less sense it makes.
IBM licensed some code from SCO (or from AT&T but SCO inherited the deal) and used it to help them in AIX (to what extent is unknown).
Now SCO has a beef with IBM because they think they put some code that IBM got from a later version of the same product (Unixware, via Monterey deal) into Linux.
Using this beef, that still hasn't been proved in court or anywhere else than by SCO telling us it is true, they want to yank IBM's Unix code license and thus prevent not only IBM from shipping new versions of AIX until SCO's code is removed from it so they don't have a claim but also RETROACTIVELY to every copy of AIX that was sold in the last 15 or so years.
If they really manage to pull up sch a legal stunt (highly doubtful, it's more likely that they just are full of crap) it would mean that any piece of proprietary software made by company A that incorporate some licensed code from another company B could become illegal if company B yank the license of company A for any reason and without needing to prove a damn thing.
This seems like a big reason NOT to use proprietary software, to recap:
Free Software: Perpetual license (at least fro the GPL and BSD), code can only be declared illegal by court decision. Later versions with amended source code are legal (like the *BSD's after the settlement). Dute to the speed of development of the Free Softwre community the delay between the court ruling making a version illegal and a cleaned up version would be very small. Earlier versions can also be easily cleaned up if necessary to avoid upgrading.
Proprietary software (if SCO's stunt miraculously works): Even if your license is supposedly perpetual by contract with the vendor another company that had no business with you can come by and say that due to a dispute between them and said vendor your version is illegal. No need for a court ruling or to prove anything you assert (according to SCO). You cannot modify the software to make it legal (no code) and it is unlikely that the vendor will be willing to modify all the older versions still used by their clients so they don't need to upgrade it.
Apparently when Novell bought Unix it came with a number of Unix licensees and when they sold/licensed...whatever they agreed to with SCO about Unix they kept these clients but SCO administered them, paying back 95% back to Novell. BUT, my interpretation is that it only concerns these clients and any new clients aquired by SCO are not covered by that arrangement.
At least that's what I understood from what the Novell guy said about it in the article.
So it seems SCO probably gets to keep all the money it collects from now on. None of that, of course, says anything about who owns the IP rights.
Hmm, no, you forgot to read the last sentence:
In addition, Novell will continue to receive revenue from existing licenses for older versions of UNIX System source code.
So why would SCO have to keep paying Novell for existing licenses for older versions of Unix System source code (e.g. SVRS) if it did own the copyright on it.
My interpretation is that Novell sold Unixware to SCO but kept the copyright to SVRS (so that SCO only owns recent changes to Unixware but not the original SVRS code apparently) and the terms of their agreement was that SCO would pay Novell royalties on Unixware until 2002 (a bit like a mortgage) and then stop to pay for Unixware but continue to pay Novell for the Unix licenses they sell to other companies, being the "administative agent" for those licenses.
> "Even though SCO has hired David Boies as its attorney -- the legal star whose past clients include Al Gore and Napster..."
>And with a track record like that, how can SCO possibly lose?
And the DOJ was his client against MS too which should mean that SCO will win the case but get so screwed up in the settlement that they will still be seen as the losers.
Nobody forced him to mention the Salon story at all which would have sidestepped any such problem (but not the problem of everyone submitting the link to it).
Another way to look at it is that if a work makes more than a dollar in fifty years it can be put in a bank account and the interest should be enough to pay for the fee each year with the cumulated interests.
If after fifty years the copyright hasn't made enough money to allow for the fee to be paid then there is no harm to the copyright holder if it is returned* to the public domain.
*I think I prefer to use the term returned to spread the meme that copyright is owned by the public but that the author(s) are given a time limited exclusive distribution right as codified in the law which is a slightly different way to look at it (the opposite of the Intellectual Property view) in which after expiration the exclusive distribution rights expire and the copyirghted material comes BACK to the public domain (i.e. It came from all the work ever created before most of which are PD and therefore it came from the PD only to be chained at birth for a limited time).
No, but somebody interested in republishing the work cannot legally do so if they cannot find the copyright owner due to such a situation. This was one of the reasons for the Eldred case, some works he wanted to publish on the net were about to be PD'd but with the extension they had another 20 years coming and for some of them there was no way to find the copyright owner therefore he couldn't publish them.
You don't need such a law if you don't plan on respecting copyrights, you only need kazaa or another P2P network.
"This law would mean that GPL code would begin to go into public domain in 50 years, unless somebody like FSF ponies up the bux."
If the Free Software community cannot compete with a competitor when having a 50 years head start over them then it deserve to die. That would be better than to turn into a copyright hoarding pig like the ??AAs' members.
"i mean wtf? a girl cant be hot unless shes in a (bad) sci-fi flick?"
Nah!! It's because the Natalie Portman Naked and Petrified trolls are a bunch of pervert that find her sexy because of her role in Leon (The Proffessional in the States).
It may not be market in action in a traditional way but it is still market in action.
Think of it that way, the market is composed of providers of goods and users of these goods. Now there existed a demand that was not fulfilled by the current market for a good quality OS that was cheap. The part of the market that created that demand didn't consider Windows good enough or traditional Unix cheap enough.
Due to the absence of a good solution the users themselves provided one (Linux and then *BSD) which could be explained as Adam Smith's "invisible Hand" and some organised themselves as providers (RedHat...) thus filling the supply for which there was an initial demand. The users working hand in hand with these new providers did such a good job that it allows for the new products to compete even in other markets for which the product wasn't geared to at first and it is even starting to introduce competition in a monopoly market (desktop) although in a small way, thus increasing competition overall.
This may be an unusual way for the "invisible hand" to happen but it seems to me to be the best example that such a force can exist given the right conditions: that the means of production of the goods are not restricted to a few big players... sound more communist than capitalist though; maybe capitalism can only work with a bit of communism (i.e. with some things not being owned by anybody).
Ok, maybe that line of argument is a bit far fetched but still interesting to think about I believe.
Slashdot Mirror
"But penguins eat fish. Fish eat worms. This worm eats Windows."
;).
This really proves that Windows is at the bottom of the ladder
"it's an act of war! and using bush logic... slashdot is in the usa
Almost there.
This wasn't done by the US government so it is an act of Terrorism, but given that the US are harboring
N
Is it? Thanks for correcting me.
D'oh, should be sweet, not seeet, damn fat fingers, time to exercise.
As seen here (and soon on
# One more thing... some of you may have noticed on the net...there was a funny thing that happened last thursday... where specifications were posted.
# 3 responses: 1) Can't be true 2) It's true 3) It's great marketing
# "Premature specifications" - it was a mistake, and it's true.
# We are delivering today - the Worlds Fastest Personal Computer.
# The Chip - we turned to IBM several years ago.
# We're calling it the G5. It is a 64-bit processor. The first first 64-bit desktop processor. Runs our existing 32-bit apps no problems.
# fastest front sidebus - ever. designed for dual processor systems.
# Massivly parallel. Up to 250 inflight instructions. -- can be processed at the same time. The G4 can do 16. Floating point "monster". Two fully symetric integer units. massive branch prediction logic.
# This is a new generation architecture.
Of course everybody expected it, heck, even the Apple WWDC pages used the term Velocity Engine (IBM-ism) instead of Altivec (Motorola-ism) like here: http://developer.apple.com/wwdc/tracks.html (in the last item "Hardware")
Seeet!
Now time to save some money and then spend it
Oh, what the heck, time to get more indebted
Nooo, must resist temptation, DAMN YOU APPLE!!
Steve Jobs come on stage, talks about lots of nifty new stuff for a long while, then prepare to go away, turn back to face the crowd...
"Oh, and one more thing, I almost forgot to talk about Panther..."
Audience yawns, somebody yells "We already saw the sceenshots!"
Steve looks a little bit disoriented "euh, yes, hum"...
But quickly recovers "Oh, and one more thing, we have at the back a demonstration machine of the new PowerMacs coming to market next month, you are really going to shit in your pants with these"
A few Apple guys come on stage with a machine described by Steve as a dual G5 (970) 2GHz, audience yawns, somebody yells "Yes, we have known for THREE BLOODY DAYS".
Steve positively looks finished, his face looking down, his speech notes fall from his hands, the lights on stage dim out while he slowly turns to exit, he advances near the back of the stage, and stops!
A spot lights up on him, his hunched body straightens up, he turns back to face the crowd with a small smile on his face, advance to the podium with long strides and start speaking:
"You will have to excuse me but I almost forgot this one LAST thing due to ship in two month."
Curtains open, revealing another machine which Jobs describes as a dual PPC G5 (970) 2.5GHz with more bells and whistles than you can shake a stick at to an audience that stays here gobsmacked, not believing what they see.
After having written this I guess I will be labeled a deluded Mac Zealot but the truth is that while MacOSX makes me drool (figuratively of course) I never owned a Mac myself but if I was in Steve Jobs position with a long string of surprises at previous keynotes and with a new architecture that cannot be too surprising in itself given how badly it is needed and expected I probably would manufacture some rumours and faked leaks to dull people's expectancy into a big surprise and then I would use a wild card to shock and awe (to reuse an already overused term) the audience by its unexpectedness as much as by its intrinsic quality. Of course this is assuming that Apple does have such a card up its sleeve.
"The technology may be, but it's still a copyright violation if they directly copied the code from SCO."
True, but the IBM suit is about trade secret. If it is a trade secret it is hard to replace it (a patented technology claimed as a trade secret by a company that didn't invent it, wtf???) but if it isn't and is "just" a copyright violation then there isn't anything stopping the release of the code in question and its replacement thus limiting SCO's gain to whatever damage they can get.
I don't know how to consider your post; is it simply a misunderstanding of the meaning of the word license or are you trolling me? You make good points so probably not trolling. Anyway here is my response:
The GPL IS a license.
The first and obvious clue would be that it is called the General Public LICENSE.
The second clue is that the text of the GPL refers to the GPL itself by using the formulation "this license" (around 28 times in all).
More seriously:
"The GPL is not a license, it is just a clause that explicitly outlines the conditions of copyright."
No, laws concerning copyright is what explicitely outlines the conditions of copyright. The GPL is a license that explicitely outlines how to obtain additional rights not available with plain copyright for a work that has been licensed under it. Note that if your use of the material does not need these additional rights then the GPL need not apply to you.
"The GPL doesn't supercede the copyright, it just outlines what conditions are necessary and sufficient to obtain permission from the real copyright holder(s) to redistribute the work."
Sounds like a license to me. EULAs are also considered licenses and yet they are the one that put so much restricting clauses that you can hardly say that they don't try to supercede copyright.
"You can read GPL'd code, be inspired by it, and write your own version of it without being subject to the GPL, as long as you did not actually copy any of the actual GPL'd code. [...] I'm pretty sure RMS would hate this loophole in the GPL"
Hmm, I'm pretty sure he does not consider it a loophole. The way
you describe it is having a copyrighted algorithm be the same as a patented algorithm (the code protects the idea, not the implementation) and given RMS's anti software patent position he would most certainly NOT agree about a copyright system that would automatically grant a patent on the code without even the laughable attempt that the patent office pretend to be doing to prevent obvious stuff and invention with prior art to be patented.
To conclude dictionary.com gives this definition of license (among others, I simply took the one I thought applied most to our case, feel free to find one supporting your case that hte GPL is not a license but I couldn't find one myself):
"Official or legal permission to do or own a specified thing."
The GPL is an official permission to do what is specified in it that is not doable with only copyright laws (i.e. redistribution).
I don't intend to continue this conversation any further, if this doesn't seem to convince you that the GPL is indeed a license the neither you are trolling me (get a life then, or try trolling somebody more important than me) or thatyou really believe it not to be one and won't change your opinion so me persisting to try to would be pointless.
Bye, HAND.
"Only if it's illegal to say that drinking a certain type of beer is going to get you more women."
You only get more women if they are the one drinking the beer, not you (unless you need to because tehy are ugly).
"4) Burn In - Everyone overclocks their systems as fast as they can stabily do so, then removes their fans. Last PC to catch fire wins. It's kind of like russian roulette."
Hmm, I don't know. At the Russian Roulette you have 1 chance in n to die; with the Burn In you have one chance in n that your computer will NOT die, seems more dangerous, like playing Russian Roulette with only one empty slot.
What I am interested is how much the penalty can be at worst (say all of SysV was copied in Linux by IBM) given how much they make, how much they can hope to make and whatever factor for punitive damage they apply.
In the abstract they could just as well have sued IBM for 100 trillions dollars but then nobody would have taken them seriously.
It's just that the amount reminds me so much of Dr Evil that I have a hard time not imagining Darl McBride putting his pinky to his mouth; it feels like a pulled-out-of-their-collective-ass number rather than a reasonable estimate of actual damage and just that makes it hard for me to take the whole thing completely seriously (well, that and their whole big-mouthed attitude).
"How about we just all agree that both Bush and Clinton are tossers."
Clinton wasn't a tosser, he had a female aid to take care of that.
I have seen many scenarios over the last few days that ask the question "what if SCO was right and there was some Unix code in Linux?"
But I am not sure this is so interesting to wonder about it.
Let's suppose that there is indeed many blocks of 10-15 lines of code that come from Unix and went into Linux (and not from a common source or the other way around). Let's further suppose that is was indeed put there by IBM (to avoid speculating about as yet nonexistent lawsuits against Linux companies). Now I ask the question:
Is that code really worth one frickin' BILLION dollars?
I mean, to prove that it was worth that much they would have not only to prove that it was there and that IBM put it there but also that it was crucial enough to transform Linux from a "bicycle" to a "sports car".
Also, I don't know how much SCO makes from Unix licenses each year but I wonder how long it would take for them to make one billion dollars from their Unix licensing program.
I also wonder how much less money they have made from said licensing program since IBM supposedly put that code here.
The more you look at it, no matter what angle, the less sense it makes.
IBM licensed some code from SCO (or from AT&T but SCO inherited the deal) and used it to help them in AIX (to what extent is unknown).
Now SCO has a beef with IBM because they think they put some code that IBM got from a later version of the same product (Unixware, via Monterey deal) into Linux.
Using this beef, that still hasn't been proved in court or anywhere else than by SCO telling us it is true, they want to yank IBM's Unix code license and thus prevent not only IBM from shipping new versions of AIX until SCO's code is removed from it so they don't have a claim but also RETROACTIVELY to every copy of AIX that was sold in the last 15 or so years.
If they really manage to pull up sch a legal stunt (highly doubtful, it's more likely that they just are full of crap) it would mean that any piece of proprietary software made by company A that incorporate some licensed code from another company B could become illegal if company B yank the license of company A for any reason and without needing to prove a damn thing.
This seems like a big reason NOT to use proprietary software, to recap:
Free Software: Perpetual license (at least fro the GPL and BSD), code can only be declared illegal by court decision. Later versions with amended source code are legal (like the *BSD's after the settlement). Dute to the speed of development of the Free Softwre community the delay between the court ruling making a version illegal and a cleaned up version would be very small. Earlier versions can also be easily cleaned up if necessary to avoid upgrading.
Proprietary software (if SCO's stunt miraculously works): Even if your license is supposedly perpetual by contract with the vendor another company that had no business with you can come by and say that due to a dispute between them and said vendor your version is illegal. No need for a court ruling or to prove anything you assert (according to SCO). You cannot modify the software to make it legal (no code) and it is unlikely that the vendor will be willing to modify all the older versions still used by their clients so they don't need to upgrade it.
Which one is better for business already?
Apparently when Novell bought Unix it came with a number of Unix licensees and when they sold/licensed...whatever they agreed to with SCO about Unix they kept these clients but SCO administered them, paying back 95% back to Novell. BUT, my interpretation is that it only concerns these clients and any new clients aquired by SCO are not covered by that arrangement.
At least that's what I understood from what the Novell guy said about it in the article.
So it seems SCO probably gets to keep all the money it collects from now on. None of that, of course, says anything about who owns the IP rights.
Hmm, no, you forgot to read the last sentence:
In addition, Novell will continue to receive revenue from existing licenses for older versions of UNIX System source code.
So why would SCO have to keep paying Novell for existing licenses for older versions of Unix System source code (e.g. SVRS) if it did own the copyright on it.
My interpretation is that Novell sold Unixware to SCO but kept the copyright to SVRS (so that SCO only owns recent changes to Unixware but not the original SVRS code apparently) and the terms of their agreement was that SCO would pay Novell royalties on Unixware until 2002 (a bit like a mortgage) and then stop to pay for Unixware but continue to pay Novell for the Unix licenses they sell to other companies, being the "administative agent" for those licenses.
"If Bill Gates is the father of the matrix....who is the mother?"
Steve Ballmer
> "Even though SCO has hired David Boies as its attorney -- the legal star whose past clients include Al Gore and Napster ..."
>And with a track record like that, how can SCO possibly lose?
And the DOJ was his client against MS too which should mean that SCO will win the case but get so screwed up in the settlement that they will still be seen as the losers.
Nobody forced him to mention the Salon story at all which would have sidestepped any such problem (but not the problem of everyone submitting the link to it).
Another way to look at it is that if a work makes more than a dollar in fifty years it can be put in a bank account and the interest should be enough to pay for the fee each year with the cumulated interests.
If after fifty years the copyright hasn't made enough money to allow for the fee to be paid then there is no harm to the copyright holder if it is returned* to the public domain.
*I think I prefer to use the term returned to spread the meme that copyright is owned by the public but that the author(s) are given a time limited exclusive distribution right as codified in the law which is a slightly different way to look at it (the opposite of the Intellectual Property view) in which after expiration the exclusive distribution rights expire and the copyirghted material comes BACK to the public domain (i.e. It came from all the work ever created before most of which are PD and therefore it came from the PD only to be chained at birth for a limited time).
No, but somebody interested in republishing the work cannot legally do so if they cannot find the copyright owner due to such a situation. This was one of the reasons for the Eldred case, some works he wanted to publish on the net were about to be PD'd but with the extension they had another 20 years coming and for some of them there was no way to find the copyright owner therefore he couldn't publish them.
You don't need such a law if you don't plan on respecting copyrights, you only need kazaa or another P2P network.
"This law would mean that GPL code would begin to go into public domain in 50 years, unless somebody like FSF ponies up the bux."
If the Free Software community cannot compete with a competitor when having a 50 years head start over them then it deserve to die. That would be better than to turn into a copyright hoarding pig like the ??AAs' members.
"slow you down?"
No, they don't but they sure make my car fly.
"i mean wtf? a girl cant be hot unless shes in a (bad) sci-fi flick?"
Nah!! It's because the Natalie Portman Naked and Petrified trolls are a bunch of pervert that find her sexy because of her role in Leon (The Proffessional in the States).
It may not be market in action in a traditional way but it is still market in action.
Think of it that way, the market is composed of providers of goods and users of these goods. Now there existed a demand that was not fulfilled by the current market for a good quality OS that was cheap. The part of the market that created that demand didn't consider Windows good enough or traditional Unix cheap enough.
Due to the absence of a good solution the users themselves provided one (Linux and then *BSD) which could be explained as Adam Smith's "invisible Hand" and some organised themselves as providers (RedHat...) thus filling the supply for which there was an initial demand. The users working hand in hand with these new providers did such a good job that it allows for the new products to compete even in other markets for which the product wasn't geared to at first and it is even starting to introduce competition in a monopoly market (desktop) although in a small way, thus increasing competition overall.
This may be an unusual way for the "invisible hand" to happen but it seems to me to be the best example that such a force can exist given the right conditions: that the means of production of the goods are not restricted to a few big players... sound more communist than capitalist though; maybe capitalism can only work with a bit of communism (i.e. with some things not being owned by anybody).
Ok, maybe that line of argument is a bit far fetched but still interesting to think about I believe.