I don't think cost has much to do with it. If a doctor or lawyer provides free services to you, but then proceeds to act negligently, that could be cause for losing his license.
Right but you have got to have a license in the first place, that is the license say that you have the necessary skill to operate ang grant you the right to do so, whereas up to now in CS you don't nee dsuch a thing, otherwise my neighbour couldn't help me make my plumbing (bad example, my father being plumber;)) because if he did it wrong i could sur him, which is obviously not the case. In any case, cost has really nothing to the with the GPL or the issue at hand. Not cost per see, but the fact that a relation of sale exists, which is most often caracterized by the exchange of money for goods or service, but it can be exchange of goods for services, or of knwoledge for knowledge (say I give you the right to use this patent if you give me the right to use this patent).
What is needed is a relationship between the two party, relationship that doesn't exist in the case of the GPL, unless you are Redhat or another commercial vendor, in which case you must ensure that the client agree with your conditions (by making him accept the GPl or another license before installing their software), and only in the case of this software vendor using the shrink wrap technique is the GPL (or BSD. or MPL) put to the same ground as other shrink wrap licenses, that is if the user doesn't agree with it he should have his rights as given by law but no more, so if the judge decide that the shrink wrap nature of the license make it non-enforceable he has his warranty as given by law. Note that if he wants to redistribute the software he is forced to agree with the GPL (in case of GPL'd software) given that this right isn'r granted by the law, and if he does so then there is again these lines disclaiming liability.
What this means is that the GPL is trying to take away your right to a warranty, and thus requires agreement - which puts it in the same position as other shrink wrap licenses.
See above, you can have this right to a warranty only if their is a sale (or renting) relationship between you and the (moral) person making the offer.
If there isn't such relationship you don't have any right to a warranty and therefore the GPL cannot take it away.
If their is such a relationship then it is to the seller to assure that you agree to give up your warranty rights, which can be done by forcing you to agree to the GPL or by making you agree to another license (as long as this license isn't more restrictive than the GPL). To make you agree the vendor can do it using a shrink wrap approach, but if the court say that this license is invalid because you didn't knew the term of the contract before agreeing to them then you have your right to ask them for a warranty back, but this isn't the GPL per see that take it away, that is the vendor that does it.
I.e. If you did not agree to the GPL beforehand, but then bought a piece of software and found the GPL inside, the GPL would be in the same position as if it were a MS Eula
Yep, but you would only have the right to sue the person with which you have the sale relationship, not with the (possibly poor) author of the software (unless he is the seller in which case it is not his quality of author that make him at risk but his quality of seller).
because the GPL is not a pure right granting document as you argued it was earlier - it requires prior agreement, and thus faces the same criticisms faced by shrink wrap licenses. Nope, the GPL in itself is a pure granting license (although the granting have got some restrictions) but the prior agreement is needed only if you want to use these extra rights. The vendor can use the GPL to make you give away your right to a warranty in your sale relationship but this taking of right isn't inherent to the GPL but stems from the fact that the vendor ask you to agree to it to conclude the sale.
Modification of the software for my own use should be outside the scope of the GPL
It is, the GPL gives you the right to modify the licensed material as much as you want, except that if you want to redistribute it then it must obey to the GPL. Even agreeing to the GPL in a shrink wrap form doesn't prevent you from modifying it for your own use.
However the GPL is worded in such a way that it claims that I have no right to modify the code besides what the GPL grants me.
Can you point me which passage please? It may be a poor understanding of the wording from the non-natural English speaker that I am but as I readed the GPL the last time (which is, I will concede too long ago) it was claiming that I have no further right than thoge given to me by the law to modify the code beside what the GPL grants me.
You know, the GPL don't give a shit what you do with the code if you keep it to yourself, but if you redistribute it, say give a binary to a friend, then it must be under the GPL, that is your friend can ask you the source code to the modifications under the cost of providing it and licensed under the GPL, which allow him to further redistribute it (say, mail it to the maintainer of the software for integration in the main tree). In other word, "You don't want to give your changes away under the GPL, then you can't give them at all"
But that clause merely states that you don't need to sign an agreement to be granted additional rights. Certainly, if you make use of those additional rights, you must assent to the terms of the agreement giving you those rights.
Which is signing it. You don't need to take a paper, a pen and put your autograph on it to have signed something, just a handshake or an oral agreement is as valid a signature if you can prove it occured (like having a testimony from a third party) but generally you sign with ink on a paper having the terms of the agreement because this is eeasier to both parties to prove that their was an agreement if a resolution need to occur.
Coming back to the GPL, you don't have the right to redistribute a copyrighted work without the author authorising you, this is the law, what the GPL is doing is allowing you to distribute things covered by it according to its terms, so by redistributing a GPL'd software, something that isn't authorized by default by the law, you have in effect said "I agree to respect the terms of the GPL for this particular software", you have signed the GPL, even if you didn't send a paper to the author.
In the case of a shrink wrap license there are a few fundamental differences:
1. They are trying to take some of your rights away by the license (well, this is not due to the nature of the licensed being shrink wrapped but this is a very common feature among them).
This mean that if I don't agree to the license I should have my rights as given by the law, no right to redistribute it (unless I sell the original and every copy of if or destroy (uninstall) them), so Xing can say whatever it wants in its license saying that I cannot reverse engineer it to figure out how to make a compatible player under Linux and I couldn't care less, given that in my country (France, although this is the cas ein the whole EU) reverse engineering for interoperability purpose is completely legal.
2. In the case of a shrink wrap license I fulfill my part of the deal (give the money to the seller) before seeing the conditions of the sell (because I need to open the box to know them, which I can't do until I pay them), I don't know how it is called (blind contract maybe?) but this doesn't hold very well in court, after all they could have said "by opening this box you agree to put a stick up your ass three time a day every day" I don't know anything of it.
3. I don't have too much knowledge about it but shrink wrap licenses are take it or leave it propositions, which isn't the kind of thing the law likes (at least in the EU).
The worst is that in the US if UCITA gets passed this will change in that it will not leave any doubt about wether shr. wrap licenses are Ok but it will set the default at them being ok which is contrary to the current practice, and it will have a lot of other horrors stuffed in it.
In fact, everything you wrote seems correct, and
Nah, in fact all I wrote was garbage aimed at confusing you;). I surely think that what i wrote is correct (unless I expressed myself in a way misrepresenting my thought or wrote it with my brain 10 meters away from my head) but I cannot affirm it a 100%, this is just my interpretation of different laws that I had while studying it in Computer Law courses and various articles/books extracts/case law on it.
I don't see how it's inconsistent with what I wrote.
It is mainly consistent except that you didn't seem to understand that by redistributing a GPL'd (or BSD-licensed or whatever license give you more right htan the law without getting any away) program you are effectively signing the GPL, this is (I know I repeat myself) because by redistributing it you are exerting a right that is not given to you by the law, so to have the right to exert it you need to have this right granted by someone who can grant it, which is what the GPL does, so sto have these extra rights you either have to accept the GPL or contact the author(s) and have a permission given by him/them, the opposite being true, that is by exerting these extra right you are indicating your acceptance of the license.
BTW, when thinking a little bit more about this guy and its (public) motivation I found it rather ironic that he wants to fight against people cheating (trying to bend/break the rules of Quake) at Quake by cheating at the GPL (trying to bend/break the rules of the GPL).
If you want to continue this discussion we may better do it by e-mail rather than here, no??
<I>manualy do your editing (unless Word now supports regexp's. Wouldn't that be nice?)</I><P>
I suppose you could create a Word macro to do it so you open the file, invoke the macro and close the file under a new name (or maybe the macro can do it for you too), but of course your macro will come bundled with a macro virus;)
What if the author of the software is the person selling you the software? So if you agree to the GPL, you have no warranty, but if you don't agree, you have warranty and protection against negligence by default? The GPL is in no different position from other shrink wrap licenses in this case.
If the author is the one selling you the software then you can ask for a warranty and if he don't want to give one to you he can refuse to sell the software to you, you can still get it but then you didn't pay any money so you have no relation to the author and no right to claim anything.
This means that ACS members researching into nanotech now have their own forum for information exchange, where previously it was scattered between several different divisions.
Hey, AC'S can now have their own forum instead of being scattered between different stories. Instead of having to search for Hot Grits all throughtout Slashdot they can just go to one place. This surely will help advancing the search for a petrified form of famous actresses and advance the state of the art of hot grit pouring techniques, but I wonder what that has got to do with nanotech???
<I>The legal issue with respect to shrink-wrap agreements is not one of signature, but assent. Again, depending upon the circumstances, many license agreements can be entered into with a handshake, a computer click, or the breaking of a shrinkwrap.</I><P>
there is a fundamental difference between shrink-wrap agreement and other agreement because in a swa (shrink wrap agreement) I know the terms of the agreement onle <I>after</I> having agreed to them, whereas with the GPL I know them before abiding to it and even if I don't know them I can't do what is permitted to do under it given that these are rights that are not granted by copyright laws.<P>
Shirnk wrap is the blind date of licenses, except that you have more risks to have an ugly experience.<P>
1. The GPL disclaims warranties. Now it is not unreasonable to suppose that I have some rights to redress if the software fails to function as specified (e.g. due to negligence on part of the author), and the GPL is trying to take away this right.
You have not to abide to the GPL to use the software, since you do not abide by it you cannot either claim anything from the software maker given that you don't have any agreement, their is no link between you and the author(s), if you want a warranty you can ask it from the person providing you the software, for example i could refuse to buy you a copy of Linux unless you provide me with a warranty, if you don't want you are not forced to sell it to me.
However, I would think that I have a fair use right to modify the software for my own use, but the GPL claims that pure modifications falls under the scope of the GPL and requires compliance with the GPL.
Read the GPL again, if you do your own modifications but don't redistribute it at all you can, but if you redistribute a modified version then the source code must be available under the GPL.
That means that the guy was legally authorised to do any change to Quake but as soon as he distributed the modified version the people he distributed it to were granted the right by the GPL to ask for the code of the modifications, code placed under the GPL, which permit them to further redistribute it, by posting it on a website for example.
So the GPL is trying to take away rights that I would normally have.
Nope, because you have to agree to the GPL only if you redistribute the program (modified or not), if you modify it but don't redistribute it you are clean, although this is not in the spirit of the GPL. RMS told it again when their was the story about the potential GPL hole (see there):
I don't think it is ethically right to permanently withhold useful improvements. But that is a different question from what the GPL permits.
So your right to fair use is still there (contrarily to proprietary licenses) but is not in the spirit of the GPL, which is to share the code.
Now suppose he agrees to the GPL, and distributes the software in compliance with the GPL. Can the FSF then sue the user for copyright violations?
No, because by stating the GPL as the license the author is saying "You have all your right and if you want you can have even more by accepting these conditions (the GPL)", if you abide to the GPL while redistributing the code and the copyright holder sue you he would sue against what he promised to give you if you abided to the GPL, so he would have lied and I don't think this would hold up in court.
Basically when you redistribute GPL'd code in violation of it their is two possible attack:
1. To have the right to redistribute it you must abide to the GPL, you didn't then you violate the GPL, license violation.
2. To have the right to redistribute it you must abide to the GPL, you didn't so you didn't have the right to redistribute it, so you infringed on my copyright, copyright violation.
The better part is that both can be used together because by violating my license (the GPL) you are also violating my copyright. This is true for the GPL an dother free software license because they grant you more right than the law, whereas other licenses trying to take rights away from you you can buy the software, violate the license (say, use windows NT workstation as a server with 100 000 connections to clients despite the fact that maybe 2 or 3 are authorised by the license) while still abiding to the law. A judge may rule that you didn't have the right to do it under the EULA and find you guilty but he may also find that this clause is invalid (like clauses not to resell books under a given price were found invalid at the beginning of the century) and allow you to do it which should be the case IMHO, after all, if I buy a Beetle and can make it go as fast as a Ferrari it's my right, the car maker can say "you can not use this car to go over XXX km/h (or Mph for you Americans)" but it won't change anything to y right to do it (ok, i am not authorised by the law to go that fast but this is another matter).
Very good summary of the difference between plain copyright, GPL and shrink wrap IMO, except for the last sentence:
You don't need to sign an agreement for someone to grant you additional rights, but you do need to sign something to waive your existing rights.
In fact yes, you do. you are not bound by the GPL unless you redistribute the software, which means that to have the right you must agree to it, whereas the shrink wrap license ask you to waive your rights for using the software which you should have the right without the license given that you bought the software, just like you don't need to sign a license to read a book you bought and the terms of the license are known after the contract has been made, that is I don't know what the license is until I have bought it.
<I>IANAL, but I'm pretty sure you cannot enter into a binding contract with a minor, so maybe he thinks the GPL doesn't apply to him.</I>
The GPL apply only if you distribute the software, and explicitely state that if you the law of your country is in clash with the GPL then you cannot agree to the GPL and therefore cannot distribute the software, you can still use it but not distribute it, which would be the case for him if he is minor.
The way he acted on the IRC logs he want to try to bypass the GPL by not distributing the GPL but distributing a binary patch to the binary, my guess is that given that the only way for this patch to have any utility is to work with the original GPL'd code this constitute a derivative of the GPL'd code and therefore should either be released under the GPL or not released at all.
The other way he tried to bypass the GPL was to put a click-through license restricting your rights nuder the GPL, which is completely forbiden by the GPL and therefore is a violation of it, so to comply with it he either remove this license/agreement or forbid anybody to download it.
<I>Licenses are the only ways an intelectual property holder can protect her intelectual property, while still distributing it.</I>
So with your reasoning books don't exists, given that they are intellectual property (Copyright) and are distributed without <i>enforceable</i> license.
<I>This includes restricting copying</I>
False, you have the right to copy the copyrighted work, for example copy your CD to your hard drive or on your MP3 player, this is called fair use, but what you don't have the right to is to redistribute it.
<I>Noone (except some Slashdoters?) is disputing the actual legicimacy or placing a license specifying what the copyright holder allows done with her copyrighted material.</I>
False, I unfortunately don't have my course notes here but in the first semester I took a Computer Law course talking about copyright (and patents this semester) and their are people outside the Free Software community that are asking themselves (and other) wether softwares should be licensed, which is a lease-like relationship or wether they should not be licensed and be sold in a product sale relationship.
This question has also already been asked for books at the beginning of the century when their were a lot of licenses on books stating that it was forbidden to re-sell the book or to re-sell it under a certain price (which was at leat as high as the original price of course) and it was judged that such licenses weren't enforceable, which is why used book stores are legal today.
My opinion is that Software being the subject of a sale (I buy the box) they should be considered as book, maybe with more restrictions as I could install it on different computer but as books nonetheless.
Finally, with regard to ". . . Microsoft employees are thought to be haughty, sharp-tongued, and prickly to deal with.":
I didn't think of MS employees like that. Their is a fundamental difference between the guys doing the work and the upper management taking the decisions and I tend to make the difference, that's also why I can't bear guys like Saddam Hussein but have nothing against Irakians (Note: I am not comparing MS to Irak & BG to Saddam Hussein).
You say: "Admittedly, Linux would have fared better against the/. effect."
Generally when i hear about Linux/FreeBSD and their speed FreeBSD people say that it is faster than Linux, is OpenBSD a little bit slower than both FreeBSD and Linux because they did concentrate on security, or in other word, do you think FreeBSD would have fared better against the/. effect? Better than Linux?
what might make the people who read Slashdot want to read daily papers.
Well, I would read newspapers if only they were full of Trolls, NP's posts, first posts and HOT GRITS. After all, isn't it the most interesting part of/.? The part that everybody chech everyday and read with awe of the insightfullness of these posters?
Would you want to advertise on a page whose basic method of getting people to go there was to con them?
That sentence sounded quite funny at first to me because in French "con" can mean (among other things) the women genitals, which reminds me of the questions of how do they to keyword-block foreign porn site, let say an other-alphabet-language porn site with no english language (except for the navigation maybe?). Maybe it's time to create your porn site entirely in Klingon;)
Frankly I haven't read the original study but I think that if/., e-mails and irc aren't considered as social interaction then snail-mail and telephone cannot either, given that you don't see physically the person you are interacting with.
Reminds me of the Hitch'Hikers
on
Brainball!
·
· Score: 1
...of the Galaxy, in which DNA (Dougla N Adams) describe competitions where you must move the Pan-galactic Gargle Blaster bottle to fill the glass of your opponent who must then drink it, of course when you begin to lose you can hardly come back, and when you were loosing you had to "do some physically degradating actions, Ford was playing to lose";)
Now if they could just replace the ball by a bottle of whisky THAT would be cool.
Personnaly i find it disgusting all the tortures vegetable-eating people inflict upon plants. They take advantage that plants are different from us animals and don't have a nervous system to make us believe that they don't suffer and that it is right to amputate them, boil them alive (he if they were dead they probably wouldn't be good to eat anyway), cut them,...<P>
to stop this flow of insane cruelty against plants I decide to stop eating any vegetable product or byproduct (like honey, which is only stolen from plants by bees); given that I do the same for meat product as vegetarian and vegan will understand I have two choice left:<P>
1. Starve, no thanks.<P>
2. Eat chemical product that are not including anything coming from an alive organism.<P>
Well, finally I think I will go back and eat this meaty steak for which a cow was killed with these crusty chips for which many potatoes plants have been uprooted, unskinned and boiled <B>alive</B> and not bother that people think it's morally wrong to kill animal but morally ok to kill plants.<P>
What happens when someone who works for a given company wants to post a story that talks about something that's not all positive about given company?
Simple, he create a fake e-mail using hotmail/Yahoo/... and then create a/. account with this e-mail.
you may say that it shows that it won't stop Trolls from posting dumb stories because they can create an account just for it and you would be right, but remember that the goal of a security system isn't so much to be unbreakable but to be hard enough to break that 99% will just stop trying, if it is made harder to troll then less people will troll, but we must not make it impossible because it would make some things impossible to do anonymously for non-trolls.
BTW, he could also ask a friend to post it for him.
and that IBM was made to accept the (Microsoft) MS-DOS operating system by the same administration.
I don't believe that IBM was forced by the NSA to use MS-DOS, remember that at the time Microsoft wasn't the big huge monopoly they are today, if this theory was slightly true this would have been mroe probable to either have the NSA team with IBM to implement the back door or the NSA teaming up with Digital Research, the company doing CP/M of which QDOS (that was bought by MS and barely modified to be sold to IBM with the name MS-DOS) was a clone for the Intel processor.
Ok, I got it, they were forced to team up with MS because the guys at IBM were unable to do sloppy programs with lots of security holes in them;)
Our site has the most content, the most detailed content, more interactive features of ANY of the presidential campaign sites - AND it runs on Linux and PHP!
I love Linux (don't really know PHP so I won't talk about it) but that's not because their site is running Linux that I will vote for him, anyway their is no way I am goin to vote for Al Gore... I am not American;)
Okay, as far as #2 goes, fine, things take time. But that's not what the FAQ says. And here's a solution to #1:
Only/. officials can see the queue at first. But instead of having two options (accept / reject), give them three (accept / reject / defer). That way, they can reject all the completely, utterly worthless crap, but anything remotely marginal gets dumped to a public queue.
Another solution is to forbid anonymous posting of stories, I can understand that Rob don't want to ban AC but do we really need them for stories? After all you are just giving a link to a story written by somebody else. This wouldn't stop trolling in story posting but would limit it.
<I>and now i'm going to have to search through comments pertaining to rob's rant</I>
And now that you have had your post about Rob's rant moderated to +4 I will not only have to search through your post but also through other post ranting about the abondance of post about Rob's rant.
Anyway, if this (or a similar post) get moderated up I may also have to go through posts ranting about having to go through post ranting about going through post talking about Rob's rant, which probably will provoke somebody to post a rant about going through... Looks like an infinite loop;)
Slashdot Mirror
Right but you have got to have a license in the first place, that is the license say that you have the necessary skill to operate ang grant you the right to do so, whereas up to now in CS you don't nee dsuch a thing, otherwise my neighbour couldn't help me make my plumbing (bad example, my father being plumber ;)) because if he did it wrong i could sur him, which is obviously not the case. In any case, cost has really nothing to the with the GPL or the issue at hand. Not cost per see, but the fact that a relation of sale exists, which is most often caracterized by the exchange of money for goods or service, but it can be exchange of goods for services, or of knwoledge for knowledge (say I give you the right to use this patent if you give me the right to use this patent).
What is needed is a relationship between the two party, relationship that doesn't exist in the case of the GPL, unless you are Redhat or another commercial vendor, in which case you must ensure that the client agree with your conditions (by making him accept the GPl or another license before installing their software), and only in the case of this software vendor using the shrink wrap technique is the GPL (or BSD. or MPL) put to the same ground as other shrink wrap licenses, that is if the user doesn't agree with it he should have his rights as given by law but no more, so if the judge decide that the shrink wrap nature of the license make it non-enforceable he has his warranty as given by law. Note that if he wants to redistribute the software he is forced to agree with the GPL (in case of GPL'd software) given that this right isn'r granted by the law, and if he does so then there is again these lines disclaiming liability.
What this means is that the GPL is trying to take away your right to a warranty, and thus requires agreement - which puts it in the same position as other shrink wrap licenses.
See above, you can have this right to a warranty only if their is a sale (or renting) relationship between you and the (moral) person making the offer.
If there isn't such relationship you don't have any right to a warranty and therefore the GPL cannot take it away.
If their is such a relationship then it is to the seller to assure that you agree to give up your warranty rights, which can be done by forcing you to agree to the GPL or by making you agree to another license (as long as this license isn't more restrictive than the GPL). To make you agree the vendor can do it using a shrink wrap approach, but if the court say that this license is invalid because you didn't knew the term of the contract before agreeing to them then you have your right to ask them for a warranty back, but this isn't the GPL per see that take it away, that is the vendor that does it.
I.e. If you did not agree to the GPL beforehand, but then bought a piece of software and found the GPL inside, the GPL would be in the same position as if it were a MS Eula
Yep, but you would only have the right to sue the person with which you have the sale relationship, not with the (possibly poor) author of the software (unless he is the seller in which case it is not his quality of author that make him at risk but his quality of seller).
because the GPL is not a pure right granting document as you argued it was earlier - it requires prior agreement, and thus faces the same criticisms faced by shrink wrap licenses. Nope, the GPL in itself is a pure granting license (although the granting have got some restrictions) but the prior agreement is needed only if you want to use these extra rights. The vendor can use the GPL to make you give away your right to a warranty in your sale relationship but this taking of right isn't inherent to the GPL but stems from the fact that the vendor ask you to agree to it to conclude the sale.
Modification of the software for my own use should be outside the scope of the GPL
It is, the GPL gives you the right to modify the licensed material as much as you want, except that if you want to redistribute it then it must obey to the GPL. Even agreeing to the GPL in a shrink wrap form doesn't prevent you from modifying it for your own use.
However the GPL is worded in such a way that it claims that I have no right to modify the code besides what the GPL grants me.
Can you point me which passage please? It may be a poor understanding of the wording from the non-natural English speaker that I am but as I readed the GPL the last time (which is, I will concede too long ago) it was claiming that I have no further right than thoge given to me by the law to modify the code beside what the GPL grants me.
You know, the GPL don't give a shit what you do with the code if you keep it to yourself, but if you redistribute it, say give a binary to a friend, then it must be under the GPL, that is your friend can ask you the source code to the modifications under the cost of providing it and licensed under the GPL, which allow him to further redistribute it (say, mail it to the maintainer of the software for integration in the main tree). In other word, "You don't want to give your changes away under the GPL, then you can't give them at all"
Which is signing it. You don't need to take a paper, a pen and put your autograph on it to have signed something, just a handshake or an oral agreement is as valid a signature if you can prove it occured (like having a testimony from a third party) but generally you sign with ink on a paper having the terms of the agreement because this is eeasier to both parties to prove that their was an agreement if a resolution need to occur.
Coming back to the GPL, you don't have the right to redistribute a copyrighted work without the author authorising you, this is the law, what the GPL is doing is allowing you to distribute things covered by it according to its terms, so by redistributing a GPL'd software, something that isn't authorized by default by the law, you have in effect said "I agree to respect the terms of the GPL for this particular software", you have signed the GPL, even if you didn't send a paper to the author.
In the case of a shrink wrap license there are a few fundamental differences:
1. They are trying to take some of your rights away by the license (well, this is not due to the nature of the licensed being shrink wrapped but this is a very common feature among them).
This mean that if I don't agree to the license I should have my rights as given by the law, no right to redistribute it (unless I sell the original and every copy of if or destroy (uninstall) them), so Xing can say whatever it wants in its license saying that I cannot reverse engineer it to figure out how to make a compatible player under Linux and I couldn't care less, given that in my country (France, although this is the cas ein the whole EU) reverse engineering for interoperability purpose is completely legal.
2. In the case of a shrink wrap license I fulfill my part of the deal (give the money to the seller) before seeing the conditions of the sell (because I need to open the box to know them, which I can't do until I pay them), I don't know how it is called (blind contract maybe?) but this doesn't hold very well in court, after all they could have said "by opening this box you agree to put a stick up your ass three time a day every day" I don't know anything of it.
3. I don't have too much knowledge about it but shrink wrap licenses are take it or leave it propositions, which isn't the kind of thing the law likes (at least in the EU).
The worst is that in the US if UCITA gets passed this will change in that it will not leave any doubt about wether shr. wrap licenses are Ok but it will set the default at them being ok which is contrary to the current practice, and it will have a lot of other horrors stuffed in it.
In fact, everything you wrote seems correct, and
Nah, in fact all I wrote was garbage aimed at confusing you ;). I surely think that what i wrote is correct (unless I expressed myself in a way misrepresenting my thought or wrote it with my brain 10 meters away from my head) but I cannot affirm it a 100%, this is just my interpretation of different laws that I had while studying it in Computer Law courses and various articles/books extracts/case law on it.
I don't see how it's inconsistent with what I wrote.
It is mainly consistent except that you didn't seem to understand that by redistributing a GPL'd (or BSD-licensed or whatever license give you more right htan the law without getting any away) program you are effectively signing the GPL, this is (I know I repeat myself) because by redistributing it you are exerting a right that is not given to you by the law, so to have the right to exert it you need to have this right granted by someone who can grant it, which is what the GPL does, so sto have these extra rights you either have to accept the GPL or contact the author(s) and have a permission given by him/them, the opposite being true, that is by exerting these extra right you are indicating your acceptance of the license.
BTW, when thinking a little bit more about this guy and its (public) motivation I found it rather ironic that he wants to fight against people cheating (trying to bend/break the rules of Quake) at Quake by cheating at the GPL (trying to bend/break the rules of the GPL).
If you want to continue this discussion we may better do it by e-mail rather than here, no??
<I>manualy do your editing (unless Word now supports regexp's. Wouldn't that be nice?)</I><P>
I suppose you could create a Word macro to do it so you open the file, invoke the macro and close the file under a new name (or maybe the macro can do it for you too), but of course your macro will come bundled with a macro virus
If the author is the one selling you the software then you can ask for a warranty and if he don't want to give one to you he can refuse to sell the software to you, you can still get it but then you didn't pay any money so you have no relation to the author and no right to claim anything.
Hey, AC'S can now have their own forum instead of being scattered between different stories. Instead of having to search for Hot Grits all throughtout Slashdot they can just go to one place. This surely will help advancing the search for a petrified form of famous actresses and advance the state of the art of hot grit pouring techniques, but I wonder what that has got to do with nanotech???
<I>The legal issue with respect to shrink-wrap agreements is not one of signature, but assent. Again, depending upon the circumstances, many license agreements can be entered into with a handshake, a computer click, or the breaking of a shrinkwrap.</I><P>
there is a fundamental difference between shrink-wrap agreement and other agreement because in a swa (shrink wrap agreement) I know the terms of the agreement onle <I>after</I> having agreed to them, whereas with the GPL I know them before abiding to it and even if I don't know them I can't do what is permitted to do under it given that these are rights that are not granted by copyright laws.<P>
Shirnk wrap is the blind date of licenses, except that you have more risks to have an ugly experience.<P>
(I should keep this sentence as a citation
You have not to abide to the GPL to use the software, since you do not abide by it you cannot either claim anything from the software maker given that you don't have any agreement, their is no link between you and the author(s), if you want a warranty you can ask it from the person providing you the software, for example i could refuse to buy you a copy of Linux unless you provide me with a warranty, if you don't want you are not forced to sell it to me.
However, I would think that I have a fair use right to modify the software for my own use, but the GPL claims that pure modifications falls under the scope of the GPL and requires compliance with the GPL.
Read the GPL again, if you do your own modifications but don't redistribute it at all you can, but if you redistribute a modified version then the source code must be available under the GPL.
That means that the guy was legally authorised to do any change to Quake but as soon as he distributed the modified version the people he distributed it to were granted the right by the GPL to ask for the code of the modifications, code placed under the GPL, which permit them to further redistribute it, by posting it on a website for example.
So the GPL is trying to take away rights that I would normally have.
Nope, because you have to agree to the GPL only if you redistribute the program (modified or not), if you modify it but don't redistribute it you are clean, although this is not in the spirit of the GPL. RMS told it again when their was the story about the potential GPL hole (see there):
I don't think it is ethically right to permanently withhold useful improvements. But that is a different question from what the GPL permits.
So your right to fair use is still there (contrarily to proprietary licenses) but is not in the spirit of the GPL, which is to share the code.
No, because by stating the GPL as the license the author is saying "You have all your right and if you want you can have even more by accepting these conditions (the GPL)", if you abide to the GPL while redistributing the code and the copyright holder sue you he would sue against what he promised to give you if you abided to the GPL, so he would have lied and I don't think this would hold up in court.
Basically when you redistribute GPL'd code in violation of it their is two possible attack:
1. To have the right to redistribute it you must abide to the GPL, you didn't then you violate the GPL, license violation.
2. To have the right to redistribute it you must abide to the GPL, you didn't so you didn't have the right to redistribute it, so you infringed on my copyright, copyright violation.
The better part is that both can be used together because by violating my license (the GPL) you are also violating my copyright. This is true for the GPL an dother free software license because they grant you more right than the law, whereas other licenses trying to take rights away from you you can buy the software, violate the license (say, use windows NT workstation as a server with 100 000 connections to clients despite the fact that maybe 2 or 3 are authorised by the license) while still abiding to the law. A judge may rule that you didn't have the right to do it under the EULA and find you guilty but he may also find that this clause is invalid (like clauses not to resell books under a given price were found invalid at the beginning of the century) and allow you to do it which should be the case IMHO, after all, if I buy a Beetle and can make it go as fast as a Ferrari it's my right, the car maker can say "you can not use this car to go over XXX km/h (or Mph for you Americans)" but it won't change anything to y right to do it (ok, i am not authorised by the law to go that fast but this is another matter).
You don't need to sign an agreement for someone to grant you additional rights, but you do need to sign something to waive your existing rights.
In fact yes, you do. you are not bound by the GPL unless you redistribute the software, which means that to have the right you must agree to it, whereas the shrink wrap license ask you to waive your rights for using the software which you should have the right without the license given that you bought the software, just like you don't need to sign a license to read a book you bought and the terms of the license are known after the contract has been made, that is I don't know what the license is until I have bought it.<I>IANAL, but I'm pretty sure you cannot enter into a binding contract with a minor, so maybe he thinks the GPL doesn't apply to him.</I>
The GPL apply only if you distribute the software, and explicitely state that if you the law of your country is in clash with the GPL then you cannot agree to the GPL and therefore cannot distribute the software, you can still use it but not distribute it, which would be the case for him if he is minor.
The way he acted on the IRC logs he want to try to bypass the GPL by not distributing the GPL but distributing a binary patch to the binary, my guess is that given that the only way for this patch to have any utility is to work with the original GPL'd code this constitute a derivative of the GPL'd code and therefore should either be released under the GPL or not released at all.
The other way he tried to bypass the GPL was to put a click-through license restricting your rights nuder the GPL, which is completely forbiden by the GPL and therefore is a violation of it, so to comply with it he either remove this license/agreement or forbid anybody to download it.
<I>Licenses are the only ways an intelectual property holder can protect her intelectual property, while still distributing it.</I>
So with your reasoning books don't exists, given that they are intellectual property (Copyright) and are distributed without <i>enforceable</i> license.
<I>This includes restricting copying</I>
False, you have the right to copy the copyrighted work, for example copy your CD to your hard drive or on your MP3 player, this is called fair use, but what you don't have the right to is to redistribute it.
<I>Noone (except some Slashdoters?) is disputing the actual legicimacy or placing a license specifying what the copyright holder allows done with her copyrighted material.</I>
False, I unfortunately don't have my course notes here but in the first semester I took a Computer Law course talking about copyright (and patents this semester) and their are people outside the Free Software community that are asking themselves (and other) wether softwares should be licensed, which is a lease-like relationship or wether they should not be licensed and be sold in a product sale relationship.
This question has also already been asked for books at the beginning of the century when their were a lot of licenses on books stating that it was forbidden to re-sell the book or to re-sell it under a certain price (which was at leat as high as the original price of course) and it was judged that such licenses weren't enforceable, which is why used book stores are legal today.
My opinion is that Software being the subject of a sale (I buy the box) they should be considered as book, maybe with more restrictions as I could install it on different computer but as books nonetheless.
I didn't think of MS employees like that. Their is a fundamental difference between the guys doing the work and the upper management taking the decisions and I tend to make the difference, that's also why I can't bear guys like Saddam Hussein but have nothing against Irakians (Note: I am not comparing MS to Irak & BG to Saddam Hussein).
I love this sentence ;) but can you say GnuStep??? and it should be multiplatform too (different Unix and even WinNT).
You say: "Admittedly, Linux would have fared better against the
Generally when i hear about Linux/FreeBSD and their speed FreeBSD people say that it is faster than Linux, is OpenBSD a little bit slower than both FreeBSD and Linux because they did concentrate on security, or in other word, do you think FreeBSD would have fared better against the
Just curious
Well, I would read newspapers if only they were full of Trolls, NP's posts, first posts and HOT GRITS. After all, isn't it the most interesting part of /.? The part that everybody chech everyday and read with awe of the insightfullness of these posters?
Oh, no ! Now you have started a new form of Trolls: "Pour Hot Ants down your pants !!!!".
That sentence sounded quite funny at first to me because in French "con" can mean (among other things) the women genitals, which reminds me of the questions of how do they to keyword-block foreign porn site, let say an other-alphabet-language porn site with no english language (except for the navigation maybe?). Maybe it's time to create your porn site entirely in Klingon ;)
Frankly I haven't read the original study but I think that if
...of the Galaxy, in which DNA (Dougla N Adams) describe competitions where you must move the Pan-galactic Gargle Blaster bottle to fill the glass of your opponent who must then drink it, of course when you begin to lose you can hardly come back, and when you were loosing you had to "do some physically degradating actions, Ford was playing to lose"
Now if they could just replace the ball by a bottle of whisky THAT would be cool.
Personnaly i find it disgusting all the tortures vegetable-eating people inflict upon plants. They take advantage that plants are different from us animals and don't have a nervous system to make us believe that they don't suffer and that it is right to amputate them, boil them alive (he if they were dead they probably wouldn't be good to eat anyway), cut them,...<P>
to stop this flow of insane cruelty against plants I decide to stop eating any vegetable product or byproduct (like honey, which is only stolen from plants by bees); given that I do the same for meat product as vegetarian and vegan will understand I have two choice left:<P>
1. Starve, no thanks.<P>
2. Eat chemical product that are not including anything coming from an alive organism.<P>
Well, finally I think I will go back and eat this meaty steak for which a cow was killed with these crusty chips for which many potatoes plants have been uprooted, unskinned and boiled <B>alive</B> and not bother that people think it's morally wrong to kill animal but morally ok to kill plants.<P>
Simple, he create a fake e-mail using hotmail/Yahoo/... and then create a /. account with this e-mail.
you may say that it shows that it won't stop Trolls from posting dumb stories because they can create an account just for it and you would be right, but remember that the goal of a security system isn't so much to be unbreakable but to be hard enough to break that 99% will just stop trying, if it is made harder to troll then less people will troll, but we must not make it impossible because it would make some things impossible to do anonymously for non-trolls.
BTW, he could also ask a friend to post it for him.
I don't believe that IBM was forced by the NSA to use MS-DOS, remember that at the time Microsoft wasn't the big huge monopoly they are today, if this theory was slightly true this would have been mroe probable to either have the NSA team with IBM to implement the back door or the NSA teaming up with Digital Research, the company doing CP/M of which QDOS (that was bought by MS and barely modified to be sold to IBM with the name MS-DOS) was a clone for the Intel processor.
Ok, I got it, they were forced to team up with MS because the guys at IBM were unable to do sloppy programs with lots of security holes in them ;)
I love Linux (don't really know PHP so I won't talk about it) but that's not because their site is running Linux that I will vote for him, anyway their is no way I am goin to vote for Al Gore... I am not American ;)
Only /. officials can see the queue at first. But instead of having two options (accept / reject), give them three (accept / reject / defer). That way, they can reject all the completely, utterly worthless crap, but anything remotely marginal gets dumped to a public queue.
Another solution is to forbid anonymous posting of stories, I can understand that Rob don't want to ban AC but do we really need them for stories? After all you are just giving a link to a story written by somebody else. This wouldn't stop trolling in story posting but would limit it.
<I>and now i'm going to have to search through comments pertaining to rob's rant</I>
And now that you have had your post about Rob's rant moderated to +4 I will not only have to search through your post but also through other post ranting about the abondance of post about Rob's rant.
Anyway, if this (or a similar post) get moderated up I may also have to go through posts ranting about having to go through post ranting about going through post talking about Rob's rant, which probably will provoke somebody to post a rant about going through... Looks like an infinite loop