I would have thought that it would come down to intent. Was the intent to create a configurable word game similar to Scrabble, or was it to create a game that other people could use to play Scrabble? The former is obviously fine; the latter may well be infringing.
Copyright, trademark and patent law came about at a time when the ability to make copies was limited, as was education. We now copy things electronically in the blink of an eye
That's true, but I don't see that as a reason to scrap copyright laws (I realise that you're not advocating that, but many do). Surely, if it's hard to copy things, copyright laws are *less* important than if it's easy to do so? In an age where anyone can copy music, films, software, etc, surely the producers of those works need *more* protection in order to be able to recoup their investment in producing them? Take films for example - they often cost tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to produce. Even if we reduced stars' wages to a more realistic value, they'd still require a large investment (ever watch the credits? It takes a lot of money to pay that many people for the time it takes to create a film, not to mention materials, properties buying/hiring, etc). If anyone could copy it the moment it was released to the public, how would the studio/backers make their money back? Similarly for software (and especially games) that can require a truly staggering investment in terms of time and money to create. (I admire the people behind OSS projects like Apache, the Linux distros, etc, but I think it's unrealistic to expect all software development to be done that way)
Similarly for an author. It can take a year or more to write a decent book. Authors can't realistically tour - how much would you be willing to pay to hear an author read excerpts from their book? Would they even be any good at public speaking?
Now, I absolutely do not agree with the seemingly incessant extensions to the length of copyright protection. Ultimately, it is not in the public interest that a thing be protected for ever (which is especially true of software, where the source code can potentially teach so many so much). However, I truly believe that it is in the public interest that it be protected for a limited time; I don't pretend to know how long that is though.
While I commend you for sticking to your principles, if you were to boycott all companies that patent even just software, you'd fast run out of companies to do business with. Even Apple has some very dubious patents, and IBM is almost a patent factory.
On your first point, if the ruling didn't explicitly state that the licence must be granted free of charge, then MS is entirely within their rights to charge a fee. Similarly, the EU is within their rights to tell them to sod off and come back with a more realistic offering, as they have done.
If it's incompatible with the GPL it's incompatible with almost all important open source out there.
Forget about the BSD, Apache and Mozila licences or something?
Arguably, the most important OSS licence is the one that introduces the most people to the concept of open source software, and right now, I'd say that that's the Mozilla Public Licence. If there's one piece of open source software that Jo Average User is likely to use or know about, it's Firefox.
That's not to say that the GPL isn't extremely important, but the quoted statement ignores the huge amount of important, non-GPL software that's available under open source licences.
ownloading music for free would cost me literally thousands of dollars in terms of time spent
No it won't. I assume that you have free time; if you use some of that free time, it's cost you nothing but time. Unless you actually do less paid work because of a free activity, then it hasn't cost you any money at all (barring outlay on kit, etc, but I'm assuming you have a PC, electricity, net connection, etc anyway)
Look at it this way - if I don't spend an hour downloading stuff one evening, I don't magically acquire the cash to buy it instead.
For what it's worth, I don't agree that "time is money" - I personally think that it's far more precious. I can always earn more money...
Would you goto jail for a couple years for 50 million dollars? I would.
Surely the courts would sieze as much of a person's assets as possible in a situation like this? I don't know about the US, but here in the UK we are (apparently) very keen indeed on seizing a convicted criminal's ill-gotten gains. That is, commit fraud like this and get caught, and you can expect to lose the money and anything you bought with it.
(I say apparently as I've never been through the process myself, so can't testify to it first-hand)
Are you *sure* about that? I used Win95 for quite a while (with a good few re-installs), and I don't recall ever having to install a third-party TCP stack. DOS yes, Windows 3.x yes, but Win95, I don't think so.
You can do that (and I do), but the last time I checked google only allowed up to 10 keywords. You've used up 5 before you've even put in any that actually relate to the thing you're searching for. Depending on the nature of your search, it can be frustrating trading off "positive" search terms and "negative" ones.
Try searching for a review of any piece of computer hardware or any consumer electrical goods. The vast majority of hits are to price comparison or ecommerce websites that allow users to add reviews. That wouldn't be so bad, but the vast majority of them don't have user reviews of the stuff I'm looking for.
You can use all the code out there for free, but if you do modifications you have to give them back to the community
That's not entirely true. You're free to modify GPLed code to your heart's content and never release the modifications, as long as you never distribute the resulting binaries. It is redistribution of the modified binaries that forces you to distribute your modifications in source form, not merely making the modifications.
a) it comes with IIS as an optional install b) it comes with a single-user terminal service licence (ie you can connect *to* it using remote desktop)
b) was the real selling point for me; I love being able to access my machine from work. Sure, I could futz around using ssh and so on, but my preferred mail client is GUI-based, not terminal-based.
You have no idea how tired I am of that. Newsflash - different people have different opinions of things and the likely course of events regardless of who they work for. Or, in other words - it's not just MS employees that like MS software, or *AA employees who are in favour of (some aspects of) trusted computing initiatives and copyright.
It's high-time people here stopped resorting to such petty insinuations and addressed people's arguments at face value.
It's a user guide, not a guide to what's under the hood.
No, the JVM spec and Java language spec are freely available online in HTML and pdf format, or to buy in book form.
There are restrictions placed on people wishing to implement their own JVM/JDK and refer to it as "Java", "a JVM", etc. That's to prevent people from trying to do exactly what MS did and embrace and extend Java by adding classes into the java.* and javax.* package hierarchies.
Then how are you supposed to buy the product (should you be so inclined)? Could you not simply feign interest for long enough to get company details out of them, then inform the relevant authorities?
(That's a serious question, as it's such an obvious solution that people *must* have thought of it, so there's got to be a reason why that doesn't work)
If the machines are independent, then the best that can be said is that the application running on them is scalable and that the scalability is achieved by running more copies of it. It says absolutely nothing about the scalability of the underlying operating system.
That is measured by moving to ever more powerful machines, not by throwing more machines at it. That is, comparing performance of the OS on a single proc box, a 2 proc box, a 4 proc box, etc.
Windows was never forked as such, the 95 and NT kernels were entirely separate. They've been united in XP since 2001 or so; even XP Home and Pro are essentially identical, Pro just comes with a few extra features. RedHat Enterprise alone comes in 3 (4?) different flavours without counting Fedora or the explosion of other distros.
Here we get to one of the most overlooked points in the GPL: All rights derived from the GPL are bound to the fact that the entity in question accepts the GPL in complete.
Yes, but the GPL specifically and explicitly does not grant the right to use the code.
From the GPL itself:
"Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted" (see http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html#SEC3)
From the FAQ:
"You are free to make modifications and use them privately, without ever releasing them. This applies to organizations (including companies), too; an organization can make a modified version and use it internally without ever releasing it outside the organization." (see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLRequir eSourcePostedPublic)
This guy's company is free to use his code internally without restriction. What they are *not* free to do, and what they're trying to do, is distribute it and keep the source closed. It's perfectly permissable, however, for a company to take a GPLed project, modify it, use it internally and never release the modifications. However, as I said, I don't think that they could legally prevent an employee from distributing it to the outside world (but of course, IANAL, and if I did such a thing I'd expect to be fired for gross misconduct or similar)
No, I'm not forgetting that, I'm contending that he owns the IP of the lines of code that he wrote, and can do with them as he wishes. That those lines are useless (and likely don't even compile) on their own is (I think) immaterial.
The way I see it, he can give his company his (useless) code, but not the GPLed code that it requires to function. I may be wrong on that (I'm not a lawyer), but that's the way I think it *should* work.
On your third point, it's actually my experience that increasingly people want Java on the server and a web-based front end, rather than anything that has to be installed on the client. I am currently involved in a project to create an application for a (UK) government agency which is deliberately architected in this way on the client's insistence.
Other than that, I agree that the average C coder is no more (or less) skilled than the average VB coder, and similarly for Java, perl, python, $language. They each have their own little intricacies - in C you have to worry about buffer overflow errors, etc, in Java tuning the JVM to make most appropriate use of RAM for your particular app, tuning the garbage collector's behaviour, and so on.
No language is a silver bullet; no language is so easy as to be foolproof and require zero skill or thought.
Oh, and the earning more money bit isn't true; here in the UK at least there are plenty of very highly paid jobs in financial areas (amongst others) for skilled Java coders, if that's your thing.
1) I do not know of a single person of my acquaintance who has verified *any* code *at all* that they were not in some way responsible for (either as author, team leader or independent auditor)
2) if there is an error in one of the dlls, then fixing it fixes the problem across all apps that rely on it. On the other hand, if a programmer is sloppy and produces errors in their own code, you must manually check and fix every single module that they write.
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I would have thought that it would come down to intent. Was the intent to create a configurable word game similar to Scrabble, or was it to create a game that other people could use to play Scrabble? The former is obviously fine; the latter may well be infringing.
Copyright, trademark and patent law came about at a time when the ability to make copies was limited, as was education. We now copy things electronically in the blink of an eye
That's true, but I don't see that as a reason to scrap copyright laws (I realise that you're not advocating that, but many do). Surely, if it's hard to copy things, copyright laws are *less* important than if it's easy to do so? In an age where anyone can copy music, films, software, etc, surely the producers of those works need *more* protection in order to be able to recoup their investment in producing them? Take films for example - they often cost tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to produce. Even if we reduced stars' wages to a more realistic value, they'd still require a large investment (ever watch the credits? It takes a lot of money to pay that many people for the time it takes to create a film, not to mention materials, properties buying/hiring, etc). If anyone could copy it the moment it was released to the public, how would the studio/backers make their money back? Similarly for software (and especially games) that can require a truly staggering investment in terms of time and money to create. (I admire the people behind OSS projects like Apache, the Linux distros, etc, but I think it's unrealistic to expect all software development to be done that way)
Similarly for an author. It can take a year or more to write a decent book. Authors can't realistically tour - how much would you be willing to pay to hear an author read excerpts from their book? Would they even be any good at public speaking?
Now, I absolutely do not agree with the seemingly incessant extensions to the length of copyright protection. Ultimately, it is not in the public interest that a thing be protected for ever (which is especially true of software, where the source code can potentially teach so many so much). However, I truly believe that it is in the public interest that it be protected for a limited time; I don't pretend to know how long that is though.
While I commend you for sticking to your principles, if you were to boycott all companies that patent even just software, you'd fast run out of companies to do business with. Even Apple has some very dubious patents, and IBM is almost a patent factory.
On your first point, if the ruling didn't explicitly state that the licence must be granted free of charge, then MS is entirely within their rights to charge a fee. Similarly, the EU is within their rights to tell them to sod off and come back with a more realistic offering, as they have done.
If it's incompatible with the GPL it's incompatible with almost all important open source out there.
Forget about the BSD, Apache and Mozila licences or something?
Arguably, the most important OSS licence is the one that introduces the most people to the concept of open source software, and right now, I'd say that that's the Mozilla Public Licence. If there's one piece of open source software that Jo Average User is likely to use or know about, it's Firefox.
That's not to say that the GPL isn't extremely important, but the quoted statement ignores the huge amount of important, non-GPL software that's available under open source licences.
ownloading music for free would cost me literally thousands of dollars in terms of time spent
No it won't. I assume that you have free time; if you use some of that free time, it's cost you nothing but time. Unless you actually do less paid work because of a free activity, then it hasn't cost you any money at all (barring outlay on kit, etc, but I'm assuming you have a PC, electricity, net connection, etc anyway)
Look at it this way - if I don't spend an hour downloading stuff one evening, I don't magically acquire the cash to buy it instead.
For what it's worth, I don't agree that "time is money" - I personally think that it's far more precious. I can always earn more money...
Would you goto jail for a couple years for 50 million dollars? I would.
Surely the courts would sieze as much of a person's assets as possible in a situation like this? I don't know about the US, but here in the UK we are (apparently) very keen indeed on seizing a convicted criminal's ill-gotten gains. That is, commit fraud like this and get caught, and you can expect to lose the money and anything you bought with it.
(I say apparently as I've never been through the process myself, so can't testify to it first-hand)
Are you *sure* about that? I used Win95 for quite a while (with a good few re-installs), and I don't recall ever having to install a third-party TCP stack. DOS yes, Windows 3.x yes, but Win95, I don't think so.
You can do that (and I do), but the last time I checked google only allowed up to 10 keywords. You've used up 5 before you've even put in any that actually relate to the thing you're searching for. Depending on the nature of your search, it can be frustrating trading off "positive" search terms and "negative" ones.
Try searching for a review of any piece of computer hardware or any consumer electrical goods. The vast majority of hits are to price comparison or ecommerce websites that allow users to add reviews. That wouldn't be so bad, but the vast majority of them don't have user reviews of the stuff I'm looking for.
Bush has large oil interests and a number of close friends with large oil interests, doesn't he?
You can use all the code out there for free, but if you do modifications you have to give them back to the community
That's not entirely true. You're free to modify GPLed code to your heart's content and never release the modifications, as long as you never distribute the resulting binaries. It is redistribution of the modified binaries that forces you to distribute your modifications in source form, not merely making the modifications.
Well, I bought Pro because
a) it comes with IIS as an optional install
b) it comes with a single-user terminal service licence (ie you can connect *to* it using remote desktop)
b) was the real selling point for me; I love being able to access my machine from work. Sure, I could futz around using ssh and so on, but my preferred mail client is GUI-based, not terminal-based.
Yes, Longhorn is just a codename; it's named after a mountain, as are most (all?) MS codenames.
Step into the light, Coward Who do you work for?
You have no idea how tired I am of that. Newsflash - different people have different opinions of things and the likely course of events regardless of who they work for. Or, in other words - it's not just MS employees that like MS software, or *AA employees who are in favour of (some aspects of) trusted computing initiatives and copyright.
It's high-time people here stopped resorting to such petty insinuations and addressed people's arguments at face value.
Somehow create a worm that turns on the XP firewall, installs MS Anti-Spy and SpyBot and whatever else is needed.
And then (in the UK at least) be liable for prosecution under the Computer Misuse Act.
Seriously, this is one of those times when fighting fire with fire is a really dumb idea, no matter how tempting it may be.
It's a user guide, not a guide to what's under the hood.
No, the JVM spec and Java language spec are freely available online in HTML and pdf format, or to buy in book form.
There are restrictions placed on people wishing to implement their own JVM/JDK and refer to it as "Java", "a JVM", etc. That's to prevent people from trying to do exactly what MS did and embrace and extend Java by adding classes into the java.* and javax.* package hierarchies.
Then how are you supposed to buy the product (should you be so inclined)? Could you not simply feign interest for long enough to get company details out of them, then inform the relevant authorities?
(That's a serious question, as it's such an obvious solution that people *must* have thought of it, so there's got to be a reason why that doesn't work)
If you are 'evileye' (what a stupid username)
;-)
Says a guy calling himself 'caveman'...
Does paging not work on XP?
Of course it does. Feel free to change the original comment to "eats page file though" if it makes you happier.
If the machines are independent, then the best that can be said is that the application running on them is scalable and that the scalability is achieved by running more copies of it. It says absolutely nothing about the scalability of the underlying operating system.
That is measured by moving to ever more powerful machines, not by throwing more machines at it. That is, comparing performance of the OS on a single proc box, a 2 proc box, a 4 proc box, etc.
Oracle is threatened by Linux? Last I heard, Oracle was pushing Linux pretty hard.
try running ANY version of windows on more then 2 processors
Windows 2003 Datacenter Edition scales to 64-way SMP.
Windows was never forked as such, the 95 and NT kernels were entirely separate. They've been united in XP since 2001 or so; even XP Home and Pro are essentially identical, Pro just comes with a few extra features. RedHat Enterprise alone comes in 3 (4?) different flavours without counting Fedora or the explosion of other distros.
Here we get to one of the most overlooked points in the GPL: All rights derived from the GPL are bound to the fact that the entity in question accepts the GPL in complete.
r eSourcePostedPublic)
Yes, but the GPL specifically and explicitly does not grant the right to use the code.
From the GPL itself:
"Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted" (see http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html#SEC3)
From the FAQ:
"You are free to make modifications and use them privately, without ever releasing them. This applies to organizations (including companies), too; an organization can make a modified version and use it internally without ever releasing it outside the organization." (see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLRequi
This guy's company is free to use his code internally without restriction. What they are *not* free to do, and what they're trying to do, is distribute it and keep the source closed. It's perfectly permissable, however, for a company to take a GPLed project, modify it, use it internally and never release the modifications. However, as I said, I don't think that they could legally prevent an employee from distributing it to the outside world (but of course, IANAL, and if I did such a thing I'd expect to be fired for gross misconduct or similar)
No, I'm not forgetting that, I'm contending that he owns the IP of the lines of code that he wrote, and can do with them as he wishes. That those lines are useless (and likely don't even compile) on their own is (I think) immaterial.
The way I see it, he can give his company his (useless) code, but not the GPLed code that it requires to function. I may be wrong on that (I'm not a lawyer), but that's the way I think it *should* work.
On your third point, it's actually my experience that increasingly people want Java on the server and a web-based front end, rather than anything that has to be installed on the client. I am currently involved in a project to create an application for a (UK) government agency which is deliberately architected in this way on the client's insistence.
Other than that, I agree that the average C coder is no more (or less) skilled than the average VB coder, and similarly for Java, perl, python, $language. They each have their own little intricacies - in C you have to worry about buffer overflow errors, etc, in Java tuning the JVM to make most appropriate use of RAM for your particular app, tuning the garbage collector's behaviour, and so on.
No language is a silver bullet; no language is so easy as to be foolproof and require zero skill or thought.
Oh, and the earning more money bit isn't true; here in the UK at least there are plenty of very highly paid jobs in financial areas (amongst others) for skilled Java coders, if that's your thing.
Two points:
1) I do not know of a single person of my acquaintance who has verified *any* code *at all* that they were not in some way responsible for (either as author, team leader or independent auditor)
2) if there is an error in one of the dlls, then fixing it fixes the problem across all apps that rely on it. On the other hand, if a programmer is sloppy and produces errors in their own code, you must manually check and fix every single module that they write.