A Delaware franchise tax report is is a blue slip of paper about 8.5 inches wide and 4 inches high. Every year a Delaware corporation is required to complete the report by filling in the names of the company's officers, its address and the number and par value of its authorized shares (e.g., "the corporation is authorized to issue up to 1000 shares of common stock, par value $0.01 per share") -- that's about it. The franchise tax is computed based on the aggregate par value of the common stock (in my example, $10 = 1000 x $0.01). The franchise tax is _not_ an income tax and the report does not require reporting of a company's income or activities. The franchise tax assessible on even a large corporation is relatively modest -- this is one of the reasons Delaware is a desireable state to charter a corporation. As the Linux and Main article itself (which was a real hachet job) said, the KDE League's franchise tax owed was $20.
Forgetting to file a franchise tax report is a very common error. The Delaware Secretary of State's office sends the report form to the last known address, and if the address of the company has changed or, if the particular person at the company does not recognize that the uninteresting-looking envelope contains important information, it is easy to overlook it. Failure to file the report, even to the point of becoming terminated by the Delaware Secretary of State's office, tells me little about the KDE League.
I saw this ad a few weeks ago on the PATH train between either 14th and 23rd Streets or 23rd and 33rd Street. Cool (though who needs more ads in life?). The first time I saw it was early in the morning before I had my coffee, the image waivered somewhat and no one else on the crowded train seemed to notice it -- it took me a second or two before I was sure I hadn't half fallen asleep and was dreaming it.
If concern over (i) trademark dilution (as a legal matter) and (ii) potential allegations that Lucas subsequently breached the copyright of a fan to a derivative work were the only concerns, I would not think it would be too difficult to come up with a brief document that fan fiction producers could sign whereby they would (1) license the SW trademarks for a limited purpose for $1 and (2) grant back to Lucas any copyright they had in their derivative work.
From my limited familiarity with government contracting, I know that being found to have violated certain laws can cause a vendor to cease to be qualified to be a government contractor. Does anyone know whether the MS antitrust charges have had any impact on MS' status as a qualified government contractor (U.S. federal, state or foreign), or whether any actions have been taken to permit them to qualify despite the antitrust charges?
Generally speaking, the GPL and its close relatives don't get much flack from the SlashDot crowd. In essence they are EULAs, using the same legalistic and hard-to-understand languages as their distant proprietary cousins, but they are accepted, tolerated--even welcome in our community.
Little of the GPL regulates _use_ of the software subject to it, rather than _redistribution_, thus most end-users have little to be concerned about. Thus, I think that the GPL is a very simple license from the perspective of an end-user that did not wish to redistribute.
For an end-user, about the only interesting portion of the GPL is the non-warranty/disclaimer of liability, and almost every piece of widely distributed software (GPL, commercial or whatever) has some form of non-warranty, so the GPL is not too unusual in that regard. (Also, I would doubt that the non-warranty would provide complete protection against liability for the creator of intentionally malicious software.)
Even for a redistributor, including a redistributor of derivative works, the GPL is pretty simple -- to each person to whom you distribute the software or a derivative work, provide the source, including the "new" source of the derivative work, licensed under the GPL.
The complexities of the GPL generally arise in contexts in which someone -- generally a commercial enterprise having access to lawyers -- is intentionally attempting to employ GPL'd software in a potential derivative work without GPL'ing it (for instance, situations involving plugins or web services).
Historically there may have been a "purpose" or "public good" requirement for corporate charters in some jurisdictions (England, U.S. states), but in the U.S. at least very few if any states still have any requirement of a public good or even a specified purpose -- the typical "boiler-plate" language in a certificate of incorporation is that the purpose of the corporation is "to engage in any lawful activity".
As to why states would give out limited liability charters "for free": the argument is that individuals would not band together (as stockholders) to form entities of large enough to engage in meaningful economic activity unless they could be assured of be liable for no more than the capital they contributed.
Some thoughts (most of which I see now others have mentioned):
1. There are a number of languages out there with sizeable user populations: C, C++, Java, Perl, Python. While the market for intros or overviews to these languages is crowded, books that do a good job covering applications of these languages to specific domains are rarer and can be very useful.
2. "Missing Manual"-type books are often very useful, since official application documentation is generally so weak.
3. As others have mentioned, books that provide an overview of available resources would be useful -- how about "The 100 Applications Every Linux User Should be Familar With", with several pages describing each?
4. Books that provide architecture overviews of open-source projects would also be useful -- not user guides and not Coriolis-type line-by-line black books.
5. Books that whip-up various Linux HOWTOs into "professional" level documentation.
1. Requiring document submissions to gov't agencies to be made in an open format would not necessarily impose great costs on the gov't -- (a) as others have pointed out, MS Word already allows documents to be saved as rtf, ascii and html and (b) any Gov't-required open document format would likely very quickly be adopted by MS or plugin/convertor vendors.
2. I wouldn't be surprised if some states did not mandate a banning of MS as a vendor based upon the findings of law against it -- I know some jurisdictions have very stringent rules against vendors having violated certain laws, and I would not be surprised if some of these provisions did not pick up antitrust laws. It is possible that MS may have violated vendor requirements in a jurisdiction but that special legislative or regulatory action might have been taken to permit them to continue as a vendor despite the findings (I would be interested to hear if this was the case).
RMS is absolutely correct that the document format issue is one of the biggest obstacles to adoption of "free" and other non-MS operating systems, programs, etc. (and thus one of the biggest factors perpetuating the MS operating system and application monopolies), though his examples are a little over-the-top for use by normal people.
In my following of the MS antitrust case, I have not seen any evidence of the U.S. Gov't or the States taking much action against MS as a supplier to the Gov't. For example, the Federal or a State Gov't could (i) cease purchasing software from MS (I am sure many states have laws prohibiting companies that have broken specified laws from being a contractor to the state) or (ii) (if (i) is too drastic) require communications with or within the Gov't to be made in "open" formats. The Gov't has the advantage of being able to set standards that its customers have to live with. Perhaps if enough Gov'tal units mandated open formats, they would be adopted in the private sector more readily. Does anyone know whether the U.S. or any states have taken actions along these lines?
PS: Has there been an Ask Slashdot lately regarding the status of open document format projects?
The tangible products/large manufacturer point is a good one. Note also that his example on nondiscriminatory pricing assumed a non-$0-marginal-cost product or service (his example was shipping).
I frankly would be quite surprised if RAND would be construed to prohibit a patent holder from (i) charging a non-trivial flat fee (e.g., $1000), (ii) charging a fixed per seat fee ($5 per seat, user, copy, etc.) and (iii) requiring restrictions on or monitoring of redistribution -- any one of which would thwart anything remotely like open source.
Linus' Attitude Appropriate For Leader
on
Torvalds Tells All
·
· Score: 1
A number of commenters have been characterizing Linus' attitude as typical techie myopia/focus, for good or for bad. While I do not doubt that this is a large part of it, it also seems that his approach may be the most appropriate one for a leader of a diverse and non-centrally controlled movement -- stick to the technical and avoid creating controversy for controversy's sake. This allows him to retain the respect and allegiance of basically all interested parties. There are any number of ways in which Linus could have accrued more short-term economic or ego gratification to himself -- (i) found a commercial Linux operation, (ii) align himself with the explicitly commercial or, alternatively, explicitly non-commercial wing of the "movement", (iii) become a philosopher/pundit on the "Meaning of Linux" -- but at the longer-term expense of his credibility. It is a credit to him, and a benefit to "movement" at large, that he has declined to do so.
Great point. The news media has, because of the nature of their business, traditionally been one of the biggest (and best-financed) supporters of the First Amendment, but when they are owned by entertainment companies (as they increasingly are), their interests may lie more on the side of protection of intellectual property.
The impact of this is apparently illustrated by this Washington Post article, which describes a situation in which CNN's chief legal officer apparently was fired/quit over a dispute over what side CNN should take in a First Amendment related law suit -- CNN's initial pro-First Amendment actions may have been overruled by AOL Time-Warner's (the owner of CNN) interest in IP protection:
if it's GPLed, does it really matter if you have the copyright?
I believe that a single holder of _all_ the copyrights on the components of a GPL'd piece of software could release a non-GPL'd version (whether fork or just alternatively licensed), which it could not do if the software incorporated GPL'd code for which third parties held the copyright (at least not without obtaining a non-GPL license from such copyright holders). Thus, someone with dual-licensing on his mind would need to insist on copyright assignments and not merely GPL licenses of contributed code.
On a large enough project where the bulk of the development effort is in the hands of the sponsoring commercial copyright holder, I would think that a commercially sponsored non-GLP'd product might be able to leave the abandoned GPL'd code in the dust and that a critical mass of independent developers may never accrete.
Thus, it would be possible for a company to (i) GPL its product, (ii) insist on assignments of licenses of contributed code, (iii) devote sufficient effort to the product so that the company's developers predominant in the development process, (iv) release a non-GPL version and (v) abandon the GPL'd version, devoting all future development efforts to the non-GPL version. (I am not accusing anyone of doing this, just pointing out the possibility.)
Because of this, hard-core GPL advocates might favor approaches where (i) the copyright is assigned to a trusted pro-GPL party (this is one argument behind assigning the copyright to the FSF) or (ii) having a project consist of GLP'd code contributed by numerous separate copyright holders (so that getting all the license together to license on a non-GPL basis would be impractical).
The fear of lawsuits is probably not a motivator for day-to-day business behavior since a doctrine known as the "business judgment rule" (which exists under most states' laws) protects corporate officers from shareholder suits related to routine business matters.
Just goes to show the dangers of closed document formats. When you think about it, it is pretty reckless for a business to send out documents (here, a press release, but it could have been a draft term sheet or contract) without knowing what is contained in it -- I would bet that many firms have taken advantage of this feature in negotiations. Do you think that MS itself would peek at a potential counterparty's MS Word document?
(Stupid question: What is the standard way to make sure that no revision history is contained in a Word document?)
Try 733 to 800 MHz. $599 seems to be the magic price point for the cheapest Compaq or HP sold though CompUSA or other major chains (base unit w/o monitor and excluding discounts for signing up for a long-term ISP contract) -- as technology evolves, the features on the $599 computer may increase, but one seldom sees the older models discounted below this (that being said, the low-end models typically feature very low quality components). I have been in the market for a low-end computer for my father-in-law, who would use it for nothing more than Internet and light wordprocessing, but haven't seen anything less than this. I have been seriously thinking about giving him a 5 year-old Compaq Deskpro I have (P200, 2.4GB HD, 64MB RAM, TNT 16 MB, Redhat 6.2 w/ NS4.72 and Abiword).
I myself have a 3 year old Compaq Presario (PII400, 8.0 GB HD, 224 MB RAM, TNT 16 MB), which I have triple booting Linux, BeOS and Win98 and do not see any compelling reasons to upgrade -- this machine can compile the Linux kernel in 7 minutes.
The bottom line is that the chip makers and OEMs are really going to be hurting unless they can figure out how to come up with a way to burn cycles -- I guess that explains the prominence of multimedia devices at computer retail stores.
To take more of a trash pop-culture angle, how about "badronald".
("Bad Ronald" was a really bad made-for-tv movie from the mid-to-late 70s about a teenager who accidentally kills a girl and whose mother hids him in a walled off section of the house (he can get in and out through a small door). The mother the dies and a new family moves in, not realizing why there is so much dead space in their floor plan.)
Just today on ZDNet, Microsoft's OEM PC guidelines for a manufactured PC to receive the Windows XP sticker have just been exposed. One of them really gets my attention:
The system does not allow end-user access to expansion bus cards. This means users will no longer routinely open their PCs to add peripherals.
If true, this is really mind-blowing. I imagine the big system makers would probably love this, as it could help accelerate the upgrade cycle. The consolidation in the add-on hardware business (nVidia and ATI on the video side, Creative on the audio side) may be such that the major hardware manufacturers don't mind too much -- given that they would expect to get the bulk of the OEM contracts. Of course, this has obvious potential problems for Linux and other non-MS OSes.
I also note that there is a requirement the BIOS display no message on start-up -- which obviously would thwart the aspirations of Phoenix and the like (or the OEMs) to splash something in front of users' faces before the MS logo comes up.
I wouldn't be quite so harsh on this particular question and it is often good to be able to hear about the multiple solutions that are available for a problem, so that one can get an idea which is best. But I agree that that submissions on AskSlashdot (probably my favorite part of/.) should strive to be more interesting/sophisticated than a newbie-ish usenet posting -- which is sometimes not the case.
Slashdot Mirror
A Delaware franchise tax report is is a blue slip of paper about 8.5 inches wide and 4 inches high. Every year a Delaware corporation is required to complete the report by filling in the names of the company's officers, its address and the number and par value of its authorized shares (e.g., "the corporation is authorized to issue up to 1000 shares of common stock, par value $0.01 per share") -- that's about it. The franchise tax is computed based on the aggregate par value of the common stock (in my example, $10 = 1000 x $0.01). The franchise tax is _not_ an income tax and the report does not require reporting of a company's income or activities. The franchise tax assessible on even a large corporation is relatively modest -- this is one of the reasons Delaware is a desireable state to charter a corporation. As the Linux and Main article itself (which was a real hachet job) said, the KDE League's franchise tax owed was $20.
Forgetting to file a franchise tax report is a very common error. The Delaware Secretary of State's office sends the report form to the last known address, and if the address of the company has changed or, if the particular person at the company does not recognize that the uninteresting-looking envelope contains important information, it is easy to overlook it. Failure to file the report, even to the point of becoming terminated by the Delaware Secretary of State's office, tells me little about the KDE League.
I saw this ad a few weeks ago on the PATH train between either 14th and 23rd Streets or 23rd and 33rd Street. Cool (though who needs more ads in life?). The first time I saw it was early in the morning before I had my coffee, the image waivered somewhat and no one else on the crowded train seemed to notice it -- it took me a second or two before I was sure I hadn't half fallen asleep and was dreaming it.
If concern over (i) trademark dilution (as a legal matter) and (ii) potential allegations that Lucas subsequently breached the copyright of a fan to a derivative work were the only concerns, I would not think it would be too difficult to come up with a brief document that fan fiction producers could sign whereby they would (1) license the SW trademarks for a limited purpose for $1 and (2) grant back to Lucas any copyright they had in their derivative work.
From my limited familiarity with government contracting, I know that being found to have violated certain laws can cause a vendor to cease to be qualified to be a government contractor. Does anyone know whether the MS antitrust charges have had any impact on MS' status as a qualified government contractor (U.S. federal, state or foreign), or whether any actions have been taken to permit them to qualify despite the antitrust charges?
CynicTheHedgehog wrote:
Generally speaking, the GPL and its close relatives don't get much flack from the SlashDot crowd. In essence they are EULAs, using the same legalistic and hard-to-understand languages as their distant proprietary cousins, but they are accepted, tolerated--even welcome in our community.
Little of the GPL regulates _use_ of the software subject to it, rather than _redistribution_, thus most end-users have little to be concerned about. Thus, I think that the GPL is a very simple license from the perspective of an end-user that did not wish to redistribute.
For an end-user, about the only interesting portion of the GPL is the non-warranty/disclaimer of liability, and almost every piece of widely distributed software (GPL, commercial or whatever) has some form of non-warranty, so the GPL is not too unusual in that regard. (Also, I would doubt that the non-warranty would provide complete protection against liability for the creator of intentionally malicious software.)
Even for a redistributor, including a redistributor of derivative works, the GPL is pretty simple -- to each person to whom you distribute the software or a derivative work, provide the source, including the "new" source of the derivative work, licensed under the GPL.
The complexities of the GPL generally arise in contexts in which someone -- generally a commercial enterprise having access to lawyers -- is intentionally attempting to employ GPL'd software in a potential derivative work without GPL'ing it (for instance, situations involving plugins or web services).
See title.
Historically there may have been a "purpose" or "public good" requirement for corporate charters in some jurisdictions (England, U.S. states), but in the U.S. at least very few if any states still have any requirement of a public good or even a specified purpose -- the typical "boiler-plate" language in a certificate of incorporation is that the purpose of the corporation is "to engage in any lawful activity".
As to why states would give out limited liability charters "for free": the argument is that individuals would not band together (as stockholders) to form entities of large enough to engage in meaningful economic activity unless they could be assured of be liable for no more than the capital they contributed.
Some thoughts (most of which I see now others have mentioned):
1. There are a number of languages out there with sizeable user populations: C, C++, Java, Perl, Python. While the market for intros or overviews to these languages is crowded, books that do a good job covering applications of these languages to specific domains are rarer and can be very useful.
2. "Missing Manual"-type books are often very useful, since official application documentation is generally so weak.
3. As others have mentioned, books that provide an overview of available resources would be useful -- how about "The 100 Applications Every Linux User Should be Familar With", with several pages describing each?
4. Books that provide architecture overviews of open-source projects would also be useful -- not user guides and not Coriolis-type line-by-line black books.
5. Books that whip-up various Linux HOWTOs into "professional" level documentation.
1. Requiring document submissions to gov't agencies to be made in an open format would not necessarily impose great costs on the gov't -- (a) as others have pointed out, MS Word already allows documents to be saved as rtf, ascii and html and (b) any Gov't-required open document format would likely very quickly be adopted by MS or plugin/convertor vendors.
2. I wouldn't be surprised if some states did not mandate a banning of MS as a vendor based upon the findings of law against it -- I know some jurisdictions have very stringent rules against vendors having violated certain laws, and I would not be surprised if some of these provisions did not pick up antitrust laws. It is possible that MS may have violated vendor requirements in a jurisdiction but that special legislative or regulatory action might have been taken to permit them to continue as a vendor despite the findings (I would be interested to hear if this was the case).
RMS is absolutely correct that the document format issue is one of the biggest obstacles to adoption of "free" and other non-MS operating systems, programs, etc. (and thus one of the biggest factors perpetuating the MS operating system and application monopolies), though his examples are a little over-the-top for use by normal people.
In my following of the MS antitrust case, I have not seen any evidence of the U.S. Gov't or the States taking much action against MS as a supplier to the Gov't. For example, the Federal or a State Gov't could (i) cease purchasing software from MS (I am sure many states have laws prohibiting companies that have broken specified laws from being a contractor to the state) or (ii) (if (i) is too drastic) require communications with or within the Gov't to be made in "open" formats. The Gov't has the advantage of being able to set standards that its customers have to live with. Perhaps if enough Gov'tal units mandated open formats, they would be adopted in the private sector more readily. Does anyone know whether the U.S. or any states have taken actions along these lines?
PS: Has there been an Ask Slashdot lately regarding the status of open document format projects?
I frankly would be quite surprised if RAND would be construed to prohibit a patent holder from (i) charging a non-trivial flat fee (e.g., $1000), (ii) charging a fixed per seat fee ($5 per seat, user, copy, etc.) and (iii) requiring restrictions on or monitoring of redistribution -- any one of which would thwart anything remotely like open source.
I think you were looking for the word "estoppel".
A number of commenters have been characterizing Linus' attitude as typical techie myopia/focus, for good or for bad. While I do not doubt that this is a large part of it, it also seems that his approach may be the most appropriate one for a leader of a diverse and non-centrally controlled movement -- stick to the technical and avoid creating controversy for controversy's sake. This allows him to retain the respect and allegiance of basically all interested parties. There are any number of ways in which Linus could have accrued more short-term economic or ego gratification to himself -- (i) found a commercial Linux operation, (ii) align himself with the explicitly commercial or, alternatively, explicitly non-commercial wing of the "movement", (iii) become a philosopher/pundit on the "Meaning of Linux" -- but at the longer-term expense of his credibility. It is a credit to him, and a benefit to "movement" at large, that he has declined to do so.
More semi-apropos Simpsons: "Is this the death of zombie Shakespeare?"
Isn't there a saying: "A picture is worth 1000 words, except when it is a picture of a word."
Yup -- Debian distros named after Toy Story characters. I wonder how Steve Jobs feels about that.
WWJD?
The impact of this is apparently illustrated by this Washington Post article, which describes a situation in which CNN's chief legal officer apparently was fired/quit over a dispute over what side CNN should take in a First Amendment related law suit -- CNN's initial pro-First Amendment actions may have been overruled by AOL Time-Warner's (the owner of CNN) interest in IP protection:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/2001 0727/aponline125649_000.htm
I believe that a single holder of _all_ the copyrights on the components of a GPL'd piece of software could release a non-GPL'd version (whether fork or just alternatively licensed), which it could not do if the software incorporated GPL'd code for which third parties held the copyright (at least not without obtaining a non-GPL license from such copyright holders). Thus, someone with dual-licensing on his mind would need to insist on copyright assignments and not merely GPL licenses of contributed code.
On a large enough project where the bulk of the development effort is in the hands of the sponsoring commercial copyright holder, I would think that a commercially sponsored non-GLP'd product might be able to leave the abandoned GPL'd code in the dust and that a critical mass of independent developers may never accrete.
Thus, it would be possible for a company to (i) GPL its product, (ii) insist on assignments of licenses of contributed code, (iii) devote sufficient effort to the product so that the company's developers predominant in the development process, (iv) release a non-GPL version and (v) abandon the GPL'd version, devoting all future development efforts to the non-GPL version. (I am not accusing anyone of doing this, just pointing out the possibility.)
Because of this, hard-core GPL advocates might favor approaches where (i) the copyright is assigned to a trusted pro-GPL party (this is one argument behind assigning the copyright to the FSF) or (ii) having a project consist of GLP'd code contributed by numerous separate copyright holders (so that getting all the license together to license on a non-GPL basis would be impractical).
The fear of lawsuits is probably not a motivator for day-to-day business behavior since a doctrine known as the "business judgment rule" (which exists under most states' laws) protects corporate officers from shareholder suits related to routine business matters.
(Stupid question: What is the standard way to make sure that no revision history is contained in a Word document?)
I myself have a 3 year old Compaq Presario (PII400, 8.0 GB HD, 224 MB RAM, TNT 16 MB), which I have triple booting Linux, BeOS and Win98 and do not see any compelling reasons to upgrade -- this machine can compile the Linux kernel in 7 minutes.
The bottom line is that the chip makers and OEMs are really going to be hurting unless they can figure out how to come up with a way to burn cycles -- I guess that explains the prominence of multimedia devices at computer retail stores.
To take more of a trash pop-culture angle, how about "badronald".
("Bad Ronald" was a really bad made-for-tv movie from the mid-to-late 70s about a teenager who accidentally kills a girl and whose mother hids him in a walled off section of the house (he can get in and out through a small door). The mother the dies and a new family moves in, not realizing why there is so much dead space in their floor plan.)
The system does not allow end-user access to expansion bus cards. This means users will no longer routinely open their PCs to add peripherals.
If true, this is really mind-blowing. I imagine the big system makers would probably love this, as it could help accelerate the upgrade cycle. The consolidation in the add-on hardware business (nVidia and ATI on the video side, Creative on the audio side) may be such that the major hardware manufacturers don't mind too much -- given that they would expect to get the bulk of the OEM contracts. Of course, this has obvious potential problems for Linux and other non-MS OSes.
I also note that there is a requirement the BIOS display no message on start-up -- which obviously would thwart the aspirations of Phoenix and the like (or the OEMs) to splash something in front of users' faces before the MS logo comes up.
I hope someone at the DOJ knows about this.
I wouldn't be quite so harsh on this particular question and it is often good to be able to hear about the multiple solutions that are available for a problem, so that one can get an idea which is best. But I agree that that submissions on AskSlashdot (probably my favorite part of /.) should strive to be more interesting/sophisticated than a newbie-ish usenet posting -- which is sometimes not the case.