Re:FreeBSD and BSDI's BSD/OS codebases *will* merg
on
The Roots Of BSD
·
· Score: 2
Let's just say that there's been a lot of claims made, and no real decisions yet, shall we? You know what media coverage can be like, even friendly media coverage.
1. Do slashdot's servers currently contain copyrighted material which they do not have appropriate permission to distribute?
That's it. Now, you can argue the *trade secret* part separately, but the fact is, the text of the spec *is* copyrighted, and entitled to protection, just as slashdot's code is copyrighted, and entitled to protection.
How would you feel if Microsoft went and ran a closed, proprietary, message system based on slashcode, and when asked, found some side issue to the question of ownership and licensing and hammered on that instead?
If there are copies of the spec, they should be removed. Instructions on bypassing the "copy protection" are much more difficult to discuss; after all, that's the DMCA, which is new law, and not very well understood.
All that said... I agree, I'd love to see Microsoft explain this one to Judge Jackson.
That "handful" of people is ever-growing, and I will say, *damn* few telemarketers call me back after I say "TCPA" and tell them to put me on a do-not-call list.
Do I sue? No, I'm too busy. But I'm on a mailing list *full* of people who sue, and win. One of them has a respectable income going here; I know people who work full time and don't get as much money as he does, just suing junk faxers.
It's still positive; after all, every one of these *could* have been a problem, and been expensive to fight; getting a few of them removed from the list makes it that much safer for Connectix.
Additionally, courts sometimes take other rulings into account; if there is adequate evidence that a party is not acting in good faith, it's possible for that to work against that party in other rulings.
A judge who sees Sony making things up for several of their charges will be less sympathetic to them on the trade secret charge.
Number Nine was one of the least-friendly companies about questions like "why don't you have Mac drivers?" or "what about Unix, then?".
As I recall, they had some Mac cards at one point, which were the same hardware as their PC cards, and cost 3x as much. At the time, I was looking for Mac cards, and believe me, when I established that they had "identical" cards at wildly different prices just to gouge the mac market, I started ignoring their cards entirely.
I think they died because they botched, and because they didn't react well to the market.
Part of the problem is that whether or not a given amount of quoting is "fair use" is very, very, murky, even in cases that look like they should be obvious.
Would I sue? No. If someone sued, would slashdot win? Maybe. Would the comment author win? Maybe.
I must say, though, that this is the most-fair way I can think of to resolve this. There is an open issue; what if someone's comment is in the book, and they *don't* know you're doing this, because they don't read slashdot? From a purist's perspective, perhaps, instead, you should use an opt-in thing; quote only comments you are told you *are* allowed to quote.
But I don't care that much; I think this is a reasonable compromise, and I'm very glad that slashdot backed down a little and is now taking the time to ask. Good job.
Yeah, so, if BSD were allowed, someone might take this code, shove it into a BSD system, then make a proprietary fork... preventing all of us from using the existing code? Of course not! We all still get to use the code.
Meanwhile, there are plenty of documented tricks for wrapping GPL'd software inside non-GPL'd software "safely"; see Tom C.'s "condom" library for an example of how you can do it.
It comes down to this: If you give something away enough that people can use it effectively, they will probably find a way to use it without sharing if that's really important to them. It doesn't matter; your code is still free.
It's hard to make useful comparisons between societies, because so many of the other variables change too. However, at least within the U.S., guns reduce the violent crime rate, fairly substantially.
Maybe the violent crimes that remain are more lethal; that's a harder statistic to extract. However, if you think about human history, I think it's fairly clear that murder is not a new problem.
Yes, and Israel is much *more* heavily armed, and safer still.
You can't draw useful conclusions from one or two data points; there's a lot of differences in cultural norms that also contribute.
But, as an example, in the UK, as I recall, about half of all burglaries occur when someone is at home; in the US, it's closer to ten or twenty percent, because burglars are aware that people may be able to shoot them.
Note that, if you rule out people who are at least somewhat involved in gangs, the U.S. becomes a lot safer looking. Different social problems...
Despite the fairly shocking title, it's a fascinating book. In fact, the real conclusion is that guns seem to reduce *violent* crime - but that non-violent crime may even increase in areas where more people are armed, presumably because people who are desparate for cash have to think of *something*.
I recommend the book, even if you plan to debunk the politically-incorrect conclusion; it's well researched, and has one of the broader ranges of statistics ever collected.
The author is John Lott, and he's written also about the ways in which pro-gun-control people have tried to discredit him. A fascinating study in propaganda.
I used SVR4 systems of various sorts, including Solaris 7, for ages. It was a horrifically split system. Just try using the Berkeley side of an SVR4 box, and watch in horror. Oh, they've probably fixed the most obvious stuff, like "stat" giving corrupted data if you link with the ucb C library, but it's still nightmarish.
I'm not sure it's really censorship to say "you may not reproduce my material without my permission". That's just *copyright*. They're not saying you can't have a given opinion...
Now, when they get into saying you can't analyze their work, or discuss their license... That loses, and I think they already lost when they put a trade secret out on the web, because the "terms" of the license agreement make no sense when applied to non-proprietary entities.
But still, be aware that they aren't demanding that people not say that Microsoft sucks. They aren't saying it's forbidden to speak against them, just that they think you can't post instructions for "defeating" the protections on their "trade secret". Now, in practice, I think it's a little late for them to realize that, and I think their targeting is a little broad... Hell, a lot broad... but it's not "censorship" the way it would be censorship if the letter had read:
Please remove any posts which do not recognize Microsoft's glorious hegemony in the personal computing industry.
Courts have never been supportive of any attempt to use copyright as a way to limit the ability of third parties to create compatible products or code. I think that nukes the "good faith" right there.
Imagine that Windows was open-sourced. Would you move to Windows? No. You'd stick with Linux, because you believe that the design is enough better that there's no hope of *ever* getting Windows up to the code quality of Linux.
Now, I'm not saying Linux is anywhere near as bad as Windows, or even necessarily "bad" in any absolute sense, but I'd much rather work on BSD systems than on Linux, and no, I *can't* just "change Linux" to make it meet my needs.
You can't just mash philosophies together. SVR4 is a total disaster because it can't decide whether it's SysV or BSD. So, I can't take the Linux kernel design, add the design ideas I want, and expect to get a meaningful result.
You can't "merge" everything. Some things are sufficiently different that the best you can hope for is coexistance and compatability.
Yes, there's still a need for BSD. From a technical standpoint, there's probably still a need for more than one, just as there's a need for all the little branches and offshoots of Linux that crop up from time to time.
I know a few people who had PowerComputing mac clones, and they were fine. The nice thing was, you could get a machine that fit in a niche Apple wasn't pursuing - say, more than three PCI slots.:)
So, the problem is, the reaction to the "stealing" of hacker was to coin a new word. Maybe instead we should be pushing existing words, like "vandal" or "marauder". Or maybe we should just accept the complete and total ambiguity of the word, and let context decide for us, the way we do with most words in English.
Got the motherboard (with CPU) from a guy on the NetBSD lists. It woulda been $100 cheaper, but word got out and people started tracking down his source and the source raised the price... Memory from the chip merchant. Case from Antec - they botched it pretty bad, actually, but I soldered the relevant contacts to a switch.;-)
After the recent spam problems and the amazing amount of lying they've done, I'm not buying from eBay, ever, under any circumstances.
We talked to an engineer. We'll call him "Jim". Jim works at a major Linux vendor. He explains, "We had no downtime to speak of. Whenever something was wrong, it was because one of our staff screwed up. We had nothing to point fingers at."
Jim converted crucial parts of the company's network to run on the NT operating system. On the company's web page, crucial CGI scripts were given filenames like "webcgi.exe" and "download.dll".
"People stopped complaining," says Jim. "They saw a filename that clearly told them this was an NT system, and they assumed that they'd just have to try their transactions again."
Jim's boss wasn't aware of the NT system at press time, but knew that Jim had done something to reduce complaints. "It cost a lot more than whatever we used to have, but I don't really care."
Everyone seems hung up on the "more convenient" format. Would you argue that printing a smaller-print copy of a book is "fair use"? Of course not.
No *creative content* was added. I agree with the judge on that one.
Also, people are missing another crucial point:
That the judge made a decision based on a given factor does *not* mean that, if he's wrong on that factor, the decision is wrong. He might have ended up making the same ruling based on other factors, and in a case like this, probably would have.
The absence of a sufficient condition for one conclusion is not a sufficient condition for another conclusion.
"Obvious" is a term of art, not just the English word you're used to. There are tests for "obviousness", and the standards are much lower than you're probably used to. Of course, *everything* is obvious once you've seen it in use.
"novel" is satisfied if even one element of the patent (say, the use of a "registry key") is distinct, as I understand it.
If debian's apt *does* do the same thing, it's prior art, and the patent is invalid. My guess is that debian's apt does *not* do the same thing as the patent.
As to why the patent office gives out patents so easily, it's probably because "obvious" is a really hard term to define, and it's not clear that the normal English usage is appropriate in the law. It may be, however, that the standards are really too low right now - in which case, the problem isn't the patent office, it's *Congress*.
IANAL, but I occasionally read things written by them.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's just say that there's been a lot of claims made, and no real decisions yet, shall we? You know what media coverage can be like, even friendly media coverage.
The question is this:
1. Do slashdot's servers currently contain copyrighted material which they do not have appropriate permission to distribute?
That's it. Now, you can argue the *trade secret* part separately, but the fact is, the text of the spec *is* copyrighted, and entitled to protection, just as slashdot's code is copyrighted, and entitled to protection.
How would you feel if Microsoft went and ran a closed, proprietary, message system based on slashcode, and when asked, found some side issue to the question of ownership and licensing and hammered on that instead?
If there are copies of the spec, they should be removed. Instructions on bypassing the "copy protection" are much more difficult to discuss; after all, that's the DMCA, which is new law, and not very well understood.
All that said... I agree, I'd love to see Microsoft explain this one to Judge Jackson.
That "handful" of people is ever-growing, and I will say, *damn* few telemarketers call me back after I say "TCPA" and tell them to put me on a do-not-call list.
Do I sue? No, I'm too busy. But I'm on a mailing list *full* of people who sue, and win. One of them has a respectable income going here; I know people who work full time and don't get as much money as he does, just suing junk faxers.
http://www.junkfaxes.org/
Read it, learn the magic words, sue the bastards.
It's still positive; after all, every one of these *could* have been a problem, and been expensive to fight; getting a few of them removed from the list makes it that much safer for Connectix.
Additionally, courts sometimes take other rulings into account; if there is adequate evidence that a party is not acting in good faith, it's possible for that to work against that party in other rulings.
A judge who sees Sony making things up for several of their charges will be less sympathetic to them on the trade secret charge.
So, what about other emulators? Will the courts eventually decide that Sony is just playing games, and has no real case?
Number Nine was one of the least-friendly companies about questions like "why don't you have Mac drivers?" or "what about Unix, then?".
As I recall, they had some Mac cards at one point,
which were the same hardware as their PC cards, and cost 3x as much. At the time, I was looking for Mac cards, and believe me, when I established that they had "identical" cards at wildly different prices just to gouge the mac market, I started ignoring their cards entirely.
I think they died because they botched, and because they didn't react well to the market.
Well, if you want to know about factual errors, how about the one where the slashdot article refers to the Berkeley Daemon as "the FreeBSD devil"?
:)
1. He's a daemon, not a devil.
2. He's BSD's, not FreeBSD's.
Part of the problem is that whether or not a given amount of quoting is "fair use" is very, very, murky, even in cases that look like they should be obvious.
Would I sue? No. If someone sued, would slashdot win? Maybe. Would the comment author win? Maybe.
I must say, though, that this is the most-fair way I can think of to resolve this. There is an open issue; what if someone's comment is in the book, and they *don't* know you're doing this, because they don't read slashdot? From a purist's perspective, perhaps, instead, you should use an opt-in thing; quote only comments you are told you *are* allowed to quote.
But I don't care that much; I think this is a reasonable compromise, and I'm very glad that slashdot backed down a little and is now taking the time to ask. Good job.
Yeah, so, if BSD were allowed, someone might take this code, shove it into a BSD system, then make a proprietary fork... preventing all of us from using the existing code? Of course not! We all still get to use the code.
Meanwhile, there are plenty of documented tricks for wrapping GPL'd software inside non-GPL'd software "safely"; see Tom C.'s "condom" library for an example of how you can do it.
It comes down to this: If you give something away enough that people can use it effectively, they will probably find a way to use it without sharing if that's really important to them. It doesn't matter; your code is still free.
It's hard to make useful comparisons between societies, because so many of the other variables change too. However, at least within the U.S., guns reduce the violent crime rate, fairly substantially.
Maybe the violent crimes that remain are more lethal; that's a harder statistic to extract. However, if you think about human history, I think it's fairly clear that murder is not a new problem.
Yes, and Israel is much *more* heavily armed, and safer still.
You can't draw useful conclusions from one or two data points; there's a lot of differences in cultural norms that also contribute.
But, as an example, in the UK, as I recall, about half of all burglaries occur when someone is at home; in the US, it's closer to ten or twenty percent, because burglars are aware that people may be able to shoot them.
Note that, if you rule out people who are at least somewhat involved in gangs, the U.S. becomes a lot safer looking. Different social problems...
Despite the fairly shocking title, it's a fascinating book. In fact, the real conclusion is that guns seem to reduce *violent* crime - but that non-violent crime may even increase in areas where more people are armed, presumably because people who are desparate for cash have to think of *something*.
I recommend the book, even if you plan to debunk the politically-incorrect conclusion; it's well researched, and has one of the broader ranges of statistics ever collected.
The author is John Lott, and he's written also about the ways in which pro-gun-control people have tried to discredit him. A fascinating study in propaganda.
Looks like I need to transfer my domains to CORE.
I used SVR4 systems of various sorts, including Solaris 7, for ages. It was a horrifically split system. Just try using the Berkeley side of an SVR4 box, and watch in horror. Oh, they've probably fixed the most obvious stuff, like "stat" giving corrupted data if you link with the ucb C library, but it's still nightmarish.
I'm not sure it's really censorship to say "you may not reproduce my material without my permission". That's just *copyright*. They're not saying you can't have a given opinion...
Now, when they get into saying you can't analyze their work, or discuss their license... That loses, and I think they already lost when they put a trade secret out on the web, because the "terms" of the license agreement make no sense when applied to non-proprietary entities.
But still, be aware that they aren't demanding that people not say that Microsoft sucks. They aren't saying it's forbidden to speak against them, just that they think you can't post instructions for "defeating" the protections on their "trade secret". Now, in practice, I think it's a little late for them to realize that, and I think their targeting is a little broad... Hell, a lot broad... but it's not "censorship" the way it would be censorship if the letter had read:
Please remove any posts which do not recognize Microsoft's glorious hegemony in the personal computing industry.
Courts have never been supportive of any attempt to use copyright as a way to limit the ability of third parties to create compatible products or code. I think that nukes the "good faith" right there.
Imagine that Windows was open-sourced. Would you move to Windows? No. You'd stick with Linux, because you believe that the design is enough better that there's no hope of *ever* getting Windows up to the code quality of Linux.
Now, I'm not saying Linux is anywhere near as bad as Windows, or even necessarily "bad" in any absolute sense, but I'd much rather work on BSD systems than on Linux, and no, I *can't* just "change Linux" to make it meet my needs.
You can't just mash philosophies together. SVR4 is a total disaster because it can't decide whether it's SysV or BSD. So, I can't take the Linux kernel design, add the design ideas I want, and expect to get a meaningful result.
You can't "merge" everything. Some things are sufficiently different that the best you can hope for is coexistance and compatability.
Yes, there's still a need for BSD. From a technical standpoint, there's probably still a need for more than one, just as there's a need for all the little branches and offshoots of Linux that crop up from time to time.
I know a few people who had PowerComputing mac clones, and they were fine. The nice thing was, you could get a machine that fit in a niche Apple wasn't pursuing - say, more than three PCI slots. :)
So, the problem is, the reaction to the "stealing" of hacker was to coin a new word. Maybe instead we should be pushing existing words, like "vandal" or "marauder". Or maybe we should just accept the complete and total ambiguity of the word, and let context decide for us, the way we do with most words in English.
Got the motherboard (with CPU) from a guy on the NetBSD lists. It woulda been $100 cheaper, but word got out and people started tracking down his source and the source raised the price... Memory from the chip merchant. Case from Antec - they botched it pretty bad, actually, but I soldered the relevant contacts to a switch. ;-)
After the recent spam problems and the amazing amount of lying they've done, I'm not buying from eBay, ever, under any circumstances.
I have a 21164 500Mhz box with 256MB of memory, total cost was around $1k. This was when memory was expensive, too...
Not a bad system at all. Nowhere near as fast as the 21264's, but much, much, cheaper. It would have been pretty usable with less memory, too...
I can just see the article.
We talked to an engineer. We'll call him "Jim". Jim works at a major Linux vendor. He explains, "We had no downtime to speak of. Whenever something was wrong, it was because one of our staff screwed up. We had nothing to point fingers at."
Jim converted crucial parts of the company's network to run on the NT operating system. On the company's web page, crucial CGI scripts were given filenames like "webcgi.exe" and "download.dll".
"People stopped complaining," says Jim. "They saw a filename that clearly told them this was an NT system, and they assumed that they'd just have to try their transactions again."
Jim's boss wasn't aware of the NT system at press time, but knew that Jim had done something to reduce complaints. "It cost a lot more than whatever we used to have, but I don't really care."
Everyone seems hung up on the "more convenient" format. Would you argue that printing a smaller-print copy of a book is "fair use"? Of course not.
No *creative content* was added. I agree with the judge on that one.
Also, people are missing another crucial point:
That the judge made a decision based on a given factor does *not* mean that, if he's wrong on that factor, the decision is wrong. He might have ended up making the same ruling based on other factors, and in a case like this, probably would have.
The absence of a sufficient condition for one conclusion is not a sufficient condition for another conclusion.
"Obvious" is a term of art, not just the English word you're used to. There are tests for "obviousness", and the standards are much lower than you're probably used to. Of course, *everything* is obvious once you've seen it in use.
"novel" is satisfied if even one element of the patent (say, the use of a "registry key") is distinct, as I understand it.
If debian's apt *does* do the same thing, it's prior art, and the patent is invalid. My guess is that debian's apt does *not* do the same thing as the patent.
As to why the patent office gives out patents so easily, it's probably because "obvious" is a really hard term to define, and it's not clear that the normal English usage is appropriate in the law. It may be, however, that the standards are really too low right now - in which case, the problem isn't the patent office, it's *Congress*.
IANAL, but I occasionally read things written by them.
I saw no pricing info on the web site. Anyone got some?