Um... wth is a "crunchie"? Is it a new tousle-your-hair, too-bad-you-don't-understand-the-realities-of-busi ness term for "techie"? The suit response to suit?
I spent three weeks in Brazil back in late 1996/early 1997. The ice cream experience was one of the unexpected highlights. It was good ice cream, for one thing... but the other thing was the way it was served: like a per-lb salad bar in the US. So you'd have 30-50 some odd flavors, plus all the topings, and you got charged some very reasonable amount per kilo. You could get an absolutely rockin' sundae for under 3 Reais (which was almost exactly $3 at the time).
And such ideas may be against the law. See, for example, a Metafilter Thread which features:
"a career criminal, high on cocaine [that] breaks into a bar that has been fitted with a security system that turns out to be lethal. The bar owner installed the system after the 3rd break in in the past month, and posted numerous signs outside warning of the danger. The criminal is electrocuted to death, and this being America, the widow of the bar's owner (who has passed away during the years of litigation over this issue) is forced to pay $75,000 to the family of the robber..."
This is exactly the kind of case that makes you mad at tort law and start spouting about the insanity of our litigious society. However, in this case, there's some really convincing arguments:
The point here is that you cannot delegate the use of that lethal force to any sort of gadget or trap, because they cannot distinguish the difference between a legitimate target (Mr. Burglar) and an innocent party (lost child, firefighter, etc.).
This is why the law punishes those who do set lethal traps, and the verdict here is justified in that regard.
This ties in with Lessig's discussions on code as law. You simply can't afford to delegate law enforcement to a machine, especially when it implies destructive or lethal force.
I agree that there's a large variety of consumer gadgets that are largely useless. I bought a 97 Geo Prizm for my last car only because my 85 Nissan Sentra gave out. I don't need a whole lot over a vehicle that works, has a radio and A/C.
But seriously, when it comes to health care or even stuff more trivial like music production, bring on the tech. Yes, sometimes you can do great things with a stethoscope and/or and acoustic guitar, and sometimes I'm content with that. But other times, it's a tool that enables you to do cool things you never could have w/o it. I'm all for Sonograms and Synthesizers. I'm healthier and happier because of both....
I don't care what browser people use, as long as it has good CSS support!
And IE qualifies how?
OK, that's an exaggeration. But it breaks standards compliant webpages in so many ways that you end up doing the masochism tango to dance around all of them: the 3 pixel text jog, the broken box model of 5.x, element height issues, clears influencing elements outside of their containing block, the lack of fixed positioning, the funny way bullet images are positioned. Thanks to Microsoft, CSS is black magic.
I agree that it's better than the witches brew of tag soup you have to live with when supporting the abortion that is Netscape 4.x. But...
"don't use Netscape 4". Most of the cube dwellers have no idea there is anything else- and people that do know there are other choices ignore my suggestions anyway- which is fine.
If they're using Netscape 4, you could reasonably expect that they'd be willing to upgrade to Netscape 7 if they have any kind of broadband connection... or even Mozilla. The pop-up blocker *alone* should be reason enough, not to mention better rednering speeds and CSS support -- because yes, some of us have already decided that Netscape 4 needs to die, and unless a client insists, we don't support it. NS4 users get unstyled content -- it's still accessible, since it's good to do that anyway -- but nothin' pretty.
Disclaimer: This post in no way constitutes financial or legal advice, or a solicitation to buy or sell financial products. Entities mentioned may have unforseen liabilities or may not even be actively traded on a recognized stock exchange. Please consult a lawyer, SEC filings, three senators, and a monk from Llhasa before engaging in trade.
Architect: "Your life is the sum of a remainder of an unbalanced equation inherent to the programming of the matrix. You are the eventuality of an anomaly which, despite my sincerest efforts I have been unable to eliminate from what is otherwise a harmony of mathematical precision.
Clearly, to simplify the Matrix they're using Gausian Elimination techniques, but each entry in the Matrix is only represented with limited floating-point precision! Of course they're going to end up with error terms -- not to mention wild inaccuracies or maybe even a singularity....
The big problem I see here is that too many of the patents are on a device that does "blank". Never mind that really, most of the work that goes into "inventing" is really in coming up with the "how".
I can speculate "Wow! Wouldn't it be cool to have a time machine!", but unless I can suggest a specific mechanism for creating one, there's no way I should be granted a patent. I can speculate "Wow! Wouldn't it be cool to have a machine to let you fast-forward commercials on live TV" -- but unless I come up with the idea of a memory buffered digital video system and slight delays and dropped frames etc, there's no way I deserve a patent. And unless my "how" is non-obvious to one versed in the arts, there's no way I deserve a patent, either.
Part of the problem seems to be that our system seems to have opened the floodgate to patenting the "what". The other problem is that they're apparently not paying much attention to the non-obvious nature of the "how".
An inventor comes up with a non-obvious "how". The IP-sharks who are nothing but deadweight on the engine of industry use the legal system to get their cut of "what".
What I want to know is why the extension on the audio files is.ogg?
There's a few problems with this. The chief one being that now that there are two ogg formats, how will you know which file is which (OK, metadata is the *correct* answer, but I mean in the world in which we live)? Why aren't they called.VRB and.THR files?
Not to mention that just about anything is cooler than.ogg. I favor.xpa and.xpv (Xiph Audio and Xiph Video), but I'm not the namer...
It's a thought. My understanding is that SVG allows for use of multiple kinds of bitmapped formats, and when people need to make the leap to SVG, maybe they'll be willing to embrace PNG, especially if the alpha transparency support comes in.
Widely varying screen resolutions are already starting to make fixed-size image display an issue. Vector graphics are the only way out. I think SVG or something similar will have its day in a few years. Maybe PNG can catche the wave.
That works great for "My First Homepage", but it falls flat on it's face for commercial sites. I can't imagine trying to explain to my business sponsors (who pay my wages) that the reason our site looks crappy to 99% of our clients is that we're using a better image format. I may as well just fire myself...
That's pretty much the situation we're in when it comes to XHTML/CSS, too, isn't it?
Well, apparently all that would be necessary, then, is for someone to adapt one of the many popular Outlook/IE viruses to do nothing except change IE's display preferences for PNG to quicktime!
And maybe install quicktime. Although if quicktime continues to be nagware, this could easily backfire...
Re:Things PHP is missing
on
PHP Cookbook
·
· Score: 4, Informative
1) consistant database integration - Why not have a SetDBType() function, rather than hardcoding mysql_connect, mssql_connect, myodbc_connect, pgqsl_connect, etc?
I believe there is a PEAR package that abstracts an OO layer over the functions to various databases. Think DBI for PHP.
2) Native XML support - It's just not there? Why re-invent the wheel each time? Give us a good XML tree-walking engine DAMMIT!
Natvie XML support is there. A SAX parser is usually built in by default. I'm happily using a DOM XML interface that I compiled into my version.
3) sane and consistant functions. Single quotes, double quotes, some functions work with both, some work with one or the other, embedded html in an echo screws up if you don't double quote it, etc.
Quotes in PHP do work in a sane and consistent way, very similar to the way they work in PERL. The only thing I mourn is the lack of a qq[-like facility (and I wouldn't be surprised if someone snuck it in while I wasn't looking, and I just didn't know about it).
If you think that's confusing, just wait for your head to spin when you consider that this FCC that's helping us out here is the same FCC currently headed by Michael "Evil Spawn of Satan and Corporate America" Powell. You know, the one blithely removing rules about media consolidation so that your only news outlets will by owned by AOLCNNTimeDisneyWarnerMSurdochNBC (ok, NPR and OSDN might still exist, but you know, if a tree falls in the woods...)
I often don't reuse for reasons described very well by other posters, but I wanted to mention some cases where I either did reuse or wanted to.
Two years ago I was developing online courseware for a company that trained/certified future medical transcriptionists. We needed to develop a typing test. Now, a typing test is all about doing two things -- (1) noting when someone types something the shouldn't be there and (2) noting when someone doesn't type something that should. So you're comparing for absensces or additions between a given text and a key. Sound like anything else? My first thought was 'diff'. My second thought was Perl (after all, this is text slinging). My third thought was CPAN. And sure enough, Mark Jason-Dominus' excellent Algorithm::Diff saved me at least days of time and quite possibly weeks.
Now, this was possible in part because I was working as a contractor, and so was probably trusted a bit more, and also, in part because my supervisor/contact with the company was pretty savvy. I can contrast this with some other experiences. Like the company I worked for that wanted a webserver log file analysis package. Again, lots of text slinging, but perl or any other scripting language was out because we wanted the source as closed as possible. Nope, it had to be in C, and I was discouraged from trying to find a regex library to use. I essentially ended writing my own regex engine. It was buggy. It needed optimization. The syntax was less powerful . The stats package itself was good, especially for 1997 (it could do things I've only seen other log analyzers do in the last two years), but because it all ran on top of this flaky regex engine, it couldn't fly. I think it got canned after I left... nobody wanted to touch it. I seriously think I lost months of my life on this, and the company lost a good product. All from trying to reinvent the wheel...
There's just too much of a lack of quality radio programming these days for me to ever consider buying one of these.
This is actually one of the *reasons* a device like this would be useful. Maybe you actually find you like 1 song out of the dreck on the current rotation on your block of friendly neighborhood clear channel stations. You set up your PRR (personal radio recorder), and you've got your song, which you can later decide to purchase or that it loses its novelty after the 10-15 plays.
Not to mention the occasional good programming. Prarie Home Companion rocks, but I'm almost invariably doing something else each week when it runs, and the Real Audio broadcasts just aren't as good. The local public station has some occasionally good stuff, too, at the wrong times for me...
I'll buy one of these for both purposes when it gets a good review....
A further problem: someone -- maybe multiple someones -- is/are going to scream about how this causes a security problem. Sure, you and I know about peer review vs security by obscurity blah blah, but it's fairly clear that most of the business world just as soon have as much obscurity as possible, whether or not they've had an expert review their system....
If half of the story told there is true, it could easily be in Katy's best interest to let it be told. For one thing, it works as a cautionary tale about letting your guard down and hooking up with the first total bastard with a law degree and some charm who crosses your path, so it could really help her platform. For another one, if she does finally go postal and put a few rounds in him, it'll be hard to blame her.
Yeah, she sure had her vacant and stupid moments in that story, and sure, Tucker Max has that good ol' livin'-a-james-bond-flick appeal, but you know, none of that makes it all right to treat someone like that in real life. I wonder if this guy practices law the way he hooks up with women.
Fine by me. In fact, maybe more than fine. If the entire modern entity that is radio wants to specialize and specialize further, when tech changes enough, they're gonna fall hard, just like any other entity that adapts itself to one set of conditions and attempts to preserve it.
The crux of my argument is that it's only released under the GPL if the person who released it had standing to do so. The GPL is a contract, and if you don't have the authority to enter into that contract, you can't release something under it.
As for "apparent authority"... imagine for a moment that crackers or other intruders gained access to Nullsoft's source repository and website. They post said source to Nullsoft's website under the GPL. "Apparent authority" is still in place -- it's on the website, right? But the crackers/intruders have no standing to release the code whatsoever. Similarly, a company employee may have authority to write code and make changes to a website -- but no standing over the works of IP he's writing for hire. The situations aren't all that different.
As a side note, any kind of "apparent authority" doctrine that implied that orders given or actions taken under apparent authority remained in force after they were discovered to be made without standing would cause a whole lot of chaos. I can see such a doctrine being used to mitigate offenses of those who believed they were acting in concert with apparent authority -- say a police officer ordered by a faked authority to hold someone on illegitimate charges -- but not to keep an action in force.
Or would you like SCO's blusterings about IP to be upheld, when they only have "apparent authority"? : )
Bottom line: either Justin had the standing to release Nullsoft's work under the GPL, or he didn't. If he had that standing, AOL can't take it back. If he didn't have that standing, it was never released under the GPL in the first place.
Any other interpretation, by the way, does exactly the damage to the rep of the GPL that the parent poster described.
It just takes one employee with web access to turnover your IP. You better look into our new products that prevent employees from having such freedom...
With patent and copyright law, both are designed to let you publish widely without giving away any particular rights.
With contract law, on which the GPL is based (in conjunction with copyright), the license is only valid of course if the licensor has standing to make the contract. And in that case, web/GPL or no, one employee or agent of the company with such standing can in fact give away "IP" anyway.
I think the posts questioning whether or not this was GPLd in this thread are correct. If Justin didn't have the standing in Nullsoft or AOL to make contracts regarding "IP" produced by Nullsoft, then the code is not released under the GPL, because the GPL is part contract. If Justin did have that standing, however, then he could have released it under the "Must Wear Watermelon Rind on Head While Using" license, and the fact that he chose to use the GPL has nothing to do with potential "leaks" of "IP".
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Um... wth is a "crunchie"? Is it a new tousle-your-hair, too-bad-you-don't-understand-the-realities-of-busi ness term for "techie"? The suit response to suit?
I spent three weeks in Brazil back in late 1996/early 1997. The ice cream experience was one of the unexpected highlights. It was good ice cream, for one thing... but the other thing was the way it was served: like a per-lb salad bar in the US. So you'd have 30-50 some odd flavors, plus all the topings, and you got charged some very reasonable amount per kilo. You could get an absolutely rockin' sundae for under 3 Reais (which was almost exactly $3 at the time).
Some enterprising soul oughta do the same here...
This is exactly the kind of case that makes you mad at tort law and start spouting about the insanity of our litigious society. However, in this case, there's some really convincing arguments:
This ties in with Lessig's discussions on code as law. You simply can't afford to delegate law enforcement to a machine, especially when it implies destructive or lethal force.
I agree that there's a large variety of consumer gadgets that are largely useless. I bought a 97 Geo Prizm for my last car only because my 85 Nissan Sentra gave out. I don't need a whole lot over a vehicle that works, has a radio and A/C.
But seriously, when it comes to health care or even stuff more trivial like music production, bring on the tech. Yes, sometimes you can do great things with a stethoscope and/or and acoustic guitar, and sometimes I'm content with that. But other times, it's a tool that enables you to do cool things you never could have w/o it. I'm all for Sonograms and Synthesizers. I'm healthier and happier because of both....
I don't care what browser people use, as long as it has good CSS support!
And IE qualifies how?
OK, that's an exaggeration. But it breaks standards compliant webpages in so many ways that you end up doing the masochism tango to dance around all of them: the 3 pixel text jog, the broken box model of 5.x, element height issues, clears influencing elements outside of their containing block, the lack of fixed positioning, the funny way bullet images are positioned. Thanks to Microsoft, CSS is black magic.
I agree that it's better than the witches brew of tag soup you have to live with when supporting the abortion that is Netscape 4.x. But...
"don't use Netscape 4". Most of the cube dwellers have no idea there is anything else- and people that do know there are other choices ignore my suggestions anyway- which is fine.
If they're using Netscape 4, you could reasonably expect that they'd be willing to upgrade to Netscape 7 if they have any kind of broadband connection... or even Mozilla. The pop-up blocker *alone* should be reason enough, not to mention better rednering speeds and CSS support -- because yes, some of us have already decided that Netscape 4 needs to die, and unless a client insists, we don't support it. NS4 users get unstyled content -- it's still accessible, since it's good to do that anyway -- but nothin' pretty.
Buy stock in Iowa!
(And don't forget to sell SCO short!)
Disclaimer: This post in no way constitutes financial or legal advice, or a solicitation to buy or sell financial products. Entities mentioned may have unforseen liabilities or may not even be actively traded on a recognized stock exchange. Please consult a lawyer, SEC filings, three senators, and a monk from Llhasa before engaging in trade.
Just like modern tuning and broadcasting equipment freed up spectrum resources for low power FM....
Tech's half the story. How the authorities see fit and/or are lobbied to allocate spectrum is the other half.
Architect: "Your life is the sum of a remainder of an unbalanced equation inherent to the programming of the matrix. You are the eventuality of an anomaly which, despite my sincerest efforts I have been unable to eliminate from what is otherwise a harmony of mathematical precision.
Clearly, to simplify the Matrix they're using Gausian Elimination techniques, but each entry in the Matrix is only represented with limited floating-point precision! Of course they're going to end up with error terms -- not to mention wild inaccuracies or maybe even a singularity....
Wouldn't this give whoever's playing Rayden a dramatic advantage?
The big problem I see here is that too many of the patents are on a device that does "blank". Never mind that really, most of the work that goes into "inventing" is really in coming up with the "how".
I can speculate "Wow! Wouldn't it be cool to have a time machine!", but unless I can suggest a specific mechanism for creating one, there's no way I should be granted a patent. I can speculate "Wow! Wouldn't it be cool to have a machine to let you fast-forward commercials on live TV" -- but unless I come up with the idea of a memory buffered digital video system and slight delays and dropped frames etc, there's no way I deserve a patent. And unless my "how" is non-obvious to one versed in the arts, there's no way I deserve a patent, either.
Part of the problem seems to be that our system seems to have opened the floodgate to patenting the "what". The other problem is that they're apparently not paying much attention to the non-obvious nature of the "how".
An inventor comes up with a non-obvious "how". The IP-sharks who are nothing but deadweight on the engine of industry use the legal system to get their cut of "what".
What I want to know is why the extension on the audio files is .ogg?
.VRB and .THR files?
.ogg. I favor .xpa and .xpv (Xiph Audio and Xiph Video), but I'm not the namer...
There's a few problems with this. The chief one being that now that there are two ogg formats, how will you know which file is which (OK, metadata is the *correct* answer, but I mean in the world in which we live)? Why aren't they called
Not to mention that just about anything is cooler than
It's a thought. My understanding is that SVG allows for use of multiple kinds of bitmapped formats, and when people need to make the leap to SVG, maybe they'll be willing to embrace PNG, especially if the alpha transparency support comes in.
Widely varying screen resolutions are already starting to make fixed-size image display an issue. Vector graphics are the only way out. I think SVG or something similar will have its day in a few years. Maybe PNG can catche the wave.
That works great for "My First Homepage", but it falls flat on it's face for commercial sites. I can't imagine trying to explain to my business sponsors (who pay my wages) that the reason our site looks crappy to 99% of our clients is that we're using a better image format. I may as well just fire myself...
That's pretty much the situation we're in when it comes to XHTML/CSS, too, isn't it?
Grrr.
Well, apparently all that would be necessary, then, is for someone to adapt one of the many popular Outlook/IE viruses to do nothing except change IE's display preferences for PNG to quicktime!
And maybe install quicktime. Although if quicktime continues to be nagware, this could easily backfire...
1) consistant database integration - Why not have a SetDBType() function, rather than hardcoding mysql_connect, mssql_connect, myodbc_connect, pgqsl_connect, etc?
.NET support?
I believe there is a PEAR package that abstracts an OO layer over the functions to various databases. Think DBI for PHP.
2) Native XML support - It's just not there? Why re-invent the wheel each time? Give us a good XML tree-walking engine DAMMIT!
Natvie XML support is there. A SAX parser is usually built in by default. I'm happily using a DOM XML interface that I compiled into my version.
3) sane and consistant functions. Single quotes, double quotes, some functions work with both, some work with one or the other, embedded html in an echo screws up if you don't double quote it, etc.
Quotes in PHP do work in a sane and consistent way, very similar to the way they work in PERL. The only thing I mourn is the lack of a qq[-like facility (and I wouldn't be surprised if someone snuck it in while I wasn't looking, and I just didn't know about it).
4)
Um.... why?
If you think that's confusing, just wait for your head to spin when you consider that this FCC that's helping us out here is the same FCC currently headed by Michael "Evil Spawn of Satan and Corporate America" Powell. You know, the one blithely removing rules about media consolidation so that your only news outlets will by owned by AOLCNNTimeDisneyWarnerMSurdochNBC (ok, NPR and OSDN might still exist, but you know, if a tree falls in the woods...)
Barring an initial flurry of churn, I think the churn rate will settle to slightly above where it is now.
:)
That's the rational thing to believe -- unless of course you believe you are the worst of all the wireless carriers.
Maybe even more than one of the wireless carriers believes this. But of course, only one of them is right.
I often don't reuse for reasons described very well by other posters, but I wanted to mention some cases where I either did reuse or wanted to.
Two years ago I was developing online courseware for a company that trained/certified future medical transcriptionists. We needed to develop a typing test. Now, a typing test is all about doing two things -- (1) noting when someone types something the shouldn't be there and (2) noting when someone doesn't type something that should. So you're comparing for absensces or additions between a given text and a key. Sound like anything else? My first thought was 'diff'. My second thought was Perl (after all, this is text slinging). My third thought was CPAN. And sure enough, Mark Jason-Dominus' excellent Algorithm::Diff saved me at least days of time and quite possibly weeks.
Now, this was possible in part because I was working as a contractor, and so was probably trusted a bit more, and also, in part because my supervisor/contact with the company was pretty savvy. I can contrast this with some other experiences. Like the company I worked for that wanted a webserver log file analysis package. Again, lots of text slinging, but perl or any other scripting language was out because we wanted the source as closed as possible. Nope, it had to be in C, and I was discouraged from trying to find a regex library to use. I essentially ended writing my own regex engine. It was buggy. It needed optimization. The syntax was less powerful . The stats package itself was good, especially for 1997 (it could do things I've only seen other log analyzers do in the last two years), but because it all ran on top of this flaky regex engine, it couldn't fly. I think it got canned after I left... nobody wanted to touch it. I seriously think I lost months of my life on this, and the company lost a good product. All from trying to reinvent the wheel...
There's just too much of a lack of quality radio programming these days for me to ever consider buying one of these.
This is actually one of the *reasons* a device like this would be useful. Maybe you actually find you like 1 song out of the dreck on the current rotation on your block of friendly neighborhood clear channel stations. You set up your PRR (personal radio recorder), and you've got your song, which you can later decide to purchase or that it loses its novelty after the 10-15 plays.
Not to mention the occasional good programming. Prarie Home Companion rocks, but I'm almost invariably doing something else each week when it runs, and the Real Audio broadcasts just aren't as good. The local public station has some occasionally good stuff, too, at the wrong times for me...
I'll buy one of these for both purposes when it gets a good review....
A further problem: someone -- maybe multiple someones -- is/are going to scream about how this causes a security problem. Sure, you and I know about peer review vs security by obscurity blah blah, but it's fairly clear that most of the business world just as soon have as much obscurity as possible, whether or not they've had an expert review their system....
If this goes into effect, there's probably a lot of people who will leave Oregon for a lot longer than six weeks.
If half of the story told there is true, it could easily be in Katy's best interest to let it be told. For one thing, it works as a cautionary tale about letting your guard down and hooking up with the first total bastard with a law degree and some charm who crosses your path, so it could really help her platform. For another one, if she does finally go postal and put a few rounds in him, it'll be hard to blame her.
Yeah, she sure had her vacant and stupid moments in that story, and sure, Tucker Max has that good ol' livin'-a-james-bond-flick appeal, but you know, none of that makes it all right to treat someone like that in real life. I wonder if this guy practices law the way he hooks up with women.
Fine by me. In fact, maybe more than fine. If the entire modern entity that is radio wants to specialize and specialize further, when tech changes enough, they're gonna fall hard, just like any other entity that adapts itself to one set of conditions and attempts to preserve it.
WASTE was released under the GPL
... imagine for a moment that crackers or other intruders gained access to Nullsoft's source repository and website. They post said source to Nullsoft's website under the GPL. "Apparent authority" is still in place -- it's on the website, right? But the crackers/intruders have no standing to release the code whatsoever. Similarly, a company employee may have authority to write code and make changes to a website -- but no standing over the works of IP he's writing for hire. The situations aren't all that different.
The crux of my argument is that it's only released under the GPL if the person who released it had standing to do so. The GPL is a contract, and if you don't have the authority to enter into that contract, you can't release something under it.
As for "apparent authority"
As a side note, any kind of "apparent authority" doctrine that implied that orders given or actions taken under apparent authority remained in force after they were discovered to be made without standing would cause a whole lot of chaos. I can see such a doctrine being used to mitigate offenses of those who believed they were acting in concert with apparent authority -- say a police officer ordered by a faked authority to hold someone on illegitimate charges -- but not to keep an action in force.
Or would you like SCO's blusterings about IP to be upheld, when they only have "apparent authority"? : )
Bottom line: either Justin had the standing to release Nullsoft's work under the GPL, or he didn't. If he had that standing, AOL can't take it back. If he didn't have that standing, it was never released under the GPL in the first place.
Any other interpretation, by the way, does exactly the damage to the rep of the GPL that the parent poster described.
It just takes one employee with web access to turnover your IP. You better look into our new products that prevent employees from having such freedom ...
With patent and copyright law, both are designed to let you publish widely without giving away any particular rights.
With contract law, on which the GPL is based (in conjunction with copyright), the license is only valid of course if the licensor has standing to make the contract. And in that case, web/GPL or no, one employee or agent of the company with such standing can in fact give away "IP" anyway.
I think the posts questioning whether or not this was GPLd in this thread are correct. If Justin didn't have the standing in Nullsoft or AOL to make contracts regarding "IP" produced by Nullsoft, then the code is not released under the GPL, because the GPL is part contract. If Justin did have that standing, however, then he could have released it under the "Must Wear Watermelon Rind on Head While Using" license, and the fact that he chose to use the GPL has nothing to do with potential "leaks" of "IP".