The implication is that some software developers and consultants convince a company to use open source by citing its low/no initial cost, and not being forthright about the ability of the client to actually run the software themselves without assistance.
The software then provides a constant revenue stream to the developer/consultant in the form of support, which the customer only realizes once they've already welcomed the software into their organization.
That's a design patent, not a standard utility patent (note the "D" before the patent number). It's basically just a registered design. There is no claim of improvement, functionality, or usability with a design patent. As a result, design patents probably don't stifle innovation much more than copyright does.
At least some of their website is "tongue-in-cheek" (they know what's implied):
We understand that some people don't have the time to design their own pens, and for those people we offer our pre-designed line of pens. Whether you're looking for a long and skinny pen, a thick pen, a fountain pen that squirts ink, or even a black pen, we have just the one for you.
If mugged and asked for your money, take out your cash (or flash money above), and throw it in one direction while you run in the other! 99% of robbers want the money. If you can get the money to spread out when you throw it, so much the better.
Why can't they have their cake and eat it too? E.g. shoot you in the back right after you start running, and then stop and pick up the money. It's not as if both you and the money are running in opposite directions and they have to choose between them...
According to the article text, the ridge is twelve miles wide and eight miles high:
The ridge is conspicuous in the picture as an approximately 20-kilometer wide (12 miles) band that extends from the western (left) side of the disc almost to the day/night boundary on the right. On the left horizon, the peak of the ridge reaches at least 13 kilometers (8 miles) above the surrounding terrain.
Still very impressive for the size of that moon, of course.
Wow, for people who like books like Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, these guys produced a really good graphic as part of their article:
Not all distribution maintainers have armies of patch people. This will push people to one of a few distributions such as RedHat or Suse.
Distro maintainers who don't want to do their own patching of the kernel mainline can simply grab the source RPM for RedHat's or SuSE's kernel, and use that kernel and patchset for their own distro. It is GPL, after all.
Best of all it affects SCO. If ELF support has to be dropped from gcc, what will they use for a compiler?
Since gcc is GPL'd, they can simply license the intellectual property that they claim is theirs to their customers, and hand out the existing versions of gcc. If they feel like doing the work (unlikely), they could even continue to merge ELF support back into future versions of gcc.
It's not that US programmers are more innovative; it's that US companies tend to use off-shore programmers in a way that won't impart any innovation to the client company.
When you follow the model of using contractors to do the "assembly" of your software, they're not going to do any innovation on your behalf; they're simply going to follow (hopefully) the spec that you gave them, no more.
This is true for contractors from any country. It just happens that off-US-shore contractors are relatively inexpensive, so the assumtion is that those are the ones that US companies are going to go with.
I think that your question is a very good one, though.
Never mind, gnome is GPL'd, but GTK+ (the toolkit, which is the proper parallel to draw to Qt) is LGPL, which is much less restrictive than the GPL.
I see Bruce's point. With GTK+, you can write GUI applicaitons, and not release your source code. The same activity with Qt requires a commercial license.
Non-GPL'd Qt development requires payments to Trolltech. Qt has the same license as Gnome under Linux.
Trolltech has licensed Qt under the GPL for Linux, which is the same license as Gnome. They will also sell you another license if you don't like the GPL and want to write apps that link to Qt using some other more restrictive license.
As far as I know, Gnome is only licensed under the GPL. Unless I'm mistaken, that means to me that with Gnome, you have one choice of license, whereas with Qt, you can opt to purchase a non-GPL license.
You might want to keep an eye on your 2.6.0 machine if it's on a network that's readily accessible to the outside world. Apparently not all of the security fixes that occurred in the 2.4 line have made it into 2.6.0.
Dave Jones' post halloween document, which is mentioned in an earlier post as a good summary of changes, mentions the following (near the bottom):
Security concerns.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Several security issues solved in 2.4 may not yet be forward ported
to 2.6. For this reason 2.6.x kernels should not be tested on
untrusted systems. Testing known 2.4 exploits and reporting results
is useful.
The itemized prices in the columns are for the single items. That's whay the "true cost of Christmas in song" ($65,264.28) is so much higher than the "total Christmas price index" ($16,885.28), which is the sum of the single items that you see.
Actually, you'd think that collisions would happen more frequently, but the paper says that in the entire key space, there was only one "real" collision where two words hashed to the same value.
The words were "$C4U1N3R" and "SEEKETH" (I understand the second one, but the first one must be leet-speak:/ ). Both words hash to "ChERhgHoo1o".
By his definition, if X was created primarily to work with the linux kernel, then it is a derived work, and therefore falls under his copyright regimen of choice (GPL). this is like saying that if you make a super efficient oil filter that was clearly designed exclusively for mercedes engines, then mercedes can tell you how to sell it.
That's a misleading concusion and resulting analogy. The work doesn't fall under the copyright of his choice just because it's a derived work; there's no such law. It falls under the GPL because presumably the derivative work authors agreed to those "extra" set of rules when they used the linux source to create their work.
There's no such agreement with Mercedes. If there were some kind of GPL'd Mercedes that everyone collaborated on, the analogy would make more sense. Then companies wouldn't be allowed to create custom add-ons for tricking out your GNU/Mercedes without also making their add-ons GPL'd.
Wow. This is some serious outfit. Look at the kind of backing that they have (from the OrbDev homepage):
The Eros Project is primarily sponsored by Beefjerky.com. You can support this critial legal work in progress by trying some delicious "Final Frontier Jerky" from Beefjerky.com.
I believe that as long as you file your patent within one year of any prior art, and can show that you conceived of the idea before the competing party, the prior art doesn't count against you. Here's the relevant part of the U.S. patent code:
"[a patent is not allowed if] the invention was patented or described in a printed publication in this or a foreign country or in public use or on sale in this country, more than one year prior to the date of the application for patent in the United States."
IBM has released a couple BIOS updates for the thinkpad that address this issue. My group had a few of these thinkpads and updating the BIOS seemed to help, although we didn't replace the batteries any more after that point so we didn't really get a clean test out of it.
Google also revealed a collaborative web page devoted to this issue, which I hadn't noticed until now:
I'm currently responsible for maintaining an IBM SP for a scientific computing facility. In this scenario, it's actually fairly close in overall design and function to a beowulf cluster.
The two things that have blown me away about this system are AIX's LVM and their high-performance shared filesystem, GPFS. Linux's logical volume manager comes close to the AIX LVM, but doesn't implement all of the functionality. I'm sure there's plenty to be learned.
BTW, a logical volume manager allows you to treat physical disks as a raw pool of resources that can be drawn upon for filesystms. You can create new filesystems, grow them in size, add more disks to the pool, all on the fly, without even having to unmount the filesystem.
GPFS is a distributed shared filesystem -- it lets you combine disks from many machines in the cluster into a shared filesystem that's visible to all machines in the cluster. There are other projects that accomplish this under linux, but IBM has been doing it for years, and the performance is unbelievable, bordering on magical.
These packages are the killer app for any type of clustering application of linux machines, be it web servers or beowulf-style computing.
After you've had a couple sessions to go through the basics, you could consider using one of the HOWTO's at linuxdoc.org for a topic for each brown bag session.
A lot of people would probably be interested in some of the common time-suckers when you're getting started with a new linux box such as how to get your dial-up connection set up. Mix the HOWTO material with your own experience and tips so that people are getting more than what they just could have read themselves.
A really big favor you could do to your coworkers is start to teach them about security and linux. Nothing sucks more for a newbie than finally getting their first linux box up and running on their cable modem, only to have it cracked within the hour. Totally demoralizing.
I imagine you'll do a session on how to install a new machine -- this is a great time to go into why and how to shut down unnecessary services, install ssh, install patches, etc. etc.
Just include it as part of the standard installation process. That's the sort of stuff that will make your seminars really unique and valuable -- securing your new box is really important, but isn't covered very often in off-the-shelf documentation.
Slashdot Mirror
The implication is that some software developers and consultants convince a company to use open source by citing its low/no initial cost, and not being forthright about the ability of the client to actually run the software themselves without assistance.
The software then provides a constant revenue stream to the developer/consultant in the form of support, which the customer only realizes once they've already welcomed the software into their organization.
That's a design patent, not a standard utility patent (note the "D" before the patent number). It's basically just a registered design. There is no claim of improvement, functionality, or usability with a design patent. As a result, design patents probably don't stifle innovation much more than copyright does.
Tiny tinfoil hats for the pin numbers.
It seems to follow the same behavior as a browser's "forward" and "back" buttons. This would probably be more familiar to non-UNIX people.
At least some of their website is "tongue-in-cheek" (they know what's implied):
Why can't they have their cake and eat it too? E.g. shoot you in the back right after you start running, and then stop and pick up the money. It's not as if both you and the money are running in opposite directions and they have to choose between them...
Wow, for people who like books like Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, these guys produced a really good graphic as part of their article:
It takes a little bit of study to understand everything that it's saying, but it's an amazingly compact representation! It shows five values at once:That's an extremely elegant graph that conveys all of the most important points of the paper, and would still manage to fit legibly on a small card.
Mmmm, mmmm! Nothing satisfies like elegant design!
Distro maintainers who don't want to do their own patching of the kernel mainline can simply grab the source RPM for RedHat's or SuSE's kernel, and use that kernel and patchset for their own distro. It is GPL, after all.
Since gcc is GPL'd, they can simply license the intellectual property that they claim is theirs to their customers, and hand out the existing versions of gcc. If they feel like doing the work (unlikely), they could even continue to merge ELF support back into future versions of gcc.
It doesn't sound like Free Software is what you're looking for.
It's not that US programmers are more innovative; it's that US companies tend to use off-shore programmers in a way that won't impart any innovation to the client company.
When you follow the model of using contractors to do the "assembly" of your software, they're not going to do any innovation on your behalf; they're simply going to follow (hopefully) the spec that you gave them, no more.
This is true for contractors from any country. It just happens that off-US-shore contractors are relatively inexpensive, so the assumtion is that those are the ones that US companies are going to go with.
I think that your question is a very good one, though.
-- Scott
Oh man, quit modding the parent "insightful +1" -- it's "wrong -5" (see my other reply).
Oh, maybe they're trying to punish me...
Or sarcastic...
Never mind, gnome is GPL'd, but GTK+ (the toolkit, which is the proper parallel to draw to Qt) is LGPL, which is much less restrictive than the GPL.
I see Bruce's point. With GTK+, you can write GUI applicaitons, and not release your source code. The same activity with Qt requires a commercial license.
My mistake.
Non-GPL'd Qt development requires payments to Trolltech. Qt has the same license as Gnome under Linux.
Trolltech has licensed Qt under the GPL for Linux, which is the same license as Gnome. They will also sell you another license if you don't like the GPL and want to write apps that link to Qt using some other more restrictive license.
As far as I know, Gnome is only licensed under the GPL. Unless I'm mistaken, that means to me that with Gnome, you have one choice of license, whereas with Qt, you can opt to purchase a non-GPL license.
You might want to keep an eye on your 2.6.0 machine if it's on a network that's readily accessible to the outside world. Apparently not all of the security fixes that occurred in the 2.4 line have made it into 2.6.0.
Dave Jones' post halloween document, which is mentioned in an earlier post as a good summary of changes, mentions the following (near the bottom):
Security concerns.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Several security issues solved in 2.4 may not yet be forward ported
to 2.6. For this reason 2.6.x kernels should not be tested on
untrusted systems. Testing known 2.4 exploits and reporting results
is useful.
It's $361.25 per ring.
The itemized prices in the columns are for the single items. That's whay the "true cost of Christmas in song" ($65,264.28) is so much higher than the "total Christmas price index" ($16,885.28), which is the sum of the single items that you see.
Actually, you'd think that collisions would happen more frequently, but the paper says that in the entire key space, there was only one "real" collision where two words hashed to the same value.
:/ ). Both words hash to "ChERhgHoo1o".
The words were "$C4U1N3R" and "SEEKETH" (I understand the second one, but the first one must be leet-speak
Neat.
That's a misleading concusion and resulting analogy. The work doesn't fall under the copyright of his choice just because it's a derived work; there's no such law. It falls under the GPL because presumably the derivative work authors agreed to those "extra" set of rules when they used the linux source to create their work.
There's no such agreement with Mercedes. If there were some kind of GPL'd Mercedes that everyone collaborated on, the analogy would make more sense. Then companies wouldn't be allowed to create custom add-ons for tricking out your GNU/Mercedes without also making their add-ons GPL'd.
sneakemail.com works well too. Have been using it for years.
IBM has released a couple BIOS updates for the thinkpad that address this issue. My group had a few of these thinkpads and updating the BIOS seemed to help, although we didn't replace the batteries any more after that point so we didn't really get a clean test out of it.
Google also revealed a collaborative web page devoted to this issue, which I hadn't noticed until now:
http://www3.sympatico.ca/milnoc/TP600Battery/
It does a good job explaining symptoms, why it occurs, and how to tell if the BIOS problem is what's killing your battery prematurely.
-- Scott
I'm currently responsible for maintaining an IBM SP for a scientific computing facility. In this scenario, it's actually fairly close in overall design and function to a beowulf cluster.
The two things that have blown me away about this system are AIX's LVM and their high-performance shared filesystem, GPFS. Linux's logical volume manager comes close to the AIX LVM, but doesn't implement all of the functionality. I'm sure there's plenty to be learned.
BTW, a logical volume manager allows you to treat physical disks as a raw pool of resources that can be drawn upon for filesystms. You can create new filesystems, grow them in size, add more disks to the pool, all on the fly, without even having to unmount the filesystem.
GPFS is a distributed shared filesystem -- it lets you combine disks from many machines in the cluster into a shared filesystem that's visible to all machines in the cluster. There are other projects that accomplish this under linux, but IBM has been doing it for years, and the performance is unbelievable, bordering on magical.
These packages are the killer app for any type of clustering application of linux machines, be it web servers or beowulf-style computing.
-- Scott
After you've had a couple sessions to go through the basics, you could consider using one of the HOWTO's at linuxdoc.org for a topic for each brown bag session.
A lot of people would probably be interested in some of the common time-suckers when you're getting started with a new linux box such as how to get your dial-up connection set up. Mix the HOWTO material with your own experience and tips so that people are getting more than what they just could have read themselves.
A really big favor you could do to your coworkers is start to teach them about security and linux. Nothing sucks more for a newbie than finally getting their first linux box up and running on their cable modem, only to have it cracked within the hour. Totally demoralizing.
I imagine you'll do a session on how to install a new machine -- this is a great time to go into why and how to shut down unnecessary services, install ssh, install patches, etc. etc.
Just include it as part of the standard installation process. That's the sort of stuff that will make your seminars really unique and valuable -- securing your new box is really important, but isn't covered very often in off-the-shelf documentation.
-- Scott