Actually it's pretty unlikely that I'd want the latest version (or indeed any version) of the gimp. But, I do see your point. The users I'm talking about will want to put the CD they got off the cover of a magazine, that came with their new scanner/camera/modem/whatever or that they just bought at their local Wal-Mart/K-Mart/Game Zone/Wherever into the CD drive of their machine and have the software install with minimal interaction from them (click a few buttons, maybe select a few options, and that's it). Autorun is a security hole but it's also very useful to novice users. They want their PC to be as easy to use as their car; kick the tyres and top up the oil periodically and it runs, if anything serious goes wrong then take it to a professional.
I've heard of quite a few people who've made a business out of installing Linux/FreeBSD onto commodity kit and selling it to people on the basis of "Turn it on and it'll work. If you want anything changed or any new software or hardware installed here's my number." then waiting for people to call for an installation or for it to be fixed when they've installed something themselves and broken it.
The Mormon church has loads of records about people and how they relate to each other. Novell's flagship product (Netware) is used to store records about objects (including people) and how they relate to each other.
Personally I know they exist because you just told me but I don't currently know how to use them. Me being me I'd probably just go to a commandline and type something like man apt-get or Google for it. That's not what my Mom would do or my sister or most of the people who sit in the same office as me. They're not techies, they just want something that works, they just want to be able to put a CD in their machine and wait for the window to open that will install the software for them if they click a few buttons.
Incidentally, for them install means put the software on the machine and put the icons for it on the desktop and on the 'Start' menu. Command line is a closed book to these people, why should they have to learn how to use it if there's another product that's easier to use? You might be comfortable using the command line, I'm comfortable using the command line, most users aren't.
What term would you reccommend as shorthand to refer to those users who aren't IT experts and basically just want a system that works? You could go with the old favourites of John Doe, Joe Soap, Fred Bloggs or their feminine equivalents. But those are rather over used in other areas to refer to 'Someone, we don't know who'.
I was at uni from 89-93 so laptops weren't really around (and if they were then they were well out of the price range an average UK student could afford). I've been in 300-400 student lectures and, honestly, you're right that little of no learning was going on. But attendance was mandatory so the theatre was full.
Based on that and subsequent educational experiences what i think would be most useful would be something like Yahoo! chat the last time I used it (most of my friends are now on AIM). As well as text IM have a 'webcam' interface and audio chat. Instead of a normal webcam connect the feed to a high definition digital camera focused on the board or feed a Powerpoint/Impress presentation and connect the lecturers microphone to the audio in with students using headphones to listen in (reduces interference from keyboard noise). That way students can watch and listen to the lecture whilst taking notes and feeding back questions (to be collated and vetted by a TA, who maybe answers the more basic ones directly) without having to move their head all over the place.
Or 3) Get some well muscled friends, abduct the 4 kids who stole the tape in the first place, strip them naked, insert their head into well used and unflush toilets then flush; then dump them still naked a few miles outside of town. Video all of the above and post the resuting video on the internet. Turnabout is fair play, sometimes.
Everyone does things in private that are never meant to be seen by outsiders. Broadcasting them is an invasion of privacy. Had this guy released the tape himself then that would be fine, taking away his choice in the matter is an abuse.
How about an IP address for the RFID chips in your clothing?
That way your socks can tell your washing machine to ask the fridge to remind you to wash them whilst also emailing the NSA about you attending a meeting of [insert-fringe-organisation-currently-in-policial- disfavour-here] and your partner about the visit to the strip club afterwards. And obviously every CD (and CDplayer) will need it's own IP address so the embedded device (running WinCE) can connect back to the RIAA over the secret pervasive wireless network to tell them who's playing what as an antipiracy measure (the customer profiling use to allow them to send you even more junk mail is purely a side effect).
I'm far more likely to pay attention to the customer reviews than a write up from Amazon.
I guess what I'm saying here is that if you buy a book from Amazon then please take a few minutes to write a quick review saying what you liked/hated about the book, it will help other people make a decision. I've found that Amazon are usually quite fair (well Amazon UK are) and will publish a negative review so long as it's clear and non-offensive. If you write "This book sux." it'll get dumped, something like "This book skips a lot of the detail you need for this sort of level." then it will probably get through.
Even if I buy a book from somewhere else I'll usually write a review of it on Amazon.
I don't know about the US but here in the UK, unless martial law has been declared, the only people who can legally detain you against your will are:
Police officers
Certain Nurses
Doctors (i.e. MDs, not PhDs)
Magistrates and Judges
Persons acting on specific written, signed and autheticated instructions from the above who are legally considered to be acting as their agents
If a security guard or other store personnel asks you to not leave the store they can only do so with your consent (i.e. they can ask you to not leave the store but cannot compel you). However, if you do leave they will be justified in calling the police and if arrested and found to be innocent you have no legal recourse to sue them unless you can show some contributory crime (e.g. this is the second time in a week they've called the police on you without justification). If they do try to prevent you from leaving and make any kind of physical contact with you at all then you can legally view that as an assault and respond under the UK's self defence laws which entitle you to use any reasonable force (undefined but usually taken to mean any level of force upto and including the level used against you or the minimum necessary to cause them to brerak off the assault, which ever is greater, so you can't hit them if all they've done is put their hand on your arm but if they then grip your arm you are entitled to prise their fingers off (or toehrwise break the hold) and if you break one of their fingers or their wrist in the process well tough on them).
A few months ago the alarms went off as I was leaving a store. I was stopped by the store deputy manager but pointed out that they hadn't gone off when i walked through but rather when the 3 teenagers in front of me had run out. I waved my bags through the sensors and demonstrated that the alarms didn't go off from them. He said that he still wanted to check my bags, as I had a large number of bags and was pissed off at the time I again demonstrated that none of my bags set off the alarms. At this point he grabbed my arm so I asked him to let go pointing out that it was assault. He tightened his grip so I dropped the bags and used a rolling throw to break his grip and put him face down on the floor. A police officer who had been a few yards away and had both seen and heard the exchange walked over. The store deputy manager stood up and demanded, screamed, that the police officer arrest me. I calmly recounted what had happened and again demonstrated that it wasn't my bags that had set off the alarm. The police officer arrested the store deputy manager on charges of assault. At the magistrates court it transpired that this particular guy was well known for misidentifying shop lifters and hassling innocent shoppers, in fact he had been warned about it a number of times by the store manager and had been told not to go on door security but restrict himself to the back of the store. He lost his job and was sentenced to 6 months for unlawful detention and assault. I got 50 pounds worth of vouchers from the store and an apology from the store manager and the regional manager for the group.
The odds are that they have a large number legacy apps that cannot be ported to Linux in the short term. Replacing Microsoft Office with StarOffice or OpenOffice.org is a no brainer, the problem comes with all those bespoke or specialist apps (many with bespoke customisations) that are vital to the running of the business but for which there is not a Linux version, or equivalent product, yet. I strongly suspect that the VMWare situation is a stop gap and they will gradually be migrating off Windows apps and on to Linux or browser based apps.
I'm not citing a report or even pulling this out of my ass. I'm basing the above on the fact that I'm currently investigating how to do what Munich have done and this is precisely the path it looks like we would take.
Maybe he meant that the real component of their business is zero but it has an imaginary component that is non-zero, sco_business=m+ni sort of thing. m is zero however modulus(sco_business)=n and arg(sco_business)=tan^-1(n/0) (i.e. tan^-1(infinity), 1.5707 radians) --- if I'm remebering my complex math correctly that is, it's been about 12 years since I last had to use it.
In other words, any business SCO has is purely imaginary and that they are, perpendicularly, out of phase to reality.
Before you know it, you'll be as bad as Europe, and soon after, as bad as Britain.
It was on the news this morning that a school in Sunderland has introduced biometric scanning (an iris scanner) for use in the cashless system for paying for lunch.
The only way things like this will get easier is if the US shifts away from the federal republic model and become a monolithic republic ala France. This would involve disemboweling the federal constitution...
Not necessarally. If the federal government set up effectively a brokerage system (say define an XML schema for the transmittal of data required for each transaction for communication with state/local systems) so that citizens could go to the one central website and perform those transactions. They then could offer that to the state/local governments on a "use it or don't use it, it's up to you" basis. The state/local governments could then have a choice of whether to use the system or not and if they chose to use it whether to use a system that natively supported that system or have an interface written to their existing systems that supported it. Citizens who value being able to do all their government transactions in one place would then be able to pressure their local/state governments to join the system!
There's something similar happening here in the UK for a number of systems (most notably the National Land and Property Gazetteer which links to the various Local Land and Property Gazetteers so you can track down where any property or piece of land is and who owns it, also all previous owners and land use).
Obviously ther above is an oversimplification but the core concept of the federal government acting as a brokerage for local/state governments seems to already be in existance.
How many of you bring your favorite keyboard to the workplace to replace the standard Dell/compaq/HP, etc?
All the time. The one Microsoft product I adore is the 'Natural Keyboard'. I find that my typing speed is much better with one and I don't get pains in my wrists anymore, as I used to with the regular keyboards. I've got 3 of these keyboards: 1 original with a PS2 interface, 1 original (but made by Belkin) with a USB interface and another with a PS2 interface that has extra 'smart keys' that (under windows) I can atach commands to so the one labelled Web/Home opens up Mozilla, the Messenger one opens Yahoo!Chat &c.
Actually, I'm not sure that you can. At the Linux Expo last week that was attached to the "Networks for Business" show I was chatting a a guy from Belgium who sells merch to fund OpenBSD development. One of the things he mentioned was that in many European states a license is only binding if you have signed a paper copy of it. Therefore both the GPL and all those click-wrap/shrinkwrap licenses are not binding (I presume that *BSD &c licenses would similarly be non-binding), in Europe at least.
This is actually something that might be relevant to some projects I am involved in at work so I'm currently trying to work out the best way to phrase a question to put to the legal department to get a definitive answer and minimise their chance to weasel out of actually answering the question (our lawyers don't like giving legal advice that could be taken in any way as 'definitive').
Or someone who can code above your level sees the code and rips you a new one. If you're lucky they then fix your mistakes, if you're really lucky they explain how, so you learn.
That doesn't happen much (if at all) in commercial environments where, IME, the better coders are usually too tied doing their own work to fix yours and managers are more interested in hitting their deadline with code that works than whether there might be a better, more reliable, way to do it. The exceptions tend to be environments where the code is highly safety critical and so gets checked over repeatedly, then repeatedly tested, because lives, potentially many lives, are on the line. Code in those environments also tends to be highly modular and have extensive error checking and handling functionality in all modules.
Sounds rather like being a commissar under Stalin. Everything's all fine and dandy until one day the secret police are knocking your door down and dragging you off to a re-education camp in Siberia.
I was at the Linux Expo that's part of the Networks Telecoms show here in Birmingham, UK, yesterday. I got chatting to a guy selling OpenBSD merchandise. He brought up a very interesting point whilst we were talking abou the GPL.
One aspect of GPL, as I and he understand it (well as I understand it and he nodded when I said it), is that if you use something GPLed and ammend it to create a derivetive product then you have to make your ammendments available under the GPL. The point this guy made is that what would happen if someone took some GPLed code and incorporated into their closed source product without telling anyone. The source is closed so there's no easy way to get a look at it an see that it's the same code.
Sure you could sue. But who would sue? The person who wrote it (who could be some college kid working out of their dorm room or a geographically diverse 'team' who each contributed their part)? FSF? AFFS? How would they even know that their code had been stolen? Even if you could show that part of the propietry product did exactly the same thing as your product, without seeing the code you couldn't refute their claim to have developed it independantly. Depending on the complexity you could be faced with the problem that for many things there are only so many ways to do them in code.
If you do sue you could get a look at the code in the dicovery phase, but by that time you've already spent money on what could be a total waste of time and could have laid yourself open to a malicous prosecution case.
Might seem like FUD, but I do think it's something that seems to be enshrouded in uncertainty and doubt. It needs to be resolved.
Controversial changes to the European
Union's software patent regime have moved a step closer to legislation
with a vote by the European Parliament's Committee on Legal Affairs and
the Internal Market (Juri) on Tuesday.
Juri voted to approve a
series of amendments to a proposed directive on the patentability of
computer-implemented inventions, which aims to eliminate ambiguity in
the way software-related patents are handled, and differences in the way
EU member states interpret individual patents.
The European
Commission, the EU's executive arm, introduced the proposal with the
argument that companies with patentable inventions currently do not seek
software-related patents because the system is ambiguous and
inconsistent across Europe. However, the proposal has been bitterly
criticised by many software developers and scientists, who argue that
the directive would expose smaller developers to a barrage of frivolous
lawsuits from large patent-holding rivals -- a situation that already
exists in the US.
The proposal had already passed through two
other committees, who suggested many of the amendments considered on
Tuesday. The Juri vote means it can pass through to the full parliament
this autumn. If ultimately approved as an EU directive, all EU member
states would need to implement the legislation at a national level,
although more changes could be made before final approval.
Arlene
McCarthy, the MEP for the North-West of England, who shepherded the
proposal through parliament, argues that the directive is necessary to
help European businesses compete in the global marketplace. In a piece
published last week in The Guardian, McCarthy argued that the
system should not drift towards a US model, but also said that software
companies should be offered a similar level of patent protection here as
in the US or Japan.
"If we fail to offer European industry the
possibility of patent protection, we will hand over our inventiveness
and creativity to (overseas) big businesses, who can cherry-pick ideas
and patent them," she wrote. "It is time some of the 'computer rights
campaigners' got real."
Critics argued that the Juri vote tossed
out the suggested amendments from the Committee on Culture, Youth,
Education, the Media and Sport (Cult) and the Committee on Industry,
External Trade, Research and Energy (Itre) that would have placed clear
limits upon what types of software inventions could be patented.
"McCarthy and her followers rejected all amendment proposals that
limit patentability while supporting all those which go even beyond the
European Commission's proposal," said the Foundation for a Free
Information Infrastructure (FFII), a Germany-based pressure group, in a
statement.
The FFII published statements condemning the vote by
technologists from several major companies and organisations, including
Hakon Wium Lie, chief technology officer of Opera, Dr. Bernhard Runge,
senior developer at SAP, Bernhard Kaindl of SuSE Linux and Richard
Clark, chief executive of Elysium and chief editor for the JPEG
standardisation committee.
When can software be
patented? According to EU law, software programs as such cannot
be patented, but inventions that involve software can be patented if
they represent an invention in a technological field. Some factions had
sought to clearly limit what kinds of software-related inventions could
be patented; Cult, for example, proposed an amendment to the proposal
stating that "data processing is not a field of technology", removing it
from consideration for patenting, while defining technology as
"controlling forces of nature to achieve a physical effect".
At
the opposite extreme, it would be possible to interpret the fact that a
program is running on a computer as meeting the definiti
Slashdot Mirror
Actually it's pretty unlikely that I'd want the latest version (or indeed any version) of the gimp. But, I do see your point. The users I'm talking about will want to put the CD they got off the cover of a magazine, that came with their new scanner/camera/modem/whatever or that they just bought at their local Wal-Mart/K-Mart/Game Zone/Wherever into the CD drive of their machine and have the software install with minimal interaction from them (click a few buttons, maybe select a few options, and that's it). Autorun is a security hole but it's also very useful to novice users. They want their PC to be as easy to use as their car; kick the tyres and top up the oil periodically and it runs, if anything serious goes wrong then take it to a professional.
I've heard of quite a few people who've made a business out of installing Linux/FreeBSD onto commodity kit and selling it to people on the basis of "Turn it on and it'll work. If you want anything changed or any new software or hardware installed here's my number." then waiting for people to call for an installation or for it to be fixed when they've installed something themselves and broken it.
Stephen
The Mormon church has loads of records about people and how they relate to each other. Novell's flagship product (Netware) is used to store records about objects (including people) and how they relate to each other.
Stephen
For some reason the scenario that brings to mind is of Charlton Heston buying a gun that turns out to be stolen:
Perhaps I'm a sick fsck.
Stephen
Personally I know they exist because you just told me but I don't currently know how to use them. Me being me I'd probably just go to a commandline and type something like man apt-get or Google for it. That's not what my Mom would do or my sister or most of the people who sit in the same office as me. They're not techies, they just want something that works, they just want to be able to put a CD in their machine and wait for the window to open that will install the software for them if they click a few buttons.
Incidentally, for them install means put the software on the machine and put the icons for it on the desktop and on the 'Start' menu. Command line is a closed book to these people, why should they have to learn how to use it if there's another product that's easier to use? You might be comfortable using the command line, I'm comfortable using the command line, most users aren't.
Stephen
What term would you reccommend as shorthand to refer to those users who aren't IT experts and basically just want a system that works? You could go with the old favourites of John Doe, Joe Soap, Fred Bloggs or their feminine equivalents. But those are rather over used in other areas to refer to 'Someone, we don't know who'.
Stephen
UNIX boys keep it up longer but Windows will go down on you regardless.
Stephen
Has anyone done the Beowolf gag yet?
Stephen
I was at uni from 89-93 so laptops weren't really around (and if they were then they were well out of the price range an average UK student could afford). I've been in 300-400 student lectures and, honestly, you're right that little of no learning was going on. But attendance was mandatory so the theatre was full.
Based on that and subsequent educational experiences what i think would be most useful would be something like Yahoo! chat the last time I used it (most of my friends are now on AIM). As well as text IM have a 'webcam' interface and audio chat. Instead of a normal webcam connect the feed to a high definition digital camera focused on the board or feed a Powerpoint/Impress presentation and connect the lecturers microphone to the audio in with students using headphones to listen in (reduces interference from keyboard noise). That way students can watch and listen to the lecture whilst taking notes and feeding back questions (to be collated and vetted by a TA, who maybe answers the more basic ones directly) without having to move their head all over the place.
Stephen
Or 3) Get some well muscled friends, abduct the 4 kids who stole the tape in the first place, strip them naked, insert their head into well used and unflush toilets then flush; then dump them still naked a few miles outside of town. Video all of the above and post the resuting video on the internet. Turnabout is fair play, sometimes.
Everyone does things in private that are never meant to be seen by outsiders. Broadcasting them is an invasion of privacy. Had this guy released the tape himself then that would be fine, taking away his choice in the matter is an abuse.
Stephen
How about an IP address for the RFID chips in your clothing?
That way your socks can tell your washing machine to ask the fridge to remind you to wash them whilst also emailing the NSA about you attending a meeting of [insert-fringe-organisation-currently-in-policial- disfavour-here] and your partner about the visit to the strip club afterwards. And obviously every CD (and CDplayer) will need it's own IP address so the embedded device (running WinCE) can connect back to the RIAA over the secret pervasive wireless network to tell them who's playing what as an antipiracy measure (the customer profiling use to allow them to send you even more junk mail is purely a side effect).
Anything I missed?
Stephen
I'm far more likely to pay attention to the customer reviews than a write up from Amazon.
I guess what I'm saying here is that if you buy a book from Amazon then please take a few minutes to write a quick review saying what you liked/hated about the book, it will help other people make a decision. I've found that Amazon are usually quite fair (well Amazon UK are) and will publish a negative review so long as it's clear and non-offensive. If you write "This book sux." it'll get dumped, something like "This book skips a lot of the detail you need for this sort of level." then it will probably get through.
Even if I buy a book from somewhere else I'll usually write a review of it on Amazon.
Stephen
I don't know about the US but here in the UK, unless martial law has been declared, the only people who can legally detain you against your will are:
If a security guard or other store personnel asks you to not leave the store they can only do so with your consent (i.e. they can ask you to not leave the store but cannot compel you). However, if you do leave they will be justified in calling the police and if arrested and found to be innocent you have no legal recourse to sue them unless you can show some contributory crime (e.g. this is the second time in a week they've called the police on you without justification). If they do try to prevent you from leaving and make any kind of physical contact with you at all then you can legally view that as an assault and respond under the UK's self defence laws which entitle you to use any reasonable force (undefined but usually taken to mean any level of force upto and including the level used against you or the minimum necessary to cause them to brerak off the assault, which ever is greater, so you can't hit them if all they've done is put their hand on your arm but if they then grip your arm you are entitled to prise their fingers off (or toehrwise break the hold) and if you break one of their fingers or their wrist in the process well tough on them).
A few months ago the alarms went off as I was leaving a store. I was stopped by the store deputy manager but pointed out that they hadn't gone off when i walked through but rather when the 3 teenagers in front of me had run out. I waved my bags through the sensors and demonstrated that the alarms didn't go off from them. He said that he still wanted to check my bags, as I had a large number of bags and was pissed off at the time I again demonstrated that none of my bags set off the alarms. At this point he grabbed my arm so I asked him to let go pointing out that it was assault. He tightened his grip so I dropped the bags and used a rolling throw to break his grip and put him face down on the floor. A police officer who had been a few yards away and had both seen and heard the exchange walked over. The store deputy manager stood up and demanded, screamed, that the police officer arrest me. I calmly recounted what had happened and again demonstrated that it wasn't my bags that had set off the alarm. The police officer arrested the store deputy manager on charges of assault. At the magistrates court it transpired that this particular guy was well known for misidentifying shop lifters and hassling innocent shoppers, in fact he had been warned about it a number of times by the store manager and had been told not to go on door security but restrict himself to the back of the store. He lost his job and was sentenced to 6 months for unlawful detention and assault. I got 50 pounds worth of vouchers from the store and an apology from the store manager and the regional manager for the group.
Stephen
The odds are that they have a large number legacy apps that cannot be ported to Linux in the short term. Replacing Microsoft Office with StarOffice or OpenOffice.org is a no brainer, the problem comes with all those bespoke or specialist apps (many with bespoke customisations) that are vital to the running of the business but for which there is not a Linux version, or equivalent product, yet. I strongly suspect that the VMWare situation is a stop gap and they will gradually be migrating off Windows apps and on to Linux or browser based apps.
I'm not citing a report or even pulling this out of my ass. I'm basing the above on the fact that I'm currently investigating how to do what Munich have done and this is precisely the path it looks like we would take.
Stephen
Maybe he meant that the real component of their business is zero but it has an imaginary component that is non-zero, sco_business=m+ni sort of thing. m is zero however modulus(sco_business)=n and arg(sco_business)=tan^-1(n/0) (i.e. tan^-1(infinity), 1.5707 radians) --- if I'm remebering my complex math correctly that is, it's been about 12 years since I last had to use it.
In other words, any business SCO has is purely imaginary and that they are, perpendicularly, out of phase to reality.
Stephen
It was on the news this morning that a school in Sunderland has introduced biometric scanning (an iris scanner) for use in the cashless system for paying for lunch.
Stephen
Not necessarally. If the federal government set up effectively a brokerage system (say define an XML schema for the transmittal of data required for each transaction for communication with state/local systems) so that citizens could go to the one central website and perform those transactions. They then could offer that to the state/local governments on a "use it or don't use it, it's up to you" basis. The state/local governments could then have a choice of whether to use the system or not and if they chose to use it whether to use a system that natively supported that system or have an interface written to their existing systems that supported it. Citizens who value being able to do all their government transactions in one place would then be able to pressure their local/state governments to join the system!
There's something similar happening here in the UK for a number of systems (most notably the National Land and Property Gazetteer which links to the various Local Land and Property Gazetteers so you can track down where any property or piece of land is and who owns it, also all previous owners and land use).
Obviously ther above is an oversimplification but the core concept of the federal government acting as a brokerage for local/state governments seems to already be in existance.
Stephen
rot26?
Stephen
That's strange. I've had the same original Natural keyboard since '97. Guess I've been lucky on that count so far.
Stephen
Cool hardware, shame about the software.
Stephen
Actually, I'm not sure that you can. At the Linux Expo last week that was attached to the "Networks for Business" show I was chatting a a guy from Belgium who sells merch to fund OpenBSD development. One of the things he mentioned was that in many European states a license is only binding if you have signed a paper copy of it. Therefore both the GPL and all those click-wrap/shrinkwrap licenses are not binding (I presume that *BSD &c licenses would similarly be non-binding), in Europe at least.
This is actually something that might be relevant to some projects I am involved in at work so I'm currently trying to work out the best way to phrase a question to put to the legal department to get a definitive answer and minimise their chance to weasel out of actually answering the question (our lawyers don't like giving legal advice that could be taken in any way as 'definitive').
Stephen
Or someone who can code above your level sees the code and rips you a new one. If you're lucky they then fix your mistakes, if you're really lucky they explain how, so you learn.
That doesn't happen much (if at all) in commercial environments where, IME, the better coders are usually too tied doing their own work to fix yours and managers are more interested in hitting their deadline with code that works than whether there might be a better, more reliable, way to do it. The exceptions tend to be environments where the code is highly safety critical and so gets checked over repeatedly, then repeatedly tested, because lives, potentially many lives, are on the line. Code in those environments also tends to be highly modular and have extensive error checking and handling functionality in all modules.
Stephen
Sounds rather like being a commissar under Stalin. Everything's all fine and dandy until one day the secret police are knocking your door down and dragging you off to a re-education camp in Siberia.
Stephen
I was at the Linux Expo that's part of the Networks Telecoms show here in Birmingham, UK, yesterday. I got chatting to a guy selling OpenBSD merchandise. He brought up a very interesting point whilst we were talking abou the GPL.
One aspect of GPL, as I and he understand it (well as I understand it and he nodded when I said it), is that if you use something GPLed and ammend it to create a derivetive product then you have to make your ammendments available under the GPL. The point this guy made is that what would happen if someone took some GPLed code and incorporated into their closed source product without telling anyone. The source is closed so there's no easy way to get a look at it an see that it's the same code.
Sure you could sue. But who would sue? The person who wrote it (who could be some college kid working out of their dorm room or a geographically diverse 'team' who each contributed their part)? FSF? AFFS? How would they even know that their code had been stolen? Even if you could show that part of the propietry product did exactly the same thing as your product, without seeing the code you couldn't refute their claim to have developed it independantly. Depending on the complexity you could be faced with the problem that for many things there are only so many ways to do them in code.
If you do sue you could get a look at the code in the dicovery phase, but by that time you've already spent money on what could be a total waste of time and could have laid yourself open to a malicous prosecution case.
Might seem like FUD, but I do think it's something that seems to be enshrouded in uncertainty and doubt. It needs to be resolved.
Stephen
English language article can be found here
"If you want to be individual, don't get a tattoo!" --- Ozzy Osbourne