Harald Welte is Urheber (copyright owner for english-american people) of netfilter/iptables. So he has all the rights to tell Fortinet to comply with whatever license he put on netfilter/iptables, if they are using it.
3) Depends on the circumstances. What were the terms of A's contract with developer B? Did it specify licensing terms? If no terms were specified (explicitly or implicitly) than I don't think developer B did anything wrong. Rather, A was negligent in setting up the contract and is wholly responsible.
About every contract I know of assures that the selling party has the right to sell the work/object/priviledge/whatever that is subject of the contract. So there surely is a clause somewhere in every software contract where the seller (developer) declares that he owns the copyrights to the work he sells or has at least for the parts he doesn't own the copyright the license to sell a copy. And even if not: If the developer in question didn't put a GPL copy in his (derivative) work, he is not in compliance with the GPL. And if Company A looks at the source code it is getting, it surely notices that the software is under GPL.
So if the seller in question doesn't have the complete copyrights to the work he is selling, and he doesn't tell the buyer, he has at least committed culpa in contrahendo, so the buyer can at least withdraw from the contract, because the contract is void as such. And the buyer can claim damages too.
So for the developer, it runs badly: He didn't comply with the GPL, so he lost the right to distribute his derivative work. Thus he sold something he didn't have the right to, so he caused financial damage to the buyer and the copyright holder.
Luckily Company A ran afoul the GPL, not another software license. If Company A stops distributing the (in fact) GPLed software, it already has complied with the GPL and stopped the infringment. And the customers who bought the GPLed product are entitled by the GPL (section 4) to further use the derivative work even though Company A didn't comply with the GPL.
Germans have no right to call their champagne "champagne", according to the Contracts of Versailles (1918), which effectively ended World War I in the West. German champagne thus is called "Sekt" (from 'vine sec' = 'dry wine').
Having permanent DST is nothing else than getting up an hour earlier every day. Everything else is just renaming the hours.
So my question is: If we had permanent DST, how long would it take until the normal workday starts at 10am and goes until 6pm?
And then we start proposing another round of "permanent DST"? And another one? And finally we have a day more, because we were switching the clock 24 times?
Everyone who proposes permanent DST should just get up earlier. Same effect. Less cost.
It's not that easy. Fundamentally the mathematical proof consists in something else than the actual running of the program.
The question is if the output of the program is equivalent to the problem you want to prove. Your proof actually consists of verifying that "Program Output is A" is only true if "Statement B is true" is true.
(It's not necessary to prove also the reverse notion. "Statement B is true" doesn't need to implicate that "Program Output is A". Imagine a program that prints out "A" if it is 8pm. Then imagine the statement being "The long hand of the clock points to the 12". If the program prints out "A", then you can be sure that statement to be true for a correctly running clock.)
In the end those proofs (Program Output is A -> Statement B is true) are as peer reviewable as any other proof.
What isn't quite so obvious is employers owning works of an employee.
That's correct under English Common Law. But at least the "open sourc" group is from the Netherlands, and they work under the maximes of the Berne Convention. In German Law (43 UrhG) it states explicitely:
43 Urheber in Arbeits- oder Dienstverhältnissen
Die Vorschriften dieses Unterabschnitts sind auch anzuwenden, wenn der Urheber das Werk in Erfüllung seiner Verpflichtungen aus einem Arbeits- oder Dienstverhältnis geschaffen hat, soweit sich aus dem Inhalt oder dem Wesen des Arbeits- oder Dienstverhältnisses nichts anderes ergibt.
(which translates to: The rules of this paragraph are also valid, if the Author has created the Work in fulfillment of his duties from a employment or service contract, except if the type of the employment or service dictate otherwise.)
The exceptions are pointing at duties to keep a secret (if you are for instance a lawyer writing something for your client, you are not allowed to publish your essay at will) or or to publish your results for everyone to read (if you are writing the exact words for a law;) ) or similar. They don't refer to any clauses in a contract.
It is still possible to make a contract about a future work (40), where you can give exclusive rights to your employer, but you still retain the Urheberschaft (the Authorship), which can't be sold or otherwise given to someone else. You even have the right after two years to regain the rights back if your employer doesn't use his rights or makes only partly use of your work (41, you could call it the Abandonware Clause).
Every bag of household litter contains the DNA of all the household members. So if you want to build a DNA bomb just get there, take the litter from a neighbouring street and fiddle around with a comparatively cheap DNA tester (which is in fact a DNA multiplier). Of course you get lots of indifferent DNA (from the last tuna sandwich and the dairy products, from the worn out leather boots and everything else) too, but the point of DNA bombs is exactly this: Lay hundreds of DNA tracks to cover your own.
The whole point of DNA evidence is that you only need a single scrap from your skin, a drop of your sweat to extract enough DNA to start pattern matching.
You confused a project which gets funded with a project which exists just for itself and for the fun and joy of it. Funding means an external support for something that can't leave out of itself. There are academic projects which can't survive without funding. Most academic projects can't today. But there are other projects in every academic circle that don't need any external support, because it is done by the academy members just for fun. The whole idea of an ancient academy was to solve the funding problem for the members without any connections to the actual projects running there. Either by choosing members who for sure could support themselves as a group (as in ancient Greece), or by having some wealthy entity paying regularily a fixed sum independently from the results of the academy (as in ancient Rome, namely the patrician Maecenas).
You got two things confused. And you fell for the same fallacy than all those people, about whom Arthur Schopenhauer wrote his famous "Dilettanten! Dilettanten!" flame:
Dilettanten!, Dilettanten! - so werden Die, welche eine Wissenschaft oder Kunst, aus Liebe zu ihr und Freude an ihr, per il loco diletto, treiben, mit Geringschätzung genannt von Denen, die sich des Gewinnes halber darauf gelegt haben; weil sie nur das Geld delektiert, das damit zu verdienen ist. Diese Geringschätzung beruht auf ihrer niederderträchtigen Überzeugung, dass keiner eine Sache ernstlich angreifen werde, wenn ihn nicht Not, Hunger oder sonst welche Gier dazu anspornt. Das Publikum ist desselben Geistes und daher derselben Meinung: hieraus entspringt sein durchgängiger Respekt vor den 'Leuten vom Fach' und sein Misstrauen gegen Dilettanten. In Wahrheit hingegen ist dem Dilettanten die Sache Zweck, dem Manne vom Fach, als solchem, bloß Mittel; nur der aber wird eine Sache mit ganzem Ernste treiben, dem unmittelbar an ihr gelegen ist und der sich aus Liebe zu ihr damit beschäftigt; sie con Amore treibt. Von Solchen, und nicht von den Lohndienern, ist stets das Größte ausgegangen.
[Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga und Paralipomena: Ueber Gelehrsamkeit und Gelehrte]
For those with Non German Language Disorder here a rough translation:
"Dilettants! Dilettants! - so are those called, who are doing a science or an art, out of love or joy for it, per il loco diletto, with disrespect by those, who do it for the gain, because they like the money that can be earned by it. This disrespect is founded in the mean conviction, that no one seriously does anything if not forced by misery, hunger or another greed. The public has the same mind and thus the same opinion: from here comes the full respect for "people of the craft" and his mistrust for dilettants. In reality for the dilettant the thing is the end, for the craftsman it is just means; only he will do a thing with full seriosity, who is immediately interested, and who is occupied by it out of love, does it con Amore. Those, not the paid servants, always started the greatest things."
Re:Who are the lawyers that will litigate this?
on
Tracking GPL Violators
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Harald Welte mostly operates within german legislation. He even said in the interview, that he goes after resellers rather than the OEMs, because the resellers are within german law.
And in german civil law, the loser pays. Or to be more exact: At the beginning of the process the demands of both parties are put on file (this is the so called Streitwert, the value of the suit), and at the end the resulting awarded damages are compared with the initial demands. The money you have to pay is depending on how much of your own demands got awared to you, and how much you have to pay to the other party. The cost of the suit is determined from the Streitwert (and the cost involves also the payments to the lawyers of both sides), and you pay the cost relatively to your payment to the other side.
This makes it rather risky to pull an SCO in a german court. If any SCO demands 1 billion Euros in a german court, the Streitwert will be at 1 billion Euros. And if SCO in the end gets awarded 10 Mio Euros, SCO would get 1% of the initial demand, so SCO had to pay 99% of the cost of the lawsuit. (In fact it's a little more complicated, this is Germany after all.)
But back to Harald Welte. He doesn't claim financial damage, so the Streitwert is rather low. He normally starts with an injunction requesting the other party to comply to the GPL and release the code in question or to stop infringing on his Urheberrecht (his Author's right to iptables/netfilter code according to the Berne convention), which amounts to stop selling the software or firmware.
A reseller then has to stop selling the product in question, because resellers almost never do have the source code. But they then can either sue the OEM for damages because of lost business or try to get the source code from the OEM and then open it to the public (or at least to the own customers). According to the GPL this heals the infringment. In the end it's the most easy thing for a reseller to press his OEM for the source code than to stop selling a product and even try to get all already sold stock back and destroy it. Only the company Sitecom tried to strike down the Injunction in question and lost in court, which uphelt the injunction. This was a 100% win for Harald, so 100% of the cost of this suit was paid for by Sitecom.
You are not bound to distribute your (derivative) work, that's correct. No one can force anyone who writes internal scripts for administative purposes, which are modifications of GPLed scripts, to the public. It might get dangerous for the security of your company if you do, because they often reveal your internal processes and even the security mechanisms and authorisations you use.
But merely the act to modify GPLed code puts the modified code under the GPL (or a compatible license), so if at any point in the future the modified code or a binary built from the code is released to anyone outside the legal entity, the releaser is bound by the GPL and has to release under the conditions of the GPL. The instance the entity in question fails to comply with the GPL during the release it loses also the modification rights, so it can't even use its own modifications anymore (because the modifications themselves are illegal now). This can be healed by complying to the GPL, and this means: Releasing the modifications to all people who got the first (non-GPL) distribution again under the terms of the GPL.
So whatever the company wants to do with the modifications, as soon as they leave the company, they are under GPL.
It is more complicated than that. Look at section 5 of the GPL: Modifications of GPLed programs are an explicite expression of accepting the terms of the license. The instant the company stops to accept the GPL, it also loses the right to modify the code, even if they only use it internally. But the only way to infringe on the GPL is to try to distribute the original or modifications hereof with a license incompatible to the GPL.
So the situation is this: Everything is fine with GPLed software. No restrictions are in place as long as you don't start to distribute the original or derivative works of the original. The instant you start to distribute the original or any derivative works without a GPL compatible license, you lose all rights to the original, including the right to use the original and to modify it.
Of course the company can use the original without any restrictions. The question is if the company can use a derivative work without any restrictions. The GPL states in section 5:
5. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying the Program or works based on it.
So modifying the program is only allowed if you accept the GPL. That's the point the guy should point out to his company.
It might be perfectly legal to use the files internally,
The GPL places no restriction on use. The company can use any GPLed software internally without restriction, including this software.
Here we get to one of the most overlooked points in the GPL: All rights derived from the GPL are bound to the fact that the entity in question accepts the GPL in complete. As far as it currently seems the company didn't accept the terms of the GPL, so they loose any rights to the code in question. This even includes using the software internally.
First of all: He can and never will legally sign over IP that doesn't belong to him. And as far as he tells us he never claimed to own the IP rights to the code he made modifications for. So he had not commited culpa in contrahendo, I guess. Whatever contract he signed, it doesn't pull the rights out of the rightful owner, the one who wrote the original code, because the company never signed a contract with the original IP holder.
So all the company can try to claim rights to are the modifications he made. So if he creates a diff output from the original code compared with his own code there may be a chance that the company receives rights to the diff files. It still doesn't help the company very much because of the GPL license, which forbids the distribution of derivative works under other licenses than the GPL. And the diff file might be called a derivative work. The complete code (diff and original merged together) surely is.
In the end the company sits on a bunch of diff files, which can not be distributed to the world other than by GPL. It might be perfectly legal to use the files internally, as long as no derivative work of the original code leaves the company. The problem is one for the lawyers of the company and of the FSF. Not one for the guy actually writing the code. He has signed all his work to the company, and his work happens to be a derivative one. Tough luck for the company, but not a fault of the guy himself.
The vast, vast majority is pirated software, pirated movies, and pirated TV shows (and, to a lesser extent, music, just because of the nature of BitTorrent being more conveniently applicable to small amounts of large files, rather than large amounts of small files).
Anyone not admitting that at this particular point in time is lying to themselves.
So I am going to lie to myself: I got to know BitTorrent and have used it until now MAINLY for legitimate purposes, downloading Linux distributions. Most people I know are answering "downloading Linux" if I ask them what they are doing with BitTorrent. And it wasn't until recently (about a year) that I found the first porn torrents. Ok, I didn't really search for them.
So I guess that differently than in the original article, where Rob Pegoraro states:
And while it is certainly handy for downloading movies and other copyrighted material for free, it's also increasingly used to distribute software and entertainment legally.
the correct sentence should have been:
And while it is certainly handy to distribute software legally, it's also increasingly used to download movies and other copyrighted material for free.
(And I still have a problem with that sentence: GPLed software is copyrighted material, and still downloading it is legitimate. Rob Pegoraro suggests in his writing that getting copyrighted material for free is somehow bad and illegal.)
It's not that easy. About 20 years ago the country with the most phone (land) lines per 1000 inhabitants was Norway (about 650 then), followed by Finland and Sweden. The U.S. was quite far behind. Regions like the former communist East Germany were at 92 phone lines per 1000 inhabitants, about the same as Uruguay, and the waiting lists to finally get a phone were long. It was easier to inherit a land line from someone than to apply for and get a new one. Most of the limits were put there with the old telephone system which couldn't handle more than five numbers for a local call. When East Germany turned Communism down, the number of available landlines was still lagging far behind the demand, and people still waited one year or longer to finally get one. But cell phones were available in the towns quite soon, and people were running for them, thus making cell phones a normality in East Germany far more early than West Germany. This would actually support your claim: Bad land line infrastructure leads to increased cell phone usage. But: Why is Finland leading cell phone usage today (followed by Norway and Sweden), when they had one of the best and most widespread land line system 20 years ago? It can't be just the patriotic pride to be home to Nokia and Ericsson;)
Have you ever used a phone booth to place a long distance call in the U.S.? Fucking complicated! Listening to a lot of options: pay in coins, pay per credit card, finally finding someone actually talking to you just to tell him that you want to pay per coins... And nowhere a decent table with instructions. Using a phone booth in the U.S. causes a culture shock.
In every other country of the world you just put your coins/your credit card/your prepaid card/whatever you use into the machine and dial a number. This works in Brasil the same than in France, in Germany the same than in Turkey.
The U.S. didn't actually surrender in Vietnam, they called it a Truce and withdrew their troups. Your mileage may vary, but this is the official version.:)
First of all: Most of the german main rail routes are in some ways "wireless" since about at least 15 years. It's called "Zugfunk" (train radio) and at first involved mainly telephone services. If you ever travelled there you might have noticed a wire lying between the rails. That's the stationary part of the system, the sender/receiver antenna for the fixed stations.
I guess the Telekom connection will use an improved system based on this infrastructure, with higher bandwith and maybe lower latency. Because it's on rails you can be pretty sure that only one client (train) of the system will be within a specified rail block, and it's quite clear beforehand, which railblock the train will enter next, so hand-over of the connection to the next railblock should be comparatively easy.
That's basicly what SUN was doing with their release numbers. Solaris 10 is in fact Solaris 2.10, and the kernel of Solaris 2.10 is the SunOS 5.10.
Solaris was released as "2", because it was the first software distribution from SUN Microsystems that was SVR4 compliant, thus making a difference to the previous SunOS releases, which were based on BSD. Solaris 2 got a rewrite of the old SunOS kernel, which was at 4.3.1 before Solaris. So the kernel was SunOS 5.0. With every new Solaris Software Release there were also minor changes to the kernel, so Solaris 2.1 had a 5.1 kernel, etc.pp. With Solaris 7 Sun got rid of the "2" (which meant Second Approach to a UNIX operating system;) ), and while in fact the core Solaris Distribution was a release 2.7 (using SunOS Kernel 5.7), it was marketed as Solaris 7 (because in fact it was the 8th release of the Solaris 2 operating system, starting counting with 0).
Same with the Linux Kernel versions. Think of Linux Kernel 2 as the kernel series with loadable modules and SMP capabilities (different than the Kernel 1 releases, which where monolithic blocks until the Kernel 1.3 developer kernels started with loadable modules). As long as this characteristics stay stable, there is no point to go for a Linux 3 kernel. The current Linux 2 kernel is at his 4th stable feature set, and because of the numbering for feature stable releases with even numbers, it gets the fourth even number: 6 (the first three being 0, 2 and 4). The different versions of the fourth feature stable Linux Kernel 2 releases should look all the same from a userland perspective (they don't completely, but that's a rather minor side effect), so they are all called Linux 2.6. To make a difference between the single versions of the Linux 2.6 kernels you get a version numbering: the first one being 2.6.0, the current one 2.6.11.
The fourth number comes into being when it goes about differently patched versions of the stable current kernel branch. None of those four-numbered kernels is thought for a general public, they are rather experimental versions until a release candidate emerges from all those patches. And if the release candidate (maybe after some bugfixing cycles) proves to be stable enough for general use, it gets released as the next Linux Kernel Series 2, 4th stable Feature Set version (a.k.a. Linux Kernel 2.6.(n+1)).
The trick with Kit TV is that none of the single parts itself are able to receive HDTV, thus none of them falls under the provision. It's the sum of all parts that makes the receiver, and this one is never been "distributed", just the parts of it.
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'weg' is also the German word for 'away', thus also 'away to go' ;)
Harald Welte is Urheber (copyright owner for english-american people) of netfilter/iptables. So he has all the rights to tell Fortinet to comply with whatever license he put on netfilter/iptables, if they are using it.
About every contract I know of assures that the selling party has the right to sell the work/object/priviledge/whatever that is subject of the contract. So there surely is a clause somewhere in every software contract where the seller (developer) declares that he owns the copyrights to the work he sells or has at least for the parts he doesn't own the copyright the license to sell a copy.
And even if not: If the developer in question didn't put a GPL copy in his (derivative) work, he is not in compliance with the GPL. And if Company A looks at the source code it is getting, it surely notices that the software is under GPL.
So if the seller in question doesn't have the complete copyrights to the work he is selling, and he doesn't tell the buyer, he has at least committed culpa in contrahendo, so the buyer can at least withdraw from the contract, because the contract is void as such. And the buyer can claim damages too.
So for the developer, it runs badly: He didn't comply with the GPL, so he lost the right to distribute his derivative work. Thus he sold something he didn't have the right to, so he caused financial damage to the buyer and the copyright holder.
Luckily Company A ran afoul the GPL, not another software license. If Company A stops distributing the (in fact) GPLed software, it already has complied with the GPL and stopped the infringment. And the customers who bought the GPLed product are entitled by the GPL (section 4) to further use the derivative work even though Company A didn't comply with the GPL.
Germans have no right to call their champagne "champagne", according to the Contracts of Versailles (1918), which effectively ended World War I in the West. German champagne thus is called "Sekt" (from 'vine sec' = 'dry wine').
Having permanent DST is nothing else than getting up an hour earlier every day. Everything else is just renaming the hours.
So my question is: If we had permanent DST, how long would it take until the normal workday starts at 10am and goes until 6pm?
And then we start proposing another round of "permanent DST"? And another one? And finally we have a day more, because we were switching the clock 24 times?
Everyone who proposes permanent DST should just get up earlier. Same effect. Less cost.
It's not that easy. Fundamentally the mathematical proof consists in something else than the actual running of the program.
The question is if the output of the program is equivalent to the problem you want to prove. Your proof actually consists of verifying that "Program Output is A" is only true if "Statement B is true" is true.
(It's not necessary to prove also the reverse notion. "Statement B is true" doesn't need to implicate that "Program Output is A". Imagine a program that prints out "A" if it is 8pm. Then imagine the statement being "The long hand of the clock points to the 12". If the program prints out "A", then you can be sure that statement to be true for a correctly running clock.)
In the end those proofs (Program Output is A -> Statement B is true) are as peer reviewable as any other proof.
Why? Are they all so bad you call them unlistenable?
That's correct under English Common Law. But at least the "open sourc" group is from the Netherlands, and they work under the maximes of the Berne Convention. In German Law (43 UrhG) it states explicitely:
(which translates to: The rules of this paragraph are also valid, if the Author has created the Work in fulfillment of his duties from a employment or service contract, except if the type of the employment or service dictate otherwise.)
The exceptions are pointing at duties to keep a secret (if you are for instance a lawyer writing something for your client, you are not allowed to publish your essay at will) or or to publish your results for everyone to read (if you are writing the exact words for a law
It is still possible to make a contract about a future work (40), where you can give exclusive rights to your employer, but you still retain the Urheberschaft (the Authorship), which can't be sold or otherwise given to someone else. You even have the right after two years to regain the rights back if your employer doesn't use his rights or makes only partly use of your work (41, you could call it the Abandonware Clause).
Every bag of household litter contains the DNA of all the household members. So if you want to build a DNA bomb just get there, take the litter from a neighbouring street and fiddle around with a comparatively cheap DNA tester (which is in fact a DNA multiplier). Of course you get lots of indifferent DNA (from the last tuna sandwich and the dairy products, from the worn out leather boots and everything else) too, but the point of DNA bombs is exactly this: Lay hundreds of DNA tracks to cover your own.
The whole point of DNA evidence is that you only need a single scrap from your skin, a drop of your sweat to extract enough DNA to start pattern matching.
You confused a project which gets funded with a project which exists just for itself and for the fun and joy of it. Funding means an external support for something that can't leave out of itself. There are academic projects which can't survive without funding. Most academic projects can't today. But there are other projects in every academic circle that don't need any external support, because it is done by the academy members just for fun. The whole idea of an ancient academy was to solve the funding problem for the members without any connections to the actual projects running there. Either by choosing members who for sure could support themselves as a group (as in ancient Greece), or by having some wealthy entity paying regularily a fixed sum independently from the results of the academy (as in ancient Rome, namely the patrician Maecenas).
For those with Non German Language Disorder here a rough translation:
"Dilettants! Dilettants! - so are those called, who are doing a science or an art, out of love or joy for it, per il loco diletto, with disrespect by those, who do it for the gain, because they like the money that can be earned by it. This disrespect is founded in the mean conviction, that no one seriously does anything if not forced by misery, hunger or another greed. The public has the same mind and thus the same opinion: from here comes the full respect for "people of the craft" and his mistrust for dilettants. In reality for the dilettant the thing is the end, for the craftsman it is just means; only he will do a thing with full seriosity, who is immediately interested, and who is occupied by it out of love, does it con Amore. Those, not the paid servants, always started the greatest things."
Harald Welte mostly operates within german legislation. He even said in the interview, that he goes after resellers rather than the OEMs, because the resellers are within german law.
And in german civil law, the loser pays. Or to be more exact: At the beginning of the process the demands of both parties are put on file (this is the so called Streitwert, the value of the suit), and at the end the resulting awarded damages are compared with the initial demands. The money you have to pay is depending on how much of your own demands got awared to you, and how much you have to pay to the other party. The cost of the suit is determined from the Streitwert (and the cost involves also the payments to the lawyers of both sides), and you pay the cost relatively to your payment to the other side.
This makes it rather risky to pull an SCO in a german court. If any SCO demands 1 billion Euros in a german court, the Streitwert will be at 1 billion Euros. And if SCO in the end gets awarded 10 Mio Euros, SCO would get 1% of the initial demand, so SCO had to pay 99% of the cost of the lawsuit. (In fact it's a little more complicated, this is Germany after all.)
But back to Harald Welte. He doesn't claim financial damage, so the Streitwert is rather low. He normally starts with an injunction requesting the other party to comply to the GPL and release the code in question or to stop infringing on his Urheberrecht (his Author's right to iptables/netfilter code according to the Berne convention), which amounts to stop selling the software or firmware.
A reseller then has to stop selling the product in question, because resellers almost never do have the source code. But they then can either sue the OEM for damages because of lost business or try to get the source code from the OEM and then open it to the public (or at least to the own customers). According to the GPL this heals the infringment. In the end it's the most easy thing for a reseller to press his OEM for the source code than to stop selling a product and even try to get all already sold stock back and destroy it. Only the company Sitecom tried to strike down the Injunction in question and lost in court, which uphelt the injunction. This was a 100% win for Harald, so 100% of the cost of this suit was paid for by Sitecom.
You are not bound to distribute your (derivative) work, that's correct. No one can force anyone who writes internal scripts for administative purposes, which are modifications of GPLed scripts, to the public. It might get dangerous for the security of your company if you do, because they often reveal your internal processes and even the security mechanisms and authorisations you use.
But merely the act to modify GPLed code puts the modified code under the GPL (or a compatible license), so if at any point in the future the modified code or a binary built from the code is released to anyone outside the legal entity, the releaser is bound by the GPL and has to release under the conditions of the GPL. The instance the entity in question fails to comply with the GPL during the release it loses also the modification rights, so it can't even use its own modifications anymore (because the modifications themselves are illegal now). This can be healed by complying to the GPL, and this means: Releasing the modifications to all people who got the first (non-GPL) distribution again under the terms of the GPL.
So whatever the company wants to do with the modifications, as soon as they leave the company, they are under GPL.
It is more complicated than that. Look at section 5 of the GPL: Modifications of GPLed programs are an explicite expression of accepting the terms of the license. The instant the company stops to accept the GPL, it also loses the right to modify the code, even if they only use it internally. But the only way to infringe on the GPL is to try to distribute the original or modifications hereof with a license incompatible to the GPL.
So the situation is this: Everything is fine with GPLed software. No restrictions are in place as long as you don't start to distribute the original or derivative works of the original. The instant you start to distribute the original or any derivative works without a GPL compatible license, you lose all rights to the original, including the right to use the original and to modify it.
So modifying the program is only allowed if you accept the GPL. That's the point the guy should point out to his company.
Here we get to one of the most overlooked points in the GPL: All rights derived from the GPL are bound to the fact that the entity in question accepts the GPL in complete. As far as it currently seems the company didn't accept the terms of the GPL, so they loose any rights to the code in question. This even includes using the software internally.
First of all: He can and never will legally sign over IP that doesn't belong to him. And as far as he tells us he never claimed to own the IP rights to the code he made modifications for. So he had not commited culpa in contrahendo, I guess. Whatever contract he signed, it doesn't pull the rights out of the rightful owner, the one who wrote the original code, because the company never signed a contract with the original IP holder.
So all the company can try to claim rights to are the modifications he made. So if he creates a diff output from the original code compared with his own code there may be a chance that the company receives rights to the diff files. It still doesn't help the company very much because of the GPL license, which forbids the distribution of derivative works under other licenses than the GPL. And the diff file might be called a derivative work. The complete code (diff and original merged together) surely is.
In the end the company sits on a bunch of diff files, which can not be distributed to the world other than by GPL. It might be perfectly legal to use the files internally, as long as no derivative work of the original code leaves the company. The problem is one for the lawyers of the company and of the FSF. Not one for the guy actually writing the code. He has signed all his work to the company, and his work happens to be a derivative one. Tough luck for the company, but not a fault of the guy himself.
So I am going to lie to myself: I got to know BitTorrent and have used it until now MAINLY for legitimate purposes, downloading Linux distributions. Most people I know are answering "downloading Linux" if I ask them what they are doing with BitTorrent. And it wasn't until recently (about a year) that I found the first porn torrents. Ok, I didn't really search for them.
So I guess that differently than in the original article, where Rob Pegoraro states:
the correct sentence should have been:
And while it is certainly handy to distribute software legally, it's also increasingly used to download movies and other copyrighted material for free.
(And I still have a problem with that sentence: GPLed software is copyrighted material, and still downloading it is legitimate. Rob Pegoraro suggests in his writing that getting copyrighted material for free is somehow bad and illegal.)
It's not that easy. ;)
About 20 years ago the country with the most phone (land) lines per 1000 inhabitants was Norway (about 650 then), followed by Finland and Sweden. The U.S. was quite far behind. Regions like the former communist East Germany were at 92 phone lines per 1000 inhabitants, about the same as Uruguay, and the waiting lists to finally get a phone were long. It was easier to inherit a land line from someone than to apply for and get a new one. Most of the limits were put there with the old telephone system which couldn't handle more than five numbers for a local call.
When East Germany turned Communism down, the number of available landlines was still lagging far behind the demand, and people still waited one year or longer to finally get one. But cell phones were available in the towns quite soon, and people were running for them, thus making cell phones a normality in East Germany far more early than West Germany.
This would actually support your claim: Bad land line infrastructure leads to increased cell phone usage.
But: Why is Finland leading cell phone usage today (followed by Norway and Sweden), when they had one of the best and most widespread land line system 20 years ago? It can't be just the patriotic pride to be home to Nokia and Ericsson
Have you ever used a phone booth to place a long distance call in the U.S.? Fucking complicated! Listening to a lot of options: pay in coins, pay per credit card, finally finding someone actually talking to you just to tell him that you want to pay per coins... And nowhere a decent table with instructions. Using a phone booth in the U.S. causes a culture shock.
In every other country of the world you just put your coins/your credit card/your prepaid card/whatever you use into the machine and dial a number. This works in Brasil the same than in France, in Germany the same than in Turkey.
The U.S. didn't actually surrender in Vietnam, they called it a Truce and withdrew their troups. Your mileage may vary, but this is the official version. :)
First of all: Most of the german main rail routes are in some ways "wireless" since about at least 15 years. It's called "Zugfunk" (train radio) and at first involved mainly telephone services. If you ever travelled there you might have noticed a wire lying between the rails. That's the stationary part of the system, the sender/receiver antenna for the fixed stations.
I guess the Telekom connection will use an improved system based on this infrastructure, with higher bandwith and maybe lower latency. Because it's on rails you can be pretty sure that only one client (train) of the system will be within a specified rail block, and it's quite clear beforehand, which railblock the train will enter next, so hand-over of the connection to the next railblock should be comparatively easy.
That's basicly what SUN was doing with their release numbers.
;) ), and while in fact the core Solaris Distribution was a release 2.7 (using SunOS Kernel 5.7), it was marketed as Solaris 7 (because in fact it was the 8th release of the Solaris 2 operating system, starting counting with 0).
Solaris 10 is in fact Solaris 2.10, and the kernel of Solaris 2.10 is the SunOS 5.10.
Solaris was released as "2", because it was the first software distribution from SUN Microsystems that was SVR4 compliant, thus making a difference to the previous SunOS releases, which were based on BSD. Solaris 2 got a rewrite of the old SunOS kernel, which was at 4.3.1 before Solaris. So the kernel was SunOS 5.0. With every new Solaris Software Release there were also minor changes to the kernel, so Solaris 2.1 had a 5.1 kernel, etc.pp. With Solaris 7 Sun got rid of the "2" (which meant Second Approach to a UNIX operating system
Same with the Linux Kernel versions. Think of Linux Kernel 2 as the kernel series with loadable modules and SMP capabilities (different than the Kernel 1 releases, which where monolithic blocks until the Kernel 1.3 developer kernels started with loadable modules). As long as this characteristics stay stable, there is no point to go for a Linux 3 kernel. The current Linux 2 kernel is at his 4th stable feature set, and because of the numbering for feature stable releases with even numbers, it gets the fourth even number: 6 (the first three being 0, 2 and 4). The different versions of the fourth feature stable Linux Kernel 2 releases should look all the same from a userland perspective (they don't completely, but that's a rather minor side effect), so they are all called Linux 2.6. To make a difference between the single versions of the Linux 2.6 kernels you get a version numbering: the first one being 2.6.0, the current one 2.6.11.
The fourth number comes into being when it goes about differently patched versions of the stable current kernel branch. None of those four-numbered kernels is thought for a general public, they are rather experimental versions until a release candidate emerges from all those patches. And if the release candidate (maybe after some bugfixing cycles) proves to be stable enough for general use, it gets released as the next Linux Kernel Series 2, 4th stable Feature Set version (a.k.a. Linux Kernel 2.6.(n+1)).
Having oil got outsourced to Norway, which didn't join the EU.
The trick with Kit TV is that none of the single parts itself are able to receive HDTV, thus none of them falls under the provision. It's the sum of all parts that makes the receiver, and this one is never been "distributed", just the parts of it.