I put one of those BSR x10 video cameras on a remote control car and followed my cats around my apartment with it. The video reception was quite good once I unplugged the base unit of my Seimens 2GHz cordles phone. Just having the telephone base unit plugged in created a lot of video interference, even with the phone just sitting in the base unit. After that problem was fixed, the remaining problems were that the camera needs a lot of light and its battery pack weighed a lot in comparison to the car.
However, the video camera itself is pretty light. The car's batteries generate 4.5V while the video cameras batteries generate 6V, so I did not try powering the video camera from the car's batteries. It would make a cool holiday present for next year if some company would actually mass produce a remote control car or boat with one of these broadcast cameras built in. Imagine doing computer vision and computer control of a fleet of these.
One more thing, for the benefit of other readers:
If you search for "AboveNet" or "Above.Net" in the spamtools archive at http://wx.iecc.com/cgi-bin/spamtoolsearch, I think it's pretty clear that the only defense offered for AboveNet's activities is that they have written their Acceptable Use Policy to allow it (again, it's just their fig leaf excuse).
<P>
Again, the primary censorship in AboveNet's interfering with ORBS's ability to test our gateway. (AboveNet's interfering with our ability to read the ORBS information is also censorship, but that's another matter.)
</P>
<P>
Even when censorship is incomplete (for example, as you point out, we can spend thousands of dollars to avoid this particular case), it is still censorship.
</P>
I am not saying that AboveNet is trying to prevent people from learning about what relay blocking is. I am saying that they are censoring the specific exchange of information needed to do the relay checking (albeit with some lame excuse). This would be akin to allowing a few books on what democracy is but not allowing people to actually communicate to implement it. In this case, we have two consenting parties that want to communicate with each other and an intermediary is actively blocking the communication.
Obviously, we cannot be the only AboveNet user that objects to this given all of the discussion you say there is about the issue (not from us). So, it would not be reasonable for AboveNet to claim that allowing ORBS probes is just too much work for just one customer request.
And, yes, we do intend to vote with our dollars, losing our setup costs after our annual contract with our AboveNet-based ISP expires.
AboveNet has constructed their criteria so that they do have "fig leaf" excuse for their censorship, as is done in virtually all real world examples of censorship. If you want to be fooled in all of these cases, that is your choice.
In this case, AboveNet's excuse is ridiculous, in light of the fact that AboveNet claims to be doing this for customer welfare, and we, the effected customer, do not want them to do it.
Yes, it is relevant, because the chief technology office of AboveNet is Dave Rand, one of principals of MAPS. Whether MAPS lists ORBS in their database or not, they (through one of the principals) are censoring ORBS. Of course AboveNet provides some lame excuse about how their blocking ORBS is for our own good, but we have never been able to get AboveNet to unblock ORBS from our class C.
As of 1:46am PDT, 14 December 2000, I still cannot traceroute from yggdrasil.com (connected via AboveNet) to www.orbs.org, but I can from my personal Pacific Bell DSL line:
traceroute to www.orbs.org (202.36.147.16), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 yggdrasil-port.yggdrasil.com (209.249.10.1) 0.348 ms 0.304 ms 2.811 ms
2 cisco-ethernet.yggdrasil.com (209.249.10.250) 2.676 ms 2.944 ms 2.260 ms
3 proteon-t1.yggdrasil.com (209.249.10.254) 291.109 ms 264.186 ms 264.251 ms
4 216.200.192.main.above.net (216.200.192.4) 315.453 ms 425.357 ms 361.949 ms
5 * * *
:
I am not a lawyer, but I think it may be useful to document the economic damages of Thomson's attempts at fear, uncertainty and doubt for possible counter-litigation if they want to play "hard ball" as the article says.
If you are working on a product or project which might include Ogg Vorbis and you receive any negative feedback from customers, resellers, partners, about FUD over statements by Henri Linde and other Thomson representatives or you can document internal costs or lost opportunities within your business, we should document it in some publicly accessible central place (so the data can be replicated by many independent servers).
For example, we are considering including Ogg Vorbis in our Linux distribution. I personally think it might increase sales by about 100,000 units per year of physical media, on which we might make $10 per copy, but only in the absense of Thomson's fear uncertainty and doubt campaign. So, that's about a million dollars per year of damages, although, obviously, these numbers are likely to change with market research.
If somebody wants to establish a central point for
submitting and disseminating this type of data, please post a follow up here. In the meantime, it would be helpful for others to post their estimates as follow-ups here.
It is not a reflection on the XCF's current membership, but it is important to
understand that the XCF was created by
destroying a public (to the student body at least) free student-run computing facility, the Undergraduate Computing Facility. The equipment and space was essentially given to XCF in the belief that they would continue the UCF, but instead the founders created a private facility for themselves.
As a result, for more than a year, there was no
public access computing for undergraduates, and
it took a long time and a lot of work to rebuild
what XCF co-opted, eventually in the form of UC Berkeley's Open Computing Facility.
Over the past fifteen years, some significant software was written at XCF, especially after they started releasing source code.
And, certainly, eliminting the "Exclusive Computing Facility", as we called it, rather than just making it more open, would not have helped anyone. However, there is no doubt in my mind that for a school as big as Berkeley with such a long history of system software development, that more and better development would have been done had XCF been a more open facility from the outset, and it would have
defined the campus programming community in a much more postive way.
By now, surely, none of the current XCF members had anything to do with its bloody founding, fifteen years ago. There has been public computing at Cal for a long time (at least as of the last time I checked),
and multitasking computers are ubiquitous. So,
the significance of the XCF to me now is only symbolic. However, as an alumnus, I would somehow feel better about about Cal to see the experimental computing club reconstituted into something that does not claim to be the legacy of the founding of the XCF. The current members do not deserve the dishonor of that association.
I wonder if this technology already was
well developed in classified form
when President Reagan
proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative.
It sounds like an idea people have been contemplating for a while.
The lost economic benefits of unrestricted information sharing, and
The pyscho-social damage of turning the morality against sharing (as Stallman has pointed out).
Before the digital age, the economic benefits of unrestricted information sharing were smaller and there were important economies of scale in putting together the large cost of setting up printing runs.
In the digital age, which still has not fully arrived, authoring is cheaper (the desktop authoring tools that a generation ago were beyond the reach of a person are now incredibly cheap for producing text, graphics, animation, code, and soon movies, even one requiring giant "render farms" today), and digital publishing is becoming infinitesmally cheap.
On the other side of the comparison, the benefits of information sharing that copyright costs us are much greater. For example, the ability to listen to fifty versions of an old song that you just learned about on Napster and to produce a modified version of your favorite one might not be something that the copyright monopoly holders would find worth their while to negotiate with you, espcially if its only worth a dollar or two to you each time, and the population of people who want to do exactly what you have in mind is relatively small and poor.
The benefits of authorship in the absence of copyright can be either economic and non-economic,
including such things as selling concert tickets, merchandise branding, feeling good, being famous, increasing market demand for you as a developer or performer. The question is: are these remaining benefits becoming sufficient to ensure that the quality works are produced?. I think the answer is becoming yes, and it would be a much more pleasant society in which to live.
Is there a web site somewhere that has a simple
user interface where I could enter my zip code
and find out the relative positions of the
congressional candidates in my distriction on
DMCA, patents, and other issues that competent
technologists care about?
If not, perhaps someone on this forum who has more
spare time than I do could create such a site.
That might actually effect this election a little bit and, more significantly, send a message about what new issues politicians need to think about for the next election.
The obstruction was not at BeOpen, it was at CNRI.
A particular person who remained at CNRI after the Python guys went to BeOpen claimed that all the work done during the CNRI days was not implicitly under the original CWI terms, but rather was copyright CNRI and CNRI had yet to give anyone permission to do anything. That party wrote new
copying conditions and, after a great deal of work by BeOpen, backed down to something that
is probably GPL compatible, but muddied. (The new CNRI copying conditions include the additional restriction beyond the GPL's that "This License Agreement shall be governed by and interpreted in all respects by thelaw of the State of Virginia, excluding conflict of law provisions." I think the issue is basically over which part of the total list of copying permissions is referred to by "This License Agreement", but I'm not a lawyer.)
Whether or not it was their plan, BeOpen made a huge sacrafice in human resources to focus on defusing the Python license bomb. We could very easily have reverted to situation where all the work done during the CNRI years was under a cloud of legal threats. BeOpen deserves our deep gratitude for this.
Also, CNRI could have been worse about this, so I would appreciate our not trashing them either.
People can and do change channels during radio and TV commercials, and yet that advertising business model still works.
In conjunction with legal harassment of sites carrying "unlicensed" MP3's with the commercials removed, and crucifying an occasional unlucky user of such sites, I can see a scenario where getting the official MP3's and putting up with the commercials is the less stressful choice for enough listeners to make the business work.
I could even imagine this model pushing the pendulum to the other side with things like affiliate commision programs, where web sites have an incentive to spread the official versions and see that "unauthorized" ones are reported and prosecuted.
The usability issues of Linux originate from its unix heritage, not its free software development process. All of the usability argument made in the article apply equially well to Solaris, SCO, and other proprietary unixes. In comparison, the free software community, is well along the path of implementing and deploying the most real solutions for these issues in the history of unix-like systems, the most visible components of which are gnome, nautilus, and a number of X window managers.
I don't understand why "Hemos" believes that Microsoft would be "forced to maintain a US subsidiary" or why another poster thinks that just because a company sells a product into the US that they are subject to US law. I don't understand how the US could do anything more than block imports of Microsoft products, and, even then, I don't know of an existing law that would mandate such an embargo. Somebody, please provide some pointers to the specific laws, regulations or court decisions involved. Thanks!
I am a GPL fan, but I still wish the owner of these patents would license them for free use by any program consisting entirely of free software (this, of course, includes all legal GPL'ed programs). That would still avoid giving a license to any program that contained any proprietary software, but would enable use in programs that are covered by the BSD copying conditions, Mozilla conditions, etc., but only in cases when they are not linked against proprietary software.
That said, I should disclose that I personally believe that the correct interpretation of current patent laws in the US (if only more courts would agree with me) is that software is not patentable. I also believe that software should not be patentable.
To reduce the total cost and the number total number of computing platforms that I have to maintain, how about turning the car stereo into just a docking station for a PDA? My Casiopeia E-105 already has a 64-bit 131MHz CPU, 32MB RAM, a 320x240 16-bit video touch screen and buttons.
I want a car stereo box that has an adapter that plugs into my PDA's CompactFlash slot, power input and sound output (which is very high quality), and provides: internal IDE hard drive bay, some CardBus/PCMCIA slots, power (from the car's power bus), sound to the car speakers. Do not include the hard disk. The only silicon that the product should include are these IO interfaces (IDE, PCMCIA, CompactFlash in). Everything else, such as the hard disk or PCMCIA/CardBus toys that I want to plug in (like GPS or wireless ethernet) are commodities that you are not going to be able to keep up with. Leave most of the software development to the Linux PDA crowd as much as you can. Just make this simple product, and people will be able to do all sorts of cool things, and you will not have to be constantly revising your product or being chastised for having one particular component out of date.
If you really feel compelled to include actual computer hardware in the product, I would suggest a built-in low profile DVD-ROM drive, and perhaps interfaces to the more common automative computer busses (to display gas mileage, etc.)
If I had this product, I could do all sorts of cool things, like interface it to my car's computer, connect it to a cellular modem to do an encrypted telephone system that had a speakerphone feature through the car's speakers, pull weather forecasts from the net via a metricom modem, store a massive library of digital music, etc. The possibilities are much greater with this approach and the costs would be much lower.
Oops. Sorry for screwing up the formatting of that message. I had not noticed that slashdot had changed its default submission format to HTML, and I foolishly did not bother to use the "Preview" button. For your convenience, here is my message again, properly formatted:
I believe that in late 1992 or early 1993, the Power Source store in El Cerrito became the first reseller on the planet to carry a Linux CD when they picked up our "Linux/GNU/X alpha release", which later became Plug-and-Play Linux. I remember visiting PowerSource to test the distribution on some of their machines.
I have not had occasion to visit Power Source since I moved Yggdrasil to Silicon Valley six years ago, but, at least back then, I really appreciated Power Source's focus on people on a budget with their bins of used computer parts and their extensive printed catalog of really cheap computer hardware that they were importing from Taiwan that had not yet made its way into most "white box" PC's in typical computer stores (for example, motherboards with smaller form factors come to mind). If you wanted to get hardware that seemed only to be available in computer flea markets, but there was no flea market in town, Power Source was the place to go. They may not have been Dell or Compaq, but I could see then that PowerSource had a bit more infrastructure than your average independent computer retail store and an interesting angle.
Come to think of it, there is still some computer hardware in a back room at Yggdrasil that I remember buying from Julius at Power Source.
I don't feel I have enough information yet to comment on Linux One or how substantive their relationship may be with Power Source, but I can say that, based on my experience with Power Source of several years ago, they're good people.
Adam J. Richter President Yggdrasil Computing, Inc.
I believe that in late 1992 or early 1993, the Power Source store in El Cerrito became the first reseller on the planet to carry a Linux CD when they picked up our "Linux/GNU/X alpha release", which later became Plug-and-Play Linux. I remember visiting PowerSource to test the distribution on some of their machines. I have not had occasion to visit Power Source since I moved Yggdrasil to Silicon Valley six years ago, but, at least back then, I really appreciated Power Source's focus on people on a budget with their bins of used computer parts and their extensive printed catalog of really cheap computer hardware that they were importing from Taiwan that had not yet made its way into most "white box" PC's in typical computer stores (for example, motherboards with smaller form factors come to mind). If you wanted to get hardware that seemed only to be available in computer flea markets, but there was no flea market in town, Power Source was the place to go. They may not have been Dell or Compaq, but I could see then that PowerSource had a bit more infrastructure than your average independent computer retail store and an interesting angle. Come to think of it, there is still some computer hardware in a back room at Yggdrasil that I remember buying from Julius at Power Source. I don't feel I have enough information yet to comment on Linux One or how substantive their relationship may be with Power Source, but I can say that, based on my experience with Power Source of several years ago, they're good people. Adam J. Richter President Yggdrasil Computing, Inc.
You understand the situation correctly. I have discussed this issue with Richard Stallman and Ulrich Drepper (the C library maintainer). I believe that other non-"GNU" compilers are effected and that there may be other legal issues that stem from use of the term "executable." The effected code is in libio, which is also in libc4 and libc5. The last time I checked, Richard was leaving the decision to Ulrich, who was refusing to change the copying conditions.
The good news is that the problem could be solved by replacing libio, which is less than 2% of the half million lines of code in glibc, with a clone covered by LGPL + the other exceptions in the libio copying conditions.
A coalition of San Francisco bay area GNU/Linux user groups and Bay Area Cypherpunks are sponsoring a (the first?) Linux-IPSEC (FreeSWAN) installfest at the Oakland convention center at the "Austin Computer Show" 12-4pm this coming Saturday (6/12/99). The "Austin Compuer Show" is basically a computer flea market. There is a $5 admission charge to the show, but apparently you can get in free if you register at http://www.robertaustin.com in the "VIP passes" section. You can also get the travel directions there.
There is a difference between saying "FSF/Linux" and "GNU/Linux." What Tom has done with his numbers is essentially to discount GNU contributions of people who did not write their code as FSF employees. Tom even goes so far as to claim that egcs, a compiler project where the contributor are actually assigning their copyrights to FSF still does not qualify as a "GNU project." A few years ago, I released some numbers indicating that counting GNU software as the software on the GNU FTP site (and that is not all of the GNU software really, but, then again, Perl is also on their FTP site), this software constituted that largest contribution to Plug and Play Linux, larger than the X Consortium (including Sun, DEc, etc. in that block), and larger than BSD, and over eleven times larger than Linux (kernel + some linux-specific stuff).
While it is difficult to document, it is also generally acknowledged that FSF people and the example of the GNU project were important factors in the decisions to make BSD and the X Window System free. Without FSF, it is likely that the state of free software on unix-like platforms would be about the same as it is on Microsoft Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
I put one of those BSR x10 video cameras on a remote control car and followed my cats around my apartment with it. The video reception was quite good once I unplugged the base unit of my Seimens 2GHz cordles phone. Just having the telephone base unit plugged in created a lot of video interference, even with the phone just sitting in the base unit. After that problem was fixed, the remaining problems were that the camera needs a lot of light and its battery pack weighed a lot in comparison to the car.
However, the video camera itself is pretty light. The car's batteries generate 4.5V while the video cameras batteries generate 6V, so I did not try powering the video camera from the car's batteries. It would make a cool holiday present for next year if some company would actually mass produce a remote control car or boat with one of these broadcast cameras built in. Imagine doing computer vision and computer control of a fleet of these.
One more thing, for the benefit of other readers: If you search for "AboveNet" or "Above.Net" in the spamtools archive at http://wx.iecc.com/cgi-bin/spamtoolsearch, I think it's pretty clear that the only defense offered for AboveNet's activities is that they have written their Acceptable Use Policy to allow it (again, it's just their fig leaf excuse).
<P>
Again, the primary censorship in AboveNet's interfering with ORBS's ability to test our gateway. (AboveNet's interfering with our ability to read the ORBS information is also censorship, but that's another matter.)
</P>
<P>
Even when censorship is incomplete (for example, as you point out, we can spend thousands of dollars to avoid this particular case), it is still censorship.
</P>
I am not saying that AboveNet is trying to prevent people from learning about what relay blocking is. I am saying that they are censoring the specific exchange of information needed to do the relay checking (albeit with some lame excuse). This would be akin to allowing a few books on what democracy is but not allowing people to actually communicate to implement it. In this case, we have two consenting parties that want to communicate with each other and an intermediary is actively blocking the communication.
Obviously, we cannot be the only AboveNet user that objects to this given all of the discussion you say there is about the issue (not from us). So, it would not be reasonable for AboveNet to claim that allowing ORBS probes is just too much work for just one customer request.
And, yes, we do intend to vote with our dollars, losing our setup costs after our annual contract with our AboveNet-based ISP expires.
AboveNet has constructed their criteria so that they do have "fig leaf" excuse for their censorship, as is done in virtually all real world examples of censorship. If you want to be fooled in all of these cases, that is your choice.
In this case, AboveNet's excuse is ridiculous, in light of the fact that AboveNet claims to be doing this for customer welfare, and we, the effected customer, do not want them to do it.
Yes, it is relevant, because the chief technology office of AboveNet is Dave Rand, one of principals of MAPS. Whether MAPS lists ORBS in their database or not, they (through one of the principals) are censoring ORBS. Of course AboveNet provides some lame excuse about how their blocking ORBS is for our own good, but we have never been able to get AboveNet to unblock ORBS from our class C.
As of 1:46am PDT, 14 December 2000, I still cannot traceroute from yggdrasil.com (connected via AboveNet) to www.orbs.org, but I can from my personal Pacific Bell DSL line:
traceroute to www.orbs.org (202.36.147.16), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 yggdrasil-port.yggdrasil.com (209.249.10.1) 0.348 ms 0.304 ms 2.811 ms
2 cisco-ethernet.yggdrasil.com (209.249.10.250) 2.676 ms 2.944 ms 2.260 ms
3 proteon-t1.yggdrasil.com (209.249.10.254) 291.109 ms 264.186 ms 264.251 ms
4 216.200.192.main.above.net (216.200.192.4) 315.453 ms 425.357 ms 361.949 ms
5 * * *
:
I am not a lawyer, but I think it may be useful to document the economic damages of Thomson's attempts at fear, uncertainty and doubt for possible counter-litigation if they want to play "hard ball" as the article says.
If you are working on a product or project which might include Ogg Vorbis and you receive any negative feedback from customers, resellers, partners, about FUD over statements by Henri Linde and other Thomson representatives or you can document internal costs or lost opportunities within your business, we should document it in some publicly accessible central place (so the data can be replicated by many independent servers).
For example, we are considering including Ogg Vorbis in our Linux distribution. I personally think it might increase sales by about 100,000 units per year of physical media, on which we might make $10 per copy, but only in the absense of Thomson's fear uncertainty and doubt campaign. So, that's about a million dollars per year of damages, although, obviously, these numbers are likely to change with market research.
If somebody wants to establish a central point for submitting and disseminating this type of data, please post a follow up here. In the meantime, it would be helpful for others to post their estimates as follow-ups here.
It is not a reflection on the XCF's current membership, but it is important to understand that the XCF was created by destroying a public (to the student body at least) free student-run computing facility, the Undergraduate Computing Facility. The equipment and space was essentially given to XCF in the belief that they would continue the UCF, but instead the founders created a private facility for themselves.
As a result, for more than a year, there was no public access computing for undergraduates, and it took a long time and a lot of work to rebuild what XCF co-opted, eventually in the form of UC Berkeley's Open Computing Facility.
Over the past fifteen years, some significant software was written at XCF, especially after they started releasing source code. And, certainly, eliminting the "Exclusive Computing Facility", as we called it, rather than just making it more open, would not have helped anyone. However, there is no doubt in my mind that for a school as big as Berkeley with such a long history of system software development, that more and better development would have been done had XCF been a more open facility from the outset, and it would have defined the campus programming community in a much more postive way.
By now, surely, none of the current XCF members had anything to do with its bloody founding, fifteen years ago. There has been public computing at Cal for a long time (at least as of the last time I checked), and multitasking computers are ubiquitous. So, the significance of the XCF to me now is only symbolic. However, as an alumnus, I would somehow feel better about about Cal to see the experimental computing club reconstituted into something that does not claim to be the legacy of the founding of the XCF. The current members do not deserve the dishonor of that association.
I wonder if this technology already was well developed in classified form when President Reagan proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative. It sounds like an idea people have been contemplating for a while.
The opportunity costs of copyright include:
The lost economic benefits of unrestricted information sharing, and
The pyscho-social damage of turning the morality against sharing (as Stallman has pointed out).
Before the digital age, the economic benefits of unrestricted information sharing were smaller and there were important economies of scale in putting together the large cost of setting up printing runs.
In the digital age, which still has not fully arrived, authoring is cheaper (the desktop authoring tools that a generation ago were beyond the reach of a person are now incredibly cheap for producing text, graphics, animation, code, and soon movies, even one requiring giant "render farms" today), and digital publishing is becoming infinitesmally cheap. On the other side of the comparison, the benefits of information sharing that copyright costs us are much greater. For example, the ability to listen to fifty versions of an old song that you just learned about on Napster and to produce a modified version of your favorite one might not be something that the copyright monopoly holders would find worth their while to negotiate with you, espcially if its only worth a dollar or two to you each time, and the population of people who want to do exactly what you have in mind is relatively small and poor.
The benefits of authorship in the absence of copyright can be either economic and non-economic, including such things as selling concert tickets, merchandise branding, feeling good, being famous, increasing market demand for you as a developer or performer. The question is: are these remaining benefits becoming sufficient to ensure that the quality works are produced?. I think the answer is becoming yes, and it would be a much more pleasant society in which to live.
Is there a web site somewhere that has a simple user interface where I could enter my zip code and find out the relative positions of the congressional candidates in my distriction on DMCA, patents, and other issues that competent technologists care about?
If not, perhaps someone on this forum who has more spare time than I do could create such a site. That might actually effect this election a little bit and, more significantly, send a message about what new issues politicians need to think about for the next election.
The obstruction was not at BeOpen, it was at CNRI.
A particular person who remained at CNRI after the Python guys went to BeOpen claimed that all the work done during the CNRI days was not implicitly under the original CWI terms, but rather was copyright CNRI and CNRI had yet to give anyone permission to do anything. That party wrote new copying conditions and, after a great deal of work by BeOpen, backed down to something that is probably GPL compatible, but muddied. (The new CNRI copying conditions include the additional restriction beyond the GPL's that "This License Agreement shall be governed by and interpreted in all respects by thelaw of the State of Virginia, excluding conflict of law provisions." I think the issue is basically over which part of the total list of copying permissions is referred to by "This License Agreement", but I'm not a lawyer.)
Whether or not it was their plan, BeOpen made a huge sacrafice in human resources to focus on defusing the Python license bomb. We could very easily have reverted to situation where all the work done during the CNRI years was under a cloud of legal threats. BeOpen deserves our deep gratitude for this.
Also, CNRI could have been worse about this, so I would appreciate our not trashing them either.
Since the Crusoe has lower power consumption, I wonder if Sony was able to use a quieter fan or perhaps eliminate the fan altogether.
People can and do change channels during radio and TV commercials, and yet that advertising business model still works.
In conjunction with legal harassment of sites carrying "unlicensed" MP3's with the commercials removed, and crucifying an occasional unlucky user of such sites, I can see a scenario where getting the official MP3's and putting up with the commercials is the less stressful choice for enough listeners to make the business work.
I could even imagine this model pushing the pendulum to the other side with things like affiliate commision programs, where web sites have an incentive to spread the official versions and see that "unauthorized" ones are reported and prosecuted.
The usability issues of Linux originate from its unix heritage, not its free software development process. All of the usability argument made in the article apply equially well to Solaris, SCO, and other proprietary unixes. In comparison, the free software community, is well along the path of implementing and deploying the most real solutions for these issues in the history of unix-like systems, the most visible components of which are gnome, nautilus, and a number of X window managers.
I don't understand why "Hemos" believes that Microsoft would be "forced to maintain a US subsidiary" or why another poster thinks that just because a company sells a product into the US that they are subject to US law. I don't understand how the US could do anything more than block imports of Microsoft products, and, even then, I don't know of an existing law that would mandate such an embargo. Somebody, please provide some pointers to the specific laws, regulations or court decisions involved. Thanks!
I am a GPL fan, but I still wish the owner of these patents would license them for free use by any program consisting entirely of free software (this, of course, includes all legal GPL'ed programs). That would still avoid giving a license to any program that contained any proprietary software, but would enable use in programs that are covered by the BSD copying conditions, Mozilla conditions, etc., but only in cases when they are not linked against proprietary software.
That said, I should disclose that I personally believe that the correct interpretation of current patent laws in the US (if only more courts would agree with me) is that software is not patentable. I also believe that software should not be patentable.
To reduce the total cost and the number total number of computing platforms that I have to maintain, how about turning the car stereo into just a docking station for a PDA? My Casiopeia E-105 already has a 64-bit 131MHz CPU, 32MB RAM, a 320x240 16-bit video touch screen and buttons.
I want a car stereo box that has an adapter that plugs into my PDA's CompactFlash slot, power input and sound output (which is very high quality), and
provides: internal IDE hard drive bay, some CardBus/PCMCIA slots, power (from the car's power bus), sound to the car speakers. Do not include the hard disk. The only silicon that the product should include are these IO interfaces (IDE, PCMCIA, CompactFlash in). Everything else, such as the hard disk or PCMCIA/CardBus toys that I want to plug in (like GPS or wireless ethernet) are commodities that you are not going to be able to keep up with. Leave most of the software development to the Linux PDA crowd as much as you can. Just make this simple product, and people will be able to do all sorts of cool things, and you will not have to be constantly revising your product or being chastised for having one particular component out of date.
If you really feel compelled to include actual computer hardware in the product, I would suggest a built-in low profile DVD-ROM drive, and perhaps
interfaces to the more common automative computer busses (to display gas mileage, etc.)
If I had this product, I could do all sorts of cool things, like interface it to my car's computer, connect it to a cellular modem to do an encrypted telephone system that had a speakerphone feature through the car's speakers, pull weather forecasts from the net via a metricom modem, store a massive library of digital music, etc. The possibilities are much greater with this approach and the costs would be much lower.
Oops. Sorry for screwing up the formatting of that message. I had not noticed that slashdot had changed its default submission format to HTML, and I foolishly did not bother to use the "Preview" button. For your convenience, here is my message again, properly formatted:
I believe that in late 1992 or early 1993, the Power Source store in El Cerrito became the first reseller on the planet to carry a Linux CD when they picked up our "Linux/GNU/X alpha release", which later became Plug-and-Play Linux. I remember visiting PowerSource to test the distribution on some of their machines.
I have not had occasion to visit Power Source since I moved Yggdrasil to Silicon Valley six years ago, but, at least back then, I really appreciated Power Source's focus on people on a budget with their bins of used computer parts and their extensive printed catalog of really cheap computer hardware that they were importing from Taiwan that had not yet made its way into most "white box" PC's in typical computer stores (for example, motherboards with smaller form factors come to mind). If you wanted to get hardware that seemed only to be available in computer flea markets, but there was no flea market in town, Power Source was the place to go. They may not have been Dell or Compaq, but I could see then that PowerSource had a bit more infrastructure than your average independent computer retail store and an interesting angle.
Come to think of it, there is still some computer hardware in a back room at Yggdrasil that I remember buying from Julius at Power Source.
I don't feel I have enough information yet to comment on Linux One or how substantive their relationship may be with Power Source, but I can say that, based on my experience with Power Source of several years ago, they're good people.
Adam J. Richter
President
Yggdrasil Computing, Inc.
I believe that in late 1992 or early 1993, the Power Source store in El Cerrito became the first reseller on the planet to carry a Linux CD when they picked up our "Linux/GNU/X alpha release", which later became Plug-and-Play Linux. I remember visiting PowerSource to test the distribution on some of their machines. I have not had occasion to visit Power Source since I moved Yggdrasil to Silicon Valley six years ago, but, at least back then, I really appreciated Power Source's focus on people on a budget with their bins of used computer parts and their extensive printed catalog of really cheap computer hardware that they were importing from Taiwan that had not yet made its way into most "white box" PC's in typical computer stores (for example, motherboards with smaller form factors come to mind). If you wanted to get hardware that seemed only to be available in computer flea markets, but there was no flea market in town, Power Source was the place to go. They may not have been Dell or Compaq, but I could see then that PowerSource had a bit more infrastructure than your average independent computer retail store and an interesting angle. Come to think of it, there is still some computer hardware in a back room at Yggdrasil that I remember buying from Julius at Power Source. I don't feel I have enough information yet to comment on Linux One or how substantive their relationship may be with Power Source, but I can say that, based on my experience with Power Source of several years ago, they're good people. Adam J. Richter President Yggdrasil Computing, Inc.
The good news is that the problem could be solved by replacing libio, which is less than 2% of the half million lines of code in glibc, with a clone covered by LGPL + the other exceptions in the libio copying conditions.
A coalition of San Francisco bay area GNU/Linux user groups and Bay Area Cypherpunks are sponsoring a (the first?) Linux-IPSEC (FreeSWAN) installfest at the Oakland convention center at the "Austin Computer Show" 12-4pm this coming Saturday (6/12/99). The "Austin Compuer Show" is basically a computer flea market. There is a $5 admission charge to the show, but apparently you can get in free if you register at http://www.robertaustin.com in the "VIP passes" section. You can also get the travel directions there.
There is a difference between saying "FSF/Linux" and "GNU/Linux." What Tom has done with his numbers is essentially to discount GNU contributions of people who did not write their code as FSF employees. Tom even goes so far as to claim that egcs, a compiler project where the contributor are actually assigning their copyrights to FSF still does not qualify as a "GNU project." A few years ago, I released some numbers indicating that counting GNU software as the software on the GNU FTP site (and that is not all of the GNU software really, but, then again, Perl is also on their FTP site), this software constituted that largest contribution to Plug and Play Linux, larger than the X Consortium (including Sun, DEc, etc. in that block), and larger than BSD, and over eleven times larger than Linux (kernel + some linux-specific stuff).
While it is difficult to document, it is also generally acknowledged that FSF people and the example of the GNU project were important factors in the decisions to make BSD and the X Window System free. Without FSF, it is likely that the state of free software on unix-like platforms would be about the same as it is on Microsoft Windows.