Considering what a difficult time the people who *wrote* the GPL seem to have specifying exactly what some parts mean (are binary-only kernel modules illegal, for example?) I don't think its unfair to say that they require somewhat different skills from those required for closed licenses.
Generally, PPU (closed) licenses have legal terms, while open-source licenses often have technical-legal mixed terms. A lawyer doesn't generally do to well at understanding the concept of linking, at least not without additional study, while most lawyers have no problem at all with typical closed license terms.
The Internet isn't deterministic in time, which would make it very, very hard to properly time it out; IIRC they're focusing on the hydrogen line? Which is a fairly high frequency, which requires a high degree of time coherency.
Also, if a signal was simultaneously picked up by all receivers across the globe, where would it be coming from? (Hint: it wouldn't be an extrasolar source... it wouldn't even be an extraplanetary source. It would come from somewhere hot and molten.)
Because biodiesel, while it doesn't have carbon cycle issues, is still polluting - diesels create nasty oxides and spit them into the air. In addition, there's only a limited amount of biodiesel available; not enough, either. If you start artificially creating it, you run into the carbon cycle issue you had in the first place.
OTOH, hydrogen burns clean and can be manufactured cleanly, requiring only an electrical input. Even if the electrical input isn't a clean source, power plants are generally cleaner than the ICE in your car.
Pay per use licenses generally have restrictions on how many times you can use them for your payment, tracking of that use, etc. They rarely have restrictions on how you have to release your code; i.e. if you have a PPU license that gives you access to the source code, 99% of the time that license says "Make whatever modifications you want to it and use it however you want in your product, as long as we get our 50k up front and 0.5c per unit" - they don't expect to ever see your mods or your code. With a Linux-based system, if you modify the base and distribute a product, you are forced to give out your mods. This is often a legitimate concern for embedded device makers.
The difference is that the penalties for Open Source violations are very different than those traditional for a closed source license, and that the terms of the licenses are traditionally very different as well. You have to realize that most companies have been working with closed-source contracts for a long time, and know how to handle them, while Open Source is new to them, and requires new skills (which costs new money).
6 figures, probably, for our site license. I forget the exact number, but one of our libraries had ~1000 Windows stations inside of it. That's one of the libraries. Big university. I'd guess we were paying for ~25-50,000 Windows licenses, all told.
You miss the point. These were legitimate full copies of Windows, and were not points on the U's license. They had the negotiating muscle to get MS to agree to sell students copies of Windows at that price, they certainly had the negotiating muscle to get that price or better for themselves.
First, jail != prison. Second, to be remanded to custody you must usually be (Gitmo is different, and I'm not going to address it because it has nothing to do with my original point):
1) Arrested (taken into custody) 2a) Indicted, or in the process of being indicted. 2b) A material witness with a risk of flight. 2c) A material witness requiring protection. 3) Convicted for a minor offense (punishment of less than one years confinement is generally served in a jail setting rather than a prison)
b and c are slight exceptions, but you can't be put into jail in the US for more than a short span of time unless you are being charged with a crime.
Third, a large proportion? Not in prison. Anyone in prison was convicted and sentenced. You can be in jail without being convicted, but if you are, you're generally in categories 1-3 above.
Again, leave Gitmo out of it. Gitmo doesn't reflect US law for the most part.
I can't be fired for retaliatory or discriminatory reasons. But I can walk away at any time I choose, while my employer has the right to ask me to leave at any time they choose, provided they have legitimate cause. The definition of legitimate cause excludes retaliation, discrimination, refusal of a lie detector test, alien status, complaining about OSHA violations, and violation of public policy. In addition, if your employer has made any sort of promise (verbal or written) regarding your future employment, they may well be held to an implied contract, which requires something called "good cause" to fire you.
See, I'm okay with this. Generally I look at it like this - if I do a good job, I won't get fired for no reason. If I get fired for no reason, then it was probably a job with management I didn't want to work for anyway.
I like social welfare programs in general, but I also don't feel legislation should be used to solve something that's self-regulating - companies that abuse at-will firing procedures tend to have trouble attracting competent employees, once word gets out of their bad habits.
The legal issues for Linux relate to when you use it in a product, as opposed to (e.g. Windows CE, QNX). The terms for Windows CE, QNX, etc, tend to be very clearly spelled out - X dollars per unit. With Linux, the risk is there of having FSF decide that you've linked too closely and that you must now release as GPL. If you've decided not to release, there's a lot of legal fees that you're going to be spending, either way.
Like I said - it isn't an issue for desktop Linux, but can be for using Linux in a product. These are different licensing regimes, but both have to be thought about.
I used the GPL as a generic term for "insert open source non-BSD copyleft license here"; there are OSNBCL specific legal issues that a traditional "pay per use" license simply doesn't face, and a BSD license basically doesn't face any legal restrictions at all (well, comparatively so).
Tracking proof of your licenses for 5 machines is nothing; you keep the certificates from when you bought the OS (you did buy the OS, right?) and you're good. Tracking for 200 machines is a little more complex, but odds are that someone in your organization has the expertise to do it with minimal effort. Tracking for large organizations, well, they have the money to hire someone to do it properly. I don't think license management is at all as big a deal as you make it out to be, provided that you've been keeping up with it since the beginning; it's trying to prove you have a license when you tossed it in a drawer or bin somewhere that can be problematic.
I'd love a world where I had a guaranteed job, but just like everyone else, I work for mine. I was just explaining the difference to the original poster between "innocent before proven guilty" and "we can fire you if we damn well want to."
Well, I hate to come down on the side of MS, but in some cases the cost of license tracking for Windows is going to be less than the cost of legal advice on licensing for Linux.
(this only applies if there is any reason why you might come up against the GPL; simply using a desktop is unlikely to do this.)
That said, license tracking for Windows isn't that hard; small businesses pretty much know if they have a legit license for a given machine, medium businesses don't have so many licenses that it becomes prohibitive to track them, and big businesses just buy site licenses anyway.
I'm the government. I can't do anything prison-like or fine-like to you without convicting you first.
Hi.
I'm your employer. Unless you have a contract stating otherwise, odds are you're an at-will employee, which means *I can fire you for just about any reason I want*.
Only in criminal court. Unless the guy had an employment contract that stated otherwise, he was employed "at the pleasure of the employer" - i.e. he can be fired for just about anything, barring discriminatory or retaliatory firings.
And I don't think anyone can argue that there's cause here.
They could have put the ISO9000 stuff on Notes, and kept the groupware on Exchange, while putting your apps on remote X.
Not that I'd know anything about that.
But yeah, that's the problem. The itch isn't strong enough for anyone to scratch it, even though the collective itch is. No one has enough of an issue to try to get around it; it isn't like an OS where a free UNIX is desireable; groupware is the sort of thing which only a large company cares about in general, and thus the sort of thing that is nearly always mandated from above anyway. The only way I see this changing is if the Exchange protocol gets frozen, opened, and publicized - then you'd start to see free clients and servers springing up.
It's a chicken and an egg problem; there's no protocol, so no one writes clients, and since there's no clients there's no one who needs to write a server, since all potential customers just wind up buying Exchange.
The University I used to attend paid, at most, $33 per license, as that's how much they would allow a student to purchase a copy of XP for. And they were not exactly famous for giving their students anything below cost.
They had a blanket site license for all their machines, though; I doubt its per seat cost was anywhere near $40, even before taking into account the differential between "quoted" seats and actual seats (aka random machine A, IT worker laptop B, student technician's 5 PCs at home that he's too cheap to buy an OS for and too lazy to get Linux working on, etc.)
The incentive MS has to offer the gov't a discount is twofold; one, the gov't unit almost certainly has a site license, not a seat license. This means that MS has no reason to even try to verify/account license points, as the unit paid for all of its seats, no matter what the actual number is. They might want to know roughly how many seats, in order to set the next years support/license price, but big organizations don't come anywhere near accounting for license points.
SS1 wouldn't have sidereal motion, it isn't high enough. Also, there's the fact that its only up there for a couple minutes. But basically, it wouldn't "look" like a signal from extraplanetary sources.
The Moon, well, they would say "It's coming from the moon". I suspect there are ways to tell if someone is bouncing it off the moon... like the fact that it would be an on again, off again signal in synch with the rotation of the planet.
To successfully hoax the SETI program would require a *lot* of effort and smarts.
Best you'd conceivably get is a detection from one dish; without actually putting a transmitter way out in space, the confirmations that would be required (things like confirming parallax of the signal, motion of the signal consistent with it being X light years away, etc.) would require access to every radiotelescope in the world.
Best you might get is "oh, neat, a candidate signal" until one or the other of the rejection mechanisms coughs and says "Bullshit."
I have Cingular GPRS. Java apps on the phone run fine, it works fine using a USB cable as a GPRS modem for my laptop. No cobranding. No strategic partnerships.
Now, for Cingular-provided content, I assume they cobrand. But since I don't bother with it, I wouldn't know.
You can do that in the US too. You buy a phone non-subsidised, you won't be locked into a contract.
Admittedly, for the CDMA providers its mostly pointless, as switching a phone between carriers isn't really doable, but for GSM providers, you aren't locked into the carrier as sole provider model.
If coverage is poor in an area, the company screwed up. If coverage is poor inside a building, but works fine outside the building, the customer is SOL. The company can't do planning for the insides of buildings. It doesn't work that way.
I have ssh over GPRS on my v400 right now. It's slow, and typing sucks, but it does work.
Java SSH client plus packet data plan = working ssh over cellphone. I don't know why you think that these plans don't offer the opportunity to get relatively raw access to the net (I believe there are some restrictions, but in line with the more restrictive ISPs out there, not a "walled garden" approach) but Cingular's GPRS service provides perfectly functional packet data as far as I've seen.
Slashdot Mirror
And on the pen drive?
Flash! With limited write cycles!
Considering what a difficult time the people who *wrote* the GPL seem to have specifying exactly what some parts mean (are binary-only kernel modules illegal, for example?) I don't think its unfair to say that they require somewhat different skills from those required for closed licenses.
Generally, PPU (closed) licenses have legal terms, while open-source licenses often have technical-legal mixed terms. A lawyer doesn't generally do to well at understanding the concept of linking, at least not without additional study, while most lawyers have no problem at all with typical closed license terms.
As far as I'm concerned, obnoxious HTML-laden email from management *is* spam.
Hah. I like the way you think.
The Internet isn't deterministic in time, which would make it very, very hard to properly time it out; IIRC they're focusing on the hydrogen line? Which is a fairly high frequency, which requires a high degree of time coherency.
Also, if a signal was simultaneously picked up by all receivers across the globe, where would it be coming from? (Hint: it wouldn't be an extrasolar source... it wouldn't even be an extraplanetary source. It would come from somewhere hot and molten.)
Because biodiesel, while it doesn't have carbon cycle issues, is still polluting - diesels create nasty oxides and spit them into the air. In addition, there's only a limited amount of biodiesel available; not enough, either. If you start artificially creating it, you run into the carbon cycle issue you had in the first place.
OTOH, hydrogen burns clean and can be manufactured cleanly, requiring only an electrical input. Even if the electrical input isn't a clean source, power plants are generally cleaner than the ICE in your car.
Pay per use licenses generally have restrictions on how many times you can use them for your payment, tracking of that use, etc. They rarely have restrictions on how you have to release your code; i.e. if you have a PPU license that gives you access to the source code, 99% of the time that license says "Make whatever modifications you want to it and use it however you want in your product, as long as we get our 50k up front and 0.5c per unit" - they don't expect to ever see your mods or your code. With a Linux-based system, if you modify the base and distribute a product, you are forced to give out your mods. This is often a legitimate concern for embedded device makers.
The difference is that the penalties for Open Source violations are very different than those traditional for a closed source license, and that the terms of the licenses are traditionally very different as well. You have to realize that most companies have been working with closed-source contracts for a long time, and know how to handle them, while Open Source is new to them, and requires new skills (which costs new money).
6 figures, probably, for our site license. I forget the exact number, but one of our libraries had ~1000 Windows stations inside of it. That's one of the libraries. Big university. I'd guess we were paying for ~25-50,000 Windows licenses, all told.
You miss the point. These were legitimate full copies of Windows, and were not points on the U's license. They had the negotiating muscle to get MS to agree to sell students copies of Windows at that price, they certainly had the negotiating muscle to get that price or better for themselves.
First, jail != prison. Second, to be remanded to custody you must usually be (Gitmo is different, and I'm not going to address it because it has nothing to do with my original point):
1) Arrested (taken into custody)
2a) Indicted, or in the process of being indicted.
2b) A material witness with a risk of flight.
2c) A material witness requiring protection.
3) Convicted for a minor offense (punishment of less than one years confinement is generally served in a jail setting rather than a prison)
b and c are slight exceptions, but you can't be put into jail in the US for more than a short span of time unless you are being charged with a crime.
Third, a large proportion? Not in prison. Anyone in prison was convicted and sentenced. You can be in jail without being convicted, but if you are, you're generally in categories 1-3 above.
Again, leave Gitmo out of it. Gitmo doesn't reflect US law for the most part.
I like at-will employment. It makes sense.
I can't be fired for retaliatory or discriminatory reasons. But I can walk away at any time I choose, while my employer has the right to ask me to leave at any time they choose, provided they have legitimate cause. The definition of legitimate cause excludes retaliation, discrimination, refusal of a lie detector test, alien status, complaining about OSHA violations, and violation of public policy. In addition, if your employer has made any sort of promise (verbal or written) regarding your future employment, they may well be held to an implied contract, which requires something called "good cause" to fire you.
See, I'm okay with this. Generally I look at it like this - if I do a good job, I won't get fired for no reason. If I get fired for no reason, then it was probably a job with management I didn't want to work for anyway.
I like social welfare programs in general, but I also don't feel legislation should be used to solve something that's self-regulating - companies that abuse at-will firing procedures tend to have trouble attracting competent employees, once word gets out of their bad habits.
The legal issues for Linux relate to when you use it in a product, as opposed to (e.g. Windows CE, QNX). The terms for Windows CE, QNX, etc, tend to be very clearly spelled out - X dollars per unit. With Linux, the risk is there of having FSF decide that you've linked too closely and that you must now release as GPL. If you've decided not to release, there's a lot of legal fees that you're going to be spending, either way.
Like I said - it isn't an issue for desktop Linux, but can be for using Linux in a product. These are different licensing regimes, but both have to be thought about.
I used the GPL as a generic term for "insert open source non-BSD copyleft license here"; there are OSNBCL specific legal issues that a traditional "pay per use" license simply doesn't face, and a BSD license basically doesn't face any legal restrictions at all (well, comparatively so).
Tracking proof of your licenses for 5 machines is nothing; you keep the certificates from when you bought the OS (you did buy the OS, right?) and you're good. Tracking for 200 machines is a little more complex, but odds are that someone in your organization has the expertise to do it with minimal effort. Tracking for large organizations, well, they have the money to hire someone to do it properly. I don't think license management is at all as big a deal as you make it out to be, provided that you've been keeping up with it since the beginning; it's trying to prove you have a license when you tossed it in a drawer or bin somewhere that can be problematic.
I can kill cats with a microwave?!?!?
I'm gonna sue GE for not telling me about this amazing new 'neighbor's stupid cat needs to die for crapping on my porch' tool!
I didn't say there was anything wrong with it.
I'd love a world where I had a guaranteed job, but just like everyone else, I work for mine. I was just explaining the difference to the original poster between "innocent before proven guilty" and "we can fire you if we damn well want to."
Well, I hate to come down on the side of MS, but in some cases the cost of license tracking for Windows is going to be less than the cost of legal advice on licensing for Linux.
(this only applies if there is any reason why you might come up against the GPL; simply using a desktop is unlikely to do this.)
That said, license tracking for Windows isn't that hard; small businesses pretty much know if they have a legit license for a given machine, medium businesses don't have so many licenses that it becomes prohibitive to track them, and big businesses just buy site licenses anyway.
Hi.
I'm the government. I can't do anything prison-like or fine-like to you without convicting you first.
Hi.
I'm your employer. Unless you have a contract stating otherwise, odds are you're an at-will employee, which means *I can fire you for just about any reason I want*.
Only in criminal court. Unless the guy had an employment contract that stated otherwise, he was employed "at the pleasure of the employer" - i.e. he can be fired for just about anything, barring discriminatory or retaliatory firings.
And I don't think anyone can argue that there's cause here.
Hey, it could be worse.
They could have put the ISO9000 stuff on Notes, and kept the groupware on Exchange, while putting your apps on remote X.
Not that I'd know anything about that.
But yeah, that's the problem. The itch isn't strong enough for anyone to scratch it, even though the collective itch is. No one has enough of an issue to try to get around it; it isn't like an OS where a free UNIX is desireable; groupware is the sort of thing which only a large company cares about in general, and thus the sort of thing that is nearly always mandated from above anyway. The only way I see this changing is if the Exchange protocol gets frozen, opened, and publicized - then you'd start to see free clients and servers springing up.
It's a chicken and an egg problem; there's no protocol, so no one writes clients, and since there's no clients there's no one who needs to write a server, since all potential customers just wind up buying Exchange.
The University I used to attend paid, at most, $33 per license, as that's how much they would allow a student to purchase a copy of XP for. And they were not exactly famous for giving their students anything below cost.
They had a blanket site license for all their machines, though; I doubt its per seat cost was anywhere near $40, even before taking into account the differential between "quoted" seats and actual seats (aka random machine A, IT worker laptop B, student technician's 5 PCs at home that he's too cheap to buy an OS for and too lazy to get Linux working on, etc.)
The incentive MS has to offer the gov't a discount is twofold; one, the gov't unit almost certainly has a site license, not a seat license. This means that MS has no reason to even try to verify/account license points, as the unit paid for all of its seats, no matter what the actual number is. They might want to know roughly how many seats, in order to set the next years support/license price, but big organizations don't come anywhere near accounting for license points.
SS1 wouldn't have sidereal motion, it isn't high enough. Also, there's the fact that its only up there for a couple minutes. But basically, it wouldn't "look" like a signal from extraplanetary sources.
The Moon, well, they would say "It's coming from the moon". I suspect there are ways to tell if someone is bouncing it off the moon... like the fact that it would be an on again, off again signal in synch with the rotation of the planet.
To successfully hoax the SETI program would require a *lot* of effort and smarts.
Best you'd conceivably get is a detection from one dish; without actually putting a transmitter way out in space, the confirmations that would be required (things like confirming parallax of the signal, motion of the signal consistent with it being X light years away, etc.) would require access to every radiotelescope in the world.
Best you might get is "oh, neat, a candidate signal" until one or the other of the rejection mechanisms coughs and says "Bullshit."
No, he said that "we have states bigger than Sweden."
And we do. Alaska and Texas. California is nearly the same size, too. I didn't see the word 'most' anywhere in the poster's statement.
CDMA = Code Division, not carrier division.
Uhm... they do.
I have Cingular GPRS. Java apps on the phone run fine, it works fine using a USB cable as a GPRS modem for my laptop. No cobranding. No strategic partnerships.
Now, for Cingular-provided content, I assume they cobrand. But since I don't bother with it, I wouldn't know.
You can do that in the US too. You buy a phone non-subsidised, you won't be locked into a contract.
Admittedly, for the CDMA providers its mostly pointless, as switching a phone between carriers isn't really doable, but for GSM providers, you aren't locked into the carrier as sole provider model.
If coverage is poor in an area, the company screwed up. If coverage is poor inside a building, but works fine outside the building, the customer is SOL. The company can't do planning for the insides of buildings. It doesn't work that way.
I have ssh over GPRS on my v400 right now. It's slow, and typing sucks, but it does work.
Java SSH client plus packet data plan = working ssh over cellphone. I don't know why you think that these plans don't offer the opportunity to get relatively raw access to the net (I believe there are some restrictions, but in line with the more restrictive ISPs out there, not a "walled garden" approach) but Cingular's GPRS service provides perfectly functional packet data as far as I've seen.