A case in point - you apparently never did file criminal charges, did you?
I was a contractor, it was a nice company to work for. That's all. It was solid basis for a business: people who want and demand a good product, who can pay for it, and who have a strong desire to be efficent.
A 5,000 unit basis for business means that if only 500 users switch your bottom line revenue is deeply hurt.
Cheap, pirated copies will only get one so far. In fact, it's superb marketing for the real product (the one with real support). What counts is the technology, the imagination of the people involved, and the management of the organization.
No, its not. When users stop paying for the licensing to use pirated copies it a direct hit against the bottom line. When all new sales stop but your software is turning up at hundreds of new locations, it has nothing to do with management or sales department or imagination. It has to with lost income and poor revenues.
Sorry, I checked with legal, and as I know work for a competitor of the software, I can't really say. The product was a vertical market app used for the medical industry: essentially managed your entire office, billing, insurance billing, scheduling, etc.
Piracy is going to happen, you have to factor this into any software sales. Even if you hadn't removed the licensing features they would have been worked around anyway given enough time. (Assumming the software was truely popular enough)
No, not really. Every copy of the software used an active form of product activation, and required regular checks against a master database of legal copies: the client could go to a secure website and get a new pre-keyed version delivered by e-mail. That would only work on one PC - determined by a powerful hash of various system bits - and at one location. Every set of binaries was unique, and it was in daily communication (internet connectivity to a remote server was already required for many features). It was virtually foolproof. There really was no widescale way to fake the system. Maybe you could spend hours and make one copy run wrongly, but really, it couldnt be done on a wide scale.
Yeah, piracy is bad, but lets be honest here... most companies don't pirate software that is critical to their infrastructure as they need support contracts when something goes awry
I say no. I see it all the time. Every day actually. Companies - big and small - pirating infrastructure software on a daily basis from both big and small companies.
The wholesale looting of others intellectual property is a very destructive thing. Of those 13,000 titles you can very sure that among them were titles by the non-industry powerhouses.
I've worked as an employee and contractor to a number of small niche players who wrote popular useful software but were ultimately forced out of business due to the direct and indirect effects of piracy.
It is criminal what is being done to some of these companies. When you have a potential customer base of perhaps 5,000 you really need to make sure that you do exactly what your customers want.
I helped organize a QA and customer satisfaction drive for a niche regional software provider. We surveyed every user of the software. Took suggestions and complaintants and feedback on every bit of the application. All told we collected, ranked, anaylzed and implemented 6,500 changes ranging from minor tweaks to major rewrites. It was an 18-month project. Every issue was documentated, analyzed, and every user, every issue recieved a human-authored note that dealt in depth with the issue.
At the request of several users the licensing was vastly simplified even though it meant - at best - a 15% decline in revenue. A solid base of the users/sysadmins complained about the technical measures used to prevent licensing violations. They were removed completely and the honor system was instituted.
After the project, the application won numerous awards within its industry. User satisifaction with the application went from 62% to 98% between the versions. The average site had about 10%-20% smaller licensing costs. Support calls dropped 50% in 3 months. A comprehensive professional written and edited user manual was given to every user, and a robust feature request/enhancement/bug tracker went live.
It was vastly successful. Yet, within 12 months of that release, the company closed its door, and released the code from escrow to the clients. 40 programmers, QA, and support people lost their jobs, and the owner - a very nice woman - was financially ruined. A number of the customer sites also went belly up - as many as 10.
The software was an investment to be sure, but allowed you to run an efficent, competitive, and focused organization. When the anti-piracy features were removed competitors with pirated editions sprang up, offering similair services at lower prices - part of which was because the new enterprises could escape making an investment in software that their competitors did have to make.
The fact is that in this situation everyone knows what happened. A few key employees from one established place took a copy of the server with all the data files and software and all that, and went to establish a competitor in an adjoining state. Same product, 25% cheaper. That 25% is almost entirely made up by the fact that they did not license the software everyone else has to pay for.
In this case, private litigation is useless and slow. The software company and several established reputable companies ended up being run out of business by a truly awful display of poor ethics.
Pirates destroyed the lives of many honest people here. This software package that was cracked and passed around so viciously on many of the big warez networks was the lifeblood of a vibrant partnership of interests. And it was trashed so that a quick buck could be made by a few destructive people (who ended up closing up shop when the easy money was over; they didn't charge enough or save enough to make it through the long slow periods that are inherent in the industry).
Bottom line is that this was a true shame. And it's not all that uncommon. Government acts on behalf of people, and many times, that means acting on behalf of businesses. It's sure easy to be pissed about the FBI spending moneny on anti-piracy, but it has very real economic effects.
Law-enforcement, including the FBI, is generally well-funded. There really isn't a great battle for r
DRM is incompatible with fair use. Its *MY* computer, if I want to copy some audio I legally purchsed the right to listen to into an MP3 format to play on my portable player I have *EVERY* right to do so, and the producer of that audio has no legal right to prohibit me from doing so, so they are chasing a technical ability to do so with DRM.
You are wrong. They have the ability to ask you to abide by additional rules. You and I can enter into a supplemental agreement on top of copyright: you get the audio I recorded, you pay me $15, you promise not to let anyone else listen to it. That's one example. Perfectly legal, perfectly acceptable, been doing it for 100 years.
Diebold showed the government a black box and said, "look! electronic voting!" and the government bought it, no questions asked about the internal workings because the internal workings were a "trade secret."
That's first off, untrue. My state did in fact review the source code. Maybe some states did not. However, it is worth noting that very few states - especially the "swing" states - used Diebold equipment this time around for e-voting.
My home state requires a source code audit of the code to be used on election day.
You can't. Make the vote. A trade secret.
I agree. No respectable Secretary of State should use trade secret protected voting machines. In Ohio, for example, the Sec. of State refused to certify Diebold machines because of this.
and verified by programs written without genuine public audit
Partially false. There has never been public audit of voting equipment. There is more auditing now - ala the ceritfication and verification process - than any time in history. So much so that the big manufactuerers had many problems getting their machines into use during the 2004 cycle. Witness the fact that the Secretary of State in Ohio forced the big "D" (Diebold) to not use their e-vote machines because of their lack of security and chain of command.
by private companies with thinly veiled intent to alter the outcome of your elections
That is a fabrication. The biggest and most popular makers of these machines are *public* companies, with requirements about posting who their makeup is and thereby any political leanings. I can only guess that you "thinly vieled" reference is a nod to the CEO of Diebold and his oft-quote comment about delivering Ohio's votes to Bush. Somehow you take this to be proof of the largest conspiracy in the history of the country? A conspiracy broadcast in plain writing to over 2 million people via a fundraising letter?
Your assertion that the equipment is "obviously flawed" is way out in left field.
Hardly. The e-vote equipment as well as traditional equipment is fail-proof. They wouldn't meet the high-level of trust required for certain other situations. They can be tampered with on an individual basis. The central tabulating system is not well protected in some cases. It's not a perfect system, and that should be the goal.
The equipment is fine; the problem is that the operaters are, effectively, -not- local government officials or volunteers..
The operates are both on paper and effectively local government officals. The chain of custody on these machines is recorded, and any breach is a serious matter. The machines are not internet connected, they are not supposed to be modified after deployment, and depending on the state can't be touched by technicans within so far of the election.
That is a 7th grade answer to a PHd level question, and you probably know it.
What we are talking about here is machines. We have used *MACHINES* To count and tabulate votes for the better part of 100 years in this country.
There have been problems with *MACHINES* for a long, long time.
The fundamental facts do not change:
1. Voting is effected by volunteers and/or local government employees.
2. Voting is tabulated and verified by state and local government employees.
3. Votes are certified and submitted by the Secretary of State or Comptroller of the Votes (depending on your state) and the whole process is open and subject to judicial review.
We took the single most important tool of citizenship... and SOLD IT.
That is false on many many accounts. The local and state governments have purchased *MACHINES* to count and tabulate votes. You are over reacting to such a degree that it's amazing.
The Slashdot crowd is only all worked about this because they can relate. Anyone who has worked with the older generation of machines knows that it was just as easy - if not easier - to manipulate the vote on the ancient equipment than anything any e-vote vendor has put out. I've worked with the machines. They have never been that good. They have never been resilient to attack or fraud.
The bottom line is that the e-vote equipment in question is obviously flawed. That does not prove there is or was fraud. And it also does not mean that this election or any election was inherently false.
What the fuck is wrong with our country?
The biggest problem is that people like to curse and swear instead of analyzing rationall a complex problem. Voting in our country is complex. We have no central election authority. We have no nationwide election. We purposely have designed the system to be decentralized. This is a topic for discussion. Hysterical claims that we "sold the most important tool of citizenship" besides being wrong, wrongheaded, false, and untrue, add nothing to the very real discussion that needs to take place.
Let this sink in: both corporations and the government have vested interests in the outcome of any election, as do the citizens. What is the appropriate role of federal, state, and local government officals in carrying out their respective elections? What is the role of machines in our elections, and what should it be?
That potential dilution is a real expense to you.
It is not a real expense. A real expense is something that actually costs you cash. Buying a new piece of equipment is a real expense.
This is a potential loss of value, that's what it is. In your example, that dilution of value for the owner still doesn't cost the company anything. The assets held by the company remain static. The value of the company remains static. The number of owners increases. That's all. There is no outlay of cash.
Stock options are both in effect and concept a gift among share holders. Options are promised at a price which is assumed to be less than the market price at a future point. You are promised the option to buy 10,000 shares at (usually) today's prices. When those options are available to you if the price is low enough you will exercise the options and the other stock holders effectively have given you the difference between market value and promised value: it's equity they used to have but is now transferred to the option holder.
Regardless, there is no expense to the company itself, only the individual stock holders.
Something only has value when it is bought or sold.
"Options" are just that - the promise of a future chance to make a sale or purchase.
Oher "options" that are provided for in business are not counted in the books: for example, if you sign a contract that allows you to buy a leased product at the end of the lease you do not have to count the eventual purchase price as an expense until (and only if) you exercise that option.
This is the kind of rule that people say is "common sense", but in fact, it's not very sensible.
Must not be true. I did find references to the fact that the "pilots" didnt know how to use most of the controls and tools on the plane. The question in my mind is how did they navigate towards anything in particular? I remember hearing (again, can't find) references to the fact that one plane followed a river into NYC.
Are you sure of that? I had read a number of times conjecture that some of the terrorists flying the planes weren't very good with the advanced avionics and instead relied on simple GPS destination mapping.
Hey, they can hold to the terms of the EULA wheen they produce the signed contract by me.
Or until a judge (in some jurisdictictions, they have) says that having software on a PC owned by you that has had the EULA agreed to is binding.
You don't get to make all the rules.
No, my computer recorded that it thought someone clicked okay. That doesn't prove someone did click okay, and, more to the point, it's not even pretending to know that was me.
Having software that has a EULA required to run on your computer is probably going to turn out to be enough. The concept is like this: if you are a business person and you give your secretary a stamp of your signature and authorization to use it for legitimate business purposes, and she uses it for something which you later regret, you can't just claim that you didn't actually sign it. You handed your authority over to someone who signed on your behalf with your authorization. It's as if you the business person actually had signed. Delegation equals assent.
It is soon coming that this will be extended to EULAs. A judge in my district enforced this when a student at a high-school agreed to the EULA saying that the BSA could inspect the machine as they desired. The BSA did, and it was challenged in court. The EULA was held to be valid because even though the IT director didn't approve the EULA, the IT department failed to prevent students from installing software and thereby agreeing to the given EULA, and therefore, he assigned the responsibility to anyone who sits at the keyboard and installs software with a EULA.
So basically: you may have the right idea for what you want, but its not the real world.
Yes, well, the gentlemen in question manages infrastructure. General purpose services. What you mention are products, and obviously, the development groups would handle those as appropriate.
However, without copyright it would be clear (rather than, as present, ambiguous) that you wouldn't need to agree to the EULA to use the software.
No, you wouldn't *have* to agree to the EULA, but they effectively make you agree to the EULA because most software is setup so that it can't be run without agreeing to the license.
Without copyright the already onerus product activation and other features of software will simply become more and more onerus.
This is all wrong. Software being protected by copyright is a legislative issue. Congress has clearly laid down the law on this matter. They have specifically designed copyright regulation on software and source code.
The courts really have no business getting in on something like this. The gentlemen should be only arguing this in front of Congress or perhaps a body designated by Congress to address copyrights.
The courts are around only to handle disputes arising from the conflict of laws, punishment for breaking the laws, ambiguities or unconstititional matters of law, etc. The courts have no business undoing the unambigious constititional statues put forth by Congress.
I am not longer involved with State government, except to pay my taxes.
It's a big mess.
Anyone whose been through it couldn't be against tax reform in the sense of ripping out the current system and replacing it with a 10 line perl script.
Linux may have made Novell interesting, but it hasn't turned the place around yet. Novell survies mostly on its legacy licensing: people using Netware 3, 4, and 5 products that have to continue to buy or upgrade licenses.
Novell keeps thier numbers pretty secret, but I have a semi-annual report (was a minor shareholder) from earlier this year that shows something close to 70% (IIRC) of their revenue and 80% of their profits coming from discontinued product licensing.
Slashdot Mirror
A case in point - you apparently never did file criminal charges, did you?
I was a contractor, it was a nice company to work for. That's all. It was solid basis for a business: people who want and demand a good product, who can pay for it, and who have a strong desire to be efficent.
A 5,000 unit basis for business means that if only 500 users switch your bottom line revenue is deeply hurt.
Cheap, pirated copies will only get one so far. In fact, it's superb marketing for the real product (the one with real support). What counts is the technology, the imagination of the people involved, and the management of the organization.
No, its not. When users stop paying for the licensing to use pirated copies it a direct hit against the bottom line. When all new sales stop but your software is turning up at hundreds of new locations, it has nothing to do with management or sales department or imagination. It has to with lost income and poor revenues.
Sorry, I checked with legal, and as I know work for a competitor of the software, I can't really say. The product was a vertical market app used for the medical industry: essentially managed your entire office, billing, insurance billing, scheduling, etc.
Piracy is going to happen, you have to factor this into any software sales. Even if you hadn't removed the licensing features they would have been worked around anyway given enough time. (Assumming the software was truely popular enough)
No, not really. Every copy of the software used an active form of product activation, and required regular checks against a master database of legal copies: the client could go to a secure website and get a new pre-keyed version delivered by e-mail. That would only work on one PC - determined by a powerful hash of various system bits - and at one location. Every set of binaries was unique, and it was in daily communication (internet connectivity to a remote server was already required for many features). It was virtually foolproof. There really was no widescale way to fake the system. Maybe you could spend hours and make one copy run wrongly, but really, it couldnt be done on a wide scale.
Yeah, piracy is bad, but lets be honest here... most companies don't pirate software that is critical to their infrastructure as they need support contracts when something goes awry
I say no. I see it all the time. Every day actually. Companies - big and small - pirating infrastructure software on a daily basis from both big and small companies.
The wholesale looting of others intellectual property is a very destructive thing. Of those 13,000 titles you can very sure that among them were titles by the non-industry powerhouses.
I've worked as an employee and contractor to a number of small niche players who wrote popular useful software but were ultimately forced out of business due to the direct and indirect effects of piracy.
It is criminal what is being done to some of these companies. When you have a potential customer base of perhaps 5,000 you really need to make sure that you do exactly what your customers want.
I helped organize a QA and customer satisfaction drive for a niche regional software provider. We surveyed every user of the software. Took suggestions and complaintants and feedback on every bit of the application. All told we collected, ranked, anaylzed and implemented 6,500 changes ranging from minor tweaks to major rewrites. It was an 18-month project. Every issue was documentated, analyzed, and every user, every issue recieved a human-authored note that dealt in depth with the issue.
At the request of several users the licensing was vastly simplified even though it meant - at best - a 15% decline in revenue. A solid base of the users/sysadmins complained about the technical measures used to prevent licensing violations. They were removed completely and the honor system was instituted.
After the project, the application won numerous awards within its industry. User satisifaction with the application went from 62% to 98% between the versions. The average site had about 10%-20% smaller licensing costs. Support calls dropped 50% in 3 months. A comprehensive professional written and edited user manual was given to every user, and a robust feature request/enhancement/bug tracker went live.
It was vastly successful. Yet, within 12 months of that release, the company closed its door, and released the code from escrow to the clients. 40 programmers, QA, and support people lost their jobs, and the owner - a very nice woman - was financially ruined. A number of the customer sites also went belly up - as many as 10.
The software was an investment to be sure, but allowed you to run an efficent, competitive, and focused organization. When the anti-piracy features were removed competitors with pirated editions sprang up, offering similair services at lower prices - part of which was because the new enterprises could escape making an investment in software that their competitors did have to make.
The fact is that in this situation everyone knows what happened. A few key employees from one established place took a copy of the server with all the data files and software and all that, and went to establish a competitor in an adjoining state. Same product, 25% cheaper. That 25% is almost entirely made up by the fact that they did not license the software everyone else has to pay for.
In this case, private litigation is useless and slow. The software company and several established reputable companies ended up being run out of business by a truly awful display of poor ethics.
Pirates destroyed the lives of many honest people here. This software package that was cracked and passed around so viciously on many of the big warez networks was the lifeblood of a vibrant partnership of interests. And it was trashed so that a quick buck could be made by a few destructive people (who ended up closing up shop when the easy money was over; they didn't charge enough or save enough to make it through the long slow periods that are inherent in the industry).
Bottom line is that this was a true shame. And it's not all that uncommon. Government acts on behalf of people, and many times, that means acting on behalf of businesses. It's sure easy to be pissed about the FBI spending moneny on anti-piracy, but it has very real economic effects.
Law-enforcement, including the FBI, is generally well-funded. There really isn't a great battle for r
DRM is incompatible with fair use. Its *MY* computer, if I want to copy some audio I legally purchsed the right to listen to into an MP3 format to play on my portable player I have *EVERY* right to do so, and the producer of that audio has no legal right to prohibit me from doing so, so they are chasing a technical ability to do so with DRM.
You are wrong. They have the ability to ask you to abide by additional rules. You and I can enter into a supplemental agreement on top of copyright: you get the audio I recorded, you pay me $15, you promise not to let anyone else listen to it. That's one example. Perfectly legal, perfectly acceptable, been doing it for 100 years.
Until about 5 seconds ago, I did the *same* exact thing. Word for word.
Do you know the genesis of the expression for your friend?
Diebold showed the government a black box and said, "look! electronic voting!" and the government bought it, no questions asked about the internal workings because the internal workings were a "trade secret."
That's first off, untrue. My state did in fact review the source code. Maybe some states did not. However, it is worth noting that very few states - especially the "swing" states - used Diebold equipment this time around for e-voting.
My home state requires a source code audit of the code to be used on election day.
You can't. Make the vote. A trade secret.
I agree. No respectable Secretary of State should use trade secret protected voting machines. In Ohio, for example, the Sec. of State refused to certify Diebold machines because of this.
and verified by programs written without genuine public audit
Partially false. There has never been public audit of voting equipment. There is more auditing now - ala the ceritfication and verification process - than any time in history. So much so that the big manufactuerers had many problems getting their machines into use during the 2004 cycle. Witness the fact that the Secretary of State in Ohio forced the big "D" (Diebold) to not use their e-vote machines because of their lack of security and chain of command.
by private companies with thinly veiled intent to alter the outcome of your elections
That is a fabrication. The biggest and most popular makers of these machines are *public* companies, with requirements about posting who their makeup is and thereby any political leanings. I can only guess that you "thinly vieled" reference is a nod to the CEO of Diebold and his oft-quote comment about delivering Ohio's votes to Bush. Somehow you take this to be proof of the largest conspiracy in the history of the country? A conspiracy broadcast in plain writing to over 2 million people via a fundraising letter?
Your assertion that the equipment is "obviously flawed" is way out in left field.
Hardly. The e-vote equipment as well as traditional equipment is fail-proof. They wouldn't meet the high-level of trust required for certain other situations. They can be tampered with on an individual basis. The central tabulating system is not well protected in some cases. It's not a perfect system, and that should be the goal.
The equipment is fine; the problem is that the operaters are, effectively, -not- local government officials or volunteers..
The operates are both on paper and effectively local government officals. The chain of custody on these machines is recorded, and any breach is a serious matter. The machines are not internet connected, they are not supposed to be modified after deployment, and depending on the state can't be touched by technicans within so far of the election.
... that we have actually PRIVATIZED THE VOTE.
That is a 7th grade answer to a PHd level question, and you probably know it.
What we are talking about here is machines. We have used *MACHINES* To count and tabulate votes for the better part of 100 years in this country.
There have been problems with *MACHINES* for a long, long time.
The fundamental facts do not change:
1. Voting is effected by volunteers and/or local government employees.
2. Voting is tabulated and verified by state and local government employees.
3. Votes are certified and submitted by the Secretary of State or Comptroller of the Votes (depending on your state) and the whole process is open and subject to judicial review.
We took the single most important tool of citizenship... and SOLD IT.
That is false on many many accounts. The local and state governments have purchased *MACHINES* to count and tabulate votes. You are over reacting to such a degree that it's amazing.
The Slashdot crowd is only all worked about this because they can relate. Anyone who has worked with the older generation of machines knows that it was just as easy - if not easier - to manipulate the vote on the ancient equipment than anything any e-vote vendor has put out. I've worked with the machines. They have never been that good. They have never been resilient to attack or fraud.
The bottom line is that the e-vote equipment in question is obviously flawed. That does not prove there is or was fraud. And it also does not mean that this election or any election was inherently false.
What the fuck is wrong with our country?
The biggest problem is that people like to curse and swear instead of analyzing rationall a complex problem. Voting in our country is complex. We have no central election authority. We have no nationwide election. We purposely have designed the system to be decentralized. This is a topic for discussion. Hysterical claims that we "sold the most important tool of citizenship" besides being wrong, wrongheaded, false, and untrue, add nothing to the very real discussion that needs to take place.
Let this sink in: both corporations and the government have vested interests in the outcome of any election, as do the citizens. What is the appropriate role of federal, state, and local government officals in carrying out their respective elections? What is the role of machines in our elections, and what should it be?
That potential dilution is a real expense to you.
It is not a real expense. A real expense is something that actually costs you cash. Buying a new piece of equipment is a real expense.
This is a potential loss of value, that's what it is. In your example, that dilution of value for the owner still doesn't cost the company anything. The assets held by the company remain static. The value of the company remains static. The number of owners increases. That's all. There is no outlay of cash.
Stock options are both in effect and concept a gift among share holders. Options are promised at a price which is assumed to be less than the market price at a future point. You are promised the option to buy 10,000 shares at (usually) today's prices. When those options are available to you if the price is low enough you will exercise the options and the other stock holders effectively have given you the difference between market value and promised value: it's equity they used to have but is now transferred to the option holder.
Regardless, there is no expense to the company itself, only the individual stock holders.
Something only has value when it is bought or sold.
"Options" are just that - the promise of a future chance to make a sale or purchase.
Oher "options" that are provided for in business are not counted in the books: for example, if you sign a contract that allows you to buy a leased product at the end of the lease you do not have to count the eventual purchase price as an expense until (and only if) you exercise that option.
This is the kind of rule that people say is "common sense", but in fact, it's not very sensible.
Well, in my opinion that is.
Searching furiously provided me with nothing...
Must not be true. I did find references to the fact that the "pilots" didnt know how to use most of the controls and tools on the plane. The question in my mind is how did they navigate towards anything in particular? I remember hearing (again, can't find) references to the fact that one plane followed a river into NYC.
Are you sure of that? I had read a number of times conjecture that some of the terrorists flying the planes weren't very good with the advanced avionics and instead relied on simple GPS destination mapping.
Hey, they can hold to the terms of the EULA wheen they produce the signed contract by me.
Or until a judge (in some jurisdictictions, they have) says that having software on a PC owned by you that has had the EULA agreed to is binding.
You don't get to make all the rules.
No, my computer recorded that it thought someone clicked okay. That doesn't prove someone did click okay, and, more to the point, it's not even pretending to know that was me.
Having software that has a EULA required to run on your computer is probably going to turn out to be enough. The concept is like this: if you are a business person and you give your secretary a stamp of your signature and authorization to use it for legitimate business purposes, and she uses it for something which you later regret, you can't just claim that you didn't actually sign it. You handed your authority over to someone who signed on your behalf with your authorization. It's as if you the business person actually had signed. Delegation equals assent.
It is soon coming that this will be extended to EULAs. A judge in my district enforced this when a student at a high-school agreed to the EULA saying that the BSA could inspect the machine as they desired. The BSA did, and it was challenged in court. The EULA was held to be valid because even though the IT director didn't approve the EULA, the IT department failed to prevent students from installing software and thereby agreeing to the given EULA, and therefore, he assigned the responsibility to anyone who sits at the keyboard and installs software with a EULA.
So basically: you may have the right idea for what you want, but its not the real world.
The problem is that I frequently hear comments and read mis-documentation of Linux binary "emulation" on FreeBSD.
DOH.
Yes, well, the gentlemen in question manages infrastructure. General purpose services. What you mention are products, and obviously, the development groups would handle those as appropriate.
It's impossible for Novell to eat only their own dogfood. Microsoft, on the other hand, can and should be forced to do exactly that.
However, without copyright it would be clear (rather than, as present, ambiguous) that you wouldn't need to agree to the EULA to use the software.
No, you wouldn't *have* to agree to the EULA, but they effectively make you agree to the EULA because most software is setup so that it can't be run without agreeing to the license.
Without copyright the already onerus product activation and other features of software will simply become more and more onerus.
Dracionian EULAs are based in contract law, not in copyright.
Most EULAs restrict beyond what copyright calls for. This is only enforceable - if at all - on the merits of the EULA as a binding contract.
This is all wrong. Software being protected by copyright is a legislative issue. Congress has clearly laid down the law on this matter. They have specifically designed copyright regulation on software and source code.
The courts really have no business getting in on something like this. The gentlemen should be only arguing this in front of Congress or perhaps a body designated by Congress to address copyrights.
The courts are around only to handle disputes arising from the conflict of laws, punishment for breaking the laws, ambiguities or unconstititional matters of law, etc. The courts have no business undoing the unambigious constititional statues put forth by Congress.
Just because it's in the article doesn't mean it's true!
That's the point. The article does nothing to prove the items you assume are factual.
What about people who bought those few months worth of DVDs?
There is nothing we can ever do to regain control that is *rightly* ours.
The damage is done.
Haha.. that's funny..
I am not longer involved with State government, except to pay my taxes.
It's a big mess.
Anyone whose been through it couldn't be against tax reform in the sense of ripping out the current system and replacing it with a 10 line perl script.
That'd be great! This is the very last law we need to pass, and then the problem of untrustworthy software, vendors, and tactics will be solved!
Great! I am going to write my congressman and tell him to get busy writing the "Penultimate Fix for Unethical Software bill.
Once Congress gets involved the problem will be solved within 6 months!
Linux may have made Novell interesting, but it hasn't turned the place around yet. Novell survies mostly on its legacy licensing: people using Netware 3, 4, and 5 products that have to continue to buy or upgrade licenses.
Novell keeps thier numbers pretty secret, but I have a semi-annual report (was a minor shareholder) from earlier this year that shows something close to 70% (IIRC) of their revenue and 80% of their profits coming from discontinued product licensing.
Windows CE, in volume, costs between $2 and $10 depending on how much volume.
As a comparison, XP Home edition in volume costs about $60.