Half Life 2 probably contains more genuine innovations than the Wright brothers, Edison, and Franklin came up with in their lifetime.
We don't see them because innovation is so much a part of the environment that we no longer have a word for the equivalents of things like the light bulb, or bifocals. We have assembly line labs using fresh-hired grad students to find solutions like those for us. It's like we're standing on the beach at Bondi complaining that there's only a couple of big waves a minute... and back on the beach at Brighton they were coming in much more often at that. Because the waves the size of the ones you get in the Channel are too common to notice between the breakers.
To find something that stands out that it looks like universal gravitation in the storm of innovation around us we need to find something like the innovation equivalent of a Tsunami.
Energy production Fission is less dangerous than people claim, there's a lot of really good ideas that haven't been really been followed through on, though what the Chinese are doing with pebble-bed reactors is encouraging.
Space travel Most of the really useful mechanisms for getting out of the gravity well haven't even been tried, and once we're out of the well chemical energy and solar sails are more than enough to get around. After they've built a linear induction motor up the side of Kilimanjaro and THAT hasn't worked out, THEN come back and tell me we need nuclear engines.
Artificial Intelligence There's more things going on in the brain than we understand, and there's all kinds of interesting things coming out of the efforts to understand it. Be hopeful.
I think that the standards for what is an "innovation" are being raised. Consider software... any program contains thousands of operations that are each potentially an "innovation" as profound as the bridle, but with billions of people making these "innovations" only a tiny fraction stand out and get noticed. The innovations that have become an everyday fact of life are masking themselves, "oh, another world-changing idea, no big deal, it's time for the new episode of Galatica".
Consider the heroic story of Edison trying out hundreds of fibers in lightbulbs. That was brilliance and dedication a century ago, and at the end one innovation resulted from it. Today that whole process has become an assembly line and then turned into something you turn a computer loose on and wait a few seconds for a billion moron-level synthetic Edisons to come up with an answer. And you don't call that answer an innovation, you call it the result of a Monte-Carlo simulation and go on to the next routine miracle. That doesn't make the answer less of a miracle than it was a century ago, it just means that innovations are coming so fast we can't even see them any more.
He's trying to compare the ripples in a millpond with the waves that are similarly outstanding in a typhoon, and saying "on the average, the typhoon is calmer".
Oh god no, I barely managed to wade through the first book of Gypsy Family Robinson anachronisms from Half-cocked Jack and his girlfriend who MUST have been a time-traveller from the 20th century.
Of course he really ought to rewrite chunks of it now that we've found out the black plague wasn't the bubonic plague after all... maybe he can use this new material when he goes back and fixes the rest of it.
Do most DNS server operators really use the root hints file that comes with BIND?
Most corporate IT people don't even know what a "root hint" means, given the number of times I have had to explain how to set up split DNS behind a proxy firewall without having unknown addresses spend 90 seconds timing out trying to get to the root.
I did have my tongue firmly in my cheek when I wrote that, and I was surprised to see it get modded to (5, Informative) given how many times straightforward serious comments get (-1, Troll). As the AC who responded to you (and who by the way could do with a couple of mod-ups) noted, the whole DNS structure really runs on trust.
Which is why when NSol started playing silly-buggers with the ".com" TLD people got bent way out of shape at them.
Basically, the identities of the root nameservers are defined by the contents of the root hints files in the nameserver software used by every company and ISP on the planet. If a release of BIND comes out and it has a certain IP address in its root hints, then that's what the people using that release of BIND will use. If Windows Server 2010 uses a different IP address, people using that nameserver will get that root server instead.
So, most of the big nameservers out there are using BIND, with dedicated Windows shops running AD or running BIND on Windows and everyone sane using UNIX, it's really up to Paul Vixie at ISC. So long as he plays ball with the Commerce Department, nobody needs to get hurt...
The original shuttle design was going to have the shuttle itself only used for lighter payloads, with the HLLV doing the, well, heavy lifting. There was also going to be a permanently orbiting vessel for inter-orbit transfers, using something like an ion drive... basically, the original shuttle design was going to be lighter and more reliable and just one member of a fleet of specialised vehicles. Congress wouldn't pay for all of them so NASA scaled up the Orbiter and it ended p costing more and doing less than originally planned.
Man, I hope they let NASA do it right this time. If they reduce the weight of the new shuttle so the SSME don't need to run over redline just to do their jobs, maybe they won't have to rebuild it after every flight like it was some damn MIG engine... and if the HLLV doesn't need to be man-rated they can use a less expensive version of the SSME in it and save even more.
If I come up with a truly innovative idea, there is nothing to protect me against a mega-corporation simply taking that idea and implementing it - stealing any the R&D investment I have made.
Software patents won't change that.
Because any IMPLEMENTATION of your idea is software, and so will almost certainly violate at least one patent in the large corporation's patent arsenal. As soon as they find one, they can hold you over a barrel... give us a license for this token fee and we'll grant you a license to this other patent for the same fee.
Why does this effect software more than physical goods?
Because software is inherently so much more complex than any physical object.
The EU doesn't have a healthy software industry now - and the lack of patent protection is a big reason why.
Can you provide one example of a way in which a software patent has helped promote a healthy software industry?
My interest is in not helping out someone who isn't willing to help me out in return.
But the vast majority of people who you help out with your GPLed software do not help you out in return. Most of them make no changes, even the ones who redistribute it with their own products.
I do not write open source software out of altruism. I do not write open source software with the expectation of getting something back. I simply believe that I will get more back from a pure gift than from a begrudging one.
I sow my seeds and let them fall where they may. Some fall on stony ground, and don't sprout. Some fall on fenced off land, and I can't pluck the fruit that grows. Some falls on fertile soil, and I get back what I sowed tenfold.
I could take more care, I could refuse to sow my seeds behind fences, but sometimes fences are just decoration, and sometimes the gate is open, and sometimes you can just walk around them. Sometimes fences come down and sometimes it's my seed and the seed of other prople like me that brings it down. Sometimes I find myself visiting people behind the fences, and I benefit from finding familiar fruit there. If I sowed more carefully, making sure I only sowed on public land, all those opportunities would be lost.
Software hoarding hurts the hoarder most of all, and that's true even if you're doing it to fight hoarding. Why should I do that to myself?
Honestly... I have benefitted FAR more from my contribution to BSD than I ever would have from sitting back and waving a finger at fencebuilders. Without BSD licensed and other TRULY open licenced software, there would not be a Mac OS X.
I don't lose anything if crabby old Farmer Gates nurses his twisted tree up in Redmond, and I've won far more now that Former Jobs in Cupertino's torn down half the fences on his land and opened up half his silos to whoever wants some seeds.
You could look at this and say "hey, Farmer Jobs still has SOME fences, he's not giving away ALL his seeds". To me, that's not just miserly, it's foolish... it's not saying "I don't want to help out people who don't want to help me out in return", it's saying "if you don't give me EVERYTHING, I don't want anything".
The BSDL is the bargain that states, "Here you go, do what you want, I trust you." If some of the people who accept that bargain aren't worthy of that trust, there's more than enough that are that the bargain works... spectacularly.
And the ones who take advantage of my trust, hey, most of them are doing the same thing to you. They just have to be a bit trickier about it. If I was going to make that bargain AND make it mean anything, I'd have to spend time making sure they kept it... so not only would I have given up the harvest from the half-fenced fields, and from the fields with rickety fences, and from Farmer Jobs and others like him, but I'd have sown less seed in the first place.
Damn, man, I'll take all the fruit I can get. Why work harder to get less of it?
And all I'm saying is that the value of the GPL, where goodwill doesn't exist, is far less than people seem to think... because the GPL can not compel companies to cooperate, all it can do is punish them for not cooperating.
If goodwill exists, it has some value in encouraging cooperation in some cases... but it also reduces the likelihood of cooperation in others.
It can be used with a dual-license strategy to allow a developer to release software under the GPL as well as to sell it commercially under a more restrictive license... but this is hardly in accordance with the goals of the FSF.
But if a company does not want to cooperate, if there is no goodwill, they will respond to the threat of punishment by looking for an exit strategy. Any gains to the free software world in that case are short term, until the company can figure out a way to defang the GPL or to replace the GPLed software with their own or with software under another license.
the actual kernel code that was in Windows (NT3) was rewritten nine years ago (NT4)
The fact that part of the code in Windows NT was rewritten, while interesting, doesn't change the fact that the rest of the code is still there. Microsoft has also picked additional pieces of BSD code since: for example, the last line of my first example was added in XP, that piece of BSD code wasn't there in Windows 2000. They also used a lot of the OpenBSD code base in the enhanced POSIX subsystem they acquired when they bought Softway Systems. Microsoft also seems to have acquired some software through the Berkeley DNS server (though more recent versions of BIND itself are fresh reimplementations).
Also, that code was never directly from BSD
So? The BSD code in System V came by multiple paths, both directly from Berkeley and via Lachman Associates. The BSD code in Interix comes via Softway Systems and OpenBSD. The BSD code in Mac OS X comes via NeXT and FreeBSD. There's BSD code all over the place.
Those copyrights are due to actual BSD source code.
There is no copyright on the API itself. There is no requirement that anyone put these copyright notices in because they use the API. There's certainly no requirement that anyone put a copyright comment from the actual BSD source code tapes in an executable where nobody's going to see it.
It doesn't matter what your intent was, nor Apple's. Shoot your boss or no, the fact that there is recourse if you violate a law prevents you from doing so without consequence.
I. Get. That. Already. You've made that point good and hard. Now listen to this one: intent matters, because intent gets all the good results of consequences, and a bunch more besides. When you have people only cooperating under threat of legal sanctions you don't really get cooperation at all.
Not to mention you get a society that sucks. The really cool thing about the open source community is that it doesn't suck, and having someone as a member of that community is so much better than having them on the outside just "getting along". Whether that someone is an individual or a corporation, I much prefer them to be part of the non-sucky community than the sucky one.
Microsoft's been using BSD code in Windows for years
No, it didn't.
C:\WINDOWS\system32>strings *.exe | grep -i california C:\WINDOWS\system32\finger.exe: @(#) Copyright (c) 1980 The Regents of the University of California. C:\WINDOWS\system32\ftp.exe: @(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California. C:\WINDOWS\system32\nslookup.exe: @(#) Copyright (c) 1985,1989 Regents of the University of California. C:\WINDOWS\system32\rcp.exe: @(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California. C:\WINDOWS\system32\rsh.exe: @(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California. C:\WINDOWS\system32\vmnetdhcp.exe: $Id: inet_addr.c,v 1.1.1.1 1999/11/22 00:57:05 edward Exp $ Copyright (c) 1983, 1990, 1993 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
And, from the release notes from Windows XP:
This product includes software developed by the University of California, Berkeley and its contributors.
Portions of this product are based in part on the work of the Regents of the University of California, Berkeley and its contributors. Because Microsoft has included the Regents of the University of California, Berkeley, software in this product, Microsoft is required to include the following text that accompanied such software:
Copyright 1985, 1988 Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms are permitted provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are duplicated in all such forms and that any documentation, advertising materials, and other materials related to such distribution and use acknowledge that the software was developed by the University of California, Berkeley. The name of the University may not be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission. THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
I distrust any voluntary cooperation by corporations without any teeth.
I distrust any involuntary cooperation on open source by anyone. Once the other partner in the relationship has decided that they're not getting enough benefit out of it to justify continuing cooperation, then all you can expect out of it long term is what you already have in your hand.
I have an irrevocable license to the source code, which I have whether it's BSDL or (assuming I'm not going to be so hypocritical as to sue Apple over a software patent) or APSL. That's it. Anything else is gravy.
No sane corporation would enter into a contract that did so little to safeguard their interests as the BSD license does,
There's lots of insane corporations out there then.
Look... about the only interest I have in open source software that I lose by using the BDSL or equivalent instead of the APSL is the ability to offer someone a less strict license in exchange for money.
It would be nice to believe that I could compel people to enhance my software for me by releasing it under the GPL, but I believe that the inherent advantage of the open source process itself is a much better inducement than litigation.
Consider a sane company that truly believes open source is a problem rather than a useful tool. If you face them with litigation over a GPL violation then the logical response is not to embrace open source, it's to do the minimum they have to to comply with the GPL while working on an exit strategy, whether that involves in-house development, licensing a for-pay closed-source package, or terminating the product line. Those are all rational responses.
So... what's going to happen if I try and compel cooperation is that some companies who aren't interested in cooperation will use a different piece of software. If I don't try and compel cooperation, then some of them will use my software and not give me anything for it.
I would much rather have the cooperation of companies that want to send me patches and updates, and failing that I'd rather have the potential of cooperation, but forcing them to cough up a little code under threat of litigation has no attraction at all. And in the meantime I'm a heck of a lot better off if they're using a version of software I'm intimately familiar with than if they're using Windows CE or something like that.
Other people have other interests, and there have been a few cases where someone wavering on the edge HAS come around on the GPL... and if you think those cases are worth the lost opportunities, if that's the game you want to play, then go for it. But that's not my game.
If they want to play the game, they can play by our rules.
My rules are the rules of the open source game. And those rules are called "open source works better". If I didn't believe in those rules, I guess I'd use the GPL, but since I do believe in them it's really not that attractive.
you might personally feel that Shiira is as good as Safari, but they are not the same application
I personally feel that you're splitting hairs. For Safari to be "a competing application" it would have to be rewritten anyway... to run under X11. To take the code they released and run it under Safari? They provide instructions for doing that! Should they have ported Konqueror to OS X so they had a KDE shell there? The functional difference between what you can do in the current situation and what you'd be able to do if KHTML was GPLed instead of LGPLed is just too subtle for me to figure out.
"To the letter" includes things like written offer, so many years, physical media, etc.
"Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange;"
They can include a file that says that it's available on FTP.APPLE.COM in such-and-such a directory, and they've kept copies of software on their FTP server for over 15 years in some cases so 3 years is no stretch. That's the kind od "dumping it on an FTP site" I was thinking of, and that certainly satisfies that requirement.
I suppose there must be SOME adware that doesn't do anything but showing ads on your machine, but I've never seen it. I've seen PLENTY of adware that does more than that. I've had to remove it from people's computers, and THAT has often been a lengthy process, because of its side effects.
Adware gets installed surreptitiously, it resists removal, it modifies the operating system in ways that reduce security and reliability, it gives other adware a leg up, it acts as a channel (deliberate or not) for other more damaging software (backdoors and trojans, viruses and worms, botnets and spam engines).
This is not just a matter of "a few bad eggs". There may be a few "good eggs" among them, but the whole class of software has long since forfeited any expectation that I might give it the benefit of doubt.
Slashdot Mirror
Half Life 2 probably contains more genuine innovations than the Wright brothers, Edison, and Franklin came up with in their lifetime.
We don't see them because innovation is so much a part of the environment that we no longer have a word for the equivalents of things like the light bulb, or bifocals. We have assembly line labs using fresh-hired grad students to find solutions like those for us. It's like we're standing on the beach at Bondi complaining that there's only a couple of big waves a minute... and back on the beach at Brighton they were coming in much more often at that. Because the waves the size of the ones you get in the Channel are too common to notice between the breakers.
To find something that stands out that it looks like universal gravitation in the storm of innovation around us we need to find something like the innovation equivalent of a Tsunami.
The hard problems aren't really being tried.
Energy production Fission is less dangerous than people claim, there's a lot of really good ideas that haven't been really been followed through on, though what the Chinese are doing with pebble-bed reactors is encouraging.
Space travel Most of the really useful mechanisms for getting out of the gravity well haven't even been tried, and once we're out of the well chemical energy and solar sails are more than enough to get around. After they've built a linear induction motor up the side of Kilimanjaro and THAT hasn't worked out, THEN come back and tell me we need nuclear engines.
Artificial Intelligence There's more things going on in the brain than we understand, and there's all kinds of interesting things coming out of the efforts to understand it. Be hopeful.
I think that the standards for what is an "innovation" are being raised. Consider software... any program contains thousands of operations that are each potentially an "innovation" as profound as the bridle, but with billions of people making these "innovations" only a tiny fraction stand out and get noticed. The innovations that have become an everyday fact of life are masking themselves, "oh, another world-changing idea, no big deal, it's time for the new episode of Galatica".
Consider the heroic story of Edison trying out hundreds of fibers in lightbulbs. That was brilliance and dedication a century ago, and at the end one innovation resulted from it. Today that whole process has become an assembly line and then turned into something you turn a computer loose on and wait a few seconds for a billion moron-level synthetic Edisons to come up with an answer. And you don't call that answer an innovation, you call it the result of a Monte-Carlo simulation and go on to the next routine miracle. That doesn't make the answer less of a miracle than it was a century ago, it just means that innovations are coming so fast we can't even see them any more.
He's trying to compare the ripples in a millpond with the waves that are similarly outstanding in a typhoon, and saying "on the average, the typhoon is calmer".
Oh god no, I barely managed to wade through the first book of Gypsy Family Robinson anachronisms from Half-cocked Jack and his girlfriend who MUST have been a time-traveller from the 20th century.
Of course he really ought to rewrite chunks of it now that we've found out the black plague wasn't the bubonic plague after all... maybe he can use this new material when he goes back and fixes the rest of it.
Actually, the root hints file is used at start up. That data is updated in memory, fetched by querying one of the name servers.
:)
Yah, now complete that thought... if the root hints file had a different set of name servers in it... where would that data be fetched from?
Do most DNS server operators really use the root hints file that comes with BIND?
Most corporate IT people don't even know what a "root hint" means, given the number of times I have had to explain how to set up split DNS behind a proxy firewall without having unknown addresses spend 90 seconds timing out trying to get to the root.
I did have my tongue firmly in my cheek when I wrote that, and I was surprised to see it get modded to (5, Informative) given how many times straightforward serious comments get (-1, Troll). As the AC who responded to you (and who by the way could do with a couple of mod-ups) noted, the whole DNS structure really runs on trust.
Which is why when NSol started playing silly-buggers with the ".com" TLD people got bent way out of shape at them.
Yeh, we did it years ago. The first non-IANA domain was the "dot" TLD.
When you put them all together they transform into the Arc of the Covenant.
Basically, the identities of the root nameservers are defined by the contents of the root hints files in the nameserver software used by every company and ISP on the planet. If a release of BIND comes out and it has a certain IP address in its root hints, then that's what the people using that release of BIND will use. If Windows Server 2010 uses a different IP address, people using that nameserver will get that root server instead.
So, most of the big nameservers out there are using BIND, with dedicated Windows shops running AD or running BIND on Windows and everyone sane using UNIX, it's really up to Paul Vixie at ISC. So long as he plays ball with the Commerce Department, nobody needs to get hurt...
The original shuttle design was going to have the shuttle itself only used for lighter payloads, with the HLLV doing the, well, heavy lifting. There was also going to be a permanently orbiting vessel for inter-orbit transfers, using something like an ion drive... basically, the original shuttle design was going to be lighter and more reliable and just one member of a fleet of specialised vehicles. Congress wouldn't pay for all of them so NASA scaled up the Orbiter and it ended p costing more and doing less than originally planned.
Man, I hope they let NASA do it right this time. If they reduce the weight of the new shuttle so the SSME don't need to run over redline just to do their jobs, maybe they won't have to rebuild it after every flight like it was some damn MIG engine... and if the HLLV doesn't need to be man-rated they can use a less expensive version of the SSME in it and save even more.
If I come up with a truly innovative idea, there is nothing to protect me against a mega-corporation simply taking that idea and implementing it - stealing any the R&D investment I have made.
Software patents won't change that.
Because any IMPLEMENTATION of your idea is software, and so will almost certainly violate at least one patent in the large corporation's patent arsenal. As soon as they find one, they can hold you over a barrel... give us a license for this token fee and we'll grant you a license to this other patent for the same fee.
Why does this effect software more than physical goods?
Because software is inherently so much more complex than any physical object.
The EU doesn't have a healthy software industry now - and the lack of patent protection is a big reason why.
Can you provide one example of a way in which a software patent has helped promote a healthy software industry?
I am not a lawyer, but I think if you were to ask one he'd tell you that patents don't work the way you think they work.
My interest is in not helping out someone who isn't willing to help me out in return.
But the vast majority of people who you help out with your GPLed software do not help you out in return. Most of them make no changes, even the ones who redistribute it with their own products.
I do not write open source software out of altruism. I do not write open source software with the expectation of getting something back. I simply believe that I will get more back from a pure gift than from a begrudging one.
I sow my seeds and let them fall where they may. Some fall on stony ground, and don't sprout. Some fall on fenced off land, and I can't pluck the fruit that grows. Some falls on fertile soil, and I get back what I sowed tenfold.
I could take more care, I could refuse to sow my seeds behind fences, but sometimes fences are just decoration, and sometimes the gate is open, and sometimes you can just walk around them. Sometimes fences come down and sometimes it's my seed and the seed of other prople like me that brings it down. Sometimes I find myself visiting people behind the fences, and I benefit from finding familiar fruit there. If I sowed more carefully, making sure I only sowed on public land, all those opportunities would be lost.
Software hoarding hurts the hoarder most of all, and that's true even if you're doing it to fight hoarding. Why should I do that to myself?
Honestly... I have benefitted FAR more from my contribution to BSD than I ever would have from sitting back and waving a finger at fencebuilders. Without BSD licensed and other TRULY open licenced software, there would not be a Mac OS X.
I don't lose anything if crabby old Farmer Gates nurses his twisted tree up in Redmond, and I've won far more now that Former Jobs in Cupertino's torn down half the fences on his land and opened up half his silos to whoever wants some seeds.
You could look at this and say "hey, Farmer Jobs still has SOME fences, he's not giving away ALL his seeds". To me, that's not just miserly, it's foolish... it's not saying "I don't want to help out people who don't want to help me out in return", it's saying "if you don't give me EVERYTHING, I don't want anything".
The BSDL is the bargain that states, "Here you go, do what you want, I trust you." If some of the people who accept that bargain aren't worthy of that trust, there's more than enough that are that the bargain works... spectacularly.
And the ones who take advantage of my trust, hey, most of them are doing the same thing to you. They just have to be a bit trickier about it. If I was going to make that bargain AND make it mean anything, I'd have to spend time making sure they kept it... so not only would I have given up the harvest from the half-fenced fields, and from the fields with rickety fences, and from Farmer Jobs and others like him, but I'd have sown less seed in the first place.
Damn, man, I'll take all the fruit I can get. Why work harder to get less of it?
And all I'm saying is that the value of the GPL, where goodwill doesn't exist, is far less than people seem to think... because the GPL can not compel companies to cooperate, all it can do is punish them for not cooperating.
If goodwill exists, it has some value in encouraging cooperation in some cases... but it also reduces the likelihood of cooperation in others.
It can be used with a dual-license strategy to allow a developer to release software under the GPL as well as to sell it commercially under a more restrictive license... but this is hardly in accordance with the goals of the FSF.
But if a company does not want to cooperate, if there is no goodwill, they will respond to the threat of punishment by looking for an exit strategy. Any gains to the free software world in that case are short term, until the company can figure out a way to defang the GPL or to replace the GPLed software with their own or with software under another license.
First, it forces Microsoft to release GPL'ed source code and to admit that that source code exists and is useful.
That's interesting, but it seems to be happening in homeopathic amounts.
It also immunizes any such code they ship from future patent claims by Microsoft
I think you'd better wait for ALL the fallout from the SCO trial before you blithely assume that will hold.
the actual kernel code that was in Windows (NT3) was rewritten nine years ago (NT4)
The fact that part of the code in Windows NT was rewritten, while interesting, doesn't change the fact that the rest of the code is still there. Microsoft has also picked additional pieces of BSD code since: for example, the last line of my first example was added in XP, that piece of BSD code wasn't there in Windows 2000. They also used a lot of the OpenBSD code base in the enhanced POSIX subsystem they acquired when they bought Softway Systems. Microsoft also seems to have acquired some software through the Berkeley DNS server (though more recent versions of BIND itself are fresh reimplementations).
Also, that code was never directly from BSD
So? The BSD code in System V came by multiple paths, both directly from Berkeley and via Lachman Associates. The BSD code in Interix comes via Softway Systems and OpenBSD. The BSD code in Mac OS X comes via NeXT and FreeBSD. There's BSD code all over the place.
Those copyrights are due to actual BSD source code.
There is no copyright on the API itself. There is no requirement that anyone put these copyright notices in because they use the API. There's certainly no requirement that anyone put a copyright comment from the actual BSD source code tapes in an executable where nobody's going to see it.
Here's some more of them:Those are the actual names of source files still in the nslookup source in bind (albeit with newer versions than Microsoft's using):(a few lines of comments and things deleted to keep the Slashdot lameness filter from freaking out over the special characters)
It doesn't matter what your intent was, nor Apple's. Shoot your boss or no, the fact that there is recourse if you violate a law prevents you from doing so without consequence.
I. Get. That. Already. You've made that point good and hard. Now listen to this one: intent matters, because intent gets all the good results of consequences, and a bunch more besides. When you have people only cooperating under threat of legal sanctions you don't really get cooperation at all.
Not to mention you get a society that sucks. The really cool thing about the open source community is that it doesn't suck, and having someone as a member of that community is so much better than having them on the outside just "getting along". Whether that someone is an individual or a corporation, I much prefer them to be part of the non-sucky community than the sucky one.
The relative ease with which Safari can be reimplemented given WebCore is a byproduct of Apple's goodwill, not the KHTML licensing.
Well, I'm glad you agree with me, but if you agree with me what the hell are you arguing about?
No, it didn't. And, from the release notes from Windows XP:
I distrust any voluntary cooperation by corporations without any teeth.
I distrust any involuntary cooperation on open source by anyone. Once the other partner in the relationship has decided that they're not getting enough benefit out of it to justify continuing cooperation, then all you can expect out of it long term is what you already have in your hand.
I have an irrevocable license to the source code, which I have whether it's BSDL or (assuming I'm not going to be so hypocritical as to sue Apple over a software patent) or APSL. That's it. Anything else is gravy.
No sane corporation would enter into a contract that did so little to safeguard their interests as the BSD license does,
There's lots of insane corporations out there then.
Look... about the only interest I have in open source software that I lose by using the BDSL or equivalent instead of the APSL is the ability to offer someone a less strict license in exchange for money.
It would be nice to believe that I could compel people to enhance my software for me by releasing it under the GPL, but I believe that the inherent advantage of the open source process itself is a much better inducement than litigation.
Consider a sane company that truly believes open source is a problem rather than a useful tool. If you face them with litigation over a GPL violation then the logical response is not to embrace open source, it's to do the minimum they have to to comply with the GPL while working on an exit strategy, whether that involves in-house development, licensing a for-pay closed-source package, or terminating the product line. Those are all rational responses.
So... what's going to happen if I try and compel cooperation is that some companies who aren't interested in cooperation will use a different piece of software. If I don't try and compel cooperation, then some of them will use my software and not give me anything for it.
I would much rather have the cooperation of companies that want to send me patches and updates, and failing that I'd rather have the potential of cooperation, but forcing them to cough up a little code under threat of litigation has no attraction at all. And in the meantime I'm a heck of a lot better off if they're using a version of software I'm intimately familiar with than if they're using Windows CE or something like that.
Other people have other interests, and there have been a few cases where someone wavering on the edge HAS come around on the GPL... and if you think those cases are worth the lost opportunities, if that's the game you want to play, then go for it. But that's not my game.
If they want to play the game, they can play by our rules.
My rules are the rules of the open source game. And those rules are called "open source works better". If I didn't believe in those rules, I guess I'd use the GPL, but since I do believe in them it's really not that attractive.
They had to fork it and, essentially, remove the dependency on Qt.
They'd have to do that anyway, because using Qt wouldn't have given them an application with a native Aqua interface.
you might personally feel that Shiira is as good as Safari, but they are not the same application
I personally feel that you're splitting hairs. For Safari to be "a competing application" it would have to be rewritten anyway... to run under X11. To take the code they released and run it under Safari? They provide instructions for doing that! Should they have ported Konqueror to OS X so they had a KDE shell there? The functional difference between what you can do in the current situation and what you'd be able to do if KHTML was GPLed instead of LGPLed is just too subtle for me to figure out.
"To the letter" includes things like written offer, so many years, physical media, etc.
"Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange;"
They can include a file that says that it's available on FTP.APPLE.COM in such-and-such a directory, and they've kept copies of software on their FTP server for over 15 years in some cases so 3 years is no stretch. That's the kind od "dumping it on an FTP site" I was thinking of, and that certainly satisfies that requirement.
That's all most GPL software provides, after all.
What the heck is "malicious" about adware?
I suppose there must be SOME adware that doesn't do anything but showing ads on your machine, but I've never seen it. I've seen PLENTY of adware that does more than that. I've had to remove it from people's computers, and THAT has often been a lengthy process, because of its side effects.
Adware gets installed surreptitiously, it resists removal, it modifies the operating system in ways that reduce security and reliability, it gives other adware a leg up, it acts as a channel (deliberate or not) for other more damaging software (backdoors and trojans, viruses and worms, botnets and spam engines).
This is not just a matter of "a few bad eggs". There may be a few "good eggs" among them, but the whole class of software has long since forfeited any expectation that I might give it the benefit of doubt.