First, congratulations to Tad for finding someone to publish ShadowMarch. I've not read the installments, but getting someone to foot your bills so that you can write is a good thing.
Second, this may be a small insight to those who believe that "free as in beer" is what all entertainment should be. I remember a gazillion posts on why it's ok to simply take music et al without concern for whether the artist gets paid. Two common threads that I can recall were:
1. We don't want to pay those stinkin' middlemen record companies and publishers. 2. Hey, creators create. There is and always will be plenty of stuff.
I have to agree with 1. I don't want to pay those stinkin' middlement record companies and publishers either. They really are a nasty bunch of thieves. OTOH, they will get people to pay for Tad's work and let him pay a few bills. The publishers make the fotune, but Tad can write without doing in the family.
2 is problematic. It seems to presume either that the most artists have no concern for the material world -- no desire for family, home, lights turned on, etc -- or that all art is equal and that every Joe down the street can write or sing with the very best of them. Such people should spend a weekend tied down in front of a constant stream of Suddenly Susan episodes. It isn't true of programmers and it isn't true of artists.
I'm beginning to wonder. Of late, it doesn't seem that their chess game is working very well.
They got lucky when Jackson got stupid, but they still have a verdict standing against them. Worse, that verdict's been upheld unanimously and is about as likely to ever be overturned as I am to grow feathers.
Now, in the remedy hearing, at at time when they really could make up some serious ground -- who cares if you lose the case but get off with a hand slap -- they are blowing it again by showing utter disdain for the judge.
There were fortunate that the new Justice Department is sympathetic and unwilling to press for appropriate sanctions. The judge, however, is not part of the Justice Department and is not part of the current administration at all. They still have time to screw the pooch.
And, of course, we haven't even mentioned all the civil actions that are lying around out there.
>This last motion was not really that out of line but a bit late and incorrect too.
Microsoft committed a no-no that can often be gotten away with in lower courts in lower profile cases with less competent judges.
Case law is a tricky thing, and any lawyer will try to use it to best advantage or to explain it away. No question.
There is however a line you must be careful to avoid crossing. When you say a holding says samething that it does not, you can be seen by the judge as saying that you don't think the judge knows the law or will bother reading the cases.
Good judges don't like that. Worse, judges will scrutinize your submissions all the more carefully when you have established that you are not trustworthy. In this case its even worse. Microsoft has high-priced lawyers. The judge will presume any attempts to mislead the court are the product of malice, not of incompetence (a presumption that most lower courts cannot safely make).
The court, in light of Jackson's stupidity, had no choice but to send the remedy back for review and clarification.
What generally gets lost is that the actual verdict was upheld by a unanimous court. That's unanimous as in don't count on the Supreme Court to grant certiori, and this from an appellate court generally regarded as both conservative and sympathetic to big business.
What I found interesting was the Judge's characterization of Microsoft's motion as misrepresenting the holdings of the cases it cited in support of the motion to dismiss.
That's a powerful statement from a judge and should be taken by Microsoft as a warning. It seems that the last thing they should be doing is demonstrating to the Court a complete and utter disregard for truth and for the law.
That's the kind of thing that makes a judge mad and judges are bad people to have mad at you.
No. The GPL is expressly and explicitly not public domain.
The GPL grants a limited set of rights in exchange for a defined set of obligations. The copyright holder retains ownership.
Public domain grants nothing. The creator of a public domain work renounces all ownership or, by expiration of rights, loses ownership. Without ownership, you can not impose conditions.
That is what makes the public domain the only truly "free" province of Intellectual Property.
The GPL diverges from the public domain in order to insure certain behaviors that its drafters consider vital to the vitality of free software. They have placed limitations on some freedoms in order to protect others.
Kino's a lot friendlier than the description indicates. Most things can be done point'nclick, but learning the keyboard commands makes everything smoother.
Kino doesn't try (at least it hasn't so far) a full-fledged editing package, but it is very handy for the simple things a lot of us want to do.
Failure to reach consensus in the industry group may be all the reason our good "friends" in Congress (are you listening, Fritz Hollings and Diane Feinstein?) need to impose some really wretchedly awful solution.
Things may be better now. The tech companies may have learned a thing or three about lobbying Congress. The Bush administration may be more receptive to tech companies than the Clinton administration was. Maybe.
Here's what I know for sure:
The last time that the entertainment industry went head-to-head with the tech industry over intellectual property protection, we got the DMCA.
That's reason enough to get worried and stay worried.
I just wonder how difficult it is to keep your head in maintaining complex and sophisticated code with a new family while living in the midst of tensions that most of us can't imagine.
SuSE is one of the largest distros out there, the biggest in Europe Turbolinux is strong in Asia Connectiva is growing in South America.
By Uniting together, they have become vastly more interesting to developers. Now, instead of being four more certifications to cover four market areas of varying interest, it's one more certification. That's a 75% drop in cost.
To my experience, the developers who tend to certify their software for one release or the other tend to be commercial developers. These people won't sniff at popping for a boxed copy.
>They're already the most profitable company in history, so they seem to be doing quite okay without it.
Except that the question isn't about going back to 1980 and exploring open source, it's about going forward. Back in 1980, IBM pretty much took the view that you're taking with regard to Microsoft. Look how long it's taken them to recover.
OTOH, I suppose most corporate managements are too arrogant to learn from someone else's mistakes. Better to crash and burn on your own, then hope you haven't fallen too far to recover.
It's hard to know where Microsoft would benefit from Open Source (remembering that they can already, ahem, borrow BSD'd and similar code) without knowing how much each product contributes to the company financially and how much each product costs, but, if I were to hazard a few guesses, it would be these:
1. IIS==>bit bucket IIS does not dominate its market and has a wretched reputation. IIS extensions are available under apache, and the apache license would allow Microsoft to make its own proprietary extensions to a Microsoft-supported license.
It would make a world of sense for MS to bite the bullet, declare apache their web server, and add MS-only content in the form of proprietary mods.
2. SQL Server. Big asterisk here. If SQL Server contributes serious net dollars, I might continue to ride it for a while.
However, SQL Server faces fierce competition at the high end from Oracle and DB2. The continued visibility of Open Source is exposing it to danger in the middle from solutions like PostgreSQL and MySQL, products that conspire to take the profit out of the segment.
I can't help but think that Microsoft could learn something here from the tremendous success of Access. Nobody buys Access because it's a great database. They buy Access because it's a database they can use. Microsoft can open up SQL-Server or they could even get more radical: base a new database on PostgreSQL, perhaps with extensions to ensure that current SQL-Server databases are cleanly supported.
Then, without having to R&D the database (and, not coincidentally, gaining a marketing point in terms of customer flexibility), focus on proprietary tools that make developing and admining the thing easier. Maybe special additions (as separate proprietary products) to help exploit the Windows platform.
3. The Access back-end. As I said, nobody buys Access because it's a great database.
4. Outlook Express. A little danger here, because it might make it easier to clone Exchange. However, this could be a sort of "reverse-samba": Outlooks showing up in all kinds of strange places and on all kinds of strange platforms where it never lived before. Why? PHBs. Nuff said.
5. NetMeeting. C'mon, guys. The whole purpose of NetMeeting is to let people in remote locations participate in a meeting. MS doesn't charge for the basic client, anyway. Opening this means that Windows can communicate with anyone else using the NetMeeting softwareThis one seems like a no-brainer, especially as a revenue stream might be found in enhanced software for originating sites as opposed to mere participants.
6. Whatever MS calls it's instant messenger. That would be a great stab at Yahoo and AOL, and, for MS, wonderful irony.
>Almost no property owner owns the mineral rights to their land, only the 'surface' rights. The mineral rights (in most cases) were seperated years ago.
This statement has me curious. Where is that the case? I know the properties I've bought had no such restrictions -- and I do read the deeds, but the properties I've bought have no petroleum potential.
Is this a common practice in areas with potential petroleum reserves? Has it become common in recent years?
Who would actually spend the money for those rights unless there is at least some legitimate basis for thinking they might harbor valuable resources?
Patents are used as weapons these days, without any regard for their validity.
The RedHat folks are right about one thing: the best defense against a patent suit is to hold the patent yourself.
Software patents are particularly bad. The PTO hands them out like cents-off coupons at a supermarket. Once in hand, they are presumed valid, a presumption that is difficult and expensive to overturn.
They could also argue that their patent collection is not conceptually different from the GPL itself. After all RMS, Bradley Kuhn and assorted other FSF luminaries are on record as saying that IP shouldn't exist at all. In a world without IP, you can't have a GPL, and, presumably, don't need one. Yet, in our world, we have a GPL that relies on current IP law.
These things make sense to me. But... Software patents so distort the whole software sphere. I guess, in the end, my head understands RedHat's moves, but my heart is deeply troubled.
I've used SuSE for some time, and been happy. However, many is the time that I wanted a newer version of software than was available from SuSE. An "uber" distribution, compatible with the assorted branded distros catches my interest because it may increase the likelihood of finding new software in rpm form that may actually work on my system.
The problem seems to be that everybody's mileage may vary, and the thing you just had a problem with sucks worse than an overclocked Hoover until the thing you replaced it with has a problem.
Personally, I've used Reiser for the last couple of years thanks to cats, small children and a less than 100% reliable power supply. I had suffered corruption with ext2 that made my life Hell. That doesn't happen any more.
Whether it's good for anybody else in this world, Reiser is great for me.
The industry makes me so mad because I want to be
on
CDs Want To Be Free
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
The thing, I think, that makes me maddest about the record industry is that I want to be sympathetic. I really do.
I understand that hiring the best engineers and studio musicians cost money Honest, I understand that.
I understand that promoting new acts entails risk and that established acts help to buffer that.
I understand that marketing and distribution cost money.
I don't begrudge somebody turning an honest dollar doing all this stuff. Not one bit.
But $18.99 per CD? Can you say exploitation?
$18.99 per CD then trying to make it so that I can't play it on my pc? Can you say outrage?
$18.99 per CD to help you lobby to take away my rights with a little help from your friends Hollings and Feinstein? Can you say I don't need your stinkin' CDs?
When you want to make an honest dollar, I may stop back by the store.
But, according to the article, she wasn't working for the Bush campaign and she wasn't working for the Republican party.
OOC -- where do you get your "information" that everyone on the Bush campaign was paid? Out in my area, lots of volunteers were solicited to do lots of things. How do you count people who put lawn signs in their yards, or delivered lawn signs to be put in yards? Hand out leaflets? Knock on neighbors' doors. I know some of those activities were done by unpaid volunteers because I did some and so did some of my neighbors.
Well, that's nice, but increasing the profits of individual corporations has nothing to do with the goals of the Constitutional grant of authority.
Besides, the result if ambiguous. If Disney loses a copyright to the public domain, who's to say others won't find additional and different ways to profit from the same material?
The goal is to benefit the American people at large, not to enrich Disney or any other copyright holder.
Slashdot Mirror
First, congratulations to Tad for finding someone to publish ShadowMarch. I've not read the installments, but getting someone to foot your bills so that you can write is a good thing.
Second,
this may be a small insight to those who believe that "free as in beer" is what all entertainment should be. I remember a gazillion posts on why it's ok to simply take music et al without concern for whether the artist gets paid. Two common threads that I can recall were:
1. We don't want to pay those stinkin' middlemen record companies and publishers.
2. Hey, creators create. There is and always will be plenty of stuff.
I have to agree with 1. I don't want to pay those stinkin' middlement record companies and publishers either. They really are a nasty bunch of thieves. OTOH, they will get people to pay for Tad's work and let him pay a few bills. The publishers make the fotune, but Tad can write without doing in the family.
2 is problematic. It seems to presume either that the most artists have no concern for the material world -- no desire for family, home, lights turned on, etc -- or that all art is equal and that every Joe down the street can write or sing with the very best of them. Such people should spend a weekend tied down in front of a constant stream of Suddenly Susan episodes. It isn't true of programmers and it isn't true of artists.
I'm beginning to wonder. Of late, it doesn't seem that their chess game is working very well.
They got lucky when Jackson got stupid, but they still have a verdict standing against them. Worse, that verdict's been upheld unanimously and is about as likely to ever be overturned as I am to grow feathers.
Now, in the remedy hearing, at at time when they really could make up some serious ground -- who cares if you lose the case but get off with a hand slap -- they are blowing it again by showing utter disdain for the judge.
There were fortunate that the new Justice Department is sympathetic and unwilling to press for appropriate sanctions. The judge, however, is not part of the Justice Department and is not part of the current administration at all. They still have time to screw the pooch.
And, of course, we haven't even mentioned all the civil actions that are lying around out there.
>This last motion was not really that out of line but a bit late and incorrect too.
Microsoft committed a no-no that can often be gotten away with in lower courts in lower profile cases with less competent judges.
Case law is a tricky thing, and any lawyer will try to use it to best advantage or to explain it away. No question.
There is however a line you must be careful to avoid crossing. When you say a holding says samething that it does not, you can be seen by the judge as saying that you don't think the judge knows the law or will bother reading the cases.
Good judges don't like that. Worse, judges will scrutinize your submissions all the more carefully when you have established that you are not trustworthy. In this case its even worse. Microsoft has high-priced lawyers. The judge will presume any attempts to mislead the court are the product of malice, not of incompetence (a presumption that most lower courts cannot safely make).
>the appellate court did find more evidence needed for a couple of the conclusions of law--so that portion of the case got dropped.
You're right, of course.
Bottom line thinking on my part.
;0)
Drives me nuts, too.
The court, in light of Jackson's stupidity, had no choice but to send the remedy back for review and clarification.
What generally gets lost is that the actual verdict was upheld by a unanimous court. That's unanimous as in don't count on the Supreme Court to grant certiori, and this from an appellate court generally regarded as both conservative and sympathetic to big business.
What I found interesting was the Judge's characterization of Microsoft's motion as misrepresenting the holdings of the cases it cited in support of the motion to dismiss.
That's a powerful statement from a judge and should be taken by Microsoft as a warning. It seems that the last thing they should be doing is demonstrating to the Court a complete and utter disregard for truth and for the law.
That's the kind of thing that makes a judge mad and judges are bad people to have mad at you.
No. The GPL is expressly and explicitly not public domain.
The GPL grants a limited set of rights in exchange for a defined set of obligations. The copyright holder retains ownership.
Public domain grants nothing. The creator of a public domain work renounces all ownership or, by expiration of rights, loses ownership. Without ownership, you can not impose conditions.
That is what makes the public domain the only truly "free" province of Intellectual Property.
The GPL diverges from the public domain in order to insure certain behaviors that its drafters consider vital to the vitality of free software. They have placed limitations on some freedoms in order to protect others.
I've used Broadcast 2000 and found it servicable for some things, but not as stable as I'd like.
I'm still searching for the multi-track recording software of my dreams (ardour sure looks nice -- if only I could make sound come out!)
No matter -- this is pretty exciting to me, even if I am little more than an end user and not the sophisticated sort the authors are aiming at.
(talk about a cheesy way to avoid writing documentation!)
Kino's a lot friendlier than the description indicates. Most things can be done point'nclick, but learning the keyboard commands makes everything smoother.
Kino doesn't try (at least it hasn't so far) a full-fledged editing package, but it is very handy for the simple things a lot of us want to do.
Can't stnad most conservatives?
By most measures, everyone on your list (with the possible exception of Franklin) would be considered conservatives by today's standards.
This could be a good sign, but I'm not sure.
Failure to reach consensus in the industry group may be all the reason our good "friends" in Congress (are you listening, Fritz Hollings and Diane Feinstein?) need to impose some really wretchedly awful solution.
Things may be better now.
The tech companies may have learned a thing or three about lobbying Congress.
The Bush administration may be more receptive to tech companies than the Clinton administration was.
Maybe.
Here's what I know for sure:
The last time that the entertainment industry went head-to-head with the tech industry over intellectual property protection, we got the DMCA.
That's reason enough to get worried and stay worried.
And then some.
I just wonder how difficult it is to keep your head in maintaining complex and sophisticated code with a new family while living in the midst of tensions that most of us can't imagine.
nonexistent marketshare?
Ummm....
SuSE is one of the largest distros out there, the biggest in Europe
Turbolinux is strong in Asia
Connectiva is growing in South America.
By Uniting together, they have become vastly more interesting to developers. Now, instead of being four more certifications to cover four market areas of varying interest, it's one more certification. That's a 75% drop in cost.
I tend to agree.
One more point, though.
To my experience, the developers who tend to certify their software for one release or the other tend to be commercial developers. These people won't sniff at popping for a boxed copy.
>They're already the most profitable company in history, so they seem to be doing quite okay without it.
Except that the question isn't about going back to 1980 and exploring open source, it's about going forward. Back in 1980, IBM pretty much took the view that you're taking with regard to Microsoft. Look how long it's taken them to recover.
OTOH, I suppose most corporate managements are too arrogant to learn from someone else's mistakes. Better to crash and burn on your own, then hope you haven't fallen too far to recover.
It's hard to know where Microsoft would benefit from Open Source (remembering that they can already, ahem, borrow BSD'd and similar code) without knowing how much each product contributes to the company financially and how much each product costs, but, if I were to hazard a few guesses, it would be these:
1. IIS==>bit bucket
IIS does not dominate its market and has a wretched reputation. IIS extensions are available under apache, and the apache license would allow Microsoft to make its own proprietary extensions to a Microsoft-supported license.
It would make a world of sense for MS to bite the bullet, declare apache their web server, and add MS-only content in the form of proprietary mods.
2. SQL Server.
Big asterisk here. If SQL Server contributes serious net dollars, I might continue to ride it for a while.
However, SQL Server faces fierce competition at the high end from Oracle and DB2. The continued visibility of Open Source is exposing it to danger in the middle from solutions like PostgreSQL and MySQL, products that conspire to take the profit out of the segment.
I can't help but think that Microsoft could learn something here from the tremendous success of Access. Nobody buys Access because it's a great database. They buy Access because it's a database they can use. Microsoft can open up SQL-Server or they could even get more radical:
base a new database on PostgreSQL, perhaps with extensions to ensure that current SQL-Server databases are cleanly supported.
Then, without having to R&D the database (and, not coincidentally, gaining a marketing point in terms of customer flexibility), focus on proprietary tools that make developing and admining the thing easier. Maybe special additions (as separate proprietary products) to help exploit the Windows platform.
3. The Access back-end.
As I said, nobody buys Access because it's a great database.
4. Outlook Express.
A little danger here, because it might make it easier to clone Exchange. However, this could be a sort of "reverse-samba": Outlooks showing up in all kinds of strange places and on all kinds of strange platforms where it never lived before. Why? PHBs. Nuff said.
5. NetMeeting.
C'mon, guys. The whole purpose of NetMeeting is to let people in remote locations participate in a meeting. MS doesn't charge for the basic client, anyway. Opening this means that Windows can communicate with anyone else using the NetMeeting softwareThis one seems like a no-brainer, especially as a revenue stream might be found in enhanced software for originating sites as opposed to mere participants.
6. Whatever MS calls it's instant messenger.
That would be a great stab at Yahoo and AOL, and, for MS, wonderful irony.
Anyway, those a re a few of my ideas.
>Almost no property owner owns the mineral rights to their land, only the 'surface' rights. The mineral rights (in most cases) were seperated years ago.
This statement has me curious.
Where is that the case?
I know the properties I've bought had no such restrictions -- and I do read the deeds, but the properties I've bought have no petroleum potential.
Is this a common practice in areas with potential petroleum reserves? Has it become common in recent years?
Who would actually spend the money for those rights unless there is at least some legitimate basis for thinking they might harbor valuable resources?
Just wondering.
If this technology could be incorporated into a CD or DVD, all of their "piracy" concerns go away.
Sure, there are some pesky customer satisfaction issues, but let's keep our priorities straight. OK?
>A public disclosure of the invention is much cheaper and just as good for defending yourself against an infringement claim.
No. Public disclosure is cheaper only so long as you don't get dragged into court for infringing a patent.
Public disclosure of an invention should but does not prevent the award of patents. The PTO really is doing a terrible job these days.
The problem comes from a patent's presumption of validity. Very expensive to disprove. Very nasty affair.
I don't know about this one.
Patents are used as weapons these days, without any regard for their validity.
The RedHat folks are right about one thing: the best defense against a patent suit is to hold the patent yourself.
Software patents are particularly bad. The PTO hands them out like cents-off coupons at a supermarket. Once in hand, they are presumed valid, a presumption that is difficult and expensive to overturn.
They could also argue that their patent collection is not conceptually different from the GPL itself. After all RMS, Bradley Kuhn and assorted other FSF luminaries are on record as saying that IP shouldn't exist at all. In a world without IP, you can't have a GPL, and, presumably, don't need one. Yet, in our world, we have a GPL that relies on current IP law.
These things make sense to me.
But...
Software patents so distort the whole software sphere.
I guess, in the end, my head understands RedHat's moves, but my heart is deeply troubled.
I've used SuSE for some time, and been happy.
However, many is the time that I wanted a newer version of software than was available from SuSE. An "uber" distribution, compatible with the assorted branded distros catches my interest because it may increase the likelihood of finding new software in rpm form that may actually work on my system.
Worth watching.
The problem seems to be that everybody's mileage may vary, and the thing you just had a problem with sucks worse than an overclocked Hoover until the thing you replaced it with has a problem.
Personally, I've used Reiser for the last couple of years thanks to cats, small children and a less than 100% reliable power supply. I had suffered corruption with ext2 that made my life Hell. That doesn't happen any more.
Whether it's good for anybody else in this world, Reiser is great for me.
The thing, I think, that makes me maddest about the record industry is that I want to be sympathetic. I really do.
I understand that hiring the best engineers and studio musicians cost money
Honest, I understand that.
I understand that promoting new acts entails risk and that established acts help to buffer that.
I understand that marketing and distribution cost money.
I don't begrudge somebody turning an honest dollar doing all this stuff. Not one bit.
But $18.99 per CD?
Can you say exploitation?
$18.99 per CD then trying to make it so that I can't play it on my pc?
Can you say outrage?
$18.99 per CD to help you lobby to take away my rights with a little help from your friends Hollings and Feinstein?
Can you say I don't need your stinkin' CDs?
When you want to make an honest dollar, I may stop back by the store.
But, according to the article, she wasn't working for the Bush campaign and she wasn't working for the Republican party.
OOC -- where do you get your "information" that everyone on the Bush campaign was paid? Out in my area, lots of volunteers were solicited to do lots of things. How do you count people who put lawn signs in their yards, or delivered lawn signs to be put in yards? Hand out leaflets? Knock on neighbors' doors. I know some of those activities were done by unpaid volunteers because I did some and so did some of my neighbors.
Well, that's nice, but increasing the profits of individual corporations has nothing to do with the goals of the Constitutional grant of authority.
Besides, the result if ambiguous. If Disney loses a copyright to the public domain, who's to say others won't find additional and different ways to profit from the same material?
The goal is to benefit the American people at large, not to enrich Disney or any other copyright holder.