It looks like it has been stricken from the docket of the Virginia House of Delegates. I'm not incredibly familiar with legislative rules, but I *think* that this means that it can't pass in VA without being re-introduced to the VA House. If someone can clarify this, please post it. You can find out more here.
Wrong bill. You were looking at a Joint Resolution between the House and the Senate. The bastards already slipped this by in the House of Delegates (making the JR unnecessary) -- see HB 561 for details. The house amended it slightly, and required that a panel be formed to study the ramifications and report back by December 1, 2000. If the house does nothing else, it goes into effect July 1, 2001.
This all assumes that the VA Senate signs off on it as well; Governor Gilmore is expected to sign whatever gets passed.
What pisses me off is that the subcommittee that did this wasn't scheduled to meet until Monday morning (2/14) at 8:00am; they got wind that people were organizing opposition, so they pushed up their meeting to Thursday, and got the bill onto the floor early. By the time that I had a chance to register my opposition it had already been approved.
The Department of Defense has already made a large commitment to using an Open Source groupware package called CVW, that was developed as an internal research project by MITRE. There's an article in the latest Linux Journal about it.
[ There are shareware products that have better groupware features than those of Microsoft products, he said, drawing applause from the audience. ]
Ok then, give some shareware developer out there an early christmas present and buy his software. If not, then basically...shutup. Or was he hoping to get some beanie points by bashing Microsoft?
The Department of Defense has already made a large commitment to using an Open Source groupware package called CVW, that was developed as an internal research project by MITRE. There's an article in the latest Linux Journal about it. My guess is that Undersecretary Hultin was referring to CVW, and confused shareware with open source.
OSS trivia item: Eric Raymond was instrumental in helping convince MITRE (and their legal department) to release CVW as Open Source Software.
Currently if you want to use Java on Unix/Linux, you either have to have Motif installed, or you have to have a Java runtime that's statically linked against Motif. Somehow, I don't think it's a coincidence that Sun hasn't released a version of Java that uses QT or GTK... since it makes it that much less likely that those Java applications will be running on a competing OS.
When Scott McNealy announces that Java will use GTK or QT, then I'll know that Motif is dead... and Solaris too!
You must be misinformed about the OMG -- all the OMG itself does is coordinate the standards (and sell books and other documentation about the standards).
On the other hand, many of the OMG members do sell CORBA implementations, but their membership in the OMG doesn't immediately confer "standard" status upon their implementations. You need look no farther than Iona (Orbix) and Inprise (Visibroker) to see that neither of these CORBA vendors wins all of the time.
Most importantly, the majority of OMG members are not CORBA vendors at all. They are companies that are producing applications using CORBA, and who have joined the OMG to help steer the standards to meet their needs. Even Microsoft has joined the OMG (you can do your own speculation as to why they joined.)
Actually, I wasn't attempting a cheap shot at ESR, and I by no means have anything against the man. (I've heard him speak in person on three separate occasions).
In fact, please re-read my actual words, I may have come off as being sarcastic, but I was genuinely asking where he was and why we hadn't heard from him here on slashdot recently!
My apologies to you, then, for misinterpreting your remarks. I've known Eric for a long time, and sometimes I get a little upset when people take his name in vain (not that you did).
Yeah, where's Eric Raymond right now? Why haven't we heard anything from him? Isn't he the self-proclaimed voice of the Open Source community? Why hasn't he even posted anything here recently?
Perhaps you missed Eric's article on Linux Today about the DVD CCA's lawsuit. I think Eric covers the situation quite well in that article, and I haven't seen anything that would require an update to that article.
Perhaps you've missed out on Eric's speaking engagements over the last month, but I know that he's been on the road, unpaid, for well over 50% of the time in the last several months, including the Eighth Annual Python Conference last week, and Linux World this coming week. What I want to know is this: where have you been? Where have your letters to the editor been published? Where are your articles on what's wrong posted?
To paraphrase John F. Kennedy, "Ask not what the Linux Community can do for you, ask what you can do for the Linux Community". That means doing more than writing derisive posts on Slashdot that take cheap shots at people you don't like. Or, as in the words of my (and I'm sure everyone else's) mother: "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all".
I was replying in the context of free software, not commercial software.
I would expect that Red Hat and Covalent did the same thing that Stronghold did -- obtain a license from RSAData for the RSA patent. I couldn't find much information on Red Hat's New & Improved website about the Red Hat Secure Web Server, other than it's included with Red Hat Linux 6.1 Professional.
In the United States... between now and September 20, 2000... if you use mod_ssl/openSSL... and it wasn't built using the RSAREF toolkit, Then you'll be in violation of the RSA patent, and subject to legal action, and should use Stronghold instead.
In the United States... between now and September 20, 2000... if you use mod_ssl/openSSL... and it was built using the RSAREF toolkit... and you're using it for commercial activities... Then you'll be in violation of the RSA patent, and subject to legal action, and should use Stronghold instead.
In the commercial workplace environment (ie: large corporations) there's only one standard for encryption: RSA. If you're using encrypted email, you're using S/MIME, which depends upon RSA (and their whole PKCS toolkit). If you're using secure web servers, you're using SSL2, which depends upon RSA. When you get an encryption-enabled web browser (be it Netscape or Internet Exploder) you depend upon RSA. Period.
If you want to develop software that plays in a commercial environment, first you have to be interoperable with the existing standards, then you can think about branching out and establishing new standards. Look at Samba -- much as I dislike Microsoft's SMB network protocol, it's a de facto standard -- and Unix computers couldn't easily participate in a Microsoft network without Samba. It's the same problem for encryption -- you have to be interoperable with what already exists in the organization, and that's RSA.
Don't get me wrong -- PGP/GPG is good technology -- but using PGP/GPG in conjuction with a seperate email package is a lot harder than using a mail client with built-in encryption, and people want email to be simple, and they want it to act the same across all platforms. The biggest advantage Netscape's Communicator has/had was that no matter how lame the email client, it worked the same for Windows, Unix, and Macs... and all of them used RSA encryption.
The good thing about the patent expiring is that packages like OpenSSL will be able to be used universally, instead of just outside of the US. It also means that the open software community can have secure encryption without the security holes that are introduced by the RSA reference implementation (RSAREF) -- see BugTrak for details.
What I would need is a CORBA ORB that will build Objective-C stubs and skeletons (ie: an Objective-C binding and implementation for CORBA).
With CORBA bindings, Objective-C is useful; without them, its useless... to me. I would love to see Objective-C support added to Orbit; hell, I'd love to see C++ support added to Orbit. I'd like to reduce the number of ORBs that I have to deal with to do multi-language development.
Check out EDS' performance over the last several years... they've had at least 3 rounds of layoffs in the last 4 years, and they've lost a number of contracts that they should have gotten, if their managers had been spending their time doing their jobs, instead of papering their nests. For that matter, their Herndon, VA, campus just built a brand-new building because EDS leased-out part of their existing building at a well-below-market rate, on a very long-term lease.
EDS may be the company that Ross Perot built, but it hasn't been well-managed since he sold it to GM in the 80's.
Do you remember Digital Audio Tape? Shortly after CDs (the digital equivalent of a vinyl record) became popular, the Digital Audio Tape was introduced, with the hopes (by some) that it would becom the digital equivalent of the cassette tape. Unfortunately, the RIAA was as afraid of DAT then as they are of MP3 now. A DAT could potentially make a first generation pristine copy of a CD -- which would have ruined the market for CDs.
So the RIAA lobbied legislators and filed lawsuits... and the end result was legislation was passed mandating that DAT decks that could write DATs had to have copy guard circuitry that would prevent copying CDs (or other commercial DATs). The requirement for the copy guard reduced demand, and without demand the manufacturers wouldn't lower prices. Today it's almost impossible to buy a DAT deck, which is exactly what RIAA wanted. And what happened to DAT technology? The manufacturers built it into computer tape drives for backing up hard drives, and camcorders.
I'm betting that you'd try and stop it happening. I'm also betting that one of the companies is going to either invest quickly in the new technology and betray the others or that some upstart firm is going to make a killing here.
It's already happening -- mp3.com is right there, right now, and the price point is right. I'm the happy owner of a DAM/CD from a group that I never would have heard of otherwise. A couple of clicks and it was mine. Admittedly I haven't deleted the mp3 that I had downloaded -- instead I copied all of the mp3's on the DAM/CD to my hard drive, so I can leave the CD with my stereo.
a) fast, cheap high-bandwidth net access b) tech jobs -- programming, networking, design at several possible companies c) wages that are enough to keep geeks somewhat confortable in their -> d) readily available affordable housing -- apartments, condos, whatever.
If you're looking to move, then checkout Northern Virginia, outside the DC beltway. NoVa scores high on all of these, as long as you don't mind getting a car and spending a lot of time in it. There's practically no unemployment; there are plenty of companies hiring all the time. MCI/Worldcom and AOL have their headquarters here; MAE East is here too.
Admittedly, the cost of living here is fairly expensive, but it's nothing like Silicon Valley...
It appears many people on/. are advocating the wrong approach to dealing with this, namely spreading the code far and wide. This is doomed to fail, because we're being driven underground, and prevented from engaging in perfectly legal activity... the reverse engineering of CSS for the purposes of compatibility. Spreading the code around in the absence of someone willing to take responsibility for maintaining it is not going to help in producing a Linux/OpenSource DVD player. Running underground is acting like the pirates they want to paint us as.
Ah, but unfortunately you're wrong there: in many jurisdictions (the UK right now, the US Real Soon Now) reverse engineering (or breaking) copy protection is illegal. I don't agree with the law, but I agree that it's a good idea not to publicly engage in illegal activities that are opposed by commercial entities who can afford lots of lawyers. What Derek and MoRE are advocating is that the work be moved (just like open source encryption work has been moved) to friendlier places. This won't actually stop the work, or make it any harder to use, but it protects the developers from the lawyers.
As a side note, while I used to think that uniform rules across all governmental jurisdictions would be a good thing, I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that uniform rules would just result in uniformly oppressive rules, whereas our current hodge-podge system actually allows more people more freedom. Go figure.
IANAL, but... it depends upon where you are, and how patents and copyrights work where you are.
Quick summary of Patents, Copyrights, and Trade Secrets for the USA:
Patents: You get a patent on X (and patent protection) for releasing the method for doing X. You get to charge everyone licensing fees for doing X, regardless of how they implemented X. In theory X is supposed to be a mechanical or chemical process, but software algorithms and business processes are patentable in the USA.
Copyrights: You get a copyright on X simply by labeling X with a copyright notice. The copyright protects you from other people using a direct (or indirect) copy of X, but if someone else implements X themselves, without any use of your X in their product, you're out of luck.
Trade Secrets: You can get a trade secret for X just by claiming that X is a trade secret, but you have to keep it secret. Trade secrets are usually fought-out between companies when critical employees (ie: they had access to the secret) change companies, and the new company starts using X. Trade secrets are damned hard to protect, unless you can implement them in hardware that can't be reverse engineered.
Reverse Engineering: Reverse engineering is the process of gathering information about X without having access to the source code, blueprints, formula, etc for X. Reverse engineering is legal in the USA for purposes of building interoperable products, as long as your final implementation of X does not derive in any way shape or form from the original X. Thus you typically need two teams -- one which reverse engineers X and produces a complete specification of X, and another team (the clean room team) that implements a new X from the specification, and nothing else.
I am sure that the CSS algorithm was not protected by a patent, since the patent process would require that the CSS algorithm be published in the body of the patent. If it was patented, then the DeCSS implementers would be in violation of the patent, but in the absence of a patent, that isn't a threat.
If the CSS algorithm was copyrighted (almost certainly) then it would be protected from people making binary copies and using the copies, but that isn't what happened here. The original reverse engineering team (in Norway) may have violated their shrink-wrap license (the one that says you're not allowed to reverse-engineer the product) but shrink-wrap licenses are on fairly shaky legal ground, and the reverse-engineering clause is probably the least legal.
If the CSS algorithm was a Trade Secret, and someone else figured out the secret, then in general the DVD people are S*** Out Of Luck.
Of course, this is all subject to the legal distinctions between differing jurisdictions, and I have no idea about how the laws in other countries will interact with the US laws in this case. In any case, I don't think that Derek is in trouble, as long as he isn't stashing decrypted DVD movies on his website, but again, IANAL.
Employee wages for R&D are tax deductable. It is done in the large corp I work for.
Yes, but only if it's actually R&D... Research and Development. Keep in mind that in a traditional company, research and development is a very small part of bringing a product to market. If I'm building widgets, R&D is what I spend to determine (1) if widgets can be built at all, and (2) how to build a widget. The bulk of my costs in producing widgets will be in purchasing the machines and raw materiels necessary to produce widgets and in paying the wages of the employees that produce the widgets.
The reason for that tax deduction was to encourage businesses to develop new products without worrying (too much) about spending money on research and development that doesn't pan out.
Now contrast that with software companies, where the development step (ie: implementing the program) is really the production step, because media production (floppies and CDs and manuals) is such a small part of the overall cost. In this case, by the existing rules, software companies are being given tax deductions for all of their actual production costs. That's a hell of a deal for Microsoft, but not exactly what the IRS intended.
For what it's worth, the IRS is beginning to crack down on this sort of abuse. Who knows if it will do any good...
Every day everyone lives with risk, risk to their lives, their health, their wealth, their happiness. You mention the feeling of coming away from the table significantly poorer than when you started... I've done that. Not on stocks or Vegas, but on other projects. But each time I calculated the reward-vs-risk for the project, and I've had my share of winners as well. (My advice? Don't ever loan money to friends... it's an easy way to lose your money and your "friends".)
That said, my reasons for wanting to invest in the Red Hat IPO are the same reasons that soldiers during WW I and WW II brought back souveniers from the war -- they wanted something to remind themselves, and others, that they had been there, fought the war, and won.
I wanted a souvenier of the Open Source Software wars... and I wanted an original. I don't happen to work for Red Hat, so I haven't earned any stock in Red Hat, so the only other way to get it was to buy it, preferably as early as possible. To me it's the difference between collecting first-issue stamps, and collecting mint stamps -- anyone can buy unused stamps at the post office, but there's only a limited number of first-issues for a particular stamp. I wanted first-issue stock in Red Hat, so I could tell stories about it years from now, when no one really remembers the Bad Old Days when Microsoft Ruled the World.
Instead my story will be a different one, a tale of disappointment, not joy.
PS: I actually did read all of Red Hat's SEC filing... long before they sent me their invitation to participate in the IPO.
Consider a software company that leases software. Business's pay to use the software on a yearly basis (for example). This gives the software company a steady stream of revenue based upon the number of people using their software. In return, the users get support, timely maintenance releases and future features. I spent 4 years working for just such a company, Dxxxxxx, which made software for administering colleges and universities. I worked on the home-built CASE tool that was used to build the rest of the software.
Dxxxxxx would lease the software to a customer, and for an additional fee, would lease the CASE tool. For an even larger fee, the customer could get the application source code, but never the CASE tool source. All of the source code was held in escrow, to be given to the customers in the event that Dxxxxxx folded (not likely -- they've been consistently profitable for 30+ years).
There's no economic incentive for Dxxxxxx to release their source code -- the field has several vendors and stiff competition, and most of their customers wouldn't know what to do with the source if they got it.
This arrangement gives Dxxxxxx a recurring revenue stream, and their customers get regular releases, updates, and bug fixes, and the ability to customize the software for their own needs.
There are thousands of companies out there operating in the same manner, providing customized solutions to anywhere from a dozen to hundreds of customers. These so-called "vertical applications" are a necessary part of the software universe that would never be created by open source developers -- they're too expensive to write, and not enough people need them.
Sure, Inprise (nee Borland), is important as a development tools company that competes with Microsoft, but the big news is that Inprise (nee Visigenic) is the most important CORBA vendor for all platforms.
Visigenic came late to the CORBA party (Orbix was there much earlier) but in the last 3 years, Visigenic has been responsible for most of the new developments in CORBA. Visigenic basically wrote the specification for IIOP (the Internet Inter-Orb Protocol) which is the vendor-vendor interoperability specification for CORBA over TCP/IP. Visigenic also defined the Java bindings for CORBA, with everyone else playing catch up. Orbix might be a bigger company, but Visigenic has been redefining the CORBA marketplace for the last 3 years.
Last year Microsoft cut a deal with Orbix whereby Orbix would integrate DCOM into their CORBA Orb; now Microsoft is buying a good-sized chunk of the most important CORBA vendor to come along in years.
The Microsoft Way: If you can't beat them, buy them.
Here's the letter I wrote to the editor of the Village Voice; I encourage everyone else to write to them as well.
Dear Sirs:
I just finished reading your feature "Suffer the (White, Middle-Class) Children" (http://www.villagevoice.com/features/9921/dark.sh tml) and I must say I am quite disappointed. Your writer apparently heard stories of suffering and pain, then checked a color bar and saw "white" and "male" and concluded that the pain and suffering weren't real, and that this was just the white, male establishment trying to steal the identity-politics initiative. Hardly the journalistic thoroughness that The Village Voice is known for.
Neither Jon Katz, nor the thousands of kids and adults that wrote him, claimed that they were the only people being punished for being different; all they said was "Hey, it's happening here, too." School *is* Hell; Matt Groening wasn't telling any new tales when he drew that collection of cartoons a decade ago.
I've never been a fan of identity-politics -- I've always felt that the problem was "the system" was taking advantage of individuals, because individuals rarely have any way to fight the system or even of knowing that the system doesn't have to be that way. Black, white, female, male, adult, child: as individuals we are all easily oppressed; only by gathering together can we become strong enough to fight the system.
But there are plenty of special interests that have figured out that they don't have to gather everyone and address all the problems -- all they need is to gather enough people from a single category, and focus on one set of problems -- and they'll have found their own special path to power, and representation within the system, consequently make the system that much worse for the rest of us. Blacks, women, gays, the elderly, the poor, the handicapped -- they all have their special needs and special desires, and their own special advocates who are all just more cogs in the system.
Your writer and your editorial policies indicate to me that The Village Voice is proud of its place within the system, and isn't interested in anyone else upsetting the status quo. Just remember when you send your kids off to school in the morning, you're condemning them to the same daily torture that you once suffered, and remind yourself that you had a chance to say and do something about it -- and decided not to rock the boat. I hope you feel proud of yourselves.
I buy a hot liquid -- that's supposed to be hot, then
I burn myself with it because I'm drinking it while driving a car, then
It costs a lot of money to repair the damage I inflicted on myself, so
The company I bought the coffee from is supposed to pay for it?
Would someone please explain the logic to me? Why didn't she sue the car maker as well, for not making a car that allowed her to drink coffee and drive at the same time? Or Juan Valdez, because coffee beans were used to make the coffee?
If I ran McDonalds, and someone came to me, using that sort of logic, I'd be pretty hard-pressed to think of a reason to pay them. In fact, if I did pay them, the McDonalds shareholders would have every right to fire me.
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Wrong bill. You were looking at a Joint Resolution between the House and the Senate. The bastards already slipped this by in the House of Delegates (making the JR unnecessary) -- see HB 561 for details. The house amended it slightly, and required that a panel be formed to study the ramifications and report back by December 1, 2000. If the house does nothing else, it goes into effect July 1, 2001.
This all assumes that the VA Senate signs off on it as well; Governor Gilmore is expected to sign whatever gets passed.
What pisses me off is that the subcommittee that did this wasn't scheduled to meet until Monday morning (2/14) at 8:00am; they got wind that people were organizing opposition, so they pushed up their meeting to Thursday, and got the bill onto the floor early. By the time that I had a chance to register my opposition it had already been approved.
The Department of Defense has already made a large commitment to using an Open Source groupware package called CVW, that was developed as an internal research project by MITRE. There's an article in the latest Linux Journal about it.
[ There are shareware products that have better groupware features than those of Microsoft products, he said, drawing applause from the audience. ]
Ok then, give some shareware developer out there an early christmas present and buy his software. If not, then basically...shutup. Or was he hoping to get some beanie points by bashing Microsoft?
The Department of Defense has already made a large commitment to using an Open Source groupware package called CVW, that was developed as an internal research project by MITRE. There's an article in the latest Linux Journal about it. My guess is that Undersecretary Hultin was referring to CVW, and confused shareware with open source.
OSS trivia item: Eric Raymond was instrumental in helping convince MITRE (and their legal department) to release CVW as Open Source Software.
Currently if you want to use Java on Unix/Linux, you either have to have Motif installed, or you have to have a Java runtime that's statically linked against Motif. Somehow, I don't think it's a coincidence that Sun hasn't released a version of Java that uses QT or GTK ... since it makes it that much less likely that those Java applications will be running on a competing OS.
When Scott McNealy announces that Java will use GTK or QT, then I'll know that Motif is dead ... and Solaris too!
You must be misinformed about the OMG -- all the OMG itself does is coordinate the standards (and sell books and other documentation about the standards).
On the other hand, many of the OMG members do sell CORBA implementations, but their membership in the OMG doesn't immediately confer "standard" status upon their implementations. You need look no farther than Iona (Orbix) and Inprise (Visibroker) to see that neither of these CORBA vendors wins all of the time.
Most importantly, the majority of OMG members are not CORBA vendors at all. They are companies that are producing applications using CORBA, and who have joined the OMG to help steer the standards to meet their needs. Even Microsoft has joined the OMG (you can do your own speculation as to why they joined.)
Actually, I wasn't attempting a cheap shot at ESR, and I by no means have anything against the man. (I've heard him speak in person on three separate occasions).
In fact, please re-read my actual words, I may have come off as being sarcastic, but I was genuinely asking where he was and why we hadn't heard from him here on slashdot recently!
My apologies to you, then, for misinterpreting your remarks. I've known Eric for a long time, and sometimes I get a little upset when people take his name in vain (not that you did).
Perhaps you missed Eric's article on Linux Today about the DVD CCA's lawsuit. I think Eric covers the situation quite well in that article, and I haven't seen anything that would require an update to that article.
Perhaps you've missed out on Eric's speaking engagements over the last month, but I know that he's been on the road, unpaid, for well over 50% of the time in the last several months, including the Eighth Annual Python Conference last week, and Linux World this coming week. What I want to know is this: where have you been? Where have your letters to the editor been published? Where are your articles on what's wrong posted?
To paraphrase John F. Kennedy, "Ask not what the Linux Community can do for you, ask what you can do for the Linux Community". That means doing more than writing derisive posts on Slashdot that take cheap shots at people you don't like. Or, as in the words of my (and I'm sure everyone else's) mother: "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all".
I was replying in the context of free software, not commercial software.
I would expect that Red Hat and Covalent did the same thing that Stronghold did -- obtain a license from RSAData for the RSA patent. I couldn't find much information on Red Hat's New & Improved website about the Red Hat Secure Web Server, other than it's included with Red Hat Linux 6.1 Professional.
IANAL, but my understanding is that...
In the United States...
between now and September 20, 2000...
if you use mod_ssl/openSSL...
and it wasn't built using the RSAREF toolkit,
Then you'll be in violation of the RSA patent, and subject to legal action, and should use Stronghold instead.
In the United States...
between now and September 20, 2000...
if you use mod_ssl/openSSL...
and it was built using the RSAREF toolkit...
and you're using it for commercial activities...
Then you'll be in violation of the RSA patent, and subject to legal action, and should use Stronghold instead.
Otherwise, you're OK.
One word: Interoperability
In the commercial workplace environment (ie: large corporations) there's only one standard for encryption: RSA. If you're using encrypted email, you're using S/MIME, which depends upon RSA (and their whole PKCS toolkit). If you're using secure web servers, you're using SSL2, which depends upon RSA. When you get an encryption-enabled web browser (be it Netscape or Internet Exploder) you depend upon RSA. Period.
If you want to develop software that plays in a commercial environment, first you have to be interoperable with the existing standards, then you can think about branching out and establishing new standards. Look at Samba -- much as I dislike Microsoft's SMB network protocol, it's a de facto standard -- and Unix computers couldn't easily participate in a Microsoft network without Samba. It's the same problem for encryption -- you have to be interoperable with what already exists in the organization, and that's RSA.
Don't get me wrong -- PGP/GPG is good technology -- but using PGP/GPG in conjuction with a seperate email package is a lot harder than using a mail client with built-in encryption, and people want email to be simple, and they want it to act the same across all platforms. The biggest advantage Netscape's Communicator has/had was that no matter how lame the email client, it worked the same for Windows, Unix, and Macs ... and all of them used RSA encryption.
The good thing about the patent expiring is that packages like OpenSSL will be able to be used universally, instead of just outside of the US. It also means that the open software community can have secure encryption without the security holes that are introduced by the RSA reference implementation (RSAREF) -- see BugTrak for details.
What I would need is a CORBA ORB that will build Objective-C stubs and skeletons (ie: an Objective-C binding and implementation for CORBA).
With CORBA bindings, Objective-C is useful; without them, its useless ... to me. I would love to see Objective-C support added to Orbit; hell, I'd love to see C++ support added to Orbit. I'd like to reduce the number of ORBs that I have to deal with to do multi-language development.
Check out EDS' performance over the last several years ... they've had at least 3 rounds of layoffs in the last 4 years, and they've lost a number of contracts that they should have gotten, if their managers had been spending their time doing their jobs, instead of papering their nests. For that matter, their Herndon, VA, campus just built a brand-new building because EDS leased-out part of their existing building at a well-below-market rate, on a very long-term lease.
EDS may be the company that Ross Perot built, but it hasn't been well-managed since he sold it to GM in the 80's.
BTW -- EDS doesn't give out raises, ever.
Do you remember Digital Audio Tape? Shortly after CDs (the digital equivalent of a vinyl record) became popular, the Digital Audio Tape was introduced, with the hopes (by some) that it would becom the digital equivalent of the cassette tape. Unfortunately, the RIAA was as afraid of DAT then as they are of MP3 now. A DAT could potentially make a first generation pristine copy of a CD -- which would have ruined the market for CDs.
So the RIAA lobbied legislators and filed lawsuits ... and the end result was legislation was passed mandating that DAT decks that could write DATs had to have copy guard circuitry that would prevent copying CDs (or other commercial DATs). The requirement for the copy guard reduced demand, and without demand the manufacturers wouldn't lower prices. Today it's almost impossible to buy a DAT deck, which is exactly what RIAA wanted. And what happened to DAT technology? The manufacturers built it into computer tape drives for backing up hard drives, and camcorders.
I'm betting that you'd try and stop it happening. I'm also betting that one of the companies is going to either invest quickly in the new technology and betray the others or that some upstart firm is going to make a killing here.
It's already happening -- mp3.com is right there, right now, and the price point is right. I'm the happy owner of a DAM/CD from a group that I never would have heard of otherwise. A couple of clicks and it was mine. Admittedly I haven't deleted the mp3 that I had downloaded -- instead I copied all of the mp3's on the DAM/CD to my hard drive, so I can leave the CD with my stereo.
a) fast, cheap high-bandwidth net access
b) tech jobs -- programming, networking, design at several possible companies
c) wages that are enough to keep geeks somewhat confortable in their ->
d) readily available affordable housing -- apartments, condos, whatever.
If you're looking to move, then checkout Northern Virginia, outside the DC beltway. NoVa scores high on all of these, as long as you don't mind getting a car and spending a lot of time in it. There's practically no unemployment; there are plenty of companies hiring all the time. MCI/Worldcom and AOL have their headquarters here; MAE East is here too.
Admittedly, the cost of living here is fairly expensive, but it's nothing like Silicon Valley...
The doorbell rings; you answer it, and there's a man standing there who says "I'm from Microsoft, and I'm here to help you..."
Do you (a) shoot him, (b) fire a warning shot, or (c) helpfully send him down the street to the local crack house?
It appears many people on /. are advocating the wrong approach to dealing with this, namely spreading the code far and wide. This is doomed to fail, because we're being driven underground, and prevented from engaging in perfectly legal activity... the reverse engineering of CSS for the purposes of compatibility. Spreading the code around in the absence of someone willing to take responsibility for maintaining it is not going to help in producing a Linux/OpenSource DVD player. Running underground is acting like the pirates they want to paint us as.
Ah, but unfortunately you're wrong there: in many jurisdictions (the UK right now, the US Real Soon Now) reverse engineering (or breaking) copy protection is illegal. I don't agree with the law, but I agree that it's a good idea not to publicly engage in illegal activities that are opposed by commercial entities who can afford lots of lawyers. What Derek and MoRE are advocating is that the work be moved (just like open source encryption work has been moved) to friendlier places. This won't actually stop the work, or make it any harder to use, but it protects the developers from the lawyers.
As a side note, while I used to think that uniform rules across all governmental jurisdictions would be a good thing, I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that uniform rules would just result in uniformly oppressive rules, whereas our current hodge-podge system actually allows more people more freedom. Go figure.
IANAL, but ... it depends upon where you are, and how patents and copyrights work where you are.
Quick summary of Patents, Copyrights, and Trade Secrets for the USA:
You get a patent on X (and patent protection) for releasing the method for doing X. You get to charge everyone licensing fees for doing X, regardless of how they implemented X. In theory X is supposed to be a mechanical or chemical process, but software algorithms and business processes are patentable in the USA.
You get a copyright on X simply by labeling X with a copyright notice. The copyright protects you from other people using a direct (or indirect) copy of X, but if someone else implements X themselves, without any use of your X in their product, you're out of luck.
You can get a trade secret for X just by claiming that X is a trade secret, but you have to keep it secret. Trade secrets are usually fought-out between companies when critical employees (ie: they had access to the secret) change companies, and the new company starts using X. Trade secrets are damned hard to protect, unless you can implement them in hardware that can't be reverse engineered.
Reverse engineering is the process of gathering information about X without having access to the source code, blueprints, formula, etc for X. Reverse engineering is legal in the USA for purposes of building interoperable products, as long as your final implementation of X does not derive in any way shape or form from the original X. Thus you typically need two teams -- one which reverse engineers X and produces a complete specification of X, and another team (the clean room team) that implements a new X from the specification, and nothing else.
I am sure that the CSS algorithm was not protected by a patent, since the patent process would require that the CSS algorithm be published in the body of the patent. If it was patented, then the DeCSS implementers would be in violation of the patent, but in the absence of a patent, that isn't a threat.
If the CSS algorithm was copyrighted (almost certainly) then it would be protected from people making binary copies and using the copies, but that isn't what happened here. The original reverse engineering team (in Norway) may have violated their shrink-wrap license (the one that says you're not allowed to reverse-engineer the product) but shrink-wrap licenses are on fairly shaky legal ground, and the reverse-engineering clause is probably the least legal.
If the CSS algorithm was a Trade Secret, and someone else figured out the secret, then in general the DVD people are S*** Out Of Luck.
Of course, this is all subject to the legal distinctions between differing jurisdictions, and I have no idea about how the laws in other countries will interact with the US laws in this case. In any case, I don't think that Derek is in trouble, as long as he isn't stashing decrypted DVD movies on his website, but again, IANAL.
Employee wages for R&D are tax deductable. It is done in the large corp I work for.
Yes, but only if it's actually R&D ... Research and Development. Keep in mind that in a traditional company, research and development is a very small part of bringing a product to market. If I'm building widgets, R&D is what I spend to determine (1) if widgets can be built at all, and (2) how to build a widget. The bulk of my costs in producing widgets will be in purchasing the machines and raw materiels necessary to produce widgets and in paying the wages of the employees that produce the widgets.
The reason for that tax deduction was to encourage businesses to develop new products without worrying (too much) about spending money on research and development that doesn't pan out.
Now contrast that with software companies, where the development step (ie: implementing the program) is really the production step, because media production (floppies and CDs and manuals) is such a small part of the overall cost. In this case, by the existing rules, software companies are being given tax deductions for all of their actual production costs. That's a hell of a deal for Microsoft, but not exactly what the IRS intended.
For what it's worth, the IRS is beginning to crack down on this sort of abuse. Who knows if it will do any good...That said, my reasons for wanting to invest in the Red Hat IPO are the same reasons that soldiers during WW I and WW II brought back souveniers from the war -- they wanted something to remind themselves, and others, that they had been there, fought the war, and won.
I wanted a souvenier of the Open Source Software wars ... and I wanted an original. I don't happen to work for Red Hat, so I haven't earned any stock in Red Hat, so the only other way to get it was to buy it, preferably as early as possible. To me it's the difference between collecting first-issue stamps, and collecting mint stamps -- anyone can buy unused stamps at the post office, but there's only a limited number of first-issues for a particular stamp. I wanted first-issue stock in Red Hat, so I could tell stories about it years from now, when no one really remembers the Bad Old Days when Microsoft Ruled the World.
Instead my story will be a different one, a tale of disappointment, not joy.
PS: I actually did read all of Red Hat's SEC filing ... long before they sent me their invitation to participate in the IPO.
Dxxxxxx would lease the software to a customer, and for an additional fee, would lease the CASE tool. For an even larger fee, the customer could get the application source code, but never the CASE tool source. All of the source code was held in escrow, to be given to the customers in the event that Dxxxxxx folded (not likely -- they've been consistently profitable for 30+ years).
There's no economic incentive for Dxxxxxx to release their source code -- the field has several vendors and stiff competition, and most of their customers wouldn't know what to do with the source if they got it.
This arrangement gives Dxxxxxx a recurring revenue stream, and their customers get regular releases, updates, and bug fixes, and the ability to customize the software for their own needs.
There are thousands of companies out there operating in the same manner, providing customized solutions to anywhere from a dozen to hundreds of customers. These so-called "vertical applications" are a necessary part of the software universe that would never be created by open source developers -- they're too expensive to write, and not enough people need them.
Visigenic came late to the CORBA party (Orbix was there much earlier) but in the last 3 years, Visigenic has been responsible for most of the new developments in CORBA. Visigenic basically wrote the specification for IIOP (the Internet Inter-Orb Protocol) which is the vendor-vendor interoperability specification for CORBA over TCP/IP. Visigenic also defined the Java bindings for CORBA, with everyone else playing catch up. Orbix might be a bigger company, but Visigenic has been redefining the CORBA marketplace for the last 3 years.
Last year Microsoft cut a deal with Orbix whereby Orbix would integrate DCOM into their CORBA Orb; now Microsoft is buying a good-sized chunk of the most important CORBA vendor to come along in years.
The Microsoft Way: If you can't beat them, buy them.
Dear Sirs:
I just finished reading your feature "Suffer the (White, Middle-Class) Children" (http://www.villagevoice.com/features/9921/dark.sh tml) and I must say I am quite disappointed. Your writer apparently heard stories of suffering and pain, then checked a color bar and saw "white" and "male" and concluded that the pain and suffering weren't real, and that this was just the white, male establishment trying to steal the identity-politics initiative. Hardly the journalistic thoroughness that The Village Voice is known for.
Neither Jon Katz, nor the thousands of kids and adults that wrote him, claimed that they were the only people being punished for being different; all they said was "Hey, it's happening here, too." School *is* Hell; Matt Groening wasn't telling any new tales when he drew that collection of cartoons a decade ago.
I've never been a fan of identity-politics -- I've always felt that the problem was "the system" was taking advantage of individuals, because individuals rarely have any way to fight the system or even of knowing that the system doesn't have to be that way. Black, white, female, male, adult, child: as individuals we are all easily oppressed; only by gathering together can we become strong enough to fight the system.
But there are plenty of special interests that have figured out that they don't have to gather everyone and address all the problems -- all they need is to gather enough people from a single category, and focus on one set of problems -- and they'll have found their own special path to power, and representation within the system, consequently make the system that much worse for the rest of us. Blacks, women, gays, the elderly, the poor, the handicapped -- they all have their special needs and special desires, and their own special advocates who are all just more cogs in the system.
Your writer and your editorial policies indicate to me that The Village Voice is proud of its place within the system, and isn't interested in anyone else upsetting the status quo. Just remember when you send your kids off to school in the morning, you're condemning them to the same daily torture that you once suffered, and remind yourself that you had a chance to say and do something about it -- and decided not to rock the boat. I hope you feel proud of yourselves.
Where do you think they test those ICBMs, anyhow?
Would someone please explain the logic to me? Why didn't she sue the car maker as well, for not making a car that allowed her to drink coffee and drive at the same time? Or Juan Valdez, because coffee beans were used to make the coffee?
If I ran McDonalds, and someone came to me, using that sort of logic, I'd be pretty hard-pressed to think of a reason to pay them. In fact, if I did pay them, the McDonalds shareholders would have every right to fire me.