I read his letter, it was just a string of non-sequiturs, AFAICT. What exactly about the GPL is allegedly in violation of the constitution, or any other law for that matter? Seriously, I couldn't see anything in the letter about how the GPL violates anything. He just says "we hate the GPL because we want to write proprietary software and make money off of it". Well, good! Have at it, champ! Who's stopping you? Certainly not the GPL, the FSF, Redhat, or whatever else he's attacking this week.
Oh, and I like how he lumps patents and copyright together, so if you are against software patents, that means you are against Copyright. o_O WTF?
I know IHBT, but my God, I hate this guy. I thought Ransom Love was Clueless, but he's a genius compared to this waste of DNA.
although there may be MULTIPLE products in the closed source arena, they are all by DIFFERENT companies and compete. OpenSource is supposed to be a place where this shouldnt happen, everyone should work together to make one single product better.
You are so wrong. Competition is just as important in the FOSS community as it is among proprietary software companies.
The FOSS community provides an evolutionary system for software development. Without competition, redundancy, and yes, even extinction, the evolutionary process would flounder and stagnate. Choice is Good. Competition is Good. Telling a FOSS developer that they should work on ABC when they want to work on XYZ is not only Bad, it's laughably unworkable.
Read again what the parent said. Yes, the users are important, because their eyes and wallets are the products. The advertisers are the customers, not the users. This is true for all mass media, except those that work exclusively by subscription or otherwise without advertisement revenue (e.g., HBO).
The point is that Adobe publishes the specs for PDF, so it's much easier for third parties to read/write PDF documents. Unlike the top-secret, purposely obfuscated DOC format.
I'd be interested to know in what sense Mr. Love thinks that Novell could have "owned" Linux, had they played their cards right.
If he meant that literally, it's mind-boggling that someone could have been an executive for Linux-related companies for so many years, and still have absolutely no clue about it.
But hey, I've learned not to underestimate this guy in the cluelessness department.
Look, I'm a technophile, but I cannot comprehend why there is such a push for these closed e-voting systems which have been shown unequivocally to be fundamentally flawed. I'll take hanging chads over this garbage any day.
I can't believe the lead scientist had to take out a loan against potential future corporate sponsorship to pay for this amazing project. Come on, UK, it's only 25m pounds! I hope they'll at least bail him out if the advertising revenue never materializes.
Or better yet, I hope he gets stinking rich from it!:)
funny post, but why would it have to be shut off at the moon? the final relay satellite in Earth orbit can shut off (or at least redirect) the microwave beam. This also has the advantage that the satellite (assuming geosynch. orbit) is always in the same direction in the sky, unlike the Moon.
The receiving station only has a mirror. That's it. It isn't required to "send" anything. Your concern would be a problem for some of the other failsafe methods I mentioned in passing, but not for the laser-bounce method, nor for the IR cameras onboard the satellite, monitoring the temperature around the receiving station.
The refractive properties of the atmosphere as a function of wavelength are well-understood. Even if it wasn't understood, as long as the satellite is in geostationary orbit, you can aim the lasers empirically at low power and then turn it on.
The time-dependent changes in the refractive properties due to weather are tiny, and made even tinier by the fact that the refraction happens only very near the target, compared to the total path-length from geostationary orbit.
It's not hard to think of very robust failsafes. The microwave satellite could have a modest optical laser pointing exactly parallel to the microwave beam. This would bounce off a mirror at the receiving station on the ground and back to a detector on the satellite. If that signal was interrupted, then the assumption is that the laser is no longer hitting the mirror, so you have a pointing error. So then you immediately shut down the microwave beam, or divert it harmlessly into space. Okay, it wouldn't work on a cloudy day, but this could be one of several failsafes; I'm sure people can think of more (GPS, temperature sensors placed around the receiving dish, IR camera on the satellite monitoring the surface temperature around the receiver, etc.).
Letting big business into the Linux groundfloor is like allowing that annoying kid Tyler into your awesome secret clubhouse: he screws around with too many things, then the club is ruined.
Amen!
I prefer a world in which _we_ are the only ones who can benefit from this amazing technology.
This I disagree with. Actually, just the word "only". Big business is welcome to join our club, to the extent that they promise not to be annoying Tyler, and screw everything up. Maybe it's inevitable, and corporations will definitely screw up the community, but I don't think so. Not yet anyway...
How about a null result? I'm in Baltimore; I looked for the aurorae last night, but saw nothing (I've seen them from Wisconsin before, so I know what I was looking for). I can't guarantee it wasn't due to light pollution, but it was a clear, relatively dark night.
Cool, glad you like it:) Be sure to update again after 3.2 is released; we've added a lot since the last release.
[and, BTW, we did a pretty rigorous in-house QA test of KStars in preparation for KDE-3.2, which revealed about 50 bugs (mostly usability issues) that have since been squashed. So, yes, testing does happen for FOSS projects:) ]
It's called beta testing. It's called bugzilla. This is structured, distributed, open-source testing. Why would we use an open, distributed development model, and then turn to a centralized testing procedure.
There is no real direction to Linux, because anyone can do with it what they want. It's both Linux' strength and weakness.
Agree about the strength; I don't see how it's a weakness. Think of GNU/Linux as an evolutionary system. Like bilogical evolution, there is no "plan" or "goal". That doesn't mean it can't make products that are "stupendous badasses" (thanks, N. Stephenson!).
the lack of focus, and tendancy for people to get bored and abandon a project/distro, is not [nice]
Again, using the evolution analogy: extinction and competition for resources (developer man-hours) are critical parts of the system. It just wouldn't work without them.
So you're saying that the Pledge of Allegiance is tantamount to a prayer? The people fighting to keep the PoA in public schools say that it is unequivocally NOT a prayer (because if they said otherwise, it would be thrown out of court in an instant). So, to the extent that the PoA is not a prayer, then there is currently no law against anyone reciting it voluntarily.
I am not usually this relentless, but as an employee at STScI, your accusation of fraud really annoys me.
Anyway, I am prepared to prove you wrong. Please examine the animated GIF image I have placed at the following URL: http://www.stsci.edu/~jharris/sombrero.gif In the image, I have stacked the HST image and the VLT image on top of each other, and I am displaying each with the same scale and orientation. The first frame shows the HST image, the second frame shows the VLT image. You may need to set your browser to "loop" animated GIFs, or save it to disk and use a tool like gifview.
The rotation and scale are not perfectly matched, but it's good enough to see correspondence between the images.
Oh, wait. I think I see what you are on about. The "missing" stars are all in the dusty disk, right? If you look closely, they aren't gone in the HST image, just much fainter. The reason is simple: the intervening dust absorbs blue light much more than red light. These disappearing-objects are not foreground stars, they are probably star clusters in the galaxy.
If you read the technical data about each image: ESO, HST, you'll see that the ESO image was taken through redder filters than the HST image (V,R,I compared to B,V,R), so it's no suprise that the ESO image is going to see through dust better!
First of all, I don't see any stars in the ESO image that do not appear in the HST image, so what are you talking about?
Maybe you mean that the stars in the ESO image look more prominent than they do in the HST image. That's because the VLT is on the ground, so the stars (which are very pointlike in the HST image) are slightly blurred.
You misunderstood me, because that's exactly what I was saying.
Well, no. You said that the First Sale doctrine "makes no mention of a limit as to how many copies you can resell". This is simply not correct: it is mentioned quite explicitly that the legal owner of a particular copy is allowed to resell that particular copy.
How do you know Broadcom did not comply with the GPL? Maybe Broadcom gave Linksys the source code to its changes.
Hence the word "If" that began my sentence. Anyway, "if" that were the case, then Linksys is still bound by the requirements of the GPL; if any of its customers ask to see source code derived from GPL'd software, they must still provide it, as a distributor of GPL'd software.
You can try to juggle blame between Broadcom and Linksys all you want, but in the end, if someone is sold GPL'd software, then they have the right to see the source code. It is not complicated.
(a) I was replying to your statement that "First Sale makes no mention of a limit as to how many copies you can resell before it stops applying.". This is wrong; First Sale says that the lawful owner can sell their copy. Of course if you legally own two copies, then First Sale applies twice. That's not what you were saying, however.
(b) You say: "If you lawfully obtain hundreds of thousands of copies, you can lawfully resell hundreds of thousands of copies." If Broadcom distributed GPL'd software without complying with its conditions, then Cisco/Linksys did not legally obtain those copies, and they therefore have no First Sale rights.
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I read his letter, it was just a string of non-sequiturs, AFAICT. What exactly about the GPL is allegedly in violation of the constitution, or any other law for that matter? Seriously, I couldn't see anything in the letter about how the GPL violates anything. He just says "we hate the GPL because we want to write proprietary software and make money off of it". Well, good! Have at it, champ! Who's stopping you? Certainly not the GPL, the FSF, Redhat, or whatever else he's attacking this week.
Oh, and I like how he lumps patents and copyright together, so if you are against software patents, that means you are against Copyright. o_O WTF?
I know IHBT, but my God, I hate this guy. I thought Ransom Love was Clueless, but he's a genius compared to this waste of DNA.
although there may be MULTIPLE products in the closed source arena, they are all by DIFFERENT companies and compete. OpenSource is supposed to be a place where this shouldnt happen, everyone should work together to make one single product better.
You are so wrong. Competition is just as important in the FOSS community as it is among proprietary software companies.
The FOSS community provides an evolutionary system for software development. Without competition, redundancy, and yes, even extinction, the evolutionary process would flounder and stagnate. Choice is Good. Competition is Good. Telling a FOSS developer that they should work on ABC when they want to work on XYZ is not only Bad, it's laughably unworkable.
Read again what the parent said. Yes, the users are important, because their eyes and wallets are the products. The advertisers are the customers, not the users. This is true for all mass media, except those that work exclusively by subscription or otherwise without advertisement revenue (e.g., HBO).
The point is that Adobe publishes the specs for PDF, so it's much easier for third parties to read/write PDF documents. Unlike the top-secret, purposely obfuscated DOC format.
I'd be interested to know in what sense Mr. Love thinks that Novell could have "owned" Linux, had they played their cards right.
If he meant that literally, it's mind-boggling that someone could have been an executive for Linux-related companies for so many years, and still have absolutely no clue about it.
But hey, I've learned not to underestimate this guy in the cluelessness department.
Ok, I get it all, except for the Sept. 19th thing...anyone want to hit me with the old clue-bat?
Any evidence presented at trial is a matter of public record anyway, unless the judge seals it for some reason...
Look, I'm a technophile, but I cannot comprehend why there is such a push for these closed e-voting systems which have been shown unequivocally to be fundamentally flawed. I'll take hanging chads over this garbage any day.
You have got to be joking. Are you seriously telling me that the latest version of IE does not render transparent PNGs? Freaking unbelievable!
I can't believe the lead scientist had to take out a loan against potential future corporate sponsorship to pay for this amazing project. Come on, UK, it's only 25m pounds! I hope they'll at least bail him out if the advertising revenue never materializes.
:)
Or better yet, I hope he gets stinking rich from it!
funny post, but why would it have to be shut off at the moon? the final relay satellite in Earth orbit can shut off (or at least redirect) the microwave beam. This also has the advantage that the satellite (assuming geosynch. orbit) is always in the same direction in the sky, unlike the Moon.
The receiving station only has a mirror. That's it. It isn't required to "send" anything. Your concern would be a problem for some of the other failsafe methods I mentioned in passing, but not for the laser-bounce method, nor for the IR cameras onboard the satellite, monitoring the temperature around the receiving station.
The refractive properties of the atmosphere as a function of wavelength are well-understood. Even if it wasn't understood, as long as the satellite is in geostationary orbit, you can aim the lasers empirically at low power and then turn it on.
The time-dependent changes in the refractive properties due to weather are tiny, and made even tinier by the fact that the refraction happens only very near the target, compared to the total path-length from geostationary orbit.
They could, you know....turn it off.
It's not hard to think of very robust failsafes. The microwave satellite could have a modest optical laser pointing exactly parallel to the microwave beam. This would bounce off a mirror at the receiving station on the ground and back to a detector on the satellite. If that signal was interrupted, then the assumption is that the laser is no longer hitting the mirror, so you have a pointing error. So then you immediately shut down the microwave beam, or divert it harmlessly into space. Okay, it wouldn't work on a cloudy day, but this could be one of several failsafes; I'm sure people can think of more (GPS, temperature sensors placed around the receiving dish, IR camera on the satellite monitoring the surface temperature around the receiver, etc.).
Dude, get a grip.
Letting big business into the Linux groundfloor is like allowing that annoying kid Tyler into your awesome secret clubhouse: he screws around with too many things, then the club is ruined.
Amen!
I prefer a world in which _we_ are the only ones who can benefit from this amazing technology.
This I disagree with. Actually, just the word "only". Big business is welcome to join our club, to the extent that they promise not to be annoying Tyler, and screw everything up. Maybe it's inevitable, and corporations will definitely screw up the community, but I don't think so. Not yet anyway...
How about a null result? I'm in Baltimore; I looked for the aurorae last night, but saw nothing (I've seen them from Wisconsin before, so I know what I was looking for). I can't guarantee it wasn't due to light pollution, but it was a clear, relatively dark night.
Cool, glad you like it :) Be sure to update again after 3.2 is released; we've added a lot since the last release.
:) ]
[and, BTW, we did a pretty rigorous in-house QA test of KStars in preparation for KDE-3.2, which revealed about 50 bugs (mostly usability issues) that have since been squashed. So, yes, testing does happen for FOSS projects
It's called beta testing. It's called bugzilla. This is structured, distributed, open-source testing. Why would we use an open, distributed development model, and then turn to a centralized testing procedure.
Many eyes make all bugs shallow.
There is no real direction to Linux, because anyone can do with it what they want. It's both Linux' strength and weakness.
Agree about the strength; I don't see how it's a weakness. Think of GNU/Linux as an evolutionary system. Like bilogical evolution, there is no "plan" or "goal". That doesn't mean it can't make products that are "stupendous badasses" (thanks, N. Stephenson!).
the lack of focus, and tendancy for people to get bored and abandon a project/distro, is not [nice]
Again, using the evolution analogy: extinction and competition for resources (developer man-hours) are critical parts of the system. It just wouldn't work without them.
So you're saying that the Pledge of Allegiance is tantamount to a prayer? The people fighting to keep the PoA in public schools say that it is unequivocally NOT a prayer (because if they said otherwise, it would be thrown out of court in an instant). So, to the extent that the PoA is not a prayer, then there is currently no law against anyone reciting it voluntarily.
;p
Oh, and you spelled "yourself" wrong
Peter,
I am not usually this relentless, but as an employee at STScI, your accusation of fraud really annoys me.
Anyway, I am prepared to prove you wrong. Please examine the animated GIF image I have placed at the following URL:
http://www.stsci.edu/~jharris/sombrero.gif
In the image, I have stacked the HST image and the VLT image on top of each other, and I am displaying each with the same scale and orientation. The first frame shows the HST image, the second frame shows the VLT image. You may need to set your browser to "loop" animated GIFs, or save it to disk and use a tool like gifview.
The rotation and scale are not perfectly matched, but it's good enough to see correspondence between the images.
Oh, wait. I think I see what you are on about. The "missing" stars are all in the dusty disk, right? If you look closely, they aren't gone in the HST image, just much fainter. The reason is simple: the intervening dust absorbs blue light much more than red light. These disappearing-objects are not foreground stars, they are probably star clusters in the galaxy.
If you read the technical data about each image:
ESO, HST, you'll see that the ESO image was taken through redder filters than the HST image (V,R,I compared to B,V,R), so it's no suprise that the ESO image is going to see through dust better!
First of all, I don't see any stars in the ESO image that do not appear in the HST image, so what are you talking about?
Maybe you mean that the stars in the ESO image look more prominent than they do in the HST image. That's because the VLT is on the ground, so the stars (which are very pointlike in the HST image) are slightly blurred.
You misunderstood me, because that's exactly what I was saying.
Well, no. You said that the First Sale doctrine "makes no mention of a limit as to how many copies you can resell". This is simply not correct: it is mentioned quite explicitly that the legal owner of a particular copy is allowed to resell that particular copy.
How do you know Broadcom did not comply with the GPL? Maybe Broadcom gave Linksys the source code to its changes.
Hence the word "If" that began my sentence. Anyway, "if" that were the case, then Linksys is still bound by the requirements of the GPL; if any of its customers ask to see source code derived from GPL'd software, they must still provide it, as a distributor of GPL'd software.
You can try to juggle blame between Broadcom and Linksys all you want, but in the end, if someone is sold GPL'd software, then they have the right to see the source code. It is not complicated.
(a) I was replying to your statement that "First Sale makes no mention of a limit as to how many copies you can resell before it stops applying.". This is wrong; First Sale says that the lawful owner can sell their copy. Of course if you legally own two copies, then First Sale applies twice. That's not what you were saying, however.
(b) You say: "If you lawfully obtain hundreds of thousands of copies, you can lawfully resell hundreds of thousands of copies." If Broadcom distributed GPL'd software without complying with its conditions, then Cisco/Linksys did not legally obtain those copies, and they therefore have no First Sale rights.