> Is it legitimate to use source code that's publicly available but doesn't fall under any particular license?
Of course it is. This kind of thing happens all the time.
Frankly, I'm glad you don't work for us. The fact that you would consider "rewriting" code that works well just because it was written by someone external to your company doesn't speak well for your sense of business priorities or usage of time. It's much more important to cut the legal risks than to make the deadline. Focusing only on meeting your personal deadline, and not about damaging your company makes you an irresponsible employee. You are a liability.
> The original author didn't attach any particular license to the code.
I think that says it all. That just shows that you know nothing about copyright.
I don't see how this is "insightful". What I think the guy should do would be just notify the guy responsible by internal mail. After that you can expect that he solves the issue. Refuse to commit the issue until he has agreed to take responsibility in front of the next tier of management. Don't commit your fixes until he does so.
Are you saying that Copyright somehow has more privileged status than patents or trademarks and courts forgive minor infractions for the later two but not the former? No. He said that copyright is a different beast.
Trademarks, patents and copyright don't have may things in common, aside from the fact that they don't have a physical existence.
That was what I was thinking as well - surely the EULA says not to reverse engineer the code.
Now, do the people on slashdot agree with breaking a legal(ish) contract to find a GPL violation when they don't agree with breaking privacy laws to catch criminals/terrorists? Interesting dilemma:) It's not a dilemma. EULAs are of no value, in most of the world. So it's difficult to make the case that they are valid. Aside from that, the analogy you are using doesn't stand. One is people vs people, and the other is government vs people. One is a civil issue, and the other is not.
of slashdot readers caring about software licenses, in-between downloading photoshop from thepiratebay... No way, photoshop does not run on Ubuntu, thank you very much.
How do these libraries save time and money if you have to hire a lawyer first to see what you can actually do with it? You are the one who says they do that. Some of us use free software because it's the ethical thing to to. Some other people use it because of technical reasons.
Aside from that, non-free software libraries also have legal issues, and if you wanted to be safe, you would have to hire a lawyer in every case, because you have to deal with redistribution issues, plus in some cases EULAs. In the case of the GPL you could hire a lawyer once (provided you don't understand the terms after actually reading them) and then reuse that knowledge forever. Also, there are lots of texts explaining the GPL available everywhere.
For other licenses, such as MIT or BSD, the Free Software Foundation can provide you with some pointers. The are biased toward the GPL, and they say so, but they provide all the information you actually need, and do a good job explaining the other licenses implications.
If you compare that situation with alternatives such as buying the distribution of non-free libraries, free software has fewer legal costs. Licenses have legal ramifications. Just because you pay the guy, it doesn't mean he will let you do whatever you want. And if you can't read a free software license alone, of course you will need a lawyer, but then you will need a lawyer to read your EULAs for you.
You are right, I was wrong. "$100 laptop" is on the front page. Aside from that, Negroponte declared repeteadly that the 100 dollars mark could be reached after mass production. That didn't start yet. And I still think the dollar devaluation is the bigger issue against reaching that mark.
True, XO is not trying to make a profit. But its suppliers are. XO doesn't actually make any hardware. Everything is outsourced. So, no, it doesn't make sense. The fact that they couldn't produce the laptop for less than DOUBLE what they had planned should make this fairly obvious.
Further, as I've said before, there is nothing preventing you from getting the Classmate PC with Linux installed. It can even come pre-installed. It's not DOUBLE. It's 180 dollars. Less than 150 dollars from 2005, the time from the annoucement, when compared to most other currencies. Big deal. The guy said he wanted to make a cheap computer, then after economies of scale (which didn't hit yet) it would be near a hundred dollars. I think the "hundred dollar laptop" is very acheivable with about a year of delay from what was planned, currency devaluation aside.
Anyhow, just because the press said it was a hundred dollar laptop it doesn't mean it was a main objective, and and exact amount. The fall of the dollar should not be attributed to Negroponte, I think.
It's kind of like asking a 1000-pound man to tap-dance with speed, precision, and artistic flair. Nobody seriously expects you to get what you're asking for.
The law is far too blunt of an instrument to compel companies to nurture their competition exactly enough so that they promote growth without killing it.
Corporations are not people. They have no inherent right to life. If small corporations can die in front of bigger competition, big corporations could cease to be viable because of competitive regulation.
I don't think Intel and Microsoft can adapt to the current world, and what the world needs from them. If they need to lose some weight, well, they will have to. They don't have to be viable at their current size. Regulation should be in the best interest of the public, not of some of the existing corporations.
Yeah but according to the cult of the FSM pirates are cool and the lack of them is causing global warming. They're just being pirates in order to combat global warming! It's not a cult, Pastafarianism is a rrrreligion. Arrrrrrrr!
Not more of this low-carb propaganda bullshit. Calories make you fat, regardless of whether they come from fat, sugars, or starches. Calories don't make you fat. Eating coal would not make you fat. The food you eat has to be processed by your body. If you understand the process, you can make it less efficient. If for example regular efficiency was 90% and you had a stable weight with a 2000 kcal diet, and even processed calories were the only source of fat in your body, you could theoretically reduce the processed calories by reducing efficiency to, say, 60%, and ingesting a 2500 kcal diet. High fiber diets have some of that effect, although very mild.
Aside from that, low fat diets have a problem, and that is that it's very hard to keep a low fat diet. With low carb, it's very easy, because you eat tasty and filling food. It's very easy for me to keep that diet.
I have followed doctor provided low fat diets in the past, with aerobic exercise, even Sibutramine (sp?) pills, with no real results (never lost more than 4 to 8 lb).
I lost 30lb last (Northern) summer with a two month low carb diet, and 45lb total throughout a year, in less than 4 months of effective diet. That is almost 20 percent of my total weight. I am 240lb now, and i'm currently losing weight with not real effort.
What I think is good with low carb diets is that they are made for regular people. People can't sustain easily a strict low fat diet. A diet you don't follow is not a good diet. With low carb, it's easy to keep the diet, because you know you can't eat that delicious pizza, but you will have a big beef for dinner! and two eggs for breakfast! With low fat it's: you can't eat that pizza, but you can't compensate.
There is a trick, too. As low carb diets are more filling, you end up eating less calories too. Add that to the fact that the only carbs you eat are high in fiber, and you have a smaller amount of "processed", or effective calories.
I've seen a lot of OSS zelots not give commercial software a try, and just rant against it for no good/valid reason, just as I've seen people blindly flock to closed source software over free-as-in-beer open source because "people actually pay for it, it must be better". Neither is a good mentality. Both sets of software have their advantages. I am a free software zealot, probably you were talking about people like me, too. About trying "commercial" software, I spent last week trying commercial free software, I think you mean "proprietary" software, as in "non-free", or "non-open-source". There are valid reasons not to try proprietary software. There are technical reasons to reject some stuff just based on their licenses, for example integration issues. Strategical reasons too, licenses are more important than the quality of the actual product most of the time, because they establish your future relationship with it. Anyhow, ethical reasons should be enough. Just because some people might think ethics are not important in some context it doesn't mean they are not valid reasons.
For all of me, I would say make capitalism work on this. Rewards for finding problems with the plant. Rewards for credible evidence of people trying to smuggle anything out. Rewards for pointing out security issues. Rewards for any other things I have overlooked that are important.
Environmentalists? Let them be inspectors ( after training and background checks ) ( and only for the ones that are not rabidly anti-nuclear ).
And build them as far from population as possible, and dont let developers develop next to them after. That's not capitalism what you are trying to use. You are trying to use markets to solve some of the problems with capitalism (such as concentration of power along with money).
The other things you propose are against free markets. Issues with public stuff are not always easily handled neither by markets, or capitals. Nuclear power, as you are hinting, requires lots of central planning in order to be viable, and secure.
and this is exactly the problem, people in IT department think they are smarter than everyone else when all they are doing is maintenance work, why are you more important than the accounting or marketing department? I don't currently work in an IT department. I have, though. I said I was smarter. I am smarter than most people. By every metric I know. So, I am smarter than most other people in any organization. To an extent, that is the case of most engineers, they are usually smarter than other people, by most metrics. The issue is not cease believeing you are smarter, because that would be unpractical and against the reality, it's understanding the small significance being smart has in politics.
Now, I work as a consultant, and as I think I provide value for what they pay me, I have reasons to believe that I am an important person for the organizations that hire me. I really think that part of my job is making sure my opinion is heard, because that is really what they pay for. Of course, I am an adapted form of geek, and I had to learn people skills in order to make more money, I'm not complaining, but I feel for the IT guys.
I would agree that Poor attitude is the biggest threat... But here is where I find the Major Issues.
It workers think they are smarter then everyone else. We get overly impresses with ourselfs when we see things that we create ourselfs become an assest to the company. As well seeing other people strugle on stuff that seems basic to us tends to push that impression... But these other people are just as smart as you they are just specialized in differnt areas. Imagin if you are tossed in accounting, HR, or Upper Management for a Day how lost will you be...
I don't know about you, but I _am_ smarter than everyone else in most places where I am. It's not a delusion, it's a fact, I need to deal with it, for example when I need to explain stuff. Not only are most of the people less knowledgeable on the subject, but they are less smart. Smart and knowledgeable are two different things. I wouldn't be less smart if I was in upper management. I would be a mess for lack of knowledge alone.
Stuck in their ways... One of my friends from college went to me. At work do you use.NET it is great it is the only programming language I will do. Then I say well I work with different language from.NET to FORTRAN, his responce is no way I would refuse to do any of that stuff... Also there is resistance from the other end Fortran or C developers refusing to code in Python, PHP,.NET... They will give reasons of ease of coding or performacnce etc, etc, etc... but in short they are afraid to learn something new.
That is a career issue. You need to have X years of experience in stuff. Professionally you need to set the course yourself. Aside from that, most people I know don't mind learning new stuff. They just mind when it means changing careers and earning less money.
Not My Job... If their job is in hardware then they point to software problems and if the person is in software point to it as a hardware problem... Sometimes in order to be useful to for the buisness the hardware person should take a step back and see if he can alter the software to work with the hardware and vice versa. This is not the same as taking over the other persons job, but if it requires a little work to get it adjusted then do it yourself if it is a major problem then get the other guy involved
No way. That's not how it works. The guy who knows is the one who should make the changes. It's not a little work, because a little work here and there by lots of untrained hands can mean a maintenance nightmare.
Not my fault... I have seen sysadmins spend more time explaining whos fault it is other then workig to fix the problem. Fine it may be somones elses fault but your job is to fix it so it doesn't happen again
Fault fires people. I see it happen all the time. The guys who don't know stuff are busy talking shit of the people who actually fix things. The latters are the ones who get fired when the shit hits the fan.
Design Sabotage... You debate your method to the bitter end and you still loose management tell you to do it the way you don't want to do it... So you do it half assed and make sure all the problems that you warned about occure... Vs. putting your feeling aside and work to make this design work as well as possible.
No way again. Patching a flawed design is only going to make the problem bigger. You might be misinterpreting sabotage for refusal to sweep the design dirt under the carpet.
Set priorities based on personal feelings... If you like the guy he gets high priority if you don't he gets low... This is different then Lowering the priority of the guy who submits all his requests as high priority, boy who cried wolf situation... But baseing the priority on your personal feelings not based on how much the problem effects the company.
Please give me a consistent distinction between "police state" and "law"/ There could be "law" without a "police state". "law" is a subset of it, at least in theory. It is theoretically possible to live without breaking the law. When the "law" is so that just by living normally, you already break the law, it is a police state.
Revolutions now only happen when A) The country in question is extremely poor, and the revolution consists of disgruntled unpaid solders, or B) A government insider uses influence and subterfuge in order to convince the military to side with him, or at the very least refrain from using force against protesters.
Both of these cases usually lead to military juntas or a bloodthirsty dictator, though sometimes a country gets lucky with sufficient foreign intervention.
So you've never had sex before the age of 18, never drunk booze before 21, never engaged in illegal drugs, never saw friends engage in illegal drugs and refrained from calling the police? Never went over the speed limit? Never pirated copyrighted material?...
Get off your high horse.
You are talking about the Police State, not the law. You didn't mention anything wrong, unless you mean "pirated" literally. Those are just things in place for you to be always a delinquent.
So much for Brazil's IT sector for the next decade or so. Any businessman would have to be nuts to open an office there after this. Brazil's IT sector is huge. Brazil is a country that has its own economy, and is viable without foreign investors, at least for IT stuff. I think that they are doing the obvious. If a "company" commits a crime, the people responsible should be made to respond. If this had happened in the US, Cisco would have to pay a couple million dollars in cisco boxes for the customs (support not included).
Ever wonder why the US is or at least used to be so very careful about treaties and treaty obligations? Here's a great example.
Congress passes a law to protect US citizens from unscrupulous gambling operations that are not subject to the same kind of regulations that Casinos in the U.S. must meet -- and the world responds via the WTO by trying to extort $100 Billion dollars from the U.S. -- which means taking money from every citizen and company in the U.S. that pays taxes to support offshore companies right to not live up to regulations that make it more difficult to cheat the gamblers out of all their money -- and each of us will pay for that whether we as individuals or companies gamble or not.
Though not hopeful, I think the U.S. in this case should tell the WTO to go pound rocks.
You are missing the big picture. The idea of making a treaty is that all part respect it. If you are not going to respect it , you should not sign it. Those treaties are pillars of the US economy. The money comes from the outside, and mostly due to regulated trade, like copyrighted, or patent protected stuff.
Treaties have the issue that you have to give something in order to take what if offered.
Of course the US could try protecting their economy only through military force, and not treaties, but it's not a sensible thing to do. That seems to be your way of seeing the issue. Anyway, they are going that way already, making all treaties optional for the US, let's see how it goes.
I am just happy that my country refused an FTA with the US, because I could see that kind of thing happening. The US forces you to comply with their odd view of "intellectual property", but doesn't feel obligated to give anything in return. In this case the issue was that they want a "F"TA that allows subsidies in the US for our main exports. Luckily our new government didn't feel forced to sign the FTA that was being negotiated. This kind of non compliance is to be expected.
Even something as simple as "3D" might not be obvious to a person with rough English language skills. "3D"? You mean tridimensional? as in tres dimensiones ?
If you want to do a startup in software, you've got Microsoft dominating the market, and tons of free open-source to compete with. What's that leave? The web. If you are looking for fast money, sure. On the other hand, free software, or open source software don't have anything to do with money. Most of the money associated with software can still be had with those. Licenses are not everything. The catch is that in order to make money from free software, you have to actually provide a service. Implantations and consulting on other peoples software is a solid service to sell, and mostly welcome by most players. Custom developments, first level support, reselling second level support. It doesn't make you rich quick, but there's a lot of bussiness to be made. I am planning on starting a company of that sort next year in my country. I will let you know how it goes, if you want.
One of the most important sources of of millionaire-ness is birth. There might be some correlation between sense and money, but it's not strong. Cite a reference douche bag.
Oh wait, you can't. Its just your opinion because you can't make a million dollars.
You suck at life. Making a million dollars is getting easier by the minute.
My bussiness plan is:
1 - Buy a couple thousand dollars worth of gold. 2 - Wait. 3 - A million dollars. But no profit.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course it is. This kind of thing happens all the time.
Frankly, I'm glad you don't work for us. The fact that you would consider "rewriting" code that works well just because it was written by someone external to your company doesn't speak well for your sense of business priorities or usage of time. It's much more important to cut the legal risks than to make the deadline. Focusing only on meeting your personal deadline, and not about damaging your company makes you an irresponsible employee. You are a liability. > The original author didn't attach any particular license to the code.
I think that says it all. That just shows that you know nothing about copyright.
I don't see how this is "insightful".
What I think the guy should do would be just notify the guy responsible by internal mail. After that you can expect that he solves the issue. Refuse to commit the issue until he has agreed to take responsibility in front of the next tier of management. Don't commit your fixes until he does so.
Trademarks, patents and copyright don't have may things in common, aside from the fact that they don't have a physical existence.
Now, do the people on slashdot agree with breaking a legal(ish) contract to find a GPL violation when they don't agree with breaking privacy laws to catch criminals/terrorists? Interesting dilemma
EULAs are of no value, in most of the world. So it's difficult to make the case that they are valid.
Aside from that, the analogy you are using doesn't stand. One is people vs people, and the other is government vs people. One is a civil issue, and the other is not.
Aside from that, non-free software libraries also have legal issues, and if you wanted to be safe, you would have to hire a lawyer in every case, because you have to deal with redistribution issues, plus in some cases EULAs.
In the case of the GPL you could hire a lawyer once (provided you don't understand the terms after actually reading them) and then reuse that knowledge forever. Also, there are lots of texts explaining the GPL available everywhere.
For other licenses, such as MIT or BSD, the Free Software Foundation can provide you with some pointers. The are biased toward the GPL, and they say so, but they provide all the information you actually need, and do a good job explaining the other licenses implications.
If you compare that situation with alternatives such as buying the distribution of non-free libraries, free software has fewer legal costs. Licenses have legal ramifications. Just because you pay the guy, it doesn't mean he will let you do whatever you want. And if you can't read a free software license alone, of course you will need a lawyer, but then you will need a lawyer to read your EULAs for you.
You are right, I was wrong. "$100 laptop" is on the front page.
Aside from that, Negroponte declared repeteadly that the 100 dollars mark could be reached after mass production. That didn't start yet.
And I still think the dollar devaluation is the bigger issue against reaching that mark.
Further, as I've said before, there is nothing preventing you from getting the Classmate PC with Linux installed. It can even come pre-installed. It's not DOUBLE.
It's 180 dollars. Less than 150 dollars from 2005, the time from the annoucement, when compared to most other currencies.
Big deal. The guy said he wanted to make a cheap computer, then after economies of scale (which didn't hit yet) it would be near a hundred dollars. I think the "hundred dollar laptop" is very acheivable with about a year of delay from what was planned, currency devaluation aside.
Anyhow, just because the press said it was a hundred dollar laptop it doesn't mean it was a main objective, and and exact amount. The fall of the dollar should not be attributed to Negroponte, I think.
It's kind of like asking a 1000-pound man to tap-dance with speed, precision, and artistic flair. Nobody seriously expects you to get what you're asking for.
The law is far too blunt of an instrument to compel companies to nurture their competition exactly enough so that they promote growth without killing it.
Corporations are not people. They have no inherent right to life. If small corporations can die in front of bigger competition, big corporations could cease to be viable because of competitive regulation.I don't think Intel and Microsoft can adapt to the current world, and what the world needs from them. If they need to lose some weight, well, they will have to. They don't have to be viable at their current size. Regulation should be in the best interest of the public, not of some of the existing corporations.
Arrrrrrrr!
You can live in Fear.
Or you can be a proud patriotic American and refuse to live in Fear.
Those are the choices. In related news, the population of Fear Town is constantly diminishing for no aparent reason.
The food you eat has to be processed by your body. If you understand the process, you can make it less efficient.
If for example regular efficiency was 90% and you had a stable weight with a 2000 kcal diet, and even processed calories were the only source of fat in your body, you could theoretically reduce the processed calories by reducing efficiency to, say, 60%, and ingesting a 2500 kcal diet. High fiber diets have some of that effect, although very mild.
Aside from that, low fat diets have a problem, and that is that it's very hard to keep a low fat diet.
With low carb, it's very easy, because you eat tasty and filling food. It's very easy for me to keep that diet.
I have followed doctor provided low fat diets in the past, with aerobic exercise, even Sibutramine (sp?) pills, with no real results (never lost more than 4 to 8 lb).
I lost 30lb last (Northern) summer with a two month low carb diet, and 45lb total throughout a year, in less than 4 months of effective diet. That is almost 20 percent of my total weight. I am 240lb now, and i'm currently losing weight with not real effort.
What I think is good with low carb diets is that they are made for regular people. People can't sustain easily a strict low fat diet. A diet you don't follow is not a good diet. With low carb, it's easy to keep the diet, because you know you can't eat that delicious pizza, but you will have a big beef for dinner! and two eggs for breakfast! With low fat it's: you can't eat that pizza, but you can't compensate.
There is a trick, too. As low carb diets are more filling, you end up eating less calories too. Add that to the fact that the only carbs you eat are high in fiber, and you have a smaller amount of "processed", or effective calories.
About trying "commercial" software, I spent last week trying commercial free software, I think you mean "proprietary" software, as in "non-free", or "non-open-source". There are valid reasons not to try proprietary software. There are technical reasons to reject some stuff just based on their licenses, for example integration issues. Strategical reasons too, licenses are more important than the quality of the actual product most of the time, because they establish your future relationship with it. Anyhow, ethical reasons should be enough. Just because some people might think ethics are not important in some context it doesn't mean they are not valid reasons.
Better latte than ever??
Umm I need to taste that...
Rewards for finding problems with the plant.
Rewards for credible evidence of people trying to smuggle anything out.
Rewards for pointing out security issues.
Rewards for any other things I have overlooked that are important.
Environmentalists? Let them be inspectors ( after training and
background checks ) ( and only for the ones that are not
rabidly anti-nuclear ).
And build them as far from population as possible, and dont let
developers develop next to them after. That's not capitalism what you are trying to use. You are trying to use markets to solve some of the problems with capitalism (such as concentration of power along with money).
The other things you propose are against free markets. Issues with public stuff are not always easily handled neither by markets, or capitals. Nuclear power, as you are hinting, requires lots of central planning in order to be viable, and secure.
I said I was smarter. I am smarter than most people. By every metric I know.
So, I am smarter than most other people in any organization.
To an extent, that is the case of most engineers, they are usually smarter than other people, by most metrics.
The issue is not cease believeing you are smarter, because that would be unpractical and against the reality, it's understanding the small significance being smart has in politics.
Now, I work as a consultant, and as I think I provide value for what they pay me, I have reasons to believe that I am an important person for the organizations that hire me. I really think that part of my job is making sure my opinion is heard, because that is really what they pay for. Of course, I am an adapted form of geek, and I had to learn people skills in order to make more money, I'm not complaining, but I feel for the IT guys.
I would agree that Poor attitude is the biggest threat... But here is where I find the Major Issues.
I don't know about you, but I _am_ smarter than everyone else in most places where I am. It's not a delusion, it's a fact, I need to deal with it, for example when I need to explain stuff. Not only are most of the people less knowledgeable on the subject, but they are less smart. Smart and knowledgeable are two different things. I wouldn't be less smart if I was in upper management. I would be a mess for lack of knowledge alone.
Stuck in their ways... One of my friends from college went to me. At work do you use .NET it is great it is the only programming language I will do. Then I say well I work with different language from .NET to FORTRAN, his responce is no way I would refuse to do any of that stuff... Also there is resistance from the other end Fortran or C developers refusing to code in Python, PHP, .NET... They will give reasons of ease of coding or performacnce etc, etc, etc... but in short they are afraid to learn something new.
That is a career issue. You need to have X years of experience in stuff. Professionally you need to set the course yourself. Aside from that, most people I know don't mind learning new stuff. They just mind when it means changing careers and earning less money.
Not My Job... If their job is in hardware then they point to software problems and if the person is in software point to it as a hardware problem... Sometimes in order to be useful to for the buisness the hardware person should take a step back and see if he can alter the software to work with the hardware and vice versa. This is not the same as taking over the other persons job, but if it requires a little work to get it adjusted then do it yourself if it is a major problem then get the other guy involved
No way. That's not how it works. The guy who knows is the one who should make the changes. It's not a little work, because a little work here and there by lots of untrained hands can mean a maintenance nightmare.
Not my fault... I have seen sysadmins spend more time explaining whos fault it is other then workig to fix the problem. Fine it may be somones elses fault but your job is to fix it so it doesn't happen again
Fault fires people. I see it happen all the time. The guys who don't know stuff are busy talking shit of the people who actually fix things. The latters are the ones who get fired when the shit hits the fan.
Design Sabotage... You debate your method to the bitter end and you still loose management tell you to do it the way you don't want to do it... So you do it half assed and make sure all the problems that you warned about occure... Vs. putting your feeling aside and work to make this design work as well as possible.
No way again. Patching a flawed design is only going to make the problem bigger. You might be misinterpreting sabotage for refusal to sweep the design dirt under the carpet.
Set priorities based on personal feelings... If you like the guy he gets high priority if you don't he gets low... This is different then Lowering the priority of the guy who submits all his requests as high priority, boy who cried wolf situation... But baseing the priority on your personal feelings not based on how much the problem effects the company.
Yes. That happens all the time. It's a big
Dumbass.
"law" is a subset of it, at least in theory. It is theoretically possible to live without breaking the law.
When the "law" is so that just by living normally, you already break the law, it is a police state.
Yeah, foreign intervention is great for moderation of dictators. For more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_CondorBoth of these cases usually lead to military juntas or a bloodthirsty dictator, though sometimes a country gets lucky with sufficient foreign intervention.
You are talking about the Police State, not the law.Get off your high horse.
You didn't mention anything wrong, unless you mean "pirated" literally. Those are just things in place for you to be always a delinquent.
Any businessman would have to be nuts to open an office there after this. Brazil's IT sector is huge.
Brazil is a country that has its own economy, and is viable without foreign investors, at least for IT stuff.
I think that they are doing the obvious. If a "company" commits a crime, the people responsible should be made to respond. If this had happened in the US, Cisco would have to pay a couple million dollars in cisco boxes for the customs (support not included).
Congress passes a law to protect US citizens from unscrupulous gambling operations that are not subject to the same kind of regulations that Casinos in the U.S. must meet -- and the world responds via the WTO by trying to extort $100 Billion dollars from the U.S. -- which means taking money from every citizen and company in the U.S. that pays taxes to support offshore companies right to not live up to regulations that make it more difficult to cheat the gamblers out of all their money -- and each of us will pay for that whether we as individuals or companies gamble or not.
Though not hopeful, I think the U.S. in this case should tell the WTO to go pound rocks.
You are missing the big picture.The idea of making a treaty is that all part respect it.
If you are not going to respect it , you should not sign it.
Those treaties are pillars of the US economy. The money comes from the outside, and mostly due to regulated trade, like copyrighted, or patent protected stuff.
Treaties have the issue that you have to give something in order to take what if offered.
Of course the US could try protecting their economy only through military force, and not treaties, but it's not a sensible thing to do. That seems to be your way of seeing the issue. Anyway, they are going that way already, making all treaties optional for the US, let's see how it goes.
I am just happy that my country refused an FTA with the US, because I could see that kind of thing happening. The US forces you to comply with their odd view of "intellectual property", but doesn't feel obligated to give anything in return. In this case the issue was that they want a "F"TA that allows subsidies in the US for our main exports. Luckily our new government didn't feel forced to sign the FTA that was being negotiated. This kind of non compliance is to be expected.
On the other hand, free software, or open source software don't have anything to do with money. Most of the money associated with software can still be had with those.
Licenses are not everything. The catch is that in order to make money from free software, you have to actually provide a service. Implantations and consulting on other peoples software is a solid service to sell, and mostly welcome by most players. Custom developments, first level support, reselling second level support. It doesn't make you rich quick, but there's a lot of bussiness to be made. I am planning on starting a company of that sort next year in my country. I will let you know how it goes, if you want.
Oh wait, you can't. Its just your opinion because you can't make a million dollars.
You suck at life. Making a million dollars is getting easier by the minute.
My bussiness plan is:
1 - Buy a couple thousand dollars worth of gold.
2 - Wait.
3 - A million dollars. But no profit.