The question, as others have pointed out, is whether of not the person owns the copy or just a liscense.
In that case it depends upon how to aquired the software. If you signed a contract *before* Microsoft gave it to you, then you have purchased a license to use their software. BUT - If you walk into a store, buy a shrink wrap box and purchase it from a retailer, then the US Commercial Code considers you the legal owner of the copy.
If M$ is claiming that you have only licensed the use of the software, then let's see their signature on the lease agreement.
At what point is John stealing Bob's work?
When he studies Bob's source?
No.
When he uses Bob's concepts?
No.
If he uses the same identifiers, or identifier structure as Bob did?
No.
If he simply cut&paste's a few lines from Bob's code.
No.
You forgot one bullet point:
If he violates Bob's copyright and license.
Yes. Assuming Bob's code is under the BSD license, then John can use it in any way he wishes, so long as he keeps the copyright untouched. But once he alters or removes the copyright line he is "stealing" Bob's work.
What gets me is why some folks finds it so onerous to give credit where credit is due.
Yeah. Probably the scenario went something like this:
"I've got a problem with my ATA code. Let's see how OpenBSD does it. Cool. Let's see how NetBSD does it. Hmmm, nice idea there. Let's see how Linux does it... Hey! That's my code!"
Yet the majority of people will to the right thing. I have my own name in the list of credits for two projects which I have never worked on, solely because those project borrowed some of my code. I didn't ask them to, they just did it because it was right.
Borrowing from BSD licenses code happens all the time. But everyone keeps the copyright around and untouched. That's just common courtesy.
I've seen the source tree for two different proprietary Unix systems. They both borrowed from FreeBSD or NetBSD. And they kept the copyright. So why can't GPL Redhat do it? Is it too onerous for them? Do they think they're too moral to bother? If Redhat has any decency left in their corporate soul, they'll take these two developers out back to the woodshed.
As any computer security expert knows, security is always balanced by convenience. A perfectly secure computer is inconvenient to the point of unusability. This truth applies to most things in life. The more secure the airport, the less convenient it is to travel.
What are your opinions on balancing the ultra-high security available with PGP, with the convenience of using it? Should secret keys be kept on a floppy (or USB memory stick), or is the home directory "safe" enough? How strict should we be in assigning trust to others? I'm interested in your opinions for both users at home and at work.
As a community, we should recognize that the Post as well as other news media outlets are NOT in their line of work to provide complete and unbiased coverage of events. They are in business to make MONEY...
I onced worked for a newspaper. We were all constantly amazed to see how much the mainstream media would take a straight-forward AP or UP newswire and completely edit it to make to read the opposite.
The problems isn't that the media wants to make money. We all want to make money. They can make just as much money reporting honestly as they can reporting dishonestly. The reason they do what they do is that they want to preach, not report. They have their own little idea about how the world should work, and are all too willing to lie in order to convince people they are right. They now consider the news to be an instrument of social change, instead of an objective statement of events.
"Bias" is not the problem. We are all biased and there is no way to get rid of that bias. But bias is no excuse for deception.
The paper I worked for was extremely biased. But if it was news and it was factual we reported it. Even if it made our "position" seem wrong.
I think your sense of semantics is getting in the way of your sense of proportion.
If the topic were something else, like "old versus new style init scripts in BSD", then you would be on target with your complaint, since FreeBSD and OpenBSD don't have the new style init scripts yet. And if the topic were "compiling the BSD kernel to support SBLive", then you would also be correct, since compiling the kernel and setting up sound will be quite different under each OS.
But the topic was not OS specific. It was "Ripping MP3s in BSD". I don't give a rip about cdrecord versus burncd, because you don't have to burn a damn thing to rip an audio track! lame works equally well under NetBSD and Open BSD as it does under FreeBSD.
If I'm talking about an OS specific topic, then I will use the specific OS name. But if the topic is general to ALL BSDs I will use the term "BSD" as a shorthand for "FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD"; if the topic is general to all free unices I will use the term "freenix" or "free unix" as shorthands for "FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Linux, GNU and variants"; and if the topic is general to all unix and unix-like systems I will use the term "unix" to refer to all of them, and damn the Open Group's trademark.
Working at a job that is interesting is FUN! But if you aren't making a marketable product, that job will soon disappear. That was the main reason most of the dotcoms went under. They weren't making anything that people would buy. Who buys a web page?
There are fun jobs out there. But before you take one, make sure that it has a positive revenue stream. Stock prices are meaningless, so go for the wage and benefits. And get the experience, which is the most important. When you're fifty in the tech field, the only advantage you will have is experience.
p.s. It sounds like you're still young, so let me clue you in on an important universal law of reality: nothing is perfect. You can find a good job, but that job will have crap mixed in with the ice cream. My current job is interesting, challenging, and productive, but it comes with a lot of crap known as PHBs, lawyers and long distance micro-management.
No, but it's something to put on the front of the box to make RMS happy. Oh wait, nothing makes RMS happy...
Re:And to think we had an astronaut named Buzz!
on
Beer In Space
·
· Score: 2
I think they would have more problem than just sparging and trying to open a bag of DME in zero Gee. (Ever open a bag of DME in ZG? Believe me, you don't want to do it!)
Eventually you get a suitable wort somehow. Then you add some yeast. These yeasties start fermenting away and giving off CO2. Where does this CO2 go? Nowhere! Your big globule of wort will soon end up looking like a floating sponge. Then if you manage that problem, you might wind up with a naturally carbonated bottle of ESB. Then you crack open that bottle and you wind up with nothing but foam everywhere but in the bottle.
Actually, I like this idea. Why? Because that's what Unix is to the end user. The sysadmin has to worry about individual computers, file systems and networks, but the end user does not need to.
I think Gentoo and LFS Linux are the only distros where you have to build everything from scratch. Everybody else has prebuilt packages. Even Slackware. I mean, nobody wants to go out and spend their entire three day holiday weekend *installing* the system! So you use packages instead.
I've built FreeBSD up from scratch from the base OS to XFree86 to KDE and all of their dependencies. Even on mostly autopilot, it took a three day weekend. Now I take a different tack. I install everything I want from a package, then recompile them in the background later, so at least I have a system I can *use* in the meantime.
I wouldn't worry except for two little things. The US now has a terrified populace all too willing to trade freedom for security, and a new cabinet-level Homeland Security Czar.
To me, it looks like the market prefers some version of the Artistic license to the MPL.
I would have mentioned that, except that virtually all AL licensed code is also dual licensed with the GPL (ala Perl). The MPL though is used by quite a bit of code outside of Mozilla, and is very popular in the Java community.
Dual licensing is an interesting concept, and I have no doubt that we will see more of it.
You need quite a computing power and good network connections to use the ports systems on a desktop on a daily basis.
How many packages do you install on a daily basis? I upgrade a port/package about once every two weeks. The first time you install it takes a while, but after that you don't have to worry about it anymore. Or you can initially install only the prebuilt packages, and only use ports for upgrading.
FreeBSD is free, as in speech, beer, and not telling you how to maintain your system.
The only thing I hope is that they let every choices to me. I use slackware and tarballs for one reason: the word automatic have been sounding weird for me.
You can do the same under FreeBSD as well. There are prebuilt binary "packages" that are essentially identical to Slackware tarballs.
What is great about ports is that you get all of the benefits of building from scratch, with the convenience of automatic builds, dependency checking, etc.
Let me correct you slightly. KDE, Gnome, MySQL, etc, are NOT part of the operating system. Neither is gcc, bash or emacs. Think about it, if you replaced bash with tcsh, are you now running a different operating system? Of course not!
An operating system is "software that controls the operation of a computer and directs the processing of programs (as by assigning storage space in memory and controlling input and output functions)." A strict reductionist would consider only the kernel and kernel modules to be the operating system. In reality, we must also include the file system, init process, boot loader, etc. as part of the OS.
What is there of GNU that is absolutely necessary to get a Linux system up and running? Nothing! However, GNU has provided a mass of software that makes using Linux much, much more convenient. Although this software is not the operating system, it does comprise the majority of the standard Unix "operating environment". Since it is not necessary, I cannot consider it part of the operating system.
What RMS does not realize in his crusade to rename LinuxOS, is that Linux is a NEW kind of system. It is the first component operating system and environment. It was created not from scratch, but from existing parts. Some of these parts came from GNU, but not all of them. Just as Home Depot does not get to name your kitchen extension, neither does GNU get to name this new kind of system just because it used some GNU parts.
Okay, I really don't like the GNU philosophy, and sometimes find RMS to be a boor. I would never choose the GPL for any of my own projects.
But at least I have a brain! Why would anyone choose to use the GPL? That's easy! I may not agree with them, but it's not my choice to make. I can think of several projects where the GPL is the most appropriate license to use.
All the BSD and Artistic License fans just wish you would go away, because you aren't helping the cause any. Hmmm, maybe you really are RMS in disguise trying to make it seem like we're all irrational fanatics.
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The question, as others have pointed out, is whether of not the person owns the copy or just a liscense.
In that case it depends upon how to aquired the software. If you signed a contract *before* Microsoft gave it to you, then you have purchased a license to use their software. BUT - If you walk into a store, buy a shrink wrap box and purchase it from a retailer, then the US Commercial Code considers you the legal owner of the copy.
If M$ is claiming that you have only licensed the use of the software, then let's see their signature on the lease agreement.
As a dedicated SuSe user, I thought I would give this a quick try and compare the two as both are KDE centric distributions.
If that's how you judge distributions, then maybe you should check out Slackware. Kernel 2.4.5, KDE-2.2, and XFree86-4.1.0.
At what point is John stealing Bob's work?
When he studies Bob's source?
No.
When he uses Bob's concepts?
No.
If he uses the same identifiers, or identifier structure as Bob did?
No.
If he simply cut&paste's a few lines from Bob's code.
No.
You forgot one bullet point:
If he violates Bob's copyright and license.
Yes. Assuming Bob's code is under the BSD license, then John can use it in any way he wishes, so long as he keeps the copyright untouched. But once he alters or removes the copyright line he is "stealing" Bob's work.
What gets me is why some folks finds it so onerous to give credit where credit is due.
Yeah. Probably the scenario went something like this:
"I've got a problem with my ATA code. Let's see how OpenBSD does it. Cool. Let's see how NetBSD does it. Hmmm, nice idea there. Let's see how Linux does it... Hey! That's my code!"
Yet the majority of people will to the right thing. I have my own name in the list of credits for two projects which I have never worked on, solely because those project borrowed some of my code. I didn't ask them to, they just did it because it was right.
Borrowing from BSD licenses code happens all the time. But everyone keeps the copyright around and untouched. That's just common courtesy.
I've seen the source tree for two different proprietary Unix systems. They both borrowed from FreeBSD or NetBSD. And they kept the copyright. So why can't GPL Redhat do it? Is it too onerous for them? Do they think they're too moral to bother? If Redhat has any decency left in their corporate soul, they'll take these two developers out back to the woodshed.
As any computer security expert knows, security is always balanced by convenience. A perfectly secure computer is inconvenient to the point of unusability. This truth applies to most things in life. The more secure the airport, the less convenient it is to travel.
What are your opinions on balancing the ultra-high security available with PGP, with the convenience of using it? Should secret keys be kept on a floppy (or USB memory stick), or is the home directory "safe" enough? How strict should we be in assigning trust to others? I'm interested in your opinions for both users at home and at work.
As a community, we should recognize that the Post as well as other news media outlets are NOT in their line of work to provide complete and unbiased coverage of events. They are in business to make MONEY...
I onced worked for a newspaper. We were all constantly amazed to see how much the mainstream media would take a straight-forward AP or UP newswire and completely edit it to make to read the opposite.
The problems isn't that the media wants to make money. We all want to make money. They can make just as much money reporting honestly as they can reporting dishonestly. The reason they do what they do is that they want to preach, not report. They have their own little idea about how the world should work, and are all too willing to lie in order to convince people they are right. They now consider the news to be an instrument of social change, instead of an objective statement of events.
"Bias" is not the problem. We are all biased and there is no way to get rid of that bias. But bias is no excuse for deception.
The paper I worked for was extremely biased. But if it was news and it was factual we reported it. Even if it made our "position" seem wrong.
I think your sense of semantics is getting in the way of your sense of proportion.
If the topic were something else, like "old versus new style init scripts in BSD", then you would be on target with your complaint, since FreeBSD and OpenBSD don't have the new style init scripts yet. And if the topic were "compiling the BSD kernel to support SBLive", then you would also be correct, since compiling the kernel and setting up sound will be quite different under each OS.
But the topic was not OS specific. It was "Ripping MP3s in BSD". I don't give a rip about cdrecord versus burncd, because you don't have to burn a damn thing to rip an audio track! lame works equally well under NetBSD and Open BSD as it does under FreeBSD.
If I'm talking about an OS specific topic, then I will use the specific OS name. But if the topic is general to ALL BSDs I will use the term "BSD" as a shorthand for "FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD"; if the topic is general to all free unices I will use the term "freenix" or "free unix" as shorthands for "FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Linux, GNU and variants"; and if the topic is general to all unix and unix-like systems I will use the term "unix" to refer to all of them, and damn the Open Group's trademark.
And the userland can differ very significantly. Compare Slackware to Debian to Redhat. Then look at all the microdistros based on busybox.
"BSD" is merely a shorthand. It's rather like saying "Linux" instead of "GNUlix/LiGNuX", or whatever the official name is this week.
Working at a job that is interesting is FUN! But if you aren't making a marketable product, that job will soon disappear. That was the main reason most of the dotcoms went under. They weren't making anything that people would buy. Who buys a web page?
There are fun jobs out there. But before you take one, make sure that it has a positive revenue stream. Stock prices are meaningless, so go for the wage and benefits. And get the experience, which is the most important. When you're fifty in the tech field, the only advantage you will have is experience.
p.s. It sounds like you're still young, so let me clue you in on an important universal law of reality: nothing is perfect. You can find a good job, but that job will have crap mixed in with the ice cream. My current job is interesting, challenging, and productive, but it comes with a lot of crap known as PHBs, lawyers and long distance micro-management.
No, but it's something to put on the front of the box to make RMS happy. Oh wait, nothing makes RMS happy...
I think they would have more problem than just sparging and trying to open a bag of DME in zero Gee. (Ever open a bag of DME in ZG? Believe me, you don't want to do it!)
Eventually you get a suitable wort somehow. Then you add some yeast. These yeasties start fermenting away and giving off CO2. Where does this CO2 go? Nowhere! Your big globule of wort will soon end up looking like a floating sponge. Then if you manage that problem, you might wind up with a naturally carbonated bottle of ESB. Then you crack open that bottle and you wind up with nothing but foam everywhere but in the bottle.
Easy, just drag your Vgg Oorbis files out of Konqueror! Of course, you need to have Dogg Vorbis installed before building Konqueror.
It's pretty cool, and I have no idea why KDE hasn't explicitely documented this anywhere.
Actually, I like this idea. Why? Because that's what Unix is to the end user. The sysadmin has to worry about individual computers, file systems and networks, but the end user does not need to.
I think Gentoo and LFS Linux are the only distros where you have to build everything from scratch. Everybody else has prebuilt packages. Even Slackware. I mean, nobody wants to go out and spend their entire three day holiday weekend *installing* the system! So you use packages instead.
I've built FreeBSD up from scratch from the base OS to XFree86 to KDE and all of their dependencies. Even on mostly autopilot, it took a three day weekend. Now I take a different tack. I install everything I want from a package, then recompile them in the background later, so at least I have a system I can *use* in the meantime.
I wouldn't worry except for two little things. The US now has a terrified populace all too willing to trade freedom for security, and a new cabinet-level Homeland Security Czar.
Actually, for many distros, I would just call it the "GNU Environment", as that's what it is. (and coming from me, that's saying a lot).
You could very accurately describe a Linux distro as "The Linux operating system plus complete GNU environment, XFree86, KDE, GNOME, etc."
To me, it looks like the market prefers some version of the Artistic license to the MPL.
I would have mentioned that, except that virtually all AL licensed code is also dual licensed with the GPL (ala Perl). The MPL though is used by quite a bit of code outside of Mozilla, and is very popular in the Java community.
Dual licensing is an interesting concept, and I have no doubt that we will see more of it.
Bring up Konqueror, put in an audio CD, and type "audiocd:". Then drag your MP3s out of there!
You need quite a computing power and good network connections to use the ports systems on a desktop on a daily basis.
How many packages do you install on a daily basis? I upgrade a port/package about once every two weeks. The first time you install it takes a while, but after that you don't have to worry about it anymore. Or you can initially install only the prebuilt packages, and only use ports for upgrading.
FreeBSD is free, as in speech, beer, and not telling you how to maintain your system.
The only thing I hope is that they let every choices to me. I use slackware and tarballs for one reason: the word automatic have been sounding weird for me.
You can do the same under FreeBSD as well. There are prebuilt binary "packages" that are essentially identical to Slackware tarballs.
What is great about ports is that you get all of the benefits of building from scratch, with the convenience of automatic builds, dependency checking, etc.
Let me correct you slightly. KDE, Gnome, MySQL, etc, are NOT part of the operating system. Neither is gcc, bash or emacs. Think about it, if you replaced bash with tcsh, are you now running a different operating system? Of course not!
An operating system is "software that controls the operation of a computer and directs the processing of programs (as by assigning storage space in memory and controlling input and output functions)." A strict reductionist would consider only the kernel and kernel modules to be the operating system. In reality, we must also include the file system, init process, boot loader, etc. as part of the OS.
What is there of GNU that is absolutely necessary to get a Linux system up and running? Nothing! However, GNU has provided a mass of software that makes using Linux much, much more convenient. Although this software is not the operating system, it does comprise the majority of the standard Unix "operating environment". Since it is not necessary, I cannot consider it part of the operating system.
What RMS does not realize in his crusade to rename LinuxOS, is that Linux is a NEW kind of system. It is the first component operating system and environment. It was created not from scratch, but from existing parts. Some of these parts came from GNU, but not all of them. Just as Home Depot does not get to name your kitchen extension, neither does GNU get to name this new kind of system just because it used some GNU parts.
Okay, I really don't like the GNU philosophy, and sometimes find RMS to be a boor. I would never choose the GPL for any of my own projects.
But at least I have a brain! Why would anyone choose to use the GPL? That's easy! I may not agree with them, but it's not my choice to make. I can think of several projects where the GPL is the most appropriate license to use.
All the BSD and Artistic License fans just wish you would go away, because you aren't helping the cause any. Hmmm, maybe you really are RMS in disguise trying to make it seem like we're all irrational fanatics.