This was my thought, once I had one that wasn't "Damn, those are some tiny bonsai mustard plants they're using". Why not try agriculture on a body a little closer to home first? One where we might realistically send space "farmers"... you know, like, the moon. Why are they going to Mars, except for the 31337-factor?
CDs don't have licenses. They are restricted by law.
DVDs I don't know anything about. I consider region coding and CSS to be unacceptable constraints on usability (and personally feel they are unethical as well). Not to mention that it's primarily a read-only medium, which makes it useless for recording TV shows and stuff. I'll be keeping the VCR until this changes, I guess.
Software. *sigh* Try using Free Software. I know I did and I'm the only person I know who gives a sh!t about it. My American friends and coworkers couldn't care less about it, or region coding and CSS on DVD's, nor the need to buy new CDs when the old ones die from mishandling. If they're any indication of where all this is headed, well I don't know, but it won't be getting better-- and these are the so-called liberals.
It's not theft. It's unauthorized duplication. They are both illegal, but they are not the same activity at all. If you can't tell the difference maybe you should pipe down during debates like this.
As for your damaged CDs, perhaps you should have backed them up onto tape cassette or.wav files BEFORE you damaged the discs. You don't have a legal license to anything. You have physical artifacts that are now unusable. Your argument for d'ling the songs via Napster is akin to saying you have a right to completely photocopy someone else's copy of a book because you dropped a cup of coffee all over one you bought once.
I realize you are trying to be funny, but if someone hates Slashdot, why the heck would they be using it? It's not like Slashdot has a monopoly on news-- unless you count Jon Katz.
Didn't the US try banning alcohol once? Didn't they end up with rampant gang violence and dangerous alcohol? You'd think we would learn.
This whole video game debate reminds me of watching the MN House debating a concealed carry bill (which was sadly withdrawn), some Demoncrat got up and read a list of school shootings starting with Kip Kinkel-- growing more hysterical in her reading with each incident. She then asked why the author of the bill wanted to flood our streets with guns. The response, (and I paraphrase) "Ma'am, in all of the incidents you list there was but one legally licensed concealed carry weapon involved-- and in that case it was a teacher who managed to put a rampaging student out of commission before he claimed more victims." Hysteria and fear are the fuels that feed the fires of the police state.
I have a few 486s, a couple of P/133s, a couple of P/166s, and a P/200. I assume all of them are over three years old and I got them all used, yet they spend the entire day working just fine (under an admittedly light load). I think they were mostly corporate castoffs-- so the main need was a couple of larger hard-drives so I could store files centrally using NFS. Heck, my rev. A iMac (with it's sluggish PPC233) is almost three years old and it's still a better machine than the brand new P3/6-something they gave me at work. I realize this is subjective and may have a lot to do with how much I don't like Windows or the apps I use at work.
Admittedly, the older machines run Konqueror under KDE a little slowly (although usably), but they are excellent to run console apps and various household server apps on. Plus, if one breaks in any major way, I can replace it for under $50 (and as long as the HD wasn't the point of failure recovery is simple, switch the drive into a replacement machine). If I centralized all my computing power into one "modern" machine, I'd be hosed if something went wrong. Out of commission until it was fixed, and facing potentially large repair costs.
I wouldn't bother to repair these older machines if they break though. Especially since so many people are essentially throwing them away-- even when they work perfectly.
I use keyboard and mouse (okay, trackpad) on the couch all the time. It's called a laptop. I use it for computing, though. When I want to play games I fire up the Sega Genesis or Playstation (and frankly, I almost like the older 2D games better than most of the newer stuff I've seen-- the only game I want in 3D is Wizardry).
I can't imagine spending a bunch of extra money to attach a keyboard, hard drive, or a bunch of other crap to my game console when I can buy a pretty nice computer for $500-$700 and be reasonably sure of software upgrades, Linux support, etc etc. And since most of us already own a real computer, that's money that could go into upgrades for the CPU, more memory, peripherals, etc.
Duh. Copyright law takes away your ability to give away software that you didn't write-- unless it is very old software or the writer actively disclaims copyright. The GPL comes along and hands me some additional rights, if I agree to not deprive others of those additional rights in the process of exercising them myself. The GPL has taken nothing away, and in the process granted me the ability to do things that are normally illegal without added permission. There is no price for using GPL software. You must agree to the terms of the GPL to distribute GPL software-- if you want to call that a price, so be it. But arguing semantics is a bad way to make your point if you think developers shouldn't protect their work from being taken and used in proprietary derivatives to which they themselves may have no access. It's a bit like saying "It's not really free speech if I can't tell lies about public figures without being sued."
Going back to front: Marriages, children, pets, churches and hobbies are not investments in the sense we are discussing. They are expenses for which we expect to get no financial return (although marriage can often be an excellent financial partnership, most people don't do it for that reason).
No. Americans seem to be especially greedy and selfish, but are perhaps more prone to accept change, oddly enough, than many places. But this is subjective, and yes, there are greedy people everywhere-- maybe Americans are just better at it, so they become a more obvious target. I'm certainly not immune to acting like a typical American when it comes to greed and selfishness.
I'm not presupposing that shareholders want anything other than high profits (and hopefully therefore increased stock prices-- since the shareholders don't actually benefit from profits, only from rising stock prices). In fact, this was my whole point. Shareholders CAN expect something else, if they make a conscious decision to do so. They seem reluctant for the reasons I already mentioned. The primary one is that they don't get the connection between their own personal greed and the things they think are awful about companies.
Examples: don't like paying $180 for Windows XP, and another $300 for Office, knowing that Bill Gates is raking it in? Step One, don't buy their software. Step Two, buy their stock and vote in new leadership who either set more reasonable prices or share the wealth more appropriately.
Don't like the fees banks are charging for this-that-and-everything? Buy bank stocks and tell the management that profits are nice, but not at the expense of customer service. Don't like the way Target buys up location property, uses it for a few years, only to build a Greatland store a mile away, then promptly abandons a very large building? Buy stock, vote in changes.
The large corporations everyone rails against are democratically owned and the top leaders are elected. This is a true victory for democracy and capitalism. If the citizens are going to whine about corporatism, etc, then let them not dodge their responsibilities as investors. And if they aren't investors, maybe they should look into it. Until shareholders connect their personal greed to corporate greed and do something other than whine to their Attorney Generals, I don't really care what the big companies do to tick them off. If American investors did really care and weren't greedy, you're right, socially conscious mutual funds would be more popular. But even more important is direct ownership of the stock. You don't get to vote on company matters without that.
Your last statement is actually untrue. If YDL sends you a binary and a source CD, they don't have to make any offers to provide the source code to you or to anyone else ever again-- they already have satisfied Section 3a of the GPL.
The GPL says you cannot set a price for the source code at all, except for the actual physical cost of distributing it (i.e. price of a blank CD or whatever). This is to prevent the source code from becoming very expensive while the binaries remain affordable.
If I buy a copy of YDL and they include the source, I'm personally responsible for giving copies of the source along with the executables if I'm sharing with my friends. The only way I'm safe is if I receive an offer for the source, but no actual source code. Then I can pass along the offer.
Not only that the FSF encourages distributors to charge for software, with the notion that this is a prime opportunity to secure funding to further develop Free Software-- something I'd say Yellow Dog is involved in. Certainly the $30-$40 for the set of disks you get from YDL is not making anyone a multimillionaire-- their 1.2 distribution was dang nice, imho, and I'm guessing that 2.0 would be money well spent as well (especially if you're not going to be a hardline Free Software zealot and only use the main tree from Debian).
One solution is for those consumers to make more of an effort to be the shareholders who put different objectives in place for the corporations. Anyone who owns shares in a mutual fund has basically forfeited their real ownership rights in the corporations in which they've invested-- but shareholders realizing this could begin to own equities more directly. Then there is nothing that says that corporate success can't be measured in other ways than capital gains.
Common wisdom states that turning as high a profit as possible is what the shareholders want. But this only stands because not enough shareholders have spoken out. Today's large corporations use democratic methods to choose their directors, so there is no reason for the status quo to continue. Except that as a group Americans seem to be greedy and selfish and wouldn't believe that a deviation from the current "natural order" of things is a good idea. They might not even understand the notion that "return on investment" can include something other than financial returns.
Wouldn't it be difficult to sneak in a backdoor on an active project? I mean, if I go to cvs commit a module I've been working on (from source I checked out prior to the backdoor being committed or inserted), I'm going to hit a conflict and either have to compare my module to the newer repository or I'm going to commit right over the backdoor with my clean code.
Although I'd say this is unlikely with many of the projects on SF, and rare in any case, since depending on the number of developers on a project, you'll want to checkout a copy of the source just prior to working on a module just to prevent conflicts anyway.
Cripes man, get over it. Millions of people fork over the money that drives the music business. They obviously love the drivel just fine. They also shop at strip malls, drive a lot of trucks, eat McDonald's and Burger King and watch broadcast "news".
If you want to take back music for our "culture", buy an instrument and learn to play. They can't commodify that. But please spare me this nonsense about our culture being co-opted-- this stuff IS our culture, like it or not.
I'd think Netscape 6 is more likely to have an impact. What this really seems to be about is the fact that AOL needs to make sure they are on the desktops as shipped-- easiest way to do that is to make a deal with MS, as most desktops ship with MS Windows. MS sets conditions, including IE (which I don't understand since the browser is no charge anyway-- I suppose this helps sell IIS on NT for the server side) and media player, for such inclusion.
It may be that in this case there is nothing tipping MS's hand and that AOL recognizes that they need to be on the desktop from first boot and that their CD-mania is not a primary driver in sales. I can't imagine that OEM's are telling MS that they won't ship Windows if they don't have AOL-- especially since the OEMs could add it. So this is all about AOL making concessions-- probably they noticed that sales of Netscape server software was pathetic compared to AOL subscription fees.
No kidding. I thought that getting sued was half the fun with Aimster. To use the DMCA to thwart the RIAA's attempt to shut down trading services by encrypting the data in transmission so that they should really have no way to know what you are trading. This sets up a precedent for protecting the innocent until they are proven guilty.
With Napster it was all too obvious that you were offering up restricted files for public download, with Aimster (which I have not used) it looks as though you need to find individuals with which to trade-- the only way they can know what you are trading is to trade with you (i.e. go in undercover). Of course, this shunts the responsibility clearly to the user. I guess now instead of a largely anonymous trading system, you'll want to make sure that you aren't trading with an RIAA lawyer or an FBI agent. That could get you more than banned from Aimster since they will have caught you committing a crime (if you are sharing their songs rather than stuff you have a right to share).
I agree. I am personally interested in Free Software. I am in the process of removing Red Hat and Yellow Dog from my home machines, because they do not differentiate between Free software and freely distributable software, and replacing them with Debian (although I do a lot of compiling from source as well-- especially on packages where I want to be up to date). While it's nice that RH and YDL don't require extra seat licenses like some OSes, the further I can get from having proprietary software running on Linux, the better IMHO. I still have one dual-boot for Mac OS, but even that I'd like to do without.
But what I don't see is a large trend towards Free software on Windows or Mac, except when Unix or Linux fans want to have their familiar tools and stuff around. Then it's off to cygwin, perl, and the like. Given that only software developers are likely to have compilers handy for Windows, I'm not sure most MS users would even understand just what a great thing they were getting by having the source code. They would surely understand their ability to freely share the code with other users, but I think they'd mostly consider this a curiosity-- as in "how do they make money giving away software?". And the not-so-obvious answer is (at least for the FSF) "they don't, they're a charity".
But I agree adding this restriction is foolhardy. It undermines the very principle of user freedom and can only serve to limit exposure. Right now I can do quick Perl scripts on Windows to impress my coworkers, but if there were a Free-OS-only restriction like this on it, the language would be largely useless--since it would only run on small Linux machines and not the big HP's and it would only run on machines at home and not at work. It might only be the thin end of the wedge, but running Free software on non-free OSes is important for the growth of Free software.
Consider a recent case in the book world. "The Wind Done Gone" was enjoined from being published because it was purported to be a violation of the copyright restrictions on "Gone with the Wind" (the former is a retelling of the latter from a different perspective), even though I gather that there are no verbatim copies of any part of the original in the later work. The later work wasn't even considered a parody or satire by the court that issued the injunction.
If this is allowed to stand as a precedent-- whether or not we might agree with this ruling-- it makes a strong case for not being able to read any source code and essentially reconstructing it, unless the original source code is public domain or otherwise disclaims copy restrictions.
My personal opinion is that only the form of a work should be protected, so that story lines, algorithms, and basic functionality are all open season as long as it can be shown that there was no direct copying or technical derivation involved (like taking a picture of a painting or using OCR to get code from a book).
Re:what can you do about it?
on
AOL And The GPL
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· Score: 2
Yeah, except that AOL is NOT writing anything except a set of applications that sit on top of Midori Linux (a Transmeta project). Gateway are the ones distributing the GPL software to users, they are the ones who have the responsibility to ensure compliance. But I guess it's much more fun to poke at AOL than it is to go after Gateway, eh?
Re:what can you do about it?
on
AOL And The GPL
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· Score: 1
Considering the machines are being sold by Gateway, I don't see why they would sue AOL.
Hmmm. Maybe they will grow up thinking of themselves as accountable to others for their actions. That wouldn't be a terrible thing.
Most of this stuff sounds relatively harmless to me, it is stuff that any parent already has access to: grades, attendance, discipline records. If this makes it easier for parents to be involved in school (if you can call those drone factories "school"), maybe it's a good deal. Hopefully the next step in school-parent interactivity will be online details about the brainwashing stuff they do instead of education, like DARE and the "Dealing with Bullies" unit.
Slashdot Mirror
This was my thought, once I had one that wasn't "Damn, those are some tiny bonsai mustard plants they're using". Why not try agriculture on a body a little closer to home first? One where we might realistically send space "farmers"... you know, like, the moon. Why are they going to Mars, except for the 31337-factor?
CDs don't have licenses. They are restricted by law.
DVDs I don't know anything about. I consider region coding and CSS to be unacceptable constraints on usability (and personally feel they are unethical as well). Not to mention that it's primarily a read-only medium, which makes it useless for recording TV shows and stuff. I'll be keeping the VCR until this changes, I guess.
Software. *sigh* Try using Free Software. I know I did and I'm the only person I know who gives a sh!t about it. My American friends and coworkers couldn't care less about it, or region coding and CSS on DVD's, nor the need to buy new CDs when the old ones die from mishandling. If they're any indication of where all this is headed, well I don't know, but it won't be getting better-- and these are the so-called liberals.
It's not theft. It's unauthorized duplication. They are both illegal, but they are not the same activity at all. If you can't tell the difference maybe you should pipe down during debates like this.
.wav files BEFORE you damaged the discs. You don't have a legal license to anything. You have physical artifacts that are now unusable. Your argument for d'ling the songs via Napster is akin to saying you have a right to completely photocopy someone else's copy of a book because you dropped a cup of coffee all over one you bought once.
As for your damaged CDs, perhaps you should have backed them up onto tape cassette or
I don't want to know what the government plans to do with that.
;)
Give the Bush twins a place to drink where no one will check ID?
Exactly. I think we finally have a case where two wrongs just might make a right.
I realize you are trying to be funny, but if someone hates Slashdot, why the heck would they be using it? It's not like Slashdot has a monopoly on news-- unless you count Jon Katz.
Didn't the US try banning alcohol once? Didn't they end up with rampant gang violence and dangerous alcohol? You'd think we would learn.
This whole video game debate reminds me of watching the MN House debating a concealed carry bill (which was sadly withdrawn), some Demoncrat got up and read a list of school shootings starting with Kip Kinkel-- growing more hysterical in her reading with each incident. She then asked why the author of the bill wanted to flood our streets with guns. The response, (and I paraphrase) "Ma'am, in all of the incidents you list there was but one legally licensed concealed carry weapon involved-- and in that case it was a teacher who managed to put a rampaging student out of commission before he claimed more victims." Hysteria and fear are the fuels that feed the fires of the police state.
Those links go to articles? I thought I was missing something...
I have a few 486s, a couple of P/133s, a couple of P/166s, and a P/200. I assume all of them are over three years old and I got them all used, yet they spend the entire day working just fine (under an admittedly light load). I think they were mostly corporate castoffs-- so the main need was a couple of larger hard-drives so I could store files centrally using NFS. Heck, my rev. A iMac (with it's sluggish PPC233) is almost three years old and it's still a better machine than the brand new P3/6-something they gave me at work. I realize this is subjective and may have a lot to do with how much I don't like Windows or the apps I use at work.
Admittedly, the older machines run Konqueror under KDE a little slowly (although usably), but they are excellent to run console apps and various household server apps on. Plus, if one breaks in any major way, I can replace it for under $50 (and as long as the HD wasn't the point of failure recovery is simple, switch the drive into a replacement machine). If I centralized all my computing power into one "modern" machine, I'd be hosed if something went wrong. Out of commission until it was fixed, and facing potentially large repair costs.
I wouldn't bother to repair these older machines if they break though. Especially since so many people are essentially throwing them away-- even when they work perfectly.
I use keyboard and mouse (okay, trackpad) on the couch all the time. It's called a laptop. I use it for computing, though. When I want to play games I fire up the Sega Genesis or Playstation (and frankly, I almost like the older 2D games better than most of the newer stuff I've seen-- the only game I want in 3D is Wizardry).
I can't imagine spending a bunch of extra money to attach a keyboard, hard drive, or a bunch of other crap to my game console when I can buy a pretty nice computer for $500-$700 and be reasonably sure of software upgrades, Linux support, etc etc. And since most of us already own a real computer, that's money that could go into upgrades for the CPU, more memory, peripherals, etc.
Duh. Copyright law takes away your ability to give away software that you didn't write-- unless it is very old software or the writer actively disclaims copyright. The GPL comes along and hands me some additional rights, if I agree to not deprive others of those additional rights in the process of exercising them myself. The GPL has taken nothing away, and in the process granted me the ability to do things that are normally illegal without added permission. There is no price for using GPL software. You must agree to the terms of the GPL to distribute GPL software-- if you want to call that a price, so be it. But arguing semantics is a bad way to make your point if you think developers shouldn't protect their work from being taken and used in proprietary derivatives to which they themselves may have no access. It's a bit like saying "It's not really free speech if I can't tell lies about public figures without being sued."
Going back to front: Marriages, children, pets, churches and hobbies are not investments in the sense we are discussing. They are expenses for which we expect to get no financial return (although marriage can often be an excellent financial partnership, most people don't do it for that reason).
No. Americans seem to be especially greedy and selfish, but are perhaps more prone to accept change, oddly enough, than many places. But this is subjective, and yes, there are greedy people everywhere-- maybe Americans are just better at it, so they become a more obvious target. I'm certainly not immune to acting like a typical American when it comes to greed and selfishness.
I'm not presupposing that shareholders want anything other than high profits (and hopefully therefore increased stock prices-- since the shareholders don't actually benefit from profits, only from rising stock prices). In fact, this was my whole point. Shareholders CAN expect something else, if they make a conscious decision to do so. They seem reluctant for the reasons I already mentioned. The primary one is that they don't get the connection between their own personal greed and the things they think are awful about companies.
Examples: don't like paying $180 for Windows XP, and another $300 for Office, knowing that Bill Gates is raking it in? Step One, don't buy their software. Step Two, buy their stock and vote in new leadership who either set more reasonable prices or share the wealth more appropriately.
Don't like the fees banks are charging for this-that-and-everything? Buy bank stocks and tell the management that profits are nice, but not at the expense of customer service. Don't like the way Target buys up location property, uses it for a few years, only to build a Greatland store a mile away, then promptly abandons a very large building? Buy stock, vote in changes.
The large corporations everyone rails against are democratically owned and the top leaders are elected. This is a true victory for democracy and capitalism. If the citizens are going to whine about corporatism, etc, then let them not dodge their responsibilities as investors. And if they aren't investors, maybe they should look into it. Until shareholders connect their personal greed to corporate greed and do something other than whine to their Attorney Generals, I don't really care what the big companies do to tick them off. If American investors did really care and weren't greedy, you're right, socially conscious mutual funds would be more popular. But even more important is direct ownership of the stock. You don't get to vote on company matters without that.
Your last statement is actually untrue. If YDL sends you a binary and a source CD, they don't have to make any offers to provide the source code to you or to anyone else ever again-- they already have satisfied Section 3a of the GPL.
The GPL says you cannot set a price for the source code at all, except for the actual physical cost of distributing it (i.e. price of a blank CD or whatever). This is to prevent the source code from becoming very expensive while the binaries remain affordable.
If I buy a copy of YDL and they include the source, I'm personally responsible for giving copies of the source along with the executables if I'm sharing with my friends. The only way I'm safe is if I receive an offer for the source, but no actual source code. Then I can pass along the offer.
Not only that the FSF encourages distributors to charge for software, with the notion that this is a prime opportunity to secure funding to further develop Free Software-- something I'd say Yellow Dog is involved in. Certainly the $30-$40 for the set of disks you get from YDL is not making anyone a multimillionaire-- their 1.2 distribution was dang nice, imho, and I'm guessing that 2.0 would be money well spent as well (especially if you're not going to be a hardline Free Software zealot and only use the main tree from Debian).
One solution is for those consumers to make more of an effort to be the shareholders who put different objectives in place for the corporations. Anyone who owns shares in a mutual fund has basically forfeited their real ownership rights in the corporations in which they've invested-- but shareholders realizing this could begin to own equities more directly. Then there is nothing that says that corporate success can't be measured in other ways than capital gains.
Common wisdom states that turning as high a profit as possible is what the shareholders want. But this only stands because not enough shareholders have spoken out. Today's large corporations use democratic methods to choose their directors, so there is no reason for the status quo to continue. Except that as a group Americans seem to be greedy and selfish and wouldn't believe that a deviation from the current "natural order" of things is a good idea. They might not even understand the notion that "return on investment" can include something other than financial returns.
Wouldn't it be difficult to sneak in a backdoor on an active project? I mean, if I go to cvs commit a module I've been working on (from source I checked out prior to the backdoor being committed or inserted), I'm going to hit a conflict and either have to compare my module to the newer repository or I'm going to commit right over the backdoor with my clean code.
Although I'd say this is unlikely with many of the projects on SF, and rare in any case, since depending on the number of developers on a project, you'll want to checkout a copy of the source just prior to working on a module just to prevent conflicts anyway.
Great. Now instead of red-baiting we have RedHat-baiting. How this gets modded up to "5, Insightful," is beyond me.
Cripes man, get over it. Millions of people fork over the money that drives the music business. They obviously love the drivel just fine. They also shop at strip malls, drive a lot of trucks, eat McDonald's and Burger King and watch broadcast "news".
If you want to take back music for our "culture", buy an instrument and learn to play. They can't commodify that. But please spare me this nonsense about our culture being co-opted-- this stuff IS our culture, like it or not.
I'd think Netscape 6 is more likely to have an impact. What this really seems to be about is the fact that AOL needs to make sure they are on the desktops as shipped-- easiest way to do that is to make a deal with MS, as most desktops ship with MS Windows. MS sets conditions, including IE (which I don't understand since the browser is no charge anyway-- I suppose this helps sell IIS on NT for the server side) and media player, for such inclusion.
It may be that in this case there is nothing tipping MS's hand and that AOL recognizes that they need to be on the desktop from first boot and that their CD-mania is not a primary driver in sales. I can't imagine that OEM's are telling MS that they won't ship Windows if they don't have AOL-- especially since the OEMs could add it. So this is all about AOL making concessions-- probably they noticed that sales of Netscape server software was pathetic compared to AOL subscription fees.
No kidding. I thought that getting sued was half the fun with Aimster. To use the DMCA to thwart the RIAA's attempt to shut down trading services by encrypting the data in transmission so that they should really have no way to know what you are trading. This sets up a precedent for protecting the innocent until they are proven guilty.
With Napster it was all too obvious that you were offering up restricted files for public download, with Aimster (which I have not used) it looks as though you need to find individuals with which to trade-- the only way they can know what you are trading is to trade with you (i.e. go in undercover). Of course, this shunts the responsibility clearly to the user. I guess now instead of a largely anonymous trading system, you'll want to make sure that you aren't trading with an RIAA lawyer or an FBI agent. That could get you more than banned from Aimster since they will have caught you committing a crime (if you are sharing their songs rather than stuff you have a right to share).
I agree. I am personally interested in Free Software. I am in the process of removing Red Hat and Yellow Dog from my home machines, because they do not differentiate between Free software and freely distributable software, and replacing them with Debian (although I do a lot of compiling from source as well-- especially on packages where I want to be up to date). While it's nice that RH and YDL don't require extra seat licenses like some OSes, the further I can get from having proprietary software running on Linux, the better IMHO. I still have one dual-boot for Mac OS, but even that I'd like to do without.
But what I don't see is a large trend towards Free software on Windows or Mac, except when Unix or Linux fans want to have their familiar tools and stuff around. Then it's off to cygwin, perl, and the like. Given that only software developers are likely to have compilers handy for Windows, I'm not sure most MS users would even understand just what a great thing they were getting by having the source code. They would surely understand their ability to freely share the code with other users, but I think they'd mostly consider this a curiosity-- as in "how do they make money giving away software?". And the not-so-obvious answer is (at least for the FSF) "they don't, they're a charity".
But I agree adding this restriction is foolhardy. It undermines the very principle of user freedom and can only serve to limit exposure. Right now I can do quick Perl scripts on Windows to impress my coworkers, but if there were a Free-OS-only restriction like this on it, the language would be largely useless--since it would only run on small Linux machines and not the big HP's and it would only run on machines at home and not at work. It might only be the thin end of the wedge, but running Free software on non-free OSes is important for the growth of Free software.
Consider a recent case in the book world. "The Wind Done Gone" was enjoined from being published because it was purported to be a violation of the copyright restrictions on "Gone with the Wind" (the former is a retelling of the latter from a different perspective), even though I gather that there are no verbatim copies of any part of the original in the later work. The later work wasn't even considered a parody or satire by the court that issued the injunction.
If this is allowed to stand as a precedent-- whether or not we might agree with this ruling-- it makes a strong case for not being able to read any source code and essentially reconstructing it, unless the original source code is public domain or otherwise disclaims copy restrictions.
My personal opinion is that only the form of a work should be protected, so that story lines, algorithms, and basic functionality are all open season as long as it can be shown that there was no direct copying or technical derivation involved (like taking a picture of a painting or using OCR to get code from a book).
Yeah, except that AOL is NOT writing anything except a set of applications that sit on top of Midori Linux (a Transmeta project). Gateway are the ones distributing the GPL software to users, they are the ones who have the responsibility to ensure compliance. But I guess it's much more fun to poke at AOL than it is to go after Gateway, eh?
Considering the machines are being sold by Gateway, I don't see why they would sue AOL.
Hmmm. Maybe they will grow up thinking of themselves as accountable to others for their actions. That wouldn't be a terrible thing.
Most of this stuff sounds relatively harmless to me, it is stuff that any parent already has access to: grades, attendance, discipline records. If this makes it easier for parents to be involved in school (if you can call those drone factories "school"), maybe it's a good deal. Hopefully the next step in school-parent interactivity will be online details about the brainwashing stuff they do instead of education, like DARE and the "Dealing with Bullies" unit.