> Doesn't that seem a bit silly? What part of the GPL would they attack? What would they sue for?
Easy. They get one of their puppet companies (MindCruft) to publish something under the GPL, "steal" the code from their puppet, and pay their puppet to take them to court with a lawyer who will blow the case. Court finds GPL worthless.
Nothing's hard when you've got billions of dollars to spend on it. (Possibly excepting innovating, which must be hard indeed, since even all MS's $$$ can't seem to acheive it.)
> you'd be blind not to notice that the best the open source community is usually able to muster is simply running a step behind the innovations developed in the commercial software world.
Beowulf?
SSH?
TUX?
TeX?
LyX?
Python?
FlightGear?
themes?
tailored kernels?
piles of research code flooding out of universities?
etc...?
How many does it take to qualify as innovative? And how many of the products from your favorite closed-source shop are just clones of something someone else did first?
OSS might not have been first with all the things I listed, but it's still a running step ahead of most of the commercial software world with respect to most of them.
The only way you can claim that OSS doesn't innovate is to wear blinders that limit your view of what counts.
Ignoring the article (and it's possible FUD and/or misinformation), here's the crux of the matter for people who want to put their code under the GPL:
If a court case demonstrates that there is a "leak" in the GPL, then we need to be able to re-license our code under a GPL++ that patches the leak (hence the "or higher" clause).
However, we have no control over what a GPL++ might happen to say. What if RMS sells out (yeah, sure)? What happens after he dies? What happens if someone else takes over the FSF?
I don't see any particularly good solution to this problem. Probably the project maintainer should insert a clause reserving the right to re-issue the entire project under a new license at any time, regardless of who has contributed to it. However, the same questions asked about RMS above could then be asked about the maintainer, plus the problem of licenses for forks arises.
> All right. So I'm supposed to read this "LICENSE" file that came with the program. But I'm an experienced Linux/BSD/Solaris/whatever user. So I just type "./configure" followed by "make install". I haven't read the license for this program at all.
Actually, the FSF recommends that you display relevant information whenever the program is started.
Don't teach them to program at all -- teach them to solve problems. After you have a sensible solution strategy, expressing it in the syntax of a given programming language is trivial (boring) work.
The problem that I see over and over and over again, among both students and "professionals", is that they sit down and start throwing code at a problem without knowing a solution strategy for that problem. And for many of these people, if you try using the Socratic method to bring out their solution strategy you'll find that they not only don't know what strategy they're trying to encode, but that they also don't even want to talk about strategies -- they want to talk about the details of the incorrect code they've already written.
I'm not against hacking, and I certainly don't think every program anyone writes needs to be supported by an engineering discipline, but I do feel, very strongly, that people need to think of programming languages as a tool for expressing a solution to a problem, not as being the solution itself.
I'm amazed (and alarmed) that the courts ever started taking the testimony of paid witnesses to begin with. How can you believe the word of anyone who is being paid by one side in a dispute? (Let alone someone who makes their living that way, as many do.)
If scientists or other specialists do in fact have expert knowledge that is needed for the resolution of a case, let the courts serve them a subpoena -- just like they do for real witnesses.
> The body of work out there under the GPL is quite humongous and therefore I cannot believe that a court would just throw away the GPL
Possibly very important in this regard is the fact that some $BIGCOMPANIES now like the GPL or even have their own variants, so that if a court case ever came down to the traditional "biggest wallet wins" it does not necessarily mean that the GPL would be stricken down.
> If the government is going to be paying people to produce software, the software should be open for all taxpayers to use.
I like that idea in principle, but in practice it's not all that simple. For instance, the government used taxpayer money to fund the White House, but that doesn't mean Joe Citizen can schedule it for a week's use during summer vacation.
Conceivably there might be circumstances where they would produce software for limited distribution as well.
> when I release software I right I am sure to use not only a BSD style license but my own language which specifies what I consider fair use.
Perhaps you didn't mean that exactly the way you said it, but if you did mean what you said then you should be aware that the doctrine of "fair use" is a matter of law and legal precedent, not a courtesy extended by publishers. In the latter case the doctrine would not exist at all.
What I'm getting at is this: If your license has a "fair use" clause that limits what kind of "fair use" you would like to grant people, then you're SOL, because the courts are going to support their notion of "fair use" rather than yours.
The *AA may be frothing about IP theft, but other businesses are apparently booming on it.
I've been shopping for a new hard drive, and I see businesses such as Best Buy describing the humongosity of their drives in terms of how many thousands of 4-minute MP3s you can store on them. (Surely they don't think people are buying drives to store 20,000 MP3s that came from their own store-bought CDs, eh?)
> The United States government has no business telling a creator what they must do with their copyrighted work.
Actually, copyright exists in the USA because the US Constitution authorizes the Congress to create it. In once sense, you may have a point: the Constitution specifies "exclusive rights", which I would take to exclude any rights of the Congress to enforce distribution.
OTOH, maybe it would be constitutional for the Congress to use a carrot-and-stick approach: license it, or you'll be dismayed at how quickly copyrights start expiring.
> As a result, intelligent people such as myself, who could command 6 figure salaries in any profession will take different career paths.
Are you "intelligent" enough to make 6F in some other field? If so, what are you complaining about? If not, then you have merely illustrated the problem with the current system as it has been operating.
> Industry produces wealth - they produce the fact that California is the 6-th wealthiest nation worth, and they help the economy.
And yet they can't keep their own lights on. Again, there's something wrong with the system.
> So are we at the fighting stage or the laughing stage, I can't really tell.
Is anyone keeping a timeline of the Pronunciations of the Microsoft Fathers? We've had some doozies over the last month or so, and it probably isn't over yet.
> The right to profit is part of the American spirit.
You are aware that "the pursuit of profit" was listed as an inalienable right in the draft, but struck from the final version of the DOI? Maybe someone didn't think it was the kind of right a country should be built on after all?
> Anybody who works in innovative industries should embrace at least the concept of patents to prevent others from taking your ingenious idea and marketing a knockoff without giving you a dime.
I "disembrace" that idea. Vigorously.
The constitutional grounds for patents (in the USA) is about promoting progress, not promoting monopolies. If you read it carefully and think about what it says, you'll realize that the only things that could be patented and still promote the constitutional goals would be things that people could not figure out by examining. The philosophy stated in the US Constitution calls for patents as a way of getting people to share ideas that would remain hidden otherwise.
For example, if I invented a new way to rifle a gun barrel efficiently, people could look at it and see that it had been rifled, but they probably could not see how my clever method did it. They would be free to come up with their own methods of rifling, but if mine was truly more efficient they would want to know what they couldn't see, and a patent would motivate me to share my idea -- all to the good of the public (assuming the public needs rifles), not all to the good of me.
US Constitution to the side, there's also an ethical issue. Anything you think of is built on millenia of prior ideas and technology. Can you fairly milk the public for the use of "your" idea, when 99.9999...% of "your" idea is just the traditions of your culture? A fair patenting system would read like the terms you get when you buy a house:
Half the mineral rights belong to... One quarter of the mineral rights belong to... One eighth of the mineral rights belong to... One sixteenth of the mineral rights belong to... [...]
Sorry, but there's just not much personal credit left over in a technological idea, once prior credit has been given where due.
Finally, how "ingenious" is any idea? Look at the history of inventions, and see how often an idea was independently proposed and/or developed. Technology is like a wavefront; once the wave reaches a certain point, certain ideas become feasible and people will start to harvest them. I don't see where an individual is entitled to get rich just for being at the right place at the right time. Even if Amazon happened to be first at the one-click business, someone else would have come up with it within a very short period of time afterward if Amazon had not, once the technology was there.
FWIW, I do support copyrights, though I do not support attempts to take away Fair Use (for my works or any others), nor do I think copyrights should be perpetual.
As for the patent system as currently practised in the USA, well, it's totally fucked. Powerful interests have a notion that everything should be 0wned, and the gold rush is on. It's a convenient scam for ensuring that the rich continue to get richer, since the patent owners just give each other tit-for-tat licensing, and leave the have-nots to pay what they don't have.
> If I was an investor, I'd want to know why Amazon is so intent on giving money to lawyers to protect a buisness model that isn't even making them any money.
Actually, I think A is realizing that e-commerce isn't all it was hyped up to be as a business plan, so now they are looking for other means of turning a buck.
Ditto for all those companies who tried to score big during the "portal" rage.
However, RAMBUS has a business model that actually works (if they win enough lawsuits), so you can expect more e-commerce companies to tranform themselves into IP holding companies.
Which should give the public a hint at what's wrong with patent policy in the USA.
> Congress really should get around to fixing the broken US Patent Office processes, too.
Unfortunately, that doesn't fit in with most well-heeled lobbyists' agendas.
Most businesses look at the internet more as a gold rush than an opportunity for sober economic expansion, and they won't take too kindly to having the Congress spoil the party.
Slashdot Mirror
> Doesn't that seem a bit silly? What part of the GPL would they attack? What would they sue for?
Easy. They get one of their puppet companies (MindCruft) to publish something under the GPL, "steal" the code from their puppet, and pay their puppet to take them to court with a lawyer who will blow the case. Court finds GPL worthless.
Nothing's hard when you've got billions of dollars to spend on it. (Possibly excepting innovating, which must be hard indeed, since even all MS's $$$ can't seem to acheive it.)
--
What it will probably do is attract a lot of failing .coms to move there so they can go bankrupt in an e-friendly e-nvironment.
The state will undoubtedly be disappointed when it discovers that it attracted the poor rather than the rich.
--
> you'd be blind not to notice that the best the open source community is usually able to muster is simply running a step behind the innovations developed in the commercial software world.
Beowulf?
SSH?
TUX?
TeX?
LyX?
Python?
FlightGear?
themes?
tailored kernels?
piles of research code flooding out of universities?
etc...?
How many does it take to qualify as innovative? And how many of the products from your favorite closed-source shop are just clones of something someone else did first?
OSS might not have been first with all the things I listed, but it's still a running step ahead of most of the commercial software world with respect to most of them.
The only way you can claim that OSS doesn't innovate is to wear blinders that limit your view of what counts.
--
Ignoring the article (and it's possible FUD and/or misinformation), here's the crux of the matter for people who want to put their code under the GPL:
If a court case demonstrates that there is a "leak" in the GPL, then we need to be able to re-license our code under a GPL++ that patches the leak (hence the "or higher" clause).
However, we have no control over what a GPL++ might happen to say. What if RMS sells out (yeah, sure)? What happens after he dies? What happens if someone else takes over the FSF?
I don't see any particularly good solution to this problem. Probably the project maintainer should insert a clause reserving the right to re-issue the entire project under a new license at any time, regardless of who has contributed to it. However, the same questions asked about RMS above could then be asked about the maintainer, plus the problem of licenses for forks arises.
--
> All right. So I'm supposed to read this "LICENSE" file that came with the program. But I'm an experienced Linux/BSD/Solaris/whatever user. So I just type "./configure" followed by "make install". I haven't read the license for this program at all.
Actually, the FSF recommends that you display relevant information whenever the program is started.
--
Don't teach them to program at all -- teach them to solve problems. After you have a sensible solution strategy, expressing it in the syntax of a given programming language is trivial (boring) work.
The problem that I see over and over and over again, among both students and "professionals", is that they sit down and start throwing code at a problem without knowing a solution strategy for that problem. And for many of these people, if you try using the Socratic method to bring out their solution strategy you'll find that they not only don't know what strategy they're trying to encode, but that they also don't even want to talk about strategies -- they want to talk about the details of the incorrect code they've already written.
I'm not against hacking, and I certainly don't think every program anyone writes needs to be supported by an engineering discipline, but I do feel, very strongly, that people need to think of programming languages as a tool for expressing a solution to a problem, not as being the solution itself.
--
I'm amazed (and alarmed) that the courts ever started taking the testimony of paid witnesses to begin with. How can you believe the word of anyone who is being paid by one side in a dispute? (Let alone someone who makes their living that way, as many do.)
If scientists or other specialists do in fact have expert knowledge that is needed for the resolution of a case, let the courts serve them a subpoena -- just like they do for real witnesses.
--
> The body of work out there under the GPL is quite humongous and therefore I cannot believe that a court would just throw away the GPL
Possibly very important in this regard is the fact that some $BIGCOMPANIES now like the GPL or even have their own variants, so that if a court case ever came down to the traditional "biggest wallet wins" it does not necessarily mean that the GPL would be stricken down.
--
> If the government is going to be paying people to produce software, the software should be open for all taxpayers to use.
I like that idea in principle, but in practice it's not all that simple. For instance, the government used taxpayer money to fund the White House, but that doesn't mean Joe Citizen can schedule it for a week's use during summer vacation.
Conceivably there might be circumstances where they would produce software for limited distribution as well.
--
> when I release software I right I am sure to use not only a BSD style license but my own language which specifies what I consider fair use.
Perhaps you didn't mean that exactly the way you said it, but if you did mean what you said then you should be aware that the doctrine of "fair use" is a matter of law and legal precedent, not a courtesy extended by publishers. In the latter case the doctrine would not exist at all.
What I'm getting at is this: If your license has a "fair use" clause that limits what kind of "fair use" you would like to grant people, then you're SOL, because the courts are going to support their notion of "fair use" rather than yours.
--
And then we bring in nukes to get rid of the unwanted microbes.
--
LMAO. That's another /. hall-of-famer, for sure.
--
The *AA may be frothing about IP theft, but other businesses are apparently booming on it.
I've been shopping for a new hard drive, and I see businesses such as Best Buy describing the humongosity of their drives in terms of how many thousands of 4-minute MP3s you can store on them. (Surely they don't think people are buying drives to store 20,000 MP3s that came from their own store-bought CDs, eh?)
--
--
> Music from the late 70s is becoming 'in vogue' now.
Heh heh heh. We certainly thought it sucked back then.
--
> The United States government has no business telling a creator what they must do with their copyrighted work.
Actually, copyright exists in the USA because the US Constitution authorizes the Congress to create it. In once sense, you may have a point: the Constitution specifies "exclusive rights", which I would take to exclude any rights of the Congress to enforce distribution.
OTOH, maybe it would be constitutional for the Congress to use a carrot-and-stick approach: license it, or you'll be dismayed at how quickly copyrights start expiring.
--
> As a result, intelligent people such as myself, who could command 6 figure salaries in any profession will take different career paths.
Are you "intelligent" enough to make 6F in some other field? If so, what are you complaining about? If not, then you have merely illustrated the problem with the current system as it has been operating.
> Industry produces wealth - they produce the fact that California is the 6-th wealthiest nation worth, and they help the economy.
And yet they can't keep their own lights on. Again, there's something wrong with the system.
--
> So are we at the fighting stage or the laughing stage, I can't really tell.
Is anyone keeping a timeline of the Pronunciations of the Microsoft Fathers? We've had some doozies over the last month or so, and it probably isn't over yet.
--
> What's next? Cages with rats attached to our faces?
No, computers with blue screens in our faces.
--
> The right to profit is part of the American spirit.
You are aware that "the pursuit of profit" was listed as an inalienable right in the draft, but struck from the final version of the DOI? Maybe someone didn't think it was the kind of right a country should be built on after all?
--
How 'bout SHEESH. It describes the way a lot of people feel about this, and it shouldn't be too hard to reverse engineer a name to fit the acronym.
--
I "disembrace" that idea. Vigorously.
The constitutional grounds for patents (in the USA) is about promoting progress, not promoting monopolies. If you read it carefully and think about what it says, you'll realize that the only things that could be patented and still promote the constitutional goals would be things that people could not figure out by examining. The philosophy stated in the US Constitution calls for patents as a way of getting people to share ideas that would remain hidden otherwise.
For example, if I invented a new way to rifle a gun barrel efficiently, people could look at it and see that it had been rifled, but they probably could not see how my clever method did it. They would be free to come up with their own methods of rifling, but if mine was truly more efficient they would want to know what they couldn't see, and a patent would motivate me to share my idea -- all to the good of the public (assuming the public needs rifles), not all to the good of me.
US Constitution to the side, there's also an ethical issue. Anything you think of is built on millenia of prior ideas and technology. Can you fairly milk the public for the use of "your" idea, when 99.9999...% of "your" idea is just the traditions of your culture? A fair patenting system would read like the terms you get when you buy a house:Sorry, but there's just not much personal credit left over in a technological idea, once prior credit has been given where due.
Finally, how "ingenious" is any idea? Look at the history of inventions, and see how often an idea was independently proposed and/or developed. Technology is like a wavefront; once the wave reaches a certain point, certain ideas become feasible and people will start to harvest them. I don't see where an individual is entitled to get rich just for being at the right place at the right time. Even if Amazon happened to be first at the one-click business, someone else would have come up with it within a very short period of time afterward if Amazon had not, once the technology was there.
FWIW, I do support copyrights, though I do not support attempts to take away Fair Use (for my works or any others), nor do I think copyrights should be perpetual.
As for the patent system as currently practised in the USA, well, it's totally fucked. Powerful interests have a notion that everything should be 0wned, and the gold rush is on. It's a convenient scam for ensuring that the rich continue to get richer, since the patent owners just give each other tit-for-tat licensing, and leave the have-nots to pay what they don't have.
--
> If I was an investor, I'd want to know why Amazon is so intent on giving money to lawyers to protect a buisness model that isn't even making them any money.
Actually, I think A is realizing that e-commerce isn't all it was hyped up to be as a business plan, so now they are looking for other means of turning a buck.
Ditto for all those companies who tried to score big during the "portal" rage.
However, RAMBUS has a business model that actually works (if they win enough lawsuits), so you can expect more e-commerce companies to tranform themselves into IP holding companies.
Which should give the public a hint at what's wrong with patent policy in the USA.
--
> Congress really should get around to fixing the broken US Patent Office processes, too.
Unfortunately, that doesn't fit in with most well-heeled lobbyists' agendas.
Most businesses look at the internet more as a gold rush than an opportunity for sober economic expansion, and they won't take too kindly to having the Congress spoil the party.
--
> The hardest part for most people would be learning to type "fresh" after their fingers are trained to type "ssh"
/bin/sh
"osh" would be easy to type: Open Secure Hwatever.
Also note that it's not a "shell" in the ordinary sense anyway:
#!/usr/bin/ssh-agent
You could remove the SH part will little damage to the concept, IMO.
--