A long time ago, in a courtroom far, far away, a judge ruled that loading a computer program into memory is making a copy of it.
Except after that, the law was changed to explicitly allow the owner of an authorized copy of a computer program to load it into memory for the purpose of running the program. Thus, you don't need an EULA in order to legally run a program.
I wonder if a judge would buy it if you patched a program to not put up a click-wrap agreement, under the argument that the program wouldn't run without that modification, and thus was necessary and allowable (and, since you hadn't agreed to any license before reverse engineering and patching the program, you couldn't be bound by its terms)?
That decision (that copying a program into RAM is making a "fixed copy") is one of the really bad decisions in this area; it's ludicrous and goes against all common sense and the original intent of the idea of copyright. Then again, "limited time" seems to also have lost all meaning.
No, the copyright holder was expecting compensation in the form of contributed source code being made available. Thus, the damages migh be:
a) fair market value of the source code that was infringed upon, where "fair market value" means how much non-exclusive use/modification/distribution rights COULD have been sold for to someone who didn't want to agree to the GPL (and many examples exist of code which is both GPL and commercially licensed, so a claim that any software released under the GPL has zero worth for licensing the right to not be subject to the GPL is clearly wrong); or
b) the fair market value of the source code that wasn't contributed back as GPLed code; could be based on development costs (which a commercial enterprise is probably tracking), or based on how much the commercial product is being sold for, or even based on how much was being asked or offered to license the source.
I've never interpreted the GPL as meaning that if you didn't comply with its terms you'd be forced to do anything - simply that you would then be subject to the penalties of having infringed on copyright. Saying that the GPL can't force you to do anything is accurate but irrelevant. What the GPL does is offer you an alternative to violating copyright law.
Typical public key encryption is to encrypt a random "session" key using the pubic key algorithm; then the body of the message is encrypted with that random key. To add a backdoor, just encrypt the session key using another public key, which only the government has the private key for.
A variant on this is to have a unique public/private key for each chip - the chip sends a unique serial number, which can be used to get the private key from a key escrow. With Clipper, the private key is stored in two halves, each half being stored with a different entity, which would then require collusion to bypass whatever legal requirements are put on releasing the private key to an authorized person. I think Clipper also used a master key to encrypt the serial number information.
The problem with the first is if the master private key gets out, then everything becomes plaintext. The problem with the second is there's a huge bureaucracy to keep track of chips and keys, the chips have to be manufactured in a secure facility, and there has to be a mechanism to prevent the re-use of that chip's private key without further authorization.
Almost all of the people I know (they're just regular computer users) know how to do basic things like put in add-in cards or upgrade memory.
How many of them have actually installed any cards that do anything besides what's already built in to an IMac? In going through a Lisa, Mac Plus, Mac II, PPC 6100, PowerCenter Pro 210, APS M*Power 200, PowerBook G4, I've never had any need to install anything other than: memory, hard drive, 2nd video card; my machine at home (the M*Power) could use a USB/Firewire card and Ethernet, so I could transfer files directly with the Powerbook, and use the same CD-ROM burner, scanner, etc. Everything else was a plug-in - SCSI, serial, Firewire, USB...
The 6100 has been running MkLinux for the past four years or so as a mailserver. The M*Power will probably run just Linux, although I'll probably see if I can get OS X running on it with the next release.
I agree with the opinion that a vast majority of computer users never expand their computer beyond what they bought, with the most likely exception being a NIC (at work) or a modem card (PCs only; Mac users were much more likely to simply use an external modem, since they were blessed with a decent serial port since the very first model). This is based on many years experience in both the business world and helping family and friends set up, fix, and upgrade Apples, Macs and PCs.
The earliest I know of real-world cash value being assigned to items and characters in an on-line RPG was Oubliette on the PLATO (now NovaNET) system in the late 70's. The inherent problem with behavior like that is that it completely destroys the basis for the game. "Cheating" behavior is bad enough within the game context itself (although, the saying on the system back then was "if the system lets you do it, it isn't cheating"). External factors on the game already have too much influence (e.g. people with no life being able to spend 24x7 in the game, which gives them a big advantage over everyone else). To add in a real-world financial incentive to reward bad behavior pushes it way over the edge.
In addition, it also brings in the possibility of game operators/programmers being presented with a strong temptation to abuse privileges in the game, to the detriment of everyone else. If your Vorpal Blade, that you got fair and square through the game by killing Asmodeus on level 15, is all of a sudden just one of hundreds, the rest all having been created by a corrupt game operator, you've lost real and game value - the time you've spent in the game, the money you've paid to play the game, other items you could have traded for within the game, and even (since now items can be bought and sold for real money) the original real-world worth of your item before it got diluted.
Add in the additional temptation to hack in to the game, exploit bugs, use social engineering, screw over other players, and adding in the element of real-world monetary value will really mess up almost any game, because it is no longer a game.
Re:Why not a translating assembler?
on
MenuetOS Debuts
·
· Score: 1
Well, I've got a translator from Cyber binary code to Alpha assembly text; in principle, it could be extended to produce code for other architectures, although having a 64-bit architecture REALLY helps.
Of course, I wouldn't recommend the Cyber as a generic machine architecture (although COMPASS is an awesome macro assembler). You can produce extremely efficient code, and it translates well to other architectures if they have enough registers, but the lack of a stack, self-modifying code, etc. is a bit of a hindrance.
Re:Treat r0 more like /dev/zero
on
Itanium Update
·
· Score: 1
r31 is the "zero" register on the Alpha. Standard-form NOP instruction is:
bis r31,r31,r31
"bis" is the "bit sum" instruction, otherwise known as "or".
What newbies are going to be getting packages from freshmeat, though? There are plenty of systems, x86 and PPC, that are installed with a variety of packages off the installation disk, and left at that.
Sure, there might be some problems with some hardware, but you find the same thing with x86 machines as well. I tried installing RHL 6.2 on a Dell PIII, and I still haven't figured out how to get X to start up in any mode larger than 320x256 or something ridiculous like that. Plug'n'Play, yeah right. Installing LinuxPPC on an APS Mac clone (equivalent of a Starmax machine), the only problem I had was that it wouldn't use the 2nd video monitor.
I do think that the initial bootstrap solutions to the New World architecture machines weren't very good for machines that weren't going to be dual-booted; having to install a Mac partition in order to boot Linux isn't nice. However, Quik still works on New World machines, as far as I know, and is fairly easy to use (certainly no more difficult than configuring Lilo)
The Mac doesn't use ROM's anymore, not for years. In fact, machines that have ROM's can't boot Mac OS X at all, you have to have a machine that uses Open Firmware, which is an IEEE standard "BIOS" that Sun and others also use.
a) Open Firmware is in ROM. It's the "MacOS ROM" code that is no longer in ROM, but is loaded off of disk.
b) There are plenty of machines that have Open Firmware AND have a MacOS ROM. The boot device (under OF) on my machine is the MacOS ROM itself (AAPL/ROM or something like that).
Side note: the Apple Lisa, running MacWorks, loaded the MacOS ROM image off of diskette or hard drive; in fact, the boot loader was a linking loader, with a bunch of.o files (or equivalent) sitting in a directory and a text file telling which ones to link together. It was pretty easy to patch in new modules. Somewhere I still have a MacWorks boot disk, I wonder if I can still read it.
I'm surprised no one has made an Open Source version of Open Firmware. It is just a byte-code compiled Forth with some specific facilities useful for block devices, file system handling, screen/keyboard/character plotting. Linux has code to allow it to boot under Open Firmware, and it seems much nicer to have ROM code figure out the specifics of a particular bit of hardware and pass that on to the OS. It's also pretty cool to have a complete programming language in your boot ROM; much more hack-worthy than having it boot into BASIC like early PCs and Apple I/II machines.
The URL isn't really different in concept from the Gopher selector; the difference is he used a text string instead of a numeric type code. The problem with Gopher was that the type code was TOO specific - it not only included the protocol to use, but the type of data. Gopher+ was designed to include type information explicitly, similar to the way HTTP specifies a MIME type, so even that (providing meta-information along with the data) wasn't innovative.
The primary innovation of HTTP/HTML was deciding to mix content with pointers, instead of having a chain of directories ending up in leaf content nodes; with a minor improvement of eliminating content type from the pointers, thus always getting the type from the meta-information from the server (but Gopher was already heading that way).
No. The author is only not in control of the software written by someone else. This is no different from any other copyright situation where there is a derivative work - copyright law doesn't allow you to release YOUR work if it includes someone ELSE's work, unless you have permission from that someone else. The GPL isn't controlling the author's work, copyright law is. The GPL gives the author a way to distribute the work anyway, which is to release it under terms no more restrictive than the GPL (and, of course, the original work must remain under the GPL).
No, it is a copyright violation to distribute a linked binary containing both GPL code and code that has restrictions not allowed by the GPL. That doesn't mean you can't distribute unlinked binaries that contain no GPL code, and it certainly doesn't mean you can't use those binaries to link to GPLed libraries in a virtual machine for the purpose of executing the code.
The non-free binary MAY have valid restrictions that prevent you from running it on a GPLed implementation, but that isn't an inherent problem with GPL.
But part of financial planning is estate planning. Assuming your mom has an estate valued at $1M, it should be fairly trivial to arrange her estate so that the taxes due on the estate are very low or even $0.
Then what use are estate taxes if it is so easy to get out of them? What benefit does it serve society to force people to do convoluted deals in order to avoid taxes? I know what it does for tax lawyers, but that's an artificial profession that does absolutely no useful work. Tax laws should be simple and straightforward; there should be no loopholes, no different ways of "structuring", and any social manipulation being done should be as direct as possible (i.e. with direct subsidies, matching funds to charities rather than charitable deductions, etc). The whole idea of a "tax shelter" should be a null concept.
Both of those cases only apply if the software in question is not "owned" (i.e. there is no ownership of a legitimate copy of the software; completely distinct and independent from the concept of "ownership of copyright").
If you own a legitimate copy of the software, you can run it without any additional permission, even though running it will make copies, regardless of what some license purports to restrict you to. If you can get a legitimate copy of the software without agreeing to the license, why would you need to agree to the license in order to run it?
I work as a Windows developer on a closed-source application. I cannot use a GPL'ed library in my app. Period. So much for "free" software (as in beer or speech).
Many libraries ARE LGPLed, but that's beside the point. You have a choice: you can develop all your own libraries ( == time and/or money); you can buy rights to someone else's commercial libraries ( == money and usually some amount of loss of control, e.g. pay per copy distributed = keeping close track of distribution; inability to fix bugs in library; no access to source code without paying lots more; can't sell source code to someone else unless they also buy a license to the library); or you can give up some control over your own code in exchange for complete access to the library source, ability to make changes, ability to pass on the library and your changes to anyone you wish. Choose whichever one makes the most economic sense to you.
The reason that the Gates comment is so misleading is that there's nothing the GPL prohibits an ordinary end-user from doing that a Microsoft license would allow you to do. If GPL is bad, Microsoft is worse. For the software developer who wants to sell copies of a program, there are tradeoffs, certainly, but Gates doesn't distinguish his remarks as being aimed only at developers. For them, if a Microsoft license makes better economic sense under specific conditions, then under those conditions developers will use the Microsoft license. If GPL or other OSS licenses give enough of an advantage to developers who use them that the Microsoft licensees start to lose money and go out of business, then obviously the Microsoft license doesn't make economic sense. Isn't that what the "free market" is all about, letting the market work out the relative worth of all sorts of intangible and incomputable values? FUD, such as the Gates comment, is the antithesis of a free market.
Actors in a straight-to-video movie hardly make tens of millions of dollars for their performances.
Perhaps that's because straight-to-video movies generally aren't very good, and that's why they were s-t-v movies in the first place? Theatrical releases function as much for advertising for the video release as they do for making money in the first place.
Since CSS is not patented, and DMCA doesn't prohibit you from encrypting things, why not take some content (video, audio, text), encrypt it using CSS, and distribute it in several forms:
with a content key (basic DeCSS)
with no keys at all (to decrypt, you need something that will brute-force the key)
with an encrypted content key (need to brute-force the master key)
with a bunch of encrypted content keys, using several (or all) of the "authorized" master keys (same program as would be used to decode a DVD - either has one of the authorized keys built in, or brute forces it).
Then authorize any and everyone who receives a copy to decrypt it. Bingo! Now it should be legal for you to own a copy of DeCSS, since you've been authorized by the copyright owner.
In addition, if the ruling is that CSS is, indeed, an "effective access device" (or whatever the wording is), shouldn't that mean that it is perfectly legal to make bit-for-bit copies of a DVD (including the encrypted content keys), since CSS will then be preventing unauthorized access to the content on it? If the CSS mechanism in an authorized DVD player can't do that (which, of course, it can't), then it seems to me it doesn't fit what the DMCA is prohibiting (and yes, I do understand that the meaning of the word "effective" in that statute means "has the effect of", not "is good at doing").
Except that 2600 people and subscribers aren't, in general, l33t hax0rs. In fact, if you look at the editorial comments in the letters section, you'll see a pretty strong disdain for that type of thing (script kiddies, malicious hacking, hax0r sp33k, etc).
Since pretty much any computer program can be copyrighted, doesn't that mean it must be expressive? Are they trying to say that any code which is purely functional should not be able to be copyrighted?
There's already quite a bit of content that contains public domain material, e.g. film history DVDs with early film. I'm sure at least some of those DVDs are encrypted (or would they be claiming new copyright status for them since they've digitized them and done some cleanup?)
You missed one (as did Judge Kaplan):
The very same DMCA also requires that all VHS players detect Macrovision and prevent recording. The existence of a VHS tape with Macrovision on it doesn't allow for "fair use".
I won't even get into the absurdity of codifying into law a "copy protection" mechanism that is only effective because the law says it is (can be applied to both Macrovision and CSS). I mean, if you're going to do that, why not just make it illegal to distribute unauthorized copies?
What's really ludicrous about all of this is that the MPAA et al think we'll buy the whole having-your-cake-and-eating-it-too mindset. They want to publish their stuff, so that they can get the rewards from society for having produced it, yet they don't want it to really be published (i.e. made public), they want to retain complete control over it. It just doesn't work that way. They can keep it a secret, they can distribute it under individual, negotiable restrictive licenses, or they can mass market it. The government shouldn't let them get away with getting the advantages of a mass market (including government enforcement of copyrights) without accepting the consequences of using a mass market (such as giving up all rights not explicitly reserved by copyright).
All of this is so old. It is amusing to see a new book or two every year. I created a notesfile called "platoanon" in 1976 on the University of Illinois PLATO system; yes, it was sort of tongue-in-cheek, but there were quite a few people who dropped out or went on probation due to gaming, talking, and otherwise communicating through the system.
So how much do the reviewers charge for their reviewing services? My impression has always been that they did it as part of what a research scientist is expected to do, is that not correct?
Costs for doing page layout, typesetting, printing, and on-line distribution are low now, and getting lower. I don't know what the print runs are like for these journals. How many total copies per year are distributed? What kind of real costs are there, such as paying for layout and printing (plus reasonable compensation for the editor, based on how much of that person's time is actually spent on the review process)?
What trademark rights do you think Apple is protecting? I thought trademark only protected using a specific mark to identify a product. If someone were to use a theme editor, on a Mac, to make the Mac look as if it was produced by Apple... umm, where's the trademark violation?
Maybe it should be Microsoft doing the suing, as the theme editor might be used to make a Mac look like it was using the far superior Windows look-n-feel (I don't do smileys; imagine your own). Or maybe Apple should be suing a theme editor for Linux or Windows, as it could be used to falsely mark a non-Apple product with Apple trademarks. That would at least have a glimmer of being a legitimate concern, even if they should still lose such a case, IMO.
The only case I can see them having is IF they somehow have the right to prevent you from changing the way their product looks, even after you've bought it; but in that case, presumably they could also prohibit you from running LinuxPPC, since that would also change the look of their product.
CP/M was NOT derived from the Bourne shell, or any other Unix shell. CP/M was strictly a set of I/O interface routines, a file system, a command shell with virtually NO intelligence (it could launch a program and pass it a command line), and a set of utility routines most reminiscent of various flavors of operating systems that ran on the PDP-11 (and quite probably earlier DEC machines, though I've only seen e.g. PDP-8 running FOCAL or BASIC), including an assembler and linker. Most tellingly was the PIP program (Peripheral Interchange Program, IIRC), which was sort of a combination of cat, dd and a few other utilities. Also, 8.3 filenames and the.COM extension for a COMmand were inherited.
Small programs could execute in the memory left over by the "command shell" (loaded into high memory, just below the operating system). If they wanted to use more memory, they had to clear a word in low memory that pointed to the shell, so that the OS would reload it when the program terminated. This allowed small commands (like DIR) to execute relatively quickly. Programs were linked to an absolute location (octal 100, I think), but the command shell was relocatable (had a relocation block), so it could load high regardless of how much memory was available (typically, 32K less the size of the OS).
The BIOS in CP/M was part of the loaded operating system, not part of any firmware, and had to be modified for the specific machine (the DOS itself was provided as a relocatable object file, with a dispatch vector at a given location); I remember adding the print routines for a Daisywheel printer so that sending output to LPR: would work transparently. Wordstar still had its own print driver for the Daisywheel so it could do overstriking/bold/superscripts/etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Except after that, the law was changed to explicitly allow the owner of an authorized copy of a computer program to load it into memory for the purpose of running the program. Thus, you don't need an EULA in order to legally run a program.
I wonder if a judge would buy it if you patched a program to not put up a click-wrap agreement, under the argument that the program wouldn't run without that modification, and thus was necessary and allowable (and, since you hadn't agreed to any license before reverse engineering and patching the program, you couldn't be bound by its terms)?
That decision (that copying a program into RAM is making a "fixed copy") is one of the really bad decisions in this area; it's ludicrous and goes against all common sense and the original intent of the idea of copyright. Then again, "limited time" seems to also have lost all meaning.
No, the copyright holder was expecting compensation in the form of contributed source code being made available. Thus, the damages migh be:
a) fair market value of the source code that was infringed upon, where "fair market value" means how much non-exclusive use/modification/distribution rights COULD have been sold for to someone who didn't want to agree to the GPL (and many examples exist of code which is both GPL and commercially licensed, so a claim that any software released under the GPL has zero worth for licensing the right to not be subject to the GPL is clearly wrong); or
b) the fair market value of the source code that wasn't contributed back as GPLed code; could be based on development costs (which a commercial enterprise is probably tracking), or based on how much the commercial product is being sold for, or even based on how much was being asked or offered to license the source.
I've never interpreted the GPL as meaning that if you didn't comply with its terms you'd be forced to do anything - simply that you would then be subject to the penalties of having infringed on copyright. Saying that the GPL can't force you to do anything is accurate but irrelevant. What the GPL does is offer you an alternative to violating copyright law.
Typical public key encryption is to encrypt a random "session" key using the pubic key algorithm; then the body of the message is encrypted with that random key. To add a backdoor, just encrypt the session key using another public key, which only the government has the private key for.
A variant on this is to have a unique public/private key for each chip - the chip sends a unique serial number, which can be used to get the private key from a key escrow. With Clipper, the private key is stored in two halves, each half being stored with a different entity, which would then require collusion to bypass whatever legal requirements are put on releasing the private key to an authorized person. I think Clipper also used a master key to encrypt the serial number information.
The problem with the first is if the master private key gets out, then everything becomes plaintext. The problem with the second is there's a huge bureaucracy to keep track of chips and keys, the chips have to be manufactured in a secure facility, and there has to be a mechanism to prevent the re-use of that chip's private key without further authorization.
How many of them have actually installed any cards that do anything besides what's already built in to an IMac? In going through a Lisa, Mac Plus, Mac II, PPC 6100, PowerCenter Pro 210, APS M*Power 200, PowerBook G4, I've never had any need to install anything other than: memory, hard drive, 2nd video card; my machine at home (the M*Power) could use a USB/Firewire card and Ethernet, so I could transfer files directly with the Powerbook, and use the same CD-ROM burner, scanner, etc. Everything else was a plug-in - SCSI, serial, Firewire, USB...
The 6100 has been running MkLinux for the past four years or so as a mailserver. The M*Power will probably run just Linux, although I'll probably see if I can get OS X running on it with the next release.
I agree with the opinion that a vast majority of computer users never expand their computer beyond what they bought, with the most likely exception being a NIC (at work) or a modem card (PCs only; Mac users were much more likely to simply use an external modem, since they were blessed with a decent serial port since the very first model). This is based on many years experience in both the business world and helping family and friends set up, fix, and upgrade Apples, Macs and PCs.
The earliest I know of real-world cash value being assigned to items and characters in an on-line RPG was Oubliette on the PLATO (now NovaNET) system in the late 70's. The inherent problem with behavior like that is that it completely destroys the basis for the game. "Cheating" behavior is bad enough within the game context itself (although, the saying on the system back then was "if the system lets you do it, it isn't cheating"). External factors on the game already have too much influence (e.g. people with no life being able to spend 24x7 in the game, which gives them a big advantage over everyone else). To add in a real-world financial incentive to reward bad behavior pushes it way over the edge.
In addition, it also brings in the possibility of game operators/programmers being presented with a strong temptation to abuse privileges in the game, to the detriment of everyone else. If your Vorpal Blade, that you got fair and square through the game by killing Asmodeus on level 15, is all of a sudden just one of hundreds, the rest all having been created by a corrupt game operator, you've lost real and game value - the time you've spent in the game, the money you've paid to play the game, other items you could have traded for within the game, and even (since now items can be bought and sold for real money) the original real-world worth of your item before it got diluted.
Add in the additional temptation to hack in to the game, exploit bugs, use social engineering, screw over other players, and adding in the element of real-world monetary value will really mess up almost any game, because it is no longer a game.
Well, I've got a translator from Cyber binary code to Alpha assembly text; in principle, it could be extended to produce code for other architectures, although having a 64-bit architecture REALLY helps.
Of course, I wouldn't recommend the Cyber as a generic machine architecture (although COMPASS is an awesome macro assembler). You can produce extremely efficient code, and it translates well to other architectures if they have enough registers, but the lack of a stack, self-modifying code, etc. is a bit of a hindrance.
r31 is the "zero" register on the Alpha. Standard-form NOP instruction is:
"bis" is the "bit sum" instruction, otherwise known as "or".
What newbies are going to be getting packages from freshmeat, though? There are plenty of systems, x86 and PPC, that are installed with a variety of packages off the installation disk, and left at that.
Sure, there might be some problems with some hardware, but you find the same thing with x86 machines as well. I tried installing RHL 6.2 on a Dell PIII, and I still haven't figured out how to get X to start up in any mode larger than 320x256 or something ridiculous like that. Plug'n'Play, yeah right. Installing LinuxPPC on an APS Mac clone (equivalent of a Starmax machine), the only problem I had was that it wouldn't use the 2nd video monitor.
I do think that the initial bootstrap solutions to the New World architecture machines weren't very good for machines that weren't going to be dual-booted; having to install a Mac partition in order to boot Linux isn't nice. However, Quik still works on New World machines, as far as I know, and is fairly easy to use (certainly no more difficult than configuring Lilo)
a) Open Firmware is in ROM. It's the "MacOS ROM" code that is no longer in ROM, but is loaded off of disk.
b) There are plenty of machines that have Open Firmware AND have a MacOS ROM. The boot device (under OF) on my machine is the MacOS ROM itself (AAPL/ROM or something like that).
Side note: the Apple Lisa, running MacWorks, loaded the MacOS ROM image off of diskette or hard drive; in fact, the boot loader was a linking loader, with a bunch of .o files (or equivalent) sitting in a directory and a text file telling which ones to link together. It was pretty easy to patch in new modules. Somewhere I still have a MacWorks boot disk, I wonder if I can still read it.
I'm surprised no one has made an Open Source version of Open Firmware. It is just a byte-code compiled Forth with some specific facilities useful for block devices, file system handling, screen/keyboard/character plotting. Linux has code to allow it to boot under Open Firmware, and it seems much nicer to have ROM code figure out the specifics of a particular bit of hardware and pass that on to the OS. It's also pretty cool to have a complete programming language in your boot ROM; much more hack-worthy than having it boot into BASIC like early PCs and Apple I/II machines.
The URL isn't really different in concept from the Gopher selector; the difference is he used a text string instead of a numeric type code. The problem with Gopher was that the type code was TOO specific - it not only included the protocol to use, but the type of data. Gopher+ was designed to include type information explicitly, similar to the way HTTP specifies a MIME type, so even that (providing meta-information along with the data) wasn't innovative.
The primary innovation of HTTP/HTML was deciding to mix content with pointers, instead of having a chain of directories ending up in leaf content nodes; with a minor improvement of eliminating content type from the pointers, thus always getting the type from the meta-information from the server (but Gopher was already heading that way).
No. The author is only not in control of the software written by someone else. This is no different from any other copyright situation where there is a derivative work - copyright law doesn't allow you to release YOUR work if it includes someone ELSE's work, unless you have permission from that someone else. The GPL isn't controlling the author's work, copyright law is. The GPL gives the author a way to distribute the work anyway, which is to release it under terms no more restrictive than the GPL (and, of course, the original work must remain under the GPL).
No, it is a copyright violation to distribute a linked binary containing both GPL code and code that has restrictions not allowed by the GPL. That doesn't mean you can't distribute unlinked binaries that contain no GPL code, and it certainly doesn't mean you can't use those binaries to link to GPLed libraries in a virtual machine for the purpose of executing the code.
The non-free binary MAY have valid restrictions that prevent you from running it on a GPLed implementation, but that isn't an inherent problem with GPL.
Then what use are estate taxes if it is so easy to get out of them? What benefit does it serve society to force people to do convoluted deals in order to avoid taxes? I know what it does for tax lawyers, but that's an artificial profession that does absolutely no useful work. Tax laws should be simple and straightforward; there should be no loopholes, no different ways of "structuring", and any social manipulation being done should be as direct as possible (i.e. with direct subsidies, matching funds to charities rather than charitable deductions, etc). The whole idea of a "tax shelter" should be a null concept.
Both of those cases only apply if the software in question is not "owned" (i.e. there is no ownership of a legitimate copy of the software; completely distinct and independent from the concept of "ownership of copyright").
If you own a legitimate copy of the software, you can run it without any additional permission, even though running it will make copies, regardless of what some license purports to restrict you to. If you can get a legitimate copy of the software without agreeing to the license, why would you need to agree to the license in order to run it?
Many libraries ARE LGPLed, but that's beside the point. You have a choice: you can develop all your own libraries ( == time and/or money); you can buy rights to someone else's commercial libraries ( == money and usually some amount of loss of control, e.g. pay per copy distributed = keeping close track of distribution; inability to fix bugs in library; no access to source code without paying lots more; can't sell source code to someone else unless they also buy a license to the library); or you can give up some control over your own code in exchange for complete access to the library source, ability to make changes, ability to pass on the library and your changes to anyone you wish. Choose whichever one makes the most economic sense to you.
The reason that the Gates comment is so misleading is that there's nothing the GPL prohibits an ordinary end-user from doing that a Microsoft license would allow you to do. If GPL is bad, Microsoft is worse. For the software developer who wants to sell copies of a program, there are tradeoffs, certainly, but Gates doesn't distinguish his remarks as being aimed only at developers. For them, if a Microsoft license makes better economic sense under specific conditions, then under those conditions developers will use the Microsoft license. If GPL or other OSS licenses give enough of an advantage to developers who use them that the Microsoft licensees start to lose money and go out of business, then obviously the Microsoft license doesn't make economic sense. Isn't that what the "free market" is all about, letting the market work out the relative worth of all sorts of intangible and incomputable values? FUD, such as the Gates comment, is the antithesis of a free market.
Perhaps that's because straight-to-video movies generally aren't very good, and that's why they were s-t-v movies in the first place? Theatrical releases function as much for advertising for the video release as they do for making money in the first place.
Since CSS is not patented, and DMCA doesn't prohibit you from encrypting things, why not take some content (video, audio, text), encrypt it using CSS, and distribute it in several forms:
with a content key (basic DeCSS)
with no keys at all (to decrypt, you need something that will brute-force the key)
with an encrypted content key (need to brute-force the master key)
with a bunch of encrypted content keys, using several (or all) of the "authorized" master keys (same program as would be used to decode a DVD - either has one of the authorized keys built in, or brute forces it).
Then authorize any and everyone who receives a copy to decrypt it. Bingo! Now it should be legal for you to own a copy of DeCSS, since you've been authorized by the copyright owner.
In addition, if the ruling is that CSS is, indeed, an "effective access device" (or whatever the wording is), shouldn't that mean that it is perfectly legal to make bit-for-bit copies of a DVD (including the encrypted content keys), since CSS will then be preventing unauthorized access to the content on it? If the CSS mechanism in an authorized DVD player can't do that (which, of course, it can't), then it seems to me it doesn't fit what the DMCA is prohibiting (and yes, I do understand that the meaning of the word "effective" in that statute means "has the effect of", not "is good at doing").
Except that 2600 people and subscribers aren't, in general, l33t hax0rs. In fact, if you look at the editorial comments in the letters section, you'll see a pretty strong disdain for that type of thing (script kiddies, malicious hacking, hax0r sp33k, etc).
Since pretty much any computer program can be copyrighted, doesn't that mean it must be expressive? Are they trying to say that any code which is purely functional should not be able to be copyrighted?
I don't see how you can have it both ways.
There's already quite a bit of content that contains public domain material, e.g. film history DVDs with early film. I'm sure at least some of those DVDs are encrypted (or would they be claiming new copyright status for them since they've digitized them and done some cleanup?)
You missed one (as did Judge Kaplan): The very same DMCA also requires that all VHS players detect Macrovision and prevent recording. The existence of a VHS tape with Macrovision on it doesn't allow for "fair use".
I won't even get into the absurdity of codifying into law a "copy protection" mechanism that is only effective because the law says it is (can be applied to both Macrovision and CSS). I mean, if you're going to do that, why not just make it illegal to distribute unauthorized copies?
What's really ludicrous about all of this is that the MPAA et al think we'll buy the whole having-your-cake-and-eating-it-too mindset. They want to publish their stuff, so that they can get the rewards from society for having produced it, yet they don't want it to really be published (i.e. made public), they want to retain complete control over it. It just doesn't work that way. They can keep it a secret, they can distribute it under individual, negotiable restrictive licenses, or they can mass market it. The government shouldn't let them get away with getting the advantages of a mass market (including government enforcement of copyrights) without accepting the consequences of using a mass market (such as giving up all rights not explicitly reserved by copyright).
All of this is so old. It is amusing to see a new book or two every year. I created a notesfile called "platoanon" in 1976 on the University of Illinois PLATO system; yes, it was sort of tongue-in-cheek, but there were quite a few people who dropped out or went on probation due to gaming, talking, and otherwise communicating through the system.
So how much do the reviewers charge for their reviewing services? My impression has always been that they did it as part of what a research scientist is expected to do, is that not correct?
Costs for doing page layout, typesetting, printing, and on-line distribution are low now, and getting lower. I don't know what the print runs are like for these journals. How many total copies per year are distributed? What kind of real costs are there, such as paying for layout and printing (plus reasonable compensation for the editor, based on how much of that person's time is actually spent on the review process)?
What trademark rights do you think Apple is protecting? I thought trademark only protected using a specific mark to identify a product. If someone were to use a theme editor, on a Mac, to make the Mac look as if it was produced by Apple ... umm, where's the trademark violation?
Maybe it should be Microsoft doing the suing, as the theme editor might be used to make a Mac look like it was using the far superior Windows look-n-feel (I don't do smileys; imagine your own). Or maybe Apple should be suing a theme editor for Linux or Windows, as it could be used to falsely mark a non-Apple product with Apple trademarks. That would at least have a glimmer of being a legitimate concern, even if they should still lose such a case, IMO.
The only case I can see them having is IF they somehow have the right to prevent you from changing the way their product looks, even after you've bought it; but in that case, presumably they could also prohibit you from running LinuxPPC, since that would also change the look of their product.
(Ok, so this is a little off topic)
CP/M was NOT derived from the Bourne shell, or any other Unix shell. CP/M was strictly a set of I/O interface routines, a file system, a command shell with virtually NO intelligence (it could launch a program and pass it a command line), and a set of utility routines most reminiscent of various flavors of operating systems that ran on the PDP-11 (and quite probably earlier DEC machines, though I've only seen e.g. PDP-8 running FOCAL or BASIC), including an assembler and linker. Most tellingly was the PIP program (Peripheral Interchange Program, IIRC), which was sort of a combination of cat, dd and a few other utilities. Also, 8.3 filenames and the .COM extension for a COMmand were inherited.
Small programs could execute in the memory left over by the "command shell" (loaded into high memory, just below the operating system). If they wanted to use more memory, they had to clear a word in low memory that pointed to the shell, so that the OS would reload it when the program terminated. This allowed small commands (like DIR) to execute relatively quickly. Programs were linked to an absolute location (octal 100, I think), but the command shell was relocatable (had a relocation block), so it could load high regardless of how much memory was available (typically, 32K less the size of the OS).
The BIOS in CP/M was part of the loaded operating system, not part of any firmware, and had to be modified for the specific machine (the DOS itself was provided as a relocatable object file, with a dispatch vector at a given location); I remember adding the print routines for a Daisywheel printer so that sending output to LPR: would work transparently. Wordstar still had its own print driver for the Daisywheel so it could do overstriking/bold/superscripts/etc.