It does NOTHING to take away ANYONE's rights under copyright.
Free software authors, like ANY authors, have the right to choose how their works are licensed, and under what terms derivitave works can be made... and that choice includes saying "Anyone can use this as long as they abide by the GPL".
You are always free to contact the copyright holder of any work available under the GPL and request licensing under different terms, you know. Think the author of a GPL work is perhaps a bunch of people? That depends on the project.. often copyrights are assigned to the project leader... and depending on how contributions are made, that may still be the case despite having lots of authors.
I'm really unclear on what aspect of the GPL needs to be "challenged". If the GPL does not apply, then copyright law forbids the things people are doing with those works the authors placed under the GPL. It's not a use license, but if you don't accept it, the law is clear: you don't have the right to do certain things with that code.
SO unless the argument is "THE gpl doesn't apply, so all works available under the GPL are actually in the public domain" there is no argument.
IT doesn't have to be tested in court... copyright is already testd in court, and the authors of any GPL software are free to sue anyone who is not abiding by the license, and hence, has NO right to do what they are doing.
SO you think that somehow fetchign 8 bytes on a 64 bit wide bus is somehow slower than fetching 4 bytes on a 32 bit bus?
Yes, I understand that just by virtue of being 64 bits wide, it's not automatically faster, but the wider bus has all KINDS of room for speeding things up, it's not JUST about the math operations.
Your lawyer and you are both stupid, or this is a troll, or both.
The output of GCC is not governed by the GPL (nor the output of any other GPL tool). Read the GPL, see the fsf.org site GPL faq, or just use your head.
If you modified the kernel itself, your modifications would have to be GPL, unless you wrote a module with an existing module interface, that could be kept closed. Big deal, the tools and OS itself were free in the first place. As you just said yourslef, this option was not even available to you with Microsoft's products.
If you think Linux isn't "being competitive" with microsoft, you are going to fail as a consultant. Linux is everywhere, and maknig huge inroads all the time. Many, many businesses use it to a huge degree.
Regarding #3: If you don't distribute source with the binary, or provide equivalent access, you must provide a written offer. If you do, that offer must be valid for *anyone*, not just your customer.
Equivalent access is teh way to go: if someone pays, logs into your site to get their binaries, and the sources are available in the same place, that satisfies your requirement, just as if you distributed them in the same package.
It's not necessarily faster...if the code is 32 bit. With 64 bit code, you can trasnfer twice as much data per cycle. You can pack more information into an instruction. The bus is twice as wide, and carries twice as many people. Twice the living room in that double wide trailer....
The increased bus speed plus processor speed plus bus width all adds up to a faster machine no matter how you slice it.
But then you have to go through the trouble of writing letters to your isp, and responding to the lawyers, etc, or possibly end up in court.
He's probably taking it down because it's a pain in the ass to deal with, and he really doesn't care.
This, btw, is one of the things about the DMCA that erally sucks; rather than forcing the complainer to get a proper court order to down the site, where they would have to show some evidence of harm, etc, they can just send out letters and force everyone into defence.
That is a confidentiality notice, and it simple means "If you are not the person we are obviously sending this to, you can't do anythign with it, including use the information contanied in it for your own benefit. In other words, pretend you never saw it"
is not a number, and no amount of energy can accelerate a lead atom to "infinite" velocity. When we say it takes an infinite amount of power, what we mean is there is no such amount of energy that can give the desired result. We can get ever closer, but never there.
What you said is just a fancy way of saying "If we had the ability to amke any amount of energy we wanted, we could make anything go really fast"
There is no such thing as an "infinite force". Infinity is not a number.
We don't need to move masses faster than c to find out if gravity propagates at c.. we only need to track the movement of some masses, and see how fast the change in the gravitational field propagates. That's like saying we can't measure the speed of sound because we can't move something faseter than sound.. we knew how fast sound was long before. I believe this has been experimentally observed, at least to some degree.
According to relativity, a spinning top has a larger gravitational effect than a stationary one.
With regards to the law, ignorance is no excuse. You can't say "I didn't know it was illegal to commit murder".
However, patents are not laws.. although they are backed by laws. It is not your responsibility to do a patent search on everything you create, it is merely an option.
Here are the scenarios:
If you know something is patented, and use it anyway, you can be held liable for damages from the point you learned about the patent.
If you don't know about a patent, you cannot be held for past damages, but from the point you are notified of the infringement, you can be held for damages.
Were it to work any other way, every single invention and business in the US would have to do a patent search every time they did ANYTHING new, to check to see if it was patented.. and that's totally unworkable.
The incentive to do a patent search before launching a product is to avoid future problems, not to prevent damages.
I've developed dozens of applications in house for use in my company.. should we have to do a patent search on every single aspect of every single one? I mean, technically we could be violating someone's patent, right?
to as much profit as they want. If you want a new board because you broke yours, and your computer is old, and they want to charge you $10,000, that's their perogative. If they do bad business, they lose marketshare. If they do good business, they can gain more.
IF you feel they are ripping you off, there are other choices.
Because Apple is nowhere near a MONOPOLY. Many practices that are *fine* in the normal business world become not fine when you are a monopoly. Microsoft is a monopoly, apple is not.
The point is that the application developers don't NEED access to the guts... it completely separates administration of resources from the applications themselves. A perfectly even development environment.
Administrators need it. I'd LOVE to be able to dynamically re-allocate disk, processor, and memory wherever I want in my network (with the associated tradeoffs in speed/latency/etc, of course) without having to worry about the application at all.
IT lets me move stuff around and worry about the resources my system has without worrying about the software itself.
But I believe there is some aspect of law where you can't charge someone with, say, copyright violation if you yourself are violating their copyrights at the same time. if it's SCO -vs- AIX (hypothetically) and it turns out SCO stole code from AIX as well, the case would probably be tossed out.
THe stuff they seem to be mentioning here is in 2.5... which as everyone knows is a development branch.. so even if some sco IP made it's way in there, that has nothing to do with SCO's business falling over the last several years in favor of linux.
Except those places where no legal jurisdiction has a rule one way or the other. Or are you implying the Amateur bands have this rule in every single jurisdiction and location on earth?
If IBM illegally copied code that rightfully belonged to SCO,and is large enough to warrant real copyright protections, and it made it's way into linux, then we want SCO to win against IBM, and we want SCO to do the right thing, which is let us know which code it is so the linux world at large can work to remove that code from future versions.
Furthermore, realize that we aren't obligated to remove it immediately; even if IBM copied it into, say, OS2, their customers would not be obligated to uninstall their software. SCO can claim damages, but claiming control over all of linux sure isn't going to happen.
On the other hand, if scos claims are really baseless, we want them to die, because they suck.
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head? I'm sick of hearing this.
It does NOTHING to take away ANYONE's rights under copyright.
Free software authors, like ANY authors, have the right to choose how their works are licensed, and under what terms derivitave works can be made... and that choice includes saying "Anyone can use this as long as they abide by the GPL".
You are always free to contact the copyright holder of any work available under the GPL and request licensing under different terms, you know. Think the author of a GPL work is perhaps a bunch of people? That depends on the project.. often copyrights are assigned to the project leader... and depending on how contributions are made, that may still be the case despite having lots of authors.
I'm really unclear on what aspect of the GPL needs to be "challenged". If the GPL does not apply, then copyright law forbids the things people are doing with those works the authors placed under the GPL. It's not a use license, but if you don't accept it, the law is clear: you don't have the right to do certain things with that code.
SO unless the argument is "THE gpl doesn't apply, so all works available under the GPL are actually in the public domain" there is no argument.
IT doesn't have to be tested in court... copyright is already testd in court, and the authors of any GPL software are free to sue anyone who is not abiding by the license, and hence, has NO right to do what they are doing.
SO you think that somehow fetchign 8 bytes on a 64 bit wide bus is somehow slower than fetching 4 bytes on a 32 bit bus?
Yes, I understand that just by virtue of being 64 bits wide, it's not automatically faster, but the wider bus has all KINDS of room for speeding things up, it's not JUST about the math operations.
Or do you mean the economic planners want it? Politicians are driven by something, and it's not just what they want.
At a top level, everyone acting predictably makes economic planning possible.
Your lawyer and you are both stupid, or this is a troll, or both.
The output of GCC is not governed by the GPL (nor the output of any other GPL tool). Read the GPL, see the fsf.org site GPL faq, or just use your head.
If you modified the kernel itself, your modifications would have to be GPL, unless you wrote a module with an existing module interface, that could be kept closed. Big deal, the tools and OS itself were free in the first place.
As you just said yourslef, this option was not even available to you with Microsoft's products.
If you think Linux isn't "being competitive" with microsoft, you are going to fail as a consultant. Linux is everywhere, and maknig huge inroads all the time. Many, many businesses use it to a huge degree.
Regarding #3: If you don't distribute source with the binary, or provide equivalent access, you must provide a written offer. If you do, that offer must be valid for *anyone*, not just your customer.
Equivalent access is teh way to go: if someone pays, logs into your site to get their binaries, and the sources are available in the same place, that satisfies your requirement, just as if you distributed them in the same package.
It's not necessarily faster...if the code is 32 bit. With 64 bit code, you can trasnfer twice as much data per cycle. You can pack more information into an instruction. The bus is twice as wide, and carries twice as many people. Twice the living room in that double wide trailer....
The increased bus speed plus processor speed plus bus width all adds up to a faster machine no matter how you slice it.
But then you have to go through the trouble of writing letters to your isp, and responding to the lawyers, etc, or possibly end up in court.
He's probably taking it down because it's a pain in the ass to deal with, and he really doesn't care.
This, btw, is one of the things about the DMCA that erally sucks; rather than forcing the complainer to get a proper court order to down the site, where they would have to show some evidence of harm, etc, they can just send out letters and force everyone into defence.
That's bullshit, sorry. What you say does apply in some circumstances... but not all, and not with the knid of force you make it out to have.
It clearly states, by the way, njobody OTHER THAN THE RECIPIENT can redistribute it, etc.
by your logic, every forwarded email in existence is probably illegal and everyone should go to prison.
That is a confidentiality notice, and it simple means "If you are not the person we are obviously sending this to, you can't do anythign with it, including use the information contanied in it for your own benefit. In other words, pretend you never saw it"
Standard, boilerplate statement.
Yeah.
I mean, Windows XP said it could play DVDs too..
they never mentioned you had to buy extra stuff to get it to work.
Do you practice what you preach?
I guarantee that, although it might be your right to do, it will just create more hassle for you.
But most of us don't automatically type "yes", instead, we ask ourselves "What changed", and we investigate, before handing out our passwords.
is not a number, and no amount of energy can accelerate a lead atom to "infinite" velocity.
When we say it takes an infinite amount of power, what we mean is there is no such amount of energy that can give the desired result. We can get ever closer, but never there.
What you said is just a fancy way of saying "If we had the ability to amke any amount of energy we wanted, we could make anything go really fast"
There is no such thing as an "infinite force". Infinity is not a number.
Mass and Energy are the same thing.
We don't need to move masses faster than c to find out if gravity propagates at c.. we only need to track the movement of some masses, and see how fast the change in the gravitational field propagates.
That's like saying we can't measure the speed of sound because we can't move something faseter than sound.. we knew how fast sound was long before. I believe this has been experimentally observed, at least to some degree.
According to relativity, a spinning top has a larger gravitational effect than a stationary one.
The FSF could take the GNU utilities and start distributing them under a proprietary license as well, as they are the outright copyright holders.
With regards to the law, ignorance is no excuse. You can't say "I didn't know it was illegal to commit murder".
However, patents are not laws.. although they are backed by laws. It is not your responsibility to do a patent search on everything you create, it is merely an option.
Here are the scenarios:
If you know something is patented, and use it anyway, you can be held liable for damages from the point you learned about the patent.
If you don't know about a patent, you cannot be held for past damages, but from the point you are notified of the infringement, you can be held for damages.
Were it to work any other way, every single invention and business in the US would have to do a patent search every time they did ANYTHING new, to check to see if it was patented.. and that's totally unworkable.
The incentive to do a patent search before launching a product is to avoid future problems, not to prevent damages.
I've developed dozens of applications in house for use in my company.. should we have to do a patent search on every single aspect of every single one? I mean, technically we could be violating someone's patent, right?
to as much profit as they want. If you want a new board because you broke yours, and your computer is old, and they want to charge you $10,000, that's their perogative. If they do bad business, they lose marketshare. If they do good business, they can gain more.
IF you feel they are ripping you off, there are other choices.
Because Apple is nowhere near a MONOPOLY. Many practices that are *fine* in the normal business world become not fine when you are a monopoly. Microsoft is a monopoly, apple is not.
BMW *will* let you buy all the spare parts and make your own, because you'll find it way cheaper to just buy a new BMW.
The point is that the application developers don't NEED access to the guts... it completely separates administration of resources from the applications themselves. A perfectly even development environment.
Administrators need it. I'd LOVE to be able to dynamically re-allocate disk, processor, and memory wherever I want in my network (with the associated tradeoffs in speed/latency/etc, of course) without having to worry about the application at all.
IT lets me move stuff around and worry about the resources my system has without worrying about the software itself.
But I believe there is some aspect of law where you can't charge someone with, say, copyright violation if you yourself are violating their copyrights at the same time. if it's SCO -vs- AIX (hypothetically) and it turns out SCO stole code from AIX as well, the case would probably be tossed out.
THe stuff they seem to be mentioning here is in 2.5... which as everyone knows is a development branch.. so even if some sco IP made it's way in there, that has nothing to do with SCO's business falling over the last several years in favor of linux.
Except those places where no legal jurisdiction has a rule one way or the other. Or are you implying the Amateur bands have this rule in every single jurisdiction and location on earth?
not all shortwave is HAM, and you generally can't use HAM for commercial purposes.
So opening up a "HAM based ISP" is probably not legal in most places.
If IBM illegally copied code that rightfully belonged to SCO,and is large enough to warrant real copyright protections, and it made it's way into linux, then we want SCO to win against IBM, and we want SCO to do the right thing, which is let us know which code it is so the linux world at large can work to remove that code from future versions.
Furthermore, realize that we aren't obligated to remove it immediately; even if IBM copied it into, say, OS2, their customers would not be obligated to uninstall their software. SCO can claim damages, but claiming control over all of linux sure isn't going to happen.
On the other hand, if scos claims are really baseless, we want them to die, because they suck.