If I understand the GPL right, it's effectively theirs until they release it. The management decision would have to be whether to give the work that their programmers produced out into the world for free, giving back to the system that gave them the base code in the first place, or keep it to themselves.
I've seen all the comments on loopholes and inconsistencies in this proposed law. This is why the politicians and corporations normally write the laws.
Unlike us, they know how to eliminate loopholes and gross internal inconsistencies. Take, respectively, the tax laws and the DMCA for example.
There's a big moral difference between the government putting a restriction on your behaviour because it puts a cost on society
Honestly ask yourself, do you do anything that puts a cost on society? Think hard, I'm sure you can come up with about 20-30 things. Do you think they should be illegal?
There's also a difference between legislating for something and enforcing something.
But it is legislated and enforced. Around here there are often 100% safety checks, with penalties, up to driving suspensions, for not wearing your seatbelt, even if it's not the driver.
The status of enforcement doesn't matter, from no enforcement to enforcement by electronic means as you mention. What matters is that there is yet another a law out there keeping me from doing something that doesn't directly harm another. States have defended their sodomy laws by saying "we rarely enforce them anyway." Tell that to the guy who will never see his daughter again because he went down on his soon-to-be-ex wife (that's sodomy, a sex crime).
Let's take this further. Harnesses will protect you from injury much better than seatbelts. Why isn't there a law mandating those?
Now let's take this even further. Airbags save lives on the whole (not counting my personal horrendous experience), but my car doesn't have one. Shouldn't I be fined for not having one?
Bad example. Not wearing a seat belt affects more than you (believe it or not)....
Okay, I'll use your logic: playing football or swimming affects more than you in the same way also. These are dangerous activities killing or injuring thousands each year at great cost to society. Therefore, there should be a law banning these activities.
Seatbelt and helmet laws are among the most rediculous, nanny-state legislation out there. BTW, I always wear my seatbelt, and I was saved by one in an accident (walked away without a scratch). This habit started before any seatbelt laws.
Laws designed to curtail behaviour that has negative impacts on other people, or society as a whole, are not wasteful.
The problem is that governments can, and do, take the collateral impact argument too far without being consistent in the application. It always comes down to "unpopular things are banned." You just don't mind it since, most likely, something you like hasn't been prohibited yet.
Welcome to the Nanny State.
Or would you prefer a law that if you weren't wearing a seatbelt, then you don't get medical treatment in the event of an accident?
No, I wouldn't prefer a law. Laws are used first by the foolish, last by the wise.
I would prefer your car and medial insurance to have clauses denying or reducing coverage (or raising premiums) if you weren't wearing a seatbelt. Same goes for motorcycle helmets, playing football, or anything else dangerous. Life insurance companies already do this with smoking.
Waffle Iron has a point, although he's wrong. I work in the government, and it looks more like "DOC PPT XLS MDB..."
There are literally terrabytes of data flowing around here, and the only truly open formats I've seen so far are JPEG and TIFF.
Of course, maybe we should define open, as in it can be a proprietary format, but the complete structure should be published for interoperability, like PDF, which accounts for a lot of our files.
McCall sold the patterns to the stores, and therefore has no rights to control their disposition after that. Like Justice John Paul Stevens said, "The whole point of the first sale doctrine is that once the copyright owner places a copyrighted item in the stream of commerce by selling it, he has exhausted his exclusive statutory right to control its distribution."
And according to Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corp., from the 9th Circuit, thumbnail images are fair use, and that could be extended to this case, even more so since here they are used to sell the product in question. Plus there's section 109(c) of the copyright act essentially allowing thumbnails.
Assuming for this study that the business need must equal the amount of software sales, and any difference is privacy. Star Office or Open Office anyone?
Did they even take into account that a high-tech business can run thousands of legal copies of software without having so much as one BSA license?
I've never been in on any extremely large-scale MS buys but:
1) I've never seen any guarantees of uptime. 2) I've never seen anything other than standard corporate-style support, but I've never even seen that being used. All problems are handled by the in-house help desk people (who may be non-Microsoft contractors), who may go to TechNet for answers.
If only "...acquisition of computerized data in non-encrypted form by an unauthorized person" had been "...by a person not authorized by the company."
Technically they might have to, by law, inform you of all those secret searches being carried out under the TREASON - er - PATRIOT act, which forbids them from informing you.
The agents would be authorized by law, but not by the company.
If the contract says "Novell grants SCO exclusive license to distribute UNIX code for the next 10 years" then yes, Novell has surrendered its distribution rights for the duration of the contract. If SCO is right, the fact that Novell retains copyright is irrelevant. Copyright lets Novell choose how to distribute their works, and they chose -- in the form of an exclusive license to another company (again, if SCO is right).
SCO asking for the copyright too is interesting. I think they were preparing to sue and thought they could go after the big bucks of willful copyright infringement by IBM rather than just a contract dispute.
As far as cancelling the contract due to abuse, again, we'd have to see the contract before we can say anything aside from just pure speculation.
From SCO's response, it appears they think that although they didn't buy the copyright, they did contract the exclusive distribution rights to the code. This appears to be like how Pixar contracted the exclusive distribution rights to its movies to Disney. Nobody can distribute all or parts of Toy Story except for Disney under the contract.
This wouldn't make it a copyright violation, but a contract violation that could have a serious ripple effect. We can't know until Novell or SCO releases the relevant terms of the contract.
there's no WAY this is going to do anything other than stop the flow of income into 321 Studios,
They want to make innovators afraid to go into business, eliminating other players in the media business. They want to own and control all media from production to viewing, and this is just a step in that direction.
Large trucking firms used to do this to drive out the independent truckers. When an independent bid for a load, the large firm would always undercut his bid, even to the point of taking a loss. They could take the loss, but the independents couldn't.
This almost drove all independents out of businesses until it was made illegal. I'm sure the same anti-dumping laws could be used for this case.
Linux still has one advantage in that it won't go out of business due to lack of income.
It appears that there's a lot of optimization to be had by recompiling for this processor, especially in getting around various scheduling pitfalls. Photoshop and other need-for-speed apps will probably be recompiled ASAP to give them the competitive edge.
There is no OSS equivalent to Photoshop if you are designing for print. While Gimp works great for the web, it can't do print.
Obviously, OpenOffice should be used for all of the MS Office applications. It doesn't have a spell checker, but then the students should be learning to spell and proof on their own, right?
This is the big difference. When people get MP3 players, the generally play with the features, think its cool and get on to listening to their music.
For an example, when a coworker recently got an (older) iPod, the excitement was tangible -- "Wow!" "This is the shit!" "Check this out!" and so on for weeks. The design was so great, he just kept holding it and feeling it, cooing over it. He's gone now, but I'm sure he's still like that.
Multi-pass helps DivX level out the bitrate usage throughout the movie, balancing high and low bitrates of various scenes in achieving a given size. Instead of a movie being 10MB too short, it can use that 10MB to add to the quality, and, more importantly, it never goes too long to fit on a CD.
Plus, subsequent passes take just as long as the first one. No padding.
Slashdot Mirror
If I understand the GPL right, it's effectively theirs until they release it. The management decision would have to be whether to give the work that their programmers produced out into the world for free, giving back to the system that gave them the base code in the first place, or keep it to themselves.
Okay, so I guess I was wrong and sarcasm tags were needed.
Keep up the good work though.
I've seen all the comments on loopholes and inconsistencies in this proposed law. This is why the politicians and corporations normally write the laws.
Unlike us, they know how to eliminate loopholes and gross internal inconsistencies. Take, respectively, the tax laws and the DMCA for example.
There's a big moral difference between the government putting a restriction on your behaviour because it puts a cost on society
Honestly ask yourself, do you do anything that puts a cost on society? Think hard, I'm sure you can come up with about 20-30 things. Do you think they should be illegal?
There's also a difference between legislating for something and enforcing something.
But it is legislated and enforced. Around here there are often 100% safety checks, with penalties, up to driving suspensions, for not wearing your seatbelt, even if it's not the driver.
The status of enforcement doesn't matter, from no enforcement to enforcement by electronic means as you mention. What matters is that there is yet another a law out there keeping me from doing something that doesn't directly harm another. States have defended their sodomy laws by saying "we rarely enforce them anyway." Tell that to the guy who will never see his daughter again because he went down on his soon-to-be-ex wife (that's sodomy, a sex crime).
Let's take this further. Harnesses will protect you from injury much better than seatbelts. Why isn't there a law mandating those?
Now let's take this even further. Airbags save lives on the whole (not counting my personal horrendous experience), but my car doesn't have one. Shouldn't I be fined for not having one?
Bad example. Not wearing a seat belt affects more than you (believe it or not)....
Okay, I'll use your logic: playing football or swimming affects more than you in the same way also. These are dangerous activities killing or injuring thousands each year at great cost to society. Therefore, there should be a law banning these activities.
Seatbelt and helmet laws are among the most rediculous, nanny-state legislation out there. BTW, I always wear my seatbelt, and I was saved by one in an accident (walked away without a scratch). This habit started before any seatbelt laws.
Laws designed to curtail behaviour that has negative impacts on other people, or society as a whole, are not wasteful.
The problem is that governments can, and do, take the collateral impact argument too far without being consistent in the application. It always comes down to "unpopular things are banned." You just don't mind it since, most likely, something you like hasn't been prohibited yet.
Welcome to the Nanny State.
Or would you prefer a law that if you weren't wearing a seatbelt, then you don't get medical treatment in the event of an accident?
No, I wouldn't prefer a law. Laws are used first by the foolish, last by the wise.
I would prefer your car and medial insurance to have clauses denying or reducing coverage (or raising premiums) if you weren't wearing a seatbelt. Same goes for motorcycle helmets, playing football, or anything else dangerous. Life insurance companies already do this with smoking.
The government that governs least, governs best.
Waffle Iron has a point, although he's wrong. I work in the government, and it looks more like "DOC PPT XLS MDB ..."
There are literally terrabytes of data flowing around here, and the only truly open formats I've seen so far are JPEG and TIFF.
Of course, maybe we should define open, as in it can be a proprietary format, but the complete structure should be published for interoperability, like PDF, which accounts for a lot of our files.
First Sale + Fair Use = No Case
McCall sold the patterns to the stores, and therefore has no rights to control their disposition after that. Like Justice John Paul Stevens said, "The whole point of the first sale doctrine is that once the copyright owner places a copyrighted item in the stream of commerce by selling it, he has exhausted his exclusive statutory right to control its distribution."
And according to Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corp., from the 9th Circuit, thumbnail images are fair use, and that could be extended to this case, even more so since here they are used to sell the product in question. Plus there's section 109(c) of the copyright act essentially allowing thumbnails.
"privacy" = "piracy"
In any case, they still think they're the only game in town.
Did they even take into account that a high-tech business can run thousands of legal copies of software without having so much as one BSA license?
I've never been in on any extremely large-scale MS buys but:
1) I've never seen any guarantees of uptime.
2) I've never seen anything other than standard corporate-style support, but I've never even seen that being used. All problems are handled by the in-house help desk people (who may be non-Microsoft contractors), who may go to TechNet for answers.
If only "...acquisition of computerized data in non-encrypted form by an unauthorized person" had been "...by a person not authorized by the company."
Technically they might have to, by law, inform you of all those secret searches being carried out under the TREASON - er - PATRIOT act, which forbids them from informing you.
The agents would be authorized by law, but not by the company.
If the contract says "Novell grants SCO exclusive license to distribute UNIX code for the next 10 years" then yes, Novell has surrendered its distribution rights for the duration of the contract. If SCO is right, the fact that Novell retains copyright is irrelevant. Copyright lets Novell choose how to distribute their works, and they chose -- in the form of an exclusive license to another company (again, if SCO is right).
SCO asking for the copyright too is interesting. I think they were preparing to sue and thought they could go after the big bucks of willful copyright infringement by IBM rather than just a contract dispute.
As far as cancelling the contract due to abuse, again, we'd have to see the contract before we can say anything aside from just pure speculation.
From SCO's response, it appears they think that although they didn't buy the copyright, they did contract the exclusive distribution rights to the code. This appears to be like how Pixar contracted the exclusive distribution rights to its movies to Disney. Nobody can distribute all or parts of Toy Story except for Disney under the contract.
This wouldn't make it a copyright violation, but a contract violation that could have a serious ripple effect. We can't know until Novell or SCO releases the relevant terms of the contract.
The DVD recorder has substantial non-infringing use so nobody argues that they are not legal.
Even if it is 100% non-infringing use, it still violates the anti-circumvention clause of the DMCA.
Luckily, the judge seems to be realizing that that clause doesn't quite fall in line with all other copyright law and precedence.
there's no WAY this is going to do anything other than stop the flow of income into 321 Studios,
They want to make innovators afraid to go into business, eliminating other players in the media business. They want to own and control all media from production to viewing, and this is just a step in that direction.
Large trucking firms used to do this to drive out the independent truckers. When an independent bid for a load, the large firm would always undercut his bid, even to the point of taking a loss. They could take the loss, but the independents couldn't.
This almost drove all independents out of businesses until it was made illegal. I'm sure the same anti-dumping laws could be used for this case.
Linux still has one advantage in that it won't go out of business due to lack of income.
It appears that there's a lot of optimization to be had by recompiling for this processor, especially in getting around various scheduling pitfalls. Photoshop and other need-for-speed apps will probably be recompiled ASAP to give them the competitive edge.
A world, free...
nVidia has an nForce 2 chipset for this, including GeForce 4 MX graphics, LAN, USB, Firewire, 5.1 audio, etc.
The USSR let us spend all the R&D for the technology leading up to the Shuttle, then took the info and made their own for far less.
As always, Apple is the outside R&D department for Microsoft.
With nVidia too. The only difference between a GeForce 2 card and a Quadro 2 card was a little soldering.
There is no OSS equivalent to Photoshop if you are designing for print. While Gimp works great for the web, it can't do print.
Obviously, OpenOffice should be used for all of the MS Office applications. It doesn't have a spell checker, but then the students should be learning to spell and proof on their own, right?
"War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. Prison is opportunity."
This is the big difference. When people get MP3 players, the generally play with the features, think its cool and get on to listening to their music.
For an example, when a coworker recently got an (older) iPod, the excitement was tangible -- "Wow!" "This is the shit!" "Check this out!" and so on for weeks. The design was so great, he just kept holding it and feeling it, cooing over it. He's gone now, but I'm sure he's still like that.
The iPod gives you this, others don't.
Multi-pass helps DivX level out the bitrate usage throughout the movie, balancing high and low bitrates of various scenes in achieving a given size. Instead of a movie being 10MB too short, it can use that 10MB to add to the quality, and, more importantly, it never goes too long to fit on a CD.
Plus, subsequent passes take just as long as the first one. No padding.