One of the things that bothers me about redistribution of modified BSDL'ed software is the issue of ownership. From my understanding of copyright law, derivative works are owned by the original copyright holder.
This means if I make some modifications to BSDL'ed code and then decide to release the result as a commercial product in binary-only form I may not own the copyright to the resulting product. While IANAL it seems to me that this could come back to haunt me some time in the future.
I would be most interested in what the interpitation of this sticky point is from those with good experience in the BSD community.
Yes, if you want to split hairs, you can make money from GPL'd programs, but it's extremely difficult and doubtful whether it's sustainable in the long-term.
It seems to me that there are enough examples of people who have made substantial sums of money from GPL'ed code they wrote to make your claims very doubtful. One of the better examples is the long-term success of Ghostscript.
Eli was a great inventor, but the real start of the industrial revolution was much earlier in England. The most important invention was probably the steam engine by James Watt.
European monk Adelard of Bath translated Arab mathematicianal-Khowarizmi's book "Al-jabr" in 1120.
Somehow a translation doesn't seem to me to qualify one as geek of the millenium. Now if Al-jabr had been written before 1000 AB (it wasn't) I'd be happy to give it to al-Khowarizmi.
I can use the rest of the system (albeit, slowly) - then that's a strange defintition of a "lock up"
If you are rebooting because your system performance has been affected by a crashed userland application, this is a Bad Thing.
It may not strictly be a lock-up, but it seems to me to be very poor behaviour on the part of your operating system to have the performance of other system services be impared in this fashion. Suppose you were running a server under fairly heavy load and this happened? All of your users would be adversely affected by this, and you DON'T have the ability to reboot - you have to wait for however long it takes Task Manager to catch up with the problem.
Congratulations for being a flaming liar. It is not completely untrue. The GPV destroys any enterprise from profiting using the established fee for copy" licensing model.
Have you ever read the GPL? It specifically includes the following:
You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee.
The article writer doesn't know what the hell he is talking about. It's just a big rant about how BSD is better because it programmers to make momey off their code, while GNU doesn't. This of course is completely untrue.
Don't waste your time. This is unworthly of slashdot.
Yeah - damn Chaucer for starting to publish his work BEFORE the great vowel shift. Maybe some day we will get a REAL language that will FACILITATE problem solving, like Loglan, rather than continuing to use the archaic meme-bases that place artificial limits on our conceptual capacity.
At least English is better than Chinese. Ever try spelling in Chinese over the telephone??? Ideogammic languages have REAL problems.
Microsoft, being the largest capitalized corporation in the world is clearly in that category.
Uh... I think there are bigger companies in the US, not mentioning the rest of the world. The name IBM or Bayer just comes to mind...
Uh yourself. Microsoft is the largest capitalized corporation in the world. Capitalization = stock prices times number of outstanding shares. Second is GE. IBM or General Motors is probably #3.
If you talk about sales or number of employees or some other measure I am sure you will come up with a different ranking.
if the same growth is going to take place in the next 5 years mr. BillG is going to buy the US.
Not very likely. Over the last two years Microsoft's growth has really slowed. If you extrapolate trends (dangerous) they will probably lose their lead quite soon to companies like Cisco and Qualcomm.
Just this year Qualcomm has gone from 3% of the value of Microsoft to 60%. Some analysts have already predicted another doubling of Qualcomm stock which would cause it to surpass Microsoft.
I think that saying that Bill Gates and Microsoft aren't worth watching, as Berst seems to have done, is insane
Once a corporation gets to be above a certain size, it has far more to lose than to gain by real change.
Microsoft, being the largest capitalized corporation in the world is clearly in that category. Over the next decade what are they going to do any differently that what they did over the last 5 years? They will be boring as hell.
Watching Microsoft is going to be like watching paint dry.
The writers of this article are criminally misleading - because they completely neglect the use of genetic engineering of agricultural crops outside Europe and North America. Places where you cannot impune technological progress simply by claiming it is being "forced on us by those evil corporations". Places where all the arable land is in production, and grain is NOT fed to cattle. And where it is estimated that a 20% increase in crop yields would relieve huge pressures on the environment, break the cycle of sustenance level poverty and provide a buffer against the potential of food shortages and famines.
It's fine to yap about crazy theories of corporate greed and misfeasence of government in an attempt to push an anti-technology agenda, and beat up on the whipping boy of the moment, which seems to be Monsanto. But if you do so you have to examine the cases where it is NOT being driven by corporations, and ask why?
If it were just corporate interests, that would be one thing. But it isn't. The move to genetically engineered foods is in fact a phenomena the is truly global and is motivated by a lot more than the profit motives that are accused in the polemic of this topic.
People need to really THINK, and get out of their chavanistic attitude that America and Europe are equal to the world when they try to assess the impact of a fundamental technology such as this.
The pages at the IRRI are also very illuminating in other ways - because they give some REAL information as to what is going on with food production in the world's most densly populated areas - where ALL arable land is in maximal production, and the grain produced is NOT being used to feed cattle.
People who throw out statements like 'we grow enough food already' and 'all we have to do is stop feeding grain to animals' are sadly mistaken.
a sterile variant outcompetes the natural variant.
This theory is baloney. Almost all commercial crops are monocultures that are not allowed to reproduce. Many non-engineered crops (like navel oranges and seedless) are in fact sterile clones.
These have exactly the same vulnerabilities that genetically engineered crops do.
clueless media types babbling about Linux today will be talking up Win2K equally cluelessly
One of the things I have noticed about MS product introductions is that they rarely live up to the pre-hype, and there is always some backlash after the product hits the street. People installing the prerelease versions are generally early adopters who focus on the upsides of the product - building the prerelease hype. After introduction the media tend to focus on the problems that occur. I don't know about you, but I sure remember the wave of problem reports that hit once people learned that Win 95 didn't support their legacy sound or network card, or some archaic software they had. Not to mention it had a number of very annoying bugs on introduction, and the the first patches/upgrades generally caused more problems than they fixed.
This makes me believe that there will be some hype associated with the the release, but as soon as people start finding that the software isn't perfectly 100% back-compatable, AND that it has a higher price than they expect AND it really isn't a consumer OS AND like any major new release there are going to be a lot of bugs you are going to see a lot of backlash in the media. There will be a lot of business organizations that will delay implementation because they don't want to beta test on enterprise servers, or because their techs are not yet W2K certified, and the media will also pick up on this.
It's the same thing you saw with Linux - as soon as you saw media the hype start about Linux as a Windows replacement there were a raft of articles about how hard it was to install, or how it wasn't ready for the desktop. That Linux as a Windows replacement stuff has mostly died out already.
Right now the media hype associated with Linux has little to do with Linux as a Windows replacement; it is driven by the stock market's appetite for technology stocks. I think that the Forrester report is making a big assumption that this enthusiasm for Linix IPOs is going to die out any time soon. The growth potential for Linux in all sorts of applications is still there, and somebody is likely to find a workable business model. The internet appliances Forrester cites positions Linux too strongly for what a lot of people think is the strategic direction for the growth in computing. This is precisely where Microsoft has seems to be it's weakest with it's losing Wince product.
Lived? No. I have only spent about 6 months there. I worked for a French company for about 7 years, and they used to send me to Lyons every now and then. I used to take the TGV to Paris most weekends, and stay in a little student oriented hotel near the Jardins Luxemborg. I really liked to visit small museums like the Cluny nearby.
I have also spent a fair amount of time in Chile (my wife is from there) and Korea (I design and started up a manufacturing plant near Chon-ju in central South Korea.
I think I have a pretty good international background - and not as North Atlantic centric as most.
you would be posting something similar.
I doubt it. In fact, I can honestly say that I have never posted a comment that states 'I am glad I don't live in Europe' when visiting a European web site.
not all Americans have the myopic view of the world that Eric does.
How the hell do you know what kind of world view I have?
copying DVDs is less economical that simply buying the movie. Is this really a compelling argument?
No, it is not. Rewriable CDs used to be $30 a pop. Now they can be found for $0.60. It might take 3-5 years, but the time will come when it becomes economical.
One of the most interesting aspects of this case is the reliance on the shrinkwrap license by the DVD CCA as a means of preventing reverse engineering. AFAIK this has never been tested in court, and in fact I have seen some legal opinions that such restrictions may be unconstitutional. The reason is that restricting reverse engineering removes the incentive to patent your technology - and there is clear wording in the Constitution regarding the desirability of patents. There is a discussion of this point here.
This could turn out to be a very important precedent.
No, the only thing the movie industry has going for it is the U.S. judicial system and the price tag involved in fighting for your right.
I think that this is greatly exaggurated. Individual parties in the US do fight large companies and win. We have a number of large companies that have been forced into bankruptcy because of this. And recent decisions are making it look very likely that the tobacco industry in the US is going to go the same way.
And there are plenty of advocacy groups like the EFF, and lawyers willing to take up causes on a pro bono or contingency basis.
If it were only the shrinkwrap agreements, they'd probably be laughed out of court. That is, if they even dare to put end user license agreements to a court test.
This is the most interesting aspect of this case. If you read the complaint, you will find that the DVD CCA is in fact relying on the shrink wrap license to claim that the reverse engineering was illegal.
As far as I know this could represent the first legal test of reverse engineering clauses in shrink wrap licenses. This case could well turn out to set some very important precedence in the US.
right to make a program that executes a proprietary algorithm
Depends on what you mean by proprietary. If it is covered by patents the answer is no.
Do individuals or companies have the right to keep data formats private
Generally the answer is yes. Many programs have private data formats. Depending on patent status and how they are licensed you might be able to reverse engineer the formats.
can you sue for damages, a person or group who released a product using your patents, if they gave that product away for free?
I am pretty sure the answer to this is yes. This is a huge threat to OSS.
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Once other people start contributing code, you have to get their permission to relicense their parts of the program.
IANAL but I am not so sure that you need to do this - under copyright law the original author also owns derivative works.
One of the things that bothers me about redistribution of modified BSDL'ed software is the issue of ownership. From my understanding of copyright law, derivative works are owned by the original copyright holder.
This means if I make some modifications to BSDL'ed code and then decide to release the result as a commercial product in binary-only form I may not own the copyright to the resulting product. While IANAL it seems to me that this could come back to haunt me some time in the future.
I would be most interested in what the interpitation of this sticky point is from those with good experience in the BSD community.
Yes, if you want to split hairs, you can make money from GPL'd programs, but it's extremely difficult and doubtful whether it's sustainable in the long-term.
It seems to me that there are enough examples of people who have made substantial sums of money from GPL'ed code they wrote to make your claims very doubtful. One of the better examples is the long-term success of Ghostscript.
Bertrand Russell, one of the greatest minds in mathematics and logic.
The problem I have with Russell is that he spent so much time trying to develop what Godel proved impossible.
"the most successful computing device in history, the slide rule"
What criterea are you using to come to this conclusion?
Length of use? No, Abacus.
Number of calculations? I imagine the x86 wins that.
Number of devices sold? Probably Abacus again.
Eli was a great inventor, but the real start of the industrial revolution was much earlier in England. The most important invention was probably the steam engine by James Watt.
India is both free and civilized. That doesn't give them a large GNP though.
European monk Adelard of Bath translated Arab mathematicianal-Khowarizmi's book "Al-jabr" in 1120.
Somehow a translation doesn't seem to me to qualify one as geek of the millenium. Now if Al-jabr had been written before 1000 AB (it wasn't) I'd be happy to give it to al-Khowarizmi.
Euclid
Wrong millennium.
Doug Engelbart
Inventor of the computer as we use it today. Gave the famous mother of all demos.
Leonard Euler
Analysis Incarnate. Best mathematician of the 19th century.
Isaac Newton
"The laws of motion and gravity lay hid darkness.
God said let Newton be and all was light"
Nikoli Copernicus
Cracked open the firmament. Started the scientific revolution still going today.
Alan Turing
We are still trying to understand his ideas.
Daniel Dennet
Developing the science of consciousness.
Louis Pasteur
Brought science to biology.
Linus Pauling.
Only person ever to win two unshared Nobel Prizes.
Ilya Prigogine
The thermodynamics of self-assembly.
Rene Descartes
Publication of La Géométrie in 1637 is first use of fully symbolic mathematics.
I can use the rest of the system (albeit, slowly) - then that's a strange defintition of a "lock up"
If you are rebooting because your system performance has been affected by a crashed userland application, this is a Bad Thing.
It may not strictly be a lock-up, but it seems to me to be very poor behaviour on the part of your operating system to have the performance of other system services be impared in this fashion. Suppose you were running a server under fairly heavy load and this happened? All of your users would be adversely affected by this, and you DON'T have the ability to reboot - you have to wait for however long it takes Task Manager to catch up with the problem.
Congratulations for being a flaming liar. It is not completely untrue. The GPV destroys any enterprise from profiting using the established fee for copy" licensing model.
Have you ever read the GPL? It specifically includes the following:
You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee.
The article writer doesn't know what the hell he is talking about. It's just a big rant about how BSD is better because it programmers to make momey off their code, while GNU doesn't. This of course is completely untrue.
Don't waste your time. This is unworthly of slashdot.
this is the 21st century?
Not for another year.
English is a pretty stupid and difficult language
Yeah - damn Chaucer for starting to publish his work BEFORE the great vowel shift. Maybe some day we will get a REAL language that will FACILITATE problem solving, like Loglan, rather than continuing to use the archaic meme-bases that place artificial limits on our conceptual capacity.
At least English is better than Chinese. Ever try spelling in Chinese over the telephone??? Ideogammic languages have REAL problems.
Microsoft, being the largest capitalized corporation in the world is clearly in that category.
Uh... I think there are bigger companies in the US, not mentioning the rest of the world. The name IBM or Bayer just comes to mind...
Uh yourself. Microsoft is the largest capitalized corporation in the world. Capitalization = stock prices times number of outstanding shares. Second is GE. IBM or General Motors is probably #3.
If you talk about sales or number of employees or some other measure I am sure you will come up with a different ranking.
if the same growth is going to take place in the next 5 years mr. BillG is going to buy the US.
Not very likely. Over the last two years Microsoft's growth has really slowed. If you extrapolate trends (dangerous) they will probably lose their lead quite soon to companies like Cisco and Qualcomm.
Just this year Qualcomm has gone from 3% of the value of Microsoft to 60%. Some analysts have already predicted another doubling of Qualcomm stock which would cause it to surpass Microsoft.
You'd think that the localtime function could be rewritten to simply return the full year in a 4-digit format.
No good. This would cause Y10K bugs 8000 years from today.
I think that saying that Bill Gates and Microsoft aren't worth watching, as Berst seems to have done, is insane
Once a corporation gets to be above a certain size, it has far more to lose than to gain by real change.
Microsoft, being the largest capitalized corporation in the world is clearly in that category. Over the next decade what are they going to do any differently that what they did over the last 5 years? They will be boring as hell.
Watching Microsoft is going to be like watching paint dry.
The writers of this article are criminally misleading - because they completely neglect the use of genetic engineering of agricultural crops outside Europe and North America. Places where you cannot impune technological progress simply by claiming it is being "forced on us by those evil corporations". Places where all the arable land is in production, and grain is NOT fed to cattle. And where it is estimated that a 20% increase in crop yields would relieve huge pressures on the environment, break the cycle of sustenance level poverty and provide a buffer against the potential of food shortages and famines.
It's fine to yap about crazy theories of corporate greed and misfeasence of government in an attempt to push an anti-technology agenda, and beat up on the whipping boy of the moment, which seems to be Monsanto. But if you do so you have to examine the cases where it is NOT being driven by corporations, and ask why?
These critics are very conveniently neglecting the use of genetically engineered crops outside the North Atlantic. Anyone who REALLY wants to appreciate the picture of what is going on here needs to look at a broader view, and include organizations like the Phillipine based International Rice Research Institute, and it's programs to introduce genetically engineered rice into Asia. The Rice Institute isn't doing this for money - it's a non-profit. The Rice Institute isn't doing this to enslave farmers into its corporate model, nor any of the other self-interested motivations that the anti-genetic engineering neo- Luddites are complaining about.
If it were just corporate interests, that would be one thing. But it isn't. The move to genetically engineered foods is in fact a phenomena the is truly global and is motivated by a lot more than the profit motives that are accused in the polemic of this topic.
People need to really THINK, and get out of their chavanistic attitude that America and Europe are equal to the world when they try to assess the impact of a fundamental technology such as this.
The pages at the IRRI are also very illuminating in other ways - because they give some REAL information as to what is going on with food production in the world's most densly populated areas - where ALL arable land is in maximal production, and the grain produced is NOT being used to feed cattle.
People who throw out statements like 'we grow enough food already' and 'all we have to do is stop feeding grain to animals' are sadly mistaken.
a sterile variant outcompetes the natural variant.
This theory is baloney. Almost all commercial crops are monocultures that are not allowed to reproduce. Many non-engineered crops (like navel oranges and seedless) are in fact sterile clones.
These have exactly the same vulnerabilities that genetically engineered crops do.
clueless media types babbling about Linux today will be talking up Win2K equally cluelessly
One of the things I have noticed about MS product introductions is that they rarely live up to the pre-hype, and there is always some backlash after the product hits the street. People installing the prerelease versions are generally early adopters who focus on the upsides of the product - building the prerelease hype. After introduction the media tend to focus on the problems that occur. I don't know about you, but I sure remember the wave of problem reports that hit once people learned that Win 95 didn't support their legacy sound or network card, or some archaic software they had. Not to mention it had a number of very annoying bugs on introduction, and the the first patches/upgrades generally caused more problems than they fixed.
This makes me believe that there will be some hype associated with the the release, but as soon as people start finding that the software isn't perfectly 100% back-compatable, AND that it has a higher price than they expect AND it really isn't a consumer OS AND like any major new release there are going to be a lot of bugs you are going to see a lot of backlash in the media. There will be a lot of business organizations that will delay implementation because they don't want to beta test on enterprise servers, or because their techs are not yet W2K certified, and the media will also pick up on this.
It's the same thing you saw with Linux - as soon as you saw media the hype start about Linux as a Windows replacement there were a raft of articles about how hard it was to install, or how it wasn't ready for the desktop. That Linux as a Windows replacement stuff has mostly died out already.
Right now the media hype associated with Linux has little to do with Linux as a Windows replacement; it is driven by the stock market's appetite for technology stocks. I think that the Forrester report is making a big assumption that this enthusiasm for Linix IPOs is going to die out any time soon. The growth potential for Linux in all sorts of applications is still there, and somebody is likely to find a workable business model. The internet appliances Forrester cites positions Linux too strongly for what a lot of people think is the strategic direction for the growth in computing. This is precisely where Microsoft has seems to be it's weakest with it's losing Wince product.
Have you lived in Europe?
Lived? No. I have only spent about 6 months there. I worked for a French company for about 7 years, and they used to send me to Lyons every now and then. I used to take the TGV to Paris most weekends, and stay in a little student oriented hotel near the Jardins Luxemborg. I really liked to visit small museums like the Cluny nearby.
I have also spent a fair amount of time in Chile (my wife is from there) and Korea (I design and started up a manufacturing plant near Chon-ju in central South Korea.
I think I have a pretty good international background - and not as North Atlantic centric as most.
you would be posting something similar.
I doubt it. In fact, I can honestly say that I have never posted a comment that states 'I am glad I don't live in Europe' when visiting a European web site.
not all Americans have the myopic view of the world that Eric does.
How the hell do you know what kind of world view I have?
copying DVDs is less economical that simply buying the movie. Is this really a compelling argument?
No, it is not. Rewriable CDs used to be $30 a pop. Now they can be found for $0.60. It might take 3-5 years, but the time will come when it becomes economical.
One of the most interesting aspects of this case is the reliance on the shrinkwrap license by the DVD CCA as a means of preventing reverse engineering. AFAIK this has never been tested in court, and in fact I have seen some legal opinions that such restrictions may be unconstitutional. The reason is that restricting reverse engineering removes the incentive to patent your technology - and there is clear wording in the Constitution regarding the desirability of patents. There is a discussion of this point here.
This could turn out to be a very important precedent.
No, the only thing the movie industry has going for it is the U.S. judicial system and the price tag involved in fighting for your right.
I think that this is greatly exaggurated. Individual parties in the US do fight large companies and win. We have a number of large companies that have been forced into bankruptcy because of this. And recent decisions are making it look very likely that the tobacco industry in the US is going to go the same way.
And there are plenty of advocacy groups like the EFF, and lawyers willing to take up causes on a pro bono or contingency basis.
If it were only the shrinkwrap agreements, they'd probably be laughed out of court. That is, if they even dare to put end user license agreements to a court test.
This is the most interesting aspect of this case. If you read the complaint, you will find that the DVD CCA is in fact relying on the shrink wrap license to claim that the reverse engineering was illegal.
As far as I know this could represent the first legal test of reverse engineering clauses in shrink wrap licenses. This case could well turn out to set some very important precedence in the US.
IANAL, but...
right to make a program that executes a proprietary algorithm
Depends on what you mean by proprietary. If it is covered by patents the answer is no.
Do individuals or companies have the right to keep data formats private
Generally the answer is yes. Many programs have private data formats. Depending on patent status and how they are licensed you might be able to reverse engineer the formats.
can you sue for damages, a person or group who released a product using your patents, if they gave that product away for free?
I am pretty sure the answer to this is yes. This is a huge threat to OSS.