Of course, the correct solution for Dell would be to tell vendors that they will not ship computers with software that has EULAs that enforce such a blatant screwing of Dell's customers.
I believe the hypothetical EULAs that kid-noodle is referring to are not EULAs for software pre-installed on the computer, but rather for software that the user installs himself.
For example: Imagine somebody purchases a Dell, then hooks it up to the Internet and downloads Software A, which includes - and by its EULA can only legally be run with - Spyware B. Now imagine that the user, irritated that B is having its way with his computer, calls Dell tech support for help. If Dell instructs the user to download an Ad-Aware workalike that delete B but leaves A still installed on the system, then Dell has put the user in violation of an EULA.
Now telling a friend to violate an EULA in such a manner would hardly place any of us in a moral dilemma; however, it does present a potential legal issue, and one that cannot safely be disregarded by a company with as many clients as Dell. I, for one, see how this could be a necessary move on Dell's part.
Think of it this way: When you buy a new car you are given a warranty on what the manufacturer has sold to you, but you cannot rightfully expect the manufacturer to warranty the new ignition control chip you put in. This is no different.
I don't see the failure of the modern-day domesday project so much as a result of some fundamental flaw in every storage medium other than paper, but merely the consequence of a flawed approach to electronic storage.
That the modern domesday records are useless to anybody without access to a laserdisc reader is analogous to the fact that the original Domesday book is useless to anybody who cannot read Latin. We can read the original Domesday book because Latin is a standardized and widely-understood language that has been in use for ages. Similarly, if it were immediately apparent how to read a laser disc (in the same way that how to read the Domesday book is immediately apparent to Latin scholars, and likely will be for some time to come) it would be a perfectly valid long term approach to information storage.
Many people consider paper a bad long-term storage medium because it does rot, given enough time, and because it takes a lot of paper to hold a little information. One solution to the storage problem that I heard somewhere else (though I can't remember where this idea originally came from) is to etch text into a spiral form on a disc of some material known to suffer very little long-term decay. The text would begin at the outer ring of the spiral, large enough to be read with the naked eye, then would quickly become smaller as it approaches the center of the disc. The bulk of the information on the disc would be recorded at as small a size as possible, allowing a large amount of information to be stored on each disc. At the same time, the storage method would be immediately apparent to any half-brained member of a future society, and thus could be easily read by anybody with the technology to build a sufficiently powerful microscope.
Of course, I am not suggesting that anybody would want to use such a disc on a day-to-day basis; this design is completely impractical for that kind of use. This kind of storage medium would, however, be appropriate for the creation of historical archives. If anybody ever desired to recall some information stored on such a disc that had otherwise been lost in the sands of time, then at that point the disc's contents could be copied to the popular storage media of the day, for more convenient access.
As if that weren't bad enough, last semester I was sent a letter by DHNet (the Division of Housing Network) for the horrible crime of... running sshd on my computer. Yep.
Needless to say, I'm staying in my own place now:)
Hmm... it's a bit tangential to the topic of this thread, but I don't think that can't be a fundamental problem with the traffic sensors. Here at the University of Florida, I can trigger the on-campus traffic light turn signals simply by riding my bicycle in the turn lane (yes, even if there are no other vehicles in the turn lanes, on either side of the intersection).
Maybe they just have the threshold turned too high on the lights in your area?
Perhaps with the advent of a new internet mail protocol... for example, imagine a protocol that encompasses the responsibilities of both the IMAP/POP and SMTP protocols of today. Outgoing messages are signed by an RSA (or insert your favorite public key algorithm here) key unique to the sender's account (and heck, perhaps encrypted to the recipient's account while you're at it). The mail server essentially becomes a certifying authority, certifying that any message sent to you comes from one specific account on that server.
Of course, in this system I have described, a spammer could still stick a new server out on the net and use it for a little while, but as soon as it has been determined that this server is spamming people it can be blacklisted. And blacklisting is a tactic which might actually be effective in this universe of discourse, considering senders would need to be authenticated with their mail servers in order to send a message. So a mail server admin would have to intentionally allow spam to be sent from his machine (or, well, get hacked) in order to get it blacklisted.
Of course, I'm sure people much smarter than I have thought this one through far more completely. But it's a thought.
Excellent point... you hit the nail right on the head. I believe that the greatest opportunity for open-source systems, in general, lies not in the already-entrenched markets, but in markets that have yet to be explored due to current cost constraints.
Why does Google use Linux on its machines? Linux did not become the best solution for high-end web servers overnight, taking large portions of that particular market share from proprietary rivals. Instead, by becoming the first* widely-used, affordable (read: free) clustered operating system, Linux found its way into Google when Google saw that Beowulf clusters, the new open-source alternative, would be the better route to go than the old way of traditional, monolithic servers.
(*Correct me if I am wrong...)
By the way, the parent post piqued my interest... for more information about the coming-about of the electric guitar, follow this link.
Typically, when you disable pop-ups with Mozilla (or Phoenix, or <insert favorite Gecko derivative here>), the browser won't blanket-disable them but instead will disable pop-ups that it deems to be unrequested by the user.
So, for example, if this pop-up were to try to load itself when you visit a web page, Mozilla would most likely block it. However, at the Unicast gallery page you are explicitly requesting the pop-up when you click on its javascript link - and Mozilla knows this, if my reasoning is sound. This is the reason that you can get the address book pop-up when you click on the "address book" link in Yahoo Mail under Mozilla, but you won't see any of the various pop-up advertisements that they throw at you.
In practice, I doubt these things would get through to Mozilla or a Mozilla-based browser (or Konqueror, for that matter).
Try Canon, for one. The S750 I purchased last summer uses the same non-chipped ink tanks as most of their other new-line home and small office printers, so even though I don't see the S750 on their web site any more, I'm pretty sure that they will be making their ink this way for some time to come.
(It's a very good printer, besides, if you were wondering for your own reference... Prints fast (I don't have a ppm count... not nosebleed fast, but notably faster than my roommate's HP), works well with the gimp-print drivers if you use Linux, prints photos well enough for my eyes, and has all sorts of other bells and whistles.)
Offset by the cost of a slightly more pricey printer ($140), the ink is pretty inexpensive. The black cartridge will set you back $15; the full set of three color cartridges costs $30. Canon ink comes in transparent plastic "dumb" cartridges that are completely sucked dry when the driver tells you they're empty... the printer won't cheat you out of any of it, as it actually measures how much ink is left in the tank rather than using HP or Epson style guesswork.
There are a few other non-evil printer manufacturers, I'm sure, but Canon seems to be the best as far as I've heard. Any other suggestions, anyone?
Very good point... for that matter, how would the courts handle it even without this new technology? Even without programs that can read words from video, it is still theoretically possible (though maybe not practically possible) that someone could read the source code to DeCSS aloud onto a video tape, such that someone else at the receiving end could manually record that code into a source file and compile it.
(And if you wanted to be really ironic about it, you could always store the video on a DVD:-) )
Do you think the almost invulnerable association that we make between the video and audio recording of somebody speaking and the term "free speech" would give this medium any better legal footing than the traditional source-code-on-magnetic-disks? If I remember correctly, at one point the PGP developers were in the business of exporting their strong encryption to non-US territories by means of publishing their source code in a book... correct me if that is wrong.
As much as I try to adhere to this philosophy, I end up printing out a good deal of material almost every day. For one thing, I'm in school... but aside from lab reports and such, I'll from time to time print out, for example, an article from the New York Times that I want to read at lunch when I would have no additional reason to lug my Inspiron to the dining hall.
In most Linux-based operating systems (those with Ghostscript) it is of course easy to "print" just about any document to a postscript or PDF document... for Windows users I would recommend the basic version of Fineprint's pdfFactory, a commercial program that will install itself as a Windows printer and save documents as PDF files. It's not very featureful, but is good for the price (college kids, email them for the student discount). You can download a free trial version from their web page if you want to give it a shot.
Slightly off-topic, but this could be useful to someone... I'll have to second your comment on the Canon S750 printer... my dad got one to use as the main printer in our house when the S750 came out about a year ago (or I think it was about a year ago). We liked it so much that I got another one for myself when I went off to college this year.
At $140 it wasn't very cheap, but I've more than made up for this initial cost in savings on the ink. This is no Epson - the ink tanks are not "chipped", and since the tanks are made of transparent plastic you can tell that the printer manages to squeeze every last drop out of them.
The photo quality is high enough for my standards, it'll print very fast in black and white, and a full set of color ink cartridges sets me back less than half as much as the color ink for a comparable HP printer costs. It works fine under Linux (Red Hat will recognize and configure it), and the Windows driver is great: You can set the printer to turn itself on automatically if you start printing to it, or to run in a "quiet mode" between any given hours of the day.
If you're looking for a new color printer, check out the Canon line... highly recommended.
(Oh, and if you need to print high-quality photos with the S750 printer: My dad and I did a little experimentation here, and we decided that the Epson glossy photo paper looks the best with the Canon ink, with the Canon paper in a close second. I'd also recommend the Epson non-gloss photo paper for a cheaper solution...)
Unfortunately that isn't a workable policy all the time, though... my girlfriend calls my cell phone with her phone card from time to time (my cell isn't based in her area code). You never know what someone's going to see on their caller ID when you call on a Sprint phone card, and it changes from one call to the next.
While you have a good point about why, in general, FPS games are far less addictive / destructive than the more "social" games, I would like to add that here at the U of F I have a suitemate who, almost every other night, will stay up until six in the morning playing Counterstrike online. This often causes him to sleep in for the rest of the day and miss an entire day's worth of classes. He even dropped two classes this semester because of this problem.
So yes, while MMORPGs are generally more addictive than FPSs, even a seemingly innocent FPS has the capability to wreak havoc on one's "real" life. I suppose that this can only get worse in the future, with advanced system such as Xbox Live providing an even more social online gaming experience.
I am sure I won't be the first to say it, but there is one thing that all of us can do here: Remember to stop by www.debrands.com sometime in the next couple of weeks after this Slashdotting has died off, pick out a nice $20 chocolate set for your {girl|boy}friend / your mother / yourself, etc., and support DeBrands. The "why" needs no explanation.
The Dells already do this to some extent, although to be safe you probably would want to (need to?) temporarily suspend the computer to do it. I can attest that my Dell Inspiron 8200 has an internal capacitor that is at least powerful enough to allow me to suspend (not "hibernate"; I mean a real "everything-is-still-in-RAM" suspend, not suspend-to-disk) the computer, swap batteries, and pick back up at whatever I was doing 10 seconds ago.
Just to add a couple points that I personally enjoy about Phoenix:
Has an interface for adding and removing browser extensions (this Mozilla lacks)
There is a mouse gestures plugin available already!
There is a text-field item available in the custom toolbar that allows you to type text to search for either in the currently loaded page or on Google or DMOZ. This, in my opinion, is very useful.
The download manager as of 0.2 is not an annoying pop-up window, but rather a sidebar panel.
The olny thing that Windows Phoenix seems to be lacking from Mozilla (as far as I can tell) is a quick-launch option and the ability to change font scale on the fly with the Print Preview function (it can still be done via Page Setup, as with older versions of Mozilla.). Overall, this is a very good browser. I can see this going places... though sometimes I do appreciate the integration of Mozilla's email client, address book, and browser. I guess that this much is up to personal opinion...
Perhaps the external deployment clause is one useful clause that was overlooked by the authors of the GPL - in effect, there is no practical difference between running a distributed binary on your system and submitting input and viewing output on your system for code that is executed on a separate server...
What I find more interesting, though, is the Mutual Termination for Patent Application clause in the Open Software License. This, ideally, would prevent "IP Warriors" from using your software in their arsenal, but I think that practically this clause would serve said Patent Warriors with no incentive to act somewhat ethically, but instead can only serve to further fragment the world of Open Source licenses.
This brings up a bigger point, one that has certainly been raised before: Are all these OSS licenses really necessary, or productive? In an ideal world, I think, we would all be able to use the BSD license without having to worry about greedy corporations and individuals "embracing and extending" our code; this is not an ideal world, however, and I firmly believe that we need the protection that licenses like the GPL and LPGL can afford us. That said, having two more-or-less functionally equivalent, yet completely incompatible, GPLs lying around does nobody any good. The goal of the GPL, and supposedly the OSI, is to foster cooperation between Open Source applications, while preventing closed-source companies and individuals from using our code. But by having two or more incompatible GPLs we can only prevent OSS projects from collaborating.
I think that a massive consolidation of OSI-approved licenses is in order.
Perhaps what the authors of this article were referring to when they mentioned the "intellectual property right trap" was Palladium itself, one mechanism that would drastically change the Chinese approach to installations of computer software in the future.
In that case, they are correct in that there is at this time no known Palladium equivalent planned for RISC processors. That may change in the future, of course, but in the meantime it can probably be assumed that code compiled for an Alpha won't need Palladium support to run...
Of course, I suppose that one of us will have to learn Chinese and read the original article to be sure =)
I don't mean to be a jerk about it, but doesn't the line "Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company" mean anything here?
Quite seriously, regardless of your personal beliefs regarding intellectual property rights and wrongs, and subscription news services: How is it that we pat a news organization on the back for paying lip service to our favorite operating system, and then infringe on their copyrights?
Of course they have to package this in a 133 megabyte package in order to discourage dialup users from applying it... is there any valid reason that such a patch should take up so much space?
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, the correct solution for Dell would be to tell vendors that they will not ship computers with software that has EULAs that enforce such a blatant screwing of Dell's customers.
I believe the hypothetical EULAs that kid-noodle is referring to are not EULAs for software pre-installed on the computer, but rather for software that the user installs himself.
For example: Imagine somebody purchases a Dell, then hooks it up to the Internet and downloads Software A, which includes - and by its EULA can only legally be run with - Spyware B. Now imagine that the user, irritated that B is having its way with his computer, calls Dell tech support for help. If Dell instructs the user to download an Ad-Aware workalike that delete B but leaves A still installed on the system, then Dell has put the user in violation of an EULA.
Now telling a friend to violate an EULA in such a manner would hardly place any of us in a moral dilemma; however, it does present a potential legal issue, and one that cannot safely be disregarded by a company with as many clients as Dell. I, for one, see how this could be a necessary move on Dell's part.
Think of it this way: When you buy a new car you are given a warranty on what the manufacturer has sold to you, but you cannot rightfully expect the manufacturer to warranty the new ignition control chip you put in. This is no different.
I don't see the failure of the modern-day domesday project so much as a result of some fundamental flaw in every storage medium other than paper, but merely the consequence of a flawed approach to electronic storage.
That the modern domesday records are useless to anybody without access to a laserdisc reader is analogous to the fact that the original Domesday book is useless to anybody who cannot read Latin. We can read the original Domesday book because Latin is a standardized and widely-understood language that has been in use for ages. Similarly, if it were immediately apparent how to read a laser disc (in the same way that how to read the Domesday book is immediately apparent to Latin scholars, and likely will be for some time to come) it would be a perfectly valid long term approach to information storage.
Many people consider paper a bad long-term storage medium because it does rot, given enough time, and because it takes a lot of paper to hold a little information. One solution to the storage problem that I heard somewhere else (though I can't remember where this idea originally came from) is to etch text into a spiral form on a disc of some material known to suffer very little long-term decay. The text would begin at the outer ring of the spiral, large enough to be read with the naked eye, then would quickly become smaller as it approaches the center of the disc. The bulk of the information on the disc would be recorded at as small a size as possible, allowing a large amount of information to be stored on each disc. At the same time, the storage method would be immediately apparent to any half-brained member of a future society, and thus could be easily read by anybody with the technology to build a sufficiently powerful microscope.
Of course, I am not suggesting that anybody would want to use such a disc on a day-to-day basis; this design is completely impractical for that kind of use. This kind of storage medium would, however, be appropriate for the creation of historical archives. If anybody ever desired to recall some information stored on such a disc that had otherwise been lost in the sands of time, then at that point the disc's contents could be copied to the popular storage media of the day, for more convenient access.
As if that weren't bad enough, last semester I was sent a letter by DHNet (the Division of Housing Network) for the horrible crime of... running sshd on my computer. Yep.
Needless to say, I'm staying in my own place now :)
You can find more information about Dr. Frank's research on his homepage.
Hmm... it's a bit tangential to the topic of this thread, but I don't think that can't be a fundamental problem with the traffic sensors. Here at the University of Florida, I can trigger the on-campus traffic light turn signals simply by riding my bicycle in the turn lane (yes, even if there are no other vehicles in the turn lanes, on either side of the intersection).
Maybe they just have the threshold turned too high on the lights in your area?
Perhaps with the advent of a new internet mail protocol... for example, imagine a protocol that encompasses the responsibilities of both the IMAP/POP and SMTP protocols of today. Outgoing messages are signed by an RSA (or insert your favorite public key algorithm here) key unique to the sender's account (and heck, perhaps encrypted to the recipient's account while you're at it). The mail server essentially becomes a certifying authority, certifying that any message sent to you comes from one specific account on that server.
Of course, in this system I have described, a spammer could still stick a new server out on the net and use it for a little while, but as soon as it has been determined that this server is spamming people it can be blacklisted. And blacklisting is a tactic which might actually be effective in this universe of discourse, considering senders would need to be authenticated with their mail servers in order to send a message. So a mail server admin would have to intentionally allow spam to be sent from his machine (or, well, get hacked) in order to get it blacklisted.
Of course, I'm sure people much smarter than I have thought this one through far more completely. But it's a thought.
Excellent point... you hit the nail right on the head. I believe that the greatest opportunity for open-source systems, in general, lies not in the already-entrenched markets, but in markets that have yet to be explored due to current cost constraints.
Why does Google use Linux on its machines? Linux did not become the best solution for high-end web servers overnight, taking large portions of that particular market share from proprietary rivals. Instead, by becoming the first* widely-used, affordable (read: free) clustered operating system, Linux found its way into Google when Google saw that Beowulf clusters, the new open-source alternative, would be the better route to go than the old way of traditional, monolithic servers.
(*Correct me if I am wrong...)
By the way, the parent post piqued my interest... for more information about the coming-about of the electric guitar, follow this link.
Typically, when you disable pop-ups with Mozilla (or Phoenix, or <insert favorite Gecko derivative here>), the browser won't blanket-disable them but instead will disable pop-ups that it deems to be unrequested by the user.
So, for example, if this pop-up were to try to load itself when you visit a web page, Mozilla would most likely block it. However, at the Unicast gallery page you are explicitly requesting the pop-up when you click on its javascript link - and Mozilla knows this, if my reasoning is sound. This is the reason that you can get the address book pop-up when you click on the "address book" link in Yahoo Mail under Mozilla, but you won't see any of the various pop-up advertisements that they throw at you.
In practice, I doubt these things would get through to Mozilla or a Mozilla-based browser (or Konqueror, for that matter).
Try Canon, for one. The S750 I purchased last summer uses the same non-chipped ink tanks as most of their other new-line home and small office printers, so even though I don't see the S750 on their web site any more, I'm pretty sure that they will be making their ink this way for some time to come.
(It's a very good printer, besides, if you were wondering for your own reference... Prints fast (I don't have a ppm count... not nosebleed fast, but notably faster than my roommate's HP), works well with the gimp-print drivers if you use Linux, prints photos well enough for my eyes, and has all sorts of other bells and whistles.)
Offset by the cost of a slightly more pricey printer ($140), the ink is pretty inexpensive. The black cartridge will set you back $15; the full set of three color cartridges costs $30. Canon ink comes in transparent plastic "dumb" cartridges that are completely sucked dry when the driver tells you they're empty... the printer won't cheat you out of any of it, as it actually measures how much ink is left in the tank rather than using HP or Epson style guesswork.
There are a few other non-evil printer manufacturers, I'm sure, but Canon seems to be the best as far as I've heard. Any other suggestions, anyone?
Very good point... for that matter, how would the courts handle it even without this new technology? Even without programs that can read words from video, it is still theoretically possible (though maybe not practically possible) that someone could read the source code to DeCSS aloud onto a video tape, such that someone else at the receiving end could manually record that code into a source file and compile it.
(And if you wanted to be really ironic about it, you could always store the video on a DVD :-) )
Do you think the almost invulnerable association that we make between the video and audio recording of somebody speaking and the term "free speech" would give this medium any better legal footing than the traditional source-code-on-magnetic-disks? If I remember correctly, at one point the PGP developers were in the business of exporting their strong encryption to non-US territories by means of publishing their source code in a book... correct me if that is wrong.
As much as I try to adhere to this philosophy, I end up printing out a good deal of material almost every day. For one thing, I'm in school... but aside from lab reports and such, I'll from time to time print out, for example, an article from the New York Times that I want to read at lunch when I would have no additional reason to lug my Inspiron to the dining hall.
In most Linux-based operating systems (those with Ghostscript) it is of course easy to "print" just about any document to a postscript or PDF document... for Windows users I would recommend the basic version of Fineprint's pdfFactory, a commercial program that will install itself as a Windows printer and save documents as PDF files. It's not very featureful, but is good for the price (college kids, email them for the student discount). You can download a free trial version from their web page if you want to give it a shot.
Slightly off-topic, but this could be useful to someone... I'll have to second your comment on the Canon S750 printer... my dad got one to use as the main printer in our house when the S750 came out about a year ago (or I think it was about a year ago). We liked it so much that I got another one for myself when I went off to college this year.
At $140 it wasn't very cheap, but I've more than made up for this initial cost in savings on the ink. This is no Epson - the ink tanks are not "chipped", and since the tanks are made of transparent plastic you can tell that the printer manages to squeeze every last drop out of them.
The photo quality is high enough for my standards, it'll print very fast in black and white, and a full set of color ink cartridges sets me back less than half as much as the color ink for a comparable HP printer costs. It works fine under Linux (Red Hat will recognize and configure it), and the Windows driver is great: You can set the printer to turn itself on automatically if you start printing to it, or to run in a "quiet mode" between any given hours of the day.
If you're looking for a new color printer, check out the Canon line... highly recommended.
(Oh, and if you need to print high-quality photos with the S750 printer: My dad and I did a little experimentation here, and we decided that the Epson glossy photo paper looks the best with the Canon ink, with the Canon paper in a close second. I'd also recommend the Epson non-gloss photo paper for a cheaper solution...)
Unfortunately that isn't a workable policy all the time, though... my girlfriend calls my cell phone with her phone card from time to time (my cell isn't based in her area code). You never know what someone's going to see on their caller ID when you call on a Sprint phone card, and it changes from one call to the next.
I think Slashdot just got certified by the Department of Redundancy Department.
What this would do is level the playing field just a bit.
And that, among other things, is precisely why they will not (and from their perspective, should not) do it.
Don't forget to add full-screen anti-aliasing to that wish list... =)
While you have a good point about why, in general, FPS games are far less addictive / destructive than the more "social" games, I would like to add that here at the U of F I have a suitemate who, almost every other night, will stay up until six in the morning playing Counterstrike online. This often causes him to sleep in for the rest of the day and miss an entire day's worth of classes. He even dropped two classes this semester because of this problem.
So yes, while MMORPGs are generally more addictive than FPSs, even a seemingly innocent FPS has the capability to wreak havoc on one's "real" life. I suppose that this can only get worse in the future, with advanced system such as Xbox Live providing an even more social online gaming experience.
I am sure I won't be the first to say it, but there is one thing that all of us can do here: Remember to stop by www.debrands.com sometime in the next couple of weeks after this Slashdotting has died off, pick out a nice $20 chocolate set for your {girl|boy}friend / your mother / yourself, etc., and support DeBrands. The "why" needs no explanation.
The Dells already do this to some extent, although to be safe you probably would want to (need to?) temporarily suspend the computer to do it. I can attest that my Dell Inspiron 8200 has an internal capacitor that is at least powerful enough to allow me to suspend (not "hibernate"; I mean a real "everything-is-still-in-RAM" suspend, not suspend-to-disk) the computer, swap batteries, and pick back up at whatever I was doing 10 seconds ago.
Just to add a couple points that I personally enjoy about Phoenix:
The olny thing that Windows Phoenix seems to be lacking from Mozilla (as far as I can tell) is a quick-launch option and the ability to change font scale on the fly with the Print Preview function (it can still be done via Page Setup, as with older versions of Mozilla.). Overall, this is a very good browser. I can see this going places... though sometimes I do appreciate the integration of Mozilla's email client, address book, and browser. I guess that this much is up to personal opinion...
Perhaps the external deployment clause is one useful clause that was overlooked by the authors of the GPL - in effect, there is no practical difference between running a distributed binary on your system and submitting input and viewing output on your system for code that is executed on a separate server...
What I find more interesting, though, is the Mutual Termination for Patent Application clause in the Open Software License. This, ideally, would prevent "IP Warriors" from using your software in their arsenal, but I think that practically this clause would serve said Patent Warriors with no incentive to act somewhat ethically, but instead can only serve to further fragment the world of Open Source licenses.
This brings up a bigger point, one that has certainly been raised before: Are all these OSS licenses really necessary, or productive? In an ideal world, I think, we would all be able to use the BSD license without having to worry about greedy corporations and individuals "embracing and extending" our code; this is not an ideal world, however, and I firmly believe that we need the protection that licenses like the GPL and LPGL can afford us. That said, having two more-or-less functionally equivalent, yet completely incompatible, GPLs lying around does nobody any good. The goal of the GPL, and supposedly the OSI, is to foster cooperation between Open Source applications, while preventing closed-source companies and individuals from using our code. But by having two or more incompatible GPLs we can only prevent OSS projects from collaborating.
I think that a massive consolidation of OSI-approved licenses is in order.
Perhaps what the authors of this article were referring to when they mentioned the "intellectual property right trap" was Palladium itself, one mechanism that would drastically change the Chinese approach to installations of computer software in the future.
In that case, they are correct in that there is at this time no known Palladium equivalent planned for RISC processors. That may change in the future, of course, but in the meantime it can probably be assumed that code compiled for an Alpha won't need Palladium support to run...
Of course, I suppose that one of us will have to learn Chinese and read the original article to be sure =)
I don't mean to be a jerk about it, but doesn't the line "Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company" mean anything here?
Quite seriously, regardless of your personal beliefs regarding intellectual property rights and wrongs, and subscription news services: How is it that we pat a news organization on the back for paying lip service to our favorite operating system, and then infringe on their copyrights?
Of course they have to package this in a 133 megabyte package in order to discourage dialup users from applying it... is there any valid reason that such a patch should take up so much space?
Perhaps this could explain the anonymous offer of such a great amount of money to anyone able to get Linux running on the XBox?