Sorry, but the US legal system is not here to ensure that powerful corporations can ensure their former employees remain jobless, or can only get a job in an area outside of their profession (e.g., hamburger flipping). These kinds of contracts are comparable to loansharking contracts, or contracts for slavery. They are meaningless before a court of law.
Not the printing forged money is ok, but I don't want my printer "deciding" what to and not to print. What's next, printers "deciding" not to print documents they deem as anti-government? Or not printing images they deem as pornography?
Only if you can show that they added something significant over the original. Putting the original text of "The Republic" through AltaVista's translator and changing one of the outputted words doesn't mean you can copyright that as a derivative.
Yea, like laywers don't come off as juvenile, immature, clueless fanatics everytime we hear them. At least ESR doesn't make his living getting rapists and murderers acquitted.
I understand your original post fine. It is, however, wrong. Any important corporation has been hit with hundreds of trivial BS lawsuites. It's not to tough to tell what a bogus lawsuite is. No-one takes SCO's claims seriously, not even MS.
Even if anyone thinks this lawsuite has merit, the end-user -- as I pointed out -- still has no liability what-so-ever, since it is not expected, plausible, or possible for the end-user of a certain piece of software to check and make sure that it isn't infringing.
No matter how trustworthy the source, she can easily be criticized and doubted. However, you cannot doubt a "source" that consists of the entire FOSS community.
Firstly, any credible business knows this lawsuite is a crock of shit.
Secondly, the end-user is not liable for any copyright/patent infringement which resulted from the actions of the distributor, because the end-user cannot reasonably be expected to check this even with FOSS, and simply *can't* check it with proprietary code.
The idea that there is stolen code in FOSS that perpetuates is absurd. Because it is FOSS, any improperly contributed code is quickly identified and purged (unlike proprietary software, which makes this impossible). If there really was a problem, it would have been identified long long ago and dealt with.
There still isn't a problem, because SCO's lawsuite is complete and total bullshit. If there was any merit to their case, they would have pointed to the offending code. The OSI has published an article tearing to shreds their bogus lawsuite and exposing it for it's lies. Once they're laughed out of court, SCO will be in some serious trouble for fraudulently filing a lawsuite and for libel and defamation. Even if there was any merit to their case, there is still no problem for the FOSS community -- the code would be quickly removed and replaced.
How about a statue of two hands molding eachother, demonstrating the wonderful concept that we all mold our own fate? You know, like Escher's picture of two hands drawing eachother?
Wrong image. He's thinking of the image where there are soldiers walking up a set of stairs which never gets higher, and cycles around, on top of a tower.
Irrelevant of *why* they are destroying it, the point is, they shouldn't be forced to store it. It is useless to them (SCO). Serves absolutely no purpose. So, why exactly should they spend money storing it? If it's so important to you and others (e.g., IBM, OSI), then they should intervene with a court order, and pay for the digitization of the documents they deem important.
That said, I do not think Sun cares about Free Software. However, the 43 boxes they digitized likely contain information on MS' most important and obvious anti-competitive behaviour, which will be relevant to both proprietary competitors and FOSS developers.
If this was some "simple" piece of code, why didn't you just write it yourself
If the code was simple enough to be generic, then it doesn't matter. The programming equivalent of something as generic as "I am fine" cannot be copyrighted. Something can only be copyrighted if it is not generic, and is of enough lenght/complexity to be unique.
Because most of the mindless masses can't be bothered to actually RTFA, I'll quote relevant excerpts:
The 937 boxes of court-ordered documents
. . .
Sun Microsystem...seeking evidence that might help in its own antitrust suit against Microsoft, eventually pulled out 40 boxes of the computer giant's secret internal communications for digital imaging.
In other words, not all of the legal documents are being destroyed. Most of those 937 pages of documents may just be legal thickness, with little relevant information...obviously, Sun thought so, as they only scanned in 40 of 937 boxes of documents.
Irrelevant of the fact that SCO and MS are a bunch of lying cheating fucks, it's unreasonable to ask anyone to spend thousands of dollars to continue storing documents that are useless to them.
You have a problem with these documents being destroyed? Get a court order to stop it, and scan in anything that you think is important. IBM may very well have cause to do so, as may the OSI. Undoubtely, the timing is obviously suspicious, but I doubt there's anything of particular value in the 897 remaining boxes of legal documents. If there is, then those interested in it should pay for the storage of the documents, not a corporation which has absolutely no use for them.
GameCube offers some games that are far superior to anything offered by the X-box. Nothing, for example, on *any* gaming platform -- aside from Resident Evil series on the Playstations -- can compete with the GameCube's "Eternal Darkness".
There is really no big deal to this at all. GPL != GNU. The GPL'ed version will still be just as Free. The only difference is that GS won't be an official part of GNU.
The GNU project (funded by the FSF) is a specific project which is not necessarily exclusively GPL'ed code. It can include any code that is Free as in Freedom. The FSF and RMS have set up certain guidelines for the criteria a project has to meet to be part of the GNU. They didn't suddenly decide on this. Now, you may disagree with those criteria. You may think that simply the promotion of any proprietary product in an unobtrusive manner shouldn't warrant disqualification from GNU, but you're not the one's who set the rules.
You don't like it, e-mail the FSF and explain to them why not, in a manner which doesn't boil down to the mindless rant. Every club has certain rules -- minimum guidelines for acceptance, and you should look at the GNU project as sort of a club; if you are just on the boundary of meeting those criteria, and are rejected for falling slightly short, you may naturally think that the club is being puritanical and unbending. However, "minimum standards" has to have a certain meaning.
Personally, I think that these things should be acceptably part of the GNU, so long as the ads are unobtrusive. Mention in the readme file -- aso opposed to a screen-wide pop-up -- counts as unobtrusive in my book. The definition for what counts as an unobtrusive ad should naturally be laid out. (I actually believe the GPL allows coders to, for example, mandate certain short messages be displayed on their progs...e.g., the Vi message about helping children...but, GPL != GNU).
Surely you jest. Nobody, anywhere, at any time, has swiped a single line of code from his employer and placed it in his GPL project? EVER??? That's a pretty broad and indefensible claim to be making.
Single lines of code are almost always generic and cannot be claimed by anyone. Surely, somewhere in his body of work, Michael Crichton wrote, "I don't think so". That does not mean that when I write that, I am plaguarizing Crichton.
It is much more likely that SCO is stealing code from GPL'ed products than vica-versa. After all, GPL'ed programs are open for everyone to see -- no-one's had a problem so far. However, SCO's code is proprietary and closed-source, so they could be stealing tons of code from GPL'ed and BSD'ed programs.
if in reality they don't give a rat's butt about the code and instead they want to milk the situation for cash, they wouldn't and would take the offender to court. It's a scumbag move but it doesn't invalidate their claim. If their claim is invalid, the court will decide.
Since their entire claim is bullshit anyways, this is moot. See the OSS' response to the lawsuite. In short, SCO's lawsuite asserts things that are misleading and down-right false, to such an extent as to be punishable under criminal law. Due to the broad falsity of their statements, they could also be civilally liable for defamation and slander.
However, SCO gains nothing by not specifying which lines of code are in violation. Even if any of their claims were true, they could not claim right to extra damages from said defendants when they could have prevented those damages by telling the defendants which lines of code were offending, thus allowing the defendants to remove them.
Additionally, even given the situation you outlined, there is no way an employer knows that developer John Smith didn't swipe code from a GPL product to meet his deadline and not tell anyone about it. Are they going to cross-check their code against the entire portfolio of open source software?
Corporations have the rights of persons (a fact which is absurd). Thus, they should collectively have those same responsibilities. They shouldn't get to both eliminate individual responsibility and the overal corporate responsibility by playing a finger-pointing game. Companies are responsible for the actions of their employees on their watch. They're the one who hired them, thus made appropriate character judgements. If those in their company commit such unscrupulous actions, and they further it by marketing those products without checking, that's their responsibility.
What your proposing gives a back-door to every corporation for any violatation of any license what-so-ever, by claiming the bullshit line that "they didn't know" and "an employee snuck in the code".
Now when John Smith works for Microsoft and does that in Windows, do you think a court is going to declare XP is now GPLed? No, MS will simply have to remove the code and maybe pay damages. But this is still backwards. It isn't GPLed code in a proprietary product. It is ALLEGEDLY proprietary code in a GPL product.
Nothing in the GPL says MS has to GPL windows if they "accidentally do such". (I state again, that there is NO accidental violation of the GPL...the individual who put in the code knew damn well what they were doing, and the company is ultimately responsible for hiring and trusting that individual). In any event, the GPL simply states that if you fail to abide by it, you no longer have the additional rights granted by it. Those additional rights cover the GPL'ed code. Meaning, you no longer have the right to distribute the GPL'ed code. You can still distribute your own code under whatever license you want, but not that GPL'ed code. So, you can either remove the GPL'ed code, stop distributing the entire program, or distribute it all under the GPL (actually, you technically can't distribute the original GPL'ed code anymore, unless granted the right to do so by a negotiation with the o
Re:GPL the best bet
on
OSI vs SCO
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Um, actually, no. There is no proprietary code in the Linux kernel or any other GPL'ed software. That's a bogus bullshit claim. If there was any validity to that claim, SCO would have published the offending lines of code. They haven't, so obviously they are full of shit.
If a proprietary entity releases some of their software with unique GPL'ed code in it, then they're obligated to either release the entire thing under the GPL, stop offering the package, or remove the GPL'ed code. For lines of code long enough to be clearly copy&pasted or of clearly enough similarity to be directly modified GPL'ed code, they knew damn well what they were doing. The GPL license is not hidden -- it is made very clear on every piece of software that comes with it. There is no such thing as "proprietary developers accidentally using GPL'ed code". That's bullshit.
No auditing is necessary for proprietary entities, if they follow simple procedures. For every piece of code they use that isn't theirs, they need to document where it came from and the license it was covered under. If they don't, that's their own fault, and it's too damn bad for them.
Chimpanzees are inarguably more closely related to gorillas and other primates than to humans. Thus, they belong in those genus'.
In any regards, talk of anything other than species is highly subjective. Genus', Families, Phyla, Orders, and Kingdoms are all determined by phylogenetic trees -- and how far up we draw the limit as to what to say is within the same genus is pretty arbitrary. It would be more appropriate to say that -- of all the organisms alive today -- chimpanzees are those that share the nearest common ancestor with humans.
Actually, no. The GPL does not state that corps caught with GPL'ed code in their proprietary software have to GPL their entire program. They have to EITHER GPL their entire program, or REMOVE all of the GPL'ed code from their proprietary program. Their choice.
No. By doing so, they've committed copyright infringement. They can either make a deal with the owner of the infringed code, or go to court. They cannot unilaterly fix it.
Actually, within the GPL, there are clauses verifying what I say. Even if what you say were true, they could still remove the GPL'ed code from their code all-together -- they do *not* have to GPL their code.
so me licensing a few hundred lines of my (no one elses!) code to you under the GPL doesn't mean that I can't use that code in my proprietary software product
This is true, but it only applies to you -- the developer of those particular lines of code. You, the developer, license your specific code in as many different ways as you want. However, once it's released as part of a larger program under the GPL, that is there permanently. You can still license it in parallel under a EULA, but there's also an identical version licensed under the GPL. Public-domain type licenses are one-way: you can't take something out of what is effectively the public domain. Once you license code under the GPL, you can't then prevent others from distributing that code under the GPL.
Re:GPL the best bet
on
OSI vs SCO
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Actually, no. The GPL does not state that corps caught with GPL'ed code in their proprietary software have to GPL their entire program. They have to EITHER GPL their entire program, or REMOVE all of the GPL'ed code from their proprietary program. Their choice.
Nope, you miss the point. The threats you speak of are minute and implausible. The threats from biocorps modifying food are much larger and more significant.
LOL, that's one of the funniest things I've read on/...that is, if you're joking.
If not, then you obviously have a pretty sorry understanding of evolution and mutation. Plants are harvested en-mass. That means thousands or millions of them at once. The probability of such a mutatation as you describe occuring in one plant infinitesimally small. The probability of that same mutation occuring in enough plants in a harvest to have any significant effect is essentially zero. Also, for plants that are being maintained in huge numbers by humans, the forces of natural selection act quite interestingly. Namely, those plants which exhibit phenotypes that make us plant more of them will be selected for. (hence, the ensured survival of marijuanna plants as long as humans are around).
Ok, so they've got this microgui environment. It's not significantly faster than X (20%, according to *them*). It can't run nearly as many apps as X. Oh yea, it offers *nothing* that isn't already offered by a solution that is free as in beer and free as in freedom (PicoGUI). So, why exactly should I waste $40 on this piece of shit, when it isn't that much faster than X, can't run many programs, probably isn't going to be the future of the FOSS community, and offers nothing that isn't offered by Pico's FOSS solution?
There is no reason.
As for performance, the $40 you spend on this crap could be spent getting a better graphics card. I believe you can get a GeForce 2's now for $30-$50. That's what I use on my current Gentoo GNU/Linux system (with WindowMaker). Guess what, no performance problems -- at all [qualifications: 1GHz CPU, 256MB SDRAM, 7200rpm ATA-100 HD].
People are really stupid when it comes to buying the latest greatest whatever. Here are the specs on my current PC:
1.1GHz AMD T-Bird CPU
256MB SDRAM
60GB 7200rpm ATA-100 hard drive
64MB GeForce2 GTS
19" Monitor
Guess what? It was fast when I bought it (a year ago). And guess what? It's still fast. It has not magically been transformed into a lumbering beast. For the home user, there is really no reason at all to buy anything other than that which sits at the best performance/price ratio. You can get an excellent system today for under $1000 that will be able to do anything you want as far as productivity goes, and will play most all games just fine.
My general plan -- and I think it's a good one -- is to upgrade once something 10 times better than what I have is available at an optimal price/performance ratio. And that's only if I have some need.
It's amazing to me how many home users are tricked into believing that a 2GHz CPU is somehow going to make their internet browsing experience any better, or make programs load faster and make Word work better. For almost all typical uses of a computer, you will *never* need to ugrade. You will only need to upgrade if you want to keep up to date with the latest games or if you want to do computationally intense computational work. Even then, you can still do so at the best price to performance ratio.
(1) This lawsuite is 100% bullshit. If there was any legitimacy to it, they would have published the infringing source code. Obviously, there is not.
(2) Blah blah blah, dying business with no business model and no useful product, sue to make money, hope for buyout. Desperation.
(3) By offering their own distribution of GNU/Linux, they released whatever ficticious code they're bitching about to the public under the GPL. They distributed Caldera under the GPL. Thus, any code that they could possibly be whining about is necessarily GPL'ed, even if they do own it.
(4) It is much more likely -- indeed, it is almost a certainty -- that SCO stole code from the FOSS community, rather than vica-versa.
K-Meleon (mozilla-based, I believe) renders web-pages much faster than IE5/6, and can launch as fast as IE5/6 if you use some preloading trick like IE5/6 use.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, but the US legal system is not here to ensure that powerful corporations can ensure their former employees remain jobless, or can only get a job in an area outside of their profession (e.g., hamburger flipping). These kinds of contracts are comparable to loansharking contracts, or contracts for slavery. They are meaningless before a court of law.
Not the printing forged money is ok, but I don't want my printer "deciding" what to and not to print. What's next, printers "deciding" not to print documents they deem as anti-government? Or not printing images they deem as pornography?
Only if you can show that they added something significant over the original. Putting the original text of "The Republic" through AltaVista's translator and changing one of the outputted words doesn't mean you can copyright that as a derivative.
Yea, like laywers don't come off as juvenile, immature, clueless fanatics everytime we hear them. At least ESR doesn't make his living getting rapists and murderers acquitted.
I understand your original post fine. It is, however, wrong. Any important corporation has been hit with hundreds of trivial BS lawsuites. It's not to tough to tell what a bogus lawsuite is. No-one takes SCO's claims seriously, not even MS.
Even if anyone thinks this lawsuite has merit, the end-user -- as I pointed out -- still has no liability what-so-ever, since it is not expected, plausible, or possible for the end-user of a certain piece of software to check and make sure that it isn't infringing.
No matter how trustworthy the source, she can easily be criticized and doubted. However, you cannot doubt a "source" that consists of the entire FOSS community.
Firstly, any credible business knows this lawsuite is a crock of shit.
Secondly, the end-user is not liable for any copyright/patent infringement which resulted from the actions of the distributor, because the end-user cannot reasonably be expected to check this even with FOSS, and simply *can't* check it with proprietary code.
The idea that there is stolen code in FOSS that perpetuates is absurd. Because it is FOSS, any improperly contributed code is quickly identified and purged (unlike proprietary software, which makes this impossible). If there really was a problem, it would have been identified long long ago and dealt with.
There still isn't a problem, because SCO's lawsuite is complete and total bullshit. If there was any merit to their case, they would have pointed to the offending code. The OSI has published an article tearing to shreds their bogus lawsuite and exposing it for it's lies. Once they're laughed out of court, SCO will be in some serious trouble for fraudulently filing a lawsuite and for libel and defamation. Even if there was any merit to their case, there is still no problem for the FOSS community -- the code would be quickly removed and replaced.
How about a statue of two hands molding eachother, demonstrating the wonderful concept that we all mold our own fate? You know, like Escher's picture of two hands drawing eachother?
Or what about a room of relativity, where one person's stares going up are another person's stares going down?
Wrong image. He's thinking of the image where there are soldiers walking up a set of stairs which never gets higher, and cycles around, on top of a tower.
Irrelevant of *why* they are destroying it, the point is, they shouldn't be forced to store it. It is useless to them (SCO). Serves absolutely no purpose. So, why exactly should they spend money storing it? If it's so important to you and others (e.g., IBM, OSI), then they should intervene with a court order, and pay for the digitization of the documents they deem important.
That said, I do not think Sun cares about Free Software. However, the 43 boxes they digitized likely contain information on MS' most important and obvious anti-competitive behaviour, which will be relevant to both proprietary competitors and FOSS developers.
If this was some "simple" piece of code, why didn't you just write it yourself
If the code was simple enough to be generic, then it doesn't matter. The programming equivalent of something as generic as "I am fine" cannot be copyrighted. Something can only be copyrighted if it is not generic, and is of enough lenght/complexity to be unique.
Irrelevant of the fact that SCO and MS are a bunch of lying cheating fucks, it's unreasonable to ask anyone to spend thousands of dollars to continue storing documents that are useless to them.
You have a problem with these documents being destroyed? Get a court order to stop it, and scan in anything that you think is important. IBM may very well have cause to do so, as may the OSI. Undoubtely, the timing is obviously suspicious, but I doubt there's anything of particular value in the 897 remaining boxes of legal documents. If there is, then those interested in it should pay for the storage of the documents, not a corporation which has absolutely no use for them.
GameCube offers some games that are far superior to anything offered by the X-box. Nothing, for example, on *any* gaming platform -- aside from Resident Evil series on the Playstations -- can compete with the GameCube's "Eternal Darkness".
There is really no big deal to this at all. GPL != GNU. The GPL'ed version will still be just as Free. The only difference is that GS won't be an official part of GNU.
The GNU project (funded by the FSF) is a specific project which is not necessarily exclusively GPL'ed code. It can include any code that is Free as in Freedom. The FSF and RMS have set up certain guidelines for the criteria a project has to meet to be part of the GNU. They didn't suddenly decide on this. Now, you may disagree with those criteria. You may think that simply the promotion of any proprietary product in an unobtrusive manner shouldn't warrant disqualification from GNU, but you're not the one's who set the rules.
You don't like it, e-mail the FSF and explain to them why not, in a manner which doesn't boil down to the mindless rant. Every club has certain rules -- minimum guidelines for acceptance, and you should look at the GNU project as sort of a club; if you are just on the boundary of meeting those criteria, and are rejected for falling slightly short, you may naturally think that the club is being puritanical and unbending. However, "minimum standards" has to have a certain meaning.
Personally, I think that these things should be acceptably part of the GNU, so long as the ads are unobtrusive. Mention in the readme file -- aso opposed to a screen-wide pop-up -- counts as unobtrusive in my book. The definition for what counts as an unobtrusive ad should naturally be laid out. (I actually believe the GPL allows coders to, for example, mandate certain short messages be displayed on their progs...e.g., the Vi message about helping children...but, GPL != GNU).
Surely you jest. Nobody, anywhere, at any time, has swiped a single line of code from his employer and placed it in his GPL project? EVER??? That's a pretty broad and indefensible claim to be making.
Single lines of code are almost always generic and cannot be claimed by anyone. Surely, somewhere in his body of work, Michael Crichton wrote, "I don't think so". That does not mean that when I write that, I am plaguarizing Crichton.
It is much more likely that SCO is stealing code from GPL'ed products than vica-versa. After all, GPL'ed programs are open for everyone to see -- no-one's had a problem so far. However, SCO's code is proprietary and closed-source, so they could be stealing tons of code from GPL'ed and BSD'ed programs.
if in reality they don't give a rat's butt about the code and instead they want to milk the situation for cash, they wouldn't and would take the offender to court. It's a scumbag move but it doesn't invalidate their claim. If their claim is invalid, the court will decide.
Since their entire claim is bullshit anyways, this is moot. See the OSS' response to the lawsuite. In short, SCO's lawsuite asserts things that are misleading and down-right false, to such an extent as to be punishable under criminal law. Due to the broad falsity of their statements, they could also be civilally liable for defamation and slander.
However, SCO gains nothing by not specifying which lines of code are in violation. Even if any of their claims were true, they could not claim right to extra damages from said defendants when they could have prevented those damages by telling the defendants which lines of code were offending, thus allowing the defendants to remove them.
Additionally, even given the situation you outlined, there is no way an employer knows that developer John Smith didn't swipe code from a GPL product to meet his deadline and not tell anyone about it. Are they going to cross-check their code against the entire portfolio of open source software?
Corporations have the rights of persons (a fact which is absurd). Thus, they should collectively have those same responsibilities. They shouldn't get to both eliminate individual responsibility and the overal corporate responsibility by playing a finger-pointing game. Companies are responsible for the actions of their employees on their watch. They're the one who hired them, thus made appropriate character judgements. If those in their company commit such unscrupulous actions, and they further it by marketing those products without checking, that's their responsibility.
What your proposing gives a back-door to every corporation for any violatation of any license what-so-ever, by claiming the bullshit line that "they didn't know" and "an employee snuck in the code".
Now when John Smith works for Microsoft and does that in Windows, do you think a court is going to declare XP is now GPLed? No, MS will simply have to remove the code and maybe pay damages. But this is still backwards. It isn't GPLed code in a proprietary product. It is ALLEGEDLY proprietary code in a GPL product.
Nothing in the GPL says MS has to GPL windows if they "accidentally do such". (I state again, that there is NO accidental violation of the GPL...the individual who put in the code knew damn well what they were doing, and the company is ultimately responsible for hiring and trusting that individual). In any event, the GPL simply states that if you fail to abide by it, you no longer have the additional rights granted by it. Those additional rights cover the GPL'ed code. Meaning, you no longer have the right to distribute the GPL'ed code. You can still distribute your own code under whatever license you want, but not that GPL'ed code. So, you can either remove the GPL'ed code, stop distributing the entire program, or distribute it all under the GPL (actually, you technically can't distribute the original GPL'ed code anymore, unless granted the right to do so by a negotiation with the o
Um, actually, no. There is no proprietary code in the Linux kernel or any other GPL'ed software. That's a bogus bullshit claim. If there was any validity to that claim, SCO would have published the offending lines of code. They haven't, so obviously they are full of shit.
If a proprietary entity releases some of their software with unique GPL'ed code in it, then they're obligated to either release the entire thing under the GPL, stop offering the package, or remove the GPL'ed code. For lines of code long enough to be clearly copy&pasted or of clearly enough similarity to be directly modified GPL'ed code, they knew damn well what they were doing. The GPL license is not hidden -- it is made very clear on every piece of software that comes with it. There is no such thing as "proprietary developers accidentally using GPL'ed code". That's bullshit.
No auditing is necessary for proprietary entities, if they follow simple procedures. For every piece of code they use that isn't theirs, they need to document where it came from and the license it was covered under. If they don't, that's their own fault, and it's too damn bad for them.
Chimpanzees are inarguably more closely related to gorillas and other primates than to humans. Thus, they belong in those genus'.
In any regards, talk of anything other than species is highly subjective. Genus', Families, Phyla, Orders, and Kingdoms are all determined by phylogenetic trees -- and how far up we draw the limit as to what to say is within the same genus is pretty arbitrary. It would be more appropriate to say that -- of all the organisms alive today -- chimpanzees are those that share the nearest common ancestor with humans.
so me licensing a few hundred lines of my (no one elses!) code to you under the GPL doesn't mean that I can't use that code in my proprietary software product
This is true, but it only applies to you -- the developer of those particular lines of code. You, the developer, license your specific code in as many different ways as you want. However, once it's released as part of a larger program under the GPL, that is there permanently. You can still license it in parallel under a EULA, but there's also an identical version licensed under the GPL. Public-domain type licenses are one-way: you can't take something out of what is effectively the public domain. Once you license code under the GPL, you can't then prevent others from distributing that code under the GPL.
Actually, no. The GPL does not state that corps caught with GPL'ed code in their proprietary software have to GPL their entire program. They have to EITHER GPL their entire program, or REMOVE all of the GPL'ed code from their proprietary program. Their choice.
Nope, you miss the point. The threats you speak of are minute and implausible. The threats from biocorps modifying food are much larger and more significant.
LOL, that's one of the funniest things I've read on /...that is, if you're joking.
If not, then you obviously have a pretty sorry understanding of evolution and mutation. Plants are harvested en-mass. That means thousands or millions of them at once. The probability of such a mutatation as you describe occuring in one plant infinitesimally small. The probability of that same mutation occuring in enough plants in a harvest to have any significant effect is essentially zero. Also, for plants that are being maintained in huge numbers by humans, the forces of natural selection act quite interestingly. Namely, those plants which exhibit phenotypes that make us plant more of them will be selected for. (hence, the ensured survival of marijuanna plants as long as humans are around).
There is no reason.
As for performance, the $40 you spend on this crap could be spent getting a better graphics card. I believe you can get a GeForce 2's now for $30-$50. That's what I use on my current Gentoo GNU/Linux system (with WindowMaker). Guess what, no performance problems -- at all [qualifications: 1GHz CPU, 256MB SDRAM, 7200rpm ATA-100 HD].
People are really stupid when it comes to buying the latest greatest whatever. Here are the specs on my current PC:
1.1GHz AMD T-Bird CPU
256MB SDRAM
60GB 7200rpm ATA-100 hard drive
64MB GeForce2 GTS
19" Monitor
Guess what? It was fast when I bought it (a year ago). And guess what? It's still fast. It has not magically been transformed into a lumbering beast. For the home user, there is really no reason at all to buy anything other than that which sits at the best performance/price ratio. You can get an excellent system today for under $1000 that will be able to do anything you want as far as productivity goes, and will play most all games just fine.
My general plan -- and I think it's a good one -- is to upgrade once something 10 times better than what I have is available at an optimal price/performance ratio. And that's only if I have some need.
It's amazing to me how many home users are tricked into believing that a 2GHz CPU is somehow going to make their internet browsing experience any better, or make programs load faster and make Word work better. For almost all typical uses of a computer, you will *never* need to ugrade. You will only need to upgrade if you want to keep up to date with the latest games or if you want to do computationally intense computational work. Even then, you can still do so at the best price to performance ratio.
(1) This lawsuite is 100% bullshit. If there was any legitimacy to it, they would have published the infringing source code. Obviously, there is not.
(2) Blah blah blah, dying business with no business model and no useful product, sue to make money, hope for buyout. Desperation.
(3) By offering their own distribution of GNU/Linux, they released whatever ficticious code they're bitching about to the public under the GPL. They distributed Caldera under the GPL. Thus, any code that they could possibly be whining about is necessarily GPL'ed, even if they do own it.
(4) It is much more likely -- indeed, it is almost a certainty -- that SCO stole code from the FOSS community, rather than vica-versa.
K-Meleon (mozilla-based, I believe) renders web-pages much faster than IE5/6, and can launch as fast as IE5/6 if you use some preloading trick like IE5/6 use.