An anonymous reader writes "According to a "quick survey" taken during the past two weeks of visitors to LinuxDevices.com's website, developers overwhelmingly believe that the Embedded Linux Consortium's recently released embedded Linux platform specification is valuable, and that it will help accelerate the growing use of Linux in embedded systems and devices." Update 03/05 07:10 GMT by C: Sorry about that. Obviously I left the last word off of the
You're complaining about Slashdot's real problems in the story comments, and you've struck enough of a nerve to hit Score:5! Getting hired isn't what you need to be looking forward too. You'd better just sit there real quiet-like and hope you don't get bitchslapped down to -1. They might not be good at editing stories, but the Slashdot people know how to handle it when the readers -- you know, the ones who comment and make the site worth reading -- get uppity.
This really is as good (good?!?) as it gets. If there were two articles right next to each other, you could make the argument that they were probably posted at the same time. If Taco reposted a story five minutes after the original post, you could just say the first story got posted between the time he last read the front page and the time he picked the story.
But no, we're talking ninety minutes instead. So they don't read their own page! They really, truly don't. Sometimes I just get really disgusted by it... I guess in the same way I get disgusted when my favorite team gets soundly beaten on gameday. I like this site, all told. But then you see something so embarassing. And they do nothing to address it, only reinforcing the impression that the Slashdot editors truly don't care.
I don't know what's more depressing: this decision, or the fact that the small amount of activity from the small percentage of people who care about this in the first place won't amount to anything.
Has the GPL ever been tested in court? It looks like an elaborate handshake agreement to me. Is it actually legally binding?
The strength of the GPL is that it gets its teeth from copyright law. If every last word of the GPL was shown to be unenforcable, you still couldn't legally release proprietary code based on a GPL'd work because you didn't have the right to in the first place.
If RMS and the US Supreme Court disagree with what makes a derivative work, it doesn't overturn the GPL, it just means that the GPL is irrelevant for that specific case.
If RMS's opinion about what the GPL says turns out to be the wrong one, it means that he's wrong. Period. There's no clause that reads "If any section of this license is found to mean something Stallman disagrees with, the license is null and void." This is my whole point.
Even if you prove that the GPL is somehow invalid it just means that you can't legally agree to it and thus can't accept it's offer, you're right back where you were before reading it.
This isn't an argument about validity. I think the license is valid. We just seem to disagree on what the license says. Here's what it says:
..."work based on the Program" means either the Program or any derivative work under copyright law...
So if a court ends up saying simple dynamic linking does not make a derivative work, then every clause about what you can do with "work based on the Program" simply doesn't not apply to dynamic linking cases. Just because this is unfortunate to somebody's adgenda doesn't change anything.
Not if they are just being used. It is only an issue if they are being distributed.
It's not enough that they're distributed together. From the GPL:
If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works.
So it's not a violation if I ship the plugin and WinAmp on the same CD but with different installers, right? That seems to be true unless dynamically linking causes a derivative work, which is where the disagreement lays. I was just trying to demostrate the problems with the "dynamic linking" argument in my examples.
The GPL assumes that a derivative work is any work that uses another work. (In the GPLs case, by linking to it).
No, see, it really doesn't. What the GPL says about it is this (emphasis mine):
This License applies to any program or other work which contains a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it may be distributed under the terms of this General Public License. The "Program", below, refers to any such program or work, and a "work based on the Program" means either the Program or any derivative work under copyright law: that is to say,
a work containing the Program or a portion of it, either verbatim or with modifications and/or translated into another language. (Hereinafter, translation is included without limitation in the term "modification".) Each licensee is addressed as "you".
It's fine and dandy that RMS thinks that dynamic linking makes a derivative work, but all too often we seem to lose sight of the fact that the GPL is a license. No matter what RMS thinks the GPL means, it means what it says, nothing more or nothing less. It's far from clear that dynamically linking to a library creates a derivitive work. There are lots of ways where this kind of thinking is problematic:
If I create a GPL'd plugin for WinAmp, does that make WinAmp GPL? I think most reasonable people think the answer is no.
If I create a GPL'd media player, and a third party makes a proprietary plug in, is this illegal? This is really the case that's up in the air here... the answer only depends on whether the plug in is legally a "derivative work" or not.
But if it is... then what happens if I create a GPL'd media player that can use WinAmp plugins? Do all proprietary WinAmp plugins become GPL? Well, of course not, but doesn't this make case two problematic?
Stating the obvious, but a dynamic library is nothing more than a set of entry points with documented behavior. By design. That's what it's intended to do. Calling something that uses a tool to do something a derivation of the original work is on shaky ground. That's like arguing a novel written in emacs is GPL. Anyway, I'm not arguing that a license couldn't provent this sort of thing; I just think version 2 of the GPL doesn't.
If you wanted to make a movie, and in your movie you had another movie playing in the background on a tv on the set, do you think you should have the right to distribute your movie containing somebody else's movie?
No, but I don't think that's a fair analogy anyway. I hope it's obvious why...
Yeesh, I thought I knew something about technology. I really didn't think technology hit the point where you could fit 500GB of data into a single hard drive!
It'll be bad news for the video game companies if MAME is re-released under the GPL. Loading a video game ROM into MAME is just like linking, and since the GPL is viral...
Many managers have difficulties to understand that there really exists people that are better than them in some areas. It makes them thinking that there own decisions are the best.
This was indeed a nice trolling attempt, and it finally did succeed, but only in a meta sort of way. As a guy who follows trolls closely, perhaps I can give you a few pointers.
The "use terrible grammer and spelling while calling people dumb" troll is often quite effective. People can know the poster is a troll and still respond. Anal-retentive people just can't help themselves.
You failed in a few ways. First of all, your post was too long. Your concentration of bad English got thinner as the message went along. By the end of the message, people may have forgiven your "mistakes" before they even reached the bottom of your post.
Second of all, your message is too insightful and on-topic. This sort of troll requires an on-topic post, true, but you'd be much better served to do a "me-too" type post. Because you threw out an interesting concept, people replied with genuinely useful comments, defeating your original purpose.
Third, you forget your audience. It works best to insult the reader in this sort of attack. Again, some people have an irresistable need to defend themselves even in the most absurd conditions. If you don't attack the reader, attack someone the reader can relate to. The majority of/. readers are coders or coder types, and many will agree that managers can be stupid (just look at the common PHB acronym, for instance).
I had to respond to your troll, though, because you do deserve an A+ for effort. C- on execution, though. Keep those trolls coming, and work harder on infuriating the sheep who make the trolls' job so rewarding.
Why have a license for this government-generated code, anyway? Just place it in the public domain. The GPL is a restrictive license. Not all taxpayers believe that all software should be free (as in speech or in beer). Releasing this under the GPL would not do anything to make this code more free. The code is already free. Use it in your open source projects all you want. It would make the code less free.
Right, but they don't care. At least, not enough to do something about it.
Seriously, you're going to keep coming back to Slashdot day after day, just like me, just like everyone else, your "tearing my hair out" comment nonwithstanding. People have been complaining about the shoddy editing work for as long as I've been here (a year at least) yet we still get this, a duplicate story with a downright false headline.
They're in no hurry to fix it because, for all of the open source mentality here, this is not a community-run site. It's run by a few people who (rightfully so) can do whatever they want with it. If we keep coming back anyway, why should they believe that this kind of stuff bothers us? Oddly enough, this is the exact same argument many/. readers make against Microsoft.
Wait, wait, you're expecting me to believe that a regular Slashdot poster not only is confused about something open-source related, but also has a girlfriend?
Riiiiiight.
Re:WotC could lay off because the project is done.
on
Layoffs at WotC
·
· Score: 1
The only thing you can't do with the editor is lay down terrain in smaller than 20 yard by 20 yard blocks. That was enough to frustrate me to the point of giving up -- every time I visualized what a room should look like, I learned I couldn't do it. A DM friend of mine tried to convert one of his dungeons to a NWN module and couldn't for this very reason.
That's really unfortunate, becaue everything you say is spot on. The conversation tree editor is really intuitive but completely powerful, and the level to which you can customize gameplay is absolutely incredible. You just can't have a small room.
Leave it to the Slashdot crowd to cheer for anything that hurts content producers. The only reason anyone would need a 160GB hard drive is to store vast quantities of pirated music and video.
I think the valid argument to make here is whether intellectual property rights should exist or not. I know that's a matter of contention around here, and that's cool.
But if you do believe in the right to control how your IP is used, then there's no justification for distributing episodes of Seinfeld, even for free. Columbia Pictures doesn't give out syndication rights out of the goodness of their hearts! It charges the stations money. If a large percentage of people pirated copies of Seinfeld, it's conceivable that fewer people would watch it on their local stations, so the ad revenue would be less, lowering the value of the syndication rights, costing Columbia money. Sure, that might not happen. In fact, the proliferation of Seinfeld episodes might actually increase interest in the show, increasing the value of the rights. But no matter what would happen, the point is that this is nobody's decision to make but Columbia Pictures'. Seinfeld episodes are not a right. They're not a natural resource. It cost quite a lot of money to make, and the stakeholders have a right to recoup that money (and, yes, make a huge profit).
Picture the GPL. Much of/. would be up in arms if someone took a GPL project, changed the code, and released it as closed-source freeware. It really comes down to the question of if we have the right to control how what we created is used. This is where we should focus our energy. Try to get the laws changed if you actually think IP is a sham (I don't), but don't just sit around saying, "I don't think this causes any harm, so this isn't illegal." (Or even sillier, "I don't think this causes any harm, so let's blame the communications providers for our actions.")
It's not just sports. In high school, I entered in state math competitions frequently, and there was one glorious time when I actually took a test "in the zone". It was exactly like you describe it, just complete autopilot. I remember towards the end of it getting really excited, knowing I had already won that competition.
Slashdot Mirror
An anonymous reader writes "According to a "quick survey" taken during the past two weeks of visitors to LinuxDevices.com's website, developers overwhelmingly believe that the Embedded Linux Consortium's recently released embedded Linux platform specification is valuable, and that it will help accelerate the growing use of Linux in embedded systems and devices." Update 03/05 07:10 GMT by C : Sorry about that. Obviously I left the last word off of the
Hire you?!?
You're complaining about Slashdot's real problems in the story comments, and you've struck enough of a nerve to hit Score:5! Getting hired isn't what you need to be looking forward too. You'd better just sit there real quiet-like and hope you don't get bitchslapped down to -1. They might not be good at editing stories, but the Slashdot people know how to handle it when the readers -- you know, the ones who comment and make the site worth reading -- get uppity.
This really is as good (good?!?) as it gets. If there were two articles right next to each other, you could make the argument that they were probably posted at the same time. If Taco reposted a story five minutes after the original post, you could just say the first story got posted between the time he last read the front page and the time he picked the story.
But no, we're talking ninety minutes instead. So they don't read their own page! They really, truly don't. Sometimes I just get really disgusted by it... I guess in the same way I get disgusted when my favorite team gets soundly beaten on gameday. I like this site, all told. But then you see something so embarassing. And they do nothing to address it, only reinforcing the impression that the Slashdot editors truly don't care.
I know there's no way I'm the first to think this, but does anyone else think that this could become the next goatse pic?
I don't know what's more depressing: this decision, or the fact that the small amount of activity from the small percentage of people who care about this in the first place won't amount to anything.
Now who's the retard?
Everyone who posted in this thread. Except for me, of course.
Has the GPL ever been tested in court? It looks like an elaborate handshake agreement to me. Is it actually legally binding?
The strength of the GPL is that it gets its teeth from copyright law. If every last word of the GPL was shown to be unenforcable, you still couldn't legally release proprietary code based on a GPL'd work because you didn't have the right to in the first place.
If RMS and the US Supreme Court disagree with what makes a derivative work, it doesn't overturn the GPL, it just means that the GPL is irrelevant for that specific case.
If RMS's opinion about what the GPL says turns out to be the wrong one, it means that he's wrong. Period. There's no clause that reads "If any section of this license is found to mean something Stallman disagrees with, the license is null and void." This is my whole point.
Even if you prove that the GPL is somehow invalid it just means that you can't legally agree to it and thus can't accept it's offer, you're right back where you were before reading it.
This isn't an argument about validity. I think the license is valid. We just seem to disagree on what the license says. Here's what it says:
So if a court ends up saying simple dynamic linking does not make a derivative work, then every clause about what you can do with "work based on the Program" simply doesn't not apply to dynamic linking cases. Just because this is unfortunate to somebody's adgenda doesn't change anything.
Not if they are just being used. It is only an issue if they are being distributed.
It's not enough that they're distributed together. From the GPL:
So it's not a violation if I ship the plugin and WinAmp on the same CD but with different installers, right? That seems to be true unless dynamically linking causes a derivative work, which is where the disagreement lays. I was just trying to demostrate the problems with the "dynamic linking" argument in my examples.
The GPL assumes that a derivative work is any work that uses another work. (In the GPLs case, by linking to it).
No, see, it really doesn't. What the GPL says about it is this (emphasis mine):
It's fine and dandy that RMS thinks that dynamic linking makes a derivative work, but all too often we seem to lose sight of the fact that the GPL is a license. No matter what RMS thinks the GPL means, it means what it says, nothing more or nothing less. It's far from clear that dynamically linking to a library creates a derivitive work. There are lots of ways where this kind of thinking is problematic:
Stating the obvious, but a dynamic library is nothing more than a set of entry points with documented behavior. By design. That's what it's intended to do. Calling something that uses a tool to do something a derivation of the original work is on shaky ground. That's like arguing a novel written in emacs is GPL. Anyway, I'm not arguing that a license couldn't provent this sort of thing; I just think version 2 of the GPL doesn't.
If you wanted to make a movie, and in your movie you had another movie playing in the background on a tv on the set, do you think you should have the right to distribute your movie containing somebody else's movie?
No, but I don't think that's a fair analogy anyway. I hope it's obvious why...
Yeesh, I thought I knew something about technology. I really didn't think technology hit the point where you could fit 500GB of data into a single hard drive!
So finally this great database comes back online, and immediately we try to /. it. ;-)
It'll be bad news for the video game companies if MAME is re-released under the GPL. Loading a video game ROM into MAME is just like linking, and since the GPL is viral...
Woo hoo! Cough up the Pac Man sources, Namco!
(Heh.)
The "use terrible grammer and spelling while calling people dumb" troll is often quite effective. People can know the poster is a troll and still respond. Anal-retentive people just can't help themselves.
You failed in a few ways. First of all, your post was too long. Your concentration of bad English got thinner as the message went along. By the end of the message, people may have forgiven your "mistakes" before they even reached the bottom of your post.
Second of all, your message is too insightful and on-topic. This sort of troll requires an on-topic post, true, but you'd be much better served to do a "me-too" type post. Because you threw out an interesting concept, people replied with genuinely useful comments, defeating your original purpose.
Third, you forget your audience. It works best to insult the reader in this sort of attack. Again, some people have an irresistable need to defend themselves even in the most absurd conditions. If you don't attack the reader, attack someone the reader can relate to. The majority of
I had to respond to your troll, though, because you do deserve an A+ for effort. C- on execution, though. Keep those trolls coming, and work harder on infuriating the sheep who make the trolls' job so rewarding.
Why have a license for this government-generated code, anyway? Just place it in the public domain. The GPL is a restrictive license. Not all taxpayers believe that all software should be free (as in speech or in beer). Releasing this under the GPL would not do anything to make this code more free. The code is already free. Use it in your open source projects all you want. It would make the code less free.
Sears couldn't sell a 500 piece socket set, half of which is completely useless
Why would that change?
It's interesting, but I'm quite literally not holding my breath.
I sure hope not. After all, that's just a figure of speech.
Right, but they don't care. At least, not enough to do something about it.
/. readers make against Microsoft.
Seriously, you're going to keep coming back to Slashdot day after day, just like me, just like everyone else, your "tearing my hair out" comment nonwithstanding. People have been complaining about the shoddy editing work for as long as I've been here (a year at least) yet we still get this, a duplicate story with a downright false headline.
They're in no hurry to fix it because, for all of the open source mentality here, this is not a community-run site. It's run by a few people who (rightfully so) can do whatever they want with it. If we keep coming back anyway, why should they believe that this kind of stuff bothers us? Oddly enough, this is the exact same argument many
Wait, wait, you're expecting me to believe that a regular Slashdot poster not only is confused about something open-source related, but also has a girlfriend?
Riiiiiight.
The only thing you can't do with the editor is lay down terrain in smaller than 20 yard by 20 yard blocks. That was enough to frustrate me to the point of giving up -- every time I visualized what a room should look like, I learned I couldn't do it. A DM friend of mine tried to convert one of his dungeons to a NWN module and couldn't for this very reason.
That's really unfortunate, becaue everything you say is spot on. The conversation tree editor is really intuitive but completely powerful, and the level to which you can customize gameplay is absolutely incredible. You just can't have a small room.
Leave it to the Slashdot crowd to cheer for anything that hurts content producers. The only reason anyone would need a 160GB hard drive is to store vast quantities of pirated music and video.
Maxtor should be ashamed.
What?!? They're calling this news? I heard about this 10 years ago!
(This is a joke, folks. Sheesh.)
I think the valid argument to make here is whether intellectual property rights should exist or not. I know that's a matter of contention around here, and that's cool.
/. would be up in arms if someone took a GPL project, changed the code, and released it as closed-source freeware. It really comes down to the question of if we have the right to control how what we created is used. This is where we should focus our energy. Try to get the laws changed if you actually think IP is a sham (I don't), but don't just sit around saying, "I don't think this causes any harm, so this isn't illegal." (Or even sillier, "I don't think this causes any harm, so let's blame the communications providers for our actions.")
But if you do believe in the right to control how your IP is used, then there's no justification for distributing episodes of Seinfeld, even for free. Columbia Pictures doesn't give out syndication rights out of the goodness of their hearts! It charges the stations money. If a large percentage of people pirated copies of Seinfeld, it's conceivable that fewer people would watch it on their local stations, so the ad revenue would be less, lowering the value of the syndication rights, costing Columbia money. Sure, that might not happen. In fact, the proliferation of Seinfeld episodes might actually increase interest in the show, increasing the value of the rights. But no matter what would happen, the point is that this is nobody's decision to make but Columbia Pictures'. Seinfeld episodes are not a right. They're not a natural resource. It cost quite a lot of money to make, and the stakeholders have a right to recoup that money (and, yes, make a huge profit).
Picture the GPL. Much of
It's not just sports. In high school, I entered in state math competitions frequently, and there was one glorious time when I actually took a test "in the zone". It was exactly like you describe it, just complete autopilot. I remember towards the end of it getting really excited, knowing I had already won that competition.