I have been visiting slashdot almost from the day it started. In the early days I learned a lot by reading posts and following discussions on technical subjects by people with superior knowledge. It was inspiring.
Slashdot has not been like that for several years now. The interesting bits have become increasingly hard to find among all the patent nonsense, speculation and general news. (The Egyptian coup is news for nerds apparently).
I could put up with that. Even though I started visiting Slashdot less often and often just skimmed it before leaving off to sites like arstechnica or stackexchange.
But to see that Slashdot only spends _a footnote_ on the death of Douglas Engelbart, just really does it. This is not the Slashdot I knew and loved. We just have to face the facts and stop pretending; it is over.
So Slashdot, thank you for all the things I have learned and the joy you gave me over the years, but it is time to part my friend. Farewell.
The EICTA response has some rather misleading statements. For instance:
Increasingly software is being supplied as a "component" for enabling an invention. If that
component cannot be the subject of a claim in a patent it means that the patent owner cannot
stop unauthorised persons from distributing technical invention-enabling software, or operating websites from which such technical invention-enabling software can be freely downloaded. Put another way this would be a charter for pirates to supply what otherwise would be an infringing
component of an invention merely because it is in the form of software.
They are confusing copyright (to which piracy is associated) and patent law in such a way that the Rocard's proposal almost seems to advocate the abolishment of copyright law.
Indeed *some Slashdotters* you seem to have a quarrel with do preach those things you say. But the code in your sig is probably not run by those Slashdotters. It's more likely to be run by *innocent bystanders*. People who hope to learn something on/. but are hurt in the process of you getting your point across is a very rude way.
I was thinking the same thing. Patents no longer seem to grand a monopoly to inventors of solutions. With these kind of patens, problems themselves have become patentable! Solutions to how this idea from Sony is ever going to be implemented are now owned even before they are invented.
It's sad that we live in a world which is so eager to regard everything as a property, so that it can be sold. And now we have started selling the future as well!
The idea behind this settlement is for new competition to enter the server market. Open Soure is an important force in the industry and should therefor be able to compete. At this moment Microsoft is going for an easy ride.
By the way, this insightful post gives a nice idea of why this license is incompatiable with open source. It's not all about the money. There are aspects of this license that go beyond the question of whether or not it can be implemented in open source. The license also cripples closed source implementations.
Under this license, if you implement the server interfaces, you cannot deviate from what MS says your implementation has to be. This poses a great problem for companies that want to innovate beyond Microsofts "standards" or that do not want to implement such features as DRM.
The EU should aim for a healthy server market in the best interest of its citizans. This would include multiple, unencumbered and independant implementations, some of which will probably be open source.
The European Parlement has really no power at all. The influence of the parlement is greatest with respect to internal market affairs, in which case it is supposed to co-decide with the counsel. The amount of real power becomes obvious if you realise this patent debate is part of the internal market policy.
In the next couple of months many citizens of the EU can vote for an European Constitution in a referendum in their countries. In this constitution the European Parlement is given nearly no decisive powers at all.
The European parlement really shouldn't be called that way.
WTF are open formats? Open to implement, but not to modify or without the right to sublicense? Microsoft still has to change the license and no one knows what that license is going to be.
Policy makers in general really don't understand the differences between open source, shared source or open standards or open formats. And maybe they don't even care most of the time, since the majority of their voters also do not understand or do not care. They can present this as a victory, while only a small minority cares about the details.
This is a different discussion. You are questioning how much sense it makes for end-users to have the source code and thus how much sense the GPL makes.
If some people like to hack their print drivers and consider it a basic freedom to have access to its source code, that's just fine. Whether you think that really happens is irrelevant.
GPL forces open source, BSD starts open source and can go whichever way a developer looking at the code wants. I prefer BSD, there's much more freedom, including the option of someone else using code from it under and using a different license
Your BSD license advertisement is offtopic and personally I find it quite annoying, since people seem to bring it up all the time.
The whole point with this "GPL/BSD offers more freedom", is the definition of freedom. Generally speaking, the BSD license values your freedom as a developer, GPL values your freedom as a user. So yes, the BSD license provides more freedom with respect to the definition you seem to prefer. But it provides less freedom with respect to the definition of others.
In case anyone is wondering about an example of software that is "open source," but not "free," a good example would be Andromeda, (...) However, you are not given permission to redistribute the code, as you are with Free software.
How is this even remotely insightful? The poster either hasn't read the article and does not know what "free" means in this context, or he knows so much he can invalidate this article's core assumptions but refuses to share any specific insights.
We're again discussing the way how such a feature should be used, while my point has been the way such a feature should be accessed.
You give very valid reasons why this text box should be a separate dialog from the ordinary load and save dialog. This does not change the fact that this separate dialog could and in my view should easily be accessible through the gui.
With regard to coping, cutting and pasting dialog texts. As an Anonymous cowards has pointed out; this is available through a context menu (i.e. right click). This is not extremely obvious for new users, but given the fact that this is hardly core functionality for a load an save dialog and it sigificantly reduces cluttering, I think that this constitutes hardly an usability problem.
Re:Hooray for dumbing down?
on
GIMP 2.2 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The dialog itself does not provide the feature
But the dialog provides access to that feature.
just because there is a box does not mean that it is obvious how to use it, you need to RTFM or know that anyway.
I'm not debating whether this feature is difficult to use and whether or not you may have to read a manual if you are not accustomed to a unix-like shell. All I'm saying is that feature itself should be easily accessible through the graphical user interface if it is accessible at all.
A shortcut should be exactly that: a shorter way to access a feature. But, that feature should nevertheless be equally accessible though the graphical user interface for people who do not know the shortcut. Whether you might have to read a manual to actually be able to use the feature really has nothing to do with that. Though the program could probably provide contextual help in that case.
Yes it is intuitive to use the keyboard when you intend to type.
Using a keyboard shotcut to be able to type in a file name in a graphical dialog is not intuitive. If a graphical dialog provides a way to type in a file name, that feature should be obvious by looking at the dialog or by expanding the dialog through an "advanced" button of some kind.
No wonder documentation is lacking in the free software world, no one ever reads it!
There are ligitimate reasons why one would want to input the file location by hand, for instance to save a file inside a hidden directory. (Think theme images for gnome or other environments). Reading a manual to be able to save a file this way should never be necessary.
Since I'm dutch and writing my thesis in english, I took a look at the dutch - english translation. The quality of the translations are bad.
Two examples: the has been translated to bovendien, which is the dutch word for moreover. if has been translated to de, which is the dutch word for the.
I know this is a community effort and one should not whine, but instead contribute. My only point is; don't get too excited. In the current form, at least the dutch - english translation is useless.
I read a couple of comments saying Micorsoft did only say it might have some rights and this discussion is an exageration. Maybe it is, but this might become an issue if Microsoft starts shouting that the Open Source community steels as always and that there are no legally correct open source implementations of these 130 standards. And I'm afraid there never will be any, because of how the license is drafted.
The open source development and distribution process works as well as it does because everyone treats open source licenses as sublicenseable, and most of them are expressly so. Open source licenses contemplate that anyone who receives the software under license may himself or herself become a contributor or distributor. Software freedom is inherited by downstream sublicensees. Meanwhile, the Microsoft Sender ID patent license
continues the convenient fiction that there are "End Users" (S1.5) who receive limited rights.
And then:
The "nontransferable, non-sublicenseable" language in their reciprocal patent license (S2.3) also imposes an impossible administrative burden on the open source development community and, in essence, creates additional downstream patent licenses that will be incompatible with the AFL/OSL and similar open source licenses, and with the open source development process.
He continues:
The scope of the patent license is limited to compliant
implementations. This is incompatible with the broad grant of open
source licenses to create any derivative work whatsoever. In
addition, as Internet software is often non-compliant for many
possible different reasons, this would restrict the use of Sender ID
unacceptably. In addition:
Measurement of compliance is a problem.
If compliance is needed to get a license, then it's a problem. If
compliance is not needed to get a license, then the clause should
just be dropped.
Full compliance might be difficult to achieve for technical or
resource reasons.
Obvious extensions (many already under discussion) could be
subject to unknown additional patents.
Accepted best practices often exceed or conflict with compliance
for Internet standards.
3.2 Patent License. To the extent Microsoft has Necessary Claims, Microsoft hereby grants You a nonexclusive, royalty-free, non-sublicenseable, personal, worldwide license under those Necessary Claims to use the Technical Documentation for the Licensed Protocols to:
(a) make, use, import, offer to sell, sell and distribute directly or indirectly to end users, object code versions of Licensed Implementations only as incorporated into Licensed Products and solely for the purpose of conforming with the Protocol as described in the corresponding Technical Documentation, and
Due to the similairities of the Sender ID license and this license I think, Open Source may never be able to live up to the requirements of this license. If it doesn't, it might not necessarily be at risk for litigation over whatever rights Microsoft might have, but Microsoft definitely gains the selling point of having legally unencombered implementations while Open Source has none.
As I said, IANAL. Maybe someone with more legal knowledge can comment on this subject. I hope I'm wrong.
The argument that "if you find a watch on a beach, you assume someone made it" isn't going to go away.
With life, we didn't just happen to find it "on the beach". We are able to view the history of it, through fossils, DNA-resemblence of species and the fast procreation of bacteria.
The question here is wheter this history can be explained by competative behavior of species in changing circumstances or wether it has to be guided by an intelligent design.
Intelligent design is a way of saying evolution cannot be a autonomous process. It's a new way of saying God created life, but without claiming he also created the fossils and subsequently using the the watch on the beach argument.
Intelligent design is indeed the modern creationists view.
But Mr Berman said it was vital for the industry to establish a single digital rights management technology as part of a strategy to popularise legal downloads among consumers.
and
While Apple has been widely praised for bringing online music into the mainstream market, some labels have complained it has priced tracks too low, making it difficult for them to make a profit from them.
If a single format will allow for competition between online music stores and at the same time increase the user base, I would expect the prices to drop. But given the second statement, I suspect they would like us to pay more.
This can only happen when the DRM-scheme they will be proposing is more restrictive then Apple DRM. So this has nothing to do with interoperability. It's about standardizing to a format they have more control over.
Agreed. Sometimes it's even very convenient to use different browsers. I have different machines, which have different resources and I use them for different things. For web development I like mozilla on my main machine, but on my old notebook I like firefox or konqueror for leisure browsing, depending on my DE/WM for that day.
I think it's wise of Apple to implement something like that. Better yet, I suppose keychain already let's you share passwords between applications. Unfortunately I have not found something like that for Linux. Haven't been looking very hard though...
but this party and D'66 are the only ones that I know of that have something to say about software patents on their website.
There were at least two more parties with references to software patents on their website: the
PvdA (social democrats) and the SP (socialist party) were two that I am aware of. The SP even supported the demonstration before the ministry of Economic Affairs!
The problem with D66 is that it is takes part in the same EU party (European Liberal Democrats and Reformers) as the dutch right wing party (VVD). I contacted a D66 MEP to ask if that influences their voting, but I didn't get any respons.
Slashdot Mirror
I have been visiting slashdot almost from the day it started. In the early days I learned a lot by reading posts and following discussions on technical subjects by people with superior knowledge. It was inspiring.
Slashdot has not been like that for several years now. The interesting bits have become increasingly hard to find among all the patent nonsense, speculation and general news. (The Egyptian coup is news for nerds apparently).
I could put up with that. Even though I started visiting Slashdot less often and often just skimmed it before leaving off to sites like arstechnica or stackexchange.
But to see that Slashdot only spends _a footnote_ on the death of Douglas Engelbart, just really does it. This is not the Slashdot I knew and loved. We just have to face the facts and stop pretending; it is over.
So Slashdot, thank you for all the things I have learned and the joy you gave me over the years, but it is time to part my friend. Farewell.
You know, the great thing of traditional Radio and TV is that time slots are limited. Podcasts do not have such a limit and it usually shows.
Indeed *some Slashdotters* you seem to have a quarrel with do preach those things you say. But the code in your sig is probably not run by those Slashdotters. It's more likely to be run by *innocent bystanders*. People who hope to learn something on /. but are hurt in the process of you getting your point across is a very rude way.
It's sad that we live in a world which is so eager to regard everything as a property, so that it can be sold. And now we have started selling the future as well!
The idea behind this settlement is for new competition to enter the server market. Open Soure is an important force in the industry and should therefor be able to compete. At this moment Microsoft is going for an easy ride.
By the way, this insightful post gives a nice idea of why this license is incompatiable with open source. It's not all about the money. There are aspects of this license that go beyond the question of whether or not it can be implemented in open source. The license also cripples closed source implementations.
Under this license, if you implement the server interfaces, you cannot deviate from what MS says your implementation has to be. This poses a great problem for companies that want to innovate beyond Microsofts "standards" or that do not want to implement such features as DRM.
The EU should aim for a healthy server market in the best interest of its citizans. This would include multiple, unencumbered and independant implementations, some of which will probably be open source.
In the next couple of months many citizens of the EU can vote for an European Constitution in a referendum in their countries. In this constitution the European Parlement is given nearly no decisive powers at all.
The European parlement really shouldn't be called that way.
Policy makers in general really don't understand the differences between open source, shared source or open standards or open formats. And maybe they don't even care most of the time, since the majority of their voters also do not understand or do not care. They can present this as a victory, while only a small minority cares about the details.
I wonder why the name of this person is not out in the open.
If some people like to hack their print drivers and consider it a basic freedom to have access to its source code, that's just fine. Whether you think that really happens is irrelevant.
Your BSD license advertisement is offtopic and personally I find it quite annoying, since people seem to bring it up all the time.
The whole point with this "GPL/BSD offers more freedom", is the definition of freedom. Generally speaking, the BSD license values your freedom as a developer, GPL values your freedom as a user. So yes, the BSD license provides more freedom with respect to the definition you seem to prefer. But it provides less freedom with respect to the definition of others.
You're way off. If it is true what you are saying, Andromeda is not open source either. Open Source software has a Open Source License which adheres to the Open Source Definition of the Open Source Initiative which specificaly requires redistribution.
How is this even remotely insightful? The poster either hasn't read the article and does not know what "free" means in this context, or he knows so much he can invalidate this article's core assumptions but refuses to share any specific insights.
ummm, gnome perhaps?
We're again discussing the way how such a feature should be used, while my point has been the way such a feature should be accessed.
You give very valid reasons why this text box should be a separate dialog from the ordinary load and save dialog. This does not change the fact that this separate dialog could and in my view should easily be accessible through the gui.
With regard to coping, cutting and pasting dialog texts. As an Anonymous cowards has pointed out; this is available through a context menu (i.e. right click). This is not extremely obvious for new users, but given the fact that this is hardly core functionality for a load an save dialog and it sigificantly reduces cluttering, I think that this constitutes hardly an usability problem.
But the dialog provides access to that feature.
just because there is a box does not mean that it is obvious how to use it, you need to RTFM or know that anyway.
I'm not debating whether this feature is difficult to use and whether or not you may have to read a manual if you are not accustomed to a unix-like shell. All I'm saying is that feature itself should be easily accessible through the graphical user interface if it is accessible at all.
A shortcut should be exactly that: a shorter way to access a feature. But, that feature should nevertheless be equally accessible though the graphical user interface for people who do not know the shortcut. Whether you might have to read a manual to actually be able to use the feature really has nothing to do with that. Though the program could probably provide contextual help in that case.
Yes it is intuitive to use the keyboard when you intend to type.
Using a keyboard shotcut to be able to type in a file name in a graphical dialog is not intuitive. If a graphical dialog provides a way to type in a file name, that feature should be obvious by looking at the dialog or by expanding the dialog through an "advanced" button of some kind.
No wonder documentation is lacking in the free software world, no one ever reads it!
There are ligitimate reasons why one would want to input the file location by hand, for instance to save a file inside a hidden directory. (Think theme images for gnome or other environments). Reading a manual to be able to save a file this way should never be necessary.
You should vote for this one then ;)
the most.
Two examples: the has been translated to bovendien, which is the dutch word for moreover. if has been translated to de, which is the dutch word for the.
I know this is a community effort and one should not whine, but instead contribute. My only point is; don't get too excited. In the current form, at least the dutch - english translation is useless.
This license resembles the Sender-ID license and therefor makes Open Source implementations with this license very dificult. Please read the Apache Software Foundation's position regarding sender ID. Lawrence Rosen states:
Now, please have a look at the Microsoft license for these 130 protocols:Due to the similairities of the Sender ID license and this license I think, Open Source may never be able to live up to the requirements of this license. If it doesn't, it might not necessarily be at risk for litigation over whatever rights Microsoft might have, but Microsoft definitely gains the selling point of having legally unencombered implementations while Open Source has none.
As I said, IANAL. Maybe someone with more legal knowledge can comment on this subject. I hope I'm wrong.
With life, we didn't just happen to find it "on the beach". We are able to view the history of it, through fossils, DNA-resemblence of species and the fast procreation of bacteria.
The question here is wheter this history can be explained by competative behavior of species in changing circumstances or wether it has to be guided by an intelligent design.
Intelligent design is a way of saying evolution cannot be a autonomous process. It's a new way of saying God created life, but without claiming he also created the fossils and subsequently using the the watch on the beach argument.
Intelligent design is indeed the modern creationists view.
From the article (emphasis mine)
But Mr Berman said it was vital for the industry to establish a single digital rights management technology as part of a strategy to popularise legal downloads among consumers.
and
While Apple has been widely praised for bringing online music into the mainstream market, some labels have complained it has priced tracks too low, making it difficult for them to make a profit from them.
If a single format will allow for competition between online music stores and at the same time increase the user base, I would expect the prices to drop. But given the second statement, I suspect they would like us to pay more.
This can only happen when the DRM-scheme they will be proposing is more restrictive then Apple DRM. So this has nothing to do with interoperability. It's about standardizing to a format they have more control over.
Do they ever learn?
Agreed. Sometimes it's even very convenient to use different browsers. I have different machines, which have different resources and I use them for different things. For web development I like mozilla on my main machine, but on my old notebook I like firefox or konqueror for leisure browsing, depending on my DE/WM for that day.
I think it's wise of Apple to implement something like that. Better yet, I suppose keychain already let's you share passwords between applications. Unfortunately I have not found something like that for Linux. Haven't been looking very hard though...
There were at least two more parties with references to software patents on their website: the PvdA (social democrats) and the SP (socialist party) were two that I am aware of. The SP even supported the demonstration before the ministry of Economic Affairs!
The problem with D66 is that it is takes part in the same EU party (European Liberal Democrats and Reformers) as the dutch right wing party (VVD). I contacted a D66 MEP to ask if that influences their voting, but I didn't get any respons.