Sorry, but exactly when did Title 17 begin including or referencing the GPL?!?!?
He never said anything about copyright law referencing the GPL. He said the GPL is the only license they had to distribute and when they violated the terms of that license by refusing to provide source code, it was no longer valid. They are therefore in violation of copyright law, as they now have no license to distribute the code.
Jogu said "Under copyright law, there is absolutely no requirement for them to provide the source code." No, but there is a requirement that they abide the copyright holder's terms, which in this case is the GPL. If they don't, they are not licensed to distribute.
Odds are, they exact opposite would have happened. Absent Microsoft and their drive for uniformity - the [IBM compatible] PC world is likely to remain chaotic and fragmented.
You are giving credit to the wrong entity. It was the team who designed the original IBM PC who decided to use an open architecture and off-the-shelf parts, meaning others could compete against them but allowing a market for the personal computer to grow as a result. All Microsoft did was perfect grabbing on to the coat tails of others and hanging on.
Although your post is obviously a joke, Windows did a fantastic job of getting the PC into the lives of average people.
No, that was the Internet.
The spreadsheet was the "killer ap" that got PCs on to the desktops of accountants and managers. The Internet was the "killer ap" that finally got the PC in to the homes of people like our parents. Email, the web and now digital photos of grandchildren on Facebook and Flickr have pretty much made even a dial-up account a necessity for pretty much everyone. Homeless people use the Internet.
And Bill Gates famously missed the potential of a free & open Internet until quite late in the game (I don't think Windows shipped with built-in support for TCP/IP until Windows 98, but correct me if I'm wrong).
The fact that the majority of people will happily give up all manner of private information in exchange for a few pennies off the price of a carton of milk. If the threat of identity theft doesn't make people more conscious of their privacy, I doubt the threat of their government reading their email will.
Use a couple of old spare crappy PCs left lying around. Every business has at least a few of those.
Yeah, they're in my office, waiting for me to fix them. Hence the lack of desire on my part to futz around with a box of old drives;)
Seriously, anything with a plug that someone thinks might be useful some day gets left on my desk (usually without so much as a post-it note on it telling me where it came from and whether or not it works. Oh, and no power cable). A regular house cleaning is necessary just so I can have a level surface to work on.
Some of those old drive could be put to use, and certainly someone with the time to wipe them could sell them at a swap meet or on eBay.
Seller shipped broken disk that sounded like a maraca when shaken. Would not buy again.
That's funny;)
As I mentioned elsewhere (after you posted your coment) if I was going to sell a drive I would boot the system with a Knoppix disc and use shred on it. I just don't have the time or inclination to do this with a hodge podge of a hundred or so 20 - 80 gig drives that "mostly work." Too many other hobbies, I've got half-finished projects at home, at work etc.
If someone does have the time and figures they can get enough in return for the drives to justify hooking each one up, shredding it, then selling it on ebay more power to them. The HD manufacturers are certainly not making smaller size drives available, and sometimes that's all you need. I'm all for recycle and reuse, but I find a lot of older "consumer" or desktop grade drives are simply too prone to failure to justify the effort. But that's just my experience.
The whole "multiple-writes else information can be gathered from the residual magnetic domains" thing is pretty much debunked. Writing zeros is sufficient.
I don't know about it being debunked, but I would tend to agree writing zeros is sufficient in most cases. If you have military secrets that someone would be willing to invest a lot of time and money in to recovering, then the DoD standard might be warranted. For the most part, the 'dd' method described above or zeroing out the drive would be sufficient for most people's needs.
As I mentioned elsewhere, GNU shred works real nice. It uses several different patterns, you can specify how many passes you would like it to make, and you can write zeros on the last pass (so it doesn't look like the drive contains encrypted data).
If I was going to sell or give away an old system I would use a knoppix or Ubuntu boot disc, let shred do it's thing overnight and put a fresh copy of the OS on the machine when it finished. More likely, if it was an older/smaller/likely-to-fail-soon drive (like, say, an old Maxtor) I would use the sledge hammer method on it and put in a new 500 gig drive for $89.99.
If you don't use the entire 40 GB you paid for, does that carry over to the next month? After all, they charge extra for going over, it only makes sense that you should either be credited for the amount you don't use, or have the remainder carry over to the next month.
As long as they don't pocket the unused bandwidth, I wouldn't have a problem at all having it metered. Makes more sense than ISP advertising "unlimited" Internet access then arbitrarily cutting off people who take them up on it.
Yeah, and DOS 6.2 (or was it 6.22?) was a decent enough operating system for single-user 486s and pentiums at the time. They basically gutted the command prompt when Windows 95 came out.
What bugs me the most is that someone who is an IT department manager w something in the server room that was plugged in, on the network, and turned on, and decided to turn it off and disconnect it without so much as asking someone.
That's why this story just doesn't ring true. The article says "The manager had thought the X-Box was just a games console that the IT departments staff used for recreation when it got quiet. Noticing that the X-Box hadn't been moved from the server room for some time and that his son was going to be at home on school holidays for the next two weeks, the manager decided to take the X-Box home so that his son would have something to entertain himself with."
As you point out, he would have had to unplug at least a network and power cable to remove it. It's not like it was sitting unused on a shelf, or it couldn't have been serving web pages.
I know people will do some stupid things, but my bs detecter tells me it's one of those urban legends.
1. True or false: copyright should expire after a reasonable period of time, say 10 years.
2. True or false: in order for copyright to achieve its stated mandate of promoting the advancement of science and the useful arts, it is important to balance the protection given to copyright holders with strong fair use rights for the public.
3. True or false: non-commercial distribution of orphaned works, or works for which the copyright holder is unknown, should be considered fair use.
4. True or false: the penalty for non-commercial distribution of copyrighted works that are available commercially should not exceed the penalty that would be applied for shoplifting the equivalent physical item.
Hey, forget university kids, they should give this test to RIAA lawyers as a prerequisite for filing lawsuits.
With a closed source license, you pretty much know ahead of time what you can do with it... install and run it.
Are you sure? Most "closed source" software I encounter requires me to agree to something called an "End User License Agreement" before I can install and run it. Despite the fact that I've already paid for the software in most cases.
In fact, a lot of hardware comes with software which requires you to agree to some form of EULA before using it, again after you have already purchased the product.
The whole point of the GPL is to assure the user of the software that they can not be prevented from installing and using the software.
I also strongly disagree with your statement "As far as I'm concerned, even with any GPL variant, unless you are a lawyer, software licenses weren't written for you." If anything, the english version of the license is far easier to read and comprehend than most legal documents, and certainly more so than any Microsoft EULA I've read. Additionally, there are versions available in
Argentinian Spanish
British English
Chinese
Finnish
French
German
Hebrew
Italian
Persian (Farsi)
Serbian
Spanish
Ukrainian
No, the GPL is pretty clear, to my eyes anyway. What I do find confusing is some of the naming conventions used by Microsoft. Office Open XML, for example, might give someone the impression that it is in some way connected with Open Office. This goes for the names of their new licensing models too, which is kind of the point of the article. You would think a company that sued another company for violating their trade mark would be more careful about creating confusion in the marketplace, unless their goal isn't really to offer flexible licensing and open standards.
I don't really see the "vast Slashdot hyprocisy" you refer to.
The submissions by NewYorkCountryLawyer tend to illuminate abuses of the legal process on the part of attorneys and investigators working on behalf of the RIAA. Regardless of how you feel about copyright, and whether or not you feel ideas are the same thing as physical property and should be treated as such, I would hope we all can agree that evidence should be gathered in a legal manner by people who are properly licensed to do so in the place they are working, and it should not be misrepresented in court as saying something that it simply doesn't.
Also, in case you hadn't noticed, Slashdot isn't just one guy posting everything. If I say something that contradicts something another Slashdotter says, that isn't hypocrisy, it's a converation.
I guess what I should have said is you question implies that a license is a means of limiting what a person may do with a piece of software, when in fact it grants additional rights - at least in the case of the GPL. The limiting factor is copyright law.
I blame Microsoft and others who have used "End User License Agreements" to attempt to impose further restrictions on how their software is used by the purchaser beyond the restrictions against distribution that copyright law covers. The GPL has nothing to say about how you use a piece of software, it simply covers the conditions under which you may distribute it.
I agree with you as well about the assumption that a thing would be free by default. That is the natural way. Laws about property ownership and such are artificial constructs that go against our instincts. That's a different discussion, though a good opportunity for a 'car analogy.'
Ok, interesting, but what about the rest of the world.
I suppose you would have to look at the applicable laws in the country you want to distribute the software in.
In some places the author of the work may have to take steps to explicitly copyright it. If he failed to do so, that may limit his ability to seek legal remedies if you decided to redistribute his work, or use it in a project of your own.
I'm not sure I understand what you are getting at. What exactly do you mean when you ask "is there no such thing as unlicensed software"? Even if there is no license, it still falls under the protection of copyright. All a license does is grant you additional rights you didn't already have.
Here's another way of looking at it: If you record a song and put it on a web site, could I just take your song and put it on a CD I'm marketing called "Songs From The Internet?"
Cause that's really what you're asking. Is there no such thing as unlicensed music? As someone else pointed out, you could put a notice up saying "I the author of this work release it to the Public Domain" and I suppose I could then do whatever I want from it. I also couldn't prevent anyone else from doing whatever they want.
You could also grant me the right to redistribute your work by giving me a license to do so, say a Creative Commons license. Armed with that license, I could redistribute your work provided I abide by its terms.
I've posted elsewhere, so I can't mod you Insightful but I wish I could. The people who parrot Ballmer and complain about the "viral" nature of the GPL gloss over the fact that if the copyright holder didn't grant additional rights via the GPL, Skype would have no right to distribute the software. Copyright prevents it.
...but if I write some software and post it on a web site, it doesn't have any license, does that mean no one can use it
IANAL, but I'll take a crack at that.
In the US, whatever you create is copyrighted by default. I believe it is easier to defend if you take the step of registering it, but as far as I know simply putting a copyright notice on it is sufficient. So I couldn't come along and take the code you published and use it in a project I intend to distribute without getting your permission.
"Getting your permission" is what abiding by the GPL amounts to. It says "this code is copyrighted. You may not redistribute it unless you agree to these terms..."
Unlike Microsoft-style EULAs, the GPL (as far as I know) does not have to be accepted by the user, as it really has nothing to do with the user (despite the fact that a lot of software out there makes you "accept" the GPL before installing it). You don't need to agree to anything to use emacs to write your novel, but if you want to include it in a software distribution, or use the source code within a project you are developing yourself, you need to get the permission of the copyright holder and agree to his terms. That means abiding by the GPL.
Well, it looks like business can no longer ignore and quietly use unlicensed software in supporting roles and they'll have to recognize it for what it is.
Unlicensed software is a threat that will expose all of the work it touches it to outside scrutiny whether you want it or not. No longer can unlicensed code be relied upon to fill some small niche in a product environment. Whatever it touches, it taints. Instead, it will be necessary to re-invent these wheels. Poorly.
It therefore immediately needs to be eliminated from the workplace or used only as an isolated tool for "support" or "administration". Keep any unlicensesd code away from the production, distribution, or testing of proprietary code.
I don't normally go for those "there, fixed that fer ya" type posts, but it seems to me this is really what you are saying.
You are correct, the result of this decision may be that some people who were using GPL code in violation of the license will no longer do so, just as the announcement of Microsoft going after companies using unlicensed copies of their software may have a similar effect. How you feel about that really depends on how you feel about copyright in general.
To me, the whole point of the eee is that it finally lets linux and windows have an unbiased competition with the market for judge
And this demonstrates that we will never have unbiased (or fair) competition as long as one of the competitors is Microsoft.
So play 'em at their own game. Hold installfests in the parking lots of places selling the things. Whoop it up. FOSS isn't driven by "market share," it's driven by the passion of its developers and users. It isn't going anywhere.
Microsoft may be able to point at some meaningless marketing numbers and say "see, people are choosing Windows, even when Linux is more expensive" and I bet some PHBs will even think that statement makes sense. Doesn't matter, Microsoft will run out of money eventually and FOSS will still be there.
Slashdot Mirror
He never said anything about copyright law referencing the GPL. He said the GPL is the only license they had to distribute and when they violated the terms of that license by refusing to provide source code, it was no longer valid. They are therefore in violation of copyright law, as they now have no license to distribute the code.
Jogu said "Under copyright law, there is absolutely no requirement for them to provide the source code." No, but there is a requirement that they abide the copyright holder's terms, which in this case is the GPL. If they don't, they are not licensed to distribute.
You are giving credit to the wrong entity. It was the team who designed the original IBM PC who decided to use an open architecture and off-the-shelf parts, meaning others could compete against them but allowing a market for the personal computer to grow as a result. All Microsoft did was perfect grabbing on to the coat tails of others and hanging on.
Don't leave out Paul Allen.
No, that was the Internet.
The spreadsheet was the "killer ap" that got PCs on to the desktops of accountants and managers. The Internet was the "killer ap" that finally got the PC in to the homes of people like our parents. Email, the web and now digital photos of grandchildren on Facebook and Flickr have pretty much made even a dial-up account a necessity for pretty much everyone. Homeless people use the Internet.
And Bill Gates famously missed the potential of a free & open Internet until quite late in the game (I don't think Windows shipped with built-in support for TCP/IP until Windows 98, but correct me if I'm wrong).
The fact that the majority of people will happily give up all manner of private information in exchange for a few pennies off the price of a carton of milk. If the threat of identity theft doesn't make people more conscious of their privacy, I doubt the threat of their government reading their email will.
Yeah, they're in my office, waiting for me to fix them. Hence the lack of desire on my part to futz around with a box of old drives
Seriously, anything with a plug that someone thinks might be useful some day gets left on my desk (usually without so much as a post-it note on it telling me where it came from and whether or not it works. Oh, and no power cable). A regular house cleaning is necessary just so I can have a level surface to work on.
Some of those old drive could be put to use, and certainly someone with the time to wipe them could sell them at a swap meet or on eBay.
Otherwise, it's Hammer Time!
That's funny
As I mentioned elsewhere (after you posted your coment) if I was going to sell a drive I would boot the system with a Knoppix disc and use shred on it. I just don't have the time or inclination to do this with a hodge podge of a hundred or so 20 - 80 gig drives that "mostly work." Too many other hobbies, I've got half-finished projects at home, at work etc.
If someone does have the time and figures they can get enough in return for the drives to justify hooking each one up, shredding it, then selling it on ebay more power to them. The HD manufacturers are certainly not making smaller size drives available, and sometimes that's all you need. I'm all for recycle and reuse, but I find a lot of older "consumer" or desktop grade drives are simply too prone to failure to justify the effort. But that's just my experience.
I don't know about it being debunked, but I would tend to agree writing zeros is sufficient in most cases. If you have military secrets that someone would be willing to invest a lot of time and money in to recovering, then the DoD standard might be warranted. For the most part, the 'dd' method described above or zeroing out the drive would be sufficient for most people's needs.
As I mentioned elsewhere, GNU shred works real nice. It uses several different patterns, you can specify how many passes you would like it to make, and you can write zeros on the last pass (so it doesn't look like the drive contains encrypted data).
If I was going to sell or give away an old system I would use a knoppix or Ubuntu boot disc, let shred do it's thing overnight and put a fresh copy of the OS on the machine when it finished. More likely, if it was an older/smaller/likely-to-fail-soon drive (like, say, an old Maxtor) I would use the sledge hammer method on it and put in a new 500 gig drive for $89.99.
There's a GNU tool called shred that works quite well too. You can even pass a -z to tell it to zero the last pass.
Who has time to do that on almost 100 drives?
I use the sledge hammer method myself. Hit it until it sounds like a maraca when you shake it.
It's Jack Thompson you're thinking of. Ken Thompson is one of the creators of UNIX.
Do you?
If you don't use the entire 40 GB you paid for, does that carry over to the next month? After all, they charge extra for going over, it only makes sense that you should either be credited for the amount you don't use, or have the remainder carry over to the next month.
As long as they don't pocket the unused bandwidth, I wouldn't have a problem at all having it metered. Makes more sense than ISP advertising "unlimited" Internet access then arbitrarily cutting off people who take them up on it.
Very well put.
I would add that they need to let their customers know what the thresholds are, so we can monitor our own use to avoid being throttled.
Yeah, and DOS 6.2 (or was it 6.22?) was a decent enough operating system for single-user 486s and pentiums at the time. They basically gutted the command prompt when Windows 95 came out.
That's why this story just doesn't ring true. The article says "The manager had thought the X-Box was just a games console that the IT departments staff used for recreation when it got quiet. Noticing that the X-Box hadn't been moved from the server room for some time and that his son was going to be at home on school holidays for the next two weeks, the manager decided to take the X-Box home so that his son would have something to entertain himself with."
As you point out, he would have had to unplug at least a network and power cable to remove it. It's not like it was sitting unused on a shelf, or it couldn't have been serving web pages.
I know people will do some stupid things, but my bs detecter tells me it's one of those urban legends.
I'd go along with questions along these lines:
1. True or false: copyright should expire after a reasonable period of time, say 10 years.
2. True or false: in order for copyright to achieve its stated mandate of promoting the advancement of science and the useful arts, it is important to balance the protection given to copyright holders with strong fair use rights for the public.
3. True or false: non-commercial distribution of orphaned works, or works for which the copyright holder is unknown, should be considered fair use.
4. True or false: the penalty for non-commercial distribution of copyrighted works that are available commercially should not exceed the penalty that would be applied for shoplifting the equivalent physical item.
Hey, forget university kids, they should give this test to RIAA lawyers as a prerequisite for filing lawsuits.
Y'all need to learn to take a joke, eh?
Are you sure? Most "closed source" software I encounter requires me to agree to something called an "End User License Agreement" before I can install and run it. Despite the fact that I've already paid for the software in most cases.
In fact, a lot of hardware comes with software which requires you to agree to some form of EULA before using it, again after you have already purchased the product.
The whole point of the GPL is to assure the user of the software that they can not be prevented from installing and using the software.
I also strongly disagree with your statement "As far as I'm concerned, even with any GPL variant, unless you are a lawyer, software licenses weren't written for you." If anything, the english version of the license is far easier to read and comprehend than most legal documents, and certainly more so than any Microsoft EULA I've read. Additionally, there are versions available in
No, the GPL is pretty clear, to my eyes anyway. What I do find confusing is some of the naming conventions used by Microsoft. Office Open XML, for example, might give someone the impression that it is in some way connected with Open Office. This goes for the names of their new licensing models too, which is kind of the point of the article. You would think a company that sued another company for violating their trade mark would be more careful about creating confusion in the marketplace, unless their goal isn't really to offer flexible licensing and open standards.
I don't really see the "vast Slashdot hyprocisy" you refer to.
The submissions by NewYorkCountryLawyer tend to illuminate abuses of the legal process on the part of attorneys and investigators working on behalf of the RIAA. Regardless of how you feel about copyright, and whether or not you feel ideas are the same thing as physical property and should be treated as such, I would hope we all can agree that evidence should be gathered in a legal manner by people who are properly licensed to do so in the place they are working, and it should not be misrepresented in court as saying something that it simply doesn't.
Also, in case you hadn't noticed, Slashdot isn't just one guy posting everything. If I say something that contradicts something another Slashdotter says, that isn't hypocrisy, it's a converation.
I guess what I should have said is you question implies that a license is a means of limiting what a person may do with a piece of software, when in fact it grants additional rights - at least in the case of the GPL. The limiting factor is copyright law.
I blame Microsoft and others who have used "End User License Agreements" to attempt to impose further restrictions on how their software is used by the purchaser beyond the restrictions against distribution that copyright law covers. The GPL has nothing to say about how you use a piece of software, it simply covers the conditions under which you may distribute it.
I agree with you as well about the assumption that a thing would be free by default. That is the natural way. Laws about property ownership and such are artificial constructs that go against our instincts. That's a different discussion, though a good opportunity for a 'car analogy.'
I suppose you would have to look at the applicable laws in the country you want to distribute the software in.
In some places the author of the work may have to take steps to explicitly copyright it. If he failed to do so, that may limit his ability to seek legal remedies if you decided to redistribute his work, or use it in a project of your own.
I'm not sure I understand what you are getting at. What exactly do you mean when you ask "is there no such thing as unlicensed software"? Even if there is no license, it still falls under the protection of copyright. All a license does is grant you additional rights you didn't already have.
Here's another way of looking at it: If you record a song and put it on a web site, could I just take your song and put it on a CD I'm marketing called "Songs From The Internet?"
Cause that's really what you're asking. Is there no such thing as unlicensed music? As someone else pointed out, you could put a notice up saying "I the author of this work release it to the Public Domain" and I suppose I could then do whatever I want from it. I also couldn't prevent anyone else from doing whatever they want.
You could also grant me the right to redistribute your work by giving me a license to do so, say a Creative Commons license. Armed with that license, I could redistribute your work provided I abide by its terms.
I've posted elsewhere, so I can't mod you Insightful but I wish I could. The people who parrot Ballmer and complain about the "viral" nature of the GPL gloss over the fact that if the copyright holder didn't grant additional rights via the GPL, Skype would have no right to distribute the software. Copyright prevents it.
IANAL, but I'll take a crack at that.
In the US, whatever you create is copyrighted by default. I believe it is easier to defend if you take the step of registering it, but as far as I know simply putting a copyright notice on it is sufficient. So I couldn't come along and take the code you published and use it in a project I intend to distribute without getting your permission.
"Getting your permission" is what abiding by the GPL amounts to. It says "this code is copyrighted. You may not redistribute it unless you agree to these terms
Unlike Microsoft-style EULAs, the GPL (as far as I know) does not have to be accepted by the user, as it really has nothing to do with the user (despite the fact that a lot of software out there makes you "accept" the GPL before installing it). You don't need to agree to anything to use emacs to write your novel, but if you want to include it in a software distribution, or use the source code within a project you are developing yourself, you need to get the permission of the copyright holder and agree to his terms. That means abiding by the GPL.
I don't normally go for those "there, fixed that fer ya" type posts, but it seems to me this is really what you are saying.
You are correct, the result of this decision may be that some people who were using GPL code in violation of the license will no longer do so, just as the announcement of Microsoft going after companies using unlicensed copies of their software may have a similar effect. How you feel about that really depends on how you feel about copyright in general.
And this demonstrates that we will never have unbiased (or fair) competition as long as one of the competitors is Microsoft.
So play 'em at their own game. Hold installfests in the parking lots of places selling the things. Whoop it up. FOSS isn't driven by "market share," it's driven by the passion of its developers and users. It isn't going anywhere.
Microsoft may be able to point at some meaningless marketing numbers and say "see, people are choosing Windows, even when Linux is more expensive" and I bet some PHBs will even think that statement makes sense. Doesn't matter, Microsoft will run out of money eventually and FOSS will still be there.