China's innovation relies mostly upon remaking things already patented in the West, just doing it cheaper by not paying the patent rights on it. This could be huge problem in the future, as many nations will require that they start honoring these agreements.
What agreements? Patents don't work like that. Unless a nation has signed a specific patent-sharing treaty (and I don't believe China has), then it does not have to honour any other country's patents. If you want to protect an invention globally, you have to file for patents in all of the countries you consider important. There are some exceptions, e.g. the EU Patent Office can grant a patent that applies to all EU countries, but they are few and far between.
You, my friend, must be a mathematician, because only a mathematician would say that "you can prove anything from a contradiction". You are clearly confused, seeing as you don't see how this statement would confuse a mathematician. It seems to work...
How the hell did they get weapons though? It's not like you can walk into a shop and press 'b', and i'm sure that l33t h4x0rz1ng the shopkeeper is gonna get you funny looks and nothing more.
Nah, they just went "IDKFA" and miraculously had everything they needed...
So, you'd believe that having, say, bash or perl or python installed on a Linux system is inherently insecure, because if, say, your mail client were to allow a script to be executed through a design flaw in the mail client, it would be able to compromise the system? Have you perhaps considered that blaming the scripting language for this is just plain stupid?
Is this exploit so blatant and so obvious that not even the Microsoft faithful will defend IE and Outlook, not to mention ActiveX or Windows Script Hosting.
There's not a lot wrong with Windows Script Hosting, as long as no other shite on your system lets somebody else run scripts without your permission.
What's wrong with Photoshop on wine? I know several people who run it regularly with no issues.
And for a professional user, Photoshop on wine might be better than native linux photoshop, which would probably not be able to run windows-based plugins.
Not to start a religious debate, but is there a huge gap in functionality between the GIMP and Adobe's PhotoShop?
Yes. Photoshop's layer manipulations are much better, and there is a much wider variety of special effect plugins available for photoshop. Plus photoshop's printing capabilities are better.
There's also a lot of inertia behind photoshop. It has been the consistent user interface behind graphic manipulation for the last 15(?) years. It is the tool that just about every graphic designer out there knows how to use. And GIMP's user interface is different enough that it will stop many users from seeing it as being as friendly.
Thank you. I thought the OP was wrong, but didn't have a source for that.
I'd also say that even if a kernel module was ported from another OS, any code touched by the porting is likely to become a derivitive work of the kernel.
The point is that the use of '*' as a wildcard is nothing whatsoever to do with the kernel. Why, then, should the kernel do anything to prevent its use in a filename? Particularly when not allowing this may violate standards and cause legacy software not to function correctly?
What changed is that it is incorporated into that driver. If it is stored as a separate file and loaded from the filesystem after it is mounted, it seems reasonable (it would come under the 'mere aggregation' clause of the GPL, as mentioned by another poster), but my understanding is that this is not how the Linux kernel currently works.
The firmware would have to be incorporated into the kernel module, which means that the firmware's source code would have to be distributed.
The offending portion of the GPL is this:
For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains
The firmware meets just about any definition you care to apply of "module", and is certainly "contain[ed]" within the kernel module.
the word from linus is closed source drivers are perfectly acceptable
Then either he needs to put an exception into the licence, or provide a way of loading them that doesn't link them directly to the kernel, because it is in contravention of the GPL to do so, whatever Linus says about the matter.
I see your point, but think your reasoning is flawed. This CD is only really 'official' in that procedes from its sale help fund the OS development process. Theo doesn't say that it's any better than any of the other ISOs out there that you can download -- he just says that if you want to help OpenBSD development, that's the one you should buy.
I don't think that matters. If it is distributed as part of a kernel module, that module will be linked to the kernel when it is compiled. If you then distribute that binary, according to the GPL, you have to distribute or offer to distribute the source (that is the "preferred form for making modifications") to _everything_ that goes into that module.
You'd better get everyone to stop using their NVidia cards then, can't run that closed-source driver.
Well, why isn't it incorporated into the kernel then? Can't do that. You have to download it when you install your system rather than get it distributed alongside it... because the result of compiling something that mixes closed source and open source code is not actually distributable under the GPL.
No, there is not a problem with running a driver that is a LKM, and thus loadable on the fly (not compiled into the OS).
Do you have a good source for this? Preferably from a lawyer? My reading of the GPL is that this is not allowable. NVidia (and others) get around this by having a small open source driver that talks to both the kernel and their closed source driver, meaning that there is no direct interface between them. Even this is legally dubious, although I doubt they'll have any problems, because they don't distribute a binary version of the closed source section.
And we aren't actually talking about anything thats really *part* of the OS anyways, you're talking about basically a binary image file (in essence) of the code used internal to the wireless card, that you have to send to the card before it will work.
Being part of the OS is irrelevant. The question is, does it link directly to the kernel? And whether the linking is static or dynamic is irrelevant, according to the GPL. I can see one allowable way of achieving this: have it as a data file that must be installed somewhere. This seems OK, because then it won't be linked, it will be loaded at run time.
Isn't there a problem here, that while a closed source redistributable binary is fine for use with *BSD, it cannot be linked into the Linux kernel because the GPL requires you to distribute source for anything that is so linked...?
Slashdot Mirror
China's innovation relies mostly upon remaking things already patented in the West, just doing it cheaper by not paying the patent rights on it. This could be huge problem in the future, as many nations will require that they start honoring these agreements.
What agreements? Patents don't work like that. Unless a nation has signed a specific patent-sharing treaty (and I don't believe China has), then it does not have to honour any other country's patents. If you want to protect an invention globally, you have to file for patents in all of the countries you consider important. There are some exceptions, e.g. the EU Patent Office can grant a patent that applies to all EU countries, but they are few and far between.
(IANAL, etc.)
Doesn't matter. They'll just end up IDNOCLIPping their way out of prison. :)
read: those morons cannot tell a daemon from a demon
Neither can I.
daemon n.
1. Chiefly British. Variant of demon.
(Source: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved -- via dictionary.com)
There is no difference, it's just a different way of spelling the same word. What's your point?
You, my friend, must be a mathematician, because only a mathematician would say that "you can prove anything from a contradiction". You are clearly confused, seeing as you don't see how this statement would confuse a mathematician. It seems to work...
since when has a maths nerd known where there are infinitely many prime twins!
Unfortunately, the proof was only that there _are_ infinitely many of them. Actually finding them is left as an exercise to the reader.
How the hell did they get weapons though? It's not like you can walk into a shop and press 'b', and i'm sure that l33t h4x0rz1ng the shopkeeper is gonna get you funny looks and nothing more.
Nah, they just went "IDKFA" and miraculously had everything they needed...
(I'm getting too old.)
So, you'd believe that having, say, bash or perl or python installed on a Linux system is inherently insecure, because if, say, your mail client were to allow a script to be executed through a design flaw in the mail client, it would be able to compromise the system? Have you perhaps considered that blaming the scripting language for this is just plain stupid?
Is this exploit so blatant and so obvious that not even the Microsoft faithful will defend IE and Outlook, not to mention ActiveX or Windows Script Hosting.
There's not a lot wrong with Windows Script Hosting, as long as no other shite on your system lets somebody else run scripts without your permission.
What's wrong with photoshop on Windows?
Err... it requires you to purchase a copy of windows, thus lining MS's dirty pockets?
Sorry, I thought from your username that you _were_ Bush for a moment there.
Troll? Well, fuck you too. It's not like I care about my karma.
What's wrong with Photoshop on wine? I know several people who run it regularly with no issues.
And for a professional user, Photoshop on wine might be better than native linux photoshop, which would probably not be able to run windows-based plugins.
Not to start a religious debate, but is there a huge gap in functionality between the GIMP and Adobe's PhotoShop?
Yes. Photoshop's layer manipulations are much better, and there is a much wider variety of special effect plugins available for photoshop. Plus photoshop's printing capabilities are better.
There's also a lot of inertia behind photoshop. It has been the consistent user interface behind graphic manipulation for the last 15(?) years. It is the tool that just about every graphic designer out there knows how to use. And GIMP's user interface is different enough that it will stop many users from seeing it as being as friendly.
The newest version of Acrobat Reader is not available for linux. Only the last version is.
Some would say that's a good thing. Acrobat Reader 6 is slow and bloated. Version 5 is ten times better, IMO.
Thank you. I thought the OP was wrong, but didn't have a source for that.
I'd also say that even if a kernel module was ported from another OS, any code touched by the porting is likely to become a derivitive work of the kernel.
The point is that the use of '*' as a wildcard is nothing whatsoever to do with the kernel. Why, then, should the kernel do anything to prevent its use in a filename? Particularly when not allowing this may violate standards and cause legacy software not to function correctly?
What changed is that it is incorporated into that driver. If it is stored as a separate file and loaded from the filesystem after it is mounted, it seems reasonable (it would come under the 'mere aggregation' clause of the GPL, as mentioned by another poster), but my understanding is that this is not how the Linux kernel currently works.
The firmware would have to be incorporated into the kernel module, which means that the firmware's source code would have to be distributed.
The offending portion of the GPL is this:
For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains
The firmware meets just about any definition you care to apply of "module", and is certainly "contain[ed]" within the kernel module.
the word from linus is closed source drivers are perfectly acceptable
Then either he needs to put an exception into the licence, or provide a way of loading them that doesn't link them directly to the kernel, because it is in contravention of the GPL to do so, whatever Linus says about the matter.
Here it is in all it's glory, complete with Gungans shouting 'Wesa free!'...
I could just about tolerate everything else he's done to it, but that's the limit.
I see your point, but think your reasoning is flawed. This CD is only really 'official' in that procedes from its sale help fund the OS development process. Theo doesn't say that it's any better than any of the other ISOs out there that you can download -- he just says that if you want to help OpenBSD development, that's the one you should buy.
I don't think that matters. If it is distributed as part of a kernel module, that module will be linked to the kernel when it is compiled. If you then distribute that binary, according to the GPL, you have to distribute or offer to distribute the source (that is the "preferred form for making modifications") to _everything_ that goes into that module.
You'd better get everyone to stop using their NVidia cards then, can't run that closed-source driver.
Well, why isn't it incorporated into the kernel then? Can't do that. You have to download it when you install your system rather than get it distributed alongside it... because the result of compiling something that mixes closed source and open source code is not actually distributable under the GPL.
No, there is not a problem with running a driver that is a LKM, and thus loadable on the fly (not compiled into the OS).
Do you have a good source for this? Preferably from a lawyer? My reading of the GPL is that this is not allowable. NVidia (and others) get around this by having a small open source driver that talks to both the kernel and their closed source driver, meaning that there is no direct interface between them. Even this is legally dubious, although I doubt they'll have any problems, because they don't distribute a binary version of the closed source section.
And we aren't actually talking about anything thats really *part* of the OS anyways, you're talking about basically a binary image file (in essence) of the code used internal to the wireless card, that you have to send to the card before it will work.
Being part of the OS is irrelevant. The question is, does it link directly to the kernel? And whether the linking is static or dynamic is irrelevant, according to the GPL. I can see one allowable way of achieving this: have it as a data file that must be installed somewhere. This seems OK, because then it won't be linked, it will be loaded at run time.
I'd like to buy a vowel please.
Sorry, we've sent them all to Bosnia.
Why do you want the Official CD-ROM, if you're not going to pay for it? Go download an unofficial one, and stop caring so much.
Isn't there a problem here, that while a closed source redistributable binary is fine for use with *BSD, it cannot be linked into the Linux kernel because the GPL requires you to distribute source for anything that is so linked...?