Re:Idiots at Novell
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Registration with the US copyright office should be a requirement, not an option.
Uh, no. To do that you have to do one of two things: 1) Pull out of the Berne Convention, which states that all works have intrinsic copyright unless otherwise stated.
2) Require that everyone file for copyright status for everything they create. Personally, I'd rather not file for copyright status on every post I make to a webboard (technically copyrighted, not that I care), every bit of code I create for my company (yeah, they'd be doing the filing, but you think that would exempt me from filling out the paperwork?), any code I put under license (be it GPL, LGPL, BSD, MIT, or anything but unfettered public domain status), or anything else. It'd be utterly absurd.
And, no, you can't just say "well if you don't file then it has no copyright" because that's a violation of the Berne convention. And before you say that you should just get rid of that then, think about the implications for open source software -- every program would have to file with the copyright office. $30 isn't all that much, but it's more than a lot of people would be willing to bother with. And so instead of GPL/LGPL licenses it'd all be public domain.
You have assets... that computer? That's an asset. Your car? Yup. Every material posession you have? Ditto. Oh, and if you're employed then you can kiss most of your paycheck goodbye forever -- since SCO will place a lien on it and get their cut right after the IRS gets theirs.
It's called fucking your life, and fucking it hard. If the OP was so hot on the idea, they should do it themselves instead of putting someone else's head on the chopping block.
That's not breach of contract since the board was clearly acting in the interest of shareholders at the time of the suit. A hostile takeover is not a cheap thing, and getting 10x your face value for the shares makes it hard to argue otherwise.
Now the majority shareholder could order them to cease and desist, and if they didn't do so could have them fired and file breach of contract, but that's not going to happen.
In fact, despite all the talk about buying SCO out, that's not likely to happen either. According to Yahoo! insiders and 5%+ owners own 68% of the company. If insiders own over 50% then a hostile takeover is impossible without someone defecting -- and those trades are usually limited by SEC rules in the first place. This is why hostile takeovers have become a thing of the past - companies have learned that having the majority of shares being held by employees, along with SEC trading restrictions, make hostile takeovers very, very difficult.
Re:Novell agrees, but can't substantiate ammendmen
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Could it be that SCO happened to "create" this ammendment and then convienently "find it in a filing cabinet" ?
Sure. And when found to be a falsified document then Novell would sue the everliving crap out of them. Fraud, forgery, harm to business, and probably a dozen or so other civil and criminal charges would be filed.
Even I don't think SCO is that stupid.
In any case, unless the ammendment was filed with the Copyright office it makes very little difference -- all SCO could do is sue Linux companies and users to cease further infringement, not monetary damages. They couldn't even recoup legal costs for the cases.
My coworker has an 11 year old son. He (the son) allegedly has some issues with violence and doesn't quite know where to draw the line when playing with other kids (I dunno - I'm not the parent, and I've only seen the kid a half dozen times or so). Because of this no violent games are allowed, and he tries to keep a lid on the movies and other media he's exposed to. At times I think he's being over the top, but at other times I can definitely see the point. And as far as it goes I'm much more inclined toward limiting violence rather than limiting "adult" themes.
Of course, his ex-wife is (again, allegedly, but from the stories I've heard I'd agree) a completely incompetent and irresponsible parent. She lets him do whatever he wants, buys him whatever he wants, and so forth -- and I really don't think a 10 year old should be seeing R-rated movies by themselves (which he has under her care). Fortunately, it's my coworker that has custody, not her.
I'd say my coworker is being a responsible parent... he does take a look at the games, videos, toys, etc. that his son gets or wants before making a decision. And he's a smart guy, and has said repeatedly that his son just needs to be a bit older before playing this stuff. Again, sometimes I think it's overboard, but I can't really chastise a parent for actually being a parent.
You can believe what you want, but TCP/IP did not start becoming widely implemented until after the availability of the free BSD stack.
Would you care for me to start listing all of the other open standards that have failed miserably due to a lack of a high quality reference implementation? Here's a starter... it's also only 3 letters.
The original statement is that the internet was built on OPEN STANDARDS and then he goes off about an IMPLEMENTATION of the standard, which is irrelevant.
No, the original statement is that Open Source did not contribute to the success of the Internet, on the premise that it was open standards, and not open source that did the job.
Exactly which part of "It's very hard to argue that the existance of the freely usable BSD stack was not a large impetus to the susccess of TCP/IP, and thus the Internet." did you not understand?
Oh, and if you had bothered reading the entire post, you'd see that the open standard was irrelevant. The real standard was the open implementation. And it still is.
As for his other "proofs", they are not proofs at all. gcc is inferior to its commercial counterparts in efficiency. It is only used because it is FREE (as in beer).
Depends on the commercial counterpart, but that certainly isn't always true. You also ignored the bits about implementation of standards/features (which, btw, was one of your original points that you've forgotten about already), and the increasing use in the embedded community because of the ease of porting, support, and efficiency.
Oh, and we're licensed for IBM's VisualAge C/C++ compiler here. We use gcc/g++ instead. VA may compile a bit faster, but the resultant code isn't signficantly faster, it doesn't implement the standards as well as gcc does (which severely limits our options for libraries), and it doesn't produce debuggable code. Oh, and gdb and ddd are far superior debugging tools to dbx or the VA debugger.
We scream troll when someone blathers about things in a blatantly incorrect manner and then starts ignoring/forgetting things when they're pointed out how incorrect they are. You sir, are a troll.
What a load of hooey. Yeah, it was good for the corporations. So what? It was good for everyone -- Linux's stack was BSD based as well. Oh good for Red Hat I'm sure you'll say. Good for everyone -- without it we wouldn't have the Internet and that's been a huge boon in social discourse.
As far as what the programmer gets out of it -- the same thing anyone gets out of donating time or money to any cause. If nothing else, you get a feeling of contribution and helping people. Maybe you'll get some work out of it too -- there are numerous people who have gotten contracts, jobs, or other compensation for open source work. No, the majority hasn't. So what?
Frankly, I suggest you go back to writing machine language code. No, not assembly. Machine language. You're apparantly unable to see the advantage of not reinventing the wheel everytime you need a library to do something. And while you may say that you should just pay for all those wheels, I call bullshit on that too... if that's true then I hope you're paying for every invention or idea you use anytime, anywhere. No, you can't use flint and steel to light a fire because you're not paying the descendants of the first person who figured out how to do it.
What a sad little mind you have if you can't figure this out. I may not get anything back directly for contributing to open source, but maybe my contribution will inspire someone else to do the same. And maybe I'll use that application they create later on. But I suppose that I still haven't been compensated for my work in your terms because you can't count those kinds of things.
Shrug... you're really not worth the time, but I'm bored at work since our wonderful Exchange server has been down for >24 hours now and most of the work I have to do needs data out of my email box.
It is easy to see that the foundation of the Internet was built on open protocols.
Factually inaccurate.
Yes, IP, TCP, and UDP are open protocols, as are most of the protocols built on top of them (telnet, ftp, dns, etc).
But the single most prevalent TCP/IP stack, from which virtually every existing TCP/IP stack is inherited, comes from BSD, which is open source. In fact, the litmus test for being able to connect to the Internet was whether or not you could communicate with a BSD stack system, not whether or not you complied to the published RFCs. BSD's stack did vary from the RFC in some cases, and if you actually wanted to work you'd better comply to those changes, not the other way around.
Of course, Microsoft is now the dominant TCP/IP stack. But that's ok - it's BSD based. If you look at the original Winsock32 code you'll find BSD disclaimers all over the compiled code. You won't find it in Winsock16, but then again Winsock16 sucked rocks and didn't work much of the time.
Did some people implement entirely new TCP/IP stacks without use of the BSD source? Sure. But it took far longer to get them working properly, and longer than that to make them efficient. It's very hard to argue that the existance of the freely usable BSD stack was not a large impetus to the susccess of TCP/IP, and thus the Internet.
It [GCC] lags its commercial counterparts in both efficiency and features.
Lags in features? So I suppose it wasn't the first compiler to fully implement the STL in a bug-free manner? Or to implement most features of C99?
Hell, most commercial compilers still have problems with the STL. Few have even begun implementing C99, much less completed large portions of it. Yeah, they may be more efficient, but that means bugger all if they won't compile the code in the first place.
And GCC is the most efficient compiler for a large number of platforms -- probably because it's the only one. Embedded programming has moved largely toward the use of GCC because of reduced support requirements on the manufacturers. And we're talking about a group (embedded programmers) where efficiency is the number one concern.
I'm not a OSS zealot, but I also don't discount its value.
Ah, okay, then you fall into the sub-contractor bit I mentioned... cool:)
Funny thing is, I just say some Modern Marvels show on bulletproofing that had a good bit of footage from SWRI. Looks like an interesting place to work.
And good for you fighting the good fight -- I'm not a zealot, and fully understand the value and need for proprietary code, but having gotten a lot of benefit from OSS, I'm all for contributing back to it when possible.
This makes sense when you think about it from their risk-averse perspective: releasing even small pieces of otherwise-useless specialized code is all downside and no upside.
But that's not entirely true... there is a distinct downside, although whether or not you want to bring it up is up to you.
If you don't release the changes back then you must make sure that any GPL or LGPL code you use (or similarly licensed code) is never, ever distributed to an outside party. That places a potentially immense risk on your codebase, since violation could mean forfeiture of all of your copyrights to the code (at least in the case of GPL). At the very least it would mean replacing all of those bits with code written entirely by your company, or purchased from another company and then integrated -- both of which are huge time sucks.
Of course, the risk of pleading this case is that they'll simply say not to use any GPL/LGPL code at all. To which you can only argue time and cost... and I know that without libraries like Boost, OTL, libxml, PCRE, and libcurl we'd be writing a shitload more code, taking far more time, and have a far less stable product.
And that's not even counting things like gcc, automake, gmake, vim, cvs, and other tools we use to actually create and maintain code! (No... no gdb... it seriously dislikes AIX 4.3 and C++)
the most restrictive license I can put on it is something like GPL
No you can't. GPL is based on copyright laws and as an employee of the US Government none of your works for it are eligible for copyright protection.
The same is not necessarily true for 3rd parties or sub-contractors working for the US Government, but that depends on the contract.
Public domain isn't a license... it's a state. Something is either copyrighted (in which case you can have a license) or public domain (in which case you can't, and you can do whatever the hell you want with it).
Actually, that brings up a good question -- can someone working for the government do work on GPL code while at work? And submit it back? I suspect the answer is yes, since the copyright isn't owned by the USGvmt (which is what's illegal), but I'm not positive. Probably just overthinking it.
I think Justin Frankel would tell you that you can't ever be sure that you have any creative control over what you are doing on company time.
And I think the vast majority of people would say "duh".
It's on company time, of course you don't have control over it. They do. If you work on it outside of working hours, not using company resources, that's another matter. But check your contract first.
If it's true GPL code and they're distributing it to outside customers, well, they're idiots. Because they now either have to remove the GPL code entirely or release the entire application under the GPL.
If it's LGPL then they need only release any modifications to the library or other LGPL'd code they did. Or, again, remove the LGPL code -- presuming they're distributing it at all.
If it's BSD or similar it's irrelevant, as you said, as long as they keep the copyright notices, etc. in tact.
Essentially, check the license before you use the code and know what it means. We use a great deal of LGPL, BSD, and public domain code in our products. We stay away from GPL though -- we don't have any intentions of distributing at this point, but if we did we'd rather not have that problem.
As far as remitting work back to the community - talk to your managers. If your managers are decent then they'll understand the issues involved. It may take some time, but most likely you'll be given the OK. After all, think about what you've modified in the code -- does it give any advantage to your competitors? Does it reduce the value of your product to your customers? Are the changes bugfixes or new logic that's only applicable to your company?
Actually, we do have one GPL program that we've modified... vsftpd. Again, no plans on redistributing it, but if we did it'd be no problem submitting the changes. They're deeply specific to our company and our usage and would utterly screw up anyone else who used them (things like automatically assuming paths on puts and gets so our customers don't have to do cd, and automatically moving files on completion of transfers (which might be useful)).
Do not work on OSS during company time though, not without explicit written consent. And many companies are now claiming anything you work on, even outside of work, to be their IP (which is on somewhat shaky grounds)... so if you want to work on OSS outside of work, check your contract and get a release from management if needed. Don't just do it -- in the worst case you're really, utterly screwing the project to the point where it may have to be removed from the net (at least officially). Most companies won't give a crap, as long as you're not doing it on company time and it's not competing with them.
If you code in a C-like language the \ key is essential in escape sequences. Similarly it's used for escape sequences in shells and shell scripting. Oh, and looky -- what's the shift of \? Yeah, the pipe. If you do any amount of command-line usage then you'd know why | is so important.
Shrug... my wife's step-mother sews. She also teaches computer classes. She has her own computer (separate from my father-in-law's) and it used to be located next to her sewing machines (they're currently moving, so who knows after they've settled in).
And no, she's not that old... in her 50s I believe.
I agree that the number of people who sew are on the decline, but I've known several people (all female, unsurprisingly) my age who sew, knit, or do other such things as hobbies. And they're all from large cities (2M+), not country bumpkins.
I suspect that what's occurred here is the hobby store (Jo-Ann's in this case it seems) wants to send the merchandise back to the manufacturer for a refund. The manufacturer issues the refund but tells the store to discard the excess material -- they don't want to store it either afterall.
It's kinda similar to books with the covers ripped off, which are not supposed to be sold since they were written off by the publisher. But it still happens. And McCall is out on a weak limb here -- if they wanted to sue someone, they should go after the store for not properly discarding the material. Or maybe they should've had it shipped back to them (at their expense) so they could discard it properly (at their expense). Once it's in the trash, it's usually considered fair game.
It really is another horrible example of the DMCA though. Yeah, I couldn't care less about the patterns, but as you said it's a law that assumes guilt (and while, admittedly, this would be a civil case where the burdon of proof is not as strong as in a criminal case, it's still a very wrong methodology).
The idea behind a network printer is that you don't need an entire PC to feed the queue. I'd like to be able to turn my PC off and still have my wife print, thanks.
Yes, but the point is that most developers will change the value of x anyway. Which is true -- all of the major games do card specific optimizations. Carmack has talked at length about the idiosynchracies between ATI and Nvidia shaders and why it's so hard to compare them.
The framers of the constituion had the right idea, but their successors have perverted the concept to where it's no longer of any value. Long live piracy!;)
Ok, so you're only pirating works that are more than 14 years old, or 28 years old with extention, right?
Yeah, I didn't think so. Don't try to talk about being all high and mighty when you're just a cheapskate.
The copyright laws have gone into the land of the absurd, but that doesn't mean to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
How many works out there are effectively defunct? You try tracking down the ownership for a movie or book from the 1920s, 30s, 40s, or 50s -- unless it was a major commercial success then good luck! But without releases from everyone involved in the project you can't do anything with it -- you can't do a re-release, an updated version, a sequel, nothing.
With this, if nobody cared about it - not even $1 worth - then it would be released to the public domain. Sure, a lot of corporations will make sure they do the filing. Goody. You'll at least be able to track them down then. But without this they get the full duration anyway.
Is it currently impossible to voluntarily move a copyrighted work into the public domain?
Sure. Right now any work - even this post - is covered by copyright.
As opposed to their fee-free (after initial filing, which this doesn't change) squandering right now?
Frankly, there's no way this can decrease the amount of information in the public domain... the copyright laws are already set at their absurd 90 year durations right now - this bill wouldn't increase that. In fact, it would chop a full 40 years off of any copyrighten work that wasn't worth $1 and some time to extend.
Oh sure, argue that it validates the term... it doesn't. If anything it highlights the absurdity of it. Lessig has already tried to get the laws changed through the courts. That failed. The only way to change them now is through legislation - and this is a good first step.
That's not in question though... what's in question is NVidia's changing of the shader precision from FP32 to INT12. It's entirely reasonable that this is a tradeoff that would be made to improve speed at a slight cost to render quality -- since the speed improvement can be substantial.
Not clearing the back buffer and other "on rails" cheats are still classified as cheats. It's merely the shader changes that are being considered as possibly OK. Which, btw, is similar to what ATI did. But I don't know that ATI's changes sacrificed visual quality at all. (Not that they haven't done that in the past...)
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Registration with the US copyright office should be a requirement, not an option.
Uh, no. To do that you have to do one of two things:
1) Pull out of the Berne Convention, which states that all works have intrinsic copyright unless otherwise stated.
2) Require that everyone file for copyright status for everything they create. Personally, I'd rather not file for copyright status on every post I make to a webboard (technically copyrighted, not that I care), every bit of code I create for my company (yeah, they'd be doing the filing, but you think that would exempt me from filling out the paperwork?), any code I put under license (be it GPL, LGPL, BSD, MIT, or anything but unfettered public domain status), or anything else. It'd be utterly absurd.
And, no, you can't just say "well if you don't file then it has no copyright" because that's a violation of the Berne convention. And before you say that you should just get rid of that then, think about the implications for open source software -- every program would have to file with the copyright office. $30 isn't all that much, but it's more than a lot of people would be willing to bother with. And so instead of GPL/LGPL licenses it'd all be public domain.
You have assets... that computer? That's an asset. Your car? Yup. Every material posession you have? Ditto. Oh, and if you're employed then you can kiss most of your paycheck goodbye forever -- since SCO will place a lien on it and get their cut right after the IRS gets theirs.
It's called fucking your life, and fucking it hard. If the OP was so hot on the idea, they should do it themselves instead of putting someone else's head on the chopping block.
That's not breach of contract since the board was clearly acting in the interest of shareholders at the time of the suit. A hostile takeover is not a cheap thing, and getting 10x your face value for the shares makes it hard to argue otherwise.
Now the majority shareholder could order them to cease and desist, and if they didn't do so could have them fired and file breach of contract, but that's not going to happen.
In fact, despite all the talk about buying SCO out, that's not likely to happen either. According to Yahoo! insiders and 5%+ owners own 68% of the company. If insiders own over 50% then a hostile takeover is impossible without someone defecting -- and those trades are usually limited by SEC rules in the first place. This is why hostile takeovers have become a thing of the past - companies have learned that having the majority of shares being held by employees, along with SEC trading restrictions, make hostile takeovers very, very difficult.
Could it be that SCO happened to "create" this ammendment and then convienently "find it in a filing cabinet" ?
Sure. And when found to be a falsified document then Novell would sue the everliving crap out of them. Fraud, forgery, harm to business, and probably a dozen or so other civil and criminal charges would be filed.
Even I don't think SCO is that stupid.
In any case, unless the ammendment was filed with the Copyright office it makes very little difference -- all SCO could do is sue Linux companies and users to cease further infringement, not monetary damages. They couldn't even recoup legal costs for the cases.
I have to wonder if American IT companies are even concerned with the quality of their technical support anymore?
That would indicate that most of them cared about it in the first place.
My experiences say otherwise.
My coworker has an 11 year old son. He (the son) allegedly has some issues with violence and doesn't quite know where to draw the line when playing with other kids (I dunno - I'm not the parent, and I've only seen the kid a half dozen times or so). Because of this no violent games are allowed, and he tries to keep a lid on the movies and other media he's exposed to. At times I think he's being over the top, but at other times I can definitely see the point. And as far as it goes I'm much more inclined toward limiting violence rather than limiting "adult" themes.
Of course, his ex-wife is (again, allegedly, but from the stories I've heard I'd agree) a completely incompetent and irresponsible parent. She lets him do whatever he wants, buys him whatever he wants, and so forth -- and I really don't think a 10 year old should be seeing R-rated movies by themselves (which he has under her care). Fortunately, it's my coworker that has custody, not her.
I'd say my coworker is being a responsible parent... he does take a look at the games, videos, toys, etc. that his son gets or wants before making a decision. And he's a smart guy, and has said repeatedly that his son just needs to be a bit older before playing this stuff. Again, sometimes I think it's overboard, but I can't really chastise a parent for actually being a parent.
You can believe what you want, but TCP/IP did not start becoming widely implemented until after the availability of the free BSD stack.
Would you care for me to start listing all of the other open standards that have failed miserably due to a lack of a high quality reference implementation? Here's a starter... it's also only 3 letters.
O
S
I
The original statement is that the internet was built on OPEN STANDARDS and then he goes off about an IMPLEMENTATION of the standard, which is irrelevant.
No, the original statement is that Open Source did not contribute to the success of the Internet, on the premise that it was open standards, and not open source that did the job.
Exactly which part of "It's very hard to argue that the existance of the freely usable BSD stack was not a large impetus to the susccess of TCP/IP, and thus the Internet." did you not understand?
Oh, and if you had bothered reading the entire post, you'd see that the open standard was irrelevant. The real standard was the open implementation. And it still is.
As for his other "proofs", they are not proofs at all. gcc is inferior to its commercial counterparts in efficiency. It is only used because it is FREE (as in beer).
Depends on the commercial counterpart, but that certainly isn't always true. You also ignored the bits about implementation of standards/features (which, btw, was one of your original points that you've forgotten about already), and the increasing use in the embedded community because of the ease of porting, support, and efficiency.
Oh, and we're licensed for IBM's VisualAge C/C++ compiler here. We use gcc/g++ instead. VA may compile a bit faster, but the resultant code isn't signficantly faster, it doesn't implement the standards as well as gcc does (which severely limits our options for libraries), and it doesn't produce debuggable code. Oh, and gdb and ddd are far superior debugging tools to dbx or the VA debugger.
We scream troll when someone blathers about things in a blatantly incorrect manner and then starts ignoring/forgetting things when they're pointed out how incorrect they are. You sir, are a troll.
What a load of hooey. Yeah, it was good for the corporations. So what? It was good for everyone -- Linux's stack was BSD based as well. Oh good for Red Hat I'm sure you'll say. Good for everyone -- without it we wouldn't have the Internet and that's been a huge boon in social discourse.
As far as what the programmer gets out of it -- the same thing anyone gets out of donating time or money to any cause. If nothing else, you get a feeling of contribution and helping people. Maybe you'll get some work out of it too -- there are numerous people who have gotten contracts, jobs, or other compensation for open source work. No, the majority hasn't. So what?
Frankly, I suggest you go back to writing machine language code. No, not assembly. Machine language. You're apparantly unable to see the advantage of not reinventing the wheel everytime you need a library to do something. And while you may say that you should just pay for all those wheels, I call bullshit on that too... if that's true then I hope you're paying for every invention or idea you use anytime, anywhere. No, you can't use flint and steel to light a fire because you're not paying the descendants of the first person who figured out how to do it.
What a sad little mind you have if you can't figure this out. I may not get anything back directly for contributing to open source, but maybe my contribution will inspire someone else to do the same. And maybe I'll use that application they create later on. But I suppose that I still haven't been compensated for my work in your terms because you can't count those kinds of things.
Shrug... you're really not worth the time, but I'm bored at work since our wonderful Exchange server has been down for >24 hours now and most of the work I have to do needs data out of my email box.
It is easy to see that the foundation of the Internet was built on open protocols.
Factually inaccurate.
Yes, IP, TCP, and UDP are open protocols, as are most of the protocols built on top of them (telnet, ftp, dns, etc).
But the single most prevalent TCP/IP stack, from which virtually every existing TCP/IP stack is inherited, comes from BSD, which is open source. In fact, the litmus test for being able to connect to the Internet was whether or not you could communicate with a BSD stack system, not whether or not you complied to the published RFCs. BSD's stack did vary from the RFC in some cases, and if you actually wanted to work you'd better comply to those changes, not the other way around.
Of course, Microsoft is now the dominant TCP/IP stack. But that's ok - it's BSD based. If you look at the original Winsock32 code you'll find BSD disclaimers all over the compiled code. You won't find it in Winsock16, but then again Winsock16 sucked rocks and didn't work much of the time.
Did some people implement entirely new TCP/IP stacks without use of the BSD source? Sure. But it took far longer to get them working properly, and longer than that to make them efficient. It's very hard to argue that the existance of the freely usable BSD stack was not a large impetus to the susccess of TCP/IP, and thus the Internet.
It [GCC] lags its commercial counterparts in both efficiency and features.
Lags in features? So I suppose it wasn't the first compiler to fully implement the STL in a bug-free manner? Or to implement most features of C99?
Hell, most commercial compilers still have problems with the STL. Few have even begun implementing C99, much less completed large portions of it. Yeah, they may be more efficient, but that means bugger all if they won't compile the code in the first place.
And GCC is the most efficient compiler for a large number of platforms -- probably because it's the only one. Embedded programming has moved largely toward the use of GCC because of reduced support requirements on the manufacturers. And we're talking about a group (embedded programmers) where efficiency is the number one concern.
I'm not a OSS zealot, but I also don't discount its value.
Ah, okay, then you fall into the sub-contractor bit I mentioned... cool :)
Funny thing is, I just say some Modern Marvels show on bulletproofing that had a good bit of footage from SWRI. Looks like an interesting place to work.
And good for you fighting the good fight -- I'm not a zealot, and fully understand the value and need for proprietary code, but having gotten a lot of benefit from OSS, I'm all for contributing back to it when possible.
This makes sense when you think about it from their risk-averse perspective: releasing even small pieces of otherwise-useless specialized code is all downside and no upside.
But that's not entirely true... there is a distinct downside, although whether or not you want to bring it up is up to you.
If you don't release the changes back then you must make sure that any GPL or LGPL code you use (or similarly licensed code) is never, ever distributed to an outside party. That places a potentially immense risk on your codebase, since violation could mean forfeiture of all of your copyrights to the code (at least in the case of GPL). At the very least it would mean replacing all of those bits with code written entirely by your company, or purchased from another company and then integrated -- both of which are huge time sucks.
Of course, the risk of pleading this case is that they'll simply say not to use any GPL/LGPL code at all. To which you can only argue time and cost... and I know that without libraries like Boost, OTL, libxml, PCRE, and libcurl we'd be writing a shitload more code, taking far more time, and have a far less stable product.
And that's not even counting things like gcc, automake, gmake, vim, cvs, and other tools we use to actually create and maintain code! (No... no gdb... it seriously dislikes AIX 4.3 and C++)
the most restrictive license I can put on it is something like GPL
No you can't. GPL is based on copyright laws and as an employee of the US Government none of your works for it are eligible for copyright protection.
The same is not necessarily true for 3rd parties or sub-contractors working for the US Government, but that depends on the contract.
Public domain isn't a license... it's a state. Something is either copyrighted (in which case you can have a license) or public domain (in which case you can't, and you can do whatever the hell you want with it).
Actually, that brings up a good question -- can someone working for the government do work on GPL code while at work? And submit it back? I suspect the answer is yes, since the copyright isn't owned by the USGvmt (which is what's illegal), but I'm not positive. Probably just overthinking it.
I think Justin Frankel would tell you that you can't ever be sure that you have any creative control over what you are doing on company time.
And I think the vast majority of people would say "duh".
It's on company time, of course you don't have control over it. They do. If you work on it outside of working hours, not using company resources, that's another matter. But check your contract first.
If it's true GPL code and they're distributing it to outside customers, well, they're idiots. Because they now either have to remove the GPL code entirely or release the entire application under the GPL.
If it's LGPL then they need only release any modifications to the library or other LGPL'd code they did. Or, again, remove the LGPL code -- presuming they're distributing it at all.
If it's BSD or similar it's irrelevant, as you said, as long as they keep the copyright notices, etc. in tact.
Essentially, check the license before you use the code and know what it means. We use a great deal of LGPL, BSD, and public domain code in our products. We stay away from GPL though -- we don't have any intentions of distributing at this point, but if we did we'd rather not have that problem.
As far as remitting work back to the community - talk to your managers. If your managers are decent then they'll understand the issues involved. It may take some time, but most likely you'll be given the OK. After all, think about what you've modified in the code -- does it give any advantage to your competitors? Does it reduce the value of your product to your customers? Are the changes bugfixes or new logic that's only applicable to your company?
Actually, we do have one GPL program that we've modified... vsftpd. Again, no plans on redistributing it, but if we did it'd be no problem submitting the changes. They're deeply specific to our company and our usage and would utterly screw up anyone else who used them (things like automatically assuming paths on puts and gets so our customers don't have to do cd, and automatically moving files on completion of transfers (which might be useful)).
Do not work on OSS during company time though, not without explicit written consent. And many companies are now claiming anything you work on, even outside of work, to be their IP (which is on somewhat shaky grounds)... so if you want to work on OSS outside of work, check your contract and get a release from management if needed. Don't just do it -- in the worst case you're really, utterly screwing the project to the point where it may have to be removed from the net (at least officially). Most companies won't give a crap, as long as you're not doing it on company time and it's not competing with them.
If you code in a C-like language the \ key is essential in escape sequences. Similarly it's used for escape sequences in shells and shell scripting. Oh, and looky -- what's the shift of \? Yeah, the pipe. If you do any amount of command-line usage then you'd know why | is so important.
Shrug... my wife's step-mother sews. She also teaches computer classes. She has her own computer (separate from my father-in-law's) and it used to be located next to her sewing machines (they're currently moving, so who knows after they've settled in).
And no, she's not that old... in her 50s I believe.
I agree that the number of people who sew are on the decline, but I've known several people (all female, unsurprisingly) my age who sew, knit, or do other such things as hobbies. And they're all from large cities (2M+), not country bumpkins.
I suspect that what's occurred here is the hobby store (Jo-Ann's in this case it seems) wants to send the merchandise back to the manufacturer for a refund. The manufacturer issues the refund but tells the store to discard the excess material -- they don't want to store it either afterall.
It's kinda similar to books with the covers ripped off, which are not supposed to be sold since they were written off by the publisher. But it still happens. And McCall is out on a weak limb here -- if they wanted to sue someone, they should go after the store for not properly discarding the material. Or maybe they should've had it shipped back to them (at their expense) so they could discard it properly (at their expense). Once it's in the trash, it's usually considered fair game.
It really is another horrible example of the DMCA though. Yeah, I couldn't care less about the patterns, but as you said it's a law that assumes guilt (and while, admittedly, this would be a civil case where the burdon of proof is not as strong as in a criminal case, it's still a very wrong methodology).
The idea behind a network printer is that you don't need an entire PC to feed the queue. I'd like to be able to turn my PC off and still have my wife print, thanks.
Go back and re-read my original post -- I was talking only about the changes to the shaders being considered as potentially OK.
All of the optimizations regarding the camera being fixed are still cheating.
Yes, but the point is that most developers will change the value of x anyway. Which is true -- all of the major games do card specific optimizations. Carmack has talked at length about the idiosynchracies between ATI and Nvidia shaders and why it's so hard to compare them.
The framers of the constituion had the right idea, but their successors have perverted the concept to where it's no longer of any value. Long live piracy! ;)
Ok, so you're only pirating works that are more than 14 years old, or 28 years old with extention, right?
Yeah, I didn't think so. Don't try to talk about being all high and mighty when you're just a cheapskate.
The copyright laws have gone into the land of the absurd, but that doesn't mean to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I fail to see the point of this legislation.
Did you even read it? Didn't think so.
How many works out there are effectively defunct? You try tracking down the ownership for a movie or book from the 1920s, 30s, 40s, or 50s -- unless it was a major commercial success then good luck! But without releases from everyone involved in the project you can't do anything with it -- you can't do a re-release, an updated version, a sequel, nothing.
With this, if nobody cared about it - not even $1 worth - then it would be released to the public domain. Sure, a lot of corporations will make sure they do the filing. Goody. You'll at least be able to track them down then. But without this they get the full duration anyway.
Is it currently impossible to voluntarily move a copyrighted work into the public domain?
Sure. Right now any work - even this post - is covered by copyright.
I hereby release this post to the public domain.
There. No copyright.
As opposed to their fee-free (after initial filing, which this doesn't change) squandering right now?
Frankly, there's no way this can decrease the amount of information in the public domain... the copyright laws are already set at their absurd 90 year durations right now - this bill wouldn't increase that. In fact, it would chop a full 40 years off of any copyrighten work that wasn't worth $1 and some time to extend.
Oh sure, argue that it validates the term... it doesn't. If anything it highlights the absurdity of it. Lessig has already tried to get the laws changed through the courts. That failed. The only way to change them now is through legislation - and this is a good first step.
That's not in question though... what's in question is NVidia's changing of the shader precision from FP32 to INT12. It's entirely reasonable that this is a tradeoff that would be made to improve speed at a slight cost to render quality -- since the speed improvement can be substantial.
Not clearing the back buffer and other "on rails" cheats are still classified as cheats. It's merely the shader changes that are being considered as possibly OK. Which, btw, is similar to what ATI did. But I don't know that ATI's changes sacrificed visual quality at all. (Not that they haven't done that in the past...)