Or a draft that was harder to misrepresent. Everyone from Perens to Groklaw was practically screaming at Torvalds that most of his major criticisms were based upon interpretations of the license that had no basis (and many of the side complaints, that the GPLv3's tightening up on loopholes was somehow against the spirit of the GPL, were clearly bogus to anyone reading but the most foaming-at-the-mouth FSF-hater.) The FSF dumbing down some of the language has made it both easier for him to back down, and made it even more difficult to be taken seriously making those same complaints had he continued to do so.
Note that despite the headline, Torvalds isn't saying he's pleased with the most recent draft, just pleased with the changes. He describes himself as a skeptic.
So you're sure that in 10-20 years rms will still be at the helm of the FSF? If he isn't who replaces him, who decides who replaces him? Which way does the FSF go, does someone like Sun find a way to get a controlling interest then go in a different way then you want to go?
No, I'm not. Which is why I wrote "By itself, that's fine, trusting a third party to always put out fair licenses is a massive mistake, but where Torvalds screwed up was in not replacing (the mechanism allowing the ability to use future versions of the GPL.)"
Ok maybe the other mechanism you suggested. Maybe a vote by committers, what if some company gets a big portion of the committers then try to push their own agenda? Ok, an organisation built around the kernel. Who decides who runs that organization?
You can create checks and balances that will reduce the chances of a serious problem to close to zero. Whereas the likelihood that the license you're using from 1991 being still relevent in 2007 is, to put it mildly, close to zero.
The simplest is to require a license be both a newer version of the GPL, and be blessed by Linus Torvalds. That's also being proposed by the FSF as a way forward for people with these problems.
Really at the end of the day the GPLv2 is a pretty good license
It's a problematic license for the reasons I described in the GP. If it was that good, we wouldn't have dozens of conflicting copyleft licenses, and wouldn't be seeing both theoretical (DMCA) and real (TiVo) hacks against it.
At this stage, the difficulty of getting enough of the contributors to ensure a smooth transition to GPLv3 seems difficult to surmount. Code exists in Linux today that's derived code of people who contributed 15 years ago, and I suspect a fair number are uncontactable. At this stage, those who believe it can be done say that it's ok, we can always rewrite the 10-25% we're unable to find and get consent from the authors of, but can we? How identifiable is this code?
Might it not be easier to "steal" FreeBSD's kernel and relicense it as GPLv3, than go through the expense and hassle of trying to convert Linux?
My reading of it was that a watered down version of the "optional" wording was integrated into the actual license, and this to some extent undermined both the rules against patents and the degree to which the new GPL could interoperate with other licenses, though I admit this is a skimmed reading of the license, I need to read it further.
He made the license permanent with the removal without replacement of the "later version" clause.
That's the fuck-up. He put no mechanism in at all allowing for future license bug fixes. No copyright assignments. No "or later version that meets the approval of Linus Torvalds." Absolutely nothing.
Let me repeat it again, because you and obviously many others didn't bother to read it: The fuck up is that he REMOVED rather than REPLACED the line.
Like I said, it's the same thing as removing, rather than replacing, a poorly written line of code. Linux has only succeeded so far because nobody's had to call the subroutine with the missing code in it. Well, guess what, now it's necessary.
Nobody's asking he be the "first guinea pig", they're pointing out that his blowhardiness over non-existant faults with GPLv3 have more to do with covering up the sheer stupidity of making it impossible for future license upgrades to happen.
Well, given they're very large corporations, and given this is the 21st century, which means, according to the Cyberpunk novels and movies, the governments will be replaced by giant, corrupt, corporations with their own secret police forces and stuff, I'm sure they'll be able to do it. Agents of IBM and Intel will be kicking down doors before you know it, trying to find "hacker5@ix.netcom.com"...
I'm sure the RedHat agent will be more classy, as befits the name, looking every bit like Philip Marlowe, only with a red hat.
The FSF's issues concerned more than just TiVo, software patents were another major issue. Fundamentally though, the main issue is that there's a lot of licensing forking going on. The GPL is broken. If it wasn't, the MPL, CDDL, and custom licenses for projects like Apache, wouldn't exist.
And the biggest problem with multiple copyleft licenses is that it undermines software freedom. If you can't mix code from one free software project in another, then how are they both "free"?
Critics of the FSF countered that this was all the GPLs fault, because, erm, it's copyleft and the others are n... well, erm, the problem is copyleft, and the GPL invented that, and nobody else wante... oh wait, well, er, RMS is a dirty smelly hippy! Yeah!
The FSF recognized there is an issue, and went forward and tried to create a set of licenses (it's important to note that both the GPL and LGPL are being modified here) that anyone who believes in free software could find common ground with.
Whereupon Torvalds threw a fit, because he'd fucked up. Seriously fucked up. Early on in Linux development, he settled on the GPLv2, but didn't like one commonly included licensing mechanism, the ability to use future versions of the GPL. By itself, that's fine, trusting a third party to always put out fair licenses is a massive mistake, but where Torvalds screwed up was in not replacing it. He just took it out. It's like seeing:
i = int_add_function(i, 1);
in some code, and deciding that it sucks, and it's hideous, and it's really going to have side effects and stuff that are unpredictable, and God knows why someone would put it in, and deciding to remove the damned line instead of replacing it with "i++;"
Essentially Torvalds replaced a clause allowing for future upgrades with nothing whatsoever, which means that it's going to be very, very, very hard indeed to ever upgrade the license of the Linux kernel, no matter how necessary.
So he made up some spurious complaints about the draft. They were nonsense. In some cases his complaints were even that it was somehow a violation of the spirit of the GPL to outlaw ways of making it illegal to modify software (such as use of the DMCA.) The FSF has had to seriously water down one important clause, and rewrite another so it's obvious even to a anti-FSF zealot that Torvalds was full of shit.
After the revision, even Linus has realized that he's going to be laughed at if he makes the same complaints, so now he's trying to look magnanimous while simultaneously dissing it. Yes, contrary to the headline, he's saying he still doesn't like it.
Meanwhile, the rest of the free software (and open source) communities look on with amazement and sadness. Looks like there's less chance than ever of us settling on common hard-copyleft and soft-copyleft licenses for software we feel should be copylefted. Instead it's more likely that GPLv3 will just add to the mess of licenses that aren't compatible with other licenses.
And if Torvalds had just said from the start, "Hey guys, great idea and everything, but just to let you know, I fucked up with the Linux kernel licensing so it's not going to happen with my project", the project itself may, instead of being compromised by the FSF jumping through hoops to satisfy one egomaniac with no great interest in the free software movement to begin with, be the universal set of licenses we wanted to begin with.
But Mozilla was, what, two years old? And for the most part, almost all the significant developers were Netscape employees.
Linux has got to be about 15 years old, and no one organization holds the copyright on the bulk of the code. It'll take a lot more work to make a relicensing possible.
I don't think there's much chance of a Linux license change. Aside from the fact Linus isn't explicitly saying he thinks it's better than GPL2, there is the issue that the Linux kernel has too many copyright holders and no explicit mechanism to move to a new license beyond every single author agreeing.
Some have proposed that perhaps everything written by people who cannot be contacted or who disagree with relicensing could simply be rewritten. I think they underestimate the impracticality of such a feat. You can't easily determine the copyrights of every single piece of code within Linux, and it strikes me that unless almost everyone who is contactable is agreeable to a license change, the amount of code that'll need to be rewritten is huge.
As an aside, I think it's a shame that some of the stuff aiming to make the GPL more compatible with other licenses was struck out, especially the patent retaliation stuff. There was a very real effort to address reasons why others who generally agree with the principles of copyleft had eschewed GPL2, and that effort seems to be falling apart. I'm hoping this doesn't mean that instead of getting a license that almost everyone agrees upon, we end up with yet another incompatible license to add to the maze of incompatible licenses that, today, undermines the freedom of free software.
The field of VMs, including OOVMs, is pretty mature..NET itself is heavily inspired by Java. It strikes me as unlikely that someone developing a from-the-ground-up design is going to hit many, if any, Microsoft patents, no matter how broadly stated, that mindblowingly obvious prior art doesn't invalidate.
Implementing.NET, on the other hand, absolutely positively guarantees that you will violate Microsoft patents, both bogus and "legitimate".
You surely see the difference between leaving open the slight possibility of violating a legal patent and guaranteeing you will?
Well, FAT is a poor example because it wasn't until recently anyone realized Microsoft had serious patents over it (and, in any case, original FAT isn't patented, it's the long filename hacks that are causing trouble.)
I think the point here isn't that people might have been worrying about inadvertently violating a patent or two, it's more that miguel set out to clone Microsoft's.NET system, knowing full well that Microsoft hadn't guaranteed that all of it (indeed, explicitly making that known on numerous occasions that only certain components) were free of patents and/or future patent lawsuits.
miguel didn't have to copy.NET, he could have built something better. He chose to copy.NET.
And whether he thinks software patents are bogus or not, we live in the real world, and they're regularly enforced. And Microsoft is, unfortunately, now one of the groups that enforces them.
My gut feeling says no, this wouldn't suffice. The receiver maker needs a license to put the software on the receivers, whether they intend to sell them or lease them, much as they'd need a license if they wanted to put a copy of The Matrix on every receiver and sell them or lease them. "Fair use", the usual out that allows us to talk about the GPL not applying to private modifications, does not apply in this case, fair use isn't as liberal as people here tend to think it is.
The fact that the software has been distributed, whether leased or sold, means it needed agreement to a license. The user was given (whether on the basis of a lease or not) the physical software. They, therefore, under the terms of the GPL, should have been offered the source code. I would be enormously surprised if that isn't the case.
No, I'm not forgetting them, as even the most cursory read of the sentence you quoted would have made obvious. If I had forgotten them, the words "settled on" and "and phased out CDs" wouldn't have been there.
The music industry looked at two competing formats and barely supported either, instead continuing to support the unencrypted CD format. As I said, the RIAA and its members could, in the late nineties, have settled on an encrypted music format, just as the movie industry did with DVDs, and phased out CDs, but they didn't.
The music industry made no serious attempt to phase out CDs in favour of an encrypted format, even though such technologies were available to them. They have made no serious attempt to use the DMCA's DRM measures to "protect" music. (Thankfully.)
The RIAA hasn't used, for the most part, the DMCA. The two central tools the DMCA gave groups like those the RIAA represents were a legal backing to DRM (the laws against circumventing Access Control Mechanisms), and a set, established, procedure for taking down content hosted by third parties.
Well, which have the RIAA used? In the former case, "DRM" used by RIAA members has tended to be of the kind of thing that isn't an Access Control Mechanism or a Copy Control Mechanism, instead a "Use bugs in certain popular CD driver implementations to make it easier to use the publisher's own special music software which causes all kinds of problems" variety. The RIAA and its members could, in the late nineties, have settled on an encrypted music format, just as the movie industry did with DVDs, and phased out CDs, but they didn't, and so their ability to use the DMCA to fight piracy was limited.
(I might add I'm glad they didn't, because DVD CSS has proven only to be a burden to non-pirates, not pirates who copy it anyway. But the point remains that the DMCA is utterly irrelevent to the RIAA actions. The RIAA has never seriously tried to make use of the DRM related parts of the DMCA.)
Then there's the take-down system the DMCA provides. Has the RIAA and its members made serious attempts to exploit this? Well, no, because they couldn't. The way the DMCA is worded means it doesn't really apply to distributed systems like the old Napster, and would, indeed, be toothless even if you could make it apply to Napster. So they've been unable to use it at all.
So my question is: why are the words "RIAA" and "DMCA" being used in the same article? One might "criticize" (because, like, we'd all have been better off if the music industry had forced us to buy our music again for the umpteenth time, this time on encrypted DVD-Audio or something. Yeah. Right.) them for not making use of the DMCA, and thus the DMCA not helping them, but the implication they tried to, but it wasn't enough because of their business model or something is complete crap.
The movie industry has made use of the DMCA, in both areas. DVDs were encrypted, much to the detriment of legitimate end users, and take down notices against groups like YouTube are frequent. If the DMCA is a failure, it should probably be measured on how much it has benefited the movie industry, without causing harm to the entire electronics industry, the customers of the movie industry, and other unrelated third parties. I think any reasonable person can call it a failure on the basis of all of these criterion.
I've bought most of those items (or similar, I haven't bought a washing machine, but I have bought a couple of household appliances - vacuum cleaner and over-the-stove Microwave) from Amazon.com. Clothing is obviously an exception, as it needs to fit, and I felt a little bit split about buying jewelry as online photos are far from ideal as a way to check. But I did buy a Tanzanite and Diamond bracelet for my wife, nonetheless, without any problems.
We've also bought, or had bought for us, sets of dishes, various kitchenware, sheet sets, and other stuff you just wouldn't get from a bookstore, not even a modern bookstore.
When my wife and I married, we set up a Wedding Registry on Amazon.com, and another on Linens and Things (a chain of brick-and-mortar stores), and had no more difficulty finding things to put on the Amazon one as for the other. Very, very, useful, especially given the number of relatives I had who wanted to buy us things who lived overseas.
Kinda. They certainly sell all kinds of media, but electronics is strictly done on a limited basis. You wouldn't walk into Borders looking for a 5.1 Receiver. You certainly wouldn't walk into Borders looking for a washing machine, some patio furniture, a diamond bracelet, a mobile phone battery, one of those little power cables you use to plug disk drives into, a leather jacket, shoes, and a Wi-Fi router.
Amazon.com, on the other hand... that's just scratching the surface of what they do.
It really is remarkable that even now, after Maynor and Ellch have been proven to have been 100% correct and on the level, the smear campaign and blatant misrepresentations against them continue to repeated and, apparently, taken just as seriously as they were when the likes of John Gruber plugged them and gave them credibility in front of the wider Mac community.
It was explained in the video that Maynor and Ellch were using a third party wireless card, but this was presented a month later as something the researchers had hidden, lied about, and as proof they were being dishonest.
It was explained repeatedly why the researches were not using live Apple hardware to demonstrate the bug in front of the Blackhat conference. But it's still posed as a question.
It was clear, early on, that the bug was, in fact, real, and widely known (similar bugs were in the FreeBSD drivers for the same hardware), and Apple themselves publicly fixed the fucking thing a month or two after the disclosure (without crediting the researchers), but it's still presented as if there never was a bug, that Apple's bug fixes were somehow unrelated.
And now Ou presents compelling evidence that Apple's PR department did, in fact, organize the smear campaign against Maynor and Ellch, and you still act as if it's not really a smear campaign, that there were legitimate reasons to be mistrustful of the researchers. Because, you know, it's still worth lying (and make no mistake, that's what Apple's PR department did, by spreading the meme that the researchers had actively mislead people about the hardware they were using) if the truth is damning by itself. Right?
You're a tool dude. The best thing you could do right now is admit you've been used, and apologize to Maynor and Ellch for your part in continuing to smear their reputation.
There was a minor scandal last year when the ReactOS project had to be suspended after it was found that some developers had been exposed to the real Windows source code (which is available under shared source licenses in some contexts), and after a thorough audit the project continued.
The ReactOS people are taking the risk of copyright infringements very seriously.
2-300km range. A (half-way decent) motorbike will typically take a couple of gallons of fuel to do that. That's burning the fuel in a relatively inefficient and heavy engine carried with the vehicle itself.
Why does $3 seem so outrageous to you? The air car is presumably light, it's not limited to gasoline powered fuel sources, it can get the energy from a finely tuned power plant rather than a local engine. I'm not seeing why there's so much skepticism. These kinds of figures have also been quoted for electric vehicles, and for some reason there's less skepticism then.
Why? The car is exceptionally lightweight. It isn't limited to being powered by gasoline based energy sources. It presumably can make use of efficient braking systems (use the momentum of the car to recompress air.) We're looking at something probably comparable to one of the lighter weight electric vehicles here, and those generally cost very little to keep moving.
Not really sure where he gets off on the conservatives vs justices thing above, because the decision in the Betamax ruling in 1984 was essentially made by the so-called liberals on the supreme court, and opposed by people like Reinquest. Betamax, indeed, was an expansion of fair-use, which isn't something Congress had explicitly ruled upon in any way relevant to the Betamax case.
Be that as it may, what, exactly, is the evidence that the court is going to rule against YouTube even if it shows it did obey the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA? I'd say exactly none. The Grokster ruling is completely irrelevant to this case, as the safe harbor rules were something Grokster et al went out of their way to avoid making even practical on their networks. Grokster's case was harmed by the central fact that they were relying upon piracy to make their networks commercially viable, as the numerous memos and other documentation entered into evidence made abundantly clear.
YouTube is an entirely different case, and unless Viacom can show that YouTube hasn't obeyed the DMCA safe-harbor provisions, even if they're able to show YouTube has acted in bad faith they're unlikely to win this. I find it highly unlikely though they'll be able to find anything about YouTube close to the overwhelming evidence that was available to show Grokster was acting in bad faith: YouTube's model has always been based upon people uploading their own videos, while copyright infringement is common it doesn't really make up the bulk of what's there and why people go to YouTube.
If the law is followed, and there's no reason to believe it will not be in this case, and if YouTube has been obeying the DMCA, I'm not seeing why they'd lose, and I'm certainly not seeing why a court would write new law just to damn them when the intent of Congress is clear, and when there's no evidence YouTube wants their network used for infringing material.
While that may be true, it's also true that some of his campaigns, notably the one against Bully which he enmemified (is that a word? To create a meme of) as a "Columbine Simulator", resulted in retailers removing the game from the shelves and making the game unavailable.
Not being able to buy a game can severely dampen its circulation.
Maybe they're vaguely related to Mehdi Ali and Irving Gould and just live to piss people off who have any love for what Commodore's engineers were creating...
I mean, we're geeks. We love great engineering. We saw the amazing stuff coming out of Commodore and we appreciated its underlying beauty. If we, as geeks, had taken over Commodore, it would be producing absolutely stunning, beautiful, powerful hardware, that works in a different but better way than anything anyone else does.
But we're not exactly the group of people who has the money to engage in that kind of take-over. To have that kind of money, to have the skills to swindle - er, I mean, convince - investors, to launch marketing campaigns full of hollow promises, to be able to get it organized such that the hardware actually comes out of the factory, regardless of how bad it is, you need a combination of PHB genetics and downright hollow cynicism not present in anyone whose heart skips a beat when they see the prompt:
1.Workbench:>
or
READY.
It was inevitable. The brand could never be launched except by people impressed with, and similar to, the cynics who ran it into the ground.
I wonder when their first Chapter 11 filing will be?
It seems for the most part most retailers are dealing with demand by creating relatively over-priced "bundles", of the "$600 buys you a console and two games!" variety.
Perhaps it's Nintendo that should have charged $5-600 for their console, and Sony who should have tried to sell their's for $250...
Slashdot Mirror
Or a draft that was harder to misrepresent. Everyone from Perens to Groklaw was practically screaming at Torvalds that most of his major criticisms were based upon interpretations of the license that had no basis (and many of the side complaints, that the GPLv3's tightening up on loopholes was somehow against the spirit of the GPL, were clearly bogus to anyone reading but the most foaming-at-the-mouth FSF-hater.) The FSF dumbing down some of the language has made it both easier for him to back down, and made it even more difficult to be taken seriously making those same complaints had he continued to do so.
Note that despite the headline, Torvalds isn't saying he's pleased with the most recent draft, just pleased with the changes. He describes himself as a skeptic.
No, I'm not. Which is why I wrote "By itself, that's fine, trusting a third party to always put out fair licenses is a massive mistake, but where Torvalds screwed up was in not replacing (the mechanism allowing the ability to use future versions of the GPL.)"
You can create checks and balances that will reduce the chances of a serious problem to close to zero. Whereas the likelihood that the license you're using from 1991 being still relevent in 2007 is, to put it mildly, close to zero.
The simplest is to require a license be both a newer version of the GPL, and be blessed by Linus Torvalds. That's also being proposed by the FSF as a way forward for people with these problems.
It's a problematic license for the reasons I described in the GP. If it was that good, we wouldn't have dozens of conflicting copyleft licenses, and wouldn't be seeing both theoretical (DMCA) and real (TiVo) hacks against it.
At this stage, the difficulty of getting enough of the contributors to ensure a smooth transition to GPLv3 seems difficult to surmount. Code exists in Linux today that's derived code of people who contributed 15 years ago, and I suspect a fair number are uncontactable. At this stage, those who believe it can be done say that it's ok, we can always rewrite the 10-25% we're unable to find and get consent from the authors of, but can we? How identifiable is this code?
Might it not be easier to "steal" FreeBSD's kernel and relicense it as GPLv3, than go through the expense and hassle of trying to convert Linux?
My reading of it was that a watered down version of the "optional" wording was integrated into the actual license, and this to some extent undermined both the rules against patents and the degree to which the new GPL could interoperate with other licenses, though I admit this is a skimmed reading of the license, I need to read it further.
He made the license permanent with the removal without replacement of the "later version" clause.
That's the fuck-up. He put no mechanism in at all allowing for future license bug fixes. No copyright assignments. No "or later version that meets the approval of Linus Torvalds." Absolutely nothing.
Let me repeat it again, because you and obviously many others didn't bother to read it: The fuck up is that he REMOVED rather than REPLACED the line.
Like I said, it's the same thing as removing, rather than replacing, a poorly written line of code. Linux has only succeeded so far because nobody's had to call the subroutine with the missing code in it. Well, guess what, now it's necessary.
Nobody's asking he be the "first guinea pig", they're pointing out that his blowhardiness over non-existant faults with GPLv3 have more to do with covering up the sheer stupidity of making it impossible for future license upgrades to happen.
Well, given they're very large corporations, and given this is the 21st century, which means, according to the Cyberpunk novels and movies, the governments will be replaced by giant, corrupt, corporations with their own secret police forces and stuff, I'm sure they'll be able to do it. Agents of IBM and Intel will be kicking down doors before you know it, trying to find "hacker5@ix.netcom.com"...
I'm sure the RedHat agent will be more classy, as befits the name, looking every bit like Philip Marlowe, only with a red hat.
Albeit, a priest who doesn't believe in God.
That's a pretty slanted view of what happened.
The FSF's issues concerned more than just TiVo, software patents were another major issue. Fundamentally though, the main issue is that there's a lot of licensing forking going on. The GPL is broken. If it wasn't, the MPL, CDDL, and custom licenses for projects like Apache, wouldn't exist.
And the biggest problem with multiple copyleft licenses is that it undermines software freedom. If you can't mix code from one free software project in another, then how are they both "free"?
Critics of the FSF countered that this was all the GPLs fault, because, erm, it's copyleft and the others are n... well, erm, the problem is copyleft, and the GPL invented that, and nobody else wante... oh wait, well, er, RMS is a dirty smelly hippy! Yeah!
The FSF recognized there is an issue, and went forward and tried to create a set of licenses (it's important to note that both the GPL and LGPL are being modified here) that anyone who believes in free software could find common ground with.
Whereupon Torvalds threw a fit, because he'd fucked up. Seriously fucked up. Early on in Linux development, he settled on the GPLv2, but didn't like one commonly included licensing mechanism, the ability to use future versions of the GPL. By itself, that's fine, trusting a third party to always put out fair licenses is a massive mistake, but where Torvalds screwed up was in not replacing it. He just took it out. It's like seeing:
i = int_add_function(i, 1);
in some code, and deciding that it sucks, and it's hideous, and it's really going to have side effects and stuff that are unpredictable, and God knows why someone would put it in, and deciding to remove the damned line instead of replacing it with "i++;"
Essentially Torvalds replaced a clause allowing for future upgrades with nothing whatsoever, which means that it's going to be very, very, very hard indeed to ever upgrade the license of the Linux kernel, no matter how necessary.
So he made up some spurious complaints about the draft. They were nonsense. In some cases his complaints were even that it was somehow a violation of the spirit of the GPL to outlaw ways of making it illegal to modify software (such as use of the DMCA.) The FSF has had to seriously water down one important clause, and rewrite another so it's obvious even to a anti-FSF zealot that Torvalds was full of shit.
After the revision, even Linus has realized that he's going to be laughed at if he makes the same complaints, so now he's trying to look magnanimous while simultaneously dissing it. Yes, contrary to the headline, he's saying he still doesn't like it.
Meanwhile, the rest of the free software (and open source) communities look on with amazement and sadness. Looks like there's less chance than ever of us settling on common hard-copyleft and soft-copyleft licenses for software we feel should be copylefted. Instead it's more likely that GPLv3 will just add to the mess of licenses that aren't compatible with other licenses.
And if Torvalds had just said from the start, "Hey guys, great idea and everything, but just to let you know, I fucked up with the Linux kernel licensing so it's not going to happen with my project", the project itself may, instead of being compromised by the FSF jumping through hoops to satisfy one egomaniac with no great interest in the free software movement to begin with, be the universal set of licenses we wanted to begin with.
But Mozilla was, what, two years old? And for the most part, almost all the significant developers were Netscape employees.
Linux has got to be about 15 years old, and no one organization holds the copyright on the bulk of the code. It'll take a lot more work to make a relicensing possible.
I don't think there's much chance of a Linux license change. Aside from the fact Linus isn't explicitly saying he thinks it's better than GPL2, there is the issue that the Linux kernel has too many copyright holders and no explicit mechanism to move to a new license beyond every single author agreeing.
Some have proposed that perhaps everything written by people who cannot be contacted or who disagree with relicensing could simply be rewritten. I think they underestimate the impracticality of such a feat. You can't easily determine the copyrights of every single piece of code within Linux, and it strikes me that unless almost everyone who is contactable is agreeable to a license change, the amount of code that'll need to be rewritten is huge.
As an aside, I think it's a shame that some of the stuff aiming to make the GPL more compatible with other licenses was struck out, especially the patent retaliation stuff. There was a very real effort to address reasons why others who generally agree with the principles of copyleft had eschewed GPL2, and that effort seems to be falling apart. I'm hoping this doesn't mean that instead of getting a license that almost everyone agrees upon, we end up with yet another incompatible license to add to the maze of incompatible licenses that, today, undermines the freedom of free software.
The field of VMs, including OOVMs, is pretty mature. .NET itself is heavily inspired by Java. It strikes me as unlikely that someone developing a from-the-ground-up design is going to hit many, if any, Microsoft patents, no matter how broadly stated, that mindblowingly obvious prior art doesn't invalidate.
Implementing .NET, on the other hand, absolutely positively guarantees that you will violate Microsoft patents, both bogus and "legitimate".
You surely see the difference between leaving open the slight possibility of violating a legal patent and guaranteeing you will?
Well, FAT is a poor example because it wasn't until recently anyone realized Microsoft had serious patents over it (and, in any case, original FAT isn't patented, it's the long filename hacks that are causing trouble.)
I think the point here isn't that people might have been worrying about inadvertently violating a patent or two, it's more that miguel set out to clone Microsoft's .NET system, knowing full well that Microsoft hadn't guaranteed that all of it (indeed, explicitly making that known on numerous occasions that only certain components) were free of patents and/or future patent lawsuits.
miguel didn't have to copy .NET, he could have built something better. He chose to copy .NET.
And whether he thinks software patents are bogus or not, we live in the real world, and they're regularly enforced. And Microsoft is, unfortunately, now one of the groups that enforces them.
My gut feeling says no, this wouldn't suffice. The receiver maker needs a license to put the software on the receivers, whether they intend to sell them or lease them, much as they'd need a license if they wanted to put a copy of The Matrix on every receiver and sell them or lease them. "Fair use", the usual out that allows us to talk about the GPL not applying to private modifications, does not apply in this case, fair use isn't as liberal as people here tend to think it is.
The fact that the software has been distributed, whether leased or sold, means it needed agreement to a license. The user was given (whether on the basis of a lease or not) the physical software. They, therefore, under the terms of the GPL, should have been offered the source code. I would be enormously surprised if that isn't the case.
No, I'm not forgetting them, as even the most cursory read of the sentence you quoted would have made obvious. If I had forgotten them, the words "settled on" and "and phased out CDs" wouldn't have been there.
The music industry looked at two competing formats and barely supported either, instead continuing to support the unencrypted CD format. As I said, the RIAA and its members could, in the late nineties, have settled on an encrypted music format, just as the movie industry did with DVDs, and phased out CDs, but they didn't.
The music industry made no serious attempt to phase out CDs in favour of an encrypted format, even though such technologies were available to them. They have made no serious attempt to use the DMCA's DRM measures to "protect" music. (Thankfully.)
What a load of crap.
The RIAA hasn't used, for the most part, the DMCA. The two central tools the DMCA gave groups like those the RIAA represents were a legal backing to DRM (the laws against circumventing Access Control Mechanisms), and a set, established, procedure for taking down content hosted by third parties.
Well, which have the RIAA used? In the former case, "DRM" used by RIAA members has tended to be of the kind of thing that isn't an Access Control Mechanism or a Copy Control Mechanism, instead a "Use bugs in certain popular CD driver implementations to make it easier to use the publisher's own special music software which causes all kinds of problems" variety. The RIAA and its members could, in the late nineties, have settled on an encrypted music format, just as the movie industry did with DVDs, and phased out CDs, but they didn't, and so their ability to use the DMCA to fight piracy was limited.
(I might add I'm glad they didn't, because DVD CSS has proven only to be a burden to non-pirates, not pirates who copy it anyway. But the point remains that the DMCA is utterly irrelevent to the RIAA actions. The RIAA has never seriously tried to make use of the DRM related parts of the DMCA.)
Then there's the take-down system the DMCA provides. Has the RIAA and its members made serious attempts to exploit this? Well, no, because they couldn't. The way the DMCA is worded means it doesn't really apply to distributed systems like the old Napster, and would, indeed, be toothless even if you could make it apply to Napster. So they've been unable to use it at all.
So my question is: why are the words "RIAA" and "DMCA" being used in the same article? One might "criticize" (because, like, we'd all have been better off if the music industry had forced us to buy our music again for the umpteenth time, this time on encrypted DVD-Audio or something. Yeah. Right.) them for not making use of the DMCA, and thus the DMCA not helping them, but the implication they tried to, but it wasn't enough because of their business model or something is complete crap.
The movie industry has made use of the DMCA, in both areas. DVDs were encrypted, much to the detriment of legitimate end users, and take down notices against groups like YouTube are frequent. If the DMCA is a failure, it should probably be measured on how much it has benefited the movie industry, without causing harm to the entire electronics industry, the customers of the movie industry, and other unrelated third parties. I think any reasonable person can call it a failure on the basis of all of these criterion.
I've bought most of those items (or similar, I haven't bought a washing machine, but I have bought a couple of household appliances - vacuum cleaner and over-the-stove Microwave) from Amazon.com. Clothing is obviously an exception, as it needs to fit, and I felt a little bit split about buying jewelry as online photos are far from ideal as a way to check. But I did buy a Tanzanite and Diamond bracelet for my wife, nonetheless, without any problems.
We've also bought, or had bought for us, sets of dishes, various kitchenware, sheet sets, and other stuff you just wouldn't get from a bookstore, not even a modern bookstore.
When my wife and I married, we set up a Wedding Registry on Amazon.com, and another on Linens and Things (a chain of brick-and-mortar stores), and had no more difficulty finding things to put on the Amazon one as for the other. Very, very, useful, especially given the number of relatives I had who wanted to buy us things who lived overseas.
Kinda. They certainly sell all kinds of media, but electronics is strictly done on a limited basis. You wouldn't walk into Borders looking for a 5.1 Receiver. You certainly wouldn't walk into Borders looking for a washing machine, some patio furniture, a diamond bracelet, a mobile phone battery, one of those little power cables you use to plug disk drives into, a leather jacket, shoes, and a Wi-Fi router.
Amazon.com, on the other hand... that's just scratching the surface of what they do.
It really is remarkable that even now, after Maynor and Ellch have been proven to have been 100% correct and on the level, the smear campaign and blatant misrepresentations against them continue to repeated and, apparently, taken just as seriously as they were when the likes of John Gruber plugged them and gave them credibility in front of the wider Mac community.
It was explained in the video that Maynor and Ellch were using a third party wireless card, but this was presented a month later as something the researchers had hidden, lied about, and as proof they were being dishonest.
It was explained repeatedly why the researches were not using live Apple hardware to demonstrate the bug in front of the Blackhat conference. But it's still posed as a question.
It was clear, early on, that the bug was, in fact, real, and widely known (similar bugs were in the FreeBSD drivers for the same hardware), and Apple themselves publicly fixed the fucking thing a month or two after the disclosure (without crediting the researchers), but it's still presented as if there never was a bug, that Apple's bug fixes were somehow unrelated.
And now Ou presents compelling evidence that Apple's PR department did, in fact, organize the smear campaign against Maynor and Ellch, and you still act as if it's not really a smear campaign, that there were legitimate reasons to be mistrustful of the researchers. Because, you know, it's still worth lying (and make no mistake, that's what Apple's PR department did, by spreading the meme that the researchers had actively mislead people about the hardware they were using) if the truth is damning by itself. Right?
You're a tool dude. The best thing you could do right now is admit you've been used, and apologize to Maynor and Ellch for your part in continuing to smear their reputation.
There was a minor scandal last year when the ReactOS project had to be suspended after it was found that some developers had been exposed to the real Windows source code (which is available under shared source licenses in some contexts), and after a thorough audit the project continued.
The ReactOS people are taking the risk of copyright infringements very seriously.
2-300km range. A (half-way decent) motorbike will typically take a couple of gallons of fuel to do that. That's burning the fuel in a relatively inefficient and heavy engine carried with the vehicle itself.
Why does $3 seem so outrageous to you? The air car is presumably light, it's not limited to gasoline powered fuel sources, it can get the energy from a finely tuned power plant rather than a local engine. I'm not seeing why there's so much skepticism. These kinds of figures have also been quoted for electric vehicles, and for some reason there's less skepticism then.
Why? The car is exceptionally lightweight. It isn't limited to being powered by gasoline based energy sources. It presumably can make use of efficient braking systems (use the momentum of the car to recompress air.) We're looking at something probably comparable to one of the lighter weight electric vehicles here, and those generally cost very little to keep moving.
$3. It's in the summary.
Not really sure where he gets off on the conservatives vs justices thing above, because the decision in the Betamax ruling in 1984 was essentially made by the so-called liberals on the supreme court, and opposed by people like Reinquest. Betamax, indeed, was an expansion of fair-use, which isn't something Congress had explicitly ruled upon in any way relevant to the Betamax case.
Be that as it may, what, exactly, is the evidence that the court is going to rule against YouTube even if it shows it did obey the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA? I'd say exactly none. The Grokster ruling is completely irrelevant to this case, as the safe harbor rules were something Grokster et al went out of their way to avoid making even practical on their networks. Grokster's case was harmed by the central fact that they were relying upon piracy to make their networks commercially viable, as the numerous memos and other documentation entered into evidence made abundantly clear.
YouTube is an entirely different case, and unless Viacom can show that YouTube hasn't obeyed the DMCA safe-harbor provisions, even if they're able to show YouTube has acted in bad faith they're unlikely to win this. I find it highly unlikely though they'll be able to find anything about YouTube close to the overwhelming evidence that was available to show Grokster was acting in bad faith: YouTube's model has always been based upon people uploading their own videos, while copyright infringement is common it doesn't really make up the bulk of what's there and why people go to YouTube.
If the law is followed, and there's no reason to believe it will not be in this case, and if YouTube has been obeying the DMCA, I'm not seeing why they'd lose, and I'm certainly not seeing why a court would write new law just to damn them when the intent of Congress is clear, and when there's no evidence YouTube wants their network used for infringing material.
While that may be true, it's also true that some of his campaigns, notably the one against Bully which he enmemified (is that a word? To create a meme of) as a "Columbine Simulator", resulted in retailers removing the game from the shelves and making the game unavailable.
Not being able to buy a game can severely dampen its circulation.
Maybe they're vaguely related to Mehdi Ali and Irving Gould and just live to piss people off who have any love for what Commodore's engineers were creating...
I mean, we're geeks. We love great engineering. We saw the amazing stuff coming out of Commodore and we appreciated its underlying beauty. If we, as geeks, had taken over Commodore, it would be producing absolutely stunning, beautiful, powerful hardware, that works in a different but better way than anything anyone else does.
But we're not exactly the group of people who has the money to engage in that kind of take-over. To have that kind of money, to have the skills to swindle - er, I mean, convince - investors, to launch marketing campaigns full of hollow promises, to be able to get it organized such that the hardware actually comes out of the factory, regardless of how bad it is, you need a combination of PHB genetics and downright hollow cynicism not present in anyone whose heart skips a beat when they see the prompt:
or
It was inevitable. The brand could never be launched except by people impressed with, and similar to, the cynics who ran it into the ground.
I wonder when their first Chapter 11 filing will be?
It seems for the most part most retailers are dealing with demand by creating relatively over-priced "bundles", of the "$600 buys you a console and two games!" variety.
Perhaps it's Nintendo that should have charged $5-600 for their console, and Sony who should have tried to sell their's for $250...