To be fair, while Gecko may have a reputation for being less elegant than KHTML, it's also got a history of being more compatible with generic web content than KHTML. It's extremely difficult to write an elegant, compatible, web browser. The best you can hope for is to write something that's elegant and compatible with standards-compliant code, but 99% of webpages are not "standards-compliant" by a long shot.
And there are Linux systems where the implementation of the UNIX userland system tools do not come from GNU either, for example the case of embedded systems using BusyBox.
Nobody's suggesting that operating systems based upon Linux without the GNU toolset should be called "GNU/Linux". They're saying that the operating systems that are Linux with the GNU toolset should be.
Personally, I'm happy seeing operating systems named after either the major projects they use, or given a name for the whole thing. For example, "Fedora Core 5" is a perfectly reasonable name for an operating system. Calling it "Linux" though is wierd as it's largely GNU, be it the toolset or GNOME desktop environment, with a few third party components such as X11 and the Linux kernel, and a smattering of entirely optional third party applications. It makes sense to describe it as a "GNU based operating system" or, if we want to give credit to Torvalds, "a GNU/Linux system". We don't call Mac OS X "XNU", we don't call Windows KRNL386.EXE.
The only thing I can find about keys simply states that you have to give up whatever keys are needed to install modified versions of the software.
The Corresponding Source also includes any encryption or authorization keys necessary to install and/or execute modified versions from source code in the recommended or principal context of use, such that they can implement all the same functionality in the same range of circumstances. (For instance, if the work is a DVD player and can play certain DVDs, it must be possible for modified versions to play those DVDs. If the work communicates with an online service, it must be possible for modified versions to communicate with the same online service in the same way such that the service cannot distinguish.) A key need not be included in cases where use of the work normally implies the user already has the key and can read and copy it, as in privacy applications where users generate their own keys. However, the fact that a key is generated based on the object code of the work or is present in hardware that limits its use does not alter the requirement to include it in the Corresponding Source.
Torvalds may feel it's a terrible infringement of TiVo's freedom not to be able to lock their hardware to specific, TiVo signed, versions of the kernel he co-develops with thousands of free software developers, but personally I remain puzzled. Arguments like "But someone might make something that only runs copies of software signed by Linus" do not make a lot of sense. If Torvalds is doing it, he needs to knock it off. If someone else does it, then they're going to have problems distributing Linux to end users anyway, as they - not Torvalds - will be in breach of the license by not making the key available. The easiest way to stay compliant is make hardware where the requirement for a key is easily enabled and disabled by the end user. Which is how it should work anyway, whether it's free software or anything else.
These changes strike me as well within the spirit of what the GPL is trying to achieve. They ensure maximum freedom for the receiver of the software. They do not grant "freedom" to restrict the freedom of others. If you object to it, the chances are you disagree with the principles that the GPL stands for anyway, and there are certainly alternative licenses, the BSD and X11 licenses being the most obvious, that will get you where you want to be.
I'm going to have to disagree. Aside from the name, virtually all the press about the Nintendo Wii has been positive, in nerd circles and outside of them. The PSP got an astounding amount of positive press from geeks and non-geeks, which surprised me for reasons I'll not reprise here. The DS is getting positive press.
Both the PS3 and X-Box 360 aren't getting much love. The X-Box has three problems - it's a tad expensive, it's only an "improved" version of what preceeded it rather than an innovative new design, and it has the word "Microsoft" on the box. The PS3 is getting less love because it seems to be a rather more expensive version of the X-Box 360, with a few ideas pinched, allegedly badly, from the Wii.
In other words, the innovation is being praised, but expensive boxes that don't appear to have any substantial innovation are not.
I don't think it's a matter of nerds will complain about anything. It's more a matter that nerds have little to praise at the moment. But generally, yes, there are still things being found to be "praiseworthy".
Rear Projection is something I've specifically rejected for our future "next generation" TV (and the wife agrees for the same reason) because of the massive change in contrast and brightness that occurs if you look at it from different angles. CRTs used to have that issue (and I'm talking laptop LCDs, before the technology started to be used with TVs) but don't seem to have that issue any more. I, personally, see more flicker on real projection TVs too than on regular CRTs or LCDs/Plasmas, and though I'm not sure that's a deal breaker (I used to use my Amiga in interlace mode all the time and didn't have a problem with it), it certainly is a minor factor that adds into the equation.
It's a shame because the price difference is massive.
On a seperate note: what are people's opinions about power consumption for the various TV types? I believe LCD is better by a long shot, but I've never seen figures on how close (or unclose) plasma is. Back when plasma was used in some "luggable" computers, the system seemed power hungry enough not to run on batteries, but for all I know the technology has massively improved since. I've yet to see any figures though.
And what idiot's comparing this to Betamax? Are plasma TVs not compatible with the same TV signals as LCDs, or is the comparison completely absurd?
POSIX and Windows are both operating systems that use hardware memory management to seperate otherwise unsafe (written in liberal mid-level languages like C) processes from one another, using a security model based largely upon user ownership. If a large number of jobs have to be done that require communications between the different programs performing the different jobs, a single program - running in its own memory space - is generally written that manages all the jobs, rather than the jobs being split out one-per-program.
Programs are loaded from files on disk, from a simplified file system that uses hierarchical name management and that's based upon arbitrary length binary files. From the point of view of the user, there are running programs and files.
This is essentially classic 1970s computer technology. In terms of where it became the standard for system design, that's roughly when it dates to.
There have been serious attempts since then to reform that model, but generally they haven't gone anywhere. The 1980s was full of simplified systems where all processes ran in the same memory space - Windows, Mac OS 6+, AmigaOS, Sinclair QDOS, etc. At the other end of the spectrum, there were many abortive attempts to break up operating systems into more simplified units protected from one another. None of these design changes are present in Windows, Mac OS X, or GNU/Linux, either the simplified or the microkernel strategies (with good reasons for both.)
The 1990s saw the beginning of managed code. While this probably does represent the future of computing, we're not seeing it yet. As yet, managed code only exists in mainstream operating systems running as high level processes at the same level as other ordinary user applications. Mac OS X, Windows, and GNU/Linux do not use managed code, they merely support it.
File systems have been reformed several times. DEC VMS supported native rich file types with record indexing. This has yet to appear anywhere else. Mac OS introduced forks and added creator and type information to the file system. While present for legacy reasons, Apple has deprecated support; Microsoft technically supports file forks in NT but has made no effort to use them or encourage their use; GNU/Linux has only recently started to support additional metadata, and the feature is barely used. Systems like Smalltalk, NewtonOS and PalmOS blur the differences between files and other objects. Achieving minor success on PDAs, their approaches have yet to really have any serious impact.
Essentially, Mac OS X, Windows, and GNU/Linux, are the latest, most optimal, versions of what you saw in the seventies. That's not a terrible thing, but 64 bits gives us the opportunity to rethink why we're programming the same way we did thirty years ago. In particular, the combination of managed code and the massive 64 bit address spaces gives us a chance to revisit the question of how we can most efficiently prevent operating system and application components from treading upon one another, and how we can keep the system secure.
You're taking the views of the FSF beyond what they actually are saying - note, for example, that glibc remains LGPL'd, the base libraries for GNOME are also LGPL'd - and you're also ignoring network effects.
The issue isn't being "popular", it's being widely used enough to be relevent. Without relevence, the rug can be pulled from underneath you simply by the introduction of a market where everything software has to interact with is proprietary, be it the formats of content or the hardware it runs upon. We've been running perilously close to the former for many decades, and the tide is turning in our favour where it's turning in our favour only because there's a substantial body of Free Software and of Free Software users. Hardware has been hit and miss for years, the increased complexity of the type of hardware we deal with day to day is making ordinary black-box reverse engineering efforts more and more difficult.
Is Freedom Freedom if you have to practice it in a cage?
Much as I'd love another excuse to blast ESR here, that's putting an awful spin on an article that doesn't quite say that about a speech that doesn't quite say that.
ESR is suggesting the open source movement concern itself with making sure GNU/Linux et al works out of the box, and if that means in the short term accepting some proprietary software, then that may be necessary. His belief is predicated upon the notion that the move to 64 bit computing means people are about to make choices about the next generation of operating systems. If they get a 64 bit machine, they're going to either chose GNU/Linux, or a proprietary system like Windows, and once that choice has been made that's it.
I think ESR is wrong in believing that. But if he believes that, then it's legitimate for him to believe that a short term acceptance of some proprietary software, that can be rewritten later, may be necessary to "get us through" to the point that the system most likely to end up being 100% FOSS is the dominant operating system.
My belief is that this is all bollocks, and the move to 64 bits will make no difference whatsoever in terms of which 1970s technology OS is used, as ultimately the major candidates are. But it's legitimate for him to think otherwise, and doesn't even represent an ideological "shift" (as the article implies) to believe that in order for FOSS to win-out, it may need some non-FOSS code in the short term. That's always been the case. Even the FSF accepts that, hence the LGPL, a license they like to discourage the use of but nonetheless one they invented anyway and want to see used for certain projects. The entire point of the LGPL is exactly the same as ESR's point: you have to integrate with proprietary software in the short term if you want to move beyond proprietary software in the long term.
The only way to read the meaning the submitter attributed to ESR is to believe ESR cares more about GNU/Linux's popularity than he does about free software. I seriously doubt that's the case.
Additionally, Echostar seems to have played some dirty pool in getting their own DVR out the gate by peeking at a TiVo that was left behind during negotiations between TiVo and Echostar for licensing DVRs.
This is kind of meaningless. What's actually been said is that TiVo left behind a technology sample which Echostar failed to return, claiming not to know its whereabouts. Far from being suspicious, I'd imagine this is relatively normal and Echostar's inability to return the machine has nothing to do with whether they took out the hard drive, copied the TiVo software, converted it from raw binaries to C, and then spent ten years with a team of expert programmers turning the unreadable code into readable code. Echostar would have had to do something completely wierd for "OMG! We copied the TiVo! We can't let TiVo find out!" to be the reason why it wasn't returned.
Moreover, my employer receives samples of technologies all the time from vendors (and I'd imagine pretty much everyone who has a full time job who reads Slashdot is in the same position), and yes, we do regularly find obscure pieces of equipment years after we've been given them in junk tote boxes, etc.
If I were a dirty patent troll (and I'm not saying TiVo is, I'm just saying), I'd deliberately "leave" a technology sample behind, as it'd make it easier to demonstrate that the future defendent has access to the technology, even though the chances are the defendent wouldn't even touch it.
There's been a lot of shit levied against Echostar over the TiVo issue. They've been accused regularly of "dirty tricks" and "bad faith" by people claiming to have followed the case in detail. Yet there's significant reasons to doubt this. They did receive outside legal advice, before they released their DVRs, that the technologies were free from patent issues WRT to TiVo. It's hard to see why they shouldn't have defended themselves given that, and it's hard to see why they would have believed that - even to the point of deliberately wasting money on lawyers who would have been certain to give them the answer they didn't want to hear - if they had just "copied a real TiVo". Asking outside experts to rule on this when you know you've copied something would be like asking a fingerprint expert to rule on who's fingerprints are on a bloody knife you know you used, barehanded, to stab someone.
I'm a happy 625 user. I can honestly say there's no functionality in the DVR that doesn't follow from the basic ideas of "Record programs automatically given a program schedule where the user can pick TV programs by name". Every refinement to this is obvious. Once you've implemented the technology, you've implemented a bunch of subtechnologies from which certain refinements are also obvious. I don't find it likely that what anything the 625 has in common with TiVo is genuinely patentable. DVRs existed before TiVo, but disk space wasn't cheap enough to make the concept worth packaging up as a consumer item. Once you've reached the point that you know you can produce a box that's cheap enough, you can also make the box and make the most obvious enhancements to the concept to make the best of the technology you have available.
To all those that thank TiVo for DVRs, you're thanking the wrong people. Thank Seagate and Maxtor and the other hard drive manufacturers for driving down the price per gigabyte. Thank Intel, AMD, IBM, Motorola, ARM, TI, and the others who have driven down the price per MIPS. They made it possible. TiVo deserves credit for remembering a concept dating back to the 1960s, and realising that the technology was ready for a consumer version, and building the first proofs that the system works, but that's not worthy of a monopoly. And it certainly doesn't mean anyone who also tries to do the same thing, whether TiVo tried to sell them technology or not, should be treated as some kind of evil who goes around copying things.
Yes, in this case, you can compare them if it is true that Echostar saw TiVo in the same terms as IBM sees SCO. Which was my main point.
The question here is not "Is TiVo's case justified?", it's "Did Echostar act in bad faith". If they sincerely believed TiVo didn't have a case, then they were not acting in bad faith by defending themselves, and they did exactly the right thing by fighting the case otherwise they would be seen as a soft target by patent trolls.
TiVo may have a legitimate product, but that doesn't change the equation. What might be added by the fact TiVo has been innovative in the past should be counterbalanced by the fact that Echostar had launched a competitive product, and TiVo is using the law to destroy it. From Echostar's point of view, if Echostar believes that TiVo doesn't have a case, then it's TiVo that appears to them to be acting in bad faith.
People have been claiming for a while to be "following the case" and it "being very clear Echostar is acting in bad faith". The Judge appears to disagree with them, and it appears to be for a very legitimate reason. Those who have prejudged Echostar in this way might consider revising their views now that they know that Echostar appears to have had legitimate reasons (even if they were wrong) to believe TiVo was misusing the courts to make bogus patent claims.
Echostar may or may not be in the wrong, but the suggestion that they acted in bad faith by defending themselves and doing so to the best of their ability (and continuing to do so) is definitely questionable.
I want companies that believe themselves to be innocent to defend themselves in IP cases. In patent cases in particular, there's too much at stake for people to just roll over and throw out their own technologies, licensing those of anyone who sues them. It doesn't matter if the plaintiff is the decendent of a company that has bought dubious "rights" to a set of technologies, or if the plaintiff is a competitor that wants anyone who competes with them to be paying royalties.
Though the judge didn't find that Echostar acted in bad faith, what I've followed of their various lawsuits leads me to disagree.
Well, bear in mind one of the reasons the Judge felt that way was because of evidence that Echostar hasn't actually been allowed to present. Specifically, it received outside legal advice that said that the DVRs it was about to, (and subsequently did), deploy did not violate TiVo's patents.
That's significant, because from Echostar's point of view, TiVo would have appeared to be the upstart patent abuser that intended to use lawsuits to shut down a legitimate competitor rather than some company whose technology it "copied" and those patents its abusing. If you're of that mindset, then going to court and fighting the case at every step isn't a matter of bleeding a competitor dry, it's a matter of necessity otherwise every patent troll in the business is going to see you as a soft target.
If Echostar genuinely believed it wasn't violating patents and that TiVo was yet another patent troll, and the judge seems to have access to evidence that that is indeed what Echostar thought, then that puts Echostar in the same moral position as IBM vs SCO. IBM could be argued, using the logic you presented, to be acting in "bad faith" because they too are refusing to settle and the logical outcome of the IBM case will be the bankruptsy of SCO.
Simply fighting your case, come what may, because you believe your side to be right, knowing that the logical outcome is the bankrupsy of a competitor, isn't necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, if you believe that the competitor is a actually abusing the law by suing you in the first place, that bankrupsy may be a legitimate secondary aim.
As I'm not actually involved in Echostar or TiVo except in being an affected customer of Dish Network, I'm not going to judge the case beyond that, but it certainly sounds to me that the Judge may have legitimate reasons to believe Echostar acted in good faith, even when it may look to many outsiders like that isn't the case. In this case, the Judge appears to know things that have not been released publicly in court. Those things do change radically the picture of why Echostar would be fighting this case. Most of us wouldn't blame anyone for taking a patent lawsuit against an organization they believe to be abusive to the logical end-point. Personally, as someone who finds the entire patent system extremely dubious, I wish that were the case in every case.
Well, you may think it's great news that your 625 will be disabled within a month, I, personally, am not looking forward to it.
In all honesty, the DVR feature is the only thing that's made TV service usable as far as I'm concerned. Barely anything we watch is live, and pretty much everything we record is recorded at times we're not around. Speculation that "EchoStar might buy TiVo" strikes me as premature, and doesn't exactly help during the period our bought and paid for hardware ceases to support advertised critical functionality.
And, personally, I'm having difficulty accepting anything that's in the 625 should be patentable. Once you've thinking in terms of a device that automatically stores programs selected from a TV schedule, pretty much everything else the 625 does follows. But whether it is or it isn't, I'm pissed about the consequences of this. Choices have just been limited. People who have bought service and signed into 18 month contracts are being screwed. Whether it's EchoStar or a combination of TiVo and the current patent system that's to blame, this isn't fair, and we are all worse off for it.
Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could turn back the clock 10 years and have our greatest concern about the President be, quite legitimately, that he once lied in court about whether he had sex with an intern.
Well, I read your justification, and I'm still none the wiser as to why you believe those comments don't jibe. Something doesn't hurt me, though my life isn't enriched without it. This is a problem for you? You demand people enrich your life? Given the choice between the non-existance of things that enrich your life, and the existance of things that could enrich your life that you're not prepared to pay for, you are actually harmed in the latter case compared to the former? I see more of a "failure to jibe" with the following:
I think that we can all agree that our lives would be greatly enriched if all creative works were in the public domain: those works would be available for us to simply use and enjoy as they are; for us to make and distribute copies of; to publicly perform or display, and; to serve as the bases for derivative works. Without that being the case, we are harmed.
...and
And I disagree. First, it's the fruit of their labors that is at issue. No one is proposing that authors be forced to labor at creative pursuits. Authors will always have the choice of whether or not to create, based upon whether they feel that it's in their own interest to do so, where the factors they consider are money, the love of art, reputation, etc.
So is someone being evil in refusing to enrich your life without monetary compensation or not?
I'm sorry, but enrichment is not a right, it's a luxury. It should be encouraged, not enforced. And undermining copyright by allowing people to make unlimited copies on peer to peer networks doesn't encourage. It destroys a valid mechanism for ensuring artists are compensated for the works they do and have some creative control over the final results.
You want to talk about how not having access to copyrighted works that can make or break your ability to make a living, and I'll agree with you that your life is actively harmed by the lack of them. Network effects ensure that. But your world does not start out with luxuries, it cannot be harmed through the lack of them, only improved by the existance of them. And you bear some responsibility for making those luxuries come into existance, whether you do that by creating them, or by funding their creation and treating artists with respect.
Nobody is exercising "civil disobedience" so far as I've seen when it comes to P2P networking. CD involves more than simply breaking the law, it means doing so openly, and in the face of those who oppress you.
Now, if this is what you, personally, are doing, then bully for you. I admire your spirit even if I don't admire your cause. But I doubt this is the case. What I suspect is that you, like everyone else who engages in this, does what they can to avoid being caught, and if, perchance, you are caught, you'll pay your fine like everyone else. Or maybe you won't - but only on the grounds that you think there's some loophole, or some other way in which you're "not guilty".
When the founding fathers signed the Declaration of Independence, they knew their very putting of pen to paper meant a death sentence. And every damned one of them would have gladly gone to the gallows for it. When Rosa Parks sat at the front of the bus, she knew she faced arrest and imprisonment. The Founding Fathers didn't "hope they'd get off", they hoped their cause would be vindicated by whatever means came about.
If you're questioning the evidence the RIAA has against you, rather than providing it and saying "Damn the settlements, I want a trial, and I'll go to jail for contempt before I pay a fine", then, yes, you are engaging in civil disobedience.
If that sounds to you like an absurdity you'd never be prepared to go through, then you might want to question whether you really are engaging in civil disobedience, or whether you're just, plain, freeloading.
If you're prepared to go to jail, then I admire your spirit, but not your cause. Hell, even if I agreed with you, I'd think you were taking things a little too far.
That sounds like pretty much what most of us geeks can do.
I don't want to point out the obvious, but most people in most generations aren't great at maths. My mother can't do what you describe, but my wife can. Every generation thinks the generation beneath it is somehow mathematically illiterate.
I don't know how old you are. If you're a typical Slashdot reader, you're probably somewhere between 20 and 40. I'm in my mid-thirties. We were brought up with calculators. I don't see calculators as something new that the current generation of schoolkids are using in any major way they weren't before.
I suspect the NASA engineers and scientists are perfectly capable of guessing the approximate square root of 27 in their heads, even if they're all 15 years old.
That's completely untrue. The default with the OSI these days is to reject a license unless it can prove not only that it conforms to the Open Source Definition, but also that it doesn't add too much to license fragmentation, which is an issue being taken seriously (at least) and has been for over a year. Some companies have even gone so far as to deprecate their existing, already approved, licenses to help out.
I have my beefs with the OSI, but they are doing something about license proliferation, and I'm very glad for that.
To the best of my knowledge, the only time the OSI rubber stamped a license rather than thoroughly reviewed it was the original APSL. You'd have thought they'd have learned a few lessons from the fall-out from that incident, and it's my reading that they did. (Alas, "Don't take ESR seriously" wasn't one of them.)
No, in my opinion, it doesn't give you a justification.
Look, I can understand taking a lot of things without paying for them. If you're starving, and the local stores are selling food with such a high mark-up, you could never afford to pay for it, then yes, I can understand you stealing.
And to a certain extent, I can understand copyright infringement when applied to software. I don't do it, I don't agree with it, but I can understand someone being in a situation where they require the tools to do a particular job, and can't afford software which would never be their choice to buy anyway, but is the software they need because other people - thanks to network effects etc - have essentially made mandatory if you want to "play" with them.
Certainly, I think there's a strong argument for, in their present form, reforming copyrights in their present form (that is, in their present form*) when applied to computer software. Hey, I'm not the only one.
But music? I could go my whole life without needing to listen to a specific piece of music. Same goes for movies, and literature. I'm not saying my life wouldn't be enriched by it, but my life can be enriched by the free music out there anyway, it doesn't have to be the latest MTV-promoted big name.
Someone's decision to make their music only available to those who are willing to pay for it doesn't hurt me in the slightest. I can make a judgement as to whether that music would enrich my life enough for me to part with the required amount of cash. In the mean time, I have real alternatives. There's music in the public domain. There are artists with lower priced music or who source their music via alternative means. To decide to take advantage of someone else's work without paying on their terms strikes me as very unfair, especially if there's nothing they've done that makes me need that work.
* You know some dumbass is going to respond "You're saying we should abolish copyright for software?" and give me a thousand reasons, three or four of which are actually good ones, why this would be bad. I'm not proposing we abolish it. Hence me repeating that part three times.
Well, kind of. Nothing stops Sun from dual licensing the system, nor from adding a waiver for applications that merely link to documented Java libraries, nor from chosing one license for the JVM and another for the library. So there are a bunch of ways in which this can be played out.
By the way, we shuld not be suprised if we hear OSS zealots saying that this action should have come earlier. Some will even say it is too little too late.
Not sure how stating either of those makes someone a zealot, but, whatever.
It should have been earlier, and it may well be too late. I respect Sun's problems with making the system open, and they've certainly experimented a great deal with different levels of openness, but I think they ended up making the wrong decisions. Not making Java Free Software earlier helped proponents of alternatives such as Mono, and this in turn gave.NET more traction.
GCJ isn't going to go away. It's more than just a JVM, after all, and people are only beginning to see its power. But I can see GNU Classpath disappearing if the official Java libraries are available under a GPL-compatible license.
1. Open Source means Open Source. There's a list of approved licenses. Sun are aware of this, they participate in the OSI, they've submitted licenses before for approval. They're not saying "Open Source" when they mean "Shared Source" or anything like that. Who do you think they are, SGI?;-)
2. Jonathan Schwarz has specifically stated that the GPL is under consideration. (See his blog) It sounds like they're interested in GPL3 but obviously want to see what it has to say first.
3. OpenOffice.org is available under the GPL. Releasing Java with a compatible license would help resolve some of the issues there are in integrating Java code with OOo code, which is a live issue right now.
4. This is a major issue. Right now, the two major enterprise distributions, RedHat, and SUSE, are promoting alternatives to Java, be they attempted workalikes like GCJ or full blown rivals like Mono. Both RedHat and Novell are being clear on this: they don't want Java in its present form because it's not Free Software. Sun has to act. They're saying they're going to act. This is, stategically, one of their most important projects, if not their most important (Solaris wasn't, StarOffice wasn't even close. By comparison, Java is something dear to Sun's heart as the only technology they own that truly does influence the direction the entire computing industry is going in.) So you can't blame them for taking baby steps. But when they say it's going to go open source, I believe them. And when Schwarz talks about the GPL and uses phrases like "Free Software" and "Open Source" with fairly clear deference to their supporter's meanings, it's hard for me to believe they haven't done their homework, that they're not aware of the damage they'll do if they don't follow through, and that they have no intention of following through.
Slashdot Mirror
To be fair, while Gecko may have a reputation for being less elegant than KHTML, it's also got a history of being more compatible with generic web content than KHTML. It's extremely difficult to write an elegant, compatible, web browser. The best you can hope for is to write something that's elegant and compatible with standards-compliant code, but 99% of webpages are not "standards-compliant" by a long shot.
Adobe's actions against Microsoft were anti-trust related, not patent related.
Nobody's suggesting that operating systems based upon Linux without the GNU toolset should be called "GNU/Linux". They're saying that the operating systems that are Linux with the GNU toolset should be.
Personally, I'm happy seeing operating systems named after either the major projects they use, or given a name for the whole thing. For example, "Fedora Core 5" is a perfectly reasonable name for an operating system. Calling it "Linux" though is wierd as it's largely GNU, be it the toolset or GNOME desktop environment, with a few third party components such as X11 and the Linux kernel, and a smattering of entirely optional third party applications. It makes sense to describe it as a "GNU based operating system" or, if we want to give credit to Torvalds, "a GNU/Linux system". We don't call Mac OS X "XNU", we don't call Windows KRNL386.EXE.
The only thing I can find about keys simply states that you have to give up whatever keys are needed to install modified versions of the software.
Torvalds may feel it's a terrible infringement of TiVo's freedom not to be able to lock their hardware to specific, TiVo signed, versions of the kernel he co-develops with thousands of free software developers, but personally I remain puzzled. Arguments like "But someone might make something that only runs copies of software signed by Linus" do not make a lot of sense. If Torvalds is doing it, he needs to knock it off. If someone else does it, then they're going to have problems distributing Linux to end users anyway, as they - not Torvalds - will be in breach of the license by not making the key available. The easiest way to stay compliant is make hardware where the requirement for a key is easily enabled and disabled by the end user. Which is how it should work anyway, whether it's free software or anything else.
These changes strike me as well within the spirit of what the GPL is trying to achieve. They ensure maximum freedom for the receiver of the software. They do not grant "freedom" to restrict the freedom of others. If you object to it, the chances are you disagree with the principles that the GPL stands for anyway, and there are certainly alternative licenses, the BSD and X11 licenses being the most obvious, that will get you where you want to be.
I'm going to have to disagree. Aside from the name, virtually all the press about the Nintendo Wii has been positive, in nerd circles and outside of them. The PSP got an astounding amount of positive press from geeks and non-geeks, which surprised me for reasons I'll not reprise here. The DS is getting positive press.
Both the PS3 and X-Box 360 aren't getting much love. The X-Box has three problems - it's a tad expensive, it's only an "improved" version of what preceeded it rather than an innovative new design, and it has the word "Microsoft" on the box. The PS3 is getting less love because it seems to be a rather more expensive version of the X-Box 360, with a few ideas pinched, allegedly badly, from the Wii.
In other words, the innovation is being praised, but expensive boxes that don't appear to have any substantial innovation are not.
I don't think it's a matter of nerds will complain about anything. It's more a matter that nerds have little to praise at the moment. But generally, yes, there are still things being found to be "praiseworthy".
Rear Projection is something I've specifically rejected for our future "next generation" TV (and the wife agrees for the same reason) because of the massive change in contrast and brightness that occurs if you look at it from different angles. CRTs used to have that issue (and I'm talking laptop LCDs, before the technology started to be used with TVs) but don't seem to have that issue any more. I, personally, see more flicker on real projection TVs too than on regular CRTs or LCDs/Plasmas, and though I'm not sure that's a deal breaker (I used to use my Amiga in interlace mode all the time and didn't have a problem with it), it certainly is a minor factor that adds into the equation.
It's a shame because the price difference is massive.
On a seperate note: what are people's opinions about power consumption for the various TV types? I believe LCD is better by a long shot, but I've never seen figures on how close (or unclose) plasma is. Back when plasma was used in some "luggable" computers, the system seemed power hungry enough not to run on batteries, but for all I know the technology has massively improved since. I've yet to see any figures though.
And what idiot's comparing this to Betamax? Are plasma TVs not compatible with the same TV signals as LCDs, or is the comparison completely absurd?
POSIX and Windows are both operating systems that use hardware memory management to seperate otherwise unsafe (written in liberal mid-level languages like C) processes from one another, using a security model based largely upon user ownership. If a large number of jobs have to be done that require communications between the different programs performing the different jobs, a single program - running in its own memory space - is generally written that manages all the jobs, rather than the jobs being split out one-per-program.
Programs are loaded from files on disk, from a simplified file system that uses hierarchical name management and that's based upon arbitrary length binary files. From the point of view of the user, there are running programs and files.
This is essentially classic 1970s computer technology. In terms of where it became the standard for system design, that's roughly when it dates to.
There have been serious attempts since then to reform that model, but generally they haven't gone anywhere. The 1980s was full of simplified systems where all processes ran in the same memory space - Windows, Mac OS 6+, AmigaOS, Sinclair QDOS, etc. At the other end of the spectrum, there were many abortive attempts to break up operating systems into more simplified units protected from one another. None of these design changes are present in Windows, Mac OS X, or GNU/Linux, either the simplified or the microkernel strategies (with good reasons for both.)
The 1990s saw the beginning of managed code. While this probably does represent the future of computing, we're not seeing it yet. As yet, managed code only exists in mainstream operating systems running as high level processes at the same level as other ordinary user applications. Mac OS X, Windows, and GNU/Linux do not use managed code, they merely support it.
File systems have been reformed several times. DEC VMS supported native rich file types with record indexing. This has yet to appear anywhere else. Mac OS introduced forks and added creator and type information to the file system. While present for legacy reasons, Apple has deprecated support; Microsoft technically supports file forks in NT but has made no effort to use them or encourage their use; GNU/Linux has only recently started to support additional metadata, and the feature is barely used. Systems like Smalltalk, NewtonOS and PalmOS blur the differences between files and other objects. Achieving minor success on PDAs, their approaches have yet to really have any serious impact.
Essentially, Mac OS X, Windows, and GNU/Linux, are the latest, most optimal, versions of what you saw in the seventies. That's not a terrible thing, but 64 bits gives us the opportunity to rethink why we're programming the same way we did thirty years ago. In particular, the combination of managed code and the massive 64 bit address spaces gives us a chance to revisit the question of how we can most efficiently prevent operating system and application components from treading upon one another, and how we can keep the system secure.
You're taking the views of the FSF beyond what they actually are saying - note, for example, that glibc remains LGPL'd, the base libraries for GNOME are also LGPL'd - and you're also ignoring network effects.
The issue isn't being "popular", it's being widely used enough to be relevent. Without relevence, the rug can be pulled from underneath you simply by the introduction of a market where everything software has to interact with is proprietary, be it the formats of content or the hardware it runs upon. We've been running perilously close to the former for many decades, and the tide is turning in our favour where it's turning in our favour only because there's a substantial body of Free Software and of Free Software users. Hardware has been hit and miss for years, the increased complexity of the type of hardware we deal with day to day is making ordinary black-box reverse engineering efforts more and more difficult.
Is Freedom Freedom if you have to practice it in a cage?
Much as I'd love another excuse to blast ESR here, that's putting an awful spin on an article that doesn't quite say that about a speech that doesn't quite say that.
ESR is suggesting the open source movement concern itself with making sure GNU/Linux et al works out of the box, and if that means in the short term accepting some proprietary software, then that may be necessary. His belief is predicated upon the notion that the move to 64 bit computing means people are about to make choices about the next generation of operating systems. If they get a 64 bit machine, they're going to either chose GNU/Linux, or a proprietary system like Windows, and once that choice has been made that's it.
I think ESR is wrong in believing that. But if he believes that, then it's legitimate for him to believe that a short term acceptance of some proprietary software, that can be rewritten later, may be necessary to "get us through" to the point that the system most likely to end up being 100% FOSS is the dominant operating system.
My belief is that this is all bollocks, and the move to 64 bits will make no difference whatsoever in terms of which 1970s technology OS is used, as ultimately the major candidates are. But it's legitimate for him to think otherwise, and doesn't even represent an ideological "shift" (as the article implies) to believe that in order for FOSS to win-out, it may need some non-FOSS code in the short term. That's always been the case. Even the FSF accepts that, hence the LGPL, a license they like to discourage the use of but nonetheless one they invented anyway and want to see used for certain projects. The entire point of the LGPL is exactly the same as ESR's point: you have to integrate with proprietary software in the short term if you want to move beyond proprietary software in the long term.
The only way to read the meaning the submitter attributed to ESR is to believe ESR cares more about GNU/Linux's popularity than he does about free software. I seriously doubt that's the case.
This is kind of meaningless. What's actually been said is that TiVo left behind a technology sample which Echostar failed to return, claiming not to know its whereabouts. Far from being suspicious, I'd imagine this is relatively normal and Echostar's inability to return the machine has nothing to do with whether they took out the hard drive, copied the TiVo software, converted it from raw binaries to C, and then spent ten years with a team of expert programmers turning the unreadable code into readable code. Echostar would have had to do something completely wierd for "OMG! We copied the TiVo! We can't let TiVo find out!" to be the reason why it wasn't returned.
Moreover, my employer receives samples of technologies all the time from vendors (and I'd imagine pretty much everyone who has a full time job who reads Slashdot is in the same position), and yes, we do regularly find obscure pieces of equipment years after we've been given them in junk tote boxes, etc.
If I were a dirty patent troll (and I'm not saying TiVo is, I'm just saying), I'd deliberately "leave" a technology sample behind, as it'd make it easier to demonstrate that the future defendent has access to the technology, even though the chances are the defendent wouldn't even touch it.
There's been a lot of shit levied against Echostar over the TiVo issue. They've been accused regularly of "dirty tricks" and "bad faith" by people claiming to have followed the case in detail. Yet there's significant reasons to doubt this. They did receive outside legal advice, before they released their DVRs, that the technologies were free from patent issues WRT to TiVo. It's hard to see why they shouldn't have defended themselves given that, and it's hard to see why they would have believed that - even to the point of deliberately wasting money on lawyers who would have been certain to give them the answer they didn't want to hear - if they had just "copied a real TiVo". Asking outside experts to rule on this when you know you've copied something would be like asking a fingerprint expert to rule on who's fingerprints are on a bloody knife you know you used, barehanded, to stab someone.
I'm a happy 625 user. I can honestly say there's no functionality in the DVR that doesn't follow from the basic ideas of "Record programs automatically given a program schedule where the user can pick TV programs by name". Every refinement to this is obvious. Once you've implemented the technology, you've implemented a bunch of subtechnologies from which certain refinements are also obvious. I don't find it likely that what anything the 625 has in common with TiVo is genuinely patentable. DVRs existed before TiVo, but disk space wasn't cheap enough to make the concept worth packaging up as a consumer item. Once you've reached the point that you know you can produce a box that's cheap enough, you can also make the box and make the most obvious enhancements to the concept to make the best of the technology you have available.
To all those that thank TiVo for DVRs, you're thanking the wrong people. Thank Seagate and Maxtor and the other hard drive manufacturers for driving down the price per gigabyte. Thank Intel, AMD, IBM, Motorola, ARM, TI, and the others who have driven down the price per MIPS. They made it possible. TiVo deserves credit for remembering a concept dating back to the 1960s, and realising that the technology was ready for a consumer version, and building the first proofs that the system works, but that's not worthy of a monopoly. And it certainly doesn't mean anyone who also tries to do the same thing, whether TiVo tried to sell them technology or not, should be treated as some kind of evil who goes around copying things.
I think a real lawyer would have no difficulty shredding holes in that argument.
It's one thing to add or remove features from a DVR. It's quite another to cease actually providing a functional DVR.
Yes, in this case, you can compare them if it is true that Echostar saw TiVo in the same terms as IBM sees SCO. Which was my main point.
The question here is not "Is TiVo's case justified?", it's "Did Echostar act in bad faith". If they sincerely believed TiVo didn't have a case, then they were not acting in bad faith by defending themselves, and they did exactly the right thing by fighting the case otherwise they would be seen as a soft target by patent trolls.
TiVo may have a legitimate product, but that doesn't change the equation. What might be added by the fact TiVo has been innovative in the past should be counterbalanced by the fact that Echostar had launched a competitive product, and TiVo is using the law to destroy it. From Echostar's point of view, if Echostar believes that TiVo doesn't have a case, then it's TiVo that appears to them to be acting in bad faith.
People have been claiming for a while to be "following the case" and it "being very clear Echostar is acting in bad faith". The Judge appears to disagree with them, and it appears to be for a very legitimate reason. Those who have prejudged Echostar in this way might consider revising their views now that they know that Echostar appears to have had legitimate reasons (even if they were wrong) to believe TiVo was misusing the courts to make bogus patent claims. Echostar may or may not be in the wrong, but the suggestion that they acted in bad faith by defending themselves and doing so to the best of their ability (and continuing to do so) is definitely questionable.
I want companies that believe themselves to be innocent to defend themselves in IP cases. In patent cases in particular, there's too much at stake for people to just roll over and throw out their own technologies, licensing those of anyone who sues them. It doesn't matter if the plaintiff is the decendent of a company that has bought dubious "rights" to a set of technologies, or if the plaintiff is a competitor that wants anyone who competes with them to be paying royalties.
Well, bear in mind one of the reasons the Judge felt that way was because of evidence that Echostar hasn't actually been allowed to present. Specifically, it received outside legal advice that said that the DVRs it was about to, (and subsequently did), deploy did not violate TiVo's patents.
That's significant, because from Echostar's point of view, TiVo would have appeared to be the upstart patent abuser that intended to use lawsuits to shut down a legitimate competitor rather than some company whose technology it "copied" and those patents its abusing. If you're of that mindset, then going to court and fighting the case at every step isn't a matter of bleeding a competitor dry, it's a matter of necessity otherwise every patent troll in the business is going to see you as a soft target.
If Echostar genuinely believed it wasn't violating patents and that TiVo was yet another patent troll, and the judge seems to have access to evidence that that is indeed what Echostar thought, then that puts Echostar in the same moral position as IBM vs SCO. IBM could be argued, using the logic you presented, to be acting in "bad faith" because they too are refusing to settle and the logical outcome of the IBM case will be the bankruptsy of SCO.
Simply fighting your case, come what may, because you believe your side to be right, knowing that the logical outcome is the bankrupsy of a competitor, isn't necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, if you believe that the competitor is a actually abusing the law by suing you in the first place, that bankrupsy may be a legitimate secondary aim.
As I'm not actually involved in Echostar or TiVo except in being an affected customer of Dish Network, I'm not going to judge the case beyond that, but it certainly sounds to me that the Judge may have legitimate reasons to believe Echostar acted in good faith, even when it may look to many outsiders like that isn't the case. In this case, the Judge appears to know things that have not been released publicly in court. Those things do change radically the picture of why Echostar would be fighting this case. Most of us wouldn't blame anyone for taking a patent lawsuit against an organization they believe to be abusive to the logical end-point. Personally, as someone who finds the entire patent system extremely dubious, I wish that were the case in every case.
Well, you may think it's great news that your 625 will be disabled within a month, I, personally, am not looking forward to it.
In all honesty, the DVR feature is the only thing that's made TV service usable as far as I'm concerned. Barely anything we watch is live, and pretty much everything we record is recorded at times we're not around. Speculation that "EchoStar might buy TiVo" strikes me as premature, and doesn't exactly help during the period our bought and paid for hardware ceases to support advertised critical functionality.
And, personally, I'm having difficulty accepting anything that's in the 625 should be patentable. Once you've thinking in terms of a device that automatically stores programs selected from a TV schedule, pretty much everything else the 625 does follows. But whether it is or it isn't, I'm pissed about the consequences of this. Choices have just been limited. People who have bought service and signed into 18 month contracts are being screwed. Whether it's EchoStar or a combination of TiVo and the current patent system that's to blame, this isn't fair, and we are all worse off for it.
That's really cool. FISA was expanded by Clinton, and Carter immediately sprung into action fifteen years earlier and used these expanded powers.
That makes perfect sense.
Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could turn back the clock 10 years and have our greatest concern about the President be, quite legitimately, that he once lied in court about whether he had sex with an intern.
So is someone being evil in refusing to enrich your life without monetary compensation or not?
I'm sorry, but enrichment is not a right, it's a luxury. It should be encouraged, not enforced. And undermining copyright by allowing people to make unlimited copies on peer to peer networks doesn't encourage. It destroys a valid mechanism for ensuring artists are compensated for the works they do and have some creative control over the final results.
You want to talk about how not having access to copyrighted works that can make or break your ability to make a living, and I'll agree with you that your life is actively harmed by the lack of them. Network effects ensure that. But your world does not start out with luxuries, it cannot be harmed through the lack of them, only improved by the existance of them. And you bear some responsibility for making those luxuries come into existance, whether you do that by creating them, or by funding their creation and treating artists with respect.
You asked if you were a tool. I answered. I also explained my view of the situation.
If you wanted answers to another question, I'm sorry, but you didn't ask it.
Let's knock this off now.
Nobody is exercising "civil disobedience" so far as I've seen when it comes to P2P networking. CD involves more than simply breaking the law, it means doing so openly, and in the face of those who oppress you.
Now, if this is what you, personally, are doing, then bully for you. I admire your spirit even if I don't admire your cause. But I doubt this is the case. What I suspect is that you, like everyone else who engages in this, does what they can to avoid being caught, and if, perchance, you are caught, you'll pay your fine like everyone else. Or maybe you won't - but only on the grounds that you think there's some loophole, or some other way in which you're "not guilty".
When the founding fathers signed the Declaration of Independence, they knew their very putting of pen to paper meant a death sentence. And every damned one of them would have gladly gone to the gallows for it. When Rosa Parks sat at the front of the bus, she knew she faced arrest and imprisonment. The Founding Fathers didn't "hope they'd get off", they hoped their cause would be vindicated by whatever means came about.
If you're questioning the evidence the RIAA has against you, rather than providing it and saying "Damn the settlements, I want a trial, and I'll go to jail for contempt before I pay a fine", then, yes, you are engaging in civil disobedience.
If that sounds to you like an absurdity you'd never be prepared to go through, then you might want to question whether you really are engaging in civil disobedience, or whether you're just, plain, freeloading.
If you're prepared to go to jail, then I admire your spirit, but not your cause. Hell, even if I agreed with you, I'd think you were taking things a little too far.
That sounds like pretty much what most of us geeks can do.
I don't want to point out the obvious, but most people in most generations aren't great at maths. My mother can't do what you describe, but my wife can. Every generation thinks the generation beneath it is somehow mathematically illiterate.
I don't know how old you are. If you're a typical Slashdot reader, you're probably somewhere between 20 and 40. I'm in my mid-thirties. We were brought up with calculators. I don't see calculators as something new that the current generation of schoolkids are using in any major way they weren't before.
I suspect the NASA engineers and scientists are perfectly capable of guessing the approximate square root of 27 in their heads, even if they're all 15 years old.
That's completely untrue. The default with the OSI these days is to reject a license unless it can prove not only that it conforms to the Open Source Definition, but also that it doesn't add too much to license fragmentation, which is an issue being taken seriously (at least) and has been for over a year. Some companies have even gone so far as to deprecate their existing, already approved, licenses to help out.
I have my beefs with the OSI, but they are doing something about license proliferation, and I'm very glad for that.
To the best of my knowledge, the only time the OSI rubber stamped a license rather than thoroughly reviewed it was the original APSL. You'd have thought they'd have learned a few lessons from the fall-out from that incident, and it's my reading that they did. (Alas, "Don't take ESR seriously" wasn't one of them.)
No, in my opinion, it doesn't give you a justification.
Look, I can understand taking a lot of things without paying for them. If you're starving, and the local stores are selling food with such a high mark-up, you could never afford to pay for it, then yes, I can understand you stealing.
And to a certain extent, I can understand copyright infringement when applied to software. I don't do it, I don't agree with it, but I can understand someone being in a situation where they require the tools to do a particular job, and can't afford software which would never be their choice to buy anyway, but is the software they need because other people - thanks to network effects etc - have essentially made mandatory if you want to "play" with them.
Certainly, I think there's a strong argument for, in their present form, reforming copyrights in their present form (that is, in their present form*) when applied to computer software. Hey, I'm not the only one.
But music? I could go my whole life without needing to listen to a specific piece of music. Same goes for movies, and literature. I'm not saying my life wouldn't be enriched by it, but my life can be enriched by the free music out there anyway, it doesn't have to be the latest MTV-promoted big name.
Someone's decision to make their music only available to those who are willing to pay for it doesn't hurt me in the slightest. I can make a judgement as to whether that music would enrich my life enough for me to part with the required amount of cash. In the mean time, I have real alternatives. There's music in the public domain. There are artists with lower priced music or who source their music via alternative means. To decide to take advantage of someone else's work without paying on their terms strikes me as very unfair, especially if there's nothing they've done that makes me need that work.
* You know some dumbass is going to respond "You're saying we should abolish copyright for software?" and give me a thousand reasons, three or four of which are actually good ones, why this would be bad. I'm not proposing we abolish it. Hence me repeating that part three times.
Well, kind of. Nothing stops Sun from dual licensing the system, nor from adding a waiver for applications that merely link to documented Java libraries, nor from chosing one license for the JVM and another for the library. So there are a bunch of ways in which this can be played out.
Not sure how stating either of those makes someone a zealot, but, whatever.
It should have been earlier, and it may well be too late. I respect Sun's problems with making the system open, and they've certainly experimented a great deal with different levels of openness, but I think they ended up making the wrong decisions. Not making Java Free Software earlier helped proponents of alternatives such as Mono, and this in turn gave .NET more traction.
GCJ isn't going to go away. It's more than just a JVM, after all, and people are only beginning to see its power. But I can see GNU Classpath disappearing if the official Java libraries are available under a GPL-compatible license.
Some major things in no particular order:
1. Open Source means Open Source. There's a list of approved licenses. Sun are aware of this, they participate in the OSI, they've submitted licenses before for approval. They're not saying "Open Source" when they mean "Shared Source" or anything like that. Who do you think they are, SGI? ;-)
2. Jonathan Schwarz has specifically stated that the GPL is under consideration. (See his blog) It sounds like they're interested in GPL3 but obviously want to see what it has to say first.
3. OpenOffice.org is available under the GPL. Releasing Java with a compatible license would help resolve some of the issues there are in integrating Java code with OOo code, which is a live issue right now.
4. This is a major issue. Right now, the two major enterprise distributions, RedHat, and SUSE, are promoting alternatives to Java, be they attempted workalikes like GCJ or full blown rivals like Mono. Both RedHat and Novell are being clear on this: they don't want Java in its present form because it's not Free Software. Sun has to act. They're saying they're going to act. This is, stategically, one of their most important projects, if not their most important (Solaris wasn't, StarOffice wasn't even close. By comparison, Java is something dear to Sun's heart as the only technology they own that truly does influence the direction the entire computing industry is going in.) So you can't blame them for taking baby steps. But when they say it's going to go open source, I believe them. And when Schwarz talks about the GPL and uses phrases like "Free Software" and "Open Source" with fairly clear deference to their supporter's meanings, it's hard for me to believe they haven't done their homework, that they're not aware of the damage they'll do if they don't follow through, and that they have no intention of following through.