I saw both, and it looked to me as though Disney didn't cut so much as a single frame.
This is probably why they didn't have a big advertising campaign for PM, now that I think about it. The movie would have been too controversial for their taste. But the controversy would have been even worse if they'd cut material, so, cowards that they are, they had no choice but to forego advertising.
OK, first of all, the Qt guy doesn't even get it. Then again, most of the GPL guys don't seem to get it either. What the whole problem with Qt and the GPL is.
It is not illegal by any means to compile and link programs against Qt. The GPL has no restrictions on this.
What it is not legal to do is distribute such programs, because Qt violates one of the terms of the GPL through its discriminatory licensing. It can be made legal again by appending an exception to the GPL.
I develop a GPL'd product for the MacOS which uses PowerPlant, a proprietary toolkit. But my program is perfectly legal to distribute. How, you ask? Because I add the following to the license:
This product is developed using PowerPlant, a toolkit written by Metrowerks, Inc. PowerPlant is NOT Free Software; because of this, our product would normally not be legal to distribute due to the fact that not being able to distribute PowerPlant's source means that one cannot distribute the program.
To remedy this problem, you are granted the following exception to the GPL: even if you are not authorized to distribute the source to PowerPlant, you may still distribute this Product, under the terms of the GPL. However, you must still make the remainder of the source available.
This license does not excuse you from the terms of Metrowerks' license. If you do not know whether or not you are authorized to distribute the source to PowerPlant, you must assume that you are not authorized to do so unless you have received explicit written permission from Metrowerks, Inc. to distribute it.
Now, Qt does have a pseudo-Open-Source license, and the code can be distributed (unlike PowerPlant's). This makes a Qt-style exception even easier. In fact, it would take no more than two sentences...
As an exception to the preceding license, you are granted explicit permission to compile, link, and distribute this software with the Qt graphics toolkit. This does not excuse you from the licensing terms of the Qt toolkit, which must still be distributed per the terms of its own license.
...and all of the licensing isues magically vanish. It really is that simple. Why the KDE team can't swallow their pride and admit that they made a very tiny (and understandable) oversight in their choice of license is beyond me. It's not like it would be that much work; I could do it with a Perl script in five minutes, including the time it takes to write the script. They never struck me as being too arrogant to admit their mistakes; I've seen them do it in the past. If they've kept decent records, they should still have contact information for the developers, not a single one of which would refuse to make the program legally distributable.
Honestly. This issue is so simple, and it can be resolved in a manner that leaves everyone happy, except maybe RMS. What's the big deal about?
It's not an ideological thing either. It's simply bad business.
First, I really don't like the misconception here that all Open-Source software has to be free-beer as well as free-speech. That's a really big problem for this community, namely that we're seen that way. I suppose it's understandable, since pretty much all Open-Source software to date has been free-beer, but that doesn't make it right.
What's my point here? With true Open-Source development, the developer does get compensated. Not necessarily in terms of money, to be sure, but there is the fame aspect, or even just the right to use one's own code as one wishes. And other rewards stem from this too, of course, but I can't list them all here. Consider, for example, Linus Torvalds. I seriously doubt he even needs a resume anymore; all he has to do is say "I wrote Linux" and he could likely just walk into any computer job he wished (well, maybe not at Microsoft, and there are formalities that need to be taken care of, but he could certainly at least get an offer anywhere else).
Perhaps I misread the article, but it seems that a "gated community" developer gets nothing at all. No money. No right to use the software (since it looks like you have to have already purchased it before you can develop, so that right is not a benefit of coding). And the company takes all the credit. Who would want to work in a model like that? It takes the OSS and proprietary models and it mixes the worst of both.
Of course, I could have been misreading the article about the compensation bit. But the fact remains, I see a lot of people here who say this is better than not being paid for OSS. Who says you can't get paid for OSS? You can make some serious money off of software, and in the end the business model you use won't make that much difference. I wonder which piece of software will prove that once and for all. Perhaps Mozilla/Netscape, once it's released, can make its way to obtaining this. Or maybe it will be Darwin; granted it's currently only the core of OSX that is Open-Source, but if the core succeeds there's no reason to believe that more of the OS couldn't possibly follow. Or maybe it will be something else. I don't know. All I know it's only a matter of time before someone hits it. And once that happens, maybe people will finally really see the advantages of the model, unhampered by the myth that you can't make money with it.
The peta.org guys have this one locked up, if they're willing to keep fighting. The right to use another's name, even a trademarked one, has been establ;ished for a long time indeed. I believe it was Jerry Falwell vs. Larry Flynt, which went all the way to the Supreme Court, which settled it once and for all, actually (IANAL, though). Everyone's favorite scumbag beat out everyone's favorite lunatic zealot, anbd rightfully so.
In other words, PETA's case is groundless. I never much liked them anyway, what with their nice little penchant for vandalism (sorry, but pouring red paint over someone's clothing is vandalism) and the hypocritical bit about how eating animals is "unnatural." Which, incidentally, isn't quite true; while it's possible to survive on plant life alone it is not natural to do so (a human cannot survive only on plant life which is indigenous to a single region, meaning the only reason it can be done at all is because technology allows us to ship it in, and thus in a "natural" state a human could not survive on plants alone). Does the fact that vegetarianism isn't "natural" make it bad? Not in the least. But don't pretend it's something that it isn't.
But I'm ranting again, and I'll probably get flamed for that last statement (please, do us all a favor and take it to e-mail rather than Slashdot). Getting back to the point, PETA has no legal grounds to stand on this time. If this guy can just hold on, he'll win.
Oh, and as for the "you have no right to profit from parody" statements I'm hearing, please go tell that to MAD Magazine and its competitors, all of whom have been profiting from parody for decades and are totally legal.
Actually, I have. The QPL is not violated by linking GPL apps to Qt software. I never said it was.
The problem is, when you try to go the other way, you violate the GPL. This is where the trouble comes in. It is the problem with a two-license system like KDE/Qt. It doesn't matter that one license is compatible with the other license. Both licenses must be made to be compatible with each other. This is where KDE hits a snag; the compatibility only works one way.
It's one tiny little sentence. That's all it takes; it really is that simple. Unless the KDE team has been keeping shoddy records (and I doubt they would; they understand that they have an important project so record-keeping is important), they should still have contact information for everyone who contributed. I don't think a single one of them would object to making their software legal to distribute (they gave it to KDE to distribute, after all), and once this is settled then the licensing exception can be added extremely easily; I could do it with a two-line shell script.
And that's really all there is to it. The licensing issues vanish. Debian can include KDE, and the other distros that already do can then do it legally. All the KDE team has to do is swallow their pride, admit they made a little mistake, and add one line to their license to rectify the problem. Are they so arrogant that they can't even admit to one minor oversight? I wouldn't think they would be; they've always led me to believe they were a nice bunch. So what's the problem?
Look, people. Debian doesn't exclude KDE out of spite. I doesn't exclude KDE because it's not Open-Source. It excludes it because, at the moment, IT's NOT FREAKIN LEGAL to include it. This is due to what is, sadly, a rather boneheaded oversight by the KDE team when they chose to use the GPL for their license. The GPL explicitly states that if you can't distribute all the source used in the program under its terms (or less restrictive ones), then you cannot distribute the program at all. QPL is more restrictive than GPL, and therefore it is technically illegal to distribute KDE unless you have explicit permission from Troll Tech.
There's an exception to this rule built into the GPL. This exception states that files which "normally" come with the operating system do not count towards this restriction. This is very important, because without it there's no legal way to make GPL'd software on closed-source operating systems. However, Qt does not qualify for this exception, since it doesn't "normally" come with Linux. You either have to download it or get it in a distro.
Now, this was overlooked by the KDE team when they chose to use the GPL for KDE. It was a rather boneheaded mistake, but an understandable one since, to my knowledge, an issue like this had never come up before. It is also trivially easy to fix. All it takes is one measly sentence in their licenses, where they explicitly state that you are allowed to link against Qt. That is all it takes. And yeah, it's embarassing to admit you made a mistake, but who cares so long as the problem is fixed?
Qt is Open-Source. Debian includes it. KDE is also Open-Source. The problem is that its license clashes with Qt's in a rather nasty way, so it's not legal to include it. All KDE has to do is add one tiny little sentence to their license, and everything is in the free and clear. Much easier than changing the license completely. It holds true to the principles under which KDE was developed (unless arrogance was one of those principles, and I very much doubt that). I do it myself with one of my own projects that uses PowerPlant (a decidedly proprietary application framework for MacOS). So what's the big deal? It's one sentence, and all of the licensing issues vanish.
So, and this is an honest question: why the heck haven't they done it?
OK. Why on earth would they rewrite Office to use Cocoa when they already have code to carbonize? Cocoa is mainly for new apps and rewrites.
You've got a point. But Microsoft themselves said they were going to use Cocoa, and while I don't tend to trust Microsoft on anything major I think this one's probably true.
Heck, it probably is a ploy to make users upgrade their computers, I won't argue that one.
Anyway, for an office suite, Carbon would do just fine. This is not to mention that there are millions of pre G3 Macs in that won't run a Cocoa version (no G3, no OS X, no Cocoa), but will run a Carbon version (which can run on any Mac OS back to 8.1).
Not strictly true. It's well-known that OSX DP4 runs on quite a few pre-G3 Macs (though if it's NuBus-based you're definitely out of luck). Further, it's quite possible that Apple may back-port OSX to the earlier machines (this is already true of Darwin, and it's stupid of Apple not to take advantage of that). Once you've got a basic OS going, porting it to different motherboards with the same architecture isn't that difficult. Writing the software from the ground up with that support, however, can be a very taxing task. The "G3 only" requiirement has been generally agreed to be just a trick by Apple to get the OS out more quickly, with backporting to follow in the spare time between OSX GM and January 2001.
How many secretaries do you think are going to be given shiny new G3s and G4s to run OS X just to use MS Office?
Not many, though be sure to consider that Office is a major app in the workforce, and this sort of thing has happened before. However, there's a greater chance of them being given iMacs (or the rumored "iBoxes") as an upgrade, and these can also run OSX.
The OSX ports of Office will be using Cocoa, Apple's evolution of the OpenStep API's. This is still not a "pure" BSD API, so things still wouldn't be that easy to port.
On the plus side, GNUstep mioght make things easier to port. It depends on how much Cocoa Microsoft uses. But there is the potential.
The x86 architecture has been obsolete for at least ten years. Then again, nothing in the Pentium2-class arena could be called an x86 by my definition; they've done some (admittedly) amazing stuff to keep hacking the speed higher and higher, determined to keep their precious cash cow from dying. The p3, by this time, is so different from the 8086 that thy're hardly the same ship or architecture. The only similarity is in the instruction set, and even then there are differences (let's see you run a KNI-enhanced program on an original 8086).
This said, the x86 instruction set really does have a lot of problems. This reflects the time in which it was made quite well. Very few chips made today have these problems; they've learned from x86's mistakes. Intel itself has hacked bits onto the x86 ISA for decades now, trying to patch up the problems, but they've also made the ISA a complete mess in doing this.
Does x86 have a performance limit? Theoretically, no; it's an instruction set, not a chip. But it's one hell of an instruction set to burden a processor with. IBM chose that chip for its PC line specifically to hobble it; that way the PC could never compete with IBM's then-profitable minicomputer line. This seems to have failed rather miserably, thanks to the amazing work done at Intel/AMD/etc. In time, x86 will die; every computing concept and program dies given enough time (anyone here still seriously use VisiCalc?) Frankly it is past its due; cleaner architectures have existed almost as long as x86 itself. But I suppose we should be patient. The day will come (probably when/if Intel finally gets IA-64 out the door).
...unfortunately, it's a very nasty compatibility issue.
In this case, the incompatible program is a small control panel called WebFree. This is a problem, since WebFree is the most common Mac-based ad-blocking software out there. The only way to make the two work is to disable WebFree's tag blocking, which defeats the purpose of the program.
This is a problem, because WebFree is quite popular on the Mac side of things.
I have never seen it having trouble with a table page, and I challenge you to publish the URL of a valid table page which M16 has trouble with. I simply don't believe you can.
I can't do that. I can, however, publish the URL's of some pages which Mozilla had damn well better be able to render right, but doesn't:
http://www.mozilla.org (they make Mozilla) http://www.mozillazine.org (the main Mozilla info/discussion site out there) http://www.netscape.com (they make a browser based on Mozilla) http://www.aol.com (they own the people who make Mozilla) http://www.w3.org (they make the standards to which Mozilla is supposed to conform)
All of these places are extremely important to Mozilla, and I would think they would take extra care in getting these pages to render. But none of them work. Also interesting to note, since mozilla.org and mozillaZine.org aren't even valid HTML (w3.org, predicatably, is valid, but even it won't render at all).
Are you sure you don't have older versions of Mozilla's shared libraries floating around in/usr lib or/usr/local/lib? I was having crazy problems back around M13 or M14, and I deleted all the libraries from/usr/lib with the same name as those in the Mozilla distribution, and suddenly it worked like a charm. It may be that you're using older shared libraries, because table rendering has been nearly flawless for me since then.
It's true that I started having these problems arouns M13 or so. But this is a fresh install of M16, and it's still not working. I'm not sure what to make of it.
The app itself is greatly improved. Windows no longer draw with all the speed and grace of a snail on barbiturates. The app doesn't feel quite as responsive as earlier milestones (and they have got to get that launch time down), but the overall feel is much better.
The show-stopper, though, is tables. I can't get a single page with tables in it to render correctly. Even mozilla.org's homepage doesn't work, much less Slashdot, Sluggy, and almost everything else nowadays. I haven't been able to do this for several milestones now, though at least now it's consistent; the pages always fail (before it was intermittent). Perhaps, rather than a bug in Gecko, this is a compatibility issue; I don't know which is worse.
My other major complaint: no HTTPS support in MacOS yet. Come on, guys; it's in Windows and Linux, and even Netscape 6 beta 1 got it into their MacOS version (it was unstable as hell but at least it was there); why isn't it in the Mozilla builds? Honest question; the PSM for MacOS obviously exists so I don't understand why it's not put in when it seems to be for the builds on other platforms where it exists.
Skin support is much nicer; it's even easier to get rid of the "modern" retro default. This is an absolute necessity, short of replacing the default skin entirely, so I'm glad to see it's landed. Ditto for full PNG support ("full" PNG support meaning everything, including alpha channels, which were missing until now).
Rendering times, for those pages that worked right, was awesome. I can hardly wait for Fizzilla (the OSX port, using Carbon for the UI but raw BSD for the networking backend); this will truly rule. IE5 on OSX DP4 was respectable (at least for an early developer release, which it was), and OmniWeb was better still, but this has the potential to really clean up.
I'm having trouble figuring out what this is; I must have missed it in the article. Is it a set of really bulky glasses? Is it some kind of contact lens? An implant, maybe?
As an RIT student, I figure I might be able to get in on the ground floor with these experiments (URochester and Bausch & Lomb are both right in town), but I'd only do it if it were in a set of eyeglasses (with or without external accesories).
The reason: I want something easily reversible. 15 years after the first successful eye surgeries to correct nearsightedness, we're finding that the people eventually needed glasses again, this time for farsightedness. The procedure worked all right, but it worked too well.
But if the current technology works as an eyeglass-type thing, where do I sign up? I'm really nearsighted myself, and if this procedure can correct defocus, astigmatism, and deformities they don't even have names for, then I'm all for it.
The issue here isn't censorship or free speech at all. An agreement was made between Adobe and Person X, and Person X violated the terms of the agreement.
That's just it. Person X violated the terms of the agreement. Not MacNN, which never signed that agreement. All Adobe has the right to do is ask MacNN to pull the article, and demand that MacNN provide contact information for their source. Then they can sue the source, who's the one that violated the agreements.
But honestly, I almost wonder if a class-action suit should be brought on the software industry by its users. We buy and pay for their software. They owe us a look into where the products we paid for, and will be paying for again to upgrade, will be going. So what if competitors know what features will be in your software; merely knowing of the existence of a feature doesn't help you in developing a counter-feature of your own. Software will always improve, and as the ones who are paying the software companies' bills we have a right to know what they're doing with our money.
I honestly didn't know that. I doubt the OSI knew it either when they coined their term. Either way, you have my sincere thanks for bringing this to light.
However, I still think we need a new term for the system under which most Linux software is licensed. "Free Software," while certainly a good description, has the unfortunate side effect of having connotations it was not meant to have. This is due to the fact that the English language has no word for "free as in speech" doesn't also mean "free as in beer." So we need to look to other languages, I think. "Software libere" was always one of my favorites. Anyone have any better ideas?
On one hand, the US has some of the most boneheaded, corporate-serving IP laws in the world, and a non-US organization could knock some sense into the Net (and maybe the rest of the US) by making it finally realize that government is there to serve people, not corporations (who ever got the idea that a corporation, which isn't even a living thing much less a human being, should be treated as a person under the law anyway? That's where the mess got started).
On the other hand, the US has heavy influence in WIPO, and will likely use it to pollute the Net with its corporatist ideals (people forget that IP was never meant to benefit the inventors; it was meant to benefit the people by promoting the growth of the arts. Rewarding the inventors/artists/etc. was only a means to that end).
That's the problem with the US nowadays; the government is now little more than a front for corporations, what with all the lobbying and bribery that goes on. This is hardly a Good Thing.
But there are even more sides to the issue. Consider: most other nations restrict free speech (the US is the only nation which even ostensibly guarantees free speech to its citizens in all matters; every other nation in the world either does restrict speech or, because it is not guaranteed, could conceivably do so in the future. And before the Canadians attempt to call me on this, as they've tried before, I suggest they read the charter which grants free speech VERY carefully; it grants free speech but stops short of guaranteeing it). The US could conceivably become polluted with this as well, leaving no haven for truly free speech left on the face of the planet. People have been trying to pollute the free-speech doctrine ever since it was first introduced; at times they've succeeded temporarily but their efforts have always been overturned in the end. But if the influence of the whole rest of the world were turned towards doing it, things could be different.
So I'm wary of this. I doubt it will be a Good Thing. More than likely the status quo won't change, or the world will become polluted with even more corporate greed than before. But even worse things could happen down the road, and this would only be a step towards that.
Just because a company might have to disclose its source doesn't mean that it has to do so in an Open-Source manner. Look at books. The "source" for books is right out there for anyone to see; that's just how books are. But no one's intellectual property is damaged, because just because you can see it doesn't mean you can copy it.
Computer source code is no different. If released in a non-Open-Source manner, it allows people to inspect code, but not copy it. New "features" in other programs are safe; they cannot be copied from the source (and even if they were, if all companies had to disclose their source it would be very easy to check for copied code).
Now, does Open-Source work in this way? The jury's still out on that one. My guess is that IP as we know it would likely cease to exist (it would still be there, but in a form very much unlike what we see IP as today). Other companies could copy Open-Source code, though by its nature they would have to be Open-Source as well in order to do this, so the company from which the code was copied could retaliate by copying some of the copier's code also. This very quickly becomes pointless.
Would it mean that software could not be sold? Absolutely not! This is what most suits, media, etc. don't get. It does mean shifting to a business model which is radically different from the proprietary models we see today. But that alone does not mean it is not possible. Consider this: the proprietary system works on a premise not too much unlike extortion; the user pays for permission to use the program, rather than the program itself. This is obviously not possible with Open-Source, since permission to use the program is implicit; if the software exists you have permission to use it.
However, there are other business models in the world today which could be adapted to be used for software. The one which will probably first be tried, even if it's the most annoying to end-users, is corporate sponsorship. This is what's used for television, radio, and most Websites. You do not pay for permission to watch TV or listen to radio. However, corporations pay for these shows' production, usually in return for advertising space.
Corporate sponsorship not your thing? Try consulting. A firm is paid to either develop completely new software (usually for a company which needs something) or to add new features to an existing piece of software. This is not as unprofitable as it may sound; many consultants make even more money than the highest-paid programmers as most "traditional" software companies (executives are another matter, of course, but executives don't code). Why would this work? Consider the postal service. It's cheap, and it gets the job done. But do you send really important packages through it? Not likely; you'll pay FedEx or UPS or some other delivery service to do it. Why? Because these services are faster and more reliable. The same is true for a consulting firm. Open-SOurce software is always evolving, but it does so in a more or less random way. You can simply not pay and wait for the features you need to evolve, but this will take a long time (and there's no guarantee the features you want will evolve anyway). You pay a consultant because you know the feature will make it into the software, and it will get there much faster than if it were simply coded by unpaid coders in their spare time.
There are other models. One popular idea is to have companies charge only for support. I'm not so sure this one is really all that viable, because not everyone needs or wants support. In the end you'd certainly make enough to fund the support efforts, but would you make enough to fund new programming? I'm not so sure. But this is just one model out of many; no model is appropriate in all cases.
But no matter how you slice it, there are plenty of business models which can be adapted to work with Open-Source software. And simply making companies disclose their source changes nothing at all, if you allow them to continue to keep their programs proprietary (as long as you keep the playing field level, that is, meaning all companies would have to disclose their source).
Guess what? It's time for Yet Another Story About Some People Who Violate Trademarks, Copyrights and Other Forms of Intellectual Property and Then Get Sued by the Rightful Owners Who Are Just Doing What They Have to Do to Maintain Their Rights.
You are technically correct. However, you speak only from the legal side. Justice and Law are two entirely different things. Sometimes they intersect. Sometimes they don't. Here, they don't.
Get a grip, people. This is how the Real World works.
Strange, I don't see MTV sending C&D letters to operators of The Real World fansites... (sorry, I couldn't resist).
Forgery is already a crime in the physical realm. Why, then, should it not be also a crime in the digital? Leave the spam issue out of it, if you want; a forged letter is still a forged letter.
Does Iron Chef have the right to do this? Certainly. No court could possibly say otherwise; this is clearly not a trademark dispute case.
Is Iron Chef right to do this? No. Not in any stretch of the word, particularly not business-wise. As with almost all foreign (and even much domestic) media in the US, it is the fans who spread the word. To hand the fans this kind of slap in the face is simply the mark of an ingrate. These people did your marketing for you, for free, for no other reason than that they loved the show and wanted to see it succeed.
Now, generally marketers are entitled to compensation of some sort. Obviously a fansite isn't entitled to monetary compensation; that's volunteer work. But is it not fair compensation to simply allow such a site to continue to exist?
Certainly Fuji has a right to protect its trademarks. But do they really need protection from harmless fansites? Certainly not. Those fans are doing Fuji a favor, not the other way around. The letters Fuji TV wrote should have been thank-you notes, not cease-and-desist orders.
Yeah yeah yeah. I've heard it all before. It's quite entertaining to read the trolls as they write about in their pathetic throes of anger (and fear?) just because one guy will stand up against them. I'm only surprised they haven't singled me out for repetitive bashing on Slashdot in general, like they did with Signal11 (what's up with the whole "Karma Whore" bit anyway?) But I suppose it's better that way; every post trolling me in the UCSSM rabbit-hole is a troll not posted in Slashdot at large, which is what I'm trying to do in the first place.
The restriction to Open-Source operating systems is a problem. While you can get away with quite a lot of things under the Open-Source banner, this one violates pretty much every guideline set and "example license" out there. GPL and BSD, the two most popular "example licences" out there, certainly don't allow this. It violates the discrimination clauses of the Debian Free Software Guidelinesand the Open-Source Definition. And on top of that, it's just plain not fair to those who choose to use other operating systems.
I never much liked Motif anyway. It was a great piece of work for its time, but it had too much inertia going for it; it eventually seems to have stopped evolving. When that happened, the other toolkits grew to surpass it. It's a shame, but it happens to every piece of software in time. It's the nature of the beast; when software stops evolving, it is ruthlessly cut out of the marketplace by faster-evolving software, which in turn will eventually be cut themselves.
The post and the attached letter seem to be saying two different things.
The post seems to imply that someone is trying to bribe Debian to include KDE with their next release. If that's the case I'm against it; I may or may not follow Debian's ideals but I do think it would be a shame for those ideals to be compromised.
However, the letter seems to say that this is just some guy offering $3000 to KDE if they'll add an exception to the GPL in their license, thus rendering it compatible with KDE. Frankly, I don't know why the hell the KDE team didn't just do this in the beginning. If they had only done that then The Licensing Wars would never have started, Troll would get to keep their precious pseudo-Free license unaltered, KDE would stay GPL, there would be no licensing conflict, Debian could have included KDE, and everyone would have been happy. Of course, then there would have been no entertaining flamewars on Slashdot, but I think that's a small price to pay.
Is this just a case of submission (or posting) error? The post makes this seem like some potential scandal, but the letter by itself is hardly that at all.
you appear to be one of the people in the world that has 1001 ideas HOW to make it a better place, yet you never seem to do anything about it.
And what, exactly, would you suggest I do about this case? I don't even know where this is, for crying out loud, thanks to a woefully underinformative original post.
Im sorry, but it is QUITE easy to track a user that is being attacked on my network. i have many toolos that will tell me the incoming traffic and where it is directed, after i know what ip, i simply check to see what user is currently using that ip. then i have plenty of options.
That's just it. You can do that. An attacker cannot, unless you have problems that are a lot worse than any DoS could ever be. If your dialupo was shooting off at the mouth, then an attacker would have no way of getting his IP address reliably. Sure, he might snatch an IP on Monday, but how would he get that same person's IP on Tuesday? The problem isn't yours, it's the attacker's, and it makes trying to attack a dialup impractical to say the absolute least.
Incidentally, because of this you cannot assume that the person to whom all the traffic is going is actually the intended target. Not off of a single DoS anyway. If the same person kept getting DoS'd, then you might have something to worry about (but if these people can keep finding this person's IP and aren't themselves part of your ISP, you have a lot more to worry about).
DoS attacks are NOT that easy to deal with and it is not simply a matter of calling the cops to get the person picked up it is FAR easier for me to simply kick off the user that is getting attacked...
Easier, yes. But is it ethical? Not by a long shot.
...that, and it will end the attack.
Hell, you can't even be sure of that. Let's take one of my previous examples, where you kick off the dialup, but the attackers were pinging the wrong address. When they learn of their little blunder, what will they do? Quite simple; they'll attack again. So you've kicked off a completely innocent person and you haven't solved your problem at all.
in my eyes...ending the attack is all that matters...
Quite a Machiavellian viewpoint. With an attitude for that you should work for MSN. Or maybe AOL.
and only selfish people that have little to no exp. in business affairs would be dumb enuff to let the business go under to save a little dialup, a dialup that makes very little for the company in the first place
Is a DoS going to make an ISP go under? Hardly. As I said, this is where you bring in the authorities. No, it's not easy to find the attacker. It does take time. But that's the key. The longer a DoS attack goes on, the greater the chances of the attacker being caught. Furthermore, attackers know this. The attack will end once you bring people in, one way or another. Either the attacker will chicken out and run, or the authorities will nail him and at least make him stop attacking you.
Slashdot Mirror
I saw both, and it looked to me as though Disney didn't cut so much as a single frame.
This is probably why they didn't have a big advertising campaign for PM, now that I think about it. The movie would have been too controversial for their taste. But the controversy would have been even worse if they'd cut material, so, cowards that they are, they had no choice but to forego advertising.
It is not illegal by any means to compile and link programs against Qt. The GPL has no restrictions on this.
What it is not legal to do is distribute such programs, because Qt violates one of the terms of the GPL through its discriminatory licensing. It can be made legal again by appending an exception to the GPL.
I develop a GPL'd product for the MacOS which uses PowerPlant, a proprietary toolkit. But my program is perfectly legal to distribute. How, you ask? Because I add the following to the license:
Now, Qt does have a pseudo-Open-Source license, and the code can be distributed (unlike PowerPlant's). This makes a Qt-style exception even easier. In fact, it would take no more than two sentences...
...and all of the licensing isues magically vanish. It really is that simple. Why the KDE team can't swallow their pride and admit that they made a very tiny (and understandable) oversight in their choice of license is beyond me. It's not like it would be that much work; I could do it with a Perl script in five minutes, including the time it takes to write the script. They never struck me as being too arrogant to admit their mistakes; I've seen them do it in the past. If they've kept decent records, they should still have contact information for the developers, not a single one of which would refuse to make the program legally distributable.
Honestly. This issue is so simple, and it can be resolved in a manner that leaves everyone happy, except maybe RMS. What's the big deal about?
It's not an ideological thing either. It's simply bad business.
First, I really don't like the misconception here that all Open-Source software has to be free-beer as well as free-speech. That's a really big problem for this community, namely that we're seen that way. I suppose it's understandable, since pretty much all Open-Source software to date has been free-beer, but that doesn't make it right.
What's my point here? With true Open-Source development, the developer does get compensated. Not necessarily in terms of money, to be sure, but there is the fame aspect, or even just the right to use one's own code as one wishes. And other rewards stem from this too, of course, but I can't list them all here. Consider, for example, Linus Torvalds. I seriously doubt he even needs a resume anymore; all he has to do is say "I wrote Linux" and he could likely just walk into any computer job he wished (well, maybe not at Microsoft, and there are formalities that need to be taken care of, but he could certainly at least get an offer anywhere else).
Perhaps I misread the article, but it seems that a "gated community" developer gets nothing at all. No money. No right to use the software (since it looks like you have to have already purchased it before you can develop, so that right is not a benefit of coding). And the company takes all the credit. Who would want to work in a model like that? It takes the OSS and proprietary models and it mixes the worst of both.
Of course, I could have been misreading the article about the compensation bit. But the fact remains, I see a lot of people here who say this is better than not being paid for OSS. Who says you can't get paid for OSS? You can make some serious money off of software, and in the end the business model you use won't make that much difference. I wonder which piece of software will prove that once and for all. Perhaps Mozilla/Netscape, once it's released, can make its way to obtaining this. Or maybe it will be Darwin; granted it's currently only the core of OSX that is Open-Source, but if the core succeeds there's no reason to believe that more of the OS couldn't possibly follow. Or maybe it will be something else. I don't know. All I know it's only a matter of time before someone hits it. And once that happens, maybe people will finally really see the advantages of the model, unhampered by the myth that you can't make money with it.
The peta.org guys have this one locked up, if they're willing to keep fighting. The right to use another's name, even a trademarked one, has been establ;ished for a long time indeed. I believe it was Jerry Falwell vs. Larry Flynt, which went all the way to the Supreme Court, which settled it once and for all, actually (IANAL, though). Everyone's favorite scumbag beat out everyone's favorite lunatic zealot, anbd rightfully so.
In other words, PETA's case is groundless. I never much liked them anyway, what with their nice little penchant for vandalism (sorry, but pouring red paint over someone's clothing is vandalism) and the hypocritical bit about how eating animals is "unnatural." Which, incidentally, isn't quite true; while it's possible to survive on plant life alone it is not natural to do so (a human cannot survive only on plant life which is indigenous to a single region, meaning the only reason it can be done at all is because technology allows us to ship it in, and thus in a "natural" state a human could not survive on plants alone). Does the fact that vegetarianism isn't "natural" make it bad? Not in the least. But don't pretend it's something that it isn't.
But I'm ranting again, and I'll probably get flamed for that last statement (please, do us all a favor and take it to e-mail rather than Slashdot). Getting back to the point, PETA has no legal grounds to stand on this time. If this guy can just hold on, he'll win.
Oh, and as for the "you have no right to profit from parody" statements I'm hearing, please go tell that to MAD Magazine and its competitors, all of whom have been profiting from parody for decades and are totally legal.
Actually, I have. The QPL is not violated by linking GPL apps to Qt software. I never said it was.
The problem is, when you try to go the other way, you violate the GPL. This is where the trouble comes in. It is the problem with a two-license system like KDE/Qt. It doesn't matter that one license is compatible with the other license. Both licenses must be made to be compatible with each other. This is where KDE hits a snag; the compatibility only works one way.
It's one tiny little sentence. That's all it takes; it really is that simple. Unless the KDE team has been keeping shoddy records (and I doubt they would; they understand that they have an important project so record-keeping is important), they should still have contact information for everyone who contributed. I don't think a single one of them would object to making their software legal to distribute (they gave it to KDE to distribute, after all), and once this is settled then the licensing exception can be added extremely easily; I could do it with a two-line shell script.
And that's really all there is to it. The licensing issues vanish. Debian can include KDE, and the other distros that already do can then do it legally. All the KDE team has to do is swallow their pride, admit they made a little mistake, and add one line to their license to rectify the problem. Are they so arrogant that they can't even admit to one minor oversight? I wouldn't think they would be; they've always led me to believe they were a nice bunch. So what's the problem?
Look, people. Debian doesn't exclude KDE out of spite. I doesn't exclude KDE because it's not Open-Source. It excludes it because, at the moment, IT's NOT FREAKIN LEGAL to include it. This is due to what is, sadly, a rather boneheaded oversight by the KDE team when they chose to use the GPL for their license. The GPL explicitly states that if you can't distribute all the source used in the program under its terms (or less restrictive ones), then you cannot distribute the program at all. QPL is more restrictive than GPL, and therefore it is technically illegal to distribute KDE unless you have explicit permission from Troll Tech.
There's an exception to this rule built into the GPL. This exception states that files which "normally" come with the operating system do not count towards this restriction. This is very important, because without it there's no legal way to make GPL'd software on closed-source operating systems. However, Qt does not qualify for this exception, since it doesn't "normally" come with Linux. You either have to download it or get it in a distro.
Now, this was overlooked by the KDE team when they chose to use the GPL for KDE. It was a rather boneheaded mistake, but an understandable one since, to my knowledge, an issue like this had never come up before. It is also trivially easy to fix. All it takes is one measly sentence in their licenses, where they explicitly state that you are allowed to link against Qt. That is all it takes. And yeah, it's embarassing to admit you made a mistake, but who cares so long as the problem is fixed?
Qt is Open-Source. Debian includes it. KDE is also Open-Source. The problem is that its license clashes with Qt's in a rather nasty way, so it's not legal to include it. All KDE has to do is add one tiny little sentence to their license, and everything is in the free and clear. Much easier than changing the license completely. It holds true to the principles under which KDE was developed (unless arrogance was one of those principles, and I very much doubt that). I do it myself with one of my own projects that uses PowerPlant (a decidedly proprietary application framework for MacOS). So what's the big deal? It's one sentence, and all of the licensing issues vanish.
So, and this is an honest question: why the heck haven't they done it?
OK. Why on earth would they rewrite Office to use Cocoa when they already have code to carbonize? Cocoa is mainly for new apps and rewrites.
You've got a point. But Microsoft themselves said they were going to use Cocoa, and while I don't tend to trust Microsoft on anything major I think this one's probably true.
Heck, it probably is a ploy to make users upgrade their computers, I won't argue that one.
Anyway, for an office suite, Carbon would do just fine. This is not to mention that there are millions of pre G3 Macs in that won't run a Cocoa version (no G3, no OS X, no Cocoa), but will run a Carbon version (which can run on any Mac OS back to 8.1).
Not strictly true. It's well-known that OSX DP4 runs on quite a few pre-G3 Macs (though if it's NuBus-based you're definitely out of luck). Further, it's quite possible that Apple may back-port OSX to the earlier machines (this is already true of Darwin, and it's stupid of Apple not to take advantage of that). Once you've got a basic OS going, porting it to different motherboards with the same architecture isn't that difficult. Writing the software from the ground up with that support, however, can be a very taxing task. The "G3 only" requiirement has been generally agreed to be just a trick by Apple to get the OS out more quickly, with backporting to follow in the spare time between OSX GM and January 2001.
How many secretaries do you think are going to be given shiny new G3s and G4s to run OS X just to use MS Office?
Not many, though be sure to consider that Office is a major app in the workforce, and this sort of thing has happened before. However, there's a greater chance of them being given iMacs (or the rumored "iBoxes") as an upgrade, and these can also run OSX.
The OSX ports of Office will be using Cocoa, Apple's evolution of the OpenStep API's. This is still not a "pure" BSD API, so things still wouldn't be that easy to port.
On the plus side, GNUstep mioght make things easier to port. It depends on how much Cocoa Microsoft uses. But there is the potential.
The x86 architecture has been obsolete for at least ten years. Then again, nothing in the Pentium2-class arena could be called an x86 by my definition; they've done some (admittedly) amazing stuff to keep hacking the speed higher and higher, determined to keep their precious cash cow from dying. The p3, by this time, is so different from the 8086 that thy're hardly the same ship or architecture. The only similarity is in the instruction set, and even then there are differences (let's see you run a KNI-enhanced program on an original 8086).
This said, the x86 instruction set really does have a lot of problems. This reflects the time in which it was made quite well. Very few chips made today have these problems; they've learned from x86's mistakes. Intel itself has hacked bits onto the x86 ISA for decades now, trying to patch up the problems, but they've also made the ISA a complete mess in doing this.
Does x86 have a performance limit? Theoretically, no; it's an instruction set, not a chip. But it's one hell of an instruction set to burden a processor with. IBM chose that chip for its PC line specifically to hobble it; that way the PC could never compete with IBM's then-profitable minicomputer line. This seems to have failed rather miserably, thanks to the amazing work done at Intel/AMD/etc. In time, x86 will die; every computing concept and program dies given enough time (anyone here still seriously use VisiCalc?) Frankly it is past its due; cleaner architectures have existed almost as long as x86 itself. But I suppose we should be patient. The day will come (probably when/if Intel finally gets IA-64 out the door).
...unfortunately, it's a very nasty compatibility issue.
In this case, the incompatible program is a small control panel called WebFree. This is a problem, since WebFree is the most common Mac-based ad-blocking software out there. The only way to make the two work is to disable WebFree's tag blocking, which defeats the purpose of the program.
This is a problem, because WebFree is quite popular on the Mac side of things.
I have never seen it having trouble with a table page, and I challenge you to publish the URL of a valid table page which M16 has trouble with. I simply don't believe you can.
I can't do that. I can, however, publish the URL's of some pages which Mozilla had damn well better be able to render right, but doesn't:
http://www.mozilla.org (they make Mozilla)
http://www.mozillazine.org (the main Mozilla info/discussion site out there)
http://www.netscape.com (they make a browser based on Mozilla)
http://www.aol.com (they own the people who make Mozilla)
http://www.w3.org (they make the standards to which Mozilla is supposed to conform)
All of these places are extremely important to Mozilla, and I would think they would take extra care in getting these pages to render. But none of them work. Also interesting to note, since mozilla.org and mozillaZine.org aren't even valid HTML (w3.org, predicatably, is valid, but even it won't render at all).
Are you sure you don't have older versions of Mozilla's shared libraries floating around in /usr lib or /usr/local/lib? I was having crazy problems back around M13 or M14, and I deleted all the libraries from /usr/lib with the same name as those in the Mozilla distribution, and suddenly it worked like a charm. It may be that you're using older shared libraries, because table rendering has been nearly flawless for me since then.
It's true that I started having these problems arouns M13 or so. But this is a fresh install of M16, and it's still not working. I'm not sure what to make of it.
...but still nowhere near ready for prime time.
The app itself is greatly improved. Windows no longer draw with all the speed and grace of a snail on barbiturates. The app doesn't feel quite as responsive as earlier milestones (and they have got to get that launch time down), but the overall feel is much better.
The show-stopper, though, is tables. I can't get a single page with tables in it to render correctly. Even mozilla.org's homepage doesn't work, much less Slashdot, Sluggy, and almost everything else nowadays. I haven't been able to do this for several milestones now, though at least now it's consistent; the pages always fail (before it was intermittent). Perhaps, rather than a bug in Gecko, this is a compatibility issue; I don't know which is worse.
My other major complaint: no HTTPS support in MacOS yet. Come on, guys; it's in Windows and Linux, and even Netscape 6 beta 1 got it into their MacOS version (it was unstable as hell but at least it was there); why isn't it in the Mozilla builds? Honest question; the PSM for MacOS obviously exists so I don't understand why it's not put in when it seems to be for the builds on other platforms where it exists.
Skin support is much nicer; it's even easier to get rid of the "modern" retro default. This is an absolute necessity, short of replacing the default skin entirely, so I'm glad to see it's landed. Ditto for full PNG support ("full" PNG support meaning everything, including alpha channels, which were missing until now).
Rendering times, for those pages that worked right, was awesome. I can hardly wait for Fizzilla (the OSX port, using Carbon for the UI but raw BSD for the networking backend); this will truly rule. IE5 on OSX DP4 was respectable (at least for an early developer release, which it was), and OmniWeb was better still, but this has the potential to really clean up.
I'm having trouble figuring out what this is; I must have missed it in the article. Is it a set of really bulky glasses? Is it some kind of contact lens? An implant, maybe?
As an RIT student, I figure I might be able to get in on the ground floor with these experiments (URochester and Bausch & Lomb are both right in town), but I'd only do it if it were in a set of eyeglasses (with or without external accesories).
The reason: I want something easily reversible. 15 years after the first successful eye surgeries to correct nearsightedness, we're finding that the people eventually needed glasses again, this time for farsightedness. The procedure worked all right, but it worked too well.
But if the current technology works as an eyeglass-type thing, where do I sign up? I'm really nearsighted myself, and if this procedure can correct defocus, astigmatism, and deformities they don't even have names for, then I'm all for it.
The issue here isn't censorship or free speech at all. An agreement was made between Adobe and Person X, and Person X violated the terms of the agreement.
That's just it. Person X violated the terms of the agreement. Not MacNN, which never signed that agreement. All Adobe has the right to do is ask MacNN to pull the article, and demand that MacNN provide contact information for their source. Then they can sue the source, who's the one that violated the agreements.
But honestly, I almost wonder if a class-action suit should be brought on the software industry by its users. We buy and pay for their software. They owe us a look into where the products we paid for, and will be paying for again to upgrade, will be going. So what if competitors know what features will be in your software; merely knowing of the existence of a feature doesn't help you in developing a counter-feature of your own. Software will always improve, and as the ones who are paying the software companies' bills we have a right to know what they're doing with our money.
I honestly didn't know that. I doubt the OSI knew it either when they coined their term. Either way, you have my sincere thanks for bringing this to light.
However, I still think we need a new term for the system under which most Linux software is licensed. "Free Software," while certainly a good description, has the unfortunate side effect of having connotations it was not meant to have. This is due to the fact that the English language has no word for "free as in speech" doesn't also mean "free as in beer." So we need to look to other languages, I think. "Software libere" was always one of my favorites. Anyone have any better ideas?
On one hand, the US has some of the most boneheaded, corporate-serving IP laws in the world, and a non-US organization could knock some sense into the Net (and maybe the rest of the US) by making it finally realize that government is there to serve people, not corporations (who ever got the idea that a corporation, which isn't even a living thing much less a human being, should be treated as a person under the law anyway? That's where the mess got started).
On the other hand, the US has heavy influence in WIPO, and will likely use it to pollute the Net with its corporatist ideals (people forget that IP was never meant to benefit the inventors; it was meant to benefit the people by promoting the growth of the arts. Rewarding the inventors/artists/etc. was only a means to that end).
That's the problem with the US nowadays; the government is now little more than a front for corporations, what with all the lobbying and bribery that goes on. This is hardly a Good Thing.
But there are even more sides to the issue. Consider: most other nations restrict free speech (the US is the only nation which even ostensibly guarantees free speech to its citizens in all matters; every other nation in the world either does restrict speech or, because it is not guaranteed, could conceivably do so in the future. And before the Canadians attempt to call me on this, as they've tried before, I suggest they read the charter which grants free speech VERY carefully; it grants free speech but stops short of guaranteeing it). The US could conceivably become polluted with this as well, leaving no haven for truly free speech left on the face of the planet. People have been trying to pollute the free-speech doctrine ever since it was first introduced; at times they've succeeded temporarily but their efforts have always been overturned in the end. But if the influence of the whole rest of the world were turned towards doing it, things could be different.
So I'm wary of this. I doubt it will be a Good Thing. More than likely the status quo won't change, or the world will become polluted with even more corporate greed than before. But even worse things could happen down the road, and this would only be a step towards that.
Just because a company might have to disclose its source doesn't mean that it has to do so in an Open-Source manner. Look at books. The "source" for books is right out there for anyone to see; that's just how books are. But no one's intellectual property is damaged, because just because you can see it doesn't mean you can copy it.
Computer source code is no different. If released in a non-Open-Source manner, it allows people to inspect code, but not copy it. New "features" in other programs are safe; they cannot be copied from the source (and even if they were, if all companies had to disclose their source it would be very easy to check for copied code).
Now, does Open-Source work in this way? The jury's still out on that one. My guess is that IP as we know it would likely cease to exist (it would still be there, but in a form very much unlike what we see IP as today). Other companies could copy Open-Source code, though by its nature they would have to be Open-Source as well in order to do this, so the company from which the code was copied could retaliate by copying some of the copier's code also. This very quickly becomes pointless.
Would it mean that software could not be sold? Absolutely not! This is what most suits, media, etc. don't get. It does mean shifting to a business model which is radically different from the proprietary models we see today. But that alone does not mean it is not possible. Consider this: the proprietary system works on a premise not too much unlike extortion; the user pays for permission to use the program, rather than the program itself. This is obviously not possible with Open-Source, since permission to use the program is implicit; if the software exists you have permission to use it.
However, there are other business models in the world today which could be adapted to be used for software. The one which will probably first be tried, even if it's the most annoying to end-users, is corporate sponsorship. This is what's used for television, radio, and most Websites. You do not pay for permission to watch TV or listen to radio. However, corporations pay for these shows' production, usually in return for advertising space.
Corporate sponsorship not your thing? Try consulting. A firm is paid to either develop completely new software (usually for a company which needs something) or to add new features to an existing piece of software. This is not as unprofitable as it may sound; many consultants make even more money than the highest-paid programmers as most "traditional" software companies (executives are another matter, of course, but executives don't code). Why would this work? Consider the postal service. It's cheap, and it gets the job done. But do you send really important packages through it? Not likely; you'll pay FedEx or UPS or some other delivery service to do it. Why? Because these services are faster and more reliable. The same is true for a consulting firm. Open-SOurce software is always evolving, but it does so in a more or less random way. You can simply not pay and wait for the features you need to evolve, but this will take a long time (and there's no guarantee the features you want will evolve anyway). You pay a consultant because you know the feature will make it into the software, and it will get there much faster than if it were simply coded by unpaid coders in their spare time.
There are other models. One popular idea is to have companies charge only for support. I'm not so sure this one is really all that viable, because not everyone needs or wants support. In the end you'd certainly make enough to fund the support efforts, but would you make enough to fund new programming? I'm not so sure. But this is just one model out of many; no model is appropriate in all cases.
But no matter how you slice it, there are plenty of business models which can be adapted to work with Open-Source software. And simply making companies disclose their source changes nothing at all, if you allow them to continue to keep their programs proprietary (as long as you keep the playing field level, that is, meaning all companies would have to disclose their source).
Guess what? It's time for Yet Another Story About Some People Who Violate Trademarks, Copyrights and Other Forms of Intellectual Property and Then Get Sued by the Rightful Owners Who Are Just Doing What They Have to Do to Maintain Their Rights.
You are technically correct. However, you speak only from the legal side. Justice and Law are two entirely different things. Sometimes they intersect. Sometimes they don't. Here, they don't.
Get a grip, people. This is how the Real World works.
Strange, I don't see MTV sending C&D letters to operators of The Real World fansites... (sorry, I couldn't resist).
Forgery is already a crime in the physical realm. Why, then, should it not be also a crime in the digital? Leave the spam issue out of it, if you want; a forged letter is still a forged letter.
Does Iron Chef have the right to do this? Certainly. No court could possibly say otherwise; this is clearly not a trademark dispute case.
Is Iron Chef right to do this? No. Not in any stretch of the word, particularly not business-wise. As with almost all foreign (and even much domestic) media in the US, it is the fans who spread the word. To hand the fans this kind of slap in the face is simply the mark of an ingrate. These people did your marketing for you, for free, for no other reason than that they loved the show and wanted to see it succeed.
Now, generally marketers are entitled to compensation of some sort. Obviously a fansite isn't entitled to monetary compensation; that's volunteer work. But is it not fair compensation to simply allow such a site to continue to exist?
Certainly Fuji has a right to protect its trademarks. But do they really need protection from harmless fansites? Certainly not. Those fans are doing Fuji a favor, not the other way around. The letters Fuji TV wrote should have been thank-you notes, not cease-and-desist orders.
Yeah yeah yeah. I've heard it all before. It's quite entertaining to read the trolls as they write about in their pathetic throes of anger (and fear?) just because one guy will stand up against them. I'm only surprised they haven't singled me out for repetitive bashing on Slashdot in general, like they did with Signal11 (what's up with the whole "Karma Whore" bit anyway?) But I suppose it's better that way; every post trolling me in the UCSSM rabbit-hole is a troll not posted in Slashdot at large, which is what I'm trying to do in the first place.
The restriction to Open-Source operating systems is a problem. While you can get away with quite a lot of things under the Open-Source banner, this one violates pretty much every guideline set and "example license" out there. GPL and BSD, the two most popular "example licences" out there, certainly don't allow this. It violates the discrimination clauses of the Debian Free Software Guidelines and the Open-Source Definition. And on top of that, it's just plain not fair to those who choose to use other operating systems.
I never much liked Motif anyway. It was a great piece of work for its time, but it had too much inertia going for it; it eventually seems to have stopped evolving. When that happened, the other toolkits grew to surpass it. It's a shame, but it happens to every piece of software in time. It's the nature of the beast; when software stops evolving, it is ruthlessly cut out of the marketplace by faster-evolving software, which in turn will eventually be cut themselves.
The post and the attached letter seem to be saying two different things.
The post seems to imply that someone is trying to bribe Debian to include KDE with their next release. If that's the case I'm against it; I may or may not follow Debian's ideals but I do think it would be a shame for those ideals to be compromised.
However, the letter seems to say that this is just some guy offering $3000 to KDE if they'll add an exception to the GPL in their license, thus rendering it compatible with KDE. Frankly, I don't know why the hell the KDE team didn't just do this in the beginning. If they had only done that then The Licensing Wars would never have started, Troll would get to keep their precious pseudo-Free license unaltered, KDE would stay GPL, there would be no licensing conflict, Debian could have included KDE, and everyone would have been happy. Of course, then there would have been no entertaining flamewars on Slashdot, but I think that's a small price to pay.
Is this just a case of submission (or posting) error? The post makes this seem like some potential scandal, but the letter by itself is hardly that at all.
you appear to be one of the people in the world that has 1001 ideas HOW to make it a better place, yet you never seem to do anything about it.
...that, and it will end the attack.
And what, exactly, would you suggest I do about this case? I don't even know where this is, for crying out loud, thanks to a woefully underinformative original post.
Im sorry, but it is QUITE easy to track a user that is being attacked on my network. i have many toolos that will tell me the incoming traffic and where it is directed, after i know what ip, i simply check to see what user is currently using that ip. then i have plenty of options.
That's just it. You can do that. An attacker cannot, unless you have problems that are a lot worse than any DoS could ever be. If your dialupo was shooting off at the mouth, then an attacker would have no way of getting his IP address reliably. Sure, he might snatch an IP on Monday, but how would he get that same person's IP on Tuesday? The problem isn't yours, it's the attacker's, and it makes trying to attack a dialup impractical to say the absolute least.
Incidentally, because of this you cannot assume that the person to whom all the traffic is going is actually the intended target. Not off of a single DoS anyway. If the same person kept getting DoS'd, then you might have something to worry about (but if these people can keep finding this person's IP and aren't themselves part of your ISP, you have a lot more to worry about).
DoS attacks are NOT that easy to deal with and it is not simply a matter of calling the cops to get the person picked up it is FAR easier for me to simply kick off the user that is getting attacked...
Easier, yes. But is it ethical? Not by a long shot.
Hell, you can't even be sure of that. Let's take one of my previous examples, where you kick off the dialup, but the attackers were pinging the wrong address. When they learn of their little blunder, what will they do? Quite simple; they'll attack again. So you've kicked off a completely innocent person and you haven't solved your problem at all.
in my eyes...ending the attack is all that matters...
Quite a Machiavellian viewpoint. With an attitude for that you should work for MSN. Or maybe AOL.
and only selfish people that have little to no exp. in business affairs would be dumb enuff to let the business go under to save a little dialup, a dialup that makes very little for the company in the first place
Is a DoS going to make an ISP go under? Hardly. As I said, this is where you bring in the authorities. No, it's not easy to find the attacker. It does take time. But that's the key. The longer a DoS attack goes on, the greater the chances of the attacker being caught. Furthermore, attackers know this. The attack will end once you bring people in, one way or another. Either the attacker will chicken out and run, or the authorities will nail him and at least make him stop attacking you.
And meep meep to you too.