Is it really GPL'd? There was a/. story on it a while ago, but it just said that Staroffice might be released under the GPL. So far I've seen no evidence at all of that. Just pure speculation. And, given Sun's record, they've not been great fans of the GPL before (they created their own Community License thingie) so I find the speculation of their sudden love to the GPL very hard to believe.
WordPerfect and PhotoPaint in their Linux versions are Win32.exe's, running under Wine. You can check that yourself (the/usr/bin/photopaint thing is a shell script, launching wine and a/usr/lib/corel/[...]/paint.exe which is the actual program). They're not native linux binaries, using libwine.
For a rollout of that size, I'd say that you need two key things: first, either a network or CDR-based install from a cut-down release tailored to your business environment, with all options pre-selected
I think that Red Hat Kickstart is exactly that. It lets you script the answers to all the questions and choices in the installer and perform a fully automated install. Basically, you put the script on a boot diskette and put the cdrom in the cd drive and off you go...
The Netcraft used some 2.2 kernel + Apache, this spec99 test used a 2.3 kernel + Tux.
So yes, I think there has been some serious improvement in kernel 2.3.x land since the Mindcraft test. If you read Ingo's explaining comment from the original/. article (also linked from the second LW article) you'll see that he talks about some of the new performerance tweakings in kernel 2.3 that helped him (async networking etc.).
Just about everyone I know in my city has been using DSL.
I think that's exactly the reason why old telephone modems won't be obsolete yet. Not everybody lives in cities. And getting ADSL or cable modem or something to that part of the population isn't going very fast. It's just to expensive. I can't imagine my parents getting anything close to that any time soon.
On the other hand, I'm enjoying the 10 Mb/s ethernet connection I have had for two and a half years now, since I moved away from home. But one must realize that internet access can be entirely different worlds depending on where you live.
That being said, I am not a lawyer (but I play one on TV) but I find it difficult to believe that the GPL wouldn't be solid. As it only grants you rights you don't have under current law, if you don't agree to the obligations set forth in the GPL, you are still morally bound by the more restrictive requirements of Copyright law. You can still use the code for your own use, but if you distribute your changes, you're opening yourself up for a copyright lawsuit.
IANAL, but a friend of mine is a law student. Now let's get on with it.
I think that the issue is not the direct terms and obligations for you when you accept the GPL and use GPL software that others have written. Those terms are merely additional rights as you say, given under certain circumstances.
What is more troublesome and is the big legal question is the whole relicensing system - when you have made changes to the software and want to give it away to a third party, is that party obliged to accept the GPL because you had to accept the GPL to recieve the code in the first place? The GPL clearly says so, but it may not be so simple in the eyes of the law.
"Contract inheritance" isn't something that is easily taken upon. Remember first sale on books: Although the author always has and always will have the copyright on the book, issuing some sort of contract inside the book cover saying that "by bying this book you agree to never resell it for less than [insert price]" was deemed illegal. Issuing a form of software contract (including the GPL), restricting further transfer in the means of keeping that license applied to the product and it's relicensing for ever may be very, very close to this.
All the sites that were linked had a www. in front of them.
I think that either is the person who put that press release together not very informed about the way the Internet works (sites without a www. are still linkable web sites, dammit!) or the press release was prepared in a fancy word processor with broken link logic (i.e. it automatically turns www.something.org into clickable links, but not something.org).
This is what I see when I ftp to my nearest Red Hat mirror:
dir bind* -rw-rw-r-- 2 johan ftpadm 1672369 Mar 8 20:40 bind-8.2.2_P5-9.i386.rpm -rw-rw-r-- 2 johan ftpadm 405796 Mar 8 20:40 bind-devel-8.2.2_P5-9.i386.rpm -rw-rw-r-- 2 johan ftpadm 656849 Mar 8 20:40 bind-utils-8.2.2_P5-9.i386.rpm
And these packages aren't even updates, they're the packages shipped with Red Hat 6.2. So, no, the current Red Hat packages are safe in this sense, and I think you're wrong.
Does it really mean anything? I don't know if you haven't been reading Slashdot for a while, but I think the impression you get if you do is that prior art seldom means anything except in theory; at least it doesn't automatically protect the original inventor from the granting of a stupid patent to the very first person who filed a patent application, like you believe.
Go read the debate between Tim O'Reilly and the Patent Office Director, or the comments in the Slashdot story. The thing is the rule called "Rule 56", basically saying that the patent applicant is required "to supply to the office all the prior art of which they're aware that's material to the examination of that application" which leaves the giant loop hole of "Ooops, we didn't know that at the time of our application, we're so sorry" and thereby leaves a lot of room for the patent to still be considered valid (if you don't have hard evidence that the patent applicant knew about it before they filed their patent application).
I also question your comments about other countries' patent laws. I know for example that the Swedish system most probably will invalidate a patent if there is later presented evidence that there was prior art before the patent application.
I think the "loop hole" in that license statement is in the sentence
Further conditions of transfer may be included in your EULA
In other words, if what you have is a OEM not-for-resale-because-it-came-bundled-with-your-c omputer Windows package, chances are that there might be an additional clause in that specific EULA for that product saying that this product may not be transfered to another party seperated from the hardware it came bundled with or without written permission from Microsoft or such a thing.
Of course, the legality/enforcability of such licenses may still be questioned...
Re:Even trickier than we thought
on
Inside Transmeta
·
· Score: 1
Wasn't this exactly the same thing that nearly made the original Pentium Pro a disaster for Intel?
The Pentium Pro hade serious performerance troubles running 16-bit code, and thus performed very poorly with Windows95 (but performed just fine with everything else). But the market decided that the lacking support for Windows 95 was unacceptable and the Pentium Pro sales were a lot under the by Intel expected sales figures. It never made it to much else than servers and high-end workstations. Granted, all chips are very pricey when new and are often found in servers and workstations at first, but then comes the time when the sales of the chip increase and the price drop and the chip appears in consumer-priced systems, but the Pentium Pro never made it that far. The original Pentium series continued to sell very well, and later got the MMX extensions. After that, the work began with the Pentium II, basically with a modified Pentium Pro core (for better 16-bit performerance) and the MMX extensions.
Didn't Transmeta learn from the Pentium Pro disaster? It's hard to think that they didn't know about it. Anybody at that time who claimed to be even mildly interested in computer hardware and read reviews knew that the Pentium Pro was a no-no in a system intended to run Windows 95, due to it's lame 16-bit performerance.
But then again, the article states that most key people on Transmeta were senior hardware engineers from Sun and other non-Intel companies, so maybe it's not strange after all that they didn't ever hear about the problems with a specific wintel combo.
I'm just curious... Why doesn't Helix (and many other big free software projects) use a dedicated, password-protected, server for the mirrors to fetch their stuff from?
Red Hat does this - whenever a new release is out, they instantly put it on a server where only mirror maintainers have access to it. First when they've finished uploading it there, they put it on their main server and announce it. Their main ftp site will of course bli slashdotted instantly, but all the mirrors will be able to get it immediately from that special mirror server.
This is of course given that the main ftp server and the server for the mirrors is on different networks - bandwidth is the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean mentos, right?
MNG = pixelized animation
SVG = vector graphics animation
Sorry, just realized my mistake.
Am I missing something here?
Correct.
This is what Corel's using, so there's no emulation involved. It's a native app.
No, it's not . See my other post on that topic.
This is a (-1, Overrrated)
Correct.
Is it really GPL'd? There was a /. story on it a while ago, but it just said that Staroffice might be released under the GPL. So far I've seen no evidence at all of that. Just pure speculation.
And, given Sun's record, they've not been great fans of the GPL before (they created their own Community License thingie) so I find the speculation of their sudden love to the GPL very hard to believe.
WordPerfect and PhotoPaint in their Linux versions are Win32 .exe's, running under Wine. You can check that yourself (the /usr/bin/photopaint thing is a shell script, launching wine and a /usr/lib/corel/[...]/paint.exe which is the actual program).
They're not native linux binaries, using libwine.
As I said, check for yourself.
I think that Red Hat Kickstart is exactly that. It lets you script the answers to all the questions and choices in the installer and perform a fully automated install. Basically, you put the script on a boot diskette and put the cdrom in the cd drive and off you go...
Sorry, replace "Netcraft" with "Mindcraft test". Duh.
So yes, I think there has been some serious improvement in kernel 2.3.x land since the Mindcraft test. If you read Ingo's explaining comment from the original /. article (also linked from the second LW article) you'll see that he talks about some of the new performerance tweakings in kernel 2.3 that helped him (async networking etc.).
Hint: The above was sarcasm.
I think that's exactly the reason why old telephone modems won't be obsolete yet. Not everybody lives in cities. And getting ADSL or cable modem or something to that part of the population isn't going very fast. It's just to expensive. I can't imagine my parents getting anything close to that any time soon.
On the other hand, I'm enjoying the 10 Mb/s ethernet connection I have had for two and a half years now, since I moved away from home. But one must realize that internet access can be entirely different worlds depending on where you live.
No, you just have to do a lot of attempts. I'm getting it right now, using wget. It's dog slow though.
IANAL, but a friend of mine is a law student. Now let's get on with it.
I think that the issue is not the direct terms and obligations for you when you accept the GPL and use GPL software that others have written. Those terms are merely additional rights as you say, given under certain circumstances.
What is more troublesome and is the big legal question is the whole relicensing system - when you have made changes to the software and want to give it away to a third party, is that party obliged to accept the GPL because you had to accept the GPL to recieve the code in the first place? The GPL clearly says so, but it may not be so simple in the eyes of the law.
"Contract inheritance" isn't something that is easily taken upon. Remember first sale on books: Although the author always has and always will have the copyright on the book, issuing some sort of contract inside the book cover saying that "by bying this book you agree to never resell it for less than [insert price]" was deemed illegal. Issuing a form of software contract (including the GPL), restricting further transfer in the means of keeping that license applied to the product and it's relicensing for ever may be very, very close to this.
I think that either is the person who put that press release together not very informed about the way the Internet works (sites without a www. are still linkable web sites, dammit!) or the press release was prepared in a fancy word processor with broken link logic (i.e. it automatically turns www.something.org into clickable links, but not something.org).
I think that scenario 2 is the most probable.
http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?i d=11876
Cheers.
This is what I see when I ftp to my nearest Red Hat mirror:
dir bind*
-rw-rw-r-- 2 johan ftpadm 1672369 Mar 8 20:40 bind-8.2.2_P5-9.i386.rpm
-rw-rw-r-- 2 johan ftpadm 405796 Mar 8 20:40 bind-devel-8.2.2_P5-9.i386.rpm
-rw-rw-r-- 2 johan ftpadm 656849 Mar 8 20:40 bind-utils-8.2.2_P5-9.i386.rpm
And these packages aren't even updates, they're the packages shipped with Red Hat 6.2. So, no, the current Red Hat packages are safe in this sense, and I think you're wrong.
Go read the debate between Tim O'Reilly and the Patent Office Director, or the comments in the Slashdot story. The thing is the rule called "Rule 56", basically saying that the patent applicant is required "to supply to the office all the prior art of which they're aware that's material to the examination of that application" which leaves the giant loop hole of "Ooops, we didn't know that at the time of our application, we're so sorry" and thereby leaves a lot of room for the patent to still be considered valid (if you don't have hard evidence that the patent applicant knew about it before they filed their patent application).
I also question your comments about other countries' patent laws. I know for example that the Swedish system most probably will invalidate a patent if there is later presented evidence that there was prior art before the patent application.
Further conditions of transfer may be included in your EULA
In other words, if what you have is a OEM not-for-resale-because-it-came-bundled-with-your-c omputer Windows package, chances are that there might be an additional clause in that specific EULA for that product saying that this product may not be transfered to another party seperated from the hardware it came bundled with or without written permission from Microsoft or such a thing.
Of course, the legality/enforcability of such licenses may still be questioned...
The Pentium Pro hade serious performerance troubles running 16-bit code, and thus performed very poorly with Windows95 (but performed just fine with everything else). But the market decided that the lacking support for Windows 95 was unacceptable and the Pentium Pro sales were a lot under the by Intel expected sales figures. It never made it to much else than servers and high-end workstations. Granted, all chips are very pricey when new and are often found in servers and workstations at first, but then comes the time when the sales of the chip increase and the price drop and the chip appears in consumer-priced systems, but the Pentium Pro never made it that far.
The original Pentium series continued to sell very well, and later got the MMX extensions. After that, the work began with the Pentium II, basically with a modified Pentium Pro core (for better 16-bit performerance) and the MMX extensions.
Didn't Transmeta learn from the Pentium Pro disaster? It's hard to think that they didn't know about it. Anybody at that time who claimed to be even mildly interested in computer hardware and read reviews knew that the Pentium Pro was a no-no in a system intended to run Windows 95, due to it's lame 16-bit performerance.
But then again, the article states that most key people on Transmeta were senior hardware engineers from Sun and other non-Intel companies, so maybe it's not strange after all that they didn't ever hear about the problems with a specific wintel combo.
And, just for the sake of it, you might want to check out the new look on www.gnome.org... ;)
Red Hat does this - whenever a new release is out, they instantly put it on a server where only mirror maintainers have access to it. First when they've finished uploading it there, they put it on their main server and announce it. Their main ftp site will of course bli slashdotted instantly, but all the mirrors will be able to get it immediately from that special mirror server.
This is of course given that the main ftp server and the server for the mirrors is on different networks - bandwidth is the problem.