Ummm, isn't OpenOfice administered seperate from Sun? In which case why would an agreement with Sun cover OpenOffice?
Exactly because it's not controlled by Sun. Everyone is focusing on "What is Microsoft's intent." Remember that a contract is an agreement between two parties. It could simply be that Sun is taking the stance that "We have no control over OOo therefore we cannot include OOo in our cross-patenting agreement." The fact that their is an OOo "relationship" with StarOffice, would merit special concern on the Sun side of the bargaining table.
It sounds more like you're concerned about your own visions of job security [by being the only one who will be able to support the system] rather than the reality of the situation
I'm with him. The "reality of the situation" is that Debian is "not supported" by commercial vendors because somehow "the market" has come to define Linux==Redhat. Guess what, though? The vendors are Johnny-come-latelies. We've already established Debian as our standard distribution years ago and the pure fact is that there is no reason an application that runs on one distro will not run on another.
Why should I change my company's standard, or have a bastard one-off machine with different operating procedures, in order to run an application?
What do you do if you need multiple commercial apps: Some are "supported" on RedHat, some are "supported" on Suse, and others supported on our own 'custom' Linux plaform" (yes, I've heard that in sales pitches). If a vendor wants to be a Linux vendor, then that's what they need to be - a Linux vendor, NOT a distro vendor. If I wanted a seperate server for every application, I'd just buy the Windows version. I've turned away vendors who wouldn't support Debian and implemented the majority of the functionality of their products on my own. There's enough open source components out there that can be glued together to hit 80% of the commercial functionality with a labor investment that pales next to the cost of "Enterprise" software.
So to Dear Mr. Vendor, "It's an Open Platform!" Tell me what libraries you need, tell me if you need special versions, tell me where your files are expected to be, tell me how to configure your application and I'll build the damn.deb for you even if you only provide binaries. If you need specific versions of libraries, I'll package those seperatel as well and hack LD_LIBRARY_PATH into your scripts, too.
I'm the customer. Work with me. By the time we're done, your product will run on any distro. All you'll need is a few Intel boxes, or a few UML images so you can do QA and honestly support Linux. In the end, you'll understand your own application better than you do now[1].
1. See "Solaris supported" application installation manuals that say "Select OEM install" because the developers are so uncertain as to what libraries they actually use that they think their application might need to dynamically write a device driver for non-existent hardware at some point in time.
Funny, yes, but probably true. If these companies are in breach of contract for selling chips to "unathorized" DVD player builders, then one has to assume the someone, somewhere, is buying those "unauthorized" players.
Maybe the chip manufacturers are starting to realize that they're better off without the CSS contract restrictions and selling things people actually do want to buy. IIRC, it's called "meeting customer demand."
What does that mean? It means that the government realizes it will get innocent people with similar names, and that it is fine with that. It has no motivation for getting people off that list. Delaying people at the airport does not cost the government one cent. Indeed, they can use it as "proof" that they are doing something about terrorism.
Real security professionals have a name for this. It's called a false positive and should be considered a security failure.
My point is: If they find themselves, through no fault of their own, in a position like SCO claims to be in, how do they defend their IP without violating the GPL?
Go through all the source they are currently distributing and mark that which they claim copyright to. This, of course, would require that they identify the code which a) they have refused to do (IMO, because it doesn't exist) and b) would provide the Linux authors exactly the information they need to write around it.
If a GPL author presses them to cease and desist distributing GPL code commingled with their precious un-GPL'ed IP, then to comply with the GPL they must either stop distributing Linux or un-un-GPL their precious IP. The bottom line is that if their claim to intellectual rights in Linux is true, all distribution of Linux must cease, including theirs.
If SCO really wanted to protect their IP, they would have served proper notice as to what it was and demanded it be removed. If SCO really wanted to kill Linux, they would have un-GPL'ed "their" pieces and gone back to their "pure" SCO UNIX product line. Neither of these is what they want. SCO UNIX has failed in the market against Linux. Linux is what customers want. SCO wants to own Linux.
Failure to do anything at all to prevent further infringement is likely to be considered
estoppel.
True, but that would have required a clue, something which I never claimed they had;) Unisys has a long history of clueless, and occasionally criminal, management.
GIF was developed as an image format by Compuserve (I think). They used LZW compression, which was a Unisys patented compression algorithm, but they never notified, let alone licensed LZW. Unisys, being the mainframe shop it was, didn't even notice for a long time. When they did, they pressed the patent issue.
The important point is that they didn't press the LZW patent because of it's use in GIFs, per se. They pressed it because it was an important patent to them at the time for other compression purposes. Unisys was big in air-traffic control and a variety of other communications applications that used LZW for dynamic, real-time, streaming compression (which is about the only application it was still good for when you look at the other algorithms available, even then). If they didn't press it on LZW in GIFs, they could have lost the ability to press it in those other lines.
Remember that uncompressed GIFs did not infringe, they asked only for licensing on commercial use, and as the article states they did make not-for-profit licenses available. Questions like "What if a licensed program made the GIF, but I editted it with Gimp" made no sense to them. (Besides, Gimp didn't exist then either;)
I was a Unisys systems programmer at the time, and I didn't know much about "open source", so I suspect Unisys management didn't have much of a clue either. I seriously doubt they had (or even now have) any idea how the community reacted to that issue. No one ever really grasped that it was Compuserve's fault for pushing a patent encumbered format (with the patent held by someone else) as a "standard". Unisys was caught by surprise and acted in the way most any company would at that time.
Times change. I learned about open source (and TCP/IP, and Unisys' brand new C compiler, and how a 36-bit word architecture complicates a C libarary implementation) by porting a subset of NCSA's httpd server to OS/2200, partially because the GIF issue introduced comp.sys.unisys to open source. (iirc, this was when Mosaic was the browser and the "graphical web" was barely graphical at all.) Some time later, Unisys demo'ed their ClearPath model for us and said "they were even working on a web server for it". I wasn't there, but a co-worker donned a medieval french helmet and said "I doubt if we're interested. We already have one, you see!"
So Unisys and I went different ways (although I did get a "wayback-machine call" for Unisys help last week). I moved on into UNIX, self-taught by downloading Slackware and trying to get it to do anything on Token Ring. Unisys moved on to buy Burroughs and into the "datacenter push" of Microsoft. One of us apparently learns quicker;) Still, the 2200 was seriously unstoppable from both a hardware and a software standpoint, and even attemting to use MVS or anything else on the "newer" IBM 390 made me want to run screaming to the hills.
If Unisys has woken up, they have the potential to do incredible things with hardware and helping them release that hardware from the constraints of Windows is a huge opportunity for both Unisys and the Linux community. If the haven't woken up, then they will once the see what Linux can do on their hardware. I was on vacation when they demo'ed the ClearPath and heard I had already written a web server on their previous (non-Intel) hardware and the day I got back a Unisys SE was waiting in my cube to ask "how'ed you do that!". He was fascinated and ate up everything about open source I had to offer (sadly, not much at the time).
Bottom line: What does it hurt us to give them a chance? If they screw up, it's going to be their fault. We've already shown that we can help any company that really wants to play nice. If we snub them for what we see as a past slight to open source, when they probably didn't know what open source was, we present ourselves as being petty about something that we still, as a community, fail to acknowledge was a situation not of their own making.
Where does most the spam, viruses and trojans come from? 0wning Windows. Despite the tongue-in-cheek presentation, the article is basically accurate. It's truth is what makes it so funny. But it's only funny because I don't have to support any Windows boxes.
If OSS really takes off in California, maybe other states will turn to this justification.
Perhaps more importantly, such states will take an active interest in presenting the risks software patents pose to their use of OSS to trim budgets (as Munich has).
US Copyright laws Fair Use clauses do not support complete copying of copyrighted goods, only computer software has an exemption to allow you to back it up. Fair use clauses give you the power to use small, insignificant portions of the copyrighted material in other works, eg quoted sources.
2. As you state, the copyright owner DOES NOT have to make it easy or able for you to exercise fair use clauses. I dont see the fair use in giving copies out to 9 other people, thats not fair use, thats distribution.
Sony v. Betamax added:
3. The right to "time and space shift"
Unfortunately #2 has also been upheld in court which, when combined with the DMCA gives the copyright owner the ability to make fair use illegal.
Whether distributing to 9 other people constistutes fair use or distribution is up to a court to decide. Right now, the FCC deems it fair use, under TiVo's proposed restricted distribution mechanism, so that's a fairly significant step decision that will be considered in any U.S. court.
Because you can't verify that what the paper says you voted is how the computer actually allocated the vote. The only way is to print a voter verifiable, phisycal ballot, one that clearly shows all choices available and a single simple mark beside the selected choice. No bar codes or anything else that a computer might interpret differenty than a human. (Think of the "complete the line" type of ballot, where your choice has a complete line and your non-choices have broken lines.) The voter then walks the ballot over to a counter box that reads the selections and tallies the votes. This type of counter already exists and is in use. The only change is that the computer printed ballot doesn't make squiggly, hard-to-interpret lines. No "butterfly ballots" where choices appear to line up differently. No "hanging chad." No extraneous pen marks.
If any questions arise regarding the outcome, people sit down and count the same paper ballots. The numbers had better be pretty durn close or someone goes to jail.
In case of publishers, they poured lots of money into marketing your name and they don't want you to go and take advantage of all that marketing effort, so as long as the public doesn't associate your nom de plume with your previously marketed name, you're OK.
For example, the artist formerly known as the artist formerly known as "Prince", who is now known as "Prince" because that contract expired.
Do you honestly think that we can restrict their money, and keep them to the spirit of the law, when we can't even keep them in check now?
Yes, but you're right that it will take a lot more than just saying "don't do that" as long as they can continue doing "almost, but not quite, that."
We need to take the foxes out of the henhouse before we staple the wire netting in place. Otherwise, we're just ensconing the foxes right where they want to be.
So, you're volunteering to be my write-in VP candidate?
The Declaration of Independence came first and defined what the U.S. stood for and why it was breaking off. The Constitution defined how it would function. The Declaration is the requirements statement. The Constitution is the implementation.
Now, the RIAA and MPAA can set up PACs(that are segregated financially) that individual actual people can give money to and those PACs can give money to campaigns.
You're splitting hairs. How the money gets routed is not the point. The fact that it does get routed is. This is not chump change.
If you're ever curious as to *where* the money is going, all PACs have to file reports with the FEC. So if you're giving an organization money and don't know who they're giving money to, it's your own damn fault.
I can't disagree. The **AA's are an extreme example, and not likely to be fed money from Joe & Jane Average Citizen, but orgs like the "Policeman's Benevolent Fund", the various labor unions, even Wal-Mart don't necessarily present themselves to contributers as political funding organizations.
Please explain why my tax dollars fund public schools when I don't have any kids. There are things the government does that don't directly benefit you. Deal with it.
I feel your pain;), BUT funding education can at least be argued to be for the betterment of society as a whole and no one can legally be excluded from the public school system for any reason, least of all for holding dissenting opinions. Political primaries do exclude people who (at least have the honesty to) say they disagree. They should not be funded by anyone's tax dollars.
Hard work is more than just "voting your conscience". It's recruiting and fielding candidates at the local level. It's about building a bench of legitimate candidates rather than unqualified nutcases looking for attention. It's building party infrastructure from the ground up that'll last for years instead of from the top down with a celebrity candidate that'll be gone after November.
I agree in principle, but there's an underlying assumption behind your argument that you don't seem to grasp: What if I don't want another political party? What if I want to support candidates based on their individual merits? Of course, your point about getting out and working to support those candidates still applies, but it's no longer about "building party infrastructure from the ground up that'll last for years", because I see that as "building another source of power that will eventually become corrupt."
I appreciate your points, but they get lost in your railing against the specific personalities that have managed to get enough media attention to become widely visible. I believe the strangle-hold the 2 party monopoly has on the media and the American consciousness is what makes it impractical for a normal, rational, independent-thinking individual to be considered a "viable" candidate for any office beyond the municipal or county levels. Being "eccentric" is about the only way a candidate will get national press.
Certainly, the work for citizen independence has to start at the local levels, but that opens up another cans of worms: the non-existence of any independent local news organizations.
The funding from PACs comes from contributions made by individual citizens. Ditto for party contributions. It's just a different way of bundling the money.
But the individuals are frequently unaware of how that money is being directed. For example, how many AAA members know how much AAA has spent working against public transportation? I suppose you could say that RIAA and MPAA funding comes from individuals as well, but if it is, it's nested too deeply. Individual->**AA member->**AA->candidate.
In many states(if not all), 3rd parties are included in the primaries. For instance, here in Washington State, when I go to the primary in September, I'll have a choice of Republican, Democrat and Libertarian primary ballots.
Doesn't help me, since I'm registered as "NO party preference." Please explain why my tax dollars fund the primary process when I don't have a voice. I don't object to party primaries, but that's what party money should be spent on. It's administrative overhead for the party.
Re: Nader, Dean, Perot, Wallace, etc., Every once in a while an individual rises p to challenge to two parties and what happens? The media reports on "how they may 'swing' the election" implicitly stating that they cannot possibly win. If you recall, exit polls showed that if everyone who really wanted to vote for Perot did, he would have won. The combination of unbalance reporting and party FUD convinced them that they would be "wasting thier vote" and/or "handing the election to [fill in bad guy here]." Score another victory for FUD.
As to getting of your ass and doing something, that was my point. Voting your conscience by not letting the partisan mind-game players talk you out of voting for your choice has consistently worked. We have simply have to stop letting them scare us into not doing what we believe is right.
Hmm... Freedom of Speech? Right to be secure in private property? Any of that...
So let's see... People have rights, legal fictions (corporations/PACS/parties) consist of people, therefore legal fictions have rights. I think that's the legal precedent that got us into this mess.
No one can or should stop the people that comprise those entities from speaking their minds or contributing to campaigns. As individuals, they have those rights. As individuals, they can send out communications to their employees/interests/members urging them to do likewise. Whose rights are being abridged?
Campaign contributions are already limited (with alternate paths around the limitations big enough to drive a truck through), so following your assumption, we are alreading restricting freedom of speech. I don't think that's true.
(And I don't get where you pulled the right to be secure in private property from.)
We all, liberals and conservatives, need to push the government to fix the voting system.
It's not the voting system. It's the funding system.
How about we pass a law that says only U.S. citizens can contribute or financially support a candidate? No PAC funding. No "soft" party funding. No corporate funding. No foriegn funding. If any of those want to help a candidate financially, they have to get out and get citizens to open their wallets for their chosen cattle-herder.
(And don't tell me that this infringes those "entities" First Ammendment rights. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights" refers to mankind and does not include some legal fiction called a "natural person")
That would make elections very different, don't you think?
Here's another one: No one, and I mean no one, gets on any ballot anywhere without a petition signed by some number of registered voters. Why should citizens of every party be funding primary elections for members of just 2. Want to make a difference? Change your registration to "No Party Preference" and bitch like hell that your funding primaries for parties you don't belong to. It's called "taxation without representation." If everyone who feels neither the Demicans or Repulicats represent them did this, I believe the majority of voters would be thus registered and the parties would have no justification for imposing their candidates on a ballot.
Contrary to popular opinion, the "two party system" is not a U.S. mandate, it's just tradition. The 2 we have now are not the 2 we have always had, but they've rigged the system so heavily that unless we act they will be from this point on.
We do not have a democracy in the U.S. Worse, we no longer have a democratic republic (which is what it was really designed to be.) What we have is a contributoracracy, and that's the way it will stay until we cut off the cash flow from anywhere other than the people. The ones as in "government of the people, by the people and for the people."
Freaking parties, committees and corporations are NOT people. People - WE - are not consumers, customers, constituents, markets or even voters. By law, WE ARE THE GOVERNEMENT, but only if we are willing to take responsibility for governing those we elect to serve us.
So get out, not only to vote, but to make your voice heard and your presence felt. Unless and until we become as vocal and as demanding as our "special interest" opponents they will continue to win. If a third party candidate represents your ideals VOTE FOR THEM. To try to fudge your vote to manipulate who among the others doesn't represent you less is like putting all your money on 42 at the roulette table. It only goes to 36, so you're not going to win. But there is no chance in hell that you'll actually change the numbers on the wheel either.
(If you can't find anyone else, write-in "mwa on slashdot". If nothing else, it will freak the power people out to see anybody get more than a handful of write-ins;)
I think your perception of Python's OOP implementation is dated. Try the following:
$ python Python 2.3.4 (#2, Jul 5 2004, 09:15:05) [GCC 3.3.4 (Debian 1:3.3.4-2)] on linux2 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> dir("1") >>> dir(1)
I can't post the results due to slashcode's "too many junk characters" attitude problem. The bottom line is that even "native" types in Python are now objects.
Thanks for the link. I watch the EFF Action Center Alerts by having the slashbox on my front page. Apparently the feed has not been maintained, as there are several alerts that don't show in the feed. I've emailed the EFF webmaster encouraging them to make RSS feed maintenance a priority.
I encourage anyone else to do likewise. RSS has no value if it's stagnate and the EFF feed has the potential for generating a lot of faxes/emails on important on-line issues.
I don't quite follow. Are you saying that open source applications/suites/etc "had the answers" b/c you could modify them? Or just that there were free alternatives for these needs that, for whatever reason, weren't reasonably covered by COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf, fwiw) software?
They had the answers because they did the basic task well and could monitor constantly, regardless of the status of licensing. Regardless, your point on a bug-free API for customizing software would help make the COTS solutions easier to swallow. But if you don't have a license to monitor box X and box X dies....
And is your "flashy" the same as "good, user-friendly design", which has been a (imo) level-headed complaint against many open source projects? Careful you don't code for the coders and miss the boat. Again, not trying to put words into your mouth; I couldn't quite follow there.
No. "Flashy" is the "shiny things" in the brochure that make executives drool but are little practical value to the technicians. My favorite is "alert maps" with different colors for different conditions. I've put all our devices on an OpenView map and you can't make out the icons for the lines. Of course, you can "containerize" and have the colors "bubble-up" to where you have a reasonable view in front of you but then you can't tell what's borked until you spend 10 minutes "drilling down."
Hey, if I could sit around on my hands and watch a blinky thingy to make sure it's green, fine. More practically, I just want a page that tells me what's broke, where it is and what the business impact is. As far as I'm concerned, a monitoring application should not have to be monitored by a human.
If so, it doesn't add much value. Yes, the user interfaces on some OSS products, uhm, lack artistic quality. But since you can drop code into them to interface directly to your notification and escalation procedures it's well worth the trade off.
I agree the overall argument applies to well designed software with accessible interfaces, but the point still stands that "capitalist" companies can leverage open source in an economically effective and technically viable manner that is far, far removed from the "charity" basis Photo_Nut seems to see as the only basis for OSS existence.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly because it's not controlled by Sun. Everyone is focusing on "What is Microsoft's intent." Remember that a contract is an agreement between two parties. It could simply be that Sun is taking the stance that "We have no control over OOo therefore we cannot include OOo in our cross-patenting agreement." The fact that their is an OOo "relationship" with StarOffice, would merit special concern on the Sun side of the bargaining table.
I'm with him. The "reality of the situation" is that Debian is "not supported" by commercial vendors because somehow "the market" has come to define Linux==Redhat. Guess what, though? The vendors are Johnny-come-latelies. We've already established Debian as our standard distribution years ago and the pure fact is that there is no reason an application that runs on one distro will not run on another.
Why should I change my company's standard, or have a bastard one-off machine with different operating procedures, in order to run an application?
What do you do if you need multiple commercial apps: Some are "supported" on RedHat, some are "supported" on Suse, and others supported on our own 'custom' Linux plaform" (yes, I've heard that in sales pitches). If a vendor wants to be a Linux vendor, then that's what they need to be - a Linux vendor, NOT a distro vendor. If I wanted a seperate server for every application, I'd just buy the Windows version. I've turned away vendors who wouldn't support Debian and implemented the majority of the functionality of their products on my own. There's enough open source components out there that can be glued together to hit 80% of the commercial functionality with a labor investment that pales next to the cost of "Enterprise" software.
So to Dear Mr. Vendor, "It's an Open Platform!" Tell me what libraries you need, tell me if you need special versions, tell me where your files are expected to be, tell me how to configure your application and I'll build the damn .deb for you even if you only provide binaries. If you need specific versions of libraries, I'll package those seperatel as well and hack LD_LIBRARY_PATH into your scripts, too.
I'm the customer. Work with me. By the time we're done, your product will run on any distro. All you'll need is a few Intel boxes, or a few UML images so you can do QA and honestly support Linux. In the end, you'll understand your own application better than you do now[1].
1. See "Solaris supported" application installation manuals that say "Select OEM install" because the developers are so uncertain as to what libraries they actually use that they think their application might need to dynamically write a device driver for non-existent hardware at some point in time.
Maybe the chip manufacturers are starting to realize that they're better off without the CSS contract restrictions and selling things people actually do want to buy. IIRC, it's called "meeting customer demand."
I think you're looking for this.
Real security professionals have a name for this. It's called a false positive and should be considered a security failure.
Yeah, that's a big improvement. Especially since terrorists are bound by their code of ethics to always give their correct name.
Go through all the source they are currently distributing and mark that which they claim copyright to. This, of course, would require that they identify the code which a) they have refused to do (IMO, because it doesn't exist) and b) would provide the Linux authors exactly the information they need to write around it.
If a GPL author presses them to cease and desist distributing GPL code commingled with their precious un-GPL'ed IP, then to comply with the GPL they must either stop distributing Linux or un-un-GPL their precious IP. The bottom line is that if their claim to intellectual rights in Linux is true, all distribution of Linux must cease, including theirs.
If SCO really wanted to protect their IP, they would have served proper notice as to what it was and demanded it be removed. If SCO really wanted to kill Linux, they would have un-GPL'ed "their" pieces and gone back to their "pure" SCO UNIX product line. Neither of these is what they want. SCO UNIX has failed in the market against Linux. Linux is what customers want. SCO wants to own Linux.
Failure to do anything at all to prevent further infringement is likely to be considered estoppel.
True, but that would have required a clue, something which I never claimed they had ;) Unisys has a long history of clueless, and occasionally criminal, management.
See this footnoote, and bear in mind that there are also international issues that are not necessarily the same as U.S. issues.
IANAL, blah, blah, and I'm not trying to defend Unisys - just explain what I think they were thinking at the time....
GIF was developed as an image format by Compuserve (I think). They used LZW compression, which was a Unisys patented compression algorithm, but they never notified, let alone licensed LZW. Unisys, being the mainframe shop it was, didn't even notice for a long time. When they did, they pressed the patent issue.
The important point is that they didn't press the LZW patent because of it's use in GIFs, per se. They pressed it because it was an important patent to them at the time for other compression purposes. Unisys was big in air-traffic control and a variety of other communications applications that used LZW for dynamic, real-time, streaming compression (which is about the only application it was still good for when you look at the other algorithms available, even then). If they didn't press it on LZW in GIFs, they could have lost the ability to press it in those other lines.
Remember that uncompressed GIFs did not infringe, they asked only for licensing on commercial use, and as the article states they did make not-for-profit licenses available. Questions like "What if a licensed program made the GIF, but I editted it with Gimp" made no sense to them. (Besides, Gimp didn't exist then either ;)
I was a Unisys systems programmer at the time, and I didn't know much about "open source", so I suspect Unisys management didn't have much of a clue either. I seriously doubt they had (or even now have) any idea how the community reacted to that issue. No one ever really grasped that it was Compuserve's fault for pushing a patent encumbered format (with the patent held by someone else) as a "standard". Unisys was caught by surprise and acted in the way most any company would at that time.
Times change. I learned about open source (and TCP/IP, and Unisys' brand new C compiler, and how a 36-bit word architecture complicates a C libarary implementation) by porting a subset of NCSA's httpd server to OS/2200, partially because the GIF issue introduced comp.sys.unisys to open source. (iirc, this was when Mosaic was the browser and the "graphical web" was barely graphical at all.) Some time later, Unisys demo'ed their ClearPath model for us and said "they were even working on a web server for it". I wasn't there, but a co-worker donned a medieval french helmet and said "I doubt if we're interested. We already have one, you see!"
So Unisys and I went different ways (although I did get a "wayback-machine call" for Unisys help last week). I moved on into UNIX, self-taught by downloading Slackware and trying to get it to do anything on Token Ring. Unisys moved on to buy Burroughs and into the "datacenter push" of Microsoft. One of us apparently learns quicker ;) Still, the 2200 was seriously unstoppable from both a hardware and a software standpoint, and even attemting to use MVS or anything else on the "newer" IBM 390 made me want to run screaming to the hills.
If Unisys has woken up, they have the potential to do incredible things with hardware and helping them release that hardware from the constraints of Windows is a huge opportunity for both Unisys and the Linux community. If the haven't woken up, then they will once the see what Linux can do on their hardware. I was on vacation when they demo'ed the ClearPath and heard I had already written a web server on their previous (non-Intel) hardware and the day I got back a Unisys SE was waiting in my cube to ask "how'ed you do that!". He was fascinated and ate up everything about open source I had to offer (sadly, not much at the time).
Bottom line: What does it hurt us to give them a chance? If they screw up, it's going to be their fault. We've already shown that we can help any company that really wants to play nice. If we snub them for what we see as a past slight to open source, when they probably didn't know what open source was, we present ourselves as being petty about something that we still, as a community, fail to acknowledge was a situation not of their own making.
Actually, it is serious. Deadly serious.
Where does most the spam, viruses and trojans come from? 0wning Windows. Despite the tongue-in-cheek presentation, the article is basically accurate. It's truth is what makes it so funny. But it's only funny because I don't have to support any Windows boxes.
Perhaps more importantly, such states will take an active interest in presenting the risks software patents pose to their use of OSS to trim budgets (as Munich has).
Whitespace by Example: I'll include the Whitespace tutorial and 3500 pages of uncommented, non-annotated examples.
- US Copyright laws Fair Use clauses do not support complete copying of copyrighted goods, only computer software has an exemption to allow you to back it up. Fair use clauses give you the power to use small, insignificant portions of the copyrighted material in other works, eg quoted sources.
- 2. As you state, the copyright owner DOES NOT have to make it easy or able for you to exercise fair use clauses. I dont see the fair use in giving copies out to 9 other people, thats not fair use, thats distribution.
Sony v. Betamax added:- 3. The right to "time and space shift"
Unfortunately #2 has also been upheld in court which, when combined with the DMCA gives the copyright owner the ability to make fair use illegal.Whether distributing to 9 other people constistutes fair use or distribution is up to a court to decide. Right now, the FCC deems it fair use, under TiVo's proposed restricted distribution mechanism, so that's a fairly significant step decision that will be considered in any U.S. court.
If any questions arise regarding the outcome, people sit down and count the same paper ballots. The numbers had better be pretty durn close or someone goes to jail.
For example, the artist formerly known as the artist formerly known as "Prince", who is now known as "Prince" because that contract expired.
Yes, but you're right that it will take a lot more than just saying "don't do that" as long as they can continue doing "almost, but not quite, that."
We need to take the foxes out of the henhouse before we staple the wire netting in place. Otherwise, we're just ensconing the foxes right where they want to be.
So, you're volunteering to be my write-in VP candidate?
The Declaration of Independence came first and defined what the U.S. stood for and why it was breaking off. The Constitution defined how it would function. The Declaration is the requirements statement. The Constitution is the implementation.
You're splitting hairs. How the money gets routed is not the point. The fact that it does get routed is. This is not chump change. If you're ever curious as to *where* the money is going, all PACs have to file reports with the FEC. So if you're giving an organization money and don't know who they're giving money to, it's your own damn fault.
I can't disagree. The **AA's are an extreme example, and not likely to be fed money from Joe & Jane Average Citizen, but orgs like the "Policeman's Benevolent Fund", the various labor unions, even Wal-Mart don't necessarily present themselves to contributers as political funding organizations.
Please explain why my tax dollars fund public schools when I don't have any kids. There are things the government does that don't directly benefit you. Deal with it.
I feel your pain ;), BUT funding education can at least be argued to be for the betterment of society as a whole and no one can legally be excluded from the public school system for any reason, least of all for holding dissenting opinions. Political primaries do exclude people who (at least have the honesty to) say they disagree. They should not be funded by anyone's tax dollars.
Hard work is more than just "voting your conscience". It's recruiting and fielding candidates at the local level. It's about building a bench of legitimate candidates rather than unqualified nutcases looking for attention. It's building party infrastructure from the ground up that'll last for years instead of from the top down with a celebrity candidate that'll be gone after November.
I agree in principle, but there's an underlying assumption behind your argument that you don't seem to grasp: What if I don't want another political party? What if I want to support candidates based on their individual merits? Of course, your point about getting out and working to support those candidates still applies, but it's no longer about "building party infrastructure from the ground up that'll last for years", because I see that as "building another source of power that will eventually become corrupt."
I appreciate your points, but they get lost in your railing against the specific personalities that have managed to get enough media attention to become widely visible. I believe the strangle-hold the 2 party monopoly has on the media and the American consciousness is what makes it impractical for a normal, rational, independent-thinking individual to be considered a "viable" candidate for any office beyond the municipal or county levels. Being "eccentric" is about the only way a candidate will get national press.
Certainly, the work for citizen independence has to start at the local levels, but that opens up another cans of worms: the non-existence of any independent local news organizations.
But the individuals are frequently unaware of how that money is being directed. For example, how many AAA members know how much AAA has spent working against public transportation? I suppose you could say that RIAA and MPAA funding comes from individuals as well, but if it is, it's nested too deeply. Individual->**AA member->**AA->candidate.
In many states(if not all), 3rd parties are included in the primaries. For instance, here in Washington State, when I go to the primary in September, I'll have a choice of Republican, Democrat and Libertarian primary ballots.
Doesn't help me, since I'm registered as "NO party preference." Please explain why my tax dollars fund the primary process when I don't have a voice. I don't object to party primaries, but that's what party money should be spent on. It's administrative overhead for the party.
Re: Nader, Dean, Perot, Wallace, etc., Every once in a while an individual rises p to challenge to two parties and what happens? The media reports on "how they may 'swing' the election" implicitly stating that they cannot possibly win. If you recall, exit polls showed that if everyone who really wanted to vote for Perot did, he would have won. The combination of unbalance reporting and party FUD convinced them that they would be "wasting thier vote" and/or "handing the election to [fill in bad guy here]." Score another victory for FUD.
As to getting of your ass and doing something, that was my point. Voting your conscience by not letting the partisan mind-game players talk you out of voting for your choice has consistently worked. We have simply have to stop letting them scare us into not doing what we believe is right.
So let's see... People have rights, legal fictions (corporations/PACS/parties) consist of people, therefore legal fictions have rights. I think that's the legal precedent that got us into this mess.
No one can or should stop the people that comprise those entities from speaking their minds or contributing to campaigns. As individuals, they have those rights. As individuals, they can send out communications to their employees/interests/members urging them to do likewise. Whose rights are being abridged?
Campaign contributions are already limited (with alternate paths around the limitations big enough to drive a truck through), so following your assumption, we are alreading restricting freedom of speech. I don't think that's true.
(And I don't get where you pulled the right to be secure in private property from.)
It's not the voting system. It's the funding system.
How about we pass a law that says only U.S. citizens can contribute or financially support a candidate? No PAC funding. No "soft" party funding. No corporate funding. No foriegn funding. If any of those want to help a candidate financially, they have to get out and get citizens to open their wallets for their chosen cattle-herder.
(And don't tell me that this infringes those "entities" First Ammendment rights. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights" refers to mankind and does not include some legal fiction called a "natural person")
That would make elections very different, don't you think?
Here's another one: No one, and I mean no one , gets on any ballot anywhere without a petition signed by some number of registered voters. Why should citizens of every party be funding primary elections for members of just 2. Want to make a difference? Change your registration to "No Party Preference" and bitch like hell that your funding primaries for parties you don't belong to. It's called "taxation without representation." If everyone who feels neither the Demicans or Repulicats represent them did this, I believe the majority of voters would be thus registered and the parties would have no justification for imposing their candidates on a ballot.
Contrary to popular opinion, the "two party system" is not a U.S. mandate, it's just tradition. The 2 we have now are not the 2 we have always had, but they've rigged the system so heavily that unless we act they will be from this point on.
We do not have a democracy in the U.S. Worse, we no longer have a democratic republic (which is what it was really designed to be.) What we have is a contributoracracy, and that's the way it will stay until we cut off the cash flow from anywhere other than the people. The ones as in "government of the people, by the people and for the people."
Freaking parties, committees and corporations are NOT people . People - WE - are not consumers, customers, constituents, markets or even voters. By law, WE ARE THE GOVERNEMENT, but only if we are willing to take responsibility for governing those we elect to serve us .
So get out, not only to vote, but to make your voice heard and your presence felt. Unless and until we become as vocal and as demanding as our "special interest" opponents they will continue to win. If a third party candidate represents your ideals VOTE FOR THEM. To try to fudge your vote to manipulate who among the others doesn't represent you less is like putting all your money on 42 at the roulette table. It only goes to 36, so you're not going to win. But there is no chance in hell that you'll actually change the numbers on the wheel either.
(If you can't find anyone else, write-in "mwa on slashdot". If nothing else, it will freak the power people out to see anybody get more than a handful of write-ins ;)
I think your perception of Python's OOP implementation is dated. Try the following:
I can't post the results due to slashcode's "too many junk characters" attitude problem. The bottom line is that even "native" types in Python are now objects.I encourage anyone else to do likewise. RSS has no value if it's stagnate and the EFF feed has the potential for generating a lot of faxes/emails on important on-line issues.
They had the answers because they did the basic task well and could monitor constantly, regardless of the status of licensing. Regardless, your point on a bug-free API for customizing software would help make the COTS solutions easier to swallow. But if you don't have a license to monitor box X and box X dies....
And is your "flashy" the same as "good, user-friendly design", which has been a (imo) level-headed complaint against many open source projects? Careful you don't code for the coders and miss the boat. Again, not trying to put words into your mouth; I couldn't quite follow there.
No. "Flashy" is the "shiny things" in the brochure that make executives drool but are little practical value to the technicians. My favorite is "alert maps" with different colors for different conditions. I've put all our devices on an OpenView map and you can't make out the icons for the lines. Of course, you can "containerize" and have the colors "bubble-up" to where you have a reasonable view in front of you but then you can't tell what's borked until you spend 10 minutes "drilling down." Hey, if I could sit around on my hands and watch a blinky thingy to make sure it's green, fine. More practically, I just want a page that tells me what's broke, where it is and what the business impact is. As far as I'm concerned, a monitoring application should not have to be monitored by a human. If so, it doesn't add much value. Yes, the user interfaces on some OSS products, uhm, lack artistic quality. But since you can drop code into them to interface directly to your notification and escalation procedures it's well worth the trade off.
I agree the overall argument applies to well designed software with accessible interfaces, but the point still stands that "capitalist" companies can leverage open source in an economically effective and technically viable manner that is far, far removed from the "charity" basis Photo_Nut seems to see as the only basis for OSS existence.