A lot of GPL code, possibly most, is under GPLv2, which hasn't changed since 1991. Many projects, and many developers, didn't switch to v3.
You can continue to use GPLv2 and not worry about any changes in the last 27 years.
The meaning of GPLv2 is pretty simple. You could invent a borderline case, but it's not that complex. I'd be more than happy to answer any questions.
It seems Stallman purposefully left the patent wording in v3 vague, so he could claim it meant one thing, while the wording leaves open a different meaning.
For new Red Hat code they produce, they can of course license it any way they like.
For pre-existing GPLv2 code, a LOT of that code is licensed "GPL, v2 or any later version". Redhat can modify that and distribute it under the "or" option - any later version.
Personally, I no longer trust Stallman enough to license my code "any later version". There's no telling what he'll put in GPLv4. Had he taken suggestions and either not pit the patent stuff in v3, or clarified that wording, I'd be comfortable with "any later version", assuming later versions would update and clarify the license, not make major changes to it.
> Why would a business with less than a million dollars of annual (revenue?) be selling to every city in the world? That doesn't sound viable.
There is this cool new thing called the "Internet". You can put your homemade gourmet popcorn, or clipboard app, or photography for sale on the "internet" and people all over the world can buy it.
To know how much sales tax to charge, you now need to read the tax code for each buyer's state, county, city, school district, and utility district. Then mail off checks to each entity, or maybe to the county - sometimes the county divides it up. Well sometimes the state does.
So for example if you approached a company about making or marketing your invention, before you patented it, and they wrote you an email saying "wow, that's a neat idea. We would have never thought of that", then they tried to patent it, their patent would not take precedence, because they admitted they didn't invent it.
The US now also has provisional patents, which allows small inventors to file inexpensively right away, then they have a year to figure out if it's worth the expense of filing a regular patent.
I can take no issue with you wishing that were true.
The fact is, in a great number of cases which jurisdiction applies is based on what's called "personal jurisdiction". That's the term to Google if you want more information. The basic idea is that US companies have to follow US law, such as anti-bribery laws. Even when they send someone across the border to perform the illegal act for them.
You can say "that's not fair" and I won't bother arguing with you; I'll just point out people do in fact go to prison for that shit.
If ION were violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the ADA, or some other discrimination laws in overseas offices, yes employees could sue for the overseas discrimination if they are US citizens working abroad.
The Fair Labor Standards Act does NOT apply overseas.
Much of employment law is at the state level. I don't know off hand which Texas employment laws apply to Texas companies like ION regarding employment outside of Texas.
It's not technically another nation anymore. A few years ago, in 1845, Texas was admitted to the union. "It's like a whole other country" is just a tourism marketing slogan.
> Even a cake baker should have that right isn't that right Google? I guess the Supreme's agreed on that one.
Unfortunately the Supreme Court didn't rule on that issue.
In Masterpiece Bakery, the case was decided based on the Colorado commission's stated hatred of religion as being the basis for their ruling.
The baker told the couple he would gladly sell them cookies, brownies, etc - anything that's not custom made with messages or decorations celebrating gay marriage. He would not, he said, use his artistic talents to create a message celebrating something that was illegal at time, and he believed was anti-Biblical.
The Colorado Commission had consistently sided with Baker's and others who refused to create messages, on cakes and elsewhere, that were critical of illegal gay marriage. Bakers and others can refuse to make things with a message they find objectionable, the commission said, based on their free speech rights. Commissioners stated, on the record, in the hearing, that they were ruling against this Baker because moral standards based on *religion* are "despicable". In a later hearing, the commissioner, again on record, compared the refusal to celebrate gay marriage to the Holocaust, and suggested that the Holocaust was caused by religion. That unfairness, that blatant, stated discrimination against religious-based morals by the state, is what the Supreme Court said was unconstitutional.
So a one-sentence summary of the Masterpiece decision is: When the government is violating the first amendment freedom of religion, they shouldn't say out loud "I'm doing this because I hate religious people".
Federal contracting IS an industry unto itself, and not one of Google's core competencies. Cool new tech is something Google does.
*IF* they were to be involved in a federal contract, they might want to let IBM handle the federal process - IBM has a whole department or two that just does federal contracts. Then subcontract the tech to Google.
Okay that particular chip it's hard to call that a computer. Unless you're a 1980s car manufacturer and want to sell replacements for $399. That's a logic gate, I'd say.
However, if that PIC had its single IO pin connected to a specialized memory device it would be a Turing Machine, capable of emulating a 486 or any other CPU (slowly).
Yes, I routinely call PIC and similar microcontrollers "tiny computers".
> Or does it have to run a full multi-tasking disk operating system wiht a GUI (or at least command line interface)?
PICs routinely have a CLI, and a GUI isn't unusual (at 128x64). It's not unusual to have a PIC read and write from a flash card disk, as well as it's built-in flash.
So even if you said "a computer must be capable of running a GUI, and having a disk plugged in", the PIC is a computer even under those terms. It can run multiple tasks, though it wouldn't be considered a multi-tasking OS, which allows multiple tasks to run *without* the tasks themselves being careful to avoid stepping on one another.
You're absolutely right, this case was mostly handled under the Obama administration, and the Trump administration could have chosen not to defend it.
It occurs to me that the legislature is supposed to pass laws saying what people can't do, including cops. The Constitution, as interpreted by SCOTUS, is the BARE MINIMUM protection that Congress and state legislatures MUST respect. Why the heck are we living under the bare minimum respect for our rights? Why has no state, under either party, ever passed a law saying cops must respect our rights by... (not doing mass surveillance or whatever)? Neither Democrats nor Republicans hardly ever pass laws protecting our Constitutional rights. Instead, they both push the limits of how far they can go toward violating our rights.
The only major bills protecting rights which come to mind are the Civil Rights Acts, which barred racial discrimination. Of course, those were pushed by Republicans, with Democrats fighting against them, including a filibuster by Grand Dragon Robert Byrd, the only person Democrats elected to Congress for 55 years straight.
The Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act were quite a while ago now. Why hasn't Congress done anything significant to protect Constitutional rights since then?
I have a degree in cybersecurity. I try very hard to be honest, but while preparing for a proctored test where I'm being tested on my knowledge of ways to bypass security, some thoughts certainly occurred to me.:)
What the law says and what they do are only very loosely correlated.
I'm dealing with that with a government agency right now. The agency's own operations manual tells their employees how to handle a certain request based on the dollar amount:
Under $10,000 : Automatically approved, online if desired, only the request form is needed and nothing on paper required.
Under $25,000: Fill out form XYZ. Approve it if X is less than 72.
Over $25,000: Fill out long forms XYZ, YYZ, XXZ, ZZY, ZXY. Approve if the result is less than 60.
My request is less than $10,000. It's supposed to be approved with no paperwork. The employee is making me do all the long forms as if it's a request over $25,000, and suggesting they won't accept the "less than 60" answer that they are legally required to accept.
When making beer at home, the fermentation produces CO2 and you get whatever amount of bubbly that the fermentation gives you.
When producing major national and international brands, I would think companies like Heineken have a very specific CO2 level for each brand, influenced by market research and other factors. I would expect they add or remove CO2 from each batch to consistently produce the same Heineken product every time.
> considering states have direct financial motivation to have this data accurate and available, I don't expect it would be that difficult to implement, or use.
How have you loves this long and never dealt with a government agency?
In my experience, agency employees are wrong in what they think the law is, as often as not. For example in Texas the statute states very clearly "X service is not taxable", the taxing authority told me it was taxable. It took several hours to get one of their employees to simply look at the tax code, look at the section I was pointing out to them, and see that plain as day it's not taxable. Even then, the employee didn't know what to do because "yeah the law says it's not taxable, but my boss says it is. I can't fix this."
If their own employees can't even see what's taxable when you point out the specific code section to them, it seems rather optimistic to think they'll: A. Figure it out, for all items and services B. Make that info available in an easily parseable way AND C. Keep it up to date
Actually I'm not sure that B is even possible. Others have pointed out the tax rate can depend on the ingredients, the size of the package, etc.
I had an experience once where I came up with something, or thought I did, then later found out it was the very distinctive hook of a popular song. Apparently I subconsciously remembered it. I'm not a musician, just "came up" with a fee notes one time.
I wonder if Shazam or something similar would find very similar music? I don't know if Shazam identifies music, as notes, or just the original recording. For example, would Shazam (or something similar) identify the same song (exactly) played on a piano instead of a guitar? I don't have any idea. I might be interesting to try it.
I haven't extensively researched YouTube, but my understanding is that their most-used process doesn't exactly follow DMCA. That would mean they don't get the benefit of DMCA safe harbor when they don't follow the process. It's not a "violation" in the sense that DMCA doesn't tell them they MUST follow the process, but rather IF they follow the process they are protected from liability on either side..
Your comment also reminded me of something else that I think was overlooked in DMCA. Remember this was before YouTube and Facebook. User-generated content was forums, and Slashdot. When I was looking at it, I was thinking in terms of a web site you're making a significant amount of money from, and a web hosting company. You'd know if your site was taken down, so I don't think there is actually a legal requirement that the host notifies you. The hosting companies I was familiar with did notify customers, because that's just basic customer service. My hosting company would call a customer if we got a complaint - specifically I would call, as the president of our small hosting company. I've heard through the grapevine that YouTube isn't always good about notifying people.
Of course on a forum, or Slashdot, how would Slashdot notify you if someone said your posting of their poem violated their copyright? I guess email, which isn't normally considered acceptable for legal notice, and was less so in 1998.
> Let's be honest, given that, what would you do? Would you care to send the complainant your full name and address?
I'm probably not the person to ask. A) I'm not hard to find, especially if you already know my web site and B) I actually really, really enjoy going to court. I was headed to law school, because I love that stuff, when my web business unexpectedly took off. I see your point though.
> I believe the DMCA is a good law, but an infringement claim should be sworn with specific criminal penalties if the claim isn't upheld by a court. It should be a misdemeanor for some small number of them, with transition to a felony after 10 or 15 of them.
I tend to agree in principle. I would point out some cases are close calls. I'd penalize recklessly sending DMCA notices, or require "ordinary care" (a legal term). I wouldn't penalize a good-faith claim where the content producer did their due diligence.
Because a reckless DMCA claim that is brought to court harms a specific, easily identified person, there is an easier, cheaper, faster, and perhaps more appropriate way to handle it. You don't need to have a completely separate criminal trial, with proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Instead it could be done faster, easier, and probably more fair by allowing (treble?) damages to be awarded to the *defendant*.
So suppose I sue you for $50,000 for copyright infringement. The court can rule any of these three ways:
1. I'm right, you violated my rights wholesale, selling my work without a license. You owe me $50,000
2. I'm not quite right. Your use was infringement, but the infringement is allowed under fair use. You don't owe me anything.
3. I'm completely wrong. You didn't infringe at all. I have to pay YOU $150,000
That would resolve the issue without an extra trial, and the penalty would be paid to the person who was harmed.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of GPL code, possibly most, is under GPLv2, which hasn't changed since 1991. Many projects, and many developers, didn't switch to v3.
You can continue to use GPLv2 and not worry about any changes in the last 27 years.
The meaning of GPLv2 is pretty simple. You could invent a borderline case, but it's not that complex. I'd be more than happy to answer any questions.
It seems Stallman purposefully left the patent wording in v3 vague, so he could claim it meant one thing, while the wording leaves open a different meaning.
For new Red Hat code they produce, they can of course license it any way they like.
For pre-existing GPLv2 code, a LOT of that code is licensed "GPL, v2 or any later version". Redhat can modify that and distribute it under the "or" option - any later version.
Personally, I no longer trust Stallman enough to license my code "any later version". There's no telling what he'll put in GPLv4. Had he taken suggestions and either not pit the patent stuff in v3, or clarified that wording, I'd be comfortable with "any later version", assuming later versions would update and clarify the license, not make major changes to it.
> Why would a business with less than a million dollars of annual (revenue?) be selling to every city in the world? That doesn't sound viable.
There is this cool new thing called the "Internet". You can put your homemade gourmet popcorn, or clipboard app, or photography for sale on the "internet" and people all over the world can buy it.
To know how much sales tax to charge, you now need to read the tax code for each buyer's state, county, city, school district, and utility district. Then mail off checks to each entity, or maybe to the county - sometimes the county divides it up. Well sometimes the state does.
The US switched to 'first inventor to file".
So for example if you approached a company about making or marketing your invention, before you patented it, and they wrote you an email saying "wow, that's a neat idea. We would have never thought of that", then they tried to patent it, their patent would not take precedence, because they admitted they didn't invent it.
The US now also has provisional patents, which allows small inventors to file inexpensively right away, then they have a year to figure out if it's worth the expense of filing a regular patent.
I can take no issue with you wishing that were true.
The fact is, in a great number of cases which jurisdiction applies is based on what's called "personal jurisdiction". That's the term to Google if you want more information. The basic idea is that US companies have to follow US law, such as anti-bribery laws. Even when they send someone across the border to perform the illegal act for them.
You can say "that's not fair" and I won't bother arguing with you; I'll just point out people do in fact go to prison for that shit.
> Sort of, but if those companies have any assets in neutral countries the US can aggressively grab those lawfully.
In this case, the two companies are both based in Houston, a few miles apart, so collecting the judgement isn't an issue.
Just curious how you come to the conclusion that federal law doesn't have jurisdiction over Houston companies?
If ION were violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the ADA, or some other discrimination laws in overseas offices, yes employees could sue for the overseas discrimination if they are US citizens working abroad.
The Fair Labor Standards Act does NOT apply overseas.
Much of employment law is at the state level. I don't know off hand which Texas employment laws apply to Texas companies like ION regarding employment outside of Texas.
It's not technically another nation anymore. A few years ago, in 1845, Texas was admitted to the union. "It's like a whole other country" is just a tourism marketing slogan.
It would be more like China expecting Chinese companies to follow the laws of China when they export stuff to the US.
Why would a company in Houston go abroad to collect a judgement from another company in Houston? ION is six miles from Schlumberger.
> Even a cake baker should have that right isn't that right Google? I guess the Supreme's agreed on that one.
Unfortunately the Supreme Court didn't rule on that issue.
In Masterpiece Bakery, the case was decided based on the Colorado commission's stated hatred of religion as being the basis for their ruling.
The baker told the couple he would gladly sell them cookies, brownies, etc - anything that's not custom made with messages or decorations celebrating gay marriage. He would not, he said, use his artistic talents to create a message celebrating something that was illegal at time, and he believed was anti-Biblical.
The Colorado Commission had consistently sided with Baker's and others who refused to create messages, on cakes and elsewhere, that were critical of illegal gay marriage. Bakers and others can refuse to make things with a message they find objectionable, the commission said, based on their free speech rights. Commissioners stated, on the record, in the hearing, that they were ruling against this Baker because moral standards based on *religion* are "despicable". In a later hearing, the commissioner, again on record, compared the refusal to celebrate gay marriage to the Holocaust, and suggested that the Holocaust was caused by religion. That unfairness, that blatant, stated discrimination against religious-based morals by the state, is what the Supreme Court said was unconstitutional.
So a one-sentence summary of the Masterpiece decision is:
When the government is violating the first amendment freedom of religion, they shouldn't say out loud "I'm doing this because I hate religious people".
Federal contracting IS an industry unto itself, and not one of Google's core competencies. Cool new tech is something Google does.
*IF* they were to be involved in a federal contract, they might want to let IBM handle the federal process - IBM has a whole department or two that just does federal contracts. Then subcontract the tech to Google.
Okay that particular chip it's hard to call that a computer. Unless you're a 1980s car manufacturer and want to sell replacements for $399.
That's a logic gate, I'd say.
However, if that PIC had its single IO pin connected to a specialized memory device it would be a Turing Machine, capable of emulating a 486 or any other CPU (slowly).
Yes, I routinely call PIC and similar microcontrollers "tiny computers".
> Or does it have to run a full multi-tasking disk operating system wiht a GUI (or at least command line interface)?
PICs routinely have a CLI, and a GUI isn't unusual (at 128x64). It's not unusual to have a PIC read and write from a flash card disk, as well as it's built-in flash.
So even if you said "a computer must be capable of running a GUI, and having a disk plugged in", the PIC is a computer even under those terms. It can run multiple tasks, though it wouldn't be considered a multi-tasking OS, which allows multiple tasks to run *without* the tasks themselves being careful to avoid stepping on one another.
You're absolutely right, this case was mostly handled under the Obama administration, and the Trump administration could have chosen not to defend it.
It occurs to me that the legislature is supposed to pass laws saying what people can't do, including cops. The Constitution, as interpreted by SCOTUS, is the BARE MINIMUM protection that Congress and state legislatures MUST respect. Why the heck are we living under the bare minimum respect for our rights? Why has no state, under either party, ever passed a law saying cops must respect our rights by ... (not doing mass surveillance or whatever)? Neither Democrats nor Republicans hardly ever pass laws protecting our Constitutional rights. Instead, they both push the limits of how far they can go toward violating our rights.
The only major bills protecting rights which come to mind are the Civil Rights Acts, which barred racial discrimination. Of course, those were pushed by Republicans, with Democrats fighting against them, including a filibuster by Grand Dragon Robert Byrd, the only person Democrats elected to Congress for 55 years straight.
The Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act were quite a while ago now. Why hasn't Congress done anything significant to protect Constitutional rights since then?
I have a degree in cybersecurity. I try very hard to be honest, but while preparing for a proctored test where I'm being tested on my knowledge of ways to bypass security, some thoughts certainly occurred to me. :)
What the law says and what they do are only very loosely correlated.
I'm dealing with that with a government agency right now. The agency's own operations manual tells their employees how to handle a certain request based on the dollar amount:
Under $10,000 : Automatically approved, online if desired, only the request form is needed and nothing on paper required.
Under $25,000: Fill out form XYZ. Approve it if X is less than 72.
Over $25,000: Fill out long forms XYZ, YYZ, XXZ, ZZY, ZXY. Approve if the result is less than 60.
My request is less than $10,000. It's supposed to be approved with no paperwork. The employee is making me do all the long forms as if it's a request over $25,000, and suggesting they won't accept the "less than 60" answer that they are legally required to accept.
When making beer at home, the fermentation produces CO2 and you get whatever amount of bubbly that the fermentation gives you.
When producing major national and international brands, I would think companies like Heineken have a very specific CO2 level for each brand, influenced by market research and other factors. I would expect they add or remove CO2 from each batch to consistently produce the same Heineken product every time.
> considering states have direct financial motivation to have this data accurate and available, I don't expect it would be that difficult to implement, or use.
How have you loves this long and never dealt with a government agency?
In my experience, agency employees are wrong in what they think the law is, as often as not. For example in Texas the statute states very clearly "X service is not taxable", the taxing authority told me it was taxable. It took several hours to get one of their employees to simply look at the tax code, look at the section I was pointing out to them, and see that plain as day it's not taxable. Even then, the employee didn't know what to do because "yeah the law says it's not taxable, but my boss says it is. I can't fix this."
If their own employees can't even see what's taxable when you point out the specific code section to them, it seems rather optimistic to think they'll:
A. Figure it out, for all items and services
B. Make that info available in an easily parseable way
AND
C. Keep it up to date
Actually I'm not sure that B is even possible. Others have pointed out the tax rate can depend on the ingredients, the size of the package, etc.
If you get the victim to start using an attacker-controlled DNS server, you can indeed do bad things. That's not what DNS rebind is, though.
Let me explain what DNS rebind is.
The attacker creates a web page which has an iframe for http://nest.attacker.net/temp/...
The attacker sets the DNS record to for nest.attacker.net to be 192.168.1.2
The browser then connects to 192.168.1.2, which is the victims thermostat, and requests temp/90
The victim has now turned their thermostat up to 90
--
The attacker doesn't know the exact IP of the thermostat, but it's probably in the range 192.168.1.2 - 192.168.1.10
The attacker therefore retries the attack with each IP in that range, updating their DNS record once per second.
I had an experience once where I came up with something, or thought I did, then later found out it was the very distinctive hook of a popular song. Apparently I subconsciously remembered it. I'm not a musician, just "came up" with a fee notes one time.
I wonder if Shazam or something similar would find very similar music? I don't know if Shazam identifies music, as notes, or just the original recording. For example, would Shazam (or something similar) identify the same song (exactly) played on a piano instead of a guitar? I don't have any idea. I might be interesting to try it.
I haven't extensively researched YouTube, but my understanding is that their most-used process doesn't exactly follow DMCA. That would mean they don't get the benefit of DMCA safe harbor when they don't follow the process. It's not a "violation" in the sense that DMCA doesn't tell them they MUST follow the process, but rather IF they follow the process they are protected from liability on either side..
Your comment also reminded me of something else that I think was overlooked in DMCA. Remember this was before YouTube and Facebook. User-generated content was forums, and Slashdot. When I was looking at it, I was thinking in terms of a web site you're making a significant amount of money from, and a web hosting company. You'd know if your site was taken down, so I don't think there is actually a legal requirement that the host notifies you. The hosting companies I was familiar with did notify customers, because that's just basic customer service. My hosting company would call a customer if we got a complaint - specifically I would call, as the president of our small hosting company. I've heard through the grapevine that YouTube isn't always good about notifying people.
Of course on a forum, or Slashdot, how would Slashdot notify you if someone said your posting of their poem violated their copyright? I guess email, which isn't normally considered acceptable for legal notice, and was less so in 1998.
I see your point
> Let's be honest, given that, what would you do? Would you care to send the complainant your full name and address?
I'm probably not the person to ask. A) I'm not hard to find, especially if you already know my web site and B) I actually really, really enjoy going to court. I was headed to law school, because I love that stuff, when my web business unexpectedly took off. I see your point though.
> I believe the DMCA is a good law, but an infringement claim should be sworn with specific criminal penalties if the claim isn't upheld by a court. It should be a misdemeanor for some small number of them, with transition to a felony after 10 or 15 of them.
I tend to agree in principle. I would point out some cases are close calls. I'd penalize recklessly sending DMCA notices, or require "ordinary care" (a legal term). I wouldn't penalize a good-faith claim where the content producer did their due diligence.
Because a reckless DMCA claim that is brought to court harms a specific, easily identified person, there is an easier, cheaper, faster, and perhaps more appropriate way to handle it. You don't need to have a completely separate criminal trial, with proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Instead it could be done faster, easier, and probably more fair by allowing (treble?) damages to be awarded to the *defendant*.
So suppose I sue you for $50,000 for copyright infringement. The court can rule any of these three ways:
1. I'm right, you violated my rights wholesale, selling my work without a license. You owe me $50,000
2. I'm not quite right. Your use was infringement, but the infringement is allowed under fair use. You don't owe me anything.
3. I'm completely wrong. You didn't infringe at all. I have to pay YOU $150,000
That would resolve the issue without an extra trial, and the penalty would be paid to the person who was harmed.