News is still an Australian company (holds its AGM in Adelaide, South Australia) but Rupert Murdoch had to become a US citizen before buying Fox in order to avoid American media foreign ownership laws, IIRC.
Licensing code via the GPL does not involve a transfer of copyright, despite SCO's claims. Indeed, the GPL depends on copyright for its functionality -- only the copyright holder can grant the rights the GPL allows.
SCO distributed OpenLinux from their FTP server, and continued to distribute it for months even after they were informed of the "alleged infringements". Included in this distribution was the COPYING file containing the GPL.
Assuming that Linux does contain SCO IP (and that's a big assumption, and not one I agree with), that COPYING file means that SCO obviously did release that IP under the GPL, thus making it legal for everyone else to use and distribute that same IP, as long as they didn't breach the terms of the GPL in doing so.
A far more interesting question in this scenario, though, is how do you distribute money back to the artists.
Statistical* sampling of a particular artist's (a) number of fans, and (b) predilection to piracy.:) Ideally this wouldn't be weighted at all by the artist's attitude to filesharing... after all, the labels get their money any which way.
Sales in the record shop and number of downloads already seem to have the same effect on money flowing to the artists (no effect, that is, due to the creative accounting -- they're always being ripped off at whatever the record companies think they can get away with) We'll be paying for it one way or another. Stop buying it and it's just more evidence of piracy to the record companies, even if bandwidth usage also drops 25% and sales of blank discs are down 50%. What can we do?:/
* "Lies, damned lies and statistics." Pope, was it?
2) Person A never hears the music, and thus doesn't buy the song.
...
But scenario 2 is definitely not theft.
It's treated as theft, and compensated for, in those countries that levy a blank disc/blank tape surcharge, with that money going to the record industry. Now that's one *powerful* monopoly -- get the Government to give you money you think you should have made but didn't for some reason.
We've had 44 degrees Celsius here recently, and it's still high 30s. I know how you feel -- I'm surprised if I catch all the errors I make:)
(I think the 'dissent/free expression' thing is two sides of the same coin -- I'm just pessimistic about things these days.)
I do see in the latest LWN that Leon Brooks agrees with me regarding the possible source of the DDoS, and also raises something that I had wondered about... various people seem to have investigated SCO's networks around the time of the original DDoS and the MyDoom one and found that things weren't actually all that bad. Hearsay, of course, and idle speculation -- as is much of the stuff posted on Groklaw. But interesting nonetheless. (After all, the whole SCO thing is a market play and thus a press play, so appearances matter more than the realities anyway:)
"Anyway, you believe what you like and I'll believe what I like. "
Fair enough. THat's not a brush off, but I doubt we'll see eye to eye. For the record, I don't think you're an idiot or anything.
Oh, I agree. It's a difference of opinion -- I can understand why you feel the way you do, and hopefully you feel the same way with what I'm saying.
I'm not ruling out the possibility of a Linux/OSS activist being behind it -- I just think it would be stupid and counterproductive.
Actually, my chief impression in the past regarding these viruses has been that they are about ego (shading over into megalomania). "Look what I can do" becomes "Oops, I just broke the Internet" (at least temporarily). I'm worried that people are going to start doing this sort of thing for financial reasons. I'm worried that all this bad behaviour provides more opportunity for the government and the mass media interests to make the 'net more like television, with less opportunity for private dissent. It doesn't really matter who is abusing the network. The problem is that someone is, for whatever reasons, and we all lose from it:(
Spammers are making money from the open ports that the machines running MyDoom have, and the inbuilt SMTP code in the virus itself. The DDoS is just sleight of hand.
* contains its own SMTP engine to construct outgoing messages
* contains a backdoor component (see below)
* contains a Denial of Service payload
...
On receipt of another kind it can relay TCP packets thus providing IP spoofing capabilities (possibly to facilitate SPAM distribution)
Show me an 'Open Source Extremist' you think to be capable of doing something like this, and lacking any moral sense... whereas we already know that spammers have been following similar methods in the past. Also, MyDoom is supposed to have started in Russia -- more famed for its spam industry than its open source contributions, you would think.
Also, 'revenge'? SCO isn't any threat to Linux -- they're only a threat to their customers, and anyone unlucky or stupid enough to have signed a contract with them. All the actual lawsuits seemed to be based around contracts rather than copyright.
Anyway, you believe what you like and I'll believe what I like. I'll admit I'm wrong when I see proof, but I guess at the moment its just our respective biases warring to no good effect.
It wasn't all that long ago that it was generally believed that the Microsoft 'investment' had to do with licensing the code in question.
Very few other companies seem to have accepted the validity of SCO's license requirements -- and anything that gives SCO oxygen at the moment benefits Microsoft by making any Unix look like a poor investment. It's hard not to see some common ground there, and possible collusion.
Regarding MyDoom -- who makes money out of that? The spammers, actually.
Follow the money. After all, that's what Bill & Darl are doing (they'd be quickly out of their jobs if they weren't).
Well, we know Microsoft gave some money to SCO ($10m?). We haven't seen evidence of, e.g., Red Hat's payments to 'Andy' or whoever wrote the Mydoom virus(es).
Not saying anything definite, but the circumstantial evidence is stronger in the SCO case, isn't it?
* Vote for politicans locally who won't whore themselves out to Bush at the first opportunity.
or, if there's no chance of that working (and I'll have to take the second option, as I'm Australian... we've just signed up to introduce the DMCA over here:()
* Get your passport and get the hell out of the place, and go somewhere more sensible.
Re:However, your rights end. . .
on
Cell-Phone Wars
·
· Score: 1
Wasting my time is wasting company time, and company time can run thousands of dollars an hour in an outage....
or the hospital staff calls you to get you to come in and save a car accident victim
What are you doing in a bar if a missed call could be the difference between life or death? If you're on call, it's reasonable that you try not to be in a place where taking that call would be an inconvenience to others (movie theatres, etc.), or that you ensure that you can do so through other means (e.g. a silent pager).
I'm (still) stuck on that train level... I get through those parts, get out of the train and the person you've rescued either gets shot by the guards outside the train or can't work out how to run away from the (soon-to-explode) train. Aaargh! I must have done this at least 20 times...
If 95% of people use something, it's not really proprietary, is it?
That depends how many of them paid a single person or organisation (the "proprietor") for the use of it. I'd argue "yes", whether or not the source is open, if they retain effective control over it and can stop others using it at a whim.
Face it, everybody needs some sort of standard or a strong leader who admits he is such.
Why can't the standards be agreed by community effort? The Internet has worked well in that fashion for a while (too many competing "strong leaders" to really agree in any other fashion than a consensus).
As to the second part of that statement, the central fascist fallacy is that such regimes rarely produce good follow-up material. Indeed, the original strong leader tends becomes autocratic and starts to repress others -- mainly the people they see might be able to replace them. (Even Singapore, which is a wet dream for the econo-fascists out there, has never really had any freedom of speech, or effective political opposition.)
By the way, open source software shares some similarities with communism*; it's interesting to see the various responses of people when scarcity is no longer a factor. The greedy introduce an artificial scarcity and attempt to profit from it, while the generous give and take in (hopefully) somewhat equal measure.
* (I'm using the word communism in the dry political Marxist abstract here, not in the "totalitarian socialist states calling ourselves communists" style of Russia, pre-1990s China, etc)
Slashdot Mirror
News is still an Australian company (holds its AGM in Adelaide, South Australia) but Rupert Murdoch had to become a US citizen before buying Fox in order to avoid American media foreign ownership laws, IIRC.
Or, indeed, your ex-wife. Ah, alimony!
The owls are not what they seem.
Yeah, sure, all the rest of that stuff is pretty wacky...
but it's true about the owl god.
[wink]
Two very different genres of game, though... given the technology of the time, Pirates! was great fun. I'm not too sure about 3D in the remake.
Navigating around the Caribbean, sea battles, sword fights... that game had everything! Thief had lots of variety too, of course.
Sid Meier and Firaxis are re-working his old game, Pirates!
:)
I guess if you're going to copy a game, go for that one instead.
Seriously, that was a great game on the Commodore 64... will be interesting to see what he does with it when he revisits the idea.
As far as I'm aware, Microsoft and the Scientologists have both forced Slashdot to remove material by threatening lawsuit(s).
:)
Now, there are two cults that are scarier than we are.
Fuck, since when did the software I use become a "movement", demanding some sort of ideological conformity?
If that's the price, maybe I should stop using it.
Rule #9a: Trust no-one.
Does that imply a #9b) The truth is out there?
Licensing code via the GPL does not involve a transfer of copyright, despite SCO's claims. Indeed, the GPL depends on copyright for its functionality -- only the copyright holder can grant the rights the GPL allows.
SCO distributed OpenLinux from their FTP server, and continued to distribute it for months even after they were informed of the "alleged infringements". Included in this distribution was the COPYING file containing the GPL.
Assuming that Linux does contain SCO IP (and that's a big assumption, and not one I agree with), that COPYING file means that SCO obviously did release that IP under the GPL, thus making it legal for everyone else to use and distribute that same IP, as long as they didn't breach the terms of the GPL in doing so.
A far more interesting question in this scenario, though, is how do you distribute money back to the artists.
:) Ideally this wouldn't be weighted at all by the artist's attitude to filesharing... after all, the labels get their money any which way.
:/
Statistical* sampling of a particular artist's (a) number of fans, and (b) predilection to piracy.
Sales in the record shop and number of downloads already seem to have the same effect on money flowing to the artists (no effect, that is, due to the creative accounting -- they're always being ripped off at whatever the record companies think they can get away with) We'll be paying for it one way or another. Stop buying it and it's just more evidence of piracy to the record companies, even if bandwidth usage also drops 25% and sales of blank discs are down 50%. What can we do?
* "Lies, damned lies and statistics." Pope, was it?
Some trivia: the author's photo on the back of my copy is Vonnegut (in costume).
2) Person A never hears the music, and thus doesn't buy the song.
...
But scenario 2 is definitely not theft.
It's treated as theft, and compensated for, in those countries that levy a blank disc/blank tape surcharge, with that money going to the record industry. Now that's one *powerful* monopoly -- get the Government to give you money you think you should have made but didn't for some reason.
(Sorry for my spelling, I'm on cold meds.)
:)
:)
We've had 44 degrees Celsius here recently, and it's still high 30s. I know how you feel -- I'm surprised if I catch all the errors I make
(I think the 'dissent/free expression' thing is two sides of the same coin -- I'm just pessimistic about things these days.)
I do see in the latest LWN that Leon Brooks agrees with me regarding the possible source of the DDoS, and also raises something that I had wondered about... various people seem to have investigated SCO's networks around the time of the original DDoS and the MyDoom one and found that things weren't actually all that bad. Hearsay, of course, and idle speculation -- as is much of the stuff posted on Groklaw. But interesting nonetheless. (After all, the whole SCO thing is a market play and thus a press play, so appearances matter more than the realities anyway
"Anyway, you believe what you like and I'll believe what I like. "
:(
Fair enough. THat's not a brush off, but I doubt we'll see eye to eye. For the record, I don't think you're an idiot or anything.
Oh, I agree. It's a difference of opinion -- I can understand why you feel the way you do, and hopefully you feel the same way with what I'm saying.
I'm not ruling out the possibility of a Linux/OSS activist being behind it -- I just think it would be stupid and counterproductive.
Actually, my chief impression in the past regarding these viruses has been that they are about ego (shading over into megalomania). "Look what I can do" becomes "Oops, I just broke the Internet" (at least temporarily). I'm worried that people are going to start doing this sort of thing for financial reasons. I'm worried that all this bad behaviour provides more opportunity for the government and the mass media interests to make the 'net more like television, with less opportunity for private dissent. It doesn't really matter who is abusing the network. The problem is that someone is, for whatever reasons, and we all lose from it
Show me an 'Open Source Extremist' you think to be capable of doing something like this, and lacking any moral sense... whereas we already know that spammers have been following similar methods in the past. Also, MyDoom is supposed to have started in Russia -- more famed for its spam industry than its open source contributions, you would think.
Also, 'revenge'? SCO isn't any threat to Linux -- they're only a threat to their customers, and anyone unlucky or stupid enough to have signed a contract with them. All the actual lawsuits seemed to be based around contracts rather than copyright.
Anyway, you believe what you like and I'll believe what I like. I'll admit I'm wrong when I see proof, but I guess at the moment its just our respective biases warring to no good effect.
It wasn't all that long ago that it was generally believed that the Microsoft 'investment' had to do with licensing the code in question.
Very few other companies seem to have accepted the validity of SCO's license requirements -- and anything that gives SCO oxygen at the moment benefits Microsoft by making any Unix look like a poor investment. It's hard not to see some common ground there, and possible collusion.
Regarding MyDoom -- who makes money out of that? The spammers, actually.
Follow the money. After all, that's what Bill & Darl are doing (they'd be quickly out of their jobs if they weren't).
Well, we know Microsoft gave some money to SCO ($10m?). We haven't seen evidence of, e.g., Red Hat's payments to 'Andy' or whoever wrote the Mydoom virus(es).
Not saying anything definite, but the circumstantial evidence is stronger in the SCO case, isn't it?
You have two options:
:()
* Vote for politicans locally who won't whore themselves out to Bush at the first opportunity.
or, if there's no chance of that working (and I'll have to take the second option, as I'm Australian... we've just signed up to introduce the DMCA over here
* Get your passport and get the hell out of the place, and go somewhere more sensible.
Wasting my time is wasting company time, and company time can run thousands of dollars an hour in an outage. ...
or the hospital staff calls you to get you to come in and save a car accident victim
What are you doing in a bar if a missed call could be the difference between life or death? If you're on call, it's reasonable that you try not to be in a place where taking that call would be an inconvenience to others (movie theatres, etc.), or that you ensure that you can do so through other means (e.g. a silent pager).
They are cheap to get and cheap to use
If they're that cheap, you won't mind paying my bills for me then?
Thanks!
I'm (still) stuck on that train level... I get through those parts, get out of the train and the person you've rescued either gets shot by the guards outside the train or can't work out how to run away from the (soon-to-explode) train. Aaargh! I must have done this at least 20 times...
... and Rare get to work for Nintendo again?
If 95% of people use something, it's not really proprietary, is it?
That depends how many of them paid a single person or organisation (the "proprietor") for the use of it. I'd argue "yes", whether or not the source is open, if they retain effective control over it and can stop others using it at a whim.
Face it, everybody needs some sort of standard or a strong leader who admits he is such.
Why can't the standards be agreed by community effort? The Internet has worked well in that fashion for a while (too many competing "strong leaders" to really agree in any other fashion than a consensus).
As to the second part of that statement, the central fascist fallacy is that such regimes rarely produce good follow-up material. Indeed, the original strong leader tends becomes autocratic and starts to repress others -- mainly the people they see might be able to replace them. (Even Singapore, which is a wet dream for the econo-fascists out there, has never really had any freedom of speech, or effective political opposition.)
By the way, open source software shares some similarities with communism*; it's interesting to see the various responses of people when scarcity is no longer a factor. The greedy introduce an artificial scarcity and attempt to profit from it, while the generous give and take in (hopefully) somewhat equal measure.
* (I'm using the word communism in the dry political Marxist abstract here, not in the "totalitarian socialist states calling ourselves communists" style of Russia, pre-1990s China, etc)
Hey, I thought we all moved up one when someone with a lower ID, erm, goes to that great bit bucket in the sky.
Wait your turn, youngster!