if a solution (to the halting problem) were to pop up, it would invalidate a couple hundred years worth of math
It's actually much simpler than that. If a solution H to the halting problem existed, it would fail to properly predict whether the following algorithm B:
Given A as input, use H to determine if the program A halts on input A
If A halts on A, go into an infinite loop, otherwise output 0 and halt
halts when given input B.
In short, it doesn't just contradict years of math, it contradicts itself.
What there is, is a law stopping you from reading the contents, which you claim no right on.
You seem to be saying that you would have no objections at all to a law that illegalized the act of opening and reading a book whose paper you own.
Attitudes like this scare me. Really. The usual antidote is to point out Stallman's article The Right to Read as an illustration of where we're heading (and, in many ways, where we already are).
do something that is not illegal to protest (stop buying DVDs might be a start).
Believe me, willfully breaking laws is a last resort. I haven't bought a DVD player or drive yet (the only ones I can afford are region-crippled), and I'm seriously considering moving to a country where so-called "protest" actions such as promoting and distributing DeCSS would be perfectly legal.
It's morally wrong for you to tell others what they should do with thier own property.
I claim no property rights on the content of a DVD disc, but I assert full property rights on the material the disc is made of. If I have the technical skill to play back the material with my own computer (not copy, just play back), this act should not be illegal, as it currently is.
To illegalize this act amounts to the record company telling me what I can and can not do with my computer and my plastic disc, which is exactly the thing that you decry as morally wrong.
Don't break the law, and you'll not have any problems. It's a slippery slope once you have situational morals.
Slippery slopes are dangerous but sometimes you have to take the risk. With enough skill, you can keep yourself from falling down.
Unquestioning obedience to an unjust law is just as bad for society as blind disregard for just laws. Our segregation laws would not have improved if Rosa Parks hadn't broken one. Voting alone wouldn't have done it: minorities are always outvoted by a majority.
I actually agree with the original poster--free music is not on a par with civil rights. However, the issue that matters to me is free speech, and free speech is.
Don't add more confusion by trying to link DeCSS and Napster--they're different ends of the spectrum.
I didn't mention Napster in my post at all. Napster wasn't mentioned in the story submission either. Any inferred connection between the two is a product of your imagination.
If anything, I should be guilty of -1: Offtopic instead of unwarranted linkage of the two.
do anything except claim that your desire to get music for free is some sort of noble cause.
I never claimed in my post that I want music for free; indeed, I have no such desire. For the past three years I have completely boycotted all North American record labels and music produced by such labels, but I spend plenty of money on CDs made outside of North America.
Free music is not a noble cause and is not worth the risk of civil disobedience. Free speech is.
This is not exactly a major world issue -- it largely deals with students who don't care to pay for music.
It starts becoming a major world issue when record and movie companies buy laws such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act which say that I cannot even listen to SDMI music or watch DVD movies except under their terms.
It's a major issue that even if I have the technical skills to circumvent their restrictions, I can't utilize or publicize those skills for fear of turning into a Jon Johansen.
It's really a major issue when a judge dictates to me that I can't even post a hyperlink to a file named decss.tar.gz (as in the Kaplan ruling), just because it might constitute contributory infringement.
I'd like to change the laws within the system if I could, but at this point our so-called democracy is so corrupt with corporate influence that frankly I don't have much chance of achieving anything legitimately.
Do you know how many sites require Javascript today?
Yes. A lot.
Do you know how many web sites out there suck? Even more.
Conveniently, the web sites that require Javascript are a subset of the web sites that suck. So I just turn off Javascript while browsing the web. If I hit a site I can't use, I stop and think to myself whether it's worth turning on Javascript to use the site. So far I haven't found any sites worth turning on the Javascript for.
Javascript is historically so riddled with security and privacy holes that browsing the web with it is akin to running arbitrary code from the internet (or running with scissors). It's not worth the risk to me, and it shouldn't be to you.
What all web browsers badly need is a way to allow the user to specify a certain list of trusted sites that are allowed to use Javascript / cookies / animations / whatever. I'm crossing my fingers that Mozilla will one day deliver this kind of fine-grained control into the user's hands.
Just because in a handful of cultures for about 100 years there have been one-price stores does NOT make that kind of pricing the "right way" to do things.
One-price stores are obviously the norm today for US bookstores. But you seem to imply that Amazon's pricing practice has historical precedent. This implication is completely incorrect.
In most parts of the world, a seller will try to charge the rich guy more. The difference is that the buyer can haggle. If I'm dealing with a Chinese merchant and I don't like the price, I can try to bargain. Amazon is different: I can't converse with a web site.
Never before in history has a merchant been able to charge different prices to different people, based on secret (unpublished) criteria, with no opportunity for the buyer to negotiate a better price.
GPL and internal-use software
on
Qt Going GPL
·
· Score: 2
I found one particular phrase from the Qt/KDE developers very interesting:
In short, we have been convinced that the GPL does indeed protect a library from being used to develop non-free software. Non-free software, in this respect, of course, includes software developed internally in an organization.
[With free software,] you should also have the freedom to make modifications and use them privately in your own work or play, without even mentioning that they exist.
I'd be very interested in finding out if the Qt/KDE developers really intend to say that I have no right to make in-house-only modifications or use of Qt.
The subject line above is a joke. Nevertheless, I can't help but wonder if KDE will ever win corporate backing from any large software company with lawyers, given the immense uncertainty hanging over the GPL-compatibility of Qt.
Based on my personal (and possibly naive) readings of the GPL and QPL,
I can distribute Qt source code, without problems.
I can distribute KDE source code, without problems.
I can distribute Qt binaries, if I provide source as well.
I can distribute KDE binaries, if I provide source as well.
I can not distribute KDE binaries along with Qt binaries, if the one links to the other, unless I provide both under the terms of the GPL (which is plainly impossible, as I do not have rights to license Qt under the GPL).
(The above analysis may make it seem as if I have something against KDE. I assure you that any such impression is purely a product of the reader's imagination. I think KDE is excellent software and that it is useful regardless of binary licensing issues, since the source code is a valuable asset and may unquestionably be compiled, copied and modified under the terms of the GPL. Also, the authors of KDE are free to release KDE binaries along with Qt since the GPL license terms do not apply to them.)
Common responses which I have gotten back from the KDE people include:
Qt is not a part of KDE, so when giving KDE to other people you don't have to provide Qt under the GPL terms that would be required if they were one work.
The fact that KDE was so obviously designed to work with Qt confers to the general public an implied license to ignore the GPL source-providing requirement of KDE with regard to Qt.
Let's not discuss the merit of these points (since that would lead to a licensing flamewar). These responses certainly represent a valid point of view. But are big companies going to buy it? Lawyers at big companies are very careful and don't want to get caught doing anything illegal. I simply cannot see companies such as Sun, IBM, and HP embracing KDE on a large scale as long as the legality of distributing KDE with Qt is unclear.
For now, commercial support of KDE really does seem to be limited to newer companies such as Red Hat, Caldera, MandrakeSoft, etc. who maybe aren't as worried about the licensing issue. Not that this is a bad thing--as Granroth says, large corporate backing certainly didn't help CDE/Motif get anywhere.
id3 tags are in MP3 file because they're part of the MP3 file format spec.
NO! This claim is completely wrong. Please don't go around spreading such misinformation.
A brief glance at even the id3 site's own history page shows that id3 tags were created by a freelance programmer independently of the MPEG audio standard.
I hate id3 tags and do everything possible to strip them out of my own mp3 files. Yes, metadata is a thorny problem, but violating the MPEG audio standard and pretending the result is still an mp3 file is a cure worse than the disease.
I also have practical reasons for avoiding the id3 tag: most of the music I listen to is not of Western origin, and does not fit well into the Title/Artist/Genre classification system of the id3 one-trick-pony. And I'm not even getting into the problems that id3 and support programs have dealing with multi-byte charsets.
To keep this post vaguely on topic, I should point out that Eazel is working on ways to handle and present metadata without the need to break standard file format specifications. For example, take a look at the album screenshot with metadata consisting of the CD cover picture. I guarantee you that the CD cover picture is not embedded into the individual mp3 files.
Bruce Schneier's observation is very relevant here:
Focusing on the cryptographic algorithms while ignoring other aspects of security is like defending your house not by building a fence around it, but by putting an immense stake into the ground and hoping that the adversary runs right into it. Smart attackers will just go around the algorithms.
In this case, the recording industry has the particular difficulty that a song, in order to be heard, must be played to the listener over unencrypted air. So the possibility of encrypting the music is right out.
If they wish to limit themselves to watermarking, then they'd have to design a watermark that doesn't leave audible artifacts but is robust enough to survive transmission through analog air. I sure wouldn't want to bet my livelihood on them coming up with one.
If both the format and the protocol in question were on equal footing, then you're right, we gain nothing in terms of standardization.
But the vast majority of mail file formats have no existence beyond their incarnation in a specific implementation, while IMAP4rev1 is an IETF standards track protocol that already enjoys a great many existing interoperable implementations. I tend to trust IETF standards a lot more than some random format implemented by a particular program (remember, the IETF brought us IP, TCP, SMTP, FTP, and many other internet standards that work very well today).
The days when you had to worry about what file format is used to store your mail are over. IMAP is designed to allow you to access your mail folders anywhere, anytime, from any program. In short, IMAP is nothing less than the definitive answer to client lock-in.
For more information on IMAP, you can read this Linux Gazette article I wrote two years ago on the subject. It's a bit dated but still mostly relevant.
Evolution, of course, supports IMAP. I switched to mutt after the 1.2 release added decent IMAP support. I urge you, if you are at all concerned about getting at your mail, to switch to IMAP today and put all those worries behind you forever.
All the various HTML and CSS standards are already for all practical purposes dead. It's not Netscape's fault, or Microsoft's fault. The blame lies with the W3C and their ridiculous practice of publishing standards before any implementations exist.
The IETF is generally considered the definitive standards body for all the various internet-related protocols. They have a strictly enforced rule over in the IETF, which I think the W3C would do well to pick up. The rule is: no protocol described in any RFC can be anointed an internet standard unless at least two independent interoperable implementations exist.
The result is that the IETF has surprisingly few internet standards (even HTTP for example is only a "Proposed standard"), but the few that they do have (SMTP, FTP, TCP, IP, among others) work very well.
Publishing a standard that has no existing implementations is an invitation for embrace-and-extend abuse. Yet the W3C has done exactly that repeatedly with their various versions of HTML 3.x, 4.x, and CSS. Even to this day, no browsers on the market have 100% HTML4+CSS2 support. Those who don't know any better wonder why HTML standards support is such a mess. I wonder why the HTML standards effort hasn't yet collapsed completely in the face of such inane stewardship.
The IETF through their public decisions processes and their wise management of the existing body of RFCs has earned my trust as an internet user. I have no such trust in the W3C. Who gave the W3C the right to publish HTML standards on behalf of the community anyway?
Technically there is nothing stopping anyone from writing a KDE/Qt front end for GnuCash. Licensing, however, is a different matter.
The Debian project has maintained for a long time that the GPL does not give a third party permission to distribute binaries linked against Qt. KDE itself is owned by the various KDE authors who are very unlikely to sue people for distributing Qt-linked binaries. GnuCash is owned by the various GnuCash authors, who may be far less permissive in this regard.
People are free to distribute KDE/Qt front ends to GnuCash as source code, but I wouldn't want to be around to see the mess that would result from distributing binaries.
As usual KDE users can always just install the GNOME libraries and run GnuCash from within KDE right alongside all their other KDE programs. Free software is much more compatible in this regard than proprietary software ([cough] Internet Explorer [cough]).
The copy protection technology that you envision is completely impossible to implement. Counterpane Labs' Schneier said it best:
... Even if [the technology] were all perfect, the scheme could never work.
The flaw is in the security model. The software player eventually gets the decryption key, decrypts the DVD, and displays it on the screen. That decrypted DVD data is on the computer. It has to be; there's no other way to display it on the screen. No matter how good the encryption scheme is, the DVD data is available in plaintext to anyone who can write a computer program to take it.
In plain English, in order to be enjoyed, a DVD movie has to be sensed, and if it can be sensed by eyes and ears, it can't be encrypted. You can't encrypt people's brains.
A license is not a contract. I have never signed any statement agreeing to any software license, yet the companies who wrote the license expect me to have agreed to those terms.
I have no problem agreeing to licensing terms (such as the GPL) that give me additional rights that I would not otherwise have. I do object to certain licenses that take away rights I already have, such as the right to reverse engineer, publish benchmarks, etc. The real failure of UCITA and current licensing laws is that most people, lawmakers included, erroneously equate an unsigned license agreement with a signed binding contract.
I think most people here agree that posting the full text of Microsoft's specification is a copyright violation. If Microsoft was demanding only the removal of posts containing the full text of their specification, their reception would be a lot friendlier, and their chances of succeeding in court would be a lot higher.
The problem is that Microsoft is demanding the removal of posts that
contain excerpts of the specification,
contain links to other servers, or
point out that you can open the file with WinZip without running the self-extracting.exe code.
The latter three demands have no legal justification in either copyright law, contract law, or the DMCA. Slashdot is right to oppose these demands.
Most people here agree that the posting of the full document is a copyright violation. The scary part is not the first demand, but the second and third demands.
Microsoft not only wants the full document taken down, they also want all posts which excerpt the document taken down, as well as all posts which link to copies of the full document. The last two demands are what scare the shit out of people.
Last I checked, excerpting copyrighted documents is sometimes protected under fair use and any claims of copyright violation would have to be contested in court on a case by case basis. As for linking, posting a link is in no way a violation of any law; if Microsoft has objections to the contents of the link, they should take it up with the server hosting the contents, and not Slashdot.
I've used mutt before. I love the interface. I love the PGP integration. But mutt's IMAP support has historically been sorely lacking. With four mail accounts that I regularly check from three computers, not all of which I own, I need IMAP more than I need mutt. Moreover, IMAP inoculates me from mail client lock-in. I do not want to deal with moving all my mail folders to a new location or changing folder formats every time I switch clients.
When good IMAP support makes it into a stable release, I'll be all over mutt. SSL/IMAP support would be a bonus, though I can deal with ssh tunneling if I have to. Point is, IMAP is a killer feature, and if using it means I have to tolerate a GUI, then that's what I'll do.
Under US law, failure to pursue trademark violations does weaken your claim to a trademark. The same is not true for patents or copyrights.
An entity that owns a US patent can selectively enforce or not enforce their patent claims as they choose without weakening their hold on the patent. The classic example is how Unisys waited several years until GIF got popular before enforcing their LZW patent.
Microsoft and Fraunhofer uses loopholes in law to play dirty tricks that are perfectly legal but very harmful to the public. In other words, they are legally right, but (in the views of many) morally wrong.
Free software groups and projects like LAME sometimes violate the letter of the law, but their actions are very beneficial to the public (I know that I for one have certainly benefited from LAME's efforts). These groups may be legally wrong, but as far as I am concerned they are morally right. They are doing the right thing, and while we always try to fight to change bad laws, in the meantime the law be damned.
Remember that at one point segregation and "separate but equal" was written into the law. I'm not saying that patent law is as harmful as legal segregation. My point is simply that the law is not always morally right. In an ideal world, the law would always be morally right, and the public could get away with just obeying laws unquestioningly without thinking for themselves whether the law deserves to be obeyed. Unfortunately, we don't live in an ideal world. I hate to break it to you, but in this world people do have to think for themselves regarding the merit of our laws.
A final point which everyone seems to have ignored is that LAME distribution could (and probably will, if necessary) be made totally legal simply by moving the distribution site to a place that does not honor the Fraunhofer patents.
Yet more proof that we live in different worlds. I understand that you work for a company that pays you wages and maybe even lets you use company funds to buy software. I respect that. If I were in your world, buying Motif would be an option.
Alas, I'm a poor college student with no money left over after tuition and no company standing behind me (not right now, anyway). Please respect that. If you want to give me enough money to buy Motif, I'll gladly buy it. But if not, please accept my statement that I can't get Motif, because it's true.
Slashdot Mirror
It's actually much simpler than that. If a solution H to the halting problem existed, it would fail to properly predict whether the following algorithm B:
- Given A as input, use H to determine if the program A halts on input A
- If A halts on A, go into an infinite loop, otherwise output 0 and halt
halts when given input B.In short, it doesn't just contradict years of math, it contradicts itself.
You seem to be saying that you would have no objections at all to a law that illegalized the act of opening and reading a book whose paper you own.
Attitudes like this scare me. Really. The usual antidote is to point out Stallman's article The Right to Read as an illustration of where we're heading (and, in many ways, where we already are).
do something that is not illegal to protest (stop buying DVDs might be a start).
Believe me, willfully breaking laws is a last resort. I haven't bought a DVD player or drive yet (the only ones I can afford are region-crippled), and I'm seriously considering moving to a country where so-called "protest" actions such as promoting and distributing DeCSS would be perfectly legal.
I claim no property rights on the content of a DVD disc, but I assert full property rights on the material the disc is made of. If I have the technical skill to play back the material with my own computer (not copy, just play back), this act should not be illegal, as it currently is.
To illegalize this act amounts to the record company telling me what I can and can not do with my computer and my plastic disc, which is exactly the thing that you decry as morally wrong.
Don't break the law, and you'll not have any problems. It's a slippery slope once you have situational morals.
Slippery slopes are dangerous but sometimes you have to take the risk. With enough skill, you can keep yourself from falling down.
Unquestioning obedience to an unjust law is just as bad for society as blind disregard for just laws. Our segregation laws would not have improved if Rosa Parks hadn't broken one. Voting alone wouldn't have done it: minorities are always outvoted by a majority.
I actually agree with the original poster--free music is not on a par with civil rights. However, the issue that matters to me is free speech, and free speech is.
I didn't mention Napster in my post at all. Napster wasn't mentioned in the story submission either. Any inferred connection between the two is a product of your imagination.
If anything, I should be guilty of -1: Offtopic instead of unwarranted linkage of the two.
do anything except claim that your desire to get music for free is some sort of noble cause.
I never claimed in my post that I want music for free; indeed, I have no such desire. For the past three years I have completely boycotted all North American record labels and music produced by such labels, but I spend plenty of money on CDs made outside of North America.
Free music is not a noble cause and is not worth the risk of civil disobedience. Free speech is.
It starts becoming a major world issue when record and movie companies buy laws such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act which say that I cannot even listen to SDMI music or watch DVD movies except under their terms.
It's a major issue that even if I have the technical skills to circumvent their restrictions, I can't utilize or publicize those skills for fear of turning into a Jon Johansen.
It's really a major issue when a judge dictates to me that I can't even post a hyperlink to a file named decss.tar.gz (as in the Kaplan ruling), just because it might constitute contributory infringement.
I'd like to change the laws within the system if I could, but at this point our so-called democracy is so corrupt with corporate influence that frankly I don't have much chance of achieving anything legitimately.
Yes. A lot.
Do you know how many web sites out there suck? Even more.
Conveniently, the web sites that require Javascript are a subset of the web sites that suck. So I just turn off Javascript while browsing the web. If I hit a site I can't use, I stop and think to myself whether it's worth turning on Javascript to use the site. So far I haven't found any sites worth turning on the Javascript for.
Javascript is historically so riddled with security and privacy holes that browsing the web with it is akin to running arbitrary code from the internet (or running with scissors). It's not worth the risk to me, and it shouldn't be to you.
What all web browsers badly need is a way to allow the user to specify a certain list of trusted sites that are allowed to use Javascript / cookies / animations / whatever. I'm crossing my fingers that Mozilla will one day deliver this kind of fine-grained control into the user's hands.
One-price stores are obviously the norm today for US bookstores. But you seem to imply that Amazon's pricing practice has historical precedent. This implication is completely incorrect.
In most parts of the world, a seller will try to charge the rich guy more. The difference is that the buyer can haggle. If I'm dealing with a Chinese merchant and I don't like the price, I can try to bargain. Amazon is different: I can't converse with a web site.
Never before in history has a merchant been able to charge different prices to different people, based on secret (unpublished) criteria, with no opportunity for the buyer to negotiate a better price.
In short, we have been convinced that the GPL does indeed protect a library from being used to develop non-free software. Non-free software, in this respect, of course, includes software developed internally in an organization.
They seem to imply that code from Qt, or any GPL-licensed program, may not be used in any in-house software projects which are not distributed to the public. This conclusion flies in the face of the FSF's own interpretation of the rights granted by the GPL and free software:
I'd be very interested in finding out if the Qt/KDE developers really intend to say that I have no right to make in-house-only modifications or use of Qt.Putting CSS encrypted data into a time capsule is pointless because anyone trying to decrypt them would presumably land in jail over DMCA violations.
Even if the US isn't around in the year 52001, people and even aliens would still be bound by the DMCA. After all look what happened in Norway.
I would suggest unencrypted DVDs, except that then the MPAA might sue you for violating your license to create DVDs.
Looks like you got misled by the hype as well. The clock speed is 1.13 GHz, not 1.3 GHz.
Based on my personal (and possibly naive) readings of the GPL and QPL,
-
I can distribute Qt source code, without problems.
-
I can distribute KDE source code, without problems.
-
I can distribute Qt binaries, if I provide source as well.
-
I can distribute KDE binaries, if I provide source as well.
-
I can not distribute KDE binaries along with Qt binaries, if the one links to the other, unless I provide both under the terms of the GPL (which is plainly impossible, as I do not have rights to license Qt under the GPL).
(The above analysis may make it seem as if I have something against KDE. I assure you that any such impression is purely a product of the reader's imagination. I think KDE is excellent software and that it is useful regardless of binary licensing issues, since the source code is a valuable asset and may unquestionably be compiled, copied and modified under the terms of the GPL. Also, the authors of KDE are free to release KDE binaries along with Qt since the GPL license terms do not apply to them.)Common responses which I have gotten back from the KDE people include:
-
Qt is not a part of KDE, so when giving KDE to other people you don't have to provide Qt under the GPL terms that would be required if they were one work.
-
The fact that KDE was so obviously designed to work with Qt confers to the general public an implied license to ignore the GPL source-providing requirement of KDE with regard to Qt.
Let's not discuss the merit of these points (since that would lead to a licensing flamewar). These responses certainly represent a valid point of view. But are big companies going to buy it? Lawyers at big companies are very careful and don't want to get caught doing anything illegal. I simply cannot see companies such as Sun, IBM, and HP embracing KDE on a large scale as long as the legality of distributing KDE with Qt is unclear.For now, commercial support of KDE really does seem to be limited to newer companies such as Red Hat, Caldera, MandrakeSoft, etc. who maybe aren't as worried about the licensing issue. Not that this is a bad thing--as Granroth says, large corporate backing certainly didn't help CDE/Motif get anywhere.
NO! This claim is completely wrong. Please don't go around spreading such misinformation.
A brief glance at even the id3 site's own history page shows that id3 tags were created by a freelance programmer independently of the MPEG audio standard.
I hate id3 tags and do everything possible to strip them out of my own mp3 files. Yes, metadata is a thorny problem, but violating the MPEG audio standard and pretending the result is still an mp3 file is a cure worse than the disease.
I also have practical reasons for avoiding the id3 tag: most of the music I listen to is not of Western origin, and does not fit well into the Title/Artist/Genre classification system of the id3 one-trick-pony. And I'm not even getting into the problems that id3 and support programs have dealing with multi-byte charsets.
To keep this post vaguely on topic, I should point out that Eazel is working on ways to handle and present metadata without the need to break standard file format specifications. For example, take a look at the album screenshot with metadata consisting of the CD cover picture. I guarantee you that the CD cover picture is not embedded into the individual mp3 files.
If they wish to limit themselves to watermarking, then they'd have to design a watermark that doesn't leave audible artifacts but is robust enough to survive transmission through analog air. I sure wouldn't want to bet my livelihood on them coming up with one.
But the vast majority of mail file formats have no existence beyond their incarnation in a specific implementation, while IMAP4rev1 is an IETF standards track protocol that already enjoys a great many existing interoperable implementations. I tend to trust IETF standards a lot more than some random format implemented by a particular program (remember, the IETF brought us IP, TCP, SMTP, FTP, and many other internet standards that work very well today).
For more information on IMAP, you can read this Linux Gazette article I wrote two years ago on the subject. It's a bit dated but still mostly relevant.
Evolution, of course, supports IMAP. I switched to mutt after the 1.2 release added decent IMAP support. I urge you, if you are at all concerned about getting at your mail, to switch to IMAP today and put all those worries behind you forever.
The IETF is generally considered the definitive standards body for all the various internet-related protocols. They have a strictly enforced rule over in the IETF, which I think the W3C would do well to pick up. The rule is: no protocol described in any RFC can be anointed an internet standard unless at least two independent interoperable implementations exist.
The result is that the IETF has surprisingly few internet standards (even HTTP for example is only a "Proposed standard"), but the few that they do have (SMTP, FTP, TCP, IP, among others) work very well.
Publishing a standard that has no existing implementations is an invitation for embrace-and-extend abuse. Yet the W3C has done exactly that repeatedly with their various versions of HTML 3.x, 4.x, and CSS. Even to this day, no browsers on the market have 100% HTML4+CSS2 support. Those who don't know any better wonder why HTML standards support is such a mess. I wonder why the HTML standards effort hasn't yet collapsed completely in the face of such inane stewardship.
The IETF through their public decisions processes and their wise management of the existing body of RFCs has earned my trust as an internet user. I have no such trust in the W3C. Who gave the W3C the right to publish HTML standards on behalf of the community anyway?
The Debian project has maintained for a long time that the GPL does not give a third party permission to distribute binaries linked against Qt. KDE itself is owned by the various KDE authors who are very unlikely to sue people for distributing Qt-linked binaries. GnuCash is owned by the various GnuCash authors, who may be far less permissive in this regard.
People are free to distribute KDE/Qt front ends to GnuCash as source code, but I wouldn't want to be around to see the mess that would result from distributing binaries.
As usual KDE users can always just install the GNOME libraries and run GnuCash from within KDE right alongside all their other KDE programs. Free software is much more compatible in this regard than proprietary software ([cough] Internet Explorer [cough]).
A license is not a contract. I have never signed any statement agreeing to any software license, yet the companies who wrote the license expect me to have agreed to those terms.
I have no problem agreeing to licensing terms (such as the GPL) that give me additional rights that I would not otherwise have. I do object to certain licenses that take away rights I already have, such as the right to reverse engineer, publish benchmarks, etc. The real failure of UCITA and current licensing laws is that most people, lawmakers included, erroneously equate an unsigned license agreement with a signed binding contract.
The problem is that Microsoft is demanding the removal of posts that
- contain excerpts of the specification,
- contain links to other servers, or
- point out that you can open the file with WinZip without running the self-extracting
.exe code.
The latter three demands have no legal justification in either copyright law, contract law, or the DMCA. Slashdot is right to oppose these demands.Microsoft not only wants the full document taken down, they also want all posts which excerpt the document taken down, as well as all posts which link to copies of the full document. The last two demands are what scare the shit out of people.
Last I checked, excerpting copyrighted documents is sometimes protected under fair use and any claims of copyright violation would have to be contested in court on a case by case basis. As for linking, posting a link is in no way a violation of any law; if Microsoft has objections to the contents of the link, they should take it up with the server hosting the contents, and not Slashdot.
When good IMAP support makes it into a stable release, I'll be all over mutt. SSL/IMAP support would be a bonus, though I can deal with ssh tunneling if I have to. Point is, IMAP is a killer feature, and if using it means I have to tolerate a GUI, then that's what I'll do.
An entity that owns a US patent can selectively enforce or not enforce their patent claims as they choose without weakening their hold on the patent. The classic example is how Unisys waited several years until GIF got popular before enforcing their LZW patent.
Free software groups and projects like LAME sometimes violate the letter of the law, but their actions are very beneficial to the public (I know that I for one have certainly benefited from LAME's efforts). These groups may be legally wrong, but as far as I am concerned they are morally right. They are doing the right thing, and while we always try to fight to change bad laws, in the meantime the law be damned.
Remember that at one point segregation and "separate but equal" was written into the law. I'm not saying that patent law is as harmful as legal segregation. My point is simply that the law is not always morally right. In an ideal world, the law would always be morally right, and the public could get away with just obeying laws unquestioningly without thinking for themselves whether the law deserves to be obeyed. Unfortunately, we don't live in an ideal world. I hate to break it to you, but in this world people do have to think for themselves regarding the merit of our laws.
A final point which everyone seems to have ignored is that LAME distribution could (and probably will, if necessary) be made totally legal simply by moving the distribution site to a place that does not honor the Fraunhofer patents.
Yet more proof that we live in different worlds. I understand that you work for a company that pays you wages and maybe even lets you use company funds to buy software. I respect that. If I were in your world, buying Motif would be an option.
Alas, I'm a poor college student with no money left over after tuition and no company standing behind me (not right now, anyway). Please respect that. If you want to give me enough money to buy Motif, I'll gladly buy it. But if not, please accept my statement that I can't get Motif, because it's true.