Dead? It depends on your point of view
on
Motif's Not Dead
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· Score: 5
From Fountain's point of view, Motif is probably alive and well. The problem is that his world is one of proprietary software, proprietary Unix, and proprietary vendors, all of which have mean absolutely nothing to the new generation of users who have been raised on Linux/BSD and free software.
One needs only examine some of his comments to see how badly out of touch Fountain is with the open source world:
Motif has become the prima facie native toolkit on Unix. Every single major operating-system vendor supports and supplies it.
Most Linux distributions don't supply Motif. The free *BSDs don't supply it. I'm certainly not about to pay for it, and even if I did, it's not really the same if you don't get source code.
It does not matter how elegant a toolkit is in terms of programmer taste if at the end of the day the product derived from the toolkit is shorn of [list of cool features]
It does not matter how cool a toolkit is if I can't obtain it. The closed nature of Motif means it is completely cut off from the free software community: even the small minority of people willing and able to pay for it aren't able to enjoy the freely licensed source code that they have come to value and expect.
[Qt/GTK] fails to guarantee any kind of continuance, stability, or development. Compare this with the Open Group's license for maintaining Motif, guaranteed by contract. Continued development is absolutely guaranteed.
He's got it exactly backwards from the way the free software community views things. Does he really think a closed, select group of NDA-d people can develop proprietary software faster than all the programmers in the world can develop open source software? As explained in The Cathedral and the Bazaar, software improves faster when development is open to all.
I actually agree with Fountain that Motif isn't dead, but his reasons are all bass-ackwards. Motif owes its future life to corporate inertia, and not to any intrinsic advantages. In the free software world Motif suffers from the most crippling drawback of all: I can't get it, and I can't hack it.
The issue of digital audio extraction is covered to death in the cdparanoia FAQ (1, 2). Basically, it's pretty hard but it's not as impossible as you make it out to be.
On a low quality CD-ROM drive (in other words, 99% of the drives out on the market), there is no way to control precisely from what point an audio packet is read. One consequence is that two different attempts at audio extraction will almost certainly start from different offsets, resulting in two audio extractions that differ by a shift of bits. If this shift is accounted for, the two extractions should be exactly the same.
Note that positioning inaccuracies in the middle of reading a track can be corrected, simply by comparing the result with the previous read and scanning for any overlap of data. This process is known as "jitter correction." However, there is no way to correct inaccuracies at the start of a read, since there is no previous data to compare against.
Different drives have different statistical distributions of offsets, which explains the differences that you report when comparing copies extracted with different drives. Again, up to shifting, the two copies should be the same. If they aren't, at least one of the drives is defective.
It's very true that two wildly different copies can sound exactly the same to human ears, but on any half-decent CD-ROM hardware every extracted copy of a track should be identical except for the offsets mentioned above.
A recent post by an AC in this thread said it well. The laws of physics are grounded in empirical evidence, and are not incontrovertible. Any physical law, even one as fundamental as Newton's law of gravitation, can and must be changed when new evidence calls for a change.
The quantum encrypted channel described in this story is bulletproof assuming Quantum mechanics is true. But there really is no reason to expect that quantum mechanics is actually true. Sure, it explains current observations very well, but there is no guarantee that future observations won't force a revision. Even the venerable Newtonian law of gravity turned out to be false, and had to be replaced with Einstein's theory of general relativity.
The analogy with mathematical laws is not a good one at all, because mathematical theorems are true independent of any underlying empirical justification. A mathematical theorem does need foundations in the form of underlying axioms, but that's quite different from relying on experimental observations. (For instance, 1+1=2 in the integers, but in the integers modulo 2, 1+1=0. Here my axioms have changed. However, no amount of adding will make 1+1 equal 0 in the integers.)
So, a better way to phrase the NSA paranoia viewpoint is, widespread deployment of quantum encrypted channels will spur the NSA to conduct experiments designed to expose any errors that may be present in our current theory of quantum mechanics. And while the post was rated funny, it's actually exactly what would happen.
Not that I think gless is useful... it would be useful, if only someone would write the few lines of code needed for mouse wheel support. I'd do it myself except that I know nothing about C.
everyone else is twisting it around and saying that they LIMITED the authors power
I am getting the sinking feeling that you haven't even read the section of the Constitution that I quoted. The Constitution says (and I quote):
The Congress shall have Power... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for
limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries
Nobody is twisting anything. The very words "limited Times" appear in the Constitution itself.
Control promotes progress.
That, my friend, is where we disagree. A limited amount of control promotes progress. Excessive control hinders progress. Our founding fathers realized this fact. That's why they added the word "limited" to the Constitution.
(Same post as before, but with luck this time Slashdot won't eat the html formatting)
First off, if your position was defensible on its merits alone, then you wouldn't need to resort to tactics like attacking my education level. Can we keep this conversation civil please?
If the founding fathers had wanted to give authors control over their works, solely for the purpose of giving authors control over their works, then the Constitution would read more like:
The Congress shall have Power... to give authors control over their works, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries
The Constitution does not read this way. The line about promoting "progress of Science and useful Arts" was very deliberately added to indicate that the act of giving authors rights to their work is not an end in itself (as you so stubbornly insist), but rather a means towards the greater goal of promoting progress.
I don't object with the idea of giving authors control over their work. I do object to the way you focus solely on guaranteeing authors control of their work, with utter disregard for whether such control promotes or hinders progress. Authorship rights are good if they provide incentives and foster creativity. Authorship rights are bad if they are so restrictive that they choke off further creativity. As obvious as all this may seem, you continue to insist that authorship rights are always good, never bad. That's wrong.
The point the original article was trying to make (which you seem to have missed) is that these days copyrights are increasingly being used to stifle instead of foster creativity.
(My apologies if the HTML formatting is missing. Slashdot is eating them up and there's nothing I can do about it.) First off, if your position was defensible on its merits alone, then you would not need to resort to tactics like attacking my education level. Can we keep this conversation civil please? If the founding fathers had wanted to give authors control over their works, solely for the purpose of giving authors control over their works, then the Constitution would read more like: The Congress shall have Power... to give authors control over their works, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries. The Constitution does not read this way. The line about promoting "progress of Science and useful Arts" was very deliberately added to indicate that the act of giving authors rights to their work is not an end in itself (as you so stubbornly insist), but rather a means towards the greater goal of promoting progress. I don't object with the idea of giving authors control over their work. I do object to the way you focus solely on guaranteeing authors control of their work, with utter disregard for whether such control promotes or hinders progress. Authorship rights are good if they provide incentives and foster creativity. Authorship rights are bad if they are so restrictive that they choke off further creativity. As obvious as all this may seem, you continue to insist that authorship rights are always good, never bad. That's wrong. The point the original article was trying to make (which you seem to have missed) is that these days copyrights are increasingly being used to stifle instead of foster creativity.
Patents and copyrights are established to insure that creators have rights over their work.
I hate it when people invent their own legal justifications for IP law. I've lost count of the number of times I've had to repeat this exact post on slashdot to correct someone's ignorance.
I don't know what country you're from, but here in the US the legal intent of IP law is defined in, of all places, the US Constitution, the highest law in the land. You can't argue with the Constitution--its text is the ultimate legal authority in the US.
The Constitution says (and I quote):
The Congress shall have Power... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries
Reading it, you will see that IP law exists to promote progress in science and arts, and not, as you say, to give authors control.
The incorrect notion that copyright and patent law exists to give the copyright/patent owner rights over their work has been misused time and time again by corporations to justify increasingly restrictive intellectual property laws, even to the point of choking progress in science and arts in a manner contrary to the Constitutional justification for copyright and patent law. But the Constitution is very clear on this point, assuming anyone even bothers to read it anymore. Authors should not be given an amount of control over their work that is so excessive that it hinders instead of promotes progress.
Intellectual property rights are not an end upon themselves, but only a means for promoting progress in science and arts.
I will not say anything in defense of the NSA-developed Digital Signature Algorithm, but El Gamal is a different matter. El Gamal is by no means more convoluted than RSA; in fact my experience is that El Gamal is a good deal simpler.
Diffie-Hellman is extremely simple and was discovered a good deal earlier than RSA. El Gamal is a totally obvious extension of Diffie-Hellman, in which the Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol is made into a public key cryptosystem in the simplest way possible: replace the predetermined secret exponent with an on-demand random one!
The only reason it took seven years to develop El Gamal's algorithm is that the scientific culture at the time was predominantly convinced that algorithms (even cryptographic ones) had to be deterministic. If you had tipped off any researcher in the field about run-time randomization of Diffie-Hellman, they could have produced El Gamal's 1984 paper off the top of their head. RSA is deterministic, requiring no random numbers at run time. Ironically, nowadays all RSA implementations introduce randomization in some form because it is obvious that a purely deterministic algorithm is not secure: Would you trust an encryption algorithm where the messages "Yes" and "No" always encrypt to the same two output messages?
As for your implication that RSA is more trustworthy than El Gamal, you might want to read Question 2.14 of the PGP DH vs. RSA FAQ, where various well-known experts assert that (as far as we know) all known ideas for solving the discrete log problem have direct applicability to factoring, whereas the reverse is not true. We know that factoring does not allow you to take discrete logs, whereas on the flip side there is strong evidence that if you can take discrete logs you can factor. All this and more is explained in the FAQ; the upshot is that most mathematicians, if forced to pick one of the two, would say that the factorization problem is likely to succumb before the discrete log problem succumbs. Of course the underlying hard problem is not the whole story, since neither RSA nor El-Gamal have been proven equivalent to the underlying hard problems, but it's the best we can do so far considering that no one has demonstrated any way to break the algorithms except through the underlying hard problems.
Finally, the very simplicity of using the same key for both encryption and signing is also a liability, in that if both keys are the same then anyone who is able to get one key (for example by a court order) is then able to forge the other operation as well. In the current political climate, I'd certainly like my signature key to remain valid even if the government seizes my encryption key.
It's certainly great news to see Mozilla release crypto-anything, but I find this release underwhelming in several aspects. In order to actaully use any of the crypto, you need a binary-only "Personal Security Manager" from iplanet that is only available for Windows and Linux systems.
Of course this is not Netscape's or Mozilla's fault. The fault lies entirely with RSA Data Laboratories, who refuse to license their patented RSA algorithm to any open source projects. While liberalization of US export laws is very nice, I think we're going to have to wait until after the RSA patent expires on Sept. 20 before people outside of Netscape (well, US citizens anyway) can start to tinker with the cryptography software themselves.
It's fascinating how RSA Data Laboratories was able to force the whole world to use RSA as their public key cryptography standard instead of the technically superior Diffie-Hellman/El Gamal algorithm. They did this by simply refusing to license Diffie-Hellman to anybody (yes, they owned a patent on that, back before it expired in 1997). Today the Diffie-Hellman algorithm has been out of patent protection for 3 years, but almost nobody uses it, because of the need to remain compatible with the large installed base of software that was forced to use RSA.
Let's hope the current patent shenanigans that are holding back Mozilla crypto are the last adverse effects that the open source community will ever see from RSA Data Laboratories, Inc.
You claim there is a difference between providing protection and securing, in that providing requires active participation while securing requires only passive defense. I personally see no difference between the two, in the sense that "to provide protection" according to your dictionary definitions means "to furnish with the means of supporting protection" which when phrased in this manner sounds just as active or passive an act as "securing".
I specifically disagree with your claim that the patent system was created to prevent secrets from dying with their inventors. The Constitution says the patent system was created to promote progress in science and arts. While one part of promoting progress may involve preventing secrets from dying with their inventors, that is certainly not the main purpose of patent law but only a side issue that may or may not be consistent with the overall goal of promoting progress.
Lastly, a couple of completely unrelated side notes:
You say a copyrighted work needs to be original, i.e., never written before. That's not true. A copyrighted work needs to be original in that you didn't copy it from any other copyrighted work. This meaning of "original" is different from your meaning. For example, if I have been living on a desert island for the past 50 years, and I write a novel entirely on my own that just happens to match a Stephen King novel word for word, I can assert copyright on my novel and the copyright would be entirely valid. In order to be copyrightable, a work needs to be original in the sense that you created it on your own without copying from copyrighted sources. It does not need to be original in the sense that nobody has ever created it before.
Also note that one is allowed to copy from public domain sources and copyright the resulting work. This scenario demonstrates very clearly that a work can be copyrighted even if it isn't an entirely new creation.
You say the courts are the appropriate forum to dispute patents. The reason many Slashdot readers disagree with this view is that in their mind the USPTO has been granting illegitimate patents at such a fast rate that there is no hope of ever challenging all of them in our already overburdened court system. Court cases are so expensive in terms of both time and money that there is no hope of reining in an abusive USPTO through the courts: the USPTO can grant patents much more easily than opponents can overturn them. Especially galling is the fact that patent applications are kept secret until the patents are actually granted, and that there is no way to overturn a patent once it has been granted except to go to court.
That's not the idea behind patents. The patent system was created to insure against trade secrets dying with their inventors.
Bzzt! Sorry, but you lose. I don't know what country you're from, but in the United States, the purpose of patent laws is defined in the highest law in the land, the US Constitution. Specifically, the Constitution says:
The Congress shall have Power... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
If you don't live in the US, then maybe things are different in your country, but considering that this entire issue is about US patent law, it is the US legal justification for patent law that applies.
I really hate it when people go off on a limb and claim that the justification for patent law is this or that pet idea of theirs. The rationale behind patent laws is very clearly spelled out in the Constitution. If you don't like the legal justification given in the Constitution, then, well, tough luck buddy. While individual laws come and go and change, the Constitution is hardly ever changed.
As a side note, you claim in your post that patents and copyrights rest on different legal foundations, but that's just not true. Both patents and copyrights derive their legal legitimacy from the very same Constitutional clause that I quoted above.
The point which the poster was trying to make, which you seem to have missed, is that just because an act is illegal does not mean in and of itself that you should refrain from committing it. At one point freeing slaves without permission from the owner was illegal, yet I would certainly have no moral qualms about breaking the law in this way. The situation with current copyright law is the same.
If you want to give a lucid, reasoned argument why this or any law deserves to be obeyed, I'll be happy to listen to you. But saying that I should obey a law just because it's the law is a slap in the face to the brave people (e.g. Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks) who are admired today for breaking laws that they thought were wrong.
No one is saying that current copyright law is a fundamental human rights violation on the same order of magnitude as slavery. Indeed, I think we should all be thankful that the laws of this nation have improved to the point where people are quibbling over money instead of over fundamental human rights.
Although it sounds like I'm advocating piracy, I actually haven't pirated anything for years. In fact, for the past few years I have been protesting the RIAA's tactics by boycotting their products. I've spent well over a thousand dollars on CDs in the last 3 years, and every single one of them was foreign-made. None of them was produced by any record label in North America. The issue for me is not money, it's freedom and attitude. I want to be able to enjoy fair use of my CDs. I want to be able to play them on my Rio and to mix and match favorite tracks on CD-R, and I cannot bring myself to support an organization (RIAA) that wants to deny us those freedoms.
They don't need to release the source, just a library that can be linked against. Then we would no doubt have command line, X, GNOME, KDE, and probably some other versions of software that could play Real streams.
The GNOME and KDE projects at least distribute all their work under the GPL, which stipulates that you cannot distribute the software unless all its components are under the GPL. This condition would plainly be impossible to satisfy for a player that requires a closed Real library.
While the KDE folks have been known to play fast and loose with this requirement of the GPL (see for example any past flame war on QT), GNOME is official GNU software and hell would freeze over before the FSF releases anything using a proprietary Real library.
Changing the subject to get back on topic, I feel that the free software/open source community should avoid touching closed standards with a 10 ft pole. Closed software is one thing, and we can work around that given enough time, but closed standards are fatal to the free software cause. File formats and protocols used by companies like Real, Microsoft, etc. have a nasty habit of changing incompatibly whenever it suits the interests of the owning company. I personally am very disappointed that a company like Redhat that has been so supportive of free software in the past is now going to be held hostage to the whims of Real and their proprietary streaming protocol.
The fact that proprietary file format standards such as Realaudio and MS Office have a monopoly chokehold on their respective market is just one more problem that our community is going to have to overcome. I don't claim to have the answers, but I at least realize that it's a problem.
For every "Linux is hard to install" sob story like yours, there is a similar story on the other side about Windows. Anecdotes don't really prove anything, because a typical user isn't going to be in the same situation as the one telling the story.
You say it is far far easier to install Windows than Linux? Speak for yourself. I'm on the other side of the fence: I have no trouble putting Linux on SCSI, Jaz drives, ZIP drives, or even on top of an existing Windows drive with no repartitioning, but Windows gives me no end of trouble whenever I have the audacity to try to install it on a system that already has another OS on it.
I have just spent a dozen hours in the last week trying to install Windows onto my machine. Windows 95? Won't detect my sym53c8xx SCSI controller (no IDE on the system, so the SCSI detection is needed for installation). Windows 98? Hangs before getting to the setup wizard. Windows NT and 2000? Won't boot unless I use the setup program's disk partitioner to create a new partition for them, and when I do that Linux complains the partition table is invalid and won't recognize the new OS. No, before you ask, I am not inexperienced at this. I have installed both Windows and Linux dozens of times, but even with all my experience Windows has me at my wit's end.
You say Windows 2000 is easy to install from scratch. I believe it. The problem occurs if you have an existing OS and don't want to destroy your existing system. Windows is exclusionary by design: it wants your whole system for itself. You complain that Linux does not play nice, but in my experience Windows is far, far worse.
I could easily install Linux onto a Jaz drive if I had to, but I dare say it is impossible to install Windows onto a Jaz drive, or indeed any drive other than the "C:" of the system. For that matter, the entire concept of prefixed drive letters for different drives is a shameful vestige of the DOS era that Microsoft ought to abandon this very instant. You have no idea how much easier it is to move files from one disk drive to another in Linux, since you don't also have to change lots of drive letters in the registry while you're at it. But this is drifting off the subject.
You want me to install Linux onto your Jaz drive? Fine, I'll do that, provided you install Windows on my system in exchange (seriously). Not everyone is in your boat. Some of us find Linux easy and need help with the Windows.
I find this comment seriously offensive. How do you watch a DVD if you have no right to view unencrypted content?
Are you going to try to lock down my brain, and prevent me from telling all my friends about the new movie I just saw, because the memory of the movie in my brain is unencrypted and can be passed to anyone?
The fundamental problem with content encryption, which you don't seem to realize, is that if it can be sensed with our eyes and ears, then it can not be protected unless you impose thought control upon the citizens. I have a sinking feeling that Orwellian thought control is what you really want to bring about in this country. It may be legal, but it sure isn't right.
There is a reason I quoted the entire sentence instead of only quoting the isolated phrase that you quoted.
If you read the entire sentence, starting from the beginning with "Congress shall have the power...", and ask yourself what this sentence authorizes Congress to do (keeping in mind that the Constitution also specifies that any power not explicitly granted to Congress remains with the states), you'll see right away that Congress has the power to promote the progress of science and the useful arts, and that's it. The word "by" in this context can only mean "by means of".
The fact that the latter half of the sentence is a subordinate clause indicates clearly (to me at least) that securing the rights of authors is subordinate to the greater purpose of promoting progress.
This is not to say that authors might not have intrinsic rights to their works anyway. They probably do have some natural rights to their work, but even if they do have such rights this sentence does not give Congress the power to secure those rights directly. As explained above, this sentence gives Congress the power to promote progress, not the power to secure rights as an end in itself.
Remember that under the Constitution, Congress is not necessarily authorized to secure every single human right. For example, Federal law says nothing about murder unless it crosses state lines (at which point Congress's laws can apply because Congress has the Constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce), but I certainly have a right to life even if I'm only staying within one state.
You make very good points, and I would have brought up those points if I wasn't trying to respond to one specific narrow assertion of the parent post. In the context of the parent post the subject was "why do we have copyright" and I provided an authoritative legal answer to that question (authoritative because the Constitution is the ultimate legal authority).
The fact that our current system does not protect authors' original rights is a major implementation failure that needs to be corrected. Even a simple change in our law to the effect of "The original author maintains ultimate copyright control during the period of copyright no matter what licensing arrangments are signed with others" would go a long way towards addressing this problem that you brought up.
There is yet another good point to be found in the "limited time" stipulation. During our nation's formative years the duration of a copyright was 27 years. I don't think our founding fathers imagined that copyright protection would be extended to anywhere near its current 95 year length. I am quite convinced that a 95 year protection period can not be considered "limited time" in anyone's lifetime, but I seem to be the only one who feels this way.
copyright and patents are older than the USA, and in fact originate in monarchies that never say fit to write the reasoning behind their laws down.
This is all right, of course. The philosophical justification of copyright is subject to intense debate and very likely differs from person to person. I was attempting to limit the focus of this discussion to legal issues, avoiding the philosophical can of worms as much as possible.
I find it entirely reasonable to view the matter from a legal perspective alone, since all tangible outcomes of this or any copyright discussion are dictated solely by the legal standing of the various arguments and issues.
So if you will allow me to restrict attention to the law, then what I said is absolutely correct: copyrights exist in this country for the purpose of promoting progress. The fact that I am citing the Constitution strengthens my position considerably. Congress can change the law with a vote (and when one's philosophy does not match the law, one often lobbies for this), but the prospect of a Constitutional amendment affecting the copyright provision is vanishingly small.
In light of your new information about the dependency checker:
Okay, depends.exe can be downloaded at no cost. That's good. It can list the dlls that an executable requires. That's good.
But I'm talking about much more. Let's say I want to know not just what dlls winword.exe requires, but the dlls that MSOffice as a whole requires. As far as I know, and taking into account what you told me, there is no way to do this.
Information about what libraries a software package requires as a whole is very useful for a system administrator. Windows is as far as I can tell architecturally incapable of performing this basic function, because there is no central program keeping track of which files go with which software packages. If there is a way of listing all the files that came with MSOffice, again, I'd like to know:-)
I'm still not very impressed that I have to buy a separate product (Visual Studio) to perform a basic administrative function that I'm accustomed to having in the base system (dependency tracing).
It's up to an application to do it's installing uninstalling.
Yes, indeed it is, and I don't like this approach. I think the Redhat Linux approach where a single centralized program does all the installing and uninstalling presents a much more uniform and powerful interface. (And no, it doesn't have to be command-line; plenty of graphical front-ends to rpm exist.)
Putting the responsibility of installation/uninstallation on the application reminds me of the bad old days of cooperative multitasking in Windows 3.1 where the application was responsible for claiming and releasing CPU timeslices. Microsoft has since done the smart thing and moved CPU timeslice control into the central system, a la preemptive multitasking. Why not do the same for software installations?
The new APIs in Windows 2000 sound good but in my view they don't go far enough, because (un)installation is still the responsibility of the application. All the APIs in the world aren't going to help if the applications aren't using them.
I know you can list the contents of cab files, but I do not know any way to find out where the contents get put into my system after I install them. In Redhat Linux, I can list the files in an rpm package and also see what directories they get put into.
Anyway I appreciate your response and I like how things are improving but I still find that, with my unique preferences, keeping a Redhat Linux box current is much easier than trying to maintain a similarly current system in Windows.
Windows is pretty much the same, set it up and it goes on forever.
If you have a secret for avoiding DLL Hell, I'd sure like to know it.
You're damn right most people don't have static configurations. Software is constantly improving and upgrades are constantly needed. It's unreasonable to expect someone to keep on using Word 95 when everyone around him is using the new Word 97 file formats.
So given that most people do not live in a bubble and need to upgrade their software, let's compare Windows and Linux on the typical tasks of software installation, removal, and upgrading.
In Redhat Linux I can, with a single command, list all the files that come with StarOffice and all the dynamic libraries it depends on to run. In Windows, well, if you know a way to list all the files that come with MSOffice and all the DLLs it requires, I'd sure like to know.
In Redhat Linux a single centralized program can uninstall any software package on the computer. It knows what files to uninstall, lets you see what those files are if you want, and checks to make sure the uninstall doesn't break any dependencies. If you can get Windows to tell me the files it's about to uninstall, to check program dependencies before uninstalling, or even to present a uniform uninstallation interface instead of the hodgepodge of hundreds of different uninstall.exe's made by dozens of different companies, well, I'd sure like to know.
In Redhat Linux, if I'm about to install a package, I can list the files contained in the package, the libraries the package requires, and check that my system satisfies all the dependencies before installing the software. In Windows, well, if you know a way to get setup.exe to reveal what files it's going to install where, and what DLLs the installed program needs, I'd sure like to know.
Now you may rightly argue that grandma doesn't need to know anything about DLLs to install her software, but that's no justification for leaving out the capability entirely. System administrators use Windows too, and all the sysadmins I know would be very happy if it could be possible to have Windows make their lives easier in ways that Linux already is.
copyrights weren't meant to prevent people from selling stuff, they were meant to give the author the right to manage the content, including distribution.
No! You are so wrong! I don't know what country you're from, but here in the US the legal intent of copyright law is defined in, of all places, the US Constitution, the highest law in the land.
The Constitution says (and I quote):
The Congress shall have Power... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries
Federal copyright law owes its entire legitimacy to this clause in the Constitution. Reading it, you will see that copyright law exists to promote progress in science and arts, and not, as you say, to give authors control.
The incorrect notion that copyright and patent law exists to give the copyright/patent owner control over their work has been misused time and time again by corporations to justify increasingly restrictive intellectual property laws, even to the point of choking progress in science and arts in a manner contrary to the Constitutional justification for copyright and patent law. But the Constitution is very clear on this point, assuming anyone even bothers to read it anymore. Authors should not be given an amount of control over their work that is so excessive that it hinders instead of promotes progress.
I do not see how you can bring the GNU GPL into this discussion, since UCITA does not apply to the GNU GPL.
The GNU GPL is not an end user license agreement (EULA). The GPL does not put any conditions on the use of GPL-covered software. The GPL regulates distribution, not use.
If you are a user of GPL-covered software then the GPL has no legal relevance to you. In fact, the GPL does not even begin to concern you until you distribute the software. For this reason, the GPL is not an End User License Agreement. It would be more accurate to call the GPL a "distributor's license agreement".
Restrictions on the distribution of software are well grounded in copyright law. UCITA is not needed to enforce distribution terms, nor does it aid in enforcing distribution terms. UCITA is all about use of software, and not at all about distribution of software. Usage restrictions such as a ban on benchmark publications or a ban on reverse engineering are much more enforcable with UCITA than without.
Please don't confuse the GPL with a EULA. A EULA attempts to restrict the ways that you can use the software, while the GPL only addresses software distribution and places no restrictions on use.
I'd really love to see the visual chaos that would result from focus-follows-mouse policies.
Although you'd never guess it from my post (and I apologize for trying to be too brief), I actually advocate that menubar behavior, like most other aspects of most X environments, be configurable. Of course you don't want to force a top-of-screen menubar down the user's throat.
Sometimes a top-of-screen menubar makes sense, sometimes it does not. On occasion I find myself running a single application full-screen, and in those situations I would like to be able to have the menubar at the top.
In Windows, the delay is even configurable, using any number of "tweaker" control panels.
I've never seen anything in the control panels that let you tweak this delay. Options are no good for the end user if you have to be an expert to use them.
In any case an activation delay is no substitute for a good triangular buffer zone. A submenu that disappears 1/4 second later instead of immediately is of no use; ideally it should never disappear at all.
Classic MacOS did many things right, but it wasn't without its awful warts too.
Yep, that's right. I'm not clamoring for Gnome or KDE to adopt the bad features of MacOS, just the good ones.
One huge advantage of writing software today is that we can skim the good features of the past and avoid the bad ones. I despise the MacOS (despite your branding me a MacHead) but I do wish that the software I use (currently GNOME) would adopt some of its good features.
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One needs only examine some of his comments to see how badly out of touch Fountain is with the open source world:
Most Linux distributions don't supply Motif. The free *BSDs don't supply it. I'm certainly not about to pay for it, and even if I did, it's not really the same if you don't get source code. It does not matter how cool a toolkit is if I can't obtain it. The closed nature of Motif means it is completely cut off from the free software community: even the small minority of people willing and able to pay for it aren't able to enjoy the freely licensed source code that they have come to value and expect. He's got it exactly backwards from the way the free software community views things. Does he really think a closed, select group of NDA-d people can develop proprietary software faster than all the programmers in the world can develop open source software? As explained in The Cathedral and the Bazaar, software improves faster when development is open to all.I actually agree with Fountain that Motif isn't dead, but his reasons are all bass-ackwards. Motif owes its future life to corporate inertia, and not to any intrinsic advantages. In the free software world Motif suffers from the most crippling drawback of all: I can't get it, and I can't hack it.
On a low quality CD-ROM drive (in other words, 99% of the drives out on the market), there is no way to control precisely from what point an audio packet is read. One consequence is that two different attempts at audio extraction will almost certainly start from different offsets, resulting in two audio extractions that differ by a shift of bits. If this shift is accounted for, the two extractions should be exactly the same.
Note that positioning inaccuracies in the middle of reading a track can be corrected, simply by comparing the result with the previous read and scanning for any overlap of data. This process is known as "jitter correction." However, there is no way to correct inaccuracies at the start of a read, since there is no previous data to compare against.
Different drives have different statistical distributions of offsets, which explains the differences that you report when comparing copies extracted with different drives. Again, up to shifting, the two copies should be the same. If they aren't, at least one of the drives is defective.
It's very true that two wildly different copies can sound exactly the same to human ears, but on any half-decent CD-ROM hardware every extracted copy of a track should be identical except for the offsets mentioned above.
The quantum encrypted channel described in this story is bulletproof assuming Quantum mechanics is true. But there really is no reason to expect that quantum mechanics is actually true. Sure, it explains current observations very well, but there is no guarantee that future observations won't force a revision. Even the venerable Newtonian law of gravity turned out to be false, and had to be replaced with Einstein's theory of general relativity.
The analogy with mathematical laws is not a good one at all, because mathematical theorems are true independent of any underlying empirical justification. A mathematical theorem does need foundations in the form of underlying axioms, but that's quite different from relying on experimental observations. (For instance, 1+1=2 in the integers, but in the integers modulo 2, 1+1=0. Here my axioms have changed. However, no amount of adding will make 1+1 equal 0 in the integers.)
So, a better way to phrase the NSA paranoia viewpoint is, widespread deployment of quantum encrypted channels will spur the NSA to conduct experiments designed to expose any errors that may be present in our current theory of quantum mechanics. And while the post was rated funny, it's actually exactly what would happen.
cat file.txt | gless
Not that I think gless is useful ... it would be useful, if only someone would write the few lines of code needed for mouse wheel support. I'd do it myself except that I know nothing about C.
I am getting the sinking feeling that you haven't even read the section of the Constitution that I quoted. The Constitution says (and I quote):
Nobody is twisting anything. The very words "limited Times" appear in the Constitution itself.Control promotes progress.
That, my friend, is where we disagree. A limited amount of control promotes progress. Excessive control hinders progress. Our founding fathers realized this fact. That's why they added the word "limited" to the Constitution.
First off, if your position was defensible on its merits alone, then you wouldn't need to resort to tactics like attacking my education level. Can we keep this conversation civil please?
If the founding fathers had wanted to give authors control over their works, solely for the purpose of giving authors control over their works, then the Constitution would read more like:
The Constitution does not read this way. The line about promoting "progress of Science and useful Arts" was very deliberately added to indicate that the act of giving authors rights to their work is not an end in itself (as you so stubbornly insist), but rather a means towards the greater goal of promoting progress.I don't object with the idea of giving authors control over their work. I do object to the way you focus solely on guaranteeing authors control of their work, with utter disregard for whether such control promotes or hinders progress. Authorship rights are good if they provide incentives and foster creativity. Authorship rights are bad if they are so restrictive that they choke off further creativity. As obvious as all this may seem, you continue to insist that authorship rights are always good, never bad. That's wrong.
The point the original article was trying to make (which you seem to have missed) is that these days copyrights are increasingly being used to stifle instead of foster creativity.
(My apologies if the HTML formatting is missing. Slashdot is eating them up and there's nothing I can do about it.) First off, if your position was defensible on its merits alone, then you would not need to resort to tactics like attacking my education level. Can we keep this conversation civil please? If the founding fathers had wanted to give authors control over their works, solely for the purpose of giving authors control over their works, then the Constitution would read more like: The Congress shall have Power ... to give authors control over their works, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries. The Constitution does not read this way. The line about promoting "progress of Science and useful Arts" was very deliberately added to indicate that the act of giving authors rights to their work is not an end in itself (as you so stubbornly insist), but rather a means towards the greater goal of promoting progress. I don't object with the idea of giving authors control over their work. I do object to the way you focus solely on guaranteeing authors control of their work, with utter disregard for whether such control promotes or hinders progress. Authorship rights are good if they provide incentives and foster creativity. Authorship rights are bad if they are so restrictive that they choke off further creativity. As obvious as all this may seem, you continue to insist that authorship rights are always good, never bad. That's wrong. The point the original article was trying to make (which you seem to have missed) is that these days copyrights are increasingly being used to stifle instead of foster creativity.
I hate it when people invent their own legal justifications for IP law. I've lost count of the number of times I've had to repeat this exact post on slashdot to correct someone's ignorance.
I don't know what country you're from, but here in the US the legal intent of IP law is defined in, of all places, the US Constitution, the highest law in the land. You can't argue with the Constitution--its text is the ultimate legal authority in the US.
The Constitution says (and I quote):
Reading it, you will see that IP law exists to promote progress in science and arts, and not, as you say, to give authors control.The incorrect notion that copyright and patent law exists to give the copyright/patent owner rights over their work has been misused time and time again by corporations to justify increasingly restrictive intellectual property laws, even to the point of choking progress in science and arts in a manner contrary to the Constitutional justification for copyright and patent law. But the Constitution is very clear on this point, assuming anyone even bothers to read it anymore. Authors should not be given an amount of control over their work that is so excessive that it hinders instead of promotes progress.
Intellectual property rights are not an end upon themselves, but only a means for promoting progress in science and arts.
Diffie-Hellman is extremely simple and was discovered a good deal earlier than RSA. El Gamal is a totally obvious extension of Diffie-Hellman, in which the Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol is made into a public key cryptosystem in the simplest way possible: replace the predetermined secret exponent with an on-demand random one!
The only reason it took seven years to develop El Gamal's algorithm is that the scientific culture at the time was predominantly convinced that algorithms (even cryptographic ones) had to be deterministic. If you had tipped off any researcher in the field about run-time randomization of Diffie-Hellman, they could have produced El Gamal's 1984 paper off the top of their head. RSA is deterministic, requiring no random numbers at run time. Ironically, nowadays all RSA implementations introduce randomization in some form because it is obvious that a purely deterministic algorithm is not secure: Would you trust an encryption algorithm where the messages "Yes" and "No" always encrypt to the same two output messages?
As for your implication that RSA is more trustworthy than El Gamal, you might want to read Question 2.14 of the PGP DH vs. RSA FAQ, where various well-known experts assert that (as far as we know) all known ideas for solving the discrete log problem have direct applicability to factoring, whereas the reverse is not true. We know that factoring does not allow you to take discrete logs, whereas on the flip side there is strong evidence that if you can take discrete logs you can factor. All this and more is explained in the FAQ; the upshot is that most mathematicians, if forced to pick one of the two, would say that the factorization problem is likely to succumb before the discrete log problem succumbs. Of course the underlying hard problem is not the whole story, since neither RSA nor El-Gamal have been proven equivalent to the underlying hard problems, but it's the best we can do so far considering that no one has demonstrated any way to break the algorithms except through the underlying hard problems.
Finally, the very simplicity of using the same key for both encryption and signing is also a liability, in that if both keys are the same then anyone who is able to get one key (for example by a court order) is then able to forge the other operation as well. In the current political climate, I'd certainly like my signature key to remain valid even if the government seizes my encryption key.
Of course this is not Netscape's or Mozilla's fault. The fault lies entirely with RSA Data Laboratories, who refuse to license their patented RSA algorithm to any open source projects. While liberalization of US export laws is very nice, I think we're going to have to wait until after the RSA patent expires on Sept. 20 before people outside of Netscape (well, US citizens anyway) can start to tinker with the cryptography software themselves.
It's fascinating how RSA Data Laboratories was able to force the whole world to use RSA as their public key cryptography standard instead of the technically superior Diffie-Hellman/El Gamal algorithm. They did this by simply refusing to license Diffie-Hellman to anybody (yes, they owned a patent on that, back before it expired in 1997). Today the Diffie-Hellman algorithm has been out of patent protection for 3 years, but almost nobody uses it, because of the need to remain compatible with the large installed base of software that was forced to use RSA.
Let's hope the current patent shenanigans that are holding back Mozilla crypto are the last adverse effects that the open source community will ever see from RSA Data Laboratories, Inc.
I specifically disagree with your claim that the patent system was created to prevent secrets from dying with their inventors. The Constitution says the patent system was created to promote progress in science and arts. While one part of promoting progress may involve preventing secrets from dying with their inventors, that is certainly not the main purpose of patent law but only a side issue that may or may not be consistent with the overall goal of promoting progress.
Lastly, a couple of completely unrelated side notes:
You say a copyrighted work needs to be original, i.e., never written before. That's not true. A copyrighted work needs to be original in that you didn't copy it from any other copyrighted work. This meaning of "original" is different from your meaning. For example, if I have been living on a desert island for the past 50 years, and I write a novel entirely on my own that just happens to match a Stephen King novel word for word, I can assert copyright on my novel and the copyright would be entirely valid. In order to be copyrightable, a work needs to be original in the sense that you created it on your own without copying from copyrighted sources. It does not need to be original in the sense that nobody has ever created it before.
Also note that one is allowed to copy from public domain sources and copyright the resulting work. This scenario demonstrates very clearly that a work can be copyrighted even if it isn't an entirely new creation.
You say the courts are the appropriate forum to dispute patents. The reason many Slashdot readers disagree with this view is that in their mind the USPTO has been granting illegitimate patents at such a fast rate that there is no hope of ever challenging all of them in our already overburdened court system. Court cases are so expensive in terms of both time and money that there is no hope of reining in an abusive USPTO through the courts: the USPTO can grant patents much more easily than opponents can overturn them. Especially galling is the fact that patent applications are kept secret until the patents are actually granted, and that there is no way to overturn a patent once it has been granted except to go to court.
Bzzt! Sorry, but you lose. I don't know what country you're from, but in the United States, the purpose of patent laws is defined in the highest law in the land, the US Constitution. Specifically, the Constitution says:
If you don't live in the US, then maybe things are different in your country, but considering that this entire issue is about US patent law, it is the US legal justification for patent law that applies.I really hate it when people go off on a limb and claim that the justification for patent law is this or that pet idea of theirs. The rationale behind patent laws is very clearly spelled out in the Constitution. If you don't like the legal justification given in the Constitution, then, well, tough luck buddy. While individual laws come and go and change, the Constitution is hardly ever changed.
As a side note, you claim in your post that patents and copyrights rest on different legal foundations, but that's just not true. Both patents and copyrights derive their legal legitimacy from the very same Constitutional clause that I quoted above.
If you want to give a lucid, reasoned argument why this or any law deserves to be obeyed, I'll be happy to listen to you. But saying that I should obey a law just because it's the law is a slap in the face to the brave people (e.g. Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks) who are admired today for breaking laws that they thought were wrong.
No one is saying that current copyright law is a fundamental human rights violation on the same order of magnitude as slavery. Indeed, I think we should all be thankful that the laws of this nation have improved to the point where people are quibbling over money instead of over fundamental human rights.
Although it sounds like I'm advocating piracy, I actually haven't pirated anything for years. In fact, for the past few years I have been protesting the RIAA's tactics by boycotting their products. I've spent well over a thousand dollars on CDs in the last 3 years, and every single one of them was foreign-made. None of them was produced by any record label in North America. The issue for me is not money, it's freedom and attitude. I want to be able to enjoy fair use of my CDs. I want to be able to play them on my Rio and to mix and match favorite tracks on CD-R, and I cannot bring myself to support an organization (RIAA) that wants to deny us those freedoms.
The GNOME and KDE projects at least distribute all their work under the GPL, which stipulates that you cannot distribute the software unless all its components are under the GPL. This condition would plainly be impossible to satisfy for a player that requires a closed Real library.
While the KDE folks have been known to play fast and loose with this requirement of the GPL (see for example any past flame war on QT), GNOME is official GNU software and hell would freeze over before the FSF releases anything using a proprietary Real library.
Changing the subject to get back on topic, I feel that the free software/open source community should avoid touching closed standards with a 10 ft pole. Closed software is one thing, and we can work around that given enough time, but closed standards are fatal to the free software cause. File formats and protocols used by companies like Real, Microsoft, etc. have a nasty habit of changing incompatibly whenever it suits the interests of the owning company. I personally am very disappointed that a company like Redhat that has been so supportive of free software in the past is now going to be held hostage to the whims of Real and their proprietary streaming protocol.
The fact that proprietary file format standards such as Realaudio and MS Office have a monopoly chokehold on their respective market is just one more problem that our community is going to have to overcome. I don't claim to have the answers, but I at least realize that it's a problem.
You say it is far far easier to install Windows than Linux? Speak for yourself. I'm on the other side of the fence: I have no trouble putting Linux on SCSI, Jaz drives, ZIP drives, or even on top of an existing Windows drive with no repartitioning, but Windows gives me no end of trouble whenever I have the audacity to try to install it on a system that already has another OS on it.
I have just spent a dozen hours in the last week trying to install Windows onto my machine. Windows 95? Won't detect my sym53c8xx SCSI controller (no IDE on the system, so the SCSI detection is needed for installation). Windows 98? Hangs before getting to the setup wizard. Windows NT and 2000? Won't boot unless I use the setup program's disk partitioner to create a new partition for them, and when I do that Linux complains the partition table is invalid and won't recognize the new OS. No, before you ask, I am not inexperienced at this. I have installed both Windows and Linux dozens of times, but even with all my experience Windows has me at my wit's end.
You say Windows 2000 is easy to install from scratch. I believe it. The problem occurs if you have an existing OS and don't want to destroy your existing system. Windows is exclusionary by design: it wants your whole system for itself. You complain that Linux does not play nice, but in my experience Windows is far, far worse.
I could easily install Linux onto a Jaz drive if I had to, but I dare say it is impossible to install Windows onto a Jaz drive, or indeed any drive other than the "C:" of the system. For that matter, the entire concept of prefixed drive letters for different drives is a shameful vestige of the DOS era that Microsoft ought to abandon this very instant. You have no idea how much easier it is to move files from one disk drive to another in Linux, since you don't also have to change lots of drive letters in the registry while you're at it. But this is drifting off the subject.
You want me to install Linux onto your Jaz drive? Fine, I'll do that, provided you install Windows on my system in exchange (seriously). Not everyone is in your boat. Some of us find Linux easy and need help with the Windows.
I find this comment seriously offensive. How do you watch a DVD if you have no right to view unencrypted content?
Are you going to try to lock down my brain, and prevent me from telling all my friends about the new movie I just saw, because the memory of the movie in my brain is unencrypted and can be passed to anyone?
The fundamental problem with content encryption, which you don't seem to realize, is that if it can be sensed with our eyes and ears, then it can not be protected unless you impose thought control upon the citizens. I have a sinking feeling that Orwellian thought control is what you really want to bring about in this country. It may be legal, but it sure isn't right.
If you read the entire sentence, starting from the beginning with "Congress shall have the power ...", and ask yourself what this sentence authorizes Congress to do (keeping in mind that the Constitution also specifies that any power not explicitly granted to Congress remains with the states), you'll see right away that Congress has the power to promote the progress of science and the useful arts, and that's it. The word "by" in this context can only mean "by means of".
The fact that the latter half of the sentence is a subordinate clause indicates clearly (to me at least) that securing the rights of authors is subordinate to the greater purpose of promoting progress.
This is not to say that authors might not have intrinsic rights to their works anyway. They probably do have some natural rights to their work, but even if they do have such rights this sentence does not give Congress the power to secure those rights directly. As explained above, this sentence gives Congress the power to promote progress, not the power to secure rights as an end in itself.
Remember that under the Constitution, Congress is not necessarily authorized to secure every single human right. For example, Federal law says nothing about murder unless it crosses state lines (at which point Congress's laws can apply because Congress has the Constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce), but I certainly have a right to life even if I'm only staying within one state.
The fact that our current system does not protect authors' original rights is a major implementation failure that needs to be corrected. Even a simple change in our law to the effect of "The original author maintains ultimate copyright control during the period of copyright no matter what licensing arrangments are signed with others" would go a long way towards addressing this problem that you brought up.
There is yet another good point to be found in the "limited time" stipulation. During our nation's formative years the duration of a copyright was 27 years. I don't think our founding fathers imagined that copyright protection would be extended to anywhere near its current 95 year length. I am quite convinced that a 95 year protection period can not be considered "limited time" in anyone's lifetime, but I seem to be the only one who feels this way.
This is all right, of course. The philosophical justification of copyright is subject to intense debate and very likely differs from person to person. I was attempting to limit the focus of this discussion to legal issues, avoiding the philosophical can of worms as much as possible.
I find it entirely reasonable to view the matter from a legal perspective alone, since all tangible outcomes of this or any copyright discussion are dictated solely by the legal standing of the various arguments and issues.
So if you will allow me to restrict attention to the law, then what I said is absolutely correct: copyrights exist in this country for the purpose of promoting progress. The fact that I am citing the Constitution strengthens my position considerably. Congress can change the law with a vote (and when one's philosophy does not match the law, one often lobbies for this), but the prospect of a Constitutional amendment affecting the copyright provision is vanishingly small.
Okay, depends.exe can be downloaded at no cost. That's good. It can list the dlls that an executable requires. That's good.
But I'm talking about much more. Let's say I want to know not just what dlls winword.exe requires, but the dlls that MSOffice as a whole requires. As far as I know, and taking into account what you told me, there is no way to do this.
Information about what libraries a software package requires as a whole is very useful for a system administrator. Windows is as far as I can tell architecturally incapable of performing this basic function, because there is no central program keeping track of which files go with which software packages. If there is a way of listing all the files that came with MSOffice, again, I'd like to know :-)
I'm still not very impressed that I have to buy a separate product (Visual Studio) to perform a basic administrative function that I'm accustomed to having in the base system (dependency tracing).
It's up to an application to do it's installing uninstalling.
Yes, indeed it is, and I don't like this approach. I think the Redhat Linux approach where a single centralized program does all the installing and uninstalling presents a much more uniform and powerful interface. (And no, it doesn't have to be command-line; plenty of graphical front-ends to rpm exist.)
Putting the responsibility of installation/uninstallation on the application reminds me of the bad old days of cooperative multitasking in Windows 3.1 where the application was responsible for claiming and releasing CPU timeslices. Microsoft has since done the smart thing and moved CPU timeslice control into the central system, a la preemptive multitasking. Why not do the same for software installations?
The new APIs in Windows 2000 sound good but in my view they don't go far enough, because (un)installation is still the responsibility of the application. All the APIs in the world aren't going to help if the applications aren't using them.
I know you can list the contents of cab files, but I do not know any way to find out where the contents get put into my system after I install them. In Redhat Linux, I can list the files in an rpm package and also see what directories they get put into.
Anyway I appreciate your response and I like how things are improving but I still find that, with my unique preferences, keeping a Redhat Linux box current is much easier than trying to maintain a similarly current system in Windows.
If you have a secret for avoiding DLL Hell, I'd sure like to know it.
You're damn right most people don't have static configurations. Software is constantly improving and upgrades are constantly needed. It's unreasonable to expect someone to keep on using Word 95 when everyone around him is using the new Word 97 file formats.
So given that most people do not live in a bubble and need to upgrade their software, let's compare Windows and Linux on the typical tasks of software installation, removal, and upgrading.
In Redhat Linux I can, with a single command, list all the files that come with StarOffice and all the dynamic libraries it depends on to run. In Windows, well, if you know a way to list all the files that come with MSOffice and all the DLLs it requires, I'd sure like to know.
In Redhat Linux a single centralized program can uninstall any software package on the computer. It knows what files to uninstall, lets you see what those files are if you want, and checks to make sure the uninstall doesn't break any dependencies. If you can get Windows to tell me the files it's about to uninstall, to check program dependencies before uninstalling, or even to present a uniform uninstallation interface instead of the hodgepodge of hundreds of different uninstall.exe's made by dozens of different companies, well, I'd sure like to know.
In Redhat Linux, if I'm about to install a package, I can list the files contained in the package, the libraries the package requires, and check that my system satisfies all the dependencies before installing the software. In Windows, well, if you know a way to get setup.exe to reveal what files it's going to install where, and what DLLs the installed program needs, I'd sure like to know.
Now you may rightly argue that grandma doesn't need to know anything about DLLs to install her software, but that's no justification for leaving out the capability entirely. System administrators use Windows too, and all the sysadmins I know would be very happy if it could be possible to have Windows make their lives easier in ways that Linux already is.
No! You are so wrong! I don't know what country you're from, but here in the US the legal intent of copyright law is defined in, of all places, the US Constitution, the highest law in the land.
The Constitution says (and I quote):
Federal copyright law owes its entire legitimacy to this clause in the Constitution. Reading it, you will see that copyright law exists to promote progress in science and arts, and not, as you say, to give authors control.The incorrect notion that copyright and patent law exists to give the copyright/patent owner control over their work has been misused time and time again by corporations to justify increasingly restrictive intellectual property laws, even to the point of choking progress in science and arts in a manner contrary to the Constitutional justification for copyright and patent law. But the Constitution is very clear on this point, assuming anyone even bothers to read it anymore. Authors should not be given an amount of control over their work that is so excessive that it hinders instead of promotes progress.
The GNU GPL is not an end user license agreement (EULA). The GPL does not put any conditions on the use of GPL-covered software. The GPL regulates distribution, not use.
If you are a user of GPL-covered software then the GPL has no legal relevance to you. In fact, the GPL does not even begin to concern you until you distribute the software. For this reason, the GPL is not an End User License Agreement. It would be more accurate to call the GPL a "distributor's license agreement".
Restrictions on the distribution of software are well grounded in copyright law. UCITA is not needed to enforce distribution terms, nor does it aid in enforcing distribution terms. UCITA is all about use of software, and not at all about distribution of software. Usage restrictions such as a ban on benchmark publications or a ban on reverse engineering are much more enforcable with UCITA than without.
Please don't confuse the GPL with a EULA. A EULA attempts to restrict the ways that you can use the software, while the GPL only addresses software distribution and places no restrictions on use.
Although you'd never guess it from my post (and I apologize for trying to be too brief), I actually advocate that menubar behavior, like most other aspects of most X environments, be configurable. Of course you don't want to force a top-of-screen menubar down the user's throat.
Sometimes a top-of-screen menubar makes sense, sometimes it does not. On occasion I find myself running a single application full-screen, and in those situations I would like to be able to have the menubar at the top.
In Windows, the delay is even configurable, using any number of "tweaker" control panels.
I've never seen anything in the control panels that let you tweak this delay. Options are no good for the end user if you have to be an expert to use them.
In any case an activation delay is no substitute for a good triangular buffer zone. A submenu that disappears 1/4 second later instead of immediately is of no use; ideally it should never disappear at all.
Classic MacOS did many things right, but it wasn't without its awful warts too.
Yep, that's right. I'm not clamoring for Gnome or KDE to adopt the bad features of MacOS, just the good ones.
One huge advantage of writing software today is that we can skim the good features of the past and avoid the bad ones. I despise the MacOS (despite your branding me a MacHead) but I do wish that the software I use (currently GNOME) would adopt some of its good features.