you seem to have the issue a little confused here.
the free speech issue is not about the vendor's speech rights. it is about the comic's right to protection as speech.
The way this affects the vendor is that he is convicted of selling obscene material. If the material is protected speech, it is not obscene (by the legal criteria for finding things to be obscene) and he cannot be guilty of selling obscene material.
This has nothing to do with the vendor's speech rights and everything to do with the freedom of expression of the artist and the comic that was sold.
Then buy a computer without the OS. What's so difficult about that?
why should i do that? why dont they abide by the contract they entered into when selling me the computer? what's so difficult about them abiding my their legal responsibilities?
i strongly disagree. the matrix REQUIRES the ability to have a massive number of concurrent users and to effectively constrain administrator rights away from the majority of them. It clearly isnt windows.
and if you dont want to demean yourself to facilitate someone else's insecurity problem you can do this:
ask him in french whatever you need to know (if possible). then ask him if he speaks english (or your native language). If he says no, say something horribly insulting about his mother, him, france, the food, etc. when he gets really pissed at you, tell him you knew he spoke english, he's an asshole for pretending not to, and punch him in the face.
seriously though, it obviously isnt a fear of Americans if they are unwilling to speak German, or Spanish. It especially isnt about America when they refuse to help a Swedish person.
that is a colossal simplification of the events around id and ion storm.
Romero's efforts didnt blow up because of the "design is law" philosophy he had. They blew up for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that he tried to build a very large game with complex new technological features (like ai backup. that hadn't been done when romero started) in 7 months. In that same time, he tried to build a company, produce 2 other games, grow the company to 100+ people, and court investors. He bit off way too much.
Carmack doesn't have to focus on the storyline. He has a company full of people who do the art and the storyline. His focus is on the technology. He builds the framework for them to do their jobs in and he lets them do their jobs.
Lord of the Rings wouldnt be made if the technology didnt exist to do it right because nobody (aside from Bakshi) would touch it unless they could do it right. But without Lord of the Rings, the story, you have Dungeons and Dragons. And that movie sucked (but had good effects).
I liked Final Fantasy. I liked the story. the animation was good enough for the story.
Actually I'm not so sure about that. After all, SCO has a right against self-incrimination in a criminal case.
they have a right against self-incrimination with respect to testimony they give in a criminal case. they have no right to bar public statements they made willingly. If people could do that, confessions would be inadmissable in court.
It's not illegal to apply a binary-only license to works protected under the GPL
i disagree. I believe the GPL specifically requires any code under the GPL that is distributed to have its source made available to anyone who requests it. A binary only license would put a further restriction on it's distribution and would then be a violation of the GPL. The only caveat to that would be if you owned the specific code, you could release it as GPL and also license it in non-GPL forms, like MySQL does. That, however, wouldnt apply in SCO's case because they are extending their restriction to cover code in the kernel that they do not hold copyright to. (unless you buy the "everything ever coded is a derivative of unix, therefore we own it" argument....but that's just absurd).
So the way i see it, if SCO fails to convince a judge that every operating system is a derivative work of sysV and thus they own the IP for all of it, their licensing scheme would clearly violate the copyright rights of all other Linux kernel contributors.
It also seems like if they fail in the civil suit, it opens them up to charges of fraud by everyone who buys one of their licenses.
because evidence brought out in the SCO case can be used against it when it is a matter of public record.
With respect to proving willful intent to violate copyright, SCO having no case in it's contract dispute will go a long way to showing that their attempt to apply a binary only license to works protected under the GPL is a willful infringement of the GPL.
the willfulness of it will probably be strengthened when it goes to court. If the case falls as a result of a judge determining it's a waste of time and is frivolous, then i would think there's a very strong case for SCO's behaviour being willful.
I doubt any criminal action against SCO will occur before the resolution of their accusations against IBM, though. I also kinda doubt the SEC is going to pursue them until after the case is resolved. (but i expect the SEC will tear everyone who sold stock during the run-up to trial a new asshole once the trial is over)
ok. so here you are talking about civil disobedience. Part of civil disobedience is you have to stay and take the punishment for openly committing the crime. You have to demonstrate the injustice and immorality with personal sacrifice.
If you arent willing to take the punishment in an effort to bring down the law, you should stay home.
They claim to have prosecuted a case for the little guy, but only cite one case where there were several parties (including big ones) being affected.
Well, they dont exactly have room for a comprehensive list of all the cases they have prosecuted. I do agree that it was a bad example and would have preferred an example involving open source software. That being said, i do wonder if there has ever been a case involving open source software considering that the criteria they use lends itself more to commercial ventures and the attitude in the open source community seems less likely to pursue government help in issues of copyright infringement.
Even after the question about terminology and agreeing that some terms are more accurate than others, they like to use the word pirate. In the last answer we have "This is the first extradition of a foreign national for online copyright piracy". Note it's not "copyright infringement", but the more evil sounding "pirate"
I chalk this up to society. The use of "pirate" for describing that behaviour is so commonplace, I think they just use it as a slang term, as opposed to any specific intent being behind it's use. It's still an incorrect usage, but i dont think it's intentionally malicious.
While they refused to answer questions about a specific case, they finnish up by talking about an ongoing extradition in a specific case.
Well, to be fair they refused to answer questions about a specific case that they had no involvement in and have no information about outside of what was published in newspapers. They arent really qualified to authoritatively discuss the merits of the case and, policywise, they probably arn't allowed to for fear of implying approval or disapproval by their department. The case they discuss at the end is something they are involved in and can speak with authority about.
that's my take on the pieces that stood out for you.
I dont think CIOs are going to be asking that question. I think CIOs will take the license to their legal dept. and ask "can you give me a summary of what this means?"
Their legal dept. when then come back and say "It's not so much a license agreement as a collection of loopholes whose edges are defined by the shell of a license."
Considering all the grumbling that's been going on for the past year or so about microsoft licensing practises (including with corporate entities), i dont think anyone is going to just take it at face value.
so, you mean that as a hobbyist i have to get my support and help from the community at large instead of via a contract with a major vendor? Isnt that how i've done it since the mid '90s?
considering the "making of" film made during the creation of Apocalypse Now was called Hearts of Darkness, i dont think they were trying to keep it a secret.
Re:SCO Investors like rats leaving sinking ship
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yeah, but you doing it couldn't be construed as a pump and dump scheme by the SEC.
We can argue over the outcome of a lawsuit forever, but the damage has long been done. It's not about a lawsuit, it's about reputation. And Linux' reputation will be tainted for a very long time to come.
yeah. I mean, look at the chilling effect it has had on the adoption of linux by major japanese multinational corporations. Since this lawsuit, there's only been one international organization of major corporations formed to utilize embedded linux in their future products.
The business world wont care about SCO's ip threats as long as they are sure SCO can be neutered. Businesses (generally speaking) will violate any law they think they can get away with, as long as there's money in it.
SCO realizes there is infringing code in Linux, but continue to release their distribution anyway. Perhaps they felt since their code was already infringed upon, why should they be punished in lost sales by pulling their product which was developed unknowingly with stolen code?
It is irrelevent that the code was already infringed upon. They have a legal avenue to stop that infringement and fix any violations. Unless certain IP bills going through congress pass, they do not have the right to violate the law just because they think someone might be violating their copyright.
Could it not be argued that once an invalid license always an invalid license?
Sure. that isnt the point, though.
Since the infringing code was included without their permission, its license under the GPL was never valid.
It was not valid initially. However, once they knew the code was in there and continued to distribute it, they set themselves up in a bad situation. As it stands now, they either willingly gave permission for the code to be distributed under the GPL, or they have (by their own admission) willfully and knowingly violated the copyright of every piece of open source software in the distribution they are making available.
So basically, they've either given permission for the code to be used under the GPL or they have committed thousands of copyright violations of the same magnitude as the one they are charging IBM with.
That's the rock and hard place their actions have put them in.
i disagree with your assertion that that solution would be fair.
Any monetary payment for predatory monopoly actions by microsoft should be paid to groups and companies that were harmed by those actions. (like consumers, netscape, samba, etc) Competition for microsoft should also come from closed source avenues and, in the event that microsoft's money were to be used to subsidize competitors, those avenues should be subsidized also. (not that i agree with the subsidy idea)
Open source software can and should win on it's moral and technological merits. The constraints on microsoft should be generic and make available the possibility of open and closed source competition for them. Then microsoft, open source competition, and closed source competition can all fight it out based on their merits instead of on subsidies or illegal business activities.
Personally, I think breaking Microsoft up was the right choice and anything short of that would lead to exactly where we are today. They effectively ignore any constraints put on them under the assumption that they can weather any legal action against them long enough to make the results of the legal action irrelevent.
With all the 3 strikes criminal laws getting so much support, it's sad that sufficiently wealthy companies can stay at bat as long as they want (provided nobody hits them with the breakup curve ball). (how's that for a lame allegory?)
Who here wouldn't buy a legal copy of XP Pro for $50?
I wouldn't. The only reason i have a copy of XP Home is because i couldnt get the laptop i wanted without a microsoft os. (and before people start in on me about wiping it or the refund thing: i know i'm not gonna get a refund unless i can get a few thousand people to ask for one with me. The machine now dual boots xp and gentoo. I use the XP partition to play games like raven shield and star wars galaxies.)
And wouldn't you not mind the bugs as much, concidering how much you had payed for it?
I would mind the bugs a lot. I would mind Microsoft's attitude towards the bugs a lot.
in their defense, i dont think having windows installed would make a difference with the ease of use of the power button.
I know what you are getting at, but isn't the whole point of lindows to make it easy for non-geeks? The installation and configuration are supposed to be de-geeked and it's supposed to be more like plug and play for installing devices. The description in the article seems to support the assertion that they have done this and done it well.
I also dont get the "biased because the mom has a clue" part of your comment. From the article i got the impression that the mother was used to windows and used to microsoft office (and that's about it). That seems to be a fair position to start from. While i know there are people who fall into the same category as your mom, i think that it is realistic to assume a familiarity with windows for the majority of the people this product is targeting.
As far as changing default behaviour for things like Gnome and KDE, that's not really an issue. You set up defaults for them and they never touch it (like windows). The real difference is that if they ever want to learn how and change it up, they can (unlike windows).
For most linux distributions, the complexity is too much for people unable or unwilling to learn how to use it. The goal for lindows is to abstract away that complexity so that those people have the equivalent "dumbed down" option.
Lastly, I dont think it's entirely fair to criticize Lindows for issues people bring up with linux on the desktop in general. Lindows is intended to solve these issues, and from the article has done so with at least some of them. Criticizing them for issues they have resolved because the issues exist in other distributions seems a little foolish.
IBM got the contract out of part of the buyout. It was probably never looked at. They would have assumed that IBM had control of derivative works, and SCO is saying that they do.
that's rediculous. When one company buys another, the company being bought has to disclose all contractual obligations to the buyer. The buyer uses that information to adjust their valuation of the company.
There's no way IBM's lawyers didnt know what responsibilities IBM was assuming when buying another company.
Slashdot Mirror
you seem to have the issue a little confused here.
the free speech issue is not about the vendor's speech rights. it is about the comic's right to protection as speech.
The way this affects the vendor is that he is convicted of selling obscene material. If the material is protected speech, it is not obscene (by the legal criteria for finding things to be obscene) and he cannot be guilty of selling obscene material.
This has nothing to do with the vendor's speech rights and everything to do with the freedom of expression of the artist and the comic that was sold.
what microsoft chooses or does not choose to exercise with respect to their copyright rights is irrelevent to what rights they have.
Then buy a computer without the OS. What's so difficult about that?
why should i do that?
why dont they abide by the contract they entered into when selling me the computer?
what's so difficult about them abiding my their legal responsibilities?
i strongly disagree. the matrix REQUIRES the ability to have a massive number of concurrent users and to effectively constrain administrator rights away from the majority of them. It clearly isnt windows.
and if you dont want to demean yourself to facilitate someone else's insecurity problem you can do this:
ask him in french whatever you need to know (if possible).
then ask him if he speaks english (or your native language).
If he says no, say something horribly insulting about his mother, him, france, the food, etc.
when he gets really pissed at you, tell him you knew he spoke english, he's an asshole for pretending not to, and punch him in the face.
seriously though, it obviously isnt a fear of Americans if they are unwilling to speak German, or Spanish. It especially isnt about America when they refuse to help a Swedish person.
that is a colossal simplification of the events around id and ion storm.
Romero's efforts didnt blow up because of the "design is law" philosophy he had. They blew up for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that he tried to build a very large game with complex new technological features (like ai backup. that hadn't been done when romero started) in 7 months. In that same time, he tried to build a company, produce 2 other games, grow the company to 100+ people, and court investors. He bit off way too much.
Carmack doesn't have to focus on the storyline. He has a company full of people who do the art and the storyline. His focus is on the technology. He builds the framework for them to do their jobs in and he lets them do their jobs.
Lord of the Rings wouldnt be made if the technology didnt exist to do it right because nobody (aside from Bakshi) would touch it unless they could do it right. But without Lord of the Rings, the story, you have Dungeons and Dragons. And that movie sucked (but had good effects).
I liked Final Fantasy. I liked the story. the animation was good enough for the story.
Actually I'm not so sure about that. After all, SCO has a right against self-incrimination in a criminal case.
they have a right against self-incrimination with respect to testimony they give in a criminal case. they have no right to bar public statements they made willingly. If people could do that, confessions would be inadmissable in court.
It's not illegal to apply a binary-only license to works protected under the GPL
i disagree. I believe the GPL specifically requires any code under the GPL that is distributed to have its source made available to anyone who requests it. A binary only license would put a further restriction on it's distribution and would then be a violation of the GPL. The only caveat to that would be if you owned the specific code, you could release it as GPL and also license it in non-GPL forms, like MySQL does. That, however, wouldnt apply in SCO's case because they are extending their restriction to cover code in the kernel that they do not hold copyright to. (unless you buy the "everything ever coded is a derivative of unix, therefore we own it" argument....but that's just absurd).
So the way i see it, if SCO fails to convince a judge that every operating system is a derivative work of sysV and thus they own the IP for all of it, their licensing scheme would clearly violate the copyright rights of all other Linux kernel contributors.
It also seems like if they fail in the civil suit, it opens them up to charges of fraud by everyone who buys one of their licenses.
because evidence brought out in the SCO case can be used against it when it is a matter of public record.
With respect to proving willful intent to violate copyright, SCO having no case in it's contract dispute will go a long way to showing that their attempt to apply a binary only license to works protected under the GPL is a willful infringement of the GPL.
the willfulness of it will probably be strengthened when it goes to court. If the case falls as a result of a judge determining it's a waste of time and is frivolous, then i would think there's a very strong case for SCO's behaviour being willful.
I doubt any criminal action against SCO will occur before the resolution of their accusations against IBM, though. I also kinda doubt the SEC is going to pursue them until after the case is resolved.
(but i expect the SEC will tear everyone who sold stock during the run-up to trial a new asshole once the trial is over)
ok. so here you are talking about civil disobedience. Part of civil disobedience is you have to stay and take the punishment for openly committing the crime. You have to demonstrate the injustice and immorality with personal sacrifice.
If you arent willing to take the punishment in an effort to bring down the law, you should stay home.
They claim to have prosecuted a case for the little guy, but only cite one case where there were several parties (including big ones) being affected.
Well, they dont exactly have room for a comprehensive list of all the cases they have prosecuted. I do agree that it was a bad example and would have preferred an example involving open source software. That being said, i do wonder if there has ever been a case involving open source software considering that the criteria they use lends itself more to commercial ventures and the attitude in the open source community seems less likely to pursue government help in issues of copyright infringement.
Even after the question about terminology and agreeing that some terms are more accurate than others, they like to use the word pirate. In the last answer we have "This is the first extradition of a foreign national for online copyright piracy". Note it's not "copyright infringement", but the more evil sounding "pirate"
I chalk this up to society. The use of "pirate" for describing that behaviour is so commonplace, I think they just use it as a slang term, as opposed to any specific intent being behind it's use.
It's still an incorrect usage, but i dont think it's intentionally malicious.
While they refused to answer questions about a specific case, they finnish up by talking about an ongoing extradition in a specific case.
Well, to be fair they refused to answer questions about a specific case that they had no involvement in and have no information about outside of what was published in newspapers. They arent really qualified to authoritatively discuss the merits of the case and, policywise, they probably arn't allowed to for fear of implying approval or disapproval by their department.
The case they discuss at the end is something they are involved in and can speak with authority about.
that's my take on the pieces that stood out for you.
I dont think CIOs are going to be asking that question. I think CIOs will take the license to their legal dept. and ask "can you give me a summary of what this means?"
Their legal dept. when then come back and say "It's not so much a license agreement as a collection of loopholes whose edges are defined by the shell of a license."
Considering all the grumbling that's been going on for the past year or so about microsoft licensing practises (including with corporate entities), i dont think anyone is going to just take it at face value.
so, you mean that as a hobbyist i have to get my support and help from the community at large instead of via a contract with a major vendor? Isnt that how i've done it since the mid '90s?
i smell a new reality tv show....
quick, someone call Fox.
we could call it "Contract Survivor" or something.
and then they opened up a cafe press store and put the broken saints logo on a thong.
considering the "making of" film made during the creation of Apocalypse Now was called Hearts of Darkness, i dont think they were trying to keep it a secret.
yeah, but you doing it couldn't be construed as a pump and dump scheme by the SEC.
how is that different than the patent infringement claim going through the courts against microsoft right now?
That problem exists in closed source as well. It's just impossible to do any oversight when dealing with closed source solutions.
We can argue over the outcome of a lawsuit forever, but the damage has long been done. It's not about a lawsuit, it's about reputation. And Linux' reputation will be tainted for a very long time to come.
yeah. I mean, look at the chilling effect it has had on the adoption of linux by major japanese multinational corporations. Since this lawsuit, there's only been one international organization of major corporations formed to utilize embedded linux in their future products.
The business world wont care about SCO's ip threats as long as they are sure SCO can be neutered. Businesses (generally speaking) will violate any law they think they can get away with, as long as there's money in it.
SCO realizes there is infringing code in Linux, but continue to release their distribution anyway. Perhaps they felt since their code was already infringed upon, why should they be punished in lost sales by pulling their product which was developed unknowingly with stolen code?
It is irrelevent that the code was already infringed upon. They have a legal avenue to stop that infringement and fix any violations. Unless certain IP bills going through congress pass, they do not have the right to violate the law just because they think someone might be violating their copyright.
Could it not be argued that once an invalid license always an invalid license?
Sure. that isnt the point, though.
Since the infringing code was included without their permission, its license under the GPL was never valid.
It was not valid initially. However, once they knew the code was in there and continued to distribute it, they set themselves up in a bad situation. As it stands now, they either willingly gave permission for the code to be distributed under the GPL, or they have (by their own admission) willfully and knowingly violated the copyright of every piece of open source software in the distribution they are making available.
So basically, they've either given permission for the code to be used under the GPL or they have committed thousands of copyright violations of the same magnitude as the one they are charging IBM with.
That's the rock and hard place their actions have put them in.
i disagree with your assertion that that solution would be fair.
Any monetary payment for predatory monopoly actions by microsoft should be paid to groups and companies that were harmed by those actions. (like consumers, netscape, samba, etc)
Competition for microsoft should also come from closed source avenues and, in the event that microsoft's money were to be used to subsidize competitors, those avenues should be subsidized also. (not that i agree with the subsidy idea)
Open source software can and should win on it's moral and technological merits. The constraints on microsoft should be generic and make available the possibility of open and closed source competition for them. Then microsoft, open source competition, and closed source competition can all fight it out based on their merits instead of on subsidies or illegal business activities.
Personally, I think breaking Microsoft up was the right choice and anything short of that would lead to exactly where we are today. They effectively ignore any constraints put on them under the assumption that they can weather any legal action against them long enough to make the results of the legal action irrelevent.
With all the 3 strikes criminal laws getting so much support, it's sad that sufficiently wealthy companies can stay at bat as long as they want (provided nobody hits them with the breakup curve ball).
(how's that for a lame allegory?)
Who here wouldn't buy a legal copy of XP Pro for $50?
I wouldn't. The only reason i have a copy of XP Home is because i couldnt get the laptop i wanted without a microsoft os. (and before people start in on me about wiping it or the refund thing: i know i'm not gonna get a refund unless i can get a few thousand people to ask for one with me. The machine now dual boots xp and gentoo. I use the XP partition to play games like raven shield and star wars galaxies.)
And wouldn't you not mind the bugs as much, concidering how much you had payed for it?
I would mind the bugs a lot. I would mind Microsoft's attitude towards the bugs a lot.
not only did i watch the bmw films, i downloaded all of them. I even ordered the dvd of them last week.
(you can get the dvd from bmw for $5 from the bmw films website. unfortunately, the purchasing cgi only works in IE.)
in their defense, i dont think having windows installed would make a difference with the ease of use of the power button.
I know what you are getting at, but isn't the whole point of lindows to make it easy for non-geeks? The installation and configuration are supposed to be de-geeked and it's supposed to be more like plug and play for installing devices. The description in the article seems to support the assertion that they have done this and done it well.
I also dont get the "biased because the mom has a clue" part of your comment. From the article i got the impression that the mother was used to windows and used to microsoft office (and that's about it). That seems to be a fair position to start from. While i know there are people who fall into the same category as your mom, i think that it is realistic to assume a familiarity with windows for the majority of the people this product is targeting.
As far as changing default behaviour for things like Gnome and KDE, that's not really an issue. You set up defaults for them and they never touch it (like windows). The real difference is that if they ever want to learn how and change it up, they can (unlike windows).
For most linux distributions, the complexity is too much for people unable or unwilling to learn how to use it. The goal for lindows is to abstract away that complexity so that those people have the equivalent "dumbed down" option.
Lastly, I dont think it's entirely fair to criticize Lindows for issues people bring up with linux on the desktop in general. Lindows is intended to solve these issues, and from the article has done so with at least some of them.
Criticizing them for issues they have resolved because the issues exist in other distributions seems a little foolish.
IBM got the contract out of part of the buyout. It was probably never looked at. They would have assumed that IBM had control of derivative works, and SCO is saying that they do.
that's rediculous. When one company buys another, the company being bought has to disclose all contractual obligations to the buyer. The buyer uses that information to adjust their valuation of the company.
There's no way IBM's lawyers didnt know what responsibilities IBM was assuming when buying another company.