If I gave you a house on a rent-free 12 month lease would you piss and whine about how inconvenient moving out would be?
While I agree with your intent, I would chose my analogies more carefully.
In the case of Windows 7, you won't have saved anything if you purchase Windows 7 a year later. It will still be the same price. At most you would have saved a few quid interest on putting your money in the bank during your year of free Windows 7.
Since housing is so incredibly expensive in comparison, you would most likely have saved an absolute fortune in rent/mortgage interest, that you could have saved up as part of a deposit on a house of your own.
Thus, free rent for a year is a massive boost to anyone which is certainly worth the hassle of moving out.
As it turns out, OpenOffice.org is LGPL, meaning it is perfectly acceptable to write closed source modules to it, or write a larger closed source application that makes use of OpenOffice.org, as long as you dynamically link with OpenOffice.org and provide source code for the OpenOffice.org part.
MS Office has a massive ecosystem because it is has been the dominant Office pack for the last 15 years, years before OpenOffice became LGPL. But I suspect you don't have a clue about these thinks (also insert patronising smiley).
Actually, it is. Firefox is triple licensed as GPL, LGPL and MPL. All of these licenses are so-called "copyleft" to some extent, requiring back contribution.
"Perl - Used everwhere, Not GPL"
Again. It is. PERL is dual licensed GPL and the Artistic License. The Artistic License has less restrictions than the GPL, but more restrictions than the BSD license.
"Ruby - Used everywhere, Not GPL"
Yet again. It is. Ruby is dual licensed GPL (all of it) and the Ruby license (some of it). The Ruby license does allow commercial and proprietary use, but certain parts of Ruby is not covered by the Ruby license.
Besides this name dropping is pointless. I can counter with other examples (at least with your definition of 'everywhere').
Linux - Used everywhere, GPL OpenOffice.org - Used everywhere, GPL MySQL - Used much more everywhere than PostgreSQL, GPL Samba - Used everywhere, GPL.
The main point is that loads of projects see great adoption even if they use the GPL. So using the GPL to cover your bases, doesn't seem to be a great deterrent.
"I'm not sure what you're looking for then? Do you only trust every contract you enter into after it has been tested in court?"
Certainly not. But in the case of a software license like the GPL, there is no explicit agreement between anyone. Nobody had to write their signature anywhere or even verbally say "yeah, I agree to these terms".
"Either the GPL is binding, or you have no right to be using the software now, let alone after Oracle take over. If the GPL isn't binding we might as well all pack up and go home."
You are again not reading my post before posting a reply. The copyright holder has given us a license, but isn't clear that the copyright holder has to abide by the terms in the license saying it is 'irrevocable'. Another poster talked about a 'gratuitous licenses' and I suggest you read that.
"Certainly the GPL has never been found to be unenforceable - surely that carries some weight?"
AFAIK no company has ever tried to revoke someone's GPL rights and very few companies are even in a position to attempt to do it. I.e. first of all, you will have to be the sole copyright holder, with nobody else having any claim to the code. Otherwise you'd be violating someone else's copyright by revoking the GPL.
SUN/Oracle is perhaps the only major player with significant Open Source projects where they own all the copyright due to having required copyright assignment for any patches.
Even so, I still think this is a fairly remote possibility, but I'd be wary of assigning your copyright to someone else when contributing.
You're not really answering my post. The GPL is clear enough on this matter, but it isn't entirely legally clear if the GPL is to be considered a binding contract or not. Thus, my argument can't really be answered by referring to the GPL. The FSF has their opinion on the matter, but the FSF does not make laws.
This is not a problem at all in the opposite case where a recipient of the code breaks the license, because without the license, the recipient has no rights to the code.
However, without the license, the copyright holder has all the rights exclusively to the code.
I'm not saying there is a big chance of the copyright holder being legally able to revoke the licensing on GPL software, but I do think it is worth considering as a remote possibility. In any case I don't think it is a good idea to agree to reassign copyright on your contributions to SUN/Oracle.
.. about "who really owns a commercial open software application".
The copyright holders owns a commercial open software application. If all the copyright has been assigned to a corporation, then the corporation owns the copyright. This is fact.
Obviously, if the corporation has licensed other people to use and distribute it (i.e. with the GPL) then non-copyright holders may have some rights too.
This leads us to the only part of the GPL that I think is in any way legally questionable (IANAL). I'm not sure it is entirely legally clear if the copyright holder is allowed to revoke the GPL licensing terms or not, no matter what is said in the license. (i.e. They could argue that the license is not a binding contract).
In the opposite case of anyone breaking the GPL license by releasing binary only derivatives, the violator can not hide behind 'not a binding contract' because that would remove all of their rights to the software whatsoever (they have no rights other than what the GPL grants them).
If the copyright holder is allowed to revoke the license, they could close up any project that they own copyright to without allowing any forks. It would mean a loss of MySQL and OpenOffice.org as free software forever.
"If the trial were held in the UK, USA, Canada, and a few others I have experience with, then the answer would be that the judge would recuse his/her self."
Your post is in my opinion very, very patronising towards Sweden (one of the least corrupt and most transparent countries in the world).
It seems just like in the US, the judge is supposed to make the call himself. For some reason he decided that he wasn't biased in this case, and that is why this is causing such a stir in Sweden.
To be equally patronising; most swedes will probably say they expected this from countries such as the US, but not in their own country.
Except that the pirate bay doesn't just link to illegal stuff. There's tons of legal files on there too.
Which is completely secondary to the Pirate Bay operation and most likely added by people to prove a point rather than for any practical reason.
The site was obviously set up with copyright infringement in mind and even takes its name from this use. Calling the site 'the pirate bay' hardly helped them argue the legal uses of the site.
Replace those features with APIs that offer features only available on the Google's application server. (eg. google.io.*, google.threads.*, google.db.*, google.util.*, etc...)
The word subset does not mean what you think it means. Hint: A subset is fully contained within the original set and does not contain any additional features. If Google adds these features their implementation is no longer a subset.
No. You completely miss the point of the parent, which is not about the importance of presumed innocence, but that fact != assumption.
"OJ may very well be a murderer, but he is innocent."
You don't know that. As the parent says 'innocent' or 'guilty' are based on facts, not on conviction. If he is the murderer then by definition he is not innocent.
We presume that a person is innocent until proven guilty, we don't know that a person is innocent. Otherwise there would be no point in a trial.
When a person is found 'not guilty', we are saying that we can not find sufficient evidence that our presumption is wrong. Therefore the legal system will continue to assume that the person is innocent.
But assumption/presumption != fact, and so it is perfectly reasonable to disagree with the findings of the court and people are entitled to their opinion on the matter.
In the case of OJ, he lost his civil case because on the balance of probability, the evidence presented suggests he is guilty.
Because our requirements are higher than 'balance of probability' in a criminal case, the legal assumption is still that he is innocent. This is as it should be, otherwise we would convict many, many innocent people.
However, my personal opinion does not require any more than 'balance of probability' and I thus believe OJ is guilty. I may be correct or I may be wrong, we will never know for sure, and that is why OJ was still walking the streets after the case.
You are unlikely to have enough information to say that he is innocent.
While I completely agree that you want a massive ration between your kills and your enemies kills, it isn't at all a different debate to "to go to war or not".
If the US hadn't predicted a massive kill ratio, they would not have invaded Iraq at all. So these things are linked.
There's not the slightest reason to suppose that such phenomena, or their explanations, would "make sense" to us.
If we were always to accept that a solution would never make sense to us, we would have missed out on a lot of our scientific discoveries.
Also, "reason to suppose" is not the only argument for investigating an issue. Sometimes "because it would be great if it was so" is an equally good reason.
In this case, it would be fantastic if there is an explanation behind it that makes sense to us. It would make the theories immeasurably easier to work with and might provide us with answers we could otherwise not comprehend.
Since it turns out that we have found many answers that "makes sense" to us in other areas of science, it is perfectly reasonable to hope that we can make sense of quantum mechanics one day as well, as long as we don't take for granted that there is a sensible explanation and mistake 'hope' for 'assumption'.
All I am saying is that this is a balance and changing operating environment causes businesses to change the way they operate. Being able to adapt to a changing market is one of the advantages of a market based system. The reason you missed the point is that you argued as if what people do doesn't matter. Obviously if a change in customer behaviour is dramatic enough, it will cause a power company to change their operations for good or bad.
Obviously power stations/technologies with more flexible power cycles is more expensive to operate than the ones that are just run continuously (and quite possibly dirtier). Otherwise every power station would be of the more flexible kind and would be adapted to the day cycle.
However, this is obviously a balance. At the moment, power production during the night isn't a complete waste, since you will still sell a fair bit of power. But if nobody used power at night (hyperbole, I admit), the balance would shift towards the more expensive and more flexible technologies and more effort would be made into day cycling the plants.
The truth is obviously somewhere in between. If people cut their night time consumption considerably (which to be fair would likely require more than just PCs), it would change the operating conditions for the power companies and might just make them switch some of their energy towards more flexible production. Obviously they wouldn't change all the production.
Whether this has unintended bad consequences, I don't know.
"Power companies will not change anything unless it MAKES them more money. They ain't interested in saving money at all."
Absolute bullshit with no connection to reality at all. Power companies are interested in profit first and foremost. And as publicly listed companies, they are very interested in increasing their profits.
This is achieved by both increasing revenue where possible and by saving operating costs wherever possible. Why on earth do you think companies make redundancies when this obviously will not increase their revenues? They do it because they increase profits by reducing operating costs.
If the market changes so the power companies could save money by producing less power during the night, damn right they would change their operating conditions.
Of course I can't make hard judgements about whether it will be enough that all companies start switching off their computers at night, that is up to the people with the figures to do. But any good business leader will continually monitor the business' environment and adapt the business to its operating conditions.
"I think you might actually have to demonstrate that he is drunker than the average Briton his age."
Not at all. Prince William's drunkenness has been demonstrated on many occasions. So that takes care of the "drunken" part. In no way does this require him to be "more drunken" than his peers.
As for embarrassment, this is a subjective personal feeling. Nobody can really dispute your feeling of embarrassment on behalf of your country, and at most you may have to demonstrate that it isn't unreasonable for a British subject to be embarrassed about his behaviour.
Even if you are just as bad of a drunkard as William, it isn't unreasonable to feel embarrassed if William exposes the mentality of you and the average Briton.
William would get absolutely nowhere in the UK trying to sue someone for calling him a drunken embarrassment.
You are missing the point completely. The point is that if most businesses started switching off their computers at night, the power companies would most likely change their operating conditions.
It might make it less economically viable to maintain such a high base load during the night, meaning it becomes more profitable to shift some of the power production on the sources with a shorter power up/down cycle.
Educating companies about how much money they are wasting is likely to be far more effective than asking them to be green for the environment.
IANAL, but it seems to me that by agressively patenting the most common file system on the planet and limiting the use of this file system, Microsoft is essentially using its monopoly on the Windows platform to gain an unfair advantage in the sat.nav market.
I'm surprised Tom Tom hasn't started an anti-trust counter suit.
And I don't for a second believe that the FAT filesystem patents would stand up if faced with a decent lawyer in a court. All the patents are describing relatively simple engineering solutions that anyone could come up with when faced with the problems Microsoft created for themselves.
The parent said "my entire music collection" (emphasis mine), not "your entire music collection". I think it becomes fairly obvious that he was talking about himself, not you.
I'm also willing to bet that 16GB will suffice to contain the music collection of at least 95% of people. At an average of 6MB per track (*), 16GB will hold over 2600 tracks, or nearly 180 albums with an average of 15 tracks per album.
I am willing to bet that owning 180 albums is well above average.
(*) Yes. This is a generous average. And no, most people do not care that your tracks are encoded at 256 kbit/s or even FLAC-encoded at 30MB each.
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If I gave you a house on a rent-free 12 month lease would you piss and whine about how inconvenient moving out would be?
While I agree with your intent, I would chose my analogies more carefully.
In the case of Windows 7, you won't have saved anything if you purchase Windows 7 a year later. It will still be the same price. At most you would have saved a few quid interest on putting your money in the bank during your year of free Windows 7.
Since housing is so incredibly expensive in comparison, you would most likely have saved an absolute fortune in rent/mortgage interest, that you could have saved up as part of a deposit on a house of your own.
Thus, free rent for a year is a massive boost to anyone which is certainly worth the hassle of moving out.
"It's simply too far out there to be a solid date. I'm not sold, I feel this is a good hint but still just speculation. "
Let me just state the obvious: it is trivial to release exactly on time if the completeness and the quality of your product is secondary.
As it turns out, OpenOffice.org is LGPL, meaning it is perfectly acceptable to write closed source modules to it, or write a larger closed source application that makes use of OpenOffice.org, as long as you dynamically link with OpenOffice.org and provide source code for the OpenOffice.org part.
MS Office has a massive ecosystem because it is has been the dominant Office pack for the last 15 years, years before OpenOffice became LGPL. But I suspect you don't have a clue about these thinks (also insert patronising smiley).
"Firefox - Used everywhere, Not GPL"
Actually, it is. Firefox is triple licensed as GPL, LGPL and MPL. All of these licenses are so-called "copyleft" to some extent, requiring back contribution.
"Perl - Used everwhere, Not GPL"
Again. It is. PERL is dual licensed GPL and the Artistic License. The Artistic License has less restrictions than the GPL, but more restrictions than the BSD license.
"Ruby - Used everywhere, Not GPL"
Yet again. It is. Ruby is dual licensed GPL (all of it) and the Ruby license (some of it). The Ruby license does allow commercial and proprietary use, but certain parts of Ruby is not covered by the Ruby license.
Besides this name dropping is pointless. I can counter with other examples (at least with your definition of 'everywhere').
Linux - Used everywhere, GPL
OpenOffice.org - Used everywhere, GPL
MySQL - Used much more everywhere than PostgreSQL, GPL
Samba - Used everywhere, GPL.
The main point is that loads of projects see great adoption even if they use the GPL. So using the GPL to cover your bases, doesn't seem to be a great deterrent.
"I'm not sure what you're looking for then? Do you only trust every contract you enter into after it has been tested in court?"
Certainly not. But in the case of a software license like the GPL, there is no explicit agreement between anyone. Nobody had to write their signature anywhere or even verbally say "yeah, I agree to these terms".
"Either the GPL is binding, or you have no right to be using the software now, let alone after Oracle take over. If the GPL isn't binding we might as well all pack up and go home."
You are again not reading my post before posting a reply. The copyright holder has given us a license, but isn't clear that the copyright holder has to abide by the terms in the license saying it is 'irrevocable'. Another poster talked about a 'gratuitous licenses' and I suggest you read that.
"Certainly the GPL has never been found to be unenforceable - surely that carries some weight?"
AFAIK no company has ever tried to revoke someone's GPL rights and very few companies are even in a position to attempt to do it. I.e. first of all, you will have to be the sole copyright holder, with nobody else having any claim to the code. Otherwise you'd be violating someone else's copyright by revoking the GPL.
SUN/Oracle is perhaps the only major player with significant Open Source projects where they own all the copyright due to having required copyright assignment for any patches.
Even so, I still think this is a fairly remote possibility, but I'd be wary of assigning your copyright to someone else when contributing.
You're not really answering my post. The GPL is clear enough on this matter, but it isn't entirely legally clear if the GPL is to be considered a binding contract or not. Thus, my argument can't really be answered by referring to the GPL. The FSF has their opinion on the matter, but the FSF does not make laws.
This is not a problem at all in the opposite case where a recipient of the code breaks the license, because without the license, the recipient has no rights to the code.
However, without the license, the copyright holder has all the rights exclusively to the code.
I'm not saying there is a big chance of the copyright holder being legally able to revoke the licensing on GPL software, but I do think it is worth considering as a remote possibility. In any case I don't think it is a good idea to agree to reassign copyright on your contributions to SUN/Oracle.
.. about "who really owns a commercial open software application".
The copyright holders owns a commercial open software application. If all the copyright has been assigned to a corporation, then the corporation owns the copyright. This is fact.
Obviously, if the corporation has licensed other people to use and distribute it (i.e. with the GPL) then non-copyright holders may have some rights too.
This leads us to the only part of the GPL that I think is in any way legally questionable (IANAL). I'm not sure it is entirely legally clear if the copyright holder is allowed to revoke the GPL licensing terms or not, no matter what is said in the license. (i.e. They could argue that the license is not a binding contract).
In the opposite case of anyone breaking the GPL license by releasing binary only derivatives, the violator can not hide behind 'not a binding contract' because that would remove all of their rights to the software whatsoever (they have no rights other than what the GPL grants them).
If the copyright holder is allowed to revoke the license, they could close up any project that they own copyright to without allowing any forks. It would mean a loss of MySQL and OpenOffice.org as free software forever.
"If the trial were held in the UK, USA, Canada, and a few others I have experience with, then the answer would be that the judge would recuse his/her self."
Your post is in my opinion very, very patronising towards Sweden (one of the least corrupt and most transparent countries in the world).
It seems just like in the US, the judge is supposed to make the call himself. For some reason he decided that he wasn't biased in this case, and that is why this is causing such a stir in Sweden.
To be equally patronising; most swedes will probably say they expected this from countries such as the US, but not in their own country.
Yes. This could never happen in any other country were judges are expected to whether they are biased or not.
Sorry mate. Coors and Bud Light have already been made.
Except that the pirate bay doesn't just link to illegal stuff. There's tons of legal files on there too.
Which is completely secondary to the Pirate Bay operation and most likely added by people to prove a point rather than for any practical reason.
The site was obviously set up with copyright infringement in mind and even takes its name from this use. Calling the site 'the pirate bay' hardly helped them argue the legal uses of the site.
The time where 'doing HTML' (and CSS) was enough to give you a decent career is over imo.
Replace those features with APIs that offer features only available on the Google's application server. (eg. google.io.*, google.threads.*, google.db.*, google.util.*, etc...)
The word subset does not mean what you think it means. Hint: A subset is fully contained within the original set and does not contain any additional features. If Google adds these features their implementation is no longer a subset.
No. You completely miss the point of the parent, which is not about the importance of presumed innocence, but that fact != assumption.
"OJ may very well be a murderer, but he is innocent."
You don't know that. As the parent says 'innocent' or 'guilty' are based on facts, not on conviction. If he is the murderer then by definition he is not innocent.
We presume that a person is innocent until proven guilty, we don't know that a person is innocent. Otherwise there would be no point in a trial.
When a person is found 'not guilty', we are saying that we can not find sufficient evidence that our presumption is wrong. Therefore the legal system will continue to assume that the person is innocent.
But assumption/presumption != fact, and so it is perfectly reasonable to disagree with the findings of the court and people are entitled to their opinion on the matter.
In the case of OJ, he lost his civil case because on the balance of probability, the evidence presented suggests he is guilty.
Because our requirements are higher than 'balance of probability' in a criminal case, the legal assumption is still that he is innocent. This is as it should be, otherwise we would convict many, many innocent people.
However, my personal opinion does not require any more than 'balance of probability' and I thus believe OJ is guilty. I may be correct or I may be wrong, we will never know for sure, and that is why OJ was still walking the streets after the case.
You are unlikely to have enough information to say that he is innocent.
While I completely agree that you want a massive ration between your kills and your enemies kills, it isn't at all a different debate to "to go to war or not".
If the US hadn't predicted a massive kill ratio, they would not have invaded Iraq at all. So these things are linked.
There's not the slightest reason to suppose that such phenomena, or their explanations, would "make sense" to us.
If we were always to accept that a solution would never make sense to us, we would have missed out on a lot of our scientific discoveries.
Also, "reason to suppose" is not the only argument for investigating an issue. Sometimes "because it would be great if it was so" is an equally good reason.
In this case, it would be fantastic if there is an explanation behind it that makes sense to us. It would make the theories immeasurably easier to work with and might provide us with answers we could otherwise not comprehend.
Since it turns out that we have found many answers that "makes sense" to us in other areas of science, it is perfectly reasonable to hope that we can make sense of quantum mechanics one day as well, as long as we don't take for granted that there is a sensible explanation and mistake 'hope' for 'assumption'.
All I am saying is that this is a balance and changing operating environment causes businesses to change the way they operate. Being able to adapt to a changing market is one of the advantages of a market based system. The reason you missed the point is that you argued as if what people do doesn't matter. Obviously if a change in customer behaviour is dramatic enough, it will cause a power company to change their operations for good or bad.
Obviously power stations/technologies with more flexible power cycles is more expensive to operate than the ones that are just run continuously (and quite possibly dirtier). Otherwise every power station would be of the more flexible kind and would be adapted to the day cycle.
However, this is obviously a balance. At the moment, power production during the night isn't a complete waste, since you will still sell a fair bit of power. But if nobody used power at night (hyperbole, I admit), the balance would shift towards the more expensive and more flexible technologies and more effort would be made into day cycling the plants.
The truth is obviously somewhere in between. If people cut their night time consumption considerably (which to be fair would likely require more than just PCs), it would change the operating conditions for the power companies and might just make them switch some of their energy towards more flexible production. Obviously they wouldn't change all the production.
Whether this has unintended bad consequences, I don't know.
"Power companies will not change anything unless it MAKES them more money. They ain't interested in saving money at all."
Absolute bullshit with no connection to reality at all. Power companies are interested in profit first and foremost. And as publicly listed companies, they are very interested in increasing their profits.
This is achieved by both increasing revenue where possible and by saving operating costs wherever possible. Why on earth do you think companies make redundancies when this obviously will not increase their revenues? They do it because they increase profits by reducing operating costs.
If the market changes so the power companies could save money by producing less power during the night, damn right they would change their operating conditions.
Of course I can't make hard judgements about whether it will be enough that all companies start switching off their computers at night, that is up to the people with the figures to do. But any good business leader will continually monitor the business' environment and adapt the business to its operating conditions.
"I think you might actually have to demonstrate that he is drunker than the average Briton his age."
Not at all. Prince William's drunkenness has been demonstrated on many occasions. So that takes care of the "drunken" part. In no way does this require him to be "more drunken" than his peers.
As for embarrassment, this is a subjective personal feeling. Nobody can really dispute your feeling of embarrassment on behalf of your country, and at most you may have to demonstrate that it isn't unreasonable for a British subject to be embarrassed about his behaviour.
Even if you are just as bad of a drunkard as William, it isn't unreasonable to feel embarrassed if William exposes the mentality of you and the average Briton.
William would get absolutely nowhere in the UK trying to sue someone for calling him a drunken embarrassment.
You are missing the point completely. The point is that if most businesses started switching off their computers at night, the power companies would most likely change their operating conditions.
It might make it less economically viable to maintain such a high base load during the night, meaning it becomes more profitable to shift some of the power production on the sources with a shorter power up/down cycle.
Educating companies about how much money they are wasting is likely to be far more effective than asking them to be green for the environment.
Not true at all.
While Microsoft doesn't market any sat nav hardware, they are providing several ready made software packages for companies to add to their hardware.
TomTom is obviously not using Microsoft's solution, and the result is this lawsuit.
Microsoft has a monopoly on desktop operating systems and is trying to use it to gain a monopoly on Sat nav software solutions.
... on the basis of Anti trust?
IANAL, but it seems to me that by agressively patenting the most common file system on the planet and limiting the use of this file system, Microsoft is essentially using its monopoly on the Windows platform to gain an unfair advantage in the sat.nav market.
I'm surprised Tom Tom hasn't started an anti-trust counter suit.
And I don't for a second believe that the FAT filesystem patents would stand up if faced with a decent lawyer in a court. All the patents are describing relatively simple engineering solutions that anyone could come up with when faced with the problems Microsoft created for themselves.
The parent said "my entire music collection" (emphasis mine), not "your entire music collection". I think it becomes fairly obvious that he was talking about himself, not you.
I'm also willing to bet that 16GB will suffice to contain the music collection of at least 95% of people. At an average of 6MB per track (*), 16GB will hold over 2600 tracks, or nearly 180 albums with an average of 15 tracks per album.
I am willing to bet that owning 180 albums is well above average.
(*) Yes. This is a generous average. And no, most people do not care that your tracks are encoded at 256 kbit/s or even FLAC-encoded at 30MB each.
"pretty soon the only thing you'll be able to post on the internet will be cat pictures. :("
How dare you?? Don't you know that underneath all that fur, those cats are completely naked?
"I am a programmer and I rely on copyright laws. I don't have the option to tour the world and make money off live shows of programming."
But you (and your company) DO have the option to tour the world selling services, consultancy integration, implementation of extra features, etc.
Not that different in principle from rock bands then is it?