Re:Then take the code WAS Re:BSD vs. GPL license.
on
Corel Dropping WINE?
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· Score: 1
I think your position is naive. Yes, we could be a martyr like you. Or we could make a difference by making sure all code that is based on free code stays free. Others are still perfectly free to not use free code, nobody 'forces' anything. As far as big corporations go: it's not one case and not two when big corporations decided to not fully litigate their abuses of the GPL and settled out of court. FreeBSD is still not out of its SMP infancy, partly because BSDi hinders innovation by keeping their SMP improvements to themselves (and bashing FreeBSD on every other occasion, without acknoledging how they are regularly 'taking' FreeBSD code improvements.). It's all these little things that mount up and make a difference. License-incompatible code forks can destroy/hinder free software projects, what is so hard to understand about this? Thanks for your attention. About WINE: I fully respect the license choice of the authors, just like I respect FreeBSD's choice.
Re:Then take the code WAS Re:BSD vs. GPL license.
on
Corel Dropping WINE?
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· Score: 2
Me GPL-ing WINE does not prevent the abuse of freedom I was talking about. A theoretical Leach Corporation could still take WINE and rename it to 'Accelerated WINE, The Ultimate Emulator Much Better Than Plain WINE', equip it with a few proprietary bells and whistels and trivial enhancements. Sounds familiar?
The WINE-internal discussion I have seen was based on an inferior understanding of the GPL. The main argument to go BSD license was to allow linking of closed-source applications with WINE-lib. But if you release WINE under the LGPL then this is perfectly possible. I very much respect the license choice WINE developers do, but I'm free to point out problems (and you are free to ignore them), no?
Without trying to rush judgement, if this really is true then this is yet another example of how the GPL protects the development community (and code authors), while the BSD license does not.
Corel initially supported WINE in a big way, Corel contributed back changes, Coral actively participated in development mailing lists. Today they have their complete internal tree (see this article) which they have not published so far. They are using WINE in the Corel/Linux distribution though. If WINE was GPL, then nobody could keep such proprietary enhancements to themselves. Corel can use, abuse and throw away WINE, leaving nothing for the WINE community but unecessary confusion. The BSD license is simply too naive for this world, and its inteded 'bigger freedom' actually results in more abuse! The sad fact is that freedom cannot be guaranteed without weapons, and the GPL is the protective 'weapon' to keep free code freed. Microsoft has analyzed this issue very accurately in the Halloween memos: the GPL is a 'next generation' license, much more 'dangerous' to Microsoft than the BSD license.
It's still not too late though - WINE could still be released under the GPL, which will prevent many types of abuses. We can only hope that WINE developers understand these issues.
Mark Murray, Microsoft spokesman, recently gave an interview in which he said that the Findings of Facts "do not have any weight or bearing on any other lawsuit" until the judge issues his final ruling. Is this true? [link to the Mark Murray article]
Yes, according to this NY Post article , Texas Gov. George W. Bush is a close friend of Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Bob Herbold and said at a conference of high-tech executives in Arizona last month that his administration would "always take the side of innovation over litigation.".
I mean, as a presidential candidate you cannot get any more explicit than this, without actually committing obstruction of justice and interfering with ongoing litigation.
This might sound offtopic, but it's interesting to see analogies to the Microsoft situation. CocaCola and Pepsi are likely in a pricing cartell, and they likely divided the market, to shut out the rest of the competition. Anyway, fact is that both are producing soft drinks with a ridiculously high profit margin, still they never manage to get into any price war with each other. Ie. as far as customers go, the soft-drink market is monopolized, in the US and in the EU. They are also pressuring food chains [analogous to OEMs in the Microsoft case] to carry their drinks exclusively with restrictive long-term contracts. There is an investigation under way somewhere in Europe (Belgium?), Cocacola threatened a food chain to increase the price of Coke if they do not sign an exclusive contract, or something like that.
The expediting provision is simply an old law. You cannot call it obscure just because most US presidents were backed by big business and as such they chose not to litigate monopolies. (eg. Raegan and Bush) The Shermann Act has only been applied 3 times, and you can name dozens of monopolies/kartells which survived for a long time. (eg. CocaCola [:-)] and Intel) By this very same logic the Constitution is obscure as well just because it's old? Expediting makes lots of sense, wasnt it Microsoft who complained about the lengthy legal process preventing them from focusing on innovation? Microsoft's only hope seems to be the other Bush becoming president - he was quoted saying: 'my administration will always prefer innovation over litigation'.
Which is correct. The ruling first separates desktop computers (referred to as PCs), and servers. Linux is clearly a 90% server system, despite its recent gains it still holds less than 1% of the desktop market. Since the judge has to issue _facts_, not guesses, Linux in this context is indeed a 'fringe OS'. It's not a fringe server OS at all, but that is not in the same market. (US antitrust law is a strange beast)
Section III, Paragraph 33.: 'In other words, Microsoft enjoys monopoly power in the relevant market.'
p.121: 'Just a few days later, Microsoft began to retaliate in earnest against the IBM PC Company.'
p.241: 'In sum, Microsoft successfully secured for Internet Explorer -- and foreclosed to Navigator -- one of the two distribution channels that leads most efficiently to the usage of browsing software.'
p.412: 'Most harmful of all is the message that Microsoft's actions have conveyed to every enterprise with the potential to innovate in the computer industry.'
Thomas Penfield Jackson signature
Hats off Judge Jackson, this ruling shows an unprecedentedly deep and analytic understanding of the inner workings of the high-tech world. A must read for everyone!
Typical bait and switch Microsoft tactics. A sane business simply should not rely on a cross-platform solution that is fundamentally dependent on one of the target platforms! (Microsoft NT source code in this case) Microsoft did this with Bristol as well: gave them NT source code access, Bristol developed a WIN32 API implementation for Unix and this indirectly baited Unix companies like AutoDesk to port their app to NT and still keep it running on Unix as well. A year or two later Microsoft suddenly increased the licensing cost of the NT source code five-fold. Five-fold *per client license* price increase. What did this mean? NT-only versions of the software remained cheap, the Unix port suddenly got very expensive. Bristol actually went ahead and sued Microsoft (and lost the case badly), and AutoDesk was stranded in the NT space. Btw., the market share of AutoDesk's AutoCAD has dropped significantly since then, so this should be a warning to other businesses. Now how is MainSoft different? Sure it will work for a year or two, until President Bush orders his antitrust chief to settle with Microsoft (under ridiculous conditions). Microsoft will be the true 1100-pound gorilla again it used to be, and MainSoft will be yet another Bristol. Keep in mind that Microsoft can increase the price of the NT source code license unilaterally at any time, to almost any value. It's theirs after all, so if you depend on it thats your problem. What should we Linuxers do? Just ignore them and write cool Linux-API (Unix) apps, Micro/MainSoft are losers;) Maybe ask MainSoft wether Microsoft guarantees (contractually) that MainSoft will get easy, fair-price, volume-independent and early access to NT source code (and source code in development) in the future.
c't (famous german computer magazine) writes that they could not measure any stability problems on the RamBus boards they tested, not even with fully loaded RAM-banks. So this must either be a very rare problem, or it affects only certain board designs.
Sure, but not at this scale, and few dare to interfere with a _criminal trial_. Microsoft even tried to introduce manipulated evidence at several times. Not much left from that original 'geek Gates'.
This article details recently uncovered email evidence, which provides a rare inside look at how Microsoft uses it's PR department. Back in October when the AOL/Netscape deal came out, they immediately decided to start a PR campaign to show that the AOL deal "undermines the core of the case." Top Microsoft officials ordered PR people to orchestrated a seemingly independent and spontaneous campaign, using it's "friends in politics" (Microsoft is by far is the biggest 'contributor' to various politicians election campaigns - Microsoft-sympathetic comittee members recently even tried to nuke the DOJ antitrust division's financing - talk about interference with criminal justice), "sympathetic columnists" (paid articles?) to pointedly manipulate the public opinion. Once again.
Integrated and Random M2 moderation
on
Moderation Ideas
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· Score: 3
While I agree that integrated M2 is fundamentally correct and wanted, 'random M2' has some very important properties as well: it in a sense _forces_ and ensures the moderator to take up 'independent' issues/comments and judge them. An M2 almost by definition only ever sees articles in which he is interested - this again creates inhomogenity in the distribution of M2's. Randomness distributes M2's much better between moderations, and this also makes it sure that 'bad moderators' will be caught sooner or later. Eg. if a 'malicious moderator' goes back to a KDE vs. Gnome thread, and moderates down KDE-positive comments, then this skews the _historic record_. Newcomers, analysts (and history) will be manipulated. It has a very low likelyhood that such malicious moderating will ever be detected - M2's by definition do not read old articles. (but there _are_ people who read old articles, but they are not likely to M2 moderate, or even _notice_ that the historic record has been manipulated with.) All in one, I very much like the current 'daily random M2', because 1) it gives me a warm fuzzy feeling that even such random samples are usually 90% well-moderated 2) I can be sure conceptually that the bad guys will be caught sooner or later, and it might be me who catches one of them. M2 is really like law enforcement, you both want to patrol on the streets but you also want to do larger scale (and more random) searches. The solution? Honestly I dont really know. Maybe this hybrid method: there would be a 'get me 1 random comment to M2-moderate' link right at the top, but also it would be possible to M2-moderate 'in the field'. Thus I could eg. random-M2 5 comments, and realtime-moderate another 5 comments. The 'split' between random and realtime M2 is thus up to the M2-moderator.
Yes, but the whole point in going undersea is the vast size of the site. The mines in the mountains are rather limited in size and access - and still they dont shield well enough and produce too many false hits/events. Undersea you can install an arbitrary number of detectors, and the shielding is perfect.
at least this is a step in the right direction. After all, do we want IBM to declare the Thinkpad to be a 'Windows 2000 only hardware design'? IBM has proven that it wants and does deliver GPL drivers for their hardware (check out this), so lets give them the chance to develop a driver for that modem. Software modems (winmodems) are subtle, their hardware is designed in a way that ties the driver deeply into Windows. It's Windows that actually includes the true 'core' of the modem's functionality - this is why winmodem drivers are easy to write for Windows, and hard to write for Linux. Not to mention the fact that the AT command set and various modem encodings are covered by numerous patents and licenses. In the last 2-3 years Microsoft has rewarded hardware manufacturers for designing pre-specified and Windows-only hardware - winmodems and DVD both have tough license traps. Yes, IBM could redesign their Thinkpad hardware, but first things first;)
If the source code (and development kit) will be available as well, then it wont be long until someone implements strong-crypto point-to-point voice connections between two such cellphones - and this with widely available commodity hardware.
A DNA sequence perfectly defines the end result, right? (give or take random noise) It would thus be wise to first do a full-lifetime simulation of all custom DNA before actually creating it... thus we'd have a chance to check out what the hell we have created? Besides, it would be perfectly fine for me to only see a simulated T-Rex;)
" 5. Self-Ratings Schemes Will Turn the Internet into a Homogenized Medium Dominated by Commercial Speakers" Thats the goal of Bertelsmann. Bertelsmann is a multinational company which owns pay-TV and TV channels, advertising companies, newspapers, publishing companies, a share in AOL and much more. They have huge assets in non-physical 'media intellectual property', ie. sports rights, movie rights, sattelite frequencies, etc. Bertelsmann controls a fair chunk of Germany's TV-news feed to ordinary germans, and subsequently Bertelsmann has entrenched political connections to the establishment. Bertelsmann's main business plan is to _control and own information and information sources_, no matter what type of information. And the Internet as of now 'threatens' much of Bertelsmann's 'core business': proprietary information. This pretty much explains why Bertelsmann is in the center of Internet censorship.
Not surprising, but only if you accept the theory of evolution. Many people (almost exclusively religious ones) do not accept evolution as a driving force behind Life On Earth. This experiment - maybe for the first time in history - directly demonstrates how life supposedly got created on Earth 4-5 billion years ago.
Wondering what the Catholic Church (and other churches) opinion about this is. Do artifical bacteria have a soul? Are they a creature of God? Can they (pre-programmed human creations) Sin? Interesting questions I think.
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I think your position is naive. Yes, we could be a martyr like you. Or we could make a difference by making sure all code that is based on free code stays free. Others are still perfectly free to not use free code, nobody 'forces' anything. As far as big corporations go: it's not one case and not two when big corporations decided to not fully litigate their abuses of the GPL and settled out of court. FreeBSD is still not out of its SMP infancy, partly because BSDi hinders innovation by keeping their SMP improvements to themselves (and bashing FreeBSD on every other occasion, without acknoledging how they are regularly 'taking' FreeBSD code improvements.). It's all these little things that mount up and make a difference. License-incompatible code forks can destroy/hinder free software projects, what is so hard to understand about this? Thanks for your attention. About WINE: I fully respect the license choice of the authors, just like I respect FreeBSD's choice.
Me GPL-ing WINE does not prevent the abuse of freedom I was talking about. A theoretical Leach Corporation could still take WINE and rename it to 'Accelerated WINE, The Ultimate Emulator Much Better Than Plain WINE', equip it with a few proprietary bells and whistels and trivial enhancements. Sounds familiar?
The WINE-internal discussion I have seen was based on an inferior understanding of the GPL.
The main argument to go BSD license was to allow linking of closed-source applications with WINE-lib. But if you release WINE under the LGPL then this is perfectly possible. I very much respect the license choice WINE developers do, but I'm free to point out problems (and you are free to ignore them), no?
Corel has already released work based on WINE, so whats your point?
Corel initially supported WINE in a big way, Corel contributed back changes, Coral actively participated in development mailing lists. Today they have their complete internal tree (see this article) which they have not published so far. They are using WINE in the Corel/Linux distribution though. If WINE was GPL, then nobody could keep such proprietary enhancements to themselves. Corel can use, abuse and throw away WINE, leaving nothing for the WINE community but unecessary confusion. The BSD license is simply too naive for this world, and its inteded 'bigger freedom' actually results in more abuse! The sad fact is that freedom cannot be guaranteed without weapons, and the GPL is the protective 'weapon' to keep free code freed. Microsoft has analyzed this issue very accurately in the Halloween memos: the GPL is a 'next generation' license, much more 'dangerous' to Microsoft than the BSD license.
It's still not too late though - WINE could still be released under the GPL, which will prevent many types of abuses. We can only hope that WINE developers understand these issues.
Mark Murray, Microsoft spokesman, recently gave an interview in which he said that the Findings of Facts "do not have any weight or bearing on any other lawsuit" until the judge issues his final ruling. Is this true? [link to the Mark Murray article]
What are Microsoft's chances if they appeal, especially what are the chances of the Expediting Act to be applied?
I mean, as a presidential candidate you cannot get any more explicit than this, without actually committing obstruction of justice and interfering with ongoing litigation.
This might sound offtopic, but it's interesting to see analogies to the Microsoft situation. CocaCola and Pepsi are likely in a pricing cartell, and they likely divided the market, to shut out the rest of the competition. Anyway, fact is that both are producing soft drinks with a ridiculously high profit margin, still they never manage to get into any price war with each other. Ie. as far as customers go, the soft-drink market is monopolized, in the US and in the EU. They are also pressuring food chains [analogous to OEMs in the Microsoft case] to carry their drinks exclusively with restrictive long-term contracts. There is an investigation under way somewhere in Europe (Belgium?), Cocacola threatened a food chain to increase the price of Coke if they do not sign an exclusive contract, or something like that.
The expediting provision is simply an old law. You cannot call it obscure just because most US presidents were backed by big business and as such they chose not to litigate monopolies. (eg. Raegan and Bush) The Shermann Act has only been applied 3 times, and you can name dozens of monopolies/kartells which survived for a long time. (eg. CocaCola [:-)] and Intel)
By this very same logic the Constitution is obscure as well just because it's old? Expediting makes lots of sense, wasnt it Microsoft who complained about the lengthy legal process preventing them from focusing on innovation?
Microsoft's only hope seems to be the other Bush becoming president - he was quoted saying: 'my administration will always prefer innovation over litigation'.
Which is correct. The ruling first separates desktop computers (referred to as PCs), and servers. Linux is clearly a 90% server system, despite its recent gains it still holds less than 1% of the desktop market. Since the judge has to issue _facts_, not guesses, Linux in this context is indeed a 'fringe OS'. It's not a fringe server OS at all, but that is not in the same market. (US antitrust law is a strange beast)
p.121: 'Just a few days later, Microsoft began
to retaliate in earnest against the IBM PC Company.'
p.241: 'In sum, Microsoft successfully secured for Internet Explorer --
and foreclosed to Navigator -- one of the two distribution channels
that leads most efficiently to the usage of browsing software.'
p.412: 'Most harmful of all is the message that Microsoft's actions have
conveyed to every enterprise with the potential to innovate in the
computer industry.'
Thomas Penfield Jackson signature
Hats off Judge Jackson, this ruling shows an unprecedentedly deep and analytic understanding of the inner workings of the high-tech world. A must read for everyone!
Typical bait and switch Microsoft tactics. A sane business simply should not rely on a cross-platform solution that is fundamentally dependent on one of the target platforms! (Microsoft NT source code in this case) Microsoft did this with Bristol as well: gave them NT source code access, Bristol developed a WIN32 API implementation for Unix and this indirectly baited Unix companies like AutoDesk to port their app to NT and still keep it running on Unix as well. A year or two later Microsoft suddenly increased the licensing cost of the NT source code five-fold. Five-fold *per client license* price increase. What did this mean? NT-only versions of the software remained cheap, the Unix port suddenly got very expensive. Bristol actually went ahead and sued Microsoft (and lost the case badly), and AutoDesk was stranded in the NT space. Btw., the market share of AutoDesk's AutoCAD has dropped significantly since then, so this should be a warning to other businesses. ;) Maybe ask MainSoft wether Microsoft guarantees (contractually) that MainSoft will get easy, fair-price, volume-independent and early access to NT source code (and source code in development) in the future.
Now how is MainSoft different? Sure it will work for a year or two, until President Bush orders his antitrust chief to settle with Microsoft (under ridiculous conditions). Microsoft will be the true 1100-pound gorilla again it used to be, and MainSoft will be yet another Bristol. Keep in mind that Microsoft can increase the price of the NT source code license unilaterally at any time, to almost any value. It's theirs after all, so if you depend on it thats your problem.
What should we Linuxers do? Just ignore them and write cool Linux-API (Unix) apps, Micro/MainSoft are losers
... where we have Microsoft and Intel? ;) [Al Gore]
c't (famous german computer magazine) writes that they could not measure any stability problems on the RamBus boards they tested, not even with fully loaded RAM-banks. So this must either be a very rare problem, or it affects only certain board designs.
Sure, but not at this scale, and few dare to interfere with a _criminal trial_. Microsoft even tried to introduce manipulated evidence at several times. Not much left from that original 'geek Gates'.
This article details recently uncovered email evidence, which provides a rare inside look at how Microsoft uses it's PR department. Back in October when the AOL/Netscape deal came out, they immediately decided to start a PR campaign to show that the AOL deal "undermines the core of the case." Top Microsoft officials ordered PR people to orchestrated a seemingly independent and spontaneous campaign, using it's "friends in politics" (Microsoft is by far is the biggest 'contributor' to various politicians election campaigns - Microsoft-sympathetic comittee members recently even tried to nuke the DOJ antitrust division's financing - talk about interference with criminal justice), "sympathetic columnists" (paid articles?) to pointedly manipulate the public opinion. Once again.
While I agree that integrated M2 is fundamentally correct and wanted, 'random M2' has some very important properties as well: it in a sense _forces_ and ensures the moderator to take up 'independent' issues/comments and judge them. An M2 almost by definition only ever sees articles in which he is interested - this again creates inhomogenity in the distribution of M2's. Randomness distributes M2's much better between moderations, and this also makes it sure that 'bad moderators' will be caught sooner or later. Eg. if a 'malicious moderator' goes back to a KDE vs. Gnome thread, and moderates down KDE-positive comments, then this skews the _historic record_. Newcomers, analysts (and history) will be manipulated. It has a very low likelyhood that such malicious moderating will ever be detected - M2's by definition do not read old articles. (but there _are_ people who read old articles, but they are not likely to M2 moderate, or even _notice_ that the historic record has been manipulated with.)
All in one, I very much like the current 'daily random M2', because 1) it gives me a warm fuzzy feeling that even such random samples are usually 90% well-moderated 2) I can be sure conceptually that the bad guys will be caught sooner or later, and it might be me who catches one of them. M2 is really like law enforcement, you both want to patrol on the streets but you also want to do larger scale (and more random) searches.
The solution? Honestly I dont really know. Maybe this hybrid method: there would be a 'get me 1 random comment to M2-moderate' link right at the top, but also it would be possible to M2-moderate 'in the field'. Thus I could eg. random-M2 5 comments, and realtime-moderate another 5 comments. The 'split' between random and realtime M2 is thus up to the M2-moderator.
Yes, but the whole point in going undersea is the vast size of the site. The mines in the mountains are rather limited in size and access - and still they dont shield well enough and produce too many false hits/events. Undersea you can install an arbitrary number of detectors, and the shielding is perfect.
at least this is a step in the right direction. After all, do we want IBM to declare the Thinkpad to be a 'Windows 2000 only hardware design'? IBM has proven that it wants and does deliver GPL drivers for their hardware (check out this), so lets give them the chance to develop a driver for that modem. Software modems (winmodems) are subtle, their hardware is designed in a way that ties the driver deeply into Windows. It's Windows that actually includes the true 'core' of the modem's functionality - this is why winmodem drivers are easy to write for Windows, and hard to write for Linux. Not to mention the fact that the AT command set and various modem encodings are covered by numerous patents and licenses. In the last 2-3 years Microsoft has rewarded hardware manufacturers for designing pre-specified and Windows-only hardware - winmodems and DVD both have tough license traps. ;)
Yes, IBM could redesign their Thinkpad hardware, but first things first
If the source code (and development kit) will be available as well, then it wont be long until someone implements strong-crypto point-to-point voice connections between two such cellphones - and this with widely available commodity hardware.
A DNA sequence perfectly defines the end result, right? (give or take random noise) It would thus be wise to first do a full-lifetime simulation of all custom DNA before actually creating it ... thus we'd have a chance to check out what the hell we have created? Besides, it would be perfectly fine for me to only see a simulated T-Rex ;)
" 5. Self-Ratings Schemes Will Turn the Internet into a Homogenized
Medium Dominated by Commercial Speakers"
Thats the goal of Bertelsmann. Bertelsmann is a multinational company which owns pay-TV and TV channels, advertising companies, newspapers, publishing companies, a share in AOL and much more. They have huge assets in non-physical 'media intellectual property', ie. sports rights, movie rights, sattelite frequencies, etc. Bertelsmann controls a fair chunk of Germany's TV-news feed to ordinary germans, and subsequently Bertelsmann has entrenched political connections to the establishment. Bertelsmann's main business plan is to _control and own information and information sources_, no matter what type of information. And the Internet as of now 'threatens' much of Bertelsmann's 'core business': proprietary information. This pretty much explains why Bertelsmann is in the center of Internet censorship.
Not surprising, but only if you accept the theory of evolution. Many people (almost exclusively religious ones) do not accept evolution as a driving force behind Life On Earth. This experiment - maybe for the first time in history - directly demonstrates how life supposedly got created on Earth 4-5 billion years ago.
Wondering what the Catholic Church (and other churches) opinion about this is. Do artifical bacteria have a soul? Are they a creature of God? Can they (pre-programmed human creations) Sin? Interesting questions I think.