I thought anyone with 1/2 a brain cell would know that the difference is that Eolas is not trying to bury Linux the way SCO is. MS did not purchase licenses from SCO to satisfy any legal/moral obligation; MS licensed SCO (whatever it is that they licensed) in order to fuel a FUD campaign against Linux.
Get back under your rock troll. Had you RTFA, you would know that the complaints which are not yet resolved relate to MS publishing specs for MS protocols. From TFA: "In addition to fining the company 497 million euros, the commission ordered Microsoft to disclose technical documentation that rival makers of server software need to develop programs that work properly with the Windows operating system."
This was the 'meat' of the ruling and MS has yet to produce said documentation in any usable form. In fact the arbitrator for the EU (who, incidentally, was chosen by MS) even commented to the EU officials that the documentation they(MS) had produced was useless.
"I've heard the 3GB figure before, but in all the times I've installed XP, I've never seen it. [wild speculation] I wonder if in some cases the install silently aborts and restarts, maybe to work around a hardware glitch? that would cause a bunch of duplicate junk to be left behind."
I think if you look, there is actually no difference between the ~1Gb install and the ~3Gb install. What it probably is, is the pagefile. MS by default uses double your system memory as the size for the pagefile; thus if you have low memory machines you may not notice, but if you do a vanilla install on a machine w/2Gb memory, you will see some disk usage.
"Microsoft never have had much to do with standards, other than to completely ignore them and create their own stuff regardless."
I am not so sure about that. They made a fine friggin mess of the SPF standard by introducing patents on several key parts of the standard while delaying and filibustering until the IETF working group (MARID) became defunct as a result. I am sure I could find other examples of MS strong-arming, delaying, and otherwise being a general pain in the ass to standards bodies.
"As I know that the GP post will be moded really down because of slashdot linux zealots I have to backup his statement..."
Dude, you have been trolled. And if that guy gets modded down it is because he is a troll, not because those evil Linux guys got him. Look at his post history and his home page -- gnaa.us? Dead giveaway.
ITX is a form-factor just like ATX is a form-factor. It simply determines the size of the board and where mounting holes should be etc... This way case manufacturers can make a case for ITX boards that should (theoretically) fit all ITX sized boards.
"The whole thing was a simulated what-if, something made abundantly clear from start to finish. They "Know" these impacts happened and at precisely what speed because IT WAS A FEKKING SIMULATION, DAMN IT!"
This is true, but also stated in the article "The cause of such impacts would be comets or asteroids between 10 and 50 kilometres wide, Gladman told New Scientist: "The kind of thing that killed the dinosaurs."" meaning that these numbers were not just pulled out of an orifice but rather based on actual historical earth impacts. Is it proof that these rocks made it to Titan (and in the numbers estimated)? No. But it is probable. The last line of the article sums it up nicely; "Gladman agrees that life may be unlikely to survive once on Titan. But he says major impacts may have happened "tens of times" throughout Earth's history and that these could have sent Earth rocks to other solar system bodies. "I just set out to answer this question: is it possible to get something there?" he says. "The answer is yes."". Draw your conclusions from there.
I read the article and did not see where intrusion was part of the assignment. From what I read, it was a vulnerability assessment, which would include a few simple scans. Knowing what I do about some scans, they can create a DOS attack (inadvertently of course; you arent going to be too clandestine if you get noticed DOSing your victim).
My point here is this; he did not assign any illegal activity from what I saw in the article. If someone could point me to where the actual assignment is written down, I might see something there, however all I saw was the ramblings of a paranoid person who has no clue as to what is and is not legal. If port scans and vulnerability scans truly are illegal, I have felons banging on my ports all day long.
"The fact that these purchases are raising doubts as to MySQL's future..."
I don't believe that to be the case. In fact, if anything, I have to agree with Bruce Perens who states "(MySQL)CEO Mickos won't dabble at vengeance and will keep looking at offers that - if nothing else - increase the evidence for valuation of his company.".
It seems to me that if the "premier" database vendor (Oracle) in the market is looking to buy up a "lesser" database, it implies that the target database is (perceived to be) a threat in some way to the larger vendor; implying that the "lesser" is in fact not lesser. This suggests that MySQL *is* a solid database ready for the enterprise. Not to mention, the GPL version of MySQL is not going anywhere, regardless of what happens to MySQL AB. Its development cycle may be slowed for a bit if MySQL were bought out, but MySQL is too important of an application to too many companies with the budget/talent to let die. Someone will be developing MySQL for the foreseeable future.
"The purchases send a message that MySQL won't achieve high-end database features without being beholden to Oracle."
"Even an outright purchase of MySQL by Oracle would not prevent anyone from using MySQL's server in a commercial application, without charge."
"You can't really buy an Open Source project. "
It seems to me that what Oracle is doing is not to try and take over or squash MySQL but rather to buy some more time. InnoDB is already OSS and I had thought Sleepycat was as well. MySQL has already been released under the GPL; no changing that retroactively. Even if Oracle had bought MySQL, the whole thing appears to be an attempt by Oracle to buy time while the new development team learns the innards of MySQL and/or codes a new transaction engine.
MySQL, with or without MySQL AB, will continue to exist and continue to be developed. Don't get me wrong, I am glad they declined the offer, but I don't think Oracle was looking to buy MySQL per se. They were just looking to buy time to keep the heat off.
This is why I do think that in states that have property taxes(all of them, right?), there should be a tax levied on IP. Hear me out on this. I realize that to try to assess the "value" of anything, let alone IP, is pretty much impossible, but we do have relative scales for "real" things; things you can touch. I totally agree with you that the value of IP(patents,copyrights,trademarks), as it is defined now, varies so greatly that to put some arbitrary value on it is not the solution or even desirable. Even a 95th percentile method, like the way bandwidth is sold, is not the solution.
I think the taxation of the value of IP should be tied to the copyright. To begin, you would recieve copyright exactly as it is now. You would have this for a short period -- something under 10years. You would not be assessed a property value to that property during this time.
Here is where it gets kind of funky. After the original copyright expires, in order to extend that copyright, you could do so for another short period (maybe this time not more than 15years) *if* you agree to the following:
1). The value of the IP is determined to be some average of the income made on that IP during its "grace period". The reason I say "income made on that IP during that period" rather than "Income made by owner" is this: If it is my copyright, I am not required to charge royalties; I could simply assign rights to copy to a third party and thus not claim that "I" made any money on that IP. There would have to be an exemption for OSS under certain approved licenses. 2). You agree to pay taxes on the previously determined value every year until the copyright expires, or you relinquish your copyright(ie. put in the public domain) to said IP. Also, as a caveat, should you make more money in a year than the assessed value of the IP, that becomes the new assessed value of the IP.
I am not a lawyer and have no idea if such a system could even be implemented. However, seeing as how the media industry sees IP as property, and their counterparts in brick and mortar land have been paying taxes on what they use to make a living, it only seems right that if it has value, taxes should be paid. When something is valueless in brick and mortar land it is thrown away. IP never gets "thrown away" under the current system; It needs to be donated to the public (or "thrown away").
"OTOH, if it is considered property, should we add a property tax to it?"
While I think you were being sarcastic, you make a valid point here. Are copyrights/trademarks/patents considered property to the IRS? If not, why not? Why would a company who profits directly from these assets not have to claim them as property when doing their taxes?
While I realize the implementation of such a system would be difficult at best, how is it that these companies have managed to avoid paying taxes on their "property"? How is it that the IRS has managed to miss this? According to copyright law, the liability is $180,000 per instance of infringement. In my mind, this means that the copyright holder should be expected to claim that amount as the value of their property; at least for the original copy.
On the other hand, how can one reasonably expect a fledgling(sp?) band to have to incorporate so as to handle ownership and taxes for their copyright? How would an open source programmer be expected to deal with this sort of overhead?
While I think the question creates more problems than it solves, how is it that copyright/patent/trademark holders have evaded taxation on their property whereas brick and mortar comapanies have had to deal with this since the beginning of property taxation.
Or is it simply that trademarks/patents/copyrights were *never* meant to be treated as property in the first place?
Your post reminds me of the movie Starship Troopers when the main characters are assigned to their respective military roles. One of the protaganists is assigned to "Games and Theory" to which one of the other cast replies "Games and Theory, that's military intelligence!".
....there is a scale of applications they simply don't seem to recognize.
100% agreed. Believe it or not, this and your following statements hold true for other niche markets as well. I have experience in MTAs. I can fight my way through sendmail and/or Postfix with confidence. I still use a proprietary MTA for my mailing because it just works. I have had a phone call regarding almost every other piece of software I manage at one time or another. The MTA has always "just worked" (port25's PowerMTA on several different flavors of Linux for those wondering).
However, all that aside, I originally was responding to your statement "One day all of you open-source weenies are going to realize that the world doesn't run on GPL.". To which I stated that that statement was not true and some reasons why. I stand by that. I agree 100% that open-source is not always the correct solution. What I did say is that in many cases and occasionally in a majority of cases it is a better solution; as an example the web server market.
First of all, can you quote where I told you to shut up?
Secondly when did I say that there was no good proprietary products out there, especially databases? I use many proprietary products in my work, including databases. Nice strawman but a terrible troll.
One day all of you open-source weenies are going to realize that the world doesn't run on GPL.
I might have given you a bit of respect until you threw out the trolling line. Also, a lot of the internet does run on GPL'd and open source software in case you hadn't noticed. Let me run a couple names by you by way of example; Apache, PHP, Sendmail, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Linux, *BSD, Firefox. You may also consider many of the embedded Linux routers/modems that are in use (one of which you are probably using to access the internet if you are at home, and maybe even in the office).
You may be right about marketing and sales to an extent, but the aforementioned software products show that even that is not a 100% accurate statement (Apache does serve more sites than all of its competition combined). One day all of you proprietary software weenies will realize that the world doesnt run exclusively on proprietary software.
And how is Goodmail any different from Bonded Sender or Habeas? And how many of these vendors is a company supposed to pay for the "privilege" of "bypassing" filters? It is extortion plain and simple. The only persons that are going to pay for these "services" are the ones that are not going to be spamming in the first place. Also how is the companies reputation affected by users who will go through the trouble of double-opt-in and still report the email as spam to the ISP; the highest number of these being AOL users by far, from my experience. Hell, I have several AOLers a day that report a confirmation for a submission that they signed up for as spam; let alone the number of complaints I receive from these morons after they confirm their subscription.
This is a business model marketed under the guise of protecting the consumer with the actual intent being to supplement income with regard to email. Nothing more nothing less.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought anyone with 1/2 a brain cell would know that the difference is that Eolas is not trying to bury Linux the way SCO is. MS did not purchase licenses from SCO to satisfy any legal/moral obligation; MS licensed SCO (whatever it is that they licensed) in order to fuel a FUD campaign against Linux.
Get back under your rock troll. Had you RTFA, you would know that the complaints which are not yet resolved relate to MS publishing specs for MS protocols. From TFA: "In addition to fining the company 497 million euros, the commission ordered Microsoft to disclose technical documentation that rival makers of server software need to develop programs that work properly with the Windows operating system."
This was the 'meat' of the ruling and MS has yet to produce said documentation in any usable form. In fact the arbitrator for the EU (who, incidentally, was chosen by MS) even commented to the EU officials that the documentation they(MS) had produced was useless.
"I've heard the 3GB figure before, but in all the times I've installed XP, I've never seen it. [wild speculation] I wonder if in some cases the install silently aborts and restarts, maybe to work around a hardware glitch? that would cause a bunch of duplicate junk to be left behind."
I think if you look, there is actually no difference between the ~1Gb install and the ~3Gb install. What it probably is, is the pagefile. MS by default uses double your system memory as the size for the pagefile; thus if you have low memory machines you may not notice, but if you do a vanilla install on a machine w/2Gb memory, you will see some disk usage.
"Microsoft never have had much to do with standards, other than to completely ignore them and create their own stuff regardless."
I am not so sure about that. They made a fine friggin mess of the SPF standard by introducing patents on several key parts of the standard while delaying and filibustering until the IETF working group (MARID) became defunct as a result. I am sure I could find other examples of MS strong-arming, delaying, and otherwise being a general pain in the ass to standards bodies.
"As I know that the GP post will be moded really down because of slashdot linux zealots I have to backup his statement..."
Dude, you have been trolled. And if that guy gets modded down it is because he is a troll, not because those evil Linux guys got him. Look at his post history and his home page -- gnaa.us? Dead giveaway.
"I wish that they said what "ITX" means."
ITX is a form-factor just like ATX is a form-factor. It simply determines the size of the board and where mounting holes should be etc... This way case manufacturers can make a case for ITX boards that should (theoretically) fit all ITX sized boards.
"The whole thing was a simulated what-if, something made abundantly clear from start to finish. They "Know" these impacts happened and at precisely what speed because IT WAS A FEKKING SIMULATION, DAMN IT!"
This is true, but also stated in the article "The cause of such impacts would be comets or asteroids between 10 and 50 kilometres wide, Gladman told New Scientist: "The kind of thing that killed the dinosaurs."" meaning that these numbers were not just pulled out of an orifice but rather based on actual historical earth impacts. Is it proof that these rocks made it to Titan (and in the numbers estimated)? No. But it is probable. The last line of the article sums it up nicely; "Gladman agrees that life may be unlikely to survive once on Titan. But he says major impacts may have happened "tens of times" throughout Earth's history and that these could have sent Earth rocks to other solar system bodies. "I just set out to answer this question: is it possible to get something there?" he says. "The answer is yes."". Draw your conclusions from there.
"What's important is that IE 7 is WAY more standards compliant than the previous version..."
Dude, they couldn't be any less standards compliant than previous versions. They had nowhere to go but up.
They did that deliberately to get numbers like that that they hoped would be misinterpreted.
:)
"They did that deliberately to get numbers like that so that they can use these misinterpreted numbers in their propaganda machine."
There, fixed that for ya
I read the article and did not see where intrusion was part of the assignment. From what I read, it was a vulnerability assessment, which would include a few simple scans. Knowing what I do about some scans, they can create a DOS attack (inadvertently of course; you arent going to be too clandestine if you get noticed DOSing your victim).
My point here is this; he did not assign any illegal activity from what I saw in the article. If someone could point me to where the actual assignment is written down, I might see something there, however all I saw was the ramblings of a paranoid person who has no clue as to what is and is not legal. If port scans and vulnerability scans truly are illegal, I have felons banging on my ports all day long.
"and instructions about how to assemble a version of XP from copies of these bytes"
You will never see MS release the source to Windows. Ever.
"Can you remove Konqueror from KDE?"
I was wondering the same thing, but then I thought the answer is moot. You can replace KDE.
In the off-chance that you aren't trolling, see this post
It is a good thing that Amazon doesn't use Slashdot's moderation system. That book would have to get modded redunudant.
Smile people, it's a joke.
Guns don't shoot people - Vice-Presidents shoot people!
Ummmmm... the guy he shot was a lawyer -- I don't think that counts.
"The fact that these purchases are raising doubts as to MySQL's future..."
I don't believe that to be the case. In fact, if anything, I have to agree with Bruce Perens who states "(MySQL)CEO Mickos won't dabble at vengeance and will keep looking at offers that - if nothing else - increase the evidence for valuation of his company.".
It seems to me that if the "premier" database vendor (Oracle) in the market is looking to buy up a "lesser" database, it implies that the target database is (perceived to be) a threat in some way to the larger vendor; implying that the "lesser" is in fact not lesser. This suggests that MySQL *is* a solid database ready for the enterprise. Not to mention, the GPL version of MySQL is not going anywhere, regardless of what happens to MySQL AB. Its development cycle may be slowed for a bit if MySQL were bought out, but MySQL is too important of an application to too many companies with the budget/talent to let die. Someone will be developing MySQL for the foreseeable future.
"The purchases send a message that MySQL won't achieve high-end database features without being beholden to Oracle."
"Even an outright purchase of MySQL by Oracle would not prevent anyone from using MySQL's server in a commercial application, without charge."
"You can't really buy an Open Source project. "
It seems to me that what Oracle is doing is not to try and take over or squash MySQL but rather to buy some more time. InnoDB is already OSS and I had thought Sleepycat was as well. MySQL has already been released under the GPL; no changing that retroactively. Even if Oracle had bought MySQL, the whole thing appears to be an attempt by Oracle to buy time while the new development team learns the innards of MySQL and/or codes a new transaction engine.
MySQL, with or without MySQL AB, will continue to exist and continue to be developed. Don't get me wrong, I am glad they declined the offer, but I don't think Oracle was looking to buy MySQL per se. They were just looking to buy time to keep the heat off.
Just my 2cents.
This is why I do think that in states that have property taxes(all of them, right?), there should be a tax levied on IP. Hear me out on this. I realize that to try to assess the "value" of anything, let alone IP, is pretty much impossible, but we do have relative scales for "real" things; things you can touch. I totally agree with you that the value of IP(patents,copyrights,trademarks), as it is defined now, varies so greatly that to put some arbitrary value on it is not the solution or even desirable. Even a 95th percentile method, like the way bandwidth is sold, is not the solution.
I think the taxation of the value of IP should be tied to the copyright. To begin, you would recieve copyright exactly as it is now. You would have this for a short period -- something under 10years. You would not be assessed a property value to that property during this time.
Here is where it gets kind of funky. After the original copyright expires, in order to extend that copyright, you could do so for another short period (maybe this time not more than 15years) *if* you agree to the following:
1). The value of the IP is determined to be some average of the income made on that IP during its "grace period". The reason I say "income made on that IP during that period" rather than "Income made by owner" is this: If it is my copyright, I am not required to charge royalties; I could simply assign rights to copy to a third party and thus not claim that "I" made any money on that IP. There would have to be an exemption for OSS under certain approved licenses.
2). You agree to pay taxes on the previously determined value every year until the copyright expires, or you relinquish your copyright(ie. put in the public domain) to said IP. Also, as a caveat, should you make more money in a year than the assessed value of the IP, that becomes the new assessed value of the IP.
I am not a lawyer and have no idea if such a system could even be implemented. However, seeing as how the media industry sees IP as property, and their counterparts in brick and mortar land have been paying taxes on what they use to make a living, it only seems right that if it has value, taxes should be paid. When something is valueless in brick and mortar land it is thrown away. IP never gets "thrown away" under the current system; It needs to be donated to the public (or "thrown away").
Anyway, just my 2 cents.
"OTOH, if it is considered property, should we add a property tax to it?"
While I think you were being sarcastic, you make a valid point here. Are copyrights/trademarks/patents considered property to the IRS? If not, why not? Why would a company who profits directly from these assets not have to claim them as property when doing their taxes?
While I realize the implementation of such a system would be difficult at best, how is it that these companies have managed to avoid paying taxes on their "property"? How is it that the IRS has managed to miss this? According to copyright law, the liability is $180,000 per instance of infringement. In my mind, this means that the copyright holder should be expected to claim that amount as the value of their property; at least for the original copy.
On the other hand, how can one reasonably expect a fledgling(sp?) band to have to incorporate so as to handle ownership and taxes for their copyright? How would an open source programmer be expected to deal with this sort of overhead?
While I think the question creates more problems than it solves, how is it that copyright/patent/trademark holders have evaded taxation on their property whereas brick and mortar comapanies have had to deal with this since the beginning of property taxation.
Or is it simply that trademarks/patents/copyrights were *never* meant to be treated as property in the first place?
They could. But an application as important and popular as MySQL would simply fork. Simply look at X.org vs XFree86.
Your post reminds me of the movie Starship Troopers when the main characters are assigned to their respective military roles. One of the protaganists is assigned to "Games and Theory" to which one of the other cast replies "Games and Theory, that's military intelligence!".
....there is a scale of applications they simply don't seem to recognize.
100% agreed. Believe it or not, this and your following statements hold true for other niche markets as well. I have experience in MTAs. I can fight my way through sendmail and/or Postfix with confidence. I still use a proprietary MTA for my mailing because it just works. I have had a phone call regarding almost every other piece of software I manage at one time or another. The MTA has always "just worked" (port25's PowerMTA on several different flavors of Linux for those wondering).
However, all that aside, I originally was responding to your statement "One day all of you open-source weenies are going to realize that the world doesn't run on GPL.". To which I stated that that statement was not true and some reasons why. I stand by that. I agree 100% that open-source is not always the correct solution. What I did say is that in many cases and occasionally in a majority of cases it is a better solution; as an example the web server market.
I personally will shutup when...
First of all, can you quote where I told you to shut up?
Secondly when did I say that there was no good proprietary products out there, especially databases? I use many proprietary products in my work, including databases. Nice strawman but a terrible troll.
One day all of you open-source weenies are going to realize that the world doesn't run on GPL.
I might have given you a bit of respect until you threw out the trolling line. Also, a lot of the internet does run on GPL'd and open source software in case you hadn't noticed. Let me run a couple names by you by way of example; Apache, PHP, Sendmail, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Linux, *BSD, Firefox. You may also consider many of the embedded Linux routers/modems that are in use (one of which you are probably using to access the internet if you are at home, and maybe even in the office).
You may be right about marketing and sales to an extent, but the aforementioned software products show that even that is not a 100% accurate statement (Apache does serve more sites than all of its competition combined). One day all of you proprietary software weenies will realize that the world doesnt run exclusively on proprietary software.
And how is Goodmail any different from Bonded Sender or Habeas? And how many of these vendors is a company supposed to pay for the "privilege" of "bypassing" filters? It is extortion plain and simple. The only persons that are going to pay for these "services" are the ones that are not going to be spamming in the first place. Also how is the companies reputation affected by users who will go through the trouble of double-opt-in and still report the email as spam to the ISP; the highest number of these being AOL users by far, from my experience. Hell, I have several AOLers a day that report a confirmation for a submission that they signed up for as spam; let alone the number of complaints I receive from these morons after they confirm their subscription.
This is a business model marketed under the guise of protecting the consumer with the actual intent being to supplement income with regard to email. Nothing more nothing less.