...but it's becoming increasingly obvious that the Slashdot "editors" have replaced themselves with very small shell scripts and are running around outside, sucking on their inhalers and embarrasing themselves fumbling hackeysacks and Frisbee(tm) Flying Disks.
Still, in this economic downturn, it's kind of nice to know that there are still companies willing to employee "creative" incompetents without bothering to check if they're getting value for money, or even a token pretence of doing any work.
Man, you guys who're paying per page must be laughing about this. No, not laughing. What's the word? Pissed.
When's the last time you saw a BSOD during routine operation on WinXP (and we're talking about new systems here, remember)? Give me an argument that's not obsolete.
Having shares that users can expose indicates a bad setup. Both systems let you screw around with UI settings, both let you lock down the important stuff. Sure, Lunix techies tend to be better at locking things down. That's why they cost more.
How much do you charge for installing Mandrake Linux 9.1? How much do you charge for supporting it for users that panic when they can't find the Any Key? Can you keep the sneer out of your voice? Can you bring yourself to talk down at their level without aggravating them? I'm betting not.
Supporting a KDE or GNOME desktop and app suite costs more, much more, than supporting the equivelant Windows desktop and apps, if for no other reason than that users are familiar with it. That's not a good argument for keeping it that way, but it's a de facto one. Much as I loath Microsoft's tortuous licensing and DRM programs, I agree with them that for a typical desktop user, TCO is lower with Windows right now and likely to stay that way for some time.
The virus argument is the only one that I find compelling. You have to pay extra to fix holes that shouldn't be there in the first place. But before you get too complacent, recall the number of 1337 h4x0rz that sat there smugly declaring how invulnerable they were while getting their boxen rooted out from under them with ssh exploits. The more boxen there are out there, the more eyes will be looking for holes in KDE/GNOME/GNU/linux. Sure, the patches come out fast, but who are you going to get to apply them? Users? Ha. It comes back to that expensive lunix sysadmin again.
Is lunix on the desktop a better long term investment? I believe so. But I don't believe that you'll see the benefits on your balance sheet for years.
I'm guessing YANAL. Under the circumstances, I'll stick with the advice of my company's IP lawyers, and continue to view the GPL as a revokable, non perpetual, non binding, non contractual implicit license.
"Nonexclusive licenses given for free are generally revocable, even if they purport to be irrevocable," Volokh said. "Even if the GPL license in cphack is treated as signed and is covered by 205(e), it might still be revocable by Mattel as the new owners of the cphack copyright."
"It is unfortunately not quite as solid a case for the good guys as the GNU license theory would have at first led us to believe," he said.
As I've said elsewhere, it depends on what rights the author has signed over. Publishers want you to sign boilerplate that gives them free reign to exploit and sublicense, then throw you a bone when and if they feel like it. Authors want to license strict sets of rights. If you license your book to a text publisher, you generally don't want to give them a contract that lets them just give it away to third parties, which is what Amazon are demanding.
Doesn't really matter. The GPL is the only thing that gives them rights to duplicate the copyrighted source owned by other contributors. If the GPL doesn't "hold up", then they are in breach of copyright. Nothing else gives them the rights to duplicate. It's that simple.
They're not in breach of contract. The GPL is a license, not a contract. If they don't adhere to the terms of that license, they're (arguably) in breach of copyright. I say "arguably" because it will be up to the rights owners to show that, but it won't exactly be difficuly.
2.6.something then. I don't see that contested code staying in the kernel for a second longer than it has to after SCO eventually fess up to what they think they own in there.
The US has a fscked up system whereby you can only claim damages for use of your copyrighted content if it's registered with the Feds. If you don't register it, all you can do is sue to not have it used, and ask for punative damages to be applied. US copyright does few favours for individual creators, which unfortunately includes many kernel contributors.
Irrelevant whether it's distributing, it's duplication. By duplicating it without a license for the GPL'd parts (and the binary-only nature of the SCO part violates this), you're in breach of copyright.
The GPL gives you extra rights, including the right both to duplicate and to distribute (which are separate issues). Once you stop following its terms, you lose both those rights.
Think of it this way. If you buy one copy of Windows XP and then install it in ten machines in your home or office, are you breaching your license and therefore Microsoft's copyright? Hell yes. Why should it be different for a GPL installation? You breach the license, you lose the rights, you leave yourself open to a suit.
How about if you replace them with the identical lines from SCO's own distribution, clearly licensed under the GPL and distributed for year after year, including after the point where they began filing suits?
We can just replace that dirty IBM contributed code with, uh, let's see, the exact same code that SCO chose to distribute themselves under the terms of a GPL license for year after year. Mmm, yup, I'll just replace it file for file, then recompile to produce an identical binary. Prove otherwise?
Sorry about the italics. I know it's traditional to point out idiotic licensing terms USING UPPER CASE AOLSPEAK, but I thought I'd try and sneak this wheeze under the crack SCO legal team's beady eyes.
It's also cretinous, because any "use" that involves duplication (including, let's see, installation from CD or network, or uploading or downloading or distributing externally or internally) will constitute a fat violation of the copy rights of every other contributor ot the kernel.
There's a GPL exemption in the linux kernal for binary only Nvidia drivers. SCO has no such provision. If you cave in to these terms, expect to hear from other rights owners, each and every one of whom has as much claim as SCO.
Note to any companies thinking of caving on this. According to Cnet, the license being offered is "run-time, binary use".
If you then duplicate this kernel in any way (yes, Virginia, downloading and installing from network or CD for internal use as well) without distributing or making available the contested SCO source under the terms of a GPL license, then regardless of whether you distribute the rest of the source you are breaking the terms of the GPL and violating the copy rights of every other rights owner that has contributed to the linux kernel, and you should expect to hear from them presently, possibly as a class action.
Furthermore, you are also declaring (implicitely) that you believe that IBM distributed without a license, that they violated both SCO's rights and (as a consequence) that they violated the rights of every other contributor as well. If you cave in to SCO, be prepared for IBM's lawyers to come around asking if you'd like to form part of a test case to see how implicit you can be while still libelling someone to their material loss.
I'd suggest that your best bet is to sit tight. You can always pay up if and when IBM lose the copyright case (which they probably won't), by which time the actual contested code will have been made public and rapidly replaced in kernel 2.6 anyway. So you can choose to upgrade for nothing, or you can pay to retain old code while sending a message that IBM are thieves and that you are prepared to cave in to any penny ante playa that sends you an invoice. Your choice.
What they want isn't necessarily what they get. However, the Amazon T&C's require anyone sending them content for sale to warrant that they have "full authority" to grant a "royalty-free, nonexclusive, worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable right and license to use, reproduce, perform, display and distribute, and adapt, modify, reformat, create derivative works of any content" and further that they can and do grant Amazon the rights to sublicense these rights.
Any author signing away these rights to a publisher deserves to be royally screwed over. I'd rather self publish and make nothing rather than gamble on receiving pennies under these terms. This flies in the face of the intent of copyright, and illustrates perfectly how completely publishers can now demand outrageous boilerplate licensing terms in return for making money by selling the fruits of other peoples' labours.
As I read this, Amazon can basically do whatever the hell they want with anything that you sell through them, and for that matter they can sell the rights to do so to anyone else they like. If you get money out of them, it's because they're being nice. They could just as easily give your content away for nothing.
As nice an example as you could find of the lesson that publishers now dictate terms to creators, pretty much the opposite of what copyright laws were supposed to achieve. Sigh.
>>Are Amazon obtaining each and every rights owners' permission to perform this duplication? I doubt it
>Why do you doubt it?
I doubt it because it would require negotiating a contract with every rights owner, not every publisher. Easier for factual books, as it's more likely that the publisher is the rights owner and the book is work-for-hire, but even that's not universal.
That said, when I say "would require", I mean should require. If this doesn't happen, and Amazon just goes ahead and does this anyway, then all it demonstrates is that copyright has been turned on its head and that publishers can ride roughshod over the "exclusive" rights of creators, all the time using the argument that because they control the means of distribution, their aims must axiomatially be the same as any rights owner, and that as long as they toss them a crumb - whether the rights owner gave them permission or not - then it's no harm, no foul.
By the same argument, Microsoft could appropriate GPL code simply by sending a cheque to the rights owner, and claiming that they're doing them a favour while they're at it. It's a nasty precedent, and I hope that you're right and that Amazon are going to obtain explicit permission from each and every right owner before implementing this.
Sure, your honour, I only OCR'd and put my entire book collection up on Kazaa so that people could search for passages before buying them from me. Same with my mp3s and DVDs, now that I think of it.
Let's look at the fair use provisions in the 1976 copyright act:
the fair use of a copyrighted work [...] for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.
Purposes such as selling isn't covered, but let's read on, because as with most things written by lawyers for the benefits of lawyers, it's not that clear cut.
In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include:
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
Well, you work it out. It's a copy of the entire work. That it's offered one piece at a time can't be a defence by itself, otherwise those fragments I upload and download to and from various people over eDonkey would be fine by same argument. The duplication is clearly of commercial nature (for Amazon's benefit), but on the other hand, it's arguably increasing the potential market for the copyrighted work.
That last one is a very, very interesting provision. If Amazon can argue that making entire copies and distributing parts of them - potentially all of them - for their profit is just increasing the market for the original work by way of advertising and promoting it, why can't I argue that for my eDonkey use?
If you think this argument is trite, have a look at www.sharereactor.com, which indexes content on eDonkey. You see the "Buy this at Amazon.com" links right there? What is eDonkey doing that's significantly different from Amazon? Are Amazon obtaining each and every rights owners' permission to perform this duplication? I doubt it, so the differences seems to be these:
It's easier to obtain all the fragments from eDonkey (but not much easier, it can take upwards of a week to completely download a large file). And sharereactor is not for profit, whereas Amazon is primarily interested in their own profit.
You work out where the morality and legality lies.
No running - or writing, or trafficking in - SMTP and POP3 software without a World Government licence, you GNU/lunix using terrorist.
When (if ever) will Plod realise that it's all just IP packets, and that anybody in the world can run any service they want? You want to ban anonymous email? Right, you go ahead and try and find my SMTP server running behind my firewall and accepting SSL encrypted connections from my friends over a non standard port and logging to/dev/null. And at least I know I'm doing that. How are you going to find and stop all the Joe Sixpack trojaned machines running SMTP proxies, all across the globe?
These guys are either breathtakingly ignorant, or are wilfully trolling. Budget time again, huh?
Slashdot Mirror
And of course that $5 has to come from an actual credit card, not another payment system. ;-)
...but it's becoming increasingly obvious that the Slashdot "editors" have replaced themselves with very small shell scripts and are running around outside, sucking on their inhalers and embarrasing themselves fumbling hackeysacks and Frisbee(tm) Flying Disks.
Still, in this economic downturn, it's kind of nice to know that there are still companies willing to employee "creative" incompetents without bothering to check if they're getting value for money, or even a token pretence of doing any work.
Man, you guys who're paying per page must be laughing about this. No, not laughing. What's the word? Pissed.
If you don't value your time, or care if it works reliably.
Let's have lots of them!
When's the last time you saw a BSOD during routine operation on WinXP (and we're talking about new systems here, remember)? Give me an argument that's not obsolete.
Having shares that users can expose indicates a bad setup. Both systems let you screw around with UI settings, both let you lock down the important stuff. Sure, Lunix techies tend to be better at locking things down. That's why they cost more.
How much do you charge for installing Mandrake Linux 9.1? How much do you charge for supporting it for users that panic when they can't find the Any Key? Can you keep the sneer out of your voice? Can you bring yourself to talk down at their level without aggravating them? I'm betting not.
Supporting a KDE or GNOME desktop and app suite costs more, much more, than supporting the equivelant Windows desktop and apps, if for no other reason than that users are familiar with it. That's not a good argument for keeping it that way, but it's a de facto one. Much as I loath Microsoft's tortuous licensing and DRM programs, I agree with them that for a typical desktop user, TCO is lower with Windows right now and likely to stay that way for some time.
The virus argument is the only one that I find compelling. You have to pay extra to fix holes that shouldn't be there in the first place. But before you get too complacent, recall the number of 1337 h4x0rz that sat there smugly declaring how invulnerable they were while getting their boxen rooted out from under them with ssh exploits. The more boxen there are out there, the more eyes will be looking for holes in KDE/GNOME/GNU/linux. Sure, the patches come out fast, but who are you going to get to apply them? Users? Ha. It comes back to that expensive lunix sysadmin again.
Is lunix on the desktop a better long term investment? I believe so. But I don't believe that you'll see the benefits on your balance sheet for years.
I'm guessing YANAL. Under the circumstances, I'll stick with the advice of my company's IP lawyers, and continue to view the GPL as a revokable, non perpetual, non binding, non contractual implicit license.
Heck, don't take my word for it:
Eugene Volokh, a law professor at UCLA, said that Mattel might be able to argue that the GPL is invalid because users don't pay for the free software.
"Nonexclusive licenses given for free are generally revocable, even if they purport to be irrevocable," Volokh said. "Even if the GPL license in cphack is treated as signed and is covered by 205(e), it might still be revocable by Mattel as the new owners of the cphack copyright."
"It is unfortunately not quite as solid a case for the good guys as the GNU license theory would have at first led us to believe," he said.
As I've said elsewhere, it depends on what rights the author has signed over. Publishers want you to sign boilerplate that gives them free reign to exploit and sublicense, then throw you a bone when and if they feel like it. Authors want to license strict sets of rights. If you license your book to a text publisher, you generally don't want to give them a contract that lets them just give it away to third parties, which is what Amazon are demanding.
Because of course, linux is free. If you don't value your time, that is.
Doesn't really matter. The GPL is the only thing that gives them rights to duplicate the copyrighted source owned by other contributors. If the GPL doesn't "hold up", then they are in breach of copyright. Nothing else gives them the rights to duplicate. It's that simple.
They're not in breach of contract. The GPL is a license, not a contract. If they don't adhere to the terms of that license, they're (arguably) in breach of copyright. I say "arguably" because it will be up to the rights owners to show that, but it won't exactly be difficuly.
Let's keep our terms straight.
2.6.something then. I don't see that contested code staying in the kernel for a second longer than it has to after SCO eventually fess up to what they think they own in there.
Thanks for the correction, it's good to get these things exactly straight. Compare with Red Hat's non-licenses for their patents, for example.
The US has a fscked up system whereby you can only claim damages for use of your copyrighted content if it's registered with the Feds. If you don't register it, all you can do is sue to not have it used, and ask for punative damages to be applied. US copyright does few favours for individual creators, which unfortunately includes many kernel contributors.
Irrelevant whether it's distributing, it's duplication. By duplicating it without a license for the GPL'd parts (and the binary-only nature of the SCO part violates this), you're in breach of copyright.
The GPL gives you extra rights, including the right both to duplicate and to distribute (which are separate issues). Once you stop following its terms, you lose both those rights.
Think of it this way. If you buy one copy of Windows XP and then install it in ten machines in your home or office, are you breaching your license and therefore Microsoft's copyright? Hell yes. Why should it be different for a GPL installation? You breach the license, you lose the rights, you leave yourself open to a suit.
How about if you replace them with the identical lines from SCO's own distribution, clearly licensed under the GPL and distributed for year after year, including after the point where they began filing suits?
We can just replace that dirty IBM contributed code with, uh, let's see, the exact same code that SCO chose to distribute themselves under the terms of a GPL license for year after year. Mmm, yup, I'll just replace it file for file, then recompile to produce an identical binary. Prove otherwise?
Sorry about the italics. I know it's traditional to point out idiotic licensing terms USING UPPER CASE AOLSPEAK, but I thought I'd try and sneak this wheeze under the crack SCO legal team's beady eyes.
It's also cretinous, because any "use" that involves duplication (including, let's see, installation from CD or network, or uploading or downloading or distributing externally or internally) will constitute a fat violation of the copy rights of every other contributor ot the kernel.
There's a GPL exemption in the linux kernal for binary only Nvidia drivers. SCO has no such provision. If you cave in to these terms, expect to hear from other rights owners, each and every one of whom has as much claim as SCO.
Note to any companies thinking of caving on this. According to Cnet, the license being offered is "run-time, binary use".
If you then duplicate this kernel in any way (yes, Virginia, downloading and installing from network or CD for internal use as well) without distributing or making available the contested SCO source under the terms of a GPL license, then regardless of whether you distribute the rest of the source you are breaking the terms of the GPL and violating the copy rights of every other rights owner that has contributed to the linux kernel, and you should expect to hear from them presently, possibly as a class action.
Furthermore, you are also declaring (implicitely) that you believe that IBM distributed without a license, that they violated both SCO's rights and (as a consequence) that they violated the rights of every other contributor as well. If you cave in to SCO, be prepared for IBM's lawyers to come around asking if you'd like to form part of a test case to see how implicit you can be while still libelling someone to their material loss.
I'd suggest that your best bet is to sit tight. You can always pay up if and when IBM lose the copyright case (which they probably won't), by which time the actual contested code will have been made public and rapidly replaced in kernel 2.6 anyway. So you can choose to upgrade for nothing, or you can pay to retain old code while sending a message that IBM are thieves and that you are prepared to cave in to any penny ante playa that sends you an invoice. Your choice.
What they want isn't necessarily what they get. However, the Amazon T&C's require anyone sending them content for sale to warrant that they have "full authority" to grant a "royalty-free, nonexclusive, worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable right and license to use, reproduce, perform, display and distribute, and adapt, modify, reformat, create derivative works of any content" and further that they can and do grant Amazon the rights to sublicense these rights.
Any author signing away these rights to a publisher deserves to be royally screwed over. I'd rather self publish and make nothing rather than gamble on receiving pennies under these terms. This flies in the face of the intent of copyright, and illustrates perfectly how completely publishers can now demand outrageous boilerplate licensing terms in return for making money by selling the fruits of other peoples' labours.
Limited License Grant By submitting content and other tangible or intangible materials to us (collectively, "Content"), you grant to Amazon.com and its affiliated companies a royalty-free, nonexclusive, worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable right and license to: (a) use, reproduce, perform, display, and distribute any copyrightable works (e.g., creative text, images, and artwork), trademarks, or trade names included in the Content; (b) adapt, modify, reformat, and create derivative works of any Content; and (c) sublicense the foregoing rights.
As I read this, Amazon can basically do whatever the hell they want with anything that you sell through them, and for that matter they can sell the rights to do so to anyone else they like. If you get money out of them, it's because they're being nice. They could just as easily give your content away for nothing.
As nice an example as you could find of the lesson that publishers now dictate terms to creators, pretty much the opposite of what copyright laws were supposed to achieve. Sigh.
>>Are Amazon obtaining each and every rights owners' permission to perform this duplication? I doubt it
>Why do you doubt it?
I doubt it because it would require negotiating a contract with every rights owner, not every publisher. Easier for factual books, as it's more likely that the publisher is the rights owner and the book is work-for-hire, but even that's not universal.
That said, when I say "would require", I mean should require. If this doesn't happen, and Amazon just goes ahead and does this anyway, then all it demonstrates is that copyright has been turned on its head and that publishers can ride roughshod over the "exclusive" rights of creators, all the time using the argument that because they control the means of distribution, their aims must axiomatially be the same as any rights owner, and that as long as they toss them a crumb - whether the rights owner gave them permission or not - then it's no harm, no foul.
By the same argument, Microsoft could appropriate GPL code simply by sending a cheque to the rights owner, and claiming that they're doing them a favour while they're at it. It's a nasty precedent, and I hope that you're right and that Amazon are going to obtain explicit permission from each and every right owner before implementing this.
Sure, your honour, I only OCR'd and put my entire book collection up on Kazaa so that people could search for passages before buying them from me. Same with my mp3s and DVDs, now that I think of it.
Let's look at the fair use provisions in the 1976 copyright act:
the fair use of a copyrighted work [...] for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.
Purposes such as selling isn't covered, but let's read on, because as with most things written by lawyers for the benefits of lawyers, it's not that clear cut.
In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include :
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
Well, you work it out. It's a copy of the entire work. That it's offered one piece at a time can't be a defence by itself, otherwise those fragments I upload and download to and from various people over eDonkey would be fine by same argument. The duplication is clearly of commercial nature (for Amazon's benefit), but on the other hand, it's arguably increasing the potential market for the copyrighted work.
That last one is a very, very interesting provision. If Amazon can argue that making entire copies and distributing parts of them - potentially all of them - for their profit is just increasing the market for the original work by way of advertising and promoting it, why can't I argue that for my eDonkey use?
If you think this argument is trite, have a look at www.sharereactor.com, which indexes content on eDonkey. You see the "Buy this at Amazon.com" links right there? What is eDonkey doing that's significantly different from Amazon? Are Amazon obtaining each and every rights owners' permission to perform this duplication? I doubt it, so the differences seems to be these:
It's easier to obtain all the fragments from eDonkey (but not much easier, it can take upwards of a week to completely download a large file). And sharereactor is not for profit, whereas Amazon is primarily interested in their own profit.
You work out where the morality and legality lies.
alt.binaries.ebooks . Kazaa. eDonkey. Gnutella. etc.
No running - or writing, or trafficking in - SMTP and POP3 software without a World Government licence, you GNU/lunix using terrorist.
When (if ever) will Plod realise that it's all just IP packets, and that anybody in the world can run any service they want? You want to ban anonymous email? Right, you go ahead and try and find my SMTP server running behind my firewall and accepting SSL encrypted connections from my friends over a non standard port and logging to /dev/null. And at least I know I'm doing that. How are you going to find and stop all the Joe Sixpack trojaned machines running SMTP proxies, all across the globe?
These guys are either breathtakingly ignorant, or are wilfully trolling. Budget time again, huh?
It's all right, the omnipresent security cameras will catch them. Or someone who looks a bit like them, which is close enough.