Are you implying that copyright law has never been tested in court?
The GPL grants you rights you do not have with standard copyright. Nothing but the GPL grants you those rights, in the case of any GPL licensed product. If any part of the GPL is found invalid in court the software will default to being under standard copyright, so the only thing anyone can accomplish going up against the GPL in court is to remove any and all freedoms the GPL grants them with regards to the software.
The GPL is not like an ordinary license agreement. If you have an ordinary license agreement it usually takes away rights you have under standard copyright. If you challange such a license in court you can get clauses stricken and obtain more rights. Successfully challanging the GPL would give you less rights; whichever way it goes in court, you lose.
Wether or not the GPL has been tried in court is really irrelevant. Either it's found valid as it is or you get a plain copyright case instead, and copyright cases arent exactly untested.
I mean exactly that. With disksuite you have to care about slices. With an LVM you dont.
For example, on a small server with two disks. You get 2 36GB disks, and at least our standard configuration sucks up 5 slices as swap plus various filesystems (all mirrored). Then you have the metadatabase replicas taking up another slice, plus the backup slice. Oops, used all my slices, which means I cant extend any filesystem later on, nor can I add more mountpoints. Which means I have to make the final configuration at once and I have no flexibility to change anything afterwards.
And on a large server you get the opposite problem; either you get too many slices everywhere since you have to have a new slice for every time you extend a filesystem, or you get loads of unused space for major additions that turned out to be unnecessary. On a large server with more than a hundred mountpoints, that makes quite a lot of slices, which makes it pretty unmanageable. It's painful even with LVM.
Oh, and hot spares we dont use, since we have FC disk. It's already raid plus hotspare, and mirrored on the host on top of that.
Disksuite simply doesnt compare to a real LVM. It works for setting up mirroring, but it just doesnt cut it when you need more flexibility. You just dont want to deal with slices at all when you get complicated consolidated larger servers.
Gaaack. Disksuite really really *really* sucks if you're managing anything more advanced than mirroring the root disks. It isnt a LVM, which is the problem.
Trust me, if you have 10 or more disks on a system, you dont want to pull out the system documentation to make sure the slices you want to use are unused. And then meticulously compare it with the current system configuration in case one of your fellow admins has been slack in updating the docs. When you get many disks, you _have_ to have a logical volume manager, so you can just add a disk to a volume group and extend the logical volumes on it, without mucking around with diskslices.
Disksuite just doesnt cut it for anything but the most simple configurations.
Actually, I sortof like HP-UX. The LVM and HA software is among the most trouble free implementations I've ever come across. Compiling stuff is a PITA tho, and whoever is responsible for the include files seems to have a fetish for disabling anything and everything common to modern UNIX unless you set several defines to get through it.
It's definitely gotten better in HP-UX 10 and 11; the releases before that were horrible. It still has some really annoying behaviour tho... memory allocation and reboot-on-changing-kernel-parameters, altho that's changed in 11i for some of it at least.
And you can get fairly accurate data even further back by studying earlier vegetation, etc.
Maybe they're not interested in data that far back simply because it would be harder to really match it to a model that includes the effects of things like CO2 emissions.
Using the last 50 years makes it easy to get a model that points to human interference. Using or verifying against several centuries or millenias worth of data could indeed make it more accurate, but it would rather point to natural variation from causes like solar radiation output, vegetation changes, etc.
Well, the problem is that they are actually using non-representative data. 1950-2000 is a too small sample by far to even begin forming a model for climate variation, something which varies over periods of centuries or millenia.
They will probably get some form of result. It wont be valid, but it will nonetheless be a result which matches the earlier period. Of course, this will start breaking down as soon as natural climate variation changes cycle. Likely it would be invalidated even faster if they try to apply the model to known data from the last 20k years (altho if they could get the model to account for the earlier climate variations that far back, I'd tend to accept it as more valid).
IIRC, anti-trust trials tend to be more about rectifying the situation and restoring competition more than about penalties. Penalties can be exacted through civil suits by those who have been harmed.
Of course, actually restoring competition would probably be more painful than any punishment even a really angry judge could dream up; both because competition is something Microsoft fears and loathes more than anything, the company wants one thing and that is control, and because it would likely entail something like splitting MS into several dozen smaller companies to actually have some real competition again.
No, it's 'tax-innovation', a right they have and are exercising. Must guard that right to 'innovate'.
Companies can retain earnings for reinvestment, and some to guard against a rainy day, but that isnt what Microsoft is doing.
It should be blindingly obvious to anyone who's even caught a whiff of a newspaper the last ten years that Microsoft does not _care_ if what they are doing is, in fact, illegal. It isnt illegal until they are convicted of it, and even then they can pay their way out of a punishment.
Re:Today, the WTO pulled the trigger on another 2.
on
Wipout Essay Results
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· Score: 2
Ok, how do you sort out the honest ones then? You're in a village in africa, and you are going to demand your partner get tested for something you barely know what it is?
How many people with AIDS do you think are going to be totally honest about it, again, in a country where AIDS runs rampant? How many are even going to know?
And, yes, I'm sure you have a choice about having sex or not when your family marries you off to someone. You can always say no and get beaten instead.
It's quite different in the western world, where you can actually demand a test before getting into a relationship. Not that the honesty thing is very common tho...
Re:Today, the WTO pulled the trigger on another 2.
on
Wipout Essay Results
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· Score: 2
Yes, the solution is to take the pharmaceutical corps out of the loop. If they prove themselves unable to value life over profits, or are unable to develop a pricing structure that allows access to everyone, they have proven that they cannot live up to the responsibility they have.
That means that governments have to go in and finance more of the medical research when it comes to matters of life and death. The pharmaceutical industry can do the Aspirins and the Viagra of the world so they dont have to deal with those ethical aspects of their buisness they have such a hard time with.
Government financing might not be the absolute best solution, but with cooperation between countries the medical research funding could get larger than it is today (altho a large part is already government financed). And the final products would be more available than they are today.
Re:Today, the WTO pulled the trigger on another 2.
on
Wipout Essay Results
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· Score: 2
Just because you've decided on a lifetime commitment doesnt make you immune if your partner is or gets infected. The social issues and the percentages work against such a strategy being efficient in countries where AIDS runs rampant.
Keeping your pants on permanently is about the only way you can be pretty sure. If you have that choice.
Lol, funny site. They're also lying (surprise, surprise). Those 'labels' recoup all their 'investments' by taking it out of the artists share of the royalties, who will most likely never see a cent after recieving their advance (which, after deducting the recording costs and other things) amounts to less than what a job mainly consisting of serving fries would pay.
That's patents as opposed to copyright. And, of course, the problem with patents is that the large corporations have far more patents anyway, and if you're a small buisnessman you're far more likely to either get sued for patent infringement (either because their patent is sorta like what you do, or because there are several patents on the same thing, or something else), or get your own patent overturned, or litigated out of existence some other way than you are to ever have a patent stand up against a large corporation.
Good idea from the beginning, which eventually resulted in the horribly defective IP laws we have now.
Re:Letting users do things that are otherwise ille
on
GPL's Strength
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· Score: 2
Traditionally you have the right to use anything you own in any way you want. Copyright does not give you any right to restrict what your customers do with what they have purchased. You can buy a book,read it, use it as a paper towel, light a fire with it, or even sell it to someone else. You just cant copy it and distribute copies.
And that's where the copyright holders, the software industry in particular, try to revoke your rights through EULAs by claiming you didnt 'buy' that software, you bought a license to run it, which would thereby allow them to restrict you from doing things you otherwise would have every right to do under copyright law.
If you really believe Microsoft is doing you a favor and allowing you to do something that would be illegal they've really done a good number on you. Except you're right in some places of course, where they and the other industry interests have done a good number on the lawmakers too.
The number of computers supported by any single API target is shrinking rapidly. Look at the graphics? It's gettin amazing if you even _get_ graphics rather than a complete lockup or a crash. Take a look around in the various game vendors tech support forums, and you'll see that it's getting as bad as when you had to write separate drivers for every video card in existence.
DirectX 8.x isnt a universal API. It's a universal disaster.
It probably wont be airtight. It would likely include automatic patching tho, so... well, if you disable the DRM system, again, the BIOS wont boot the OS. You might be able to bypass it through bugs, but the next time you connect to the internet you'll be patched, so such a hole will be temporary. And, again, if you try to disable the autopatching, your OS will stop booting.
It will probably never be completely airtight, but it will get painful enough that almost nobody will hack it. Digital satellite recievers and the newer game consoles are a precursor to what you are going to see, and while it's still possible to modify those, fewer and fewer people are even trying to for every generation. Once you get to the point where you have to make shady deals with a friend-of-a-friend and buy your own $1000 soldering equipment to replace the chips that form the foundation of the DRM tech, most people give up.
Nobody but the RIAA/MPAA wants systems like this. It will easily hike the price of a PC by several hundred dollars, if not more, and turn it into a glorified digital decoding device for media playing rather than what it is today. Which is why they try to push it legally, because neither the consumers or the IT industry wants it.
There are no DRM controlled OS's today, nor any hardware really (except certain bank crypto processors that work according to similar principles of multilevel crypto and verification). That will change with if the law forbids the sales of non-DRM controlled hardware and software.
With DRM, there will be no way you could compromise the integrity of Windows. The hardware would check that the OS wasnt compromised before booting at all. Sure you can go ahead and hack it. Only your computer wont boot because the BIOS no longer gets the right handshake. Go ahead, flash in a hacked BIOS, only now your CPU wouldnt even start executing the BIOS since the BIOS couldnt handshake right. Stick a hacked CPU in it, and your northbridge will deny the CPU access to memory.
No, Linux wont be illegal. It will only be illegal to build and sell a machine that can run it. Of course, it will be illegal to build and sell a machine that runs any version of Windows up to date too, but do you really think Microsoft would be upset about having to sell everyone a new version again?
Because Microsoft knows that they have no products they can sell anymore. That's the trouble with consumer productivity software; it gets finished. Windows was finished around NT/Win 98. Office was finished around Office 97. Etc. These products have all the features that the average consumer will ever need in a lifetime, and what Microsoft can improve, and has improved in them since that time, is worth about a dollar or two to the consumer. They are their own absolute nightmare competitor, because the last product did the job. And the one before that. So, why pay again?
The same holds true about free software. It takes its time, but eventually it gets there with this type of program. They get finished, good enough, and eventually there is just a few features added now and then.
MS needs to switch to a subscription base or they die. The only buisnesses that can survive in the post-software-got-finished world are the ones on a subscription model, alternatively those in markets like games, buisness systems integration, services, etc, where the products dont ever get finished.
Microsoft has a rock solid grip on a dead market, partly killed by them, partly killed by the product structure, and they know it. That's why they need to change and make money in other markets.
Of course, nobody wants them in any other market so they're met with a blank wall of resistance from all sides. Maybe the other industries will manage to keep them in their glass box until their 'air supply' runs out.
Oh, yeah, with the emphasis on 'build systems'. You're allowed to build your own motherboard, with your own home-made CPU, and your own home-made IO subsystems, as long as you dont do it for profit. If you've got a few billion dollars I expect you could do that.
If you, however, want to write a program that can resample and re-encode, sure you can do that. Only, no hardware or OS will exist that will allow your program to run, because it will be illegal to build systems that allow bypassing of the security, such as re-encoding.
The draconian aspect of the law doesnt become apparent until you understand the only way it can be implemented. Any device can be programmed to bypass copying restrictions until you go all the way with DRM included in the hardware complete with cryptographic handshakes between OS, BIOS and various hardware like CPU, disks, display and audio devices. To ensure the restrictions cannot be bypassed the various components have to verify integrity of eachother and any integrity failure would render the system unable to boot. The OS would have separate hooks for reading and writing protected files, and no uncertified program would be allowed to access devices from which protected data could be read.
Linux wouldnt be able to run at all. You cannot guarantee the integrity of Linux, thus is would be illegal to ship hardware that will allow it to run. If you're a programmer, you wouldnt be able to write programs that access protected media (directly), or the OS vendor wouldnt be able to guarantee rights management. Sure, you wouldnt be convicted for writing a program that can resample and reencode, but anyone selling a system that will allow you to write such a program will be convicted.
Lol, that trend terminates with DRM. Everyone you know who tries to 'get their software for free' will be in _jail_ in the future, and the rest will be paying their monthly bill.
Hardware based legally mandated DRM (SSSCA) means no way no how are you ever going to be able to run a unlicensed copy of a proprietary OS, nor are you going to be allowed to run a Free OS. Unless you can afford a chip and motherboard manufacturing plant for a few billion to produce your own computer from scratch (except, of course, if you tried to build a computer from scratch you'd be in jail again).
Re:Actually, the UNIX market share is going down..
on
Unix Isn't Dead
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· Score: 2
This quote from the article is quite amazing actually.
"Those larger companies are moving aggressively as well, trying to eke sales out of a Unix market that shrank 18.7 percent from $25.3 billion in 2001 to $20.6 billion in 2000"
Oh, and hey, in other news the market shrank from $20.6 billion in 2000 to $0 in 1970. Amazing really.
In the embedded market look at Axis (www.axis.com) for a successful 'linux' company. Of course, they dont make a big deal of using Linux. They just use it, reap the profits and go on selling *products* rather than hyping a good way to decrease costs.
When you get the merging of the owners of the means of production and the political power you have in the US, the lines become blurrier. It's not communism, any more than the Soviet union was, but it has more in common with the soviet economy than with free market capitalism.
Capitalism requires private, not government, ownership of production. When the owners of the production have the means to get the political leaders elected or not, as well as an inordinate amount of political influence through lobbying, they cannot really be regarded as entirely separate from the government anymore. Of course, they are still unaccountable to the people, but so were the Soviet leaders, and so are the Chinese leaders.
Microsoft is not about capitalism and free markets. They're into market control and five-year-plans, and that is not a capitalistic thing. Their view of the market has more in common with the Soviet union plan economy model.
If people dont want MS products they have to buy them anyway. That's the entire problem. If you believe otherwise you must have stuck your head in the sand the last ten years. Steve and Bill would be rolling on the floor laughing at you for believing that what they're doing is a 'free market' thing.
And no, open source software is flawed when it comes to producing mass consumer productivity software as a buisness model. Using it is a perfect way to decrease costs and improve profits.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you implying that copyright law has never been tested in court?
The GPL grants you rights you do not have with standard copyright. Nothing but the GPL grants you those rights, in the case of any GPL licensed product. If any part of the GPL is found invalid in court the software will default to being under standard copyright, so the only thing anyone can accomplish going up against the GPL in court is to remove any and all freedoms the GPL grants them with regards to the software.
The GPL is not like an ordinary license agreement. If you have an ordinary license agreement it usually takes away rights you have under standard copyright. If you challange such a license in court you can get clauses stricken and obtain more rights. Successfully challanging the GPL would give you less rights; whichever way it goes in court, you lose.
Wether or not the GPL has been tried in court is really irrelevant. Either it's found valid as it is or you get a plain copyright case instead, and copyright cases arent exactly untested.
I mean exactly that. With disksuite you have to care about slices. With an LVM you dont.
For example, on a small server with two disks. You get 2 36GB disks, and at least our standard configuration sucks up 5 slices as swap plus various filesystems (all mirrored). Then you have the metadatabase replicas taking up another slice, plus the backup slice. Oops, used all my slices, which means I cant extend any filesystem later on, nor can I add more mountpoints. Which means I have to make the final configuration at once and I have no flexibility to change anything afterwards.
And on a large server you get the opposite problem; either you get too many slices everywhere since you have to have a new slice for every time you extend a filesystem, or you get loads of unused space for major additions that turned out to be unnecessary. On a large server with more than a hundred mountpoints, that makes quite a lot of slices, which makes it pretty unmanageable. It's painful even with LVM.
Oh, and hot spares we dont use, since we have FC disk. It's already raid plus hotspare, and mirrored on the host on top of that.
Disksuite simply doesnt compare to a real LVM. It works for setting up mirroring, but it just doesnt cut it when you need more flexibility. You just dont want to deal with slices at all when you get complicated consolidated larger servers.
Gaaack. Disksuite really really *really* sucks if you're managing anything more advanced than mirroring the root disks. It isnt a LVM, which is the problem.
Trust me, if you have 10 or more disks on a system, you dont want to pull out the system documentation to make sure the slices you want to use are unused. And then meticulously compare it with the current system configuration in case one of your fellow admins has been slack in updating the docs. When you get many disks, you _have_ to have a logical volume manager, so you can just add a disk to a volume group and extend the logical volumes on it, without mucking around with diskslices.
Disksuite just doesnt cut it for anything but the most simple configurations.
Actually, I sortof like HP-UX. The LVM and HA software is among the most trouble free implementations I've ever come across. Compiling stuff is a PITA tho, and whoever is responsible for the include files seems to have a fetish for disabling anything and everything common to modern UNIX unless you set several defines to get through it.
It's definitely gotten better in HP-UX 10 and 11; the releases before that were horrible. It still has some really annoying behaviour tho... memory allocation and reboot-on-changing-kernel-parameters, altho that's changed in 11i for some of it at least.
And you can get fairly accurate data even further back by studying earlier vegetation, etc.
Maybe they're not interested in data that far back simply because it would be harder to really match it to a model that includes the effects of things like CO2 emissions.
Using the last 50 years makes it easy to get a model that points to human interference. Using or verifying against several centuries or millenias worth of data could indeed make it more accurate, but it would rather point to natural variation from causes like solar radiation output, vegetation changes, etc.
Well, the problem is that they are actually using non-representative data. 1950-2000 is a too small sample by far to even begin forming a model for climate variation, something which varies over periods of centuries or millenia.
They will probably get some form of result. It wont be valid, but it will nonetheless be a result which matches the earlier period.
Of course, this will start breaking down as soon as natural climate variation changes cycle. Likely it would be invalidated even faster if they try to apply the model to known data from the last 20k years (altho if they could get the model to account for the earlier climate variations that far back, I'd tend to accept it as more valid).
IIRC, anti-trust trials tend to be more about rectifying the situation and restoring competition more than about penalties. Penalties can be exacted through civil suits by those who have been harmed.
Of course, actually restoring competition would probably be more painful than any punishment even a really angry judge could dream up; both because competition is something Microsoft fears and loathes more than anything, the company wants one thing and that is control, and because it would likely entail something like splitting MS into several dozen smaller companies to actually have some real competition again.
No, it's 'tax-innovation', a right they have and are exercising. Must guard that right to 'innovate'.
Companies can retain earnings for reinvestment, and some to guard against a rainy day, but that isnt what Microsoft is doing.
It should be blindingly obvious to anyone who's even caught a whiff of a newspaper the last ten years that Microsoft does not _care_ if what they are doing is, in fact, illegal. It isnt illegal until they are convicted of it, and even then they can pay their way out of a punishment.
Ok, how do you sort out the honest ones then? You're in a village in africa, and you are going to demand your partner get tested for something you barely know what it is?
How many people with AIDS do you think are going to be totally honest about it, again, in a country where AIDS runs rampant? How many are even going to know?
And, yes, I'm sure you have a choice about having sex or not when your family marries you off to someone. You can always say no and get beaten instead.
It's quite different in the western world, where you can actually demand a test before getting into a relationship. Not that the honesty thing is very common tho...
Yes, the solution is to take the pharmaceutical corps out of the loop. If they prove themselves unable to value life over profits, or are unable to develop a pricing structure that allows access to everyone, they have proven that they cannot live up to the responsibility they have.
That means that governments have to go in and finance more of the medical research when it comes to matters of life and death. The pharmaceutical industry can do the Aspirins and the Viagra of the world so they dont have to deal with those ethical aspects of their buisness they have such a hard time with.
Government financing might not be the absolute best solution, but with cooperation between countries the medical research funding could get larger than it is today (altho a large part is already government financed). And the final products would be more available than they are today.
Just because you've decided on a lifetime commitment doesnt make you immune if your partner is or gets infected. The social issues and the percentages work against such a strategy being efficient in countries where AIDS runs rampant.
Keeping your pants on permanently is about the only way you can be pretty sure. If you have that choice.
Lol, funny site. They're also lying (surprise, surprise). Those 'labels' recoup all their 'investments' by taking it out of the artists share of the royalties, who will most likely never see a cent after recieving their advance (which, after deducting the recording costs and other things) amounts to less than what a job mainly consisting of serving fries would pay.
That's patents as opposed to copyright. And, of course, the problem with patents is that the large corporations have far more patents anyway, and if you're a small buisnessman you're far more likely to either get sued for patent infringement (either because their patent is sorta like what you do, or because there are several patents on the same thing, or something else), or get your own patent overturned, or litigated out of existence some other way than you are to ever have a patent stand up against a large corporation.
Good idea from the beginning, which eventually resulted in the horribly defective IP laws we have now.
Traditionally you have the right to use anything you own in any way you want. Copyright does not give you any right to restrict what your customers do with what they have purchased. You can buy a book,read it, use it as a paper towel, light a fire with it, or even sell it to someone else. You just cant copy it and distribute copies.
And that's where the copyright holders, the software industry in particular, try to revoke your rights through EULAs by claiming you didnt 'buy' that software, you bought a license to run it, which would thereby allow them to restrict you from doing things you otherwise would have every right to do under copyright law.
If you really believe Microsoft is doing you a favor and allowing you to do something that would be illegal they've really done a good number on you. Except you're right in some places of course, where they and the other industry interests have done a good number on the lawmakers too.
The number of computers supported by any single API target is shrinking rapidly. Look at the graphics? It's gettin amazing if you even _get_ graphics rather than a complete lockup or a crash. Take a look around in the various game vendors tech support forums, and you'll see that it's getting as bad as when you had to write separate drivers for every video card in existence.
DirectX 8.x isnt a universal API. It's a universal disaster.
It probably wont be airtight. It would likely include automatic patching tho, so... well, if you disable the DRM system, again, the BIOS wont boot the OS. You might be able to bypass it through bugs, but the next time you connect to the internet you'll be patched, so such a hole will be temporary. And, again, if you try to disable the autopatching, your OS will stop booting.
It will probably never be completely airtight, but it will get painful enough that almost nobody will hack it. Digital satellite recievers and the newer game consoles are a precursor to what you are going to see, and while it's still possible to modify those, fewer and fewer people are even trying to for every generation. Once you get to the point where you have to make shady deals with a friend-of-a-friend and buy your own $1000 soldering equipment to replace the chips that form the foundation of the DRM tech, most people give up.
Nobody but the RIAA/MPAA wants systems like this. It will easily hike the price of a PC by several hundred dollars, if not more, and turn it into a glorified digital decoding device for media playing rather than what it is today. Which is why they try to push it legally, because neither the consumers or the IT industry wants it.
There are no DRM controlled OS's today, nor any hardware really (except certain bank crypto processors that work according to similar principles of multilevel crypto and verification). That will change with if the law forbids the sales of non-DRM controlled hardware and software.
With DRM, there will be no way you could compromise the integrity of Windows. The hardware would check that the OS wasnt compromised before booting at all. Sure you can go ahead and hack it. Only your computer wont boot because the BIOS no longer gets the right handshake. Go ahead, flash in a hacked BIOS, only now your CPU wouldnt even start executing the BIOS since the BIOS couldnt handshake right. Stick a hacked CPU in it, and your northbridge will deny the CPU access to memory.
No, Linux wont be illegal. It will only be illegal to build and sell a machine that can run it. Of course, it will be illegal to build and sell a machine that runs any version of Windows up to date too, but do you really think Microsoft would be upset about having to sell everyone a new version again?
Because Microsoft knows that they have no products they can sell anymore. That's the trouble with consumer productivity software; it gets finished. Windows was finished around NT/Win 98. Office was finished around Office 97. Etc. These products have all the features that the average consumer will ever need in a lifetime, and what Microsoft can improve, and has improved in them since that time, is worth about a dollar or two to the consumer. They are their own absolute nightmare competitor, because the last product did the job. And the one before that. So, why pay again?
The same holds true about free software. It takes its time, but eventually it gets there with this type of program. They get finished, good enough, and eventually there is just a few features added now and then.
MS needs to switch to a subscription base or they die. The only buisnesses that can survive in the post-software-got-finished world are the ones on a subscription model, alternatively those in markets like games, buisness systems integration, services, etc, where the products dont ever get finished.
Microsoft has a rock solid grip on a dead market, partly killed by them, partly killed by the product structure, and they know it. That's why they need to change and make money in other markets.
Of course, nobody wants them in any other market so they're met with a blank wall of resistance from all sides. Maybe the other industries will manage to keep them in their glass box until their 'air supply' runs out.
Oh, yeah, with the emphasis on 'build systems'. You're allowed to build your own motherboard, with your own home-made CPU, and your own home-made IO subsystems, as long as you dont do it for profit. If you've got a few billion dollars I expect you could do that.
If you, however, want to write a program that can resample and re-encode, sure you can do that. Only, no hardware or OS will exist that will allow your program to run, because it will be illegal to build systems that allow bypassing of the security, such as re-encoding.
The draconian aspect of the law doesnt become apparent until you understand the only way it can be implemented. Any device can be programmed to bypass copying restrictions until you go all the way with DRM included in the hardware complete with cryptographic handshakes between OS, BIOS and various hardware like CPU, disks, display and audio devices. To ensure the restrictions cannot be bypassed the various components have to verify integrity of eachother and any integrity failure would render the system unable to boot. The OS would have separate hooks for reading and writing protected files, and no uncertified program would be allowed to access devices from which protected data could be read.
Linux wouldnt be able to run at all. You cannot guarantee the integrity of Linux, thus is would be illegal to ship hardware that will allow it to run. If you're a programmer, you wouldnt be able to write programs that access protected media (directly), or the OS vendor wouldnt be able to guarantee rights management. Sure, you wouldnt be convicted for writing a program that can resample and reencode, but anyone selling a system that will allow you to write such a program will be convicted.
Lol, that trend terminates with DRM. Everyone you know who tries to 'get their software for free' will be in _jail_ in the future, and the rest will be paying their monthly bill.
Hardware based legally mandated DRM (SSSCA) means no way no how are you ever going to be able to run a unlicensed copy of a proprietary OS, nor are you going to be allowed to run a Free OS. Unless you can afford a chip and motherboard manufacturing plant for a few billion to produce your own computer from scratch (except, of course, if you tried to build a computer from scratch you'd be in jail again).
This quote from the article is quite amazing actually.
"Those larger companies are moving aggressively as well, trying to eke sales out of a Unix market that shrank 18.7 percent from $25.3 billion in 2001 to $20.6 billion in 2000"
Oh, and hey, in other news the market shrank from $20.6 billion in 2000 to $0 in 1970. Amazing really.
In the embedded market look at Axis (www.axis.com) for a successful 'linux' company. Of course, they dont make a big deal of using Linux. They just use it, reap the profits and go on selling *products* rather than hyping a good way to decrease costs.
When you get the merging of the owners of the means of production and the political power you have in the US, the lines become blurrier. It's not communism, any more than the Soviet union was, but it has more in common with the soviet economy than with free market capitalism.
Capitalism requires private, not government, ownership of production. When the owners of the production have the means to get the political leaders elected or not, as well as an inordinate amount of political influence through lobbying, they cannot really be regarded as entirely separate from the government anymore. Of course, they are still unaccountable to the people, but so were the Soviet leaders, and so are the Chinese leaders.
Microsoft is not about capitalism and free markets. They're into market control and five-year-plans, and that is not a capitalistic thing. Their view of the market has more in common with the Soviet union plan economy model.
If people dont want MS products they have to buy them anyway. That's the entire problem. If you believe otherwise you must have stuck your head in the sand the last ten years. Steve and Bill would be rolling on the floor laughing at you for believing that what they're doing is a 'free market' thing.
And no, open source software is flawed when it comes to producing mass consumer productivity software as a buisness model. Using it is a perfect way to decrease costs and improve profits.