First of all, he's 73. Think how much the world has changed in his lifetime.
When someone approaches you asking for your help to appropriate the contents of someone else's bank account, you refuse or you realise that you're involved in a crimninal conspiracy and are not going to get any sympathy if your fellow conspirators steal from you instead of from the bank. I doubt very much that that has changed in the course of the last 73 years.
My Grandmother cannot send email successfully by herself, and often times has me print out things online to fax to her.
So if some people said to her that they work for a bank, that someone in no way related to her has left a large sum of money in one of the accounts at the bank and that if she can help them to take it for themselves then she can have a share, do you think she'd go along with it? If so do you would you call that being "innocent"?
They were playing on his dishonesty. However "naive" he was in not realising they were stealing from HIM, his intention was crooked in trying to participate in stealing from the bank / the depositor / the government.
Pursuing LEGAL action in a LEGAL way is far from being unethical
Pursuing legal action in a legal way can be ethical or unethical, depending on the details. Likewise, behaving illegaly may be ethical or unethical. Legality and ethicality may cross at times but they are not the same thing.
I think this guy IS doing something unethical, though not on the level of killing people obviously. But that doesn't make his post a troll and it shouldn't have been modded down.
If he truly is working for SCO then his comments about the attitude of people there are informative. If he's lying about it then I still think his points are worth discussing.
Not a troll.
Re:And Bill Gates once said: NOT!
on
First Computers
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It really isn't that likely he would have said that.
I agree, but then I also doubt that Microsoft was the driving force behind IBM choosing to make their PC 16 bit as he seems to be claiming in that interview, so I guess it all balances out.
"I.B.M." is an abbreviation for International Business Machines. "SCO" is not an abbreviation, it's three letters placed next to each other in such a way as to encourage confusion with the Santa Cruz Operation.
So if I've got this right; you're not planning on using UserLinux yourself, you don't think many other people will use it and yet you think it's an important enough issues to have made 15 posts about already? WHY?
It matters to the KDE folk, because we ( a group of some twenty enthusiast KDE and Debian developers ) were intending to work together with UL on making UserLinux a KDE based enterprise distro that would easily beat other available offers.
So to be clear on this, your intention wasn't some marvelous egalitarian distribution with equal showing for Gnome and KDE that so many people here are going on about, your hope was to base it on KDE instead? You agree with the basic idea of Bruce picking one desktop environment or the other, you just understandably wish that he'd picked your one. Have I got that right?
The only way Gandalf would be powerful enough to directly confront Sauron (the first of The Creators disciples, btw)
If by The Creator you mean the creator of the world i.e. Eru Iluvatar then no, that isn't correct. Sauron's master, Melkor, could be described in those terms at least if by "the first" you mean "the most powerful", but Sauron is nowhere near that.
I think there's two main reasons Gandalf doesn't take on Sauron directly:
1. I think the wars against Melkor made quite a mess out of the world and the Valar didn't want a repeat, so raw power versus power was essentially banned.
2. In Unfinished Tales it's noted that when he was chosen for the task Olorin (Gandalf) "declared that he was too weak for the task, and that he feared Sauron". That seems to me like an excellent reason for avoiding a direct confrontation:)
Are you saying that I can use Apple as the name of my computer company, cause apple is generic?
No. He's saying something more like if you use Apple as the name of your brand of fruit then don't expect the courts to recognise you as having a trademark on that word in relation to fruit sales. At least, not in English speaking countries.
Selling a windowing OS under the name "Windows" isn't quite as bad, but it isn't far off either. The US courts don't seem to have been impressed by Microsoft's intial claims, but that doesn't mean they can't be convinced.
It isn't just that there's some context in which the word is generic (like apples) but that that context is the same as, or extremely close to, the one in which you want to claim your trademark applies.
Incorrect. If you do break it once that only breaks it on that one computer. You CANNOT run it anywhere else because every other computer has a different key.
I don't understand that. Presumably by "breaking" a palladium machine he meant attaining unfettered access to his machine and the data on it. If you can do that then you can tamper with the files, change formats, remove any requirement for a "key" to be checked to begin with.
Provided that these machines allow backwards compatibility with older files (or creation of your own files for that matter) then they must be able to run some files without restriction. If they don't allow that then I have a hard time imagining many of them being sold.
Getting unfettered access to a machine may be hard but I doubt it's impossible, and I don't see why Break Once Run Anywhere wouldn't apply.
Beings with advanced technology could obtain all the resources we have on earth without resorting to warfare, so why would they bother us?
Well, if they've been around longer than us and are more technologically advanced than us... odds are we're going to be infringing on some of their IP. Just ask Jack Valenti whether that's worth going to war over.
They may have the same itch, and a few separate attempts at scratching it might be attempted, but in the end, Windows doesn't come with 15 different GUIs.
But the proprietary software companies between them do. I just don't understand the problem. Different developers work on different products according to their interests and tastes, different users pick the ones they like. Is there something surprising here?
OpenSource is supposed to be a place where this shouldnt happen
Who supposes this?
everyone should work together to make one single product better.
Why should they?
An awful lot of the time (not 100% I'll admit) making something better for some people means making it worse for others. There is no one browser that would suit everyone perfectly. same for office suite, same for anything else.
It's like claiming that the goal of food producers should stop producing a wide variety of fruits and stick to making one fruit "better". So do we pick apple, orange, peach, banana... or what as our one fruit? Once we've sorted that out we can start working on our one perfect cereal and so on. It's not just that it's not going to happen, it's that the whole idea is divorced from reality.
The people were probably aware that their conversations (on company time) were being recorded and potentially monitored. That might cause you to doubt the accuracy of the results as people knowing they were being monitored might act differently to normal but it seems as though the conversations were over the period of more than a year, not just collected for the purpose of the study so they probably were using it just the way anyone would in the workplace.
The pricing is set at $0 in order to drive all the proprietary software vendors out of business. The idea is to generate a large volume of GPL'ed code very quickly (i.e. while there are still companies out there with investors naive enough to believe it's a good idea) so that by the time everyone realizes it's a bad idea, the barrier to entry for non-GPL'ed code will be impossibly high.
The pricing isn't universally set at $0, and in any event the motives vary considerably. At the very minimum a large number of developers believe they are doing a good thing. Others are following a business plan.
Linus has different motives to Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond has different motives to either. The CEOs of Red Hat, IBM and Trolltech are all coming from different positions again. That's barely scratching the surface of all the people involved.
If you want to assert that they haven't realised the implications and that you have due to your unique perspective of feeling that it hurts your employment prospects then you may even be right but I doubt your theory of a vast and knowing conspiracy is going to convince many.
The GPL can be thought of either as a proprietary license that grants you extra rights or as a public domain license that takes away some rights. If you choose to believe everything you read, it's the former. But I am more cynical than that. As far as I'm concerned, the GPL is a deliberate attempt to twist copyright law to create a public domain license that takes away some rights.
I think we both know that whilst you might choose to spin the GPL as either a proprietary license with additional rights or a public domain grant with less rights that the truth is neither. I think we both understand that the legal system grants copyright by default and that that's the starting point for any work. GPL does grant more rights than people would have in its absence. Public domain even more but that doesn't mean the GPL is taking anything away. It IS purely a grant of rights.
I very strongly suspect that the license you would seek to impose would be very more restrictive than GPL, and from what you've said so far it seems that you would like the option to rip off the work of others in order to create your much more restrictively licensed works. If not then I've misunderstood your objective in your comment about wishing that the courts would deem the GPL to have the same effect as the BSDL.
I think maybe you should examine your own motives and objectivity. I doubt you'll find much comfort though.
After all, it involves predatory pricing and an EULA which denies all sorts of rights to some users. (Of course this is cleverly spun into granting rights to other users.)
I don't see how the pricing is predatory. I don't believe there's a hidden agenda to raise prices later or anything, the pricing is set to attain the reward the authors are seeking, nothing more nothing less.
More importanly though, how do you see the GPL as being "spun"? Are there some rights that you feel that you have in the absence of the GPL that the GPL takes away? If so then what are they?
There's effectively a choice to either distribute the source code with the binary OR to provide the offer valid for at least 3 years. So in your example the consultant simply provides the source code to the customer, who can then hold onto it for himself or delete it if he pleases, and no offer valid to a third party need ever be made.
I wish for works to be in the public domain 2 years after the ORIGINAL AUTHOR dies.
There is no sensible reason for tying the value of a work to its authors life-span. It simply makes no sense. Copyright should apply to a fixed period (maybe flat 50 years for a "traditional" work of art, maybe quite a bit less for a computer prigram but the appropriate period is reasonably up for debate).
If the author wants to pay some of the earnings across that fixed period into a pension scheme or life assurance policy or just save it in the bank then that's probably very wise. If they don't then that's their choice.
I can't think of any reason why rewards/incentive for a 20 year old to create a work should need to be higher than the rewars/incentives for a 50 year old to create that same work. This is not how most people are paid and I've never heard any remotely convincing argument for it being applied to people with copyrights.
I'd suggest you contact them in the UK, France, Germany and Italy (and in their respective languages) as these countries hold the most MEPs in the EU Parliament, and therefore the most power and votes to pass this.
The EU Parliament has already voted on this and has come out firmly against software patents. The Council of Ministers, i.e. the representatives of the governments of the member states, now have the opportunity to accept that or to effectively reverse it. So it's not about power in the EU Parliament, it's about influencing government policy in the countries concerned.
Slashdot Mirror
First of all, he's 73. Think how much the world has changed in his lifetime.
When someone approaches you asking for your help to appropriate the contents of someone else's bank account, you refuse or you realise that you're involved in a crimninal conspiracy and are not going to get any sympathy if your fellow conspirators steal from you instead of from the bank. I doubt very much that that has changed in the course of the last 73 years.
My Grandmother cannot send email successfully by herself, and often times has me print out things online to fax to her.
So if some people said to her that they work for a bank, that someone in no way related to her has left a large sum of money in one of the accounts at the bank and that if she can help them to take it for themselves then she can have a share, do you think she'd go along with it? If so do you would you call that being "innocent"?
They were playing on his dishonesty. However "naive" he was in not realising they were stealing from HIM, his intention was crooked in trying to participate in stealing from the bank / the depositor / the government.
Pursuing LEGAL action in a LEGAL way is far from being unethical
Pursuing legal action in a legal way can be ethical or unethical, depending on the details. Likewise, behaving illegaly may be ethical or unethical. Legality and ethicality may cross at times but they are not the same thing.
I think this guy IS doing something unethical, though not on the level of killing people obviously. But that doesn't make his post a troll and it shouldn't have been modded down.
If he truly is working for SCO then his comments about the attitude of people there are informative. If he's lying about it then I still think his points are worth discussing.
Not a troll.
It really isn't that likely he would have said that.
I agree, but then I also doubt that Microsoft was the driving force behind IBM choosing to make their PC 16 bit as he seems to be claiming in that interview, so I guess it all balances out.
Why the hell is it "SCO" but "I.B.M."???
"I.B.M." is an abbreviation for International Business Machines. "SCO" is not an abbreviation, it's three letters placed next to each other in such a way as to encourage confusion with the Santa Cruz Operation.
So if I've got this right; you're not planning on using UserLinux yourself, you don't think many other people will use it and yet you think it's an important enough issues to have made 15 posts about already? WHY?
It matters to the KDE folk, because we ( a group of some twenty enthusiast KDE and Debian developers ) were intending to work together with UL on making UserLinux a KDE based enterprise distro that would easily beat other available offers.
So to be clear on this, your intention wasn't some marvelous egalitarian distribution with equal showing for Gnome and KDE that so many people here are going on about, your hope was to base it on KDE instead? You agree with the basic idea of Bruce picking one desktop environment or the other, you just understandably wish that he'd picked your one. Have I got that right?
The only way Gandalf would be powerful enough to directly confront Sauron (the first of The Creators disciples, btw)
If by The Creator you mean the creator of the world i.e. Eru Iluvatar then no, that isn't correct. Sauron's master, Melkor, could be described in those terms at least if by "the first" you mean "the most powerful", but Sauron is nowhere near that.
I think there's two main reasons Gandalf doesn't take on Sauron directly:
:)
1. I think the wars against Melkor made quite a mess out of the world and the Valar didn't want a repeat, so raw power versus power was essentially banned.
2. In Unfinished Tales it's noted that when he was chosen for the task Olorin (Gandalf) "declared that he was too weak for the task, and that he feared Sauron". That seems to me like an excellent reason for avoiding a direct confrontation
Are you saying that I can use Apple as the name of my computer company, cause apple is generic?
No. He's saying something more like if you use Apple as the name of your brand of fruit then don't expect the courts to recognise you as having a trademark on that word in relation to fruit sales. At least, not in English speaking countries.
Selling a windowing OS under the name "Windows" isn't quite as bad, but it isn't far off either. The US courts don't seem to have been impressed by Microsoft's intial claims, but that doesn't mean they can't be convinced.
It isn't just that there's some context in which the word is generic (like apples) but that that context is the same as, or extremely close to, the one in which you want to claim your trademark applies.
Incorrect. If you do break it once that only breaks it on that one computer. You CANNOT run it anywhere else because every other computer has a different key.
I don't understand that. Presumably by "breaking" a palladium machine he meant attaining unfettered access to his machine and the data on it. If you can do that then you can tamper with the files, change formats, remove any requirement for a "key" to be checked to begin with.
Provided that these machines allow backwards compatibility with older files (or creation of your own files for that matter) then they must be able to run some files without restriction. If they don't allow that then I have a hard time imagining many of them being sold.
Getting unfettered access to a machine may be hard but I doubt it's impossible, and I don't see why Break Once Run Anywhere wouldn't apply.
Beings with advanced technology could obtain all the resources we have on earth without resorting to warfare, so why would they bother us?
Well, if they've been around longer than us and are more technologically advanced than us... odds are we're going to be infringing on some of their IP. Just ask Jack Valenti whether that's worth going to war over.
They may have the same itch, and a few separate attempts at scratching it might be attempted, but in the end, Windows doesn't come with 15 different GUIs.
But the proprietary software companies between them do. I just don't understand the problem. Different developers work on different products according to their interests and tastes, different users pick the ones they like. Is there something surprising here?
OpenSource is supposed to be a place where this shouldnt happen
Who supposes this?
everyone should work together to make one single product better.
Why should they?
An awful lot of the time (not 100% I'll admit) making something better for some people means making it worse for others. There is no one browser that would suit everyone perfectly. same for office suite, same for anything else.
It's like claiming that the goal of food producers should stop producing a wide variety of fruits and stick to making one fruit "better". So do we pick apple, orange, peach, banana... or what as our one fruit? Once we've sorted that out we can start working on our one perfect cereal and so on. It's not just that it's not going to happen, it's that the whole idea is divorced from reality.
The people were probably aware that their conversations (on company time) were being recorded and potentially monitored. That might cause you to doubt the accuracy of the results as people knowing they were being monitored might act differently to normal but it seems as though the conversations were over the period of more than a year, not just collected for the purpose of the study so they probably were using it just the way anyone would in the workplace.
The pricing is set at $0 in order to drive all the proprietary software vendors out of business. The idea is to generate a large volume of GPL'ed code very quickly (i.e. while there are still companies out there with investors naive enough to believe it's a good idea) so that by the time everyone realizes it's a bad idea, the barrier to entry for non-GPL'ed code will be impossibly high.
The pricing isn't universally set at $0, and in any event the motives vary considerably. At the very minimum a large number of developers believe they are doing a good thing. Others are following a business plan.
Linus has different motives to Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond has different motives to either. The CEOs of Red Hat, IBM and Trolltech are all coming from different positions again. That's barely scratching the surface of all the people involved.
If you want to assert that they haven't realised the implications and that you have due to your unique perspective of feeling that it hurts your employment prospects then you may even be right but I doubt your theory of a vast and knowing conspiracy is going to convince many.
The GPL can be thought of either as a proprietary license that grants you extra rights or as a public domain license that takes away some rights. If you choose to believe everything you read, it's the former. But I am more cynical than that. As far as I'm concerned, the GPL is a deliberate attempt to twist copyright law to create a public domain license that takes away some rights.
I think we both know that whilst you might choose to spin the GPL as either a proprietary license with additional rights or a public domain grant with less rights that the truth is neither. I think we both understand that the legal system grants copyright by default and that that's the starting point for any work. GPL does grant more rights than people would have in its absence. Public domain even more but that doesn't mean the GPL is taking anything away. It IS purely a grant of rights.
I very strongly suspect that the license you would seek to impose would be very more restrictive than GPL, and from what you've said so far it seems that you would like the option to rip off the work of others in order to create your much more restrictively licensed works. If not then I've misunderstood your objective in your comment about wishing that the courts would deem the GPL to have the same effect as the BSDL.
I think maybe you should examine your own motives and objectivity. I doubt you'll find much comfort though.
After all, it involves predatory pricing and an EULA which denies all sorts of rights to some users. (Of course this is cleverly spun into granting rights to other users.)
I don't see how the pricing is predatory. I don't believe there's a hidden agenda to raise prices later or anything, the pricing is set to attain the reward the authors are seeking, nothing more nothing less.
More importanly though, how do you see the GPL as being "spun"? Are there some rights that you feel that you have in the absence of the GPL that the GPL takes away? If so then what are they?
There's effectively a choice to either distribute the source code with the binary OR to provide the offer valid for at least 3 years. So in your example the consultant simply provides the source code to the customer, who can then hold onto it for himself or delete it if he pleases, and no offer valid to a third party need ever be made.
Actually those homeless kids would be somewhere across the pacific.
And that makes a difference because....?
I wish for works to be in the public domain 2 years after the ORIGINAL AUTHOR dies.
There is no sensible reason for tying the value of a work to its authors life-span. It simply makes no sense. Copyright should apply to a fixed period (maybe flat 50 years for a "traditional" work of art, maybe quite a bit less for a computer prigram but the appropriate period is reasonably up for debate).
If the author wants to pay some of the earnings across that fixed period into a pension scheme or life assurance policy or just save it in the bank then that's probably very wise. If they don't then that's their choice.
I can't think of any reason why rewards/incentive for a 20 year old to create a work should need to be higher than the rewars/incentives for a 50 year old to create that same work. This is not how most people are paid and I've never heard any remotely convincing argument for it being applied to people with copyrights.
Poll: 75% of Palestinians support Haifa restaurant attack:
Oh?
I'd suggest you contact them in the UK, France, Germany and Italy (and in their respective languages) as these countries hold the most MEPs in the EU Parliament, and therefore the most power and votes to pass this.
The EU Parliament has already voted on this and has come out firmly against software patents. The Council of Ministers, i.e. the representatives of the governments of the member states, now have the opportunity to accept that or to effectively reverse it. So it's not about power in the EU Parliament, it's about influencing government policy in the countries concerned.
BSD IS THE WALKING DEAD, and thus, is UN-STOP-ABLE :)
You're obviously confusing BSD with Plan 9.
On the other side, if you want openness, shouldn't we have openness in labor markets as well as software?
Yes.