Talk to a lawyer, go take a business law class--do something.
What did you do exactly? Make something up based on scraps you'd heard somewhere? Throw together a bunch of speculation?
A license is a type of contract.
A license CAN be contractual, but it doesn't have to be. "You may enter my home" is a license. It is not a contract. Same for "You may duplicate and distribute my copyrighted works".
Contracts permitting either could be drawn up, but the statements as written are licenses, not contracts.
Why must open source folk always turn around and bite the corporate entities that want be a part of it?
Silly question really. "Open source folk" criticise and insult the FSF too, and Richard Stallman and Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens and Linus Torvalds. Some more than others. Oh, and some of them complain about the GPL and some about the BSD license and probably some about both. Oh, and they criticise and complain about Slashdot and its editors individually and collectively as well.
If someone genuinely wants to be part of a community then they're going to have to accept that sometimes there's going to be friction between them and some other people in that community. Life's like that.
If this is true then Bois himself can be charged with fraud and a whole host of other federal crimes.
Is that really true? The way I thought it worked was if the client says, e.g. "yeah, I'm guilty but I want you to get me found not guilty" or "no, I don't really have a case but I want to pump my stock value" then you have to refuse, but if they say "this is the way it is, honest, cross my heart and hope to die, would I lie to you?" then that's all it takes. Even if you think it looks pretty doubtful, everyone's entitled to representation, their lawyer doesn't have to try them that's what the courts do. I could be totally wrong though...
If wonder whether the OSNF (Open Source Now Fund) is a non-profit 501(c)(3) corporation? Should it be? If so, should Red Hat's contributions to it be tax deductible? While others will benefit from the fund, so of course will Red Hat.
Why should that be an issue? Presumably their legal fees just like their other business expenses are tax deductible anyway.
I'm not a lawyer or an American so you might have rules I don't know about but surely the special thing about charitble donations is that they're deductible even though they're not business expenses, not because they're not business expenses.
Oh yes, definitely offtopic, and I'm not supporting a boycott of Mandrake or whatever:)
It's mainly interesting to me as a relatively clear cut example of a Western government doing something very wrong, apparently just to prevent a civilian group from embarrasing them. (Incidentally, in a world where tens of thousands can get killed in a terrorist attack or a retaliation it's hard to find words to describe an attack like this where "only" one person died that doesn't sound like either hyperbole or ridiculously weak).
I think the moral of the story is that whilst you don't want to fall for every conspiracy theory going that governments do need watching, and I certainly wouldn't limit that to the French Government.
To say that the French are terrorists because of some random French idiots is kind of like saying Americans are terrorists because of Timothy McVeigh and the Unabomber.
Well, the French certainly aren't the only western country to have a history of state sponsored terrorist acts but the "random idiots" who destroyed the Rainbow Warrior in New Zealand's waters and caused one death (it could easily have been more, others managed to escape) were working for the French government.
I don't think any court has officially concluded that the French Government were responsible but I think you'd have to be fairly gullible to doubt it. Undeniably those convicted were agents of the French Government. Being as generous as possible to the French Government you'd have to say that commissioned officers that they assigned to assist their security forces were people who planted bombs in their spare time.
I'm sure you can dig up serious wrong doing by most powerful countries though. And that doesn't justify it of course.
Am I totally off base in wondering if the Virtual Machine stuff they've developed to mimic the DOS environment can be extended to more "modern" games instead of just these old Amiga era games? Stuff like the original SimCity that ran under DOS
The original Sim City ran on the Amiga. I don't think it was even all that late in the Amiga's timeline.
So the question is, is the Linux RCU implementation an independent rewrite, or a copy of the original implementation? Unfortunately, we won't know unless SCO shows us their implementation.
You're confused. The original implementation was by Sequent and nothing to do with SCO.
Though none of the customers were deprived of music as a result of file sharing (as opposed to stealing a CD), the artist was deprived of a certain amount of money which he could've made as a result of selling the music. So it *could* be labelled as theft, since the artist was deprived indirectly as a result of filesharing.
That doesn't make it theft. If I smash all the windows in your house then I've committed a crime and it's probably going to put you at a financial loss but it isn't theft.
If I take something that belongs to you with the intention of permanently depriving you of it, and it has zero sale value then I have committed theft. If I leave a million dollars when I take the item, but still without your permission? Still theft, though you might choose not to complain:)
Lots and lots of things cause economic loss, some of them lawful and some of them unlawful but that isn't enough in itself to make any of them theft. Theft is about taking the property of another with the intention of permanently depriving them of it.
His comments about copyright infringement potentially hurting the victim more than "traditional theft" was especially glaring. If I burn your house down then that's probably going to hurt you pretty badly and if you're in it at the time then almost certainly more so than "traditional theft" but that doesn't mean it is theft. "Theft" isn't a measure of harm, it's one particular, clearly defined, offence.
Free as in Freedom means once a single person pays for it, it can become Free as in Beer if that person feels like putting it up for download.
For a commercial product, that's a death sentence. Imagine if Adobe GPL'ed Photoshop - their sales would drop to almost zero.
That's all true, but the claim that was being refuted was:
"Stallman actively seeks to destroy anyone that wants to get paid for writing software (he spins it as "no one should be forced to pay for software", "information wants to be free", etc.)."
That is untrue. He definitely does not spin his position by saying that no one should be forced to pay for software. If the claim had been the opposite, that he spins his position by saying that people still could be forced to pay for software when in fact that would be impractical, then that would be at least an arguable position.
I'm not aware of him using the "information wants to be free" line either but I could be wrong about that one.
Come to think of it, Big Blue hasn't really been that evil of all the major computer corporations.
The term FUD was coined to describe IBM's approach to marketing i.e. undermining their competitors' real products through vapourware announcements, incompatability stories etc. As major corporations go... well, I guess the East India Company did worse .
I mean what if you were a cop [or agent of say the FBI, RCMP, etc..] and you're brother was pirating software. Would you just sit by since "reporting on friends breeds distrust" or would you uphold your oath to support the laws of the land?
Just to be clear here, are you saying that if you were a cop, that you'd try to initiate legal action against your own brother for copying software? Or something else?
Nobody said they were. Theft is wrong. Copyright infringement is about the same on the wrongness scale as theft. Rape and murder are lots worse. Its really not that complicated.
I think that drinking tea and watching cartoons are simliarly placed in the moral scale but if I say one when I mean the other then I won't be surprised if I'm corrected. It's a simple matter of using words with appropriate meanings.
If you bring moronic hyperbole into an argument, don't be surprised when people make fun of you.
Substitute whatever offences you think are of similar "wrongness" then. If you think that rape and murder are suitably similarly immoral then that doesn't mean that it makes sense to use the terms interchangeably. Or blackmail versus robbery, or whatever. "But they're both illegal" and "but they're both wrong" doesn't mean they're the same thing.
I don't understand why you're so defensive about it. Someone used the wrong word. They were corrected. You problem is...?
Re:Why I don't use the LPGL for Java
on
LGPL is Viral for Java
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
You don't gain anything by GPLing your software except for the satisfaction that no one will probably ever make a profit off of it.
If the program's useful then there's every chance that people will profit off of it. To suggest otherwise is just silly. Companies large and small all over the world use GPLd software in their businesses. The GPL does not seek to prevent this.
Open source software lives by the certainty of the licensing it uses. If we can't trust the interpretation of the licenses, then we can't feel confident in working with this code. The FSF is risking a serious blow to the open source community.
So far as I can see the FSF are giving their honest assessment of how the LGPL operates in this situation. The way it works may be inconvenient in this case, or for that matter the FSF could be wrong, but I can't see what strategy would be better for them to adopt than giving an honest opinion. Why do you feel they are doing something risky? Or what would you suggest they do instead?
So, you feel the system is working if any company can bring suit against everyone who could have gotten free service?
The fact that they can bring suit against anyone is very much a good thing.
The expense of the system may be bad, the awarding of costs or damages by the courts may be wrong, or the process may take too long or be too technical, but the principal that if you have a complaint against someone that you can bring it before an impartial judge has to be right.
Once it gets to the judge, sure he should be able to tell you to go away and stop wasting everyone's time, and ideally order you to compensate the defendant for the bother if appropriate but you must have a right to bring the case to that point. If you can't then who decides which cases merit being heard?
If someone hacks into your bank account (let us assume this is in a country with no depositor insurance) and empties your account you haven't been deprived of anything tangible. Is it theft?
Someone has defrauded the bank. In the UK I think this would come under 'obtaining money by deception' or possibly 'obtaining a pecuniary advantage by deception'.
I guess you're implying that the bank can't afford to repay its debts and goes into liquidation as a result of this. I don't think that turns a fraud against the bank into theft from me. I don't see how it could.
In the case of the bank account hacking, you have been deprived of something tangible. You have been deprived of the cash you had stored in the bank. Before your account was hacked, you had X dollars. After it was hacked, you have 0. The fact that someone else was holding the money for you, or that the theft was done electronically is irrelevant.
This is incorrect. Before the hacking the bank owed you some money and after the hacking they still owe you the same amount. The bank has clearly been defrauded in this case but nothing has been stolen from you.
Presumably the people who keep trying to pretend that it is theft care. I would guess that they think the people listening to them will care too, otherwise why do it?
It is still illegal, and it is still morally wrong no matter what you call it.
Lots of things are illegal; that doesn't mean that theft, rape, breach of contract, murder, blackmail, criminal damage, parking on yellow lines and treason are all interchangeable terms.
If you call people who park illegally murderers (or vice versa) then don't be surprised if you get corrected.
I somehow doubt that McBrides Dog and Pony show is going to have much of an impact on the CERF companies. These folks didn't just draw Linux out of a hat, they have been studying it for months now. Not only that but their lawyers have already looked at all sorts of fine print about this and concluded that the companies are OK.
Yes, the most interesting thing about this story is it seems apparent that Darl contacted the CELF companies after they officially announced their plans. The fact that they didn't contact SCO beforehand suggests that they weren't at all impressed by SCO's claims, which they must have known about (barring incompetence by all of them).
Unfortunately, no one can say what the copyright notices say. If one says GNU, and the other says SCO, then we would have to look at the checkins.
But the claim is that the two copyright messages are the same i.e. that one has been copied from the other. They can't be suggesting that "Copyright SCO" (or AT&T or whatever) in one codebase and "Copyright Linus" (or whoever) in the other is in itself evidence of copying between the two.
In that case, why is Sequent code and a Sequent copyright notice in the Linux kernel?
I gather that the code was provided by Sequent to Linux,or possibly by IBM (who own Sequent) to Linux. Hence you would expect it to have Sequent's or IBM's copyright notice. Just piecing together what I've read though.
the Native Americans have a treaty to grow hemp. It wasn't a law (although it should have been considered so)...
I thought that "This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding."
Saying that treaties aren't laws seems hard to reconcile with them being part of the supreme law of the land.
Slashdot Mirror
Talk to a lawyer, go take a business law class--do something.
What did you do exactly? Make something up based on scraps you'd heard somewhere? Throw together a bunch of speculation?
A license is a type of contract.
A license CAN be contractual, but it doesn't have to be. "You may enter my home" is a license. It is not a contract. Same for "You may duplicate and distribute my copyrighted works".
Contracts permitting either could be drawn up, but the statements as written are licenses, not contracts.
Why must open source folk always turn around and bite the corporate entities that want be a part of it?
Silly question really. "Open source folk" criticise and insult the FSF too, and Richard Stallman and Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens and Linus Torvalds. Some more than others. Oh, and some of them complain about the GPL and some about the BSD license and probably some about both. Oh, and they criticise and complain about Slashdot and its editors individually and collectively as well.
If someone genuinely wants to be part of a community then they're going to have to accept that sometimes there's going to be friction between them and some other people in that community. Life's like that.
If this is true then Bois himself can be charged with fraud and a whole host of other federal crimes.
Is that really true? The way I thought it worked was if the client says, e.g. "yeah, I'm guilty but I want you to get me found not guilty" or "no, I don't really have a case but I want to pump my stock value" then you have to refuse, but if they say "this is the way it is, honest, cross my heart and hope to die, would I lie to you?" then that's all it takes. Even if you think it looks pretty doubtful, everyone's entitled to representation, their lawyer doesn't have to try them that's what the courts do. I could be totally wrong though...
If wonder whether the OSNF (Open Source Now Fund) is a non-profit 501(c)(3) corporation? Should it be? If so, should Red Hat's contributions to it be tax deductible? While others will benefit from the fund, so of course will Red Hat.
Why should that be an issue? Presumably their legal fees just like their other business expenses are tax deductible anyway.
I'm not a lawyer or an American so you might have rules I don't know about but surely the special thing about charitble donations is that they're deductible even though they're not business expenses, not because they're not business expenses.
Oh yes, definitely offtopic, and I'm not supporting a boycott of Mandrake or whatever :)
It's mainly interesting to me as a relatively clear cut example of a Western government doing something very wrong, apparently just to prevent a civilian group from embarrasing them. (Incidentally, in a world where tens of thousands can get killed in a terrorist attack or a retaliation it's hard to find words to describe an attack like this where "only" one person died that doesn't sound like either hyperbole or ridiculously weak).
I think the moral of the story is that whilst you don't want to fall for every conspiracy theory going that governments do need watching, and I certainly wouldn't limit that to the French Government.
And I am sure you can dig up enough evidence of the US supporting innumerable terrorist groups in Latin America, Africa, Asia and Europe.
Agreed.
To say that the French are terrorists because of some random French idiots is kind of like saying Americans are terrorists because of Timothy McVeigh and the Unabomber.
Well, the French certainly aren't the only western country to have a history of state sponsored terrorist acts but the "random idiots" who destroyed the Rainbow Warrior in New Zealand's waters and caused one death (it could easily have been more, others managed to escape) were working for the French government.
I don't think any court has officially concluded that the French Government were responsible but I think you'd have to be fairly gullible to doubt it. Undeniably those convicted were agents of the French Government. Being as generous as possible to the French Government you'd have to say that commissioned officers that they assigned to assist their security forces were people who planted bombs in their spare time.
I'm sure you can dig up serious wrong doing by most powerful countries though. And that doesn't justify it of course.
Am I totally off base in wondering if the Virtual Machine stuff they've developed to mimic the DOS environment can be extended to more "modern" games instead of just these old Amiga era games? Stuff like the original SimCity that ran under DOS
The original Sim City ran on the Amiga. I don't think it was even all that late in the Amiga's timeline.
So the question is, is the Linux RCU implementation an independent rewrite, or a copy of the original implementation? Unfortunately, we won't know unless SCO shows us their implementation.
You're confused. The original implementation was by Sequent and nothing to do with SCO.
Though none of the customers were deprived of music as a result of file sharing (as opposed to stealing a CD), the artist was deprived of a certain amount of money which he could've made as a result of selling the music. So it *could* be labelled as theft, since the artist was deprived indirectly as a result of filesharing.
:)
That doesn't make it theft. If I smash all the windows in your house then I've committed a crime and it's probably going to put you at a financial loss but it isn't theft.
If I take something that belongs to you with the intention of permanently depriving you of it, and it has zero sale value then I have committed theft. If I leave a million dollars when I take the item, but still without your permission? Still theft, though you might choose not to complain
Lots and lots of things cause economic loss, some of them lawful and some of them unlawful but that isn't enough in itself to make any of them theft. Theft is about taking the property of another with the intention of permanently depriving them of it.
His comments about copyright infringement potentially hurting the victim more than "traditional theft" was especially glaring. If I burn your house down then that's probably going to hurt you pretty badly and if you're in it at the time then almost certainly more so than "traditional theft" but that doesn't mean it is theft. "Theft" isn't a measure of harm, it's one particular, clearly defined, offence.
Free as in Freedom means once a single person pays for it, it can become Free as in Beer if that person feels like putting it up for download.
For a commercial product, that's a death sentence. Imagine if Adobe GPL'ed Photoshop - their sales would drop to almost zero.
That's all true, but the claim that was being refuted was:
"Stallman actively seeks to destroy anyone that wants to get paid for writing software (he spins it as "no one should be forced to pay for software", "information wants to be free", etc.)."
That is untrue. He definitely does not spin his position by saying that no one should be forced to pay for software. If the claim had been the opposite, that he spins his position by saying that people still could be forced to pay for software when in fact that would be impractical, then that would be at least an arguable position.
I'm not aware of him using the "information wants to be free" line either but I could be wrong about that one.
Come to think of it, Big Blue hasn't really been that evil of all the major computer corporations.
The term FUD was coined to describe IBM's approach to marketing i.e. undermining their competitors' real products through vapourware announcements, incompatability stories etc. As major corporations go... well, I guess the East India Company did worse .
I mean what if you were a cop [or agent of say the FBI, RCMP, etc..] and you're brother was pirating software. Would you just sit by since "reporting on friends breeds distrust" or would you uphold your oath to support the laws of the land?
Just to be clear here, are you saying that if you were a cop, that you'd try to initiate legal action against your own brother for copying software? Or something else?
Nobody said they were. Theft is wrong. Copyright infringement is about the same on the wrongness scale as theft. Rape and murder are lots worse. Its really not that complicated.
I think that drinking tea and watching cartoons are simliarly placed in the moral scale but if I say one when I mean the other then I won't be surprised if I'm corrected. It's a simple matter of using words with appropriate meanings.
If you bring moronic hyperbole into an argument, don't be surprised when people make fun of you.
Substitute whatever offences you think are of similar "wrongness" then. If you think that rape and murder are suitably similarly immoral then that doesn't mean that it makes sense to use the terms interchangeably. Or blackmail versus robbery, or whatever. "But they're both illegal" and "but they're both wrong" doesn't mean they're the same thing.
I don't understand why you're so defensive about it. Someone used the wrong word. They were corrected. You problem is...?
You don't gain anything by GPLing your software except for the satisfaction that no one will probably ever make a profit off of it.
If the program's useful then there's every chance that people will profit off of it. To suggest otherwise is just silly. Companies large and small all over the world use GPLd software in their businesses. The GPL does not seek to prevent this.
Open source software lives by the certainty of the licensing it uses. If we can't trust the interpretation of the licenses, then we can't feel confident in working with this code. The FSF is risking a serious blow to the open source community.
So far as I can see the FSF are giving their honest assessment of how the LGPL operates in this situation. The way it works may be inconvenient in this case, or for that matter the FSF could be wrong, but I can't see what strategy would be better for them to adopt than giving an honest opinion. Why do you feel they are doing something risky? Or what would you suggest they do instead?
So, you feel the system is working if any company can bring suit against everyone who could have gotten free service?
The fact that they can bring suit against anyone is very much a good thing.
The expense of the system may be bad, the awarding of costs or damages by the courts may be wrong, or the process may take too long or be too technical, but the principal that if you have a complaint against someone that you can bring it before an impartial judge has to be right.
Once it gets to the judge, sure he should be able to tell you to go away and stop wasting everyone's time, and ideally order you to compensate the defendant for the bother if appropriate but you must have a right to bring the case to that point. If you can't then who decides which cases merit being heard?
If someone hacks into your bank account (let us assume this is in a country with no depositor insurance) and empties your account you haven't been deprived of anything tangible. Is it theft?
Someone has defrauded the bank. In the UK I think this would come under 'obtaining money by deception' or possibly 'obtaining a pecuniary advantage by deception'.
I guess you're implying that the bank can't afford to repay its debts and goes into liquidation as a result of this. I don't think that turns a fraud against the bank into theft from me. I don't see how it could.
In the case of the bank account hacking, you have been deprived of something tangible. You have been deprived of the cash you had stored in the bank. Before your account was hacked, you had X dollars. After it was hacked, you have 0. The fact that someone else was holding the money for you, or that the theft was done electronically is irrelevant.
This is incorrect. Before the hacking the bank owed you some money and after the hacking they still owe you the same amount. The bank has clearly been defrauded in this case but nothing has been stolen from you.
Who cares if it is legally considered theft?
Presumably the people who keep trying to pretend that it is theft care. I would guess that they think the people listening to them will care too, otherwise why do it?
It is still illegal, and it is still morally wrong no matter what you call it.
Lots of things are illegal; that doesn't mean that theft, rape, breach of contract, murder, blackmail, criminal damage, parking on yellow lines and treason are all interchangeable terms.
If you call people who park illegally murderers (or vice versa) then don't be surprised if you get corrected.
I somehow doubt that McBrides Dog and Pony show is going to have much of an impact on the CERF companies. These folks didn't just draw Linux out of a hat, they have been studying it for months now. Not only that but their lawyers have already looked at all sorts of fine print about this and concluded that the companies are OK.
Yes, the most interesting thing about this story is it seems apparent that Darl contacted the CELF companies after they officially announced their plans. The fact that they didn't contact SCO beforehand suggests that they weren't at all impressed by SCO's claims, which they must have known about (barring incompetence by all of them).
Unfortunately, no one can say what the copyright notices say. If one says GNU, and the other says SCO, then we would have to look at the checkins.
But the claim is that the two copyright messages are the same i.e. that one has been copied from the other. They can't be suggesting that "Copyright SCO" (or AT&T or whatever) in one codebase and "Copyright Linus" (or whoever) in the other is in itself evidence of copying between the two.
In that case, why is Sequent code and a Sequent copyright notice in the Linux kernel?
I gather that the code was provided by Sequent to Linux,or possibly by IBM (who own Sequent) to Linux. Hence you would expect it to have Sequent's or IBM's copyright notice. Just piecing together what I've read though.
the Native Americans have a treaty to grow hemp. It wasn't a law (although it should have been considered so)...
I thought that "This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding."
Saying that treaties aren't laws seems hard to reconcile with them being part of the supreme law of the land.
Or in other words, "I say we stalk 'em" (Score: +5, insightful)
OR "If they plan on stalking us, and argue there's no reason we should mind, then how about we show them what it's like?"