Blah, they could sue these guys for making a derivative work. That simple.
Yeah. Real simple if you don't know what the heck you are talking about.
You don't even need to get into the particulars of relevant case law to debunk this idea. Perhaps you should actually look at the US copyright law some day?
103(b) The copyright in a compilation or derivative work extends only to the material contributed by the author of such work, as distinguished from the preexisting material employed in the work, and does not imply any exclusive right in the preexisting material. The copyright in such work is independent of, and does not affect or enlarge the scope, duration, ownership, or subsistence of, any copyright protection in the preexisting material.
A derivative work is something which includes parts of the original. From what I understand, this program does not. So it is not a derivative work.
Unless Rockstar planned to release this feature as an expansion to the existing PC games.
Not very likely. No games are developed today without seriously considering multiplayer. Rockstar obviously took the design decision not to include it.
Had they decided to make a multiplayer add-on they would have done so already. GTA3 has been out for 3 years now. It's been very successful, obviously they have the resources. Not to mention they already know the internals of the game engine.
If they wanted to do something like this, they'd have done it already.
I can't imagine that what they've done doesnt break some copyright law somewhere
They're not circumventing a copyright-protection device, so they're not violating the DMCA.
Possibly, they could be violating the End-User License Agreement on the game, if it includes an anti-reverse-engineering clause. Although it's anyone's guess as to if they'd be able to enforce it.
what are the odds Rockstar sues?
"Very, very, small" Seems like a good guess to me. Why would they?
1) These guys don't have any money. 2) They're not making any money off it. 3) Rockstar isn't losing any money off it, more likely the opposite.
Doesn't seem like they'd get much in damages. Hardly enough to outweigh the lawyer costs and PR damages.
Besides, there are only upsides to people doing this stuff. It extends the life of the game and generates more interest and sales. Game developers know this. The general trend in the last 10 years has been towards accomodizing people who want to mod games, not sueing them.
It's not like this is a trademark issue, where you have to go after people or you risk losing it.
Which is why a high demand product (Mozilla Firefox) is having problems getting developers.
Uh, what? How's your own grip on reality? Business reality, that is? There's a thing called 'price elasticity', denoting the relationship between price and demand. It is not at all the same for FireFox vs VB.
Is anyone prepared to pay for Firefox? Not very many. How many users would FF have if it costed $50 a copy?
Is anyone prepared to pay for VB? Yes. Very many.
Does FireFox provide critical services to any businesses? Uh, no. A web browser may be critical, but most of them work pretty much equally well.
Does VB provide critical services to any businesses? Yes. Many businesses have legacy VB apps, for which there is no replacement for VB.
So.. how many businesses are prepared to pay for a version of FireFox which will work on their new machines? Probably not very many.
How many businesses are prepared to pay for a version of VB which will work on their new machines? Quite a few. As long as the price of upgrading VB is lower than the price of migrating the application, there is a market.
Ok.. Have I managed to establish to you that there is a market for this service?
Now, given that there is a market, how do you go about providing this service?
1) Buy VB from Microsoft, and continue development This depends on MS willingness to sell VB. A key question is if they profits from providing support will justify whatever Microsoft wants for the code.
2) Develop your own VB clone. Even more costly. Same caveat as above.
Now if VB was F/OSS what would the situation be? You would now have the option:
3) Fork the VB codebase and continue development from there.
Now is option 3 more or less expensive than options 1 and 2?
So, there is a market, and there are 2 options for continued proprietary development, and one for continued F/OSS development. The F/OSS has a much lower bar of entry.
You could argue that sales would be lower for the F/OSS product, since it will be available for free. However, in this case the target market is support for business-critical legacy applications. Businesses typically won't leave that to chance. They want guarantees. They want a support contract. This is a proven business model for F/OSS development.
There is kaffe and gjc. Java is a bit of a moving target though and not easy to keep up with. If there was one standard Open Source version then we wouldn't need a dozen different versions all trying to play catch-up with the 'official' Sun version.
That's not quite true though, because there is: GNU Classpath. Which is used by just about every free VM out there. Kaffe and GCJ are major contributors to Classpath.
Repeating myself, the class library is the major issue. It's much, MUCH less work to write a VM than to implement the entire class library. Also, the VM changes less than the class library; new packages get added a lot more often than new language features.
How's the performance on java programs made with it?
Depends on the benchmark. (Or rather, application) Usually faster than Sun, or at least as fast, when you compile to native.
Obviously there'd be some positive side effects, but exactly how much could the community benefit from having Sun's compiler open-sourced?
Not much at all. There are already several free compilers (Jikes for instance) that compile to java bytecode. The main benefit would be the support of Generics and the new stuff in Java 1.5 introduced last fall.
However, since none of the free VMs have support for generics yet either, it wouldn't be of much use. Why have a free compiler if you don't have a free JVM for it?
Java is a langauge and say it is prorietary is like saying C or C# are proprietary.
Wrong. There are many implementations of C. There are three of C# (excluding the runtime).
There is no need to reverse engineer anything since JavaDoc spells it all out for gou,
No it doesn't. Sun's documentation is terrible in lots of places.
and heck Sun provide the source code to the files too!
Looking at Sun's sources if you want to make your own implementation is legal suicide.
It bugs me that people perfer Mono'a C# over Java because it's "more free".
It IS more free (see below).
If they spent half the time coding a JVM that they've spent coding a Mono they'd be done years ago.
Well, I would certainly like to to see more resources go towards free Java development, but the missing thing at the moment isn't a VM. There are lots of free JVMs (gcj,kaffe,jamvm,sablevm,jikesRVM,cacao and so on), some of which are quite mature.
The missing part is the class library.
You can use IBM's or Apple's or your own.
These are not seperate implementations; They all use Sun's code, notably the class library. They are all covered by the same licensing restrictions set by Sun.
Is there some big piece that I'm missing that would bother anyone besides GPL Zealots?
Yes. For instance, what if you'd like to include the install of the runtime in your own installer? Can't do it.
What if you do embedded work and would like to exclude the parts of the runtime you don't need in order to save space? Can't do it.
What if you do find a bug in Sun's code, and include a work-around in your code? Bravo. You just violated Sun's license.
"Open source versions are forked. Therefore, if it had been open source there would be no forks"?
Wrong. Open source versions aren't 'forked' by any sense of the word. They're not based on Sun's code base. Nor do they have any goal or intent to be incompatible.
Unless you mean that duplicating every single Sun bug, including the ones Sun has acknowledged as bugs, is what is neccessary for 'compatibility'. But by that metric, future versions of the Sun JDK won't be 'compatible' either. Sun does fix bugs. Sometimes.
I'm curious - does the new Fedora actually ship with gcj and gij as 'Java'? That will be an interesting development to watch.
Actually, yes. Red Hat has actually aliased 'java' to them in the default install for quite some time now.
The more interesting thing is that FC4 will for the first time include natively-compiled Java packages. And not just any packages, but Eclipse and Apache Tomcat.
If Fraunhofer decided to get enforce it's rights, and take a patent royal, what percentage of the $0, the amount I pay for Fedora Core, do you suppose they should get? 10%, 100%, 1000000%? How do you declare patent royalties on something a company gives away for free?
You're just making stuff up as you go along?
By that rationale, you won't be liable to pay any compensation for distributing copyrighted films and music either, if you weren't charging for it.
And people would be free to break the GPL without damages too, since most GPL software is not sold for a profit either.
Licensing royalties don't have to be percentages, either with patents or copyrights. They don't even have to be money; the GPL works by demanding your changes to be put under the same license. There's such a thing as contractual freedom. You can make any agreement you want, as long as you don't violate the law.
The way this works, if you haven't charged money, is that the Court decides on an amount corresponding to what they think the thing would be worth commercially (even if you didn't sell it) and makes an estimate of what the commercial loss to the rights-holder would be. And then they usually add a punitive fine on top of that, since you broke the law.
Well, how come every other linux distro doesn't have this problem. AFAIK, FC (maybe redhat) is the only distro that doesn't support MP3 out of the box. Doesn't the patent license only cover commercial use of the CODEC? Isn't personal use licensed for free? How come so many other companies give away free mp3 codecs for free?
No, the patent license covers ALL use. However, Fraunhofer says that they won't enforce it against free software. There is nothing written on that, and it is not legally binding.
SuSE and Mandrake think that's enough of a guarantee for them and obviously are willing to take that risk. Red Hat decided differently. (Which is reasonable; they're the biggest vendor, and thus the most likely target, not to mention that they're based in the litigation-happy USA.)
That doesn't clarify things. GCJ can both compile java to bytecode, and java to native code (Without going through bytecode. Indeed, compiling to native directly gives significantly better optimization).
Even the most efficient JVM is only as good as the bytecode it gets. Just like the most efficient (microcode, pipelines, etc) x86 is only a good as the compiler.
That is not a valid comparison, because a processor will always execute a given instruction in the same amount of time. The compiler can know for certain that a certain piece of code is faster than another equivalent one.
That is not true of a JVM. One JVM may execute a certain set of instructions faster than another set, whereas a different JVM might produce the opposite result. JIT will complicate things further, since some parts will be JIT-compiled and some not, and what might hold true for the interpreted bytecode might not hold true for the JIT-compiled bytecode. And so on.
I don't quite understand what you mean.. Are you talking about VMs running bytecode or GCJ-compiled native code?
What about the comparative efficiency of the Java bytecode it will generate? If the Java compiler is already getting more of its maximum theoretical efficiency, doesn't that mean that Java code might be faster than C++?
GCJ does not produce the most efficient Java bytecode out there. But it depends on the VM exactly how efficient the bytecode is run, so I can't see how that's relevant here.
Java code (compiled to native) is unlikely to ever be faster than well-written C++. Garbage collection, for instance, will slow the Java down, but the difference is rather small.
In theory, a JIT VM can be faster than natively-compiled code. But I can't see how that's relevant, since GCC (currently) doesn't include a JIT. It can compile to native, and it can interpret Java code.
There are valid arguments both for JITs being faster than natively-compiled and vice-versa. It depends on the application.
If the Java efficiency isn't as close, doesn't that mean that any comparatively lower performance compared to C++ executables could be overcome by developing the Java compiler further?
If you mean bytecode, the performance benefits of producing better bytecode are small, and there it's up to the VM. If you mean native code, then you can theoretically get as close as GC and such will allow. (Which is less of an overhead than some seem to think)
But I hate how you refer to this as 'open source'. Can you change Knuth's books any way you want and redistribute them? Nope. So really, it is nothing like open source or free software, except for inviting collaboration.
And collaboration did exist long before OSS. Academic peer-review has been around for a hundred years. And collaboration has always been popular in the academic world. It was uses within academic collaboration which turned ARPANET into the internet. It was the collaborative ideals of the academic world which inspired RMS to create free software.
So, IMHO, calling this 'open source editing' or talking about 'open source science' is really putting the cart in front of the horse. (Not that academia hasn't been influenced by OSS/Free software, but since OSS/Free Software also originated there, that's what you call feedback, not a new and direct influence.)
But in that case, wouldn't the virus also be able to cause cancer in normal circumstances too?
From what I understand, most viruses doesn't normally cause cancer when inserting their DNA into a cell. Now, if you change the DNA it inserts, and it suddenly causes cancer.. it seems to me that the 'blame' would have to be put on the DNA sequence or the interaction of it and the virus, but not on the virus itself?
However, France (under De Gaulle) did leave NATO military command completely in 1966, which is the specific incident I was referring to. They rejoined (in part) in 1992.
Still, my point in the post was to point out that France has not related to NATO in the same way as the rest of the NATO member, not to give a detailed history of NATO.
Apparently, the "harmless virus" used in a French trial ended up causing cancer in two patients. TFA does not seem to mention these other trials.
Nonsense. How can you say that the virus caused the cancer? Nobody knows what caused the death and cancer related to this.
Yes the virus is harmless, that doesn't mean to say the treatement is safe. Noone involved in this would say that; it's an experimental form of treatment.
I'm guilty. But tell me, why do you think it is that so many people are more anti-French than anti-other EU countries?
I'll tell you that. An active campaign during the latter half of the 20th century.
Historically, the USA has not been anti-french. The French were allies in the War of Independence. The founding fathers were very much inspired by the Enlightenment, which was to a large part a French movement. The French peacefully sold Louisiana to the US. The French gave the US the Statue of Liberty. And so on.
But there is an old Anglo-Saxon grudge against the French which dates back forever. That much is true.
What happened, happened during and after WWII. The USA and UK didn't want De Gaulle to lead France, since he was a rather proud/arrogant guy, strongly independent, and would not let himself be convinced to do something unless it was what he considered to be best for France. In other words, he acted a lot like America does.
So France went off on their own, unilaterally leaving NATO, for instance. America responded by calling them arrogant, ungrateful, and playing on existing anglo-saxon stereotypes of 'snooty' French. The french, to an extent, do consider the Americans to be arrogant as well. Whereas both nations have really done nothing other than support their own self-interest.
There is also a general anti-European sentiment in the USA (and vice versa, of course, but the forms are different). There has been a very deliberate effort from the American republicans in the last half-century to paint a bad picture of Europe.
Because Europe is more to the left than the USA, giving the Democrats the argument of a Good Example would be a dangerous thing. So Europe (and France in particular) has been badmouthed at every opportunity. High taxes. Strikes. Inefficiency. Listening to American media reports, you'd think Europe is part of the third world.
And the strategy worked: I'll give them that. You cannot refer to Europe in American politics. It's political suicide. Taboo. Tell Americans something is European and they'll vote against it on sheer principle.
(European anti-americanism is different. Referring to the USA in European politics happens all the time.)
As for the 'french surrender' crap. It's a lie and a prejudice. An uncommonly stupid and hurtful one, at that.
Straight from the horse's mouth: "The system has to work for everybody," said David Kaefer, director of Microsoft's IP Licensing Program. "It's only a system that works for the largest companies."
However, the full reasons are not disclosed as the judgment is not published yet (the court is late). Apparently reverse-engineering is only allowed if you own a legal copy of the software. So he was convicted for reverse-engineering a piece of code he wasn't entitled to use.
That is quite possible. Perhaps even likely.
OTOH, it does mean that the 'security research' argument doesn't quite hold; One must assume that real researchers will obtain their software through legal means.
Of course, france might have implemented this european directive differently.
That is why I refered to the directive itself. I don't know exactly what the French implementation looks like.
However, I do know several nations (Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark) who in their implementations do specifically mention finding/fixing bugs (well 'errors' is the more common term in law) as a valid reason for reverse-engineering.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah. Real simple if you don't know what the heck you are talking about.
You don't even need to get into the particulars of relevant case law to debunk this idea. Perhaps you should actually look at the US copyright law some day?
A derivative work is something which includes parts of the original. From what I understand, this program does not. So it is not a derivative work.
End of discussion.
Unless Rockstar planned to release this feature as an expansion to the existing PC games.
Not very likely. No games are developed today without seriously considering multiplayer. Rockstar obviously took the design decision not to include it.
Had they decided to make a multiplayer add-on they would have done so already. GTA3 has been out for 3 years now. It's been very successful, obviously they have the resources. Not to mention they already know the internals of the game engine.
If they wanted to do something like this, they'd have done it already.
I can't imagine that what they've done doesnt break some copyright law somewhere
They're not circumventing a copyright-protection device, so they're not violating the DMCA.
Possibly, they could be violating the End-User License Agreement on the game, if it includes an anti-reverse-engineering clause. Although it's anyone's guess as to if they'd be able to enforce it.
what are the odds Rockstar sues?
"Very, very, small" Seems like a good guess to me.
Why would they?
1) These guys don't have any money.
2) They're not making any money off it.
3) Rockstar isn't losing any money off it, more likely the opposite.
Doesn't seem like they'd get much in damages. Hardly enough to outweigh the lawyer costs and PR damages.
Besides, there are only upsides to people doing this stuff. It extends the life of the game and generates more interest and sales. Game developers know this. The general trend in the last 10 years has been towards accomodizing people who want to mod games, not sueing them.
It's not like this is a trademark issue, where you have to go after people or you risk losing it.
Which is why a high demand product (Mozilla Firefox) is having problems getting developers.
Uh, what? How's your own grip on reality? Business reality, that is? There's a thing called 'price elasticity', denoting the relationship between price and demand. It is not at all the same for FireFox vs VB.
Is anyone prepared to pay for Firefox? Not very many. How many users would FF have if it costed $50 a copy?
Is anyone prepared to pay for VB? Yes. Very many.
Does FireFox provide critical services to any businesses? Uh, no. A web browser may be critical, but most of them work pretty much equally well.
Does VB provide critical services to any businesses? Yes. Many businesses have legacy VB apps, for which there is no replacement for VB.
So.. how many businesses are prepared to pay for a version of FireFox which will work on their new machines? Probably not very many.
How many businesses are prepared to pay for a version of VB which will work on their new machines? Quite a few. As long as the price of upgrading VB is lower than the price of migrating the application, there is a market.
Ok.. Have I managed to establish to you that there is a market for this service?
Now, given that there is a market, how do you go about providing this service?
1) Buy VB from Microsoft, and continue development
This depends on MS willingness to sell VB. A key question is if they profits from providing support will justify whatever Microsoft wants for the code.
2) Develop your own VB clone.
Even more costly. Same caveat as above.
Now if VB was F/OSS what would the situation be? You would now have the option:
3) Fork the VB codebase and continue development from there.
Now is option 3 more or less expensive than options 1 and 2?
So, there is a market, and there are 2 options for continued proprietary development, and one for continued F/OSS development. The F/OSS has a much lower bar of entry.
You could argue that sales would be lower for the F/OSS product, since it will be available for free. However, in this case the target market is support for business-critical legacy applications. Businesses typically won't leave that to chance. They want guarantees. They want a support contract. This is a proven business model for F/OSS development.
Clear enough?
There is kaffe and gjc. Java is a bit of a moving target though and not easy to keep up with. If there was one standard Open Source version then we wouldn't need a dozen different versions all trying to play catch-up with the 'official' Sun version.
That's not quite true though, because there is: GNU Classpath. Which is used by just about every free VM out there. Kaffe and GCJ are major contributors to Classpath.
Repeating myself, the class library is the major issue. It's much, MUCH less work to write a VM than to implement the entire class library. Also, the VM changes less than the class library; new packages get added a lot more often than new language features.
Hey, is anybody using the gnu java compiler much?
Yes.
How's the performance on java programs made with it?
Depends on the benchmark. (Or rather, application) Usually faster than Sun, or at least as fast, when you compile to native.
Obviously there'd be some positive side effects, but exactly how much could the community benefit from having Sun's compiler open-sourced?
Not much at all. There are already several free compilers (Jikes for instance) that compile to java bytecode. The main benefit would be the support of Generics and the new stuff in Java 1.5 introduced last fall.
However, since none of the free VMs have support for generics yet either, it wouldn't be of much use. Why have a free compiler if you don't have a free JVM for it?
Java is a langauge and say it is prorietary is like saying C or C# are proprietary.
Wrong. There are many implementations of C. There are three of C# (excluding the runtime).
There is no need to reverse engineer anything since JavaDoc spells it all out for gou,
No it doesn't. Sun's documentation is terrible in lots of places.
and heck Sun provide the source code to the files too!
Looking at Sun's sources if you want to make your own implementation is legal suicide.
It bugs me that people perfer Mono'a C# over Java because it's "more free".
It IS more free (see below).
If they spent half the time coding a JVM that they've spent coding a Mono they'd be done years ago.
Well, I would certainly like to to see more resources go towards free Java development, but the missing thing at the moment isn't a VM. There are lots of free JVMs (gcj,kaffe,jamvm,sablevm,jikesRVM,cacao and so on), some of which are quite mature.
The missing part is the class library.
You can use IBM's or Apple's or your own.
These are not seperate implementations; They all use Sun's code, notably the class library. They are all covered by the same licensing restrictions set by Sun.
Is there some big piece that I'm missing that would bother anyone besides GPL Zealots?
Yes. For instance, what if you'd like to include the install of the runtime in your own installer? Can't do it.
What if you do embedded work and would like to exclude the parts of the runtime you don't need in order to save space? Can't do it.
What if you do find a bug in Sun's code, and include a work-around in your code? Bravo. You just violated Sun's license.
"Open source versions are forked. Therefore, if it had been open source there would be no forks"?
Wrong. Open source versions aren't 'forked' by any sense of the word. They're not based on Sun's code base. Nor do they have any goal or intent to be incompatible.
Unless you mean that duplicating every single Sun bug, including the ones Sun has acknowledged as bugs, is what is neccessary for 'compatibility'. But by that metric, future versions of the Sun JDK won't be 'compatible' either. Sun does fix bugs. Sometimes.
I'm curious - does the new Fedora actually ship with gcj and gij as 'Java'? That will be an interesting development to watch.
Actually, yes. Red Hat has actually aliased 'java' to them in the default install for quite some time now.
The more interesting thing is that FC4 will for the first time include natively-compiled Java packages. And not just any packages, but Eclipse and Apache Tomcat.
If Fraunhofer decided to get enforce it's rights, and take a patent royal, what percentage of the $0, the amount I pay for Fedora Core, do you suppose they should get? 10%, 100%, 1000000%? How do you declare patent royalties on something a company gives away for free?
You're just making stuff up as you go along?
By that rationale, you won't be liable to pay any compensation for distributing copyrighted films and music either, if you weren't charging for it.
And people would be free to break the GPL without damages too, since most GPL software is not sold for a profit either.
Licensing royalties don't have to be percentages, either with patents or copyrights. They don't even have to be money; the GPL works by demanding your changes to be put under the same license. There's such a thing as contractual freedom. You can make any agreement you want, as long as you don't violate the law.
The way this works, if you haven't charged money, is that the Court decides on an amount corresponding to what they think the thing would be worth commercially (even if you didn't sell it) and makes an estimate of what the commercial loss to the rights-holder would be. And then they usually add a punitive fine on top of that, since you broke the law.
Well, how come every other linux distro doesn't have this problem. AFAIK, FC (maybe redhat) is the only distro that doesn't support MP3 out of the box. Doesn't the patent license only cover commercial use of the CODEC? Isn't personal use licensed for free? How come so many other companies give away free mp3 codecs for free?
No, the patent license covers ALL use. However, Fraunhofer says that they won't enforce it against free software. There is nothing written on that, and it is not legally binding.
SuSE and Mandrake think that's enough of a guarantee for them and obviously are willing to take that risk. Red Hat decided differently. (Which is reasonable; they're the biggest vendor, and thus the most likely target, not to mention that they're based in the litigation-happy USA.)
The big question is, does it support MP3 out of the box (off the CD?).
No, it does not, and will not as long as the patent is in force.
Red Hat would end up being liable to pay Fraunhofer licensing for RHEL, and possibly for FC4 too.
Are you going to pay for that license? No? Then quit bitching about Red Hat and put that energy towards the real problem here: Software patents.
I'm talking about GCJ.
That doesn't clarify things. GCJ can both compile java to bytecode, and java to native code (Without going through bytecode. Indeed, compiling to native directly gives significantly better optimization).
Even the most efficient JVM is only as good as the bytecode it gets. Just like the most efficient (microcode, pipelines, etc) x86 is only a good as the compiler.
That is not a valid comparison, because a processor will always execute a given instruction in the same amount of time. The compiler can know for certain that a certain piece of code is faster than another equivalent one.
That is not true of a JVM. One JVM may execute a certain set of instructions faster than another set, whereas a different JVM might produce the opposite result. JIT will complicate things further, since some parts will be JIT-compiled and some not, and what might hold true for the interpreted bytecode might not hold true for the JIT-compiled bytecode. And so on.
I don't quite understand what you mean.. Are you talking about VMs running bytecode or GCJ-compiled native code?
What about the comparative efficiency of the Java bytecode it will generate? If the Java compiler is already getting more of its maximum theoretical efficiency, doesn't that mean that Java code might be faster than C++?
GCJ does not produce the most efficient Java bytecode out there. But it depends on the VM exactly how efficient the bytecode is run, so I can't see how that's relevant here.
Java code (compiled to native) is unlikely to ever be faster than well-written C++. Garbage collection, for instance, will slow the Java down, but the difference is rather small.
In theory, a JIT VM can be faster than natively-compiled code. But I can't see how that's relevant, since GCC (currently) doesn't include a JIT. It can compile to native, and it can interpret Java code.
There are valid arguments both for JITs being faster than natively-compiled and vice-versa. It depends on the application.
If the Java efficiency isn't as close, doesn't that mean that any comparatively lower performance compared to C++ executables could be overcome by developing the Java compiler further?
If you mean bytecode, the performance benefits of producing better bytecode are small, and there it's up to the VM. If you mean native code, then you can theoretically get as close as GC and such will allow. (Which is less of an overhead than some seem to think)
They also mention it in the TFA.
But I hate how you refer to this as 'open source'. Can you change Knuth's books any way you want and redistribute them? Nope. So really, it is nothing like open source or free software, except for inviting collaboration.
And collaboration did exist long before OSS. Academic peer-review has been around for a hundred years. And collaboration has always been popular in the academic world. It was uses within academic collaboration which turned ARPANET into the internet. It was the collaborative ideals of the academic world which inspired RMS to create free software.
So, IMHO, calling this 'open source editing' or talking about 'open source science' is really putting the cart in front of the horse.
(Not that academia hasn't been influenced by OSS/Free software, but since OSS/Free Software also originated there, that's what you call feedback, not a new and direct influence.)
But in that case, wouldn't the virus also be able to cause cancer in normal circumstances too?
From what I understand, most viruses doesn't normally cause cancer when inserting their DNA into a cell. Now, if you change the DNA it inserts, and it suddenly causes cancer.. it seems to me that the 'blame' would have to be put on the DNA sequence or the interaction of it and the virus, but not on the virus itself?
The virus did cause the cancer. In at least one patient, they mapped the site of viral intergration and found that it activated a known oncogene.
But is it known if it is the virus that caused this, or the gene the virus was inserting?
You are correct. France is a NATO member.
However, France (under De Gaulle) did leave NATO military command completely in 1966, which is the specific incident I was referring to. They rejoined (in part) in 1992.
Still, my point in the post was to point out that France has not related to NATO in the same way as the rest of the NATO member, not to give a detailed history of NATO.
Apparently, the "harmless virus" used in a French trial ended up causing cancer in two patients. TFA does not seem to mention these other trials.
Nonsense. How can you say that the virus caused the cancer? Nobody knows what caused the death and cancer related to this.
Yes the virus is harmless, that doesn't mean to say the treatement is safe. Noone involved in this would say that; it's an experimental form of treatment.
I'm guilty. But tell me, why do you think it is that so many people are more anti-French than anti-other EU countries?
I'll tell you that. An active campaign during the latter half of the 20th century.
Historically, the USA has not been anti-french. The French were allies in the War of Independence. The founding fathers were very much inspired by the Enlightenment, which was to a large part a French movement. The French peacefully sold Louisiana to the US. The French gave the US the Statue of Liberty. And so on.
But there is an old Anglo-Saxon grudge against the French which dates back forever. That much is true.
What happened, happened during and after WWII. The USA and UK didn't want De Gaulle to lead France, since he was a rather proud/arrogant guy, strongly independent, and would not let himself be convinced to do something unless it was what he considered to be best for France. In other words, he acted a lot like America does.
So France went off on their own, unilaterally leaving NATO, for instance. America responded by calling them arrogant, ungrateful, and playing on existing anglo-saxon stereotypes of 'snooty' French. The french, to an extent, do consider the Americans to be arrogant as well. Whereas both nations have really done nothing other than support their own self-interest.
There is also a general anti-European sentiment in the USA (and vice versa, of course, but the forms are different). There has been a very deliberate effort from the American republicans in the last half-century to paint a bad picture of Europe.
Because Europe is more to the left than the USA, giving the Democrats the argument of a Good Example would be a dangerous thing. So Europe (and France in particular) has been badmouthed at every opportunity. High taxes. Strikes. Inefficiency. Listening to American media reports, you'd think Europe is part of the third world.
And the strategy worked: I'll give them that. You cannot refer to Europe in American politics. It's political suicide. Taboo. Tell Americans something is European and they'll vote against it on sheer principle.
(European anti-americanism is different. Referring to the USA in European politics happens all the time.)
As for the 'french surrender' crap. It's a lie and a prejudice. An uncommonly stupid and hurtful one, at that.
To summarize your comment:
.sig describes himself as a 'free software enthusiast', you sure don't seem to understand how the free software world works.
"So project X is doing fine, but why can't project Y do what I want it to?"
For someone who's
Ever heard of 'Scratching an itch', etc?
Straight from the horse's mouth:
"The system has to work for everybody," said David Kaefer, director of Microsoft's IP Licensing Program. "It's only a system that works for the largest companies."
I'm sure this quote will come in handy.
However, the full reasons are not disclosed as the judgment is not published yet (the court is late). Apparently reverse-engineering is only allowed if you own a legal copy of the software. So he was convicted for reverse-engineering a piece of code he wasn't entitled to use.
That is quite possible. Perhaps even likely.
OTOH, it does mean that the 'security research' argument doesn't quite hold; One must assume that real researchers will obtain their software through legal means.
Nej, KTH. Och utexaminerad sedan ett par år. :)
Of course, france might have implemented this european directive differently.
That is why I refered to the directive itself. I don't know exactly what the French implementation looks like.
However, I do know several nations (Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark) who in their implementations do specifically mention finding/fixing bugs (well 'errors' is the more common term in law) as a valid reason for reverse-engineering.