I've not seen reports that Echelon is employed within the US itself. From what I've read, Echelon employs the hardware formerly used to spy on the Eastern block to spy on Europe as a whole, focussing in particular on industrial spionage.
We will never defeat Microsoft unless we all pull together and focus our energy!
The Microsoft == the Borg analogy is used quit often, but many people fail to look at it thoroughly. The Borg are defeated by individuals, not by another collective. Individuals differ, compete and cooperate with each other. Neither pure competition, nor pure cooperation seem to be the best strategies, evolutionarywise.
Re:I thought the problem was GPL compatibility?
on
qt 2.0 released
·
· Score: 2
Well even if it wasnt it could have been included in non-free couldnt it?
Actually contrib is the place for free-but-depending-on-non-free software.
I thought the problem was the lackluster linking of KDE stuff against GPL'd stuff?
The core problem is the interaction between Qt's license and KDE's (GPLed). It can be solved by changing KDE's license, but that will mean replacing the third-party GPLed code in KDE, or getting it relicensed, which may prove difficult.
And I do remember reading that the QPL although it does conform to the Debian Free Software Guidelines is still not compatible with GPL.
Indeed. Essentially, the GPL requires that code linked to by a GPL-ed piece of software be under the GPL or under a license that imposes no more restrictions than the GPL (like public domain, the MIT license, or BSD without the ad clause), except when that code is part of a major system component (something like a proprietary Motif or C library in an environment where they're always present (think Motif on SUN)).
X doesn't qualify as such a component (you can have a perfectly working Linux system without it, and X is not part of all distributions), so Qt, a layer over X, doesn't either. And Qt's license, now the QPL, imposes more restrictions than the GPL (e.g. the "patch requirement" that modified versions may only be distributed as original code + separate modifications).
Re:So does this change the debian situation?
on
qt 2.0 released
·
· Score: 3
Can KDE now be included again in the debian distribution?
No. Qt can (and will) however now be included in Debian proper ("main"), rather than being available in "non-free".
Or are the licensing concerns still as valid as they ever were?
The licensing concerns are that Qt's license is incompatible with KDE's (GPL). This has regrettably not changed with the QPL. Knghtbrd, one of Debian's developers, provided a lot of input to Troll Tech regarding the QPL, but they couldn't be convinced to make the QPL GPL-compatible.
If the licensing issue had been about Qt1's non-freeness by itself, KDE could simply be in the "contrib" section. But the licensing issue is an interaction between licenses that prevents us from redistributing KDE binaries.
Luckily, there are strong indications that the KDE developers will be changing KDE's license to one that does not interact badly with the QPL (e.g. an Artistic-like license); once that happens, KDE can go in Debian proper.
What Qt 2 being free means to Debian is that Qt itself will now become a part of Debian proper, and that Qt-using software that doesn't suffer from the licensing issue (e.g. like pi-address, which is GPL + exception clause) can go in Debian.
No, this works via transfer. If Company X makes binaries of GPLed code available on CDs (by selling them, or giving them away), and I get one from them, then they have an obligation to me to make the source code available on my request. If I then lend my CD to you, it is I who then has the obligation to make source available to you on your request, not Company X.
So the question is when can we download their changes to the Linux kernel?
The GPL does not require someone using GPLed code to make their changes available for download. The GPL only requires that someone who distributes binaries built from GPLed code to make the source code available to those who received the binaries, upon their request under reasonable terms (only a copying fee).
Thus, the only way to determine whether there is an actual violation of the GPL in this case is to buy the product and check whether it is accompanied by the source or an offer for the source.
The most ironic portion of all this is the inconsistency with the information the government already has available. And I'm not just talking about the Starr Report
In think it's too over-reactive to think that SlashDot would be censored.
/. has in its motto "News for nerds". We all know that nerds are the prime cause of highschool shootings, right?
/. brings news for hackers. We all know how close they brought the world to destruction by playing "global thermonuclear warfare", right?
/. had extensive coverage and negative comments about the CDA and its ilk down under. It's a cesspool of anti-censorship technoanarchists and libertarians. So let's protect our children's minds from its evil influence, OK?
Sometimes I fear that the basic requirement for entering politics is the capability of permanently maintaining an inconsistent worldview.
Critical thought is an essential ingredient for progress in human society. Censorship is based on the diametrically opposite notion that others (politicians, clergy, royalty) have better judgement than I as a regular citizen. They don't. Being taught not to think critically, but simply follow others' judgement, order and orders is what brought the world the crusades, gulags, apartheid, Auschwitz and the killing fields.
Now the same congress that just awarded Rosa Parks a medal for thinking critically, and acting on it, is actively working to prevent the development of critical thought?
It's days like these that make me pessimistic enough to fear that reality isn't as far away from dystopia's like 1984, Fahrenheit 451 and the American fundamentalist theocracy in Heinlein's future history.
Given his essay I wonder if it wouldn't be more productive to have Stephenson rather than ESR speak to MS. I can't really see MS learning much from the free software development process, but perhaps they could be gotten to rethink user interface issues.
I'm no expert on voodoo (and neither is William Gibson I suspect), but from what I recall of Gibson's sprawl trilogy, "Legba" is a class of (semi)divine beings, rather than the name of a particular one.
The internet is an equalising communication medium. As such, it's a place where catholics, atheists, muslims, hindus, gnostics, buddhists, pagans, agnosts etc. can all openly and frankly discuss their beliefs and convictions among themselves and each other.
If the catholic church were to declare a patron saint for the internet, that means the church either does not understand the internet, or that there may be hope yet for it to become less of a conservative patriarchal hierarchical institution.
Kaffe is a free Java Virtual Machine implementation (GPLed); it runs on e.g. Linux. It may be that people are working to provide platform-specific extensions for it. Transvirtual is the company started around kaffe by the kaffe project leader, Tim Wilkinson
I don't know about Microsoft's involvement, but it has been clear for a long time that Microsoft resents Sun's dominance in the Java world. I'm sure they'd be happy to have a non-Sun-controlled JVM. Whether or not they care enough having a non-Sun-controlled JVM to fund a GPLed development, I don't know.
Much of the material on Colossus was classified for a long time (I recall reading that some of it is still classified today).
Colossus was developed to break the Enigma ciphers used by the German navy and airforce; this was earlier in the war than the Manhattan project which gave birth to ENIAC. The first breaks were done with special-purpose machines (the "bombs"); more refined versions of the ciphers were broken later by Colossus, which was (more?) general purpose.
I don't have my copy of Alan Turing: The Enigma (of Intelligence) by Andrew Hodges handy, but I recall it dates the majority of Turing's Bletchley park in 1941-43.
If I'm not mistaken, bacterial life started as anaerobic bacteria (bacteria that procuce oxygen as a byproduct of their metabolism). When there was sufficient oxygen in the atmosphere for it to become toxic to many anaerobic bacteria, aerobic (oxygen-loving) ones evolved.
There is nothing more effective in disabling the restraint I usually exercise in my use of language than fucking political morons trying to regulate what their tiny minds cannot comprehend, and thus fear.
What happens to RedHat if SuSE, Debian or Caldera decide that the easiest way to become the best is to offer their distribution for US$20 or $30 less than RedHat?
Debian already does this, in a sense. Unlike Red Hat, SuSE and Caldera, Debian isn't a CD-selling company, but a volunteer project that doesn't sell CDs.
Thus, we don't control the price directly, but it is kept low through competition. A number of vendors offer Debian CDs in the $10 range; many offer a way of donating say $5 to Debian.
I suspect that marketing ("brand placement") is a lot more important than price when it comes to shifting the balance between the distributions, which is one of the reasons I'm happy about Corel chosing Debian to base their Linux distributioon on.
This is the case with many privatisations in Europe: a state monopoly company (be it phone, railway or electricity) is made private, but gets the whole infrastructure as part of the privitisation, making it extremely difficult for new companies to enter the market.
Witness the difference between mobile and regular telephony. Mobile telephony is a fairly recent development here in Europe. As such, the former state companies are more or less in the same position as the newcomers. Here in the Netherlands, there are probably ten mobile phone companies, making it a reasonably effective market. For regular telephony, as a private citizen there is effectively still no other choice than the former state company. (And, as the state company is quite wealthy, it can afford to make a loss on services like mobile telephony in order to put competitors out of business. The regulatory body ( OPTA) is putting a stop to some unfair practices and prices, but we're still a long way from a fully liberalised phone market.
A reasonably popular alternative infrastructure for internet access and voice is cable, but it's not available yet in many places (because it needs to be rewired for twoway connections), and the cable companies are often cluefully challenged.
I assume this refers to one of the other pieces of free-ish software SGI has released, GLX; I haven't studied its license.
SGI also released OpenVault but its license has some problems (Notification Clause, Advertising Clause, US Legislation Imperialism) which have been discussed on license-discuss and debian-legal.
Although there are many other versions of Linux, Red Hat Linux is emerging as a standard for Linux users in this country because of the company's reputation for quality.
Red Hat does useful things for the community, and their distribution is OK, but I disagree with this statement. The primary reasons for Red Hat's success in my opinion are lots of advertisement, and catering to the MS-converts.
Will someone stop threatening for a minute and show me chapter and verse in the GPL where it says I can't use proprietary dynamic libaries?
You can. But it means trouble for (potential) redistributors of binaries produced from your code; see the Debian analysis for chapter and verse. That analysis deals with the old Qt license, but the QPL is similarly incompatible with the GPL.
My sincere commiserations to the net users down under.
Can someone provide details on Australia's legal system? I.e. does Australia have a constitution (I know England hasn't) and a constitutional court which might provide a means of getting this law killed?
It's a pet theory of mine that the biggest impact of telecommunications, and the net in particular, will be cultural.
In the past, one's culture depended to a very large degree on one's physical place. The net is changing this, and allows us to find our own cultures (yes, plural), independent of our geographical location and "real world" culture. Not a global village with a monoculture, but a bazaar of cultures/communities.
This need not necessarily be a good thing (think of suicidal cults), but the Hellmouth discussions show that it can be. The net is a place where we can go beyond the grief this tragedy caused, and where we can force each other to search our souls, not just to ask "What went wrong?" and "Who/what can we blame this on" but also "What can we learn from this?".
I'd like to thank everyone who contributed to the Hellmouth discussions and thereby helped the "real" world show that the net is a home for communities.
Slashdot Mirror
You missed part of the URL; this is the real link for the Block Cipher Lounge
I've not seen reports that Echelon is employed within the US itself. From what I've read, Echelon employs the hardware formerly used to spy on the Eastern block to spy on Europe as a whole, focussing in particular on industrial spionage.
Lots
We will never defeat Microsoft unless we all pull together and focus our energy!
The Microsoft == the Borg analogy is used quit often, but many people fail to look at it thoroughly. The Borg are defeated by individuals, not by another collective. Individuals differ, compete and cooperate with each other. Neither pure competition, nor pure cooperation seem to be the best strategies, evolutionarywise.
Actually contrib is the place for free-but-depending-on-non-free software.
I thought the problem was the lackluster linking of KDE stuff against GPL'd stuff?
The core problem is the interaction between Qt's license and KDE's (GPLed). It can be solved by changing KDE's license, but that will mean replacing the third-party GPLed code in KDE, or getting it relicensed, which may prove difficult.
And I do remember reading that the QPL although it does conform to the Debian Free Software Guidelines is still not compatible with GPL.
Indeed. Essentially, the GPL requires that code linked to by a GPL-ed piece of software be under the GPL or under a license that imposes no more restrictions than the GPL (like public domain, the MIT license, or BSD without the ad clause), except when that code is part of a major system component (something like a proprietary Motif or C library in an environment where they're always present (think Motif on SUN)).
X doesn't qualify as such a component (you can have a perfectly working Linux system without it, and X is not part of all distributions), so Qt, a layer over X, doesn't either. And Qt's license, now the QPL, imposes more restrictions than the GPL (e.g. the "patch requirement" that modified versions may only be distributed as original code + separate modifications).
No. Qt can (and will) however now be included in Debian proper ("main"), rather than being available in "non-free".
Or are the licensing concerns still as valid as they ever were?
The licensing concerns are that Qt's license is incompatible with KDE's (GPL). This has regrettably not changed with the QPL. Knghtbrd, one of Debian's developers, provided a lot of input to Troll Tech regarding the QPL, but they couldn't be convinced to make the QPL GPL-compatible.
If the licensing issue had been about Qt1's non-freeness by itself, KDE could simply be in the "contrib" section. But the licensing issue is an interaction between licenses that prevents us from redistributing KDE binaries.
Luckily, there are strong indications that the KDE developers will be changing KDE's license to one that does not interact badly with the QPL (e.g. an Artistic-like license); once that happens, KDE can go in Debian proper.
What Qt 2 being free means to Debian is that Qt itself will now become a part of Debian proper, and that Qt-using software that doesn't suffer from the licensing issue (e.g. like pi-address, which is GPL + exception clause) can go in Debian.
No, this works via transfer. If Company X makes binaries of GPLed code available on CDs (by selling them, or giving them away), and I get one from them, then they have an obligation to me to make the source code available on my request. If I then lend my CD to you, it is I who then has the obligation to make source available to you on your request, not Company X.
The GPL does not require someone using GPLed code to make their changes available for download. The GPL only requires that someone who distributes binaries built from GPLed code to make the source code available to those who received the binaries, upon their request under reasonable terms (only a copying fee).
Thus, the only way to determine whether there is an actual violation of the GPL in this case is to buy the product and check whether it is accompanied by the source or an offer for the source.
Correlating CDA votes to Starr report release votes yielded the 285 Most Hypocritical US Representatives tasty bit.
Trust me, /. is a fine candidate for censoring.
Critical thought is an essential ingredient for progress in human society. Censorship is based on the diametrically opposite notion that others (politicians, clergy, royalty) have better judgement than I as a regular citizen. They don't. Being taught not to think critically, but simply follow others' judgement, order and orders is what brought the world the crusades, gulags, apartheid, Auschwitz and the killing fields.
Now the same congress that just awarded Rosa Parks a medal for thinking critically, and acting on it, is actively working to prevent the development of critical thought?
It's days like these that make me pessimistic enough to fear that reality isn't as far away from dystopia's like 1984, Fahrenheit 451 and the American fundamentalist theocracy in Heinlein's future history.
Given his essay I wonder if it wouldn't be more productive to have Stephenson rather than ESR speak to MS. I can't really see MS learning much from the free software development process, but perhaps they could be gotten to rethink user interface issues.
Can someone refresh me on this one?
If the catholic church were to declare a patron saint for the internet, that means the church either does not understand the internet, or that there may be hope yet for it to become less of a conservative patriarchal hierarchical institution.
I don't know about Microsoft's involvement, but it has been clear for a long time that Microsoft resents Sun's dominance in the Java world. I'm sure they'd be happy to have a non-Sun-controlled JVM. Whether or not they care enough having a non-Sun-controlled JVM to fund a GPLed development, I don't know.
Colossus was developed to break the Enigma ciphers used by the German navy and airforce; this was earlier in the war than the Manhattan project which gave birth to ENIAC. The first breaks were done with special-purpose machines (the "bombs"); more refined versions of the ciphers were broken later by Colossus, which was (more?) general purpose.
I don't have my copy of Alan Turing: The Enigma (of Intelligence) by Andrew Hodges handy, but I recall it dates the majority of Turing's Bletchley park in 1941-43.
If I'm not mistaken, bacterial life started as anaerobic bacteria (bacteria that procuce oxygen as a byproduct of their metabolism). When there was sufficient oxygen in the atmosphere for it to become toxic to many anaerobic bacteria, aerobic (oxygen-loving) ones evolved.
There is nothing more effective in disabling the restraint I usually exercise in my use of language than fucking political morons trying to regulate what their tiny minds cannot comprehend, and thus fear.
Debian already does this, in a sense. Unlike Red Hat, SuSE and Caldera, Debian isn't a CD-selling company, but a volunteer project that doesn't sell CDs.
We make ISO images of "Official Debian GNU/Linux" available (via cdimage.debian.org ) which are put on CD by numerous vendors (see the Debian CD vendors list).
Thus, we don't control the price directly, but it is kept low through competition. A number of vendors offer Debian CDs in the $10 range; many offer a way of donating say $5 to Debian.
I suspect that marketing ("brand placement") is a lot more important than price when it comes to shifting the balance between the distributions, which is one of the reasons I'm happy about Corel chosing Debian to base their Linux distributioon on.
Witness the difference between mobile and regular telephony. Mobile telephony is a fairly recent development here in Europe. As such, the former state companies are more or less in the same position as the newcomers. Here in the Netherlands, there are probably ten mobile phone companies, making it a reasonably effective market. For regular telephony, as a private citizen there is effectively still no other choice than the former state company. (And, as the state company is quite wealthy, it can afford to make a loss on services like mobile telephony in order to put competitors out of business. The regulatory body ( OPTA) is putting a stop to some unfair practices and prices, but we're still a long way from a fully liberalised phone market.
A reasonably popular alternative infrastructure for internet access and voice is cable, but it's not available yet in many places (because it needs to be rewired for twoway connections), and the cable companies are often cluefully challenged.
SGI also released OpenVault but its license has some problems (Notification Clause, Advertising Clause, US Legislation Imperialism) which have been discussed on license-discuss and debian-legal.
Red Hat does useful things for the community, and their distribution is OK, but I disagree with this statement. The primary reasons for Red Hat's success in my opinion are lots of advertisement, and catering to the MS-converts.
You can. But it means trouble for (potential) redistributors of binaries produced from your code; see the Debian analysis for chapter and verse. That analysis deals with the old Qt license, but the QPL is similarly incompatible with the GPL.
Can someone provide details on Australia's legal system? I.e. does Australia have a constitution (I know England hasn't) and a constitutional court which might provide a means of getting this law killed?
EGCS put gcc on speed :-)
In the past, one's culture depended to a very large degree on one's physical place. The net is changing this, and allows us to find our own cultures (yes, plural), independent of our geographical location and "real world" culture. Not a global village with a monoculture, but a bazaar of cultures/communities.
This need not necessarily be a good thing (think of suicidal cults), but the Hellmouth discussions show that it can be. The net is a place where we can go beyond the grief this tragedy caused, and where we can force each other to search our souls, not just to ask "What went wrong?" and "Who/what can we blame this on" but also "What can we learn from this?".
I'd like to thank everyone who contributed to the Hellmouth discussions and thereby helped the "real" world show that the net is a home for communities.