How do you protect your trademark without sending out C&Ds?
Dang - I just posted the answer above. But to recap: you license it. Sell the "offending" party the right to continue using their name for the minimum dollar amount necessary to create a binding contract (which I think is traditionally $1). That way they're in the clear, and in the event that someone else infringes in the future, you can prove that you're aware and have dealt with other infringers in the past.
Aren't you required to vigorously defend your trademark or else stand to lose it?
If they were genuinely concerned about losing their trademark, while admitting that SparkFun is not at all likely to be confused with Sparc, they could grant SparkFun trademark rights for $1. Basically tell them "we agree not to sue you for infringing what we believe is our rightful trademark, in exchange for consideration".
I'm tired of that damn "the law made me do it!" excuse. No, it didn't. There are plenty of remedies outside the courts that can accomplish the same ends.
And don't get me started with the hideous piece-of-s*** that is Bonjour, which is a system service installed by iTunes that intercepts and modifies DNS requests. It opens your computer to vulnerabilities and has broken some apps. A music player has absolutely no business fucking around with system-wide DNS.
Citations needed. Bonjour implements a multicast DNS system that iTunes (and lots of other apps) use to find peers on their same network. It's the underlying mechanism for you being able to stream music off another computer without specifically configuring anything, and is also an IETF draft. What led you to believe it was anything different?
I agree wholeheartedly, which is why I'm more supportive of outright legalization pushes than I am of some kid playing ultimate and claiming "it's for the sick people, wink-wink." Not that there aren't people legitimately calling for legal medical usage - and a lot of them! - but I still claim that far more people are using it as a means to different ends.
You're playing exactly into the fears that the people who oppose this drug have; that it's just a bunch of potheads that want it.
For every chronic pain or nausea victim, there are 20 stoners saying, "right on, dude!" Know what? More power to 'em. If you can go out and get staggering drunk legally, you should be able to go out and get staggeringly stoned legally. I'm not a stoner, but I believe in your right to be one. So stocking caps off to Westword for admitting what everyone else already knows: a big chung of the legalization movement consists of normal, otherwise law-abiding people who want to get stoned.
I had to mess around with MySQL the other day to maintain a Drupal database, and tried something like DELETE FROM foo WHERE foo.id IN (SELECT DISTINCT id FROM bar) and it complained that you can't delete from a subselect. That didn't exactly make me regret my old switch to PostgreSQL.
I don't really get this. If you Oracle on Solaris is a good solution for you today, will it become a bad solution if the merger isn't approved?
Also, how do you produce "hard evidence that there were no competition problems"? Tell them you looked really hard but couldn't find any counterevidence?
I'm ambivalent about Sun and am definitely not an Oracle fan, but I don't really see the problems here.
I honestly do not understand why some people persist in pimping postgres.
Well, a lot of us are happy with the idea of a database that, you know, works. That doesn't silently discard data. That doesn't make you choose between performance and ACID. That doesn't pull crap like insisting that the wire protocol is licensed under the GPL. That sort of stuff.
I remember 10 years ago, postgres was a ghost project -- no updates/maintenance. the entire fucking world adopted mysql except for the postgres-obsessed.
Good point. Guess I'll roll back my desktop to E16 on Slink to comply with your state-of-a-decade-ago fetish.
Actually, this exact subject made me realize that I'm a Libertarian. I fell in love, got married, and had kids. I can't imagine how I'd feel if someone told me I wasn't allowed to just because my wife and I are both white, or both have brown hair, or because of some other quirk of genetic luck. With that in mind, how can I tell someone else that they're not allowed to marry the person that they fell in love with?
I'm not pro- (or anti-)gay. I don't "get" homosexuality because I can't imagine not being attracted to a woman, or being attracted to a man. But as far as I'm concerned, that doesn't matter. Two consenting adults want to be able to enter into an arrangement that I've personally entered into, and I just can't think of a reason why I should be allowed to prevent it.
This is similar to why corporations don't want Card Check, to intimidate their way into power. There, fixed it for you.
I'm not a corporation, and I don't want it. I'm not keen on the idea of a union steward coming into my office and asking me to vote yay or nay right there on the spot.
I am all for treating these signatures like votes, off the public record. keep them private.
"I am all for treating these lobbying efforts like votes, off the public record. keep them private." Because that's what petitions really are: lobbying for the government to enact some law or another. So where do you draw the line between, say, the public's right to know what a tobacco lobbyist is up to and a citizen's right not to be held accountable for lobbying to take the rights of others? Answer: you don't. It's all in the public interest and should be open.
You can't be opposed to copyrights all the time and encouraging piracy but then turn around and bash people for violating your precious GPL copyright license.
It's almost as if Slashdotters generally want to ensure the free sharing of information and are opposed to things that block it.
Been there, done that on Solaris and Linux 10 years ago in plain old C. No magic required, just
#include <pthread.h>
and away you go.
Piece of cake! Of course, you have no idea how many other processes are tossing threads at their workload and so have no idea if this is a great time to spawn another 8 to really load out the CPU or whether you should just spawn 2 and let some other processes have their time. That's what GCD buys you.
The ILECs "opened" their lines to competitors, and then used paperwork, "reasonable" delays, and low level sabotage to ensure that their competitors didn't keep the clients they could get.
Ain't that the truth. I worked for a CLEC around '99-2000, and the ILECs were an absolute nightmare to deal with, even when they were technically complying with the laws. For example, they had something like a 60 day window to handle requests that we submitted to them. 30? 60? I forget, but we'll go with 60 for illustration. In this case, "handle" doesn't mean "complete" - it just meant that they had to act on it in some way.
So, a new customer would sign up for our DSL service. We'd fire off a work order to the ILEC to provision the line. 59.5 days later, we'd get back a notice that we didn't file form ID10T (which we didn't even know that the ILEC required because none of this was documented outside their internal policy manual, which was filed in the leopard-marked unused lavoratory). We'd fill out ID10T and re-submit it. 59.5 days later, we'd find out that the filing of form ID10T requires an additional form WTF23, "Intent To File Form ID10T", and that we needed to fix our paperwork and try again.
In the mean time, our customer's been without service for nearly 4 months and is utterly unthrilled with our incompetence. After all, when he got tired of waiting and called the ILEC directly, it only took 2 weeks for their truck to show up and turn on his DSL.
Perhaps it's time to press for a Bill of Responsibilities to accompany the Bill of Rights. Things like: When the pursuit of profit conflicts with the good of the country, it will be considered treason.
"We hold that 'The Country' is, by definition, 'The People'. Since it would be good to distribute APL bigot's income to The People, and he insists on hoarding it to 'make mortgage payments' and 'pay medical bills' and 'buy food', we find him guilty of treason. Against the wall."
And that's why they don't let random schmoes on Slashdot hack the Constitution.
What happens when cloud computing gets cheaper and bigger?
Back when we still called it "shell accounts", absolutely nothing. Most people with cool branches of GPLv2 projects contributed their changes upstream, just as they do now. Some people didn't, and saw their neat new features duplicated by the more open branches and released anyway.
Which is exactly what's happening now. Someone writes phpFoo. Others run copies of it. Some of those people work to build an ecosystem around it, and some keep their changes local. When the former sees features from the latter, they re-implement them and roll the changes back into the main branch. After a while, the latter gets tired of wasting so much time creating their own easily-duplicated branch that they give up trying to keep it proprietary.
Again, "cloud computing" was absolutely freakin' pervasive when the GPLv2 was written - we just didn't call it that back then.
Isn't it interesting how some people scold us for working to keep software free while those who keep theirs proprietary get a free ride?
Who are you referring to, Bruce? Granted, I've only released a half-dozen or so projects under the BSD, GPLv2, and GPLv3 licenses, but I'm hardly a proprietary software fan. My coworkers and geeky friends would laugh at the idea, given that I'm the one responsible for moving my company off of closed technologies and onto Linux, FreeBSD, OpenOffice, Jabber, IMAP, PostgreSQL, Python and QT, and I'm the one who talked my boss into letting me distribute my paid work under Free Software licenses.
A more charitable (and honest) interpretation might be that there are dedicated Free Software advocates who nonetheless see things differently from you, and who take positions (in the cause of freedom) that don't directly jibe with yours. That doesn't mean we're anti-freedom.
No. Just... stop. Before we had web apps, we had shell apps and BBS doors and hundreds of other ways to do client/server. This is not some new thing that came along in the last few years.
This is a work-around for the bug that copyright law does not define a public-performance right for software, although a similar right is defined for audio recordings, movies, and theatrical scripts.
I think there's a fundamental difference, though, in that the AGPL and related licenses are seeking to affect the instruments themselves and not their output.
I understand the rationale behind the license, but it seems like cutting off your nose to spite your face. Yeah, some people might get to abuse the system, but I think that's better than killing the ideals by trying to save them.
No open source licence of any kind has ever put restrictions on the output of a program or of code.
You are wrong. The output of any program licensed under the AGPL may include invariant sections that you are explicitly forbidden (with as much force as a EULA can muster) from altering or removing.
When you try and draw a line between them, you are helping those who would argue that "open source" merely means access to source code.
I tried nothing. I think I gave an accurate statement of RMS's take on the matter, even if you disagree with the distinction he'd almost certainly make.
I chose the AGPL for a web project of mine, and the protection it gives is pretty essential. Without it someone could take the code, improve it and run their site based on it without sharing the improvements back.
Right. Just as every GPL author has allowed you to do over the years.
If you don't think that's fair I'd be interested to hear why not.
None of your upstream distributors have ever put such a restriction on you. You're referring to your strategy game, right? To run it, you'd have to install Linux (or another OS), Apache (or a similar webserver), PHP, MySQL, GD, FreeType, and a mailserver. So given that entire multi-MLOC stack, your 32KLOC running on top of it all are the only ones that can't be locally modified without releasing the changes.
You ask me if your terms are fair. You're damn straight, I don't. Let me turn it around: what makes your code so special that you feel you can restrict the conditions under which I install and run it?
Why shouldn't they get the source code to a program they are using, even if it is over SSH? Isn't that the whole point of the Open source and the GPL.
The problem is that all versions of the GPL have governed distribution, and they're on solid ground with copyright law. Basically, they grant you additional distribution rights above and beyond what you'd normally be allowed as long as you comply with certain restrictions. End users don't even have to agree to the GPL to use software so licensed because usage isn't governed by copyright. The GPLv3 (and the AGPLv3, confusingly enough) even explicitly states this:
9. Acceptance Not Required for Having Copies.
You are not required to accept this License in order to receive or run a copy of the Program.
Contrast with the AGPL which seeks to control how you run the software by adding:
Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software.
So, there are new limits to how I can modify the software that have never existed in any prior FSF license. If I start with a GPLv3 library and only want to use one function, then I'm allowed to do that. Not so under the AGPLv3! Taken to the extreme, imagine that Linux was relicensed under the AGPLv3. If you host a Linux server, then you have to offer copies of the Linux kernel (which holds the networking code) to any client that connects to it. Wouldn't that be fun to comply with?
When did having the program you're using running on your own computer become a prerequisite for obtaining GPL rights?
When the GPL was written as a distribution license.
Slashdot Mirror
How do you protect your trademark without sending out C&Ds?
Dang - I just posted the answer above. But to recap: you license it. Sell the "offending" party the right to continue using their name for the minimum dollar amount necessary to create a binding contract (which I think is traditionally $1). That way they're in the clear, and in the event that someone else infringes in the future, you can prove that you're aware and have dealt with other infringers in the past.
Aren't you required to vigorously defend your trademark or else stand to lose it?
If they were genuinely concerned about losing their trademark, while admitting that SparkFun is not at all likely to be confused with Sparc, they could grant SparkFun trademark rights for $1. Basically tell them "we agree not to sue you for infringing what we believe is our rightful trademark, in exchange for consideration".
I'm tired of that damn "the law made me do it!" excuse. No, it didn't. There are plenty of remedies outside the courts that can accomplish the same ends.
And don't get me started with the hideous piece-of-s*** that is Bonjour, which is a system service installed by iTunes that intercepts and modifies DNS requests. It opens your computer to vulnerabilities and has broken some apps. A music player has absolutely no business fucking around with system-wide DNS.
Citations needed. Bonjour implements a multicast DNS system that iTunes (and lots of other apps) use to find peers on their same network. It's the underlying mechanism for you being able to stream music off another computer without specifically configuring anything, and is also an IETF draft. What led you to believe it was anything different?
I agree wholeheartedly, which is why I'm more supportive of outright legalization pushes than I am of some kid playing ultimate and claiming "it's for the sick people, wink-wink." Not that there aren't people legitimately calling for legal medical usage - and a lot of them! - but I still claim that far more people are using it as a means to different ends.
You're playing exactly into the fears that the people who oppose this drug have; that it's just a bunch of potheads that want it.
For every chronic pain or nausea victim, there are 20 stoners saying, "right on, dude!" Know what? More power to 'em. If you can go out and get staggering drunk legally, you should be able to go out and get staggeringly stoned legally. I'm not a stoner, but I believe in your right to be one. So stocking caps off to Westword for admitting what everyone else already knows: a big chung of the legalization movement consists of normal, otherwise law-abiding people who want to get stoned.
I had to mess around with MySQL the other day to maintain a Drupal database, and tried something like DELETE FROM foo WHERE foo.id IN (SELECT DISTINCT id FROM bar) and it complained that you can't delete from a subselect. That didn't exactly make me regret my old switch to PostgreSQL.
I don't really get this. If you Oracle on Solaris is a good solution for you today, will it become a bad solution if the merger isn't approved?
Also, how do you produce "hard evidence that there were no competition problems"? Tell them you looked really hard but couldn't find any counterevidence?
I'm ambivalent about Sun and am definitely not an Oracle fan, but I don't really see the problems here.
I honestly do not understand why some people persist in pimping postgres.
Well, a lot of us are happy with the idea of a database that, you know, works. That doesn't silently discard data. That doesn't make you choose between performance and ACID. That doesn't pull crap like insisting that the wire protocol is licensed under the GPL. That sort of stuff.
I remember 10 years ago, postgres was a ghost project -- no updates/maintenance. the entire fucking world adopted mysql except for the postgres-obsessed.
Good point. Guess I'll roll back my desktop to E16 on Slink to comply with your state-of-a-decade-ago fetish.
Actually, this exact subject made me realize that I'm a Libertarian. I fell in love, got married, and had kids. I can't imagine how I'd feel if someone told me I wasn't allowed to just because my wife and I are both white, or both have brown hair, or because of some other quirk of genetic luck. With that in mind, how can I tell someone else that they're not allowed to marry the person that they fell in love with?
I'm not pro- (or anti-)gay. I don't "get" homosexuality because I can't imagine not being attracted to a woman, or being attracted to a man. But as far as I'm concerned, that doesn't matter. Two consenting adults want to be able to enter into an arrangement that I've personally entered into, and I just can't think of a reason why I should be allowed to prevent it.
This is similar to why corporations don't want Card Check, to intimidate their way into power. There, fixed it for you.
I'm not a corporation, and I don't want it. I'm not keen on the idea of a union steward coming into my office and asking me to vote yay or nay right there on the spot.
I am all for treating these signatures like votes, off the public record. keep them private.
"I am all for treating these lobbying efforts like votes, off the public record. keep them private." Because that's what petitions really are: lobbying for the government to enact some law or another. So where do you draw the line between, say, the public's right to know what a tobacco lobbyist is up to and a citizen's right not to be held accountable for lobbying to take the rights of others? Answer: you don't. It's all in the public interest and should be open.
*BSDs (all of them) still lack HA and failover clustering software.
Ironic in a story about an OS release that features improved HA networking.
You can't be opposed to copyrights all the time and encouraging piracy but then turn around and bash people for violating your precious GPL copyright license.
It's almost as if Slashdotters generally want to ensure the free sharing of information and are opposed to things that block it.
Been there, done that on Solaris and Linux 10 years ago in plain old C. No magic required, just
and away you go.
Piece of cake! Of course, you have no idea how many other processes are tossing threads at their workload and so have no idea if this is a great time to spawn another 8 to really load out the CPU or whether you should just spawn 2 and let some other processes have their time. That's what GCD buys you.
The ILECs "opened" their lines to competitors, and then used paperwork, "reasonable" delays, and low level sabotage to ensure that their competitors didn't keep the clients they could get.
Ain't that the truth. I worked for a CLEC around '99-2000, and the ILECs were an absolute nightmare to deal with, even when they were technically complying with the laws. For example, they had something like a 60 day window to handle requests that we submitted to them. 30? 60? I forget, but we'll go with 60 for illustration. In this case, "handle" doesn't mean "complete" - it just meant that they had to act on it in some way.
So, a new customer would sign up for our DSL service. We'd fire off a work order to the ILEC to provision the line. 59.5 days later, we'd get back a notice that we didn't file form ID10T (which we didn't even know that the ILEC required because none of this was documented outside their internal policy manual, which was filed in the leopard-marked unused lavoratory). We'd fill out ID10T and re-submit it. 59.5 days later, we'd find out that the filing of form ID10T requires an additional form WTF23, "Intent To File Form ID10T", and that we needed to fix our paperwork and try again.
In the mean time, our customer's been without service for nearly 4 months and is utterly unthrilled with our incompetence. After all, when he got tired of waiting and called the ILEC directly, it only took 2 weeks for their truck to show up and turn on his DSL.
Perhaps it's time to press for a Bill of Responsibilities to accompany the Bill of Rights. Things like: When the pursuit of profit conflicts with the good of the country, it will be considered treason.
"We hold that 'The Country' is, by definition, 'The People'. Since it would be good to distribute APL bigot's income to The People, and he insists on hoarding it to 'make mortgage payments' and 'pay medical bills' and 'buy food', we find him guilty of treason. Against the wall."
And that's why they don't let random schmoes on Slashdot hack the Constitution.
What happens when cloud computing gets cheaper and bigger?
Back when we still called it "shell accounts", absolutely nothing. Most people with cool branches of GPLv2 projects contributed their changes upstream, just as they do now. Some people didn't, and saw their neat new features duplicated by the more open branches and released anyway.
Which is exactly what's happening now. Someone writes phpFoo. Others run copies of it. Some of those people work to build an ecosystem around it, and some keep their changes local. When the former sees features from the latter, they re-implement them and roll the changes back into the main branch. After a while, the latter gets tired of wasting so much time creating their own easily-duplicated branch that they give up trying to keep it proprietary.
Again, "cloud computing" was absolutely freakin' pervasive when the GPLv2 was written - we just didn't call it that back then.
Not the GPLv3! It's the AGPLv3 that's so broken. Although similar, they're vastly different in the details.
Isn't it interesting how some people scold us for working to keep software free while those who keep theirs proprietary get a free ride?
Who are you referring to, Bruce? Granted, I've only released a half-dozen or so projects under the BSD, GPLv2, and GPLv3 licenses, but I'm hardly a proprietary software fan. My coworkers and geeky friends would laugh at the idea, given that I'm the one responsible for moving my company off of closed technologies and onto Linux, FreeBSD, OpenOffice, Jabber, IMAP, PostgreSQL, Python and QT, and I'm the one who talked my boss into letting me distribute my paid work under Free Software licenses.
A more charitable (and honest) interpretation might be that there are dedicated Free Software advocates who nonetheless see things differently from you, and who take positions (in the cause of freedom) that don't directly jibe with yours. That doesn't mean we're anti-freedom.
The whole web-app phenomenon
No. Just... stop. Before we had web apps, we had shell apps and BBS doors and hundreds of other ways to do client/server. This is not some new thing that came along in the last few years.
This is a work-around for the bug that copyright law does not define a public-performance right for software, although a similar right is defined for audio recordings, movies, and theatrical scripts.
I think there's a fundamental difference, though, in that the AGPL and related licenses are seeking to affect the instruments themselves and not their output.
I understand the rationale behind the license, but it seems like cutting off your nose to spite your face. Yeah, some people might get to abuse the system, but I think that's better than killing the ideals by trying to save them.
No open source licence of any kind has ever put restrictions on the output of a program or of code.
You are wrong. The output of any program licensed under the AGPL may include invariant sections that you are explicitly forbidden (with as much force as a EULA can muster) from altering or removing.
When you try and draw a line between them, you are helping those who would argue that "open source" merely means access to source code.
I tried nothing. I think I gave an accurate statement of RMS's take on the matter, even if you disagree with the distinction he'd almost certainly make.
I chose the AGPL for a web project of mine, and the protection it gives is pretty essential. Without it someone could take the code, improve it and run their site based on it without sharing the improvements back.
Right. Just as every GPL author has allowed you to do over the years.
If you don't think that's fair I'd be interested to hear why not.
None of your upstream distributors have ever put such a restriction on you. You're referring to your strategy game, right? To run it, you'd have to install Linux (or another OS), Apache (or a similar webserver), PHP, MySQL, GD, FreeType, and a mailserver. So given that entire multi-MLOC stack, your 32KLOC running on top of it all are the only ones that can't be locally modified without releasing the changes.
You ask me if your terms are fair. You're damn straight, I don't. Let me turn it around: what makes your code so special that you feel you can restrict the conditions under which I install and run it?
Why shouldn't they get the source code to a program they are using, even if it is over SSH? Isn't that the whole point of the Open source and the GPL.
The problem is that all versions of the GPL have governed distribution, and they're on solid ground with copyright law. Basically, they grant you additional distribution rights above and beyond what you'd normally be allowed as long as you comply with certain restrictions. End users don't even have to agree to the GPL to use software so licensed because usage isn't governed by copyright. The GPLv3 (and the AGPLv3, confusingly enough) even explicitly states this:
Contrast with the AGPL which seeks to control how you run the software by adding:
So, there are new limits to how I can modify the software that have never existed in any prior FSF license. If I start with a GPLv3 library and only want to use one function, then I'm allowed to do that. Not so under the AGPLv3! Taken to the extreme, imagine that Linux was relicensed under the AGPLv3. If you host a Linux server, then you have to offer copies of the Linux kernel (which holds the networking code) to any client that connects to it. Wouldn't that be fun to comply with?
When did having the program you're using running on your own computer become a prerequisite for obtaining GPL rights?
When the GPL was written as a distribution license.