Source isn't the problem. The GPL does not permit Apple to prevent users from redistributing a GPL binary that they downloaded from the iTunes store. Anyone who downloads GNU Go from the iTunes store needs to be able to give functioning copies to anyone they want through any distribution mechanism permitted by the GPL.
If someone provides you with bootleg DVDs that say "This is a pirated DVD" on the cover and you sell them from your store, you're going to get in trouble. You might even get into trouble if you can't even tell they are pirated.
I would have assumed "checking the license" was one of the usual steps in approving an app.
Who said this had anything to do with source availability? From TFA "Apple imposes numerous legal restrictions on use and distribution of GNU Go through the iTunes Store Terms of Service, which is forbidden by section 6 of GPLv2."
I believe one problem is that iTunes prohibits redistribution of a downloaded app. I'm sure there are other restrictions that violate the GPL as well.
The problem is they aren't voluntary transactions because the buyer and seller have no control on the timescale of the transaction.
Buyer X wants to buy 10,000 shares of a stock at $20.10 per share. Seller Y is trying to sell, will accept $20 and has been waiting for an offer for half a second. Flash trader GS's supercomputer located at the market floor sees the offer and ask and sells 10,000 shares to X at $20.10, then buys Y's shares at $20, quickly pocketing $1000. Y never gets to see X's bid. X never gets the see Y's asking price. That $1000 came out of X and Y's pocket.
All that has happened is that money was sucked out of the market and into GS's pockets. Now multiply it by every freaking trade. There is no benefit to the market, or to anyone else. Markets work on knowledge and are only efficient if everyone has knowledge. Flash trading is using information before it can be generally made known. That alone makes it a force that doesn't belong in any market.
When you are a lawyer, you take the cases your clients want you to take and you litigate them to the best of your ability, whether you agree or not, whether your client is innocent or not. To not do so would not only be unethical, it could be illegal. Any argument in a case should not be the opinion of the lawyer, it should be an argument that will help win the case.
You may have noticed several lawyers who were representing detainees during the Bush years are now representing the Obama administration, and are making counter arguments to the arguments they made a couple years ago. That's not inconsistent, it's called being a lawyer. The positions you take are those of your client.
An amicus brief might be a different story, if it is not submitted for a client or employer. If I go to my lawyer and say I want him to write an amicus brief in favor of eating kittens, he's going to write it if he wants to get paid. That doesn't mean he supports eating kittens.
In other words, don't read to much into what opinions a lawyer expresses on duty. They might surprise you.
Since this is way down at the end you'll never see this advice.
Sit down with your boss and talk it out. If your boss doesn't understand the GPL, explain it to him. Explain that if the University plans to distribute this as non-free software, you will need to reimplement a significant portion of the code. Give him an estimate of the time you would need to do it. If they are selling it, make sure you are on the author list registered with the University intellectual property office.
If he doesn't plan to distribute it, ask why not. Are their trade secrets in the code? How much time would it take to remove them? Who paid for this code? Do they require open distribution?
If you were hired because of your work on these libraries, your employer should have understood the licensing issues in using them in advance. Also let them know you were never told to avoid GPL libraries in your development efforts.
Final effort, if you can't reach an agreement, and your employment has ended, contact the University's legal department and tell them that you are worried that you boss will be illegally distributing this software. They aren't going to take your side, and they aren't going to give you GPL distribution. But they will make sure that your boss doesn't distribute this software.
I think you got the timing wrong there.... By about 3 years. The PC was released in August 1981. The Compaq was released in May 1983. The Macintosh was released in January 1984.
Compaq made a clean room re-engineering of the PC ROM BIOS. Under the case law of the time, that was legal, and IBM didn't sue.
On the other hand, even though case law didn't support suing over work-alike or look alike software, because no code was copied, Steve Jobs went around suing anyone who developed an OS with a GUI that even remotely resembled a Mac. This led to much of that case law being overturned. To some extent, that led to some of the draconian provisions present in the DMCA.
So no, Steve Jobs isn't responsible for everything that is wrong with patent and copyright law in this country. But he sure did his part. And the iTunes store and the Apps Store and the developers license are just more of the same.
But hey, I don't have a (recent) Mac, or an iPod, or an iPhone, or an iPad. I will never develop for iP*, and I only develop for Mac when forced. I refuse to get sucked in, no matter how hard Apple sucks.
I was wondering that. Also is there a way to write your own apps for the iPad/iPhone/iTouch and test thme before "release" without signing/paying up to be a dev?
Of course not. Not legally anyway. That would be unamerican.
>> One of the anti-competitive measures Apple is attempting is to prevent the development of such a layer for the smartphone market.
You mean, the smartphone market of devices running iPhone OS right? This is a very narrow definition of their monopoly.
Who said anything about a monopoly? It's possible to do anticompetitive things without having a monopoly. Whether it's legal is a question for the investigators to decide.
I'm sure they would manage not to have any profits. At least not in the U.S.
I don't know if BP practices the same accounting tricks that Exxon does. Exxon paid $15 billion in taxes to other countries last year. None to the U.S. It's tough being a non-profit.
I think the problem is you used the term "always." I might agree that altruism can often be due to selfishness, but "always?"
Anyone who uses the term "always" to describe the cause of any human behaviour has obviously never met a human being.
Again, in aggregate pushing someone out of the way of an oncoming bus may benefit society or the species and therefore be selfish. I can't imagine what form of "self" that applies to. Self implies an individual, not a species or a society.
If I pushed an old childless lady out of the way of a bus and I got killed in the process, in that specific case there would neither be benefit to me or to the species. And I doubt I'll feel good about it while I'm dying. I find it hard to consider that sort of behavior selfish.
Altruism is always a disguised form of selfishness.
That's some pretty bizarre bullshit. That's right up there with concluding that every human behavior is logical and can always be explained. In aggregate, maybe there is a small tendency for altruism to improve the status of the altruistic. But for individual actions, you could never make that claim that an altruistic person always expects a benefit.
Not to mention that Rand felt that altruism was ethically unsupportable. That claim has led her followers to propose some really zany ideas.
I don't know if this is true. Though I am not sure where all the restaurant shrimp comes from, the kind I get at my local supermarket is farmed far far away.
where it does more damage to the environment than an oil spill does.
<silverlining>I'm not entirely kidding when I say that this could be very good for shellfish populations in the gulf.</silverlining>
Except they can't pass that cost on to the consumer, because they're still competing in a highly fungible market. Exxon isn't having this problem, Shell isn't having this problem - it's just BP. Which means that if BP raises its prices, people will buy gas from companies that don't have to deal with a multi-billion dollar clean-up.
The usual strategy in the oil market at this stage would be for BP to close down a refinery or two. "Required maintenance" is the usual reason. Once gas prices go up a buck or two the cost of the clean up will be covered, and all the the oil companies will clean up, so to speak.
It doesn't matter who pays for it. We all will. If BP pays for it, they will raise gas prices. If the rest of the oil companies don't do the same, BP will shut down a refinery for "maintenance" in order to cut supply and boost prices.
If the government pays for the cleanup, then our taxes will pay for it. Possibly the gas tax will increase to pay for it.
On any other system you could use a layer that provides a standardized API. (Think WXwidgets providing a standardized windowing API that works on multiple platforms). One of the anti-competitive measures Apple is attempting is to prevent the development of such a layer for the smartphone market. Or the use of an existing one, for that matter. The point is to lock developers into an iPhone only mode.
It supports "open" food. You just need to pay the place that sold you the refrigerator a dollar an item to unlock the refrigerator door for you so you can "open" it.
The SETI Institute employs biologists, sociologists, astronomers, geologists, educators, and other researchers. Many are funded by their own research grants. Anyone working on something related to finding planets, understanding planet formation, interstellar chemistry, habitability, evolution, signal processing, searching for any type of life (mostly non-intelligent) and SETI is welcome.
SETI itself is a minority component. But once the institute was formed, the scientists worked on what paid the bills (i.e. anything but SETI). And they hired more scientists to do the same. So the actual SETI work became a small fraction of the total.
I was just talking to one of the scientists whose data was released to SETIQuest. Her data was observations of a pulsar to measure scattering of radiation by interstellar matter. It's unlikely that there are any civilizations in that data. But if the people processing it can't detect a pulsar in it, that probably means you can ignore their algorithm, at least for broad band transmissions.
There is a process involved in getting public funding. Rules to be followed. For example, my organization agrees to give me a place to do my work, and to pay to keep the lights on and the phone bill paid. The public (i.e. funding organization) agreed to pay for the scope of work I proposed. They set out requirements I needed to meet.
What the "public" doesn't get to say is that they're changing the rules after the fact, and now I need to spend more money than I was initially granted on making my data available to everyone. The public wants the data to be made available, they need to pay the cost of making it available. I don't work for free, and I can't pay to hire IT support to maintain a data distribution site without money.
You want my data to be made available, I'll need at least 1 FTE and a grad student to document data format. That'll be $140k per year (which is about the size of the typical NSF astronomy grant. But it would never get funded because NSF won't pay for IT staff.) How long do you want this data archive to be maintained? Now add the hardware...
Stop with the you took PUBLIC MONEY crap. You might think I was required to make my data public, but nowhere in the proposal requirements did it say I needed to, and nowhere in my proposal did I say I would. I wasn't funded to do so. If you want the data, make it a requirement of the grant and I would have increased my budget to match. So would everyone else. And then you'd be bitching about how expensive it is.
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How do you ensure it will be available for three years?
Source isn't the problem. The GPL does not permit Apple to prevent users from redistributing a GPL binary that they downloaded from the iTunes store. Anyone who downloads GNU Go from the iTunes store needs to be able to give functioning copies to anyone they want through any distribution mechanism permitted by the GPL.
If someone provides you with bootleg DVDs that say "This is a pirated DVD" on the cover and you sell them from your store, you're going to get in trouble. You might even get into trouble if you can't even tell they are pirated.
I would have assumed "checking the license" was one of the usual steps in approving an app.
Who said this had anything to do with source availability? From TFA "Apple imposes numerous legal restrictions on use and distribution of GNU Go through the iTunes Store Terms of Service, which is forbidden by section 6 of GPLv2."
I believe one problem is that iTunes prohibits redistribution of a downloaded app. I'm sure there are other restrictions that violate the GPL as well.
Sound like you bought the crap that was thrown into history texts throughout the last century in order to appease the southern states.
I think you need to learn the difference between public and private schools.
Buyer X wants to buy 10,000 shares of a stock at $20.10 per share. Seller Y is trying to sell, will accept $20 and has been waiting for an offer for half a second. Flash trader GS's supercomputer located at the market floor sees the offer and ask and sells 10,000 shares to X at $20.10, then buys Y's shares at $20, quickly pocketing $1000. Y never gets to see X's bid. X never gets the see Y's asking price. That $1000 came out of X and Y's pocket.
All that has happened is that money was sucked out of the market and into GS's pockets. Now multiply it by every freaking trade. There is no benefit to the market, or to anyone else. Markets work on knowledge and are only efficient if everyone has knowledge. Flash trading is using information before it can be generally made known. That alone makes it a force that doesn't belong in any market.
When you are a lawyer, you take the cases your clients want you to take and you litigate them to the best of your ability, whether you agree or not, whether your client is innocent or not. To not do so would not only be unethical, it could be illegal. Any argument in a case should not be the opinion of the lawyer, it should be an argument that will help win the case.
You may have noticed several lawyers who were representing detainees during the Bush years are now representing the Obama administration, and are making counter arguments to the arguments they made a couple years ago. That's not inconsistent, it's called being a lawyer. The positions you take are those of your client.
An amicus brief might be a different story, if it is not submitted for a client or employer. If I go to my lawyer and say I want him to write an amicus brief in favor of eating kittens, he's going to write it if he wants to get paid. That doesn't mean he supports eating kittens.
In other words, don't read to much into what opinions a lawyer expresses on duty. They might surprise you.
Since this is way down at the end you'll never see this advice.
Sit down with your boss and talk it out. If your boss doesn't understand the GPL, explain it to him. Explain that if the University plans to distribute this as non-free software, you will need to reimplement a significant portion of the code. Give him an estimate of the time you would need to do it. If they are selling it, make sure you are on the author list registered with the University intellectual property office.
If he doesn't plan to distribute it, ask why not. Are their trade secrets in the code? How much time would it take to remove them? Who paid for this code? Do they require open distribution?
If you were hired because of your work on these libraries, your employer should have understood the licensing issues in using them in advance. Also let them know you were never told to avoid GPL libraries in your development efforts.
Final effort, if you can't reach an agreement, and your employment has ended, contact the University's legal department and tell them that you are worried that you boss will be illegally distributing this software. They aren't going to take your side, and they aren't going to give you GPL distribution. But they will make sure that your boss doesn't distribute this software.
I believe IBM still has higher revenue and higher earnings, even though it has half the market cap of Apple.
I think you got the timing wrong there.... By about 3 years. The PC was released in August 1981. The Compaq was released in May 1983. The Macintosh was released in January 1984.
Compaq made a clean room re-engineering of the PC ROM BIOS. Under the case law of the time, that was legal, and IBM didn't sue.
On the other hand, even though case law didn't support suing over work-alike or look alike software, because no code was copied, Steve Jobs went around suing anyone who developed an OS with a GUI that even remotely resembled a Mac. This led to much of that case law being overturned. To some extent, that led to some of the draconian provisions present in the DMCA.
So no, Steve Jobs isn't responsible for everything that is wrong with patent and copyright law in this country. But he sure did his part. And the iTunes store and the Apps Store and the developers license are just more of the same.
But hey, I don't have a (recent) Mac, or an iPod, or an iPhone, or an iPad. I will never develop for iP*, and I only develop for Mac when forced. I refuse to get sucked in, no matter how hard Apple sucks.
I was wondering that. Also is there a way to write your own apps for the iPad/iPhone/iTouch and test thme before "release" without signing/paying up to be a dev?
Of course not. Not legally anyway. That would be unamerican.
The problem is that the farm league pays their stars better than the big leagues. And the public likes the farm league better, anyway.
>> One of the anti-competitive measures Apple is attempting is to prevent the development of such a layer for the smartphone market.
You mean, the smartphone market of devices running iPhone OS right? This is a very narrow definition of their monopoly.
Who said anything about a monopoly? It's possible to do anticompetitive things without having a monopoly. Whether it's legal is a question for the investigators to decide.
I'm sure they would manage not to have any profits. At least not in the U.S.
I don't know if BP practices the same accounting tricks that Exxon does. Exxon paid $15 billion in taxes to other countries last year. None to the U.S. It's tough being a non-profit.
I think the problem is you used the term "always." I might agree that altruism can often be due to selfishness, but "always?"
Anyone who uses the term "always" to describe the cause of any human behaviour has obviously never met a human being.
Again, in aggregate pushing someone out of the way of an oncoming bus may benefit society or the species and therefore be selfish. I can't imagine what form of "self" that applies to. Self implies an individual, not a species or a society.
If I pushed an old childless lady out of the way of a bus and I got killed in the process, in that specific case there would neither be benefit to me or to the species. And I doubt I'll feel good about it while I'm dying. I find it hard to consider that sort of behavior selfish.
Altruism is always a disguised form of selfishness.
That's some pretty bizarre bullshit. That's right up there with concluding that every human behavior is logical and can always be explained. In aggregate, maybe there is a small tendency for altruism to improve the status of the altruistic. But for individual actions, you could never make that claim that an altruistic person always expects a benefit.
Not to mention that Rand felt that altruism was ethically unsupportable. That claim has led her followers to propose some really zany ideas.
I don't know if this is true. Though I am not sure where all the restaurant shrimp comes from, the kind I get at my local supermarket is farmed far far away.
where it does more damage to the environment than an oil spill does.
<silverlining>I'm not entirely kidding when I say that this could be very good for shellfish populations in the gulf.</silverlining>
Except they can't pass that cost on to the consumer, because they're still competing in a highly fungible market. Exxon isn't having this problem, Shell isn't having this problem - it's just BP. Which means that if BP raises its prices, people will buy gas from companies that don't have to deal with a multi-billion dollar clean-up.
The usual strategy in the oil market at this stage would be for BP to close down a refinery or two. "Required maintenance" is the usual reason. Once gas prices go up a buck or two the cost of the clean up will be covered, and all the the oil companies will clean up, so to speak.
It doesn't matter who pays for it. We all will. If BP pays for it, they will raise gas prices. If the rest of the oil companies don't do the same, BP will shut down a refinery for "maintenance" in order to cut supply and boost prices.
If the government pays for the cleanup, then our taxes will pay for it. Possibly the gas tax will increase to pay for it.
Who's getting pushed over a barrel now?
On any other system you could use a layer that provides a standardized API. (Think WXwidgets providing a standardized windowing API that works on multiple platforms). One of the anti-competitive measures Apple is attempting is to prevent the development of such a layer for the smartphone market. Or the use of an existing one, for that matter. The point is to lock developers into an iPhone only mode.
It's too bad scores are limited to 5.
It supports "open" food. You just need to pay the place that sold you the refrigerator a dollar an item to unlock the refrigerator door for you so you can "open" it.
The SETI Institute employs biologists, sociologists, astronomers, geologists, educators, and other researchers. Many are funded by their own research grants. Anyone working on something related to finding planets, understanding planet formation, interstellar chemistry, habitability, evolution, signal processing, searching for any type of life (mostly non-intelligent) and SETI is welcome.
SETI itself is a minority component. But once the institute was formed, the scientists worked on what paid the bills (i.e. anything but SETI). And they hired more scientists to do the same. So the actual SETI work became a small fraction of the total.
I was just talking to one of the scientists whose data was released to SETIQuest. Her data was observations of a pulsar to measure scattering of radiation by interstellar matter. It's unlikely that there are any civilizations in that data. But if the people processing it can't detect a pulsar in it, that probably means you can ignore their algorithm, at least for broad band transmissions.
There is a process involved in getting public funding. Rules to be followed. For example, my organization agrees to give me a place to do my work, and to pay to keep the lights on and the phone bill paid. The public (i.e. funding organization) agreed to pay for the scope of work I proposed. They set out requirements I needed to meet.
What the "public" doesn't get to say is that they're changing the rules after the fact, and now I need to spend more money than I was initially granted on making my data available to everyone. The public wants the data to be made available, they need to pay the cost of making it available. I don't work for free, and I can't pay to hire IT support to maintain a data distribution site without money.
You want my data to be made available, I'll need at least 1 FTE and a grad student to document data format. That'll be $140k per year (which is about the size of the typical NSF astronomy grant. But it would never get funded because NSF won't pay for IT staff.) How long do you want this data archive to be maintained? Now add the hardware...
Stop with the you took PUBLIC MONEY crap. You might think I was required to make my data public, but nowhere in the proposal requirements did it say I needed to, and nowhere in my proposal did I say I would. I wasn't funded to do so. If you want the data, make it a requirement of the grant and I would have increased my budget to match. So would everyone else. And then you'd be bitching about how expensive it is.