Watt's steam engine and Whitney's cotton gin can both be reverse engineered from their description. Does that mean that they weren't worthy of a patent?
TiVo would be like SCO if TiVo it had sold all their patents to Comcast, then claimed that they still owned them, started suing every PVR manufacturer, then sent everyone who had a PVR in their house a letter saying that they owed them $700 in protection money.
I think the market is telling TiVo that they aren't making a quality product. Otherwise they'd not be hounding after advertising in their menus, etc.
It has nothing to do with quality. It has to do with the monopoly television providers (cable & satellite companies) bundling low quality PVRs with their products. I seem to recall another monopoly getting into trouble for bundling...
If you've got DirecTV, your option is one of their PVRs or one of their PVRs.
I'm sure the view anytime aspect of things cut into TiVo's business.
Not really. User interface is a big part of the picture. When I miss a show that was preempted by the president on short notice, I want to be able to use my TiVo to watch it on Hulu. I don't want to have to go sit at my computer to watch TV. I have a DivX player with a Hulu plugin, but the UI is horrible.
The crappy PVR boxes with crippled functionality that the satellite and cable companies are pushing aren't worth the price, even if they are "free".
Isn't it how... the Joint Strike Fighter (X-32 vs X-35) program worked?
No, not really. Once the winner was chosen, the government is still locked in to a single source provider, regardless of subsequent cost or product reliability. If, on the other hand, the government had designed the JSF or had received all rights to the plane as a condition of the competition contracts, it theoretically could have handed out multiple contracts to build the planes.
The same goes for launch vehicles. Spacecraft are in development for a number of years and are designed to the launch vehicle interface specs. It is not generally possible to take a spacecraft built for a Delta II and launch it on an Atlas or Pegasus.
Re:and if these companies made profit?
on
NASA May Outsource
·
· Score: 1
But outsourcing would have a big advantage for NASA: The next time their launch vehicle explodes, they can just point to the producers and say "it was their fault, not ours!"
Yeah, sure. That would work. NASA would still get the blame for it, because it was their job to make sure that the contractor didn't provide a shoddy product as a means of boosting their profit.
Re:What have they been doing until now?
on
NASA May Outsource
·
· Score: 1
Well yes, (1) is pretty much the point -- that NASA buy commercial launch services just like the DOD and commercial satellite companies do.
Unless you've been under a rock since 1955, you might have noticed that they do, for everything except manned space flight. If you think the shuttle disasters were bad for NASA PR, wait until there is a loss of crew event on a manned launch vechicle that NASA bought from the low bidder.
If it was YOUR ass on the line, would you rather fly on the "man rated" shuttle with its track record of one crash with complete loss of crew and vehicle every sixty-something flights and no means of emergency escape or an EELV as-is with no "man rating" and a decent escape system?
If the EELV has made a hundred flights without a fatality, I'd probably choose it. Before then you are taking your chances either way because that "decent escape system" is not applicable to all phases of flight, nor is it applicable to all failure modes.
Nasa outsourced the whole project to JPL to manage and generally run.
Isn't that kind of like saying Intel outsources wafer fabrication to Intel's Rio Rancho wafer fabrication facility? Or did you not notice the ".nasa.gov" in "jpl.nasa.gov"?
He has, in fact, said this and it's one of the stupidest things he's ever said. Any sane person would notice that Fed Ex and UPS charge 25 times what the USPS charges for delivering a letter. It's politically impossible for the Post Office to raise rates enough to cover their projected expenses. They are forced to seek permission to increase rates a penny or two at a time. If they had just been able to raise rates to $0.50 a few years ago they'd be swimming in cash at this point. The problem is that Congress thinks that $0.45 is too much to pay to deliver a letter across the country. Yet UPS and Fed Ex charge about $13.50 for the same service.
Because you should be able to buy fire insurance after your house burns down.
Do you have the slightest clue how insurance works?
Here's what would happen if fire insurance were like health insurance.
Under this system fire insurance is provided by your employer, who gets a group discount from the insurance companies. Neither your employer nor the insurance company is allowed to disclose how much the insurance costs, because they both consider it a trade secret. Once a year, in November, you get the chance to change your fire insurance company if you are unhappy with them. But since you probably haven't had a fire, what is there to be unhappy about?
If you lose your job, you lose your fire insurance but the insurance company is required by law to allow you to pay an exorbitant sum to continue your insurance for 6 months. They will also allow you to buy a cheaper plan, which will replace your house with a tent if it burns down. By the way, the most common way to lose your job is to have a house fire.
If you are self employed or unemployed, you might be able to buy insurance. It will be much more expensive than the group plans that employers get. You will also be disqualified if you have had a fire in the past, smoke, or have been seen with matches or a cigarette lighter.
The way the fire insurance system works is that your insurance company will provide you a list of twenty fire inspectors. You are required to have a fire inspector in order to get access to a fire station. You will call all twenty and their secretaries will tell you that they aren't taking any new clients. You will eventually get taken on by one of them because your mother is one of his clients.
The inspector is paid a flat fee per year per client by the insurance company. He gets paid this amount whether he inspects your home or not. Each time he does inspect your home he might get a small payment from the insurance company, but you need to give him a $20 additional payment. This is to encourage you not to get your home inspected. If your home has apparent problems that need further investigation, the inspector does not get additional payments from the insurance company. If your home needs repairs to prevent a fire, the insurance company will pay for them, but the inspector might get charged a fee for referring you to a contractor. This is to encourage your fire inspector not to refer you to a contractor to perform repairs.
The fire inspector contracts with a fire station to handle emergencies. It might not be the closest fire station to your home. None of the firefighters working at the fire station are employees of the fire station. They are all independent contractors who are paid by the person who has a fire, or by the insurance company. The only employees at the fire station are the 35 people they have on staff to handle billing the 65 insurance companies that they contract with.
If you have a fire, the first thing you do is call your fire inspector. If he agrees that there is a fire, he will call the insurance company to get authorization to call the fire station. Some fraction of the time these authorizations will be denied.
When the fire station gets the call they will also call the insurance company for authorization. When each fireman gets to the house, they will ask for a copy of your insurance card before putting out the fire. If any of the people involved forgets to get authorization, they won't be paid by the insurance company. They will either bill you, or eat the expenses.
Fortunately it was just a minor fire entirely contained in a frying pan. After the fire has been put out, and a contractor has started repairs, you will receive a bunch of bills that have "THIS IS NOT A BILL" written on them. You will get one from each fireman, one from the fire station, one from your fire inspector, one from the contractor who is repairing your house and one from each of the construction workers the contractor has hired. They will come wit
But please, show me a health insurance that actually screens its applicants with a health exam first and uses that to determine coverage premiums?
I think you are confusing the group plan that you get through your employer with an individual insurance plan. Either that or you live in a state where denying coverage based upon preexisting conditions is illegal. Health insurance companies often share data about preexisting conditions and use that information when deciding whether you are a good risk. In most states in the U.S., that is perfectly legal.
.
There are thousands of other tricks used to deny coverage. Some insurance plans will claim that every 6 month plan renewal is the start of a new plan, so no condition covered in the last period will be covered in this period because it is preexisting. If you get cancer you'd better hope you don't live until the next renewal period. There's also retroactive denial because on your application you said your father's name was Al, when in fact his name was Albert. Or you might have forgotten to mention on your medical history that you had an ingrown toenail when you were 12. If you are on a group insurance plan from a small company, your insurer may call your employer and suggest that they terminate you to avoid large rate increases.
.
Anyone who isn't scared shitless about possibly losing their coverage is either fooling themselves or an idiot. But hey, at least we can be happy that all those insurance company profits are resulting in improved technologies for rejecting payments.
We've decided we're leaving. We intend to form our own country, and we're taking the other Blue States with us. In case you aren't aware, that includes California , Hawaii , Oregon , Washington , Minnesota, Wisconsin , Michigan , Illinois , and all of the Northeast. We believe this split will be beneficial to the nation, and especially to the people of the new country of New California.
To sum up briefly: You get Texas , Oklahoma and all the slave states. We get stem cell research and the best beaches. We get the Statue of Liberty . You get Dollywood. We get Intel and Microsoft. You get WorldCom. We get Harvard. You get Ole' Miss. We get 85 percent of America 's venture capital and entrepreneurs. You get Alabama . We get two-thirds of the tax revenue and two-thirds of the gross national product; you get to make the red states pay their fair share.
Since our aggregate divorce rate is 22 percent lower than the Christian Coalition's, we get a bunch of happy families. Please be aware that Nuevo California will be pro-choice and anti-war, and we're going to want all our citizens back from Iraq at once. If you need people to fight, ask your evangelicals. With the Blue States in hand, we will have firm control of 80 percent of the country's fresh water, more than 90 percent of the pineapple and lettuce, 92 percent of the nation's fresh fruit, 95 percent of America's quality wines (you can serve French wines at state dinners), 90 percent of all cheese, 90 percent of the high tech industry, most of the U.S. low-sulfur coal, all living redwoods, sequoias and condors, all the Ivy and Seven Sister schools plus Stanford, Cal Tech and MIT.
With the Red States, on the other hand, you will have to cope with 88 percent of all obese Americans (and their projected health care costs), 92 percent of all U.S. mosquitoes, nearly 100 percent of the tornadoes, 90 percent of the hurricanes, 99 percent of all Southern Baptists, virtually 100 percent of all televangelists, Rush Limbaugh, Bob Jones University, Clemson and the University of Georgia.
We get Hollywood and Yosemite, thank you.
Additionally, 38 percent of those in the Red states believe Jonah was actually swallowed by a whale, 62 percent believe life is sacred unless we're discussing the death penalty or gun laws, 44 percent say that evolution is only a theory, 53 percent that Saddam was involved in 9/11 and 61 percent of you crazy bastards believe you are people with higher morals then we lefties.
Finally, we're taking the good pot, too. You can have that dirt weed they grow in Mexico.
Maybe if someone does their shopping only at some corner convenience store instead of going a few extra miles to a real grocery store, but that's true of anywhere.
How do you get those few extra miles? You're a parent with two children under age five. You don't have a car. Are you going to get on the bus and take them to a grocery store with you and hope you can get them and several bags of groceries back home with you? Or are you going to buy a frozen pizza and some Gatorade from the liquor store at the corner?
Anyone who calls the Democratic party the "Democrat party" gets an automatic foe marking. Anyone who calls the Republican party the "Republic party" gets the same thing.
A business relationship does not require money to change hands. I suspect that like contracts all that is required is that both parties receive some sort of "consideration", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consideration [wikipedia.org]. Consideration is obvious for the user(s), they get the software, but consideration for the author(s) could be quite varied. Passing along the author's work (as the GPL requires), reporting bugs back to the author, mere use of the software enhancing the author's standing in a community (or maybe just stroking the ego),... I'm sure a real lawyer could get quite creative, as they have successfully done with consideration under contract law. Unless of course the legislation gives OSS authors a special status which they currently do not have.
These is no contract involved in using software provided under the GPL. The GPL only covers distribution, not use. If no consideration was provided to the author from the end user, no business relationship exists. A distributor of GPL based software has a contract with the author, but that contract only involves distribution, not use of the software. Since that contract states pretty clearly that the software is provided for distribution only if the distributor disclaims that it is fit for any specific purpose the author is pretty much covered against legal action. The distributor, on the other hand, if they don't disclaim warranty they can be held accountable by both the user of the software, and by the author for failure to follow the licensing terms.
IANAL, so this ain't legal advice.
Technically, the GPL allows me to just forward the URL where I got the source in this particular instance (clause 3c) but I forgot at the time, which is rather my point
And for the Nth time you are wrong. Clause 3c only allows you to do that in the case where you are redistributing a binary provided to you with a source code offer.
.
You compiled this code so you needed to choose 3a (provide the source with the binary) or 3b (provide an offer to give any third party the source used to create this binary.) Since you probably didn't archive the code you used to build the binary, that leaves only clause 3a. In other words, always provide the source code with the binary!
Your understanding is quite wrong.... Your options are a) distribute source code with the binary. b) distribute source code to anyone who asks on a medium used for commonly used for software exchange at no more than your marginal cost. c) If you are non-commercial and redistributing a pre-compiled binary, you can just point at the source code at the site where you downloaded the binary.
.
Under option b, the only things that count as common these days would be CD-ROM, DVD, or over the net. So cost would be, cost of a CD blank, cost of a DVD blank, or free (since there are so many free source code hosting sites.)
GPL v2.
You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:
a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)
.
After so long how can people still get this wrong.
You haven't actually read a commercial license recently, have you?
"You have the right to use this program on one machine using this specific operating system. You may not run this program on a virtual machine. You may not run this program under a debugger. You may not attempt to disassemble this program. You may not run this program under a remote connection. You may not benchmark this program. You may not publish any reviews of this program without approval. You may not run any third party program that accesses any internal APIs contained in this program. You may not run any program which attempts to communicate to this program on any interfaces. You may not attempt to modify this program. We cannot be held responsible if this program kills all of the first born sons of your community."
I can understand them wanting to charge for the use of entire articles in commercial databases or such, but I can't imagine a situation in which you would want to use "more than four consecutive words" (but less than entire articles) for anything that wouldn't be covered by fair use anyway.
It's worse than that. It's dangerous for anyone ever to use this tool. By using this tool and paying AP for a license to use N words, you might be acknowledging that you believe that any bit of text N words or greater is not covered by fair use. It's better to get wrongly sued for a fair use than to give up fair use entirely.
Exactly!. Why do they insist it needs de-orbiting in 2016? This seems to be the ultimate stupidity! (Sell it to Hilton as the ultimate (for now) tourist destination!)
Please explain how you expect Hilton to keep it in orbit without a means to boost it....
Slashdot Mirror
Enabling MRV and HMO on a DirecTiVo with PTVnet
Watt's steam engine and Whitney's cotton gin can both be reverse engineered from their description. Does that mean that they weren't worthy of a patent?
TiVo would be like SCO if TiVo it had sold all their patents to Comcast, then claimed that they still owned them, started suing every PVR manufacturer, then sent everyone who had a PVR in their house a letter saying that they owed them $700 in protection money.
I think the market is telling TiVo that they aren't making a quality product. Otherwise they'd not be hounding after advertising in their menus, etc.
It has nothing to do with quality. It has to do with the monopoly television providers (cable & satellite companies) bundling low quality PVRs with their products. I seem to recall another monopoly getting into trouble for bundling...
If you've got DirecTV, your option is one of their PVRs or one of their PVRs.
I'm sure the view anytime aspect of things cut into TiVo's business.
Not really. User interface is a big part of the picture. When I miss a show that was preempted by the president on short notice, I want to be able to use my TiVo to watch it on Hulu. I don't want to have to go sit at my computer to watch TV. I have a DivX player with a Hulu plugin, but the UI is horrible.
The crappy PVR boxes with crippled functionality that the satellite and cable companies are pushing aren't worth the price, even if they are "free".
Isn't it how ... the Joint Strike Fighter (X-32 vs X-35) program worked?
No, not really. Once the winner was chosen, the government is still locked in to a single source provider, regardless of subsequent cost or product reliability. If, on the other hand, the government had designed the JSF or had received all rights to the plane as a condition of the competition contracts, it theoretically could have handed out multiple contracts to build the planes.
The same goes for launch vehicles. Spacecraft are in development for a number of years and are designed to the launch vehicle interface specs. It is not generally possible to take a spacecraft built for a Delta II and launch it on an Atlas or Pegasus.
But outsourcing would have a big advantage for NASA: The next time their launch vehicle explodes, they can just point to the producers and say "it was their fault, not ours!"
Yeah, sure. That would work. NASA would still get the blame for it, because it was their job to make sure that the contractor didn't provide a shoddy product as a means of boosting their profit.
Well yes, (1) is pretty much the point -- that NASA buy commercial launch services just like the DOD and commercial satellite companies do.
Unless you've been under a rock since 1955, you might have noticed that they do, for everything except manned space flight. If you think the shuttle disasters were bad for NASA PR, wait until there is a loss of crew event on a manned launch vechicle that NASA bought from the low bidder.
If it was YOUR ass on the line, would you rather fly on the "man rated" shuttle with its track record of one crash with complete loss of crew and vehicle every sixty-something flights and no means of emergency escape or an EELV as-is with no "man rating" and a decent escape system?
If the EELV has made a hundred flights without a fatality, I'd probably choose it. Before then you are taking your chances either way because that "decent escape system" is not applicable to all phases of flight, nor is it applicable to all failure modes.
Nasa outsourced the whole project to JPL to manage and generally run.
Isn't that kind of like saying Intel outsources wafer fabrication to Intel's Rio Rancho wafer fabrication facility? Or did you not notice the ".nasa.gov" in "jpl.nasa.gov"?
He has, in fact, said this and it's one of the stupidest things he's ever said. Any sane person would notice that Fed Ex and UPS charge 25 times what the USPS charges for delivering a letter. It's politically impossible for the Post Office to raise rates enough to cover their projected expenses. They are forced to seek permission to increase rates a penny or two at a time. If they had just been able to raise rates to $0.50 a few years ago they'd be swimming in cash at this point. The problem is that Congress thinks that $0.45 is too much to pay to deliver a letter across the country. Yet UPS and Fed Ex charge about $13.50 for the same service.
Because you should be able to buy fire insurance after your house burns down.
Do you have the slightest clue how insurance works?
Here's what would happen if fire insurance were like health insurance.
Under this system fire insurance is provided by your employer, who gets a group discount from the insurance companies. Neither your employer nor the insurance company is allowed to disclose how much the insurance costs, because they both consider it a trade secret. Once a year, in November, you get the chance to change your fire insurance company if you are unhappy with them. But since you probably haven't had a fire, what is there to be unhappy about?
If you lose your job, you lose your fire insurance but the insurance company is required by law to allow you to pay an exorbitant sum to continue your insurance for 6 months. They will also allow you to buy a cheaper plan, which will replace your house with a tent if it burns down. By the way, the most common way to lose your job is to have a house fire.
If you are self employed or unemployed, you might be able to buy insurance. It will be much more expensive than the group plans that employers get. You will also be disqualified if you have had a fire in the past, smoke, or have been seen with matches or a cigarette lighter.
The way the fire insurance system works is that your insurance company will provide you a list of twenty fire inspectors. You are required to have a fire inspector in order to get access to a fire station. You will call all twenty and their secretaries will tell you that they aren't taking any new clients. You will eventually get taken on by one of them because your mother is one of his clients.
The inspector is paid a flat fee per year per client by the insurance company. He gets paid this amount whether he inspects your home or not. Each time he does inspect your home he might get a small payment from the insurance company, but you need to give him a $20 additional payment. This is to encourage you not to get your home inspected. If your home has apparent problems that need further investigation, the inspector does not get additional payments from the insurance company. If your home needs repairs to prevent a fire, the insurance company will pay for them, but the inspector might get charged a fee for referring you to a contractor. This is to encourage your fire inspector not to refer you to a contractor to perform repairs.
The fire inspector contracts with a fire station to handle emergencies. It might not be the closest fire station to your home. None of the firefighters working at the fire station are employees of the fire station. They are all independent contractors who are paid by the person who has a fire, or by the insurance company. The only employees at the fire station are the 35 people they have on staff to handle billing the 65 insurance companies that they contract with.
If you have a fire, the first thing you do is call your fire inspector. If he agrees that there is a fire, he will call the insurance company to get authorization to call the fire station. Some fraction of the time these authorizations will be denied.
When the fire station gets the call they will also call the insurance company for authorization. When each fireman gets to the house, they will ask for a copy of your insurance card before putting out the fire. If any of the people involved forgets to get authorization, they won't be paid by the insurance company. They will either bill you, or eat the expenses.
Fortunately it was just a minor fire entirely contained in a frying pan. After the fire has been put out, and a contractor has started repairs, you will receive a bunch of bills that have "THIS IS NOT A BILL" written on them. You will get one from each fireman, one from the fire station, one from your fire inspector, one from the contractor who is repairing your house and one from each of the construction workers the contractor has hired. They will come wit
But please, show me a health insurance that actually screens its applicants with a health exam first and uses that to determine coverage premiums?
I think you are confusing the group plan that you get through your employer with an individual insurance plan. Either that or you live in a state where denying coverage based upon preexisting conditions is illegal. Health insurance companies often share data about preexisting conditions and use that information when deciding whether you are a good risk. In most states in the U.S., that is perfectly legal.
.
There are thousands of other tricks used to deny coverage. Some insurance plans will claim that every 6 month plan renewal is the start of a new plan, so no condition covered in the last period will be covered in this period because it is preexisting. If you get cancer you'd better hope you don't live until the next renewal period. There's also retroactive denial because on your application you said your father's name was Al, when in fact his name was Albert. Or you might have forgotten to mention on your medical history that you had an ingrown toenail when you were 12. If you are on a group insurance plan from a small company, your insurer may call your employer and suggest that they terminate you to avoid large rate increases.
.
Anyone who isn't scared shitless about possibly losing their coverage is either fooling themselves or an idiot. But hey, at least we can be happy that all those insurance company profits are resulting in improved technologies for rejecting payments.
These days $450/month is damn cheap health insurance.
Dear Red States:
,
.
We've decided we're leaving. We intend to form our own country, and
we're taking the other Blue States with us. In case you aren't aware,
that includes California , Hawaii , Oregon , Washington , Minnesota
Wisconsin , Michigan , Illinois , and all of the Northeast. We believe this
split will be beneficial to the nation, and especially to the people of the
new country of New California.
To sum up briefly: You get Texas , Oklahoma and all the slave states.
We get stem cell research and the best beaches. We get the Statue of
Liberty . You get Dollywood. We get Intel and Microsoft. You get
WorldCom. We get Harvard. You get Ole' Miss. We get 85 percent of
America 's venture capital and entrepreneurs. You get Alabama . We get
two-thirds of the tax revenue and two-thirds of the gross national product;
you get to make the red states pay their fair share.
Since our aggregate divorce rate is 22 percent lower than the Christian Coalition's,
we get a bunch of happy families. Please be aware that Nuevo California will
be pro-choice and anti-war, and we're going to want all our citizens back from Iraq at
once. If you need people to fight, ask your evangelicals. With the Blue States in
hand, we will have firm control of 80 percent of the country's fresh water,
more than 90 percent of the pineapple and lettuce, 92 percent of the nation's
fresh fruit, 95 percent of America's quality wines (you can serve French wines at state
dinners), 90 percent of all cheese, 90 percent of the high tech industry, most of the
U.S. low-sulfur coal, all living redwoods, sequoias and condors, all the Ivy and
Seven Sister schools plus Stanford, Cal Tech and MIT.
With the Red States, on the other hand, you will have to cope with 88
percent of all obese Americans (and their projected health care
costs), 92 percent of all U.S. mosquitoes, nearly 100 percent of the
tornadoes, 90 percent of the hurricanes, 99 percent of all Southern
Baptists, virtually 100 percent of all televangelists, Rush Limbaugh,
Bob Jones University, Clemson and the University of Georgia.
We get Hollywood and Yosemite, thank you.
Additionally, 38 percent of those in the Red states believe Jonah was
actually swallowed by a whale, 62 percent believe life is sacred
unless we're discussing the death penalty or gun laws, 44 percent say
that evolution is only a theory, 53 percent that Saddam was involved
in 9/11 and 61 percent of you crazy bastards believe you are people
with higher morals then we lefties.
Finally, we're taking the good pot, too. You can have that dirt weed
they grow in Mexico
Peace out,
Blue States
I don't live in the Ghetto, but are there really grocery stores that don't have a produce section?
That's not the problem. The problem is that there aren't any grocery stores in the parts of town where the poor people live.
.
Safeway stores in South Oakland
Maybe if someone does their shopping only at some corner convenience store instead of going a few extra miles to a real grocery store, but that's true of anywhere.
How do you get those few extra miles? You're a parent with two children under age five. You don't have a car. Are you going to get on the bus and take them to a grocery store with you and hope you can get them and several bags of groceries back home with you? Or are you going to buy a frozen pizza and some Gatorade from the liquor store at the corner?
Anyone who calls the Democratic party the "Democrat party" gets an automatic foe marking. Anyone who calls the Republican party the "Republic party" gets the same thing.
I tried to play my mp3's with TeX, and it didn't work! That's a bug and I'm going to sue!
A business relationship does not require money to change hands. I suspect that like contracts all that is required is that both parties receive some sort of "consideration", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consideration [wikipedia.org]. Consideration is obvious for the user(s), they get the software, but consideration for the author(s) could be quite varied. Passing along the author's work (as the GPL requires), reporting bugs back to the author, mere use of the software enhancing the author's standing in a community (or maybe just stroking the ego), ... I'm sure a real lawyer could get quite creative, as they have successfully done with consideration under contract law. Unless of course the legislation gives OSS authors a special status which they currently do not have.
These is no contract involved in using software provided under the GPL. The GPL only covers distribution, not use. If no consideration was provided to the author from the end user, no business relationship exists. A distributor of GPL based software has a contract with the author, but that contract only involves distribution, not use of the software. Since that contract states pretty clearly that the software is provided for distribution only if the distributor disclaims that it is fit for any specific purpose the author is pretty much covered against legal action. The distributor, on the other hand, if they don't disclaim warranty they can be held accountable by both the user of the software, and by the author for failure to follow the licensing terms. IANAL, so this ain't legal advice.
Technically, the GPL allows me to just forward the URL where I got the source in this particular instance (clause 3c) but I forgot at the time, which is rather my point
And for the Nth time you are wrong. Clause 3c only allows you to do that in the case where you are redistributing a binary provided to you with a source code offer.
.
You compiled this code so you needed to choose 3a (provide the source with the binary) or 3b (provide an offer to give any third party the source used to create this binary.) Since you probably didn't archive the code you used to build the binary, that leaves only clause 3a. In other words, always provide the source code with the binary!
Your understanding is quite wrong.... Your options are a) distribute source code with the binary. b) distribute source code to anyone who asks on a medium used for commonly used for software exchange at no more than your marginal cost. c) If you are non-commercial and redistributing a pre-compiled binary, you can just point at the source code at the site where you downloaded the binary.
.
Under option b, the only things that count as common these days would be CD-ROM, DVD, or over the net. So cost would be, cost of a CD blank, cost of a DVD blank, or free (since there are so many free source code hosting sites.)
GPL v2.
.
After so long how can people still get this wrong.
You haven't actually read a commercial license recently, have you?
"You have the right to use this program on one machine using this specific operating system. You may not run this program on a virtual machine. You may not run this program under a debugger. You may not attempt to disassemble this program. You may not run this program under a remote connection. You may not benchmark this program. You may not publish any reviews of this program without approval. You may not run any third party program that accesses any internal APIs contained in this program. You may not run any program which attempts to communicate to this program on any interfaces. You may not attempt to modify this program. We cannot be held responsible if this program kills all of the first born sons of your community."
I don't understand the male obsession with 20 year olds. They don't know shit!
If you're disappointing with this year's model you can try next year's. The thing about 20 year olds is they keep making more.
I can understand them wanting to charge for the use of entire articles in commercial databases or such, but I can't imagine a situation in which you would want to use "more than four consecutive words" (but less than entire articles) for anything that wouldn't be covered by fair use anyway.
It's worse than that. It's dangerous for anyone ever to use this tool. By using this tool and paying AP for a license to use N words, you might be acknowledging that you believe that any bit of text N words or greater is not covered by fair use. It's better to get wrongly sued for a fair use than to give up fair use entirely.
Exactly!. Why do they insist it needs de-orbiting in 2016? This seems to be the ultimate stupidity! (Sell it to Hilton as the ultimate (for now) tourist destination!)
Please explain how you expect Hilton to keep it in orbit without a means to boost it....