The BSD license doesn't have an explicit patent grant. Lawyers argue that it has an implicit license grant, because no sensible person would give with the copyright hand and take away with the patent hand. THe trouble with implicit terms in a license is that you have to rely on the judge having gotten out on the right side of the bed.
Also, Rishab Ayer Ghosh (an OSI board member) noticed that the Ms-PL requires that source distributions be licensed under the Ms-PL, which the BSD doesn't.
The MPL is a long, complicated license. The Ms-RL is one page. ONE PAGE. IMHO, that's its biggest contribution: an ordinary developer can read it and understand its terms. Can't shake a stick at that. Of course, they also made it not a reusable license, and there may be other problems, so we definitely have more negotiating to do with Microsoft. -russ
So... tell me, does an open door mean that you can only see through the door? That it's not possible to actually pass through the door? Open Source means what most people think it means, and most people think that you can not only see the source, but modify it and share it. You keep using hthat word. I do not think it means what you think it means. -russ
What did I say?? Weren't you paying attention?? I said "We only have the authority that people give us." If we're nutters, then so is just about everybody else. But if you think that everybody else needs psychiatric treatment, chances are that it's YOU who is insane. GASP! What's that over there?
Also, I said that any authoritative follow-up MUST have an obligatory reference to The Princess Bride, so clearly not even you believe your own posting. -russ
I really am weary of anything that Microsoft does now.
IMHO, you are correct to not trust Microsoft. On the other hand, Microsoft is a big company with lots of conflicting internal opinions. If we constantly expect Microsoft to be evil, they WILL be evil. If we support open source advocates inside Microsoft, they will not have their asses kicked with "We told you those open source advocates were nutjobs; they can't be trusted."
If you extend an olive branch and it gets bitten off, you know you acted too soon. We'll see what happens. -russ
They don't actually have any authority over what is or isn't open source.
We only have the authority that people grant us. A few nutcases think that open source shouldn't mean anything, or that it should mean everything, or only the things THEY say it means. Enough people trust us to do the right thing that they're willing to rely on our definition of open source. You're welcome to try to convince them that they're wrong, but in my book, you're one of the aforementioned nutcases. Anybody wanna peanut? -russ p.s. any reply must have an obligatory Princess Bride reference to be considered authoritative.
If they submit their licenses for approval, please express this opinion on the license-discuss mailing list. Without meaning to differ with you myself, I would note that the earlier/. discussion of this pointed to several terms of the GPL which require the same action. Please remember that terms may have different text, but if they require the same actions, they don't conflict. -russ
They already use the GPL. Yes, they're starting to learn. IBM used to be pretty evil, in their time. I noticed that I had forgiven when I looked around my office and saw four IBM PCs of one stripe or another. Now, IBM is one of the biggest promoters of open source. Yeay for them, and maybe yeay for Microsoft in the future. -russ
That's just not going to happen. We need to defend the trademark that we license to people whose software is using an approved license. In order to do that, we can't let people use the trademark without approval. If we were to withdraw approval (NOT a possibility!) we would end up with people innocently misusing the trademark. It wouldn't be their fault; it would be our fault. We would be diluting our own trademark. Not a happy-making situation to be in, so we're not going to withdraw approval.
Instead, the current plan is to provide advice to developers when they want to pick a license. I expect that we will have three lists: Recommended, Recommended Specialty, and Not Recommended. Typical possible ranking: Recommended: GPL, Recommended Specialty: NOSA, Not Recommended: any license of the form "Copyright (C) Foo Bar, Inc., purveyors of find liquor-vending software."
SCO is losing business and not gaining any more business. Why would Marten take the chance of alienating his user base for the sake of a few more bucks from SCO, risking his entire business? It's not like the database field isn't competitive. -russ
But you don't understand! You're a customer of theirs, sure, but YOU ARE AN UNETHICAL THIEF even though you just paid them money. You will now give the movie to all of your so-called "friends" who (unlike you) are too cheap to buy the movie for YOU. So even though you are a source of income to them, they hate you. Maybe the conflict will drive them sane?? One can only hope. -russ
You're right that we probably won't run out of oil... but supply is no longer meeting demand and it'll never again catch up,
But that's just my point: supply *will* meet demand, and at some combination of demand, price, and supply, the supply will exceed the demand at a given price. The two things you said above simply cannot be true at the same time. You're neglecting the effect of price on both supply and demand. No one of them is an independent variable.
Jared Diamond's new book "Collapse"
Yesbut all of his examples involved deforestation and erosion. Marginal Revolution puts him in his proper place of Yet Another Environmental Alarmist Who Has Been Proven Wrong. Of course, the beauty of saying "We're all gonna die!!!!" is that the prediction cannot be falsified since we're not dead yet, and if any kind of disaster is averted, the claimant can say "But if would have died if I hadn't raised the alarm!!!!".
In it he shows that we've/not/ always managed in the past.
All of your ancestors survived long enough to reproduce. You do them an injustice!
we don't just have that one crisis... we have many.
Sorry. Not impressed. We've always had people willing to claim that we're facing a crisis or two or three. Remember during the Cold War when the Russians were going to destroy the world at the push of a button? And we were taught to hide under our desks ("duck and cover")? We are (were) all gonna die!!!!! It's not a wolf; there's no need to cry out about it.
We will never run out of oil because we'll switch to something else first. What will that be? I have no idea but I know that it will be better than oil, just as oil has been better than horsepower. Why am I so confident? Because we managed to make the transition from horses to cars without the end of the world happening. I'll bet that if you go do the research, you'll find predictions of how human society would crash because there simply wasn't enough space to grow the hay to feed all the horses needed to sustain society. -russ
Pessimism sells better. Look at all the copies of "The Great Depression of 1990" that Ravi Batra sold. Look at how many copies of "The State of The Earth" that have been sold compared to "The Skeptical Environmentalist". -russ
Don't think "hacker geek" as the market for this product. Think "person with a real life who just wants to USE their computer, not play with it." -russ
I don't see any overriding moral arguments that a recipient of a document shouldn't copy it. The publisher's property is not harmed by my copying. His copy is still perfectly fine. Clearly the question whose answer needs to be discovered (that is: what is the natural law of copyright) is "To what extent are thoughts still your property once you give them to someone else?"
Oh? So why is the natural law against murder not a priori correct? If you think it's wrong, does that mean I can murder you with no natural consequences? -russ
Do you have a better explanation for why people don't respect copyright anymore? Calling my explanation "bullshit" without coming up with a better explanation is intellectual masturbation.
True. And ten minutes later, the Indians would set up their own root zone with a copy of the official root, with.in fixed, and another ten minutes after that all the Indian nameservers would be reconfigured with the new root.
Well, I exaggerate the time scale, but one and only one thing keeps ICANN in charge: the fact that they are not completely evil nor completely incompetent. Were they to do something evil such as you mention, they would lose their control over the net. Their control is based solely on being less of a pain in the ass than would be changing everybody's root zone. THAT'S IT.
This whole "Whoever controls the root controls the Internet" thing is complete and total bullshit. No better word for it: bullshit. -russ
Customers are free to purchase software which comes with no disclaimer of warranty. Companies are free to warrant their software. Neither party is interested in doing that. You tell me why, since you think it's such a great idea but the parties involved don't. -russ
The problem here is that nobody sees the RIAA as breaking the rules. They've managed to break the copyright rules (by which I mean the natural law, not the legislated law) by ensuring that copyright never expires. Copyright is inherently a bargain between the publishers of copyrighted works and the recipients of copyrighted works. The publishers promise to eventually put the work into the public domain, and the recipients promise not to copy. That's copyright *natural* law. Whenever legislated law doesn't match natural law, you see a massive disrespect for legislated law.
Slashdot Mirror
The BSD license doesn't have an explicit patent grant. Lawyers argue that it has an implicit license grant, because no sensible person would give with the copyright hand and take away with the patent hand. THe trouble with implicit terms in a license is that you have to rely on the judge having gotten out on the right side of the bed.
Also, Rishab Ayer Ghosh (an OSI board member) noticed that the Ms-PL requires that source distributions be licensed under the Ms-PL, which the BSD doesn't.
The MPL is a long, complicated license. The Ms-RL is one page. ONE PAGE. IMHO, that's its biggest contribution: an ordinary developer can read it and understand its terms. Can't shake a stick at that. Of course, they also made it not a reusable license, and there may be other problems, so we definitely have more negotiating to do with Microsoft.
-russ
So ... tell me, does an open door mean that you can only see through the door? That it's not possible to actually pass through the door? Open Source means what most people think it means, and most people think that you can not only see the source, but modify it and share it. You keep using hthat word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
-russ
What did I say?? Weren't you paying attention?? I said "We only have the authority that people give us." If we're nutters, then so is just about everybody else. But if you think that everybody else needs psychiatric treatment, chances are that it's YOU who is insane. GASP! What's that over there?
Also, I said that any authoritative follow-up MUST have an obligatory reference to The Princess Bride, so clearly not even you believe your own posting.
-russ
I really am weary of anything that Microsoft does now.
IMHO, you are correct to not trust Microsoft. On the other hand, Microsoft is a big company with lots of conflicting internal opinions. If we constantly expect Microsoft to be evil, they WILL be evil. If we support open source advocates inside Microsoft, they will not have their asses kicked with "We told you those open source advocates were nutjobs; they can't be trusted."
If you extend an olive branch and it gets bitten off, you know you acted too soon. We'll see what happens.
-russ
They don't actually have any authority over what is or isn't open source.
We only have the authority that people grant us. A few nutcases think that open source shouldn't mean anything, or that it should mean everything, or only the things THEY say it means. Enough people trust us to do the right thing that they're willing to rely on our definition of open source. You're welcome to try to convince them that they're wrong, but in my book, you're one of the aforementioned nutcases. Anybody wanna peanut?
-russ
p.s. any reply must have an obligatory Princess Bride reference to be considered authoritative.
If they submit their licenses for approval, please express this opinion on the license-discuss mailing list. Without meaning to differ with you myself, I would note that the earlier /. discussion of this pointed to several terms of the GPL which require the same action. Please remember that terms may have different text, but if they require the same actions, they don't conflict.
-russ
They already use the GPL. Yes, they're starting to learn. IBM used to be pretty evil, in their time. I noticed that I had forgiven when I looked around my office and saw four IBM PCs of one stripe or another. Now, IBM is one of the biggest promoters of open source. Yeay for them, and maybe yeay for Microsoft in the future.
-russ
That's just not going to happen. We need to defend the trademark that we license to people whose software is using an approved license. In order to do that, we can't let people use the trademark without approval. If we were to withdraw approval (NOT a possibility!) we would end up with people innocently misusing the trademark. It wouldn't be their fault; it would be our fault. We would be diluting our own trademark. Not a happy-making situation to be in, so we're not going to withdraw approval.
Instead, the current plan is to provide advice to developers when they want to pick a license. I expect that we will have three lists: Recommended, Recommended Specialty, and Not Recommended. Typical possible ranking: Recommended: GPL, Recommended Specialty: NOSA, Not Recommended: any license of the form "Copyright (C) Foo Bar, Inc., purveyors of find liquor-vending software."
Danese Cooper's blog entry is our official statement on this matter.
-russ
SCO is losing business and not gaining any more business. Why would Marten take the chance of alienating his user base for the sake of a few more bucks from SCO, risking his entire business? It's not like the database field isn't competitive.
-russ
How are the jails in your country? Comfy, I hope, for your sake.
But you don't understand! You're a customer of theirs, sure, but YOU ARE AN UNETHICAL THIEF even though you just paid them money. You will now give the movie to all of your so-called "friends" who (unlike you) are too cheap to buy the movie for YOU. So even though you are a source of income to them, they hate you. Maybe the conflict will drive them sane?? One can only hope.
-russ
There ought to be a law against calling for more regulation! We need to put some limits into the Constitution on what the Federal Government can do!
You're right that we probably won't run out of oil... but supply is no longer meeting demand and it'll never again catch up,
/not/ always managed in the past.
But that's just my point: supply *will* meet demand, and at some combination of demand, price, and supply, the supply will exceed the demand at a given price. The two things you said above simply cannot be true at the same time. You're neglecting the effect of price on both supply and demand. No one of them is an independent variable.
Jared Diamond's new book "Collapse"
Yesbut all of his examples involved deforestation and erosion. Marginal Revolution puts him in his proper place of Yet Another Environmental Alarmist Who Has Been Proven Wrong. Of course, the beauty of saying "We're all gonna die!!!!" is that the prediction cannot be falsified since we're not dead yet, and if any kind of disaster is averted, the claimant can say "But if would have died if I hadn't raised the alarm!!!!".
In it he shows that we've
All of your ancestors survived long enough to reproduce. You do them an injustice!
we don't just have that one crisis... we have many.
Sorry. Not impressed. We've always had people willing to claim that we're facing a crisis or two or three. Remember during the Cold War when the Russians were going to destroy the world at the push of a button? And we were taught to hide under our desks ("duck and cover")? We are (were) all gonna die!!!!! It's not a wolf; there's no need to cry out about it.
Continued peace? No, WWI and WWII were the aberrations. Peace? Tell that to the people in Cambodia and Rwanda. Oh, wait, you can't; they're dead.
We will never run out of oil because we'll switch to something else first. What will that be? I have no idea but I know that it will be better than oil, just as oil has been better than horsepower. Why am I so confident? Because we managed to make the transition from horses to cars without the end of the world happening. I'll bet that if you go do the research, you'll find predictions of how human society would crash because there simply wasn't enough space to grow the hay to feed all the horses needed to sustain society.
-russ
Pessimism sells better. Look at all the copies of "The Great Depression of 1990" that Ravi Batra sold. Look at how many copies of "The State of The Earth" that have been sold compared to "The Skeptical Environmentalist".
-russ
Don't think "hacker geek" as the market for this product. Think "person with a real life who just wants to USE their computer, not play with it."
-russ
Will I still enjoy Serenity if I've never seen Firefly? Please reply after you've seen the movie so I'll know if I want to see it or not.
I don't see any overriding moral arguments that a recipient of a document shouldn't copy it. The publisher's property is not harmed by my copying. His copy is still perfectly fine. Clearly the question whose answer needs to be discovered (that is: what is the natural law of copyright) is "To what extent are thoughts still your property once you give them to someone else?"
Oh? So why is the natural law against murder not a priori correct? If you think it's wrong, does that mean I can murder you with no natural consequences?
-russ
Do you have a better explanation for why people don't respect copyright anymore? Calling my explanation "bullshit" without coming up with a better explanation is intellectual masturbation.
True. And ten minutes later, the Indians would set up their own root zone with a copy of the official root, with .in fixed, and another ten minutes after that all the Indian nameservers would be reconfigured with the new root.
Well, I exaggerate the time scale, but one and only one thing keeps ICANN in charge: the fact that they are not completely evil nor completely incompetent. Were they to do something evil such as you mention, they would lose their control over the net. Their control is based solely on being less of a pain in the ass than would be changing everybody's root zone. THAT'S IT.
This whole "Whoever controls the root controls the Internet" thing is complete and total bullshit. No better word for it: bullshit.
-russ
Customers are free to purchase software which comes with no disclaimer of warranty. Companies are free to warrant their software. Neither party is interested in doing that. You tell me why, since you think it's such a great idea but the parties involved don't.
-russ
The problem here is that nobody sees the RIAA as breaking the rules. They've managed to break the copyright rules (by which I mean the natural law, not the legislated law) by ensuring that copyright never expires. Copyright is inherently a bargain between the publishers of copyrighted works and the recipients of copyrighted works. The publishers promise to eventually put the work into the public domain, and the recipients promise not to copy. That's copyright *natural* law. Whenever legislated law doesn't match natural law, you see a massive disrespect for legislated law.