I assumed that I had just missed this from a while ago!
You (and SlashDot) did. The news page has this in the 2000-02-23 update:
You might wonder why I haven't put up any binaries for 0.92.0. The reason is that I'm still having trouble with Fraunhofer/Thomson and things are starting to heat up. Since their complaint is that I'm distributing products using their patented technology and they now are threatening to take me to court if I don't stop, I've decided to remove the binaries from my homepage.
I will remove the binaries tomorrow, but you can rest assure that this is not the end of BladeEnc. I will place all the necessary details on these pages in a few days, so please don't mail me asking for details yet, I'll be busy writing together a lengthy piece explaining the situation, what I plan to do and what you can do to help.
I always find it at least peculiar, if not downright weird, that the Internet generation feels that it's somehow your RIGHT to be anonymous in this world; because it isn't, and it never has been.
The United States Supreme Court disagrees with you. The Court ruled in Talley v. California (1960), and reiterated in McIntyre v. Ohio (1995), that the First Amendment protects the right to anonymity. I think that the first ruling was well in advance of the "Internet generation".
First, attacking the author is not a valid way to attack an argument. The arguments in the article shouldbe considered independently of the author. (An ad hominem logical fallacy, if you want the details.) Of course, that is exactly what Mr Meyer did - he declared Eric Raymond's views on guns (and, by extension, himself) to be "repugnant", then turned around and criticized free software because Eric Raymond is associated with it. And that after criticizing the FSF for their "absence of rational justification for the extremist view"!
How do you spell Hall's name? ... According the article, it's option three, John with an 'H' and 'maddog' like a computer person's login name, all lowercase with no spaces.3.John 'maddog' Hall
Go back and read the article. His name/nickname is in the second paragraph - Jon "maddog" Hall, and in the eighth paragraph:
although he notes that he is a different person from the John Hall at VA Linux whose stock wealth once topped a billion dollars.
How is he going to fork the hardware and bandwidth?
I thought that this was about open source/free software, not open hardware or free bandwidth. There are costs involved in forking a project - in this case the costs may include setting up a competing service. OTOH, depending upon how the fork is done, the forked source might even be hosted on Source Forge itself, and a forked documentation project could certainly live there.
Some of the problems described are far from unique to Source Forge, but one of the beauties of the open source and free software models is that if you don't like how the project is being run, and you care to do more than bitch, you can fork the project. Two of the most notable forks of free software forked from the temple of the high priest, and for reasons which included some of the complaints listed here. egcs forked from gcc in part because of the slow (or nonexistient) release cycle of gcc, and XEmacs forked from Emacs because Lucid couldn't cooperate with RMS.
As for documentation, in general, documentation sucks because developers hate writing documentation. There are exceptions, but they are no more common in the world of open source than in the world of closed source.
If you don't like how the Source Forge software is being developed, and the differences are irreconcilable, fork it. If you don't like how the Source Forge documentation is being maintained, and the differences are irreconcilable, fork it. If you're right, your project will flourish.
It was my understanding that MP3.com's service allowed a user access to only his/her own legally purchased music. That is, if I uploaded Mozart and you uploaded Beethoven, I could listen to my Mozart over the net, from anywhere in the world.... That's not like your freehtmlbooks.com example.
Users of my.mp3.com didn't upload their own mp3s, but inserted a CD into their computer from which a checksum was made which "proved" that they posessed the CD, and mp3 gave them access to the music. That's the same as my freehtmlbooks.com example, where the copyright page of the book takes the place of the checksum (this isn't so far-fetched - O'Reilly uses the title page for proving eligibility to "upgrade" their books. Although you have to send them the page, you can certainly resell the remaining book). Just like you can borrow a book, you can borrow a CD, so the CD checksum proved nothing more than a photocopied copyright page would.
It's more the equivalent of e-mailing something to yourself, so you can pick it up in another real-world location.
Except that you're not sending the music, you're just getting access to a repository where the music is stored. The problem, legally, is that mp3.com doesn't have the right to permit access to the repostitory.
My Mp3 Storage is closer to what you're thinking my.mp3.com is, as you have to upload the mp3s that you want to make available. I'm surprised that RIAA hasn't gone after them yet, though, as they encourage you to share and trade the mp3s.
This is why I don't understand the ruling; there doesn't appear to be any copyright violation, really. I'm allowed to make a copy of a CD for my own use.
Correct. You are allowed to make a copy for your use. However, mp3.com is not allowed to make a copy for your use.
The way Rakoff explains it, when you purchase a CD or other recording, you purchase the rights to just that copy of the IP. It means that mp3 players and converting music to mp3s are pretty much illegal, unless the record labels and artists themselves give explicit permission otherwise, whether through a blanket authorization or case-by-case. I'd be interested if anybody who studys IP case law can cite other cases where this view of IP is contradicted.
Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417 (1984) covers the use of VCRs for time shifting. However, as RealNetworks noted in their case versus Streambox, Sony covers personal copying, like what you are discussing, whereas the mp3.com case covers commercial copying. I'm not sure if the Diamond Rio case touched upon the DMCA or the personal use question.
Agreed. In this case, the good guys were in the wrong (legally, at least). I don't think that many people would argue that if freehtmlbooks.com[1] offered you access to books on-line which they had scanned in if you send them a scanned image of the copyright page, that freehtmlbooks.com would be violating copyright law, and that was, essentially, what mp3.com did. It is unfortunate that music publishers don't want to make music available in mp3 format (like Baen offers some of its new books in html format), but the answer is to refuse to purchase new music from them.
[1] Damn, it was hard to find a reasonable electronic book domain name that wasn't actually registered.;)
It's very cool that Netpliance wants to work with us, and if I had extra money, I might buy a $600 device just to affirm that. But realistically, how many of you would really buy one of these at a price allowing them to make a profit?
If the total price was $500-$600, I wouldn't buy one - I'd buy two. But I see your point - I'm not sure how much of the market there would be for what I want. The only changes that I'd want would be to have a 100baseT controller, and purchase options to increase the base memory and to preload net-bootable OSes on the flash drive rather than the ISP-connecting QNX.
Beirne said: "Now, I've marketed a lot of things that people said were stupid--Netscape was one of them."
Yikes! Clark and Barksdale made out ok fer trying a "stupid idea".
Um, that was the point. Just because the "experts" say that something is "stupid", doesn't mean that it isn't worth investing in. Of course, that doesn't automatically make it worth investing in either.
(3) With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea. It is hard to be sure where they are going to land, and it could be dangerous sitting under them as they fly overhead.
If Microsoft drops below $100 it will be in a classic bear market [20% off it's highs]
Been there, done that. Check out Microsoft's performance over the past quarter. Microsoft has already spent most of February and March under $100, and closed at 89 3/8 on 29 Feb - that's a 25% drop from the high of 119 15/16. I don't seem to recall the world ending when that happened.
I'll admit to never having seen a bear market, but I certainly expect to see one in the near future - it's just been far too long since the last one, and Alan Greenspan seems bound and determined to create one. Dubya must be secretly hoping for one this summer - it would be a nasty thing for Algore to have to campaign around.
I'm surprised that noone has mentioned that, once again, Red Hat is shipping a kernel version that doesn't really exist. I don't have any objections to Red Hat adding code to the kernel (so long as the chnages are open source), but they shouldn't be declaring their own kernel versions.
People who are trying to decide whether to rely on Linux or BSD should note that the two commercial BSD-based companies are unifying at the same time that the Linux market is being divided up into smaller and smaller fragments.
It's a shame that Mr Bruce felt the need to take a gratuitous shot at the Linux community. Perhaps he should take a look at it in a different fashion:
People who are trying to decide whether to rely on Linux or BSD should note that the two commercial BSD-based companies are merging in a desperate attempt to survive at the same time that an expanding Linux market is feeding the growth of new participants.
Is that fair? No, but Mr Bruce's comment isn't any fairer. I wonder if it isn't more sour grapes over the decline in the importance of Slackware than anything else.
I purchased Civilization: Call to Power for Linux as soon as it hit the shelves at my local CompUSA, but I soon became discouraged over the delays between the Activision patches and your own. Specifically, while I didn't expect the Linux patch at the same time as the Windows patch, it seemed to be a bit extreme to take an 5 months to port the 1.2 patch that only took Activision 4 months to develop. What are you doing to reduce these lags?
In a related question, are you going to be porting Civilization: Call to Power II, and, if so, what are you doing to reduce the lag time between the Windows and Linux versions?
For example, I bet it would still be OK for a Hotline Psychic Friend to take your credit card, and then (now that they are a creditor, i.e. not a "third party")
No, they wouldn't be a creditor unless they are extending you credit, like billing you in installments rather than all at once.
You don't need a patent in order to 'defend' against patent lawsuits. All you have to do is properly document (date,witness,etc) your invention and you have a very strong claim against anyone who tries to patent the same invention in the future.
I'm not a lawyer, but I'm guessing that you're not one either, given your impression that having documented prior art is a "very strong claim". Unfortunately, that isn't the case, as a patent has a presumed to be valid, and you have to prove otheriwse. A competing, previously issued patent is a very strong claim. Documented prior art is not, at least it doesn't seem to be, from the outside of the legal profession looking in.
Except for Windows NT, they didn't list _any_ NOS which was not reviewed in the article. They didn't list SUSE, TurboLinux, Debian, Mandrake, CorelLinux, OpenLinux, NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, DG-UX, OpenVMS,... because they weren't reviewed.
DVD's are a popular new format for the distribution and playback of motion pictures. The DVD format is controlled by a standards organization known as the DVD Consortium. To ensure and safeguard against unlawful duplication, the content has been encrypted;
And you were doing so good there.;( You chouldn't have perpetuated the myth of the DVD Consortium, that encrypting the content prevents the encrypted content from being duplicated. The encrypted content can be copied to your heart's content (if you have the necessary equipment to burn DVDs, or if you have a massive amount of disk space). What encrypting the content, and attacking anyone who defeats the encryption, protects is the cartel of DVD player manufacturers, and the fees they can charge anyone who wishes to join the cartel.
Slashdot Mirror
I assumed that I had just missed this from a while ago!
You (and SlashDot) did. The news page has this in the 2000-02-23 update:
You might wonder why I haven't put up any binaries for 0.92.0. The reason is that I'm still having trouble with Fraunhofer/Thomson and things are starting to heat up. Since their complaint is that I'm distributing products using their patented technology and they now are threatening to take me to court if I don't stop, I've decided to remove the binaries from my homepage.
I will remove the binaries tomorrow, but you can rest assure that this is not the end of BladeEnc. I will place all the necessary details on these pages in a few days, so please don't mail me asking for details yet, I'll be busy writing together a lengthy piece explaining the situation, what I plan to do and what you can do to help.
why in the world France???
;)
They don't like to be reminded of their battle cry.
I always find it at least peculiar, if not downright weird, that the Internet generation feels that it's somehow your RIGHT to be anonymous in this world; because it isn't, and it never has been.
The United States Supreme Court disagrees with you. The Court ruled in Talley v. California (1960), and reiterated in McIntyre v. Ohio (1995), that the First Amendment protects the right to anonymity. I think that the first ruling was well in advance of the "Internet generation".
One couldn't just walk into Egghead Software and pick up a copy of OS/2.
Funny, ISTR doing just that. "OS/2 for Windows", I believe it was called.
First, attacking the author is not a valid way to attack an argument. The arguments in the article shouldbe considered independently of the author. (An ad hominem logical fallacy, if you want the details.)
Of course, that is exactly what Mr Meyer did - he declared Eric Raymond's views on guns (and, by extension, himself) to be "repugnant", then turned around and criticized free software because Eric Raymond is associated with it. And that after criticizing the FSF for their "absence of rational justification for the extremist view"!
How do you spell Hall's name?
...
According the article, it's option three, John with an 'H' and 'maddog' like a computer person's login name, all lowercase with no spaces.3.John 'maddog' Hall
Go back and read the article. His name/nickname is in the second paragraph - Jon "maddog" Hall, and in the eighth paragraph:
although he notes that he is a different person from the John Hall at VA Linux whose stock wealth once topped a billion dollars.
How is he going to fork the hardware and bandwidth?
I thought that this was about open source/free software, not open hardware or free bandwidth. There are costs involved in forking a project - in this case the costs may include setting up a competing service. OTOH, depending upon how the fork is done, the forked source might even be hosted on Source Forge itself, and a forked documentation project could certainly live there.
Some of the problems described are far from unique to Source Forge, but one of the beauties of the open source and free software models is that if you don't like how the project is being run, and you care to do more than bitch, you can fork the project. Two of the most notable forks of free software forked from the temple of the high priest, and for reasons which included some of the complaints listed here. egcs forked from gcc in part because of the slow (or nonexistient) release cycle of gcc, and XEmacs forked from Emacs because Lucid couldn't cooperate with RMS.
As for documentation, in general, documentation sucks because developers hate writing documentation. There are exceptions, but they are no more common in the world of open source than in the world of closed source.
If you don't like how the Source Forge software is being developed, and the differences are irreconcilable, fork it. If you don't like how the Source Forge documentation is being maintained, and the differences are irreconcilable, fork it. If you're right, your project will flourish.
It was my understanding that MP3.com's service allowed a user access to only his/her own legally purchased music. That is, if I uploaded Mozart and you uploaded Beethoven, I could listen to my Mozart over the net, from anywhere in the world. ...
That's not like your freehtmlbooks.com example.
Users of my.mp3.com didn't upload their own mp3s, but inserted a CD into their computer from which a checksum was made which "proved" that they posessed the CD, and mp3 gave them access to the music. That's the same as my freehtmlbooks.com example, where the copyright page of the book takes the place of the checksum (this isn't so far-fetched - O'Reilly uses the title page for proving eligibility to "upgrade" their books. Although you have to send them the page, you can certainly resell the remaining book). Just like you can borrow a book, you can borrow a CD, so the CD checksum proved nothing more than a photocopied copyright page would.
It's more the equivalent of e-mailing something to yourself, so you can pick it up in another real-world location.
Except that you're not sending the music, you're just getting access to a repository where the music is stored. The problem, legally, is that mp3.com doesn't have the right to permit access to the repostitory.
My Mp3 Storage is closer to what you're thinking my.mp3.com is, as you have to upload the mp3s that you want to make available. I'm surprised that RIAA hasn't gone after them yet, though, as they encourage you to share and trade the mp3s.
This is why I don't understand the ruling; there doesn't appear to be any copyright violation, really. I'm allowed to make a copy of a CD for my own use.
Correct. You are allowed to make a copy for your use. However, mp3.com is not allowed to make a copy for your use.
The way Rakoff explains it, when you purchase a CD or other recording, you purchase the rights to just that copy of the IP. It means that mp3 players and converting music to mp3s are pretty much illegal, unless the record labels and artists themselves give explicit permission otherwise, whether through a blanket authorization or case-by-case. I'd be interested if anybody who studys IP case law can cite other cases where this view of IP is contradicted.
Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417 (1984) covers the use of VCRs for time shifting. However, as RealNetworks noted in their case versus Streambox, Sony covers personal copying, like what you are discussing, whereas the mp3.com case covers commercial copying. I'm not sure if the Diamond Rio case touched upon the DMCA or the personal use question.
A reasonable ruling.
;)
Agreed. In this case, the good guys were in the wrong (legally, at least). I don't think that many people would argue that if freehtmlbooks.com[1] offered you access to books on-line which they had scanned in if you send them a scanned image of the copyright page, that freehtmlbooks.com would be violating copyright law, and that was, essentially, what mp3.com did. It is unfortunate that music publishers don't want to make music available in mp3 format (like Baen offers some of its new books in html format), but the answer is to refuse to purchase new music from them.
[1] Damn, it was hard to find a reasonable electronic book domain name that wasn't actually registered.
It's very cool that Netpliance wants to work with us, and if I had extra money, I might buy a $600 device just to affirm that. But realistically, how many of you would really buy one of these at a price allowing them to make a profit?
If the total price was $500-$600, I wouldn't buy one - I'd buy two. But I see your point - I'm not sure how much of the market there would be for what I want. The only changes that I'd want would be to have a 100baseT controller, and purchase options to increase the base memory and to preload net-bootable OSes on the flash drive rather than the ISP-connecting QNX.
Beirne said: "Now, I've marketed a lot of things that people said were stupid--Netscape was one of them."
Yikes! Clark and Barksdale made out ok fer trying a "stupid idea".
Um, that was the point. Just because the "experts" say that something is "stupid", doesn't mean that it isn't worth investing in. Of course, that doesn't automatically make it worth investing in either.
BTW: Does anyone know when pigs will fly? (c:
According to RFC 1925:
(3) With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea. It is hard to be sure where they are going to land, and it could be dangerous sitting under them as they fly overhead.
If Microsoft drops below $100 it will be in a classic bear market [20% off it's highs]
Been there, done that. Check out Microsoft's performance over the past quarter. Microsoft has already spent most of February and March under $100, and closed at 89 3/8 on 29 Feb - that's a 25% drop from the high of 119 15/16. I don't seem to recall the world ending when that happened.
I'll admit to never having seen a bear market, but I certainly expect to see one in the near future - it's just been far too long since the last one, and Alan Greenspan seems bound and determined to create one. Dubya must be secretly hoping for one this summer - it would be a nasty thing for Algore to have to campaign around.
Aaaaaargh! They had "2.2.15" in the beta, but switched to the real 2.2.14 in the final. Aaaaaargh!
I'm surprised that noone has mentioned that, once again, Red Hat is shipping a kernel version that doesn't really exist. I don't have any objections to Red Hat adding code to the kernel (so long as the chnages are open source), but they shouldn't be declaring their own kernel versions.
People who are trying to decide whether to rely on Linux or BSD should note that the two commercial BSD-based companies are unifying at the same time that the Linux market is being divided up into smaller and smaller fragments.
It's a shame that Mr Bruce felt the need to take a gratuitous shot at the Linux community. Perhaps he should take a look at it in a different fashion:
People who are trying to decide whether to rely on Linux or BSD should note that the two commercial BSD-based companies are merging in a desperate attempt to survive at the same time that an expanding Linux market is feeding the growth of new participants.
Is that fair? No, but Mr Bruce's comment isn't any fairer. I wonder if it isn't more sour grapes over the decline in the importance of Slackware than anything else.
"net" was traditionally intended for use by network service providers.
Yes, and I've only seen one ISP (UUNet) which actually uses that as their primary address.
How about Jump.Net or Texas.Net?
I purchased Civilization: Call to Power for Linux as soon as it hit the shelves at my local CompUSA, but I soon became discouraged over the delays between the Activision patches and your own. Specifically, while I didn't expect the Linux patch at the same time as the Windows patch, it seemed to be a bit extreme to take an 5 months to port the 1.2 patch that only took Activision 4 months to develop. What are you doing to reduce these lags?
In a related question, are you going to be porting Civilization: Call to Power II, and, if so, what are you doing to reduce the lag time between the Windows and Linux versions?
For example, I bet it would still be OK for a Hotline Psychic Friend to take your credit card, and then (now that they are a creditor, i.e. not a "third party")
No, they wouldn't be a creditor unless they are extending you credit, like billing you in installments rather than all at once.
You don't need a patent in order to 'defend' against patent lawsuits. All you have to do is properly document (date,witness,etc) your invention and you have a very strong claim against anyone who tries to patent the same invention in the future.
I'm not a lawyer, but I'm guessing that you're not one either, given your impression that having documented prior art is a "very strong claim". Unfortunately, that isn't the case, as a patent has a presumed to be valid, and you have to prove otheriwse. A competing, previously issued patent is a very strong claim. Documented prior art is not, at least it doesn't seem to be, from the outside of the legal profession looking in.
The general consensus seems to be that NFS on Linux still sucks badly (security problems).
//. SMB may have its problems, but its better on security than NFS. Trusting clients for security is a bad idea.
s/on Linux
Except for Windows NT, they didn't list _any_ NOS which was not reviewed in the article. They didn't list SUSE, TurboLinux, Debian, Mandrake, CorelLinux, OpenLinux, NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, DG-UX, OpenVMS, ... because they weren't reviewed.
DVD's are a popular new format for the distribution and playback of motion pictures. The DVD format is controlled by a standards organization known as the DVD Consortium. To ensure and safeguard against unlawful duplication, the content has been encrypted;
;( You chouldn't have perpetuated the myth of the DVD Consortium, that encrypting the content prevents the encrypted content from being duplicated. The encrypted content can be copied to your heart's content (if you have the necessary equipment to burn DVDs, or if you have a massive amount of disk space). What encrypting the content, and attacking anyone who defeats the encryption, protects is the cartel of DVD player manufacturers, and the fees they can charge anyone who wishes to join the cartel.
And you were doing so good there.