I thought that at least the slashdot readers would know the difference between copyrights, trademarks and patents by now.
Patents cover an idea. If it's patented, you can't do it. You can't black-box reverse engineer it. You can't get divine inspiration and get it out of the thin air. You just can't do something that's patented until the patent expires.
Copyrights cover a specific expression of an idea, like source code or prose or poetry. You can do the same thing, as long as you don't copy the original.
Trademarks cover a word/phrase associated with a company/brand. You're not allowed to make software and sell it under the name of Microsoft.
Trademarks are something you need to enforce. Patents and copyrights, on the other hand, can't be lost until they expire.
Dude, you moved between dorms (probably in the same city), a short drive away. I've moved between 6 cities in 4 countries in the last 10 years or so. A desktop doesn't fit into your hand luggage, a laptop does;-)
This drive will be important for laptop users. Currently 60GB on a laptop is considered good, 80GB a luxury. The laptops have displays, processors and RAM to match the desktop computers, but HD capacity is one area where they're severely lacking. It's nice to see that Toshiba is pushing the envelope here.
We are talking about a company modifying already existing software (let's say Linux). The company doesn't own this software, its authors do: Linus, Alan and many others. The company can't change a few lines of code and then claim ownership over Linus' code. And Linus' code comes with the GPL.
And giving someone software qualifies as distribution. Or SCO would be able to sell us Linux and claim that it wasn't giving it to us, but allowing us to use a copy that the company owns, thus refusing to show us the code. What they are actually doing is distribution.
Nothing in the GPL allows an employee to take an internally modified version of GPLd software (modified for proprietary purposes perhaps) and distribute it outside the company (or in any other way) without permission of that person's employer.
The GPL gives you exactly that right. The only thing stopping you would be a contract which strictly prohibits it, and I addressed that. This is why you'd lose your job.
When a company takes a GPL'd program, all their changes automatically fall under the GPL. If you give this code to someone else (whether internal or external, doesn't matter), you are bound by the GPL, and GPL allows this person to redistribute. If you don't like this, don't use GPL'd software. There is nothing in the GPL which prevents the person from redistributing.
That's theft (trade secret, no less), industrial espionage, and just plain UNETHICAL.
Why is it unethical if I release some code which/I/ wrote without asking my employer?
Just because it's GPLd does not mean it's just out there for anyone to do what they want with it.
No. It means that it's just out there for anyone who receives it to do anything which is allowed by the license, in this case the GPL. That's how licenses work.
Now, if that company does decide to distribute this GPLd item outside the company for others to use, then of course it goes with it's source and all the other things spelled out in the GPL.
Sure. But how do you define 'others'? If Siemens, for example, takes a GPL'd program and modifies it, they would be able to distribute this software to half a million of their own employees without ever showing them the source code, just because you choose to define 'distribution' in a certain way.
But the whole point of the GPL is that you can't assign further restrictions on it. If I give you a copy of a program under GPL, you have the right to distribute it. I can't take a copy of Linux, give it to you, and then prohibit you from redistributing it. The same way, if a government official gives a government employee a heap of code under the GPL, this employee can redistribute it because when he received the code, he got it under the provisions of the GPL, so he can also redistribute it under GPL.
Now you can say that it is internal to the corporation/government and that the corporation/government hasn't released it so it can impose further restrictions on GPL software used internally, but that's a very dodgy argument. You can similarly claim that you're working internally within a country and that you don't have to give the source to your customers within the same country because it's all 'internal'.
What you can do is have a clause in your contract that you are not allowed to redistribute any software you come in contact with, in which case the redistribution would be a breach of your contract with the government. If the code, however, leaks out, it can not be taken back, because it was redistributed under the GPL. The person responsible did break his contract, but the code was freed and everyone is free to use it as they will, as it was GPL'ed all along.
So, it's not a very good line of defense for top-secret projects:-) IANAL, of course.
I see it like this. You make a tool so people can use it. You make linux (or help develop it) so people can use it. You might also make a screwdriver so people can use it. If people use it, you're happy. It doesn't mean that you must be happy about every possible use of the tool.
If you make a screwdriver, and someone uses it to take people's eyeballs out, should you be happy? Should you say "I'm glad that people are using my screwdriver, it's great that it is finding such different uses like taking stabbing people's eyeballs out"?
If someone uses something you're contributed to (Linux) for war and destruction do you HAVE to rejoice and express happiness because "we are making market penetration, linux is being taken seriously, yeah death to proprietary software w00t"?
Not talking about this particular guy here, but some posters can't fathom the idea that you might be offended by some uses of your creation.
You've just pinpointed why no boycott nowadays can be effective. The megacorps today are way too large and way too interconnected for anyone to keep track of it all. I laugh at people who boycott RIAA and then go and buy a Sony walkman or sign up for AOL.
At my campus in the UK there was a campus-wide boycott of Nestle products, because Nestle was involved in a milk powder controversy in Africa, which resulted in death of thousands. So you couldn't buy Nestle chocolate anywhere on campus. But you could buy Walls ice-cream (made by the same company). Similarly, there was a protest because the University owned stock in GEC/Marconi, who produce weapons (among many other things). Same people who called for the boycott were happily using their mobile phones, which use several of Marconi's patents.
Basically, in today's society you cannot effectively boycot ANYTHING without sentencing yourself to the very edge of society -- and the number of people willing to do that is way to small for such a boycott to be effective. So with every penny you spend on bread, water, electronics, or entertainment, you are effectively building weapons, putting people in danger through horrible business practice and lobbying for Draconian laws. Welcome to the brave new world!
part of the war in Iraq is securing access to vital resources for the American Economy. In other words oil.
I think you're wrong here. ALL of the war in Iraq is about securing access to vital resources for the American Economy, in other words oil. I shudder at the thought of what happens when Canadian forests, or Brazilian beaches become vital resources for the American Economy.
I do, however, agree that if you believe that software should be free, it should be free for everyone (free to use, not free of charge). It is part of the old dilemma which involves giving free speech to hate activists and extremists of all denominations and giving legal aid to murderers and rapists. If you do believe in freedom, then you must also believe in the freedom of your worst enemy.
I do assume that this guy only wanted to make a statement and ruffle some feathers, though.
That's the reason I asked, because Konqueror does most of what you just mentioned by default (not sure about EXIF, I think only specialised viewing KDE programs use that).
I just checked and Konqueror lets you view and edit EXIF comments by default too. So if you don't need an html autogenerated gallery, it does the job.
Also, the alternative is to just come up with a standard package format and have the various distributions agree to ship the packaging tool. Note that this does NOT imply that your choice of package managers is "stifled", you still have choice. There's just a standard package manager that all distros would be guaranteed to support. Linux distros being compatible with one another -- imagine that.
Nope, the package manager is a trivial issue. The real problem are lib/file locations, and that is tackled by the LSB effort. I guess we are moving in that direction, but it will take time.
Still, you have not addressed the issue of distros that lack such packaging tools (there are untold numbers of distros, I'm sure there's at least a few that don't have package managers!). What about them? Are they forced to compile from source or perform bizarre hacks to get the program working? The answer is yes.
I don't expect somebody who has problems installing software to use a distro without a package manager. RedHat/Fedora, SuSE, Mandrake, Gentoo and Debian all have apt or apt-like tools for installing basic software. And I guess the type of users who have a problem with Linux now will not use Bobby's 1337 Linux From Scratch distro:-)
You're assuming that every app someone could possibly ever want to use is packaged in the particular format that your distro uses. Depending on your needs, there will most likely be a time when you have to fall back from packages.
The alternative is to let an installer (run with administrator privileges) put libraries all over your system without your intervention, like it's currently done under Windows.
I believe it is the job of the distributions to make sure things run under their distribution. The problem arises with proprietary software which is not available for download. Maybe the solution is to have the distros work with the vendors to package the binaries. In my post, I was concentrating on the apps one needs for basic desktop usage, and all of those can be easily installed using apt/yum and their kin.
Collectively, all the alternative browsers remain flat-lined on the Google Zeitgeist. Moz showing a pulse only when compared to IE4. There is nothing here to suggest that browser technology will drive users to Linux.
That's correct. But years ago, Linux users were ridiculed for not having a browser. Now we do. Then we were ridiculed for not having an office suite, now we do. We have pretty much everything needed for regular desktop use. And the arguments against it keep getting sillier.
But are both these players street-legal and free of dependencies on the Windows DLLs?
Yes. Windows DLLs are extras which can be used if you have/wish them. FFMpeg (used by both projects) has native MPEG4/DivX encoding and decoding, both gained native Sorenson3 a while ago and a few years back I was playing Real movies with a kosher MPlayer (it was a bit skippy, though).
The DVD playback is another story. You need libdvdcss for this, which might be illegal where you live. But this is simply because the MPAA wants to keep all open source DVD players illegal and not a technical difficulty.
The secret here is that the camera acts like a usb drive, so it is accessible directly from Konqueror. All you need is a mount point and a fstab entry. KDE automounts partitions if you click them. Same for the portable hard disk (USB 2.0).
I have no experience with gphoto2, maybe it would have been more difficult in this case, but I guess it would amount to taking the MMC card out and putting it into the card reader in my laptop and copying from there -- never tried it.
There you go. Of course, due to my choice of distribution, this requires a compiler step (which is automated), but you could easily do the same on a different distribution:
apt-get install kde apt-get install kaffeine
Or, similarly:
yum install kde yum install kaffeine
Not that difficult, really, and no compiling involved.
You're right, but what I meant by 'standardise' is use, for example, KDE apps exclusively. You'll lose the power of GIMP and Mozilla, for example, but your user experience will be amazingly consistent. It's a tradeoff one can make. It also means dropping OpenOffice for KOffice, which can still be a painful experience.
That's the reason I asked, because Konqueror does most of what you just mentioned by default (not sure about EXIF, I think only specialised viewing KDE programs use that).
The one useful thing people mentioned is a web gallery, and that could be a cool feature, though it certainly doesn't belong in a file browser:-) So it seems like there is a reason for such software to exist.
I agree that these are some of the real problems Linux is facing. The software installation is pretty much a non-issue with broadband and apt/yum/emerge-type applications. These are really great, but not standard across linux distributions. I don't see why they should be, though.
The setup will/should be handled by the OEMs as not many people install windows on their own anyway, not without the help of somebody more knowledgable. The driver thing is sadly a question of acceptance. When we are more mainstream, we will have drivers. I remember when 3d in Linux was unthinkable. Now we take NVidia's and ATI's drivers for granted.
Slashdot Mirror
No, patents cover a process, not an idea.
You are correct, bad wording on my part.
I thought that at least the slashdot readers would know the difference between copyrights, trademarks and patents by now.
Patents cover an idea. If it's patented, you can't do it. You can't black-box reverse engineer it. You can't get divine inspiration and get it out of the thin air. You just can't do something that's patented until the patent expires.
Copyrights cover a specific expression of an idea, like source code or prose or poetry. You can do the same thing, as long as you don't copy the original.
Trademarks cover a word/phrase associated with a company/brand. You're not allowed to make software and sell it under the name of Microsoft.
Trademarks are something you need to enforce. Patents and copyrights, on the other hand, can't be lost until they expire.
Of course, you know that JPEG can also use lossless compression, so the two are in effect competitors.
Still, PNG is more of a direct threat to GIF (low end) and TIFF (high end) formats.
Dude, you moved between dorms (probably in the same city), a short drive away. I've moved between 6 cities in 4 countries in the last 10 years or so. A desktop doesn't fit into your hand luggage, a laptop does ;-)
Yeah, but laptops today are often used as desktop replacements. If you move every few months, you don't want to take a desktop computer around.
This drive will be important for laptop users. Currently 60GB on a laptop is considered good, 80GB a luxury. The laptops have displays, processors and RAM to match the desktop computers, but HD capacity is one area where they're severely lacking. It's nice to see that Toshiba is pushing the envelope here.
We are talking about a company modifying already existing software (let's say Linux). The company doesn't own this software, its authors do: Linus, Alan and many others. The company can't change a few lines of code and then claim ownership over Linus' code. And Linus' code comes with the GPL.
And giving someone software qualifies as distribution. Or SCO would be able to sell us Linux and claim that it wasn't giving it to us, but allowing us to use a copy that the company owns, thus refusing to show us the code. What they are actually doing is distribution.
Nothing in the GPL allows an employee to take an internally modified version of GPLd software (modified for proprietary purposes perhaps) and distribute it outside the company (or in any other way) without permission of that person's employer.
/I/ wrote without asking my employer?
The GPL gives you exactly that right. The only thing stopping you would be a contract which strictly prohibits it, and I addressed that. This is why you'd lose your job.
When a company takes a GPL'd program, all their changes automatically fall under the GPL. If you give this code to someone else (whether internal or external, doesn't matter), you are bound by the GPL, and GPL allows this person to redistribute. If you don't like this, don't use GPL'd software. There is nothing in the GPL which prevents the person from redistributing.
That's theft (trade secret, no less), industrial espionage, and just plain UNETHICAL.
Why is it unethical if I release some code which
Just because it's GPLd does not mean it's just out there for anyone to do what they want with it.
No. It means that it's just out there for anyone who receives it to do anything which is allowed by the license, in this case the GPL. That's how licenses work.
Now, if that company does decide to distribute this GPLd item outside the company for others to use, then of course it goes with it's source and all the other things spelled out in the GPL.
Sure. But how do you define 'others'? If Siemens, for example, takes a GPL'd program and modifies it, they would be able to distribute this software to half a million of their own employees without ever showing them the source code, just because you choose to define 'distribution' in a certain way.
But the whole point of the GPL is that you can't assign further restrictions on it. If I give you a copy of a program under GPL, you have the right to distribute it. I can't take a copy of Linux, give it to you, and then prohibit you from redistributing it. The same way, if a government official gives a government employee a heap of code under the GPL, this employee can redistribute it because when he received the code, he got it under the provisions of the GPL, so he can also redistribute it under GPL.
:-) IANAL, of course.
Now you can say that it is internal to the corporation/government and that the corporation/government hasn't released it so it can impose further restrictions on GPL software used internally, but that's a very dodgy argument. You can similarly claim that you're working internally within a country and that you don't have to give the source to your customers within the same country because it's all 'internal'.
What you can do is have a clause in your contract that you are not allowed to redistribute any software you come in contact with, in which case the redistribution would be a breach of your contract with the government. If the code, however, leaks out, it can not be taken back, because it was redistributed under the GPL. The person responsible did break his contract, but the code was freed and everyone is free to use it as they will, as it was GPL'ed all along.
So, it's not a very good line of defense for top-secret projects
I see it like this. You make a tool so people can use it. You make linux (or help develop it) so people can use it. You might also make a screwdriver so people can use it. If people use it, you're happy. It doesn't mean that you must be happy about every possible use of the tool.
If you make a screwdriver, and someone uses it to take people's eyeballs out, should you be happy? Should you say "I'm glad that people are using my screwdriver, it's great that it is finding such different uses like taking stabbing people's eyeballs out"?
If someone uses something you're contributed to (Linux) for war and destruction do you HAVE to rejoice and express happiness because "we are making market penetration, linux is being taken seriously, yeah death to proprietary software w00t"?
Not talking about this particular guy here, but some posters can't fathom the idea that you might be offended by some uses of your creation.
Yes, but any of those 'internal' guys can take the code and release it to the public on his website, completely legally.
You've just pinpointed why no boycott nowadays can be effective. The megacorps today are way too large and way too interconnected for anyone to keep track of it all. I laugh at people who boycott RIAA and then go and buy a Sony walkman or sign up for AOL.
At my campus in the UK there was a campus-wide boycott of Nestle products, because Nestle was involved in a milk powder controversy in Africa, which resulted in death of thousands. So you couldn't buy Nestle chocolate anywhere on campus. But you could buy Walls ice-cream (made by the same company). Similarly, there was a protest because the University owned stock in GEC/Marconi, who produce weapons (among many other things). Same people who called for the boycott were happily using their mobile phones, which use several of Marconi's patents.
Basically, in today's society you cannot effectively boycot ANYTHING without sentencing yourself to the very edge of society -- and the number of people willing to do that is way to small for such a boycott to be effective. So with every penny you spend on bread, water, electronics, or entertainment, you are effectively building weapons, putting people in danger through horrible business practice and lobbying for Draconian laws. Welcome to the brave new world!
part of the war in Iraq is securing access to vital resources for the American Economy. In other words oil.
I think you're wrong here. ALL of the war in Iraq is about securing access to vital resources for the American Economy, in other words oil. I shudder at the thought of what happens when Canadian forests, or Brazilian beaches become vital resources for the American Economy.
I do, however, agree that if you believe that software should be free, it should be free for everyone (free to use, not free of charge). It is part of the old dilemma which involves giving free speech to hate activists and extremists of all denominations and giving legal aid to murderers and rapists. If you do believe in freedom, then you must also believe in the freedom of your worst enemy.
I do assume that this guy only wanted to make a statement and ruffle some feathers, though.
And if she didn't know that this interview was for Slashdot, this question would make it more than evident...
That's the reason I asked, because Konqueror does most of what you just mentioned by default (not sure about EXIF, I think only specialised viewing KDE programs use that).
I just checked and Konqueror lets you view and edit EXIF comments by default too. So if you don't need an html autogenerated gallery, it does the job.
Also, the alternative is to just come up with a standard package format and have the various distributions agree to ship the packaging tool. Note that this does NOT imply that your choice of package managers is "stifled", you still have choice. There's just a standard package manager that all distros would be guaranteed to support. Linux distros being compatible with one another -- imagine that.
:-)
Nope, the package manager is a trivial issue. The real problem are lib/file locations, and that is tackled by the LSB effort. I guess we are moving in that direction, but it will take time.
Still, you have not addressed the issue of distros that lack such packaging tools (there are untold numbers of distros, I'm sure there's at least a few that don't have package managers!). What about them? Are they forced to compile from source or perform bizarre hacks to get the program working? The answer is yes.
I don't expect somebody who has problems installing software to use a distro without a package manager. RedHat/Fedora, SuSE, Mandrake, Gentoo and Debian all have apt or apt-like tools for installing basic software. And I guess the type of users who have a problem with Linux now will not use Bobby's 1337 Linux From Scratch distro
Oh really?
:)
OK, it means dropping OpenOffice for KOffice for now.
You're assuming that every app someone could possibly ever want to use is packaged in the particular format that your distro uses. Depending on your needs, there will most likely be a time when you have to fall back from packages.
The alternative is to let an installer (run with administrator privileges) put libraries all over your system without your intervention, like it's currently done under Windows.
I believe it is the job of the distributions to make sure things run under their distribution. The problem arises with proprietary software which is not available for download. Maybe the solution is to have the distros work with the vendors to package the binaries. In my post, I was concentrating on the apps one needs for basic desktop usage, and all of those can be easily installed using apt/yum and their kin.
Collectively, all the alternative browsers remain flat-lined on the Google Zeitgeist. Moz showing a pulse only when compared to IE4. There is nothing here to suggest that browser technology will drive users to Linux.
That's correct. But years ago, Linux users were ridiculed for not having a browser. Now we do. Then we were ridiculed for not having an office suite, now we do. We have pretty much everything needed for regular desktop use. And the arguments against it keep getting sillier.
But are both these players street-legal and free of dependencies on the Windows DLLs?
Yes. Windows DLLs are extras which can be used if you have/wish them. FFMpeg (used by both projects) has native MPEG4/DivX encoding and decoding, both gained native Sorenson3 a while ago and a few years back I was playing Real movies with a kosher MPlayer (it was a bit skippy, though).
The DVD playback is another story. You need libdvdcss for this, which might be illegal where you live. But this is simply because the MPAA wants to keep all open source DVD players illegal and not a technical difficulty.
The secret here is that the camera acts like a usb drive, so it is accessible directly from Konqueror. All you need is a mount point and a fstab entry. KDE automounts partitions if you click them. Same for the portable hard disk (USB 2.0).
I have no experience with gphoto2, maybe it would have been more difficult in this case, but I guess it would amount to taking the MMC card out and putting it into the card reader in my laptop and copying from there -- never tried it.
This was Gentoo, BTW
This is how I set up the system I described:
emerge kde
emerge kaffeine
There you go. Of course, due to my choice of distribution, this requires a compiler step (which is automated), but you could easily do the same on a different distribution:
apt-get install kde
apt-get install kaffeine
Or, similarly:
yum install kde
yum install kaffeine
Not that difficult, really, and no compiling involved.
You're right, but what I meant by 'standardise' is use, for example, KDE apps exclusively. You'll lose the power of GIMP and Mozilla, for example, but your user experience will be amazingly consistent. It's a tradeoff one can make. It also means dropping OpenOffice for KOffice, which can still be a painful experience.
That's the reason I asked, because Konqueror does most of what you just mentioned by default (not sure about EXIF, I think only specialised viewing KDE programs use that).
:-) So it seems like there is a reason for such software to exist.
The one useful thing people mentioned is a web gallery, and that could be a cool feature, though it certainly doesn't belong in a file browser
I agree that these are some of the real problems Linux is facing. The software installation is pretty much a non-issue with broadband and apt/yum/emerge-type applications. These are really great, but not standard across linux distributions. I don't see why they should be, though.
The setup will/should be handled by the OEMs as not many people install windows on their own anyway, not without the help of somebody more knowledgable. The driver thing is sadly a question of acceptance. When we are more mainstream, we will have drivers. I remember when 3d in Linux was unthinkable. Now we take NVidia's and ATI's drivers for granted.
As for what's outside the universe, there can be only one answer:
SCO's stolen code
Weapons of Mass Destruction
Duke Nukem Forever
42
See, there are indeed several possibilities!