Your comment is funny. The situation is not, though. This has been the case with congress-critturs for a decade or more as well. They get paper mail, faxes, what-have-you and sort them into two piles for each major issue (pro or con) and then measure the height of those piles. If the content is too complex to interpret quickly, it is junked.
Contributors to the campaign, friends and relatives have other means of reaching these people, the public points of access are just garbage chutes for straw-polling and allowing the Secret Service to gather and track death-threats and such.
This is not ALWAYS true, but from talking to people who have worked on The Hill, I'm certain that it is the case far, far more often than not.
One time, I sent mail about Echelon to my Senetor. I was frankly stunned and awed to the point of voting for him in the next election because I got back a letter than addressed what I had said, and outlined what he had done as a result, and what the results of his actions were.
It wasn't a lot, just one page and not a lot of action as a result, but the fact that this Senetor cared about the concerns of a constituent got MY vote! I urge you to discuss the things that matter to you with your representitive government, and when they work on your behalf (not just send you a form "Yes, this is a pressing issue which all Americans should vote for me over") you should reward them by voting for them.
As the FSF's attorney has pointed out, the issue is not their code becoming LGPLed because of your code. It's the clause that requires that they allow reverse egineering and modification.
Basically, any program that links against your library must comply with the LGPL in order to distribute, and that compliance means allowing mods.
Now, it does *not* mean that you have to provide source, but many companies are quite unhappy with having to write "you can modify this software" into their license even if you can't distribute the modified (or unmodified) version or get source.
The Java community had thought that the "import" mechanism in Java was a loophole because it's not "linking" in the classic sense. The fuss here is because the FSF is pointing out that in a license, you cannot interpret such terms as "linking" in a purely narrow, techinical sense.
Love it, hate it or don't care, you do have to admit that it's rather provincial of us to make distinctions between "linking" and "importing" of libraries, when functionally they used for the same reasons with respect to accessing libraries.
To be more accurate, the analogy to viral infection is not without merit, however, it is NOT the GPL that does the infecting, it is copyright. The fact thta the GPL does not lift the restrictions of copyright law and allow you to do whatever you like without additional terms is one of the most prominent differences between putting your code under the GPL and releasing it to the public domain.
The GPL is not, as you say viral. However, it most certianly does apply to works which are infected by (ie. are derived from) the copyrighted work which it covers.
if you do re-assign the rights to the FSF, you are no longer the owner and may not reissue the program under any other license
Hmmm, is that really true? I don't think so, but feel free to find some evidence to support the statement.
For starters, I'm not exactly clear on what the requirements are for assigning copyright. I'm not sure you can just assign copyright to anyone and that makes it theirs and not yours without having an agreement between you. If you could, I'm a little concerned over what the implications in terms of warantee might be.
Even if that is possible, we would have to have a specific contract that states that I am assigning *all* versions of the work to you, or I could just go back to my other version of the software in question and do whatever I like with it, including distribute it under another license (though, I'm not certain if I could put it under the public domain at that point or not... that's where it gets way too complicated for me).
you may not modify the LGPL or the GPL in any way. It violates the FSF's copyright and is not allowed. Read the license -- "Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed."
Yes of course, but that has no bearing on how I might or might not alter the agreement that you and I are party to (which could be something like, "you may distribute this software under the terms of the BSD or GNU General Public licenses").
The document is copyrighted by the FSF, the agreement is not. I don't think you can prevent two parties from negotiating by claiming copyright over a license.
Re:FSF's interpretation are not very relevant
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LGPL is Viral for Java
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· Score: 3, Insightful
There's a flaw in your logic. You cannot retro-actively interpret a license. The license is an agreement. If you then decide that the agreement "really means" something other than what I think it means, we have a dispute. We can settle it between us by altering the agreement to be clear on the point, or either one of us can take the matter to court for resolution. This happens all the time. What you meant for the agreement to say is beside the point unless we had some form of verbal or implied understanding at the time.
If, for example, SCO got to tell IBM, "well, our interpretation of the license for UNIX means that you can't put code from Sequent into Linux," then IBM would be quite unhappy about the results.
I think the point of confusion here is history. Long ago, Linus made a big splash when he stated his interpretation of the GPL for purposes of binary-only drivers. A lot of folks walked away from that assuming that that meant he had the ability to retro-actively interpret ambiguity in the GPL.
That was not at all the case. What Linus was doing was essentially making a promise to holders of this ambiguous license (and the GPL *is* ambiguous on that point, IMHO) that he was interpreting the license in the most liberal possible way, and thus no one need fear that he would sue them over it.
He could still sue, of course, but his public statements would weigh heavily against the outcome (the scary part for businesses is that you still run into litigation risk regardless of the fact that the cards are stacked in your favor).
On the other hand, if Linus had said, "I'm interpreting the GPL to mean that you can't link your binary-only driver into Linux without creating a derived work which may only be distributed under the terms of the GPL," then the ambiguity would still remain, and no one would be sure if Linus was right or wrong about that until precident was set in court (which it probably has in other contexts outside of the GPL, but I'm not at all sure about that).
The same thing happens if I say, "I interpret the GPL to mean that you [can/cannot] distribute my software on DVD media." My interpretation is just that, and does not affect you at all. You might, of course, think to yourself, "hmm... this guy is interpretting the GPL in exactly the same way a first-class nut-case would... perhaps I should use some other software."
That's fine, you can feel that way, and I would not blame you in the slightest. But that social dynamic does not change the essence of the GPL, nor our agreement as stated in the GPL.
It was a baby. They mophed a section of its face into an image of a smiling baby face. It was just a little rough so that if you were aware of the technology, you could see it, but I'm sure most folks saw the baby smile on cue, which was kind of stunning to most parents, I'm sure;-)
It didn't claim that plan 9 was new. It said, "...new advances in software like Plan 9..."
You're reading that as "new advances, like plan 9, in software".
Plan 9 is not new, but certianly in th prosaic world of filesystem design, Plan 9's cited paper from 2000 *is* new, and *is* very interesting to the developers working on filesystems today.
They did not pay 4.3 Billion for Netscape, it was a 0.45:1.00 stock swap, that didn't really cost AOL much at all, and netted them a CTO, a strong position in the post-browser-war world, allowed them to build out their internal technology with some of the best engineers they could get their hands on, a new desktop tool called Photon, which I beleive still uses Gecko, bargaining power vs. Microsoft.
This was a serious win for AOL, and MS got the short end of the stick (it's not like AOL ever wanted to make thier own browser... but they would have used it if they had to, and that forced MS' hand). When you look at where AOL was and where it has gone even after a major market correction, it's kind of hard to argue with results. Given tha the purchase was in 98, I think you'd see AOL hurting a lot more by now if it had been a poor choice.
"they're getting IE "for free". Just like every other Windows developer"
No, Windows developers cannot build a product around IE and then ship it on CD to millions of customers. Check that EULA one more time... you're actually very restricted in what exactly you can do before you have to buy a separate license that costs a non-trivial amount per unit.
You'll want to look at the SPLA which is the license service providers have to sign in order to be able to use MS end-users tools (like IE) in a hosting environment. It's not exactly fun stuff.
Shipping something that requires IE version XYZ in order to run is not acceptable to AOL, whose CDs end up in the hands of people who will almost certainly NOT have the software installed that would be reuqired.
The Netscape employees were a part of AOL that did not earn AOL any money
Wildly incorrect, unless you don't include saving millions (tens, hundreds, I have no idea) of dollars as "earning" money. AOL is getting IE for free. Why? Because of two factors: 1) AOL was likely to win its case against MS. But, that was a minor thing, and MS would likely have made more money on the IE licensing than they would have lost on the case. So why?
2) AOL was waving Netscape around as their big stick, all the while hoping to never have to use it. The better Netscape got, the more reasonable AOL's threat became, and the more MS was looking at paying out for the suit AND losing the IE business to Netscape (thus legitimizing Netscape and likely moving a huge chunk of the industry with it).
MS could not allow that, and AOL knew it. I doubt anyone has ever gotten as sweet a deal out of MS, and this one was possible due to the hard work of Netscape employees.
Mind you, I think AOL has made the wrong choice. They're tying their fate to MS, and free or not, IE is now able to control the AOL users' experience without the threat of Netscape stepping in to replace it. I see a very dark future for AOL users, and I'll be continuing to shepherd all of my friends and relatives who use it over to the bells and other ISPs. Give them Mozilla mail+browser and an account with Joe dialup, and most of them are all set.
The Unix filesystem was a great step forward? In what ways, exactly? My first exposure to Unix (in '88) left me pretty cold, filesystem-wise -- VMS certainly had a more advanced system that either pre-dated or was at the very least coincident with the FFS.
The unix slash-as-root, slash-as-separator, unified root, everything-is-a-file model was indeed a step forward for its time (somewhere in the 70s, though honestly, I'm not sure if it was around the dawn of UNIX which would put it at 69-70 or if the FS came later in the mid-70s).
There were other systems which made other useful contributions. Among them are Apollo's Aegis, Digital Equipment Corporation's VMS and many others. Some of those features of other systems are still not present in today's modern filesystems. This sort of parallel and often disjoint filesystem development is a hallmark of innovative OS design, and sometimes it results in losing usful advances for a geration (of OSes) or so.
That doesn't mean Unix didn't have an innovative filesystem.
The rest of the fileystems you note came at least a decade after the Unix filesystem, so I won't touch on those. They too had some useful contributions, but aren't really pertinent to what I was saying.
One thing about filesystems, Hans Reiser has definitely earned the credibility to suggest things like adding transactional support to a filesystem, and not get laughed at (where most would deserve the laughter). If he can make a balanced tree work efficiently for a filesystem, perhaps he can come up with some way to make transactions only cost those who use them... we shall see.
I think the "dark ages" are refered to that way because it was a period of decline following the hieghts of technology and social advances that the Roman Empire had brought.
In fact many features of the Roman Empire (e.g. bathing) were shunned simply on the basis of having been associated with Rome and thus, later with the fall.
Transactions are required for Reliable databases and filesystems. If you don't mind occassional corruption
No, you are incorrect. You're thinking of atomicity, pretty much a requirement for all filesystem and database models (though not *all*, some are actually designed, and designed well around the limitation of non-atomic operations for certain real-time applications).
Transactions are only for keeping multiple atomic operations in sync, and you can always simulate transactions at a higher level if you have an atomic test-and-set, or a locking mechanism build on same.
I'm really getting tired of the ever-creeping assertion that transactions are required for [x]. At first x was ACID-compliant relational databases, and such was true because ACID was defined as such. However, then I started to see assertions that relational databases had to be ACID-compliant (mostly from the anti-MySQL camps who were ignoring the long history of highly valuable, non-ACID relational databases).
Now, in this article, I see the assertion that databases in general require transactions, and thus cannot be supported by a filesystem.
Worse, the logic is self-refuting, as the article previously states that a filesystem is a database, just a limited one. As it happens, POSIX-type filesystems are quite powerful, and let's not kid ourselves into thinking that they have not served us well for 20-30 years! Yes, changes are coming and I'm frankly quite impressed by Hans Reiser's accomplishment in finally coming up with a balanced-tree-based filesystem. Many have tried and failed where he succeeded.
That's because his was a great step forward, not because the old UNIX filesystems weren't also. Let's stop trying to re-define terms so that we can explain why the last 20 years were the dark-ages. They simply were not.
I believe you'll find that this is the norm for all of the "manufactured bands" and "pop idols" that the industry created from scratch. Only the real artists get their own touring revenues, and the writing has been on the wall for them since the labels discovered that they could manufacture bands in just about any popular genre, not just bubblegum.
Personally, I think it's a good thing.
One of the reasons that artists are skeptical of online distribution of their music is the fact that it has the precise effect of making record lables think of those songs as valueless (which they are) and instead focus on tangible things that people will pay for (e.g. a concert with merchandise).
Once artists and labels get used to this arrangement, though, there's no reason that the indy labels can't do the same, and then distributing the music cheap (or even for free) and making their money on the concerts too.
A "label" in the Internet age should be... what? My feeling is that it should be a clearinghouse... a packager if you will that records/collects the band's or artist's music, sees to its quality of recording, adds lots of indexable info and then gets it to all of the online distributors (iStore, mp3.com, etc) that will "retail it". Heck, they could just run a Gnutella farm with a web-site full of reviews and other "value added" indexing, and a client-side plugin for downloading. Boom, instant high-bandwidth music distribution, and as long as the client has some basic incremental checksum system so that it can verify it's getting the exact file that you selected, you can be sure you're downloading what you wanted. That adds ad revenue to the label's list of sources.
The margins on all of that are small to negative, but if they have an alternate source of income, then they can afford to do it, and there's really no reason that foobar label can't compete with EMI on equal footing.
And you wondered why the RIAA was deathly afraid of file sharing... it's not because they thought their members would lose money, but because they KNEW that it had to lead to a decision about the value of music that they didn't want to have to make, and ultimately killing this goose once and for all!
Excuse me, but if anything were "running away screeming" in industry, I would tag it right on your quote. For a company to scale back or remove its support for, use or deployment of a platform due to legal concerns... well, what do you call that if not running away? "Screaming" is clearly hyperbole, and I take note that you're not fond of such metaphorical license, but this is an important step in the process of establishing how legally stable open source software is.
Those who are just realizing now that that hadn't actually been decided yet are, understandably, rather unnerved. There are even those who have bought into the "aren't we stealing by using Linux?" thing, and that's generating even more paranoia and misrepresentation.
Don't go throwing the term FUD around at anything you don't agree with, it only serves to make those who really DO use fear as a tool look more justified in doing so.
So, I asked if you could name battles that weren't in the books, or ones that had an a disproportinately large role in the movies as compared to the books...
You replied:
The troll in Moria
As I recall, the goblins in Moria engaged our heros in a battle in which Frodo's armor was revealed in exactly the way it is in the movie. I didn't ask if you could name a creature that was out-of-place, obviously you compress some things from the books rather than simply throwing them away (like trolls), and that was the case with many situations. I asked if there was a BATTLE (since you mentioned that there were too many in your opinion) that was not in the books.
Rohirrim versus warg riders
This is as close as you come. Again, nothing new here, but the alteration is large enough that I consider it a "new" scene. Fair catch.
I don't see any other way to bridge the large sections of "woe is us that the fellowship is broken" with the attack on helms deep without throwing Aragorn in the river, and that would be rather pointless without some REASON for him to fall, but still... it is an alteration that was made to the movie, and it was accomplished with a fair amount of CG-FX.
It's not just battles though, there were other scenes added; some of them were benign "subtitles for dummies" scenes
Such as? Subtitles for "dummies" or for those who were unfamilliar with the volumes upon volumes of Tolkein's work on Middle Earth?
some were nepotism writ large
Huh? Such as? Not sure what this means.
but the "dwarf tossing" scene added in Moria was just a showcase for Weta.
Too bad it wasn't in Moria, but at Helms Deep. And besides, what was wrong with that scene? It exposed the the distrust turned respect, turned admiration, turned freindship that really wasn't in the dialog so much as the narration in the books.
I get the impression you didn't so much experience the movies as go to them to find fault with the treatment of your treasured memories. I understand. I did the same thing when I went to see that travesty of a movie Starship Troopers (or insert just about any SF book of the 50s made into a movie in the last 10 years). I was stunned by the mistreatment of that book, and it really set me up to expect LotR to be about Prince Aragorn and his trusted band of "Hobboids" (large reptilian beasts with psychic powers) who set off to save the Princess from the clutches of legions of "Orcitrons from Planet 10"... in some ways that would have been better than what they did to ST.
Instead you got what I think is the best treatment of the Fantasy genre on the big screen to date, but you wanted more... oh well.
I suppose I should not follow up to my own follow up, but in re-reading it I realized I came off as a bit of a gushing LoTR fanboy. Let me make it glowingly clear that I want there to be a trillogy that comes along next year and blows me away, and makes LoTR look poor by comparison.
Based on the work that's out there, I don't think that's impossible as LoTR is a good but fatally flawed story in the sense that it myopically ignores vast areas of character development. There are some works that come to mind (e.g. Hyperion or Diamond Age or going back further, Magician (which is not the calibre of work that LoTR is, but would also IMHO translate to the screen far better), Foundation and The Mote in God's Eye) that I think are a better foundation for a movie, but I also don't think it'll happen. I don't know who Jackson had to do what to to get the freedom and budget that he had on this, but it won't happen again soon if history is a guide. Then again the Wachowski Bros. have been given extraordinary leeway to make the films they wanted to make, and if you look at their previous work (e.g. Bound), it's a little unclear WHY that is.... who knows.
When it does happen, oddly enough Disney usually has a finger in it (Toy Story is a great example of a technology-driven, but well-crafted story that the visionaries at the helm were allowd to STAY at the helm on)... Disney is doing something interesting here... cranking out gobs and gobs of crap on the one hand and at the same time spending ludicrous amounts of money on a few amazingly good stories through their other divisions such as Toy Story, LoTR, importing/translating/releasing Miazaki's work, etc. I don't understand their plan, but as long as I'm allowed to ignore the crap, I'll continue to patronize the good stuff.
Also, there are more and better examples of brand new technology being brought to bare on creative work than I listed: Akira (computer-assisted animation's giant baby-step), Tron (computer-generated FX first big movie, and while I wasn't a big fan, certainly a wonderful exploration of the idea of cyberspace long before the die was cast by the likes of Gibson, and to envision a games-based virtual reality was perhaps closer to the mark than we could have realized at the time...), and more I'm not thinking of now because I'm slow in the mornings.
I think you can easily pick out 2-5 really good stories that come out, backed up by brand-new (or brand-new to movies) technology per decade, and when I look at the world of books, I see about the same... a really creative new idea is rare, and while books are easier to produce the ratio of good idea + good story to number of books published seems (at first, unscientific glance) to be in the same ballpark.
I will certianly agree that many of these technologies need time to mature, and morphing is always my best example there. I decided morphing hand matured when I saw that movie about the assassin going back to his high school reunion (don't recall the name) and it struck me that a particular scene used morphing, just to compensate for a real-world limitation in the filming (go see the movie, and see if you can spot it).
Interestingly, it was The Abyss that introduced morphing to movies, and its use was also not center-stage, but was actually used to create motion-blur for the computer-animated effects.
If you never saw The Abyss, you need to: it was perhaps Cameron's best work... though I'm tempted to say that might have been Titanic... another widely misunderstood movie that was NOT about LeoDiGirlMagneteo, but about the ways (many!) that people face -- or refuse to face -- death.
Terminator and Aliens were Cameron's adolescent big-guns action movies. The Abyss was his more mature, sense of wonder, coming-of-age story. T2 was just a love-for-SF picture with a bit of reflection on what he'd been doing. True Lies seems to have been born of some relationship concerns he must have had, and I'm willing to mostly ignore it, Titanic was his attempt to come to terms
Look at films like Final Fantasy, SW1&2, or even LoTR (flame on!). The directors went overboard with the graphics and the story suffered as a result
Look at films like 2001, The Abyss, The Matrix, or any of the other GOOD films that broke new FX technology ground. If you want to talk purely about CG, I doubt that it's fair at this point. The medium is new, and most of the really good work is going to be in the background right now, done by people who are struggling to get into the business. This is true with any new development (I'm reminded of the kid with the keyboards auditioning in the beginning of Fame).
And in LoTR, so much time was spent showing battle after battle, landscape after landscape, hokey special effect after hokey special effect, that it took 3 and a half hours to tell one third of a 2 hour movie.
Hello! What elements of Lord of the Rings are you suggesting cutting out in order to tell the story of THREE BOOKS in 2 hours?!
Jackson already had to cut a lot of the books (as, of course, anyone would... the film-version of the books unabridged would probably be 50-100 hours!)
You mentioned battle after battle. Ok, name a battle that wasn't in the books. Name a battle that took more time in the movie (proportionate to story) than it did in the books.
You mention landscapes... much of the time in the books is spend describing these landscapes, their history, the importance of their past... Jackson is doing as much as he can with the gorgeous landscapes of his native home to give you that same sense of awe and wonder at the world. If you didn't get that, I'm sorry... it was truely as close as I think a movie can come to the books without hour upon hour upon hour of cheesy voice-over, essentially narrating the book.
Special effects in LoTR are, IMHO, some of the most seemlessly integrated FX in the history of movie-making.
Perhaps you saw different movies, or read different books than I, but I'm very pleased at what is clearly the most faithful adaptation of those stories to hit the screen to date. I can only hope that it's the start of a trend!
The grand plan in ANY industry is exactly what you suggest, and none of this is a shock to anyone who understands business.
What is worrisome about the RIAA is a) the tactics they employ to restrict what music gets to the majority of ears and b) the fact that they and the MPAA together (which employs much the same tactics) run very little risk of being tagged for anti-competitive business practices (and thus forced to open up to competition) due to their massive infusions of cash into the political machinery of the United States.
Campaign reform is the only way to solve this problem, but I don't see it coming from the folks who get the checks... that leaves coordinated efforts on the part of the states and there's not much chance of that happening any time soon.
Hopefully the RIAA will be contained within the US, and music will flourish elsewhere in the world....
I've read many comments here and in other forums complaining about clients and bosses citing the SCO mess as a reason to put off Linux implementations/rollouts/development
Yep... don't go around thinking that 9% is tiny... it's not!
That means that if there are 100,000 companies considering Linux, 9,000 of them have bought the SCO FUD and are running away screaming.
Where I work, we sit back and watch, because we all knew the day would come when something and staggeringly brilliant as de-commoditizing software was going to have to go through the courts. I see this as stage one in a long series of legal battles over every aspect of the licensing, contractual obligations of contributors, waranty, etc, etc.
I'm not worried, and I continue to work with Linux. In the end, some cases will be won and some lost, but the important ones will be settled out of court or result in corporate buyouts (where I think SCO is aiming to go with this one, but they will fail), and thus leave swords hanging....
I look to this case as a great opportunity. If Open Source gets a big, decisive win, it gains much credibility to weather the next few rounds. If Open Source loses, it gains a small amound of credibility for its ability to rip out code, re-write, re-release and go on with life.
Any "secure" text-display is subject to modification
Hmm, ok modify the text displayed by your TV's menu-system. Without physically assaulting your TV, I don't think it's gonna happen.
The idea behind this scheme is not to make it any more secure than paper (though I'm sure some marketing dweeb has spun it that way), but to allow a company to feel that releasing an electronic book, magazine, newsletter, documentation suite, etc. is no less of a "transmission to the world" than releasing dead trees.
As it stands, that's not the case, because you can take this encrypted document, let your reader decrypt it, and then let your plugin save it as raw, unencrypted data. 100% perfect reproduction with no OCR, or other analog process.
In the same way that WB isn't worried that cam-corders in movie theaters are going to kill the DVD market, but ARE worried about perfect rips of DVDs -- so too is Adobe concerned about this and not about OCR coppies of such works (which BTW isn't very doable, since one of the features that Adobe gives the publisher is the explicit ability to deny or charge for printed copies).
Slashdot Mirror
Your comment is funny. The situation is not, though. This has been the case with congress-critturs for a decade or more as well. They get paper mail, faxes, what-have-you and sort them into two piles for each major issue (pro or con) and then measure the height of those piles. If the content is too complex to interpret quickly, it is junked.
Contributors to the campaign, friends and relatives have other means of reaching these people, the public points of access are just garbage chutes for straw-polling and allowing the Secret Service to gather and track death-threats and such.
This is not ALWAYS true, but from talking to people who have worked on The Hill, I'm certain that it is the case far, far more often than not.
One time, I sent mail about Echelon to my Senetor. I was frankly stunned and awed to the point of voting for him in the next election because I got back a letter than addressed what I had said, and outlined what he had done as a result, and what the results of his actions were.
It wasn't a lot, just one page and not a lot of action as a result, but the fact that this Senetor cared about the concerns of a constituent got MY vote! I urge you to discuss the things that matter to you with your representitive government, and when they work on your behalf (not just send you a form "Yes, this is a pressing issue which all Americans should vote for me over") you should reward them by voting for them.
As the FSF's attorney has pointed out, the issue is not their code becoming LGPLed because of your code. It's the clause that requires that they allow reverse egineering and modification.
Basically, any program that links against your library must comply with the LGPL in order to distribute, and that compliance means allowing mods.
Now, it does *not* mean that you have to provide source, but many companies are quite unhappy with having to write "you can modify this software" into their license even if you can't distribute the modified (or unmodified) version or get source.
The Java community had thought that the "import" mechanism in Java was a loophole because it's not "linking" in the classic sense. The fuss here is because the FSF is pointing out that in a license, you cannot interpret such terms as "linking" in a purely narrow, techinical sense.
Love it, hate it or don't care, you do have to admit that it's rather provincial of us to make distinctions between "linking" and "importing" of libraries, when functionally they used for the same reasons with respect to accessing libraries.
Correct. That's basically what I said later on in the post.
Good points on warantee. I had never seen it that way.
To be more accurate, the analogy to viral infection is not without merit, however, it is NOT the GPL that does the infecting, it is copyright. The fact thta the GPL does not lift the restrictions of copyright law and allow you to do whatever you like without additional terms is one of the most prominent differences between putting your code under the GPL and releasing it to the public domain.
The GPL is not, as you say viral. However, it most certianly does apply to works which are infected by (ie. are derived from) the copyrighted work which it covers.
if you do re-assign the rights to the FSF, you are no longer the owner and may not reissue the program under any other license
Hmmm, is that really true? I don't think so, but feel free to find some evidence to support the statement.
For starters, I'm not exactly clear on what the requirements are for assigning copyright. I'm not sure you can just assign copyright to anyone and that makes it theirs and not yours without having an agreement between you. If you could, I'm a little concerned over what the implications in terms of warantee might be.
Even if that is possible, we would have to have a specific contract that states that I am assigning *all* versions of the work to you, or I could just go back to my other version of the software in question and do whatever I like with it, including distribute it under another license (though, I'm not certain if I could put it under the public domain at that point or not... that's where it gets way too complicated for me).
you may not modify the LGPL or the GPL in any way. It violates the FSF's copyright and is not allowed. Read the license -- "Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed."
Yes of course, but that has no bearing on how I might or might not alter the agreement that you and I are party to (which could be something like, "you may distribute this software under the terms of the BSD or GNU General Public licenses").
The document is copyrighted by the FSF, the agreement is not. I don't think you can prevent two parties from negotiating by claiming copyright over a license.
There's a flaw in your logic. You cannot retro-actively interpret a license. The license is an agreement. If you then decide that the agreement "really means" something other than what I think it means, we have a dispute. We can settle it between us by altering the agreement to be clear on the point, or either one of us can take the matter to court for resolution. This happens all the time. What you meant for the agreement to say is beside the point unless we had some form of verbal or implied understanding at the time.
If, for example, SCO got to tell IBM, "well, our interpretation of the license for UNIX means that you can't put code from Sequent into Linux," then IBM would be quite unhappy about the results.
I think the point of confusion here is history. Long ago, Linus made a big splash when he stated his interpretation of the GPL for purposes of binary-only drivers. A lot of folks walked away from that assuming that that meant he had the ability to retro-actively interpret ambiguity in the GPL.
That was not at all the case. What Linus was doing was essentially making a promise to holders of this ambiguous license (and the GPL *is* ambiguous on that point, IMHO) that he was interpreting the license in the most liberal possible way, and thus no one need fear that he would sue them over it.
He could still sue, of course, but his public statements would weigh heavily against the outcome (the scary part for businesses is that you still run into litigation risk regardless of the fact that the cards are stacked in your favor).
On the other hand, if Linus had said, "I'm interpreting the GPL to mean that you can't link your binary-only driver into Linux without creating a derived work which may only be distributed under the terms of the GPL," then the ambiguity would still remain, and no one would be sure if Linus was right or wrong about that until precident was set in court (which it probably has in other contexts outside of the GPL, but I'm not at all sure about that).
The same thing happens if I say, "I interpret the GPL to mean that you [can/cannot] distribute my software on DVD media." My interpretation is just that, and does not affect you at all. You might, of course, think to yourself, "hmm... this guy is interpretting the GPL in exactly the same way a first-class nut-case would... perhaps I should use some other software."
That's fine, you can feel that way, and I would not blame you in the slightest. But that social dynamic does not change the essence of the GPL, nor our agreement as stated in the GPL.
It was a baby. They mophed a section of its face into an image of a smiling baby face. It was just a little rough so that if you were aware of the technology, you could see it, but I'm sure most folks saw the baby smile on cue, which was kind of stunning to most parents, I'm sure ;-)
I think you mis-read the original.
It didn't claim that plan 9 was new. It said, "...new advances in software like Plan 9..."
You're reading that as "new advances, like plan 9, in software".
Plan 9 is not new, but certianly in th prosaic world of filesystem design, Plan 9's cited paper from 2000 *is* new, and *is* very interesting to the developers working on filesystems today.
They did not pay 4.3 Billion for Netscape, it was a 0.45:1.00 stock swap, that didn't really cost AOL much at all, and netted them a CTO, a strong position in the post-browser-war world, allowed them to build out their internal technology with some of the best engineers they could get their hands on, a new desktop tool called Photon, which I beleive still uses Gecko, bargaining power vs. Microsoft.
This was a serious win for AOL, and MS got the short end of the stick (it's not like AOL ever wanted to make thier own browser... but they would have used it if they had to, and that forced MS' hand). When you look at where AOL was and where it has gone even after a major market correction, it's kind of hard to argue with results. Given tha the purchase was in 98, I think you'd see AOL hurting a lot more by now if it had been a poor choice.
"they're getting IE "for free". Just like every other Windows developer"
No, Windows developers cannot build a product around IE and then ship it on CD to millions of customers. Check that EULA one more time... you're actually very restricted in what exactly you can do before you have to buy a separate license that costs a non-trivial amount per unit.
You'll want to look at the SPLA which is the license service providers have to sign in order to be able to use MS end-users tools (like IE) in a hosting environment. It's not exactly fun stuff.
Shipping something that requires IE version XYZ in order to run is not acceptable to AOL, whose CDs end up in the hands of people who will almost certainly NOT have the software installed that would be reuqired.
The Netscape employees were a part of AOL that did not earn AOL any money
Wildly incorrect, unless you don't include saving millions (tens, hundreds, I have no idea) of dollars as "earning" money. AOL is getting IE for free. Why? Because of two factors: 1) AOL was likely to win its case against MS. But, that was a minor thing, and MS would likely have made more money on the IE licensing than they would have lost on the case. So why?
2) AOL was waving Netscape around as their big stick, all the while hoping to never have to use it. The better Netscape got, the more reasonable AOL's threat became, and the more MS was looking at paying out for the suit AND losing the IE business to Netscape (thus legitimizing Netscape and likely moving a huge chunk of the industry with it).
MS could not allow that, and AOL knew it. I doubt anyone has ever gotten as sweet a deal out of MS, and this one was possible due to the hard work of Netscape employees.
Mind you, I think AOL has made the wrong choice. They're tying their fate to MS, and free or not, IE is now able to control the AOL users' experience without the threat of Netscape stepping in to replace it. I see a very dark future for AOL users, and I'll be continuing to shepherd all of my friends and relatives who use it over to the bells and other ISPs. Give them Mozilla mail+browser and an account with Joe dialup, and most of them are all set.
The Unix filesystem was a great step forward? In what ways, exactly? My first exposure to Unix (in '88) left me pretty cold, filesystem-wise -- VMS certainly had a more advanced system that either pre-dated or was at the very least coincident with the FFS.
The unix slash-as-root, slash-as-separator, unified root, everything-is-a-file model was indeed a step forward for its time (somewhere in the 70s, though honestly, I'm not sure if it was around the dawn of UNIX which would put it at 69-70 or if the FS came later in the mid-70s).
There were other systems which made other useful contributions. Among them are Apollo's Aegis, Digital Equipment Corporation's VMS and many others. Some of those features of other systems are still not present in today's modern filesystems. This sort of parallel and often disjoint filesystem development is a hallmark of innovative OS design, and sometimes it results in losing usful advances for a geration (of OSes) or so.
That doesn't mean Unix didn't have an innovative filesystem.
The rest of the fileystems you note came at least a decade after the Unix filesystem, so I won't touch on those. They too had some useful contributions, but aren't really pertinent to what I was saying.
Thanks for your points.
One thing about filesystems, Hans Reiser has definitely earned the credibility to suggest things like adding transactional support to a filesystem, and not get laughed at (where most would deserve the laughter). If he can make a balanced tree work efficiently for a filesystem, perhaps he can come up with some way to make transactions only cost those who use them... we shall see.
Plan 9 is a moving target, as is Linux. To say that Plan 9 isn't new is like saying Reiser isn't new. That's true enough, but Reiser 4 certainly is.
True enough, they were pretty warm in places ;-)
I think the "dark ages" are refered to that way because it was a period of decline following the hieghts of technology and social advances that the Roman Empire had brought.
In fact many features of the Roman Empire (e.g. bathing) were shunned simply on the basis of having been associated with Rome and thus, later with the fall.
Transactions are required for Reliable databases and filesystems. If you don't mind occassional corruption
No, you are incorrect. You're thinking of atomicity, pretty much a requirement for all filesystem and database models (though not *all*, some are actually designed, and designed well around the limitation of non-atomic operations for certain real-time applications).
Transactions are only for keeping multiple atomic operations in sync, and you can always simulate transactions at a higher level if you have an atomic test-and-set, or a locking mechanism build on same.
I'm really getting tired of the ever-creeping assertion that transactions are required for [x]. At first x was ACID-compliant relational databases, and such was true because ACID was defined as such. However, then I started to see assertions that relational databases had to be ACID-compliant (mostly from the anti-MySQL camps who were ignoring the long history of highly valuable, non-ACID relational databases).
Now, in this article, I see the assertion that databases in general require transactions, and thus cannot be supported by a filesystem.
Worse, the logic is self-refuting, as the article previously states that a filesystem is a database, just a limited one. As it happens, POSIX-type filesystems are quite powerful, and let's not kid ourselves into thinking that they have not served us well for 20-30 years! Yes, changes are coming and I'm frankly quite impressed by Hans Reiser's accomplishment in finally coming up with a balanced-tree-based filesystem. Many have tried and failed where he succeeded.
That's because his was a great step forward, not because the old UNIX filesystems weren't also. Let's stop trying to re-define terms so that we can explain why the last 20 years were the dark-ages. They simply were not.
I believe you'll find that this is the norm for all of the "manufactured bands" and "pop idols" that the industry created from scratch. Only the real artists get their own touring revenues, and the writing has been on the wall for them since the labels discovered that they could manufacture bands in just about any popular genre, not just bubblegum.
Personally, I think it's a good thing.
One of the reasons that artists are skeptical of online distribution of their music is the fact that it has the precise effect of making record lables think of those songs as valueless (which they are) and instead focus on tangible things that people will pay for (e.g. a concert with merchandise).
Once artists and labels get used to this arrangement, though, there's no reason that the indy labels can't do the same, and then distributing the music cheap (or even for free) and making their money on the concerts too.
A "label" in the Internet age should be... what? My feeling is that it should be a clearinghouse... a packager if you will that records/collects the band's or artist's music, sees to its quality of recording, adds lots of indexable info and then gets it to all of the online distributors (iStore, mp3.com, etc) that will "retail it". Heck, they could just run a Gnutella farm with a web-site full of reviews and other "value added" indexing, and a client-side plugin for downloading. Boom, instant high-bandwidth music distribution, and as long as the client has some basic incremental checksum system so that it can verify it's getting the exact file that you selected, you can be sure you're downloading what you wanted. That adds ad revenue to the label's list of sources.
The margins on all of that are small to negative, but if they have an alternate source of income, then they can afford to do it, and there's really no reason that foobar label can't compete with EMI on equal footing.
And you wondered why the RIAA was deathly afraid of file sharing... it's not because they thought their members would lose money, but because they KNEW that it had to lead to a decision about the value of music that they didn't want to have to make, and ultimately killing this goose once and for all!
Excuse me, but if anything were "running away screeming" in industry, I would tag it right on your quote. For a company to scale back or remove its support for, use or deployment of a platform due to legal concerns... well, what do you call that if not running away? "Screaming" is clearly hyperbole, and I take note that you're not fond of such metaphorical license, but this is an important step in the process of establishing how legally stable open source software is.
Those who are just realizing now that that hadn't actually been decided yet are, understandably, rather unnerved. There are even those who have bought into the "aren't we stealing by using Linux?" thing, and that's generating even more paranoia and misrepresentation.
Don't go throwing the term FUD around at anything you don't agree with, it only serves to make those who really DO use fear as a tool look more justified in doing so.
So, I asked if you could name battles that weren't in the books, or ones that had an a disproportinately large role in the movies as compared to the books...
You replied:
The troll in Moria
As I recall, the goblins in Moria engaged our heros in a battle in which Frodo's armor was revealed in exactly the way it is in the movie. I didn't ask if you could name a creature that was out-of-place, obviously you compress some things from the books rather than simply throwing them away (like trolls), and that was the case with many situations. I asked if there was a BATTLE (since you mentioned that there were too many in your opinion) that was not in the books.
Rohirrim versus warg riders
This is as close as you come. Again, nothing new here, but the alteration is large enough that I consider it a "new" scene. Fair catch.
I don't see any other way to bridge the large sections of "woe is us that the fellowship is broken" with the attack on helms deep without throwing Aragorn in the river, and that would be rather pointless without some REASON for him to fall, but still... it is an alteration that was made to the movie, and it was accomplished with a fair amount of CG-FX.
It's not just battles though, there were other scenes added; some of them were benign "subtitles for dummies" scenes
Such as? Subtitles for "dummies" or for those who were unfamilliar with the volumes upon volumes of Tolkein's work on Middle Earth?
some were nepotism writ large
Huh? Such as? Not sure what this means.
but the "dwarf tossing" scene added in Moria was just a showcase for Weta.
Too bad it wasn't in Moria, but at Helms Deep. And besides, what was wrong with that scene? It exposed the the distrust turned respect, turned admiration, turned freindship that really wasn't in the dialog so much as the narration in the books.
I get the impression you didn't so much experience the movies as go to them to find fault with the treatment of your treasured memories. I understand. I did the same thing when I went to see that travesty of a movie Starship Troopers (or insert just about any SF book of the 50s made into a movie in the last 10 years). I was stunned by the mistreatment of that book, and it really set me up to expect LotR to be about Prince Aragorn and his trusted band of "Hobboids" (large reptilian beasts with psychic powers) who set off to save the Princess from the clutches of legions of "Orcitrons from Planet 10"... in some ways that would have been better than what they did to ST.
Instead you got what I think is the best treatment of the Fantasy genre on the big screen to date, but you wanted more... oh well.
I suppose I should not follow up to my own follow up, but in re-reading it I realized I came off as a bit of a gushing LoTR fanboy. Let me make it glowingly clear that I want there to be a trillogy that comes along next year and blows me away, and makes LoTR look poor by comparison.
Based on the work that's out there, I don't think that's impossible as LoTR is a good but fatally flawed story in the sense that it myopically ignores vast areas of character development. There are some works that come to mind (e.g. Hyperion or Diamond Age or going back further, Magician (which is not the calibre of work that LoTR is, but would also IMHO translate to the screen far better), Foundation and The Mote in God's Eye) that I think are a better foundation for a movie, but I also don't think it'll happen. I don't know who Jackson had to do what to to get the freedom and budget that he had on this, but it won't happen again soon if history is a guide. Then again the Wachowski Bros. have been given extraordinary leeway to make the films they wanted to make, and if you look at their previous work (e.g. Bound), it's a little unclear WHY that is.... who knows.
When it does happen, oddly enough Disney usually has a finger in it (Toy Story is a great example of a technology-driven, but well-crafted story that the visionaries at the helm were allowd to STAY at the helm on)... Disney is doing something interesting here... cranking out gobs and gobs of crap on the one hand and at the same time spending ludicrous amounts of money on a few amazingly good stories through their other divisions such as Toy Story, LoTR, importing/translating/releasing Miazaki's work, etc. I don't understand their plan, but as long as I'm allowed to ignore the crap, I'll continue to patronize the good stuff.
Also, there are more and better examples of brand new technology being brought to bare on creative work than I listed: Akira (computer-assisted animation's giant baby-step), Tron (computer-generated FX first big movie, and while I wasn't a big fan, certainly a wonderful exploration of the idea of cyberspace long before the die was cast by the likes of Gibson, and to envision a games-based virtual reality was perhaps closer to the mark than we could have realized at the time...), and more I'm not thinking of now because I'm slow in the mornings.
I think you can easily pick out 2-5 really good stories that come out, backed up by brand-new (or brand-new to movies) technology per decade, and when I look at the world of books, I see about the same... a really creative new idea is rare, and while books are easier to produce the ratio of good idea + good story to number of books published seems (at first, unscientific glance) to be in the same ballpark.
I will certianly agree that many of these technologies need time to mature, and morphing is always my best example there. I decided morphing hand matured when I saw that movie about the assassin going back to his high school reunion (don't recall the name) and it struck me that a particular scene used morphing, just to compensate for a real-world limitation in the filming (go see the movie, and see if you can spot it).
Interestingly, it was The Abyss that introduced morphing to movies, and its use was also not center-stage, but was actually used to create motion-blur for the computer-animated effects.
If you never saw The Abyss, you need to: it was perhaps Cameron's best work... though I'm tempted to say that might have been Titanic... another widely misunderstood movie that was NOT about LeoDiGirlMagneteo, but about the ways (many!) that people face -- or refuse to face -- death.
Terminator and Aliens were Cameron's adolescent big-guns action movies. The Abyss was his more mature, sense of wonder, coming-of-age story. T2 was just a love-for-SF picture with a bit of reflection on what he'd been doing. True Lies seems to have been born of some relationship concerns he must have had, and I'm willing to mostly ignore it, Titanic was his attempt to come to terms
Look at films like Final Fantasy, SW1&2, or even LoTR (flame on!). The directors went overboard with the graphics and the story suffered as a result
Look at films like 2001, The Abyss, The Matrix, or any of the other GOOD films that broke new FX technology ground. If you want to talk purely about CG, I doubt that it's fair at this point. The medium is new, and most of the really good work is going to be in the background right now, done by people who are struggling to get into the business. This is true with any new development (I'm reminded of the kid with the keyboards auditioning in the beginning of Fame).
And in LoTR, so much time was spent showing battle after battle, landscape after landscape, hokey special effect after hokey special effect, that it took 3 and a half hours to tell one third of a 2 hour movie.
Hello! What elements of Lord of the Rings are you suggesting cutting out in order to tell the story of THREE BOOKS in 2 hours?!
Jackson already had to cut a lot of the books (as, of course, anyone would... the film-version of the books unabridged would probably be 50-100 hours!)
You mentioned battle after battle. Ok, name a battle that wasn't in the books. Name a battle that took more time in the movie (proportionate to story) than it did in the books.
You mention landscapes... much of the time in the books is spend describing these landscapes, their history, the importance of their past... Jackson is doing as much as he can with the gorgeous landscapes of his native home to give you that same sense of awe and wonder at the world. If you didn't get that, I'm sorry... it was truely as close as I think a movie can come to the books without hour upon hour upon hour of cheesy voice-over, essentially narrating the book.
Special effects in LoTR are, IMHO, some of the most seemlessly integrated FX in the history of movie-making.
Perhaps you saw different movies, or read different books than I, but I'm very pleased at what is clearly the most faithful adaptation of those stories to hit the screen to date. I can only hope that it's the start of a trend!
The grand plan in ANY industry is exactly what you suggest, and none of this is a shock to anyone who understands business.
What is worrisome about the RIAA is a) the tactics they employ to restrict what music gets to the majority of ears and b) the fact that they and the MPAA together (which employs much the same tactics) run very little risk of being tagged for anti-competitive business practices (and thus forced to open up to competition) due to their massive infusions of cash into the political machinery of the United States.
Campaign reform is the only way to solve this problem, but I don't see it coming from the folks who get the checks... that leaves coordinated efforts on the part of the states and there's not much chance of that happening any time soon.
Hopefully the RIAA will be contained within the US, and music will flourish elsewhere in the world....
I've read many comments here and in other forums complaining about clients and bosses citing the SCO mess as a reason to put off Linux implementations/rollouts/development
Yep... don't go around thinking that 9% is tiny... it's not!
That means that if there are 100,000 companies considering Linux, 9,000 of them have bought the SCO FUD and are running away screaming.
Where I work, we sit back and watch, because we all knew the day would come when something and staggeringly brilliant as de-commoditizing software was going to have to go through the courts. I see this as stage one in a long series of legal battles over every aspect of the licensing, contractual obligations of contributors, waranty, etc, etc.
I'm not worried, and I continue to work with Linux. In the end, some cases will be won and some lost, but the important ones will be settled out of court or result in corporate buyouts (where I think SCO is aiming to go with this one, but they will fail), and thus leave swords hanging....
I look to this case as a great opportunity. If Open Source gets a big, decisive win, it gains much credibility to weather the next few rounds. If Open Source loses, it gains a small amound of credibility for its ability to rip out code, re-write, re-release and go on with life.
Any "secure" text-display is subject to modification
Hmm, ok modify the text displayed by your TV's menu-system. Without physically assaulting your TV, I don't think it's gonna happen.
The idea behind this scheme is not to make it any more secure than paper (though I'm sure some marketing dweeb has spun it that way), but to allow a company to feel that releasing an electronic book, magazine, newsletter, documentation suite, etc. is no less of a "transmission to the world" than releasing dead trees.
As it stands, that's not the case, because you can take this encrypted document, let your reader decrypt it, and then let your plugin save it as raw, unencrypted data. 100% perfect reproduction with no OCR, or other analog process.
In the same way that WB isn't worried that cam-corders in movie theaters are going to kill the DVD market, but ARE worried about perfect rips of DVDs -- so too is Adobe concerned about this and not about OCR coppies of such works (which BTW isn't very doable, since one of the features that Adobe gives the publisher is the explicit ability to deny or charge for printed copies).