There's also the very nice cygwin. I suppose this is just a sort of distribution thing, but cygwin has actually been around for longer even than Linux has. Why the sudden need for other distributions of GNU tools for Windows, I wonder?
By failing to protect the public interest in free access to the products of the inventive and artistic genius -- indeed, by virtually ignoring the central purpose of the Copyright/Patent Clause [in the Constitution] -- the Court has quitclaimed to Congress its principal responsibility in this area of the law."
Justice Stevens, J., dissenting "Eldred v. Ashcroft"
It's just amazing. You've quoted that twice now, and you seem to keep mis-reading it. He first tackles the issue of copyright. He explains why copyright would not be their claim, based on the GPL and the original effort.
This has nothing to do with patents at the point in the original post that you are quoting.
The original post is moving one logical step at a time, and you're jumping ahead to the patent issue. Stop. Breath. Relax. It's ok to discuss multiple topics in one post.
I imagine this will end when SCO reveals their patent and one of the following happens:
1. Overwhelming prior art forces them to shut up 2. The affected code is re-written, forcing Linux to evolve for the better. 3. Tremendous market pressure from current Caldera users and other parties interested in SCO forces them to withdraw.
There is basically nothing that Linux and UNIX(tm) have that *BSD does not. This means that if SCO comes after Linux, they would have to explain why they (and the IP holders before them) let BSD live for 20+ years. That's going to be a hard sell.
Quoted in parent: It almost certainly is not copyrights. Linux was written from scratch by Linus Torvalds and released under the GNU GPL. Any and all code submitted to the kernel is likewise GPLed, so if SCO submitted code, they did so under the terms of the GPL. This is where the GPL really shines... it innoculates against entities such as SCO submarining code into the OS and then making copyright claims down the road.
Notice that what you're quoting is about copyright
Parent: Sorry to inform you, but if any developer writes code that violates SCOs patents it doesn't matter if it is GPLd or not. The patent encumbrance clause of the GPL states that if there is a patent dispute than distribution is forbidden.
Ok, now... notice that you're responding about patents.
Quoted: In any event, if the rest of the world ever wants to throw off the yoke of the American Hegemony,
Ooook, it's time to go back on the meds and take off the tinfoil hat. There is no American Hegemony. [... comments about China stripped...]
Ad hominem attacks aren't really very productive, and in this case you again missed (ignored?) the point. The United States sets precident for most of the world's treaties on international patent and trademark law. Thus, it's perfectly reasonable to attack the US when speaking of the utter mess that such treaties have created. China is, in fact, making rather grand (if, as yet, unsuccesful) efforts to move toward compliance with those treaties in order to gain an equal footing with the west in international trade.
Umm... we are talking about the same company here, right? Have you ever known any of their products to be capable of catching truly creative and unique intrusions of any sort? They're a signature vendor, and they do a very good job of it.
In order to get a list of the signatures (network traffic and disk-image alike) for every common form of intrusion, you need this kind of a network. Is there some other way to get this info that I'm not aware of?
Would you trust a company that said, "we have done a few google searches for root kits and we think we have some good software based on that"?
Then again, the best source of network intrusion data is to boast about the quality of your security and then sit back and log the results:-)
This is just a honeypot network, which if you think about it, is the only reasonable way for them to get the information they need on network intrusion.
Well, if you were trying to stay one step ahead of the people breaking into systems, wouldn't you have a network with a bunch of honeypots and as much logging as you could manage?
This article (not the Slashdot article, but the review referenced) is really going around itself to lap up the MS PR releases here. First off, it never once questions why you would want this thing in preference to a TiVo or Replay. It does bring up the "advantage" of PC-based PVRs. Apparently it's the ability to convert your stored shows to any format you like... of course, they then explain that MCE can't do that, but they expect that MS will add it soon!
They also skip right over any discussion of ease of use, setup, cabling, access to guide data, fees, etc. I'm assuming that the author simply read some releases, watched a couple of Simpsons episodes and then decided to write a review (mostly of the Simpsons, as it turns out).
Oh, and I'm assuming that the assertion that this will be WindowsXP/Pro + MCE is a joke. I can't imagine that MS won't lock all of the "server" features in this, just like they do with XP/Home.
As with most GUI-based admin tools, the Windows tools seem much more friendly and useful... until you need to do something that they weren't designed to do:-/
Having command-line tools that can do anything you want them to do is a pain in the ass for the developers who write the tools ("what do you mean he wants to do THAT with cron?!" is something I'm sure Mr. Vixie has said...), but for the systems folk who have better things to do, it's a godsend.
This eventaully boils down to the old command-line vs. GUI argument, and as evidence that that war has finally been decided, I will point to the fact that after 15 years of saying it would never happen, MacOS now has a command-line. They could have gotten rid of it, but when faced with replacing such a robust set of tools with GUIs, the Mac folks had to admin defeat.
One day, I hope there is a GUI that is as powerful as a command-line, but I've never seen one.
I leave you with this daily-show-like moment of zen:
cron and bash along with most UNIX command-line tools and a good sized chunk of the X software has been available for Windows from Cygnus (now RedHat) for years now.
A Windows box with Cygnus and XFree86 installed and running *can* be told apart from a Linux box that simply doesn't have Gnome or KDE installed, but it takes a few minutes and an inclination to check.
What I would love to see (has it been done?) is a deconstruction of information into pure physics in a way that leaves us able to speak about units like "processing speed". The high-energy physics definition of information is too absolute. It defines information as a lack of entropy, and that's not really enough of a toe-hold to talk about what information is to us, and what the practical limits on it are.
Trading copies of the program(regardless of medium) to people is a copyright violation.
Oh so? An how is this different from sharing a video tape or a book (both of which have been held up as fair use).
Let me answer for you, and people can correct me if I'm wrong:
Some will try to argue that sharing digital media is inherently an act of "broadcast", and thus is not fair use. If you share a TV show with a friend, I don't see how this could stand up in court*
Others will go for the silver bullet of, electronic media such as a TiVo show cannot be shared directly, but instead has to be coppied. This duplication creates a new work which can, in turn be coppied.
This last one is important. It's not how the media industries will win, but it is a valid point. The obvious response is for TiVo to create a locking mechanism that ensures that the loaner and loanee cannot share the show and both retain coppies, but that won't happen either.
* As I said above, that's not how they'll win because it requires going after individuals. The one that will be used is the first one. Disney and Sony et al. will latch onto the P2P networks and sue the ISPs to force them to monitor these "priate broadcasts". Once a tool is in place to "detect piracy", the innocent and concientious person who shares with friends and does not retain copies will be suck in the position of having to prove that s/he did not fall into either category above.
This is a win for businesses because now they can get the law to do their work and only people who aren't too lazy to stand up for themselves will have to be actively attacked.
Of course it's not a driver of the development! It's a side-effect. Moore's Law exists because of our thirst for data processing. We need to speed up entertainment (video games, embeded entertainment devices, etc); information processing (dsp, telemetry processing, etc); and many other applications both theoretical and concrete.
As long as the market demands bigger, faster, stronger, new methods and materials will continue to be developed.
The problem is that every time we hit a wall, there's enough economic incentive for SOMEONE to find a way around the wall.
The possible growth is probably limited somewhat, but by limited we're talking about a scale that we're not even close to. Quantum Computing and Nanotech are currently leading us down some interesting paths, and who knows what's next.
I suspect that you'll never be able to perform more parallel logic operations in a given volume than a smallish multiple of the number of atoms in that volume. Atomic nuclei have properties that we understand well enough that controling them for purposes of logic is currently believable SF. To think that we'll be able to control a single electron or a proton, and its component quarks enough to make it perform logic for us is something I'm not YET willing to accept, but even still I think that we'll be sharply limited in how far down that ramp we can go. At some point we'll need a different model of the universe before we're allowed to extract any meaningful data.
I disagree. There is no larger battle than public opinion. If you accept the term piracy (and it's only been used to describe copyright violations since the late 80s), you end up having to look at fair use as "are you a good pirate, or a bad pirate", and that kills your point before you get started.
When you start asking, "what is fair use, and what is the relationship between copyright expiration in one nation vs. another", then a) 1/2 or more of the population tunes you out and b) the other half or less are the ones who actually care about the issue enough to learn what it is that's going on. Now, you don't have 10million idiots cheering "down with pirates" and you can sit down with the libraries and the industry associations and the artists and the customer advocates and come to some compromises on the right way to do business in everyone's favor.
The other path leads to things like the DMCA.
Re:1) light fire. 2) open gas can...
on
Droning On
·
· Score: 2
"The following is just a sig. (And truer everyday.)[note: that was not part of the sig -ajs]
If you voted for Nader, THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT!"
I could not agree more! These damn Nader supporters should have voted libertarian like all of the right-thinking people did. Dolts!
We really need a 10-party system, I agree, but first I want my favorite candidate voted into office. Why aren't more people like you, so that they could see this?!
[note: the preceding is just sarcasm, and not my sig -ajs]
Yeah, you have it surrounded. Make it think for you. I might prefer such "adaptive" techniques as an option rather than a default, but a more adaptive file tree view would probably satisfy you there anyway.
No, they are incorrect. Copyright violations, even importing such materials is not piracy, theft, murder, rape, arson or any other nifty name you want to think of. It's copyright violation. It's a civil offense much like violation of contract, but the RIAA, MPAA and others have slowly worked in criminal charges for many related "crimes".
The problem is that saying "this man is a copyright violator" puts people in mind of the little guy vs the corporate giants. Saying "this man is a pirate" makes people understand the God's Honest Truth(tm)... that these are whoring, theiving, pilaging bastards who have thrown their lot in with the devil!
The above is a rhetorical technique is called hyperbole. In my case it's saterical, and I'm honest about it. In the RIAA's case it's an underhanded trick that they defend staunchly, meant to make people think there's someone getting hurt in all of this.
I think the tree model is ideal. What is not ideal is everything after the tree.
The file selection widget (FSW) is a core element of any high-level toolkit, and yet I've never seen one that provided any kind of utility that I need to make a filesystem work well in a GUI.
For starters, all FSWs should have memory, and they should understand what they're being used for. All of my graphics apps should "remember" where the last graphics app saved a file and default to that directory. Same goes for opening a file. Or office apps.
They should also have a history pull-down.
We also need a graphical abstraction for the filesystem (other than the MS-like horizontal tree) that customizes itself through use. If, for example, there are three directories that I load and save files to/from all the time, they should be the most obvious and accessible things in the tree.
Do these things, and graphical interaction with a filesystem makes sense.
As for a metadata filesystem, I think there's utility in it to some extent, but unless "rm" understands it, and it's easy to use from that level too, it's useless to anyone who really USES a UNIX(-like) system.
Since others have been confused on this point -- and I was none to clear in my original posting -- keep in mind that the above example works just fine no matter whose module you have installed as "CGI", as long as it obeys the CGI API....
Thus, I may have developed this against my own "CGI" module, and it just happens to work with the better-known version that ships with Perl.
If that gives you a headache imagine how bad it gets when we get to OO programming where "deriving" is actually part of the programming paradigm! When I create an object that derives from yours, is it a derived work in the copyright sense? If not, why not?
My answer is similar to Rosen's, but goes deeper. If your modification to or derivation from my code is made through an API that I provided, then you're not creating a derived work, you're using my tool as I intended it to be used (and stated in the license that you were allowed to "use" it). The issue will have to be resolved for the case where there is no license (e.g. if you have not accepted the terms of the GPL), but I think the answer should be the same.
Oh! Oh! Passive tense in english! Oh the humanity!:-)
"regardless of the actual mechanism that does it, you're the one that's causing it to actually be done. So that part of your thesis needs a little work"
I'm not so sure that holds water. You say that my work is a derivative of yours (casting you as the CGI author here for simplicity)? What if I say, "No, no! I wrote an API-compatible module for doing CGI stuff! Your module was crap. My CGIOverride is designed to alter my module, but if someone wants to use it with yours, that's ok with me too."
Now what happens? I've caused the compiler to modify my module, but it can just as easily modify yours, and in fact I encourage the users of my software to do so. That's why I mentioned the idea of questioning the copyrightability of namespaces in programming languages.
This is where copyright law is lagging decades behind the real world. The hew and cry from people like me to fix this kind of mess was answered with the DMCA, which introduced a host of new problems and solved non of the real ones. Sigh.
Lawrence Rosen is an attorney in private practice, with offices in Los Altos and Ukiah, California (www.rosenlaw.com). He is also corporate secretary and general counsel for the Open Source Initiative, which manages and promotes the Open Source Definition (www.opensource.org).
Here's an interesting copyright question for you. Many of us have quoted the article. All totaled, this page probably has a complete copy of it. Is that fair use? Heh.
Slashdot Mirror
There's also the very nice cygwin. I suppose this is just a sort of distribution thing, but cygwin has actually been around for longer even than Linux has. Why the sudden need for other distributions of GNU tools for Windows, I wonder?
"Eldred v. Ashcroft"
Need more be said?
It's just amazing. You've quoted that twice now, and you seem to keep mis-reading it. He first tackles the issue of copyright. He explains why copyright would not be their claim, based on the GPL and the original effort.
This has nothing to do with patents at the point in the original post that you are quoting.
The original post is moving one logical step at a time, and you're jumping ahead to the patent issue. Stop. Breath. Relax. It's ok to discuss multiple topics in one post.
I imagine this will end when SCO reveals their patent and one of the following happens:
1. Overwhelming prior art forces them to shut up
2. The affected code is re-written, forcing Linux to evolve for the better.
3. Tremendous market pressure from current Caldera users and other parties interested in SCO forces them to withdraw.
There is basically nothing that Linux and UNIX(tm) have that *BSD does not. This means that if SCO comes after Linux, they would have to explain why they (and the IP holders before them) let BSD live for 20+ years. That's going to be a hard sell.
Quoted in parent: It almost certainly is not copyrights. Linux was written from scratch by Linus Torvalds and released under the GNU GPL. Any and all code submitted to the kernel is likewise GPLed, so if SCO submitted code, they did so under the terms of the GPL. This is where the GPL really shines ... it innoculates against entities such as SCO submarining code into the OS and then making copyright claims down the road.
...]
Notice that what you're quoting is about copyright
Parent: Sorry to inform you, but if any developer writes code that violates SCOs patents it doesn't matter if it is GPLd or not. The patent encumbrance clause of the GPL states that if there is a patent dispute than distribution is forbidden.
Ok, now... notice that you're responding about patents.
Quoted: In any event, if the rest of the world ever wants to throw off the yoke of the American Hegemony,
Ooook, it's time to go back on the meds and take off the tinfoil hat. There is no American Hegemony. [... comments about China stripped
Ad hominem attacks aren't really very productive, and in this case you again missed (ignored?) the point. The United States sets precident for most of the world's treaties on international patent and trademark law. Thus, it's perfectly reasonable to attack the US when speaking of the utter mess that such treaties have created. China is, in fact, making rather grand (if, as yet, unsuccesful) efforts to move toward compliance with those treaties in order to gain an equal footing with the west in international trade.
Umm... we are talking about the same company here, right? Have you ever known any of their products to be capable of catching truly creative and unique intrusions of any sort? They're a signature vendor, and they do a very good job of it.
In order to get a list of the signatures (network traffic and disk-image alike) for every common form of intrusion, you need this kind of a network. Is there some other way to get this info that I'm not aware of?
Would you trust a company that said, "we have done a few google searches for root kits and we think we have some good software based on that"?
Then again, the best source of network intrusion data is to boast about the quality of your security and then sit back and log the results :-)
This is just a honeypot network, which if you think about it, is the only reasonable way for them to get the information they need on network intrusion.
Well, if you were trying to stay one step ahead of the people breaking into systems, wouldn't you have a network with a bunch of honeypots and as much logging as you could manage?
This is basic network security practice, no?
This article (not the Slashdot article, but the review referenced) is really going around itself to lap up the MS PR releases here. First off, it never once questions why you would want this thing in preference to a TiVo or Replay. It does bring up the "advantage" of PC-based PVRs. Apparently it's the ability to convert your stored shows to any format you like... of course, they then explain that MCE can't do that, but they expect that MS will add it soon!
They also skip right over any discussion of ease of use, setup, cabling, access to guide data, fees, etc. I'm assuming that the author simply read some releases, watched a couple of Simpsons episodes and then decided to write a review (mostly of the Simpsons, as it turns out).
Oh, and I'm assuming that the assertion that this will be WindowsXP/Pro + MCE is a joke. I can't imagine that MS won't lock all of the "server" features in this, just like they do with XP/Home.
Having command-line tools that can do anything you want them to do is a pain in the ass for the developers who write the tools ("what do you mean he wants to do THAT with cron?!" is something I'm sure Mr. Vixie has said...), but for the systems folk who have better things to do, it's a godsend.
This eventaully boils down to the old command-line vs. GUI argument, and as evidence that that war has finally been decided, I will point to the fact that after 15 years of saying it would never happen, MacOS now has a command-line. They could have gotten rid of it, but when faced with replacing such a robust set of tools with GUIs, the Mac folks had to admin defeat.
One day, I hope there is a GUI that is as powerful as a command-line, but I've never seen one.
I leave you with this daily-show-like moment of zen:
cron and bash along with most UNIX command-line tools and a good sized chunk of the X software has been available for Windows from Cygnus (now RedHat) for years now.
A Windows box with Cygnus and XFree86 installed and running *can* be told apart from a Linux box that simply doesn't have Gnome or KDE installed, but it takes a few minutes and an inclination to check.
What I would love to see (has it been done?) is a deconstruction of information into pure physics in a way that leaves us able to speak about units like "processing speed". The high-energy physics definition of information is too absolute. It defines information as a lack of entropy, and that's not really enough of a toe-hold to talk about what information is to us, and what the practical limits on it are.
Oh so? An how is this different from sharing a video tape or a book (both of which have been held up as fair use).
Let me answer for you, and people can correct me if I'm wrong:
- Some will try to argue that sharing digital media is inherently an act of "broadcast", and thus is not fair use. If you share a TV show with a friend, I don't see how this could stand up in court*
- Others will go for the silver bullet of, electronic media such as a TiVo show cannot be shared directly, but instead has to be coppied. This duplication creates a new work which can, in turn be coppied.
This last one is important. It's not how the media industries will win, but it is a valid point. The obvious response is for TiVo to create a locking mechanism that ensures that the loaner and loanee cannot share the show and both retain coppies, but that won't happen either.* As I said above, that's not how they'll win because it requires going after individuals. The one that will be used is the first one. Disney and Sony et al. will latch onto the P2P networks and sue the ISPs to force them to monitor these "priate broadcasts". Once a tool is in place to "detect piracy", the innocent and concientious person who shares with friends and does not retain copies will be suck in the position of having to prove that s/he did not fall into either category above.
This is a win for businesses because now they can get the law to do their work and only people who aren't too lazy to stand up for themselves will have to be actively attacked.
easydns has done very well by me. Backup MX, domain transfers, dns primary and/or secondary, aliases, redirects, dynamic DNS, etc.
Good service, and cheap. Found a bug once. Got mail from the maintainer saying it was already fixed, and going out next week.
Still on hold with Network Solvent three years later on how the hell to transfer or delete a freakin HOST entry. Sigh.
Of course it's not a driver of the development! It's a side-effect. Moore's Law exists because of our thirst for data processing. We need to speed up entertainment (video games, embeded entertainment devices, etc); information processing (dsp, telemetry processing, etc); and many other applications both theoretical and concrete.
As long as the market demands bigger, faster, stronger, new methods and materials will continue to be developed.
The problem is that every time we hit a wall, there's enough economic incentive for SOMEONE to find a way around the wall.
The possible growth is probably limited somewhat, but by limited we're talking about a scale that we're not even close to. Quantum Computing and Nanotech are currently leading us down some interesting paths, and who knows what's next.
I suspect that you'll never be able to perform more parallel logic operations in a given volume than a smallish multiple of the number of atoms in that volume. Atomic nuclei have properties that we understand well enough that controling them for purposes of logic is currently believable SF. To think that we'll be able to control a single electron or a proton, and its component quarks enough to make it perform logic for us is something I'm not YET willing to accept, but even still I think that we'll be sharply limited in how far down that ramp we can go. At some point we'll need a different model of the universe before we're allowed to extract any meaningful data.
I stand corrected.
I was aware of this term first in the software industry in the 80s, and had thought that it originated there. My bad.
I disagree. There is no larger battle than public opinion. If you accept the term piracy (and it's only been used to describe copyright violations since the late 80s), you end up having to look at fair use as "are you a good pirate, or a bad pirate", and that kills your point before you get started.
When you start asking, "what is fair use, and what is the relationship between copyright expiration in one nation vs. another", then a) 1/2 or more of the population tunes you out and b) the other half or less are the ones who actually care about the issue enough to learn what it is that's going on. Now, you don't have 10million idiots cheering "down with pirates" and you can sit down with the libraries and the industry associations and the artists and the customer advocates and come to some compromises on the right way to do business in everyone's favor.
The other path leads to things like the DMCA.
"The following is just a sig. (And truer everyday.)[note: that was not part of the sig -ajs]
If you voted for Nader, THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT!"
I could not agree more! These damn Nader supporters should have voted libertarian like all of the right-thinking people did. Dolts!
We really need a 10-party system, I agree, but first I want my favorite candidate voted into office. Why aren't more people like you, so that they could see this?!
[note: the preceding is just sarcasm, and not my sig -ajs]
Yeah, you have it surrounded. Make it think for you. I might prefer such "adaptive" techniques as an option rather than a default, but a more adaptive file tree view would probably satisfy you there anyway.
No, they are incorrect. Copyright violations, even importing such materials is not piracy, theft, murder, rape, arson or any other nifty name you want to think of. It's copyright violation. It's a civil offense much like violation of contract, but the RIAA, MPAA and others have slowly worked in criminal charges for many related "crimes".
The problem is that saying "this man is a copyright violator" puts people in mind of the little guy vs the corporate giants. Saying "this man is a pirate" makes people understand the God's Honest Truth(tm)... that these are whoring, theiving, pilaging bastards who have thrown their lot in with the devil!
The above is a rhetorical technique is called hyperbole. In my case it's saterical, and I'm honest about it. In the RIAA's case it's an underhanded trick that they defend staunchly, meant to make people think there's someone getting hurt in all of this.
I think the tree model is ideal. What is not ideal is everything after the tree.
The file selection widget (FSW) is a core element of any high-level toolkit, and yet I've never seen one that provided any kind of utility that I need to make a filesystem work well in a GUI.
For starters, all FSWs should have memory, and they should understand what they're being used for. All of my graphics apps should "remember" where the last graphics app saved a file and default to that directory. Same goes for opening a file. Or office apps.
They should also have a history pull-down.
We also need a graphical abstraction for the filesystem (other than the MS-like horizontal tree) that customizes itself through use. If, for example, there are three directories that I load and save files to/from all the time, they should be the most obvious and accessible things in the tree.
Do these things, and graphical interaction with a filesystem makes sense.
As for a metadata filesystem, I think there's utility in it to some extent, but unless "rm" understands it, and it's easy to use from that level too, it's useless to anyone who really USES a UNIX(-like) system.
Since others have been confused on this point -- and I was none to clear in my original posting -- keep in mind that the above example works just fine no matter whose module you have installed as "CGI", as long as it obeys the CGI API....
Thus, I may have developed this against my own "CGI" module, and it just happens to work with the better-known version that ships with Perl.
If that gives you a headache imagine how bad it gets when we get to OO programming where "deriving" is actually part of the programming paradigm! When I create an object that derives from yours, is it a derived work in the copyright sense? If not, why not?
My answer is similar to Rosen's, but goes deeper. If your modification to or derivation from my code is made through an API that I provided, then you're not creating a derived work, you're using my tool as I intended it to be used (and stated in the license that you were allowed to "use" it). The issue will have to be resolved for the case where there is no license (e.g. if you have not accepted the terms of the GPL), but I think the answer should be the same.
"You are causing to be modified..."
:-)
Oh! Oh! Passive tense in english! Oh the humanity!
"regardless of the actual mechanism that does it, you're the one that's causing it to actually be done. So that part of your thesis needs a little work"
I'm not so sure that holds water. You say that my work is a derivative of yours (casting you as the CGI author here for simplicity)? What if I say, "No, no! I wrote an API-compatible module for doing CGI stuff! Your module was crap. My CGIOverride is designed to alter my module, but if someone wants to use it with yours, that's ok with me too."
Now what happens? I've caused the compiler to modify my module, but it can just as easily modify yours, and in fact I encourage the users of my software to do so. That's why I mentioned the idea of questioning the copyrightability of namespaces in programming languages.
This is where copyright law is lagging decades behind the real world. The hew and cry from people like me to fix this kind of mess was answered with the DMCA, which introduced a host of new problems and solved non of the real ones. Sigh.