And by paying SCO
your actualy changing the licence, what is not allowed under the GPL. So you lose the right to use linux if you pay SCO right ?.
The GPL is a copyright material distribution licence. If you don't comply with the terms then you can't distribute the software to any third parties. Unless you have an alternative permission from all of the relevent copyright holders. If you distribute without permission then that is "copyright infringement" or, to use the popular term, "software piracy". The GPL has nothing to do with the legally questionable entities called EULAs.
Except that it could create a liability for CA. Taking the licence has created a relationship between CA and SCO which did not exist before.
Second, it costs nothing.
Having it in a settlement agreement is not comparable to purchasing the licenses, even for a penny.
It costs whatever the difference would have been between a settlement with the licence and a settlement without it. If this licence were considered valueless by CA they wouldn't have accepted it in the first place.
Communism requires the goods being produced to be distributed to those who need it. As far as I can tell this requires a tolitarian state in order to enforce it.
One important thing is that software is not "goods". Yet proprietary software business models frequently rely on software behaving as though it is, whilst at the same time attempting to be excluded from any statute and case laws which might apply to the supply of "goods".
Free software is written explicitly to satisfy the ego and desires of the author.
The latter includes making a good tool to use in their (non software) business.
I also want to point out that the GPL is an extremely clever creation of capitalist greed. It allows an individual to advertise themselves, to get their work used and perhaps relied on, without the fear of others stealing their work and depriving them of potential income.
Not just income but also recognition. In some circles recognition can be a very valuable "currency".
The real Communists are all the dweebs who post here and whine that they cannot steal GPL code and make money off it.
People aren't rewarded for what they do. They may still get that "warm fuzzy" feeling, but that doesn't always motivate people as much as money will.
People, and their motivations, are complex. There are plenty of situations where any amount of money provides a lesser motivation than something else (e.g. having their name on something).
For instance, would someone like Bill Gates have spent so much time pushing forward the PC industry (I don't like the man, but I will give him credit for that) if there hadn't been a financial opportunity for him?
That is simply one person out of over 6 thousand million. It's also debatable that he pushed the PC industry "forward" as opposed to "backward".
Probably not. Also, communism calls for absolution of religion, which I, as well as many Americans, refuse to accept.
The US Constitution calls for separation of religion and government, but quite a few US politicans appear to have a problem with that.
Are copyright laws really a good idea for software? Remember, copyright protection lasts for at least 70 (but up to 95) years after the death of the author. Moreover, copyright renewals would extend this period even more.
These are issues with copyright law as it is now applied. Rather than the principle of copyrights in general. The original post was about modifying copyright to work in a different way from the way it does now.
Now tell me any kind of software that would not be utterly obsoleted in, say, 100 to 150 years from now!
Applicable to far moe than software. e.g. what is the chance of a book which has been "out of print" for a century ever making it into the public domain? A highly relevent question is "what is the optimal copyright term, to encourage publication and disemination?"
Software-Copyrights effectively eliminate public dissemination forever.
It can do, it can also enforce public dissemination. The latter being the case with "open source" licencing. It's simply a tool, which can be used in various ways.
Is this the purpose of copyright, as intended when it was invented?
Copyright was invented to enable the ruling classes to regulate the printing press. (Which was at the time a piece of highly "disruptive technology".) The idea of copyright having anything to do with creators of works is a later revision. With publishers having fought for a couple of centuries to regain the level of control they had when the third party publisher/distributor business model came into existance.
Why would I stand by my car waiting patiently for who-hell-knows-who? I wouldn't - if I'm not actually doing something to fix my car, I'd be inside it with the doors locked, on my cell if I can get a signal, waiting for the tow truck, my husband, a trooper, or whomever I'm expecting to show up and give me a hand.
Unless you have managed to get your car completly off the road being inside may well be the most dangerous place.
And now that the terrorists have moved on to other techniques, is our privacy restored by removing the ability to track users' cell phones?
You also have the "who watches the watchers" problem as a fundermental problem. With the position of "watcher" being highly attractive to criminal types.
Denmark, for instance, has the worlds ONLY state funded Nazi radio station. Why? Because the legislation that allows for publicly funded radiostations set out some guidelines that the Nazi station lives up to, namely public service (like news etc).
I have absolutely no problem with that. Why? Because if I want freedom of speech, it should also cover the speech I find deeply appaling! If it doesn't, how can it be free?
One important thing is that it is only ever politically/socially incorrect speach which ever needs protecting. But what is PC speach is highly variable, both by geography and time.
- The idea of free speech originated first in Europe (maybe elsewhere also).
An obvious "elsewhere" would be Iraq. A pre-requisite for free speach is people not having to spend most of their time just staying alive.
Scores of euro philosophers/political thinkers have argued for free speech long before the US existed, including ancient greeks.
Quite a few of the ideas involved in the founding of the US are of classical Greek and Roman origin.
- The european provisions you mention are insignificant.
The likes of "hate speach" laws exist in the US. As do well organised (and funded) groups of people who will attack anyone who anyone who has a point of view different from theirs on certain issues.
There are far more important factors to free speech, such as good public service media and the conditions of political campaigns.
A good public service media needs to be politically independent. Something which appears rarely the case in the US.
In practice, socio-political debate in west-european countries span a much wider range of ideas than that of the US,
Also in many European countries there are a wide variety of political parties, including non national parties. In the US there are often at best only two parties, on quite a few issues there is effectivly only one party.
The german law implies you may not sue anyone who does not have business with you or interferes with you in some way.
Since SCO's customers actually have some sort of contract with SCO it is possible for SCO to sue their customers for "breach of contract". But they cannot sue random third parties. Indeed the worst thing anyone can do is to buy a SCO "Linux licence" since doing so gives them a liability they didn't have before.
Therefore, if SCO tells it will be suing people they have no business with, they are obviously wrong.
In a lot more places that just Germany.
Paragraph 263 of the german "Strafgesetzbuch" (criminal code) seems to apply in this case (fraud, making false claims to extract property).
Is there anywhere, with a functioning government, which does not have laws against fraud?
Depends on when you're creating the content. I believe the idea is "I want to spend time on something that people will want to read/listen to. I can't spend the time on it if I'm not paid to do it.
Thing is that a lot of content is created without the motivation of being paid for it/having something to sell. (Including the best selling book series in history.)
I'm getting close to death, and unless the rights that go with it last longer than that, I'm not going to find anyone I can sell this to."
Such hyperthetical person is likely to be receiving a pension. Which puts them in a similar catagory to the musician who plays evenings and weekends whilst having a full time job.
Of course, a 40 year copyright term (fixed length), or a "life time or 20 years, whichever is longer", would also solve the same problem, we merely have a more extreme version.
Both of these seem over long, considering that it was only a couple of centuries ago that 14 years (plus another 14 if explicitally requested) was considered enough. Without the possibility of global markets and quick transport of information. If anything 10 (plus 10) years would make far more sense.
Re:Easier way to lower the electricity bill
on
DIY HVAC
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· Score: 1
Don't leave your VCR, radio and all other electric devices on standby all the time. They use up a significant amount of power each year.
In winter and cold climates if you turned them off you'd wind up using at least as much energy for an alternative source of heating.
As much as I love the idea of a "democratic" web, I have to disagree with more people creating content being a good thing. I've been arguing against copyright for a long time, and one of the reasons I do so is that it creates far too much of an incentive to create.
It's worth asking if copyright actually does provide such an incentive. It being kind of hard to see how something which outlives its creator by nearly a century can motivate anyone:)
From where I sit, MS's overwhelming monopoly actually hurt interoperability.. why? Because people didn't need to think about designing their programs for multiple systems.. they could just design for Windows and that was good enough.
Given that Windows isn a moving target this dosn't always work. Resulting in either programs which only work under certain versions of Windows or, worst, work in different ways (with the associated risk of quiet data corruption) with different versions of Windows.
The more subtle things are things like the tiny writing (saying, for example, "FIFTY DOLLARS"); the seven point star that reveals itself only when you hold the note up to the light; that sort of thing. The seven point star actually is somewhere between "ultra subtle" and "obvious" -- looking at the note, it can be noticed without too much difficulty if you're observant.
Whilst it can be easily observed by a human such a feature is difficult to duplicate with a scanner and printer combination. Either it will get printed or it won't get printed. With the result that the result will not follow the behavior of the genuine note.
that rather than trying to fix the software that can copy notes, you design a note that's harder to copy in such a fashion?
Especially since such attempts are likely to work as well as software intended to detect porn images or face recognition systems intended to spot terrorists at airports... Possibly the most obvious first step would be the use of colour schemes which are difficult to emulate using CMYK printing.
Maybe something that has a clear window, shadow image, fluorescent printing, and more?
Other techniques include holograms and interwoven metal threads.
If the typical US bank note is too easily copied by technology available to the home user, then it's time for the typical US bank note to be updated.
Some issues are rather specific to the US Doller. Including having the same size for every denomination, similar colour schemes and keeping the same design for decades. Even with the new $20 doller design the US is still 20-30 years behind the rest of the planet when it comes to counterfit resistant currency.
Sidewinders have an IR sensor on the nose to seek the hot tail exhaust of enemy jets and would need to be mounted outside of the internal bomb bays to be effective. If the sidewinders are mounted outside, the low radar profile of the F117A would be compromised and the jet would lose its best asset.
The missiles themselves also have a very hot exhaust. Launching any missile from a plane gives a nice IR signature for any AAA in the area to use.
Also, if you were gonna try and export the plane, what could anyone do? Just fill the gas tank up, punch the throttle and fly to eastern Siberia or somewhere.
Unless you remember to cost in something like a K-10 you'll wind up getting very wet.
This is only due to the fact that most consumers have become accustomed to poor security practices from Monopolysoft over the last 20 years. Microsoft doesn't only produce poorly engineered products, they also help perpetuate bad computing culture.
In some cases it's even to the point of promoting really daft ideas as being positive
Although, quite often the novice WinDOS users are not infact their own administrators. WinDOS is not quite as easy or simple as M$ propaganda would lead one to believe.
This even applies to many "home" systems.
Then there's the whole notion of "sandbox" that suddenly goes by the wayside with the WinDOS security mentality. Such security policies can even be transparent to the common boob.
As well as the possibility of their being transparent to badly written applications.
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And by paying SCO your actualy changing the licence, what is not allowed under the GPL. So you lose the right to use linux if you pay SCO right ?.
The GPL is a copyright material distribution licence. If you don't comply with the terms then you can't distribute the software to any third parties. Unless you have an alternative permission from all of the relevent copyright holders. If you distribute without permission then that is "copyright infringement" or, to use the popular term, "software piracy".
The GPL has nothing to do with the legally questionable entities called EULAs.
Then, after the fact, SCO decided to give all existing Unixware licensees Linux rights as well.
Which is about as meaningful as Linus issuing Unixware licences.
SCO's authority to issue "Linux licences" is simply non existant.
First, it creates no liability for CA.
Except that it could create a liability for CA. Taking the licence has created a relationship between CA and SCO which did not exist before.
Second, it costs nothing.
Having it in a settlement agreement is not comparable to purchasing the licenses, even for a penny.
It costs whatever the difference would have been between a settlement with the licence and a settlement without it.
If this licence were considered valueless by CA they wouldn't have accepted it in the first place.
Communism requires the goods being produced to be distributed to those who need it. As far as I can tell this requires a tolitarian state in order to enforce it.
:)
One important thing is that software is not "goods". Yet proprietary software business models frequently rely on software behaving as though it is, whilst at the same time attempting to be excluded from any statute and case laws which might apply to the supply of "goods".
Free software is written explicitly to satisfy the ego and desires of the author.
The latter includes making a good tool to use in their (non software) business.
I also want to point out that the GPL is an extremely clever creation of capitalist greed. It allows an individual to advertise themselves, to get their work used and perhaps relied on, without the fear of others stealing their work and depriving them of potential income.
Not just income but also recognition. In some circles recognition can be a very valuable "currency".
The real Communists are all the dweebs who post here and whine that they cannot steal GPL code and make money off it.
These arn't so much Communists as bandits
People aren't rewarded for what they do. They may still get that "warm fuzzy" feeling, but that doesn't always motivate people as much as money will.
People, and their motivations, are complex. There are plenty of situations where any amount of money provides a lesser motivation than something else (e.g. having their name on something).
For instance, would someone like Bill Gates have spent so much time pushing forward the PC industry (I don't like the man, but I will give him credit for that) if there hadn't been a financial opportunity for him?
That is simply one person out of over 6 thousand million. It's also debatable that he pushed the PC industry "forward" as opposed to "backward".
Probably not. Also, communism calls for absolution of religion, which I, as well as many Americans, refuse to accept.
The US Constitution calls for separation of religion and government, but quite a few US politicans appear to have a problem with that.
Are copyright laws really a good idea for software? Remember, copyright protection lasts for at least 70 (but up to 95) years after the death of the author. Moreover, copyright renewals would extend this period even more.
These are issues with copyright law as it is now applied. Rather than the principle of copyrights in general. The original post was about modifying copyright to work in a different way from the way it does now.
Now tell me any kind of software that would not be utterly obsoleted in, say, 100 to 150 years from now!
Applicable to far moe than software. e.g. what is the chance of a book which has been "out of print" for a century ever making it into the public domain? A highly relevent question is "what is the optimal copyright term, to encourage publication and disemination?"
Software-Copyrights effectively eliminate public dissemination forever.
It can do, it can also enforce public dissemination. The latter being the case with "open source" licencing. It's simply a tool, which can be used in various ways.
Is this the purpose of copyright, as intended when it was invented?
Copyright was invented to enable the ruling classes to regulate the printing press. (Which was at the time a piece of highly "disruptive technology".) The idea of copyright having anything to do with creators of works is a later revision. With publishers having fought for a couple of centuries to regain the level of control they had when the third party publisher/distributor business model came into existance.
Someone needs to tell SCO that the GPL text is not a joke.
It might be simpler to tell SCO that they are a joke.
Why would I stand by my car waiting patiently for who-hell-knows-who? I wouldn't - if I'm not actually doing something to fix my car, I'd be inside it with the doors locked, on my cell if I can get a signal, waiting for the tow truck, my husband, a trooper, or whomever I'm expecting to show up and give me a hand.
Unless you have managed to get your car completly off the road being inside may well be the most dangerous place.
And now that the terrorists have moved on to other techniques, is our privacy restored by removing the ability to track users' cell phones?
You also have the "who watches the watchers" problem as a fundermental problem. With the position of "watcher" being highly attractive to criminal types.
Denmark, for instance, has the worlds ONLY state funded Nazi radio station. Why? Because the legislation that allows for publicly funded radiostations set out some guidelines that the Nazi station lives up to, namely public service (like news etc).
I have absolutely no problem with that. Why? Because if I want freedom of speech, it should also cover the speech I find deeply appaling! If it doesn't, how can it be free?
One important thing is that it is only ever politically/socially incorrect speach which ever needs protecting. But what is PC speach is highly variable, both by geography and time.
- The idea of free speech originated first in Europe (maybe elsewhere also).
An obvious "elsewhere" would be Iraq. A pre-requisite for free speach is people not having to spend most of their time just staying alive.
Scores of euro philosophers/political thinkers have argued for free speech long before the US existed, including ancient greeks.
Quite a few of the ideas involved in the founding of the US are of classical Greek and Roman origin.
- The european provisions you mention are insignificant.
The likes of "hate speach" laws exist in the US. As do well organised (and funded) groups of people who will attack anyone who anyone who has a point of view different from theirs on certain issues.
There are far more important factors to free speech, such as good public service media and the conditions of political campaigns.
A good public service media needs to be politically independent. Something which appears rarely the case in the US.
In practice, socio-political debate in west-european countries span a much wider range of ideas than that of the US,
Also in many European countries there are a wide variety of political parties, including non national parties. In the US there are often at best only two parties, on quite a few issues there is effectivly only one party.
The german law implies you may not sue anyone who does not have business with you or interferes with you in some way.
Since SCO's customers actually have some sort of contract with SCO it is possible for SCO to sue their customers for "breach of contract". But they cannot sue random third parties. Indeed the worst thing anyone can do is to buy a SCO "Linux licence" since doing so gives them a liability they didn't have before.
Therefore, if SCO tells it will be suing people they have no business with, they are obviously wrong.
In a lot more places that just Germany.
Paragraph 263 of the german "Strafgesetzbuch" (criminal code) seems to apply in this case (fraud, making false claims to extract property).
Is there anywhere, with a functioning government, which does not have laws against fraud?
Depends on when you're creating the content. I believe the idea is "I want to spend time on something that people will want to read/listen to. I can't spend the time on it if I'm not paid to do it.
Thing is that a lot of content is created without the motivation of being paid for it/having something to sell. (Including the best selling book series in history.)
I'm getting close to death, and unless the rights that go with it last longer than that, I'm not going to find anyone I can sell this to."
Such hyperthetical person is likely to be receiving a pension. Which puts them in a similar catagory to the musician who plays evenings and weekends whilst having a full time job.
Of course, a 40 year copyright term (fixed length), or a "life time or 20 years, whichever is longer", would also solve the same problem, we merely have a more extreme version.
Both of these seem over long, considering that it was only a couple of centuries ago that 14 years (plus another 14 if explicitally requested) was considered enough. Without the possibility of global markets and quick transport of information. If anything 10 (plus 10) years would make far more sense.
Don't leave your VCR, radio and all other electric devices on standby all the time. They use up a significant amount of power each year.
In winter and cold climates if you turned them off you'd wind up using at least as much energy for an alternative source of heating.
As much as I love the idea of a "democratic" web, I have to disagree with more people creating content being a good thing. I've been arguing against copyright for a long time, and one of the reasons I do so is that it creates far too much of an incentive to create.
:)
It's worth asking if copyright actually does provide such an incentive. It being kind of hard to see how something which outlives its creator by nearly a century can motivate anyone
Sakes alive, the Microsoft spin machine has been well oiled this morning!
:)
They must have had a delivery of snake oil
From where I sit, MS's overwhelming monopoly actually hurt interoperability.. why? Because people didn't need to think about designing their programs for multiple systems.. they could just design for Windows and that was good enough.
Given that Windows isn a moving target this dosn't always work. Resulting in either programs which only work under certain versions of Windows or, worst, work in different ways (with the associated risk of quiet data corruption) with different versions of Windows.
The more subtle things are things like the tiny writing (saying, for example, "FIFTY DOLLARS"); the seven point star that reveals itself only when you hold the note up to the light; that sort of thing. The seven point star actually is somewhere between "ultra subtle" and "obvious" -- looking at the note, it can be noticed without too much difficulty if you're observant.
Whilst it can be easily observed by a human such a feature is difficult to duplicate with a scanner and printer combination. Either it will get printed or it won't get printed. With the result that the result will not follow the behavior of the genuine note.
that rather than trying to fix the software that can copy notes, you design a note that's harder to copy in such a fashion?
Especially since such attempts are likely to work as well as software intended to detect porn images or face recognition systems intended to spot terrorists at airports...
Possibly the most obvious first step would be the use of colour schemes which are difficult to emulate using CMYK printing.
Maybe something that has a clear window, shadow image, fluorescent printing, and more?
Other techniques include holograms and interwoven metal threads.
If the typical US bank note is too easily copied by technology available to the home user, then it's time for the typical US bank note to be updated.
Some issues are rather specific to the US Doller. Including having the same size for every denomination, similar colour schemes and keeping the same design for decades. Even with the new $20 doller design the US is still 20-30 years behind the rest of the planet when it comes to counterfit resistant currency.
Says me. The nose cone of the F117A doesn't have an antenna or dish, nor does the rest of the aircraft.
The problem with fitting radar to a stealth aircraft is that a radar dish itself has a fairly high RCS.
Sidewinders have an IR sensor on the nose to seek the hot tail exhaust of enemy jets and would need to be mounted outside of the internal bomb bays to be effective. If the sidewinders are mounted outside, the low radar profile of the F117A would be compromised and the jet would lose its best asset.
The missiles themselves also have a very hot exhaust. Launching any missile from a plane gives a nice IR signature for any AAA in the area to use.
It's a plane ... what are they going to do, send out an F117A and shoot you down?
Even though the F117A is often refered to as a "stealth fighter" it is in actual fact more of a light bomber. It dosn't even have cannon.
Also, if you were gonna try and export the plane, what could anyone do? Just fill the gas tank up, punch the throttle and fly to eastern Siberia or somewhere.
Unless you remember to cost in something like a K-10 you'll wind up getting very wet.
This is only due to the fact that most consumers have become accustomed to poor security practices from Monopolysoft over the last 20 years. Microsoft doesn't only produce poorly engineered products, they also help perpetuate bad computing culture.
In some cases it's even to the point of promoting really daft ideas as being positive
Although, quite often the novice WinDOS users are not infact their own administrators. WinDOS is not quite as easy or simple as M$ propaganda would lead one to believe.
This even applies to many "home" systems.
Then there's the whole notion of "sandbox" that suddenly goes by the wayside with the WinDOS security mentality. Such security policies can even be transparent to the common boob.
As well as the possibility of their being transparent to badly written applications.
You're right that there is software out there that requires admin rights to run. It should be pretty clear that this isn't Microsoft's fault, though.
Given that Microsoft also produce the development tools and the documentation they may be part of the problem here.