The source and binaries accompany each other under the GPL, or at least they are both availble.
Not quite, if you supply someone with a binary the GPL obliges you to make the source available to them at no additional cost. If you supply someone with just the source then you have no obligation to compile it for them. What you can't do is just supply a binary then either not make the source available or then offer to sell the source to them at a profit.
IANAL so I've always wondered about the following: Let's say I have a company and I build a bunch of for-internal-use-only custom modifications of GPL software. That seems fine by GPL standards. What if I decide to sell my company? The software I've developed is certainly an integral part of the value of my company.
If you sell the binaries of your modified GPL code, which you most likely would if they are needed for the company to operate, then you must supply the source to whoever you have sold your company to.
Would GPL require me to publish all of the modified source code if I sell the company?
The GPL never requires you to publish anything. What it does require is that if you supply binary then you must also make available the source at no additional cost (except that involved in producing a copy of the source). Anyone you supply the software to has the same rights and obligations as you do.
Certain rights, however, can't be signed away no matter what the contract says. Nobody knows if that is the case for first sale rights. The problem is that the first sale right for software licenses hasn't been tested in courts,
Nor does anyone who has the lobbying power appear to have much interest in trying to get a statute passed which says this.
and nobody wants to be the guinea pig.
You'd need someone with deep pockets who would see the case through to the end.
I believe that any license agreement trumps public law.
No the law always trumps any contractual agreement. You'd end up with a kind of anarchy quite soon otherwise.
The law may give you a right, but you are free to sign away that right.
You can have a legal right you cannot sign away, one which you can only sign away with difficulty and one which you can revoke your signing away (typically within some time period.
For example, you have the right to sue me in any court, but you are free to sign an agreement with me that you will only sue me in the court of my choosing.
Even if such an agreement is binding now it may cease to be binding in future. Anyway if someone chose to ignore such a clause your only option would be to countersue for breach of contract.
Retail copeis are still best in my opinion. Yeah, you pay for them at full rate, but, you own something, have a receipt, have a real copy of it. Its nice to have a BSA audit, and take them out back, open up a big cardboard box, and show them the boxes for 20 copies of office, 20 copies of windows, and 2 copies of windows server (actually been at a place like that). The audit last 10 minutes (well, thats 18 machines, 20 sets of licenses, you're all set -have a nice day).
Problem is that this down't scale that well. With it being large organisations, especially where more then one person has purchasing authority where record keeping becomes a nightmare.
As I understand it (see my disclaimer above), all bets are off in bankruptcy court. IOW, just because you have a piece of paper saying that an asset in non-transferrable, the bankruptcy court can do what they want with it.
It's a court, which is an agency of the state empowered to rule on meaning of contractual terms. They are also a third party to any contracts the bankrupt party made, who's primary job is to get secured creditors the money they are owed.
If I lease my delivery trucks from Ford, then go out of business, I can't then turn around and sell the trucks as an asset of the firm. Instead, the trucks go back to Ford, which is the real owner of the truck.
So long as Ford makes it clear they were leasing. If they claimed they were selling the trucks, then turned around and said thwy were leasing them then there would be trouble. The problem with proprietary software is that some software companies appear to want to pick and choose if they are selling or leasing on a whim and sometimes retrospecitvly.
I'm confused. What is the problem with using a GPL'd binary? If I'm looking for an alternative to Word, I can use AbiWord or OpenOffice.org Writer. I don't to worry about licensing issues because I don't intend to modify the source.
You can modify the source all you like. The only time the GPL comes into play is if you distribute to a third party. N.B. this applies regardless of if "you" are a single individual or a transnational corporation employing millions of people around the world. Whilst the GPL would come into affect with a corporate sale, merger or split it only affects the parties directly involved and handing over some source is a lot less disruptive than having to work out what software might need relicencing.
I don't have any idea why MSFT is screwing around with such a small transaction - they must be angry about other issues.
If they can get a precident set in such a case they can get leverage over much larger corporations. Those big enough to be able to take on Microsoft in a straight legal battle.
Don't even get me started on opensource (I know, sacrilidge on slashdot, but guess what, most companies won't acquire anything built in opensource due to the license problems)..
The point is to a software user there are no licence issues. If the company is sold, merged, split the licence issues are trivial (make sure the new corporate entity or entities get the source for all the binaries which were transfered). Compared with all the "fun" of dealing with ELUAs, per user, per seat and per server schemes risk of having your business disrupted by a BSA "audit". Then if corporate structure or ownership is changed you can wind up with a big bill.
This could potentially set a huge precedent - it's not just Microsoft's licenses that carry these agreements. If they manage to succeed with this line of reasoning I think we can expect a lot more software companies throwing their weight around.
IIRC there was a hospital in Scotland which got bitten by this kind of clause in proprietary software licences.
Which, in the end, is *very* good for the opensource community - we can transfer software all we want!
So long as people don't belive the FUD which gets thrown around about there being complex legal issues surrounding using open source software. Whilst drawing attention away from the ability of proprietary software licencing to complicate any kind of sale, merger or split of a corporate entity which uses software.
There have been some recent proposals saying that the ITU should be in charge - as somebody who's been in the telecom business for 25 years, I view them as better than ICANN, because some of them are engineers and because they're a slow bureaucratic multilateral committee rather than a cabal, but they're still the kind o f bureaucratic telecom who brought you E.164 names, X.25 as their best example of data networking, and OSI protocols and high European telecom settlement costs,
With the alternative being the NANP, which manages to put Bermuda and Guam into the same country code. At least with the ITU countries can actually manage their own numbering schemes too.
ICANN needs to be reined in, certainly, but having the DNS run by a subgroup of the International Telecommunications Union or by a new treaty organization would be a nightmare.
if someone called you up and said "do you think J-walking should be legal" and even though you J-walk every day, you would probably say no just so you don't get in trouble.
Depends where you ask the question, outside of the US a typical response would be "What's jaywalking?" Anyway the question would be nonsensical in Europe, since pedestrians always have right of way over motor traffic. Due to some of the roads being in use for thousands of years before anyone even though of the internal combustion engine.
If MacroSoft doesn't think this is fair, well, it can always go file a complaint in court. In Panama.;)
Why Panama? If MacroSoft is based in the US and you are a non US citzen Cuba might be a better choice. Or pick a country which has no functional judicial system.
Neither are "shrink wrap" contracts (you know, the kinds that are kept inside the sealed plastic covering that start "By breaking this seal you agree to..." , and continues "...Microsoft does not garantue the usefuleness of this software for any purpose what-so-ever, even including purposes stated by Microsoft or Microsoft employees."
If they were valid you could simply send Microsoft a letter stating "Dear Microsoft, by opening this envelope you agree to transfer all your assets to me in return for the payment of one US doller".
See that part about "by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease or lending"? The copyright owner of a work *owns* it and can do with it whatever they please with it, including licensing ("leasing") a copy of it to you under terms of a EULA that may restrict your rights to use it.
If you pretended you were selling widgets, but put a little note in the box saying that you were actually leasing, there probably arn't that many civil courts of the planet which wouldn't throw the case out. More likely you'd wind up in a criminal court, as defendant, since laws against fraud go hand in hand with laws upholding contracts.
That is not correct. Software is not exempt from contract law. Is the GPL not a contract? Do you feel you can do whatever you please under the GPL.
The GPL is not an EULA, indeed it specifically states that issues of use are outside its scope. Copyright law states that you need permission of the copyright holder to distribute, copies of, copyright works. The GPL grants permission to distribute specific copyright works, subject to conditions and states what those conditions are. An EULA attempts to regulate how you "use" a copyright work. It may also make redundent claims that you can't distribute copies, which copyright law prevents you from doing anyway.
And what grants the author the right to give permission for use?
The recent revisions of copyright law. Also the idea that making a transitory copy in order to use software is somehow different from making an image on your retina to read a book
If you have purchased the software then you obviously have permission to use, just as if you've purchased a toaster you have every right to use it or if you've purchased a book you have every right to read it. You are being hoodwinked by the corporate culture.
From the user side, EULAs are often often very anti corporate. Software being written to be registered to person at company, when the owner is a corporation. One "person" having to buy multiple copies, etc.
I think at least Io was so volcanic and active because of the extreme "tidal waves" from
Jupiter. The "waves" are, due to the huge gravitation of Jupiter, so strong they pull solid
matter and this of course cause quite a bit of friction. And friction cause heat. Not really
surprising, since such a small object as our Moon does funny things to our seas.:-)
IIRC Io being heated is part of an interaction with the other Jovian moons. What happens is that a moon generating tides also transfers energy to the moon, so that it moves away from the planet it orbits. This is what happens here on Earth. With Io the interaction of the other large moons keeps in in orbit, so the energy shows up as vulcanism.
Despite evidense to the contrary, California and Arizona are not different countries.
Neither are New York and Pennsylvania. Ergo a call from one state to the next state is
merely going over an abundance of fiber optic lines between the states. The difference
between France and Germany is they are indeed different countries.
You might just as well compare the US and Germany, since they are both federal republics. Or even with the UK, you don't play roaming charges moving between England and Wales or between England and Scotland or even if you cross the Irish sea to Northern Ireland. There is probably plenty of fibre capacity between France and Germany too.
Any call between
the two countries has to switch between different national telephone systems.
The actual issue is between telephone networks operated by different telephone companies. AFAIK there are no companies providing cellular telephone coverage of the entire US. But you can end up with the situation of "islands" of coverage from one company, without any coverage between these areas.
Most phone plans have different international rates for landline and mobile.
Up until recently international calls only depended on the country code, except for calls into the NANP (where it will generally cost the same to call New York or LA, but could be a different amount to call Hamilton or Toronto. Even possibly a very different amount to call Maimi or Nassau). Now there can be different rates depending if the call is to a landline or to a mobile. Except of course to calls within the NANP where the called party pays and you'd need a huge lookup table to work out if you are calling a mobile or not
So even in your local calling
area you're paying for other people's calls, and if you're roaming (which, depeinding on
carrier, could only be in the next state!) then you get airtime and roaming charges.
Other US posters have complained how they ended up roaming due to reception problems or the failure of their providers network. Which dosn't tend to happen in Europe unless you are very close to a border, but just as likely you can cross the border and still be on your regular network.
a lot of people have been caught out when their friends have called them while they are
on holiday and they chat thinking its a regular call until they get home and see their
cellphone bill and see hideous charges incurred for other peoples calls, needless to
say sales calls get a mouthful of abuse.
Then they feel a fool for not noticing that the display showing the network they were on wasn't what it was usually when they were in Spain or where ever...
In europe that's true. however that's only because no country in europe is that large.
folks in russia, australia, or some south american country might have the same roam-less
situation as americans and yet still be able to roam around the world.
When did Russia cease to be in Europe? Brazil and China are larger than the US, Australia and Indonesia cover similar areas.
When the person who owns the cellphone doesn't pay for the call, the charges for the
call are "reverse-billed" back to the caller. Since the caller isn't a customer of the
cellphone company, the cellphone company has far less incentive to keep the
reverse-charges low.
Except that the cellphone company isn't likely to be billing an actual customer. They are billing another telephone company for an "interconnect charge". Interconnection charging can be complex, since the charge paid will depend on all the calls between the two telephone companies in the charging period and the charges for incomming and outgoing interconects can be very asymetric. With it being perfectly possible for any specific call be routed through more than two telephone companies.
(Ever notice that collect calls are more expensive than regular
long-distance calls? A similar economic principle is at work.)
More likely because of involving a human operator. Operator connected calls are more expensive than direct dialed calls. Humans are a lot more expensive (and slower) than machines at connecting telephone calls.
Slashdot Mirror
The source and binaries accompany each other under the GPL, or at least they are both availble.
Not quite, if you supply someone with a binary the GPL obliges you to make the source available to them at no additional cost. If you supply someone with just the source then you have no obligation to compile it for them.
What you can't do is just supply a binary then either not make the source available or then offer to sell the source to them at a profit.
IANAL so I've always wondered about the following: Let's say I have a company and I build a bunch of for-internal-use-only custom modifications of GPL software. That seems fine by GPL standards.
What if I decide to sell my company? The software I've developed is certainly an integral part of the value of my company.
If you sell the binaries of your modified GPL code, which you most likely would if they are needed for the company to operate, then you must supply the source to whoever you have sold your company to.
Would GPL require me to publish all of the modified source code if I sell the company?
The GPL never requires you to publish anything. What it does require is that if you supply binary then you must also make available the source at no additional cost (except that involved in producing a copy of the source). Anyone you supply the software to has the same rights and obligations as you do.
Certain rights, however, can't be signed away no matter what the contract says. Nobody knows if that is the case for first sale rights. The problem is that the first sale right for software licenses hasn't been tested in courts,
Nor does anyone who has the lobbying power appear to have much interest in trying to get a statute passed which says this.
and nobody wants to be the guinea pig.
You'd need someone with deep pockets who would see the case through to the end.
I believe that any license agreement trumps public law.
No the law always trumps any contractual agreement. You'd end up with a kind of anarchy quite soon otherwise.
The law may give you a right, but you are free to sign away that right.
You can have a legal right you cannot sign away, one which you can only sign away with difficulty and one which you can revoke your signing away (typically within some time period.
For example, you have the right to sue me in any court, but you are free to sign an agreement with me that you will only sue me in the court of my choosing.
Even if such an agreement is binding now it may cease to be binding in future. Anyway if someone chose to ignore such a clause your only option would be to countersue for breach of contract.
Retail copeis are still best in my opinion. Yeah, you pay for them at full rate, but, you own something, have a receipt, have a real copy of it. Its nice to have a BSA audit, and take them out back, open up a big cardboard box, and show them the boxes for 20 copies of office, 20 copies of windows, and 2 copies of windows server (actually been at a place like that). The audit last 10 minutes (well, thats 18 machines, 20 sets of licenses, you're all set -have a nice day).
Problem is that this down't scale that well. With it being large organisations, especially where more then one person has purchasing authority where record keeping becomes a nightmare.
As I understand it (see my disclaimer above), all bets are off in bankruptcy court. IOW, just because you have a piece of paper saying that an asset in non-transferrable, the bankruptcy court can do what they want with it.
It's a court, which is an agency of the state empowered to rule on meaning of contractual terms. They are also a third party to any contracts the bankrupt party made, who's primary job is to get secured creditors the money they are owed.
If I lease my delivery trucks from Ford, then go out of business, I can't then turn around and sell the trucks as an asset of the firm. Instead, the trucks go back to Ford, which is the real owner of the truck.
So long as Ford makes it clear they were leasing. If they claimed they were selling the trucks, then turned around and said thwy were leasing them then there would be trouble.
The problem with proprietary software is that some software companies appear to want to pick and choose if they are selling or leasing on a whim and sometimes retrospecitvly.
I'm confused. What is the problem with using a GPL'd binary? If I'm looking for an alternative to Word, I can use AbiWord or OpenOffice.org Writer. I don't to worry about licensing issues because I don't intend to modify the source.
You can modify the source all you like. The only time the GPL comes into play is if you distribute to a third party. N.B. this applies regardless of if "you" are a single individual or a transnational corporation employing millions of people around the world.
Whilst the GPL would come into affect with a corporate sale, merger or split it only affects the parties directly involved and handing over some source is a lot less disruptive than having to work out what software might need relicencing.
I don't have any idea why MSFT is screwing around with such a small transaction - they must be angry about other issues.
If they can get a precident set in such a case they can get leverage over much larger corporations. Those big enough to be able to take on Microsoft in a straight legal battle.
Don't even get me started on opensource (I know, sacrilidge on slashdot, but guess what, most companies won't acquire anything built in opensource due to the license problems)..
The point is to a software user there are no licence issues. If the company is sold, merged, split the licence issues are trivial (make sure the new corporate entity or entities get the source for all the binaries which were transfered). Compared with all the "fun" of dealing with ELUAs, per user, per seat and per server schemes risk of having your business disrupted by a BSA "audit". Then if corporate structure or ownership is changed you can wind up with a big bill.
This could potentially set a huge precedent - it's not just Microsoft's licenses that carry these agreements. If they manage to succeed with this line of reasoning I think we can expect a lot more software companies throwing their weight around.
IIRC there was a hospital in Scotland which got bitten by this kind of clause in proprietary software licences.
Which, in the end, is *very* good for the opensource community - we can transfer software all we want!
So long as people don't belive the FUD which gets thrown around about there being complex legal issues surrounding using open source software. Whilst drawing attention away from the ability of proprietary software licencing to complicate any kind of sale, merger or split of a corporate entity which uses software.
There have been some recent proposals saying that the ITU should be in charge - as somebody who's been in the telecom business for 25 years, I view them as better than ICANN, because some of them are engineers and because they're a slow bureaucratic multilateral committee rather than a cabal, but they're still the kind o f bureaucratic telecom who brought you E.164 names, X.25 as their best example of data networking, and OSI protocols and high European telecom settlement costs,
With the alternative being the NANP, which manages to put Bermuda and Guam into the same country code. At least with the ITU countries can actually manage their own numbering schemes too.
ICANN needs to be reined in, certainly, but having the DNS run by a subgroup of the International Telecommunications Union or by a new treaty organization would be a nightmare.
How would that be the case?
if someone called you up and said "do you think J-walking should be legal" and even though you J-walk every day, you would probably say no just so you don't get in trouble.
Depends where you ask the question, outside of the US a typical response would be "What's jaywalking?" Anyway the question would be nonsensical in Europe, since pedestrians always have right of way over motor traffic. Due to some of the roads being in use for thousands of years before anyone even though of the internal combustion engine.
If MacroSoft doesn't think this is fair, well, it can always go file a complaint in court. In Panama. ;)
Why Panama? If MacroSoft is based in the US and you are a non US citzen Cuba might be a better choice. Or pick a country which has no functional judicial system.
Neither are "shrink wrap" contracts (you know, the kinds that are kept inside the sealed plastic covering that start "By breaking this seal you agree to..." , and continues "...Microsoft does not garantue the usefuleness of this software for any purpose what-so-ever, even including purposes stated by Microsoft or Microsoft employees."
If they were valid you could simply send Microsoft a letter stating "Dear Microsoft, by opening this envelope you agree to transfer all your assets to me in return for the payment of one US doller".
See that part about "by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease or lending"? The copyright owner of a work *owns* it and can do with it whatever they please with it, including licensing ("leasing") a copy of it to you under terms of a EULA that may restrict your rights to use it.
If you pretended you were selling widgets, but put a little note in the box saying that you were actually leasing, there probably arn't that many civil courts of the planet which wouldn't throw the case out. More likely you'd wind up in a criminal court, as defendant, since laws against fraud go hand in hand with laws upholding contracts.
That is not correct. Software is not exempt from contract law. Is the GPL not a contract? Do you feel you can do whatever you please under the GPL.
The GPL is not an EULA, indeed it specifically states that issues of use are outside its scope. Copyright law states that you need permission of the copyright holder to distribute, copies of, copyright works. The GPL grants permission to distribute specific copyright works, subject to conditions and states what those conditions are.
An EULA attempts to regulate how you "use" a copyright work. It may also make redundent claims that you can't distribute copies, which copyright law prevents you from doing anyway.
And what grants the author the right to give permission for use?
The recent revisions of copyright law. Also the idea that making a transitory copy in order to use software is somehow different from making an image on your retina to read a book
If you have purchased the software then you obviously have permission to use, just as if you've purchased a toaster you have every right to use it or if you've purchased a book you have every right to read it. You are being hoodwinked by the corporate culture.
From the user side, EULAs are often often very anti corporate. Software being written to be registered to person at company, when the owner is a corporation. One "person" having to buy multiple copies, etc.
I think at least Io was so volcanic and active because of the extreme "tidal waves" from Jupiter. The "waves" are, due to the huge gravitation of Jupiter, so strong they pull solid matter and this of course cause quite a bit of friction. And friction cause heat. Not really surprising, since such a small object as our Moon does funny things to our seas. :-)
IIRC Io being heated is part of an interaction with the other Jovian moons. What happens is that a moon generating tides also transfers energy to the moon, so that it moves away from the planet it orbits. This is what happens here on Earth.
With Io the interaction of the other large moons keeps in in orbit, so the energy shows up as vulcanism.
Despite evidense to the contrary, California and Arizona are not different countries. Neither are New York and Pennsylvania. Ergo a call from one state to the next state is merely going over an abundance of fiber optic lines between the states. The difference between France and Germany is they are indeed different countries.
You might just as well compare the US and Germany, since they are both federal republics. Or even with the UK, you don't play roaming charges moving between England and Wales or between England and Scotland or even if you cross the Irish sea to Northern Ireland.
There is probably plenty of fibre capacity between France and Germany too.
Any call between the two countries has to switch between different national telephone systems.
The actual issue is between telephone networks operated by different telephone companies. AFAIK there are no companies providing cellular telephone coverage of the entire US. But you can end up with the situation of "islands" of coverage from one company, without any coverage between these areas.
Most phone plans have different international rates for landline and mobile.
Up until recently international calls only depended on the country code, except for calls into the NANP (where it will generally cost the same to call New York or LA, but could be a different amount to call Hamilton or Toronto. Even possibly a very different amount to call Maimi or Nassau). Now there can be different rates depending if the call is to a landline or to a mobile. Except of course to calls within the NANP where the called party pays and you'd need a huge lookup table to work out if you are calling a mobile or not
So even in your local calling area you're paying for other people's calls, and if you're roaming (which, depeinding on carrier, could only be in the next state!) then you get airtime and roaming charges.
Other US posters have complained how they ended up roaming due to reception problems or the failure of their providers network. Which dosn't tend to happen in Europe unless you are very close to a border, but just as likely you can cross the border and still be on your regular network.
a lot of people have been caught out when their friends have called them while they are on holiday and they chat thinking its a regular call until they get home and see their cellphone bill and see hideous charges incurred for other peoples calls, needless to say sales calls get a mouthful of abuse.
Then they feel a fool for not noticing that the display showing the network they were on wasn't what it was usually when they were in Spain or where ever...
In europe that's true. however that's only because no country in europe is that large. folks in russia, australia, or some south american country might have the same roam-less situation as americans and yet still be able to roam around the world.
When did Russia cease to be in Europe?
Brazil and China are larger than the US, Australia and Indonesia cover similar areas.
When the person who owns the cellphone doesn't pay for the call, the charges for the call are "reverse-billed" back to the caller. Since the caller isn't a customer of the cellphone company, the cellphone company has far less incentive to keep the reverse-charges low.
Except that the cellphone company isn't likely to be billing an actual customer. They are billing another telephone company for an "interconnect charge". Interconnection charging can be complex, since the charge paid will depend on all the calls between the two telephone companies in the charging period and the charges for incomming and outgoing interconects can be very asymetric. With it being perfectly possible for any specific call be routed through more than two telephone companies.
(Ever notice that collect calls are more expensive than regular long-distance calls? A similar economic principle is at work.)
More likely because of involving a human operator. Operator connected calls are more expensive than direct dialed calls. Humans are a lot more expensive (and slower) than machines at connecting telephone calls.