You do realize that if EULA's are declared illegal the GPL is effectively illegal also since its really nothing more than an overrated EULA?
How many times does this need explaining. The GPL is not an EULA, indeed it specifically says it isn't. The GPL is a licence for the distribution of copyright material. You can use software licenced under the GPL in anyway you see fit. The conditions apply if you want to distribute copies to a third party. An EULA attempts to regulate how you can use a piece of software.
This stuff can happen to any company at any time. If Microsoft asked my company for a license audit we could turn the results over immeditely, because we constantly track software licenses owned, used, and installed. This was not easy or cheap, but you have to do it.
Wonder how often TCO studies remember to take account of this. In the case of the likes of client access licences this could be an order of magnitute greater than the purchase price of the licence.
Now, they not only have to have an invoice, but they have to have the CD-ROM, the Certificate of Authenticity, the invoice, the sticker (in the case of OEM copies of the OS itself), and all manuals and documentation.
Exactly how long do you seriously expect these stickers to remain stuck in a school environment?
Many kids may also be arrogant about how to get to programs they already know "I don't care about computers, as long as I go to Start>Programs>America Online that's what I'll use, would be what most teenagers would say.
Actually it's more likely to be teachers who kick up a fuss about any changes. Not always the obvious teachers either.
Well the school doesn't have much of a choice. Let's say they have MS Word, Windows, etc. courses, do you think that they have the time to change all those courses and find qualified OpenOffice, Linux, etc. teachers before next semester?
Excactly how would then need to change any courses. Certainly no more than if they changed to a different version of MS Office. Which no-one appears to make half as much fuss about. It'e very unlikely that any of these courses cover any of the "advanced features" of anything.
There are plenty of programs out there which can assist in disabling most of the potentially dangerous functions of Windows, and they work quite well.
Quite a few of the third party addons are really fancy versions of poledit, often combined with having been originally written for stand alone systems. About the only foolproof way to run Windows in a school environment is using VMware or Win4Lin.
Are you actually insinuating that given the choice the average person would rather use a (quote) "complicated" Operating System rather than one that is (quote) "simple" (unquote)?
It's been a very long time since the average person has actually had a choice.
Do you have a house? Did you go chop down the trees to get the lumber you needed to build it? It's the same argument you are trying to make against people who like Windows because it's simple.
Because that is the way Windows works, the end user is typically expected to do all the technical bits themselves.
They don't have the same level of interest in computers as you do.
`Then why ram Windows down their throats, where they have got to learn all sorts to stuff they shouldn't have to, just to get the thing to work in the first place and keep it working. Why should these people who are unintersted in computers have to learn how to install programs, how to set up applications in the first place?
They just want the crap to work.
Just about anything other than Windows is a better choice here. Separating administration from end user tasks is very good for this, because it makes it very hard for the end user to break the application. The "Windows is easy" zealots appear to live in a fantasy world. Do they want cars where the driver can try and overhaul the engine; planes where the pilot (or even the passengers) can perform "heavy maintanance" in flight; offices where people are expected to install their own telephone & network sockets, possibly even build their own desks? Yet when it comes to computer systems they call something analagous "easy to use". With just about every other area of technology there is a clear division between "users" and people who perform building, maintanance, servicing, etc. Unix type systems are consistent with the way airlines, cars, washing machines, televisions, etc work. Indeed most appliances come with a "No user servicable parts" label. Windows is the exception, indeed user servicing is expected. If this truely makes things "easy to use" why isn't this paradigm commonplace? Or more to the point how many people would want to fly in a 747 where a group of passengers had just replaced an engine?
The schools basically rely on the teachers to "admin" these windows boxen, so what happens when the teachers no longer have the ability to keep the linux boxen running properly.
As they are actually trained to teach they are likely to struggle with this. But with Windows you don't really have the choice, with unix type systems remote administration is far easier.
lets say that a sufficient amount of teachers needed to do this job, could find the spare time from their teaching to learn it all in 1 year...
Maybe you should have some sysadmins teaching children, in their spare time, too:)
Re:The worst parts of Microsofts attack on the GPL
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Now. The BSD-license grants you even more rights. But that is another story.
Only to entities selling proprietary software. The vast bulk of companies simply use software. If they wish to do this (including modifying software for internal use) there is little practical difference between the GPL and *BSD.
Re:There is a huge difference
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Most, if not all, commerical EULAs try to take away or restrict rights that you normally have under the law. Now this is of questionable legality. Normally to give up right there needs to be a signed contract and such. A person can't make you jsut give up your rights by handing you a peice of paper and claiming you agree. So the legality of these EULAs is still being tested.
However contracts operate within the "law of the land" they do not supercede it. Indeed you might well find that a specific law is required in order for a "right" to be contracted away in the first place.
Re:Letting users do things that are otherwise ille
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The GPL lets you do MORE than any other standard EULA.
Except that the GPL is explicitally not an EULA. It applies only to distribution of the software to a third party.
This preserves the original spirit of copyright law, which is to limit only distribution of a work or its derivatives.
In the case of the US (where the GPL was invented), part of the point of copyright is to encourage distribution and usage.
Unlike MS and many other software companies, the FSF did not join in the software land-grab. MS and others have reinterpreted copyright to include usage terms, and this has been upheld by the courts.
Not just upheld by courts, copyright laws have been rewritten to become partly also "useright".
Re:Letting users do things that are otherwise ille
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The GPL on the other hand grants you extra rights. Once you have obtained the software you can do whatever the hell you want with it personally.
With the GPL "personally" also applies to a "person" such as a corporate entity. Whereas many EULA's have to jump through hoops to treat natural people and legal people differently.
Re:Letting users do things that are otherwise ille
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In the case of software there is normally something that tries to stop you getting at the software without accepting the license (a click license in the installer or an 'if you open the box' rule). Some people have tried getting around this (by, for example, getting a young child to accept the license, which is meaningless as a child cannot enter into a legal agreement), but I'm not sure it's ever been tested in court.
I'm not sure the software companies would want these things tested in court. If the opening the box created a binding contract they'd be bankrupt within a week, since the ruling would would also give opening envelopes the same status as opening boxs...
The counter argument would be that it is the license, not the software, that is sold; since the software isn't yours the company can dictate what you can do with it. This is highly contoversial and I think is also still untested. (Amongst other things if tested it could lead to software stores being sued for trade descriptions for claiming that they are selling software. "Software Warehouse" would have to become "License Warehouse" etc...)
Another challenge would be DVDs advertised as "Yours to own (forever)"...
Re:Saw something similar about EULAs in general
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It seems to be established ground that user agreements like EULA is legitimate in contractual terms. The whole idea is that if you don't accept the user agreement, you're supposde to return the software back to the shop (ha).
This isn't relevent anyway, since the GPL is not an EULA. It is a copyright licence.
This specific problem isn't about wether M$ admins are good, bad, untrained, uninformed or if wether they are Gods(tm). This is a completely non-M$ issue.
The central issue is having something switched on by default when it might be better defaulting to off. This is certainly to some extent a Microsoft issue, simply because Microsoft are notorious for packing in "features" which are rarely needed, but which default to being enabled.
MOST people just want to get in a car and get from point A to point B. They don't want to deal with a manual transmission.
Mass use of automatic transmission is very specific to one part of the world. There are a great many parts of the world where you would want a car with with not only a manual gear box but manual switching between front wheel drive, rear wheel drive and 3 wheel drive.
MOST people don't want to fly a 747. They want to get in one and get from point A to point B.
There are plenty of airline pilots, just as there are plenty of bus and train drivers.
As long as average people have to deal with that extraneous arcana to get simple (or even complex) things done, they will not use Linux on the desktop.
This is more of an argument against Windows than any other OS though.
Don't condescend to people who want to use linux but can't tell a/dev/hda from/dev/null and who don't want to.
Except that the user/B> may not need to know these things
Don't condescend to people who want to drive a Lamborghini, but can't tell the brake from the clutch and don't want to.
Don't condescend to people who want to fly a 747, but can't tell the throttle from the flaps, and don't want to.
Don't condescend to people who want to skydive can't tell the difference between a ripcord and a shroud line, and don't want to.
IN these three examples knowing the difference involves part of the user interface. However the car driver has no need to know the details of the fuel system and how to service an engine, the pilot does not need to know how many fan blades there are on the engines or the exact route of the quadrupally redundant systems on the plane, etc.
Develop a good UI and let experts in the area choose it and you will find that there are few people who disagree that it's the best. UI design doesn't come down to personal preference, it is based on common traits that almost all people share.
Natural language is also based on common human traits, but look at the variation you get there.
The installer is always the first part of your UI that the user sees. Unfortunately, it may also be the last.
In many cases the question of "why should the end user be installing anything in the first place?" is totally ignored. No-one demmands that cars must be end user servicable. Or expects the typicall office worker to install their own network, telephone and power sockets, let alone assemble their own office using bricks, wood and plasterboard. But suddenly when it comes to computers it's vital that everything be end user installable (even if it results in making the job of real sysadmins considerably harder.)
Why are we sending cell phones, a luxury product if ever there was one, to Third World nations
Because if you are starting from scratch it's a lot easier to set up a telephone system with cellular phones than it is to install lots of cable. It's also a lot quicker and cheaper to get a cellphone system back operational following a major natural disater or war.
Yes, if Carnivore is doing a simple word scan on email messages, but somehow I doubt that. I would imagine that it knows the difference in context from a message like "Say a prayer for those who died by the hands of terrorists" and a message that contains the launch directives for the next message.
Except that a terrorist "go code" probably wouldn't contain any information about what they were doing at all. Since they already know what the mission is.
If I was going to do something similar to a terrorist activity, I wouldn't just be pushing raw ASCII email messages with that kind of information in them. I would encrypt the message in a image and say, "Look at some pictures from my trip to NYC." Carnivore is looking for those kinds of patterns.
No you want to avoid encrypting anything and denfinitly not hiding inside a graphics file. Since this is likely to create obvious patterns. Far better to use a code a good code will appear to be a competly innocent message.
I mean, if this keeps up, then won't it give real terrorists a "buffer zone" of time in which they can send unencrypted emails and act on them before the feds can even get the emails from the ISPs?
Except that terrorists are unlikely to send encrypted emails in the first place. Until they actually act they don't want to draw unwanted attention to themselves. Only if encrypted email was the norm would terrorists use it.
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You do realize that if EULA's are declared illegal the GPL is effectively illegal also since its really nothing more than an overrated EULA?
How many times does this need explaining. The GPL is not an EULA, indeed it specifically says it isn't. The GPL is a licence for the distribution of copyright material. You can use software licenced under the GPL in anyway you see fit. The conditions apply if you want to distribute copies to a third party. An EULA attempts to regulate how you can use a piece of software.
This stuff can happen to any company at any time. If Microsoft asked my company for a license audit we could turn the results over immeditely, because we constantly track software licenses owned, used, and installed. This was not easy or cheap, but you have to do it.
Wonder how often TCO studies remember to take account of this. In the case of the likes of client access licences this could be an order of magnitute greater than the purchase price of the licence.
Now, they not only have to have an invoice, but they have to have the CD-ROM, the Certificate of Authenticity, the invoice, the sticker (in the case of OEM copies of the OS itself), and all manuals and documentation.
Exactly how long do you seriously expect these stickers to remain stuck in a school environment?
Many kids may also be arrogant about how to get to programs they already know "I don't care about computers, as long as I go to Start>Programs>America Online that's what I'll use, would be what most teenagers would say.
Actually it's more likely to be teachers who kick up a fuss about any changes. Not always the obvious teachers either.
Well the school doesn't have much of a choice. Let's say they have MS Word, Windows, etc. courses, do you think that they have the time to change all those courses and find qualified OpenOffice, Linux, etc. teachers before next semester?
Excactly how would then need to change any courses. Certainly no more than if they changed to a different version of MS Office. Which no-one appears to make half as much fuss about.
It'e very unlikely that any of these courses cover any of the "advanced features" of anything.
There are plenty of programs out there which can assist in disabling most of the potentially dangerous functions of Windows, and they work quite well.
Quite a few of the third party addons are really fancy versions of poledit, often combined with having been originally written for stand alone systems.
About the only foolproof way to run Windows in a school environment is using VMware or Win4Lin.
Educational software primarily runs on the Wintel or Mac Arch.
It would be very interesting to find out how much of this "educational software" is actually in regular usage and who is using it.
Are you actually insinuating that given the choice the average person would rather use a (quote) "complicated" Operating System rather than one that is (quote) "simple" (unquote)?
It's been a very long time since the average person has actually had a choice.
Do you have a house? Did you go chop down the trees to get the lumber you needed to build it? It's the same argument you are trying to make against people who like Windows because it's simple.
Because that is the way Windows works, the end user is typically expected to do all the technical bits themselves.
They don't have the same level of interest in computers as you do.
`Then why ram Windows down their throats, where they have got to learn all sorts to stuff they shouldn't have to, just to get the thing to work in the first place and keep it working. Why should these people who are unintersted in computers have to learn how to install programs, how to set up applications in the first place?
They just want the crap to work.
Just about anything other than Windows is a better choice here. Separating administration from end user tasks is very good for this, because it makes it very hard for the end user to break the application.
The "Windows is easy" zealots appear to live in a fantasy world. Do they want cars where the driver can try and overhaul the engine; planes where the pilot (or even the passengers) can perform "heavy maintanance" in flight; offices where people are expected to install their own telephone & network sockets, possibly even build their own desks? Yet when it comes to computer systems they call something analagous "easy to use".
With just about every other area of technology there is a clear division between "users" and people who perform building, maintanance, servicing, etc. Unix type systems are consistent with the way airlines, cars, washing machines, televisions, etc work. Indeed most appliances come with a "No user servicable parts" label.
Windows is the exception, indeed user servicing is expected. If this truely makes things "easy to use" why isn't this paradigm commonplace? Or more to the point how many people would want to fly in a 747 where a group of passengers had just replaced an engine?
I don't think linux is even close to being a viable option for a school desktop...
It's a lot more viable that quite a few Windows offerings, no nonsense about every user having to run setup, just in order to get a program to work...
The schools basically rely on the teachers to "admin" these windows boxen, so what happens when the teachers no longer have the ability to keep the linux boxen running properly.
:)
As they are actually trained to teach they are likely to struggle with this. But with Windows you don't really have the choice, with unix type systems remote administration is far easier.
lets say that a sufficient amount of teachers needed to do this job, could find the spare time from their teaching to learn it all in 1 year...
Maybe you should have some sysadmins teaching children, in their spare time, too
Now. The BSD-license grants you even more rights. But that is another story.
Only to entities selling proprietary software. The vast bulk of companies simply use software. If they wish to do this (including modifying software for internal use) there is little practical difference between the GPL and *BSD.
Most, if not all, commerical EULAs try to take away or restrict rights that you normally have under the law. Now this is of questionable legality. Normally to give up right there needs to be a signed contract and such. A person can't make you jsut give up your rights by handing you a peice of paper and claiming you agree. So the legality of these EULAs is still being tested.
However contracts operate within the "law of the land" they do not supercede it. Indeed you might well find that a specific law is required in order for a "right" to be contracted away in the first place.
The GPL lets you do MORE than any other standard EULA.
Except that the GPL is explicitally not an EULA. It applies only to distribution of the software to a third party.
This preserves the original spirit of copyright law, which is to limit only distribution of a work or its derivatives.
In the case of the US (where the GPL was invented), part of the point of copyright is to encourage distribution and usage.
Unlike MS and many other software companies, the FSF did not join in the software land-grab. MS and others have reinterpreted copyright to include usage terms, and this has been upheld by the courts.
Not just upheld by courts, copyright laws have been rewritten to become partly also "useright".
The GPL on the other hand grants you extra rights. Once you have obtained the software you can do whatever the hell you want with it personally.
With the GPL "personally" also applies to a "person" such as a corporate entity. Whereas many EULA's have to jump through hoops to treat natural people and legal people differently.
In the case of software there is normally something that tries to stop you getting at the software without accepting the license (a click license in the installer or an 'if you open the box' rule). Some people have tried getting around this (by, for example, getting a young child to accept the license, which is meaningless as a child cannot enter into a legal agreement), but I'm not sure it's ever been tested in court.
I'm not sure the software companies would want these things tested in court. If the opening the box created a binding contract they'd be bankrupt within a week, since the ruling would would also give opening envelopes the same status as opening boxs...
The counter argument would be that it is the license, not the software, that is sold; since the software isn't yours the company can dictate what you can do with it. This is highly contoversial and I think is also still untested. (Amongst other things if tested it could lead to software stores being sued for trade descriptions for claiming that they are selling software. "Software Warehouse" would have to become "License Warehouse" etc...)
Another challenge would be DVDs advertised as "Yours to own (forever)"...
It seems to be established ground that user agreements like EULA is legitimate in contractual terms. The whole idea is that if you don't accept the user agreement, you're supposde to return the software back to the shop (ha).
This isn't relevent anyway, since the GPL is not an EULA.
It is a copyright licence.
This specific problem isn't about wether M$ admins are good, bad, untrained, uninformed or if wether they are Gods(tm). This is a completely non-M$ issue.
The central issue is having something switched on by default when it might be better defaulting to off. This is certainly to some extent a Microsoft issue, simply because Microsoft are notorious for packing in "features" which are rarely needed, but which default to being enabled.
MOST people just want to get in a car and get from point A to point B. They don't want to deal with a manual transmission.
Mass use of automatic transmission is very specific to one part of the world. There are a great many parts of the world where you would want a car with with not only a manual gear box but manual switching between front wheel drive, rear wheel drive and 3 wheel drive.
MOST people don't want to fly a 747. They want to get in one and get from point A to point B.
There are plenty of airline pilots, just as there are plenty of bus and train drivers.
As long as average people have to deal with that extraneous arcana to get simple (or even complex) things done, they will not use Linux on the desktop.
This is more of an argument against Windows than any other OS though.
Don't condescend to people who want to use linux but can't tell a /dev/hda from /dev/null and who don't want to.
Except that the
user/B> may not need to know these things
Don't condescend to people who want to drive a Lamborghini, but can't tell the brake from the clutch and don't want to.
Don't condescend to people who want to fly a 747, but can't tell the throttle from the flaps, and don't want to.
Don't condescend to people who want to skydive can't tell the difference between a ripcord and a shroud line, and don't want to.
IN these three examples knowing the difference involves part of the user interface.
However the car driver has no need to know the details of the fuel system and how to service an engine, the pilot does not need to know how many fan blades there are on the engines or the exact route of the quadrupally redundant systems on the plane, etc.
Develop a good UI and let experts in the area choose it and you will find that there are few people who disagree that it's the best. UI design doesn't come down to personal preference, it is based on common traits that almost all people share.
Natural language is also based on common human traits, but look at the variation you get there.
The installer is always the first part of your UI that the user sees. Unfortunately, it may also be the last.
In many cases the question of "why should the end user be installing anything in the first place?" is totally ignored. No-one demmands that cars must be end user servicable. Or expects the typicall office worker to install their own network, telephone and power sockets, let alone assemble their own office using bricks, wood and plasterboard.
But suddenly when it comes to computers it's vital that everything be end user installable (even if it results in making the job of real sysadmins considerably harder.)
Why are we sending cell phones, a luxury product if ever there was one, to Third World nations
Because if you are starting from scratch it's a lot easier to set up a telephone system with cellular phones than it is to install lots of cable. It's also a lot quicker and cheaper to get a cellphone system back operational following a major natural disater or war.
Yes, if Carnivore is doing a simple word scan on email messages, but somehow I doubt that. I would imagine that it knows the difference in context from a message like "Say a prayer for those who died by the hands of terrorists" and a message that contains the launch directives for the next message.
Except that a terrorist "go code" probably wouldn't contain any information about what they were doing at all. Since they already know what the mission is.
If I was going to do something similar to a terrorist activity, I wouldn't just be pushing raw ASCII email messages with that kind of information in them. I would encrypt the message in a image and say, "Look at some pictures from my trip to NYC." Carnivore is looking for those kinds of patterns.
No you want to avoid encrypting anything and denfinitly not hiding inside a graphics file. Since this is likely to create obvious patterns. Far better to use a code a good code will appear to be a competly innocent message.
Thats why I wanted a combination of NI and PIN
You mean an NI PIN or even a password, which is nothing to do with any banking PINs anyway...
I mean, if this keeps up, then won't it give real terrorists a "buffer zone" of time in which they can send unencrypted emails and act on them before the feds can even get the emails from the ISPs?
Except that terrorists are unlikely to send encrypted emails in the first place. Until they actually act they don't want to draw unwanted attention to themselves. Only if encrypted email was the norm would terrorists use it.