Of course, GNU was not the beginning of the free software movement.
People were distributing free software ever since the begining of computers. Larry Wall distributing patch, BSD distributing a set of patches for Unix, and even "here's your rk05, love Dennis", all preceed GNU by years.
For UI's, originality is often counterproductive. If a user comes across a new widget they've never seen before, then they've got to spend time working out what they're supposed to do. If every application had it's own set of widgets, then we'd spend a lot of useless time just learning UI's. With re-use of widgets, especially the higher level ones, then we can spend our time learning about the applications instead.
I don't know about deliberate actions, but there are certainly films which have been lost, because the copyright owner did not take good care of the media. If you do a trivia search on 'check your attic' on IMDB you'll find a list of some of them, eg thi s one filmed in 1948. Some of these losses are through deliberate action of the copyright owner, for example the BBC destroyed several hundred episodes of Dr Who, and many of these episodes only exist because of various people recording off of the air.
Regardless of incentive, it's obvious that current copyright laws are not resulting in good maintence of media.
One problem is that audio media is no longer seperable from non-audio media.
Almost all of the new recording media introduced in the last 20 years or so has been used by both data & non-data uses, as both markets have shared their R&D & production costs.
I'd like to add in a provision which allows use which would not otherwise occur.
There are many old books which are out of print. The publisher has no intention of reprinting them, but they will be in copyright for decades to come. If a second company thought that it could make money by scanning these books and created e-books, they could not do this under copyright law, even if the original company had no intention of doing it. I think it's obvious that it would be good if the second company would be allowd to write to the publisher, and the publisher would have to either have to do the same thing that the e-publisher was intending to do, or grant a royalty free license for the intended use.
In the US, penetration of radio is damn near 100%. Penetration of PC's is less than 50%,
However, each radio can only receive a limited number of channels, depending on what is broadcast in your area. Each of these channels has a format, and limited amount of time it can broadcast, and with the same song being broadcast multiple times, it's a very competative market for songs to find broadcast time.
Contrast this to the internet, where there is no competition for making songs available. If you have created a mp3, then you can get an account on mp3.com and upload it. No-one will say "that's no good", no-one will say "We don't play punk", no-one, except the potential listener, will play the latest Britany Spears song instead of yours.
Video rental stores succeed because they give the customer the choice. Radio does not, the Internet does.
And, as the founders of the United States noted in the Constitution, it takes its most undesirable form when good ideas lay dormant for fear that they might be stolen. IP law is a trade-off: the government will protect your monopoly on your idea, under the condition that you allow the government to publish the idea after a certain period of time.
While I can see this applying to patents, I don't see how this applies to copyright. The most widely published computer programs are the freely distributable ones. Almost everyone has a copy of gzip, which can be downloaded from GNU, but also from thousands of other places too.
I've found that people trying to sell phone long distance are a great source of amusement. Asked how many long distance calls I make, I tell them none, cause I don't have any friends. "Will you be my friend. PLEEEEEEEASSSEEEEEE. We can go to hockey games any everything. PLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSEE EEEEE."
Sounds like you need an unbreakable (or nearly so) tether. Dr Robert L. Forward has designed such a tether, and the uses discussed on the website include exactly this usage.
For example, there is no fstab, it's got/etc/filesystems, formatted like this:
/opt: dev =/dev/lv00 vfs = jfs log =/dev/hd8 mount = true options = rw account = false
It's not XML, but then XML didn't exist when AIX started using this format.
Smit is one of the best administration tools available for Un*xes, easy enough for anyone to use, yet the poweruser can learn the commands behind it and script them when appropriate.
After the 3 manned skylab missions, it actually exceeded the experimental goals, 60% more earth observation passes, and 27% more solar viewing time, but then it was shut down, waiting on the completion of the shuttle, but due to the almost inevitable delays in a big project could not get it completed in time. They'd already given up on Saturn launchers, so when the increased solar activity caused the orbit to decay, they could not get anyone up there to correct the orbit.
If they'd decided to keep on building Apollo/Saturn 1B's, then probably Skylab would be like Mir, and exceed it's design life in orbit, instead of the 6 it actually did.
When launching, you want to be as close to the equator as possible. This gives you the fastest rotational speed, and therefore the least acceleration required to get to escape velocity, and therefore the maximum amount of materials launched into space.
This is why ESA launches are from Guiana.
This severely limits the number of possible locations for the launch facility, and when you consider that they already have one in Kazakhstan, it's not going to be worthwile building a new one, even if they do have somewhere suitable.
I remember 20 years ago my father being stuck at the house, because he couldn't go anywhere in case he got called. Nowadays, he's got a cell phone. This means he can go out without worrying.
Why not build a monument to the "foolishness" of the Challenger 7 rather than to their "heroism"?
What heroism? They were told that the shuttle made space so safe, you could send schoolteachers & congressmen up. The heroes were the early astronaughts, who got to see rockets blow up, and then a few months later, they sat upon those same rockets putting their trust in the rocket scientists getting it right this time.
The Mercury & Vostok men knew that they were risking their lives, yet they still did it. That's the mark of a hero.
There were plenty of OS's developed by small underfunded groups before Linux. Minix & Xinu were both Unix clones. CP/M was developed single handedly by Gary Kildall. And of course, there was an OS developed on a little used PDP-7 in the corner.
On the other hand, no-one except for major governments has ever launched a manned rocket, and even for non-manned rockets, large launches are all well funded, simply because it is difficult == expensive.
Changing the molecular structure in the sort of way you find in isomorphs of octane is quite a large change, you are really discussing different chemicals with different groups. That's one reason why the current trend in organic chemistry is to name the chemical after the longest chain, and describe the subchains seperatly. However, if you compare the isomorph of octane with a 4 carbon chain, and butane, you get broadly similar properties.
The sort of change which is done to drugs is more of the order of replacing a few atoms with similar atoms, or replacing a group of atoms with another group of atoms.
Asprin was first created by adding an acetyl group to salicylic acid. The pain relief portion of the molecule was not affected, and a patentable medicine was invented.
Copycat drugs (ie generic) appear on the market after patents expire. No generic drugs are the same drug, but sold by a different manufacturer, usually under the chemical name instead of the brand name. Copycat drugs are a different drug, but with broadly similar properties & side effects, sold under a brand name chosen by the new manufactuer.
Prozac is a SSRI, it's chemical name is Fluoxetine Hydrochloride. Currently there are no generic's, because it is still patented. However there are copycat SSRI's available, including Zoloft, Paxil & Celexa.
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People were distributing free software ever since the begining of computers. Larry Wall distributing patch, BSD distributing a set of patches for Unix, and even "here's your rk05, love Dennis", all preceed GNU by years.
Am I missing something?
They don't. Refuse to give it to them. They don't object.
For UI's, originality is often counterproductive. If a user comes across a new widget they've never seen before, then they've got to spend time working out what they're supposed to do. If every application had it's own set of widgets, then we'd spend a lot of useless time just learning UI's. With re-use of widgets, especially the higher level ones, then we can spend our time learning about the applications instead.
Regardless of incentive, it's obvious that current copyright laws are not resulting in good maintence of media.
What's wrong with walking along a corridor trying all the doors you see?
Almost all of the new recording media introduced in the last 20 years or so has been used by both data & non-data uses, as both markets have shared their R&D & production costs.
There is late & there is LATE.
How do you propose a program tells if a file is legal or illegal?
Someone can program anything you can write an algorythm for, but until you have that algorythm, it's not going to be written.
There are many old books which are out of print. The publisher has no intention of reprinting them, but they will be in copyright for decades to come. If a second company thought that it could make money by scanning these books and created e-books, they could not do this under copyright law, even if the original company had no intention of doing it. I think it's obvious that it would be good if the second company would be allowd to write to the publisher, and the publisher would have to either have to do the same thing that the e-publisher was intending to do, or grant a royalty free license for the intended use.
However, each radio can only receive a limited number of channels, depending on what is broadcast in your area. Each of these channels has a format, and limited amount of time it can broadcast, and with the same song being broadcast multiple times, it's a very competative market for songs to find broadcast time.
Contrast this to the internet, where there is no competition for making songs available. If you have created a mp3, then you can get an account on mp3.com and upload it. No-one will say "that's no good", no-one will say "We don't play punk", no-one, except the potential listener, will play the latest Britany Spears song instead of yours.
Video rental stores succeed because they give the customer the choice. Radio does not, the Internet does.
While I can see this applying to patents, I don't see how this applies to copyright. The most widely published computer programs are the freely distributable ones. Almost everyone has a copy of gzip, which can be downloaded from GNU, but also from thousands of other places too.
I've found that people trying to sell phone long distance are a great source of amusement. Asked how many long distance calls I make, I tell them none, cause I don't have any friends. "Will you be my friend. PLEEEEEEEASSSEEEEEE. We can go to hockey games any everything. PLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSEE EEEEE."
Sounds like you need an unbreakable (or nearly so) tether. Dr Robert L. Forward has designed such a tether, and the uses discussed on the website include exactly this usage.
Ah, so you think we should all switch over to grey book email addresses?
For example, there is no fstab, it's got /etc/filesystems, formatted like this:
It's not XML, but then XML didn't exist when AIX started using this format.
Smit is one of the best administration tools available for Un*xes, easy enough for anyone to use, yet the poweruser can learn the commands behind it and script them when appropriate.
Not that unknown. Start with www.wall.org
Skylab 4 resupplied Skylab, the first time that an oribiting platform was resupplied from the ground.
Judging by the list of copyright notices whenever you boot a SCO system, I'd have to say that opensourcing anything would be difficult to acomplish.
After the 3 manned skylab missions, it actually exceeded the experimental goals, 60% more earth observation passes, and 27% more solar viewing time, but then it was shut down, waiting on the completion of the shuttle, but due to the almost inevitable delays in a big project could not get it completed in time. They'd already given up on Saturn launchers, so when the increased solar activity caused the orbit to decay, they could not get anyone up there to correct the orbit.
If they'd decided to keep on building Apollo/Saturn 1B's, then probably Skylab would be like Mir, and exceed it's design life in orbit, instead of the 6 it actually did.
This is why ESA launches are from Guiana.
This severely limits the number of possible locations for the launch facility, and when you consider that they already have one in Kazakhstan, it's not going to be worthwile building a new one, even if they do have somewhere suitable.
I remember 20 years ago my father being stuck at the house, because he couldn't go anywhere in case he got called. Nowadays, he's got a cell phone. This means he can go out without worrying.
What heroism? They were told that the shuttle made space so safe, you could send schoolteachers & congressmen up. The heroes were the early astronaughts, who got to see rockets blow up, and then a few months later, they sat upon those same rockets putting their trust in the rocket scientists getting it right this time.
The Mercury & Vostok men knew that they were risking their lives, yet they still did it. That's the mark of a hero.
On the other hand, no-one except for major governments has ever launched a manned rocket, and even for non-manned rockets, large launches are all well funded, simply because it is difficult == expensive.
The sort of change which is done to drugs is more of the order of replacing a few atoms with similar atoms, or replacing a group of atoms with another group of atoms.
Asprin was first created by adding an acetyl group to salicylic acid. The pain relief portion of the molecule was not affected, and a patentable medicine was invented.
Copycat drugs (ie generic) appear on the market after patents expire. No generic drugs are the same drug, but sold by a different manufacturer, usually under the chemical name instead of the brand name. Copycat drugs are a different drug, but with broadly similar properties & side effects, sold under a brand name chosen by the new manufactuer.
Prozac is a SSRI, it's chemical name is Fluoxetine Hydrochloride. Currently there are no generic's, because it is still patented. However there are copycat SSRI's available, including Zoloft, Paxil & Celexa.