Forget about Unix copyrights. No litigation value remaining because of the time they were in the public domain, and the time they were released under the BSD license. Look how far it got SCO.
All software is a patent minefield. You can't write any significant software without infringing upon a granted patent. If existing patents were enforced at all well, there would be no software industry.
MS continues to make gains in licensing its "Linux patents", and there's nothing that says they won't decide it's time to enforce them against you and me tomorrow.
The worst part is that we have no credibility in fighting this at the government level any longer. When Open Source was people doing good for other people, we had the credibility to kill a proposal for uniform enforcement of software patents across the EU. Today, Open Source is big business, and there is no such credibility if it's Microsoft vs. Red Hat rather than Microsoft vs. do-gooders and non-profits. So, this means that our commercial success is likely to kill us through software patents eventually.
I think SuSE understood what they had to do to make a business out of a Linux distribution. And Ubuntu/Canonical has, and they started later. I don't believe that Novell ever has. Like Caldera before them, they ended up alienating the very communities that would have pushed their own product in the enterprise, because they didn't understand that those communities were grass-roots engineering staff within their corporations - and were already connected to Open Source developers if they weren't themselves the developers - rather than the IT management that Novell focused upon.
So, Novell was doing poorly, and saw MS as a fast and easy source of some third of a Billion dollars if they'd just do what Microsoft wanted, which would also endear themselves to those same IT managers that Novell was after, while further alienating the engineers.
It was a short-term strategy.
Want to bet that Novell becomes a litigation factory eventually? We're starting to see the symptoms.
Once you start with MS your paths close up until the only remaining one is: they own you. Maybe if Novell had stayed away from Microsoft they'd be doing better now. Red Hat is doing really very well.
You were returning the proper merchandise in the box, which the manufacturer would handle and the store would not be screwed. You were within the warranty period. The manufacturer had responsibility to fix their problem. I don't see an ethical issue here.
In the cases I brought up, someone was out to actively screw the merchant or (sometimes) the manufacturer by deliberately repackaging the wrong merchandise.
Twice recently I've found someone else's obsolete merchandise in boxes of purportedly new equipment from a hardware store. One was a 10-year-old smoke detector in a box for a different model, one was a non-combination arc-fault circuit breaker instead of the combination arc-fault model now required by electrical codes. In both cases I assume this was a previous return by someone defrauding the store. Both merchants were happy to take the merchandise back. In the Home Depot I had to tell the sales clerk "please don't restock this", and then she put a sticker on the box.
What bothers me is that in both cases, the bad merchandise could have compromised someone's safety.
Add a varying amount between 0 and 1/2 the circumference of the earth, with the 1/2 being best-case. I don't know what the velocity factor of optical fiber is. Yes, there's also a signal-processing delay, but let's not assume we're using 30-year-old equipment so it should not add very much.
You can't get instant feedback from the moon. There's a slight delay. So, it doesn't really feel like you are holding something in your hands unless you're standing still. It mostly feels like you're drunk when you operate a waldo with a delay. People are going to have to get trained to deal with that.
Actually, asking for donations doesn't have anything to do with the economic interest we proved (read my testimony) and IMO if someone's making money off your product that doesn't have to do with it either.
Well, sunlight insolation is about a kiloWatt per square meter for a sun-facing surface at sea level in very clear weather. So, I am figuring this is 3875 times the intensity of sunlight in a square inch.
I didn't say that everything coming from Larry sucks, and I think he knows that he doesn't have to be his own lawyer any longer. Some people really like Perl.
Well, I know how to write bit-slice microcode, which is lower-level than assembler. I wrote it for image processing at Pixar. It can get a lot more performance out of the hardware. But so many people insist on programming in those pesky high-level instruction sets that popular CPUs don't even come with the facility to accept user microcode any longer.
Start with patent 4,549,302 on the guard time in the Hayes Modem protocol. That's from 1985. I'm sure there are others. Surely the touch-tones were patented before then. Indeed, there must be telephony ones going back to the 1920's.
It's not that the general impact on the consumer is zero, but that the consumer uses us all the time and doesn't realize that we're there. We're in those other software platforms you mentioned, in their SONY TV (literally hundreds of models), and every time they type a domain name into their web browser.
I remember leaving Pixar, and discussing with Steve Jobs that I was going to work full time on Open Source. Steve didn't think we'd ever be able to make a successful GUI. Two years later he went on stage at MacWorld and announced that Safari would be based on KDE, standing in front of a slide entitled "Open Source, We Love It".
We own a big piece of the smartphone market now, which is the platform of tomorrow. The world isn't going back. How much did you expect us to achieve in 10 years.
As far as FSF vs. Open Source, not many people care any longer that RMS and Eric Raymond don't get along. I can't see that it's getting in the way of anything.
We did have a FOSS segment that was oriented toward public service. Ubuntu ate them. Actually, they're still around, they just don't matter much any longer. It's not clear that the public wanted the service.
I like BSD licenses because they allow me to close my own source, not the source others contributed but mine.
Everybody wants to receive the BSD license. Of course. Everybody loves a gift, and that's what the BSD license is. But it doesn't always make sense for someone to give it. And since the person giving the license is doing the work, it's their choice.
Sure there are rights being restricted. If you use GPL code you can not close your own code and still distribute it.
I'm afraid you sound a bit confused about this. If you apply the GPL to your own code, you certainly do have the right to close it and distribute it. All copyright holders have that right.
Perhaps you mean if you mix your code with someone else's GPL code. In that case, you still have the right to distribute your own code privately, as long as you remove that other person's GPL code from the project.
The person giving you the GPL code is only giving you rights, not taking any away at all, because before they gave you the code you had no rights regarding that code. The problem from your perspective is that they aren't giving you all rights.
It's hard to believe that Monty has been for some time presenting documentation of his spreading FUD. Could you please provide a citation?
That didn't parse. Do you want me to present you with Monty's recent arguments to the EU? They've been pretty widely publicized. Essentially, he protested that the GPL terms were anti-competitive in this case. But of course he was one of the three people who put those terms in place.
Brian, it is the meme of "we must now reform GPL over-reaching" which has risen only because Oracle is now the entity enforcing the GPL on others rather than MySQL. I agree that MySQL used FUD to cause customers to buy, especially before MySQL 5 came out. But the only folks who ever believed that the GPL applied to a protocol were those who didn't know the scope of copyright from that of patent. This was not an issue that anyone who could discuss the situation intelligently with an attorney ever believed, with one exception, and it does not need reform now because it's not for real. The one exception was the MySQL principals themselves. They got the most draconian read from a lawyer at some point, something that wouldn't ever have flown in court, and Monty still believes it today.
Well, protocols are the subject of patents rather than copyright so I never felt any need to listen to Monty about that particular point. It's more his protesting the GPL's terms now that they are being applied to him rather than by him. And in that regard your presentation sounds really familiar.
Slashdot Mirror
Treason never prospers, what's the reason?
For if it prospers, none dare call it treason.
Forget about Unix copyrights. No litigation value remaining because of the time they were in the public domain, and the time they were released under the BSD license. Look how far it got SCO.
All software is a patent minefield. You can't write any significant software without infringing upon a granted patent. If existing patents were enforced at all well, there would be no software industry.
MS continues to make gains in licensing its "Linux patents", and there's nothing that says they won't decide it's time to enforce them against you and me tomorrow.
The worst part is that we have no credibility in fighting this at the government level any longer. When Open Source was people doing good for other people, we had the credibility to kill a proposal for uniform enforcement of software patents across the EU. Today, Open Source is big business, and there is no such credibility if it's Microsoft vs. Red Hat rather than Microsoft vs. do-gooders and non-profits. So, this means that our commercial success is likely to kill us through software patents eventually.
I think SuSE understood what they had to do to make a business out of a Linux distribution. And Ubuntu/Canonical has, and they started later. I don't believe that Novell ever has. Like Caldera before them, they ended up alienating the very communities that would have pushed their own product in the enterprise, because they didn't understand that those communities were grass-roots engineering staff within their corporations - and were already connected to Open Source developers if they weren't themselves the developers - rather than the IT management that Novell focused upon.
So, Novell was doing poorly, and saw MS as a fast and easy source of some third of a Billion dollars if they'd just do what Microsoft wanted, which would also endear themselves to those same IT managers that Novell was after, while further alienating the engineers.
It was a short-term strategy.
Want to bet that Novell becomes a litigation factory eventually? We're starting to see the symptoms.
Bruce
Once you start with MS your paths close up until the only remaining one is: they own you. Maybe if Novell had stayed away from Microsoft they'd be doing better now. Red Hat is doing really very well.
In the cases I brought up, someone was out to actively screw the merchant or (sometimes) the manufacturer by deliberately repackaging the wrong merchandise.
What bothers me is that in both cases, the bad merchandise could have compromised someone's safety.
Add a varying amount between 0 and 1/2 the circumference of the earth, with the 1/2 being best-case. I don't know what the velocity factor of optical fiber is. Yes, there's also a signal-processing delay, but let's not assume we're using 30-year-old equipment so it should not add very much.
You can't get instant feedback from the moon. There's a slight delay. So, it doesn't really feel like you are holding something in your hands unless you're standing still. It mostly feels like you're drunk when you operate a waldo with a delay. People are going to have to get trained to deal with that.
I think it would melt those gold microparticles and burn their substrate.
Actually, asking for donations doesn't have anything to do with the economic interest we proved (read my testimony) and IMO if someone's making money off your product that doesn't have to do with it either.
Well, sunlight insolation is about a kiloWatt per square meter for a sun-facing surface at sea level in very clear weather. So, I am figuring this is 3875 times the intensity of sunlight in a square inch.
Well, if they want a talk about the issue next time, I can hook them up with a lawyer who works with me.
I didn't say that everything coming from Larry sucks, and I think he knows that he doesn't have to be his own lawyer any longer. Some people really like Perl.
A light of 2.5 KW per square inch is a weapon.
Well, I know how to write bit-slice microcode, which is lower-level than assembler. I wrote it for image processing at Pixar. It can get a lot more performance out of the hardware. But so many people insist on programming in those pesky high-level instruction sets that popular CPUs don't even come with the facility to accept user microcode any longer.
That's a U.S. patent, I forgot to mention.
Start with patent 4,549,302 on the guard time in the Hayes Modem protocol. That's from 1985. I'm sure there are others. Surely the touch-tones were patented before then. Indeed, there must be telephony ones going back to the 1920's.
It's not that the general impact on the consumer is zero, but that the consumer uses us all the time and doesn't realize that we're there. We're in those other software platforms you mentioned, in their SONY TV (literally hundreds of models), and every time they type a domain name into their web browser.
I remember leaving Pixar, and discussing with Steve Jobs that I was going to work full time on Open Source. Steve didn't think we'd ever be able to make a successful GUI. Two years later he went on stage at MacWorld and announced that Safari would be based on KDE, standing in front of a slide entitled "Open Source, We Love It".
We own a big piece of the smartphone market now, which is the platform of tomorrow. The world isn't going back. How much did you expect us to achieve in 10 years.
As far as FSF vs. Open Source, not many people care any longer that RMS and Eric Raymond don't get along. I can't see that it's getting in the way of anything.
We did have a FOSS segment that was oriented toward public service. Ubuntu ate them. Actually, they're still around, they just don't matter much any longer. It's not clear that the public wanted the service.
Everybody wants to receive the BSD license. Of course. Everybody loves a gift, and that's what the BSD license is. But it doesn't always make sense for someone to give it. And since the person giving the license is doing the work, it's their choice.
I'm afraid you sound a bit confused about this. If you apply the GPL to your own code, you certainly do have the right to close it and distribute it. All copyright holders have that right.
Perhaps you mean if you mix your code with someone else's GPL code. In that case, you still have the right to distribute your own code privately, as long as you remove that other person's GPL code from the project.
The person giving you the GPL code is only giving you rights, not taking any away at all, because before they gave you the code you had no rights regarding that code. The problem from your perspective is that they aren't giving you all rights.
Nobody owes you a gift.
That didn't parse. Do you want me to present you with Monty's recent arguments to the EU? They've been pretty widely publicized. Essentially, he protested that the GPL terms were anti-competitive in this case. But of course he was one of the three people who put those terms in place.
Brian, it is the meme of "we must now reform GPL over-reaching" which has risen only because Oracle is now the entity enforcing the GPL on others rather than MySQL. I agree that MySQL used FUD to cause customers to buy, especially before MySQL 5 came out. But the only folks who ever believed that the GPL applied to a protocol were those who didn't know the scope of copyright from that of patent. This was not an issue that anyone who could discuss the situation intelligently with an attorney ever believed, with one exception, and it does not need reform now because it's not for real. The one exception was the MySQL principals themselves. They got the most draconian read from a lawyer at some point, something that wouldn't ever have flown in court, and Monty still believes it today.
Well, protocols are the subject of patents rather than copyright so I never felt any need to listen to Monty about that particular point. It's more his protesting the GPL's terms now that they are being applied to him rather than by him. And in that regard your presentation sounds really familiar.
Bruce
Because they can be patented.
Brian,
Well, your article sounds identical to the presentation we've been hearing from Monty for some months now, and you are behind the Drizzle fork.