Brian works for Monty. Monty made something around USD$130M selling MySQL to Sun, who then sold themselves to Oracle. Monty, instead of buying a yacht and taking a vacation, wants to stay in the MySQL business. The problem is that he sold his rights. If someone was "over-reaching" with the GPL at MySQL, Monty was one of the three people behind that. Now, Monty wants to both take back the licensing scheme that made him a very rich man, and keep the money.
Yes. If compatibility with other licenses is a goal, then LGPLv3 might be one to choose, unless you want a strongly reciprocal one, in which case the other two v3 licenses would be your choice. Choose AGPLv3 if you are concerned that Google (or any other SaS company) might capitalize on your software without returning value to the project.
You seem to be missing quantum mechanics. The noise from a noise diode, a good way of getting real randomness, is a quantum phenomenon and you can only explain it with statistics. There is a probability that any little bit of the junction will avalanche within a certain time, but there is no way for you to say when.
When someone engages is these sorts of activities, there should be more than civil penalties. There should be criminal penalties as well. It is simply unbelievable.
Lying on your patent application is perjury. It hasn't been prosecuted since 1974, when USPTO discontinued their enforcement division.
I have so far had little success in evangelizing that it should be prosecuted again. If you know an organization that would like to sponsor work on that, I could use some help. I rarely can put food on the table through evangelism, and thus can't do it as much as I'd like.
BSD, MIT, etc. are simple, but they don't give you any protection from patent aggressors. And so I am wary of using them, because it's patent suits that are the largest problem.
GPLv3, LGPLv3, AGPLv3 are the strongest within the constraints that RMS set. License not contract, no rights that you already had are restricted, etc. About 40 lawyers involved in drafting and review. Larry Rosen thinks his licenses are better for the absence of RMS. Look at both sets and make your own decision.
There is a Japanese font license submitted by a government project there that is legally solid but the provisions don't match the needs of the average developer. I think that there is still a need for someone to get a good lawyer to draft one and have it reviewed online by more good lawyers. If you don't want to do that I think the font exception from FSF is the best we have right now.
The problem is that someone could try to take your home, car, and savings for using their patent in your crappy code. And unfortunately even if you put the whole darned thing in the public domain you can't get away from it. Maybe you should leave it by the roadside anonymously like an abandoned baby. Don't count on many people running it, though.
I think he means faster to develop. The reality is that it is fast enough when it is running that the cost is in the time to develop and the time to market rather than the use of computer resources.
Rails 3.0.0beta is faster, anyway, Ruby 1.9 is faster, and I'm sure that trend will continue.
I am not running the Android kernel project. If I get to run any embedded manufacturer's project, I will try very hard to get the code into the kernel, and I know how to make the technical and economic case for that.
Most cell phones have two processors. The radio modem is in the smaller one, and is awake much of the time, and the PDA in the larger one, and is not awake nearly as often. That's how stand-by can work for so long on such a little battery. The radio uses a real-time OS and the PDA of course has Linux. Often their communication is over the Hayes modem protocol, believe it or not. So, when you want to call 911, Linux sends "+++ATDT911" or something similar.
I have a hard time believing that the Linux kernel is a fundamental problem regarding anything about the call, given the above architecture. I am sure that there are design flaws.
Well, it says a number of things to FOSS developers. One is that your license choice matters. This case was much longer than it should have been, and was almost lost, because of the license. Second, it says the patent system still sucks and we're not fighting hard enough. And we still need tort reform.
But it has some significant value in deterrence, for the subclass of sane aggressors. Nothing deters the other ones, the only thing you can do is to make sure your own legal execution (your license, how you accept contributions, how you identify your developers) in order so that the court doesn't make things worse.
"Understood by everyone in the industry" is my job. I tell the judge if that's the case or not. As does an expert on the other side. Obviously, we often contradict each other. And then the judge has to decide which of us he trusts. So, what the industry understands is only unreliably communicated to the courts.
Not just the kernel. The utility code is crap too, hard-coded in places where it shouldn't be, etc. And some people don't like the fact that they dropped LIBC and put in their own version. They'll fix it eventually.
If you read the story, rather than the summary, you will find that Jacobsen is of course all over it. The summary is written by an editor who wishes you to read the story based on the credibility of a writer whom you already know, yours truly. And I am, to some extent, telling the story from the perspective of my own involvement.
I am also taking the opportunity to advertise my work as an expert witness, which I get damn little chance to do because every other case I've participated in has sealed and thus I can't show anyone my writing samples!
Sorry if that annoyed you. All of the work on the case was done for free. I get a little money from Datamation, but far from enough to live on.
It went to appeals court twice and the appeals court ruled both times, then handed the case back to the lower court. The main precedents come from the appeals court.
That's the way it always is. Lower court precedents aren't terribly useful because only that court has to follow them. Appeals court precedents are more valuable, and the appeals courts are more respected as expert jurists so that other courts follow them even if they don't have to.
The precedents are that Open Source licenses can be enforced, and with all of the mechanisms that have been put in place to enforce proprietary licenses, including summary judgement. To get that, we had to show that the Open Source developer has an economic interest in his work even though he isn't paid by legitimate licensed users of the work, and is harmed by an infringer even though he isn't paid.
To you and me it seems odd that anyone had a problem with that idea. But we're inside the revolution.
The court said that Katzer deliberately misappropriated and obfuscated. My guess is that he would have done so to anyone he thought he could beat. The failure of the license took what should have been a short case and made it longer. Of all the terms in Open Source licenses, I never saw myself having to fight a case over the right to be attributed properly. We had just a little thin thread to fight with, IMO.
Actually, this is a symptom of a broader problem with font licensing. Legally, any document created using any font does not attract the copyright of the font used. Period. Yes, it was stupid to state it explicitly, because it will make it impossible for the license to benefit from future clarification of the law, but they just stated what is basically the case already.
Of course, currently distributing any font you extract from a document (whether you OCR, or extract an embedded font) is illegal, but you can get around that easily by not distributing and doing the extraction yourself, which would require a police state to check.
I think the font "program" can be copyrighted but the actual outline of the font can't. Currently. Here. It's different in other countries. I am mostly concerned with machine extraction of the font, which is really trivial in the latest generation of document files that are actually archives of a directory full of files.
Maybe it would have been more accurate for me to say "more than a thousand". If you look at his case journal on the JMRI website, it has tons of documents, and I know that there are actually more documents than are listed in the index.
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Doesn't this come back to Godel's theorem? You can't fully characterize the system from inside of the system.
If you want to understand the economics of Open Source, read this. It pokes some pretty big holes in your thesis.
As you've already been informed, nothing. I made some pocket money on the article you read, but I am not able to make a living that way.
Brian works for Monty. Monty made something around USD$130M selling MySQL to Sun, who then sold themselves to Oracle. Monty, instead of buying a yacht and taking a vacation, wants to stay in the MySQL business. The problem is that he sold his rights. If someone was "over-reaching" with the GPL at MySQL, Monty was one of the three people behind that. Now, Monty wants to both take back the licensing scheme that made him a very rich man, and keep the money.
Give it up, Monty. Work on something else.
Yes. If compatibility with other licenses is a goal, then LGPLv3 might be one to choose, unless you want a strongly reciprocal one, in which case the other two v3 licenses would be your choice. Choose AGPLv3 if you are concerned that Google (or any other SaS company) might capitalize on your software without returning value to the project.
You seem to be missing quantum mechanics. The noise from a noise diode, a good way of getting real randomness, is a quantum phenomenon and you can only explain it with statistics. There is a probability that any little bit of the junction will avalanche within a certain time, but there is no way for you to say when.
Lying on your patent application is perjury. It hasn't been prosecuted since 1974, when USPTO discontinued their enforcement division.
I have so far had little success in evangelizing that it should be prosecuted again. If you know an organization that would like to sponsor work on that, I could use some help. I rarely can put food on the table through evangelism, and thus can't do it as much as I'd like.
Darn. I do the work and Brent Spiner makes the millions. :-)
BSD, MIT, etc. are simple, but they don't give you any protection from patent aggressors. And so I am wary of using them, because it's patent suits that are the largest problem.
GPLv3, LGPLv3, AGPLv3 are the strongest within the constraints that RMS set. License not contract, no rights that you already had are restricted, etc. About 40 lawyers involved in drafting and review. Larry Rosen thinks his licenses are better for the absence of RMS. Look at both sets and make your own decision.
There is a Japanese font license submitted by a government project there that is legally solid but the provisions don't match the needs of the average developer. I think that there is still a need for someone to get a good lawyer to draft one and have it reviewed online by more good lawyers. If you don't want to do that I think the font exception from FSF is the best we have right now.
I don't know if they are part of the $100K or if he got them back separately.
Oh, you've noticed you're a slave, then.
Next step: what are you going to do about it?
The problem is that someone could try to take your home, car, and savings for using their patent in your crappy code. And unfortunately even if you put the whole darned thing in the public domain you can't get away from it. Maybe you should leave it by the roadside anonymously like an abandoned baby. Don't count on many people running it, though.
I think he means faster to develop. The reality is that it is fast enough when it is running that the cost is in the time to develop and the time to market rather than the use of computer resources.
Rails 3.0.0beta is faster, anyway, Ruby 1.9 is faster, and I'm sure that trend will continue.
I am not running the Android kernel project. If I get to run any embedded manufacturer's project, I will try very hard to get the code into the kernel, and I know how to make the technical and economic case for that.
Most cell phones have two processors. The radio modem is in the smaller one, and is awake much of the time, and the PDA in the larger one, and is not awake nearly as often. That's how stand-by can work for so long on such a little battery. The radio uses a real-time OS and the PDA of course has Linux. Often their communication is over the Hayes modem protocol, believe it or not. So, when you want to call 911, Linux sends "+++ATDT911" or something similar.
I have a hard time believing that the Linux kernel is a fundamental problem regarding anything about the call, given the above architecture. I am sure that there are design flaws.
Well, it says a number of things to FOSS developers. One is that your license choice matters. This case was much longer than it should have been, and was almost lost, because of the license. Second, it says the patent system still sucks and we're not fighting hard enough. And we still need tort reform.
But it has some significant value in deterrence, for the subclass of sane aggressors. Nothing deters the other ones, the only thing you can do is to make sure your own legal execution (your license, how you accept contributions, how you identify your developers) in order so that the court doesn't make things worse.
Not your fault, this stuff is complicated.
"Understood by everyone in the industry" is my job. I tell the judge if that's the case or not. As does an expert on the other side. Obviously, we often contradict each other. And then the judge has to decide which of us he trusts. So, what the industry understands is only unreliably communicated to the courts.
Not just the kernel. The utility code is crap too, hard-coded in places where it shouldn't be, etc. And some people don't like the fact that they dropped LIBC and put in their own version. They'll fix it eventually.
If you read the story, rather than the summary, you will find that Jacobsen is of course all over it. The summary is written by an editor who wishes you to read the story based on the credibility of a writer whom you already know, yours truly. And I am, to some extent, telling the story from the perspective of my own involvement.
I am also taking the opportunity to advertise my work as an expert witness, which I get damn little chance to do because every other case I've participated in has sealed and thus I can't show anyone my writing samples!
Sorry if that annoyed you. All of the work on the case was done for free. I get a little money from Datamation, but far from enough to live on.
It went to appeals court twice and the appeals court ruled both times, then handed the case back to the lower court. The main precedents come from the appeals court.
That's the way it always is. Lower court precedents aren't terribly useful because only that court has to follow them. Appeals court precedents are more valuable, and the appeals courts are more respected as expert jurists so that other courts follow them even if they don't have to.
The precedents are that Open Source licenses can be enforced, and with all of the mechanisms that have been put in place to enforce proprietary licenses, including summary judgement. To get that, we had to show that the Open Source developer has an economic interest in his work even though he isn't paid by legitimate licensed users of the work, and is harmed by an infringer even though he isn't paid.
To you and me it seems odd that anyone had a problem with that idea. But we're inside the revolution.
I think to the lower court this might have been seen as businessman v. hacker.
The court said that Katzer deliberately misappropriated and obfuscated. My guess is that he would have done so to anyone he thought he could beat. The failure of the license took what should have been a short case and made it longer. Of all the terms in Open Source licenses, I never saw myself having to fight a case over the right to be attributed properly. We had just a little thin thread to fight with, IMO.
I think the font "program" can be copyrighted but the actual outline of the font can't. Currently. Here. It's different in other countries. I am mostly concerned with machine extraction of the font, which is really trivial in the latest generation of document files that are actually archives of a directory full of files.
Maybe it would have been more accurate for me to say "more than a thousand". If you look at his case journal on the JMRI website, it has tons of documents, and I know that there are actually more documents than are listed in the index.