While MS pledged some patents to be royalty-free as part of the ECMA standardization of C#, those were only the patents that applied directly to the C# language. Mono code is covered by claims in other Microsoft patents as well, and patents of additional third parties.
So, if you use a paid-up copy of Novell, Microsoft says it won't sue you for using Mono. For 5 years, I hear, and then maybe they'll do it anyway.
I can't begin to understand why Miguel would have wanted to devote so many years of his life to a project that MS would invariably claim rights over. Is he just waking up to this now?
Question: is it not possible to put a clause in the GPL v3 to make tis quite clear? Something along the lines of "Any funny tricks to circumvent the SPIRIT of the GPL will make it automatically void and the offending entity will be sued for copyright infringement"
Of course. Here's the legal language you're asking for: "Do what I mean, not what I say.":-)
So, this illustrates the fundamental problem in law. Law does not require ethical behavior. This is because there is no canonical definition of ethical behavior in all of its details that we could get everyone to agree on, and thus instead law defines particular kinds of behavior in specific terms and prohbits them, setting fines and penalties.
So, we can point out what seems to us to be unethical. We can convince lots of you, possibly even a fair majority, of our argument. We can ask you to take action to retaliate, like not recommending Novell again. But we can't get them in court, this time. We'll be ready next time.
I don't see a short-term solution for this. Perhaps further human evolution is necessary.
Hey guys, what's taking so long? Go ahead and mod this up to +5 Interesting. This is Bruce Perens speaking, you know.
When the story is about me and my comments get lost in the noise, I really get to think that Slashdot might not value information right from the horse's mouth as much as that from the other end of the horse:-)
So, lets get clear on this to make sure I understand it correctly. You and the GPLv3 are perfectly ok with Tivo implementing DRM in firmware and hardware that stops the player from booting if certain controlled measures aren't present?
No, it wouldn't work this way. In a compliant system, you'd be able to change the kernel as you liked, the system would still boot, but the DRM would still decrypt and play media correctly without offering access to the unencrypted data stream. The key is that the GPL3 DRM terms mean that the DRM must not lock down the GPL program, and the DRM functionality of playing the media must keep working if you change the GPL program. GPL3 does not say that you have to be able to break the DRM, it only restricts what the DRM can break.
This isn't going to keep users away from the program. Users don't generally care about licensing as long as they have a clear right to run the program, and they do. Look at the nasty EULAs they sign from MS, much worse than ours. It may keep certain developers away, but historically the GPL share-and-share-alike terms have helped, rather than hurt, to build a large developer community.
The new GPL3 provision says that if you arrange to protect any party from patents regarding the software, that protection has to apply to everyone. We might have the final language to see on Saturday, for the FSF annual meeting, I've not been told but that's what I'd guess.
Forget about GPL3 introducing major forks. There will be a few small spats. The license is in the interest of the Open Source developers who would use it, and that's all of the developers who want a share-and-share-alike form of licensing rather than an outright gift as in BSD. The folks who mainly would be opposed to it are those who want to benefit without sharing, and to say the community doesn't need them would be an understatement.
If you believed that GPL3 would prohibit Linux from being used in a system with DRM, you can stop now. There are four places where you can put DRM in a system with a GPL3 kernel and have it work well and not have to give away your keys: in hardware as in a chip that mediates access to the display or audio output, in a coprocessor as with the separate chip that runs the GSM stack in cell phones, in a kernel under the kernel as with Microsoft's "nib", and in a user mode program. Those are also the best places to put the DRM from a technical standpoint. I am currently working on a paper on this, maybe I'll have it out tomorrow evening.
Hi. What I meant was that Novell's Linux business is going to be hurt by what they've done, long term, because technical people won't be recommending them. And their Linux business has not reached the point of viability anyway, so I don't see how they plan to go forward rather than take as much money as possible before getting out of the business. Look at the customers they've listed of late (only four) and then ask them why they bought. The HSBC guy called the MS agreement FUD in the press, one of the others told me privately they'd rather be rid of Microsoft.
Will MS buy them? MS tends to work through proxies these days. Is 330 Million a good starting investment? Sure.
Get ready for those long-distance ham radio contacts when the ionosphere goes crazy, and conditions generally improve even when it's not crazy! And now that there's no more Morse Code test, we'll see a lot of people who were stuck on VHF before on the HF bands.
Looking at auroras will be cool too. Be sure to reserve the left seat on US to Europe red-eye flights, I've seen amazing aurorae out that window, nothing that you could see from the ground.
Unfortunately, Debian has suffered from a concatenation of problems this year. Dunc-tank (a scheme to pay some developers) sapped a lot of good-will and motivation, and made some developers actually work to hold back the release in protest, and as a result it's another "who knows when it'll happen" Debian release. There has been a lot of bickering on other topics - Debian should never hold face-to-face meetings, something bad always happens - and unfortunately the current DPL hasn't been able to rally the troops or lead effectively in any way I can see. I hope they recover, I think they are still our best hope among Linux distributions.
Well, I think the way we win this one is not to spend our $$$ on pyrric victories in court, because Microsoft has lots more money to fight lawsuits than our side does. The way to win is to admit that they have a lot of patents that can stop us dead and that there are 20 or so big companies that can still stop software development dead even after the developer licenses with Microsoft, and that nobody but those 20 companies can afford to do business if they have to license all 20. Then you have to convince your legislator of that.
but they also say "...there are developers around the world who would be more than happy to work with Microsoft to resolve this issue...", implying that they think developers will reimplement offending pieces of code. I guess you know a lot more about this than me - do you think that would be a likely/possible outcome?
I don't think it's to anyone's advantage for developers to remove anything that Ballmer points to. Because there wouldn't necessarily be much left if you did it that way. You certainly don't want to leave the decision of what to remove in his hands. He has a really big collection of vague patents, and a willingness to stretch them as far as he wishes to point at each and every line of code we have. So, I guess I think this is a naive' approach.
The problem is that the law is not on our side. Microsoft has been granted so many patents on computer software algorithms that there is no part of the Linux kernel, and no significant Open Source program, that Ballmer could not point to and say "remove that". Obviously those patents are not justly granted, and many can not be enforced, and the longer Microsoft waits, the more likely that any particular suit could be won by our side with a Laches defense. But the true answer to "show us the code" is "everything", and Microsoft could win some of those lawsuits, certainly enough to deter any part of Open Source or the whole movement.
I think the only solution lies in legislative change.
Well, there has been ample coverage on Slashdot of the Massachusetts Open Document issue, for example. Open Voting is even more important - even if you don't live where it's currently being considered.
Did it bug you that they have ESR do his angry intro to Revolution OS right before your interview is shown? (IIRC, that's how it went...)
Nah, I'm pretty thick-skinned by now. It didn't even bug me when Richard Stallman and I were presenting at the U.N. World Summit on the Information Society, and I said something about how the Open Source folks were standing on Richard's shoulders, and Richard covered his shoulders! It's in this video. That one was damn funny, classic Richard.
What bothers me is that this eminently trivial story about Eric quitting Fedora gets on Slashdot, and when I need you folks to help with something really important, for example, by voting for the only Secretary of State candidate in California who supports Open Voting, that gets killed. Slashdot used to be an important site in the Open Source world. They took the readers and made it a "geek culture" site. And that's a shame. The "firehose" hasn't helped, it seems. An editor's job is to uplift the content, marking schemes seem to cater to the lowest common denominator.
* 2007-02-05 15:54:23 Open Hardware License - Call for Public Review (Features,Hardware Hacking) (rejected)
* 2006-11-03 00:53:13 Novell-Microsoft: It's About Software Patenting (Linux,Patents) (rejected)
* 2006-06-30 01:06:08 Software Patent Lawsuits Against Open Source (Politics,Patents) (accepted)
* 2006-04-14 21:31:56 California to consider Open Source Voting Bill (Index,Software) (rejected)
I remember in the early 1960's, when my dad was working on the Lunar Module program at Grumman, he'd bring home engineering industry rags like Design News, and fluidic logic was the big thing then, there were always articles on it and press releases from manufacturers (most of whom probably didn't find many customers) about their new fluidic devices.
Fluidic technology has been explored for a backup computer for intrinsicaly-unstable aircraft, I'm not sure it's been deployed on any.
If I were a Novell executive, upon reading your second sentence, I would immediately think: "That's correct. This is in our best interests financially!" I would stop reading beyond that point; you just made my point for me, so any disagreement expressed would not be in my interests to investigate.
I see. You believe that the phrase "it betrays... for Novell's sole financial benefit" would be percieved as "we screwed someone to make money, great!, no need to read any more of this, there can't possibly be any negative consequences".
If that degree of cynicism applies, and it may well, there's little hope of convincing them of anything. Our only choice would be to follow a similar strategy to SCO - deprecate them and direct customers elsewhere until there's no business left. And that's what we're doing, because there never was very much hope that they'd "get" it, and we've handled situations like this enough times to know that yes, we'll be rid of them eventually.
I hope you can understand that I am wary of editing the document after 2973 people have already signed it.
Who is the offer to? Really two parties, I think. The first is the recieving party, who can enforce compliance with the offer only on the basis of contract law, because they aren't the copyright holder. The second is the copyright holder, who can enforce on the basis of copyright law. Can the party offering the binary keep the offer secret from the copyright holder, if the copyright holder asks to see it? I doubt it.
Who can get the source? Any third party, not just the one that the party recieving the binary designates. And the copyright holder can enforce that if ever a binary has been distributed.
So, I think it ends up that you have to give source to anyone.
GPL 3(b) applies if a commercial distribution doesn't include the source along with the binary. That requires the distributor to include an agreement to provide source to any third party.
I've publicly told Nat Friedman, whom Novell is using as the public apologist for the patent agreement, that I think his ethical position stinks, Jeremy's resignation (which I applaud, of course), should reinforce this. Nat should leave too.
Please sign the Open Letter to Novell. I'd like to get that over 3000 signatures at least today. It's at about 2950 now.
The CEO who left had his head handed to him by the membership, and if they didn't actually tell him to go, staying would not have been very pleasant. Endorsing the Novell thing wasn't too smart, and they were very upset. And he's said to have promoted the GPL3 story to Forbes, which also pissed off the membership tremendously. Other than that, Oracle won't join (Wim said he feels that OSDL doesn't operate in Linux' best interest, which I think is correct), Andrew Morton walked out and went to work for Google, and OSDL can't get enough members to stay afloat financially.
Let's cross our fingers and hope that OSDL goes in a better direction now.
I don't know anything about the other laid-off folks and suspect they were innocent bystanders.
I might not be protected from any patent fireballs Microsoft may launch in the future, but I'm still free to use it.
Let's go over that carefully. The four freedoms long definition for Freedom 0 includes:
The freedom to run the program means the freedom for any kind of person or organization to use it on any kind of computer system, for any kind of overall job and purpose, without being required to communicate about it with the developer or any other specific entity.
A paid-up SuSE user can use that software without being sued by Microsoft. If you use it without paying SuSE, or indeed if you let your subscription lapse, Microsoft can, at its option, bring a lawsuit against you for doing so. Thus "any person" does not have the freedom in this case. According to the American Intellectual Property Law Association's 2006 economic survey, the cost of even proving yourself innocent can range from three to five Million dollars. That is a pretty big "fireball".
By the way, RMS said that specific language of the GPL did not come into play, not that the spirit of the GPL wasn't violated. It certainly was. There is no chance that the spirit of the GPL was to enforce a prohibition on discriminatory licenses but not on covenants that had the same effect.
By the way, would you believe that this method of brewing beer wasn't invented until 1993? I wouldn't either.
Slashdot Mirror
Bruce
So, if you use a paid-up copy of Novell, Microsoft says it won't sue you for using Mono. For 5 years, I hear, and then maybe they'll do it anyway.
I can't begin to understand why Miguel would have wanted to devote so many years of his life to a project that MS would invariably claim rights over. Is he just waking up to this now?
Bruce
Of course. Here's the legal language you're asking for: "Do what I mean, not what I say." :-)
So, this illustrates the fundamental problem in law. Law does not require ethical behavior. This is because there is no canonical definition of ethical behavior in all of its details that we could get everyone to agree on, and thus instead law defines particular kinds of behavior in specific terms and prohbits them, setting fines and penalties.
So, we can point out what seems to us to be unethical. We can convince lots of you, possibly even a fair majority, of our argument. We can ask you to take action to retaliate, like not recommending Novell again. But we can't get them in court, this time. We'll be ready next time.
I don't see a short-term solution for this. Perhaps further human evolution is necessary.
Thanks
Bruce
When the story is about me and my comments get lost in the noise, I really get to think that Slashdot might not value information right from the horse's mouth as much as that from the other end of the horse :-)
No, it wouldn't work this way. In a compliant system, you'd be able to change the kernel as you liked, the system would still boot, but the DRM would still decrypt and play media correctly without offering access to the unencrypted data stream. The key is that the GPL3 DRM terms mean that the DRM must not lock down the GPL program, and the DRM functionality of playing the media must keep working if you change the GPL program. GPL3 does not say that you have to be able to break the DRM, it only restricts what the DRM can break.
This isn't going to keep users away from the program. Users don't generally care about licensing as long as they have a clear right to run the program, and they do. Look at the nasty EULAs they sign from MS, much worse than ours. It may keep certain developers away, but historically the GPL share-and-share-alike terms have helped, rather than hurt, to build a large developer community.
Bruce
Forget about GPL3 introducing major forks. There will be a few small spats. The license is in the interest of the Open Source developers who would use it, and that's all of the developers who want a share-and-share-alike form of licensing rather than an outright gift as in BSD. The folks who mainly would be opposed to it are those who want to benefit without sharing, and to say the community doesn't need them would be an understatement.
If you believed that GPL3 would prohibit Linux from being used in a system with DRM, you can stop now. There are four places where you can put DRM in a system with a GPL3 kernel and have it work well and not have to give away your keys: in hardware as in a chip that mediates access to the display or audio output, in a coprocessor as with the separate chip that runs the GSM stack in cell phones, in a kernel under the kernel as with Microsoft's "nib", and in a user mode program. Those are also the best places to put the DRM from a technical standpoint. I am currently working on a paper on this, maybe I'll have it out tomorrow evening.
Thanks
Bruce
Will MS buy them? MS tends to work through proxies these days. Is 330 Million a good starting investment? Sure.
Bruce
Looking at auroras will be cool too. Be sure to reserve the left seat on US to Europe red-eye flights, I've seen amazing aurorae out that window, nothing that you could see from the ground.
Bruce
Well, they would not have been able to hold back Etch unless they were the critical-path people for getting Etch done, would they?
Bruce
Bruce
I don't think it's to anyone's advantage for developers to remove anything that Ballmer points to. Because there wouldn't necessarily be much left if you did it that way. You certainly don't want to leave the decision of what to remove in his hands. He has a really big collection of vague patents, and a willingness to stretch them as far as he wishes to point at each and every line of code we have. So, I guess I think this is a naive' approach.
Bruce
I think the only solution lies in legislative change.
Bruce
Nah, I just thought he was retiring.
Bruce
Nah, I'm pretty thick-skinned by now. It didn't even bug me when Richard Stallman and I were presenting at the U.N. World Summit on the Information Society, and I said something about how the Open Source folks were standing on Richard's shoulders, and Richard covered his shoulders! It's in this video. That one was damn funny, classic Richard.
What bothers me is that this eminently trivial story about Eric quitting Fedora gets on Slashdot, and when I need you folks to help with something really important, for example, by voting for the only Secretary of State candidate in California who supports Open Voting, that gets killed. Slashdot used to be an important site in the Open Source world. They took the readers and made it a "geek culture" site. And that's a shame. The "firehose" hasn't helped, it seems. An editor's job is to uplift the content, marking schemes seem to cater to the lowest common denominator.
* 2007-02-05 15:54:23 Open Hardware License - Call for Public Review (Features,Hardware Hacking) (rejected)
* 2006-11-03 00:53:13 Novell-Microsoft: It's About Software Patenting (Linux,Patents) (rejected)
* 2006-06-30 01:06:08 Software Patent Lawsuits Against Open Source (Politics,Patents) (accepted)
* 2006-04-14 21:31:56 California to consider Open Source Voting Bill (Index,Software) (rejected)
LWN ran this a day or two ago, and their headline was ESR's Farewell Letter. I had such great expectations for a moment, until I read the article :-)
Fluidic technology has been explored for a backup computer for intrinsicaly-unstable aircraft, I'm not sure it's been deployed on any.
Bruce
I see. You believe that the phrase "it betrays ... for Novell's sole financial benefit" would be percieved as "we screwed someone to make money, great!, no need to read any more of this, there can't possibly be any negative consequences".
If that degree of cynicism applies, and it may well, there's little hope of convincing them of anything. Our only choice would be to follow a similar strategy to SCO - deprecate them and direct customers elsewhere until there's no business left. And that's what we're doing, because there never was very much hope that they'd "get" it, and we've handled situations like this enough times to know that yes, we'll be rid of them eventually.
I hope you can understand that I am wary of editing the document after 2973 people have already signed it.
Thanks
Bruce
Who can get the source? Any third party, not just the one that the party recieving the binary designates. And the copyright holder can enforce that if ever a binary has been distributed.
So, I think it ends up that you have to give source to anyone.
A lawyer could probably do a better job at this.
Bruce
Bruce
Bruce
Please sign the Open Letter to Novell. I'd like to get that over 3000 signatures at least today. It's at about 2950 now.
Thanks
Bruce
Let's cross our fingers and hope that OSDL goes in a better direction now.
I don't know anything about the other laid-off folks and suspect they were innocent bystanders.
Bruce
Let's go over that carefully. The four freedoms long definition for Freedom 0 includes:
A paid-up SuSE user can use that software without being sued by Microsoft. If you use it without paying SuSE, or indeed if you let your subscription lapse, Microsoft can, at its option, bring a lawsuit against you for doing so. Thus "any person" does not have the freedom in this case. According to the American Intellectual Property Law Association's 2006 economic survey, the cost of even proving yourself innocent can range from three to five Million dollars. That is a pretty big "fireball".By the way, RMS said that specific language of the GPL did not come into play, not that the spirit of the GPL wasn't violated. It certainly was. There is no chance that the spirit of the GPL was to enforce a prohibition on discriminatory licenses but not on covenants that had the same effect.
By the way, would you believe that this method of brewing beer wasn't invented until 1993? I wouldn't either.
Bruce